For the first time in US political history, two Muslim women joined the ranks of the US Congress with Western and Arab media widely reporting on their win during the first midterm elections under US President Donald Trump. Ilhan Omar, a Democrat, is the first Somali American to serve in Congress and Michigan Democrat Rashida Tlaib is a Palestinian American.
However, the Democrats’ battle against the Republican control of the US Congress, led to an alliance with Political Islamist movements in order to restore their control on government, pushing Muslim candidates and women activists of immigrant minorities, onto the electoral scene.
The common ground between Congresswomen Omar and Tlaib is that both are anti-Trump and his political team and options, especially his foreign policy starting from the sanctions on Iran to the isolation of the Muslim Brotherhood and all movements of political Islam. Those sponsoring and supporting the two Muslim women to reach the US Congress adopted a tactic to infiltrate through their immigrant and Black minority communities in general, and women’s groups in particular. One example of that is the Palestinian American activist Linda Sarsour with roots in Muslim Brotherhood and a member of the Council on American-Islamic Relations known as CAIR.
Who is Linda Sarsour?
The name of the Palestinian Linda Sarsour (38), appeared in the public scene, when Barak Obama took office in 2008 as President of the United States. Since then Sarsour became a familiar face in the White House.
“I have been invited at least to seven meetings in the White House since April 2010,” she has been quoted.
This culminated in receiving the “Champion of Change” award from President Obama in 2012.
A social media site still carries a previous US Department of State promotional tweet, published in July 2014 saying: “Share with Mrs. Linda Sarsour about Islam in America.”
The paradox here is that the description of the “Obama” award is similar to the title of “Youth and Change”, the first book taught by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin - the spiritual leader of Hamas, the military arm of the Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine – to Muslim women, according to Rajaa Halbi, an officer in the women’s movement in Hamas, and who personally learned from this book directly from Hamas founder and spiritual leader Sheikh Yassin.
What we know about Linda Sarsour is that she was born in 1980 in Brooklyn, New York, from Palestinian parents from al-Bireh in the West Bank in Occupied Palestine.
In recent years, she took part in protests and anti-Trump demonstrations.
She has been employed as the president of the Arab American Association of New York, Which was created by Palestinian Ahmed Jaber, a member of the Qatar International Foundation responsible for funding the association.
Linda Sarsour and her husband, Maher Jouda, who is also a Palestinian from al-Bireh, were investigated and placed under observation by US Federal authorities in 2004 on their suspicious relations with extremist elements.
Also, the New York Police Department opened an investigation into the Arab American Association of New York for its links to terrorism and extremism, especially its links with the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas.
Sarsour activities with Muslim Brotherhood
One of the activities in which Linda Sarsour participated was an annual meeting of the International Network of Muslim Brotherhood in North America and Canada in 2016, which lasted for three days, from December 26-28, organized by the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA).
Also participating in this conference was the Muslim Students Association ( MSA), which was established in 1979 by a women’s group called “The Sisters of Success” which is affiliated to the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and its Palestinian Executive Director and co-founder Nihad Awad.
At that event, appearing next to Linda Sarsour was Samah Safi Bayazid, a Jordanian film director, accompanied by her brother and cameraman, Mohammad Safi Bayazid, who were responsible for filming and producing a show called “Noor” for Saudi cleric Salman Odeh, who is detained in Saudi Arabia.
Samah posted on her twitter account the picture with Linda at the event. She had also posted a photo with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and her brother, in addition to another picture of her participating in ALSHARQ FORUM managed by Palestinian Waddah Khanfar in Turkey.
Among the speakers at the conference were: Siraj Wahhaj, who is described by his supporters as a pioneering Islamic preacher in New York and a hero of social community work; Jasser Auda, who is a founding member of the International Union of Muslim Scholars, president of Maqasid Studies in London, and professor of Islamic studies at Carlton University in Canada, member in the European Council for Fatwa and Research and a former member of Qatar Foundation; and Jamal Badawi, a member of the International Union of Muslim Scholars and a founding member of CAIR.
