In July and August 2024, protests rocked Bangladesh culminating in the ouster of Sheikh Hasina, Bangladesh’s long-term prime minister, and the daughter of the country’s founder. Sheikh Hasina—and the Awami League over which she presided—embraced secularism and sought to maintain Bangladesh’s sectarian and social tolerance.
Traditionally, Bangladeshis viewed Islamist extremism negatively due to the role of the Jamaat-e Islami in the genocide that marked the country’s birth.
Both the United States and the United Nations soft-pedal concerns about radical Islamism while at the same time uncritically accepting accusations by Islamists against those critical of Islamist terror connections.
Both the United States and the United Nations soft-pedal concerns about radical Islamism while at the same time uncritically accepting accusations by Islamists against those critical of Islamist terror connections.
In his memoir Power & Principle, President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski recalled the debates that preceded Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s victory over the shah in the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
“The State Department and the U.S. Ambassador in Tehran, William Sullivan, even opposed the transfer to the Iranian government of crowd-control devices, since that presumably would have inhibited the needed process of conciliation”, Brzezinki recalled. “As the crisis unfolded, it became evident to me that lower echelons at State, notably the head of the Iran Desk, Henry Precht, were motivated by doctrinal dislike of the Shah and simply wanted him out of power altogether.”
In Egypt, Hosni Mubarak was a dictator, and he presided over a system in which the army distorted its economy, often pushing out private sector competitors through unfair contracting or acquiring subsidised supplies.
The Obama administration welcomed Mubarak’s fall during the Arab Spring 15 years ago and whitewashed the Muslim Brotherhood, taking at face value its promises of democracy and reform, even while its actions suggested otherwise.
In 2022, George Clooney claimed his wife Amal helped the Muslim Brotherhood draft their new constitution. That constitution made women subservient to Islamic law and dropped sex from the criteria of discrimination clauses.
While Amal portrays herself as a jet-setting human rights activist, if her husband is believed, she worked against human rights and the empowerment of an Islamist vision in Egypt. This is not to say she is an Islamist; she is not. Rather, like many progressives, she is naïve toward the ultimate goals of Islamist movements.
While Amal portrays herself as a jet-setting human rights activist, if her husband is believed, she worked against human rights and the empowerment of an Islamist vision in Egypt.
Egyptians quickly learned the price of their naivete. When they saw the Muslim Brotherhood’s true intentions both in their draft constitution and in their actions, they turned en masse. The July 3, 2013, ouster of Mohamed Morsi was less a coup than a revolution given the revulsion with which millions of Egyptians came to view the Muslim Brotherhood after embracing them just a year before.
It is in the context of both naivete and wilful blindness toward Jamaat-e Islami that the United States and the United Nations should approach their narratives with caution.
To justify the ouster of Sheikh Hasina, the United Nations said that 1,400 protestors died in the chaos that preceded the end to her administration and the banning of her party. The Awami League acknowledges around 800 died in the protests.
After Sheikh Hasina’s ouster, Muhammad Yunus, the Nobel Peace Laureate, who had clashed with Sheikh Hasina over his own corruption, became the interim “chief administrator” of Bangladesh. He had every reason to exaggerate the death toll to delegitimise his nemesis, but only cited a figure of 800 until the UN inexplicably raised it.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio and US Ambassador to the United Nations Mike Waltz alongside Minister of External Affairs S. Jaishankar and India’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations Harish Parvathaneni should demand the United Nations compile a list of names of those killed.
The Awami League can name victims, both anti-government students but also police and sectarian minorities whom the students and their Islamist backers slaughtered; Jamaat-e Islami cannot, since most of those whom they claim as victims never existed.
It is understandable that at the height of a crisis, uncertainty would predominate, but UN experts with their inflated, tax-free salaries must do better than make up numbers to besmirch those whose politics they dislike.
The reality, though, is the UN fanned the flames of anti-Sheikh Hasina violence. UN Secretary General António Guterres, an old Portuguese socialist, embraced Yunus, despite the discrepancy between his international conference circuit reputation among Clinton Foundation circles and ordinary Bangladeshis, who know him best for the payday loan-type scam exploiting and indebting Bangladeshi poor through his Grameen Bank.
Unless Guterres can now show the basis of UN claims, it appears both UN and Western officials massaged data to demonise Sheikh Hasina, promote Yunus, and support his effort to ban the Awami League—easily the most popular party in Bangladesh despite legitimate criticism about Sheikh Hasina’s abuses.
If the UN cannot come clean, it is time to reverse the anti-Sheikh Hasina coup and to hold new elections in which those Bangladeshis who support a secular order, democracy, economic growth, and social tolerance can compete freely.
Islamists led Iran into disaster; tens of thousands of Iranians have died just this year, protesting their abusive regime. Thousands more perished during the Woman, Life, Freedom movement. Egyptians looked over the Islamist cliff and stepped back. Bangladesh still teeters on the cliff.
It is understandable that Prime Minister Tarique Rahman does not demand the UN release names of those it says were killed, because their exaggeration form the basis for the Awami League’s disqualification and Jamaat-e Islami’s empowerment. If the UN must admit its experts fabricated their numbers, then Rahman immediately loses his legitimacy; essentially, he was the victor in an election in which only one side could run.
If the UN cannot come clean, it is time to reverse the anti-Sheikh Hasina coup and to hold new elections in which those Bangladeshis who support a secular order, democracy, economic growth, and social tolerance can compete freely.
Published originally on October 24, 2026.
