Canada needs to have a serious talk about the Muslim Brotherhood

The U.S. is proposing to list it as a terror organization. Why aren't we?

Last week, some 4,000 participants from over 40 countries demanded humanitarian aid access to Gaza, via Egypt’s heavily fortified border crossing at Rafah. An advance group of 200 (including a number of Canadians) was stopped by Egyptian police, indifferent to emotional pleas for their cooperation on behalf of their Gazan “brethren.” The incident ended with casual brutality meted out to some, others detained or deported.

This, according to the Global March to Gaza’s spokesperson, was “completely unexpected.” Not if the march leaders had done their homework. Egypt does not consider Hamas or Hamas’s supporters its “brethren.” Au contraire. Hamas is guided in its Islamist vision and visceral hatred of Israel and Jews by the Muslim Brotherhood. Egypt was ruled by Brotherhood avatar Mohamed Morsi from 2012 to 2013. It did not go well. Egyptians consider themselves well shot of the group. In fact, it is designated as a foreign terrorist organization not only in Egypt, but in Saudi Arabia, Russia, Syria (under Assad), Bahrain, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates.

The Muslim Brotherhood represents a genre of political Islam that is as ideologically totalitarian as communism, and equally focused on the subjugation of the West. A powerful movement founded in Egypt a century ago, its affiliates have a spectrum of strategies to reach their supremacist goal, from the open violence of Hamas in the Arab world, to the “bottom-up Islamization” favoured in university Middle Eastern Studies departments and advocacy institutions such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) in the United States and the Muslim Association of Canada (MAC).

Brotherhood apologists dumb down its violent wing and core jihadism, but its own literature exposes the chilling truth. The group’s founder, Hassan al-Banna, once declared: “It is the nature of Islam to dominate, not to be dominated, to impose its law on all nations and to extend its power to the entire planet.”

Indonesian Muslim protesters from Hizb ut Tahrir Indonesia shout slogans and hold placards during a rally against the Miss World beauty pageant being held on the resort island of Bali, outside the presidential palace in Jakarta on September 9, 2013.
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A screencap of a video posted on X showing Islamist preacher Mohammed Hijab, left, speaking to a group of local Muslims in Leicester, England, in 2022.
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In 2014, Tom Quiggin, a former Privy Council intelligence analyst and court-recognized expert on terrorism, authored a study that “intended to focus public attention on the requirement to have a national level discussion on the Muslim Brotherhood and its role in Canada.” It was not welcomed by the Liberal Party under Islamo-reverent Justin Trudeau, who came to power shortly after its publication. Attacked as a smear against Canadian Muslims by the National Council of Canadian Muslims (formerly CAIR-CAN), the report’s recommendation for an investigation into the Brotherhood was quickly subsumed under the general heading of “Islamophobia.” References to the group gently sank beneath the bar of permissible discourse.

Nevertheless, investigations carried out elsewhere are available to us. For example, in 2021 a European Parliament committee produced an in-depth analysis of Muslim Brotherhood activity in Europe. More recently, a classified French report the group’s plan to take over Europe was leaked to France’s Le Figaro; writing on the subject, the Free Press’s Simone Rodan-Benzaquen observed, “The Brotherhood operates as a political project. Its goal is not sudden revolution, but gradual transformation.… And it is not coming just for France. It is coming for all of the West.”

The U.S. has known all about the Muslim Brotherhood’s ideology since a damning 1991 memorandum by the group detailing its Islamist aims and methods surfaced in the next decade during the Hamas-centric Holy Land Foundation trial. Before the Trump era, a cone of silence, similar to Canada’s, had been placed over it. (Barack Obama naively believed he could make the Brotherhood an ally.)

 

In 2017, Congress held a hearing on whether the Muslim Brotherhood should be designated as a foreign terrorist organization, but a proposal to criminalize it failed to materialize due to divisions in Trump’s first administration. Now, lawmakers are trying again: early this month, a new bill was introduced to Congress with promising bicameral support.

Unfortunately, the chances of Canada’s present government following suit — or even committing to a Europe-style investigation — are nugatory to nil.

My certainty springs from the concerning fact that on June 6, in Ottawa, Prime Minister Mark Carney chose MAC as his audience for a multiculturalism-themed Eid al-Adha address. A George Washington University report by the school’s Program on Extremism found that MAC proudly self-identifies as a Muslim Brotherhood legacy group. The Brotherhood also hosts foreign speakers whose discourse features antisemitism, misogyny and homophobia.

At his address, Carney equated MAC values with Canadian values. Backlash ensued; more than one observer noted that MAC had been investigated by the Canada Revenue Agency which, in a 2021 audit document, alleged that some MAC directors and employees were involved in “an apparent Hamas support network.”

It’s one thing for woke, virtue-signalling global marchers to be shrouded in ignorance. We can mock their credulity. The same appearance of ignorance is inexcusable in a nation’s leader. Was Carney deliberately messaging acceptance of the Muslim Brotherhood’s claim for social inclusion under the aegis of multiculturalism? If so, that too is inexcusable, but also makes no sense. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which has, like the Brotherhood, spawned numerous terrorist offshoots — Hezbollah, the Houthis, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad — was (finally) designated by Canada as a terrorist entity in 2024. Yet there is precious little daylight between the triumphalist end games of both IRGC and the Muslim Brotherhood.

A saving grace in the era of Soviet-sponsored infiltration of the West was our freedom to educate ourselves about communism’s dangers without being accused of “Marxophobia.” It’s past time we had that same freedom to hold a “national level discussion” on the Muslim Brotherhood.