The root causes of the Gaza conflict in less than 6 minutes
From the dawn of Islam the universal Muslim community has been known as the Ummah , literally “the nation” . From the 7th century through the early 20th century the Ummah was ruled by a Caliph, who was considered to be the legitimate political successor to the Prophet Muhammad on earth. His domain was known as the Caliphate.
The capital of the Caliphate and the amount of territory it controlled changed with the geopolitical currents of the day. In the 7th and 8th centuries the Ummayad Caliphs ruled from Damascus. From the 8th to the 14th century, the Abbasid Caliphs oversaw Islam’s "Golden Age" from Baghdad. The capital moved away from the Arab world to Constantinople with the ascendance of the Turkish Ottoman Empire in the 16th century.
No matter what form the Caliphate took in a particular era, it was always ruled by one adaptation or another of Islamic Shariah law. The Koran was the highest legal authority, and Christians and Jews lived as insecure Dhimmis, inferior guests in the domain of Islam. Zoroastrians, Hindus and polytheists at the fringes of the Caliphate were considered even lower
From the 19th century on, as the Western world modernized and industrialized, the obsolete Ottoman Empire steadily declined. Western concepts of nationalism influenced Arabs in the Middle East who wondered why they were being governed from a faraway Turkish capital, and influenced Turks to wonder why they were governed by an ancient religious empire rather than a Turkish nation-state.
It was this morally and physically weakened Caliphate that opposed the Allies in WWI, uniting with the Central Powers of Germany and Austria-Hungary. From the ashes of the Ottoman defeat at the hands of the Allies, the nationalist leader Mustafa Kemal Ataturk declared the modern state of Turkey. On March 3, 1924 he constitutionally abolished the institution of the Caliphate, the first time this had happened in the almost 1300 years since the Prophet Muhammad walked the earth.
The Muslim Brotherhood
The Muslim Brotherhood Project
One might be led to think that if international law enforcement authorities and Western intelligence agencies had discovered a twenty-year old document revealing a top-secret plan developed by the oldest Islamist organization with one of the most extensive terror networks in the world to launch a program of “cultural invasion” and eventual conquest of the West that virtually mirrors the tactics used by Islamists for more than two decades, that such news would scream from headlines published on the front pages and above the fold of the New York Times, Washington Post, London Times, Le Monde, Bild, and La Repubblica.
If that’s what you might think, you would be wrong.
In fact, such a document was recovered in a raid by Swiss authorities in November 2001, two months after the horror of 9/11. Since that time information about this document, known in counterterrorism circles as “The Project”, and discussion regarding its content has been limited to the top-secret world of Western intelligence communities. Only through the work of an intrepid Swiss journalist, Sylvain Besson of Le Temps, and his book published in October 2005 in France, La conquête de l'Occident: Le projet secret des Islamistes (The Conquest of the West: The Islamists' Secret Project), has information regarding The Project finally been made public. One Western official cited by Besson has described The Project as “a totalitarian ideology of infiltration which represents, in the end, the greatest danger for European societies.”
Included in the documents seized during the raid of Nada’s Swiss villa was a 14-page plan written in Arabic and dated December 1, 1982, which outlines a 12-point strategy to “establish an Islamic government on earth” – identified as The Project.
This report presents a global vision of a worldwide strategy for Islamic policy [or "political Islam"]. Local Islamic policies will be drawn up in the different regions in accordance with its guidelines. It acts, first of all, to define the points of departure of that policy, then to set up the components and the most important procedures linked to each point of departure; finally we suggest several missions, by way of example only, may Allah protect us. more
It was just four years after this spiritual-political blow that the Muslim Brotherhood was founded in Egypt in 1928. The brotherhood railed against the new tide of nationalism in the Middle East. Their primary goal was to reinstate Islamic rule and Sharia law in the modern nations that used to belong to the Caliphate, and eventually extend that rule over the entire world .
The officially stated objectives of the Brotherhood are :
• Building the Muslim individual
• Building the Muslim family
• Building the Muslim society
• Building the Muslim state
• Building the Caliphate
• Mastering the world with Islam
Today the Brotherhood has branches in 70 countries. Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the architect of 9/11, was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. Abdullah Azzam, a Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood preacher, was the mentor of Osama Bin Laden. Bin Laden’s lieutenant Ayman al-Zawahiri got his start in the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood at the age of 14.
