The Muslim Lobby as an Impediment to the US-Israel Relationship

by Raphael Israeli (July 2010)

Raphael Israeli NER Symposium Nashville from Jerry Gordon on Vimeo.

The following is an expanded version of the speech Dr. Israeli delivered to the 2010 New English Review Symposium, “Decline, Fall & Islam” June 19th 2010.

Apologia

The fifty year-old special relationship between the US and Israel (1960- 2010), which has been steady on the whole despite occasional ups and downs, has been founded on such immutable constants as common values, a strategic alliance, Christian Zionism, the influence of AIPAC and of the Jewish community, and an unshakable support of both houses of Congress to Israel since its inception. The Muslim presence in the US, which in numbers has always approximated the Jewish presence, was never as potent in the past due to the low profile and the relatively marginal impact of the Muslim community on the economic, intellectual, artistic and political life of the US. Five major elements have in recent decades contributed to altering that situation, which has gradually shifted from an unquestioned American support for Israel to a concomitant rise of Muslim influence:

The growing dependence of Muslim countries like the Gulf, Egypt, Morocco, Iraq, Afghanistan, Central Asia, the Palestinians and Jordan on the US for their security, albeit the corresponding weakening of ties with such traditional allies as Turkey;
The September 11 (2001) horrors which, on the one hand, heightened the US suspicions of Muslim elements within the country and abroad, especially in view of the many hostile individuals and “charitable” front organizations who were seized red-handed and brought to justice; but on the other hand, the need to maintain close relationship with oil-producing and “pro-western” regimes, has kept deterioration from going too far;
The rise to power of Barack Hussein Obama and his administration’s determination, as reflected in his Cairo speech to the Muslims, to engage the Muslim world instead of confronting it, and to exert unilateral pressure on Israel, often at its detriment, while protesting its “permanent commitment to its security.”
A sequence of “nationalist” Israeli governments, which have learned the disastrous consequences of Oslo and of the various “peace processes,” and the debilitating effect they have had on Israel’s resilience, in the face of the escalating Arab and Muslim hostility and annihilationist statements, by Iran, al-Qa’ida, Hamas, Hizbullah and others.
A better organization, often replicating Jewish groupings, and a more insidious variety and diffusion of Muslim lobbies, partly activated by Muslim external powers, like Saudi Arabia, partly by local American-Arab and American-Muslim groups and organizations.

While all those elements play their role in the growing Muslim influence in the US and the corresponding difficulties that the pro-Israeli lobby has been experiencing, this paper will address particularly the question of the Muslim lobbies in the US, domestic and external, and their impact on the rise of Muslim influence. Moreover, in view of the multitude of Muslim groups in the US: political, societal, charitable, religious and others, an emphasis will be laid on the most important of them like the “Muslim Brothers,” the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), and their many derivatives. It is also noteworthy that while the first Muslim arrivals in the US at the end of the 19^th Century were identified as “Turks” (including Greeks and Armenians) all originating from the Ottoman Empire, or “Syrian,” even though they were Christian in their majority[1], today the Muslim community in the US is so numerous, so differentiated and so varied, that Muslim organizations cannot be more than umbrella groupings bringing together various coreligionists who may share little else, or be represented in parallel or rival groups at one and the same time.

By the time the bulk of the Muslim immigrants arrived in the US after World War II, the idea of total assimilation which had been sought by their Christian predecessors of half a century earlier, namely absorption of a minority culture into an established Anglo-Saxon dominant ideal, and the new concept grew where the minority only takes on select aspects of the host culture and otherwise retains its original identity.[2] This allowed for the continued extraordinary differentiation between various Muslim groups, who all rushed to huddle under the CAIR (and other similar groupings) umbrella once the horror of September 11 exposed them all to criticism, suspicion and extra-screening. At the same time, the more the FBI and other agencies excavate deeper into the seemingly innocent and well-meaning Muslim groupings, the more they realize that only thanks to that traumatic event was the American system jostled profoundly enough to launch inquiries into areas in which Muslims were not even suspected of any wrong doings before. Throughout the 1990s, Steven Emerson, the pioneer investigative reporter of terrorism in America, was shouting foul, but no one listened, least of all the FBI who claimed that as long as no law was violated they could do nothing. On September 11 that attitude was clearly contravened.

Already one year prior to this disaster, the Boston Globe ran an extremely pertinent and almost prophetic article on the Muslims of America, who then claimed to number 6 million and were growing fast due to a combination of high birthrate, immigration of more Muslims, and internal conversion to Islam. However, when reporter Michael Paulson visited the mosque in Dearborn, Michigan, – which was led by Iraqi-born Imam Qazwini, who was urging his congregants to vote in the upcoming 2000 elections, he noticed a group of male students who disagreed with the Imam, claiming that he was “usurping the authority of Allah and proposing an un-Islamic action that cannot be justified by the Qur’an.” Their explanation, offered by 25-year old Danny Agemi, a marketing major at the University of Michigan, was no less perplexing: ”God forbids any Muslim from participating in the legislation of a non-Islamic state.” This young man then positioned himself by the entrance gate and distributed leaflets calling voting in the general elections “treason against Islam,” citing verses of the Qur’an as evidence for his position that voting was a sin. The reporter observed that “most Muslim Americans were newcomers and relatively new to this country and inexperienced in the ways of democracy, and many were frustrated that neither political party seemed supportive of their interests.”[3] But for a young man versed in American education and benefiting from its bounty to incite his fellow citizens to abstain from voting seems a rather extremist step that requires exploration, especially as other Muslim Americans who cannot identify with the preponderant Judeo-Christian culture, respond by saying: ”to hell with the rest, we are going to keep to our own,” as Hasan Jaber, Deputy Director of the Arab Community Center in Dearborn, was quoted as saying. He indeed confirmed that “You still see mosques here that do not encourage the movement of political activism – they see it as betrayal of their culture and religion, and as threatening their purity, although these are in the minority.”[4]

