The “Woman, Life, Freedom” mural project was born from an unshakable call—both ancient and immediate—to honor the women of Iran who are risking everything for their freedom. But this work reaches beyond politics or protest. These murals are sacred declarations, layered with ancestral memory and prophetic vision. Conceptually, they exist as bridges: between eras, nations, and faiths. Each image invokes a lost garden—Edenic and exilic—where Persian and Jewish histories intertwine not as strangers, but as kin.

Spiritually, the work is deeply rooted in the shared Biblical soil of Persia and Israel. Queen Esther, a Persian Jew, stood between two worlds and saved her people. Cyrus the Great, a Persian king, is named in the Hebrew Bible as the one chosen by God to set the Jews free and rebuild the Temple. That legacy of mutual liberation is not symbolic—it is prophetic. These murals reclaim that covenant and cry out for its revival in our time. Each brushstroke is a prayer, a lament, and a call to justice, echoing Jeremiah 49:38: “I will set my throne in Elam.” This isn’t just ancient scripture—it is a divine promise breaking into the present.

Aesthetically, the murals fuse modern resistance iconography with ancient Near Eastern symbolism. Faces are fractured yet defiant, adorned with elements of fire, wind, gold, and light. Some figures are drawn from martyrs of the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement—Mahsa Amini, Nika Shakarami, Hadis Najafi—rendered in haunting beauty as if painted on the walls of a contemporary Book of Lamentations. Colors are chosen not merely for contrast, but for their elemental weight: crimson for martyrdom, turquoise for Persian royalty, black for mourning, and white for divine justice. The result is a visual language that transcends borders and demands the viewer not only to see, but remember.

In bringing this work to Israel—on walls, fences, and courtyards—I sought to return these women’s stories to sacred ground. This is not just political art. It is prophetic art. And like all prophecy, it is meant to disturb the comfortable, comfort the afflicted, and awaken something ancient inside us.

Mural 1, printed banner, January 2023, Jerusalem, Israel. Mahsa Amini, Sarina Esmailzadeh, Fereshteh Ahmadi, Nika Shakarami—all women murdered by the Iranian Islamic regime.

Mural 2, spray paint on concrete, January 2023, Nazareth, Israel. “It’s time for the Esthers of the world to rise up”—in Farsi, Hebrew, and English—celebrates the fact that this is the first woman-led revolution in the history of the world.

Mural 3, spray paint on stucco, March 2023, Netanya, Israel. Niloufar Aghaee, blinded by the Islamic regime for showing her hair; the nightingale (the official bird of Iran) covers the eye the morality police shot out.

Mural 4, spray paint on concrete, April 2023, Netanya, Israel. Ghazal Ranjkesh, also blinded for showing her hair; the hoopoe (the official bird of Israel) covers her eye, its beak pointing toward the Golden Gate (also called the Gate of Mercy) leading to the Temple Mount.

Mural 5, spray paint on stucco, December 2023, Tel Aviv, Israel. The only mural in the world dedicated to the schoolgirls of Iran who were deliberately poisoned by the Islamic regime—with toxic chemicals released through school ventilation systems as an act of terror against families demanding freedom. But notice that the little girl is still smiling and her hair is showing, and she is brave and strong (Proverbs 31:25).

Mural 8, printed banner, December 2023, Museum of Tolerance, Los Angeles. Dedicated to Mahsa Amini and Shirel Haim Pour, an Iranian Jewish IDF soldier murdered on October 7. Recalling the two places in the Bible where God will set His throne: Jerusalem and Elam (Iran).

Mural 9, spray paint on concrete, January 2024, Tel Aviv, Israel. Kosar Khoshnoudikia—a champion archer, blinded for showing her hair—riding a lion with a bow and arrow in her hand; beside her are her sisters, Shirel Haim Pour and Queen Esther.

Mural 12, spray paint on stucco, May 2024, Mateh Yehudah Regional Council, outside of Jerusalem, Israel. One of only two murals in the world—both located in Israel—in honoring Toomaj Salehi, an Iranian rapper imprisoned in 2023 for participating in the 2022 anti-regime protests.

Mural 13, spray paint on stucco, June 2024, Tel Aviv, Israel. Celebrating the death of President Ebrahim Raisi, the women he murdered for showing their hair use their hair to pull down his helicopter—the Hand of God, fulfilling Jeremiah 49:38, assisting the righteous below.

On September 8, the Christian Daily International reported that Muslims murdered a Catholic and wounded another while they traveled to a pilgrimage site in Punjab Province, Pakistan.

Afzal Masih and his cousin Harris Tariq Masih were among a group of Catholics who were in a passenger van en route to the annual Feast of the Nativity of Mary shrine in Mariamabad, Sheikhpura District. They were attacked by Muslims with a Kalashnikov assault rifle, said Aurangzeb Peter, a member of the traveling group.

“There were about 12–13 people in the van, including women and young girls of our families,” Peter said. “When we were on the Sheikhupura highway at around 1:30 a.m., three Muslim youths riding two motorcycles started teasing and catcalling our women passengers. They also blocked our way by zigzagging their bikes in front of our van.”

Afzal Masih, sitting in the front seat, asked the assailants to stop harassing the women. The Muslims stopped the van and pulled him out onto the road, Peter said.

“They started beating him with fists and kicks and attacked us as well when we tried to rescue Afzal,” Peter told the Christian Daily International.

When the assailants noticed the posters and crosses pasted on the vehicle and heard that all the passengers were Christians en route to the shrine, they started cursing in coarse language.

“They also called us Chuhra [pejorative term used for Christians] and said how could we dare to call them out,” Peter said.

The assailants left and the pilgrims resumed their journey. When they stopped at a gas station for a tire pressure check, the three Muslims suddenly reappeared with weapons while Afzal Masih and Harris Masih were standing with the driver. One of them, later identified as Muhammad Waqas of Farooqabad, opened fire with a Kalashnikov assault rifle. He shot Afzal Masih in the neck and Harris Masih in his right arm, Peter said.

Afzal is one of the many victims of Islamic violence against minorities in Pakistan and the wider South Asia region: a subject conveniently ignored by many human rights organizations in the West.

A rare event in Geneva, however, shed light on the increased human rights abuses in Pakistan and the wider South Asia region. On September 24, during the 60th session of the United Nations Human Rights Council, a seminar highlighted the alarming deterioration of Pakistan’s human rights conditions. Organized by the Forum on Inter-Cultural and Inter-Religious Dialogue (FICIR) and the Asian-Eurasian Human Rights Forum (AEHRF), the event convened prominent voices including activists, journalists, and political analysts, who raised concerns about the erosion of civil liberties and the expanding influence of Islamic radicalism.

During the discussions, participants addressed the causes and consequences of human rights violations in south Asia, as well as Pakistan’s involvement in supporting regional terrorism and Islamism.

Participants also discussed the situation of minorities, media censorship, as well as summary extrajudicial executions in Bangladesh, Pakistan, Myanmar and (more recently) Nepal. Participants further reported on the continuing impunity for crimes against humanity in Sri Lanka since the end of the civil war in 2009.

Out of all these cases, Pakistan seems to be the most extreme case where the freedom of religion and conscience is systematically violated by the country’s Islamic majority.

A new report by the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan entitled Streets of Fear documents the violations related to freedom of religion or belief (FORB) from July 1, 2024, to June 30, 2025. It shows a picture as grim as in previous studies. 

According to the report, in Pakistan, religious minorities face marginalization. Their exclusion and ongoing victimization have compelled the minorities to prefer living in tight-knit areas that sometimes resemble slums. In addition, violence against minorities increased during the reporting period. Even Muslims, ex-Muslims, and Muslim minority sects are abused. For example, some are murdered by the Sunni majority simply for not being the right type of Muslims. There have been numerous targeted killings of Ahmadis, a Muslim minority. In one instance, an Ahmadi man was lynched just a short distance from a sizable contingent of police in the middle of a busy market in Pakistan’s largest city.

Places of worship which belong to Ahmadis are often partially or wholly demolished by law enforcement agencies, despite some of them having the protection of a high court verdict. Several incidents of grave desecration which impact those belonging to religious minorities have been reported from all over the country.

Meanwhile, Pakistan’s blasphemy law is misused to settle personal scores or seek financial gain. As noted in a recent report by Human Rights Watch, the “mere accusation of blasphemy can be a death sentence.”

Most alarmingly, two individuals accused of blasphemy were extrajudicially killed by the police while they sought police protection from a hostile mob bent upon lynching them. This casts a shadow on Pakistan’s law enforcement agencies. Both victims were Muslims.

On September 12, 2024, police constable Saad Khan Sarhadi gunned down Abdul Ali, a blasphemy suspect, inside Cantonment Police Station’s jail in Quetta.

The suspect, a resident of Kharotabad, a neighborhood on the outskirts of Quetta, was detained after a video circulated in which he allegedly made offensive remarks about khatam-e-nabuwat (“finality of [Muhammad’s] prophethood”). A case was registered against him under Section 295-C after the video went viral.

In another incident, Dr. Shahnawaz Kunbhar, an employee of the Civil Hospital, Umerkot, fled to Karachi on September 17, 2024. He was trying to escape being lynched by enraged protestors. A local cleric had accused him of uploading blasphemous content on social media. However, Kunbhar denied the accusations in a video message he uploaded from his hotel.

That same day, law enforcement agencies arrested him. According to the family, this was voluntary, since the police had assured him protection. Later, he was handed over to the Mirpurkhas police.

On September 19, the police announced that Kunbhar was killed in an encounter. The police officers responsible for the killing were hailed as heroes and were garlanded by the local community. The family of the deceased tried to bury his body in Jehanro, a small town 40 kilometers from Umerkot. However, a large mob armed with “petrol and axes” gathered at the local graveyard and prevented them. The victim’s dead body was also mutilated by the mob when the family attempted to bury him on their ancestral land in the desert.

In addition, during the last quarter of 2024/25, Pakistan watched hearings which were live-streamed which followed the case of a writ petition filed by the parents of young men and women who were honey-trapped into false blasphemy cases. The hearings revealed that the youngsters were criminally entrapped with the collusion of Pakistan’s Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) officials. 

Meanwhile, the pattern of non-Muslim minor girls going missing and then reappearing after a few days, having converted to Islam and “married” a Muslim man, has persisted for years. Hindus in Sindh (who make up 8.8% of the province’s population) and Christians (who constitute 1.9% in Punjab) have repeatedly raised this issue.

In those regions, many minority girls under age 18 were abducted by Muslim men or lured into leaving their homes during the reporting period.

Multiple human rights organizations cite that as many as 1,000 Christian, Hindu, and Sikh girls are annually abducted in Pakistan. Many are forced to convert to Islam and coerced into marriage because it is widely believed in Pakistan that marriages under the age of 16 are acceptable under Sharia law. According to a 2019 UNICEF study, 18.9 million Pakistani women were married before turning 18, and 4.6 million before turning 15, averaging a total ratio of “1 in 6.”

For instance, 14-year-old Chahat, a Hindu girl, went missing in Quetta this past April. A few days after her disappearance, Chahat claimed that it was of her own free will that she decided to convert to Islam and enter into a marriage. However, she made this claim over a video message, raising the possibility of being coerced into making this statement. Additionally, Chahat’s parents presented her birth certificate and B-Form to prove that she was well below Balochistan’s legal marriage age of 16.

In another case, Alina, a 14-year-old Christian girl, experienced a particularly tumultuous year in 2024. It was marked by her disappearance from home, her forced conversion to Islam, and forced marriage to her Muslim abductor. She was rescued from the residence of her abductor and placed under the custody of the Child Protection Unit. Rather than returning Alina to her parents, however, a court ordered that she be returned to the same individual accused by Alina’s parents of abducting her.

In September of 2024, the writ petition in the Islamabad High Court regarding Alina’s case was dismissed. An appeal against the High Court’s decision has since been pending in the Supreme Court of Pakistan for the past eight months. The family is eagerly awaiting this hearing.

Violent hate speech targeting religious minorities and their defenders in Pakistan has also been on the rise. Death threats were directed at the chief justice of the Supreme Court when the court granted bail to an Ahmadi individual. An elected senator was also publicly insulted, particularly by some social media channels, which also questioned his patriotism when he spoke out in defense of religious minorities.

Those systematic and severe human rights abuses against religious minorities in Pakistan are not solely a leadership issue. They are a societal issue shaped by Islamic traditions and a result of full Islamization. Before Islamic armies began penetrating deep into the Indian subcontinent in the eighth century, later taking over and Islamizing its population, the land that is today called Pakistan was part of India and majority-Hindu.

Pakistan’s current population is overwhelmingly Muslim (around 96%), with religious minorities making up approximately 3–4% of the population. 

Pakistan is the ultimate case that demonstrates what happens when a society is fully Islamized. The West, however, instead of challenging Pakistan—particularly for its support for terrorism and ethnic cleansing campaigns against non-Muslims—contently enables the brutality of Islam in Pakistan and welcomes the same genocidal ideology into its own lands.

“Be careful with words, they are dangerous. Be wary of them. They beget other demons or angels. It’s up to you to give life to one or the other. Be careful, I tell you, nothing as dangerous as giving free rein to words.”

—Elie Wiesel, Legends of Our Times (1968)

Every day is marked by somebody or some organization claiming that Israel is committing genocide and perhaps a slew of other war crimes. There are several definitions of genocides, so anybody can pick and choose to indict a person or state. For example, the website of the Legal Information institute at Cornell Law School lists the following definitions:

1. 1948 U.N. Convention on Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines genocide as “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”
2. Genocidal intent requires that acts must be committed against members of a group specifically because they belong to that group (ICTR, Trial Judgment § 521). Genocidal intent can, “in the absence of direct explicit evidence, be inferred from” circumstantial evidence (Jelisić, ICTY, Trial Judgment § 47). When proving genocidal intent based on an inference, “that inference must be the only reasonable inference available on the evidence” (Appellate Judgment § 41).
3. Under Article 25(3)(e) of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, a person who “directly and publicly incites others to commit genocide” has committed  a crime against international law. There is no explicit requirement that genocide actually be committed. Conservative interpreters might be quick to assume such a requirement, but the drafting in Art. 25(3)(b) provides that one who “orders, solicits or induces the commission of such a crime” is liable only if that crime “in fact occurs or is attempted.” In other words, incitement to war crimes and crimes against humanity is punishable only if the crime occurs or attempted, but incitement to genocide is punishable regardless of the crime’s actually occurring or being attempted. 

According to Cornell Law School, incitement to genocide refers to someone directly and publicly encouraging others to commit genocide. But it has to be a clear and direct call to action, rather than a vague or indirect suggestion. And the interpretation of what constitutes a clear and direct call to action can be quite subjective: the level of directness is judged based on the context and audience for which it was intended. Even if the incitement is not obvious to outsiders, it can still be considered direct as long as the intended audience immediately understands the message (again this allows several quite different interpretations). The claims in this paragraph make clear that one does not need evidence of actual genocide to accuse an entity of genocide.

As I read the above definitions of genocide, I understood the broadened and less rigorous definition accommodates people and organizations who wish to accuse an entity, in this case Israel, of genocide. It provides any accuser with a pick and choose option which would make it easier to accuse a country or a leader. This mishmash of opinions provided opportunities to enemies of Israel to accuse it of committing genocide in Gaza. Among the almost 200 states which are members of the U.N., it is only Israel that is accused of genocide based on the inclusion intent, just saying something nasty about Gazans—or even Hamas—and on desire of an accuser to do so. That nobody else is accused of the possibly worst crime, not even Hamas, should raise suspicions of bias.

Did anybody think about real genocidal states or movements? One state which comes to my mind, and it is surprising it is not mentioned by all these “genocide scholars,” is Iran. Iran always made clear what its intent is—first destruction of Israel, followed by destruction of the U.S. Iran’s hatred goes much deeper than that: it includes an intent to eliminate Jews in general and it attempted genocide by shooting several hundred ballistic missiles at civilian Israeli population centers. Genocide did not happen only because of robust Israeli anti-missile defense. Why is there no concern about the fate of the Druze, Kurds, the Yemeni (not Houthi) population and massacres in Sudan, Syria, or China? Is it because Gazan lives are more worthwhile or because no Jews or Israelis can be found in those areas?

That Hamas’s intent and attempt to commit genocide on October 7 is escaping the label of genocide is quite horrifying, made even more so as quite a few people, and not only Palestinians, consider Hamas’s genocidal action a legitimate defense against the “settler-colonialist” state of Israel. In addition, Hamas and its supporters do not hide their intent to continue in genocidal activities. The confab of terrorists and their supporters at the recent People’s Conference for Palestine in Detroit should terrify every citizen of the Western World and beyond. This meeting was a lovefest of anti-Semites and terrorists. These people are not freedom fighters, they are terrorists and killers. Congressional representative Rashida Tlaib went beyond her usual support of militant Palestinians and lashed out on her colleagues in the Congress for their support of Israel. At the same conference, Nidal Jboor, a founder of Doctors Against Genocide, suggested that political leaders in the U.S., Europe, and Israel need to be taken out and neutralized. And this is just two of the speakers!

And the reaction of many citizens living in Western countries to speeches like this occurring at many demonstrations and “artistic” events is astonishing and terrifying. Not only do they blame Israel and Jews in general for conditions in Gaza, but they are making life for Jews unbearable in their own countries. Eighty years after the end of WWII, open anti-Semitism is back and it is thriving unabashedly among nations without any shame. Hamas is being legitimized if not outright admired, especially by young people.

What happened? Yes, most of the world declared us culpable of severe war crimes; starvation; deprivation of food, water, medicine, and electricity to civilians in Gaza; and of genocide. And we obliged—many of us, we do feel guilt and shame. Some of us agree with accusers and do not even question the premises upon which these accusations are based. Are they supported by solid facts and statistics, by reliable and independent witnesses, medical professionals, journalists and photographers, humanitarian aid workers and organizations? Are interpretations of facts and impressions objective and verifiable? I can say “yes and no” to all of the above. 

The photos from Gaza are disturbing and sad. Quite disturbingly, as they are distributed rather rapidly around the world, many turned out to be intentionally mislabeled, attributing the images of emaciated young kids to Israel intentionally starving Gazan children when those children were thin due to certain genetic conditions, and some were sent for treatment in Europe with Israeli help. Other photos turn out be falsified by certain photographers posing Palestinians with empty pots. Several German newspapers, such Bild and Suddeutsche Zeitung, brought these manipulations of truth and reality to our attention. Similarly, CNN and Honest Reporting warned about the image of the emaciated child published in the New York Times weeks ago. Many of the photographers and journalists are affiliated with anti-Semitic and even Islamist outlets.

I am old enough to remember the “classic” examples of falsification by the news industry many years ago. Does anybody remember 12-year-old Muhammad al-Durrah, supposedly killed by the IDF? His “killing” was never confirmed—in fact, the video was proven to be fake. Anybody remembers the so-called Jenin “massacre” of 2002 that was not?

Just to make us feel more guilty, absurd comparisons of the Gaza war with Warsaw ghetto, the Holocaust, and Biafra are calculated very carefully for maximum effect—both to increase anti-Semitism and anti-Israeli hatred as well as Jewish guilt. Why should we believe such a narrative to begin with? The narrative about medical problems and the death toll in Gaza is impossible to verify, the data provided mostly by Hamas via their so-called “health ministry”—data that, indeed, are impossible to verify at all. The descriptions of malnutrition and disease in Gaza by medical and/or public health professionals are based on estimates, narratives coming from Gaza not through real-time observations, statistics, and studies but from Hamas, in whatever form. Earlier this year, a U.N. observer estimated that “14,000” Gazan babies were going to die within the next two days. That did not happen, and the claim was actually retracted.

That almost nobody blames Hamas for the situation in Gaza—and the U.N. for lying about it—is amazing. After all, it is their own people who are responsible for any “famine,” as they are known for infiltrating UNRWA and stealing humanitarian aid (and the U.N. does not object to that). It is Israel that is supposed to supply an enemy with all its needs.

The world knows that even Netanyahu can feel guilty. Some older Jews feel guilty on account of fraudulent equivalencies made between the Holocaust and Gaza, and some of the younger ones reject Israel altogether. This comes from our religion, for our guilt is supposed to be collective—our prayers and narratives said with the congregation on Yom Kippur and on Tish’ah b’Av were developed or evolved over two millennia for the purpose of the congregation, for Jewish communities and individuals, to apply justice, love, and unity to our failings as one people. This our enemies use against us.

This is not to deny the bad reality of civilian life in Gaza. But Israel (with U.S. help) is alleviating it as much as it can. It did not cause or initiate the war; it was Hamas massacring, mutilating, and raping innocent people, including babies, and dragging live people and corpses as hostages off to Gaza. It is Hamas stealing food and using its own people as human shields. And the hostages—what hostages?—they seemed to disappear from the world’s conscience.

I am afraid that recent proclamations of “Gaza genocide” and “war crimes” by Israeli politicians—such as Ehud Olmert, Moshe Ya’alon, and Yair Golan—and by David Grossman, a Israeli prominent writer, and a group of Israeli artists and musicians makes things more difficult for Israel on the world scene and only incites more anti-Semitism worldwide. Do they really believe Hamas propaganda? Do they believe that the establishment of Palestinian state and perhaps sudden withdrawal of the IDF from Gaza will bring peace and justice to the Middle East?

Some people blame poor or even a lack of hasbara—public diplomacy or reactive “propaganda”—by the Israeli government for genocide accusations and an increase in anti-Semitism. This has been considered a big problem for years, as the Israeli government claimed that it actually does not make any difference. I am afraid that it might be correct. The hasbara right after October 7 seemed to be effective and it led to some short-term sympathy, but Hamas and its supporters beat us to people’s hearts very quickly. They were well prepared, as many knew ahead of time what would and did happen. Hamas and its supporters have studied us and the Western world for decades. In some aspects, they understand us better than we understand ourselves. They abuse our sense of guilt, shame, and tikkun olam, and they also got a grasp of hidden anti-Semitism among non-Jews, especially among Europeans. They have been abetted by Qatari funding of universities, Middle East studies programs, and think tanks in the U.S., Canada, Australia, and Europe.

Still, one important thing they are missing: they do not value human life, love, justice, respect for themselves, or other religions or nations. The wave of pro-Palestinian and pro-Hamas protests on campuses has not appeared out of the blue. It is the result of a carefully prepared process over the last couple of decades by faculty, most of them Muslims, if not outright Islamists, and, sadly, quite a few (nominally) Jewish and Israeli professors (people should remember Ilan Pappé, Norman Finkelstein, and Noam Chomsky, all belonging to the older generation). Omer Bartov, the so-called “genocide expert,” is a new addition to this group. Jon Stewart, Peter Beinart, Ezra Klein, and, perhaps most perplexingly, a large group of mostly Reform rabbis, many of them female, seem to lose a sense of Jewish suffering and justice. Do they really feel so much guilt and shame that they basically need to self-flagellate in public? Or, at least for some of them, is it a matter of self-promotion, self-hatred, or an attempt at survival? Who knows? I do not. Unfortunately, the protests of well-meaning hostage families and sympathizers do not help to bring the hostages back. I am afraid they encourage Hamas in their obstinance and refusals to surrender. Why surrender when Israelis push their own government to surrender?

What we are witnessing in the Western world is the perception of Jews as villains as they were portrayed in the Middle Ages. By this I mean that the blood libel is back.

Through this idea of Israel committing genocide, some are accusing Israelis of stealing organs from Palestinian bodies. The call of Irish doctors to not give medications manufactured by Teva, an Israeli pharma company, is outrageous, disgusting, and harmful more to their own Irish kids than to Teva itself. It is a denigration of the medical profession itself, especially when supported by British doctors, and completely unethical. The E.U. and Emmanuel Macron in particular are so obsessed by Gazan suffering that the explosion of quickly spreading vicious and violent anti-Semitism into public venues, such as concerts, movie festivals, and sport events is not even noticed, and it seems to have become a part of public entertainment. Australia, led by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has become one of the most severe critics of Israel, with this accompanied by a marked increase in anti-Semitism, only marginally prosecuted by Australian authorities, and which does not seem to worry the Australian government.

To me, all of this is becoming an echo of Nazi Germany. What is particularly tragic is that these Western countries, instead of helping Israel in dismantling Hamas and bringing additional humanitarian aid to Gaza, found a final solution in supporting a two-state solution. In other words, we are witnessing total impotence and humiliation of the West in exchange for the satisfaction of betraying its only real ally between Greece and South Korea.

Charcoal and pastel studies by the author. An open letter on recognition, justice, and survival: Gaza was the test; the U.N. learned nothing. Gaza in 2005 already tested the two-state promise. The unilateral land-for-peace disengagement produced rockets, tunnels, indoctrination, and, on October 7, the deadliest massacre of civilian Jews—including babies, pregnant women, people with disabilities, and…

Since Israel’s latest war began, Hamas and the global forces of anti-Semitism have engaged in a three-pronged propaganda campaign to cripple the Jews and Israel: (1) fool gullible leftists into supporting the victims of “genocide”; (2) rally Muslims throughout the West to terrorize Jews while pressuring supine governments; and (3) encourage Christians to withdraw their support for Zionism.

While many secularists have long ago discarded any sympathy for Jews or Israel—partly thanks to disinformation from the KGB in the last century and from the legacy media today—Hamas’s propagandists and their allies at The New York Times are well aware that the last major bastion of Western philo-Semitism is Christian Zionism. Therefore, they have embarked on a campaign to convince Christians that the Jews are the aggressors—even the persecutors of Christians themselves—in the cause of breaking the Christian-Jewish alliance.

In order to accomplish this rupture, Hamas propagandists and their mainstream media messengers have weaponized historical Christian prejudices, iconographic motifs, and sensitivities, some nearly 2,000-years-old. With many Western Christians on high alert against leftist assaults on their faith, especially since 2020, there has never been a more opportune time for Hamas-affiliated anti-Semites to plant seeds of doubt about Christian sympathy for Jews. And the enemies of Jews and Israel have had decades of practice, and success, on which to bank.

Pallywood

Nearly 25 years ago, arguably the most famous child on the planet was Muhammad al-Durah, a 12-year-old Palestinian boy reportedly shot to death by a hail of Israeli bullets in a cross-street gun battle on September 30, 2000. The riveting video, narrated by Charles Enderlin of France2, depicted a firefight near Netzarim Junction in Gaza, culminating in the child’s death, huddled behind his father Jamal. “Here Jamal and his son Muhammad are targets of gunfire from the Israeli position,” narrated Enderlin. “Muhammad is dead, and his father grievously wounded.”

The result was a rabid, international wildfire of anti-Semitism, producing some of the first riots in which “Death to the Jews!” could be heard shouted in the streets of post-war Europe—all with Muhammad al-Durah as their sacrilegious saint. Only 12 days after the incident, two Israeli reservists who had accidentally wandered into Ramallah were brutally lynched and ripped into pieces to chants of “Revenge for the blood of Muhammad al-Durah!” Usamah bin Laden even produced a recruiting video calling Muslims worldwide to jihad on behalf of the boy who “died at the hands of the Jews.”

Only later was it revealed that the video of Muhammad and his father, indeed much of the footage shot that day, was fake. Meticulous analysis of the raw tapes showed instance after instance of men spontaneously falling down “wounded” and then being hurled into waiting ambulances; likely uninjured youths dripping in fake blood; nonchalant bystanders watching the action—even a “dead” man lying in the gutter talking on his cellphone—just yards from where Muhammad was “killed.”

Historian Richard Landes, then a professor of medieval history at Boston University, coined the term “Pallywood” as a result of his groundbreaking investigations. His 2005 short film Muhammad al-Durah: The Birth of an Icon makes clear what was again confirmed years later in a French court: that the tape not included in the France2 broadcast was indeed staged and showed a living child pretending to be dead. Landes later called the contrived image “the first blood(less) libel of the 21st century.”

“Israel is losing me”

The al-Durah hoax was probably the most successful single piece of international war-time disinformation in history; but, outside the Muslim world and its immigrant enclaves abroad, especially in Europe, it mostly evoked anti-Jewish hatred from Western socialists keen on erasing generational shame over the Holocaust by replacing the Nazis with the Jews. It did not engender comparable Christian fury, and American Christian Zionism largely held steady throughout the first decade of the new century.

This war, however—the longest in Israel’s history, and with Arab Christian communities constantly in danger from Hamas using them as human shields during Israeli incursions—has proven different. On multiple occasions, Hamas operating in areas of Gaza containing churches has resulted in structural damage and the accidental deaths of Christian bystanders, beckoning medieval blood libel archetypes back into the open.

Never mentioned is the fact that the Arab Christian population of Hamas- and Palestinian Authority-ruled areas has shrunk by at least 80% in one generation, and that Israel’s Christian population is steadily growing. The shock of Jews accidentally harming churches or killing Christians under any circumstances, let alone Christian suffering in the region of any kind, is the headline—and Christians notice. Just a few of many disturbing examples are sufficient:

• On October 19, 2023, a number of Christians were killed in an Israeli air strike on a building near the Greek Orthodox Church of Saint Porphyrius in Gaza. The church courtyard was a known site of past Hamas rocket-launching and Hamas was using a nearby building as a base, but some local Christians—including young family members of former congressman Justin Amash, an anti-Israel Palestinian Christian—died. In response, Christian anti-Semites with large social media followings like Jackson Hinkle, Candace Owens, and Lauren Witzke—even well-known conservatives like Charlie Kirk—expressed horror that Israel had “targeted,” even “destroyed,” the church. And many condemnatory posts were made days after it was revealed that the Israeli Air Force had not “targeted,” let alone “destroyed,” the church but had missed its mark slightly, damaging a nearby assembly hall within the church compound in which Christians had sheltered.

• On April 9, 2024, Tucker Carlson released an interview with Pastor Munther Isaac of the Bethlehem Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church with the supposed aim of answering the question, “How does the government of Israel treat Christians?” While a characteristically dead-eyed Carlson listened quietly and uncritically, Isaac proceeded to blame Israel, without any evidence, for a grim litany of Christian sufferings, when nearly all of those indignities are the fault of Hamas and the Palestinian Authority—which controls his native Bethlehem. What Carlson the “truth” man—let alone the “conservative”—never told his audience is that Isaac is actually an avowed Marxist who used a sermon at holy communion on October 8, 2023, to praise Hamas’s massacre of the previous day. His church even created a vile Christmas nativity scene depicting the baby Jesus draped in a terrorist kufiyah scarf amidst pieces of concrete rubble (the late Pope Francis unveiling and venerating a similar crèche at the Vatican a year later). As the Reverend Johnnie Moore of the Congress of Christian Leaders summed up Isaac, he “has long been the high priest of antisemitic Christianity,” a fact hardly surprising given Martin Luther’s own luridly anti-Semitic legacy. With all reasonable doubt washed away, Carlson’s actions caused Elie Mischel of Israel365 to conclude that “Tucker Carlson is officially an antisemite.”

• On July 7, 2025, it was reported that “Jewish settlers” had deliberately set fire to the Arab Christian town of Taybeh, threatening its residents, ancient cemetery, and ruined Byzantine church. The Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem condemned the “attack,” and even U.S. Ambassador Mike Huckabee called the incident a “crime against humanity and God.” Later, however, it was discovered that the “settlers” seen in video of the blaze were probably involved in extinguishing a fire set by local Muslims, and the fire “damage” to the church and cemetery was negligible.

• On July 17, 2025, an Israeli drone strike on a Hamas target damaged the Catholic Holy Family Church in Gaza, killing three, for which Israel immediately apologized. The damage to the church was not severe and the civilian deaths a deeply regrettable consequence of a war against terrorists who hide amongst non-combatants. But many Christians—including Pope Leo XIV, who has never demanded the return of the hostages—somehow could not believe that the occurrence was an accident. Catholic conservative commentator Michael Knowles—like Kirk, a generally pro-Israel figure—reacted with cold rage: “Israel is losing me,” he said the day after. “You struck the church. Churches are pretty obvious targets. They are pretty obvious sites. The cross. Can you explain to me how this was an accident?” What conceivable benefit is there to Israel in deliberately targeting a church? The only explanation must be that Jews are evil, and want to inflict needless pain upon Christians—a basic element of the blood libel.

• On August 11, 2025, Tucker Carlson released a 91-minute interview with Mother Agapia Stephanopoulos—leftist ABC News host George Stephanopoulos’s sister—a Russian Orthodox nun who lives in “Palestine.” Carlson titled the interview “Here’s What It’s Really Like to Live as a Christian in the Holy Land,” with the description, “Self-described evangelicals like Ted Cruz and Mike Johnson have no interest in how Israel treats Christians. Mother Agapia Stephanopoulos has spent years living in the region. They should listen to her.” Agapia’s expertise, however, consisted entirely of reprising most of Pastor Isaac’s slanders, saying that “we have to battle AIPAC and the Christian Zionists,” mischaracterizing Israeli counter-terrorism measures as Christian persecution, and defending Hamas, which she called “a resistance movement, simply people fighting for their people.” Carlson and Agapia were suitably mocked for the mendacity of their surreal conversation, but the video of the interview received nearly 12 million views on X in one week.

Poisoned pietà

A quarter-century after Muhammad al-Durah, Hamas operatives superseded his image with that of an ever more graphic namesake. On July 25, 2025, the front page of The New York Times was dominated—rather conquered—by the shocking photograph of skeletal 18-month-old Mohammed Zakaria Ayyub al-Mutawaq cradled in the arms of his mother Hedaya. The headline below staff photographer Saher Alghorra’s haunting image read, “Young, Old and Sick Starve to Death in Gaza: ‘There is Nothing.’”

The Times has done similar things before, giving over its May 28, 2021, front page to a grid of 64 photographs supposedly of minors Israel had killed “indiscriminate[ly]” in that year’s war. “They Were Just Children,” the melodramatic headline bawled, above the epitaph that “They had wanted to be doctors, artists and leaders.” But the 2021 war only lasted 15 days and the world moved on to other things. More than four years later, however, there is total war, and total war calls for more sophisticated blood libels.

Naturally, the libel part emerged almost immediately.

Another, unpublished contemporary photograph showed Mohammed’s three-year-old brother Joud standing beside him and his mother—a child of perfectly normal weight. Researcher David Collier then obtained a medical report on Mohammed’s condition, showing that he is afflicted with cerebral palsy and congenital hypoxemia, not malnutrition. Pallywood once again.

