What the U.S. Gets Wrong About the Muslim Brotherhood

How can you tell the difference between a terrorist and an extremist? Both seek to subvert and even overthrow the established constitutional order. To achieve this aim, a terrorist uses violence and an extremist? Well, he may never detonate a bomb or fire a shot. But the story he tells about history and politics taken to its logical conclusion certainly justifies political violence. And all the while, he builds his network of fellow travelers, often hiding in plain sight. Lorenzo Vadino is the director of the program on extremism at the George Washington University in Washington, D.C. His focus, the Muslim Brotherhood. He is a top expert on this shadowy, secretive and revolutionary movement. For years, Lorenzo has warned, though not necessarily a terrorist organization, the Muslim Brotherhood in the United States is an extremist movement. And he believes that when it comes to the Brotherhood, the U.S. government has been far too naive. I'm Thomas Small. This is my conflicted conversation with Lorenzo Vadino. Lorenzo, thank you so much for coming on conflicted. It's great to meet you. I'm so pleased to discuss this very important topic with you. Thank you. Pleasure to be here. What we're talking is because last month, the Trump administration signaled that they were planning to declare the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization. More specifically, Trump signed an executive order directing the Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, and the Treasury Secretary, Scott Besent, to consider designating specific Muslim Brotherhood chapters as foreign terrorist organizations, focusing on branches in the Egypt, Lebanon, and Jordan. We don't want to exaggerate. It's not like the Trump administration is just saying the whole Muslim Brotherhood is a terrorist organization. It's a little bit more complicated than that. First of all, what do you, Lorenzo, suppose the behind-the-scenes discussions were like, which resulted in that policy? First of all, you're very correct in pointing out that the devil is in the details, and I think you've seen a lot of headlines saying that the Trump administration has banned the Muslim Brotherhood. That's definitely not the case. What you outlined is the very complicated process, which might or might not end up with the designation of those three branches, or maybe only one of them, so it's absolutely working progress and much more narrowly defined than what some people think. That is very much the mirror of a bill that has been introduced a few months ago by Senator Cruz, Ted Cruz from Texas, as the main proponent of the bill, but it's relatively bipartisan bill that seeks to ban the Muslim Brotherhood, and it's very different from previous bills that have tried to designate the Brotherhood in the past, which are really very half-assert attempts by isolated members of Congress, but are very unnuanced in the way they were drafted. The Brotherhood is better, terrorists that designate them, let's designate the whole organization, and those bills in the past have seemed quite a few of the last ten years, had no traction whatsoever, had no support in Congress. The bill by Cruz has a much broader support, whether it will be needed, will be voted upon, but it will be passed, that's difficult to say, but it's pretty much the same language as the executive order, and it points to, I would say, a good part of the Republican Party with some support from some factions within the Democratic Party that are concerned about Islamism in general, are concerned also by groups that are not, let's say, openly directly beyond the pale terrorist, like ISIS, like Al-Qaeda, but are, let's say, one step or half a step removed from terrorism, like the Brotherhood. Of course, this is a very divisive topic, you will find a variety of opinions on it, but in general to your question, I think there's a good part of mostly the Republican Party that for a long time has talked about the designation of the Brotherhood, and I think now it's doing so not only because it has power, being at the White House, having relative majority in Congress, but it also has sort of refined the play compared to the past. There are lots of institutional players involved, the White House obviously, Trump himself and his advisors are looking to satisfy some longstanding campaign promises. I supposed to respond to anger in his base, maybe after his meeting with the New York City, Mayor-elect, so Ron Mamdani, I think too much can be made of this, but obviously Trump is always involved in political calculations, and the Republican base, the MAGA media ecosystem, especially, have long urged a rather hawkish approach on the Muslim Brotherhood. Then there's the State Department, now past State Department guidance has repeatedly cautioned that the Muslim Brotherhood writ large is not a terrorist organization. There is some internal friction there, maybe. The Treasury Department always concerned with mapping financial networks and assessing whether designations might be enforceable or not, useful to disrupt terrorist funding, especially towards Hamas. That might have been one way into their contribution to this new policy, and then there's the National Security bureaucracy. Their consensus has also been quite dovish, I think, on the Muslim Brotherhood. They tend to stress that they're non-violent Islamist actors, they distinguish them from designated terrorist organizations. It's a complicated business, I suppose, to start this conversation. What is the Muslim Brotherhood? I've been reading about studying and researching the Muslim Brotherhood for years on and off, like talking to top think tankers in D.C., intelligence agents in the Middle East even. And yet if I'm honest, I still don't know how to define the Muslim Brotherhood or even how to conceive of it. I sometimes think is there even such a thing as the Muslim Brotherhood? Is it truly a shadowy organization or is it just a shadow, like a figment of anti-Islamist or even Islamophobic minds? Is it a conspiracy theory? Now I know that's not really true, there is a Muslim Brotherhood, but you are truly one of the world's top experts on the subject. So could you please tell me what exactly is the Muslim Brotherhood? First of all, I've been studying it 25 years, I share a lot, not all, but many of the doubts we just expressed at 25 years. My biggest claim is that I understand maybe 10% of our words, because there's no question, but it's a very shadowy movement. It does exist. I have no doubts in my mind about that and I have no doubts about certain aspects of it. Now before I give you what I see as the definition of what the Brotherhood is, secrecy is a key element in the Brotherhood's DNA. It is the element that probably more than anything else has allowed the movement to survive almost a century of repression in a variety of Middle Eastern countries. That's actually a big