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A Window on the Muslim Brotherhood in America: An Annotated Interview with DHS Advisor Mohamed Elibiary

Elibiary-Occasional-Paper-1001-cover2From the Foreword: The Center for Security Policy is pleased to publish this informative interview with Mohamed Elibiary, a prominent Muslim advisor to the Department of Homeland Security.  It is particularly instructive insofar as Elibiary is a prime-mover behind two of the Obama administration’s most dangerous policies:  (1) normalizing relations with domestic and foreign Islamist groups, including the Muslim Brotherhood, and (2) severely restricting enforcement of the nation’s laws governing material support for terrorism.

At a moment when the Egyptian military is striving to dismantle the infrastructure of the Muslim Brotherhood in that country—including its political arm, the Freedom and Justice Party—it is incumbent upon Americans to consider what it and other Islamists who share an agenda of imposing shariah worldwide are doing here.  An important window into the latter is provided by Elibiary’s career and activism, first as a Texas-based terrorism consultant and founder of the (now-defunct) Freedom and Justice Foundation in Plano, and more recently in his capacity as a member of the Department of Homeland Security’s Advisory Committee and its Countering Violent Extremism Working Group.

Elibiary’s official functions have been the focus of congressional and media attention, particularly in light of his controversial associations with leading American Islamists.  These include the radical Assembly of Muslim Jurists of America and convicted Hamas fundraiser Shukri Abu Baker.

Troubling as such connections are, the implications of the policies Elibiary has espoused are even more worrying.  For example, Elibiary’s promotion of the narrative that the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamists are “moderates” appears to have been influential in encouraging the Obama administration’s blindness to what is, in fact, an unbroken continuum between the ideology and goals of the Muslim Brotherhood and al Qaeda.

Moreover, Elibiary has insisted that even the most basic information about the doctrinal drivers of jihadist terror be purged from U.S. government training materials. Pursuant to the guidance he has helped President Obama promulgate, even quoting the Brotherhood’s own written statements can be portrayed as “Islamophobia.”

It is crucial for American citizens and their representatives to become engaged in a policy discussion about the true nature of the Muslim Brotherhood and its agenda.  The Center for Security Policy hopes that this substantive interview—conducted by national security analyst Ryan Mauro, together with annotations from Mr. Mauro and the Center—will make plain the perils associated with the “civilization jihad” being waged by the Brotherhood in America, with help from well-placed advisors to the Obama administration like Mohamed Elibiary.

 

Read the paper at the link below.

pdf iconRyan Mauro: A Window on the Muslim Brotherhood in America: An Annotated Interview with DHS Advisor Mohamed Elibiary | Center for Security Policy Occasional Paper Series | October 1, 2013  (PDF 37 pages, 457KB)

Homeland Security advisor supports convicted terrorist fundraiser

By Charles C. Johnson: A senior advisor to the Department of Homeland Security is an old friend of  an activist who was convicted in 2008 of financing the terrorist organization Hamas.

In an interview with The Daily Caller, Mohamed Elibiary, a member of the Homeland Security Advisory Council, reiterated claims he made this summer that former Holy Land Foundation president and CEO Shukri Abu Baker is innocent and a victim of political persecution.

Elibiary, who in his position on the council has regular access to classified information, also said the United States insults Muslim dignity and compared the Muslim Brotherhood to American evangelicals.

Elibiary confirmed to journalist Ryan Mauro of the ClarionProject in August that he is a longtime friend of Baker. Mauro’s interview can be read at the Center for Security Policy.

Baker and four other officials of the closed Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development were convicted of using the charity to finance Hamas in 2008. It was the largest terrorism financing trial in U.S. history. Federal prosecutors described the Foundation, which was closed by the U.S. government in 2001, as an entity of the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood.

Elbiary first disclosed the relationship in a 2007 article in the Dallas Morning News. He met Baker as a teenager and was so moved by the terrorist funder’s explanation of alleged Israeli persecution of Palestinians that he says he began donating monthly to Baker’s foundation until it closed in 2001. The friendship continued, with Elibiary meeting with Baker for coffee the day before he was convicted.

Elibiary maintains that Baker is innocent, and in 2010 he wrote that the U.S. government was “using the law to force compliance with unjust foreign policies.” He reiterated his belief that the U.S. should not have prosecuted the Holy Land Foundation.

The Muslim activist has never disguised his support for Muslim Brotherhood extremism. In a 2006 letter to the Morning News, he defended the fanatically anti-American early Brotherhood leader and theorist Sayyid Qutb, stating, “I’d recommend everyone read Qutb, but read him with an eye to improving America not just to be jealous with malice in our hearts.”

Elibiary has been honored by the FBI’s Society of Former Special Agents. In September he was promoted to Senior Advisor at the Advisory Council, a title held only by select members. Other Council members include William Bratton, the revered former New York police commissioner and Los Angeles chief of police; former CIA Director Bill Webster; and L.A. County Sheriff Lee Baca.

I’m honored to be reappointed to Secretary’s Homeland Security Advisory Council (HSAC) and promoted to Sr. Fellow position @DHSgov #Service

— Mohamed Elibiary (@MohamedElibiary) September 12, 2013

“If you ever wondered why the Obama Administration believes that the Muslim Brotherhood is a moderate force for good and partners with known U.S. Muslim Brotherhood entities, this interview with Mr. Elibiary helps us find an answer,” Mauro said.

Elibiary received national attention in June 2012 when Minnesota Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann and four other members of Congress wrote a letter to the Department of Homeland Security naming him as one of three advisors with “extensive ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, other Islamist organizations and causes.”

