By Ryan Mauro
Tue, October 8, 2013
The Clarion Project, the Center for Security Policy and the Institute on Religion and Democracy have published a shocking interview with Mohamed Elibiary, a senior Department of Homeland Security adviser. The Daily Caller reported on it yesterday.
Elibiary is a member of the Secretary’s Homeland Security Advisory Committee and founder of Lone Star Intelligence LLC. He served on the DHS Countering Violent Extremism Working Group and the DHS Faith-based Security and Communications Advisory Committee.
On September 12, he announced that he had been reappointed to the Committee and promoted to Senior Fellow. He was also a delegate for Republican presidential nominee John McCain in 2008.
The complete 37-page annotated interview is available here. The report is full of interesting material, but here are 15 important points to focus on. If you feel that these facts are concerning, e-mail, mail and/or fax a copy of this article to the House Homeland Security Committee, the Senate Homeland Security Committee as well as your congressman whose job is to represent you.
1. Elibiary says he knows the Muslim Brotherhood
in a “personal manner.”
In 2007, Elibiary wrote, “[O]ur government is playing a post-9/11 script it played in the 1960s against the Mafia, but this time against a social network it calls the ‘International Muslim Brotherhood.’ People like me know of the brotherhood group in a much more personal manner than the Average White Guy, who has no more insight than what’s available in the media.”
2. Elibiary praises the Muslim Brotherhood and says the U.S. should support it.
In his interview with me, Elibiary said, “MB in Egypt is a pragmatic, non-violent and generally pluralistic socio-political movement by Egyptian cultural standards. It is not accurate to paint MB-Egypt as dogmatic, violent or autocratic, much less more sensationalized terms like dictatorial, totalitarian or jihadist.”
He continued: “I believe that MB and its political arm, the Freedom and Justice Party, has by and large acted responsibly, if not always effectively, during the democratic transition period that Egypt is in the very early stages of.”
His Twitter photo has a pro-Muslim Brotherhood “R4BIA” logo that protests a violent crackdown on a Brotherhood protest in Egypt after the military toppled President Morsi by popular demand. He says it is a pro-freedom symbol that is “bigger than” the Brotherhood.
Elibiary says the U.S. should partner with the Muslim Brotherhood. In our interview, he said, “Our government needs to deepen our strategic engagement with MB.”
3. Elibiary compares the Muslim Brotherhood to Christian evangelicals.
In 2007, his organization made a presentation at a conference of the Assembly of Muslim Jurists of America. It stated: “The Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt, Jordan, Tunis, etc. is a social movement for religious revival that seeks to Islamicize the society through cultural changing Dawah and that includes the political system, sound familiar? Yup you’re right they are the Muslim world’s version of the Evangelical Christian Coalition/Moral Majority movement.”
He told the Daily Caller “Islamism
is a multi-century, transnational, intellectually grounded movement with influential philosophical works from multiple continents … It has many subcultures and currents of thought. Some are no different than conservatives who ground their values in a Judeo-Christian worldview and it has its violent extremist strains.”
4. Elibiary has associated with the Assembly of Muslim Jurists of America and pro-Khomeini groups.
As mentioned above, Elibiary spoke at a joint conference of the Assembly of Muslim Jurists of America (AMJA) and the North American Imams Federation.
AMJA is a hardline Islamist group whose fatwas call for the gradual establishment of sharia
law in America using deception; marital rape; jihad
against Israel and ban Muslims from joining the FBI or serving the US military in a combat capacity.
AMJA opposes offensive jihad in the West because "the Islamic community does not possess the strength to engage in offensive jihad at this time."
In our interview, Elibiary says he “spent a week with dozens of very senior Salafi scholars” from the group discussing Islamic jurisprudence.
He also speaks of when he brought a senior Salafi cleric “to give the first Friday Muslim congregational prayer literally inside the Texas State Capitol.” It is unclear if this Salafi cleric was from AMJA.
In 2004, Elibiary spoke at a pro-Khomeini conference. He said he did not know of the event’s extremist nature.
5. Elibiary says the U.S. should not oppose sharia law in Muslim countries.
In the same presentation, Elibiary’s group said, “We should remember that them [Islamists] ruling their countries with sharia law doesn’t mean them coming to our country and using our planes to destroy our buildings.”
“We must always resist the temptation to force one group such as Islamists to reform by adopting ‘liberalism’ for example. That would be denying them their self-determination to structure their societies according to their public will,” it also said.
6. Elibiary is a long-time friend of the former head of the Holy Land Foundation, a convicted Brotherhood/Hamas fundraiser.
shows American Muslim students blaming hatred against their faith on the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. The story was first reported by Sancho Panza in the