Wednesday, September 26, 2012

The Muslim Brotherhood, Part V - Al-Ikhwan Al-Muslimun in the 21st Century

PETER FARMER September 26, 2012
Part I - A Brief History of the Muslim Brotherhood (Can be found by clicking here)

Part II - The Muslim Brotherhood - Haj Amin al-Husseini (Can be found by clicking here)

Part III - The Muslim Brotherhood - Hitler's Imam
Part IV - he Muslim Brotherhood -  Sayyid Qutb

From its humble beginnings in 1928, the Muslim Brotherhood has grown into a global Pan-Islamic movement. The group is riding a wave of successes as it moves into the 21st century. Despite many setbacks, the "Brethren" have been remarkably successful in advancing their agenda not only in the Middle East but around the world. What factors can account for their success? The following analysis considers some of the most-critical ones.

1. The Muslim Brotherhood has sharply-defined its mission and core values in its motto, "Allah is our objective; the Quran is our law, the Prophet is our leader; Jihad is our way; and death for the sake of Allah is the highest of our aspirations." Members know what the group stands for, and the goals for which it is striving. In military terms, the motto functions as a set of mission orders which set forth the objectives for which the individual believer is striving.


2. The Muslim Brotherhood functions, in part, according to the "leaderless movement" model and functions as a distributed network. Although the group has a leadership hierarchy and bureaucracy, it pushes much operational responsibility down to the local level. Local groups are compartmentalized cells or "franchises," which are capable of independent operation as well as coordinated action. By using small cells as the basic unit of organization, the Brotherhood enhances its resiliency and also makes infiltration and penetration by outsiders and enemies more difficult.

