At a closed-door meeting for select guests in the German Parliament building, the head of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), Germany’s domestic intelligence service, warned of high-level Islamist infiltration into German political institutions.
What only select guests in the Bundestag were allowed to hear behind closed doors should be known to all of Germany.
Sinan Selen, 54, who has served as president of the BfV since 2025, explicitly raised the alarm about the Muslim Brotherhood before a select audience at the German Bundestag during a breakfast meeting, BILD said in an exclusive report in early June, noting that the information leaked to the newspaper was “extremely worrying.”
Islamist groups in general and the Muslim Brotherhood in particular were exerting targeted influence on state and political structures in Germany with a view to transforming the state and society, Selen told the secret meeting. The ultimate goal of these infiltration attempts was the establishment of an Islamic society.
The Muslim Brotherhood does not act violently, but it is no less dangerous, because it pursues its objectives in an extremely strategic manner with long-term goals, the intelligence head noted. The Islamists respect German laws—but only insofar as these laws are compatible with Sharia.
The Muslim Brotherhood’s strategy involves establishing contacts with political figures and inviting them to events through a complex network of organizations. The goal is to build long-term relationships and influence public officials in line with the movement’s agenda. For example, officials should oppose criticism of political Islam or turn a blind eye to Islamism, Selen said.
Parties on the left-wing political spectrum are more open and susceptible to contact and infiltration from Islamists, the intelligence chief warned. This is partly due to a lack of understanding of Islamist structures and partly due to a poorly understood concept of tolerance.
Several participants at the closed-door meeting, organized under the patronage of State Secretary for the Interior Christoph de Vries, told BILD that they were surprised by the urgency of Selen’s remarks but also satisfied with the clarity of his message.
Integration Commissioner Warns of Islamist Footholds
In a follow-up interview with BILD published on June 4, Güner Balci, the Integration Commissioner for Berlin-Neukölln, confirmed that Islamist infiltration was so widespread in Germany that there are “still police projects nationwide in which Islamists participate.”
“Women and girls are forced to enter marriage as virgins or at least to pretend to be,” Balci warned. Because many people in Muslim communities “despise, abhor, and even want to punish” homosexuality, “we have a very high number of homophobic attacks and crimes in Neukölln, but also in other districts of Berlin.”
“Islamists have indeed gained a foothold in many areas, and not just in Neukölln,” Balci said. “They aren’t just active in mosque communities; they’re doing educational work, community outreach, they’re approachable for all kinds of issues in the neighborhood, they maintain contact.”
“They work in supposed integration projects funded by public money—and in doing so, they are gradually gaining access to more and more areas and spaces, and more and more ways to reach young people,” she added.
It is noteworthy that both Germany’s domestic intelligence chief Sinan Selen, born in Istanbul and raised in a secular Turkish family that immigrated to Cologne, and Berlin-Neukölln Integration Commissioner Güner Balcı, the daughter of Turkish Alevi guest workers, have emerged as particularly clear-eyed voices on the Islamist threat. Their backgrounds underscore the critical distinction between Islam as a faith and Islamism as a political ideology. Those with intimate knowledge of Muslim-majority societies and communities often best appreciate this divide—and recognize that effectively countering Islamist infiltration requires supporting anti-Islamist Muslims and secular voices rather than blurring the lines between the religion and its totalitarian perversion.
‘Slowly Waking Up’
“That the ones who are responsible for Europe even being in this situation are slowly waking up is one step in the right direction, as we need to counter Islamist infiltration,” Kent Ekeroth, a former Sweden Democrats MP, told Focus for Western Islamism.
“However, as I keep saying, the only long-term solution is a demographic one: we need to re-migrate a large part of the immigrants, be it first, second, or third generation. Otherwise, it’s just a more or less cosmetic effort, even if it can postpone the development somewhat,” he noted.
Islamism Exploits Feminism and Immigration
“Aha! Officially, they say the threat comes from the right—but behind closed doors, they say something completely different,” the computer scientist and political commentator Hadmut Danish remarked. “What only select guests in the Bundestag were allowed to hear behind closed doors should be known to all of Germany.”
“The Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), the Greens, and the Left Party can be considered to have been taken over by Islamists. In the case of the Greens, this is quite clear, and in the case of the Left Party, it’s practically blatant,” Danish wrote. “I know the Greens are strongly Islamist, and the entire left-wing bloc is infiltrated by Islam.”
Exploring the links between leftist ideologies such as feminism, immigration, and Islamism, Danish asked: “Could it be, if one thinks this through further, that feminism serves this goal simply to prevent Germans from having children so that Islam can gain a majority more quickly?”
He added, “First feminism, then migration due to declining birth rates? A plan? Systematic extermination? At least feminism and Islamic immigration both emerged at roughly the same time, in the seventies.”
Political Scientist’s Book on Muslim Brotherhood Vindicated
Writing on X, the German political scientist Nina Scholz said she was “naturally delighted when security agencies share the analysis from our book.” Scholz’s book, Political Islam—A Hybrid Threat to Europe: The Muslim Brotherhood’s “Civilization Jihad,” was published in April.
According to Scholz’s findings, the Muslim Brotherhood attempts to delegitimize the state and its institutions by infiltrating state institutions, influencing legislation, and exploiting the state’s weakness caused by external and internal crises to shift norms.
“A central element of their strategy is citizenship, which grants civic rights to activists in the network,” she writes, explaining that Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the chief ideologue of the Brotherhood, explicitly recommends that Muslims accept the citizenship of their host countries in his book on the interpretation of Islamic norms for Muslims in non-Muslim countries.
Scholz notes that “allies from the left and alternative spectrum, who adhere to identity political concepts of hierarchizing supposedly marginalized groups, prove to be particularly vulnerable,” to the lure of the Muslim Brotherhood. “Based on their own ideology, they possess no argumentative resistance to the normative demands of the Muslim Brotherhood. They are discursively co-opted, subordinate themselves, or dissolve as independent actors,” she argues.
Ultimately, the “strategic goal of the Muslim Brotherhood is the complete elimination of equal partnerships,” which are “replaced by a model of asymmetrical alliances in which potential partners are subordinate to the leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood.”
