An Islamic student group helping to drive France’s chaotic leftist-driven protests is an alleged Muslim Brotherhood front.
Muslim Students of France repeatedly posted on social media in support of the anti-government protests over school conditions that have descended into rioting since last month. A May 2025 French parliamentary investigation labeled the club a “student branch of the Muslim Brotherhood,” the decades-old Islamic fundamentalist movement that created Hamas and which maintains political connections worldwide, according to a summary by the American think tank Middle East Forum.
The student organization did not respond to the Washington Examiner’s request for comment. Its website denies that it is a Muslim Brotherhood affiliate.
American and European critics are increasingly sounding the alarm on the brotherhood’s influence, with Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul el Sayed facing an avalanche of questions in the media about his alleged family ties to the group, which he denies. Muslim Students of France has persisted in encouraging students to join the mass demonstrations even as they lead to clashes with police, fires, property damage, a city’s town hall being demolished, and a teenager getting parts of his arm blown off by a police stun grenade. French officials have arrested around 1,800 people in the riots and announced curfews to suppress the unrest, according to multiple reports.
A Fox News report identified numerous communist or leftist organizations participating in or otherwise promoting the student uprising.
France’s May 2025 parliamentary report connected Muslim Students of France with an anti-“Islamophobia” group that the French government dissolved due to alleged Islamic extremist ties, according to Middle East Forum. One Muslim activist, Mohamed Louizi, was a student leader at his local Muslim Students of France chapter in 1999 while working for the Muslim Brotherhood, the Economist reported last month. Louizi reportedly quit the brotherhood over what he called its “totalitarian project.”
Despite its controversies, Muslim Students of France won a director’s seat in April 2026 on the French government’s National Center for University and School Services, which oversees the country’s higher education system, Middle East Forum reported.
The Trump administration sanctioned Muslim Brotherhood chapters in Sudan, Jordan, Lebanon, and Egypt as terrorist organizations since January 2026 in a historic first. The U.S. government’s announcements focused on the brotherhood’s ties to other designated terrorist groups such as Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, as well as brotherhood members directly participating in violence.
President Donald Trump called the Muslim Brotherhood a “transnational network” undermining America in a November executive order authorizing the terrorism sanctions. “Relevant here, its chapters in Lebanon, Jordan, and Egypt engage in or facilitate and support violence and destabilization campaigns that harm their own regions, United States citizens, and United States interests,” the order says.
RAMPANT TERRORISM TIES RUN THROUGH TRANSNATIONAL PRO-PALESTINIAN PROTEST GROUP
Trump called on France to close its borders in response to the riots in a Sunday Truth Social post. His administration has called out Europe over loose immigration policies for people from Muslim-majority regions that it blames for rising cultural instability in the West.
“France is burning! The immigration of people from an entirely different world, people with hatred in their hearts, has shattered that once great country,” the president said. “Close your Borders and take control, before it is too late!”