Muslim countries act against radicalisation - so why won’t Britain?

The UK, in its rush to demonstrate its historical tolerance through an unquestioning embrace of multiculturalism, has created a crisis within its own borders by turning a blind eye to the growing threat of Islamism.

I can see the warning lights flashing red in Britain. Islamist extremists appear to be operating with a free hand, especially those of the Muslim Brotherhood. They have taken advantage of institutional weakness to infiltrate mosques, charities, schools, business councils, and even sports clubs in order to exert influence at a local, regional and national level.

Remember, the Muslim Brotherhood was the movement which spawned Hamas, Al-Qaeda and ISIS, and its fanatics have committed untold atrocities. Today, it is wreaking havoc in Sudan where the Muslim Brotherhood-led army – supplied with weapons by Iran, funnelling drugs through Port Sudan, and supporter of Hamas’s 7th October genocide – is systematically killing Christians.

Europe’s great capital cities and towns haven’t been spared Islamist terrorism, as Londoners and the people of Manchester know to their cost, but I fear far worse is to come unless those in power accept reality and start acting against the threat posed by the Muslim Brotherhood movement and its idealogues.

On every front of this insidious insurgency, the UK is painfully behind the curve and seen as a soft touch by its adversaries. The Muslim Brotherhood’s acolytes are segregating Muslims culturally, intellectually and spiritually by playing on disenfranchisement and identity politics to generate hatred and rejection of what they claim is a decadent and immoral secular Britain. Slowly reorganising society from the grassroots up, their long-term goal – as advocated by its founder Hassan al-Banna - is nothing less than the establishment of an Islamic Caliphate governed by Sharia.

The Muslim Brotherhood’s weaponisation of the devastating war between Israel and Hamas has helped it go mainstream. Its relentlessly pedalled worldview reached millions of naïve Brits and stoked community tensions. Its intimidatory devotees have cynically, but successfully, normalised the idea that the Islamic world’s problems are the fault of Western foreign policy and the audacity of Israel exercising its legal right to self-defence. This victimhood strategy has worked, aided in no small part by the BBC’s perverse and misguided coverage of the war.

Disguised as ‘activists’ these fundamentalists have exploited the UK’s freedoms to preach violent hatred, anti-Jewish racism, and radicalise. It should be no surprise that MI5 has revealed that 75% of its work deals with countering Islamist terrorism; this is the inevitable product of the Muslim Brotherhood's stealthy efforts.

Britain, once a beacon of liberty, is being eroded from within by a threat operating in plain sight. The shadow of sectarian politics looms large with the number of so-called pro-Gaza ‘Independents’ set to multiply and potential for a new political party with subversive aims far beyond Gaza.

This lethal cocktail of misplaced tolerance and wilful blindness means many British citizens no longer feel safe in their own neighbourhoods. Jews walk in fear, removing their kippahs not out of shame but for safety. The police seem either unwilling or unable to protect them.

The UK must urgently follow the lead of Muslim countries like Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the UAE which are taking an assertive approach to rid their societies of this cancerous Islamist ideology. In doing so they have systematically dismantled its infrastructure – including religious centres and charities - to prevent its brainwashing of their citizens.

The UK must do the same, starting now. After all, an extremist in the Muslim Middle East is surely one in the West?

This threat isn’t new. A long-overdue 2015 review into the Muslim Brotherhood commissioned by Prime Minister David Cameron concluded that its “ideology and tactics…are contrary to our values and have been contrary to our national interests and our national security”. Armed with this troubling information, no further actions were taken.

This may finally be changing. President Trump has initiated a process to designate the Muslim Brotherhood’s transnational network in Egypt, Lebanon and Jordan as foreign terrorist organisations. The grassroots civil society nature of the Muslim Brotherhood – which lacks a central leadership structure and defined organisational entity – has made proscription of the organisation in its entirety problematic.

However, the new U.S. approach suggests that by shining a light on its spiderweb of affiliated entities abroad it can have a chilling effect on Muslim Brotherhood-linked activities domestically. Law enforcement agencies will be armed with an ever-expanding database of evidence on the activities of Muslim Brotherhood affiliates in the U.S. and the Government can progressively expand the number of entities that meet the threshold of proscription as terror groups.

It offers a blueprint for the UK and other Western nations struggling with Islamism. If Labour is serious about its commitment to clamp down on Islamist extremism in the wake of the Manchester synagogue terror attack, it must urgently follow suit.

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Amjad Taha is a political strategist and analyst from the UAE.

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