The Muslim Brotherhood in America

JANUARY 14, 2016

While much has been written on the terrorist organization known as the Muslim Brotherhood, for the most part the majority of Americans continue to remain unaware of this nefarious organization as it operates freely in America under a litany of various front organizations posing as charities and civil rights groups. Although terrorist groups like al-Qaeda, the Islamic State (ISIS), and Hamas have clear tactical differences, they both share the exact same ideology and goals. In fact, al-Qaeda, Hamas, and ISIS would not exist today if it wasn’t for the Muslim Brotherhood which birthed these groups through the teachings of ideologues like Hasan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb. It is no understatement to say that the Muslim Brotherhood has inspired the entire modern Islamic terrorist enterprise.

Yet, too much attention has been given to groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS as they seek to bring about their ultimate goal of establishing Sharia law via the “Caliphate” through violence. The spotlight has been virtually ignored on the Muslim Brotherhood though as they seek the same goal of Sharia but through a gradual, termite-like approach that burrows deeply into a host society by eating away it’s institutions slowly from within. These are the two tactical differences that Americans need to become aware of as the former has virtually controlled the narrative while the latter is whitewashed away as not irrelevant. The Muslim Brotherhood in America has acquired positions of influence behind the scenes in the government, academia, and even the media with little to no resistance. For the Brotherhood, it all begins with the establishment of various innocuous sounding Islamic organizations created at the grassroots level which eventually serve the purposes of evolving into breeding grounds for radicalization.

More than thirty years ago the Muslim Brotherhood laid out a twelve point strategy to put up a false front of peace while acting covertly to subvert the Western world in a document that came to be known as “The Project“. The document was recovered by Swiss authorities as they raided the lakeside villa of the Brotherhoods’ then foreign minister Youseff Nada shortly after the September 11th attacks on the United States. The document was written in 1982 and it outlines a strategy for the Muslim Brotherhood to “establish an Islamic government on earth.”

Patrick Poole, a counter-terrorism consultant and National Security and Terrorism Correspondent for PJ Media, notes that “what makes The Project so different from the standard ‘Death of America! Death to Israel!’ and ‘Establish the global caliphate!’ Islamist rhetoric is that it represents a flexible, multi-phased, long-term approach to the ‘cultural invasion’ of the West. Calling for the utilization of various tactics, ranging from immigration, infiltration, surveillance, propaganda, protest, deception, political legitimacy and terrorism, The Project has served for more than two decades as the Muslim Brotherhood master plan.”

Rather than focusing on terrorism as the sole method of group action, as is the case with Al-Qaeda, Hamas, ISIS, and various other terrorist organizations, the use of terror falls into a multiplicity of options available to progressively infiltrate, confront, and eventually establish Islamic domination over the West. Poole highlights a few of the following tactics and techniques that are among the many recommendations made in The Project:

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.

Establishing financial networks to fund the work of conversion of the West, including the support of full-time administrators and workers.

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.

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.

Collecting sufficient funds to indefinitely perpetuate and support jihad around the world.

While these are just a few of the key bullet points outlined in the document, one only needs to look towards a 2005 report conducted by the Dutch on the Muslim Brotherhood clandestine infiltration in the Netherlands to get an idea of how the strategy operates within western society. The report, titled From Dawa to Jihad: The various threats from radical Islam to the democratic legal order explains that their exists in the Netherlands “radical branches of the Muslim Brotherhood which employs covert dawa (propagation of radical Islamic ideology and appeal to convert people to become Muslim) strategies that seek to gradually undermine it (the State) by infiltrating, and eventually taking over the civil service, the judicature, schools, local administrators, etc.”

Aiming at a clandestine infiltration of political and social institutions, the 2005 report goes on to state that their are also conceivable, for example, “attempts to infiltrate community-based organisations with the aim of monopolising them (thus obstructing the proper functioning of ‘civil society’). But in the long run, more serious forms of such covert subversion are also conceivable, for example attempts by radical Islamic organisations to infiltrate local administration, the judicature et cetera, whilst concealing their actual objectives and loyalties.”

