LMB: Front of Muslim Brotherhood in Brussels

Ali Rajab

The European continent is the target of the international organization of the Muslim Brotherhood. There are more than 500 Muslim Brotherhood organizations in 28 European countries, as stated by the Saudi Crown Prince, Prince Mohammed bin Salman, in April 2017. He said: “The Brotherhood’s main goal is to turn Europe into a Muslim Brotherhood continent.”

The Brotherhood’s incursion into the European continent began in the 1950s, coinciding with a failed attempt to assassinate President Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1954. If the Brotherhood began to establish charities and foundations in Europe, it would have later become political. Belgium was one of the first European countries to have established Muslim Brotherhood institutions.

In Belgium, the Brotherhood founded the League of the Muslims of Belgium {Ligue des Muslmans de Belgique (LMB)}, the most important organization of the Muslim Brotherhood, where the association was founded in 1997, by Moncef Shattar and Karim Azouzi. Belgium’s League of Muslims has been governed by 10 mosques and has headquarters in five Belgian cities, including Brussels, Anvir, Ghent, Liege, and Vervres, and is run by a professor of biology, Karim Shamalal, who lives in Anver.

Ligue des Muslmans de Belgique (LMB) is a member of the Union of Islamic Organizations in Europe (IBEW), which brings together Muslim Brotherhood organizations in some 28 European countries. It is a union of the Muslim Brotherhood in the European continent and is supported by Qatar. The Belgian newspaper «Levif» reported that the LMB received about 1.81 million euros from the Qatar Charity Association, put by the Arab quartet (Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Bahrain) on the lists of terrorism.

The newspaper added that an official at the Qatari embassy in Brussels played an important role in supporting the budget of the LMB, which contributed to the purchase and establishment of a Muslim school in the city at a total cost of about 3 million euros. Tariq Ramadan, the grandson of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood Hassan al-Banna, who is accused of several harassment cases, lectured at LMB institutions and presented a vision of the Brotherhood’s ideology.