Ban the Muslim Brotherhood

It was found to harm national security in 2015. What happened?

Muslim Brotherhood supporters rally in Egypt

Whatever the ins and outs of the row between the Telegraph and Ipso this week, it highlighted a subject which has been brushed under the carpet for too long. We are being taken for mugs by the Muslim Brotherhood. In my view, neither social harmony nor national security will be achieved until this secretive group, which lies at the heart of global jihadism and the drive towards sharia, is banned.

Before I get into the arguments, here’s a quick update. With the deadline for completing my new book, Never Again? How the West Betrayed the Jews and Itself (which can be ordered here), barrelling towards me at the end of the month, I have been deeply submerged in the writing. Hence the slightly fewer posts on Substack recently; bear with me, normal service will resume shortly.

Yet I have also been incubating a new project which I have yet to formally announce (you heard it here first): a new podcast discussing the state of the West and ways to restore it. Called The Brink, it will include full-length interviews with leading intellectuals that will be cited in my book. The Brink will be launched around the time of publication.

One of the people I will interview is the impressive Ayaan Hirsi Ali. When we discussed the Brotherhood, she told me: “The irony is that when Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt, Jordan and others proscribed the Muslim Brotherhood and took their leaders down, the Brotherhood decided to headquarter themselves in Europe and in America.

“Why? Because in America and in Europe, constitutionally, we have the freedom of religion, freedom of speech and freedom of association. So that’s the paradox. They can come and invoke these freedoms and establish themselves as a subversive force, with a huge infrastructure of mosques and madrasas and Islamic centres where they want to upend the existing constitutions and replace it with Sharia law, something that the Arab Muslim countries would not stand for.

“The Muslim Brotherhood is not the only Islamist movement. There’s also Jamaat-e-Islami, the South Asian version, and of course, there’s the government of Iran and its propaganda.

“All of that is now based in the West, in Western universities and Western schools, Western media, Western campuses. The big conundrum for Western governments is how can we ban them and at the same time retain our freedoms. Arab countries don’t wrestle with that.”

It’s high time we stopped with the wrestling.

For all its spectacular ambitions, one of the Muslim Brotherhood’s characteristics is its slowly-slowly approach, particularly when it comes to the West. Hassan Al-Banna, the group’s founder, believed that a jihadi revolution could be achieved by building grassroots influence over several generations, quietly encouraging a popular demand for Sharia until a weakened government had no choice but to fold.

In 2015, the government asked Sir John Jenkins, His Majesty’s former ambassador to Riyadh, and the late Sir Charles Farr, former chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee and Director of the Office for Security and Counter-Terrorism, to produce a report on the Brotherhood. Although it was secret, a shorter version was made public.