MEFILES

A translated clip of a Doha-based cleric becomes ammunition for the untouched leg of Trump’s order

MEMRI’s subtitles of Ali al-Qaradaghi praising the electoral rise of Zohran Mamdani and Abdul El-Sayed circulated in US media this weekend. The significance is not the cleric’s opinion but the gap in Executive Order 14362 it is being used to fill.

Ali al-Qaradaghi, secretary general of the Qatar-based International Union of Muslim Scholars, is reported to have told a conference in Turkey in August that the political rise of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed followed from Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attack. As subtitled by MEMRI TV and reported by the New York Post on 5 September, he said: “These are all blessings of the Al-Aqsa Flood,” and “If not for the Al-Aqsa Flood... what is happening in Europe and America would not be happening.” Townhall carried it the same day, Israel National News and VINnews on 6 September, each citing the Post or MEMRI. Every element rests on one partisan monitoring organisation’s translation. The Files found no Arabic-language primary recording, no independent account of the venue, and no IUMS statement confirming or denying the remarks. The subtitles also describe Mamdani as governor of New York State, which he is not; outlets reproduced the error with “[sic]”.

Executive Order 14362, signed 24 November 2025, sets a process for designating Muslim Brotherhood chapters as Foreign Terrorist Organizations and Specially Designated Global Terrorists, and states the concern that such chapters “pose a threat to the United States”. Everything done under it has been extraterritorial. On 13 January the State and Treasury Departments designated the Lebanese, Jordanian and Egyptian chapters, listing al-Jamaa al-Islamiya as an FTO and SDGT and its secretary general Muhammad Fawzi Taqqosh as an SDGT — a move State called “a first step”. On 9 March State designated the Sudanese Muslim Brotherhood as an SDGT, asserting it had contributed “upwards of 20,000 fighters” to Sudan’s war, a US government figure not independently verified. Nothing domestic has landed. In Congress, S.2293 and H.R.3883 remain pending; a Senate Judiciary subcommittee held a Brotherhood hearing on 20 May.

On the group’s own site, ikhwanonline.com carried a statement on 7 September to the effect that the Brotherhood expresses its positions “through the group’s institutions” — a standing disclaimer of what individual members say publicly. The timing sits one day after the Qaradaghi clip surfaced in English. The Files could not establish that the two are connected and does not assert it. The Brotherhood’s posture towards the January designations remains unresolved: an Egyptian Brotherhood official told Al Jazeera on 13 January that the group rejected the listing and would pursue legal avenues to challenge it. Eight months on, no filing has been reported. Either the challenge was never made or it was made quietly, and both would say something about how the organisation now calculates its exposure in American courts.

Assessment: Watch the direction of travel, not the cleric. A single subtitled clip from an advocacy group with a demonstrable error in its own captions is thin evidentiary material — but it is exactly the kind of material that gets entered into a designation record when the record is otherwise empty. Ten months of EO 14362 have produced four foreign listings and no domestic one, because the domestic leg is the legally hardest: it runs into the First Amendment. Expect quotable statements by Doha-adjacent scholars to do the work that evidence of operational control has not. The Gulf question is whether Qatar lets Qaradaghi’s silence stand.

An Egyptian commentator gives a date, a place and a probability for a Brotherhood meeting in the Netherlands

Abdel Rahim Ali told MBC Masr the gathering was ‘more than 80%' likely. The claim is unverified and single-sourced — but it comes with a deadline, which makes it checkable.

On Saturday 5 September, Abdel Rahim Ali, the Egyptian journalist who heads the Centre for Middle East Studies in Paris, told Amr Adib’s programme “Al-Hekaya” on MBC Masr that Brotherhood figures and exiled Egyptian opposition activists were arranging a conference in the Netherlands on the 17th, 18th and 19th, and put the odds of it going ahead at “more than 80%”. He alleged it would be convened under cover of front entities including an “Amal Party” and a “Technocrats” bloc, to work around Dutch parliamentary pressure, and named Rami Shaath, Samia Hares and Anas Habib among invitees, with media figures Mohamed Nasser and Moataz Matar asked to cover it. The Files could find no indication that any of those named has been asked for comment; none was reached for this item. The account was carried by Youm7 on 6 September and Roayah News on 7 September, both Egyptian outlets aligned with the government. The sole source for every element is Ali speaking on a talk show. No document, no second source, no Dutch official comment.

In the same interview Ali asserted that $1.6 million of Mossad money had funded certain channels and that $1.8 billion had been stolen from Gaza donations. Neither figure is supported by anything he produced, and neither belongs in a ledger; they are useful only as a specimen of the arithmetic circulating in Cairo’s information campaign. What sits behind the story is harder. In mid-March the Dutch House of Representatives passed a motion tabled by Geert Wilders’s PVV calling on the government to ban the Muslim Brotherhood and affiliated organisations, by 76 votes of 150 — as reported by the Jerusalem Post on 3 April and by Roayah News. Both note that it is a parliamentary recommendation requiring legal and constitutional review before implementation. Six months later, no outcome of that review has been reported.

Assessment: The Dutch file is real and the conference claim is not yet anything. Note the structure: a narrow parliamentary majority produces a recommendation nobody has to act on, and the vacuum where an implementation decision should be gets filled by an Egyptian broadcast allegation that travels back into European coverage as though it were reporting. That is how a 76-vote motion acquires momentum it did not earn at the ballot. Ali’s claim has one virtue his usual output lacks — a date. If nothing convenes on the 17th, that is on the record, and it should be noted as loudly as the allegation was made.