The Digital Forensics, Research and Analytics Center (DFRAC) has uncovered a conspiracy by the Muslim Brotherhood to paint a bad picture of India under the guise of defending the honour of Prophet Muhammad.
The Muslim Brotherhood is an international Sunni Islamist organisation founded in Egypt in 1928 by Islamic scholar and schoolteacher Hassan al-Banna. In the DFRAC report, Dilshad Noor said that the organisation also runs a smear campaign against the Hindus who work in the Gulf countries.
The organisation claims to raise the issue of respect for Prophet Muhammed and Islamophobia on the international platform. In recent years, the members of this organisation have started targeting India.
In its investigation, DFRAC found three key figures involved in these activities. These persons are Dr Ali Al- Qaradaghi, Dr Sheikh Mohammed Al-Sagheer, and Muhammad Al-Hasan bin Al-Diddu Al-Shanqiti. DFRAC said these three are in the top positions in the group to run smear campaigns against India in the guise of protecting the image of Prophet Muhammad. All three of them are associated with the Muslim Brotherhood.
Al-Sagheer openly supported Al Qaeda terrorist Abdul Rehman, who was accused of assisting in the World Trade Centre bombing of 1993 that killed six people and injured 1042 people. He also launched a campaign against France. He was one of the key figures behind running the #Expulsion_of_Hindu_Labour campaign on social media.
As per DFRAC’s report, Al-Qaradaghi was also responsible for running anti-India campaigns online. He not only holds a lot of hate for India but regularly paints Hindus in a bad light. Al-Sagheer mainly targets Hindus. He runs campaigns against the relations between India and Muslim countries. Al-Shanqiti has appealed to Muslims worldwide to boycott India. He also demanded the removal of Hindus from Gulf countries.
Notably, in the first part of the report released in August 2022, DFRAC reported that India became the target of the propaganda by the Muslim Brotherhood after disinformation about former BJP spokesperson Nupur Sharma was propagated by the propaganda fact checker Mohammed Zubair of Alt News. DFRAC mentioned in its report that following the disinformation, anti-India campaigns ran in Arab and Gulf countries.
Muslim Brotherhood ran multiple campaigns to smear India’s image. For example, the official handle of the Support Prophet Muhammed campaign claimed that Hindus killed Afghan civilian Sufi Maulana Khwaja Syed Zarib Chishti in Nashik. In reality, he was murdered over a property dispute.
In another tweet, the handle claimed a Muslim woman was deliberately run over in India. The accident occurred after a person learning to drive a car accidentally hit a pedestrian.
The report also noted that anti-India campaigns ran across Muslim nations to boycott Indian products and deport Indian envoys after the Nupur Sharma incident.
