The West stopped finding bombs. That’s when the conquest began

More than two decades ago, Sheikh Yusuf al Qaradawi, the Muslim Brotherhood’s most influential cleric, predicted that Islam would return to Europe as a conqueror. Then he added the sentence that matters: This time, the conquest would come “not by the sword but by preaching and ideology.”He called his doctrine wasatiyya, the moderate middle way. The West believed the label and skipped the fine print: In 2003, the same “moderate” said suicide attacks against the “Zionist occupation” were “by no means to be defined as terrorism.” For a generation, the West measured the Islamist threat by the only yardstick it trusted: bombs. Madrid in 2004. London in 2005. Paris in 2015. Barcelona in 2017.When the bombs became rarer, many concluded the threat had receded. It had not. It changed its weapon. Jihad, notes Dina Lisnyansky of Tel Aviv University’s Moshe Dayan Center, can be waged with the sword, with the word, or with money. In Europe, the sword yielded to da’wa: preaching, organizing, and building institutions inside the West’s own system. Qaradawi called it conquest. CNN’S DISGRACEFUL NEW YORK ISIS ATTACK COVERAGEEurope finally reads the sentence Europe took two decades to read Qaradawi literally. In May 2025, a report commissioned by the French government warned of Muslim Brotherhood “entryism,” a patient strategy run through mosques, schools, associations and local politics.On Jan. 13, Washington designated three Muslim Brotherhood chapters as terrorist entities: Lebanon’s as a foreign terrorist organization and Egypt’s and Jordan’s for material support to Hamas. On Oct. 8, the European Parliament voted 381-167 for a strategy against “Islamist entryism” and asked member states for evidence to support terrorist listings.A November 2025 survey by the French Institute of Public Opinion found that 57% of French Muslims aged 15-24 rank Islamic law above the laws of France. Among all French Muslims, 38% approve of some or all Islamist positions, double the 1998 share. Critics question the survey’s method.None of this indicts a faith or its believers. It measures the audience a patient movement has spent decades cultivating.The wrong lens Some on the Right answer with a theory of “replacement,” a supposed plot to swap the West’s population. The numbers sink it. Muslims are about 1% of Americans. At least seven will sit in the next Congress, roughly 1.3% of its members. That is representation, not replacement.In Spain, this year’s regularization drew nearly 1.2 million applications, two-thirds from Latin America and 13% from Morocco. Madrid is mostly legalizing Spanish-speaking Latin Americans.The danger is not a demographic. It is an organization. The explanation does not require conspiracy. It requires history. The Muslim Brotherhood never needed a majority. It needs access: to institutions, to money, and to the moral vocabulary of the Western Left. And it has found an ally. That ally wears red. At New York’s pro-Palestinian rallies, Soviet flags have flown, and so have Hamas and Hezbollah banners. I grew up under that flag. My father was deported under it at 14. It is not a costume. It is a genealogy.Moscow built much of the anti-Zionist scaffolding today’s Left inherits. In 1996, I read the KGB’s surviving archive in Tbilisi: 85% of its foreign budget went to subversion, not espionage. The Soviet bloc helped pass the United Nations’s 1975 “Zionism is racism” resolution. KGB files smuggled out by Vasili Mitrokhin show that, in 1970, the KGB recruited Wadie Haddad, the operations chief of the Marxist-Leninist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The PFLP’s international front, Samidoun, is banned in Germany, listed as a terrorist entity in Canada, and sanctioned by the United States as a sham charity.The modern money has an address. The People’s Forum, a Manhattan hub of anti-Israel protest, received $22.4 million from Neville Roy Singham, a Shanghai-based American tycoon with what the House Ways and Means Committee chairman calls “documented CCP affiliations.” A federal grand jury is reportedly examining his network.Red money. Green banners. Shared targets.America’s first exam On Nov. 3, Michigan made Abdul el Sayed the first Muslim elected to the Senate. Days later, at an Arab American summit outside Washington, he said it is “the capital of the United States of America, but Michigan is the capital of Arab America.” Dearborn, Michigan, has long carried that nickname. Heritage is not the story, and neither is his faith. The Constitution bans religious tests, and it should. The infrastructure behind the wins is.A super PAC funded by the lobbying arm of the Council on American-Islamic Relations has claimed credit for helping elect New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Rep.