Britain concerned that Brotherhood may use COVID-19 for serving terrorism

Shaimaa Yehia

There are British concerns that the Muslim Brotherhood may use the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic to boost its influence. MP Andrew Rosindell of the Conservative Party has raised his concerns at the highest level of British government, asking ministers to answer questions over the rise in Muslim Brotherhood activities as a result of the pandemic

MP Rosindell asked Home Secretary Priti Patel for her assessment of the Muslim Brotherhood’s activity in Britain as a result of the economic downturn.

He asked Dominic Raab, the Foreign Secretary, for an evaluation of the “global economic downturn on trends in the level of recruitment by the Muslim Brotherhood overseas”.

“I think we have been far too soft for far too long,” he told the Conservative Party Conference in 2014.

“We should take much firmer action and if necessary ban individuals and organizations from operating in this country.”

In February, MP Ian Paisley said the Government should move to proscribe the Muslim Brotherhood, an organization that inspires hatred and attacks on Christians at home and abroad.

“This is an organization that uses and abuses the beliefs of a whole culture to attack Christians and others, which is frightening and wrong. It hides in and uses mosques illegitimately for its hatred against Christians, and it is right and proper that the full facts about the Muslim Brotherhood in this nation are brought out,” Paisley said.

According to The Arab Weekly, all the anti-terrorist procedures initiated by the British government in the past five years, including developing anti-terrorism legislation and methods, monitoring the content of curricula in Islamic schools, examining books read by prisoners and those that are a source for speeches, lectures and sermons in mosques, in addition to tracking the money that comes to Islamic societies or goes to charitable projects have been built on the realisation of these two truths. So, the Muslim Brotherhood was included among the suspicious groups targeted by these procedures, if not at the forefront of them.

The UK Ministry of Justice banned from prisons books such as works of Muslim Brotherhood theoreticians Sayyid Qutb and Hassan al-Banna. Education watchdogs banned from school curricula material that adopted the group’s thought of considering Christians as disbelievers.

Commenting on that, researcher Hisham El-Nagar, an expert on Islamist movements, said that there’s some ambiguity as Britain has not banned the Muslim Brotherhood due to the Brotherhood’s links to the British intelligence service, which uses the organization as a tool for serving its political goals.

“There is a historical factor related to the formation of the Muslim Brotherhood as British colonizers wanted to split the Egyptian society on an ideological religious basis especially after the 1919 revolution.  The Muslim Brotherhood was the only organization capable of causing social division on a sectarian basis,” El-Nagar added.