Muslim Bro/hood subverted the universities

How the Muslim Brotherhood has subverted the universities
MELANIE PHILLIPS
JAN 2
Anti-Israel demonstrators' "die-in" at Harvard Business School
Decent people throughout the west have been astounded and appalled at how the universities have become the stamping ground of the new equivalent of the Hitler youth: tens of thousands of young people baying for the extermination of Israel and the blood of Jews as their response to the Hamas pogrom of October 7 and subsequent war in Gaza.

There’s been much handwringing about the fact that the universities, which should be the crucible of reason, have spawned such ignorance, bigotry and murderous rage. Anyone who’s been paying attention to what’s been happening in higher education over the past few decades — the universities’ takeover by Marxist ideologues and their bullying, intimidation and censorship of anyone who challenges totalitarian, barking mad, left-wing nostrums — cannot be entirely surprised by the vicious onslaught against Jews on campus. Yet even given the support for the ineradicably antisemitic Palestinian cause which is now the default in progressive circles, the violent intimidation and moral bankruptcy that have been on display since October 7 have been shocking and terrifying.

The astonishing situation at Harvard, whose president, Claudine Gay, was one of the trio of Ivy League heads who notoriously refused to acknowledge to a congressional committee that calls on campus for genocide against the Jews violated their codes of conduct — and who is now under pressure to resign amidst turmoil on campus — shone a spotlight onto the civilisational corruption at the heart of the universities.

This sewer has been fed over the years by various channels of western thinking. Much of it is due to the left-wing doctrine of “intersectionality,” which ordains that the world is divided between the oppressed who can do no wrong and oppressors who can do no right — and which holds grotesquely that Jews are oppressors and can never be victims.

Into this moral and intellectual vacuum have paraglided the jihadis of the Muslim Brotherhood, understanding correctly that this cultural demoralisation gives them the opportunity to strike a mortal blow against the Jews and the west in order to fulfil their aim of destroying the former and conquering the latter.

A report by the Jerusalem Centre for Public Affairs, Jihad on Campus Unmasked, details how American universities have been hijacked by Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). The JCPA says its role is far more sinister than other anti-Israel organisations pushing propaganda narratives onto impressionable college students because it may be an active facilitator of Hamas’s strategy.

According to Adela Cojab Moadeb, a law student, former campus activist and the complainant in a Department of Education action pushing for equal protections for Jewish students at New York University in 2019, SJP was ready with relevant material for dissemination immediately after October 7, which was only possible for a student organisation with some advance warning.

Think about that.

The report says:

In other words, from the level of action readiness by SJP campus groups, SJP chapters were made ready for a rapid propaganda response to any anticipated Hamas action. If any of the SJP chapters or the national centre had an advance warning of an impending attack and had agreed to facilitate the consequent information campaign, they could be considered accessories after the fact or co-conspirators in planning the attack. This means that the organisation and any of its constituent members who were privy to that information and took any part in relevant, coordinated activities could be subject to a criminal investigation.

SJP, Cojab contends, should be recognised as closely affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, which is believed by many to be a grassroots revolutionary movement engaged in Muslim advocacy. In contrast to its reputation of being democratic, progressive, and revolutionary, the Muslim Brotherhood — the source from which Hamas and most jihadist groups emerged —is a tribal/familial, rigidly hierarchical, and tightly controlled movement that began in Egypt under the ideological influence of the Bolsheviks and Nazis.

The Brotherhood is engaged in a political form of Islam and views outsiders with suspicion even when they share its ideology and views. The Muslim Brotherhood, which has migrated from Egypt to Turkey and Europe following the counter-coup by now-President Al Sissi, has been generously funded by Qatar, which also reported supporting Hamas and other terrorist organizations. SJP’s sister organisation, American Muslims for Palestine, shares a co-founder, Hatem Bazian, a lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley and recipient of donations from the AFR Foundation. According to the Middle East Forum, this foundation appears to serve as an umbrella for approximately 50 private Islamist grant-making foundations. Moreover, at least one of these organizations, the Muslim American Youth Association, has, according to the FBI, “played pivotal roles in building [the Palestinian terrorist group] Hamas’s infrastructure in the United States”.

The donation to American Muslims for Palestine (AMP) may seem negligible. Still, under federal law, non-profits in the United States are not required to disclose all their funding sources, even those from abroad (although several states require greater transparency). The financial trail from Hamas-linked and other Islamist entities to SJP and its network could be substantially greater than is currently known. Before creating AMP and SJP, Bazian was a fundraiser for KindHearts. This pro-Palestinian charity had its assets frozen by the 9 federal government for “support for terrorism behind the façade of charitable giving,” specifically for allegedly providing aid to the terrorist organisation Hamas,” according to InfluenceWatch. KindHearts denied these allegations, but the pattern of links between Bazian and Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad-linked entities has already been explored extensively by the Jerusalem Centre for Public Affairs.

It is of course shocking that SJP has been able to make such inroads on campus. Shocking because, while SJP’s jihadi connections may not be widely known, university administrators either chose to ignore or were themselves in full agreement with its virulently anti-Israel, anti-western agenda.

Even more disturbing is that British and US governments have failed to identify the Muslim Brotherhood — the parent of Hamas and the global fount of Sunni jihadi aggression — as a subversive enemy of the west which must be isolated and neutralised. Instead, they have turned a blind eye while the Brotherhood steadily advances its agenda not just on campus but throughout the west.

In 2014, a UK government report by the former British ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Sir John Jenkins, summarised the history of the Brotherhood’s activities in Britain. It said:

In the 1990s the Muslim Brotherhood and their associates established public facing and apparently national organisations in the UK to promote their views. None were openly identified with the Muslim Brotherhood and membership of the Muslim Brotherhood remained (and still remains) a secret. But for some years the Muslim Brotherhood shaped the new Islamic Society of Britain (ISB), dominated the Muslim Association of Britain (MAB) and played an important role in establishing and then running the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB).