During the deep disarray among Muslims following September 11, ‘Alaa al-Bayumi, the Director of Arab Affairs at CAIR wrote in the London-based al-Hayat, that:

…non-Muslim Americans are now interested to know Islam. There are a number of signs: libraries have run out of books on Islam and the Middle East… English translations of the Qur’an head the American best-selling list… The Americans are showing increased willingness to convert to Islam since September 11… Thousands of non-Muslim Americans have responded to invitations to visit mosques, resembling the waves of the sea, one after another. All this is happening in a political atmosphere that, at least verbally, encourages non-Muslim Americans’ openness towards Muslims in America and in the Islamic world, as the American President has stated many times in his speeches.[5]

Other Muslim spokesmen knew more details: Nihad Awad, the Chairman of CAIR, told a Saudi Daily that 34,000 Americans had converted to Islam after September 11, the highest rate in the US to date.[6] All that information and the rosy picture in which it depicted the future of Islam in America, must have prodded the Muslim organizations not only to be defensive about Islam, the supposed “religion of peace,” so as to exonerate it of any blemish after September 11, but also to go on the offensive for the purposes of proselytizing, as explicitly stated in the platforms of several Muslim organizations which act as lobbies. Due to the enormous post September 11 backlash, not only did Muslim Americans not go into hiding, but they asserted their rights as Americans, fighting against what they viewed as discrimination and prejudice and launching legal and political challenges via political activism.[7]
Muslims who acted as outside lobbyers in America, like the Saudis, after a brief period of shock and confusion, where they could not shed total responsibility for the incident, soon came to their senses and began to accuse others (Mossad, FBI, the Jews in general and other agencies) of the horror, or to “credit” the US for fully deserving the consequences of those horrifying events. In short, they expect that any incident, even if it reflects badly on Islam, should be fully taken advantage of to generate more “understanding” for Islam, so as to bring in its wake certain accommodations and privileges not granted to others. Thus, they achieve their larger aim to Islamize the public space in the country on any number of levels.

Domestic Muslim Lobbies

While the distinction advanced by some scholars between plain Muslims and “Islamists” is spurious (otherwise all Muslim organizations in the US would have been “Islamist”), inasmuch as Islam presents one set of doctrines, though with different degrees of observance, just like among Christians and Jews, it is important to emphasize that the widespread diffusion of moderate Muslims in America, those who have adapted to the American way of life, does not necessarily mean the concomitant existence of “moderate,” as compared to “extremist” Islam. Moreover, not all those active in Muslim lobbies and seeking to defend Muslim interests are necessarily Muslim “fanatics,” exactly as not all Jews active in AIPAC and other Jewish lobbies can be defined as “extremist” or even “religious” Jews. Their identification with their respective faiths’ interests and their pursuit of activites in this vein often derives from political or ethnic or social or economic or cultural motives. In fact, while part of the activities of the Muslim lobbies, unlike their Jewish counterparts, are geared to facilitate the spread of the faith, much of it is primarily calculated to enhance its stature and ameliorate its image, and especially to improve its political clout, either for its own sake or for countering what is perceived as the “powerful Jewish lobby,” which tends to skew American politics in favor of the Jews and Israel.

Ever since the Arab immigrants in America established their Arab National League (1938-42), and the Institute of Arab American Affairs (1945-50), the plight of the Palestinians became their core issue, after the Balfour Declaration (1917) was made good by the British for creating a national home for the Jews in Palestine. But the calamity of the Holocaust and the legitimation in the US of the Zionist designs soon dwarfed that plight, followed by the creation of Israel and then and its joining the western world against the imminent danger of communism. It was not until after the 1967 Six Day War that a new generation of activists founded the Association of Arab-American University Graduates which became the first organization to provide “accurate information about the Arab world and Arabs in the US, and to educate Arab intellectuals and political leaders about US policies and the US political process, and activism among American Arabs to get them to participate in politics”. It devoted its resources to political lobbying, attacks against defamation of and discrimination against Arabs and Arab-Americans. Other Arab organizations followed, notably ACCESS in Dearborn in 1971. But after the reinforcement of Muslim immigration to the US since the 1950’s, organizations of Muslims, which ultimately subsumed the Arabs, who were Muslim in their majority, mushroomed, including the Muslim Student Association in 1963, the Islamic Society of North America which had subsumed most of the functions of its predecessors in 1982. MPAC and CAIR are much younger- 1988 and 1994, respectively[8].

In the aftermath of September 11, Muslim-Americans and Middle Eastern Muslims who happened to be in the US, either on a pleasure trip or in some sort of business (school, diplomacy, commerce) were immediately hit by the violent backlash of the angry and suspicious American public, security apparatuses and the Administration, which translated into hate crimes, profiling and discrimination, commensurate with the extent of the horror which struck America in general, especially those in the proximity to the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. Many non-Muslims and Muslim innocents fell victim to an outraged undiscriminating public. So much so that following the attacks, anyone looking Middle Eastern or Muslim, regardless of his religion or nationality, “was singled out for harassment, threats and assaults,” as the New York Times put it most adequately.[9] Of course, the backlash operated not exactly the way of the Muslim lobby, and in fact many of the beneficial achievements of that lobby were undone by the outrage and the fury that were caused amidst the American public against anything Muslim or Middle Eastern, or looking to be so. Thenceforth, it became imperative for the Muslim lobby to first control the damage, and then counter-attack with a vengeance in order not only to show that Muslims had nothing to do with 9/11 (of course, the Jews were to blame), but that Muslim “amity” and their “close alliance” with America would naturally cause them to join “”battle against terrorism.” This has since constituted the cornerstone of Muslim-American policy. Details like the Muslim identity of the 9-11 perpetrators or the jovial reactions in the Muslim streets from Quetta to Casablanca, and from Cairo to Gaza, were hidden or duly denied.

