Salam al Maseeh

The first Palestinian above all others is Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.

Let be accursed any gospel other than that which was preached at the beginning, received not from man but from Christ Jesus, thou alone, in whom we have redemption through thy all holy infinitely pure and undefiled blood, the remission of our sins, who in the future shall recreate the heavens and the earth, called by thine special choice, who before hoped in Christ with all who heard the word of truth and believed, sealed with the Holy Spirit of the promise, who is the pledge of our inheritance, to the redemption of the possession, for the praise of his glory, in faith in the Lord Jesus, and of love for all the saints in unceasing intercession of all the elect angels and saints of God, virgins, with all thanksgiving, that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may grant us the spirit of wisdom and revelation in deep knowledge of him; the eyes of our minds being enlightened, to know the hope of his calling, the riches of the glory of his inheritance in the saints, and the exceeding greatness of his power towards us who believe, according to the working of his mighty power wrought in Christ the only first born from the dead in the flesh raised above all things he made subject under his feet, we who hold him the head directly and no other, Christ Jesus our only Lord and Saviour immortal son of the immortal Father in the unity and power and bond of love of the immortal Holy Spirit our Paraclete unto the ages of the ages. Amen.

The Final Trial: Jesus Christ begotten of the Father - not made

A prayer of Isaias the Prophet.

Is. 26: 9-21

(Isaias' prophecy, which is also his prayer.)

O Lord our God, grant us peace. Out of the night my spirit waketh at dawn unto Thee, O God; for Thy commandments are a light upon the earth. Learn righteousness, all ye that dwell upon the earth. For the ungodly man hath come to an end; every one that learneth not righteousness upon the earth shall not be able to do truth; let the ungodly be taken away, that he may not see the glory of the Lord. O Lord, Thine arm is lifted up, and they knew it not; but when they know it, let them be put to shame. Zeal shall lay hold upon an untaught people, and now fire shall devour the adversaries. O Lord our God, bestow Thy peace upon us, for Thou hast given all things unto us. O Lord our God, take us for Thy possession. O Lord, we know no other beside Thee; we call upon Thy name. But the dead shall not see life, neither shall physicians raise them up; therefore hast Thou brought wrath upon them, and hast slain them, and hast taken every man of them away. Bring more evils upon them, Lord; bring more evils upon them that are glorious upon the earth. O Lord, in trouble we remembered Thee; with small affliction was Thy chastening with us. And as a woman in travail draweth nigh to be delivered, and crieth out in her travail, so have we become in the presence of Thy beloved. We have conceived, O Lord, because of Thy fear, and have suffered pangs, and have brought forth the spirit of Thy salvation, which we have wrought upon the earth. We shall not fail, but all those that dwell upon the earth shall fail. The dead shall arise, and they that are in the tomb shall awake, and they that are upon the earth shall rejoice. For the dew which Thou sendest is healing unto them; but the land of the ungodly shall perish. Go, my people, enter into thine inner chamber, shut thy door, hide thyself for a little season [during the Great Tribulation, hidden in mountains and dens and caves of the earth - there is NO secret rapture which is only an heretical apostate Lurianic Talmudic Judaic doctrine], until the anger of the Lord shall pass away.

Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.

And see: The Abomination of Desolation

Note in the below that this is a description of the evil that precedes the Antichrist who is the Abomination of Desolation. Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ then comes after the reign of Antichrist has proceeded for a while. Antichrist, his reign and the False Prophet and all their followers are then destroyed by the Second Coming of Our Lord Jesus Christ from heaven with all His elect Angels and sent to hell forever. The saints will then reign with Our Lord Jesus Christ at their head on earth forever.

Palestine, which is properly the Holy Land for in it walked God in the flesh, Jesus Christ, and there He allowed Himself to be sacrificed for the salvation of those who profess Him from the heart and with the mouth, is a miniature of all the evil that has come upon the earth and there will the final evil be concentrated in its fullness and rule from there for a short time.

From: The Abomination of Desolation

Writing in the second century, St. Hippolytus wrote the following about the evil that will abound before the coming of Antichrist:

The temples of God will be like houses, and there will be overturnings of the churches everywhere. The Scriptures will be despised, and everywhere they will sing the songs of the adversary. Fornications, and adulteries, and perjuries will fill the land; sorceries, and incantations, and divinations will follow after these with all force and zeal. And, on the whole, from among those who profess to be Christians will rise up then false prophets, false apostles, impostors, mischief-makers, evil-doers, liars against each other, adulterers, fornicators, robbers, grasping, perjured, mendacious, hating each other. The shepherds will be like wolves; the priests will embrace falsehood; the monks will lust after the things of the world; the rich will assume hardness of heart; the rulers will not help the poor; the powerful will cast off all pity; the judges will remove justice from the just, and, blinded with bribes, they will call in unrighteousness.

