Both Hugh Fitzgerald and I have discussed the (generally successful) efforts by a Washington lobbyist named Jim Guirard to stop military and government officials from using the word “jihad” for the…global jihad. Their contention is that Islam is a religion of peace, that the jihadists’ use of the language of jihad is illegitimate on Islamic grounds, and that Americans and other non-Muslims can help delegitimize the jihadists by employing other Arabic terms for them and their activities — terms which brand them criminals.
This idea sounds terrific, but it has many serious flaws. I discussed some of them here, and Hugh here.
And now it has come to light that the whole enterprise may be a Muslim Brotherhood deception campaign. Douglas Farah at the Counterterrorism Blog reproduces a memo by LTC Joseph C. Myers, Senior Army Advisor at Air Command and Staff College at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama.
Myers’s memo says:
This assessment makes the point that the Muslim Brotherhood should be considered a threat organization and the affiliated US domestic Muslim NGOs and associations identified in the strategy document should likewise be considered part of the Muslim Brotherhood network, that these are “front” functional organizations operating as links and nodes of the overall network.
Exceptionally important in the analysis is the role of the “Truespeak” organization and Jim Guirard who has been arguing in DoD circles and academic institutions that the term jihad should be suspended from the GWOT lexicon to be replaced by hiraba. This analysis demonstrates that “Truespeak” contributors are part of the Muslim Brotherhood threat network, with the implication that this entire communication and lexicon effort is part of a strategic disinformation and denial and deception campaign.
Those involved in strategic communication or IO, whether senior leaders, practitioners or analysts should take a close note.
This analysis begins to provide clear I&W for domestic threats that DoD, DHS and the USG must come to terms with.
Myers also has at The American Thinker an article about the Muslim Brotherhood’s latent insurgency in America: “Homeland Security Implications of the Holy Land Foundation Trial”:
The on-going Holy Land Foundation trial has established important facts about the resident domestic Islamic jihad threat inside the United States. Although evidence brought forward in documents and testimony has explosive implications for US Homeland Security, the intelligence community, and every American citizen, relatively little media attention has been paid to it.
This information also has serious implications for professionals, military and civilian, involved in homeland security, DoD plans and strategy as well as national agency intelligence analysts and local law enforcement. The raw documents outlining the strategic goals and activities of the Muslim Brotherhood in America, now exposed for public view, are substantiating the concerns and information long raised by various private sector counterterrorism think-tanks, organizations and blogs such as Stephen Emerson’s Investigative Project and Robert Spencer’s Jihad Watch among others.
From an intelligence perspective, the first thing in assessing and evaluating these raw, translated documents is that they all passed sufficient legal scrutiny to be entered into evidence in a federal trial. Secondly, since these are raw, primary sourced documents of the Muslim Brotherhood and not secondarily sourced, they are the equivalent in a tactical or operational sense of key leadership defector, or detainee debriefing statements, or the capturing of the enemy’s strategic campaign plan. Indeed the title of one document is “An Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America.” Third, the defendants did not challenge in court the authenticity or veracity of the evidentiary documents. All of which immediately speaks to both the credibility and reliability of these reports for intelligence analysis and exploitation.
Civilization Jihad and the Settlement Strategy
The Brotherhood’s strategy memo, while published in May 1991, was drafted earlier, upon a
“…general strategic goal of the Group in America which was approved by the Shura Council and the Organizational Conference for the year [I987].”
In other words this strategy has already been operative for at least 20 years in America. The strategic objective of the Brotherhood in America is clear:
“The Ikhwan [The Muslim Brotherhood’s name for itself] 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 Allah’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.”
The primary strategic concept to accomplish the Brotherhood’s objective is “civilizational jihad,” the usurpation and replacement of American Judeo-Christian and Western liberal social, political and religious foundations by Islam. The campaign plan is one of colonization, described by the Ikhwan as a “settlement strategy.” Explaining this concept they describe it as establishing Islam in America as “stable,” “rooted” and “enabled on which the Islamic structure is built and with which the testimony of civilization is achieved.” Recognizing this strategy cannot be carried forward alone by the Brotherhood they recognized the strategy requires that, “They are then to work to employ, direct and unify Muslims’ efforts and powers for this process. In order to do that, we must possess a mastery of the art of “coalitions”, the art of “absorption” and the principles of “cooperation.”
Read it all.