J Street calls itself “pro-Israel and pro-peace.” Apparently, that requires pretending Hamas has no agency nor role in the conflict.
In a Facebook post marking the anniversary of the Gaza ceasefire, J Street laments displaced Palestinians, continuing deaths, stalled reconstruction and the absence of a new Palestinian government. It then delivers its indictment:
“We cannot claim to stand for Israel’s future while looking away as its government denies Palestinians the possibility of one.”
Notice who is missing from this account of Gaza’s future: Hamas.
Hamas launched the October 7 massacre. Hamas continues to maintain an armed organization. Hamas has resisted surrendering its weapons and relinquishing military control. Yet in J Street’s telling, the obstacle to peace is Israel’s government.
Hamas becomes a passive spectator to its own war. Palestinians become people without political leadership or responsibility. Israel alone possesses agency, and therefore Israel alone receives blame.
J Street knows better. Its own policy analyses acknowledge Hamas’s continued armed presence and the necessity of disarmament. Yet when communicating with its Facebook audience, those inconvenient facts disappear.
J Street claims to be pro-Israel and pro-peace while treating Hamas as an innocent bystander and Israel as the sole villain. That is more than intellectual dishonesty. It is moral cowardice masquerading as moral clarity.
HISTORICAL ECHO
We have seen this in Jewish history before – those in leadership positions enabling the mob rather than confronting depravity.
In the wilderness, Aaron fashioned a Golden Calf rather than confront a crowd demanding an idol. Today, condemning Israel has become a new Golden Calf, an act of public devotion that substitutes fashionable outrage for moral judgment. J Street, which claims to speak for Jewish values and Israel’s future, should recognize the biblical warning. Instead, it leads and joins the worshippers, sacrificing moral clarity on the altar of popular approval.
Before the October 7, 2023 Gazan massacre of Israelis and the subsequent war in Gaza, Palestinian Arabs enjoyed one of the most favorable combinations of high fertility and low childhood mortality in the surrounding Arab world.
Typically, wealthy countries like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait have few children and lower infant mortality, defined as a child dying before five years old. Poorer countries and those in conflict have more children and higher infant mortality, like Yemen, Iraq and Syria.
Yet in 2022, Palestinian women had approximately 3.6 children each, while the under-five mortality rate in the West Bank and Gaza was roughly 14 deaths per 1,000 live births.
Compare that with Syria, where approximately 21 children per 1,000 died before their fifth birthday. In Iraq, the figure was 23. In Yemen, 41. The difference was enormous. West Bank and Gaza Arabs were much closer to the exceptional high fertility and low infant mortality rates of Israel.
If one were to expand the regional focus to Sudan, Eritrea, Ethiopia and Djibouti, one would see an even more dramatic gap – Sudan (4.38; 51.7), Ethiopia (4.2; 46.5), Eritrea (3.79; 36.6) and Djibouti (2.7; 51.9). On the other extreme for wealthy Gulf states are UAE (1.15; 5.3) and Qatar (1.74; 6.1).
Applying Syria’s childhood mortality rate to approximately 144,000 Palestinian births in 2022 would imply roughly 950 additional deaths before age five. Iraq’s rate would imply another 1,300 deaths compared with the Palestinian rate. Yemen’s would imply nearly 3,900 additional deaths.
Extend those differences illustratively across 20 annual birth cohorts, assuming similar numbers of births and mortality differences, and the results are striking: approximately 19,000 additional Palestinian childhood survivors compared with Syria’s rate, 26,500 compared with Iraq’s, and 78,000 compared with Yemen’s. Using the same methodology for Sudan or Djibouti would result in nearly 110,000 Palestinian Arabs childhood deaths.
The Palestinian territories benefited from robust vaccination programs, maternal healthcare, hospitals, and medical services developed over decades, including services provided through United Nations and Palestinian institutions, international organizations, and cooperation with Israel.
Despite the incremental 19,000 to 110,000 young Palestinian Arabs alive today because of healthcare investment and coordination with Israel, anti-Israel organizations have been accusing Israel of pursuing a “genocide” and the destruction of the Palestinian population. These figures illustrate the precise opposite. Israel is a Palestinian Arab child MAKER.