St. Hippolytus of Rome, Treatise on the end of the world and on Antichrist

My Blog List

Baptism

Traditional Catholic Prayers: Baptism

MATTHEW 28

CHAPTER XXVIII.

The resurrection of Christ. His commission to his disciples.

1 And *in the end of the sabbath, when it began to dawn towards the first day of the week,

18 And Jesus coming, spoke to them, saying: All power is given to me in heaven and in earth.

19 *Going, therefore, teach ye all nations: baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit;

20 Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and behold I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world.

"Consummation of the world," - the end of this age of grace and the beginning of the eternal ages with Christ reigning visibly. This is the end of the eschaton and the beginning of the eternal recreated heavens and the earth and will begin when Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ returns from heaven in the same flesh He rose with and ascended into the third heaven with, seated at the right hand of the Father. His return will be with all of His elect angels. He will raise and judge all men in the flesh and then recreate the heavens and the earth, which in that state will last that way for eternity. There will NOT be any sin in the new heavens and earth, so prepare now by confessing the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit and be baptized as commanded above and shown how to baptize below and live Holy and Godly lives in sincerity and humility and meekness waiting for the Lord when He returns so that we are not like the five foolish virgins but are like the five wise virgins.

____________________

*

1: A.D. 30.; Mark xvi. 1.; John xx. 1.

19: Mark xvi. 15.

====================

Method of Baptism

From the Didache (49 A.D. Council of Jerusalem):

Chapter 7. Concerning Baptism.

And concerning baptism, baptize this way: Having first said all these things, baptize the one to be baptized into Jesus Christ in "the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit," in running water. But if you have no running water, baptize into other water [still water]; and if you cannot do so in cold water, do so in warm. But if you have neither, pour out water three times upon the head onto the one to be baptized saying at that time "in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit." But before the baptism, if possible, let the baptizer fast, and the baptized, and whoever else can; but you shall order the baptized [when there is time] to fast one or two days before.

Baptism can and should always be performed immediately when there is danger of death of the one to be baptized. For instance, impending martyrdom or possible death causing illness.

Israel is the Nation of the Antichrist = Dajjal: Totally reject Dajjal and instead Come to Christ and receive the water of life

The Muhammad of the Almighty Triune God of The Final Trial would not stand in the way of Muslims coming to Our Lord Jesus Christ and being baptized in Him as the Injeel commands. The Mohammed of Ahmadiyya is the same as the Mohammot of al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah and both are antichrists and contradict the clear commands of God in the Injeel and Taurat and Quran.

Noble Quran

003.045 Behold! the angels said: "O Mary! God giveth thee glad tidings of a Word from Him: his name will be Christ Jesus, the son of Mary, held in honour in this world and the Hereafter and of (held in honor by the company of the prophets and saints) those nearest to God;

003.046 "He shall speak to the people in childhood and in maturity. And he shall be (adhered to by the company) of the righteous."

003.047 She said: "O my Lord! How shall I have a son when no man hath touched me?" He said: "Even so: God createth what He willeth: When He hath decreed a plan, He but saith to it, 'Be,' and it is!

003.048 "And God will teach him [Jesus Christ] the Book [alkitaba = all sacred writing from God Most High] and Wisdom [hikma = sophia = uncreated wisdom of God one with His Holy Spirit], the Law [Taurat fulfilled in the Gospel of Jesus Christ] and the Gospel [of Jesus Christ],"

As the Word of God Jesus Christ willed to learn in His Incarnation what He already possessed and knew prior to His Incarnation as part of His kenosis (emptying out of Himself and taking upon Himself our nature while in no way losing anything of what He already was as God by nature and Son of God as the Second Person of the undivided Trinity) and as an example to us of how we in humility must follow God the Father and the Son Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit.

Baptism

The Final Trial: Traditional Catholic Prayers: Baptism

Traditional Catholic Prayers: Baptism

MATTHEW 28

CHAPTER XXVIII.

The resurrection of Christ. His commission to his disciples.

1 And *in the end of the sabbath, when it began to dawn towards the first day of the week,

18 And Jesus coming, spoke to them, saying: All power is given to me in heaven and in earth.

19 *Going, therefore, teach ye all nations: baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit;

20 Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and behold I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world.

