The media may be in “see no evil” mode about the Muslim Brotherhood but this fraternity is hardly a benign force wherever it is massed in significant numbers, whether that be in the country of Egypt or on an American college campus. “The Muslim Brotherhood has been in the United States for three generations,” former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy said in a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference (C-PAC) on February 12, 2011. “They started in the 1960s with the Muslim Students Association (MSA).”
“They [the MSA] have 600 chapters.” In the Holy Land Foundation case in which the FBI exposed a terrorist front, “the Muslim Brotherhood, the Muslim Students Association and the Islamic Society of North America were named as co-conspirators,” McCarthy claimed.
McCarthy describes the Islamic Society of North America as the “graduate program for the Muslim Students Association.”
“Given the fact that the Muslim Brotherhood’s tentacles are in colleges and prisons, college students can identify their outlets,” Ayaan Hirsi Ali, author of Infidel, said in the same panel discussion. She advised students to “offer the Muslim students an alternative much better than what the Brotherhood has to offer.”
Ali is no stranger to the Brotherhood. “Muslim Brotherhood recruitment is rife in Somalia, Sudan, Nigeria and Kenya,” she told the audience at the Marriott. She herself encountered the Brotherhood in Kenya. “We were all trained as activists at 15 and 16,” she remembered.
“There’s a real divide between the rank and file and their leaders,” McCarthy asserted. “As a prosecutor, they would help us but they wanted secrecy.”
“When they say leadership, they are self-appointed,” Ali notes.
“Ayaan Hirsi Ali was born in Somalia and raised a devout Muslim,” the website of the AHA foundation, which she founded, informs us. “In 1992, Ayaan was married off by her father in a ceremony which she refused to attend.”
“In order to escape this marriage, she fled to the Netherlands where she was given asylum, and eventually citizenship. After earning a degree in political science at the University of Leiden, she served as an elected member of the Dutch parliament for three years.”
“She has since become an active critic of fundamentalist Islam, an advocate for women’s rights and a leader in the campaign to reform Islam. Her willingness to speak out and her abandonment of the Muslim faith as currently defined have made her a target for violence and threats of death by Islamic extremists.”
In Egypt, whether the Muslim Brotherhood gains power will depend on three trends, Ali contends:
1. “The Muslim Brotherhood’s influence in the Egyptian military;
2. “How gullible the U. S. Government is, as witness the Director of Intelligence’s claims that the Muslim Brotherhood was secular; and
3. “The disarray of secular forces in Egypt.
“Right now, all of these forces are in play for a Muslim Brotherhood government now or
two to five years from now.” This would be especially portentous because the system of law that the Brotherhood embraces “Shariah, or political Islam, is aimed at establishing a world-wide caliphate,” former CIA director James Woolsey said at the C-PAC symposium. In this system, “the beating of women” and “death to homosexuals and apostates,” are common, Woolsey claimed.
“In America, you debate gay rights and it is over whether they can marry,” Ali
observed. “In these countries, homosexuals have two choices: hide or hang.”
The Brotherhood presents, in one key way, a different threat to the United States than the U. S. has known. “We got to be pretty good at defeating secular empires in the 20th Century, knocked off five of them, really,” Woolsey noted.
Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia.
If you would like to comment on this article, e-mail mal.kline@academia.org
