Underscoring the necessity of declaring the Brotherhood a terror organization.

The US Council of Muslim Organizations said that its 2nd Annual National Muslim Advocacy Day on Capitol Hill Monday was “designed to connect national, regional and state Muslim organizations, community members with their elected representatives in Congress.” However, the ties that some of the foremost organizations making up this coalition have to the Muslim Brotherhood reveal the sinister aspect of this agenda – and underscore the necessity of passing S. 2230, the Muslim Brotherhood Terrorist Designation Act.

Among the principal members of the US Council of Muslim Organizations is the Muslim American Society, which the Chicago Tribune reported in 2004 was one of the chief arms of the Muslim Brotherhood in the U.S.: “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.”

The Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), which openly states its goal of establishing a global caliphate and was listed 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.”

Also listed in this document among the “organizations of our friends” is the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP), the parent group of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (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.”

There is much more than its links to Hamas to establish that the Brotherhood is a terrorist organization. The Muslim Brotherhood Terrorist Designation Act itself sets out ample evidence that the Brotherhood richly deserves the terror designation, including February 2011 testimony by then-FBI Director Robert Mueller, who declared that “elements of the Muslim Brotherhood both here and overseas have supported terrorism.” Al-Qaeda founders Abdullah Azzam and Osama bin Laden and its current leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, were all members of or trained by the Muslim Brotherhood.

This support for jihad terror is in line with the Brotherhood’s goal since its founding. Brotherhood founder Hasan al-Banna’s ambition was to restore the caliphate (which had been abolished in 1924, four years before he founded the Brotherhood), creating a global Islamic superstate instituting Sharia as a universal law. Al-Banna insisted that it was a “duty incumbent on every Muslim to struggle towards the aim of making every people Muslim and the whole world Islamic, so that the banner of Islam can flutter over the earth and the call of the Muezzin can resound in all the corners of the world: Allah is greater [Allahu akbar]!”

That includes the United States. Brotherhood leader Muhammad Mahdi Othman Akef said in 2004: “I have complete faith that Islam will invade Europe and America.” He was referring not to a military invasion, but one driven by propaganda. Five years later, a powerful friend of the Brotherhood entered the White House. Barack Obama made sure that Muslim Brotherhood members were in the audience when he gave his Cairo speech in June 2009, and came out in favor of the uprisings against Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak even when it became clear that the Brotherhood stood to be their chief beneficiary. Protesters against the Brotherhood regime in Egypt as it was driven from power in 2013 accused Obama of supporting terrorism.

If anyone should know whether or not the Brotherhood is a terrorist group, those protesters should: they lived through the Brotherhood’s rocky year in power, and saw its abuses up close. Likewise Coptic Solidarity, a group dedicated to defending the rights of one of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood’s chief terror targets, last week began an advocacy campaign in favor of the Muslim Brotherhood Terrorist Designation Act.

Coptic Solidarity President Alex Shalaby declared: “It is unconscionable that the US still has not taken this action when countries such as Egypt, Syria, Russian, UAE, and Saudi Arabia have all declared the Muslim Brotherhood to be a terrorist organization.” Indeed it is. The designation will enable the next President and Congress to move decisively against the Brotherhood – maybe just in the nick of time.