Palestinian Islamic Jihad Leader Holds Muslim Brotherhood Conference at Turkish Think Tank

Turk­ish media is report­ing that a Turk­ish think tank head­ed by a for­mer leader of a US/EU des­ig­nat­ed ter­ror­ist orga­ni­za­tion is hold­ing a con­fer­ence about the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood. The Anadolu Agency report sug­gests the con­fer­ence par­tic­i­pants were favor­ably dis­posed toward the Brotherhood:

Jan­u­ary 28, 2022: A three-day inter­na­tion­al con­fer­ence to debate Mid­dle East’s Islam­ic move­ment, pop­u­lar­ly known as Mus­lim Broth­er­hood, start­ed in Istan­bul on Fri­day. “That we are ‘callers of peace and towards right­eous­ness’ was the clear mes­sage of Hasan al-Ban­na,” said Mohamed Gamal Hesh­mat of Cana­di­an Insti­tute for Strate­gic Stud­ies and Devel­op­ment, refer­ring to the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood founder who was a school­teacher. The three-day con­fer­ence will brain­storm the Mus­lim Brotherhood’s expe­ri­ence in pol­i­tics and gov­er­nance in Egypt, said Sami Al-Ari­an, direc­tor of Cen­ter for Islam and Glob­al Affairs, an Istan­bul-based think tank and the host of the event.

Read the rest here.

As the GIOR report­ed in August 2021., Sami Al-Ari­an was a US leader of the US/EU des­ig­nat­ed Pales­tin­ian Islam­ic Jihad (PIJ) and was sen­tenced to 57 months in prison for con­spir­ing to con­tribute funds, goods, or ser­vices to or for the ben­e­fit of the PIJ.

Accord­ing to a Cen­ter for Islam and Glob­al Affairs tweet, speak­ers at the con­fer­ence includ­ed John Espos­i­to, a long-time sup­port­er of the Glob­al Mus­lim Broth­er­hood, and Abdul­lah Al-Ari­an, Sami Al-Arian’s son.

Al-Arian’s Cen­ter for Islam and Glob­al Affairs is based at Istan­bul Saba­hat­tin Zaim Uni­ver­si­ty, which in turn was found­ed by the Ilim Yay­ma Vak­fı foun­da­tion, whose cur­rent pres­i­dent is Turk­ish Pres­i­dent Erdoğan’s son Bilal.

[NOTE: This post was updat­ed from the orig­i­nal ver­sion with infor­ma­tion about con­fer­ence speakers]