Politics at play as UK leaders and media point the finger

Speculation continues to surround the UK government’s as yet unpublished report into the Muslim Brotherhood, commissioned in March. On 19 October, Britain’s conservative newspaper The Telegraph reported that Downing Street is to order a crackdown on the organisation and linked Islamist groups, in an article that emphasised a view of the Brotherhood as “at heart a terrorist organisation”. The article by journalists Robert Mendick and Robert Verkaik was not in keeping with what a foreign office source recently told GSN, which was that the report had concluded the Brotherhood’s members were not generally involved in terrorist activity, and that the delay in publishing was at least in part due to concerns that the UK’s Gulf allies (in particular the UAE) would not be pleased by the findings.