分类： politics

Behind the public-facing statements of one of Sunni Islam’s most influential institutions lies a story of political pressure, national economic interests, and shifting regional alliances, multiple anonymous sources with direct knowledge of the matter have revealed. Egypt’s presidential administration has explicitly pressured Al-Azhar, the Cairo-based leading center of Sunni Islamic learning, to publicly align with the United Arab Emirates and other Gulf nations in their ongoing confrontation with Iran, according to security sources and insiders close to Al-Azhar’s Grand Imam Ahmed al-Tayeb.

Since the outbreak of the latest round of regional conflict, Al-Azhar has released four official public statements, with one explicitly branding Iranian strikes on UAE territory as “the aggression of the Islamic Republic of Iran against its Muslim neighbour, the United Arab Emirates”. What is notable in all four statements, however, is the complete absence of any condemnation of American or Israeli strikes targeting Iran. This marks a clear departure from the institution’s position during 2023’s regional conflict, when it openly labeled attacks on Iran as “the aggression of the occupying entity against the Islamic Republic of Iran”.

Sources confirm that Al-Azhar’s 2023 stance triggered significant anger from UAE officials, even though no Gulf territory had been attacked at that point. The Emirati daily Al-Khaleej publicly launched criticism of Grand Imam Tayeb over his position last year. From the very start of the current conflict, Egyptian state agencies issued a clear mandate to Al-Azhar: align unreservedly with Gulf allies and avoid any reference to U.S. or Israeli strikes on Iran, senior leadership sources within Al-Azhar told Middle East Eye.

One senior source shared the explicit message delivered by Egypt’s presidential institution: “It was stated plainly and directly by the presidential institution that there are major interests with the Gulf and the US that we cannot sacrifice under the current economic conditions, that what happened over Gaza cannot be repeated, and that Al-Azhar would bear the blame for the Egyptians who lose their jobs in the Gulf if it takes a contrary position.” This is not the first time such pressure has been applied: MEE previously reported that Egyptian authorities used identical tactics last year to force Al-Azhar to withdraw a statement calling for global intervention to address famine in Gaza. At that time, the state threatened to hold Al-Azhar responsible for derailing ceasefire efforts and blocking humanitarian aid from entering the enclave.

Gulf officials have also held direct meetings with Tayeb, framing their narrative of regional harm from Iranian actions, which sources describe as having been “greatly exaggerated”. A closer look at Al-Azhar’s four released statements reveals the carefully calibrated alignment that resulted. The first, issued on March 2, called for an immediate end to hostilities and an end to further bloodshed, while rejecting violations of Arab state sovereignty—but made no mention of Iran by name. The second, released March 17, explicitly condemned Iran’s “unjustified attacks” against a list of nations including all six Gulf Cooperation Council states, as well as Jordan, Iraq, Turkey and Azerbaijan. The third statement, dated April 9, warned the “occupying entity”—Al-Azhar’s longstanding term for Israel—against attempts to inflame regional tensions and violate the temporary truce, noting that a lack of international accountability had emboldened further criminal acts, but made no reference to strikes on Iranian soil. The most explicit statement, released May 5, singled out “the aggression of the Islamic Republic of Iran against its Muslim neighbour, the United Arab Emirates” for condemnation.

Sources close to the Egyptian presidency defend the pressure campaign, arguing that Al-Azhar is an inherent part of the Egyptian state apparatus, and unifying its public position is a critical necessity tied to Egypt’s core national interests with Gulf states. Gulf governments have themselves been closely monitoring Al-Azhar’s positions and raised the issue directly during high-level diplomatic talks throughout the current conflict, the Egyptian sources added. The close personal relationship between Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and UAE President Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, paired with Egypt’s deep-seated economic reliance on Emirati investment and support, made a targeted statement condemning Iranian strikes on the UAE a non-negotiable requirement, they noted.

MEE has not been able to independently verify the anonymous accounts provided by multiple sources. Requests for comment from Al-Azhar, the office of the Egyptian president, and the office of the UAE president have not yet received a response.

Even with this shift on the Iran-Gulf confrontation, sources note that previous pressure campaigns from Egypt and Gulf governments—led by the UAE—have failed to change Al-Azhar’s longstanding stance on Palestinian armed factions, which the institution continues to publicly support. That difference of opinion has drawn pushback from Palestinian leadership: Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas personally called Tayeb to argue that Al-Azhar’s pro-faction stance benefited political groups outside the Palestinian Authority’s official decision-making framework. Sources say the Grand Imam rejected this characterization during the call, prompting Abbas to take his complaint directly to President Sisi. The Palestinian Authority has not responded to MEE’s request for comment on the matter.

