For too long, Western democracies have treated radical Muslims, or Islamists, as a physical security problem rather than a political and ideological one. We devote enormous resources to stopping terrorist attacks while paying far less attention to how Islamists use our own civic infrastructure to grow, organize, and influence public life, eroding our values and undermining our way of life from within.
Texas has decided that approach is no longer acceptable. It is determined to confront the Islamist movements infiltrating the state.
In November, Governor Greg Abbott designated the Muslim Brotherhood and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) as foreign terrorist organizations and transnational criminal organizations under Texas law. He invoked the state’s penal and property codes to authorize asset forfeiture, bar the groups from acquiring land in Texas, and give the state attorney general power to pursue their dissolution.
Texas showed it is willing to confront an ideological threat before it hardens into an irreversible political one.
Other states are following, as well. This year, Florida enacted a law giving state officials the power to designate groups like Muslim Brotherhood and CAIR, as terrorist organizations, and Louisiana, Oklahoma and Arizona introduced bills that would do the same. More should join them and the sooner is better.
This is a struggle against Islamism, a political ideology that seeks to replace liberal democracy with religious authoritarianism.
The Muslim Brotherhood, Islamism’s foundational movement, was founded nearly a century ago in Egypt. It has served as the intellectual wellspring for Islamist movements throughout the Middle East and beyond. Its founding goal was a society, and ultimately a world, governed by Sharia law. To advance it, the movement has consistently relied on building influence through civic organizations, advocacy groups, charity, social services, education, political activism, and public relations, using the tools of democracy to advance an ideology fundamentally opposed to the principles that sustain free societies.
For three decades, CAIR has positioned itself as a leading voice representing American Muslims, using that standing to build relationships and influence within progressive circles. Its record tells a different story. Federal prosecutors named CAIR an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation case, the largest terrorism-financing prosecution in American history, and a federal judge later found “ample evidence” establishing CAIR’s association with the Holy Land Foundation and Hamas. That history, and the statements of the organization’s own leaders, expose CAIR’s real motives.
This pattern extends to the classroom. CAIR urges educators to avoid terms like “Islamic terrorist” or “jihadist” when teaching about 9/11.
Just weeks ago, CAIR’s national back-to-school guide pointed educators to a K-12 “Muslim Studies Curriculum” developed by its New Jersey chapter. It described the 9/11 hijackers only as “a group self-identifying as Al Qaeda,” never once using the word terrorist, and taught that the attacks were motivated by “America’s support for Israel” and the U.S. military presence in the Middle East. The same curriculum recommended that students read Osama bin Laden’s “Letter to America” — a document that tells readers, “Behind them stand the Jews, who control your policies, media and economy.” CAIR pulled the link only after it was exposed. This was not one chapter improvising. It is the same organization laundering its ideology into American classrooms, one generation at a time.
States have the authority, and the responsibility, to ensure that organizations operating within their borders are legally compliant, financially transparent and accountable.
Texas has demonstrated that this kind of scrutiny is possible. It is also more urgent than ever.
The urgency is clearest among young Americans. When Osama bin Laden’s “Letter to America” went viral on TikTok in 2023, young users by the thousands praised it as eye-opening. Last year, a Harvard CAPS/Harris poll found that 60 percent of Americans aged 18 to 24 sided with Hamas over Israel, the only age group to do so. Many of these young people have been taught to see Muslims as a uniformly oppressed people and America as their oppressor. From there, it is a short step to excusing, or even celebrating, violence against the West as “resistance.”
They believe this makes them progressive. It is the opposite. The Islamist movements and regimes they romanticize persecute gay people, subjugate women, silence dissent, and punish apostates. Hamas has not held an election in Gaza in two decades, Iran executes protesters, and the Taliban bars girls from school. Every value these young activists claim to champion, from equality and free expression to women’s and LGBTQ rights, is precisely what Islamism seeks to destroy. And Islamism’s first victims are very often Muslims themselves, including the many American Muslims who came here to escape it.
This did not happen by accident. It is the product of an ideologically driven campaign, one Islamists have spent decades advancing through student groups, advocacy organizations, and some mosques across the country.
That is what makes Islamism harder to counter than a conventional terrorist threat. Terrorism is fought at the level of plots and cells. Islamism operates one level up, through the student organizations, mosques, charities, and advocacy groups that spend decades shaping what an entire generation considers acceptable political speech, long before any violence occurs.
The result has been a slow normalization of hostility toward America’s liberal democratic order in classrooms, on campus quads, and in city councils. Only about four in ten Gen Z adults say they are extremely or very proud to be American, according to Gallup, far below older generations.
The same ideology is spreading among a new generation of elected officials and political candidates who treat America’s founding institutions as illegitimate and argue for tearing down the American system. Recent DSA primary winners and other far-left candidates reject free markets, question the country’s historical role in the world, and align with movements that view Western institutions as inherently oppressive.
Islamism and this far-left ideology differ in almost everything except one thing: both treat liberal democracy’s foundations as obstacles to be dismantled.
The Muslim Brotherhood and CAIR have spent decades using the freedoms of American civil society as the mechanism for undermining the values that make that society possible. They use our courts, campuses, advocacy spaces, and media to do it.
We must close that vulnerability. Confronting it means refusing to let organizations that want to dismantle liberal democracy weaponize its own principles against it.
Texas has shown that a state can name the threat plainly and act on it.
Other states, and the federal government, should have the same clarity and the same resolve.
About the Author: Adam Milstein is an Israeli-American “Strategic Venture Philanthropist.” He can be reached at [email protected], on Twitter @AdamMilstein, and on Facebook www.facebook.com/AdamMilsteinCP.
The views expressed in this op-ed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Dallas Express.
