I was wrong. Within days, familiar narratives resurfaced. “It didn’t start on October 7,” critics insisted. “If Israel had just given the Palestinians a state…,” “Netanyahu’s government brought this on itself.” The victims, it seemed, had somehow provoked their own massacre.

This reaction did not surprise me as much as it should have. Years earlier, living in Egypt, I witnessed something eerily similar. A woman in Cairo was sexually harassed and assaulted in public. Instead of outrage directed at the perpetrators, many, including other women, blamed the victim. “She was asking for it,” they said. “Look at how she was dressed,” “She shouldn’t have been out alone.” I was stunned. Why would women turn on one of their own when any of them could have been in her position?

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A new poll commissioned by Policy Exchange and conducted by JL Partners between April 16 and 27, 2026, surveyed 1,006 British Muslims in the parts of England where Muslim populations are concentrated, Greater London, the West Midlands, Greater Manchester, West Yorkshire, and parts of Lancashire, South Yorkshire, and Merseyside. The findings are not ambiguous, and they are not the work of a fringe outlet. Policy Exchange is the most influential center-right think tank in Britain. JL Partners is a member of the British Polling Council. The results confirm what every previous serious poll of British Muslims has shown: no other community in the United Kingdom comes close to matching the levels of antisemitism, sympathy for terrorist organizations, hostility to liberal democratic norms, and divided loyalty seen within Britain’s Muslim population.

Twenty-five percent of British Muslims polled hold a favorable view of Hamas, an organization that on October 7, 2023, slaughtered, raped, and kidnapped Israeli civilians in the worst single attack on Jews since the Holocaust. Sixteen percent hold a favorable view of the Islamic State, the organization that carried out genocide against the Yazidis, enslaved Christian women, and beheaded captives on camera for global broadcast. Fifteen percent hold a favorable view of al-Qaeda, the organization that flew passenger aircraft into the World Trade Center. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Tehran regime’s instrument of regional terrorism and the body responsible for arming the Houthis, Hezbollah, and Hamas, holds a net positive favorability among British Muslim respondents. These are not narrow majorities expressing reservations. These are minorities ranging from one in seven to one in four expressing approval of organizations the British government has formally designated as terrorist.

On the relationship between Islam and the laws of the country in which they live, the numbers are sharper. Sixty-three percent of British Muslims polled want the burning of the Quran made a criminal offense. Fifty-two percent want depictions of Muhammad criminalized. Twenty-four percent, nearly one in four, believe violence is a legitimate response to either. Hundreds of thousands of British Muslims, maybe even millions, hold the view that a fellow citizen who burns a book or draws a cartoon may be killed for it.

On Jews and Israel, forty-five percent of British Muslims polled believe Jews wield excessive influence over the British media. Thirty-nine percent believe the same about Parliament, more than twice the rate found in the general public. Twenty-one percent admit unfavorable feelings toward Jews directly, compared with eleven percent nationally. These are the standard antisemitic conspiracy theories, Jews controlling the media, Jews controlling the government, held at rates that would be disqualifying for any other constituency in British public life and that the political class has, for thirty years, decided to overlook for this one.

When asked which identity comes first, sixty-three percent of British Muslim respondents answered Islamic. Twelve percent answered British. The remainder gave mixed or hedged responses. The country has admitted, settled, and granted citizenship to a population of roughly four million people, and a majority of them, when asked the most basic question of political loyalty, name a religious community above the country whose passport they hold.

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These figures are not new. They are consistent with a polling record that goes back more than a decade.

The 2016 ICM survey commissioned by Channel 4, conducted face-to-face with over a thousand British Muslims, found that twenty-three percent supported the introduction of Sharia law in Britain, thirty-nine percent agreed that wives should always obey their husbands, and thirty-five percent believed Jewish people had too much power in Britain. The Henry Jackson Society poll conducted by JL Partners in February and March 2024 found that forty-six percent of British Muslims agreed Jews have too much power over British government policy, while only one in four accepted that Hamas committed murder and rape on October 7. The Pew Research Forum has tracked British Muslim attitudes for years and shown the same pattern, substantial minorities holding views directly hostile to the liberal democratic order, with younger British Muslims more radical than their parents rather than less. British Social Attitudes data shows the same. The findings are not the result of one outlier survey, one biased question, or one partisan researcher. They are the consistent finding of every serious polling operation that has examined the question, across more than a decade, with different methodologies, different sponsors, and different commissioning purposes.

The contrast with every other major community in Britain is the analytical move that matters most.

