The Muslim Brotherhood Problem Washington Refuses to Solve

We are debating legal definitions while they are building an ideological army. Why the new designation order is a good first step but misses the true engine of the threat.

For the last several chapters of this project, I’ve been mapping how antisemitism mutates. Part 1: Antisemitism is the Oldest Rebellion Against Universal Justice explained why it never dies. Part 2: Packaging Hate as Social Justice showed how it is repackaged today as “social justice.” Part 3: A Moral Counteroffensive: The War for Truth and Liberty finished the series with a critique on why we’re losing the information war and framed out a strategy to turn the tide: A counteroffensive designed to outflank the assault on truth and reclaim both the public square and the virtual realm.

Because that is the core of the work that we must do in order to persuade Americans that the threat we face is not “bias,” but a political movement that seeks to dismantle the West itself.

Most Americans still struggle to grasp that antisemitism disguised as justice does not float in the abstract. It is not a spontaneous cultural glitch. It is rooted in an ideology, organized through institutions, and pushed through networks that most citizens never see. And the oldest, most sophisticated of these networks is the Muslim Brotherhood.

To defeat it, we must defeat it politically. We must educate the electorate about what Islamism actually is, how it works, and what it intends to replace the American constitutional order with. Antisemitism is one of its most powerful weapons, but destroying western civilization is its goal.

The Muslim Brotherhood: The Engine of Global Islamism

For nearly a century, the Muslim Brotherhood has served as the intellectual engine of modern Islamism. Its thinkers provided the ideological blueprint for groups that would eventually splinter into Hamas, al-Qaeda, ISIS, and dozens of regional militias. Its political branches built the “respectable” facade: the charities, student groups, mosques, and NGOs that wrap extremism in humanitarian language. And its international infrastructure, particularly the Qatar-Turkey axis, has spent decades cultivating influence inside universities, think tanks, media organizations, and Western governments.

National security scholars across the spectrum describe the Brotherhood not as a traditional terrorist organization, but as something more dangerous: a global ideological system with dozens of franchises, political parties, charities, and covert networks, all loosely united by a worldview — if not a single rigid chain of command— that seeks an Islamic state through political, cultural, financial, and, when expedient, violent means.

That incoherence is the Brotherhood’s strength and our weakness.

This is not speculation. The evidence has been public for decades.

The 100-Year Plan: Civilization Jihad

In 1991, federal agents discovered an internal Muslim Brotherhood strategy memo in a Virginia safe house formally titled the “Explanatory Memorandum” (and often referred to by critics as the “100-Year Plan”). It outlined a long-term “civilization-jihadist” project in North America. A roadmap for ideological infiltration, institutional capture, and political influence. The memo became a key exhibit in the Holy Land Foundation trial. Although the trial judge later ruled that the memo was not evidence of the specific money-laundering conspiracy, its authenticity has never been disputed, and it has since been widely analyzed by researchers and security services.

It’s stated goal:

A kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within.

This is not fringe. It is the Brotherhood’s formal internal guidance to its American chapters.

The Foundation for Defense of Democracies has since mapped the Brotherhood’s international infrastructure. The Heritage Foundation has recommended designation of key MB branches since 2017 explaining in their report that, despite modern claims that these groups have evolved independently:

The Muslim Brotherhood has operated and recruited in the U.S. since the 1960s. They initially had a focus on university campuses. Mohammed Morsi, the former President of Egypt, was recruited into the Brotherhood in the 1980s while studying for his doctorate at the University of Southern California.

An organization called the Muslim Students Associations (MSA) was the most visible manifestation of the Brotherhood’s early presence in America, disseminating the work of Qutb and el-Banna. Other groups followed that were tied to the Brotherhood or its associates.

• In 1973, Brotherhood members and/or associates formed the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT).

• In 1981, the Islamic Society in North America (ISNA), an Islamic umbrella organization that served as a successor group to the MSA, was founded.

• In the same year, Brotherhood members were also key to the formation of the Islamic Association of Palestine (IAP).

• In 1993, Brotherhood members and/or associates helped form the Muslim American Society (MAS).

• In 1994, senior figures within the IAP helped establish the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR).

The NAIT, ISNA, and CAIR are listed as unindicted co-conspirators in a major terror financing trial related to the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF). Millions of dollars were directed towards Hamas by the Holy Land Foundation and five men jailed for their role in doing so. Despite this, CAIR has worked closely with the Department for Homeland Security and been in close contact with the FBI. CAIR has also been hosted at the White House by multiple Administrations. Such engagement helps legitimize Islamist groups and their claims to be representative of broader Muslim communities in the U.S.

