Sheehan is interviewed by Al Jazeera:

Cindy Sheehan, an American activist who was nicknamed the "Peace Mom" by the media for her criticism of the Iraq War, retreated from her public campaigns in 2007.

The death of her son Casey, a US soldier, in a Baghdad battle in 2005 had transformed Sheehan into a public figure in the US.
But she resurfaced in Cairo last week as a member of a delegation from the Muslim American Society which is in Egypt to protest against the military trial of 40 members of the banned Muslim Brotherhood.
She spoke to Al Jazeera about her journey from peace activist to Congressional candidate, her thoughts on Iraq and her experiences in Egypt. Al Jazeera: You first became famous for your protests against the Iraq war in August 2005, but you have not been an active anti-war figure for a while now. What happened?

Sheehan says she wants to put impeachment of George Bush back on the agenda [GETTY]

Sheehan: In May 2007, I decided to quit actually being the face of the anti-war movement in America. I quit and I have not gone back to that. When I left the movement I was broke, I was tired, I was sick – literally sick and in pain.

I wanted to just totally be out of the political realm and not have anything to do with it. The establishment that runs our country just disgusted me and I was tired of it. It is very corrupt and I definitely saw that when I was focusing on anti-war activism.

The leaders of both parties work together to keep normal people out of the process. In many ways the Democratic leadership, especially in Congress, has been complicit with George Bush, the US president, in his crimes against humanity.

How can [Democratic Speaker of the House] Nancy Pelosi say unequivocally that water-boarding is torture and that Bush and [Richard] Cheney, the US vice-president, should not only be impeached but they should be charged with war crimes when in 2002 she herself was briefed on water-boarding and shown video of the rendition places where water-boarding happened?
Impeaching George Bush was a popular demand among liberal Americans at one time, but very few people talk about it anymore. Is that what turned you into an activist again?

When George Bush commuted [vice-presidential aide] Scooter Libby’s sentence, the Democrats in Congress didn’t do anything about it. When the Administration said they would not cooperate with subpoenas against [presidential aide] Harriet Myers, the democrats didn’t do anything about it.

That’s what pulled me back into activism. I thought how can they do that? How can they say ‘I’m just not going to come to your stupid trial,’ and no one will say anything about it?

When the Democrats took impeachment off the table, I decided enough was enough. On July 23, 2007, I officially announced that I was running for Congress against Nancy Pelosi.
Why the focus on Nancy Pelosi?

I decided if Nancy Pelosi wasn’t going to put impeachment on the table then I would run against her.

You can’t take any part of the Constitution off the table, even though they have rendered it almost meaningless between George Bush and Karl Rove. Since they came to power they have institutionalised torture and spying against Americans.

They have passed the Military Commissions Act and just done away with habeas corpus. They have practically rendered it meaningless. That is why I decided to challenge Pelosi for her seat. I always say if you want change you have to vote out the enablers, and Pelosi is the biggest enabler there is. 
If your new focus is on unseating Nancy Pelosi, what are you doing in Egypt?
 

My anti-war work evolved into work for global human rights because I saw the problem was much deeper than just George Bush.

It’s about militarism and violence, globalisation and free trade.

I decided I wanted to do human rights work on behalf of people around the world who have been harmed by US imperialism.

Part of why I am here, also, is to draw attention to the parallels between the military courts here and the same kinds of courts that are being used to try detainees at Guantanamo Bay by the US.

If this becomes the standard for the world, and there is no international outcry, then everyone is in big trouble.

But what does the US have to do with a military trial in Egypt?

Egypt is a major recipient of US foreign aid, and there is no relationship between American aid and human rights.

If we [America] really want to promote democracy in this region then we cannot silence the voices of the Muslim Brotherhood because they’re the moderate voice here and they are the ones who are actually working for democracy.
Do you think your presence in Egypt will have an effect on the trial?

Well, we have been doing a lot of media work since we came to Egypt and we hope this will put pressure on the Egyptian government to treat the prisoners better and to also maybe alleviate their punishment.

Hopefully we will draw some international attention to what is happening here, too, and that will help the situation.
You also went to the National Council of Women in downtown Cairo to request a meeting with Suzanne Mubarak, Egypt’s First Lady. How did that go?

I didn’t really understand a lot of what was going on. There was a lot of yelling in Arabic. They weren’t the right people to get us a meeting with Suzanne Mubarak … I left a letter for Madame Mubarak and they promised that she would see it.