Mauro writes that Elibiary was instrumental in promoting DHS’s guidelines “Countering Violent Extremism Dos and Don’ts,” which Mauro says “essentially prevent law enforcement from learning about the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood or being trained in its doctrine.”

“I helped my community pick up the pieces and safeguard its nonprofit organizations, in order to protect its liberties, after the HLF’s closure and eventual conviction,” Elibiary told Mauro. “But the corollary to my position was that if the Muslim community leadership and the government can mutually reconcile and turn a new page, then the targeted national Muslim community organizations should be allowed to proceed anew.”

Elibiary’s efforts to “safeguard” American Islamists from prosecution supports April 2011 reports by Patrick Poole that the Justice Department stopped planned indictments of HLF co-conspirators, including a founder of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, along with several officials with the International Institute of Islamic Thought and the now-defunct SAAR Group.

In 2007, Elibiary’s Freedom and Justice Foundation made a presentation to an imam training conference at the 4th Annual Assembly of Muslim Jurists of America, held jointly with the North American Imams Federation in California. Both are hardline Islamist groups. The presentation states:

“The Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt, Jordan, Tunis, etc. is a social movement for religious revival that seeks to Islamicize the society….and that includes the political system. Sound familiar? Yup, you’re right they are the Muslim world’s version of the Evangelical Christian Coalition/Moral Majority movement.”

Reached by phone to confirm some of his statements to Mauro, Elibiary reiterated his positions. He also condemned The Daily Caller’s “drive-by” reporting on Syrian Islamists.

“Islamism is a multi-century, transnational, intellectually grounded movement with influential philosophical works from multiple continents,” Elibiary told TheDC. “It has many subcultures and currents of thought. Some are no different then conservatives who ground their values in a judeo-Christian worldview and it has its violent extremist strains.”

Elibiary also took issue with The Daily Caller’s reporting on the DHS guidelines he helped institute.

“I recognized that I’d be taking a political risk in granting you an interview, especially after reading the less than accurate piece on DHS’s CVE training guidance I read from you,” Elibiary told TheDC, “but I overcame my distrust and cooperated because bridging the divide between the Average Conservative Male today and the Average Muslim is needed for our country and the Republican Party.”

The FBI’s Pro-Islamist Insubordination

Yesterday was not a good day for the Muslim Brotherhood in America.  One of their flagship front groups – the terrorist-tied Council on American Islamic Relations – launched a study that attacked individuals and organizations for being what CAIR calls “Islamophobes.”

The study didn’t amount to much, just more smearing of Americans who justifiably warn about the Brotherhood’s influence operations and other subversive activities.

Ironically, at approximately the same moment, the legitimacy of such warnings was being underscored by the Justice Department’s Inspector General.  In a highly critical report, the IG observed that a number of the bureau’s offices had defied repeated direction from headquarters to stop dealing with CAIR because of its ties to Hamas.

Representative Frank Wolf of Virginia responded by demanding the firing of the insubordinate FBI agents.  Great idea, Congressman!

Obama’s vanishing deterrent

Barack Obama appears at this writing to be poised to embroil the United States in a new war in Syria in response to the recent, murderous use of chemical weapons there.  Ill-advised as this step is, it is but a harbinger of what is to come as reckless U.S. national security policies and postures meet the hard reality of determined adversaries emboldened by our perceived weakness.

The focus at the moment is on what tactical response the President will make to punish Syrian dictator Bashar Assad for his alleged violation of Mr. Obama’s glibly declared “red-line” barring the use of such weapons of mass destruction.  There seems to be little serious thought given at the moment to what happens next:  What steps Assad and his allies, Iran and Hezbollah, may take against us, our interests and allies; what the repercussions will be of the United States further helping the Muslim Brotherhood and al Qaeda forces who make up the bulk of Assad’s domestic opposition; and the prospects for a far wider war as a result of the answers to both of these questions.

Even more wanting is some serious reflection about decisions taken long before Mr. Obama came to office – but that are consonant with his own, deeply flawed predilections about deterrence.  Over two decades ago, President George H.W. Bush decided he would “rid the world of chemical weapons.”  The UN Chemical Weapons Convention has had the predictable – and predicted – result that the United States has eliminated all such arms in its arsenal, leaving only bad guys like Assad with stockpiles of Sarin nerve gas and other toxic chemical weapons.

No one can say for sure whether the threat of retaliation in kind would have affected recent calculations about the use of such weapons in Syria.  What we do know is that they have been used, evidently repeatedly, in the absence of such a deterrent.

Unfortunately, President Obama seems determined to repeat this dangerous experiment with America’s nuclear forces.  He has made it national policy next to rid the world of these weapons.  And, as with our chemical stockpile, Mr. Obama seems determined to set an example in the hope that others will follow.

This policy has set in train a series of actions whose full dimensions are not generally appreciated.  All planned steps to modernize our nuclear arsenal have either been cancelled or deferred off into the future – which probably amounts to the same thing.  Consequently, we will, at best, have to rely indefinitely on a deterrent comprised of very old weapons.  Virtually all of them are many years beyond their designed service life and most are deployed aboard ground-based missiles, submarines and bombers that are also approaching or in that status.

Confidence in the safety, reliability and effectiveness of these weapons has, since Bush 41’s tenure, relied upon exotic scientific calculations bereft of actual underground nuclear tests to confirm their accuracy.  Accordingly, certifications on these scores by the directors of the nation’s national nuclear laboratories have become a function of informed guesswork, rather than empirically proven analysis.  This is not a basis for reliable deterrence.

