Lorenzo Vidino is an academic who frequently collaborates with anti-Muslim hate groups and whose research promotes conspiracy theories about American Muslims, Islam and the Muslim Brotherhood’s supposed influence in Europe and the U.S. Currently, he serves as the director of the Program on Extremism at The George Washington University.
The Program on Extremism (PoE) at George Washington University presents itself as a nonpartisan research center “producing empirical work and developing pragmatic policy solutions that resonate with policymakers, civic leaders, and the general public.”
Under the leadership of director Lorenzo Vidino, the program has faced criticism from affiliated scholars for promoting anti-Muslim narratives. In April 2023, two affiliated scholars, Hilary Matfess and Cynthia Miller-Idriss, publicly severed ties with the program. Matfess cited Vidino’s reported role in a smear campaign that targeted Muslim scholars and civil society actors.
Miller-Idriss said, “I too feel I should have done better diligence before agreeing to join [the George Washington University Program on Extremism], & I apologize to all Muslim organizations in particular who were directly harmed by these false, slanderous claims that came from leader whose organization had my name attached to it.”
Vidino has longstanding connections with anti-Muslim figures and organizations in Europe and the U.S. In 2004 and 2005, Vidino was a Senior Analyst on the Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT) in Washington, D.C., led by anti-Muslim figure Steve Emerson. [Archive] In 2018, the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hatewatch staff described Emerson as “a longtime anti-Muslim agitator who has peddled the debunked myth of Muslim-only ‘no-go’ zones in Europe and claimed the Oklahoma City bombing had ‘a Middle Eastern trait.’”
In 2005, Vidino published an article in the Middle East Forum’s journal Middle East Quarterly. The Middle East Forum was founded by the notorious anti-Muslim figure Daniel Pipes. Vidino’s article was titled “The Muslim Brotherhood’s Conquest of Europe,” where he claims that mainstream Muslim organizations across Europe are secretly fronts for the Muslim Brotherhood, a common anti-Muslim conspiracy used across the West. Additionally, in the article, he frames Muslim community organizing, youth outreach, and interfaith engagement as a covert plan for domination, alleging that “Their ultimate goal may not be simply ‘to help Muslims be the best citizens they can be,’ but rather to extend Islamic law throughout Europe and the United States.”
In 2005, Vidino did an interview with the far right and anti-Muslim site FrontPage Magazine, then edited by anti-Muslim figure David Horowitz, whom the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) described as the “godfather of the modern anti-Muslim movement.” In the interview, Vidino platforms the great replacement conspiracy theory, warning that Muslims would soon make up the majority in many European cities and urging Europe to reclaim its “history, tradition, and values.”
In November 2006, Vidino published an essay titled “Aims and Methods of Europe’s Muslim Brotherhood” for the Hudson Institute, a D.C.-based think tank with a history of anti-Muslim actions that include bringing Geert Wilders to the United States to warn against the Muslim plot to “rule the world by the sword.” Geert Wilders is a well-known politician from the Netherlands who platforms and promotes anti-Muslim tropes and has made claims such as “Islam is something we can’t afford any more in the Netherlands. I want the fascist Koran banned. We need to stop the Islamisation of the Netherlands.” In the essay, Vidino discusses “Europe’s Muslim Brotherhood,” alleging that “The European Ikhwan network, under the cover of various civil rights groups and Islamic organizations, is the vanguard of this peaceful conquest.”
Vidino published another essay for the Hudson Institute in August 2008, titled “Islam, Islamism, and Jihadism in Italy” again in which he claims “the control of the Italian Muslim community has been conquered by an active minority,” portraying Muslim leadership as a hostile takeover and reinforcing the Islamophobic trope that organized Muslim religiosity is a threat.
According to the Bridge Initiative, Vidino also repeatedly quotes Udo Ulfkotte, “a German anti-Muslim conspiracy theorist who believed that Germany was being ‘Islamized.’” Ulfkotte also conspired that a 2014 E.coli outbreak in Germany was allegedly because of the bad hygiene of Turkish women farmers and came with the wild conclusion that Muslims were waging a “fecal matter jihad.”
Vidino has written two books about the Muslim Brotherhood in the West. In 2010, he published his first book titled “The New Muslim Brotherhood in the West,” where he continued to build off his previous work in presenting anti-Muslim conspiracies as facts. For example, he cites French journalist Sylvain Besson’s “The Conquest of the Occident: The Secret Project of the Islamists,” yet again promoting the anti-Muslim conspiracy that Muslims aim to attack the West.
Vidino has also had an influence on political parties and anti-Muslim policies pushed across Europe. In 2010, Vidino spoke at the Austrian Political Academy of the Austrian People’s Party in Vienna, and the Wilfried Martens Centre later published his remarks for European Studies, the official think tank of the European People’s Party.
