The Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohammed Morsi, the recently elected president of Egypt, will be a featured participant at the eighth annual meeting of Bill Clinton’s Clinton Global Initiative in New York next week. 

Morsi is a prominent figure in the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, the most important of the world’s Islamist organizations and ideological progenitor of al Qaeda and nearly every jihadist terrorist group in the world. Its slogan reads, “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.”

Clinton’s welcoming of Morsi to his high-profile event in New York City is surprising and may undermine the tough-on-terror image the Democratic Party is trying to cultivate ahead of the November elections.

Clinton recently praised the Obama administration’s foreign policy in his address to the Democratic National Convention: “I am grateful that they have worked together to make us safer and stronger, to build a world with more partners and fewer enemies.” However, it is clear–even, apparently, to Obama–that the Muslim Brotherhood is moving Egypt toward the enemy side.

Upon winning his election for the presidency, Morsi pledged to work for the release of terror mastermind Omar Abdel Rahman (the Blind Sheik), now serving a life sentence for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and other attempted attacks in New York City.

This is also not the first high-profile Muslim Brotherhood figure embraced publicly by the Clintons. During the 1990s, Abdurahman Alamoudi–later convicted of laundering money for an al Qaeda assassination scheme–was the Clintons’ chief liaison to the Islamic community. Alamoudi’s brother has been a large donor to the Clinton Foundation.

This summer, Rep. Michele Bachmann and four other Members of Congress drew fire for writing letters to inspectors general in five executive branch departments calling for investigations of pro-Muslim Brotherhood influence within the US government. One letter described the Muslim Brotherhood connections of Huma Abedin, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s Deputy Chief of Staff and a longtime associate of both Hillary and Bill Clinton.

For his part, Morsi is no stranger to the American branch of the Muslim Brotherhood and the constellation of organizations the 2008 Holy Land Foundation Trial found to be associated with it. Morsi and his wife joined the Muslim Brotherhood–probably through its many American front groups–while living in southern California in the late 1970s. 

According to a Clinton Global Initiative press release, other participants will include Libyan president Mohamed Megarif, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon and over fifty current and former heads of state.