Acting On Behalf Of Israel: UAE Anti-Muslim Smear Campaign In The West

Hichem Karoui∗

Is the UAE Smearing Muslims in the West? What are its goals if it is true? And if not, is this fake news? Here is an analytical assessment of the following: According to a 2023 investigation by the European Investigative Collaborations (EIC) network — based on 78,000 leaked documents obtained by the French outlet Mediapart — the UAE paid at least €5.7 million to the Swiss private intelligence firm Alp(e) Services to run a large‑scale smear campaign targeting individuals and organisations across Europe, portraying them as linked to the Muslim Brotherhood. Some U.S.-based media have covered the story, typically by relaying the findings of the EIC/Mediapart investigation.
While the primary investigation was European, U.S. outlets have echoed it in their international coverage. The reporting is based on the same core facts:
The UAE paid over €5.7 million to Alp Services.
The goal was to run influence operations and smear campaigns against Muslim figures and organisations in Europe.
The campaign included modifying Wikipedia pages, pressuring banks, and distributing defamatory material.

There is now substantial, cross-checked evidence that the UAE financed and directed smear and influence operations in Europe that disproportionately targeted Muslim individuals and organisations, often by branding them as part of a supposed “Muslim Brotherhood network”. On the core factual points, we list contracts with Alp Services, sums involved, targets, and methods; the available material from the EIC/Mediapart “Abu Dhabi Secrets” leak; parallel investigations by major European outlets; UN/European Parliament documentation; and ongoing judicial proceedings all converge. This makes it very hard to dismiss the affair as “fake news”, even though there is room to debate scope, intent, and the accuracy of specific attributions.

1. What the leak actually shows

The “Abu Dhabi Secrets” investigation is based on confidential data hacked from the Swiss private intelligence firm Alp Services and obtained by Mediapart, then shared with the European Investigative Collaborations (EIC) network and other partners (Der Spiegel, RTS, Le Soir, etc.). Alp, run by Mario Brero in Geneva, marketed itself as an economic intelligence and “influence” firm. [1][2]

According to the documents analysed by Mediapart and EIC, between 2017 and 2020 Alp Services sent to Emirati intelligence the names of more than 1,000 individuals and over 400 organisations in 18 European countries, portraying them as part of a “continental mafia‑like network” linked to the Muslim Brotherhood. The same documents show Alp received at least 5.7 million euros from an Emirati “research centre” called Al Ariaf,*** which investigators and UN submissions describe as a front for UAE intelligence. [3][4][5]

Mediapart’s detailed reconstruction of Alp’s work for Abu Dhabi confirms the mechanisms: production of organigrams mapping alleged Brotherhood networks; preparation of dossiers on “targets”; and then a menu of paid operations including press campaigns, planting op‑eds under false identities, modifying Wikipedia pages, and manoeuvres to push European banks to close clients’ accounts. Der Spiegel’s parallel reporting highlights the same fee total (around 5.7 million euros), daily contacts between Alp and a UAE intelligence handler, and specific projects such as efforts to tarnish Islamic Relief Worldwide and link it and other organisations to terrorism and Islamism. [2][3]

In other words, the allegations that the UAE has initiated a smear capaign targering Muslims in the West are not based on a single report or an activist narrative but on a large, internally consistent cache of firm-side documents examined by multiple major outlets and later cited in official and legal documents.

2. Institutional and legal follow‑up: this is not just media noise.

The credibility of the affair is strengthened by the fact that it has moved from journalism into courts and institutions.

