The fact that the Islamic State published this list is being trumpeted as a sign that these people are genuinely moderate. That is not the case. In reality, many of the people on this list are tied to the Muslim Brotherhood, which is a chief rival of the Islamic State in attempting to reestablish the caliphate. This isn’t a hit list of “moderates,” but of Muslim Brotherhood rivals.

Take, for example, Keith Ellison. In 2008 Ellison accepted $13,350 from the Muslim American Society (MAS) to go on a pilgrimage to Mecca. The Muslim American Society is a Muslim Brotherhood organization: “In recent years, the U.S. Brotherhood operated under the name Muslim American Society, according to documents and interviews. One of the nation’s major Islamic groups, it was incorporated in Illinois in 1993 after a contentious debate among Brotherhood members.” That’s from the Chicago Tribune in 2004, in an article that is now carried on the Muslim Brotherhood’s English-language website, Ikhwanweb.

Pictured but not mentioned in Dabiq is Nihad Awad of Hamas-linked CAIR, another Muslim Brotherhood-linked entity. In a May 1991 internal Muslim Brotherhood document that was later discovered by law enforcement officials. Entitled An Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America, the document lists ICNA as an allied group and states that Brotherhood operatives in the U.S. “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.”

Listed in this document among the “organizations of our friends” is the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP), the parent group of CAIR. FBI officials ended ties with CAIR in 2008 after evidence in the Holy Land Foundation (HLF) trial – the largest terror financing trial in U.S. history – revealing links between the HLF’s founders including CAIR co-founder and Executive Director Nihad Awad and the terrorist group Hamas, which describes itself in its charter as “one of the wings of the Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine.”

Then there is Huma Abedin, whose Muslim Brotherhood connections have been fully exposed by Andrew McCarthy and bruited about for years. The facts are quite public, albeit largely ignored: Abedin’s parents are both members of the Muslim Brotherhood, but her links to the organization are not just familial. Abedin was for twelve years the assistant editor of the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs (JMMA), which was founded by Abdullah Omar Naseef, a Muslim Brotherhood operative and al-Qaeda financier. Naseef and Abedin both appeared on the JMMA’s masthead from 1996 to 2003.

You get the idea. This is a hit list of rivals, not “moderates.”

“EXCLUSIVE: ISIS Has Hit List of Western Muslim Leaders,” Clarion Project, April 13, 2016: