Here’s the latest from the crossroads of faith, media & culture: 09/12/22

9/12 + 21. Our hearts go out to all those who lost loved ones on 9/11/01, including all those who spoke at yesterday’s World Trade Center commemoration shown below. It’s been said that America was never more united than on 9/12/01 and, perhaps, never less united than today. I think the speaker at the 12:51 mark spoke for a lot of Americas when he addressed the politicians in attendance and said “It took a tragedy to unite our country. Back then nobody cared if you were a Republican, Democrat, age, gender, race or ethnicity. We were united. It took a tragedy to unite us  and I want to remind all of you there that it should not take another tragedy to unite our nation because if I have to stand at this podium again or another podium for another event because of lives lost because of dereliction of duty it’s gonna hurt just like it hurts me.”

IMHO: Part of the “dereliction of duty” the speaker I cited is talking about is the way our supposed leaders certainly appear to be dividing us for political gain. The hard fact is that we do have actual enemies out there in the world who are no doubt counting their lucky stars that we’ve allowed ourselves to become so manipulated that we don’t seem to realize that we don’t need a “reckoning” to learn from the wrongs of the past and that we can respect each other’s differences without  engaging in pointless word wars over pronouns or whatever. The all-too-real enemies of freedom like nothing more than to see us going beyond debating our internal issues with the intent of resolving them to actually hating one another. To paraphrase the classic line from the Pogo comic strip, “We have met the enemy and he is NOT us.”

For a reminder of that, check out my conversation with Egyptian-American author Cynthia Farahat (The Secret Apparatus: The Muslim Brotherhood’s Industry of Death, Simon & Schuster) below the video, followed by a video clip of a 1984 interview with a KGB defector that seems to speak to the current age.

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Cynthia Farahat wrote the book on terror. The Egyptian-American author, columnist, political analyst, counterterrorism expert, and fellow at the Middle East Forum also co-founded the secular Liberal Egyptian Party in Egypt that advocated for peace with Israel, capitalism, and the separation of mosque and state. She studied Islamic jurisprudence for more than twenty years and co-authored Desecration of A Heavenly Religion, which was officially banned by Al-Azhar University in Cairo in 2008 for its criticism of Egypt’s blasphemy law.

She found herself on an al-Qaeda-affiliated group’s hit list and was officially banned from entering Lebanon for her work fostering regional peace. For almost a decade, she received daily death threats from Islamists. After her brother was tortured, her friend was murdered, and Islamists tried to assassinate her, Farahat immigrated to the United States where she has testified before the U.S. House of Representatives, briefed more than two hundred congressional offices, and advised intelligence and law enforcement agencies. She has received the Speaker of Truth Award from the Endowment for Middle East Truth and the Profile in Courage Award from ACT for America. Her writing has been translated into more than fifteen languages.

In her new book, The Secret Apparatus: The Muslim Brotherhood’s Industry of Death, she describes the title group as a clandestine incubator for Islamic terrorism that exports its “industry of death” around the world, including the United States.

JWK: How did you get on a terrorist hit list?

Cynthia Farahat: Islamists have been following my work very closely since 2003, when I co-founded the first classic liberal secular political party in the history of Modern Egypt. Then-president Hosni Mubarak’s regime was stacked by Muslim Brotherhood operatives and their sympathizers. They were monitoring our political party meetings and I ended up under surveillance for almost a decade until I immigrated to the US in 2011. Both Islamists inside and outside the regime realized from my discourse that I have been closely studying them.

In October 2008, an anonymous person sent me an online hit list which included the names and pictures of Egyptian anti-theocracy dissidents who were to be slain. I was on that list. When I first saw it, I assumed it had been compiled by a random Islamist but I later received a phone call from an operative in Egyptian state security who said the list had been composed by an al-Qaeda affiliate in Egypt. He told me that this group worked under the leadership of Egyptian convicted terrorist Abu-Islam Ahmed Abdallah, one of the world’s most dangerous Islamists. Abdallah, was also working with Al-Azhar Islamic University and they were both responsible for creating what is known today as “cyber jihad.” He is the pioneer of online terror recruitment.

Abdallah had an organization in Cairo where he trained young men to use the internet to advance jihad. While his center is now closed, his online forum on (the) Paltalk chat program is still operational. He was the first Islamist to recruit terrorists via the internet and he started doing this even before the al-Qaeda’s attacks on September 11, 2001. Under Mubarak’s regime, Islamists had almost full freedom to do what they wanted. The state security agent who told me Abdallah was affiliated with al-Qaeda also threatened me, saying he would send Abdallah to my house if I didn’t stop using the internet to expose Islamists and their relationship with the regime. I knew it was not an idle threat because I was familiar with Abdallah’s relationship with al-Qaeda and the Taliban. And I stopped publishing Arabic Articles online. After President Barack Obama was elected, I knew they had the support they needed in America to destroy Copts, classic liberal Muslims, and everyone who was against jihadism. We felt like hostages.

JWK: You describe the Muslim Brotherhood as a fraternal cult modeled after Joseph Stalin’s Secret Apparatus that is an incubator for Islamic terrorist organizations and has a one-hundred-year plan to destroy the West. Can you elaborate?

CF: The Muslim Brotherhood is the most sophisticated international criminal enterprise I have ever seen. I studied various organized criminal entities from across the globe and throughout history and I have never seen anything like it. The MB operates a public political group known as the General Apparatus, or the General Office, and a covert wing known as the Secret Apparatus. They have borrowed these terms from Stalin’s power apparatuses and copied their internal structure. I discuss this extensively in my book The Secret Apparatus: The Muslim Brotherhood’s Industry of Death. The Muslim Brotherhood calls its own operation an “industry of death.”