The Muslim Brotherhood ( MB- Ikhwan)[10]

The organization was founded in Egypt by Hasan al-Banna in 1928, principally in reaction to the fall of the Ottoman Empire in WW I and the dissolution of the last Caliphate. It unabashedly declared its universal goal of Islamizing the universe, and making the banner of Islam flutter over the entire earth, and has given rise to radical Islamic groups among the Palestinians (Hamas), the Algerians (the Groupes Islamiques Armes), the various Gamaat and Islamic Jihad groups in Egypt, and ultimately the Taliban, al-Qa’ida, Lashkar a-Taiba and other radical and violent terrorist groupings in Asia. Since the 1970’s that tendency has expanded into western democratic countries, whose internal liberalism and tolerance ironically allowed the uninhibited spread of Muslim communities in Europe, America, Canada and Australia. As recently as 2004, Muhammed ‘Akef, the elected Supreme Guide of the Brotherhood, stated in no uncertain terms that he had complete faith that Islam will invade Europe and America, because Islam had logic and a mission. He also admitted that the invasion would not be achieved via bombs and armies, but that the westerners would “fall into the bosom of Islam out of conviction.”[11]

What has become a most formidable Muslim lobby in the US, as part of the “Global Muslim Brotherhood” activities, was founded in 1991 in America. An explanatory memorandum of the “General Strategic Goal of the MB in North America”[12] was promulgated on 22 May, 1991, which stated some goals and provoked some reactions:

1. The process of Muslim settlement is a “civilizatory-Jihadist process with all the word means. The Ikhwan 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 [Islam] is made victorious over all other religions. Without this level of understanding, we are not up to this challenge and have not prepared ourselves for Jihad yet. It is a Muslim’s destiny to perform Jihad and work wherever he is and wherever he lands until the final hour comes.

2. The document lists many of the MB fronts that have been set up in the US, most of which have counterparts in the UK and elsewhere, often with the same names. For example, two organizations named in it: the Organization of Muslim Social Scientists (AMSS), and the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT) have bases in the UK too.

3. Army Colonel Joseph Myers, Military Advisor and former Head of the Intelligence Agency’s South America Division, wrote: “The Muslim Brotherhood should be considered a threat organization, and the affiliated US domestic Muslim NGOs and associations identified in the strategy document, should likewise be considered part of the MB network, that these are “front” functional organizations operating as links and nodes of the overall network.”[13]

4. This group of MB organizations has involved itself with many European governments, and is actively sought by the EU for “dialogue” on various levels. The Head of the MB in Germany, Ibrahim al-Zayat, has said that one of its constituent groups, FEMYSO, does “lobby work” in relation to the EU. EL Zayat is married to the sister of Mehmet Erbakan, who is the President of the MIlli Gorus in Germany, they are the nephew and niece of Necmettin Erbakan, the founder of the anti-Semitic Milli Gorus and a former deposed Turkish Prime Minister, whose disciple, Teyyip Erdogan, is now the anti-Israeli Prime Minister there.

Part and parcel of the MB plan of action has been to establish various organizations to further the Islamic cause. So, we find in both Europe and America, many “innocent” front organizations, like the Holy Land “charitable” grouping, which was posing as a “humanitarian” organization, dedicated to aid the poor and the destitute in Islamic countries, while in fact the money it raises in the West is channeled to terrorist groups like Hamas.[14] In its struggle against terrorism, the US under President George W. Bush laid its hand on such front organizations in order to dry their sources of financing. But in his sycophantic Cairo speech of 2009 to the Muslim world, President Barack Obama pledged to re-invigorate such “charities” so as to re-enable the Muslims of America to carry out their basic Muslim tenet of zakat, one of the five Pillars of the Faith, which obligates Muslims to donate to Islamic causes across the world. Nevermind if their “charitable” act grossly abuses the very struggle against terrorism which the President has pledged to his electorate to fight. Thus, some of the seemingly most “moderate” Muslim organizations in America, which have been judged as such due to their soft propaganda and temporarily non-violent program, are included in the list of the MB partners and affiliates like The Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), the Muslim Student Association (MSA), the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT), the Muslim Arab Youth Association (MAYA), the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), and the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR).[15]

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR)[16]

For a long while, the Council whose acronym recalls that of AIPAC, its Israeli counterpart, was thought for many years to have been a partner of the FBI for reaching out to Muslims in the US. But unlike the pro-Israel lobby, which is a wholly American NGO geared to advance Israeli interests of Americans, as visualized by Americans, and for Americans, hence the wide divergence of its membership from all hues of American life, CAIR is comprised principally of Muslims who live in the US, without any particular ethnic affiliation and seeking to advance no specific cause of any country. In this regard, it operates more like the ADL, though the latter does not state in its title its concern with discrimination against Jews while CAIR does spell out its narrow focus on Muslims. Given that the identity of the group it promotes is religious, and that the religion involved is Islam, then at least since September 11, when all the perpetrators of the horror were identified as Muslims, CAIR sensed it had much to defend and much to apologize for.

As many organizations, such as Jihad Watch, keep revealing to the American public and its security apparatuses the threat posed by the subversive Islamic Jihadist groups to American national security, inter alia by supporting, fund raising and associating with such terrorist groups as Hizbullah and Hamas, investigations are open against CAIR, and some of its former officials have been indicted and convicted. CAIR’s co-founder and former board chairman, Omar Ahmed, as well as its spokesman, Ibrahim Hooper, have made Islamic supremacist statements, but despite the doubts about their loyalty to American constitutional values, the FBI worked closely with them, until CAIR went, under investigation, into the status of unindicted co-conspirator with the Holy Land Foundation in the fall of 2008.

