FBI Takes One Step Forward, Two Steps Back

From the Investigative Project on Terrorism:

FBI Replaces Brotherhood-Tainted Liaison with Brotherhood-Tainted Liaison

IPT News
June 25, 2009

A top FBI official met Wednesday with the vice president of the Islamic Society of North America, a move which followed the Bureau's decision "to use ISNA as their official point of contact with the American Muslim community," an email from an intelligence community veteran that was widely distributed Wednesday said.

The Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT) has previously reported on the depth of ISNA's Muslim Brotherhood ties.

The FBI has not yet commented on the claim. But the IPT has confirmed that the meeting did take place at FBI headquarters. The decision to make ISNA the FBI's contact point came over the objections of case agents and supervisors investigating Muslim Brotherhood activity in the U.S.

Last year, the FBI cut off outreach communication with the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), after evidence in the Hamas-support trial against the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF) raised questions "whether there continues to be a connection between CAIR or its executives and HAMAS." The FBI's case agent testified that CAIR was a Hamas front.

Like CAIR, ISNA was an unindicted co-conspirator in the HLF trial. It is listed among "who are and/or were members of the US Muslim Brotherhood." Jamal Badawi, an ISNA board member, also was named as an unindicted co-conspirator, listed among people who raised money for HLF.

The evidence involving ISNA, however, was not as deep as it was with CAIR. In CAIR's case, its founders are included on a telephone list for members of a secret Hamas support network in the U.S. created by the Muslim Brotherhood. And they participated in a 1993 meeting of Hamas members and supporters called to discuss ways to thwart U.S.-led peace efforts between Israel and the Palestinians.

In that weekend-long meeting, CAIR co-founder Omar Ahmad discussed ways to mislead Americans about their goals and ideology. Executive Director Nihad Awad discussed media strategies to help the cause.

In the evidence admitted by the court, ISNA officials were not named among members of the Hamas support network, called the Palestine Committee. But FBI investigative records show it held a significant role in the Brotherhood's U.S. activities. According to an FBI memorandum from the 1980s obtained via the Freedom of Information Act, past "ISNA conferences provided opportunities for the extreme fundamentalist Muslims to meet with their supporters ... The annual conferences are used for both religious and political purposes. The political purpose is to further the Islamic Revolution, which includes providing anti-U.S. and Israel publications and publications that support the war effort of Iran in the Iran-Iraq war."

The Brotherhood is an 80-year-old Egyptian movement which seeks to spread the rule of Shariah, or Islamic law, throughout the world. But some top FBI officials are not convinced the Brotherhood is a problem, a law enforcement source said Thursday. This, despite the fact that FBI investigation has uncovered documents showing the U.S. Brotherhood's goal 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 other religions."

The problem, the source said, is too many FBI officials have developed friendly individual relationships with the leadership of groups like ISNA. "As an FBI agent, we use facts and evidence and truth to base our decisions and not because we went to dinner with someone."

ISNA's roots in the Brotherhood are clearly established. Internal Muslim Brotherhood records in evidence the HLF trial show ISNA was created by Muslim Brotherhood members in the U.S. who had been leaders of the Muslim Students Association. In addition, the Chicago Tribune and federal prosecutors in Dallas have documented the link.

"Numerous exhibits were entered into evidence establishing both ISNA's and NAIT's [the North American Islamic Trust, an ISNA subsidiary] intimate relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood, the Palestine Committee, and the defendants in this case," prosecutors wrote in July 2008.

Sami Al-Arian, an admitted Palestinian Islamic Jihad supporter, acknowledged in an affidavit that he was directly involved with the Brotherhood in 1981, the year he claims to have been among ISNA's founders.

ISNA has never come clean on its Brotherhood connection. In a statement issued in the fall of 2007, it ignored the documents in evidence and claimed it "never was, and is not now, affiliated with or influenced by any international organizations including the Muslim Brotherhood."

In its service, ISNA rallied to the defense of Hamas political leader Mousa Abu Marzook following his arrest by U.S. authorities pending an Israeli warrant. After he was deported to Jordan, Marzook included ISNA among those he thanked for supporting him through his "ordeal." Marzook wrote that ISNA's efforts had "consoled" him.

Meanwhile, ISNA's annual convention is scheduled to begin July 2 in Washington, D.C. This year's conference could have the largest representation of government agencies in the group's history. The FBI and the departments of Justice, State and Homeland Security all are sponsoring information booths and may have speakers in formal programs.

The conference also will feature speakers from other groups rooted in the Muslim Brotherhood. Among them, CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad, spokesman Ibrahim Hooper and former Muslim American Society (MAS) President Esam Omeish and MAS-Freedom Director Mahdi Bray.

The depth of this outreach, especially the FBI's decision to make ISNA its contact to American Muslims, raises a host of troubling questions. ISNA's denials of its Brotherhood roots ring hollow in the face of the public record.

In light of these documented connections to the Muslim Brotherhood and recent controversial statements, the FBI should explain publicly why it is embracing ISNA.

From Tehran with Love

Iranian expert Michael Ledeen has a current article, ("Caving to Iran"), about how the British government has been giving in to Iranian blackmail lately. In it Ledeen paints a picture of a high-level doomsday summit of global bad guys in Tehran that could have come out of an old James Bond movie:

After the humiliation of Hamas by Israel earlier this year, the Iranian leaders summoned more than a dozen terrorist groups to Tehran for meetings with Supreme Leader Khamenei and President Ahmadinejad. The meetings went on for several weeks, from mid-February to mid-March. According to usually reliable sources, the terrorists were informed that Iran had committed a billion dollars for the “liberation of Palestine,” and that actions would be coordinated by an umbrella organization to be called “Hezbollah of Palestine.” Participants included Egyptian and Lebanese Muslim Brotherhood leaders and top officials from Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Reportedly, representatives of the Turkish government were also present. The Iranian regime was represented by officers from the Revolutionary Guards and the Quds Forces, and by Khamenei himself, a clear demonstration of the urgency with which the Iranians viewed the matter.

Check out the complete article.

FBI Finally Wakes Up and Smells the Coffee About CAIR

We've been talking about this for a while. ("FBI Stops Returning CAIR's Phone Calls. Finally"). But here are some good points from Andrew McCarthy at NRO Online:

CAIR’s Well-Deserved Expulsion

Terrorism is only one expression of jihad — there are others as dangerous.

By Andrew C. McCarthy

A week ago, the FBI officially announced that it has cut ties with the Council on American-Islamic Relations. The self-styled civil-rights organization is characteristically squawking, but the FBI’s move was patently overdue — so much so that we ought to be asking: Why on earth did the FBI have ties with CAIR in the first place?

While we should applaud the government for finally doing the right thing, we also must seize this moment to consider why this action was necessary, and what it says about the threat we are up against.

That threat is not, essentially, about terrorism. Given the life-and-death stakes involved, it is understandable that government is preoccupied by terrorism (or what Obama’s homeland-security secretary, Janet Napolitano, absurdly calls “man-caused disasters”). But jihadist terror is merely the means to a specific end: the installation of sharia, the Islamic legal code, which Muslim fundamentalists regard as the necessary precondition for the achievement of Islam’s universalist ambitions.

