 This is Think Tech. I'm Jay Fidel. We're talking about bigotry, bigotry in America, but bigotry around the world, I think, with Cynthia Farahat. She joins us by Zoom. Where are you now, Cynthia? Can you tell us? I'm in the DC metro area. Okay. We had a show with you before, and I want to follow up on that, just to ask you how things are doing in the Middle East, how things are doing with radical Islam in the Middle East, how the deal with the Emirates may have changed things in the Middle East. We need to know how things are settling down here if they are in the Middle East. Can you talk about it? Absolutely. So first of all, if you had told me 10 years ago that this would happen, I would never have believed you ever. I would have said this is just crazy. It's impossible. So what has happened is indeed incredible. And I believe that it is a real peace deal. There is a history with Arab regimes where they are not always serious about peace and about treaties. And the radical Islamists do not believe in most, the vast majority of treaties with non-Muslim countries. And there is a lot of reasons to be suspicious. But the reason I completely believe in the validity of this peace agreement is because of the Arab Spring. Arab regimes have indeed realized that the Muslim Brotherhood Tiger that they have been breeding since the 20s is going to replace them. They saw it in Egypt. They saw it in Tunisia. They saw that it was, they were trying to do it in Libya. They saw they're trying to do it in Syria. And they freaked out. Can you discuss for a moment what the Muslim Brotherhood is, who is part of it and what their aspirations are? Absolutely. So the Muslim Brotherhood was founded in 1928. It's a clandestine military organization with a political wing and a very, very strong one indeed. And they have, the founder was Hassan al-Bana. He was an Arabic school teacher. He recruited among military types and people who were not very educated, although the military at the time, they were, it was, it was very different. It was, it was indeed much, much better. But he started this clandestine group where the whole operation was centered around what he calls the secret apparatus, a konzim al-sidri, or the special apparatus. He borrowed that time from Stalin, by the way. And yeah, they are so, they were, they borrowed so much from the Nazis and the Soviets. I'm talking a lot about this. Pardon me. Are they terrorists? Oh, yes, of course they are. They have had, they are the founders of Al-Qaeda. They are the founders of Hamas. They are the founders of ISIS. They are the founders of al-Jama'at, Islamic group. They founded a terrorist group called excommunication immigration at Takfir al-Hijrah. They founded the Islamic Jihad group. They were even involved in Boko Haram. You give me the terrorist organization, even a Shia terrorist organization, which is a different sect of Islam. And I will show you the Muslim Brotherhood connection. And I'm indeed doing this in my book. I just signed a contract for the publisher, which I'm very excited about. And it should come out sometime next year. And I discuss in detail from their own words, not a conspiracy theory, not some infidel in the West, from their own words, how they were involved in the founding of the terrorist groups that perpetrated some of the worst atrocities around the world, such as 9-11. So we have an evolution going on now. The evolution is the Muslim Brotherhood is losing traction, losing influence. What are the factors that make that happen? I mean, and I suggest, inherent in what you say is organizations like ISIS could not happen again, at least not in the current environment. So radical Islam, what is the term you used in your email? How radical Islam has become shunned in the Middle East? So what has caused that? And what are the indications of the shun and by whom? So the reason I'm saying that is because I have been monitoring, and I have been part of the political Egyptian society, I was a part for a decade before I came to America. So I have been monitoring the media, I've been monitoring jihadist chat forums. I have lived in that scene since I was a teenager. And what the first factor that caused this severe divorce from the Muslim Brotherhood and their ideas is the fear that they would indeed come to power and implement sharia law. The vast majority, 98 I would say from my own personal research percent of Muslims are terrified of sharia law. They don't want to live like that. And I have seen it. I used to have hundreds of Muslim women wearing hijab coming to my events and crying and hugging me and telling me don't leave us alone. These people are going to devour us. They're going to destroy us. So Muslims are terrified of sharia law more than any non-Muslim on earth because they are going to be the number one victims of the radical Muslim Brotherhood Sunni interpretation of Islamic law. So the fear that they were going to really destroy the country scared people off and they said wait a minute, what are these ideas? Let's look at history. Let's look at what these guys are saying. And it started