debate among Brotherhood in the West. The part of the Brotherhood that I studied the most, whether that secrecy should be adopted also in the West or by operating open democracies or whether they should shed it. So we don't know a lot about the Brotherhood because of the secrecy that the organization has. You have written that the Brotherhood is not a monolith, quote unquote. It's closer to a transnational school of thought than a centrally commanded entity. That was back in 2011. I mean, is that still the case in your mind? No, absolutely. I think so. I'm probably into some degree even more, but with some caveats. To see it as a monolith that Cairo, the brotherhood in Egypt, which is the historical birthplace of the Brotherhood, where it all started with the biggest and most influential branch, operated, gave marching orders to all Brotherhood spin-offs and actors all over the world. Sort of the way we would have seen communism back in the 50s and 60s with the coming term and Moscow, that was incorrect even back then for communism because the Italian Communist Party or the Spanish Communist Party were more free to operate that they were not given a fax every day telling on what to do. But that's even more true for the Brotherhood. There are different branches in different countries. They are scribe to the same word view, but each of them is free to operate. Each of them has its own structure and its ability to operate according to the local circumstances, which obviously very case by case. Those entities, while independent, belong to a brother family. There is no question that there are individuals that are influential. There are constant communication among the different branches, which often lead to coordination on certain issues and at times don't lead to fights between different branches. Like any big family, there are differences in views at times, but at the same time, they have a common approach, a common doctrine that hasn't really changed. But just to make sure that I've understood, it did begin as something like a real formal organization in 1928, in Egypt when its founder Hassan Albena founded it as a kind of revivalist sociopolitical Islamist movement directly influenced by similar movements in the anarchist or Bolshevist space in Europe. So it was initially genuinely an organization, but over time you say that there is no global headquarters directing all its branches. It does remain very structured, very hierarchical, very bureaucratic in each country. So you will have the Egyptian branch of the Brotherhood, the Libyan branch of the Brotherhood, the Algerian, the Jordanian, the Syrian, whatever, even in the West. You will have even the Swedish branch of the Brotherhood, the Spanish branch. Each of these branches has a structure, is very much a formal organization. A bureaucratic, extremely hierarchical, with very clear rules and a structure that is very similar from country to country. What happens is that we have dozens and dozens of these branches, and they don't belong to the same organization, therefore the executive order leading to potential designation. Very correctly makes a distinction between the different branches and talks about the Egyptian, the Jordanian, the Lebanese, and indeed it might be, I'm not going to express an opinion, that one of those branches does engage in terrorism and another doesn't. But all of them within their country have a very strict hierarchical structure and BR organizations through and through. What I don't think is correct to see is to see all these different entities, which will be like 60-70 entities all over the world, functioning as one transnational organization. At the transnational level we have a more informal movement in which the top guys kind of know everybody kind of knows everybody, very similar financial pipelines, they cooperate on certain issues, Palestine being one, they coordinate the messaging, they do a lot of things together, but at the same time everybody does their own thing, operating in their own, let's say jurisdiction. Okay, so you say that you don't want to really adjudicate at the moment which of these national organizations are involved in terrorism or not, I mean in terrorism of course is a loaded term. Certainly one of those organizations, Hamas in Palestine, he's involved in, at the very least, violent insurgency as they would understand it. I think the Lebanese organization is implicated in similar sorts of activities, but then in countries like Egypt and Morocco and Tunisia, the Muslim Brotherhood manifests more as political parties participating to the extent they're allowed to in a more or less pluralistic system, whether that is simply opportunism on their part or not as always, always being debated. And then in the West and throughout the, let's say Muslim diaspora, it's slightly less cut and dry, there's a more like a gradualist institution building activism sort of network of organizations and we'll talk about that in a second. But if the Muslim Brotherhood is not a global organization, but is a transnational school of thought, and if it is ideology that unites the different chapters of the Muslim Brotherhood globally, then what is that ideology? I think the organization, the Muslim Brotherhood itself would say, look, it's just Islam. And a lot of their detractors, let's say on the right, would probably agree with them. This is just Islam, it's a threat, there's no subtlety there. But most people would say no, the Muslim Brotherhood's ideology is Islamism, it's a different thing. But it is sometimes hard to discern the difference. So what is that ideology? Of course, the difference is there is that Islamism is a political ideology that uses parts of the religion to pursue political goals. And I think there's a lot of polling that shows that the majority, not just of governments in the Arab world, but of people in the Arab world, reject Islamism in different ways. It depends kind of how you ask the question, but reject the Brotherhood. And I think the Brotherhood since 2012, '13 has been a deep dive when it comes to popularity that tells you a lot that people can distinguish between Islam and Islamism, particularly in the Arab world. I think it's us in the West, but at times it's a bit more of a challenge in doing so. The ideology seeks the gradual, you used the word gradualism earlier, the gradual Islamization of society. Obama had his gradual plan, he started with the Islamized individual and the family all the way up to the state, doing so through proselytism, through Dawa, through politics, although violence is never completely abandoned. And there's a tool. I think this is the one big issue that comes where we evaluate the Brotherhood from an ideological point of view. The Brotherhood has never abandoned, never disavowed violence. It disavows violence when tactically it's not a smart thing to utilize. You will read Karadawi or other top of the ideologist for the