Wahhaj, whom Linda Sarsour has admired and who in turn influenced her, was back in the national spotlight when his son Siraj Ibn Wahhaj was arrested in Aug. 2018 and jailed on a Georgia warrant alleging child abduction. Law enforcement officers searching a rural northern New Mexico compound for a missing three-year-old boy found 11 children in filthy conditions and hardly any food, and weapons where Wahhaj was allegedly training them how to execute mass shootings in America’s schools.
As for Jasser Auda, he is a founding member of the International World Union of Muslim Scholars, sponsored and chaired by extremist cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi, and author of the book “Disrupting the Domineering Systems: Jihad and the Folly of State Sovereignty,” published in 2017, in which he called on Islamic entities to think strategically to restore the concept of true jihad and its institutions to the life of the nation and that it should not be repelled by the current political and media situation, no matter how urgent.
His book also emphasizes that “Islamic entities, and even honest humanity in general should begin to think about the coarse means the Islamic societies and humanity itself could use to eliminate those gangs and to disintegrate the tyrannical entities.”
Jasser Auda book also preaches that: “The concept of state sovereignty is one of the greatest lies and myths. It is the disaster of the idea and politics that have afflicted humankind in our time, which are being invested by tyranny and gain huge gains on the ground, especially in the eradication or distortion of jihad in Islam or damaging its image to serve their interests.”
What about Linda Sarsour’s declaration of Jihad?
From all that is mentioned, we can touch the influence of Muslim Brotherhood in shaping the thoughts of American activist Linda Sarsour and consequently her declaring her “Jihad” against US President Donald Trump, in addition to her call for the application of “Sharia”, the rule of Islam in the United States of America, during a speech at the annual meeting of the San Francisco branch of CAIR. These are terms used by Muslim Brotherhood teachings and in the views of Sayyid Qutb, a scholar and co-founder of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, as well as from Abul A’la Maududi’s books “Islam and Ignorance” and “Fundamentals of Islam”. These terms are used and preached also by al-Qaeda terrorist organization and ISIS extremist group.
In her speech, Linda Sarsour said: “God is waiting for us to stand up to those who are oppressing our societies, not only in the Middle East and abroad, but also here in the United States, and this is a kind of jihad, where you have fascists, white supremacists and Islamophobes. We have to remain angry. Those who are currently sitting in the White House are not normal. Normal citizens should not be among this administration. If something terrible happens, you will be responsible for that.”
“You have no choice but to be politicized, engage and be part of the resistance to defend our right to be Muslims in the United States. Opposition is the highest form of national expression in a country like the United States,” she said.
Despite the claims of Islamist activist Linda Sarsour that her speech - which was about human rights - was taken out of its context, but according to some observers, that her defense is just only one of the tactics of the Muslim Brotherhood and their dodgers in the use of the terms of jihad, as they are afraid to say the word openly, as the collective memory of the West in general, is still tense toward events blamed on extremists, so the Muslim Brotherhood resorts to political terms away from its militant tones when using the Jihad word.
What Linda Sarsour has said is not far from those of Zainab al Ghazali, one the most prominent women of the Muslim Brotherhood who said in her book, “My daughter: the love of jihad": “The nation is subjected to many hardships, but the most difficult is to abandon the breeding of jihad and love of death for the sake of God ... And my daughter’s role is to awaken the spirit of jihad and love of martyrdom in your husband and your daughter and this is your role, which I ask you and the whole nation awaits”.
Linda Sarsour made headlines once against when she called for “Jihad” against Trump and his administration in 2017. However, Political Islamists – the masterminds behind the so-called “Arab Spring” – have said time and again that the word “Jihad” could not be re-interpreted in any other sense except in the meaning of “physical fighting” against the rulers through a coup or revolution against them.