We thought it was important to go there because there are women and children who are being harmed by having their fathers and husbands detained, so I wanted to talk to Suzanne, mother to mother.

We brought along mothers and wives of the detainees and they were actually able to file complaints, and it was really great.
Have you spoken to many of the families of the defendants in the military trial? Have you spoken to many female members of the Brotherhood mother-to-mother?

My conversations with the mothers and children of the detainees have been really emotional. They told me about the hardships [the arrests and trials] have placed on their families, from financial hardships to emotional and physical hardships.

It is very emotional for me because my family has gone through the same things since my son died. It has been really hard for us.

People always say to me, ‘Cindy, why do you always make everything personal?’.

But in the end, everything affects people, whether it’s war or economics or human rights violations. I don’t think politicians who make political decisions necessarily think about how they are going to affect people and their families.

That is why when I meet people who have been harmed by the policies of their own countries, or the policies of my country, it just makes me resolved to work harder to make the world a better place. 

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Tidbits: It just so happens that while Sheehan was in Egypt, a few members of the Jarrar family were with her, though, they stayed behind the scenes this time. For those of you not familiar with the Jarrar’s; they’re Iraqi/Palestinian terrorists or as Sheehan calls them, "freedom fighters". The very same freedom fighters that killed her soldier son.

By Ben Johnson
FrontPageMagazine.com

Of the many outrages Cindy Sheehan has perpetrated since using her heroic son’s coffin as a pole-vault into national stardom, none has gotten less laudatory press than her recent intervention on behalf of 40 imprisoned members of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood. A typical headline adorning the Associated Press story declared, “Cindy Sheehan in Egypt for Islamists.” Yet none of this coverage – which has changed toned markedly since she decided to run against the Democratic Speaker of the House – has exposed the Brotherhood’s extremist ideology, its violent history – or the fact that MB members have called the terrorists who killed U.S. soldiers like Casey Sheehan “heroic.”

The elder Sheehan took to Egypt last week as part of a leftist contingent to insist the Egyptian government free a handful of Brotherhood members.  As AP recorded, “According to the Brotherhood, 3,245 members of their organization were arrested in 2007.” Some 40 of that number are on trial. The trial began a year ago against two-scores of its members, including its third most prominent member, Khayrat el-Shater (its “chief strategist and financier”), for money laundering – and terrorism. 

Nonetheless, Sheehan felt obligated to give the MB an early Valentine’s Day hug, penning a letter to Egyptian first lady Suzanne Mubarak. The second sentence denounced “the illegal and immoral U.S. occupation of Iraq.”  She continued, presenting three demands: Egypt must financially support MB family members of these “political prisoners,” protest any future harm to MB family members, and complete “the return of the personal belongings (including money and jewelry) of the families involved.”

Of course, such money could be immediately put to use in terrorism, as many in Egypt fear.

Yet Sheehan joined former U.S. Congressman Walter Fauntroy, leftist agitator Mahdi Bray, and her own campaign manager, Tiffany Burns, in a Valentine’s vigil against the Brotherhood’s military trial. Walter E. Fauntroy served as Washington, D.C.’s non-voting Congressman for some 20 years in the House of Representatives, becoming a founding member and former chairman of the far-Left Congressional Black Caucus. Meanwhile, this makes Mahdi Bray’s second trip to Egypt in solidarity with the Muslim Brotherhood. Bray is a former SDS radical before converting to Islam and becoming a founding member of Sami al-Arian’s National Coalition to Protect Political Freedom. Bray’s MAS Freedom Foundation is an off-shoot of the Muslim American Society, itself founded by MB members. More than organizational ties, the group shares a common ideology and bloodlust with the MB. Bray once brayed, “Let’s all go into jihad, and throw stones at the face of the Jews.”

This rhetorical and ideological hatred is the Brotherhood’s stock-in-trade. Robert Spencer has called the Muslim Brotherhood “the parent organization of Hamas and al-Qaeda.” Founded 80 years ago by Hasan al-Banna, the MB seeks a worldwide Islamic caliphate that would enforce Shari’a law – the definition of Islamofascism.

Brotherhood members had been in de facto war against the state of Egypt since Islamist theoretician Sayyid Qutb indicted Gamal Abdel Nasser’s government as “the Party of Satan.” (Nasser executed Qutb in 1966). Yet his influence lived on through members like Ayman al-Zawahiri, the number two man in al-Qaeda, and many other anti-Muslim terrorists. Anwar Sadat brought MB out of the wilderness, and it now competes for parliamentary seats as part of the “Islamic Alliance.” Although the organization is formally banned by the secular-leaning Hosni Mubarak regime, its candidates often run as “independents” declaring, “Islam is the solution.”