Far too late, on July 29, the Times released a weak correction on its “Communications” X account—one with just shy of 90,000 followers compared to the 55.1 million of its main account. “Our reporters and photographers continue to report from Gaza,” the non-apology said, “bravely, sensitively, and at personal risk, so that readers can see firsthand the consequences of the war.”

It cannot be legally confirmed that the Times or any other outlet published photographs of the child knowing that he was not starving, or that Mohammed’s deceased father was far more likely a Hamas fighter than an innocent killed, as the Times claimed, while “he went to seek food.” But incidents like this—like the endless, false allegations of “famine”—only go one way. And, most egregiously, they contrive to conceal the fact that the only people truly starving in Gaza are the hostages; people whom every entity crying about “starvation”—the media, U.N., “humanitarian organizations,” and the Red Cross—have utterly abandoned.

But some watchful Jews noticed something else in this latest blood libel image. “Why has this deceptive image been pushed on social media and front pages?” wrote Rebecca Trenner on X in response to another picture of Mohammed from a different shoot by Ahmed Jihad Ibrahim al-Arini. “Because it is deliberately framed as a pieta. Mary cradling the dead christ [sic]. It is designed to push the antisemitic buttons of Christians.”

Indeed, the enveloping robe of the abayah and the hijab so like a hood strikingly yet subtly resemble the Marian veil so common to Christian art. In fact, Byzantine icons of the Virgin and child Jesus (the Theotokos) often depict Mary in a shade of burgundy similar to that of Hedaya al-Mutawaq’s garment.

“That’s why the now-notorious picture of the skeletal Gazan child, prominently displayed in The New York Times and countless other media outlets around the world as allegedly dying of starvation, packed the punch it did,” wrote Melanie Phillips. “It wasn’t merely that it was a dreadfully distressing picture of a dying child. It was that it was posed to call irresistibly to mind the original Madonna, the mother of Jesus, cradling him in her arms.”

From the masterpieces of Giotto and Simone Martini to Giovanni Bellini and Michelangelo, the drama of any image of the Madonna and Child is the tragic emotional interplay between any mother’s love for her son and the knowledge that this precious son, begotten by angelic miracle, will not just die but shall pre-decease his mother, and she shall weep over him. But not only shall the son die, he, some Christians still believe, will be tortured and murdered at the behest of the Jews.

“…[W]hile the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason may have collectively abjured religion, the icon of mother and child remains fiercely resonant in the West,” wrote ISGAP scholar Naya Lekht. “Why is this image so powerful? What makes it endure so? Significantly, it is not just a child and a mother—it is a child martyred by an unseen prosecutor,” namely the Jews.

In her 1988 book The Devil at Isenheim: Reflections of Popular Belief in Grünewald’s Altarpiece, the late art historian Ruth Mellinkoff points out what many naïve viewers have failed to appreciate: that disgust for Jews and Judaism has often been hidden in the otherwise comforting and idyllic image of the Madonna. In the case of German painter Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim altarpiece (c. 1512–1516), this tremendously significant phenomenon is encapsulated in a small, inconspicuous, largely overlooked but vitally important detail. While invariably omitted from most close-up reproductions, in the panel depicting the nativity, a possibly used chamber pot sits in the foreground to the Virgin’s right; a chamber pot with fake Hebrew lettering around its rim.

Grünewald certainly did not know the “holy tongue”; what he painted was just a gobbledygook of “Hebraic” letters. But that was precisely his point: by means of this detail, easily overlooked by the conscious mind but a powerful subliminal suggestion to the Christian viewer, the coming of Christ renders the Hebrew texts in which the “Old Law” is proclaimed nothing less than polluting gibberish. As Mellinkoff observes, the chamber pot “alludes to the decay of the Old Law and the advent of the New.” It also “stands for the defilement of Synagoga [the feminine personification of Judaism]—a tradition of vilification that links the metaphors of pollution with unconverted Jews who stubbornly continue to reject Christ” (pp. 61–62). While this touch is unique to Grünewald, the artist was only illustrating widely held Christian beliefs.

In Grünewald’s Madonna, we see a radiant young mother tenderly adoring her baby boy; and yet we know that when the Man-God’s flesh is nailed to the cross, the same torn swaddling cloth will be wrapped around his loins, as is depicted in the corresponding crucifixion—one of the most gruesome in all of European art. And who is responsible? The perfidious Jews.

Yet, in their zeal, Hamas propagandists and their mainstream media allies have taken this argument a step further than orthodox Christian artists working in the Western tradition. Whereas the old masters were doctrinally forced to admit Jesus, his mother Mary (Mir’yam), Mary Magdalen (Mary “of the tower” [mig’dal]), and all Gospel protagonists except for the Romans a small measure of Jewishness, the al-Mutawaq photograph replaces the Jewish baby Jesus with an Arab Muslim child, and the Jewish Mary with a Shari‘ah-compliant Muslim woman. This is a substitution implying that the Jews of the Christian Bible were not the historically indigenous inhabitants of Israel, but, ex post facto, “settler colonists.” This de-Judaization of the Virgin and Child is tremendously significant because it activates another trope: that Jesus, his family, and followers were too good to be Jews and must have been of another ethnic group—perhaps Arabs (who actually invaded the region more than six centuries later).

Still, a perhaps even more disturbing artistic echo seems to resonate in the modern-day al-Mutawaq pietà. In the work of the great Bellini, Madonna after Madonna looks down solemnly at a baby who, unlike in Grünewald’s composition, is not bonny and awake but—joltingly—is sickly, sad, pale—even dead-looking. This again is a foreshadowing of the Virgin’s later lamentation over the dead Christ, and Bellini’s startling 1505 Madonna of the Meadow even includes the dead tree symbolizing Judaism supplanted by Jesus the “tree of life.”

But one of al-Arini’s photographs of Hedaya and Mohammed, the one published in the British Daily Express, is almost a venomous inversion of that foreshadowing. The pitiful, dying baby Mohammed looks out, awake, towards the viewer, begging for his life, while Hedaya (having replaced his diaper with a garbage bag) exhibits not a look of loving despair but what almost looks like a smirk. Malicious knowledge that the world will blame the Jews for the fate of her son, as it did for the crucifixion. The Pallywood version of Mel Gibson’s Passion in a single image. Indeed every instance of Pallywood is a blood libel, and every blood libel a bray for Jewish blood.

None of this is to provably charge that any Arab Muslim photographer in the Middle East consciously knows any of this theological or artistic history. But university-educated employees of major news agencies publishing the pictures—The New York Times especially—very likely do. And these subliminal motifs—of natal bliss and messianic divinity threatened by Jewish evil—are buried so deeply in the modern world’s visual culture that twenty-first-century Christians in Europe and America will respond to them. With so many other successful endeavors to “push” age-old Christian anti-Jewish “buttons,” no wonder Israel’s enemies continue to try.

Then, as now, all these arguments combine “supersessionism,” the replacement of Judaism by Christianity as the true religion, with that of the ancient Jews by non-Jews, now, ironically, “Palestinians.” The true purpose of these particular Pallywood screeds and images is to demonize Jews in the eyes of Christians, and irrevocably break the Judeo-Christian alliance at the heart of American support for Israel.

It is clear that the propagandists have not yet succeeded entirely, as a recent poll found that 90% of thoroughly Christian “MAGA” Republicans “remain united behind Israel,” and major social media Jew-haters like Carlson and Owens now loath President Trump for his Zionist sympathies; but such sentiments undoubtedly can change with enough lies.

To address those Pallywood lies, on August 10, 2025, Prime Minister Netanyahu gave a press conference in which he announced that “I’m looking right now into the possibility of a governmental suit against The New York Times, because this is outrageous.” These blood libels have been “propelled around the Earth almost [in] the [same] way that the Jewish people were maligned in the Middle Ages,” he said. “Every massacre of the Jewish people was preceded by massive vilification.… As these lies spread around the globe, they were followed by horrific, horrific massacres—pogroms, displacements—finally culminating in the worst massacre of them all: the Holocaust. Today, the Jewish state is being maligned in a similar way.”

Perhaps only the God of Israel said it better: “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor” (Exodus 20:13).

Dear Mr. Klein,

Since I’ve been having trouble understanding some of my Jewish friends, I was eager to read your recent essay in the New York Times, “Why American Jews No Longer Understand One Another” (July 20). At first, I was put off by unfair criticisms of Israel, some explicit and some tacit, which are too familiar these days. Thanks to insights from an especially close bud, and personal experiences shared by others, I now appreciate that you were alerting us to arguments roiling the Jewish community, more than telling us where you stand or where we should. Your premise is moving and worth studying:

I’ve watched the experience of rising antisemitism polarize young Jews into two camps. Some have moved closer to Israel, convinced that their elders were right and their standing in the West was more tenuous than they had believed. Some have moved into a deeper alienation, horrified at what is being done in their name and angry at the way their safety has felt compromised by the actions and politics of a state in which they do not live.

Leaving aside what may or may not be your own views, I’m going to comment on some of the big issues you raise, mostly in the form of questions.

The Mamdani syndrome

The New York mayoral candidate is excused by some people because, although he “does not use the slogan ‘globalize the intifada,’ [he] does not condemn those who do…” Would Mamdani and friends also support candidates who don’t use—but don’t condemn—slogans like “White Lives Matter!” and “Jews will not replace us!”? And what about the candidate’s other “banally liberal” arguments, that “Israel has a right to exist”—thank you—“but [only] as a state with equal rights,” and his disapproval of “any state that has a hierarchy of citizenship on the basis of religion or anything else…”? Do economic inequality and democratic “backsliding” compromise America’s right to exist? Is Israel’s policy of preferential admissions for Jews wishing to immigrate so special? Is the support Mamdani enjoys from Brad Lander, Jerry Nadler, and others reminiscent of other times when Jewish loyalty to certain political movements didn’t pan out so well?

The occupation

You argue that, for many Jews, the “vision [of a two-state solution] now lies buried beneath the settlements of the West Bank, the rubble of Gaza, and the expansionist ambitions of Israel’s right-wing government.” In strolling at that gravesite, though, let’s be careful to not trip on another large pile of rubble: accumulated documents chronicling persistent Arab rejection of peace offers and proposals for territorial solutions. After October 7, most rational observers (left, right, center, but not the extremist fringes) agree that this isn’t the best time to revive hope in the old two-state idea (although other options are worth exploring). Is that so hard to understand? Should Israel ignore recent events and take the risk that yet another neighbor will have less than neighborly plans? Maybe “those angry at Netanyahu [do not] want his successor to seek a Palestinian state, or even Palestinian rights,” but it’s not clear who the “those” are and whether their reticence is minimally understandable. Following Fania Oz-Salzberger, one of Bibi’s staunchest opponents, I would ask Mamdani and his followers this “single crucial question… do you support Israel’s right to exist—alongside a peaceful Palestine?”

Expulsion and other bad ideas

I was taken aback, as I’m sure most American Jews are, by “polls [showing that] a majority of Israeli Jews are open to the expulsion of Palestinians…” But the same Ha’aretz article you cited cautions that “a deeper dive into the data reveals a far more complex and divided public opinion…” The authors (writing in a newspaper known for relentless opposition to Netanyahu and all prior governments who didn’t end the occupation) list problems of sampling and item construction that should raise caution flags. And, even if some part of the population is “open” to the idea, that’s a far cry from whether the idea is enacted, as it was elsewhere: Jews expelled from Arab and Muslim lands, Greek-Turkish population exchange, eight million ethnic Germans kicked out of Poland after WWII. I’m not advocating for expelling Palestinians, but do the survey data indicate a uniquely Israeli brand of evil? And what about deportation, which, under Presidents Obama and Biden and now Trump, is more real and more abhorrent than whatever some extremist Israelis may be “open to” but which are not (and never have been) official Israeli policy? (Isn’t deportation another word for expulsion?)

Shifting blame, assessing risks

You observe, correctly, that “debates about Israel often circle the same, strangely posed question: Does Israel have the right to exist?” I applaud you for trying to immunize readers from the double-standard virus that infects so much popular discourse: no one seems to be calling for the dismantling of Hungary or Italy, not to mention China, Russia, and God knows how many other countries, because they don’t like their current leaders. But then we’re into rougher terrain: “…Hamas could perpetrate the murders of Oct. 7 only because Israel had … allowed its attention to basic questions of security to lapse” (italics added). Why should a lapse in basic security—whether due to hubris, technological and organizational meltdown, or normal balagan (a friendly euphemism for chaos)—be enough to ignite a firestorm of unimaginable depravity? It seems that Jews are sentenced to an eternity of high alert because indulgence in even momentary nonchalance can spark (and legitimate) existential calamity. Who is more to blame for October 7? The barbaric perpetrators or the people they massacred? You then alert us to another misconception: “Hamas did not then, and certainly does not now, threaten Israel’s existence.” Wait: do other countries respond onlywhen their existence is at stake, but not when their people and property are “merely” violated? In any case, if there is still any doubt that Hamas (along with Hezbollah, the Houthis, Iran, maybe even China) seeks to destroy the Jewish State, language in their charter should settle the matter: “Israel will… continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it.” It seems Israel is blamed for foolishly ignoring the threat and being lulled into a false sense of security, but also for overreacting to what was not a real threat in the first place. Why is Israel the only country in the world to face these damnable “damned if you do and damned if you don’t” criticisms? (Students of anti-Semitism will recognize the motif: Jews as foolish weaklings, Jews as omnipotent masters.)

Devastation is real

For many Jews—including a growing number in Israel—the legitimate need to respond militarily to the invasion of October 7 no longer justifies carnage at a scale that is increasingly hard to fathom. Reports of devastation and famine—contested as they are—exacerbate the problem you have surfaced, namely the erosion of allegiance to Zionism among Jews who keep hearing that Israel perpetrates unconscionable crimes. Regardless of the validity of the casualty numbers thrown around carelessly and maliciously on mainstream and social media (in what Matti Friedman aptly calls a “blizzard of ideological fiction”), and the dispute about who is to blame for the delay in unloading thousands of food trucks (yes, Netanyahu has explaining to do…), there is no denying the magnitude of the suffering, which no Jew—no one for that matter—should brush off. Still, the anguish felt by the overwhelming majority of Israelis, who want the war to end and the remaining hostages freed, is confounded by impolitic pronouncements of politicians and intellectually dishonest scholars who throw around words and phrases like “genocide” and “war crimes” that alienate even Netanyahu’s most ardent opponents.

Jewish clergy join the chorus of anger and, in their signaling of high virtue, ignore complexities in the data that should at least temper their effort to make Israel’s choice look obvious. What’s missing from too many of these one-sided critiques is the simple fact that release of the remaining hostages—the living along with remains of the dead—would bring an immediate end to the war. That “simple fact,” though, is not so simple, because ending the war is not enough for Hamas, which demands also the release of thousands of its heroic “freedom fighters” from Israeli jails. If the American Jews you write about are unsure how to balance the moral imperative of rescuing civilians from Hamas tunnels against the moral imperative of preventing future tunnels, they are in good company: Israelis cope with that dilemma every day. Infused in these debates are allegations that the IDF could do more to save lives. Maybe, but how many warning leaflets did the Allies distribute to the good citizens of Dresden before fire-bombing their city to smithereens and killing 35,000 people in two days? How much food was trucked in to feed the enemy in the Battle of the Bulge? Did Egypt bring medical supplies to treat injured Israelis in the surprise attack of 1973? The judgment of serious military historians who study such questions is often missing or muted in these discussions.

The company we keep

I was relieved that you corresponded with Deborah Lipstadt and shared her wisdom on the dubious distinctions between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, a semantic distraction helpful to people who believe the Jewish People would be better off without the encumbrance of a state (but who seem flummoxed when asked what will happen to the seven million Jews living there today). But Peter Beinart? You quote him as saying “the question is not whether Israel has the right to exist,” a curious bit of sophistry from someone whohas been raising exactly that question for years—and answering it in the negative. With respect, quoting Lipstadt and then Beinart on Jewish affairs is like citing Francis Collins and then turning to R. F. K., Jr. for insights about vaccines. On the other hand, the fact that Beinart and others of that ilk influence public opinion amplifies the urgency of your message.

Diagnosis and treatment

Reading you brought to mind a quip I heard on a recent visit in Jerusalem: there are only two places in the world unsafe for Jews—Israel and the diaspora. Most American Jews have been comfortable in their dual identities, thanks to the hospitable environment they found in America compared to European and other temporary safe zones. Some have always been troubled (embarrassed?) by the Zionist project; and an increasing number, especially younger ones, struggle between fealty to social justice causes and crass right-wing extremism in Israel they neither understand nor abide. That schism is nurtured by demagogues who capitalize on Jewish affinity for universal humanism to sow seeds of doubt about allegiance to Israel. In the spirit of “nothing new under the sun,” we’ve been dealing with betrayal by traditional allies for a long time, with what my friend Mitchell Cohen wryly observes is a “left that doesn’t learn.” After October 7, though, things worsened, with American Jews (and others worldwide) pummeled by waves of anti-Semitism crashing from right and left. Some Israelis, still digging out of their physical and emotional trauma, apologize that this momentary failure of the Zionist project on October 7 may have compromised the safety of Jews everywhere. Talk about empathy!

What to do? It’s always easier to chop down really dumb ideas, such as exile as an alternative to sovereignty, than to come up with good ones. But I’ll offer some guiding principles in hopes you might help us move the discussion toward rectifying the problem you wrote about.

I’ll start with three assumptions, admittedly straining for optimism:

1. Most American Jews want the war in Gaza to end—conditional on release of the remaining hostages and the hostages’ remains—but underestimate how many Israelis share that wish. On the other hand, those who advocate for unilateral and unconditional ceasefire tend to overestimate the popularity of that view among Israelis, even those on the hard left. You can help correct these misunderstandings.

2. Beyond the specifics of the current war, most American Jews want to connect with Israel, even if they are reticent about self-identifying as Zionists. With some slippage, survey data affirm that, for the majority, with variation by age and religious affiliation, identification with Israel grew after October 7. These data are encouraging, and should be flagged if you continue working on these issues.

3. Incomplete knowledgeof Jewish, Zionist, and Middle Eastern history, more than foundational hostility to Jews or Judaism, fuels American Jewish ambivalence about Israel. Among those who lean “banally liberal,” too many are unschooled about the moral grandeur and historical significance of Zionism and Jewish national self-renewal. But at least they’re not opposed to the whole project. (For a crude analogy, the fact that some U.S. college graduates have trouble naming their two senators doesn’t mean they reject our grand democratic experiment.) If you continue on this topic, please help readers with a balanced set of references for further reading.

From those assumptions and requests, I’ll proceed with my top five more specific recommendations to educators in all disciplines, in and out of schools, including journalists and other “influencers.” We should:

a) challenge hyperbolic anti-Israel reporting that blurs people’s capacity to know what is going on and contributes to incessant degrading of Israel’s legitimacy;

b) question the bizarre notion that the Jewish people don’t need sovereignty, a fad unburdened by evidence showing why the diaspora (except possibly in America) has proven to be not a viable alternative;

c) acknowledge that external criticism of Israel’s government is fair play (God knows it’s the national sport there)—if it’s done honestly, humbly, and with at least a modicum of respect for the democratic ideals of the Zionist project;

d) push back against popular narratives (such as “settler colonialism” as the driving force in establishment of the Jewish state), derived from fanciful utopian visions that indict the West in general and Jews in particular; and

e) reclaim our commitment to evidence, logic, and moral clarity that distinguishes liberal education from the uncurated claptrap and conspiracy mongering of social media.

We need more journalists, politicians, and scholars joining the fight against the global epidemic of “banal liberalism” generally and its unholy alliance with anti-Semitism specifically.

A version of this article originally appeared on the author’s Substack. Reproduced with permission.

You’re not being silenced for telling the truth, Mr. Stewart; you’re being silenced for only telling half of it.

In his recent interview with Peter Beinart, Jon Stewart casts himself as a brave truth-teller under attack for daring to speak out: “People yell at me about what I say sometimes about Palestine and what’s going on in Israel, and they call me a bad Jew… And to be told that I have to shut up because I risk the Jewish state by speaking out…” But this isn’t truth-telling. It’s selective outrage dressed up as courage.

His outrage doesn’t come from deep investigation. It’s drawn from a pool of activist talking points that have long distorted the nature of this conflict; and, since October 7, have shown just how far they’re willing to bend truth to justify horror and to frame Israel as the sole villain in a war it didn’t start.

Take Peter Beinart’s claim that “Israel’s leading human rights organization, B’Tselem, has just come out with a report saying they believe this is genocide.” Beinart presents this organization as a neutral watchdog, but B’Tselem is no neutral observer.

It’s part of a coordinated ideological network, including Al-Haq, an organization officially designated by Israel’s Ministry of Defense as tied to the terrorist group the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). Al-Haq’s leadership included former PFLP operatives, and, after October 7, it co-signed statements framing Hamas’s massacre as “resistance.” Neither Al-Haq nor B’Tselem recognize Israel as a legitimate Jewish state, a foundational position that skews every report they produce.

This is not incidental. These groups share major international human rights awards and publicly endorse one another’s legal campaigns. This is a deliberate alliance to delegitimize Israel, not a principled movement for human rights.

When public figures like Stewart and Beinart treat these sources as moral arbiters, they aren’t amplifying justice, they, as those organizations have, imply that Jews do not have the right to their own country in their own land. Stewart likely hasn’t sat with a single Jewish student who’s been harassed or silenced for being openly Jewish or pro-Israel on campus. These students aren’t gatekeepers suppressing the truth, they’re living with the fallout of a movement whose language comes directly from the very sources Stewart praises: one that calls for “resistance,” but never defines the terrorism it excuses; that invokes “apartheid” and “colonialism,” but without legal or historical rigor; and grieves only one side.

Beinart insists he doesn’t want Israelis to die, but also suggests they should feel what it’s like to face consequences. But what was October 7, then? Nearly 1,200 people raped, mutilated, burned alive, kidnapped—wasn’t that “consequence” enough? Why is it only when Israel defends itself that Stewart and Beinart find their moral urgency?

Beinart points to so-called Palestinian “non-violent resistance,” but the example he cites has been documented as orchestrated by terrorist factions. The 2018 “Great March of Return” was planned by Hamas to create photo-ops and martyrs—including photo-ops with swastika flags. Numerous people were killed or injured and, while endlessly heartbreaking, this was not the fruit of a Gandhi-led movement. These were human shields, deployed by a terror regime.

He goes on to ask why equality under the law can’t exist like it does elsewhere, but ignores who’s preventing it. Gaza is governed by an elected terrorist regime that jails, tortures, and kills political dissenters, executing rivals in public.

Where, exactly, is Israel supposed to build a democracy… inside a dictatorship? And then there’s the myth of occupation. Gaza has been under Hamas’s control since 2007, and not under Israel’s control since 2005. Hamas governs every aspect of life. Law: Hamas imposes its own legal system, crushes dissent, and enforces its ideology through an unaccountable (Islamic) judiciary. Education: Curricula glorify jihad and martyrdom—including to toddlers. Economy: Hamas controls imports, levies taxes, and profits off smuggling tunnels. Security: Armed police and militias target rivals, not criminals. Military: Hamas has an army, rockets, and has declared intent to repeat October 7 “again and again.”

This is not a territory under foreign military occupation. This is an authoritarian regime governing itself while Israel and Egypt control their borders via land, air, and sea. Even the UN’s own Fourth Committee—no friend of Israel—has never defined Israel’s presence as “colonization.” The word is used by activists, not legal scholars. And yet these are the sources Jon Stewart and Peter Beinart cite as Gospel, never interrogating from where their funding comes, what ideologies they promote, or which facts they never studied or choose to omit.

Stewart and Beinart speak endlessly about what needs to happen to fix this, yet all their “fixes” exclude Jewish students on college campuses who are afraid to speak, Israeli survivors of October 7, academics and experts who don’t buy into the activist playbook.

You say we should invite Palestinians into Jewish spaces? Agreed, but you’ve emptied those spaces of the Jews who don’t agree with you. Selective empathy is not moral clarity: it’s propaganda, and it’s dangerous. You cannot demand justice for Palestinians and ignore October 7. You cannot claim to seek peace while excusing those who burn families alive. You cannot defend regimes that jail dissidents and glorify child killers, and still pretend to care about human rights.

And you cannot do all this while claiming to speak for Jews, as you mock their treasured holidays on camera for your millions of viewers. That moment alone did more to erode more dignity and safety for the Jewish community than most open hostility ever could.

If your premise is that the Palestinian people deserve a state regardless of who leads them, then, by that same logic, Israel, the only democracy in the region, deserves the same respect regardless of its leadership.

Jon, this isn’t moral courage, it’s selective outrage and half-facts.You’re not being silenced for telling the truth, you’re being challenged for abusing your platform for broadcasting misinformation to millions.

Dear Minister Puente,

When a group of French Jewish students flying from Valencia to Paris was removed from a Vueling flight, reportedly for singing in Hebrew, you responded on X with the following rhetorical question:

Will the patriots stand with Vueling? Will the law enforcement forces stand with air safety? Will the xenophobes be with the Spanish company? Or will they all stand united behind the Israeli brats?

We cannot answer for the people of Spain, but we can say unequivocally that White Rose Magazine stands not only with the “Israeli brats,” as you so crudely put it, but with all Israelis regardless of faith—and with the Jewish people in France, in Israel, and around the world. We also stand with truth, fairness, and the foundational principle that government officials must rise above bigotry, not amplify it.

While the flight crew claims the students “disrupted” the safety briefing, passengers indicate they were targeted for singing—even just speaking—in Hebrew. What is clear is that you, the Transport Minister of Spain, chose to reduce a group of French teenagers, none of whom are Israeli citizens, to a caricature based solely on the language they spoke and the nationality you projected onto them.

That is textbook anti-Semitism.

In a just world, such a statement from a government minister would be followed swiftly by a retraction and a resignation. Instead, you doubled down, fueling a fire you helped ignite. For a representative of a Western democracy, and the successor to Europe’s last openly fascist regime, that is unacceptable. You also deleted your post once the condemnations began, indicating that you do not even have the courage to stand behind your bigotry.

Further, the incompetence in your ministry that allowed Iván Chirivella, the pilot in question, to fly commercial airliners is also unacceptable. A man who trained Mohamed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi, two of the 9/11 hijackers, and had his U.S. work permit revoked on account of that fact, regardless of his “innocence,” should never be rewarded with such a privileged position.

If the removal of these students is confirmed to have been discriminatory, Vueling Airlines must be held to account. But, regardless of the airline’s motives, your public framing of the event was driven not by facts, but by prejudice—and worse, you invited the Spanish people to join you in that prejudice.

Your country’s history of prejudice against Jews is a dark one. When the bubonic plague arrived in Spain in 1348, massacres of the supposedly responsible Jews followed throughout Barcelona, Zaragoza, and other Catalán cities, soon spreading across Iberia. In 1391, mobs slaughtered thousands of Jews in Sevilla, then commanded the weeping survivors to accept baptism; the many who refused were sold to the Muslims as slaves. That atrocity sparked a “holy war” against the Jews which resulted in thousands of forced baptisms. With the fall of Granada in 1492, the Catholic Monarchs and their Inquisition demanded the expulsion of all Jews who would not convert. Many of those who did—and the descendants of those forced converts from 101 years earlier—the conversos, would be tortured and burned alive for fear that their adherence to Catholic orthodoxy was insufficient. 

Even today, Sephardic Jews still say prayers for their brothers and sisters imprisoned and murdered by the Spanish Inquisition, as if it had just happened.

You owe the people of Spain, and the Jewish community in particular, an apology. And you owe your office your resignation.

Anti-Semitism has no place in foreign diplomacy. Bow your head in shame, Minister. Then do the decent thing and step down.

Sincerely,

White Rose Magazine

White Rose Magazine was named in honor of Sophie and Hans Scholl’s underground Christian press, which printed anti-Nazi pamphlets during the Second World War at the University of Munich; Sophie, Hans, and all of their associates were executed for their bravery in 1943.

I wrote recently that the Judeo-Christian moral code is centered on love. This is not a sentimental observation. It is grounded in Scripture. When Jesus was asked what the greatest commandment was, He gave two answers: love God above all else, and love your neighbor as yourself (Matthew 22:36–40). The second answer was not a hedge. It was a reinforcement of the first. In Christianity, love is the full expression of both obedience and righteousness.

I also wrote that the Islamic moral code, which is based not on love but on submission to the will of Allah, functions as an inversion of the Judeo-Christian moral code.

There are times when you understand something intellectually, but do not have an emotional connection to that knowledge. Children, for example, often realize their parents are imperfect at a very young age, but do not feel the emotional weight of that knowledge until adolescence. It is in that moment, the one where the heart understands as well, that we begin to rebel against our parents.

It is only when we emotionally connect to the fact that we don’t know everything either, that our rebellion ends.

When I wrote that essay for White Rose Magazine, I knew I was telling the truth. I suspect that Islamic scholars, reading it from within their own framework, would find little to disagree with on factual grounds. From a Christian point of view the moral architecture of Islam is reversed, and I laid that out plainly. The point I think an Islamic scholar would object to is not the structure of the argument, but the judgment I applied to it. What Islam calls righteousness, I called evil. That is what would offend them, and not because it is inaccurate, but because they believe the West is evil precisely for refusing to invert our morality in the same way.

I understood that intellectually, but I did not connect emotionally to it until White Rose Magazine released the entire issue and I began reading the contributions of others.

In “The Living Legacy of Jihad Slavery,” by Dr. Andrew G. Bostom, I came across a quote from Patricia Crone that stopped me cold:

Captives might also be given the choice between Islam and death, or they might pronounce the confession of faith of their own accord to avoid execution: jurists ruled that their change of status was to be accepted even though they had only converted out of fear.

As soon as I read that, I thought, “Of course Islam views conversion by fear as valid. A person who submits to Islam out of terror is demonstrating a more complete and immediate form of submission than someone who arrives at faith through conviction. Islam is not primarily concerned with belief so much as with submission.”

This led to a deeper realization: Islam does not glorify submission in the way Westerners might assume; and, in fact, it is not the submission itself that is glorified. In many cases, such as rape, the shame falls not on the offender, but on the victim. 

Islam glorifies not submission itself (as I think we assume), but the power to compel submission.

The virtue lies not in being the one who yields, but in being the one who forces others to yield.

This becomes clear when you look at how Islamic law treats dhimmis, a term for non-Muslims living under Muslim rule who are allowed to practice their religion only after paying a special tax. The jizya, or poll tax, is extracted in a manner designed to humiliate. The Qur’an commands that it be taken while the dhimmi feels “subdued” (9:29). Submission in this context is not honored. It is degraded. The very act of being allowed to survive is conditional upon accepting a visibly inferior position in society.

Slavery under Islam follows the same pattern. A slave is not treated as morally elevated by her obedience. She is not praised for patience or humility. She is a tool. Her value is in her function as a symbol of dominance. The master is not righteous because he is kind. He is righteous because he has the authority to command. If the slave is a woman, her body may be used sexually without consent, as long as she is legally classified as ma malakat aymanukum, a Qur’anic term meaning “those whom your right hands possess,” referring to non-Muslim women taken as spoils of war and subject to sexual ownership (see 4:24).

This is a legal category for captives taken in war, and consent is not required from such a woman. Her pain is not a concern. Her submission is the only thing that matters, and, in that submission, the dominant party sees confirmation of divine order.

This same moral framework applies even within Islamic societies when the victim is a Muslim woman. If she is raped, the burden is placed on her to prove that she did not invite the act. If she violated any social code, by walking alone, by going out uncovered, or by leaving home without permission, her assault is often interpreted as a form of moral correction. She is made to submit, not only through the physical violation itself, but through public shame and legal impotence. The man, on the other hand, often faces no consequence at all, especially if he continues to present the outward signs of piety.

Even the historical abuse of boys fits into this same moral structure. While homosexual acts are officially condemned in Islamic law, the rape of young boys, particularly in military or courtly contexts, has appeared throughout Islamic history. In these cases, shame is attached to the boy, not the man. The boy is seen as having been feminized. The act is not regarded as immoral because of what it is, but because of the social role it assigns. Again, the problem is not the violation, but the submission, and, in a world where submission is degradation, the one who forces it is morally ascendant.

All of this reveals something that goes beyond contradiction. It reveals a system where submission is not a virtue for all people, but a condition imposed on others to reinforce the power of those at the top. Islam claims to be a religion of submission, but it never honors those who submit. It only honors those who rule.

Islam’s exaltation of dominance means that submission by fear and force is not just tolerated. It is often preferred over submission by conviction.

We in the West assume that submission must be noble, because, in our worldview, voluntary humility is a sign of moral strength; but, in Islam, those who submit are not celebrated. They are reminded constantly of their inferiority. The one who holds power is the one who is praised, be that Allah, a mullah (a Muslim cleric), or a rapist.

This may help explain why gang rape has been used by some Muslim men in Europe as a means of domination. The repeated violation is not just about lust. It is about forcing submission, both physical and spiritual. The repeated violations are meant to drive her deeper into submission.

Rape, slavery, conquest, and coercion cannot possibly be viewed as moral aberrations in Islam, because, in the core of the religious moral code, they are not stains on an otherwise virtuous system, but expressions of the system working as intended. When submission is extracted by force, and when those who submit are reminded of their lowly station, the social order is, in fact, affirmed.

It is truly the only logical outcome possible in a moral system where obedience is placed above dignity, and where power is exalted above love. This inversion creates a theology in which domination becomes virtue, and in which the suffering of others becomes evidence of divine approval. It dehumanizes the weak while absolving the strong, making hierarchy sacred and cruelty righteous.

Islam is not a religion of humility. It is a religion of enforced order. Once you recognize that, every other contradiction begins to make perfect sense.

These are not perversions of the faith. They are the mechanisms by which it enforces its moral order, and by which it sustains its claim to righteousness through domination.

And once you connect emotionally to this fact, the true horror of this religion which is not a religion suddenly comes fully into view.

“The Democrats think we’re stupid,” a young black friend recently told me. “That we’ll embrace whatever insanity they’re pushing.” I had asked him what he thought of Zohran Mamdani, 33, who leads the NYC race for mayor by 10 points.

