by Pierre Rehov
The progressives think that the Islamists will boost them to power, and the Islamists think the progressives will boost them to power.
For 25 years, American counterterrorism policy has been organized around the image of September 11: a terror cell, an aircraft, an explosion. Billions went into intelligence, airport screening and wars abroad. Across those same years, a slower project advanced through channels that no security agency was built to monitor: one moving through universities, lobbying organizations, municipal, state and national politics, and the vocabulary of civil rights. It required nothing more explosive than money, patience and a working knowledge of how an open society such as the United States functions.
The Muslim Brotherhood grasped the possibilities long before Washington did.
Millions of Muslims have no interest in seeing political Islam govern anyone, and many may have even crossed an ocean to escape it. The organizations that claim to speak in their name are another matter, and their central achievement has been to make the two indistinguishable, so that a political network registers as a whole population.
The progressives think that the Islamists will boost them to power, and the Islamists think the progressives will boost them to power.
While countries in the West are always nonchalantly accused of imperialism and colonization, how come no one ever mentions the Islamic imperialism and colonization of Christian Byzantium – now Turkey – let alone the entire Ottoman Empire? How come no one ever mentions the Islamic colonization of the Coptic Christian country of Egypt, or of northern Cyprus in 1974? Or the formerly Buddhist countries of southeast Asia, such as the Maldives, Malaysia or Indonesia?
The Islamic colonization now underway in Europe and the United States carries no racial or demographic content.... The territory being taken is ideological: it changes hands whenever a political movement discovers that open institutions can be used more profitably than if they were attacked, or whenever foreign money purchases standing inside institutions that form the next generation of American elites, or whenever two movements with incompatible values find they can trade access for votes.
Americans may not notice it right away, or now, but one day, unless actions are taken as soon as possible to prevent it, they may wake up one morning to find themselves under Islamic rule.
The process is arithmetic: small concessions, each too minor to be worth a fight, accumulating across institutions, phrases and political territory until reversing the situation would demand a confrontation no one wishes to have. Europe crossed this threshold without even noticing it. America has not.
The interval, however, in which recognizing the problem still costs less than reversing it is not indefinite.
For 25 years, American counterterrorism policy has been organized around the image of September 11: a terror cell, an aircraft, an explosion. Billions went into intelligence, airport screening and wars abroad. Across those same years, a slower project advanced through channels that no security agency was built to monitor: one moving through universities, lobbying organizations, municipal, state and national politics, and the vocabulary of civil rights. It required nothing more explosive than money, patience and a working knowledge of how an open society such as the United States functions.
The Muslim Brotherhood grasped the possibilities long before Washington did. Its activists have operated in the US since at least the late 1950s; by 1991, one of them had committed the strategy to paper. This memorandum, written by Mohamed Akram and later entered into evidence by federal prosecutors in the Holy Land Foundation terrorism-financing trial, described the movement's work in North America as a "civilization-jihadist process" aimed at "destroying Western civilization from within." It attached a list of the organizations then considered friends of the movement. The method it laid out was institutional, incremental and on its face, lawful.
Not every American Muslim, of course, is an extremist; the overwhelming majority practice their faith peacefully, ask nothing of their neighbors and want for their children what every other American family wants. Millions of Muslims have no interest in seeing political Islam govern anyone, and many may have even crossed an ocean to escape it. The organizations that claim to speak in their name are another matter, and their central achievement has been to make the two indistinguishable, so that a political network registers as a whole population.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) illustrates the mechanism. Founded in 1994, it presents itself as "America's largest Muslim civil rights organization." Its co-founder and national executive director, Nihad Awad, previously worked with the Islamic Association for Palestine, one of the groups named in the 1991 memorandum. Federal prosecutors listed CAIR as an unindicted co-conspirator in the 2007 Holy Land Foundation case. The United Arab Emirates, an Islamic state that wisely treats the Muslim Brotherhood as an existential threat, placed CAIR on its list of terrorist organizations in 2014, a designation the Obama administration's State Department publicly rejected within days.
CAIR is also politically fluent. Its affiliate CAIR Action intervenes openly in elections. After Zohran Mamdani won New York's Democratic mayoral primary, it publicly pressed Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and the House of Representatives Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries to endorse him. Influence in a democracy operates this way, in daylight, through the ordinary instruments of pressure politics.
Washington has finally begun to respond. Executive Order 14362, "Designation of Certain Muslim Brotherhood Chapters as Foreign Terrorist Organizations and Specially Designated Global Terrorists," signed in November 2025, opened the process. On January 13, 2026, the State Department designated the Lebanese Muslim Brotherhood a Foreign Terrorist Organization while the Treasury Department listed the Egyptian and Jordanian branches as Specially Designated Global Terrorists for having provided material support to Hamas. On July 23, Treasury sanctioned a senior Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood official based in London along with two sham charities that had channeled money to Hamas's military wing. These were the first designations of national Muslim Brotherhood chapters in American history. US Senator Ted Cruz spent years making the case and reintroduced his Muslim Brotherhood Terrorist Designation Act in 2025.
Naming the Muslim Brotherhood abroad while leaving political Islam unexamined at home addressed half a problem. No president can personally audit every organization, adviser or intermediary orbiting his administration. Networks built over 60 years are dismantled by people who understand how the machinery works, and this machinery now extends well beyond explicitly Islamic organizations. Its most valuable American partner today is the radical left.
The left-Islamist alliance might look incongruous only from a distance. Progressives and Islamists disagree profoundly about religion, sexuality, women and individual liberty, and elections have made those disagreements affordable. Progressive politicians require organized constituencies, Islamist and anti-Israel activist networks require access to mainstream power, and hostility to Israel supplies the bridge. Ideological incompatibility matters less than arithmetic. The progressives think that the Islamists will boost them to power, and the Islamists think the progressives will boost them to power.
