FRANK GAFFNEY:
Welcome to Secure Freedom Radio, this is Frank Gaffney, your host and guide for what I think of as an intelligence briefing on the war for the free world. We are going to have just such a briefing for a full hour today with a man whose intelligence I’ve come to admire greatly, his acumen, particularly with respect to the business of the counter-jihad is, well, practically unparalleled in America today. He is Patrick Poole. You can find his writings regularly at PJ Media where he does extraordinary work as really an investigative reporter on terrorism and national security issues. But he’s deeply knowledgeable in these subjects. His counsel has been sought by those in government on Capitol Hill and elsewhere. Of course, we’re always thrilled to have his participation in our program. Patrick, welcome and thank you for giving generously of your time today.
PATRICK POOLE:
Thanks for having me.
FRANK GAFFNEY:
I’d like to start with kind of a parable, almost. Yesterday, the president of the United States made his first visit to a mosque in this country. And he chose of all of the mosques he could have gone to, the Islamic Society of Baltimore. I’d like to kind of tease out with you, Patrick Poole, as a man who knows a lot about both the mosques in this country and the relationships that many of them have with organisations like the Muslim Brotherhood, to figure out whether this was a bad choice by the president, perhaps emblematic of kind of a series of bad choices he’s been making in this space. What do you think?
PATRICK POOLE:
Well, Frank, I do think that this is kind of emblematic of the failure of the Obama administration’s countering violent extremism or CVE policies which, in fairness, also go back to the latter half of the Bush Administration, where we see this engagement with really bad – I mean, known bad actors in the Muslim community, promoting them as moderates, that are supposedly going to help us de-radicalise. Well, yet, in fact, we’re seeing you know, from an empirical point of view, we’re seeing more terror arrests now than we’ve ever seen before.
FRANK GAFFNEY:
And not much thanks to these guys, as best I can tell. The partners in this outreach process.
PATRICK POOLE:
Yeah, and it’s – I think there are a couple of things with this Baltimore mosque visit by Obama. First off, is that Obama has to go to Baltimore to find a location that’s not going to be problematic. He couldn’t go directly across the Potomac River to dar al-Hijrab, you know, one of the largest mosques on the east coast. Because it’s terror-tied up to its eyeballs. I mean, there have been more than a dozen, as I’ve reported at PJ Media previously on dar al-Hijrab – you’ve just got this stream of terrorists, including their former imam, Anwar al-Awlaki, you know, who was killed in a CIA drone strike as the senior al-Qaeda leader. And then they couldn’t go to the ADAMS Center in Herndon, Virginia, because with Mohamed Magid, Obama’s pal Mohammad Majid, where a number of US officials have traipsed up to and held press events, because his mosque has churned out several terrorists here over the past couple of years. Same thing with the mosque in College Park. So I mean, you know, that Obama has to go seventy miles away from the White House to find a mosque that could even be spun up as non-problematic, is a problem in and of itself. And then you have the Baltimore mosque.
FRANK GAFFNEY:
You know, before we get to the Baltimore mosque in more detail – but, Patrick, as you’ve just pointed out, several of the mosques that have been prominent in the Washington region for some time are, in fact, entities with which the administration has engaged and the previous administration as you say. But interestingly enough, the long time imam of the mosque in Baltimore, a gentleman by the name of Mohammed Adam el-Sheikh, apparently spent time at the very mosque you’re talking about, the dar al-Hijrab as well. In other words, problematic there, too. But talk if you would a little bit about the Islamic societies in this country, Patrick, and what we know about their relationship to the Muslim Brotherhood.