Such Islamist ends did not pacify its most radical detractors. Zawahiri and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi attacked the MB for taking part in parliamentary elections in 2005, viewing any trifling with democracy as idolatry. Zarqawi asked, “How can anyone choose any other path but that of jihad? I appeal to the Islamic party: Abandon this strategy which is a losing one for Sunnis.”  Brotherhood members won 80 of some 150 elections it chose to contest and now hold 20 percent of parliamentary seats.

However, despite media criticism of Sheehan’s role, most coverage has painted the Brotherhood as a “progressive,” pro-democracy party oppressed by fascistic U.S. allies. John Walsh of the Harvard International Review gushes, “Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood provides an example of the goals and methods of centrist Islamism.” Among its achievements, the cadre “has established a network of social services in neighborhoods and villages,” which fills “gaps in government services.”

Two fellow academics agreed in The Boston Globe. Joshua Stacher, who teaches history at the American University in Cairo, and Samer Shehata, who teaches Arab Studies at Georgetown University, wrote, “Unlike other Islamist organizations, such as Hamas or Hezbollah, the Brotherhood has no armed wing, and neither the U.S. Department of State nor the European Union considers it a terrorist group.”

Similarly, the New York Times coos that the MB “helped establish a local health insurance system…During Ramadan, [a member’s] charitable organization distributes free food.” It praises “the [Egyptian MB] national platform with its typically populist positions.” The Times charts these populist crowd-pleasers’ totalitarian trajectory – only to excuse it. “Turning Egypt into an Islamic state is an interim goal along the way to recreating the Islamic empire, or caliphate, of 1,000 years ago,” it reports. But not to worry: this would resemble “something like the European Union.”

Well, something like the European Union if it cut off people’s hands.

The Council on Foreign Relations – by no means a conservative institution – is a bit more open: “Strengthening the role of Islamic law, or Shari’a, is at the center of the Muslim Brotherhood’s identity as an organization, both in Egypt and among the group’s many offshoots throughout the Muslim world.”  

…Including the Muslim Brotherhood’s affiliate in Iraq, where the MB’s parliamentary representation, the Iraqi Islamic Party, has heaped praise upon the “heroic Iraqi resistance.” This encomium encompasses whomever killed Casey Sheehan, the event Cindy exploited to begin her perpetual revolution-and-media-whoredom.

Cindy Sheehan thinks so little of her son that she is willing to join forces with the movement whose extremist ideology spawned the organization that killed him and whose offshoot holds his killers up as role models.

The Muslim Brotherhood’s continued radicalism belies the prophecy of the founder’s youngest brother, 85-year-old Gamal al-Banna. Gamal recently said, “The real test of the Brotherhood is to let it enter politics. They will be in a different situation when they confront the necessities of ruling, and there are only two possible outcomes. They will have to compromise or fail.” This was precisely what the intelligentsia said about Hamas’ electoral victory in Palestine. Instead, Hamas instigated a brutal civil war against Fatah, which resulted in the strange sight of Palestinians fleeing for refuge into Israel in order to escape fellow Palestinian Muslims.

Whenever Islamists take power, they engage, not in community building and progressive anti-poverty programs, but in jihad against all who oppose them – including, sometimes before all others, their fellow Muslims. This is the process Sheehan wished to accelerate with her protest last week.

To be fair, this was Sheehan’s second trip in which she met with those who supported the killing of her son, undertaken putatively to honor Casey Sheehan. In August 2006, she joined Tom Hayden, Medea Benjamin, and a dozen Code Pink activists on a trek to Jordan to meet with Iraqi pro-terrorist leaders. On the trip, she met with members of the Iraqi parliament, including Sheikh Ahmad al-Kubaysi, who once asserted that foreign jihadists like those who killed Casey Sheehan “are guaranteed Paradise.”  The group also pressed the flesh with Saleh al-Mutlaq, leader of the Iraq National Dialogue Front, who wrote, “terrorists the honorable national resistance movements…we cannot give peace.”

If her exploitation of her son’s death during her hate-filled protest in the United States, or her trip to buss Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez, did not convince the national media of her opportunism, nothing will. Yet only when she embraces those who justify her son’s murder can one grasp the full breadth of her betrayal, of her son and her country.