The Secret Apparatus is heavily operational in North America. In 2004, the FBI uncovered some of their documents and few them were entered into court evidence in the Holy Land Foundation trial in 2009. It is the largest terror funding case in the history of America. Among the documents was one titled The Explanatory Memorandum where they extensively discuss both their covert and overt mission to destroy the United States. Islamists don’t just make plans that take place over the span of years and decades, their plans span over centuries. They view themselves as tools and small rings in a large chain aiming to establish Sharia law and dominate the West.

U.S. academia and policy makers are still under the misguided assumption that the Secret Apparatus has been dismantled decades ago. The opposite is true. In my book I provide evidence to this fact from Brotherhood’s own words, internal documents, and Arabic public discourse.

JWK: May I ask about your faith? Are you a Muslim? And do you view the Muslim Brotherhood as more of a political terrorist group or a religious terrorist group – or both?

CF: I am not Muslim but I my closest friends in the world are mostly Muslim and I have Muslim family members. I feel uncomfortable talking about my personal beliefs as I lived the first thirty years of my life under a regime that brutalized Coptic Christians and listed our faith in our personal ID cards to facilitate segregation and discrimination against us. No matter where I was in Egypt, I suffered from religious persecution under Mubarak’s regime. Things have vastly changed under President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi who significantly reversed this injustice and his government treats Christians as citizens and not hostages like his predecessors.

JWK: Have you received any support from faith communities, particularly the Muslim community?

CF: The vast majority of my supporters and readers are Muslims. Muslim communities have been severely abused by the Brotherhood and their ilk. I don’t know any Muslim family who doesn’t know someone who has been targeted by Islamic terrorists and specifically the Brotherhood. It’s much easier for me to discuss the jihadism with Muslims because they are its first targets.

JWK: What’s your reaction to the recent attempt to assassinate Salman Rushdie?

JWK: Islamists feel emboldened under President Joe Biden’s administration, like they felt emboldened under President Barack Obama, and Jimmy Carter. The horrific attack on Salman Rushdie is just the beginning. Both Iran and the Brotherhood have consistently expressed that their biggest target is the United States. A foreign policy of appeasement towards Islamists encourages aggression on U.S. soil.

JWK: Do you feel safe?

CF:  I feel safe because I am married to American hero, retired Supervisory Special Agent Jeffrey James Higgins. Since I married him the death threats stopped. But I also rarely entertain this issue in my mind. I have a mission to get the Brotherhood designated as a terrorist group in every Western country. I have written my book, to make sure that, whether I am dead or alive, it will be making my case for me. This is what is important. Everyone dies eventually and, if I have to continue this war from beyond the grave, (then so)be it. It will actually be worse for them to turn me into a martyr. I’d like to think that they’re more intelligent than that.

JWK: You have testified before the U.S. House of Representatives, briefed more than two hundred congressional offices and advised intelligence and law enforcement agencies. Do you think this country is taking the threat of exported Islamic terrorist seriously enough?

CF:  Sadly, I don’t think either law enforcement agencies or law makers know how much trouble this country is in. In my book I discuss how Islamists tied to al-Qaeda and ISIS lobby congress, how they stated that they personally control U.S. intelligence agency’s narratives about them. How they have successfully infiltrated every sensitive organ in the U.S. government. I added in my book tools to help law enforcement investigate and counter their terrorism and infiltration stratagems.  

JWK: Do you think the American and international media focuses enough attention on the issue?

CF: Unfortunately not. I think the media both nationally and internationally has been extremely commercialized to the point that most news agencies are more in the business of clickbait than actual news reporting and/or adequately analyzing most issues. They are also focused on creating division and partisanship. There are definitely honest journalists and television channels but the majority is morally corrupt, in my opinion.

JWK: Does the open U.S. southern border concern you at all as a security threat through which assassins and other terrorists could enter the country?

CF: Any rational person should be horrified by the U.S. southern border crisis. For decades Islamists have said that they have been utilizing it to smuggle jihadists into America. For example, prominently Islamist Abdullah Al-Nafisi even stated that if they decide to cause a massive bioterror attack against the U.S. it will be through smuggling anthrax through the southern border. Lawmakers know this. It makes me question their motives to keep it open.

JWK: What do you think needs to be done by this country and others to counter the threat you warn of?

CF: The U.S. should learn from its Middle Eastern and Arab counterparts who designated the Brotherhood as a terror group. It is the incubator of the vast majority of Islamic terror groups and I would even argue that groups like al-Qaeda and Islamic State are the MB’s military wings. Instead of playing a game of Whack-A-Mole with these terrorists, they should criminalize the source – The Muslim Brotherhood.
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A warning from the Soviet grave. The Soviet Union may have been left on ash heap of history but the anti-freedom ideology it was built on appears to have lived in.

Yuri Bezmenov (1939-1993) was a Soviet journalist and a former KGB informant who defected to Canada in 1970  and became known for writing anti-communist books and delivering anti-communist lectures. In 1984, he sat down for an interview with controversial author and filmmaker G. Edward Griffin in which he contended that the KGB was engaged in a multi-decade plot to gradually subvert of the political system of the United States. While his interviewer has been linked to some fringe conspiracies, what Bezmenov describes in the interview does seem to bear a striking resemblance to the sort of  things we’re seeing play out in society today.

I think we should heed his warnings and beware of being manipulated. Totalitarianism can come in the form of religion (any religion, not just Islam) or atheism. It’s still totalitarianism and our best defenses against it are vigilance, balance and gratitude that, through no virtue of our own, we have been born into a nation built on a constitution that recognizes that our inalienable rights come from God and not madmen or control freaks of any stripe.

John W. Kennedy is a writer, producer and media development consultant specializing in television and movie projects that uphold positive timeless values, including trust in God.