PATRICK POOLE:
Well, Frank, as Steve Coughlin points out in his book published by the Center for Security Policy, the Islamic society is basically a brand name for the Muslim Brotherhood operating here in the United States. And we even see this in the Muslim Brotherhood documents which the Justice Department entered into evidence during the Holy Land Foundation trial. So, you know, when we see Islamic society, it immediately should, you know, pop up that, hey, you know, this is a Muslim Brotherhood-related mosque. And in fact we have the long time imam, who you were just talking about, Mohammed Adam el-Sheikh, the Washington Post actually identified, back in 2004, Mohammed el-Sheikh as a former member of the Muslim Brotherhood in Sudan. And not only that, while he was the imam at the mosque there in Baltimore, he was also the regional director for the Islamic American Relief Agency, which was designated as a terrorist organisation back in 2004 for funding Osama bin-Laden and al-Qaeda.
FRANK GAFFNEY:
So, Patrick, what I guess is coming across to those listening to this account is that the Obama administration may not have reached out in this instance to some of the people that it has in the past reached out to, some of the mosques, some of the Muslim Brotherhood front organisations, but they’ve chosen another one that just happens to be a little further removed. And I guess what I’m interested in mostly is, what does that tell us about the larger policy? You’ve indicated that we’ve been taking instruction from some of these very problematic people about how to avoid radicalisation. Does this essentially mean, as a guy who’s a serious professional in this space, that we’ve been suborned? Not just penetrated, but actually suborned by enemy operators?
PATRICK POOLE:
Well, Frank, I think you’d be hard pressed to find another scenario in which the bad guys are more embedded inside our system than what we have today. And again, I’m a bipartisan critic in this regard. We had Republicans who were pushing the Muslim Brotherhood back in 2007, 2008, including the Bush Administration. You know, officials within the Bush Administration, the CIA, State Department, and you’ve received the reporting that’s now coming out of the Middle East where the Brotherhood is now openly, I mean, kind of dropped the pretence of their supposed non-violence and are – places like Libya are openly affiliating with al-Qaeda and with the Islamic State. And so, our policies here inside the United States have been gravitating towards – our countering violent extremism policies have basically embraced these groups that overseas are now openly engaged with the bad guys. I mean, it’s – which, of course, a number of us have been, you know, warning about for more than a decade that this was a problem. But now we’re seeing it work out. And we’re seeing the problem proliferating at an exponential rate here inside the United States in terms of radicalisation and jihadisation.
FRANK GAFFNEY:
Right. Patrick, we have to pause for a minute here. I just want to say what you’ve just described is really the nub of the issue, it seems to me, this imputing to the Muslim Brotherhood a commitment to non-violence which makes them acceptable partners – not only acceptable partners, but people that we want to empower and embrace and legitimate and, frankly, even arm because they somehow are on the right side in this difficult problem with the violent jihadists. When we come back, we’re going to drill down on that question. What is the Muslim Brotherhood actually up to and have they eaten our lunch? That and more with Patrick Poole of PJ Media right after this.
FRANK GAFFNEY:
Welcome back. We’re visiting with Patrick Poole, an investigative reporter and national security analyst par excellence in matters, especially involving counter-terrorism and the jihad that is the principle focus of counter-terrorism efforts or should be, should I say. Patrick, we were talking before the break about the visit to the mosque the president’s made with just the latest example of an embrace, implicit if not explicit, by his administration of the Muslim Brotherhood. And you were helping to explain to us what the Brotherhood’s actual attitude is towards violence. But maybe you could put it in the context of its goals, as they make no bones about. What are their goals and is there an appreciable difference between those they share and those of, say, al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, Boko Haram or the rest?
PATRICK POOLE:
Frank, as we’ve laid out in our book, Shariah: The Threat, the Muslim Brotherhood’s endgame is identical to that of al-Qaeda and the Islamic State and a number of these other terrorist groups. Boko Haram, al-Shabaab. And that’s to re-establish the caliphate and to impose shariah law in place of, quote, man-made law. And so they’re unashamed about that. They put it on their official website that this is their goal. And we saw last year, just a little over a year ago, that we had the State Department receive a Muslim Brotherhood delegation inside the State Department headquarters in Foggy Bottom there in Washington, DC. And the very next day, the Muslim Brotherhood published on their official website a call for jihad against the Egyptian government. You know, and invoking its terrorist past. You know, going back to the secret apparatus and, you know, the killing of Westerners. And of course, I did the interview with Sheikh Nabil Naeem in Cairo last year. And I’ve got video of that up at Pjmedia.com. There – one of the founders of Egyptian Islamic jihad. And the series of questions that I do – walk through with Sheikh Nabil is about the connection between the Brotherhood and terrorism.