Another symptom of the deteriorating condition of our nuclear arsenal is the fact that the Air Force has taken disciplinary action for the second time in the past few months against some of those responsible for the operations of nuclear-armed ballistic missiles.  There are surely specific grounds for these punishments.  But we are kidding ourselves if we fail to consider the devastating impact on the morale and readiness of such personnel when they are told, at least implicitly, by the Commander-in-Chief that their mission is not only unimportant; it is one he wishes to terminate as soon as practicable.

Seem far-fetched?  Recall that eliminating outright our land-based missile force is something Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel personally endorsed prior to taking office. That may be the result if the President succeeds in reducing our nuclear forces to just 1,000 deployed weapons.  As of now, it is unclear whether he intends to take that step only if the Russians agree, or will do so unilaterally if they don’t.  Another uncertainty is whether Congress will go along with such rash cuts.

What is clear is that – with no more serious debate than has been applied to the implications of becoming embroiled in another war in the Middle East, this time with a country armed with chemical weapons against which we can threaten no in-kind retaliation – the United States has been launched on a trajectory towards a minimal nuclear deterrent.

Fortunately, a group of the nation’s preeminent nuclear strategists and practitioners under the leadership of the National Institute for Public Policy has just published a powerful indictment of this misbegotten policy initiative entitled Minimum Deterrence: Examining the Evidence.  It lays bare the faulty assumptions that underpin the Obama denuclearization agenda – not least the fact that the other nuclear powers, including all the threatening ones, are not following the president’s lead.

Some say America can no longer afford a strong and effective deterrent.  We may be about to test that proposition in Syria.  Heaven help us if we compound the error there by continuing our slide towards a minimum nuclear deterrent posture, en route to a world rid only of our nuclear weapons.

Resetting US foreign policy

Aside from the carnage in Benghazi, the most enduring image from Hillary Clinton’s tenure as US secretary of state was the fake remote control she brought with her to Moscow in 2009 with the word “Reset” in misspelled Russian embossed on it.

Clinton’s gimmick was meant to show that under President Barack Obama, American foreign policy would be fundamentally transformed. Since Obama and Clinton blamed much of the world’s troubles on the misdeeds of their country, under their stewardship of US foreign policy, the US would reset everything.

Around the globe, all bets were off.

Five years later we realize that Clinton’s embarrassing gesture was not a gimmick, but a dead serious pledge. Throughout the world, the Obama administration has radically altered America’s policies.

And disaster has followed. Never since America’s establishment has the US appeared so untrustworthy, destructive, irrelevant and impotent.

Consider Syria. Wednesday was the one-year anniversary of Obama’s pledge that the US would seek the overthrow of Syrian President Bashar Assad’s regime if Assad used chemical weapons against his opponents.

On Wednesday, Assad’s forces used chemical weapons against civilians around Damascus. According to opposition forces, well over a thousand people were murdered.

Out of habit, the eyes of the world turned to Washington. But Obama has no policy to offer. Obama’s America can do nothing.

America’s powerlessness in Syria is largely Obama’s fault. At the outset of the Syrian civil war two-and-a-half years ago, Obama outsourced the development of Syria’s opposition forces to Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Erdogan. He had other options. A consortium of Syrian Kurds, moderate Sunnis, Christians and others came to Washington and begged for US assistance. But they were ignored.

Obama’s decision to outsource the US’s Syria policy owed to his twin goals of demonstrating that the US would no longer try to dictate international outcomes, and of allying the US with Islamic fundamentalists.

Both of these goals are transformative.

In the first instance, Obama believes that anti-Americanism stems from America’s actions. By accepting the mantel of global leadership, Obama believes the US insulted other nations. To mitigate their anger, the US should abdicate leadership.

As for courting Islamic fundamentalists, from his earliest days in office Obama insisted that since radical Islam is the most popular movement in the Islamic world, radical Islam is good. Radical Muslims are America’s friends.

Obama embraced Erdogan, an Islamic fascist who has won elections, as his closest ally and most trusted adviser in the Muslim world.

And so, with the full support of the US government, Erdogan stacked Syria’s opposition forces with radical Muslims like himself. Within months the Muslim Brotherhood comprised the majority in Syria’s US-sponsored opposition.

The Muslim Brotherhood has no problem collaborating with al-Qaida, because the latter was formed by Muslim Brothers.

It shares the Brotherhood’s basic ideology.

Since al-Qaida has the most experienced fighters, its rise to leadership and domination of the Syrian opposition was a natural progression.

In other words, Obama’s decision to have Turkey form the Syrian opposition led inevitably to the current situation in which the Iranian- and Russian-backed Syrian regime is fighting an opposition dominated by al-Qaida.

At this point, short of an Iraq-style US invasion of Syria and toppling of the regime, almost any move the US takes to overthrow the government will strengthen al-Qaida. So after a reported 1,300 people were killed by chemical weapons launched by the regime on Wednesday, the US has no constructive options for improving the situation.

A distressing aspect of Obama’s embrace of Erdogan is that Erdogan has not tried to hide the fact that he seeks dictatorial powers and rejects the most basic norms of liberal democracy and civil rights.

Under the façade of democracy, Erdogan has transformed Turkey into one of the most repressive countries in the world. Leading businessmen, generals, journalists, parliamentarians and regular citizens have been systematically rounded up and accused of treason for their “crime” of opposing Turkey’s transformation into an Islamic state. Young protesters demanding civil rights and an end to governmental corruption are beaten and arrested by police, and demonized by Erdogan. Following the overthrow of the Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt last month, Erdogan has openly admitted that he and his party are part and parcel of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Obama’s approach to world affairs was doubtlessly shaped during his long sojourn in America’s elite universities.

