WhatsappThe United States must recognize that Israel’s fight is also a battle for Western civilization’s survival and safety.
The United States was founded on Enlightenment principles following a revolution to overthrow the British monarchy’s political oppression and economic mercantilism. The American Republic’s Constitution enshrined individual rights to freedom of speech, religion, assembly and thought, regardless of how radical or extreme.
Yet these uniquely American liberties have been exploited by its enemies to subvert the United States and the West from within.
Americans, who embrace freedom of religion and speech, have largely been willfully blind to recognizing that enemy ideologies alone, without tanks, armies or navies, can eventually undermine U.S. national security and destroy its societal fabric.
American scholars have noted this fact in relation to Soviet and Chinese ideological subversion during the Cold War. The question remains: Why does America continue to struggle to recognize jihadi subversion by Islamist organizations and actors?
America’s Islamic enemies have publicly declared their intention for decades: The 1991 Muslim Brotherhood Explanatory Memorandum, discovered by the FBI in 2004 and entered as evidence in the Holy Land Foundation terror financing trial, the most consequential in American history, revealed this strategy in detail.
Authored by Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohammed Akram, the memorandum details a “Civilization-Jihadist Process” to destroy Western civilization from within and establish Islamic governance in North America.
The Muslim Brotherhood memorandum reveals the organization’s aims unambiguously: “The ikhwan [“brotherhood”] must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within.”
This is not a metaphor. This is a declaration of war.
The 2008 Holy Land Foundation trial revealed the depth of the infiltration. This largest terrorism financing prosecution in U.S. federal court history exposed a web of organizations funneling money to Hamas while presenting themselves as legitimate charities.
Yet even this watershed event failed to catalyze broader American awareness of the Muslim Brotherhood’s strategic penetration of American institutions. As the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy has documented, Qatar alone, whose royal family serves as patron to the Brotherhood, has funneled over $100 billion into American universities and institutions, fundamentally reshaping academic discourse on democracy, the West, Israel and the Middle East.
Hamas embodies the success of this dual strategy of violent jihad and state subversion. The Islamic Republic of Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood are the ideological-theological “godfathers” of this global assault.
The Iranian regime’s Quds Force supplies Hamas with weapons, training and operational support.
Brotherhood and Qatari financing
Qatar’s Muslim Brotherhood regime leads the media and political jihad, promoting disinformation to the West. American university campuses erupted into sometimes violent, pro-Hamas, “dismantle Israel” protests following Oct. 7, 2023, many organized and funded by groups with documented ties to the Brotherhood and Qatari financing, though they were portrayed as organic, grassroots and peaceful student activism.
Qatar supplies Hamas with sanctuary, billions in funding and religious guidance from figures such as the late Sheikh Youssef al-Qaradawi, the Brotherhood’s spiritual leader, who blessed Hamas’s operations and counseled its leadership, including Ismail Haniyeh and Yahya Sinwar.
Hamas leaders have revealed the universal scope of their jihadi ambitions. They have declared their intention to target Rome and Andalusia (Spain) after “liberating” Jerusalem—underscoring that their global ambitions extend beyond Israel to encompass the West.
This echoes the foundational doctrine of Islamic warfare as described by Harold Rhode in his book Modern Islamic Warfare, which explains how jihadist movements view their struggle as a cosmic battle that cannot cease “until the world be all for Allah.”
Among both Sunni jihadists of various sects and “Mahdists,” the messianic variety of Shi’ite jihadists that dominate the Iranian regime leadership, the West represents an adversary to be subdued, and Israel is merely the first, local hurdle in conquering the world for Islam.
The historical record abounds with examples of jihadi extremism that broadcast largely ignored warning signs to America and other Western nations in the years preceding the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden issued explicit declarations of jihad against the U.S., calling for the murder of Americans worldwide. His 1998 fatwa, or religious ruling, stated clearly that killing Americans, civilian and military, was the “individual duty” of every Muslim. After 9/11, bin Laden’s “Letter to America” laid out his ideological grievances, framing the conflict in explicitly religious terms as part of a global jihad.
Yet even these unambiguous declarations were often misinterpreted through the lens of political grievance rather than recognized as expressions of theological commitment to Islamic supremacism.
Iran’s Islamic Revolution of 1979 provided another clear signal. Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s declaration that America was the “Great Satan” and Israel the “Little Satan” resulted in the seizure of 53 American hostages who were held for 444 days. These were not mere acts of political protest. Rather, they were manifestations of a revolutionary Islamic ideology.
Over the subsequent four decades, the Iranian regime has reaffirmed its commitment to exporting the Islamic Revolution in the service of destroying Israel and eliminating American and Western influence and presence in the Middle East.
The most recent nationwide anti-regime protests in Iran that began on Dec. 28, 2025, culminated in an unprecedentedly brutal and murderous crackdown by regime security forces, which left tens of thousands of Iranian citizens dead. The crackdown has revealed the extent of the Islamic Republic’s totalitarianism, now akin to North Korea’s, with a total internet blackout from the free world.