MAB became politically active, notably in connection with Palestine and Iraq, and promoted candidates in national and local elections. The MCB sought and obtained a dialogue with Government. MAB were active partners in a security dialogue with the police and collaborated with the police in ejecting Abu Hamza, the militant Salafist preacher, from a mosque in north London. The MAB have participated in the governance of this mosque ever since. In 2009 the then government suspended dialogue with the MCB after an office holder signed a public document which appeared to condone violence against any country supporting an arms blockade against Gaza. There has been no substantive dialogue since then between any part of the Brotherhood in the UK and Government.

In 2020, Jenkins wrote in the Spectator that Britain was still failing to deal with the Brotherhood. His analysis of the reasons was as alarming as it was unsparing. On what he had encountered when he conducted his 2014 review, he wrote:

It certainly wasn’t plain sailing. But the problem wasn’t the Islamists, many of whom were only too willing to speak to me (and when they weren’t, it was water off a duck’s back). Instead it was barely disguised hostility to the whole idea of the review from some experts in the field (who seemed to regard it as an impertinence for a mere government to question their research) and, perhaps more surprising, from some colleagues.

They seemed to have a grab-bag of objections, some reasonable, most not. The project, they said, served a hard-right agenda. Or, they said, we were being used by the Emiratis, Egyptians or Saudis to pursue their own vendettas (we weren’t).

Islamists, with whom we had engaged for decades, were simply misunderstood, it was claimed — and I was abetting that misunderstanding. They weren’t anti-democratic. And in any case, governmental responsibility would domesticate them.

Islamism, it was argued, was an authentic and understandable response to oppression. The Brotherhood, in particular, some suggested, were like Christian Democrats with beards, who acted as an important firewall on the primrose path to radicalisation. These people said that the Brotherhood offered the suffering masses of the Islamic world a peaceful political alternative to the otherwise inevitable explosion of righteous anger against Arab dictators and a hostile and Islamophobic west.

Six years on from his review, after the Islamist hijacking of Libya, the incompetent rule of the Brotherhood in Egypt and the horrors of Isis, Jenkins found that, while eyes were being opened in Europe to the realities of Islamic extremism, in Britain heads were still firmly in the sand. He wrote:

The police still seem to believe that ideology (at least on this issue) is a private matter and they should anyway focus strictly on counter-terrorism — which, by the way, is increasingly about far-right movements. Christian and Jewish groups up and down the country seem to think that there is nothing that can’t be resolved by a nice cup of tea and more inter-faith dialogue. [My emphasis] The local government association commissions research on the offensiveness of the word “Islamist”. And underneath it all, one detects the undiminished inclination of the bureaucratic “machine” to pursue what it considers to be the path of least resistance: engagement with Islamists.

In America, the Council on American–Islamic Relations (CAIR) is a Muslim Brotherhood advocacy group that was named in a list of co-conspirators and/or joint ventures in the federal terrorism prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development. The JCPA has written:

It is headquartered on Capitol Hill in Washington D.C., with regional offices nationwide. Since its founding in 1994, CAIR has grown into a large organisation with a budget of over $2 million; it describes itself as “the nation’s leading Muslim organisation in the civil rights and advocacy arenas”. CAIR followed a typical Islamist pattern which criticises governments’ attempts to confront processes of radicalisation, maintaining that “Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) programs actively surveil, profile, censor, and divide the American Muslim community.” CAIR members, inter alia, have been involved in the delegitimisation campaign against Israel. This includes signing various petitions, publishing anti-Israeli press releases, and more.

The JCPA also says that the Islamic Society of North America is “another US Muslim Brotherhood organisation that emerged from the Brotherhood’s early structure in the country”. It states on its website, however, that it has never been subject to Brotherhood control and that it was

“very disturbed”when the Department of Justice named it as another of “unindicted co-conspirators” in the Holy Land case. ISNA has engaged legal counsel to protect its rights and maintain its organisational integrity and credibility by immediate removal of ISNA from this list.

The JCPA goes on:

The organisation is probably best known for its annual convention, which in the past hosted speakers who used pro-Islamist, anti-Israeli, and anti-western rhetoric…ISNA addressed senior officials of the Obama administration a number of times to protest against Israel’s policy in Gaza. During Operation Cast Lead in July-August 2014, it protested against the “escalation of violence against the Palestinians” on Israel’s part and against Israeli bombings in Gaza which hurt, it claims, “mainly women and children”.

On National Review, Andrew McCarthy has noted:

I’ve written for decades that the Muslim Brotherhood — the world’s most effective sharia-supremacist organisation — was building an infrastructure in the west, the foundation of which were not notorious jihadists but rather the Muslim Students Associations. Established in the mid-sixties by just a handful of obscure chapters on midwestern campuses, there are now hundreds of MSA chapters in campuses across the United States and Canada. They steep students in the anti-western animus of Islamist scholars; this grooms them to find common cause (or is it “intersectionality”) with the radical students, faculty, and administrators of the campus Left and its DEI indoctrination.

You want to know how Harvard, within days of the October 7 atrocities, could generate a statement in which nearly three dozen student associations effectively champion jihadist terrorism against the only democracy in the Middle East? That’s how.

Despite all the evidence that the Muslim Brotherhood is a transit point for jihadi extremism and for individuals and groups involved in violent and terrorist acts and despite the fact that it is proscribed in numerous Muslim countries, successive British and US governments have refused to ban it.

The result is the brainwashing, jihadi extremism and dehumanisation of Jews now at epidemic levels on campus and elsewhere in the west.

Later this week: how schools are indoctrinating children in hatred of Israel.