Abdul El-Sayed: The Gerry Adams of the Muslim Brotherhood

The Senate candidate’s denials of ties to that Islamist movement follow a familiar playbook.

T hose who followed the Troubles in the mid- to late 20th century may remember Gerry Adams as the apparent leader of the Irish Republican Army — president of Sinn Féin, functionally the Provisional IRA’s “political wing” (the two organizations insisted that they were separate despite overlapping memberships and objectives). Adams appeared in every way to be an influential member of the movement, to project himself as its spokesman, to be prominent at all the important meetings, and to be consulted in all the important negotiations. Yet he vehemently denied that he was a member of the IRA, the organization in which his father was a member, his paternal and maternal uncles were members, and his mother’s family (the Hannaways) were active for years. He was even interned a couple of times in the 1970s as a suspected senior IRA official — released between stints to join secret talks with the British government. But no sirree, Adams maintained he had nothing to do with the IRA — crazy talk, terrorism smear!

With this in mind, on our podcast last week, I couldn’t help but suggest to Rich Lowry that Abdul El-Sayed, the hard-left Democrat running for one of Michigan’s U.S. Senate seats, is “the Gerry Adams of the Muslim Brotherhood.”

Questions about El-Sayed’s ties to modern history’s most successful Islamist movement persist. As was the case with Adams and the IRA, this partially owes to El-Sayed’s family’s connections: The Washington Free Beacon has reported that his sister, Eman Abdelhadi, has publicly acknowledged that her family had “long been” active in the Brotherhood’s mothership — its Egyptian branch. Also mirroring Adams, however, entirely rational inferences about El-Sayed’s ties to sinister movement — ties he denies but never quite disavows — stem from his own conduct, rhetoric, and affiliations.

In a paramount example, in 2012, El-Sayed co-signed an Arabic-language letter urging Mohamed Morsi, the since deceased president of the short-lived Brotherhood government in Egypt, to “purge” the media and police. El-Sayed’s parents are Egyptian immigrants to the United States; he was born in Michigan, though the letter self-describes him and his 45 co-signatories as “leaders of the Egyptian community” in America.

As I detailed during the “Arab Spring” delirium — in my 2012 book, Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy, and at NR, e.g., here, here, and here — Morsi was then following the Brotherhood playbook: exploiting democratic processes in a majority fundamentalist Islamic society to acquire power in order to impose the totalitarian sharia system. In the letter co-signed by El-Sayed, the signatories proclaimed support for “the revolutionary decisions taken by the president” (Morsi), urged him to “purge the media and the police as quickly as possible,” and asserted that they “strongly reject those voices that are courting America and Europe to take a position against the Egyptian regime.” These positions have to be understood in that context. The purge El-Sayed was advocating would eliminate opposition to the enforcement of sharia’s draconian dictates. Nothing about his background suggests any daylight between his views and the Muslim Brotherhood’s animating objective.

It is a sign of our perilous times that this letter is not disqualifying for a candidate for high American office — at least absent a convincing renunciation, which El-Sayed hasn’t offered. The Brotherhood is an anti-Western organization, and the Brotherhood’s fundamentalist brand of sharia is incompatible with the U.S. Constitution. That El-Sayed, a Democrat who shares much of the democratic socialist agenda, though he is not a DSA member, could very well be elected come Tuesday demonstrates the strides made by the Brotherhood’s project in America.

Domination, Not Coexistence

The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in Egypt in 1928 as Jama’at al-Ikhwan al-Muslimun (the Society of the Muslim Brothers). That’s why it is often referred to (and frequently refers to itself as) “the Ikhwan.” It has not operated in the West as a regimented organization with a formal membership (or mafia-style initiation rites). Why would it? The Brotherhood’s mission is to establish and spread sharia, Islam’s legal system and societal framework. Because sharia is incompatible with Western liberalism, and the Brotherhood defines itself as hostile to Western culture and institutions, the movement’s mission in the West is sabotage. Not principally by jihadist terror; the Brotherhood strives to bore itself into a society’s institutions and transform them.

