The ideology that inspired America’s worst terrorist attack lives on through the Muslim Brotherhood, experts warn.
The Trump administration was recently inaugurated. targeting The Muslim Brotherhood’s international financial network and some Republican politicians make a call Opposed the administration to prevent CAIR from receiving federal funding. Lorenzo Vidino, director of the extremism program at George Washington University, said the Muslim Brotherhood shares the same fundamental principles as groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS.
“The difference between the Brotherhood, al-Qaeda and ISIS is only in tactics. They have the same ideology. They have the same goals,” Vidino said. said recently At the Manhattan Institute’s 9/11 Program. He called al-Qaeda’s founders, including Osama bin Laden, “impatient brothers” and said they were “no longer satisfied with the Brotherhood’s gradualist approach, a century-old plan to Islamize society, infiltrate the system, and ultimately seize power.”
While earlier panels in the Manhattan Institute’s 9/11 Program focused on how ISIS continues to cause lone-wolf attacks across the West, later in the evening examined more subtle forms of Islamism and the challenges they pose to America.
The Muslim Brotherhood was originally founded in Egypt, and its founders were followers of Salafi Islam. Their founding goal was to globalize Islam and establish a caliphate. Vidino also described the debate that led al-Qaeda and other groups to break away from the Brotherhood as “a never-ending debate within the Islamist movement between votes over bullets.” The Muslim Brotherhood has sometimes been involved in both, including the creation of Hamas.
The Muslim Brotherhood poses a unique security challenge to the United States, panelists said. Because they often work by funding charities and nonprofits or sponsoring academics who share their worldview to influence the next generation, they cannot simply designate all officials as terrorists without significantly changing U.S. law.
Mariam Wahaba, a Coptic Christian who fled the Egyptian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, I lamented How professors at Fordham University defended the Muslim Brotherhood when she attended the school. She believed that the popularity of the “Tentifada” protests on college campuses was a sign of the Muslim Brotherhood’s growing influence on American campuses.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) is one of the Islamic charities with ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. Texas Attorney General and Republican Senate candidate Ken Paxton is suing CAIR Texas over its operations in the state. suit overview There are extensive ties between CAIR and other violent Islamic organizations, including its establishment as a camouflage tool for Islamist movements.
Bidino noted that the Muslim Brotherhood is widely banned as a terrorist organization in the Arab world, and that President Trump recently designated four branches of the Brotherhood as terrorist organizations. He praised the “Al Capone approach” in which authorities scrutinize individuals known to be associated with the Brotherhood, discover other crimes they have committed and prosecute them to the fullest extent possible.