The FBI undertook further investigations after Chris Gaubatz (the son of David Gaubatz), posing as a a new convert to Islam, named David (“Dawud”) Marshall, secured an internship with CAIR in 2008, and began carrying out of CAIR headquarters some 12,000 pages of documents and audiotapes as evidence. This was the material used for the explosive book : Muslim Mafia: Inside the Secret Underworld that is Conspiring to Islamize America[17] authored by David Gaubatz and Paul Sperry, which disclosed that CAIR was indeed still one of the arms of the Muslim Brotherhood.[18]

As a result of the revelations in Muslim Mafia, Republican Representatives Sue Myrick(N.C.), Trent Franks (Ariz), Paul Broun (Ga) and John Shadegg (Ariz) wrote a letter to the Attorney General, requesting that he “provide each member of Congress a summary of the evidence and findings that led them to name CAIR as unindicted co-conspirator in a terrorism trial.” The Attorney General has not publicly complied, and CAIR has been still hiding behind the veil of secrecy. However, when Muslim Mafia hit the stores with its sensational findings, CAIR did not deny any of the revelations, instead, it tried defaming the Gaubatzes, father and son, and Sperry, as “hate-mongers,” and sued to recover the documents, but did not refute their authenticity. A court ruled in favor of CAIR regaining its documents, but before they could retrieve them, the FBI intervened with a subpoena, and took them for its own ongoing investigation. In the meantime, all CAIR can do is to oppose any anti-terror measure adopted in the US after 9/11, and to demonize anyone who blows the whistle about the impending threat of terrorism in the US.

CAIR has been so much and so often involved in political matters that it has often collided with American conservatives, and pro-Israeli lobbies. The Foreign Policy Research Institute is one of them, and its founder and director, Daniel Pipes, has been most prominent in those acrimonious debates. For example, CAIR’s Philadelphia chapter announced on March 17, 2010, that it was launching a nationwide campaign to challenge anti-Islam bias in a series of children’s books that the Washington-based group says promote “hostility towards Islam and suspicion of Muslims.” The reference was to a ten-volume series for middle and high school students, titled the World of Islam, produced by the Foreign Policy Research Institute, and published by Mason Crest Publishers. CAIR was incensed by the publication, which it considered propaganda against Muslims, partly because one of the publications of Mason Crest received a glowing review from the Association of Jewish Libraries. Questions were raised that CAIR had penetrated several publishing houses to avert publication of materials it thought inimical to it, and that from authors’ names it concluded that the publications were hostile.[19]

The Jihadi Ideological Lobby

Most insidious amidst the Muslim efforts to transform the American environment to its liking has been the ideological penetration which is pursued not only via concrete and well-defined chartered organizations like MB and CAIR, but also by means of intangible and amorphic religious ideas and trends, like the Saudi Wahhabis and the Turkish Fethullah Gulen grouping, which exist as undercurrents of religious and political thought and exert their impact through budgets, educational networks, political lobbying and the like. While the Wahhabi current is often co-terminus with the all-powerful Saudi Lobby, the politically clout-less Gulen movement, relies solely on the fringe movements of the Jihadi type which cluster around activists who prefer the long haul with thorough groundwork to pave the way, to superficial and rapid success. In America, as part of what Robert Spencer has called “Stealth Jihad”[20], which seeks to impose its ideology over the world, a secretive foreign network of Muslim radicals operates charter schools, aided by governmental money, and inspired by the founder of the movement, Fethullah Gulen, who lives in the US but directs in Turkey, among the Turkish diasporas and in the world at large, an important Islamic network.

Gulen, who has been criticized as a puppet of the Erdogan government, which since its inception in 2002 has been subtracting Turkey from the American orbit and frustrating the American vision of a continuum of “a moderate Islam from the Balkans to Central Asia,” is particularly credited for his thousands of Islamic schools, at all levels, throughout the world and especially in Turkey where they have become a key element in solidifying the Islamic political agenda. For it has transpired that the Movement operates some 85 primary and secondary schools on American soil. The roster of the Gulen schools has been released to the public by the Patriotic Group Act. Those schools are often designated as “science academies” and are concentrated in Texas, Ohio and California, while others are scattered throughout the land, notably in Arizona and Utah, which host charter schools: the Daisy Education Corporation operates three schools in Tucson, under the rubric of the “Sonoran Science Academy,” and in Phoenix it runs an all-level campus with the same name. The Tucson Weekly published a report at the end of 2009 noting that the Sonoran Science Academy had been named the “charter school of the year” by the Arizona Charter School Association, but one dismayed parent, speaking for other parents too, who declined identification for fear of being intimidated by the Gulen movement, said they believed that the school had a hidden agenda to promote Gulen’s brand of Turkish nationalism.[21]

In early 2009, the Beehive Science and Technology Academy, a high school in Salt Lake City, was similarly investigated by the Salt Lake Tribune, where it was reported that the Utah State Charter Board began the inquiry after following complaints from an alarmed parent that while the schools offered a regular program, they also had another mission – to promote certain Islamic beliefs. The inquiry also pointed to questionable financial transactions and hiring practices as proof of the school’s covert ties to Turkish Muslim preacher Fethullah Gulen. The Beehive Principal, Muhammet Frank Erdogan in Salt Lake City admitted such links for his school, and the Tribune found that many of the school’s teachers and founders supported Gulen’s ideals. A history teacher, Adam Kuntz, wished to teach the Holocaust in a WW II class, while the Principal wanted him to revise the plan, based on his questioning the conventional accounts of genocide. A parent, Kelly Wayment, was removed from the school board after he emailed other parents on the Gulen influence at school. He also complained that the teachers tended to be from Turkey and Central Asia, living on working visas in the US. Many are now asking how the Turks succeed in establishing this educational foothold in America, and in introducing religious and political indoctrination there.[22]