Practicing Christians remain the largest religious bloc in Britain. They are more socially conservative than secular Britons on questions of family and faith. Their views on terrorism, blasphemy violence, and antisemitism are dramatically milder than those recorded among Muslims. Christian sympathy for Hamas, the Islamic State, or al-Qaeda is statistically negligible. Christian belief that Jews wield excessive power over British institutions runs at a small fraction of the Muslim figure.

The Hindu and Sikh communities of Britain offer an even sharper contrast. Both are smaller than the Muslim community, but both have grown rapidly through immigration in recent decades, meaning the comparison cannot be dismissed as a function of length of settlement. British Hindus and Sikhs rank among the most economically successful and socially integrated minorities in the country. Polling consistently shows low antisemitism, near-zero sympathy for Islamic extremism, strong identification with British civic norms, and warm favorability ratings toward Jews and toward the West. Hindus and Sikhs face violence from Muslim communities with depressing regularity in parts of Britain, at school gates, on city streets, in their own places of worship, and the British political class has noticed this even less than it has noticed the antisemitism.

Across antisemitism, terrorism sympathy, blasphemy violence, divided loyalty, and rejection of basic British political norms, the British Muslim population stands apart. Not by a small margin. By an enormous one. And the gap is not closing with time, contact, or generation. The polls show younger British Muslims are more hostile to Britain than their parents.

Islamic terrorism has been the dominant security threat in Britain for a generation. The overwhelming majority of terror plots disrupted by MI5, the overwhelming majority of arrests under the Terrorism Act, the overwhelming majority of Prevent referrals, all derive from the British Muslim community. Parallel social structures have emerged in cities and towns across the country, with Sharia councils operating outside the British legal system, with grooming networks that targeted thousands of British girls across two decades while authorities looked the other way for fear of “community tensions,” with street-level enforcement of Islamic norms in neighborhoods where ordinary British citizens no longer feel safe. Since October 7, 2023, antisemitic incidents in Britain have surged to levels not seen in the modern history of the country, and the British Jewish community now reports openly that ordinary public life, wearing a kippah, sending children to a Jewish school, walking past a mosque on a Friday, has become very risky.

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The 2021 census recorded just under four million Muslims in the United Kingdom, six percent of the total population, up from 4.8 percent a decade earlier. The Pew Research Forum’s mid-range projection has the Muslim share of the British population reaching 17.2 percent by 2050 under continued high-migration assumptions. The Muslim population is younger than the general population, with a higher fertility rate, and is concentrated in specific urban areas where the local share is already much higher than the national average.

The standard response of the British political class to data of this kind has been to suppress it. The 2016 ICM survey was attacked by every Muslim advocacy organization in Britain and dismissed by significant portions of the political class. The 2024 Henry Jackson Society poll was attacked along the same lines. The 2026 Policy Exchange poll will be attacked along the same lines. The strategy is consistent. The numbers are the problem; therefore the numbers must be denied, the methodology must be impugned, the researchers must be smeared, and the topic must be redirected toward “Islamophobia”, a term constructed precisely to make the discussion of the polling impossible. The strategy has failed because the polls keep coming, and they keep finding the same thing. Britain is now living with the cumulative cost of three decades of refusing to discuss what its own data has been telling it.

A serious response to the findings requires three things. First, an honest public conversation, conducted in plain English, about what the polling actually shows and what it implies. Second, a re-examination of the immigration policy that has produced the demographic outcome the polling describes, including a pause on high-volume immigration from regions whose source populations consistently produce these numbers when polled in Britain. Third, the dismantling of the parallel legal, educational, and social structures that have allowed the unintegrated portion of the Muslim community to consolidate its separation from the rest of British life.

Khaled Hassan is a fellow at the Ideological Defense Institute

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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.

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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 fourteen-hundred-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, Sira, 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.

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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 US 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 antisemitism, 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 antisemites 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 paleoconservatives, 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.

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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, antisemites, 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 needs 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 it’s universities, its governments, it’s 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.

Danny Burmawi is the chief executive of the Ideological Defense Institute.

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Subject-matter experts, former Muslims, Arab Christians, and Western thought leaders, coming together to equip policymakers to prevent destructive foreign ideas from being translated into law, restore confidence in the biblical principles that built the West by empowering the Church to reengage the public square, and provide the public with solid analysis to combat the confusion that is making the West vulnerable.

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“And I was talking about, you know, what is the first truly Islamist country that will get a nuclear weapon, and we were like, maybe it’s Iran, you know, maybe Pakistan already kind of counts, and then we sort of finally decided maybe it’s actually the UK, since Labour just took over.”

