The Muslim Brotherhood’s hundred year project and the West’s fifty years of denial

When you warn about Islamist organizations in the West, you hear the same sentence again and again. “Come on, this sounds like a conspiracy theory.”

It is not a conspiracy. It is a strategy.

Over the last decades, researchers have traced a deliberate Muslim Brotherhood project to penetrate Western institutions and weaken democratic societies from within. 

Internal documents openly describe the goal of “eliminating Western civilization from within,” not by war in the classic sense, but by patient, organized pressure inside parliaments, universities, media and civil society.

If you take them at their word, we are now around the halfway mark of a hundred year plan.

Civilizational jihad in a suit and tie

What is often called “civilizational jihad” does not look like terrorism. It looks like lobbying, networking and “community work.”

Instead of trying to blow up a parliament, you work to shape who gets hired inside it.

Instead of attacking universities from the outside, you build student organizations, endow chairs, and influence curricula.

Instead of shouting “death to the West,” you learn the language of rights, diversity and anti racism while quietly pushing an Islamist worldview that rejects real pluralism.

Over roughly five decades, Muslim Brotherhood aligned networks have gained access to Western government agencies, human rights organizations, academic institutions, civil rights groups and media platforms. 

They present themselves as the natural representatives of Muslims in the West. They build alliances with progressive and minority groups. Once inside, they work to redefine the vocabulary and the red lines.

They push to decide what counts as “Islamophobia.”

They push to decide who is allowed to speak for Muslims.

They brand critics as racists and work to isolate them.

In public, they speak the language of inclusion. In their own ecosystem, they speak the language of Islamic revival and long term power.

The Qatar connection and the terror ecosystem

No serious analysis can avoid the role of Qatar. For years, Qatari money has been flowing into Western universities, think tanks, media outlets and religious institutions. 

A significant part of this funding is tied directly or indirectly to the intellectual and organizational world of the Muslim Brotherhood.

This is not only about ideas. It is also about hard links to violence.

The same ecosystem that cultivates influence in Western institutions connects to designated terrorist organizations such as Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. 

Charities and front groups that present themselves as partners in dialogue and “civil society” in Europe or North America have, in other contexts, acted as channels of political, financial and ideological support for violent movements.

On one side of the Mediterranean it looks like an NGO. On the other side it is part of the terror infrastructure.

October 7 as a stress test

For readers in the Middle East, none of this is really new. Countries like Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia have lived with the Brotherhood for decades. 

They have banned it, restricted it or faced it in direct confrontation. They understand the ideological DNA of the movement and the way it exploits institutions from within.

What changed on October 7, 2023 is that the Western illusion finally cracked in public.

After the Hamas massacre in Israel, the mask slipped. Western campuses exploded with open support for a movement that proudly films its own atrocities. 

Student groups glorified murderers as “resistance.” In cities that constantly talk about human rights and inclusion, protesters marched under slogans calling for the end of the Jewish state.

This did not happen in a vacuum. The rapid mobilization, the common language, the organized presence on campuses and in activist circles were not born overnight. 

They were the result of decades of patient preparation by networks that are ideologically part of the same world as the Muslim Brotherhood and, in many cases, connected to it directly.

October 7 was the stress test. It revealed how deep the penetration had gone.

The failure of Western elites

The real scandal here is not that the Muslim Brotherhood followed its own strategy. They said what they would do and they did it.

The scandal is the behavior of Western elites who knew, or chose not to know.

Politicians preferred short term quiet and cheap legitimacy to long term security.

University presidents welcomed foreign money and looked away from what was being preached in classrooms and student unions.

Human rights organizations imported Islamist talking points wholesale in the name of “inclusion.”

Media institutions gave microphones and legitimacy to front groups, presenting them as mainstream voices of Muslim communities, while dismissing Jewish fears as paranoia.

Now that the evidence is too visible to ignore, many of these same institutions claim to be “shocked.” They are not shocked. They are exposed.

Why this matters for the United States, Israel and the Arab world

For Washington, this is not an abstract intellectual debate. A movement that seeks long term control over Muslim representation in the West, that builds bridges to violent groups and that carries a totalitarian vision of society, cannot be treated as a routine “partner” in community outreach.

For Israel, the implications are direct. The campaign to delegitimize the Jewish state in Western institutions has not been driven only by naive activists. 

It has been nurtured by structures with a clear ideological lineage that runs back to the Muslim Brotherhood. The explosion of antisemitism after October 7 is not just about the conflict. It is the export of an ideological hatred that has been incubated elsewhere.

For Arab states that have chosen a different path, the picture should be familiar. They have already paid a heavy price for years of Brotherhood activity inside their own institutions, their education systems and their mosques. They know that the first victims of Islamism are usually Muslims themselves.

There is therefore a natural, although still fragile, convergence of interest between parts of the Arab world, Israel and serious Western policymakers. 

All three face the same strategic challenge: a transnational ideological movement that uses Western freedoms to build the foundations of a very different, deeply illiberal future.

A political and moral choice

Some have called for the Muslim Brotherhood to be formally designated as a terrorist organization by the United States. Whether or not Washington takes that step, it is clear that the old model of quiet engagement has failed.

At a minimum, Western democracies need full transparency on foreign funding of universities, think tanks, religious centers and NGOs. 

They need to stop outsourcing “Muslim representation” to the loudest Islamists and start listening to genuine moderates and reformers. They need media that can distinguish between Islam as a faith and Islamism as a political project.

Above all, they need the courage to say openly what many capitals in the Middle East already understood the hard way: the Muslim Brotherhood is not just another participant in the democratic game. It is a movement that uses democracy tactically in the hope of replacing it later.

Nothing in this story is destiny. The Brotherhood’s hundred year project is an attempt, not a law of nature. Whether it succeeds or fails will depend on decisions made in Washington, in European capitals, in Jerusalem and in the Arab world.

The question is simple and brutal: do we still have enough clarity and self respect to defend open societies, or will we keep pretending that those who dream of dismantling them from within are just another voice in the “diversity” choir.