As Spencer has pointed out, the teachings of Islam include the mandate to wage violent Jihad against unbelievers, but violence can be temporarily be set aside for strategic reasons, as “medicine for a particular time,” according to the vocabulary of the Jihadists. So, soft ways like indoctrination, “education,” propaganda and the like do not have to be regarded as an ideally elected way to persuade others by gentle means, something which would sound reasonable to western ears, but a pragmatic adaptation to an environment which is instinctively averse to coercive methods and would have otherwise rejected them out of hand. In other words, the means to apply Jihadi activities and to attain Islamic goals are not judged by their moral worth or unworthiness, but by their strategic desirability and tactical feasibility. They are working to introduce, gradually and in imperceptible ways, the hegemony of Islamic law into American society, expecting Americans to accommodate it without protest. Of course, they use the pretext of “Islamophobia” to demand “civil rights” for Muslims, thus transforming pluralistic and tolerant western societies into Muslim states, and using the high standards of equality, freedom of conscience, speech and assembly to take over those very notions and curtail them once they monopolize them.[23]

Much of the activity and financial resources needed for soft Jihad, and indirectly in terrorism in America, are focused around the SAAR Network, which encompasses a complex corporate web of companies, “charities” and non-profit associations, sometimes also referred to as the SAFA group. The Network handles large-scale money laundering by terrorist organizations and social organizations with overlapping financial assets and executive personnel, seemingly deliberately designed to mislead and delude, and in that regard it controls the most sophisticated terror-funding mechanisms in the US. SAAR originated with a group of foreign Muslim scholars, businessmen and scientists from the Middle East and Asia who gathered in the US in the mid-80s. It was born in Virginia in 1983, but dissolved in 2000, to be replaced by SAFA Trust which is run by many who had been affiliated with SAAR. Federal investigations, according to Emerson, have found that about a hundred non-profit organizations, interrelated through corporate officers and holding companies, have entered in subsidiary relationships to facilitate the funding of terrorist organizations. Most of those organizations have the same individuals at their helms – specifically Middle Eastern nationals in Virginia with ties to radical Islamic groups that have been accused of fostering radicalism and supporting terrorist goals like that of the Hamas.[24]

The Foreign Muslim Lobby

Underlying the activity of the Muslim lobby in the US has been the American widespread, if unjustified, self-accusing feeling that America must have perpetrated some horrifying deed against Muslims to make them hate Americans enough to obliterate so many of them on that day of September 2001. The apologetic stance adopted by many liberals and intellectuals in this respect only enhanced the daring of international Islam to advance more demands for repentance and redress, in an audacious reversal of turning the victims of terror to the culprits and its perpetrators to the “peaceful” party thereof. It is in that campaign of “peace,” which Robert Spencer refers to in his book, Stealth Jihad: How Radical Islam is Subverting America Without Guns of Bombs, where the danger of the Muslim lobby lies.[25] For when subsumed under a rhetoric of “peace,” goodwill, civil rights and the like, the universal mission of Islam, which is acknowledged and articulated by such organizations, trends of thought and movements such as the wahhabis, the Muslim Brothers and any number of active Muslim groupings worldwide, is hidden by its progenitors and ignored by its auditors. So, the importance is minimized, and the existence is denied, that basic Jihadi ideology governs those activities, with long term goals, and an unmistakably clear vision of an ultimate Muslim takeover of the West, America included.[26]

Without a doubt, the most powerful foreign Muslim lobby in America has been the Saudi one. For, not only has its domination of OPEC and of the oil market lent it clout in the American scene, made its Ambassador in Washington the darling of American politics, and allowed it to spend hundreds of millions in erecting mosques and Islamic centers throughout the land, while resisting any attempt to build similar western centers in the Arabian Peninsula. With the new opening of the Obama Administration towards Muslims, and the pilgrimage of liberal Hussein Obama to Riyad to bow before the Arabian absolute monarch, a new era has dawned in America’s foreign relations, that of relinquishing its democratic and loyal ally, Israel, and allying with this erratic and most obscurantist regime in the Middle East.

Saudi Arabia has been exploiting its new stature by imposing more audaciously its school curriculum and extremist Wahhabi mosque literature on the US arena, without an adequate American reaction, since the Saudi lobby has effectively silenced the American resistance. Thus, anti-Israel and anti-Jewish Saudi hate ideology has invaded American mosques and religious Muslim schools. A recent updated report by Nina Shea and Talal Eid[27] sadly and alarmingly illustrates this turn. They make the point that terrorists “are not born, they are made” by extremist indoctrination, and they point to the fact of the growing list of Americans accused of terrorist activities having been inspired by “radical ideology,” the most prominent of which is the Saudi government’s interpretation of Wahhabi, or Hanbali Islam, as also taught and diffused by such fanatic organizations as the Milli Gorus, the MB, the Tablighis, the Deobandis, the Salafi movements, the Jihadi currents of all hues, the Hizbu-a-Tahrir, and any number of followers of those tendencies. Naturally, not all those taught in this tradition end up as terrorists, but observing that the American serviceman who gunned down his fellow soldiers in Kuwait at the outset of the Iraq War, and the military psychological counselor who mowed down his patients in Fort Hood in 2010, not to speak of the killers of September 11, were all schooled in these traditions suffice to make one shudder.

Pardoxically, Saudi Arabia’s enhanced open role on the “educational” and propaganda fronts in the US has also caused that country to be designated by the Obama Administration as one of the 14 countries whose nationals will face additional searches in airports, and whose past record had put it on the State Department black list for engaging in egregious violations, but the US has also invoked a “national interest” waiver on any actions (including sanctions), giving the Saudi state a free pass. Of course, both parties can claim in their defense that Riyad has itself been fighting terrorists, and in that she is the closest Arab ally of the US, so how can it be included in that list? The only problem is that “education” and indoctrination are ignored by official US agencies as “non-violent incitement” though they are recognized by all experts and security agencies as primary inducements to terrorist acts. So, Saudi “educational” programs in Saudi Arabia and worldwide continue unabated, though with some amendments, and are expanding with new facilities to open in Ireland and France, and enlarge the Islamic Saudi Academy in northern Virginia and the Khalil Jubran Academy in Brooklyn.[28] All the US government is doing is to meekly protest that the reforms were not “complete,” and it continues to remind the public that the Saudi textbooks, both at home and abroad, still teach hatred towards other religions, for example that Jews and Christians are enemies of the Believers and that apostates, polytheists and adulterers (except, of course, the sheikhs and the monarchy who maintain harems), deserve death.

