Congress Nears Move To Designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a Terrorist Organization

Momentum has built for the U.S. government to formally designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization in the weeks since President Donald Trump’s Middle East trip, lawmakers and other sources familiar with the effort tell the Washington Free Beacon.

While the parties involved iron out the final details, sources working on the effort said that lawmakers have multiple avenues to financially cripple the Muslim Brotherhood, a global Islamist organization that preaches terrorism against Israel, the United States, and Western governments.

The recent push began building steam last month, when the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP) held a closed-door briefing for congressional staff that "focused on developing strategies to ban the growing threat of the Muslim Brotherhood in the United States," the group said in a press release.

The Muslim Brotherhood is already designated as a terror outfit in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Syria, and Bahrain. But the United States has failed to follow suit, even though Congress attempted multiple times in the past. During Trump’s first term in office, officials in both the White House and Congress began laying the groundwork to sanction the Muslim Brotherhood’s global affiliates, but a formal designation never materialized.

With Trump back in office and the GOP holding slim majorities in Congress, insiders say a fresh push to designate the Muslim Brotherhood would likely draw broad Republican support. It also has the important backing of key Arab allies that already identify the Brotherhood as a purveyor of violent extremism and discussed the issue during Trump's visit to the Gulf states.

"There are several ways the U.S. designates groups as terrorists, and they do different things so Congress may have to choose between options, but momentum is building," said one senior GOP congressional source who works on Middle East and counterterrorism issues. "President Trump went to the Middle East and had an amazingly successful trip, in which he heard from our allies about their concerns—and most of those allies consider the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization."

An Arab official agreed, saying many Arab states would like to see the United States take action against the Muslim Brotherhood.

"Any of the countries in the Middle East who have already designated the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization would welcome the United States doing the same," the official told the Free Beacon.

One method the United States could use involves classifying the Brotherhood as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO), which would sanction the group’s leaders and freeze its assets. A second option would see it added to the Specially Designated Global Terrorist (SDGT) organization list, which imposes similar financial penalties, according to those briefed on the effort.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas) has long sought tougher action against the Muslim Brotherhood and told the Free Beacon that now is the right time to get it done.

"The Muslim Brotherhood uses political violence to achieve political ends and destabilize American allies, both within countries and across national boundaries," Cruz said. "The Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood is Hamas, a terrorist group which on Oct. 7 committed the largest one-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, and which included the murder and kidnapping of dozens of Americans."

The Brotherhood, Cruz argued, "used the Biden administration to consolidate and deepen their influence, but the Trump administration and Republican Congress can no longer afford to avoid the threat they pose to Americans and American national security."

Rep. Ashley Hinson (R., Iowa), who sits on the House Appropriations Committee's Homeland Security subcommittee, said the Trump administration’s ongoing efforts to target terror factions tied to the Iranian regime could provide the groundwork for an expansion that covers the Muslim Brotherhood’s international affiliates.

"[The] Muslim Brotherhood—or any terrorist organization, for that matter—should be designated as such," Hinson told the Free Beacon. "I’m thankful to the Trump Administration for defending the U.S. from our adversaries and brutal terrorists—something Biden failed to prioritize. Peace through strength is back in the White House, and we must continue signaling deterrence."

A 2023 ISGAP report noted that when "Hamas was created, it designated itself as ‘one of the wings of Moslem Brotherhood in Palestine.'" While the Brotherhood’s Qatari branch was formally dissolved in 1999, its "ideology, network, and influence remain prominent in Qatar today, having developed a mutually beneficial relationship with the royal family."

ISGAP executive director Charles Asher Small said the Muslim Brotherhood’s decades-long promotion of radical anti-Israel ideology contributed heavily to the rise in Jew hatred following Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack.

"We are witnessing the consequences of the Muslim Brotherhood’s long-term plan to undermine democracy from within," Asher Small said in a statement. "The recent wave of violent unrest in the United States—which has included threats to Americans, their safety and their lives, vandalism, and the destruction of property—is the result of a radical ideological infrastructure led by the same forces associated with the atrocities of October 7, carried out by the Palestinian chapter of the Muslim Brotherhood—Hamas."

The Brotherhood, he added, "is backed and financed by the Qatari regime. Qatar is not only their main financier—it is their enabler, their host, and their lifeline."

Jonathan Schanzer, a former terrorism finance analyst and executive director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, noted that any effort to designate the Brotherhood as an FTO is likely to face headwinds in Washington.

"The Islamist lobby, backed by Qatar’s untold billions in soft power investments, will push back fervently," Schanzer said. "The way forward is likely to approach the problem piecemeal, designating the most violent branches under the SDGT designation." Over time, he added, these designations could result in "a wider, blanket proscription."

The Muslim Brotherhood, also called The Society of Muslim Brothers (Hizb al-Ikhwan al-Muslimun, also Jamiat al-Ikhwan al-Muslimin), and usually shortened to Ikhwan al- Muslimun (Muslim Brothers), or simply Ikhwan (the brothers), is the most extensive and influential of the purely political Islamist movements organized in the Twentieth Century. It is the nexus from which all Sunni-dominated Islamist movements trace their heritage. It was the obverse of the Wafd, the liberal, constitutionalist, and nationalist political movement launched by Saad Zaghlul Pasha (1850-1927) following the end of World War I.

The Muslim Brotherhood was founded by Hassan al-Banna, a recent college graduate, who with six associates met in Ismailia, Egypt in March 1928 and pledged to live a life devoted exclusively to Islam. Banna claimed it was the loss of the Caliphate in Turkey, and the tangible sickness that existed within the Muslim community (umma) that led he and five followers, all in their early twenties, to create the Ikhwan whose credo would be “The Kuran is our Constitution.” Commencing with the small handful of intitiates, by the end of WWII the Ikhwan had about 500,000 members in Egypt alone. In 2005 it had branches in 70 countries, and its members were numbered in the millions.

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