Using the same elitist sensibilities that cause him to blame American “arrogance” for the world’s troubles, and embrace radical Islam as a positive force, Obama has applied conflict resolution techniques developed by professors in ivory towers to real world conflicts that cannot be resolved peacefully.

Obama believed he could use the US’s close relationships with Israel and Turkey to bring about a rapprochement between the former allies. But he was wrong. The Turkish-Israeli alliance ended because Erdogan is a virulent Jew-hater who seeks Israel’s destruction, not because of a misunderstanding.

Obama forced Israel to apologize for defending itself against Turkish aggression, believing that Erdogan would then reinstate full diplomatic relations with the Jewish state. Instead, Erdogan continued his assault on Israel, most recently accusing it of organizing the military coup in Egypt and the anti- Erdogan street protests in Turkey.

As for Egypt, as with Syria, Obama’s foreign policy vision for the US has left Washington with no options for improving the situation on the ground or for securing its own strategic interests. To advance his goal of empowering the Muslim Brotherhood, Obama pushed the Egyptian military to overthrow the regime of US ally Hosni Mubarak and so paved the way for elections that brought the Muslim Brotherhood to power.

Today he opposes the military coup that ousted the Muslim Brotherhood government.

The US claims that it opposes the coup because the military has trampled democracy and human rights. But it is all but silent in the face of the Muslim Brotherhood’s own trampling of the human rights of Egypt’s Christian minority.

Obama ignores the fact that Mohamed Morsi governed as a tyrant far worse than Mubarak.

Ignoring the fact that neither side can share power with the other, the US insists the Brotherhood and the military negotiate an agreement to do just that. And so both sides hate and distrust the US.

Wresting an Israeli apology to Turkey was Obama’s only accomplishment during his trip to Israel in March. Secretary of State John Kerry’s one accomplishment since entering office was to restart negotiations between Israel and the PLO. Just as the consequence of Israel’s apology to Turkey was an escalation of Turkey’s anti- Israel and anti-Semitic rhetoric, so the consequence of Kerry’s “accomplishment” will be the escalation of Palestinian terrorism and political warfare against Israel.

As Jonathan Tobin noted Wednesday in Commentary, to secure Palestinian agreement to reinstate negotiations, not only did Kerry force Israel to agree to release more than a thousand Palestinian terrorists from prison. He put the US on record supporting the Palestinians’ territorial demands. In so doing, Kerry locked the US into a position of blaming Israel once the talks fail. When the Palestinians escalate their political and terrorist campaign against Israel, they will use Kerry’s pledges as a means of justifying their actions.

The current round of talks will fail of course because like the Turks, the Syrians and the Egyptians, the Palestinians are not interested in resolving their conflict.

They are interested in winning it. They do not want a state. They want to supplant Israel.

Clinton’s Reset button was played up as a gimmick. But it was a solemn oath. And it was fulfilled. And as a result, the world is a much more violent and dangerous place. The US and its allies are more threatened. The US’s enemies from Moscow to Tehran to Venezuela are emboldened.

The time has come to develop the basis for a future US policy that would represent a reset of Obama’s catastrophic actions and attitudes. Given the damage US power and prestige has already suffered, and given that Obama is unlikely to change course in his remaining three years in power, it is clear that reverting to George W. Bush’s foreign policy of sometimes fighting a war on nebulous “terrorists” and sometimes appeasing them will not be sufficient to repair the damage.

The US must not exchange strategic insanity with strategic inconsistency.

Instead, a careful, limited policy based on no-risk and low-risk moves that send clear messages and secure clear interests is in order.

The most obvious no-risk move would be to embrace Israel as America’s most vital and only trustworthy ally in the region. By fully supporting Israel not only would the US strengthen its own position by strengthening the position of the only state in the Middle East that shares its enemies, its interests and its values.

Washington would send a strong signal to states throughout the region and the world that the US can again be trusted.

This support would also secure clear US strategic interests by providing Israel with the political backing it requires to eliminate Iran’s nuclear program. Moreover, it would bring coherence to the US’s counter-terror strategy by ending US support for Palestinian statehood. Instead, the US would support the institution of the rule of law and liberal norms of government in Palestinian society by supporting the application of Israel’s liberal legal code over Judea and Samaria.

Another no-risk move is to support former Soviet satellite states that are now members of NATO. Here, too, the US would be taking an action that is clear and involves no risk. Russia would have few options for opposing such a move. And the US could go a long way toward rebuilding its tattered reputation.

Low risk moves include supporting minorities that do not have a history of violent anti-Americanism and are, in general, opposed to Islamic fascism.

Such groups include the Kurds. In Syria, Iraq, Turkey and Iran, the Kurds represent a national group that has proven its ability to self-govern and to oppose tyranny. With certain, easily identified exceptions, the stronger the Kurds are, the weaker anti-American forces become.

Then there are the Christians. The plight of the Christians in the Islamic world is one of the most depressing chapters in the recent history of the region. In country after country, previously large and relatively peaceful, if discriminated against, Christian minorities are being slaughtered and forced to flee.

The US has done next to nothing to defend them.

Strong, forthright statements of support for Christian communities and condemnations of persecution, including rape, forced conversions, massacre, extortion and destruction of church and private Christian-owned property from Egypt to Indonesia to Pakistan to the Palestinian Authority would make a difference in the lives of millions of people.