FRANK GAFFNEY:
Our guest is Patrick Poole of PJ Media and we’re talking about the Obama administration’s systematic outreach and to some extent that of its predecessor to the wrong Muslims. And what a problem that is. And Patrick, you were talking about kind of the actual ambitions and tactical preferences, subject to change depending on circumstance, of the Muslim Brotherhood and its friends. Please complete that thought.
PATRICK POOLE:
Well, yeah, I was talking about the interview I did with Egyptian Islamic jihad founder Sheikh Nabil Naeem. And Sheikh Nabil said unequivocally that he thought that the Brotherhood was the most dangerous organisation out there because they engage in this double speak. And they have no reservations. We see a lot of this hand wringing in the Western media about, well, you know, the Muslim Brotherhood has lost control of the youth. But in fact, when we look at the youth cadres of the Brotherhood, this is exactly what they’re trained to do. You know, they’re trained to engage in violence. And in fact, the, you know, some of the crackdowns back in the last decade, in 2005, 2007, were because the Muslim Brotherhood youth cadres were engaging in these military parades around Cairo.
FRANK GAFFNEY:
Yeah. Patrick, let me just ask you to pause on that for a moment, cause I really want to speak at length with you about what’s going on in Egypt, what’s been going on in Egypt, and what we need to be understanding or its implications for us, because you’ve spent a lot of time there lately. But before we just leave our own situation, I just wanted to draw you out on a petition that was put on the Obama administration’s official White House website. And it’s a part of their public outreach effort, I guess, to invite petitions. Well, one was put up there calling on the president to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organisation for the sorts of reasons that you’ve just mentioned. And something on the order of two hundred thousand Americans signed onto that petition and it took the administration a while to get around to it, but as I recall, maybe a year after they started this thing, and long after it reached the threshold that they’re supposed to respond to, they came back and said, well, we see no evidence that the Muslim Brotherhood has abandoned its commitment to non-violence or words to that effect. You’ve just laid out a pretty compelling case that that’s fraud. That’s actually not true. And that what the administration is doing by continuing to embrace these guys is actually quite perilous to us in this country, not just like in places like Egypt as well.
PATRICK POOLE:
Yeah, Frank, the claim that the Brotherhood has somehow eschewed violence as James Clapper told congress here back several years ago, and that they were a largely secular organisation, the Muslim Brotherhood, is basically –
FRANK GAFFNEY:
Our top intelligence officer in the United States government, let’s be clear.
PATRICK POOLE:
Right. It’s a narrative that exists almost exclusively within Western academic and think tank circles. I mean, it’s never been true. And the – you go overseas and you meet with Egyptians, you know, we met with some high ranking level Libyans where again, just here within the past two weeks, Asharq al-Awsat, the Saudi-run newspaper, ran a pretty extensive article about the Muslim Brotherhood’s proposed merger with Ansar al-Sharia, al-Qaeda. And the Islamic State in Libya, in Benghazi. And they’ve – they’ve, long time, the Muslim Brotherhood has long time been in alliance with Ansar al-Sharia, the group that attacked our consulate in Benghazi. And you have the head of the Muslim Brotherhood in Yemen, Abdul Majeed, who is a designated terrorist, who is identified by the Treasury Department as a bin-Laden mentor and supporter. And he’s the head of the al-Islah party in Yemen, the Muslim Brotherhood’s party in Yemen. So, I mean, we can go through, I mean, all these Muslim Brotherhood affiliates and, you know, getting back to the change.org petition, Senator Ted Cruz, who just won the Iowa caucuses here earlier this week, he put forward a bill in the senate calling for the designation of the Brotherhood and the findings of that bill go through the US government statements on the Brotherhood, fingering the Brotherhood for terrorism and it’s going to be interesting to see – and some surprising individuals such as Orrin Hatch have co-sponsored the senate bill and Mario Diaz-Balart is the sponsor of the bill on the House side. And, you know, the findings of the bill just say, hey, this is what the US government has already said about the Muslim Brotherhood, including what the Justice Department said in federal court.
