Honey, I've Shrunk the HAMAS Front Group!

UPDATE: Thanks to American Thinker and LGF for the plugs today!

Welcome to everybody joining us today from my article at FrontPage this morning, "CAIR by the Numbers", which also could have been titled, "The Incredible Shrinking CAIR". If you're here for the first time, be sure to check out the blog for Central Ohioans Against Terrorism (COAT).

The article today has a number of tasty statistical tid-bits about our favorite Islamist organization, but here's the jist:

But their new 2006 Annual Report and their recently posted 2005 IRS Form 990 shows that CAIR continues to hemorrhage members. Whereas my estimates for 2004 showed that based on their membership receipts in that period they had approximately 4,761 dues-paying members, in 2005 their membership plummeted dramatically to an estimated 2,615. This puts CAIR on the same comparative membership level as the American Indian Kaw Nation in Kansas, the Cleveland Section of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, the Society for News Design, the University of Texas Longhorn Alumni Band, and the South Dakota chapter of the National Federation of Independent Businesses (NFIB), none of whom are consulted near as frequently by Beltway politicians or sought after for comment by the media establishment as CAIR.

The steep decline in CAIR membership is directly correlated in membership receipts (line 3 of the Form 990), which dropped off from $119,029 in 2004 to $65,377 – a decrease of $53,652, or almost half (45 percent) of the previous year’s membership revenues. If this trend continues at the same pace, their 2006 Form 990 numbers will show $29,419 in membership revenues, representing only 1,177 members, roughly comparable to the membership of the Genealogical Society of Rockingham County, Virginia and the Garden Club of Tacoma, Washington – neither of which has a Washington DC lobbying office.

In a previous post, "CAIR and all that", I linked to some of my previous articles on CAIR, but here's an updated list of CAIR-related pieces:

CAIR’s Grievance Theater, the Flying Imams and 9/11 (04/18/07) Did a previous CAIR lawsuit indirectly aid the 9/11 terrorists?

CAIR’s Blood Money (03/13/07) CAIR-OH hosts an unindicted co-conspirator of the 1993 WTC Bombing as its annual fundraiser banquest keynote speaker.

Numbers Don’t Lie (02/12/07) Reality doesn't quite measure up to CAIR's propaganda.

CAIR Betting on Democrats (10/27/06) Islamists put their money where their ideology is.

Agence France Presse Pushes CAIR's Fake Hate Crime Numbers (09/04/06)

CAIR, Assault and Videotape? (08/08/06) CAIR's version of "free speech".

Kafir-phobia: Americans as Violent Anti-Muslim Bigots (08/31/06) CAIR indulges in the very bigotry they attribute to others.

Thanks for stopping by!

Going Global on the Muslim Brotherhood

Last week, my ongoing debate with Nixon Center "scholars" Robert Leiken and Steven Brooke on the Muslim Brotherhood was noticed by the Italian daily, Il Foglio, in reporter Guilio Meotti's 3-part series examining in detail Leiken and Brooke's claims of a "Moderate Muslim Brotherhood".

My translation of the Il Foglio series appears today at FrontPage, "Going Global on the Muslim Brotherhood". I am cited in the third article, where Meotti refers to my extensive critique of Leiken and Brooke's thesis, "Showdown on the Muslim Brotherhood, Part 1" [Part 2] [Part 3]:

The American analyst Patrick Poole remembers that "in 2004, when the Kuwaiti authorities attacked the radicals, the government discovered that the source of the jihadist preaching were the imams associated with the Brotherhood".

The series is well worth the read, notwithstanding my rather lumpy translation.

Albanians and Anti-Jihad Bigotry

UPDATE (05/10/07): Welcome to everyone visiting today from Our Man in Tirana blog! And thanks to Our Man for the plug. New details have emerged that at least three of the four Albanians have been in the US for 23 years (courtesy Fox News) and were not part of the refugee community that came to Fort Dix in 1999. That notwithstanding, the bigotry continues.

A few weeks ago when I had my article published at The American Thinker, "Albania and the Perils of the 21st Century," one letter to the editor that AT received likened me to a Nazi sympathizer for having a kind word to say about the Albanian people. That article raised the issue of Albania's struggles with radical Islam, which you would think the anti-jihad crowd would have appreciated.

But my article today, "Kosova and Anti-Jihad Bigotry", has absolutely brought out the worst. An email I just received called me "an angry apologist for jihadist murderers". This was from a well-known anti-Jihad writer, who had previously agreed with the sentiments expressed that I was a Nazi sympathizer. The jist of his position would be: "Albanian Muslims bad, Serbian Christians good; Albanians jihadist murderers, Serbians innocent victims." But as with all things in the Balkans, things just aren't that simple. If anything, at least I'm not an apologist for Serbian genocide.

EXHIBIT A for the thinly-veiled racism that bubbles to the surface whenever the issue of the Albanians arises is Julia Gorin's leading article today at FrontPage Magazine (yes, a publication I regularly write for), "Balkan Muslim Gratitude". Her point is to condemn the entire Kosova Albanian refugee community for the arrest yesterday of six men, four of whom are Albanian, for plotting to kill soldiers at Fort Dix, New Jersey. EXHIBIT B would be the reader comments. EXHIBIT C would be Srdja Trifkovic at Chronicles, "Kosova Blowback Reaches America", where he compares Kosovar refugees to Al-Qaeda.

