Mohamed Elibiary has left the building

Mohamed Elibiary, an Islamist with extensive ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and a record of influence operations in the service of its agenda, has announced his departure after five years on the Department of Homeland Security Advisory Council. We can only hope that – at a moment when the danger posed by shariah-adherent Muslims is becoming more palpable by the day – the Department decided to stop legitimating an advisor who has publicly championed that it was, “ inevitable that ‘Caliphate’ return”, contended that the United States is “an Islamic country with an Islamically compliant constitution.”

Elibiary had always been brazen in his support for Islamists and the Muslim Brotherhood in particular, including featuring the Muslim Brotherhood “R4Bia” symbol on his twitter page, and publicly lauding Muslim Brotherhood ideologue Sayyid Qutb.

In 2011, Elibiary was also suspected of utilizing his security clearance in order to access confidential documents from the Texas Department of Public Safety, and seeking to “shop” the files to journalists in order to label then Presidential candidate Governor Rick Perry an “Islamophobe.” In May 2014, during testimony before Congress, DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson admitted to Representative Louie Gohmert (R-TX), that this was “problematic.”

Whatever the cause of Elibiary’s departure from a senior advisory capacity in the Obama administration, it must be welcomed because – as documented in the Center for Security Policy’s online, video-based course entitled The Muslim Brotherhood in America: The Enemy Within” (MuslimBrotherhoodinAmerica.com) – he played a prominent role in blinding the U.S. government to the threat posed by the Brotherhood’s “civilization jihad.” This was the practical upshot of a sequence of events that began with Elibiary being given the FBI’s highest civilian award at the Bureau’s Training Academy in Quantico, Virginia in September 2011.

Shortly thereafter, Spencer Ackerman of Wired Magazine published pictures of materials in the FBI Training Academy’s Library that Elibiary and his ilk deemed “offensive” accompanied by a series of screeds about the need to stop employing such information and trainers employing it to prepare Bureau personnel to protect us against all enemies, foreign and domestic. On November 8, 2011, then-Homeland Security Advisor to the President (now CIA Director) John Brennan agreed not only to accommodate that demand but applied the purge to the U.S. military, U.S. intelligence community and Department of Homeland Security, as well.

Unfortunately, as welcome as the news is that Mohamed Elibiary may be less able in the future to run subversive influence operations from within the U.S. government, his next publicly announced mission is disconcerting. In response to a Tweeted question from investigative reporter Ryan Mauro (who conducted a highly illuminating interview with Elibiary in the fall of 2013), the former Senior Fellow at the Obama Department of Homeland Security announced that he was now going to turn his attention to “reform[ing] the conservative movement so the GOP can win in 2016.”

I had an opportunity to witness personally Mohamed Elibiary’s involvement with the conservative movement when I was invited in the Spring of 2013 to address a conservative group that meets monthly in the Park Cities neighborhood of Dallas, Texas. Undeterred by his presence, I briefed the group on the nature of the Muslim Brotherhood, its goals of imposing shariah worldwide under the rule of a Caliph, and its practice of stealthy, pre-violent “civilization jihad” to advance that agenda.

I also discussed the enabling role that has been played on behalf of and with Muslim Brotherhood-tied Islamists like Abdurahman Alamoudi, Sami al-Arian, Nihad Awad and Suhail Khan in their influence operations targeting the George W. Bush in the run-up to and during his administration by a prominent conservative activist, Grover Norquist. As recounted at length in Agent of Influence: Grover Norquist and the Assault on the Right, the Brotherhood front called the Islamic Free Market Institute, founded by Norquist and Alamoudi, and Norquist’s self-styled “Center-Right” Coalition meetings in Washington and similar groups meeting in state capitals and major cities across the country have served as vehicles for facilitating the penetration and subversion of the conservative movement.

In the course of my Park Cities briefing last year, I did not mention Elibiary by name and he did not make any intervention or otherwise challenge my briefing. After the meeting ended and he left, however, I asked the organizer, “Why do you have a Muslim Brother in this meeting?” Interestingly, he did not reply by saying, “Who are you talking about?” or “What evidence do you have that anyone here is a Muslim Brother?” Instead, he simply said, “The Center-Right Coalition recommended him.”

One can only assume that if Mohamed Elibiary is going to be involved in “reforming the conservative movement,” he will be doing it with the help of Grover Norquist. And that prospect should be of concern to all of us – as are Norquist’s past dealings with such Islamists to, among many others, former Attorney General Michael Mukasey, former Director of Central Intelligence R. James Woolsey, former federal prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy, former Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Lieutenant General William G. “Jerry” Boykin and six of their colleagues in the community of influential national security practitioners who signed a cover letter accompanying the Statement of Facts that makes up the body of Agent of Influence. It should be required reading for all conservatives.