A major investigation into the finances of the European Muslim Brotherhood, conducted with the assistance of the GMBDW editor, has been published by The Times in the UK. Although the newspaper website is behind a paywall, Breitbart.com has published its own lengthy summary which begins:
A registered charity with an £8.5million property portfolio in the UK, whose leaders have alleged links to al-Qaeda, Hamas and even the terrorists behind 9/11, has been revealed to exist solely to fund international Islamist organization, the Muslim Brotherhood. The trust owns 47 student flats in Leeds and the student rents have been unwittingly bankrolling political Islam in Europe for years.
The Leicestershire-based Europe Trust, which was created in 1996 with the backing of Gulf donors, claims to be ‘a non-political, non-profit making and independent, charitable organisation’ on its website, which seeks to ‘contribute to a harmonious society where equal opportunity and quality of life are a reality for everyone’ by supporting ‘the advancement of the Islamic religion.’
However, it sends funds to the Federation of Islamic Organisations in Europe (FIOE), identified as the Brotherhood’s unofficial representative network on the Continent by experts; the Muslim Association of Britain (MAB), a member FIOE identified as ‘the Brotherhood’s representative in the UK’ by a government minister in 2010, and a network of Arabic-language religious schools attended by one of Lee Rigby’s murders.
The activities of the trust and the unofficial network of Brotherhood-linked organisations it funds were exposed in an investigation by Andrew Norfolk in The Times.
Former head of the FIOE and MAB, who has therefore been one of the most senior Islamists in Europe, Dr. al-Rawi, is the current President and a former trustee of Europe Trust. The structural engineer, 67, was born in Iraq but came to the UK in 1975. He is a member of the European Council for Fatwa and Research (ECFR), funded by the FIOE which promotes it as the ‘chief religious authority for Muslims throughout Europe’.”
ECFR chairman, Yusuf al-Qaradawi (pictured above), regarded as the Brotherhood’s supreme religious authority, has praised Hitler for “put[ing the Jews]in their place” and has issued fatwas condoning suicide bombings, attacks on Israeli children, FGM, wife-beating, and stoning homosexuals to death.
Read the rest here.
Unlike numerous blogs and websites in the US who have appropriated our material without a single credit, The Times generously credited the assistance of the GMBDW editor. As Breitbart writes:
Steven Merley, an American intelligence specialist with a decade of experience researching the Brotherhood, who assisted The Times with their investigation, said:
“Brotherhood-affiliated organisations in Europe have traditionally been heavily dependent on funding from Gulf sources. The money supply once seemed unlimited, but that’s changing and they needed to find a way to insulate themselves from potential funding problems in the future… To meet Islamic requirements they can’t get involved with interest-bearing assets, but property is seen as an Islamically compliant vehicle for building wealth. Britain is central to the Brotherhood’s European activities and Europe Trust’s role is significant.”
The GMBDW believes that The Times articles is the first and only major media to ever report on the finances of the Global Muslim Brotherhood.
The GMBDW editor’s investigations into the Europe Trust and FIOE began in 2004 when he was working with the Wall Street Journal on a series of articles about the Muslim Brotherhood in Europe. In the December 2005 Journal article that was published on the Trust, the editors chose to omit any mention of the real-estate portfolio because they thought the holdings were not ‘financially significant.” Since that time, as The Times has noted, the holdings have grown to £8.5 million ($13.2 million). Our editor’s work on the Europe Trust continued in a 2008 NEFA Foundation report on the Federation of Islamic Organizations in Europe (FIOE).
Since the inception of the GMBDW, we have reported on the activities of the Europe Trust including that in 2008, local government in Berlin, Germany had rejected plans for construction of a 4800 square meter Berlin mosque and culture complex sponsored by an Islamic association linked to the Muslim Brotherhood. An earlier post had reported that the project was backed by an Islamic association whose earlier plans for the construction of a facility twice the size were rejected after running into trouble in 2004 when German media revealed that the property was actually purchased on behalf of the European Trust by Ibrahim El-Zayat, the leader of the Islamische Gemeinschaft Deutschland (IGD) and still a Trustee of the Europe Trust as reported by The Times.
In addition to the reporting on the Europe Trust, The Times also published an analysis of the Muslim Brotherhood by journalist Andrew Norfolk that begins:
Those who urge the West to engage with the Muslim Brotherhood hail its supporters as democrats who denounce terrorism and espouse universal values of freedom and human rights.
European followers are said to have cast aside the movement’s fundamentalist roots in Egypt to become political Islam’s voice of moderation and ideal interlocutors for governments desperate to divert young radicals from the murderous jihadism of Isis and al-Qaeda.
Dissenters counter that the modern Brotherhood, which operates in at least 70 countries, is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. The movement’s conversion to the virtues of the ballot box was dismissed as short-term pragmatism by opponents who predicted that, once in power, the Brotherhood would change the rules.
Read the rest here.
The original Times articles can be found here, here, and here.
Two more articles in The Times series on the Muslim Brotherhood will be published and we will cover those over the next days.