"Consummation of the world," - the end of this age of grace and the beginning of the eternal ages with Christ reigning visibly. This is the end of the eschaton and the beginning of the eternal recreated heavens and the earth and will begin when Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ returns from heaven in the same flesh He rose with and ascended into the third heaven with, seated at the right hand of the Father. His return will be with all of His elect angels. He will raise and judge all men in the flesh and then recreate the heavens and the earth, which in that state will last that way for eternity. There will NOT be any sin in the new heavens and earth, so prepare now by confessing the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit and be baptized as commanded above and shown how to baptize below and live Holy and Godly lives in sincerity and humility and meekness waiting for the Lord when He returns so that we are not like the five foolish virgins but are like the five wise virgins.

____________________

*

1: A.D. 30.; Mark xvi. 1.; John xx. 1.

19: Mark xvi. 15.

====================

Method of Baptism

From the Didache (49 A.D. Council of Jerusalem):

Chapter 7. Concerning Baptism.

And concerning baptism, baptize this way: Having first said all these things, baptize the one to be baptized into Jesus Christ in "the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit," in running water. But if you have no running water, baptize into other water [still water]; and if you cannot do so in cold water, do so in warm. But if you have neither, pour out water three times upon the head onto the one to be baptized saying at that time "in the name of Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit." But before the baptism, if possible, let the baptizer fast, and the baptized, and whoever else can; but you shall order the baptized [when there is time] to fast one or two days before.

Baptism can and should always be performed immediately when there is danger of death of the one to be baptized. For instance, impending martyrdom or possible death causing illness.

___________________________________________

See this for why Jesus Christ must be confessed as the Holy Word and Son of God: The Final Trial: Mary - revered by both Christians and Muslims as the vessel through whom God made the Word, Jesus Christ, Incarnate

The Muslim feast of Eid only commemorates the typological sacrifice by Abraham of Issac. That prefigured the final and only Supreme Sacrifice of Jesus Christ on His Most Holy Cross. It is only by the Sacrifice of Christ on His Cross that we are saved. Jesus Christ commanded, not suggested, that we be baptized; echoing the rest of the Church Fathers, St. Augustine noted that if someone could not be baptized even though they wanted it and did everything they could to be baptized in the water in name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, then their confession of faith is enough for their salvation. But no where are we allowed to refuse baptism.

All Muslims and everyone who will, are invited and encouraged to come to the water of life now and be baptized in the water and in the Spirit in name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit and receive Communion.

For Noah and Abraham as Prophecies of Baptism in Our Only Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ see:

Traditional Catholic Prayers: THE TWELVE PROPHECIES - The Second Prophesy: Genesis 5: 32; 6; 7: 6: 11-14, 18-21, 23-24; 8: 1-3, 6-12, 15-21

Traditional Catholic Prayers: THE TWELVE PROPHECIES - The Third Prophesy: Genesis 22: 1-19

There is no evolution, to be baptized in Our Only Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ one must believe in the truth of literal Creation by God and no pantheistic syncretism with deistic design and the rest of pagan evolutionary theory.

Traditional Catholic Prayers: THE TWELVE PROPHECIES - The First Prophesy: Genesis 1: 1-31; 2: 1-2

And see the rest of the Baptismal Prophecies. They are a must.

For all Jews wishing to convert sincerely from the heart to Jesus Christ now, here is a prayer based on the biblical Hebrew of the prophets of the Old Testament and the Septuagint Greek of the Old Testament and the New Testament and Arabic.

(The Arabic, Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala, means the same as God Almighty, or 'O Theos 'O Pantocrator, in Septuagint Greek.)

In the below “Dam (Blood) Kadosh (Holy) bet Yeshua ha Maschiach (Jesus Christ) kanawn anawim (have mercy on Your faithful [those who turn to God by the shed Blood of Christ on Calvary])” is asking for God's forgiveness by the shed Holy Blood of Christ – which is the only forgiveness there is from God for sin.

Go here: Jews called in Christ: Begun in 2002, judged illegal 2004, Israel’s apartheid wall goes on regardless | Jews for Justice for Palestinians

And then be baptized in Christ - see above: Baptism.

_________________________________________________________________________

Palestine Cry: The Justice of God: Parousia of Jesus Christ Our Lord: The BROAD way to hell - forever.

The Final Trial: The Final Trial: The Truth: The coming of the Antichrist, ad-Dajjal

The Illuminati: Mani and Manichaeism - blasphemous heresy

The Illuminati: Bahai - The Illuminati - Masonic Colonialism of the Holy Land

The Illuminati: Gnosticism, Occult, Masonry, Sabbateanism, Frankist--followers of Jacob Frank, Illuminati, Rosicrucianism and Mormonism are all rooted in and intertwined in the same Diabolic paganism

Israel is the Nation of the Antichrist = Dajjal: The Holy War - The Review of Religions

Israel is the Nation of the Antichrist = Dajjal: 18 Temple Benedictions: 6 + 6 + 6 = Temple of the Antichrist

The Illuminati: You'll never think the same way again. . . The Revelation

The Final Trial: No to all Terrorists

Traditional Catholic Prayers and The Justice of God

Reason for the Antichrist's - Dajjal's - war on the Noble Sanctuary

Reason for the Antichrist's - Dajjal's - war on the Noble Sanctuary
Reason for the Antichrist's - Dajjal's - war on the Noble Sanctuary | defilement of the Noble Sanctuary - click on picture

Parousia of Jesus Christ Our Lord

See:





The Promise of His coming. His commands to prepare and be worthy.

