Are media reports that the EU is financing Islamist groups really true?
This article was originally published in Hungarian on the fact-checking website Lakmusz. By Szilárd Teczár
An article on the Hungarian website hirado.hu claimed that the European Commission has given tens of millions of Euros to two “Islamist” pan-European organisations. We look at what is behind these reports and spoke to a former member of the Muslim Brotherhood.
“Brussels is paying Islamist groups tens of millions of Euros” ran the headline on 10 March above an article on hirado.hu, a website that is part of the state-run media.
Quoting an interview with the French sociologist Florence Bergeaud-Blackler that appeared in Le Figaro, the French daily newspaper, the article said the European Commission is giving considerable sums to two groups that are linked to the Muslim Brotherhood: the Forum of European Muslim Youth and Student Organisations (FEMYSO) and European Network Against Racism (ENAR).
According to the article, ENAR received €23 million and FEMYSO €288,000 from the commission. It said that ENAR was an Islamist front organisation, and that it used to be led by a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. It gave no explanation for linking FEMYSO to the Brotherhood and Islamicism.
It interpreted a recent book by Bergeaud-Blackler as saying that “a new Islamist movement has sprouted out of the Muslim Brotherhood”. The article said that in Europe the movement “is keen to present itself as non-violent and moderate” and doesn’t mind linking up “even with LGBTQ organisations”, but its ultimate aim is “to move Europe towards a global Islamic society”.
ENAR co-hosted the second EU Anti-Racism and Diversity Week in Brussels 21-22 March 2023 in the European Parliament. Photo Alain Rolland/EP
Illustrating the article was a photograph taken at the Bataclan club in Paris. The Bataclan was the one of the targets in the 2015 terrorist attacks in the city that Islamic State claimed responsibility for. By using this illustration the website associated the EU-funded organisations not merely with Islamists, but also with terrorists. That link is underlined by the caption:
“Tribute is paid to the victims in the Bataclan hall on the anniversary of the series of attacks in 2015. In coordinated attacks Islamists murdered 130 young people in the French capital. Brussels is generously supporting Islamist groups.”
There is no link at all between the 2015 attacks and ENAR and FEMYSO – nor did the Muslim Brotherhood have any connection with the killings.
However the link between the two EU-funded organisations and the Brotherhood is more complicated. The claims by the French sociologist that were quoted in the article are contentious, and the connection between ENAR and the Brotherhood seems quite arbitrary.
Below, we will look at:
The structure, funding and Hungarian membership of the two organisations attacked in the article;
What the Muslim Brotherhood does in Europe;
The link that exists (or not) between ENAR and FEMYSO and the Brotherhood;
And how far the activity of the two organisations can be termed Islamist.
FEMYSO and ENAR
FEMYSO is a pan-European umbrella organisation founded in 1996 for the continent’s Muslim youth groups. Its website states that FEMYSO would like to become the “leading voice” of young Muslims in Europe, and its aim is the building of a multi-cultural, cohesive, and vigorous Europe. FEMYSO has 31 member organisations in 21 countries, including in Hungary the Muslim Youth Society (Muszlim Ifjúsági Társaság), the youth organisation of the Organization of Muslims in Hungary (Magyarországi Muszlimok Egyházának, MME).
The MME is listed as one of the “members and partners” of the Council of Europeans Muslims, which is often referred to as FEMYSO’s “parent organisation”. However, the MME’s chairman, Zoltán Sulok, told us that the MME left the council’s predecessor, the Federation of Islamic Organisations in Europe, in 2010. The MME has been a member of FEMYSO since 2001.
ENAR has been actively fighting against all forms of racism and discrimination for 25 years. In response to Lakmusz’s questions, it said it deals with anti-Roma, antisemitic, Islamophobic, anti-migrant and Afrophobic behaviour, as well as with women’s rights, among other things. Its website says it represents more than 150 non-governmental organisations, although it names only 133 of them. As befits ENAR’s role as an umbrella organisation, the list includes Roma, Muslim and Jewish groups, NGOs fighting for Black and women’s rights, as well as an organisation representing sex workers and an NGO standing up for the rights of LGBTQ migrants. FEMYSO is a member of ENAR, too.
