The Brotherhood: America's Next Great Enemy (31 page)

Read The Brotherhood: America's Next Great Enemy Online

Authors: Erick Stakelbeck

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

Despite his immigration commission debacle, Omeish soon had another high-profile opportunity to showcase the supposed “moderate school of thought” within the Muslim Brotherhood, when he ran for the Virginia House of Delegates as a Democrat candidate in 2009. Although his bid was unsuccessful, Omeish did receive 15.7 percent of the vote, finishing third overall.
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Not bad for a guy who had been captured on tape praising “the jihad way.” Incidentally, the third highest contributor to Omeish’s campaign was the Virginia-based International Institute of Islamic Thought—another organization launched by the Muslim Brotherhood.
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It’s a good bet that we haven’t heard the last of Esam Omeish on the public stage. In September 2012, he attended a reception for Egyptian president Mohammed Morsi during the Brotherhood stalwart’s first visit to the United Nations. Omeish later wrote on his Facebook profile, “His Excellency provided great insights and we share important perspectives.” Perhaps Omeish will share some of those perspectives during future meetings at the White House. An exposé by the Investigative Project on Terrorism found that Omeish visited 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue three times during President Obama’s first term, meeting with officials from the White House Office of Public Engagement.
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No word on what was discussed.
One thing, however, is certain. With an administration in power that fully supports the Muslim Brotherhood agenda, the Amerikhwan is ready to expand its territory like never before.
Let the mosqueing of America commence.
CHAPTER EIGHT
 