Sharia should be of grave concern to us because it is antithetical to the U.S. Constitution and to our way of life. It rejects several core American propositions: that liberty cannot co-exist with an established state religion, that free people have a right to govern themselves irrespective of any religious code’s dictates, that
there should be freedom of conscience (sharia holds that apostasy from Islam is not merely a crime but a capital offense), sexual liberty (homosexuality is also a death-penalty offense), and equal protection under the law (sharia privileges Muslims over non-Muslims and men over women). Sharia, furthermore, is the rationale commonly trotted out by militants to justify the use of force (whether we call it “terrorism” or employ such sophistries as “resistance” or “man-caused disasters”) for resolving policy disputes — under the rationale that policies that do not privilege Islam constitute an attack on Islam and therefore justify jihadist violence.

Incrementally establishing sharia is the central imperative of CAIR and several other organizations to which our government has recklessly been reaching out for years, since long before the 9/11 attacks. In sum, administrations of both parties, and executive branch agencies including the FBI, have taken the position that government’s only legitimate concern is the comparatively tiny cohort of terrorists who construe Islamic scriptures to command mass-murder attacks.

Not only have we averted our eyes from the ideology that motivates jihadism. We have affirmatively anointed as Muslim “moderates” the purveyors of this ideology, who are anything but moderate.

Worse, the effect has been to empower anti-American elements at the expense of authentic Muslim moderates and reformers who crave liberty.

CAIR is an outgrowth of the Muslim Brotherhood, an Egyptian organization founded in 1928 that today boasts divisions throughout the world. The Brotherhood has been operating in the United States since the 1960s in a manner fully consistent with its motto: “Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. The Quran is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.” Its website makes no bones about the fact that it seeks “the introduction of the Islamic Shariah as the basis for controlling the affairs of state and society.”

Last year, the government won convictions in a terrorism-financing trial that targeted an ostensible Islamic charity, the Holy Land Foundation, along with several of its top operatives. CAIR has complained long and loud because prosecutors identified it as an unindicted co-conspirator in the case. Its argument that this was a smear is specious. The issue is not whether the government named CAIR on a list disseminated pretrial; what’s germane is the basis for that listing. The government richly supported its assertion with evidence, and no citizen or organization has a right to expunge that which is proved in the public’s courts.

At trial, the jury was treated to a 1991 Brotherhood memorandum that described the organization’s “work in America” as “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 other religions.” CAIR has been the linchpin of that strategy.

Some history is in order. In 1987, the Brotherhood had established Hamas (or “the Islamic Resistance Movement,” as it describes itself). As its charter professes, Hamas is one of the wings of Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine. Muslim Brotherhood Movement is a universal organization which constitutes the largest Islamic movement in modern times. It is characterized by its deep understanding, accurate comprehension and its complete embrace of all Islamic concepts of all aspects of life, culture, creed, politics, economics, education, society, justice and judgment, the spreading of Islam, education, art, information, science of the occult and conversion to Islam.

In a memorandum filed in a Texas federal court, prosecutors further elaborated that, through the early 1990s, “the Muslim Brotherhood was controlled by Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood members, and the leader of the U.S.-Muslim Brotherhood was Mousa Abu Marzook, who in 1989 was selected to be the leader of HAMAS, a position that he held while residing in the United States and controlling the U.S.-Muslim Brotherhood.” To support Hamas, the Brotherhood established a “Palestine Committee” in the United States.

Marzook (deported in 1995, he is currently wanted on a U.S. terrorism indictment in Chicago) led the Palestine Committee. One of its most important members was Omar Ahmad, who became president of the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP), which Marzook had formed years earlier. In 1993, the Palestine Committee convened a meeting in Philadelphia to plot a strategy for destroying the Oslo Accords’ vision of a two-state solution — Palestine peacefully co-existing with Israel, which Hamas
is pledged to destroy. The meeting was secretly surveilled by the FBI, which caught Ahmad conversing with Nihad Awad, the IAP’s public-relations director, about strategies for deceiving Americans about their true intentions.

Less than a year later, Ahmad and Awad formed CAIR. The Holy Land Foundation, which was ultimately shuttered by the government and finally convicted for providing millions of dollars to Hamas, contributed part of the seed money. To serve as CAIR’s communications director, Ahmad and Awad tapped Ibrahim Hooper, another IAP veteran who has publicly acknowledged that his purpose is to establish sharia as the law of the United States.

Since its founding, several CAIR officials have been convicted or deported for terrorism-related activities and for other criminal offenses. CAIR, meanwhile, has sought to undermine national security — and the FBI specifically — at every turn: frequently mounting public-relations campaigns for indicted terror suspects, vigorously opposing the Patriot Act and the surveillance of suspected al-Qaeda communications, and even distributing a “Muslim community safety kit” that discourages cooperation with the FBI.

Despite that sordid record, government officials regarded CAIR as a representative and leader of American Muslims. Our law-enforcement and national-security agencies consulted with it closely and even permitted it to indoctrinate our agents during compulsory “sensitivity training” lectures. Doing so, they raised its profile, facilitated its radical, anti-American agenda, and dispirited our allies in the Muslim community, many of whom are in the United States precisely because they don’t
want to live in the totalitarian misery the Muslim Brotherhood and its satellites would impose.

The major threat we face today is not what al-Qaeda may do to the grand structures that house our government and our institutions. It is what radical Islam is accomplishing inside those structures. Thankfully, the FBI has shown CAIR the door. But that only begins to address the problem.


— National Review’s Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and the author of Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad (Encounter Books, 2008).

Minnesota ACLU Gets Religion

This is one time the ACLU is on the right side of things.

The Minnesota ACLU has filed a federal lawsuit against the Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy, “named for the Muslim general who conquered medieval Spain,” the taxpayer-funded charter school operating as a private Muslim religious school. (“ACLU to sue Twin Cities charter school that caters to Muslims”).

You can read the Complaint here.

Besides requiring Islamic dress, serving halal food in the cafeteria, scheduling prayers during class times, and arranging the bus schedule so that students more or less have to attend Islamic religious classes at the end of each schoolday, “the school has issued a handbook instructing staff to not discuss what goes on at the school.” Charles Samuelson, state ACLU executive director, points out that “’You cannot have a broad secrecy oath’ in a school funded with public dollars.’”

Samuelson said the school has used some government aid money to pay rent to holding companies, which then funneled it to the Muslim American Society of Minnesota and Minnesota Education Trust, a group the ACLU says is a non-profit that also promotes Islam.

The MAS is a front for the Muslim Brotherhood in the United States. As we have noted here time and again, the mission of the Muslim Brotherhood includes “eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within.” And the school’s sponsor, Islamic Relief—USA, is a subsidiary of Islamic Relief Worldwide, which the Israeli government has identified as providing support and relief to Hamas.

According to Katherine Kersten, who broke this story early last year:

TIZA’s strong religious connections date from its founding in 2003. Its co-founders, Zaman and Hesham Hussein, were both imams, or Muslim religious leaders, as well as leaders of the Muslim American Society of Minnesota (MAS-MN).

Since then, they have played dual roles: Zaman as TIZA’s principal and the current vice-president of MAS-MN, and Hussein as TIZA’s school board chair and president of MAS-MN until his death in a car accident in Saudi Arabia in January.

TIZA shares MAS-MN’s headquarters building, along with a mosque.

MAS-MN came to Minnesotans’ attention in 2006, when it issued a “fatwa,” warning Muslim taxi drivers at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport that transporting passengers with alcohol in their baggage is a violation of Islamic law.

