President Trump recently issued an order to Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, asking his administration to consider designating chapters of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Lebanon and Jordan as foreign terrorist organizations.
Trump’s order claims that the countries’ Muslim Brotherhood affiliates “engage in or facilitate and support violence and destabilization campaigns.” Specifically, the order accuses the groups of engaging in or supporting “violence and destabilization campaigns that harm their own regions, United States citizens, and United States interests.”
The order goes on to accuse the Lebanese Muslim Brotherhood of joining “Hamas, Hezbollah, and Palestinian factions to launch multiple rocket attacks against both civilian and military targets within Israel” amidst the latter’s military invasion of Gaza. It also claims that a senior leader of the organization’s Egyptian chapter “called for violent attacks against United States partners and interests” on October 7, 2023, and that leaders in the Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood “have long provided material support to the militant wing of Hamas.”
Rubio and Bessent now have 30 days to submit a report to the president, advising him on whether any chapters of the Muslim Brotherhood should be classified as foreign terrorist organizations under U.S. law. The secretaries then have 45 days after the report is submitted to take action.
If the groups are ultimately designated as foreign terrorist organizations, it would become illegal under U.S. law to knowingly provide them with funding or other material support. The groups could also face travel bans and have any funds held in U.S. banks frozen.
In a statement provided to 1819 News, U.S. Senator Tommy Tuberville, R-Alabama, celebrated Trump’s order and called for the groups to be officially designated as foreign terrorist organizations. Tuberville also used the opportunity to continue attacking against what he calls “Radical Islam.”
“I fully support President Trump’s potential designation of Muslim Brotherhood chapters as terrorist organizations,” Tuberville said. “We can’t be naive about this—the Muslim Brotherhood wants to see every freedom-loving American dead. The reality is that Radical Islam is fundamentally incompatible with our Western values. It isn’t a religion, it’s a death cult and it does not belong here.”
“This is an important step, but there’s still more to be done. Radical Islam has destroyed Europe and the Middle East. If we don’t wake up, America will be next,” Tuberville added.
The comments are the latest in a recent string of anti-Muslim remarks espoused by the sitting U.S. senator and Alabama gubernatorial hopeful.
In early October, Tuberville railed against “radical Islam” on the Senate floor, alleging that America is “allowing people with extremist ideologies, people who hate American values to not only live here, but to hold positions of power and influence our government.” He went on to say that “mass migration has destroyed [the United Kingdom’s] society” and accused fellow members of Congress of “openly support[ing] the radical Islamic terrorist organization, Hamas.” The senator later repeated similar comments in an interview with far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.
Additionally, Tuberville recently introduced two pieces of legislation entitled the “No Sharia Act” and the “Preserving a Sharia Free America Act.”
Together, the bills would ban Sharia—the body of Islamic law and standards derived from the Quran and other holy texts of the faith—from being considered in judicial decision-making processes and make advocating for the “imposition of Sharia law” in the U.S. punishable by deportation.
In response, the Council of American-Islamic Relations, CAIR, lambasted Tuberville’s comments and both pieces of legislation, decrying the bills as “anti-Muslim bigotry” and criticizing Tuberville for attempting to infringe on Muslim-Americans’ First Amendment rights.
“At best, Senator Tuberville’s Preserving a Sharia Free America Act is redundant: a key principle of Sharia law is that observers must follow the laws of the lands in which they reside,” Britton O’Shields, the staff attorney for CAIR’s Alabama chapter, told APR last month. “At worst, it provides the government with the pretext to target and discriminate against Americans who are simply abiding by the tenets of their faith.”
CAIR has also made multiple requests for Tuberville to visit a mosque, first asking the senator to do so in June after Tuberville said people moving to Alabama from blue states would not be welcome if they brought a “communist, Islamic atmosphere.” However, the senator has yet to respond to those requests or formally meet with any members of Alabama’s Muslim community.
