UK civil society media is reporting that the charity known as Islamic Relief has joined the ranks of organizations protesting its inclusion on the recent UAE list of terrorist organizations. According to a Third Sector report:
Islamic Relief USA
November 18 Islamic Relief has strongly denied any links to terrorism after being blacklisted in the United Arab Emirates.
The UAE has named the international humanitarian aid and development charity as a terrorist organisation along with two other British Islamic organisations – the think tank the Cordoba Foundation and the Muslim Association of Britain – on a list of more than 80 organisations, groups and associations from around the world including Al Qaeda and Hizbollah.
The Muslim Association of Britain and the Cordoba Foundation also rejected claims that they were linked to terrorism. TCF said it was ‘no coincidence’ that the organisations named had criticised the UAE for violating human rights and oppressing its citizens.
Employees or volunteers of the organisations on the list face arrest if they enter the UAE, and funds passing through its financial system risk being seized, according to a report in The Times newspaper.
In a statement on its website, Islamic Relief said that it was surprised to have been identified as a terrorist organisation. ‘We abhor terrorism in all its forms, and we categorically refute any allegation of links to terrorism and any such accusations that have been made by the UAE,’ the statement said.
The above denial can be found on the web page of Islamic Relief UK, a branch of Islamic Relief Worldwide that issued its own denial.
Islamic Relief Worldwide (IRW) is headquartered in the UK where one it’s chairman of the board of trustees is Ibrahim El-Zayat, a leader in both the European and the German Muslim Brotherhood. Mr. El-Zayat is also a trusteeof the UK branch of Islamic Relief. Islamic Relief Worldwide is also listed as a company in the UK where records indicate that Dr. Ahmed Al-Rawi, the former head of the Federation of islamic Organizations in Europe (FIOE) and former of the Muslim Association of Britain (MAB) has been a director at one time. Both FIOE and the MAB are part of the U.K. and European Muslim Brotherhood. Another member of the board of Islamic Relief Worldwide is Essam El-Haddad, a longtime Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood member a former adviser to Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi. A third former member of the Islamic Relief company was Issam El-Bashir, a Sudanese national with multiple ties to the Global Muslim Brotherhood.In May 2006, the Israeli government announced the arrest of an IRW worker for activities related to supporting Hamas and said that IRW activities in the Palestinian territories ” are carried out by social welfare organizations controlled and staffed by Hamas operatives.” In June 2014 , the GMBDW reported that the Israeli Defense Minister had banned Islamic Relief Worldwide from operating in Israel saying that it is involved in sending cash to Hamas.
The GMBDW has been monitoring the reactions of the various organization who almost universally say they are astonished at being included on the list, claiming to be merely innocent “civil-society” groups. We reported yesterday on an insightful article observing that the list included numerous organizations tied to the Muslim Brotherhood in the US and Europe. As we noted in that post, tthe GMBDW believes that much of the confusion over the ties of groups such as identified in the article would be resolved if there was a greater acceptance of the notion of the Global Muslim Brotherhood, a concept which we first start publicly expounding in this publication in 2007. We have noticed a trend towards increasing mention of the term over the years but until there is a far wider acceptance of the reality of the global Brotherhood, groups such as those included on the UAE list will continue to be “astonished” at being publicly linked to the Muslim Brotherhood.