“Dude, how hard is it to condemn a phrase—globalize the Intifada—that the entire world knows means ‘kill the Jews’?” 

For the first couple of weeks after the June primary, there was disbelief that the city with the largest number of Jews outside of Israel could elect an inexperienced young man who has questioned Israel’s right to exist, praised Al-Qaeda, promised to arrest Prime Minister Netanyahu, and believes that mocking Hanukkah is normal for a U.S. politician. 

As the polls continue to show Zohran in the lead, that disbelief quickly turned to anger. We well know his biggest voting block: millennials. Millennials, 29–44, are not well liked here. They scream lies at our kids in schools, lack basic manners and appear to believe that work—a job—is beneath them.

“Finally, a millennial who wants to work,” a friend recently quipped. “What’s not to like?” said another. “He’s going to give away—for free!—a  country that never existed.”

A couple of summers ago, I had an intense discussion with a Democratic operative here about the future of the party. “It’s never returning to classical liberalism,” she said definitively. “It will keep radicalizing till it’s forced to shut down.” But of course she wasn’t fully taking into consideration the (uneducated) millennial vote, as well as older Gen-Zers.

This is not to say that every Democrat has bought into Sharia socialism. But what’s abundantly clear is that nearly every Democrat won’t cross that red-green line and condemn Zohran—even if this means the end of the Democratic Party.

Many of us called ourselves socialists for a week or so in high school. Then we learned that socialism has never worked in any city, state or country where it’s been tried. Moreover, anyone who lives here knows that NYC runs best on an energetic capitalism. When NYC is at its best, people from all backgrounds are inspired to excellence, in all fields. China destroyed much of that with COVID; four years later, stores are still closed on Madison Avenue and the city lacks incentive, let alone inspiration.

Perhaps the scariest part of the Zohran mystique is that he isn’t dumb. He knows the policies he’s espousing—from government-run grocery stores to defunding the police—don’t work: he knows it will destroy NYC. 

So why is he espousing all of this? Power, of course. Power to BDS Israel, to stop ICE from deporting terrorists, and to globalize the Intifada. Just as his brethren are doing in London, Paris, Sydney and Madrid.

After 9/11, we weren’t allowed to use the I-word. The fact that a large, well-funded group of Muslim terrorists flew planes into buildings here and in D.C. was just a coincidence. The Islamophobia charge follows every criticism of Zohran; we would be disappointed if it didn’t. 

Meanwhile, many of us have already made plans to leave (Shalom, Governor DeSantis). But we’re also really concerned about the Orthodox and Hasidic communities in Brooklyn who may not leave, no matter what. 

The keffiyehs here have already spit on us, called us “dirty Jews,” threw rocks and glass bottles at us, and thanked Allah for the ability to slaughter us. 

What will happen when there’s no NYPD to protect us?

Sure, this type of persecution has marked our history. But we also know that our grandparents would be horrified to learn that the Democratic Party, the party they helped to build, would turn on us so easily. At this point, the term Jewish Democrat is an oxymoron.

The truth is, the West is at an inflection point. Will it continue to submit, as Douglas Murray has put it, to a form of fascism that pretends to be a religion? Or will Zohran become the bridge too far—the Islamic zealot who forces the U.S. to finally say: Enough. 

Jews came to the U.S. with nothing and helped build this country into the great liberal democracy that it’s been. You can’t walk a block in NYC without seeing Jewish names on buildings. Zohran is running on destruction and racism, looking to London’s no-go zones and Pakistani rape gangs as the city’s future. Did I mention that he also wants to abolish prisons?

But sure, Islamophobia is the real problem here.

This article was originally published in The Jewish Journal. Reproduced with permission.

Historian Will Durant observed in The Lessons of History that for a civilization to endure, it must hold fast to at least two of three social bonds: a shared religion, a shared culture, and a shared language.

I have often said that the less there is a God, the more we need one, and this is a metaphysical truth grounded not in religion but in the necessity of those social bonds. We need a shared language so we can communicate clearly, and, somewhere between religion and culture, we need to find a shared moral framework. Religion can be particularly helpful, as it places that moral framework above mankind, protecting society from moral relativism and the resulting moral rot.

Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are often grouped together as Abrahamic faiths, but they are not all variations on the same moral theme. Islam, at its core, produces opposite outcomes, built on a fundamentally different image of God and a vision of morality and human purpose utterly incompatible with that of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

Where the Torah says, “The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself” (Leviticus 19:34), the Qur’an commands, “Kill them [the unbelievers] wherever you find them…” (Qur’an 2:191). The moral contrast could not be more stark.

This is not a piece about which religion is “true.” It is not an argument over revelation, spiritual experience, or salvation. It is a moral analysis, focused on the civilizational consequences of two radically different belief systems.

Nor is this an apologetic. The polite view of Islam is to treat its foundational texts as irrelevant, as just another cry to a “fictional sky god.” But that is not honest critique; it is secular evasion. Religions are built on texts, not impressions, and while atheistic intellectuals may scoff at what those texts demand, believers do not. Therefore, I begin with the assumption that the devout will act out their faith.

This is also not a commentary on Arabs as an ethnic group, or Muslims as individuals. Many self-identifying Muslims are kind, sincere, and morally upright. But just as a devout Christian is expected to grow more Christ-like as their faith deepens, so, too, a devout Muslim is expected to become more aligned with the tenets of Islam, and of Muhammad, its corresponding central figure. It is those tenets, found in the Qur’an, the Hadith, and the life of Muhammad, that form the basis of this critique.

The Judeo-Christian tradition, forged through the convergence of Biblical revelation and Greek reason, gave rise to a civilization built on freedom, conscience, love, and moral accountability. Islam, by contrast, emerged as an intentional inversion—a system that replaced grace with law, love with power, and voluntary faith with enforced submission.

The word Islam predates the formalized religion of that name. In Arabic, “Islam” means “submission,” specifically submission to the will of Allah. 

According to Islamic doctrine, humanity is divided into two broad groups: Dar al-Islam (the House of Islam) and Dar al-Harb (the House of War). The House of Islam contains those who have submitted. The House of War contains those who have not submitted and are therefore in a state of opposition to Allah’s rule.

“House of War” is literal: one of the central tenets of Islam is that it is in a perpetual state of war with everything else. The name of that war is, of course, jihad.

To Islam, the only thing separating the world from paradise is impure belief. If all who disbelieve in Allah, or believe imperfectly, are either converted or killed, then pain, suffering, hunger, and disease will vanish. Everything bad will cease to exist (Qur’an 8:39, 9:33, 24:55).

Unlike Christianity, which makes no attempt to dictate how a state should be structured (in fact, Christ Himself explicitly separated spiritual authority from political power, saying “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s” in Matthew 22:21), Islam presents itself as a comprehensive political, legal, and religious system. The Qur’an is not merely a book of spiritual wisdom; it is presented as a complete and binding code of divine law for all of mankind. According to Islamic doctrine, the world suffers not because man has fallen short of moral virtue, but because man has failed to fully submit to the laws of Allah (Qur’an 5:3, 33:36).

This distinction is critical. The Judeo-Christian God is rooted in love. God creates out of love, redeems out of love, and grants free will as a reflection of that love, even when it allows for rebellion (Genesis 2:16–17, Deuteronomy 30:19, Ezekiel 18:30–32, I John 4:8). Islam, by contrast, is rooted in submission (Qur’an 3:19, 3:85; Sahih al-Bukhari 7142). Its conception of God is not as a relational Father, but as a sovereign (slave) master whose decrees are absolute, final, and beyond question.

Islam does not simply encourage obedience, but demands it under threat of death. The Qur’an repeatedly calls for the punishment and terrorizing of those who disbelieve (Qur’an 4:89, 8:12, 9:73), who abandon the faith (Bukhari 6922; Sunan an-Nasa’i 4034, 4059), or who believe incorrectly (Qur’an 5:33, 9:29). As a result, Islam cannot be peaceful—even within itself. The moment Muhammad died, with no clear succession plan and no tolerance for dissent, the religion fractured instantly into Sunni and Shia sects, and these internal divisions were not mere theological refinements but power struggles wrapped in divine justification. These groups have remained violent toward one another for over a millennium, and, as Islam continues to splinter into sub-factions, its internal compulsion to purge impure belief risks turning it into a global suicide cult.

The Ridda Wars that followed Muhammad’s death were not defensive. They were a campaign to slaughter or subjugate any tribe that strayed from obedience. Islam has never been peaceful, not even among its own.

Moderates within Islam are often branded as apostates by their more devout peers, since to challenge orthodox interpretations is to question Allah Himself, for Allah has “perfected for you your religion” (Qur’an 5:3). This dynamic doesn’t remain isolated to theological debate, but quickly manifests as legal and political enforcement through Sharia.

This ideological rigidity has direct political consequences, as Sharia becomes the mechanism through which enforcement escalates and dissent is punished. This is why Islamic populations tend to become more, not less, devout over time. In nations where Islam takes hold, the pattern is consistent: what begins as coexistence becomes confrontation, then coercion, then enforcement. This is not a perversion of Islam, but its natural trajectory.

There is a belief in the West that Sharia needs to be passed to be enforced, but understand that, in the Qur’an, Allah already passed it and all that is needed is the power to enforce it. The basis of this religion is to make the entire globe either submit or die, and though Muslims as people may have a preference between those two things, the Qur’an does not.

Islam, at its core, is not merely an alternative moral system. It is a deliberate inversion of the Judeo-Christian ethic. Where Judaism and Christianity teach that God is love and that morality flows from His unchanging goodness, Islam teaches that Allah is pure will, and that whatever He commands is moral by definition. In Judeo-Christian tradition, God gives man free will and calls for personal responsibility. In Islam, man must submit entirely, without question—let alone responsibility:

One need not believe in the Judeo-Christian God to believe in love (even of enemies), free will, conscience, forgiveness, grace, and the primacy of secular governance, but these are the values that have defined the Western world, and they stand in sharp contrast to Islamic principles.

Muhammad, incidentally, did not misunderstand Judaism or Christianity. He saw their civilizational influence and created a new version in direct opposition to them and as a vehicle for domination. He absorbed Judeo-Christian language and reversed the meaning. Islam is not a sibling faith. It is a counter-religion: one whose founder sought not holiness, but sovereignty and control. That inversion lives on in every doctrine that commands conquest, every law that mandates submission, and every punishment aimed at the soul that dares to question.

This is not just an indictment of Islam, but a warning to the West.

If the West does not re-anchor itself in the moral clarity of its own tradition, it will not survive the challenge of Islam. This is not because Muslims are inherently dangerous, but because the ideology that governs the devout is structurally incapable of coexistence with liberty. It does not negotiate. It does not even tolerate. All it does is to convert, conquer, command, and kill.

Unless we are willing to name that inversion and reject it outright, we will be absorbed by it—not as martyrs, but as infidels.

Ironically, those who say that criticizing Islam is “Islamophobic” (and who have no problem with criticism of other religions) are creating a tremendous threat to decent, non-observant Muslims, as the first person Islam calls to kill is not the infidel, but the incorrect Muslim (Qur’an 4:89). In Islam, a non-Muslim has not been taught the truth and can thus possibly be converted, but the incorrect Muslim was taught the truth and rejected it, and there is no redemption for that (Qur’an 4:137).

Islamic doctrine does not merely tolerate violence and exploitation in the context of jihad. It actively sanctions it. Acts that Western civilization regards as criminal or immoral, such as rape, torture, theft, and even murder, are explicitly permitted when committed in the service of spreading or defending the faith.

The Qur’an permits Muslim men to have sexual relations with captive women, even if those women are married. Qur’an 4:24 states: “[Forbidden to you are] married women except those whom your right hands possess.” This verse was revealed after Muslim fighters expressed hesitation about raping women taken as slaves in battle, and especially those who had husbands (Sahih Muslim 1456-A). Rather than forbidding the act, the Qur’an explicitly legalizes it. This is further reinforced in Muslim 1438-A, where a companion of Muhammad reports:

[We] took captive some excellent Arab women; and we desired them, for we were suffering from the absence of our wives, (but at the same time) we also desired ransom for them. So we decided to have sexual intercourse with them but by observing ‘azl (withdrawing the male sexual organ before emission of semen to avoid conception). But we said: We are doing an act whereas Allah’s Messenger [Muhammad] is amongst us; why not ask him? So we asked Allah’s Messenger and he said: It does not matter if you do not do it, for every soul that is to be born up to the Day of Resurrection will be born.

The concern here is not about consent or morality, but about preserving the women’s resale value as sex slaves. The rape is taken as a given. Only the logistics are discussed.

Qur’an 23:5–6 reinforces this: “They guard their private parts, except from their wives or those their right hands possess, for indeed, they are not to be blamed.”

By contrast, Deuteronomy 21:10–14 establishes rules that would make the idea of marrying a captive woman deeply unappealing to brutal or impulsive men. The captive must be brought into the home, have her head shaved and nails trimmed, remove her captive clothing, and be allowed to mourn for a full month before marriage. If the man later rejects her, he must let her go free: “You must not sell her or treat her as a slave, since you have dishonored her.” The process deliberately delays gratification, strips the woman of aesthetic appeal in the short term, and imposes legal and moral obligations turning what might have begun as lust into responsibility or nothing at all.

Torture is also sanctioned when deemed expedient. In Bukhari 6899, we read that Muhammad “ordered to cut their hands and feet, and their eyes were branded with heated pieces of iron, and then he threw them in the sun till they died.” This describes Muhammad’s treatment of a group of men whom he had advised to drink camel milk and urine, then who apostatized and stole said camels. They were mutilated and left to die of exposure. Another account from Ibn Ishaq’s Sirat Rasul Allah recounts that, after the siege of Khaybar, Muhammad tortured Kinana ibn al-Rabi’ by lighting a fire on his chest to force him to reveal the location of hidden treasure, before ordering his execution. This is not fringe behavior. It is foundational history, and treated as exemplary by Islamic sources.

Theft, or more accurately, loot as divine reward, is codified in the doctrine of ghanimah (war booty). Qur’an 8:1 opens the discussion: “They ask you about the spoils of war. Say, ‘The spoils belong to Allah and the Messenger.’” Later, Qur’an 8:41 clarifies: “And know that anything you obtain of war booty—then indeed, for Allah is one fifth of it and for the Messenger…” This is not condemnation of looting, but a divine directive to divide the spoils, including enslaved people, among the victors. Muhammad himself received one-fifth of all plundered goods, including captives (Bukhari 3124).

Leviticus 19:11 forbids theft outright: “You shall not steal, you shall not deal falsely, you shall not lie to one another.” In contrast, the Qur’an institutionalizes what can only be described as a religiously sanctioned protection racket. Qur’an 9:29 commands Muslims to “fight those who do not believe in Allah… until they pay the jizya with willing submission and feel themselves subdued.” This is not a tax for services rendered, but a penalty imposed for disbelief. The conquered are forced to fund their own subjugation, with the express goal of humiliation.

Further, the traditional Jewish understanding of the Eighth Commandment, Exodus 20:15 (“You shall not steal”), is that it refers specifically to the stealing of people. Theft of property, as aforesaid, is strictly prohibited elsewhere in the Torah. As allowed by Qur’an 47:4, Hamas, an Islamic jihad organization, did just that on October 7, 2023, when it stole 251 innocent human beings as hostages.

Most disturbing is Islam’s explicit authorization to kill non-believers for the crime of disbelief alone. Qur’an 9:5 instructs: “Then, when the sacred months have passed, kill the polytheists wherever you find them, capture them and besiege them and lie in wait for them at every ambush.” These are not contextual footnotes, but final-stage revelations in Surat at-Tawbah (9), chronologically among the last chapters of the Qur’an, and therefore considered binding and unambiguous in classical Islamic jurisprudence. Indeed, Qur’an 2:106 enshrines the doctrine of abrogation, where Allah “bring[s] forth” a revelation “better than” the earlier one when convenient to a new situation.

In the Judeo-Christian tradition, such acts are sins. In Islam, when done to advance Allah’s rule, they become sacred duties. This is the ultimate inversion, not only of Judeo-Christian morality, but of universal ethics. A system that grants moral license to rape, torture, plunder, and kill, so long as it advances submission, is not merely incompatible with Western civilization; it is its theological and moral antithesis.

Truth, in both Judaism and Christianity, stands as the hallmark of divine authority. Deuteronomy 18:22 declares: “When a prophet speaks in the name of the Lord, if the thing does not come to pass or come true, that is a word the Lord has not spoken.” Christ further affirms that “you will know them by their fruits” (Matthew 7:16), grounding spiritual legitimacy in honesty, integrity, and transparency. By contrast, Islam permits lying when it serves the faith (Qur’an 2:225, 16:106, 66:2), a doctrine known as taqiyya. Qur’an 3:28 instructs Muslims not to take unbelievers as allies “unless you are guarding yourselves against them,” legitimizing deception in dealings with non-Muslims. While Christianity demands that truth reveal the prophet, Islam allows concealment of truth to protect the mission. One treats truth as sacred; the other as strategic. Muhammad condensed it to three words: “War is deceit” (Bukhari 3029).

The Torah, in Numbers 23:19, presents truthfulness as intrinsic to God’s nature: “God is not a man, that He should lie, nor a son of man, that He should change His mind.” In stark contrast, Qur’an 3:54 celebrates Allah’s cunning: “And they deceived, and Allah deceived, and Allah is the best of deceivers.”

To call Allah “the best of deceivers” echoes Revelation 12:9: “And the great dragon was thrown down, that ancient serpent, who is called the devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world…”

Muhammad may have even deceived himself, dying in precisely the way Qur’an 69:44–46 says he would were he were a false prophet: “[If Muhammad] had made up about Us some [false] sayings, We would have seized him by the right hand; Then We would have cut from him the aorta.”

How did he die? Bukhari 4428 and other Islamic sources document that, “in his [Muhammad’s] ailment in which he died, [he] used to say, ‘O ‘Aisha! I still feel the pain caused by the food I ate at Khaibar, and at this time, I feel as if my aorta is being cut from that poison.” The story of Khaybar is significant in this context, as it was a battle where Muhammad and his followers massacred, enslaved, and raped the last remnant of Arabia’s Jews.

One of the Jewish widows, Zainab bint al-Harith, offered poisoned mutton to Muhammad and his warriors, saying “If you were a prophet, it would not harm you; but if you were a king, I should rid the people of you” (Sunan Abu Dawud 4512).

Muhammad preached that women are worth less than men in testimony and inheritance (Qur’an 2:282, 4:11); citing the “deficiency of a woman’s mind,” that they are half as intelligent as men (Bukhari 2658); that they can be beaten for “rebellion” (Qur’an 4:34); and that they make up the majority of hell (Bukhari 29, 304, 3241). He then taught that Muslims must “fight against” and “kill” all Jews (Muslim 2922)—only to die in agony, four years after Khaybar, failing a Jewish woman’s test of true prophethood.

ISIS may hold apocalyptic beliefs that some Muslims find extreme, but, in terms of doctrinal purity and fidelity to Islam’s original texts, it is arguably the most literal and consistent expression of the religion today. Its acts, including burning prisoners alive, beheading captives, and enslaving women, are not fringe distortions. They are the logical and textually grounded outcomes of Islamic jurisprudence when followed without reinterpretation or restraint. This is precisely why thousands of Muslims from Western countries have supported or joined ISIS: not in spite of its theology, but because of it.

Islam was not revealed; it was reverse-engineered. It is not the fulfillment of divine truth, but its calculated inversion. Islam is not even a religion so much as a tool for conquest wrapped in the language of faith. 

Where the Judeo-Christian ethos lifted civilization through love, conscience, and self-sacrifice, Islam enslaved it through fear, obedience, and blood. And, in every place it gains ground, the first casualty is not unbelief, but freedom itself.

A religion that sanctifies rape, glorifies theft, mandates lies, and punishes conscience with death is not holy. It is not even human. It is a machine for the destruction of souls, built in the image of power, not of God.

To tolerate such a thing in the name of pluralism is not virtue, but suicide, and, if we, who have inherited a civilization built on the freedom to think, speak, and believe (or not), cannot find the courage to name this evil and reject it outright, then we are not defending the West. We are digging its grave.

For reasons that are historic, political, and racial, the trans-Atlantic slave trade has remained a key topic of discussion in the Western world, and especially in the United States. Those discussions have included everything from the Juneteenth holiday to slave reparations to ethnic studies curriculum. As intense as those talks can be, one thing is certain: the trans-Atlantic slave trade of Africans—led by African, Arab, and European slave traders—began in the 1500s and ended in the 1800s. It lasted about 250 years.

Yet there is another slave trade of Africans that began long before the former, and has continued long after. It is known as the trans-Saharan slave trade, started by Arab Muslims as a key feature of imperial, colonial Islam in the seventh century. From Eamonn Gearon’s article “Arab Invasion of Africa: The First Islamic Empire” in History Today:

When Muhammad, the Prophet of Islam, died in 632 the new religion had already gathered a number of impressive victories on the battlefield. The armies of Islam quickly and easily conquered the Arabian peninsula before moving on to take the homelands of their various neighbours. Marching out of Arabia in 639 they entered non-Arab Egypt; 43 years later they reached the shores of the Atlantic; and in 711 they invaded Spain. In just 70 years they had subdued the whole of North Africa, instituting a new order. This conquest, from the Nile to the Atlantic, was more complete than anything achieved by previous invaders and the changes it wrought proved permanent.

Within the Arabic language, black Africans are referred to as abid, “slaves.” It is a generic word that describes one’s color, ethnicity, or social status (or lack thereof). Throughout the history of Islam, it has been generally accepted that non-Muslims who were conquered and enslaved could gain their freedom by converting to Islam. For no other ethnic group has this proven to be false more than Africans. From the time of Muhammad until now, African Christians, Jews, Muslims, and peoples of other religions have been enslaved, raped, slaughtered, and displaced en masse by Arab Muslims.

Anti-Black attitudes go back to the beginning of Islam, with Muhammad purchasing an enslaved Arab man who wanted to join his army with two of his own Black slaves (Sahih Muslim 1602); saying that a Black man who denied his prophethood looked like the devil (Sirat Rasul Allah, p. 243); and relating a dream in which a Black woman with messy hair was a symbol of a deadly plague of fever (Sahih al-Bukhari 7039), amongst other things mentioned in the Muslim sources.

Because Muhammad, whom Qur’an 33:21 says is every Muslim’s perfect pattern of conduct, owned Black slaves and insulted Black people (Bukhari 7142), then that is considered acceptable by and is part of Islamic law (Sharia). Islam considers anything Muhammad did to be good and exemplary; therefore, owning and taking slaves, which he did, is permitted. The Muslim sources actually describe Muhammad as “white” on many occasions, and he is said to have owned perhaps six people of African descent out of between 20 and 40 slaves.

Qur’an 3:106 even speaks of how “On the Day [some] faces will turn white and [some] faces will turn black. As for those whose faces turn black, [to them it will be said], ‘Did you disbelieve [i.e., reject faith] after your belief? Then taste the punishment for what you used to reject.’” Not just Muhammad but Allah says that to have black skin is a disfiguring punishment.

In fact, one of Islam’s most beloved books outlining Muhammad’s teachings, Ash-Shifa by the scholar Qadi Iyad (1083–1149), goes so far as to say the following (in Aisha Bewley’s translation): “Ahmad ibn Sulayman, Sahnun’s companion, said that whoever says that the Prophet was black is killed. The Prophet was not black” (p. 387).

An enslaved Black Arabian poet who wrote under the nom de plume Suhaym (“Little Black Man”) spoke of the deep racism of his host culture. As quoted in Bernard Lewis’s book Race and Slavery in the Middle East (p. 28), he says, “If my color were pink, women would love me / But the Lord has marred me with blackness,” and “Though I am a slave my soul is nobly free / Though I am black of color my character is white.” He wrote these words in the decades just after Muhammad’s death. In the end, Lewis says, Suhaym was “killed and burned by his owners [about the year 660] because of his attentions to their women” (n. 2, p. 113).

Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406), one of the most revered Arab writers of all time and often called the father of modern sociology, says that Black people are literally subhuman. As quoted by Lewis (p. 53):

Therefore, the Negro nations are, as a rule, submissive to slavery, because [Negroes] have little [that is essentially] human and have attributes that are quite similar to those of dumb animals, as we have stated.

By Ibn Khaldun’s time, Arabs controlled all of North Africa, and slave raiders penetrated deep into the continent, dragging women and children off to slavery. The women and little girls became concubines and the little boys—if they were lucky—became goatherds. Other boys were brutally castrated for use as eunuchs in Muslim rulers’ harems, with most of them dying as a result of the “operation.” The half-Black babies which resulted from masters’ abuse of their Black concubines were often murdered. Nothing like this happened universally as part of the trans-Atlantic slave trade—that is why the Black American, Brazilian, and Caribbean diasporas exist today. In Turkey, there are almost no dark-skinned people who identify as Black, even though millions of slaves were sent there. As British historian David Starkey says, the trans-Saharan slave trade can be described as “a genuine genocide.”

A clear majority of the maybe 25 million enslaved Black people transported from Africa between the eighth and nineteenth centuries (perhaps 14 million) were traded to the Islamic world. While the West had the moral courage to end this atrocity and then feel ashamed of it, the Muslim world has never done any such thing. In fact, the atrocity continues to this day.

In Mauritania, light-skinned Arabs and Berbers own Black Africans—all of whom are Muslim like them—as chattel slaves. According to the Global Slavery Index, 149,000 people are still kept in bondage as of 2023. Anti-slavery activists are even thrown into prison and, the U.S. State Department says, are victims of Arab police brutality on an increasingly regular basis.

In Sudan, the Arab government has restarted its racist war against the Black peoples of the western Darfur province, after having killed around 200,000 of them during the first genocide a generation ago. CNN reported in 2025 that “Those with a black or African tribal identity are being systematically hunted and killed by Arab militias like the RSF (Rapid Support Forces).” The BBC, too—no friend of countries in which people of African descent are not hunted and killed by the majority population—has covered these massacres. As part of the slaughters, Black women have been dragged off into sexual slavery. Even the politically driven United Nations, which often enables such abominations, has documented this:

The UN human rights office (OHCHR) expressed alarm… over reports that in Sudan, women and girls are being abducted, chained and held in “inhuman, degrading slave-like conditions” in areas controlled by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in Darfur.…

Survivors, witnesses and other sources have reported that over 20 women and girls have been taken, but the number could be higher, said OHCHR Spokesperson Liz Throssell.

“Some sources have reported seeing women and girls in chains on pick-up trucks and in cars,” she said.

But this is not new. Between 1955 and 1972 and again between 1983 and 2005, the Arabs in the north of Sudan fought a genocidal jihad against the Black Christians of what is today South Sudan. In addition to killing millions, Arab raiders enslaved hundreds of thousands of Black women and children.

Simon Deng, a former slave from Sudan now living in New York, was one of those children, and has traveled the world telling his story:

I will not forget that day when Arab Sudanese government troops came and raided my village. We didn’t know what was going on until we heard gunshots from every direction. I was only 9 years old, but the militiamen were shooting anybody they saw, including children.

Myself, my family, and five of my friends had to run. But the Arabs ran after us: While we were running, they shot two of my friends. We ran wildly, not knowing where we were running. We just wanted to get away from these men, and the bullets, chasing us.

Simon goes on to explain how he was befriended by an Arab man (Abdullahi), sold as a slave by that man, and given away to an Arab Muslim family in the north:

I left with that man and his family for their farm and I never saw Abdullahi again. Three days later, I stupidly asked the family where Abdullahi was, since he was the way I was going to get back [home]… to my parents. For that question I was beaten terribly. Bleeding and in pain the man told me that I should never ask anything about Abdullahi again, since he had given me away as a “gift.” In other words, I was now a slave.

By the grace of God, using donated money, the aid organization Christian Solidarity International—assisted by the American Anti-Slavery Group’s courageous fundraising campaigns—has managed to buy the freedom of around 160,000 souls like Simon since 1995. CSI believes some 35,000 still remain enslaved in the north.

After the Western-led coup against Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, the vacuum of power in Libya was filled by warlords who opened up slave markets reminiscent of the seventh century. In 2017, Michael Mpeirwe Katungi submitted testimony for the African Union Commission:

An immoral trade proliferates in total indifference in a Libya devastated by war and which tends to become a sort of new Gore’e for migrants.

Sub-Saharan migrants are exchanged for between $200 and $500 and then assigned to work in Libyan homes.

Others are sequestered, tortured and forced to call their families to pay for their release.

In Libya, (the international organisation for migration) said in a statement, are hundreds of sub-Saharan migrants and migrants are publicly sold in markets or garages.

Even more graphically, that same year, CNN obtained actual video of a night-time slave auction in which two African migrants were sold for the equivalent of $400 apiece.

Algeria is another Arab Islamic nation in Africa where slavery is commonplace, with the Global Slavery Index estimating a total of 84,000 people held in bondage. As Reuters reported in 2018:

Dozens of Africans say they were sold for labor and trapped in slavery in Algeria in what aid agencies fear may be a widening trend of abusing migrants headed for a new life in Europe.

Algerian authorities could not be reached for comment and several experts cast doubt on claims that such abuses are widespread in the north African country.

The tightly governed state has become a popular gateway to the Mediterranean since it became tougher to pass through Libya, where slavery, rape and torture are rife.…

The scale of abuse is not known, but an IOM [International Organization for Migration] survey of thousands of migrants suggested it could rival Libya.…

“The first time they sold me for 100,000 CFA francs ($170),” said Ousmane Bah, a 21-year-old from Guinea who said he was sold twice in Algeria by unknown captors and worked in construction.

“They took our passports. They hit us. We didn’t eat. We didn’t drink,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. “I was a slave for six months.”

It was in Algeria that former Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver saw black slaves for the first time. It shocked and dismayed him, as Cleaver, like so many young revolutionaries of the 1960s and ’70s, believed the deception that Arab Muslims were the true allies of Africans and people of African descent, and that Whites and Jews were their enemies. Slavery in Algeria was the beginning of Cleaver’s reformation that would eventually see him denounce Communism and Islamic terrorism and become a Black supporter of Israel.

In Nigeria, thousands are murdered by Islamic terrorists each year in what is now the greatest genocide of Christians in the world—more than 62,000 since the year 2000. In early 2024, Nigerian Stephen Enada, president of the International Committee on Nigeria (ICON), wrote in Newsweek:

A struggle today for Africa launched by Islamic terrorists is something Western elites wish to ignore, even as thousands of innocents are being brutally murdered, raped, burned alive, and taken captive. It is mostly a war waged against black Christians by African Islamists—and therefore an awfully sensitive subject. The recent Christmas attack against Christians in Nigeria claimed the lives of almost 200 people, yet it was mostly ignored in the mainstream press.

Some took notice when this centuries-old religious conflict flared in 1989, as Sudan’s jihad slaughtered Christians and enslaved perhaps 200,000 more. It ended only in 2005, when the U.S. helped broker a peace deal; in 2011, the south succeeded and become South Sudan, the world’s newest nation. More recently, Islamist attacks have spread where Islamic and Christian societies intersect: Mozambique, Niger, and Mali. In Darfur, there is a bit of a twist: Arab jihadists are slaughtering and enslaving Black people who converted to Islam long ago, but refuse to adopt Arab culture and language and who, in addition to being thought of as racially inferior, are not considered real Muslims.

Mali and Niger are part of the Western Sahel region of Africa along with Togo, Benin, Chad, and Burkina Faso. Burkina Faso has been in the international headlines as its young leader, Ibrahim Traoré, took power in the fall of 2022 and is making sweeping changes. Traoré is a devout Muslim whose grandmother was a devout Christian, and he is attempting to save his country from the Islamic terrorism of al-Qaeda, ISIS, and others. In fact, resistance to Islamic terrorism in Africa is part of the rallying cry during a new era of pan-Africanism. Traoré has been joined by the leaders of Mali and Niger, and their collective top priority is national security and the safety of their people.

But many Africans are not safe. Over the past decade, tens of thousands of African women, mostly from Nigeria and Uganda, have been lured by false promises of good-paying, legitimate jobs into traveling to Arab countries where they are forced into domestic and sexual slavery. The oil-rich Gulf states, over which the U.S. fawns so much and so inexcusably, are the worst perpetrators. In 2020, Tolulope Akande-Sadipe, chair of Nigeria’s parliamentary Committee on Diaspora Affairs, announced that as many as 80,000 Nigerian women were living as slaves in Lebanon, Mali, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. The following year, Ugandans were grief-stricken to hear that Milly Namazzi, a young woman trafficked to Saudi Arabia to work as a maid, was murdered by her master when she asked to go home. Her body was returned to Uganda mutilated.

I remember a conversation with a young Nigerian Christian from the Igbo tribe. He and his family immigrated to America when he was about 10-years-old. He described the violence he saw against his people at the hands of Arab Muslims and called it Sharia—Islamic law. “It was rough, Pastor Dumisani. I don’t ever want live anywhere near that again,” my young friend said. 

Every American, every Westerner should understand that, no matter what propaganda one hears about what Sharia is, Sharia’s ultimate application in Islamic nations is wanton violence against non-Muslims, and against Africans regardless of whether they are Muslim. The genocides and slavery in Nigeria, Algeria, Mali, Niger, Sudan, Libya, and beyond should serve as warning signs accompanying the Islamic quest for Sharia cities emerging in places like Texas and Michigan. And when the inevitable slander of “Islamophobia” is hurled at people who hold these legitimate concerns, the testimonies of Simon Deng, Stephen Enada, Eldridge Cleaver, and others should be shouted from the rooftops.

The onus should remain on proponents of Islamic rule to explain why 1,400 years of precedence is not an accurate prediction of where the West is headed. The ongoing trans-Saharan slave trade should tell every thinking person that this is precisely what Sharia advocates have in mind for Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, Baltimore, and every city and town in America.

Skeptical? I challenge anyone to list the number of Arab Muslim abolitionist organizations out there. Where is the “Islamic Anti-Slavery Group”? The fact there are none is further proof positive that political rule based on Islam is the opposite of freedom.

Yes. The trans-Atlantic slave trade had a beginning and an ending, the latter led by Black and White abolitionists. The trans-Saharan slave trade is alive, thriving, and, in the context of championing Sharia law, celebrated by Muslims who either participate or refuse to condemn it. Western leaders—Christians, Jews, and Muslims—had better find the moral courage to tell the truth or forever lose the privilege to do so.

