The Brotherhood: America's Next Great Enemy (6 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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That perfectly encapsulates the prevailing view of the Muslim Brotherhood among Western governments.
No robes, no bombs, nice suits, welcoming smiles, and fluent English—we can work with these guys.
The problem with this insane narrative of the Ikhwan as the “anti-al-Qaeda” is that al-Qaeda would not exist without the Brotherhood. The MB birthed AQ and although the two organizations have clear tactical differences today, they both share the exact same ideology and goals.
The teachings of Brotherhood ideologues like Hassan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb inspired the entire modern Islamic terrorist enterprise—including al-Qaeda, Hamas, and, in many ways, the Shia revolutionaries in Iran. Those teachings perfectly supplement Islam’s core texts, the Koran and Sunnah, which are littered throughout with calls for conquest and violence against non-Muslims. Combine the two—revolutionary ideology and extreme theology—and you have a lethal mix. Essentially, the Muslim Brotherhood is a totalitarian political movement with theological underpinnings. Nazis sought a thousand-year Reich founded on racial superiority; the Soviets wanted a global communist system; the Muslim Brotherhood and its offshoots like al-Qaeda, as well as the Shia jihadist axis of Iran and Hezbollah, all seek a global caliphate governed by sharia law. It’s a seamless transition, from one great American enemy to the next.
The rise of the Muslim Brotherhood and the global Sunni Islamist movement does indeed represent the rise of America’s next great enemy. China might be a great enemy in the future, and a declining (but still militarily formidable) Russia might be our enemy of the past, but the revolutionary Islamism epitomized by the Muslim Brotherhood is rapidly emerging as our great enemy of today. Yes, Iran is, as I write this, on the verge of acquiring nuclear weapons that would change the world landscape in horrific ways and pose an existential threat to the United States. But I believe, based on years of conversations with Israeli officials, that Israel will never allow Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon and will instead, at some point, conduct a preemptive strike against Iran’s nuclear weapons facilities. If that happens, the Iranian regime will go from aspiring to lead the Islamic world to being a vengeful, weakened terrorist sponsor. And despite current differences (seen most clearly in the Syrian civil war, where Iran and Hezbollah are battling the Brotherhood and al-Qaeda as I write), I see Shia Iran eventually working closely with the Brotherhood-led Sunni Islamist movement toward the common goals of destroying Israel and taking on the West. The only question is whether Tehran will accept being a subsidiary or still angle to be top dog.
The wild card in this conversation, of course, is North Korea. Little is known about Kim Jong-un other than his fondness for Dennis Rodman and garish haircuts. He seems the type who tortured kittens and immersed himself in violent video games and films while growing up a spoiled child in his equally depraved father’s palace in Pyongyang. Now this chubby sociopath is in control of a growing nuclear arsenal and his regime is vowing to blow U.S. cities off the map. In order to one day accomplish that feat, North Korea, like Iran, is actively working on intercontinental ballistic missiles that can reach the United States.
Also like Iran, Kim’s regime has worked on electromagnetic pulse (or EMP) technology that could destroy America’s electrical grid and send us back into the nineteenth century. All it would take is one nuclear missile, mounted on a Scud and fired from the deck of, say, an unmarked freighter a few hundred miles off of America’s coast. Once that missile is detonated in the atmosphere above the United States, frying everything below, life as we know it ends, and the country collapses into chaos. Then we’re talking about America’s
last
great enemy.
The flip side is that the North Korean regime is eminently beatable and isolated and—minus its acquiring intercontinental ballistic missiles or EMP capabilities—can be erased overnight by the United States if a military engagement were to break out (and if the Obama administration were willing to use the appropriate force—a big if). At the end of the day, the North Korean regime just doesn’t have the staying power, global reach, or numbers to be a long-term, existential threat.
Islamism, on the other hand, has an established track record of 1,400 years and counting of expansionist, jihadist carnage, not to mention tens if not hundreds of millions of fanatical adherents. Yet even a small number of Islamists can go a long way. Nineteen hijackers changed the course of American and world history on 9/11. Two young Islamic terrorists in Boston were able to kill three people, wound 264 more, and shut down a major American city. Even failed attacks, like we saw with the attempted “Underwear Bombing” on Christmas Day 2009, chip away at the foundations of our country, changing the way we live and diminishing our freedoms.
The so-called Arab Spring—in reality, an Islamist Winter—has encouraged Islamist forces, led by the Muslim Brotherhood, to gain confidence that their ultimate goal is in sight: the reestablishment of a global Islamic caliphate that would see the entire Muslim world unite politically, economically, and militarily to aggressively take on the West and Israel in all spheres, while at the same time controlling a sizable chunk of the world’s oil supplies and speaking with one powerful, influential voice at the UN.
Without the spread of the Muslim Brotherhood’s destructive influence, there would be no al-Qaeda, there would be no Hamas, there would have been no 9/11, no War on Terror—heck, you’d even be able to leave your shoes on at the airport. This is not a group the United States government should be in the business of embracing—it’s a group that should be weakened, marginalized, discredited, and defeated at every turn, along with the Islamist ideology it espouses. That includes here at home, where Muslim Brotherhood–linked organizations are securing positions in sensitive areas of the U.S. government thanks to the Obama administration’s warm embrace of what it considers the MB’s “moderate” brand of Islam. In this book, I’ll show how the Muslim Brotherhood and their Sunni Islamist allies (working, when their interests intersect, with Shia jihadists), are rapidly positioning themselves as America’s greatest scourge—and what we need to do about it.
An Islamist Winter is not just coming: it’s already upon us. America’s next great enemy is not just ascendant in the Middle East, it has set up shop inside the United States. Our government is not just ignorant of the enemy’s ideology and goals, it is aiding and abetting their advance at every turn. The current Muslim Brotherhood–driven Islamist offensive can be defeated, just as other great waves of jihadist conquest have been driven back through the centuries. But to achieve victory we must first know our enemy. If the government will not take up that charge, the people must. Read on to find out what America is facing and how we can turn the tide.
CHAPTER TWO
 
