A Muslim who visits Mecca is called a Hajji. It is one of the highest honors in Islam, the completion of the Hajj pilgrimage, celebrated by family and community as a sacred accomplishment.
A Catholic who travels to the Vatican is a pilgrim. For centuries, the faithful have journeyed to Rome, walking into St. Peter’s Square with reverence, greeted with blessing and legitimacy.
And a Jew who goes to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem — the very place where the First and Second Temples once stood, the holiest site in Judaism? That Jew is branded a provocateur. Not a pilgrim, not a worshiper, not a faithful soul ascending to pray — but an instigator, an agitator, an accused trespasser, a “settler” on their own sacred ground.
The disparity could not be starker. What is celebrated as devotion for others is condemned as incitement for Jews. For Muslims, the Hajj is a right; for Catholics, Vatican pilgrimage is honored; but for Jews, even quiet prayer on the Temple Mount is labeled an offense — by the United Nations, NGOs, and international bodies.
It is not only hypocrisy; it is erasure. To deny Jews the name of pilgrim is to deny Jewish history, Jewish identity, and Jewish legitimacy. It casts the holiest place in Judaism as alien to Jews themselves, a desecration of memory turned into policy.
And why? Because the world has normalized the jihad. It has allowed Islamic Supremacy to dictate permissible behavior, even in the Jewish holy land.
The truth is simple: a Jew ascending the Temple Mount is not incitement. It is the most ancient pilgrimage of them all — the echo of three millennia of devotion, commanded in Torah, rooted in covenant, and carried in every prayer whispered toward Jerusalem, before Islam was even created.
The real provocation is not the Jew who prays on the Temple Mount but a world that dares to tell Jews they don’t belong at the center of their faith.
ACTION ITEM
Come to the United Nations in New York City and demand Jewish rights and freedom of religious assembly in Jerusalem.
They came for the Yazidis. They came for the Druze. They came for the Kurds. We came for the Jews.
Across the Middle East, ethnic and religious minorities have been hunted, uprooted, and erased. Yazidi women were rounded up and sold like cattle. The Druze were betrayed by neighbors and hunted in the streets. The Kurds—called terrorists for seeking sovereignty—were chased by Turkey with Western silence as a shield.
Thousands of Yazidi women sold as sex slaves in Iraq
We watched. We said nothing. We let them disappear, acknowledging—without saying it—that the Islamic Middle East had no place for ethnic and religious minorities. In our United Nations chairs, we shook hands with their butchers and waited for the news cycle to move on.
But not for the Jews.
The one minority whose return to sovereignty we supported—however begrudgingly many decades ago—was the Jews. We recognized their state, and in doing so, we made demands. MAKE demands. Demands no other people are burdened with.
We demand that Israel allow its citizens to be slaughtered and call for restraint. That it accept that others dictate its borders and immigration policy. That Jews be barred from praying at their holiest site. That any territory not clearly within historic armistice lines be judenrein, Jew-free.
And when Israel resists these demands – no, conditions we now apply for its existence – we condemn it. Not just at the UN, but in our schools, in our media, and on our streets—training citizens to treat diaspora Jews the same way: that they are alive only due to our grace. We are not equals; they owe us for everything.
We did not protect the Kurds. We abandoned the Yazidis. The Druze are being rounded up and killed. But we took action to help the Jews defy their extinction after the Holocaust. And for that, we believe they owe us—debtors with no right to complain. We pretend that Israel is a peer at the UN but we know the reality: it’s a vassal state and will be commanded by the order of the day.
Druze hunted in Syria
We don’t ask anything of the Gazans. Their genocidal rage toward Jews is seen as instinct, not ideology. Understandable. Natural. That’s why global protests erupt only when Jews defend themselves—not when they’re killed. Dog bites man, not the other way round.
To help Jews survive, we crafted Israel as a dam. It may shield its people inside from the massive jihadi flood—but only within walls we design.
However, once built, we insist that the floodwaters be let in. Millions of Muslim “refugees” must be allowed to “return” to the spring. The saltwater ocean that surrounds and crashes against the well’s walls, will mix with the spring water inside to become undrinkable.
We know it makes no sense. But we know we can’t contain the ocean, so we poison the well. It will happen eventually anyway, we reason.
The entrance to the United Nations’ Aida Refugee Camp, near Bethlehem, with a key on top showing that the doorway to get into homes inside Israel is via the UN
The world is watching—and learning. There is no future for Druze, Yazidis and Kurds. We silently move our lips, and our streets at home are silent. Yet when Jews retaliate when massacred, we rage and our people echo the screams.
