Britain’s willful blindness to the Muslim Brotherhood’s subversive agenda and its acquiescence to its vitriolic propaganda is not merely a local disease. The international tentacles of the MB assist the organization to infect other countries. Unfortunately, the United States seems to follow in the footsteps of England, unwisely ignoring the growing influence of the MB in its borders.
Despite renewed attention in recent years on Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated groups operating in the U.S. radical Islamic organizations disguised as “mainstream Muslims” are now presenting their Islamic agenda to the government and appear on a regular basis in the media. These groups include the Council on Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Muslim Students Association (MSA), the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT), the Muslim American Society (MAS), Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) and the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT), and the Muslim Youth of North America (MYNA).
CAIR’s terror ties have long been confirmed in numerous court cases, the most recent of which is the Holy Land Foundation (HLF) case of 2009, which exposed HLF as a Hamas fundraising front.
During the HLF trial, the FBI identified CAIR as part of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestinian Committee, which was tasked with funneling financial support to Hamas and obstructing prospective peace deals in the Middle East.
The FBI also listed CAIR’s co-founders, Omar Ahmad and Nihad Awad, as members of the MB Palestine Committee. Ahmad and Awad formerly headed another member organization of the Palestinian Committee, the Islamic Association for Palestine. Now defunct, IAP was shut down following a civil suit against it and other HAMAS fundraising entities by the family of an American teenager murdered by terrorists in the West Bank. Ahmad left CAIR leadership in 2005, with the title of “chairman emeritus,” but his biographical information is no longer available on CAIR’s website, as is Nihad Awad’s, one of CAIR’s founders and its current Executive Director.
At least 15 other CAIR officials have been identified in terror investigations, including Ghassan Elashi, also a founding member, who was involved in the HLF case.
Despite criminal ties, known connections to the American ‘Wahhabi lobby,” and blatant MB affiliations, CAIR continues to boast its reputation as the preeminent Muslim civil rights group in the U.S. The group is linked with the highest level of government. For instance, in 1997, Awad was appointed by Vice President Al Gore as a member of the Civil Rights Advisory Panel to the White House Commission on Aviation Safety and Security. According to CAIR’s website, he is also “a regular participant in the U.S. Department of State’s “International Visitors Program,” which welcomes foreign dignitaries, journalists, and academics who are currently visiting the President of the United States.”
Like CAIR, ISNA, another unindicted co-conspirator in the HLF case has been warmly embraced by the Obama Administration. ISNA President Ingrid Mattson has spoken at various White House functions, including the presidential inauguration, and was invited to join the White House Council on Women and Girls. In February 2010, another ISNA member, Eboo Patel, was appointed to the President’s Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood partnerships.
ISNA has hosted multiple conferences at which speakers and released publications that supported jihad, terrorism and radical Islam, documented in a recent report by the Investigative Project on Terrorism. ISNA has been described as “one of the chief conduits through which the radical Saudi form of Islam passes in the United States.” Among its many functions, this powerful group holds the deed to anywhere from 50% to 80% of the mostly Saudi funded mosques in the United States through its affiliate organization, NAIT.
ISNA was the primary endorser of imams assigned to federal prisons until the federal Bureau of Prisons suspended it in 2003, when the FBI conducted investigations unto ISNA’s terror ties. ISNA’s former chaplain-endorsing agent, Dr. Louay Safi, is affiliated with the terror-linked IIIT, an organization that has close ties with both Anwar and Qaradawi. Safi was also an unindicted co-conspirator in the trial of Sami Al-Arian, who was convicted of fundraising for terrorist group Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ). Safi was an instructor to Major Nidal Malik Hassan, at the Fort hood military base, where Hassan massacred 13 people on the in 2009, yelling “Allahu Akbar.”
As of December 2010, ISNA was listed as one of the two organizations that vet Muslim chaplains in the American military.
