Competition Between the Brotherhood and al Qaeda?

By Douglas Farah

Across Europe, according to intelligence sources, the international Muslim Brotherhood is competing for recruits and cash with armed, radicalized Islamist groups operating in Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

The competition is not over the ultimate goal of the Islamist project: the recreation of a Muslim caliphate in the areas of the world once ruled by Muslims and the eventual Islamization of the entire world. Rather, it appears that the Brotherhood, long able to recruit among the best and brightest Islamists in Europe and the Arab peninsula, is now struggling to make its more staid message of incremental change relevant to those who would join the Islamist movement.

The Brotherhood has long served as a key financial node for different Islamist groups, and the intelligence officials say that has not changed signficantly. What has changed is the unwillingness of many potential young recruits to play the long-standing double game that the Brotherhood has mastered. This includes a moderate public discourse, particularly for non-Islamist audiences; deception; denial of the true goals and aims of the Brotherhood; and the stated need to portray the Brotherhood as modern and open to assimilation in the West. My full blog is here..

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