Peter Skerry at the Brookings Institution has written an article titled “The Muslim-American Muddle, America and the World After 9/11, Islamic World, Religion, Policy and Politics, Social Issues.” The article begins:
A decade after 9/11, America has reached a political and intellectual stalemate regarding the Muslims in its midst. Many Americans continue to fear their Muslim neighbors and fellow citizens, if not as potential terrorists then as terrorist sympathizers — or, more generally, as the bearers of an alien culture shared by America’s enemies.Stoking these fears are a handful of zealous investigative journalists and bloggers who recycle a body of facts about the Islamist origins of most Muslim leaders and of virtually all major American Muslim organizations. Largely taken from the federal government’s successful prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation, a Hamas front group, this evidence is incontrovertible — yet its implications are far from clear. As critics repeat and re-examine them, the facts take on a frozen-in-time quality, like artifacts of political archeology never put into any wider context. The critics fail to acknowledge that individuals who once espoused Islamist views do not necessarily remain committed to them over time. People do mature beyond youthful folly and rage, and America causes immigrants to change. On the other hand, our political, media, and intellectual elites routinely dismiss these findings as irrelevant ancient history. This, too, is a mistake, both substantively and politically: Though these Muslim leaders and organizations do not represent all (or even most) Muslim Americans, they do dominate the relevant political space. Moreover, their Islamist ideology has had, and continues to have, a formative influence on how Muslims think of their place in America and of America’s relationship to the Islamic world. Elite opinion also systematically denies or ignores the fact that Islam is a dynamic, even aggressively proselytizing religion. This is not to suggest that Muslim-American leaders are terrorists or terrorist sympathizers; nor is it to criticize how they interpret the call to advance Islam. Like many Christians, many Muslims regard their own exemplary actions as the best way to spread their faith. Nevertheless, Muslim leaders readily acknowledge that not so long ago they dreamt of, as some have put it, “the crescent flag one day flying over the White House.” For most leaders, perhaps for all, this fantasy long since collided with reality. Yet its influence lingers.
Read the rest here.
The GMBDW acknowledges that we are one of the publications that “recycle a body of facts about the Islamist origins of most Muslim leaders and of virtually all major American Muslim organizations.” We would be please to stop doing so should both of the following conditions be met:
1) The U.S. Muslim Brotherhood organizations honestly acknowledge their origins in the Global Muslim Brotherhood.
2) The U.S. Muslim Brotherhood organizations no longer operate under the influence of and as part of the Global Muslim Brotherhood.
As documented in many of the thousands of GMBDW posts concerning the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood organizations, there is no evidence that either of these conditions is even close to being met so we will continue to “recycle” these facts as long as it is necessary. We should also point out that the evidence for the Muslim Brotherhood origins of these organizations goes far beyond the Holy Land evidence and is extensively documented in a Hudson Institute report on the subject. Nevertheless, it is rare for an institution such as Brookings to even acknowledge some of the facts about the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood and the article is worth reading for the insights it provides.