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

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.