Insiders close to Tayeb have also pushed back against claims that the UAE’s 2019 mediation of a domestic crisis surrounding the Grand Imam has influenced Al-Azhar’s current position. At that time, Egyptian media reported that President Sisi planned to remove Tayeb from his post through constitutional amendments governing Al-Azhar’s leadership, and that UAE Foreign Minister Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan stepped in to mediate the dispute, preserving the existing constitutional framework in exchange for the removal of two senior officials close to Tayeb. But Al-Azhar sources say the UAE’s role in that 2019 crisis has been widely overstated.

They explain that the UAE did not object to Tayeb’s removal in principle, but was dissatisfied with the proposed replacement candidates, judging that none could match Tayeb’s global standing in countering extremism and promoting a moderate interpretation of Islam—an area where Egypt and the UAE had once cooperated extensively. That cooperation slowed dramatically after the UAE normalized relations with Israel in 2020 as part of the U.S.-brokered Abraham Accords, and today is limited to only specific narrow policy areas, with the condition that Al-Azhar avoid taking any public stance on issues involving Israel, insiders added. In the 2019 crisis, real support for preserving Tayeb’s position came from within Egyptian state agencies, the sources confirmed.

Those opposing agencies leaked news of the planned removal at the exact moment Tayeb was signing the landmark Document on Human Fraternity with Pope Francis, a timing calculated to frame the removal as punishment for Tayeb’s outreach and openness. The leak sparked public demonstrations in Luxor, Tayeb’s hometown and the base of his family, where protesters rallied holding the Grand Imam’s portrait. Widespread public pushback was paired with formal objections from Southeast Asian Muslim-majority nations, and private messages to Sisi from multiple African heads of state during a continental tour. This led Sisi to conclude that he had been misled by advisers hostile to Tayeb, sources say. After those advisers were removed from their posts, relations between the presidency and the Grand Imam recovered.

Newly released data from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) confirms a notable increase in reports of sexual harassment and assault within its ranks over the 2025 calendar year, Israeli media outlets confirmed this Tuesday. The data, published by the Gender Affairs Advisor unit to the IDF Chief of Staff, records 2,420 formal complaints of sexual violence filed by service members in 2025, an increase of roughly 350 complaints compared to the year prior. Further breakdown of the figures, released by the unit that oversees female soldier welfare, shows that only 42 complaints have resulted in formal criminal indictments, while another 21 cases were resolved through internal military disciplinary measures. In more than 700 of the reported incidents, the IDF’s response was limited to what the institution labels “command-level discussions,” in which accused perpetrators receive only formal warnings or reprimands. Meirav Ben Ari, an opposition lawmaker from the centrist Yesh Atid party who called for a special hearing on the issue before the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, described the newly published statistics as deeply alarming. Ben Ari stressed that the IDF is obligated to deploy every available resource to curb the prevalence of sexual violence within the ranks, prevent incidents wherever possible, and provide consistent, long-term support to survivors throughout their military service. IDF officials have pushed back on framing the rising complaint numbers as a sign of growing crisis, arguing instead that the steady upward trend in reports over the last decade reflects increasing trust among soldiers in the military’s reporting systems, and a growing willingness of survivors to come forward with their experiences. The military reiterated its long-stated policy of “zero tolerance” for all forms of abuse, and added that it remains committed to building and maintaining a safe service environment for all personnel. A safe environment, the IDF noted, is a foundational requirement for operational effectiveness, trust between command and troops, and the overall resilience of the fighting force. This release of official complaint data comes just one week after a high-ranking IDF officer was suspended from duty over allegations that he sexually assaulted a female soldier under his command, Israeli national newspaper Israel Hayom first reported. The outlet further confirmed that complaints of sexual violence within the military have risen steadily since October 2023, when the Gaza war began. Experts and officials cited by the paper link the increase to two key factors: growing public and institutional awareness of sexual harassment in the armed forces, and a dramatic surge in total troop numbers following the mass mobilization of hundreds of thousands of reserve soldiers after the outbreak of hostilities. The rising trend of sexual violence is not limited to the IDF, however. Data collected by the Association of Rape Crisis Centres in Israel, a leading non-governmental organization working to combat sexual violence across the country, shows that incidents have been increasing across Israeli society for years. The organization recorded more than 16,000 requests for help in 2024, over 85 percent of which came from women. In 2023, the group’s crisis centers received more than 17,000 calls for support, marking a 26 percent jump compared to call volumes in 2018. While the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, the parliamentary body tasked with overseeing military activity, held a formal debate on rising sexual violence within the IDF’s ranks last week, the committee did not address a separate set of explosive allegations: widespread claims of systemic sexual abuse against Palestinian detainees held by Israeli soldiers and security forces, which have been documented by multiple international and independent outlets. One week prior to the committee hearing, The New York Times published an in-depth investigation detailing what it described as systematic sexual abuse of Palestinian detainees by Israeli security forces that began after October 2023. The publication sparked immediate outrage from Israeli officials, who have pushed back aggressively against the findings. Israel’s Foreign Ministry confirmed that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar have instructed government legal teams to file a defamation lawsuit against the American newspaper. Allegations of sexual violence against Palestinian people held in Israeli detention facilities since the start of the Gaza war have been widely verified and documented by multiple human rights organizations and independent media outlets, including the London-based Middle East Eye. In December 2024, two Palestinian detainees spoke to Middle East Eye on the record, describing being raped while held in Israeli detention. One detainee reported being raped by a military dog, while a second recounted that Israeli officers raped him with sharp objects while he was held blindfolded. A United Nations independent inquiry published last year went further, formally accusing Israel of using sexualized torture and rape as an official method of war, employed to destabilize, dominate, oppress, and destroy the Palestinian people.

