Via BBC:
"[In] every European country you can find Muslim Brotherhood," says Ibrahim Mounir, a senior member of the group, who has spent many years in Egyptian prisons, but now lives in exile in London.
Unlike the Egyptian counterpart, the Muslim Brotherhood in the West has no headquarters, and no documented membership.
"In the last 30 years, there have been dozens of groups found in the United States that have been derivative of the Muslim Brotherhood," says Steve Emerson, an American journalist who has spent years monitoring political Islam in the US.
"The Muslim Brotherhood does not exist in a corporate way, it was always formed under false cover or under different organisations," he adds.
(...)
Suspicion and alarm
Since 9/11, the group's ideology and its possible links to militant jihad have come under greater scrutiny.
Perhaps more than anything else, its open support for the militant Palestinian group, Hamas, which is designated as a terrorist organisation by Washington, explains why it is viewed with suspicion and alarm, and its members refused entry to the US.
One such man is Kamal Helbawy, a senior member of the Muslim Brotherhood, now based in London, who is quite candid about his support for jihad in what he regards as "occupied countries", including Afghanistan - where both the US and UK have troops.
But Mr Helbawy says this does not amount to encouraging European or American Muslims to take up arms against their governments.
His advice to them is to use whatever democratic means available to them to campaign against such policies.
Global jihad and foreign policy aside, Mr Ibrahim says the Muslim Brotherhood wants "the right [for Muslims in the West] to live according to their religion."
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