(IPT) American Islamists rushed to offer tributes this week to a radical Egyptian cleric and spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood who had a long-established support for violent jihad and murdering Jews.
The U.S. Council of Muslim Organizations (USCMO), a coalition of the country’s top Islamist groups, glowingly eulogized Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi as “the most prominent and consequential scholar of Islam of our time.” Qaradawi, the statement added, was influenced as a teenager by “Hasan al-Banna, the charismatic founder of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood (in 1928),” and “joined him in his mission of reestablishing Islam in its worship and transactions in the hearts and lives of Muslims and Muslim society, and re-envisioning the political integration of the Muslim Ummah, or global community, free of settler colonial presence or imperial hegemonic influence in Muslim lands.”
