A former leading figure in the Muslim Brotherhood has told the JC how large sums raised as charitable donations have gone to fund the militant activities of Hamas and other groups.
The revelations have sparked calls for the British government to close down organisations like the Muslim Brotherhood that are already banned as terrorist organisations in other countries.
Abdurrahman Bin Subaih Al Suwaidi was convicted of trying to overthrow the government of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) but has now been pardoned by the president.
The former director of funding for the Muslim Brotherhood told the JC that “millions of dirhams” (one million dirhams is £200,000) were given as charitable donations to organisations including Hamas.
He said: “Hamas says the money is for one thing, but use it for something else. It’s the conflict between what Hamas talks and how Hamas walks.”
Al Suwaidi was speaking for the first time since his release from prison. Now living in Dubai, he had served three-and-a-half years of a 10-year sentence.
He said: “We were polishing the leaders of Hamas with this money, making it seem they were doing charity work on the one hand, like building schools and sponsoring children, then, on the other, knowing what it was really being used for... but behind the scenes, we couldn’t really check.
“We supported the Taliban, groups in Bosnia, the Philippines, Chad, Djibouti, you name it. A lot of the money got into the wrong hands.”
Set up almost a century ago in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood has a network across more than 70 counties and is now considered a terrorist organisation by the US, Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Hamas was founded as the Palestinian branch of the group.
Al Suwaidi was asked to raise funds to support the 2006 parliamentary elections for Hamas but through official channels, such political campaigning was forbidden.
“We could only utilise the secret channels for this,” he said.
A huge team of lawyers within the Muslim Brotherhood helped to ensure they kept out of trouble with the law, according to Al Suwaidi.
He said: “When it came to groups like Hamas, everything was done in cash so there were no traces of what we were doing as we couldn’t transfer directly.”
He explained the inner workings of the group, which groomed its members over decades to help them reach positions of power from universities to government, preachers in mosques to journalists.
He said he was recruited as a young teen, taken into what he saw as a religious youth group where he learned the Quran, played sports and met new friends. But his life changed on his first trip to the Afghan border with Pakistan at the end of the Eighties.
He told the JC: “It was here that I started to do military training and many of my colleagues went on to join the Mujahideen. For me, I thought I was there for ‘relief’ but in the end, it was more about fighting. This was not my life mission.”
He warned: “This organisation is still very dangerous. “A ‘terrorist’ is more than holding a gun.
“This ideology is more difficult than holding a gun, than violence. It’s affecting people’s minds and is much more dangerous. You can hide ideology. You can’t hide a gun.”
A 2015 British government review said the Muslim Brotherhood was not “linked to terrorist-related activity in and against the UK”.
In the Middle East, the report described a “complex and situational relationship, in a region where political violence was and is common.”
It said the group historically had “engaged politically where possible. But they have also selectively used violence and sometimes terror in pursuit of their institutional goals”. The UK government has since resisted calls for it be banned.
The military wing of Hamas is proscribed in Britain but not the political wing, despite calls by pro-Israel campaigners to treat the two bodies as one.
Caroline Turner of UK Lawyers for Israel said:
“Terrorist organisations such as Hamas or Hezbollah do not have separate ‘political’ and ‘military’ wings. They should be proscribed in full and closed down in the UK and other countries.”
