American Islamist Groups Shape Arab Revolutions

American Islamist Groups Shape Arab Revolutions [Excerpts]

Illustrating that the jihadist enterprise transcends all borders, American Islamist groups typically preoccupied with remaking the U.S. have been leaving their fingerprints on the campaign to exchange secular authoritarianism for religious authoritarianism in the Middle East. As these organizations labor stateside to nudge the governing class to embrace Arab Islamists at the expense of liberals — prompting Egyptian intellectual Essam Abdallah to lament that “the most dramatic oppression of the region’s civil societies and the Arab Spring … is led by the powerful Islamist lobbies in Washington” — several of the groups’ past and current officials have emerged as key players in the Middle East’s new political landscape. The connections underscore that Islamists everywhere are united by a single goal: the imposition of Shari‘a.

One of the prominent figures to embody these ties is Bassem Khafagi, who in March announced his intention to run for president of Egypt on behalf of the Freedom and Justice Party (FJP), an arm of the Muslim Brotherhood, which seeks to resurrect the caliphate and achieve “mastership of the world.” He failed to get the nod, but his back story is intriguing nonetheless. Khafagi once worked for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and is among its most notorious alumni. While serving as CAIR’s community affairs director, Khafagi was arrested in 2003 as part of a terrorism support and recruitment probe targeting the Islamic Assembly of North America (IANA), of which he was a founder.

Khafagi’s election platform was the essence of Islamism: “complete the implementation of Islamic law in Egypt.” Moreover, Khafagi boasted about being “the first to expose the notion of ‘moderate Islam,’ which is used as a means to canonize a ‘non-Islamic Islam.’ … This ‘moderation’ means violation [of the laws] of Islam.”

Tentacles from American Islamist organizations also reach into the Syrian National Council (SNC), the U.S.-favored civilian umbrella group opposing dictator Bashar al-Assad. The SNC is widely understood to be stacked with Islamists, so these radicals fit right in.

Heading the roster is Louay Safi, a central figure in the SNC and increasingly its public face. Safi may be most familiar, however, as a longtime official with the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), serving as executive director of the ISNA Leadership Development Center from 2004 to 2008 and becoming ISNA’s director of communications and leadership development in 2009. A document composed by the Brotherhood lists ISNA as one of “our organizations and the organizations of our friends” that can advance the “grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within.” Like CAIR, it was designated as an unindicted co-conspirator in the HLF case. Safi’s résumé also includes past senior positions with the Virginia-based International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT), which has been the focus of investigations into terror funding, and the D.C.-based Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy (CSID), which reformist Muslims have dubbed “a front for some of the most obnoxious members of the ‘Wahhabi lobby’ in America.”

Equally troubling are Safi’s musings on the Shari‘a-mandated execution of those who leave Islam. On the one hand, during the international uproar over charges levied against Afghan convert Abdul Rahman in 2006, Safi wrote an article voicing platitudes about individual religious liberty under Islam while laughably blaming Western imperialism for the barbaric apostasy laws in various Muslim countries, where converts can face penalties that include death. Middle East Forum president Daniel Pipes described himself as “surprised, even wondrous, at the lack of shame.” On the other hand, a monograph published by Safi a few years earlier, when there was much less media scrutiny of the subject, takes a harder line, concluding that although “a quiet desertion of personal Islamic duties is not a sufficient reason for inflicting death on a person,” execution is “just punishment” if “the individual’s desertion of Islam is used as a political tool for instigating a state of disorder, or revolting against the law of Islam.” Along with the rest of his radical history, these contradictory pronouncements — standard fare whenever Islamists address the public on uncomfortable matters — should cast doubt on any claims made by Safi, particularly his soothing assurances that Syria’s future will be characterized by “equal rights and freedoms of all people.”

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