Editorial: Terror In Waiting

Mideast: As the radical Muslim Brotherhood schemes to oust a pro-American despot in Egypt, U.S. pundits have cheered the move as a boon for freedom. This is dangerous pablum.

The Muslim Brotherhood is in talks with opposition leader Mohamed ElBaradei to form a unity government to replace the regime of embattled Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, a U.S. ally.

Pundits on both the left and the right have naively portrayed the Brotherhood — a worldwide jihadist movement based in Cairo — as a pro-democracy force that has "courageously campaigned against the government and for the poor," as a CNN anchor put it. Obama adviser Bruce Riedel, a former CIA officer, argues that the U.S. "should not be afraid of the Muslim Brotherhood." He claims it "renounced violence years ago."

Former Bush spokeswoman Dana Perino chimed in that at least the Brotherhood would pick up the trash and provide basic services for Egyptians. "Don't be afraid of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt," she said on Fox News. "This has nothing to do with religion." In fact, it has everything to do with it. The exiled Brotherhood hates Mubarak because he secularized Egyptian society. The Brotherhood wants to Talibanize it.

In 2007, the Brotherhood drafted a party platform under the banner "Islam is the solution." It called for establishing an undemocratically selected board of religious scholars with the power to veto any legislation passed by the Egyptian Parliament and approved by the president that's not compatible with Islamic law. The platform also called for banning women and Christians from high office.

Caroline Glick is an ace. Building on her article—

“The Salafist Movement
An examination of the ideology that has inspired the global jihad and the emergence of its most dangerous incarnation.”
Frontline
January 25, 2005 (Interesting date)

From the article: “Salafi jihadists — who constitute less than 1 percent of the world’s 1.2 billion Muslims — see life as being divided between the world of Islam (dar al-Islam) and the land of conflict or war (dar al-harb). Through jihad, they wish to extend the Muslim world so that all of humankind can live under its umbrella. They harken back to the Great Caliphate, when the Muslim world extended from Spain (then called Andalusia), across North Africa and the Middle East, down the west coast of Africa, and across the Caspian region to India and the Philippines. At its height in the 1200s, the Caliphate was a highly sophisticated civilization, responsible for many inventions and innovations in mathematics and science.

The origins of Salafi jihadism can be traced to the Muslim Brotherhood, the seminal organization for Islamic terrorism. Founded in 1928 in Egypt with the goal of establishing an Islamic state, the Brotherhood had as its slogan “The Quran is our constitution.” The Brotherhood’s political agenda combined with its rigid version of Islam proved to be an explosive formula. “The Muslim Brotherhood is the mother of all these movements, ideologically,” says Dr. Mamoun Fandy, an Egyptian-born professor of politics and senior fellow at the James A. Baker III Institute of Public Policy. “Salafist jihadism and the activation of the views of the world of the house of Islam and the house of war are the ideas that emerged from the writings and the teachings of the Muslim Brotherhood.”

Indeed, the Brotherhood spawned Sayyid Qutb, who provided the intellectual underpinnings of Salafi jihadism. Born in Egypt in 1906, Qutb received a traditional Muslim education — committing the Quran to memory by the age of 10 — before receiving a modern, secular education in college. In the 1920s and ‘30s he took up socialism and literature, and wrote novels and poems. He even traveled to the United States in the late 1940s, enrolling at the Colorado State College of Education and earning a master’s degree...”

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/front/special/sala.html

Obama Administration Lifts US Ban on Muslim Brotherhood Leader
01/22/10 | IsraelNationalNews.com | by Avi Yellin

The Barack Obama administration has decided to lift a ban preventing Muslim Scholar Professor Tariq Ramadan from entering the United States. Ramadan, an Egyptian currently living in Switzerland, is a leading member of Europe’s Muslim Brotherhood branch and the grandson of the movement’s founder Hassan al-Banna. The Muslim Brotherhood is the parent organization for Hamas and some of the groups that recently merged into al-Qaeda, including Ayman al Zawahiri’s Egyptian Islamic Jihad.

Ramadan was invited to teach at the University of Notre Dame in 2004 but the George W. Bush administration revoked his visa, citing a statute that applies to those who have “endorsed or espoused” terrorism. The administration later dropped the terror endorsement claim and linked the ban to $1,336 in donations Ramadan made between 1998 and 2002 to a Swiss charity that was later blacklisted by the US.

Although the White House asked the court last March to uphold the Bush-era entry ban on Ramadan, the administration has now decided to lift the ban and possibly allow both Ramadan and South African Muslim activist Professor Adam Habib onto American soil. State Department spokesman Philip Crowley told reporters that the government no longer views Ramadan or Habib as representing threats to the United States. “The next time Professor Ramadan or Professor Habib apply for a visa, they will not be found inadmissible on the basis of the facts that led to denial when they last applied.”

October 1, 2010 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews.org - Tariq Ramadan, the son of [now deceased] Said Ramadan, former Secty. General of the World Islamic Council [source, http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05193/536684.stm] and grandson of Hassan Al Banna [see, Wiki bio, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tariq_Ramadan] the 1928 founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, is headlining the 16th Annual CAIR Banquet on October 9.

According to the Weekly Standard, it was Said Ramadan who was the likely author of the Muslim Brotherhood’s ambitious plan to topple Western democracies, variously called, “the Plan” or “the Project.” [Link to doc here An Explanatory Memorandum On the General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America. The document was entered into evidence in U.S. vs. Holy Land Foundation, America’s most important terror funding prosecution.

“Said Ramadan was one of the most important Islamist thinkers of the 20th century. He is probably the author of “The Project,” a 14-page document dated 1982 found by the Swiss secret service in 2001. “The Project” is a roadmap for installing Islamic regimes in the West by propaganda, preaching, and if necessary war.” [source, http://www.weeklystandard.com/content/public/articles/000/000/012/800naxnt.asp]

Muslims Target Tariq Ramadan, Brotherhood
by IPT News • Apr 16, 2010

Excerpt:

Jasser said that Western elites misconstrue critical issues in the current struggle with radical Islam. They erroneously believe that the most important aspect of the conflict is whether an Islamist organization is violent or nonviolent.

But truly moderate Muslims spend most of their time dealing with the factors that drive people toward radical Islam. And a major factor is “political Islam,” which Jasser described as “the 800-pound elephant in the room.”

A key component of this consists of making excuses for terrorism and objecting to U.S. defense actions against violent jihadists. Jasser cited an interview during which a reporter asked Ramadan about the recent announcement that the United States would target Anwar al-Awlaki –an Al Qaeda-linked imam who has endorsed terrorist attacks like the Fort Hood massacre and the attempted Christmas Day airliner bombing.

Ramadan voiced objections to U.S. efforts to kill Awlaki, saying the imam felt “estrangement” from mainstream American society and had been “pushed away.”
Jasser and Mansur voiced particularly strong objections to this “root cause” argument, saying it was an attempt to make excuses for Awlaki’s criminal behavior. Ramadan also accepted money from Iran as compensation for a television show on the regime controlled PRESS Television.

“I would not take remuneration from a government that engages in the oppression of Muslims,” Jasser said.

Ramadan stands for “obfuscation and denial” and represents the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood, he added.

Fatah, who also published this column on Ramadan in the Montreal Gazette, blasted the “cowardice of Western society” in refusing to confront efforts to “recreate the world of [Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna, Tariq Ramadan’s grandfather] in Canada.”

(...)

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