Lorenzo Vidino: How the Muslim Brotherhood quietly threatens the West

The West offers the “ideal environment” for an organization like the Muslim Brotherhood to carry out its operations “because we are extremely tolerant,” says Lorenzo Vidino, an expert on the Islamist organization.

The Muslim Brotherhood has inspired or spawned some of the world's most dangerous terrorist organizations. Yet its goals, strategy, structure, and financing remain poorly understood – even by many of the world's leading national security and intelligence agencies.

The Brotherhood’s long-term goal is the Islamification of society. The West’s tolerance offers fertile grounds for its activities to remain unchecked – creating a national security blind spot within Western democracies.

One of the world’s leading experts on the Brotherhood, Vidino is director of the Program on Extremism at The George Washington University. He joins Inside Policy Talks to share his research on the Brotherhood conducted over the past 25 years.

“In the West, they could operate freely,” explains Vidino. “They can fundraise, they can open mosques, they can disseminate the propaganda, they can carry out all the social, religious, and political activities and fundraising activities.”

On the podcast, he explains in detail to Casey Babb, director of The Promised Land at MLI, how the Brotherhood carries out activities like raising revenues.

He says this involves a combination of receiving money from the Middle East, conducting ventures like real estate businesses in the West, and obtaining funds directly from unsuspecting Western governments.

“It's the ability of Brotherhood networks to receive grants, donations from governments at all levels,” says Vidino.

“It's not like the applicant would be an organization called Muslim Brotherhood of Montreal. It would be some group with a nice sounding name about integration and friendship and interfaith,” he says. “With a bit of naïveté in most cases … policymakers – often second-tier bureaucrats – would give the funding.”