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Andrew C. McCarthy
National Review
Which Islam Will Prevail in America?
That is the real question at hand in the Ground Zero mosque debate.
The real battle for religious freedom lurks beneath the Ground Zero mosque controversy. It is sadly ironic that our public debate presents the mosque proponents as the partisans of liberty: That includes everyone from imam Feisal Rauf, the project’s sharia-touting sponsor, to President Obama, Mayor Bloomberg, and the rest of the Islamist-smitten Left, to the GOP’s own anti-anti-terrorist wing. Yet, wittingly or not, when they champion this mosque and its sponsors, it is the agenda of an alien and authoritarian Islam that they champion — an Islam against which many American Muslims chafe.
When it comes to liberty, no one in this society has been given a wider berth than the Islamists, the purveyors of this authoritarian Islam, which is the mainstream Islam of the Middle East. Their vise grip on the American Muslim community has been cinched for two decades by the government, the media, and the academy. For our post-American ruling class, “Islamic outreach” means prostituting themselves for Saudi largesse; it means putting the “moderate” label on the Muslim Brotherhood — the Saudi-backed saboteurs whose American operatives boldly promise to “eliminate and destroy Western Civilization from within.”
The victims of this lethal charade include American Muslims. They, too, crave religious liberty and Western enlightenment. Our elites abandon them to the sharia-mongers. That freedom destroyers have been allowed to pose as freedom defenders ought to tell mosque opponents something: We have done a poor job of explaining the stakes.
In 1993, I headed up a prosecution team that was preparing to try the “Blind Sheikh” Omar Abdel Rahman and eleven other jihadists for conducting a terrorist war against the United States. The case revealed this country’s Muslim divide.
On one side were patriotic American Muslims, without whom successful prosecution would have been impossible. Not only did they infiltrate the terror cells, they helped us shape the resulting evidence into a compelling narrative. On the other side were the Muslim Brotherhood’s satellites. These included outfits like CAIR (the Council on American-Islamic Relations), which was formed in 1994 by the Brotherhood’s Hamas-support wing, with seed money from an Islamic “charity” — the Holy Land Foundation — later shut down for financing foreign terrorist organizations. These Brotherhood satellites purport to speak for American Muslims. In fact, they speak for anti-American Muslims, most of whom are outside the United States. They demagogued the case as a phobic criminalization of Islam itself, just as they have libeled America since 9/11 as being “at war with Islam.”
Translating evidence into English turned out to be a Herculean challenge during our trial preparation. Most of our evidence was in Arabic, because almost all of our defendants had immigrated here from Egypt and Sudan, hotbeds of anti-American Islam. The resulting mounds of documents, wiretap recordings, and inflammatory sermons overstretched the Justice Department’s thin Arabic-language capacity. To ease the strain, we tried to retain some civilians as private contractors. A number of local Muslims expressed interest, but in the end they turned us down.
BROTHERHOOD ISLAM vs. AMERICAN ISLAM
Mind you, they wanted to help. They were as offended as anyone by what the terrorists had done. These folks were Americans. They were the kind of Muslims you’re never exposed to, given the media’s preference for jihad apologists who, when not applauding him, claim Osama bin Laden was “made in the U.S.A.” But the would-be translators wanted ironclad assurance that their assistance to the prosecution would be kept confidential. It was an assurance I was not in a position to give, so they politely declined.
Here’s the most depressing part: It wasn’t really a matter of safety. There was surely some element of that — it goes with the territory in terrorism cases. But these people were mostly worried that they and their families would be ostracized in their communities as traitors to Islam.
In Muslim communities, I learned, many people — especially American Muslims — were supportive of our investigations. Of course they didn’t like the light of suspicion being shined on Muslims, not any more than Italian Americans liked the attention our mafia cases thrust on their communities. Yet they tuned out the CAIR chorus, just as most sensible people tune out the grievance industry. They reserved most of their resentment for the malevolent, anti-American actors in their midst. They understood that public safety is the government’s highest obligation. As long as they could do it quietly, they were willing to help.
But doing it quietly was imperative. Most American Muslims are not instinctively different from other Americans. But American Muslim communities are peculiar. In many of them, the leadership of the mosques and Islamic centers is foreign (or at least foreign-influenced). This leadership tends to be anti-Western and arrogant, claiming an Islamic authenticity Americans are said to lack. Many American Muslims are intimidated into silence. They are cowed by the specter of being condemned as too American. In Islam, there is no more grievous offense than causing disunity through infidelity. It is no small thing when community leaders frame a Muslim as insufficiently loyal to the ummah, the notional Islamic nation.
American Muslims are also taken aback by the ease with which their community leaders straddle the line between preaching Islam and cheerleading for terrorists. Why, they wonder, does their government, the U.S. government, consistently elevate America-bashing Islamists who can’t give a straight answer when asked about Hamas and Hezbollah? Why not highlight Muslims who are pro-American and unambiguously anti-terrorist — Muslims who desperately need the support?
Most of the mosques and Islamic centers in our country are controlled, to a greater or lesser degree, by the Muslim Brotherhood and its satellites. The North American Islamic Trust (NAIT) was established in the early Seventies to buy up property for the establishment of American mosques and “Islamic centers,” the latter being what the Brotherhood calls “the axis” of the Islamist movement in America. The Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) supplies literature and vets imams. Both NAIT and ISNA, along with CAIR and other Brotherhood groups, were identified by the Justice Department as unindicted coconspirators in the recent Hamas-financing prosecution against the Holy Land Foundation. These Islamists owe their vision to the Brotherhood. Just as important, they owe their livelihood, influence, and power to moneyed Middle East patrons, particularly the Saudis.
The Kingdom and the Brotherhood have combined for a half-century to put American Muslim communities in a stranglehold. They proselytize a fundamentalist interpretation of Islam — an amalgam of Saudi Wahhabism and Brotherhood Salafism — that is virulently anti-Western. Its instruction to Muslims in the United States, Canada, and Europe is voluntary apartheid: Immigrate but don’t integrate, infiltrate but don’t assimilate.
SHARIA OR RELIGIOUS FREEDOM?
This brand of Islam is designed to create parallel Muslim enclaves, resistant to America’s freedom culture and to Western civilization, just as it created the liberty-killing “no-go zones” now sprouting up throughout Europe. It is designed to snuff out religious freedom, pressuring American Muslims to adopt the Islamists’ social mores, financial practices, and anti-Western outlook. And the authoritarian device it uses to establish and control these enclaves is sharia, Islam’s legal and political framework, which aspires to control of all aspects of life — not just spiritual life, but all of life.
It is the Brotherhood’s objective to thread sharia through American law and culture. This mission drives imam Feisal Rauf’s work, as documented by the Center for Security Policy’s Christine Brim in an eye-popping report at Andrew Breitbart’s Big Peace website.
Since 2006, Rauf has been developing the “Sharia Index Project.” His partners in this venture include longtime Muslim Brotherhood honcho Jamal Barzinji, a top official at the International Institute of Islamic Thought. The IIIT, a major backer of the convicted terrorist Sami al-Arian, is one of the Brotherhood satellites that republished Rauf’s book, What’s Right with Islam Is What’s Right with America, the book that was released in Malaysia under the more telling title, A Call to Prayer from the World Trade Center Rubble: Islamic Dawa in the Heart of America Post-9/11. (The other Brotherhood organization behind the republication of Rauf’s book was the aforementioned ISNA.) As Ms. Brim explains, the purpose of Rauf’s Sharia Index Project is “to benchmark” every country’s compliance with sharia, with an eye toward pressuring them to adopt and enforce more.
The United States is not going to become a sharia state anytime soon. That obvious fact has commentators pooh-poohing the encroaching peril, even as we watch Europe succumb before our eyes, as if no-go zones, honor killings, the Balkanizing of society, and the strangulation of freedom could never happen here. On Tuesday, for example, in an otherwise insightful column on the Left’s incoherence in the mosque controversy, the Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto took an offhanded swipe at the “fringe right’s ravings about ‘Shariah.’” But are the concerns really “ravings,” and are they truly confined to a right-wing “fringe”?
It so happened that in the same day’s Journal, Bret Stephens penned a sharp essay about Muslim “moderates” who turn out not to be so moderate. As his counterpoint, he offered a courageous, progressive Muslim reformer, Irshad Manji. Rather than pretending that Islamic doctrine has nothing to do with terrorism, Ms. Manji is forthrightly confronting the doctrine and working to change it. What is it that needs change? As illustrated in her spellbinding book, The Trouble with Islam Today: A Muslim’s Call for Reform in Her Faith, much of what ails Islam is sharia sclerosis. Sharia, she elaborates, represents the legal opinions of classical Muslim jurists, frozen a millennium ago and, ever since, impervious to critical inquiry.
Frozen it remains thanks to atavistic zealots, prominent among them the Muslim Brotherhood, an organization founded by fundamentalists in the 1920s and lavishly funded by the Saudis since the 1950s, an outfit Manji correctly describes as “the al-Qaeda of its generation.” These Islamists are the true enemies of religious liberty. It is they who foreclose modern Muslims from the right to reason independently, to evolve.
Whether Ground Zero mosque proponents realize it or not, the cause they are advancing — against the will of the American people, and, perversely, under the guise of “religious freedom” — is the Islamist cause. It is the Brotherhood, not American Muslims, insisting that this monument must be imposed on this sacred spot.
It is a “considerable comfort,” Mr. Stephens writes, “to know that there are Muslims in the U.S. like Irshad who are working, tirelessly but mainly out of view, toward the cause of reform. They could use more support and recognition.” But, of course, their tireless work must happen “out of view,” because the Islamists have made it too dangerous for them to work openly. And they are denied support and recognition because the post-American ruling class has made its bed with sharia salesmen like Rauf, who blame America for 9/11 and can’t bring themselves to say Hamas is a terrorist organization.
By contrast, American Muslims grasp that 9/11 was an attack on their country, too. Their emerging leaders, such as Zuhdi Jasser and Steven Schwartz, have started organizations — respectively, the American Islamic Forum for Democracy and the Center for Islamic Pluralism — that promote freedom and offer Muslims an escape from the Brotherhood’s clutches. As Messrs. Jasser and Schwartz relate, American Muslims understand the significance of Ground Zero to our nation, to the families of those who were slaughtered, and to the enemy against whom we are still fighting. They know that, in contrast to the innate intolerance of sharia states, the United States opens its arms to people of all faiths, including Muslims. Like Ms. Manji, they are struggling, against daunting opposition, to forge an Islam that embraces Western values, that reveres religious faith but denies it temporal authority.
The Ground Zero mosque controversy is not about religious liberty for Muslims. It is about which Islam will thrive in the United States: the one that is fighting Americans, or the one American Muslims are fighting for.
A group calling themselves “White Roses”
created a video to inform non-Muslims about Islam. The name of this video is Three
Things About Islam
White Roses is headquartered in Sweden.
This first version is in English. The name “White Roses” is based on a student
resistance group “Die weiße Rose” in Nazi Germany. The group became known for an
anonymous leaflet campaign, from June 1942 until February 1943, which called for
active opposition to Adolf Hitler’s regime.
I urge all of you to view this video and
forward it to your E mail list. You may be familiar with the points made in this
video but many Americans are not, either out of a desire to put their heads in
the sand to avoid confronting the problem or just simple ignorance of the crisis
we face. It may not be possible to get all the Dramatis Persona to acknowledge
this Islamic road to perdition but those Americans, who just do not know, out of
ignorance, just might find the learning experience worth while.
As a person who has spent lengthy time
studying Islam I can tell you this video is one of the best I have seen…it’s
short and to the point and all those points are dead on!
Hearld News On-Line – August 27, 2010
HOMER GLEN — Many Homer Glen trustees and residents say they need to explore any available options — including detaching from Lockport Township High School District — to get a new high school in the village.
After the district board voted last week not to hold a referendum in November, asking whether a new high school should be built in Homer Glen, some trustees and residents at Tuesday’s village board meeting said they don’t think the district’s remaining options to address overcrowding are viable to the village.
District officials have been studying whether to build an addition to the East Campus, ask voters for a sixth time to support a tax increase to build a new school or opt for a plan put forth by Homer Glen. Under that plan, the village would use its home-rule authority and federal Build America bonds to build a high school on land the district owns on Cedar Road. The district would lease the school with the opportunity to buy it in the future.
A key to that plan was asking via referendum if a school should be built in order to keep about $35 million in state construction grant money the district applied for years ago and is expected to receive in the near future. The school board voted 4-3 against conducting the referendum.
“It goes beyond disappointment,” Homer Glen Trustee Mary Niemiec said. “It wasn’t a vote on dollars. It was a vote on direction.”
Niemiec said Homer Glen needs to study other options available, including detaching from the district or forming a new unit district, so that a high school will be built.
“We fought so hard to incorporate this community 10 years ago,” she said. “A strong school system is at the heart of a community. This is frustrating. It’s infuriating. I’m tired. I won’t stay silent anymore.”
Some district residents have been through this before. In the 1970s, Lockport West High School left the district and later became Romeoville High School. State law has significantly changed since then, and district spokeswoman Kim Brehm has said it would be all but impossible for a new high school to detach from the district.
Village Trustee Laurel Ward, a member of a school committee to research overcrowding, said she thinks building an addition to the East Campus is “an expensive Band-Aid” and asking for a high school through a referendum will take too long. District officials have said a referendum proposal could be placed on the ballot in November 2012, with construction of a new school expected to be completed by fall 2017 if it were approved.
“I don’t believe waiting seven years or longer is a viable option for Homer Glen,” Ward said.
Trustee Russell Knaack said the village wants good schools to attract and keep residents and businesses.
“We need to take the next step to take over the reins and do whatever we need to do to get a school in Homer Glen,” he said. “Right now, our biggest asset is our potential.”
Trustees said they may consider putting their own referendum proposal on February’s primary ballot to gauge residents’ wishes. Some residents in attendance Tuesday said they were disappointed in the school board’s vote.
“If we have to break away, that is what we need to do,” resident Laura Bugos said.
Resident Kim Manson said she feared Homer Glen does not have enough seats on the district board to favor issues important to the village.
District board member Cindy Polke, a Homer Glen resident who has supported the Homer Glen financing plan, said the village board has bent over backward to try to find a solution to overcrowding.
“You put our children first,” she said.
In the often emotional meeting, Trustee Margaret Sabo said she will continue to be objective on the potential school/village partnership. She said she has heard from residents who believe the village should not be in the education business but also thinks that a referendum would have been helpful.
We are working with the Americans for Prosperity (AFP) to bring you one of the biggest rallies this year. All we want to know is are you ready to take your country back on November 2nd? If you are met us at the American Legion in Lockport on September 15th at 6:30 and be prepared for real change this November.
Go to www.novemberiscoming.com
The Socialist Party of America announced in their October 2009 newsletter that 70 Congressional democrats currently belong to their caucus.
This admission was recently posted on Scribd.com:
American Socialist Voter–
Q: How many members of the U.S. Congress are also members of the DSA?
A: Seventy
Q: How many of the DSA members sit on the Judiciary Committee?
A: Eleven: John Conyers [Chairman of the Judiciary Committee], Tammy Baldwin, Jerrold Nadler, Luis Gutierrez,
Melvin Watt, Maxine Waters, Hank Johnson, Steve Cohen, Barbara Lee, Robert Wexler, Linda Sanchez [there are 23 Democrats on the Judiciary Committee of which eleven, almost half, are now members of the DSA].
Q: Who are these members of 111th Congress?
A: See the listing below
Co-Chairs
Hon. Raúl M. Grijalva (AZ-07)
Hon. Lynn Woolsey (CA-06)
Vice Chairs
Hon. Diane Watson (CA-33)
Hon. Sheila Jackson-Lee (TX-18)
Hon. Mazie Hirono (HI-02)
Hon. Dennis Kucinich (OH-10)
Senate Members
Hon. Bernie Sanders (VT)
House Members
Hon. Neil Abercrombie (HI-01)
Hon. Tammy Baldwin (WI-02)
Hon. Xavier Becerra (CA-31)
Hon. Madeleine Bordallo (GU-AL)
Hon. Robert Brady (PA-01)
Hon. Corrine Brown (FL-03)
Hon. Michael Capuano (MA-08)
Hon. André Carson (IN-07)
Hon. Donna Christensen (VI-AL)
Hon. Yvette Clarke (NY-11)
Hon. William “Lacy” Clay (MO-01)
Hon. Emanuel Cleaver (MO-05)
Hon. Steve Cohen (TN-09)
Hon. John Conyers (MI-14)
Hon. Elijah Cummings (MD-07)
Hon. Danny Davis (IL-07)
Hon. Peter DeFazio (OR-04)
Hon. Rosa DeLauro (CT-03)
Rep. Donna F. Edwards (MD-04)
Hon. Keith Ellison (MN-05)
Hon. Sam Farr (CA-17)
Hon. Chaka Fattah (PA-02)
Hon. Bob Filner (CA-51)
Hon. Barney Frank (MA-04)
Hon. Marcia L. Fudge (OH-11)
Hon. Alan Grayson (FL-08)
Hon. Luis Gutierrez (IL-04)
Hon. John Hall (NY-19)
Hon. Phil Hare (IL-17)
Hon. Maurice Hinchey (NY-22)
Hon. Michael Honda (CA-15)
Hon. Jesse Jackson, Jr. (IL-02)
Hon. Eddie Bernice Johnson (TX-30)
Hon. Hank Johnson (GA-04)
Hon. Marcy Kaptur (OH-09)
Hon. Carolyn Kilpatrick (MI-13)
Hon. Barbara Lee (CA-09)
Hon. John Lewis (GA-05)
Hon. David Loebsack (IA-02)
Hon. Ben R. Lujan (NM-3)
Hon. Carolyn Maloney (NY-14)
Hon. Ed Markey (MA-07)
Hon. Jim McDermott (WA-07)
Hon. James McGovern (MA-03)
Hon. George Miller (CA-07)
Hon. Gwen Moore (WI-04)
Hon. Jerrold Nadler (NY-08)
Hon. Eleanor Holmes-Norton (DC-AL)
Hon. John Olver (MA-01)
Hon. Ed Pastor (AZ-04)
Hon. Donald Payne (NJ-10)
Hon. Chellie Pingree (ME-01)
Hon. Charles Rangel (NY-15)
Hon. Laura Richardson (CA-37)
Hon. Lucille Roybal-Allard (CA-34)
Hon. Bobby Rush (IL-01)
Hon. Linda Sánchez (CA-47)
Hon. Jan Schakowsky (IL-09)
Hon. José Serrano (NY-16)
Hon. Louise Slaughter (NY-28)
Hon. Pete Stark (CA-13)
Hon. Bennie Thompson (MS-02)
Hon. John Tierney (MA-06)
Hon. Nydia Velazquez (NY-12)
Hon. Maxine Waters (CA-35)
Hon. Mel Watt (NC-12)
Hon. Henry Waxman (CA-30)
Hon. Peter Welch (VT-AL)
Hon. Robert Wexler (FL-19)
Dan Proft Commentary
as heard on the Don Wade & Roma Morning Show on WLS AM-890.
You know how I know I’ve been in Illinois politics too long?
The comedy troupe of Sam Adam Sr. and Jr. was starting to make some sense to me.
For example, during his post-verdict floor show, Sam Adam Sr. said that US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald thinks Illinois is a banana republic.
Isn’t it?
A banana republic is marked by a politically unstable government ruled by a small and corrupt elite who use the power of the state to collude with favored monopolies in order to line their pockets.
If the fruit fits…
Adam Sr. criticized Fitzgerald’s prosecution of Scooter Libby where, as in the Blagojevich case, a conspiracy was alleged but none was proven. I share his view that the Libby prosecution was an overreach into the realm of criminalizing politics.
Both Adam boys constantly denigrated their client during the trial describing Blagojevich as both a terrible judge of character and dumb. Who could argue with those assessments?
But then I caught myself.
Skilled street hustlers are very good at identifying one or two glaring deficiencies of their adversary while admitting one or two of their own to get you nodding along in agreement. That’s when they try and slip the fastballs by the jury.
And so came Sam Adam Sr. the fiscal hawk who doesn’t want to see precious taxpayer dollars squandered on a retrial. And then Sam Adam Jr. presented himself as a Neighborhood Watch block captain to lament gang violence and, hey John Q. Public, don’t you think the US Attorney’s Office should be concerning itself with prosecuting drug kingpins?
As if the only thing standing between us and safer neighborhoods is foregoing the retrial of Rod Blagojevich.
In Illinois when it is one branch of the government versus another branch of the government, it is sometimes difficult to figure out which side to trust the least.
However, whatever the failures of prosecutors in the first trial and whatever the cost to be incurred for the second trial, justice demands Blagojevich be re-tried.