The table was set with the finest linens and silverware,
A buffet of assorted delicacies selected, chef’s choice.
House rules codified,
Preparations fixed for the arrival of the most honorable Guest.

A chair was imported to impress,
Security tight, garden manicured,
The house sparkled with anticipation.

The other guests signed confidentiality agreements,
Some came prepared to seek His glare even for one glorious moment.
Some memorized a famous quote, others brought gifts, everyone donned their favorite attire.

His expected appearance made everyone and everything around Him better.

The neighborhood buzzed,
Children climbed poles to catch a glimpse of His caravan,
Even the weather behaved.

The moment arrived,
It was glorious,
All felt protected and holier as His reflection shined on them.

The host waited to greet Him,
Outside as He emerged from the entourage,
Inadvertantly passed over while the Guest of Honor was rushed inside.

A slight was perceived,
Righteousness became infected by indignation,
Goodness redefined,
While His nemesis crept in the opened backdoor,
Then pardoned in its wake,
And took His prestigious seat at the table.

The people still clamored for their moment with His replacement,
Some recognized the affront but cared not,
Rules amended then fortfied by the mob.

They replaced Him with what He despised,
Enticed by Bilam,
A remnant of Ba’al,
The attraction toward debaseness,
Compromised their soul.

If a piece is sacrificed, is it all damned?

The newly crowned guest saddled his Trojan Horse,
Dismounted and dismantled,
The efforts that proceeded,
While the onlookers cheered and chanted in his name.

Erased, was every mention and quote uttered by and about the Guest,
Curriculums edited,
Statues demolished and replaced,
“God is dead,” they declared.

“This is not how you treat an invited Guest,” One spoke up,
Rejected and discounted,
He suffered alone, not due to His embarrassment,
But that for his host and all others.

But shame had already exited quietly, defeated,
While the disrespected Guest impatiently waited for His Name to be cried out once again,
And for another invitation to arrive.

There are at least 12 known Arab countries in which non-Arab peoples—most commonly sub-Saharan Africans and South Asians—are owned and trafficked as slaves or are forced to labor in slave-like conditions:

1. Algeria
2. Egypt
3. Iraq
4. Kuwait
5. Lebanon
6. Libya
7. Mauritania
8. Oman
9. Qatar
10. Saudi Arabia
11. Sudan
12. United Arab Emirates

As the American Anti-Slavery Group reports:

Sub-Saharan Africans are enslaved in areas beyond Arab North Africa. The form this slavery takes is human trafficking, mainly of young women. Lured by advertisements of legitimate jobs overseas, desperately poor women, often from Nigeria and Uganda, are trafficked to Arab countries for use as prostitutes and household maids. Many young women are tricked into believing that the oil-rich Arab world holds the answer to their economic worries and fall into the traffickers’ traps.…

Not only Africans are enslaved in the Arab world. For decades, the Gulf states have imported—some say trafficked—massive numbers of migrant laborers, mainly from South Asia, in order to build their infrastructure and perform menial tasks. The resulting ratios of natives to migrants in these relatively lightly-populated countries is astonishing. For example, approximately 95% of Qatar’s labor force is foreign-born—more than two thirds of its population. And, as of 2015, more than 88% of the United Arab Emirates’ total population was made up of foreign-born laborers.

Exact estimates for the number of those trafficked are non-existent, but Tolulope Akande-Sadipe, the chair of Nigeria’s parliamentary Committee on Diaspora Affairs, announced in 2020 that some 80,000 Nigerian women had been trafficked as sex slaves across Lebanon, Mali, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and the U.A.E.

The estimates for enslaved black Africans and South Asian migrant workers are:

• Algeria: 84,000
• Libya: 47,000
• Mauritania: 149,000
• Qatar: 2 million
• Saudi Arabia: 740,000
• Sudan: 35,000

L. E. Penny reveals how picturesque “Minnesota nice” Minnesota has been systematically conquered by Islamic elements.

Jihad, a permanent Islamic institution, is intrinsically linked to enslavement, which explains the extensive and enduring nature of slavery in Muslim societies.

How does an indigenous population returning to its ancient homeland become settler colonialism? And how do Jews, persecuted for 3,000 years, become genocidal oppressors?

Traditionally progressive causes like environmentalism, feminism, and LGBT rights have now taken a backseat to Islamism, being fully subsumed in the name of “Palestine.”

Trump’s decision, taken at the height of Israel’s impressive campaign, literally saved the Ayatollahs’ regime, called by the U.S. State Department the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism, 39 years in a row, since 1984.

Hamas is made up of the same people, acting on the same colonizing and imperial motivations, who enslaved me and murdered 4 million of my black brothers and sisters.

Bangladesh’s slide into becoming an Islamic state was inevitable. Its creation owed to the disgruntlement of undivided Pakistan’s Bengali Muslims against the ruling Pakistani elite, which was—and is—overwhelmingly Punjabi Muslim.

In 2024, around the world, 4,476 Christians—more than 12 a day on average—were “killed for faith related reasons.” Another 4,744 Christians were arrested or illegally detained, and 7,679 churches and other Christian institutions were attacked, often destroyed.

Overall, the global persecution of Christians has reached unprecedented levels. “More than 380m Christians suffer high levels of persecution and discrimination for their faith,” according to the World Watch List 2025 (WWL) published earlier this year by the international human rights organization, Open Doors.

Every year, the WWL ranks the top 50 nations in which Christians are the most persecuted for their faith. The data are compiled by thousands of grassroots workers and external experts. The latest edition of the WWL covers October 1, 2023, to September 30, 2024.

According to the WWL, around the world, one in seven Christians (14%) is persecuted. In Africa, that number grows to one in five (20%). In Asia, it is a shocking two in five—meaning 40% of all Christians there are persecuted.

The list categorizes three levels of persecution: “extreme,” “very high” and “high.”

The top 13 of the 50 nations on the list are characterized by the worst form of persecution: “extreme.” They are: 1) North Korea, 2) Somalia, 3) Yemen, 4) Libya, 5) Sudan, 6) Eritrea, 7) Nigeria, 8) Pakistan, 9) Iran, 10) Afghanistan, 11) India, 12) Saudi Arabia, and 13) Myanmar.

The form of persecution experienced there ranges from assault, rape, imprisonment, or even murder on being identified as a Christian or attending (usually underground) churches.

Coming in as #1 is North Korea:

If your Christian faith is discovered in North Korea, you could be killed on the spot. If you aren’t killed, you will be deported to a labour camp and treated as a political criminal. You will be punished with years of hard labour that few survive. And it’s not only you who will be punished: North Korean authorities are likely to round up your extended family and punish them too, even if your family members aren’t Christians. There is no church life in North Korea. It’s impossible to gather for worship or prayer, and even secret worship and prayer is at great risk. Official spies could inform on you, if they have any indication that you are a Christian, and so could your neighbours or teachers.

Not surprisingly, most of the “extreme persecution” meted out to Christians in nine of these 13 worst nations continues to come either from Islamic oppression, or occurs in nations with large Muslim populations. Significantly, this means that approximately 70% of the absolute worst (“extreme”) persecution around the globe takes place under the aegis, or in the name, of Islam.

This trend affects the entire list: the rest of the “very high” or “high” levels of persecution that Christians experience in 37 of the 50 ranked nations (or 74%), also comes either from Islamic oppression or occurs in nations with majority or large Muslim populations. Many of these nations are governed by some form of shari’a (Islamic law). Those enforcing the persecution can either be the government or society or, more frequently, both, although societies—particularly family members outraged by relatives who have converted—tend to be more zealous in the application of shari’a.

This means that although the persecution in North Korea is worse, there is at least a light at the end of the tunnel: the ill-treatment of Christians is entirely connected to the regime of Kim Jong-un. “Recognising any deity beyond the Kim family is considered a threat to the country’s leadership,” notes the report. Once the Kim family is gone, which is inevitable, North Korea may well become like South Korea, where Christianity is flourishing.

Conversely, the persecution of Christians by Muslims is perennial, existential, and far transcends this or that ruler or regime. Persecution of the “other” in Islam is part of its history, doctrines, and socio-political makeup—hence its tenacity and ubiquity. Brief summaries of the dangers of being Christian in the nine Muslim nations where “extreme” levels of persecution occur include:

Somalia, #2, where only a few hundred Christians are believed to exist,

…following Jesus is a matter of life and death. Al-Shabab, a violent Islamist militant group… enforces a strict form of Sharia (Islamic law) and is committed to eradicating Christianity from Somalia. They have often killed Somali Christians on the spot. The dangers have increased over the years, as the militants have increasingly focused on finding and eliminating Christian leaders.

Yemen, #3:

The country is now divided into territory ruled by three different [Muslim] powers, as well as some areas held by al-Qaeda and the so-called Islamic State. None of the powers involved are sympathetic to Christians, and the official constitution upholds Sharia (Islamic law) and no freedom of religion. The 1% of Yemenis from minority religions are severely marginalised. Relief aid is mostly distributed through local Muslim groups and mosques, which are alleged to be discriminating against anyone not considered a devout Muslim. If someone is reported to be a Christian and or involved in Christian activities, they could face severe monitoring, arbitrary detention, torture, ill-treatment and even murder.

Libya, #4:

…following Jesus is a huge risk for anyone. Libyan Christians with a Muslim background face violent pressure from their families and communities to renounce their faith. Foreign Christians, especially those from sub-Saharan Africa, are targeted by Islamist militant and criminal groups. These groups kidnap and sometimes brutally kill Christians. Even if they avoid such a fate, sub-Saharan Christians face harassment and threats from radical Muslims. Christians who openly express their faith or try to share it with others risk arrest and violent opposition.

Sudan, #5:

Sudan was on a path towards religious freedom, but a coup and devastating war dashed these hopes. Christians are once again in danger… [T]he conflict has given Islamist extremists more opportunity to target them. More than 100 churches have been damaged so far, and Christians have been abducted and killed. Sudanese Christians who have come to faith from a Muslim background face severe backlash from their families and communities. These believers tend to keep their faith secret, even from their own children. Christians are also experiencing exceptional hardship in the hunger crisis because local communities discriminate against them and won’t give them support.

Nigeria, #7:

Jihadist violence continues to escalate in Nigeria, and Christians are particularly at risk from targeted attacks by Islamist militants, including Fulani fighters, Boko Haram and ISWAP (Islamic State West Africa Province)…. The attacks are shockingly brutal. Many believers are killed, particularly men, while women are often kidnapped and targeted for sexual violence. More believers are killed for their faith in Nigeria than anywhere else in the world. [A total of 3,100 Nigerian Christians “paid the ultimate price for their faith” in 2024.] These militants also destroy homes, churches and livelihoods. More than 16.2 million Christians in sub-Saharan Africa, including high numbers from Nigeria, have been driven from their homes by violence and conflict. Millions now live in displacement camps. Christians living in northern Nigerian states under Sharia (Islamic law) can also face discrimination and oppression as second-class citizens. Converts from Islam often experience rejection from their own families and pressure to renounce their new faith. They often have to flee their homes for fear of being killed.

Christian carnage is so endemic to Nigeria that, only recently, on April 13, 2025—Palm Sunday—54 Christians were slaughtered following church celebrations in one village alone. And as bad as it is in Nigeria, “Sadly, more Christians were killed outside Nigeria, many in sub-Saharan Africa countries like DRC, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Niger.” The report continues.

Multiple countries in Sub-Saharan Africa have seen a rise in violence against Christians. Currently, 8 of the top 10 deadliest places for Christians are in Sub-Saharan Africa—and all of them (except Nigeria) have more faith-based killings than they did during the 2024 World Watch List reporting period.

Pakistan, #8:

Pakistan’s notorious blasphemy laws are often used to target minority groups, but Christians are disproportionately affected. Indeed, roughly a quarter of all blasphemy accusations target Christians, who make up just 1.8 per cent of the population. Blasphemy laws carry a death sentence. While this is seldom carried out, people accused of blasphemy are vulnerable to attack or murder by mobs. In June 2024, an elderly man was killed by mob violence after being accused of desecrating the Quran.… Historical churches …are heavily monitored and have been targeted for bomb attacks. The number of Christian girls (and those from other minority religions) abducted, abused and forcefully converted to Islam (frequently backed by lower courts) is growing…. All Christians suffer institutionalised discrimination. Occupations that are deemed low, dirty and degrading—such as cleaning sewers or working in brick kilns—are reserved for Christians by the authorities. Many are referred to as ‘chura’, a derogatory term meaning ‘filthy’. Christians are also vulnerable to being trapped in bonded labour.

Iran, #9:

Unrecognised converts from Islam to Christianity face severe religious freedom violations, primarily from the government and, to a lesser extent, from society and their families. The government views these converts as a threat, believing they are influenced by Western countries to undermine Islam and the regime. Both leaders and ordinary members of Christian groups are often arrested, prosecuted and given long prison sentences for ‘crimes against national security’. Recognised historical communities such as Armenian and Assyrian Christians are state-protected but treated as second-class citizens. They face many discriminatory legal provisions and are not allowed to worship in Persian or interact with Christian converts. Those who support converts can also face imprisonment.

Afghanistan, #10:

Most Afghan Christians are converts from Islam, which makes it basically impossible to practise their faith openly. In Afghanistan, leaving… and conversion is punishable by death under Islamic law. This has been increasingly enforced since the Taliban took control of the country in 2021. If converts are discovered, the family, clan or tribe may try to preserve its ‘honour’ and deal with the convert through pressure, violence or even murder. If a convert’s faith is discovered by the government, many Afghan believers have no other option but to try to flee. Women and ethnic minorities experience additional oppression. Christians among these groups live under unthinkable pressure.

Saudi Arabia, #12:

It’s very risky to become a Christian in Saudi Arabia. Not only is it illegal to leave the Islamic faith, new believers will face intense opposition from their families and communities as well…. Because of this, most Saudi Christians tend to follow their faith quietly and secretly. This extends as far as not even telling their own spouse or children about their faith, for fear that extended family members or school staff could discover that they have left Islam. There are no legal church buildings or meetings…. The majority of the Christians living in Saudi Arabia are temporary workers from other countries. They are forbidden from sharing their faith with local Saudis, and gathering for worship is restricted. Breaking these rules can get them detained and deported.

Notably, the nine “extreme” persecuting Muslim nations listed above are different in many respects—racially, socially, economically, and governmentally: some are rich (Saudi Arabia), while others are unimaginably poor (Somalia); some are advanced (Iran), while others are far from it (Yemen); they are represented by a variety of governments (republics, monarchies, theocracies); and various different races are represented—Arabs, sub-Saharan Africans, Pakistanis, Persians, and Afghans. The only commonality they all share, the common denominator, is Islam.

The variety grows when looking at the full list of 50 nations, which also includes Sinic and Turkic nations—such as Maldives (#16), Uzbekistan (#25), Turkey (#45), and Brunei (#48)—all of which share little in common other than Islam. Kyrgyzstan, which has not made the top 50 list since 2013, made a dramatic return at #47:

There was a sharp increase in violence against the church, many registered churches and Christian institutions were forced to close, and pressure on Christians increased in almost all spheres of life.

Beyond the Muslim world, however, hostility for Christianity has, in fact, become pandemic. As the report notes:

Several countries on the World Watch List saw an increase in anti-Christian violence. While the contexts were different, either tightly controlled autocratic states, or countries that are unstable due to weak government or civil war, the result was the same: targeting of Christian communities, destruction of lives, homes and churches, and immense pressure on believers.

A rise in Hindu nationalism has made India (#11) a hotbed of persecution:

In India, Hindu extremists view all Christians as outsiders and aim to cleanse the nation of Islam and Christianity, often using extensive violence. This hostility is often driven by Hindutva, an ongoing Hindu nationalist belief among some extremists that Indians ought to be Hindu—and no other faith will be tolerated. This mindset has led to violent attacks across the country and impunity for the people who hold these beliefs, especially where the authorities are also Hindu hardliners. In such places, Christians who attend house churches risk attack by extremist mobs who target services. Additionally, 12 states have passed anti-conversion laws, which threaten religious freedom for individual believers.

Even in Buddhist Myanmar (#13), the last nation to make the top 13 offenders, Christians experience “extreme” levels of persecution:

Since the military coup in February 2021, Christians have encountered greater violence and tighter restrictions. Believers have been killed and churches have been indiscriminately attacked. This includes those in predominantly Christian states…. More Christians than ever have been driven out of their homes and have found refuge in churches or displacement camps. Some are even forced to flee to the jungle where they are often deprived of access to food and health care. Government forces have continued to disproportionately attack Christian villages and churches. They have also killed Christian aid workers and pastors, often in aerial attacks. Beyond the conflict, converts to Christianity find themselves persecuted by their Buddhist, Muslim or tribal families and communities because they have left their former faith. Communities who aim to stay ‘Buddhist only’ make life impossible for Christian families.

Even in nations that would appear to be friendly or at least neutral to Christianity, such as Cuba, Nicaragua, and Mexico, Christians are being abused for their faith, by a variety of actors and for a variety of reasons.

In communist Cuba, #26:

Church leaders and Christian activists who criticise the regime can face interrogation, arrest and imprisonment. They also suffer smear campaigns, travel restrictions, and harassment (which can include physical violence and damage to church buildings).

Although not communist, in Nicaragua, #30:

Hostility toward Christians continues to intensify: those who speak out against President Ortega and his government are viewed as destabilising agents. …Christian leaders have been harassed and arrested, Christian properties seized, Christian schools, TV stations and charities closed, and churches monitored and intimidated.

In Mexico (#31), drug cartels target Christians, especially if they speak out against their activities or try to lead the youth away from them; in southern Mexico, especially “in some Indigenous communities, those who decide to leave ancestral and traditional beliefs to follow Jesus face ostracism, fines, incarceration and forced displacement.”

Perhaps the most disturbing trend is that the persecution of Christians continues to grow every year, and has nearly doubled since 1993, when the WWL was first issued. Then, only 40 nations scored high enough to warrant sufficient tracking. Today, nearly double that number qualify, though the list only ranks the top 50.

How long before this ongoing trend metastasizes into even those Western nations once hailed for their religious liberties?

The article was originally published by the Gatestone Institute. Reproduced with permission.

Islam may be history’s most prolific vehicle for cognitive disruption, as Muhammad’s followers only ever went forth to nations outside the Arabian Peninsula to plunder their wealth and force them to submit—yet we are obliged to refer to Islam as a “religion of peace.”

“How can there be a left-Muslim alliance?” Jewish civil rights activist Charles Jacobs once asked an audience at Boston University. “How can people who like burqas align with people who like bikinis?”

The answer lies in the phenomenon often called the “Red-Green Alliance.” Both Marxists and Muslims (who truly observe the teachings of Muhammad) are united in a crusade to destroy Western civilization’s most crucial moral values: that only some ends justify some means; right is might; and that morality itself is more than just a political weapon.

Both ideologies envision utopian earthly paradises in which individuality is erased and omnipotent government removes suffering through confiscatory taxation and wealth redistribution. And both relish the terror required to keep their fantasy worlds’ perfection unpolluted.

The two of them together, therefore, have plenty in common, going back at least to the 1960s, when the KGB created the PLO and worked closely with Muslim terrorist groups to foment anti-Western jihad on the widest possible scale. Among their most important joint achievements was the Islamic Revolution against the openly pro-American and quietly Zionist Shah Pahlavi—a cataclysm perhaps haunting the world more than any other.

As the left—ranging in character from the KGB’s old “useful idiots” to technocratic power addicts—has conquered more and more of American life, Islam’s power, both worldwide and in the U.S., has grown comparably. And a shared commitment to the destruction of Israel, the United States, and the humane values they represent unites the post-modern and pre-medieval in a roaring blaze of raw, political passion worthy of both Marxism and Islam’s erotic visions of heaven.

With such co-habitation thus comes co-dependency. Increasingly, without Arab and Muslim voters, leftist parties cannot win elections; and without leftist parties, Islamic elements cannot build a non-Muslim power base ready to riot and demonize Islam’s good-faith critics on their behalf. Having fully exploited Marxist “victim group” ideology, Islam claims “victim” status on “racial” and “persecuted minority” grounds—as if Islam were either a race or somehow content (per Qur’an 9:33) with remaining in the minority (let alone out of the persecution business). The left’s lust for destruction and cynical yet psychotic obsession with victimhood—of which Islam makes such cunning use—is what manages to fuse the most lethal ideas of the 2020s with those of the 620s.

Today, therefore, it is not puerile partisanship to charge that the Democratic Party—which Marxists, beginning with the McGovern campaign in 1972, have successfully turned from “blue” to red—has become an institution overly friendly, not to mention beholden, to Islamic influence. Rather, as with its equivalent parties in Canada and the U.K., it is simply where the evidence leads. Mirroring its agenda of forcing Americans to submit to a government powerful enough to both giveth and taketh all away, the Democratic Party, since 2009, is far along the Khyber Pass of emulating its European counterparts in submitting itself to Islam.

“A New Beginning”

Ever since it was revealed in the months prior to the 2008 election that Barack Obama’s former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, was an anti-American, anti-Israel racist and apostle of “black liberation theology,” the former president’s party has only moved in one direction. Despite slickly flinging his former spiritual teacher of more than 20 years (over 1,000 Sundays) under his campaign bus—a falling out for which Wright later blamed “[t]hem Jews”—“God damn America!” (if the divine Name is meant with any sincerity) has become a good description of the party’s platform.

As president, Obama vastly expanded pre-existing efforts to heavily discourage good-faith criticism of Islam. His famous Cairo speech of June 4, 2009, contained many concerning statements, including (de-contextualized) references to the “Holy Koran” and to his (unconstitutional) “responsibility as President of the United States to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear.” Also, in the same speech (“A New Beginning”), the man whose moral psyche was shaped by a pastor who would claim years later that “Jesus was Palestinian” malevolently distorted the history of Israel, referred to the “daily humiliations… that come with occupation,” and characterized “the situation for the Palestinian people” as “intolerable.”

His warm words to the Muslim world—spoken less than a month after bowing like a vassal to the Saudi king—were followed by still warmer deeds. These included, personally or through his administration:

• Abandoning the heroic anti-regime protesters in Iran during the 2009 uprising (many of whom were raped and murdered).
• Attempting (unsuccessfully) to have 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Muhammad tried in a civilian court in Manhattan—where a jury of his “peers” (jihad warriors) might acquit him—as opposed to by military tribunal.
• Openly supporting the “Ground Zero Mosque” initiative—a project headed by Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, a cleric who asserted that American “policies were an accessory to the crime” of 9/11.
• Demanding that Prime Minister Netanyahu destroy Israel’s national security by retreating to the (indefensible) “1967 lines,” in order “to advance a lasting peace.”
• Ordering the FBI to remove (accurate) descriptions—even mentions—of Islam, the Muslim Brotherhood, and jihad from Bureau training materials.
• Protecting Hamas supporter Nihad Awad, leader of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Brotherhood and Hamas front-group, from prosecution.
• Supporting the Muslim Brotherhood’s short spell of rule over Egypt—not to mention ignoring the plight of the Coptic Christians they persecuted (and the women they sought to denigrate).
• Forcing Israel to accept a “ceasefire” in both its 2012 and 2014 wars against Hamas.
• Exclaiming that “The future must not belong to those who slander the Prophet of Islam,” after falsely blaming the infamous September 11, 2012, Benghazi jihad attack on an obscure video mocking Muhammad.
• Without the slightest evidence, smugly brushing ISIS off as but a “jayvee team.”
• Hubristically claiming that (said “jayvee team”) ISIS—whom his weak foreign policy had helped to grow—was “not Islamic.”
• Dismissing Americans’ disgust for ISIS’ (Islamic) brutality as “get[ting] on our high horse,” because “slavery and Jim Crow [were] all too often justified in the name of Christ”—not mentioning that both slavery and racial apartheid are permitted, and rampant, under Islam.
• Pushing for the disastrous (and unconstitutional) 2015 nuclear “deal” with the Islamic regime occupying Iran.
• Allowing the Defense Department to devote a 42-page report to dismissing the 2009 Fort Hood jihad attack as “workplace violence.”
• Demanding that the U.S. accept 110,000 Syrian refugees—people raised from childhood to hate Jews and Christians—because, Obama said, it was America’s responsibility to “help the world’s most vulnerable people.”
• Giving implicit approval to a U.N. resolution cataloguing “East Jerusalem”—wherein stands the Western Wall—as “occupied Palestinian territory.”

Not surprisingly, by the time he left office in 2017—to much of the country’s hysterical grief—the party of Obama showed no intention of refusing (and every indication of intending) to become the party of Islamic apologetics.

The jihad “Squad”

On January 21, 2017, the day after Donald Trump was inaugurated, the so-called “Women’s March” descended upon Washington, led by the shrieks of “unapologetically Palestinian” Linda Sarsour. Sarsour—who lamented the fall and capture of Saddam Hussein, has defended known terrorists, has family members connected to Hamas, and wished on Twitter that she could remove Ayaan Hirsli Ali’s (already mutilated) genitalia—rocketed to prominence as part of the Democrat “resistance” (or, in her words, “jihad”) against the Trump presidency. Her hijab-enveloped face, covered in the thick make-up sternly forbidden in public under Islam, graced magazine after magazine, and appeared, without rebuke, in the mainstream (Democrat) media. Still, the vast bank of her vile comments, connections, and exploits—which included stealing money pledged to repair desecrated Jewish cemeteries—eventually trickled into public discourse, and she became too radioactive. By the spring of 2018, she and her three other original “Women’s March” organizers—two of whom were blushing admirers of Louis Farrakhan—had stepped down.

Nevertheless, while the Sarsour packaging eventually proved too abrasive and shocking for most outside Bernie Sanders’ 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns (representing the party’s youngest,  largest, and most energized minority), the Sarsour agenda was less so. Throughout the Trump presidency, Democrat party leadership mobilized fully against Trump’s temporary ban on travel from terrorist-infested countries, very nearly elected terrorist sympathizer and former Nation of Islam member Keith Ellison as DNC chair (before installing him as deputy), and collectively fainted upon the administration’s withdrawal from Obama’s Iran nuclear deal.

Then the 2018 mid-terms brought a “new beginning” indeed to the legacy of Obamania. Sarsour’s fellow anti-Semites and allies of jihad Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez from New York, Ilhan Omar from Minnesota, Ayanna Pressley from Massachusetts, and Rashida Tlaib from Michigan won House races and settled (for the foreseeable future) in the rich leather seats theoretically reserved for patriots.

Though bawdy, corrupt, dodgy, ignorant, juvenile, salty-mouthed, sleazy, and worse, the Islamo-Marxist “Squad,” as its members childishly named themselves, gradually began to force the party establishment to submit to its bratty orders. The most egregious incident was when, in 2019, then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi allowed Ilhan Omar to transform a House resolution meant to censure her for her own anti-Jewish rants into one condemning “Islamophobia” and “anti-Muslim bigotry” as well. Earlier that year, of course, Pelosi saw no issue with allowing Omar to lead the repeal of an 1837 rule against wearing hats in Congress, just so she could—in accordance with Islamic, not U.S., law—wear her hijab on the House floor.

Such sentiments seemed to catch on quickly, as the party then falsely accused Trump of being a racist when he suggested that Omar go back to her native Somalia due to her obvious hatred for the country whose taxpayers furnish her unearned prosperity. So, too, then-Minority Leader Chuck Schumer expressed horror that Trump had implored Israel not to allow anti-Jewish racists like Omar and Tlaib to enter its borders, given their terrorist sympathies and connections—a suggestion the Israelis wisely implemented. Then, in 2020, the Democrats threw another tantrum that Trump did not forewarn them of Islamic regime mass murderer Qasem Soleimani’s assassination—perhaps because the White House took the scene they had made over discarding the Iran nuclear deal seriously.

Slouching towards Tehran

“America is back,” a blustering Joe Biden told the planet on February 4, 2021. To what exactly was unclear, in view of revelations that the “Million Muslim Votes” campaign, mobilized to defeat Trump in 2020, was organized by Emgage, a CAIR-style Brotherhood front-group.

Before his first 100 days in office ran out, the “Biden-Harris” administration—in line with a campaign promise to include “Muslims at every level of government”—had set about appointing and nominating a stream of anti-Semites, Democrat-first Jews, self-loathing Jews, and social jihad warriors to cabinet positions. A small selection of the most illustrious—all of whom were confirmed—included:

• Maher Bitar—former board member of Georgetown University’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter and BDS activist—as Senior Director for Intelligence Programs at the National Security Council (later elevated to Deputy Assistant to the President).
• Anthony Blinken—who opposed designating the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, the Islamic regime’s equivalent of the SS at home and ISIS abroad, as a terrorist organization—as Secretary of State.
• Reema Dodin—former leader of UC Berkeley’s chapter of the Muslim Students’ Association (a Brotherhood off-shoot) who called suicide bombings against Jews the “last resort of a desperate people”—as Deputy Director of the White House Office of Legislative Affairs.
• Avril Haines—who signed a 2020 letter denouncing Democrats for being too pro-Israel—as Director of National Intelligence.
• Alejandro Majorkas—who served on the board of the “refugee” agency HIAS, which supports bringing Jew-hating Muslim migrants to the U.S. and works with the Hamas money-laundering “charity” Islamic Relief—as Secretary of Homeland Security.
• Robert Malley—who helped negotiate the Iran nuclear deal and condemned Qasem Soleimani’s assassination—as Special Envoy to Iran.
• Susan Rice—who presided over the Benghazi attack cover-up, scorned Israel for opposing the Iran nuclear deal, and demanded that the Trump administration restore funding to UNRWA (Hamas)—as Director of the Domestic Policy Council.
• Wendy Sherman—who downplayed suicide bombings against Israelis as but “nagging disruptions from the Palestinian side” and was a key Iran nuclear deal negotiator—as Deputy Secretary of State.

The administration’s ensuing policies expectably reflected its members’ backgrounds.

In 2021 alone, Trump-era sanctions against the Islamic regime occupying Iran were withdrawn in order to revive the nuclear deal; funding, halted at the Trump administration’s order in 2018, was restored to UNRWA; Israel was successfully forced into accepting a “ceasefire” in its fourth war against Hamas since 2009; major economic sanctions against the Islamic regime’s oil business were given up; the catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan was completed, during which 13 American soldiers were killed and priceless weapons left for the hungry Taliban; the “Squad” (momentarily) defunded Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system; and Nigeria, which is conducting an Islamic genocide against its Christian population—some of whom are jihad slaves—was removed from the “Countries of Particular Concern” list.

In 2022, more sanctions against the Islamic regime were waived in another unsuccessful attempt to restore the nuclear deal; Elizabeth Fawley Bagley, who once complained of the “influence of the Jewish lobby” and “major money” on American foreign policy, was appointed ambassador to Brazil; Hady Amr, who had written that he “was inspired by the Palestinian intifada,” was appointed “Special Envoy to the Palestinians”; aid to the terrorist Palestinian Authority was restored; and Israel, then led by its leftist “caretaker” government, signed an American-backed “mini”-Iran deal of its own: giving Hezbollah-controlled Lebanon rights to Israeli offshore gas fields.

By 2023, Robert Malley had turned out to be just as special an envoy as his title suggested when he was exposed as a likely spy for the Islamic regime in Iran. Biden also suddenly restored preferential trade deal status to Mauritania, a modern-day apartheid state in which Arab Muslims still own 149,000 black Africans as chattel slaves.

Then, after October 7, the gas pedal was screwed to the metal.

Hamas’s massacre of Jews elicited a superficially forceful show of comradeship with Israel, but—in line with every other recent Israeli war—as soon as the IDF actually began to fight back, the word “pause” appeared. Though Netanyahu protested as long as he could, by November, the White House had strongarmed Israel into submitting to one. Israel released 240 convicted terrorists (fraudulently labelled “women and children”) in exchange for 110 hostages. Emboldened, Hamas, understandably, fought on once the “humanitarian pause” was over.

Lost to some in the media chatter, however, was the memory of Biden’s 2021 Iranian oil sanctions relief. This allowed the Islamic regime, which controls Hamas, to once again get rich from oil sails, have $6 billion in frozen assets released less than a month before October 7, and then another $10 billion more just over a month later. Altogether, by the fall of 2023, U.S. sanctions relief likely earned the regime an estimated $80 billion in oil revenue.

Worse still, as the year turned, Israel’s enemies witnessed a growing groundswell of support for them inside the United States. Starting on October 8—before Israel had even mustered a full-scale counterattack—Marxist and Muslim political agitators launched riots across the country to demand a “ceasefire.” The protests, funded partially by the Islamic regime in Iran, then seized the nation’s campuses, and set off month after month of venomous, violent “occupations” which sympathetic yet check-mated (Democrat) administrators, at best, refused to discourage. Elected Democrats, of course, fearful of losing the (Hitler) youth vote, rarely condemned any of the protests. Even when Hamas itself praised the rioters and Iran’s theocratic dictator Ayatollah Ali Khamene’i applauded them for being “on the right side” of history, their clearest denouncer was Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson: “When you’ve won the Ayatollah, you’ve lost America.”

Standing opposite Johnson in tenor was Ilhan Omar, who visited the (illegally) encamped Columbia squatters and smarmily accused pro-Israel Jewish students of being “pro-genocide.” Interestingly, Isra Hirsi, Omar’s daughter, was suspended from neighboring Barnard College after she was arrested for taking part in the illegal encampment. Appearing on MSNBC with October 7 minimizer and protest defender Ayman Mohyeldin, Hirsi whined about being “locked out of my dorm,” “100% targeted,” and “sprayed” with “chemical weapons” (which turned out to be joke “fart spray”). Within days, her “suspension” mysteriously evaporated, as she appeared beside her mother at Columbia, of which Barnard is a subsidiary, when Omar visited the campus.

Such collegiate screeches for a “permanent ceasefire” and an end to the “genocide in Gaza” inevitably had an effect, causing U.S. “peace” pressure to never relent throughout 2024. In May, the administration ordered Israel not to attack the Hamas-infested Rafah area of southern Gaza, threatening to withhold vital weapons. Then, when Israel eventually did, and Biden agreed to send the weapons, the administration slow-walked them. Several months later, it approved $165 million for “heavy-duty tank trailers,” but with a (conveniently late) delivery date of 2027.

270 reasons to pander

Knowing that states with large Muslim populations like Michigan and Minnesota had to be won in 2024, the (increasingly “Harris”) administration had spent years battling the scourge of “Islamophobia.”

In 2022, the White House announced the formation of an “interagency group” supposedly to “combat antisemitism,” but which would also “coordinate efforts to counter Islamophobia in the U.S.” The following May, it held a “Listening Session on Islamophobia” in which Robert McCaw, a senior CAIR (Hamas) operative, participated. Later that month, it released the “First-Ever National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism”—which succeeded both in mentioning “Islamophobia” and including CAIR (Hamas) as a partner organization.

Then, after October 7, 2023, as unprecedented, genocidal Judeopathy erupted across the globe, the Oval Office instead chose to reiterate just how desperately its “national strategy” from back in May was needed. “For too long, Muslims in America,” White House spokesperson (and anti-Israel bigot) Karine Jean-Pierre said, “…have endured a disproportionate number of hate-fueled attacks and other discriminatory incidents.” According, however, to the FBI “hate crimes” statistics Jean-Pierre conveniently omitted, American Jews, not Muslims, enjoy that particular distinction. What’s more, most reports of “anti-Muslim” incidents appear to originate from CAIR (Hamas)—casting titanic doubts over their validity to say the least.

Sadly for the administration, strategic difficulties soon emerged. In December, CAIR itself had to be disavowed after its leader, Nihad Awad, said that he “was happy to see” his colleagues in Hamas kidnapping, massacring, and raping Jews on October 7. And, as the new year loomed, some Muslim activists even expressed reservations about joining any White House coalition, feeling “unsafe and unsupported” due to Biden not being anti-Israel enough.

2024 marked crunch time to secure the critical (and slipping) “Muslim vote,” thus bringing with it new and more attempts at appeasement. On January 27 (Holocaust Remembrance Day), “Second Gentleman” Doug Emhoff met with the “interfaith” group NewGround—which partners with the Brotherhood-linked Muslim Public Affairs Council—in order to “address Antisemitism and Islamophobia in the United States and across the world.” On March 15, the White House released a statement to mark the “International Day to Combat Islamophobia,” saying (without citing evidence) that American Muslims “frequently endure baseless fearmongering, blatant discrimination, harassment, and violence in the course of their everyday lives.” On June 16, a “fact sheet” detailing how the administration would “take action against Islamophobia” and the “rise in harassment, bigotry and horrifying violence toward Muslim, Arab, and Palestinian Americans” appeared. On June 26, the White House appointed longtime Muslim Brotherhood member and “interfaith” con artist Mohamed Elsanousi to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. Then, on July 18, Emhoff proudly proclaimed that “an Islamophobia plan” would be “coming out soon.”

Joy

On July 21, 2024, President Biden announced that he would not seek re-election. Biden was smoothly swapped out for Vice President Kamala Harris, who had polled at 2% nationally when she ran in 2019. Despite never receiving one 2024 primary vote, the “Democratic” Party shoved her forward as its presumptive nominee and supposed leader until at least 2029. Overshadowed by her “historic,” “joy”-drenched (s)election was the reality that she would not only perpetuate Obama and Biden’s anti-Israel, pro-Islamic policies, but intensify them.

Four days after becoming the on-camera president, she met with Prime Minister Netanyahu to express “concern” that a “ceasefire” was not yet at hand, as pro-Hamas protesters had to be satisfied. “The images of dead children and desperate hungry people [in Gaza] fleeing for safety” wrenched her heart with grief so much that “I will not be silent,” she told the media. Not long after, she met with the Muslim mayor of Dearborn, Michigan—a city with a clear Muslim majority which has been called “America’s jihad capital”—and indicated openness towards an arms embargo against Israel.

Not only would she—who had spent years associating with a circle of Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas operatives—never pass up prayer rug-scraping for the sake of staying in power, but so would Biden. During what amounted to his “retirement” speech to the Democratic National Convention on August 19, Biden, 51 years in harness, barked that “Those [anti-Israel] protesters out in the street, they have a point.” While screaming pro-Hamas rioters ripped down pieces of the metal fencing protecting the convention center—reminiscent of their Brotherhood brothers in southern Israel 10 months and 12 days before—the now-dowager President of the United States confirmed they represented a demographic to be won and not repudiated. The tone was set for the rest of the DNC, during which the Israeli hostages were only mentioned once, and a Muslim Brotherhood imam was invited to bless the assembled delegates.

The last Walz

Shortly before the DNC, Harris announced her running mate: Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota, whose heavily Muslim capital of Minneapolis CBS News called a “recruiting ground” for ISIS in 2014.

Walz was not only a confirmed liar, COVID tyrant, and Chinese pawn, but revealed to have fond ties to Islamic hatemongers, Ilhan Omar among them. For example, his administration had given over $100,000 in taxpayer money to the Minnesota branch of the Muslim American Society (a major Brotherhood front-group), run by Imam Asad Zaman. A man who once shared a link to a six-and-half-hour neo-Nazi pseudo-documentary, Adolf Hitler: The Greatest Story Never Told, on his Facebook page. Walz had tenderly praised this literal Nazi, who celebrated October 7, as “a master teacher” before pretending that he had “no personal relationship with him” despite speaking previously of the “time we’ve spent together.” Even worse, the Minnesota state government had authorized more than $2 million over the course of five years to the Islamic Association of North America, another Brotherhood-linked organization, which fundraised for Rahma Worldwide, a group connected to foreign jihad organizations. Walz also spoke at a CAIR gala in 2019 and was photographed next to Hatem Bazian, founder of Students for Justice in Palestine.

Just as there had been no joy for any Jews unfortunate enough to be in college during the last school year, there was even less for Israel in the weeks after the convention. It was reported that U.S. trade with Iran’s Islamic regime had spiked 43% in 2023; Biden (Harris) had sent an envoy to pressure Israel into “land swaps” with Hezbollah in the hope of “averting a war”; and State Department officials had protected disgraced regime operative Robert Malley, whose role in strengthening the regime prior to October 7 has come under intense suspicion.

By contrast, the administration’s laxity in protecting its opponent with similar dedication to Robert Malley is far more disturbing given that two of the three known attempts on former President Trump’s life had Islamic regime connections, some distant, some direct. Even more egregiously, the regime had released a video in early 2022 depicting an animated scenario in which a drone strike killed Trump on his golf course in Palm Beach. The threat, made in revenge for the assassination of Qasem Soleimani two years earlier, was covered in major media, including Newsweek and the AP, yet the then-Biden-now-Harris administration did nothing. To use a now-familiar term, such negligence from a ruling political party towards another, in light of everything known, is worse than collusion.

Khomeini’s curse

The Democratic Party’s protracted 15-year quest for absolute power through submission to Islam echoes its economic fantasies: no price is too high, for money, as “capitalists” know it, will eventually be meaningless.

What most leftist Islamophiles may not know is that, after successfully cooperating in overthrowing the Pahlavi government and promising to share power, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s new junta systematically betrayed its Marxist allies. After Marxist groups revolted in 1988, the regime’s secret police rounded up thousands of communists and atheists from across the country who were then tortured and executed.

Islam regards its leftist allies with only the deepest contempt and, as it did in Iran, it will eliminate them on the day of its victory. The fact that the U.S. State Department offered “condolences” upon the death of regime “President” Ebrahim Raisi—the man who ordered the 1988 mass murder—will not change that outcome.

Having years ago completed the “long march through the institutions,” for no other reason than its own good, the Democratic Party must advance no further on the long march to Makah.

“When your Lord revealed to the angels: I am with you, therefore make firm those who believe. I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Therefore strike off their heads and strike off every fingertip of them.”
—Qur’an 8:12

“If we can, you know… we will take [over America], but in… means that the law allows us [sic]. Here, we’re gonna’ make da‘wah [proselytize Islam] to the people. …[I]f America becomes majority Muslims [sic], then, insh’Allah [Allah willing], we choose to implement Sharia.”
—Imam Dr. Fadi Kablawi,
Sermon to the Masjid as-Sunnah an-Nabawiyah North Miami,
January 26, 2024

In 2011, novelist and Daily Wire wit Andrew Klavan made a video for PJ Media’s now-defunct YouTube arm entitled “How to Behave During an Islamic Massacre.” Klavan’s comedic monologue, part of his satiric “Klavan on the Culture” series, included a pearl of sage counsel: “Holding homicidal Muslims responsible for their savage brutality will only annoy them, and could cause you to be accused of Islamophobia: the irrational fear of being decapitated.”

Nearly a decade and half later, Klavan’s axe block humor is perhaps even more prescient than he intended. With Islam so unapologetically on the march, it would appear that almost every Western society today, broadly speaking, has gone ahead and taken his “advice.”

Truly, in many ways, an ominous normalization of Islamic cultural mores, political influence, and even legal strictures has begun to take root across America and especially Europe. Needless to say, willful blindness to the fact that the non-Muslim world is arguably more Islamic since 2001—not to mention October 7, 2023—is a crucial step on the way to willful headlessness.

The undeniable presence of Sharia (the Islamic legal system) within Western societies is worthy of fear and debate of the same intensity with which they are regularly ridiculed or suppressed. And living under Sharia, however faint the future possibility may be, should be cause for anyone in that condition to wish he or she had been willing to “annoy” its would-be implementors in the past. Yet, provably, the bad news is that, at best, such a future is not a faraway one.

Concern surrounding Islamic cultural, political, and legal influences should be an automatic reaction in the West, but fear of all the now typical insults—so omnipotent yet so meaningless—prevents decent people from expressing their natural apprehensions, let alone of having intelligent debates. And a great many of those apprehensions stem from genuinely altruistic revulsion at how Islam and Sharia treat Muslims themselves, particularly women and children. If that is “bigotry” and “intolerance,” then every compassionate human being should wear those slanders as medals of moral clarity.

Sharia is jihad

Sharia (often translated as “justice”) is the system by which an Islamic society is to be governed and controlled. In Islam, both theology and law come from the all-important Islamic “trilogy”: the Qur’an (believed to be the words of Allah delivered through Muhammad), the Sirah (the “life” or biography of Muhammad), and the Hadith (the many thousands of oral “traditions” preserving Muhammad’s sayings and actions).

Islam, let alone Sharia, cannot be understood without the person of Muhammad. Qur’an 33:21 says that “Indeed, in the Messenger of Allah you have an excellent example for whoever has hope in Allah and the Last Day, and remembers Allah often.” This—buttressed by 90 other verses—is understood to mean that Muhammad is the perfect example of conduct for every Muslim. Combined, the Sirah and Hadith form what is called the Sunnah (“way” or “path”) of Muhammad. Given that Muhammad was a warlord who ordered no fewer than 44 assassinations of his enemies, first consummated his marriage to his “favorite” wife A’ishah when she was nine (and still playing with dolls), rid Arabia of its Jews by expulsion and massacre, and embarked on at least 61 acts of jihad in the final decade of his life, upholding such a man as an “excellent example” to be imitated is more than worrying. And since the Sharia is a summation of Qur’an and Sunnah—of which about a third concerns jihad—jihad itself is an integral, load-bearing pillar of the Sharia, if not nearly fungible with it. Sharia, therefore, is the application of Muhammad’s jihadist example to everyday life.

Furthermore, as moderately well known today, the Sharia allows for amputation as punishment for theft; the lashing and stoning of adulteresses (some falsely accused); execution or imprisonment of rape victims (rape being classified as “adultery”); rape victims requiring four male witnesses as proof; execution of homosexuals; clitorectomy; a woman’s legal testimony being worth half of a man’s; wife beating; child marriage; forced veiling; chattel slavery; execution for apostasy; execution for mocking Muhammad; and more. (The primary sources for each of these practices are Sunan an-Nasa’i 4873; Sahih Muslim 1690-A; 1690-C; Qur’an 24:13; 15:74; Muslim 349; Qur’an 2:282; 4:34; 65:4; 24:31; Muslim 1602; an-Nasa’i 305; and Qur’an 9:61 respectively.) It goes without saying that such customs are universally and rightly illegal in the civilized world.

Still, one of the most important and surprising aspects of Islam is that the non-Muslim, the Kafir, is a subject of supreme doctrinal importance within its foundational texts. In fact, when combined, no less than 51% of the core Islamic texts—Qur’an (64%), Sirah (81%), and the sahih (“authentic”) Hadith collection of Muhammad al-Bukhari (37%)—is devoted to non-Muslims. This was true in pre-modern times and it remains true now. While—contrary to all hysteria—Jewish law (Halakhah) does not sanction subjugation or degradation of non-Jews, and does not apply to anyone outside the Jewish people, Sharia, by contrast, does apply to non-Muslims.

Even more disturbing is that Islam does not actually possess a version of what Christians call the “Golden Rule.” Instead of what could be called “symmetrical” ethics, Islamic morality is dualistic: one set of ethics apply to Muslims, another to the Kafir. While, for instance, the Qur’an (3:110) calls Muslims “the best nation produced [as an example] for mankind,” thus due mutual respect within the group (see 48:29), the Kafir, on the other hand, can be freely hated (40:35); mocked (83:34); plotted against (86:15–17); terrorized and beheaded (8:12); murdered “wherever you overtake them” (4:91); crucified (5:33); fought, subjugated, and extorted (9:29); taken hostage (47:4); labeled “unclean” (9:28); taken and “possess[ed]” as a sexual slave (4:24); damned as “the worst of creatures” who will abide “in the fire of Hell” (98:6); and deceived (Bukhari 3029, 4037). What’s more, Muhammad’s followers—as justified by Qur’an 8:39, 9:33, 48:28, and 61:9—are obligated to make Islam the religion of the entire world. Therefore, Sharia colonialism is a form of jihad.

Sharia is here

All the more alarming is the fact that, in varying degrees, Sharia exists and is being normalized in Western society. Throughout America, Europe, and the Anglosphere, Islamic legal and cultural practices have been slowly—sometimes even quickly—accepted with a minimum of pushback.

Crucially, jihad is not necessarily violent, with there being four types: of money, speech, writing, and of the sword. Jihad is not just physical conflict but civilizational war, utilizing all aspects of civilization in order to defeat the Kafir. Thus, silent, creeping Sharia is a far more dangerous mechanism of Islamic colonialism than violent terrorism.

There are four stages of what might be called “Islamization.” The first, Dar al-Suh (“House of Treaty”) implies a land strong enough to keep Islam out—thus a people with whom Muslims, in a militarily inferior status, must sign a treaty of mutual boundaries. The second is Dar al-Harb (“House of War”), in which Muslims make war upon weakened non-Muslim lands through immigration, “communal” demands, then violent conquest; finally, with their population past a critical a point, they begin jihad on a constant basis—jihad which can be neither criticized nor punished. The third is Dar as-Islam (“House of Islam”): Islam has conquered, and the Kafir vanquished.

By far the most affected Western venue is Europe, which—though India and Bangladesh arguably are much worse—has seen the influx of millions of Muslim immigrants and migrants within the last decade alone. Sharia, however, has been operational there for decades, flourishing in the shadows long before non-Muslims managed to document it. Europe and India are nearing the sunset of the second stage of jihad, America its blinding dawn.

Further, it cannot be stressed enough that incidences of Sharia colonization are in far too great a supply to permit investigation of three continents in fewer words than Mein Kampf. Therefore, a highly abridged selection of British and American tribulations alone are sufficient for illustration.

U.K.

In England, Sharia seems to be so deeply engrained in what genuinely was once one of the greatest civilizations in human history that it is mostly received with ignorant “tolerance” or learned apathy. While violent jihad has rocked the country on an ever increasing basis since the 7/7 massacres of 2005, it is irrelevant in comparison to what former comedian and Internet polemicist Pat Condell once summarized as “cultural terrorism.” This terrorism—lubricated by large slates of society propagandized with artificial guilt over the British Empire’s supposed savagery, and propagandists who themselves wish to gain power from the chaos—has slowly wormed its way through the foundations of decent, post-racial Britishness to a possibly irreversible degree.

Rape gangs

For many years, gangs of Muslim men groomed, raped, and trafficked countless underage girls in cities like Oldham, Oxford, Rochdale, Rotherham, and Telford, with the full knowledge of the police, social workers, the Blair government, and the BBC, who did nothing (until it was far too late at best).

In one case, rapist Bannaras Hussain was revealed at trial to have sat in a parking lot adjacent to the local police station while forcing one of his child sex slaves, sitting in the passenger seat, to administer a sexual act. “When, shortly afterwards,” counsel for the prosecution told the press, “a police car pulled up alongside them and asked what was going on,” Hussain truthfully told the officer what he was enjoying, and “The police car drove off.” For his part, Hussain’s fellow rapist brother Arshid “fathered” a child with a 14-year-old girl named Sammy Woodhouse. A child to whom a (non-Sharia) court later awarded Mr. Hussain visitation rights.

As regards the police and social workers who abandoned these untold thousands of children, the BBC reported (belatedly) that such dereliction of responsibility stemmed from fear “that if they pursued groups of non-white offenders they might be accused of racism.” Ironically, the British media, in order to conceal the rapists’ religion, resorted (and still resort) to an act of cheap racism: namely, by referring to such criminals as “Asians.” Thereby they smeared and continue to smear millions of law-abiding Hindu and Sikh Britons who happen to look similar in order to avoid being called racist.

Sharia courts

Today, dozens of Sharia courts exist throughout the United Kingdom, one estimate being “85 at least” since 1982. The courts’ existence is often played down with reference to their role being limited to “family disputes,” but, given the maltreatment of women and children allowed under the Sharia, this is no comfort at all. Some British mosques, too, according to (of all things) The New York Times, are in the habit of “offering Shariah councils for family matters” under the table.

In response to years of bubbling controversary, in 2016, the British government launched an official inquiry into the courts, brought on by rumors that “some sharia councils may be working in a discriminatory and unacceptable way… contrary to the teachings of Islam.” Well-documented evidence submitted to the tribunal confirmed that the Sharia courts ruled in favor of imprisoning women who had been raped and beaten within forced marriages. This included news coverage from 2008 exposing a “Muslim Arbitrational Tribunal” as having “worked ‘in tandem’ with police investigations” in six cases of serious domestic violence, resulting in all six cases being withdrawn. This point alone casts considerable doubt upon any protestation that these courts had operated without official knowledge or good will.

Disgracefully, however, the board of inquiry included two Islamic scholars as advisors, one of whom, in 2024, signed a petition—along with the “UK Board of Shariah Councils”’ vice chair—demanding the new Labour government “stop the indiscriminate slaughter of Palestinians.” The inquiry’s final report, published in the winter of 2018, boasts a section called “Evidence of bad practice” (p. 16), which, among its 13 bullet points, lists none of the abuses documented in testimony or in the media. One bullet point could not even be spared for the revelation that the courts sanction clitorectomy, a crime committed regularly for many years within Muslim communities despite being illegal since 1985 and carrying a minimum 14-year sentence.

Despite the assault against justice they constitute, major institutions have apparently accepted these courts and tribunals as an integral part of British society. For example, in 2021, Bristol University Press published a book about Cohabitation and Religious Marriage—distributed online by Cambridge University Press—containing an essay praising the Sharia courts. Bristol University, incidentally, offers a Sharia-compliant loan program for Muslim students.

Even an “award-winning,” female-led firm of solicitors in Manchester, voted the “UK’s Number One” by The Times, provides advice on “Divorce[,] Sharia Law[,] and your legal rights in the UK.” This follows the trend, given that, in 2022, the U.K. Law Society appointed a Muslim as its president, and a DEI protocol called the “Muslim Employment Charter,” which, news coverage of it says, is meant “to make law firms more Muslim-friendly,” has “a major international law firm onboard.” Undergirding that, a 2016 poll showed that 40% of British Muslims supported “implementation of elements of Sharia law,” holding steady from a 2010 poll—one which also revealed that a third of British Muslim students supported killing in the name of Islam.

Halal meat

Like Judaism, Islam maintains specific requirements for meat preparation, but, unlike Jews, some Muslims have been demanding that Islamic dietary practices be made the norm for all, rather than the exception.

In 2024, the Cowbridge Comprehensive School in Wales announced that it would serve only halal-slaughtered meat in its cafeteria. Despite the fact that only 0.2% of the local population is Muslim, the school went ahead with this gastronomic alteration “in response to community needs.” As far back as 2013, The Guardian found that “Three-quarters of schools under Waltham Forest Council control [in outer London] serve only Halal meat.”

Additionally, school food handlers have been fired for serving non-halal meat to Muslim children, and there is evidence that Islamic food producers (as an example of financial jihad) use their profits to support Hamas.

U.S.

America’s position on the road towards Islam dislodging constitutional government is certainly well behind the U.K., but the evidence shows that the seeds have been sown. The same refusal to, in Condell’s words, “name the poison” which exists in England prevails in America, paving the way for far worse to come.

Muslim Brotherhood

Founded in 1928 by Hasan al-Banna (Egyptian Nazi sympathizer and leader of anti-Jewish riots) to spread the rule of Islam across the globe, the Muslim Brotherhood has operated all but freely within the United States for decades.

In 2004, the FBI discovered a Brotherhood manifesto entitled “An Explanatory Memorandum: On the Strategic Goal for the Group In North America.” The chilling document, dated May 22, 1991, proclaimed that the Brotherhood’s take on the American Dream was

a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and “sabotaging” its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.

That sentence—alluding to Qur’an 9:33’s command to make “the religion of truth to manifest… over all religion”—also sums up the Brotherhood’s strategy for defeating the American way of life. Through quiet subversion and clever deception; through inviting Americans, “by their hands,” to dismantle American civilization for them; through the Sharia doctrine of taqiyah, the concept of deception and propaganda in the furtherance of Islam. This has chiefly been done by abusing the First Amendment’s guarantee of religious freedom and Americans’ rightful disdain for bigotry in order to seek that welcoming culture’s elimination. Through use of harmless sounding front-groups like the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), and Muslim Students’ Association (MSA), the Brotherhood has worked tirelessly and successfully to further its destructive aims within the framework of American civic life.

Perhaps the most powerful front-group is CAIR, a lawfare organization which regularly libels good-faith critics of jihad and Sharia as guilty of “Islamophobia” and “hate.” In 2024, for example, its Oklahoma branch applauded the defeat of a state bill banning Sharia—which provably oppresses Muslims—because, contrary to the primary source evidence, “Sharia law teaches tolerance and respect for religious diversity.”

CAIR has good reason to be so combative and aggressively dishonest, since, during the infamous 2007 Holy Land Foundation trial, it was exposed as the Brotherhood’s foremost America-based Hamas money-laundering operation. CAIR’s leader, Nihad Awad, has openly said that “I am in support of the Hamas movement”—itself a Brotherhood off-shoot. And, despite the FBI severing ties with them in 2009, Awad and CAIR enjoyed the Obama DOJ’s protection, and even advised the Biden White House on the subject of “Islamophobia.” It was only disavowed at the presidential level in 2023 after Awad said that October 7 made him “happy.”

The MSA, too, wields immense power as the mother organization of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), the nationwide campus mafia which terrorizes Jewish college students. SJP and its allies managed to devote roughly the entire 2023 and ’24 academic year to ferocious pro-Hamas protests, while intimidated yet supportive administrators enabled and protected it. The MSA also has a da‘wah (proselytism) wing, which attempts to convert college students to Islam, and is involved in trying to make campuses more “Ramadan-friendly.” Administrators should know that—according to the example of Muhammad—Ramadhan is not just an Islamic holiday but a month-long spree of jihad in which hundreds of innocent people are killed every year, as those who kill during it are sure to enter Paradise. And MSA or SJP members see victories as Islamic victories. Particularly in the context of anti-Semitic BDS resolutions passed through student governments, MSA affiliates have celebrated with chants of Allahu akbar! and jubilant social media posts such as “Hamas & Shariah have taken over UC Davis.” (The day after that UC Davis resolution passed, the Jewish campus fraternity was vandalized with swastikas.) During the 2024 pro-Hamas protests, Muslim students at Columbia and UCLA who were part of the illegal encampments held prayer ceremonies as a visible gesture of victory.

And while government has been nearly unable to react to the deafening storm of anti-Jewish campus jihad, it has managed to place the Muslim Brotherhood in a position to influence religious freedom policy (the perfect domain of Sharia normalization). In 2024, the Biden administration announced the appointment of Mohamed Elsanousi, a longtime ISNA member, to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. Elsanousi must be fully aware that almost nobody in government knows anything about the Brotherhood’s network, since he proudly includes his 12 years as a senior member of ISNA in his official online bio. A bio which also boasts of a bachelor’s degree in “Sharia and Law” from the International Islamic University in Pakistan.

Mosques

As terrorism expert Steve Emerson’s award-winning 1994 film Terrorists Among Us: Jihad in America documented a generation ago, throughout the 1980s and beyond, Brotherhood operatives regularly fundraised for overseas jihad in mosques and at conferences across the country. Some keynote speakers—such as al-Qa‘idah co-founder Abdullah Azzam—were active terrorists on leave from the Afghan, Chechen, and Israeli theaters. These coincided with the growth of Usamah bin Laden’s recruitment and fundraising network, which eventually spread to 35 countries worldwide, as well as a minimum of 38 American cities.

It is known today that many individuals tied directly to 9/11, and the major jihad episodes prior to it, were, from both within and abroad, associated with the Masjid al-Farooq in Brooklyn. The mosque, founded in 1976, was a major fundraising center for al-Qa‘idah and Hamas going back to the 1980s, but none of this was fully understood prior to 2001. Despite everything discovered after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and even 9/11, the mosque’s brightly colored façade still graces Brooklyn with open doors.

This inability on the part of government and law enforcement to investigate mosques has undoubtedly resulted in unnecessary confusion, not to mention human carnage. One of the most egregious examples is the case of the Islamic Society of Boston, founded in 1981 by convicted terrorist conspirator Abdulrahman Alamoudi, with the late Brotherhood “spiritual leader” Yusuf al-Qaradhawi as a board member. Since then, the ISB and its ISNA-owned “mega-mosque” off-shoot, the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center, have produced 14 (known) associates, former members, and students who are at large, dead, in prison, or have been deported for involvement in terrorism—including the Boston Marathon bombers. It was this mosque which, in 2010, asked a field trip group of local high school students to participate in Islamic noontime prayers.

Local researchers formally briefed the FBI (at its request) about the mosque as far back as 2009, detailing its terrorist connections and vile curriculum, including instructions on wife-beating. But, at a congressional hearing two months after the Marathon bombing, FBI director Robert Mueller claimed that he knew nothing about the mosque’s leadership or conduct.

The Qur’an

The free speech and establishment clauses of the First Amendment allow Americans to criticize or mock any religious text, but, in the eyes of the U.S. government, the Qur’an has been off limits for years. America is still a mostly Christian country, but disrespect shown towards the Christian Bible is never nearly as controversial as any slight to the Qur’an’s dignity.

In 2005, a series of guidelines were issued for personnel serving at Guantánamo, requiring those guarding terrorists to wear “[c]lean gloves” if a copy of the Qur’an must be touched, and to treat it “as if it were a fragile piece of delicate art.” When an obscure, attention-seeking Florida pastor put the Qur’an on “trial” and burned it in 2011, President Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and General David Petraeus vigorously condemned the burning of the “holy Qur’an.” Because Muslims in Afghanistan rioted and murdered at least 14 people in response to the pastor’s actions, the U.S. government chose to elevate a bound sheaf of paper over Americans’ First Amendment rights to be peacefully crude or offensive.

In the course of Operation Enduring Freedom, American leaders chose to transplant Afghan morality to America—arguably placing Qur’an 9:33 over the Constitution they swore to uphold, protect, and defend.

A fitting post-script is that, in the midst of the Biden administration’s catastrophic 2021 pull-out from Afghanistan, CNN claimed that a Navy veteran, Zachary Young, had somehow committed a crime in selflessly rescuing women and children from the clutches of the victorious Taliban. Nearly three years later, in its defense against Young’s well-deserved $1 billion defamation suit, CNN’s legal team cited the fact that the Taliban has “implemented Sharia law, banning women from leaving the country” as reason for their innocence.

As Klavan admonishes: “With just a little intellectual dishonesty and some unprincipled sniveling, we can put an end to Islamic slaughters peacefully by eliminating their cause: our freedom.”

“Islamophobia”: a weapon of abusive psychological warfare

The term “gaslighting” will appear constantly in any serious abuse counselor’s materials, but the easiest way for an abuse counselor to endure relentless public abuse is to admit the truth that “Islamophobia” itself is the most powerful form of socio-political gaslighting in recent history. It is a method for convincing good people to doubt objective moral reasoning. Reasoning which makes it clear that Islam, both in theory and practice, suffers from severe moral inadequacies, and that having the freedom to condemn injustice wherever it may be includes within Islam. There is nothing irrational, for example, about fearing courts which could, can, and do refuse a woman’s plea for a divorce on grounds of physical cruelty.

Additionally, Marxists traveling under the fake passport stamped “liberal”—who watch The Handmaid’s Tale, a dystopic fantasy of Christian misogyny, and rejoiced at Obergefell v. Hodges—consistently denounce anyone who criticizes evil when it comes from Islam. The Handmaid’s Tale very nicely captures Islamo-Nazi-occupied Iran—where 184,000 girls under the age of 15 were “married” between 2017 and 2022—and Obergefell would never exactly make it to the Supreme Court of Afghanistan, but, even so, people who claim that all cultural values are equal are never so polite to their own. Accusing the truly liberal of “racism” for their concerns is not only racist against Muslims—making them, like toddlers, beneath honest, well-intentioned moral criticism—it also is factually absurd. If Islam were a “race,” then there would not be Muslims of every color—including Muslims who own African slaves. Islam and Sharia are ideas, and, as Sam Harris said famously on Real Time with Bill Maher in 2014, “We have to be able to criticize bad ideas… and… Islam, at the moment, is the motherload of bad ideas.”

The word “Islamophobia” itself has drunk much ink in recent decades—some deserved, most not—and, frankly, should have died of thirst in the choking ash of 9/11. Despite masquerading as a rhetorical air raid shelter for a persecuted minority, it is known to have been first popularized in 1989 following British Muslim pressure groups’ support for Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa for the murder of Salman Rushdie. So, too, given that the cutting edge of British society scandalously sided with the world’s first true Islamic terrorist state against a mild-mannered immigrant novelist, its very origins indicate that Muslims in the West were (and are) hardly as persecuted as advertised.

Identically to interpersonal abuse, the only cure for gaslighting, as for “Islamophobia,” is to reject it. “Islamophobia” is as real as waiters’ fear of the booth fairy, and civilized people must likewise disown it, condemn it, and drown it in suitably abusive humor.

“When you get to the stage where anyone criticizing your beliefs is automatically deemed to have a mental illness,” to quote Condell once more, “that is a sure sign of mental illness. It’s also cultural terrorism.”

Is hope worth our time?

The Western world must understand that it is worth more than the sum of its shortcomings. It is built upon the ideas of individual liberty, God-given dignity, and personal responsibility. Islam, sadly, is not compatible with these values, espousing diametrically opposing ones.

It must be restated that opposition to Sharia is not only an act of Western self-interest, but of empathy. Islamic legal and cultural practices, even now, harm Muslims far more than non-Muslims. It is Muslim women and children who are beaten and raped, dwarfing the number of non-Muslims subjected to the same crimes. Those who express moral disapproval of Sharia do so because Muslim suffering at the present moment irks them as much as their own in the coming years.

Finally, Islam, like the West, despite everything, may be in trouble, too. Even in the face of its vigorous birth rate, Islam’s rate of conversion is anemic. What’s more, its apostasy rate is massive, enough for prominent imams to express public bewilderment—one calling it an “avalanche.” Ex-Muslims are now prominent on YouTube and social media, and their following, while dwarfed and subject to Internet censorship, is reliably growing.

Like Muhammad’s following before them, theirs can be neither ignored nor discounted. Their knowledge and courage may be part of a blind, suicidal West’s last chance for survival—for they, unlike us, know that Andrew Klavan’s “advice” was a joke.

Islam is a religion that insists on global adoption of its laws and customs, even in non-Islamic countries.

Do you believe that Islam is a danger to the West, and, if so, what do you deem the severity of its current danger?

I believe that Islam is two things in one. One it’s a religion. It has the attributes of a religion—the praying, the fasting, the belief in a transcendent, transcendental power. So, it’s a faith, but there is a much more important and more consequential characteristic of Islam, which is the political, and political Islam is a danger to the West. It’s a danger to the world, because the key component of political Islam is that, in order to worship God and in order to fulfill God’s commands, it’s not enough to pray and to fast and to pay charity, and all those religious aspects of it. You have to wage holy war against unbelievers, and bring the world under the dominion of Islam. And even if that costs the lives of Muslims, even if that costs and sows chaos, even it leads to wars, it’s all worth the sacrifice. And because that seed of political Islam, with that component of holy war, has not been fully challenged, Islam remains a threat to the world.

But, before I finish, I also want to say for political Islam and any other kinds of destructive ideas to be an actual threat to the west, the West has to be in a place of decline and demoralization. And I find that to be ultimately more of a threat: that the West has lost confidence in her own foundational principles, and in her own ideas and ideals. And that’s why political Islam today is a threat when it wasn’t a threat, say, 100 years ago. In fact, Islam—political Islam—felt threatened and was threatened by the West, and so that’s my sort of two cents on that question.

How much of the Muslim Brotherhood’s goals have been achieved, and are those goals on schedule?

So I think it’s important for your audience to know what the Muslim Brotherhood is, and, more importantly, to know who Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, was.

He established the movement, the Muslim Brotherhood, in 1928 as a reaction. And he wasn’t alone. There were others who, in the Muslim world at that time, felt the same way. The Muslim world was ascendant from the time the Prophet went to Madinah in the seventh century, all the way to the—shall we say—roughly the end of the eighteenth century, and then it begins to decline. The West becomes ascendant, and Muslim empires are invaded and colonized by the West. And, at the time, contemporary Muslim leaders responded in different ways. One way was to copy the West and to say, “Well, we concede they have defeated us” in the territories that mattered at the time, and that was military, science, technology, forms of government. “Right, and we have to become like them. We’ve got to copy them. The Empire is gone. We have to understand and accept the notion of nation states,” etc. A very clear example of a Muslim leader who followed and who went down that path is Mustafa Atatürk. He established a secular Turkey and put in place a military that would stop it ever from becoming Islamist. But that’s a story for a different time.

But there were others, and Hassan al-Banna is a very prominent one of those who concluded that “No,” the way forward was not to copy the West. It’s the opposite. It was to go back to the “fruits” of Islam, what made Islam great in the first place. And so we have to take away layers of history, layers of moderation, which he thought of not as moderation but as the seeds for decline. And so he went to this incredibly—what we in the West call—radical or fundamentalist or puritanical Islam, and the Muslim Brotherhood as a movement was the vehicle for establishing a vanguard, a place to launch that idea of his to bring back Islam as the dominant force in world affairs.

The Muslim Brotherhood is not just a local Egyptian project, but it was an international, global project. And it was two-faced. It had the face of, you know, addressing local Egyptian problems—poverty, lack of education, lack of other resources, and, of course, addressing tyranny, which is, unfortunately, what a lot of post-Islamic nation states stand out to be: they became tyrannical, authoritarian governments. And so, when Hassan al-Banna and those whom he inspired were addressing the issues of tyranny, authoritarianism, human dignity, lack of charity, great poverty, all of these things were real issues, but the remedy he was proposing was the one of political Islam. Islam has to come to power and take over political power, and those issues would be addressed, but it wouldn’t be enough for the Muslim Brotherhood to take political power and address what ails Muslims—it had to dominate the entire world. And, over time, it spread and spread far and wide and away from Egypt and its Middle Eastern locales. It started to come to the West, and I think one of the first organizations it started was the Muslim Students’ Association, here in in the United States.

But it wasn’t limited to the United States. It did the same thing all across Europe, Indonesia. I was a 14-year-old teenager, 15-year-old teenager, when I first encountered branches of the Muslim Brotherhood in Nairobi, Kenya, and its teachings. If you look at all the pan-nationalist or global Islamist movements, I would say, in 2024, the Muslim Brotherhood as an organization and a movement is the most successful. It’s even more successful than the Islamist-led projects by the Islamist government of Iran. And the Islamist government of Iran is using state power, which is it means it has infinitely more resources than a tiny movement that was founded by a low-level junior teacher. And yet the Muslim Brotherhood is, I would say, much more formidable than the Iranian Shi‘ah project to spread Islam and destroy the state of Israel.

Why do you think the murder, rape, kidnapping, and torture of Jews (children, teenagers, adults, and the elderly)—let alone that of women and children under Islam in general—elicit so little pity amongst so many in Europe and America, especially Western feminists?

That’s a very, very broad question, and it is the question of our time. But I think that speaks to the decline of the West and a lack of self-confidence; the emergence of a self-loathing narrative of the West, where the West fixates on things that Western civilization got wrong but eventually corrected. If you look at the reflection on American history, we no longer teach what’s great about America; we only teach the things that America got wrong. 1776 has to be replaced by 1619. If you look across the Atlantic, Britain and other European countries—because race there doesn’t really stick—it’s easy to accuse Americans of racism, but it’s different in Europe. So they’ve started to revive anti-colonial narratives. And if you look at these anti-colonial and anti-slavery narratives that are advanced by Western-born ideologues—socialism, Marxism, Leninism—these are ideas that were born in the West and spread in the West and beyond the West into other places. 

But this self-loathing is coming from American universities and the Islamists. The Muslim Brotherhood is delighted. The Muslim Brotherhood is exploiting this. And the Muslim Brotherhood is therefore able—if you look at this, the so-called “Red-Green Alliance”—the Council on American-Islamic Relations is able to convince their “red” counterparts that if they actually detest colonialism, as they say they do, then they must recognize that Israel is a white European settler state. Israel is the oppressor, and then violence, therefore, is wholly justified, and the victim victimized: a narrative that is the core foundation of what we call “wokeism” is applied to that conflict between Israel and the Arabs, and the Arabs in Gaza and in the “West Bank.” And so, from a narrative perspective, the young people who were indoctrinated with this wokeism have no inoculation, I would say, against the potent ideology of Hassan al-Banna and of Islamism. 

Everything that a young, shall we say, 21-year-old student in America can throw at an Islamist is thrown back right at them. You know, take the sexual violence of October 7—the way the women, the girls, even babies, were subjected to the most gruesome sexual violence—and you would think that every Western feminist organization, every Western man and woman would simply say, “Let’s just agree on that one and condemn that wholeheartedly. No, ‘buts,’ no ‘ifs.’” That can’t happen because we are saturated in this narrative that we have something to atone for. We have to atone for our sins of slavery, segregation, and colonization, for stealing land from the indigenous peoples of North America and Australia and New Zealand—that we are guilty of genocide, and so we’re guilty of racism. We have to atone, atone, atone. And so when these bad ideas come along, I think we’ve made ourselves vulnerable, dangerously so, to these ideas; to da‘wah, to the spread of radical Islam, through narratives, through non-violent means.

To me, I think we are losing. We’re losing the narratives game. We are no longer responding to these in the realm of ideas with the simple assertion of our ideas of human dignity and due process and curiosity and human freedom—that life matters more than destruction and death. We’re not responding confidently, and so we are. We’re allowing ourselves to be bamboozled and our young people bamboozled into letting them get away with these horrendous crimes against humanity. We are being told that we have to side with Hamas, the perpetrators of October 7, over the teeny, tiny state that’s been in existential crisis from the time of its inception.

Do you think the way the left expresses its support for Islam and the Palestinians racist because it insists on judging them by an infantilizing, bottom-drawer standard?

It is racist without question; and it’s racist again if you dig and drill through into this wokeist ideology of victim and victimizer. “People of color” cannot be victimized as they’re always the victims. The oppressor is the white man. What does it tell you? First of all, just think about “victim and victimizer” and “oppressor and oppressed.” For me, these words denote strength, and the assumption is people of color can never be strong. They can never be strong enough to oppress. It’s a factual lie. We know from human history, and we know all across the country where people, white people, have never set foot that people of color have been oppressing people of color. Black people have oppressed black people. I come from Somalia. We had a period of 20 years of rule by a tyrant who’s of my clan, and he had massacred hundreds of thousands of Somalis, and then we descended into civil war, and it was Somalis killing Somalis. And the same goes for everywhere. Syrians killing Syrian; Iraqis killing Iraqis; Arabs killing Arabs; Muslims killing Muslims.

The history of oppressor and oppressed is just human history. And if you take a small slice of it at one point where, yes, there were white people involved in oppressing not just people of color but also other whites, and you tell only that little bit without context, without anything, and you leave out the parts where there were hundreds of thousands and millions of white people who objected to these types of oppression—in fact, created societies that are stable, prosperous, and amazing—then what you get, I think, is this racist narrative: a truly racist narrative with the assumption that people of color are always victims. And if you then narrow it down to what’s going on between the Israelis and the Palestinians, then the Palestinians can never be held responsible for anything they do. They cannot be held responsible for taking women and children and using them as civilian shields, knowing that they’re going to be killed, knowing that the bombs will fall on them.

They are not held responsible for programming young children with suicidal ideas of martyrdom. They cannot be held responsible for refusing absolutely every single serious attempt at peace with the Israelis. They can’t be held responsible for what happened on October 7. It all has to be done by someone else. And so, you know, it’s racism of the worst kind, because the assumption is they’ll never meet the standards. See, Israel is constantly told, “You know, maybe it’s justified that Israel ought to defend herself against what happened on October 7, but then she has to meet these incredibly high standards.” So, the standards for Israel are higher and higher and higher all the time—and why? Because the assumption is, whether you like it or not, they are superior because they can’t meet these standards. Whereas Arabs and Palestinians—well, every time they pull out of the peace process, what does it tell you? Should we hold them accountable? Do we think that they, too, are endowed with reason and with intelligence? What does it say about what you are saying about the Arabs? What are you saying about the Palestinians when you keep making excuses for them?

They get a state Gaza, Hamas wins elections with the support of an overwhelming majority of the people who live in Gaza, and they govern like tyrants. They’re not held accountable. They kill their own people and subjugate them and imprison them. They are not held accountable. They take the resources the international community gives them to build a state, and, instead, they build tunnels and they buy rockets because they are so obsessed with destroying Israel, which is considered an enemy, rather than feeding and educating their own people and caring about the lives of their own people. They get away with it. They’re never held accountable. So there is no standard whatsoever to which the Palestinians are held at all for any length of time that can bring about a state of peace; and that, to me, is the purest of racism that we’ve ever seen.

It is racism against Palestinians. It’s racism against the children of Gaza. The children of Gaza deserve better. They deserve better leadership. And if the children of Gaza—every day, we are told, in wall-to-wall coverage, that’s why they’re flying these flags and why they’re out there protesting—the question is, if you really—if we really—care about Palestinian children and the children of Gaza and the West Bank, then you should be protesting for a better leadership. You should be protesting for the demise of Hamas, because it’s Hamas that keeps putting them in this situation over and over and over again. But that’s, of course, not going to happen, because, right now, the reintroduction of racism and tribalism is the human and Western collective madness that we’re riding on. It’s the collective madness of our time.

Can Israel actually trust any of the Arab countries which signed or say they want to sign peace agreements? If Iran just disappeared tomorrow, would they revert back to business as usual?

My advice to Israel, both the government and the people, is “trust but verify.” That’s a quote from Ronald Reagan. Yes, it’s true that some of the most important Arab countries have come ’round to accepting that Israel is here to stay, and they want to take it one point further and say “We want normalization along economic and maybe even security lines.”

Now, the logical conclusion of that is obviously to settle this—shall we call it the “Palestinian question”? And I think that Arab countries, like Saudi Arabia and the UAE and others, except Qatar—even Egypt—would like this normalization process to go on and to be concluded in ways that bring peace and security for the Arab side of the equation and the Muslim side of the equation, but also on the Jewish side. Actions speak louder than words. The UAE has demonstrated that she wants friendship by allowing synagogues, I suppose, even churches: allowing openly to recognize Israel and trade with Israel and that’s a good thing. The Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, who is obviously in a much trickier position, has also expressed his desire for this normalization process. Egypt, Jordan—behind closed doors—you hear this desire for normalization, the recognition of Israel, the emphasis on what we have in common. More importantly, from the people of Iran, not the regime of Iran. It’s pretty obvious that the people of Iran feel no hostility towards Jews in general or Israel in particular, and that, in fact, many of them are actually supporters of Israel, and they come out openly, and they say it when they know that their own government is not going to lock them up and torture them and kill them and throw them off tall buildings.

But, yeah, going forward, I think we have to go back to where you started this conversation. With the Muslim Brotherhood. And that is taking us back to the realm of ideas: the idea of political Islam. As long as that idea is alive, and as long as that idea is followed by large numbers of people, as is the case today, then Israel and Jews, wherever they are, are not safe from that idea, because baked into that idea is the destruction of Israel, and that’s the destruction of Jews.

And so that’s where I think, when we are having open and honest conversations with leaders of Arab countries, is what are we going talk about. What are we going to do about the idea of political Islam now? For a country like Saudi Arabia or Egypt or the UAE, with authoritarian governments, up to a point, it’s easy for them to say, “Well, we banned the Muslim Brotherhood. Why don’t you ban them?” That’s the most common assertion that I hear when I go to various conferences and seminars and lectures. And, you know, Gulf Arabs talk about all the measures that they have taken to combat the Muslim Brotherhood and their ideas, and Salafism and various denominations of Wahhabi theology. We are open societies. We are liberal societies. We believe in freedom of religion, freedom of conscience, freedom of association, we believe in freedom of speech. And so, for us—and so it’s the same in Israel—it’s very hard for us to simply adopt the attitude of an authoritarian government towards an unwanted ideological movement. But, in the future, I think it’s going to have to be a collaboration between the countries that are the home of Islam—the countries where large numbers of Muslims have migrated to.

So, as long as the idea of political Islam is alive and well, and as long as Muslim leaders—political leaders, religious leaders, educational leaders—are not willing to engage with that idea in the realm of ideas, they will use military force. Hassan al-Banna was killed in Egypt, and many of the other Islamists that adopted his ideas were killed in Egypt. They were killed in Syria. They’re killed in Saudi Arabia. They’re imprisoned and killed in the UAE. But the idea is not dead. And I think this is the same question. When this campaign against Hamas, the military campaign, ends in a military victory, what are we going to do about the idea itself? To my horror, I mean, I’ve been speaking out against this since 2001, and I kept saying and repeat over and over again, “I understand that we are, militarily speaking, superior. I understand that, economically speaking, we have more resources.” But, this idea—Elon Musk called it a “mind virus”—that mind virus, as long as it’s lodged in the hearts and minds of numerous people who want to act on it, then we will run out of resources, and they’ll still be around. You’ve got to treat the mind virus first, and it is there, I think, the resources should be directed both in the West and there in the Middle East.

Some studies and some imams’ sermons show that Islam has an apostasy problem: while birth rates are very high, apostasy rates aren’t far behind, and the conversion rate is very low; do you think Islam is in trouble, that the imams’ fears of an apostasy “avalanche” are justified, and what could this mean for the world?

And this is tied to the question I just finished answering about the mind viruses. Again, because it is ideas and, ultimately, a religion based on fear alone is hard to maintain. So, if you stay within the religion for no other reason than that you are afraid, then the imams and the people who want you to stay in the religion rely only on means of intimidation to enforce the faith. So, of course, they are worried about an avalanche of blasphemy and an avalanche of people abandoning Islam, and it has happened.

And technology—I know we’ve said all sorts of bad things about technology. Lately, we’ve lost faith in social media and so on and so forth, but the new technology of the Internet has democratized the sharing information and knowledge so that it can now happen without the control and filters of, to a large degree, the state, of imams, and other theological enforces outside even of your family. So you are seeing more and more people leaving Islam and going on these websites and forming friendships with ex-Muslims and so on.

I’ve never had so many friends—“Muslim” friends—in my life, and they’re very sincere. And the abandoning of Islam as an idea is just as real. But what it tells me is these leaders, whether they are Western leaders or Arab leaders, who are struggling to fight the mind virus of political Islam should, in fact, not be afraid of fighting the idea on its own merits. It’s an idea, ultimately, that shouts from the rooftops, “We believe in death. You believe in life.” So if we were to go and fight this idea, collectively as Muslims and non-Muslims, we could say to the those who are pushing for political Islam, “There are more people who believe in life than death. You are about death and destruction, and we could win on the basis of the platform of ideas.” They are now winning without using military force.

When the Islamists were using terrorism—when they were forcing people physically, when they were blowing things up—they weren’t winning. They were, in fact, losing believers. ISIS lost Islam more believers than any other movement. So violence did not really reward them. What is rewarding is that they can go and find these young, impressionable, impressionable minds and fill their heads and hearts with these political Islam narratives. And that is where we ought to fight them.

And so I think the two things, those two questions, are tied together. You’ve got to fight this on the level of ideas, and I know that Muslim political leaders will fight them up to a point, but they’re afraid of going to the bottom of the idea, because that’s going to throw them in cognitive dissonance. Because that’s going to force them to take a stand on some of the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad. And so, as long as that is the case, then Israel will need her Iron Dome in Israel. Israel will need to arm herself to the teeth, and maybe Israel and Jews themselves will need to get and engage in this battle of ideas.

You can never rely on others for your own security. You cannot rely on others. History has made that clear to you plenty of times.

C / ALAN: What? No. Jews, we’re loud, but we don’t, we’re not violent [sic]. We don’t engage in violence.

A / DAHNA: Oh no?

—Jason Grote, 1001 (2007)

Against hindsight’s superior judgment, in the summer of 2011 I enrolled in a five-week acting class at Emerson College in Boston. It lasted from 9:00 in the morning to 8:30 at night, and then for several hours more each Saturday. It was exhausting, humiliating, and revealed permanently that my dramatic talents lay elsewhere. That such a grueling, ultimately fruitless self-incurred adventure should have occurred at 17, and not later, is a blessing for which I am grateful.

The night of July 27, our class was slated to see a play at the Plaza Theatre on Tremont Street in the South End. It was called 1001 by Jason Grote, a playwright whose work, in retrospect, I am surprised that my lunatic high school drama teacher never inflicted upon me along with Jean Genet and myriad other Marxist luminaries unknown to people with normal educations.

“1001 is a remarkable play that is hilarious, seductive, and alarmingly relevant,” Company One’s artistic director Shawn LaCount wrote in the program. “At times dizzying in its approach, Grote has a style of storytelling that we think you’ll find surprising and enticing. You’ll want to buckle up for this magic carpet ride.” Fair enough.

Little did 17-year-old me know, however, that standard acting curriculum in first-rate art colleges included lewd, anti-Semitic screeds against the country in which they stood, received with all the solemnity of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged). This was normal fair, apparently, as the tenth anniversary of 9/11 approached—and the most unorthodox people in society, as subsequent events would illustrate, brooked no unorthodox observations. The previous decade was apparent proof that the West needed a restorative herbal bath of jihad to warm its icy heart, and the inhabitants of the land between the Nile and Fertile Crescent had far too much of it for there to be peace on Earth. K–12 education wasn’t indoctrinating children against civilization quickly enough, so it needed some sophisticated collegiate cavalry. “Woke” had awoken long before everybody knew that men were really barren women, and, as I learned, anybody under 30 daring to opine otherwise was not to be trusted.

I was to endure a ride indeed that evening, but with no means of buckling up, and even less magic than allowed in the Dursley household. And, in the space of about 100 minutes, I would be privy to more reasons than the title’s zeroes represented why Jews should never go to the theater.

A tale of noble Arabs, a Jewish putz + fat crusaders

The convoluted, deliberately confusing play concerns two main intersecting stories: the first of The Thousand and One Nights, in which clever Sheherazad cheats death by enchanting the Persian king Shahriyar with 1,001 stories, the second of the incompatible lovers Alan, a Jewish hipster, and Dahna, a Palestinian-born Kuwaiti, set in New York City in 2001. Six actors play all of the many parts, but actors “A” and “C,” as the (typo-ridden) script calls them, exclusively play both Sheherazad-Dahna and Shahriyar-Alan respectively.

The first scene opens with an ensemble comprised of actors “B,” “D,” “E,” and “F” describing Sheherazad, dressed as a modern-day Arab businesswoman, walking through Times Square, mocked deliberately as the “center of the world.” “This is it? The land of milk and honey?” Sheherazad thinks through the ensemble’s narration, while she tip-toes “through the throngs of fat crusaders.” The narration continues, driving any meandering points home:

Here [in New York City] all is ifrits [demons] and djinns, flitting to and fro, illuminating an infinity of idols.

She has been told of them, these djinns and ifrits, conjured by the infidels.

This is why she bears the story that weighs so heavily on her back and her hips. It moves inside her. Feel it? Feel it move. It is the story of a final jihad against the infidel (insh’Allah)[.]

Or it is the story of a monstrous carriage crashing into one of these great fortresses…[?]

The scene eventually shifts to the story of Sheherazad and Shahriyar. King Shahriyar discovers that his unnamed queen has committed adultery “with a filthy blackamoor slave… for debauched women prefer the Moors on account of the size of their parts,” a “One-Eyed Arab” informs the audience. While Shahriyar sits seething in front of a television on which video of his wife’s exploits is imagined to play, he, now believing that all women shall similarly betray him, resolves to procure, marry, and ravage a new virgin every night only to behead her in the morning. When the thousand-and-first such bride (“a young girl of 13 or 14,” the script notes, “who trembles, crying”) has been so surgically altered, Wazir, the king’s chief minister, tells him that the kingdom is now nearly denuded of virgins to sacrifice to his royal neurosis. Though the king may, perhaps, have achieved his goal of forever eradicating adultery from his realm, the resentful commoners—no doubt wishing to dispose of their daughters less wastefully—slide toward revolt. Sheherazad, Wazir’s daughter, then tells her father that she has a plan to save the king, the kingdom, and its virgins, from the wrath their lord’s madness will surely heap upon them. She herself shall marry the king and rescue him from himself.

Face-to-face with the gynophobic monarch, a fearless Sheherazad playfully licks the dried blood off her fiancé’s fingers and admires the manly “sinew in your arms” on account of “lifting a heavy sword” with such regularity. A dazed Shahriyar responds that “You totally remind me of my girlfriend.” Upon their marriage, Sheherazad conducts him to bed, and, with her sister Dunyazad’s help, convinces the king to hear a story before she receives the same fate as the fifty-score-and-one who have gone before her. Sheherazad proceeds to tell him a gawdy story of an Arab prince who lusted for his lisping sister, then, before the end is reached, she insists that she is exhausted, “And we have business to attend to this night, do we not?” Haltingly and still confused, he begs to hear the end of the story; she assents, but informs the king that this story “then may only be understood if one first hears another story.”

Alan the Jewish hipster (his regal robes shed for a rumpled plaid shirt and jeans) then appears. He wanders the labyrinth of his own unconscious, sporting a conspicuously bandaged head wound. He is inarticulate, shabby, and makes little sense. He then stumbles upon the same “One-Eyed Arab” who introduced the character of Shahriyar. After the man shows Alan an incomprehensible TV program featuring Usamah bin Laden reciting lyrics from Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” Alan is transported to his apartment with his Palestinian girlfriend Dahna.

The scene shifts back to the king and his wily she-bard. She tells the story, smeared with unsubtle anti-colonial admonitions, of French novelist Gustave Flaubert and the Egyptian prostitute Kuchuk Hanem. After simultaneously enjoying her while writing a letter to his mother, a “Horrible Monster” creeps into the brothel to accost Flaubert in his sleep. He tells Flaubert that he regards this woman of the East as “an experience to be purchased” (something apparently unique to Western johns). “You think the world is a restaurant,” the “Monster” says. “That every word is a word in a menu. Listen to my tale for it will tell you what you really are.” The “Monster” then tells Flaubert Dahna and Alan’s awkward meeting story: “The Tale of Dahna and Alan Dershowitz.”

In a lecture hall at Columbia, Dahna, a graduate student, appears at a microphone during the Q&A session after a panel discussing academic boycotts of Israel. Alan Dershowitz—“a learned and powerful Jew, advisor to the Christian kings of America,” the “Horrible Monster” narrates—begins babbling empty, patronizing evasions over a brave, undaunted Dahna. She attempts to ask a polite question about why he does not support “a campaign for justice” modeled after the “successful campaign against Apartheid in South Africa.” Dershowitz will not let her speak, wheedles that she is an “extremist,” and talks over her until the moderator says that “we’ll have to move on to the next question.” After Dahna storms out, Alan, also a graduate student, follows her and tells her how much he admired her courage: “So that was uh great in there,” the slow-witted admirer blithers. “In that uh in the lecture you uh/ really held your own [sic].” He tries to make clear that “we [Jews] weren’t all like that. You know.” Their tedious dialogue is interrupted by the appearance of a livid Orthodox student, his tzitzit waving. He shouts at Dahna and accuses her—without reason, of course—of supporting “murderers and cancer,” since boycotting Israel will deprive sick people of life-saving Israeli medical technology. Alan shouts back at the crazed Chasid, who, now exposed in public as a coward who harasses women, retreats, defeated. Alan apologizes to Dahna on the man’s behalf; “I’m used to it,” she says stoically, adding that “It sounded like you were going to get violent.” Alan is rattled: “What? No. Jews, we’re loud, but we don’t, we’re not violent [sic]. We don’t engage in violence.” “Oh no?” the less than convinced yet ironically charmed Palestinian responds.

After calming down, Alan and Dahna embark on a flirtation. They find a building on the Chelsea pier where they watch the sun set, and Dahna tells Alan about her oil-rich Kuwaiti-Palestinian family with siblings spread across three continents. They then go dancing at an illegal rave. The rave becomes Shahriyar and Sheherazad’s bedroom, in which she and Dunyazad argue over whether to kill the king in his sleep, Sheherazad arguing in his favor. When he wakes up, Sheherazad distracts him with the story of Sinbad the Sailor and the blind Jorge Luis Borges. Borges tells the lost Sinbad that “You are not who you think you are,” for the text of The Thousand and One Nights is actually the work of a Frenchman who compiled a collection of famous Islamic stories, which was then translated back into Arabic, and then into English. Sinbad is as much a Western colonial invention as he is an authentic Arab folk hero. Borges then tells the tale of “Alan and Dahna in Palestine,” bringing the audience to the play’s defining location: Gaza.

Gunfire rocks and deafens the stage as Dahna ducks for cover holding a baby. The Israelis bombard Rafah while Dahna and Alan endeavor to aid the Strip’s besieged, destitute Muslims. Alan insisted that he and Dahna go there, seemingly out of moral obligation to prove that “We’re not all” like his namesake Dershowitz. Bullets careen left and right as Dahna narrates the hellish scene:

This is a bad night. We’re walking home after curfew with Mostafa, our translator, who has just taken his little girl to the Doctors Without Borders doctor. Something bad must have gone down today because soldiers start firing on us, that or they’re just bored maybe, or scared, but we hear, pok [sic]! Pok! Pok! Little chunks fly out of stone walls over our heads, small clouds of dust appear at our feet.

Dahna and Mostafa then see Alan the Jew standing frozen in front of the unseen Jewish soldiers. Ignoring their screams for him to run, Alan stands there, refusing to move, as the bullets fly over his head, slowly and purposely descending in height toward his skull. Finally, Mostafa runs and tackles him; he (the “One-Eyed Arab”) is shot in the eye. Though he lives, Alan is racked with guilt:

C / ALAN: I couldn’t move.

A / DAHNA: You were scared. It happens.

C / ALAN: It wasn’t that. I wanted to draw his fire. I felt like he knew, the soldier, somehow, that you and Mostafa were Arabs and I was a Jew, that if I stood there he wouldn’t kill me and you guys would. Get to safety [sic]. But then it was a game of chicken, like I was calling his bluff. I had this whole fantasy where he kills me, it makes the news, a Jew kills another Jew, they argue about it in the Knesset [sic].

Mostafa might die because of me.

Alan and Dahna move in together after they come home. But they are not happy. Alan is boring, immature, and immersed in not working on his dissertation, supposedly “about postcolonialism and internet porn.” Dahna’s sister Lubna has heard that she is living in sin with a Jew—however “exciting”—and she desires better for her. Lubna sets her up via the wonder of instant messaging with Asser, a rich Palestinian currency trader living in England. The two flirt half-heartedly; Dahna is tempted by his appearance and wealth in contrast to Alan’s nerdy, nose-picking idealism, but admits to herself that Alan was unlike other Jews enough to be “ready to die for me” in Gaza. She decides, however, to tell an oblivious Alan that she is interested in somebody else, and insinuates that she can’t stay with him anymore. When Alan finally figures out that she wants to leave him, he begs her to stay. She points out that he, of the two, is the one far more obsessed with post-colonial studies and anti-Israel politics; “Sometimes I wonder if I’m just some kind of Orientalist project for you,” she sighs. “I can’t be who you want me to be.”

At that moment, the first plane roars into the North Tower. A deafening blast rocks the entire world. The Lower Manhattan apartment nearly disintegrates. The scene melts away to medieval Persia, with Dahna and Alan transformed back into Sheherazad and Shahriyar. The crusaders are coming. They are savages who “know little of civilization, for theirs stopped evolving centuries ago and they remain as in ancient times,” Wazir warns his lord. Shahriyar’s realm is too weak to fight the onrushing murderers, but he refuses to flee, as he must hear just one more story before the barbarians “cut us all and fornicate with our bleeding wounds.” Sheherazad tells of “Alaeddin and His Magic Lamp.” The famous jin finds a dirty, lovesick Alan desperately looking for Dahna as the sirens blare and the city crumbles into wasteland. Alan says that his only wish is to find Dahna; the jin says that he can and will see her again, but it will come at a terrible price. Alan agrees, and then rushes to a bus stop where Dahna is getting off the M106 from the Bronx, wearing a blue silk scarf as a mask (or a veil). She is civil but not pleased to see him. The Orthodox student from Columbia then bursts from the shadows. As before, he starts shouting at Dahna, but now he tears the scarf off her face. He shrieks that she—“Arab scum”—is a “terrorist c—t.” He pulls out a brick to kill Dahna. Alan tries to stop him. The man smashes Alan in the head, who falls down bleeding and senseless. He then raises the brick against Dahna, the witness. She opens her duffle bag and pulls out Shahriyar’s sword, hacking off the bloodthirsty Jew’s arm. He scuttles away, groaning, into the smoke of 9/11. The final scene sees Dahna reading to Alan from The Thousand and One Nights, he lying comatose in a hospital bed with his head wrapped in bandages. She leaves the room and then returns as Sheherazad, Alan emerging from the bed as Shahriyar. They dance together as an eternal couple—united forever as schmuck and heroine.

Why do Jews find magic carpet rides so offensive?

The next morning, I arrived at the Paramount Center hoping—perhaps assuming—that the teachers and my fellow students would share my shock and disgust. We sat, as always, in a close circle on the filthy gray dance mats to say what we each thought of the play. I have no specific memory of what anybody else said, but such a blank is indicative of their obedient, fascinated approval. Then my turn came.

I recall my heart sinking and doubling in temperature, somehow sensing what was coming. Yet, I had to tell the truth: with a sheepish smile on my face, trying to stay calm and keep my language temperate, I launched into how “offended” I had been (a word I know I used), that the play was anti-Israel propaganda (if anybody knew what that meant), and that it was filled with bizarre anti-Semitic fantasies and self-satisfied anti-American nonsense. Then I remember awkward, surprised silence. Nobody said anything for a few eternal seconds. Maybe one girl, who was also Jewish, perhaps agreed with me faintly, or did so with sufficient brevity or moderation that my memory never preserved her opinion. One of the teachers, who had served as part of the play’s production staff—an otherwise decent woman who, before and after, was always kind to me—smiled and said something diplomatic. Then we moved on to the next kid. Or maybe I was last.

I do not remember the rest of that specific day, but I will never forget my “friends”’ polite, belittling reaction. My “five-week family,” as one of the girls had christened the group, looked at me as if I had eaten of the insane root that takes the revolution prisoner. If one were to dislike a play, I was learning quickly, the only acceptable reasons were technical: bad actors, ineffective directing, unwise lighting choices, a script which failed to build tension. My reason—that the play presented delusional lies about Jews and Israel dressed up in arch, high-brow avant-garde—was not on the list. A greater faux pas was that I displayed a lack of zeal for what almost every accredited acting teacher will tell you is theater’s highest purpose: to disturb bourgeois sensibilities—distaste for PLO misinformation apparently among them. If actors were going to make the world a better place someday, lippy Jews like me shouldn’t be so self-righteous. Israel, as everybody knows, is a tiny SS outpost only quadruple-chinned long-ago-decomposed Republican Klansmen support. “Artists” and people with brains and feelings—unlike quadruple-chinned long-ago-decomposed Republican Klansmen—value “Palestine over profits,” so to speak, so they understand that Dahna pulling an Obi-Wan Kenobi on the Wandering Jew is the only way to end a rollicking good magic carpet ride.

Said said so

Jason Grote describes himself as “a white, secular Jew” of a “Marxian” persuasion. Not surprisingly, too, as his Facebook page shows, he is a supporter of Ilhan Omar, prone to wearing a terrorist kufiyah scarf, and promised once that “I will find a way to urinate on you” if anybody accuses Bernie Sanders of advancing anti-Semitism—which, the socialist Forward says, he has. Yet, he, the crass literary snob who holds the most chic ideas in the wind, according to academia, is a non-conformist. Only people mad enough to see a commercial for the Hamas-supporting International Solidarity Movement—whom Grote’s own activism indicates he supports—and bother to complain are the stiffs.

And a pompous justification for jihad against Israelis is the only way to describe 1001. Since the same actor plays both Shahriyar and Alan, it cannot be irrelevant to Alan’s character that Shahriyar is a mass serial (child) rapist and serial killer, whose motivation is based purely upon petty sexual humiliation. Shahriyar is not only among the most pathetic characters imaginable, he is the ultimate coward. Due to tawdry penile envy and terror of female rejection, the tiny, weak, spineless king can only sooth his ego by massacring the most innocent and defenseless of his subjects. Israel, to Grote, appears to be the same: an evil, deranged tyranny so despicable and cowardly that it can only feed its thirst for power and security with the blood of Arab children. Alan the wimpy Jew is a righteous character only because he explicitly rejects his Jewishness and allegiance to his people’s nation-state. Further, Alan’s “fantasy” that a Jew killing another Jew would “make the news”—meaning that a Jew killing an Arab supposedly would not—lends fake evidence to the immortal anti-Semitic hallucination that the media are pro-Israel. He thus finds courage only when confronting Jews who do not reject their Jewishness, namely the unhinged Orthodox student and the murderous Israeli soldiers—who, like Amon Göth in Schindler’s List, kill when “bored.” As Jew-hating Columbia professor Joseph Massad once described Israel’s greatest achievement, 1001 can be summed up as “the transformation of the Jew into the anti-Semite and the Palestinian into the Jew.”

An even greater insult to human decency concerns the fact that, as some writers have mused in recent years, there are slight parallels between The Thousand and One Nights and the Book of Esther. Both depict beautiful, fearless heroines who hatch cunning schemes to rid the Persian Empire of an all-consuming evil. Both women marry dim, vain, thuggish potentates who believe they can preserve their rule only through mass slaughter. Both women successfully trick their degenerate emperors into giving might a rest and right a chance. The twisted irony of 1001, though, is that it seems to invert the holy story of Purim back on itself: Sheherazad as Esther (combined with Dahna the Arab) seduces the king (in place of wicked Israel) in order to free Muslims from the yoke of Jewish genocide. Considering that a comfortable majority of Muslims in both the U.S. and “Palestine” think that genocide against Jews is the most effective solution to Middle Eastern unrest, this fevered moral indulgence is as obscene as it sounds.

The script’s extensive “Selected Bibliography” section also memorializes Grote’s debt to anti-Israel propagandist Edward Said, whose infamous 1978 tirade Orientalism appears second down. Said, a staple of Columbia University for 40 years (and certified fake Palestinian), was arguably the founder of “anti-colonial studies” and the great-grandfather of American academic anti-Zionism. His professorial progeny includes shameless Columbian anti-Semites like Joseph Massad, Hamid Dabashi, Rashid Khalidi, and George Saliba, some of whom are known to have bullied their Jewish students.