FRANK GAFFNEY:
Right. So what’s so bizarre about this, Patrick Poole, and nobody’s really chronicled this in certainly the press as well as you, there is this fundamental disconnect between the facts as we know them or have the ability to know them, and what the US government has been doing with respect to the Brotherhood, in part dressed up on this idea that they’re non-violent and therefore people we can do business with, but in part simply because, I guess, they think that when they hear these guys talking about their commitment to, you know, preventing radicalisation and maintaining good relations with the Muslim community, that they found their partners for a sort of a Muslim outreach program that is, in fact, at the end of the day, a fraud. And one that will get, I’m afraid, more Americans killed. We’re going to talk more about that with Patrick Poole right after this.
FRANK GAFFNEY:
Our guest is Patrick Poole and he is one of the stars of the lineup at PJ Media. He reports brilliantly on matters involving national security and counter-terrorism. He has a deep understanding of jihadism, the perpetrators, the doctrine of shariah that underpins it and the threat that it poses to us. Whether it’s being wielded in an overt, violent manner or as the Brotherhood has called it, through civilisation jihad. He was one of the co-authors of a book that I’m very proud of, the Center for Security Policy’s Shariah: The Threat to America. And Patrick, we’ve, I think, been very usefully discussing how the administration and, for that matter, the Bush Administration before it got bolloxed on embracing the wrong Muslims I’d like to just talk a little bit about an experience that we’ve learned of recently from Philip Haney, a former customs and border protection patrol officer who recently retired and has talked about an investigation into a group that most of us had never heard of and I’m sure you’re familiar with, Tablighi Jamaat. And I’d like to just sort of get your sense of his accounts of what happened to that investigation and whether it may in fact have contributed to failure to stop an act of terrorism in San Bernardino.
PATRICK POOLE:
Well, in fact, we talk about Tablighi Jamaat in the Shariah: The Threat book. Which we had published a couple of years ago. And they’re one of the largest Islamic organisations in the world. They typically hold the largest annual international Islamic event every year. And so, I mean, these are not, you know, obscure players, and, you know, according to the testimony of Philip Haney, that he was asked to conduct an investigation into the terror connections of Tablighi Jamaat and which in fact he did and he ended up receiving an award for it and the civil rights, civil liberties division of DHS intervened and shut the investigation down and –
FRANK GAFFNEY:
And the State Department, as I understand it, a large number of lawyers from State under Hillary Clinton.
PATRICK POOLE:
Yeah, and it ended up shutting the investigation down. And of course, you know, there’s whole elements of what exactly was going on, reporting from the Washington Free Beacon and Senator Charles Grassley here more than a year ago a terrorist hands off list which was signed by both Hillary Clinton and Janet Napolitano. You know, I think there’s a lot here that congress just hasn’t really picked up on. You know, they’ve been, you know, the more sexy Benghazi investigation and things of that sort, but I mean, this really gets to the fundamental elements of our national security policy and how we’ve been undermined by our own policies and we see the net result in the proliferation of these domestic terrorists. I mean, right here at home while they’re engaged in these outreach efforts. There was an Associated Press article here this week talking about the countering violent extremism policies as part of the White House’s outreach efforts in Minnesota. Well, I mean, the Minneapolis-St. Paul, the Twin Cities area, has been one of the most active recruiting areas for jihad and there’s no signs of it abating. You know, despite these this White House program. And you read the article and they filed for grant money, you know, I’m looking at the article now, four hundred thousand dollars being administered, and they’re talking basically about midnight basketball and, I mean, things that are, you know, may be good things in and of themselves, but that have absolutely nothing to do with diminishing the Islamic terror threat here inside the United States.
