Origins of the Muslim Brotherhood
To understand the Brotherhood and how it operates, especially inside Western societies such as America's, a brief overview of where it came from and why it was established is in order. Following the early years of blindingly fast military conquests, Islam began to falter as European Christendom doggedly kept pushing back, eventually surpassing an increasingly corrupt empire that had run out of lands to conquer, people to enslave, and riches to plunder. Yoked by consensus of the scholars (ijma) to an ideology that rejected critical thought, innovation, and scientific inquiry in favor of blind obedience to revelation, the Islamic world remained largely untouched by the Renaissance, Enlightenment, and eventual Industrial and Technological revolutions that catapulted the West to global power status. Eventual European colonization of the Arab and Muslim world and the stunningly successful re-establishment of the Jewish nation in the modern State of Israel brought humiliation to people raised on tales of historical supremacism over these, its traditional dhimmi victims.
Aside from Israel, which came later, this was the world into which Hassan al-Banna was born in the early 20th century. An Egyptian Cairene, al-Banna seethed with frustration at Islam's diminished status in the world; in particular he resented the presence and power of the British colonial administration in Egypt. The abolishment of the last Caliphate by Kemal Ataturk in 1924 was perhaps the worst indignity, one that left al-Banna and his young Muslim university contemporaries apparently feeling unmoored. They joined together in 1928, determined (as we know from their statements and writing) to rectify things; "rectifying things," for them, seems to have meant re-establishment of the Caliphate and global enforcement of Islamic Law (shariah). The organization they founded to return Egypt, the Middle East, and eventually the world to "proper" subservience to Islam as ordained by Allah would be the Muslim Brotherhood (Al-Ikhwan al-Muslimun in Arabic).
Global Jihad
Since its inception in 1928, the Muslim Brotherhood consistently has championed the cause of global jihad to "mobilize the entire Umma into one body to defend the right cause with all its strength…to jihad, to warfare…" Until early 2011, its original bylaws could be found on the Brotherhood's English language website, Ikhwanweb, established in 2005 by senior Brotherhood official Khairat al-Shater. Since then, they have been preserved by Steven Emerson at The Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT). Article (2) makes clear that the Brotherhood conceives of itself as "an international Muslim Body, which seeks to establish Allah's law in the land by achieving the spiritual goals of Islam and the true religion…establishing the Islamic State" and "…building a new basis of human civilization as is ensured by the overall teachings of Islam."
In case that sounds relatively benign, Article (3) E gets more to the point: "The Islamic nation must be fully prepared to fight the tyrants and the enemies of Allah as a prelude to establishing an Islamic state." This is exactly what the Brotherhood did in Egypt in the violent years before and after the 1949 death of al-Banna, until it was forcibly suppressed, only to rise again in 2011-2012 when circumstances permitted.
The story of how those circumstances shifted to permit (even compel) the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood to power not only in Egypt, but also Libya, Tunisia, and perhaps soon, Syria and elsewhere, spans 20th century world history. World War II and the Brotherhood's close alliance with Adolf Hitler and his genocidal antisemitic Nazis provided the perfect opportunity for Islam's latest expansion into Europe, where dozens of Brotherhood branches were established. Upon the defeat of Nazi Germany, its clandestine networks of Muslim operatives were picked up by the western Allies and naively turned to the same purpose as the Nazis had pursued: to counter the influence of atheist communist Soviets. So it was that Sa'id Ramadan, the son-in-law of Hasan al-Banna, and a delegation of Muslim Brothers, found themselves in the Oval Office on 23 September 1953 meeting with President Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Organization and the Settlement Process
Aside from its ideology, if there is a single characteristic that defines the Brotherhood, it is organization. From its earliest days, the Ikhwan has operated with military-like efficiency. The Muslim Brotherhood plan for the infiltration and subordination of America is no different. Once again, the blueprint can be found in Hasan al-Banna's Brotherhood bylaws, where, in Article (2) D, he lists as one of the key "Objectives and means" the following:
Make every effort for the establishment of educational, social, economic and scientific institutions and the establishment of mosques, schools, clinics, shelters, clubs as well as the formation of committees to regulate zakat affairs and alms."
To be sure, the patient task of Da'wa includes establishment of Islamic institutions, education of the non-Muslim population, and countering "the prejudices of Judeo-Christians against Islam," as Ikhwan scholar Shamim A. Siddiqi wrote in 1989. But in Islam, Da'wa, or the call to Islam, is always followed by jihad. Siddiqi, writing for the Muslim Brotherhood cadre in the U.S., was candid with them and cautioned that "[i]n this initial stage there may not be any opposition to Dawah work. For some time the Islamic Movement of America may have some smooth sailing. But with the increase in Dawah efforts, in the number of activities and growth of the strength of the organization, the anti-Islamic forces will take notice of the multifarious activities of the Movement," "…the fight…may become a challenge for them," and "[a]larming signals will be raised by the so-called 'free press.'"
