There will be no cables, no memoranda or manuscripts, no official records of the presidency it’s designed to celebrate. The Barack Obama Presidential Center will not be a historical archive, scholarly resource, or even museum, so much as a vast, 33-acre monument to Obama, spread over multiple structures and a manicured landscape.

Most startling of all, the unclassified papers of the Obama administration, the ostensible purpose of any presidential library, will repose not in Chicago but in a distant federal warehouse, digitized for online access but otherwise inconvenient and inaccessible.

Presidential libraries are many things.

They’re repositories of the official papers and, in many cases, the personal archives and artifacts of our nation’s chief executives, as well as those of their families, friends, and colleagues in public service. And as the name would suggest, they are also home to vast collections of books, articles, dissertations, monographs, and journals about their subject or the presidency in general. They’re a scholar’s dream for historians, researchers, and students alike. If you’re seeking to understand, say, Harry S. Truman’s diplomacy or Ronald Reagan’s life before politics, a journey to Independence, Mo., or Simi Valley, Calif., is probably obligatory.

In recent decades, they’ve expanded their purview. Since the advent of Jimmy Carter’s eponymous center in Atlanta, they double as the site of think tanks, foundations, or institutes intended to continue the public work of retired or deceased presidents. Some are located at birthplaces or boyhood homes, which are of interest in themselves, or on college campuses, where their presence may evoke mixed sentiments. They are conference centers, ceremonial and mortuary sites, and, above all, tourist destinations featuring well-stocked museums, rotating exhibitions, troops of visiting schoolchildren, and capacious gift shops.

At the John F. Kennedy library alongside Boston Harbor, you can see a replica of his Oval Office, complete with rocking chair, and at the Reagan library in sunny Southern California, there’s a two-story fragment of the Berlin Wall on an outside terrace.

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Mike Scruggs- The Muslim Brotherhood is the most powerful Muslim political organization in the world. Its motto is: “Allah is our objective; the Prophet is our leader; the Koran is our law; Jihad is our way; dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.”

Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-BannaThe Muslim Brotherhood (Ikhwan in Arabic) was established in Egypt in 1928 by Hassan al-Banna, a devout Muslim school teacher, and six followers. Al-Banna, his followers, and many Muslims in Egypt believed that Islam had become shamefully secularized and marginalized during British Colonial Rule and that of the secular Muslim leaders that followed after Egypt’s independence in 1922. Moreover, British military and political influence continued.

The Brotherhood was established as a Muslim revivalist organization with the goal of bringing Egypt and eventually all other Muslim nations back to the pure Islam of the Koran and the teachings of Muhammad. As purists, they also advocated expanding Islam over the whole world by peaceful or violent means, whichever is required.

By analogy, it was a “reformation” to turn Islam back to the doctrines and practices of its founders.

By 1938, the Brotherhood had 200,000 members in Egypt. By the end of 1948 and the birth of Israel, the Ikhwan had 2,000,000 members in Egypt, about 10 percent of the total population including women and children.

The Muslim Brotherhood operates primarily within the Sunni branch of Islam, competing for world dominance with the numerically smaller Shia branch led by Iran. The Brotherhood’s modern operating philosophy is often called “Civilization Jihad” or stealth Jihad.

They typically work by deception, infiltration, and subversion until they are strong enough to take power and enforce their dominance by the sword. Hamas and Islamic Jihad were two of their first terrorist branches, but they also had a significant role in establishing al-Qaeda, which is essentially a spinoff of Hamas.

Similarly, ISIS is essentially a spinoff of Al-Qaeda. Oil money, especially from Saudi Arabia and Qatar, has been one of their most powerful resources for propagandizing, bribing, and corrupting political, civil, education, banking, and church leaders in the West.

Although the Muslim Brotherhood is a Sunni organization, they often cooperate with Shia Muslims and even the secular Left against common enemies. The Muslim Brotherhood also has immense influence in the 57-nation member Organization for Islamic Cooperation within the United Nations.

The Brotherhood’s strategic goals in the United States were uncovered by an FBI raid in August 2004 on the Annandale, Virginia, home of Ismail Elbarasse, suspected of fundraising for the Hamas terrorist group and planning to sabotage the Chesapeake Bay Bridge in Maryland. Among the 80 boxes of Muslim Brotherhood archives was an “Explanatory Memorandum” of the Brotherhood’s game plan for bringing America down by infiltration and subversion from within.

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by S. A. Miller