Surprising nobody.

Via NOW:

“Don’t be shocked if you expect one thing and find something entirely different,” writes Anas Fouda, editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post’s brand new Arabic-language edition, HuffPost Arabi, in his inaugural editorial.

The warning is apt, for presumably few readers indeed will have expected the liberal American media juggernaut to launch a venture headed by two prominent figures of the Middle East’s religious right.

Fouda, previously an executive producer at Al Jazeera Arabic (AJA), is managing the website in partnership with his old boss, former AJA director general Wadah Khanfar. Their profiles may make for interesting perusal for existing Huffington Post readers unfamiliar with the Arabic-language media landscape.

An Egyptian national now living in Turkey, Fouda was arrested in the United Arab Emirates in 2013 on suspicion of affiliation with the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) – an affiliation which he freely admitted had existed since 1988, though he claimed to have held no formal party role since 1995. A browse of his Twitter timeline shows his politics to be fairly bread-and-butter MB; recommending, for instance, articles praising “His Eminence” Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Holocaust-revisionist cleric who routinely denounces Shiite and Alawite Muslims, to say nothing of Jews. Indeed, Fouda has himself on occasion found less-than-obliging things to say about his Semitic cousins, e.g., tweeting last July that, “Only after the latest Israeli aggression on Gaza did I realize the number of Egyptian Jews has increased greatly since the coup.”