The rippling effects of the revolution which led to the ousting of the Muslim Brotherhood from the political spectrum cannot be ignored and it will be remembered as the time when the Islamists almost ruled the Middle East.

Islamists’ rapid rise to power in the Middle East following the Arab Spring revolutions came to a halt following a popular revolution that swept Egypt on June 30, 2013. Several days of protests across the country were met with violence by the Muslim Brotherhood and allied Islamists to protect the first Islamist president of Egypt, Mohamed Morsi, at all costs. But the Egyptian army declared it would side with the will of the people on July 3, and ousted Morsi, signaling a new era in the region.

Prior to the June 30th revolution, Islamists across the region had reached the highest echelons of power, including the presidency in Egypt in 2012, and controlled the parliaments in Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco and Jordan.

They were moving steadily to dominate the entire region between the years of 2011-2013, but along came the June 30th revolution that obliterated the Islamists’ ambition to rule the region.

“The June 30, 2013 [revolution] underscored for the first time that the Arab Spring was not brought about by democratic forces as many Western scholars have claimed and many in the MENA region liked to believe at the time, but rather, was a result of a narrow, hierarchical structured manipulation by the Muslim Brotherhood and its state sponsors,” New York-based human rights lawyer and editor-in-chief of the Washington Outsider Irina Tsukerman told The Investigative Project on Terrorism. “The revolt that followed uprooted the mistaken perception of the MB as having widespread popular and institutional support in Egypt. This change was very important because it uncovered that the MB and its allies were actually subverting democratic processes, rather than implementing them.”

Back in February 2012, the Arab Spring revolutions had toppled the long-serving leaders such as Tunisian President Zine al-Abdine Ben Ali, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, Libyan leader Moammar Qaddafi, and Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh, who were ousted from office in quick succession under pressure from uprisings that were initiated by liberal powers. These rebellions were eventually hijacked by Islamists in all of these countries.

A few years after the June 30th upheaval, the Muslim Brotherhood group was banned in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Jordan, Syria, and the United Arab Emirates. Last April, Tunisia banned the activities of the Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated Ennahda party.

“The revolution (June 30) itself did not stop the efforts by the MB but it sent a strong message across the various countries that MB was not in fact a popular movement in Egypt and did not have the power or the influence that it claimed to have,” said Tsukerman. “It had no popular or political legitimacy despite external efforts to prop it up, and that it could and should be stopped to avoid disastrous and unpopular results such as marginalization of minorities, the spread of extremist ideology.”

The Muslim Brotherhood’s brief rule of Egypt under President Mohamed Morsi was characterized by authoritarianism that reached its climax when Morsi suspended the constitution, disbanded the High Constitutional Court and appointed Islamists in most key positions in the country.

One former convicted terrorist, Adel el-Khayat, member of the Islamic Group that committed the Luxor massacre in 1997 which left 58 tourists and four Egyptians dead, was appointed by Morsi as the governor of Luxor in 2013, resulting in a massive outcry and protests.

The growing anger against Morsi was parallel to massive waves of violence that reached Christian minorities and even the headquarters Coptic Cathedral in Cairo, and targeted Christian individuals and businesses. The American embassy in Cairo was attacked by Islamists and assailants replaced the US flag with the ISIS flag under the nose of Morsi who didn’t lift a finger. Three years later an Egyptian court sentenced 168 of the rioters to two years in prison.

The Wind of Change in the Middle East

Other Middle Eastern countries’ leaders who were facing the meteoric rise of Islamists in their countries such as Saudi Arabia, UAE, Jordan and Tunisia felt relieved that the Muslim Brotherhood was beaten in its home country by the will of the people.

“The Revolution certainly sent a message of support and inspiration to the other Middle Eastern leaders who were facing the same concerns, precisely because Egypt is a huge country that has played a particularly important role in the region and because it is the place where the Muslim Brotherhood originated,” said Tsukerman.

The Gulf states led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates began to adopt more liberal ways of living and governance. Both countries introduced secular-leaning reforms , and the UAE eventually adopted social and religious liberties in a region that is marred by ultra-conservatism and extremism.

Saudi Arabia adopted massive social and religious reforms, many of which focused on women and social freedoms and unlocking the potential of the Saudi society.

“KSA and UAE reforms have independent roots but benefit from the positive developments in Egypt, as major steps are easier to take in coordination; moreover, the countries had united at one point to bring an end to extremist ideology and to terrorism and other subversive activity emerging from the ashes of the Arab Spring. Saudi Arabia had been taking very slow steps in the direction of improving [the] situation for women under King Abdullah; however, due to the regional hold by the MB, any improvement in the situation was glacial,” said Tsukerman.

Changes included granting women permission to drive in 2019, and remove their Islamic headscarves -Hijab and Niqab – freely without getting arrested or punished. Cinemas, theaters and music carnivals are allowed now in the once ultra-conservative Kingdoms. Moreover, religious reforms have been adopted which enable the country to part from its Wahhabi adopted doctrine.

“The end of the MB reign in Egypt sent a signal that such reforms could be welcomed and would not have additional financial or ideological opposition coming from one of the most significant players in the region,” said Tsukerman. “When Mohammed bin Salman became the Crown Prince, he embraced the reforms far beyond the initial steps that were hoped for in terms of driving rights and embraced a much more active effort to integrate women into the work force and to create an opening for their much more visible public role in various institutions.”

Qatari state-sponsored terrorism failed to turn the tide of events

Following the January 2011 Arab Spring uprising in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood leaders received direct political and financial support from Qatar which endorsed the groups and hosted its leaders in Doha.

But the constant media support spearheaded by the Al Jazeera news network, along with the financial and political support, did not change the destiny of the Muslim Brotherhood, as reality and shoddy performance of the group in power became too visible to mask.

“Qatar’s power and money have limits; mismanagement of the economy by the local proxies, radical excesses, and local violence are just some of the factors they cannot control. Ultimately, [the] MB fell because it was weak and because it got too greedy too quickly without accounting for the overall situation inside the country,” said Tsukerman. “Qatar thus lost an important link for spreading its sentiments and disinformation; the crackdown on the revolutionary activity and the proliferation of the ideology in Egypt was not something they could buy off or change because their accounts were frozen and their media had been shut down.”

Qatar capitulated under a boycott from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and UAE, and was forced to alter its rhetoric and mitigate its support for the Muslim Brotherhood. Following visits from Qatari Prince Tamim Bin Hamad, the diplomatic relations between Egypt and Qatar were restored.

But Tsukerman warns that the Qatar threat and Muslim Brotherhood support is not over yet.

“I would question against early triumphalism, because Qatar always looks for back doors and the Al Ula agreement, along with the recent economic crisis, provided such an opening,” said Tsukerman.

“The normalization of financial relations led to an influx of Qatari money into energy and other investments in Egypt; the Biden administration’s support for [the] MB and poor relations with the Egyptian government has contributed to internal crises and concerns which made it easier for Islamists to reemerge and to attack the government on the basis of economic grievances as always,” warned Tsukerman. “With so much economic and political activity in Egypt in its favor, it’s hard to imagine the ideologues in Doha will not try to capitalize on that by gaining ground on the grassroots level in any way that they can, including by weaponizing or exploiting any domestic or foreign vulnerabilities.”

Sudan changes its path

Sudan was reeling under the weight of Islamist rule under President Omar el-Bashir since the 1989 coup d’ etat. The Sudanese dictator allied himself with the Muslim Brotherhood leader Hassan Al Turabi to rule with strict Islamic laws in the country. Following the ouster of El-Bashir in 2019, Sudan turned a new page and the once stronghold of Islamists and launchpad of terrorist groups including Al Qaeda in the region, adopted a secular constitution and recognized Israel. Sudan and Israel announced last February that they will normalize relations this year.

“Sudan is one of the countries that benefited the most and most directly from Egypt’s revolution. In fact, arguably, the June 30th event served as a model and a direct inspiration for the ousting of Bashir,” said Tsukerman. “Unfortunately, due to the complex dynamics inside the country and the initial lack of direct Western involvement and support, it cannot be said that Islamists have had their positions erased. Some are still active within the Sudan’s armed forces; with the failure of the civilian secularists, they have arguably gained some traction and ground especially now vis-à-vis the power struggle with the Rapid Support Forces.”

Rapid Support Forces evolved from and were comprised of Janjaweed militia elements involved in massacres in Darfur that left over 300,000 killed and over 2.5 million displaced.

The Tunisian revolt against the Muslim Brotherhood

Following the events in Egypt, Tunisia which was once regarded by the media as the epitome of Arab Spring success stories, has also revolted against the tight grip of Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated party Ennahda. The once ruling party, Ennahda, repeated its Egyptian counterpart’s mistakes and adopted violent methods and schemes including assassinations and hidden deals with foreign powers such as Erdogan’s Turkey.

Ennahada’s leader and former speaker of the house, Rachid Ghannouchi, was sentenced to one year in prison last May on charges related to terrorist activities.

“In Tunisia, elections eventually put a limit to the extent of Muslim Brotherhood influence and activity. Ennahada, the MB party, too came to be seen as corrupt and linked to foreign actors. Tunisia was ripe for internal strife; the situation there is not ideal now, but [the] MB is now only one of competing interests and concerns; it has lost a lot of political hold and power,” said Tsukerman.

However, Tunisia is facing economic blues following the Coronavirus crisis and the political instability that characterized the country in the past few years. Western political circles and analysts fear the worst for the country if the international community does not assist Tunisia financially.

The international community is at risk of “having the Muslim Brotherhood create instability” in Tunisia if the country is not swiftly granted “substantial financial help,” said Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani said at a conference last March. “We can’t afford the radicalization of the Mediterranean,” he added.

That said, the Muslim Brotherhood’s attempts to return to the political scene in the Middle East cannot be discounted.

“The Muslim Brotherhood not only CAN but IS already returning to the Middle East – taking advantage of the economic crisis in Egypt, of the attacks on Crown Prince Mohamed Bin Salman in Saudi Arabia, and of UAE’s cold relations with the US. The US has welcomed and fully embraced [the] MB at top levels of their governance, which sends a bad signal along with US’ overall foreign policy not favoring more liberal Middle Eastern leaders,” said Tsukerman. “The current chaos and lack of visionary leadership in the West has put Middle Eastern leaders into extremely vulnerable and pressured situations; they may be forced to make political compromises for the sake of political survival and hope for a better future.”

The rippling effects of the revolution which led to the ousting of the Muslim Brotherhood from the political spectrum cannot be ignored and it will be remembered as the time when the Islamists almost ruled the Middle East. It can be safely stated that the June 30th revolution in Egypt was the D-Day for ending the rule of Islamists which had been projected to last for decades, if not centuries.

Hany Ghoraba is an IPT Senior Fellow and an Egyptian writer, political and counter-terrorism analyst at Al Ahram Weekly, author of Egypt’s Arab Spring: The Long and Winding Road to Democracy and a regular contributor to the BBC.

Article first published on The Investigative Project on Terrorism, and re-published by The Milli Chronicle for non-Profitable, Educational and Research Purposes.

Dalia Ziada

The ill performance and unwise decisions of the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood are the main reasons why the Muslim Brotherhood has failed in ruling Egypt.