________________________________________
Follow me on:
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Dan Proft (dan@danproft.com) is a talk show host and political commentator for WLS-AM 890 (wlsam.com) in Chicago.
For other Dan Proft commentaries (radio & print), please visit: http://www.urqmedia.com/proft/
For other recent Don Wade & Roma interviews, commentary, and discussions visit: http://www.wlsam.com/sectional.asp?id=16410
© All Rights Reserved
LARRY KELLEY
Editor’s Note: This article first appeared in the May 2010 issue of Townhall Magazine.
The Muslim Brotherhood is leading the way for radical Muslims to infiltrate American society and government. Their goal is simple: control the United States and impose Shariah law.
In A.D. 622, Muhammad was forced to flee to Medina from his birthplace in Mecca, where the ruling tribe, the Quraysh, had come to see his preaching and proselytizing as a threat. While in Medina, he amassed a following of Bedouin warriors who swarmed to his banner to participate in the conquest and plunder of the smaller cities dotting the surrounding Arabian landscape.
In 630, Muhammad’s armies surrounded Mecca and forced its unconditional submission. All organized resistance on the Arabian Peninsula then collapsed, bringing it under Islamic military domination.
In their book “Muslim Mafia,” coauthors David Gaubatz and Paul Sperry expose the Muslim Brotherhood as the worldwide, Saudi government-funded Islamist hand behind all Sunni terrorist groups and the world’s largest and most dangerous stateless organization. They reveal the Brotherhood’s plan for the eventual Islamic domination of the United States and strategy to follow the example of the prophet after “he fled to Medina.”
WEAKNESS IN THE FACE OF A THREAT
While there are reasons to be encouraged by the administration’s Afghanistan offensive, many serious observers of America’s war with militant Islam see reasons for alarm. A case in point — the Fort Hood Massacre. It was shocking enough to learn that the American domestic military establishment cannot even protect its own troops inside the United States. But what seemed even more shocking was the fact that the country’s most senior Army officer, Gen. George Casey, publicly stated that the attack caused him to be more worried about harm to the military’s diversity than the disgrace that failed to prevent such an appalling waste of lives.
Many fear our superpower status is rapidly ebbing away and, shockingly, at the behest of our own government. The reasons for alarm continue to multiply: the (thankfully now-abandoned) initiative to prosecute the CIA operatives whose “enhanced interrogation techniques” produced intelligence that thwarted numerous 9/11-style attacks; this administration’s prosecution of Navy Seals who allegedly punched a captured terrorist who killed and mutilated Americans in Fallujah, Iraq; the White House’s pledge to close the Guantanamo Bay prison facility and release more of the most senior terrorists back to their terror networks; the cancellation of our long-range missile defense installation contracts in the Czech Republic and Poland precisely when Iran is feverishly working on nuclear long-range missiles; the failure to issue the smallest encouragement to the Iranian freedom fighters who want to align with us in their efforts to put down the most dangerous Islamic regime on the planet; and its profligate spending that threatens to render America feckless, indebted to its enemies and unable to finance its own defense.
Given the escalating Islamic threat, it seems appropriate to ask: Why is this diminution of American power happening? Are there Islamic jihadists influencing our government? Who are the jihadists influencing? What have they accomplished? And what is their end game?
BUILDING THE BROTHERHOOD
In 1948, an influential Egyptian writer, Sayyid Qutb, set sail from Cairo to New York City. His trip was financed by powerful Egyptian friends who were also conspiring against the dissolute monarch, King Farouk, who was a puppet of the occupying British government and who had put out a warrant for the seditious writer’s arrest. Also in that year, five Arab armies were in the final stages of losing the war to prevent the establishment of the Jewish state within Islamic lands. As Lawrence Wright puts it in his book, “The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11,” “[This event] not only stunned the Arab world but the shame of that experience would shape the Arab intellectual experience more profoundly than any other in modern history.”
Qutb’s writing espoused a new Islamic fundamentalist ideology and movement, which was reflected in an organization called the Muslim Brotherhood, of which Qutb was a member. Founded in 1928 by an equally influential Egyptian, Sheik Hassan al-Banna, the original goal of the Brotherhood was to convert Egypt into an Islamic state.
Al-Banna was a man of action. Just two decades after its founding, his organization counted hundreds of thousands of members across Egypt and throughout the Middle East. He and Qutb saw the movement as a kind of counter society, challenging every norm of Western secular politics and culture.
In 1949, while still in the United States and as his book, “Social Justice in Islam,” was about to be published, Qutb learned that al-Banna had been assassinated. The event shocked him. The Egyptian government killed al-Banna and did so out of self-defense because the Brotherhood was beginning to embrace violence, blowing up movie theaters in Cairo and murdering British and Egyptian officials.
With al-Banna’s death, Qutb became the leading voice of the new Muslim fundamentalism. He wrote, “The white man in Europe or America is our number one enemy. … We are endowing our children with amazement and respect for the master who tramples our honor and enslaves us. Let us instead plant the seeds of hatred, disgust and revenge in the souls of these children. Let us teach them that the white man is the enemy of humanity and that they should destroy him at the first opportunity.”
INSPIRING BIN LADEN
In August 1950, Qutb returned to Egypt fully radicalized and determined to violently overthrow the regime. By this time, the Brotherhood numbered 1 million members in a country of 18 million.