The demographic record deserves to be confronted: Palestinian Arabs were raising large families, with child survival outcomes that compared extremely favorably with much of the neighboring Arab world.
The parade of international dignitaries has left New York City. The various leaders from the free and non-free world came to speak at the United Nations General Assembly as they do every September.
They left behind the smell of an organism rotting.
The global agency has long had a history of inept bureaucracy. That is, and likely will always be, a defining characteristic of thousands of politicians and diplomats from so many cultures and philosophies convening together. Arguably, its inability to do anything should be viewed as a protective relief, not failure.
The problem I see is well beyond the simmering war between the Global South and the Global North, where regions are competing for a greater share of economic and political power. That is politics on a grand scale.
The rot is stemming from an institution that is increasingly dividing the world between Muslims and “non-Muslims.”
Azerbaijan has Muslim and “non-Muslim” communities
The UN presses whether Kuwait is “abolishing all legal provisions that discriminate against non-Muslim women”
Iraq law states clearly that “No Muslim woman may marry a non-Muslim man.”
The UN notes how Malaysia has different laws for non-Muslims
The UN asked the Maldives whether it has repealed laws preventing non-Muslims from becoming citizens
The UN questions whether Qatar continues to have different laws for non-Muslims
UN report on Somalia: “Non-Muslims report that they cannot practise their religions openly.”
United Arab Emirates has a federal law “regulating places of worship for non-Muslims”
The list goes on.
Farkhunda Malikzada (actually a Muslim woman) was beaten and lynched in Afghanistan in 2015, falsely accused of burning a Koran. In the aftermath of Malikzada’s lynching, a number of Muslim clerics and Afghan government officials stated that she had desecrated Islam in order to gain American citizenship.
Leaders of the United Nations agencies similarly use the divide:
No other religion has such frequent use at the United Nations. Try to find “non-Christian”, “non-Hindu” or any other division of people and law and you will find barely a handful.
Priyantha Kumara, a Sri Lankan Buddhist living in Pakistan, was accused of blasphemy and a mob beat him to death and set his body on fire in 2021
RAMIFICATIONS
The prevalence of the term “non-Muslims” does several things at once. It places Muslims at the center of the religious world, elevates Islam as the dominant religious reference point, and erases everyone else into a single category of “other.” Christians, Baha’is, Hindus, Jews, Buddhists and countless other religious communities lose their distinct identities, histories and belief systems. They become defined solely by what they are not: Muslim.
This linguistic centering of Islam is a subtle form of Islamic supremacy. The steady repetition of “non-Muslim” is a form of colonizing the mind, conditioning people to see Islam as the standard against which all other faiths are measured. Language shapes assumptions, and repetition makes those assumptions seem natural. Eventually, a religious hierarchy becomes so embedded in everyday vocabulary that people cease to notice it.
The distance between the polite bureaucratic term “non-Muslim” and the radical Islamist characterization of others as “infidels” is smaller than it first appears. The words carry different meanings and implications, but both can frame humanity around a single religious dividing line: those who belong to Islam and those who do not. For radicals who seek Islamic domination, that division is foundational.
The United Nations was established to recognize the equal dignity of all peoples. Yet its own vocabulary repeatedly places one religion at the center and relegates the rest of humanity to the margins.
The United Nations is subtly surrendering the world’s religions to Islam. Right in front of us.
Islamist terrorists are targeting Jews across the West. The FBI is disrupting plots while the protections around Jewish communities face growing scrutiny and political pressure.
This week, an 18-year-old ISIS supporter allegedly planned to murder 30 to 60 people at Minnesota’s Mall of America. He selected the shopping center because he believed it was Jewish-owned and considered attacking during a Hmong cultural celebration, when thousands would be gathered.
Sheikhdoon Abdullahi Mohamud had considered traveling to Somalia – the training ground for children in jihad – to join jihadists before deciding to bring jihad to Minnesota. The FBI had been investigating him since December 2024.
