A former executive of the William J. Clinton Foundation who is now a senior Muslim Brotherhood official was arrested in Cairo Tuesday for inciting violence.
Gehad el-Haddad served the Clinton nonprofit founded by former President Bill Clinton for five years, but he actually began his work with Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood before he left the foundation, according to the Washington Free Beacon .
El-Haddad’s duties with the Muslim Brotherhood began in February 2011, when he took control of a Brotherhood-supported Renaissance Project, ostensibly an economic recovery program but was actually used to bring Egypt more in line with the Brotherhood’s fundamentalist Islamic views.
“Renaissance is far more than the electoral program of President Mohamed Morsi or the Brotherhood’s political wing, the Freedom and Justice Party,” the Egypt Independent reported at the time. “It is a 25-year project to reform state, business and civil society, rooted in the Brotherhood’s Islamic values but conditioned by the experiences of the project’s founders in the modern economy.”
Three months later, in August 2011, el-Haddad was appointed a senior foreign affairs advisor for Mohamed Morsi’s Freedom and Justice Party.
However, el-Haddad didn’t leave his position with the Clinton Foundation until more than a year later — August 2012, two months after Morsi assumed power.
The Free Beacon reported:
El-Haddad represented the Clinton Foundation’s Clinton Climate Initiative in Egypt during his overlapping tenure, according to his LinkedIn profile.
He additionally “setup the foundation’s office in Egypt and managed official registration,” “supervised policy-making workshops & presented foundations views,” and “presented projects to high-level government officials,” among many other duties.
Egyptian security forces arrested el-Haddad “as part of a wider crackdown on officials loyal to ousted former President Morsi,” the Beacon reported, and charged him with inciting violence.
“It was only a matter of time before Gehad el-Haddad was arrested,” Egypt expert Eric Trager told the Washington Free Beacon. “Many of the other Muslim Brotherhood spokesmen have been apprehended, and in addition to decapitating the organization, the military-backed government has been specifically targeting the Brotherhood’s media wing, including by shutting down its TV stations at the time of Morsi’s ouster on July 3.”
Brotherhood supporters expressed outrage on social media, as the following tweet suggests. Note the black four-finger salute “Asif” uses as his profile avatar, indicating support for the Muslim Brotherhood.
@gelhaddad We are thinking about you and you are in our prayers #Gehad #IAmGehadElHaddad
— Asif (@AsifManzoor) September 18, 2013
The Free Beacon reported that the Clinton Foundation failed to respond to “multiple requests for comment on El-Haddad’s employment and arrest.”
Read more at the Washington Free Beacon .