Collectively we wonder whether maintaining the Jewish State is too hard.
Whether under dictatorship or democracy, religious zealotry or secular law, the story repeats: minorities are tolerated in the Global South only as long as they are passive, picturesque, and dying. The moment they survive and carve out self-determination, they are a threat to those with seats in the august UN chambers. Will these little tribes demand rights and sequester land too?
Yet another vote against Israel at the UN General Assembly
“Globalize the intifada” is not just a slogan; it is already in motion. Those floodwaters have breached the shores. The jihad is mowing down non-Muslims in the Middle East. It is teaching the Global North the chorus courtesy of Qatar, and dance moves via TikTok from China.
Marchers in the Global North demand an end to the Jewish State and persecution of Jews everywhere
The Global South – 42% Muslim outside of China and Latin America – will soon control the UN and is preparing to erase the exception of the Jewish state. Once America is convinced to step aside, the protective walls will surely collapse and the Jews will be slaughtered like other minority groups.
Druze mowed down outside hospital in Syria
Jews wonder why the streets are empty of protestors when various nations of the Middle East slaughter ethnic minorities, but are packed when Israel fights terrorists. It’s because Jews have still not internalized that the world views them as a minority which will ultimately be erased by the tide of the Islamic jihad, and it regrets making an exception for the most persecuted people on earth.
On February 18, 1947, senior members of the British Kingdom’s government assembled to discuss the Palestine Mandate. By this point, the British had already separated the area east of the Jordan River and handed it to the small Hashemite tribe who created the Kingdom of Trans-Jordan. The people assembled at this meeting were at an impasse of how to handle the remaining portion of Palestine in regards to the roughly 1,200,000 Arabs and 600,000 Jews.
It is worth reading the discussion in full, but I will only highlight a few points here.
By way of background, the British had assumed the Palestine Mandate as well as for Iraq in 1922, while France had mandates for Syria and Lebanon. Due to Arab revolts in Palestine which started in 1936, the British – contrary to their mandate – limited Jewish immigration to Palestine to only 75,000 during the European Holocaust; they placed no limits on Arab migration into Palestine, allowing the Arab population to grow rapidly (more than doubling from 1918, whereas Syria only grew by 50% over the period).
An interesting observation is that the word “Palestinian” appears nowhere in the discussion, as the current notion that it only means Arabs would not be concocted for decades. At this point in time, the idea of a possible “Palestinian State” would incorporate both Palestinian Arabs and Palestinian Jews, a term without meaning today.
In discussing the desire of the local Arab population in Palestine, Bevin said that the Arabs were “unwilling to contemplate further Jewish immigration into Palestine,” even when survivors of the European Holocaust were desperate to come to the Jewish homeland. He added that the Arabs “are equally opposed to the creation of a Jewish State in any part of Palestine.“
Bevin would go on to state the position of Zionists who wanted an independent state, in line with the mandate which called for Jews “reconstituting their national home in that country.”
Again, he made the position clear that “for the Arabs, the essential point of principle is to resist to the last the establishment of Jewish sovereignty in any part of Palestine.” He saw “no prospect of resolving this conflict by [negotiated] settlement,” consequentially leading to persistent violence. The competing demands of the Arabs and Jews made the situation “irreconcilable.”
Willie Gallacher (1881-1965), a communist who had opposed Britain’s involvement in WWII asked during the back-and-forth whether the UK’s “Balfour Declaration is recognised to be utterly unrealistic,” giving priority to Arab claims. He failed to comprehend that the declaration served as the very basis for which Britain had been handed the mandate for Palestine. The members therefore concluded that the matter should go to the United Nations General Assembly to decide how to reconcile the irreconcilable.
The discussion proved prophetic. Even today (“to the last”), the majority of the Stateless Arabs from Palestine (SAPs) refuse to accept a Jewish State “in any part of Palestine.” They continue to fight it by any means at their disposal, including war, terrorism and boycotts. Their actions do not only make life difficult for Jews in Israel but for Americans. The US embassy in Israel issued “travel advisories” suggesting people reconsider travel to Israel and the West Bank and to not go to Gaza because of the activities of various Palestinian Arab terrorist groups.
The SAPs are fighting Jews on two fronts, via the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Hamas. The PA is fighting for a Palestinian State without a single Jew living in it. It has the United Nations endorsement, with the passing of UN Security Council Resolution 2334 in December 2016. Hamas and other terrorist groups are fighting to ensure no Jewish State exists “in any part of Palestine.”
