Star Spangled Shariah: The Rise of America's First Muslim Brotherhood Party

The Muslim Brotherhood has long operated as a formidable political force in Egypt, the place of its founding in 1928, and to varying degrees in other Middle East countries. And as we know, the Muslim Brotherhood has been actively infiltrating American government and society since shortly after the Second World War. But March 2014 marked a significant step forward for the Brotherhood in America: Some of its key leadership figures joined together to establish the U.S. Council of Muslim Organizations (USCMO), the first political activist group in this country to be openly associated with the jihadist Muslim Brotherhood. Formation of the USCMO was announced at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. on 12 March 2014, just blocks from the U.S. Capitol Building. At the podium were: Ousama Jammal, Secretary General USCMO and past President of The Mosque Foundation; Naeem Baig, President, Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA); Nihad Awad, National Executive Director, Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR); Mazen Mokhtar, Executive Director, Muslim American Society (MAS); Imam Mahdi Bray, National Director, American Muslim Alliance (AMA); and others associated with identified Muslim Brotherhood organizations. The significance of this move is best understood in the context of what the Muslim Brotherhood itself calls “civilizational jihad,” a term used in its 1991 strategic plan: An Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal of the Group in North America. As the Explanatory Memorandum states, the Brotherhood’s mission in America is “destroying Western civilization from within,” preparing the way for its replacement by the rule of Islam’s supremacist code, shariah (Islamic law). Unlike more immediately violent Brotherhood off-shoots – for example, al-Qa’eda, Egyptian Islamic Jihad, the Islamic State or HAMAS, the Brotherhood in the West has generally taken care to operate stealthily, under the radar, even to the point of sometimes denying its very presence in the United States. Yet, as the Center for Security Policy’s Civilization Jihad Reader Series is documenting, the Muslim Brotherhood’s information operations – including many tactics learned from the KGB – have enabled this organization to insinuate itself gradually into a position from which it can assault the pillars of our society. These include: government, academia, faith groups, the media, intelligence and security agencies, our refugee resettlement and other immigration processes and the U.S. judicial system. By its nature, the object of such a stealthy form of jihad is to ensure that the target community remains unaware of the extent of the threat until it is too late. It is our purpose with this volume and the other monographs of the Center’s Civilization Jihad Reader Series to raise the alarm and to engage the American people and their elected representatives in countering this threat while there is still time.