Nine years ago, the Muslim Brotherhood were given a once in generation opportunity to rule Egypt, and they wasted it. The unexpected rise of the Muslim Brotherhood group to the topmost of power, in Egypt, followed by a quick and loud fall, has shattered the group into unassimilable pieces. The Muslim Brotherhood leaders had dug the grave of the group with their own hands, by insisting on placing their Islamist identity above the nationalist identity, that Egyptians dearly embrace.

Then, they shot the group right in the heart, by inciting their young followers to practice acts of violence, under the flag of defending Islam, against civilians, policemen, and state facilities in a vengeful reaction to their ouster from power. Even after fleeing Egypt, they continued to hurt their grassroots supporters, whom they left behind with no protection or support, by creating meaningless internal battles over the group’s leadership and finances. The ill performance and unwise decisions of the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood are the main reasons why the Muslim Brotherhood has failed in ruling Egypt.

The Opportunity

Before becoming a president, in 2012, Mohamed Morsi had not been known to most Egyptians, including those who identify with the Muslim Brotherhood. Morsi’s marginal victory with 51.7% against Ahmed Shafik, the former military aviator and the last prime minister of Mubarak’s regime, marked a plot twist in the decades-long rivalry between the military institution and the Muslim Brotherhood.

Morsi’s victory was widely celebrated by western media and academics as a step towards containing Islamists within an organized political system. But, inside Egypt, there was a heightened sense of shock and defeat, especially among the liberal and pro-democracy activists. The majority of the young Egyptians, who participated in the revolution against Mubarak, had not planned or expected to see Egypt turning into an Islamic theocracy governed by the Muslim Brotherhood in presidency and the far-right Salafist movement, in parliament.

Neither the military nor the liberal activists dared to challenge the results of the elections. The military could not afford exposing the country to the threat of initiating a civil war by not accepting the new reality of Islamists taking over. The chaotic aftermath of the Arab Spring offered a perfect environment for this hellish scenario. Likewise, it was easier for the pro-democracy activists to accept the results of the elections, even though they do not ideologically agree with the Muslim Brotherhood, than letting Egypt fall back into the sludge of dictatorship on the hands of Mubarak’s associates.

Meanwhile, the majority of Egyptians, pushed by fear of losing the secular Egypt that they know under the pressure of systematic Islamization of the state by the new rulers, chose to quietly retreat to their safe caves of apathy. “The couch party” was the term used by analysts to describe this phenomenon of Egyptians sudden withdrawal from political participation, at that time. The political ascendance of the Islamists instigated a shuffle in the relationship dynamics between the Islamists, the military, and the general public.

That was the beginning of a whole new chapter, where the average citizens started to reconsider the legitimacy of the Arab Spring revolution that ousted Mubarak from power, and the viability of the democratization process if it will happen on the expense of risking state security and stability.

The Mistake

The Muslim Brotherhood did not care to address the concerns of the public, or to console the defeated liberal activists. They did not even try to negotiate a political deal with the powerful military generals. On the contrary, they purposefully marginalized everyone who adopted a political or religious ideology that is different to them, and kept the hardcore Salafists as the only political allies. The Muslim Brotherhood took every step in the wrong direction of alienating themselves and stirring popular anger and resentment.

First, the Muslim Brotherhood turned against the military generals. On the first week of August 2012, nearly one month after Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi was seated as president, Morsi fired the two most popular leaders of the Armed Forces: Field Marshal Mohammed Tantawy, the Minister of Defense, and his Army Chief of Staff, General Sami Anan. Together, Tantawy and Anan had complete control over the military for years. Both commanders were highly respected by the Egyptian public and counterpart militaries, worldwide. Ironically, what the Muslim Brotherhood thought was a bold step to control the military institution, turned out to be their most unwise decision. The new Minister of Defense, Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, who was appointed by Morsi after the removal of Tantawy played a tremendous role in overthrowing the Muslim Brotherhood regime from power, a few months later.

In parliament, the performance of Muslim Brotherhood allies, was not only shocking to the public, but also threatening to the liberal and democratic values that motivated the young activists to lead a revolution against Mubarak. The legislations discussed by Islamist Members of Parliament were not about improving economy or advancing democracy. Rather, they were pre-occupied by making new laws to legalize child marriage, allow the return of the horrific practice of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM), and prohibiting women from working in certain fields that they believed should be reserved exclusively to men.

They went as far as marginalizing the Coptic Christian citizens and disregarding their needs for individual freedom and security. This explains why women and Coptic Christian citizens represent the majority of El-Sisi’s electoral constituency. They are, also, the two main social groups that supported the ouster of the Muslim Brotherhood regime from power, in 2013.

Yet, the most shocking behavior by Islamist parliamentarians was when they refused to stand up to honor the Egyptian flag when the national anthem was playing, claiming that this is a non-Islamic practice. Even worse, some Salafist Members of Parliament used to disrespectfully disturb parliamentary discussions by standing up without permission and loudly reciting the Islamic “Azan” (the call for prayer), and then leaving the room in groups to perform prayer.

One of the biggest mistakes that the Muslim Brotherhood committed when in power was tolerating the discriminative practices of the Islamists against women and non-Muslim citizens, in order not to lose the support of their grassroots followers. That is despite the fact that, on another level, the Muslim Brotherhood took the effort to end its own discriminative rhetoric against women, to please western allies. For the first time ever, the female members of the Muslim Brotherhood were allowed to take leadership positions inside the political party that the group created after the Arab Spring revolution. These women were, in fact, the wives and daughters of the leaders of the group. They had no political experience and they were acting as instructed by the top leaders.

The Downfall

The victory of Islamists in presidential and parliamentary elections, in 2012, was a result of disgraceful manipulation of people’s religious piety and starvation for democratic change. The slogan the Islamists used in parliamentary elections, for example, was: “we are your way to Allah’s Heaven.” They deceived the religious pious grassroots citizens into believing that voting to political Islamists is voting to Allah. However, it did not take Egyptians more than a few month to realize that they committed a mistake by voting political Islamists in presidency and in parliament.

A series of surveys ran by Ibn Khaldun Center for Democratic Studies, between July 2012 and June 2013, about the public citizens’ satisfaction with presidential performance marked sharp declines in Islamists’ popularity and credibility among grassroots citizens. In July 2012, only one month after Morsi was elected, the survey showed that 40.3% of Egyptians were satisfied with the performance of the president. During this month, Morsi – the then new president – gave an endless list of flowery promises that included improving the economy and empowering women and religious minorities into decision-making positions, in a clear contradiction to his group’s ideology and principles. But, in November 2012, as public rallies surrounding the presidential palace to protest government’s failure were received by violent resistance from Muslim Brotherhood militia, the citizens’ satisfaction index dramatically declined to 8.5%.

By the end of June 2013, in coincidence with Morsi’s first anniversary in power, the Egyptians decided that the Muslim Brotherhood have wasted their opportunity and does not deserve to remain in power, any longer. The persistence of Egyptians to overthrow the Muslim Brotherhood from power was clearly expressed through a number of nonviolent tactics that built up to the momentum of nation-wide protests that eventually overthrew Morsi from power.

Towards the end of 2012, ordinary citizens, especially in Cairo, started to hang banners outside their houses and shopping stores located on main streets, portraying Islamists as Machiavellian manipulators. Soon after, a massive petition signing campaign, under the name “Tamarud” (Rebellion), was launched by young liberal democratic activists to mobilize the “couch party” citizens to express their rejection to the Muslim Brotherhood regime. Tamarud petition collected more than twenty-two million signatures in less than three months, between February and June 2013, exceeding the number of those who voted to Morsi in the presidential elections.

Tamarud petition called upon Morsi to resign and for the constitutional court to set a date for new presidential elections. In parallel, young liberal activists organized protests, on regular Fridays, outside the Presidential Palace and the Muslim Brotherhood’s headquarters. As the police forces and military guards at the presidential office refused to use violence to control the protesters, the Muslim Brotherhood’s leaders ordered the militia affiliated to the group to clash with them.

The decline of the military and police forces to obey the presidential orders to violently repress the protesters, awakened people’s desire to see the military coming back in power. By March 2013, the protests against the Muslim Brotherhood started to incorporate slogans calling for military’s return to political leadership. In addition to the regularly used slogan of “down with Muslim Brotherhood rule,” the people started once again to chant the revolution’s slogan “people and the military are one hand.” This renewed confidence in military, encouraged the Minister of Defense, Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, to instruct the military institution to take the side of the people against the Muslim Brotherhood.

On the 1st of July, as the protests calling for Morsi’s resignation multiplied and expanded, El-Sisi made a public statement, in his capacity as the Minister of Defense, giving Morsi an ultimatum of forty-eight hours to resign, in compliance with people’s demands. On the 2nd of July, Morsi responded by a televised speech about his electoral legitimacy, asserting that he was willing to defend it even by “shedding blood.” A few minutes after the speech, violent clashes between Muslim Brotherhood supporters and anti-Morsi protesters erupted at several locations across Egypt, resulting in fatalities. On the 3rd of July, El-Sisi announced the removal of Morsi from his position as president and transferring presidential powers to the president of the constitutional court until writing a new constitution and holding a presidential election.

The Polarization

Not all Egyptians observe the June 30th anniversary the same way. The perception varies with great degrees, based on the political tendencies of who is looking back at the day that initiated the new political reality of Egypt and the entire region of the Middle East.

For the Egyptian state, and its supporters, June 30th anniversary represents two significant events. It is the day, in 2013, when the Egyptian people rallied nation-wide to protest the rule of the Muslim Brotherhood and call upon the military institution to intervene to force convening early presidential elections. On the same day, exactly one year later, the retired Major General Abdel Fattah El-Sisi was sworn in as the new president of state, after an overwhelming majority of Egyptians elected him in reward to his central role in ridding Egypt of the Islamists’ rule.

Pragmatically, the people, also, believed that El-Sisi is the only person who can restore security and stability because the military is backing him. In his inauguration speech, El-Sisi made sure not to make promises to the people about what he can achieve. He only asserted that his main task is to save Egypt from the “people of evil,” and asked the Egyptians to help and support him on that mission.

On the flip side, the Muslim Brotherhood members and sympathizers remember the June 30th anniversary as a coup d’état against a democratically elected regime, that derived its legitimacy from the constitution and the will of the citizens who voted the group in.

In the middle, the pro-democracy activists, who led the Arab Spring revolution against Mubarak’s autocratic rule, and then supported the uprising against the Muslim Brotherhood, out of fear of a probable theocracy, are wondering, with a sense of guilt, if they have recklessly wasted Egypt’s rare chance for democracy when they cheered the early purge of the elected regime of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Article first published on Liberal Democracy Institute.

Al-Suwaidan who currently resides in Turkey, lauded late. Yusuf Al-Qardawi, the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood who recently passed away, and he especially applauded Qardawi’s book on the fiqh (Islamic law) of Jihad.

During the interview hosted by Islamist-cleric Qadhi, Al-Suwaidan said, “By Allah, there is no one I would love to meet Allah with a word similar to his, more than Sheikh [Yusuf] Al-Qaradhawi”. Upon which Qadhi replied, “Allah be praised”.

The interview was published on the YouTube channel of the East Plano Islamic Center on October 20, 2022.

Al-Suwaidan said, “He (Qardawi) wrote the book on jihad. And so on, if somebody wants to read the details of the fiqh of zakat, don’t waste your time, just go and read the three volumes of Sheikh Al-Qaradhawi. On jihad, three volumes on the fiqh of jihad and the details of that”.

