Egyptian media is reporting that Dr. Ayman Aly (aka Ayman Ali) has been appointed as the director of the Egyptian Cabinet’s Information and Decision Support Center. According to an Egypt Independent report:
Al-Masry Al-Youm Presidential spokesperson Yasser Ali has been reassigned as director of the Cabinet’s Information and Decision Support Center, and replaced by President Mohamed Morsy’s advisor for Egyptian expatriates, Ayman Ali. Sources said on Thursday that the move was part of a broader restructuring plan for the president’s team that would be presented to Morsy for approval on Saturday. Ali came under heavy criticism for relentlessly denying news reports, and the president wanted to relieve him of this pressure, the sources said. Yasser Ali, 48, was appointed as spokesperson on 30 June. He is a dermatologist who joined the Muslim Brotherhood in 1987, and has a diploma in media from Cairo University.
A post from December 2012 discussed Dr. Aly’s appointment as an adviser to Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi. In June, another Egyptian media report identified Dr. Aly as both a representative of Federation of Islamic Organizations in Europe (FIOE) and one of 100 members of the new constituent assembly that was charged with drafting the country’s new constitution. An Egyptian blog reported following the adviser announcement that Ayman Ahmed Ali was a Muslim Brotherhood member and a physician.
FIOE is the umbrella group representing the Muslim Brotherhood in Europe. A NEFA Foundation report on FIOE described Ayman Aly as follows:
Ayman Aly was born in 1966 in Zarkah-Demiatte, Egypt. 197 In 2001, Dr. Aly was receiving a monthly stipend from the Muslimische Studenten Vereinigung to support his studies in Nuclear Medicine at the University of Bonn. Dr. Aly has lived in Europe since 1994 and has spent six years in “Eastern Europe and the Balkans.” 198 Confidential sources report that Dr. Aly was originally located in Albania but came to Germany because it was easier to run the Balkan section of the FIOE from there. He is the Assistant Secretary-General of the International Islamic Federation of Student Organizations (IIFSO) “having close relations with the Muslim World League and with the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY). 199 200 Dr. Aly is a founding member of the Forum of European Muslim Youth and Student Organizations (FEMYSO), described earlier in this report as the youth wing of the FIOE. 201 Dr. Ali was the head of the Albanian office of the Taibah International Aid Association. 202 As discussed later in this report, Dr. Aly appears to have been operating both the Taibah office and the FIOE office in Albania simultaneously and from the same facilities. In these capacities, Dr. Aly made financial transfers involving the FIOE, Taibah, WAMY, and other organizations linked to the global Muslim Brotherhood described as dubious by a German money-laundering investigation. The FIOE/Taibah in Albania and Bosnia also appear to have been linked to Islamic fundamentalist organizations operating in that area. Dr. Aly currently lives in Austria.203
Dr. Aly is is not the first Western Islamic leader that has now openly declared his affiliation with the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood or other Global Muslim Brotherhood organizations. In August 2012, a post reported that Radwan Masmoudi, the founder and President of Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy (CSID), was being considered for the post of Tunisian ambassador to the U.S. and that he acknowledged for the first time that he has been a part of the Tunisian Muslim Brotherhood since the 1980’s. On the other hand Michael Privot, a Belgian convert and former youth leader in FIOE who in 2008 had openly acknowledged being part of the Muslim Brotherhood, has written in his blog that he has “put an end to all my links and ties with the European Muslim Brotherhood.”
GMBDW notes that it should be apparent to any reasonable observer that the increasing evidence of ties between Western Islamic leaders and Mideast Muslim Brotherhood organization more than suggests the existence of a global network of Brotherhood organizations, far from being the “myth” that some analysts have called such a network.