Statement of what is happening in the world in connection with the Second Coming of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.

Nuzul i Isa - Qiyamah, the Parousia of Jesus Christ Our Lord.

Rv:22:7 Behold I come quickly. Blessed is he that keepeth the words of the prophecy of this book.

Friday, July 5, 2013

The CIA and The Muslim Brotherhood: How the CIA Set The Stage for September 11 | Terrorism and the Illuminati

The CIA and The Muslim Brotherhood: How the CIA Set The Stage for September 11 | Terrorism and the Illuminati


The CIA and The Muslim Brotherhood: How the CIA Set The Stage for September 11

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Martin A.Lee
RAZOR Magazine
September 2004
The CIA and The Muslim Brotherhood: How the CIA Set The Stage for September 11
Reverend Franklin Graham, the pugnacious preacher who delivered the prayer at President George W. Bush’s 2001 inauguration, might have a bone to pick with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). When Franklin branded Islam “a very evil and wicked religion” after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, he had no idea that American spies were once eager to promote a Muslim leader in the Middle East modeled after his own father, the famous evangelist Billy Graham.
The CIA often works in mysterious ways – and so it was with this little-known cloak-and-dagger caper that set the stage for extensive collaboration between US intelligence and Islamic extremists. The genesis of this ill-starred alliance dates back to Egypt in the mid-1950s, when the CIA made discrete overtures to the Muslim Brotherhood, the influential Sunni fundamentalist movement that fostered Islamic militancy throughout the Middle East. What started as a quiet American flirtation with political Islam became a Cold War love affair on the sly – an affair that would turn out disastrously for the United States. Nearly all of today’s radical Islamic groups, including al-Qaeda, trace their lineage to the Brotherhood.
“The Muslim Brothers are at the root of a lot of our troubles,” says Col. W. Patrick Lang, one of several US intelligence veterans interviewed for this article . Formerly a high-ranking Middle East expert at the Defense Intelligence Agency Lang considers al-Qaeda to be “a descendent of the Brotherhood.
For many years, the American espionage establishment had operated on the assumption that Islam was inherently anti-communist and there fore could be harnessed to facilitate US objectives. American officials viewed the Muslim Brotherhood as “a secret weapon” in the shadow war against the Soviet Union and it’s Arab allies, according to Robert Baer, a retired CIA case officer who was right in the thick of things in the Middle East and Central Asia during his 21 year career as a spy. In Sleeping with the Devil, a book he wrote after quitting the CIA Baer explains how the United States “made common cause with the Brothers” and used them “to do our dirty work in Yemen, Afghanistan and plenty of other places”. This covert relationship; unraveled when the Cold War ended, whereupon an Islamic Frankenstein named Osama bin Laden lurched into existence.
Described by ex-CIA analyst Graham Fuller as “the preeminent international Islamist organization,” the Muslim Brotherhood currently has a huge following with autonomous branches, all in close contact, spread across the Arab world.
But it is banned in several countries, including Egypt, it’s birthplace, for being an alleged front for terrorists – a claim its supporters adamantly deny even though bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders had close personal ties to the Brotherhood prior to September 11, 2001
To understand what happened on that fateful day when terrorist strikes leveled the World Trade Center and damaged the Pentagon, one must revisit the turbulent changes that took place a half century earlier in the land of the sphinx. After seizing power in a 1952 military coup Egyptian Col. Gamal Abdul Nasser quickly threw prominent Communists in jail. This raised eyebrows among US cloak-and-dagger operatives who were eager to oblige when Nasser requested help in upgrading Egypt’s ineffectual secret service. But the US government “found it highly impolitic to help him directly,” the late CIA agent Miles Copeland acknowledged in his memoirs, The Game of Nations , so the CIA subcontracted more than a hundred German Third Reich vets, who specialized in Nazi security and interrogation techniques, to do the job.
Before long, however, US officials grew wary of Nasser, who seemed like a loose cannon on the deck of Middle Eastern politics. A fervent pan-Arab nationalist, he rebuffed American appeals to join a neutralist coalition of Third World nations that favored an independent stance during the Cold War. Non-alignment in the East-West conflict was an abomination to CIA director Allen Dulles and he bristled at Nasser’s growing stature as a charismatic leader who could galvanize Arabs and Muslims far beyond Egypt, “If that colonel of yours pushes us too far, we will break him in half,” Dulles admonished Copeland, the CIA’s man-on-the-spot in Cairo.