Several European reports (including one sponsored by an ECR group in the European Parliament and a 2025 French Interior Ministry report) between 2020 and 2025 warn that Brotherhood-inspired organizations use mosques, charities, and schools to promote an Islamist agenda incompatible with liberal democracy.

Yet, for decades, the United States continues to treat the Brotherhood as a normal political actor.

The Ideological Parent of Hamas

This failure to act has lethal consequences. While Western leaders debate definitions, the Brotherhood’s children are at war. Hamas was born from the Brotherhood’s Gaza branch in 1987. Its founding charter cites Brotherhood ideologues. Its leadership operates openly from Qatar, the Brotherhood’s modern patron. Turkey gives it media platforms, passport access, and logistical cover. To pretend the Brotherhood is “nonviolent” while Hamas commits atrocities is absurd. They are two parts of the same organism:

• Hamas = the militant arm.

• The Brotherhood = the ideological arm.

• Qatar = the financial and media arm.

• Turkey = the geopolitical arm.

• U.S.-based NGOs = the legitimacy shield.

Violence abroad and narrative warfare at home are not contradictory. They are coordinated. This is why the distinction between “violent” and “nonviolent” Islamists, so cherished by Western policymakers, is an illusion. And without understanding this structure, the public cannot understand why antisemitism and anti-Americanism surged after October 7th. It was not a spontaneous mass delusion. It was the result of decades of ideological cultivation.

The Betrayal: Why Washington has Protected the Brotherhood

Even as many countries, including Muslim nations like Egypt, the very birthplace of the organization, as well as Saudi Arabia and the UAE, have designated the group a terrorist entity, the United States has held hearings for more than a decade, paralyzed by a distinction between the Brotherhood’s ‘political’ and ‘militant’ wings that these Arab nations argue does not exist.

In fact, the Obama administration actively courted several of its regional branches. The Biden administration refused to confront it. But why?

As the Heritage Foundation argues, the Muslim Brotherhood is the ideological engine of modern Islamist terrorism, with a global caliphate as its aim and a long record of violent activity, even as U.S. officials warn that formally designating the entire movement raises complex legal, diplomatic, and operational questions.

Designating the global Muslim Brotherhood as an FTO is:

• legally difficult;

• diplomatically explosive;

• nearly impossible to sustain in court;

• disruptive to alliances with Jordan, Morocco, and Turkey;

• risky for intelligence operations; and

• incompatible with decades of U.S. government partnerships with Muslim Brotherhood linked groups.

And now, even with the most serious attempt in years, Washington still cannot bring itself to say the simple, unavoidable truth: The Muslim Brotherhood is the ideological nerve center of modern Islamism, and Islamism is the political project that has spent fifty years trying to dismantle Western civilization from within.

The Legal Shell Game: Why Designation is So Hard

Thankfully, the Trump Administration is finally turning the tide against this paralysis.

In November 2025, President Trump signed an executive order titled “Designation of Certain Muslim Brotherhood Chapters as Foreign Terrorist Organizations and Specially Designated Global Terrorists.”

While supporters hailed it as a “historic” step, the order was careful. It did not designate the entire movement. Instead, it directed the Secretaries of State and Treasury, in consultation with the Attorney General and Director of National Intelligence, to identify chapters of the Muslim Brotherhood explicitly including only three chapters (Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon) for potential designation as Foreign Terrorist Organizations and Specially Designated Global Terrorists.​

This was quickly followed by legislative action. On December 3, 2025, the House Foreign Affairs Committee approved the “Muslim Brotherhood Terrorist Designation Act of 2025,” directing the President and Secretary of State to use existing authority to sanction the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization. It still requires passage by the full House and Senate.

Separately, in November 2025, Texas Governor Greg Abbott issued a state-level proclamation declaring the Muslim Brotherhood and CAIR as “foreign terrorist and transnational organizations” in Texas, a move that allows him to block them from purchasing land in the state. CAIR has since challenged the proclamation in court, arguing that the state has exceeded its authority.

Yet, even with this political will, the legal hurdles remain immense. This is because U.S. law is built to fight armies, not ideologies.

Under U.S. law (8 U.S.C. § 1189), to designate a group as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, the Secretary of State must show that a specific, identifiable organization engages in terrorist activity and threatens U.S. national security. Ideology alone is not enough.

