Subcommittee on Terrorism: Muslim Brotherhood Part II

Testimony Highlights of Lorenzo Vidino, Visiting Fellow, The RAND Corporation

...Therefore, the term “Muslim Brotherhood” can simultaneously encapsulate various realities.

...the Brotherhood is also a global movement in which like-minded individuals interact through an informal yet very sophisticated international network of personal, financial, organizational, and, most important, ideological ties.
Mohammed Akef, the former murshid of the Egyptian branch of the Brotherhood, describes it as “a global movement whose members cooperate with each other throughout the world, based on the same religious worldview—the spread of Islam, until it rules the world.”

...What binds all these entities together is a deep belief in Islam as a
comprehensive way of life that, in the long term, they hope to turn into a political system using different methods in different times and places.

...The combination of experienced militants and enthusiastic students bore immediate fruits, as Brotherhood activists formed some of the West’s first Muslim organizations (in the United States,the Muslim Students Association, founded on the campus of University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1963).

...Some critics argue that the main goal of Western Brotherhood organizations is to establish sharia law in the West. Unquestionably that prospect looms in the imagination of the Brothers. Tellingly, Yussuf al Qaradawi, the spiritual leader of the global Muslim Brotherhood, stated in a speech delivered in Toledo, Ohio, in
1995: “We will conquer Europe, we will conquer America, not through the sword but through dawa [preaching].”

And it is undeniable that Western Brotherhood organizations have led efforts to introduce limited aspects of sharia law in Western societies, both by establishing sharia advisory bodies (like the Fiqh Council of North America) and by lobbying Western governments to accept some sharia principles in Western legal systems.

Pessimists argue that thanks to the Western Brothers’ resources and the naiveté of most Westerners, the Western Brothers are engaged in a slow but steady social engineering program, aimed at Islamizing Western Muslim populations and ultimately at competing with Western governments for their allegiance. The pessimists accuse the Brothers of being a modern-day Trojan horse, engaged in a sort of stealth subversion aimed at weakening Western society from within, patiently laying the
foundations for its replacement with an Islamic order. The fact that the Western Brothers do not use violence but participate with enthusiasm in the democratic process is seen simply as a cold calculation on their part. According to pessimists, officials of Brotherhood-linked organizations have understood that infiltrating the system, rather than attacking it head on, is the best way to obtain what they want; after all, in the West, at least for now, the harsh confrontations mounted by
al Qaeda lead nowhere.

...a top official like Steven Pomerantz, former Assistant Director and former Chief of the Counterterrorism Section of the FBI, has publicly stated that “[i]t is clear from a review of CAIR’s statements and activities that one of its goals is to further the agenda of radical Islamic terrorist groups by providing political support. By masquerading as a mainstream public affairs organization, CAIR has taken the lead in trying to mislead the public about the terrorist underpinnings of militant Islamic movements.” And in the wake of the 2008 Holy Land Foundation terrorism financing trial, the FBI formally cut its ties to CAIR.

...are the moderate statements of the new generation just a carefully devised
smokescreen for the movement’s real and more nefarious aims, which still are, as the infamous Akram memorandum introduced as evidence during the Holy Land Foundation trial stated, “a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’its miserable house”?

Watch session on C-SPAN.