a massive movement for secularism and for classical liberal values within these countries. Like now when I was in Egypt and I started my Egyptian liberal political party, saying that you were a liberal was a dirty word. Saying that you were a secular, oh my god, that means that you're endangering your life, your family's life, your children. Just the whole world can turn into chaos. This is a word that nobody said. And I would see the reaction I would get from the government because I used this word. I used to get from 10 to 50 death threats a day. Guess what happens today when you say you're a secular? They interview you on the media. You get to explain secularism on Egyptian local TV over and over and over almost daily. You get to denounce radical Islamic theology on TV daily. A dramatic change then. It's crazy. Their TV, Egyptian TV, Saudi TV, Emirati TV are so much more liberal in terms of the discourse than any American TV. Ascribe the change to Cynthia. I mean, that's a pretty 180 degree change. It is a 180 degree change. What happens to make all those people think differently? On a social level, the fear of implementing Sharia law. On a government level, these rulers discovered that the Muslim Brotherhood was after their throne. So they said, oh my God, these vicious monsters, we can't use them anymore. They're after our chairs. They want a rule. So you have society and government for the first time since 1952 are coming together, the people and their own governments to shun radical Islamic thought. It's now more popular to denounce them than to say that you believe in their ideals. So is this limited to Egypt or is this all over the Middle East? No, no, no. That's Egypt. That's Saudi Arabia. That's the UAE. That's Lebanon. A lot, a lot, a lot of the most important ones. The most important ones for sure. Things really changed. In 2007, German newspaper interviewed me and they said, when do you think more people will be able to embrace your values and who you are and your ideas in your country? I said maybe in 200 years. So I thought in 200 years. I was more pessimistic than anyone because I was living in a very, very oppressive police state and I couldn't see. Nobody could speak. But so what I'm seeing now is crazy. And then you have someone like President Sisi, who's very, very, very anti-Islamism, very anti-brotherhood. You have the UAE leadership, very, very anti-Islamist and brotherhood. So although the United States, you can't say the United States was responsible for this shift in opinion in the Middle East, certainly it has to be a factor in the success of this administration, the Trump administration's negotiating the deal between Israel and the United Arab Emirates. So can you talk about the environment in which that deal was made? What were the elements that made it possible? Because a few years ago it would not have been possible. Now prior to 2011, it would have been completely impossible. And I would say there are two reasons for that. First of all, there was no political will in America for it to happen. You name it, Republican, Democrat. They weren't willing to do what it takes to make it happen. They were politicians, career politicians. They thrive over existing conflicts and these sorts of issues. So the factor that Trump is not a politician played a huge, huge role because he was able to identify and recognize that this is a climate where this could be introduced. And that's half the battle. Because it... What about Jared Kushner? Was he a significant personality in that? Oh, absolutely. Absolutely he was. Nobody can deny that. I would say he played just as a big role in making it happen. And I would say what I mentioned before, the second factor is because the Emirates recognize that they can no longer have a sustainable relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood. They're terrorists. They're vicious. The UAE is a great country on so many levels. Yes, there's certainly room for improvement, but it's so much more advanced than the vast majority of countries in the Middle East. So they didn't want to lose... What struck me, and I wonder if it struck you, when this hit the press and the administration announced that they'd cut a deal and Netanyahu announced that he had cut a deal with Emirates. I said, why Emirates? Emirates is a certain distance away from Israel. Emirates, you say people hadn't been thinking about it. Well, they certainly hadn't been thinking about Emirates. Emirates is very little known in this country. I mean, by people who are presumably familiar with things in the Middle East, they didn't know anything about Emirates. Now, all of a sudden we have a deal between Israel and Emirates. Why not one of those other countries? Maybe closer. Maybe more iconic. Why Emirates? Because the leadership in Emirates is bold. They do not care whatsoever about what Islamists say or do. They are not ashamed of being moderate, very, very, very fierce, uncompromising. They are a very modern country. They're a very rich country. So, they have a lot of influence in the Middle East. They also have a lot