For Immediate Release: February 12, 2011
Contact: Anne Marie Frawley :: (202)489-7559
The annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), a project of the American Conservative Union Foundation (ACUF), concluded today with a keynote address from Congressman Allen West of Florida and the announcement of the 2011 CPAC/Washington Times Presidential Straw Poll results. This year’s gathering, the largest and most successful CPAC on record, included more than 11,000 conservative leaders and activists meeting to discuss many of the political and social issues challenging our nation today.
Congressman West addressed a standing room only crowd, receiving a series of standing ovations as he discussed international, social and economic policy. This was Congressman West’s third trip to CPAC. Two years ago, he attended as a concerned private citizen. Last year he gave a well received speech that catapulted him to the forefront of the conservative movement in Florida, providing the momentum to win a very competitive Congressional race. This year he was invited to give the 2011 CPAC Closing Keynote Address in recognition of his powerful work in support of conservative ideals.
The 2011 CPAC/Washington Times Presidential Straw Poll had a larger number of participants than any CPAC straw poll in past years, with a total of 3,742 votes. This was an increase of almost 56% over last year’s numbers. In this year’s poll Texas Congressman Ron Paul received 30% of the vote. He was followed closely by Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney who received 23% of the vote. Former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie each received 6% of the vote.Former Speaker Newt Gingrich received 5%. Former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachman, and Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels each received 4% of the vote. Former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin received 3% while Former Godfather’s Pizza CEO Herman Cain, former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum, and South Dakota Senator John Thune each received 2% of the vote. Former Utah Governor John Huntsman and Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour each rounded out the voting with 1%. Other candidates received 5% of the vote, and 1% were undecided. The poll was opened to all CPAC participants.
At the three day conference at the Wardman Park Marriott in Washington, DC, conservative activists from across the country attended speeches by Mitt Romney, Ron Paul, Tim Pawlenty, Ann Coulter, Mitch Daniels and other prominent leaders. Attendees from every state in the union took advantage of dozens of exhibitions, panel discussions, film and documentary premiers, and social events to engage other conservatives.
The American Conservative Union is the nations oldest and largest grassroots conservative organization. The American Conservative Union Foundation’s annual CPAC meeting is the largest gathering of conservatives annually.
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Give this to Suhail Khan, who declared at CPAC that there is no Muslim Brotherhood in the US!!!
The Muslim Brotherhood in the United States
STEVEN MERLEY
Research Monographs on the Muslim World
Series No 2, Paper No 3, April, 2009
HUDSON INSTITUTE
CENTER ON ISLAM, DEMOCRACY,
AND THE FUTURE OF THE MUSLIM WORLD
…
Pg 5
A speech given in the early 1980’s by Zeid al-Noman, an MB leader, explains how the Brotherhood organization coalesced in the U.S. in the early 1960s. al-Noman describes the first phase as a “gathering or grouping:”17
… the Movement was founded here with the founding of the general Islamic
activism or it might have preceded it by a little bit. At first, it was a gathering or a grouping for Islam activists without an organizational affiliation with the Movement. So, the first generation of the Muslim Ikhwans in north America composed of a team which included he who was an Ikhwan in his country or he who was a member of The Worshipers of the Merciful Group or he who doesn’t have a direction but who is active in Islamic activism. This was the first point or group which gave or planted the Muslim Brotherhood seed in America.18
Al-Noman describes the second phase of Brotherhood development as regional gatherings headed by a “Coordination Council:”
After that, the Movement went through different organizational formats. One of the first organizational formats tried here were the regional gatherings as each movement had …, had its gathering with a leadership and the collection of these leadership formed the Group’s leadership or what is called the Coordination Council. They were meeting and the resolutions of that Council were non-binding for its members. Of course, there were some countries …, there were some countries which did not have a large gathering in North America, we can call them ….[UI] countries, individuals of this country would associate with the nearest movement to them. So, for instance, an Iraqi might have joined Jordan’s Ikhwans and, for instance, a Libyan might associate with Egypt’s Ikhwans and so forth.
