Stealth Jihad

How Radical Islam Is Subverting America without Guns or Bombs

Robert Spencer

• Publisher: Regnery
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781596980754
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Radicalism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Wars aren't always violent. Stealth Jihad exposes the silent, insidious, secret war jihadists are waging on our nation. A war fought not by violence, but by culture, is perhaps the most dangerous war of all.

CHAPTER ONE

MUSLIMS TRYING TO TAKE OVER THE USA? YOU’VE GOT TO BE KIDDING . . . .

THE GRAND JIHAD

• The 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 Allah’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.” ¹

• “We reject the UN, reject America, reject all law and order. Don’t lobby Congress or protest because we don’t recognize Congress. The only relationship you should have with America is to topple it.... Eventually there will be a Muslim in the White House dictating the laws of sharia.”²

• “Let us damn America, let us damn Israel, let us damn them and their allies until death.”³

• “Very soon, Allah willing, Rome will be conquered, just like Constantinople was, as was prophesized by our Prophet Muhammad. Today, Rome is the capital of the Catholics, or the Crusader capital . . . . This capital of theirs will be an advanced post for the Islamic conquests, which will spread through Europe in its entirety, and then will turn to the two Americas.”⁴

• “I have complete faith that Islam will invade Europe and America, because Islam has logic and a mission.”⁵

• “Islam isn’t in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant. The Koran should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on earth.”⁶

• “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.”⁷

• “If only Muslims were clever politically, they could take over the United States and replace its constitutional government with a caliphate.”⁸

Ravings of a lone crank? If only they were. In reality, these statements were made by eight separate speakers—including some of the most influential Islamic spokesmen and leaders in the United States.

Nor were they indulging in wishful thinking or empty braggadocio, however far they may be from actually attaining their goals. Rather, they were enunciating, in various ways, an agenda that many Muslims within the U.S. are pursuing today.

They envision not only a Muslim president, but that the United States Constitution be replaced or amended so as to comply in all particulars with Islamic sharia law. These would not simply be small or cosmetic changes that would leave America’s foundations intact. Whether the United States has a Baptist president or a Methodist president or a Jewish president or a Catholic president would almost certainly make little difference in policy or law. But a Muslim president who began to institute Islamic law in the United States, as these men envision it, would make for a very large difference indeed.

Those who are advancing this agenda are striving for nothing less than an Islamic conquest of North America, after which not only the government will be Islamic, but so will society as a whole. Even if a majority of Americans do not convert to Islam, Islam will be dominant: Islamic perspectives will reign supreme, non-Muslims will have to cater to Islamic sensibilities, and Islamic law will govern not only Muslim communities, but non-Muslims as well. This will also include—most important of all—the Islamization of the mainstream media and the public sphere.

Yes, that can mean stonings for adultery and amputations for theft. But it means much more as well. Islamic law is an enormous complex of regulations governing every aspect of human existence—and it institutionalizes discrimination on the basis of gender and religion.

Could this ever happen here?

Of course not, most analysts confidently reply. In the minds of our academic, political, and media elites, the advent of sharia law in the U.S. is about as likely as a return to Prohibition or the Libertarian Party candidate being elected president.

And yet, while the groups advancing the Islamic agenda may be small, they are by no means powerless and in no sense discredited. In fact, they are in many cases extraordinarily well-financed and surprisingly influential. And even if one grants for the sake of argument that they will never be able to attain their goals in all their fullness, there is no doubt whatsoever that there are Muslims in the United States today, as well as outside it, who are working to accomplish exactly those goals.

One of the best weapons they have on their side is that very few, even among law-enforcement or government officials, are even aware that this agenda exists, or that anyone is advancing it, or by what means. For this is a jihad—a struggle to advance the cause of Islam, the cause of Allah—but it is a jihad without any of the signs that law enforcement officials are trained to recognize as indications of terrorist activity. There are no guns and bombs. No terrorist training manuals. No open glorification of blood-drenched thugs.

It is a jihad that advances without violent attacks at a time when almost all our “anti-terror” resources and energy are devoted to heading off another violent attack on American soil. Many American officials, and officials all over the Western world, persist in regarding the problem we face solely as a “terrorism threat,” consisting entirely of the possibility of attacks against civilians and the work of preventing those attacks. During the 2008 presidential campaign we heard many candidates speak about the terrorism threat (or, in the case of failed Democratic hopeful John Edwards, the absence of such a threat), but no one dealt with the possibility that the terrorist agenda might be advancing through non-terrorist means. Most analysts inside and outside of government don’t possess the knowledge necessary to understand, or to recognize the implications of the fact, that the jihadists might be laboring to advance their goals without any terror attacks at all.

It is a jihad, but one whose leaders work within American communities and organizations, and quite often have won the respect and gratitude of their non-Muslim colleagues and peers.

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It is a jihad whose leaders enjoy the respect of the mainstream media, who often aid and abet their efforts to present themselves as benign civil rights advocates and conceal their actual agenda.

It is a jihad, but one that has a good chance to transform American society before most Americans have any idea of what’s happening.

It should rightly be called a stealth jihad.

THE MAIN PLAYER

As we’ll see, the work that many Muslims in the United States today are undertaking to advance this stealth jihad is already doing significant damage to our legal systems, our financial systems, and our sense of ourselves as a society. Even if the United States never becomes an Islamic state—and it may seem fanciful that it ever would—this damage will not be easily repaired.

Are all Muslims in the United States involved in such an effort? Of course not. To say that some Muslims in this country are working to advance a supremacist agenda that would subvert the Constitution doesn’t mean that all are. There is a spectrum of belief, knowledge, and fervor among Muslims as there is among devotees of every belief system, religious or not. And so there are innumerable Muslims in this country today who are happy to live in a pluralistic society in which there is no established religion.

