The House Judiciary Committee passed legislation on Wednesday inspired, in part, by authoritarian crackdowns, including a brutal campaign waged by former Syrian President Hafez al-Assad. It was approved in a 17-10 vote split along party lines, with Republicans backing the measure and Democrats opposing it.
The bill calls on the Secretary of State to designate the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization. “Findings” listed in an earlier version of the proposal noted that in 1980 “the Government of Syria banned the Muslim Brotherhood from the country; and made membership in the organization punishable by death.”
That section also cited, as inspiration, Egyptian, Saudi Arabian and Bahraini government rulings declaring the Brotherhood a terrorist organization. All three states made the determination after Egypt’s only democratically-
In the aftermath of its call to make Muslim Brotherhood membership “punishable by death,” the government of Hafez al-Assad in 1982 carried out massacres in the town of Hama. The attacks killed tens of thousands of civilians. Hafez’s son, current Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, told Charlie Rose in a 2013 interview that the incident informed how he has overseen his country’s brutal civil war.
“He talked about his father, and the lessons that he learned from his father, that war was ruthless, and that after Hama, his father went all out to destroy, at the time, the Muslim Brotherhood,” Rose noted, in a preview of the segment.
House Judiciary Committee chair Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) amended the bill to remove the aforementioned historical observations, but affirmatively noted that they informed the legislative process.
“The amendment makes technical clarifications and streamlines the bill by striking about twenty pages of findings, which would be more appropriate in legislative history,” Goodlatte said. Legislative histories are used by lawyers and judges to make points about Congressional intent—a legal concept used to clarify ambiguities in statutes.
The committee’s ranking member, Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) sarcastically lauded his Republican colleagues for no longer “including Russia and Syria” in the bill. “I’m glad the majority will no longer be citing these countries as a source of our foreign policy approach,” he said.
Conyers still strongly urged Democrats to oppose the maneuver on numerous grounds. He hit out at Goodlatte for not consulting with the State Department or the intelligence community, and noted that the Muslim Brotherhood has been “predominately a non-violent religious political and social service organization” since the 1950’s.
“I fear that this bill appeals to our base fears,” Conyers said. “Islamophobia may be good politics—time will tell—but it certainly is not good policy. It does not serve our national security or foreign policy interests. It will not make us safer.”
Conyers also said it “would complicate our bilateral relationship with Egypt,” given the Muslim Brotherhood’s reach and complexity there.
Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (R-Fla.), a co-author of the legislation that cited the Hafez al-Assad’s mass execution order, rejected this claim by defending Egypt’s dictatorial regime.
“We’ve seen the administration’s approach to the situation in Egypt tilt in favor of the Brotherhood over people like President [Abdel Fatah] el-Sisi,” Diaz-Balart said. “This is a group that is dedicated to the imposition of Sharia and the establishment of an Islamic caliphate.”
In 2013, in the aftermath of its ousting of President Mohammed Morsi, the Egyptian military junta outlawed the Muslim Brotherhood and declared the group a terrorist organization. Since the coup, “the country’s security forces have killed hundreds of Brotherhood supporters on the streets and arrested thousands,” International Business Times noted earlier this month.
