Blueprint For Islamic Conquest Of North America: Repository Of Foundational Muslim Brotherhood Documents – Part III
By Amb. Alberto M. Fernandez | MEMRI | February 13, 2026
Sometimes one small thing can be greater than the whole. When the French conquered Egypt in 1799 they took over a dilapidated Mameluke fortress and found a piece of old granite as part of the walls, it was the Rosetta Stone, more important and more celebrated than anything else Napoleon brought back from the East.
In August 2004, the FBI raided the Annandale, Virginia home of Ismail Selim Elbarasse and discovered a wealth of documents, sometimes described as “the archives of the Muslim Brotherhood in America.” Elbarasse had worked as an accountant for a Saudi school in Northern Virginia.[1] One document in particular among so many would become legendary among counter-terrorism circles, touted as a kind of Rosetta Stone of terror, the so-called Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal of the Group in North America (see the Appendix below for the original text and an English translation).[2]
The raid was in conjunction with a decade-long U.S. government’s investigation into an American non-profit, the Holy Land Foundation (HLF), accused of funneling money to Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist terrorist group.[3] While the organizers of the HLF were found guilty and the Explanatory Memorandum was entered into the court documents by the prosecution, neither Elbarasse nor the document’s purported author Muhammad Akram Adlouni were prosecuted. Both had ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and/or to Hamas but they were not the main focus of the trial.
The 15-page Arabic-language document may have helped secure a guilty verdict in the HLF case but it does not, in and of itself, describe or advocate illegal activity per se. The HLF trial was essentially about a Hamas front organization and “material support for terrorism” and the Explanatory Memorandum is not precisely about Hamas but rather about the work of the Muslim Brotherhood in the United States. Even though Hamas is the armed wing of the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood, the document is about something else altogether, something bigger.[4]
The document was a plan for “a new stage of Islamic activism” on the American continent. This intense, directed activity has a clear objective:
The Ikhwan [Muslim Brotherhood] 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.”
This goal differentiates the document and the vision behind it from other hopes and aspirations immigrant groups or exile communities may express in their new homeland. Immigrants or political exiles may press for change in their new homeland, that is not very unusual. They may and do push for changes in policies. That is rather common in the American experience. But, say, Armenian or Cuban or Ukrainian Americans usually do not talk about “eliminating or destroying” their host from within.
This is ideological language used by an adversary against an enemy. Notice that the ultimate goal is not, for example, to try to make the United States more amenable or sympathetic to Muslim causes or to the question of Palestine but to “sabotage the miserable house” at the hands of the Muslims, to overthrow the status quo and replace it with a new dispensation where Islam (the Muslim Brotherhood’s version of Islam in particular) is not equal but dominant, “made victorious over all other religions.” If a non-Muslim had written such a document or invented such a charge he would be brought to trial today.
Some apologists for political Islam have tried to make the point that the views expressed in the document were merely those of one man, the author (who is still very much alive today and is a loud supporter of Hamas) and do not represent the Muslim Brotherhood.[5] It is true that the Brotherhood is a protean organization, operating informally and nationally, often working through fronts or allied organizations.
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