A First Response to “The Muslim Question”

The topic is important. Accuracy is paramount.

I debunk conspiracy theories for a living, more or less, so when I published “The Muslim Question“ and promised a response, I was concerned that it leaned much of its argument on a documented “100-year plan” for the Muslim Brotherhood to conquer North America. This sounded too conspiratorial for my taste. So I did what I always do - try to debunk it.

The claim comes from a November 2025 ISGAP report, and from ISGAP’s director, Dr. Charles Asher Small, who told reporters “we are now fifty years into the Brotherhood’s 100-year plan to entrench themselves into key institutions in the United States and other Western societies.” Every subsequent citation of the 100-year plan — the Fox News piece, the syndicated wire copy, the essay that started this — traces back to that single quote. ISGAP’s own report cites two documents as its evidence: a 1982 internal Brotherhood strategy paper known as “The Project,” seized by Swiss authorities from a Muslim Brotherhood financier in 2001, and a 1991 memo by a Brotherhood official named Mohamed Akram, seized by the FBI in 2004 and entered as evidence in the Holy Land Foundation terrorism-financing trial. I read both documents. Neither one discusses a “100-year plan.” ISGAP’s own report concedes this, saying the document “timelines and step-by-step approach clearly expect” long-term transformation.

But the contents of the files are just as concerning as any conspiracy theory would be.

Both texts are real, in the ordinary evidentiary sense: seized from people with documented Brotherhood ties, authenticated in a federal courtroom in the Akram memo’s case, and never disowned as forgeries by anyone in a position to know. The Project lays out twelve “points of departure” for a worldwide Islamic strategy — build institutions, avoid needless confrontation, cooperate tactically with movements you don’t actually agree with, keep the long-term goal of “the establishment of the global Islamic State wherever it is” in view at every stage. The Akram memo applies that logic to North America specifically, calling the mission “settlement” — making Islam “a part of the homeland it lives in” rather than a foreign transplant — and naming twenty-nine organizations, several of them still major institutions in American Muslim life, as the “seeds” of that project.

I cannot know if these plans were accepted by the Brotherhood as a whole or were just memos written by individuals in the organization. But from what I can tell, they are completely consistent with the Brotherhood ideology and larger strategy since it was founded nearly a century ago.

Worse, they seem consistent with the things that have happened since they were written.

From the eleventh point of The Project:

To adopt the Palestinian cause as part of a worldwide Islamic plan, with the policy plan and by means of jihad, since it acts as the keystone of the renaissance of the Arab world today.

a-Elements:

...To prepare the community of believers for jihad for the liberation of Palestine.

To create a modest nucleus of jihad in Palestine, and to nourish it in order to maintain the flame that will light the road toward the liberation of Palestine, and in order that the Palestinian cause will endure until the moment of liberation.

...

c-Suggested Missions:

To conduct studies on the Jews, enemies of Muslims, and on the oppression inflicted by these enemies on our brothers in occupied Palestine, in addition to preaching and publications.

To fight against the sentiment of capitulation among the Ummah, to refuse defeatist solutions, and to show that conciliation with the Jews will undermine our Movement and its history.

To conduct comparative studies on the Crusades and Israel, and [the victory that will be that of Islam].

To create jihadi cells in Palestine, and support them in order that they cover all of occupied Palestine.

To create a link between the moujahadin in Palestine and those throughout the Islamic world.

To nourish a sentiment of rancor with respect to the Jews and refuse all coexistence.

Yes, antisemitism is part of the strategy and there is no difference between anti-Zionism and antisemitism. Which is what we are seeing today, 44 years later.

The other document, on North American strategy, is chilling both in its scope and in the scale of implementation since it was written in 1991:

4- Understanding the role of the Muslim Brother in North America:

The process of settlement is a “Civilization-Jihadist Process” with all the word means. The Ikhwan must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the 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. Without this level of understanding, we are not up to this challenge and have not prepared ourselves for Jihad yet. It is a Muslim’s destiny to perform Jihad and work wherever he is and wherever he lands until the final hour comes, and there is no escape from that destiny except for those who chose to slack. But, would the slackers and the Mujahedeen be equal.

5- Understanding that we cannot perform the settlement mission by ourselves or away from people:

A mission as significant and as huge as the settlement mission needs magnificent and exhausting efforts. With their capabilities, human, financial and scientific resources, the Ikhwan will not be able to carry out this mission alone or away from people and he who believes that is wrong, and God knows best. As for the role of the Ikhwan, it is the initiative, pioneering, leadership, raising the banner and pushing people in that direction. They are then to work to employ, direct and unify Muslims’ efforts and powers for this process. In order to do that, we must possess a mastery of the art of “coalitions”, the art of “absorption” and the principles of “cooperation”.

Now, let’s look at the so-called “Red-Green Alliance” between socialists and Islamists. It isn’t an alliance. Watching the last decade of campus and municipal politics, it is a one-directional trade. The socialist side has moved: absorbing “decolonization” framing, treating anti-Zionism as settled progressive doctrine, going quiet on gender and sexuality commitments that would otherwise put it at odds with religiously conservative coalition partners. I can’t point to the reverse — an Islamist-aligned organization publicly revising its own positions on gender, sexuality, or religious authority to accommodate its socialist allies. The accommodation runs one way, and “useful idiot,” a phrase coined for exactly this kind of one-sided coalition, has acquired an uncomfortable second meaning: the people who used to deploy it as an insult may now be describing themselves without knowing it.

Again, I have no solid proof that the Muslim Brotherhood is employing this precise strategy in the US today. But since 2000, we have seen 9/11, wars against Al Qaeda and ISIS, and yet Islamist thinking is more embedded in the US than ever before. Muslim candidates are cool while Jewish candidates are suspect of “Zionism.” New York was the site of the deadliest jihadist attack in American history. Twenty-four years later, New York magazine’s cover story is ‘Habibi City’ — not because violence won, but because the Akram memo’s other kind of jihad, the ‘Civilization-Jihadist Process’ of settlement and institution-building, did. Muslims are running and winning elections as socialists, a worldview the Islamists certainly do not believe in, but one that shares their goal of “eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within.” This doesn’t happen by itself; whether this is the actual plan or a general strategy, it is visible to anyone willing to see.

When you have a well defined revolutionary ideology, you don’t need a conspiracy to carry it out. You just need enough people willing to do whatever it takes to implement it. While these documents seem largely consistent with what we have been seeing, there may be other memos superseding them , or there may be none. We do not need a central organization to tell Linda Sarsour to promote Muslim political power while pretending it is consistent with socialist principles as her “MPower Change” organization claims.

“The Muslim Question” essay is terrifically important. But equally important is the presentation. If there is any overreach, anything that can be disproven, if the language is perceived as discriminatory, then the project fails. I’ve only just begun to deeply analyze it, but we have already established that the danger is real and Islamist organizing is the best explanation for much of what we see nowadays, It is critical that the project does not claim anything beyond what can convince a skeptical person.

There are plenty of real concerns. Anyone who cares about the future of America, and of Jews in America, needs to take the contents of these memos seriously because those plans are being implemented, explicitly or implicitly.