of legitimacy because they're a very Islamic country, very religious, much, much more Islamic than Egypt or Lebanon. Saudi? No, Saudi is more religious than the UAE. But the UAE would be like maybe a second or third to the Saudis. So, it has this Islamic legitimacy. So, when you combine all these factors together, it's the perfect country for it. So, the deal, I think what I felt at looking at it when it happened was that this was a cornerstone deal. What I mean was if the Emirates would enter into a deal with Israel, that would break down a lot of the enmity that other countries around had toward Israel, and they might be willing to make similar deals or at least stand back and not be so hostile to Israel. Am I right about that, Cynthia? You're absolutely right because Bahrain also now has a deal with Israel. Tomorrow, the U.S. is mediating talks between Lebanon and Israel. They're going to meet tomorrow to have these discussions. President Trump's trying to push Sudan into the same thing. Sudan is, by the way, is a very important country. That's something not a lot of people know. Sudan is critical because it was the first country to be directly and officially ruled by the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1989 coup d'etat. Omar al-Bashir is a card-carrying member of the Muslim Brotherhood. So, now that he's ousted, this country can, and after the Muslim Brotherhood murdered millions in that nation, it's very important for it to move outside of this death to Israel nasty camp and join the modern world. That would have a ripple effect on other countries in Africa. Sudan is critical for Africa, it's the most important country for Africans. I asked you before we started, the significant question for me is whether the deal, the implications of the deal with Emirates and the apparent shift in opinion around the Middle East by the Arab nations in the Middle East will stick. Will it stay that way? One thing we know is that things change. One thing we know is that the Middle East has been, for the longest time, fragmented and dangerous, and this has promised, but the natural course of events has gone the other way. It's gone to violence, it's gone to hostility, it's gone to all kinds of horrible negative things, and query, do you think that this will stick? That we will have, what do you want to call it, an Emirates spring, a Middle Eastern spring, beyond the Arab spring, which didn't go that far, and if you think that, tell me how that would work. It's a tough question because unfortunately there are several variables and most of them are external. Like for example, it depends on the next president of the United States, whether the next president, whether it's Trump or Biden, would still be consistent in holding all the parties accountable for their part of this agreement. Are you going to be, hold this, so that's one question. The second question is the next president going to start supporting the enemies of these countries, so that they would destroy the people who sign these deals. Like would you support, is the next president going to support the enemies of the UAE government? That's a big question because it happened in 2011 when Obama supported the Muslim Brotherhood, which is the enemy of these regimes. So that could have a significant effect on weakening the strength and the consistency of them being able to continue that process. But as far as the intentions of the UAE government itself, I am pretty confident that they intend to uphold it because it is in their best interest. They want peace. They do not want radicals destroying their country, destroying their culture, destroying their economy. Well, let's throw some other elements into this environment in the Middle East. We have Iraq, which is not stable. We have Iran, which is its own kind of terrorism. We have Syria. It's a rogue nation and a rogue leader and a great tragedy. And then, of course, you and I talked earlier, we have whatever happens in Afghanistan, which is not that far away from the epicenter of this agreement. So could these things derail, these countries that are unstable or adverse to American interests, adverse to peace in the Middle East, for that matter, is that going to just derail what happened with Emirates? Yes, it absolutely could because if the next president is going to be supporting the Iranians, is going to be supporting the Brotherhood, that gives them that gives them a lot of power to go behind, hide behind Iran for it to start creating like unofficial terrorist groups to start creating chaos in the Middle East. So you need a political leadership in the West. It's very unfortunate that American presidents have so much power. I don't like it. Nobody wants to have this much power. It's scary, but they do. The reality is they do. So if one of them starts to have, yeah, I want to have a peace deal with Iran, like the one President Obama wanted to have, Iran was, they didn't even sign it. That's how disrespectful they were of America and of the president and of the peace so-called peace agreement. They wouldn't even sign it. So that was a