3.  The bureaucracy of the movement is divided into a General Organizational Council, composed of delegates from individual chapters of the Brotherhood; the Shura Council, which formulates the general goals of the organization; and an Executive Office, which implements the directives of the Shura and GOC.  Within this bureaucracy are found offices devoted to executive leadership, education, fund-raising, political action, finance, and affairs of the Muslim Sisterhood.
4. The Muslim Brotherhood has links to a vast number of international, national, regional and local organizations, including Islamic charities, madrasas and schools, clinics/hospitals, newspapers/publishing houses, and electronic media outlets. The movement also has an office devoted to propaganda and public relations, and maintains websites in Arabic, English and many other languages. This network functions to cultivate new followers, collect donations and funds, and also to provide services to Muslims around the globe. These groups are also part-and-parcel of the civilizational jihad project of the Brotherhood - whose aim is to spread Islam into the non-Muslim world. Moreover, this web of services assures the continued good will - and financial support - of existing members. Patrons of the group include many fabulously-wealthy members of the royal families of the Middle East.
5. Like many of today's most-successful crime syndicates, the Muslim Brotherhood goes to great lengths to present a "respectable" face to the world at large, while hiding the often-brutal and violent means it uses to advance its agenda. Since the 1960s, the organization has publicly-disavowed violence - while continuing its clandestine support of the PLO-Fatah, Black September, Hamas, Hezbollah, al-Qaeda and other terrorist and direct-action groups. The dual nature of the group functions offers a degree of protection from retaliation by its enemies. Using proxies for direct-action also provides the organization a degree of plausible deniability and helps maintain its cover as a "legitimate" organization.
6. The Muslim Brotherhood have proven to be skilled manipulators of the western, left-leaning press. The movement's tactics include a heavy reliance on disinformation, psychological operations and propaganda to advance its agenda in the non-Islamic world, and obscure its intentions. This objective is accomplished via multiple means, but one of the most common is through non-profit organizations such as CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations), the MSA (Muslim Student Association), and other front groups, which promote Pan-Islamic views in their respective spheres of influence. The Ikhwan also have a significant presence at Al-Jazeera, the Arabic-language cable TV network.  These initiatives are funded by petrodollars flowing from Saudi Arabia and the other Sunni Arab Gulf States.
7. Consistent with its goal of civilizational jihad and stealth sharia, the Brotherhood has targeted schools and universities as focal points of its efforts to advance Islam into the western world. In Texas, independent researchers discovered that a wealthy Muslim was trying to influence the textbook and the lesson plans used in public schools. Many universities have received extremely generous gifts from Muslim benefactors in return for opening Centers for the Study of Islam or similar initiatives. Naturally, these centers are staffed by academicians sympathetic to the Muslim Brotherhood and Pan-Islamism in general.
8. As shown by the recent controversy involving Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her senior aide, Huma Abedin - a member of the Muslim Sisterhood - the movement has also been very active at infiltrating the government and the military. The notorious Ft. Hood shooter and mass murderer, psychiatrist Nidal Hasan (who had the inscription "SoA" or "Soldier of Allah" on his U.S. Army business cards) and U.S. Army Sergeant Hasan Akbar (who killed two fellow soldiers in a grenade attack in Kuwait in 2003) attest to the degree of penetration by Islamists into government and the military.
9. The Muslim Brothers have made a concerted effort to reach out to disaffected blacks; the movement has also recruited extensively from the U.S. prison population. The preferred method of the Brotherhood is to sponsor imams who then go into prisons and recruit/convert inmates. Of course, these outreach efforts omit or hide the historical crimes committed by Muslims against blacks, such as the role of Islamic slave-traders  in the capture and sale of Africans into bondage during the height of the trans-Atlantic slave trade - and the continued , wide-spread existence of illicit slavery within the Islamic world today.
10. The communications strategy of the group has been to tone-down or dilute statements made to the non-Islamic or western press, while continuing to preach jihad, sharia and Islamic supremacy to Muslim audiences. This same strategy is followed by imams in mosques across the western world. Thereby, western audiences are presented with an image of Islam and the Muslim Brotherhood utterly at-odds with the one Muslims themselves are seeing, hearing and reading.
11. Spearheaded by such groups as the Organization of Islamic Conference and supported by the Muslim Brotherhood, attempts are now-underway at the United Nations to criminalize criticism of Islam.
12. The international left and Pan-Islamism share many of the same goals, and thus often can be found in cooperation with one another. This alliance of convenience serves as a force multiplier for the Brotherhood.
13. Since many (if not most) major media outlets in North America and Europe are left-leaning in their editorial and reporting slant, the Muslim Brotherhood enjoy a large degree of protection and rhetorical cover for their actions in the west. The extent of this phenomenon can be seen in the number of newspapers and other media outlets which declined to print or broadcast the so-called "Mohammed Cartoons" by cartoonist Kurt Westergaard, which first appeared in the Danish newspaper Jyllands Posten in 2005.
14. The "Ground Zero" mosque (hereafter GZM) controversy also bears the fingerprints of the Ikhwan via Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, a known supporter of Hamas. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who supported the mosque, was later discovered to have a conflict of interest when it was disclosed that a Bloomberg-owned company was seeking approval to operate a sharia-compliant financial services firm in the United Arab Emirates. It is likely that Bloomberg's support of the GZM was a quid pro quo for green-lighting of the venture. Lost in all of the media chatter about the GZM was the fact that it was being pushed for a very specific reason, one well-known to members of the Ikhwan: Islamic history shows that Muslims build mosques on the sites of what they believe to be great victories for jihad.
15. Deception has always been a critical part of the Muslim way of conquest. Muslims are not permitted to lie to fellow shahids (believers), but are permitted to deceive infidels (non-Muslims) via two means - taqiyya (saying something that isn't true) or kitman (lying by omission). For example, the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) claims that it "has not now or ever been involved with the Muslim Brotherhood, or supported any covert, illegal, or terrorist activity or organization."  In fact, the ISNA was created by the Muslim Brotherhood and has helped fund Hamas. The denials issued by the ISNA are forms both of taqiyya and kitman. The Koran requires that a true Muslim practice deception in order to protect himself, other members of the umma (world-wide community of Muslims) or the faith itself. Naturally, Muslims are not required to tell infidels when they are deceiving them.
15. False-flag and other propaganda operations are a standard part of the information warfare playbook of the Brotherhood and its surrogates. A textbook example occurred during the 2006 incursion into Lebanon by Israel. After two Israeli aircraft fired rockets into a Hezbollah-controlled area near Cana, Hezbollah operatives released photos to the western press that were picked up by the AP and many other major news organizations, which seemed  to show two burned-out ambulances with rocket damage. International condemnation against Israel followed. However, forensic analysis of the scene and the photos later proved conclusively that the ambulances had been destroyed by Hezbollah and used to stage a fake Israeli atrocity. In another incident in the same war, the AP and other news services were caught red-handed using photos "photoshopped" (digitally-altered) by Muslim operatives to make bomb and artillery damage to appear worse than it was.
16. CAIR and other Islamist groups are specialists in an emerging form of asymmetrical conflict known as "lawfare," the practice of using the law as a weapon to silence, intimidate or otherwise render ineffective critics of Islam. This is typically done by suing targets repeatedly; sustained by the deep pockets of their patrons, CAIR can afford to pursue such suits indefinitely while bankrupting their targets. Another form of jihad and asymmetrical warfare employed by CAIR is the control of language. By creating neologisms such as "Islamophobia," the group hopes to control the terms of the debate and silence critics by labeling them as "extremists."
17. Via its publishing houses and other sources, the Muslim Brotherhood is able to maintain the flow of its message throughout the Islamic world. Works by its past leaders such as Hassan al-Banna, Haj Amin al-Husseini, and Sayyid Qutb, can be brought to rising generations of Muslims in countless madrasas. Similarly, in this manner, the Brothers can also promote such Anti-Semitic works as Hitler's Nazi manifesto Mein Kampf, which - in its Arabic translation - remains a best-seller throughout the Muslim World, and fictional-but-popular works such as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
18. Pursuant to its goal of creating a world-wide community of Muslims, Dar al-Islam, and funded by billions in petro-dollars, the Muslim Brotherhood is systematically-expanding across the globe and into non-Muslim regions of the world, erecting mosques, community centers and schools from Tennessee to Oslo, Norway to Sydney, Australia. To uninformed westerners, a mosque appears only to be a place of worship, not unlike a Christian church or temple. However, to a Muslim, a mosque is much more, as disclosed by the words of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, "The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets and the faithful our soldiers..." Thus, the mosque should be regarded not simply as a place of worship, but as a sort of fortress or advanced party of Islam within the land of the infidels.
The foregoing list details the many-and-various ways in which the Muslim Brothers exert their growing influence in the Muslim and non-Muslim worlds; to these can be added overt political action, for in the on-going turmoil of the "Arab Spring," a Muslim Brotherhood-backed candidate, Mohamed Morsi, has now ascended to the presidency of Egypt. Thus closes the circle begun by Hassan al-Banna and his colleagues more than eighty years ago. Skeptics and apologists for Islam will likely dismiss concerns about the global ambitions of the Muslim Brotherhood as unfounded or delusional, but if there is anything that the history of this dynamic and relentlessly committed group proves, it is that it is foolhardy to underestimate them. We in the west have not seen the last of Al-Ikhwan Al-Muslimun.
Copyright 2012 Peter Farmer
Peter Farmer is a historian and commentator on national security, geopolitics and public policy issues. He has done original research on wartime resistance movements in WWII Europe, and has delivered seminars on such subjects as political violence and terrorism, the evolution of conflict, combat medicine, and related subjects. Mr. Farmer is also a scientist and a medic. 

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