According to Sir John Jenkins of University of Cambridge, a world leading expert on the Muslim Brotherhood and Islamic terrorism, and contrary to the US State Department’s worldview: “… The key to confronting the Islamist challenge is to understand what the challenge is. There is a lot of nonsense talk about the Muslim Brotherhood’s approach to violence…. In fact, violence has been constitutive of the Brotherhood ideology since its origins….
“Central to the Brotherhood’s shared ideology are the ideas of Sayyid Qutb [who was executed in Egypt in 1966 for plotting to assassinate President Nasser], a seminal figure for all Islamist movements… the foundational text of Islamism, particularly violent Islamism….
There is an interview of Al Jazeera and Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, the al-Qaeda-linked Jabhat al-Nusra leader in Syria. [Al Jazeera’s interviewer] says to al-Jolani: ‘Everything you’re doing and saying is straight out of the Muslim Brotherhood and Qutb’s handbook…. And al-Jolani replies: ‘Yes; you’re right that Qutb is essential, and we teach him in our schools….’ You have to understand this in order to understand the constitutive ideological challenge of Islamism….
“The Brotherhood’s ultimate objective is to take power and create what they construe as a true Islamic state… an idea they share with all radicalized Islamists including ISIS and other actively violent Islamist movements…. The relationship between the Brotherhood and more theatrically violent groups like ISIS or al-Qaeda is complex. They criticize each other…. But this is what Freud called the narcissism of small differences. The end-state of all these groups is the same…”