One of the organizations founded by the MB following the Lugano conference was the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT). Pulitzer Prize–winning
Wall Street Journal
reporter Ian Johnson has noted the importance of IIIT to the Brotherhood’s mission in the United States:
Despite IIIT’s name, its function was not theological. Its goal was to provide the theoretical underpinnings for the spread of Islamism in the West. It would hold conferences and allow leaders of the Brotherhood and similar groups to meet and exchange ideas. It would also publish papers and books, helping to nurture the global rise of Islamist philosophy.
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IIIT would be incorporated in Philadelphia in 1980 and later relocated to Herndon, Virginia, near Washington, D.C., where it is still based today. It has long been the focus of federal law enforcement investigators who have examined its ties to terrorist financing, culminating in a 2002 raid in which, according to the search warrant, authorities were looking for “any and all information referencing in any way PIJ (Palestinian Islamic Jihad), Hamas, Al-Qaida . . . Usama Bin Laden, and any other individual or entity designated as a terrorist by the President of the United States, the United States Department of Treasury, or the Secretary of State.”
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All this, allegedly emanating from an organization based just a few miles from the White House.
One other target of the Herndon raids was IIIT employee Tarik Hamdi, who had coordinated media interviews for bin Laden and even transported a satellite phone battery to the al-Qaeda leader in 1998.
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But don’t worry: liberals tell us talk of a Muslim Brotherhood plan to undermine America is just right wing, racist paranoia. If only it were so.
In Chapter Two, we saw that suspected Brotherhood operatives have infiltrated the Obama administration. What follows are three additional case studies that show just how deeply, and shrewdly, the Muslim Brotherhood has entrenched itself into American society. Their
stated
goal is nothing less than the destruction of Western civilization. And the worst part about it is that your government knows and apparently could not care less.
THE MASTERMIND
At first glance, it sounds like the quintessential immigrant success story. After a hardscrabble upbringing in Gaza, Mousa Abu Marzook arrived in the United States in 1981 to study at Colorado State University, where he received a Master’s Degree in industrial sciences. In 1985, he moved his family to Ruston, Louisiana, to begin work on a doctoral engineering program at Louisiana Tech University.
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Up until that point, Marzook’s academic journey was the kind that countless ambitious immigrants have navigated in the United States. But then came a slight twist.
By October 1992, Marzook was leading a delegation from the terrorist group Hamas on an official visit to Tehran for meetings with the Iranian regime.
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Mousa Abu Marzook, fresh off a decade spent at two well-respected American institutions of higher learning, was now head of Hamas’s political bureau and a major player on the global jihadist scene. Like I said, just a
slight
twist.
Surprised at how this promising doctoral student’s career turned out? Don’t be. Time and again, Islamic terrorists have worked the U.S. educational system to their advantage. Look no further than the jihadist-ridden alumni of the Muslim Students Association (MSA), or 9/11 plotter Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s stint at North Carolina A&T, or convicted al-Qaeda terrorist Aafia Siddiqui’s time at MIT. The list goes on. Clearly, Marzook had some illustrious—and murderous—company in his American educational pursuits.
It was during his time in Louisiana that Marzook not only assumed leadership of Hamas, but also oversaw the establishment of the Hamas support network in the United States. He did so by enlisting the backing of a number of operatives to assist in recruiting, terrorist training, and money laundering, and also by establishing a series of organizations to help keep Hamas running.
After Israel arrested most of Hamas’s top leadership in the early 1990s, Marzook moved immediately to reorganize the terrorist group’s infrastructure and keep it alive. His response was to move much of the organization’s decision-making outside of Gaza and the West Bank and divide leadership responsibilities into three areas: the Political Committee, the Propaganda Committee, and the Jihad Committee. The Political Bureau would be headed by Marzook himself from Falls Church, Virginia, just outside Washington, D.C.; the responsibilities for propaganda would be handled by another U.S.-based Marzook associate, Ahmed Yousef; and the terrorist arm would be supervised by Mohammed Sawahla in London.