Al-Suwaidan blamed Zionism and said, “All of these challenges [we are facing in the Arab world] are small, [when compared] to our challenge in facing Zionism and the occupation of Palestine. This is in the heart of the Arab world and Muslim world and they have been able to corrupt our governments, making them accept their presence in our lands”.

During the introduction Qadhi said that, he used to listen to the audio-tapes of Al-Suwaidan while going to his university.

The segment was trimmed and subtitled by Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI).

Due to Al-Suwaidan’s antisemitic views, and his support for terrorism, he has been barred from entering several countries, including the United States and Belgium. He was also an unindicted co-conspirator in the case against the Holy Land Foundation for funding Hamas terrorism.

Wokeism, in its various manifestations, arguably constitutes a perfect political vessel for Islamists.

Islamism in the West has an almost 70-year history, dating back to when the first members of the Muslim Brotherhood, either students pursuing graduate studies in Western universities or senior leaders fleeing persecution in their home countries, arrived in Europe and North America in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Since then, activists linked to various branches of the Muslim Brotherhood in the Arab world and other movements from the Indian sub-continent (Jemaat-e-Islami) and Turkey (Millî Görüş) that belong to the broad family of political Islam have established a stable presence in the West. These movements have since evolved ideologically and organizationally, and, despite their still relatively small size, they have become disproportionally influential forces in the West’s heterogeneous Muslim communities.

Some aspects of this presence have not changed substantially over time. For example, the inner workings of many Western Islamist networks, such as the scrupulous selection process, the internal secrecy and the hierarchical structure, are virtually identical to those of the early days, in substance replicating those of the mother structures in Muslim-majority societies. Yet, over the years, Western-based members of the characteristically flexible and pragmatic Islamist movement came to understand that several aspects of their political matrix had to be adapted.

Firstly, they understood that the goals the movement harbored for Muslim majority societies—Islamization of the entire society and installation of an Islamic government ruling based on sharia—could not realistically be achieved in the West, where Muslims constitute just a small minority. Western Islamists went on to see disseminating their politico-religious worldview inside Western Muslim communities and influencing Western policies and debates on pertinent issues as two more suitable goals.

Moreover, with time, Western Islamists understood that not only their goals but also their tactics needed to be adapted. Some of the narratives, frames and language that constitute the traditional repertoire of Islamism have remained unmutated. This has been particularly true among the tightly knit older members of the movement, and as the movement has sought to engage with the wider but still relatively small audience of conservative sympathizers in Western Muslim communities. But, at the same time, Western Islamists have substantially altered how they present themselves to two of its core audiences: Western Muslim communities (the majority of which have little knowledge about or interest in Islamism) and Western establishments (broadly intended to include governmental actors, media, and civil society).

Making traction with these two constituencies has been crucially important to Western Islamists since they realized, by the early 1980s, that their presence in the West was not temporary and that they could use it not just as a refuge from Middle Eastern regimes but to achieve a new and broad set of goals. The recently established and fast-growing Muslim communities of the West came to be seen as an ideally receptive audience for the Islamists’ religious and socio-political worldview, and Yussuf al-Qaradawi, the putative spiritual leader of the global Islamist movement, posited “the duty of the Islamic Movement [is] not to leave these [Western] expatriates to be swept by the whirlpool of the materialistic trend that prevails in the West.” As for influencing Western establishments, over the last thirty years Islamists have consistently sought to present themselves as legitimate representatives of local Muslim communities, reliable and moderate interlocutors for governments, media and society at-large.

In order to win over these constituencies, Western Islamists soon understood the need to tailor their messaging and frames. This process of language adaptation started decades ago but has deepened and accelerated over the last 10-15 years, as a new generation of young activists has come to the fore. Unlike the first generation of Islamists who arrived from the Middle East, this new cadre is more attuned to Western cultural sensitivities by virtue of being born in the West and having mostly been educated in social sciences, humanities and communications (while the educational background of most activists of the first generation heavily tended to be in disciplines such as engineering and medicine).

Many from this new generation of Islamist activists retain only tenuous formal links to established Islamist structures. They might have grown up with Islamist influences—in some cases literally, as some of them are the children of Islamist pioneers in the West—such as being active in Islamist youth groups or giving frequent lectures at mosques and events linked to the network. But they have often created their own ways of amplifying their voices, from establishing new organizations and a multi-platform online presence. Their degrees of connectivity with traditional Islamist organizations varies but is at times quite limited, at least formally.

Moreover, most of these young Islamist actors rarely use Islamist references and if they do so, it tends to be done in somewhat veiled terms. Instead, they speak the language of discrimination, anti-racism, internalized oppression, intersectionality and post-colonial theory. Several of the causes they embrace, such as the environment or lowering university fees, have nothing to do with Islamism. Others can be seen as overlapping with Islamism’s traditional grievances but are framed in typically progressive terms and with no apparent Islamist undertone. For example, Western Islamists’ recent adherence to calls to “de-colonize” school curricula fit the ideology’s inherent anti-colonial nature but are formulated adopting the phrasing commonly used in progressive circles.

These approaches have allowed the new generation of Western Islamists to make inroads in political, media and civil society circles in ways their predecessors could only hope. By largely shedding Islamist tropes and adopting progressive frames and causes, young Western Islamists have forged strong alliances in mainstream society and have come to be widely accepted in Western establishment circles. Many of them have therefore come to run as candidates in political parties, pen op-eds for and appear in debates on mainstream media; forge alliances with a broad array of progressive organizations and thought leaders; receive grants from respected foundations and governmental agencies.

In substance, long gone are the days in which Western Islamists publicly burned books, as during the Rushdie Affair in 1988. Many of today’s Islamists use frames, embrace causes and make alliances that puzzle not only long-time observers of the movement but also the first generation of pioneers. Some, particularly in Europe, have begun to refer to this trend as “woke Islamism”. The term is contested and can be seen as somewhat disparaging. But it has become relatively common among both observers and old-timers of the Islamist scene in the West, aptly describing a trend that has substantially accelerated over the last couple of years.

This article seeks to analyze some of the key dynamics behind woke Islamism in the West, from its origins to its many manifestations. Doing so is a complex endeavor, as the trend changes from country to country and is relatively new, making its developments and implications impossible to fully assess. Despite these challenges, the article aims to shed some light on a phenomenon that is substantially changing the face of Islamism in the West and that should therefore be understood by academics and policymakers alike.

Islamism and Ultra-Progressive Politics

The relationship between the Left and Islamism—both terms, to be sure, that include an incredibly diverse array of political views and currents—is a complex one. Even by limiting our analysis to the West, it is impossible to even remotely capture its many facets, a task that is anyway beyond the scope of this essay. Yet it is fair to say that one of the most prominent trends that have characterized the relationship between at least some of the most progressive and at times radical elements of the Left and Islamism is that of sympathy and desire to cooperate.

Many voices on the Left, including in its more progressive quarters, take a markedly different approach, highlighting the many issues on which the two movements sharply differ and arguing against any favorable view of Islamism. But a fascination with Islamism has gripped substantial parts of the Western Left since the 1950s. Islamism’s strong anti-colonial views, rejection of what it perceives as Western-imposed social and economic constructs, anti-Americanism and anti-Zionism, and its ability to mobilize masses have garnered admiration in broad sections of the Western Left.

This sympathy and perceived commonality of enemies have led many to postulate an alliance with Islamists. The view has been held, whether openly or not, by many in the Western Left, from mainstream voices to, at times, fringe, violent Leftist groups. Many of these theorizations have found little to no concretization. But, over the last twenty years, several operationalizations of the potential alliance (at times dubbed as red-green) have happened in more mainstream quarters of the Left in various Western countries. Many see a quintessential example of this dynamic in the alliance that emerged in the UK in the early 2000s around the Stop the War Coalition (STWC).

Originally a partnership of various organizations led by the Socialist Workers Party and the Communist Party of Britain, in the run up to the 2003 Iraq war STWC reached out to the Muslim Association of Britain, an organization founded and headed by prominent UK-based Muslim Brotherhood activists such as Kamal Helbawy, Azzam Tamimi and Anas al-Tikriti. Impressed by the turnout an anti-Israel protest MAB had organized in central London in April 2002, STWC leaders asked MAB to join the coalition. It should be noted that MAB’s anti-Israel protest had received widespread criticism for the presence of emblems of Hamas and Hezbollah and the burning of Israeli and American flags.

The offer generated intense internal debate, as MAB leaders weighed the benefits of extending their message on a much larger level and the potential costs that an alliance with Marxists, atheists and homosexuals could have caused them, particularly among the most conservative segments of the Muslim community. In the end, MAB accepted to enter in a form of a partnership on an equal basis, cooperating closely but remaining an autonomous bloc with its own agenda. It also imposed as necessary conditions for its participation the presence of halal food, faith-sensitive accommodations and gender-segregated meetings and demonstrations. STWC leaders, despite the protests of some of their members, reportedly agreed to all the conditions.

The cooperation between MAB and STWC was quite successful, as hundreds of thousands of demonstrators participated to their events. It also led to the formation of a political party, RESPECT/The Unity Coalition, which achieved minor successes at the polls. Its candidates included far Left leaders like “Old Labour” MP George Galloway and Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party leader Lindsey German, MAB members like Anas al Tikriti, and other Muslim activists like Salma Yaqoob and Yvonne Ridley, the British journalist who had converted to Islam after being held in captivity by the Taliban.

Somewhat similar forms of cooperation have taken place in other Western countries over the last twenty years. But over the last decade some of the more progressive quarters of the West’s Left have adopted issues, frames and a language that are significantly different from those it traditionally used. Identity politics, intersectionality, concerns over systemic injustices and prejudices have become the predominant issues among leftist activists, particularly of the younger generation. The term “woke,” despite being contested by some for having become somewhat derogatory of the trend, is frequently used to describe this approach to political activism.

Wokeism, in its various manifestations, arguably constitutes a perfect political vessel for Islamists. The tendency to blame “whiteness” and the white man’s allegedly domineering tendency for most of the world’s woes is, for example, a perfect fit for an ideology like Islamism that was born in the first half of the 20th century in opposition to colonialism and that has since blamed a large part of the Muslim world’s problems on the West. By the same token, strong forms of identity politics perfectly match with the long-standing claim of Western Islamists that Western Muslim communities should be allowed to have their own separate social, educational and legal structures. If in his writings in the 1990s Yussuf al-Qaradawi urged Western Islamists “have your small society within the larger society, try to have your own ‘Muslim ghetto,” today’s confrontational identity politics offer Islamists arguments to make the case that Muslims need “safe spaces” to be shielded from “structural racism” and preserve their identity.

Moreover, wokeism provides Western Islamists with a strong, multipurpose rhetorical weapon: Islamophobia. To be sure, anti-Muslim hatred and discrimination are, sadly, fairly widespread problematics, manifesting themselves throughout the West both in subtle ways and, occasionally, dramatically violent actions. But Islamists have a tendency to exaggerate and instrumentalize the issue to serve their own various, overlapping purposes.

With Muslim communities, Western Islamists seek to use the Islamophobia card to foster a strong Islamic identity and carve out a position of leadership for themselves. Western Islamists have long understood that no other factor has a greater impact on the formation of a collective identity than the existence or the perception of an outside force threatening the community.

