A report published by George Washington University (GWU) in the United States has detailed the highly negative concerns of the security services across seven European countries regarding Muslim Brotherhood operations in Europe. ‘Verbatim: What European Security Services Say About the Muslim Brotherhood in Europe’ was written by Lorenzo Vidino and published by GWU’s Program on Extremism.
The report features testimony from the security services of Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain and Sweden. Vidino concludes that without exception, all European security services adopt a highly negative view of the Muslim Brotherhood on the Continent. Of particular concern is the “extensive and sophisticated network linked to the Brotherhood that operates covertly in Europe, both at the national and pan-European level (through its umbrella organization, FIOE/CEM, and spinoffs like FEMYSO)”.
The report also covers security services’ alarm that European-based Brotherhood-linked activists have created front organisations that allow them to “operate within society and advance their agenda without being easily recognizable as being part of the Brotherhood”. Although the report does not make any claim of terrorist activity, it does emphasise that the Muslim Brotherhood has views and goals that are “problematic, subversive, undemocratic, and incompatible with basic human rights and Western society”.
The report includes direct testimony from key figures, including Lucile Rolland, then head of France’s Service Central duRenseignementTerritorial (SCRT).
Rolland addressed the parliamentary commission on the October 3, 2019 terrorist attack at the Paris Préfecture de Police. She described the Muslim Brotherhood as “an elite wishing to completely irrigate society by entering public life, even politics. Gathered within a national federation, the Musulmans de France, they clearly want to take power through the ballot box. The link between the two is therefore a fundamentalist vision of religion, although the way of expressing it is not the same: the goal is to ensure that the country in which they are located is governed by the law of God and not by the law of men.”
Sûretédel’État, Belgium’s intelligence agency, said in their 2002 report to the Belgian Parliament: “The State Security [Sûretédel’État] has been following the activities of the Internationalist Muslim Brothers in Belgium since 1982. The Internationalist Muslim Brothers have possessed a clandestine structure in Belgium for more than 20 years. The identity of the members is secret; they operate in the greatest discretion. They seek to spread their ideology within Belgium’s Muslim community and they aim in particular at young, second and third generation immigrants. In Belgium as in other European countries, they seek to take control of sport, religious and social associations, and they seek to establish themselves as privileged interlocutors of national and even European authorities in order to manage Islamic affairs.”
Vidino concludes in the GWU report that whenever the security services of essentially all the largest Western European countries (with the notable exception of Italy) have publicly aired views on the Muslim Brotherhood, these views have been very negative.. Vidino adds that he is not aware of any European security service stating anything that even slightly contradicts the assessments on the Brotherhood made by the services of the seven countries mentioned in his report. To the contrary, he states that interviews he conducted with most European security services over the last twenty years confirm that even those which have not gone on the record (Italian security services, for example) on this subject, hold extremely negative views of the Brotherhood that are in line with those whose views are on record.
Vidino’s report concludes that the European security community has reached a firm and consistent consensus over a twenty year period on the “presence, structure, tactics, aims, and ultimately, problematic nature of the Muslim Brotherhood in Europe”. It adds that this consensus should be the basis for well-informed policymaking on the subject. With the French government’s own recent report, and a similar report on the horizon in Belgium, it seems that European countries are finally moving towards adopting policies to decisively tackle this threat.
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