The Truth about the Muslim Brotherhood

The Caricatures Riots

The riots following the publication of 12 caricatures of the prophet Mohammed in the then obscure Danish newspaper Jyllands Posten, [34] in September 2005, should have surprised no one. In fact, the seeds of Islamic attacks against Denmark, as a stepping-stone to the Islamist takeover of Europe, in line with the MB agenda, were planted long before the cartoons were published.

In April 15, 2005, five months before the cartoons ran, Palestinian preacher and leader of Hizb ut Tahrir (a radical group that works to establish the Caliphate), Sheikh Issam Amayra, from the al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, called upon Muslims in Denmark to begin a holy war, according to his sermon translated from the Arabic by Jonathan Dahoah Halevi, director of Orient research Group in Toronto, Canada.

Amayra’s sermon warned that: "…the three percent of the Muslims in Denmark constitute a threat to the future of the kingdom of Denmark. And that should not be a surprise. After all, the Muslims in Yathrib [the city of Medina, before Mohammed moved there from Mecca] constituted less than three percent of the population there. Yet they managed to change Yathrib into Medina. Thus, it should not be a surprise that our Danish brothers manage to bring Islam to all the homes of the Danes. Allah will grant them the victory in their country in order to raise the Caliphate in Denmark."

Amayra continued, "Afterwards the citizens of the Caliphate (which will be raised in Denmark) will wage war on Oslo, and after they change that city’s name to Medina [for the Arabian holy city] they will fight their neighboring Scandinavian countries in order to join their lands to the territory of the Caliphate. In the next stage, they will wage a holy war and spread the message of Islam to the rest of Europe, until they reach the original city of Medina. Then they will join both cities under the banner of Islam."

Clearly, the riots in Denmark and throughout the world were not spontaneous, but planned and organized well in advance[35] by Islamist organizations that support the MB, and with funding mostly from Saudi Arabia.[36]

The MB and its offspring organizations employ the Flexibility strategy in the U.S. and wherever they operate. This strategy calls for a minority group of Muslims to use all "legal" means to infiltrate majority-dominated, non-Muslim secular and religious institutions, starting with its universities. As a result, "Islamized" Muslim and non-Muslim university graduates enter the nation’s workforce, including its government and civil service sectors, where they are poised to subvert U.S. law enforcement agencies, intelligence communities, military branches, foreign services, and financial institutions.

The Muslim Brotherhood in the United States

The MB planted its roots in the United States with its 1963 [37] establishment of the Muslim Student Association (MSA).[38] Since then, it has used political developments, especially in the Middle East, to advance its strategic agenda and recruit more like-minded people to the cause of Islamizing the U.S., which, being non-Muslim, constitutes a part of the Dar al Harb - the "Land of Warfare." [39] In other words, it "is a country belonging to infidels which has not been subdued by Islam."

This dogma, to which Muslims have adhered since at least the 9th Century, is based on the classical Islamic definition of non-Muslim territory. Egyptian MB spiritual leader Sayyed Qutb [40]expounded further on this ideology. Although he studied in the U.S. from 1948 to 1950 on a U.S.-funded scholarship, Qutb hated America and Western values. Upon his return to Egypt, he joined the MB and became its most influential ideologist and writer after MB founder Hassan al Banna. [41] The Egyptian government executed Qutb in 1966.

Following Qutb’s vitriolic criticism of the U.S., the MB made the U.S. a target for sedition. In the U.S. (as elsewhere), the MB utilizes its "concealment" strategy through "Political Activism"[42] and exploits U.S. "weaknesses" (istid’af)[43] at opportune moments. The organization also helped to establish mosques, Islamic schools, summer youth camps and prominent Muslim organizations, often with Saudi funds. According to a 2004 Chicago Tribune [44] investigative report, the MB has been "a major factor...in why many Muslim institutions in the nation have become more conservative in recent decades."