Brotherhood. They will always say that. They will never say that violence is morally wrong, but they simply say that it's not the time. It's not the place. Groups like ISIS or Akhidah are just misguided because they use it in a non-calibrated way and not at the right time. So the idea of the Brotherhood is according to the circumstances. We calibrate how much non-violence and how much violence we use. We choose in a smart, patient way what are the tools that allow us to the goal, which is the Islamization of society, and once the society is Islamized, the natural consequences of those would be the full application of Islamic law and the establishment of an Islamic form of government. There is a difference between Islam and Islam, but when you describe it that way, the Muslim Brotherhood seeks gradually the Islamification of society. It's hard for me to distinguish that from Islam, which for so many centuries was involved in something like a political project to create an Islamic society. Is it that the Islam that there islamicizing society with, is it different from traditional Islam? What is there Islam in their mind? What do they think Islam is? And how does that differ from what let's say a normal early 20th century Muslim thought? First of all, we need to understand what is classical Islam and traditional Islam would be very different in Saudi Arabia from Indonesia or Bosnia or Morocco. So first of all, they are very different. That's one of the big criticisms of Islamism that became very apparent, not just in theory, but in practice during the Arab Spring, is the very vague connotation of what that Islamic state would look like. The inability that Islam is forced to, I'm thinking about Egypt and Tunisia, had in making this very nicely sounding project become something concrete. How do you run a country with just these big statements, Islam is the solution, which has been the brotherhood model for decades. Well, the moment push came to shove, there wasn't really much of a concrete idea on how to fix potholes and how to run an economy, they were instead a lot of superficial and highly polarizing gestures that led to a polarization of society. The criticism that many people would make, and this is not just from a Western point of view, but from Muslim point of view would be that it would be insisting on very conservative viewpoints that would be fairly intolerant to groups, including minorities, including women, of course, in the few brotherhood texts that seek to define, again, in very broad vague terms, what that formal government should be, they argue well, some kind of democracy, the constant of shura of consultation should be used, but it's consultation among them. It's also this group of self-appointed brotherhood leaders or Islamist clerics are the ones who should be ruling. The accusation would make it that basically it's a system that is poorly defined whether out of incapacity or because they don't want to define it, so that among themselves they can rule any country it would create without really much of a check and balance behind it. I see. Well, maybe it is more than anything that idea of a monolithic political structure that should unite the whole Muslim world and beyond, maybe that's what makes the Muslim brotherhood distinct from traditional Islam, which had great diversity, as you said, but we are not here to talk about the Muslim brotherhood in general, but the brotherhood in the United States and how the Muslim brotherhood, let's say infiltrated, quote unquote, Muslim society and organizations in America, and indeed in some cases non-Muslim organizations, but before we do that, could you describe what Islam was like in the United States before the Muslim brotherhood arrived in America in any form in the 1950s? Presumably there was Muslim migration to the States in the 19th century alongside all the migration from the Mediterranean and Eastern Europe and elsewhere, and of course many people will have heard of Islamic movements affiliated with black Americans, African Americans, but then of course some of the original slaves brought to America from West Africa must have been Muslim, some of them at least, so tell us the story and in brief of Islam in America before the Muslim brotherhood arrived. As you correctly said, the brotherhood arrived in the mid-50s, early 60s, and we are talking really about a few hundred individuals and really scattered incidents here and there of people who came to America, most of them almost by coincidence, so not part of a plot to Islamize America or anything, the various per se. They arrived in a country where Islam was fairly unknown, you only had very few Muslims compared to today, numbers were very low, majority number wise were people that indeed ever had, as you correctly said, an African-American background that came mostly as slaves centuries earlier, and practiced forms of Islam that I would say most people would say probably be corrupted by their time in America, very distant from what people would define as, let's say, pure Islam, a bit hesitant to use these terms, but clearly had evolved in America away from classical Islam. And there had been just a few years before the brotherhood came to America, there had been movements that used Islam from a sort of a black nationalist perspective, so reinforcing the diversity and the strength of the black identity, sort of antagonistic to the white, Christian majority and used Islam, but again at times it sort of swayed into a bit of a cult of personality, talking about nation of Islam, a mourish temple, this sort of groups that some define as sects. Yeah, I think the nation of Islam is the most famous, it has its devotees, they were bowties and they proselytize amongst fellow African-Americans and they have been very controversial, they adopt quite antagonistic, as you say, attitude towards the white majority. And they have, let's say, views that are very different from traditional Islam, including a very almost cultish devotion to its founder and leader to the point that most Muslims would not see him as Muslims, Malcolm X is a very good example of somebody that got it started in Islam with the nation of Islam and broke away from it, the famous pilgrimage to Mecca and then became Sunni Muslim and thinking that nation of Islam was really not Islam. You had then that small immigrant communities, mostly from Lebanon and Syria, actually quite well integrated, not Islamist in the least, in fact there was an organization of Federation of Islamic Organization of America that was present in the 1950s, it was relatively small, the communities were scattered throughout the country. So a fairly invisible presence at the time. So before the 1950s say the US had Islam, but no Islamist activism, no large Sunni institutional network, no major religious student organizations, so it was basically immigrant communities. But then Muslim Brotherhood members arrive in the United States, initially