The Seven Stages of Muslim Brotherhood Denial

In the past day on on Facebook I have seen various old friends go through the stages of what I am going to call "Muslim Brotherhood Denial", the refusal to acknowledge the truth that there is a worldwide conspiratorial fraternal organization, active, wealthy, and well-organized in the United States, devoted to bringing the world (including the United States) to Islamic rule.

So, diagnose your friends and relatives with this handy MBD chart

Stage 1:  It is paranoid to think that such an organization exists.

Stage 2:  It is paranoid to think that such an organization is active in the United States.

Stage 3:  With 1% of the US population, it is paranoid to think that Islam will take over in the United States.

Stage 4:  Anyone who opposes large-scale immigration of Muslims supremacists is paranoid.

Stage 5:  If the Muslims take over I will be long dead,

Stage 6:  "The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam."

Stage 7:  Ash-hadu anla ilaha illal-Lahu Wahdahu la Sharika Lahu wa-ash-hadu anna Muhammadan abduhu wa rasuluhu.

In 24 hours some people have gone from Stage 1 to Stage 5.  Insufficient data yet on how long it takes to go all the way to stage 7, but research grants for a long-term study are gratefully accepted.

{I should add:  The Muslim Brotherhood is a complex organization, and my views of it are complex.  At one time I shared the general neocon view that the Brotherhood and its affiliates were progressive democratic forces that should be encouraged in the Middle East.  But the Brotherhood in Egypt, and its Palestinian affiliate Hamas, turned out to be weaker and perhaps less democratic than we had believed.

As regards the United States, I believe with George Washington that "reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle"; and with John Adams that "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."   Which religion?  As recently as 2008, I was a cheerleader for the old time Americanism of, say, Bill Clinton.  But while that political religion is not quite dead, it much weaker than it was a decade ago, and younger people are mostly unaware of it or disaffected from it.  There are certainly worse possible futures for most Americans than political Islam.}

The Muslim Brotherhood and the 2016 Election (updated)

"The U.S. Brotherhood had a plan for achieving Islamic rule in America: It would convert Americans to Islam and elect like-minded Muslims to political office." So reported the Chicago Tribune in 2004. But plans change, and the Muslim Brotherhood, a transnational movement that aims at Muslim supremacy everywhere, is nothing if not tactically flexible.  Its long term goal, however, is fixed, achieving Muslim rule in the United States and everywhere else on the globe -- by peaceful means, if possible, but by violence, as undertaken by the Brotherhood's Palestinian affiliate Hamas, if necessary.
     Huma Abedin, Hillary Clinton's right-hand woman, is the daughter of the deceased Muslim Brotherhood activist Syed Zainul Abedin, and served as assistant editor until 2008 on the journal he founded, The Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs.  Huma's mother runs the Journal and its affiliated institute to this day.

     At least two of the speakers at the Democratic National Convention have close ties to the Muslim Brotherhood or affiliated groups.  Sherman Jackson , a Muslim cleric and African-American "has also been a board member of the North American Islamic Trust, which owns and funds most Sunni mosques in the United States. Both ISNA [the Islamic Society of North America] and NAIT were identified as un-indicted conspirators in the Holy Land terror-funding operation."  Khizr Khan, who has succeeded in trolling Donald Trump by exploiting the combat death of his son in Iraq, was an intellectual follower of Said Ramadan, grandfather of the European Islamic scholar Tariq Ramadan and "unofficial foreign minister of the Muslim Brotherhood."  Tariq Ramadan was banned from entering the United States by the Bush Administration, this ban was lifted by orders of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.  Clinton, as Secretary of State, helped and praised many Brotherhood affiliates.

     The Brotherhood's goal of global Islamic rule is, of course, a long term project.  In working towards it in the United States, the Brotherhood and their affiliates have cultivated Republican activists and politicians with as much enthusiasm and success as they have Democrats.  Brotherhood activists have found powerful Republican allies for their program of strengthening political Islam through immigration, education, and conversion.  The election of Donald Trump, who has proposed banning Muslim immigration into the United States until better methods are found for screening out those Muslims who immigrate in order to wage violent jihad, would of course be a serious setback for the Brotherhood's American political agenda.
     In January 2015 Michel Houellebecq published his novel Submission.  The plot of that novel hinges on a Muslim Brotherhood takeover of France.  In the novel, the Brotherhood comes to power democratically, winning the 2022 Presidential election in alliance with the liberal left, who join with Islamists and adopt their agenda in order to defeat the populist nationalists (this, at least, should ring bells with Americans!).  The Islamists, you see, are thoroughly Europeanist, as they reject all forms of nationalism and work toward achieving a superstate that unites Europe and the Mediterranean under the rule of Islam.
     Some reviewers claimed that Houellebecq's plot belongs "to the world of fervid fantasy and café millennialism."  But given the stunning success of the Muslim Brotherhood in making the Hillary Clinton campaign a vehicle for its ambitions, it would be more prudent to say that, in the United States at least, the Brotherhood has come far even though it has yet far to go.