At the end of the 1950s, Saïd Ramadan, the son-in-law of Hassan al-Banna (founder of the Muslim Brotherhood) fled Egypt and chose Geneva to set out to conquer the West. His son Hani has headed the Islamic Centre of Geneva (ICG) since 1995. His brother Tariq was the best-known French-speaking Muslim on the planet, before vice scandals toppled him in 2017. Even today, the city of Calvin is still largely under the thumb of the Ramadan family. But there was a dramatic turn of events on September 10, 2024. While Tariq Ramadan had been acquitted in May 2023 at first instance, he was sentenced on appeal to three years in prison, including one year in prison, for rape and sexual coercion.
Have our leaders been so naive over the last 30 years as to take Islamists for fervent republicans, or have they simply played a dangerous game of deadly electoralism, believing they were seducing France’s Muslims by agreeing to respond to the communitarian demands of thugs sporting trimmed beards and ties?
Yet how many journalists, researchers and politicians have warned, sometimes at the risk of their lives, of the threat posed by Islamism, and more specifically by the Muslim Brotherhood in Europe? How many martyrs of the Republic, from the Charlie Hebdo attack to the attack on Samuel Patty, did it take to understand the civilisational danger posed by these madmen of Allah?
A group of researchers from the Emirati Trends Research & Advisory center, the University of Montreal and ”Pluriel”, the university research platform on Islam based in Lyon, have been collaborating since 2021 to produce the first academic index capable of measure the global influence of the Muslim Brotherhood. They have just released their first report covering the period 2022/2023. Exclusive extracts.
For decades, numerous books have denounced the dangerous nature of the Muslim Brotherhood. However, until 2011 and the Arab Spring, very little was known about their ability to manage countries. In Cairo, as in Tunis, when they came to power, it only took them a few months, if not a few weeks, to reveal their incredible incompetence. “To rise in the hierarchy of the Brotherhood, you have to obey and, above all, not think. As a result, it’s not the most intelligent who have come to power”, notes sociologist Sarah Ben Néfissa, co-author with Pierre Vermeren of the book “Les Frères musulmans à l’épreuve du pouvoir”1.
The alliance between the far left and the Islamists responds to a supposed ideal of convergence of struggles. However, in 1979 in Iran, this unnatural marriage turned tragic. Once in power, the Mullahs liquidated their Communist and Marxist allies. An example that the extreme left in France would do well to ponder.
On 1 February 1979, as the Iranian revolution entered its final phase, Ayatollah Khomeini, who had played on the alliance between the far left and the Islamists, returned to Tehran after several years in exile. On 31 March of the same year, he proclaimed the birth of the Islamic Republic, becoming its Supreme Guide. He put his closest allies in charge of newly-created ministries, and subjected Iran to Sharia law.
In a remarkable book, entitled “the hidden face of the Mullahs. The black book of the Islamic Republic of Iran”, Emmanuel Razavi, senior independent reporter, regular contributor to Global Watch Analysis, reveals how the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood inspired Khomeini’s Shiite political Islam. Exclusive extracts
Rien ne prédestinait la Force Al-Qods, unité d’élite du Corps des Gardiens de la révolution iranienne (Pasdarans) et l’Organisation mondiale des Frères musulmans à se rapprocher. Pourtant, des documents issus des archives secrètes du ministère iranien du Renseignement révèlent l’inconcevable : des tractations ont bien eu lieu entre ces deux organisations, d’apparence rivales, pour faire face à leurs ennemis communs.
The Islamologist Lorenzo Vidino, an eminent specialist on the Muslim Brotherhood in the West, produced, in October 2023, as part of the program on extremism at George Washington University, a report entitled ”Verbatim: What European Security Services Say About the Muslim Brotherhood in Europe”. Exclusive extracts.
7 October 2023 will remain an indelible date in the history of Israel and in the conscience of the world. A massacre without a name, crimes that even the most necrotic of imaginations would have been incapable of devising. Innocent people had a rendezvous with death at its most despicable. A death deliberately inflicted by fanatical men who had no more than a vague and deceptive notion of humanity.
On 11 October, a large demonstration was held in front of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Brussels. The slogan? “War in Gaza: For a ceasefire and a just peace, against colonial violence and apartheid”.
Reading this text, things are clear: the culprit for everything is Israel. Israel, which colonises, illegally occupies and has shamefully despoiled a territory that does not belong to it, exerting such violence on its inhabitants that the key to peace is now in its hands alone.
