A window on the muslim brotherhood in america

Elibiary (cont’d): Plus, as part of my engagement with Muslim commu­nities across the country, I have met privately with all the major nationalMuslim organizations regularly demonized as “front groups” for the Muslim Brotherhood and gained from them all a very clear understand­ing of their perspectives on Islamism/Political Islam in our country. Inmy opinion, these community organizations are in 2013 operating asAmerican organizations fully within the bounds of US law for the bene­fit of the American Muslim community and broader American society.

If it’s a matter of recognizing and addressing legitimate security concerns about the “US Muslim Brotherhood,” you’d be hard pressed to find someone who’s done more substantively on the topic than I have over the past decade.

As the FBI’s own press release⁵³ about some of my work stated, I’ve been building up community-based partnerships with law enforcement since2003. One can’t do that in the Dallas-based environment where I grewup without first addressing the mess left behind by HLF. Therefore, it’s illogical to ever accuse me of being dismissive of legitimate “concerns about the US Muslim Brotherhood” as simply “Islamophobia.”

Center for Security Policy Occasional Paper Series
RYAN MAURO: A WINDOW ON THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD IN AMERICA

An Annotated Interview with DHS Advisor Mohamed Elibiary

What Elibiary seems to be saying here is basically “trust me.” He assures us he is sen­sitive to “legitimate concerns” about the US Muslim Brotherhood. He has met with what have been considered to be Muslim Brotherhood front groups and satisfied himself abouttheir “perspectives on Islamism/Political Islam in our country.” He believes that they are“operating as American organizations fully within the bounds of US law.”

But Elibiary’s goes on to make clear that he thinks some aspects of US law should notapply to these organizations—namely, the prohibitions on material support for terrorism.He goes on to describe the interference he has run with the US government on behalf of Muslim Brotherhood entities in America. The implication seems to be that the US gov­ernment was preparing to indict components of the US Muslim Brotherhood network be­sides the Holy Land Foundation—and, that he played a role in stopping it from happen­ing.

Elibiary (cont’d): The bottom line is that my decade-plus track record isclear to anyone with an objective eye. In my career, I have both advocat­ed in defense of the Muslim community as well as directly pioneered the at-times dangerous counter-ideological work associated with several ofour nation’s biggest homegrown terrorism investigations.

Post-9/11, I decided to respond by assisting our government counterthreats to the homeland from al-Qaeda and its associated allies. Simul­taneously, I helped my community pick up the pieces and safeguard itsnonprofit organizations, in order to protect its liberties, after the HLF’s closure and eventual conviction.

A segment of our fellow Americans see those two goals as mutually ex­clusive. I naturally disagree with that assessment and my track record in­dicates that. I staked out a flag early after HLF was closed that, due to some mistakes made before 9/11 by community members, the criminaltrial should be allowed to proceed and the criminal justice system’s ver­dict respected. But the corollary to my position was that if the Muslimcommunity leadership and the government can mutually reconcile andturn a new page, then the targeted national Muslim community organi­zations should be allowed to proceed anew.

This passage is instructive in several respects. In it, Elibiary makes plain his workin promoting the false narrative that “the threat to the homeland” comes only from “alQaeda and its associated allies.” This characterization of the threat has as its corollarythe contention that the Muslim Brotherhood and its front organizations he has de­scribed as “mainstream” must be viewed not as the problem but as part of the solution.

RYAN MAURO: A WINDOW ON THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD IN AMERICA

An Annotated Interview with DHS Advisor Mohamed Elibiary

To that end, he has worked to “safeguard [his community’s targeted] nonprofit organi­zations” after the HLF verdicts and to encourage the government to allow them to“proceed anew.”

Elibiary seems to be alluding to his efforts to protect American Islamists fromfurther prosecution in connection with material support for terrorism. This substanti­ates reporting in April 2011 by counterterrorism expert Patrick Poole⁵⁴ that the Justice Department stopped planned indictments of HLF co-conspirators, including a founderof the Council on American-Islamic Relations, several officials with the International Institute of Islamic Thought and the now-defunct SAAR Group.

In the following comments, Elibiary describes how he accomplished this feat byprofessing a “”middle-of-the-road position” that acknowledged America’s “legitimatesecurity concerns about Muslim Brotherhood-associated networks,” yet worked to en­sure that such networks could raise funds for their favored “charities” without fear of prosecution. Never mind that such charities would include Brotherhood organizationsand activities that appear to involve material support for terrorism.

