From CNN:
Dr. Abdulmonem Hresha knows first hand how Moammar Gadhafi’s regime works. He says the seeds of his opposition were sown when he was age 10.
He and classmates were taken to witness the public execution of a political opponent of Gadhafi.
“They hung him up in front of thousands of small kids,” Hresha said. “He did that to scare people.”
Hresha, who taught physics at Tripoli University, later fled to Canada.
The prominent member of the Muslim Brotherhood now lives in London, and anticipates the group could become an important player in a post-Gadhafi environment.
As in Egypt and Tunisia, the Brotherhood in Libya has been energized by the sudden upheaval sweeping the Arab world.
It says it has no organizational links with the Brotherhood elsewhere, but shares the philosophy of the pan-Arab Islamist movement founded in Egypt in the 1920s.
Despite years of repression, Hresha claims the Brotherhood still has thousands of members scattered across Libya, with chapters in almost every single town, including Sirte, Gadhafi’s birthplace on the coast west of Tripoli.
In 2006, its leaders were released after reconciling with the Libyan regime. But now the Brotherhood is siding with the rebellion.
In February, as protests in Libya began, Yusuf al Qaradawi — an Egyptian preacher in Qatar widely viewed as the Muslim Brotherhood’s chief spiritual guide — issued a fatwa or religious ruling obliging any Libyan soldier who had the opportunity to do so to assassinate the leader.
Al-Amin Bilhaj, a leading figure in the Libyan Muslim Brotherhood and the President of the Muslim Association of Britain (MAB) recently traveled to Benghazi, the headquarters of the rebel movement, according to Hresha.
Guma el-Gamaty, a Libyan academic based in the UK who has emerged as a key liaison between the Libyan opposition overseas and the Benghazi Council said no Muslim Brotherhood leaders had yet been appointed to the Council, and played down their influence.
Hresha, the long-time Brotherhood member, expects that to change.
“We’ve been working secretly till this moment,” he said.





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