The Brothers of Austria… From birth to siege

60 years of deceiving a society that say hello and treat immigrant groups in good faith, but the act of chasing nature always comes back to the fore. Those who have the habit of secretly abusing a country’s rules and hitting their cohesion from within cannot stop this black agenda.

This is what the terrorist Muslim Brotherhood did in Austria in the past decades, before Vienna awoke for a month that approached, and was beaten with an iron hand by the deceitful and deceptive tails and returned disappointed.

The beginning was in the 1960s, when the terrorist group established its first presence in Graz in southern Austria, at the hands of Youssef Nada and Ahmed al-Qadi, according to a 2017 study by the Internal Intelligence Agency and the University of Vienna.

The Brotherhood instilled its dubious existence by establishing small spaces for prayer and meetings. Over the years, the Brotherhood moved from small associations to the umbrella organization, establishing the Association of Culture in the city of Graz.

With a network stretching from Graz to Vienna, with dozens of associations, mosques, for-profit real estate companies, and children’s kindergartens, the Brotherhood now has an integrated parallel society.

The government’s awakening began, with Vienna hitting the Brotherhood first in March 2019, banning all its slogans and symbols in the country, and then second in 2020, by establishing the Center for the Documentation of Political Islam, which monitors the group on the ground and in the absence of the Internet.

The biggest blow came when Austrian police raided the group’s hideouts on November 9, putting 100 people and dozens of properties and headquarters into broad investigations of the group’s activity, its funding network, and its clandestine and public movements, which are likely to take them to court for the first time in Europe.

On July 7, the Austrian parliament, through a package of anti-terrorism legislation, laid the legal foundation for a larger confrontation against the group, which will play out in the coming months, likely to uproot the Brotherhood once and for all, cut its roots and funding channels, and end a grim chapter in the land of art and freedom.