joke. Speaking about a joke, that was a joke. That gave them political legitimacy. That gave them legitimacy to recruit terrorists, to funnel funds and training to political, to terror groups and use Afghanistan as training grounds for this work. Now that can be a problem. The next president or President Trump or whoever decides to go down this route. That could be a problem. And then there's the unfortunate war between Saudi Arabia, which has lots of U.S. weapons and oil money and the like, and Yemen, which is a great national tragedy. And I wonder if the deal with Emirates is having, would have, should have some effect on that? I don't think it will. I do not think it will because Saudi proxies and Iranian proxies are fighting on Yemeni grounds. So they're fighting over the identity of the country. They're fighting over the religion, over the borders. It's an all in war. It's way too big for it to be controlled this way. Unfortunately, I don't see it changing the situation there. And Afghanistan, we didn't spend enough time on that. But what is happening there as would affect the stability of the region? Well, Afghanistan is currently an absolute utter disaster. Just, I'm very, very concerned about this because the United States now started to revert to pre-911 policies. That resulted in 911. Like exactly, they're doing exactly everything they did wrong. President Trump is not paying attention to this, to Afghanistan at all. It's a huge mistake. He's leaving it to Ambassador Zalmay Khalilizad. He was the US ambassador to Afghanistan. And he's now leading the so-called reconciliation process over there and making just absolute atrocious disasters and mistakes. Like, for example, in 2000, and I want to say, I have the exact date here, just one second. Yeah. In 2012, President Obama's administration released from Gitmo the five most dangerous Taliban leaders or founders of the Taliban. So these guys, they're not going to go work for 7-11 or no, right? They're just going to go continue doing what they do best. They travel from, they go from Gitmo to Qatar, where they establish a political office, okay? A political office, the five most brutal mass murdering savages. They go, found a political office in Qatar, which is a hub for the Muslim Brotherhood and ISIS and al-Qaeda. And in 2015, the leader of al-Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahri, gives a bayah, which is the Islamic oath of allegiance to the Taliban. So now, who is the leader of al-Qaeda? It's the Taliban. That's a fact. It's not an opinion. So they continue. And till today, till today, the Taliban is the official leader of al-Qaeda. This is not a, you know, this is not, this is not a signal well for the future. It's horrific because, and then in 2008, in 18, sorry, the United States and Qatar asks Pakistan to release its most dangerous Taliban prisoner, who's Mullah Baradar. Mullah Baradar, when he was in charge of the Taliban from 2009 to 2010, he had the highest number of American casualties period to ever die in Afghanistan. He is a monster and he is a brutal terrorist. And they release him. The U.S. and Qatar requested his release. Very, very bad, very bad. He goes, of course, to the political office in Qatar. And guess who? Ambassador Khalil al-Zad has the negotiations with. It's that mass murderer, Mullah Baradar himself. They're pictured shaking hands. U.S. Ambassador shaking hands with one of the worst mass murderers on planet Earth. What kind of message does this send to terrorists, to U.S. allies, to everyone in the Middle East? It's so bad that the Muslim Brotherhood, one of the Muslim Brotherhood leaders said that this was the official surrender of the United States of America. That was the official surrender that day. They signed the so-called agreement. Let me extend that to first, I had the impression when you were talking about the Muslim Brotherhood that maybe terrorism was on the wane, because we talked about the word shun, that how radical Islam had become shunned the Middle East because of the, I don't want to call it, the degradation of the Muslim Brotherhood in the eyes of the common people. But has radical Islam become less? Has it declined? Or is it still a great concern? And let me ask you also, has the risk of terrorism from radical Islam in this country declined or not because of this process, this degradation of radical Islam in the Middle East? So it's both. It's much, much less. It has been indeed shunned in the Middle East, but you're always going to have the threat of terrorism because it's not 100%. You are always going to have psychopaths and murderers and people who are very evil who want to do evil things and they can create significant damage. From my research, there's about, I would say half of them, and that's according to also the highest member in the Muslim Brotherhood to ever defect from the organization. This is about half a million members in the Muslim Brotherhood today. It's really shrunk, but these people can cause serious damage. And ask for your question whether there's threats against the United States? Absolutely. There's