Hollywood at the Service of the Muslim Brotherhood

Hollywood has been a deliberate target of Islamic advocacy for decades. The Muslim Public Affairs Council operates an entire Hollywood Bureau. MPAC says the bureau works directly with executives, writers, producers, studios, and streaming companies to change portrayals of Muslims and Islam. By shaping culture, MPAC says, it can shape public perception and ultimately public policy. Its Hollywood Bureau has consulted with Disney, Paramount, Amazon, Hulu, CBS, NBC, Fox, FX, National Geographic, Starz, the BBC, and others.

Tom Clancy’s 1991 novel The Sum of All Fears involved Muslim terrorists, but when Paramount adapted the book, they were gone. The film’s villains became European neo-Nazis. Director Phil Alden Robinson and screenwriter Dan Pyne argued that Muslim terrorists had become a cliché and that neo-fascists fit the film they wanted to make. That part of the history should not be erased.

Well, what about the other part, not only of history, but of the present and the future as well?

CAIR conducted a lobbying campaign over the portrayal of Muslim villains before the film was released. CAIR’s ownlater materials acknowledge its involvement with The Sum of All Fears, among numerous Hollywood productions.

Fear of accusations of Islamophobia, combined with sustained pressure from Muslim Brotherhood-linked organizations, helped create a culture in Hollywood in which filmmakers became increasingly nervous about depicting Islamic terrorism, even as groups such as Hamas, al-Qaeda, ISIS, Hezbollah, the Houthis, Al-shabab, Boko Haram, and Iran-backed militias remain active around the world. At the same time, Hollywood has remained perfectly comfortable casting Nazis, Christian fundamentalists, intelligence agencies, corporations, the military, and American conservatives as villains.

In the Holy Land Foundation prosecution, federal investigators introduced internal documents from the Muslim Brotherhood’s American network. One of them was the now-famous 1991 Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America. Its author described the Muslim Brotherhood work in America as a long-term “civilization-jihadist” project aimed at changing the country from within. The document was not an American intelligence assessment. It was an internal Muslim Brotherhood document entered into evidence in federal court.

In 2008, a federal jury convicted the foundation and five of its leaders of providing material support to Hamas. The Justice Department said the evidence showed that Hamas’s parent organization, the Muslim Brotherhood, had built a network of organizations in the United States that raised money and spread support for Hamas. The defendants were ultimately convicted of channeling millions of dollars through Hamas-controlled organizations.

While CAIR itself was never prosecuted in the Holy Land Foundation case, the underlying historical connections cannot be waved away. Documents and testimony introduced in the case placed CAIR founders Nihad Awad and Omar Ahmad inside the Palestine Committee milieu from which the Hamas-support network operated in the United States. Recent congressional testimony drawing directly from the trial exhibits again identified both men on internal Palestine Committee records.

MPAC describes itself as a bridge between the Muslim community and the entertainment industry. It cultivates relationships with executives, develops writers, advises productions, organizes fellowships, works with industry institutions, and trains Muslim storytellers to enter the business. In 2018 it partnered with Disney/ABC Television on a Muslim screenwriters lab. It has worked with entertainment-industry figures and institutions including the Writers Guild Foundation and The Black List.

Hollywood does not ordinarily invite the National Rifle Association to determine whether a film about gun violence is fair to gun owners. It does not ask oil companies to approve environmental thrillers. It does not hand evangelical political organizations informal authority over scripts about Christian nationalism.

Yet organizations devoted explicitly to changing what America is have successfully presented themselves as neutral experts on what should appear on screen. MPAC says plainly that its work in entertainment shapes perception and, through perception, policy.

A country becomes vulnerable when it loses the ability to name an ideology that is openly trying to shape it. Hollywood helps teach people which threats are considered legitimate and which are considered taboo. If Americans are frequently exposed to the narratives of the Muslim Brotherhood, then the Muslim Brotherhood will gain room to operate through institutions, advocacy groups, media, and electoral politics without any scrutiny.

Using Hollywood to Attack the UAE

Paramount+’s espionage series is an American adaptation of the French Le Bureau des Légendes, created for the U.S. version by Jez and John-Henry Butterworth. George Clooney and Grant Heslov are among its executive producers. Its second season premiered in June 2026, in which Michael Fassbender is a CIA officer who has spent years undercover in the region. His lover, Samia, is Sudanese. In Season 2 she is imprisoned and eventually falls into the hands of an Emirati intelligence officer, Saeed Al-Bukhatir, who interrogates her, threatens members of her family, takes her to Abu Dhabi, and attempts to force her into advocating a particular political arrangement for Sudan.

That is the fiction. The reality in Sudan is more complicated.

Omar al-Bashir’s dictatorship was an Islamic state built through an alliance between the military and Hassan al-Turabi’s Islamic movement. After Bashir fell, those networksbecame the army. Reuters reported in 2023 that Islamic movements retained significant influence within military structures; by 2025, senior Islamic figures were openly describing the war as a vehicle for the return of the Islamic state and thousands of Islamic-linked fighters were fighting alongside the army. By 2026 the matter had become serious enough that the United States designated the Sudanese Muslim Brotherhoodas a terrorist organization.

The SAF has not fought this war alone. Iran supplied drones that helped the army regain momentum. Turkey’s Baykarsent at least $120 million in military equipment, including TB2 drones and warheads. Egypt and Saudi Arabia backed the SAF. The important point is not that all four countries were backing the Muslim Brotherhood for the same reason, they were not. It is that Iran, Turkey, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia all ended up supporting, in different ways, the side of the war which the Muslim Brotherhood controls.

Neither side in Sudan’s war should be exonerated. However, when a Western audience watching The Agencyencounters a sinister Emirati intelligence apparatus coercing a Sudanese woman while the Muslim Brotherhood’s long history of influence over Sudan’s state, army, and civil war goes unmentioned, the result is an audience left misinformed about the reality of the conflict.

It should not be difficult to look at the UAE’s record and understand why its role in Sudan would be portrayed this way. A country that has spent years confronting the Muslim Brotherhood and opposing Brotherhood-aligned movements across the world was always likely to become a villain in a Hollywood culture already shaped by radical-left influence and sustained pressure from Muslim Brotherhood-linked networks. Abu Dhabi has made itself the main enemy of the Muslim Brotherhood. For more than a decade, the Emirati government has dismantled Muslim Brotherhood-linked networks at home and opposed them abroad. In 2014, it formally designated the Muslim Brotherhood and numerous associated organizations as terrorist entities, including CAIR.

The UAE’s threat to the Muslim Brotherhood increased since it normalized relations with Israel. The Abraham Accords established full diplomatic relations between Israel and the UAE in 2020 and opened cooperation in trade, tourism, technology, security, investment, and other areas. The Muslim Brotherhood’s narrative depends on grievance: grievance against Israel, grievance against Western power, grievance against secular Arab governments, grievance against the existing international order. The UAE has crushed that narrative.

There is no public evidence that Brotherhood-linked groups directly dictated The Agency’s treatment of the UAE. But given the documented effort by MB advocacy organizations to influence Hollywood, it is hardly unreasonable to ask whether that wider network helped shape the climate in which such portrayals are produced. If the Muslim Brotherhood-linked movements have already succeeded in gaining access to Hollywood’s narrative machinery, then we are yet to see what that influence will produce over the next decade.

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Danny Burmawi is the chief executive of the Ideological Defense Institute

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