We are all aware of the barbaric acts of ISIS, al Qaeda and the others flying the Black Flag. Sadly their violence continues to kill innocents around the world and here at home. They fight in the cause of Jihad to impose their totalitarian religion on all people. But they are not the only ones working toward that goal. There are other Islamist groups who seem much less dangerous on the surface, but actually represent an even more insidious threat to free western society. They seek to use our very freedoms as weapons against us.
Congress has taken an unusually positive step. After eight years of struggling with the issue, the House Judiciary Committee has favorably reported a major bill that recognizes the Muslim Brotherhood’s status as a Foreign Terrorist Organization and requires the State Department to so designate it. If the bill becomes law, it would mark a sea change in the relationship between the administration and the Brotherhood.
The Muslim Brotherhood has been patiently infiltrating its assets into American institutions for more than two decades. It has placed agents at high levels in the Pentagon, the State Department, and the White House. Members of Muslim Brotherhood serve as legislative advisors to congressmen and senators. After the convictions handed down in the Holy Land Foundation trial in 2008, the Muslim Brotherhood in America should have been rolled up and shut down. That same year, however, the American people elected a friend of the Muslim Brotherhood as their president…. It took until 2016, the final year of the Obama administration, for a Republican-controlled Congress to push back against the forces that are relentlessly Islamizing the United States.
If anything, they are understating the case. The Muslim Brotherhood’s relationship with the United States goes back to the Eisenhower administration, which regarded them as a fascist outgrowth of the Nazi movement in Germany but one that could be used against the Soviets in the Islamic world. The relationship continued through the Clinton administration, which allowed regular access to the President to one of the Brotherhood’s top officers in the United States, Abdurahman Alamoudi, currently serving a Federal sentence for financing al Qaeda.
Even that did not end the relationship, with the right to certify Islamic clergy for the US military and Federal prisons simply transferring from Alamoudi’s organization to another Brotherhood offshoot. This offshoot, the Islamic Society of North America, is mentioned in the Explanatory Memorandum and remains an endorsing authority for Muslim chaplains to this day.
The turning point was 9/11, when the George W. Bush administration began to take the Brotherhood seriously as a threat instead of a ‘partner’ in the Islamic world. The Holy Land trial was a good start that, as the Gates of Vienna post notes, was short-circuited by the election of an administration more favorable to repairing the Cold War relationship with the Brotherhood. Unfortunately, that will continue through at least the start of next year and the arrival of a new administration.
This bill in Congress nevertheless offers at least a hope of a significant step forward. It would only be the beginning of the work to be done. Much must be done to unravel the Brotherhood’s networks of supporting and allied organizations. Still, this is a significant advance that deserves your support.
In 2007, Federal prosecutors brought charges of terrorism financing against the Holy Land Foundation, the largest Islamic charity in America, which funneled $12.4 million to Hamas.
In 2007, the Justice Department convicted the largest Islamic charity in North America, The Holy Land Foundation, and its leadership of channeling more than twelve million dollars to known terrorists in the Middle East.