Stop the presses! The Muslim Brotherhood is an Islamic supremacist group! It is good to see this article in the Dallas Morning News echoing what we have said here for years. Robert Leiken of the Nixon Center, one of the chief proponents of the idea that the U.S. should negotiate with the Brotherhood, is quoted toward the end still as resolute as ever not to take the Brotherhood at its word, but the Holy Land Foundation is waking up at least some people.
“Group’s takeover plot emerges in Holy Land case,” by Jason Trahan for The Dallas Morning News (thanks to all who sent this in):
Amid the mountain of evidence released in the Holy Land Foundation terrorism financing trial, the most provocative has turned out to be a handful of previously classified evidence detailing Islamist extremists’ ambitious plans for a U.S. takeover.
A knot of terrorism researchers say the memos and audiotapes, many translated from Arabic and containing detailed strategies by the international Islamist group the Muslim Brotherhood, are proof that extremists have long sought to replace the Constitution with Shariah, or Islamic law.
But some academics and Muslim leaders say that the ideals contained in the documents were written by disgruntled foreign dissidents representing a tiny radical fringe. The documents also pre-date the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and the 80-year-old Muslim Brotherhood is now either inactive or largely underground in America.
The documents — introduced in recent weeks as part of the prosecution’s case in the trial of the now defunct Holy Land Foundation and five of its organizers — lay out the Brotherhood’s plans in chillingly stark terms.
A 1991 strategy paper for the Brotherhood, often referred to as the Ikhwan in Arabic, found in the Virginia home of an unindicted co-conspirator in the case, describes the group’s U.S. goals, referred to as a “civilization-jihadist process.”
“The Ikhwan 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,” it states. This process requires a “mastery of the art of ‘coalitions,’ the art of ‘absorption’ and the principles of ‘cooperation.’ ”
Success in the U.S. “in establishing an observant Islamic base with power and effectiveness will be the best support and aid to the global movement,” it states.
A transcript of a Brotherhood orientation meeting recorded in the early 1980s includes discussions of the need for “securing the group” from infiltration by “Zionism, Masonry … the CIA, FBI, etc. so that we find out if they are monitoring us” and “how can we get rid of them.” Discussions later turn to “weapons training at the Ikhwan’s camps” in Oklahoma and Missouri.
[…]
Esam Omeish, president of the Virginia-based Muslim American Society, or MAS, says the documents introduced in the Holy Land trial are full of “abhorrent statements and are in direct conflict of the very principles of our Islam.”
“The Muslim community in America wishes to contribute positively to the continued success and greatness of our civilization,” Dr. Omeish said. “The ethics of tolerance and inclusion are the very tenets that MAS was based on from its inception.”
His group, formed in 1993, is thought by many to be the Brotherhood’s current incarnation in the U.S., although he and other MAS leaders say their group formed as an alternative to radicalism.
“MAS is not the Muslim Brotherhood,” Dr. Omeish said. The society “grew out of a history of Islamic activism in the U.S. when the Muslim Brotherhood once existed but has a different intellectual paradigm and outlook.”
[…]
Mahdi Bray, director of the Washington, D.C.-based Muslim American Society’s Freedom Foundation, which promotes Muslim civil rights, called the Holy Land documents “a throwback.” He has attended portions of the Holy Land trial.
“If those documents talk about the establishing of Shariah law in America, I’m saying that’s a lot of hype: wishful thinking from an immigrant perspective. … It doesn’t reflect genuine American perspective in terms of where we’re heading,” Mr. Bray said.
He said members of MAS decided in 1993, when the organization was founded, that they would pursue political and nonviolent tactics.
“I wouldn’t be candid if I didn’t say there weren’t some old-timers who want to hold onto the old way, who say that this is the way the Ikhwan did it, this should be our model,” he said. “We said ‘So what? It doesn’t work here.’ We’ve been very adamant about that.”
Mr. Bray, an Islamic convert, has been criticized by some as being an apologist for terrorists, particularly for his condemnation of Israel’s 2004 missile strike in the Palestinian Gaza Strip that killed Hamas’ spiritual founder, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin.
Mr. Bray says that although his politics are controversial, he’s not anti-American.
“Those on the right and many of those who I would classify as Islamophobes, many of them have failed to realize that there is an authentic American Muslim organization here and movement in America that wants to integrate,” he said. “We believe the ballot is an appropriate place to be.”
He said that he “liked the Bill of Rights” and didn’t want to see the Constitution replaced with Islamic law.
“There’s a maturation that’s taken place in the American Muslim community that’s either not understood, or understood but viewed as a threat to other interest groups in this country.”
[…]
There are those in the U.S. government who believe that the Brotherhood is the Bush administration’s best chance for reaching out to moderate Islamists internationally.
The Brotherhood “works to dissuade the Muslims from violence, instead channeling them into politics and charitable activities,” said Robert S. Leiken, director of the Immigration and National Security Program at The Nixon Center in a recent article in Foreign Affairs, a publication of the nonpartisan Council on Foreign Relations.
While he has not studied the Holy Land documents, Dr. Leiken said that the U.S. discussion on Islamic thought tends to be polarized and that what passes for scholarship is often more selective than rigorous.
“The more you study it, the more distinctions and differences should emerge,” he said. “And scholars should see these distinctions. In Europe, these things are understood better, but in the U.S., they often get brushed aside in the heat of the debate.”
Yes, in Europe they understand it all so well.