Such a mission would counsel against proclamations of membership. That would be true even if (1) the Brotherhood had not been designated as a terrorist organization by several countries, (2) components of the Brotherhood (in Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon) had not been designated as terrorist organizations by the U.S. government, and (3) one of the Brotherhood’s main projects in the West since the 1980s had not been support for Hamas (the Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch, providing material support to which has been felony in this country for nearly 30 years). Not surprisingly, then, as the Hudson Institute’s Zeyno Baran reported in 2008, an internal memorandum of the Muslim American Society (the Brotherhood’s quasi-official American flagship) “explicitly instructs group leaders to respond negatively if asked whether they are part of the Brotherhood.”

When I say the Brotherhood’s mission in the West is sabotage, I am not merely stating an opinion. I am quoting the Brotherhood itself. In 2010, I wrote a book about the Brotherhood’s operations and political alliances, called The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America. The title was taken from an internal Brotherhood memorandum written in 1991 by Mohamed Akram, a leader of what functioned as the Brotherhood’s American governing council. This document was introduced into evidence by the Justice Department in the Holy Land Foundation’s terrorism-financing prosecution, in which several Brotherhood operatives were convicted of supporting Hamas. The memo states in pertinent part:

The Ikhwan must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and “sabotaging” its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions. [Quotation marks in original.]

This is entirely consistent with the vision of the Brotherhood’s founder, Hassan al-Banna. A charismatic Egyptian teacher, Banna put it this way a century ago: “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.”

The Justice Department’s 2004 indictment of the Holy Land Foundation alleged: “The Muslim Brotherhood . . . is committed to the globalization of Islam through social engineering and violent jihad (holy war).” That is accurate. The Brotherhood’s motto is: “Allah is our objective, the Prophet is our leader, the Koran is our law, jihad is our way, and dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.” It’s blunt — and they really mean it.

Sharia-Supremacist Indoctrination

The Brotherhood became active in the United States in the middle of the 20th century. The fundamental building block of its sharia-supremacist movement was the Muslim Students Association (MSA). Steve Emerson’s research organization, the Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT), has published an excellent dossier on the MSA, extensively citing court documents, testimony, and other public accounts. Since it is the ignition of the Brotherhood’s American engine, it should be obvious that the MSA is not a mere campus social club. It is an indoctrination organization, teaching and promoting sharia-supremacist ideology. While attending the University of Michigan, a state with a large and predominantly young Muslim population, Abdul El-Sayed was vice president of the school’s Muslim Students Association chapter.

Some history. The MSA was incorporated in 1963 as the Muslim Students Association of the United States and Canada. It started when some of the first Brotherhood operatives stationed in the United States met at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. It initially comprised just a handful of chapters in the Midwest. Now, in addition to an overarching national organization, there are approximately 600 chapters at campuses across North America.

The IPT’s dossier quotes at length a speech made in the 1980s, during a Brotherhood conference in Missouri, by an operative named Zaid Naman. (The speech was another exhibit in the Holy Land Foundation case.) He explained the significance of the MSA and student activism to the growth of the Brotherhood in the United States:

All of that, Ikhwans, was at the beginning of work when the Ikhwans who came to America, may God reward them all good, were seeking methods for activism. This was probably in the mid-sixties. . . . As for recruitment in the ranks of the Movement, its main condition was that a brother . . . must be active in the general activism of the MSA, a person who attends its conferences or participating in its executive committees, whether local or central, and this was the Movement’s conditions in the 1960s.

Naman elaborated:

We say that first of all, the organization base in North America is an organizational base with a dynamic characteristic. This dynamic is at two levels. The first one is at the North America’s level as the vast majority of the Muslim Brotherhood here are students.

The Islamist Students’ Graduate Program

Back in July, I wrote about a report by the Washington Free Beacon’s Alana Goodman, which related that El-Sayed’s father-in-law, Tayeb Jukaku, is a longtime leader of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA). I added some context about the ISNA’s history (which I’d traced in greater detail in The Grand Jihad):

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 [1982] — although it traces its history to the founding of the MSA [in 1963], 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.