FRANK GAFFNEY:
Patrick, you understand that terrorism threat probably as well as anybody, certainly anybody who’s reporting on these issues, why would you say that? Why is it that at the end of the day, the engaging these, you know, shariah-adherent Muslims, whether they’re from Somalia as in Minnesota, or from other parts of the Muslim world or whether they’re, you know, people who’ve been here for a generation or two, but nonetheless embrace this program, why is it that midnight basketball or other blandishments like it are unlikely to change them from their course of jihad?
PATRICK POOLE:
Well, I think – and all you need to do is ask the Muslims in these communities, you know, what exactly the problem is. And, you know, I’ve been up to Minneapolis, I’ve met with some of the Muslim community leaders there, like Abdirizak Bihi, whose nephew was recruited into al-Shabaab and killed in Somalia. And they make no bones about the problem is some very identifiable mosques up there. You know, the Abu Bakr al-Siddeeq mosque. You have staff members who have been convicted of recruiting for al-Shabaab. And other, you know, other mosques, you know, with respect to the Islamic State. There’s one case where one of the kids who was going to go fight for the Islamic State, he was dropped off at the mosque, you know, and that’s straight out of the indictment.
FRANK GAFFNEY:
Now would this by any chance have been a Muslim Brotherhood associated mosque? Or a mosque that might have gotten funding from the North American Islamic Trust, a Muslim Brotherhood Saudi passthrough?
PATRICK POOLE:
Well, in that case, it doesn’t identify which mosque it was in terms of the indictment. It just says that he was dropped off at the mosque. But we know that these, you know, mosques like Abu Bakr al-Siddeeq up in Minneapolis, are, you know, affiliated with the Brotherhood and has long time been affiliated with the Somali Muslim Brotherhood, al-Itjihad, al-Islamiyya, which became the Islamic Courts Union, which – its youth division was al-Shabaab. So, I mean, we can trace the lineage here.
FRANK GAFFNEY:
So Patrick, can I just ask you to – speaking of the lineage, put this kind of all in context. You have violent jihad on the one hand and you’ve established, I think, persuasively that the Muslim Brotherhood, among many other Islamic supremacist groups, has no problem with engaging in it when they can. And then you’ve got this other piece that the Brotherhood, as you’ve indicated, calls civilisation jihad, that is kind of a stealthy sort of subversive activity you do when you’re not strong enough to engage in the violent kind. And these mosques and Islamic societies, Islamic cultural centers and other front groups are all part of that. When you put that all together, do you find, Patrick Poole, that what we’re looking at is something akin to what’s been happening in Europe, which is people coming into this country, perhaps who aren’t necessarily jihadists, but getting dropped off at the mosque as it were and becoming, in fact, full fledged jihadists, perhaps of the civilisation kind, perhaps of the violent kind.
PATRICK POOLE:
Well, I think we’re seeing the civilisation jihad approach, that we’re getting more to the militant stage and in fact there was a very excellent report done by the AIVD, the Dutch Intelligence Service, called From Dawa to Jihad, that talks about the fact that, you know, there – it’s one continuum. You know, it’s hard to separate civilisational jihad from, you know, militant jihad because they’re all part of the same cycle. You know, if you don’t comply with civilisation jihad, then you get militant jihad. And that’s what we’re seeing in Europe. Is, you know, they’re beginning to push back on the Islamisation policies at, you know, in these problematic areas in Belgium, in France. And now we see the French, I mean, of all people, you know, the French are – they’ve been picking up on how problematic this issue is in their interventions in Africa, particularly with Central African Republic, but now they’re dealing with the problem internally and we see reports that they’re talking about closing down a hundred mosques.
FRANK GAFFNEY:
Wow. And having raided some of them, found them armed to the teeth. Patrick, we’re going to have to pause again. When we come back, let’s talk a little bit further about the disarming of our own country and then what we’re seeing as a case study of the folly of this in Egypt. That will be the topic with Patrick Poole for our next segment right after this.
