“I have set watchmen upon your walls,
O Jerusalem, who shall never hold their peace day nor night:
you that make mention of the LORD, keep not silence.”

—Isaiah 62:6

PROLOGUE

MEET THE BROTHERHOOD

T
he alleged leader of Germany’s Muslim Brotherhood punched me.

It was actually more of a playful nudge of my right shoulder, something an old friend might do while busting your chops. Yet I had met Ibrahim el-Zayat only minutes before.

“You should have asked me for some names,” el-Zayat said as we stood in the lobby of a Cologne hotel. “I could have put you in touch with all the right people.”

I had just informed him that I had contacted a few leading Islamist figures in his home base of Cologne and gotten no response. Hence, the nudge and a look of feigned exasperation.
How long must I suffer this infidel?

In reality, I wasn’t too upset at the lack of response from Cologne’s Islamists. El-Zayat was the one I really wanted. He’s been called “one of the most influential Islamists in Europe”
¹and “a quintessential New Western [Muslim] Brother.”
²Likewise, the
Global Muslim Brotherhood Daily Report
, a comprehensive intelligence digest, regularly refers to el-Zayat as “the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood in Germany.”
³

Since I was writing a book about the Brotherhood, el-Zayat seemed a good place to start. But in the run-up to our meeting in late June 2012, I had all but given up on interviewing him. For weeks, I had sent el-Zayat emails saying I was coming to Germany and would love to get together. His responses were infrequent and noncommittal. Finally, on my last night in Germany and after a long day of interview shoots, my cell phone rang as I was heading back to my hotel. To my great surprise, it was Ibrahim el-Zayat.

“I can meet you at your hotel in thirty minutes,” he said. “But I can’t stay long.”

My cameraman and I grabbed a quick bite, set up for the interview shoot and waited. And waited. Just when we thought el-Zayat might not show, he came bounding through the hotel’s front entrance. Clad in a smart suit and designer eyeglasses and sporting a wavy, salt-and-pepper mane and neatly trimmed beard, el-Zayat looked more like a European diplomat than “a spider in the web of Islamist organizations,” as one German security official described him.
⁴

That alleged web has many strands. El-Zayat, according to
Wall Street Journal
reporter Ian Johnson, “seemed to have either founded or been closely involved with every recently established Muslim Brotherhood–related group in Europe.”
⁵The list includes The Federation of Islamic Organisations in Europe (FIOE)—widely considered the Brotherhood’s lobbying arm on the Old Continent—as well as the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY), a Saudi-created group for which el-Zayat acted as European representative. El-Zayat also served for nearly a decade as head of the Islamic Society of Germany (IGD), an organization with longtime ties to top Brotherhood leaders in Germany and abroad.

In short, Ibrahim el-Zayat is an extremely well connected mover and shaker who, despite his youth, has been a major player on Europe’s Islamist scene for years. Born in Germany in 1968 to an Egyptian Muslim father and a German mother who converted to Islam, el-Zayat has spent most of his life in Deutschland but is well traveled and speaks fluent English. After studying law and economics at German universities, he went on to become a successful businessman and marry a doctor (his wife is the niece of famed Turkish Islamist Necmettin Erbakan).

Needless to say, Germany has been very good to el-Zayat. Yet he seemed to have little affinity for his homeland as he spoke to me of Germany’s supposed intolerance for its 4.3 million-strong Muslim community.

“From the Muslim community’s side, it is that you feel not part of the country,” he told me as we sat in a small conference room. “Because many people have the deep understanding that they have done the utmost to be part of Germany, but the society is refusing them.... Germany has a lot of parts now which are no longer multicultural but now monocultural, and this is a challenge for everybody.”

A challenge indeed: particularly for non-Muslims in places like London, Madrid, and Boston who’ve seen Muslim immigrants unleash deadly terror on their cities in recent years.

