Exposing the Muslim Brotherhood in America

Erick Stakelbeck, author of The Brotherhood: America’s Next Great Enemy on Fox News (Photo credit: ramparts360.com)

Erick Stakelbeck, host of the insomnia-inducing weekly Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) program, “Stakelbeck on Terror,” discussed his new book The Brotherhood: America’s Next Great Enemy in a whirlwind Capitol Hill lunch briefing sponsored by the Endowment for Middle East Truth (EMET) on July 25, 2013. Stakelbeck, a well-recognized expert on terrorism and national security issues, quickly connected the dots from the current rapid spread of the Muslim Brotherhood and Islamic domination across the Middle East and North Africa to the spread of power and influence of the Muslim Brotherhood across the United States. He warned that the ongoing effort of the Obama Administration to nurture and engage so-called “moderate” Islamists such as the Brotherhood, whether at home or abroad, was “disastrous policy.”

Having spent eleven years meeting with leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood (also known as the Ikhwan) all over the world, Stakelbeck spoke with authority and a deep sense of urgency. He began by explaining the significance of the Egyptian people’s overthrow of Muslim Brotherhood President Mohamed Morsi and how, instead of supporting the people in their struggle to overcome tyranny and bring about true democracy, the U.S. government is now stopping support — support that was given freely when Egypt was under the thumb of an Islamic president. This is symptomatic of current U.S. policy concerning Islam, and Stakelbeck promised that he would explain how the United States has arrived at this position.

Stakelbeck warned that even with the forceful ouster of Morsi, “the Muslim Brotherhood will not go quietly.” They have waited 80 years for this kind of power, and they are not going to willingly relinquish it because of the Egyptian People’s Revolution. He quoted the Brotherhood’s motto: 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 goal.  Not really an inducement towards admitting defeat and waiting until their next turn at the ballot box.

The Brotherhood was born because its founder, Hassan al-Banna, was outraged by the collapse of the Islamic Caliphate with the disbanding of the Ottoman Empire in 1924, Stakelbeck explained. Al-Banna’s grandson, the darling of the Left, Tariq Ramadan, has insisted to Stakelbeck, as he has to so many others, that his grandfather was against violence. But in his book The Brotherhood, Stakelbeck shows that from the beginnning al-Banna was a jihadist with the goal of tranforming Egypt into an Islamic state “en route to reviving this global caliphate and glories of Islam’s heyday.”

Shockingly, and eerily similar to the spread of Islamism today, the Muslim Brotherhood began with only seven members, and twenty years later it boasted anywhere from 1-2 million members around the world. During those years, it became evident that the Brotherhood was not just anti-Israel, but anti-Semitic. Stakelbeck quoted the group’s spiritual leader, the infamous Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who said that their battle was not just against the State of Israel, but against all Jews. Al-Qaradawi and al-Banna were both great admirers of Hitler. The Brotherhood collaborated with the Nazis, and Nazi agents funded al-Banna and his movement.

Stakelbeck described the spread of the Muslim Brotherhood around the world to some 80 countries. But he emphasized the group’s effect and influence on the United States. He declared that without the birth of the Muslim Brotherhood, there would have been no 9/11, no war on terror. “The Muslim Brotherhood is the gateway drug to Islamic terrorism and jihad,” Stakelbeck declared.

Although in 2010, Mohamed Morsi called America one of the Egypt’s enemies and called for a world-wide Muslim boycott of U.S. goods, Stakelbeck revealed that the Brotherhood does not treat American the same way that it has treated other enemies — primarily with violent jihad. Instead, it has been carrying on what has come to be known as a “stealth jihad” in the United States.

The U.S. government knows the Muslim Brotherhood’s intentions in America. The U.S. government “has had the Muslim Brotherhood strategic documents in its possession for almost a decade,” Stakelbeck said bluntly. He was referring to the Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America, written by a top Muslim Brotherhood leader connected to Hamas, Mohamed Akram Adlouni. The Explanatory Memorandum was discovered in 2004 in an FBI raid on the home of a Muslim Brotherhood/Hamas operative, Ismail Elbarrasse, in Annandale, Virginia.  The whole story of the raid is worthy of a spy novel, but Stakelbeck focused particularly on the stated purpose of the Muslim Brotherhood as explained in the document, and on how the Muslim Brotherhood has been working out that purpose ever since the Explanatory Memorandum was written.

Stakelbeck quoted from the Explanatory Memorandum:

The Ikhwan must understand that all 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 religions.

Reiterating that the U.S. government is aware of this strategy, Stakelbeck spoke of how some of the 29 Muslim organizations in America that are listed as the Brotherhood’s “allies in the grand jihad,” have had a policy-changing influence on a succession of U.S. administrations, and never more so than the Obama White House.

In recent years American Islamists, operatives of the Muslim Brotherhood, have “turned the White House ‘from a position hostile to Islamic groups and organizations’ to ‘the largest and most important supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood,” said Stakelbeck, quoting a December 2012 article in an Egyptian magazine. He also talked about Muslim Brotherhood operatives such as Imam Mohamed Magid, President of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), who is an adviser to the Department of Homeland Security’s task force on countering violent extremism and of course has managed to make the focus of the group countering violent extremism against Muslims.

Stakelbeck brought some disturbing facts to light. He said that the Brotherhood operatives “are gatekeepers at America’s mosques.” They are turning radical mosques that used to be moderate and are building enormous Islamic centers in areas  in which the smallish Muslim population hardly seems to justify them. But this is what Stakelbeck called “the enclave effect.” He said that when people move out, more and more Muslims move in, with the vision of establishing a No-Go zone under Sharia. The Muslim Brotherhood compares the mosques to “beehives” Stakelbeck said, and their slogan is “mosques, enclaves, victory” to describe how the building of more and more mosques will increase the Muslim enclaves and dominance over an area, which will bring victory for Islam. This strategy is already close to complete in Europe, although some Europeans have woken up to it and are trying to resist.

The briefing ended with Stakelbeck’s recommendations on how to “turn the tide” against the Brotherhood’s agenda and accomplishments. First, he said, the U.S. government should designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO). Second, all of the Muslim Brotherhood affiliated groups in America should be banned/shut down as being seditious and a threat to national security. Third, the U.S. should make sure that European governments know that the Muslim Brotherhood is an enemy of American interests. This could possibly give some of European leaders the backbone to turn the tide in their own countries. More recommendations are in the last chapter of his book.

Here’s another recommendation: Buy his book. Read it. Buy it for someone else. For several people. Some would call Stakelbeck an “Islamophobe,” but as he says in the conclusion of The Brotherhood, “as you might have guessed after reading the first few chapters, I could not have cared less.” For Stakelbeck there is too much is at stake to be politically correct. He says, “the America I grew up in is fading away before my eyes. For the sake of the country and my children, I refuse to be silent. We are entering dangerous times, and I would rather tell the truth boldly, while I still have the platform, and leave all the consequences to God.

Stakelbeck says that, “Our government and the mainstream media (and  many of the churches, F.M.) have checked out almost completely, and in many cases are running interference for the enemy.” Therefore, “If the long battle against Islamism is to be won, it will be won by what we, as concerned American citizens do.” With this book Erick Stakelbeck has done his part.