The US Capitol building was the venue for Dr. Waller to speak on the Muslim Brotherhood and the power of ideology as part of a Westminster Institute program.
The September 6, 2013 event brought together a panel of distinguished speakers on a range of topics to battle Islamist aggression:
- Dr. Patrick Sookhdeo, The Role of Religion in the Battle Space since 9/11
- Tawfik Hamid, Psychology and Ideology of Islamist Extremism
- Dr. J. Michael Waller, The Muslim Brotherhood and the Mobilizational Power of Ideology
- Stephen Ulph, The Importance of Muslim Reformers
- Robert R. Reilly, Information Operations: Successes and Failures
- Walid Phares, A New U.S. Response to Upheaval in the Middle East
- Diana West, Countering Subversion: Lessons from History
- Katharine C. Gorka, The OIC’s Political Warfare
- Dr. Sebastian Gorka, A New American Strategy
“The mobilizational power of ideology is something that our government is not equipped to understand regardless of who is in political power, who is in political office. We don’t have a way of coping with it which is odd because everyone elected to a position of power in our country understands the mobilizational power of ideology in getting themselves into office in the first place,” Waller said.
“So if you look at our foreign and domestic enemies, kind of the way you’d look at politics. You know there are certain factors where, beyond which a certain individual cannot be flexible in a certain space, but if you understand the ideology if not of the individual at least the movement that supports that individual. You’ll find there are places where certain politicians cannot go, certain hot button issues we have in American politics.
“So you have also in with our enemies such as the Muslim Brotherhood, which is an enemy of the United States. You think for example when people take the oath of say, their commission, as an officer the oath of enlistment or the oath of office as an elected official. They swear to do what? To uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic. How is enemy defined? Look in the DOD Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms. It’s this thick. The word enemy is not defined. They have enemy combatant. They don’t have a modifier. So how can a person in uniform, to say nothing of a person with a badge or someone who works in this complex here, how can they really know what an enemy is if we don’t define it? And more when those who do define the enemy are so marginalized that they either feel intimidated against saying something or are intimidated by others and banned effectively as we’re seeing and have been seeing,” Waller said.
For a full transcript, click here.