For years, national security experts and freedom activists have sounded the alarm about Muslim Brotherhood activity in the United States, only to be tarred and dismissed as hysterical "Hatemongers" and "Islamophobes." Now an internationally prominent former Brotherhood activist has confirmed the warnings.
In a June 6, 2024, interview, Sami al-Arian, a former Palestinian Islamic Jihad organizer, stated that "There was a Muslim Brotherhood movement in America whose early beginnings were in the late 1960's." Asked if it was "Registered officially," al-Arian responded, "No, no. This turned into a problem later on." Nevertheless, he said, "The Muslim Brotherhood movement existed in America. It consisted of people who were Muslim Brotherhood members in their countries and came to the U.S. to study, or people who studied there."
Al-Arian makes this even clearer when he explains that those who favored making the U.S. Brotherhood "a public movement with the 'localization of the dawa'" were those who were not planning to return to their home countries, while those who were planning to return wanted to keep the group undercover, so that they would not encounter trouble for having belonged to it when they returned to Muslim countries where the governments opposed the Brotherhood's efforts to impose Sharia.
His description of the Brotherhood as initially a clandestine organization that developed a coherent program for the future in the late 1970s and early 1980s corresponds exactly to what counter-jihad organizations and individuals have been saying about it for decades.
In 2016, the Center for Security Policy published a "Lecture by a top-level Muslim Brother before a closed Brotherhood audience [that] serves as an authoritative oral history of the Muslim Brotherhood and their efforts in the United States in their own words. The talk took place in Missouri in the early 1980s, yet it foreshadows issues mentioned in the Explanatory Memorandum almost a decade later - including references to the Brotherhood's efforts to engage in 'settlement,' which the Memorandum will later come to define as a 'Civilizational-jihadist' process."
The Explanatory Memorandum is further confirmed by al-Arian's recent interview in that it discusses efforts at what al-Arian called "Localization of the dawa" as well as subversive activity, and thus appears to have represented an attempt to heal the split in the U.S. Brotherhood between those who wanted to focus on proselytizing and those who wanted to maintain an underground organization dedicated to destroying the nation.
Will the Huffington Post, the SPLC, and the ADL now take note of Sami al-Arian's interview and apologize to those whom they smeared as "Islamophobes" for calling attention to the Muslim Brotherhood threat? It is much more likely that they will ignore what al-Arian has confirmed and continue their defamation.
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