"Smooth sailing" indeed would seem to characterize the early decades of the Ikhwan's Da'wa movement in America. The first official Muslim Brotherhood front organization founded in the U.S. was the Muslim Students Association (MSA), established on the Urbana-Champaign campus of the University of Illinois in 1964. Today, there are over 600 MSA chapters at colleges and universities across North America, working to recruit members to the Muslim Brotherhood and jihad. According to former FBI Special Agent John Guandolo, "The MSA serves as a recruitment tool to bring Muslims into the Brotherhood…[w]hich was its original purpose: to evaluate Muslims and to bring them into the Brotherhood and to recruit non-Muslims into Islam as a dawa entity, giving them the call to Islam." The MSA was the blueprint model for the thousands of Muslim Brotherhood front groups that exist, function, and continue to multiply across the U.S. today.
"The process of settlement is a "Civilization-Jihadist Process" with all the word means. The Ikhwan must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and "sabotaging" its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God's religion is made victorious over all other religions.
-- 'An Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America,' 1981
Holy Land Foundation Trial
The 2008 Holy Land Foundation terror-funding trial has proven extremely valuable, well beyond its success in putting a U.S.-based jihad money channel out of business that had that sent millions of dollars to HAMAS, the Muslim Brotherhood's Palestinian branch. Hundreds of documents presented as evidence in the trial by U.S. Department of Justice prosecutors were subsequently placed online. Among these was a transcript of a talk given in the U.S. in the early 1980s by a Muslim Brotherhood executive-level leader, Zeid al-Noman. In it, al-Noman provided a remarkably detailed description of the history and mission of the Muslim Brotherhood in America, beginning with the establishment of the first front groups, such as the MSA, and proceeding according to the Ikhwan Bylaws to expand the network in a methodical, organized manner. Today, this infrastructure extends its reach within every single pillar of societal support in America – academia, government, intelligence, legal community, media, military, society, and the workplace – and demonstrably exerts a powerful influence on U.S. policy, both domestic and foreign, at the highest levels.
The recruitment process begins with identifying and cultivating Muslims who show, by their dedication to living a devout Islamic life, that they might be susceptible to Brotherhood da'wa. In a 27 December 2012 essay, Eric Trager, a Next Generation fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, provided a detailed look at the intensive process by which the Egyptian Brotherhood conducts its recruitment and training of young Muslim membership candidates; develops, reinforces, and repeatedly tests their commitment over a multi-year period, and ultimately incorporates them into its nationwide hierarchical organization. What he describes tracks closely with al-Noman's U.S. lecture from three decades earlier—which itself references a process modeled on Hassan al-Banna's original vision. The ideological continuity and internal discipline manifested by the Brotherhood's ability to maintain and replicate its "settlement process" across the world, and a span of more than eight decades, is remarkable. This is a formidable enemy.
The "Explanatory Memorandum" cited above, and also in the documentary evidence at the Holy Land Foundation trial, likewise provides a telling glimpse into "the process of settlement" that the Brotherhood termed "civilization jihad." Quite literally, the Muslim Brotherhood infiltration of the U.S. began as an immigration and settlement experience. As al-Noman recounts in his talk, "the first generation of the Muslim Ikhwan in north [sic] America composed [sic] of a team which included he who was an Ikhwan in his country…," among others.
After that, 'the Movement,' as he calls it, slowly established the organizational structures from basic cell level all the way to leadership Councils that define the Brotherhood's extensive presence in Egypt and elsewhere. The emphasis on an internal stealth jihad, to "sabotage" the West from within, characterized the movement from the beginning and drove the strategic decision to use front groups that are calculated to arouse little concern in an open and democratic society such as the U.S. Although not the focus of this report, it should be noted that massive financial support from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf sheikhdoms has always played a central and deeply important role in the ability of the Brotherhood to fund its global expansion, especially in the U.S. -- the ultimate prize for Islamic colonization.
The last page of the "Explanatory Memorandum" listed 29 Muslim Brotherhood groups under the heading, "A list of our organizations and the organizations of our friends." Among these are the names of some of the best-known, mainstream Islamic organizations in the U.S. today, including a number whose Muslim Brotherhood-linked officials advise, socialize with, and train the leadership of key agencies within the U.S. national security community. The list includes the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP, the immediate parent organization of the Council on Islamic American Relations or CAIR), the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), the International Institute for Islamic Thought (IIIT), the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT), and the Muslim Students Association (MSA). This is, of course, but a small sampling of North American Muslim Brotherhood front groups, but gives an idea of the level of "acceptability," among both mainstream Muslim and U.S. society in general, that the groups have achieved by stealth and deception.
