At the conference, Fatah expressed his own viewpoints on mainstream and radical Islam, including the Muslim Brotherhood. He asserted, “The religion of Islam is being used as a tool by a fascist force.”
He then moved on to discuss what he views as the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood at the highest level of the federal government. “Instead of bringing victory over the fascist forces of the Muslim Brotherhood, we now recognize that their infiltration is right up to the American White House, but we can’t say that,” he said.
According to Cal Thomas of the Washington Examiner, Fatah may be onto something, as it has been a longtime goal of the Muslim Brotherhood to infiltrate the leadership ranks of the United States. He wrote:
In 1991, a memo written by Mohamed Akram for the Shura Council of the Muslim Brotherhood spelled out the objective of the organization. Akram said the Muslim Brotherhood “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 God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.”
Some observers began to ponder a potential Brotherhood influence when James Clapper, President Obama's Director of National Intelligence, publicly referred to the Muslim Brotherhood as a “heterogeneous” and “largely secular group” just hours after the organization had declared Sharia law as its ultimate goal.
Likewise, blogger Trevor Loudon has pointed to two members of the White House with potential ties to the radical group. The first is Rashad Hussain, the U.S. Special Envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC). The Examiner's Cal Thomas has stated that Hussain’s appointment to the OIC “should be of serious concern to Congress and the American public.”
FrontPage Magazine, a David Horowitz publication, expanded on this subject:
The Global Muslim Brotherhood Daily Report took a look at Hussain’s official biography and found several concerning affiliations. The first is that in October 2000, Hussain spoke at a conference sponsored by the Association of Muslim Social Scientists, which was listed in an internal Muslim Brotherhood document as one of “our organizations and the organizations of our friends,” and the Prince Alwaleed Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding of Georgetown University, which receives Saudi funding and is directed by prominent Muslim Brotherhood advocate John Esposito.
FrontPage also reports that Hussain “played a role” in the 2004 conference of the Muslim Students Association, which was founded by the Muslim Brotherhood in 1963.
Additionally, Hussain defended Professor Sami Al-Arian, a convicted leader of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad who later admitted to being a Muslim Brotherhood member. Despite these findings, Hussain claimed that the legal battle launched against Al-Arian was “politically-motivated persecution.”
Hussain has also spoken at a conference sponsored by Islamic Brotherhood affiliates.
The second name put forward by Cal Thomas is Dalia Mogahed, senior analyst and executive director at the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies, and a sitting member of Obama’s Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships.
According to David Horowitz’s DiscovertheNetworks.org, Mogahed is the co-author of the book Who Speaks for Islam? What a Billion Muslims Really Think. The website adds:
In early October 2009, Mogahed was interviewed on a British television program hosted by Ibtihal Bsis, a member of the extremist Hizb ut Tahrir party, which seeks to facilitate the non-violent destruction of Western democracy and the creation of a worldwide Islamic state governed by Sharia Law. Bsis and another guest (also a member of Hizb ut Tahrir) stated that Sharia should be “the source of legislation” for all nations in the world; they also repeatedly condemned the “man-made law” and the “lethal cocktail of liberty and capitalism” that existed in Western societies. Mogahed did not dispute any of their assertions.
Instead, Mogahed stated that the Western view of Sharia was “oversimplified,“ and that the majority of Muslim women around the world associate Islamic Law with ”gender justice.“ ”I think the reason so many women support Sharia is because they have a very different understanding of Sharia than the common perception in Western media,” she said.
Mogahed was referred to by Tablet Magazine in 2010 as the “most important person shaping the Obama Administration’s Middle East message.”
The Investigative Project on Journalism conducted a detailed investigation of Mogahed’s past and asserts that she is a staunch defender of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), both recognized as Muslim Brotherhood front groups.
Robert Spencer of Human Events has also written about the Obama administration’s ties to the Muslim Brotherhood:
Obama first reached out to the Brotherhood when he chose the leader of a Muslim Brotherhood-linked group that had been named an unindicted co-conspirator in a Hamas terror funding case to give a prayer during his inauguration ceremonies. Ingrid Mattson, then-president of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), offered this prayer at the National Cathedral on Obama’s Inauguration Day — despite the fact that the ISNA has admitted its ties to the Brotherhood….
Obama didn’t ask Mattson to explain the ISNA’s links to the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas. On the contrary: He sent his senior adviser, Valerie Jarrett, to be the keynote speaker at the ISNA’s national convention in 2009.
Analysts note that while there is no evidence directly tying any of these individuals to the Muslim Brotherhood, their connections to questionable groups are troubling, particularly when coupled with Fatah’s warnings.
Fatah also bemoans what he perceives to be an inability to stand up to radicalization as a result of political correctness. “Today we are fighting another idea of Islamo-fascism that has shut our mouths and we can’t speak because we’re too scared that someone may turn around and call us a racist. And mind you, every day as I speak, a few dozen Muslims would have been killed by now by these Jihadis.”
Fatah used these assertions in an attempt to motivate Canadians to stand up against Islamists, declaring that the unwillingness to confront radicals could lead to the “end of civilization as we know it.”
Photo: Terek Fatah
