Yes, I am definitely Islamophobic — and make no apologies about it.
I am not a violent person, but I am also not self-defeating. If I am asked to defend myself, my people, and my homeland, or allow others to walk all over us in the name of Islam, I choose the former.
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In 2014, approximately one year after I moved from my hometown Los Angeles to Israel, a handful of Hamas operatives randomly kidnapped three Israeli teenage boys and murdered them, leading to a mini war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.
Hamas is, of course, an Islamic fundamentalist terror group whose charter includes tracks like “Hamas as an Islamic Resistance Movement with an ideological programme of Islam” for “Muslims who have given their allegiance to Allah” and:
“The Day of Judgment will not come until Muslims fight the Jews, when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say, ‘O Muslim, O servant of God, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.’ Only the Gharkad tree would not do that, because it is one of the trees of the Jews.”
For anyone who has been paying attention since — I don’t know — the 1800s, Palestinian terrorism is predominantly a feature (not a “bug”) of their cause, way before modern-day Zionism was even a figment of the Jewish imagination. Thus, Hamas is not a separate, isolated entity from “the Palestinian cause.” It is very much rooted in the Palestinian DNA.
Yasser Arafat, the first true Palestinian leader who had widespread Palestinian support, fought alongside the Muslim Brotherhood, and Arafat turned the Palestine Liberation Organization into the most connected terrorist organization on the planet.
And, after the 2000 Camp David Summit in the U.S. failed to produce meaningful progress toward a two-state solution because Arafat refused to negotiate, the Second Intifada (a violent Palestinian uprising) immediately ensued, resulting in more than a thousand Israeli deaths, at the time the worst result since Israel’s War of Independence in 1948.
It was at this time that the Palestinian Authority (an extension of the Palestine Liberation Organization) underwent a change: incorporating Islam into its political rhetoric and adding jihad to its agenda.
As a result, the Palestinian Authority gained even more support financially and politically within the Arab and Muslim worlds. According to one report, the amount of money officially donated to the Palestinian Authority during the Second Intifada jumped 80 percent, from $555 million to more than $1 billion.1
Islamist-inspired terrorism is, in other words, good for Palestinian business.
Furthermore, the countries that truly support today’s Palestinians are Islamist fundamentalist regimes, chiefly Iran and Qatar. And everyone knows that Hamas is an outgrowth of the Muslim Brotherhood, which continues to destabilize the Middle East and North Africa.
In fact, one could reasonably make the argument that the mainstream “Palestinian cause” is the Muslim Brotherhood in camouflage. And on the subject of the Muslim Brotherhood, let’s hear from one of its ex-members, Mosab Hassan Yousef, who is uncoincidentally also the son of one of Hamas’ founders. He recently wrote:
“This is not a conspiracy theory, this is a Muslim Brotherhood strategy. Targeting universities has been one of their most effective strategies. They infiltrate campuses through an angry cause; then they spread their indoctrination. ‘Resistance by all necessary means,’ ‘from the river to the sea,’ ‘October 7th was a justified act of resistance,’ ‘Hamas are freedom fighters, ‘globalize the intifada,’ ‘Hitler didn’t finish the job.’”
“Their attempts to legitimize global violence and terror as an act of resistance. The useful idiots who have been spreading false allegations of genocide, colonialism, occupation, and apartheid are advocating on behalf of genocidal jihadists who hate [the West]. The Muslim Brotherhood shadowy agents are the only beneficiaries from this chaos.”
“To make some [Western] students believe that there is a hostage situation called ‘Palestine’ then to weaponize the narrative to divide the [Western] society is only one step. What is next? Targeting the economy.”
I am not naive or stupid; I know that all Muslims are not terrorists and Jew-haters. But many of them are. And even for the ones who are not, a significant amount of these folks who call us “Islamophobic” when we talk about Islamist terrorism in Western countries or in Israel are awfully quiet when Muslims are killed by Hamas in Gaza, by the Houthis in Yemen, by Assad in Syria, or by the Islamic State in Iraq.
In fact, of the 11 million Muslims who have been killed in the Middle East since 1948, the year that the State of Israel was founded, just 0.03 percent of them have been killed by Israel. So if you are outraged by the (mathematically impossible) numbers coming out of Gaza, you must be even more outraged by the number of Muslims who have been killed by other Muslims in this region.
Otherwise, you are an untrustworthy, maniacal, laughable hypocrite. Or simply antisemitic.
Just like the folks who claim to be indigenous and “anti-colonialism” — while adopting the colonial Roman name for the land they claim to be indigenous to, as their identity. And just like the folks who are yelling at other people about an “occupation” while they forcefully occupy other places (e.g. the Golden Gate Bridge, college campuses, airports).
Everything I have written here would be moot points if the Palestinians would agree to live in peace with the Jews in our indigenous homeland — two states for two peoples — but since the 1800s, many of them have not agreed to do so. They have repeatedly turned down peace offers and two-state solution proposals in favor of antisemitic, Islamist-inspired hate, violence, and destruction.
I am no longer naive enough to think that “land for peace” will work, for it has not in the past, and the sample size is significant. It must be highlighted that all of the existing “occupation” infrastructures which are overemphasized in the media, like checkpoints and walls, were created because previous “land for peace” deals were not honored by the Palestinians.