Copeland pondered ways to knock the pesky Nasser off his pedestal. One scheme called for slipping the Egyptian president a surreptitious dose of LSD to induce bizarre public behavior that would discredit him and tarnish his heroic image. But this wasn’t feasible. Instead of an acid hit, American spies opted for pushing “the opiate of the masses,” as Karl Marx sp famously described religion.
There were notable precedents for marshaling religious sentiment to advance America” Cold War agenda . In 1948, the fledging CIA enlisted the cooperation of the Vatican and Catholic Action, the largest Catholic lay organization in Italy, in a successful campaign to deliver the vote and vanquish left-wing parties in a hotly contested Italian election. Although Muslims have no pope or authoritative religious hierarchy, CIA strategists figured they could win over Arab hearts and minds by manipulating Islamic piety. Copeland recounts in The Game of Nations how the CIA engaged in black propaganda operations in Egypt that sought to demonstrate “Soviet ungodliness” by circulating anti-Islamic literature – including books with titles like Against the Veil and Mohammed Never Existed – while attributing its distribution to the Soviet embassy.
But cutting Nasser down to size was a much taller order than making the Soviets look like atheists. What the CIA really needed, according to Copeland was a “religious spellbinder” to alter Arab opinion and “divert the growing stream of anti-American hostility” . As Copeland recalled, “I wanted to find and groom a messiah who would start out in Egypt, and then spread his word to Africans and perhaps other Third World peoples. Our Chosen One would immunize them against false prophets,” I.e., Nasser and other non-aligned nationalist leaders.
Miles knew “from what was happening in America that a religious movement didn’t have to make sense in order to attract adherents,” as he put it. He was referring to Billy Graham’s sick gospel and salvation road show, which drew huge crowds across the USA in the early 1950’s. The meteoric transformation of this dime-a-dozen, Protestant Bible-thumper into a big time celebrity evangelist evidently made quite an impression on Copeland, who came up with the bright idea to sponsor “a Moslem Billy Graham.
Copeland was off and running. He visited several Egyptian mosques in search of an Islamic preacher who could sway the Arab masses in a manner most congenial to US interests. Although Copeland never found the CIA’s messiah, his furtive machinations were not without impact. While on the prowl for a Muslim Billy Graham, Copeland reached out to leaders of the religious revival movement known as the Ikhwan, or Muslim Brotherhood, which sought to build an Islamic society from the bottom up. The seeds of a clandestine relationship between the CIA and the Ikhwan were planted by Copeland, who surmised that the Muslim Brothers, by virtue of their strong antipathy to Arab nationalism as well as Communism, might be a viable counterweight to Nasser in the years ahead, US intelligence would become a defacto partner of the Brotherhood as it evolved from a mass-based social reform organization into the wellspring of Islamic terrorism.
“Any contact Miles had with the Muslim Brotherhood was not official policy,” insists retired CIA officer Raymond Close, a colleague of Copeland in the Middle East. “It was strictly solo work on his part. There were an awful lot of things that Miles did that were totally off the board.”
Whether Copeland’s efforts were “off the board” or otherwise, the Muslim Brotherhood was certainly a force to be reckoned with. Since its inception in 1928, the Society of the Muslim Brothers sought to restore Islamic law and values in the face of growing Western influence. Launched as a social welfare association, it became a focal point of resistance to British colonial rule. The Special Order Group, a secret paramilitary wing set up by the Brotherhood, carried out guerrilla raids in Egypt during the 1940′s, bombing British installations and killing British soldiers and civilians. By the time Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna was assassinated in 1949, the fast-growing Ikhwan, with its distinctive green flag crossed with white swords and a red Koran, had a half million Egyptian members and affiliates in several other countries.
When a group of young Egyptian army officers led by Col. Nasser toppled the pro-British monarchy, the Muslim Brotherhood gave them full support. But the Brothers soon had a falling out with Nasser when it became apparent that he did not intend to establish an Islamic state. Egypt’s secular strongman cracked down hard on the Muslim Brethren, which comprised the largest organized popular force in the country and the last obstacle to his autocratic leadership. Nasser’s aim was not to banish religious expression from the political domain, but to prohibit any religious expression that was not government controlled.
In the wake of failed assassination attempt against Nasser in October 1954, Egyptian authorities outlawed the Muslim Brotherhood, jailed and tortured thousands of its members and killed several of its leaders. Some went underground or fled the country to escape successive waves of brutal repression aimed at smashing the Brethren.