Detail from the Members Map on the ENAR website. Source: enar-eu.org.
ENAR’s Hungarian member organisations include Sim Shalom Progressive Jewish Congregation (Szim Salom) and the Subjective Values Foundation (Szubjektív Értékek Alapítvány). One other member, United for Intercultural Action, is based in Hungary but the focus of its activity is pan-European antiracist campaigns.
How much money do they get?
Both FEMYSO and ENAR have indeed received EU funds in recent years for a range of projects. Looking at EU funding for the years 2014-2021, which is the period currently available under the European Commission financial transparency system, FEMYSO took part in four EU projects in this period. These involved a total of €563,000, but FEMYSO only received €134,000 since the largest of the four projects involved cooperation with other groups.
ENAR was involved in 14 projects in this period. Out of a total of €15.2 million ENAR received €8.5 million.
To put this support into context, in the same period the Hungarian state also gave funding to the two organisations.
Marcell Lőrincz, the director of the Subjective Values Foundation, told us that it received 180 million forints (more than £400,000) for its Art-trick (Art-ravaló) project between 2018 and 2021 from the Interior Ministry’s National Crime Prevention Council. This was for artistic and occupational training for young people who grew up in care.
Sim Shalom has received an annual one million forints over the past three years from the Prime Minister’s Office through the Gábor Bethlen Fund, the deputy chairman of the congregation, Péter Árvai, told us.
The MME (part of the Islamic Council of Hungary) was officially recognised in the 2011 Church Law. The importance of this is that approved religious communities can be chosen designated by taxpayers to receive 1% of their previous year’s income tax; they are also entitled to budgetary support and to state funding for religious education. Tax office figures show that MME received 8.1 million forints through the 1% tax clause in 2022. The figures for how much budgetary support was given is not available. In 2019 the MME received a total of 9.1 million forints through the 1% clause and budgetary supplements and 1.6 million forints for religious education.
The Muslim Brotherhood
The hirado.hu article stressed that a former head of ENAR was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. This is a reference to Michael Privot, a Belgian Islamologist who was the director of ENAR between April 2010 and August 2021. (Privot was also a member of the FEMYSO leadership team from 2003 to 2007, although this was not mentioned by either hirado.hu or Le Figaro.)
Privot admitted that he had indeed been a member of the Brotherhood.
Born into a non-practising Christian family, Privot converted to Islam at the age of 19. Very few European Muslims have openly admitted to being members of the Brotherhood, and he is one of those few. He “came out” on his blog and in Le Soir (the French-language Belgian daily paper) in 2008 after a US organisation identified him as a member of the Brotherhood in Belgium.
However, he left the organisation a few years later, in 2012: on his blog he announced that he was cutting all connections with the Brotherhood. Speaking to Lakmusz, he said he was a member of the Brotherhood between 2003 and 2012, but after he became the director of ENAR he played no active role in the movement. From 2007 to 2010 he was only active at a local level, in a mosque in Verviers, Belgium.
So what is the Muslim Brotherhood? The conservative Muslim religious-political movement was founded by Hassan al-Banna, an Islamic scholar, in Egypt in 1928, and spread to other countries in the Middle East. During the Arab Spring in Egypt the Brotherhood founded the Freedom and Justice Party, which won the most seats in the 2011-12 parliamentary elections. Its leader, Mohamed Morsi, was elected president of Egypt in 2012.
The first “brothers” who appeared in Europe in the late 1950s and early 1960s were either political refugees or young Muslims from Middle Eastern countries who had come to study.
The movement operates in secret, especially in Europe, and there are no officially registered “Muslim Brotherhood organisations”.
In the vast majority of cases it cannot be stated with total certainty that an individual is a member of the Brotherhood.
Researchers rely mainly on accounts by former members of the Brotherhood, police reports and scattered statements by “brothers” living in the Arab world to map out the Muslim Brotherhood in Europe.
In a 2021 study Lorenzo Vidino and Sergio Altuna divide the European Brotherhood into three layers.