These words were dismissed by the simpering British commentariat as a wild exaggeration, but I think that Vance taps into an important debate about immigration, integration, and ongoing major political shifts in the UK.

I’m not even sure his words were that hyperbolic and they most certainly invite asking a tough question:

Could the UK, a bastion of liberal democracy and nuclear power, fall to Islamic ideology?

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As always, demography tends to be destiny. The UK’s Muslim population has grown steadily, from about 2.7 million in 2001 to over 3.9 million by 2021, according to census data. Undoubtedly that will now be well in excess of 4.5 million. Projections suggest it could reach 13 million by 2050 if high immigration continues, driven by so called “asylum seekers” from Muslim-majority countries like Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Syria.

If we look at fertility rates among Muslim communities, we see that they are around 2.9 children per woman compared to the national average of 1.6. This will further accelerate this shift. In urban centers like London, Birmingham, and Manchester, Muslims already form significant minorities, with some council wards exceeding 50% Muslim residents. Over time, this is leading to “parallel societies,” where cultural norms diverge from the mainstream, fostering enclaves with Sharia councils handling family disputes, as already seen today.

The Labour Party’s reliance on ethnic minority votes, particularly in inner-city constituencies, means it panders to Islamist-leaning factions. In the 2024 election, Labour secured strong support from Muslim voters amid Gaza-related protests, but this came with strings: candidates faced pressure to adopt pro-Palestinian stances, and some independents ran on explicitly Islamist platforms, winning seats in places like Leicester and Blackburn.

In the most recent Parliamentary by election, the Green Party outmaneuvered Labour in attracting to the Muslim vote. Labour is desperate to try and keep these voters through policies like relaxed blasphemy laws or state-funded faith schools. This craven weakness inadvertently empowers the hardline voices it seeks to appease.

Hypothetically, by the 2040s, coalition governments could include Islamist ministers pushing for reforms: halal standards in public institutions, gender-segregated facilities in schools, or even symbolic recognition of Islamic holidays over Christian ones.

Cultural and legal erosion would follow, amplified by societal pressures. Free speech debates, already strained by hate speech laws, could tilt further. Incidents like the 2022 Batley Grammar School controversy—where a teacher was forced into hiding after showing a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad—highlight how vulnerable we are.

In a “fallen” UK, repeated protests and legal challenges might lead to de facto blasphemy protections, stifling criticism of Islam. Media self-censorship, driven by fear of backlash or “Islamophobia” accusations, could normalize Islamist narratives. The Education curriculum could evolve fostering a generation more aligned with global ummah identities than British national ones.

Economically, stagnation could fuel radicalization. Vance alluded to “high levels of immigration” correlating with “economic stagnation.” He’s right there too!

Hypothetically, by mid-century, economic woes might prompt populist Islamist movements promising welfare reforms inspired by zakat (Islamic charity) or interest-free banking, appealing to broader disaffected groups. International influences, like funding from Qatar or Saudi Arabia for mosques and community centers, could subtly promote conservative ideologies, mirroring trends in other European nations.

The nuclear angle in Vance’s quote underscores the ultimate stakes. The UK, as a NATO nuclear power with Trident submarines, maintains independent deterrence. In this scenario, an Islamist-influenced government might not dismantle the arsenal but could realign foreign policy: withdrawing from alliances seen as anti-Muslim, like supporting Israel, or even sharing technology with sympathetic states.

A “soft coup” through democratic means—via referendums or parliamentary majorities—could install leaders prioritizing Sharia principles, transforming the UK into a hybrid theocracy. Think Turkey under Erdogan, but with Britain’s global clout.

Of course, this is not inevitable. The UK people have a choice. They fight back or they will be erased and the UK will become an Islamic caliphate.

David Vance is a Northern Irish political commentator, broadcaster, and blogger known for his outspoken views on politics, national identity, and security issues in the United Kingdom and Europe. A longtime commentator on current affairs, he has written extensively on Islam, terrorism, free speech, and Western civilization. Vance has contributed to numerous media outlets and frequently appears in public debates and interviews discussing political and cultural developments in the West.

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Practicing Muslims observe Ramadan by praying and fasting. They abstain from food and drink from dawn to sunset and break the fast with the evening meal known as iftar, an often elaborate, multi-course banquet enjoyed with family and friends at festive gatherings. It is the iftar that most non-Muslims promote and participate in during Ramadan.