According to Kersten, and representatives of the ACLU, TIZA officials were evasive and squirrely about claiming to be in compliance with all state laws, when they clearly weren’t. They also dragged their feet when asked to make changes.

If this were a private religious school, none of this would matter to us. For that matter, I'm personally not that enamored with the current regime where voluntary religious activity and expression is completely eliminated from public schools.

Nonetheless, and in large part because of groups like the ACLU, that is the strict standard that everyone else—especially the majority Christian population—have been forced to accept. A double standard can’t be applied just for Muslims.

This isn’t just a misunderstanding. These scalawags knew perfectly well they were flouting the law, and taking taxpayer money to spread and finance Islam, to boot. I’m thinking they also had a pretty good idea that since they were Muslim there would be a “fear factor” preventing state authorities from taking too much notice. In other words, the whole thing followed standard operating procedure for people imposing creeping shariah.

The ACLU has applied a much, much lower standard when making cases against Christians. At least in this case, when the abuse was egregious enough, ACLU-MN did the right thing. I’m not sure ACLU-MI ever would.

Dawud Walid Deals His Own Race Card

Our favorite CAIR spokesman, Dawud Walid, has written a letter to the Detroit News explaining that Ayman Al-Zawahiri’s recent speech insulting Obama as a “house slave” doesn’t “speak for Muslims.” Rather, writes Walid, “From Senegal to Indonesia, Muslims have celebrated Obama’s victory,” and view his election “as a clear sign that America has taken a big step toward the fulfillment of its principle of racial equality.” (“Al-Qaida's No. 2 leader doesn't speak for Muslims”).

As Walid explains the feelings of the world’s Muslims--the majority of whom will not be eligible for Obama’s promised middle-class tax cuts nor his health care plan--the reason they’re all so geeked about Obama is that it proves America isn’t a “racist imperial power” after all. (In retrospect, that must explain what all those riots and beheadings were about!)

Now after days of holiday overeating I can’t see grabbing hold of that old tar baby about who does or doesn’t speak for Muslims, especially to take issue with Walid, who, to hear him tell it, does speak for all Muslims.

Frankly, I don’t really care if Zawahiri or bin Laden want to say our new president (by the way, Democrats, see how easy it is to say “our new president”?) is a house negro, or want to make any other provocative racial comments about Westerners they don’t like. It’s not these guys’ racial theories that earned them a spot on our Most Wanted List. What did that would be their religious theories, according to which murdering innocent Westerners gets them in really good with their deity.

And I’m pretty sure that the election of Obama notwithstanding, that religious point of view still is a big motivator for Muslims out there. Otherwise, to take a recent example (and when it comes to Islamic rerror, there is always a recent example), the Bombay jihadists would have been searching for tourists holding racist imperialist ideas, rather than only tourists with British and American passports. (“Terrorists said `Put your hand up if you're British or American'”)

Apparently, what’s been causing all the tension between the Islamic world and the rest of us all these centuries has been our stubborn refusal to embrace the enlightened racial teachings of Islam. Enlightened teachings that right now aren’t, curiously, offering much comfort to the millions of African Muslims in Sudan who are being systematically slaughtered by their Muslim Arab brothers in Darfur. “Darfur: the genocide is Islamic racism” ” Or the Jews who were specifically targeted, (again, to take only the most recent example) by the Bombay murderers simply because they were Jewish.

The overreaction to Zawahiri’s racial comments was ludicrous, as if a fugitive terrorist “playing the race card” somehow compounds the evil of using hijacked airliners to destroy American office towers and murder thousands of innocent people. Walid may think that he can use this phony race issue to distance CAIR and its radical Islamic mission from that of al Qaeda, and to falsely paint CAIR as a civil rights group when it actually is a jihadist front, but it won’t work.

Osama bin Laden declared religious war on the USA in 1996 because he saw us as infidel crusaders, who needed our civilization destroyed and replaced with Islam.

The Pew Poll in 2006 showed there was still huge support for that amongst the world’s Muslims.

Support for terrorism: All the Muslim populations polled display a solid majority of support for Osama bin Laden. Asked whether they have confidence in him, Muslims replied positively, ranging between 8% (in Turkey) and 72% (in Nigeria). Likewise, suicide bombing is popular. Muslims who call it justified range from 13% (in Germany) to 69% (in Nigeria). These appalling numbers suggest that terrorism by Muslims has deep roots and will remain a danger for years to come. (“[Pew Poll on] How Muslims Think”).

Dawud Walid's CAIR and the Muslim Brotherhood, (one and the same) have a mission in America, and it isn’t to foster our principle of racial equality. It is to further their anti-Western “’Civilization-Jihadist process... 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 other religions.”

Since they share bin Laden's and Zawahiri's jihadist goals of destroying America and imposing Islam, what difference does it make if Walid tries to take the high ground over this silly race-card flap?

History of Violence at UM-Dearborn's MSA

We’ve discussed the Muslim Students Association here before, particularly its direct creation as a tool of Da'wa in North America by the radical terrorist Muslim Brotherhood.

The MSA is active in Dearborn both at Henry Ford Community College and, more notably, at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. In its time, and not so long ago, the MSA was coming under the influence of a group so radical it had even rejected the Muslim Brotherhood for not being radical enough-- Hizb ut Tahrir al-Islami — the Islamic Party of Liberation. Under their influence, the UM-Dearborn MSA was featuring “radical imams unleashing hate speech at Friday prayers,” and “preventing women without headscarves from joining the association.”

Beyond Dearborn, Frank Hyland of Counterterrorism Blog reports there is there is strong evidence that Hizb ut Tahrir al-Islami is a subordinate unit of Al Qaeda. (“Source Compromise Exposes Probable Connection Between Al Qa'ida and Hizb ut Tahrir”).

Geneive Abdo writes about Muslim issues, especially Arab reform, Islamic revivalism, and Muslim integration in the West. Her most recent book, on Muslim assimilation in America, is MECCA AND MAIN STREET, (Geneive Abdo. Copyright 2006 Oxford University Press).

In a section of her book, adapted by The Century Foundation, and published in The Globalist, she describes what happened to Farhan Latif, one-time president of the UM-Dearborn chapter of the MSA, (as well as Student Government president), when he tried to liberalize the association and open it up to more moderate Muslims. The brutal attack and attempted murder of Latif was reported at the time in UM’s student newspaper, The Michigan Journal. (“SG President assaulted and battered”). This is Ms. Abdo's account of it:

The Future of the Faith

Geneive Abdo, The Century Foundation, 6/13/2008

In universities across the United States, young leaders are emerging to represent the new face of Islam. In "Mecca and Main Street," Geneive Abdo examines the raging — and sometimes violent — debate between moderate and conservative young Muslims.

Farhan Latif always knew it was only a matter of time before the slow-burning anger would erupt. His conservative Muslim enemies had made their intentions clear to him. They had sent threatening e-mails and left menacing messages on his cell phone. In their eyes, Farhan’s ideas were criminal. The Western world might call him a moderate Muslim, but his foes thought he was an apostate, luring young Muslims away from the faith.

The breaking point
The day Farhan feared came in September 2004. As he was about to enter his modern apartment in Dearborn, about one mile from his university, three young men jumped him and pushed him to the ground. They beat and kicked him without saying a word. Farhan recognized one of his attackers — the guy did not bother to hide his face under a mask.