The Academic Lobby

A combination of the domestic lobby, with the tens of thousands of American Muslim students, studying or otherwise busy on campuses across the US, and of the additional tens of thousands of foreign Muslim students on the same campuses, creates not only an opportunity for both sorts of scholars to meet, to reinforce each other, to organize politically in force, and to ally on campus with anti-Semites or extreme leftists hostile to Israel and Jews, but also brings them under the one umbrella of the Muslim Student Association, usually financed by Saudi Arabia or other rich Arab states. Anyone who has experienced the activities of such Associations, the amount of energy, funds and planning they invest in luring neutral students to their camp and their militant colleagues to more forceful and more vociferous events, and the food catering, attention to detail, personal treatment of the ingathered and the forging of recurrent contacts with them, has come to appreciate the scope and the depth of this endeavor. A usually articulate guest speaker: a religious Muslim scholar, either immigrant to the US or naturalized, a successful Muslim businessman in the US, a diplomat or a scholar in a field where he excelled, are produced to the audience of students to both deliver his speech and answer questions. Muslim students stand guard at the exit, both to prevent disturbances and to take leave of the departing guests and ensuring their return to other events.

Exemplary of activities among academics, where young students are malleable and ready to try various new experiences, and often pick the cause of the underdog and identify with it, has been the intensive efforts made by Muslims on campuses right after September 11, to regain the hearts of their fellow Americans, by playing the victims of the situation instead of its perpetrators. Many of the Muslim academic lobbyists who are in this apologetic situation, cite “moral” arguments to encourage guilt among western intellectuals and civil rights activists who are sensitive to human rights issues. Thy invoke notions of humanity, freedom, democracy, equality and compassion, which ring familiar bells in liberal ears, and produce an inordinate amount of self-flagellation, remorse and self-inflicted guilt among naïve and well-meaning souls who do not comprehend that these very terms and notions mean different things to those who utter them, and are used only to subvert western conscience. This tactic works, because there are not a few Americans who cultivate their sense of guilt to the point of adopting the Muslim point of view lock, stock and barrel, militate for it at the detriment of their own national interests, apologize for their past deeds, express their dismay at their government’s policies and unwittingly mobilize their professional authority and human sensitivity in the service of the enemies of their own civilization, country and interests. As a consequence, they begin to speak of their own government as “imperialistic,” of their economy and international trade as “exploitative,” of their culture as “arrogant,” and of their sworn enemies as “kind,” “co-operative” “underdogs” who deserve sympathy, “victims” who merit redress, and as members of a worthy and misunderstood civilization. This is dhimmitude at its “best,” namely taking blows and punches and showing sycophantic gratitude for them.

Naturally, Muslim militants not only find solace and encouragement in these words of support from within their perceived enemies ranks, but also view them as “proofs” that their messages are being absorbed by their detractors, and that the time will come when the latter will see the light and convert to Islam. Instructive in this regard are the words of Dr Fatihi, a member of the faculty of The Harvard School of Medicine, who, following the September 11 drama, reported to the Arabic Press the following:

From day one, the media began hinting that Muslim and Arab hands were behind the event. We convened an emergency meeting of the Islamic Center in Boston and decided to organize blood donations, to be covered by the media… We all tried to hang on to any bit of information that would distance this criminal act from Muslim and Arab hands… For we wanted to prove our humanity, as we were attacked on all sides, and we were afraid that our preaching for Allah was set back 50 years in the US and the entire world…

On Saturday the 15^th of September I took my wife and children to the largest church in Boston at Copley Square, to represent Islam there, at the invitation of Boston senators…We were welcomed as if we were foreign ambassadors… The senior priest defended Islam in his sermon and introduced me to the audience as the representative of the Muslim Association of Boston. Following the sermon, I read a statement of the heads of the Muslim religion who condemned the events [not the perpetrators], and explained the principles of Islam and its sublime teachings…

After that, I read translations into English of verses from the Qur’an… Those were moments I shall never forget, because the entire audience broke in tears when they heard the Words of Allah… One of them told me: ’I do not understand Arabic, but what you said certainly sounded like the words of Allah.’ Another woman left a note in my hand upon leaving the church in tears. It said: ’Forgive us for our past and present. Please continue to sermonize to us.’ Another person, also in tears, stood at the gate of the church and said: ’You are just like us, nay, better!’

On Sunday, 16 September, we issued an invitation to the public to visit the Islamic Center that lay between Harvard and MIT. We expected 100 visitors , but we had 1,000…, including University professors, priests, who were invited to speak, and all of them expressed solidarity with the Muslims [not with their victims]… There were many questions from the public who wanted to understand the teachings of Islam, not one of them was hostile. On the contrary, they were in tears when they heard about the lofty principles of Islam. Many of them had only heard of Islam through the incitement of the media. I was invited to repeat the same at another gathering in the church the same day, and the sights were the same…

On Thursday, a delegation of 300 Professors and students from Harvard, accompanied by the American Ambassador to Vienna, undertook a visit of the Islamic Center. They sat on the floor of the mosque… WE talked to them, explained Islam and cleared it from the suspicions that had been attached to it. I once again read from the Qur’an and their eyes filled with tears. Many of them were so excited that they asked to participate in the weekly classes that the Center holds for non-Muslims. Friday, 21^st September, A Muslim delegation convened for a closed meeting with the Governor of Massachussetts, where the introduction of Islam into school curriculi was discussed, so as to avert racism against Islam, which originates from American ignorance of the Islamic faith…

This is an example of what is happening today in Boston and other American cities. Our proselytizing not only was not set back 50 years as we had feared, but those 11 days that have elapsed since September 11, were the equivalent of 11 years of proselytizing. I am writing to you today with full confidence that Islam will expand all over America and the entire world, Allah Willing, because the world is all too eager to know Islam.[29]