It would also go some way toward rehabilitating the US’s reputation as a champion of human rights, after Obama’s embrace of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Under Obama, America has made itself worse than irrelevant. In country after country, it has become dangerous to be a US ally. The world as a whole is a much more dangerous place as a consequence.

Nothing short of a fundamental transformation of US foreign policy will suffice to begin to repair the damage.

Don’t rescue the Muslim Brotherhood

Ever since President Obama came to office, his administration has cultivated relations with, legitimated, emboldened, empowered, funded and even armed the Muslim Brotherhood.  This policy has amounted to our changing sides in what is best described as the War for the Free World.

As documented in a free online, video-based course I produced last year (www.MuslimBrotherhoodinAmerica.com), one of the factors behind this strategically disastrous – and largely unnoted – reversal is the success the Brotherhood has had, going back at least to the Clinton administration, in penetrating and running influence operations against our country.  The Brothers call it “civilization jihad.”  And it has enabled them to establish not only an array of front groups to insinuate themselves into American civil society institutions and governing agencies.  It has also largely obscured the true nature of this organization and the threat it poses to our nation, allies and interests.

The success of such patient, stealthy subversion is much in evidence at the moment in the response to events in Egypt on the part of some prominent Democrats and Republicans, alike.  In recent days, President Obama and Senators like Jack Reed, Democrat of Rhode Island, and Republicans John McCain, Lindsay Graham and Kelly Ayotte of Arizona, South Carolina and New Hampshire, respectively, have discussed the need to cut off assistance to those in Egypt now battling the Muslim Brotherhood.

The principal justification offered for doing so is that the Egyptian people elected the Brotherhood to run their country after America’s longtime ally, Hosni Mubarak, was overthrown, with the support of the Obama administration.  It is further being intensified by the Brothers’ success in forcing the government to resort to violence to establish order throughout Cairo and other cities.

The trouble is that the bloodshed now taking place in Egypt – including that of Christians at the hands of Islamists who have torched or otherwise damaged more than eighty churches in recent days – is just a foretaste of what is to come if we do as the aforementioned leaders have in mind and rescue the Muslim Brotherhood.  And some of that blood will inevitably be ours.

This unhappy prospect is inevitable because of a fact obscured by the Brotherhood’s successful influence operations, and ignored at our peril:  We know for a fact that the Muslim Brotherhood has as its mission the worldwide imposition of Islam’s toxic, brutally repressive and anti-constitutional supremacist doctrine known as shariah.  And yes, it means here, too.

Lest there be any confusion on that point, consider the 1991 mission statement of the Muslim Brotherhood in America: “It is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within…sabotaging its miserable house from within…by [our] hands and the hands of the believers so that God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.”  The strategic plan from which this passage comes was introduced into evidence during the successful 2008 federal prosecution of Muslim Brotherhood operatives in Dallas, Texas in connection with their fundraising in this country for the organization’s Palestinian franchise: the designated terrorist organization known as Hamas.

Senators McCain and Graham have also provided bipartisan political cover to the Islamists’ efforts to takeover other countries, as well.  These include, notably, Libya and Syria.  The former has been a debacle of the first order; the murderous attack on our missions and personnel in Benghazi is but a taste of what is to come there and beyond.  And these lawmakers are working with Team Obama to inject the United States into the latter’s civil war, with the predictable practical effect of helping the Brotherhood and/or al Qaeda take over that country next.

As in these other places, if the Muslim Brotherhood’s American friends have their way in Egypt – most immediately, by cutting off U.S. aid or other ties to its military – the killing will not stop.  It will, instead, mean those dying will increasingly be people who have historically looked to us as allies and partners.  And they will be dispatched by jihadists bent on our destruction, as well.

It seems the military and tens of millions of ordinary citizens in Egypt have no intention of rolling over, as their counterparts have done in Turkey.  In that case, an Islamist regime has used elections to destroy democracy and institute an increasingly shariah-compliant order – complete with the incarceration on trumped-up charges of much of the leadership of the Turkish armed forces.  Having tried and failed to effect a similar transformation in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood seems now determined to crush its opponents through full-scale civil war.  Were the United States to cut off Egypt’s military, it would simply encourage and perhaps enable the Muslim Brotherhood to pursue that course.

Even worse from our point of view, the United States will likely drive the Egyptian military back into the arms of the Russians – and possibly this time the Chinese – folks who would love to displace us and secure close relations with a nation that sits astride the strategic Suez Canal.  These are, after all, countries now seen, unlike America, to be reliable allies, not fair-weather friends.

The Muslim Brotherhood is our enemy.  Insisting on its restoration to power – either immediately or through another round of premature elections – will be perilous for this country and for people in Egypt and elsewhere who do not want to submit to the Islamists and their anti-freedom shariah agenda.

Crushing the Brotherhood

Egyptian authorities are clearing the Muslim Brotherhood from the areas of Cairo the Islamists have occupied to protest the country’s liberation from their misrule.

It’s predictable that the result will be horrific images and narratives of the killed and wounded – losses that will, inevitably, be replicated across Egypt.  After all, in previous confrontations with the security forces, the Brotherhood reportedly shot some of their own in order to create victims and martyrs for the cause, and undermine support for the new interim regime.

The Islamists are counting on friends in the Obama administration and Republican Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham to seize upon this violence to save the Muslim Brotherhood.  As the Brothers’ stated mission is to “destroy Western civilization from within,” we should do nothing of the sort.

Bolton: Support Egyptian Military if it Wants to Outlaw the Muslim Brotherhood

The United States has been “asleep at the switch” while facing a growing threat from Al Qaeda over the past few years, according to former US Ambassador to the UN John Bolton.

