Mohamed Elibiary's Planned Reforms Raise Concerns

Mohamed Elibiary, an Islamist  with extensive ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and a record of influence operations in the service of its agenda, has announced his departure after five years on the Department of Homeland Security Advisory Council. We can only hope that — at a moment when the danger posed by Shariah adherent Muslims is becoming more palpable by the day — the Department decided to stop legitimating an advisor who has publicly championed that it was, “ inevitable that ‘Caliphate’ return”, contended that the United States is “an Islamic country with an Islamically compliant constitution.”

Elibiary had always been brazen in his support for Islamists and the Muslim Brotherhood in particular, including featuring the Muslim Brotherhood  R4Bia symbol on his twitter page, and publicly lauding Muslim Brotherhood ideologue Sayyid Qutb.

Whatever the cause of Elibiary’s departure from a senior advisory capacity in the Obama administration, it must be welcomed because he played a prominent role in blinding the U.S. government to the threat posed by the brotherhood’s civilization jihad. This was the practical upshot of a sequence of events that began with Elibiary being given the FBI’s highest civilian award at the Bureau’s Training Academy in Quantico, Va., in September 2011.

Shortly thereafter, Spencer Ackerman of Wired Magazine published pictures of materials in the FBI Training Academy’s Library that Elibiary and his ilk deemed offensive, accompanied by a series of screeds about the need to stop employing such information and trainers employing it to prepare Bureau personnel to protect us against all enemies —  foreign and domestic. On November 8, 2011, then-Homeland security adviser to the president — now CIA director — John Brennan agreed not only to accommodate that demand but applied the purge to the U.S. military, U.S. intelligence community and Department of Homeland Security, as well.

Unfortunately, as welcome as the news is that Mohamed Elibiary may be less able in the future to run subversive influence operations from within the U.S. government, his next publicly announced mission is disconcerting. In response to a Tweeted question from investigative reporter Ryan Mauro — who conducted a highly illuminating interview with Elibiary in the fall of 2013 — the former Senior Fellow at the Obama Department of Homeland Security announced that he was now going to turn his attention to “reform[ing] the conservative movement so the GOP can win in 2016.”

I had an opportunity to witness personally Mohamed Elibiary’s involvement with the conservative movement when I was invited in the Spring of 2013 to address a conservative group that meets monthly in the Park Cities neighborhood of Dallas, Texas.

Undeterred by his presence, I briefed the group on the nature of the Muslim Brotherhood, its goals of imposing Shariah worldwide under the rule of a Caliph, and its practice of stealthy, pre-violent civilization jihad to advance that agenda.

In the course of my Park Cities briefing last year, I did not mention Elibiary by name and he did not make any intervention or otherwise challenge my briefing. After the meeting ended and he left, however, I asked the organizer, “Why do you have a Muslim Brother in this meeting?” Interestingly, he did not reply by saying, “Who are you talking about?” or “What evidence do you have that anyone here is a Muslim Brother?” Instead, he simply said, “The Center-Right Coalition recommended him.”