USAID’s stated goal was to further “America’s foreign policy interests in expanding democracy and free markets while also extending a helping hand to people struggling to make a better life, recover from a disaster or striving to live in a free and democratic country.”

However, upon issuing the first USAID loan guarantee of $1.15 million to an Islamic bank in Indonesia in August 2011, the agency’s blog justified the move, stating: “The finance guarantee agreement builds on President Obama’s speech in Cairo, which called for deeper engagement with the Muslim world.”

The development of Islamic banking was made possible by Malaysia.

A recent Economist article, “Banking on the ummah,” reviewed the country’s Islamic banking industry and pointed out the lack of standardized regulations and transparency. But the piece ignored the country’s role in implementing the Muslim Brotherhood’s larger agenda to create a “parallel economy“ by first infiltrating and co-opting the Western economy.

Islamic banking is a concept that was slow to catch on until 1993, when Anwar Ibrahim – then Malaysia’s finance minister – helped to introduce newly invented ”Islamic banking windows” into conventional banks. This measure, which familiarized the clientele with and built confidence in the unknown Islamic banking system, proved central to the development of the global Islamic finance industry.

The establishment of an independent “Islamic economy” is an important factor in the Muslim Brotherhood agenda. Consequently, the development of Islamic banks is viewed as critical to facilitating the establishment of a global Islamic umma, or state.

Islamic banking was introduced in Malaysia in 1963 with the establishment of the Tabung Haji (Pilgrim’s Fund), a savings institution created to help Muslims save toward their pilgrimage to Mecca. But the Islamization of Malaysia began in earnest in 1981, when Mahathir bin Mohamad became prime minister. He immediately established the Islamic Consultative Body to oversee the implementation of national development programs according to Islamic values.

Mohamad’s ambition to turn Malaysia into a “model Muslim nation” seemed to convince Anwar, then president of the Malaysian Islamic Youth Movement, to join the government. Soon he became a major proponent of the Islamic Banking Act and the establishment of Bank Islam Malaysia Berhad in 1983. But the Malaysians were slow to trust a newly invented banking system.

To remedy the situation, Anwar’s finance ministry issued regulations facilitating the establishment of “Islamic banking windows” in the conventional Western banks that operated in Malaysia in 1993. Making Islamic banking familiar helped win the public’s trust and paved the way to independent Islamic banks in Malaysia and elsewhere.

The artful Muslim Brother Anwar often sprinkles his presentations with Arabic phrases from the Quran and other Islamic books while touting the socio-political aspects of Shariah banking. He claims that Islamic banking and economics, based on “maqasid al-shariah,” i.e., “the objectives of Islamic law,” could help create wealth and eradicate poverty.

Anwar’s talks of eradicating poverty and spreading justice and democracy seem to have confused his Western supporters, who clearly ignored his commitment, as a Muslim Brother, to replace Western political, social and economic principles with Islamic law.

Incredibly, throughout his political career, Anwar has openly rejected Western values while promoting Islam. In his 1983 speech, “Development and changing political ideas,” at the 50th anniversary conference of the Australian Institute of International Affairs, Anwar criticized the “wholesale imitation of Western values and practices” in Malaysia. These should be replaced, he argued, with Islam, which “provides an ideological alternative to the dominant paradigm.”

Speaking at Australian National University on Nov. 15, 2010, Anwar declared: “Democracy … is presumed [in part] to be defined by the conditions of the free market. And this is where the founding fathers of the French Revolution with their clarion call for liberty, equality, and fraternity missed the mark. … [T]his is because a free market is based on competition, and competition, being a zero-sum game, has no truck with equality. On the contrary, free markets engender inequality. … Islam enjoins that while society may pursue commerce to the fullest, justice and fairness must remain the chief criterion … in order to establish a humane economy.” Anwar posted this speech, along with most of his others, on his website.

Anwar’s advocacy of “Islamic democracy” and Islamic banking as “ethical banking” ostensibly means to fight for social justice and freedom of religion. This made him popular with Westerners, ignorant of Muslim Brotherhood duplicity, who desperately seek moderate Muslim leaders.

Even a cursory review of Anwar’s speeches on democracy and Islamic finance over decades shows Anwar is as a committed Islamist, as is one of his favorite authors, Sayyid Qutb, whose writing inspired al-Qaida and other radical Islamic groups.

In 1999, in prison on previous charges of corruption and sodomy, Ibrahim wrote to Abdul Hamid Abu Sulaiman, former rector of International Islamic University of Malaysia and a fellow director of the Virginia-based Muslim Brotherhood’s International Institute of Islamic Thought: ”I’m trying to keep myself busy – with prayers and … reading. … My old copy of Abdullah Yusuf Ali’s translation of the Quran is most valuable because of my earlier short notes and references from Ibn Kathir, al-Qurtubi, Sayyid Qutb and Maulana Maududi’s tafsirs (interpretations).”

Yet, Anwar is the darling “moderate Muslim” to his many admirers in the U.S. and the West.

Indeed, the list of prominent U.S. admirers of Anwar Ibrahim, Malaysia’s former deputy prime minister, is impressive. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton intervened on his behalf during her visit to Malaysia in November 2010 when he was tried on charges of sodomy and corruption. Letters of support from former U.S. Vice President Al Gore and former World Bank President James Wolfensohn among others praised his leadership and fight “for international justice, peace and development.”

Strangely, these prominent figures fail to notice Anwar’s deception. His fight – like President Mohamed Morsi’s in Egypt – is not for democracy, justice and peace according to Western principles. Instead, his call is for democratization ”on the platform of Islam” and for replacing the competitive Western principles with a more “just” Islamic system.

