On January 13, 2026, the U.S. State Department and Treasury blacklisted Muslim Brotherhood branches in Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon, citing alleged support for Hamas. Within two months the same vocabulary of terrorism had jumped from those foreign chapters to American civil-rights groups, a French anti-discrimination collective and a motion in the Dutch parliament. The Muslim Brotherhood label had stopped describing a foreign militant network and started describing ordinary Muslim civic life.
That shift is the story, and it follows a script Western democracies have run before. Strip away the modern security language and the mechanics resemble the McCarthy era, when association stood in for evidence and a vague affiliation became proof of guilt.
From Foreign Chapters to Local Charities: How the Label Traveled
The sequence matters because the order surprises people. American state governments reached for the terrorism label before the federal government formally designated anyone. The push began with an executive order, then state officials moved, then Washington made its foreign designations official.
By the time the State Department acted, the word “terrorist” was already attached to a domestic advocacy group that has never been charged with a crime. Here is how the label moved from one continent to another in roughly four months.
- November 2025 – President Donald Trump signs an executive order directing his administration to begin designating Muslim Brotherhood chapters.
- November 18, 2025 – Texas Governor Greg Abbott labels the Brotherhood and the Council on American-Islamic Relations as foreign terrorist and transnational criminal organizations.
- December 9, 2025 – Florida Governor Ron DeSantis issues a similar order barring the two groups from state contracts and funds.
- January 13, 2026 – The State Department and Treasury formally designate Brotherhood chapters in Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon.
- January 22, 2026 – France’s National Assembly votes to treat the movement as a terrorist organization.
- March 17, 2026 – The Dutch House of Representatives narrowly backs a motion to ban it.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations, the country’s largest Muslim civil-rights group, sits at the center of the American move. The Texas governor’s office designation order tied the group to the Brotherhood and accused both of seeking to impose Sharia, an accusation the organization rejects. iAqaba has tracked the state-level moves in its coverage of the two governors signing terror-label orders.
What Washington Designated, and What It Left Out
The federal action was narrower than the headlines suggested, and the gap between the two is where the trouble starts. Treasury named the groups in Jordan and Egypt as specially designated global terrorists. The State Department gave the Lebanese branch the heavier label, a foreign terrorist organization, after noting that one wing had fired rockets toward Israel following the October 2023 Hamas attack.
None of that touched the parent movement as a whole, and none of it touched any American organization. The distinction is easy to lose in political speeches, so it is worth stating plainly.
| Entity | Designating authority | Label applied |
|---|---|---|
| Brotherhood chapter, Lebanon | U.S. State Department | Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) |
| Brotherhood chapters, Egypt and Jordan | U.S. Treasury | Specially Designated Global Terrorist (SDGT) |
| Muslim Brotherhood (movement as a whole) | None | No U.S. federal designation |
| Council on American-Islamic Relations | Texas, Florida (state only) | No U.S. federal designation |
A Foreign Terrorist Organization, or FTO, is the most serious tier in U.S. law; it makes material support a federal crime and bars members from entering the country. A Specially Designated Global Terrorist, or SDGT, freezes assets and blocks transactions but stops short of the FTO’s criminal-support penalties. Neither label, at the federal level, reaches the group that American politicians spent the winter denouncing. That is the crucial fact most coverage skips: neither the Brotherhood as a whole nor the American civil-rights group carries any U.S. federal terrorism designation. You can read the full scope in the State Department’s chapter-by-chapter designation notice and the underlying White House presidential action on the chapters.
The Structure That Isn’t There
Part of what makes the label so elastic is that the thing it names barely holds together. The Muslim Brotherhood is not a single global organization with one leader, a membership roll and a chain of command. Scholars who study it describe an international body that is loose and frequently ineffective, where local conditions override loyalty to any central apparatus.
That weakness deepened after the 2013 coup in Egypt. Most of the top three ranks of the movement’s leadership ended up in prison, exile or hiding, and the group split into rival camps with separate structures and opposing strategies. Former deputy chairman Muhammad Habib has spoken openly of “fissures” inside it.
The ambiguity is not a footnote. It is the feature that makes broad accusation possible. When an entity has no clear boundary, almost any Muslim organization can be accused of belonging to it, and almost none can prove a negative. A student association, a charity or an anti-discrimination body can be tied to the Brotherhood through ideological resemblance rather than any operational link.
The McCarthy Template in New Clothing
The pattern of treating association as evidence has a name in American history, and legal scholars are already drawing the line back to it. When suspicion replaces proof and membership in a loosely defined movement becomes the charge itself, the model is the Red Scare, not modern counterterrorism.
Where the Legal Authority Runs Out
State governors do not have the power to create their own terrorism lists, and that is the heart of the constitutional problem. In an analysis published through the Knight First Amendment Institute, Stanford Law professor Shirin Sinnar and University of Chicago scholar Darryl Li argue that state designations diverging from the federal list intrude on federal authority, pointing to the Supreme Court’s unanimous ruling in Crosby v. National Foreign Trade Council.
They also note that domestic groups carry due-process and First Amendment protections that the Court deliberately preserved in Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project. As U.S. organizations, the analysis argues, civil-rights groups have “indisputable due process rights to notice and a hearing,” which the executive orders never provided. A Florida court agreed in substance on March 4, 2026, granting the targeted group an injunction and finding that a governor cannot unilaterally brand a major civil-rights organization a terrorist outfit. The full argument is laid out in the Stanford Law analysis of state terrorist designations.
