Islamism kills Jews. The West pretends not to notice.

Jews are murdered in the UK, just like they were on October 7th, and far too many people still won’t say why.

A jihadist casually walking the streets of London (photo: Ian Hutchinson/Unsplash)

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This is a guest essay by Matthew Nouriel, an Iranian and Jewish writer and activist.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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On Yom Kippur in Manchester, Jews leaving Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation were rammed with a car and stabbed. Two people were murdered and at least three were badly injured.

The attacker was identified by Greater Manchester Police as Jihad Al-Shamie, a 35-year-old British citizen of Syrian descent. He was shot dead by armed officers at the scene and was reported to be wearing what was later determined to be a fake explosive vest.

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer did at least call the attack antisemitic. He described it as someone attacking Jews because they are Jews and promised enhanced protection for Jewish communities, but that doesn’t erase the fact that Islamic antisemitism has been allowed to run rampant in Britain for years.

London has hosted repeated mass marches where chants veer into open support for Hamas and calls for Jewish destruction, and in a disturbing inversion, anyone daring to speak against Hamas or openly for Jews at these protests risks being detained by police, while those chanting for “intifada” or waving Hamas symbols often walk away untouched.

University campuses have seen harassment of Jewish students and pressure around Israel-related issues. In some local councils and municipal decisions, Jewish communities have felt ignored or de-prioritized.

This legacy of tolerance predates Starmer, and similar patterns are found across Europe.

In France, synagogues remain under armed guard, Jews are attacked in broad daylight, and public rallies chant “Death to the Jews!” In Germany, firebombs are thrown at synagogues while officials search for ways to rationalize it. Even in the United States, where the current administration at least condemns antisemitism forcefully, we see the same protests, the same harassment, the same slogans shouted, and the same vandalism. The pattern is global.

This refusal to name and confront Islamic antisemitism became glaring on October 7th. That day, Jews in Israel were butchered in their homes, in their communities, and at a music festival in the worst mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust. Almost immediately, instead of focusing on the atrocity itself, certain politicians, institutions, activists, and “influencers” could barely bring themselves to condemn it, and when they did, it had to be qualified, always framed with “both sides.”

In fact, any time antisemitism is publicly acknowledged today, it’s almost always quantified with “Islamophobia.” It’s the “all lives mattering” of Jewish suffering, a way of refusing to let Jewish pain stand on its own.

But here, there is no both sides. That’s not how it works. To collapse those things into a pairing was an act of rhetorical violence. It erased Jewish grief at the very moment it needed recognition most, and it told the perpetrators that even their bloodlust would be softened by those too afraid to speak plainly.

This infantilization extends beyond rhetoric. Nearly two years after October 7th, instead of holding Hamas accountable for their horrific, genocidal actions and decades of rejectionism, world leaders lined up to “recognize the State of Palestine” — but there is no State of Palestine, because the Palestinians have for nearly a century rejected every opportunity to build one.

Hamas itself admits that the October 7th massacre helped bring international recognition closer. What other people on earth would be rewarded for mass murder with symbolic statehood? This is not diplomacy; it’s the bigotry of low expectations. And like everything else, it is rooted in Islamic antisemitism — the ideology that says Jewish sovereignty is illegitimate, and that violence against Jews is always understandable, if not excusable.

This cowardice is not accidental. The very term “Islamophobia” has been deliberately instrumentalized. The word predates modern politics, but in recent decades Islamist groups and regimes, especially the Islamic Republic of Iran’s regime, have championed it as a weapon. The regime presents itself as the global defender of Muslims, leading campaigns against “Islamophobia,” but the goal is not to protect ordinary Muslims from prejudice; it’s to shield Islamist ideology from criticism.

By conflating legitimate critique with bigotry, the regime in Iran and its allies/proxies created a shield that Western leaders have absorbed. Today, anyone who names Islamic antisemitism risks being branded a racist (despite the fact that Islam is not a race, but that’s another essay altogether).

To be clear: Islam and Islamism are not the same. Islam is a religion practiced by nearly two billion people. Islamism is a political ideology that fuses religion with state power, demands clerical rule, the implementation of sharia law, and weaponizes antisemitism as a central plank. Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Islamic Republic are not simply “Muslim.” They are imperialistic, colonial, Islamist movements.

But antisemitism in Muslim societies is not confined to Islamists; it is mainstream. Surveys over the past decade show overwhelmingly negative attitudes toward Jews across much of the Middle East and North Africa. Pew’s regional polling documented extremely high unfavorable views of Jews in Jordan, the Palestinian Territories, and Egypt, and Anti-Defamation League global surveys have repeatedly shown the Middle East and North Africa region among the highest in endorsement of antisemitic stereotypes.

If antisemitism truly were a fringe problem, as so many insist, then where are the voices proving it? Where are the Muslim leaders, activists, and scholars loudly rejecting Jew-hatred? Yes, there are brave individuals, but they are vanishingly few. The silence itself is an indictment. If antisemitism were truly marginal, Muslim voices condemning it would drown out the hatred. Instead, the silence is deafening.

This reality explains why “land for peace” has never worked. Westerners hear “land dispute” and think of borders to be haggled over, but in Islamic jurisprudence, once land is ruled by Islam it becomes part of Dar al-Islam (the Abode of Islam), and it can never legitimately revert. If lost, it must be retaken. This is why Hamas declares all of “Palestine” a permanent Islamic trust, a waqf, never to be relinquished.

Israel has tested the land-for-peace formula again and again. It accepted the UN partition plan in 1947; Arab leaders rejected it. It withdrew from Gaza in 2005; rockets, wars, and kidnappings followed. Israeli Prime Minister Olmert offered 97 percent of the West Bank in 2008; the Palestinians turned it down. The problem is not how much land Israel controls. The problem is that Jews — the subordinate, cowardly dhimmis (second-class citizens) — control any land at all, and dare not only to fight for what is rightfully ours, but to do it successfully.

This is the true root of the conflict. It was never just about borders; it is about whether Jews can be permitted to be sovereign in a land once conquered and ruled by Islam. For Islamists, the answer is no, and until that reality is confronted, every concession will fail, because the demand is not compromise; it’s elimination.

Jews from the Middle East and North Africa know Islamic antisemitism intimately. Families like mine who fled Iran after the 1979 Islamic Revolution have seen Islamism before, and know what it means: repression and danger for Jews.

And not only for Jews. Non-Jewish Iranians also paid the price, just as countless ethnic and religious minorities under Islamic rule. And, yet, when Jews from the Middle East and North Africa (Iranians, Kurds, Yazidis, Assyrians, Kopts, Hindus, and countless others) try to warn the world about Islamic antisemitism and Islamism, we are silenced. We are branded “Islamophobic.” Even Muslim dissidents from the Middle East who dare speak about it are accused of betraying their own people and threatened with death.

Academia doesn’t just avoid this truth, it justifies it. Professors and “critical theorists” dress up Islamic antisemitism in the language of “decolonization” and “resistance.” They call Jewish sovereignty “settler-colonialism.” They invert history so that centuries of Jews living as second-class dhimmis are erased, while those who subjugated or expelled us are cast as indigenous. They recycle antisemitic tropes under the guise of scholarship, laundering hatred into theory and bigotry into coursework. It’s pseudo-intellectual horsesh*t that gives Islamic antisemitism a veneer of respectability.

Right now, we are living through the biggest surge of antisemitism since the Holocaust. That is not hyperbole; it’s a reality measured in assaults, vandalized synagogues, and mobs chanting for Jewish death in cities across the world.

Yet, even in this moment, people look away. They rationalize and West-splain. They tell Jews what we are allowed to call antisemitism, and what we are not. The result is the same enforced silence: Jews are murdered, and the world insists we speak about anything but the hatred that killed us.

Antisemitism mutates. In medieval times it was religiously based Christian and Muslim, depending on where one lived. In the 20th century it was racially motivated Nazi fascism, and then Soviet subjugation, as well as Arab nationalism in the Middle East and North Africa.

In today’s world, it is predominantly rooted in Islamist ideology, paired with Soviet-era propaganda, and we are witnessing a resurgence of Nazism from the Alt-Right who have found an unholy bedfellow in Islamism. The essence has not changed: Jew-hatred. To pretend otherwise, to call the Manchester attack “senseless” or to insist the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is just about land, is dishonest. The truth is harder. The conflict endures, and Jewish blood keeps being shed, because Islamic antisemitism is the root, and nobody wants to admit it.

And the vilification of Zionism — the national liberation and indigenous movement of the Jewish People — was just the beginning. It was the test case. Once the world learned it could demonize the very idea of Jewish sovereignty, the door was open to everything that has followed.

It won’t stop until we name what it is and have the courage to confront it: Islamism and Islamic antisemitism. And if you still think it begins and ends with Israel and the Jews, then pull your head out of your you-know-what before it suffocates you.

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