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Authors: Erick Stakelbeck

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The Brotherhood: America's Next Great Enemy (37 page)

BOOK: The Brotherhood: America's Next Great Enemy
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Haniyeh’s letter sounds like it could have been written by Michael Moore. In short, America is a militaristic bully, and its capitalist-imperialist system must be abolished. This is the kind of rhetoric that makes Occupiers swoon, especially when delivered by a non-white, “oppressed” Third Worlder like Haniyeh. And Haniyeh knows his audience: he intentionally avoids any mention of Islam lest he turn off Occupy’s decidedly irreligious rabble. In addition, the way he melds America and Israel as joint capitalist-imperialist oppressors of the Palestinian “struggle” (just as Anas al-Tikriti and his ilk have done in Britain) is seamless. And with his closing statement that conjures images of a unified global resistance— a revolutionary movement that transcends race or religion—he appeals directly to the “fight the power” ethos that is the very essence of the Left’s destructive, utopian fantasies.
In short, Haniyeh’s letter is pretty darn brilliant strategically, given its purpose: to rally American leftists who share Hamas’s disdain for America, Israel, and capitalism, making them useful idiots in the Islamist cause. What else would you expect from the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch?
Haniyeh wasn’t the first Islamic terrorist to use rhetoric designed to appeal to the American hard Left. While al-Qaeda was strangely silent on Occupy Wall Street, its leaders have weighed in on other pet leftist causes. In recent years, both current al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri and former AQ kingpin Osama bin Laden gave addresses blaming the United States for global warming, and Zawahiri not only railed against former President George W. Bush, the Iraq War, and the treatment of terrorists at Guantanamo Bay, he’s also slammed the United States as a hopelessly racist society and referred to Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice as “house slaves” working in the Bush administration.
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AMERICAN ISLAMISTS
 
