How did the Democratic Party come to make America the chief backer of Iran—the world’s leading state sponsor of jihad? Likewise how did the Democratic Party come to impose a maximum pressure campaign on our chief regional ally and bulwark against the mullocracy, Israel, in her time of existential peril? And how did the left-wing sympathizers of the Iran-backed genocidal jihadists of Hamas come to wreak havoc on our city streets, paralyze our college campuses, and threaten Jewish communities with pogroms?

These shocking developments were the predictable consequence of an unholy alliance between progressives and Islamic supremacists that has for several years been fundamentally transforming not only the Democratic Party, but America. This was the central thesis of a book I wrote four years ago titled American Ingrate. Therein, I argue that Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan Omar—whose path to legitimacy was in part paved by Barack Obama—personified the future, if not present, of a Democratic Party representing half of the country.

The Party, like other American institutions, would be responsive to an ascendant and disproportionately influential progressive movement—one that views America as the evil oppressor par excellence that must repent for its sins by destroying itself while elevating our would-be foreign destroyers in pursuit of domestic and international equity. The Party would also be responsive to a growing, overwhelmingly Democratic-voting Muslim population that progressives fit into their identitarian fold as a purportedly oppressed, largely immigrant minority group.

I will detail the troubling views held by large percentages of American Muslims later in my remarks, but suffice it to say, staggering numbers are, or subscribe to the same worldview, as Islamic supremacists who seek to impose, by means peaceful and violent, overt and covert, a theo-political, Sharia-based ideology on America, wholly antithetical to our constitutional republic.

While leftists and Islamic supremacists are in some ways polar opposites, traditionalist, patriotic Americans are the chief stumbling block to each side achieving its objectives. So I detail in the book how they have made common cause to topple us. Ultimately, I argue that should the partners prevail, the pair would be left to duke it out for hegemony, given their pursuit of ultimately incompatible—yet similarly totalitarian—ends.

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I was asked today to speak to the challenge the Islamic supremacist cohort presents. To do so, it is instructive to compare what perhaps the leading Islamic supremacist organization advocated for in America some 30 years ago with what has transpired in the decades since.

In 1991, a senior leader of the Muslim Brotherhood in America—the tip of the Sunni Islamic supremacist spear—laid out the group’s “general strategic goal” in a memorandum to his colleagues.

The leader described the goal as the

Enablement of Islam…meaning: establishing an effective and a stable Islamic Movement led by the Muslim Brotherhood which adopts Muslims’ causes domestically and globally, and which works to expand the observant Muslim base, aims at unifying and directing Muslims’ efforts, presents Islam as a civilization alternative, and supports the global Islamic State wherever it is.

The Memorandum used “Enablement” or “Settlement” of Islam interchangeably to mean making “Islam and its movement become a part of the homeland it lives in.” To do so, it called for not only working through like-minded mosques, but leveraging a slew of affiliated civil society groups—including those that would go on to build prominent successor organizations that today actively lobby for their cause on Capitol Hill. 

In a more subversive and sinister passage, the leader instructed his brethren to internalize that

The process of settlement is a “Civilization-Jihadist Process” with all the word means. The [Muslim Brothers] must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying…Western civilization from within and “sabotaging” its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.

Juxtapose this memo with relevant American policies and developments in the two decades since September 11th, 2001. Less than a week after 9/11, flanked by Muslim leaders, including the former PR director for Hamas’s U.S.-based propaganda arm, then and today serving as the executive director of CAIR—an organization that was to become an unindicted co-conspirator in the largest terrorism financing case in U.S. history—President George W. Bush declared “Islam is peace.”

By making this declaration, the president dismissed the idea that Islamic supremacists rely on a rich and comprehensive religious canon, scholarship, and jurisprudence to justify and guide their efforts. He intimated that Islamic supremacists who seek to make the world submit to Allah’s rule “misunderstand” the religion, and he sought to disabuse Americans of the reality that irrespective of who has the right interpretation of it, like-minded devotees exist in sizeable numbers globally, and they hail from an Islamic world largely antithetical to America in values and principles, and that is hostile towards Jews and the Judeo-Christian West.

