The Brotherhood: America's Next Great Enemy (9 page)

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Authors: Erick Stakelbeck

Tags: #Political Science / Political Ideologies / Conservatism & Liberalism

BOOK: The Brotherhood: America's Next Great Enemy
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Again: the U.S. government has had the Explanatory Memorandum in its possession for nearly a decade. It obtained it in 2004, when federal agents raided the Annandale, Virginia, home of MB/Hamas operative Ismail Elbarasse. It was there, just a few miles from the White House, that agents uncovered a secret sub-basement containing hundreds of official Muslim Brotherhood documents. According to a
Washington Post
account of the raid:
At Elbarasse’s home on Whistler Court, agents seized computer disks, bank records and Arabic documents, including one document titled “For Your Eyes Only—How to Propagate Islam.”
Also seized, according to court records, were copies of checks from the Dar Al-Hijra mosque in Falls Church; an Arabic CD with an “evaluation of the Jihad movement”; a piece of paper containing the address of the Norfolk Naval Station; Israeli travel documents; various “anti-Israel materials” ; and documents concerning the Muslim Brotherhood, a secretive movement of political activists dedicated to restoring Islamic rule in secular Arab societies.
In addition, agents seized a document called an “anarchist cookbook” and an item referred to in court records as “Spreadsheet of trained pilots ‘Law Enforcement Only.’”
32
 
Akram’s Explanatory Memorandum was one of the documents agents seized. While the memo’s contents became public during the Holy Land Foundation trial, box upon box of additional documents uncovered in the raid of Elbarasse’s well-kept suburban home have yet to be released by the U.S. government, despite repeated requests by various national security-focused organizations and members of Congress.
The Explanatory Memorandum alone was a massive game changer in understanding the Brotherhood’s network and intentions inside the United States. How many more documents like it were found in Elbarasse’s home? And why would this Hamas operative be in possession of a “Spreadsheet of trained pilots”? The Obama administration—like the Bush administration before it—has yet to answer any of these questions. For all we know, the rest of the documents are locked away in some dusty basement, discarded and forgotten. And based on the Obama administration’s close alliance with various U.S. Muslim Brotherhood–tied organizations and individuals, those docs won’t see the light of day anytime soon. Here are just a few examples of the MB’s influence on the Obama White House:
■ A December 2012 piece in Egypt’s
Rose El-Youssef
magazine alleged that six American Islamists who work closely with the Obama administration in various capacities are, in fact, operatives of the Muslim Brotherhood.
33
The Investigative Project on Terrorism, which translated the
Rose El-Youssef
article into English, described its troubling contents:
The . . . story . . . suggests the six turned the White House “from a position hostile to Islamic groups and organizations in the world to the largest and most important supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood.”
The story is largely unsourced, but its publication is considered significant in raising the issue to Egyptian readers.
The six named people include: Arif Alikhan, assistant secretary of Homeland Security for policy development; Mohammed Elibiary, a member of the Homeland Security Advisory Council; Rashad Hussain, the U.S. special envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference; Salam al-Marayati, co-founder of the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC); Imam Mohamed Magid, president of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA); and Eboo Patel, a member of President Obama’s Advisory Council on Faith-Based Neighborhood Partnerships.
34
 
■ A year-long investigation, culminating in October 2012, also conducted by the Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT), found that radical Islamists conducted hundreds of visits to the Obama White House during the president’s first term and met with top administration officials.
35
For instance, after scouring through millions of White House visitor log entries, IPT found that individuals from the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) were among the administration’s guests at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. This despite the fact that the FBI supposedly cut ties with CAIR after the Islamist outfit was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the largest terrorism financing trial in American history.
36
■ In February 2012, after meetings between FBI Director Robert Mueller and representatives from several American-Islamist organizations—including the Brotherhood-linked Islamic Society of North America and Muslim Public Affairs Council—it was announced that the FBI had purged hundreds of counterterrorism training documents that were used to educate federal agents about the Islamist threat.
The FBI’s Islamist friends were permitted to review the materials and helped deem that more than seven hundred documents and three hundred presentations should be eliminated due to “anti-Muslim” language.
37
Even before the purge, the Obama administration had already handed down edicts that terms like “Islamic terrorism,” “radical Islamist,” and “jihadist” could not be used by government agencies. So I suppose the FBI’s capitulation was the natural, and pathetic, next step. Nothing like letting your enemies review and censor the very materials that could lead to their exposure.
When details emerged that FBI agents had actually interviewed Tamerlan Tsarnaev in 2011—
two years
before he and his younger brother carried out the deadly terror attack at the Boston Marathon—but had found no cause for suspicion (even after Russian authorities warned that Tsarnaev was a radical Islamist), I was angered but not surprised.
38
After all, the same thing happened in 2009 when Muslim convert Abdulhakim Muhammad was subject to a preliminary investigation by the FBI’s joint counterterrorism task force prior to his jihadist attack on a military recruiting station in Little Rock, Arkansas, that left one American soldier dead and another seriously injured.
39
How much of the FBI’s inaction in these two cases can be traced back to a culture of rampant political correctness enforced at the very top of the bureau? And worse still, to the ideology of the man who currently sits in the Oval Office?
President Obama is not a Muslim, but he is quite fond of Islam. This is clearly due in large part to his family lineage (for starters, his father and stepfather were both Muslims) and to the fact that he spent four formative years as a boy in Indonesia, a Muslim nation where he attended an Islamic
madrassah
for a time. Obama believes that he understands “the real Islam” based on his personal experiences, which include close friendships with a Pakistani roommate and other Pakistani Muslims during his stint at Occidental College in the late 1970s and early 80s. Obama traveled to Pakistan with one of those friends and spent three weeks there in 1981. During the 2008 presidential campaign, he even said the trip bolstered his credibility on foreign policy.
40
Maybe he could see Karachi from his window.
Obama thinks he “gets” Islam and, by extension, understands the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamists and what makes them tick, including their many grievances—some of which he shares. At the top of that list is Western “imperialism” against oppressed, Third World (often Muslim) peoples, with the chief violators being the United States, Great Britain, and Israel. The fact that most of the so-called oppressed are not white and the “oppressors” are only adds fuel to Obama’s progressive fire. To him, the Muslim Brotherhood is not a dangerous Islamist organization but a revolutionary liberation movement that opposes corrupt, U.S.-supported dictatorships (like Mubarak’s) and Western imperialism and stands for authentic, true Islam. To President Obama, the “Muslim” in the Muslim Brotherhood is secondary, even insignificant. It’s the MB’s struggle against the existing and inherently unfair global order—one set up by greedy, imperialistic, capitalistic Western powers—that really matters and must be supported.
And support it the president has, time and time again—whether it’s publicly castigating and isolating Israel, assisting Ikhwan-centric regimes throughout the Muslim world, or working with Brotherhood-linked Islamists in the United States. As far back as 2007, then-candidate Obama was dropping hints that he would embark on this Islamist-friendly course as president—that he, the worldly, charismatic “great healer,” the veteran of an Indonesian madrassah and a few weeks in Pakistan—would bridge the gap between the Muslim world and the West. Believing himself the right man, with the right name and the right background to placate the seething Muslim masses, he has never missed a chance to showcase his supposed brilliance in Muslim relations. The results have been disastrous for U.S. national security and an Allah-send for the Muslim Brotherhood. A few examples:
■ In 2007, then-Senator Barack Obama, never lacking confidence in his own transcendent brilliance and magnetism, told New Hampshire Public Radio:
I truly believe that the day I’m inaugurated [as president], not only does the country look at itself differently, but the world looks at America differently.... If I’m reaching out to the Muslim world they understand that I’ve lived in a Muslim country and I may be a Christian, but I also understand their point of view.... My sister is half-Indonesian. I traveled there all the way through my college years. And so I’m intimately concerned with what happens in these countries and the cultures and perspective these folks have. And those are powerful tools for us to be able to reach out to the world... then I think the world will have confidence that I am listening to them and that our future and our security is tied up with our ability to work with other countries in the world that will ultimately make us safer.
41
 
I’m sure the al-Qaeda–linked terrorists who stormed the U.S. consulate in Benghazi and slaughtered four Americans were given pause by the fact that Barack Obama has a sister who is half-Indonesian. Ditto for Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan, the Boston bombers, and the Taliban jihadists who are killing U.S. troops in Afghanistan.
■ 2007 was also the year that
New York Times
columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote a fawning profile of the future president called “Obama: Man of the World.” In one passage from the piece, the smitten Kristof managed—unknowingly—to capture everything that is wrong with Obama’s approach to the Muslim world:
He once got in trouble for making faces during Koran study classes in his elementary school, but a president is less likely to stereotype Muslims as fanatics—and more likely to be aware of their nationalism—if he once studied the Koran with them.
Mr. Obama recalled the opening lines of the Arabic call to prayer, reciting them with a first-rate accent. In a remark that seemed delightfully uncalculated (it’ll give Alabama voters heart attacks), Mr. Obama described the call to prayer as “one of the prettiest sounds on Earth at sunset.”
42
 
It’s all there: Obama’s reverence for Islamic culture, his determination to prove his Islamophile bona fides (“Hey, I love the Arabic call to prayer! And guess what? My sister is half-Indonesian!”), and his—and Kristof’s— assumption that Koran classes taken as a small boy in Indonesia some forty years ago left Obama uniquely equipped to improve relations with the Muslim world.
Don’t you see, Muslims? Your friend Barry
gets it
. He gets
you
! Why, just look at his close relationship with Rashad Hussain.
43
In 2010, on naming Hussain as “special envoy” to the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC), Obama gushed that Hussain was “a hafiz of the Qur’an.”
44
Which means Hussain can recite the entire Koran from memory. Obama neglected to mention Hussain’s troubling links to groups affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood.
45
■ In January 2009, Obama chose to give the Arabic-language network Al-Arabiya the first formal interview of his presidency as part of his stated effort to improve America’s image in the Muslim world. It was the beginning of the Obama Global Apology Tour. During the interview, he again stressed his family ties to Islam and criticized America: “all too often the United States starts by dictating—in the past on some of these issues—and we don’t always know all the factors that are involved,” said the Apologist-in-Chief. “[T]he language [Americans] use has to be a language of respect. I have Muslim members of my family. I have lived in Muslim countries.”
46
The result of Obama’s pandering? Polls show that the United States is more unpopular than ever in the Muslim world .
47

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