Dr. Alex Grobman is senior resident scholar at the John C. Danforth Society and a member of the Council of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East. He has written extensively on the Shoah and Israel in books and scholarly journals. He holds an MA and PhD in Contemporary Jewry from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, both completed under the primary supervision of Professor Yehuda Bauer one of the world's leading authorities in the field.
Beyond deciding where to live, worship, or educate their children, American Jews now confront an existential reckoning: what happens when antisemitism is no longer confined to the margins, but is woven directly into the movements, institutions, and language of American public life?
This shift is neither accidental nor organic; it is the result of decades of deliberate ideological organizing by movements-including networks rooted in the Muslim Brotherhood-that have successfully translated militant anti-Zionism into the vocabulary of Western activism.
In June 2025, a man attacked a gathering in Boulder, Colorado, where participants were calling attention to hostages held in Gaza, hurling Molotov cocktails into the crowd and killing one woman. In November 2026, Mohamed Sabry Soliman pleaded guilty to federal hate crimes, admitting he targeted the gathering because of the participants’ actual or perceived Jewish religion and Israeli national origin (U.S. Department of Justice, November 2026).
Following the assault-which came on the heels of the murder of two Israeli Embassy employees outside an event at the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington-the FBI warned that the Israel-Hamas conflict could motivate further domestic violence against Jewish and Israeli communities and their supporters (FBI, June 2025). While there is no evidence that these attackers acted on behalf of the Muslim Brotherhood, the bloodshed proves a stark reality: the battle claimed to be over Israel is not only about the Jewish state, it is about the Jewish people and American Jews are paying a price at home
A Movement with a Long Strategy
Founded in Egypt in 1928 by Hassan al-Banna, the Muslim Brotherhood sought to organize society and government according to its interpretation of Islam. Hamas emerged from the Palestinian Brotherhood.
In Jihad and Jew-Hatred, political scientist Matthias Küntzel describes the Brotherhood as both a religious movement and a revolutionary political organization. Al-Banna sought a return to early Islam, but built a modern urban mass movement that organized workers, offered social services and recruited foreign students to establish branches abroad. Küntzel calls this project an “Islamist international."
Its ambitions went beyond religious observance. Küntzel writes that the Brotherhood sought to replace parliamentary democracy with a political order based on its interpretation of Islamic law and a caliphate. He describes its hostility to what it regarded as the materialism of both capitalist and communist societies. The movement could address social grievances while working toward a fundamentally different order.
Küntzel also emphasizes al-Banna’s militant conception of jihad and his exaltation of death in battle. In his interpretation, the Brotherhood transformed religious commitment into a political struggle that celebrated martyrdom. His account makes ideology central to understanding the movement rather than treating its institutions as ordinary charities or political clubs.
Antisemitism is central to Küntzel’s argument. He traces how Islamist hostility to Jews absorbed European conspiracy theories and Nazi ideology. Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian political theorist and revolutionary who was a leading member of the Brotherhood, portrayed Jews as agents of moral and social corruption. In a 2008 Stanford University lecture, Küntzel argued that Jews became associated in this worldview with threatening aspects of modernity, including individual freedom and equality.
The clandestine side of the movement was real. Research by Ahmed Abou El Zalaf documents the Brotherhood’s secret apparatus in the early 1940s, including its role in violence and political assassinations. (Religions, January 2022).
Egyptian-American author Cynthia Farahat argues in The Secret Apparatus: The Muslim Brotherhood’s Industry of Death that the movement’s political activities cannot be understood without examining that clandestine history. She describes the Brotherhood as a secret military apparatus with a political façade.
Küntzel’s analysis helps explain why Jews matter to this story: hostility to them was not merely a response to the policies of a particular Israeli government. It formed part of a worldview that portrayed Jews as a collective enemy and the struggle against them as an ideological and religious imperative.
What the FBI Found
In 1991, Mohamed Akram, a member of the Brotherhood’s North American Shura Council, wrote an internal memorandum describing a strategy for building an effective Islamic movement in North America under Brotherhood leadership. It discussed institutions, relationships and expanding the movement’s base. Akram called the work a “civilization jihad" and wrote of eliminating Western civilization from within.
An attachment listed “our organizations" and “organizations of our friends" and imagined them working according to one plan. The FBI recovered the memorandum, which was introduced as a government exhibit in the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, once the largest Muslim chaity in the US. (case (Government Exhibit 003-0085, May 22, 1991). It records the author’s ambitions; it does not establish that every organization named accepted the plan or follows it today.
In 1993, Hamas supporters met near Philadelphia to discuss opposing the Oslo peace agreement and concealing their connections. The FBI was listening.
According to the FBI’s translated transcript, Holy Land Foundation leader Shukri Abu Baker spoke about “deception" and “camouflage." Participants referred to Hamas as “Sister Samah"-Hamas spelled backward. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals later described the meeting as involving continued support for Hamas and efforts to conceal those connections. (FBI translation; Fifth Circuit, United States v. El-Mezain, December 2011).
The Holy Land Foundation presented itself as a Palestinian charity. Prosecutors charged that it sent money to Hamas through charitable committees. In 2008, the foundation and five leaders were convicted on charges including providing material support to Hamas. In 2011, the Fifth Circuit upheld the individual convictions.