Other jihadists – countries and groups – also rallied to fight a Jewish State “in any part of Palestine.” From 1948 to the 1970s, the Arab world routed 850,000 Jews from their nations. Most still refuse to recognize Israel. Many boycott Israel and do not allow Israelis to enter their country. Islamic countries which are not Arab – foremost Iran and Turkey – actively support Hamas. Turkish President Recep Erdogan said right after the October 7 massacre that “Hamas is not a terrorist organization, it is a liberation group, ‘mujahideen’ waging a battle to protect its lands and people.”
Jihadi groups like al Qaeda rally radical Muslims to attack “Americans and Jews” around the world because of Israel, and attack tourists and fellow Muslims in Egypt and Jordan because those countries struck peace agreements with the Jewish State. The presence of Jewish sovereignty in Palestine has generated a call to history of 1,000 years ago, with the “World Islamic Front for the Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders.“
The conflict is cast in western circles as a local conflict over land between Jews and Arabs which can find compromise, but radical Islamists see it as a global religious matter between Muslims and Jews. The violent extremists cannot accept Jewish sovereignty “in any part of Palestine” as an “essential point of principle.” Current efforts to “Globalize the Intifada” is their rallying call to end the Jewish State in its entirety, with Jews and Christians (“Crusaders”) fair marks for attack.
On October 7, 2001, Osama bin Laden released a speech just hours after the United States began airstrikes in Afghanistan against the Taliban and al-Qaeda, in response to the September 11 terrorist attacks. The message wasn’t veiled nor political. It was explicitly religious: a jihad.
Bin Laden declared, “America struck by God Almighty in one of its vital organs, so that its greatest buildings are destroyed. Grace and gratitude to God,” praising Allah for the 9/11 attacks. He wasn’t waging war over oil, sanctions, or American foreign policy. He was answering what he believed was a divine command to wage jihad—to rid Muslim lands of infidels.
“God has blessed a group of vanguard Muslims, the forefront of Islam, to destroy America. May God bless them and allot them a supreme place in heaven.”
Osama Bin Laden on October 7, 2001, praying for the Islamic terrorists who committed the 9/11 attacks on the United States
This was a war incumbent upon “every Muslim,” not Afghanis or Iraqis. It was a battle against “infidels,” not just Americans. Bin Laden cast western values as “paganism,” stoking a religious war. He was incensed about American troops in the “Peninsula of Muhammad” (Saudi Arabia) and Jews living in “Palestine.”
Osama Bin Laden speech on October 7, 2001, just after America began to respond to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001
Exactly 22 years later, on October 7, 2023, the radical Islamist group Hamas unleashed an unprovoked massacre against Israeli civilians, murdering babies, burning families alive, raping women, and taking hundreds hostage. The attack was ideological, theological, and genocidal. And the date was no coincidence. It marked a continuation of the same jihad that bin Laden declared in 2001—a war against Jews and the West, justified not by grievances, but by scripture.
The Global Jihad Doctrine
The doctrine of jihad—holy war in the path of Allah—is foundational to groups like al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Islamic State. It is not merely an internal spiritual struggle, as modern apologists in the West often portray it. For these groups, jihad is a call to arms against unbelievers, to expand the domain of Islam and purify it of non-Muslim presence.
Bin Laden was clear in 2001: the “world [is divided] into two camps, the camp of the faithful and the camp of infidels… Every Muslim must rise to defend his religion. The wind of faith is blowing and the wind of change is blowing to remove evil from the Peninsula of Muhammad, peace be upon him.”
It was an echo of Hamas’s foundational charter: “Israel, Judaism and Jews challenge Islam and the Moslem people (Article 28) and “the spread of vice on earth and the destruction of religious values… fight with the warmongering Jews.” (Article 32) Their twisted view of Islam is that a religious jihad is a clash of good Muslims versus evil non-Muslims that can only be resolved through violence: “There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time.” (Article 13)
On the anniversary of America’s war on terror, Hamas launched what it called the “Al-Aqsa Flood”, naming the massacre after an Islamic mosque in Jerusalem. The Arabs slaughtered civilians in their homes and at a music festival as an offering to Allah. Dead women were paraded through Gaza to the cheers of the crowd, a spectacle with no military purpose other than to rile up Gazans to scream “Allahu Akhbar” God is greater – than you.
Murdered Young woman paraded through streets of Gaza to cheering crowds which spat on her body on October 7, 2023.
The enemy, in their eyes, is not just Israeli or US policy—it is the very existence of Jews, Christians, and secularism in lands they define as Islamic.
