A researcher of Islamic extremism, a private investigation firm and a Gulf state all played a role in spreading unfounded smears.

By Farid Hafez, Visiting Professor of International Studies at Williams College

In the early morning hours of Nov. 9, 2020, I woke to the sound of banging at the door of my family home in Vienna, Austria. As I made my way to the window of my bedroom — still half asleep in the morning darkness — to investigate the commotion, I witnessed a sight unlike any I could have ever imagined. Below my window were dozens of heavily armed police officers, preparing to breach my front door. When they saw me these men began screaming, gesturing and pointing their weapons at me. The laser sights from their guns bathed my body and the room behind me in a terrifying red glow. At that moment, my mind racing, I could think only of my wife and three children, now waking up to the sounds of these armed men, and the unknown terror that had arrived in the night for us.

As I learned later, the police raid on my home was part of a broader operation named Operation Luxor, a wide-ranging crackdown on Muslim civil society activists in Austria. I had been born and raised in Austria, growing up in a small town of fewer than 500 souls, before rising to become a well-known public commentator and academic, often writing as an interlocutor on Muslim issues for the Austrian public. In my mind, I was part of the diverse democratic fabric that gave voice to the unheard. I considered Austria not just my home but a place where I enjoyed the trust and respect of my compatriots, among them many influential figures in Austria’s government and civil society who knew me well.

The morning of the raid shattered that sense of belonging. As nearly three dozen police officers circled my house, including heavily armed special forces, I frantically tried to gather my family to safety, my mind racing for an explanation of what was occurring. The front door crashed open as police officers barged in screaming, brandishing guns. A large window near the entrance shattered so that more officers could pile in. The men stormed through the house, terrifying my wife as well as my young children. Barking orders, a group of special forces police trained their weapons on my chest and forced me to hold my arms up against the wall.

My heart pounding while I tried to make sense of the situation, I asked one of the officers whether they had a warrant — the only bit of guidance I could remember from watching Hollywood police movies. One officer passed me a sheet of paper to read. As I scanned the document, trying to focus amid the shock, I realized that I was holding a state prosecutor’s warrant. The document claimed that I was a member of a criminal and terrorist organization as well as an enemy of the Austrian state. In that instant, my previous identity seemed to vanish into smoke.

I was not charged with a crime that night, nor would I be in the future. Yet I was nonetheless treated as a criminal and enemy of the state. My bank account was frozen, as were other assets. The police took all my electronic devices. Following a lengthy interrogation at a police station, I was released on my own recognizance and sent home with not a single penny that I could say was mine. I had been scheduled to give a guest lecture that morning at the University of Vienna, but no longer even had a phone with which to contact my hosts to cancel. The Austrian news media sprang into action with alacrity to cast me as an extremist — even though I had long been a writer for many of its most prestigious publications.

The morning of the raid was a turning point in my life. But I was not the only one affected. Operation Luxor targeted nearly 70 individuals and organizations, with raids by nearly 1,000 police officers taking place in three different Austrian states. While cast as a crackdown against the Muslim Brotherhood in Austria, a transnational political organization with which I had no connection, the raids were in reality part of an effort by an increasingly right-wing government to punish and silence politically active Austrian Muslims. I had woken up one day and discovered that, through no apparent fault of my own, I was no longer welcome in my country. It would take me some years more to unravel why and how I and many others had been targeted by smears intended to cast us out of society.

Aside from a few stretches of travel and scholarship programs abroad, I had spent my entire life in Austria. I grew up in a predominantly white, rural part of the country where conservative politics were the norm, before moving to the small town of Ried. The son of working-class parents — my father was of North African background and my mother Austrian — I grew up in places where most of my peers were Austrian and few immigrants could be seen. Though my father was of Muslim background, he was not particularly religious and I was baptized Catholic as a child. At times, I felt that I fit in and was welcome in the communities where I lived. But gradually, I began to notice that because of my race, there was something different in how my peers treated or saw me.

In my small town, though I was not Black, I had often been called the N-word. Many of my classmates had family members involved in far-right politics, and hearing ugly jokes about Adolf Hitler and the Jewish people was not uncommon. My experiences of belonging to a racial minority in rural Austria and learning that I could sometimes be ostracized because of differences in skin color or for having a foreign name led me to a gradual awakening about race and identity. I discovered the writings of Malcolm X as a teenager and developed a political consciousness, first studying the history of antisemitism in Austria and then the world of immigrant politics and Islam.

These readings would gradually blossom into a career in academia and journalism largely focused on the study of racism, including anti-Muslim racism in Europe. I wrote on a variety of topics in Austrian newspapers, where I became well known as a public commentator. I was awarded prizes for my work and was regularly interviewed about daily political events on television. My country, meanwhile, was going through changes that would gradually transform its political landscape. Joerg Haider had become one of the most successful far-right leaders, who mainstreamed his party, the Freedom Party of Austria (FPO), by both capitalizing on and encouraging anti-immigrant sentiment in the country. I found that my scholarship was welcomed by the public so long as my criticisms focused on him and other far-right parties, long considered to be the primary vectors of racism in the country.