So far so good, if it were not for the slight hyperbole. But the same Dr Fatihi, who praised the lofty principles of Islam and bragged about his own successes, like the Prophet, in bringing non-Muslims to tears, could not retain for too long his obscene bigotry against the Jews, and started boasting, he who advocated understanding and harmony, about destroying the Judeao-Christian dialogue. Again, let this eminent intellectual and champion of Islamic-style fraternity speak for himself:

In spite of campaigns of distortion launched by the Zionist lobby, which mobilizes many of the media to its service, there are signs that our intensive educational campaign is bearing fruit. For example, the number of converts has doubled since September 11… and many non-Muslims have evinced solidarity with Muslims in American universities. For example, dozens of non-Muslim female students at Wayne University have worn the veil in solidarity with Muslim students on campus and elsewhere…

Jewish organizations have called upon us to open dialogue with them, because they are afraid of the Christian-Muslim dialogue in churches, mosques and campuses. There are already positive fruits to the Christian-Muslim dialogue: a radio station has broadcast a sympathetic program about the suffering of the Palestinians…something that angered the Jews and they decided to boycott it, which in turn increased the pro-Muslim coverage… For example, the station interviewed young American female students who converted to Islam, through the efforts of the Boston Islamic Association… They hold advanced degrees from the Boston and Harvard universities, and they spoke about the greatness and might of Islam and the sublime status of women in Islam, which prompted their conversion into the faith.

Thus, the Muslim community in America in general, and Boston in particular, has become perplexing to the Zionist lobby. In fact, what the Qur’an said about them is true: ”They will be humiliated wherever they are found, unless they are protected under a Covenant with Allah… They have incurred Allah’s wrath and they have been affected with misery. That is because they have continuously rejected the Signs of Allah and were after slaying the Prophets without just cause, and this resulted from their disobedience and their habit of transgression.”[30]

Conclusions

While the Jewish lobby in the US has been seeking American interest and Israeli interest as part of the larger American one, the Muslim lobby has posted as its stated goal to prefer its interest over the American one, often to the latter’s detriment. While Jews regard themselves as part and parcel of America and contribute handily to its political, social, cultural and economic life, many Muslims view their presence there as an avant garde of a Muslim takeover, and therefore they act to weaken America and undermine it, in order to eventually destroy it and substitute for it their Muslim regime.
Jews regard America as the forefront of progress, democracy and freedom, but Muslims, as reflected in their organizations’ platforms, regard America as the pinnacle of retrogression, corruption and oppression, hence the need to fight it and obliterate it.
But while the Jews have only little and insignificant Israel to count on to accomplish their constructive and positive goals, the Muslims can rely on a vast Muslim, diversified and powerful world, rich with petroleum and petro-dollars, with intrigue and pipedreams, with Jihad and aggression, to sustain them in their destructive and subversive objectives.

It is incomparably easier for the Israeli Lobby in the US to gain the sympathy and the confidence of the American public and of policy and opinion makers, than can the Muslim Lobby ever dream to achieve. And that, not only due to the vast common grounds of democratic and liberal norms which unite both countries, and the Judaeo – Christian background which they share, but mainly due to the infallible reliability of Israel as an ally of the US under any circumstance. We remember the unfolding of the Iraq War, when such “allies” as Saudi Arabia, which was rescued from occupation by Iraq only a decade earlier, suddenly could not allow its American rescuers to use their air bases on Saudi land against a “brotherly Arab state,” or Turkey who had provided the main bases against Iraq during the Gulf War, suddenly turning sour under the Islamic regime of Erdogan, and refusing to open a second front from its territory, which was to shorten the war and save American lives. In a dire time of need, the US had to forego the second front from her NATO Ally’s territory and to compress all her forces in tiny Kuwait. But Israel allowed during those very hours the deployment of American troops on its land and the stockpiling of American weapons in its depots. In this vein, Israel’s invaluable technological advances have benefited America’s arms industries.

As long as the US is dependent on oil, both positively to fuel its industry and that of its allies, and negatively to prevent its takeover by rivals like China, the US will continue to turn a blind eye to the violations of human rights which radiate from Saudi Arabia and to the subversive Islamic revolution that is fed by the Wahhabi and other[31] Muslim radical regimes. Paradoxically, it is precisely that conservative, reactionary and puritanical regime, which loathes revolution and change and is reluctant to reform and mend its ways, which has been steadily and unmistakably nourishing the elements of its own demise, when the generations fed by the radical and unforgiving Jihad ideology of the Hanbali school that is dispensed to them, rise to demand its implementation. Therefore, to scuttle that eventuality, the US must continue to press the Saudis for reforming their curriculum, introduce more tolerance of other faiths, excise hatred from the literature, blunt the militancy of their Jihadi zeal, and reduce publicly and financially their support of such agents of its implementation as the Muslim Brothers. After all, 15 out of the 19 perpetrators of September 11 were Saudis, as well as many thousands of others who perished in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia and other battlefields, all products of the Saudi “educational” system, including Osama bin-Laden.

One ought to heed Youssef Ibrahim’s warning regarding the Muslim-Saudi lobby in the US.[32] He asserts that while all ethnic lobbies in America have been built from the bottom up, based on American members of certain ethnic groups (Jews, Greeks, Armenians etc), the “sinister Saudi lobby,” where there are hardly any Saudi Americans, works from the top down. It consists of American businessmen, oilmen and academics, as well as Arab-Americans from Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia, all “hijacked” or bribed to fill[33]that void. These individuals are vocal on behalf of Saudi Arabia on Capitol Hill, the White House, the Pentagon, to the extent that one day after September 11, all the 50 followers of Bin Laden who were stranded in the US were allowed to leave without any questions asked. That facility of movement against all rules is facilitated by the flow of Saudi dollars to mosques, academic institutions which are in dire budgetary straits, the oil and arms industries, and any other individuals or institutions likely to bend to Saudi whim. Renowned is the case of Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, whose 10 million check for the Twin Towers fund was returned by Mayor Giuliani, when the Prince linked the September 11 horrors to America’s policies in the Middle East. Several years later he snuck back his money to the US as a $20 million grant to Harvard University, not to study anything specifically Saudi, but Islam, Islamic jurisprudence and Islamic history. This is how patience for the long haul can serve the cause of Islam of the MB type and vision. Ibrahim ominously warns: ”this money is not a gift to the American people from American Arabs or American Muslims, and the expected quid quo pro could be the sale of America’s soul”.[34]