The War the West Refuses to Recognize
Despite the clear intent, the West continues to deny the religious nature of this war. Politicians, academics, and media pundits try to cast Hamas as a localized “resistance movement,” or claim it’s a response to the Israeli government. But Hamas’s founding documents and speeches speak for themselves. Their goal is not statehood. It is the total eradication of the Jewish people from what they view as purely Islamic land, or as Bin Laden calls it, “dar al-Islam.”
Radical Islamists believe that Israel is a temporary entity, just as Russian and American presence in Afghanistan was short-lived. American troops fleeing Kabul in 2021 was a confirmation of their beliefs, much like Israel’s abandoning Gaza in 2005. Allah rewards perseverance. Time is on their side.
Jihadists in the Islamic Republic of Iran call America the “Big Satan” and Israel the “Little Satan.” Perhaps it is time to state the obvious inverse: Al Qaeda and the Taliban are the “Big Satans” and Hamas and Hezbollah are the “Little Satans.”
Until the West acknowledges that jihad is not a grievance but a theology, it will continue to lose the war it refuses to name. October 7 was not an aberration; it was a declaration. It is being repeated on western streets under the banner “globalize the Intifada,” and excused by radical politicians to secure power to defeat capitalism and Judeo-Christian values.
Unless the west answers with moral clarity, military resolve, and promotes moderate Muslims, the tidal wave of jihadists will drown us before long.
On May 22, 2013, the streets of London ran red with the blood of a British soldier. Lee Rigby, a young drummer and veteran of Afghanistan, was savagely killed and hacked in broad daylight by two men shouting “Allahu Akbar.” The killers were converts to Islam, driven by jihadist ideology, determined to murder a British soldier as vengeance for the United Kingdom’s involvement in the War on Terror.
Lee Rigby (1987-2013) didn’t die while a soldier fighting in Afghanistan, but while walking on the streets of London
The attackers didn’t flee the scene. They stood there, hands dripping with blood, speaking calmly to a bystander’s camera, stating their religious motivation and intent. Rigby was targeted not for who he was as a person, but because of the uniform he wore — because he was part of a democratic nation that dared to fight radical Islamism abroad.
Flash forward to UK’s Glastonbury Festival in June 2025.
A crowd of thousands cheered and danced as the band Bob Vylan stood on stage and led them in a chant: “Death, death to the IDF.” Cheers. Applause. Raised fists. The UK’s biggest music festival turned into a public bloodlust rally, reminiscent not of peace and love but of Tehran rallies and Hamas parades in Gaza.
The same United Kingdom that once mourned Lee Rigby now hosts musical mobs screaming for Israeli soldiers — who are, like Rigby, young conscripts — to be hunted down and murdered. The shift is not just disturbing; it’s revelatory. The British public has not simply forgotten Rigby. It has been slowly conditioned to join the other side.
Bob Vylan celebrated by thousands at British music festival after calling for the murder of Israeli soldiers
What changed? The two Nigerian-born converts who killed Rigby were once on the fringes, denounced by the press and public as monsters. But the ideology that drove them — jihadism blended with anti-Western, anti-Semitic venom — is no longer beyond the pale in western cities. It’s broadcast on stages, shouted from union podiums, printed on placards at “Free Palestine” marches, and justified in classrooms as “decolonization.”
From the beheading of a soldier in Woolwich to mobs calling for the deaths of Jews in Glastonbury, Britain has not gone soft; it has gone sick.
Islamist terror was once the enemy of the nation. Now, it’s being mainstreamed and rebranded as some twisted form of “justice.”
The chants at Glastonbury weren’t about military critique or foreign policy. They were blood chants. Calls to murder the soldiers of the world’s only Jewish state. Just like Rigby, IDF soldiers are conscripts. They are fighting a defensive war on radical Islam — Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, the Islamic Republic of Iran — just as Rigby once fought al Qaeda and the Taliban. Their enemies are the same; their battlefields different.
But instead of solidarity, Jewish soldiers are demonized. Instead of mourning victims of jihad, Brits chant in chorus with the same ideology that murdered their own.
This is not coincidence. It is the result of years of ideological infiltration. Islamism, wrapped in the cloth of anti-imperialism, has become fashionable among youth and elites. Hamas propaganda has found its way into British classrooms, British parliaments, British airwaves — and now British music festivals, not dissimilar to the Nova Festival in Israel in which thousands of Gazans mowed down and raped concert goers.
Consider that the UK banned Hamas as a terror group in 2021, yet its slogans are alive and well in 2025. “Globalize the Intifada” has more sway than Democratic law.