In January 1952, the Brothers fomented a riot in Cairo, and in September, the government was seized in a military junta, led by a young army colonel, Gamal Nasser. The military plotters coordinated the coup very closely with the Brothers, and in fact, one of the officers, Anwar Sadat, the man who succeeded Nasser, was himself a Brother.
While Nasser invited Qutb to be an advisor to his Revolutionary Command Council, the alliance was short-lived. Nasser’s dream was to found a Pan-Arab modern socialist state with Cairo as its capital. This had nothing to do with the dream of a new theocratic caliphate that Qutb and the Brothers had in mind.
In October 1954, while Nasser was speaking to a huge assembly and the country listened on the radio, a number of Brothers opened fire at him. Miraculously, Nasser escaped injury. The regime immediately captured and hung the conspirators, rounded up thousands of Brothers and placed thousands in concentration camps, including Qutb, who was given a life sentence.
Qutb, suffering torture in prison, became a hero for the new Islamic fundamentalists. Through family and friends, bits and pieces of Qutb’s Islamist manifesto, “Milestones,” were smuggled out of his cell and ultimately published in 1962. It was this book that would profoundly influence a young Osama bin Laden.
Although Nasser pardoned and released him in 1964, Qutb went immediately back to plotting violent revolution, with the secret support of Saudi Arabia whose ruling monarchy feared Nasser’s brand of Pan-Arabism. Six months later, Qutb and 42 conspirators were arrested and put on trial. Qutb received his death sentence gratefully. “I performed jihad for 15 years until I earned this martyrdom,” he declared.
Nassar knew that Qutb was more dangerous to him dead than alive. He dispatched Sadat to visit Qutb in prison and offered him another pardon if he would a write a request for clemency. Qutb refused and was hung after prayers in August 1966, His body was not surrendered to his family for fear his grave would become a shrine. As Wright puts it, “[Qutb’s] lonely genius would unsettle Islam, threaten regimes across the Muslim world and beckon to a generation of rootless Arabs who were looking for meaning and purpose in their lives and would find it in jihad.”
Al-Banna and Qutb were the Marx and Lenin of the new Islamic fundamentalism that produced the Muslim Brothers, that inspired and produced unknown numbers of new leaders of even more violent splinter affiliates, including: Hamas; the Taliban; Ayman al Zawahiri’s al-Jihad, which conducted the assassination of Anwar Sadat; and bin Laden’s al Qaeda.
THE BROTHERHOOD COMES TO AMERICA
In the mid-20th century, the Brotherhood began its campaign to infiltrate and impact the direction of the United States.
During the 1960s, the Brotherhood began sending vast numbers of students to American universities.
In 1973, with massive Saudi funding, they formed the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT), an investment vehicle that enabled them to acquire 300 mosques and schools in the United States.
In 1987, Hamas, the Palestinian wing of the Brothers with the stated goal of destroying Israel, was founded and largely funded by American Muslims.
In 1990, the Brotherhood formed the American Muslim Council (AMC) with Abdurahman Alamoudi as its boss and the new capo di tutti of the entire syndicate.
Then in 1994, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) was founded.
In 1980, there were 481 officially recognized Mosques in the United States. Today, there are 1,209, with an estimated 80 percent of those funded and controlled by Saudi Arabia, where the official religion is virulently anti-Western Wahhabi Islam.
Sperry and Gaubatz’s “Muslim Mafia” exposes the Muslim Brotherhood’s activities in America using declassified FBI documents, FBI agent interviews, transcripts of telephone wire taps and thousands of internal documents smuggled out of CAIR headquarters by Gaubatz’s son, Chris Gaubatz, who posed as an American convert to Islam and was hired by CAIR. They demonstrate that the Brotherhood is now a worldwide central clearinghouse for virtually all Sunni terrorist groups, is operating inside U.S. mosques across the country and is in complete control of CAIR and its myriad subsidiaries.
And while the House of Saud attempts to portray itself as a loyal U.S. trading partner, the authors prove that it is actually financing and partnering with the Brotherhood, that it is actively undermining our national security, and that it controls CAIR and at least 46 other supposedly moderate Muslim front groups in the United States, along with countless other subsidiary shell companies. And for the first time, they expose the Brotherhood’s five-phase plan for dominating America:
• Phase I: Establish an elite Muslim Leadership and raise Islamicist consciousness in the community;
• Phase II: Create Islamic institutions that the leadership can control and form autonomous Muslim enclaves;
• Phase III: Infiltrate America’s political and social institutions forming a shadow state; escalate conversions; manipulate mass media to remove language offensive to Islam;
• Phase IV: Open hostile public confrontation over U.S. policies, riot, make militant demands for special rights and accommodations;
• Phase V: Wage final conflict and overthrow (jihad).
According to Sperry and Gaubatz, the consensus among counterterrorism officials is that the North American Brotherhood is already in Phase III.
CLERICAL INFILTRATORS
Many of the imams at major mosques play a pivotal role in implementing the first two phases of the plan, acting as recruiters and organizers. In internal documents, they refer to the United States as their Dar al-Arqam, their safe house. FBI wiretaps of secret meetings reveal that the Brotherhood views America as a pushover.
I found the Muslim Community Association (MCA) of Santa Clara, Calif., a mosque near my home, mentioned in numerous sources as a major Brotherhood center with ties to al Qaeda. I was able to meet with the MCA outreach director, Dian Alyan, at the mosque on a Friday in order to also observe services.