Elibiary (cont’d): Staking out that middle-of-the-road position that would satisfy all of the government’s legitimate security concerns aboutMuslim Brotherhood-associated networks providing material support toterrorism and the organized Muslim community maintaining certainnonprofits and their civic engagement capabilities, naturally was not ac­ceptable to absolutists at both ends of the spectrum.

There were those voices in the Muslim community who wondered if Imight be a sellout because I wouldn’t join the HLF’s Hungry for JusticeCoalition and instead staked out an independent public messaging linein the media. Similarly, there were voices in the anti-Islamist advocacycommunity, including their law enforcement and media allies, who frankly continue to see that, because I won’t accept the marginalizationand eventual indictment of the HLF unindicted co-conspirator commu­nity organizations, that I can’t be fully trusted in a post-9/11 Global War on Terror.

Naturally, I have been happy to see, by and large, the United States gov­ernment arrive at a similar endpoint as I staked out a decade ago in Dal­las. As has been reported in multiple conservative media outlets over the past few years, the long-desired HLF 2.0 trial for the unindicted co­conspirators is no longer going to happen.

Center for Security Policy Occasional Paper Series
RYAN MAURO: A WINDOW ON THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD IN AMERICA

An Annotated Interview with DHS Advisor Mohamed Elibiary

So with the HLF 1.0 trial’s appeal process now complete and no moreHLF-associated “US Muslim Brotherhood” trials coming, an honest and frank discussion should publicly happen between all the parties soour country can move forward.

Mohamed Elibiary’s willingness—however expedient, transitory or insincere it mayhave been—to acknowledge “legitimate national security concerns” about the Brother­hood’s networks puts him at odds with most of his ideological allies in Muslim activ­ism—and, indeed, the mainstream media and far-left activists as well. They default toviewing the mountains of court-admitted evidence of the Brotherhood’s web of influ­ence in America as little more than a conspiracy theory. As we shall see, however, he seems perfectly prepared later in the interview to embrace this narrative and use it as acudgel against his critics.

Turning to “Islamophobia,” this term is all too often used as a political weapon andfundraising appeal. Of course, there have been some incidents of discrimination andhatred towards Muslims. But the sustained use of the “Islamophobia” term was beingused by Islamists long before September 11, 2001.⁵⁵

In fact, according to Abdur-Rahman Muhammad, a former member of an influ­ential US Muslim Brotherhood entity called the International Institute of IslamicThought (IIIT), he attended a group meeting in the early 1990s where the Islamistspresent discussed using the term against their opponents. He later said, “This loath­some term is nothing more than a thought-terminating cliché conceived in the bowelsof Muslim think tanks for the purpose of beating down critics.” ⁵⁶

It is instructive that Mohamed Elibiary is perfectly prepared to use Islamophobiatoward that end.

Elibiary (cont’d): Islamophobia or anti-Muslim bigotry as I prefer to call it, today in “God’s greatest nation” as Michael Medved says, to me comes in three varieties. The first form of Islamophobia is simply an ir­rational bigotry towards anything Islam-or Muslim-related, and that’s a very small percentage of our population that I don’t really worry about because it’s driven by a diminishing emotional radicalization dynamic.

The second form of Islamophobia is a Western civilization phenome­non, aptly coined “anti-Semitism on training wheels” by Suhail Khan, aformer Bush White House official, during his debate with Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy at the Harbor League years ago.⁵⁷

RYAN MAURO: A WINDOW ON THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD IN AMERICA

An Annotated Interview with DHS Advisor Mohamed Elibiary

This form is strongly rejected by Jewish community leaders because itsmacks of a “Protocols of Elders of Zion”-type narrative about Muslimstrying to take over the world. It tells Americans that Islamic theology isuniquely a threat to our way of life and therefore needs special preventa­tive legal measures, just as in centuries past, Western anti-Semites used to make the same arguments of Jews and their faith as being incompati­ble with enlightened European Christian values.

The third form of Islamophobia treats the 2013’s organized AmericanMuslim community as a counter-intelligence subversive front group for the international Islamist movement known as the Muslim Brother­hood. This approach treats the American Muslim community with un­deserved and unfair suspicion, and marginalizes a sizable portion of ourfellow citizens out of the political mainstream, like a pariah.

