When House Homeland Security Committee Chair Pete King holds hearings on the source of homegrown terror Thursday, he should zero in on the radical Muslim Brotherhood. FBI case agents who’ve investigated Brotherhood-controlled mosques, charities and other fronts here in America say that virtually every major terror case points back to the Egypt-based Brotherhood.
Over the last few decades, the Muslim Brotherhood has stealthily built an impressive infrastructure of support for terrorists, from Washington to New York, from Chicago to San Diego. Pre-9/11, much of their activity went unnoticed by even law enforcement. But now the US Justice Department says — albeit quietly, through a growing body of post-9/11 court records — that most major Muslim groups in America are fronts for the Brotherhood. And these US fronts have raised millions of dollars for Hamas, al Qaeda and other terror groups.
Just a few years ago, federal prosecutors identified 61 US-based Muslim Brotherhood figures and entities among unindicted co-conspirators in the largest terror-financing case in American history. On the list are the most prominent Islamic groups in America, including the Islamic Society of North America and its subsidiary the North American Islamic Trust, which holds title to most major mosques in the country. Also listed was the Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, which is now banned from outreach by the FBI due to its “ongoing” terror ties.
The 11-page list was attached to a pre-trial court brief that implicated these mainstream Muslim groups as part of an allegedly criminal Brotherhood scheme to funnel millions to Palestinian terrorists under the guise of charity. They allegedly conspired in the terror plot with the largest Muslim charity in America — the Brotherhood-controlled Holy Land Foundation.
Holy Land’s leaders were convicted in 2008 on all 108 counts. The brief listing the other groups was not supposed to leak publicly — but it is supported by “ample evidence,” according to a post-trial ruling by the federal judge who heard the case.
Other US Muslim Brotherhood figures convicted or suspected of terror include:
* Abdurahman Alamoudi, an al Qaeda financier who served as a top Muslim adviser to Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush — and as an official State Department goodwill ambassador to the Muslim world.
* Anwar al-Awlaki, now a top figure in Al Qaeda in the Arabian Penninsula, a US citizen who spent more than two decades living in America and preaching violent jihad at Brotherhood mosques — including one outside Washington attended by both the Fort Hood terrorist and some of the 9/11 hijackers.
In my books, “Infiltration” and “Muslim Mafia,” I tracked Awlaki’s associations, and found that he worked closely with Mohammad El Mezain, who served as one of the Brotherhood’s top leaders in the US before recently landing behind bars on terror charges. Awlaki and El Mezain not only lived in the same Fort Collins, Colo., apartment complex, but preached together in mosques there and in San Diego, while also co-sponsoring tours of Islamic holy sites through the Saudi embassy in Washington.
Alamoudi, once the Brotherhood’s supreme leader in the US, is also now behind bars, serving a 23-year federal prison sentence for plotting terror. Unfortunately, before the government got wise to him, he managed to set up the Pentagon’s program for training and certifying many Muslim chaplains now serving in the US military.
Known by former members as the “Ikhwan mafia,” the Brotherhood is bent on infiltrating, “sabotaging” and “destroying” the US “from within” and replacing our ways with “Allah’s religion.” This seditious goal is revealed in the US Brotherhood’s founding documents, which the FBI seized in a post-9/11 raid of a Brotherhood boss’ home in the Washington suburbs.
FBI case agents have argued for dismantling the Muslim Brotherhood network using the same RICO statutes used to roll up the mob. But there’s little political will at FBI headquarters or the Justice Department for such a mass prosecution of Islamic nonprofits.
Not only is it politically incorrect to go after them, it’s politically messy. Republicans and Democrats alike have fatuously certified these Brotherhood-linked groups and their leaders as “moderate” and “mainstream,” and it would be politically embarrassing to unring that bell now.
Few want to own up to the unpleasant truth that the Muslim establishment that publicly mouths moderate platitudes and decries the radical fringe is a central part of it. King’s hearings this week promise to break through the facade. Let’s hope they do.
Paul Sperry is a Hoover Institution media fellow and author of “Infiltration” and “Muslim Mafia.”