The murderers of Lee Rigby told the British public they were coming for them. “You people will never be safe,” they said. Over the next twelve years, Brits have responded: We won’t only abandon the war on radical Islamism, we’ll join the jihad.
News report from 2013 by the jihadists who murdered Lee Rigby on the streets of the UK
The jihadist dream was never just about bombs and blood. It was about conquest — ideological, demographic and territorial. That process has been in motion across Europe, but the UK is perhaps its most advanced test case.
From Rigby to Glastonbury, Britain has undergone a chilling conversion. Not to Islam, but to jihadism — masked as progressive, broadcast as pop culture, and absorbed by a population eager to cheer with the mob.
A country that once mourned for its murdered soldier now cries for the death of others. That is not a battle lost but a societal surrender.
For centuries, antisemitic violence has been a grotesque feature of Jewish history—pogroms in Tsarist Russia, inquisitions in Catholic Europe, and, ultimately, the Holocaust engineered by Nazi Germany. These atrocities were largely confined to the Global North, where much of world Jewry lived and where the modern tools of mass murder were industrialized.
Global North in blue, Global South in red
But on October 7, 2023, the locus of mass antisemitic violence shifted decisively. The massacre orchestrated by Hamas, the ruling authority of Gaza, against Israeli civilians was not merely another terror attack—it was the first state-sponsored pogrom to originate from the Global South on the Global North in centuries. It marked a turning point in the nature of antisemitic violence: no longer the work of loosely organized mobs in the South or repressive imperial regimes of the North, but the deliberate, systematic assault by a democratically-elected government in the Muslim world, targeting Jews as Jews, and Jews and “colonizers.”
A Historic Shift
Historically, Jews living under Muslim rule experienced discrimination and periodic violence, but the scale of the bloodshed never approached that of Christian Europe. Pogroms in places like Fez (1912), Constantine (1934) and Baghdad (1941), were undeniably horrific, but they typically resulted in the deaths of dozens, not thousands. In most cases, these events were local eruptions of violence, not centrally planned exterminations.
That changed dramatically in the 1950s. The rise of Arab nationalism, fused with pan-Islamic identity and antisemitic European ideologies, led to the near-total ethnic cleansing of Jews from the Muslim world. From Iraq to Egypt, from Yemen to Libya, ancient Jewish communities were uprooted. Between the late 1940s and 1970s, over 850,000 Jews were forced to flee Muslim-majority countries. They resettled primarily in Israel, France, and North America. But while the Jews left, the hatred remained. For Jews, and for Western “imperialism.”
Hamas and the Theology of Erasure
Hamas is not just a terrorist organization; it is the elected governing body of Gaza, a polity not recognized by much of the Global North but very much embraced within the Global South. Its 1988 charter is steeped in genocidal antisemitism. It doesn’t distinguish between Israeli combatants and civilians. It doesn’t merely call for “resistance” against Israeli policy—it calls for the annihilation of Jews in the land, whom it labels foreign interlopers and infidels contaminating Muslim soil.
On October 7, 2023, this ideology became mass action. Roughly 1,200 Israelis were slaughtered—women, children, the elderly—tortured, raped, and mutilated in their homes and at a music festival, and 250 people were taken captive. The violence wasn’t spontaneous. It was premeditated, coordinated, and state-executed. It echoed the darkest moments of European Jewish history, but this time the origin was a Muslim-ruled territory in the developing world.
Hamas had launched many wars against Israel since it took over Gaza in 2007, most notably in 2008, 2012, 2014 and 2021. But it never did a mass coordinated invasion of Israel. It never took hundreds of hostages. It never counted on regional allies of Houthis in Yemen, Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Islamic Republic of Iran to join the jihad.
While Muslims are a minority in the Global North, they are the plurality on the Global South
A Government Pogrom
What separates October 7 from prior attacks is its nature: it was not a riot nor mob action. It was not a fringe group operating in defiance of authorities. It was the government. Hamas planned the massacre for years. It diverted foreign aid and resources meant for schools and hospitals to build tunnels, train fighters, and manufacture weapons. And then it unleashed them— on civilians.
The western world has been slow to reckon with this fact. The idea of a pogrom—an antisemitic mass killing—carried out by a government of the Global South against the Global North challenges dominant narratives in international politics, which often frame power dynamics as North exploiting South, not the other way around. But facts do not bend to ideology.
The Silence and the Hypocrisy
Western voices that once said “Never Again” have hesitated to name October 7 for what it was. Some have even rationalized it as “resistance,” blurring the line between anti-Zionism and rank Jew hatred. But no cause justifies the butchery of innocents. No political grievance legitimizes the burning of children or the beheading of elderly Holocaust survivors.
