By Michael S Smith, II
If you’re wondering how the Obama administration has benefited from
interest in the terrorist attack in Benghazi, abuses of power by IRS
officials, or a defense contractor turned “transparency activist,”
here’s one way: This dizzying array of scandals has provided a smoke
screen for the administration’s dialog with a deeply anti-American,
anti-Semitic global enterprise whose thought leaders have not only
called for attacks on U.S. soldiers in places like Iraq, but more
recently called for a jihad on America while urging their followers to
overthrow the Mubarak regime in Egypt. Yet history tells us the
administration’s pursuits in this vein are virtually destined for
failure — while at the same time sure to strengthen the Muslim
Brotherhood as it goes about its business of promoting values that are
antithetical to America’s in a region which remains vital to our
interests.
According to Global Muslim Brotherhood investigator Steve Merley,
an associate of my firm Kronos who catalogs portions of his research on
The Global Muslim Brotherhood Daily Watch, at some point during the
past month senior administration officials and representatives of other
government agencies quietly held a meeting in the White House with Abdallah bin Bayyah. Given his close ties with Brotherhood thought leaders like Yusuf al-Qaradawi
(who is banned from entering the U.S.), not to mention bin Bayyah’s own
influential role in the Brotherhood, it’s obvious this meeting was held
to discuss U.S. support for the Brotherhood at a time when its
popularity in Egypt is plummeting.
The irony of the U.S. supporting the Muslim Brotherhood, whose
adherents have helped create some of the world’s most lethal terrorist
organizations, is not lost on Egyptians. As The Wall Street Journal reported on June 28,
during the past month criticism of the U.S. in Egypt has grown loudest
not among the elements one might expect, but rather among secularist
Egyptians. Meanwhile, the Obama administration’s volatile and
ever-expanding policy experiments with the Brotherhood continue to
receive little attention in the U.S. Still, history is begging for our
concern.
Since 1950, the U.S. has made numerous attempts to partner with the
Muslim Brotherhood. Although the reasons for such efforts have varied,
in each case the results fell far short of policy makers’ intended
outcomes. As Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ian Johnson has noted
in his examinations of these policy blunders, “if we look to history,
we can see a familiar pattern: each time, U.S. leaders have decided that
the Brotherhood could be useful and tried to bend it to America’s
goals, and each time, maybe not surprisingly, the only party that
clearly has benefited has been the Brotherhood.”
Despite these experiences, for many decades the Brotherhood — like
most Islamist organizations — remained an opaque entity for America’s
national security managers. Only after a spate of terrorist attacks
during the late 20th and early 21st centuries ignited federal concerns
about Islamist groups’ activities in the U.S. did officials begin to
seriously probe the Brotherhood’s North American spheres.
Aside from discovering prominent members and front groups were
raising funds in the U.S. for Hamas, itself an offshoot of the
Brotherhood, investigations unearthed volumes of data that shed light on
the Brotherhood’s larger goals. As a 1991 document titled “An Exploratory Memorandum: On the General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America”
put it, members of the Brotherhood operating in the U.S. “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.”
Yet despite the overt anti-American views spewed by representatives
of this semi-secretive international Islamist organization — whose
slogan reads, “Allah is our objective; the Prophet is our Leader; the
Quran is our law; Jihad is our way; dying in the path of Allah is our
highest hope” — today, the hopeful “experts” guiding President Obama’s
foreign policy portfolio are hell bent on entering into an alliance with
the Muslim Brotherhood.
The obvious question is: What on earth are they thinking?
In recent years there’s been no shortage of speculation hurled about
regarding a so-called “infiltration” of the U.S. government by the
Brotherhood. But the reality seems far less intriguing, albeit
nonetheless worrisome: President Obama has made it a policy to play with
fire by welcoming the Brotherhood’s top emissaries into the White
House, working toward an alliance with their movement, and supporting
their political puppets like Egypt’s new president.
Clearly, the Obama administration’s engagements of the Muslim
Brotherhood are fueled by a brash notion that the outcomes will somehow
differ from past efforts on this front. Clearly, this all reflects a
mystifying level of hubris emanating from the White House. And clearly,
someone ought to remind the president of Albert Einstein’s definition of
insanity: Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting
different results.
Michael S. Smith II is the COO of Kronos Advisory, a counterterrorism advisor to members of Congress, and a senior analyst with Wikistrat.
Related Reading:
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