FRANK GAFFNEY:
Welcome back, our guest is Patrick Poole for a very special hour long conversation about the state of jihad in America and what we ought to be learning from our friends and others overseas who are also being subjected to one kind or another of the jihad. And Patrick, one of the, well, I would like to say the gold standard, really, of counter-terrorism in the United States, for most of the period since 9-11, has been the New York Police Department, the NYPD. Notably under its previous commissioner Ray Kelly. Under a new commissioner, Bill Bratton, who actually had previously headed it up and the present mayor of New York City, Bill de Blasio, we’ve seen a settlement, recently, with a sort of, well, what I think of as the red-green axis that brought suit against the NYPD. Talk about that case if you would and what the implications are of that settlement for New York’s Finest.
PATRICK POOLE:
Well, I think the most problematic element of that was the censorship of the radicalisation report which came out in 2007, which outlined the process and the organisations by which radicalisation inside the Muslim community happens. And the bizarre thing is that as much as even the federal government wanted this report suppressed, but in fact it’s a DOJ study, a Justice Department study found exactly the exact same thing. So it’s curious whether the Justice Department is going to censor itself on the findings of the radicalisation process. And it’s a, as you said, the NYPD has been undoubtedly the most diligent in terms of its counter-terrorism policies and been very successful in that regard even despite, sometimes, the federal authorities. And I do think with, I mean, immediate family members living in New York City, that, you know, this – the efforts to shut down the NYPD, to know what’s happening in the community, I’m not signing off on everything the NYPD was doing, and they have even said, look, you know, we were just, you know, trying to find out what was happening in these communities, it’s – I think it’s going to end up getting New Yorkers killed.
FRANK GAFFNEY:
One of the issues, Patrick, as you know, has been surveillance of the mosques, and having NYPD personnel undercover in there just to monitor what’s going on. Given what we were just talking about, about France, and what it’s discovered, given what we’ve discussed so far in the program about several of these Muslim Brotherhood mosques, given what you know more generally about some of the favoured speakers who were brought around, including but not limited to Tariq Ramadan, Siraj Wahhaj, for example, people who are known to be advocates of jihad and working to bring others to it, is this kind of surveillance not absolutely necessary and not just in New York City, but elsewhere across the country?
PATRICK POOLE:
Well, Frank, again, I think with respect to the surveillance issue is, what the proponents of no surveillance whatsoever, they’re creating the conditions in which Muslims are going to be more under inspection, because we hear, you know, these advocates saying, you know, who basically use the Muslim community as a human shield for the extremists. And when something happens, much as it did after 9-11 when, you know, most of the surveillance took place in New York, you know, the years immediately following that is, you know – when the next event happens, then, you know, once again, it’s going to be the entire Muslim community rather than these known hotspots of jihad. I mean, again, it’s not rocket science. These modes of radicalisation which the NYPD radicalisation report talked about, like the Muslim Students Associations, you know, these mosques. There’s a mosque in Bay Ridge there in Brooklyn that’s been problematic for years. And in fact, in once case, one of the parishioners went to the mosque, heard this extremist sermon, and then he went out and shot up a van full of Orthodox Jewish students, killing one, on the Brooklyn Bridge back in the 90s. And so I mean, it’s not a great mystery. And again, these advocates want to use the Muslim community as a human shield to prevent any, you know, any attempt to look into these extremist hotspots.
FRANK GAFFNEY:
It makes, in a way, the larger point, Patrick, with which I think you would agree. And that is, if we keep reaching out to the wrong Muslims, if we keep empowering them, if we keep legitimating them as the leaders of the community, there’s much less space for Muslims who don’t want to be part of any effort to impose shariah in this country, don’t want to live under it themselves, for that matter, to be effective alternatives or oppositions to this and thereby create, as you say, problems probably for the community at large. Patrick, before we run out of time, I do want to ask you about your insights into all of this arising from your in-depth reporting and investigative trips to Egypt. I think you’ve made two of them now if I’m not mistaken. Give us sort of a flavour of where that most populous of Arab nations is at the moment and whether the work that President el-Sisi has engaged in against the Muslim Brotherhood and other extremists in his country is bearing fruit or is faltering and our role in that matter.
PATRICK POOLE:
Well, Frank, my experience in Egypt – I was there for most of September and I’m about to head back, one of the amazing things is what we were just talking about. The elements within the Muslim community, I mean, who are concerned about the US Obama administration policies and embrace of the Muslim Brotherhood, and we see this particularly over in Egypt where you have the largest reported protest in human history, thirty million people or more taking the streets of Egypt to overthrow the Muslim Brotherhood regime back in 2013. And it’s a question I get asked by virtually every Egyptian I meet is, what is up with the US policies? I mean, we’ve gotten rid of the Muslim Brotherhood. I mean, Egypt is in an existential struggle against the Muslim Brotherhood right now. And, you know, why is the Obama administration continuing to embrace these people? I mean, they feel insulted. Hey, we got rid of these guys and you’re still promoting them. You know, you still have these Muslim Brotherhood delegations traipsing through, you know, over to the State Department.
FRANK GAFFNEY:
To say nothing of the Muslim Brotherhood operatives in this country that are always been feted at the, you know, Eid dinners and the like, but also called upon to help inform and guide this so called CVE policy. And, Patrick, we have to pause in another moment. Let me just tie this up by saying you’ve been asked a pregnant question. It kind of goes back to what we were talking about earlier with respect to the administration’s domestic policies and when we come back I want to just see what you’re saying to your Egyptian interlocutors is animating US policy and what that policy is really doing in the course of this existential threat to what is arguably one of our most important allies in opposing the jihad, namely the Sisi government. We’ll be finishing up our conversation with Patrick Poole in our final segment right after this.
FRANK GAFFNEY:
We’re back for what has been an extraordinary interview and conversation with a dear friend and much admired colleague, Patrick Poole. We’re wrapping it up with a final segment. And Patrick, I kind of want to use this to synthesise what you’ve already told us about the Obama administration’s attitude towards the Muslim Brotherhood here at home and what you’ve suggested is confounding people in Egypt and elsewhere I’m sure in terms of its ongoing support for this operation elsewhere. What do you make of the state of that existential struggle between President el-Sisi and his government and I think the vast majority of Egyptians on the one hand and the Brotherhood and the Islamists on the other? Is it a real and potentially, you know, fight to the death between them? Or is, as we hear in some quarters, el-Sisi beginning to, you know, sort of trim sails and find ways to accommodate and perhaps at the insistence of his Saudi benefactors?
PATRICK POOLE:
I think the voices who say that somehow el-Sisi is trimming his sails are absolutely deluded. You know, at this point, how can el-Sisi go back and unwind? I mean, you’ve got this massive conflagration between the Egyptian government, I mean, which has the full support of the Egyptian people, and the Muslim Brotherhood. And we saw, you know, basically what was an ambush targeting police in Giza here, just here within the past two weeks. Where it was a joint Muslim Brotherhood-Islamic State IED factory at an apartment in Giza. I mean, how could the Brotherhood ever forgive President el-Sisi? I mean, it’s just ludicrous. And so, you know, when I’m over there, it seems perfectly clear to most Egyptians that our policies are at best problematic, if not, you know, actively aiding the enemy. And so they all just kind of throw up and ask me, well, you know, what’s going on over there? And I think it’s a fair question because, I mean, we’ve – as you noted, Egypt is the largest Arab country in the world, you know, it safeguards the Suez Canal, I mean, one of the most important transit points for international commerce. And they’ve been a strategic partner in the Middle East for the United States for more than three decades now. So why is it that the Obama administration continues to go out of its way to stick its thumb in the eye of the Egyptian people? And it’s really a question that can’t be answered.