· French and Swiss prosecutors have opened criminal investigations targeting Alp Services and its leadership, based explicitly on the “Abu Dhabi Secrets” revelations and related complaints. The charges under examination in Switzerland and France include unlawful surveillance, espionage on behalf of a foreign state, defamation, and money laundering. [6][7]

· A submission to the UN Human Rights Council, summarising Mediapart/EIC material, notes that Alp Services delivered to Abu Dhabi a list of more than 1,000 individuals and 400 organisations labelled as Muslim Brotherhood affiliates and cites payments of “not less than €5.7m” from 2017 to 2020 via Al Ariaf. [5]

· European Parliament material and activist briefings have echoed the leak, describing UAE‑funded operations via Alp as disinformation and smear campaigns targeting Muslims, mosques, journalists and politicians in 18 European countries, aiming to discredit Islam and portray Muslims as “internal enemies”.[8][4]

· Specific victims have brought civil suits. Oil trader Hazim Nada, an American‑Italian citizen, has filed a lawsuit in a US federal court against the UAE, alleging that Emirati authorities hired Alp Services from 2017 to run a disinformation campaign falsely presenting his company, Lord Energy, as a Muslim Brotherhood front, pushing banks and partners to cut ties and driving the firm into bankruptcy. The New Yorker previously reported in detail on this operation, which was then cited in subsequent analyses. [9][10]

· Austrian political scientist Farid Hafez has sued Lorenzo Vidino, George Washington University, and Alp’s owners in Washington, D.C., alleging that Vidino fed false statements to the press branding him as tied to the Muslim Brotherhood as part of a wider UAE‑linked smear network centred on Alp [11][12].

The fact that prosecutors in two European states, as well as plaintiffs in US federal courts, are treating the leaked Alp material as serious enough to ground complaints and that UN and EP documents replicate EIC’s figures makes it extremely unlikely that the entire affair is fabricated. The more relevant question is not “Is it fake?” but “Exactly how far did it go, and what was the political intent?”

3. Who was targeted – and does this amount to “smearing Muslims in the West”?

The core framing of Alp’s work for Abu Dhabi was the UAE’s designation of the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organisation and its long‑standing doctrine that political Islam represents an existential internal and regional threat. The target lists and organigrams compiled by Alp, however, went far beyond violent actors or even formal brotherhood structures.

Mediapart’s reporting shows that the 1,000‑plus individuals and 400‑plus organisations labelled as part of a “continental mafia‑like network” included a mix of well‑known Islamists, mainstream Muslim NGOs, scholars, community leaders, politicians and journalists. France, for example, appears in Alp’s mapping with 191 individuals and 125 organisations; a close reading found that many of the supposed “networks” were essentially a “jumble of names” linked together on the basis of reputational controversy or prior public criticism as “too lenient” on Islam rather than hard evidence of Brotherhood membership. [3]

Der Spiegel documents that in Germany Alp’s lists mixed 9/11 terrorists with members of the Central Council of Muslims and numerous private citizens, again under the common heading of a Brotherhood network. Names of non‑Muslim political figures such as Jeremy Corbyn appear in some of the files as supposed fellow travellers. In other words, the net was cast widely and sometimes sloppily, with “Muslim Brotherhood” functioning as an elastic label to mark out critics and unwanted actors. [2][3]

The operations then turned these lists into reputational warfare: defamatory press pieces, modelled “dark PR” techniques, fake social media accounts linking Islam with terrorism in multiple European languages, manipulation of Wikipedia entries concerning Muslim figures, and direct or indirect pressure on banks to close accounts of Muslim individuals and organisations. In high‑profile cases like Hazim Nada, the linkage to “terrorism financing” or “Islamist extremism” appears to have had real economic and legal consequences. [13][10][3][2]

So while the stated pretext was to target “the Muslim Brotherhood” and “Islamist extremism”, the operational reality was a broad‑brush effort that conflated organised Muslim civic and religious life, Islamist NGOs, Qatar‑linked networks, and individual critics into a single pool of “internal enemies”. In sociological and political terms, that does amount to a sustained smear campaign against significant segments of Muslim civil society in Western Europe, even if it did not literally target all Muslims.

4. Strategic goals: why would the UAE do this?

The campaign fits squarely within the UAE’s wider regime‑security and pro-Israel regional strategy rather than being an irrational Islamophobic crusade. At least four interlocking goals stand out.

