U.S. Government Provides Millions to Malaysia’s Muslim Brotherhood

The State Department handed out, between 2022 and 2024, over $290,000 to Angkatan Belia Islam Malaysia (ABIM), the terror-tied Malaysian offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, even as the group pledged support for Hamas’s October 7 killings of Israeli civilians and cheered the kidnap of the Bibas family. U.S. federal departments have also approved a further $1 million to the International Islamic University Malaysia, a key Islamist institution in the Far-East used by designated terrorist group Hamas as recruiting grounds.

Both the university and ABIM share the same founder: the current pro-terror anti-Jewish prime minister, Anwar Ibrahim. Malaysia is a key ally for Hamas, which sent terrorists to the far-eastern country in 2014 to receive paraglider training—a tactic employed by the terror group during its October 7 terror attacks.

According to federal spending records, U.S. funding of ABIM was issued to counter the Chinese regime’s misinformation efforts in the region over its repression of Uyghur Muslims. This is believed to be the first time the U.S. government handed money directly to a foreign Muslim Brotherhood offshoot.

ABIM, also known as the Malaysian Islamic Youth Movement, was established in 1971, writes one Georgetown academic, as the “recognized Malaysian ‘sibling’ of the Brotherhood,” a dangerous Islamist movement regarded by Western policymakers as a key driver of radicalization and terror. Indeed, ABIM’s own website features the claim: “The initial model that inspired the founding of many movements like Abim is of course that of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.”

Islamist Prime Minister Ibrahim remains involved with his creation, publicly disclosing his consultations with the group. In August, he praised ABIM for “shaping the thinking and ideals of the younger generation” and serving as “the moral voice of the ummah.”

The Investigative Project on Terrorism describes ABIM as part of Malaysia’s “Hamas lobby,” citing ABIM’s support for Hamas operatives. In 2015, ABIM announced that its “leadership … headed by its President, held a meeting with Khaled Mesh’al, Head of the Political Bureau of Hamas in Palestine, during his official visit to Kuala Lumpur this week.” ABIM reported that Meshal “appreciated the strong support of the Malaysian community” and expressed his hope for a “fourth intifada.” ABIM officials gushingly described the Hamas terror leader “as a skilled, refined and humble leader …. a great leader, who occupies a position preceded by the likes of [Hamas founders] Sheikh Ahmad Yasin and Dr Abdul Aziz Rantisi.”

In 2023, ABIM openly supported the October 7 attacks, sharing Hamas images and video across its social media, and declaring its “support for the struggle of the Palestinian people.” Today, ABIM remains openly supportive of Hamas.

A few years earlier, Hamas’s Khaled Meshal also addressed the International Islamic University Malaysia (IIUM), an important center of Islamist ideological development. As noted by the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center, Hamas “conducts extensive social and cultural activities for students at the International Islamic University Malaysia.” Some are “recruited to Hamas’s military-terrorist wing” and “sent to a course in Turkey (at Hamas’s expense), given money by Hamas and then sent to Judea and Samaria.”

In 2025, grants to ABIM were canceled in accordance with the Trump administration’s executive orders. Contracts with IIUM, however, are still funded. The Departments of State and Defense have authorized almost $950,000 to IIUM. Defense grants were issued for a variety of military and technological programs, while the State Department chose IIUM to “provide and conduct programs on preventing violent extremism in different segments for Malaysian youth” and to “provide virtual and physical capacity building programs and trainings for CSOs, NGOs and religious authorities on addressing vulnerable groups subject to radicalization…”

Malaysia’s Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim worked as president of IIUM for a decade. Ibrahim is also a leading figure of American Islamism, having long-served as a top official of the Safa network, a Virginia-based web of wealthy interlinked charities, businesses, and think tanks, founded by Muslim Brotherhood ideologues, and today run by a small group of powerful Islamist voices previously investigated over terror financing activities. Ibrahim was chairman of Safa’s flagship institution, the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT), which helped establish and run Malaysia’s IIUM.

The IIUM and IIIT share another founder: AbdulHamid AbuSulayman, whom a federal investigator once described as among IIIT’s “ardent supporters” of the designated terror organizations Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

Safa’s IIIT and IIUM are sister organizations. IIIT provides IIUM with scholarships and officials, while an IIUM founder has boasted about the “decision to not become a secular university and how they managed to achieve it with International Institute of Islamic Thought support.” IIUM once published articles portraying Prime Minister Ibrahim’s rise as a product of the IIUM and the IIIT’s partnership, writing that should Ibrahim be elected, “the army and civilians in the constituency are bound to gain from the same trajectory with which the IIUM and the IIIT in Malaysia once handsomely gained.”

The U.S. taxpayer is funding Malaysia’s slide into Islamism. At events in 2023 organized by Safa and IIUM, Prime Minister Ibrahim declared that “Islamic education syllabus” in Malaysia would be “reformed” and that “Islamic civilization” would be instilled at “every level.”

IIUM is not the only Safa entity to receive Defense Department monies. Since 2021, federal spending records indicate Safa company CommunityForce Incorporated has been approved for $28 million of federal contracts, mostly from the Defense Department, for programs such as the U.S. Air Force’s “Force Modernization and Sustainment Automated Management System.”

CommunityForce officials include Mohammad Omar Ashraf, a key Safa network operative whose home was included in a list of residences to be searched as outlined in a 2003 federal affidavit alleging “a group of individuals ... suspected of providing material support to terrorists, money laundering, and tax evasion through the use of a variety of related for-profit companies and ostensible charitable entities under their control.”

Other CommunityForce officials include Firas Barzinji, who also serves as an attorney for other Safa network institutions, and is involved with other Muslim Brotherhood-founded groups such as the Islamic Society of North America. Firas is the son of the late Jamal Barzinji, a prominent American Islamist and Safa member, about whom federal agent David Kane declared: “I believe that Barzinji is not only closely associated with PIJ [Palestinian Islamic Jihad] (as evidenced by ties to [convicted PIJ financer Sami] Al-Arian, including documents seized in Tampa in 1995 reflecting direct correspondence between Barzinji and Al-Arian), but also with HAMAS.”

Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim is an unpleasant partner for the United States. Ibrahim has previously attacked a “Jewish-controlled” public relations firm, alleged “Zionist” conspiracies influencing his opponents and “directly involved in the running of the government,” and he has boasted of his efforts to “remove renowned Islamic scholar Dr Shaikh Yusuf Qardhawi’s name from [the U.S.] terrorist blacklist.”

The late Qaradawi served as spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, and was best known, the Counter-Extremism Project notes, for advocating “the murder of Americans, gay people, and Jews through his writings, speeches, and fatwas.”

In 2022, Ibrahim posted on Twitter a video of him speaking with Ismail Haniyeh, leader of the U.S. designated terrorist group Hamas. Speaking in English, Ibrahim states that his own election victory is also a victory for the “Palestinians and the ummah” and pledged to “work together, inshallah, to redeem the lost image and also role of the ummah.” Ibrahim subsequently also spoke to Hamas’s political leader Khaled Meshal, former chairman of the Hamas Political Bureau.

After the October 7 attacks, Ibrahim reaffirmed his support for Hamas, praising its child-killing terrorists as “freedom fighters” and met again in 2024 with the late Hamas terror leader Ismail Haniyeh.

Ibrahim, and his organizations, ABIM and IIUM, should not be funded by the U.S. government, but designated and sanctioned, not funded. Malaysia is today part of a dangerous Sunni Islamist axis of evil, and must be opposed.