Finally, al-Noman says that a unified leadership emerged, operating under the name of “The Muslim Brotherhood:”
Following this stage, a new organizational format started to evolve which is the unified Movement. These …, these groups of Ikhwans started to gather under one leadership. During this stage, the name of this gathering was not important but the affiliation with the Ikhwan’s name was an affiliation due to the size of thought of this Movement and …er, or books and writings of this Movement which were available in the field. This was the reason for which the name “The Muslim Brother hood” was adopted as a basis for this work. I mean, to the point that, at some point, there was an attempt to change the name of the Muslim Brotherhood Movement to The Islamic Movement and making it affiliated with a dissenting group in Iraq called the Islamic Movement. All of that, Ikhwans, was at the beginning of work when the Ikhwans who came to America, may God reward them all good, were seeking methods for activism. This was probably in mid ’60s …er, or even …., I mean, mid ’60s, long time ago.19
This “new organizational format” of the U.S. MB may have been related to the “The Cultural Society,” an organization that was created in 1962 to protect the identity of Muslim Brothers who had come to the U.S. The Chicago Tribune investigation detailed the formation of the Society:
U.S. chapter of the Brotherhood … was formed in the early 1960s after hundreds of young Muslims came to the U.S. to study, particularly at large Mid western universities such as Illinois, Indiana, and Michigan. Some belonged to the Brotherhood in their homelands and wanted to spread its ideology here. But to protect themselves and their relatives back home from possible persecution, they publicly called themselves “The Cultural Society” and not “The Brother hood.”20
There is no available information about where the Cultural Society was first established or the identity of its early leaders.21 However, the Tribune investigation reported that the Cultural Society went on to help establish the Muslim Students Association (MSA) in 1963, the first in a series of the Brotherhood’s public or “front” organizations. A U.S. Brotherhood document confirms that MSA was founded by the Brotherhood giving a slightly earlier date:
In 1962, the Muslim Students Union was founded by a group of the first Ikhwans in North America and the meetings of the Ikhwan became conferences and Student Union camps.22
One of the MSA founders acknowledges the 1962 founding of the organization, providing some additional detail: 23
The MSA of the U.S. and Canada was officially formed at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign on January 1, 1962. We first met in Urbana on December 25th, 1961, when some MSA students were visiting us from Indiana, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. Then we met again on the first day of January 1962 to plan a strategy for the bylaws and how to organize all the students in America. There were about eight people from four different states. In April of the same year, we had our first annual convention in Urbana where fifteen people attended. The second convention was in Urbana as well, and fifty people attended. And the third was in Carbondale, Illinois where we had two hundred people attend…. At that time, we were [all] known as “Muslims”… there was no difference between Arabs and non- Arabs, Shia and Sunni. People at the time did not know much about Islam. We were invited by non-Muslims to give lectures about Islam. Even the university’s foreign student advisor used to help and guide us, and gave us a plaque of achievement. MSA was the best student group on campus; we used to pray daily on campus and had a series of lectures to non-Muslims on Friday evenings.24
In 1995, global MB leader Shaykh Yusuf al-Qaradawi further confirmed the connections between MSA and the Brotherhood, and said that the goal of the organization was to “conquer” the U.S. through dawa (Islamic proselytizing):
In a 1995 speech to an Islamic conference in Ohio, a top Brotherhood official, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, said victory will come through dawa: “Conquest through dawa, that is what we hope for,” said al-Qaradawi, an influential Qatari imam who pens some of the religious edicts justifying Hamas suicide bombings against Israeli civilians. “We will conquer Europe, we will conquer America, not through the sword but through dawa,” said the imam, who has condemned the 9/11 attacks but is now barred from the United States. In his speech, al-Qaradawi said the dawa would work through Islamic groups set up by Brotherhood supporters in [the U.S.]. He praised supporters who were jailed by Arab governments in the 1950s and then came to the United States to “fight the seculars and the Westernized” by founding this country‘s leading Islamic groups. He named the MSA [as one such group].25
It is likely that the MSA served as an important recruiting tool for the U.S. MB. The Chicago Tribune investigation details how the Cultural Society’s recruitment process involved careful surveillance of Islamic facilities and organizations:
Not anyone could join the Brotherhood. The group had a carefully detailed strategy on how to find and evaluate potential members, according to a Brotherhood instructional booklet for recruiters. Leaders would scout mosques, Islamic classes, and Muslim organizations for those with orthodox religious beliefs consistent with Brotherhood views…. The leaders then would invite them to join a small prayer group, or usra (family or prayer goup). The prayer groups were a defining feature of the Brother hood…. But leaders initially would not reveal the purpose of the prayer groups, and recruits were asked not to tell anyone about the meetings. If recruits asked about a particular meeting to which they were not invited, they should respond, “Make it a habit not to meddle in that which does not concern you.” Leaders were told that during prayer meetings they should focus on fundamentals, including “the primary goal of the Brotherhood: setting up the rule of God upon the Earth.” After assessing the recruits’ “commitment, loyalty, and obedience” to Brotherhood ideals, the leaders would invite suitable candidates to join. New members, according to the booklet, would be told that they now were part of the worldwide Brotherhood and that membership “is not a personal honor but a charge to sacrifice all that one has for the sake of raising the banner of Islam.”26