There are the “pure Brotherhood” groups operating in secret. These comprise the true members of the Brotherhood, and they enjoy considerable autonomy. While they maintain links with each other, they do not receive directions from a European centre – or from Egypt.
The second level at the “Brotherhood spawns”. These are officially registered Muslim organisations that do not call themselves the Muslim Brotherhood and deny that they have anything to do with the movement. At the same time these organisations are founded by members of the Brotherhood, and although their own membership is not exclusively drawn from the Brotherhood, the “brothers” control most positions. The researchers say that these groups represent the public face of the Brotherhood’s secret activities.
Finally, there are “organisations influenced by the Brotherhood”. These have ideological ties to the Brotherhood through individuals but have no operational links.
It should be noted that the views of Lorenzo Vidino, who has written several books on the European Muslim Brotherhood, arouse considerable controversy. ENAR told Lakmusz that Vidino was “a propagator of anti-Muslim conspiracy theories who had ties to far-right think tanks”. The former Brotherhood member Michael Privot said that Vidino’s account was “as precise as it can be”, while according to Florence Bergeaud-Blackler said Vidino only took account of those facts that supported his theories.
What is the connection between them?
Bergeaud-Blackler is not the first to link FEMYSO and ENAR with the Brotherhood or to criticise the EU’s support for the organisations. In recent years several MEPs have raised the issue in written questions to the European Commission. The commission has given roughly the same answer to them as it did to Lakmusz: it only supports groups that respect human rights and upholds the EU’s core values. If the conditions for funding are broken, there are mechanisms for breaking off cooperation and for the repayment of grants.
Both FEMYSO and ENAR categorically deny they have any contact with the Muslim Brotherhood.
So what is behind the claims that they do have contact?
FEMYSO’s links with the Brotherhood are more widespread than ENAR’s. In their study Vidino and Altuna consider FEMYSO to be part of the of the “pan-European Brotherhood milieu” and identify it as a union of youth groups that are Brotherhood spawns. They base this on the fact that the predecessor of the Council of European Muslims, the FIOE, played a major role in setting up FEMYSO. They call the FIOE the main European umbrella organisation for Brotherhood spawns, on the basis that the former general secretary of FIOE became a senior adviser to Mohamed Morsi after his election as president of Egypt.
The French government also referred to the ties between FEMYSO and the Brotherhood in 2021 when Clément Beaune, then European affairs minister, shared a tweet that called the organisation the glove puppet of the Brotherhood. The French government criticised Helena Dalli, the European Commissioner for Equality, for having a meeting with FEMYSO leaders. FEMYSO had been involved in formulating a Council of Europe campaign to popularise the wearing of the hijab. (The council is not an EU body but brings together the human rights organisations of 46 countries.) The campaign was withdrawn after complaints from France and other countries.
Michael Privot has often identified FEMYSO as having connections with the Brotherhood. In his response to Lakmusz he said: “It is possible that some of its members and member organisations do not belong to the Brotherhood, but I would be surprised if any of its leaders were not aware of where they were.”
FEMYSO and ENAR, the group that Privot once led, both rejected claims that FEMYSO has connections with the Brotherhood. It is impossible to choose between these conflicting position. It can at least be stated that there are more signs of the Brotherhood having links with FEMYSO than with ENAR.
For all that hirado.hu called ENAR “an Islamist front organisation”, there are far fewer sources suggesting that the antiracist network is a part of the Brotherhoood (even Vidino and Altuna do not say this in their study). Those who do say this often base their claims on Privot’s position as director or the fact that FEMYSO is a member of ENAR.
However, Privot himself denies that ENAR has any ties to the Brotherhood, even though he says that FEMYSO does have.
He told Lakmusz that as director he had never tried to push the Brotherhood’s agenda at ENAR. He said wasn’t an active member of the groups after 2010 anyway, and two years after his appointment as director he formally left the Brotherhood.
He added that FEMYSO is just one of more than 150 member groups in ENAR, so even if it wanted to influence ENAR’s activities to serve the Brotherhood’s agenda it would hardly able to do so. “Working groups draw up proposals for ENAR on every subject, which either the leadership or the general assemble approve. There was only one year during my time as director that a representative of FEMYSO was on the ENAR board.”