MOSQUES, ENCLAVES, VICTORY
 
I
t was hard to believe that the gaping hole staring up at me would be filled by a large mosque in the near future.
It was even harder to believe the location of the project—which, when completed, would boast a price tag of well over $1 million.
The 2800 block of Voorhies Avenue in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, is not a bustling commercial center or a major thoroughfare; it is a quiet, residential street lined with tidy row houses. Like most blocks in this working class neighborhood nestled along the Atlantic coastline, it boasts a multi-ethnic mix of residents: Irish, Russian, Jewish, Italian—but, at the time of my visit in June 2011, not one Muslim family. In fact, according to neighbors, the nearest area with a significant Muslim presence was blocks away.
Nevertheless, someone was determined to build a large, three-story mosque smack dab in the middle of this cramped residential block where parking was at a premium. To the neighbors’ utter dismay, that “someone” was the Muslim American Society, or MAS, an organization that federal prosecutors have described as the Muslim Brotherhood’s U.S. arm.
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“We have Holocaust survivors who live in these buildings around here,” local resident Victor Benari told me. “And people, of course, are in shock.”
Benari, a short, thoughtful man with glasses, settled in Sheepshead Bay after moving from Israel in 1999. Now he and the large local Jewish population—including some who survived Auschwitz—faced the prospect of living alongside followers of an organization that had worked with the Nazis to liquidate Jews.
As we stood together on the rooftop of a nearby apartment building and surveyed the large crater below—where a construction crane stood at the ready—Benari shook his head at the bitter irony of it all.
“People invested money to buy these houses and live in a nice, quiet neighborhood,” he said. “The mosque will be able to hold hundreds of people—at least. What happens when they come here to pray? Will they walk here? I doubt it. They will probably drive ... what about the parking ? And the noise? And what about the call to prayer five times a day? Do people want to hear that over loudspeakers?”
No, they don’t. But to Islamic supremacists conducting a not-so-subtle settlement jihad, an infidel’s concerns are but a mere trifle. That was certainly the case a few miles from Sheepshead Bay, at Ground Zero, where Muslim Brotherhood–tied Islamists forged ahead with plans to build a mega-mosque at the scene of the worst Islamic terror attack in U.S. history—despite the opposition of some 70 percent of the American people.
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At the time of this writing, the so-called Park51 project—a planned $100 million, fifteen-story “Islamic community center” which would have inhabited a building damaged by landing gear from one of the planes that struck the Twin Towers—has fizzled, with the building housing little more than a glorified Muslim prayer room frequented by a few dozen Friday worshippers.
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The good people of Sheepshead Bay, however, have had no such luck. Despite heated protests by local residents against the MAS mosque throughout 2010 and 2011 that drew national media coverage—most of it, predictably, depicting the protestors as knuckle-dragging nativists—construction on the facility, as I write this, is nearly complete.
Benari joined with other neighbors to form a group called the Bay People that was dedicated to stopping the mosque, and for a while they had some success. Their complaints over building and zoning violations coupled with quality-of-life concerns resulted in some construction stoppages, not to mention thousands of dollars in fines for the property’s owners.
But in the end, despite a valiant effort, the Bay People’s pleas fell on deaf ears. Other than support from a few local officials, they could not muster any sort of significant backing from New York City’s mostly leftist lawmakers. And appealing to pandering New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg—the Ground Zero mosque project’s most vociferous and shameless public supporter—was never a realistic option.
“We welcome Muslim families to build a house and to be a good neighbor,” Victor Benari explained as we walked along the Brooklyn waterfront. “But we will not welcome this facility in the wrong place and backed up with the wrong organization behind it.”
That brings us to the heart of the matter. Benari and the Bay People were careful to frame their opposition to the mosque around quality-of-life and zoning issues rather than the Islamist nature of the Muslim American Society. But I quickly found during our meeting that the Bay People knew full well who—and what—their new neighbors would represent.
“There are clips of Mahdi Bray, a [former] leader of MAS, speaking at an event in D.C., supporting Hamas and Hezbollah, 100 percent,” said one Sheepshead Bay local, referring to an infamous anti-Israel event Bray appeared at in 2000 across the street from the White House.
“They’re tied to the Muslim Brotherhood,” added another neighbor. “How do you deal with people who embrace enemies of the United States? I don’t think that anybody can.”
Unless, of course, you work for the Obama administration.
As for MAS’s Muslim Brotherhood ties, they were extensively documented in a groundbreaking 2004
Chicago Tribune
article that would have won a Pulitzer Prize in a world where real investigative journalism was the norm. The
Tribune
piece contains several direct quotes from senior Brotherhood leaders, past and present, that leave no doubt that MAS was founded as a Brotherhood front group:
In recent years, the U.S. Brotherhood operated under the name Muslim American Society, according to documents and interviews. One of the nation’s major Islamic groups, it was incorporated in Illinois in 1993 after a contentious debate among Brotherhood members.
Some wanted the Brotherhood to remain underground, while others thought a more public face would make the group more influential. Members from across the country drove to regional meeting sites to discuss the issue....
When the leaders voted, it was decided that Brotherhood members would call themselves the Muslim American Society, or MAS, according to documents and interviews.
They agreed not to refer to themselves as the Brotherhood but to be more publicly active. They eventually created a Web site and for the first time invited the public to some conferences, which also were used to raise money....
[Former U.S. Muslim Brotherhood head Ahmed] Elkadi and Mohammed Mahdi Akef, a Brotherhood leader in Egypt and [until 2009] the international head, had pushed for more openness. In fact, Akef says he helped found MAS by lobbying for the change during trips to the U.S. . . .
Shaker Elsayed, a top MAS official, says the organization was founded by Brotherhood members but has evolved to include Muslims from various backgrounds and ideologies.
“Ikhwan [Brotherhood] members founded MAS, but MAS went way beyond that point of conception,” he says.
Now, he says, his group has no connection with the Brotherhood and disagrees with the international organization on many issues.
But he says that MAS, like the Brotherhood, believes in the teachings of Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna, which are “the closest reflection of how Islam should be in this life.”
“I understand that some of our members may say, ‘Yes, we are Ikhwan,’” Elsayed says. But, he says, MAS is not administered from Egypt. He adds, “We are not your typical Ikhwan.”
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To review, according to its top officials, MAS was founded by Brotherhood members and adheres to the pro-jihad, anti-Semitic teachings of MB founder Hassan al-Banna. In addition, MAS has been known to distribute the violent writings of Brotherhood icon Sayyid Qutb at its events.
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But not to worry, Sheepshead Bay: these aren’t “your typical Ikhwan.” And hey, MAS even disagrees with the international Brotherhood on “many issues”—although I have yet to hear one.
The reality is that the Sheepshead Bay mosque was a quintessential, Ikhwan-style operation from its conception. The double lot on Voorhies Avenue was purchased in 2008 by a Yemeni immigrant named Ahmed Allowey for a whopping $800,000.
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Allowey then sold the property to the Muslim American Society, which promptly had the two homes demolished and began construction on the mosque before neighbors on Voorhies Avenue even knew what was happening.
When I spoke to members of the Bay People, all of them expressed frustration that they were left completely in the dark about the mosque project by Allowey and MAS, not to mention by local officials. Incredibly, the Bay People said they only found out about the planned mosque after someone asked a worker at the Voorhies Avenue site what exactly was being built. And, well, there goes the neighborhood.
Now, I’m sure Ahmed Allowey, who also owns a laundromat and lives in a modest home in Sheepshead Bay not far from the mosque, is a fledgling tycoon. But $800,000 is a lot of money—particularly for a Yemeni immigrant who only arrived in the United Sates in 1997. It also seems an awful steep price to pay for two modest homes in working-class Brooklyn.
I would have loved to have asked Allowey about his finances and his relationship with the Muslim American Society, but he did not respond to my phone calls or answer his front door when I came a-knockin’. I also had no luck when I dropped by a Muslim American Society mosque in Brooklyn to inquire about the project on Voorhies Avenue. A young girl in a hijab politely referred me to a MAS official, who never returned my calls. A very transparent bunch, these Ikhwan disciples.
MAS, for its part, seems to have unlimited funding at its disposal. In addition to the Sheepshead Bay mosque, MAS also opened a massive mosque in Boston in 2008 that cost over $15 million (with more than half of those funds reportedly coming from Saudi sources)
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and the group has more projects in the works. Given MAS’s unsavory Ikhwan ties and the numerous reports over the past decade of foreign funding of American mosques—including estimates that some 80 percent of these structures have Saudi influence behind them
8
,
9
,
10
—it’s fair to ask where MAS and other mosque developers in the U.S. are getting their money. Indeed, as we’ll see in this chapter, the Brotherhood and the Saudi regime, despite some differences, have worked together closely over the past several decades to establish mosques throughout the West.
Is the mosque in Sheepshead Bay one of them? We may never know, as MAS is under no obligation to reveal its funding sources. But before leaving Brooklyn, I had an intriguing conversation with a resident of Voorhies Avenue who lived very close to the site of the future mosque but wished to remain anonymous for safety reasons. He told me that in 2010, shortly before ground was broken on the facility, two Arab Muslim men approached him about selling his home.

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