“I think it’s clear that not only is Al Qaeda not on the run as the President has told us all last year and even the year before, it’s growing in strength. It looks like a different kind of organization, but all organizations evolve, including this one,” Bolton said on Monday’s Secure Freedom Radio.

While Bolton approves of the US embassy closures in light of increased terrorist chatter, he says it is important to take into account the larger political context of the decision.

“The breadth of these embassy and consulate closures is unprecedented in my memory, and I’ve racked my memory to see if we’ve ever done anything like this and I don’t think we have,” he says. “The conclusion should be not what this particular closure means but what five years of the Obama administration have meant for America’s place in the Middle East and North Africa.”

One of the major failings of Obama’s policy in the region has been his response to the Muslim Brotherhood, according to Bolton.

The Muslim Brotherhood “is not engaging in election campaigns to foster democracy in Egypt, but to gain power which it never intends to relinquish. So when you treat the Brotherhood as just another political party, you’re fundamentally playing their anti-democratic game,” says Bolton. “I think the Obama administration, and many on the Republican side too, just don’t understand that.”

“I would outlaw the Brotherhood, if that’s what the interim government decided to do in Egypt. I think we should support them,” Bolton concludes.

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The Mosque: Center of Religion, Politics and Dominance

Islamic-style authoritarianism is the dominant characteristic shared by both the military and the Muslim Brotherhood, theocrats and non-theocrats: one or the other must be dominant. The cannot share power. One side or the other must come out on top. Both of these conflicts, in Syria and Egypt, are, at their base, about the inseparability of Mosque and State in Islam, and the burning zeal of those believers who have no tolerance for Arab and Muslim regimes they see as allowing the two to function apart.

News reports out of Syria are airing graphic footage of extensive interior damage to the historic Khalid Ibn Al-Walid Mosque in Homs. Syrian government troops, backed by Hizballah fighters, captured the mosque from Free Syrian Army (FSA) forces on July 27, 2013 in heavy fighting that has engulfed the northern Homs neighborhood of Khaldiyeh.

Although the mosque holds little strategic value to the Sunni rebels, it holds great symbolic status as the centuries-old mausoleum of Khalid Ibn Al-Walid, revered by Muslims as a companion of Muhammad, as well as commander of the Islamic military forces that conquered Syria after the defeat of the Christian Byzantine forces at the 636 CE Battle of Yarmouk. Syrian television footage showed the dome of the mausoleum had been knocked out in the recent fighting, causing heavy fire damage to the interior, with debris strewn across the floor. Clearly, the mosque assault by Syrian forces loyal to the Alawite regime of Bashar al-Assad, with back-up support from Shi’ite Hizballah, was intended to incite intra-Islamic sectarian rage from the Sunni rebels.

The extent to which that objective will now be met remains to be seen, but is reminiscent of the February 22, 2006 bombing of the great golden-domed Shi’ite Askaria Mosque in Samarra, Iraq, by al-Qa’eda elements, under the command of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. That carefully-calculated outrage is credited with igniting a savage multi-year civil war in Iraq, which, tragically, appears to be breaking out anew: July 2013 attacks on mosques and worshippers have killed at least 700.

Unfortunately, Iraq and Syria are but the current-day iterations of a 1,300-year-old blood feud over who has the greater legitimacy to rule over the Islamic ummah [Nation of Islam]: Shi’ites or Sunnis. After the 632 CE death of Islam’s traditional founder, the companions and bloodline descendents of Muhammad disagreed—vehemently—over whom should be granted the allegiance of his followers, with all the power the position of Caliph entailed. Then, as now, there was never any question about invoking the consent of the governed, or acknowledging the status or natural worth of the individual, to contribute to the political functioning of the Islamic state. As described so starkly by the Greek-American political scientist P.J. Vatikiotis, and cited here by Andrew Bostom, the essentially authoritarian, autocratic ethos of Islam “may be lasting, even permanent,” and shackles its adherents to an endless “No Exit” cycle of coup, counter-coup, revolution and oppression. Shi’ite and Sunni are doomed to internecine combat over the centuries because both Islamic sects are bound to an ideology based on dominance, not good faith mutual concessions or participatory collaboration. The name of this power-obsessed ideology is Islam. As a belief system, it is deeply bound up with the compellingly spiritual dimensions of Islam and cannot be separated from them, but nevertheless, as ideology, prioritizes the political dimensions.

The Islamic forces shredding each other in Syria are fighting at one of the top levels of what Philip Carl Salzman called “balanced opposition” in his compelling 2007 book, “Culture and Conflict in the Middle East.” That level is intra-Islamic: between the Shi’ite-backed Assad regime, whose ability to cling to power even this long is directly due to the massive support from Shi’ite Iran and its Shi’ite terror proxy, Hizballah; and the Sunni rebel militia forces that count Sunni Gulf states such as Qatar and Saudi Arabia, plus Turkey and the U.S., in their corner.

Virtually all sides in Syria (excepting only the Kurds and the outnumbered pro-democracy forces within the FSA) see things from a “zero-sum-game” theological perspective: whichever side wins is expected to unleash holy genocide on every other group not aligned with it. Ethnic Christians in Syria are already the victims of what Nina Shea, director of the Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom, has called “ethno-religious cleansing.”

Deeply rooted in pre-Islamic tribal social structures, some of the most primitive of all human drives—to conquer and dominate by force—were brilliantly sacralized in Islamic doctrine. With assassination, banditry, genocide, hatred-of-other, polygamy, rape, pillage, and slavery all divinely sanctioned in scriptures believed to be revealed by Allah himself, the world is not likely to see an end to Islam’s “bloody borders” or “bloody innards” any time soon. In the traditional Arab and Muslim system, there is just too much at stake for those who win, as well as those who lose. There is no such thing as a “win-win” concept in Islam.