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Marzook would also oversee the establishment of Hamas offices in Amman and Damascus.
In December 1992, another crisis confronted Marzook when Israel deported more than four hundred Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorists, including most of the Hamas terror command, to Lebanon amid howls of outrage from the UN Security Council, which—with the support of the United States—adopted a resolution that “strongly” condemned the deportation of “hundreds of Palestinian civilians.”
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Israel eventually allowed the terrorists to return thanks to withering international condemnation. Political commentator Daniel Greenfield has written that with its despicable pressure campaign against Israel, “the world saved Hamas.”
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Some observers believe that without the evil genius of Mousa Abu Marzook and his prolific fundraising on U.S. soil (which saw him raise millions for Hamas), the Hamas terror factory would have been snuffed out for good even earlier.
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Marzook was living in Jordan at the time of the deportations and responded by dispatching another trusted U.S.-based associate, Muhammad Salah, to coordinate cash distributions to the families of the deported, finance the purchase of weapons and explosives for retaliatory strikes against Israel, and scout potential targets for attacks. When it came to terror and mayhem, Marzook was clearly adept at thinking on his feet. Evidently, a quality American education can help take an enterprising jihadist a long way.
Marzook and his family lived in the Washington, D.C., area during part of this period of his leadership of Hamas. It is undoubtedly a period that American officials would rather forget, seeing as it happened right under their noses. Marzook did his best to help them in that regard. After being expelled from Jordan in 1995, he tried to reenter the United States and, upon being apprehended by authorities at JFK Airport in New York, denied any involvement with Hamas or terrorism. Regardless, the Clinton administration listed him as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist in August 1995. He would remain imprisoned until 1997, as U.S. officials debated what to do with him.
The Israelis wanted Marzook extradited to face charges of murder and terrorism but later dropped their request amid concerns over possible retaliatory terror attacks.
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The U.S. ultimately deported Marzook back to Jordan. From there, he bounced to Damascus for several years before finding his perfect match: the new, Muslim Brotherhood–led Egypt, where he has resided since 2012 as Hamas’s overall second-in-command.
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The strange case of Mousa Abu Marzook is notable for many reasons, the most obvious being that a committed jihadist was able to run one of the world’s deadliest terrorist groups from within the friendly confines of the United States—including, for a time, from a suburb of the nation’s capital. Another important detail: following Marzook’s arrest in 1995 at JFK Airport, he became a
cause célèbre
for American Muslim organizations in the Brotherhood orbit. The Amerikhwan loudly declared Marzook’s innocence, claiming that he was a victim of false evidence concocted by the Israeli government.
Yet in court filings submitted by federal prosecutors during his two-year detention, the U.S. government proved that Marzook had lived a double life in America, comfortably ensconced in the ’burbs while at the same time directing and approving Hamas terror attacks abroad. Although the U.S. Ikhwanis were ultimately unable to save Marzook from deportation, future pressure campaigns would be far more successful thanks to a Hamas-tied group whose genesis began in 1993: the Council on American-Islamic Relations, also known as CAIR.
THE ’93 MEETING: KILLADELPHIA
In October 1993, I was a seventeen-year-old kid in Northeast Philadelphia gearing up for my final season of high school basketball. While I was preparing to launch jump shots, a group of Muslim Brotherhood operatives were gathered across town preparing to launch America’s most notorious Islamist group.
The creation of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) was just one alleged by-product of a three-day summit held in October 1993 at the Marriott Courtyard Hotel near the Philadelphia airport. The gathering featured several leaders of U.S.-based Muslim Brotherhood organizations as well as others from the Brotherhood’s “Palestine Committee”—an Ikhwan apparatus formed, according to internal MB documents, to “serve the Palestinian cause on the U.S. front.”
