On April 13, 2002, MAB organised a pro-Palestinian rally in London. The MAB email advertising this rally was headlined “Muslim Brotherhood launch biggest Palestine rally in the UK”, clearly indicating the MAB/Muslim Brotherhood connection that Altikriti has denied. At the rally itself, demonstrators dressed as suicide bombers and carried placards, downloaded from the MAB website, equating Israel with Nazi Germany.

In 2003, a MAB spokesman, Azzam Tamimi (whom Altikriti told me was almost certainly a Muslim Brother), wrote an article titled “Anti-Semitism or Just Jews Behaving Badly?” So carried away was Tamimi by his accusations of racism against Israelis, that his own language descended into racism, going well beyond legitimate criticism of Israel and its policies.

Israeli Jews were described as “invaders” that came from afar “out of greed . . . justifying their aggression by . . . claiming themselves to be the chosen people of God who are given a divine licence to dehumanise, kill and rob and [sic] entire nation of a decent living”.

The article concluded: “Few humans may accept the racist claim of other humans of being God’s chosen ones who may kill others because they are less divine . . . Until when will the world be able to put up with their arrogance and aggression? If they want to be as human as anybody else, Jews must wake up before it is too late.”

No doubt Tamimi would say that his hostility to Israelis was not because they are Jews. The same defence was made by the Brotherhood’s ex-President of Egypt Mohamed Morsi in 2013 to six American senators who questioned him about a ranting speech in which he urged Egyptians to “nurse our children and our grandchildren on hatred” for Jews and Zionists. In a later interview Morsi described Zionists as “these bloodsuckers who attack the Palestinians, these warmongers, the descendants of apes and pigs”. While confining his comments to “Zionists” and never explicitly mentioning Jews, his tirade nonetheless invoked an anti-Semitic theme common in the Middle East about malevolent Jews exercising demonic power: “They have been fanning the flames of civil strife wherever they were throughout their history. They are hostile by nature.”

As the government review found, senior members of the Brotherhood “routinely use virulent, anti-Semitic language”, which is a core motivator of violent extremism. And the truth is their language goes well beyond Israel. The view that Jews are intrinsically evil was developed in prose reminiscent of the Nazis by a Muslim Brother revered on MAB’s website as the “doyen” of the Brotherhood, Sayyid Qutb. Echoing al-Banna, Qutb extolled the Islamic virtue of extreme purity defiled by Jewish “filth” just a few years after the Holocaust. In an essay entitled “Our Struggle With the Jews” he wrote:

Free the sensual desires from their restraints and they destroy the moral foundation on which the pure Creed rests, in order that the Creed should fall into the filth which they spread so widely on the earth. They mutilate the whole of history and falsify it. . . . From such creatures who kill, massacre and defame prophets one can only expect the spilling of human blood and dirty means which would further their machinations and evil.