Sheikhdoon Abdullahi Mohamud
He was hardly alone.
In Pennsylvania, Jonathan Hunter Kramer allegedly discussed poisoning food at synagogues while professing allegiance to ISIS. He had previously attracted FBI attention in 2023.
Muhammad Shahzeb Khan pleaded guilty in 2026 to plotting an ISIS-inspired massacre at a Brooklyn Jewish religious center. He selected New York for its large Jewish population and wanted to murder as many Jews as possible.
Federal prosecutors charged Mohammad al-Saadi, an alleged Iranian-backed terrorist operative, in connection with attacks against Jewish institutions in Europe and alleged plans targeting synagogues in New York, Los Angeles and Scottsdale.
In Manchester, British authorities charged two Iranian nationals with preparing an attack against the city’s Jewish community, including alleged surveillance of a synagogue and Jewish museum.
Radical Islamists in UK
The targets were synagogues, community centers, a museum and a shopping mall. The intended victims’ citizenship, political views and relationship to Israel were irrelevant. Jewish identity was enough.
The danger has already been demonstrated in blood. In December 2025, ISIS-inspired terrorists murdered 15 people at a Hanukkah celebration at Australia’s Bondi Beach. Two months earlier, an ISIS-inspired attacker killed two Jewish worshippers outside Manchester’s Heaton Park synagogue. Security personnel prevented him from entering the building, where more worshippers had gathered.
The difference between a massacre and an even greater massacre was a locked door and the people guarding it.
Attack at Michigan school and synagogue by radical Islamist
New York’s Jewish institutions have repeatedly appeared in terrorist investigations. Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch has described NYPD operations that disrupted plots against a Manhattan synagogue and a Brooklyn Jewish center. Jews, roughly one-tenth of the city’s population, accounted for more than half its confirmed hate-crime victims this year.
Therefore Within Our Lifetime and other anti-Zionist activists like the Democratic Socialist of America have demanded that Mayor Zohran Mamdani dismiss Tisch. Defending Jews is an impeachable offense to jihadists.
Meanwhile, the FBI’s methods are also under attack.
In March, HBO’s John Oliver devoted a segment to FBI terrorism stings, questioning whether undercover agents were stopping terrorists or manufacturing them. Really? Investigators in Minnesota had followed Mohamud who allegedly discussed mass murder before supplying him with a disabled rifle.
What would have been gained by waiting until he obtained a functioning weapon?
Members of Students for Justice in Palestine tweet about killing Jews
A successful counterterrorism investigation produces no funerals, no photographs of murdered children and no devastated families. The absence of casualties can make the threat seem imaginary.
Jewish communities understand the danger. Intelligence officers investigate plots. Police patrol synagogues. Schools employ armed guards. Community centers install barriers. Religious celebrations require security plans.
Each layer stands between a terrorist’s intentions and his intended victims.
The attacker needs only one opening: an unguarded entrance, an overlooked warning, an intelligence failure or a crowded celebration without adequate protection.
Almost every antisemitic attack in the western world the past few years has come from radical Islamists
The jihadists are already here. They are looking for that opening. The next massacre will begin wherever the defenses fail.
After 51 Muslims were murdered in Christchurch, the UN established an international day against Islamophobia. Jihadists have murdered thousands more, including Muslims, yet there is no equivalent day dedicated to combating jihadism.
On March 15, 2019, a white supremacist murdered 51 Muslims praying at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. Three years later, the United Nations General Assembly designated March 15 the International Day to Combat Islamophobia. Pakistan introduced the resolution on behalf of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, and the General Assembly adopted it by consensus.
Consider the terrorist atrocities of recent decades:
On September 11, 2001, al-Qaeda murdered 2,977 people in the United States.
Jemaah Islamiyah murdered 202 in Bali in 2002.
Islamist terrorists killed 193 commuters aboard Madrid trains in 2004.
Lashkar-e-Taiba murdered 166 people in Mumbai in 2008, including six Jews at the Chabad House.