Gorin charges that this is "Balkan blowback" for NATO having intervened in the Serbian ethnic cleansing campaign in Kosova that drove hundreds of thousands of Albanian out of their own country. Notwithstanding that we have had thousands of US troops stationed in Kosova for almost a decade, not a single combat-related fatality has been recorded. In fact, the Albanians are perhaps the most pro-US group in Europe, and Albanian troops have fought alongside US troops in Afghanistan. The NATO mission in Kosova very well may be the most successful international peacekeeping operation in modern history. Does this sound like the Albanians are all raging jihadists, bloodthirsty to kill American soldiers?

Even while writing this post I have received emails that I would not dare post for their vulgarity, openly racist, and religiously bigoted sentiments. As I say in my article, if these individuals would just substitute the word "Jew" for "Albanian", I believe many of them would be ashamed at the malignant spirit that is driving them. Unfortunately, some of them still wouldn't be ashamed. It seems I have struck a wound deeply into the heart of the anti-jihad movment. Those, like me, who are concerned about the opposition to global jihad would do well to take note.

Debunking Muslim Brotherhood Myths

In an article today at The American Thinker, "The US and the Muslim Brotherhood", I take aim at one of the cardinal myths invoked by the Brotherhood's Western apologists in defense of their claims of a "moderate" Muslim Brotherhood. Here's a quick summary:

In the current debate on the Muslim Brotherhood, the group's Western apologists claim that the jihadist ideology of their leading thinker, Sayyid Qutb, was discarded in the late 1960s and 1970s with the publication of Hassan al-Hudaybi's "Preachers, Not Judges". But recent scholarship demonstrates Hudaybi didn't write the book, promote it, or even agree with it.

That's right. The main piece of evidence used the Muslim Brotherhood's defenders (the Nixon Center, James Traub's recent piece in the New York Times Magazine, etc.) is fabricated whole-cloth.

Perhaps the top scholar on this subject is Barbara Zollner, Director of Islamic Studies at Birbeck College, University of London. Not only is the book the topic of her PhD dissertation, but she has a volume on the subject, The Muslim Brotherhood: Hasan al-Hudaybi and Ideology, which is due to be published by Rutledge early next year.

At a conference held at Georgetown University in March on the theme of "Islamist Politics: Contemporary Trajectories in the Arab World," Zollner delivered a brief synopsis of her extensive research on the subject, "Du'at la Qudat: Notes on the Authorship, Purpose, and Relevance of a Text Purporting a Moderate Theology". During her lecture (available in audio here) she challenged the popular myth still advanced by the Muslim Brotherhood's Western apologists:

There are a number of writers who argue that Du'at la Qudat, when it was published in the 1970s, to be exact in 1977, that it is an evidence of the Muslim Brotherhood's turn away from radical thinking, and that it evidences a shift of the Muslim Brotherhood's stance towards a centrist Islamist ideology...What I want to say today are two things. Overall my argument that Preachers, Not Judges was not written by Hassan al-Hudaybi, and secondly, it is not written as a response to Sayyid Qutb.

Utilizing my recent research on the topic, journalist and terrorism finance expert Doug Farah blogged yesterday on "The Amazing Deception in the Muslim Brotherhood's Charm Offensive". In the comments section of Farah's post, however, appeared Ibrahim El Houdaiby, the great-granson of Hassan al-Hudaybi, invoking family folklore to rebut the overwhelming consensus of scholars on this subject, but not providing any substantive evidence in support of his claims. The strange thing is that since the revelations first appeared in 1995 about the true origins of "Preachers, Not Judges", and the testimony of others inside and outside the Brotherhood, this new information (that Hudaybi had no role in the creation of the book) has gone unchallenged until now.

This raises a lot of questions in the ongoing debate over the Muslim Brotherhood. Here's my conclusion:

These evidences raise some important questions in the current debate in the West over the Muslim Brotherhood: is it the case that the journalists and Beltway wonks appealing to Preachers, Not Judges as proof of a "reformed" Brotherhood are simply ignorant of most of the scholarship over the past decade on this topic, or have they determined to bury this evidence with their silence in the hope that it will be ignored? If the former, we have cause to question their credibility as self-appointed experts on the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood, and we also have to acknowledge their gullibility in accepting unquestioned the propaganda put out by the group; if the latter, their pretended objectivity is little more than the component of the official duplicity that characterizes the Muslim Brotherhood's long-standing operational methodology. Only they can tell us which it is.

I'm not holding my breath for a response.

Does the Nixon Center Have Anything Better To Do?

UPDATE (05/03/07): For more, see my article in today's edition of FrontPage Magazine, "Nixon Center's Plumbers Unit". If you're visiting from the link in that article, be sure to read this post from earlier this week.

Earlier this week I observed that someone from the Nixon Center had paid me a visit to download virtually all of the blog posts here at Existential Space. Well, this afternoon we had several different people from the Nixon Center riffling through my blog archives (opposition research interns?), this time downloading even more blog entries - apparently the ones they missed earlier in the week:

I notice that they all were visiting at the same time and are coming through Google searches targeting my name. Yet even more evidence that they're attempting to dig up dirt to attack me with rather than face the prospect of having to respond to the massive amount of evidence I cited against their preposterous "Moderate Muslim Brotherhood" thesis.

A note to the folks at the Nixon Center:

First, do you guys have anything better to do, like lobbying to get al-Qaeda taken off the Specially Designated Global Terrorist list?

Secondly, if you're so eager to find my skeletons, just email me! I'll be glad to tell you where they are! But that doesn't change the fact that your rehabilitation of the Muslim Brotherhood is factually bankrupt.