They have also shown an unparalleled cunningness in becoming the main advocates of causes that outraged the majority of Muslims, even those who did not share Islamist leanings. From the Rushdie Affair to the Danish cartoons, from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to controversies over the veil in various European countries, Western Islamists have utilized their superior resources and mobilization skills to lead protests against events that they portrayed as part of a pattern of Western aggression against Muslims and Islam.

Fostering the idea that Muslims are under siege, discriminated and victimized, Western Islamists have portrayed themselves as the only voices willing and capable to stand up for the community. By framing them to suit their needs, they have exploited global political crises, undeniable forms of discrimination that have affected Western Muslims, and cultural tensions that have routinely appeared in most Western countries over the last twenty years. A “community under siege,” to use an expression often employed in Brotherhood circles after 9/11, tends to close ranks, reinforce its communal identity, and rely on aggressive and capable leaders who can defend it. Having nurtured this culture of victimhood, Western Islamists, as consummated identity entrepreneurs, have been consistent in tapping into the grievances of Western Muslims and presenting themselves as the only force able to “act as the first line of defence for Islam and Muslims all over the world.”

Externally, Islamophobia serves two main purposes. The first is to create a broad range of alliances with other communities that face discriminations and organizations that fight it. Western Islamists have increasingly framed Islamophobia as part of the structural injustices that, according to them, plague Western societies and, on that basis, have formed alliances with the most disparate organizations fighting discrimination. This includes entities from groups towards which the Islamist movement has historically shown animosity, such as Jewish or LBGTQ organizations. These alliances allow Islamists to gain greater access to mainstream society and counter the accusations of intolerance to which they have themselves been historically subjected.

Finally, Western Islamists utilize Islamophobia as a label for any criticism not just of Islam and Muslims but also of themselves. Any scrutiny of Islamist ideology and actors can be easily labelled as racist, an attempt by people with privilege to silence marginalized voices of color. This charge is made also against critics of Islamism with a Muslim background, as they too are not rarely accused of being Islamophobes.

Islamist Networks Go Woke

As wokeism has become gradually mainstream in Western societies over the last decade, Western Islamists have also increasingly embraced it. They have increasingly framed several of their “historical” issues, such as Palestine or anti-Muslim discrimination, through progressive frames that at times accompany but, in most cases, replace, at least externally, Islamist ones. And they also adopted new issues, such as the anti-capitalist agenda to tackle climate change or even gender equality, which have traditionally been alien, if not contrary to, Islamist discourse.

This new approach begs the question over its sincerity. A more skeptical observer could argue that it is purely façade, that Islamists use the language of the progressive Left simply to be seen as moderate, shed the bad image that tarnishes the Islamist milieus they come from, and be accepted in mainstream circles. But, fear the critics, Islamists have not abandoned their views and have just cleverly adopted wokeism as a political tool to better advance their goals, which in reality have little to do with progressive causes.

A different viewpoint is that the new cadres of activists that got their start in Western Islamist milieus are Western-born, have studied at Western universities (and, unlike the pioneers of the movement, not in technical faculties but mostly in humanities), and have frequently participated in the activities of non-Islamist entities. This, taken together, means young Islamists have been deeply exposed to wokeism and may have genuinely embraced at least some elements of its worldview and framing. In substance, it is not unreasonable that young Western Islamists generally embrace various aspects of wokeism, often juxtaposing and reconciling it with various elements of the Islamist worldview they also absorbed during their activism career.

It is impossible to assess which of the two opposing positions is correct, and obviously each case is different and should be looked at individually. In several instances a middle position, one that considers that Western Islamists are simultaneously embracing progressive causes and frames out of genuine conviction and more cynically adopting them to advance their cause without fully believing in them, is likely to be the most appropriate.

What seems clear though in this relatively new and fast-developing trend is the fact that, while individual activists might embrace wokeism independently, organizations and networks with clear and long-standing Islamist connections have been playing an important role in furthering this process. In substance, in what appears a fairly concerted effort, established Islamist groups or structures have been connecting, platforming and financially supporting activists with or without an Islamist background that adopt positions steeped in wokeism which advance the Islamist movement’s goals. In substance, while the adoption of wokeism might be spontaneous, there is ample evidence that Islamist structures seek to support it.

Examples of this dynamic abound. Among the most telling is that of Al Jazeera+ (better known as AJ+), which tellingly describes itself as “a unique, global digital news and storytelling brand dedicated to human rights and equality, holding power to account, and amplifying the voices of marginalized communities seeking to make their stories seen and heard” and “a social justice lens on a world struggling for change.” Launched in 2014, AJ+ is “the trailblazing brainchild of the young-and-restless creative minds of Al Jazeera’s Incubation and Innovation Unit, who earlier than most saw the emerging opportunity to reach a millennial audience with a video news product delivered via social media platforms.” As its own website openly states AJ+ “is part of the Al Jazeera Media Network, an editorially independent entity funded by the government of Qatar as an investment in promoting ‘the public good’ — in the way that the British taxpayer funds the BBC.”

Al Jazeera Arabic, the mother entity of the group, is well known for being heavily staffed with members and sympathizers of the Muslim Brotherhood and for regularly broadcasting Islamist viewpoints, a fact that has led the channel to be banned in several Arab countries and suffer severe criticism in the West. AJ+, which has a large social media presence in four languages (English, Spanish, Arabic and French), targets a very different audience from the mother channel and adopts a radically different approach. AJ+, in fact, regularly features stories that focus on issues central to the progressive movement and framed in quintessentially woke fashion.

Most of AJ+’s stories have little or nothing to do with Islamist-related issues, but consistently accuse Western societies of a ubiquitous pattern of injustice and discrimination against a variety of victim groups, from ethnic and religious minorities to the LBGTQ community. Supplementing these stories, which constitute the backbone of AJ+’s editorial line, are stories that do cover topics closer to the traditional interests of Islamists, such as various Middle Eastern conflicts or anti-Muslim sentiments in the West. The insertion of the latter topics in the broader narrative and the use of similar language to discuss all of them clearly aim at making Islamist points of view acceptable to the AJ+’s audience, a large portion of which is composed of millennials and younger individuals without a Muslim background.

As an example, AJ+ English regularly demonizes the U.S. government for a variety of past and current sins with stories such as The Government Plot To Erase Native Languages; The Real Story of the Alamo: forget what you learned in school; Capitalism is a disease; and Raoul Peck’s Journey Into The Heart of Whiteness. These stories are accompanied by others such as Fleeing to the Heart of the Empire, which compares the experiences of Vietnamese and Afghan refugees to America (“the heart of the empire”). “Once again,” reads the article, “those subject to America’s imperialist adventures are banging on the door, seeking to escape the conflagration as troops pull out. And once again, they are met with widespread indifference.” Other stories include Resistance and the ‘War On Terror’ in East Africa; Palestinians Are Striking to Fight Apartheid;) or On COVID, India and privilege.

A similar dynamic is visible for the French language version of AJ+. French AJ+ has launched or actively promoted a series of campaigns to denounce various incidents, many of them steeped in pop culture close to millennials and their juniors, it considered racist with quintessentially woke frames. They include promoting the hashtag #BlackHogwarts to point out that people of color are severely underrepresented in the Harry Potter series; denouncing both Miley Cyrus’ twerk and Kylie Jenner’s hairstyle as cultural appropriation; and criticizing the French football federation for featuring a white player, Antoine Griezmann, as its main testimonial of its anti-racism campaign.

Accompanying these messages, which serve no Islamist goal if not that of painting Western countries as irremediably racist and potentially weakening young people’s belief in them, French AJ+ puts out messages that are more in line with traditional Islamist viewpoints. The channel, for example, has actively championed the campaign to support Tariq Ramadan after the Brotherhood-linked scholar was accused by French authorities of sexual violence against various women. And over the last couple of years, once the government of Emmanuel Macron began adopting increasingly confrontational positions towards Islamism, French AJ+ stepped up its anti-France rhetoric. An article, for example, compares France to Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and Iran, arguing that the European country’s anti-hijab laws are identical to those of countries that dictate what women should wear.

If AJ+ is a glossy, multimedia platform targeting the TikTok generation with short, simple but professionally produced messages, other entities with a clear Islamist background seek to disseminate a more academic version of Islamist wokeism. A perfect example of this dynamic is the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA), an “independent, nonprofit, research and public policy institution based in Istanbul, Turkey, and affiliated with Istanbul Zaim University.” Initially a small entity established in 2010, Zaim University has been closely affiliated with Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP). It has received substantial government funding and therefore experienced remarkable growth, reaching 10,000 students in just a few years.

CIGA was established at Zaim by prominent Palestinian scholar-cum-activist Sami al-Arian. Al-Arian is a very well-known name in Islamist circles and was famously the subject of a high-profile terrorism case in the US. He was arrested in February 2003 in Florida on a 17-count indictment. He eventually plead guilty to one charge, being sentenced to 57 months in prison for conspiring to violate a federal law that prohibits making or receiving contributions of funds, goods or services to, or for the benefit of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), a Specially Designated Terrorist. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, “in his guilty plea, al-Arian admitted that, during the period of the late 1980’s and early to mid-1990’s, he and several of his co-conspirators were associated with the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. He further admitted that he performed various services for the PIJ in 1995 and thereafter, knowing that the PIJ had been designated as a Specially Designated Terrorist and that the PIJ engaged in horrific and deadly acts of violence.”

Upon release, al-Arian received political asylum in Turkey, where he opened CIGA. Under al-Arian’s leadership, CIGA has established itself as a major hub of Islamophobia studies. Since 2018, CIGA holds a large annual conference on Islamophobia, which brings together dozens among the most prominent academics and activists engaged in researching and challenging Islamophobia. An analysis of invitees, sponsors and topics of CIGA’s conferences clearly show a mix between traditional Islamism and ultra-progressivism, the perfect Islamist wokeism combination.

CIGA’s 2021 conference, which due the COVID-19 pandemic was held online, clearly showcased these features. The event was co-sponsored, among others, by Qatar’s Ahmed bin Khalifa University and by Cage, a highly controversial UK-based organization created in the early 2000s to advocate for the release of Guantanamo Bay detainees that has since embraced various Islamist causes. Speakers included individuals with clear Islamist connections such as Yasin Aktai, chief adviser for the president of Turkey’s AK Party; Chafika Attalai, a leading member of Collective Against Islamophobia in France (CCIF), an organization dissolved by the French government in the wake of the assassination of French school teacher Samuel Paty; and Cage’s Moazzam Begg, himself a former Guantanamo detainee. At the same time, many of the other speakers did not have any Islamist background, but were mostly Western-based academics, activists, defense lawyers in terrorism cases, and in general individuals in various capacities engaged in issues CIGA considered Islamophobia-related.

Somewhat embodying CIGA’s transnational academic Islamist wokeism is a young scholar from Austria, Farid Hafez. Hafez is a fellow at CIGA and was present at all three editions of CIGA’s Islamophobia conference. He is also a fellow at Bridge Initiative, “a multi-year research project on Islamophobia housed within” Georgetown University’s Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (ACMCU). According to Georgetown’s website, the ACMCU “was established in 1993 with the mission of building stronger bridges of cooperation between Muslims and Christians, and enhancing the West’s understanding of the Islamic world. In December 2005, Georgetown received a $20 million dollar gift from His Royal Highness Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal of Saudi Arabia to support and expand the center.”