I, more than most, have gone out of my way to sit down with fellowAmericans who find themselves concerned about Muslim Brotherhood associations within the American Muslim community to help them findpeace of mind after separating fact from fiction.

Unlike some other Muslim community leaders who’ve wholesale labeled all Americans in this category as similar to the “anti-Semitism on train­ing wheels” second category of “Islamophobia,” I have privately gone outof my way to speak graciously with those who’ve most viciously attackedme publicly as a subversive threat myself to our national security and of­fered to clarify their misunderstandings in this area.

Mohamed Elibiary’s parsing of the kinds of people he believes should be described as Islamophobes or anti-Muslim bigots is a classic example of an influence operation.By affecting an air of reasonableness and an openness to “clarify [others] misunder­standings” in order to “separate fact from fiction.” Elibiary has sought to deflect scruti­ny from the abundant evidence that Islamist doctrines, organizations and activities do,indeed, constitute a threat to the United States. It is not unreasoning to fear such athreat; indeed, there is a legitimate basis for doing so and for striving to counter it.

Speaking of influence operations, in October 2011, Patrick Poole broke the story⁵⁸ that Elibiary was suspected of trying to leak confidential information for political pur­poses. The Director of the Texas Department of Public Safety confirmed that Elibiarydownloaded the documents in question. Elibiary has claimed that he was cleared of any misconduct. And, indeed, when questioned about the charges by Congressman LouieGohmert, Secretary Napolitano appeared to deny Poole’s story. Yet, she was respond-

Center for Security Policy Occasional Paper Series
RYAN MAURO: A WINDOW ON THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD IN AMERICA

An Annotated Interview with DHS Advisor Mohamed Elibiary

ing to a question about whether Elibiary tried to leak “classified” information. Poole never asserted that the documents were classified; he said they were marked “Law En­forcement Sensitive.”

In addition, in response to Elibiary’s contention that a DHS investigation had ex­onerated him, Poole told the Clarion Project that the Department of Homeland Securi­ty: “At no time was I or my source ever contacted by anyone at DHS. How could theyhave done an investigation with only one side being heard?”

To hear Elibiary tell it, Patrick Poole and Rep. Gohmert would appear to fall intoone or the other of his categories of “Islamophobes.”`

Elibiary (cont’d): For example, in early 2011, after completing myspeech at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), I ap­proached Patrick Poole, a terrorism investigative reporter, and handed him my business card offering to talk and explain things after his publicbroadside of me in Andrew Breitbart’s Big Peace news site for helpingthe Department of Homeland Security with its Countering Violent Ex­tremism (CVE) policies.

I never heard from Patrick until 8 months later when he emailed me re­questing my response to his charge against me of mishandling classified intelligence, a charge I would later be publicly cleared of a few monthslater in a congressional hearing after an investigation by our government.

Similarly with Texas Congressman Louie Gohmert, as he personally re­called our interaction on a conservative talk radio program, I privately walked up to him in June 2012 at the Texas GOP Convention and of­fered to answer any of his concerns about my work. Unfortunately, theCongressman declined my offer and proceeded to, within about a monthin partnership with Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, CongressmanTrent Franks and others, to fire off a letter to the Inspector General ofDHS requesting I get investigated for Muslim Brotherhood influence.

The questions Reps. Bachmann, Gohmert and their colleagues asked the Inspec­tors General to investigate remain unanswered. In light of what has happened in the inter­val in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Syria and elsewhere that has helped expose the Islamists’ true nature and agenda, they deserve responses, now more than ever.

RYAN MAURO: A WINDOW ON THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD IN AMERICA

An Annotated Interview with DHS Advisor Mohamed Elibiary

5. Elibiary and US Policy

In Part 5, Mohamed Elibiary reasserts his claim that Islamists and their ideology are

not problems, and that the threat is only from irreconcilable violent Islamists like al-Qaeda.

He insists that the root cause of terrorism and Islamic extremism is not the Islamist ideolo­

gy, but legitimate gripes against Western policy. It follows that the solution lies in reconciliation with supposedly non-violent Is­lamists like the Muslim Brotherhood. And the Obama administration has embraced this theory wholeheartedly.

In our opinion, it is both prudent and necessary to look instead to the publicwords of Islamists, like those shown in the Clarion Project’s several documentary filmsand, not least, the 1991 strategic plan of the Muslim Brotherhood in North America⁵⁹ which described its “work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and de­stroying the Western civilization from within.”