Much of the non-Muslim support for Ramadan is coming from well-meaning individuals and organizations from across the political spectrum—left, right, and center—and is usually portrayed as part of an effort to promote freedom of religion, inclusion, and tolerance.

Ramadan’s Spiritual Significance

The iftar is much more than a meal; it has great spiritual significance. The signal for Muslims that they may begin the iftar is the Adhan (the Islamic call to prayer) at sunset. The Adhan repeats four times that Allah is “the greatest” of all gods, two times that there is “no god but Allah,” another two times that Allah is “the greatest,” and concludes with the assertion that “there is no god but Allah.” The Adhan falsely declares that Allah is greater than Yahweh, the God of the Bible.

The Adhan at sunset, the fourth of five daily Islamic prayers, is known as the Maghrib prayer, which requires Muslims to acknowledge the sovereignty of Allah. In the prayer, Muslims recite Surah al-Fatiha, the first chapter of the Qur’an, which states that Allah is the “Lord of all worlds,” the “Master of the Day of Judgment,” and emphatically declares, “You alone we worship.”

After breaking the fast (iftar), practicing Muslims recite a prayer known as dua, which states: “O Allah, for you I have fasted and by your provision I have broken my fast.” Muslims then make personal supplications to Allah.

In essence, Ramadan is a festival that celebrates the giving of the Qur’an, a book that elevates a deity called Allah above the God of the Bible and denies the divinity of Jesus Christ. The iftar is a ceremonial meal dedicated to Allah and falsely establishes him as the one true God. This is the theology that non-Muslims endorse when they promote Ramadan and participate in the iftar. The are, in effect, denying the God of the Judeo-Christian Bible.

Ramadan’s Political Significance

Beyond its spiritual significance, Ramadan has great political importance. Many analysts of Islam in the West warn that Islamists (those who seek to reorder Western countries and societies according to the principles of Islam) are “ideologically instrumentalizing” Ramadan to further their aims of Islamizing the West.

Mouhanad Khorchide, head of the Center for Islamic Theology at the University of Münster, notes that the significance of Ramadan in Europe is shifting from religious to political and that Islam is increasingly becoming a principle source of identity. “Religious rituals or visible symbols are increasingly taking their place; not primarily as expressions of inner piety, but as markers of belonging,” he says.

Seyran Ates, founder of the Ibn Rushd-Goethe Mosque in Berlin, adds: “From my perspective, there is unfortunately an instrumentalization of Ramadan by political Islam in Germany at present, which everyone should warn against. In particular, when politicians are invited to the breaking of the fast, they should better examine which organizations are behind it.”

Ates notes that many of the Islamist groups promoting Ramadan in Germany are being surveilled by intelligence agencies due to the threat they pose to the liberal democratic order.

Ramadan Controversies

Austria

Teachers in Vienna, the Austrian capital, are reporting a “worrying dynamic” in classrooms where students are facing “massive” peer pressure to comply with Ramadan fasting rules. Thomas Krebs, a teachers’ union representative, said “surveillance groups” are “meticulously ensuring” that classmates not only abstain from food, but also adhere to “appropriate” dress and behavior during Ramadan. “It cannot be that individual students put themselves above others,” Krebs warned in a special report aired on Austrian television.

Krebs also revealed that lessons are being disrupted by students who spontaneously unroll prayer rugs during class and begin praying. Others are warning that social media acts as a “digital morality police” that is “massively increasing” social control over young people. An Austrian commentator noted: “One has to let this sink in: underage students are establishing a system of social control in European classrooms that resembles a religious morality police.”

Germany

In Göttingen, a city with nearly 125,000 inhabitants, the Adhan was recited publicly for the first time in the city’s history. The occasion was the breaking of the Ramadan fast on February 24. Mayor Petra Broistedt described the public call to prayer as a “moving moment” and “an expression of a pluralistic society.”

The call to prayer on rang out from the city’s Königsstieg Mosque, which is closely linked to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, an Islamist opposed to the assimilation of the Turkish diaspora in Germany. The mosque is well known for promoting Islamism and antisemitism. In 2021, the then-chairman Mustafa Keskin was forced to resign after he spread antisemitic content on social media. In several posts, he claimed, among other things, that Jews were cursed and controlled world politics. He also referred to Armenians as “bastard dogs.”

In an interview with the Göttinger Tageblatt, the current leader of the mosque, Ali Serkan Sabhaz, revealed that the public call to prayer was not a one-off event but a trial run for regular calls to prayer. He said he is discussions with the city hall to obtain permission to sound a call to prayer once a month on Friday at noon. The long-term objective appears to be calls to prayer five times a day.

