The Moslem Brotherhood’s US Election Infiltration – Background

Jonathan Feldstein

Muslim Brotherhood Flag. Photo: Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons

-Part one in a two-part series-

Twenty-five years after September 11, 2001, even amid the horrors revisited throughout American media, much of America has hit the snooze button on what happened, and the threat that still exists. The memorials were everywhere. The videos were everywhere. Testimonies of survivors were everywhere.

Yet the urgency to confront the clear and present danger that still prevails was not. This is especially true regarding the Moslem Brotherhood’s infiltration of American elections, both in the past and looking ahead at the upcoming US midterm. Jim Hanson of the Middle East Forum presented sobering insights that should alarm all Americans on the “Inspiration from Zion” podcast.

25 years ago, Hanson was in Chicago that morning, three blocks from the Sears Tower. He and a fellow former Special Forces soldier saw the first plane strike on a storefront television, judged the gaping hole in Tower 2 as too large to be accidental, emptied their office, and rode a packed train out of the city while mapping what might come next. They assumed al-Qaeda. They feared additional attacks against ordinary towns, not only iconic targets. The second plane, the Pentagon, and Flight 93 confirmed a coordinated attack. What stayed with Hanson was not only the shock of a country that had trusted two oceans as their line of defense, but the later realization that the United States is only marginally safer now than it was then.

Hanson was not only a knowledgeable observer then, he’s an expert on the Moslem Brotherhood, the Ikhwan, its global influence and domestic fingerprints. The Moslem Brotherhood is not a new ideology or threat. It is approaching a century of radical Islamist ideology, and calculated strategies to dominate all societies in which it sets its target, not just the Middle East.

Hanson calls the Moslem Brotherhood the first serious intellectual project of Islamic supremacism: not merely piety, but a written plan for Islam as a world-ordering system. He draws a line between Islam as a faith, and Islamists who work to make that faith politically supreme and globally dominant. He also said the line blurs when, for example, Al-Azhar scholars in Cairo treat eventual Islamic dominance as the religion’s end state and only debate the timetable and the methods.

He explains, the Moslem Brotherhood wrote the doctrine, exported it, and built affiliates the way a global ideological movement builds cells. Hanson compared that structure, at its height, to international communism: ideology, practice, and active measures. Violent jihad later damaged the brand. Airplane hijackings and mass murder made it harder to dismiss the project simply as neutral mosque-building. Scrutiny rose. The Cairo headquarters was destroyed. The network did not vanish. It adapted. Morphed. And it flourishes.

In the United States the Brotherhood’s most visible face, Hanson said, is CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations. He described it as a front for the Moslem Brotherhood and Hamas, and specializes in weaponizing the charge of Islamophobia. After every Islamist atrocity the script is the same. Do not blame Moslems. Do not say Islam caused it. Even when the attackers shouted Allahu Akbar and named the faith as the cause, CAIR hijacks the language. The organization is in every major city and every state, well-funded, and as quick to the microphone as the 9/11 terrorists were to hijack the planes. Hanson noted Middle East Forum’s work on grant abuse which helped trigger federal attention, including an HHS letter to California and Washington and the possibility of debarment from receiving federal money. Some states have already designated CAIR a terrorist organization. It’s a good start and marks big wins, but more needs to be done.

Hanson’s more important distinction is between two kinds of jihad. Violent jihadists, al-Qaeda and ISIS, kill people and are widely understood. Civilization jihadists do not need a bomb. They move in, reach critical mass, build mosques, and impose their law, culture, and public presence onto the host society. The First Amendment makes this hard to stop. Freedom of religion is protected. The result is a strategy that uses American freedom as a weapon against American culture. This reality and decades long strategy has shown its impact in US elections with Islamist candidates now being normal, and winning.

The methods are concrete and deliberate. Organized prayer dominating public parks, on sidewalks, and blocking streets is not overflow from a crowded mosque. It is a display of who controls the space. No police permits. Jihad through prayer. Hanson noted the same tactic and intimidation outside synagogues. School boards have been influenced to change curriculum so 9/11 is no longer taught as Islamic terrorism. In Fairfax County, Virginia, near where he lives – and near the Pentagon – teachers were told not to connect the attacks to Islam because it would make Moslem children feel bad. Hanson’s reply was that feelings do not rewrite what happened. Lawfare fills the rest of the toolkit: lawsuits over speech, religious accommodations, even hijabs and burqas allowed to mask the faces in driver’s license photos meant to identify a person. Attempts at Moslem-only housing with internal Sharia rules have appeared even in conservative states such as Texas.

That is the essence of what he describes as civilization jihad: not a single plot with a headquarters, but a long campaign to make Islamist supremacist politics look like ordinary religious liberty, and to make naming the ideology look like hate. They have been doing this for decades. CAIR and allied voices fuel the societal blackmail. Enclaves and institutions create facts on the ground. Americans who hit the snooze button and do not recognize the threats for what they are play the role of the Islamists’ useful idiots have woken up in a society that they no longer recognize. The Moslem Brotherhood’s infiltration of American elections is a cornerstone of their plan.

The 9/11 anniversary was not nostalgia. It is a reminder that the men who flew the planes were the explosive version of a project that also works quietly, dominating and hijacking behind the scenes in school boards, city halls, universities, and public parks, while much of the West argues about tone, or fear being branded as an “Islamophobe.”

However, Hanson noted that the fear of being labeled an Islamophobe has finally cracked, because the record is too visible. The remaining task, he explained is to talk about the Moslem Brotherhood’s American agents and methods without the cartoon demand to “ban Islam,” and without the opposite cartoon that 19 hijackers and a century-old movement have nothing to do with the faith they cited. The week of the anniversary of 9/11 was the fitting time to have the conversation about the Moslem Brotherhood’s election infiltration so the modern threat 25 years later would be framed in the context of the memory of what happened by not recognizing it sooner.

Follow the full conversation on YouTube or the “Inspiration from Zion” podcast.

This is part one in a two-part series.

Jonathan Feldstein is president of the Genesis 123 Foundation (www,genesis123.co) whose mission is to build bridges between Jews and Christians and Christians with Israel. He was born and educated in the U.S. and immigrated to Israel in 2004. He is married and the father of six, and grandfather of four (so far).

Two sons and a son in law are currently serving in the IDF and have been involved in combat in Gaza and Lebanon since the October 7, 2023 Hamas massacre in Israel.

Jonathan is a leader working with and among Christian supporters of Israel, and shares experiences of living as an Orthodox Jew in Israel through his work, writing, and as host of the Inspiration from Zion podcast. Since the war began, he has authored more than 150 articles, and participated in a similar number of interviews, briefings, prayer events, and more.

Jonathan is working with Christian leaders all over the world to realize a true peace in Gaza, details of which can be found at www.SolutionforPeaceinGaza.com.

In 2023 he published the highly acclaimed book, Israel the Miracle (www.israelthemiracle.com), which makes a great gift for Chanukah and Christmas, and year round.