But it is no less true that there are also untold numbers of Muslims within the United States who are working today to make the U.S., someday, into an Islamic state. Although they often have links to jihad terrorist organizations, they don’t need any terror attack to advance their agenda. In fact, many of them would regard one, if it does come, as an actual hindrance to their efforts.

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The chief player in this stealth jihad in America today is the shadowy international organization known as the Muslim Brotherhood.

The Brotherhood (in Arabic, Al-Ikhwan Al-Muslimun) is an international Islamic organization that has, in the course of its tumultuous eight decades of existence, given rise to the jihad terror groups Hamas and al Qaeda. An earnest and pious Muslim named Hasan al-Banna founded the group in Egypt in 1928 in part as a response to the establishment of a secular, non-Islamic government in Turkey and the abolition of the caliphate, the office of the successor of Muhammad that had stood for centuries as the symbol of Islamic unity and political power. With his Brotherhood, al-Banna wanted to revive the political aspects of Islam that had retreated with the decline of the Ottoman Empire and the advent of Western colonialism; he decried the separation of “the state from religion in a country which was until recently the site of the Commander of the Faithful.”⁹ His Islam was inherently and essentially political:

We summon you to Islam, the teachings of Islam, the laws of Islam and the guidance of Islam, and if this smacks of “politics” in your eyes, then it is our policy.... Islam does have a policy embracing the happiness of this world . . . . We believe that Islam is an all-embracing concept which regulates every aspect of life, adjudicating on every one of its concerns and prescribing for it a solid and rigorous order.¹⁰

Al-Banna wrote in 1934 that “it is a duty incumbent on every Muslim to struggle towards the aim of making every people Muslim and the whole world Islamic, so that the banner of Islam can flutter over the earth and the call of the Muezzin can resound in all the corners of the world: God is greatest [Allahu akbar]!”¹¹ He further instructed his followers, “Islam is faith and worship, a country and a citizenship, a religion and a state. It is spirituality and hard work. It is a Qur’an and a sword.”¹²

The Brotherhood was no ragtag gathering of marginalized kooks. It grew in Egypt from 150 branches in 1936 to as many as 1,500 by 1944. In 1939 al-Banna counted “100,000 pious youths from the Muslim Brothers from all parts of Egypt,” although the foremost historian of the Brotherhood movement, Brynjar Lia, believes he was exaggerating then. Nevertheless, by 1944 membership was estimated at between 100,000 and 500,000.¹³ By 1937 the Brotherhood had expanded beyond Egypt, setting up “several branches in Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, and Morocco, and one in each of Bahrain, Hadramawt, Hyderabad, Djibouti, and,” Lia adds portentously, “Paris.”¹⁴ These many thousands, dispersed around the world, heard al-Banna’s call to “prepare for jihad and be lovers of death.”¹⁵

But the Brotherhood’s modus operandi involves much more than blood and death and terror. Scholar Martin Kramer notes that the Brotherhood had “a double identity. On one level, they operated openly, as a membership organization of social and political awakening. Al-Banna preached moral revival, and the Muslim Brethren engaged in good works. On another level, however, the Muslim Brethren created a ‘secret apparatus’ that acquired weapons and trained adepts in their use.”¹⁶

That double identity has in America today become the instrument for conducting the stealth jihad. It takes the form of groups that appear outwardly to be moderate, but advance the jihadist agenda through various non-violent initiatives—even while the groups themselves and many of those involved in them have ties to violent jihadist organizations.

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THE PLAN

“I have complete faith that Islam will invade Europe and America, because Islam has logic and a mission.” Muhammad Mahdi Othman ‘Akef made that statement in 2004 when he took over leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood. But he didn’t mean an invasion of armies, or even of bomb-wielding terrorists: “The Europeans and the Americans,” he explained, “will come into the bosom of Islam out of conviction.”¹⁷

Forming that conviction in the minds of European and American non-Muslims would take a concerted effort spanning years and comprising many fronts. But the ultimate goal of the stealth jihad is clear: the elimination of Western civilization. This was unequivocally enunciated in a 1982 Muslim Brotherhood document that detailed a twelve-point strategy to “establish an Islamic government on earth.” Instead of advocating terrorism, the document advises avoiding “confrontation with our adversaries, at the local or the global scale, which would be disproportionate and could lead to attacks against the dawa [Islamic proselytizing] or its discplies.”¹⁸ Instead, according to terror analyst Patrick Poole, the Brotherhood would use “deception to mask the intended goals of Islamist actions.”¹⁹

Those goals were described in detail by a top Brotherhood operative in this country, Mohamed Akram, who explained that the 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 Allah’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.”²⁰

Akram’s directive came in a Muslim Brotherhood memorandum from May 22, 1991 entitled “An Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America.” The document came to light during the 2007 trial of what had been the largest Islamic charity in the United States, the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, which was accused of funneling charitable donations to the jihad terror group Hamas. The case ended in a mistrial on most charges and the defendants, who are pleading not guilty, are now being retried.²¹

In the memorandum, Akram lays out a plan to do nothing less than conquer and Islamize the United States. The Brotherhood’s success in America would ultimately further the even larger goal of establishing “the global Islamic state.”²²

Akram seems to be aware of how fantastical his goal might sound—even to his fellow Muslim Brothers. He claims his plans are not “abundant extravagance, imaginations or hallucinations which passed in the mind of one of your brothers, but they are rather hopes, ambitions and challenges that I hope that you share some or most of which with me.”

Arguing that those hopes and ambitions can become reality, Akram says that he perceives a “glimpse of...