Lawsuit Links Wild UAE-Financed Smear Campaign to George Washington University

Hafez would seem like an unlikely target for a smear campaign. A well-respected academic researcher in Austria, his work focused on documenting and combating anti-Muslim racism in Europe. He was a co-author of the European Islamophobia Report, a scholarly annual analysis of anti-Muslim discrimination on the continent, and was affiliated with a Islamophobia research center based out of Georgetown University.

The Muslim Brotherhood is a political movement mostly based in the Arab states, which has often clashed with the conservative monarchies in the region. The movement has been suppressed in countries like Egypt but remains a bogeyman for local leaders as well as right-wing groups in Western countries who have frequently accused Muslim political opponents of association with the group.

Hafez felt himself gradually becoming the target of these attacks. The accusations were often put forward vaguely in public where individuals or organizations were accused of “affiliations” with the Muslim Brotherhood rather than holding any concrete roles or membership. The allegations were amorphous enough that they were impossible to refute, or even challenge, mostly disseminated as they were through whisper campaigns spread through the Austrian government and security establishment.

“In a way, what Vidino was enabling was the criminalization of critical scholarship about Islam and anti-Muslim racism in Europe,” Hafez said. “But when I first started looking into him, I was focused on his ideological ties to the far-right in the United States. I assumed that he was an ideologically inspired person. I had no clue whatsoever that the UAE was behind his work, and maybe even the main driver.”