October 7 was a pogrom. Not the first in Jewish history, but the first of its kind, launched from the Global South by a sitting government, acting with genocidal intent against a Jewish population it deems foreign and expendable.
It will not be the last. Members of the Global South have been moving to the Global North post de-colonization. The numbers have ramped considerably over the past decade, as the poorly named “Arab Spring” and civil wars launched tens of thousands of people from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) into Europe and North America.
The First Pogrom from the Global South was greeted in western city streets with chants to “Globalize the Intifada,” because this war of annihilation is infused with radical Islamism and nationalism. The first battle is against the perceived island of the Global North inside the Muslim Global South: Israel. Europe and the United States are to follow.
Antisemitism is not bound by geography or ideology; it infects the right and left around the world. But the Muslim Crusade of colonizing the Global North is very much a function of region and philosophy. It is coming for a broad redistribution of power and wealth from North to South, and indoctrination of Islamic principles from South to North. It will achieve its aims through force of arms and diplomatic cover of an altered United Nations.
“the Jewish people suffering the worst and most murderous pogrom since the Holocaust.
Thinking of October 7 in terms of the worst slaughter of Jews since the European Holocaust blinds people to the tectonic earthquake that is taking place. History is not simply repeating itself in killing Jews. A new chapter of crusades is upon us in which Jews are the first victims but will not be the last.
“God is love,” says the Christian scripture (1 John 4:8). In Judaism, Ahavat Hashem — love of God — is commanded and cultivated with blessing: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your might” (Deuteronomy 6:5). The love of God is a bond between man and heaven built on compassion, holiness, and peace.
But in far too many places across the Global South, another phrase is being taught: “The love of Jihad.”
It’s neither metaphorical nor poetic. It is proudly literal — sung by schoolchildren, broadcast on TV, etched into educational curricula, printed on flags held by terrorists. “We love death like our enemies love life” was a chilling Hamas slogan even before October 7, 2023. It isn’t a chant of a lone errant radical but a core tenet of Islamist extremism: to define one’s identity by war, death, and the annihilation of the other.
Two Loves. Two Worlds.
There is a love that sanctifies hospitals, schools, and synagogues. There is another love that sanctifies suicide belts and the murderers of civilians.
In the Judeo-Christian tradition, love flows downward from a Creator who gives life and asks for holiness in return. Morality is measured by how one treats the stranger, the widow, the orphan. The spiritual path is about elevating the self — resisting the urge to dominate, to hate, to take vengeance. I call it “Humble Faith.”
But in radical Islamist ideology, compassion is redirected from the divine to the destructive. Martyrdom is romanticized. The afterlife is promised not to those who love their neighbor, but to those who murder them. Jihad isn’t just war — it’s the highest expression of spiritual devotion.
Columbia University students call “Glory to the martyrs. Victory to the Resistance” supporting the Hamas war in October 2024 (photo: Mike Segar, Reuters, Redux)
People have attempted to sanitize “jihad” and “intifada” in Western media. We are told jihad means “inner struggle” and intifada means “shake off.” Perhaps it does for some Muslims. But the jihad of Hamas, Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, and Iran’s Revolutionary Guards is unmistakably violent. It’s the jihad of Kalashnikovs, tunnels under kindergartens, and paragliders into music festivals. It’s identical to Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” which similarly means “My Struggle.”
"Jihad means the fighting of the unbelievers and involves all possible efforts that are necessary to dismantle the power of the enemies of Islam, including beating them, plundering their wealth, destroying their places of worship, and smashing their idols." - Hassan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood
And yet, around the world, there is a growing refusal to admit this unvarnished truth.
The West’s Romanticization of Jihad
Academics and activists in the West have twisted themselves into knots to justify the “rage” of jihadists. Excuses of “occupation,” “imperialism” and “colonialism” are concocted. New definition of “apartheid” and “genocide” are contrived. The love of jihad is recast as a legitimate cry for justice, while Israel’s efforts to protect its citizens is painted as cruel, racist, even genocidal.
When Hamas terrorists butchered entire Israeli families, raped women, and burned children alive, some depraved people in the West saw “resistance.” When Israel responded, the cries of “Ceasefire now!” emerged to protect Hamas, but not for Israel, which had been dragged into battle.
Hamas terrorist Ahlam Tamimi, who abetted the killing of 15 people and injuring of 122 – almost all women and children, celebrated her jihadi murders. She walks free in Jordan.
