The FBI’s June 21 arrest of an 18-year old-suburban Indianapolis high school student on charges of attempting to join the Islamic State (ISIS) elicited all the usual protestations of disbelief from local politicos, school spokespeople, and media outlets.
To the extent the arrest was covered at all, it contained rich details of the cooperative steps taken by federal, state, and local enforcement to monitor, track, and finally arrest the suspected terrorist as he attempted to board a Greyhound Bus.
None of the local coverage of Brownsburg High School student Akram Musleh’s arrest made any mention of ties he might have had with local Islamists, let alone who those Islamists might be. Nor was Musleh the first Muslim arrested in Indianapolis on terror support charges. Last February, local authorities charged six people with material support for terrorism. In its only story on those arrests, the Indianapolis Star proclaimed the reason for their presence in Indiana “was unclear.”
Left unmentioned was that Indianapolis is home to the largest and single most influential Muslim organization in the United States. For 36 years, the Islamic Society for North America has been hiding in plain sight on a spacious, well-tended campus on South County Road, just west of the Indianapolis International Airport in Plainfield, IN.
According to its own telling, ISNA was created by the Muslim Brotherhood in 1980 “to be a nucleus for the Islamic Movement in North America” and has been run by a succession of senior Muslim Brotherhood leaders who have turned it into the largest and most powerful Muslim Brotherhood organization in the country.
The Brotherhood itself was founded in Egypt in 1928 to replace the Islamic Caliphate that collapsed with the Ottoman Empire after World War I. It designed an organizational structure to implement a clear founding mission; the establishment of a global caliphate to be governed by Sharia — a totalitarian legal system that radical Muslims believe must be imposed upon everyone, everywhere.
The group turned violent during World War II, targeting the families of Egyptian politicians and British military officers, leading in 1949 to a harsh crackdown against it, which included the assassination of its founder Hassan al-Bana.
The group took advantage of a brief lifting of a ban on it in 1951 to take part in the coup that ousted King Farouk. However, the Brotherhood’s failed attempt just two years later to oust the new military regime lead by Gamal Abdel Nasser resulted in a ferocious crackdown that scattered many of its survivors to Europe and, of all places, Urbana, IL, where, in 1963, the Muslim Brotherhood established its first U.S. front group called the Muslim Students Association. Today, MSA chapters can be found on almost every college and university campus in the U.S. and Canada.
The Muslim Brotherhood’s own detailed plan to inculcate itself in the United States was discovered by the FBI in 2004 as part of a hidden archive in a suburban Virginia basement. The materials were accepted as evidence during the 2007 Holy Land Foundation trial, which named ISNA an “un-indicted co-conspirator.” The most incriminating document in the archives discovered in that basement was the so-called “Explanatory Memorandum,” which outlines the Brotherhood’s “strategic plan” for turning the United States into an Islamic state. The memo detailed what it called a campaign “civilizational Jihad” designed to “eliminate and destroy Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by its own hands.”
According to that memo, ISNA was to become the paramount node of the entire Brotherhood operation in the U.S. and Canada. Today, in controlling more than 300 community, religious, educational and professional organizations across the United States and Canada, the Islamic Society of North America certainly seems to have fulfilled its mission.
Not only has the group never been made ground zero in the struggle against radical Islam, it has been generously protected by locals in its home state and inexplicably empowered by the federal government. Under both Republican and Democratic administrations, the U.S. government has exponentially increased ISNA’s power and influence by granting it exclusive rights to certify all Muslim chaplains for service in the U.S. armed forces military and inside all federal prisons; ISNA has been made an “official partner” of the U.S. government for “Muslim outreach”; and has been chosen to oversee the training of all senior officers in the U.S. military about Islam.
If there are any students of history in the future, they will no doubt be stunned to learn how easy we made it for our enemy’s strategic plan to look so brilliant.
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