“Why are you doing this?” Farhan cried, trying to shield his face from their blows. The attackers did not reply. Within minutes, they got back into their car and tried to run Farhan over before they sped away. He managed to avoid the oncoming wheels by rolling away just in time.

Sense of betrayal
As he rested in the hospital, nursing a swollen head, several cracked ribs and a broken arm, Farhan was depressed more than shocked over the beating. It was one thing to endure the daily blows from the non-Muslims who criticized Islam. But now he was in a battle with his fellow believers.

“I fight against everything people say against my religion every day, on television, on the radio, everywhere,” Farhan remarked, reflecting on the incident later. “I was not so much scared when this happened but sad that fellow Muslims would do this.”

A broad appeal
Months before the attack, in the spring of 2004, Farhan was elected president of the Muslim Students’ Association at the University of Michigan’s Dearborn campus. In a short time, he revolutionized the association, making it more attractive to a majority of Muslim students on campus — many of whom had refused to join when the conservatives were in charge.

Farhan and the new leaders decided there would no longer be radical imams unleashing hate speech at Friday prayers. All lecturers would be required to follow certain rules. They lifted the ban that prevented women without headscarves from joining the association. All Muslims would be welcome, no matter their political ideas or their sect — minority Shiites, often scorned for their separate ways and different approach to the faith, were just as acceptable as the Sunni student majority.

Moderation and interfaith dialogue
Farhan organized events to show how the three monotheistic faiths have much in common. A drama called “Children of Abraham” made its debut before the Muslim association.

None of this sat well with members of Dearborn’s Muslim Students’ Association who were either radical Salafis or affiliated with the Hizb ut Tahrir al-Islami — the Islamic Party of Liberation.

Radical opposition
The movement — a clandestine, radical Sunni Islamic group that is banned in several countries around the world — advocates the replacement of individual Muslim governments with a single caliphate governed under a strict reading of the sharia. The students who are members of Hizb ut-Tahrir al-Islami share a common creed that calls for strict adherence to the Koran and the rejection of applying human reason and logic when interpreting the Islamic holy texts.

Before Farhan had arrived on the campus, radical students had turned the Muslim Students’ Association into a virtual training camp for conservative ideologues. Under the influence and guidance of an imam at a Dearborn mosque, the students believed their fellow Muslims were straying dangerously from the faith.

Divisions from within
In their eyes, being a dedicated Muslim meant that men should work to pressure the U.S. government to change its policies in the Islamic world, Muslim women should wear headscarves and Muslims should have little to do with Jews and Christians. This was the crux of the ideological battle the Salafi students and those belonging to the Hizb ut-Tahrir al-Islami were determined to win against Farhan and his friends and allies.

Beginnings abroad
Farhan’s parents pleaded with him to stop his activism on campus. Farhan usually listened to them. He had come to the United States alone in 2000 hoping to attend medical school.

A cousin in Dearborn offered to help him, so Farhan left his parents at their current home in Qatar. For years, his family had traveled from country to country, as his father pursued a career as a Pakistani diplomat and later a lawyer.

They were often strangers in a new land, and the bond among them remained strong even as Farhan became more independent. Farhan’s father’s expertise in sharia law offered Farhan a scholarly and enlightened view of the Islamic tradition, putting him at odds with the students from the Hizb ut-Tahrir — who blindly followed the ideas of a radical imam.

No matter the cost
Other students, if beaten for their beliefs, might have given up. But Farhan and his close group of friends inside the student association wanted to press on with their ideas — no matter the cost. Together, they had been the leaders of the MSA at a nearby college for two years before enrolling at the University of Michigan in Dearborn.

During that time, they watched literally from across the street, the distance from their university to the University of Michigan, as the radical students drove more measured Muslims away from the MSA there. Farhan and his friends worked on a strategy for transforming the organization from a distance — even before they were elected to lead it.

Speaking up for moderate Islam
They believed they had the support of a majority of Muslim students and others on campus, and they were not going to surrender to violence and intimidation. For many educated, upwardly mobile young Muslims, the student associations are defining how to live as a devout Muslim in a secular and often hostile society.

The racial politics at the core of black Islam and the isolationism of the early-twentieth-century prairie Muslims both ended in failure — a fate today’s believers are determined to avoid.

As this second generation of Muslims becomes more attached to their distinct religious identity, the student associations are rapidly becoming the main platform for debating religious and social issues — ranging from whether women should be veiled to how much contact Muslim Americans should have with non-Muslims.

The emerging leadership
The battle is being waged not only by schools of thought at either extreme of the ideological spectrum — but also among students who would not define themselves as either progressive or conservative Muslims. Since September 11, Muslim student leaders have found themselves in great demand. They are often called upon to explain the basics of Islam to campus audiences of hundreds of students. With the spotlight unexpectedly focused on what was a closed, sectarian world, when asked to explain publicly what it is to be a Muslim in the modern world, many young student leaders have risen to the occasion.

Genieve Abdo is a Fellow at The Century Foundation. This excerpt was published in The Globalist .

We've written previously about the Muslim Student Association (MSA), and its influence on local campuses, especially the University of Michigan-Dearborn. The following article from FrontPage Magazine provides a further glimpse at the MSA's activities, this time at the University of California-Irvine.

Campus Support for the Terrorist Jihad

By Reut R. Cohen and Jonathan Constantine Movroydis

FrontPageMagazine.com Monday, May 05, 2008

The Muslim Student Association (MSA) maintains more than 150 chapters at colleges across the country, fronting as a cultural and religious organization. Realistically, however, the MSA is a radical political group that was initially founded by members of the Muslim Brotherhood, the godfather of al-Qaeda and Hamas. The purpose of the MSA is to promote jihad in institutions of higher learning.

At the University of California- Irvine (UCI), the Muslim Student Union (MSU) is also a part of the Muslim Student Association and has openly supported terrorist groups. Presently the MSU aims to "build an environment that enhances good, discourages bad, and provides networks of resources, knowledge, people, and companionship to its members." The MSU offers "daily congregational prayers, daily free iftars … over eight weekly classes, a quarterly magazine Alkalima, coalition building with other clubs on campus, and a gateway to the larger Muslim community …" MSU also provides career advice and a study program to help Muslims at UCI.

Yet underneath this innocuous description it also becomes apparent that this organization preserves a seething hatred of Jews, Israel, and America. MSU activities constantly reveal support for violence, anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism. MSU members have made their positions clear: they support Hamas, they support "freedom fighting" and they have publicly declared that Zionists have no future and Israel will soon be wiped off the map. Members of this organization commonly wear green armbands to signal their allegiance to the terrorist group Hamas.

Earlier this month, a student coalition led a boycott against two Orange County, CA, movie theaters for their decision to hold a private screening and fund-raiser co-sponsored by CAIR (Council of American-Islamic Relations) and the UC Irvine Muslim Student Union. The featured film was the USA Versus Sami Al-Arian: (1) a hagiographic screening on the self-starved convicted terrorist. An indictment against the United States government on the egregious charge of false imprisonment, the film compares the Palestinian Islamic Jihad collaborator to a Socratic like figure jailed for his patriotic dissent and practice of his fundamental civil rights.