Saudi Arabia became a magnet for many persecuted Islamist refugees not only from Egypt but also from Syria, Iraq, Libya and other Arab states where the Muslim Brothers were perceived as a threat to the secular, nationalist order. Ikgwani expatriates were welcomed by the oil-rich Saudi monarchy, which became the principal patron of the Brotherhood on the Arabian Peninsula and elsewhere. A strategic US ally, the Saudi royal family was so hostile to godless Communism that it did not even maintain diplomatic relations with Moscow.
American intelligence formed a three-way tryst with the Saudis and the Muslim Brothers, according to Robert Baer, the former case officer in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, With the CIA’s implicit approval, the Saudi royals channeled funds to the Brothers, who joined a US-backed anti-Nasser insurgency in Yemen in 1962. “Like any other truly effective covert action, this one was strictly off the books,” explains Baer “There was no CIA finding, no memorandum of notification to Congress. Not a penny came out of the Treasury to fund it. All the White House had to do was give a wink and a nod to countries harboring the Brothers”
Yemen was just a warm up. To give a boost to Islamic proselytizing the Saudis with CIA encouragement, founded the Muslim World League in 1962. Underwritten initially by several donors including the Saudi-based Aramco oil consortium (then a CIA collaboration, the League established a formidable international presence with representatives in 120 countries. Members of the Muslim Brotherhood occupied key staff positions at the League while it disseminated anti-communist religious propaganda and sponsored the construction of mosques and Islamic center’s around the world.
Exiled Ikhwani were also employed as teachers and imams in Saudi mosques, schools and government agencies, where they promoted the extremist doctrine of Sayyid Qutb, the Brotherhood’s leading scribe and theorist. Executed in 1966 after 10 years of confinement in Egyptian torture chambers, Qutb is arguably the most influential religious scholar in modern Islam. He fashioned a lethal variant of political Islam that provided a Koranic justification for violence as the only way to rid the Muslim world of corrupting Western influences. Qutb’s hostility toward the West, in general, and the United States, in particular, was born during two years of study at the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley in the late 1940′s. He returned to Egypt mortified by decadent, sex-crazed America, which he likened to a brothel.
The Muslim Brotherhood underwent a significant shift with the radicalization of Qutb in prison. What had been essentially a reformist organization in its formative phase veered off in a dangerous new direction. In addition to intro ducting a harsh anti-American perspective to the Brethren, Qutb called for the formation of a revolutionary Islamic vanguard to spearhead the violent overthrow of secular Arab regimes. Qutb’s martyrdom bestowed instant credibility upon his message, which posthumously filled the ideological void left by the huge Arab defeat in the 1967 Six Day War with Israel, a defeat that shamed Nasser and discredited the Arab nationalist cause.
Qutb’s inflammatory writings would decisively influence a generation of young militants, including the future spear-carriers of al-Qaeda. Osama bin Laden, the tall, handsome scion of a wealthy Persian Gulf family, was first exposed to Qutb’s nostrums while attending King Abdul-Aziz University in Jeddah. One of bin Laden’s instructors in religious studies was Egyptian Professor Muhammed Qutb, the exiled brother of Sayyid Qutb, who taught classes on the imperatives and nuances of Islamic jhad.
After Nasser died in 1970, the Muslim Brethren, buoyed by Saudi petrodollars, resurfaced in Egypt. The newly emboldened Ikhwani were wooed by President Anwaar Sadat, Nasser’s successor, who freed Islamic activists from jail, lifted some restrictions on the Brothers, and turned them loose against the Nasserite die-hards and leftist student groups who disapproved of Sadat’s decision to make amends with the United States. Sadat’s courtship of the Brotherhood elicited more winks and nods from US intelligence. Right under the CIA’s nose, the officially-banned by semi-tolerated Muslim Brotherhood was going through a momentous transformation in its country of origin.
French scholar Gilles Kepel, the author of Jhad: The Trail of Political Islam, describes how Qutb’s theories found a receptive audience at Egyptian university campuses, giving rise to a potent radical wing with in the Islamist movement. When the older leaders of the Ikhwan, chastened by years of repression, repudiated armed confrontation in favor of gradual efforts to reform the system, renegade Brothers created several violent splinter groups and vowed to wage holy war against an authoritarian Egyptian regime, which they saw as corrupt, anti-Islamic, and a US puppet. The heads of two Brotherhood breakaway factions – the Egyptian Islamic Jhad of Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri and the Islamic Group of Sheik Omar Abdei Rahman – were among those implicated in the 1981 assassination of President Sadat.
