Ending The Muslim Brotherhood’s American Experiment

Marco Rubio announced this week what should have been obvious years ago: the Muslim Brotherhood will be designated a terrorist organization. The only question now is how long it takes to cut through the red tape that has protected this network for far too long.

America has been played, outmaneuvered by men in suits who speak our language while subverting our way of life. They needed no bombs or bullets, only patience, legal cover, and a nation too polite to call evil by its name.

The Brotherhood’s American infiltration reads like a textbook case of ideological warfare. In 1993, Hamas operatives gathered in Philadelphia to discuss propaganda strategy. Within months, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) established its presence in Washington. CAIR became the Brotherhood’s public face in America — clean, articulate, and fluent in the language of civil rights. They spoke to American ideals while quietly serving the Brotherhood’s agenda. For thirty years, this charade worked perfectly. CAIR leaders testified before Congress. They met with presidents. They helped craft the counterterrorism policy built to stop organisations like theirs. The audacity is staggering; it’s like commissioning the fox to design the locks on the henhouse.

Audacity was never their weakness, but patience was their weapon. While Americans obsessed over quarterly earnings and election cycles, the Brotherhood thought in decades. They built networks within networks; organizations that appeared independent yet shared the same funding, leadership, and objectives. The Muslim Brotherhood’s terror, drug, and cash operations run through a disciplined, interlocking system.

As Middle Eastern political expert Amjad Taha points out, the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT) controls mosque properties and financial assets. The Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) lends the Brotherhood a degree of religious legitimacy. The American Muslim Council (AMC) works the political front, cutting deals and building alliances. The Muslim American Society (MAS) runs operations on the ground, embedding itself firmly in local communities.

In universities, the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT) shapes the narrative. On campuses, the Muslim Students’ Association (MSA) targets the next wave of recruits. The Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA) and Young Muslims (YM) focus on families and youth. Then come the neighborhood strongholds — the Universal School in Bridgeview, Illinois, the Noor Islamic Cultural Center in Columbus, Ohio, and the Islamic Society of Baltimore (ISB). These schools, mosques, and cultural centers are far more than community spaces. They operate as recruitment hubs, training grounds, and engines of extremist influence.

The strategy was and remains both simple and brutally effective. Don’t attack the American system. Take it over. Don’t fight American values. Bend them. Don’t oppose democracy. Use it. Every lawsuit, media appearance, political alliance, and community initiative pulled in the same direction: make the unthinkable look inevitable.

And it worked with unsettling precision. Critics who warned of Brotherhood influence were quickly dismissed as bigots. When intelligence agencies traced the links to terrorist networks, they were met with charges of Islamophobia. The Brotherhood weaponized America’s own tolerance against itself, turning our strength into their shield.

At the same time, the evidence kept piling up steadily. Court documents revealed CAIR’s founders emerged from organizations that federal judges determined supported Hamas. Intelligence reports traced funding flows from Gulf states to American Brotherhood affiliates. Former FBI officials testified about the organization’s true nature. But none of it mattered and the machine kept rolling.

The most damning indictment is not what the Brotherhood did but what America allowed. We had the intelligence, legal authority, and every right to take meaningful action, but lacked backbone. Political leaders preferred comfortable lies to uncomfortable truths, bureaucrats mistook civil rights for moral relativism, and a media establishment treated legitimate security concerns as racist paranoia.

Meanwhile, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE – three nations that know the Brotherhood’s threat firsthand – designated them as terrorists years ago. When countries that live under the shadow of Islamist terrorism act decisively while America, the self-proclaimed leader in counterterrorism, stalls, something is deeply and deliberately broken.

Now, however, things are changing. Rubio’s announcement concedes the scale of the failure; we’ve been asleep while our enemies built and fortified their networks. Waking up won’t be easy, but it’s necessary. The Brotherhood’s network was engineered for endurance: a multi-headed hydra — multiple organisations sharing resources while maintaining separate legal identities, overlapping leadership to coordinate strategy while concealing accountability, and financial arteries running beneath layers of charitable fronts. Redundancy is built into every tier, ensuring that if one head is cut off, the others strike back faster and more fiercely.

The designation process will face serious legal challenges designed to delay and deflect: political pressure from allies who cling to the fiction that these are civil rights organizations, and media narratives that frame enforcement as persecution. The Brotherhood will fight back using every tool America’s open society provides. They will leverage their alliances with progressive movements and institutions. The reckoning won’t be gentle. Thirty years of institutional capture doesn’t disappear overnight. Organizations that have positioned themselves as legitimate voices of American Muslims will fight to preserve their influence. Political allies who accepted their support will resist admissions of error. Academic institutions that host the conferences and endorse the scholarship will move quickly to defend their reputations.

But none of that changes the fundamental reality. America has been harboring networks built to advance “a grand Jihad to eliminate and destroy Western civilization from within and sabotage its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers”. They have pursued this mission on a global scale. The evidence was always in plain sight, and the legal authority was always there, but the only thing missing was the political will to act.

Marco Rubio just provided it. The Brotherhood’s American experiment is ending, and its architects won’t survive the fallout. Whether Britain and the rest of Europe follow America or learn the hard way remains to be seen.