With so much readily available information on Anwar’s advocacy of Islamic supremacy and his ties to sponsors of violence against the West, it is disconcerting that his Western supporters consider Anwar a hero and Islamic banking a solution to Western economic mishaps. Like Hillary Clinton, they laude Malaysia’s “creative approach” to Islamic banking.

Clinton’s enthusiasm for Islamic banking is not surprising, considering USAID’s support of Shariah-compliant financing institutions instead of developing conventional banking services. In January 2010, together with the World Council of Credit Unions, it established “a network of credit unions, known as Islamic Investment and Finance Cooperatives, whose management and products are Shariah compliant.

In June 2011, USAID organized online discussion on Islamic banking with 61 participants from 25 countries. The topics included the fundamentals of Shariah financing and the development of a new business model to address the needs of Islamic finance (different than conventional banking). In addition to Indonesia, USAID provided grants to develop Shariah finance institutions in Shariah-ruled Afghanistan, Kenya and elsewhere.

In the meantime, facing criticism for lack standard regulations, Malaysia and Dubai announced new regulatory regime that would help to “strengthen a ‘parallel economy’ – free from conventional and interest-based financial practices.”

Assisting to develop Islamic regimes – which by definition are anti-democratic and anti-capitalist – is not in the U.S. foreign or domestic interest.

Adhering to the Obama doctrine of “deeper engagement with Islam,” USAID is likely to increase its support – your tax money – to Shariah-based economies that are strapped for cash, such as Afghanistan, Egypt and Libya.

However, bin Laden’s and other Islamists’ calls to destroy the U.S. economy, along with rapidly evolving technology, left the financial markets vulnerable. Over the past 11 years, the U.S. failed to prepare for another major war – one that is already under way, yet rarely recognized: financial and economic warfare.

Cyber attacks have been the focus for some time. Between October 2011 and February 2012, more than 500,000 cyber attacks on U.S. government and private industry, including 86 attacks on “critical infrastructure networks,” were detected. However, a July 2012 report by the Bi-Partisan Task Force, headed by Gen. Michael Hayden, concluded that these represented “a small fraction of ‘virtual, network type’ attacks against the U.S.”

The U.S. financial industry, supposedly one of the most closely monitored sectors of our economy, remains susceptible to serious threats. Not all from the outside, either. While the streets will not be littered with bodies, when elements of our financial infrastructure – the monetary system, various exchanges – come under attack, the U.S. economy – and the world’s economy–could be severely damaged and millions of people devastated. Smaller attacks are already being carried out incrementally, yet rarely detected, periodically bleeding the market. The reaction, or lack thereof, leaves the stock market open to an overwhelming attack that is likely to leave the U.S. economy in dire straits for years.

Contributing factors to such threats include the opacity of the market, which is exacerbated by greed and rapidly evolving technologies. For example, Knight Capital’s software glitch last August has eroded confidence in the U.S equity market, according to a survey released by the TABB Group. However, there is much more at stake.

Consider May 6, 2010, when the U.S. stock market plunged about 1,000 points (9 percent). Although the market recovered most of those losses in minutes, the U.S. economy is still feeling the aftereffects. Two years later, while worried about a similar crash, the entire financial industry has yet to receive a cogent explanation of why and how this event occurred. A joint report by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission did not rule out “terrorism” as a possible cause for the 2010 “flash crash.”

An exceedingly electronic-driven market system facilitates high frequency trading (HFT), which, by its very nature, is opaque, unregulated and misunderstood. Moreover, the current market structure’s deficient security leaves it vulnerable to attacks.

Compounding these threats is the Direct Market Access (DMA) – electronic trading facilities that allow investors to interact with the order book of an exchange – as it often is combined with proprietary algorithmic trading strategies.

Adding to market vulnerability are the large number of leading high-frequency programmers, who reside in such countries as Ukraine, Romania, India and the Philippines, and are not subject to proper background checks.

This opens the door for cyber threats from DMA clients and by potential “sleepers” residing at member or brokerage firms.

The idea of a new rule to limit one aspect of “dark pools” has been kicked around for the last two years. It would require dark pool participants to place real displayed orders into the pool before they trade, providing more transparency to the market. But this attempt to prevent dark pool operators from picking their prey – like a sniper – milliseconds before the trading closes, risks objections from the HFT crowd.

This foot-dragging has resulted in investors’ loss of confidence, hurting capital formation and job creation, the very foundation of capitalism.

Recognizing the need to better monitor the markets, the Securities and Exchange Commission recently issued Rule 613 – Consolidated Audit Trail (CAT) – an audit system that will apply to mostly secondary market transactions in the NASDAQ National Market. CAT will capture all orders and cover stocks on that exchange – but excludes over-the-counter options, futures, bonds, foreign exchange or other derivatives trades.

However, the CAT audit will occur a day after trading takes place, not in real time, because the cost of auditing the whole market in real time – more than $4 billion – is considered excessive. While CAT is a positive beginning, it’s too limited, too little and too late to be a major deterrent against crippling economic warfare attacks.

Our financial markets’ vulnerabilities are well-known to those intent on sabotage. Despite an awareness of such threats, the nation’s tools for early identification of financial threats remain limited, as the latest survey of IT security executives concluded. These represented 100 companies and organizations with more than $100 million in annual revenue. Moreover, even when detected, financial-industry cyber attacks go underreported, or unreported, because officials are reluctant to divulge information that could prevent further losses.

The threat of a mega attack on the financial markets, a major factor in America’s economic stability, is very real. Crash attacks via high-frequency trading would further cripple investors’ confidence in U.S. financial markets and destroy America’s economy for many years. The present stagnant economy and the uncertainties associated with this year’s presidential elections could be a tempting opportunity to create an economic “perfect storm” that the U.S. is currently incapable of preventing.