The evidence against Al-Arian was damning, alleging that Al-Arian, a former professor at the University of South Florida, was the head of the American wing of Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The indictment against Al-Arian suggests that Al-Arian abused his position as a university professor to bring other members of his terrorist group into the United States "under the guise of academic conferences and meetings." (2)

Al-Arian purportedly also helped Palestinian Islamic Jihad members "receive cover as teachers or students" at USF and worked to further alliances with other groups like Hamas and Hezbollah.

The event was first expected to be held at an Irvine theater owned by Starplex Cinemas, but as the story became viral on Friday, April 11, scores of readers called and emailed (3) (4) Starplex’s corporate office with their concerns, prompting special events coordinator Kristen Wheaton to cancel the screening and fundraiser on Monday, April 14.” (5)

In a phone call with Wheaton about her decision to cancel the event, her response was particularly noteworthy and further evidence of the deceptiveness with which extremist Muslim organizations operate. According to Wheaton, two female members of the Muslim community, Marya Bangee and Natania Abdelfattah, reserved the venue and misled the theater about the nature of the screening, describing it as a “college student film.” (6)

Moreover, despite CAIR officials charging Wheaton with allegations of breach of contract, the theater was never notified of the fact that CAIR co-sponsored the screening, or that the proceeds from ticket sales would be spent on Mr. Al-Arian’s legal defense. More specifically, in order to conceal their involvement from the theater, CAIR-LA’s Executive Director Hussam Ayloush directed Bangee and Abdelfattah to bill his personal credit card.

When CAIR decided to change the venue for the screening and fund-raiser to Edwards Woodbridge 5 in Irvine, they did so fearing that the community would inform the parent company Regal Cinemas about their motives. (7) (8) After calling a series of theaters in Irvine, we were able to procure and publicize the new location on Wednesday, April 16. (9)

Though Regal Cinemas received similar scores of protesting phone calls and emails, (10) the Tennessee-based Corporation ignored community concerns and decided to proceed with the screening and fundraiser. In a phone call with the theater manager about the ultimate decision to hold the event, she replied that people can use the theater for any desired purpose. Officials from the corporate office couldn’t be reached for comment.

Despite Regal’s disappointing decision, the fundraiser was sparsely attended and a dismal failure. Secretly moving the venue to a new and more expensive location on very short notice resulted in only a couple dozen regulars mainly from the Muslim community. (11)

Though CAIR is charging anti-Muslim bigotry and censorship against those who participated in the effort to boycott the screening for this fictitious hero, (12) only a government body possesses the unwarrantable power to levy the heavy handedness of law. This effort was an entirely civil and democratic effort grounded in the classical power of persuasion and the modern self-empowering influence of new media.

Accordingly, the decentralization of media has raised an unprecedented level of awareness and a civic virtue, essentially an army of readers promoting goodwill, with a discerning eye on behavior potentially destructive to the community.

In utilizing the new media’s unique ability to mobilize political action, this month’s grass-roots initiative allowed readers to voice their concerns and express to US businesses the right to vote with their money. Some have expressed their decision never to attend an Edward’s chain again. (13) Consequently, Edwards should realize that in supporting the legal defenses of convicted terrorists like Al-Arian, they better expect intense scrutiny.

ENDNOTES:

[1] Muslim Student Union Fundraising For Suspected Terrorist
[2] Guilty as Charged[3] Fundraising for Sami Al-Arian at UC Irvine[4] Michelle Malkin » UC Irvine Muslim group holds Al-Arian fund-raiser [5] Comment by Kristen Wheaton [6] CAIR's Duplicity In Focus - Al Arian Propaganda Film Screening Charade [7] USA vs. Al-Arian Screening: Updated Information[8] RE: USA vs. Al-Arian Screening: Updated Information
[9] New Venue for Al-Arian Fund-raiser
[10] CAIR and MSU Relocate Al-Arian Fundraiser[11] What if you had a Terror Fund-Raiser and Nobody Showed up?[12] CAIR: Calif. Theater Cancels Al-Arian Doc After Pressure From 'Anti-Muslim Bigots'
[13] Comment By Dennis P. Skea

This Will Be on the Final

The following column from Family Security Matters touches on many things we've discussed here before. But constant reminders about basic things helps. Thanks to Wendy Woodley for sending this link to us.

Jihad Means Offensive War to Spread Islam: Osama Bin Laden’s Warning to Europe

Clare M. Lopez

Just in case Europe didn’t catch his drift with one new message, al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden launched two audio taped broadsides on the Internet during the third week of March 2008. In them, he specifically threatened Europe with Jihad, apparently in response to recent stirrings of self-assertion on the Continent. It would seem that the republishing of some of the Danish cartoons, the release of a short film about Islam by Dutch filmmaker, Geert Wilders, and a sterner approach to the expansionist Islamist agenda by a crop of tough new European leaders have sparked a yelp of protest from the al Qaeda leadership.

To the Jihadi vanguard, it must have looked like Europe was well on its way to slipping back into a dhimmitude last seen centuries ago, when Jihadi warriors overran much of southern Europe, white women were prized features on auction blocks across the Caliphate, Christians and Jews knew their places in societies dominated by Islam, and it was ransom and tribute that flowed out of Christendom’s kingdoms, not impertinent caricatures of their Prophet. France already had cordoned off over 700 no-go zones where neither Napoleonic Code nor police were welcome. Belgian bishops had permitted North African illegal immigrants demanding sanctuary from threat of deportation to hold Muslim prayer services in beautiful Brussels cathedrals. A German judge had refused the desperate plea of an abused Moroccan-born woman for an expedited divorce, because, as she intoned from the bench, in the culture of Islam, it is permitted for a husband to beat his wife. The Archbishop of Canterbury had urged Britons to just accept the coming of Sharia in the UK. Theo van Gogh had been shot and stabbed to death because he stood unrepentantly for free speech, and his colleague, Ayan Hirsi Ali, had been hounded from the Netherlands altogether. Taxi drivers in Norway, the UK, and elsewhere were refusing blind passengers with Seeing Eye dogs, because they said dogs are deemed unclean animals in Islam. The newest architectural trend from Oxford to Cologne was the building of mammoth, Saudi-funded mega mosques. Yes, the establishment of Eurabia must have seemed well underway.

But then Europe began to push back and a new Pope mounted the throne of Peter, a “Panzer Pope” he’s been called, and gave a 2006 speech at the University of Regensburg in the sturdy Teutonic heart of this continent. He didn’t actually say anything about a crusade; in fact, Pope Benedict XVI, at Regensburg and since, has sought quite sincerely to present Christianity as a vehicle for discourse and reason among faiths. The 2008 establishment of a permanent council for dialogue between the Vatican and Islam was meant to build bridges, not spark fury and menace.

This is where the well-reasoned temperance of the Enlightenment falls flat, however. For the Islamic Jihad is not about reason, or temperance, or enlightenment. It is about conquest. And right now, al Qaeda and its Jihadi cohorts both home-grown and international, including the Muslim Brotherhood, the Union of Islamic Clerics, the European Council for Fatwa and Research, and their smooth-talking spokesmen such as Dr. Mustafa Ceric, Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, and Tariq Ramadan, have set their sights on Europe. Europe is too liberal, too free, too open, too outspoken, too rich, and also nicely softened up by decades of inroads by concepts like multiculturalism, a paralyzing antipathy to discriminating judgment, and an abhorrence of self-defense.