In 2014, ISIS massacred approximately 1,700 Iraqi military cadets at Camp Speicher.
That same year, the Pakistani Taliban murdered 149 people, including 132 schoolchildren, at a school in Peshawar.
In 2015, al-Shabaab murdered 148 people at Kenya’s Garissa University, separating Christian students from Muslims before killing them.
Months later, ISIS murdered 130 people across Paris.
In 2019, Islamist suicide bombers murdered approximately 269 people at churches and hotels in Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday.
On October 7, 2023, Hamas-led terrorists murdered approximately 1,200 people in Israel, including families in their homes and young people attending a music festival.
These were different countries and different jihadist movements. The victims included Muslims, Christians, Jews and of other backgrounds. Every attack killed more people than Christchurch, sometimes by orders of magnitude.
The United Nations has established annual observances for victims of terrorism generally, on August 21, and victims of religious violence, on August 22. None of these massacres has its own comparable UN international day tied to its anniversary.
Yet Christchurch received something these other massacres did not: a permanent place on the UN calendar dedicated to combating the hatred behind the attack.
The contrast is especially striking because jihadists have slaughtered so many fellow Muslims. The victims at Camp Speicher and Peshawar were overwhelmingly Muslim. ISIS, al-Qaeda, the Taliban and their ideological counterparts have terrorized Muslim populations for decades, murdering those who resisted their demands for religious submission.
The UN created an International Day to Combat Islamophobia. It is long past time for an International Day to Combat Jihadism. Its victims include the very Muslims the UN claims to protect.
This is going to be part of a new series of articles under the header “Ramifications.” We often see and hear the news but we don’t often consider the underlying consequences of the information, as well as the lack of it.
The News:
Guangtian Ha earned his doctorate at Columbia University and spent eight years teaching religion at Haverford College, the elite Pennsylvania liberal arts institution. His courses included Introduction to Islam, Blackness in Islam, Gender and Sexuality in Islamic Texts and Practices, and studies of Islamic culture in China.
On October 6, 2026, federal authorities arrested Ha on charges of cyberstalking a Jewish colleague. Prosecutors allege he operated at least four anonymous social media accounts, sending approximately 50 threatening messages between October 2025 and May 2026. The messages invoked Hitler, the Holocaust, the extermination of Jews and the victim’s children.
The indictment describes a campaign of terror directed at a Jewish family. Ha allegedly published photographs of the colleague’s mailbox, identified his home and referenced his children by name. The colleague’s wife and three children fled their home twice. The children were prevented from playing in their front yard or waiting outside for the school bus.
“If jews are so special then they should also be placed in special camps.”
“Eliminate the jewish cockroaches.”
“Give it another 10 years, and you shall see a true Holocaust.”
“The jews are angry because the world has woken up and realized Hitler was right all along.”
“the end of American Jews is close.”
To Sen. Ted Cruz “You are a slave to the rapist, bloodsucking jews,”
In a post directed at Jewish Columbia professor Shai Davidai, Ha allegedly asked what flavor of gas he would prefer.
Another post directed at Jewish congressman Randy Fine invoked making candles from his body fat.
Clearly horrible. Clearly anti-Jewish and not anti-Israel.
But what you didn’t see or hear is worse.
Ramification: Teaching Antisemitism
Over eight years, potentially hundreds of students passed through his classrooms, learning about religion, race, culture and society from a professor whom Haverford granted tenure in February 2024. Jewish students were aghast as Ha had long promoted a hateful and divisive environment on campus and filed a lawsuit against the university in May 2024.
In June 2025, the House Education and Workforce Committee specifically asked Haverford president Wendy Raymond whether the college had investigated Ha’s statements equating Zionists with Nazis and advocating their exclusion. Eventually, the college settled the students’ lawsuit in August 2026.
Consider that this vile antisemite wasn’t an irrelevant lunatic ranting on the streets of Times Square.
He is a Columbia-trained professor.
He was hired at a leading liberal arts school.
He taught religion.
He was granted tenure.
