The Terrorist Next Door (7 page)

No Islamist entity has seized upon the message sent by The Bow more than the Muslim Brotherhood—the first modern Islamic terrorist group and the Saudis' steadfast ally in the
mosqueing
of America. So at this point, let's undertake a brief introduction to the Brotherhood, which is the most important and influential Islamist movement in the world—yes, even more so than al-Qaeda—and which we'll be discussing frequently in this book.

The Muslim Brotherhood—also known as the
Ikhwan
or the Society of Muslim Brothers—was founded in 1928 in Egypt by a schoolteacher named Hassan al-Banna. A fervent Islamist with a deep-seated hatred of the West, al-Banna established the Brotherhood with the goal of re-joining
the entire Muslim world—or
ummah
—into one unified, Islamic state governed by sharia law. This global Islamic state, called the
caliphate
, had ended a few years earlier with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.

Al-Banna and his Brotherhood cohorts wasted no time getting down to the business of reestablishing it, starting at home. By 1951, with their ranks in Egypt swelled to some 2 million members,
²⁷
Brotherhood jihadists had committed a series of terrorist attacks and assassinations of Egyptian government officials. Al-Banna himself was assassinated in 1949, and Brotherhood members were forced to flee the country when Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser launched a bloody crackdown and ultimately banned the group. Most of the Brotherhood's leaders ended up in Saudi Arabia where, as we'll see, they soon forged an unholy alliance with the Saudi royals. From Saudi Arabia, many top Brothers then made their way to Europe and the United States during the 1960s and '70s—and they weren't coming for the ambience.

There are two critical facts related to the Brotherhood's impact on the West, both of which Western governments have willfully ignored in their embrace of the Ikhwan as “outreach partners.” First, the Brotherhood is the dean of all modern Islamic terrorist groups, having provided the ideological inspiration and blueprint for al-Qaeda, Hamas, and many of today's most violent jihadist outfits. Hamas, in fact, is the self-described Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. As for al-Qaeda, most of its senior leadership, including Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, belonged to the Brotherhood as young men,
²⁸
and Anwar al-Awlaki has spoken of the seminal Brotherhood ideologue Sayyid Qutb in glowing terms.
²⁹

Brotherhood leaders maintain that the group is non-violent. However, as exemplified by the terror campaigns the organization carried out in Egypt until Nasser's crackdown, the Brotherhood was specifically created as a terrorist organization. As noted by Brian Fairchild, a former CIA clandestine services officer and Brotherhood expert whom I interviewed in 2010, the Brotherhood “formed a nucleus with support from
Nazi Germany and the German military intelligence. And [the Nazis] actually helped create the Brotherhood's special section, known as the ‘secret apparatus,' as their military terrorist wing.”
³⁰

The Nazis, al-Qaeda, and Hamas. Boy, this Muslim Brotherhood sure keeps some interesting company.

The second salient fact about the Brotherhood is that its founding motto—the creed it lives by—is an undisguised call to establish global Islamic domination through violence. It states: “Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. Qur'an is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.”

The last time I checked, such a belief system was fundamentally incompatible with the U.S. constitution and with Western, Judeo-Christian civilization. This should be no surprise. Here is the Brotherhood's current global leader and Supreme Guide, Mohammed Badi, endorsing jihad against America in one of his weekly sermons in Egypt in September 2010:

Badi was just getting warmed up:

This was no less than a declaration of war against the United States by the leader of the world's most influential Islamist movement, one that boasts affiliates in 110 countries. But I'll bet the vast majority of leaders in America's intelligence and federal law enforcement communities never heard it. How could this be, you ask? Because those leaders and their bosses in the Obama White House do not believe the Muslim Brotherhood is a threat to U.S. national security; rather, they think that since the Ikhwan does not presently engage in violence on U.S. soil, they are a moderating force. Indeed, the prevailing view among Washington bureaucrats, as we'll discuss in greater detail later in the book, is that as long as you don't strap a bomb to yourself or openly call on others to do so, you can be “engaged” through dialogue. Therefore, they believe, the Brotherhood can be co-opted as a force for good and a counterweight to the
really
bad guys like al-Qaeda.

This is an incredibly shortsighted and naïve misunderstanding of the Islamist threat—and one that has enormous implications today, as one Arab regime after another is toppled, while in nearly every country a powerful Brotherhood group watches and waits. As we've seen, the Brotherhood shares the same goals as al-Qaeda and other violent jihadist groups: the imposition of Islamic sharia law worldwide and the reestablishment of the caliphate. Yes, the Brotherhood and al-Qaeda have different strategies for getting there: al-Qaeda pursues a short-term,
win now
strategy through violence and terror, while the Brotherhood has a more patient, long-term strategy: infiltrate a society, then conquer it from within. But again, while the tactics may be different, the endgame is unquestionably the same.