US Representative Ilhan Omar demonstrated how quickly the boundaries could move. Her repeated controversies over Israel cost her nothing inside progressive politics and eventually made her one of its emblems. US Representative Rashida Tlaib traveled a similar road from activism into Congress. Positions once considered politically fatal turned out to be assets within carefully assembled constituencies.
Mamdani then dispelled any illusion that the new movement was confined to a few congressional districts. He supported BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel), helped to establish a Students for Justice in Palestine chapter at Bowdoin College, and became the first political endorsement in the history of US Campaign for Palestinian Rights Action. He now governs the city with the largest Jewish population in the world.
Michigan is the next laboratory. On August 4, Abdul El-Sayed, who claims to be a physician but has never had a medical license, won the Democrat Senate nomination over establishment-backed Representative Haley Stevens by roughly one point.
According to WFMD radio:
"Abdul El-Sayed has made his supposed medical credentials a centerpiece of his campaign, but the truth is he never held a medical license, never did his residency, never passed his boards, and never practiced medicine independently," campaign spokesperson [for State Senator Mallory McMorrow (D-Michigan) Michigan] Jackson Boaz told Fox News Digital. "If Michigan voters can't trust El-Sayed to be honest about something that is so central to his entire rationale for running, how can they trust him to be honest about what he'd do as a United States Senator?"
US Senator Bernie Sanders, US Representatives Tlaib and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and the Working Families Party backed El-Sayed, who campaigned against military aid to Israel. Within days, the machinery of unity engaged. The defeated Stevens offered her support. Michigan's Governor Gretchen Whitmer and US Senator Chuck Schumer, after opposing the nominee, fell in behind him, and former President Barack Obama telephoned to offer advice. El-Sayed called that conversation warm and inspiring while saying he hoped the former president would campaign for him this autumn.
The political pattern for the country is that the radical "left" has no need to convert the Democratic Party. They are already there, having proven that they can deliver votes in Michigan, Minnesota and New York. Once those votes are seen as necessary, yesterday's radicals become today's coalition partners in a constituency that is organized, concentrated and situated where elections are close.
Money underwrites these projects, both political and cultural. Federal disclosure data records $7.7 billion flowing from Qatar to American universities since 1986, more than from any other country, with more than $1.1 billion arriving in 2025 alone -- roughly a fifth of all foreign funding that year. And that is just what we know about -- it was reported. The Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy places the real total far higher across five decades and calls it a deliberate effort to seed Muslim Brotherhood thinking inside American institutions. Qatar spent years hosting senior Hamas leaders while accumulating extraordinary standing in Western universities, media and diplomacy. Influence among elites never arrives as a suitcase with instructions. It arrives as endowed chairs, research partnerships, satellite campuses and eventually dependency and submission to requests.
While countries in the West are always nonchalantly accused of imperialism and colonization, how come no one ever mentions the Islamic imperialism and colonization of Christian Byzantium – now Turkey – let alone the entire Ottoman Empire? How come no one ever mentions the Islamic colonization of the Coptic Christian country of Egypt, or of northern Cyprus in 1974? Or the formerly Buddhist countries of southeast Asia, such as the Maldives, Malaysia, or Indonesia?
The Islamic colonization now underway in Europe and the United States carries no racial or demographic content. A Muslim family settling in Detroit colonizes nothing, any more than an Italian family arriving in New York a century ago. The territory being taken is ideological: it changes hands whenever a political movement discovers that open institutions can be used more profitably than if they were attacked, or whenever foreign money purchases standing inside institutions that form the next generation of American elites, or whenever two movements with incompatible values find they can trade access for votes.
For now, at least, America's position remains far stronger than Europe's. The Muslim Brotherhood has been named and sanctioned, Marco Rubio's State Department has begun converting old warnings into policy, and many American Muslims who fled from religious authoritarianism abroad may be reluctant to watch it follow them across the Atlantic. The instruments of self-defense are also intact, if largely unused. US Section 117 disclosure of gifts to educational institutions is enforced only in bursts of periodic embarrassment. It should be routine. The Foreign Agents Registration Act reaches those acting for foreign principals, yet in February 2025 the Justice Department narrowed criminal enforcement to conduct resembling traditional espionage and disbanded the FBI unit that investigated foreign influence. An administration willing to designate Muslim Brotherhood chapters abroad has quietly retired the main statutory tool for detecting foreign influence at home.
Americans may not notice it right away, or now, but one day, unless actions are taken as soon as possible to prevent it, they may wake up one morning to find themselves under Islamic rule.
The process is arithmetic: small concessions, each too minor to be worth a fight, accumulating across institutions, phrases and political territory until reversing the situation would demand a confrontation no one wishes to have. Europe crossed this threshold without even noticing it. America has not.
The interval, however, in which recognizing the problem still costs less than reversing it is not indefinite.
Pierre Rehov, who holds a law degree from Paris-Assas, is a French reporter, novelist and documentary filmmaker. He is the author of six novels, including "Beyond Red Lines", "The Third Testament" and "Red Eden", translated from French. His latest essay on the aftermath of the October 7 massacre " 7 octobre - La riposte " became a bestseller in France. As a filmmaker, he has produced and directed 17 documentaries, many photographed at high risk in Middle Eastern war zones, and focusing on terrorism, media bias, and the persecution of Christians. His latest documentary, "Pogrom(s)" highlights the context of ancient Jew hatred within Muslim civilization as the main force behind the October 7 massacre.
Source: https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/22847/islamic-colonization-of-america
