The Muslim Students Association and the Jihad Network

April 09, 2008
By FrontPage Magazine

The following essay, adapted from the Introduction to this booklet, shows how, as early as the 1980s, operatives from the Muslim Brotherhood, parent group for al Qaeda and Hamas, formulated a blueprint for a “jihadist process” that would ultimately sabotage the “miserable house” of the United States.

These Muslim Brotherhood operatives saw that the work of undermining the U.S. could be best accomplished by the use of front groups such as the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Muslim Students Association. But while CAIR was designed to work in the legal-cultural realm, posturing as another of the minority rights groups functioning in the public square, the MSA’s role was to be restricted to college campuses, where it would advance the cause of radical Islam and lead the effort to stigmatize Israel.

Over the next several days, Front Page will publish profiles of individual chapters of the MSA on a variety of campuses around the country, showing how specifically they achieve the broad goals of the organization. – The Editors
—————–
As revealed in documents seized by the FBI and entered as evidence in a Texas court, the Muslim Students Association is a legacy project of the Muslim Brotherhood.[1] The Brotherhood is an organization formed by a Hitler-admiring Muslim named Hasan al-Bannain Egypt in 1928.[2] It was designed to function as the spearpoint of the Islamo-fascist movement and its crusade against the West.

The Brotherhood spawned al-Qaeda and Hamas.[3] Its doctrines make up the core of the terrorist jihad conducted by organizations such as Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, Hamas and the government of Iran.[4] Its agendas have been clear since its creation: infiltration, subversion and global terror with world conquest as the goal.

…To establish one Islamic state of united Islamic countries, one nation under one leadership whose mission will be to reinforce adherence to the law of Allah…and the strengthening of the Islamic presence in the world arena….The goal…is the establishment of a world Islamic state.[5]

The first target was the “near enemy” – the Arab states that al-Banna and his followers felt had betrayed Islam. The United States – the “far enemy” – would not become a specific focus of the Brotherhood until many years later.

The organization’s aspirations for world dominion seemed like a fantasy until the Iranian revolution of 1979. But that event showed the jihadists that they could conquer and govern a state and use it as a base for Islamic revolution elsewhere. There was no doubt who the enemy was. The Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeni coined the phrase “Great Satan” and “Little Satan” to demonize the United States and Israel and mark them for destruction.

“Destroying Western Civilization From Within”

A formal plan for targeting America was devised three years after the Iranian revolution, in 1982.[6]. The plan was summarized in a 1991 memorandum written by Mohamed Akram, an operative of the Muslim Brotherhood. “The process of settlement” of Muslims in America, Akram explained, “is a ‘Civilization-Jihadist Process.’” This means that members of the 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 God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.”[7]

This memo surfaced in a Texas courtroom in the fall of 2007 after prosecutors introduced it as evidence in the trial of the Holy Land Foundation, once the largest Islamic charity in the United States.[8] The HLF was charged with funneling charitable donations to the jihad terrorists of the Islamic Resistance Movement, or Hamas, a Brotherhood organization that now controls the Gaza Strip. But the implications of this document go far beyond the Holy Land Foundation.

It is actually a blueprint for the subversion of American society, and the eventual imposition of Islamic law in the United States. This would mean an institutionalized oppression of women, homosexuals, and religious minorities; the end of freedom of speech and the freedom of conscience; and the replacement of democracy by theocracy.

U.S. authorities had been keeping an eye on Brotherhood operatives even before the memo surfaced. In 2001, U.S. officials accused Youssef Nada, a member of the organization, of funding terrorism.[9] Two years later, American investigators described Soliman Biheiri, a businessman in Virginia, as the Brotherhood’s U.S. “financial toehold.”

Surveying the Islamic organizations that existed in the U.S. in 1991, Mohamed Akram declared in his memo: “The big challenge that is ahead of us is how to turn these seeds or ‘scattered’ elements into comprehensive, stable, ‘settled’ organizations that are connected with our Movement and which fly in our orbit and take orders from our guidance.”

At the end of the document, Akram provided “a list of our organizations and the organizations of our friends” – apparently, those whom he believed were likewise dedicated to this great project of sabotaging the “miserable house” of American society. Surveying all these groups filled him with enthusiasm: “Imagine if they all march according to one plan!!!”[10]

Akram contemplated a network of many overlapping groups, with personnel that move from one to the other and hold positions in different organizations simultaneously—an arrangement that resembles the Communist Party’s creation of interlocking front groups during the Cold War and complicates the task of understanding and tracking the pattern of their activities.

