New York City radio host Sid Rosenberg asked Secretary of State Marco Rubio about whether the State Department intends to designate the Muslim Brotherhood and Council on American-Islamic Relations as terrorist organizations. Rubio responded that “all of that is in the works,” although “obviously there are different branches of the Muslim Brotherhood, so you’d have to designate each one of them.”

Logistics and bureaucracy aside: It’s about time.

For far too long, the United States has treated the Muslim Brotherhood with a dangerous combination of naivete and willful blindness. The Brotherhood is not a random innocuous political movement with a religious bent. It is, and has been since its founding about a century ago, the ideological wellspring of modern Sunni Islamism. The Brotherhood’s fingerprints are on jihadist groups as wide-ranging as al-Qaeda and Hamas, yet successive American administrations — Republican and Democratic alike — have failed to designate its various offshoots for what they are: terrorist organizations.

That failure is not merely academic. It has real-world consequences. By refusing to label the Muslim Brotherhood accurately, we tie our own hands in the fight against Islamism — both at home and abroad. We allow subversive actors to exploit our political system and bankroll extremism under the guise of “cultural” or “charitable” outreach.

Founded in Egypt in 1928 by Hassan al-Banna, the Muslim Brotherhood’s stated mission has never wavered: the establishment of a global caliphate governed by sharia law. The Brotherhood has always attempted to position itself as a “political” organization, but it is “political” in the way Lenin was political. Think subversion through infiltration — or revolution through stealth.

Consider Hamas. Hamas is not merely inspired by the Muslim Brotherhood — it is the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestinian-Arab branch. The link is unambiguous; as Article Two of Hamas’ founding charter states, “The Islamic Resistance Movement is one of the wings of Moslem Brotherhood in Palestine.” And Hamas’ charter also makes clear its penchant for explicit violence: “Initiatives, and so-called peaceful solutions and international conferences, are in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic Resistance Movement.”

This is not the rhetoric of nuance or moderation. This is the ideological foundation of contemporary jihadism. Yet, while Hamas is rightly designated as a “foreign terrorist organization” by the U.S. State Department, other branches of the Muslim Brotherhood remain off the list.

Why? Because Western elites have allowed themselves to be duped by the Brotherhood’s two-faced strategy. Abroad, they openly sow the seeds of jihad, cheer for a global caliphate, and preach for the destruction of Israel and Western civilization more broadly. But in the corridors of power in the U.S. and Europe, they and their Qatari paymasters don suits and ties, rebrand as “moderates,” and leverage media credulity and overly generous legal protections to plant poisonous ideological roots.

What’s more, CAIR — an unindicted coconspirator in the largest terrorism financing trial in U.S. history — has extremely well-documented ties to the Brotherhood.