Yet this honeymoon period lasted only until Islamophobia became politically mainstream in Austria. The anti-Muslim policies of the FPO were gradually coopted and implemented by the center-right Austrian People’s Party (OVP), under the leadership of its political wunderkind Sebastian Kurz. The focus of my own work shifted from the far right, as I now began criticizing not a political party in opposition but a party in power. The OVP began putting in force a laundry list of anti-Muslim policies that it had seemingly cribbed from Haider and others it had once deemed dangerous radicals. Under the leadership of the OVP, mosques were closed, the hijab was banned in several educational institutions, and plans were made to eventually ban it for college students and civil service employees. The surveillance of Muslim associations by the intelligence service and the criminalization of Muslim associations by the state authorities increased, leading to the establishment of state-funded institutions such as the Documentation Center for Political Islam, an advisory organization widely viewed as critical of Islam. Within the course of a few years, criticizing the far right had become redundant. The political mainstream had become hostile to Muslims.

The anti-Muslim policies of the OVP were good domestic politics. Unlike the far right’s discourse 10 years earlier, the OVP claimed that it was separating the vast majority of peace-loving Muslims from the few radicals that it claimed to be targeting with these measures. It was an untrue claim: The anti-Muslim policies targeted individuals without exception. Yet this sleight of hand was how they were able to persuade many in the opposition, from the center-left Social Democrats to the liberals and even some Greens, a party programmatically dedicated to anti-racism, to go along with their program of marginalizing and suppressing Austrian Muslims. To circumvent charges that it was violating Muslims’ religious freedom in contravention of its obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights, the government further claimed that it was combating only “political Islam.” This framing gradually became common sense in Austrian politics.

The groundwork for this policy had been years in the making. As news reports would later reveal, Sebastian Kurz and his team had planned to use anti-Muslim talking points as part of a broader strategy to build their political profile in the country. Initiating this plan required commissioning and publishing critical reports on Austrian Muslims that would outline the terms of their campaign. The main report that laid the groundwork for the anti-Muslim policies of the OVP, and that would be cited 14 times in the search warrant for the Operation Luxor raid that eventually targeted myself and others, was titled “The Muslim Brotherhood in Austria.” The report was funded by the government through a contribution of about $100,000 and authored by an individual named Lorenzo Vidino.

Vidino was not an Austrian, did not speak German and had not spent a great deal of time in the country. In my long life there I had never encountered him, even though I knew most people in Austria’s close-knit civil society, including political leaders like Kurz himself. Vidino had once appeared in Austrian media in 2015 to attack critics of Kurz’s new “Islam Act” that aimed to restructure the relationship between Muslim organizations and state authorities. I had been among those who criticized Kurz for this step. Vidino serves as the director of George Washington University’s Program on Extremism, a think tank established with the ostensible mission of combating radicalism and extremism. His academic affiliations in the U.S. gave an intellectual cachet to his commentary and the subsequent report he would write for the government.

Vidino’s report purported to document the activities of the Muslim Brotherhood in Austria. Yet he painted his targets with such a broad brush that almost anyone could be suspected of affiliation with the group. Vidino argued that talking about “Islamophobia,” as scholars of anti-racism like me did as a matter of course, was a tool of the brotherhood to subvert and undermine Austrian society. His report did not name me. Yet given his attacks on the concept of Islamophobia, there was a clear implication that I might be one of the shadowy figures he was talking about. I was well known in the Austrian public as the editor of an annual publication called the Islamophobia Studies Yearbook, the co-editor of another periodic study called the European Islamophobia Report and a critic of Kurz’s anti-Muslim policies. The report gave license to begin targeting individuals like me who talked about seemingly common-sense issues like anti-racism and Islamophobia as though we were seditious extremists or members of suspect political organizations like the brotherhood.

Upon its publication, the Austrian Ministry of the Interior summarized Vidino’s English-language report in a short press release. The press release quoted Vidino as saying that “the Muslim Brotherhood is aiming to divide society and strengthen the influence of political Islam.” In his comments, Vidino seems to criticize specifically discussion of anti-Muslim racism, an undeniable reality in Austrian life, even suggesting that such discussions amounted to encouragement of violence. “Especially against the backdrop of the sharp increase in Islamic radicalization in Europe,” Vidino writes, “the spread of the narrative of Muslims as victims must be viewed with concern.”

He would continue to press this case in the years to come. Two days after the raids that targeted my home and others, Vidino published an article on the Foreign Policy website, where he praised Austria for leading a crackdown on Islamism in Europe. This time he targeted me explicitly, linking to a publication of mine about Islamophobia and describing me as a “known Islamist actor.” True to his style, it was a vague accusation that I had no opportunity to contest, yet appeared calculated to further destroy my reputation. In that sense, his attacks on me were successful. I had become persona non grata in Austria, the only country I had ever known as home.

