Lawrence Auster should stick to what he does best

Lawrence Auster does a lot of variegated good things on his website; demonstrating Islamoliteracy is not one of them.

In an otherwise good posting on his website, Does disaster represent our only hope, Lawrence Auster lurches a tad too far in the direction of a realm in which he evidently is insufficiently knowledgeable. One would have hoped, in such a situation, he would have at least let his instincts guide him (which are usually good on Islam), or say nothing; but apparently, his certitude was irrepressible.

In one parenthetical correction to the writer he was featuring (Arnold Ahlert), Auster abruptly corrects the statement --

...the Muslim Brotherhood, one of the most virulent Islamic terrorist organizations in the world...

with this corrective:

[... this is incorrect; as is well known, the MB in recent decades has avoided direct involvement with terror]

All one would have to do is Google, for example -- just to pick one terror-fomenting Muslim cleric out of thousands one could adduce from a fez -- Anwar al-Awlaki, and juxtapose that search with "Muslim Brotherhood", and one would find articles such as this one, which reveals how thick in terrorism the Muslim Brotherhood's paws are in various serpentine ways. Indeed, they only went the route of putting on a facade of being legitimate because after they assassinated Sadat, Mubarak clamped down and that was the only way they could survive to continue to machinate the jihad in their own enormously influential way. And this kind of intertwining association and mutual inspiration (not to mention likely material collusion) we see between Al-Awlaki and the Muslim Brother hood could be multiplied a thousand-fold all over the world. To bluntly assert that the Muslim Brotherhood is not a terrorist organization would be like saying that Charles Manson was not a murderer (you see, he only sang songs, had orgies, got high, and indirectly inspired those young women to go on a killing spree); or like saying that some Mafioso honcho who has never gotten his own immediate hands bloody is not a murderous criminal.

Either Auster is demanding some rigid definition of "terrorist organization" whereby the members must be actually setting off bombs or decapitating heads in order to qualify; or he is, in his hectic obsession with being emergent about everything under the sun including the kitchen sink, pronouncing on matters about which he knows little.