Today Rahman, a blind Egyptian cleric, is serving a life sentence in the United States for plotting to blow up the United Nations, Manhattan’s FBI building, the George Washington Bridge and other New York City landmarks, while Dr. al-Zawahiri, a squat, bespectacled zealot with a round head and owlish face, appears in post-9/11 video footage sitting on the right-hand side of Osama bin Laden. Dubbed “the brains behind al-Qaeda,” al-Zawahiri became bin Laden’s top deputy after the Egyptian physician had matriculated through the ranks of the Muslim Brothers.
Muslim Brotherhood veterans have played a prominent role during every phase of bin Laden’s terrorist odyssey. As a college student he was mentored by Abdullah Azzam, a Palestinian Brother, who convinced the young Saudi to join the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan, a cause embraced by Islamists worldwide, moderates and radicals alike, after the Red Army invaded in 1979. That same year, Islamists Shiite revolutionaries led by the Ayatollah Khomeini overthrew America’s longtime partner, the Shah of Iran. These tumultuous events underscored the geopolitical importance of the Saudi connection to unnerved US officials. Henceforth, Saudi Arabia would serve as a Sunni Muslim bulwark against Shiite extremism, while also matching the United States dollar for dollar in support of the Afghan mujahedin guerillas who were fighting against the Soviets.
In 1984, Azzam and bin Laden jointly set up the Service Bureay, based in Peshawar, which played a pivotal role in organizing Islamic militants from 43 countries, including the United States, who flocked to Pakistan’s North-West Frontier territory to join the anti-communist jihad. With contacts spread across North Africa and the Middle East the Muslim Brotherhood was instrumental in recruiting many of these foreign Islamic volunteers. Jane’s Defence Weekly estimates that 14,000 of the so-called “Afghan Arabs” (though none were Afghans and many were not Arabs) trained in guerrilla camps, where paramilitary drills were infused with radical Islamic teachings. Some of these outside agitators fought along side CIA-backed mujahedin units during clashes with the Red Army.
Once again, an off-the-shelf approach to nation-tampering was deemed preferable by US intelligence as the Afghanistan operation grew by leaps and bounds during the 1980’s. It became the largest covert intervention in the CIA’s history, with Washington’s funneling more than $3 billion worth of aid and military equipment to the mujahedin through Pakistan military intelligence, which served as a conduit for American and Saudi largesse. In Ghost Wars, a compelling narrative history of the CIA’s Afghan imbroglio Steve Coll discusses how this cut-out arrangement provided US intelligence with a layer of deniability while its Pakistan proxy pushed aside traditional Afghan mujahedin organizations lacking the requitsite fundamentalist ardor and boosted the four mujahedin groups led by militants aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood. The CIA, according to Cole, never pressed Pakistan to back the more moderate, nationalist-oriented mujahedin rebels instead of the radical Islamic Afghan leaders who touted the writings of Sayyid Qutb, which were translated into local Afghan dialects.
A well-known figure among the Muslim Brotherhood-linked Afghan factions, bin Laden also collaborated with top Saudi and Pakistani espionage officers. Although bin Laden had no official contact with the CIA, his efforts to create an Islamic foreign legion were generally looked upon with favor by US intelligence. The more anti-communist forces in the fray the better, they figured. The going assumption was that these bearded extremists could be revved up and covertly deployed when Washington needed “a cheap no-American-casualties way to fight the Soviet Union,” as Baer put it.
Some of Baer’s colleagues at the CIA thought the foreign legion contingent should be formally endorsed and expanded. “The CIA examined ways to increase their participation… but nothing came of it,” then-CIA deputy director Robert Gates said of the Islamic volunteers, who, if nothing else, were useful from a public relations perspective. The burgeoning international brigade was touted as proof that the entire Muslim world stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the Afghan mujahedin against the Evil Empire. No one at the CIA reckoned that the foreign legionnaires had their own agenda.
Even before the Red Army withdrew the last of its regiments from Afghanistan in 1989, bin Laden was already hatching ambitious plans to wage a worldwide jihad. The Soviet pull out prompted a wholesale scattering of foreign volunteers, who retruned to their respective countries imbued witht eh spirit of Islamic revolution and ready to carry on the struggle. About 1000 militants remained in Afghanistan, many of these men could not go home because they were wanted for crimes against the state. This self-selecting stay-behind network formed the core of al-Qaeda, which became even leaner and meaner when bin Laden transferred his base of operations to the Sudan in 1991.