huge threats against the United States because it's their number one target after Israel actually. They hate America more because they call America the big Satan in Israel, the little Satan. So they hate America. And the reason I'm also extremely concerned is while radical Islam is shunned in the Middle East, it's not shunned in America. It could be shunned. You shun it. I shun it. We don't like it. Most Americans don't like it, but politicians like it. Elan Omar likes it. Those who voted for her like it. Those who hired a convicted terrorist to teach at the Union County College in New Jersey love it. They sure love mass murder because a guy who admitted to being responsible in killing and maiming and injuring 506 people getting hired as a professor at this college, that means that they like it. So there's a huge threat. And the number one victims are moderate Muslims who are terrorized, who contact me and say we're terrified of speaking out. They beat moderate Muslims in mosques in America. So it's easier to be a moderate Muslim in Cairo or the UAE than it is in America. That's a frightening, terrifying conclusion that I never thought in a million years I would come, you know, I would come to. Well, so that we have time for one more question, so to speak, Cynthia, if you don't mind. So looking at the Middle East, what do you think the best American foreign policy would be? And for that matter, looking at the prospect of Islamic terrorism, radical Islamic terrorism in this country, what do you think the best policy should be by the government in both cases? I think the best policy is do not reward evil, do not reward radicals by funneling the money, do not compromise with governments that sponsor an ideological rhetoric that is anti-American ever. Why would, why was America paying millions and millions of dollars to the Egyptian government when 24 hours a day under Mubarak, they were calling America Satan and the worst evil on the planet? Why were you funding regimes who speak like that? Any regime who holds an anti-American stance should be rejected completely by the United States of America and should be punished depending on the level of their engagement in terrorism, whether they should, through sanctions, through boycotts, I do not believe that we go and kill, you know, these regimes or whatever go to war. I believe that it could be done through economic pressure. Okay, and domestically? Domestically, oh my god, that's even more complicated because right now the vast majority of Islamic organizations in the United States are controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood. So the first thing that needs to happen is to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist group. This way it will be hard for them to take control of the organizations and hijack the representation of Muslims in America. So this way moderate Muslims can take control of their community again instead of being terrified of getting killed or beaten up or kidnapped because that's the kind of threats they get. So designate the Brotherhood as a terrorist group. So is this discussion in the book that you're going to be publishing, Cynthia? Yes. What will that cover and what do you call, what's the working title and when will it be available and how can we get it? So the working title is The Secret Apparatus. The Brotherhood is claiming that the Secret Apparatus was history and it ended a long time ago in the 50s. It's a lie from their own words. I have evidence that it's working right now and it's in America and it is the secret body that controls a lot of the organization's mission in terms of terrorism and propaganda work. And I call it like the Secret Apparatus, the Muslim Brotherhood's industry of death. Do you know that Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Brotherhood, referred to his organization as an industry of death? Amazing, right? But then you get then you get American experts, the Muslim Brotherhood is a peaceful organization. People told me this to my face. So that's the book. I'm talking about, of course, policy recommendations, but I'm going in through their history. I'm talking a lot about their work with Iran. People think that Sunnis and Shias are enemies and on some level they are, but on so many levels they're not. And I'm talking about the 14th centuries of cooperation, not just the 14th centuries of war. And I'm talking about all the evidence to the work between the Muslim Brotherhood and Iran from the day they were, the Brotherhood was founded till now. And a lot of fun elements like that. It's supposed to be available. Well, I hope, yeah, go ahead. Sorry, it's supposed to be available sometime next year, still not sure exactly when. All right. Well, then or sooner, I'd like to pick up this discussion with you and related to current times, because as I said before, this one thing about the Middle East is changes all the time. And it would be interesting to get your take on the changes that are now to come. Thank you, Cynthia. Cynthia Farahat, thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. Aloha.