The center is run by two prominent Islamic studies scholars with well-known Islamist sympathies, John Esposito and Jonathan C. Brown. Tellingly, both scholars have close ties to Sami al-Arian, CIGA’s founder. Esposito publicly described al-Arian as “a good friend” and submitted a letter to the judge of his U.S. terrorism trial praising him as “an extraordinarily bright, articulate scholar and intellectual-activist, a man of conscience with a strong commitment to peace and social justice.” Brown is married to Leila al-Arian, Sami al-Arian’s daughter and, incidentally, a producer for Al-Jazeera. Hafez’s position at both centers is therefore unsurprising.

Hafez is a rising star of Islamophobia studies, giving talks at institutions on both sides of the Atlantic and cooperating with many other scholars of the circle. His approach to the subject very much adopts progressive frames to discuss the issue of Islamophobia. His latest book, for example, is revealingly titled The ‘Other’ Austria: Life in Austria beyond white male heteronormative German Catholic dominance.

But Hafez is also a very controversial figure with Islamist connections. In November 2020, for instance, Hafez was detained as part of Operation Luxor, the largest counterterrorism operation ever conducted in Austria. According to Austrian authorities, the individuals investigated were part of a Muslim Brotherhood/Hamas support network in the Central European country. Hafez has been vocal in proclaiming his innocence and arguing that the case is baseless and politically motivated. Some of his defenses caused controversy, like when his article Xinjiang and Kristallnacht in Austria: Freedom of Religion under Threat compared the actions of the Austrian government in Operation Luxor to the Nazi regime’s persecution of Jews and the Chinese government’s brutal treatment of the Uighurs. The article drew severe criticism from Jewish organizations in both Austria and the United States. He has nonetheless become a cause célèbre in Islamist and progressive circles, with petitions and online fundraising efforts created to support him.

Academically, Hafez has gained international attention for his role as co-editor of the annual European Islamophobia Report (EIR). Launched in 2015, the EIR is an edited volume in which contributors outline alleged incidents and trends of anti-Muslim discrimination in various European countries. Tellingly, the front cover of EIR’s latest edition (2021), a more than 900-page book analyzing 31 countries, features French President Emmanuel Macron on the cover, a clear indication that EIR’s targets are not just those individuals and actors that engage in clear-cut anti-Muslim hatred but also mainstream personalities that challenge Islamism.

EIR has some strong links to Turkey, a country whose AKP regime in recent years has consistently accused Europe of pervasive Islamophobia. The report’s co-editor is Enes Bayrakli, who has served as SETA’s director of European studies and Brussels office coordinator. Formally independent, SETA is virtually unanimously seen as a propaganda arm of the AKP. The founder of SETA is Ibrahim Kalin, President Erdogan’s spokesperson, and recently the co-author of a book with Georgetown University’s Bridge Initiative director John Esposito. Kalin is also a fellow at Georgetown’s ACMCU, Bridge’s parent institution.

For several years EIR was published by SETA and funded by the European Union as part of the EU-Turkey Civil Society Dialogue. This created controversies and various European governments and European MPs publicly stated their views opposing the idea of European public funds paying for an Islamophobia report published by an AKP-linked think tank. EIR’s 2020 edition was no longer published by SETA but by the Vienna-based Leopold Weiss Institute. The institute has no website and is not known to organize any activity, but a search of Austrian databases shows that its director is Farid Hafez.

Turkey’s role in previous editions of EIR was evident, and it is particularly interesting to note how high-ranking Turkish politicians attended and keynoted EIR launch events. EIR’s findings were also often used by Turkish politicians to support their political positions. For example, at the launch of the 2018 edition of the EIR, Faruk Kaymakci, Turkey’s deputy foreign minister and director for EU affairs, stated that the rise of far right movements and growing Islamophobia were the main challenges to the European Union and argued that Turkey joining the EU could be the “antidote” to these issues. “With Turkey’s membership, the EU can change its image,” he stated, “EU institutions can reach the Muslim world; otherwise the EU will be seen as an imperialist Christian club.”

Reactions and Possible Developments

As said, irrespective of whether the adoption of woke issues and frames on the part of Western Islamists is genuine or tactical, it has allowed many of its activists to be accepted in ultra-progressive milieus in ways pioneers of the movement in the West could not. From anti-racism structures to mainstream media, from governmental agencies funding anti-discrimination and diversity work to progressive intellectual circles and churches, woke Islamists have made valuable alliances which grant them greater visibility and access. Moreover, their very proximity to these environments partially shields them from the critics’ accusations of being Islamists.

At the same time, over the last few years the phenomenon of woke Islamism has received increased scrutiny and criticism. This is particularly true in France and, more broadly, the French-speaking world, where concerns over Islamism and its impact on society have arguably been more heightened than in any other part of the West. Moreover, in France concerns over the spread of wokeism in general, which is largely seen as a divisive American cultural import, have been widespread and President Macron has openly declared he is “against woke culture.”

In this environment it is not surprising that discussions over the contested term Islamo-gauchisme (Islamo-Leftism) take place at the highest levels of French government and culture, with France’s higher education minister Frédérique Vidal stating that “Islamo-gauchism is eating away at our society as a whole.” Le Figaro’s piece described how FEMYSO, a Brussels-based student and youth organization founded by top leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood in the West and historically run by scions of prominent Brotherhood leaders and heads of Brotherhood-linked student groups throughout Europe, received large funding from the European Union to conduct anti-Islamophobia and pro-hijab campaigns. FEMYSO framed many of its slogans in typical woke Islamist fashion. For example, it described one its projects, MEET, as an “EU-funded comprehensive programme aimed at tackling gendered Islamophobia,” which it described as the “intersectional discrimination that Muslim women and girls suffer based mainly on grounds of ethnicity, religion and gender.”

But sharp criticism of woke Islamism has come also from non-governmental voices, many of them of Muslim background. Naëm Bestandji, a French-Tunisian author, has argued that Islamism is a quintessentially far-right ideology but that the movement has understood that working with the progressive Left is its most promising tactic and that “infiltrating anti-racist circles is therefore essential.” “For that,” he argues, “you have to transform a religion into a ‘race.’ Any criticism of their ideology, presented as just Islam, would therefore be an attack on individuals. It is the creation of a blasphemy specific to Islam by the diversion of the fight against racism. This is the art of the term ‘Islamophobia.’ The religious fight and the fight against racism are then intertwined. The second serves as a pretext for the advance of the first. It’s a masterstroke.”

An alternative way of looking at this is to interpret it not as a calculated ploy but as a genuine phenomenon that can be described as the Westernization of Islamism. It can be argued that we are witnessing a generational process that leads new, Western-based Islamist actors to shed some aspects of traditional Islamism and honestly embrace aspects of other ideologies. That could potentially further lead to a dilution and an atomization of Islamism, as various activists could embrace different ideological strands and embark on different pathways.

Of course, these are purely hypothetical theories and scenarios which are difficult to prove and they assume the trend will continue and that it will be adopted by the mainstream of Islamist movements in the West. But irrespective of whether it is tactically or genuinely embraced, Islamist wokeism has become a concern for many. Apprehension about the implication of the dynamic have been well framed by Belgium-based activist Dyab Abou Jahjah. Abou Jahjah has a background that makes his views particularly interesting. Born in Lebanon in 1971, he fought with Shia militias before moving to Belgium in 1991. There, he founded the Arab European League, an activist group that became particularly controversial in the years immediately following the September 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States, as Abou Jahjah expressed veiled support for the attack and other anti-Western views, earning him the nickname of Belgium’s “public enemy number 1.” He has since left activism and works as a teacher, but he has remained a keen observer of Belgium’s Islamist and Muslim scenes.

“This new woke Islamism,” writes Abou Jahjah on his blog, “along with the rest of the extreme progressive movement (often called ‘woke’), dreams of an archipelago of ‘Safe spaces’ that interact in justice and equity. It is in this colorful and beautiful utopian painting of society that the toxic nature of European Islamism resides today. Along with the other woke trends, the woke neo-Islamists deconstruct ‘universalism’ in favor of the ‘intersectionality’ of exceptions. Thus, one day, all exceptions may eventually become the rule.” 

“The fact that a large proportion of Islamists now embrace ultra-progressive politics is better than that they embrace jihadist fascism,” he adds. “Nevertheless, the attack on modernity and most of its values, including secularism, is carried out in a more refined and efficient manner and within a broad alliance with serious potential to mobilize. This strategy is not aimed at creating an Islamic state, but it can lead to a fragmentation of society along identity lines so that everyone can ‘be themselves’.” “When exceptionalism,” he concludes, “not universalism, becomes the cornerstone of citizenship, who will then dare to challenge calls for separate tribunals and even separate laws?”

It is difficult to say whether Abou Jahjah’s prediction of the evolution of woke Islamism is correct. What is clear, as this article has aimed to summarily describe, is that there is a growing trend within Western Islamist circles to adopt ultra-progressive/woke issues and language and to forge alliances with entities in that milieu. The questions over this relatively new development are plentiful, from whether it is authentic or tactical; whether it could determine splits within Islamist ranks, as some of the most conservative cross-sections might be uncomfortable with embracing various ultra-progressive causes; and whether some progressive circles will not embrace woke Islamists. These dynamics might play out in different ways in different circumstances and different countries. But it is clear that the trend of woke Islamism is one that deserves being followed.

Article first published on Hudson Institute. Refer to the original article for references.

Lorenzo Vidino is the Director of the Program on Extremism at The George Washington University.

Brotherhood has provided and continues to provide dangerous services to all these hostile projects.

The British decision to classify the Brotherhood Hamas as a terrorist movement is an important decision, albeit belated and defective.

By all accounts, the movement is terrorist as a religious ideology, a political movement and an organization. Its terrorism is mainly focused on the Palestinian people in Gaza, which it rules with an iron fist, and then on the Arab countries.

The movement targets security and stability of the Arab countries, and that is in alliance with some regional countries which have extremist expansionist projects.

Does classifying Hamas as terrorist outfit mean that the Palestinian cause is also terrorism? The answer is certainly no.

The Palestinian cause is just and supported by all the Arab countries that are hostile to the Hamas movement, especially Egypt, despite the fact that Hamas has spared no effort in targeting Egypt’s security and stability, apart from smuggling weapons to it, storming its prisons and engaging in many other hostile behaviors.

As per the statements of Hamas leaders, the movement does not recognize the state of Palestine or its borders. Rather, it considers itself as a larger international movement than that, and entertaining parties of some ideological leaders that target the security, safety and life of Arab peoples.

The British decision came late because Hamas’ terrorism is old and its crimes date back long time. The decision is also defective because it is supposed to have included the entire Brotherhood outfit with all its branches, not just the Palestine branch, but Britain does not want confrontation with the Brotherhood and political Islam groups after it has had invested in them for decades.

Britain’s relations with the Brotherhood have been in force until to date, and UK’s support for it is continuing. The provision of safe havens, comfortable investments, and supportive institutions tells endless details of this relationship.

There has been long-term British investment in political Islam groups, and it is still the country from where Ibrahim Munir is leading his Egyptian Brotherhood’s infighting with the Istanbul group of Brotherhood associated with Mahmoud Hussein.

