Amid the steady stream of reporting on U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed’s connections to the Muslim Brotherhood — and El-Sayed’s protests that any questions about those ties are bigoted and out of bounds — many are unaware of why the ties matter. Here are five critical things about the Muslim Brotherhood every American should know.
Global Conquest
The Muslim Brotherhood has a takeover of the world as a publicly stated goal. The man who founded the group in 1928, Hassan al-Banna, stated that “it is the nature of Islam to dominate, not to be dominated, to impose its law on all nations and to extend its power to the entire planet.” The group’s motto is “Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. The Quran is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.”
More specifically for Americans, a 1987 Muslim Brotherhood document titled “An Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Brotherhood in North America” stated that Brotherhood operatives “must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated, and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.” As Peter Schweizer pointed out, the memo “specifically addressed … using migration as a weapon of subversion.”
Insidious Incrementalism
The Muslim Brotherhood is implementing Marxist Antonio Gramsci’s long march through the institutions, but the Islamic edition. The memorandum mentioned above describes a five-phase process for conquest in Islam through “settlement,” “establishment,” “stability,” enablement,” and “rooting.” In other words, the approach is not open war or (necessarily) terror-driven collapse but incremental conquest.
As former Muslim Ayaan Hirsi Ali explained in the aftermath of Osama bin Laden’s execution, “Unlike Al Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood has evolved and learned the hard way that the use of violence will be met with superior violence by state actors. The clever thing to do, it now turns out, was to be patient and invest in a bottom-up movement rather than a commando structure that risked being wiped out by stronger forces. Besides, the gradualist approach is far more likely to win the prize of state power.” Ali goes on to detail that this means gaining power or influence over schools, news outlets, laws, and societal norms and customs.
‘Islamophobia’ Immunity
The Muslim Brotherhood shields itself from scrutiny by deploying accusations of “Islamophobia,” bigotry, and racism. The Brotherhood and related organizations cast criticism and negative attention as stemming from anti-Muslim sentiment rather than their own actions.
A recent report on the Brotherhood’s campaign in Canada summarized the strategy this way:
The term “Islamophobia,” which originally described genuine anti-Muslim prejudice, was systematically stretched to encompass any critical examination of Islamist ideology, organizations, or funding networks, thus constraining academic inquiry, shaping journalism guidelines, and generating sustained pressure on security agencies to remove Islamist-specific terminology from training materials. Operationalized through North American advocacy groups and a network of allied organizations and sympathetic academic institutions, it became one of the Muslim Brotherhood’s most effective instruments for insulating the institutional web [Yusuf] al-Qaradawi and fellow Muslim Brotherhood leaders had built from the scrutiny it was designed to evade.
Ironically, El-Sayed has utilized this same strategy to go after opposing candidate Mike Rogers and others on the right who have question his associations, contorting these queries about political groups into attacks on his religion or his skin color.
9/11 Culpability
Multiple 9/11 terrorists were members of the Muslim Brotherhood. The al-Qaida “operational planner” and terrorist mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, joining the organization in Kuwait when he was a teenager. Mohamed Atta, the terrorist who guided American Airlines Flight 11 into the World Trade Center’s North Tower, was also reported to have been in the group, as noted by Schweizer in his book The Invisible Coup. Osama bin Laden was mentored by Abdullah Yusuf Azzam, who was a member of the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, and a senior al-Qaida leader stated that bin Laden was a Muslim Brotherhood member. A 2007 Council on Foreign Relations profile on bin Laden traced his radicalization back to the 1970s, when he “fell in with the Muslim Brotherhood, a radical group devoted to establishing a pan-Islamic state.
Red-Green Alliance
The Muslim Brotherhood has dangerous and unprecedented political opportunity because Democrats and Democratic Socialists of America are embracing Islamist groups and activists like never before. From New York to Paris to Michigan, leftists and Muslims are locking arms and forging a political alliance aimed at defenestrating conservatives and gaining a stranglehold on political power.
“The Red-Green Alliance is the most dangerous partnership in American politics, and the radical left is proud to be part of it,” Mike Davis, founder of The Article III Project, warned recently. “Communists want your country. Islamists want your faith. They hate America, and they’ve figured out they’re stronger when they march together.”