As she said in one of her conversations with the Arab Muslim community in New York via Skype: “What happened in the Middle East revolutions inspired the Arabs in the United States,” adding that: “After the Arab Spring, we worked harder than the last four decades, because in this country there are rights and freedoms which do not exist in the Arab countries. We began to exercise our rights here. Tthe Arab Spring encouraged us to be involved in the political life - you gave us courage.”
Muslim Sisters to topple Trump
Through the interaction and support of the president of the Islamic Society of North America (USA), Dr. Ingrid Mattson, who is of Canadian origin, and is designated as the mother of “Muslim sisters” in the United States, whom former President Obama chose to speak at his inauguration in January 2009 – and with the campaign Women’s march against Trump led by Linda Sarsour and Somali Ilhan Omar, the spiritual daughter of Obama, who said in a tweet in November 2017: “Thank you Obama for being a source of inspiration, hope and change! I have always been proud to call you my president!”
In addition, there is Dalia Mogahed, former Executive Director of the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies, and was chosen to serve on Obama’s Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships in 2009. She is known as a staunch critic of Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and one of the vocal participants of the annual meeting of the International Network of Muslim Brotherhood in North America and Canada, in the presence of Turkish president’s daughter Soumaya Erdogan and othe Muslim Sisters hosted by Obama at a dinner in the White House.
It turns out that the common ground for these “sisters”, who are supported by former US President Obama, are the protest, sit-ins and demonstrations on US streets. On one hand, they are “Mujahideen”, as Linda Sarsour describes, in the face of tyrants and opponents of Trump’s foreign policies - from the siege of Iran, the fight against political Islam groups, and his choice of Saudi Arabia under the leadership of King Salman bin Abdulaziz and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman as a strategic ally.
Muslim Brotherhood document to establish a “Caliphate” in America and Canada
In this context, it should be noted that the document, which was released by the US authorities in 2017, was found among 5,000 pages of the International Network of Muslim Brotherhood, in the house of Ismail al-Barassi, a member of the group (Palestinian origin and American) who was arrested in Virginia in 2004 on charges of belonging to Hamas. The document was presented as evidence during his trial in 2008.
The document, entitled “Explanatory Note to the Strategic Objective of Muslim Brotherhood in North America,” was presented in 1991 by Mohammed Akram, the secretary of the group’s Shura Council, in what he described as an attempt to explain the long-term plan adopted by the Muslim Brotherhood’s North American Shura Council in 1987, in which he notes that the Empowerment Memorandum is based on the realization of the overall strategic objective of the Muslim Brotherhood in North America, namely, the establishment of an Islamic movement led by the Muslim Brotherhood that embraces Muslim issues locally and globally and proposes Islam as an alternative to civilization.
The second objective is to achieve naturalization and empowerment in North America and to establish a mechanism for that.
The document referred to the International Network of Muslim Brotherhood’s important plan of implementing naturalization and empowerment of the Muslim Brotherhood in North America and Canada, “that Islam and its movement be part of the country in which he lives”, by turning to stable institutions and stabilizing these institutions within the Muslim community.
The document names a number of Islamic organizations that are affiliated to the Muslim Brotherhood, which according to Al Arabiya English, are all the organizations affiliated with CAIR - the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) and the Islamic Information Foundation founded by Egyptian Canadian Dr. Jamal Badawi, the center run by Hamed Ghazali, and many others.
The document explains the need to absorb Muslims and win their loyalty from all classes and colors in America and Canada, for the interest of the naturalization plan, saying: “At that time, If we ask for money, it will be abundant. Even if we asked men to come in, they will.”
The document consideres the work of Muslim Brotherhood in North America as a kind of great jihad in the removal and destruction of Western civilization.
The document also mentions the need to establish a section for “Muslim Sisters”, which includes central and local women’s associations, training and technical vocational institutes, schools and kindergartens.
