Muslim Brotherhood Day on Capitol Hill

On Monday, April 18, legislators’ offices will be visited by individuals associated with a group unknown to most lawmakers: The United States Council of Muslim Organizations (USCMO). In the interest of helping members of the U.S. Congress understand precisely who their interlocutors are, permit a brief introduction: The USCMO is the latest in a long series of front organizations associated with, and working to advance, the agenda of the Muslim Brotherhood in the United States.

Members of Congress should be clear about the true nature of that agenda. It is laid out most authoritatively in a document introduced into evidence by federal prosecutors in the course of the largest terrorism financing trial in the nation’s history, U.S. v. Holy Land Foundation et al. Written in 1991 by a top Muslim Brotherhood operative, Mohamed Akram, and entitled “The Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal of the Group in North America,” this internal correspondence was meant for the eyes only of the organization’s leadership in Egypt. So, the document is direct and to the point: It explicitly states that the mission of the Muslim Brotherhood in North America is “destroying Western civilization from within … by [the infidels’] hands and the hands of the believers so that Allah’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.”

There are two other important facts legislators should know about Akram’s memo.

First, the document helpfully attaches a list of 29 groups under the heading “Our organizations and organizations of our friends: Imagine if they all march according to one plan!” A number of the identified Muslim Brotherhood fronts — and many others that have come into being since 1991 — are members of the U.S. Council of Muslim Organizations. Representatives and associates of such fronts will be among the Islamists in congressional offices on Monday.

Second, the memo describes in detail the Muslim Brotherhood’s favored technique for accomplishing its stated goal of “destroying Western civilization” — at least until such time as they are strong enough to use violence decisively: “civilization jihad.” This sort of jihad involves employing stealthy, subversive means like influence operations to penetrate and subvert our government and civil society institutions. (The successful application of these means have been chronicled extensively in the Center for Security Policy’s “Civilization Jihad Reader Series.”)

With the launch of the U.S. Council of Muslim Organizations in March 2014, the Muslim Brotherhood has secured a new instrument for its subversion: a self-described U.S. “political party” meant to dominate and mobilize Muslim voters across the country and get them marching according to one plan. The object is to elicit support for the Muslim Brotherhood’s demands from candidates and to help achieve what the Islamic supremacists would regard as favorable outcomes in the 2016 elections. (For more on the USCMO, its purpose and activities to date, see “Star Spangled Sharia: The Rise of America’s First Muslim Brotherhood Party.”)

Unfortunately, some members of Congress have already embraced the Council of Muslim Organizations. For example, two with longstanding ties to assorted Muslim Brotherhood fronts, Reps. André Carson (D-Ind.) and Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), spoke at the USCMO’s inaugural banquet in June 2014. Neither has disavowed the USCMO’s subsequent participation in anti-Semitic, pro-Hamas and pro-Muslim Brotherhood demonstrations and its fundraising on behalf of Islamic Relief USA, a large, U.S.-based Islamic supremacist charity.

Another reason lawmakers and their staffs should be leery of this new Muslim Brotherhood front group is its avowed intention to make common cause with radical non-Muslim entities like the Black Lives Matter movement. At a conference in December 2015 convened by two of the Muslim Brotherhood’s most virulent fronts, the Muslim American Society and Islamic Circle of North America, leading USCMO figures publicly discussed how they could impart lessons to African-Americans by holding up the Brotherhood as the community that staged revolutions across the world.

Congress is on notice: As long as organizations associated with Islamic supremacism like the USCMO and its member organizations dominate “Muslim Advocacy Day” on Capitol Hill, it will actually be Muslim Brotherhood Advocacy Day. And legislators should have nothing to do with either its participants or its programs.