Indeed, according to Lebanese-American Sufi leader Hisham Kabbani and Italian Muslim leader Sheik Abdul Hadi Palazzi, chief among the extremists controlling at least 80 percent of the more than 3,000 U.S. mosques is the Muslim Brotherhood, [45]or Ikhwan. According to the Tribune, the group even established a correspondence school called the Islamic American University (IAU), based in suburban Detroit, to train teachers and preachers. The IAU chairman and head of their board of trustees, according to MAS’ press release in May 2005, is well-known Brotherhood leader Yusuf Al Qaradawi an Egyptian graduate of Al-Azhar Theological Seminary [46] and the rumored MB international chief, who resides in Qatar and was banned from the U.S. in 1999. Sheikh Qaradawi proclaimed in 1995, "We will conquer Europe, we will conquer America, not by the sword but by our Dawa [proselytizing]."[47]

MB Network’s "Flexibility" in the U.S.

On its own website, the MB states its goals under the heading "Establishing the Islamic government." The MB notes that: "Preparing the society is achieved through plans for: spreading the Islamic culture, the possible media means, mosques, and Da’awa [inviting others to Islam, an obligatory duty for Muslims], [48]work in public organizations such as syndicates, parliaments, student unions." In stands to reason that the Brotherhood secretly cultivates new members at the mosques, madrassas and Islamic "Cultural Centers" it has helped to create, providing these recruits with moral and financial support.

Today, the MSA advocates, in a Young Muslims of North America newsletter,[49] the collective obligations (fard) of all Muslims. "These include the spreading of the message of Islam (Da’awa), the establishment of the Islamic State (khilafah) and the defense of Muslim lands (jihad)." The Young Muslims of North America and the Alexandria, Virginia-based Muslim American Society (MAS) Youth Department note that these are required by the Shari’a and in "some of the Islamic Movement′s texts on these subjects," including "the key books of any of the following: [MB founder] Hasan al-Banna, [Pakistani MB role model] Abul A′la Mawdudi, [50] Ahmad ar-Rashid, Assam al-Bashir and [Al-Qaeda co-founder] Abdullah Azzam)."[51]

Brotherhood members rarely announce their affiliation, since they are sworn to secrecy when they join. But operating under the seemingly benign name of the "Cultural Society" to avoid detection, the American Muslim Brotherhood also created organizations such as the Muslim Youth of North America (MYNA),[52] the North American Islamic Trust [53] (NAIT), the Islamic Medical Association [54] (IMA), the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) [55], and The Muslim American Society [56] (MAS) according to the Tribune, the Washington Post, [57] and the MAS website. [58]

With help from the late MB member, Isma`il al-Faruqi, the group also established the International Institute of Islamic Thought [59] (IIIT) based in Herndon, Va., which publishes books and pamphlets resting on MB educational theory. This thesis is actually a plan advocating the Islamization of virtually all fields—from Economics [60] and Science and Technology [61] to The Islamization of Knowledge. [62] In Muslims and Islamization in North America: Problems and Prospects, [63] the group describes the hurdles it faces in its planned takeover of the U.S. and Canada. IIIT even envisions historical revisionism to erase non-Muslim scholarly documentation of the past and replace it with an Islamist perspective. The Treasury Department’s Operation Green Quest [64] investigation also identified methods by which IIIT may have funded suspected terrorists. Furthermore, on the 2004 Form 990 filed with the IRS, the IIIT reported that it sent $17,849 to Rahim Ghouse, an Australian/Malay business associate of Yassin al Qadi, an al-Qaeda financier and a U.S. designated terrorist. The family refused to answer any questions about these and other funds regularly received from the IIIT. Moreover, the IIIT directors plead the Fifth Amendment on page 26 of the Form 990.

Other organizations that openly support the MB dogma include The American Muslim Council (AMC),[65] the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC),[66] the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR)[67], Islamic Center of Southern California (ICSC),[68] Islamic Society of Orange County, (ISOC) and many others.