For the next five years, bin Laden and his inner circle were holed up in Khartoum courtesy of Sheikh Hassan al-Turabi, the Sorbonne-educated head of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Sudanese branch. Dubbed the “black pope”, Turabi came to power on the heels of a military coup and immediately announced that Islamic law would be strictly enforced in his country. He was hin Laden’s protector during this crucial period of exile, together they hosted strategic powwow’s with representatives from several Islamic terrorist organizations, including Hamas, a Palestinian offshoot of the Brotherhood. There was considerable debate among jihadists over whether to target the “near enemy” (apostate regimes in the Muslim world or the “far enemy ,” (the Western powers thwarting the implementation of Islamic rule.) More militants parted ways with al-Qaeda when it’s leadership dominated by Egyptian veterans of the Muslim Brotherhood , decided to go after “the head of the snake, “ which is how they described the United States.
By a process of elimination, only the hardest of the hardcore stayed with bin Laden when he and 150 border-hopping Islamic radicals and their families moved back to Afghanistan in 1996. Shortly thereafter, according to the official September 11 Commission, Khalid Shekh Mohammed, a tubby young engineer, approached bin Laden and pitched an outlandish idea to hijack jets and fly them into buildings in New York and Washington. This was the origin of the collective muder-suicide assaults that killed nearly 3000 people on September 11, 2001. Mohammed, the self-described mastermind of the 9/11 operation who had cut his teeth with the Kuwaiti chapter of the Muslim Brotherhood, is now in US custody.
The emergence of anti-American terrorist cadres from the bowels of the CIA’s proxy war in Afghanistan took US spymasters by surprise. It was blunder as colossal as the CIA’s inability to predict the collapse of Soviet Bloc Communism. ”Conceptually we failed,” admits Baer, “ We didn’t consider Sunni Islam to be a threat to the West…We didn’t want to see it.” While CIA operatives fixated on Shiite Iran as the fount of religiously motivated terrorism, a stateless network of Muslim Brotherhood-inspired zealots morphed into a worldwide insurgency. “The militant wing of the Muslim Brotherhood is essentially what we’re facing today.” asserts Baer.
Perhaps Col. W. Patrick Lang, formerly with the Defense Intelligence Agency, summed it up best by nothing the similarities between the Brotherhood and the Irish Republican Army (IRA). “There is the main IRA, whick=h eschews violence, and the “Provisional IRA, the armed wing. And there’s also the ‘Real IRA’, a more extreme spin-off from the Provisionals …These groups tend to fracture as they develop almost theological – and in the xcase of the Muslim Brothers actual theological – differences. They find each other’s projected courses of action to be insufficiently zealous or earnest or pure enough. And in Islam, of course, there’s no hierarchy to settle ideological disputes.
And so it continues as al-Qaeda chieftains criticize the Muslim Brotherhood for its accommodating stance toward secular rulers in Egypt and Jordan, where several Ikhwani sit in parliament. At the same time, moderate Brotherhood leaders – the Islamist movement’s elder establishment – have condemned terrorist attacks by bin Laden as “a grave sin,” Pursuant to their long-term strategy of using peaceful means to turn Egypt into an Islamic republic, the Muslim Brotherhood have taken over numerous trade unions and professional associations, while operating banks, businesses, health clinics, schools, and legal services that often outperform shabby government institutions. With more than two million members divided into several thousand semi-clandestine cells throughout the country, the Brothers are still subjected to episodic police raids, incarceration and torture. But these measures have failed to stifle popular support for a mainstream movement that, for a better or worse, expresses the concerns, aspirations and legitimate grievances of Muslims from all social strata.
America’s invasion of Iraq – “an avaricious, premeditated unprovoked was against a foe who posed no immediate threat,” as one CIA agent scathingly put it – has energized the entire spectrum of Islamist groups. While they give voice to anti-US passions and pervasive feelings of the injustice in Muslim communities, moderate Islamist also risk losing followers to fanatical jihad cults spawned by the Brotherhood. (The opiate of the masses turns out to be a gateway drug, as well.) According to a recent report by the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, Iraq is now a fertile breeding ground for new recruits that have swelled al-Qaeda’s ranks to more than 18,000 potential terrorists.
In response to a plethora of social and economic ills that bedevil the Muslim world, the answer from every Brotherhood chapter and affiliate has always been the same: Islam is the solution,” Ironically, US spymasters also once saw Islam as the solution to America’s problems in the Middle East. Fifty years ago, a CIA cad dreamed of an Arab messiah, “a Moslem Billy Graham,” who would plunk for US priorities in Egypt and beyond. That’s how it all began. And now, ironically, it’s onward Christian soldiers with Rev. Franklin Graham, Billy’s prodigal son, denigrating Islam and trumpeting the clash of civilizations as he dispatches American missionaries to save souls in US-occupied Iraq. Aself-fulfilling prophet, Franklin carries on like God’s gift to bin Laden, who must be laughing somewhere in his cave or his grave.
Martin A.Lee
RAZOR Magazine
September 2004

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