The Brotherhood: America's Next Great Enemy (3 page)

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Authors: Erick Stakelbeck

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Is it any wonder that Egypt’s beleaguered Coptic Christians—who not long ago comprised 10 percent of the country’s population—are leaving in ever-growing numbers now that Morsi is in power?
Incidentally, Morsi’s harangue was neither spontaneous nor original. He simply—and intentionally—paraphrased the longtime motto of the Muslim Brotherhood:
Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. Qur’an is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.
 
In other words: total, unwavering devotion to imposing fundamentalist Islam—by the sword if necessary—upon the world, with a ghoulish veneration of violent death to boot. The slogan is the same today as it was eighty-five years ago. And it will be the same eighty-five years from now. The Brotherhood, unlike the flatlining Western societies it is slowly helping transform from within, does not compromise on its core beliefs. It does not do tweaks or reboots. It’s all Allah, Mohammed, the Koran, jihad, and violent martyrdom, all the time—take it or leave it, infidels. Americans, meet your new “ally” in the Middle East.
What Mohammed Morsi did in his May 2012 speech—one which was utterly ignored by Western media—was the same thing that a long succession of Brotherhood leaders have done before him. He simply laid down the gauntlet and reiterated the Brotherhood’s longstanding, bedrock principles to Egyptians and to the world. All who are shocked by Morsi’s subsequent moves as president have no one to blame but themselves. They weren’t listening.
If they were, they would have known that the Brotherhood’s official rallying cry has remained the same ever since its founding by a fervently Islamist schoolteacher named Hassan al-Banna in the Egyptian port city of Ismailia in 1928. Al-Banna, who was heavily influenced by the extremist Wahhabi Islam of Saudi Arabia, was disgusted by British colonial rule and the non-Muslim influence it brought to Egypt. He blamed the country’s downtrodden state of affairs on what he perceived as its drift away from Islam.
Al-Banna’s slogan, “Islam is the answer,” spread like wildfire and the Brotherhood—also known as the
Ikhwan
or the Society of the Muslim Brothers—went from seven members at its founding to as many as two million by the late 1940s.
4
Indeed, al-Banna’s anti-Western message of Muslim superiority (which also included generous doses of jihad incitement and anti-Semitism) resonated to such a degree that by 1948—just twenty years after its founding—the Ikhwan had become arguably the most powerful political and cultural force in all of Egypt.
Today, although Egypt remains its main power base, al-Banna’s movement knows no national boundaries. The Brotherhood’s relentless focus on
dawa
, or proselytization, has helped it make major inroads on six continents. One of its main “settlement” techniques has been its control of mosques, including across the United States and Europe. These frequently mammoth, multi-million-dollar Islamic centers, run by Brotherhood acolytes, are built largely with funds supplied by wealthy donors in the Persian Gulf region, particularly from Saudi Arabia and Qatar.
Thanks to this disciplined, dawa-and-settlement strategy, the Muslim Brotherhood is now present in at least eighty countries, and according to one longtime Brotherhood leader, boasts some 100 million adherents worldwide. The vast majority are not official “members” but all have one thing in common: tireless, fanatical devotion to the Brotherhood’s radical ideology.
5
That’s bad news for the United States, not to mention Europe, Israel, and any secular-minded Muslim or religious minority who has the misfortune of living under Ikhwan rule.
The seeds for the Ikhwan’s meteoric global rise were planted by al-Banna. Above all, he was devastated by the collapse of the Islamic caliphate, which ended with the disbandment of the Turkish-led Ottoman Empire in 1924. The caliphate joined the Muslim world—
or ummah
— into one unified, Islamic state governed by sharia law and pitted against the West. Al-Banna’s ultimate goal was to transform Egypt into an Islamic state en route to reviving this global caliphate and the glories of Islam’s heyday. As described in the Brotherhood’s seven-point pledge of allegiance, which he devised:
. . . the Muslim Brotherhood should collectively work to restore the international position of the
Umma
. To this end, it will be necessary to liberate occupied Muslim regions. The Brotherhood should restore Muslim honor and superiority; it should promote its civilization and re-establish its culture. A new spirit of oneness should be instilled until the entire
Umma
becomes a heartwarming unity.
In this way the crown and throne of the caliphate of the world can be regained.
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[emphasis added]
 
Translation: world domination. By the way, those “occupied Muslim regions” that must be liberated include any nation that was once part of the Islamic caliphate, including Spain, Sicily, Greece, Bulgaria, the former Yugoslavia, and Israel, among others. In the Islamist worldview, if a nation was conquered and existed under the banner of Islam for even a short amount of time, it must eventually return to the fold: by force, if necessary.
No such force will be needed, however, to cajole the nations of the Middle East and North Africa into caliphate-hood. An April 2013 Pew Forum poll showed that a majority of Muslims throughout those two regions, as well as in South Asia, want sharia law to govern their countries.
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The numbers are even more stunning when you consider that, as National Review Online’s Andrew McCarthy noted, the poll did
not
include Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Sudan, arguably the top three sharia hotbeds in the world.
8
The bottom line, if the results of the Pew poll are any indication, is that the Brotherhood’s aspirations seem to be supported, at least in a general way, by a majority of Muslims around the world. The Arab Spring has brought these forces newfound power, and they have never been closer to achieving al-Banna’s caliphate dream than they are today. And make no mistake: today’s Muslim Brothers are fully committed to al-Banna’s vision of a modern-day caliphate. During a May 2012 rally to launch the presidential campaign of Mohammed Morsi, leading Brotherhood cleric Safwat Hegazy delivered a thunderous sermon declaring that the dawn of a revived Islamic super-state was at hand:
We can see how the dream of the Islamic Caliphate is being realized, Allah willing, by Dr. Mohamed Morsi and his brothers, his supporters, and his political party. We can see how the great dream, shared by us all—that of the United States of the Arabs ... will be restored, Allah willing. The United States of the Arabs will be restored by [Morsi] and his supporters. The capital of the Caliphate—the capital of the United States of the Arabs—will be Jerusalem, Allah willing.
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In case you were wondering how Jerusalem—currently the capital of Israel—could possibly become the centerpiece of a new caliphate, Hegazy (who has also promised that the Muslim Brothers will one day be “Masters of the World”)
10
filled in the blanks:
Our capital shall not be Cairo, Mecca, or Medina. It shall be Jerusalem, Allah willing. Our cry shall be: “Millions of martyrs march toward Jerusalem.” Millions of martyrs march toward Jerusalem.
11
 
