UAE funded smear campaign against Islamic relief charity, report says

this united arab emirates Funded a smear campaign against the British charity Islamic Relief and attempted to link its officials to the Muslim Brotherhood and violent extremists The New Yorker Report.

In a lengthy report published on Monday, the magazine said Alp Services, a private intelligence firm based in Geneva, had launched a campaign to smear Islamic Relief (IRW) in the UAE.

According to the report, Arp sought to link IRW board member Heshmat Khalifa to terrorism after working with Egyptian humanitarian organizations in Bosnia in the 1990s.

After that failed attempt, Alp searched Khalifa’s social media history, where they found several anti-Semitic posts shared by board members after Israel’s 2014 offensive on Gaza.

According to The New Yorker, Arp shared the information in 2020 with the Times of London, which subsequently published a story about his social media posts.

Khalifa immediately resigned from the charity and IRW’s chief executive condemned the posts, calling them appalling and “unacceptable”.

Despite pledging to root out such practices by screening current and future board members, the charity told The New Yorker they had been relentlessly attacked by the media.

Under the Trump administration, the U.S. State Department, release Strong criticism of the IRW and encourages all government agencies to review “IRW activities and their relationship to IRW.”

Additionally, the UK Charity Commission and the Swedish International Development Agency launched investigations into IRW, while Germany stopped funding the organization entirely.

The bank also threatened to “stop diverting Islamic relief funds to crisis areas around the world,” according to the magazine.

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IRW told The New Yorker that it spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to pay for “external audits, suppress disinformation in Internet search results and restore good relations with the government.”

It also paid for an independent committee headed by former UK Attorney-General Dominic Grieve.

The commission ends up set up IRW is an “effective charity” free from institutional anti-Semitism.

IRW chief executive Waseem Ahmad told The New Yorker that the damage to the charity’s reputation affects the millions of poor people around the world who depend on it.

“It just hurts and delays our humanitarian work,” he told The New Yorker. “Why is the UAE undermining Islamic Relief? It’s a multi-million dollar question … It’s a very unjust world – let’s put it this way.”

In 2014, the UAE added the IRW to a list of 86 illegal “terrorist” organizations, along with several prominent Muslim organizations, including the Council on American-Islamic Relations. It accused the IRW of being an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, an allegation it denied.

MEE reached out to the UAE embassy for comment but had not heard back by press time.

Islamic Relief Worldwide told MEE they had nothing more to add.

IRW has been at the center of multiple attacks and allegations of links to “terrorist” groups, including as early as 2013.

In 2017, MEE Report A smear campaign against some British Muslim charities.

The New Yorker on Monday reported that “no one has been able to reliably establish any institutional links between the charities.” [Islamic Relief] and Islamic movements”.

The report also found that Alp Services carried out several pro-UAE activities and was hired as part of its feud with Qatar.

The UAE, along with Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Egypt, severed ties with Qatar in June 2017, citing Doha’s close ties to Iran and support for militant groups. Qatar has denied the allegations.

The regional blockade of Qatar ends in 2021, when the UAE reopens its airspace to Doha and resumes travel and trade links with the country.

Alp Services did not respond to MEE’s request for comment.