Hungarian organisations that are members of ENAR confirm that they never sensed any Islamist tendencies either from Privot or FEMYSO. “Quite the opposite – if ever there was fantastic antiracist activity it was what ENAR was doing,” Sim Shalom’s Péter Árvai said. His organisation knew nothing about Privot’s past membership of the Brotherhood when it joined ENAR in 2018. Marcell Lőrincz, of the Subjective Values Foundation, said: “Michael never made a secret of his background. But even then this was all in his past and never came up in discussions.”
What kind of Islamists?
The Muslim Brotherhood is not banned in any EU country and does not feature on the EU’s list of terror organisations. According to Michael Privot the perpetrators of terrorist attacks in Europe loathe the Brotherhood – referring to it as the “Corrupted Brothers” – because the majority of the movement’s members support building a relationship with the whole of society and taking part in democratic processes.
Hamas, the Palestinian branch of the Brotherhood, is indeed on the EU’s terrorist list. However, Privot said the general view of Hamas within the Brotherhood is problematic, and this was one reason why he left the movement. “After each Hamas attack they condemn the use of violence, but generally they add something about how Israel is the root cause.”
Another reason he left the movement was when some scholars who had great authority within the Brotherhood, such as Yusuf al-Qaradawi, made statements that went against what the movement represented int Europe.
“In the early 2000s we started dealing with the LGBTQ matters in FEMYSO, an area which had always been a taboo, but at the same time al-Qaradawi was saying things such as that homosexuals should be stoned. There was no attempt by the Brotherhood in Europe to distance itself from these statements. It just played the whole matter down.”
Privot states that in his time at the head of ENAR he never witnessed FEMYSO taking any stance that was contrary to the EU’s core values.
“If that had happened, we would have excluded it, just as we excluded a Romanian group for its anti-LGBTQ rhetoric and a Polish group for its anti-migrant position.”
ENAR and FEMYSO, like all other groups that receive EU money, have to pay attention to the EU core values and the regulations laid down by the Commission not least because of EU funding. Privot believes that if anyone wanted to “Islamicise” Europe, “carrying out EU projects would not be an effective way to do it”. According to EU financial records for the period 2014-2021, FEMYSO’s funding was for the prevention of Islamophobia targeting girls and women, while ENAR’s was for promoting public policy against racism, hate crimes and intolerance.
The Council of Europe’s hijab campaign in a French TV debate, before the campaign was abandonned. FEMYSO was involved in formulating the campaign. Source: YouTube/France24
The accusation of Islamicisation is similar to the conspiracy theories in Florence Bergeaud-Blackler’s writings, Michael Privot told Lakmusz. “The Muslim Brotherhood can be considered an Islamist organisation in so far as it interprets Islam as a political message and would like to structure society accordingly. In the context of Europe this clearly means adopting a conservative ethical attitude, rather than an attempt to seize power.”
Even Lorenzo Vidino, who is in general extremely critical of the Brotherhood, recognizes in the study mentioned above that “the brothers” are working towards more realistic targets than the Islamicisation of Europe: their aim is the strengthening of Islamic identity, the representation of Muslim communities and public policy relating to Islam.
While Michael Privot is a believer in dialogue with the Muslim Brotherhood, he thinks the Islamicisation and terrorism narrative and the groundless conflation of the Brotherhood with ENAR may prevent the organisations from tackling anti-Muslim hatred. So it would end up preventing Muslims enjoying the same protection against hate crimes and discrimination as Black, Roma and Jewish people.
The article was written with the assistance of the Center for Independent Journalism’s Get the Trolls Out (GTTO) project. Marcell Lőrincz, who was quoted in the article, is involved in the GTTO project as a consultant.
Szilárd Teczár completed a degree in media and communication studies at ELTE in 2012 and in that same year had his first article published in the weekly magazine Magyar Narancs. From 2013 to 2022 he was a regular contributor to the magazine on Hungarian politics and the EU. He now covers the same areas in his writing for Lakmusz since he joined the team in October 2022.