HOW THEY’RE WINNING (AND HOW WE’RE HELPING)
 
“T
his can’t be the place. Can it?”
My cameraman Ian and I were standing in front of a nondescript building on a Brussels side street, trying to locate the headquarters of an organization that’s been called “an umbrella group that comprises the global Muslim Brotherhood in Europe.”
1
“I’m pretty sure it’s the place,” Ian answered me. “See that little piece of paper right there in the slot next to the doorbell? It says ‘Federation of Islamic Organisations in Europe.’”
It dawned on me that I should not have been surprised at all. It was just like the Muslim Brotherhood to stealthily tuck away one of its more important purported assets.
FIOE boasts some twenty-eight member organizations that hail from across the European Union, as well as from Russia and Turkey.
2
FIOE representatives meet with officials from the EU and other political bodies to lobby on Islamic issues and—in classic Western Brotherhood fashion—present FIOE as Europe’s only credible Muslim dialogue partner.
After ringing the doorbell of the organization’s Brussels base repeatedly with no answer, I walked around the side of the building to investigate further and was met by a short, fifty-something Arab man in a work shirt and paint-splattered jeans. In broken English, he explained that he commuted in from France every day to do maintenance work on the building. He didn’t seem to understand what “FIOE” meant. All he knew was that he was making a living.
As we were talking, another Arab man who looked barely out of his teens walked up to us and asked who we were looking for. His behavior seemed suspicious from the outset.
“No one is here,” he said at first. Then, after a few minutes of chatting with us about why we were in Brussels, he changed his tune.
“I’ll go in and check if anyone is upstairs,” he said, disappearing into the building.
A few minutes later, he emerged. “No one is here,” he said, looking as if he were concealing a smile. “But I will take down your information and they will call you when they get back.”
As I wrote down my phone number and email address, two young Arab women in hijabs walked past us and into the building. Yes, the place was just stone empty.
In my travels around Brussels, I found that it represented a sort of microcosm of the Islamist project in the West. Before our stop at FIOE headquarters, we spent time at the Great Mosque of Brussels, a large structure built with Saudi funding that lies just a block from European Union buildings. Anti-Semitic attacks are on the rise in the city, a phenomenon many locals I spoke to attributed to a growing Muslim presence that now makes up some 30 percent of Brussels’s overall population.
Women covered in hijabs and niqabs and men in Islamic garb are common sights, and Muslim Brotherhood front organizations like FIOE abound, always ready to make their case to officials based in the European Union’s headquarters.
Other than EU officials, no one I spoke to, particularly local Jews, held much optimism about Brussels’s future. Aggressive Islamization, they believed, would continue apace, which meant culture clashes were inevitable—in Belgium and other European countries—because Europe, with its open borders immigration polices, aging indigenous populations, collapsing economies, and wholesale abandonment of its once-strong Judeo-Christian heritage and identity, has placed itself in an extremely precarious position. Its boisterous, confident Muslim minority—which now numbers some 20 million overall in European Union countries, not counting illegal arrivals—smells weakness and complacency in its hedonistic hosts. News of Islamic terrorism-related arrests is now a part of daily life in Europe, and sharia enclaves are not just on the horizon: they’re already present in Great Britain, the Netherlands, Sweden, France, Germany, and elsewhere. Confrontation is coming—and it won’t be pretty. Walk around some of Europe’s more hardcore Muslim neighborhoods, as I have, and you can almost feel it in your bones.
Unfortunately, America seems determined to duplicate Europe’s mistakes in nearly every way.
Although it has reached new and dangerous heights under the Obama administration, the U.S. government’s courtship of the Muslim Brotherhood actually dates back to the early 1950s under President Dwight D. Eisenhower, when the CIA backed Said Ramadan, son-in-law of MB founder Hassan al-Banna and father of Islamist provocateur Tariq Ramadan.
3
Then, as now, American decision-makers believed the Brotherhood could prove an invaluable asset against an implacable foe. During Eisenhower’s day, it was the Soviet Union, which had gobbled up Muslim Central Asia and was flexing its muscle throughout the Middle East—and whose atheism the Brothers despised. Today, the great enemy is seen as al-Qaeda and affiliated hardcore Salafi jihadi groups, whose violent agenda the Brotherhood supposedly opposes (when in reality the Brotherhood opposes only the timing of al-Qaeda’s jihad, not its endgame).
Likewise, today, as in Eisenhower’s day, policymakers are seeking a Muslim voice that has credibility—both theologically and on the all-important Arab street—and has the numbers, influence, and reach to speak to a broad tract of the Islamic world in ways favorable to the West. The Ikhwan was—and is—that voice, or so the wishful thinking has gone inside the Washington Beltway. During the Cold War, the United States wanted the Brothers to denounce atheistic communism to the Muslim masses. Today, U.S. policymakers assume the Brotherhood can be the crucial force that turns Muslims away from jihad and toward a moderate, non-violent form of Islamism. Unfortunately, that’s not going to happen, because surface appearances aside, the Muslim Brothers are hardly moderates. As respected Middle East expert Daniel Pipes explains:
All Islamists are one; a moderate Islamist is as fantastical a notion as a moderate Nazi. Every member of this barbaric movement is a potential totalitarian thug. Western governments should neither accept nor work with the one or the other.
4
 

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