from Egypt, is that right? There are two groups and again we're talking about a few hundreds, I mean if you thousand people in the 50s and 60s, we're really talking about small numbers, you have a minority that were senior Muslim Brotherhood members who were escaping persecution in the countries of origin. There's a couple of really big names of individuals, so there are prominent members of the Egyptian Brotherhood who were very close to the brotherhood founder Hassan Al-Banna by the mid-1950s, the Egyptian regime was cracking down brutally on the Muslim Brotherhood, some of his individuals fled, many of them fled to the Arab Gulf, some fled to the West, and some found refuge in America. We're talking about a very tiny number, a few dozen maybe individuals like that, but very senior. The larger group were students. The brotherhood is an elite organization, I'm hard pressed to think of a brotherhood member who doesn't have at least a graduate degree. So these are people who further their studies in American University graduates of universities back home in Egypt, in Syria, in other Arab countries who got admitted to universities, often it was engineering or medicine, the genetic technical subjects and they came to America. Again, it wasn't part of a concerted brotherhood plot to Islamize America, it's more individual stories, but these individuals who shared a more conservative and politicized interpretation of Islam came together on college campuses because they are the ones interested more than the generally secular Arab students who are on American college campuses, both of that more of a religious inclination, and is a misclination, started building the first small mosques, small Muslim organizations, primarily on college campuses. So in your view, there is no evidence that the Egyptian Muslim brotherhood headquarters, for example, sent activists to America with an official plan in the 1950s, nothing like that. Zero, never seen anything like that, and actually quite the opposite in the evidence pointing out, but it's really isolated individuals. If we are talking about the beginning, if we're talking about the 1950s and 1960s, the brotherhood in Egypt at the time, his main goal was to survive, not to spread to Kentucky. So once these Muslim brotherhood members had settled in the US as individuals, they quickly began to form study circles or families, the classic brotherhood microcell. Tell us about that structure and how these American emigres formed them. Three characteristics to define the brotherhood, secrecy, selectiveness, organization. And that's how the brotherhood functions at the micro level all the way to the top. So what happened is that individuals who came to America started recreating the microunit of the brotherhood back home in Egypt or Syria or other countries, which is the Ustra, his family in Arabic, which would be the microunit of five, six, seven individuals that meets regularly. So it's local. So let's say we're talking about Milwaukee, Wisconsin. There will be maybe 20 students in different universities in the Milwaukee area. They would create two, three Ustra's, two, three families and they would meet once a week and everybody would have a task in the Ustra. The Ustra is a place where their things are discussed from religion to politics, to activism. Activism means at the local level or at the global level. But Ustra is really, as the word says, a family is a big part of your social life because the people in the Ustra, first of all, total secrecy, you don't reveal to outside people that you belong to the Ustra and all the other members of the Ustra are very difficult to penetrate. Again, reason for the brotherhood survival for a hundred years in the Middle East is that secrecy that exists and that unit is really the center gravity of your life. You often marry the sister or the daughter of somebody that is in your Ustra or the other Ustra locally, you often do business with them, there's a relationship of faith and trust with these individuals in your Ustra in particular, but also the other Ustra that is unparalleled to any other person you might have in your social life. It's also the way the pyramid of the brotherhood functions. You have Ustra at the local level and then different levels all the way up to the leadership. Now of course in a country like Egypt, where you had in its heydays more than a million members, full-fledged members, it would be a very big pyramid. In the U.S., we're talking about a few thousand individuals, a microversion of the version you would have in any Arab country. So Ustra's are being established, informal, let's say leadership hierarchies are developing in America, and eventually in 1963, some of these individuals at least build the Muslim Student Association, the MSA, which is the first national Muslim organization in U.S. history, is that right? What did the MSA do? MSA brings together this very initial core of activists, of students, mostly with a bit of the supervision of some of the adults, some of the people who came to America already as full-fledged brotherhood members, keeping my bet, the process to become a member of the Muslim brotherhood at a very complex one, it lasts five, six years on average, of vetting, very complicated, very selective. The MSA brings together this core activist, mostly in the Midwest, that's sort of the core of the brotherhood, at least at the time, and then of course there's people nationwide. And it organizes events, it starts spreading publications, translating the texts of Al-Falbanan, how the brotherhood leaders, it organizes conferences, and we should see it as we sort of double structure of the brotherhood. There's a secret structure, this is the pyramid of the brotherhood, where only full-fledged brotherhood members, people who have sworn allegiance to the brotherhood, they are part of a only day, no of a very part of that structure. Then there's a parallel structure, which is not exactly the mirror image, but it's very similar, but it has public facing entities. Like the MSA, not everybody but as a member of the MSA would be a brotherhood member. Of course the people that really call the shots behind it tend to be majority brotherhood members. The MSA is used therefore to spread the brotherhood narrative to a larger audience. Also it's a very useful place to spot a new talent, to see who could be the next members of the brotherhood, because you see activists, how they operate, who's clever, who's not, and that's a recruiting pool. And it's a way for them to operate in the public, creating alliances. I don't necessarily love the word infiltration of society, I know it's used a lot. Let's call it interaction with society, because of course nobody interacts that member of the MSA, but no organization that calls itself MSA, but they use more public facing entities with names that give a different impression. So things are developing. And then in 1981, as part of a