Make no mistake: Osama bin Laden’s threat is real. Al Qaeda and the Jihadis, whose cultural references were formed in the searing sterility of the 7th Century Hijaz, are coming for Europe. In the Arab desert where Islam was born, the code of the tribes demands challenge, honor, and spoils. A society raised on the values of the strong, where nothing is ever produced but only seized from the weak, where concession and compromise are met with contempt, and where revenge and retribution define human interaction – a society such as this cannot abide a civilization of uninhibited intellectuality and tolerance. In such a milieu, Islam developed, inextricably, as both socio-political system and monotheistic faith. Both remain hard, unforgiving, and bent on global domination. The sacred and immutable doctrine of Islam is laid out for all time in the revealed scripture of the Koran, the hadiths (or sayings of Muhammad), and the Sunna (or accounts of Muhammad’s deeds). There is nothing in any of these about turning the other cheek, loving one’s neighbor as oneself, or the inherent equality of all human beings. Neither will you find virtues of non-violence, self-sacrifice, or truthfulness applicable among any people but Muslims themselves. For the infidel, there is only the choice of three: convert, submit, or die.

Europe needs to wake up, and quickly. The obligatory Islamic warning has been given, the Continent put on notice that unless it agrees to compromise on its liberal lifestyle and legal system, al Qaeda will unleash its Jihadi attackers. The Vatican, too, notably accused of inspiring another crusade only after the conciliatory announcement was made about the new council for interfaith dialogue, will need to muster all the stern resolve and brilliant theological command of its current Vicar if nearly-spent Christianity is to help lead Europe’s defense. For in the end, while its population may well exhibit the studied ennui of a post-faith-based society, Europe nevertheless has much to be proud of and plenty to defend. And even though its advanced technology, orderly and educated native citizens, magnificent artistic expression, complex economies, and sophisticated political systems elicit scant acknowledgment from the savage Jihadis sworn to destroy it all, these are accomplishments that represent a pinnacle of human development. Europe is the well-spring as well as the front line of defense for modern concepts of liberal democracy now spreading inexorably the world over (except for the Arab/Muslim part of it).

Unless Europeans at every level, from the small village grocer to the leaders of academia, government, labor, and media, somehow grasp that the world view driving al Qaeda’s warnings shares virtually nothing in common with their own and adapt their defenses accordingly, it is completely conceivable that Bernard Lewis’s dire prediction about the likely Islamization of Europe by century’s end could prove true. Or, as Daniel Pipes put it some time ago, Europe must either somehow assimilate its burgeoning and increasingly hostile Muslim elements, adopt a draconian program of expulsion and immigration control, or acquiesce to Muslim dominance.

Islam does not really mean peace and Jihad is not inner yoga. Islam means submission: submission to Allah, to Islam, and to Sharia. The only peace being offered by Osama bin Laden is under the shade of the Koran and the sword. Whether by da’wa (preaching and persuasion), infiltration and destruction of faith from within, or the outright terror that al Qaeda promises its enemies, it is not just Europe that faces the Jihadi onslaught. It is every society that dares to be free to choose its own way of life, elect its own leaders, and enact its own laws. It is Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel, and the United States of America.

Knowing the enemy, naming the enemy, and mastering the enemy’s culture, history, ideology, and tactics are essential to meeting and defeating his challenge. Only by frankly facing the Islamic Jihad and resisting every urge to dismiss it as primitive, already defeated, or somehow unequal to modern civilizations such as our own, will we have any chance of prevailing.

Toledo: No to Marines, Yes to Muslim Brotherhood

Here’s another one of those fun coincidences we all enjoy.

Toledo, our neighbor to the south, just made news a couple weeks ago for its mayor’s blockheaded refusal to allow U.S. Marines their previously planned and approved urban training operation in a small portion of downtown Toledo, (which, by the way, is already deserted on weekends), because the Marines “frighten people.” (“Democratic Mayors: Semper Foolish?”).

Then we learn from Patrick Poole at Central Ohioans Against Terror that the Muslim Brotherhood--who really should frighten people, in our opinion--just held a conference at the University of Toledo. (“The Muslim Brotherhood's "Grand Jihad" in Toledo”).

Maybe the Inkhwan were the people Mayor Finkbeiner was concerned would have been frightened by the U.S. Marines--if they'd been allowed into town. Poole writes:

It might only be the shores of Lake Erie, but the Muslim Brotherhood has established an invasion beachhead in Toledo. The most recent landing by the international Islamic extremist organization was last weekend when the Muslim American Society (MAS) – the ideological arm of the Muslim Brotherhood in the US, identified as such by the Department of Justice in a court filing back in December – held a conference at the University of Toledo. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that the Department of Homeland Security recently added Toledo to the list of high-risk terrorism areas.

Among the speakers were national MAS leaders Esam Omeish and Mahdi Bray, respectively the MAS president and head of their Virginia Commission on Immigration just weeks after his appointment. According to a September 28, 2007 article in the Washington Post, Omeish was forced out when a video surfaced of Omeish preaching holy war against Israel at a December 22, 2000 Jerusalem Day rally in Washington DC, where he said:

“...you have learned the way, that you have known that the jihad way is the way to liberate your land...and we shall do everything we can to help your cause.”

Here’s the video with Omeish’s remarks (the full speech video is here; all videos courtesy of the Investigative Project)

Please read the rest of this article here.

Nor did the Toledo conference lack a local connection, as our own Dawud Walid was there, making some thoughtful remarks about blacks and Islam on behalf of CAIR. He was reported by the Toledo Blade to have said:

the history lesson about how Islam spread among blacks is tied to the "slavery psyche."

Dehumanization and discrimination had a negative impact on the black psyche, he said. Some blacks joined the Muslim movement as a protest of white supremacy in America, Mr. Walid said, and some joined in an effort to carve new identities for themselves. (“Muslims’ roots in America branch out; speakers at UT event talk of positive change”).

That's as may be. But by my logic, Dawud is staying that blacks in America who embraced Islam do so in reaction to having been beaten down and dehumanized by slavery and discrimination--in other words, the "slavery psyche" lends itself to Islam.

A statement with which, come to think of it, I completely agree.

The Plan of the Muslim Brotherhood

We're happy to see the shadowy side of the Muslim Brotherhood getting more attention.

Editorial columnist Rod Dreher, at the Dallas Morning News, explores the meaning of the "explanatory memorandum" created by the Muslim Brotherhood in the early 1990s, and made an exhibit by the Justice Department in the Holy Land Foundation trial in Dallas.

In our recent post, "Just What Is the MSA?", we wrote some about this memo, and the Muslim Brotherhood's plans for "civilizational jihad" in North America.

Dreher does much the same thing, though for a much wider audience. In view about how primal fear of being accused of Islamophobia keeps the media from publicizing even the most shocking examples of jihadist fifth-column activity in the US, every article putting people on notice of these things is a gem.

Here's an excerpt, and you should read here the rest of Dreher's column, "What the Muslim Brotherhood means for the U.S."

According to a 2004 Chicago Tribune investigation, establishing the Brotherhood in the United States has been a 40-year project that has worked mostly underground – even beneath the notice of many Muslims. Richard Clarke, the former top U.S. national security official, told the Senate in 2003 that the Muslim Brotherhood is the common thread linking terrorist fundraising schemes in the United States – which likely explains why so many mainstream American Muslim organizations were named by the feds as "unindicted co-conspirators" in the HLF trial. Is this just alarmist paranoia? Not at all.

