Whitewashing the Muslim Brotherhood
by Alyssa A. Lappen
FrontPageMagazine | Nov. 15, 2007

On the wall over my desk hangs an amusing trophy from the late, disgraced former President, Richard M. Nixon, whose lies about Watergate ultimately forced him from office. I framed Nixon’s letter–extolling secretive textile magnate Roger Milliken as one of America’s greatest businessmen–beside the May 1989 Forbes piece in which I also reported on the suitcases of cash Milliken gave to both Nixon presidential campaigns.

On October 19, 2006, I encountered a liar rivaling Nixon–ironically then a “senior fellow” at Washington’s Nixon Center. Also then a consultant to ABC News and the U.S. Defense Department (DOD), Alexis Debat appeared at New York University Law School’s Center on Law and Security on an “expert” panel on the Muslim Brotherhood. Debat claimed he was writing “a book on the Muslim Brotherhood,” reportedly with an enormous, indirect DOD grant, through the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA) headed by former DOD analyst Andrew Krepinevich.

Masquerading as a Sorbonne Ph.D. and former French Defense Ministry adviser, Debat simultaneously made the most preposterous claims. “Let’s stop hyperventilating about the Muslim Brotherhood,” he said, adding, “I hear the same things in a [British] church as I hear in a mosque”–despite frequent, recurrent incitements emanating from Islamic mosques, centers and schools, including myriad tapes, textbooks, and other media.

“Islam is a source of enlightenment,” Debat said, calling the Muslim Brotherhood “chiefly a ‘political movement, not a party,”–a “liberation” movement, and a “highly pragmatic” prospective “leader in Egypt.”

As was obvious from his foolish remarks, Debat was no Muslim Brotherhood “expert.” Indeed, in September 2002 Agence France Presse had reported, the French Defense Ministry never employed Debat in any capacity–a fact further corroborated by terror expert Jean Charles Brisard, in a Sept. 26, 2007 email. Moreover, Debat never received a Sorbonne Ph.D.

Responding to my Oct. 23, 2006 American Thinker report, Debat falsely complained of “misquotes and distortions,” which I easily refuted. NYU’s Center for Law and Security didn’t publish a recording–which would have been too embarrassing.

Events quickly put the lie to Debat’s nonsense, as my colleague Patrick Poole noted in February 2007. Continue reading “Lies of the Nixon Center” →

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