The Brotherhood: America's Next Great Enemy (19 page)

Read The Brotherhood: America's Next Great Enemy Online

Authors: Erick Stakelbeck

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

Yes, the MB and hardcore Salafists share the same ideology and have worked together frequently to achieve their mutual goals. That cooperation will only increase in the years to come, as the Salafists play a vital role as foot soldiers in the Brotherhood’s multi-pronged offensive in the Muslim world and beyond. But make no mistake: the Brotherhood will be the unquestioned leader and trendsetter of this Sunni Islamist surge. America’s next great enemy may be pure evil, but whether they’re hoodwinking Western governments or outpacing rival Islamist movements, they’re darn good at what they do.
CHAPTER FIVE
 
HATCHING HAMAS
 
I
stood in the midst of a hundred Hamas supporters as they touched their foreheads to the ground in unison.
It was noontime on Friday—prayer time in Sheikh Jarrah, a predominantly Palestinian Muslim enclave in eastern Jerusalem, just outside the Old City.
Veneration of Allah was now in full swing and since I was clearly not Palestinian and clearly not praying, I found myself on the receiving end of some rather unpleasant stares.
As an openly Christian journalist who has spent years on camera and in print supporting Israel and condemning Hamas by name, I can’t say it was the most comfortable situation I’ve ever been in. Ditto, I’m sure, for the two-man camera crew accompanying me—both of them Israeli.
By the time a stern-faced imam strode to the front of the crowd and began delivering a blistering sermon in Arabic, we felt a bit like guests at an elaborate feast where we were the main course.
In a decade-plus of covering the global Islamist movement, I had visited Friday prayers at dozens of mosques across the United States and Europe. This time, however, stood apart for two reasons. First, the setting was not a Muslim house of worship but the Jerusalem headquarters of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). And second, the throng of men in the street in front of the ICRC building had gathered for much more than prayers; they had come to pledge their full-throated support for three heroes of Hamas’s jihad against the hated “Zionist entity,” Israel.
Those same three Hamas parliamentarians now stood just a few feet away from me, holding court and greeting well-wishers under a makeshift tent they had set up on Red Cross property—with the apparent consent of ICRC officials.
By now, you’re probably wondering how three representatives from one of the world’s most notorious terrorist groups managed to set up shop on property owned by the world’s most renowned humanitarian relief organization. The short answer is that the ICRC, like many international bodies, has taken a fashionably leftist tilt, especially when it comes to Israel and its Muslim opponents.
My visit was in early 2011, but the Hamas “sit in” at the Red Cross had actually begun months before, when Hamas parliament members Khaled Abu Arafa, Mohammed Totah, and Ahmed Attoun showed up at ICRC headquarters and announced that they would be holding a protest.
The Israeli government had recently revoked the men’s residency cards because they were suspected of engaging in Hamas activity in Jerusalem and, when questioned, had refused to renounce their affiliation with the terror group. Membership in Hamas—an organization devoted to eliminating the Jewish State—is outlawed in Israel, for obvious reasons.
Their residency cards gone, Attoun, Abu-Arafa, and Totah were given until June 2010 to leave Israel. Instead, they turned up at the ICRC offices to draw international attention to their cause. A rather cagey move on their part, I have to admit. After all, theirs was the kind of narrative that sets hearts aflutter in EU circles and in the newsrooms of the BBC and
New York Times
(not to mention left-wing Israeli dailies like
Haaretz
)—entities that never miss a chance to portray Israel as heavy-handed and reactionary.
Sure enough, the “Hamas Three” found a willing host in the Red Cross. It was a safe bet. According to the respected Italian pro-Israel journalist, Guido Meotti:
The Red Cross is waging a “soft war” against Israel and the Jews. In 2001 Rene Kosirnik, head of the International Red Cross’s delegation to Israel, called the Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria a “war crime.”
The organization is serving as a mouthpiece for Palestinian propaganda against Israel on a variety of issues, including Israel’s security barrier aimed at preventing suicide attacks—and the blood libel of the 2002 battle in the Jenin refugee camp that the Red Cross described as a “massacre” (independent investigators subsequently found that no massacre was committed, rather 11 Israeli soldiers died in house to house fighting with terrorists because the IDF refrained from having the area strafed—this to avoid civilian casualties despite having warned residents to leave).
A case in point is how the Red Cross allocates budgets worldwide.
For all of North Africa, the Red Cross has one office in Tunis.
For “Israel/Occupied Territories/Autonomous Territories,” the Red Cross has offices in Jenin, Tulkarm, Nablus, Kalkilya, Ramallah, Jericho, Bethlehem, Hebron, Gaza, Khan Yunis, Majdel Shams, Jerusalem, and Tel Aviv.
During the Second Intifada, Red Crescent ambulances commonly served as “Trojan horses” to transport terrorists and weaponry through the “West Bank” and Gaza. . . .
1
 