Thus, any current “land for peace” proposal is just a stepping stone for the current Palestinian leadership to attempt to accomplish their ultimate goal: an Islamist Palestinian state from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, precisely where the State of Israel and its nine million citizens currently exist.
We have been hearing “pro-Palestinians” and their “friends” chant for months now across the world, “From the river to the sea!” Maybe you do not take them at their words, but I do. Not because this is some new fad that caught the virality of social media, but because it has dominated the ethos of the mainstream Palestinian movement from “day one” — which goes back more than a century.
And many of them justify it in the name of Islam, which is a fascist, misogynistic, violent political doctrine as much as it is a theological one. Anyone who tells you otherwise is gaslighting you.
Ultimately, it is not the Israelis who are asking people to choose between Israelis and Palestinians; it is the Palestinians, their supporters, and the useful idiots of their supporters who are telling you that it is either all “Palestine” or virulent resistance “by any means necessary” — you know, even “rape is resistance.”
“No peace on stolen land” is also one of their mottos, even though the land was not stolen; it was initially purchased by Jews in the 1800s and 1900s, and then other lands were confiscated by Israel after the Palestinians turned down a United Nations peace proposal in 1947 and waged a genocidal war against the Jews, which the Palestinians and the five Arab countries “defending them” lost.
That is exactly what happens when you wage war and lose: You relinquish land. Sorry not sorry.
But the Palestinians have used Islam as a tool to continue to cowardly attack the Jewish state and inspire others to go after Jews across the world, at least in part because Islam is a deeply antisemitic (really, anti-non-Muslim) religion and God forbid you, as a Muslim Palestinian, have to share land with the Jews.
So yes, I am profoundly scared of people who want to exterminate me, my people, and my homeland, not because all Muslims are murderously dangerous, but because some are, and they are emboldened by the silence of the majority, just as the Nazis were.
For those of us in Israel, these some live on our borders, so we do not have the luxury of making irrelevant, hypothetical moral equivalencies and debating textbook theories that have no inkling of semblance on real life in the Middle East.
And yet, my Islamophobia does not end there. I am also deeply frightened by Islamic fundamentalists and their “friends” occupying college campuses in the West and other Western institutions, taking advantage of the media and people’s gullibility, perverting Western liberties, and making statements like “Zionists are not welcome.”
For those less naive in the crowd, we know that the term “Zionist” is really just a code word for “Jews.” Indeed, if Israel and Zionism did not exist, Jews everywhere would be the default targets. This is what makes the “anti-Zionist” Jews, and the Jews demonstrating alongside these “anti-Israel” demonstrators, all the more idiotic.
I, for one, am not a violent person, but I am also not self-defeating. If you are asking me to defend myself, my people, and my homeland, or allow others to walk all over us in the name of Islam, I choose the former — and make no apologies about it.
There are also those admittedly less biased than me — who rightfully concur — such as Faran Jeffery, the Deputy Director of the organization, Islamic Theology of Counter Terrorism. He recently wrote:
“There are plenty of people like me — non-Jewish and non-Israeli and formerly very pro-Palestinian — who are done with the Palestinian cause. And when I say done, I mean done. No more. Crush it by any means necessary. It’s because we have seen this movement very closely. We have heard all their arguments. And we have seen their values.”
“And we have also seen the other side. The side which largely believes in progress, scientific discovery, decency, freedom, and liberty. As pro-Palestinians rage on in the streets and college campuses in the West, they should remember that they are hardening hearts. I lost all and any sympathy for these people long ago.”
“And this isn’t about being pro-Israel. Israel can take care of its own business. This is about this movement being a pro-terrorist movement. This is about any future Palestinian state guaranteed to be a terror state.”
“Heck, if Israel agrees to accept a Palestinian state tomorrow, I’m pretty sure I’d be in opposition to that. Because this is about being against terrorism. This is about regional and global security. Israel is simply a very small part of it. This movement has tried to hijack everything it has come in contact with. It has destroyed countless innocent lives on both sides.”
“Any person with two brain cells should at the very least look at this movement with deep suspicion. Pro-Palestinians say ‘resistance by any means necessary.’ But I say fight terrorism by any means necessary.”2
Info-Prod Research
Faran Jeffery on X
Thanks for this strong, hard-hitting essay. It's definitely needed. We have already tried the path of papering over the jagged edges of outrageous Palestinian actions and demands, and we now can see clearly where it has brought us. All those interfaith prayer breakfasts and other attempts to find common ground were a colossal waste of time; they only bought time for the Islamists to advance their agenda at our expense. At this point, the cat's out of the bag. We've watched as "criticism of Israeli gov't policies" became "criticism of Israel's policies" which became "criticism of Zionist policies" which finally proclaimed its true agenda for all to see: "Death to the Jews!"
Let's move forward with a clear understanding that we have an enemy that has no desire to compromise and whose sincere and simple desire is to kill us all. It's time to stop pretending that putting lipstick on a pig will change the nature of the beast.
A phobia is an irrational fear. It is perfectly rational to fear those who call for your death.