His students relied on him to explain unfamiliar histories, cultures and beliefs. And he used his credentials, his tenure and his position to teach his rabid antisemitism to over a thousand students over his teaching career. Ha taught that Jews are “filth” as fact, not noxious opinion.
And like all students know, to get a good grade, they needed to parrot the poisonous professor.
CONCERN: Extremist ideas circulate through American academic institutions under the authority of scholarship, tenure and “political expression.” Your tax dollars go to support this student indoctrination in Jew-hatred to poison society.
Ramification: Whitewashing Antisemitism
The New York Times covered the story – and minimized the vicious Jew-hatred.
In the three Ha quotes the Times decided to showcase, none said the word “Jew.” None described his deep hatred – instead they pointed to making the targeted person feel unwelcome with language of “Get out of my country,” “you scums have had it too easy” and “Run. Flee. Leave.” Note that according to court filings, the end of the second post was “Goyim are taking America back, blood-guzzling demons,” which the Times omitted.
To further confuse the Times readers, the article said the targeted “person is a Jewish faculty member, according to three people who know the person.” A reader had to INFER that the get-out-of-town comments were about the person being Jewish – or maybe Ha just had a general beef with this other faculty member.
Were the “jew filth”, “jewish cockroaches” and “rapist, bloodsucking jews” comments too clear that this professor is a vile antisemite?
The New York Times has twisted itself for years to say that hating the Jewish State doesn’t mean hating Jews. Is it also trying to whitewash plain Jew-hatred into a squabble between two faculty members in which one of them could be Jewish according to people who know him?
CONCERN: If even clear and blatant broadcast Jew-hatred cannot be called out clearly and explicitly in leading mainstream media (perhaps because the Jew-hating professor is a minority teaching Islam), there is no chance that more subtle forms of antisemitism will be reported.
RAMIFICATIONS
Americans are being educated in their colleges and in left-wing media that hating Jews is appropriate, and if Jews complain – especially if the actions come from so-called minority groups – they are overly sensitive and should make room for victims of preference. That is a movement of systematic exclusion and expulsion of Jews from the American promise, a much bigger story than a “professor being accused of harassing a colleague.”
ACTION ITEMS
Haverford College. Please read the statement by President Wendy Raymond. She is upset that a professor was harassed. By what about the Jewish students on campus? What about the thousand students who were taught by this evil person? Demand a full audit and review of all class materials that the professor used over his time at the university, and interview the students who took his classes to learn more about how antisemitism might have infused his lectures. president@haverford.edu(610) 896-1021
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has once again postponed Palestinian elections, this time from November 2026 until September 2027. It is a familiar routine for the 90-year-old leader, who was elected in 2005 to a four-year term and has remained in power for 21 years. Palestinians last elected a legislature in 2006, when Hamas defeated Abbas’s Fatah party. Since then, Abbas has repeatedly promised elections, postponed them and continued governing by decree, knowing that he will be trounced in elections.
This latest postponement for the authoritarian leader has consequences far beyond Palestinian politics. In September 2025, Canada, France, Britain and Australia recognized a Palestinian state, citing commitments by Abbas to democratic elections and governance reform. Just over a year later, those promises have been broken.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney explicitly predicated recognition on Abbas’s commitment to fundamental governance reform, elections in 2026 excluding Hamas, and demilitarization. Australia’s Anthony Albanese similarly cited Palestinian commitments to elections, reform and demilitarization.
French President Emmanuel Macron secured written assurances from Abbas to hold presidential and legislative elections under international supervision. Britain’s Keir Starmer endorsed Abbas’s commitment to elections within a year of a ceasefire. Belgium tied further diplomatic implementation to elections and Hamas’s disarmament.
These Western governments knew Abbas’s record when they accepted his promises. He had already postponed national elections in 2021.
Meanwhile, only 32% of Palestinian Arabs are in favor of a two-state solution with a majority opposed according to an October 2026 Gallup poll. So what Palestinian state are western governments trying to recognize anyway?