I’ve visited many of the type of unassimilated, “monocultural” Islamic communities el-Zayat describes and have reported on them extensively. From Berlin to Brussels to suburban Paris to Dearborn, Michigan, Muslim immigrants are segregating themselves from their host societies and setting up Islamic enclaves that are often no-go zones for non-Muslims, including police.

It’s hard to see why a committed Islamist like el-Zayat would frown on this development. The Muslim Brotherhood’s leading global ideologue and Spiritual Guide, Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi (whom el-Zayat praises effusively), is the driving force behind the Brotherhood’s state-within-a-state strategy for the West. And el-Zayat himself is helping to spearhead the rapid construction of mosques throughout Europe.

A Cologne newspaper featured a profile of el-Zayat describing him as the chief representative of an organization called European Mosque Construction and Support. In that capacity, el-Zayat reportedly maintains more than six hundred mosques across Europe and helps with the construction and renovation of countless others.
⁶According to the Muslim Brotherhood’s own documents, mosques, or “Islamic centers,” are meant to serve as the “beehives” of the parallel Muslim societies the Brotherhood envisions in Europe and the United States .
⁷Coincidence?

When el-Zayat’s involvement in a mosque project becomes known, locals often protest—his reputation as a Muslim Brotherhood–connected figure precedes him. He is well aware of the baggage he carries in the eyes of non-Muslims and shared a simple, very Brotherhood-esque solution in an interview with the
Wall Street Journal
’s Ian Johnson:

If a plan to build a mosque is made public, everyone is against it. Mosques must always be built secretly... if it’s not public, you can build any mosque, regardless of who’s behind it. You just have to keep it secret.
⁸

This strategy of deception—or
taqiyya
—has paid big dividends for el-Zayat. It has also attracted the attention of German authorities, who have investigated his business dealings over the years but have yet to indict him on any charges.

Although the government scrutiny and ensuing bad press have forced el-Zayat to keep a lower public profile, once we began our interview, he settled almost immediately into his familiar role of crafty spokesman for the Islamist cause.

The Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohammed Morsi had been declared the victor in Egypt’s presidential election just hours earlier, and el-Zayat was clearly pleased.

“I think it is a big success for Egypt and for the democratic change process that you have Mohammed Morsi now as president,” he crowed.

To hear “Mohammed Morsi” and “democratic change” uttered in the same sentence now sounds absurd, given Egypt’s wholesale descent into Islamist chaos under Morsi’s rule. Of course, to those of us who’ve long warned that the Muslim Brotherhood is a radical, anti-American organization that spawned al-Qaeda and Hamas and actively calls for the destruction of Israel, the idea of Morsi as Cairo’s version of Thomas Jefferson has always been not only ludicrous, but downright dangerous.

Yet at the time of Morsi’s election in 2012, Western media and governments were still enraptured by the so-called Arab Spring (some still are, despite its disastrous results) and had much invested in the notion of a supposedly moderate, pragmatic Muslim Brotherhood taking the reins in Egypt.

Whether el-Zayat assumed I was among this sizable, pro-Brotherhood camp is unclear. Regardless, he plowed ahead with talking points that would leave the average
New York Times
or BBC journo positively smitten (as if the playful love tap on the shoulder wouldn’t have already done the trick).

“I believe that for many years we had only a lot of misinformation and misconceptions about... the Muslim Brotherhood,” el-Zayat said. “You had information mainly filtered by governments who have been oppressive ... and I think that this should be overcome and I hope that it’s overcome.”

He needn’t have worried. Ever since the outbreak of the Egyptian revolution in January 2011, the Obama administration and its mainstream media minions have been hard at work recasting the Brotherhood as (in el-Zayat’s words) a “reform movement” that is “evolving” and worthy of more than a billion dollars in American taxpayer aid, even given our massive debt.

“I think what is special about the Muslim Brotherhood in the end. . . ,” el-Zayat continued, now clearly hitting his stride, “is what you could describe as a thought which is combining Islam with modern life. And this starts with [Jamal al-Din] al-Afghani and Rashid Rida and it comes to Hassan al-Banna—who had been the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood but who had a completely different stance on things.”

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