Moderate? Muslim Brotherhood affirms aim of ‘Caliphate’

Many U.S. officials in recent decades have insisted the Muslim Brotherhood is a moderate ally with which the government can work, but one of the movement’s leaders has affirmed the ultimate objective remains to establish an “Islamic caliphate.”

Magdy Shalash reminded supporters the aim is a global state ruled by Shariah, or Islamic law, reported the Investigative Project on Terror.

“The Muslim Brotherhood was established for a general overall purpose, namely, the return of the comprehensive entity of the Umma (Muslim community) … the Islamic Caliphate, which is based on many Sharia proofs,” Shalash wrote in a Facebook post on Wednesday.

Shalash makes it clear he is talking about “the return of all states Islam ruled, such as Andalusia and others, to the quarters of the coming Caliphate.”

Andalusia is part of modern Spain.

Shalash praised the “Ottoman Caliphate,” which ruled for five centuries until World War I, since it “eliminated a state of pluralism and fragmentation in name of a plurality of Islamic countries.”

IPT noted official Muslim Brotherhood statements in Arabic “tend to reflect the group’s core motivations and goals more than sanitized statements in English.”

After a deadly Palestinian terrorist attack in Jerusalem in July, the Brotherhood called, in Arabic, for an violent uprising, or Islamic intifada, against Israel.

“The Muslim Brotherhood stresses that defending holy places, and blood and goods is a Shariah duty and a duty to every Muslim, which cannot be ignored except by a traitor or someone submissive,” the statement said, according to a translation.

In July, Pro-Palestinian groups and Muslim Brotherhood affiliates in the United States organized anti-Israel protests throughout the country, which featured anti-Semitic chants and radical statements.

WND reported last week that despite FBI evidence presented in federal court, leaders of Islamic groups in the United States such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations have denied they are connected to the Muslim Brotherhood.

But CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad is among the U.S.-based leaders who publicly mourned the recent death of a former chief spiritual guide of the Muslim Brotherhood, Mohamed Akef.

Awad’s group CAIR was a spinoff of a group Awad helped form that, according to FBI wiretap evidence, was a front for the Muslim Brotherhood. CAIR itself was designated by the Department of Justice as an unindicted co-conspirator in a plot to fund Hamas. CAIR also was designated by the Gulf Arab state United Arab Emirates as a terrorist organization. The group has sued a co-author of a WND Books exposé, “Muslim Mafia: Inside the Secret Underworld That’s Conspiring to Islamize America,” which documented the group’s ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.

As WND has reported, the Muslim Brotherhood’s motto is: “Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. The Qur’an is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope. [Allah is greater!].”

Founded in Egypt in 1928 by Hassan al Banna, the Brotherhood sought to revive the crumbled Islamic empire, or caliphate, led by the Ottoman Turks.

“It is the nature of Islam to dominate, not to be dominated, to impose its law on all nations and to extend its power to the entire planet,” al-Banna wrote.

The top leadership of al-Qaida, including the late Osama bin Laden, Khalid Sheik Muhammad, Muhammad Atta, the blind Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman and current leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, were all members of the Muslim Brotherhood.

In 2004, the FBI raided a Muslim Brotherhood house in northern Virginia and confiscated a document called “An Explanatory Memorandum for the General Strategic Goal for the Brothers in North America.” The document, presented as evidence in a Hamas-funding trial in 2008 in Dallas, outlined the Muslim Brotherhood’s strategy to take over America “from within.”

It states 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.”

Under the Obama administration, the Department of Homeland Security invited CAIR and other Muslim Brotherhood-related groups to help develop its counter-terrorism policy. And CAIR officials in May participated in DHS townhall discussion in Florida.