The Brotherhood: America's Next Great Enemy (7 page)

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Authors: Erick Stakelbeck

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BOOK: The Brotherhood: America's Next Great Enemy
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Yet for the better part of the last two decades, particularly since 9/11, the U.S. government—under both Republican and Democrat administrations—has done exactly that, investing in the Muslim Brotherhood as a “moderate” counterweight to violent jihadists. The Brotherhood, of course, has willingly taken all of the funding, support, and legitimacy that a U.S. seal of approval brings and used it to its own devious ends.
During the Cold War, the damage caused by America’s romance with the Brotherhood was limited, though Osama bin Laden and other MB-LINKED terrorists indirectly benefited from American support for the Afghan
mujahideen
against the Soviets. Today, however, when America’s next great enemy is revolutionary Sunni Islamism, aid to the Muslim Brotherhood means supporting a group devoted to establishing a caliphate ruled by sharia law—not to mention, a group that has America squarely in its crosshairs. How’s that for realpolitik?
Whereas al-Qaeda seeks to bring about sharia states rapidly through violence, the Muslim Brothers favor a gradual, termite-like approach, burrowing deeply into a host society and eating away at it slowly from within. They’ll acquire positions of influence, often behind the scenes, in government, academia, and the media. They’ll start Islamic organizations at the grassroots level and build (or slowly absorb) mosques and Islamic schools. They’ll even hold their nose and work with ideologically divergent factions, namely the Left, to advance their ultimate goals. Then, when they have the numbers and the influence, and the situation is deemed ideal, the final phase can begin. It could consist of violent jihad, depending on the favorability of conditions on the ground in a given country. But jihad may not be necessary—exploiting domestic instability to peacefully seize power has been the Brotherhood’s model thus far for the Middle East and North Africa during the so-called Arab Spring. And the results have been impressive.
■ In Egypt and Tunisia, Muslim Brotherhood parties are now in control following electoral victories.
■ In Morocco, an Islamist named Abdelilah Benkirane was elected prime minister in 2011. He’s a member of the Justice and Development Party, the MB’s Moroccan offshoot, which won a plurality of seats in the country’s 2011 parliamentary elections.
■ Although the Brotherhood’s Libyan affiliate, the Justice and Construction Party, finished a distant second in national elections in July 2012 (after being favored to win), the party has quickly regrouped, and conditions on the ground favor the Brothers’ eventual dominance.
Post-Gaddafi Libya remains a frighteningly unstable place. Its second largest city, Benghazi, is a jihadist hotbed where Westerners dare not tread (as America so painfully learned with the consulate attack of September 11, 2012).
■ In Jordan, the Brotherhood’s Islamic Action Front, the main opposition force to King Abdullah II, is gaining ground fast on the heels of the Islamist Winter revolutions and has helped lead regular demonstrations against the monarchy. Abdullah is well aware of the gathering Ikhwan threat, a view he shared in an expansive, 2013 interview with Jeffrey Goldberg of
The Atlantic
:
. . . [Abdullah] believes his Western allies are naive about the Brotherhood’s intentions. “When you go to the State Department and talk about this, they’re like, ‘This is just the liberals talking, this is the monarch saying that the Muslim Brotherhood is deep-rooted and sinister.’” Some of his Western interlocutors, [Abdullah] told me, argue that “the only way you can have democracy is through the Muslim Brotherhood.” His job, he says, is to point out that the Brotherhood is run by “wolves in sheep’s clothing” and wants to impose its retrograde vision of society and its anti-Western politics on the Muslim Middle East. This, he said, is “our major fight”—to prevent the Muslim Brothers from conniving their way into power across the region.... The king argues that a new, radical alliance is emerging—one that both complements and rivals the Iranian-led Shia crescent. “I see a Muslim Brotherhood crescent developing in Egypt and Turkey,” he told me. “The Arab Spring highlighted a new crescent in the process of development.”
5
 
■ Events unfolding in Jordan’s next door neighbor, Syria, may go a long way toward determining King Abdullah’s fate. Already, over half a million Syrian refugees have crossed into Jordan as a result of Syria’s brutal civil war.
6
As I write this, the “victor” in that bloody conflict has yet to be determined, even after some eighty thousand civilians (and counting) have been killed. One thing, however, seems certain: sharia will rule in Syria if dictator Bashar al-Assad is toppled. According to the
New York Times
:
In Syria’s largest city, Aleppo, rebels aligned with Al Qaeda control the power plant, run the bakeries and head a court that applies Islamic law. Elsewhere, they have seized government oil fields, put employees back to work and now profit from the crude they produce.
Across Syria, rebel-held areas are dotted with Islamic courts staffed by lawyers and clerics, and by fighting brigades led by extremists. Even the Supreme Military Council, the umbrella rebel organization whose formation the West had hoped would sideline radical groups, is stocked with commanders who want to infuse Islamic law into a future Syrian government.
Nowhere in rebel-controlled Syria is there a secular fighting force to speak of.
7
 
