UK Politicians Legitimize The Brotherhood
In Britain in 1997, the Muslim Brotherhood founded the Muslim Association of Britain (MAB). This group claims to be moderate, and promotes missionary (dawah) work among the young. Its founder, Kamal Tawfik Helbawy, was at that time the Brotherhood’s European spokesman. Born in Egypt in 1939, he had been a member of the Brotherhood since the age of 12. He co-founded the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY) in Saudi Arabia in 1972 with Abdullah bin Laden, Osama’s nephew. WAMY is an organization which has been accused of funding terrorist organizations, including Hamas. Kamal Helbawy was WAMY’s first president.
In November 1997, in the same year that he had founded MAB, Helbawy helped to found the Muslim Council for Britain (MCB), which was officially inaugurated on March 1, 1998. As Helbawy stated in a 2005 interview: “I played a role in the establishment of the MCB. Our objective was that the MCB should remain independent and its primary function should be to represent and protect the interests of Muslims.”
The MCB, whose senior members have supported extremism, enjoyed an unprecedented position with Blair’s government, acting as advisers on all things Islamic. In June 2005 its then-secretary general Iqbal Sacranie was given a knighthood by Blair, even though he is an anti-Semite who wishes to see Holocaust Memorial day scrapped. In 1996, Sacranie supported plans to invite Osama bin Laden to the UK to lecture to Muslims, claiming the terrorist was an “Islamic Scholar”. Despite boycotting memorials for the Shoah, Sacranie nonetheless attended a memorial service for Sheikh Yassin, the founder of terror group Hamas. This service was held at London’s Central Mosque in 2004.
In 2005, the MCB persuaded Blair to introduce a bill which would have outlawed any criticism of Islam, which was neutered by the Lords, parliament’s Upper House. In June 2006, the unelected MCB succeeded in persuading the elected Blair government to abandon its 18-month campaign to outlaw forced marriage, which annually affects at least 250 young Muslim girls.
The government has been so manipulated by the claims of the “moderate” Muslims in Britain, that MI6 and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office have actively courted the Muslim Brotherhood. The overtures to the Brotherhood have been made through a unit called the “Engaging With the Islamic World Group” (EWIG) which was founded in 2003. EWIG is led by a 27-year old former Muslim radical called Mockbul Ali. In July 2006, this group used taxpayers’ money to pay Yusuf al-Qaradawi, spiritual leader of the Brotherhood, to attend a conference in Turkey. On July 14, 2005, one week after the London bombings, Mockbul Ali argued that a visa should again be given to Qaradawi. That document and others can be found here.
After the London suicide bombings of July 7, 2005, the Blair government invited Tariq Ramadan, son of Said Ramadan and grandson of Hassan al-Banna, to sit on a working committee. This committee was set up to find ways of preventing radicalism amongst Britain’s youth. Ramadan is not even a UK citizen, and according to Jean Charles Brissard, he has had meetings with known terrorists in his native Switzerland. The UK government sponsors a website promoting “the radical middle way” of Islam, where Ramadan has his own page. Tariq Ramadan is still barred from entering to the US, though he insists he is not a Muslim Brotherhood member.
US Politicians Duped By The Brotherhood
In the United States, one individual maintained a pretense of “moderation” which would later embarrass the left and the right. According to the testimony of Dr. Michael Waller to the US Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Abdurahman Alamoudi was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. A man born in Eritrea in 1951, he arrived in the US in 1979 and became a naturalized US citizen on May 23, 1996. From 1985 onwards he became involved in many Muslim groups. In 1990 he founded the Washington DC-based American Muslim Council (AMC), which Waller states “has been described as a de facto front of the Muslim Brotherhood.” The AMC was an affiliate of the American Muslim
Foundation, which was also headed by Alamoudi. Despite this, in June 2002 the FBI called the AMC “the most mainstream Muslim group in the United States.”
What is of concern is the manner in which Alamoudi persuaded US authorities under two administrations of his reliability. Around 1993, he was an adviser for the Pentagon on which Muslim chaplains should serve in the US military. He continued this role until 1998. From 1997 he acted for the State Department as a “goodwill ambassador” to Muslim countries. He was regularly at the Clinton White House and had advised Hillary Rodham Clinton on managing iftar dinners since 1996. Alamoudi had made donations to the Democrat party but was open to wooing the opposition.
In 1998, as Frank Gaffney recounted, Republican Grover Norquist formed the Islamic Institute, which aimed to recruit Muslim and Arab Americans to support the GOP. Alamoudi made contributions both to the Islamic Institute and later, in 2000 and 2001, he made payments to a lobbying firm connected with Norquist.