In a press release, the center-left Mayor Broistedt said the public call to prayer “is not a political symbol, but rather the rule of law in practice.” She added: “We consciously prioritize dialogue, respect, and the protection of our shared freedom.”

Center-right politicians like Hendrik Wüst praised the public call to prayer as a “contribution to integration.” But Islam experts like Ahmad Mansour warns that it is a “demonstration of power by political Islam.”

German commentator Heinz Steiner described the public call to prayer as “acoustic capitulation” to political Islam. “While the mosque publicly presents itself as liberal and open to dialogue, internally it often preaches a hardline, anti-Western, and Islamist agenda. The fact that a German mayor granted this very association permission to broadcast its message through loudspeakers in public spaces demonstrates a shocking level of political naiveté.”

The Alternative for Germany (AfD), a civilizationalist party, stated: “The public call to prayer is not merely an exercise of religious freedom, but an acoustic marking of public space that disturbs and excludes large parts of the non-Muslim neighborhood. We see this as an ideological shift in boundaries that does not fit with our understanding of a secular and tolerant coexistence.”

Also in Germany, primary school children at the Joseph Beuys Comprehensive School in Kleve, North Rhine-Westphalia, were required to eat lunch in secret because doing so might “provoke” their fasting Muslim classmates. The move came after Muslim students began bullying their non-Muslim classmates and ordered them to “fast now” and “throw your food in the trash can.”

A spokesman for the AfD parliamentary group, Götz Frömming, commented: “The events at the comprehensive school in Kleve show that tolerance in many places has long since turned into preemptive submission. Our free and democratic legal order, which rests on a Christian-Roman cultural heritage, not Islam, must be the guiding principle for everyday school life.”

AfD Member of Parliament Birgit Bessin added: “The Ramadan rules of conduct in Kleve further relativizes the Christian identity of our country and reflects the gradual Islamization of everyday school life. It is urgently necessary to push back these Islamization tendencies and demand unconditional respect for German core values.”

Spain

In Barcelona, the City Council’s Office of Religious Affairs issued Ramadan procedures for the city’s schools in order “to create a climate of respect and overcome the stigma, ignorance, and Islamophobia that permeates much of the Western imagination.” The handbook, “Guidelines for Educational Centers on Ramadan,” states that “understanding Ramadan helps avoid stereotypes, prevent discrimination, and ensure equal treatment for all students.”

Among other advice, the guide recommends that schools avoid extracurricular activities such as music or dance, which may be considered “inappropriate” by Muslims during Ramadan, “since it is a month dedicated to spirituality, during which it is especially important to maintain a pious attitude.” Therefore, it would be “advisable to take this sensitivity into account when planning activities or offering alternative options.”

The Barcelona City Council has a long history of mocking Christians during Christmas by setting up “secular” nativity scenes in which Jesus, Mary, and Joseph are represented by empty chairs. Gonzalo de Oro, a spokesman for Vox, a Spanish civilizationist party, said the guide “is further proof of the surrender of the Socialist Party and the mayor of Barcelona to Islam.” He added:

“It’s a surrender that began many years ago with the Ramadan greetings, which then continued with the lack of Christmas greetings, with hiding the Nativity scene, and now they’ve finally dropped the mask. They’re banning pork in public schools, meaning our Christian children cannot eat pork in public schools, which is outrageous, and on top of that they presume to tell us how we should behave during Ramadan.”

De Oro concluded: “What this City Council wants is for Barcelona to become like Marrakesh or Algiers. We at VOX will not normalize these guides or these attitudes that are against our civilization.”

The Netherlands

Lawmakers Diederik van Dijk and André Flach expressed concern that Dutch politicians are fully embracing the Islamic iftar, while increasingly erasing the Judeo-Christian tradition. In an op-ed article published by De Telegraaf, the largest Dutch daily morning newspaper, they wrote:

“The large numbers of politicians and administrators attending iftar celebrations may seem sympathetic at first glance. And we understand the purpose: to connect all groups in society. An important task. But one thing is overlooked: the Netherlands has a Judeo-Christian tradition, and the religion they champion is inherently anti-Jewish and anti-Christian. Therefore, it is at the very least questionable to attend iftars where exclusion is preached, under the guise of inclusion.