“While the instigators themselves do not wish to openly present themselves as jihadists or even be associated with armed jihadists, they wish to promote violence in a covert way,” concludes the report. As we can see the influence of “The Project” not only matches exactly what is happening in the Netherlands, but also aligns identically to the Muslim Brotherhood’s 1991 Explanatory Memorandum On the General Strategic Goal for the Group In North America. This memo, meant for Brotherhood operatives working within the United States, explains the strategy behind the establishment of an Islamic Center in every city.

The memo notes, “The center we seek is the one which constitutes the ‘axis’ of our Movement, the ‘perimeter’ of the circle of our work, our ‘balance center’, the ‘base’ for our rise and our ‘Dar al-Arqam’ to educate us, prepare us and supply our battalions in addition to being the ‘niche” of our prayers. This is in order for the Islamic center to turn – in action not in words – into a seed ‘for a small Islamic society’ which is a reflection and a mirror to our central organizations.”

For an example on how this works in America, Erick Stakelbeck in his book The Brotherhood: America’s Next Great Enemy illustrates how the Brotherhood goes about establishing their Centers in the following illustration:

An Islamist organization—usually linked to the Muslim Brotherhood and flush with cash from Saudi Arabia and/or the Gulf states—spends big bucks to buy up several acres of property in a town where hardly any Muslims reside. Plans are announced to build an ‘Islamic Cultural Center’ where all faiths are welcome and diversity will be celebrated in a new, multiculti mini-utopia. But blindsided local residents, after doing some research, quickly learn of the nefarious connections of the mosque’s leadership and see a potential hub for terrorist plotting in their midst—one with financial backing from overseas radicals to boot.

Yet, when these same neighbors demand to know where the money is coming from to pay for the planned mega-mosque, smooth-talking Muslim spokesmen involved with the project just smile and calmly reassure all comers that the funds have been “locally raised.” The local city council, petrified of being called racist, ultimately approves the so-called Islamic center against the will of the people. On cue, the mainstream media and Islamic groups then team up to condemn critics of the mosque as “bigots” and “Islamophobes.” Neighbors are left feeling demonized, abandoned, angry, and alone. And the mosque is built—even though its leadership has been exposed as having ties to the extremist Muslim Brotherhood, a hatred for Israel, and a fondness for sharia law.

Examples such as this can be seen virtually everywhere throughout the United States and represent a direct threat to Americans as the mosque nexus to terrorism can be found in the majority of cases in which the arrest or the attack of a “homegrown jihadist” hits the news. The reason for this is because these mosques are operating in the exact way described by both “The Project” and the 1991 memorandum.

In what should have been a major wake up call to law enforcement and those working within national security, a 2011 study originally published by the  Middle East Quarterly and examined in depth by Perspectives on Terrorism ,the correlation between sharia adherence and violent dogma in U.S. mosques is found to be shockingly high. In a random survey of 100 representative mosques in the U.S., the Shariah Adherence Mosque Survey found that 80% provide their worshipers with jihad-style literature promoting the use of violence against non-believers and that the imams in those mosques expressly promote that literature.

The study explains that the texts were selected for scoring based on the fact that they either called for violent jihad against non-Muslims or because the texts called for hatred of “the other.” For example, Reliance of the Traveller by Ahmad Ibn Lulu Ibn Al-Naqib, The Fiqh-us-Sunnahand Tafsir Ibn Kathir, and authors including Maulana Maududi and Muslim Brotherhood ideologue Sayed Qutb  were selected because their texts make explicit demands for jihad against non-Muslims. As the study states, “texts authored by Maududi and Qutb and similar materials, such as pamphlets and texts published and disseminated by the Muslim Brotherhood, were selected in part because these materials strongly advocate the use of violence as a means to establish an Islamic state.” Remember, 80% of mosques surveyed carried such material, directly indicating that the Brotherhood is more than influential and flourishing within these mosques.

