RNA - A bill introduced this week by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) calls on the U.S. State Department to determine whether the Muslim Brotherhood is a foreign terrorist organization. Advocates for American Muslims suspect a darker purpose ― to smear and potentially prosecute American Muslim advocacy groups, a move that could prove disastrous for the civil rights of Muslims in this country.
Cruz and Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (R-Fla.) introduced the Muslim Brotherhood Terrorist Designation Act in both chambers of Congress on Tuesday. In a press release, Cruz said that the brotherhood espouses “a violent Islamist ideology with a mission of destroying the West” and that formally designating them a terror group would “enable the U.S. to take action that could stifle the funding they receive to promote their terrorist activities.”
It’s the fifth time members of the Senate and House, urged on by a multimillion-dollar network of anti-Muslim groups, have attempted to label the Muslim Brotherhood a terror organization.
But American foreign policy and counterterrorism experts, while highly critical of the brotherhood’s brand of Islamism, have generally not viewed the organization as a threat to U.S. national security. They have argued that a terror designation might needlessly complicate U.S. relations with Middle Eastern countries where the brotherhood or its offshoots hold some level of influence.
Additionally, a British government investigation last year determined that while the Muslim Brotherhood had ties to extremism, it was not a terrorist group.
American Muslim advocates contend that the real intent of Cruz’s bill has little to do with foreign policy. Rather, they argue, the legislation would enable the U.S. government to target domestic Muslim groups that Cruz and others earnestly believe are part of a massive, covert conspiracy to destroy the U.S. from within.
A 2001 executive order issued by President George W. Bush gave the State and Treasury departments broad powers to investigate organizations that the government alleges have provided material support to, or are “otherwise associated with,” a designated terror group. Those being investigated can have their funds frozen and be subject to warrantless searches and asset seizures. The investigations can drag on for years, effectively shutting down the organization.
A 2009 American Civil Liberties Union review of Muslim charities in the crosshairs found that Bush’s executive order “effectively allows the government to shut down an organization without notice or hearing and on the basis of classified evidence, and without any judicial review.”
Now Cruz’s legislation looks like another step along that road.
“The bill is about domestic control of Muslims,” Corey Saylor, director of the department to monitor and combat Islamophobia at the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), told The Huffington Post. “It has everything to do with a widely debunked conspiracy theory that Muslim organizations are nefarious.”
“Let me be extremely clear,” J.M. Berger, a counterterrorism analyst at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism, told BuzzFeed last fall, speaking of the broader idea of a terrorist designation for the Muslim Brotherhood. “This initiative is concerned with controlling American Muslims, not with any issue pertaining to the Muslim Brotherhood in any practical or realistic sense.”
For years, anti-Muslim groups have claimed that CAIR, the country’s largest Muslim civil rights organization, and other pro-Islam groups in the U.S. are, in fact, fronts for the brotherhood.
Saylor vehemently denied that allegation on Wednesday. “The Muslim Brotherhood affects CAIR the way a dust storm on Mars affects the weather in Washington, D.C.,” he said, adding that CAIR has never received funding from the brotherhood.
Yet with the election of Donald Trump, who has surrounded himself with anti-Muslim conspiracy theorists, and with Republicans in control of the Senate and House, the proposed Muslim Brotherhood Terrorist Designation Act has a chance of passing and being signed into law.
Lana Safah, a spokeswoman for the Muslim American Society, another high-profile Muslim advocacy group, told HuffPost that her group has “no affiliation with any foreign or international organization.”
Yet, she said, “in the Trump era, and in the most Islamophobic atmosphere the American Muslim community has ever experienced, it seems we should expect the unexpected, such as this unprecedented designation, which no former administration has made. It would cripple the operations of any Muslim organizations linked, however circumstantially, to the Brotherhood.”
“Demonizing these organizations,” she added, “will only hinder national security efforts to eradicate the roots of violent extremism.”
Nathan Lean, author of the 2012 book The Islamophobia Industry, agrees. He said designating the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist group could give government officials cover to effectively dismantle U.S. Muslim groups. And that, he fears, would lead to “the wanton violation of American Muslim civil rights.”
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