The Muslim Brotherhood in America

Part 12 of a serialization of Shariah – The Threat to America, the report of Team B II of the Center for Security Policy.

The Muslim Brotherhood began its penetration of the United States in the 1950s. In 1953, Princeton University hosted a group of “prominent Muslims” for an “Islamic Colloquium.” Brotherhood delegates asked for and were granted a meeting with President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who agreed on the counsel of his defense and intelligence advisors, who saw it as an opportunity for the U.S. to influence the Muslim world and to use them against the Communists, who were on the ascendancy.

One of the delegates at the meeting was the “Honorable Saeed Ramahdan, Delegate of the Muslim Brothers,” as described in the official White House documents. A now-declassified CIA document recording the events of the meeting described Ramadan as follows: “Ramadan seems to be a Fascist, interested in the grouping of individuals for power. He did not display many ideas except for those of the Brotherhood.”

Setting down roots

As the Muslim Brothers “settled” in North America, they did so according to their stated bylaws. The MB’s bylaws, and specifically the approved “means” to achieve the Ikhwan’s objectives in America, include this mandate: “Make every effort for the establishment of educational, social, economic, and scientific institutions and the establishment of mosques, schools, clinics, shelters, clubs.”

Through these means, the Muslim Brotherhood would wage civilization jihad in North America. At the University of Illinois in Urbana, the Ikhwan created its first North American front organization, the Muslim Students Association (MSA), in 1963. Today, MSA chapters are present on many college campuses across the country, serving as recruiting nodes for the MB and, in some cases, for violent jihadist organizations.

As the Team B II report on shariah explains, out of the MSA came nearly every Muslim organization in America today.

Initially, as MSA chapters sprang up on American campuses, they presented Islam in public as a mainstream alternative to other religions, never mentioning extremist or revolutionary aspects. In recent years, MSA members have become ever-more aggressive in their demands for accommodations and silencing those who oppose them.

In the 1970s, the Brotherhood formed a number of trade organizations for the purpose of insinuating its members more deeply into American society. Those organizations included the Association of Muslim Social Scientists (AMSS), the Association of Muslim Scientists and Engineers (AMSE), the Islamic Medical Association (IMA), the Muslim Communities Association (MCA), and others. The Brothers also formed other student groups in the 1970s, including the Muslim Arab Youth Assembly (MAYA) and Muslim Youth of North America (MYNA).

In 1973, the Saudis created an important new enabler of Brotherhood operations in the United States and domination of American Muslim communities: the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT). NAIT “controls” approximately 80 percent of the titles/deeds to the mosques, Islamic organizations and Islamic schools in the United States, ensuring that the vast majority of Muslim facilities in this country are dominated by the most reactionary strains of Islam.

Typically, along with such ownership come Saudi-trained and appointed imams, textbooks for the madrassas, jihadist literature and videos for the bookstores, paid hajj pilgrimages (the obligatory trip to Mecca) and, in some cases, training for jihad.

According to NAIT’s website, NAIT promotes a lifestyle for Muslims to live in America “in a shariah-compliant way.” The site does not provide a street address for NAIT, but lists office phone numbers that have a Chicago area code.

In 1980, the Brotherhood created a new organization to extend the footprint made possible by the swelling ranks of Muslim Students Association alumni. It brought together most of its groups under the auspices of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), based in Indiana, which today is the largest Muslim Brotherhood front on the continent.

NAIT says on its website, “NAIT supports and provides services to ISNA, MSA, their affiliates, and other Islamic centers and institutions. The President of ISNA is an ex-officio member of the Board of Trustees of NAIT.”

The creation of ISNA ushered in an era of massive growth of the Muslim Brotherhood movement in North America. Through the 1980s and 1990s, the Ikhwan created hundreds of new organizations and built hundreds of mosques and Islamic schools across North America. It did so primarily with funding from Saudi Arabia.

Breaking the code

An alert Maryland Transportation Authority Police officer, on an August day in 2004, observed a woman wearing traditional Islamic garb videotaping the support structures of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, and conducted a traffic stop. The driver of the vehicle was identified as Ismail Elbarasse. Elbarasse was detained on an outstanding material witness warrant issued in a Chicago Hamas case.

The FBI’s Washington Field Office raided Elbarasse’s residence in Annandale, Virginia. In the basement of the suspect’s home, the FBI found a hidden sub-basement. In the sub-basement, agents discovered the archives of the Muslim Brotherhood in North America.

The documents confirmed what investigators and counterterrorism experts had previously suspected and contended about the myriad Muslim-American groups in the United States – namely, that nearly all of them are controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood and, therefore, as shariah dictates, are hostile to the United States, its Constitution and its freedoms. The documents make clear that the strategic objective of the Muslim Brotherhood in North America is to implement shariah law in the United States in furtherance of establishing a global caliphate.

In Part 13, Team B shows how the FBI blew apart the Muslim Brotherhood’s operations in the United States in the Holy Land Foundation terrorist financing trial of 2008.