Part I
Many religions spin off the more radical into action groups. These groups often do not represent the majority of believers nor fairly represent people of faith. Evangelical in nature, such groups have predetermined agendas and desires.
The oldest Islamic such organization, founded in Egypt, is the Muslim Brotherhood, a religious faction that also has a lot of entities. These entities can be charitable, companies making profit, stock trading companies on Wall Street or the other world trading exchanges, import/export services, schools, and even laundry services.
As a religious movement, they have a simple message of belief: They convince people to get on and stay on their right path for salvation. And, like most Muslim believers, their charitable works combined with their deep faith are to be commended.
However, since its Egyptian start almost 100 years ago, the Muslim Brotherhood has evolved into a spiderweb of nondocumented membership, yet accounts for millions of supporters. It raises mosques, funds campaigns for religious freedom in non-Islamic countries, stages peaceful marches opposing religious oppression and funds Islamic activities untraceable by security forces.
Their offices are Islamic welfare centers in London, Paris, Kuala Lumpur; Islamic safe havens for refugees from war and inter-Islamic strife in Beirut, Jordan, Baghdad, and Manila; they operate religious training centers in 40 countries; and many of their members and staff have, in the past, been actively on CIA payrolls (especially during the Russian Afghanistan war).
They are deeply involved with education, including instruction, culture and member schooling funding (higher education, including many U.S. colleges).
The Muslim Brotherhood is the world’s most influential Islamist group. It was only natural they would expand into the West. Their main base of operation outside of Cairo is in Germany, in Munich.
As Ian Johnson (Pulitzer winner) explains in his seminal “A Mosque in Munich,� this Islamic outpost was built just before World War II with the encouragement of the Nazis to try to harness the anti-communist power of Islam against the Russians. After the war, the Islamic center was taken over by the CIA to strengthen U.S. aims in Europe (Cold War tactics) and around the world. The CIA needed allies that could promote anti-communism. That alliance continued throughout the 1950s, ’60s, ’70s and perhaps through the ’80s (no one is sure, and the CIA is not telling).
There is no doubt that establishing such a strong foothold in Germany, our principal allied country in the Cold War, permitted the Muslim Brotherhood and Islamic factions to spread to the United States and other democratic countries. Of course, their agenda had nothing to do with our aims (except being anti-communist) and the pipeline the Nazis and then our CIA afforded them have led to extremist infiltration and, of course, as is the case with the CIA-trained and funded Bin Laden, terrorism. In time, The Muslim Brotherhood nurtured and created its own spin-offs: the Islamic Jihad and Hamas.
The Muslim Brotherhood operations hide in plain sight: setting up companies, schools, prayer centers, help centers, teaching centers. The Muslim Brotherhood does not exist in a corporate way; it has always formed its operations in a deliberate way to hide in plain sight, to fool the media and law enforcement.
Shut down a radical mosque and you miss the travel agency next door. Shut down the travel agency and you miss the limo service.
All through the 1990s and early 2000s, we were using a car service out of New York. The driver, ex-Pakistani Ahmad, and I spent many hours to and from Kennedy Airport to Amenia.
He would tell me of his CIA handlers helping smuggle rockets to the Taliban in Afghanistan to help defeat the Russians. He was proud of his peaceful Muslim Brotherhood membership, his anti-communist fervor and his part in the jihad in Pakistan-Afghanistan.
As a reward, the CIA got him and his wife (and son born in Queens) medical insurance and a U.S. passport. Two days after 9/11, I called him for an airport trip — his cell phone, house phone and the New York car service he worked for had lost track of him. He simply disappeared, wife, kid and all.
What is jihad, exactly? Literally, it does not mean to fight — it means to fight back. It is a defensive war they feel they are fighting. And every one of us should remember that when you are on the defensive, when you feel the wall to your back, you fight with a vigor and determination greater than expected.
Britain had that spirit against the Nazis, we against the Japanese after Pearl Harbor. In 1941, President Roosevelt called for us to defend our nation, safeguard our God-given right of democracy, and not merely fight the Japanese. Belief (ours in America under attack) is a powerful motivator.
So, the question is this: Where else is the supposed nonviolent Muslim Brotherhood active in helping the Islamic jihad and Hamas? Everywhere in the world.
Meanwhile, nonviolent Islam is also a threat, principally because of its opposition to all “godless and corrupt� Western societies. It teaches that Western culture is evil and to be opposed or converted for our own good. (Sound familiar? Think of the Christian Inquisition.)
However peacefully they preach that opposition to be carried out, the end result is that it takes little effort to radicalize 10 percent of those taught that we are “godless and corrupt.� Their imams claim that the Koran says that the “godless and corrupt� must be killed or converted, just as the Spanish Inquisition professed the Bible instructed 500 years ago.
Peter Riva, formerly of Amenia Union, lives in New Mexico.
