How radical Islamists and the far left united to ‘fight America everywhere and all the time’
By Peter Schweizer January 19, 2026Why are American progressives, who believe in gay rights and abortion, aligned with radical Islamists, who want a religious dictatorship? Because “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” writes Peter Schweizer in his new book, “The Invisible Coup: How American Elites and Foreign Powers Use Immigration as a Weapon.” In this exclusive excerpt, he explains that they are after the same thing: the destruction of Western society from within.
Ismail Selim Elbarasse, an accountant by training, seemed to be living a quiet life in Annandale, Virginia. But in 2004, when police officers noticed him driving with his wife across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge and filming its critical structural elements, they decided to act, then detained him and notified federal agents.
He was already a suspect in a scheme to provide funding to Islamist terrorist groups, and now agents were searching through his home for further evidence of his possible involvement.
They discovered far more than a terrorism funding scheme
Buried among the stacks of paperwork in his home was a document written in Arabic titled “An Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Brotherhood in North America,” written by a US-based Islamist leader from the Muslim Brotherhood.
The strategic goals memo specifically addressed the “Civilization-Jihadist Process” for using migration as a weapon of subversion.
Members “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.”
The Muslim Brotherhood specifically and Islamists in general have long viewed immigration as a weapon to deploy against the West.
“One of the goals of immigration is the revival of the duty of Jihad and enforcement of their power over the infidels,” declared Abu Basir, a radical Islamic scholar.
“Immigration and Jihad go together. One is the consequence of the other and dependent upon it. The continuance of the one is dependent upon the continuance of the other.”
The fact that some Muslim immigrants arrive in the West and become dependent on public assistance is seen by some Islamists as a good and just behavior, describing it as a form of jizya, a tax placed on non-Muslims for the benefit of Muslims.
As Anjem Choudary, a Muslim preacher in Britain, stated: “We take the Jizya, which is ours anyway. The normal situation is to take money from the [non-Muslim], isn’t it? So, this is the normal situation. They give us the money. You work, give us the money, Allahu Akhbar. We take the money.”
In 2024, Choudary was sentenced to life in prison for supporting a terrorist organization.
In the United States, the Muslim Brotherhood operates through several groups that they have founded and/or funded, such as the Islamic Society of North America, launched in 1981, which describes itself as an umbrella organization for Muslims in North America “to advance the cause of Islam and service Muslims in North America so as to enable them to adopt Islam as a complete way of life.”
The Muslim Brotherhood has other groups under its control, such as the Muslim Students Association, which actively recruits students on college campuses.
It would be a mistake to dismiss the Muslim Brotherhood as a limited fringe movement.
Further, the strange progressive bedfellows they have found in the United States — pro-gay, pro-abortion, and pro-feminist socialists — have increased the Brotherhood’s political influence and power as those progressives often work with Islamists in common cause.
And what exactly is their common cause? According to veteran left-wing scholar and Princeton professor Michael Walzer, it comes from their common rejection of American values.
Both Islamists and progressives want to subvert American civilization, their common enemy. As a result, progressives often rally as comrades with Islamists.
Professor Judith Butler of the University of California at Berkeley, another icon of the progressive left, argues for the need for “understanding Hamas, Hezbollah as social movements that are progressive, that are on the Left, that are part of a global Left, is extremely important.”
In 2007, in a remarkable display of strange bedfellow solidarity, Aleida and Camilo Guevara, the daughter and son of Marxist revolutionary and college campus icon Che Guevara, traveled to Iran to discuss “common goals” with clerics and students at the Amirkabir University of Technology in Tehran. The two visitors met with these “militant students” to discuss the struggle ahead; Aleida even wore a head covering during the meeting.
At a meeting with the Iranian minister of culture and Islamic guidance, Mohammad-Hossein Saffar-Harandi, it was declared that the common goal was to fight America “everywhere and all the time.”
It is just that simple.
Perhaps prominent progressive-Islamic activist Linda Sarsour personifies the merging of these two movements best.
Born in Brooklyn, New York, and raised by Palestinian parents, Sarsour became a prominent activist during the Obama years when she was regularly invited to meetings at the White House. In 2012, President Barack Obama gave her the “Champions of Change” award at a White House ceremony.
Sarsour sits on the board of the New York Immigration Coalition, which includes 200 groups, and was the head of the Arab American Association of New York.
In 2017, she helped organize the massive “Women’s March” in Washington and later became a campaign surrogate for the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign.
Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) has aligned herself with Sarsour, headlining together the Sixteenth Annual Universal Muslim Association of America, as “the two took the stage to promote women’s rights and progressive values.”
The event reportedly segregated men and women in attendance, and most women wore hijabs, but that did not seem to bother the congresswoman.
To Sarsour, the founder of the Muslim faith, Muhammad, was a progressive activist. “Our prophet was a racial justice activist, a human rights activist, a feminist in his own right,” she said. “He was a man that cared about the environment. He cared about animal rights … He was also the first victim of Islamophobia.”
The Muslim Brotherhood has amplified her message by posting her videos and praising her work.
“Our number one and top priority is to protect and defend our community,” Sarsour explained in a speech in 2017 before the Islamic Society of North America, a Muslim Brotherhood group. “It is not to assimilate and please any other people in authority. Our obligation is to our young people, is to women, and to make sure our women are protected in our community. And our top priority — even higher than all those priorities — is to please Allah and only Allah.”
Aware that a clear, direct Islamist message has limited appeal in the United States, Islamists have exploited the strange Islamist-progressive relationship to produce some important political offspring, including several influential members of Congress.