On November 18, 2011, the New York branch of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), helped organize a Friday prayer rally and march in lower Manhattan to protest police surveillance of Muslims. Some five hundred Muslims gathered in Foley Square and were later joined by at least fifty members of Occupy Wall Street in marching on police headquarters and chanting for NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly’s firing. Protestors waved signs that read, “NYPD Watches Us. Who Watches NYPD?”
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CAIR, though it poses as a mainstream, moderate Islamic organization, is, as we’ve seen, a Hamas-linked group that was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the largest terrorism financing trial in American history. CAIR doesn’t like the United States in its current form. Ultimately, it would like the United States to be governed by sharia. So naturally, it gravitates to others who feel the same way—not about sharia, but about turning the existing order in America on its head. Hence, CAIR’s relationship with Occupy Wall Street.
A few weeks before the anti-NYPD rally, CAIR-NY helped lead a Muslim prayer service in Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park—the epicenter of Occupy Wall Street—complete with dozens of men in Muslim garb and women in hijabs chanting “We are the 99 percent.” According to the Investigative Project on Terrorism, the Muslim demonstrators also chanted, “American Muslims have to stand with Occupy Wall Street,” and portrayed themselves as victims of American racism and “Islamophobia.”
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It’s the kind of language the Left laps up—and Islamists know it. So it should have come as no surprise when a Muslim lawyer who’d worked on cases with CAIR turned up as a leader of Occupy Orlando.
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Occupy had been occupied.
CAIR was joined in its support for OWS by other well-known American Brotherhood front groups. The youth branch of the Muslim American Society (MAS)—an organization created by MB members—held an event in Zuccotti Park to stand in solidarity with “the protestors of Occupy Wall Street.” The MAS flyer for the event declared the group “members of the 99 percent” and claimed it was Muslims’ duty to “stand up against social and economic injustice.”
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Likewise, the Islamic Circle of North America—another radical Brotherhood front closely linked to MAS—released a November 2011 press release in support of Occupy Wall Street that invoked classic leftist class warfare rhetoric:
Real progress and development of a country depends on prosperity of society as a whole, not just that of a selected portion of society. Yet the income gap between the rich and the poor continues to grow, and uneconomic recovery across the country has been uneven and unstable at best. Corporations are ruthlessly cutting jobs, leaving 10% of the entire population unemployed while Wall Street enjoys huge bonuses.
A report... by the Congressional Budget Office found that the average after-tax income for the top 1 percent of U.S. households had increased by 275 percent over the past three decades. Middle-income households saw just a 40 percent rise. For those at the bottom of the economic scale, the jump was 18 percent.
Despite government aid during the credit crisis, banks have been indifferent to the suffering of distressed homeowners and have made it extremely difficult to refinance homes. They have also restricted credit to small and mid-size businesses, essentially forcing them to close. Any attempt to improve the situation has been shot down by the Wall Street sponsored lobby.
ICNA sympathizes with the message of Occupy Wall Street protesters and supports their cause. These protesters are raising legitimate concerns regarding income disparity, unemployment and the state of our economy that cannot be ignored. As American Muslims we stand in solidarity with them across the country.
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Sounds a lot like the campaign ads run by the Obama administration during the 2012 election. Yet it was written by an Islamist organization that considers the Left as a bunch of godless infidels and libertines. Go figure.
Islamists weren’t alone in pledging their full-throated support for Occupy Wall Street. A comprehensive list of Occupy boosters compiled by the conservative website Pajamas Media revealed that virtually every nefarious anti-American, anti-freedom dictatorship or movement you can think of lined up behind OWS. The list includes the North Korean regime, the Chinese Communist Party, the late Venezuelan tyrant Hugo Chavez, Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, the Communist Party USA, the American Nazi Party, and ex-Klansman David Duke, among others.
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From black separatists to white separatists, from Reds to brownshirts, from Marxists to Muslim extremists, all can agree on one thing: they
are
the 99 percent; they eagerly joined President Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Joe Biden as supporters of the Occupy movement.
Interestingly, they offered no such support for the Tea Party movement. CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad, for example, said in 2010 that, “the Tea Party and the Republican Party have given the green light for . . . people to defame and stereotype Muslims, and . . . these have led to violence against Muslims.”
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If you haven’t heard of Tea Party violence against Muslims, that’s because there wasn’t any. But the reason why Islamists can come together with Occupiers and not Tea Party folks is because the Tea Partiers love America, venerate the Constitution and free markets, and want to make America stronger and more prosperous; the Occupiers hate America, loathe the free market, want to weaken the United States, overthrow capitalism, and divide the spoils among themselves. Islamists hate capitalism as much as any socialist Occupier does, because they seek to install a global Islamic financial system based on sharia precepts. Additionally, the Islamists and the radical Left both regard the United States—the standard bearer and chief protector of Judeo-Christian Western Civilization—as the Great Satan that must be destroyed.
So the next time you’re tempted to scratch your head when you see Islamic totalitarian Mahmoud Ahmadinejad linking arms with secular Latin American Marxists, just remember: the enemy of my enemy is my friend. This phrase has never been more fitting than in the case of the alliance between hardcore Islamists and the hardcore Left. These two disparate, destructive factions certainly don’t agree on everything, but they certainly do agree that the United States, its military, its Constitution, its capitalist economic system, its ally Israel, and its observant Jews and Christians are enemies to be destroyed.
I’ve seen this combined leftist-Islamist hatred of America and Israel, Christians and Jews, up close on a few occasions, most memorably, in a speech I delivered at Portland State University in May 2012. The PSU chapter of Christians United for Israel (CUFI), which had invited me to speak, placed posters around campus to promote the event. The posters featured American and Israeli flags, plus my picture. A few days prior to the event, the posters were vandalized, with pro-Palestinian slogans and swastikas scrawled over the Star of David. Other flyers around campus were torn down.
That was just a foretaste of what I would experience at the event. As I prepared to speak, more than fifty demonstrators filed into the room with masking tape over their mouths as a “silent protest” against lil’ ol’ me. According to a mass email that was sent out by a pro-Palestinian student group on the night before my appearance, I was a “fundamentalist, right-wing pundit” whose “racism,” “hatred,” “Islamophobia,” and “intolerance” were not welcome at Portland State University. But apparently, defacing the Star of David with swastikas is perfectly acceptable.
My direct and immediate challenge to the protestors to debate me on the facts went unheeded. Instead, they stood up in unison and filed out of the room about twenty-five minutes into my speech, with a few waving anti-Israel signs and shouting mindless slogans about Israeli “apartheid” as they left. So the protest itself was completely ineffectual. But the makeup of the protestors was revealing: hijab and skullcap-clad Muslims, obviously very serious about their Islam, flanked by aging, tie-dyed ex-hippies and smarmy young leftists who looked like refugees from the local Occupy camp. It was the worst of both worlds and a telling sign of where things are headed.
These two divergent groups had joined together at PSU not because of any genuine camaraderie but due solely to their shared hatred for America, Israel, observant Jews, and professing Christians. Their protest was peaceful this time, but another taste the Islamists and the radical Left share is the taste for violence. Not only did the radical Left give a pass to the communist regimes of the twentieth century that killed about 100 million people—because you can’t make a progressive utopian omelet without breaking a few eggs—but leftist radicals take it for granted that their causes merit violence, almost as much as any Islamist does.
Here on American soil, we saw the Weather Underground movement murder civilians and carry out terrorist attacks against U.S. government targets during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s in the name of the same sort of revolutionary Marxism that the Occupiers espouse today. That’s the same Weather Underground, incidentally, that boasted Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn among its ranks. If those names don’t ring a bell, they should. In 1995, the two former domestic terrorists—now comfortably ensconced as college professors and still unrepentant about their crimes—held a fundraiser for Barack Obama at their Chicago home that marked the beginning of his foray into politics.
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The radical Left has a weakness for certain sorts of murderers. When disgruntled former LAPD officer Christopher Dorner went on a killing spree in February 2013—murdering four people, including two police officers, before dying himself during a standoff with police—he was cheered by Occupy Los Angeles, which posted a photo of the cold-blooded murderer on its official website with the caption, “Rest in Power Chris Dorner: Assassinated by The Police for Trying To Expose LAPD Corruption.”
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BOOK: The Brotherhood: America's Next Great Enemy
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