Two data points from this past week alone compel us to closely examine, once more, the role and reach of the Islamist organization.
Two data points from this past week alone compel us to closely examine, once more, the role and reach of the Islamist organization.
W hy is there a Muslim Brotherhood?
It’s a basic question. How frustrating that it still needs asking over a half century after the ascent of sharia supremacism began in American universities, and after the ties that now bind Islamists with the radical base of the Democratic Party were first forged.
This week, two data points once again bring the question to the fore.
First, Pew reports that Hamas is quite popular among American Muslims. Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch, been designated as a foreign terrorist organization (FTO) by the United States since 1997 — one of federal law’s first such designations, even before al-Qaeda.
As if such a following for a jihadist group were not alarming enough, Pew’s polling of young Americans in general (i.e., not just Muslim young people) is jaw-dropping. Among adults aged 30 and under, 58 percent have a favorable view of Palestinians compared to just 32 percent who favorably view Israel. Among self-identified Democrats under 30, it’s a four-to-one chasm — 72 percent for Palestinians and just 26 percent for Israel.
Many find this shocking, but not anyone who has been paying attention.
The third doleful anniversary of the October 7 atrocities is on the horizon. It should also be remembered as the third anniversary of the campus agitation that began in the days that immediately followed. The progressive press, reliably protecting the Democrats’ sharia-supremacist allies, framed this phenomenon on America’s universities as “pro-Palestinian” protest. But to the honest observer, the menacing signage, raucousness, and jihadi-chic of the agitators make it impossible to say where the Palestinians end and Hamas begins.
That’s by design: The ostentatious display of conquest over contested space is the whole point. What’s happening on the quad is no different from what happened over many years in the enclaves now dominated by sharia supremacists in major European cities, long known as “no-go zones” because non-Muslims and the state’s authorities fear ingress.
This leaves us aghast, but at this point, again, it should not be a surprise. To take the most pertinent example, the October 7 attack was not carried out by Hamas alone. It was led by Hamas, but other Palestinian groups (such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a Marxist FTO) and countless everyday Palestinians, unaffiliated with any particular terrorist group, enthusiastically joined the operation. It took concerted Palestinian effort — jihad means effort or striving in pursuit of holy war — to kill 1,200 Jews, wound 3,400 more, and abduct still another 251, who were hidden (alive and dead) and tortured for months in the safehouses and tunnels of Gaza.
Alas, even some informed analysis of Hamas’s popularity among Muslims gets things backward. It is not that young Muslims are swinging toward jihadi radicalism. It’s that there would not be Hamas without Islam, and if Hamas disappeared tomorrow, Islam would generate new jihadists to take its place.
Yes, there is pluralism in Islam, including Muslims in America and the West who virulently oppose classical sharia and the aggression it inevitably breeds. Those Muslims are patriotic, and many have contributed heroically to the antiterrorism efforts of our military, intelligence, and law enforcement services. Yet their personal moderation does not make their creed moderate. It gives the game away that we regard as “moderation” and “reform” their project to promote cultural Muslim kinship at the expense of Islamic doctrine, to “contextualize” the doctrine to something fit for the modern world. Fundamentalist Islam is the ancient, stubborn foundation; their moderation, the hopeful innovation.
It is simply a fact that sharia supremacism is the most dynamic, authentic Islam in the world, including in the beach heads it is gradually forming in the West. Based on 14 centuries of scholarship, it instructs that sharia — literally, “the path” — is Allah’s law governing how human life is to be lived. It is more than mere law, in the Western understanding; it is a comprehensive framework for society. Under Allah’s immutable doctrine, the state is to be guided by the sharia authority (the caliph), and no separation between the spiritual and secular realms is recognized. And sharia is irrevocably geared to Islamic domination, not to coexistence. The central tenet is that Allah demands a world ruled by sharia, and it is deemed a profound offense for a nonbeliever to be called to Islam — to be informed about the imperative of accepting sharia — yet decline to submit (Islam means “submission”). The only more egregious offense is for a Muslim to renounce Islam after being born into or otherwise accepting it; apostasy has always been a death-penalty offense under sharia. Contrary to what you’ve been led to believe, that’s not a terrorist aberration; it is sharia, and thus it is the law in many Muslim-majority countries.
It’s late in the day, but we need to understand this. We need to understand rudimentary things that flow from it. Jihad is always and everywhere a striving to implement and spread sharia, particularly (though not exclusively) by force. Transnational progressives would have you believe the violence is wanton, or that it is motivated by local political disputes (as if Hamas were just fretting about water rights and al-Qaeda were upset about U.S. foreign policy). But it is all about conquest: jihad fi sabilallah, “in the cause of Allah” (see, e.g., Koran 2:244).
While jihad’s ready resort to brutality creates an atmosphere of intimidation that makes the project work, the mission of forging a global caliphate — i.e., the mission that is the cause of Allah — is not confined to warfare. It is a mission of proselytism, da’wa. As notoriously framed by the late Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Sunni sheikh most revered in modern times, “We will conquer Europe, we will conquer America, not through the sword but through da’wa.” (As Qaradawi’s oeuvre richly demonstrates, he was all for the sword when necessary to prepare the way for da’wa.) The objective of da’wa is to press on every significant institution in society — politics, law, media, popular culture, and most of all, education.
