Report: How Muslim Brotherhood has earned its terrorist organization designation?

In an April 11 Brookings Institution report titled “Is the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization?” senior fellow Shadi Hamid states that the Trump administration’s proposed designation of the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist group “could have significant consequences for the U.S., the Middle East, and the world.”

Among many astounding claims in the report, the three most misleading among them begin with his statement that the Muslim Brotherhood is a “non-violent Islamist group,” that “there is not a single American expert on the Muslim Brotherhood who supports designating it as a Foreign Terrorist Organization,” and that President Trump’s advisors were enlisting Americans in what Mr. Hamid calls “civilization struggle.”

First, there is overwhelming evidence that the Muslim Brotherhood is indeed a violent terrorist organization. The Brotherhood’s slogan is “‘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.”

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that nearly every Sunni terrorist group in the world was either fully or partially founded by active or former Brotherhood operatives.

Brotherhood-linked terrorist organizations include ISIS, al-Qaeda, Hamas, and al-Gama’at al-Islamiyya.

Moreover, the Brotherhood also has active militias such as the “95 Brigade,” a Brotherhood terrorist group founded in 1995, which is currently operating under the direction of the Brotherhood Guidance office. The Brotherhood also has a well-funded transnational multi-lingual propaganda machine, which makes it more dangerous.

In a series of interviews with al-Jazeera TV, Osama Yassin, a minister in former President Mohammed Morsi’s cabinet, revealed that the 95 Brigade engaged in the abduction, beating, and torture of “thugs” and threw Molotov cocktails at its opponents.

The brigade’s operatives were also implicated in the killing of anti-Brotherhood protestors. In March 2014, for example, two Brotherhood operatives were sentenced to death after an online video clip showed them killing a teenager by throwing him from a building.

Under Mr. Morsi’s leadership, current Brotherhood leaders were personally involved in torture. During an interview with al-Jazeera TV in 2011, Brotherhood leader Safwat Hegazy bragged about his involvement in torturing a man whom he suspected was a police officer.

Egyptian Ambassador to Venezuela Yehyia Najm is among the numerous victims of what is known in Egypt as the “Brotherhood’s Slaughterhouses.” Ambassador Najm stated that the room where he was held captive and tortured with 49 other people, was “like a Nazi camp.” This is Mr. Shadi Hamid’s idea of a “non-violent group.”

Second, Mr. Hamid’s claim that there are no American experts on the Muslim Brotherhood who support its designation as a terror group, is wrong. The Middle East Forum, one of the America’s most renowned think tanks that specializes in Middle East and Islamic terrorism studies, supports the Brotherhood’s terror designation. Also, Mr. Trump’s advisor, Walid Phares, one of America’s most respected experts on Islamic terrorism and the Middle East, supports the Brotherhood’s terror designation. Andrew C. McCarthy III, former assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, who led the 1995 terrorism prosecution against Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman and 11 others, also supports the Brotherhood terror designation. Yet, Mr. Hamid chooses to ignore them, as he also chooses to ignore other facts.

Third, Mr. Hamid claimed that, “This language works to enlist Americans to join the “civilizational struggle” — an idea once reserved for those from the farthest fringes of the far right in the United States, now held by people in the very center of American power: the White House.”

Mr. Hamid may have borrowed the term “civilization struggle,” or “A’mali Jihadia Hadaria” (civilization jihad operation), from the Muslim Brotherhood’s International Apparatus. The nihilistic term first appeared in a 1991 document titled “The Explanatory Memorandum,” which outlined the Muslim Brotherhood’s strategic goals for North America. This memorandum was entered as evidence in the Holy Land Foundation terror funding trial in 2008, the largest terror financing case in U.S. history.

This wouldn’t be the first time the Brookings Institution engaged in misleading disinformation on behalf of the Muslim Brotherhood. For example, a Brookings Institution article stated that the fourth of the Muslim Brotherhood’s 10 thawabet (precepts) in its bylaws specified that “during the process of establishing democracy and relative political freedom, the Muslim Brotherhood is committed to abide by the rules of democracy and its institutions.”

This is a bold misrepresentation of the fourth precept. According to the Brotherhood’s own standards and internal bylaws, the fourth precept is violent jihad and martyrdom, which the Brotherhood states is an obligation of every individual Muslim, as well as the collective obligation of their organization.

There is a civilization jihad or struggle as Mr. Hamid called it, but it’s waged against America and the Western world by the very people he is defending. To answer Mr. Hamid’s question as to whether the Muslim Brotherhood is a terrorist organization, the answer is yes, indeed it is a terrorist organization.

Mr. Trump’s administration needs to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a terror group. Congress should also require think tanks to disclose any foreign funding received while lobbying Congress. These financial disclosures will help combat disinformation campaigns targeting lawmakers, including reports like Mr. Hamid’s.

Finally we want to present you these 13 reasons about the Muslim Brotherhood and why this organization should be declared a terrorism organization:

1. The motto and logo of the Muslim Brotherhood speak for themselves. The motto is “Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. The Qur’an is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope. [Allah is greater!].” The logo includes crossed swords and the Quran emblazoned across the Earth. Below the swords is the Arabic word for “prepare,” which is pulled from Quran 8:60 on the spoils of war:

2. The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in Egypt in 1928 by Hassan al Banna, who sought to revive the crumbled Islamic empire, or caliphate, led by the Ottoman Turks. “It is the nature of Islam to dominate, not to be dominated, to impose its law on all nations and to extend its power to the entire planet,” al-Banna wrote.

