Former US Muslim Brotherhood leader confirms: The ‘Islamophobes’ were right all along

For years, national security experts and freedom activists have sounded the alarm about Muslim Brotherhood activity in the United States, only to be tarred and dismissed as hysterical “hatemongers” and “Islamophobes.” Now, however, an internationally prominent former Brotherhood activist has confirmed the warnings. Is he, too, a “hatemonger” and “Islamophobe?”

In a June 6, 2024, interview, Sami al-Arian, a former Palestinian Islamic Jihad organizer, stated that “there was a Muslim Brotherhood movement in America… whose early beginnings were in the late 1960’s.” Asked if it was “registered officially,” al-Arian responded, “No, no. This turned into a problem later on.” Nevertheless, he said, “the Muslim Brotherhood movement existed in America. It consisted of people who were Muslim Brotherhood members in their countries and came to the U.S. to study, or people who studied there.”

Al-Arian was a part of it all: “I officially joined the movement… Ideologically, I considered myself part of this, but I officially joined in 1978.” He immediately encountered friction within the movement: “In 1978, there was a clear and major dispute in the organization, between people who settled in America and wanted to open the movement, and turn it into a local movement…They called it ‘localization of the dawa.’ They had a dispute with people who wanted to keep it clandestine.”

Remember: organizations that are engaging in entirely legal and above-board activities have no need to be clandestine. The Brotherhood was thus not engaged in legal and above-board activities. Al-Arian makes this even clearer when he explains that those who favored making the U.S. Brotherhood “a public movement with the ‘localization of the dawa’” were those who were not planning to return to their home countries, while those who were planning to return wanted to keep the group undercover, so that they would not encounter trouble for having belonged to it when they returned to Muslim countries where the governments opposed the Brotherhood’s efforts to impose Sharia.

Al-Arian states that those who favored “the localization” plotted a coup, but were foiled: “a Sudanese brother was coming [to America] and he was very familiar with professional unions. He foiled the coup and showed very impressive leadership skills so he was immediately elected to be the leader. He developed a major plan for the future. That was in 1979-1981. Under his leadership, the movement in America progressed significantly.”

All this comes from a man who was well situated to track the progress of the Brotherhood in the United States. Sami al-Arian was deeply involved in clandestine activities along with the Brotherhood: he was deported from the United States in 2015 after pleading guilty to a charge of “conspiracy to make or receive contributions of funds to or for the benefit of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a Specially Designated Terrorist” organization. His description of the Brotherhood as initially a clandestine organization that developed a coherent program for the future in the late 1970s and early 1980s corresponds exactly to what counter-jihad organizations and individuals have been saying about it for decades.

The first indication of the activities of this clandestine Brotherhood organization came in September 2007, with the revelation during the Holy Land Foundation Hamas terrorism funding trial of a document dating from May 1991, “An Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Brotherhood in North America.” It stated that “The process of settlement is a ‘Civilization-Jihadist Process’ with all the word means. The Ikhwan [Brotherhood] 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” (p. 7).

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