Many of these groups deny connections to or influence from the Muslim Brotherhood, but all of them mouth the same ideological goals, most often with the exact same words that appear on the MB’s own websites. The MAS website, for example, describes itself as "a charitable, religious, social, cultural, and educational, not-for-profit organization" that seeks "an Islamic revival and reform movement that uplifts the individual, family, and society." Moreover, the official MAS publication, the American Muslim, [69] posts on its website the biography and "appreciation" of MB founder Hasan al-Banna. The American Muslim noted in its first issue: "Created in Egypt in 1928, the Muslim Brotherhood became the first mass-based, overtly political movement to oppose the ascendancy of secular and Western ideas in the Middle East. The Brotherhood saw in these ideas the root of the decay of Islamic societies in the modern world, and advocated a return to Islam as a solution to the ills that had befallen Muslim societies."

Furthermore, former MAS Communications Director Ismail (Randall) Royer [70], who also worked for AMC and CAIR[71], pleaded guilty [72] to helping other Muslims reach a Pakistani training camp run by Lashkar-e-Taiba, a designated foreign terrorist organization and a MB offshoot.

The AMC, established in 1990, similarly advertises itself [73] as a "movement for political and civil rights" and "justice for all Americans." The group also wants to increase "effective participation of American Muslims in the U.S. political and public policy arenas,"—but only to promote the ultimate MB goal of establishing an Islamic state. Former AMC founder and director Abdurrahman Alamoudi, [74] now imprisoned for 23 years [75] for his role in a 2003 Libyan plot to assassinate Saudi (then Crown Prince) King Abdullah, demonstrated in January 2001 [76] just how strongly he and his group felt about U.S. democracy when he served as the AMC delegate to a terrorists′ "Jerusalem" Conference in Beirut, where he (and at least four other American Muslims) met with leaders from Al Qaeda, HAMAS, Hizballah and Islamic Jihad [77] as well as such state sponsors of terror as Syria, Sudan and Iran. The conference drew up a statement advocating "Jihad (holy war) in all its forms." It also stated: "America today is a second Israel." Indeed, these Islamist terrorists have for years advertised that the war against Israel and the war on America are one and the same. In January 2001,[78] when these terrorist chieftains met at the Beirut conference[79], they issued a communiqué saying: "Destroy Israel .. Boycott America." It also called for "Jihad in all its forms and resistance" against Israel and urged a boycott of American goods, since "American products are exactly like the Israeli products." [80]

Despite all this, the AMC has had considerable access to U.S. leadership, thereby lending the group a facade of legitimacy. In 1991 and 1992, respectively, Imam Siraj Wahhaj [81] and Imam Warith D. Mohammed, made the first Islamic invocations at the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate, according to the AMC website. Alamoudi’s visits to both the Bill Clinton [82] and George W. Bush [83] White House received wide media coverage.

The Dar al-Hijrah mosque in Falls Church, Virginia., is the major MB mosque for the Washington DC area. Its former chief cleric, Anwar Aulaqi, called [84] on the faithful "to become ′shaheeds,′′ or martyrs, and ′′die in the sake of Allah." The U.S.-born Aulaqi was educated in Yemen, and according to the 9/11 Commission report [85], he met on several occasions with two of the 9/11 attackers in San Diego.

MPAC openly supports MB progeny in its obituary for HAMAS founder Sheik Ahmed Yassin,[86] whom Israel eliminated in March 2004. The article, still posted on the MPAC website, bemoans the loss of this terrorist leader, who is described as a harmless invalid. Furthermore, as Steven Emerson reported in American Jihad, the MPAC cosponsored an October 28, 2000 rally in Washington DC to support the "Al-Aqsa intifada." While AMC leader Alamoudi exhorted the crowd to cheer for HAMAS and Hizballah, MPAC political adviser Mahdi Bray "was seen jubilantly exclaiming his support for these two deadly terrorist organizations." MPAC senior adviser Dr. Maher Hathout, who also participated, later heralded the rally in an American Muslim article "as a marker of a ′new era." And in a 2003 position paper concerning counter-terrorism, the MPAC questioned [87] whether "alleged terror plots, such as those in Seattle, Buffalo, Portland, and Detroit, actually posed threats as serious as the government initially claimed them to be." In two of those cases, the suspects had gone to Afghanistan to join the Taliban and train in their terrorist camps.