The study found that when a mosque imam or its worshipers were “sharia-adherent,” as measured by certain behaviors in conformity with Islamic law, the mosque was more likely to provide this violent literature and the imam was more likely to promote it. Moreover, the study also found that of the 80% of mosques that contained severe materials:

100% were led by an imam who recommended that worshipers study violent materials;

100% promoted violent jihad;

98% promoted the financial support of terror;

98% promoted the establishment of the Caliphate in the United States;

100% praised terror against the West;

and 76% invited guest speakers known to have promoted violent jihad.

The survey’s results help to provide insight into the role that Sharia-adherent behaviors play in defining group identities, creating an us-versus-them outlook, and projecting violence against the West and non-Muslims, which is mirrored by the Sharia literature found in the mosques prone to violent literature. Ultimately, the survey concludes by suggesting that “Islam, at least as it is generally practiced in mosques across the United States, continues to manifest a resistance to a sufficiently tolerant religio-legal framework that would allow its followers to make a sincere affirmation of Western citizenship. This survey provides empirical support for the view that mosques across the U.S., as institutional and social settings for mosque-going Muslims, provide a milieu resistant to, the legal, theological, or political arguments that make political, civic, and social cooperation within a secular constitutional political order ideal.”

By providing the ideological breeding grounds for terrorists, mosques and various Islamic centers within the U.S. serve as a critical starting point in which the radicalization, justification, and resources for committing jihad is prevalent. So where are these mosques and Islamic centers located and can it be shown that they are tied to the Muslim Brotherhood and have produced jihadists?

To answer both questions all we need to do is look at a few examples of various instances in which either a jihadist has been arrested, carried out an attack, or joined a terrorist organization and note which mosque or center they attended as well if its linked to the Muslim Brotherhood.

The first mosque examined is the notorious Islamic Society of Boston (ISB). The ISB is owned and operated by the Muslim American Society (MAS) which federal prosecutors described in a 2008 case as being an “overt arm of the Muslim Brotherhood in America.” So far at least 8 former attendees to the mosque have become jihadists including the following; The boston marathon bombers Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev; Abdurahman Alamoudi, the mosque’s founder and first president, who in 2004 was sentenced to 23 years in prison for plotting terrorism. In 2005, the Treasury Department issued a statement saying Alamoudi raised money for al Qaeda in the U.S.; Aafia Siddiqui, an MIT scientist-turned-al Qaeda agent, who in 2010 was sentenced to 86 years in prison for planning a New York chemical attack; Finally, there’s Ahmad Abousamra, who was eventually killed in 2015 but not before becoming one of the top media propagandists for the terrorist group known today as the Islamic State or ISIS.

Next, we have the Islamic Community Center of Phoenix (ICCP) whose own website declares that it is “entrusted with the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT). The importance of this cannot be understated as NAIT’s status as a U.S. Muslim Brotherhood entity was confirmed by federal prosecutors during the 2009 prosecution of another U.S. Muslim Brotherhood entity named the Holy Land Foundation. The Justice Department designated NAIT as an unindicted co-conspiratorin that case. So far at least 4 former attendees to the Islamic Center in Phoenix are known jihadists. The most notorious are Elton Simpson and Nadir Soofi who were killed last year while attempting to execute people holding a draw Mohammed cartoon contest in Garland, Texas. Yet, as Patrick Poole of PJ Media notes, “two other previous ICCP mosque attendees — Hassan Abu-Jihaad and Derrick Shareef are currently in federal prison on terrorism-related charges.”

Most recently, and unfortunately tragically, is the Islamic Society of Corona/Norco (ISCN) which was attended by the San Bernardino jihadist Syed Farook and his friend as well as financier and arms supplier Enrique Marquez. According the federal complaint filed against Marquez he was charged with conspiring with Farook in 2011 and 2012 to commit crimes of terrorism, as well as unlawfully purchasing two assault rifles used in the San Bernardino massacre and defrauding immigration authorities by entering into a sham marriage conducted at the ISCN. The federal complaint also states that in 2012 Marquez and Farook were planning on carrying out an attack on a busy California freeway as well as a local community college but scrapped their plan as Marquez stated that he “distanced himself from Farook and ceased plotting with him after 2012 for a variety of reasons, including the arrest of Ralph Deleon and others on material support [for terrorism] charges in November 2012.” This statement by Marquez indicates that he knew whoRalph Deleon was, this is important to note because Deleon along with three others were charged on November 16, 2012, for conspiring to provide material support and resources to terrorists. All four men in that case were from the Riverside/San Bernardino area and according to the federal complaint, one of the informants for the FBI was told by Deleon that there were “a couple of brothers from the mosque who wanted to [travel abroad] for jihad.” While the FBI doesn’t identify which mosque, one can guess which one Deleon & his “brothers” were attending. 

Finally, we have the example of the Dar al-Hijrah Islamic Center (DAH) located in Falls Church, Virginia. “Dar al-Hijrah, which fittingly means Land of Migration, is where the Brotherhood has settled in America,” writes former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy in his book The Grand Jihad. McCarthy elaborates on Dar al-Hijrah explaining that, “in the shadow of the White House and Capitol Hill, it is the optimal location as the $6 million complex was established in 1991, the same year the Brotherhood playbook was written…The Dar al-Hijrah complex was purchased in the 1980s by the North American Islamic Trust. The Islamic Affairs Department of the Saudi embassy in Washington chipped in for the construction and the trustee was the Muslim Brotherhood operative Jamal Barzinji.” Supporting McCarthy’s claim, according to a 2002Customs and Border Protection document, DAH is stated as “operating as a front for Hamas operatives in U.S.” while a December 2007 document says it “has been linked to numerous individuals linked to terrorism financing” and “has also been associated with encouraging fraudulent marriages.”

Some of Dar al-Hijrah’s most infamous congregants have included Omar Abu Ali, who is now serving life in prison for joining al-Qaeda while also having plotted mass murder attacks against the United States and conspiring to murder former President George W. Bush. Then we have Nawaf al-Hazmi and Hani Hanjour, who are now better known for crashing Flight 77 into the Pentagon, just a short distance away from the Land of Migration. Adding to the list is probably the most infamous and, thanks to a drone strike in 2011, now deceased former Imam by the name ofAnwar al-Awlaki. Before going on to become the leader of the al-Qaeda affiliate in Yemen, al-Awlaki was the spiritual leader of Dar al-Hijrah and in 2001 the mosque just so happened to feature a worshiper by the name of Nidal Hassan. Hassan, now known as the Ft. Hood jihadist, went on a killing spree in a 2009 attack as he opened fire on his fellow soldiers killing 13 and wounding 30 at the Texas military base.

From Boston to California and Phoenix to Virginia, these four examples alone epitomize the threat posed to America by the ideological machinery of the Muslim Brotherhood. Yet, in the face of such evidence none of these mosques or Islamic Centers have been investigated let alone shut down for their ties to terrorism. Instead we are told by various Brotherhood front organizations such as theCouncil on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) that these mosques and centers in no way, shape, or form serve as the ideological springboard for the promotion of violence. This, of course, serves the purposes of obfuscating the truth as the facts have repeatedly shown that the first step on the road to jihadist terrorism is the instruction in Islamist ideology.

The Islamist threat is very real and is the result of decades of networking, infrastructure building, and intellectual as well as ideological preparation. It is advancing at an unprecedented speed as it actively and openly creates a fifth column of activists, jihadists, and apologists who work tirelessly to undermine the very foundations of America with the establishment of new mosques and Islamic centers. It cannot be stressed enough that the very ideology that the Muslim Brotherhood supports is at the root of the majority of Islamic terrorist groups in the world today and without acknowledging the ideology America itself stands no chance in even beginning to fight.

So the next time a jihadist attack happens on American soil and representatives from organizations like CAIR immediately crawl out of their holes in an attempt to act as apologists for the jihadist, remember that they themselves are directly responsible for supporting the ideology that promotes jihad.

As the Brotherhood creed goes, “Allah is our objective; the Koran is our law; the Prophet is our leader; jihad is our way; and death for the sake of Allah is the highest of our aspirations.”