Iran now functions like a country-wide concentration camp under the Islamic Republic’s brutal force, fear, torture, intimidation and mass arrests. Iran’s resources have been diverted almost entirely to sustain its ruling theocracy, its security forces, including the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and Basij militia, military and nuclear program, rather than benefiting its people, who seek freedom.
Yet, the Iranian regime’s jihad also has its supporters: Russia and communist China have provided the Islamic regime with sanctions evasion and military and technical aid.
Theologically driven
The West’s delegitimization, condemnation and isolation of the Islamic Republic’s jihadist leadership have been late in coming. The U.S. has treated Iran’s proxy threats as political rather than theologically driven.
Western willful blindness is rooted in its misguided belief that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is fundamentally a territorial dispute that can be resolved through a two-state solution. This conviction, still dominant in American policy-making circles and public opinion, represents perhaps the most dangerous manifestation of Western incomprehension of jihadi ideology.
The reality of Islamist warfare and jihad has spoken volumes. Since the arch terrorist Yasser Arafat assumed leadership of the PLO in 1969, Palestinian nationalism has reflected an Islamic lexicon, points of reference and imagery. Arafat invoked the Al-Aqsa mosque, called for jihad and employed religious terminology to frame what Western audiences were encouraged to view as a secular nationalist movement struggling for human rights and liberation.
At the same time, the PLO’s original 1964 charter and Hamas’s 1988 covenant called for the annihilation of Israel through jihad. Hamas’s founding charter holds that “the land of Palestine is an Islamic Waqf [religious endowment] consecrated for future Muslim generations until Judgment Day,” and today it is Hamas whose doctrine and political popularity dominate the Palestinian street, as proven yearly in polls.
These are not stances subject to negotiation or territorial compromise. These are theological and ideological commitments that will premise any Palestinian state.
This jihadist strategy has been effective precisely because it operates through disinformation and deception, which the West has proven vulnerable to accepting since it believes actors are rational and utilitarian according to Western standards.
The fact that many Americans still view the Palestinian cause primarily as rooted in territorial grievance rather than ideological jihad demonstrates the success of the campaign and the strategic deception that anchors it.
The invasion, massacre and kidnapping of Oct. 7, 2023, shattered this illusion. Hamas’s horrific massacre of some 1,200 Israelis revealed the bankruptcy of the “land for peace” paradigm.
Committed to jihad
Polling in Israel following Oct. 7 reflects a fundamental shift. Israelis from left to right now understand that a Palestinian state led by movements committed to jihad poses an existential threat. Yet much of the American public and policy establishment has yet to internalize this lesson.
There is still room for optimism: The European Union recently, in a vote by 27 European foreign ministers, designated Iran’s IRGC as a terrorist organization, which represents a belated, if welcome, recognition of what some in the West have warned about for decades.
The path forward demands American leadership. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in a December 2025 Fox News interview, acknowledged that “Radical Islam has shown that their desire is not simply to occupy one part of the world and be happy with their own little caliphate; they want to expand. It seeks to expand and control more territories and more people. … That’s a clear and imminent threat to the world and to the broader West, but especially the U.S., which they identify as the chief source of evil on the planet.”
Reflecting Rubio’s approach, on Jan. 13, 2026, the U.S. State and Treasury departments designated three Muslim Brotherhood branches terrorist entities, labeling the Lebanese Muslim Brotherhood (Al-Jamaa al-Islamiyah) a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO, a State Department designation that criminalizes material support) and an SDGT (Specially Designated Global Terrorists—a Treasury designation that imposes asset freezes and sanctions), and the Egyptian and Jordanian branches SDGTs. Muslim Brotherhood front organizations such as CAIR, American Muslims for Palestine, Students for Justice in Palestine and the Palestine Solidarity Committee must also be designated as terror-supporting organizations.
Yet, designating organizations is not enough. Increasingly, jihadi speech has provoked violence, and institutional capture now threatens democratic governance. American universities must fully disclose foreign funding and divest from authoritarian regimes that weaponize financial influence to reshape American discourse.
Second, any American policy toward Palestinian leadership in any case of independent governance must be conditioned on the explicit and verifiable rejection of jihad, recognition of Israel’s permanent right to exist, and adoption of educational curricula free of religious hatred and incitement.
Most important, the U.S. must recognize that Israel’s fight is also a battle for Western civilization’s survival, safety and security. Hamas, Hezbollah, their Iranian patrons, and the broader network of Islamist movements view Israel merely as the forward position of the West, which they openly declare their desire to destroy.
The Oct. 7 massacre was not only an attack on Israel—it was an attack on the U.S. on Israeli soil. It demands moral clarity and a united front between Israel and the United States to defeat jihadist terror and political subversion.
