On Sunday, November 23, President Donald Trump announced his plans to finally designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a foreign terrorist organization, due in large part to new revelations that point toward the Islamic group’s growing radicalism and increasingly large influence in the West.
As background, the Muslim Brotherhood was first founded in Egypt during the 1920s and has grown into one of the most influential Islamic organizations on the planet. It’s known for creating a noxious cocktail of religious teaching and political activism and support for social welfare reforms.
The organization came to power by winning the presidency in Egypt during the now infamous Arab Spring that took place in the early 2010s. Its rule came crashing to an end in 2013. Egypt has since labeled the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization, along with both the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia.
In any case, President Trump, speaking with Just the News about his administration’s currently planned moves regarding the infamous group, said, “It will be done in the strongest and most powerful terms. Final documents are being drawn.”
That is good news for the many think tanks and congressional lawmakers have been calling for the president to make such a designation for quite some time now. In fact, Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has already labeled both the Muslim Brotherhood and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) as foreign terrorist groups in the Lone Star State.
Part of the purpose of the federal government designating the organization a terrorist group is severing financing and other means of support for its operation. A recent analysis conducted by the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy revealed that the Muslim Brotherhood has reached the 50% mark in a plan to “transform Western society from within.”
“We are now 50 years into the Brotherhood’s 100-year plan to entrench themselves into key institutions in the United States and other Western societies to undermine and destroy our democracy,” ISGAP’s director, Dr. Charles Asher Small, went on to say. “This is not simply a political movement but a transnational ideological project that adapts itself to Western systems while working to undermine them.”
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The group, which has a number of different factions under its umbrella, as a whole stands for strict adherence to Sharia law and has pushed for a caliphate. For those who might not have a deep understanding of the Islamic religion, a caliphate, according to the New York Post, is a government under the rule of strict Islamic religious code, also known as Sharia law. It’s widely known for its oppression of women’s rights and extreme forms of punishment. As you can see, it’s completely incompatible with the Judeo-Christian values championed by the West.
“Globally, the Brotherhood is a gateway to terrorism, infusing members with the religious doctrines and hatred that justify violence,” an October report on the Muslim Brotherhood by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies think tank explained. “The most determined of these members then form splinter groups or migrate individually to terrorist organizations.”
While in office during his first term, President Trump considered labeling the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist group. This, of course, didn’t sit well with the organization, who struck back at the label, referring to their work as advocacy for “our moderate and peaceful thinking in what we believe to be right, for honest and constructive cooperation, to serve the communities in which we live and humanity as a whole.”
However, when you take a peek at their motto, it paints a much different picture. The motto says, “Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. The Qur’an is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.” Not exactly the kind of rhetoric a group that is all about being peaceful would use.
In August, Secretary of State Marco Rubio stated that designating the Muslim Brotherhood as a foreign terrorist organization was a work already underway at the time. “Obviously, there are different branches of the Muslim Brotherhood, so you’d have to designate each one of them,” he said. He then explained that the State Department was in the middle of a long preparatory process in order to make the designation a reality.