The Brotherhood: America's Next Great Enemy (10 page)

Read The Brotherhood: America's Next Great Enemy Online

Authors: Erick Stakelbeck

Tags: #Political Science / Political Ideologies / Conservatism & Liberalism

■ In April 2009 at the G-20 Summit in London, President Obama bowed to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia as other Western leaders looked on in shock. Heck, even Abdullah looked surprised. This was an act of full on, he-must-have-lost-a-contact lens prostration by an American president to an Islamist despot whose government has spent billions spreading radical Islamism around the world. As I wrote of “The Bow” in my 2011 book,
The Terrorist Next Door
:
Obama’s shameless act of groveling, performed in one of his first forays onto the international stage, signaled that debasing America and exalting Islam would be key elements in achieving his oft-stated goal of improving America’s image in the Muslim world.
. . . From Riyadh to London to Jakarta and beyond, Islamists saw Obama’s bow to Abdullah and smiled broadly. To them, The Bow—and the steady stream of pandering, pro-Islamic policies that have followed from the Obama White House—represented a green light to further expand their tentacles into the United States....
No Islamist entity has seized upon the message sent by The Bow more than the Muslim Brotherhood.
48
 
Indeed.
■ In June 2009, President Obama delivered his now-infamous Cairo speech, in which he, once again, apologized for America’s behavior toward the Muslim world and sought “a new beginning” between the U.S. and the Religion of Peace. The Obama administration reportedly “insisted” that at least ten Muslim Brothers (who were then in opposition to the Mubarak regime) be allowed to attend the speech at Cairo University.
49
Why would the Obama administration be so adamant that members of an openly anti-American, anti-Semitic Islamist organization be permitted to attend the event? Because the administration views the Brotherhood as authentic “moderate” Islam, even though the Ikhwan’s so-called “moderation” is a confessed front, a mere tactic.
During his Cairo address, the president also uttered this jaw-dropper: “I consider it part of my responsibility as President of the United States to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear.”
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I’m pretty sure that’s not what the Founders had in mind.
If only Obama, who has said—with a straight face—that “Muslims have suffered the most at the hands of extremism”
51
would be so passionate about the Christian minorities that the Muslim Brotherhood and its offshoots are harassing, torturing, and murdering throughout the Muslim world. As it stands, he and his allies in the mainstream media have been missing in action on one of the most pressing issues of our time: the wholesale emptying of Christians from the Middle East—the birthplace of Christianity—due to relentless Islamist persecution.
It is a phenomenon that has been sped up immeasurably by the so-called Arab Spring that the Obama administration has so steadfastly supported. In Egypt, in the post-Mubarak era, Christian churches are frequent targets of arson. In October 2011, a group of Cairo Coptic Christians protested the burning of one such church and were attacked by Egyptian security forces. More than a dozen Copts were killed. Video footage showed the Christian protestors not only being shot but even run over by armored personnel carriers.
52
President Obama’s risible response to the anti-Christian carnage was to issue a statement urging “restraint on all sides.”
53
Point taken. The next time Egypt’s Christians are dodging Islamist bullets or being crushed to death by Muslim security forces, I’m sure they’ll remember to exercise the proper “restraint.”
■ During a visit to India in 2010, Imam Obama issued one of his more memorable fatwas. While meeting with a group of university students in Mumbai, the president was asked his opinion on jihad, or Islamic holy war. Obama’s answer flew in the face of fifteen hundred years of carnage and conquest carried out by self-proclaimed jihadists. “The phrase jihad has a lot of meanings within Islam and is subject to a lot of different interpretations,” Imam Obama intoned.
“I think all of us recognize that this great religion in the hands of a few extremists has been distorted to justify violence towards innocent people that is never justified. And so, I think, one of the challenges that we face is, how do we isolate those who have these distorted notions of religious war.”
54
Oh, like the Muslim Brotherhood? The Brothers are the modern-day godfathers of those “distorted notions of religious war” the president mentions, yet are still invited to the White House and receive hundreds of millions in U.S. aid.
What the president left out of his comments in Mumbai was the bedrock belief that drives the Obama administration’s entire “countering extremism” strategy: violent al-Qaeda jihadists bad, MB stealth jihadists good. As for jihad, its primary meaning since Islam roared out of the Arabian Peninsula in the seventh century to conquer a good chunk of the known world has been “holy war,” not spiritual striving. Indeed, the people of India know jihad all too well. Untold millions of non-Muslim Indians died at the hands of Muslim jihadists between the seventh and twentieth centuries. More recently, in 2008, Mumbai—the city where Obama delivered his “jihad” remarks—was the scene of an Islamic terrorist rampage th at left 164 people dead and the world’s third largest city in utter chaos for days. Perhaps the president can bring along CIA Director John Brennan on his next trip to Mumbai. Brennan, who likes to refer to Jerusalem by its Arabic name, “Al-Quds,” has called jihad, “a legitimate tenet of Islam.” He’s also extolled Islam as a faith of “peace and tolerance,” of “goodness and beauty,” that has “shaped [his] own worldview.”
55
How do you say, “we’re in deep doo-doo,” in Arabic?
What was perhaps the most shocking—and disastrous—of all President Obama’s Islamo-panders occurred during his speech to the UN General Assembly on September 25, 2012. Just thirteen days after Islamic jihadists murdered four Americans in Benghazi, the president stood before the world’s leaders and uttered the now-infamous line:
“The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam. ”
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It was the kind of exhortation that you’d hear from a Wahhabi imam during Friday prayers in Mecca. Yet it came from the mouth of a sitting President of the United States—the supposed Leader of the Free World.
At the time of his UN speech, Obama and his team were in the middle of a scandalous effort to portray the Benghazi attack as a spontaneous reaction by Libyan locals to a little-seen, low-budget YouTube video lampooning Islam’s prophet (who must never be slandered). The video, called “The Innocence of Muslims” consisted of fourteen minutes of trailer clips put together by an Egyptian native living in California named Mark Basseley Youssef. The clips are so risibly produced, and the acting so remarkably bad, that it’s hard to believe anyone would watch it for thirty seconds without bursting out laughing. But as the Ayatollah Khomeini once said, “there is no humor in Islam.”
The clips were somehow discovered by the Muslim-world-at-large and sparked riots and protests from Pakistan to Gaza and beyond (it doesn’t take much to rile the followers of what columnist Michelle Malkin has dubbed, “The Religion of Perpetual Outrage”). In the process, Youssef’s video quickly became the Obama administration’s go-to scapegoat for the Benghazi attack and the storming of American embassies in Egypt, Yemen, and Tunisia during the anniversary week of the 9/11 attacks.
For example, according to the father of Tyrone Woods, a former Navy SEAL who was killed in the Benghazi assault, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in offering her condolences, told him that the administration would “make sure that the person who made that film is arrested and prosecuted.”
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Not the jihadists that murdered Tyrone Woods. No, a chubby, ex-con pseudo-filmmaker was apparently the main focus of the Obama administration’s post-Benghazi investigations. And they got their man: Youssef was promptly arrested, supposedly for unrelated probation violations, and sentenced to a year in federal prison.
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That’ll teach him not to slander the prophet of Islam.
It later emerged, of course, that the Benghazi incident was a well-coordinated jihadist assault that had nothing to do with any film (al-Qaeda training videos aside). Same with the other embassy attacks. But in classic, never-let-a-crisis-go-to-waste fashion, the Obama administration saw an opening to advance a growing push by the Muslim Brotherhood and its allies to outlaw so-called “hate speech” about Islam worldwide. Indeed, on the heels of “The Innocence of Muslims” debacle, Mohammed Morsi, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, and other Brotherhood leaders called for global laws that would make it illegal to insult Islam’s prophet Mohammed—including inside the United States. The Brotherhood bigwigs were echoed by American imams, including one in New Jersey who called for “limits and borders [on] free speech” when it comes to the Religion of Peace.
59
These Islamist calls for global “hate speech” laws regarding supposed defamation of religion have been gathering steam in recent years at the United Nations, courtesy of an organization called the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC). The OIC consists of fifty-six Muslim-majority countries plus the Palestinian Authority, all speaking with one powerful and influential voice at the UN. In addition to leading the push to delegitimize Israel on the world stage, the OIC is also the driving force behind efforts to criminalize free speech about Islam. In his 2012 book,
Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy
, author Andrew McCarthy writes:
Another Muslim Brotherhood brainchild made possible by Saudi funding, the OIC primarily seeks global recognition of the worldwide ummah as a single, supranational community, with the OIC as its sovereign and voice. It is well on the way to achieving that goal ... the OIC’s overarching aim is to Islamize societies through the gradual implementation of sharia standards. It would govern its subjects in accordance with classical sharia. It would also dramatically expand its domain beyond OIC countries by purporting to speak for Muslims
living in the West
.
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McCarthy calls the OIC, “a caliphate in the making.” Interestingly enough, when I asked the alleged leader of Germany’s Muslim Brotherhood, Ibrahim el-Zayat, about the possibility of reviving the caliphate, he answered, in part:
. . . if you look at the European Union now—you’ll see that Catherine Ashton [the EU Foreign Affairs chief] is quite powerless. But at the same time it could be a quite powerful position. But a structured position based on an organic structure with an institutional setting. This is what should be the future of the world. To have the United Nations become more powerful, more working, to have other entities.
 