MB Infiltration into U.S. Academia

Even a random examination of political positions on U.S. university campuses reveals the very same ideology dominated by anti-American attitudes, often directed by MSA chapters or Middle East Centers and departments.

In February 2004, at an MSA West [88] conference at the University of California (Berkeley), Amir Abdel Malik Ali, the Oakland mosque imam, called for the establishment of an Islamic dictatorship [89] in the U.S., which would eliminate the Constitution, Bill of Rights and Declaration of Independence.

On September 7, 2005, Carnegie Endowment [90] for International Peace awarded Mustafa Khalfi a three-month fellowship, as part of his yearlong Fulbright/American Political Science Association Congressional fellowship. He is now in Washington DC, where he is "studying U.S. policy in the Middle East, with a focus on democracy promotion efforts." Khalfi is the editor-in-chief of the Moroccan Islamist newspaper, at-Tajdid, [91] which in addition to printing pro-Islamist terrorist propaganda and anti-American articles, is raising money for HAMAS, and many other outlawed Islamist organizations, most of which are also offshoots of the MB, and are united under the umbrella organization "The Union of Good,"[92] which is represented by the London based Islamist organization Interpal. At-Tajdid, until February 2006, had a link directing its readers to the donation page of Interpal, which the U.S. Treasury department had identified in 2003 [93] as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist for supporting HAMAS.

Yet Khalfi was not the first Islamist with an avowedly anti-western agenda to study at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). Earlier, in March 2005, SAIS appointed Anwar Ibrahim, Malaysia’s former deputy prime minister, as a visiting scholar at its Foreign Policy Institute. Ibrahim co-founded the Herndon, Virginia-based International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT), which according to the Washington Post, "was set up in the 1980s largely by onetime Brotherhood sympathizers with money from wealthy Saudis." [94]

Ibrahim also strongly supports al-Qaradawi’s pro-Jihad doctrines. SAIS, however, recently lost Ibrahim to the newly renamed Prince Alwaleed bin Talal [95] Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, at Georgetown University, where he lectures "on several topics. [96]" It is ironic that this trustee of the World Association of Muslim Youth, which supports HAMAS and has been implicated [97] in funding al Qaeda and other Islamist organizations, has been assigned to teach Georgetown students "modernity in Islam, [and] interfaith understanding." [98]

There are literally hundreds of similar examples of "Islamist thought at work" on U.S. campuses.

MB and Terrorist Groups

Among the many permanent, negative features of Shari’a is a system that subjugates and oppresses non-Muslims. It requires non-Muslims to convert to Islam or pay the jizya [154] tax, a form of extortion, creating a "contract" (dhimma) that "guarantees" the infidels′ lives and possessions. In a recent essay [155] Dr. Andrew Bostom quotes the Arabic scholar, E.W. Lane, who bluntly calls the tax on "free non-Muslim subjects …compensation for not being slain."
The system′s "obligations" institutionalize discrimination (dhimmitude) that targets Jews and Christians. Others, like such Hindus, and Buddhists ostensibly have a choice to convert or to be slaughtered, although historically, they were often offered an even more degrading dhimma than the "People of the Book." [156] These regulations prohibit dhimmis from possessing arms, ringing church bells, testifying in courts, building and restoring houses of worship while restricting many other civil rights as well. Like Nazi regulations, the Islamic rules also require non-Muslims to wear special, identifying clothes. These key features of the Shari’a and Islamic ideology are political, not merely religious.