Al-Noman describes Brotherhood recruitment in a similar manner, also making reference to usras (prayer groups), and suggests that the MSA was the main organization for recruiting into the U.S. MB:
As a recruitment in the ranks of this movement, it’s main conditions was that a brother must be active in the general activism in the MSA, a person who attends its general conferences or participating in its executive committees, whether local or central, and this was the Movements’ condition in the sixties. We can then sum up the condition of the movement in the 60s by saying that commitment to the movement was a sentimental commitment, a grouping one and general activism was the basis for that commitment. Also in the beginning, there were regional gatherings which turned into a unified movement without an intellectual or organizational scale. And we said that recruitment used to take place in the following format, attending the MSA conferences, and choosing active Arab elements and approaching them to join the Ikhwans. As for the Ikhwan who came from their countries, they probably joined the movement specifically if there were large numbers of Ikhwan movement who preceded them to America. Then, joining movement would be automatic; he would notify that he has arrived and after that he would join in the nearest opportunity. Most of the Usras then were then individual Usras. I mean, sometimes an Usra would be made up of three people and the distance between two of them is maybe 100 or 150 miles. They would meet once a month or once every six weeks.27
The document also notes that the concurrent conferences of the two organizational structures facilitated this recruitment from MSA into the Brotherhood:
The Ikhwan’s conferences used to be held at the same time as the MSA conferences. They would either precede it with one day or come a day after them.28
Three individuals—Ahmad al-Haj Totonji, Dr. Jamal al-Din Barzinji, and Dr. Hisham Yahya al-Talib—played key roles in the founding and development of MSA. All were born in the Kurdish, northern part of Iraq, and may have met there or possibly later in Britain, where all three received their undergraduate education in engineering.29 30 31
An FBI memo has identified Barzinji and al-Talib as members of the Muslim Brotherhood prior to establishing a residence in the U.S.”32 TheWashington Post adds that [Barzinji] fled Iraq in 1969 when the Ba’athist regime started executing fellow Islamists.33 34
After completion of their studies in Britain, the three came to the United States, ostensibly for graduate study but also to continue organizing Muslim youth activities. An MSA history identifies Totonji, among others, as one of the founders of MSA:
It was in January 1963 that some of the most respected personalities in the Islamic movement came together at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and formed the MSA of the U.S. and Canada. Over seventy people from across the country, including Muslim Brothers Totonji, Ahmad Sakr,35 Mahdi Bhadori, Ilyas Ba-Yunus—then all students—met in what would be the first of a number of historic gatherings to discuss the state of Muslims in North America.36
A December 1996 letter written by Totonji indicates that he had become the MSA Chairman.37 Another history of the MSA adds Barzinji to the list of MSA leaders:
The MSA … started with just a little more than a dozen students…. The earlier conventions in the sixties attracted hardly a hundred participants. But the momentum provided by the likes of Sakr, Totonji, Barzinji, and others too num erous to mention, gradually caught on, membership increased, chapters multiplied, and [this] brought us to the point where we are today.38
The Washington Post article confirms that Barzinji was an important MSA leader and implies that he was a member of the MB:
An engineering student and top MSA leader, [Barzinji] joined MSA associates in 1971 to host the top leaders of the Egyptian Brotherhood—just released from sixteen years in prison—for two weeks of meetings in Indiana. He and other then-MSA leaders helped persuade the Egyptian Brothers to try participating in Egyptian elections as an alternative to underground struggle…. “It was one of our main contributions to the Ikhwan movement worldwide,” he said.39
An online biography of Dr. Barzinji adds that he was MSA President in 1972.40
Finally, a book written by al-Talib suggests that he was also one of the important members of the MSA at that time.41
Various documents and media articles indicate that the MSA headquarters was located in Gary, Indiana, until 1975, where it was associated with the Masjid al-Amin Mosque.
More here:
http://www.currenttrends.org/docLib/20090411_Merley.USBROTHERHOOD.pdf
I was disappointed to see that there was no room at CPAC for conservative Democrats — once a fixture in the Southern States, but in other regions too. And back in the 1960s there was no shortage of Democratic congressmen who stood up for gun rights, small unintrusive government, and who also thought abortion to be ghoulish. CPAC 2011 was all GOP including the lavender crowd with Miss Coulter as their booster-in-chief.
The exhibits seemed to be geared to making commercials to get the least offensive candidate into office. I was happy to see the John Birch Society’s presence there, though, and had a good lunch chat with John McManus. Nice to see a record turnout, but Jonah Goldberg (or his locum) touting war for democracy seemed ridiculous, and possibly offensive.
Many attendees, needed some serious lessons in what conservatism is. Next year some sub seminars featuring the writings of Edmund Burke might be in order. Perhaps some Joe Sobran and Sam Francis should be taught.
Nice job guys, stay relevant!
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