The IPT also has a helpful dossier on the ISNA. As I’ve noted in the past, it’s not enough to say that the ISNA was identified by the Justice Department as an unindicted co-conspirator on the Hamas-support scheme. Such a designation is of little moment unless prosecutors back it up with evidence. At the Holy Land Foundation trial, the government proved that an ISNA subsidiary, the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT, also designated as a co-conspirator) was used to funnel funds to Hamas. The ISNA deposited checks into an ISNA/NAIT account for the Holy Land Foundation, often made payable to “the Palestinian Mujahideen” (mujahideen are fighters in a jihad). The Holy Land Foundation forwarded the funds to leaders of Hamas.

It is frequently reported that the ISNA was an unindicted co-conspirator. It is rarely added that it grew out of the MSA. In a 2005 post on its website, titled “A Little Taste of History,” the MSA recounted that MSA National was the precursor of ISNA (as well as of other Brotherhood tentacles). In 2007, MSA National explained: “MSA National maintains continuous affiliation with ISNA. An affiliate of ISNA, historically, the MSA National President has a seat on the ISNA Majlis Ashura [a council of consultation]. However, beyond this, ISNA does not have any direct involvement in MSA National affairs. In addition, the MSA Annual Continental Conference is held alongside ISNA.”

Again, the ISNA was founded in 1982. Yet it referred to its 2009 conference as the 46th such annual event. That’s because it includes the MSA’s previous annual conferences in the total. Appended to the 1991 Brotherhood memo excerpted above is “A list of our organizations and the organizations of our friends.” Of the 29 entities named, the ISNA and the MSA are the first and second.

El-Sayed, Director of Da’wa

According to a six-installment IPT series on El-Sayed, the University of Michigan MSA chapter proclaimed in its charter that it served “as a chapter of the Muslim Students’ Association of the U.S. and Canada . . . and the Great Lakes MSA Council” and would “adhere to the by-laws and constitutions of both these supervisory entities.” In his years at the university, the student then known as Abdulrahman El-Sayed was an extremely active member. According to the MSA chapter’s board minutes and newsletter, Al-Risalah (The Message), in addition to his stint as vice president, he sat on the chapter’s board for two years, wrote for the newsletter, and chaired the MSA outreach committee. In his latter capacity, El Sayed ran recruiting and da’wa: an aggressive form of proselytism. (Rich and I discussed da’wa on the aforementioned podcast episode. I’ve also explained the concept at length in The Grand Jihad and in NR a number of times, e.g., here, here, and here.)

The Brotherhood’s most revered modern jurisprudent, the late Yusuf al-Qaradawi, infamously inveighed: “We will conquer Europe, we will conquer America, not through the sword but through da’wa.” To repeat my synopsis, “The objective of da’wa is to press on every significant institution in society — politics, law, media, popular culture, and most of all, education.” The Brotherhood’s central purpose is to implement and spread sharia, and da’wa is the principal strategy.

By the way, don’t infer from Sheikh Qaradawi’s remark that da’wa and jihad are mutually exclusive. Quite the opposite: they are complementary — as attested by al-Qaradawi’s voluminous writings, speeches, fatwas (sharia edicts), and popular commentary, which endorsed Hamas mass-murder attacks and suicide bombings, referred to jihadists who killed American troops in Muslim countries as heroic “martyrs” engaged in righteous “jihad,” and instructed that Jew-hatred — not mere anti-Zionism — had its roots in Islamic scripture.

El-Sayed graduated from Michigan with honors, won a Rhodes Scholarship to attend Oxford, and completed his medical degree at Columbia. It was during his time at Columbia that he co-signed the letter supporting Morsi’s dictatorial moves in Cairo, urging the Brotherhood-led government to purge media and police. As the IPT catalogues, El-Sayed thereafter appeared regularly on the “circuit” of Brotherhood-tied organizations as he launched his political career: the ISNA, the Muslim American Society, and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR, another Brotherhood-created organization that was an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation case).

I’d say that Abdul El-Sayed’s denials of his ties to the implacably anti-American, antisemitic Muslim Brotherhood are laughable. But, as with Gerry Adams’s denials of IRA affiliation, this is no laughing matter.