Muslim Militancy in America

[abu afak]

Muslim Brotherhood Militancy in America: Student Journeys into Secret Circle of Extremism

Paul M. Barrett/Wall Street Journal via jcpa.org:
12/23/03

In 1994, Mustafa Saied, then a junior at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, was invited by a friend from the United Arab Emirates to join the Muslim Brotherhood and entered a secretive community that was slowly building a roster of young men committed to spreading fundamentalist Islam in the U.S. Saied underwent a conversion to a less orthodox form of Islam in 1998. Today, his story offers a rare inside look at an extremist movement that flourished in the U.S.

In December 1994, Saied and his friends attended a conference in Chicago sponsored by the Muslim Arab Youth Association that attracted some 6,000 people, according to the Chicago Sun-Times. At one point, six or seven masked young men dressed as Hamas militants ran down the aisles, waving the organization's green flags and shouting, "Idhbaahal Yahood!" ("Slaughter the Jews!"). Saied recalls his own reaction was, "Cool."

"..."Anti-American sentiment is usually reserved for closed-door discussions or expressed in languages that most Americans don't understand," says Mr. Saied. "While such rhetoric has been drastically reduced since 9/11, it is still prevalent enough to be a cause for concern..."

http://haganah.org.il/haganah/2.html ..
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Or full article at:
http://online.wsj.com/article_email/0,,SB107213437945607800-H9jeoNolad2mp2sZ36IbKiJm4,00.html

[Mediocrates]

It's important to read that article and have an appropriate response to the WSJ about it as well. Mr. Barrett's article has a somewhat apologetic tone that attempts to make Mr. Saied more a youthful victim of something he didn't fully understand. That is about as far from the truth as can be.

[Mediocrates]

I read with interest this piece in the December 23 print edition. But I was struck by a number of things:

It’s not secret
The Muslim Brotherhood operated then as now openly and has never made much more of token effort to hide its various agenda. You article attempts to paint it like a cult, which it is not. It is and organized, funded, disciplined group which recruits members and leaders.

It’s not a club
I believe Mr. Saied was thrilled to be asked to join the Muslim Brotherhood but make no mistake, it’s not as if he was being asked to be a pledge for Rush Week to one of the Greek Societies in his university. This is a group that engineered large fund-raising and organizational activities for groups which openly called for the destruction of American society, of the state of Israel and which openly called for genocide.

It’s not a ‘phase’
It’s a promotion. It is misplaced to show Mr. Saied’s story as a Roman a Clef, an interesting journey from youthful radical anger to maturity. It is not. Like all terrorist organizations and their supporters, the front line troops of the Muslim Brotherhood are young because frankly, everyone else dies, goes to jail or is internally purged. That is their nature. You’ve never saw an old shahid suicide bomber, have you? Why is it we accord an odd ‘Wise Old Man” status to any of their leaders who survive? As you cover in the article, you can’t even be sure if all you’re seeing is the Brotherhood being driven underground. What better time but now?

That is not really the point though. They point is what do we do as a civil society to recognize and then push back the sharp edges of groups which openly call for our deaths? What do we demand of moderate Muslims and ‘ex’-radicals to speak and act against these former comrades? You show Mr. Saied as more of a success story, a survivor of the ‘hood’ as if he was hard working and gritty and smart enough to pull himself up by his bootstraps. This is nonsense. Mr Saied and the men and women like him should be out fighting against radicalism not merely passively working around it, if that is in fact what they stand for now.

It’s moderate, now
By what standard? We are so obsessed with looking for the mythical moderate Muslim that we’re willing to set the bar this low? People who only used to support terrorism? We have to suspend our disbelief in Mr. Saied’s case and agree that a recruited leader, the head of a regional ideological group in the Brotherhood operated for years raising money without knowing where the money actually went. That insults the rest of us. It’s patronizing to assume that the Muslim Brotherhood is a dark conspiracy to its own leaders who are innocently tripped up in a plot. No, we have to assume that Mr. Saied knew what he and his group were doing and for whom.

And given all this, one can conclude that Mr. Saied’s mellowing with age speaks more to opportunity than intent. I hope I am wrong. I hope that radicalism destroys itself from the inside. I hope its members see that in the end all it brings is death and waste. But one man’s story that would have us believe he is now a man of peace is not the story of radical Islam in America and we would are foolishly negligent to draw comparisons between the two.