In another 2011 report for the Wilfried Martens Centre, Vidino characterized alleged ‘Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated groups’ in Europe as “modern-day Trojan horses” engaged in covert efforts to erode European society and gradually replace it with an Islamic system. He further accused these networks of operating a “remarkable propaganda machine” by labeling critics as racists or Islamophobes.
In April 2011, Vidino brought his anti-Muslim rhetoric to Congress, testifying at a House Intelligence Committee hearing launched by Rep. Sue Myrick, a known promoter of Muslim infiltration conspiracies. Citing a widely discredited 1991 memo, Vidino pushed the false narrative that Muslim groups in the U.S. are part of a hidden “civilization jihad,” calling them a “modern-day Trojan horse” hiding behind a “moderate facade.”
In August 2017, Vidino published a report funded by Austria’s intelligence agency on Austria’s Muslim Brotherhood. The report accused nearly all Austrian Muslim organizations of Muslim Brotherhood ties. In 2018, Austria’s intelligence agency relied on this report in its annual review, marking the first time the state targeted not only violent extremists but also the legally recognized Islamic Religious Authority in Austria (Islamische Glaubensgemeinschaft in Österreich).
In July 2020, Austria’s Federal Chancellery launched the Documentation Center for Political Islam to monitor, surveil, and map Muslims in Austria, framing it as a step toward combating a “dangerous ideology.” Vidino, who sits on the Center’s advisory board, called it a “pioneer in Europe” at its launch. The center is funded by the Integration Ministry with €500,000 and staffed by a small team of “experts.”
Vidino appears to have built his career by mainly pushing a false narrative that casts mainstream Muslim civic life in the West as a front for extremism. Among his most damaging interventions was a years-long smear campaign targeting Dr. Farid Hafez, an Austrian political scientist known across the West for his work on Islamophobia and European Muslim communities.
The campaign began in 2014 after Hafez publicly criticized Austria’s proposed Islam Act, a law that sought to regulate Muslim institutions. Soon after, Vidino began alleging that there were ties between Hafez and the Muslim Brotherhood based solely on his past involvement with the Muslim Youth of Austria. In 2017, Vidino named Hafez directly in his report “The Muslim Brotherhood in Austria,” funded by Austria’s intelligence agency.
In 2020, the consequences escalated. Vidino’s report was cited 14 times in a search warrant used to justify a militarized police raid on Hafez’s home at 5 a.m. as part of Operation Luxor. Operation Luxor was an operation on November 9, 2020, where Austrian authorities raided the homes of 70 individuals and institutions across Vienna, Styria, and Carinthia, targeting alleged “political Islam.” In 2021, Hafez wrote that he and his children were being treated for post-traumatic stress disorder following the violent police raid.
In 2023, an Austrian appellate court ruled the Operation Luxor raids were unlawful and dismissed all false accusations of ties that the raided individuals and groups provided financial support for terrorism. No formal charges were ever filed, and the court found the investigation lacked basic legal grounds. Additionally, the phone taps that were a part of the operation were ruled to have been unlawful. All the witnesses against the defendants either withdrew their testimonies or lost in civil proceedings.
That same year, The New Yorker published an investigative exposé titled “The Dirty Secrets of a Smear Campaign,” revealing that Vidino had reportedly played a central role in a covert disinformation operation funded by the UAE and executed by Swiss intelligence firm Alp Services.
Between 2018 and 2020, Vidino was reportedly paid at least €13,000 to provide “interesting leads” and the names of alleged Brotherhood affiliates across Europe. His affiliation with George Washington University lent credibility to false and damaging intelligence, which was then repackaged into smear dossiers and fake news articles.
One such campaign, enabled by Vidino, reportedly helped the United Arab Emirates falsely brand the British charity Islamic Relief Worldwide (IRW) as a terrorist-linked organization. In 2014, the UAE designated IRW a terrorist group, accusing it of ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. After these accusations, an independent audit conducted on IRW cleared the organization. Yet UAE-aligned media and think tanks intensified their claims, and Vidino reportedly contributed to spreading the narrative that mainstream Muslim organizations like IRW are covert Brotherhood fronts. The campaign’s influence led to temporary government investigations and the resignation of some IRW board members. The New Yorker report stated that “nobody has ever credibly identified any institutional ties between the charity and an Islamist movement”.
In 2024, Hafez filed a $10 million federal lawsuit in Washington, D.C., naming Vidino, George Washington University, Alp Services, and UAE-linked actors as defendants. The suit cites violations of RICO, FARA, and conspiracy to defame, arguing that Vidino knowingly led a campaign that weaponized false allegations against Muslims to destroy their reputations and ultimately chill Muslim civic engagement. At the time of this profile’s publication, legal proceedings in the case continue.