20110205
reuters

CAIRO (Reuters) - President Hosni Mubarak was playing a familiar card when he claimed this week that the Muslim Brotherhood has orchestrated the mass protests that have brought his rule to the brink of collapse.

Mubarak said in an interview with ABC on Thursday that the Brotherhood, Egypt's largest and most influential opposition movement, was behind attacks by his supporters on protesters in central Cairo this week that left 11 people dead.

He also said that if he resigned now, then the group he has depicted as the bogeyman to Western governments over the years would surely take over -- an argument that seems to have run out of steam as foreign leaders push for a transfer for power.

While Mubarak was attacking the group to U.S. media, his vice president Omar Suleiman made an unprecedented offer of talks, saying it was a "valuable opportunity" the group should not pass up.

"The Muslim Brotherhood was used by the regime (to frighten) the West) and Mubarak wasn't the only one doing this," said Jamal Khashoggi, a prominent Saudi commentator, referring to ousted Tunisian ruler Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali.

Run out of power on January 14 in an uprising, Ben Ali crushed the Islamist Ennahda group in the 1990s and exploited Western fear of political Islam to secure support for his police state.

The Brotherhood has served a further purpose in justifying heavy-handed security policies at home, Khashoggi said.

The group champions Islamic sharia law in a country Mubarak has kept mainly secular with concessions to religion. Mubarak has played on Western and Arab liberal fears it would install an anti-Western Islamic state similar to Iran. Washington fears for the future of Egypt's pioneering peace treaty with Israel.