Defending America’s national interest requires grappling with that world as it is rather than as we might wish it to be. But our Commander in Chief, and many leaders to follow him, by and large have preferred to advocate willful blindness. In response to the worst jihadist attack against the U.S. in our history, we undertook a war on “terror”—a tactic, refusing to clearly define the enemy, let alone lay out a set of goals, tactics, and strategies to defeat it based on an understanding of what animates it.

While we have no doubt eliminated jihadists in large numbers, they persist in their efforts; and our 20 years in the Middle East resulted in Iraq becoming Iran-dominated, and an Afghanistan that sits today under Taliban rule armed with our weaponry. These operations also came at massive expense extending far beyond the initial 9/11 shock to the country—in blood, treasure, and morale, plus strategic and financial opportunity costs.

The Global War on Terror also birthed a dramatically expanded national security apparatus. That apparatus has likely saved American lives in substantial number. But it has also been abused—in ways that benefit progressives and Islamists while harming traditional Americans, and our system of liberty and justice. 

The national security state has been weaponized against conservatives and our political representatives—from whom the nation’s leading counter-jihadists are drawn—as well as against Christians and dissenters from ruling regime orthodoxy more broadly. Those dissenters are treated like domestic terrorists and proactively targeted, unlike the “known wolf” jihadists so often apprehended only after they have struck.

That DHS was created to combat terrorists, yet it housed the key sub-agency behind the massive government-led censorship regime targeting wrong-thinkers that has only recently become unmasked, illustrates the mission creep at hand.

The Obama Administration widened and watered down the focus of our counter-terrorism authorities by transitioning to a “Countering Violent Extremism” paradigm—an ideology-free construction enabling a shift from pursuing jihadists to persecuting patriots. The administration sanitized national security documents detailing Islamic supremacist ideology, and purged trainers with expertise in it, blinding counter-terrorism officials to the threat at the urging of individuals and organizations affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood’s partners as laid out in the 1991 memorandum. The administration elevated Islamic supremacists, Sunni and Shia alike. 

It signaled this posture from the get-go when the White House “insisted” that Muslim Brotherhood members attend President Obama’s 2009 Cairo speech. The Brotherhood would be among the chief beneficiaries of the president’s not-so-tacit support of “Arab Spring” movements to topple authoritarian leaders, unleashing the Islamic supremacist forces Middle East potentates had suppressed.

When Iran’s mullocracy came under threat however, the Obama Administration remained mum—which spoke volumes. Its foremost foreign policy aim was to make the Iranian regime the regional strong horse—as my co-panelist Michael Doran has comprehensively detailed. The administration flooded Tehran’s coffers with tens of billions of dollars in sanctions relief and legitimized and pledged U.S. defense of its nuclear program via its signature Iran nuclear deal—while at the same time putting the screws to Iran’s chief counterpart, Israel, in myriad ways.

The administration pursued many of these policies with personnel sympathetic to, and often times in consultation with individuals and entities affiliated with the groups laid out in the aforementioned Muslim Brotherhood memo. 

President Trump sought to reverse many of these policies, neutralized Islamic supremacist forces, and fostered an Israel-Sunni Arab partnership against Iran. But he was met with substantial resistance to related policies from the outset of his presidency, ranging from an immigration moratorium on countries rife with jihadists; to an effort to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization; to his maximum pressure campaign against Iran.

The Biden Administration has represented the third term of the Obama Administration. Its foreign policy too has been marked by an effort to aid, abet, and enable the Iranian mullocracy. This has included seeking to reprise the Iran nuclear deal—and in truth executing a shadow deal enriching and emboldening Tehran as it dashes towards a nuclear bomb—while concurrently boxing and imperiling Israel to prevent it from challenging Iran’s bid for dominance. 

The Biden Administration is tying Israel’s arms as it faces a seven-front war against Iran and the terrorist proxies it funds and arms, including Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Houthis, and allied groups from Syria to Iraq. This ring of fire threatens to engulf our ally, the Jewish state.

