The Muslim Brotherhood terrorist designation is a decision John Kiriakou has questioned on the ground that nothing about the organisation has changed to justify it.
The designation
Kiriakou noticed the subject rising on Fox News and elsewhere in right-wing print media, and believed that the State Department had just declared the Muslim Brotherhood, or elements of it, a terrorist organisation. He is explicit that he is not certain of the fact — “I think, I’m not positive.”[1][2][3]
He raises it as an instance of a pattern he had just been describing: the deliberate exploitation of an American audience’s inability to tell one Middle Eastern faction from another, which he says was how the public was tricked into the Iraq war.[2]
The objection
His argument is from the record. The organisation is 105 years old; it has never carried out an anti-American terrorist operation; and it has never been called a terrorist organisation by any American administration.[1][3]
He separates the group’s character from the label: “It’s fundamentalist. It doesn’t like us, but that doesn’t mean it’s a terrorist organization.”[4][5]
What he presses on is the purpose. If it is now a terrorist organisation, “does that mean we attack it?” — what is the reason for making the declaration at all?[4][5]
Said to a former IDF spokesman’s face
In September 2025 Kiriakou made the same argument in a hostile setting, describing a televised debate with a former IDF spokesman a few days earlier. He prefaces the account with a general complaint about the format: you cannot debate Israeli officials, current or former, because they do not let you speak, they throw out lie after lie, and they accuse you of being a terrorist or of supporting terrorism. He eventually told the man he would put his own career up against his any day of the week.[6]
The substance he opened with was this designation: “literally everything you said in your opening statement was a lie. The Muslim Brotherhood has never been classified as a terrorist organization. Never. Not by anybody. You can dislike somebody’s politics, that doesn’t make them a terrorist organization.”[7]
The older quarrel: Egypt’s election
Kiriakou’s interest in the Brotherhood predates the designation by a decade, and in his earlier treatment the group is an example not of terrorism but of American hostility to elections whose results Washington dislikes.
Egypt held a democratic election and the Muslim Brotherhood won it, he says — and as soon as the Brotherhood turned out to be somebody the United States did not want to do business with, the United States supported a military coup and the ensuing military dictatorship. He files it alongside Hamas’s election victory, Iran, Guatemala in the 1950s, the Dominican Republic in the 1960s, and the 1967 overthrow of the elected government of Greece.[8][9]
Put to him that a vote for the Brotherhood was really a vote to discontinue elections thereafter, he rejected the premise on the record: “the Muslim Brotherhood never said that it was one vote, one man, one vote, one time. They never said that.” He added that there were no democratic institutions in Egypt in the first place, in part because the United States had supported Mubarak and Sadat before him for so many decades — and that to say the Brotherhood was not really democratic and should therefore be overthrown is “disingenuous.”[10][11]
The wider complaint about labels
Kiriakou raises the case immediately alongside “narco terrorist” and Islamofascism, as another instance of a label arriving before any conduct that would warrant it.[12] His complaint about the newer term is that nobody can say what it means: it is “amazing how these new terms come out and then all of a sudden every pro-war right-winger is repeating them.” The conduct the word is supposed to describe — killing civilians to shift politics — is not what is being alleged of the boat targets in Venezuela, where the claim is drugs on a boat, and that not demonstrated.[5][13]
The practical objection is that the label ends the argument rather than starting one. Asked why survivors of a strike were killed, the answer offered is that the questioner must be defending narco-terrorists: “turn your brain off and just don’t even think about this.” Kiriakou’s response is to restate the rule: there are laws of war that the United States has signed, and if you have launched a strike and there are survivors no longer able to participate in the fight, you cannot kill them. “If you don’t like the law, change the law.”[14][15]