by Emma Schubart, The Critic
Britain can no longer afford to ignore the Muslim Brotherhood’s quiet but far-reaching influence
For too long, Britain has ducked the Muslim Brotherhood problem.
Instead, we have focused on the loudest forms of Islamism: the bomb plot, the radical preacher, the proscribed terror group, the returning jihadist. Those threats are real. But they are not the whole picture.
The most sophisticated vehicle for Islamism in the West is the Muslim Brotherhood, and it rarely advertises itself through spectacular violence. It advances more patiently than that, accumulating influence through institutions, respectability, ambiguity and time.
That is why the Henry Jackson Society has launched the “Ban the Brotherhood” UK campaign.
The starting point is an uncomfortable one. The last formal UK assessment of the Muslim Brotherhood was Sir John Jenkins’s 2015 review. That review concluded that aspects of the Brotherhood’s ideology and behaviour were “contrary to British values, national interests and national security”. And yet, more than a decade later, the organisation remains legal, the questions raised by that review remain unresolved, and the British state is still relying on an assessment produced over a decade ago. This is no longer tenable.
A renewed review is necessary, not because nothing is known, but because the stakes are too high to ignore. The 2015 review came before the 7 October Hamas attacks (Hamas, by the way, identifies itself as the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood). It came before the discovery of Hamas weapons caches across the European continent. It came before a series of Britain’s closest allies hardened their positions against the Brotherhood. And it came before one of those allies, the UAE, cut scholarships for its students to study at British universities due to concerns over the “Muslim Brotherhood’s influence on UK campuses”.
In short: the threat picture has evolved, but British policy has not. That failure has helped to make Britain a permissive operating environment: a country more comfortable discussing the finished product of Islamist radicalism than the ecosystem that incubates it, launders it, legitimises it, funds it or gives it institutional cover.