Cruz Rips Dems Skipping Hearing On Muslim Infiltration

Speaking at a hearing on Wednesday about the dangers of the Muslim Brotherhood network across America, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) denounced the five Senate Democrats who refused to attend the hearing.

Cruz laid into Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Federal Courts, Oversight, Agency Action, and Federal Rights, who announced on Tuesday that they would refuse to participate in the hearing focused on Muslim Brotherhood networks within the United States.

“You may notice that there are empty chairs on the Democrat side of the dais,” Cruz said. “The American people should ask themselves why not a single member of the minority decided that a hearing on terrorism was worth their time. It is an embarrassment and a disservice to the thousands of American victims of the Muslim Brotherhood. History has taught Americans the danger of dismissing determined jihadist movements because their ambitions seem too extreme to be real.”

Cruz continued:

The present members of this subcommittee will look at two questions. First, how the Muslim Brotherhood built its network in America. And second, what that network looks like today. The Muslim Brotherhood spawned Hamas, influenced the ideology of Al-Qaeda, and gave rise to multiple terrorist organizations. Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and now the United States have all designated the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization. 

Abdul El-Sayed, the son-in-law of a leading member of several Brotherhood groups, won Michigan’s Democrat primary for U.S. Senate. Perfect timing for this hearing. Probably explains why no Democrats are here and none intend to attend because their campaign is now openly embracing terrorist organizations waging war on America. Behind El-Sayed’s political rise sits a much older and more entrenched institutional network two major parties refuses even to see, is exactly the outcome these organizations that we’re discussing have spent 40 years working to produce.

Sen. Ted Cruz ripped the Dem boycott of the Muslim Brotherhood hearing as "an embarrassment," tying Democrats' absence to Abdul El-Sayed's Michigan Senate primary win.

The five Democratic senators issued a joint statement calling the hearing a "political creepshow" and said… pic.twitter.com/35cFYinmkE

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The Democrat boycott targeted a session organized by Cruz titled “Hidden in Plain Sight: Confronting the Muslim Brotherhood Network in America.” The proceeding aligned with broader initiatives by national and state Republicans aimed at cracking down on the group, which included proposals to classify its various branches as terrorist organizations.

In a joint statement, Democratic Senators Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), Mazie Hirono (D-HI), Alex Padilla (D-CA), and Peter Welch (D-VT) sharply criticized the panel’s focus, writing, “Scapegoating Muslims may be a Texas Republican strategist’s idea of ‘solid gold’ to whip up their voters, but Democrats have no intention of indulging this political creepshow, particularly after the recent violence targeting places of faith. Our focus is the costs families face thanks to rampant, non-stop Trump corruption.”

During the hearing, Cruz questioned expert witnesses Lara Burns, Arielle Klepach, and Kyle Shideler regarding the domestic presence and influence of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Burns, the head of terrorism research at the Program on Extremism at the George Washington University, emphasized that the infrastructure supporting foreign terrorist organizations operates inside the U.S. under the guise of charity and advocacy. She testified:

A dangerous myth about foreign terrorist organizations persists in the United States, that the infrastructure supporting them exists only overseas. In reality, these support infrastructures have existed inside the U.S. for decades. They operate through financial, propaganda, and organizational support networks and commonly hide under the cover of charity, advocacy, or activism.

In 1993, leaders of the Palestine Committee held a meeting known as the 1993 Philadelphia Meeting, which was lawfully wiretapped by the FBI. There, members of the Palestine Committee defined the scope of the conspiracy, which included supporting Hamas abroad and infiltrating universities, media, and politics here in the U.S. Why? To begin normalizing Hamas and Muslim Brotherhood extremist ideology in American society. They stated, “War is deception when plotting to lie to Americans.” They also noted their intent to cleanse the curriculum in U.S.-based K-12 schools because “we don’t want our children growing up surrendering to the idea of peace with Jews.”  

Kyle Shideler, the director and senior analyst for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism at the Center for Security Policy stated that the Muslim Brotherhood operates as a counterintelligence and systemic threat in the U.S. He testified:

From its very beginning, the Muslim Brotherhood has operated as a clandestine organization, which engages in the creation of public front groups, cultivates agents of influence, seeks control over religious institutions, and engages in acts of political subversion as well as creating deniable sub-organizations devoted to terrorism, all in pursuit of their ultimate goal, the overthrow of governments and the reestablishment of a worldwide caliphate operating under Islamic law.

It is worth recalling that the government demonstrated that the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood, like all Brotherhood branches worldwide, created and funded Hamas support networks known as Palestine Committees at the direction of the U.S. of the International Muslim Brotherhood, beginning in 1983. … The issue of the U.S.-Muslim Brotherhood is not merely a counterterrorism issue, but it is also a systemic counterintelligence challenge. And even more broadly, it is a challenge to the fabric of the United States and its ability to seek assimilation and social cohesion.

Arielle Klepach, the former assistant U.S. attorney in the special prosecution sections of the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida, testified on the infiltration of the American education system, saying, “When someone tells you who they are, believe them. The Muslim Brotherhood told us their strategy for the West, but don’t take my word for it. They put it on paper. … This is not a relic of the 1990s. It is a foreign terror-supporting movement on American soil targeting our Constitution and our founding principles. I would ask you to remember three things. These organizations are dangerous, they are in our schools, and they hide by abusing the very legal system they are working to dismantle.”