So it should come as no surprise that the Brotherhood was quickly able to put aside whatever differences it had with the Saudi royal family to further its ultimate goal: the Islamization of the West. My friend
Patrick Poole, a dogged investigative journalist and one of America's top experts on the Muslim Brothers, explained the Brotherhood's baleful influence on worldwide Islam on the
Stakelbeck on Terror
show in September 2010:

So the Saudis provide the money to build the mosques, and Brotherhood operatives and sympathizers organize and facilitate the on-the-ground apparatus: imams, literature, meetings, youth groups, guest speakers, and educational seminars, all with an anti-Western, Islamic supremacist bent that pleases the financiers back in Riyadh. Nearly all of the many U.S. mosques I've visited feature pamphlets or some kind of literature by Muslim Brotherhood-connected groups like the Muslim American Society (MAS), Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), or the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). Of course, some of the literature I've obtained in U.S. mosques, including Korans, was actually printed in Saudi Arabia.

Another Brotherhood-inspired phenomenon I have seen repeatedly in my investigations, from Oklahoma to Ohio and from London to Austria, is that when a huge Islamic center is built (usually in spite of heated local opposition), it serves as a magnet for Muslims from surrounding communities. In essence, the new mega-mosque marks an area as Muslim
territory. Suddenly, more and more Muslims either resettle around the new mosque or become regular commuters there. Muslim-owned shops pop up around the structure with signs written in Arabic. Women in veils and men in traditional Islamic garb become regular sights in the neighborhood. Longtime non-Muslim residents feel uncomfortable and move out, the Muslim call to prayer echoing in their ears as they depart a neighborhood they no longer recognize. More Muslims move in.

And voila! Suddenly you have a mini-Islamic enclave in your town, with the multi-million-dollar mosque serving as the centerpiece. Perhaps down the line these self-segregating Muslim areas will also become selfgoverning, with sharia law enforced. Many Americans can't envision this happening here, but just a few decades ago, not many Europeans could imagine such a phenomenon occurring in their cities, either. Yet that's exactly what's happening today throughout Europe, where many Muslim neighborhoods are no-go zones for the police. As we'll see in a later chapter, some Muslim areas of Great Britain even have their own fully functioning sharia courts to resolve local disputes.

All this is part of the Brotherhood's framework for the West: establish Islamic power bases over a wide geographical area, and above all, do not assimilate into the surrounding infidel culture. It's a long-term plan for domination that has been espoused by the Brotherhood's most influential modern-day figure, the radical Qatar-based cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi (a man, by the way, whom Imam Rauf has praised
³⁴
), who has said, “Conquest through Da'wa [proselytizing], that is what we hope for. We will conquer Europe, we will conquer America! Not through the sword but through Da'wa.”
³⁵

Will this strategy work in places like Murfreesboro that were previously impenetrable to Islam? It will, if the Obama administration has anything to say about it. In fact, the administration feels so strongly about the matter that the Civil Rights Division of its Department of Justice filed an amicus brief in October 2010 stating its “vigorous” support of the new Islamic Center of Mufreesboro.
³⁶
In addition to
injecting itself into a local issue, the DoJ willfully ignored the long, checkered history of mosques in the West, not to mention the radical links of the ICM's board members.

That's one reason why the Muslim Brotherhood is betting that in the long run, with the U.S. government's acquiescence, its plan for the West will succeed—one mosque at a time. And as the Brotherhood now faces a strong possibility of inheriting power, perhaps even democratically, in revolutionary Middle Eastern states like Egypt, they are becoming better positioned than ever before to implement their plan.

CHAPTER TWO

I
stood just a few feet from the men as they trampled upon the Israeli flag. First two guys, then three, then five, like sharks in the water, all jockeying for position as they tried to tear a chunk out of the Star of David. As my cameraman and I moved alongside them and filmed their outburst, I was struck by the singular focus of their rage. They weren't just stomping on the Israeli flag—they wanted to obliterate it with their feet until not a shred was left. Likewise, their chants of “Death to Israel” were delivered with pogrom levels of fervency and conviction. It was the kind of scene that plays out on a daily basis across the Middle East. Except this wasn't Tehran or Gaza—it was New York City.

The group behind the flag-stomping display calls itself the Islamic Thinker's Society, or ITS—a Queens-based collection of young, secondgeneration Arab and South Asian Muslims, plus a few converts, that calls for reestablishing a worldwide Islamic caliphate. It was February 2006, and I had come to New York City to watch a group of some twenty-five ITS members and hangers-on (their website had promised a much larger crowd) gather in front of the Danish Consulate, near the United Nations
building on Manhattan's east side, to protest cartoons published in a Danish newspaper featuring Islam's prophet, Mohammed. By that time, the “Mo-toons” had sparked worldwide Muslim rioting that resulted in dozens of deaths in countries like Afghanistan and Pakistan, and I was curious to see the tone of the ITS protest.