A World Turned Upside Down
Imagine a child in Gaza, raised on songs about martyrdom and vengeance, told that killing Jews is a way to please Allah. Compare him to a Jewish child reciting “Oseh shalom bimromav” — “May He who makes peace in His heavens bring peace upon us.”
Imagine a Christian child learning to “turn the other cheek,” and then hearing protesters on Western campuses chant “Intifada until victory” — a call for permanent war.
There are two radically different spiritual trajectories here. One aims upward, toward love, life, and sanctity. The other plunges downward into hatred, death, and hell.
It is no coincidence that the Islamic Republic of Iran calls Israel “Little Satan” and the United States “Big Satan.” The philosophy of radical Islamism is not oriented towards love and God but directed to violence and the underworld.
Choose Your Love
The West must stop pretending. To love God is to abhor the love of jihad. To defend life is not to disrespect culture; it is to preserve culture that can sustain a free and peaceful society.
Jihadism — like Nazism before it — dresses hatred in the garb of purpose. It seduces the young, exploits the poor, and destroys the innocent. And like Nazism, it will not stop until it is confronted with clarity, courage, and conviction.
We must stop asking why terrorists hate and start asking why we excuse it.
Across Western cities, “Nakba” protests fill the streets in May, marking what Stateless Arabs from Palestine (SAPs) call the “catastrophe” of Israel’s founding. Protesters chant slogans of “liberation,” wave Palestinian flags, and brandish large symbolic keys—representing homes lost in the Arab-Israeli 1948 War, and a longed-for return.
In London, British actor Khalid Abdalla holds a key symbolising the supposed Palestinian “right of return” (photo: Middle East Eye)
To the casual observer, these demonstrations appear to be non-violent expressions of secular nationalism: a displaced people demanding justice and return. The rhetoric is packaged in the language of “anti-colonialism,” a phrase from the Global South marketed at western universities.
The terminology is secular and political but the facts on the ground tell a different story.
The actual war against Israel is not being led by nationalists. It is driven by radical Islamist groups including Hamas and Islamic Jihad. The attack launched on October 7, 2023, was not called the “Nakba Response” or “Operation Liberation.” It was named “Al-Aqsa Flood”—a title soaked in religious meaning, not national aspiration. It invoked Islam’s third-holiest site which sits atop Judaism’s holiest site.
The strategic use of “Nakba” language in western cities is a deliberate effort to mask a religious war in secular terms. It is designed to resonate with Western leftists who are comfortable championing national self-determination but uneasy with theocratic zeal. It reframes an Islamic holy war as a freedom struggle, making it seem modern, rational, and even “progressive.”
But the religious reality will not remain buried forever.
Because just as SAPs speak of return, so do Jews. If Jews are forced to lose their sovereignty, perhaps diluted in a binational state, it will likely not lead to secular coexistence—it may unleash something far older and deeper: the demand for rebuilding the Third Jewish Temple.
Today, the Temple Mount is controlled administratively by the Jordanian Waqf, which bans Jewish prayer. Since the Second Temple was destroyed in 70AD, Jews have dreamed of rebuilding it, and while that has remained marginal in the modern secular Jewish state, it may surge forward in a post-Zionist situation in which Jews are compelled to relinquish so much.
If Israel is converted to a binational state in which everyone has equal rights, Jews would obviously insist on the same rights as Muslims enjoy today, to pray openly by the thousands on the Temple Mount. The demand to rebuild the Jewish Temple could move from the fringe to the center. The so-called “liberation” of Palestine would be matched by calls to liberate the Mount—from Islamic control.
In that light, the pro-Palestinian protest chants of “liberation” are a double-edged sword. They echo with reciprocal cries: not just the return of SAPs to Jaffa but the return of Jews to the Temple Mount. The religious war launched by Gazans wrapped in secular “Nakba” terminology in the west would be laid bare for what it is.
Muslims and Jews hold keys for places that don’t exist in the holy land anymore – for homes and a Temple. Should one side pursue a “right of return” to create a future-past, the mirrored key will do no less.
In an ongoing insult to Jews around the world, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas said at the 32nd Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) Central Council meeting on April 23, 2025 that the two Jewish “Temples were in Yemen.”
PA President Abbas claiming the Jewish Temples were in Yemen, April 23, 2025
Abbas falsified history in an attempt to deny Jews any rights or privileges at their holiest location. The fact that it was an insult to over 2 billion Christians who believe that Jesus was in Jerusalem and not Sanaa was a slight he was willing to make to claim the site as purely Islamic.
The United Nations adopted the same position. In a 1949 map of the holy places in Jerusalem, the Temple Mount was marked as only holy to Muslims, while the Western Wall was marked as holy to both Muslims and Jews.