Events in Egypt — where so far things have not deteriorated to the levels of carnage now seen in Iraq or Syria — have not reached their conclusion, perhaps not even their mid-point. Islamic-style authoritarianism is the dominant characteristic of governance shared by both the military and the Muslim Brotherhood, theocrats and non-theocrats: one or the other must be dominant. They cannot share power. There will be no coalition government or government of national unity. One side or the other must come out on top after the bloodletting is done (which could be a long time indeed). Neither will there be anything approaching genuine liberal democratic civil society in Egypt for possibly an even longer time. The foundational building blocks of civil society—individual liberty, freedom of belief and speech, genuine universal equality before the law, citizens’ participation in their own governance that goes beyond a mere ballot box exercise—are simply not there and cannot develop there as long as so many in Egypt remain in thrall to Islamic law (shariah), to which such concepts are anathema. Indeed, as Vijay Kumar wrote in his 2010 essay entitled, “The Muslim Mosque: A State Within a State,” “[c]entral to the Koran’s political mandates is prohibition of religious freedom and religious tolerance, along with denouncements of religions such as Christianity and Judaism.”

Unfortunately for Egypt’s Copts, other minorities, and the genuinely pro-democracy liberals, the trend in Egypt as well as the rest of North Africa for well over the last 1300 years has been unswervingly in the direction of the forces leading the Arab Islamic conquest. The colonialist, nationalist period of experimentation with Western styles of political systems (whether communism, fascism, or democracy) slipped right back to the status quo ante in the post-Nasser era, in which the default position is autocracy punctuated by outbreaks of rebellion and revolution.

Even given the recent, serious setback dealt the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the likelihood that the Brotherhood will stay down, become quiescent, or abandon its jihadist roots and objectives, is virtually non-existent. This is, at least in part, because it is not so much Islam or even shariah law that have been discredited, but rather the Muslim Brotherhood, the Morsi administration, and their ability to govern according to the Brotherhood slogan, “Islam is the solution.”

Turning back to the mosque as a center of military — as well as political and religious — activity in intra-Islamic fitna [upheaval], as in the case of the Khalid Ibn al-Walid Mosque in Homs, Syria, it is worth concluding with some consideration of the role the mosque, or masjid in Arabic, traditionally has played in these periodic convulsions within the Islamic world. According to Sam Solomon, a former Islamic jurist who was born a Muslim and trained in shariah for fifteen years before converting to Christianity, “Islam is not simply a religion. Islam is a socio-political system. It is a socio-political, socio-religious, socio-economic, socio-educational, socio-judicial, legislatic, militaristic system cloaked in, garbed in religious terminology.”

The masjid (its Arabic root means to prostrate, as in worship) is the place where shariah, believed to be the immutable law of Allah, is upheld and implemented. As such, it is the central structure in an Islamic society: it is a gathering place, place of worship, and a place for teaching Islamic doctrine—but also a base of operations, military operations, the command and control hub for the commanders of the Islamic armies to plan their next offensives in the incessant wars of conquest. They declared jihad [war in the cause of Islam] from the mosques. Official delegations from the tribes met at Islam’s early mosques; pledges of loyalty were given and accepted, alliances formed, and treaties proposed and signed. In this way, affairs of state were conducted in such mosques, underlining the intrinsically political nature of Islam from its earliest inception.

As Solomon points out in his 2007 monograph, “The Mosque Exposed,” because all Muslims are obligated to emulate Muhammad, modern mosques must model themselves on the first mosque the Muslim community established in Medina (after the 622 CE hijra [journey] from Mecca). Inasmuch as that original mosque was above all a political center, and only secondarily became the place for Muslim prayers, so to this day mosques serve multiple purposes: as places of worship, certainly, but also as centers of jihad, public policy, and shariah justice. As Yousef al-Qaradawi, the senior jurist of the Muslim Brotherhood, elaborated in a 2006 fatwa [answer to a question about religion],

“In the life of the prophet there was no distinction between what the people call sacred and secular, or religion and politics: he had no place other than the mosque for politics and other related issues. That established a precedent for his religion. The mosque at the time of the prophet was his propagation center and the headquarters of the state… From ancient times the mosque has had a role in urging jihad for the sake of Allah…”

Al-Qaradawi’s words echo those of Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan, who, speaking in 1997, quoted the words of a 1912 poem, “The Soldier’s Prayer,” written by a Turkish poet: “The minarets are our bayonets, the domes our helmets, the mosques our barracks and the faithful our army.”

Obviously, the Syrian forces attacking the Khalid Ibn al-Walid Mosque in Homs understood its role as the rebels’ base of operations as well as the symbolic value it held for them because of the mausoleum inside. For the pro-Morsi Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and its supporters, the Rabaa Al-Adawiya Mosque in the Nasr City suburb of Cairo is the protest rally point. Both of these civil conflicts are, at their base, about the inseparability of mosque and state in Islam, and the burning zeal of those believers who have no tolerance for Arab and Muslim regimes they see as allowing the two to function apart. As Muhammad Badi accused in his 2010 declaration of jihad against unfaithful Arab and Muslim regimes, “…they are disregarding Allah’s commandment to wage jihad for His sake with [their] money and [their] lives, so that Allah’s word will reign supreme…”

Syed Abul A’ala Maududi, another key theoretician of Islam, left no room for doubt about the nakedly political objectives of Islam:

“Islam wishes to destroy all states and governments anywhere on the face of the earth which are opposed to the ideology and program of Islam regardless of the country or the nation which rules it. The purpose of Islam is to set up a State on the basis of its own ideology and program.”