After her lengthy description of how her Mosque was a force for good, I read her the following, culled from my sources (Robert Spencer, Gaubatz, Sperry and others), and asked for her reaction:
“Ali ‘the American’ Mohamed was a loyal member of the Muslim Brotherhood who emigrated from Egypt to spy for the Brotherhood in America. He infiltrated the U.S. Army as a sergeant and became a U.S. Special Forces trainer. He went on to the JFK Special Warfare Center and School (SWICK) where was able to steal classified military secrets. During leaves, he would travel to New Jersey to train al Qaeda operatives in weapons and warfare tactics.
“After his honorable discharge, he moved to Santa Clara where he set up a communications cell for al Qaeda while fronting as a computer engineer … there he brought Ayman al-Zawahiri to California for fundraising tour, which netted the al Qaeda leader $500,000. A large chunk of it was raised at the Muslim Community Association, the home mosque of CAIR cofounder Omar Ahmad. Five years later, the FBI arrested Mohamed, who subsequently pleaded guilty to conspiracy in the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Africa.”
As I neared the end of my reading, I saw Ms. Alyan’s face flush from her impeccable olive hue to a bright pink, which gave me a sickening feeling, as if I had kicked her in the stomach.
“Where did you get that, off the Internet?” she asked.
“No, from books and recently declassified FBI files,” I said.
“May I have those? I’d like to show them to Mr. [Mohammed] Nadeem [president of MCA].”
I told her that I would send her clean copies without my notes scribbled on them.
“Muslim Mafia” contains many depictions of American imams openly espousing treason. For example, American Muslim cleric Zaid Shakir, was secretly recorded giving a lecture in the San Francisco area advising his audience of fellow Muslim Americans to follow the strategy of the prophet when he fled to Medina and accumulated power first before waging violent jihad. Shakir is a regular speaker at CAIR-sponsored events, where he has referred to the Brotherhood’s aforementioned plan to overthrow America by saying, “If we put a nationwide infrastructure in place and marshaled our resources, we’d take over this country in a very short time.”
U.S. GOVERNMENT INFILTRATORS
The Brothers and their Islamist allies have been successfully gaining access to the highest levels of our government since the Clinton administration. Just a few who’ve been outed are:
Sami al-Arian: In Sperry’s 2005 book, “Infiltration,” he writes that on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Sami al-Arian awoke “extremely upbeat.” Finally, all the work he had done in Florida in 2000 “getting out the Muslim vote” had paid off — conservative activist and leading George W. Bush advocate Grover Norquist argued that it was al-Arian’s Muslim voters in Florida who had pushed Bush over the finish line. In a few hours, he and eight other Muslim leaders would meet with the president to discuss how Bush would live up to his campaign pledge to end the use of secret intelligence in the investigation of American Muslims — the culmination of a four-year effort for this Muslim professor and the secret Brotherhood capo.
Ironically the 9/11 attacks preempted al-Arian’s audience with Bush. Today, he’s behind bars, convicted of fraudulently raising money and funneling it to Hamas and other terrorist organizations conducting suicide operations in Israel.
Abdurahman Alamoudi: In 1997, Norquist brokered a meeting with then-Texas Gov. Bush to develop a plan to bring in a previously untapped voting block, he called it the “Muslim Strategy.” The meeting featured AMC boss and top Brotherhood member Alamoudi, top AMC lieutenant Khaled Suffuri, Karl Rove, Norquist and Talat Othman, a Saudi friend of Bush and fellow member of Harken Oil. The plan hinged on a Bush vow to limit the government’s use of secret information in the investigation of Muslims — the same deal al-Arian sought to close four years later.
Alamoudi had long been the toast of the town in multiculturalist Washington. In 1993, he was commissioned to create the first Muslim chaplin corps for the Pentagon. In 1996, he organized the first Ramadan dinner for government officials and met with Clinton and Gore in the White House. That year, he was recorded at the Islamic Association of Palestine’s annual convention in Illinois saying, “I think if we are outside the country, we can say, ‘O Allah, destroy America.’ But once we are here, our mission in this country is to change it.”
Today, Alamoudi is serving a 23-year prison sentence. Busted in 2003 for trying to smuggle $340,000 in sequentially numbered bills into the United States from Libya, prosecutors connected him to Hamas and Hezbollah, and he eventually pled guilty to plotting terrorist attacks on the United States with support from Libya.
Shiek Hamza Yusuf: The only Muslim in a group of religious leaders invited to the White House to pray with the president after 9/11, Yusuf is an American-born convert to Islam and cultivates his moderate image. But only two days prior to 9/11, he spoke to Muslims in Irvine, Calif., gathered in support of a cop-killing Muslim imam, “[T]his country [America] is facing a very terrible fate. The reason for this is that this country stands condemned. … This country unfortunately has a great tribulation coming to it.”
Omar Ahmad: Co-founder of CAIR and also an honored guest at the Bush White House, Ahmad was invited by the president to the National Cathedral to mourn the Americans lost on 9/11. In 1998, he was secretly recorded at an Islamic conference in Fremont, Calif., saying, “Islam isn’t in America to equal to any other faith but to become dominant. The Koran should be the highest authority in America and Islam the only accepted religion.” Before founding CAIR, Ahmad was a leader at the Islamic Association of Palestine, which was an Islamist organization that raised money in America for Hamas but was shut down by the government in 2005.