The stories Sheherazad tells throughout the play preach Said’s well-debunked but academically beloved thesis that Western people, by definition, cannot interact with Islamic civilization in a way that is not distorted by racism. As the Borges character points out, The Thousand and One Nights was originally compiled by a European writer—meaning that the story itself is really an imposition of the imperialist Western imagination upon Arab culture. This slyly tempts the audience into wondering if Shahriyar’s brutality is nothing more than a projection of the perverse Western mind onto innocent, beautiful Islam. That Muslim violence is really all America’s fault, and Israel (a “creation” of Western imperialism) is far more Shahriyar than he is himself.

The play’s use of language, too—hokey and dull though it may be—suggests another layer of propaganda. Shahriyar and Alan, in contrast to Sheherazad and Dahna, are deliberately idiotic. The script gives actor “C” the word “uh” 29 times throughout the play. Alan especially can barely speak in complete sentences, whereas Dahna speaks clearly, eloquently, and intelligently. Because Alan is an echo of Shahriyar, he cannot truly understand words, so his Sheherazad, goddess and mistress of verbal inspiration, must educate him. Also (with two exceptions), only the Muslim characters consistently speak well or mellifluously. Only people from the culture of the Qur’an—poetry so sweet, Muhammad argues (absurdly, as it turns out), that its beauty must be proof of Islam—grasp the value and power of words. Where Western characters transplanted into Sheherazad’s stories like Gustave Flaubert are informed that they think “every word is [but] a word in a menu,” the Muslim characters’ lines are drenched in rich silks, crisp pastel colors, beguiling perfumes, fruits unknown to the primitive wilderness of Europe, and all the passion and pleasure of an Allah-fearing world without capitalism. The word “crusaders,” too, is equally telling, for it is an undisguised euphemism for Americans—the mocked victims of 9/11 included. And it is always used in contexts which imply that jihad directed against the United States is all the American people can expect after the events of the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries. What’s more, just after the first plane hits, “crusaders” invade Shahriyar’s kingdom. The historical inaccuracy intimates Grote’s intentions: the crusaders never came anywhere near Persia, therefore, their appearance is a crude caricature of the American invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. Invoking the once-fashionable slogan of George Bush the “crusader,” Grote makes it very clear who he blames for an Islamic terrorist attack: “It’s Bush’s fault,” Alan fumes, “the f—ing idiot.” Grote even reverses basic, obvious reality to demean a wounded West yet further: the Americans “know little of civilization, for theirs stopped evolving centuries ago and they remain as in ancient times”—a common, objective observation many have made of Islamic civilization. No shock, then, that the introduction declares the play itself to be no less than the “story of a final jihad against the infidel (insh’Allah).”

For such a slime as this

Since 2011, every one of the lies contained within 1001 have become sacred writ within American academia, and “educated” youth culture. It is taken for granted that Israel’s entire existence has been the longest “holocaust” in human history, Islam is simultaneously both peaceful and should destroy America, and Jews can only be allowed to exist if they burn the Israeli flag. Even bin Laden’s abhorrent rationalization for massacring innocent Americans has gained wet-eyed worship all over TikTok.

Though it appears 1001 has mercifully fallen into obscurity since the production I saw that far-off Arabian night, in its younger years, it enjoyed great popularity, being produced across the country and receiving praise from The Boston Globe, L.A. Weekly, New York Times, Village Voice, and Washington Post. So, too, as my program further revealed, Company One could not have edified me so without generous support from the taxpayer-funded Massachusetts Cultural Council and Boston Center for the Arts. This can only mean that a sizeable chunk of the American theater-going public—including patrons affiliated with city and state governments—thought anti-Semitic, pro-jihad plays a welcome night’s entertainment years before the Iraq War ended (though there is no evidence that the ear-splitting 2018 musical adaption took off). Only natural, then, that violent pro-Hamas protests should have paralyzed both Columbia and Emerson during the jihad-speckled 2024 spring semester. With polling now consistently showing support for Israel nearly gone amongst American leftists, that a full house would have clapped for such a play as this so long ago is less of a surprise.

Theater itself, my teachers told me endlessly in various ways, was about speaking truth to cowards, but this trauma planted the first seed in my mind that they, like all Marxists, were liars. Were the instructors who ran my class—people I had to trust—too stupid to notice that they had taken me to see a play which seemed to blame America and Jews for 9/11? The magic of the theater, as we all know, makes anything possible; but, at least, nobody with that many degrees has an excuse—especially to smile and tell me that my eyes need to buckle up for the “intifadah.” But, unlike Alan, I understand words, and I don’t need to become a dhimmi to learn their power.

“When your Lord revealed to the angels: I am with you, therefore make firm those who believe. I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Therefore strike off their heads and strike off every fingertip of them.”
—Qur’an 8:12

“Prepare against them what you believers can of military power and cavalry to deter Allah’s enemies and your enemies as well as other enemies unknown to you but known to Allah. Whatever you spend in the cause of Allah will be paid to you in full and you will not be wronged.”
—Qur’an 8:60

“Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth, (even if they are) of the People of the Book [Jews and Christians], until they pay the Jizyah with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.”
—Qur’an 9:29

Most Americans and Europeans probably first heard the word jihad in 2001. It was as bizarre, foreign, shocking—indeed novel—as the idea of quotidian passenger jets roaring into office buildings.

On the one hand, it was a chilling yet exotic term Usamah bin Laden used in declaring war against America. Much more often, however, it came in the form of Westerners attempting feverishly to reframe it—at worst, mysterious; at best, innocuous, or even positive.

The mystified media

In 2002, ABC News asked “Is Bin Laden’s Concept of ‘Jihad’ Correct?” One university student in Pakistan—as if students of anything, now or then, can be trusted to be helpful—described jihad “as a personal ‘struggle and strife against the evils of society, against anything,’” and said “it has nothing to do with killing innocent people.” ABC procured even less authoritative—let alone believable—answers from students at, of all places, “the Islamic al Ashar University in Gaza.” Two “definitions they offered were ‘to do your best’ and ‘to fight against evil and for charity.’” ABC informed its readers, without qualification, that “Islamic scholars insist that for most Muslims, the most important interpretation is: an individual struggle for personal moral behavior.” Its evidence for this was one scholar’s opinion: that jihad is “a very beautiful concept which is deep in the area of spirituality.”

In 2007, CNN denizen Christiane Amanpour devoted multiple minutes of her (infamously anti-Israel) three-part series God’s Warriors to how true jihad consists simply of everyday American Muslims navigating their adopted country’s irrational bigotry. Jihad in its purest form, said Amanpour, was just “a public display of faith… swearing off alcohol, praying five times a day, which isn’t easy in a typically busy American life,” an American life in which Muslims feel “singled out for surveillance.” A woman she interviewed—“a jihadist, just not the sort you’re thinking of”—said that jihad was “self-struggle,” and “my jihad” was “wearing hijab in the United States.” “I mean, holy war, really? Who made that up?” she insisted. “That’s really a very bad translation. It’s a self-struggle. Living in a secular society, where you have to work to maintain your Islamic values, that’s jihad.”

Sadly for the same Western media which constantly blame Israel for its enemies’ depravity, the post-9/11 love affair with the “greater” and “personal” jihad is supported by neither the Islamic sources nor historical fact.

Jihad in context

It is true that jihad means “struggle,” but not in the same way as the Hebrew word Yis’ra’el (Israel), which Rabbi Jonathan Sacks translates as “one who wrestles with God and with man and prevails.” The new name the angel of the Lord gives Jacob is to denote an explicitly spiritual dimension of struggle, since, in Genesis 32, the human patriarch has just wrestled with a spiritual being representing God. Jacob-Israel’s struggle with the angel becomes symbolic of his descendants’ struggle with their own humanity, and the God who has chosen them to bring His light to the world. As we can see from Islam’s foundational texts, and subsequent history, the so-called “radical” definition of jihad—military struggle against the Kafir (non-Muslim) by all means necessary and available—is the one borne out.

The best way to understand jihad is through its scriptural and historical context. In order to do that, the basics must be grasped first. Islam’s holy texts are comprised of a trilogy; most know of the Qur’an (believed to be the words of Allah delivered through Muhammad), but there is also the Sirah (the “life” or biography of Muhammad), and the Hadith (the many thousands of oral “traditions” preserving Muhammad’s sayings and actions). Each part of this trilogy complements the other in terms of the different types of information it provides: theological and ethical pronouncements venerated as prophetic (Qur’an), instructional stories and aphorisms (Hadith), and historical, biographical narrative (Sirah). All of them overlap somewhat, but Islam is incomprehensible without all three. It also cannot be practiced in any one portion’s absence: for example, the crucial Five Pillars of Islam originate from the Hadith, not the Qur’an.

Furthermore, Islam, let alone jihad, cannot be understood without the person of Muhammad. Qur’an 33:21 says that “Indeed, in the Messenger of Allah you have an excellent example for whoever has hope in Allah and the Last Day, and remembers Allah often.” This—buttressed by 90 other verses—is understood to mean that Muhammad is the perfect example of conduct for every Muslim. Combined, the Sirah and Hadith form what is called the Sunnah (“way” or “path”) of Muhammad. Therefore, what Muhammad said and did are of supreme importance. Even though the historicity of such sources have been legitimately and understandably questioned, these are still the beliefs of hundreds of millions of people.

The word jihad or obvious references to its practice occur a total of 164 times in the Qur’an. From a purely statistical perspective alone, jihad is not peaceful. References to its so-called “greater” form appear nowhere in the Qur’an, and of the nearly 1,400 ahadith in the Sahih al-Bukhari collection which clearly concern jihad with or without naming it, roughly 98% are in violent contexts. When the Sirat Rasul Allah (“Life of the Messenger of Allah”), Muhammad’s sacred biography, is factored in, the situation is even clearer. Unlike the Qur’an and Hadith—non-linear collections of disconnected, decontextualized sayings—the Sirah presents the cohesive, chronological story of the world’s first Muslim, and not once in the text does CNN’s variety of jihad appear. “The apostle [of Allah],” the Sirah says, “took part personally in twenty-seven… raids” as well as many battles and military expeditions, of which there were “thirty-eight… in number” (pp. 659–660). The Sirah also duly cites the historian at-Tabari’s differing respective count of 26 and 35 military operations. Showing preference for at-Tabari’s more conservative sums—excluding the many executions and 44 known assassinations Muhammad ordered of his enemies—this comes to 61 acts of jihad between his departure from Makah in 622 C.E. and his death in 632. This roughly averages one act of jihad every few months. In total, about 67% of the Sirah concerns military matters, 21% of al-Bukhari’s ahadith, and 9% of the Qur’an; taken together, roughly a third of the entire Islamic trilogy concerns jihad.

Crucially, too, jihad does not necessarily have to be violent. There are four types of jihad: of money, speech, writing, and of the sword. Jihad of money, for instance, is that practiced by organizations like the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) laundering money for Hamas; entities which fund anti-Jewish campus hate groups like Students for Justice in Palestine; or Arab countries which endow anti-Israel Middle East Studies departments at universities. Those of speech and writing (completely fungible in the electronic age) refer to da‘wah (Islamic proselytism), and taqiyah, the concept of deception and propaganda in the furtherance of Islam. As Muhammad says in the Hadith (Bukhari 3029), “War is deceit.” Jihad is not just physical conflict but civilizational war, utilizing all aspects of civilization in order to defeat non-Islam.

The life of Muhammad (c. 610–632 C.E.)

The Islamic scriptures document Muhammad’s evolution from an obscure preacher in Makah to the most powerful warlord on the Arabian peninsula. By the time of his death, every single Arab living within the peninsula was a Muslim. The Sirah shows us that this occurred not because Muhammad persuasively preached religion but because he became a military leader. He preached theology in his birthplace of Makah for about 12 years starting around the year 610, but failed to convert many of his pagan Arab neighbors, most of whom were members of his own tribe, the Quraish. Early in his career, Muhammad had preached some sermons which did encourage peace and charity, but, since this had not won him followers, his homilies changed. In his frustration and anger, says Ibn Kathir, one of Islam’s most admired scholars and Qur’an commentators, Muhammad began to insult the Makans’ ancestral gods and set one tribe against another. According to the Sirah (pp. 130–131), the infuriated Makans—who held a preference for religious tolerance between clans in order to secure the flow of trade—turned against Muhammad.

The sincerity of Muhammad’s belief in the reality of his God and his own prophethood is impossible to determine with any confidence, but Qur’an verses thought to date from this Makan period (for example, 33:37, 33:50, and 33:53) certainly illustrate the indulgent use he made of his exalted status. The Islamic sources themselves even acknowledge this: A’ishah, Muhammad’s “favorite” and most “beloved” wife—six-years-old at her marriage and nine upon consummation (a delay secured only due to disfiguring illness)—once told her husband that “I feel that your Lord hastens in fulfilling your wishes and desires.”

In the year 622, Muhammad left Makah and set out with his small band of around 150 followers for the town of Yathrib to the north. Another motive for his departure was that emissaries from Yathrib had sought his help in settling a dispute between two Arab tribes. He was also told that there were Jews there (roughly half the town’s population), who, with their knowledge of the Biblical prophets, surely would recognize his own claim to prophethood and accept Islam. When he arrived in Yathrib, however, Muhammad—whom the Qur’an indicates was illiterate (though some ahadith disagree)—was sorely disappointed. The well-educated Jews rejected him, because, among many other likely reasons, his pronouncements inaccurately recounted narratives from Tanakh’ (for obvious errata, see Qur’an 19:27–28 and 22:26, as well as Bukhari 3425). The repercussions of this rebuke remain with us to this day, for Muhammad saw the Jews’ refusal to acknowledge him as a prophet and convert to Islam as an unforgivable betrayal, as he had been counting on the “People of the Book” to affirm his status as a prophet. In addition to the Jews, the Arabs he found in Yathrib were no more interested in his sermons than his tribesmen back in Makah.

As the Sirah recounts, rejected by both the Jews and his own tribesmen, without new converts, and hamstrung by his followers’ continuing poverty, Muhammad began to preach sermons of the wrath of Allah. He then declared war upon the Makans, and his followers began to rob their camel caravans (pp. 280–287). Caravans were the life-blood of Arabia, as merchants would “invest” in one by parting with some of their own possessions, hoping that they would be traded for commodities valuable enough to be bartered for food to feed their families. Therefore, Muhammad’s practice of economic warfare hit hard at the foundations of Makan society, harming innocent non-combatants who had nothing to do with his war of revenge. Thus, when the Makans heard that Muhammad’s army was heading for a particularly large caravan, they rushed to defend it. This precipitated the Battle of Badr (624), the most pivotal military event in Islamic history, where an outnumbered Muhammad achieved a great victory over the non-Muslim Arabs and was able to take their wealth for himself and his believers (pp. 292–306). He had also broken the taboo against making war upon his own people. Muhammad then ordered the bodies of the defeated hurled down a well, then shouted at the dead in the middle of the night:

O people of the pit, you were an evil kinsfolk to your prophet. You called me a liar when others believed me; you cast me out when others took me in; you fought against me when others fought on my side.… Have you found that what your Lord [Allah] promised you is true?

p. 306

The fear Muhammad’s victory inspired across Arabia succeeded where his religious preaching had not: crowds now flocked to his ranks, for he had proven himself a great warrior, worthy of universal awe and respect. Yathrib was later renamed Madinah (“city [of Muhammad]”) in recognition of this fact. All of the chapters in the Qur’an containing violent verses come from after Muhammad left Makah and went to Yathrib in 622, the journey called the Hijrah. The chapters (suwar) which preach the most violence and repression (such as 2, 3, 4, 5, 8, 9, 24, 98, etc.) occur in the latter part of Muhammad’s prophetic career, when he himself became a jihadist. It was in Yathrib (Madinah) that Muhammad first embraced war (jihad) as a means of gaining power and converts. In fact, 622 is the first year of the Islamic calendar: the year when Islam finally began to achieve success.

Muhammad then turned his attention to the Jews. Three Jewish tribes inhabited Yathrib and its environs: the Banu Qainuqa, an-Nadir, and Quraizah. Muhammad began to preach furiously anti-Jewish sermons: for example, Qur’an 5:60 (the infamous verse of “apes and pigs”), 5:82 (in which “You will surely find the most bitter towards the believers to be the Jews and polytheists”), and 98:6 (in which Jews, and all of Allah’s other enemies, “will abide in the Fire of Hell,” for they “are the worst of creatures”). According to the Sirah, Muhammad then laid siege to the Banu Qainuqa’s quarter of Yathrib, for they, worried by his anti-Jewish sermons, broke a non-aggression pact to which they had reluctantly agreed when Muhammad first began to dominate the city. Once the Qainuqa surrendered—their lives spared only at the behest of an Arab ally—Muhammad exiled the tribe from the city forever, but, coveting their great wealth, stole all of their valuable possessions before sending them on their way (pp. 363–364).

In early 627, members of the Banu Quraizah moved against Muhammad, causing him to lay siege to their fortress at Dhul Qa‘dah for 25 days. When the Jews finally surrendered, Muhammad ordered trenches dug and commanded every pubescent male Jew be bound and beheaded before his eyes: according to differing accounts, between 600 and 900 Jewish men and boys were slaughtered that day (pp. 461–464). The women and young girls were divided as sex slaves amongst Muhammad’s soldiers, with Muhammad taking a widowed Jewish teenage girl, Raihanah bint Zaid, as a concubine (p. 466).

After Muhammad ordered the assassination of an elderly Jewish poet who had criticized him in his poems after he had lost two dear Arab friends at Badr (pp. 364–369), members of an-Nadir joined with Muhammad’s Makan enemies to fight in the Battle of the Trench (627). As at-Tabari recounts in his monumental History of the Prophets and Kings, when the Muslims finally emerged victorious, the same fate meted out to Banu Qainuqa befell most of an-Nadir, with Muhammad expelling them and confiscating their property (pp. 156–160).

Eventually, Muhammad came to confront what remained of Banu Quraizah and an-Nadir. Like an-Nadir, the Quraizah were wealthy date farmers who, in fear of Muhammad, had conspired with his enemies in self-defense. Therefore, says the Sirah, in the spring of 628, bent on plunder and revenge, Muhammad and his army attacked the oasis town of Khaibar, north of Yathrib, where the Jews were besieged within their fortresses. Unable to mount an effective counter-attack, the Jews surrendered after a siege of roughly two weeks. After their defeat, Muhammad cut a deal with those Jews he neither killed nor enslaved. With all of their wealth and date palm plantations already now Muhammad’s property, the beaten, terrified Jews offered to work the plantations and hand over half of their produce and income to Muhammad at the end of each year in return for both remaining Jewish and alive. Muhammad agreed (p. 515). From this emerged the Islamic doctrine of the dhimmi. A dhimmi is a non-Muslim who, in exchange for the right to remain alive without converting, must both pay the special dhimmi tax, the jizyah (“tribute”), and submit to a long list of humiliating regulations codifying his or her religious inferiority and social status as a non-citizen semi-slave. As the bereaved, weeping Jewish women were once again distributed as sex slaves, Muhammad took a trophy of another teenage girl for his harem, Safiyah bint Huyai (p. 511). Safiyah was the new bride of Kenanah ibn ar-Rabi’, Banu an-Nadir’s treasurer. Muhammad ordered Kenanah tortured to death—in vain—for the whereabouts of the tribe’s hoard of gold and silver by means of a fire kindled upon his chest (p. 515).

It is these massacres of Jews to which supporters of Hamas refer when they chant Khaibar, Khaibar, ya Yahud! Jaish Muhammd sawfa ya‘ud! (“[Remember] Khaibar, Khaibar, oh, Jews! The army of Muhammad shall return!”) It is this massacre of Jews which established the precedent for the kidnapping, enslavement, and rape of non-Muslim women. And it is Muhammad’s hatred for Jews which imams the world over echo when they utter his blood-curdling vision of the apocalypse:

The last hour would not come unless the Muslims will fight against the Jews and the Muslims would kill them until the Jews would hide themselves behind a stone or a tree and a stone or a tree would say: Muslim, or the servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him; but the tree Gharqad would not say, for it is the tree of the Jews.

(Sahih Muslim 2922)

The history of jihad (632–present)

Muhammad’s death in 632—from a wasting illness brought about after being poisoned by a Jewish woman whose husband, father, and uncle his followers had killed (Sirah, p. 516)—was only the beginning of jihad.

Muhammad’s empire consisted only of the Arabian peninsula (aj-Jazirah). His successors, however, were not satisfied with that. In fact, Muhammad himself had implored them to be dissatisfied. Armed with the commands of Qur’an 8:39, 9:33, 48:28, and 61:9, which called Muhammad’s army to make Islam the religion not just of their homeland but of the entire known world, those who assumed Muhammad’s throne proceeded to do just that. Known as the “rightly-guided ones” (Rashidun), these leaders, called khalifat (“caliphs”) dispatched their armies in all directions to capture—and colonize—territory in the name of Allah.

The first khalifah of the “rightly-guided” four, Abu Bakr (573–634)—the only one to die a natural death—ruled for too short a time to make much headway against the Byzantine and Persian Empires. The second, however, Umar ibn al-Khattab (c. 582–644), won dazzling victories against the Muslims’ large imperial neighbors. Severely weakened in the previous century by bubonic plague and costly wars, the Byzantines and Persians could not defend the edges of their territory. In 637, Umar’s armies conquered Jerusalem after starving the city for months. Around the turn of the following century, the Muslims built a mosque today known as the Dome of the Rock upon the Jewish Temple Mount as an emblem of Judaism’s defeat. Another mosque, the Masjid al-Aqsa, followed not long after. Then, between 639 and 646, the Arabs conquered Egypt, making the native Coptic Christians dhimmah and banning their ancient spoken language, so antique that much of it dates back to pharaonic times. Today, Christians, once the majority for centuries, make up only a tenth of Egypt’s population. Moving south, Muslim warriors quickly began seizing control of the rich trade along the Nile and advanced into the territory of the ancient black civilization of Nubia. Securing ivory and then gold from Nubia’s legendary mines rapidly progressed into enslaving large numbers of native Africans. Over the centuries, Arabs and then Islamized blacks pushed deep into the continent, reducing multitudes of non-Muslim blacks to slavery along the way. Thus began the Muslims’ more than millennium-long trade in black slaves, which would castrate untold thousands (itself amounting to genocide), facilitate the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and help to disperse around 25 million captive Africans across the planet from Brazil to China. No one may ever know how many blacks died as a result of Islam’s conquest of Africa; one rigid, perhaps low, estimate is 120 million. It is an abomination which continues today.

Uthman (c. 573–656), third of the Rashidun, expanded the jihad east into Syria, Iraq, Persia, and what is now western Afghanistan. Persia was mostly Zoroastrian, and Afghanistan was home to thriving communities of Buddhists, Christians, and Hindus, yet Islam supplanted all with ruthless efficiency, killing at least 10 million Buddhists in the process. Muslim warriors also moved deeper into western India at this time. The eight centuries of subsequent Islamic invasions of Hindu territory, the worst beginning in the eleventh century, would traumatize India forevermore. It has been estimated that as many as 80 million Hindus died as a result of jihad between the years 1000 and 1525. Jihad even carved itself into the very landscape of Asia. The mountain range called the Hindu Kush was named for the nameless masses of Hindu slaves who died as they were marched towards Afghanistan for sale. The name “Hindu Kush” means “kill the Hindu” in Persian. And jihad is the sole reason that it today exists within the borders of Afghanistan and Pakistan, rather than India.

The tenure of Ali (c. 600–661), Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law, as the fourth khalifah was crippled by fierce civil war. He claimed that Muhammad had chosen him (a relation by both blood and marriage), not Abu Bakr, as successor. Ali, eventually “martyred” by his enemies in Kufah in Iraq, became the first “imam” of Shi‘ah Islam, whose followers later took control of Persia. From this bloody schism—a jihad within a jihad—came the Sunni-Shi‘ah split which still plagues Islam to the present.

To the south in North Africa and to the east in what are now the Arab countries which encircle Israel, Muslims subjugated and destroyed more Greco-Roman-influenced Christian communities which had existed since the first century. Today, the Christian population of the Arab Middle East is in the single digits. Why? Because jihad has killed some 60 million Christians since the seventh century. 

In 711, Muslims invaded the Visigoth-ruled Iberian peninsula. The conquerors’ brutality was such that, in one incident in 715, they—according to one source—brought 30,000 slaves (many of them young girls), along with thousands of camels laden with looted riches, as tribute for the Umayad ruler of Damascus. Though the Shari‘ah would not always be enforced uniformly in later centuries, and some obedient non-Muslims gained high status, degradation and repression of Jews and Christians was much more the norm than the exception.

While only the subject of occasional allusion, such as in Victor Davis Hanson’s magnificent Carnage and Culture (pp. 198–200), the lurid cruelty of the men who conquered “New Spain”—the conquistadores—was very likely forged under the indirect influence of Islam. A Reconquista lasting the better part of eight centuries, from about 718 through 1492, seems to have bred a de-moralizing, reactionary fanaticism in the uniquely war-like Spanish Christians which beckoned them on to commit the atrocities which scar the history of the Western Hemisphere to the present. The conquistadors’ indiscriminate slaughter, rape, and enslavement of the native peoples, while hardly foreign to the pre-modern world, do vaguely parallel Islamic methods of submission. Perhaps only a kind of macabre replication of jihad in the name of crown and cross could replace mass human sacrifice with encomiendas and the casual ravaging of Indian women.

A generation after the invasion of Spain, Muslim armies moved further into Europe, especially France. Only defeat in the Battle of Tours, exactly one century after Muhammad’s death, in 732, halted the Muslims’ gallop towards Northwestern Europe. By 750 C.E., Islam reigned from Spain in the west to modern-day Pakistan in the east. And it would only expand from there.

With the rise of the Ottoman Empire, the Islamic Ummah (imperial “community” of believers) finally managed to gain a foothold in Europe. After taking the prize of Constantinople in 1453, the Turks proceeded west and north to capture Greece, the Balkans, most of modern Ukraine, all of Romania, and much of today’s Hungary. By 1683, they had reached and surrounded Vienna. Only a headlong charge by the Winged Hussars of Jan III Sobieski, the king of Poland, prevented Muslim armies from succeeding in the east where they had failed in the west at Tours.

Islam fought more than 500 battles against European and Christian civilization between 622 and 1918, more than 150 of which were in Spain alone. Almost none of those on the European mainland or in the Middle East and North Africa were defensive, and a great many were slave-taking operations. The bloodlust of the crusades—against Jews especially—is well-documented and correctly condemned, but it must be remembered that Muslim raiders first began attacking the European mainland in the seventh century. The First Crusade began in 1096, nearly four centuries after the Moorish invasion of Iberia. The crusades were a response to generations of military assaults across the breadth of Christendom and against Christian communities oppressed under the dhimmi system. The great crusades ended in 1291, whereas jihad continues to this day. Muslim-majority societies stretch from Senegal to Indonesia and Kazakhstan to Somalia.

Most of this geographical colossus was created not through peaceful persuasion but by jihad—in other words, colonialism. In fact, one of the new United States’ very first foreign policy crises was the scourge of Muslim pirates enslaving American sailors and their passengers off the coast of North Africa, precipitating the Barbary Wars (1801–1816). The U.S. Marine Corps, itself created to stop the piracy, proudly preserves its eventual pacification of “the shores of Tripoli” in its anthem.

Of no small importance, too, are the abhorrent Islamic practices which exist throughout not only the Ummah but now the West. Among the most prominent of these practices is child marriage. Because Qur’an 33:21 sanctifies all of Muhammad’s personal behavior as morally perfect, and commands Muslims to replicate it in their own societies, Muhammad’s marriage to a small child—who still played with dolls and on swings—is perfectly acceptable. Also, Qur’an 65:4 makes clear that “those who have not [yet] menstruated,” meaning prepubescent girls, are subject to the laws of divorce—therefore, of marriage, too. In the Muslim world itself, according to a 2019 UNICEF study, an average of 700,000 girls below the age of 18 are married to adult men every year; 1 in 25 will be married before they turn 15; and there existed nearly 40 million such marriages throughout the Middle East and North Africa. And, in Europe, Muslim men imitate this crime on conquered soil, grooming, trafficking, and raping non-Muslim girls regularly and with governments’ unforgivable complicity.

Israel’s wars are the world’s

Maimonides, among the greatest rabbis of all time, said in his Epistle to Yemen in 1172 that though the Jewish people were usually allowed to practice their religion under Islam, life (as dhimmah) under their Muslim rulers, whom he collectively calls “Ishmael,” was still terrible. As quoted in Joel Kraemer’s critically acclaimed biography, the soaring sage wrote that “Never has a people arisen against Israel more hurtful than [Ishmael], nor one that went so far to debase and humiliate us and to instill hatred toward us as they have” (p. 240). He wrote such words in recollection of how Muslims had driven thousands of Jews, including himself and his family, out of his native Spain in 1145 because they would not convert to Islam. Such misery, he said, could only be a divine trial.

The modern state of Israel itself was, in fact, forged in the fire of jihad. The War of Independence was a war of defiance not only against the gas chambers, but against jihad. Eleven Arab armies’ bid to finish Hitler’s work was not an act of geo-political “nationalism,” but of jihad. Hamas’s ineffable crimes are not because of “land” or a “cycle of violence,” let alone are they “resistance” to “occupation.” They are because of the doctrine of jihad, one which across 14 centuries has stolen perhaps 270 million lives and terrorized humanity across six continents.

Qur’an 8:60, calling for Muhammad’s followers to “Prepare against them [non-believers] what you believers can of military power and cavalry to deter Allah’s enemies and your enemies as well as other enemies unknown to you but known to Allah,” is quoted in the constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Despite what pseudo-conservative isolationists may say, the Islamic regime occupying Iran is among the most dangerous on earth. Apart from funding Hamas, it has been at war with the United States (the “Great Satan”) since 1979, and works madly towards a deliverable nuclear weapon. Jihad has real consequences which do not just affect Israelis. The West’s open borders and closed minds make sure of this.

We can do nothing to confront jihad—in Paris or London, Orlando or New York, Jerusalem or New Delhi—unless we understand its origin, true nature, antiquity, and its intentions. And, if we are to heed the words of Qur’an 9:33—that “the religion of truth… [shall] prevail over all others”—we must know that war against Jews—a people of only 15.7 million, amongst a globe of billions—is only the tip of the scimitar.

HonestReporting, an Israeli media watchdog group, was founded in October of 2000 in response to the infamous AP-New York Times scandal in which an Israeli border guard defending a bloodied American yeshiva student from a mob of Palestinian assailants was as identified as “An Israeli policeman and a Palestinian [sic] on the Temple Mount [sic].” On November 8, 2023, they published an investigative piece entitled “Photographers Without Borders: AP & Reuters Pictures of Hamas Atrocities Raise Ethical Questions.” In it they document at least six Arab photographers whose photos from that day were published by Western news agencies: Hassan Eslayeh (CNN), Yousef Masoud (New York Times), Ali Mahmud (AP), Hatem Ali (AP), Mohammed Fayq Abu Mostafa (Reuters), and Yasser Qudih (Reuters). All based in Gaza, these photographers accompanied the Hamas incursion into southern Israel on October 7, and, in addition to taking pictures of themselves in front of burning Israeli tanks, also rode with them in their vehicles, and took photos of the atrocities Hamas committed.

HonestReporting wonders whether their presence that early on a sleepy Saturday morning at precisely the place Hamas breached the fence was mere coincidence; or, were they “embedded” with Hamas troops? Moreover, vis-à-vis the news agencies that used their pictures—including one in Reuters’ “In pictures: Seven days in Israel and Gaza” montage (number 43 of 46) of a dozen men mobbing the body of a dead soldier (à la the infamous 2000 Ramallah lynching)—did they realize what was happening in order for them to get these photos? Or, if they did, did they wonder how their photographers got these shots? Did they say to themselves they were “doing what photojournalists always do during major news events, documenting the tragedy as it unfolded”? War correspondents embed with troops all the time; what’s wrong with photographers ready to accompany forces on a mission?

Of course, the answer is—at least for those who claim to care about humanitarian laws of warfare and journalistic ethics—that this was not a military mission, but a mass murder. Were there Hutu photographers who coordinated with Hutu genociders when they went out on their missions to slaughter 800,000 Tutsis? There may have been photographers then who filmed the massacres because they had the (mis)fortune to be there as it happened, but… embedded with the Hutus? As Jonathan Tobin put it: “legitimate journalists don’t tag along with criminals in the commission of their crimes and take pictures of them as if they were paid to record a wedding for posterity.”

Who are these people? And why have they become a mainstay of news from Gaza? 

Here’s one of the photographers whom CNN and the AP used as a stringer taking pictures of Palestinian suffering. 

And now, ask yourself: how many of the other photographers listed in the article, when they look at this photo, feel disgust, and how many envy?

The news agencies involved have all insisted that they had no foreknowledge of the attack and that the photos they used were published 45 minutes after the attack (Reuters) and 90 minutes later (New York Times). Of course, we need to know when the photos were taken, not published. We need to know what photos these “journalists” took that the agencies did not publish. We need not denial but transparency.

They also warn against such accusations which endanger the journalists. Of course, one has to ask here: Have not these photographers, some of whom are riding along with the “fighters,” purchased their “safety” by siding with the people who would not hesitate to kill them if they thought they were not supporting the cause? What would have happened to any reporter who was not pre-approved by Hamas? When the AP claims that “No AP staff were at the border at the time of the attacks, nor did any AP staffer cross the border at any time,” are they just covering their rears (they’re using photos from “free-lancers,” not staff)? Or do they realize whom they are paying for these photos? (For more on the media response, see also my conclusion.)

Right at the beginning of the Oslo Jihad (so far, a 23-year long war), a BBC correspondent, Fayad Abu Shamala, proclaimed at a Hamas rally in Gaza on May 6, 2001—that is five months into the horrific suicide terror campaign—that “journalists and media organizations [are] waging the campaign shoulder-to-shoulder together with the Palestinian people.” When the Israeli government showed the tape to the BBC, they responded: “Fayad’s remarks were made in a private capacity. His reports have always matched the best standards of balance required by the BBC.” Some years later, evidence emerged that Abu Shamala was a member of Hamas. Were the BBC aware of the humiliating irony in their statement, a reflection not of Abu Shamala’s high standards but their abysmally low ones? Or did they believe their own PR?