Obama national security and foreign policy hands have led a Biden Administration policy that is culminating in October 7 and thus the murder and hostage-taking of Americans; the forced de-population of northern Israel; Iran’s unprecedented aerial attack on the Jewish state; an impending war with Hezbollah; and hundreds of attacks on U.S. troops across the Middle East.

Consider the backgrounds of key parties just below the principal level shaping the Biden Administration’s policies:

• Maher Bitar is senior director for intelligence programs on the National Security Council. He’s a former BDS activist from Georgetown, where he served as an executive board member for Students for Justice in Palestine—organizing virulently anti-Israel conferences. He then interned at the Hamas-captured UNRWA and pursued like-minded think-tank and academic work—building a paper trail of writings that demonize Israel—ultimately working his way to the top of the US national security apparatus.

• Hady Amr is the first U.S. Special representative for Palestinian Affairs. One year after 9/11, he said that he was “inspired by the Palestinian intifada.” Amr was the founding director of Brookings’s Doha Center—which can be seen as a key Qatari influence effort. The Biden Administration elevated Qatar to a major non-NATO ally, notwithstanding its protection of the Muslim Brotherhood, and promotion of it and other Islamic supremacist forces more broadly via Al-Jazeera, its harboring and supporting of Hamas, and its close ties with Iran.

• And of course, there’s Rob Malley. The former chief Iran Deal negotiator in the Obama Administration—who assumed that role years after being jettisoned from the Obama campaign over his Hamas ties—Malley reprised that role under President Biden. He is currently under FBI investigation for allegedly mishandling classified documents that appear to have ended up in the hands of Iranian agents of influence and/or regime officials—this after having brought into his near orbit in and out of government members of a mullocracy-led influence ring.

These two decades of policies, executed by personnel like these, have occurred against the backdrop of an influx of Muslim immigrants—despite 9/11 being in no small part an immigration failure. Ignoring Europe’s experience too, we have welcomed over two million immigrants from the Muslim world in the last two decades. Consequently, Muslims are projected to surpass Jews and become the second largest U.S. religious group by 2040; by 2050, their population is set to more than double to over eight million. 

If Michigan and Minnesota’s “uncommitted” votes in the 2024 Democratic presidential primary don’t clearly enough indicate this population’s views, consider the polling. According to Pew, more than one-third of American Muslims have a favorable opinion of Hamas. Nearly 60 percent have a favorable opinion of the Hamas-lite Palestinian Authority. Separate polling shows that 57 percent of American Muslims somewhat or strongly agree that “Hamas was justified in attacking Israel as part of their struggle for a Palestinian state.” A 2017 ADL poll shows 34 percent of American Muslims held anti-Semitic views—more than two-times the percentage of non-Muslims. 

Past polls have shown between 5 and 10 percent of American Muslims saying suicide bombings and other attacks against civilian targets are sometimes or often justified to defend Islam. Though such studies are few and far between, one 2011 analysis indicated that of 100 mosques surveyed, 80 percent had texts severely or moderately advocating violence; in 84.5 percentof the mosques, the imam recommended studying violence-positive texts; 58 percent of mosques invited guest imams known to promote violent jihad.

Nations supportive of Islamic supremacist individuals and entities like Qatar have also flooded Washington, D.C. with lobbying dollars and lavished billions more on elite college campuses with funding correlative with genocidal Jew-hatred and outbursts of anti-American fervor that we’ve witnessed over the past year.

One obvious question arises: To what extent has the growing Muslim population, and the influence efforts of Muslim-majority nations impacted U.S. policy?

This by no means comprehensive chronicling of relevant developments suggests America is trending in a direction favorable to our Islamic supremacist foes.

Whether, and to what extent that direction is more attributable to progressives acting of their own volition—be it in their belief in appeasing adversaries, dedication to Open Borders, and political ambitions—or under the sway of Islamic supremacists who have exploited our openness, tolerance, naivete and greed to their advantage, is difficult to disentangle.

We might say that we are being sabotaged by our own hands—but with a helping hand.