Given that political subjugation of non-Muslims is built into Islamic law, and that the MB desires to return to "classical Islam," it is not surprising that the organization was the fountainhead from which all Sunni terrorist organizations have flowed. Its offspring include Al-Qaeda,[157] HAMAS, [158] Palestinian Islamic Jihad, [159] Gamaat Islamiyyah, [160] the Philippine Abu Sayyaf group,[161] and the Algerian Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC) [162]and Armed Islamic Group (GIA) [163]. Between 1992-1998, the Algerian terrorists murdered an estimated 200,000 people. [164] Today, according to Italian security agencies, and as reported by Kathryn Haahr-Escolano [165] of the Center for Intelligence Research and Analysis, GSPC cells in Italy not only target Italy, but "employ a dual-track approach to planning terrorist attacks and provide support infrastructure—safe houses, communications, weapons procurement and documentation—to GSPC networks in other European countries."

The ties of all these terrorist groups to the MB are evident from their identical strategies and overall Islamist agenda, and they often carry out joint operations. The MB even influenced Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, [166] who developed the Iranian version of their ideology in the 1970s. Indeed, Khomeini adhered to the teaching of Egyptian MB leader Qutb [167]and followed the lead of Muhammad Navab-Safavi, [168] who was a guest of the MB in Egypt in 1953. [169] Navab-Safavi later formed the dreaded Iranian death squad, the Fedaiyon-e-Islam, or the ‘Soldiers of Islam.’

In Egypt, where the group was founded in 1928 and later banned, the Brotherhood worked under the Islamic doctrine of "concealment" (kitman) [170] in order to "Islamize" the country. In the 1930’s and 1940’s, the MB collaborated with the Nazis. Hajj Amin al-Husseini,[171] the MB chief in British Mandate Palestine, strongly supported Arab links with the Nazis, particularly in Syria, Lebanon and Iraq, where he backed the short-lived pro-Nazi regime of Rashid Ali al-Gailani [172] in 1941. In Egypt too, the MB orchestrated riots, occupied police stations and attempted coups d’etat. Following their failed 1954 attempt to assassinate Gamal Abdel Nasser, [173] MB loyalists fled Egypt to the universities[174] of Saudi Arabia, where they were granted business monopolies to finance their future reemergence; in 1961 the sympathetic King Sa′ud [175] even funded their establishment of the Islamic University in Medina. In October 1981, an MB offshoot group assassinated Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. In the last decade alone, MB offspring including Gama′a al-Islamiya and the Abdullah Azzam Brigades repeatedly attacked Western tourists, killing hundreds and wounding many more.

Since the history of the MB is full of instigating civil wars and committing atrocities in countries such as Egypt, Syria, Sudan and Algeria, their expansion and success elsewhere is destined to wreak more havoc and destabilize every nation in which they are allowed to operate freely.

Conclusion

The MB is a dangerous organization that spreads its tentacles throughout the world. Its goal is the establishment of the Caliphate ruled by Islamic law. Mostly Saudi and Gulf sources fund its activities.

Recommendation

The Muslim Brotherhood spawned and encouraged many Islamist proxies dedicated to the spread of Shari’a law around the world and the establishment of the Caliphate. In many countries it has also been linked to terrorist groups and activities. In others, its members support terrorist organizations verbally and financially. Moreover, in the U.S. as elsewhere it calls on its supporters to "To channel thought, education and action in order to establish an Islamic power [government] on the earth." Such form of government would deprive Americans of their rights as granted by the Constitution.

In the interest of preserving freedom in the U.S. while advancing it globally, it is time for our government to thoroughly investigate the Muslim Brotherhood and its offshoots and consider designating it as a terrorist organization.

In the same vein, the U.S should not allow foreign donations to U.S. organizations and institutions from Islamic countries that prohibit religious freedom