U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Tuesday that his department is in the process of designating the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization.
“I got to ask you: Why wouldn’t you guys designate the Muslim Brotherhood and CAIR?” Sid Rosenberg, the host of an eponymous radio program, asked Rubio. “I look at these organizations. I have a mayor’s race here in New York City with this psycho, this lunatic Mamdani.”
“Both of these groups, you know, are behind him, especially the Muslim Brotherhood. Is that something you think we can count on, maybe in the near future?” Rosenberg asked. “Maybe not CAIR just yet, but certainly the Muslim Brotherhood?”
“All of that is in the works,” Rubio said. “Obviously, there are different branches of the Muslim Brotherhood, so you’d have to designate each one of them.”
The secretary described the legal challenges that have prevented slapping terrorist sanctions on the Islamist group.
“These things are going to be challenged in court,” Rubio said. “Any group can say, ‘Well, I’m not really a terrorist. That organization is not a terrorist organization.’”
“You have to show your work like a math problem when you go before court,” he said. “All you need is one federal judge—and there are plenty—that are willing to do these nationwide injunctions and basically try to run the country from the bench. So we’ve got to be so careful.”
Rubio declined to address directly whether he supported Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s decision to take military control of Gaza City but said that Hamas must be “eliminated.”
“The Arab League came out and said we agree Hamas needs to be disarmed, it can—disband it—they can no longer exist,” Rubio said. “As long as Hamas exists, there will be no peace in Gaza. That’s a fact.”
“You can have a ceasefire for 30, 60, 90 days. You can do whatever you want. You will not have peace in Gaza as long as Hamas exists,” Rubio said.
Several countries, including Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and France, have said that they intend to recognize a Palestinian state either in response to the Gaza City military operation or to humanitarian conditions throughout the coastal enclave. (London said it would do so absent “substantive” steps from Israel.)
Rubio called those statements “meaningless.”
“It’s symbolic, and they’re doing it primarily for one reason, and that is their internal politics, their domestic politics,” Rubio said. “The truth of the matter is that the future of that region is not going to be decided by some U.N. resolution. It’s not going to be decided by some press release by a prime minister or a president from some country.”
“It’s going to be decided on the ground,” he said. “It’s going to be decided by: when will the day come when Palestinian areas are not governed by terrorist organizations? Because that’s truly what this comes down to, and that is the security of Israel.”