■ Like its fellow monarchy in Jordan, the Saudi Royal Family is alarmed by the Muslim Brotherhood’s growing clout. The Saudis know the Brotherhood well. For decades the Saudi regime worked closely with the Brotherhood to spread Islamism worldwide. But the relationship has become strained, with the Saudi Royals feeling threatened by an “Arab Spring” that brought the MB to dominance through democratic means, undercutting the legitimacy of the Saudi monarchy.
In an April 2013 interview on Arab television, Saudi Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal said of the revolutions sweeping the region, “I don’t refer to it as ‘the Arab Spring,’ but rather as ‘the so-called Arab Spring.’ I call it ‘the Arab destruction.’” He continued, “If any ruler thinks he is immune, he is making a grave mistake. Nobody is immune.... Whoever thinks that this flame will not reach his country is mistaken.” Alwaleed added that in his own country “several Saudi sheikhs reek of Muslim Brotherhood. This is known to all. I won’t mention names, but this is clear.... We should meet more of the people’s demands, to avoid giving the [Brotherhood] the opportunity to take advantage of the poverty, the housing problems, or the cost of living.”
8
The Brotherhood, in other words, is a revolutionary problem, not a solution.
■ Saudi Arabia’s neighbors in the Persian Gulf region are experiencing similar Brotherhood surges. In the case of Qatar, its relations with the Ikhwan are by choice. The wealthy kingdom, riding the regional Islamist wave, is rapidly replacing Saudi Arabia as the MB’s main global bank-roller, pledging billions, for example, to help prop up the Mohammed Morsi regime in Egypt.
In the United Arab Emirates, however, ninety-four people were arrested in early 2013 and charged with participating in an alleged Muslim Brotherhood plot to overthrow the government.
9
Kuwait worked with the UAE to break up the accused MB cell.
10
Dubai’s police chief has warned repeatedly about the Brotherhood’s noxious influence in the Emirates, and has wondered aloud why the West “sympathizes, adopts and supports” the Ikhwan.
11
The Brothers believe that in the long run, they’ll win, not only in the Arab world, but in the West, where they make a show of publicly condemning terrorist acts their own poisonous ideology has helped inspire.
For instance, the mainstream media showed little interest in the fact that the Tsarnaev brothers attended the Islamic Society of Boston (ISB) mosque in Cambridge before carrying out their deadly attack on the Boston Marathon in April 2013. ISB is owned and operated by the Muslim American Society, which federal prosecutors have described as an “overt arm of the Muslim Brotherhood in America.”
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So what did the Tsarnaevs learn at ISB? Did the mosque’s teachings play a part in their radicalization process? We may never know, and the media isn’t exactly breaking down the mosque’s doors to inquire.
We do know, however, that the Tsarnaevs were not the only terrorists who have attended ISB. Former worshippers include Aafia Siddiqui, a convicted al-Qaeda terrorist; Tarek Mehanna, who was sentenced to seventeen years in prison in 2012 for conspiring to aid al-Qaeda; and Abdulrahman Alamoudi, the mosque’s first president and an al-Qaeda financier, who was convicted in federal court in 2004 for his role in an assassination plot against then-Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah.
13
Alamoudi, incidentally, was an “outreach partner” for the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations.
14
In 1996, Alamoudi spoke at an Islamic conference where he summarized the Brotherhood’s strategy in the United States:
I have no doubt in my mind, Muslims sooner or later will be the moral leadership of America. It depends on me and you, either we do it now or we do it after a hundred years, but this country will become a Muslim country. And I (think) if we are outside this country we can say ‘oh, Allah destroy America’, but once we are here, our mission in this country is to change it.... There is nowhere for Muslims to be violent in America, nowhere at all. We have other means to do it. You can be violent anywhere else but in America.
15
 
Got that? Muslims can kill and maim unbelievers anywhere they want, but in America the name of the game is to be an Islamist in sheep’s clothing. Alamoudi’s declaration is hardly surprising since he was merely repeating themes laid out in the Brotherhood’s own documents years before.
THE PROJECT
 
In late September 2012, I appeared in a two-part documentary series produced by The Blaze TV detailing one of the most important documents you’ve probably never heard of. Don’t be offended—the vast majority of our intelligence community has never heard of it either.
The documentary featured a host of leading terrorism analysts and Islamism experts, as well as former and current U.S. lawmakers and intelligence officials, breaking down a Muslim Brotherhood manifesto that has become known simply as, “The Project.” The existence of the fourteen-page document was first revealed in a 2005 book, published in France, by Swiss journalist Sylvain Besson.
16
According to Besson, The Project was recovered when Swiss authorities raided the lakeside villa of longtime Muslim Brotherhood “foreign minister” Youssef Nada shortly after the 9/11 attacks.
Dated December 1, 1982, it outlines a twelve-point strategy for the Muslim Brotherhood to “establish an Islamic government on earth.” Nada reportedly told Swiss authorities that the strategic plan had been drafted by “Islamic researchers” affiliated with the Brotherhood, but he also downplayed The Project as an insignificant document (in his authorized biography, he says it was actually found in a Brotherhood colleague’s home down the street, not his ).
17
Not surprisingly, it’s much more important than Nada has let on. Some have speculated that Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Brotherhood’s Spiritual Guide, had a hand in drafting The Project.
18
He certainly echoed it in his 1990 book,
Priorities of the Islamic Movement in the Coming Phase
. According to Middle East expert Olivier Guitta:
“The Project” is a roadmap for achieving the installation of Islamic regimes in the West via propaganda, preaching, and, if necessary, war. It’s the same idea expressed by Sheikh Qaradawi in 1995 when he said, “We will conquer Europe, we will conquer America, not by the sword but by our Dawa [proselytizing].”
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One intelligence official told Besson that The Project signifies “a totalitarian ideology of infiltration which represents, in the end, the greatest danger for European societies.”
20
Juan Zarate, President George W. Bush’s counterterrorism czar, told the Swiss author that the document represents the Brothers’ blueprint for “spreading their political ideology.” Zarate added, “The Muslim Brotherhood is a group that worries us not because it deals with philosophical or ideological ideas but because it defends the use of violence against civilians.”
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