Sweden at the forefront as Europe awakens to drying up sources of Brotherhood funding

Aya Ezz

Europe is awakening to the need to dry up the sources of Brotherhood funding on the continent, with Sweden prominently moving over the past week to confront the terrorist organization.

According to the Swedish newspaper NLT, Stockholm has officially moved against the Brotherhood’s institutions, following similar steps by Germany and Austria, which has dealt heavy blows to the terrorist organization and limited its sources of funding.

According to the newspaper, several Swedish cities, led by the western city of Gothenburg, stopped funding the Ibn Rushd Educational Association, which serves as the Brotherhood’s arm in the country.

This step prompted broad political demands to ban funding for the group in all parts of Sweden, which is expected to be discussed by the government in the coming weeks, according to Swedish newspapers.

In the same context, the Swedish newspaper said that the Ibn Rushd Educational Association invites extremist personalities and incites violence and the carrying of weapons, as well as violence against women, in its various seminars and activities. It explained that one example of this happened in 2018, when the association invited Nourredine Khadmi, a Brotherhood leader in Tunisia, to deliver a seminar, during which he incited youth at the time to travel to Syria for jihad.

The newspaper continued, “Despite the storm of criticism that faced Khadmi’s participation in the Ibn Rushd Forum in 2018, the association continues to invite him to its activities today.”

The other reason for Gothenburg and other cities stopping the funding for Ibn Rushd is that two of the seven organizations affiliated with the association, namely the Muslim League and the Swedish Muslim Youth League, also had their funding suspended by the government because their activities do not conform to democratic values. The Muslim League in Sweden also belongs to the Federation of Islamic Organizations in Europe (FIOE), the Brotherhood’s umbrella organization in Europe.

According to the newspaper, a spectrum of politicians, especially those who belong to the Swedish Democrats, will press the parliament and government in the coming weeks to stop funding Ibn Rushd throughout the country.

Drying up Brotherhood’s sources of funding

Sweden’s move to dry up the sources of funding for the Brotherhood’s institutions, which was preceded by a move by Germany that halted government funding for the Islamic Relief’s branch in the country in March, according to the German news site Jungle World.

According to the site, the German government was able in recent months to uncover the the Islamic Relief Organization’s relationship and affiliation with the Brotherhood, including funding this organization for the Brotherhood’s activities and conferences in Germany. Therefore, the German Foreign Ministry dried up one of the most important sources of income for the Islamic Relief Organization, which is German government aid.

The ministry told Jungle World that the Islamic Relief Organization no longer receives funding from the German government, whether for supporting medical care in Syria or any other projects.

The Islamic Relief Organization in Germany received aid from the German Foreign Ministry, amounting to €1.5 million in 2017 and €2.5 million in 2018.

According to the website, the donation campaigns organized by the Islamic Relief Organization in Germany have been negatively affected, as well as the income of the organization in 2019 and 2020, when the German government officially announced in April that it had discovered personal and institutional links between the organization and the Brotherhood.

The matter did not stop there, as the German Parliament in February referred a draft resolution to the Committee on Internal Affairs for study, providing for strong oversight against the Brotherhood in Germany, without a final decision coming from the committee until now, due to parliament’s preoccupation with facing the corona virus.

The Brotherhood has a strong presence in Germany through many organizations and mosques spread across the country.

The German Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution subjects Brotherhood institutions and their leaderships in Germany to its oversight and classifies them as a threat to the constitutional and democratic order.

Austria is on the front line

In recent days, Austria also took several steps to dry up the sources of funding for the Brotherhood, including the establishment of the Center for Documentation of Political Islam. Vienna is betting on the minds of the best experts to defeat the ideology of the Brotherhood and other extremist Islamist currents.

The center began operations at the beginning of this summer after its structures were completed, its leaders were appointed, and the state allocated an initial budget of half a million euros in order to monitor the Brotherhood and extremist organizations in the country.

The center’s role is to document extremist political Islamist movements and analyze their trends, especially the Brotherhood, as well as document their crimes. In March 2019, a law banning symbols of the Brotherhood and other terrorist organizations in Austria came into effect.