by Clare M. Lopez:

Given the long history of Muslim Brotherhood activity in this country, its declared objective to “destroy the Western civilization from within,” and the extensive evidence of successful influence operations at the highest levels of the U.S. government, it is urgent that we recognize this clear and present danger that threatens not only our Republic but the values of Western civilization.

“Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. The Qur’an is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest aspiration.”

– Motto of the Muslim Brotherhood

The upheavals of 2011-2012 across the Middle East and North Africa swept aside secular rulers and the established political order with startling speed, and continue to focus world attention on the revolutionary forces driving these far-reaching events. Poverty, oppression, inequality, and lack of individual freedom are all hallmarks of the societal stagnation that has gripped the Islamic world for the better part of fourteen centuries, but the driving force of the so-called “Arab Spring” is a resurgent Islam, dominated by the forces of al-Qa’eda and the Muslim Brotherhood. Energized as Islam may be at this time, however, without the active involvement of the United States to help arm[1], fund[2], support[3], and train[4] the region’s Islamic rebels, it is questionable whether they could have gotten this far, this fast.

This report describes how the Muslim Brotherhood infiltrated and suborned the U.S. government to actively assist, whether knowingly or not, the mission of its grand jihad. Its hard-won position at the forefront of the 21^stcentury Islamic Awakening is possible only because of decades of patient infiltration and political indoctrination (Da’wa) in the West, and especially the United States of America, even as the grassroots work of building an organizational structure advanced steadily in the land of its origin as well. It is important to recognize the sophistication of the Brotherhood’s international strategy and how the takedown of U.S. national security defenses from within was critical to the current Middle East-North Africa (MENA) campaign to re-establish the Caliphate and enforce Islamic Law (shariah).

Origins of the Muslim Brotherhood

To understand the Brotherhood and how it operates, especially inside Western societies such as America’s, a brief overview of where it came from and why it was established is in order. Following the early years of blindingly fast military conquests, Islam began to falter as European Christendom doggedly kept pushing back, eventually surpassing an increasingly corrupt empire that had run out of lands to conquer, people to enslave, and riches to plunder. Yoked by consensus of the scholars (ijma) to an ideology that rejected critical thought, innovation, and scientific inquiry in favor of blind obedience to revelation, the Islamic world remained largely untouched by the Renaissance, Enlightenment, and eventual Industrial and Technological revolutions that catapulted the West to global power status.[5] Eventual European colonization of the Arab and Muslim world and the stunningly successful re-establishment of the Jewish nation in the modern State of Israel brought humiliation to people raised on tales of historical supremacism over these, its traditional dhimmi victims.

Aside from Israel, which came later, this was the world into which Hassan al-Banna was born in the early 20^thcentury. An Egyptian Cairene, al-Banna seethed with frustration at Islam’s diminished status in the world; in particular he resented the presence and power of the British colonial administration in Egypt. The abolishment of the last Caliphate by Kemal Ataturk in 1924 was perhaps the worst indignity, one that left al-Banna and his young Muslim university contemporaries apparently feeling unmoored. They joined together in 1928, determined (as we know from their statements and writing) to rectify things; “rectifying things,” for them, seems to have meant re-establishment of the Caliphate and global enforcement of Islamic Law (shariah). The organization they founded to return Egypt, the Middle East, and eventually the world to “proper” subservience to Islam as ordained by Allah would be the Muslim Brotherhood (Al-Ikhwan al-Muslimun in Arabic).

Global Jihad

Since its inception in 1928, the Muslim Brotherhood consistently has championed the cause of global jihad to “mobilize the entire Umma into one body to defend the right cause with all its strength…to jihad, to warfare…”[6]Until early 2011, its original bylaws could be found on the Brotherhood’s English language website, Ikhwanweb, established in 2005 by senior Brotherhood official Khairat al-Shater. Since then, they have been preserved by Steven Emerson at The Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT)[7]. Article (2) makes clear that the Brotherhood conceives of itself as “an international Muslim Body, which seeks to establish Allah’s law in the land by achieving the spiritual goals of Islam and the true religion…establishing the Islamic State” and “…building a new basis of human civilization as is ensured by the overall teachings of Islam.”[8]

In case that sounds relatively benign, Article (3) E gets more to the point: “The Islamic nation must be fully prepared to fight the tyrants and the enemies of Allah as a prelude to establishing an Islamic state.”[9] This is exactly what the Brotherhood did in Egypt in the violent years before and after the 1949 death of al-Banna, until it was forcibly suppressed, only to rise again in 2011-2012 when circumstances permitted.

The story of how those circumstances shifted to permit (even compel) the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood to power not only in Egypt, but also Libya, Tunisia, and perhaps soon, Syria and elsewhere, spans 20^th century world history. World War II and the Brotherhood’s close alliance with Adolf Hitler and his genocidal antisemitic Nazis provided the perfect opportunity for Islam’s latest expansion into Europe, where dozens of Brotherhood branches were established. Upon the defeat of Nazi Germany, its clandestine networks of Muslim operatives were picked up by the western Allies and naively turned to the same purpose as the Nazis had pursued: to counter the influence of atheist communist Soviets.[10] So it was that Sa’id Ramadan, the son-in-law of Hasan al-Banna, and a delegation of Muslim Brothers, found themselves in the Oval Office on 23 September 1953 meeting with President Dwight D. Eisenhower.[11]

There is much more at Gatestone Institute

Clare M. Lopez, a strategic policy and intelligence expert, is a senior fellow at the Center for Security Policy and the Clarion Fund. She was formerly a career operations officer with the Central Intelligence Agency.