The implications are straightforward. Western governments should announce that they are standing by their words and not going to recognize a Palestinian State headed by an authoritarian corrupt Holocaust denier, nor one with a genocidal jihadi legislature.
The Stateless Arabs from Palestine (SAPs) do not want a state to coexist next to a Jewish State; they want to control every inch of the holy land. Perhaps it is time for western governments to recognize what these regional Arabs have been saying consistently for a century.
Three days after the third anniversary of Hamas’s October 7 massacre, The New York Times devoted its dominant front-page photograph and two full inside pages to the “hopes” and aspirations of Gazans. There were weddings, swimming, barbershops, reopened businesses and families trying to rebuild their lives amid the rubble.
It was a touching portrait of ordinary dreams – at least for normal people in the western world. But what about the extraordinary support among Gazans for killing Israeli civilians that preceded the war?
In June 2022, the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research found that 73% of Gazans supported armed attacks inside Israel similar to those had been recently carried out. Fifteen months later, Hamas invaded Israel, slaughtered civilians, kidnapped families and celebrated the massacre. By March 2024, five months into the war and amid Gaza’s devastation, 71% of Gazans still considered Hamas’s decision to launch October 7 correct, according to the same polling organization.
Two-thirds of Gazans on average since 2001 have supported killing Jewish civilians inside of Israel according to PCPSR polls
These were majority attitudes, measured before the massacre and after its consequences became devastatingly clear.
Hamas is Gaza’s government, controlling the territory since 2007. It operated ministries, schools, police and security forces alongside its military apparatus. It is Gaza’s political life. Before October 7, PCPSR polling showed Hamas leading Fatah in hypothetical Palestinian parliamentary voting and Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh defeating Mahmoud Abbas in a two-candidate presidential contest. Hamas continues to lead Fatah, which is why PA President Mahmoud Abbas continues to delay elections.
Yet the Times’ sprawling photographic treatment of Gaza’s aspirations ignored the genocidal ideology that permeates Gaza and helped produce October 7. The newspaper deliberately failed to show what Gazans truly hope for: dead Jews and the destruction of the Jewish State.
Imagine the same treatment of Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces. Three days after the anniversary of an RSF massacre, would the Times devote its front page and two inside pages to swimming, weddings and employment in communities governed by the militia, with little examination of the violence and political support behind it?
The Times showed readers Gazans dreaming of a swim. Its own society’s polling shows overwhelming support for killing Jewish civilians both before and after the October 7 massacre.
The Times has whitewashed the genocidal ideology of Gazans and portrayed them as victims of the jihadi war they launched. Doing so is not just anti-Israel, it is a promotion of radical Islam deployed against Jews.
Or perhaps worse – the Times is educating its readers that those who want to rape and kill Jews are very much like us.
From Cain and Abel to the Third Anniversary of October 7
The first murder in the Bible takes place in the fourth chapter of Genesis. Cain kills his brother Abel, and God asks him a simple question: “Where is Abel your brother?”
God already knows the answer. The question gives Cain an opportunity to acknowledge his crime. Instead, Cain replies, “I do not know. Am I my brother’s keeper?”
With those words, the first murderer in human history also becomes the first to attempt to redirect the narrative away from his victim. God asks about Abel. Cain makes the conversation about himself, challenging the very notion that he bears responsibility for his brother.
God refuses to follow him.
“What have you done? The voice of your brother’s blood cries out to Me from the ground.”
Abel is dead. He cannot describe his suffering, challenge Cain’s account, or defend his memory. Cain remains alive, free to explain himself and change the subject. But God insists that the victim’s blood speaks louder than the murderer’s words.
Cain and Abel by Marc Chagall (1960)
There is an extraordinary detail in the Hebrew. God refers to demei achikha, literally “your brother’s bloods,” in the plural. Rashi, drawing on rabbinic tradition, explains that the words encompass Abel’s blood and the blood of all his descendants who would never be born.
The first murder extinguished generations of possibilities. Children, grandchildren, families, and entire futures disappeared with Abel.
Combine these two ideas – the living control the narrative and the dead include generations – and one can see that the murderer will attempt to frame history for all time.
