Inside the Ring: Brotherhood threat

NEWS AND ANALYSIS:

Islamists linked to the Muslim Brotherhood and similar groups are working to undermine the U.S. government through “civilization jihad” aimed at imposing Islamic law rule in the United States.

That is the conclusion of a new 10-part online video course produced by the Center for Security Policy (CSP), a Washington think tank, that was made public Tuesday.

The briefing-style educational video, “The Muslim Brotherhood in America: The Enemy Within,” features lectures by CSP chief Frank Gaffney.

The video includes a detailed section on “Team Obama” that identifies six people working close to or inside the Obama administration that the course says are linked to the Muslim Brotherhood or similar Islamist groups through numerous front organizations.

They include Rashad Hussein, special envoy to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation; Huma Abedin, deputy chief of staff to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton; and presidential adviser Dalia Mogahed.

The video says Mr. Hussein, the special envoy to the OIC, has “long-standing ties to Muslim Brotherhood front groups.”

A State Department spokeswoman declined to comment on the video’s claims.

The objective of the course, according to its online statement, is to deal with “a threat most Americans are unaware even exists within our country, let alone the degree of peril it represents.”

“The threat is the totalitarian, supremacist Islamic doctrine its adherents call ’Shariah’ and the organized, disciplined and increasingly successful efforts by such adherents - most especially the Muslim Brotherhood - to bring it here,” the statement says.

The video briefing is designed to educate the public about the threat of political Islam that it says is “principally about power, not faith.”

Based on public-domain sources of information and firsthand accounts, the course seeks to provide a threat-assessment of the dangers to U.S. security posed by Islamists.

The course asserts that the Muslim Brotherhood is “not a nonviolent group.” But in most countries where it operates, the group acts in ways the CSP course identified as “a pre-violent phase.”

The Muslim Brotherhood’s strategic plan for the Islamicization of the United States is described as a “civilization-jihadist process” aimed at destroying Western civilization from within, the course says.

The Brotherhood strategy is to plant agents and subvert government and societal institutions using stealth means.

According to the course, the Brotherhood is seeking what the Pentagon calls “information dominance.”

“If the Muslim Brotherhood can exercise it, we can be kept ignorant of the true nature of the threat they pose and the progress they are making in bringing Shariah to America,” the course says.

“In light of these findings,” the course states, “there is an urgent need for rigorous congressional oversight and investigations aimed at exposing the extent of the civilization jihad and the need for corrective action aimed at countering it, particularly by federal authorities.”

“Such legislative branch initiatives should be accompanied by corresponding actions initiated by inspectors general and, as appropriate, law enforcement.”

Publication of the online course comes as Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, reportedly ordered a review of U.S. military training material with the goal of purging allegedly anti-Islamic content, the online portal Danger Room reported Tuesday.

The move was hailed by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim advocacy group the Justice Department named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the 2007 prosecution of a fundraising group in Texas called the Holy Land Foundation. The foundation was involved in illicit funding for Hamas, a Palestinian terrorist group.

A military source critical of Gen. Dempsey’s move said the chairman’s action is a politically correct effort to “make our professional military education fit a narrative, not objective inquiry.”

NDU CENTERS TARGETED

The National Defense University is facing sharp funding cuts as Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, seeks to cut spending and reorient the military school toward education and away from policymaking.

Defense officials said two entities at the Fort Lesley J. McNair-based military university facing defunding are the Institute for National Strategic Studies (INSS) and its controversial subcomponent, the Center for the Study of Chinese Military Affairs.

The officials said the Chinese Military Affairs center was created in the 1990s by conservatives in Congress who wanted the center to provide more honest assessments of China’s growing military power.

Instead, the center has been dominated by so-called “benign China” specialists who write papers and hold conferences that generally limit discussions to making sure China’s military is not presented as a threat - past, present or future.

One of the center’s key China hands and current director is Philip Saunders, who wrote in the early 2000s that China was incapable of developing anti-satellite weapons because it lacked the technology.

Mr. Saunders would be proved wrong in January 2007 when China shocked the U.S. military with its first successful test of a direct-ascent missile that knocked out a Chinese weather satellite in orbit.

More recently, the INSS has sought to disparage the Pentagon’s new Air Sea Battle Concept, a new program to better coordinate Navy and Air Force capabilities to counter China’s high-tech weapons.

Joint Staff spokesman Richard Osial told Inside the Ring that because of fiscal realities “all organizations are critically examining alignment of resources with structure and operations to ensure a focus on core missions.”

For the NDU, Gen. Dempsey recently revised the mission of Joint Professional Military Education “to focus on the needs of the joint forces commanders.”

That has prompted “a rigorous mission analysis of priorities, organizations and levels of effort,” including the Institute for National Strategic Studies and the Center for the Study of Chinese Military Affairs, he said.

One official said institute officials are lobbying Congress to prevent being dismantled and are using their China-is-not-a-threat materials to show the center is fighting to block the “China-threat theory” - in the United States. The term originated with China’s communist government to criticize its critics.

EMP WARFARE

Military officials say the threat of electromagnetic pulse weapons in future warfare is growing.

The threat is prompting the Pentagon to take steps to harden its computers and electronics against the devastating effects of EMP weapons, which simulate the debilitating effect on electronics produced by a nuclear blast.

A military source tells Inside the Ring that Russia has already developed battlefield EMP weapons and used them in combat.

During the early 2000s, Russian military forces fired an EMP mortar round that deployed a small metal-coated parachute. As it floated to earth, the EMP energy burst was reflected downward by the underside of the parachute and also spread by the cords attached to the shell. The result was a cone of anti-electronic energy that disrupted all electronics within its area.

The mortar was used by Russian forces to attack hand-held cellular telephones used by Chechen rebels to communicate.