This matters because high-profile organizations with roots explicitly in the Muslim Brotherhood have successfully established themselves in a paramount position to define Islam in America according to a radical politicized model. And they've done so without the American public having the slightest idea about their real agenda.

'The Missing Hijab 2 & the Jew,' and the Missing Humor of the MSA

Little Green Footballs, (and also American Thinker , and Protein Wisdom ), are giving their readers a chance to appreciate a grossly unamusing video, entitled “The Missing Hijab 2 & the Jew,” created by members of the Muslim Student Association at the University of Texas--San Antonio.

What with its roots in the Muslim Brotherhood, its being joined at the hip with CAIR, and its craven deceitfulness in posing as a campus student organization to disguise its unswerving mission to impose Islam on all of us by slow degrees, we at Dearborn Underground haven’t got much sympathy for the MSA.

Take a look at this video. Then ask yourself if you want your tax dollars spent to install ritual footbaths so guys like this can wash their feet?

Just What Is the MSA?

At the center of the foot-bath controversy coming out of the University of Michigan-Dearborn is the harmless-sounding Muslim Student Association (MSA). According to the MSA’s website, “MSA is dedicated to representing the Islamic perspective through lectures, cultural and social activities, community celebrations and social betterment programs.”

That, and as we in Dearborn have come to learn, the MSA is front and center in obtaining religious accommodations through its alter ego, the Muslim Accommodations Task Force (MATF).

But there’s more to the MSA than just baking brownies for fundraisers and bringing in guest speakers. Much, much more.

Stephen Schwartz, a senior policy analyst at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, wrote the following about the MSA in 2003:

When its leaders speak to mainstream media, MSA presents itself as a campus-service organization not much different from other collegiate faith groups. But the reality is very different, and deeply sinister. MSA is a key element in the Wahhabi lobby, and a cornerstone of the conspiracy by Saudi-backed extremists to control American Islam, as well the public discourse about Islam in America. (“Butcher Enablers”).

Jonathon Dowd-Gailey of the Middle East Quarterly reports:

“There is overwhelming evidence that the MSA, far from being a benign student society, is an overtly political organization seeking to create a single Muslim voice on U.S. campuses—a voice espousing Wahhabism, anti-Americanism, and anti-Semitism, agitating aggressively against U.S. Middle East policy, and expressing solidarity with militant Islamist ideologies, sometimes with criminal results.”

How can a campus service organization professing a mission to present "the Islamic perspective" at the same time be a sinister front for Wahhabism?

The answer is, that the organization was directly spawned for that purpose by the foundational Islamic terrorist group of the past century, the Muslim Brotherhood. That is, the Muslim Brotherhood created the MSA for the purpose of establishing Islamic dominance in North America by slow degrees.

The Mission of the Muslim Brotherhood in North America

The Muslim Brotherhood, al-Ikhwan al-Muslimun, was founded in 1928 by 22-year-old Hassan Banna in the Egyptian city of Ismailiyya, in reaction to the end of the Ottoman Empire and Ataturk's abolishing in 1924 of the centuries-old Islamic caliphate. "Banna railed against the colonial powers' humiliation of Muslims, and preached that governments should be ruled by Islamic law, or sharia." (“In Search Of Friends Among The Foes”).

As Robert Spencer writes in Onward Muslim Soldiers, (p. 218), Banna’s political/religious “vision was in perfect accord with that of classical Muslim scholars such as Ibn Khaldun, who taught in the fourteenth century that ‘in the Muslims community, the holy war is a religious duty, because of the universalism of the Muslim mission and (the obligation to) convert everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by force.’”

Force, as we are all aware, means armed jihad, the sword. Persuasion comes in the form of dawah.

In lands and situations where a weaker Muslim community cannot prevail through violent jihad, the teaching of al-Ikhwan “allows for the suspension of Jihad, and concentration on the non-violent Dawa campaign. Both Jihad and Dawa, in any event, are designed to serve an interim goal of advancing the long-term, ideological objective.” Ultimately, “[t]hrough Dawa the ground for Jihad is supposed to be prepared.” ("Hamas: Radical Islam in a National Struggle").

And dawah is Muslim-speak for the old frog-in-the-boiling-water experiment. It is meant to proceed by increments. But the objective remains the same: the eventual imposition, by force if necessary, of Islam and sharia law. Dawa doesn't accomplish this. It just gets us all used to the idea. (By the way, how do you think that's going?)

As reported in the Washington Post, (“In Search Of Friends Among The Foes”),

Advocating patience in achieving Brotherhood goals at an Ohio rally in 1995, "top Brotherhood official, Youssef Qaradawi, said victory will come through dawah .... ‘Conquest through dawah, that is what we hope for,’ said Qaradawi, an influential Qatari imam who pens some of the religious edicts justifying Hamas suicide bombings against Israeli civilians. ‘We will conquer Europe, we will conquer America, not through the sword but through dawah,’ said the imam, who has condemned the Sept. 11 attacks but is now barred from the United States.”

The Muslim Brotherhood Movement Homepage, under the heading of “Establishing the Islamic Government,” describes this step of preparation:

Al-Ikhwan believe that ruling a government should be the step which follows preparing (most of) the society for accepting the Islamic laws. Otherwise, ruling a totally corrupt society thru a militant government-overthrow is a great risk. Preparing the society is achieved thru plans for: spreading the Islamic culture, the possible media means, mosques, and da'wa work in public organizations such as syndicates, parliaments, student unions, .... Parallel to that, distinct muslims should be trained to administer political, economical, social, and student organizations efficiently (and Islamically), as another preparation step.

According the same source, the group’s theme is:

Allah is our objective.
The messenger is our leader.
Quran is our law.
Jihad is our way.
Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.

In his 1995 speech, Qaradawi said the dawah would work through Islamic groups set up by Brotherhood supporters in this country. After praising the old “supporters who were jailed by Arab governments in 1950s and then came to the United States to ‘fight the seculars and the Westernized’ by founding this country's leading Islamic groups,” he specifically singled out as an example of dawah the Muslim Students Association: “Twenty years later, the MSA -- using $21 million raised in part from Qaradawi, banker Nada and the emir of Qatar -- opened a headquarters complex built on former farmland in suburban Indianapolis. With 150 chapters, the MSA is one of the nation's largest college groups.”

Papers now surfacing because of the Houston terror-support trial US v. Holy Land Foundation provide a stark look at Muslim Brotherhood plans. One such document, prepared by Brotherhood official Mohamed Akram around 1991, is titled “An Explanatory Memorandum: On the General Strategic Goal for the Group In North America,” and provides this "general strategic goal" for the movement:

Enablement of Islam in North America, meaning, establishing an effective and stable Islamic Movement led by the Muslim Brotherhood which adopts Muslims’ causes domestically and globally, and which works to expand the observant Muslim base, aims at unifying and directing Muslims’ efforts, presents Islam as a civilization alternative, and supports the global Islamic state wherever it is.

Key to this mission of "establishing an effective and stable Islamic Movement" is “Settlement,” a term meaning “That Islam and its Movement become a part of the homeland it lives in”, i.e., North America. In order for this to take place, “the Movement must plan and struggle to obtain ‘the keys’ and the tools of this process in [sic] carry out this grand mission as a ‘Civilization Jihadist’ responsibility which lies on the shoulders of Muslims and -- on top of them-- the Muslim Brotherhood in this country.”