One of the most "mainstream" of these front groups is the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), named, by the Justice Dept., an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation terror funding case. According to Frank Gaffney, the president of the Center for Security Policy (CSP), ISNA functions as a kind of umbrella organization for many hundreds of offshoot Islamic Societies across North America. Yet, in spite of its DoJ status as a front group for the jihadist Muslim Brotherhood, ISNA still has been granted a coveted advisory role with the National Security Council (NSC) of the Obama White House. ISNA's president, Muhammed Magid, is not only the Director of the All-Dulles Area Muslim Society (ADAMS) Center, but also an A-list invitee to White House iftar dinners, and a member of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) "Countering Violent Extremism" Advisory Council. In that capacity, Magid participated in a July 2012 CIA training session, speaking at Langley about "Building Communities of Trust: A Local Example of a Partnership between the All Dulles Area Muslim Society (ADAMS) and Law Enforcement."
The Project
There is one more document, called simply "The Project," that should be examined in the study of the Brotherhood's expansion into Western society in general, and the U.S. government in particular. A November 2001 raid by Swiss authorities on a villa belonging to Yousef Nada, the Muslim Brotherhood director of the Al-Taqwa bank (which had been funding al-Qa'eda), recovered this 14-page plan, written in Arabic and dated December 1, 1982. "The Project" presents a "flexible, multi-phased, long-term approach to the 'cultural invasion' of the West," according to Patrick Poole, a counterterrorism and Muslim Brotherhood expert. Rather than relying primarily on terrorism, as al-Qa'eda and other kinetic-approach jihadis do, the Muslim Brotherhood opted instead for a progressive infiltration of the very structures of Western society in order to achieve the same end result that al-Qa'eda seeks: Islamic domination over the West.
In view of the alarming success this approach has achieved to date, not only across the Middle East and North Africa, but inside Europe and the U.S., it is worthwhile to quote from Poole's articles just some of the tactics outlined in "The Project:" [emphasis added]
Networking and coordinating actions between likeminded Islamist organizations;
Avoiding open alliances with known terrorist organizations and individuals to maintain the appearance of "moderation";
Infiltrating and taking over existing Muslim organizations to realign them towards the Muslim Brotherhood's collective goals;
Using deception to mask the intended goals of Islamist actions, as long as it doesn't conflict with shari'a law;
Establishing financial networks to fund the work of conversion of the West, including the support of full-time administrators and workers;
Putting into place a watchdog system for monitoring Western media to warn Muslims of "international plots fomented against them";
Cultivating an Islamist intellectual community, including the establishment of think-tanks and advocacy groups, and publishing "academic" studies, to legitimize Islamist positions and to chronicle the history of Islamist movements;
Building extensive social networks of schools, hospitals and charitable organizations dedicated to Islamist ideals so that contact with the movement for Muslims in the West is constant;
Involving ideologically committed Muslims in democratically-elected institutions on all levels in the West, including government, NGOs, private organizations and labor unions;
Instrumentally using existing Western institutions until they can be converted and put into service of Islam;
Instituting alliances with Western "progressive" organizations that share similar goals;
Inflaming violence and keeping Muslims living in the West "in a jihad frame of mind";
Supporting jihad movements across the Muslim world through preaching, propaganda, personnel, funding, and technical and operational support;
Instigating a constant campaign to incite hatred by Muslims against Jews and rejecting any discussions of conciliation or coexistence with them;
Collecting sufficient funds to indefinitely perpetuate and support jihad around the world
Information Dominance
With all of this information so readily available in the public domain, the obvious question must be, "Why doesn't the U.S. government know that it is a target, realize that it is penetrated, and take steps to correct an obviously dangerous situation?" The answer can be summarized in two words: information dominance. As described in preceding pages, the Muslim Brotherhood approached its campaign to subvert U.S. society in a comprehensive but
also a stealthy way. Recall the wording from the "Explanatory Memorandum," which stated it would sabotage [our] "miserable house by their [our] hands." What this means is that the Ikhwan intend to co-opt the leadership of this country by fooling it into "believing a counterfactual understanding of Islam and the nature of the Muslim Brotherhood, thereby manipulating or coercing these leaders to enforce the MB narrative on their subordinates." Siddiqui, too, emphasized how the fight to impose Islam will intensify with "the help and involvement of the people of the land." As the evidence indicates, this is already happening.
