The Muslim Brotherhood's decades-long effort to infiltrate the United States is now visible in ways that can no longer be dismissed, as the movement has been strategically expanding toward America since the early 1990s, Newsmax foreign policy analyst Walid Phares said on Sunday.
"This is core of my own career over four decades, almost," Phares said on Newsmax's "Sunday Report." "We've seen it in the Middle East before I emigrated, spreading in Syria, Egypt, elsewhere. There is a whole history of it."
Phares said he witnessed the Muslim Brotherhood's rise across the Middle East long before it became a domestic concern.
The Muslim Brotherhood, he said, shifted its focus toward the United States following internal meetings in Sudan after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
"It's only at the end of the Cold War, when the Soviet Union collapsed, that the Brotherhood actually turned their ire and their fire to the United States, and basically to infiltrate, penetrate, influence the United States," Phares said.
He added that his concern is not that the threat is coming to light now, but that the U.S. failed to confront it earlier.
"My surprise is not that, you know, we're talking about it right now. Why haven't we addressed it before?" said Phares. "There is a failure in our national security, strategic, and the global approach of the Muslim Brotherhood."
Phares emphasized that the Brotherhood is not a single group but the center of a much larger movement.
"The Muslim Brotherhood is a mothership out of which other branches of jihadists, meaning most of these jihadist forces you name, Hamas, you name Jemaah Islamiyah, and Algeria and Sudan and elsewhere," he said. "That's the large mothership out of which many branches of jihadism have been operating."
He also noted emerging signals that President Donald Trump may move toward a federal terrorist designation against the Muslim Brotherhood.
Phares said the public should understand that groups the West has sometimes engaged with have longstanding Brotherhood roots.
"Some of the jihadists that even the West dealt with positively have been built by the Muslim Brotherhood," he said.
As unrest tied to the Israel-Hamas conflict surfaces on U.S. campuses and in major cities, Phares said awareness of the Brotherhood's global structure and long-term objectives is critical to confronting the movement's influence.
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