Maybe the language is a bit heavy, but not as bad as all that, right? Maybe "Civilization Jihad" only means the same peaceful civiliazational advances we all hope for? You can think that until he gets more specific about the meaning of “settlement”:

“Understanding the role of the Muslim Brother in North America:

“The process of settlement is a ‘Civilization-Jihadist Process’ with all the word means. The Ikhwan must understand that 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 other religions.”

That seems clear enough. Down with Western civilization and the US Constitution, and up with Sharia. And the Muslim Brotherhood does hold an impressive track record for founding groups that successfully accomplish many of their deadly ends. Along with the MSA, the Brotherhood founded Al Qaeda, Hamas, and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, all extremely efficient shedders of innocent blood. Those heavily influenced by Muslim Brotherhood ideas include Osama Bin Ladin and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

The Brotherhood Founds the MSA

Joe Kaufman at FrontPage Magazine summarizes the well-documented history of how the MSA came into being:

The Muslim Students Association (MSA) was founded by members of the radical Muslim Brotherhood, al-Ikhwan al-Muslimun, at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, in January of 1963. It was the first major project of the newly arrived Brotherhood immigrants, who numbered in the hundreds. Today, MSA chapters are found in most, if not all, of the leading universities throughout the United States and Canada. (“MSA, the Missing Co-Conspirator”).

Much like the Brotherhood overseas, the MSA is set up using “Zonal” representatives. Both the U.S. and Canada have East and West Zones and conferences staged at each.

In another Muslim Brotherhood memo made an exhibit in the Holy Land case, Brotherhood official Zeid-Al-Noman explains how in the early days of the Ikhwan in the 1960s, a "main condition of recruitment in the ranks of this Movement was that a brother...must be active in the general activism in the MSA, a person who attends its general conferences or participating in its executive committees, whether local or central, and this was the Movement's condition in the 60s." Zeid also explains that one dynamic element of the organizational base in North America is that "the vast majority of the Muslim Brotherhood here are students."

And, according to Minneapolis-Star reporter Katherine Kirsten, neither the contemporary MSA or MATF, in spite of being student organizations, is merely being "operated by overly enthusiastic college students. Its professional staff, based in the Washington, D.C., area, includes coordinators who provide legal advice, teach students to lobby, write letters on their behalf, and help them overcome ‘obstacles’ such as college administrators' concerns about violating the separation of church and state.”

And just to show how the MSA is a chip off the old Muslim Brotherhood block, in March 2003 the MSA hosted a guest speaker at an MSA meeting in Queensborough Community College in New York who declared openly,

“‘We reject the U.N., reject America, reject all law and order. Don't lobby Congress or protest because we don't recognize Congress. The only relationship you should have with America is to topple it ... Eventually there will be a Muslim in the White House dictating the laws of Shariah.’” (Jonathon Dowd-Gailey, “Islamism's Campus Club: The Muslim Students' Association”).

As Dowd-Gailey explains:

The MSA reflects a prime characteristic of militant Islamic groups: a refusal to acknowledge the legitimacy of secular society and personal spirituality. The MSA's Starters Guide contains an open call to Islamicize campus politics:

It should be the long-term goal of every MSA to Islamicize the politics of their respective university … the politicization of the MSA means to make the MSA more of a force on internal campus politics. The MSA needs to be a more "In-your-face" association.

All of this, the guide explains, results from the MSA's duty "to bring morality back into the campus" and to convince students to practice Islam "as a complete way of life."

In the process, the MSA preaches a creed of "special treatment" and "self-segregation" that sounds reminiscent of, and may actually borrow from, Afro-centric campus politics of the 1990s. Demanding that universities be more "Muslim-friendly," the MSA's newly established National Religious Accommodations Task Force (RATF) directs local MSA chapters to insist that universities provide separate housing and meals for Muslims only.

(NOTES: The RATF has since been renamed the Muslim Accommodation Task Force (MATF). Also, The Starter’s Guide is no longer available online, and online searches reveal no traces of it aside from Dowd-Gailey’s footnote.)

Indeed, The Muslim Accommodations Task Force (MATF), is “an initiative by theby [sic] MSA National to invite Muslim students, their colleagues, educators and administrators to discover how Muslim student leaders and colleges and universities have worked hand in hand to make campuses ‘Muslim-friendly.’”

The MSA Founds the ISNA

In 1981 the MSA spun off the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), "an umbrella organization for Islamic groups that holds annual conventions drawing more than 25,000 people."

International Communication Professor J. Michael Waller described the ISNA's function at length in recent Congressional testimony:

The Islamic Society of North America is an influential front for the promotion of the Wahhabi political, ideological and theological infrastructure in the United States and Canada.

Established by the Muslim Students Association, ISNA seeks to marginalize leaders of the Muslim faith who do not support its ideological goals. Through sponsorship of propaganda, doctrinal material and mosques, is pursuing a strategic objective of dominating Islam in North America. ISNA provides ideological material to about 1,100 of an estimated 1,500 to 2,500 mosques in North America. It vets and certifies Wahhabi-trained imams and is the main official endorsing agent for Muslim chaplains in the U.S. military.

Politically, ISNA has promoted leaders of the American Muslim Council (AMC), the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP), and the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC).

NRO's Stephen Schwartz describes ("Butcher Enablers"), how Western Muslim scholar Hamid Algar, in his essay, Wahhabism: A Critical Essay, “calls attention to MSA's role in the creation of the Islamic Society of North America, or ISNA, which is best described as a branch of the Saudi religious militia operating to impose Wahhabi conformity on all of American Islam.”

In 1971 some of the same people who founded MSA also founded the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT), “a financing arm that holds title to hundreds of U.S. mosques and manages bank accounts for Muslim groups using Islamic principles.” (“In Search Of Friends Among The Foes”).

I don’t know about you, but those sound like some hefty spin-offs from just a college student’s group. I’ll bet InterVarsity never appointed a subcommittee that ended up controlling the pulpits of more than half the Bible churches in America.

“In addition,”continues Schwartz, “the MSA has strong ties with the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY), established in 1972 and directed from the Saudi capital, Riyadh. WAMY's U.S. offices in Northern Virginia have been a central target of the federal investigation of terrorist funding and money laundering by Islamist groups following the horrors of September 11th.”

For that matter, in January 2006 the U.S. Senate Finance Committee requested the Internal Revenue Service to turn over documents concerning several Muslim charities, including the MSA, in search of ties between tax-exempt organizations and terror groups.

So we've got the Muslim Brotherhood, Saudi Wahhabists, CAIR, the ISNA, financial ties to terrorists, anti-American propaganda, and an ideology of religious contempt for the West. That's a perfect storm of bad guys amongst whom is nestled your local MSA. Is it any wonder Joe Kaufman refers to the Muslim Student Association as “the missing coconspirator” in the Holy Land case?

But more to my point, remember that Qaradawi promised the Muslim Brotherhood and its puppet front, the MSA, would “conquer America, not through the sword but through dawah.”

Objections to the foot baths were never about people just being unhappy about installing new plumbing for a few students showering their feet in a rest room. The objections are about parrying the thrust of dawah.

There is a reason why, when a few of us pinched the University and the MSA over these foot baths, it was CAIR that squealed.

They are telling us this is only preparation. And like the old saying goes, Allah is in the details.