Radical Islam Watch

U.S. Facilitating Muslim Brotherhood's Extremist Agenda

Clare Lopez

First the U.S. allowed itself to be gulled into co-sponsoring an international “Global Counterterrorism Forum (GCTF)” together with Turkey that deliberately excluded Israel. Now, at the most recent GCTF conference, held December 14, 2012 in Abu Dhabi, the Muslim Brotherhood has succeeded in getting the U.S. to lend its name – and its taxpayers’ money – to the so-called “International Centre of Excellence for Countering Violent Extremism.”

In this context, the only officially permitted “violent extremists” are al-Qa’eda and only al-Qa’eda. “Violent Extremism” does not include, for instance, HAMAS, Hizballah, the Muslim Brotherhood or the Taliban, all of which espouse the exact same ideology and goals as al-Qa’eda.

The GCTF, which comprises 30 members (including the U.S. and the European Union, but not Israel), bills itself as “an informal, multilateral counterterrorism (CT) platform that focuses on identifying critical civilian CT needs, mobilizing the necessary expertise and resources to address such needs and enhance global cooperation.”

One third of its members are Muslim countries, including some of those most often identified as sources of funding for jihadist organizations such as al-Qa’eda, Ansar al-Shariah and the Muslim Brotherhood. Its Plan of Action on Victims of Terrorism, developed at a July 2012 conference in Madrid, is suitably bland and, naturally, makes no mention of either Islamic terrorism (which is responsible for the vast majority of victims of terrorism), or of Jews and Israelis, who often are the target of such terrorism.

The GCTF’s ominously named “Cairo Declaration on Counterterrorism and the Rule of Law” was adopted September 22, 2011 and spawned the GCTF Criminal Justice and Rule of Law Working Group, which is co-chaired by Egypt and the U.S. At the time of the group’s inaugural meeting (held November 3-4, 2011 in Washington, D.C.), it will be recalled that Egypt had recently installed a Muslim Brotherhood president, Mohammed Morsi, who is pledged to the global imposition and enforcement of Islamic law (sharia).

Further, Egypt, as well as the other nine GCTF Islamic member countries, is also a signatory to the 1990 Cairo Declaration, which rejected the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights and declared that the only human rights Islamic members of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) recognize are those allowed by the sharia. Egypt is also the co-sponsor, together with the U.S., of UN Human Rights Council Resolution 16/18, which calls on Western governments to criminalize “any advocacy of religious hatred against individuals that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence,” which is, in fact, a thinly disguised assault on the U.S.’s First Amendment free speech rights.

Hard on the heels of the Muslim Brotherhood’s blitzkrieg takeover of Egypt, the sharia-adherent Egyptian judiciary has wasted no time in moving to suppress criticism of Islam, both at home and abroad. Even before the new sharia-elevating constitution’s late December 2012 referendum, an Egyptian blogger was convicted for blasphemy and “contempt of religion” and the conviction of a Coptic Christian was upheld for “insulting the prophet” by pointing out that Muhammad had more than four wives (which is amply documented in both the Sira and ahadith). Not content to crush free speech only at home, in November 2012, an Egyptian court sentenced seven people, including an American citizen, to death on blasphemy charges for their involvement in the online video, “Innocence of Muslims.”

To date, there has been no official statement from the U.S. State Department on exactly how it intends to work on ‘Criminal Justice and Rule of Law” with a sharia champion GCTF co-chair like Egypt and reconcile that with its Constitutional obligations to the American people.

Set against this OIC/Muslim Brotherhood backdrop, then, the U.S.-funded establishment of the GCTF “International Centre of Excellence for Countering Violent Extremism” in Abu Dhabi further institutionalizes the global campaign to suppress free speech about Islam.

The term “Countering Violent Extremism” was first conjured up inside the Muslim Brotherhood-influenced Advisory Council of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) as a way to avoid having to talk about the Islamic roots of Islamic terrorism.

In February 2010, DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano tasked the Advisory Council to conduct outreach to “relevant community groups” (including affiliates, associates and members of the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood) to develop recommendations about combating “violent extremism” domestically.

Thus was formed the Brotherhood-influenced “Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) Working Group.” Among the CVE Working Group members is Imam Mohamed Magid, President of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), listed by the Muslim Brotherhood itself as one of its affiliates in the Brotherhood’s 1991 “Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America.”

In lockstep with the National Counterterrorism Center’s 2008 “Words That Work and Words That Don’t,” the DHS’s own 2009 “Domestic Extremism Lexicon” and the Obama White House’s omission of “Islam” and “jihad” from the 2010 National Security Strategy document, it is hardly surprising that the DHS CVE Working Group likewise performed linguistic gymnastics to avoid mention of the one category of terrorism that has killed more Americans – and more human beings, including fellow Muslims – than any other in the history of the world: Islamic terrorism.

Deliberate deceit and dissimulation as practiced by the Muslim Brotherhood and other jihadist organizations regarding the truth about the roots of Islamic terrorism in Islamic doctrine, law and scripture is called taqiyya. When taqiyya is swallowed hook, line and sinker by infidel governments, it is called a successful influence operation.

Now, the U.S. government itself is becoming an agent of influence for the Brotherhood, as it helps to establish the “International Centre of Excellence for Countering Violent Extremism.”

Clare Lopez is a senior fellow at RadicalIslam.org and a strategic policy and intelligence expert with a focus on the Middle East, national defense and counterterrorism. Lopez served for 20 years as an operations officer with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).