Emmanuel Razavi

However, awareness seems to be growing, and there is every reason to rejoice. On 4 May, Gérald Darmanin announced to Le JDD that he wanted to combat religious separatism by launching a mission on political Islamism and the Muslim Brotherhood. It will be entrusted to two senior civil servants, François Gouyette, former ambassador, and Pascal Courtade, prefect of the Yvelines department, who will assess the threat posed to France by the followers of Hassan al-Banna (founder of the Islamist brotherhood).

However, the mission in question seems belated, to say the least, given how much has already been said and written on the subject, and that a commission of enquiry into radical Islam has been organised for 2019.

And yet we want to believe that the Minister of the Interior is well aware of the danger. He is ideally placed to know the extent to which the discourse of the Muslim Brotherhood is a vehicle for violence.

Let’s look at the facts, which have been well-documented for decades: the Muslim Brotherhood, the matrix of contemporary jihadism, spread from Egypt in 1928. Their brotherhood, fiercely anti-Semitic and anti-Western, is present in “more than 70 countries”, in the words of its vice-guide Mohamed Habib, whom I interviewed in Cairo in 2007 for the Arte channel. He explained to me that it was well established in France, Spain, Belgium, Germany, England, the United States and Canada, where it had penetrated universities, large companies, private religious schools, mosques, hallal food shops and the world of associations, the media and politics.

At the same time, I met Essam el-Erian, the organisation’s spokesman in Egypt. This doctor-turned-activist had praised the qualities of his childhood friend, Ayman al-Zawahiri, then number 2 in al-Qaeda. Two of its young executives also took me to task, telling me straight out that if France didn’t give in on the Islamic veil, it would be “set on fire”. Years later, in London, the Muslim Brother Azzam Tamimi, an Anglo-Jordanian academic and political activist, told me about the digital and economic jihad that his “brothers” were preparing to wage against the West.

Peaceful, the Muslim Brotherhood? Contrary to what pseudo-Islamologists of the calibre of François Burgat would have us believe, not really. The Muslim Brotherhood intends to seize power through the ballot box and, if it does not succeed, to take it by force of arms.

A global caliphate, with France as its stepping stone in Europe

What are the aims of the Muslim Brotherhood? Establish Sharia law, organise society around the values of early Islam and restore the Caliphate. Its two main sponsors are Qatar and Turkey, not to mention Iran and Russia, whose secret services skilfully use the Brotherhood to suit their geopolitical interests, even in European universities.

Considered by experts to be the matrix of contemporary jihadism, the Islamist organisation, whose French leaders are more adept at wearing three-piece suits than wielding Kalashnikovs, appears on the surface to advocate an Islam that is compatible with the Republic. You’d like to think so, except that his story is quite the opposite. In the years following its creation, its leaders opted to set up a secret armed wing and a strategy of infiltration, the devastating effects of which we know today.

In the 1960s, the Muslim Brotherhood spread to the Maghreb, where thirty years later it spawned the Islamic Salvation Front, followed by terrorist groups such as the Armed Islamic Group (GIA), the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC) and al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). At the end of the 1980s, they gave birth to al-Qaeda, with Osama Bin Laden being mentored by one of the organisation’s leading activists, Abdallah Azzam, nicknamed the “Imam of Jihad”. Closer to home, in 2014, the Brotherhood supplied a number of cadres to ISIS. And then there is the Islamic Republic of Iran, whose founder, Ayatollah Khomeini, was inspired by the theories of Seyed Qutb, the ultra-radical theoretician of the Islamist brotherhood.

We’ve known almost everything about the Muslim Brotherhood and its plans to infiltrate our institutions for a long time now.

But here’s the thing: successive governments over the last forty years have not wanted to see or know anything, ignoring the warnings of specialist journalists and our intelligence services alike.

Meanwhile, the “Brothers” patiently pursued a strategy of Islamisation of Europe, working within a multitude of associative structures that cheaply defended the persecution suffered by the Palestinians and explained to us that Hamas was not a terrorist organisation, but a “resistance movement”.

This, of course, combined with the concept of victimisation of Muslim populations living in the West, has meant that in less than four decades they have institutionalised communitarianism and overturned the foundations of secularism.

The most serious thing is that the action of the Frères, relayed by the extreme left-wing parties, has installed a form of revisionism in France that has led to a rise in anti-Semitism. Just take a look at Sciences Po Paris, to understand just how much damage the unholy alliance between Marxism and Islamism has done at the very heart of the elite factory.

To have endorsed the Muslim Brotherhood through so many institutional representations is not only an attack on the values of universalism, but also on the dignity of Muslims in the West, who have ended up being wrongly assigned the role of victims, as if the contribution of the Enlightenment and secularism were not accessible to them.

As I explained in a book published a few years ago, this anti-integrationist, fundamentally relativistic premise is in fact the real racism hidden by the victimist rhetoric of pseudo-anti-racists, who defend Islamists under the guise of multiculturalism.

We need to react and act now!

Make no mistake: while we are currently witnessing a rise in radicalism among young Muslims who have been “re-Islamised” by imams who take their orders from Turkey and Qatar, their parents often left their countries of origin in search of a world of freedom. Watching helplessly as their children were taken away from them, those among them who denounced this reality were systematically ostracised, suspected of Islamophobia or affiliated with the extreme right.

I know something about this, because being of Iranian origin and having many Muslims in my family, I was one of those who raised the alarm.

So it’s high time we heard the truth and avoided falling into the trap of a future confrontation that the Islamists want. Because we are heading straight for it, with the aforementioned purveyors of funds for radical Islam intending to take advantage of the weakness of democracies to impose their plans for Islamic republics, or even caliphates.

The response will therefore have to be commensurate. Otherwise, our democracies will unfortunately be weakened for a long time to come.