The New "Protocols"

For over a century, a bold, long-disproven, racial slander has refused to die, no matter how many times it has been proven to be a forgery, a hoax, a lie - it is called The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It is a malicious lie meant to paint the Jewish people as evil, and as scheming to take over the world. Even though it has been proven over and over to be a forgery, it is still used today by neo-Nazis and other anti-Semites when they feel like smearing and slandering Jews, or proving the extent of their own bigotry and racism.

Today, there is a new claim about a similar document floating about, and being heavily promoted by the usual bigots. It is very similar to the Protocols, it is called The Project, and it claims that Muslims have a grand scheme to take over the world. There are several "red flags" that grab a reasoned reader's attention and which make anyone of normal intelligence and common sense realize that this, too, is a malicious hoax.

Here is one of the spreaders of this story:

From FrontPage Magazine:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID={67736123-6864-4205-B51E-BCBDEF45FCDE}

The Muslim Brotherhood "Project"
By Patrick PooleFrontPageMagazine.com 5/11/2006
One might be led to think that if international law enforcement authorities and Western intelligence agencies had discovered a twenty-year old document revealing a top-secret plan developed by the oldest Islamist organization with one of the most extensive terror networks in the world to launch a program of “cultural invasion” and eventual conquest of the West that virtually mirrors the tactics used by Islamists for more than two decades, that such news would scream from headlines published on the front pages and above the fold of the New York Times, Washington Post, London Times, Le Monde, Bild, and La Repubblica.
If that’s what you might think, you would be wrong.

In fact, such a document was recovered in a raid by Swiss authorities in November 2001, two months after the horror of 9/11. Since that time information about this document, known in counterterrorism circles as “The Project”, and discussion regarding its content has been limited to the top-secret world of Western intelligence communities. Only through the work of an intrepid Swiss journalist, Sylvain Besson of Le Temps, and his book published in October 2005 in France, La conquête de l'Occident: Le projet secret des Islamistes (The Conquest of the West: The Islamists' Secret Project), has information regarding The Project finally been made public. One Western official cited by Besson has described The Project as “a totalitarian ideology of infiltration which represents, in the end, the greatest danger for European societies.”



Other anti-Islam publications and speakers are also claiming this document is "proof" that it's the end of civilization as we know it, that Muslim terrorists are taking over the world, that a grand plan is in place. See:

http://www.intelligencesummit.org/speakers/PatrickPoole.php

http://patrickpoole.blogspot.com/2005/12/muslim-brotherhood-and-islamofascist.html (although Poole, another self-proclaimed "expert", mistakenly states that the document was "recently" seized, in reality it was seized in 2001.)

http://www.melaniephillips.com/diary/?p=1079

www.familysecuritymatters.org/index.php?id=1132779

(there are a lot more of the usual Islamophobes spreading this story, pick any of the major ones listed in this blog and you can likely find them repeating the story without doing any objective analysis.)


The Red Flags:

So what are the "red flags" so readily seen? For one, this sentence: "Since that time information about this document, known in counterterrorism circles as “The Project”, and discussion regarding its content has been limited to the top-secret world of Western intelligence communities." If this document is tightly limited under top secret classifications, then how did a Swiss journalist get his hands on it? Secondly, if this document is top secret, how was this Swiss journalist able to write and publish a newspaper article and then a book about it? Third, this author claims to have access to the classified reports of the investigation into this alleged document - do I even need to explain why this is impossible? Fourth, only one copy of this document has ever been found anywhere - what good is a worldwide conspiracy of 2.1 billion Muslims going to do if there is only one copy of the plan?

In a translation of the newspaper article, found here: http://jmm.aaa.net.au/articles/16149.htm this author first claims The Project is a Muslim plan to expand throughout the world and eventually take over the world, then he states that the Muslim expansion throughout the world is the result of immigration, unrelated to the Project.


More problems with claims of legitimacy:

As noted by others, Besson does not conclusively prove that the plans detailed in the captured documents were adopted by the Brotherhood -- they could have been simply position papers that were later discarded. Also, although individual Brotherhood members and offshoots of the Brotherhood have definitely been involved in terrorism, the group's clear rejection of terrorism makes it hard to sustain any claim of an organizational link with terrorist groups.

The Moderate Muslim Brotherhood

Principles of the Muslim Brotherhood

The document was (allegedly) found in a raid by Swiss police on the large villa belonging to wealthy Egyptian banker Youssef Nada, who is also a Swiss financier. After years of investigation, the Swiss authorities have dropped the investigation of Youssef Nada, stating that they have not been able to develop any evidence on which to base a prosecution.

The document is debunked here: http://www.blogistan.co.uk/blog/mt.php/2005/12/05/the_project_an_islamophobic_co


Further information is at: http://64.233.169.104/search?q=cache:FNmJR1c--ZUJ:004bb14.netsolhost.com/mideast/November%25209.doc+Sylvain+Besson&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=9&gl=us&lr=lang_en&ie=UTF-8

The author of the newspaper article about this alleged document just happened to get a book contract out of it, and now a speaking tour by the usual suspects, "The Intelligence Project", where he's being touted as a "terrorism expert."



NOTE: This is not to say that Youssef Nada has not been suspected of involvement with laundering funds and handling banking for terrorists. There are reasonable questions about his activities. However, to date he has not been convicted of anything. Recent terrorism-related charges in Italy were dismissed. UN, EU blacklist is "not proof" of terrorist activity, court rules - Europe

This article only concerns the strong possibility that "The Project" is a malicious hoax, it is not meant to address the involvement or non-involvement in terrorism by the Muslim Brotherhood (in Egypt) or Youseff Nada.