Following the raids, I left Austria for the U.S. to take up a teaching position that had been offered to me at a university. I was no longer able to work in my home country, where, while I was never charged with any crime, I had been turned into a pariah by the government and its media apparatchiks. This experience took a deep emotional toll on me, compounded by my own incomprehension of how I had become the subject of such sensational accusations. It would take years to find out what forces were at work behind Vidino and the Austrian authorities in this campaign to snuff out Muslim civil society in Austria.

In March 2023, The New Yorker published an investigative story outlining how a Swiss private investigative firm, Alp Services, had helped orchestrate the downfall of an American businessperson named Hazim Nada. Alp had run a clandestine operation branding Nada’s company a front for the Muslim Brotherhood, gradually destroying his reputation and financially ruining him. The New Yorker investigation further revealed that an authoritarian government had been behind this. In its campaign against Nada and many others, Alp Services had been commissioned by the government of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), compiling lists of people and organizations to be subjected to smears aimed at driving them out of public life. Integral to this campaign, the article revealed, was Lorenzo Vidino, who was contracted by Alp to help them find targets to characterize to the Emiratis as supporters of Islamism. According to The New Yorker, Vidino delivered “a series of gossipy reports about the Brotherhood’s reach” that helped create the framework for Alp’s work on behalf of the UAE. Alp ultimately earned millions of Euros in fees from the Emiratis, while few of the individuals like Nada were fortunate enough to learn what had been behind the attacks on them.

The information that made up the basis for The New Yorker’s investigation came from a leak of hacked documents from Alp that were given to Nada. The same documents showed that I too had been a target of the same campaign. While Vidino had been cautious and indirect in his public statements, in his private communications he showed no such discretion. In a secret paper he wrote for Alp Services, Vidino subsumed me under the category of “known Islamist actors and supporters” — an amorphous yet sensational charge that would prove sufficient to destroy my life.

The documents would be more than enough to allow me to launch a lawsuit against Vidino, Alp Services and the George Washington Program on Extremism. Vidino had cast me as a radical and extremist in order to further his own relationship as a contractor for firms like Alp, and possibly secure funding from the UAE, all potentially in violation of the Program on Extremism’s own mission and status as a nonprofit, ostensibly engaged in academic research. As I would later discover, Vidino also served thrice as an expert witness in the terrorism investigation against me, attempting to create a link between myself and the Muslim Brotherhood, which was considered a terrorist organization by the leading state prosecutor in Austria. I was never given a chance to defend myself in these closed-door meetings, nor even told that I was being accused.

Though neither I nor anyone else was charged with a crime in the raids of Operation Luxor, they were perhaps still a success from the Austrian government’s perspective. Under the new right-wing status quo in the country, my critique of anti-Muslim policies in Austria has effectively been silenced, in no small part thanks to Vidino’s work smearing me and other critics of Islamophobia as extremists. Risible as it may be, the argument now being propounded in Austria is that discussing issues of anti-Muslim racism is merely the first step in laying the groundwork for an Islamic caliphate. That is exactly what a regional court argued in dismissing my appeal in trial court to end the investigation against me. According to the regional court, my “activities in the preparation of the so-called Islamophobia Report and activity with the Bridge Initiative at Georgetown University is intended to disseminate the fighting term ‘Islamophobia’ with the goal of preventing any critical engagement with Islam as a religion […] in order to establish an Islamic state.”

The trauma following both the brutal intrusion of heavily weaponized police forces into my private home and the character assassination that ensued left me with little choice but to leave my country of origin and begin anew in the United States. Uprooted from our place of birth, my children, my wife and I started a new life in a place where we could enjoy dignity and the protection of the law and not live under a regime where Muslim identity per se is criminalized. As painful as it has been, my forced displacement has deepened the commitment to advocating for justice that began so many years ago when I was a young man. Having gone through this nightmare, I see the opportunity to educate and inspire a new generation of students, fostering a more nuanced understanding of Islamophobia and its consequences.

Suing Vidino, Alp Services, George Washington University and their Emirati financiers may bring some measure of justice to my life and expose the malicious intent behind their actions. However, the broader issue persists: Too many ideological extremists have allied with corrupt and authoritarian financial backers in order to crack down on Muslim civil society. This sordid marriage enables monarchies to introduce authoritarian policies in Western nation-states for their own benefit, while undermining democratic basic principles under the guise of combating extremism.

Vidino is now readying to dispute the lawsuit in court. While hearings are expected later this year, the legal fight may continue for years. Underlying this battle is my contention that individuals like Vidino have become mercenaries, using the shield of their academic connections to conceal an ugly and destructive campaign that has ruined the lives of countless innocents.

My ordeal began on that night in November 2020, when the police came for me and my family. Yet I do not plan to go silently or to forfeit the rights to which I know I am entitled. As the far right rises across Europe, allied in some cases with ideologues in the U.S. and authoritarian regimes in the Middle East, I intend to keep fighting against Islamophobia and injustice with the same vigor I have throughout my life. While I may have fallen victim to the same forces I sought to document, my hope is that, by my taking a stand now, future generations of Muslims in Austria and across the continent may be spared the same fate.

Source: New Lines Magazine