1949 UN map of Jerusalem’s holy places
The United States should therefore adopt a resolution called “Status of the Temple Mount,” similar to the twisted United Nations resolutions called “Status of Jerusalem,” to correct the wrong. Its passage in Congress will serve as a template for other countries to adopt before being submitted to the United Nations General Assembly.
Key phrases should be included in the resolution, to combat the disgraceful UN remarks about Jewish rights:
The United States abhors the “aggressive and dangerous” comments made by the president of the Palestinian Authority which “could inflame tensions and lead to a religious war that has no boundaries.”
Comments made by the PA president “serve the forces of extremism around the world.”
Incendiary remarks that deny Jews their heritage and history “do absolutely nothing to improve the lives of Palestinian Arabs,” and simply “push back the Middle East peace process.”
“The Temple Mount built by King Herod two thousand years ago has been and will always be the holiest location of Judaism.”
On December 9, 2021, Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) expressed his disgust with a December 3 UN General Assembly resolution about Jerusalem saying “The recent vote by the United Nations disavowing Jewish historical ties and exclusivity to the Temple Mount—the holiest and most sacred Temple in Judaism—is an outrageous act of religious persecution. This is a transparent effort, supported by 129 nations but opposed by the United States, to rewrite history, cleanse the holy area of its religious ties to the Jewish faith and deny that Israel has roots to the Middle East…. The Jewish Temple, located in the heart of Jerusalem’s Old City, is holy ground to Jews and it belongs solely to their faith. I object to any effort to ethnically cleanse the Jewish people from their sole historic claim to this land and temple.”
It is time for U.S. Congress to endorse a resolution to correct the shameful religious persecution and ethnic cleansing of Jews, by passing the “Status of the Temple Mount” resolution.
ACTION ITEM
Write Paul Gosar (if you are in his district), your representatives in Congress and the White House (comments@whitehouse.gov) to clearly stand by historic truth and correct the ongoing slander and religious persecution of Jews. “In light of the ongoing antisemitic insults by the Palestinian Authority and the United Nations, please pass a resolution which clearly states that the Jewish Temples stood on the Temple Mount in the Old City of Jerusalem and that the site has been the holiest site for Jews for 3,000 years. https://primarybowman.com/2025/04/29/resolution-recognizing-the-jewish-temples-stood-on-the-temple-mount-in-jerusalem/“
Mike Huckabee, the new U.S. Ambassador to Israel, landed in the holy land to assume his new role and immediately went to the Western Wall of the Jewish Temple Mount. It is the holiest site where Jews can pray today, so he used the opportunity to address Jews in a call for peace.
Huckabee carried a small paper note from U.S. President Donald Trump praying for peace, which Huckabee inserted into a small crack in the ancient wall. He told those gathered that he and the president prayed that all the hostages violently taken by Gazans would be released to their families soon.
Mike Huckabee speaking at Western Wall about the “Judeo-Christian understanding that every life has worth and value.”
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) said that Huckabee’s appointment as ambassador to Israel will “undermine the rights and safety of Muslim and Christian Palestinians, including American citizens living in or traveling to the region.” Somehow, a man devoted to peace for everyone – including Jews – and freedom for everyone – including hostages – is a threat to radical Muslim groups like CAIR and the Islamic Waqf.
US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, wearing a hostage support yellow ribbon pin, places a note into the Western Wall of the Jewish Temple Mount, during Passover 2025
On the same day, Israel increased the number of Jewish visitors onto the Temple Mount to 180 at a time to accommodate demand. These were the largest sized groups according to the Islamic Waqf coming to “al Aqsa Mosque.” Aouni Bazbaz, head of international affairs for the waqf told Middle East Eye that the scene was “frightening” and portended Jews seeking to divide the holy compound into Jewish and Muslim sections like the Cave of the Jewish Matriarchs and Patriarchs in Hebron.
To put the 180-person Jewish group in context, during Ramadan last month, Israel banned Jews visiting the site while 90,000 Muslims visited for prayers without putting anyone into a “group” for security. No one in Israel called the massive number of Muslim visitors “frightening.”
To add insult to the waqf’s smear, Bazbaz said Israel’s allowing both Jews and Muslims to pray in Hebron was “apartheid” and likely to happen in Jerusalem.
Islamic extremists want a purely Muslim holy land in the Jewish homeland, without basic human rights like prayer for non-Muslims. Dignity for other faiths is labeled “apartheid” in slurs likely to be adopted by the United Nations and “human rights” groups.
First One Through 