Jihad: Washington’s strategy to defeat terrorism is lacking in many ways, but none more than its failure to attack it at its root: the Muslim Brotherhood. But that may change with the fast-tracking of a bill to outlaw the terror network.
In a major development on this important front, the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday passed a bill to effectively ban the Muslim Brotherhood as a designated terrorist group, 17-10.
The legislation — which freezes Brotherhood assets and also outs its front groups, including hundreds in the U.S. — is headed for the House floor. Its passage there is likely since the GOP leadership supports HR 3892, which has 28 co-sponsors and is steadily gaining new backers each week.
If a companion bill introduced in the Senate by GOP Sen. Ted Cruz passes, it would tee the ban up for a GOP president to sign into law — a dream of FBI case agents across the country, who find elements of the Brotherhood showing up in virtually every terrorism case they work.
The pro-jihad Brotherhood gave rise to Hamas and al-Qaida, and shares ideology with ISIS.
Earlier this month, Senate Homeland Security Chair Ron Johnson, R-Wis., endorsed the companion bill. Now it will also need support from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, chaired by Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn.
Officially designating the Brotherhood a terrorist organization would not only deny U.S. entrance to any foreign national tied to it, but force banks to block financial transactions related to it. What’s more, it would make it a crime for anybody in the U.S. to provide material support to the Brotherhood.
This, in turn, would criminalize hundreds of Brotherhood front groups and mosques in the U.S. that the FBI says secretly support and finance terrorism, allowing the agency to finally put them out of business and turn off a major spigot of jihad flowing in the American Muslim community.
The bill explicitly identifies several mainstream, supposedly “moderate” U.S. Muslim organizations as Brotherhood entities, and cites evidence tying them to the Brotherhood and its Palestinian terrorist wing Hamas.
“Federal prosecutors implicated a number of prominent United States-Islamic organizations in this conspiracy, including the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT) and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR),” the text of the bill states.
“These groups and their leaders, among others, were named as unindicted co-conspirators. The Department of Justice told the court that these United States-Muslim Brotherhood affiliates acted at the direction of the international Muslim Brotherhood to support terrorism in a July 2008 court filing,” which revealed:
“ISNA and NAIT, in fact, shared more with (the Holy Land Foundation) than just a parent organization. They were intimately connected with (HLF, now a convicted terrorist front) and its assigned task of providing financial support to Hamas.
“CAIR was later added to these organizations. The mandate of these organizations, per the International Muslim Brotherhood, was to support Hamas.”
The FBI says the Brotherhood’s goal in the U.S, according to secret documents that agents uncovered after 9/11, is to carry out a “grand jihad in eliminating and destroying (America) from within.”
As ex-FBI Director Robert Mueller testified, “Elements of the Muslim Brotherhood both here and overseas have supported terrorism.”
Indeed, many of the terrorist attacks here in the U.S. — including 9/11 and the Boston bombings — were launched with key support from the Brotherhood network. ISIS’ American poster boy, Ahmad Abousamra, was radicalized in a Brotherhood-controlled mosque, as were the San Bernardino and Chattanooga terrorists.
There is no doubt that the Brotherhood is a terrorist group. Making its designation official would dry up a lot of homegrown terrorism.