El-Zayat provided an intriguing window into what some Islamists might be thinking as they continue their global march. The OIC could very well be one of the “other entities” he mentions and a vehicle for establishing a de facto caliphate that does not identify itself as such—and with the veneer of UN legitimacy, to boot. The leader of the OIC, depending on who it is, could then potentially be seen as a caliph-type figure. And voila! The Brotherhood and its allies would have a twenty-first century caliphate without the world even realizing what hit it.
It’s a safe bet, however, that the Obama administration won’t be surprised. In December 2011, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton hosted a three-day, closed-door conference with OIC leaders to discuss the possibility of implementing a UN resolution that would essentially establish guidelines on free speech about Islam and outlaw “Islamophobia” around the world.
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It’s no exaggeration to say that if the OIC—with the support of the Obama administration—has its way, books like the one you’re holding right now will be banned. Any coverage of Islam-related issues and the Middle East will be filtered through the Brotherhood—which means the truth about the MB and what it represents will never see the light of day.
CHAPTER THREE
 
A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE
 
T
he man they call “Islam’s Savior” appeared in desperate need of one.
Tariq Ramadan, darling of the European Left and arguably the West’s most influential Islamist, had just been informed that eight minutes still remained in our interview, which was scheduled to run a full half hour. He looked at me with a nervous, almost pleading smile and checked his watch, seemingly counting the seconds until he could bolt out the door and back into the warm embrace of his effete leftist admirers at Oxford University, where he’s comfortably ensconced as a professor of Contemporary Islamic Studies.

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