Throughout this tirade, Mohammed Morsi sat directly behind Hegazy on stage, smiling and nodding his head in affirmation. Egypt’s soon-to-be-president was absolutely enthralled with both Hegazy and the event’s master of ceremonies, who led the frenzied audience in chants of “Banish the sleep from the eyes of all Jews” and “Come on, you lovers of martyrdom, you are all Hamas,” all under Morsi’s watchful eye. It was a fitting coming out party for a man who would soon become the equivalent of a modern day jihadist pharaoh.
Yes, our new “asset” in Cairo is a real piece of work. Video unearthed by the invaluable Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) in January 2013 captured some of Morsi’s greatest hits from his appearances on Arabic television. In one lighthearted clip, he called Jews, “blood-suckers, who attack the Palestinians . . . warmongers, the descendants of apes and pigs.”
12
The “Jews-as-apes-and-pigs” reference is an old Islamist favorite. Another is armed jihad, which Morsi also encouraged in the video, saying of Israel, “We should employ all forms of resistance against them. There should be military resistance within the land of Palestine against those criminal Zionists.”
Interestingly enough, our new partner for peace in the Middle East also referred to America as being among Egypt’s “enemies,” and called for a worldwide Muslim boycott of U.S. goods. Morsi made these comments in 2010, just two years before his newly elected government would become the recipient of massive U.S. aid.
Morsi, like many top Brotherhood leaders in Egypt, is also an unabashed 9/11 “Truther” who denies that al-Qaeda was behind the deadliest terrorist attack in American history. As Robert Satloff and Eric Trager recounted in the
Washington Post
:
In a May 2010 interview with Brookings Institution scholar Shadi Hamid, Morsi dismissed al-Qaeda’s responsibility for the attacks. “When you come and tell me that the plane hit the tower like a knife in butter, then you are insulting us,” Hamid reported Morsi as saying. “How did the plane cut through the steel like this? Something must have happened from the inside. It’s impossible.” Similarly, in 2007, Morsi reportedly declared that the United States “has never presented any evidences [sic] on the identity of those who committed that incident.” In 2008, he called for a “huge scientific conference” to analyze “what caused the attack against a massive structure like the two towers.”
13
 
Of course, Morsi has kept mum about his views on 9/11 since assuming the Egyptian presidency. Why jeopardize all that high-tech American weaponry and cash? Besides, he knows from firsthand experience how easy it is to deceive naïve American
kuffar
. According to Morsi’s wife, he joined the Muslim Brotherhood not in his Egyptian homeland, but in America, while he was a student at the University of Southern California in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
14
It’s a good bet that Morsi hooked up with some of Cali’s finest “Amerikhwan,” or U.S.-based Muslim Brothers.
After earning a doctorate in rocket engineering (an area of expertise which could come in handy for his rocket-happy Hamas friends in Gaza), Morsi worked for three years as an assistant professor at Cal State University, Northridge. Two of his children were born in the United States and are U.S. citizens. But by 1985, Morsi had returned to Egypt, where he went on to steadily climb the Brotherhood’s ranks and spend time in prison under the Mubarak regime.
Morsi’s trajectory—a few years in America, followed by time in Egyptian prisons for his Brotherhood activities—mirrors in some ways that of one of the Brotherhood’s greatest icons. Sayyid Qutb lived in the United States from 1948 to 1950, bouncing from New York City to Washington, D.C., to Greeley, Colorado, where he studied at a teachers’ college. His hatred for America and for what was, in his eyes, its endless moral vice, grew with each new stop. In Greeley, an idyllic small town where alcohol was banned, Qutb saw a den of iniquity. After attending a dance at a local church, he wrote in disgust:
The room convulsed with the feverish music from the gramophone. Dancing naked legs filled the hall, arms draped around the waists, chests met chests, lips met lips, and the atmosphere was full of love.
15
 
Remember, this was the late 1940s, not exactly known as one of the more hedonistic periods in American history. If Qutb visited the United States today, he might spontaneously combust from shock. Instead, he was hanged in Egypt in 1966 after various stints in prison for participating in Brotherhood plots to overthrow the Egyptian government. His ideas, however—cultivated over his years as the Muslim Brotherhood’s chief propagandist—still inspire legions of Islamic suicide bombers to combust themselves and others.
Qutb was a frail, bookish introvert who never married. Yet if there were a Jihadist Mount Rushmore carved somewhere deep in the wilds of the Saudi desert, his profile, along with al-Banna’s, would surely be among those included. Qutb’s writings have played a critical part in the genesis of the entire modern jihadist movement—particularly al-Qaeda (AQ). AQ heavyweights like Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and Anwar al-Awlaki (the American-born jihadi cleric killed in a U.S. drone strike in Yemen in 2011) have all cited Qutb as a major inspiration, and Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has translated Qutb’s books from Arabic to Farsi.
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