The Muslim Brotherhood’s winter offensive

Sixty-nine years ago this month, Nazi Germany mounted its last, horrific offensive in the dead of winter in what came to be known as the Battle of the Bulge.  Perhaps taking a page from the playbook of their fellow totalitarians, the Muslim Brotherhood seems to have its own audacious winter offensive underway – only this one is being waged inside America, a country the Brothers have declared they seek “to destroy from within.”

At the moment, the object of this exercise appears to be to prevail on the U.S. government to do what it did once before: help install a Muslim Brotherhood regime in Egypt.  The difference, of course, is that the last time was in the heyday of the so-called “Arab Spring,” a moment when the ambitions of Egyptian Islamists and those of their counterparts in Tunisia, Libya, Syria and elsewhere were temporarily obscured by disinformation and wishful thinking.

In short order, however, the determination of the Muslim Brotherhood and its ilk to impose the supremacist and brutally repressive doctrine they call shariah became evident in Cairo and the rest of the Middle East.  Whether they gained power via violent revolution or through the ballot box, the goal was the same: compel moderate Muslims, secularists, Christians and everybody else to submit to orthodox Islamic misrule. Resistance was met with violence, imprisonment and the destruction of churches.

Fortunately, as many as thirty million Egyptians took to the streets of their cities last summer to denounce the Brotherhood and demand the removal from power of its president, Mohamed Morsi.  He was overthrown and arrested in July by the military-led opposition, his organization banned and its other leaders incarcerated.  Most sentient Americans recognized this as a very positive development.

The Muslim Brotherhood’s operatives, front organizations and allies in this country have nonetheless demanded Morsi’s restoration. They present themselves as champions of democracy, hoping no one will notice the practical effect of the Brothers’ policies when in power: a state in which elections amount to nothing more than one man, one vote, one time.

The Brotherhood’s advocates enjoy considerable access to and influence with the Obama administration.  For example, the President and his subordinates take counsel from Homeland Security Department advisors like Mohamed Magid, the president of this country’s largest Muslim Brotherhood front, the Islamic Society of North America, and Mohamed Elibiary, an Islamist community organizer based in Plano, Texas. At the urging of their ilk, Mr. Obama cut off military sales to the Egyptian government a few months ago.  In addition to needlessly alienating Cairo when it is rolling up our mutual enemies, he thus created an opportunity for Vladimir Putin to pick up the slack and, in the process, further reestablish Russia in the Middle East.

The Muslim Brotherhood in this country (the subject of a free ten-part online course at www.MuslimBrotherhoodinAmerica.com) is evidently determined to do even more for their fellow jihadists in Egypt.  Hence, they have created new fronts to promote Egyptian “democracy” and held lobbying and fundraising events in several U.S. cities featuring top Brotherhood personalities.

As the indispensable Investigative Project on Terrorism first reported, one of those is Tariq Ramadan, the grandson of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan al-Banna.  Ramadan was allowed into the United States in January 2010 at the direction of then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whose longtime aide, Huma Abedin, also has extensive personal and family ties to the Brotherhood.

Even more outrageous is the presence at several of these events – including one in the House Cannon Office Building on December 5^th – of Sami Al-Arian. Al-Arian would seem an unlikely choice to sell Congress on so dubious a proposition as restoring the Muslim Brotherhood to power in Egypt.  After all, he not only engaged in what the Brotherhood calls “civilization jihad” in the United States. That’s the stealthy subversion Islamists employ until they are able to use violence to foist shariah worldwide.

Sami al-Arian was also convicted in 2006 of aiding Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), a designated terrorist group he led for many years.  PIJ has been responsible for murders of innocents in the past and applauded a bus bombing in Israel just last Sunday.  Why on earth would Judge Leonie Brinkema allow Al-Arian, who is awaiting disposition of contempt of court charges and faces possible deportation, to collaborate and agitate with his fellow Muslim Brothers, albeit with a location-monitoring bracelet?

It is obscene that anyone in Congress would host such a jihadist. Rep. Andre Carson (D-IN), a Muslim legislator who sponsored the event at which Al-Arian appeared, claims not to have known that he would be there.  True or not, he and President Obama have certainly failed to recognize the Muslim Brotherhood for the enemy it is.

That failure makes all the more dangerous the Muslim Brotherhood’s present offensive.  As we mark the anniversary of the bloody and avoidable Battle of the Bulge, we would do well to reflect upon an event held last month at the Brotherhood beachhead at Georgetown University, the Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding.  Among those invited to promote a “return to democracy” in Egypt was a featured guest speaker named Rami Jan, who happens to be a member of the Egyptian Nazi party.