In a book titled “The Way of Jihad,” Banna wrote: “Jihad [means] the fighting of the unbelievers, and involves all possible efforts that are necessary to dismantle the power of the enemies of Islam including beating them, plundering their wealth, destroying their places of worship and smashing their idols.”

3. Brotherhood ideologue Sayyid Qutb, known as the father of modern jihad, traveled to the United States before he was executed by Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1966. Qutb saw the world as divided into two spheres: “the Party of Allah and the Party of Satan.” He asserted that the Prophet Mohammad would have rejected any secular government not based on the Party of Allah. Qutb claimed Muslims had both a right and an obligation to resist such government.

4. The top brass of al-Qaida’s leadership including the late Osama bin Laden. Khalid Sheik Muhammad, Muhammad Atta, the blind Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman and current leader Ayman al-Zawahiri were all members of the Muslim Brotherhood and often quoted from Qutb’s writings. According to Discover the Networks, Qutb’s writings, “which challenged the views of mainstream Sunni theologians, who extolled the Islamic tradition of deference to the state and ruler – are now cited by many scholars as some of the first formulations of political Islam.”

So it was Banna and Qutb who laid the theological foundations that the Brotherhood is dedicated to a global revivalist movement determined to spread Shariah law.

It is often argued by Western liberals that the Muslim Brotherhood became peaceful after the execution of Qutb in 1966. But, according to the Clarion Project, “there is no Muslim Brotherhood manifesto of unequivocal non-violence anywhere to be found. For all the talk of this momentous change, the Brotherhood has never produced an authoritative declaration explaining this supposed ideological moderation.”

A book titled “Preachers, Not Judges” is said to have been written by the Muslim Brotherhood’s General Guide, Hasan al-Hudaybi, and is often described as a formal rebuttal to the teachings of Qutb.

There’s one problem, however. The book is a fraud. “Top experts have concluded that the text was not even written by Al-Hudaybi, nor is there any evidence that it was written or endorsed by the Brotherhood,” Clarion concludes.

5. American-born imam Anwar al-Awlaki issued a fatwa against the United States during the time he was being sheltered by fellow Brotherhood members in Yemen, and he famously declared, “I pray that Allah destroys America.”

6. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a known Islamist who is turning Turkey back to Shariah law, has a close relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood, which has endorsed him as the new leader of the global Islamic community.

7. Hamas, which is listed on the State Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations, remains the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood.

8. The Brotherhood has been banned by Egypt’s current regime, as well as by Saudi Arabia, Russia and the United Arab Emirates.

9. At the Holy Land Foundation trial in 2008, the FBI presented documents designating more than 200 organizational affiliates of the Muslim Brotherhood and known supporters of Hamas. The foundation was shut down, and nearly a dozen people were sent to jail for their connections to these organizations and roles in helping funnel money to Hamas.

10. In 2004, the FBI raided a Muslim Brotherhood house in northern Virginia and confiscated a document called “An Explanatory Memorandum for the General Strategic Goal for the Brothers in North America.” This document, presented as evidence in the HLF trial in 2008 in Dallas, outlined the Muslim Brotherhood’s strategy to take over America “from within.”

This memo was written by Mohamed Adlouni Akram in 1991 for the Shura Council of the Muslim Brotherhood. Here are some of the notable excerpts:

“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.”

“The process of settlement is a ‘Civilization-Jihadist Process’ with all the word means. The Ikhwan [Brothers] 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. Without this level of understanding, we are not up to this challenge and have not prepared ourselves for Jihad yet. It is a Muslim’s destiny to perform Jihad and work wherever he is and wherever he lands until the final hour comes, and there is no escape from that destiny except for those who chose to slack. But, would the slackers and the Mujahedeen be equal.”

11. The Muslim Brotherhood has many destructive offshoots operating in the U.S. There are too many to name here, but the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, is an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation terror-financing trial of 2008, and a judge refused under appeal to remove CAIR’s name from this list. Many of CAIR’s former officials have been arrested and/or convicted of terror-related crimes.

The North American Islamic Trust, or NAIT, has direct ties to the Brotherhood, as documented by the FBI in evidence presented at the trial. (See Sec. VII, Page 8 of court document.) NAIT is a financial subsidiary of the Islamic Society of North America and holds the deed to more than 325 mosques in 42 U.S. states that are controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood, according to Discover the Networks.

12. Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi is currently fighting the Muslim Brotherhood in the Sinai Peninsula and has himself survived two assassination attempts believed to be backed by the Brotherhood. “What kind of message is it going to send if we can’t figure out how to designate the Brotherhood a terrorist organization when they’re fighting them in Sinai right now?” asks Haney.

13. The argument that the Brotherhood works for “democracy” in the Middle East is misleading, at best. Sure, it works for democracy in areas where it knows Shariah dominates. For example, Hamas was elected in 2006, and they haven’t had an election since. This disdain for democratic elections after an initial election, often rigged, is explained further in Haney’s article “Green Tide Rising.”

Source: Meforum