Ali warns against prevalence of Brotherhood ideology in Europe

CAIRO – Director of the Center for Middle East Studies in Paris and Chairman of the Board of al-Bawaba News Institution, Abdul Rahim Ali, said Tuesday that terrorism always starts at the level of ideas.

If these ideas are not countered, he said, they spread into every corner of society and turn this society into a fertile soil for extremism.

He warned at a seminar at the headquarters of the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France, against religious discrimination taking root and growing in European societies.

Ali revealed that non-Muslims are denied the right to be members of societies owned and run by the Muslim Brotherhood in European cities.

Non-observant Muslims, he added, are also sacked from these societies.

He noted that the internal laws of the Muslim Brotherhood societies in a country like France, for example, bar the membership of women in these societies.

Women, he said, can never head these societies of be members of their boards.

Ali said women were never allowed to be members of the office of the supreme guide of the Muslim Brotherhood, the decision-making organ of the group, in Cairo since the founding of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928.

Ali’s seminar at the premises of the European Parliament in Strasbourg is a clear victory for him against the background of pressures exerted in the past weeks by Qatar and the Muslim Brotherhood for the European representative institution to cancel the event out.

In making this pressure, Qatar and the Brotherhood shuddered at the prospect of Ali divulging more secrets about terrorism financing and the activities of the International Organization of the Muslim Brotherhood in Europe.