By Dr Charlotte Littlewood

Last week, the United States took a historic step by initiating the process to designate certain Muslim Brotherhood chapters as Foreign Terrorist Organizations, an extraordinary shift that aligns Washington with countries across the Middle East, including Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Bahrain, which have long treated the Brotherhood as a dangerous destabilising force.

That decision did not emerge in a vacuum. It came after growing evidence that the Brotherhood’s challenge to the West is not primarily violent but ideological, strategic, and systemic.

A major new report by US think tank ISGAP outlines how the movement has spent decades embedding itself into Western civil society, campuses, media narratives, and political discourse.

The Brotherhood’s playbook is “institutional capture by cultural means,” a long-term project of ‘tamkeen’, or entrenchment, designed to undermine liberal democracies from within.

This is what the US is now responding to: a movement that uses Western freedoms to hollow out Western confidence, advancing an illiberal ideology beneath the language of rights, representation, and moral critique. Antisemitism is central to that strategy, not incidental.

From its earliest writings, the Brotherhood understood that antisemitism could be deployed as a civilisational solvent, a way to unite Muslims and non-Muslims alike against a shared enemy, to turn Western guilt into moral weakness, and to........

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