These opening chapters of Genesis offer a striking perspective on the third anniversary of the October 7 massacre.
On October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorists invaded Israel, murdered 1,195 people, and abducted 251 hostages. Families were slaughtered in their homes, young people were murdered at a music festival, and entire communities were devastated.
Three years later, the struggle over how to commemorate the massacre has become a struggle over whose story is being told.
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani acknowledged the Hamas killings in his anniversary statement before shifting substantial attention to Israel’s subsequent military campaign and Palestinian suffering. Several leading democratic politicians did the same.
And just two days after the October 7 massacre anniversary, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the United Nations’ Navi Pillay, the woman who helped spread the genocide libel about Israel’s defensive war against jihadi terrorists. Seen together, the world is establishing the narrative that will prevail into the future, where the Bibas babies’ descendants who will never be born, will not be able to counter the charge.
The Bibas brothers with their mother, slaughtered by Gazan terrorists
Cain asks, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” as a diversionary tactic to invert the subject.
God never answers that question directly. Instead, He demands, “What have you done?”
Three years after October 7, the United Nations and too many politicians have learned to answer questions about the murdered by changing the subject.
On April 16, 1962, New Yorkers lined Broadway to welcome Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran, and Empress Farah. The ruler of a Muslim-majority American ally received a ticker-tape parade through Lower Manhattan’s Canyon of Heroes. A plaque embedded in the sidewalk still commemorates their visit.
Marker on downtown Broadway sidewalk commemorating ticker tape parade for Shah of Iran and his wife (photo: First One Through)
Seventeen years later, the Islamic Revolution overthrew the Shah. Ayatollah Khomeini established a theocratic regime that called America the Great Satan, sought Israel’s destruction and held 52 Americans hostage for 444 days.
America had welcomed a Muslim ally. The jihadists who seized power declared America their enemy.
Their war against the West did not remain in the Middle East. Iranian revolutionaries seized Americans in Tehran, while Sunni jihadists carried their violence to American soil. Just blocks from the Shah’s parade route, Islamist terrorists bombed the World Trade Center in 1993 and destroyed its towers on September 11, 2001, murdering nearly 3,000 people.
World Trade Center memorial for those who died in the jihadi war on America on September 11, 2001 (photo: First One Through)
Different branches of radical Islam pursued their own visions of religious domination. ISIS declared a caliphate spanning national borders. Hamas, supported by Iran, sought an Islamist Palestine in place of Israel, massacring approximately 1,200 people and abducting 251 on October 7, 2023.
Three years later, masked demonstrators wearing green headbands marched along Lower Broadway displaying Hamas-associated symbols, with City Hall nearby and the rebuilt One World Trade Center rising behind them.
Young men with faces covered and Hamas headbands sporting jihadi flag, stand on Broadway before the World Trade Center to call for the continued war on Israel on the third anniversary of the October 7, 2023 jihadi massacre in Israel (photo: Gideon Askowitz)
Within a few blocks, the Canyon of Heroes had become the setting for three extraordinary encounters: Americans celebrating a Muslim ally, mourning the victims of Islamist terrorism and tolerating demonstrators displaying the symbols of a jihadi movement responsible for massacring Jews.
For decades, America has welcomed Muslims as allies, immigrants and citizens, embracing religious freedom and coexistence. At the same time, jihadist movements have declared their own war against the West, seeking religious and political domination. They carried that confrontation beyond the Middle East, taking American hostages, destroying American landmarks and massacring American allies.
The intersections of narrow streets in downtown Manhattan seemingly have compressed history into a web of toxins poisoned by Islamic radicals. Coexistence will only be permissible “under the wing of Islam,” as their “struggle” is perpetual and voracious.
“under the wing of Islam followers of all religions can coexist in security and safety where their lives, possessions and rights are concerned. In the absence of Islam, strife will be rife, oppression spreads, evil prevails and schisms and wars will break out.” – 1988 Hamas foundational charter
The West is in a defensive war against radical Islam. One can see the progression clearly on the streets of lower Broadway.