-elect Adam Hamawy (D-NJ) and el Sayed. The CAIR never created or funded the PAC, according to the group. By a Fox News count, CAIR-linked donors gave his campaign more than $115,000. The senator-elect’s father-in-law, a CAIR-Michigan board member, is a top backer of a pro-el Sayed super PAC. Texas and Florida have designated the CAIR a terrorist organization under state law. The group denies Muslim Brotherhood ties and is fighting the Texas designation in federal court.In March, a man who had lost family in an Israeli airstrike in Lebanon attacked Temple Israel, a synagogue in West Bloomfield, Michigan. El Sayed condemned the attack, then, invoking Israel’s war in Lebanon, added: “Hurt people hurt people.” In August, he apologized to Michigan’s Jewish Democrats: “I made a mistake.”Voters in New York’s 13th Congressional District, meanwhile, elected Darializa Avila Chevalier, a self-described socialist and convert to Islam. She defended joining the Times Square rally of Oct. 8, 2023, where marchers celebrated Hamas’s massacre. On an X account she later deleted, she wrote “seize the means of production,” reposted that “Israel doesn’t exist,” and wrote about using an American flag as a napkin. She is the red-green alliance in a single biography.Janeese Lewis George, the mayor-elect of the District of Columbia, calls herself a “proud member” of the Democratic Socialists of America. In 2022, she sponsored a D.C. Council resolution adopting a widely used definition of antisemitism. In November 2025, she told local DSA leaders: “If this vote came up today, I would not vote for it.” She is not an Islamist. Her reversal exposes the Left’s fault line between criticism of Israel and antisemitic rhetoric. The Muslim Brotherhood did not draw that line. It only needs it to keep moving.Israel’s test Arab turnout in the Oct. 27 Knesset election surged to about 80%. Central Elections Committee Chairman Noam Sohlberg, a Supreme Court justice, ordered the Shin Bet to investigate suspected foreign funding and vote-buying. Investigators are examining whether money from Qatar reached a sitting Joint List lawmaker. Qatar denies it.Police rejected Likud’s broader “stolen election” claim, and the Shin Bet, still investigating, warned against jumping to conclusions. That is the right standard: Follow the money, prove it, then act.The counterintelligence test Muslim lawmakers have been sworn in to Congress on Qurans since 2007, when Keith Ellison of Minnesota used Thomas Jefferson’s copy. The republic survived. I spent more than a decade in Georgian counterintelligence, working against Russian and Iranian operations. We never asked what book a man swore on. We asked who paid him, whom he met, and what he did after the meeting.That test matters most in Congress, because members receive classified information without a security clearance. And the danger has never tracked religion. The first sitting senator ever convicted of conspiring to act as a foreign agent, New Jersey’s Bob Menendez, served Egypt’s interests for gold bars and cash.So ask specific questions, and ask them of everyone. Who funds the PACs? Which foreign governments stand behind the nongovernmental organizations? Which designated organizations’ officials appear on donor lists? What does Qatar, Qaradawi’s longtime home and the largest foreign funder of American universities, expect in return? That is not Islamophobia. It is due diligence.RUSSIA COUNTS ITS BEARS. IT DOESN’T COUNT ITS DEADThe sentence outlived the sheikh Qaradawi died in 2022. His sentence did not. Europe spent 20 years treating it as rhetoric before it began writing resolutions. America can learn from that delay, or repeat it. President Ronald Reagan, the “amiable dunce,” fought Soviet active measures without a religious test: his interagency working group exposed them.The sword was retired. The mission was not. Whether the West answers with paranoia or with procedure will decide who owns the next 20 years.Emzari Gelashvili is a San Francisco-based geopolitical analyst and columnist who monitors Russian-language media. From 1996 to 2008, he held senior positions in Georgia’s Ministry of State Security, Ministry of Defense, and Ministry of Internal Affairs, with a counterintelligence career focused on Russian and Iranian intelligence operations, and he was a member of the Georgian Parliament from 2008 to 2012. His work appears in Newsweek, the Hill, the Washington Examiner, RealClearDefense, RealClearWorld, RealClearEducation, and RealClearPolicy, and at emzargelashvili.substack.com.