And there’s more. ISNA is part of the Coordinating Council of Muslim Organizations (CCMO), another MB affiliated organization in the United States that included terror-tied groups such as CAIR, IIT, the Dar al Hijrah Mosque, and MPAC. According to Bigpeace.com, the Obama administration reportedly hosted a group from CCMO in 2010 to teach participant groups how to “cut through red tape” to “receive direct access” to “funding, government assistance, and resources.” News of the financial workshop made the press not because the Obama Administration reported about it, as transparent government should have done, but because of an ISNA e-mail
The West’s response to Anwar and Qaradawi is par for the course in its approach to the MB’s rapidly growing and metastasizing tentacles. Despite the vast MB infrastructure in the U.S. and the UK, both countries are turning a blind eye and a deaf ear to the growing incitement and activities of their homegrown Islamist organizations.
Qaradawi remains a worldwide media figure with access to students at some of the most prestigious American universities. In January 2009, Qatar’s mouthpiece Al Jazeera aired one of many similar Qaradawi speeches in which he said:
“Throughout history, Allah has imposed upon the [Jews] people who would punish them for their corruption. The last punishment was carried out by Hitler. Using all the things he did to them – even though they exaggerated this issue – he managed to put them in their place. This was divine punishment for them. Allah willing, the next time will be at the hand of the believers.”
Qaradawi concluded:
“The only thing I hope for is that as my life approaches its end, Allah will give me an opportunity to go to the land of Jihad and resistance, even if in a wheelchair. I will shoot Allah’s enemies, the Jews, and they will throw a bomb at me, and thus, I will seal my life with martyrdom. Praise be to Allah.”
Qaradawi’s radical views did not deter Prominent British Labor party politician and former Mayor of London Ken Livingstone from welcoming Qaradawi into City Hall, in July 2004. Livingstone lavishly praised Qaradawi and compared his scholarly rank to “the position of Pope John XXIII.” Livingstone also opined that Qaradawi is “an absolutely sane Islamist.”
Qaradawi, who is Sunni, also defends Shiite Iran. In 2007, he stated that Muslims should mobilize internationally to “resist any possibly attack the US might launch against Iran. Iran is a Muslim country which all Muslims should defend while the US is an enemy of Islam that has already declared war on Islam under the disguise of war on terrorism…”
But such statements do not offend MB apologist John Esposito. The director of Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University, Esposito is also closely affiliated with Anwar Ibrahim, the Honorary President of the Center. In 2006, Anwar was a a Distinguished Visiting Professor in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University.
Esposito describes Qaradawi as a “moderate” who represents “a cross-section of Muslim thinkers, religious leaders and mainstream Islamic movements from Egypt to Indonesia, Europe to America.” Furthermore, he praises Qaradawi for his “reformist interpretation of Islam and its relationship to democracy, pluralism and human rights.”
Esposito’s ruthless laundry of Qaradawi’s anti-American and anti-Semitic views seems to work. A 2008 Foreign Policy Magazine poll ranked Qaradawi third on a list of the world’s top twenty public intellectuals.
On December 30, 2010, days before Sudan’s referendum on Southern Sudan’s secession, the “moderate” Qaradawi charged that the election was part of a Western plot orchestrated to weaken the Muslim world.
The well-oiled MB propaganda machine has succeeded in portraying the most radical, anti- American, anti-West and anti- Semitic Islamic organizations and leaders as “moderate” Muslims and reformers. How much longer can the West afford to ignore the Muslim Brotherhood’s efforts to replace Western democracy and capitalism with the oppression of the Islamic Caliphate?
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld is the Director of the New York-based American Center for Democracy. She is an expert on terrorism and corruption-related topics such as terror financing and narco-terrorism. She had helped to change New York state law when the Libel Terrorism Protection Act (pdf) was passed. Similar laws have been passed in other U.S. states, and a federal law known as the SPEECH ACT which was signed by the president in August 2010, follows the same principle – that First Amendment guarantees should protect authors and publishers against foreign libel judgments from countries with poor free speech protections.