Why is there a Muslim Brotherhood? At root, this most consequential sharia-supremacist movement in modern history — since its founding in Egypt after the final collapse of the Ottoman caliphate following World War I — is an education project. Education in sharia activism.
The Brotherhood’s founder, Hassan al-Banna, was an Egyptian schoolteacher. Reacting to the post-Ottoman Westernization of Turkey by his contemporary, Kemal Atatürk, Banna conceived the Brotherhood as a revolutionary education enterprise to induce an Islamic revival — politically, militarily, and spiritually. He was blunt: “It is the nature of Islam to dominate, not to be dominated, to impose its law on all nations and to extend its power to the entire planet.” Hence the Brotherhood’s well-known credo, vibrant among Muslims though Westerners barely notice: “Allah is our objective. The prophet is our leader. The Koran is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.”
That brings us to the week’s second data point. It involves Abdul El-Sayed, Detroit-born and educated at the University of Michigan and Oxford, who claims to be an epidemiologist — though Politico reports that he has no evident experience as a licensed medical doctor. El-Sayed has seamlessly transformed into an Islamist-aligned, radical leftist Democratic candidate for a Michigan seat in the U.S. Senate.
The Washington Free Beacon’s Alana Goodman published an important report this week, detailing El-Sayed’s intimate and entirely predictable ties to the Muslim Brotherhood’s premier American platform. His father-in-law (a top donor to a super PAC supporting his candidacy) is Tayeb Jukaku, a longtime leader of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) — deemed a “founding committee” member for nearly two decades.
A little history (outlined more extensively in The Grand Jihad, my 2010 book about the Muslim Brotherhood’s operations in the West and its long-standing bonds with progressive Democrats). The Brotherhood’s most consequential project in the West has been the Muslim Students Association. Building on a Muslims Student Union started by some of the first Brotherhood operatives to relocate in North America, the MSA was begun in 1963 in the Midwest — the first chapter was formed at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Today, there are hundreds of chapters at academic institutions throughout the United States and Canada.
The MSA is not a social club. It is a serious indoctrination program, in which members delve into the writings of Banna and his successor — in Brotherhood leadership and martyrdom — Sayyid Qutb. The MSA’s ethos is the marriage of sharia-supremacist doctrine and political activism.
There’s nothing secret about this. In Banna’s framework, the Islamist movement always needs an axis. All successful uprisings that are outnumbered and out-resourced by regimes they are trying to supplant must have a nerve center for coordination, recruitment, training, and fundraising. In neighborhoods, it is the mosque cum Islamic community center; but the more ready-made axis is the campus. The universities were the Brotherhood’s hubs as it grew exponentially in the Muslim Middle East, and they have served the same purpose in the United States. It is on campus that sharia supremacism combines and combusts with the radical left — a shared animus against Western liberalism and passion for transformative change uniting them despite salient doctrinal differences. (Historically, Islamist-leftist alliances work when the established order is a common enemy; they become rivalries if the established order is overthrown and the factions find themselves vying for power.)
So successful was the MSA after a generation that sharia supremacists had the luxury of forming a graduate program of sorts — an institution to continue and solidify the MSA’s Islamist activism and political alliances. That program is ISNA, formed in 1981 — although it traces its history to the founding of the MSA, as if they’d always existed together. ISNA is the Brotherhood’s American umbrella, bringing various Islamist organizations under one roof, orchestrating conferences and subsidiaries in which sharia supremacists and progressive Democrats (and now, Democratic Socialists) collaborate.
Because ISNA bloomed from the activism of self-styled Palestinian Muslims, its immediate priority was the elimination of the Jewish state. Promoting Hamas, which was established six years after ISNA, became ISNA’s early preoccupation; as the Beacon report details, ISNA was proven in the Justice Department’s landmark Holy Land Foundation terrorism-financing prosecution to be an unindicted co-conspirator of Hamas.
Still, don’t mistake this for a local, contemporary political dispute. Jew-hatred is a tenet of sharia supremacism. It’s not all about Israel. Jews are targeted everywhere, notwithstanding the herculean labors of the media, Democratic, and pop-culture confederates of Islamists to portray this hatred as mere “anti-Zionism.” To repeat, the principal mission, the driving force of the movement, is always to implement and spread sharia. That sharia is antithetical to the republican democracy of the U.S. Constitution — founded on principles of liberty and equality for all — is fuel for the Islamist-leftist alliance. Abdul El-Sayed, with his Brotherhood backers and his progressive Democratic agenda — anti-Israel (the “genocide” in Gaza, of course), defunding police, abolishing ICE, Medicare for all, etc. — embodies that alliance.
If we want to understand the popularity of Hamas, the campus unrest, the surging antisemitism, the steep decline in American patriotism among young Americans (especially those who identify as Democrats), and the political candidacies of El-Sayed and Adam Hamawy (the Blind Sheikh sympathizer likely to win a New Jersey seat in the House of Representatives), it’s not hard. The evidence of a fifth column has been staring us in the face for 60 years. And it’s all happened before. History doesn’t just rhyme. Occasionally it thunders. We just have to listen.