Lara Burns, the retired FBI special agent who worked on the investigation, warned the House Ways and Means Committee that terrorist organizations had used tax-exempt entities for financial support and propaganda. In August 2026, she told a Senate Judiciary subcommittee that, in her judgment, elements of the network remained active .(House Ways and Means Committee, July 23, 2024; Senate Judiciary Committee, August 5, 2026).
The lesson is not that every public statement is a lie. It is that a network’s public presentation must be measured against its records, relationships, financing and conduct. The Philadelphia recordings show why that examination is necessary.
The Alliance and the Opportunity
France offers a warning about how ideological movements can seek influence within established institutions and broader political coalitions. In May 2025, a French government-commissioned report warned of Brotherhood-linked influence through religious, educational and civic organizations. (French Interior Ministry, May 2025; Reuters, May 21, 2025).
A French parliamentary inquiry later documented points of convergence between some elected officials, principally from the hard-left La France Insoumise movement, and individuals promoting Islamist ideology. It had not established national organizational or financial ties between political parties and Islamist movements (French National Assembly, December 17, 2025).
A movement does not have to control every protest to gain influence. It can join a cause, build relationships and use the language of social justice, anti-racism or opposition to Western power to reach beyond its own constituency.
Progressive activists may believe they are defending minorities and opposing injustice. Islamist movements can participate in those campaigns while pursuing an order hostile to the pluralism, women’s equality, gay rights and Jewish national self-determination that many on the left say they defend. What happens to those commitments if the alliance succeeds in weakening the institutions that protect them?
The protests that spread across France in 2026 began with complaints about schools and public services. They developed into violence and looting that left authorities struggling to respond. Among people incarcerated after the October unrest, French reporting said 29 percent were foreign nationals; among those held in connection with looting, the figure was 35 percent. By comparison, foreign nationals represented only 9.1 percent of France’s population in 2025 (TF1 Info, October 23, 2026; INSEE, 2025 population data).
The Brotherhood has not been shown to have directed the riots. But, Palestinian Arab flags and keffiyehs have been flown alongside French tricolors and labor union banners-including on top of the historic Marianne statue at the Place de la République in Paris. According to Arab News, their presence reveals “how Gaza has shaped a generation's politics." (Arsb News, November 10, 2026)
What Happens to the Jews?
A fundamental question American Jews must ask is why must Jewish communities repeatedly prepare for the consequences of Arab movements supposedly concerned with other grievances? When hostility to Israel becomes a license to intimidate and violently assault Jews, the distance between a foreign conflict and an American synagogue has vanished.
In America, the Anti-Defamation League’s analysis of FBI data reported 1,528 single-bias anti-Jewish hate-crime incidents in 2025. Although lower than the 2024 figure, it was the third-highest year on record. Jews were the target of approximately 14 percent of all reported hate crimes, while representing roughly 2 percent of the population (Anti-Defamation League, August 17, 2026).
The incidents have different perpetrators and motivations: anti-Jewish hostility crosses ideological boundaries, finding new language and audiences.
The American Political Landscape
The Pew Research Center found that 53 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents viewed Israel unfavorably in 2022. By 2026, the figure had risen to 80 percent (Pew Research Center, April 7, 2026). The war in Gaza, civilian suffering, social media and partisan politics have contributed to that shift. Whatever its causes, American Jews increasingly confront a political environment in which their connection to Israel is treated as a liability.
Americans can criticize Israeli leaders and debate foreign aid. But Hamas is a designated terrorist organization that deliberately massacred civilians and took hostages on October 7. American citizens were murdered and held hostage.
Foreign funding also warrants scrutiny. The Congressional Research Service reported approximately $8.8 billion in cumulatively reported Qatar-attributed gifts and contracts to American universities as of February 23, 2026. The figure includes American university branch-campus operations in Qatar; it does not establish that Qatar financed a particular American protest. (Congressional Research Service, March 25, 2026).
While America Sleeps
The Brotherhood’s internal American memorandum laid out a clear blueprint to build domestic institutions and political influence. Federal wiretaps captured Hamas supporters discussing the need to conceal their true agenda. The Holy Land Foundation prosecution exposed a vast network dedicated to financing the terrorist organization. Abroad, the French government has formally warned of Brotherhood-linked infiltration, while a former FBI investigator testified before Congress that key elements of the American network survived intact.
Together, these facts demand urgent answers: who is building and financing these organizations, who is gaining privileged access to university campuses and political leaders, and whose agenda is advancing when strategic alliances make hostility toward Israel respectable?
Thomas Paine famously observed that "an army of principles can penetrate where an army of soldiers cannot." Because ideas can breach defenses that armies never could, history cautions against waiting for an ideological threat to reach full maturity before confronting it. Confronting it requires clarity of principle.
As Cynthia Farahat asserts, "Islamists can only be defeated with a strategy consistent with the moral and intellectual standards of America's founders. To rephrase James Madison, as peace is better than war with no nation, it shouldn't be extorted by Islamists to surrender to none. Either you are with the overwhelming majority of Muslims, and every peaceful individual on earth, or you are with the Muslim Brotherhood."
For American Jews, the crisis is not confined to the street violence that captures headlines; it is the insidious corrosion of a public square where Jewish vulnerability is dismissed, terror is rationalized, and the guardrails of a free society fail to recognize an ideological advance in plain sight. The defining question of this moment is stark: has that line already been crossed?