[1] Gary C. David, “The Creation of Arab-American: Political Activism and Ethnic (Dis)Unity”, Critical Sociology, 10 April, 2007, pp. 837-40

[2] Ernst McCarus (ed), The Development of Arab-American Identity, The University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1994 Introduction.See also Iyad Barghouti, Palestinian Americans: Sico-Political Attitudes of Palestinian Americans Towards the Arab-Israeli Conflict, Center for Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, Durham University, Occasional Papers No 38, 1988.

[3] Michael Paulson, “Muslims Eye Role at US Polls”, Boston Globe, 23 October , 2000. The article is headlined on A1, an indication of its importance in the eyes of the editor, but its bulk appears in p. A12.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Al-Hayat, (London) 11 November, 2001, MEMRI. Ibid.

[6] Al-Ayyam (London), 12 November, 2001.

[7] Anny Bakalian and Mehdi Bozorgmehr, Backlash 9/11: Middle Eastern and Muslim Americans Respond, UC Berkeley, 2009, p. 2.

[8] Ibid. pp. 100-103.

[9] Anny Bakalian and Mehdi Bozorgmehr, Backlash 9/11: Middle Eastern and Muslim Americans Respond,
UC Berkeley, 2009 , Introduction.

[10] David Gaubatz and Paul Sperry, Muslim Mafia:Inside the Secret Underworld that’s Conspiring to Islamize America, WND Books, especially Ch. 14 , “The Ikhwan Mafia”, pp. 236 ff.

[11] Robert Spencer, Stealth Jihad, Regnery Publishing, Inc., Wash DC, 2009, pp. 16-18.

[12] www.nefafoundation.org/miscellaneous/HLF/Akram_GeneralStrategicGoal.pdf

[13] http:/nefafoundation.org/miscellaneous/HLF/CoughlinMemo.pdf

[14] Steven Emerson, Jihad Incorporated : A Guide to Militant Islam in the US, Prometheus Books, N.Y. 2006, pp.434ff .

[15] Robert Spencer, Stealth Jihad, Regnery Publishing, Inc., Wash DC, 2009, pp20-25.

[16] For the “Dark Lair of CAIR” see Paul Sperry, Infiltration: How Muslim Spies and Subversives have Penetrated Wahsington, Nelson Current, 2008 . And David Gaubatz and Paul Sperry, Muslim Mafia:Inside the Secret Underworld that’s Conspiring to Islamize America, WND Books.

[17] David Gaubatz and Paul Sperry, Muslim Mafia: Inside the Secret Underworld that is Conspiring to Islamize America, WDN Books, 2009.

[18] Robert Spencer, “Jihadist-defending CAIR Finally Under Investigation”, HumanEvents.com , 14 December, 2009.

[19] Daniel Pipes, “CAIR Attacks the Foreign Policy Research Institute”, FrontPageMag.org, 16 March, 2010.

[20] Robert Spencer, Stealth Jihad, Regnery Publishing, Inc., Wash DC, 2009.

[21] Stephen Schwartz, “Islamist Gulen Movement Runs US Charter Schools”, Islamist Watch, 29 March, 2010.

[22] Ibid.

[23] Spencer, p. 4-6, 9-30.

[24] For extensive details see Steven Emerson, Jihad Incorporated : A Guide to Militant Islam in the US, Prometheus Books, N.Y. 2006, especially Chap 10, the SAAR Network, pp. 381ff.

[25] Robert Spencer, Stealth Jihad, Regnery Publishing, Inc., Wash DC, 2009.

[26] Ibid, see especially the Introduction.

[27] Nina Shea and Talal Eid, “ Saudi Government Extremism and the US Response”, Huffington Post, 26 January, 2010.

[28] Robert Spencer, Stealth Jihad, Regnery Publishing, Inc., Wash DC, 2009, pp. 209-212

[29] Article by Dr Fatihi in Al-Ahram al-‘Arabi (The NYT of the Arab World), Cairo, 20 October, 2001. It is noteworthy that this motif ‘ of tears when one hears the sublime verses of the Qur’an’ goes back to early Islamic history, which relates that the Christians of Najran in southern Arabia burst into tears when they heard the Prophet reciting to them the Word of Allah, and they converted to Islam on the spot. ( See Report 36 by Memri of 2001-2.

[30] This is Sura3, Verse 113 from the Qur’an, which is cited as the Word of Allah. The article by Fatihi was published in Al-Hayat (London), 11 November, 2001. See MEMRI, 36, 2001-2. This discussion, in its wider context, is dealt with in R. Israeli, Islamikaze: Mainifestations of Islamic Martyrology, Frank Cass, London, 2003, pp. 56-8.

[32] Youssef Ibrahim, “Israel Lobby’s Pull Pales Next to Evil Saudi Input”, 25 September, 2007,
www.nysun.com/foreign/israel-lobbys-pull-pales-next-to-evil-saudi-input/63353/

[33] Ibid.

[34] Note the upheaval caused by the appointment of Chas Freeman, former an Ambassador to Saudi Arabia and a recipient of its financial favors, as Chair of the National Intelligence Council . See Eli Lake, “Obama’s Intelligence Pick Linked to Saudi Arabia”, 27 February, 2009. http://washingtontimes.com/news/2009/feb/obamas-intelligence-pick-linked-to-saudi-arabia/print

Dr. Israeli’s post speech interview is here: