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.

The summer is an ironically somber time for Jews. While the weather reaches its height of annual jollity, the Jewish calendar reaches its nadir.

The fast of Tish’ah b’Av commemorates what ArtScroll’s introduction to the Book of Lamentations, read in the synagogue that evening, calls “the quintessential day of Jewish tragedy.” It continues:

It was the day when the Jews in the Wilderness believed the libel of the Spies, and that generation lost its chance to enter the Land of Israel. Among other national calamities, both Temples were destroyed on Tishah B’Av. Nor the was the catalogue of woe limited to ancient times. During the time of the Spanish Inquisition, Tishah B’Av 1492 was the deadline for the Jews to leave the country or face death. And in 1914, Tishah B’Av was the day when World War I was declared, thus ushering in the political and economic collapse that resulted in the Bolshevik Revolution and the Holocaust.

But, not many weeks after Tish’ah b’Av, there comes another summer day of mourning: a Gregorian date which has held significance for far less time.

A quarter-century has passed (somehow) since the massacre of 9/11. I was not yet eight-years-old and retain no memory of the day itself, but I do remember the aftermath: the late Bill Moyers speaking of the “smoking wound” in America’s heart; at least one animated PBS children’s show highlighting real children handing out pastries to surviving firefighters; and, of course, the trickle of trailers for searing, searching documentaries—the crowning masterpiece of which was Helen Whitney’s Faith & Doubt at Ground Zero. Every year, I make a ritual of watching Whitney’s film and a small collection of others as my own sort of Yiz’kor service of remembrance for an event of which I personally remember only fragments.

While the Jewish people as a whole have never been in danger of forgetting our exhaustive string of 9/11s, a large section of the events of the last 25 years have demonstrated that many Americans have indeed forgotten theirs.

Some of this amnesia, of course, has roots in one positive aspect of the American character. Unlike others, modern Americans have little talent for holding onto exterior grudges. Any hatred Italians bear for Austrians, or Poles for Russians, Englishmen for Frenchman, Croatians for Serbs is a passé, faraway concept in the American psyche. With human history checkerboarded with constant national and tribal feuding, the American preference for “moving on” and worrying about the newest iPhone can sometimes be more refreshing than troubling. For Americans, unlike other peoples, have usually been good at forgiving—even if that grace is “cheap,” as Bonhoeffer famously called it.

But amnesic forgiveness has cost America dear. Only six days after 9/11, Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR)—actually a Muslim Brotherhood terrorist organization in its own right—brought President Bush to a mosque and instructed him that “Islam is peace.” The murderers who had just carried out the mass slaughter of 2,977 people suddenly were almost “forgiven”—and they suddenly had committed this act of ineffable evil for reasons different from their stated ones. Instead of letting the American people learn about the ideology which had flown men into buildings instead of to the Moon, the naïve, well-meaning Bush administration was successfully convinced that such a conversation was “hateful” and not worth having.

Words like “radicalism,” “fundamentalism,” and “extremism” substituted the proper name of the hijackers’ creed, blocking people from truly understanding the gravity of the ongoing threat the country faced. Then the failure to effectively justify the war in Afghanistan, let alone the project to “democratize” it, as a response to 9/11 made many lose interest. The Iraq War, despite the irrevocably abhorrent character of Saddam Hussein, also did very little, even before its popularity began to dissolve, to sanctify 9/11 as a pivotal part of America’s history. By the Obama years, “Islamophobia”—a term imported from the British Muslim mobs who had supported Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa against Salman Rushdie in 1989—achieved an importance it did not have before, and a decidedly “self-critical” attitude to the America 9/11 so wounded had gained in fashion.

American society never thought deeply about how to preserve the memory of 9/11 while it was still fresh, and then, distracted by controversial wars, economic recession, and the massive political chaos which followed in Obama’s wake, the country made good use of its ability to forget and seemed to be content with slowly “moving on.” With both Millennials and “Gen Z” generally having developed awash in the propaganda either of anti-American teachers’ unions or the wastes of “Podcastistan,” to them, 9/11 is often just a few images from the magnetic tape age, only of interest as a vessel of conspiratorial nonsense. Not surprisingly, by 2025, a Harvard Political Review poll found that only 41% of young Americans were proud of their country, and 29% agreed that they were “embarrassed to be American.”

Concerns about immigration from the Muslim world, too—in which support for strict adherence to Sharia hovered at a mean of 56.8% in a 2013 Pew study, and, according to a 2014 ADL poll, 74% of Muslims in the Middle East and North Africa expressed deep hatred of Jews—never seem to have registered as sufficiently important. Islam is not a race and it was never racist to worry about how compatible certain beliefs were with a tolerant and diverse country’s system of constitutional rights. Now, in 2026, violence on the part of Muslim immigrants against Jewish and non-Jewish Americans alike has only become far more common than it was in 2001. Anti-American Muslim politicians have been elected to serve inside the very Capitol Building Flight 93 probably was meant to destroy, and CAIR, known to be a money-laundering front for Hamas, is organizing more than 200 similar candidates to run for state and local seats nationwide.

Today, our leaders and our culture’s irresponsibility has let national memory evaporate to such an extent that Zohran Mamdani—a Jew-hating, Muslim communist who appointed a lawyer who defended an al-Qaeda terrorist out of direct sympathy as his chief counsel—is mayor of New York City. Seduced by absurd promises of free buses and groceries, hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers voted for a man who blamed FBI surveillance for al-Qaeda imam Anwar al-Awlaki’s decision to join the organization and took $100,000 in campaign donations from CAIR.

Even worse, some 33% of Jewish New Yorkers proved they, too, had forgotten 9/11. They voted for a man who said he wants to “globalize” Hamas’s anti-Jewish genocide and made arresting Prime Minister Netanyahu (an utterly illegal fantasy) a major campaign promise.

Jewish New Yorkers might like to know that the plot which eventually became 9/11 originated as a plot to massacre Jews. As 1993 World Trade Center bombing conspirator Abdul Rahman Yasin admitted to CBS News in 2002, chief bomber Ramzi Yousef “told me, ‘I want to blow up Jewish neighborhoods in Brooklyn.’” Since bombing Crown Heights and Williamsburg proved too difficult, and “the majority of people who work in the World Trade Center are Jews,” Yousef told Yasin, the target was moved to Lower Manhattan. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11, was Yousef’s uncle, and vowed to complete the atrocity his nephew had left unfinished. In the end, despite Hezbollah’s lie that no Jews went to work that day, a maximum of around 400 Jews are estimated to have been murdered in all three strikes and all four planes.

At this perilous point, is there any conceivable salve for such suicidal absentmindedness?

The only possible answer would be for Americans to borrow a leaf from Jewish tradition. Though the First Temple was destroyed in 586 B.C.E. and the Second in 70 C.E., most Jews have never forgotten. Why? Because Jews understood these catastrophes as spiritual as well as historical events; that they had meaning for future generations; and that they were blaringly relevant for their relationship with God.

Jews never forgot the destruction of the Temples because the rabbis established the fast of Tish’ah b’Av, an integral part of an exiled nation’s liturgy which grounded it in the significance of calamity as both a wicked enemy’s cruelty on the outside but also its own failure within.

Yet, as the ArtScroll introduction continues, “The Sages teach that the Messiah will be born on Tishah B’Av, meaning that a proper understanding of and reflection upon the causes of destruction reveal that contained within are the seeds of redemption.”

If America were to develop a reverence for 9/11 which mirrored Jews’ remembrance of the destructions of the Temples, America could begin turning towards its redemption. Understanding where the nation went wrong, but seeing the nation as a sacred thing which must be preserved to be restored. Recognizing 9/11 as a perennial spiritual trauma to be healed is what Whitney’s extraordinary film does, and why it has aged so little. That is how 2,977 innocent people’s lives can be given sanctity.

America cannot defeat its enemies and renew its vigor if it places no value upon sacred memory. That is what Judaism can teach. “We do not forget our tragedies,” ArtScroll concludes, for “we retain our optimism, because ‘Had I not fallen, I could not have arisen; had I not sat in the darkness, God would not have been a light to me’ (Midrash Tehilim Ch. 22).”

A version of this article was also published in JNS. Used with permission.

In 2004, a group of Democratic activists built a central online hub to make campaign donations easier. ActBlue’s founders said they were using the internet to “democratize the least democratic part of the political process,” and by the 2023–24 election cycle, ActBlue was processing $3.8 billion in contributions.

In the third quarter of 2024 alone, nearly 7 million donors made 31.7 million contributions through ActBlue. Those donations totaled $1.55 billion and went to more than 18,000 Democratic and progressive campaigns and groups. That was in just one quarter.

ActBlue is now the dominant online fundraising platform for Democratic politicians, and for thousands of Democratic campaigns, clicking “Donate” sends the supporter straight into ActBlue.

An April 2025 joint House staff report, based on documents from ActBlue and its fraud contractor Sift, showed that in 2023 ActBlue knew it had a fraud problem. Its own employees detected at least 22 major fraud campaigns, some from overseas. In spite of this ActBlue raised its fraud-review thresholds “across the board” in April 2024, calling the changes a “more lenient approach,” leading to even more fraud. 

By July, internal notes admitted that ActBlue was “accepting” more fraud.

Employees reviewing suspicious transactions were trained to “look for reasons to accept contributions.” They were told not to reject a donation because of one suspicious detail. Instead they should “look for the forest and not the trees.” ActBlue’s own notes called this approach “a bit antithetical” to stopping fraud.

American campaign-finance law bans foreign nationals from giving to federal elections. It also bans contributions made in someone else’s name. ActBlue makes both kinds of fraud easy. There are clear cases where someone’s identity was used to donate money through people who never knew about their contributions.

Elizabeth Waffle, an 88-year-old woman in Michigan, was listed as making nearly 15,000 contributions totaling about $150,000 over five years. She lives on a modest pension and told reporters she had made only a few dozen small donations. Clifford Slayman was listed for 7,539 contributions totaling $213,163. He signed an affidavit calling it fraud. Barbara Schmerzler signed an affidavit after 2,549 contributions totaling about $41,000 were listed under her name.

Investigators later found 18 Democrats in Connecticut over the age of 70 whose names were tied to roughly $1.9 million in political contributions. Some said they had made small donations, but their information was then used for many more donations they never knew about.

Someone donated that money in a kind of reverse identity theft. The stolen identity was not used to take money, as in normal identity theft. It was used to give money illegally, and since the name on the donation belongs to a real person, the contribution looks legal. No bill ever goes to the person whose name was used to give the donation, so the person whose identity is stolen is completely unaware.

Moving this kind of money into campaigns by hand would be a logistical nightmare. Someone would have to give cash to large numbers of people and then coordinate their donations to avoid red flags. Small-dollar digital fundraising automates the whole process. Five million dollars can be split into 250,000 contributions of about $20 each in just a few seconds.

Donor-identity theft also helps with marketing. Journalists treat small-dollar fundraising as proof of grassroots support, and parties use fundraising numbers to judge a candidate’s viability. Real donors are drawn to candidates who look like they are gaining momentum, so a sophisticated donor-identity operation could deliver both campaign cash and the appearance of a real political movement.

And in the 2023–2024 election cycle, hostile foreign powers were circling ActBlue like vultures.

During one 30-day stretch in September and October of 2024, ActBlue detected 237 contributions made with prepaid credit cards from foreign IP addresses. Internal documents show that as this kind of fraud grew, the company became more open to it. It continued to raise the thresholds that triggered fraud review and adopted what its own papers called a “more lenient approach.” Its analysis estimated that the change allowed more fraudulent transactions to go through. A few months later, internal notes acknowledged that ActBlue knew it was accepting more fraud.

ActBlue is a partisan group, so it has every incentive to help its side. Accepting fraud helps the campaigns receiving donations whereas rejecting fraud denies those campaigns cash.

By March 2025, according to a second joint staff report, every member of ActBlue’s legal and compliance team had either resigned, been fired, or gone on extended leave. Five current or former employees invoked the Fifth Amendment a combined 146 times in depositions. Congressional investigators also cited an internal legal analysis from outside counsel warning that ActBlue could be accused of accepting or facilitating foreign-national contributions.

After Congress investigated, ActBlue made some changes. It now requires CVV codes for credit-card donations and blocks foreign IP addresses. Those steps will not stop foreign donors who have valid credit cards with CVV codes (including the prepaid ones), and who use an American IP address through a VPN, but the changes do raise an obvious question: these are common fraud-prevention tools, so why were these basic protections not in place before?

A July 2026 White House report of declassified intelligence says China bought, stole, or hacked the voter-registration data of 220 million Americans. That data, combined with domestic-looking payment methods and a VPN, would give China what it needs to commit donor-identity theft at scale, and in a close election moving just a few percentage points determines who wins.

Beijing has clear interests in who Americans elect. If China can help elect people who favor things that benefit China, it could gain influence over U.S. policy toward Taiwan, Pacific military commitments, tariffs, technology controls, energy, Chinese access to American capital, and scrutiny of Chinese influence operations.

A sophisticated foreign influence operation does not need to bribe an American politician. It only needs to find American politicians who hold views helpful to the foreign government, and then to help those people get elected. Breaking large sums into hundreds or thousands of small donations through ActBlue would accomplish that, and ActBlue was demonstrably vulnerable to exactly this kind of fraud.

The politician, the campaign, and legitimate donors need never even know the fraud occurred.

Qatar too has interests in American elections too, as does Iran, Russia, and a number of other hostile foreign powers.

I have written at length about Qatar’s information jihad operation. A peer-reviewed 2024 study of foreign funding in American universities found nearly $2.8 billion from Qatar, making Qatar the largest foreign source of money for U.S. colleges and universities. The study also found that funding from the Organization of Islamic Cooperation preceded censorship of views critical of Islam, and led directly to higher levels of anti-Semitism on American campuses. Those changes can be traced school by school.

Correlation is not causation, but it is hard to believe Qatar is giving universities that much money with no strings attached. Our universities increasingly teach Qatari talking points. Those talking points are anti-American, anti-Western, anti-Israel, and anti-Semitic.

The Congressional Research Service (CRS) describes Hamas as an outgrowth of the Muslim Brotherhood and notes that Qatar hosted Hamas’s political office, along with many of Hamas’ leaders, in Doha. CRS also notes that Qatar hosts the International Union of Islamic Scholars, which it calls a Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated tool.

The Qatari regime is fiercely anti-Semitic, and the International Union of Islamic Scholars, in Doha, called for the extermination of the world’s Jewish population by 2033. Following is a direct quote:

Today humanity has realized that you are a threat to the world’s peace and security, and the countdown to your end—which will be imminent, Allah willing—has already begun. Note in your diaries today, not tomorrow, that by the end of the first third of this century, between 2025 and 2033, you will be nothing but history future generations will talk about. Take into consideration that this time the world will not take pity upon you, and that, when its anger boils over, not one of you will be left upon the Earth. Trump’s veto power, or that of whoever succeeds him, will not avail you.

Muslim Brotherhood-linked networks operate in the United States. In the Holy Land Foundation prosecution, the Justice Department presented evidence that the Muslim Brotherhood created a Palestine Committee in the United States specifically to support Hamas.

Qatar has worked hard to change American political views on Israel, Zionism, Hamas, and political Islam, and though I cannot prove that Qatar used ActBlue to fund the campaigns of Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Abdul El-Sayed, Zoran Mamdani, or anyone else, Qatar has every reason to help such candidates win, and ActBlue is an open door it could easily use if it has not done so already.

It is no surprise that as Qatari support of American institutions has increased, so too has the anti-Semitism of the public, and with more and more Islamic candidates winning primaries, we need to do a thorough investigation to ensure that Qatari money is not going into our political campaigns.

We usually picture this kind of corruption as foreign agents offering politicians money in exchange for a vote, but it makes far more sense for foreign agents to find sympathetic candidates and support them without the candidates ever knowing. That way, if the funding later comes to light, the candidate is protected from blame and can stay in office.

Suppose an American politician sincerely believes the United States should change its relationship with Israel. Suppose another sincerely believes America should reduce its commitment to defending Taiwan. If they can successfully disguise the source of the money, Qatar and China can put as much money as they want into those campaigns without ever telling the candidates.

I don’t know that hostile foreign powers did donate to American political campaigns, but we do know ActBlue detected donations from foreign IP addresses that used domestic prepaid cards. We know ActBlue loosened its fraud standards even though internal evidence showed the change would let more fraud through. We know employees were trained to “look for reasons to accept contributions.”

We know real Americans have disputed thousands of contributions made in their names.

We know China and other foreign adversaries have collected information about Americans, including hacking the voter data of over 220 million voters. We know China, Qatar, Iran, Russia, and other foreign powers have every strategic reason to influence American elections.

What we do not know is whether any of those governments have already combined these vulnerabilities to pour foreign money into American campaigns at scale. My guess is that they have, and this is a testable hypothesis that starts with Elizabeth Waffle.

Identify every ActBlue transaction she says she did not make. Examine the IP address, device information, transaction history, fraud flags, and other data in ActBlue’s systems. Check whether supposedly unrelated donors used the same payment methods or devices.

Do the same with every other donor who disputes transactions attributed to them. Then follow the money backward.

If the money came from Waffle’s own accounts, the transaction is probably legal. If hundreds or thousands of unrelated contributions all used the same financial sources, that would point to fraud at scale. If the money trail leads overseas, we can follow it.

Congress also needs to subpoena ActBlue’s full databases rather than relying on selected emails and testimony. Payment methods, IP addresses, device information, fraud scores, rejected transactions, accepted suspicious transactions, refunds, and chargebacks can all be analyzed for patterns.

This cannot be a partisan investigation. WinRed and every other major political payment processor should face the same scrutiny. I am starting with ActBlue as we already know it processed fraudulent transactions, but that does not mean ActBlue is alone. We need to investigate all of them. We should also ask whether it makes sense for partisan actors to run such financing operations when they have every incentive to accept fraud.

Is it possible that every sophisticated foreign intelligence and influence operation on Earth looked at a system moving billions of dollars, saw that donations could be funneled through real American identities, and then politely decided to leave our elections alone? It is possible, but unlikely. If I can see how easy this is, we have to assume they can see it too.

I, for one, would like to find out.

We also need practical safeguards to protect future elections. Every online political contribution, no matter how small, should include verified identity information that is cross-checked against government databases in real time. An email should be sent to the person making the donation giving them the option to question it, and to opt-out of future donations.

Prepaid cards, virtual cards, and other anonymous payment methods should be banned for political contributions. Payment processors should be required to automatically flag and reject any donation originating from a foreign IP address or a VPN, with no exceptions.

Platforms like ActBlue and WinRed should be forced to retain device fingerprints, IP logs, and payment-source data for every transaction for at least ten years. Executives should face criminal liability if they knowingly raise fraud thresholds or instruct staff to look for reasons to accept suspicious contributions.

Limits should also be placed on the total number of donations that can come from the same IP address, device, or payment instrument. Finally, a public, searchable database of all contributions under $200 would let journalists and investigators spot patterns of donor-identity theft.

I don’t know that China, Qatar, Iran, Russia, or any other foreign power has already flooded American campaigns with illegal money through ActBlue. What I do know is that the system is wide open for them to do so. ActBlue knew it had a serious fraud problem and lowered its defenses, training staff to look for reasons to accept questionable contributions. 

We do not need to wait for proof to launch a full investigation. Congress should subpoena the full transaction databases of ActBlue, WinRed, and every other major political payment processor, and investigators should start with the disputed donors, following the money backwards.

If we are not willing to take election integrity seriously, we should expect hostile foreign powers to take our lack of election integrity very seriously. We have a right to safe and secure elections, and election security does not begin and end at the ballot box. We also have a right to know that every dollar used to elect an American leader came from someone legally entitled to give it.

The recent violent disruption of Shabbat services at Central Synagogue was not an isolated incident—it was the visible culmination of an escalating environment of intimidation. Across New York City, Jewish residents face verbal attacks, harassment, and overt discrimination on public transit, university campuses, K–12 schools, sidewalks, and workplaces. This crisis is not confined to houses of worship; it compromises the daily safety and fundamental rights of individual New Yorkers in every public space.

To Mayor Zohran Mamdani:

Leadership is measured by the boundaries you set and the atmosphere you cultivate. Your persistent demonization of Israel dehumanizes the vast majority of New Yorkers who support Israel and its right to exist and defend itself. In practice, extremist actors treat anti-Israel rhetoric as open permission to target Jewish individuals and institutions across the five boroughs—and beyond.

To govern New York City credibly, you must adhere to basic standards of executive responsibility:

1. End the weaponization of City Hall against Israel: Your role is the civic governance and safety of New York City, not using municipal power to wage political campaigns against Israel that directly endanger your own constituents.
2. Cease excusing violent slogans: Stop offering semantic rationalizations for rhetoric such as “globalize the intifada.” When rhetoric incites hostility against a community, leadership must call it what it is—anti-Semitism—without caveat.
3. Demand accountability within your political and social orbit: Draw an unequivocal line against individuals and political allies who traffic in anti-Jewish hostility or justify harassment under the banner of political activism.

To Governor Kathy Hochul:

Passivity from the state executive is unacceptable. Polite disagreements or generic statements of concern are far beneath a person entrusted with your responsibilities.

As governor, you are the ultimate guarantor of civil rights and public safety in New York State. You must explicitly denounce Mayor Mamdani’s rhetoric, publicly reprimand his administration for prioritizing anti-Israel hostility to the obvious and documentable cost of municipal safety, and enforce state-level oversight to ensure Jewish citizens and all New Yorkers are protected against pervasive intimidation.

Statements issued after an altercation occurs will not protect anyone—in fact, they are an inducement, because criminals are never cowed by scoldings. Both city and state leadership will be judged by whether you dismantle the permission structures of hate before legitimized hostility turns into further violence.

Mamdani’s mayoral campaign is documented to have received funding from the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), exposed in federal court in 2008 for having laundered money for Hamas, the terrorist organization which committed the massacre of October 7, 2023. CAIR is an apparatus of the Muslim Brotherhood, a global syndicate that has supported Sunni Islamic terrorism worldwide since its founding in 1928 by Nazi enthusiast Hassan al-Banna. It should also interest the state—indeed federal—Department of Justice that the Brotherhood’s many terrorist offshoots include al-Qaeda, which carried out the massacres of 9/11. This is precisely why the mayor has been repeatedly told by the victims’ families not to attend this year’s commemoration.

To the public:

Europe has come to painfully and belatedly recognize that empty, perfunctory gestures of sympathy only lead to the making of more room to kill Jews. Moral leadership demands more of our leaders and its citizens, who, throughout history, have possessed all the power, but accepted bystander status instead.

America must not make the same mistakes as Europe, which welcomed in millions of unvetted migrants from the most anti-Western of cultures because of a belief that past colonialism must be punished by a new colonialism. These people neither assimilated into European culture, nor agree with Europe’s supposed ethic of “tolerance.” Today, far fewer Jews remain in Europe than in 1945.

White Rose Magazine, named after Sophie and Hans Scholl’s anti-Nazi student resistance group, is obliged to respond in kind to any instance of politics being organized against the Jews and Western values. Given that most have forgotten all the reasons to do so, we choose to remember why such trends do not end with the Jews. With five churches torched in the city since Mamdani took office, it is clear that even if all the Jews leave, no one is safe.

Why liberal democracy requires us to confront the one ideology we are forbidden to criticize.

Societies and sub-communities are defined by what they tolerate, not by their high-minded manifestos. When a group refuses to enforce its own moral guardrails—especially when social, financial, or political incentives push it to look the other way—its stated values erode until they become meaningless. While this story is not exclusive to Islam, it is arguably the defining story of Islam.

In a healthy pluralistic democracy, accountability relies on a double guardrail. First, sub-communities self-police. Internal shaming and social disapproval are the first line of defense when a member violates foundational norms. This self-correction works best when it comes from within the tribe. Ongoing violations should result in more severe social consequences, up until total excommunication from the group. But if a group fails to discipline its violators, the behavior metastasizes, forcing the broader host society to step in with escalating social and legal consequences. Catching and stamping out illiberalism early, inside the group, is always less painful than resolving a full-blown institutional and cross-tribal crisis later.

For decades, however, anyone who raised concerns about the illiberal and violent elements within Islamic orthodoxy was routinely branded an “Islamophobe.” That label worked like a social threat, teaching millions of people to self-censor simply to avoid public stigma (disclosure: I was one of those people). Rationalized under the guise of politeness or cultural humility, this enforced silence has allowed serious threats to liberal democracy to grow unchecked.

To break this silence, we must draw a clear line: genuine hatred, dehumanization, and bigotry directed at individual Muslims simply for their faith are vile and deserve total rejection. But honest, principled critique of an ideological and political system is not bigotry. Weaponizing “Islamophobia” to collapse the distinction between anti-Muslim hatred and legitimate theological critique is a bad-faith maneuver designed to make an entire belief system immune to questioning.

Silence is not empathy. It is a surrender of the liberal order. We need to talk about Islam directly, because it presents a unique, large-scale, and structurally unchecked challenge to liberal democracies—and because it remains the one global ideology we are discouraged from confronting.

The Dominance of Orthodoxy

To treat Islam as merely one of many equivalent personal faiths is to ignore its history, theology, and foundational texts. Islam is not simply a system of private devotion; it is a complete social order that explicitly claims authority over both the individual and the state (din, dunya, dawla).

Islam holds no monopoly on dangerous scriptures or followers inclined to interpret them violently. Christianity and Judaism contained plenty of illiberal doctrines, and their reform was neither easy nor peaceful. It took centuries of brutal conflict, internal dissent, and immense personal sacrifice by brave reformers to ensure that moderation won out and religious authority yielded to secular law. That struggle established a vital precedent: divine law must submit to individual conscience and democratic legislation. Mainstream Islamic orthodoxy has built no comparable, functioning self-limiting mechanisms.

Whether one views fundamentalism as inherent to the foundational texts or as a historically contingent reality, the practical outcome is the same: hardline interpretations currently hold institutional dominance. The reason reform has failed to take root at scale is not a lack of moderate Muslims who reject Sharia and jihad. It is that orthodox Islam remains structurally totalizing, claiming jurisdiction over both adherents and non-believers. This places internal reformers in immediate physical and social peril the moment they challenge traditionalist authority. But while internal dissidents face immense personal risk, broader civil society faces no such constraint. Host societies have a duty to apply uncompromising normative pressure—demanding a clear, explicit line that makes religious practice and what it preaches compatible with liberal democracy.

Where other major traditions were forced to recontextualize their violent and illiberal scriptures, dominant Islamic institutions continue to preserve doctrines incompatible with a free society:

• Political Jihad: The doctrine of coercive or subversive struggle to advance the political dominance of the faith.
• The Supremacy of Sharia: The claim that divine law overrides democratic legislation, denying equal rights based on gender or creed, and demanding severe penalties for apostasy and blasphemy.

Nowhere is this surrender clearer than in our self-imposed taboos surrounding the depiction of the Prophet Muhammad. Following repeated threats and acts of violent retribution, Western media, publishing houses, and public institutions quietly capitulated—adopting a de facto Islamic blasphemy code out of fear. When a liberal democracy allows violent intimidation to dictate what can be drawn, written, or published, it accepts that religious dogma takes precedence over its first and most essential right: freedom of speech. And if we have already agreed to compromise on our most treasured right, then is it that unthinkable that we’ll eventually succumb to the same degradations of our liberal democracy that have been seen in Europe, from “no-go zones” to Sharia councils to public calls for prayer?

If Islam is to coexist with liberal democracy, it will require a formal theological break—one where a critical mass of Muslim moderates explicitly severs ties with fundamentalist orthodoxy and builds institutions that openly repudiate political jihad and Sharia legal claims. Until that happens, a community that refuses to purge its radical elements will inevitably be defined by them.

The Voices We Fail to Listen To

We are often told that outside critique of Islam is inherently bigoted. Yet much ink has been spilled by current and former Muslims, as well as courageous scholars, warning of the structural dangers posed by unchecked orthodoxy. From internal reformers pleading for theological reinterpretation to ex-Muslim dissidents who face real physical threats for speaking out, the most unsparing assessments of Islamic doctrine frequently come from those who know it best.

These critics point to a fundamental distinction between Islam and other major world religions. As scholar A. C. Rosenthal articulated recently, while most modern faiths have accepted a boundary between personal conscience and public law, orthodox Islam remains uniquely structured around asserting political and legal jurisdiction over people who never chose it.

The tragedy is that when Western gatekeepers shut down honest debate to prevent “Islamophobia,” they do not protect vulnerable minorities—they betray the very reformists and dissidents fighting for freedom from within. By treating orthodox institutions as the sole voice of the Muslim community, the host society starves internal reformers of the support they desperately need to challenge fundamentalist authority.

The Institutional Incentive Problem

This failure of support creates a dangerous incentive structure within traditionalist institutions. It is easy enough for public figures or religious organizations to issue boilerplate condemnations of terrorism after a tragedy occurs—though even then, political leaders often hesitate when pressed to denounce specific extremist networks or hostile foreign regimes.

The real test lies in what is tolerated and rewarded from the pulpit and the flock day in and day out. While comprehensive empirical data on internal congregational dynamics is difficult to gather, the underlying incentive structure facing religious leaders is stark: Which cleric is more likely to face internal pushback, loss of funding, or a drop in followers—one who unequivocally denounces political jihad, rejects Sharia legal supremacy, and champions absolute freedom of conscience, or one who speaks the traditional language of orthodoxy?

When fundamentalist interpretations carry low social costs and high communal rewards—while reformist positions carry severe personal risks—the trajectory of the institution is set. Recent polling indicating that 44 percent of Muslim Americans hold a favorable view of Hamas, whatever the methodological caveats, points to a troubling reality: support for illiberalism and violence is not a negligible fringe, but a metastasizing strain that internal and external gatekeepers have failed to contain.

This challenge is exacerbated when sub-communities form insular physical or social enclaves. Geographic concentration and cultural isolation make it easier for fundamentalist norms to grow unhindered by the assimilative pressures of the host society. When insularity is combined with a host society terrified of being labeled bigoted, a dangerous shield is created. Whether dealing with radical pulpit rhetoric or systemic corruption within community institutions—such as the recent public oversight failures surrounding insular programs in Minnesota—any outside effort to enforce universal legal or moral standards is routinely met with accusations of racism or “Islamophobia.” Too often, host-society gatekeepers back down, allowing illiberalism to entrench itself within the enclave until the damage is already done. Without strong, external normative pressure from broader civil society demanding adherence to liberal democratic guardrails, the radical fringe will continue to control the mainstream.

Reclaiming Civic Enforcement

To understand how host societies must respond, we need to be precise about what enforcement actually means. State coercion, speech suppression, and religious tests have no place in a free society. The state’s role is strictly bound by the rule of law: it must intervene only when statutes are broken, or when sub-communities demand legal exemptions that violate equal treatment under the law.

Beyond the law lies the essential realm of civic boundaries. Pluralistic societies depend on strong cultural taboos to protect their foundational values: individual liberty, equal rights regardless of gender or creed, and the absolute separation of church and state.

When individuals or institutions advocate for doctrines that directly conflict with these principles, the response of civil society must not be polite silence or accommodating deference. Shaming illiberal ideas is a necessary cultural tool. Those who promote doctrines incompatible with democracy—along with the opportunistic politicians who court them—must be publicly challenged, named as anti-democratic, and socially ostracized.

This is not a call for McCarthyism, permanent blacklisting, or “canceling” Muslims. To prevent civic enforcement from devolving into mob rule, a liberal society must always maintain the open door principle: a permanent offer of redemption. Ostracism is directed specifically at those who explicitly advocate for illiberalism and those who refuse to police their own ranks. But the door remains open to anyone ready to renounce fundamentalism, reject Sharia legal supremacy, and explicitly align with the foundational values of a free society.

We must extend to Islam the exact same unsparing intellectual critique that we apply to any other belief system. To remain silent out of social fear is not tolerance. It is an act of cowardice that abandons internal reformers, destabilizes host communities and societies, and surrenders the liberal order to the very doctrines seeking to dismantle it. We need to talk about Islam—openly, critically, and without apology.

Christopher Nolan’s summer blockbuster, The Odyssey, has inspired legions of fans who never once gave a whit about ancient Greece and its contribution to Western culture. That’s a positive outcome if reviving the canon of classical literature is important to you. Humanities majors, rejoice!

But the film also serves as an important object lesson for both classical liberalism and modern Europe, one that may be less cinematic but should not be left on the cutting room floor. The most haunting metaphor from both The Iliad and The Odyssey—that nifty but bloody military maneuver that guaranteed victory for the Greeks in the Trojan War—applies to another more contemporary deployment of a Trojan horse.

In Nolan’s film (though not in Homer’s text), Odysseus, the wily warrior who conjured the entire scheme, was left traumatized by its aftermath—the slaughter of all those Trojan men, women, and children—which no doubt lengthened his travails and led to roadblocks on his way home.

We’re told never to look a gift horse in the mouth. Yet, the craftsman of that ultimate equine gift, Odysseus, knew that it’s probably good practice to more heavily scrutinize a gift. One never knows whether it may contain a surprise from which the beneficiary may never recover.

Contemporary Europeans know a little something about booby-trapped gifts. The West has been led to believe for well over a century that immigration is a national gift—to be given, and to receive. The mass infusion of talent and energy—that innate quest to seek the opportunities that free nations offer; to join in the service of nation building and self-improvement—can only enhance the collective experience of the country.

But Europeans, and perhaps soon Americans, too, now know that immigration can also make a country worse. If the newly incoming are not properly vetted—if their arrival was not motivated by the pursuit of happiness but rather a mission of conquest; if they flash a grateful, friendly face at the border that changes into one more fierce at the local mosque—a national threat materializes, internally, without the mess that military invasions produce.

A Trojan horse can come in many shapes and sizes, and from various possible directions.

This was bound to happen with Islam, which is both a religion and a political movement—“political” in its determination to both govern Islamic societies and conquer other lands to extend Islam’s influence. In taking an honest look at Iran, Lebanon, Yemen, Gaza, and Nigeria, it looks as if the IRGC, Hezbollah, the Houthis, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Boko Horam are much more focused on spreading violence, terror, and conquest than the spiritual health of their people. It is difficult to deny that the politics of Islam, which is military in nature, often overshadows its religious pretensions. In this way, Islam, especially as practiced by the regime occupying Iran, could not possibly be more different from the Vatican.

Indeed, the spreading of Sharia law throughout the world, especially in Western nations, is not a benign theological, hypothetical exercise. It’s nothing like the study of Talmud or a faithful reading of Christian scripture. The Qur’an, and the many Islamic Hadiths, speak plainly that Allah is the one true God—the final word on religious authority—and the prophet, Muhammad, is Allah’s messenger, making him the one true prophet.

This being the 21st century—with its many interfaith imperatives and mandates for religious pluralism—we are reassured by theologians that Islam’s core beliefs are not rigid articles of faith. They are, instead, mere religious exaggerations that no Muslim actually believes. After all, devout Christians don’t necessarily believe that Jesus walked on water, and most Jews attend synagogues without holding fast to the signs and wonders of Moses parting the Red Sea.

But Islam is different. The literal translation of its name is “submission.” Choosing how one practices the Islamic faith is not an option; there are no denominations offering Muslims ways to be more casual about their devotion to Allah. It’s not like a self-identified Christian who doesn’t turn the other cheek, or a practicing Jew who is wishy-washy on observing dietary laws. A religion that goes by the name “submission” is completely insistent upon the obligation to commit to Islam’s non-negotiable beliefs and doctrines.

It should be noted that, unlike other world religions, Islam is the one that has resisted any attempt at reform. So-called “moderate” Muslims share the same beliefs as the Mu’min—the most devout. And there really aren’t any “reformist” Muslims. “Submission” means what it says: no loopholes; no modifications on the menu. Catholics took a hard look at the New Testament and the Gospels at the Second Vatican Council (Vatican II), which took place over a three-year period in the early 1960s, resulting in improved relations with other faiths and a willingness to adapt to the modern world. Judaism has centuries of experience re-evaluating its understanding of Torah. There are different denominations—the largest being Reform Judaism.

No such internal audit has ever taken place in Islam. And yet, most Muslims believe that “submission” must also apply to infidels—because, as the world’s youngest religion, Islam represents the final word, one that must supersede all others. No society can be expected to accept religion on such uncompromising terms.

But there is something else that tells you everything you need to know: Muhammad is a prophet with a side hustle. The Prophet may be his public persona, but his preferred occupation is warlord and supreme commander of the armies of Islam.

Imagine if Jesus Christ and Moses were also generals. What would that say about Christianity and Judaism—and the entire Judeo-Christian framework? Are they organized around theological imperatives, or military doctrines? Jesus is the Prince of Peace. His Sermon on the Mount is a pacifist’s creed. Moses never makes it to the Promised Land. He gets left behind as Joshua takes command of the ragtag Hebrew army to do battle against the Canaanites and Hittites. 

The presumption is, and should always be, that prophets never have blood on their hands—but that’s not true in the Islamic faith.

Muhammad appointed no one else to lead Muslims into battle to extend Islam’s influence over other nations. When the Qur’an speaks of caliphates—and the warfare required to create them—it isn’t kidding around:

• “When the sacred months have passed, kill the polytheists wherever you find them…” (Qur’an 9:5)
• “Fight those who do not believe in Allah…” (9:29)
• “Fight them until there is no more persecution and religion are devoted entirely to Allah…” (8:39)
• “The Last Hour would not come unless the Muslims fight against the Jews, and the Muslims would kill them until the Jews would hide behind a stone or a tree. The stone or tree would say: ‘O Muslim, O servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him…’” (Sahih Muslim 2922)

Nowhere in either the Old or New Testaments can such similar language be found.

When most people think about Islam’s war against the West, they think of acts of terrorism committed by al-Qaeda, ISIS, Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis. Images of 9/11; the Boston Marathon bombing; the London tube and Madrid train bombings; the Bali bombings and Mumbai attacks; and the shootings and suicide bombings in France at the Bataclan, cafés, kosher market, and Charlie Hebdo all readily come to mind.

There are many others. And I am leaving out Israel and its forever to be mourned morning nightmare on 10/7. But long before there was terrorism there were conventional wars launched largely by invading Muslim armies into Europe. Terrorism is only the most contemporary iteration of Islam seeking to kill infidels and claim hegemony over Christian lands.

It goes back as far as the invasion of Spain (711), then the Battle of Tours (Poitiers) in 732, followed by the great Crusades (1095–1291), the Siege of Malta (1565), the Battle of Lepanto (1571), the Battle of Vienna (1683), the Great Turkish War (1683–1699), and the Balkan and Russo-Turkish Wars that traversed both the 18th and 19th centuries from 1737 all the way to 1916. (There are other Islamic-Christian wars I have omitted.)

Islam has been busy fighting Christians and Jews for nearly its entire existence. This is the “religion of peace”? On what planet is that true? 

None of the battles listed above involved Jews or Israel. Israel didn’t become a nation until 1948. Ask the decimated Christian populations in Nigeria, Egypt, Lebanon, and Bethlehem how amenable Muslims are to interfaith, multicultural relations.

We are repeatedly told that the problem Islam has with the West is solely limited to a tiny population of Jews who have reclaimed their also tiny ancestral homeland to create the world’s one Jewish state. Then why has Islam been at war with Christians during the 2,000 years that Jews have lived in exile?

The problem Islam has always had with the West is Western civilization itself, which is predominately a Christian enterprise, with a little help from the Jews. Israel is not the problem but the pretext. The real target—the true trophy for Islam—is Christianity and the West. And they prove that every day—if anyone is paying attention to what has been happening throughout Europe.

Of course, they don’t teach anything about that in middle and high schools, in colleges and universities, throughout the West. The mere mention of such historical red-letter dates in which Islam made war against the West is deemed “Islamophobic.” That’s right: we now live in a world where even calling attention to the direct link between Islam and terrorism is a hate crime. In the United Kingdom, I would already be locked up for writing that sentence.

Muslims have been surfing on a multicultural, politically correct, woke wave with astonishing success. To criticize Islam is “racism,” even though Islam is a religion and not a race. To call attention to Islamic extremism is “Islamophobia” even though terrorism, which is disproportionately committed by Muslims, is intentionally terrifying and should evoke the fear that gives rise to the phobia that dare not speak its name.

Surely not all Muslims are a threat to the Western world—whether they live in the Middle East, North Africa, or Persian Gulf, or have received asylum and established residency as citizens (and not sleeper cells) throughout Europe, Canada, Australia, and the United States.

But there are 2 billion Muslims in the world. Polling by the Pew Research Center has indicated that a majority of Muslims worldwide believe in a strict adherence to Sharia law. (In some nations, it is as high as 90%.) That means that such Muslims accept permissibly raping female infidels, the taking of Muslim child brides, the torching of homosexuals, the killing of apostates, and the dismemberment, stoning, beheadings, and lashings of wives or daughters whose only crime may have been listening to music, learning to read, or showing a strand of hair in public.

All of this is in compete service of accelerating the date of the next caliphate.

You don’t need 2 billion Muslims to instantly give the West an unwanted makeover. Tens of millions will do. Just look at the hundreds of Sharia courts throughout Europe, the “no-go zones,” the public calls to prayer on public streets in nation after nation—the many allowances made for Islam, the forsaking of law enforcement, all on account of either genuine fear or misguided tolerance.

There are those—former Muslims and some political analysts—who honestly wonder whether Islam is ultimately a religion. Perhaps it’s a military doctrine masquerading as a religion. Its true faith and unconcealed intentions are the creation of a global caliphate. Religion may be merely a loss leader.

This is how much damage Islamists have done to Islam. Its chief critics wonder whether it is even entitled to have religious pretensions. Are Muslims children of Allah, or are they Muhammad’s mercenary army?

The complete dismissal of Islam’s political, militaristic ambitions—because of Western naïveté, paternalism, white guilt, multicultural excess, and unenforced immigration laws—is folly. It is indeed a threat to democracy and liberal culture in its rejection of the separation between mosque and state, free speech, open inquiry, religious pluralism, female empowerment, homosexual rights, and the rule of secular law.

Leaving aside terrorism, Muslims with Islamist inclinations are now both office holders and running for office, often under the façade of “socialism,” but caliphates, covertly, lurk behind, waiting patiently in the pole position.

We have a prime example in New York City. Zohran Mamdani ran for mayor on a “socialist” platform. If you hadn’t read his previous posts and videos about Israel—“Globalize the Intifada!”—you may have been completely surprised by his unrelenting focus on Israel. Immediately upon taking office, he discarded the now standard definition of anti-Semitism from the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). That maneuver allowed violent protests outside of synagogues, and inciteful rhetoric that has led to multiple attacks against Jewish New Yorkers.

The ostensible political agenda here is not one that encourages debates over public policy. It instead more resembles the submission demanded by Islam, all fait accompli: rich white people are all racists and “Islamophobes”; property owners must be stripped of their rights; Israel is an illegitimate state; and all Israelis deserve to die. And since Mamdani won’t denounce the slogan “Globalize the Intifada!”, he must wish the same fate for New York Jewry—his constituents.

Islam is not all that much different from the Trojan horse that ominously rolled into Troy—the failure of governments to perform the necessary due diligence in gleaning the hidden intentions of uninvited guests. Men wrapped in tubular keffiyehs and women whose entire bodies, including their faces, are covered up, are difficult to read.

This is a Trojan horse shaped by humanitarian gestures and misguided policy. Such benign neglect and blindness to duplicity can prove to be as lethal as canon fire, ballistic missiles, or nuclear weapons—rendering an entire continent as traumatized as Nolan’s Odysseus after the Trojan War.

Inside mosques throughout the West, terrorism is discussed and supported even if not personally practiced. Does that mean that they are both houses of worship and strategic strongholds? Many Muslims abide by Sharia law over the law of their land. They have no interest in assimilation and do not wish their host nations well. Some would happily burn a flag and march in parades that call for jihad against Jews, Israel, and the United States. Such people are not mere Manchurian Candidates; they are ticking time bombs that aim to implode Western nations—from the inside-out.

The United States may be relatively new to all this, but the signs are everywhere. Once that first American flag was torched in Dearborn, Michigan, less than two years ago, followed by the Islamic ditty “Death to America!”, Islamists within the United States essentially said, “Game on!” Dearborn is the only city in America with a Muslim majority, a Muslim mayor, and a city council that is comprised entirely of Muslims. No surprise: Dearborn is within Rep. Rashida Tlaib’s congressional district.

Not long after that American flag was set aflame, Mamdani was elected to govern New York City; and Islamists may soon claim several congressional seats and a place in the United States Senate. Candidates such as Michigan’s Mohamed El‑Sayed, who is running for a Senate seat; and aspiring congresspersons Adam Hisham Hamawy, from New Jersey, and Aisha Wahab, from California, might join incumbents Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, André Carson, and Lateefah Simon.

These candidates and elected public officials are not just Muslims—they are hardcore Islamists who have cleverly leveraged our democracy against us. Taken advantage of our open societies. Mobilized Muslim voters with a wink and deceived the rest with diversions such as “affordability” and universal healthcare. The ultimate destruction of the democratic, liberal, meritocratic order is mischievously missing from their platforms.

Islam saw a shortcut that was far less bloody and more penetrating into the heart of the Western World. European nations have been stupefyingly willing to swing open their doors and throw down welcome mats that started the clock on the next caliphate.

The Greek army realized it would never be able to scale the massive wall that surrounded Troy. Muslims came to realize that in winning all those wars initiated by Islam, Europe had succeeded in creating a moat that Islam would not be able to cross—unless they were invited in.

Who knew Islam could be this deceptive and ingenious? Europeans are starting to realize that the decline of their countries can partly be blamed on the massive influx of Islamists whose intentions have always been more Greek than continental.

What is to be done to stop the replacement of constitutional democracy with Sharia law? Most importantly, enforce existing criminal and immigration laws that already exist without fear of an “Islamophobia” charge or a ricocheting hate crime. 

Raping white women, beating to death an elderly Holocaust survivor and tossing her off her balcony, and setting fire to another Holocaust survivor can’t be excused because of marijuana use or chalked up to “cultural differences.”

“Grooming gangs,” and the predisposition to violence at the drop of a kufi, are not acceptable behavior in civilized societies. The West should not degrade its civilization simply to appease its Muslim populations.

Allowing public streets to become the setting of freewheeling pogroms, or being turned into neighborhoods where even the police are afraid to patrol, is so incompatible with classical liberalism, an honest conversation must be had with a nation’s Muslim citizens and asylum seekers:

Are you committed to obeying Sharia law over the secular, constitutional law of this land? Do you really want to be here, learn the language, live in harmony with neighbors, and show mutual respect, tolerance, and good citizenship? Embrace religious pluralism, and, in the United States, become a part of the American Experiment?

If not, you don’t really belong here, and you know it. Your heart and loyalty lie elsewhere. More important, you are unwilling to respect the Western way of life and the liberal culture, freedoms, and governance that have enabled the West to prosper since the Enlightenment of the 17th century.

Islam, we are afraid, has consistently been headed in the wrong direction, aiming for a rebirth of the Dark Ages, when caliphates were more common.

We see your Trojan horse for what it is, and we respectfully decline this gift.

On September 11, 2001, the world watched as nineteen men turned commercial airliners into weapons of mass murder. Nearly three thousand people died in the space of a few hours. The perpetrators left no ambiguity: they acted in the name of Islam, citing the Qur’an and the example of Muhammad as they struck what they saw as the heart of unbelief. For a brief, clarifying moment, the mask slipped. The ideology that had animated centuries of conquest, subjugation, and doctrinal absolutism stood exposed in the dust and fire of Manhattan, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania. Here was Islam as a political system that commands its followers to fight until the religion of Allah reigns supreme.

Within days, President George W. Bush stood before the Islamic Center of Washington and declared, “Islam is peace.” British Prime Minister Tony Blair echoed the sentiment. European leaders followed suit. The message was uniform: the attacks had nothing to do with Islam itself. A tiny fringe of extremists had hijacked a noble religion. True Muslims were victims, too: victims of misunderstanding, of prejudice, of the very terrorists who claimed to speak for them.

The exoneration was not born of ignorance. Intelligence agencies had tracked jihadist networks for years. Scholars of Islamic texts knew the doctrinal foundations of offensive warfare, of abrogation, of the permanent state of war between Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb. Yet fear overrode clarity. There was the immediate terror of backlash: the FBI recorded a seventeen-fold spike in anti-Muslim hate crimes in 2001, from 28 incidents the previous year to 481. Media outlets amplified every reported slur, every mosque vandalism, every suspicious glance. The narrative solidified: Muslims were now the vulnerable minority in the West, and any criticism of their faith risked igniting pogroms. Geopolitical calculus reinforced the denial. The United States needed allies in the Muslim world for the coming invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Egypt—none could be alienated by the suggestion that their state religion was the problem. Oil flowed. Bases were secured. Coalitions were built on the polite fiction that the enemy was “al-Qaeda,” not the theology that produced it.

So the script was written: terrorism was “radical,” “extremist,” the work of a handful of deviants who had twisted a peaceful faith. The term “Islamist” had not yet been massaged into its modern usage, but the distinction was already being drawn. Islam was innocent. Muslims were innocent. The West owed them not merely tolerance but active protection and accommodation.

The consequences unfolded. Doors that might have been narrowed after the worst attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor were instead flung wide open. In the United States, the Muslim population, already growing through the 1990s, accelerated. Pew Research data show roughly 2.35 million Muslims in 2007; by 2015, the figure had climbed to approximately 3.3 million. In Europe the surge was even more dramatic. Between mid-2010 and mid-2016 alone, an estimated 3.7 million Muslims entered the continent, more than half through regular migration channels rather than refugee status. France, Germany, Britain, Sweden, the Netherlands, each saw its Muslim population swell by hundreds of thousands in the decade following 9/11. Mosques multiplied. Islamic schools proliferated. Demands for halal food in public institutions, prayer rooms in workplaces, gender-segregated swimming sessions, and exemptions from standard curricula became routine bargaining chips in the politics of “inclusion.”

This was not mere demographic drift. It was reparation dressed as compassion. The West had briefly entertained the uncomfortable thought that Islam might be the issue; having quickly repented of that heresy, it now paid penance through policy. Every new mosque became a monument to atonement. Every accommodation—Sharia councils in Britain, taxpayer-funded Islamic centers in Germany, university prayer spaces in Canada—was presented as proof of moral superiority.

Muslims, sensing the opening, doubled down. The very grievance of being “unfairly accused” after 9/11 became the lever. Innocence declared, they pressed their advantage. Integration was reframed as oppression. Criticism of any Islamic practice was recast as racism. The faith itself was placed beyond scrutiny.

And the attacks kept coming.

Madrid 2004. London 2005. Beslan. Mumbai. Fort Hood. Paris 2015. Brussels. Nice. Manchester. Orlando. San Bernardino. The Bataclan. The Pulse nightclub. The Manchester Arena. The list stretches across continents and decades. Trackers such as the French think tank Fondapol have documented more than 66,000 Islamic terrorist attacks worldwide between 1979 and April 2024, the overwhelming majority occurring after 9/11, claiming at least a quarter of a million lives. Yet each fresh atrocity triggered the same ritual: swift condemnation of the act, followed by even swifter exculpation of the religion. “This has nothing to do with Islam,” officials repeated like a catechism. “The vast majority of Muslims reject violence.” The perpetrators were always “lone wolves,” “mentally ill,” “radicalized online,” anything but faithful executors of a 1,400-year-old command to fight the unbelievers until they submit.

To sustain the illusion, Western academia and institutions performed a linguistic sleight of hand. They invented “Islamism.” The term, once a neutral descriptor for the political application of Islamic doctrine, was repurposed as a firewall. Islam, we were told, is a beautiful faith of peace and justice. Islamism is the regrettable political distortion practiced by a minority. The distinction allowed policymakers, professors, journalists, and NGOs to defend the faith while condemning its most visible consequences. It shielded the source code—Qur’an, Hadith, Sirah, the doctrine of abrogation, the example of the Prophet—from examination. Question the distinction and you were no longer a critic of terrorism; you were an “Islamophobe,” a bigot, a threat to social cohesion. The very act of noticing the pattern became evidence of prejudice.

By the mid-2010s the inversion was complete. Islam had been granted total immunity. Sixty thousand-plus attacks across more than seventy countries, rivers of blood from Mindanao to Mali to Manhattan, and still the default position in polite society was that Islam bore no responsibility. To suggest otherwise was not merely controversial; it was eccentric, almost indecent. The West had convinced itself that the problem was everywhere except the one place the perpetrators kept naming: the religion itself.

The Perfect Target

October 7, 2023, was the day Islamic terrorism finally hit its perfect target.

Not office workers in New York. Not commuters in London or Madrid. Jews. The one people on earth against whom no justification has ever been required. The one people history itself has already condemned in the eyes of their enemies: they deserved it, just as they “deserved” expulsion from a hundred countries across the centuries. The old blood libel needed no update. It only needed a new stage, and Hamas delivered it in living color, bodycams, livestreams, babies burned in ovens, women paraded naked, elderly Holocaust survivors dragged into tunnels. Barbarism so pure it should have ended every conversation. Instead, it became the moment both Islam and the radical left dropped the mask together.

For twenty-two years the West had clung to the fiction that jihad was the work of “Islamists,” a political perversion, not the faith itself. That firewall had protected Islam from scrutiny after every terrorist attack. But on October 7 the target was Jews, and suddenly neither Muslims nor their new leftist allies could afford the old distinction. They did not want to distance themselves from the slaughter. They wanted to celebrate it. They wanted to own the triumph.

So Muslims claimed Hamas outright. Not as a “radical faction.” Not as “extremists who hijacked the religion.” As Islam. Pure, unadulterated, straight from the Qur’an and the Prophet’s example. For the first time since 9/11, the theology was not denied. It was embraced. The chants were not “Not in our name.” They were “From the river to the sea,” “Globalize the intifada,” and open calls for more October 7ths. Imams and influencers who had spent decades parsing “Islam versus Islamism” dropped the parsing. Hamas was not a distortion. Hamas was the faith in action. The mask was not just off; it was thrown away because the victims were Jews and the victory felt too sweet to disown.

The radical left, which had spent the same two decades polishing that same “Islamism” distinction to shield its favorite victim group, did not hesitate either. It claimed Hamas, too. Immediately. Enthusiastically. The very people who had once called bin Laden’s followers “deviants” now marched with the same killers’ flags. Why? Because the target was Jews. Because Israel is not merely a country to them; it is the living symbol of the West, its competence, its resilience, its refusal to apologize for existing. To both ideologies, Israel is the final proof that the old order still breathes: Judeo-Christian roots, Western values, individual dignity, technological triumph grafted onto ancient soil. Smash it, and you smash the West without firing a shot in Manhattan.

So the left supplied the language the Muslims had always lacked in polite society. What Hamas filmed as religious ecstasy, jihad, conquest, humiliation of the infidel, the left translated into “resistance,” “liberation,” “anti-colonialism,” “decolonization.” The rapes became metaphors for “settler violence.” The baby-killings became “context” for 1948. The massacre of festival-goers became “armed struggle against occupation.” Suddenly the oldest hatred on earth had a progressive gloss. Jihad was no longer medieval; it was intersectional.

This was not alliance. It was convergence. Two anti-Western projects, Islam with its fourteen-century mandate of submission, Marxism in all its postmodern, critical, decolonial flavors, had hunted for a common symbol for generations. They found it in the Jews. Demonize Israel and you delegitimize the entire Western project. Legitimize violence against Jews and every other anti-Western grievance becomes instantly righteous.

The proof came fast. Within weeks, Osama bin Laden’s 2002 “Letter to America,” the manifesto that had justified 9/11 by blaming U.S. support for Israel, went viral on TikTok, racking up tens of millions of views. Young Westerners who had never read a page of history suddenly declared it “eye-opening.” The murder of three thousand Americans was retroactively reframed not as religious fanaticism but as righteous blowback against “Zionist imperialism.” What al-Qaeda could never achieve in the years after 9/11, mainstream legitimacy, was handed to them on a platter by the very people who had once called the attacks un-Islamic. October 7 did not just justify itself; it reached back in time and justified everything that came before it.

The demonization of Israel never stopped. Israel was not defending itself after the worst pogrom since the Holocaust. It was a “genocidal settler-colonial state,” the last outpost of Western empire. Every targeted strike on Hamas infrastructure became “indiscriminate bombing.” Every civilian death, deliberately engineered by Hamas’s human-shield doctrine, was proof of Israeli sadism. The West itself was on trial by association. Support Israel and you support colonialism, capitalism, whiteness, patriarchy, every sin on the progressive ledger. Oppose Israel and you stand with the oppressed, even if the “oppressed” are openly calling for your own civilization’s erasure.

In that single inversion, both ideologies won. Islam got its theological victory celebrated in the streets of London and New York without having to hide behind “Islamism.” The radical left got its moral cover to mainstream conquest while pretending it was still fighting “oppressors.” Together they produced the perfect hybrid: jihad with a human-rights vocabulary, medieval barbarism dressed in academic jargon. Hamas’s crimes were not crimes; they were justice. Bin Laden’s massacre of Americans was not fanaticism; it was anti-imperialism. And any defense of Israel, or of the West that still dared to stand behind it, became proof of complicity in original sin.

The streets told the story. Palestinian flags flew beside rainbow banners and Che Guevara icons. Queers for Palestine marched beside people who would throw them from rooftops. Feminists chanted “globalize the intifada” while women in Gaza were still being stoned for “honor.” Marxists who had spent decades denouncing religion suddenly discovered that one particular religion was sacred when it killed Jews. The shared symbol had done its work. Israel had become the hinge on which two dying civilizations could briefly unite to tear down the one that still worked.

What happened after October 7 was not merely the repackaging of Islamic terrorism. It was the mutual legitimization of two irreconcilable projects that hate the West more than they hate each other. By claiming the same enemy, they claimed each other. 

The Betrayal from Within

October 7 did not just expose the Red-Green alliance. It pulled in a third, far more dangerous partner: segments of the American right who call themselves patriots, America Firsters, realists, and defenders of Western civilization. These were not the usual suspects from the campus left or the Muslim diaspora. These were voices that had once stood against cultural surrender. And yet, when the moment came, many of them did exactly what their enemies hoped they would: they joined the chorus demonizing Israel, laundering jihad as “blowback,” and treating the Jewish state as the root of every American problem. How does a man who claims to love his country end up carrying water for the very forces that want to bury it?

They are useful idiots in the classic Leninist sense, except this time they wear MAGA hats and quote the Constitution. Some did it out of cowardice. Some out of something uglier. Some out of genuine delusion. And some because the money was too good. Each group reveals a different fracture in the right’s soul, and together they show how even those who swear they are defending the West can become the instruments of its undoing.

The largest contingent, and the most disappointing, were the cowards who once professed love for Israel. These were the people who had cheered the Abraham Accords, who had mocked the left’s obsession with “Zionist influence,” who had correctly identified radical Islam as the civilizational threat of our time. After October 7 they watched the propaganda machine go into overdrive: campus encampments, TikTok floods, legacy media footage of Gazan children framed as victims while Israeli children lay in morgues. Suddenly “pro-Israel” became a political liability. The polls shifted. The donor class wavered. The online right began calling anyone who defended Israel a “neocon” or a “dual citizen.” And these men folded. They did not deny the massacre, they simply stopped talking about it. They pivoted to “What about Gaza?” They discovered a sudden interest in “civilian casualties” they had never shown when Muslims slaughtered Christians in Nigeria or Yazidis in Iraq.

They told themselves they were being “consistent” or “anti-interventionist.” What they were really doing was dropping the one frontline state that still fights the enemy on its own soil. They failed to understand that Israel is not a favor the West does for Jews. Israel is the West’s proof of concept: a nation rebuilt from exile, armed with the Western values that Jerusalem gifted the world, and unapologetic self-defense. Abandon Israel in the face of this assault and you are not saving American blood or treasure. You are signaling to every jihadi and every decolonial theorist that the West no longer has the will to defend its own principles. You are handing the enemy the moral high ground they could never seize on their own.

Others needed no conversion. They had been waiting for this moment their entire lives. The old anti-Semitism, never fully extinguished on the fringes of the right, finally found respectable cover. For decades it had been socially radioactive to say the quiet part out loud. Now the left had made hatred of Israel the central moral cause of the age. Suddenly the same tropes that had once been confined to 4chan comment sections were being mainstreamed by Ivy League professors and CNN anchors: “Zionist lobby,” “genocide,” “apartheid,” “dual loyalty.” The anti-Semites on the right did not have to invent new language. They simply borrowed the left’s. They could now post memes about “Zionist Occupied Government” and be retweeted by millions who thought they were merely criticizing “forever wars.” October 7 gave them the perfect alibi. They were not bigots; they were “anti-Zionists” fighting the same empire the progressives were fighting. The fact that their new allies would happily throw them into the same ditch once the Jews were gone never seemed to register. Hatred is a powerful solvent. It dissolves principle faster than any ideology.

A smaller but vocal group genuinely believed the propaganda. These were the sincere realists, the paleo-conservatives, the libertarians who had spent years warning against neoconservative overreach. They watched the same footage the rest of us did, but they swallowed the narrative whole. Hamas’s atrocities became “resistance.” Israel’s response became “genocide.” They convinced themselves that if America simply cut off support for Israel, the jihad would evaporate and the Muslim world would suddenly become a partner in peace. They ignored fourteen centuries of doctrine. They ignored the Muslim Brotherhood’s own words. They ignored what every former Muslim from the Middle East has been screaming for years. Instead, they listened to Dave Smith explaining that the attack was “predictable” or Tucker Carlson wondering why we care so much about a country “the size of New Jersey.” They believed the Muslims when the Muslims told them the problem was Israel. They believed the leftists when the leftists told them the problem was “colonialism.” They flipped because they mistook tactical grievance for strategic truth. In doing so they became the perfect marks: patriots who thought they were saving America by betraying its strongest ally in the only theater where the enemy is already engaged.

Then there are the ones who were never sincere to begin with. The paid actors. Qatar, Turkey, and their Gulf proxies have spent billions building influence networks inside the American right. Think tanks quietly funded, influencers on retainer, podcasts with suspiciously large sponsorships. Some of these voices suddenly discovered a deep concern for Palestinian children right around the time their bank accounts got fatter. The money does not buy outright lies; it buys selective blindness. It buys the decision to platform certain guests, to soft-pedal certain doctrines, to treat Hamas as a “resistance movement” rather than a death cult. Foreign funding has always been the quiet corruption of American discourse. After October 7 it simply found a new cause célèbre.

Finally, the most human and most tragic category: those who have nice Muslim friends. They know Ahmed from the gym, Fatima from the PTA, the friendly imam down the street who always smiles and talks about “peace.” These people cannot square the images of October 7 with the pleasant, assimilated Muslims in their daily lives. So they perform the mental gymnastics required: “My Muslims are different. This is just politics. This is not real Islam.” They have never read the Qur’an. They have never sat through a Friday sermon in Arabic. They have never asked their nice Muslim friends what they really think about apostates, about Jews, about the caliphate. Personal experience becomes the ultimate authority, and the doctrine is dismissed as “extremist.”

All of them, cowards, anti-Semites, true believers, paid voices, and the willfully naïve, share one fatal misunderstanding. They think the war is about Israel. It is not. Israel is the symbol, not the cause. The real war is between two competing projects, Islam’s total submission and the radical left’s total deconstruction, against the last remnants of the West that still refuses to kneel.

The Re-Zionization of the West

Zionism began in the late nineteenth century as a desperate Jewish political project: a movement of exiles who had been hunted across continents, stripped of their land, their dignity, their right to exist as a people. Theodor Herzl and the early Zionists were not dreaming of empire or supremacy. They were trying to survive. They wanted one small patch of earth where Jews could finally stop running, stop apologizing, stop dying for the crime of being Jewish. A nation-state. A refuge. A place to plant vineyards, build hospitals, and raise children who would not have to hide their names or their prayers.

That project succeeded beyond anything Herzl could have imagined. Israel rose from the ashes of the Holocaust, from pogroms and expulsions, from the centuries of dhimmitude under Islamic rule. It became a miracle of resilience: a democracy in a sea of theocracies, a technological powerhouse in a desert of failed states, a people who turned swamps into cities and turned “never again” into actual policy. But somewhere along the way, Zionism outgrew its original skin. It stopped being merely a Jewish national movement and became something far larger, far more universal.

It became the Western civilization project itself.

Because what Israel defends on the front lines of the Middle East is not just Jewish land. It is the last unapologetic outpost of everything the West once claimed to believe in: the sovereignty of the individual, the rule of law rooted in Judeo-Christian morality, the right to defend yourself without begging permission from the international community, the refusal to submit to tribal theocracy or postmodern relativism. Israel does not apologize for its borders. It does not apologize for its strength. It does not pretend that every culture is equally equipped to build free societies. It simply exists, thrives, and wins, under the most hostile conditions imaginable. In doing so, it proves that the West’s ideas are not historical accidents. They are superior. They work. Even when surrounded by enemies who want to erase them.

This is why the alliance we have watched form since October 7 hates Israel with such primal intensity. It is not about settlements or checkpoints or the size of the country. It never was. Islam sees in Israel the theological insult of a dhimmi people who refused to stay dhimmi. The radical left sees in Israel the living rebuke to its entire worldview: a nation that rejects victimhood, rejects deconstruction, rejects the idea that history is nothing but a chain of oppressions. Both projects, Islam’s total submission and Marxism’s total dismantling, require the West to kneel. Israel refuses. And because it refuses in full view of the world, it has become the symbol of everything the West must still be if it wants to survive.

That is the re-Zionization of the West.

It is not about ethnicity. It is not about converting Christians or secularists into Jews. It is about rediscovering the unapologetic civilizational confidence that Zionism now embodies. The West was once Zionist in spirit long before the word existed. It was the civilization that believed that borders mattered, that strength was not a sin, that history could be bent toward justice instead of endless grievance. It was the civilization that was not ashamed of excellence. Israel is that same root system transplanted into hostile soil and still bearing fruit. To defend Israel today is to defend the West’s own possibility of renewal.

Look at what the enemies are really attacking when they attack “Zionism.” They are attacking the idea that a nation can prioritize its own citizens without being called supremacist. They are attacking the idea that some values, liberty, truth, self-defense, are worth dying for and not everything is negotiable. Islam demands submission; the left demands deconstruction. Israel says no to both. It is the living proof that the West can still say no.

The re-Zionization of the West is therefore not military or territorial. It is moral and civilizational. It means stopping the endless apologies. It means recognizing that not every migrant is a future citizen, that not every culture is compatible with open societies, that not every grievance is sacred. It means understanding that Israel’s fight against Hamas is not a “regional conflict” but the West’s fight against the same forces that are already inside Western cities, inside its universities, its governments, its streets.

Re-Zionization of the West is the recognition that the war is not about land in the Middle East. It is about the soul of the West itself. Israel is not asking the West to save it. Israel is showing the West what it must become again if it wants to save itself: clear-eyed, unashamed, willing to name the enemy and willing to defeat it. It is showing that a civilization can be both particular, rooted in its own history and people, and universal in its defense of the ideas that made it great.

A version of this article was originally published by the Ideological Defense Institute. Used with permission.

The First Amendment states that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

On the surface of it, this is a fairly straightforward formulation barring the legislative branch from taking any action to create a state religion (the Constitution specifically bans religious texts for public office) or barring the practice of any religion, and yet history provides a more complex context that raises significant questions about the legality of Islam in America.

The Founders were English citizens and well aware of the way in which religion could stoke political violence. In the late eighteenth century, Oliver Cromwell was not ancient history, neither were the Scots Covenanters or the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. While they did not anticipate the rise of an Islamic insurgency in America, they understood quite well that religion and violence could and would intersect. That was one of the reasons for barring a state church, to avoid giving the government control over religion, a situation that had resulted in much of the religious violence in England. By giving religion independence, but not political power, the First Amendment sought to avoid a repeat of the same ugliness that had marked centuries of wars in Europe.

The separation of church and state was meant to protect the integrity of both, and avoid power struggles between religious groups. There was to be no state religion: the government could not leverage religious authority and religious factions could not begin civil wars in a struggle to gain power or autonomy. For the most part, it worked until mass migration changed America.

What they had not been anticipating was that the religious conflict in America would not come from European-style clashes between Christians or over Christianity, but from an entirely different religion that made the acquisition of political power by any means its central mission on earth.

Until now, the only real acid test for this approach involved the Mormon Church, an ugly history on both sides that has mostly been buried under the weight of time. More recently, Scientology flared up as a cult turned church that demanded its own autonomy and did its best to make war on the government and its critics.

And then there is Islam. The first problem with using the First Amendment in defense of Islam is that its goal is to violate the First Amendment. Islam’s widely stated goal is to become a state religion, around the world and in America as well.

Sharia has been making steady advances in Africa and parts of Asia. Majorities of Muslims in the U.K. have said that they want Sharia law, and leading British figures such as the Archbishop of Canterbury have supported the introduction of Islamic law into the British legal system. Domestic advocates for Sharia are pushing for the normalization of Sharia law in the United States as well. 

This would, in effect, turn Islam into an established religion in the United States, itself a violation of the First Amendment. Furthermore, Islam abridges the remaining portions of the First Amendment, which protect freedom of speech and the press. Islam rejects both of these. To protect “Islamic rights,” therefore, means depriving non-Muslims of freedom of religion—and both Muslims and non-Muslims of freedom of speech and the press.

These are not hypothetical scenarios: the Muhammad cartoon controversies and their resulting slaughters and attacks demonstrated exactly how this will work. So did the persecution of Salman Rushdie. To accept Islam is to reject freedom of speech and religion, in the same way that accepting communism meant rejecting freedom of speech and religion. Islam and the Constitution of the United States are incompatible in the same way that communism and the Constitution are incompatible because they are founded on the rejection of any kind of coexistence or dissent.

The Founders sought to protect religious freedoms; at no point in time did they seek to protect religious terrorism. And Supreme Court justices throughout American history have found that the First Amendment does not provide license for significant lawbreaking. That is why polygamy is not legal in the United States. Having to choose between religious freedom and the rights and dignity of women and children, America correctly chose the latter.

In 1785, James Madison, father of the Constitution, wrote, “We hold it for a fundamental and undeniable truth that religion or the duty which we owe our Creator and the manner of discharging it can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence.”

Yet Islamic history and recent events in Eurabia demonstrate that Islam does indeed spread by force and violence. Upholding the right of Islam to force its statutes and views on Americans violates Madison’s fundamental and undeniable truth.

In 1802, Jefferson wrote his explanation for the First Amendment to the Danbury Baptist Association: “Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, and that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that the legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’” thus building a wall of separation between church and state.

There is a key phrase in this statement, which is that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions. This statement was used as a legal principle by the Supreme Court in 1878 in the case of Reynolds v. United States. Reynolds, a Mormon, had been charged with bigamy and claimed that his faith required him to engage in polygamy. The Court found that, while Reynolds had the right to believe that polygamy was his duty, he did not have the right to practice it—thus upholding Jefferson’s distinction between action and belief.

As the court put it:

In our opinion, the statute immediately under consideration is within the legislative power of Congress. It is constitutional and valid as prescribing a rule of action for all those residing in the Territories, and in places over which the United States have exclusive control. This being so, the only question which remains is, whether those who make polygamy a part of their religion are excepted from the operation of the statute. If they are, then those who do not make polygamy a part of their religious belief may be found guilty and punished, while those who do, must be acquitted and go free. This would be introducing a new element into criminal law.

Laws are made for the government of actions, and while they cannot interfere with mere religious belief and opinions, they may with practices. Suppose one believed that human sacrifices were a necessary part of religious worship, would it be seriously contended that the civil government under which he lived could not interfere to prevent a sacrifice? Or if a wife religiously believed it was her duty to burn herself upon the funeral pile of her dead husband, would it be beyond the power of the civil government to prevent her carrying her belief into practice?

So here, as a law of the organization of society under the exclusive dominion of the United States, it is provided that plural marriages shall not be allowed. Can a man excuse his practices to the contrary because of his religious belief? [98 U.S. 145, 167] To permit this would be to make the professed doctrines of religious belief superior to the law of the land, and in effect to permit every citizen to become a law unto himself. Government could exist only in name under such circumstances.

The outcome then was that we could not have a situation in which crimes could be committed in the name of religion and protected by the First Amendment. Belief could not be criminalized, but practice could be.

We can begin by pointing out that any number of Islamic practices which violate American law or promote an unhealthy social consequence can be banned, for much the same reason that polygamy was. In Reynolds v. United States, the Court upheld the right of the Utah legislature to brand the spread of polygamy as a threat to innocent women and children that had to be arrested through strong measures.

The spread of Islam’s practices can be seen in the same way.

France has treated the hijab in a similar way. The United States can, too, if it finds any abuse or violence associated with its enforcement or use. Honor killings over the hijab demonstrate that this is the case; state legislatures, then, can move to ban the hijab given that Muslim women defying its forced ubiquity face murder.

Thus, while we cannot charge someone with believing in Islam, we can stamp out many Islamic practices that are dangerous or abusive. The First Amendment does not protect religious practices that are illegal or made illegal; it protects only the beliefs themselves.

But what does that actually mean and how exactly do we distinguish between action and practice? Does it merely mean that it is legal to believe in seizing America in the name of Islam, but not to practice it?

We can go much further at an organizational level, based on the Sedition Act of 1918 and the 1954 Communist Control Act , which give us some guidelines for cracking down on militant organizations seeking to overthrow America:

Sec. 2. The Congress hereby finds and declares that the Communist Party of the United States, although purportedly a political party, is in fact an instrumentality of a conspiracy to overthrow the Government of the United States. It constitutes an authoritarian dictatorship within a republic, demanding for itself the rights and privileges accorded to political parties, but denying to all others the liberties guaranteed by the Constitution. Unlike political parties, which evolve their policies and programs through public means, by the reconciliation of a wide variety of individual views, and submit those policies and programs to the electorate at large for approval or disapproval, the policies and programs of the Communist Party are secretly prescribed for it by the foreign leaders of the world Communist movement. Its members have no part in determining its goals, and are not permitted to voice dissent to party objectives.

This applies to Islam just as much as it applies to communism. And this preamble was part of a passage demonstrating the fundamental distinction between communism and legitimate political parties.

The assumption of the Communist Control Act was that the First Amendment did not apply to the Communist Party or to communist-controlled parties, because they did not fit the democratic template of the First Amendment. As such the Communist Party was not a legitimate party, but an overseas directed conspiracy to overthrow the United States and replace it with a communist system.

Not only can this same argument also apply to Islamic organizations such as CAIR, but Islam can be distinguished from other religions on similar grounds. The following phrase from the original document represents the key point here:

It constitutes an authoritarian dictatorship within a republic, demanding for itself the rights and privileges accorded to political parties, but denying to all others the liberties guaranteed by the Constitution.

And that is the core of the problem. While we cannot criminalize individual beliefs alone, we can criminalize organizations dedicated to overthrowing the United States and replacing it with a totalitarian system. An organization is not merely “belief”—it also represents an attempt to put those beliefs into practice.

The Internal Security Act of 1950, along with the 1954 Communist Control Act provides extensive legal grounds for criminalizing organizations dedicated to the overthrow of the United States, as well as membership in such organizations—and even provides for the removal of citizenship from members of such organizations.

While succeeding courts have thrown out many portions of these laws, had the United States truly gotten serious about the War on Terror, it could have passed a real Patriot Act that would have clamped down on Islamist organizations in a similar way.

The bill could have easily retrofitted some of the language of the Communist Control Act as follows:

Sec. 3. Islamic organizations, regardless of their assumed name, whose object or purpose is to overthrow the Government of the United States, or the government of any State, Territory, District, or possession thereof, or the government of any political subdivision therein by force and violence, are not entitled to any of the rights, privileges, and immunities attendant upon legal bodies created under the jurisdiction of the laws of the United States or any political subdivision thereof; and whatever rights, privileges, and immunities which have heretofore been granted to said party or any subsidiary organization by reason of the laws of the United States or any political subdivision thereof, are hereby terminated…

Sec. 4. Whoever knowingly and willfully becomes or remains a member of such organizations, or (2) any other organization having for one of its purposes or objectives the establishment, control conduct, seizure, or overthrow of the Government of the United States, or the government of any State or political subdivision thereof, by the use of force or violence, with knowledge of the purpose or objective of such organization shall be subject to all the provisions and penalties of the Internal Security Act of 1950.

The question then becomes one of defining what exactly an Islamist organization is. If we define Islamist under the same guidelines as communist, but specifically modified as representing a belief in the overthrow or takeover of the United States or any part of it, thereby placing the United States under Islamic law, we already have a very broad net with which to work.

Or, to simply quote the Internal Security Act again:

Sec. 4. (a) It shall be unlawful for any person knowingly to combine, conspire, or agree, with any other person to perform any act which would substantially contribute to the establishment within the United States of a totalitarian dictatorship.

Since Islam represents a totalitarian dictatorship, any organization or individual seeking to establish Islamic law or Sharia within the United States can be held liable and charged over its violation. This would apply to both Muslims and non-Muslims.

And the Qur’an itself represents a volume whose contents both implicitly and explicitly call for the violent overthrow of the United States.

Consider chapter 9 of the Qur’an, which governs the interaction between Muslims and non-Muslims. Particularly 9:29: “Fight those who do not believe in Allah, nor in the latter day, nor do they prohibit what Allah and His Apostle have prohibited, nor follow the religion of truth, out of those who have been given the Book, until they pay the tax in acknowledgment of superiority and they are in a state of subjection.”

There are numerous other verses in the Qur’an which similarly call for Muslims to subjugate non-Muslims and take power. This parallels the charge against the Communist Party and places Muslims who believe in the Qur’an on the same level as communists who believe in the overthrow of the United States.

Participation in any Muslim organization therefore becomes the equivalent of participating in a communist organization—and can be banned.

While the First Amendment does not permit a ban on any specific religion, this is limited to religious belief, not religious practice. And the laws enacted against communism in the 1950s demonstrate that organizations aimed at the overthrow of the United States can be banned and membership in them can even be criminalized.

We can ban Islam from the public sphere, ban Islamic organizations as criminal organizations, criminalize Islamic practices, and even denaturalize and deport Muslims who are United States citizens. The legal infrastructure is there. Despite the fact that the United States is far more protective of political and religious rights, every single Islamic organization can be shut down within a decade, from the national to the mosque level—and those who believe in the Islamic mandate of jihad to Islamize the world in general and the United States specifically can be deported. Theoretically, those Muslims who claim they reject the Qur’anic commandment of conflict and supremacism would have nothing to fear, allowing for the emergence of the “moderate Islam” about which we have heard much in word, but has failed to come into being in deed and practice. And if, of course, they are lying, as Islam allows, then they can and must leave, too.

The legal infrastructure is there. Despite the fact that the United States is far more protective of political and religious rights, within a decade every single Islamic organization, from the national to the mosque level, can be shut down—and the majority of its members and participants can be deported from the United States regardless of whether they are citizens or not.

We can do it. Whether we will do it is another matter. It would require rolling back a number of Supreme Court decisions, but it was briefly possible post-9/11.

It may yet become possible again.

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

The name he heard was similar,
Letters and sounds familiar,
But Yusuf barely recognized himself.

The looking glass reflection,
Captures the present,
Hints at the past.

“Search for it יוֹסֵף”—Yusuf thought he heard the mirror whisper.
“You have your grandfather’s eyes,”
Staring right back at me.

His grandfather’s name was Ibrahim,
His grandmother adoringly called him “Abba.”
“Father,” in Arabic, he mistakenly believed.

And he spoke perfect Arabic,
Except when he prayed in private,
That’s when Yusuf would detect a foreign accent.

“Look deeper.”

His grandmother observed rituals,
Not practiced in the Muslim faith.
The candles she lit on Friday night,
Always warmed up their home.

“Keep searching, questioning.”

Yusuf began to search,
And question.
The evidence confused him.

Hidden identification papers,
Misspelled his grandfather’s name as Abraham,
Signed with an unfamiliar surname,
“Halabi” (from Aleppo).

Fear began to overwhelm him.
Were my grandparents converts?
Who am I?

“Ask the question.”

“Jadd,” Yusuf began to address his grandfather,
“Yes, Yoseph,” Avraham answered.

The United States was founded, as John Adams put it, “not as a Christian nation, but as a nation of Christians,” and a surprising number of the men who signed the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were trained ministers. I like to think of the Constitution as a libertarian document, but classical liberalism is an Enlightenment concept, and the Enlightenment is a direct descendent of the Christian world, where Judeo-Christian morality collided with Greek philosophy.

That is not to say the Constitution is only for Christians. 

There is this strange thought today that the West is too Eurocentric, but, while certainly European countries have uniquely European cultures, healthy cultures borrow from one another, and the central tenet that undergirds classical liberalism—that each person should be free to live their lives however they wish provided they allow others to do the same—makes just as much sense outside the West as do tacos or pizza. Nor is the Judeo-Christian moral order European. It originally comes from the Middle East.

The founding generation did not only include Christians. It also included theists, rationalists, deists, agnostics, and atheists. Pennsylvania Quakers had little in common with the slaveholding Baptist planters of South Carolina, or the Anglican gentry of Virginia. Every colony, and every region within those colonies, carried its own customs, its own economic realities, and its own religious views. Culture varied from place to place.

What held these communities together was the revolutionary idea that people should be equal under the law, and should be free to live their lives as they see fit provided they allow others to do the same. That principle—ordered liberty—was the only thing strong enough to bind a people who otherwise had every reason to separate.

And they did separate. The original 13 colonies came together to fight for independence, but as 13 nations. The first attempt at post-British rule was not the Constitution we use today, but the Articles of Confederation of 1781, which created not something that resembled a nation of states so much as a collection of independent nations with a common enemy. This confederation looked more like NATO than a unified country, each nation with its own currency, its own trade policies, its own legislature, and most of its own powers. 

Congress under the Articles could request money and coordinate defense, but it lacked the authority to tax, regulate, or raise a permanent army, leaving the confederation weak and vulnerable to both internal disorder and external threats. As the states began to bicker, there was fear that some of them might even go to war with one another, giving the 13 nations under the Confederation every reason to form “a more perfect Union.”

The Constitutional Convention defined a federal system with just enough central authority to secure liberty and commerce across borders, while preserving each states’ distinct character. This balance is what made the American experiment possible.

The founders knew slavery contradicted the claim that all men are created equal. Thomas Jefferson’s original draft of the Declaration of Independence not only specified this, but it blamed the King of England for the slave trade. Thomas Jefferson was a slave owner when he wrote the Declaration, but he was also an abolitionist who wanted to tell the King, “We seem stuck with this abhorrent practice and it is all your fault.” (George III ironically completely agreed with Jefferson, and had nothing but the most haughty contempt for the enslavement of Africans.) What the founders lacked was the political will to end slavery at the national level. They compromised by leaving it to the states.

When we pretend the sins of the founding era were national sins rather than the sins of specific states, or when we pretend that our ancestors’ failure to live up to their own ideals renders those ideals guilty, we trade a more perfect union for what would become a very different union, in which the state no longer referees disputes, but instead manages the public. In that union, the right to live as one wants is gone.

Human beings have always wanted liberty for themselves. The desire to be free is universal; the willingness to extend that freedom to others is not. This is because we desire more than mere freedom; we desire the divine right of kings, and, in that respect, many modern Americans are no better than the slaveholders of two centuries ago. We just updated the chains.

If we are honest about human nature, it is not about freedom so much as control. We all want to be in control of ourselves, but we also want control over other people. Personal liberty is not a goal so much as a compromise in which we all say, “I will not try to control you, and in return you will not try to control me.” Slavery conflicts with that compromise.

Slavery was not an American invention either, nor even a Western one. It has been a near-constant part of human history, across every continent, up until the last 200 years. Nobody gave it a second thought when it was the norm, and a child born today, raised in ancient Rome would grow up a Roman. If placed in a wealthy household, this child would likely own slaves—mostly from places like what we now call Spain, France, or Britain. The word “slave” derives from “Slav,” and for centuries the Slavic peoples of Eastern Europe supplied a large share of the human chattel in the Islamic world.

It is en vogue today to claim that it was the Islamic countries that first recognized the independence of the United States, but the truth is that Britain paid tribute to the Barbary nations of Northern Africa so that the Barbary pirates would leave British ships alone. When we became an independent nation, the Barbary pirates began attacking American ships and taking American crews into slavery. When we sent envoys to ask why, we were told that we were no longer covered by British tributes, and that the Qur’an demands that Muslims enslave anyone who is not Islamic unless they pay the jizyah. We were told to either pay tribute as a form of jizyah, or to watch our ships getting seized and their crews becoming slaves, for all time to come.

Thomas Jefferson responded by sending the United States Marine Corps, whose hymn starts with “From the Halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli,” based on Tripoli being one of the capitals of the Barbary states. Our very first war as an independent nation was against the Islamic states of North Africa, and it was fought against slavery.

What changed in the modern era was not that everyone around the world suddenly saw slavery as morally wrong. What changed was that one civilization—the West—was so moved by the words of Thomas Jefferson—that “all men are created equal”—to be moved to end slavery. Also, the Industrial Revolution—the age of steam and machinery—revealed that having inanimate objects do the most strenuous of work was much more profitable and efficient than keeping armies of strong, dangerous men in terrible conditions and with no reward for their labor. England, in particular, ended slavery. First England ended it throughout its empire, and then it used its vast empire to stomp out slavery around the world.

Black slaves in the Americas were not the last people freed from bondage; they were among the first. Arab and Ottoman slave trading continued long after the trans-Atlantic trade ended, and it included both black Africans and white Europeans. The Barbary corsairs alone captured and enslaved an estimated 1 to 1.25 million Europeans between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, raiding as far as Iceland and the coasts of Ireland. We treat slavery as something that separates us but we all have slaves in our ancestry. We differ only in how far back we have to go to find them.

Islam is a religion, but it is also a political and legal system, with the Qur’an as a kind of theocratic constitution. Its core texts contain explicit commands both to submit personally to Allah through Sharia, and to bring others under that submission, by persuasion where possible and by force where necessary.

A faith that asks its followers to wear a burka can coexist with liberty, but a faith that commands its followers to ensure that others wear the burka cannot coexist. The Islamic parallel to ordered liberty is to live according to Sharia, and to force others to do the same.

The Qur’an contains verses such as 9:29, which directs believers to fight those who have received the Scripture yet do not believe in the full truth of Islam “until they give the jizyah willingly while they are humbled.” Historical practice codified this into the dhimmi system: non-Muslims could retain limited rights to life, property, and private worship in exchange for a special poll tax, restrictions on bearing arms, limits on building or repairing houses of worship, distinctive clothing or markings, and prohibitions against criticizing Islam. 

The Barbary slave trade was part of a much larger system that persisted in parts of the Muslim world well into the twentieth century. Saudi Arabia officially abolished slavery in 1962—at the behest of the Kennedy administration. Mauritania banned it in 1961—then 1980 and 1981, then criminalized it in 2007, and again in 2015 (after the French banned it in 1901, and then again in 1905). Slavery is now making a comeback under Islam, with active slave trading everywhere ISIS has ruled, including Libya today.

As with all faiths, true believers are apt to read the religious doctrine and to act it out in their daily lives. A national leader who says “Don’t do that” is to the true adherents of Islam an apostate, the penalty for which is death. Groups like ISIS and al-Qa‘idah are not extreme because they move away from Islamic doctrine into something else, but because they are the most pure examples of Islam currently in practice.

In many Muslim-majority countries, apostasy remains punishable by death or imprisonment. Blasphemy laws are enforced. In Europe, many Muslims have formed no-go zones where the police only go in force, causing riots. Such behavior flows from a theology that treats the separation of mosque and state as a temporary concession rather than a permanent principle, and that views classical liberalism as a weakness to be exploited until conquest is possible.

Personal freedom is incompatible with a religion based on forced submission, and though millions and millions of Muslims worldwide practice Islam as a personal set of beliefs, they have to ignore much of their central doctrine to do so. They are also apostates to the true adherent. Apostasy being a crime punishable by death in Islam, this is a religion that bends toward—not away from—extremism.

Islam can, in fact, be more extreme in the West than in traditional Islamic lands. Saudi Arabia had to ban British Muslims from traveling to Saudi Arabia out of the fear that British Muslims would radicalize the Saudi people towards the Muslim Brotherhood, which believes the decadent, U.S.-aligned Saudi monarchy insufficiently Islamic.

Western societies cannot survive if they refuse to apply their own founding principles to Islam. A liberty framework that tolerates every private belief but draws the line at beliefs that require the coercion of others is not bigotry; it is the minimal condition of ordered freedom. 

The problem the West has is not really Islam. It is that we cannot enforce the liberty principle on others if we will not enforce it on ourselves. The West increasingly treats liberty as permission granted by institutions rather than as the natural condition of the individual. People are still told they are free, but that freedom is narrowed by administrative rules, speech codes, licensing regimes, mandates, surveillance, and an expanding belief that government has a legitimate role in managing private choices for the sake of collective outcomes. 

The old principle was that adults should be free to live as they choose so long as they do not violate the equal rights of others. The emerging principle is that people may live as they choose only so long as their choices conform to priorities established by political, bureaucratic, corporate, and cultural authorities, and a free people which does not believe in freedom is ripe for capture by any people with a coherent belief system. Islam has one; it might not be the one we want, but it does exist.

Restoring ordered liberty means rejecting the notion that any group’s religious or cultural demands entitle it to exemptions from the non-aggression rule. It also means treating jihadist ideology and Sharia supremacism as the civilizational threats they are, not as protected cultural expressions. 

It also means recognizing that the same human impulse that once justified chattel slavery—the desire to control others—has found new language and new justifications in the contemporary world of the West. We must learn once again to reject those impulses in ourselves, so that we can also reject them in other people.

Technology has changed what modern societies look like, letting us live with material abundance and capabilities that would have seemed miraculous even 50 years ago. That abundance did not come from reducing liberty, or from pretending that all moral systems are the same. Gratitude for our relative abundance means defending the conditions that produced it. Those conditions include refusing to accommodate any ideology, religious or otherwise, that treats the right to live free as something to destroy. 

The American founding was imperfect, as every founding is. Our central idea that each person should be free to live their life however they see fit as long as they let others do the same remains the only workable basis for a free and plural society, and Islam rejects ordered liberty at its root. A nation with religious freedom cannot ban Islam, but it can ban the things Islam does whenever those things violate the rights of others, and it can enforce those laws with zeal.

Mankind cannot change, but people can, both individually, and collectively. What we cannot do is to change generationally unless each subsequent generation teaches the one that comes after, and if the West is going to survive, it needs to give its children a crash-course on classical liberalism and ordered liberty today. 

We were founded as a nation of Christians. We do not have to remain one, but we do have to keep the Judeo-Christian values that shaped the Western world. The alternative is tyranny. The question is whether that be a tyranny of the hijab, or one protecting us from it.

How two decades changed my views on Islam, Muslims, and the West

Young people are often dismissed as naïve because they cling to the hope that if enough people simply believe in peace, sit down together, share meals, and talk across differences, the world will improve. I once held that hope with real conviction. At 41, I still see value in conversation and cooperation. Yet experience has taught me that optimism without real-world knowledge can become a liability. 

For more than two decades, the subject of that optimism for me was Islam. My journey from idealistic engagement to harder clarity has been neither simple nor comfortable, as I explain in this piece.

Post-9/11 Beginnings + the Search for Common Ground

I came of age as a post-9/11 teenager, in a climate thick with anxiety about terrorism and suspicion toward Muslims. As an undergraduate student at American University in Washington, D.C., I sought out Ambassador Akbar Ahmed, the former Pakistani high commissioner to the United Kingdom and a prominent Islamic anthropologist dedicated to presenting Islam in ways Western audiences could largely accept. I admired his commitment to interfaith dialogue and the possibility that such work might serve as an antidote to the armed conflict then unfolding in Afghanistan and Iraq.

After returning from London following the completion of my master’s degree, I joined Ambassador Ahmed on the Journey into America project, visiting dozens of mosques across the U.S. in an effort to understand American identity through the lens of Muslims and locate shared ground between the West and Islam. Ambassador Ahmed championed the pluralist vision of the American Founders—religious freedom and equality under the law. I embraced those principles then and still do. 

After more than 20 years of study, travel, and relationships with Muslim Americans and Muslims abroad, however, my understanding has grown considerably more layered. I no longer claim that supporting Islam is my duty as a U.S. citizen, or believe that every criticism of Muslim communities or Islamic doctrine equals “Islamophobia.”

Rethinking Islamic Concepts + the Limits of Soft Interpretations

Between 2005 to 2022, I positioned myself as a public defender of Islam. In books, op-eds, lectures, interviews, and classroom discussions, I worked to separate the faith from the violence committed in its name, insisting that the real danger lay in the hearts and minds of Westerners rather than in any doctrinal or cultural patterns among Muslims themselves. I repeatedly explained and argued that any apparent contradiction could be resolved through progressive theological interpretations or better interfaith dialogue. Looking back at these previous endeavors I had used a rubber shield—flexible, well-intentioned protection against charges of Islamophobia—which gradually hardened into a blindfold. It spared me (for a time) from uncomfortable data. It also prevented me from seeing the ideology that kept producing new pawns. 

A dense fog of good intentions and academic orthodoxy surrounding Islamic concepts kept me blinded from the truth. In the 2010s I defended Muslims even when the evidence did not warrant it, and, in the process, I shifted attention away from the victims of Islam-inspired terrorism and softened the role of Islamic ideologies that motivated the killers. I routinely responded to Islamist terrorist attacks by warning that alarmist Western reactions would only fuel Islamophobia. I rejected the charge of taqiyah—the claim that Muslims are permitted to deceive outsiders to advance communal goals—seeing it as a tool for those promoting Islamophobia. For over a decade, I asserted that “jihad” means only an inner spiritual struggle. While jihad can indeed carry that meaning, many Muslims in the U.S. and elsewhere understand it as a drive to reshape the surrounding society according to Islamic norms, or, in its more extreme form, as armed conflict. With that said, I continue to respect the hadith that ranks the greater jihad as the battle against one’s own ego and the lesser as physical fighting. What troubles me is how frequently the lesser version appears to dominate in practice.

Much of my earlier outlook was shaped by Western academia and the progressive wing of the Democratic Party—circles I no longer claim as my own. Within the hierarchy of identity politics in both realms, Muslims occupied a privileged place near the top—they were to be treated with special solicitude because they were labeled “oppressed.” I no longer accept that ranking either. 

The progressive academic environment that shaped my early thinking actively planted the seeds for Islamist influence. Cultural Marxism, critical race theory, and the broader social justice framework watered those seeds by teaching a generation of students to view every disparity through the singular lens of “oppressor” versus “oppressed,” with Muslims in the bracket of the latter. In that binary, Western civilization, the U.S., and Israel were permanently cast as the villains, while Muslims and Palestinians in particular were granted automatic moral priority. This intellectual architecture supplied Islamist activists with ready-made allies and linguistic cover. Student groups and professors backed them by invoking “de-colonization,” “resistance,” and “equity” while advancing agendas that, in practice, rejected the very liberal order that made the university possible in the first place. The result was that progressive orthodoxy expanded the space for Islamist narratives while shrinking the space for dissent in academia and civil society. I watched this dynamic unfold in real time—first as a participant who internalized the hierarchy of the “oppressed,” and then later as a target when I stepped outside it. 

From Celebrated Bridge-Building to Crossing the Red Line

For more than a decade, I walked a carefully constructed tightrope. I was celebrated on one side as a Christian bridge-builder who humanized Islam, while the other side remained mostly silent—so long as I never stepped too far away from certain political realities. The moment I did, the rope snapped. This dynamic peaked in 2020 with the publication of my book The Humanity of Muhammad: A Christian View. Favorable treatments of Muhammad and consistent advocacy for constructive Islamic messaging earned me goodwill. Yet those same portrayals provoked resistance from those who saw them as dilutions of the faith designed to appeal to Western sensibilities. These critics showed little interest in locating genuine common ground between U.S. civic values and the priorities of the Ummah. Around this time I also remained broadly “pro-Palestinian” and treated Islamist terrorist organizations as fringe outliers within the ummah. I now see that I functioned as a useful puppet. My positive messaging formed part of a broader strategy to improve Islam’s public image. More tensions surfaced the moment I raised political questions about Palestinians. Pressure then followed to stay within the accepted “party line”—criticize and denounce Israel and its allies. I eventually learned that the non-negotiable boundary was Zionism. Once I crossed it, the relationships changed permanently.

Opposition intensified because of my academic visits to the United Arab Emirates. Critics who rejected interfaith efforts accused the Emiratis of inventing a hybrid “Abrahamism” that blended Judaism, Christianity, and Islam into something new and illegitimate. That criticism increased when I publicly supported the Abraham Accords. Opponents framed the agreements as a betrayal of the Palestinians—an abandonment of the long-standing Arab insistence on linkage between normalization with Israel and progress towards Palestinian statehood. In retrospect, the goodwill I had earned among Muslims was never unconditional. The moment my foot landed on that forbidden ground of Zionism, the rope was cut. Bridge-building, it turned out, had always been conditional. 

October 7 + the Price of Clarity

The decisive break came after October 7, 2023. When I publicly stated my support for Israel and Zionism, a wave of cancellation followed online and offline. I lost roughly 80,000 Instagram followers and 30,000 followers on X. Some of those accounts may have been automated, but the message was unmistakable—support for Jews, Israelis, and Zionists was no longer tolerable. Even self-described moderate Muslims stepped away, and some labeled me Islamophobic simply for criticizing Islamist movements like the Muslim Brotherhood, equipped with its well-documented and organized presence in the U.S. and the West at large.

At Rice University, where I have served as a faculty member since 2015, my advocacy for Zionism has produced years of difficulty. I cannot detail every incident without risking further professional harm. The result is a form of self-censorship undertaken to shield a faith (Islam) or a movement (the third intifadah) that are not even my own. In today’s academy, open criticism of Islamist networks combined with support for Israel can become grounds for isolation or worse—removal. 

My decision to stand with Israel was never merely emotional, tribal, or for professional purposes. The truth is that it was my recognition that the U.S.-Israel alliance is a strategic pillar of Western civilization itself. Israel remains the only democracy in the Middle East. The security partnership between the two countries delivers concrete benefits to Americans with joint development in missile-defense systems and sharing intelligence. Beyond the bilateral relationship, Israel functions as a barrier against the westward expansion of Islamist influence, which has already made its way onto the European continent. The survival or collapse of the alliance would send a signal far beyond the Middle East about the resolve of free societies. 

When progressive and Islamist voices demand that the U.S.-Israel alliance be broken, they are not merely criticizing a foreign policy preference. Instead, they are attacking one of the pillars safeguarding the entire democratic and liberal Western order. For me, crossing the Zionism red line of the leftist-Islamist alliance meant refusing to participate in the “soft war” campaign against the West. The personal cost was high, but the alternative—remaining silent while a democratic ally was delegitimized and attacked—would have been a betrayal of the very Enlightenment principles I claim to defend.

Networks, Frameworks + Uncomfortable Data

My experiences over the years never amounted to mere personal friction or the challenging give-and-take of interfaith work. It was actually a small window into a much larger strategic convergence that has been taking shape for decades—the growing alliance between leftist revolutionaries and Islamist radicals, which is the focus of my forthcoming book When Marx Meets Islam: Navigating Radical Ideologies in Defense of the West. Building on the analysis first advanced by David Horowitz, I now see this partnership as an active “soft war” against the West—especially against the U.S.-Israel relationship anchoring Western security, primarily in the Middle East. The alliance is not made up of classic liberals or ordinary Muslims. Rather, it is composed of extremist ideologues who share a Marxist worldview that divides humanity into the “oppressed” and the “oppressors.” That binary fuels anger, resentment, and permanent victimhood while systematically targeting the civic culture of the West. The leftists supply the language of diversity and social justice, while the Islamists supply the energy and focus of religious absolutism. Together, they exploit the very openness and tolerance that define Western societies, turning those virtues into vulnerabilities and, at worse, threats.

The goal of the leftist-Islamist alliance, as I explain in the book, is not open dialogue or potential reform, but the gradual capture of institutions and the eventual displacement of democratic norms with radical alternatives. Once I understood that the pressure I faced was part of this broader campaign rather than isolated disagreement, the pattern of cancellation, self-censorship, and enforced silence became far more intelligible—and far more alarming. 

As the leftist-Islamist alliance came into focus, I grew disillusioned with the overlapping networks that present themselves as secular civil-rights or interfaith organizations. Behind the public affirmations of loyalty to the U.S. often lay a deeper resentment toward the country and the West at large. Both are portrayed as inherently racist and Islamophobic, an assessment I find both false and corrosive. Equally troubling is the widespread adoption by many Muslim Americans of a simplistic Marxist lens that divides the world into “oppressors” and “oppressed.” In this scheme Americans, Christians, Westerners, Jews, Israelis, and Zionists occupy the former category, while Palestinians, Muslims, and the Third World occupy the latter. The framework is intellectually lazy and a direct product of trends inside Western universities. It is also blatantly hypocritical, as there is a virtual silence among Muslim Americans regarding the plight of Christians around the world, particularly those living in Islamic countries.

The rupture within interfaith circles was especially revealing in recent years. Some Muslim communities prefer to partner only with Jews who reject Zionism—individuals who, in practice, prioritize Palestinian and Muslim interests above those of Israelis or even their own people. Genuine Jewish partners who are Zionists who affirm Israel’s right to exist are shunned and publicly condemned as “not the right kind of Jews” or “bad Jews.” This selective solidarity is inherent in Marxism and the “oppressor”-“oppressed” framework—Jews who remain Zionists are reclassified as evil, while those who renounce Zionism are welcomed as morally upright and on the “right side of history.”

With all that said, I do not argue that Islam should be barred from the United States. I do argue, however, that serious problems exist. A recent Pew Research poll found that 44% of Muslim Americans hold favorable views of Hamas, a U.S.-designated terrorist group. That figure is unacceptable. It is a bleak commentary on our moment in time that opposition to Hamas, groups such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or to Qatari influence in the U.S., is automatically branded Islamophobic, bigoted, or racist. It is equally concerning that significant numbers of Muslim Americans have aligned themselves with the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, a faction that has drifted toward socialist and communist premises. These are clear red lines for me as well. 

A Warning Grounded in Experience

Ultimately, my path from hopeful dialogue to this clearer assessment was shaped by accumulated experience, by observable patterns, and by the repeated refusal of too many to confront what stands in plain view. The moment I insisted on supporting Israel or examining Islamist networks with the same scrutiny applied to every other political movement, I discovered how quickly the language of tolerance can be weaponized to enforce silence. Regarding the academy, it once served as the institutional guardian of free inquiry, but it now often functions as its opposite, rewarding conformity and punishing deviation. If we cannot speak honestly about the doctrines, organizations, and demographic trends that challenge liberal democracy, then the Enlightenment project itself becomes a museum piece rather than a living organism.Defending those values requires the courage to apply them universally, without exemption for any progressive cause or interpretation of Islam.

I offer this account as a caution to progressives and to anyone still inclined to overlook the realities mentioned here. At the heart of what is under assault are the Enlightenment values that make free societies possible—individual liberty, freedom of conscience, open debate, and the right to follow evidence wherever it leads. These principles are the operating system of the West itself, not some optional cultural preferences. When any ideology—whether progressive identity politics or political Islam—demands that certain questions be placed off-limits, that certain groups be granted moral immunity, or that criticism itself be redefined as bigotry, those Enlightenment foundations are eroded. My own trajectory illustrates the cost.

More and more information is surfacing to reveal that the Islamic holy war against the West isn’t just being waged on the battleground of the Middle East.

Even more significantly, it’s also being waged through a trillion-dollar influence campaign to colonize and subvert the Western mind, organized by extremists from the Islamic world.

These have tunneled into the West through a vast civic infrastructure whose real purpose and sources of funding have been as well concealed, and in their own way are just as deadly as the subterranean genocide factories in Gaza and Lebanon.

To those with eyes to see, it was obvious from the start that the hate marches springing into existence after October 7, 2023—even while the Hamas-led atrocities were still going on—weren’t spontaneous protests against Israel.

They were instead a globally coordinated campaign to turn gullible Westerners into the unwitting army of Islamic jihad through support for the Palestinian cause.

An important new report by NGO Monitor shows that this post-October 7 protest infrastructure in Britain has used the signature liberal causes of humanitarianism and human rights to launder the Islamic jihad against the West.

The report found that, through a series of concentric circles, just six groups have been involved in more than 80% of the major protests.

In the innermost circle sit the states hostile to the West: Iran, China, Russia and Qatar; terrorist organizations, such as Hamas, Hezbollah and al-Qaeda; and extremist religious-political movements like the Muslim Brotherhood.

Lapping around them are charities, campaign groups, protest movements and advocacy organizations that provide legitimacy for these hostile forces, amplify their propaganda and transmit extremism to society.

Out of 40 organizations mapped in the report, at least 11 have links to extremist groups or officials who have cooperated with Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Muslim Brotherhood.

U.S.-based progressive foundations and far-left activist groups, such as the Open Society Foundation, Action Network, Cultures of Resistance and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, are providing significant funding and support, facilitating donations and strengthening the British protests.

Some of these groups have helped inspire violence in the United States. Last month, U.S. prosecutors indicted eight current and former students at the University of Michigan for conspiring to threaten university leaders, law enforcement, businesses and the Jewish Federation.

The indictment stated that one of the internet websites used by the defendants to spread their demands belonged to Palestine Action, the U.K. group that continues to attract passionate support from otherwise respectable, middle-class Brits, despite having been proscribed by the government as a terrorist outfit.

Well-meaning, if ignorant, people continue to support such organizations on the naïve assumption that they help the oppressed.

The Islamist program to subvert the Western mind has relentlessly focused for years on universities and schools. The Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy has just published another vitally important report, “Institutional Capture,” which documents how anti-West, Islamist Qatar has reshaped American education in a devastating program of cultural infiltration.

Over the past 16 years, according to the report, Qatar Foundation International (QFI), the U.S. member of the Doha-based Qatar Foundation for Education, Science, and Community Development, has conducted a systematic campaign to embed itself within American educational institutions.

Deploying at least $65.3 million across 220 documented initiatives between 2009 and 2025, it has been a “manipulator of thought” in social studies, science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics, as well as in youth engagement, professional development and social activism initiatives.

Through corporate restructuring and strategic partnerships, it has leveraged the reputation of host organizations to embed the Qatari viewpoint on the Middle East in educational materials served up to students in both universities and K–12 schools.

At national conferences for social studies educators, it has stacked the proceedings with presenters trained by QFI to present Qatari talking points.

The result has been an educational echo chamber that “casts doubt on Israel’s very existence, rejects curriculum that teaches students about the efforts to normalize relations between Israel and Arab states, and normalizes and relativizes terrorism.”

This is the template for the Muslim Brotherhood’s long-term strategy for civilizational jihad against Western society, turning educational institutions into a weapon of war by shaping, producing and normalizing ideological positions that fit the agenda of conquering the West for Islam.

It’s scant wonder, therefore, that the West has fallen victim to a psychotic madness about Israel’s fictitious perfidies—a malevolent narrative of demonization that is in turn a Trojan horse for suicidal anti-Western loathing and contempt among the elites. Millions of people are being manipulated on a staggering scale.

America is beginning to grapple with this. In March, the House Committee on Education and the Workforce released nearly 900 pages of documents detailing two major American university partnerships in Qatar.

As the Jewish Institute for National Security of America observed in its own analysis of these documents last month, they showed that Qatar has “used complex funding contracts with American universities to acquire access to intellectual property, governance deliberation, academic credentialing and institutional reputation, which it has used to help support Islamist movements hostile to the United States and its allies.”

The release of those documents galvanized the introduction last month of legislation to ban federal funding to colleges that operate branch campuses in adversarial countries, or accept research funding for sensitive fields like artificial intelligence, biotech, and quantum computing.

That’s a welcome development, but acute concerns still remain. This process of jihadi infiltration has been going on for decades. Successive British governments and U.S. administrations have refused to acknowledge the civilizational threat that it poses.

In large measure, this is because the West can’t understand Islamic religious fanaticism. It assumes that everyone in the world is, like itself, governed by self-interest. So it simply can’t get its collective head around the fact that Islamists are apocalyptic and messianic, and believe they have a divine command to conquer Israel, America, and the West for Islam.

U.S. President Donald Trump seems to make the same mistake. True, none of us can know what’s in his mind. Maybe he really does understand the Islamists’ mindset and is playing a long game to reel them in.

But maybe he believes that the Iranian regime and other Islamists are driven by the same self-interest as in his own world, and that therefore he can end all such conflict through his supposedly unmatched art of the deal.

Such concerns are exacerbated by the extremely troubling financial links between members of Trump’s circle and Qatar. Rather than treating it as the enemy of the civilization that it is, Trump has used Qatar as a trusted interlocutor in talks with Hamas, the Taliban and Iran. His apparently unshakeable belief in the universality of venal self-interest presumably explains his disbelief that the Iranian regime won’t accept that its devastating military losses mean it’s lost the war.

It explains his view that Gaza’s Islamist lions would obviously be turned into lambs by the prospect of the Strip’s transformation into a property developer’s Riviera paradise.

And it may explain his support for Turkey’s menacing Islamist president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. According to Trump, Erdoğan almost entered the war in support of Iran and against America, but the U.S. president talked him out of it. Now, Trump reportedly intends to reward him for this by selling him F-35 warplanes.

Taking his words at their face value (which may always be a mistake), this suggests that narcissistic fantasies prevent this American president from understanding what being an Islamist means.

So as Trump continues to give us all political whiplash by his on-off-on Iran war, and as the West allows its mouth to be stuffed with Qatari gold, the Islamists fight on—as they’ve done ever since the seventh century—playing the longest civilizational war game in the world.

A version of this article first appeared in JNS. Used with permission.

The activist group “NYC Educators for Palestine” is staging a “teach-in” for New York public school children of all ages, using Martin Luther King Day to equate the non-violent movement for black American civil rights with anti-Jewish jihad.

What these propagandists will never tell children as young as 6 is that their actions are covering up for history’s greatest anti-black catastrophes while blaming innocent Jews.

For a start, many of Dr. King’s own African ancestors were trafficked to the Americas in the first place partially as the result of the enslavement of black people by Palestinians’ fellow Muslims. Arabs and Islamized Africans bear substantial responsibility for the trans-Atlantic slave trade, with the Europeans buying many slaves from Muslim rulers who eagerly profited from selling off their non-Muslim war captives.

By contrast, Jews were among the most passionate opponents of racial discrimination in America, making up nearly a quarter of all white freedom riders, with some murdered alongside blacks for their anti-racist activism.

Professed Arab “concern” for black civil rights during the 1960s was actually no more than a cynical disinformation campaign concocted by Communist China and the KGB to pull politically active black Americans closer towards Third Worldist Marxism and away from patriotic integrationism.

But these “educators” are hiding something much worse: Arabs and Muslims, kin to the Palestinians, still own black slaves today. The following could serve as the basis for any serious curriculum on black-Arab relations:

In Algeria and Libya, tens of thousands of Africans attempting to make their way to Europe are enslaved by local Arabs, some terrorist militiamen. The Global Slavery Index says that they number 84,000 and 47,000 respectively. Those who escape have detailed torture, blackmail, and use as grunt labor, with CNN disseminating chilling video in 2017 of a nighttime auction in which two Nigerien men were sold for the equivalent of $400 apiece. The U.S. State Department’s 2024 human rights report on Libya documents that “criminal and nonstate armed groups controlling extralegal facilities routinely tortured and abused detainees [including refugees, asylum seekers, and other migrants], subjecting them to arbitrary killings, rape and sexual violence, beatings, electric shocks, burns, forced labor, and deprivation of food and water, according to dozens of testimonies shared with international aid agencies and human rights groups. In many instances, the purpose of this abuse was reportedly to extort payments from detainees’ families.” Those black migrants within Algeria who are not enslaved also face deeply-seated (systemic) racism.

In Mauritania—a 100% Muslim country—the Arab and Berber minority rule over a true apartheid state in which the black majority is treated as sub-human and racist violence is commonplace. For centuries, Africans have been owned as complete chattel—bequeathed in wills, rented out between friends, and given as gifts to pay gambling debts or as part of dowries. Well within living memory, many were tortured unimaginably. French colonial administrators banned slavery in 1901 and 1905, but to no avail. Then, the year after independence, Mauritania banned it again in 1961; then again in 1980 and 1981; then criminalized it in 2007, and then further criminalized it in 2015. Today, despite some finally being freed, the Global Slavery Index estimates 149,000 Africans are still enslaved, with an unspecified number caught in more modern forms of bondage, such as wage theft. Abolitionists are also subject to violence and repression, one imprisoned in 2018 for planning to run for president.

In Sudan, thousands are still enslaved 21 years after the end of a racist jihad perpetrated by the Muslim Brotherhood junta which dominated the country from 1989 to 2019 (and now does again). In scenes repellently similar to October 7, Arab Muslim militias armed by the state would penetrate into the mostly Christian south, storm villages, shoot and behead the adult men, burn the huts to the ground, and drag away black women and children as chattel slaves. The women became concubines, the girls domestics (before becoming concubines), and the boys herders (often murdered once they reached adulthood). All were forcibly converted to Islam; all suffered physical and racial abuse; many were physically mutilated. Perhaps 200,000 were kidnapped between 1983 and 2002 and 2 million killed before a peace deal was finally signed in 2005. One vague estimate for those still in bondage is 35,000. Today, Arab Sudan is once again waging a genocide against the black Muslims in the western Darfur province in which human bondage, particularly sexual slavery, has re-emerged, with untold numbers of black women raped—some even marched away in chains. As of 2025, the separatist Rapid Support Forces may have killed 200,000 Africans since the conflict re-ignited in 2023, but any estimate is faulty.

Additionally, the Arab world itself is also a major center of black slavery. Impoverished African women, often from Nigeria and Uganda, are tricked into answering advertisements for decent-paying jobs as domestic servants in countries like Egypt, Lebanon, and the Gulf states—Saudi Arabia and the UAE in particular. Once there, passports confiscated, they are plunged into long hours of unpaid labor: some sold from trafficker to master, many raped, some forced into prostitution, some beaten for taking a day off, some sent to prison for escaping—some murdered and mutilated for trying to return home. In 2020, Tolulope Akande-Sadipe, a member of Nigeria’s House of Representatives, claimed that as many as 80,000 women had been trafficked across Lebanon, Mali, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE into sexual slavery from Nigeria alone. Some Nigerian women have even been trafficked as far east as Iraq, enduring rape, forced abortion, and gruesome torture. Africans are also trafficked to the migrant slave labor hub of Qatar, forced into debt to pay their recruitment fees and often taking up jobs as cleaners and security guards, but always running the risk of being abandoned without food or pay.

Africans are sometimes even enslaved by non-Arab Muslims like Boko Haram in Nigeria. In Hamas-style attacks, Boko Haram terrorists have raided boarding schools and Christian villages, dragging off boys to train as child soldiers and girls to distribute amongst themselves for “marriage” as concubines. In 2014, 276 Christian girls were abducted from the town of Chibok, causing some short-lived concern among mainstream media and political figures like Michelle Obama; as of 2025, however, 91 are still in captivity. In 2018, Boko Haram stormed a school in Dapchi, kidnapping 110 students, killing five, and demanding a ransom for their release. That October, when a ransom was organized, Boko Haram refused to release one 15-year-old girl, Leah Sharibu, because she refused to convert to Islam, proclaiming her a “slave for life.” Now approaching 23, Leah is still a slave, reportedly “married” to a Boko Haram terrorist and mother to his two children.

It’s clear that any “Palestine teach-in” will conceal all of these grisly facts. Because the liars who hijack Martin Luther King Day for the purposes of Hamas and Iran’s Islamic rulers are exclusively interested in training American children to hate Jews. If they were truly to honor Dr. King, as opposed to hijacking his good name, they’d do what he would have wanted: demand that Arabs and Muslims free their black slaves. But we won’t be holding our breath.

The New York “anti-racist” Palestinianist teachers would never tell public school students that there is a neighborhood in Gaza principally home to residents of African origin called “al-Abid.” Abid is an Arabic slang term meaning both “black” and “slave”—a rough equivalent of the N-word. Those Palestinians “face entrenched racism,” says JFeed, “frequently denied leadership positions, excluded from certain professions, and pressured to marry within their own community.” Black Americans who have learned of this long obscured fact are neither endeared to the Palestinian cause nor blame the Jews.

Even less likely is that an anti-Israel “teach-in” would include as “balance” the 2010 accusation that Hamas rounded up, tortured, and harvested internal organs from 250 black Eritreans trekking through the Sinai to seek asylum—in Israel.

On Martin Luther King Day in 2004, the prestigious Perkins School for the Blind in Watertown, Massachusetts, welcomed Francis Buk, an African immigrant who had been brutally kidnapped at 7 and owned as a chattel slave in Sudan for a decade, to speak to its students. “The question is what good [is] your freedom if you don’t use it, to help others who live [for] and dream of freedom?” Buk told local news after his emotional speech. Would these “teachers” deign to let Buk or any other survivor of modern-day Arab slavery address children—let alone ones who could see the tears in his eyes?

Dr. King was a resolute Zionist. He wanted nothing to do with Jew-haters of any color or persuasion. Teaching the truths outlined above would be what he would want done on his day. Not using that day, in which we honor his dreams, to promote a hatred he fought to eliminate.

A version of this article first appeared in JNS. Used with permission.

“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.

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.

“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.

1. What is jihad?

Jihad is a global “struggle,” by all necessary means—physical violence included—against the non-Muslim world. Its origins can be found in the foundational texts of Islam, namely the Qur’an, the Hadith (the oral traditions preserving Muhammad’s sayings and actions), and the Sirah (Muhammad’s sacred biography). Relevant Qur’an verses include 2:216, 2:244, 3:151, 4:56, 4:74, 4:76, 4:89, 8:12, 8:39, 8:57, 8:60, 9:33, 47:4, 48:28, and 61:9.

2. Was jihad how Islam spread?

Islam did not generally spread peacefully. Between Muhammad’s death in 632 and the year 750 C.E., Muslim armies conquered (colonized) much of the known world, from Spain in the west to the borders of China in the east. North Africa, the Middle East, and northwestern India—now Afghanistan and Pakistan—became Islamic through brutal military campaigns. By 1683, the Muslim Ottoman Empire had come to rule all of southeastern Europe, with its expansion reversed only at a besieged Vienna’s gates.

3. Is the Islamic war against Israel an example of jihad?

Islamic inability to accept Jewish sovereignty over the Jewish people’s ancient homeland has nothing to do with “land” and everything to do with the doctrine of jihad. By tradition (Qur’an 2:191), non-Muslims who have wrested land Islam has conquered from its colonizers must be fought via jihad, a jihad for Islam’s honor and political supremacy.

4. Was the massacre of October 7, 2023, an example of jihad?

Hamas terrorists’ murder, rape, and abduction of Jews is modeled upon the example of Muhammad during the Battle of Khaibar (628 C.E.), in which a Jewish tribe was besieged, slaughtered, and enslaved, with its women carried off as sexual trophies of war.

5. Is Israel jihad’s main target? 

Jihad is a war against non-Muslims worldwide, including (especially) in America and Europe. Qur’an 9:33 says that the “religion of truth [Islam]” should “prevail over all others,” meaning that all the world must accept Islam. Or, as the Ayatollah Khomeini famously said, Israel is the “Little Satan,” but America is the “Great Satan.”

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.”

A man has found himself between
Being alive and being free
He looks his captor in the face
Says “I’ll be buried in my grave.
Before you put me in those chains,
You can put me in the ground”

Take my life, you’ll never take my soul
I will meet my Father face to face
And see the new Jerusalem
And see the new Jerusalem

Three Hebrew boys are meant to choose
Between a lie and what is True
They stand up tall before the King
Said “you can throw us to the flames.”
It makes no difference what you do,
Cuz we will never bow to you.”

Long ago, we have resolved
To serve nobody else but G-d
To never fall into again
The deathly wicked hands of man
It seems we lost this war, my brothers
But I will not perish by their sword
I’d rather die in a state of freedom
Then hand my life over to Rome

Based on Eleazar ben Yair’s final speech in the Great Revolt against the Romans (66–73 C.E.):

“Since we, long ago, my generous friends, resolved never to be servants to the Romans, nor to any other than to God himself, who alone is the true and just Lord of mankind, the time is now come that obliges us to make that resolution true in practice. …We were the very first that revolted… and we are the last that fight against them; and I cannot but esteem it as a favor that God hath granted us, that it is still in our power to die bravely, and in a state of freedom…”