Muslim Brotherhood's Plans for the West?

Investigative Project on Terrorism

I've long been aware of the investigative journalist Steven Emerson, who has looked into radical Islamism in the West since the early 1990s, especially in the United States. He founded an archive in 1995 on Islamist groups, the Investigative Project on Terrorism, which has among its files a widely known Islamist memo by the Muslim radical Mohamed Akram on pdf file, "An Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Brotherhood in North America" (May 19, 1991). This is a fifteen-page Arabic document followed by an eighteen-page English translation in which Akram sets forth his detailed plan for Islam in America. One section is labeled Understanding the Role of the Muslim Brother in America, by which he means the role of the "Muslim Brotherhood," -- though Akram seems not to distinguish clearly between Muslim Brother and ordinary Muslim -- and in which he states the following:

The process of settlement [in America] is a "Civilization-Jihadist Process" with all the word means. The Ikhwan [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. Without this level of understanding, we are not up to this challenge and have not prepared ourselves for Jihad yet. It is a Muslim's destiny to perform Jihad and work wherever he is and wherever he lands until the final hour comes, and there is no escape from that destiny except for those who chose to slack. But, would the slackers and the Mujahedeen be equal.

This is written for a broadly conceived jihad -- "with all the word means," Akram tells us, and since the word means "struggle," then he intends to see it applied to all of its traditional uses, from inner spiritual struggle to active proselytizing to outright battle. This is to be the American front in the Islamist attack on Western Civilization, and that memo was written nearly twenty-one years ago as an explanation of a long-term plan dating from 1987, so this Islamist goal is at least twenty-five years old. Read the entire memo to see just how ambitious this "Brotherhood" is.

The Ikhwan, or Muslim Brotherhood, will be familiar to those who have been keeping up with the Arab Spring as the weather has changed with the seasons to an Islamist Winter. The Brotherhood's members were the winners in the recent Egyptian election, and the group has a very professional website that shows their pleasant face under the name of the Freedom and Justice Party, but the terms "freedom" and "justice" have Islamic meanings delimited by sharia, Islamic law, which the FJP fully intends to implement, a legal system in which Muslim women have fewer rights than Muslim men, Christians and Jews have fewer rights than Muslims, and infidels have no rights as all, not even to mention the hudud laws stipulating beheading, stoning, amputation, and flogging for crimes against Allah.

That's what Islamist individuals like Mohamed Akram want for the US as well as for the broader West . . .