As with any totalitarian system, controlling the information that the U.S. government is allowed to know about Islamic doctrine, history, law, and scriptures is paramount for the Brotherhood. If its sabotage operation were to be successful, the Ikhwan knew it would have to keep its targets ignorant of the true nature of Islamic jihad and shariah. This objective also fulfills the parallel objective to implement Islamic Law on slander and blasphemy, which says that "slander (ghiba) means to mention anything concerning a person [that is, a Muslim] that he would dislike." The truth about Islam's violent history, savage penal system, inherent inequality and supremacism, and legal commitment to "warfare to establish the religion" obviously would not be helpful in lulling unsuspecting kufr (infidels) into somnolence.
One of the early and most important indicators of the Brotherhood's surreptitious expanding influence within the Intelligence Community [IC] showed up as a terminology scrub of official strategic documents dealing with counterterrorism. As Robert Spencer explains, the trend toward politically correct Global War on Terror (GWOT) language began with a misguided effort by Jim Guirard, the founder and president of the TrueSpeak Institute, a lobbying group influenced by input from the Muslim Brotherhood, including Yousef al-Qaradawi, the senior jurist of the Muslim Brotherhood. Unfortunately, thanks to Mr. Guirard, senior U.S. government officials, either incompetent or unwilling to fulfill their professional duty to "know the enemy," fell under the Brotherhood's influence and began substituting a garbled lexicon of inaccurate Arabic vocabulary in place of the actual words the enemy uses to describe what he does and why he does it.
As a consequence, for example, where the 2004 9/11 Commission Report contained hundreds of instances of the use of words like "Jihad," "Muslim," and "Islam," by the time the FBI published its unclassified Counterterrorism Lexicon in 2008, those words were gone, entirely missing from the document. That same year, the State Department, DHS, and the National Counter Terrorism Center (NCTC) all instructed their employees to refrain from using the words "jihad" or "mujahedeen" to describe Islamic terrorism and its perpetrators.
A flurry of publications such as DHS's "Terminology to Define the Terrorists: Recommendations from American Muslims" and NCTC's "Words That Work and Words That Don't: A Guide for Counterterrorism Communication" advised that using such terms (that is, accurately, as the jihadis themselves do), could confer some level of religious credibility on terrorists or even possibly alienate moderate Muslims. The 2009 National Intelligence Strategy and 2010 National Security Strategy both followed suit, avoiding the use of "jihad," "Muslim," "Islam," the "Muslim Brotherhood" or "shariah" (except to say that these were not what U.S. strategy was about except in terms of "engagement" or "partnership"). By 2012, the entire Executive Branch, including DHS and the Defense, Justice, and State Departments, of the U.S. government was busy purging all instructors and training curriculum that associated Islamic doctrine, law, and scriptures with Islamic terrorism.
The sheer absurdity of America's unilateral rejection of the vocabulary required appropriately to describe, understand, and counter the enemy is topped only by the sophistication of that enemy's tactics in getting us to do it. If the officials whose professional responsibility it is to implement countermeasures based on the enemy's threat doctrine are not allowed even to speak the words that explain the ideology that drives that enemy's hatred, there is no chance these officials will be able effectively to direct a national security strategy. And that, of course, is the whole point.
The full-court press came in October 2011. On 19 October, an editorial appeared in the Los Angeles Times by Salam al-Marayati, president of the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), that threatened the FBI and Dept. of Justice with a refusal from the U.S. Muslim community to assist in counterterrorism efforts if alleged "deep anti-Muslim sentiment" in training materials were not "immediately addressed." Piling on, a group of 57 "top U.S. Muslim groups," including Muslim Brotherhood front groups, delivered a letter the same day to NSC counterterrorism advisor John Brennan, urging him to begin an "independent, effective investigation into the federal government's training of its agents and other law enforcement" and institute a "purge" of any material that the undersigned organizations deemed unacceptable."
The official U.S. response followed closely at a 19 October meeting held at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. that was attended by representatives of many of the groups which had signed the letter and top officials from the Justice Department. Reportedly, the Muslims lobbied for "cutbacks in anti-terror funding, changes in agents' training manuals, additional curbs on investigators and a legal declaration that U.S. citizens' criticism of Islam constitutes racial discrimination." By early 2012, it was reported that the FBI had "purged hundreds of bureau documents of instructional material about Muslims, some of which characterized them as prone to violence or terrorism."
This is what is meant by the Brotherhood term, "by their hands," from the Explanatory Memorandum.
Alain Laprise June 20, 2014