In the meantime, the Western press corps, especially in coverage of what was narrowly declared the “Israel-Palestine conflict,” took in large numbers of journalists whose Arab or Islamic media agenda overruled any commitment to ethical or professional standards. Even minimal ones. For them, as for their apologists in the West, this is all “a means of communication… the weapons of the weak.”

Al Jazeera embodies this combination of high technical production standards and “patriotic” war-propaganda-as-news. Despite Al Jazeera’s strong agenda in favor of the Muslim Brotherhood and its Palestinian branch Hamas, the watchdog Media Bias/Fact Check described them having a “slight to moderate liberal [sic] bias… [their] straight news reporting… a minimal bias.” And yet, in 2008, when Israel released Samir Kuntar, imprisoned in 1985 for the Nahariya massacre in which he smashed the head of a four-year-old Israeli girl against a rock, he not only received a hero’s welcome in Lebanon, but Al Jazeera “journalists” in their Beirut office held a birthday party for him. Hamas gave them an award for their “highly professional coverage of Gaza,” for “demonstrat[ing] their belonging to the cause of the oppressed Palestinian people” and their “high level of nationalism.” When Israel threatened to expel Al Jazeera for their widely known violations of professional journalism, the guardians of press freedom objected.

Indeed, in the early years of the Oslo Jihad (2000–2002), there was a systemic partisanship in Palestinian journalism that insiders knew about but kept from their audiences—a “public secret.” Everyone in the news media world knew it, but they would never say it publicly. I was let in on this secret for a moment, sitting with Charles Enderlin and watching the uncut rushes that he got from his cameraman of 12 years, Talal Abu Rahmah, that ended with the 59 seconds capturing the “death” sequence of Muhammad al-Durah (“le petit Mohamed”) on September 30, 2000. Enderlin, a French-Israeli senior correspondent for France2, had edited those last 59 seconds to put together his famous broadcast: “the child, target of fire coming from the Israeli position… is dead.”

What we saw were repeated efforts to stage plausible scenes that the Western news agencies could use as background to the tale of Palestinian valiance and victimhood they tirelessly recited. At one particularly obvious fake (which Enderlin later cut before showing the footage to the court), I asked Enderlin, “Why so much faking?” “Oh, they do that all the time. It’s a cultural thing.” When I asked him then, how did he know they didn’t fake the al-Durah story, he responded, “Oh, they couldn’t fool me.” It was this experience that inspired the term “Pallywood.”

This off-the-record confession of the complete unreliability of Palestinian news sources was repeated a while later when three French journalists got a chance to view the same footage that I saw. The non-stop staging they saw “troubled them deeply.” When confronted with the obvious fakes, the France2 senior staff responded as had Enderlin:

And when we said to them, “You can see it’s staged,” one of them [Didier Eppelbaum] said, smiling, “Yes, but you know well that it’s always like that.” [We replied:] “You may know that, but your viewer doesn’t know it’s always like that.”

At least at the time of their interview on Jewish radio, the two distinguished journalists still got indignant at these “outrageous” violations of their code. But a word from higher up (reportedly Jacques Attali) sufficed to kill the story. Instead, the guild of journalists gathered around to save Enderlin from having his “honor” impugned by mere citizens.

So, in public, at least, the position of the media must be the exact opposite of the public secret: in his 2010 book of self-justification, A Child is Dead [sic], Enderlin sings Abu Rahmah’s praise: “Never failing in his professionalism, Talal is a most credible source, and has been employed by France2 since 1988.” Enderlin assured Esther Schapira, “Talal abu Rahmah is a journalist like me; he’s a prima facie witness. He told me what happened. I’ve no reason not to believe him.” Like the BBC about Abu Shamala, Enderlin doesn’t seem to understand the devastating irony when he states: “he’s a journalist like me.”

No, actually, in this and many cases, Enderlin is a journalist like Talal. When asked by an Israeli journalist why he made the most explosive accusation about “the target of fire from the Israeli position,” Enderlin replied, “If I hadn’t said that the child and father were victims of shooting coming from the direction of the IDF position, they’d say in Gaza ‘How come Enderlin does not say it’s the IDF?’” So he not only accepts uncritically the work of his cameraman, he also takes crucial instructions from the Palestinians!

The Western media have played this dishonest game for a long time. In his co-authored book on his years working as the head of the Israeli Press Office, Israel and the Foreign Media, Daniel Seaman recounts multiple examples of agents of Hamas being paid by Western press services. As Talal promised his audience in his thank you speech to the Arab Media Awards gala ceremony (Dubai, September 2001): “I will continue to fight with my camera.”

When Esther Shapira asked the head of PATV why they inserted a picture of an Israeli soldier from three days later, firing rubber bullets at crowds, into the footage of the al-Durah scene—so that their viewers saw an IDF soldier aiming at and shooting the boy—he answered:

These are forms of artistic expression, but all of this serves to convey the truth…. We never forget our higher journalistic principles to which we are committed of relating the truth and nothing but the truth.

Like Hamas rewarding Al Jazeera for their “highly professional coverage,” this is modern language used in a profoundly anti-modern context.

Nor is this aberrant behavior. On the contrary, it is prescribed: the Arab and Muslim formal “journalism” codes explicitly demand partisan behavior—support my side, right or wrong—especially when it comes to Israel:

To combat Zionism and its colonialist policy of creating settlements as well as its ruthless suppression of the Palestinian people… Islamic Media-Men should censor all material that is either broadcast or published, in order to protect the Ummah from influences that are harmful to Islamic character and values, and in order to forestall all dangers.

And yet, somehow, the German scholar and “Islamophobia” specialist Kai Hafez insists: “there is a broad intercultural consensus that standards of truth and objectivity should be central values of journalism.” 

On the contrary, as one honest Jordanian editor noted, “fake news has a long and distinguished pedigree in the Arab world.” And when, on rare occasions, self-censorship fails and Muslims begin to publicly criticize Muslims, an “honor-brigade” steps in to save Muslim face. Western journalists, who depend on these media-men, who trust them and “have no reason to doubt” them, thus pump unfiltered (enemy) war propaganda into the public sphere.

This partisan journalism does not stop at aiding and abetting terrorism. On August 9, 2001, college student and TV newsreader Ahlam Tamimi, a Jordanian, used her press credentials as a journalism student to accomplish one of the most heinous of the suicide terror attacks, deliberately targeting religious children at a kosher Sbarro pizzeria in downtown Jerusalem. Sixteen innocents, among them three American women, were murdered. Tamimi subsequently made clear that she has no regrets and that, given the opportunity, she would do it again. And, in honor of her efforts, Palestinian students erected a papier-mâché exhibition where people could come and savor the moment of the blast.

Tamimi, released in the same 2011 exchange that freed Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, was greeted joyfully in Jordan where, from 2012 to 2016, she hosted her own television program. The U.S. Department of Justice repeatedly called on Jordan to hand her over for extradition under the 1995 U.S.-Jordan treaty, which Jordan has refused. And U.S. diplomats worry that, given her broad popularity among Jordanians, her extradition might destabilize the monarchy. Few phenomena speak more eloquently to the broad support in Arab countries allied with the U.S. for the merciless targeting of Israelis and Jewish children.

This is, we must admit, despite our fondest hopes for a world at peace, another world. 

Does this mean all Arab journalists are terrorists, or terror supporters, abettors, sympathizers? Not necessarily, but those questions need to be legitimately raised about the work of any Arab journalist, especially when his or her product is highly compliant with Palestinian media protocols. 

We were all witnesses to the power of this alliance between post-fact “narrative” journalism and pre-fact, propaganda journalism. The consequences were and continue to be devastating on a global scale. On October 17, 2023, just before 7 P.M., an explosion occurred in the parking lot of the al-Ahli hospital in Gaza City. The explosion, by military standards, was minimal, and the fire ball that followed, though briefly impressive, only burned a half dozen cars, with structural damage to three. The hospital had some windows blown out by the blast, but remained intact. Informed estimates put the death toll at a high of 50, and probably fewer. (The only two photos showing multiple bodies have around 20.) The most impressive one in the courtyard of the hospital is surrounded by people with no sign of further bodies anywhere.

Hamas decided to play this one for all it’s worth. They claimed that an Israeli airstrike bombed the hospital itself in a “horrific” and “criminal” attack. With thousands crowded around the hospital seeking safety from the savage Israeli bombing, it led to over 500 of them being killed, and the death count would probably rise as bodies were dug out from the rubble. What proof did they offer for these claims? Pictures of hundreds of bodies? Pictures of the destroyed hospital and the workers digging victims from the rubble? Pictures of the giant crater and the belongings of the thousands of people who had taken shelter there? Shrapnel and other fragments of the missile that struck?

Nothing of the sort. The fragments had mysteriously vanished from the site, “making it impossible to assess its provenance,” according to the New York Times. Actually, not impossible at all. The removal of the shrapnel from their own rockets is a standard Hamas operating procedure in cases of shortfall, a tell-tale proof of provenance.

Instead, what the stations showed was a medley of short, jerky, un-focused pictures of bodies being removed in the chaotic darkness. It’s not clear whether this is how the footage came, or—in time-honored Pallywood style—CNN’s editors strung together the most striking sight-bytes to give the impression of a massive catastrophe. CNN’s reporters certainly were convinced, referring repeatedly to the “horrific images,” warning that the pictures viewers were about to see were “horrendous… sickening… heart-wrenching… graphic scenes of utter destruction.”

And yet, these actual shots that CNN used over and over to illustrate their claims, they don’t add up to much at all. Looked at dispassionately, these photos offer no evidence for any of Hamas’ accusations—nothing showing damage to the hospital, nothing indicating the presence of hundreds of deaths, or thousands of people gathered there to seek shelter, no picture of the huge crater caused by the “massive” blast that killed so many.

And yet, so mesmerized were the entire pack of CNN journalists, that for the next 17 hours (at least)— hours after the IDF had presented the evidence to them—CNN played the same medley of videos, each time with a somber warning, each time accompanying the narratives about a horrific catastrophe that had killed hundreds, “with a rising toll expected as bodies are pulled from the rubble.” Over and again CNN recited the tale (for which they had no photographic evidence) that the ceiling of the hospital’s operating room caved in during surgery.

So convinced were these shrewd journalists of the massive nature of the blast, that when the Israelis claimed it was a Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) rocket, the response was incredulity: “that is a lot of damage for one rocket.” Clarissa Ward, claiming expertise based on her experience, but reading from Hamas talking points, expressed doubts about Israel’s case: “I will say, based on seeing these rocket attacks, that they don’t usually have an impact like that in terms of the size of the blast, the number of the death toll.” Narrative over evidence.

It was a common response: BBC correspondent Jon Donnison told viewers on the evening of the explosion: “It’s hard to see what else this could be, really, given the size of the explosion, other than an Israeli air strike, or several air strikes,” adding, “When we’ve seen rockets being fired out of Gaza, we never see explosions of that scale.” You still haven’t. Later, Jeremy Bowen noted that investigators would question whether Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the group Israel accused of causing the devastation with a misfired rocket, had the firepower to flatten an entire building. Long after pictures of the parking lot were available, Mustafa Barghouti and Khaled Elgindy could still claim on CNN that the number of dead—500, 600 “instantly”—was way too high to be a rocket shortfall… and they received no pushback.

The New York Times wrote extensive articles quoting witnesses who spoke of bodies overflowing from morgues and bodies piled up in the area reserved for journalists—and yet not one cell-phone photo from any of those journalists to corroborate? Chief correspondent Patrick Kingsley even seriously quoted an allegedly professional photographer claiming that “[t]here were so many bodies I couldn’t even photograph them!” And Anderson Cooper, with an equally grave face, repeated these statements as evidence of the “the massive explosion” that caused this “human tragedy on a terrible scale.” Of course, relying on the reporting of their very own “video journalist” in Cairo, Yousur Al-Hlou, even after it was clear the hospital wasn’t touched, the Times continued to get information that confirmed the Hamas narrative.

In other words, for hours on end, CNN (and many other reporters) informed their viewers of an event that never happened, for which they had no evidence, describing bodies pulled from rubble that never existed, from the collapse of a hospital that was entirely intact, and wringing their hands over the damage this has done to both Israeli and American interests. And all that folly, because they trusted their Palestinian sources—from Hamas, to the staff at the hospital, to the stringers whose camera work they used for their Pallywood medley, to the human rights workers who habitually see no terrorism and, here, repeated the lies as authoritative. When asked how the New York Times could have believed a terror group like Hamas so soon after they had shown the world their true self, Helene Cooper responded, “It was not only Hamas who said it. There were other Palestinians who said it as well. We had reporters who were there who spoke with Palestinians, spoke with Hamas, and spoke with other groups.” QED.

When at last, dawn broke some twelve hours after the blast, and photos of the parking lot with the damaged cars and the intact hospital, and the tiny crater, finally emerged in the light of day, it took CNN another six hours to show this evidence to their audience, meanwhile playing the “he-said-she-said” game:

At no time in the lengthy discussions (some 80% of news time given to this) did any CNN anchor or correspondent ask what these pictures meant for the Hamas narrative they had been conveying as news all night. No thoughts about non-existent rubble, intact hospitals, lack of evidence of thousands of Gazans sheltering, of hundreds dead. On the contrary, as the presidential plane landed, Becky Anderson noted how President Biden’s mission had been turned upside down by this event:

…[G]iven what we saw [sic] here at 7:00 yesterday, the enormous loss of life [sic] by an explosion at the hospital… and now you see [sic] this incredible loss of life [sic], at a hospital, I mean this is just the sort of thing that nobody hoped to see [sic] and what is unfolding on the ground is very, very devastating [sic].

Long hours after she had ample evidence to the contrary, she repeated with her own heart-felt emphasis what Hamas claimed. As for the “sort of thing that nobody hoped to see…” aside from the fact that some in Gaza, and without, welcomed such a catastrophe that they could blame on Israel—a game changer!—what does it mean about what Becky Anderson wants, that she still sees this “awful catastrophe” that didn’t happen?

When just before noon, Israeli Army spokesman Peter Lerner challenged Anderson to stop playing the two-sides narrative and pay attention to the evidence (which she had still studiously avoided analyzing), she cut him off indignantly:

PETER LERNER: If you’re asking for proof, you don’t really want the proof, you just want to make sure you have a story, and unfortunately there’s so much premature reporting…

BECKY ANDERSON: [Interrupts] I don’t want you to suggest… Hang on Peter that is unfair. I don’t want you to suggest that we are not seeking the truth. Peter Lerner, we are trying to seek the proof… please don’t suggest that we are not trying to identify the truth because that is exactly what we are doing.

LERNER: You’ll never be content with whatever I share because you’ll ask for more and more and more…

ANDERSON: [Interrupts] I am reporting what other people, what the Palestinians are asking for.

LERNER: But it’s not the Palestinians, you are parroting what Hamas is saying. 

ANDERSON: [Interrupts] Okay I’m going to leave it there. It’s good to have you, Peter Lerner, it’s good to have you…

LERNER: …They have been manipulating you.

ANDERSON: Understood. We are trying to nail down the facts. Good to have you with us.

Let’s just try an alternative universe of possibility. When the Western news agencies received the claims of the Hamas-run Health Ministry and the Pallywood footage from their cameramen, if they had, before running the story, demanded shots of the hospital damage, of the crater, of the hundreds of bodies strewn everywhere… if they had had real journalists working for them, prepared, with all precautions, to interview people who were there about Hamas activity after the strike (removing shrapnel)… if they had awaited Israeli response and intelligence… if their first headline had been “HAMAS OFFICIALS BLAME ISRAEL FOR PALESTINIAN ROCKET THAT, ACCORDING TO THEM, KILLED 500 GAZANS”… then maybe our “allies” in Jordan, Lebanon, and Iraq (not Iran), threatened by their angry “street,” could have used this information to undermine the anger. After all, it’s pretty humiliating when your own side kills your own people in front of the world.

And even if it had only a limited effect on the Arab and Muslim world—where, as the Western reporters, in full Orientalist mode, admit that evidence will have no impact on the rage-inducing belief that Israel did it—certainly in the West, where there are still people for whom evidence matters (or at least, like the CNN pack of reporters, claim that evidence matters), this could have had a major impact on taking the air out of the tires of the brutal, intrusive, violent protests in favor of Palestinian “resistance” after Hamas showed what that meant.

Maybe if the media had behaved professionally, rather than like “stenographers” for Hamas; if Agence France-Presse had behaved like a serious operation, rather than as “Agence France-Palestine”; maybe if they reported on the evidence that Hamas will fire on its own people, to keep them from fleeing from Israeli fire and that Gazans are arming themselves to fight Hamas’ predatory greed; maybe if the Washington Post didn’t remove a bitingly accurate political cartoon because “it was seen by many readers as racist,” and then publish a long list of complaints about the unflattering caricature (as if that is not the very stuff of political cartoons); then maybe the media and the politicians who take them seriously wouldn’t wring their hands over Israel killing Gazan babies and women, and using figures from the very people who will kill them to prevent them from not being killed by Israel and who, on principle, label all casualties civilian, preferably children.

Then, maybe, Hamas would not be able to brag, as they did in 2014, that their propaganda “constituted the river from which the global media quenched its thirst for information about what was happening.”

Perhaps the best way to close the circle of this discussion is to bring in the New Yok Times’ reaction to the HonestReporting article about, among others, Times photographer Youssef Masoud (emphasis mine):

The accusation that anyone at The New York Times had advance knowledge of the Hamas attacks or accompanied Hamas terrorists during the attacks is untrue and outrageous. It is reckless to make such allegations, putting our journalists on the ground in Israel and Gaza at risk. The Times has extensively covered the Oct. 7 attacks and the war with fairness, impartiality, and an abiding understanding of the complexities of the conflict [sic].

The advocacy group Honest Reporting has made vague allegations about several freelance photojournalists working in Gaza, including Yousef Masoud. Though Yousef was not working for The Times on the day of the attack, he has since done important work for us. There is no evidence for Honest Reporting’s insinuations. Our review of his work shows that he was doing what photojournalists always do during major news events, documenting the tragedy as it unfolded.

Aye, there’s the rub. In its self-confident, defensive, cognitive egocentrism, the New York Times arrogantly assumes that its cameraman also saw these events as a “tragedy,” not a glorious victory to which he contributed by “fighting with his camera.” And, not to pile on the humiliating ironies, an organization dedicated to press freedom, weighed in on the side of the news media in denial. Good to know that the media’s honor trumps any professional commitments to what Becky Anderson so quaintly calls “the truth.” And even as they insist on their self-righteous denial, the legacy media continue to feature the work of the most flagrantly pro-terror reporters.

As Schiller noted: Mit Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens (“With stupidity the gods themselves struggle in vain”).

A popular conventional Indian folksong goes along the lines of: 

O Traveller, Keep Vigil.

 There are thieves eyeing your belongings.”

Conventional wisdom usually has layers of meaning.

In its most sublime and subtle form, this song exhorts a human being to be wary of temptations which are constantly trying to steal away our awareness.

At face value, it just means: watch out, the evil is around you, trying its best to harm you.

Tragically, conventional wisdom often encounters ridicule from individuals obsessed with showing off their moral uprightness and one-upmanship over others.

It is not uncommon in the world today for someone who is given the above advice, to say, “Why would anyone take somebody else’s belongs? It’s not logical.”

Or, “It is disrespectful to suspect a person before he has done anything.”

Or, “Are you teaching me to hate others?”

Since no thief goes around with a “I am here to rob you” sign, lame arguments like the ones above often go uncontested and the evil finds its way to its targets unopposed.

It is this precise sentiment that has helped evil thrive all over the world for centuries.

It is this precise sentiment that has caused Jihad to expand from being a local plague to a global pandemic. 

The ticking time bomb 

It would only be to our peril to shut our eyes to this ticking time bomb.

In the past several centuries, India has experienced extreme forms of the violence of Jihad. The list is endless, but to quote a specific event that illustrates something very important at the core of this menace:

In the 1920s, the region of Malabar in coastal South India saw one of the most horrifying genocides of Hindus. 

When asked his views on these incidents, the Supreme Leader of the Indians at that point of time—who is hailed all over the world as a “saint”—said that he could not blame those brave people for “practicing their religion in the form their religion prescribes them.”

When the situation spiralled out of control, the “saint” eventually sent out a plea to the Jihadis to give up violence.

The Jihadis responded: “Why should we listen to a non-believer”?

That pretty much sums up the state of affairs, the reason and the consequences of everything related to Jihad in India, and the rest of the world.

The “mysterious” phenomena of Jihad

Jihad is one of the most mysterious psychological phenomena. Having thrived for one and a half millennium now, it is a mystery on how a faith that has an explicitly open declaration of intent that “no body on the Earth has a right to exist unless he subscribes to our systems,” a faith which has no hesitation in declaring its intent of annihilating everyone who doesn’t come within their fold, manages to garner a huge amount of support from a large quarter of the world, including the ones who are the worst victims of their monstrosity.

It would be very simplistic to dismiss these as cases of “Stockholm Syndrome.” It is important for us to understand the distinct psychological mechanism at work, if we intend to come up with a definitive strategy to combat this menace.

In this article, we will look at four prominent causes of why this terror phenomenon has been thriving all these centuries and only grown both in its scale of terror as well as the monstrosity of it.

Here are the four pretty masks that hide the grotesqueness of Jihad and allows it to flourish.

1. The impact of permanent pain and persistent trauma.

Human beings cannot exist in a state of cognitive dissonance. We cannot be in a state that is out of sync between our internal and external world. We are wired to dissolve all dissonance and reach a state of internal equilibrium, either changing our external circumstances to match our inner world, or changing our internal world to match the outside.

If the “external” refuses to change, the internal state is bound to alter to match with the external reality.

We are wired for “normalization.” If I wear shoes weighing five pounds all the time, that would become the normal feel for feet and footwear. When I take off those shoes, I would feel awkward and may go back to put on that weighty shoe.

If we are exposed to a situation that contradicts our internal state of mind for a long period of time, two things could potentially happen:

1. If we can, we would move out of that state causing the dissonance and find a more resonant existence.

2. If we cannot, we would finally align with the state around us.

The whole psychology of Jihad has been to stand doggedly to its explicit agenda of annihilating everyone who does not subscribe to their faith, severe consequences for practitioners who do not follow the mandates of the religion, and extreme consequences for those who abandon the faith.

Even if one feels abhorrent toward and disgusted with this perennial state of fear, we cannot live in a state of abhorrence and disgust for long. Our emotions seek a neutral and positive existence, and when we are assured that this is how the world around is going to be, we tend to get neutral and eventually positive about what is.

All conversions to this religion take place through a mix of two extreme emotions – extreme fear and extreme greed. It is common to come across individuals, who within days of their conversion, display extremely hateful behaviour against their family and friends and treat them with the same disdain as they would treat any other disbeliever.

Humans are normally wired to move away from pain and toward pleasure, but if the consequences of moving away from pain are horrifying, that pain becomes normalized.

The Subconscious Defence Mechanisms

Psychology states that we have several automatic defence mechanisms that our subconscious mind resorts to in order to protect ourselves from various crises.

One of these is a mechanism called displacement, which causes one to substitute their original target and aim, masking it with a safer option.

In India, even when a person feels disgusted with the brutalities of Jihad, he is aware that is not safe to express this disgust in its original form. The defence mechanism of displacement triggers into action, causing him to direct his disgust to the safest option in India – Hinduism. 

In India, all atheists, rationalists, sceptics, and wokes vent their angst against the monstrosity of Jihad and its foundational faith by ridiculing and criticizing Hinduism. They get to express their emotions, directed through a safe channel.

An extremely absurd instance of this was seen a few years ago, when PETA (People For Ethical Treatment of Animals), which incessantly campaigns against the killing of animals, put out billboards during Id-ul-Azha, the Muslim festival of goat sacrifice, to appeal to people to avoid the killing of animals.

No, the billboards were not intended to request for non-killing of goats during Id-ul-Azha. The campaign was an appeal to Hindus to not gift leather goods during the upcoming Hindu festival at the same time.

The safety valves in place ensure that the religion gets away with all acts of terror with no opposition either physically or ideologically.

2. ‘Universal Brotherhood’ vs. ‘Self-Centredness.’

It is popularly believed that this entire faith functions as a universal family, and they stand by in unison as a family would.

Anybody who looks beyond the surface knows the lie that this is. They are driven into factions. Each faction asserts its own superiority and dismisses all other sects as “disbelievers.”

How is it that they always appear to be speaking in one voice? 

Why, then, do they stand together on every matter in the world that pertains to them?

Ten photocopies of a document look all the same, not because there is a sense of unanimity between the photocopies.

They all look the same because they are copies of one original.

The faith has played the masterstroke of appealing to the foundational emotion that drives every aspect of our existence: self-centredness. 

Every practitioner of the religion works for his own highest good in the afterlife. When they appear to be one, they are not standing by each other or fighting for a common cause. 

Each individual just stands by the triad of the Almighty, his representative, and the Book. Each of them is actually salvaging his position in the afterlife by defending this triad and hence, they all appear to be speaking the same voice and doing the same things, but they are all doing it for exactly their own selfish end.

Faith as the only virtue

In Islam, the one and only virtue that counts is the Faith in their Almighty and his words. There are many videos of preachers from all over the world who say that the one who believes in their Almighty could do the most grotesque of acts, but he is still more virtuous than somebody who lives ethically.

Any act carried out in the name of their Almighty, and to establish his might on earth, is the highest of all virtues.

One could rape and kill in his Name, and that makes him even more pious. He could tell lies, cheat, deceive, give fall perceptions, and it earns him an even better afterlife. 

A believer would normally be thrown into hellfire for visiting temples of other faiths, but if it is done to serenade a girl of the other faith into marriage and turn her into a believer, it’s the highest virtue.

It is even okay to pretend to condemn certain aspects of the religion itself, if it helps in the overall propagation of the faith, and for their own well-being, e.g., to save their job.

This is what makes them go to any extent to commit horrific acts with a sense of pride, and either brazen it out, disguise it with masks, or come across as an apologist, as the situation demands. Those who cannot do it themselves live in a bigger guilt, and compensate for it by hailing and hero-worshipping those who do. 

This behaviour is not random, but fully institutionalized in the doctrine of the three doors of Islam – 

1. Dar-ul-Aman: door of peace – regions where they exist in extreme minority. They live in peace and champion equality of religions and respect for all religions.

2. Dar-ul-Harb: door of struggle – when in significant size, they fight for control and establishment of an Islamic rule.

3. Dar-ul-Islam: door of Islam – when they have seized the power, the region acts as per Sharia, with no rights to non-Muslims.

This is a documented philosophy, and being in denial about well-documented strategies of terror is what has helped them expand unrestricted.

The social strata, level of education, accomplishments of an individual do not matter a bit. Terrorism is NOT an outcome of lack of education, as apologists often seem to suggest. The highly educated ones, the most intelligent ones, the extremely accomplished ones find better means to execute their intentions on larger scale.

3. The Power of “Narrative”—They win as a victor, they win as a victim.

In India, a statement along the lines of “I respect other religions as much as they respect ours” is classified as a communal, hateful statement.

The right to practice, profess, and propagate a religion, as guaranteed by the Constitution of India, assumes ridiculous proportions when applied to certain religions. To them, this includes the right to annihilate other religions and exterminate followers of other religions. 

Furthermore, any attempt to stand against it is deemed as hateful and communal.

The biggest factor that has led to their success is the ability to play both the victor and the victim with equal ease.  

They initiate trouble, with a strong belief that they are invincible because their Almighty is on their side.

Then, after a few days they realize that their Almighty has abandoned them once again. 

Then, they play victim and call for considerations of humanity.

The skill of “roar when winning, whine when losing” earns them admirers for their bravado as well as sympathizers for their wounds, and whatever be the context, they emerge as a winner.

When the world was signing the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, the entire Islamic world rejected it as being un-Islamic. 

Eventually, in 1990, they brought in their own Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam.

They invoke the latter when they want to destroy other religions and nations, and invoke the former when they get thumped in the process.

They have explicit intention of annihilating all those who do not believe in their faith, but are the quickest to demand “respect for other religions” from other faiths. 

In India, they label every practicing Hindu as “communal” and a “bigot.” Any condemnation of any of their acts of monstrosity is instantly branded as “Islamophobic.”

In India, the invaders and rules of the faith have demolished hundreds of thousands of temples and a mosque erected there.

Some of these places have been given names that translate to “The Might of Islam.” When attempts are made to reclaim some of the most prominent ones which have extreme historical and religious significance to Hindus, it is projected as an atrocity against Islam.

They brag about having ruled the country for a thousand years and lament how they live in perpetual fear in the same breath. They openly express their dream of establishing an Islamic rule in India, but cry foul against any talk of any consolidation of Hindus.

They very well know the power of what I refer to as “The Spotlight Effect.” They have mastered the skill of putting the spotlight on their might and power as long as they are winning, and turn the wounds (including the made-up ones) when they fail to get through their murderous way.

They assert they cannot be blamed for what their ancestors did, but they support and defend every act of the past invaders and partake in the glory of their conquests of “Kaffirs.”

They complain that their patriotism is often under question, but unfailingly turn out in millions in the funeral of every terrorist.

The control of narrative

In India, you could use a general rule of thumb that any individual or organization with names that include “Peace,” “Justice,” “Progressive,” “Human,” etc. and speak endlessly on these topics is very likely to have a Jihadi connection.

They have learnt the art of using generics and rhetoric with great finesse to create pretty masks that are deceptive.

Through the use of the right generics and rhetoric, they manage to garner support from those individuals and organizations who they are possibly conspiring to demolish. The religion is dead against any form of unnatural sex, but you will find gay organizations all over the world standing by them with totally solidarity. 

It is ironic that the most regressive minds end up gaining the empathy of everyone who wants to show themselves off as “woke” and “progressive.”

They pass every crime of theirs, however gruesome, as a “law and order problem,” and magnify even an ordinary crime that involves a Muslim as a victim as Islamophobia.

Heck, even a clash between two of their own communities gets passed off as Islamophobia, because the ones suffering in such clashes are Muslims. 

The mastery of rhetoric and a complete control of the narrative has yet another dangerous side effect: the right choice of words and the inherent wokism in their narratives are very appealing to the next generation. This is something that definitely needs to be watched out for and taken care of.

4. A self-sufficient system takes care of all boundary conditions.

Recently, I came across an interesting statistic about the growing number of atheists in Pakistan. A Pakistani YouTuber revealed that there is an overall resentment against the religion across all of Pakistan. What keeps people from speaking out are the two-fold safety valves of the “blasphemy laws” and the “punishment for apostasy.” 

These are masterstrokes that allow anyone to cause serious damage to anybody they do not like in the pretext of saving the religion. 

Death for apostates is one other factor that keeps everyone from speaking out. It may force disgruntled individuals to sulk endlessly, but it ensures that there is no public narrative set against them.

The need for a strategic counter to Jihad

The movie “Glory Road” is based on a true story and events that lead to University of Texas at El Paso fielding an all-black lineup in a game for the first time in university basketball. 

When coach Dan Haskins goes around recruiting players, he encounters raw talent. One student, when challenged to pass through Haskins with the ball, said: “I can pass through you, over you, under you, around you, I can spin you like a top.”

The student player tries to get past coach Haskins, expecting to deceive him with extra body movement. Haskins doesn’t react to his individual movements. He stands centred and focused on the ball, moves only as required and proves impossible to pass through.

Haskins tells him: “You expect me to react to all that head-shake and body gyration? It’s activity without accomplishment. You got the ball in front of you. You ain’t going anywhere without it.“

The primary reason why we have so far been ineffective in tackling this menace is because we have been involved excessively in “activity without accomplishment,” as Haskins put it.

Since a lot of them speak in multiple tones, reacting to all of those ends up in situations allowing each of them to walk away with victory easily.

They put forth the red herrings of real Islam vs Islamism, terrorism has no religion, good terror vs bad terror, etc. We need to know it beyond doubt that there is only one Islam, and it seeks annihilation of every other faith.

Those who do not pick up a gun or tie a suicide vest on themselves regard the ones who do as the soldiers of Almighty and provide them every possible tangible and intangible support.

We need to have a single front of this battle, and not get distracted by the fake narratives they set.

What we need to strike at is their dismissal of every other faith as false, and their explicit agenda of establishing their religion over the entire world as one unique faith. 

Any other unrelated conversation or activity, e.g., mocking the faith, casting aspersion on their icons, burning their books, calling for their annihilation, end up getting them more empathizers and dilute the fight against their inherent terror. They put those against Jihad on the same moral footing as the Jihadis, taking away the bite and sting from all campaigns against them. 

We need to stay away from emotional ramblings, provocative statements, and immature declarations. We need to be more strategic and brave rather than indulging in mindless bravado.

We need to demand humane behaviour from them in return for the humane behaviour they demand to be meted out to them. We need to end this toxic practice of unilateral appeasement. 

We, Indians, believe in the ubiquity of God. We have absolutely no resistance to any faith in the world. 

They do not have to agree with us. They do not have to support us. They do not have to do what we do. 

But they got to let us live. 

O Traveller, Keep Vigil

When it is more than obvious that there are thieves eyeing our belongings, we have no choice but to wake up and take vigil.

We need to be absolutely clear about their intent, and counter and demolish every narrative they present in the name of high philosophy.

“How far would you go back into history and correct the wrongs?” As far we know and have evidence for.

“We should not be like them, we should be who we are.” Why should we not be like them? Why should we not do what they do? Are they that bad?

We need to counter and dismantle all their fake narratives. 

We need to stay focussed and directed at their open agenda to exterminate or subjugate everyone who is not with them. 

We need to turn the spotlight to their genocides and atrocities when they are in control and to their reality of being a paper tiger when they are shown their place. 

We need to distinguish between butchery and bravery and call it out explicitly.

There cannot be any camaraderie, fraternity, brotherhood, or co-existence with one who has an explicit intent of annihilating you. The eligibility for receiving humane treatment is to be human.

Wanting to protect one’s life, existence, culture, and heritage is not “phobia.”