Endangering American Muslims

By David K. Shipler

                If the Trump administration goes ahead with its plan to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization, hundreds of thousands of US citizens could face federal prosecution for providing funds and leadership to mosques and Islamic community centers across the country. That is because federal law prohibits “material support” for terrorist groups, and some key Trump insiders accept the slanderous allegation by anti-Islam activists that the Brotherhood effectively owns mosques and has infiltrated the United States.

                Muslim Americans and their institutions could also face rising jeopardy from local authorities and organized citizens, who would employ the designation to mobilize fear. Mosques already have difficulty in some locations getting zoning changes and building permits, and extremists could easily use the official label of “terrorist” to justify vigilante violence. In other words, the hatred stoked by President Trump and some of his allies would be granted the force of law.

While President George W. Bush kept the anti-Muslim movement at bay, even after 9/11, Trump has surrounded himself with admirers and promoters of vitriolic alarmists who portray Islam in sinister terms reminiscent of the smears and suspicions fueled by hunts for communists in the McCarthy era of the 1950s.

Stephen Miller, a leading White House adviser, has a long record, dating back to his senior year at Duke in 2007, of imagining what he terms “Islamofascism” as being at war with Western civilization. Stephen Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist, remains in the president’s inner circle after running Breitbart, the rightwing outlet that helped promulgate baseless assertions that Islamic centers were fronts for the Muslim Brotherhood’s stealthy program to subvert America by imposing Sharia, Muslim religious law.

Frank Gaffney, who served on Trump’s transition team, distorts Islamic sources to create an ominous specter of community centers, mosques, and Muslim organizations controlled by the Brotherhood. Gaffney has been praised by Bannon as “one of the senior thought leaders and men of action in this whole war against Islamic radical jihad.” Between 2013 and 2017, Mike Pompeo, now Secretary of State, appeared on Gaffney’s radio program 34 times, according to The Atlantic.

Such people might have been relegated to the ranks of cranks in pre-internet and pre-Trump days. They would have been handing out leaflets on street corners or mailing broadsheets to a limited like-minded audience. In the digital era, though, they have become a cottage industry of slick websites with the deceptive look of careful research and solid argument, complete with videos and links to sources whose exaggerations are repeated and requoted in such circular fashion that flaws are hard to see without careful, skeptical examination. Human Rights Watch, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the Southern Poverty Law Center have all denounced this coterie of Islam watchers.

The movement gained access to the White House with Trump’s election. The first victory was the president’s ban on immigration from Muslim countries, initially rejected by the courts and then partially upheld by the Supreme Court. A second victory would be outlawing the Muslim Brotherhood.

Most attention to this prospect has been focused on its complications for foreign policy, since the Brotherhood is a legitimate—and nonviolent—political player in Morocco, Turkey, Tunisia, Algeria, Kuwait, and Jordan. The terrorist label was promoted by Egyptian president Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi, the former army chief who ended the Brotherhood’s brief rule in 2013. (One might ask how the Brotherhood could take over the US if it couldn't even control Egypt for more than a year.)

Indeed, the Brotherhood opposes a number of Arab autocrats. But it is fragmented and diverse, and while it has spawned violent offshoots, such as Hamas, it probably doesn’t meet the legal criteria for the terrorist designation by the State Department. Experts in the Defense and State Departments are reportedly opposed to the label, which would prohibit American officials from engaging in certain diplomacy and military cooperation in the Middle East.

But there would be more harm inside the US, where the designation could impair First Amendment freedoms of association and speech if the FBI and federal prosecutors accepted the anti-Islam activists’ assertions about the role of the Muslim Brotherhood. One of the many provisions in the Patriot Act following 9/11 imposes long prison sentences for anyone who “knowingly provides material support or resources to a foreign terrorist organization, or attempts or conspires to do so.” Although the law contains a caveat that it should not be “construed or applied so as to abridge” constitutional rights, it bars “training” and “expert advice or assistance,” which certainly can fall into the category of speech. Indeed, the Supreme Court has ruled that “material support” can include pro-democracy training abroad by American non-profits where the trainees are affiliated with a terrorist-designated organization. This inhibits efforts to help bring combatant groups into civil society.

 Anti-Islam alarmists such as John Guandolo, a former FBI agent and Marine officer, try to get around the constitutional obstacle by arguing that Islam is not truly a religion but “a complete way of life, social, cultural, military, and political system governed by a foreign law, Sharia.” As head of Understanding the Threat, he has trained local police and sheriff’s departments wherever he can overcome local Muslims’ objections. At the end of a training for civilians that I attended, I asked what victory for his cause would look like. He replied:

“The Muslim Brotherhood is decimated. They are designated by the US government as a terrorist organization, we have shut down all MB Islamic centers, all Iranian centers, and we have locked up all the MB officials in the United States. That’s a good start. And all those who have aided and abetted them are locked up after being tried in federal courts.”

A book by Guandolo contains a boilerplate affidavit for law enforcement to get search warrants of mosques and Islamic centers, stating, “Your affiant believes that Probable Cause exists that the Islamic Center of [fill in the blank] is part of the Muslim Brother­hood’s ‘Islamic Movement’ inside the United States whose stated objective is the overthrow of the United States government and the establishment of an Islamic State, including the use of violence in our local area.”

Guandolo is quoted frequently on Breitbart, and has been a guest on the radio show of Fox News host Sean Hannity, who talks regularly with Trump. Guandolo claims that he can spot a “Sharia-compliant” Muslim by his closely trimmed mustache and unruly red beard, and in March 2018 took and tweeted a photo of a Southwest Airlines employee who fit the profile, labeling the man “a Sharia adherent Muslim (aka jihadi) at my plane.” The airline called the tweet “cruel and inappropriate.” Several months later, after Guandolo blamed the Democrats for the shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue, Twitter suspended him from its site.

 For the linchpin of their scary fantasies, Guandolo and his comrades, including Sean Hannity, rely on an exaggerated reading of a single copy of a document written in 1991, found by the FBI in the basement of a Virginia home, entitled “Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America.” In researching my book, Freedom of Speech, I drilled down into this document, questioned its purveyors, and came up with zero justification for citing it as a source of concern.

It calls for “a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within.” It lists current and would-be organizational friends of the Brotherhood. And from these two elements the anti-Islam alarmists spin their terrible specter of existential threat.

They picture the memo as a plan and conveniently avoid quoting its passage making clear that the author, Mohamed Akram, is offering a proposal, not pronouncing policy. Some have inflated his position in the Brotherhood to General Masul [leader] when his memo is actually addressed to the General Masul. He appears on one membership list at a mid-level position in the Brotherhood. Nowhere do the alarmists cite a document showing that his 28-year-old suggestion was adopted by higher authority.

Similarly, the argument that the Muslim Brotherhood owns mosques and Islamic centers relies on the memo’s list of friendly organizations, which was introduced into evidence in the 2007 case against the Holy Land Foundation, a Texas-based charity convicted in a retrial of sending funds to Hamas. The anti-Islam propagandists who smear those organizations with the stain of terrorism have acquired standing with the White House, and now are poised to place many Muslim citizens at grave risk.