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JAKARTA, INDONESIA - AUGUST 12: An estimated 60,000 muslim people attend an Islamic Caliphate conference held by the radical Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir, at Gelora Bung Karno stadium, August 12, 2007 in Jakarta, Indonesia. Controversial Indonesian cleric Abu Bakar Ba'asyir was scheduled to address the conference, but organisers asked him not to attend after police raised security concerns. Founded in Lebanon in 1905, Hizb ut-Tahrir is committed to uniting all Muslim countries in a single Islamic state or Caliphate. The organisation promotes Shariah, or Islamic Law, and claims to have more than a million members in 40 countries. (Photo by Dimas Ardian/Getty Images)
In an unprecedented series of Capitol Hill briefings, a coalition of former U.S. intelligence officials, military officials, FBI investigators and federal prosecutors plans to warn incoming Republican lawmakers about what they say is a seditious threat to national security from radical Muslim Brotherhood front groups in America.
The coalition, organized by the Washington-based Center for Security Policy, will urge congressional leaders to "hold urgent hearings to assess the damage" from Brotherhood influence operations, and pass Cold War-style legislation to help ferret out such subversive Islamist elements operating within U.S. borders.
Currently, the officials say, the FBI and Pentagon have no formal counterintelligence programs in place to guard against Brotherhood infiltration efforts targeting Washington.
"Under both parties, the U.S. government has comprehensively failed to grasp the true nature of this enemy," the group warns in a 352-page report distributed to winners of the 2010 elections and other members of Congress.
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In addition, the group will present case studies of influence operations the Brotherhood has mounted against the U.S. government.
The Muslim Brotherhood, a worldwide jihadist movement based in Egypt and heavily funded by Saudi Arabia, is the parent of Hamas and al-Qaida. It shares al-Qaida's goals of imposing Shariah law in the West and re-establishing the Islamic caliphate to rule in accordance with it.
Shariah law is an Islamic legal code that administers "cruel and unusual punishments" against women, homosexuals and non-Muslims, according to the report. It also limits free speech and expression, including the liberty to analyze and criticize Shariah, making it "incompatible with the U.S. Constitution."
"In fact," the coalition argues, "Shariah's pursuit in the United States is tantamount to sedition."
The group says laws empowering the FBI and other agencies to crack down on Soviet infiltrations during the Cold War may not be enough to protect Washington from Brotherhood penetrations. It warns that the Brotherhood is already "embedded deep inside both the United States and our allies," and its agents are more "sophisticated" than Soviet spies and "highly skilled in exploiting the civil liberties and multicultural proclivities of Western societies."
"The prior experience would not mean the security precautions that sufficed to protect the nation from communism are sufficient to shield us from a totalitarian ideology cloaked in religious garb," the group asserts in its report, without elaborating.
On Tuesday, the group, led by former senior Pentagon official Frank Gaffney, is scheduled to hold a meeting with congressional staffers and leaders – including Rep. Doug Lamborn, R-Colo., member of the House Armed Services Committee – to discuss the threat Shariah poses to First Amendment and other rights.
A few years ago, FBI investigators uncovered a trove of Brotherhood documents in the Northern Virginia basement of a senior Brotherhood leader under investigation for terrorism. The archives established a subversive network in America that happens to include some of the country's largest mainstream Muslim groups.
Among other entities, the secret documents listed: the Islamic Society of North America; an umbrella group for several Muslim organizations; the North American Islamic Trust; which owns most of the major mosques in America; the Holy Land Foundation, at the time the nation's largest Islamic charity; and the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the nation's largest Muslim advocacy group.
U.S. prosecutors entered the Brotherhood documents into evidence in the Holy Land Foundation trial, which ended in 2008 with convictions on all 108 counts. ISNA, NAIT and CAIR were added to a list of unindicted co-conspirators in the terror-financing case.
The Brotherhood network's strategy papers called for a "grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and 'sabotaging' its miserable house ... so that Allah's religion is made victorious over all other religions."
So-called Shariah creep, formerly confined to Canada and Britain, has become an issue in America.
In 2009, for example, a New Jersey family court judge denied a request for a restraining order by a woman whose Muslim husband had serially tortured and raped her. The judge ruled on the grounds that the abusive husband had acted according to his Shariah beliefs, which condone wife beating and marital rape. A New Jersey appellate court overturned the ruling last July.
Oklahoma earlier this month overwhelmingly passed a constitutional ban on Shariah law. But a U.S. district court judge has delayed its certification pending a lawsuit filed by CAIR.
CAIR argues that "Shariah is a dynamic legal framework derived from the Quran" and other Islamic scripture, and is confirmed by scholars using "analytical reasoning." It claims it is not a set of fixed principles and is flexible, applied differently throughout the Muslim world.
Not so, argues the anti-Shariah security coalition. "In fact, for especially the Sunni and with regard to non-Muslims, there is ultimately but one Shariah," it says in its report titled, "Shariah: The Threat to America."
CAIR insists a parallel legal system based on Shariah punishments – such as stonings, amputations, death sentences for apostates, and other human-rights abuses witnessed in Saudi Arabia and other Muslim states – is not being proposed in America.
"No one has or will ever propose anything to do with criminal punishments often associated with Shariah," CAIR says.
However, CAIR's leaders are on record expressing their desire to institutionalize Shariah law in America.
"I wouldn't want to create the impression that I wouldn't like the government of the United States to be Islamic sometime in the future," CAIR Communications Director Ibrahim Hooper told a Minneapolis Star-Tribune reporter in 1993, before CAIR was created.
CAIR's founding chairman Omar Ahmad wants Shariah law to replace the Constitution.
"Islam isn't in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant," Ahmad told a Muslim audience in Fremont, Calif., in 1998. "The Quran should be the highest authority in America."
CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad believes Muslims are best suited to run Washington: "Who better can lead America than Muslims?" Evidence introduced during the Holy Land trial showed that Awad participated in a 1993 meeting with Hamas leaders at a Philadelphia hotel.
CAIR says it's a "civil rights advocacy group," but the Justice Department says it's a front group for Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, which prosecutors say has a plan to not only support violent jihad but impose Shariah law on the U.S.
"From its founding by Muslim Brotherhood leaders, CAIR conspired with other affiliates of the Muslim Brotherhood to support terrorists," said assistant U.S. Attorney Gordon Kromberg in a recent federal court filing, as quoted in the book, "Muslim Brotherhood: Inside the Secret Underworld That's Conspiring to Islamize America," which exposes Muslim Brotherhood front groups in America.
