In recent months, a quiet but consequential shift has been taking place across democratic governments. Argentina this week moved to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization, joining a broader trend of increased scrutiny of the movement’s activities and affiliations.
President Javier Milei’s announcement follows intense action by the US government to dismantle Brotherhood-linked networks at home and in places like Egypt, Lebanon, and Jordan. Individual US states – including Texas and Florida – have also recently advanced measures to restrict or ban the organization’s operations.
Why, you might ask, has there been such broad agreement – particularly among Arab nations – that these actions are not only justified, but long overdue?
It is because leaders across the Arab world have long understood what much of the West is only now beginning to realize. The Muslim Brotherhood is not a danger through action on any battlefield. Rather, it weaponizes the long game of patience and the openness and “tolerance” of enlightened society itself.
Western security policy has traditionally focused on state sponsors of terrorism and armed extremist groups. Iran, for example, still plays its familiar role in this theater, albeit with less confidence and increasing internal decay. But by staring so intently at these obvious villains, our policymakers have managed to miss the quiet man in the corner, politely filing paperwork, founding charities, and organizing youth movements.
For nearly a century, the Muslim Brotherhood has perfected the art of gradualism – an ideology that advances one seemingly harmless step at a time. One school, one community organization, one sporting association at a time. Everything legal.
The Brotherhood’s gradual influence
Everything respectable. All this, while promoting a worldview fundamentally hostile to pluralism, equality, and the very democratic principles that allow it to flourish. Unlike groups that blow themselves up, the Brotherhood has learned to thrive on court rulings, funding applications, and the sacred cow of “dialogue.”
European governments have started to notice the cumulative effects – slowly and painfully. Official reviews and court cases in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Austria have documented the same pattern. Brotherhood-influenced organizations speak the language of civil rights while quietly encouraging parallel societies, communal segregation, and deep distrust in democracy’s legitimacy – unless, of course, democracy delivers the result they seek.
The cost of this ideological ecosystem is no longer abstract, particularly for Jewish communities. Since October 7, intimidation and open celebration of terrorist violence have exploded from Manchester to Sydney. In Western capitals, protesters have praised Hamas, excused mass murder as “resistance,” and discovered a sudden moral flexibility when Jewish lives are involved. This is not a spontaneous moral collapse. It is the Brotherhood curriculum.
Hamas, after all, is not an accident of history. It is a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, nourished by the same antisemitic, absolutist worldview. While not every protester or activist is formally affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, the ideological framework that normalizes support for Hamas, excuses terrorism, and demonizes Jewish identity has been cultivated over many decades.
This also explains the strange pattern of outrage in Western streets: Hundreds of thousands mobilized seemingly overnight in defense of a terrorist organization, while the Iranian regime’s bullets cutting down its own citizens are met with a deafening silence. Evidently, some victims seem to be more fashionable than others.
Arab governments learned these lessons the hard way. Where the Brotherhood was allowed space, it did not coexist – it competed, dominated, and destabilized. The scars of that experience explain why many Arab states designated the Brotherhood a national security threat years ago, and why Western hesitation was met with thinly veiled disbelief.
Lessons from the Arab world
Recent developments in the United Kingdom illustrate this point. The decision by the United Arab Emirates to suspend scholarships for its citizens studying there – citing concerns about Islamist radicalization and extremist influence on some university campuses – reflects a broader fear that permissive environments can be exploited to legitimize extremist ideologies under the cover of academic freedom and political activism.
The European Union now faces a choice. Fragmented national approaches allow transnational networks to adapt quickly, shifting activities across borders in response to local restrictions. A coordinated EU-wide designation of the Muslim Brotherhood would not be an act of repression, but one of self-interest and defense.
This is not a call to suppress religion or outlaw dissent. It is an attempt to draw a line between genuine civic participation and movements that exploit democratic freedoms to hollow them out from within.
Argentina’s decision, the actions of US states, and the long-standing stance of Arab governments are not isolated episodes. They are symptoms of a dawning realization that the Muslim Brotherhood’s greatest advantage has never been popular support, but the West’s reluctance to believe that ideology, when patient enough, can be as dangerous as violence.
The West is finally waking up to this uncomfortable reality. Whether Europe will open its eyes fully – or hit the snooze button once again – is the only question that remains.
The writer is the head of combating antisemitism, intelligence, and security at the World Jewish Congress (WJC).