Mauro: Why don’t you support the marginalization of the Muslim

Brotherhood and its affiliated groups?

Elibiary: President Obama has certainly expressed publicly the im­portance of strategic engagement for our national interest in multiple speeches, and to a lesser extent, so has Senator McCain, whom I en­dorsed on FOX News early in the 2008 election as a Texas Republican state convention delegate. So this is an area where I think our govern­ment’s policy is ahead of where the national political discourse is in theconservative media.

Having served for more than a decade in various Republican Party ofTexas positions, as well as with Dallas-based roots in the conservativemovement going back two decades, I clearly see that Christian socialconservatives as well as Jewish conservatives concerned about Israel’s fu­ture are simply fearful to the point of psychological paranoia on how todeal with the rising Islamic movements across the globe.

It’s my hope that interviews like this will help address concerns and helpelevate our national political discourse around these topics to catch upwith national realities.

Elibiary is transparently deflecting the key question by touting his success in pene­trating not only the Obama administration’s highest councils but also the RepublicanParty and conservative movement in Texas. We can only surmise the extent to which

Center for Security Policy Occasional Paper Series
RYAN MAURO: A WINDOW ON THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD IN AMERICA

An Annotated Interview with DHS Advisor Mohamed Elibiary

such access has helped misinform those with whom he has been interacting on the DHS Secretary’s Advisory Council and in GOP circles. One indication of that influence, however, can be found in Elibiary’s descriptionof his role on the Department of Homeland Security Advisory Council.

Mauro: As a member of the DHS Secretary’s Homeland Security Advi­

sory Council, what recommendations have you made?

Elibiary: The Secretary’s Homeland Security Advisory Council (HSAC)has approved over 100 official recommendations during the past fouryears and about 90% have either been already implemented or are in theprocess of implementation by the Department of Homeland Security(DHS). As a member of the HSAC, I voted along with my colleagues topass on all those recommendations to Secretary Napolitano for consider­ation. The Secretary then signs off on what she agrees with and ordersits implementation.

Those recommendations cover many areas that DHS works in fromcounter-terrorism to cyber-security, from immigration enforcement byICE to disaster resiliency by FEMA, from border enforcement by CBPto Infrastructure Protection by NPPD. An example of a direct recom­mendation the HSAC offered and the Secretary approved was the can­cellation of the post-9/11 color-coded terrorism alert system we used tosee everywhere and its replacement with a more effective National Ter­rorism Advisory System.

Another impact came about in the aftermath of Elibiary’s recognition by the FBI Director at the Bureau’s Training Academy at Quantico, Virginia on September 8,2011. Within days, a series of articles – one of which was accompanied by photographstaken on a cell phone in the Academy’s library – began appearing in Wired Magazine. They expressed outrage at the offensive nature of the FBI’s training curriculum andmaterials concerning the connections between Islamist supremacism, jihad and terror­ism.

On October 4, 2011, Elibiary joined other Islamist activists and leftists in writingDirector Mueller demanding that the FBI’s training materials be purged of such offen­sive material. Fifteen days later, he was among 59 individuals and groups who wrotethen-Homeland Security Advisor to the President John Brennan insisting that thepurge be extended to the training and trainers involved with the military, the intelli­

RYAN MAURO: A WINDOW ON THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD IN AMERICA

An Annotated Interview with DHS Advisor Mohamed Elibiary

gence community and homeland security/law enforcement community, as well. On November 11^th, Brennan agreed.

This document purge was accompanied—and enhanced—by another effort forwhich Elibiary takes some credit: the promulgation of new Countering Violent Ex­tremism training guidelines issued by the Department of Homeland Security. The Clarion Project published an analysis of those guidelines in May 2013⁶⁰, pointing outhow they restrict training related to the US Muslim Brotherhood and non-violent Is­lamist tactics. Indeed, these guidelines effectively require the approval of “partners” inthe American Muslim community (i.e., the sorts of “mainstream” groups Elibiary pro­motes, despite their ties to the Muslim Brotherhood) before trainers can be engagedand the training undertaken.

In addition to Mohamed Elibiary, other controversial members of the DHS Advi­sory Council involved in crafting these guidelines included Mohamed Morsi, the presi­dent of the Islamic Society of North Ameica. ISNA was the very first group listed in the Brotherhood’s 1991 roster of “our organizations and organizations of our friends.”Here’s how Elibiary describes this effort.