On November 24, Anwar Ibrahim became Malaysia’s tenth prime minister, following a tumultuous few decades waiting in the wings, during which time he served several jail terms, purportedly on trumped-up charges, and has been at the center of extraordinary political dramas featuring unusual alliances and stunning betrayals.

Largely ignored amid excitement in international media over the emergence of a purported “reformist,” it is worth noting that Ibrahim is in fact an Islamist.

Ibrahim’s radical roots lie with Angkatan Belia Islam Malaysia (Muslim Youth Movement of Malaysia), or ABIM, which he co-founded in 1971. A thesis published by Georgetown University (where Ibrahim happens to be a senior fellow) examines ABIM’s role as an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, a violent international Islamist movement regarded by Western policymakers as a key driver of radicalization and terror.

Ibrahim’s Islamism includes fervently anti-Jewish ideas and open alignment with a genocidal terror group.* A proud supporter of Hamas, Ibrahim has previously attacked a “Jewish-controlled” public relations firm, alleged “Zionist” conspiracies influencing his opponents and “directly involved in the running of the government,” and he has boasted of his efforts to “remove renowned Islamic scholar Dr Shaikh Yusuf Qardhawi’s name from [the U.S.] terrorist blacklist.”

The late Sheikh Qaradawi served as spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, and was best known, the Counter-Extremism Project notes, for advocating “the murder of Americans, gay people, and Jews through his writings, speeches, and fatwas.”

Such hatreds, it must be pointed out, are not new for Malaysian statesmen. Ibrahim’s own former mentor, former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, has long served as a vociferous anti-Semite himself, with an occasional but highly noticeable habit of Holocaust denial.

What is new, however, is that Anwar Ibrahim is not just a Malaysian politician, but an important figure within American Islamism as well.

Ibrahim serves as the chairman of the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT), often referred to as the leading thinktank of the Muslim Brotherhood in the West. Ibrahim, in fact, co-founded IIIT.