multi-day training session for MSA members in the United States, a man, Zaid Al Noman, I suppose his name is, a senior Muslim brotherhood figure. He gives an internal lecture to help train members who have come together for a training session. And he describes something like a formalized U.S. brotherhood structure, and even talks about five year plans and such like. So something much more official is now in place. By the mid-70s, there's a very complex structure. So the microversion of what you have in Arab countries with the Ustra and the Pyramid, the Shura Council at the top, it's very, very sophisticated. It's, that is because of three reasons. Many more people coming, more students, people settling in the United States, more organizations being created, the MSA is only the first. The brothers everywhere they go, they have this hyper tendency of creating countless organizations, very specialized. That's for a variety of reasons. A lot of funding coming in, mostly from the Arab Gulf. So you have really a boom of brotherhood structures and organizations. And as a very bureaucratic, very strategic minded organization, the leaders of the network there decide, understand that they need to plan, they do planning, do the five year plan, which is somewhat reminiscent of the communist five year planning. Of course, they describe the different elements, the different organizations, the name names, of what are sort of the public facing organizations in the United States. And they argue what the strategic vision for the brotherhood should be. And they divide it in different phases. The first phase would be what they call the settlement of the Daoah, the first phase in which the group places its roots in the country, sets up a structure in organizations. And proselytizes, Daoah means proselytizes. Correct. And so it creates its roots, it understands the environment, it attracts new people. And then it does, whether you want to call it an infiltration or an engagement, an interaction, with society to advance the goal. So the brotherhood, Al-Naman also uses language that is quite troubling when it comes to actually what the long term goals for that engagement should be because it talks about a civilizational jihad, I think the quote is a civilizational jihad to destroy the miserable house of the infidels from inside. Charming. I see. Not necessarily what they would put on their pamphlets that they put through the doors, but it's illuminating. It is illuminating. And it matches with other documents that have been found in Europe and in other places, in very similar timings, in very similar circumstances in which brotherhood leaders, have random individuals scribbling down notes, but leaders, senior board members, with the equivalent of a board meeting. These documents were found by the FBI, been introduced as evidence in a federal trial. So nobody can really challenge the authenticity of these documents. I think some critics would argue, well, it was just one individual who wrote them. There's no indication that it was approved as a plan for the brotherhood, true, and my bitch were, but at the same time, this is very senior individuals that write these things and present them to, again, the equivalent of an annual board meeting of the brotherhood. It makes it very clear that that's at least one big line of thinking. And how is it that you're able to study this lecture that was given in 1981? Did it leak somehow? No, it's just published with public documents. The FBI found it during a raid of brotherhood operative that was scouting a bridge. And so we go back to the violent or known violent. The operation that led to the uncovering of a document was this individual going back and forth on a major bridge on the East Coast with his main event and taking pictures that the FBI clearly saw as not the pictures you and I would take to admire a big river and a big bridge, but clearly as surveillance operation, bed led to a search warrant of his house and eventually to find a bed document. It was introduced as an exhibit in the 2008 Holy Land Foundation trial in Dallas, Texas. So just an exhibit in a federal trial. Anybody can go on the website and the federal court in the northern district of Texas and find it. So when you're talking about raids and trials, now you're in the war on terror era. So that sort of jumped history a bit. But I'd like to focus a little bit on the 90s before we get into the war on terror era which changed things for the Muslim brotherhood because I think it's fair to say that I don't want to be reductivist or to engage in any dog whistle speculation. But immigration from Muslim countries to the United States began to increase and multiculturalism as a kind of governing ideology became more pronounced. So presumably in the 90s and into the nauties, the Muslim brotherhood was well placed to benefit from a culture of greater liberalism and openness. To be clear, you've emphasized in your work that that none of these organizations are like formal chapters of the Egyptian brotherhood. They're all best understood as American organizations shaped by Muslim brotherhood ideas and personnel, you know, people who are members, but they're their own beast. But nonetheless, you know, in the 90s with the expansion of multiculturalism, would you say the brotherhood benefited? And maybe this is where we can talk about care, the council on American-Islamic relations, which often people say is a Muslim brotherhood organization, though they deny it. What is care? The history of a lot of these organizations that are among the most visible and vocal players in the Muslim organized space, but I highlight visible and vocal, which doesn't mean the most representative is a big difference between the two concepts. Here is the most active on the political level, and it is like Muslim-American society is very active at the grassroots level, Islamic society, North America. You have a whole jungle of organizations, which of course have a lot of overlap in terms of personnel, activities, and so on. They all trace their roots, not just ideologically, but in terms of founding members to the brotherhood. If you have an organization who seven out of eight of your founders who are full-fledged open Muslim brotherhood members, if for 20 years you published and disseminated the books of Aslan Al-Banna, it's a walk-like, a dog-talk-like approach to the education. It talks like a brotherhood member, it's a brotherhood member. You can play the game as much as you want, but nobody is stupid here. Now, of course, I'm open-minded enough to think that some of these entities have moved on. There's new generation, although you can see Kair being a good example of it, but the leadership has remained the same as when it was founded in 1994, so it's very complicated to exactly assess whether they are directly linked or not. I'm sort of caviating myself. You did say that these entities are independent, but then we occasionally