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And serve it they have—in the form of repeated denunciations of Israel and open support for Hamas.
The Philadelphia meeting was a strategy-and-planning session called to formulate the Palestine Committee’s response to the recently signed Oslo Accords, which set out an (ultimately doomed) strategy for peace between Israel and terror master Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO). The proposed peace plan was a direct threat to Hamas’s agenda, which was then—and remains today—the complete destruction of Israel.
The Brotherhood’s efforts to support Hamas were re-doubled at the Philly confab, and also led to a major organizational expansion for the MB movement in the United States. Unbeknownst to the participants, the FBI had obtained a warrant from the top-secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to wiretap the meeting. The transcripts from these wiretaps would later play a prominent role in the Holy Land Foundation terrorism financing trial and also shed light on the thinking behind the American MB’s future direction.
Participants in the summit were concerned that the image of the U.S. Brotherhood groups was taking a beating because of their open opposition to the Oslo process. “Let’s not hoist a large Islamic flag and let’s not be barbaric-talking,” cautioned Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development CEO Shukri Abu Baker. “We will remain a front so that if the thing happens, we will benefit from the new happenings instead of having all of our organizations classified and exposed.”
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What they needed was a presence in Washington, D.C., that presented a polished, professional, and managed message concealing their ultimate mission of supporting Hamas and its jihad against Israel. The new organization tasked with this job would need to work closely with the media and have the ear of lawmakers on Capitol Hill. Within a year of the Philly meeting, the Council on American-Islamic Relations was born.
According to 2008 testimony by FBI Special Agent Lara Burns at the Holy Land Foundation (HLF) trial, CAIR was formed as a direct result of the Philadelphia meeting and came under the umbrella of the Palestine Committee.
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Its creation was a watershed moment for the Islamist movement in the United States.
The group—named, like fellow Brotherhood front ISNA, as an unindicted co-conspirator in the HLF terror financing trial—has seen past officials convicted on terrorism charges and was linked to Hamas by a federal judge. You’d think such a resume would make CAIR persona non grata in mainstream circles and possibly lead to its being shut down by the U.S. government—given that Hamas is listed by the State Department as a terrorist group.
But never underestimate the willful ignorance of America’s elites. CAIR leaders continue to pop up frequently on network news shows and provide quotes to leading daily newspapers. No disclaimer or asterisk next to their names explaining their organization’s ties to Hamas and rather problematic designation as an unindicted co-conspirator in the largest terror financing trial in U.S. history. Instead, hosts and scribes alike present CAIR to their audiences as the equivalent of a Care package, sent to educate ignorant America about the “real Islam” and how right-wing Christians and Jews are distorting it.
Still more dangerous than CAIR’s manipulation of the media, however, is its continued access to local, state, and federal governments, where it attempts to affect the dialogue on Islamism, sharia, and the Palestinian jihad against Israel—and with great success, in many cases. CAIR officials continue to have the ear of the Obama administration, just as they had access to the Bush and Clinton administrations before it.
The birth of CAIR is one reason why, in a comprehensive assessment of HLF’s role in support of terrorism, the FBI deemed the 1993 Philly summit a “significant” event which “represented a meeting in the United States among senior leaders of Hamas, [the Holy Land Foundation] and the [Islamic Association of Palestine].”
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Needless to say, if I had known my future career path at the time, I might have skipped basketball practice and swung by the Marriott for a look-see.
It’s doubtful, however, that I would have made it very far past the front door. Participants took extensive security measures in case they were being watched. As the FBI assessment noted, at the beginning of the meeting, those assembled were cautioned by Abu Baker to use code when referring to Hamas:
During the meeting the participants went to great length and spent much effort hiding their association with the Islamic Resistance Movement, a.k.a. HAMAS. Instead, they referred to Hamas as “SAMAH,” which is HAMAS spelled backwards. Most of the time, the participants referred to HAMAS as “the Movement.”
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