WASHINGTON — President Trump on Sunday revealed his plans to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a foreign terrorist organization amid recent revelations about the Islamist group’s radicalism and growing influence in the West.
“It will be done in the strongest and most powerful terms,” Trump told Just the News. “Final documents are being drawn.”
The move comes on the heels of advocacy from think tanks and lawmakers in Congress.
Last week, Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott designated both the Muslim Brotherhood and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) as foreign terrorist organizations in the state.
The designation by the federal government seeks to cut off financing and any other means of support to the targeted group, among other things.
The Muslim Brotherhood, which was founded in Egypt in 1928, has been cited as having ties to numerous terrorist groups. Hamas, for example, billed itself as “one of the wings of the Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine” in its founding charter.
Just the News reported that there had been growing momentum within the Trump administration to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a foreign terrorist organization, before the president revealed his plan to do.
A chilling analysis from the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy last week found that the Muslim Brotherhood is halfway through its plan to “transform Western society from within.”
“We are now 50 years into the Brotherhood’s 100-year plan to entrench themselves into key institutions in the United States and other Western societies to undermine and destroy our democracy,” ISGAP’s director, Dr. Charles Asher Small, said.
“This is not simply a political movement but a transnational ideological project that adapts itself to Western systems while working to undermine them.”
While there are different branches of the Muslim Brotherhood, the organization has generally championed strict Sharia law and pushed for a caliphate.
A caliphate is a government ruled by strict Islamic religious code, or Sharia law, under which women’s rights are typically severely restricted while extreme forms of punishment abound as its overseers crack down on personal freedoms.
“Globally, the Brotherhood is a gateway to terrorism, infusing members with the religious doctrines and hatred that justify violence,” according to a blistering October report on the Muslim Brotherhood by the conservative-leaning Foundation for Defense of Democracies think tank.
“The most determined of these members then form splinter groups or migrate individually to terrorist organizations.”
Trump’s first administration had mulled designating the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization.
At the time, the Muslim Brotherhood hit back at that label, describing their work as advocacy for “our moderate and peaceful thinking in what we believe to be right, for honest and constructive cooperation, to serve the communities in which we live and humanity as a whole.”
The group’s motto states that, “Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. The Qur’an is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.”
Multiple Middle Eastern countries such as Saudi Arabia, the United Aram Emirates and Bahrain, have branded the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization, while Egypt and Jordan have banned the group.
For months, Republican lawmakers had been pushing the Trump administration to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization.
In August, Secretary of State Marco Rubio indicated that designating the Muslim Brotherhood as a foreign terrorist organization was “in the works.
“Obviously, there are different branches of the Muslim Brotherhood, so you’d have to designate each one of them,” Rubio explained at the time, noting that the State Department was going through a lengthy preparatory process to make the designation.