see moments in which they're not so independent, for example. Independent investigation carried out by the Canadian tax authority, not the Antivir, most people look at, but they basically did a very intense scrutiny of what the local brotherhood leaning organization there. What we found after one year investigation and going over more than 300,000 internal emails is that individuals who moved to Canada, brotherhood members who moved to Canada from Egypt, from Lebanon, from other Arab countries, could move their membership in the brotherhood by sending their file over to this entity. It's much more structured and organizational because you have emails, "Hello, my name is so-and-so. I'm member of Ustra number, so-and-so in Cairo. I am moving to Montreal to study at university, so-and-so. I was told that I can transfer my brotherhood membership by sending over your file to you, public-facing organization in Canada." Is that true? Absolutely, brother. We can do that. It's like moving from UC Berkeley to UCLA. You see what I mean? It's clearly something that transcends the ideological connection that moves into something more operational. Bottom line, I would say, a lot of these entities trace their roots there, and perhaps it's fair to say that while for the most part operation independent, advanced the goal of the global Muslim brotherhood, they know what the goals are, they know what the goals for the Islamist movement broadly intended as we did at the very beginning of our conversation as an informal movement. They do not need to gather daily marching orders from Cairo or from Gaza or from any other place. And they advanced the agenda of the Islamist movement independently without the structural connection. Well, you mentioned Gaza there. We also mentioned the trial of the Holy Land Foundation, in which care, this council on American-Islamic relations was implicated. This does shine a spotlight on one unifying ideological dimension of Islamist activism, Israel and Palestine. So where does the Muslim brotherhood and its affiliate organizations in the United States stand in terms of that larger discourse about Israel? Is Israel a focus of their attention? A hundred and ten percent, I would say the main one, and it's funny that a group like care defines itself as a civil rights organization in America, devotes an inordinate amount of its attention to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and you cannot help but see the history of the group. But is exactly in the Hamas leadership in America in the 90s, back in 1993, another very interesting document. Again, public, found by the FBI, introduced by the Department of Justice in the trial, is a day-long wiretap of leaders of the Hamas infrastructure in America discussing their way forward, how to support Hamas in America, understanding that a designation of Hamas as terrorist organization by the U.S. government was forthcoming and indeed it came a couple of years later. And what was individuals discussed was the idea, we know that it's going to come, we should create a new structure, a new organization, and a new system to push the Hamas narrative in ways that is more palatable to an American audience. We cannot be the word that they use, we cannot be barbaric talking, we cannot talk about terrorism, suicide bombing, but build a narrative that is palatable, and that's how we advance the Hamas agenda, they say we should describe the Hamas leaders as exactly like the founding fathers of America, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson fighting against the foreign occupation for the liberation of the land. We go back to the point that every brotherhood leaning entered in each country knows the political debate in each country, what would fly in country A would not fly in country B. So they fully understand that and that's how they discussed it internally. 25 years later on U.S. college campuses where maybe Jefferson and Washington are not exactly beloved by part of the student body, the language that they use to support the Hamas narrative is more the language of post-colonial theory, oppression, white supremacy, and so on. So students for justice in Palestine, which is an organization that comes from this milieu historically doesn't refer to Israel as Israel, it calls it of course Palestine, but doesn't call America America, it calls the Turtle Island, because of course both Israel and America in SGP narrative are colonial entities that are assurping native populations. This overlaps with sort of what I was saying about how beginning with the 90s a new kind of politics began to emerge in the United States, and you know part of that politics involved to NGOs and other such charitable groups getting involved in politics often from a left wing perspective, although in their own minds they were confronting a right wing media ecosystem that grew in the same time as society became more polarized. But you know that strange lockstep march that we see sometimes radical Islamists making with other activist types on the left shows that the Muslim Brotherhood and its affiliate organizations are adapting politically, adapting their messaging, adapting their da'wa, the way in which they proselytize to moving in line with these wider trends really at the university level, because as you said, the Muslim Brotherhood has almost always been, especially in the diaspora, a highly educated kind of organization. You're 100% correct and I think when earlier I used some adjectives to define the Brotherhood, I should add one more, which is flexibility. And that's really remarkable on all levels how a group that can be as dogmatic as the Brotherhood on certain aspects on its ideology can be extremely malleable, extremely flexible when it comes to political alliances. You're 100% right that a lot of these alliances tend to be with the progressive left and I, despite having looked at this for 25 years, I'm still at times mesmerized by some of the alliances with the LGBTQ organizations and, you know, some of them very often seem very, you know, illogical. And I'm a bit of a contrarian here because everybody's been looking at this sort of what people call the right green alliance, this sort of Islamist with progressive left entities. There's no question about this happening, I think, on college campuses. We saw that the early reminiscent of the Iranian Revolution where, of course, we know what the Islamist did to their Marxist fellow travelers after we got in power. But the Brotherhood works with everybody, the full political spectrum. In the United States, there's no question that they created extremely strong alliances with groups on the left from the extreme left to some groups like Code Pink, for example, to fairly mainstream politicians in the Democratic Party. But I would be remiss if we didn't talk about some of the alliances on the right that they have made in the United States. We've done that in several