“Unfortunately, it doesn’t stop there. Many governments in the Netherlands go a step further. They organize or subsidize iftars themselves. At taxpayer expense, imams are thus given the opportunity to spread the message to municipalities, ministries, or the National Police that no god may be worshiped but Allah. Conversely, we have yet to encounter a pastor who is allowed to lead prayers at a ministry’s Christmas reception or Easter breakfast in a town hall. In fact, the terms “Christmas reception” and “Easter breakfast” have often long since been abandoned. This is a double standard, and it flies in the face of the neutrality our government claims to uphold.

“And that brings us to the crux of the matter. In the Netherlands, we are seeing two developments: Islam is gaining an increasingly dominant position; and Christianity is increasingly being pushed to the background, while the Netherlands has Christian roots.”

Van Dijk and Flach concluded: “We stand for freedom of religion, but oppose preferential treatment of Islam. Anyone who cuts off their own history and roots to make room for another religion or ideology uproots themselves and ultimately offers no one else a foundation to stand on.”

Other Ramadan Controversies

Other Ramadan-related controversies and disputes in Europe this year include:

• Austria. A 17-year-old non-Muslim student at a boarding school in Saint Pölten was suspended after complaining about Muslim roommates waking up at 3 AM daily to eat Sahur (a pre-dawn meal consumed by Muslims before fasting during Ramadan) amid loud music. The Deputy Governor of Lower Austria, Udo Landbauer, was indignant: “Our children are being suspended so that others can behave badly? Integration means adapting, accepting our rules, and respecting our local culture.”

• Austria. A major restaurant chain offered special Ramadan menus that are only available after 5 PM. Kronen Zeitung, Austria’s largest newspaper, reported that the issue is “polarizing” for many people because the company does not offer unique menus for Christians or kosher products for Jews.

• Belgium. Almost ten years to the day after 32 people were killed and more than 300 were injured in jihadist attacks at the airport and metro in Brussels, authorities at Brussels Airport hosted an elaborate daily iftar buffet.

• Britain. At least six professional football matches were paused mid-game so that Muslim athletes could break their fast. This follows a formal agreement reached in 2021 to accede to Islamic demands to accommodate fasting during Ramadan. “It is interesting to observe this latest concession to Islamic demands for provision to accommodate fasting during Ramadan,” notes Tim Dieppe of Christian Concern. “Other recent accommodations to Islam include rescheduling exams to avoid Ramadan, Ramadan lights in London, an Iftar in Manchester United’s Old Trafford stadium, provision of Muslim prayer rooms, halal food in many workplaces, and so much more.” According to Dieppe, it is “part of a much bigger trend towards the Islamization of Britain.”

• Germany. In Berlin-Reinickendorf, Emine Demirbüken-Wegner, the Turkish-born mayor, invited representatives of hardcore Islamist mosques and organizations in the borough to participate in an iftar at the city hall at taxpayer expense. The guest list included members of the Turkish-Islamic Union for Islamic Affairs (Türkisch-Islamische Union der Anstalt für Religion, DITIB), the largest Islamic umbrella organization in Germany. DITIB, which is a part of the Turkish Directorate of Religious Affairs (known in Turkish as Diyanet), an organization described as the “extended arm” of the Turkish state, is directly subordinate to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, a tireless propagator of political Islam in Europe.

• Italy. A classroom at the University of Brescia was converted into a mosque, with rugs on the floor and partitions to separate prayer spaces for males and females during Ramadan. The walls were covered with flyers in Arabic calling for invocations to Allah. The university said the move was conceived as “a special opportunity to come together as a community, share profound reflection, and experience together the emotion of breaking the fast during Ramadan.” Silvia Sardone, a Milan City Councilor, noted: “Far from integration, Islamists are now demanding dedicated spaces within Italian universities.”

• Italy. In Cremona, a city in Lombardy, a high school student on a public bus was physically assaulted by two Muslim girls for eating a sandwich during Ramadan. “We’re not eating, it’s Ramadan,” they said. When the 52-year-old bus driver ordered the girls to get off the bus, they assaulted him too and he ended up in the emergency room. Silvia Sardone, a Milan City Councilor, described the incident as “truly alarming” and warned: “We’re at the point of total delirium. Yet there are still some on the left who continue to bow to the growing Islamization, closing schools for Ramadan and even allowing the niqab to be worn in classes. What will be next?”

• Sweden. IKEA showcased a “Ramadan Musthaves” collection ranging from kitchen essentials to table settings. IKEA also offered a “festive Ramadan menu” at their in-store restaurants. Charlie Weimers, a Swedish Member of the European Parliament, noted that while Muslims are “perfectly free and open” to observe Ramadan, he also drew attention to the fact that Christians in Europe are being attacked by Muslim mobs for openly displaying their faith during Ramadan. “With that as a starting point, we can certainly discuss whether Ramadan has its natural home in Sweden or not,” he wrote.