The organizations Akram saw as advancing the Islamo-Fascist movement in America included, among many others, the Islamic Society of North America, the North American Islamic Trust, the Islamic Circle of North America, the International Institute for Islamic Thought, and the Islamic Association for Palestine – from which came the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) three years later. But perhaps the most important of these groups in terms of the long term infiltration and conquest the Brotherhood envisioned was The Muslim Students Association (MSA).

The Stealth Jihad of the MSA

Established in January 1963 at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the Muslim Students Association of the United States and Canada, or MSA (also known as MSA National) currently has chapters on nearly 600 college campuses across North America.)[11] The relationship between MSA National and the individual university chapters is not a fixed hierarchy, but rather a loose connection. Thus the policies and views of the national organization may differ from those of some of the local chapters.) Stating that its mission is “to serve the best interest of Islam and Muslims in the United States and Canada so as to enable them to practice Islam as a complete way of life,”MSA is by far the most influential Islamic student organization in North America.[12]

Founded by members of the Muslim Brotherhood, MSA was named in Mohammed Akram’s 1991 memorandum as one of the Brotherhood’s likeminded “organizations of our friends” who shared the common goal of destroying America and turning it into a Muslim nation. These “friends” were described by the Brotherhood as groups that could help teach Muslims “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 … so that … God’s religion Islam is made victorious over all other religions.”[13]

From its inception, MSA had close links with the extremist Muslim World League, whose chapters’ websites have featured not only Osama bin Laden’s propaganda, but also publicity-recruiting campaigns for Wahhabi involvement with the Chechen insurgents in Russia. According to author and Islam expert Stephen Schwartz, MSA is a key lobbying organization for the Wahhabi sect of Islam.[14]

MSA solicited donations for the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, whose assets the U.S. government seized in December 2001 because that organization was giving financial support to the terrorist group Hamas. MSA also has strong ties to the World Assembly of Muslim Youth.[15]

Charging that U.S. foreign policy is driven by militaristic imperialism, MSA steadfastly opposes the American military incursions into both Afghanistan and Iraq.[16] The organization also follows the Arab propaganda line in the Middle East conflict and has condemned the anti-terrorist security fence that Israel has built in the West Bank as an illegal “apartheid wall” that violates the civil and human rights of Palestinians.

An influential member of the International ANSWER steering committee, MSA maintains a large presence at ANSWER-sponsored anti-war demonstrations.[17] The pro-North Korea, pro-Saddam Hussein ANSWER is a front organization of the Marxist-Leninist Workers World Party.[18]

Local chapters of MSA signed a February 20, 2002 document, composed by the radical group Refuse & Resist (a creation of the Revolutionary Communist Party’s) condemning military tribunals and the detention of immigrants apprehended in connection with post-9/11 terrorism investigations.[19] The document read, in part: “They the U.S. government are coming for the Arab, Muslim and South Asian immigrants. … The recent ‘disappearances,’ indefinite detention, the round-ups, the secret military tribunals, the denial of legal representation, evidence kept a secret from the accused, the denial of any due process for Arab, Muslim, South Asians and others, have chilling similarities to a police state.”[20]

MSA has strongly opposed the Patriot Act, which it describes as an “infamous” piece of legislation. The organization’s chapters across the United States have similarly denounced virtually every other national security initiative implemented by the U.S. government since the 9/11 attacks.

MSA chose not to endorse or participate in the May 14, 2005 “Free Muslims March Against Terror,” an event whose stated purpose was to “send a message to the terrorists and extremists that their days are numbered … and to send a message to the people of the Middle East, the Muslim world and all people who seek freedom, democracy and peaceful coexistence that we support them.”[21]

But while it is possible to understand its political orientation from some of the positions it has taken on large national issues, the Muslim Students Association comes into sharper focus in the actions of the individual chapters that do its work every day on campuses across America. The following analysis of 18 separate campus chapters of MSA will make this clear.
—————
To read “The MSA at UCLA,” click here.
To read “The MSA at Berkeley,” click here.
To read “The Muslim Student Union at UC Irvine,” click here.
To read “The MSA at Brown,” click here.
To read “The MSA at Columbia,” click here.
To read “The MSA at Michigan State,” click here.
To read “The MSA at Ohio State,” click here.
———–
NOTES: