answer any of these questions. For all we know, the rest of the documents are locked away in some dusty basement, discarded and forgotten. And based on the Obama administration’s close alliance with various U.S. Muslim Brotherhood–tied organizations and individuals, those docs won’t see the light of day anytime soon. Here are just a few examples of the MB’s influence on the Obama White House:
■ A December 2012 piece in Egypt’s Rose El-Youssef magazine alleged that six American Islamists who work closely with the Obama administration in various capacities are, in fact, operatives of the Muslim Brotherhood. 33 The Investigative Project on Terrorism, which translated the Rose El-Youssef article into English, described its troubling contents:
The . . . story . . . suggests the six turned the White House “from a position hostile to Islamic groups and organizations in the world to the largest and most important supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood.”
The story is largely unsourced, but its publication is considered significant in raising the issue to Egyptian readers.
The six named people include: Arif Alikhan, assistant secretary of Homeland Security for policy development; Mohammed Elibiary, a member of the Homeland Security Advisory Council; Rashad Hussain, the U.S. special envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference; Salam al-Marayati, co-founder of the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC); Imam Mohamed Magid, president of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA); and Eboo Patel, a member of President Obama’s Advisory Council on Faith-Based Neighborhood Partnerships. 34
■ A year-long investigation, culminating in October 2012, also conducted by the Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT), found that radical Islamists conducted hundreds of visits to the Obama White House during the president’s first term and met with top administration officials. 35 For instance, after scouring through millions of White House visitor log entries, IPT found that individuals from the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) were among the administration’s guests at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. This despite the fact that the FBI supposedly cut ties with CAIR after the Islamist outfit was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the largest terrorism financing trial in American history. 36
■ In February 2012, after meetings between FBI Director Robert Mueller and representatives from several American-Islamist organizations—including the Brotherhood-linked Islamic Society of North America and Muslim Public Affairs Council—it was announced that the FBI had purged hundreds of counterterrorism training documents that were used to educate federal agents about the Islamist threat.
The FBI’s Islamist friends were permitted to review the materials and helped deem that more than seven hundred documents and three hundred presentations should be eliminated due to “anti-Muslim” language. 37 Even before the purge, the Obama administration had already handed down edicts that terms like “Islamic terrorism,” “radical Islamist,” and “jihadist” could not be used by government agencies. So I suppose the FBI’s capitulation was the natural, and pathetic, next step. Nothing like letting your enemies review and censor the very materials that could lead to their exposure.
When details emerged that FBI agents had actually interviewed Tamerlan Tsarnaev in 2011— two years before he and his younger brother carried out the deadly terror attack at the Boston Marathon—but had found no cause for suspicion (even after Russian authorities warned that Tsarnaev was a radical Islamist), I was angered but not surprised. 38 After all, the same thing happened in 2009 when Muslim convert Abdulhakim Muhammad was subject to a preliminary investigation by the FBI’s joint counterterrorism task force prior to his jihadist attack on a military recruiting station in Little Rock, Arkansas, that left one