moments, historically. Before 9/11, the Brotherhood in America was more of a Republican leaning, the Democratic leaning for two reasons. There's social conservatives, and they tend to be very wealthy, the American Muslim community tends to be wealthy. And so they don't like high taxes. And on these two fronts, they're very close to the Republican Party. You'd see a lot of Brotherhood entities putting out press releases saying that their votes said the Muslim votes are mobilized, God Bush elected in the 2000 election against Al Gore. And whether that's true or not, it's debatable. But the point is that they were leaning Republican. Then the war on terror came, and the pendulum swung completely because, of course, more the right saw Islamism as a big threat. Islamist found the common cause more with the left. Pre-October 7, so I would say three years ago, with the war on terror basically being a memory of the past, and the big issues being a lot of the, let's say, gender identity issues, LGBTQ, there was back to the alliance between the evangelical right and Islamist on issues related to, let's say, books about LGBTQ in schools, and you had instances of Islamist and evangelical Christians picketing schools throughout the country against the more liberal worldview. Again, Islamist will ally with anybody who advances their cause. It doesn't matter to them. Perhaps that's also a sign that at the present, the Muslim Brotherhood and its organizations in the United States is even less cohesive or monolithic than before. I mean, obviously on the one hand, as you say, there's flexibility built into the system, so they can pivot as they see fit. But at the same time, some of them might pivot, maybe the younger ones, pivot in a post-colonial left-leaning direction and support that kind of thing. Other ones, maybe older ones, will pivot more towards a MAGA, adjacent, anti-trans, anti-woke kind of narrative, maybe because they're not so unified at the moment. If we fast forward to the present to the end of 2025, Texas has designated care as a terrorist organization at the state level, Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas, has designated the Muslim Brotherhood in Texas as a terrorist organization. But at the same time, where does the Muslim Brotherhood actually stand in America today? Are we looking at a movement that is genuinely influential? Has its power declined? What do you think? Very difficult to say. Starting with your first point, as to whatever splits, ideological splits inside, I don't have an answer to that. I mean, I have different ideas, different views, and I fight with myself over what the answer to those questions is. On some level, being extremely cynical, you can argue that they're just using a divide and conquer approach. Some of their activists are aligning themselves with MAGA, and some others are aligning themselves with the ultra-progressive left and everything in between. We just cover the full political spectrum, and that would yield some results because both sides are going to eventually win some and lose some. That's a very cynical view. I think there's another less cynical view, which is to say that, as any movement, it evolves with time, and there will be splits, and there are people who are now second, for generation, American born, they inevitably adopt the political ideologies other than Islamism, and so there are beliefs in some, say, progressive or the conservative ideologies is heartfelt and not cynical and facade. You can have both theories, and I don't think we're in a position to really say how it is at this stage. But things have changed in America. If, when the Muslim Brotherhood individuals arrived in the '50s and '60s, they came to follow ground. I mean, there wasn't much of a Muslim presence, and it hadn't been organized. That's not so much the case now. There has been a diversification of Islamic authority in the meantime, and the Muslim Brotherhood. I think it doesn't dominate mosque boards and chaplaincies and student organizations to the same degree as in its high water days in the '80s and '90s. There are sufis around that compete for Muslim attention, salafis of the more Wahabi, Saudi-oriented variety that are anti-Muslim Brotherhood, and then like third generation Muslims quite progressive, we all see them. They're indistinguishable from any young, left-leaning American in the way that they talk and the way that they dress, so I think maybe the Muslim Brotherhood just has less authority over the hearts and minds of American Muslims than maybe they did 30 years ago. There's no question that it's a very heterogeneous environment, and there are many more competing forces. They're absolutely right. Let's stick to the point that we're talking about a relatively small group of movement, which you want to call it, but number-wise, nobody here is suggesting that they dominate the Muslim space, and I think particularly the grassroots level that is true. Now the flip side of that, and this is the challenge of the beauty of the brotherhood. Everything is true, and everything can be somewhat challenged. The Brotherhood outpaces all the other groups when it comes to organization, funds, and operational skills. I'm hard-pressed to find organizations at the national level that can compete with some of those that you and I mentioned, like Care and so on. I cannot think of one that really competes, there have been some attempts. I think at the local level you will find people, you will find prominent personalities, some small local organization, but at the national level, no other Muslim trend as the ability, the resources, or even the inclination to compete with brotherhood spin-offs. The Brotherhood's finances are rooted in a tithing system for initiates into the organization, or rooted just in the fact that the average member is well-off, professionally successful, or are there foreign governments involved, where does the Muslim Brotherhood's money come from? It's a very opaque word, obviously. I would make my educated guess this year. The funds that come from the fees that each member has to pay, which ranges from 3% to 5% depends that there is more part of it. 3% to 5% of their income each year. It's a small percentage, that's not really what makes the difference there. There are other mechanisms that have historically allowed the Brotherhood to outpace every competing Muslim group. The main one, no question, historically has been foreign funding, coming from a variety of Gulf countries. Today, being mainly Qatar, that's the reality of it, for the last ten years being almost exclusively. Qatar have not semi-isolated individuals here and there. The second mechanism, they have very sophisticated fundraising mechanisms within the United States. As we said earlier, the American Muslim community is a quite wealthy community, there's pockets of wealth, Silicon Valley, for example, where they can organize fundraisers and gather $20 million in one