We now know that the Muslim Students’ Association (MSA) in the United States served as a incubator for the spread of Shariah law in the Mideast. No less a personage than Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi can count himself an alumnus of the MSA.

“Morsi pursued his doctorate at the University of Southern California in the early Eighties,” former federal prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy recounts in the October 15, 2012 issue of National Review. “His wife, Nagla Ali Mahmoud, joined him in the United States.”

“In fact, two of the five Morsi children were born here and are American citizens.” McCarthy is a regular contributor to NR.

“It was in the Golden State that Morsi joined the Brotherhood, through the Muslim Students Association,” McCarthy relates. “The MSA is the gateway through which many young Muslims—including such jihadist notables as Anwar al-Awlaki, the al-Qaeda leader killed in Yemen last year—begin the lengthy process of study and service that leads to membership in the brotherhood.”

As a federal prosecutor, McCarthy successfully prosecuted the blind sheik who masterminded the 1993 bombing at the World Trade Center. His research on radical Islam has grown since then and resulted in two books—The Grand Jihad and Spring Fever. McCarthy’s NR piece is serialized from the latter.

“Morsi adheres fiercely to classical sharia,” McCarthy claims. “His dispute with the renegades involved his support for hardline Brotherhood positions favoring the disqualification of women and non-Muslims from seeking the presidency and the vetting of proposed laws by religious scholars.”

“For crossing Morsi, the dissenting Brothers were expelled.” McCarthy goes on to quote Morsi himself on the subject of sharia.

“The sharia, then the sharia, and finally the sharia,” Morsi has stated. “This nation will enjoy blessing and revival only through the Islamic sharia.”

In one appearance, Morsi led a call-and response in which a receptive audience echoed the statements “Jihad is our path,” followed by “And death for the sake of Allah is our most lofty aspiration.”

McCarthy asserts that Morsi has more than one American connection, and not of the six-degrees of separation variety.

“Notably, Morsi’s wife is a longtime and influential member of the Muslim Sisterhood, the movement’s distaff division,” McCarthy avers. “Interestingly, serving with her in the Sisterhood’s ‘Guidance Bureau’ is Saleha Abedin—the mother of Huma Abedin, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s deputy chief of staff and close adviser.”

“Small world, no?” Maybe not.

This year, “by August, Morsi had shrewdly purged the [Supreme Council of the Armed Forces] SCAF’s Mubarak remnants, with the support of the Obama Administration, and the military was humiliated by a jihadist attack that left 16 of its soldiers dead on the Sinai border with Israel—a border most Egyptians would rather see their troops attacking than securing,” McCarthy notes.

“Islam and the West can coexist but they can’t mesh,” McCarthy told me in a filmed interview for Accuracy in Media on September 21, 2012 at AIM’s conference at which he spoke.

Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia.

If you would like to comment on this article, e-mail mal.kline@academia.org.