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Soeren Kern is a fellow at the Ideological Defense Institute.

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Subject-matter experts, former Muslims, Arab Christians, and Western thought leaders, coming together to equip policymakers to prevent destructive foreign ideas from being translated into law, restore confidence in the biblical principles that built the West by empowering the Church to reengage the public square, and provide the public with solid analysis to combat the confusion that is making the West vulnerable.

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This scene is more than a moment of dark cinematic absurdity; it is a clinical observation of a specific moral pathology. It perfectly encapsulates what we might call the “Indignant Predator”, a mindset in which the perpetrator views their own violence as mundane routine, and the victim’s self-defense as a personal insult or an act of aggression.

While Hannah Arendt famously coined the phrase “Banality of Evil” to describe the thoughtless, bureaucratic machinery of the Holocaust, Raya represents a different stage of the same disease: an evil that is not only banal but feels itself to be the aggrieved party. It is a psychological inversion in which the act of killing is treated as “work,” and the victim’s struggle is recast as “aggression.”

When we apply this lens to modern academic discourse, specifically the influential work of Edward Said, we find this same sentiment operating through a startling narrative inversion: the “bite” of the historical victim has been reframed as the “stranglehold” of the aggressor.

Said’s Orientalism is often championed as the definitive critique of Western aggression against the East. Yet Said’s narrative performs a massive act of contextual excision. By starting the historical “clock” at the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt in 1798, Said and his followers treat Western intervention as a sudden, unprovoked act of strangling. To sustain this narrative of the West as the original and sole predator, one must willfully ignore over a millennium of actual “strangling” that preceded it, actions that have defined the relationship between the Occident and the Orient since the 7th century.

This omitted history is not composed of minor skirmishes but of world-shaping imperial projects. It includes the devşirme system, through which the Ottoman Empire forcibly took Christian children, converted them, and turned them into Janissaries to further subjugate their own kin. It includes the twice-attempted conquest of Europe at the gates of Vienna (1529 and 1683), campaigns in which the predator was not the Frenchman in Cairo, but the Turk at the heart of Europe. Furthermore, it ignores the Barbary slave trade, which represents a massive, centuries-long stranglehold that the modern narrative has almost entirely sanitized. Between the 16th and 19th centuries, North African corsairs operated a sophisticated industry of human trafficking. It is estimated that over one million Europeans were captured and enslaved, with “Naval Jihad” raids reaching as far as Ireland and Iceland. Coastal villages were emptied, their inhabitants dragged to the slave markets of Algiers and Tripoli. This was not a matter of interpretation. The doctrine was stated plainly by Tripoli’s own ambassador, Sidi Haji Abdrahaman, when asked by Jefferson and Adams why his nation made war upon countries that had done it no injury:

“It was written in their Koran, that all nations which had not acknowledged the Prophet were sinners, whom it was the right and duty of the faithful to plunder and enslave.

Jefferson and Adams had their answer. When Thomas Jefferson re-established the U.S. Navy and the Marine Corps, immortalized in the hymn “to the shores of Tripoli”, it was not born of “Orientalist” ambition or colonial desire. It was a material necessity to stop American citizens from being sold into slavery; a state of affairs that, at its peak, consumed some 20% of the young republic’s annual budget in tribute payments simply to keep the stranglehold loose enough for trade to continue.

By framing the eventual Western response as “unprovoked colonialism,” academics like Said adopt the Raya Persona: they express moral indignation that the victim, after centuries of being strangled, finally refused to submit, and had the audacity to bite the hand at its throat.

The result of this selective history is a profound and dangerous moral asymmetry that governs modern thought. The Orient is granted a history of imperialism, slavery, and conquest, from the early Caliphates to the Ottoman Empire, that is treated as a natural, almost invisible background: a given of history requiring neither examination nor apology. The Occident, by contrast, is denied the right to recognize an enemy. Any attempt to defend itself from, or simply name, centuries of incursion is reframed as the original sin of “racism” or “Islamophobia.”

This asymmetry finds its roots in the earliest theological declarations of expansion. Whether one looks at the letter sent by Muhammad to the Prefect of Egypt, or the later letters of Khalid ibn al-Walid to the Persians, the message was always the same: “Aslim Taslam,” “Submit and be safe.”