The Brotherhood, along with political Islam groups, is a model for betrayal and the fifth column. It involved along with some Western countries in targeting Arab states, and what happened in the so called “Arab Spring” was an obvious example for this constant betrayal in the group’s approach.

But the group hides it all in the name of religion and Islam and other religious slogans with which it wants to throw dust in the eyes of others.

Moreover, the Brotherhood group is involved in the regional projects of some non-Arab countries, which target Arab countries and seek to pull them down and enslave, kill and exterminate their people. Brotherhood has provided and continues to provide dangerous services to all these hostile projects.

These groups and their symbols and elements have continued to betray as they have a religious, political, and moral system to justify their misdeeds through multiple ways.

Any researcher, who observes some Western “human rights”, “research” and “media” institutions that target Arab countries, can find that they are all grafted with elements, which belong organizationally and intellectually to political Islam groups and they do not find it embarrassing to target their countries, leaders and peoples, and to harm the interests of their peoples, even if it is with claims of defending them.

The Western investment in political Islam movements brought many historical “catastrophes” to Islamic and Arab countries. Leaders of these movements and organizations used to return from Western exile to rule their countries when they succeeded in spreading chaos and terrorism until the moment of their failure. There are many and varied examples for this.

Abdullah bin Bijad al-Otaibi is a Saudi writer and researcher. He is a member of the board of advisors at Al-Mesbar Studies and Research Center. He tweets under @abdullahbjad.

This article first published in Arabic by Al-Ittihad newspaper, and translated by Saudi Gazette.

Muslim Brotherhood and their Islamist affiliates were practicing violence against civilians in avenge to their ouster from power…

On the fifth night of the holy month of Ramadan, millions of Egyptians re-lived the difficult emotions of worry, fear, and anger that I personally experienced, first-hand, in the summer of 2013. The fifth episode of the TV Drama “Al-Ikhtyar 2 (The Choice 2)” depicted the bloody events that took place during the evacuation of the Muslim Brotherhood’s so-called protest camps of “Rabaa” in Cairo and “Al-Nahda” in Giza, on the early morning of the 14^th of August 2013.

The Muslim Brotherhood and their fellow propagandists promoted the horrific events as a massacre committed by the Egyptian police forces against the so-called peaceful protesters at the Muslim Brotherhood camps. They even labeled the event for western media as the “Rabaa Massacre”. However, this is one of the Muslim Brotherhood’s biggest lies, in history.

I was present in the middle of chaos, at Rabaa Square, on that blood-stained morning. It was part of my work, at that time, to monitor and evaluate the performance of police forces with protesters. The night before the evacuation, I received an invitation from the National Security Bureau, to monitor the evacuation of the Muslim Brotherhood strike camps, the next day, in application to the Public Prosecutor’s decision, made after 45 days of investigations. The police forces promised to commit to highest degrees of self-discipline during evacuating the protesters striking in those camps. Thus, they did not hesitate to invite media personnel and observers from local human rights organizations, like myself, to witness the event and report to the local and international public opinion.

While the anti-Morsi protesters gathered in Tahrir Square to celebrate the fall of the Muslim Brotherhood regime, on the 3^rd of July, the Muslim Brotherhood gathered a few hundreds of their members and sympathizers from the Salafist grassroots affiliates into two parallel sit-in camps in Al-Nahda Square in Giza and Rabaa Square in Cairo. The Muslim Brotherhood manipulated the strikers, mostly poor and uneducated, into believing that the Egyptian military is launching a war on Islam. Then, the Muslim Brotherhood leaders contacted Western media and international human rights organizations to sell them the lie that the sit-ins are nonviolent camps that rejected the so-called “military coup” against Morsi. In reality, the strike camps of the Muslim Brotherhood were hubs for organizing and launching violent attacks on civilians and state facilities, as was revealed later through independent judicial investigations and documented confessions by the members of the Muslim Brotherhood who organized those camps.

Even worse, the Muslim Brotherhood leaders ordered the torture of the group’s young members, who denounced using the strikes to organize violent attacks against civilians. On July 23^rd, a group of 670 young members of the Muslim Brotherhood announced their dissidence from the group and called themselves “Muslim Brothers against Violence”. In response, the Muslim Brotherhood leaders arrested them, kept them in custody at Rabaa sit-in camp, and slashed and tortured them as punishment for dissent.

In addition, the Muslim Brotherhood leaders forced women and children to join the strikes, in an attempt to copy a Syria-style scenario, so they can easily call for foreign intervention on humanitarian basis. They forced women to join their husbands on the strike to provide them with sexual intimacy whenever they need, so that they guarantee the men would remain in the strikes for longer. They, also, brought children, under ten years old, from orphan houses owned by the group’s charity organizations in rural poor cities, and forced the kids to carry coffins and wear labels reading “potential martyrs” on their chests.

In August 2016, Muslim Brotherhood’s fabrications about the “peacefulness” of Rabaa and Al-Nahda strike camps were revealed by Ahmed Al-Moghier, the manager of Rabaa strike camp. He posted on his own Facebook page the full details on how they used the camps to hide machine guns, create primitive bombs and Molotov bottles, and train strikers on martial combat. He, also, confessed that they brought some skillful gunmen from the Muslim Brotherhood militia, to kill the police officers employed by a legal order from the Public Prosecutor to evacuate the strikes. Al-Moghier’s confessions derives their credibility from the fact that he was not only the manager of Rabaa strike, but also a close associate to Khairat Al-Shatter, the most powerful de facto leader of the Muslim Brotherhood.

During the strike, in August 2013, a number of local human rights non-governmental organizations formed a fact-checking delegation to visit Rabaa strike camp, after citizens living around Rabaa Square filed complaints to the Public Prosecutor about strikers receiving martial combat training and storing weapons inside wooden coffins, hidden at the strike camp. Al-Moghier and his armed affiliates prevented the human rights delegation from entering the Rabaa strike camp or searching the wooden coffins. When the members of the delegation insisted, Al-Moghier and his men physically assaulted them, forcing them to leave.

The military institution, with the help of the judiciary, Al-Azhar, and the Prime Minister, spent long weeks hopelessly trying to convince the Muslim Brotherhood leaders to end the sit-ins, before Eid Al-Fitr. Some foreign allies, including representatives from the European Union, the United States, and some Arab countries tried to intervene, in vain, to negotiate a deal with the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood. As reports and complaints were filed to the Public Prosecutor about the violent crimes practiced by the strikers against civilian inhabitants around the sit-in locations, the Public Prosecutor made a decision that the strikes represent a threat to national security. Accordingly, the Public Prosecutor issued a legal order assigning police forces to intervene adequately to disperse the sit-in camps. The 13^th of August was declared as an ultimatum for the Muslim Brotherhood to end the strikes before police intervention.

As the Muslim Brotherhood leaders failed to comply, the police forces were sent on the early morning of the 14^th of August to disperse the camps. According to what I saw with my own eyes, on that day, and told to the court investigating the Raba case later, the assigned police forces aimed at gradual use of force and vowed commitment to high levels of self-discipline, while accomplishing their mission. The policemen started by clearing a safe exit passage for the strikers to leave peacefully, without being harmed or arrested. Then, a policeman spoke to strikers, through a microphone, urging them to leave the strike camp without resistance.

However, in less than half an hour, a gunshot coming from inside the strike camp in Rabaa killed the policeman holding the microphone. As a result, the police forces had to use equal force to deal with the shooters located inside the camp. Inevitably, the evacuation of the Rabaa camp turned into a horrific scene of mutual war between police forces and gunmen inside the strike. I repeat, it was a scene of war between the police and an armed group, and not a massacre by a police force against peaceful protests, as the Muslim Brotherhood propaganda were claiming. In other words, the police forces had no option but to use force to contain the shootings that killed policemen. According to Egyptian government official statistics, more than six hundred people were killed, including policemen and civilians.

Meanwhile, the members of the Muslim Brotherhood and their Salafist sympathizers in locations away from Rabaa and Al-Nahda square started to practice violence against innocent civilians, in attempt to cause a greater state of chaos. The first victims of Muslim Brotherhood violent assault were Coptic Christian citizens in Upper Egyptian cities, whose personal properties and churches were burnt and destroyed. In one day, the violent affiliates of the Muslim Brotherhood and sympathizing Salafists burnt and destroyed 83 churches and attacked a dozen of police stations. One graphic example was the horrible attack on Kerdasa Police Station, in Giza, where Muslim Brotherhood affiliates tortured police officers, using Nitric Acid, and then burnt them alive.

Simultaneously, Muslim Brotherhood leaders, who fled Egypt immediately after the 2013 revolution, deliberately incited and funded their associates in the Hamas movement, which is the Muslim Brotherhood branch in Gaza, to spread terror in North Sinai. In immediate response to Muslim Brotherhood leaders’ incitement, Hamas attacked military troops in Sinai, and consequently revived fellow terrorist organizations that had been hiding in Sinai for years – for example – Ansar Beit Al-Maqdes and Al-Jama’a Al-Islamia. The waves of terrorism that Hamas initiated, at that time, was polarized in mid-2016, when the terrorist organizations in Sinai got united under the flag of the Islamic State (ISIS) and called themselves “Welayat Sinai.”

The peak of violent attacks by Muslim Brotherhood members and sympathizers inside Egypt continued till late 2015, mounting up to more than three thousand documented violent atrocities committed by the Muslim Brotherhood members and sympathizers against innocent civilians and state institutions in internal cities. This horrific number of documented violent atrocities does not include the toll of life losses caused by terrorists dwelled in Sinai.

Long story short, as the Muslim Brotherhood and their Islamist affiliates were practicing violence against civilians in avenge to their ouster from power, in 2013, the Muslim Brotherhood leaders with good connections in the United States and Europe cleverly sold a big lie to Western media in an attempt to legitimize their purposeful violent atrocities inside Egypt. That lie is labeled as the Rabaa massacre.

Article first published on Sadaa ElBalad English.

The American bet on the Brotherhood returned again with the entry of the new millennium…

All evidence confirms that terrorism and the Brotherhood organization are two sides of the same coin. The Brotherhood has pursued a method of murder rooted in the hands of their leader Hassan Al-Banna nearly 90 years ago that still governs the organization’s ideas until now.

History confirms that for decades the Brotherhood did not abandon the idea of ​​bloodshed, so all terrorist organizations emerged from the womb of the Brotherhood and gathered them together as a single jurisprudential cloak and employed texts in favor of the Brotherhood murder project, so Egypt and our Arab region suffered from a series of assassinations and terrorist operations that claimed lives throughout history.

With the year 2011, the Brotherhood began writing a new chapter in the history of the killing, even after they seized power in Egypt and many crimes committed by the terrorist organization after the June 30 revolution.

A black history of the Brotherhood over more than 90 years, from their inception in 1928 with the support and funding of the British, to their strategic alliance with the United States of America in recent decades to achieve common interests.

In 1936, the British offered a grant to the founder of the Brotherhood, Hassan al-Banna, with the aim of supporting and expanding the group’s activities to strike the ranks of the national movement at this time.

In March 1954, Eisenhower met the thirty-fourth President of the United States, the top leaders of Islamic movements around the world, and this is what the American writer Robert Dreyfus explains in his famous book “The Devil’s Game”.

