Two U.S. Muslim organizations were shocked this week to find themselves on a massive terror blacklist put out by the government of the United Arab Emirates, but researchers who have documented their links with the Muslim Brotherhood weren’t surprised.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Muslim American Society — like many other banned groups around the world — both insisted they did not belong on the Emirati blacklist.
“We are seeking clarification from the government of the United Arab Emirates about this shocking and bizarre report. There is absolutely no factual basis for the inclusion CAIR and other American and European civil rights and advocacy groups on this list,” CAIR said.
“Like the rest of the mainstream institutions representing the American Muslim community, CAIR’s advocacy model is the antithesis of the narrative of violent extremists.”
Both CAIR and the Muslim American Society said they would ask the U.S. government to intervene on their behalf. Neither are on the U.S. list of banned terrorist organizations, nor is the Muslim Brotherhood.
The State Department said officials are “engaging” the UAE government on the issue.
Aside from the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, al Qaeda and a number of Iranian-backed Shia extremist groups, the Emirati list seems to focus on the Muslim Brotherhood and many of the group’s local affiliates around the world, including the International Union of Muslim Scholars, led by Qatar-based Egyptian cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi, widely seen as the group’s principal theologian. The Emirati government sees the Brotherhood as a threat to its existence.
Despite their protestations, there is considerable evidence both U.S. groups have close ties to the Brotherhood and its Islamist ideology.
Steven G. Merley, editor of the Global Muslim Brotherhood Daily Watch website, which monitor’s the group’s activities, said the Muslim American Society is the U.S. branch of the Brotherhood’s global organization, and CAIR grew out of the Islamic Association for Palestine, a U.S.-based support group for Hamas, the Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch.
“The Muslim Brotherhood is more than just the Egyptian organization,” he noted.
Merley detailed both groups’ ties to the Brotherhood in a 2009 paper for the Hudson Institute that relied partly on evidence presented at the trials of leaders of the Holy Land Foundation, an Islamic charity, who were convicted in 2008 of operating a group as a front to finance Hamas terrorism. CAIR was not charged in the case.
Though CAIR advocates for U.S. Muslims and does legitimate civil-rights work, “they’ve done their best to oppose just about every anti-terror initiative the U.S. has ever created,” he said.
One of CAIR’s financial benefactors has been the Al Maktoum Foundation, controlled by Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum, ruler of Dubai and vice president of the UAE. But whatever amity existed between Emiratis and the group appears to have dissolved amid concerns that the Brotherhood is working to overthrow the Emirati government.
“Brotherhood groups in the Gulf have called for revolts against local governments, seeking to ride the wave of chaos that has followed the Arab Spring into power. When it failed, it allied with these countries’ foreign rivals,” Abdulrahman Al-Rashed, general manager of Al-Arabiya television, wrote in an op-ed Tuesday in the pan-Arab Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper.
“The roles of the Brotherhood’s political and military wings have become blurred over the past three years as they have begun to work closely together. This prompted countries like the UAE and others to view the Brotherhood as even more dangerous than [the Islamic State],” he wrote.
