Muslim Brotherhood’s papers detail plan to seize U.S.

Group’s takeover plot emerges in Holy Land case

By JASON TRAHAN / The Dallas Morning News

Amid the mountain of evidence released in the Holy Land Foundation terrorism financing trial, the most provocative has turned out to be a handful of previously classified evidence detailing Islamist extremists’ ambitious plans for a U.S. takeover.

A knot of terrorism researchers say the memos and audiotapes, many translated from Arabic and containing detailed strategies by the international Islamist group the Muslim Brotherhood, are proof that extremists have long sought to replace the Constitution with Shariah, or Islamic law.

Screenshot: The Muslim Brotherhood – official website

But some academics and Muslim leaders say that the ideals contained in the documents were written by disgruntled foreign dissidents representing a tiny radical fringe. The documents also pre-date the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and the 80-year-old Muslim Brotherhood is now either inactive or largely underground in America.

The documents – introduced in recent weeks as part of the prosecution’s case in the trial of the now defunct Holy Land Foundation and five of its organizers – lay out the Brotherhood’s plans in chillingly stark terms.

A 1991 strategy paper for the Brotherhood, often referred to as the Ikhwan in Arabic, found in the Virginia home of an unindicted co-conspirator in the case, describes the group’s U.S. goals, referred to as a “civilization-jihadist process.”

“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 God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions,” it states. This process requires a “mastery of the art of ‘coalitions,’ the art of ‘absorption’ and the principles of ‘cooperation.’ “

Success in the U.S. “in establishing an observant Islamic base with power and effectiveness will be the best support and aid to the global movement,” it states.

A transcript of a Brotherhood orientation meeting recorded in the early 1980s includes discussions of the need for “securing the group” from infiltration by “Zionism, Masonry … the CIA, FBI, etc. so that we find out if they are monitoring us” and “how can we get rid of them.” Discussions later turn to “weapons training at the Ikhwan’s camps” in Oklahoma and Missouri.