An explosive New York Times investigation published Monday has pulled back the curtain on a multi-million-dollar secret reputation management operation run by the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to bury an unflattering 2017 report linking its long-serving U.S. ambassador Yousef al-Otaiba to sex workers and human traffickers. The operation, which has cost UAE taxpayers more than $6 million since 2020, leveraged aggressive search engine optimization tactics and opaque digital tradecraft to push the damaging reporting far down Google’s search rankings, according to internal records and interviews with former insiders.

Al-Otaiba, who has held the post of UAE ambassador to Washington since 2008 and is widely regarded as one of the most well-connected foreign diplomats in the U.S. capital, personally oversaw parts of the years-long campaign to suppress the 2017 article originally published by The Intercept. That reporting, headlined an exploration of the “sordid double life of Washington’s most powerful ambassador,” once appeared among the top results whenever users searched the ambassador’s name on Google.

According to official filings under the U.S. Foreign Agents Registration Act, which requires disclosure of work done on behalf of foreign governments, the UAE contracted New York-based digital reputation firm Terakeet for the project starting in July 2019. The firm’s initial public mandate included promoting UAE tourism, but the secondary, unstated core task was cleaning up al-Otaiba’s public image. Four former Terakeet employees who spoke to the NYT on condition of anonymity confirmed the secret nature of the work: to avoid leaving a detectable digital paper trail, a senior Terakeet account manager permanently relocated to Washington for more than a year to coordinate the campaign in person with the ambassador.

The campaign relied on a suite of common but controversial search engine optimization tactics to displace the damaging article. Terakeet built an official standalone website for al-Otaiba, edited his Wikipedia entry to frame him positively using an anonymous sock puppet account, and drafted glowing profiles highlighting the ambassador’s purported leadership qualities. Those profiles were then submitted to institutions that al-Otaiba maintains formal affiliations with — including Harvard University’s Kennedy School, the Milken Institute, and the Special Olympics — which published the content with embedded links to pro-UAE blogs secretly written by Terakeet staff. The linked structure boosted the positive profiles in Google’s algorithm, pushing the older negative reporting further down search results.

Payment records show the UAE paid Terakeet more than $6 million for this work between 2020 and 2022, and the campaign remains active as of 2024. The effort has delivered on its core goal: by 2023, the original Intercept story had dropped to the second page of Google search results for al-Otaiba, and today it rests on the fifth page for most users, outside the view of the vast majority of people searching the ambassador’s name. When contacted by the New York Times for comment, al-Otaiba did not address the details of the campaign beyond confirming that Terakeet had completed contracted work for the UAE.

The NYT’s investigation also uncovered a second high-profile reputation cleanup campaign by Terakeet that ended in failure, involving former Goldman Sachs chief legal officer Kathryn Ruemmler and her ties to disgraced convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Ruemmler, who previously served as White House counsel under former President Barack Obama, was caught up in the 2023 Epstein Files document release, which exposed her close personal and professional connections to the financier, a convicted child sex trafficker. The released records showed Ruemmler referred to Epstein as “sweetie” and “Uncle Jeffrey,” discussed planning a trip to France with him, thanked him for expensive lavish gifts, provided him informal legal advice, and expressed interest in attending private meetings with former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, one of Epstein’s closest associates.

After the damaging documents became public, Goldman Sachs — a Terakeet corporate client — hired the firm to contain the reputational fallout for Ruemmler. The NYT reports that Terakeet deployed the same furtive, algorithm-focused digital tactics that made it one of the most expensive and exclusive players in the booming global reputation management industry. But unlike the UAE ambassador campaign, the effort to repair Ruemmler’s image failed. Ruemmler announced her resignation from Goldman Sachs in February 2024 and is set to depart the firm in June.

In a formal statement to the New York Times, Terakeet CEO Mac Cummings defended the firm’s work, noting that Cummings has previously referenced his close personal ties to Ruemmler and has played golf with Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon. “Terakeet’s technology is built on a simple mandate: organizations must tell their own story,” the statement read. “If they do not, third-party bias combined with generative AI will shape it for them.”

Terakeet is no stranger to high-profile political and corporate clients: the firm previously worked on reputation and search campaigns for former President Barack Obama and 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, and counts major corporate brands including MetLife, JPMorgan Chase, Oracle, Target, Walmart, Disney, and Bain Capital among its clients.