Frank Gaffney’s monologue commemorating the 20th anniversary of 9/11

Twenty years ago, I had a rather unique perspective on the 9/11 attacks. On that morning, I providentially witnessed a gathering of leading Islamists that I believe contributed to a form of jihad that has proven over the intervening decades to be even more lethal than that day’s violent manifestations.

The Muslim Brotherhood calls it “civilization jihad.” Its practitioners use stealthy influence operations and subversion to advance the insinuation of their totalitarian Islamic code until the Global Islamic Movement is strong enough to use violent means decisively to impose Sharia worldwide.

Thanks to this stealth jihad, the Brotherhood has, in my professional judgment, successfully blinded the U.S. government and military from that day to this to the true nature of the so-called “War on Terror” – thereby, rendering us incapable of waging it successfully. Witness Joe Biden’s humiliating defeat in Afghanistan.

Let me be clear. My experiences of the past twenty years and the critique informed by them finds serious fault with both parties. The administrations of both parties have all been influenced, misinformed and undermined to varying degrees by what I think are best described as “Sharia-supremacists,” many of whom in this country are associated with various front groups, mosques and/or organizations tied to the Muslim Brotherhood.

As it happens, on September 11, 2001, my organization, the Center for Security Policy shared space with Americans for Tax Reform and the Islamic Free Market Institute. During my commute to work that morning, the World Trade Center and Pentagon were murderously attacked.

Once in the office, I observed a group of fifteen or twenty men and women, many of them wearing Muslim and/or Middle Eastern attire, entering the conference room my organization shared with its neighbors.

We subsequently learned that this was a group of Islamists who were supposed to be elsewhere that day. The backstory is laid out in extensive detail in a ten-part online course called “The Muslim Brotherhood in America” available at SecureFreedom.org.

But the short form of it is that they were supposed to meet that day at the White House with President George W. Bush and his team to address a number of putative Muslim community grievances.

After the attacks, though, the White House complex was locked down and the Islamists relocated to the conference room I shared with the man who had set up the meeting with President Bush and his team: Grover Norquist.

In the conference room was a White House representative, Suhail Khan, at the time a full-time volunteer in the Office of Public Liaison responsible for its connections to the Muslim community. Suhail Khan’s father – of whom he has publicly expressed great pride and described as a man whose work he sought to carry on – was a founder of several of the largest Muslim Brotherhood front groups in the United States.

As a result in part of Suhail Khan’s efforts, first the Bush 2000 campaign and then the Bush White House wound up liaising with Muslim Brotherhood operatives like those who met on 9/11 in our conference room. In the wake of that meeting, Mr. Bush was photographed with leaders of Brotherhood fronts like the Council on American Islamic Relations. He also espoused Muslim Brothers’ memes like “Islam is a religion of peace,” “jihad is about personal struggle” and “the people who hijacked those planes are trying to hijack Islam.”

Under the Brotherhood’s influence, the Bush ’43 administration was soon recruiting personnel to prove that its War on Terrorism was not anti-Muslim. Not surprisingly, this arrangement resulted in people aligned with Sharia-supremacism getting jobs, advisory board positions and contracts throughout the government. The Obama-Biden administration engaged even more aggressively in this practice.

For example, Imam Mohammed Magid, the president of the largest Muslim Brotherhood front, the Islamic Society of North America, was one of three Islamist activists appointed to the Obama Department of Homeland Security’s Advisory Committee. They worked to deflect attention from jihadism to so-called “violent extremism” involving constitutionalists, gun-owners, veterans and conservatives.

For his part, Donald Trump ran for president pledging to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization. Unfortunately, foreign powers and like-minded U.S. officials – not a few of whom were hold-overs from the previous administration – stymied his efforts to do so once in office.

After the 2020 presidential election, the events of January 6th offered an unprecedented opportunity to propagate and institutionalize the Brotherhood’s deflection campaign. Suddenly, “violent extremists” morphed into “white supremacists,” and Trump voters were branded as the greatest threat to our homeland security.

Thus far, under President Biden, concerns about jihadists have been minimized, if not wholly neglected. Meanwhile the Muslim Brotherhood, now sponsored by the Sharia-supremacist governments of Turkey and Qatar, has built out its organizational, mosque and other infrastructure in the United States and secured more and more powerful government jobs for its cohort and their allies.

It can only be hoped that Joe Biden’s humiliating strategic defeat in Afghanistan at the hands of Sharia-supremacists will compel this country finally to reckon with the reality of the doctrine at the core of authoritative Islam. The good news is that many Muslims do not practice their faith in accordance with Sharia. The bad news is that the authorities of Islam consider such Muslims to be apostates, deserving of capital punishment. And such views cause too many of their co-religionists to remain silent, if not actually compliant with Sharia’s dictates – the most important of which is to engage in violent jihad to impose their version of Islam worldwide.

Twenty-years after 9/11, we face the distinct prospect of more and possibly far worse jihadist attacks, elsewhere and here. We must be clear now about what will prompt them, namely, Sharia-supremacism. By so doing, we will improve dramatically our ability to counter the perpetrators and defeat those who enable them. We must do no less.