In 1991 the Muslim Brotherhood recognized some 29 “likeminded” organizations in the United States, including the Muslim American Society, the International Institute of Islamic Thought, The Islamic Society of North America, the Muslim Students Association and the forerunner of the Council on American Islamic Relations .
Meanwhile, Israel is struggling against the Gaza branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. In the 1987 Hamas Charter they explicitly refer to themselves as a wing of the Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine.
And if we read Article 9 of the Hamas Charter, we can examine the Muslim Brotherhood influence:
“Hamas founded itself at a time when Islam had disappeared from life. Thus, rules were shaken, concepts were upset, values changed and evil people took control, oppression and darkness prevailed, cowards became like tigers: homelands were usurped, people were scattered and were caused to wander all over the world, the state of justice disappeared and the state of falsehood replaced it. Nothing remained in its right place. When Islam is absent from the arena, everything changes."
This of course refers to the fall of the Islamic Caliphate.
"As for the objectives: They are fighting against the falsehoods, defeating them and vanquishing them so that justice can prevail, that the homelands be retrieved and from their mosques the voice of the mu'azen would emerge declaring the establishment of the state of Islam, so that people and things would return each to their right places, as Allah is our helper.
The western concepts of peace and truces and territorial compromises are not relevant to the conflict with Hamas. No territorial concession will whet their appetite, as the violent reaction to the Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza strip in 2005 has shown.
Hamas’s stated goal as a Muslim Brotherhood organization is to establish the rule of Islam on earth. First over the Gaza Strip, then the West Bank and Israel, then the rest of the world. They believe the world was organized properly in the era of the Caliphate, and that the past 85 years of secular rule in the Middle East have been a hideous aberration.
In their eyes Israel is not marked for destruction because it occupies this or that piece of territory, but because it exists at all as land not governed by Sharia. As such, a permanent settlement can never be reached with Hamas.
The current conflict between Hamas and Israel will end when Israel accepts Islam, or when Hamas’ ideas of Islamic supremacy are obliterated… whichever comes first. Source
Mapping the Muslim Brotherhood in America
The “process of settlement” outlined in the Explanatory Memorandum and in published Muslim Brotherhood doctrine, such as Toward a Worldwide Strategy for Islamic Policy and Methodology of Dawah Ilallah in American Perspective has been operationalized in the United States by one MB-related front group after another, starting with the very first, the Muslim Students Association (MSA), and continuing to the present day.
As noted earlier, through this process, the Muslim Brotherhood has, as a matter of historical fact, established, built and maintained control over most of the prominent Muslim organizations in America.
The identified MB fronts and the other, as-yet-unknown groups share an inherent enmity for the United States and the West. It follows that when any friendly entity – to include federal, state and local law enforcement or intelligence units in the United States, other public officials, media organizations and religious institutions – works with individuals representing a self-described “Muslim” group, there is the probability those with whom such outreach is being conducted and the group with whom it is being undertaken, are actually hostile to the United States.
The Muslim Brotherhood’s own Explanatory Memorandum identifies the following groups under the heading “a list of our organizations and the organizations of our friends”:
• Islamic Society of North America (ISNA)
• Muslim Student Association (MSA)
• The Muslim Communities Association (MCA)
• The Association of Muslim Social Scientists (AMSS)
• The Association of Muslim Scientists and Engineers (AMSE)
• Islamic Medical Association (IMA)
• Islamic Teaching Center (ITC)
• North American Islamic Trust (NAIT)
• Foundation for International Development (FID)
• Islamic Housing Cooperative (IHC)
• Islamic Centers Division (ICD)
• American Trust Publications (ATP)
• Audio-Visual Center (AVC)
• Islamic Book Service (IBS)
• Muslim Businessmen Association (MBA)
• Muslim Youth of North America (MYNA)
• ISNA Fiqh Committee (IFC)
• ISNA Political Awareness Committee (IPAC)
• Islamic Education Department (IED)
• Muslim Arab Youth Association (MAYA)
• Malasian (sic) Islamic Study Group (MISG)
• Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP)
• United Association for Studies and Research (UASR)
• Occupied Land Fund (OLF)
• Mercy International Association (MIA)
• Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA)
• Baitul Mal Inc (BMI)
• International Institute for Islamic Thought (IIIT)
• Islamic Information Center (IIC)
Several of the preeminent Muslim-American organizations in the United States today (notably, the Council on American Islamic Relations [CAIR], the Muslim Public Affairs Council [MPAC] and the Islamic Free Market Institute [II]) had not been established at the time in 1991 when this document was adopted by the Muslim Brotherhood. Source
Islamic Society of North America Headquarters
Plainfield, Indiana
Khalid Shaikh Mohammed
Ayman al-Zawahiri
The Origins of the Muslim Brotherhood “Project”
In May 2006, when I first introduced American readers to the Muslim Brotherhood strategic plan known as “The Project” (including the first complete English translation of such, published here at FrontPage), very little was known about the document beyond what had been reported in the European press and Swiss journalist Sylvain Besson’s book, La conquête de l'Occident: Le projet secret des Islamistes (Paris: Le Seuil, 2005).