Alamoudi’s Brotherhood connections were not touted openly, but in August 1997, he was publicly proclaiming on Fox TV that Hamas was a “freedom fighting organization”. Hamas had started its first bombings of Israeli civilians in February 1996, a year earlier. On October 28, 2000, Alamoudi attended an anti-Israel protest at Lafayette Park outside the White House, where he was caught on video proclaiming “I have been labeled… as being a supporter of Hamas. Anybody supporters of Hamas here? Hear that, Bill Clinton. We are all supporters of Hamas. I wish they added that I am also a supporter of Hezbollah. Anybody who supports Hezbollah here?”
Shortly after the White House outburst, Hillary Clinton returned a donation of $1,000 to her election war chest, which Alamoudi had presented on May 25 of that year. Alamoudi embarked upon at least 10 clandestine trips to Libya. On September 28, 2003, after returning from a multi-stage excursion he was arrested at Dulles International Airport. He was handed a 19-count indictment on October 23, on charges including money laundering and dealing with a prohibited nation.
Alamoudi had been stopped at Heathrow on August 16, 2003 before boarding a flight to Syria, and had $340,000 of Libyan money seized. On July 30, 2004, he pleaded guilty to three charges – violating conditions barring transport to, and commerce with, prohibited nations (Libya), failure to disclose to IRS his income, and lying to ICE federal investigators. On October 15, 2004, Alamoudi was given a jail sentence of 23 years. He had told officials that he provided Libyan money to London-based Saudi dissidents to finance a plot to assassinate Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah.
Politicians may have been fooled by Alamoudi, who headed sixteen US-based Islamist organizations, but despite what is known of the Muslim Brotherhood’s support of terrorism and extremism, US politicians are now openly courting the Brotherhood. On April 5 this year in Egypt. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer met with Mohammed Saad el-Katani, the leader of the Brotherhood’s 55 members within the Egyptian parliament. Hamdi Hassan, the Brotherhood’s spokesman, said Hoyer met with el-Katani once at the parliament building and later at the home of the US ambassador to Egypt.
On May 27, a delegation by four members of the House of Congress again met with Mohammed Saad el-Katani in Egypt. The delegation was led by David Price, a Democrat who represents North Carolina.
The Enemy Within
While Said Ramadan was establishing European bases for the Muslim Brotherhood in Geneva and Munich, similar actions were being taken in the United States. In 1962, an organization called the “Cultural Society” was set up, the first Muslim Brotherhood body to be formed on American soil. Muslim Brotherhood members are sworn to secrecy when they join up (”kitman” or concealment) so exact details of this group are murky. The Cultural Society mainly drew its recruits from foreign Muslim students at mid-western universities, such as Illinois, Indiana and Michigan. The name “Cultural Society” was employed to draw attention away from its Brotherhood identity. The following year, the Muslim Students Association (MSA) was formed by the US Brotherhood, and up until the 1970s, new bodies proliferated.
The website of a newer Brotherhood-founded group, the Muslim American Society (MAS) describes its founders as “pioneers” – “The call and the spirit of the movement reached the shores of North America with arrival of Muslim students and immigrants in the late 1950s and early 1960s. These early pioneers and Islamic movement followers established in 1963 the Muslim Student Association (MSA) of the U.S and Canada as a rallying point in their endeavor to serve Islam and Muslims in North America. Other services and outreach organizations soon followed, such as the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT), the Islamic Medical Association (IMA), the Muslim Arab Youth Association (MAYA) and the Muslim Youth of North America (MYNA), to name a few.”
All of the groups listed above were formed by the Muslim Brotherhood. MYNA was founded by Ahmed Elkadi, who was the US Brotherhood’s treasurer from the 1970s until 1984, when he became its president. He held this position until 1995, but has since left the Brotherhood. He did not resign from his position as president of the US Ikhwan (MB) – he was pushed.
Other groups were founded by the US Brotherhood later – the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) was formed in the 1980s as an outgrowth of the Muslim Students Association (MSA).
The Muslim American Society, under Brotherhood leadership, was incorporated in 1993 in Illinois. The decision to incorporate the MAS was made at a meeting of 40 Ikhwan (MB) members at a hotel near the Alabama-Tennessee state line. Shaker Elsayed, a leader within MAS, has admitted the Brotherhood had founded the Muslim American Society, saying: “Ikhwan members founded MAS, but MAS went way beyond that point of conception.”
MAS is based in Falls Church, Virginia, the same town where Abdurahman Alamoudi lived. Five miles away in Alexandria lay the US headquarters of the World Assembly of Muslim Youth or WAMY, which was co-founded by a Brotherhood member, Kamal Helbawy. On Friday May 28, 2004 the WAMY offices were raided by agents of the FBI, ICE and the Joint Terrorism Task Force. An affidavit from a customs agent claimed that one WAMY publication included a section entitled “Animosity Toward the Jews”, and stated: “The Jews are humanity’s enemies: they foment immorality in this world.” The affidavit mentioned links with WAMY and the terrorist group Hamas.