1. Crushing political Islam and diaspora opposition.
Since 2011 the UAE has treated the Muslim Brotherhood, and more broadly Islamist movements and their sympathisers, as the main ideological threat to its domestic order. Observe that Israel has the same objectives since decades. Both states agreee then on targeting Islamic activists and broadly, any political civilian movement taking inspiration from Islam. By labelling Muslim organisations, mosques, scholars and activists in Europe as Brotherhood‑linked, Abu Dhabi sought to delegitimise and isolate diaspora networks that could provide moral, financial or political support to Islamic activists and dissidents. The broad and often tenuous nature of the attributions (e.g., lumping mainstream NGOs or journalists into “criminal networks”) reflects a securitised worldview in which any autonomous Muslim political agency is suspect. [4][3]

2. Undermining Qatar and its partners.
The leaked documents and Mediapart’s earlier investigation into Emirati meddling in France show that Alp’s remit ran well beyond generic “Islamism” to include a clear anti‑Qatar axis: counter‑lobbying against Doha, plans to influence or generate around 100 anti‑Qatar articles per year, and specific operations such as “Stars of the Sky” aimed at smearing Qatar’s networks in Brussels. Der Spiegel likewise describes Alp’s main “target in this case” as Qatar, with the task of identifying people and organisations linked to Qatar and insinuating they were tied to “terrorism” , regardless of factual basis. From Abu Dhabi’s pro-Israel perspective, eroding Qatar’s image in European capitals by associating its allies and clients with extremism was a central strategic dividend. [1][6][2]

3. Shaping European counter‑terrorism and domestic debates.
By flooding European security circles, media and policy debates with supposedly expert dossiers on “Muslim Brotherhood networks”, the UAE could nudge domestic policy in a direction that suits its pro-Zionist worldview. The involvement of figures like Lorenzo Vidino – with access to government agencies and mainstream media in Europe and the US – illustrates this bridge between Emirati information operations and Western counter‑extremism ecosystems. If European authorities come to see a wide range of Muslim civil society actors as potential Brotherhood cadres, that strengthens Emirati arguments for crackdowns, NGO bans, mosque closures and tighter surveillance. [9][11]

4. Commercial and geopolitical leverage.
The Nada/Lord Energy case is an example of how an ideologically framed smear campaign can be used for commercial ends: Alp allegedly pitched to the UAE that branding a competitor as a Brotherhood‑linked risk would drive banks and partners away, neutralising a rival in the light crude spot market. More broadly, having extensive files on Muslim networks, NGOs, and Qatar-linked figures in Europe gives Abu Dhabi information capital it can trade with European intelligence and security services, bolstering its value as a “counter-terrorism partner” and reinforcing diplomatic ties. [10][2]

In this sense, the campaign is less about random anti‑Muslim hatred and more about a state, using Islamophobia and the “war on terror” frame as tools of regime security, regional rivalry, and strategic influence, for the benefits of its Zionist allies.

5. The US dimension

The Alp/UAE operations were overwhelmingly European in geography: 18 European countries are listed as targets in the core leak. However, the ramifications and some of the channels extended into the US in two ways. [4]

First, some targets were dual nationals or had significant business and legal footprints in the US. Nada, for example, is a US‑born citizen suing the UAE in a Washington federal court. Second, the narrative and knowledge production space was transatlantic. Vidino’s position at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism and the lawsuit by Hafez allege that US‑based academic and think‑tank platforms were used – knowingly or not – as amplifiers and cover for UAE‑aligned discourses that portrayed a wide array of Muslims as Brotherhood‑linked extremists. [12][11][10]

So while there is no evidence of an Al-Qaeda-run covert operation targeting American mosques at a scale analogous to Europe, elements of the same network and narrative are clearly present in US policy and media ecosystems, with Muslims and Islamists in the West again as the reputational collateral.