We knew at that time from Besson’s research that the document had been recovered from the home of Yousef Nada, the head of the Al-Taqwa Bank in Lugano and the de facto Foreign Envoy for the international Muslim Brotherhood movement, during a raid of his compound in November 2001 investigating Al-Taqwa’s involvement in terrorism financing. The strategic plan has received considerable discussion and analysis in the Western intelligence community ever since. As Besson notes in his book, Nada admitted that the document was genuine but declined to elaborate about the circumstances of its drafting. more
Enter the Muslim Brotherhood
After two days of background, prosecutors in the Hamas-support trial against five former officials at the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF) got to the heart of their case Thursday, presenting evidence that the charity was the fundraising arm of a vast Muslim Brotherhood plan to help Hamas and to infiltrate the United States.
In doing so, they showed how two active national organizations, the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) and its parent, the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT) were both tied to the Muslim Brotherhood and to HLF. more
The Role of the Muslim Brotherhood With Hamas and Iran
The fundamental truth is that Hamas’ road to Iran runs through the international Muslim Brotherhood, and has for two decades.
The Islamic Resistance Movement is one of the wings of the Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine. The Muslim Brotherhood Movement is a universal organization which constitutes the largest Islamic movement of modern times. It is characterized by its deep understanding, accurate comprehension and its complete embrace of all Islamic concepts of all aspects of life, culture, creed, politics, economics, education, society, justice and judgment ,the spreading of Islam, education, art, information, science of the occult and conversion to Islam.” more
Haqqani on Muslim Brotherhood's Real Agenda
At a Hudson Institute conference in Washington last year, the Muslim scholar Zeyno Baran spoke about how the radical Muslim Brotherhood has established front groups in the US to mask and mainstream its Islamist ideology. Baran said:
Now, when we engage with Islamist organizations, either in conferences or government outreach programs, that is seen as endorsing that group and gives them legitimacy and empowers this sort of Islamism to become much more legitimate in the eyes of, let's say American Muslim groups.
If groups like CAIR or ISNA, Council on American Islamic Relations, CAIR, or the Islamic Society of North America, the two indicted coconspirators in the Holy Land trial case that I'm sure you all know about, and I believe you mentioned it briefly in your introduction, when those groups are invited to events with U.S. government, then most of the American Muslim groups who don't really understand these issue think that they are the legitimate representative organizations and they need to be supporting them. And instead of then having sort of non-Islamist networks being formed, many of the Muslims feel that this sort of the non-Islamist Muslims feel that there's really nowhere for them to go since the government is not reaching out to them, and since through decades of funding, institutional networking, creating of organizations, the Brotherhood and its affiliates have been taking over, or starting to take over the mainstream, that is the answer when some of you say, where are the real moderate Muslims, why aren't they speaking up, and that is partly the reason why they don't speak up because they don't think that there is really any interest or really opportunity for them.
Also on the panel was Islamic scholar Husain Haqqani, who recounted the history of how the Muslim Brotherhood took over mainstream Muslim institutions in the US. I reproduce his remarks below, not only because they are important to keep in mind when many Americans prefer to believe that CAIR, ISNA and the other mainstream Muslim organizations pursue a benign agenda, but also because Dr. Haqqani is now Pakistan's ambassador to the United States. more
Stealth Jihad
Frontpage Interview's guest today is Robert Spencer, a scholar of Islamic history, theology, and law and the director of Jihad Watch and the outhor of Stealth Jihad: How Radical Islam is Subverting America without Guns or Bombs. more