The Brotherhood exploits this loophole perfectly. There is no single international “Muslim Brotherhood, Inc.” with a formal global command structure. Instead, it is a hydra:

• In Egypt, the Brotherhood has been a mass political and social movement, with periods of repression and brief electoral power.​

• In Jordan and Morocco, Brotherhood‑linked parties functioned as legal opposition or coalition partners.​

• In Gaza, Hamas openly identifies as a Brotherhood branch and is designated as a terrorist organization.​

• In parts of Europe and North America, Brotherhood‑inspired activists operate NGOs, student groups, and civil‑society networks that generally do not carry out violence but are accused by some security services of “entryism” and illiberal agendas.​

Many analysts, including critics of the Brotherhood, argue that as a whole it is too diffuse and diverse to meet this standard. Officials warn that a blanket designation might:

• Undercut cooperation with allies like Jordan, Morocco, Kuwait, and possibly Turkey, where Brotherhood‑linked parties or networks are interwoven with formal politics.​

• Push non‑violent or semi‑legal Brotherhood actors toward underground or more radical paths, rather than splitting them from jihadist currents.​

• Be read across the Muslim world as a declaration of war on all political Islam, complicating other U.S. priorities and feeding jihadist narratives.​

Thus even officials who loathe the Brotherhood, tend to favor targeting specific violent chapters and financiers rather than the “entire system” at once.

But this is the point: The fragmentation of the Brotherhood is not a shield. It is a strategy.

It built an ideology that is unified but created organizations that look separate. It avoided direct violence but fed the groups that commit it. It created charities that look humanitarian but funnel money and legitimacy to militancy. It built campus groups that preach inclusion publicly and grievance and revolution privately. It wrapped itself in the First Amendment while advancing a movement that would abolish the First Amendment.

This is the danger Americans must understand. This is what our political counteroffensive must expose.

The End Game: Dismantling the Constitution

Antisemitism is the Brotherhood’s most effective tool but it is not its ultimate objective.

Its real aim is to replace the American constitutional order with political Islam.

To dissolve the nation’s moral confidence.

To turn our freedoms against us.

To make “pluralism” a weapon.

To make “tolerance” an entry point.

To make “social justice” a Trojan horse.

And after October 7th, the results were unmistakable:

• Campus uprisings

• Mass protests defending mass murder

• Westerners chanting the slogans of a terror organization

• Media framing Islamist brutality as “resistance”

• Open calls for replacing constitutional law with religious supremacy

This did not appear overnight. It was the product of long-term ideological work the exact work the 100-Year Plan foretold.

Why This Must Be Exposed to the American Public

This chapter is not about policy minutiae. It is about civic survival. If Americans do not understand the Brotherhood, they cannot understand:

• the rise of anti-Israel extremism

• the collapse of moral clarity in elite institutions

• the resurgence of antisemitism

• the infiltration of U.S. nonprofits by foreign ideological networks

• the narrative battlefield we are losing

• the stakes of the political fight unfolding now

And if they cannot understand these things, they cannot vote wisely and we cannot defeat Islamism politically.

In Part 3: A Moral Counteroffensive: The War for Truth and Liberty, I argued that the only way to defeat an ideological movement built on lies, is to flood the field with truth. Nowhere is that strategy more urgent, or more necessary, than in the fight against the Muslim Brotherhood.

For thirty years, the Brotherhood has operated behind a veil of plausible deniability, infiltrating our nonprofits, schools, and political parties. They have relied on the fact that average Americans cannot distinguish between a civil rights group and a foreign ideological network. They have bet on our ignorance, believing they can dismantle our liberty using our own democratic institutions against us.

This is why we must flood the field. We cannot rely on the government alone to designate them; we must ensure the American voting public can see them.

If the electorate remains blind to this enemy, they cannot vote wisely. And if they cannot vote wisely, we are in danger of electing ourselves out of existence.

This chapter is the beginning of that flood. By stripping away the camouflage of “social justice” and revealing the totalitarian machinery underneath, we begin to reverse the imbalance. Because the truth is simple:

• If you cannot name the ideology, you cannot defeat the movement.

• If you cannot confront the narrative, you cannot stop the violence.

• And if you cannot educate the voter, you cannot defend the country.

Islamism understands America’s vulnerabilities better than we understand its intentions. Our job, and the purpose of this series, is to change that.

We are removing the disguise once and for all.

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