Recently the head of German domestic intelligence, Sinan Selen, held a meeting in the Bundestag building where he laid out for a select audience the threat of Islamist infiltration into the country’s political institutions. More on his warning can be found here: “Germany’s Intelligence Chief Warns of Islamist Infiltration of Political Institutions,” by Jules Gomes, Middle East Forum, June 14, 2026:

Sinan Selen, Cybersec22, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0

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.

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.

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.

I’m not convinced that those now called “Islamists” represent a “totalitarian perversion” of the faith. They are the Muslims who take their Islam straight, not on the rocks. It is the “moderate” Muslims who choose to ignore parts of the faith, but we have no way of knowing which Muslims are only feigning “moderation” or which, initially being real moderates, for whatever reason become more fanatical in their faith. The countries of the Western world have no way to distinguish the “moderates” from the “fanatic,” when they cross the border, and cannot be sure that those who initially may appear “moderate” will remain that way. European countries must strive to end migration by all Muslims into their midst.

“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….

But those who are “waking up” to the perils of Islamic political infiltration were never part of the leadership that allowed mass migration of Muslims into their countries in the first place. Such leaders as Jordan Bardella of the National Rally in France, Alice Weidel of the Alternative für Deutschland, Rupert Lowe of the Restore Britain party, and Giorgia Meloni of the Fratelli d’Italia party have always been leery of Muslim migrants. What has changed is popular sentiment. It has become ever more hostile to Muslim migrants, which explains why those leaders, and their anti-Muslim immigrant parties, have risen so spectacularly in the polls. The naïve enthusiasm for Muslim migrants, as famously expressed in former Chancellor Angela Merkel’s insistence in 2015 that “Wir schaffen das!” — “We Can Do This!” — that is, we the people of Germany can successfully integrate large numbers of Muslims into our societies, has disappeared. Instead, the indigenous peoples of Europe have realized that the large-scale presence of Muslims in their countries has created a situation that for them is more unpleasant, expensive, and physically dangerous than would be the case without that large-scale Muslim presence.

It is the Muslim alliance with the left that has magnified the threat of Islamic penetration of Germany’s political institutions. This alliance should be publicized, and efforts made to convince the left that such an alliance is misconceived, given Islam’s misogyny and homophobia, and Islam’s refusal to uphold both freedom of speech and freedom of religion.

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.

According to Al-Qaradawi, Muslims should accept citizenship not out of any sense of loyalty to the state, but only in order to vote for those who will support their Islamic penetration of domestic institutions. Think only of Zohran Mamdani, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Sadiq Khan.

What begins as an alliance of seeming equals — Muslims and leftists — according to Scholz soon metamorphoses into an alliance where Muslims, that is, the Muslim Brotherhood, call the shots, and the leftists, having nowhere else to go, must follow. For all Muslims know, as Muhammad insisted, that “Islam is to dominate and not to be dominated.”

Now the head of Germany’s domestic intelligence service has issued his warning about Muslim infiltration of the country’s political institutions behind closed doors. Why should he not come out of the shadows and address the entire Bundestag with his warning? Surely he, who was born into a Muslim family, is not afraid to endure the predictable slander from the Muslims and the Left, that he is a “racist” and an “Islamophobe.”

Jihad Watch, Hugh Fitzgerald