In other words, the ICRC building in eastern Jerusalem might as well have hung a flashing neon sign out front that said “Jihadists Welcome.” Yet when one of my CBN colleagues interviewed ICRC spokeswoman Cecilia Goin, she was adamant that the Red Cross was not willfully providing the Hamas men a safe haven.
“This is a pure humanitarian activity that we are doing,” said Goin. “Pure humanitarian help to them. We don’t talk about politics—this is not the place of the [Red Cross].”
Of course, Goin then proceeded to make a blatantly political statement: “This is east Jerusalem, which is occupied territory,” she intoned. “This is something that has to be clear. And Israel is the occupying power... [the Hamas trio] are protected people living in East Jerusalem. So the Israeli authorities must respect the Geneva conventions, which they signed.”
Ladies and gentlemen, meet your new and improved non-partisan, non-political Red Cross!
According to Goin, under “international humanitarian law,” Attoun, Abu-Arafa, and Totah were “protected people” living in “occupied territory.” Her sympathy for their supposed plight is even more galling when you consider that for five and a half years, Hamas refused to allow the Red Cross access to visit kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit in Gaza. When the ICRC demanded proof from Hamas that Shalit was alive, a Hamas spokesman responded dismissively, saying, “The Red Cross should not get involved in Israeli security games aimed at reaching Shalit. It should take a stand that results in ending the suffering of Palestinian prisoners.”
2
That’s the real Hamas—the Hamas that demands safe haven from the Red Cross, but will not give it access to an Israeli hostage; the ruthless, murderous Hamas that has slaughtered hundreds, if not thousands, of Israelis and, yes, Palestinians as well. But when I approached Attoun, Abu-Arafa, and Totah under their tent at the ICRC as Friday prayers ended, they were all smiles. After all, I was accompanied by a cameraman and holding a microphone. Which meant, in their view, that like the countless other BBC, Reuters, and AP stooges they had no doubt encountered over the years, I was a “friendly” who would be sympathetic and allow them to air their grievances against Israel for a large audience.
The throng of Hamas supporters pressing against us—including children who kissed the three terrorists’ hands in deference—apparently agreed. Their earlier scowls turned to eager smiles once they realized that the tall, white infidel and his two friends were television journalists. When I told Mohammed Totah, the trio’s de facto spokesman, that I worked for CBN News he didn’t bat an eye. This was no surprise. I often joke that the various Islamists and jihadists I’ve interviewed must have assumed that CBN stood for “Chechen Broadcasting Network” when they agreed to speak with me.
The real answer, though, is that they simply can’t resist the lure of a camera and the opportunity to share their views and hopefully sway a naïve Western audience to their side. Sure enough, during our ten minute interview, Totah was in full victim mode, calling on the “international community” to rally behind him and his two comrades and condemn Israel for its unjust treatment of the Palestinians.
His answers were all pretty boilerplate and boring—which was exactly the intention. Every Islamist worth his seventy-two virgins knows that you say one thing to a clueless Western audience to garner sympathy and another thing entirely to an Arabic-speaking audience to incite the masses.
This clever tactic was on full display when I asked Totah if Hamas could ever recognize Israel’s right to exist. After all, Hamas’s founding charter—which we’ll examine shortly—clearly states that Israel must be “obliterated.”
Totah thought about it for a second, then answered: “The Israelis came in 1948 to our historical Palestine. They occupied 78 percent of our land. And in 1967 they occupied the other 22 percent. This is not acceptable and the international community must say so.”