The director of MAS’ “Freedom Foundation”, Mahdi Bray, pushed for the release of a Falls Church citizen, Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, who had been accused of plotting to assassinate George W. Bush in an al-Qaeda plot. Ali, who had been educated at the Saudi-funded Islamic Saudi Academy in Alexandria, was convicted on November 22, 2005 and sentenced to 30 years’ jail on March 29, 2005.
MAS, which has 10,000 members in 53 chapters across the US, is also involved in the disputes at Minneapolis-St Paul airport, where Somali taxi drivers have refused to carry passengers carrying alcohol. Three quarters of the 900 drivers are Muslim, mostly from Somalia. Last year, 5,400 potential rides were turned down because passengers had alcohol. The Metropolitan Airport Commission sought guidance from Muslims, and a fatwa was made by the MAS. Khalid Elmasary declared: “It is expressly stated. Transportation of alcohol for Muslims is against the Islamic faith, and therefore forbidden.” The issue still has not been resolved.
It is sometimes hard to work out if such Muslim “representatives” are really following the ways of the prophet, or are following the plans laid out in Muslim Brotherhood’s “Project” manifesto for gaining national and global power.
Mahdi Bray, who is based in Washington, D.C., where he has a radio talk-show, is accused of taking part in protests where there were calls for the death of Jews. Steve Emerson in his book American Jihad stated that at the October 28, 2000, rally for Hezbollah and Hamas at Lafayette Park, “Mahdi Bray, stood directly behind Alamoudi and was seen jubilantly exclaiming his support for these two deadly terrorist organizations.” Three weeks earlier, Bray had “coordinated and led a rally where approximately 2,000 people congregated in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C…. at one point during the rally, Mahdi Bray played the tambourine as one of the speakers sang, while the crowd repeated: ‘Al-Aqsa is calling us, let’s all go into jihad, and throw stones at the face of the Jews.”
Bray, who was awarded a Congressional Black Caucus award in September last year, has issued a press release claiming “victory” in the settlement of a vindictive lawsuit launched by the Islamic Society of Boston (ISB), which attacked 16 organizations and individuals, including Steve Emerson.
There was no settlement agreed between the parties – the Islamic Society of Boston mysteriously dropped its lawsuit, which claimed “defamation”, on May 29, 2007. With MAS coming to its defense, and with Muslim Brotherhood member Abdurahman Alamoudi listed as one its founders and trustees, with the Muslim Brotherhood’s spiritual leader Yusuf al-Qaradawi as another early trustee, it is not unreasonable to assume that the Islamic Society of Boston began its life in 1982 as another outreach of the Muslim Brotherhood. In 2002, Qaradawi appeared by videolink at an ISB fund-raising event.
The ISB, which is building the largest mosque in Eastern United States at Roxborough, Boston, was in January 2006 defended by Arsalan Iftikhar, the legal director of the Council of American Relations (CAIR), who said: “Unfortunately, I see the Boston case as indicative of a growing trend in anti-Muslim rhetoric that has grown after 9/11.” It should be noted that the two co-founders of CAIR, Omar Ahmad and Nihad Awad, were officials of the Islamic Association for Palestine, which was established by Hamas member Mousa Abu Marzook, and has been called a “Hamas Front”. Nihad Awad and Ahmed Bedier, head of CAIR’s Florida chapter, have both openly pledged their support for Hamas, which itself is derived from the Muslim Brotherhood.
With its previous links to Muslim Brotherhood members, ISB may be thankful that it was not listed as an “unindicted co-conspirator” in a plot to fund Hamas. This has been the recent fate of CAIR. In a trial in Dallas, Texas, Ghassan Elashi, the head of CAIR’s Texas chapter, is accused along with a staggering list of co-conspirators. Elashi was also head of Texas branch of the outlawed Holy Land Foundation. The indictment maintains that other officials from the Texas branch of the Holy Land Foundation had conspired with numerous others to supply funds to Hamas. Ghassan Elashi and his brothers Bayan and Basman were convicted of “conspiracy to provide material support to terrorists” on April 13, 2005. Elashi was given a seven year sentence on October 13, 2006.
The named co-conspirators include eight Muslim Brotherhood individuals and organizations: Abdurahman Alamoudi, Gaddor Ibrahim Saidi, the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), Muslim Arab Youth Association (MAYA), Nizar Minshar, North American Islamic Trust (NAIT), Raed Awad and Tareq Suwaidan. The trial will begin on July 16. The trial will hopefully clarify further the exact roles of CAIR, and also the mysterious American contingent of the Muslim Brotherhood.
The Muslim Brotherhood is not a body to be trusted. It claims peace and moderation, while simultaneously planning to conquer the globe by fair means or foul. It propagates anti-Semitism, and justifies and supports the murder of Israeli civilians. Its current motto is: “Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. Koran is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.” Those politicians who try to make deals with such a group are betraying not only the people who elected them and the nations they serve, but they jeopardize the security of the Western world at large.
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