by Michael Cook

Created on: February 13, 2011

Of course the Muslim Brotherhood should be allowed to participate in Egypt's transformation from an autocratic dictatorship to an emerging democracy, but it should not be allowed to dominate that process any more than any other faction should.

Living abroad, what I've found fascinating and disturbing is just how little balanced, let alone fair, coverage the US media afforded this epic story.

Nowhere is that more true than in certain quarters of America's increasingly right wing media, from Fox News to the Eagle Tribune newspaper in North Andover, MA.

To hear many in our Islamophobic, right wing media tell it, what happened in Cairo is little more than an encore of the Iranian Revolution that occurred  more than three decades ago. But the facts on the ground say otherwise.

Watching coverage of events in Cairo on media outlets from several countries, I was struck that, as far as I know, not one major US media outlet ran a clip I saw on the BBC several days ago.

In that clip, a small group of Islamists were chanting "Allah Akbar", but they were shouted down by a much louder and larger group of young Egyptians who responded by chanting, "Muslim, Christian - We are all Egyptian".

Just today, February, 13, a spokesman for the Muslim Brotherhood denounced Iranian President Ahmadinejad's attempt to conflate events in Cairo into the beginning of an Islamic revolution that will sweep the region in the coming months.

That spokesman asserted publicly  the democratic groundswell that toppled Hosni Mubarak was driven by all Egyptians, not just Egyptians of any one faith. It was, when all is said and done, quite a repudiation by the Muslim Brotherhood of the Iranian president.  

But then, years after it renounced violence, the Muslim Brotherhood was one of the first Muslim organizations to denounce the attacks of September, 11 and has continued to be an outspoken critic of both Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda.

But such facts don't get reported much in the US media, particularly within the right wing media, and many right wing GOP/Tea Party politicians are also making a bogeyman of the Muslim Brotherhood for what can only be called tawdry domestic political gain.

Pundits like Glenn Beck and pols like Iowa Congressman Steve King and Sarah Palin are again stoking the flames of Islamophobia in the US in the wake of events in Egypt because they know doing so mobilizes their ignorant, religiously

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