Do the math and you’ll recognize that Totah and his Hamas brethren believe that every last inch of Israel is, in actuality, a nation called “Palestine” that is currently occupied by people who have no right to be there.
Totah’s own “right” to be on the grounds of the ICRC eventually came to an end. First, his partner-in-jihad, Attoun, was lured off the ICRC grounds and arrested by undercover Israeli police and then, after about a year and a half, Israeli police raided their tent and took Totah and Abu Arafa into custody. The Islamist circus at the Red Cross was finally closed.
You may be wondering why I’m spending so much time talking about Hamas—or the Islamic Resistance Movement—in a book about the Muslim Brotherhood. After all, while Hamas is identified by the U.S. government as a Specially Designated Terrorist Organization, rendering the group a diplomatic pariah, global Brotherhood leaders have been distinguished guests at the White House. And while Hamas sends suicide bombers and rockets against Israeli civilians on a regular basis, we’re told that the Brotherhood has abandoned its blood-soaked past and renounced violence. Plus, the Brotherhood and its offshoots exist, in Egypt and elsewhere, as freely elected political parties that actually govern nation-states, whereas Hamas today “governs” only the cramped, seething cauldron of Gaza.
For now, at least, the view in Brussels, Foggy Bottom, and on the Beltway cocktail circuit is that the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas are completely different animals with little common ground: one is supposedly respectable, reasonable, and open to dialogue while the other—although we are assured it has legitimate grievances and is acting only out of desperation wrought by “occupation” and Israel’s blockade of Gaza—is going about things in an extreme and counterproductive way.
Never mind that as soon as they took power, the Egyptian Brothers violated the Camp David accords and re-militarized the Sinai Peninsula bordering Israel, shut down opposition media outlets, spewed anti-Jewish propaganda, and called for a return of an Islamic caliphate. In most Western political and media circles it is taken for granted that rigid extremists like Hamas are part of the problem and Islamist “moderates” like the Muslim Brotherhood are the solution.
But there is a massive hole in this theory. Namely, as Mosab Hassan Yousef, son of one of Hamas’s founders, told me in a 2010 interview, “Hamas
is
the Muslim Brotherhood.” Yousef, a longtime Hamas insider and heir apparent, eventually became repulsed by the movement’s murderous brutality and deceit. He became an Israeli spy, converted to Christianity, and is now one of Hamas’s fiercest critics. In our interview, he made abundantly clear that Hamas and the Brotherhood are inextricably linked—until death for the sake of Allah do they part.
But don’t take my bigoted, Zionist, Islamophobic word for it, or even Yousef’s. Rather, take a look at this excerpt from Hamas’s founding charter—written by its leaders in April 1988, a few months after the group’s creation:
The Relation between the Islamic Resistance Movement and the Muslim Brotherhood
 
 
 
Article Two
 
The Islamic Resistance Movement is one of the wings of the Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine.
The Muslim Brotherhood movement is a global organization and is the largest of the Islamic movements in modern times. It is distinguished by its profound understanding and its conceptual precision and by the fact that it encompasses the totality of Islamic concepts in all aspects of life, in thought and in creed, in politics and in economics, in education and in social affairs, in judicial matters and in matters of government, in preaching and in teaching, in art and in communications, in secret and in the open, and in all other areas of life.
3
[emphasis added]

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