The three largest American-based Brotherhood front groups have been blacklisted and/or shut down by the FBI. The FBI shut down Holy Land Foundation, the largest Islamic charity, for fraudulently raising money for Hamas and listed CAIR and the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) as unindicted co-conspirators.
THE COMPROMISED
Many American officials seem to be compromised by two interlocking phenomena. First, they cannot countenance a belief system that is cloaked in a religious conviction that includes our subjugation. Second, for good reason, they are driven by fear. In Northern Virginia, the Muslim Brotherhood has targeted U.S. Attorney Gordon Kromberg, issuing death threats to him and his family for his prosecution of their leaders, including CAIR executives.
Here are a few government players who have been used by Islamists:
Robert S. Mueller: FBI Director Robert Mueller, appointed by Bush and retained by Obama, has allowed his agency to be infiltrated and his agents brainwashed by CAIR/Brotherhood operatives. One of his responses to 9/11 was to sponsor “diversity and sensitivity workshops” conducted by CAIR executives. As Sperry and Gaubatz point out, these quickly turned into nothing less than “dangerous disinformation campaigns designed to desensitize agents from the threat of Islamic terrorism.”
Documents obtained by Chris Gaubatz confirm that CAIR is enjoying, under the Obama administration, expanded “positive relations with the FBI.” Assistant Director for Public Affairs John Miller, now invites highly suspect CAIR officials to FBI headquarters for regular “working lunches.” Incredibly, it’s Miller’s policy to keep CAIR and other Muslim groups informed about FBI plans to raid Islamic targets in counterterrorism investigations.
Agents assert that these “outreach” policies have created discord at all levels of the FBI except within the top brass, which “continues to be clueless about the nature of the enemy.”
Brian Humphrey: In 2006, then-Customs and Border Protection Executive Director Brian Humphrey assured CAIR that his agents do not single out Muslim airline passengers for special screening. Further, his agents must undergo a course in Muslim sensitivity. The course is put together by Margaret Nydell, an Arabic Studies professor at Georgetown University, which houses a large Saudi financed center on Islamic studies. One border agent described her course as “politically correct drivel.”
Valerie Jarrett: A longtime Obama associate from Chicago and now a senior advisor to the president, Valerie Jarrett had the dubious distinction of being the first White House official to address a national convention of Brotherhood front group ISNA.
Eric Holder: Last December, in a piece for National Review titled “Shifty Shifting,” Andrew McCarthy eviscerated Attorney General Eric Holder, describing him as a man who seems to be compromised not by Muslim intimidation but by the ideology of the extreme international Left of which he and Obama are members in good standing. Holder served as the No. 2 man in the Clinton Justice Department when, as McCarthy puts it, “nearly as many terrorists were pardoned as were prosecuted,” and served during a time when the al Qaeda attacks on U.S. interests were occurring every year and escalating in intensity. It was Holder who obtained the pardon for Marc Rich, one of the FBI’s most wanted, a man who was indicted for millions of dollars in fraud and tax evasion and for cutting illegal deals with the regime in Iran.
Holder’s desire to close Guantanamo without a plan for what to do with the 200 prisoners detained there along with his desire to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammad and four other terrorists in a civilian court are indicative of a much larger malfeasance in this administration’s approach to our war with Islamic terrorists. In a House Judiciary Committee hearing last fall, he exhibited an abject ignorance of the fact that a civilian trial for the terrorists would be exactly what our Islamic enemies crave, a new weapon where they would gain intelligence and broadcast propaganda.
THE BROTHERS AS SEEN BY AN APOSTATE
I spoke with Nonie Darwish, author of “Now They Call Me Infidel” and “Cruel and Usual Punishment” and internationally recognized advocate for Muslim apostates. Now an American, she grew up a Muslim in Egypt, the daughter of an Egyptian general whose family was part of President Nasser’s inner circle.
I asked her to characterize the current state of the Brotherhood in Egypt and internationally. She explained that they are very popular throughout the entire world of Sunni Islam. In most countries — Islamic and in the West — they remain somewhat clandestine. But in Egypt, the Brothers operate openly. There are even avowed members serving in the Egyptian parliament. “The reason that they are so popular is because they are seen as carrying the flag of true Islam,” she added.
“How can the Mubarak government allow the Brothers to be in the government, given that they were accomplices to the assassination of Sadat?” I asked.
“Because the Egyptian government is afraid of them,” she said. “There are assassination attempts constantly, because the Brothers are always watching and evaluating if Mubarak is pure enough. Most Muslim leaders walk a fine line, keeping one foot in the West while they keep talking to their own people about jihad.”
“And in the U.S., how would you describe the Brothers today?” I asked.
Ms. Darwish explained that we are beginning to resemble Egypt, not just in the sense that Brothers are operating openly, working to reverse the Patriot Act and always trying to gain more protection for their jihadist syndicate but because, as she puts it, “our leaders now have invited them to join the government.”
She cited as an example Dalia Mogahed, also an Egyptian by birth, the chief advisor to Obama on Islamic affairs and the first veiled Muslim to work in the White House. “I can tell that she is very sympathetic to the Brothers.”
“How can you tell?” I asked.
“See if you can find any statement she has ever made condemning the acts of terrorist organizations such as Hamas or al Qaeda. You won’t find one.”