The Recurring Cost of Guilt by Association
The McCarthy comparison is not rhetorical decoration. It describes a specific mechanism with predictable costs:
- Vague ideological links are treated as operational ties, with no requirement to prove coordination or violence.
- The burden flips onto the accused, who must disprove membership in an organization that has no formal roster.
- The chilling effect spreads well past the named group, since donors, employees and partners fear being labeled supporters.
- Ordinary advocacy, including documenting discrimination, gets recast as a hostile political project.
The deportation cases that follow show the reach. iAqaba reported on a Dallas religious leader removed over alleged terror ties, the kind of action that becomes easier once the boundary between militancy and community life blurs.
Europe’s Mirror, and an Older Conspiracy
The same logic is running through European capitals, with one example that ended in court. France dissolved the Collectif Contre l’Islamophobie en France (CCIF), or Collective Against Islamophobia in France, by government decree on December 2, 2020, after the murder of teacher Samuel Paty.
What the French Case Revealed
Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin first called the collective an Islamist organization working against the Republic and suggested it was implicated in the killing. That accusation vanished from the formal decree. The Council of State later confirmed, in September 2021, that the group had no connection to terrorist acts. Its documented role had been recording anti-Muslim discrimination, and one charge against it was that it called counter-terrorism measures Islamophobic. Amnesty International warned at the time that shutting down the anti-racist organization risked basic freedoms, and the official dissolution decree on Legifrance remains the primary record.
The Dutch Vote and a Familiar Echo
In the Netherlands, the House of Representatives backed a ban with 76 of 150 votes on March 17, 2026, on a motion from Geert Wilders’ Party for Freedom. The country’s own intelligence service, the AIVD, does not regard the Brotherhood as a structured organization there, which leaves the government unsure how to act on a vote against a body it cannot locate.
This is where the deeper history turns uncomfortable. At the turn of the twentieth century, some European political movements recast Judaism as a hidden political conspiracy rather than a faith, a reframing that justified exclusion and then far worse. Contemporary anti-Muslim narratives perform the same move on a different community, treating a religion as a covert political program. On a continent that lived through where that road leads, the resemblance should be hard to wave away.
The Chilling Effect on Muslim Civic Life
The stated goal of these measures is security and better integration. The likely result is the opposite, and the contradiction sits in plain view. Governments warn that Muslim communities are insufficiently integrated while passing policies that restrict the very participation integration requires.
Bans on religious symbols, obstacles to mosque construction and pressure on civil-society groups all push in one direction: exclusion. The repression model that some politicians hold up as success, the mass arrests and executions used by Arab governments that “eradicated” the Brotherhood, is authoritarian elimination of dissent, not democratic containment. iAqaba has documented one version of that approach in Jordan’s expanding crackdown on Brotherhood business networks.
Historical experience suggests that such repression does not prevent radicalization but contributes to it, and the alienation it produces is the very outcome the policy claims to address.
If the framework keeps widening, the test will come from the courts and the calendar. The Florida injunction has already paused one designation, and the Dutch government still has no mechanism to act on its parliament’s vote. If those checks hold, the label stays attached to the foreign chapters it was built for. If they give way, the definition of a terrorist organization grows to fit whichever Muslim civic group is politically convenient next.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is the Council on American-Islamic Relations a designated terrorist organization?
No. The group carries no U.S. federal terrorism designation and has never been charged with a crime. Texas and Florida governors issued state-level orders labeling it a terrorist organization in late 2025, but a Florida court granted an injunction on March 4, 2026, finding a governor cannot unilaterally make such a designation.
Which Muslim Brotherhood chapters did the United States actually designate?
The federal government designated specific national chapters, not the movement as a whole. On January 13, 2026, the State Department labeled the Lebanese branch a Foreign Terrorist Organization, while the Treasury named the Egyptian and Jordanian branches Specially Designated Global Terrorists, citing alleged support for Hamas.
Is the Muslim Brotherhood a single global organization?
No. Scholars describe the international body as loose and often ineffective, with local affiliates following their own course. After the 2013 coup in Egypt, much of its senior leadership was imprisoned, exiled or in hiding, and the movement split into rival camps with separate structures.
What happened to the French anti-Islamophobia group CCIF?
The Collectif Contre l’Islamophobie en France was dissolved by government decree on December 2, 2020, after the murder of teacher Samuel Paty. France’s Council of State confirmed in September 2021 that the group had no connection to terrorist acts; its documented work had been recording anti-Muslim discrimination.
Why do critics compare these measures to McCarthyism?
Because they replace evidence with association. Critics say groups are accused of Brotherhood links through ideological resemblance rather than proven operational ties, flipping the burden onto the accused to disprove membership in an organization with no formal roster, much as the Red Scare treated suspicion as proof of guilt.
Did the Dutch parliament ban the Muslim Brotherhood?
Not in practice. The House of Representatives backed a motion calling for a ban with 76 of 150 votes on March 17, 2026, but the government has not determined how to act on it, and the Dutch intelligence service does not consider the Brotherhood a structured organization in the country.
