Will FBI break ties with Boston Islamists?

A month ago this column explored the FBI’s decision to sever ties with the country’s largest Muslim rights group – CAIR – Council on American Islamic Relations. And we wondered if there were any Boston angles. There may be.

Recall that while CAIR purported to be a moderate organization, the FBI discovered evidence that it is part of a network created by members of the Muslim Brotherhood to radicalize America’s historically moderate Muslim community. (The Muslim Brotherhood, you need to know, is the progenitor – and currently the global captain – of nearly all modern jihadist movements.)

Concern about CAIR emerged from the FBI investigation of the nation’s largest Muslim charity – The Holy Land Foundation (HLF). HLF was convicted of funneling money to Hamas and CAIR was named an unindicted co-conspirator.

What’s new? Last week, Senators Jon Kyl, Chuck Schumer, and Tom Coburn of the Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism, commended FBI director Robert Mueller for severing ties with an unindicted co-conspirator in the terror finance case. Importantly, they asked Mueller whether the FBI has relationships with any other unindicted co-conspirators in terror-financing trials — and whether it plans to sever these ties as well.

Well, here in Boston, they do. The Boston FBI office sends its agents to "Muslim sensitivity training" run by the Muslim American Society (MAS) which now manages the Saudi-funded Islamic Society of Boston (ISB) mosque in Roxbury. The FBI has also recruited employees at job fairs held at the mosque.

As it turns out, the FBI discovered that MAS founder Jamal Badawi (now Trustee of the Roxbury mosque) was a leader in the Muslim Brotherhood. For his role in helping HLF raise money for Hamas, he was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the HLF trial. It will be interesting to see how the FBI’s Mueller responds to the Senators.

Why are so many seemingly disparate Muslim groups and individuals (over 300 in the HLF case) listed together as co-conspirators? Giving the plain answer makes me feel almost like a conspiracist! But here it is.

CAIR, MAS, and a constellation of other American Muslim organizations are creations of the Muslim Brotherhood, a group about which Americans can no longer be ignorant. On one foot: In the 1920’s, an Egyptian Islamic theologian, Hassan al-Banna, challenged Islamic civilization with a most painful religious question: if Islam teaches that Muslims would come to dominate the world, how to explain the collapse of the Ottoman Islamic Empire, the only remaining caliphate (Islamic sovereignty), and how account for the state of Muslims around the world – impoverished, and dominated by the West?

The Muslim Brotherhood was born of his answer: the Muslims themselves, al-Banna preached, were to blame, for they had abandoned the fundamentals of their religion and adapted to shameful Western modes of life. The answer was to fight for "Islam" in all of what the Brotherhood conceived as its most original, pure and fundamental aspects. This battle, spreading throughout the Islamic world and then to Europe, now seems to have come to our shores.