Muslim Brotherhood symbol |
A U.S. front organization for the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood has lobbied the State Department in recent years to pressure Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to open national elections to the banned Muslim Brotherhood, a book reveals.
The radical Muslim Brotherhood has organized rioters demanding the ouster of Mubarak, a U.S. ally. Its leaders are in talks with opposition leader Mohammed ElBaradei to form a unity government to replace Mubarak's regime, which has honored the 1979 Egyptian-Israeli peace deal. The Brotherhood vows to end the treaty.
The Washington-based Council for American-Islamic Relations, which describes itself as a domestic "civil-rights advocacy organization," took the unusual move of interfering in Egyptian politics after Mubarak made it harder for the Brotherhood to seize power.
In a 2007 letter to then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, CAIR blasted the relatively secular Mubarak government for instituting measures separating mosque and state, according to the bestseller "Muslim Mafia: Inside the Secret Underworld That's Conspiring to Islamize America," which exposes the Muslim Brotherhood and its front groups in America.
That same year, coincidentally, the Justice Department named CAIR a front group for Hamas and its parent the Muslim Brotherhood.
"From its founding by Muslim Brotherhood leaders, CAIR conspired with other affiliates of the Muslim Brotherhood to support terrorists," wrote assistant U.S. attorney Gordon Kromberg in a 2007 federal court filing.
Mubarak outlawed the Muslim Brotherhood because it assassinated his predecessor Anwar Sadat and plotted to kill him, as well. Egyptian authorities have kept the Brotherhood, which advocates violent jihad and funds Hamas and al-Qaida terrorism, on a tight leash.
CAIR was upset that Mubarak was further suppressing the Brotherhood, which is based in Cairo, and took the extraordinary step of lodging a formal protest with the secretary of state. The Mubarak government at the time had amended Egypt's constitution to ban religious-based parties.
Egypt's constitutional amendments further restrict the outlawed Brotherhood movement, which has been trying to turn Egypt away from secularism and toward an Islamic government based on strict Islamic law, or Shariah – something CAIR's own leaders say they'd like to see happen in this country.
"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 let it slip out to a Minneapolis Star-Tribune reporter in 1993, before CAIR was formed. Hooper spent a number of years working in Cairo.
CAIR's founding chairman Omar Ahmad wants Islamic law to replace the Constitution. "Islam isn't in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant," he told a Muslim audience in Fremont, Calif., in 1998. "The Quran should be the highest authority in America."
The Justice Department in 2008 named Ahmad an unindicted co-conspirator in a Brotherhood scheme to raise millions of dollars for Hamas suicide bombers and their families. The department also listed Ahmad as a leader of the U.S. branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. CAIR also was blacklisted, prompting the FBI to cut off ties to the group.
The Muslim Brotherhood credo is: "Allah is our goal; the Prophet is our guide; the Quran is our constitution; Jihad is our way; and death for the glory of Allah is our greatest ambition."
The Egypt-based Brotherhood proposes an Islamic theocracy overseen by a mullah council.
In 2007, it drafted a party platform under the banner "Islam is the solution." The Brotherhood called for establishing an undemocratically selected board of religious scholars with the power to veto any legislation passed by the Egyptian parliament and approved by the president that's not compatible with Islamic law. It also called for banning women and Christians from high office.
When Mubarak's anti-theocracy amendments were passed by a majority of Egyptian voters, CAIR's chairman at the time, Parvez Ahmed, fired off a complaint to the State Department charging the referendum was rigged and "would essentially lock out any meaningful political opposition" – that is, the Muslim Brotherhood – to challenge the more secular Mubarak regime. In his critical letter to Rice, Ahmed chided the U.S. for its "tepid" response to what he characterized as the Egyptian government's "backsliding on promised democratic reforms."
"CAIR is a domestic-based nonprofit organization, not a registered foreign agent," said terrorism analyst Paul Sperry, co-author of "Muslim Mafia." "For its chairman to go out of his way to write the secretary of state about a foreign election speaks volumes about CAIR's vested interest in the radical Brotherhood."
The Egyptian Embassy in Washington learned of the complaint and rebuked CAIR for its "interference," reminding it that democracies are supposed to separate religion and state.
"I find this interference rather hypocritical," Egyptian Ambassador Nabil Fahmy told Ahmed in a letter obtained by the authors of "Muslim Mafia," "since I assume you are aware of the notion of separation of church and state as enshrined in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution which governs your own country."
He closed by advising CAIR to "to focus on its core mission" in America, and butt out of foreign affairs.
"It's a sad commentary when an Arab nation has to lecture an American 'civil-rights group' about Western jurisprudence and liberties," Sperry said.
CAIR refused comment.