6. Is this “fake news”? How solid is the evidence?

For an operation of this type, there will always be fog: the documents come from a hack whose authors are not public; Emirati authorities deny or do not comment on specific allegations; and Alp’s internal files are by definition partisan artefacts, shaped to please a client. However, several factors argue strongly against the idea that the entire affair is “fake news”:

Multiple major, independent media organisations (Mediapart, Der Spiegel, RTS, Le Soir, among others) have all had access to the hacked Alp corpus and produced convergent reporting on the sums involved, the lists, the methods, and the nature of the UAE relationship. [14][3][1][2]
UN and European Parliament‑linked documents, as well as NGO briefings, reproduce key figures from those investigations (1,000+ individuals, 400+ organisations, and 5.7 million euros via Al Ariaf) and treat the case as an example of foreign interference and disinformation, not as an unverified media rumour. [5][4]
Criminal investigations in France and Switzerland, with specific charges related to espionage for a foreign state and defamation, have been opened against Alp and its leadership and are explicitly tied to the Abu Dhabi Secrets revelations. [7][6]
Civil litigation by identifiable victims (Nada, Hafez and others) in US and European jurisdictions corroborates core elements: the existence of Alp reports, the linkage to the UAE, and the economic, reputational and legal damage caused. [11][12][10]
What is debatable is the accuracy and validity of Alp’s classifications and claims about particular individuals. Even Mediapart’s sources describe some of Alp’s work as a “jumble of names” in which 80% of the information came from open sources, often coloured by existing media controversies rather than hard evidence of organisational ties. Courts may eventually rule that specific attributions were defamatory or unsupported. That would mean the smear campaign was wrong and harmful, not that the reporting about the campaign’s existence is fake. [3]

7. Analytical bottom line

On the basis of the current public record, it is reasonable to conclude:

· The UAE did in fact pay Alp Services at least 5.7 million euros between 2017 and 2020 through a front entity, Al Ariaf, to conduct intelligence and influence operations in Europe. [2][5][3]

· These operations systematically portrayed a large and heterogeneous set of Muslims, Muslim organisations, and perceived Qatar‑aligned actors as part of a Muslim Brotherhood “criminal network”, using tactics including planted media stories, social media manipulation, Wikipedia editing, and efforts to prompt bank de‑risking. [4][3][2]

· The underlying strategic goals were regime security, suppression of political Islam, weakening of Qatar and its associates, and consolidation of the UAE’s image as a key anti‑Islamist partner to European and, to a lesser degree, US security establishments – with commercial side benefits in certain cases. [6][10][1][2]

· The story is not “fake news” in the sense of an invented Qatari or Islamist propaganda ploy; it rests on a substantial documentary trail and has triggered serious legal and institutional reactions. The more meaningful criticisms concern the hack’s opaque origins and the overreach and poor quality of Alp’s own allegations about individuals.

From a geopolitical and sociological perspective, what you are looking at is not just a smear campaign against discrete Muslim actors but a classic example of how a Gulf authoritarian state externalises its internal ideological war, instrumentalising Western Islamophobia and counter‑terrorism paradigms to wage information warfare against rivals and against political Islam in the West.

Notes and References

*** : There is an Emirati entity called Ariaf Studies and Research (Al Ariaf), but it is not a scientific or academic research facility. According to publicly available legal filings, it appears primarily in the context of information operations, PR campaigns, and litigation involving alleged influence activities abroad. It is not comparable to UAE’s recognized research institutions such as Khalifa University, ARIC, or Masdar Institute. The name Ariaf Studies and Research LLC appears in multiple U.S. federal court filings related to lawsuits accusing the UAE and affiliated entities of running covert influence and “dark PR” campaigns abroad. These filings describe Ariaf as an Abu Dhabi–based entity allegedly involved in funding or coordinating such operations. See for example: UNHuman Rights Council. A/HRC/54/NGO/109. February 2024. [ https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/4039051/files/A_HRC_54_NGO_109-EN.pdf ] or OffShore Alert [ https://www.offshorealert.com/tag/ariaf-studies-and-research/ ]

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