Among those whom Grandfather Eisenhower met was a young Egyptian in his twenties, “Said Ramadan”, who is the son-in-law of Hassan Al-Banna and the husband of his youngest daughter, and the father of Tariq Al-Banna, a Muslim Brotherhood preacher who was arrested months ago in France and charged with sexual rape. More than 27 years at that time, but the American administration found its way in this young man who had at least 10 years of experience in Islamic groups and their armed organizations in the Middle East, and this experience extended from Cairo to Karachi and Amman.

The United States saw that the Brotherhood at that time could be an advanced tool and spearhead in Arab countries and some of the Asian countries in which Islam is spreading to confront communism, and despite that, communism spread and the group failed America and its plan against communism at its time.

Despite this, the American-Brotherhood relations continued and Ramadan moved after that to Switzerland, and the beginnings of the establishment of the international organization of the Brotherhood, and the Brotherhood at that time expanded and became the organizational sponsor for successive generations of extremist groups that emerged from the womb of the terrorist group and expanded in many Arab and Western countries, and over the four decades that after the meeting of Ramadan and Eisenhower, the first turned into an activist figure in various fields, all of which unfortunately were devoted to presenting Islam as an extremist, heavenly version, but it originated among its followers of these ideas, and from here extremist Muslims appeared in Pakistan, and provided a safe haven for Al Qaeda in the 1990s.

The American bet on the Brotherhood returned again with the entry of the new millennium, specifically with the rise of US President Barack Obama, and the group was able to reach power in Egypt in 2012 after January 25, 2011, which the Brotherhood used to implement their plans.

Despite all support, according to Michael Walker, a researcher at the London Center for Research and Studies, there is a secret presidential document bearing No. 11 issued by the former US president, Barack Obama, that explained the strategic relationship of the United States and its alliance with the Brotherhood, to bring about change in the Middle East and everywhere in the world.

The recent leaked Hillary Clinton documents revealed the Brotherhood’s recruitment to achieve US interests in Egypt and the region, and the exchange of private messages between the organization and the Obama administration.

For his part, Dr. Ikram Badr al-Din, a professor of political science, said that the Brotherhood sold their country to achieve the benefit they found with the Americans, noting that the Obama administration had earlier taken the Brotherhood as a strategic ally in the region, and betting on the group’s rule in Egypt to be the tool of the United States in the entire Arab region, and to achieve the scheme of division and influence the nation state.

Details of the establishment of “Hasm” and why did Washington not list the Brotherhood as a terrorist group?

A meeting of the Egyptian Brotherhood leaders in Istanbul, in which they decided to establish the movement and train its members through Turkish intelligence in Sudan and Malaysia decisively puts Turkey and the Brotherhood against America. The Brotherhood denied its relationship with its terrorist cell and the American administration stated that its leaders are the Brotherhood and Turkish institutions are threatened with freezing their funds because of their relationship with Samahi, Moussa and the blood leaders.

The US State Department has included “Ansar Beit Al-Maqdis” group, the ISIS branch in Sinai, Egypt, and the “Egyptian arms movement” known as “Hasm” on the list of global terrorism.

The classification also included personalities associated with the “Hasm” organization, namely, Alaa Al-Samahi, the founder of the movement, who is Egyptian and currently in Turkey, and another leader in the movement called Yahya Moussa, who also resides in Turkey.

Here, an important question arises, which is if the movement affiliated with the group was included in the terrorist lists, then why was it not, by extension, that the planner and the financier, the “Brotherhood” group, was included and classified as a terrorist group?

The details of the establishment of the movement start from the year 2014, when the Brotherhood leaders who fled to Turkey agreed to revive the armed action of the group inside Egypt, through the formation of a new armed organization that takes several names such as “Egypt’s Arms” and “The Revolution Brigade”, and selecting its members who have the foundations. Physical and psychological elements of the revolutionary movement, and their inclusion of armed combat groups and their training inside and outside Egypt, and assigning them later to target institutions and symbols of the state to weaken the system and cause safe chaos.

The Egyptian security services revealed information that the leaders of the group residing in Turkey, namely Yahya al-Sayed Ibrahim Muhammad Musa, a teacher at the Faculty of Medicine at Al-Azhar University, Mahmoud Muhammad Fathi Badr, an engineer, Ahmed Muhammad Abdul-Rahman, a doctor, Ali al-Sayyid Ahmad Batikh, a doctor, and Jamal Heshmat Abdel Hamid, a doctor, Qadri Muhammad Fahmy Mahmoud al-Sheikh, a pharmacist, and Salah al-Din Khaled Salah al-Din Fateen, a communications engineer. The aforementioned met in Istanbul, and decided to form an operations room abroad to coordinate with leaders of the group fleeing inside Egypt, including Muhammad Muhammad Kamal al-Din, a doctor from Assiut governorate and responsible for the quality committees within the group. Muhammad Rafiq Ibrahim Manna, a journalist from Alexandria governorate, and Magdy Musleh Shalash, a teacher Faculty of Studies at Al-Azhar University, Hamdi Taha Abdel-Rahim, a former member of the People’s Assembly during the Muslim Brotherhood era, and Mohamed Fouad.

All agreed to implement the mandate of the group’s senior leaders to form an armed military wing under the name “Hasm”. The information indicated that the leaders of the group agreed that Turkish intelligence agents would combat training in training camps in the State of Sudan during the regime of ousted President Omar al-Bashir, in camps in the Burri and Azhari neighborhoods in the capital Khartoum, and other camps in the city of Atbara. Its responsibility is assumed by the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, Tariq Syed Ahmed Abd al-Wahhab Farraj, while it was found that the members of the movement had been trained on intelligence work in Malaysia and Turkey.

It was agreed that Yahya al-Sayyid Ibrahim Musa, Ahmed Muhammad Abd al-Rahman Abd al-Hadi, and Alaa Ali Ali al-Samahi would assume the actual and field leadership of the movement.

The information confirmed that Brotherhood officials had chosen the group’s members who were physically and psychologically prepared, and equipped them to carry out terrorist operations and assassinations.

The movement began to carry out several operations in Egypt, including the assassination of Counselor Hisham Barakat, the former Public Prosecutor, the attempt to assassinate Dr. Ali Gomaa, the former Mufti of Egypt, the failed assassination attempt of Counselor Zakaria Abdulaziz Othman, the Assistant Public Prosecutor and Director of the Judicial Inspection Department at the Public Prosecution, and the attack on the police ambush Agizi in Menoufia.

Political researcher Ahmed Al-Bakri says that classifying the Hasm movement as a terrorist organization at a time when everyone knows that it is one of the military arms of the Muslim Brotherhood requires by extension the inclusion of the Brotherhood as a terrorist organization, adding that since 2017 there have been discussions in America to include “Hasm” a terrorist organization, and the decision was issued.

After 4 years, which implies that the group should be on the list of terrorism and its inclusion and classification as a terrorist organization in the near future, especially since all information confirms the affiliation of the movement to the Brotherhood.

He added that the US administration included the branches on the list of terrorism, and the original Brotherhood group is still far from being classified, stressing that the Egyptian security services have succeeded in dismantling “Hasm” and aborted all their plans, and the movement has become non-existent or active on the ground since 2019, but the parent organization is still The Brotherhood is present, and it is possible to reproduce its armed and military arms with new names instead of those listed on the lists of terrorism.

He said that the ideal decision that everyone awaits is the inclusion of the Brotherhood as a terrorist group, for they are the root of the affliction, and the birthplace of all groups of violence and darkness, and from which all armed movements branched out.

He concluded by saying that the decision to include “Hasm” a terrorist organization is worthless, because there is virtually no presence on the ground in Egypt or in the world there is a movement called Hasm, while there is a terrorist group in the whole world and in Egypt that carries arms and produces violence that takes lives called “Brotherhood”.

Waleed Al-Ghamdi is Saudi-based independent researcher and political analyst. He tweets under @nofr2021.

Agnes Callamard is known for her hostility towards Saudi Arabia and her silence regarding Iran and Turkey.

In this report, I will describe some of the most famous human rights organizations, their political backgrounds, financiers and goals. On closer inspection, you will find that all of them, whether it is Human Right Watch, Amnesty International, etc., are organizations that are close to the Muslim Brotherhood.

Human Rights Watch can be considered a highly suspicious institution, that has submitted to the orders from Qatar and Turkey, and the Muslim Brotherhood. Doha funds many human rights organizations and reports, that just serve to target certain countries. But not only Doha, George Soros is another sponsor of these organizations.

Amnesty International is also not a neutral and impartial organization, because of its known political and ideological interests, that go beyond any correctness and credibility. Amnesty International receives respectable financial donations, and this seems to be enough to give it sacred legitimacy. What is also interesting about Amnesty International is, that its funding streams are used by employees and former directors-general for personal purposes. Irene Khan, who received financial compensation of 600 million euros when she left the organization, that defends the interests of the world’s poor, leaves questions unanswered.

Susan Nossel, the director of Amnesty International, was the chief assistant to Hillary Clinton, the former Secretary of State and advocate of the so-called “Smart Power Policy”. She previously worked for the US Institute for Foreign Relations, one of the official interfaces for American intelligence services.

One of the best known financiers of Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, is George Soros. He also controls the values ​​of Europe through the highest European judicial authority. Due to his influence, many European countries were forced to change their laws in order to implement an open society without borders. George Soros tries to put an end to the idea of ​​closed nations, and to enforce an open society without borders. Anyone who regards his ideas, and ignited revolutions as inhuman is considered an anti-Semite, and is classified in the category of fascists.

Many heads of state are of the opinion that George Soros, with his Open Org Society and countless NGOs, aims to destroy the world. His biggest critics include: Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Victor Orban and Benjamin Netanyahu. Most of the judges at the European Court of Human Rights belong to NGOs that are funded by the Open Society.

So what has George Soros got to do with the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia?

George Soros, who supports the extreme left in Europe and America, also appears as an obvious sponsor of Antifa, makes no secret of promoting the activities of the Muslim Brotherhood. Wasn’t it he, who awarded the Tunisian Muslim brother Ghannouchi the Peace Prize? It is also confirmed, that he supports Muslim Brotherhood networks in Europe with financial grants.

As everyone knows, the Muslim Brotherhood sparked revolutions, bloody civil wars and the so-called Arab Spring, a movement that, under the guise of humanity, served Soros and his Open Society Foundation, as it drove millions of people out of their countries were then received by Ms. Merkel in Germany with open arms, which earned her the nickname – “Mutti”.

Now to Sarah Lea Whitson, Executive Director of DAWN and Human Rights Watch division in the Middle East. She was the first to spread rumors about the causes of Morsi’s death, and has a close relationship with Bin Jassim, a member of the Royal Family in Qatar. She has been interviewed on Muslim Brotherhood channels such as Aljazeera and Makmalin, and announced that her organization would campaign for the release of Muslim Brotherhood leaders.

The woman who holds a key leadership position at Human Right Watch is the group’s first defender of terrorism, and her main focus right now is publicly denouncing Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates. It has been shown to be particularly supported by the American Democratic Party, which has close ties with the Muslim Brotherhood. According to the media reports, Sarah Lee Watson received $ 100,000 for three reports, the last of which was about incitement to Egypt. Because of its ties with Qatar, HRW’s Middle East division has never condemned human rights abuses against foreign migrant workers in Qatar.