FRANK GAFFNEY:
Well, it does seem as though it may have something to do with this affinity that the Obama administration has exhibited, we’ve been discussing it for an hour, towards the Muslim Brotherhood. Certainly here in this country and arguably in other places as well. Helping bring them to power in Egypt, helping overthrow the government of Muammar Gadaffi with the expectation, I think, that the Brotherhood, you know, would reap the benefits of that. Tunisia, perhaps Syria as well. But let me ask you about one particularly important moment in the Sisi government’s relatively short tenure, and that was when the president went to al-Azhar University in December of 2014 as I recall and challenged the leadership of that organisation, some call it the Vatican of Islam as it is, to change course. Talk a bit about that, Patrick, and whether you consider that to be a really signal development and where things stand on that front at the moment.
PATRICK POOLE:
It was surprising, Frank, that the Sisi speech at Al-Azhar was so dismissively covered by the Western media, because, I mean, over there it was seen as something that was very important and in fact, this last trip I made to Egypt, Steve Coughlin and I met with Sheikh Ramadan, one of the senior sheikhs of al-Azhar and he openly admitted that al-Azhar has problems and that al-Azhar is trying to turn, you know, their ship after, you know, more than a thousand years of operation, to begin to address these problems within their midst. And it’s going to take time. I mean, there are a lot of problems in Egypt. There are a lot of political problems in Egypt. You know, I’m not denying that. And it’s going to take time to right that ship. But I think they’re in the right direction and in the meantime, we have the think tanks and the professional agitators here in the US, you know, goading the administration to somehow punish Egypt for its approach to the Muslim Brotherhood and it’s, you know, when I ask people, you know, it’s not clear what exactly the Obama administration is getting out of its promotion of the Brotherhood. You know, after the collapse of the so-called Arab Spring. So, you know, it’s not clear to me, you know, that the administration is really getting anything out of it other than antagonising our long time allies in the region and doubling down on a failed policy. I mean, failed is kind of an understatement. I mean, it’s been absolutely catastrophic.
FRANK GAFFNEY:
Yes, a charitable characterisation, indeed. If you were to simply summarise the character of the policy that we think has brought such grim results and that really must be changed, whether you call it the countering violent extremism policy, the civil rights, civil liberties approach, the embrace of the Muslim Brotherhood, at the end of the day, is it fair to say this is aligning the United States with the wrong people within the Muslim community and that the implications of doing so, domestically and internationally, is fraught with peril?
PATRICK POOLE:
Absolutely. And let’s kind of start overseas and work back to the United States, you know, we mentioned earlier Libya. Well, we backed Abdelhakim Belhadj, the head of the Libyan Islamic fighting group, LIFG, which is basically Libyan al-Qaeda, to overthrow Gadaffi. I mean, that’s just been an absolute catastrophe. We backed the Brotherhood in Syria. And, I mean, you’ve already got hundreds of thousands of dead in basically a stalemate. And a continuously evolving US policy with respect to, you know, who are we even backing at this point? And then, you know, in Egypt with the Brotherhood, etceteras. Ghannouchi in Tunisia. And then you have here in the United States the countering violent extremism policies of the Obama administration has done nothing but embrace the radicals and the extremists at the expense of the voices in the American Muslim community that ought to be not only heard, but empowered. And so, I mean, we’re basically punishing and ignoring as a matter of policy the very people who would help us resolve the situation and these policies have done nothing but – they’ve, you know, they’ve certainly not stemmed the tide of radicalisation in the American Muslim community and in fact we’re seeing it increasing, you know, nearly exponentially.
FRANK GAFFNEY:
By the day. Patrick, we have to leave it at that. We didn’t get anywhere near Iran. Which, while not a Sunni operation, to be sure, has very many of these same trappings and has also been blessed by the strong support of the Obama administration, again, with almost impossible to imagine disastrous results, I’m afraid. But that’s for another day. We look forward to having that conversation with you and many more in the course of 2016. In the meantime, thank you so much for your generous time today and your insights and the extraordinary work that you do, day in and day out, at PJ Media and so many other outlets. Keep it up, my friend. Come back to us again soon. And I hope the rest of you will do the same tomorrow. Same time, same station. Until then, this is Frank Gaffney. Thanks for listening.