What’s the Real Story? Part 3

This is the third essay in a series about the maneuvering and intrigue behind the scrim of the current crisis in the Middle East. Previously: Part 1, Part 2.

The Muslim Brotherhood Comes of Age

For those who follow national security issues in the United States, it is well-known that there is substantial enthusiasm within the Pentagon and the intelligence community for the idea that the Muslim Brotherhood and its affiliates are our natural allies against Iran, and against “terrorism” in general.

A policy of quietly supporting and coordinating with the Ikhwan began in the mid-1990s, after the first attack on the World Trade Center, when the Brothers were seen as a force for stability and order within the Sunni Muslim world, an alternative to Al Qaeda and other violent terrorist organizations (which the USA had helped nurture during the final phase of the Cold War, but that’s another story). The policy concerning the Muslim Brotherhood was, in effect: “These are people we can work with.”

If an Islamic awakening — now known as the “Arab Spring” — was to be the wave of the future, then recruiting a fundamentalist Islamic faction as an ally seemed a prudent and effective strategy. The Muslim Brotherhood was regarded as clean alternative to the corrupt despotisms that had up until then been the norm in the Middle East. Belligerent leaders like Muammar Qaddafi thwarted American designs in the region, and corrupt dictators like Hosni Mubarak sucked up billions of dollars in foreign aid.

The United States gave discreet assistance to the Brotherhood, both at home and abroad. It allowed agents of the Ikhwan access to our own governmental structures at all levels, laying the groundwork for the neutering of the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and local law enforcement. In due course it helped the Brotherhood to overthrow those “un-Islamic” regimes in the Middle East that it so despised.

(The exception, of course, was Saudi Arabia. The Saudis cut a deal with the Salafists decades ago, agreeing to supply substantial funding for their overseas da’wa, provided that they refrained from violent attacks on Saudi territory or direct attempts to overthrow the House of Saud. This may change once all the other regimes in the region are deposed, but for now it remains the case.)

It was no accident that such luminaries as Sami al-Arian or Salam al-Marayati became cozy with successive Presidents of the United States. They were considered representatives of the “good” fundamentalist Muslims, willing to cut deals and forego terrorism in return for generous slices of the pie that American foreign policy wonks, in their infinite wisdom, were perennially cutting up for various factions in the Middle East. In return for working to contain violent Salafists, these ostensibly non-violent Salafists were to be handed the keys to political power as soon as the existing regimes could be conveniently overthrown.

What happened in 2011 was presented by the Western media as a spontaneous uprising by ordinary citizens yearning for democracy, but in fact it was nothing of the sort. The Muslim Brotherhood and its allies in the Western military and intelligence services had simply been waiting for the right moment. They needed a precipitating incident that would catalyze domestic discontent all across the Middle East and North Africa. When it eventually came, it provided them the opportunity to overthrow the despots and install the Salafists in power.

The larger strategic vision — if you can call it that — was to use the Muslim Brotherhood to provide cover and protection for an eventual military operation to take out Iran’s nuclear program, whose removal has been seen for more than a decade as an absolute necessity for the security of the United States and Western Europe. In return for our helping it into power, the Ikhwan has allegedly agreed to guard our Middle Eastern flank and restrain the “Arab Street” when the fireworks in Iran finally begin.

The ongoing economic crisis — which has had at least as much effect on the Islamic world as it has on the West — provided the fuel for the Islamic fire. The self-immolation of the Tunisian pushcart operator was a spark to the tinder, and the fundamentalist parties were ready with their gasoline cans as soon as the flames appeared. Western governments were quick to provide financial and logistical assistance to the “rebels”, along with advanced weaponry — frequently laundered through surrogates — when required.

Some analysts reckon that the CIA and the Pentagon are split roughly 50-50 between those who see the Muslim Brotherhood as a valuable strategic ally for the United States, and those who consider it a grave danger to our security. Perhaps the accession of Barack Hussein Obama to the Oval Office throne tipped the balance, giving the Ikhwanists the final push they needed to gain ascendancy within the labyrinths of the national security bureaucracy. In any case, the United States and its Western Allies have uniformly supported the Brotherhood since the uprisings began, even to the point of coordinating the inclusion of Al Qaeda elements as part of the rebel alliances in Libya and Syria.

From an Islamic point of view, the various operations to install Salafist governments throughout the Middle East comprise just one theater in a much wider war, the 1400-year war between Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb. The Organization for Islamic Cooperation (OIC) — acting in its capacity as the provisional government of the future World Caliphate — is coordinating operations across all the theaters of this war.

The “Arab Spring” is the necessary first step in the achievement of worldwide shariah governance. This is the beginning of the reawakening of Islam, as envisioned eight decades ago by Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood. Islamic law cannot be established across the globe until the Islamic heartland is cleansed of its blasphemous and un-Islamic rulers. From a Brotherhood point of view, the despots who rule most Islamic countries have usurped the offices of “rightly-guided” leaders, the legitimate heirs of the first four Caliphs. The process of unseating and replacing Arab tyrants with those who govern according to the word of Allah, one of al-Banna’s primary goals, is now nearing its completion.

When the heart of the Ummah has been restored to its rightly-guided path, the new Caliphate will turn its attention to the infidel world, the House of War.

Islam has three traditional strategies for spreading the faith, which must be employed by diligent Muslims in varying degrees to attain their goal of a global Caliphate:

1.		Jihad:		Waging warfare in the path of Allah to subdue the infidel and force his submission to Islamic law.
2.		Da’wa:		Proselytizing and education, with the aim of convincing the non-believer to embrace Islam voluntarily.
3.		Hijra:		Migration — the movement of faithful Muslims into non-Muslim areas until their numbers are sufficient that #1 and #2 may be employed more effectively, thus transforming an infidel land into an Islamic domain.

The leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood and the OIC are well aware that there is no chance that the forces of Islam, even if they could somehow unite and overcome their sectarian splits, would ever be able to confront the armed might of the West and prevail in a military conflict. This rules out strategy #1, the Jihad option, except for terrorist attacks — which are more directed at making the infidel afraid and demoralized than they are about actual military conquest.

Hence the need for a strategy of “boring from within”, which was explicitly laid out in “An Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America” by the Muslim Brotherhood on May 22, 1991:

The process of settlement is a “Civilization-Jihadist Process” with all the word means. 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 Allah’s religion is made victorious over all other religions. … It is a Muslim’s destiny to perform Jihad and work wherever he is …

The Muslim Brotherhood has enjoyed spectacular success in this endeavor over the past twenty-one years. By infiltrating federal, state, and local governments at all levels they have succeeded in placing their agents as bureaucrats and advisors who affect major administrative decisions, and thus ensure that the political winds always blow in Islam’s favor.

This infiltration serves as a variation on strategy #2, Da’wa — the indoctrination of the non-believer through education, persuasion, and what is nowadays known as “propaganda”. The infidel targets of covert da’wa become accustomed to Islamic doctrines — which place Mohammed and the Koran above criticism, demand “respect” for Islam from Muslim and non-Muslim alike, and insist that non-Muslims conform to Islamic tenets and customs while in the presence of Muslims — without realizing what is happening to them. Little by little Westerners grow to accept Islamic law in all its outward manifestations, so that the eventual official conversion to a shariah state becomes a mere formality.

The Ikhwan has employed similar tactics in Europe and other parts of the West. One of their most effective methods has been to use the stifling doctrine of Politically Correct Multiculturalism — which hobbled the political systems of Western nations long before Islam appeared as force to be reckoned with — to undermine democracy, civil society, and the rule of law. The ultimate goal is to use our own ideology to force us to replace these bastions of Western culture with Islamic Law — shariah.

The Brotherhood cleverly added the term “Islamophobia” to our lexicon of victimization, and lobbied successfully in the UN and other international bodies to have the fanciful syndrome declared the equivalent of “racism”. This tactic has been extraordinarily successful in suppressing almost all criticism of Islam. Any factual discussion of the core theological and jurisprudential tenets of Islam — even simply quoting from Islamic scripture — becomes “Islamophobia” when it is carried out by non-Muslims.

Strategy #3, Hijra, has been operating in parallel for almost forty years, ever since the first oil crisis, as documented by Bat Ye’or. Tacit agreements between Western nations and OIC states encouraged the immigration of millions of Muslims into the West, especially the European Union. This process accelerated in the 1990s, reaching a dizzying rate after 2001. Muslim enclaves, effectively ruled by shariah, have formed in cities all across Western Europe, and to a lesser extent in the United States, Canada, and Australia.

Increasing the numbers of Muslims in infidel lands through hijra has turbo-charged jihad (in its terrorist form) and da’wa (through infiltration and subornation) to expedite the Islamization of non-Muslim Western nations, especially the formerly Christian countries of Europe. With the threat of violence constantly hanging over them, and sapped by the weaponization of Political Correctness against them, Western politicians are rapidly acceding to a de facto regime of Islamic law within the governmental bodies for which they hold responsibility.

Such were the conditions that prevailed when the Third Extraordinary Session of the Islamic Summit Conference convened in 2005. On that occasion the OIC implemented a ten-year plan “to meet the challenges facing the Muslim Ummah”.

The event was dubbed an “extraordinary” summit, which meant it was attended by the heads of state of Muslim countries. There was (and is) no higher decision-making body in the Islamic world than this summit — it functioned as the High Council of the Provisional Caliphate, in effect. Any summit of the heads of all Islamic state can credibly claim to be the authoritative voice of the entire Ummah, as it is understood in classical Islamic law.

Section 1 of the OIC’s ten-year program covered “Intellectual and Political Issues”. Under category VII, “Combating Islamophobia” it had this to say:

1.		Emphasize the responsibility of the international community, including all governments, to ensure respect for all religions and combat their defamation.
2.		Affirm the need to counter Islamophobia, through the establishment of an observatory at the OIC General Secretariat to monitor all forms of Islamophobia, issue an annual report thereon, and ensure cooperation with the relevant Governmental and Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) in order to counter Islamophobia.
3.		Endeavor to have the United Nations adopt an international resolution to counter Islamophobia, and call upon all States to enact laws to counter it, including deterrent punishments.

#1 reiterated what had been ongoing for more than a decade: strong pressure against Western governments to accommodate the demands of Islam.

#2 codified the campaign against “Islamophobia” and set up the Observatory, which has been issuing major annual reports and lesser quarterly reports in the years since it was established.

#3 was crucial for the success of the OIC’s plans: unless Western governments could be coerced into suppressing all criticism of Islam, the combined strategies of da’wa and hijra would inevitably meet with increasing popular resistance in countries undergoing the process of Islamization. Year after year the OIC attempted to get its resolution against the “defamation of religions” passed at the UN, but failed to achieve a major success until the summer of 2011, when Hillary Clinton put the full weight of the United States behind Resolution 16/18.

At this point what is now known as “The Istanbul Process” began. Barack Hussein Obama and the Muslim Brotherhood had already joined hands to march together into a glorious Islamic future. With Hillary Clinton and the OIC now proclaiming their joyful partnership, and with the end of the ten-year plan fast approaching, we encounter the third skulking figure crouched in our metaphorical closet…

Tomorrow: Part 4, The Mohammed Movie: Blasphemy, Defamation, and Insult