John Brennan, President Obama's nominee for CIA director, does not believe we are at war with jihadists because "jihad is a holy struggle, a legitimate tenet of Islam, meaning to purify oneself or one's community, and there's nothing holy, legitimate, or Islamic about murdering innocent men and women."
The Society of the Muslim Brothers (Al-Ikhwan al Muslimeen, the Muslim Brotherhood) is one of world's largest and most influential Islamic political organizations. Its affiliates operate as the main opposition parties in several Arab states, as a ruler in the Palestinian Gaza Strip and as the leading Muslim institutions in Western Europe and the United States.
When America’s top intelligence officer calls the Muslim Brotherhood a “largely secular” organization, it's appropriate to wonder what the intelligence community is doing with its generous budget. The spooks might get a clue get from the organization’s name, if nothing else.
Ronald Reagan once said, "Freedom is never more than one generation from extinction." Readers of this book are likely to conclude that the turning point may be much nearer than they thought.
Had the citizens of Greeley, Colo., been friendlier to the introverted Egyptian student Sayyid Qutb during his studies there from 1948 to 1950, he might not have become the Muslim Brotherhood's signature ideologue. But the lonesome Qutb resented everything America had to offer, especially individual freedom, capitalism, jazz and women's "open" sexuality.