night, easy. That's a big part of it. And finally, people overlook that. Some of these organizations have become very good at raising public funds. You mentioned Texas and the designation of the Brotherhood and Care as terrorist organizations. At the same time, Brotherhood linked organization in Texas over the years have received millions in public funding from the state of Texas, but we can apply that to federal level or pretty much every state in the country, because they run K-12 schools, because they run initiatives against racism, they run initiatives on immigration and a variety of things. Of course, they do not do so as Muslim Brotherhood entities, and they do get a lot of public funding. A combination of resources of funding leads them to be extremely well funded. Again, together with the organizational skills and the inclination to be political allows the entity to operate, at least when it comes to visibility and political access or media visibility in a way that no other competing Muslim trend can. It's another sign of that kind of, I don't know, what do you want to call it, multi-culturalist, NGO, bureaucracy, democracy we have for ourselves. But if you're savvy, you can get a lot of public funds, and though the city councilor or the state governor or the senator who thinks that they're providing money to educate people or to help charity, some of that money, God knows where it ends up. As for Qatar, if you say it's the beauty of the Muslim Brotherhood, they're one thing and they're another thing, Qatar has also stymied all attempts to really understand what its policies are across a huge range of things. Here on Conflicted, we have tried to work it out, I find it particularly difficult. Lorenzo, we've got to bring this fascinating conversation to a close. Given everything we've discussed, the rise, the evolution, and maybe the partial decline of the Brotherhood in the U.S., certainly they are in the firing line now. What do you think policymakers in the U.S. consistently misunderstand about the Muslim Brotherhood? If it was up to you and you could correct one misconception right now, what would it be? I'm very happy you asked that question, because this has been a point I've been trying to convey for a long time with very limited success. I don't like the very dichotomous approach that the U.S. has towards the Brotherhood. I think in this conversation, we've looked at how everything about the Brotherhood is fairly opaque. Terrorist, not terrorist, yes, there's violence, but not violence, looking at the Brotherhood solely through the lenses of terrorism, whether it's a terrorist organization and therefore we ban them and we throw the book at them, or they're nothing, they're not, and they should be allowed to operate as freely as if they were the nicest organization on the planet, seems a very silly and short-sighted, black or white approach. I like the German approach to it, and some Europeans, but Germans in particular, the German Security Services have three categories. They have the terrorist organizations, I guess it's like Al Qaeda, exactly like in the U.S. If you're designated illegal and providing support to them, put you in prison, great. You have entities that are nothing, they're no problematic, and then you have extremist organizations, and the Brotherhood falls exactly in bad category in Germany, and I think there should be. Extremist organizations in Germany are allowed to operate, they're not illegal, but they're under the microscope and they're limitations to what they can do. And the microscope means that the German Security Services, whose name is Verfassungschutz, protection of the Constitution, that's the name of the German State, and it tells you to be the mindset the Germans have. Well, it reminds us of German history, they know about extremist organizations working in a clandestine way to suddenly, you wake up one day and you're living in a completely different country. That is exactly what the Germans would say. Out of our experience, our history, we know that democracy can be subverted from the inside. We monitor also groups like the Muslim Brotherhood, who are not directly terrorists, but they are subversive and extremists. So they put them in bad category, so the German Security Services have not the right, but the duty to monitor the Brotherhood, and in fact, every year we'll read at the federal and state level annual reports that detail the operations of the Muslim Brotherhood in Germany. And second, there are limitations to what the Brotherhood can do. For example, individuals who are identified as Muslim Brotherhood members cannot receive asylum in Germany, or they cannot hold certain positions in the German government, so there are a bunch of limitations which make sense. Even if there is no designation, it doesn't mean that then you should just say, "Oh, well, they're free to operate." There are several things that you can do once you assess of this group is problematic that you should do to limit their influence. The US has a very high threshold of tolerance to extremist organizations, much higher than Europe. Coco Kutslan is a legal organization in America, but very few entities, very few public entities would fund KKK activities, very few politicians would get their pictures taken with KKK activists. I'm not necessarily making the equivalency between the Brotherhood and KKK, although I think there's something there, but they should be treated in a similar fashion. You hear that, President Trump, not a terrorist organization, but dangerous subversive extremists. That's what it sounds like Lorenzo would like you to think about the Muslim Brotherhood and to respond accordingly. Keep your eyes more closely peeled upon it. I've learned a lot. Your expertise is pretty breathtaking. Thank you very much. Thank you. My pleasure. You've been listening to Lorenzo Vadino, director of the program on extremism at the George Washington University in Washington, D.C. The argues America needs something like Germany's system for distinguishing terrorists from extremists. And after our discussion, I've found myself thinking that framework might be exactly what this debate has been missing. To follow Lorenzo on social media, you can find all his links in the show notes. His books include the new Muslim Brotherhood in the West and the closed circle, joining and leaving the Muslim Brotherhood in the West. The show notes also have links to those. Remember for even deeper dives, including Q&As with my co-host Amundine and Real Insider Intel, join the Conflicted community, check the show notes for how to subscribe. This coming Tuesday, Amund reveals his forecast for 2026. News flash, full blown war may be returning to the Middle East sooner rather than later. I'm Thomas Small, thanks for joining me. Conflicted is a message-heard production. Our executive producers are Jake Warren and Max Warren. This episode was produced and edited by Thomas Small.