The US welcomed Muslim Brotherhood leaders despite their political assassinations.

Evidence

Some administrators even began to develop the notion of Saud as a kind of “Islamic Pope.” A year after Eisenhower wrote his letter about Saud, he received Said Ramadan, the son-in-law of the Muslim Brotherhood’s founder Hassan al-Banna, at the White House. Even though the Brotherhood had resorted to violent actions, killing several Egyptian officials, Ramadan was to become a part of the United States’s strategy in the Middle East. Thus, we see that actions that would later be called “terrorism,” such as political assassinations, were acceptable if carried out by allies. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 387

Categorization

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

• XREF: Challenges the stark good-vs-terrorist framing of the War on Terror — the leading Brotherhood figure was hosted at the White House in 1953.

Related

• The US hosted the Muslim Brotherhood despite its violence against Egypt (similarity 0.93)
• The US courted even a violent Muslim Brotherhood against Nasser (similarity 0.87)
• The CIA cultivated the Muslim Brotherhood to counter Nasser’s pan-Arab nationalism (similarity 0.82)
• Pan-Arab anticolonial unity prompted CIA support for the Muslim Brotherhood (similarity 0.80)