The Islamic mosque is the bricks and mortar institutionalization of those objectives.

Willful blindness, mortal peril

Diana West’s splendid new book, American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character, is an expose of a practice that she persuasively argues has cost us dearly in the past and endangers our future.  Former federal prosecutor-turned-pundit Andrew C. McCarthy calls it “willful blindness” and we indulge in it at our extreme peril.

Ms. West painstakingly documents how America’s government, media, academia, political and policy elites actively helped obscure the true nature of the Soviet Union.  She persuasively argues that such blinding began literally from the moment in November 1933 when Franklin Roosevelt normalized relations with the USSR in exchange for the Kremlin’s fraudulent promise to forego subversion against this country.

Ms. West came to this exhaustive research project by dint of her curiosity about the failure of such elites in our own time to recognize and counter today’s present danger: the Islamists and their shariah doctrine that some have described as “communism with a god.”  Several examples illustrate willful blindness in our time:

O Army Major Nidal Hassan, whose trial for the Fort Hood massacre finally begins this week, repeatedly signaled his intention to engage in such an act of jihad prior to gunning down his comrades.  Testimony is expected to show that officers in his chain of command refused to entertain such a possibility – and actually threatened the careers of those who had the temerity to warn of the violent mayhem this Islamist believed he must inflict, pursuant to shariah.

O Such dereliction of duty was compounded by a serious error by the nation’s first line of defense against such internal threats – the Federal Bureau of Investigations. Thanks to communications intercepts by the lately much-maligned National Security Agency (NSA), the FBI was aware that Hassan was being mentored about his duty under shariah by an al Qaeda-associated cleric then based in Yemen, Anwar al-Awlaki.  Yet, rather than move in on Hassan, the Bureau dismissed such counseling as nothing more than research for the major’s thesis at a U.S. military medical school.

O The FBI’s performance against such jihadists has been further hampered by the influence operations of Muslim Brotherhood-tied individuals and organizations who are now “inside the wire” of the U.S. government – in a manner all-too-reminiscent of the penetration of our governing and other institutions by Soviet agents during the 20th Century chronicled so brilliantly by Diana West.  The training materials of not only the Bureau, but the military, the intelligence community and homeland security agencies, have been purged of information that would help connect the dots between the supremacist Islamic doctrine of shariah and terrorism.

O Such self-imposed blinding about the enemy’s threat doctrine is dressed up as multicultural sensitivity and political correctness, aimed at not gratuitously giving offense to Muslims.  In fact, it amounts to submission to our enemy’s bid for what the U.S. military calls “information dominance.”  There seems little doubt that these sorts of imperatives contributed to the Bureau’s inability, despite some 14 hours of interviews with Tamerlan Tsarnaev, to discern the jihadist proclivities of a man who subsequently acted on them to perpetrate the Boston Marathon attack last April.

O Meanwhile, the Obama administration has throughout its tenure submissively aided the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, by legitimating, empowering, funding and even arming it.  While this public embrace has diminished somewhat since the Egyptian military responded affirmatively to popular demands for the overthrow of the Brotherhood regime of Mohammed Morsi, Team Obama insists that the avowedly anti-democratic Muslim Brotherhood nonetheless be allowed to participate in any future electoral process.

This has required a determined effort to ignore the true agenda of the Muslim Brotherhood, both there and here.  Particularly alarming are the findings of a detailed analysis by counter-terrorism expert Patrick Poole recently documented in the Middle East Review of International Affairs (http://www.gloria-center.org/2013/06/the-u-s-governments-disastrous-muslim-outreach-efforts-and-the-impact-on-u-s-middle-east-policy-blind-to-terror1/).  Poole documents how, time and again, one element of the U.S. government, under both this and previous presidents, “reached out” to Brotherhood figures and organizations, even as they or their associates were being investigated (and, in some cases, prosecuted) by other agencies for material support for designated terrorist groups, subversion or preparations for jihadist attacks.

O A particularly glaring example of willful blindness involves the almost complete suppression of information about Huma Abedin’s extensive Muslim Brotherhood ties.  Despite the incessant coverage of Mrs. Anthony Weiner on many other scores, there has, for example, been scarcely any discussion of her role as the State Department’s Deputy Chief of Staff in the Benghazigate scandal.   Hopefully, the report last week by CNN that 35 witnesses to the jihadist attack on the CIA annex are being actively suppressed, intimidated and pressured not to tell the Congress or the American people what happened on September 11, 2012 will lead, at last, to a proper investigation.  It must illuminate, among other things, the Abedin connection and Hillary Clinton’s serious misjudgment in giving a woman with such associations a succession of positions of trust over the past 16 years.

O Finally, the U.S. government has reportedly classified the thesis written by the new military leader and possible future president of Egypt, General Abdel Fatah Al-Sisi, during his time at the Army War College.  While Al-Sisi has, for the moment, routed the Muslim Brotherhood, according to an expert on the Egyptian armed forces, the Naval Postgraduate School’s Professor Robert Springborg: “[His] thesis goes beyond simply rejecting the idea of a secular state; it embraces a more radical view of the proper place of religion in an Islamic democracy.”  It won’t do to replace willful blindness about the tendencies of the past Egyptian leadership with self-imposed ignorance about those of its replacement.

Neither the American people nor those they entrust with their security can afford to engage in delusional fantasies about the enemies we face, at home as well as abroad.