Hamad bin Jassim provided this woman with false reports of allegations, that Iraq and Syria possessed weapons of mass destruction. Her connection to the Muslim Brotherhood goes back to the time of the former President Hosni Mubarak, where she appeared constantly on the Aljazeera Network to polish up the image of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Now we come to Agnes Callamard, she worked for Amnesty International from 1998 to 2001, then as executive director for the human rights organization ARTICLE-19. She is currently director of the Global Freedom of Expression project at Columbia University, and special rapporteur for extrajudicial executions, and sits on the Human Rights Council the United Nations. Agnes Callamard is known for her hostility towards Saudi Arabia and her silence regarding Iran and Turkey.

In 2013, human rights defender, Agnes Callamard wrote a special report calling on the Egyptian military to lift bans on five Egyptian satellite channels and other people affiliated with Hamas and jihadist Islamic parties. She considered closing channels of the Muslim Brotherhood, because they were necessary for so-called democratic discourse as a violation of freedom of expression.

Agnes Callamard also attended a meeting of the United Nations Human Council in September 2010 with Tariq Ramadan, the grandson of Al-Banna, who was convicted of rape and sexual assault of minors in France. She called several times on the United Nations to work for the release of members of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Before starting the investigation into the murder of Khashoggi, she worked with a number of international organizations and associations, to politicize the Khashoggi case as part of the campaign against Saudi Arabia. She ignored in her reports that Khashoggi’s article in the Washington Post was proven to have been directed and written by the Qatar Foundation International, and the American “Maggie Salem”, the foundation’s executive director. Agnes also aimed to use human rights reports on behalf of private human rights organizations to attack the Arab coalition and legitimacy in Yemen.

It accused both Saudi Arabia and the United Emirates of targeting civilians and ignored all human rights reports regarding the terrorist activities of the Houthis, who carried out countless extrajudicial executions in Yemen, and committed and continue to commit many human rights abuses that are simply overlooked. At the same time, Agnes is under criticism for her silence regarding the massive arrests of opposition activists and journalists in Turkey, which she also does not criticize. Your report on Khashoggi and the CIA report contain no evidence of the involvement of Mohammed bin Salman, but the wording in the international media gave the impression that, Mohammed bin Salman had commissioned the murder, or the report had proven it.

This extremely dubious 1-page report contains nothing, but assumptions and assessments, and ultimately even the human rights organizations and Ms. Callamard were disappointed that no direct evidence was found.

Muslim Brotherhood and Clinton Emails

As emerged from the Clinton emails, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama supported the Muslim Brotherhood during the Arab Spring both financially, ideologically and with weapons, to carry out bloody revolutions in various countries. The result was countless cities and infrastructures destroyed, 1.4 million injured and dead, 22 million refugees and over 100 million unemployed. Syria, Yemen, Tunisia, Lebanon, Libya and Egypt were particularly hard hit.

In 2013, the Muslim Brotherhood was successfully overthrown in Egypt and banned as a terrorist organization.

The Brotherhood was founded in 1928 in Egypt by Hassan Al Bannah, the British and the Freemasons, to help build the Islamic Caliphate worldwide. In fact, he went so far as to express his willingness to declare war on “any leader, party and organization” who fail to implement the Brotherhood’s programs.

In the 1940s, the Brotherhood’s “secret apparatus”, a paramilitary unit established by El-Banna, carried out serious acts of political violence. Those murdered included a prominent judge, the Cairo police chief and the Egyptian prime minister. In 1954 they tried to assassinate President Gamal Nasser.
Even after it was disbanded in December 1948, the Brotherhood turned to more violence, militarization and clandestine action. It remained in the grip of the secret apparatus for decades and encompassed the jihadist philosophy led by El-Banna and promoted by his student Sayyid Qutb.

Brotherhood splinter groups such as al-Takfir wal Hijra murdered thinkers who publicly criticized the group’s radical ideology. Tanzim Al-Jihad, founded by Al-Qaeda’s second husband, Ayman Al-Zawahri — a member of the Brotherhood, assassinated President Anwar el-Sadat in 1981 after signing a peace treaty with Israel. These and other groups affiliated with the Brotherhood have also carried out terrorist attacks against tourists and religious minorities.

The Brotherhood also maintains links with terrorist organizations established by leaders within their “international network” outside Egypt. According to the report from 9 Bedford Row, Osama bin Laden, Ayman Al-Zawahiri and Aballah Yusuf Azzam, the three founders of al-Qaeda, were prominent members of the “international network”.

As in Egypt, the Saudi King Abdullah banned the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization in 2014, as did the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Syria and Russia.

The highest Islamic scholars of Saudi Arabia have officially justified and confirmed this decision again in 2020, pointing out that the Muslim Brotherhood does not reflect Islamic values, but only promotes riot, violence and terrorism.

What has the Muslim Brotherhood, which has been and still is diligently supported by the West, achieved in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Sudan besides civil wars, devastation and the emergence of ISIS?

Is it really only supported by the West to bring so-called “democracy” to these Islamic countries? Isn’t there a bigger, less “benevolent” concept behind this?

Anna Sacher is an Austria-based Independent Political Analyst and Commentator. She often writes for Millichronicle. She tweets under @RealthingUlli.

Waleed Alghamdi is a Saudi-based researcher and analyst. He writes about Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist factions. He tweets under @nofr2021.

He hosts HAMAS leaders regularly and they call him “the elder brother.”

Turkey’s president Erdogan is in real trouble, after the United States’ Department of State officially designated Harakat Sawa’d Misr (HASM) and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) as terrorist organizations, last week. That is not only because HASM and PIJ are affiliated to the Muslim Brotherhood group, of which Erdogan is a leading member; but, also, because Turkey hosts the Egyptian leaders of HASM, who were also designated by U.S. State Department as Specially Designated Global Terrorists (SDGT).

In mid-January, the U.S. State Department announced the designation of the Egypt-based militia, HASM, which is affiliated to the Muslim Brotherhood, on the list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs). Previously, in 2018, the U.S. State Department designated HASM and Liwa’ al-Thawra, which is also a militia affiliated to the Muslim Brotherhood, as SDGT. HASM and Liwaa Al-Thawra are armed groups affiliated to the Muslim Brotherhood and have been operating in Egypt, since the fall of the Muslim Brotherhood regime, in 2013. Their goal was to cause a state of extreme chaos that forces the military to return the Muslim Brotherhood regime back in power.

HASM was formed by young members of the Muslim Brotherhood, who fled to Turkey later on, in early 2015. From their safe residences in Turkey, the leaders of HASM continued to command operations implemented by the young members of the Muslim Brotherhood, who could not flee Egypt, at that time. HASM operations mainly targeted state officials and policemen and their innocent families.

The most prominent operation executed by HASM was the assassination of Egypt’s Attorney General, Hisham Barakat, in June 2015. According to recorded confessions of the perpetrators, the assassination was planned, instructed, and funded by HASM leaders, who are based in Turkey. The perpetrators, in Cairo, used to discretely communicate with the leaders, in Turkey, via encrypted online applications.

In the same statement, the U.S. State Department mentioned that they reviewed the FTO designation of the Gaza-based Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) and decided to maintain it. Although PIJ, operating in Gaza, is known as an Iran-backed terrorist militia, it is originally a faction of HAMAS and is, allegedly, supported, financially and politically by Qatar and Turkey.

HAMAS, which Erdogan shamelessly supports, is also one of the military wings of the Muslim Brotherhood. HAMAS has been designated as a terrorist organization by the United States, the European Union, Britain, and some other countries, since 1990s. Turkish president Erdogan is friendly with both HAMAS and PIJ leaders. He hosts HAMAS leaders regularly and they call him “the elder brother.”

In August 2020, Erdogan hosted two HAMAS leaders, in Istanbul, despite knowing that HAMAS is a designated terrorist organization and that the two leaders he met are designated by the U.S. as SDGT. The U.S. State Department issued a press statement, at the time, condemning Erdogan’s “continued outreach” to terrorist organizations and warned that such meetings “only serve to isolate Turkey from the international community.”

After the recent designation of HASM and its founders, who live in Turkey, the Turkish president Erdogan is knowingly and purposefully harboring officially designated terrorists in his country. That may not only hurt him personally or his Islamist AKP party, but it may also incur serious sanctions on the people of Turkey, who are already struggling with a failing economy and the recently-imposed U.S. sanctions on their national defense industry.

Despite that, Turkey still declines Egypt’s requests to extradite the members of the Muslim Brotherhood, which Turkey hosts, since 2013, including the leaders of the terrorist militia, HASM. Erdogan has, always, insisted on keeping the members of the Muslim Brotherhood in his country, including those involved in committing violent crimes against civilians and state institutions in Egypt. By doing so, he created a political rift with important Middle East countries, like Egypt, United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. By continuing to do so, he is risking Turkey’s relationship with the European Union, NATO, and the United States, especially, in light of the cold shoulder diplomacy, which Joe Biden is already showing to him.

Is it worth severing Turkey’s ties with neighbors in the Middle East and Europe, risking Turkey’s relations with international allies, threatening the well-being of a country as big as Turkey, and causing 85 million innocent people to suffer diplomatic isolation and economic sanctions; only to provide a hotbed for Muslim Brotherhood members, including those who practiced and incited violence? This is the question that President Erdogan, and his loyal advisors, need to, urgently, consider, before it is too late.

Article first published on Liberal Democracy Institute.

LDI and the MBTO campaign shall continue their efforts to document Muslim Brotherhood violence and educate the public opinion…

The Popular Campaign to Designate the Muslim Brotherhood as an International Terrorist Organization (MBTO), and campaign’s host, the Liberal Democracy Institute (LDI), welcome the decision, announced Thursday, by the United States Department of State to officially designate HASM as a terrorist organization.

On January 14th, the US Department of State designated the Egypt-based Harakat Sawa’d Misr (HASM) as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO), under section 219 of the Immigration and Nationality Act. In 2018, HASM and Liwaa Al-Thawra, two Egypt-based armed groups, were announced as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist (SDGT). The State Department has also reviewed the FTO designation of the Gaza-based Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) and maintained it.

“This designation is a new proof that the Muslim Brotherhood is a violent group, that qualifies to be designated as a foreign terrorist organization. HASM, Liwaa Al-Thawra, HAMAS and PIJ are armed factions of the Muslim Brotherhood. Yet, the US still cannot designate the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization;” said Dalia Ziada, Director of LDI.

“While we are not optimistic that the new U.S. Administration of president Joe Bide may take serious steps towards designating the Muslim Brotherhood as a foreign terrorist organization, LDI and the MBTO campaign shall continue their efforts to document Muslim Brotherhood violence and educate the public opinion, worldwide, about the extremist ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood, which feeds the rhetoric of almost all Islamist terrorist organizations, who are wreaking havoc in the Middle East, today.” Dalia Ziada added.

“The Popular Campaign to Designate the Muslim Brotherhood as an International Terrorist Organization” (MBTO) is an initiative, by the Liberal Democracy Institute (LDI) to document the violent crimes committed by the Muslim Brotherhood, since the overthrow of their regime in Egypt, in 2013, against innocent civilians, Coptic Christians, policemen and their families, and state institutions. The campaign documented more than 3000 violent atrocities committed by the members of the Muslim Brotherhood in the period between, June 2013 to December 2015.

Article first published on LDI.