Both Ilhan Omar from Minnesota and Rashida Tlaib from Michigan have received considerable support from both progressives and the Muslim Brotherhood in their climb to political prominence.
Omar was on the radar of the Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated CAIR even before she was in Congress. CAIR was born out of a 1993 meeting in Philadelphia where members of a radical group called the Palestine Committee, which was tied to the terrorist group Hamas, discussed the creation of a moderate front organization to continue supporting Hamas.
CAIR was also named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the largest terrorism financing prosecution in US history, the 2007 trial of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development in Texas.
According to CAIR officials, the purpose of living in the United States is to change it.
“So, what is our role in that regard?” asked former Florida CAIR director Hassan Shibly in a 2025 speech. “How do we even justify living here? I mean, why are we living here? Have we asked ourselves this question, why are we living in the United States? The only answer I believe is excusable and justifiable is if we are living here to shift this country’s political direction and spiritual direction together, engaging in da’awah [spreading Islam], and da’awah is essential.”
Leaders also emphasize that assimilation to the American way of life is not an option. “Ultimately, we can never be full citizens of this country,” explained Ihsan Bagby, a member of the board of directors of CAIR, “because there is no way we can be fully committed to the institutions of this country. We can be citizens in the sense that we try to influence American policy.”
In February 2017, before she was a member of Congress, Ilhan Omar was the keynote speaker at CAIR’s Annual Banquet in Chicago. Over the years that have followed, she has been a regular fixture at the organization’s events, and CAIR made a $5,000 contribution to her 2018 campaign.
The political rise of Zohan Mamdani in New York politics is emblematic of radical Islam’s political network in the United States.
His parents have ties to radical entities in the Middle East; his mother received millions in financing for her film projects from the government of Qatar.
Mamdani was a politically inexperienced rapper who caught the attention of radical Islamists in part because of a rap song he performed in 2019, about his “‘love’ for the ‘Holy Land Five,’ ” the five men convicted for gathering $12 million for the terrorist organization Hamas.
At the same time, he embraced the American progressive movement through the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), having attended his first meeting in 2017 and then working with local candidates tied to the DSA.
By 2024, he was a candidate for mayor of New York and Muslims became a key component of his campaign. As the International Quran News Agency in Iran reported, his path to victory in the primary was through mosques and imams across New York City. “His campaign team visited more than 100 mosques, of which Mamdani personally visited almost 25,” according to Zara Rahim, a senior advisor to the campaign.
“Many of the tenets of this campaign are inherently Muslim: justice, mercy, commitment to community,” she explained.
Funds have flowed into Mamdani’s mayoral campaign from troubling sources. A political action committee called New Yorkers for Lower Costs is supporting his campaign and received at least $100,000 from a California-based PAC called the Unity and Justice Fund. The fund is reported to be associated with CAIR.
The Unity and Justice Fund had just days earlier received a donation from Imam Siraj Wahhaj, a Muslim cleric tied to figures involved in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Indeed, three of Wahhaj’s children had been sentenced in 2024 to life in prison for their role in a terrorism plot in New Mexico.
Wahhaj predicted in a 2021 interview the opportunity to create a Muslim political force.
“They say, you know, there may be as many as 1,300,000 Muslims in New York City . . . And so, we have a number of Muslims who are into politics. So, I would like to see us more working more together, getting stronger politically and economic development.”
He went on to note the role that mass immigration had played in the population surge including at his Mosque.
“Let me tell you something interest[ing]. We started our masjid 40 years ago, 100% African-American. Now, you know the percentage of African-Americans? Maybe 20%. Maybe 25%. The rest are immigrants.”
The Muslim Brotherhood and their allies look to the Prophet Muhammad himself for inspiration on the use of migration as a tool of conquest. Muhammad called it hijrah (“migration”), and it was an important component of Islamic expansion.
One method is through R-1 visas, a program launched in 1990 that allows mosques and other religious institutions to bring religious workers to the United States. Most mosques in the United States are headed by imams who are not from the US but lived and studied overseas. Some have extremist views.
Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, the so-called “Blind Sheikh” who organized the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, entered the US through an R-1 visa.
An investigation by the Department of Homeland Security in 2007 found that the program’s fraud rate was “excessively high.” Specifically, “instances of fraud were particularly high among applicants from predominantly Muslim countries.”
In one instance, a Pakistani man living in Brooklyn declared himself an imam and submitted 200 applications for religious worker visas.
Islamists are confident that their infiltration and subversion will be successful.
During a 2015 speech at the famed Al-Aqsa Mosque, which sits atop the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, Sheikh Muhammad Ayed declared that Muslims in the Western world should be patient. “This dark night will be over,” he declared, “and soon, we will trample them underfoot, Allah willing.”
He gives the West no credit for accepting Muslim migrants out of compassion.
“They wish that we were dead. But they have lost their fertility, so they look for fertility in their midst. We will give them fertility! We will breed children with them, because we shall conquer their countries — whether you like it or not, oh Germans, oh Americans, oh French, oh Italians, and all those like you. Take the refugees! We shall soon collect them in the name of the coming Caliphate.”
American progressives are either not aware of these sorts of state- ments or ignore them out of strategic convenience: the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
Both are engaged at some level in viewing migrants as catalysts for radical social change. Migration can be “instrumental in forging social transformations,” they argue.
Why do stable, prosperous, free societies like the United States need “social transformation?” They never say.
Excerpted with permission from Peter Schweizer’s “The Invisible Coup: How American Elites and Foreign Powers Use Immigration as a Weapon,” out Tuesday from Harper.