In the mind of the Indignant Predator, this constitutes an offer of peace. The predator’s reason holds that if the victim simply allows the rope to tighten, there will be no violence. Therefore, when the victim struggles, it is the victim who is introducing violence into the relationship. In this light, the true “Banality of Evil” is not found in the act of self-defense, but in the intellectual thoughtlessness of the modern historian who sanitizes the predator.

When resistance is labeled as the “cause” of conflict rather than its “consequence,” the perpetrator is granted a moral shield that allows them to continue their work with the same chilling detachment seen in Raya, genuinely shocked that the world views them as the enemy.

In the 1953 film, Sakina is the accomplice: the one who holds the victim down, covers her mouth, and muffles the noise so the neighbors cannot hear the struggle. In modern discourse, much of the media and academia plays the role of Sakina. They function as a voluntary human shield for the aggressor, employing the most dangerous tool in the propagandist’s arsenal: the conflation of a people with an ideology. This conflation creates a condition in which the perpetrator is protected by the very identity of his victims.

We currently witness activists, journalists, and politicians carrying water for some of the most brutal regimes on earth, as long as those regimes define themselves as anti-Western. This dynamic is nowhere more vividly illustrated than in the treatment of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The media routinely conflates the Iranian people, who are currently risking their lives for freedom, with the IRGC (Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps). In reality, the man on the street in Tehran is the primary victim of the theocratic stranglehold. Yet when Western critics challenge the theology of aggression or the ideology of the IRGC, the “Sakina” class of media accuses them of “attacking Muslims” or perpetuating “Western Imperialism.”

This is a masterstroke of narrative manipulation: it protects the hands at the throat by claiming that criticizing those hands is an insult to the throat itself. The predator’s work is thus kept undisturbed by moral scrutiny from the outside world. The same mechanism operates not merely around actions, but around openly stated intent.

Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, one of the most influential Islamic scholars of the 20th century, with a global television audience and the formal chairmanship of the International Union of Muslim Scholars, stated plainly:

“It is our duty to restore the glory of the nation of Islam back to the days where the Muslims were rulers of the world.”

This was not a fringe voice.

In 2004, the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, gave Qaradawi an official reception at City Hall, publicly praising him as “one of the most authoritative Muslim scholars in the world today.” When critics raised the alarm, Livingstone accused them of xenophobia, the Raya reasoning made flesh: the hand is at the throat, the neighbor hears the struggle, and it is the neighbor who is accused of causing a disturbance.

Qaradawi’s words were not hidden; they were broadcast on Al Jazeera, documented in his own writings, and repeated across decades. The Sakina class did not miss them. They heard them, and chose the reception hall over the alarm bell.

The implications of this narrative inversion are not merely academic; they produce a form of civilizational self-harm. By accepting the “Orientalist” critique without scrutiny, the West has been coached into a state of moral paralysis. If every act of self-defense is “racism,” and every recognition of an enemy is “bigotry,” then the only “moral” path left open is surrender. This creates a vacuum in which the most predatory ideologies thrive.

When the history of the MENA region is framed as one of constant, unprovoked Western bullying, we erase the agency and accountability of the Islamic Caliphates that actually ruled the region for fourteen centuries. We also abandon the reformers within those cultures. The liberal, secular, and dissenting voices of the East, the ones who are actually being strangled, are told by Western academics that their struggle is a “colonial import.”

True moral clarity requires us to distinguish between the human being and the ideology of the predator. The genius of Negma Ibrahim’s performance in Raya and Sakina was her ability to make the audience feel the full absurdity of her character’s indignation. We see the hands, we see the victim, and we see the killer, and yet it is the killer who demands our sympathy. Modern academic discourse has made the same demand on our behalf. It has asked us to look at the rope and see a “cultural artifact,” and to look at the victim’s bite and see “unprovoked aggression.”

To break free of this inversion, we must return to a grounded, longitudinal view of history. We must stop being shocked when the victim bites back. And, most importantly, we must stop pretending, as Raya did, that the person with their hands around the victim’s throat, and the intellectual who justifies the tightening of that rope, is anything other than an enemy of human freedom.

Salam Almasri is a fellow at the Ideological Defense Institute.

What Is IDI ?

The most trusted source of information on the Middle East, Islam, and the ideological threats facing the West.

Subject-matter experts, former Muslims, Arab Christians, and Western thought leaders, coming together to equip policymakers to prevent destructive foreign ideas from being translated into law, restore confidence in the biblical principles that built the West by empowering the Church to reengage the public square, and provide the public with solid analysis to combat the confusion that is making the West vulnerable.