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.
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
The Green Party charted a new course in British politics, calling for an end of the Jewish State of Israel and demanding a boycott of the country until it allows millions of Arabs into the territory and become a binational state. The alt-left group was immediately rebuked by members of the other British political parties.
Labour’s Bridget Phillipson, the equalities minister said the Green vote “crosses a line” and was “fundamentally wrong.” She explicitly connected her objection to the two-state solution saying “It is shameful to vote against a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine.”
David Pinto-Duschinsky, centre, and Bridget Phillipson, right, meet with Jewish school in London with the school’s headteacher
Conservatives shadow home secretary Chris Philp said of the Green vote “I think that’s completely wrong.” He called the resolution a “stereotypical and potentially antisemitic characterisation” and said the Greens needed to do more to combat antisemitism in their ranks. The Conservative Party subsequently issued an even more directly relevant statement through Philp: “British Jews should not have to disclaim a belief in Jewish self-determination and the existence of Israel.”
Liberal Democrats MP Luke Taylor MP said “This is a divisive motion that pours fuel on the fire of tensions in the UK,” and said it would leave many British Jews feeling less safe. Lib Dem foreign-affairs spokesman Calum Miller called the Green vote “deeply wrong” and a “deeply harmful failure of judgement.” Former leader Tim Farron said the Greens had been “captured.”
Green councillor Hau-Yu Tam (centre) pictured alongside Green Party deputy leader Zack Polanski (left). Photo Credit: London Green Party
“Zionism is pure evil and must be abolished.” “Zionism was undoubtedly and unquestionably the Nazism of our time.” – Green Party’s Hau-Yu Tam
Perhaps it is therefore time to move beyond making statements about the Green Party vote and push forward clear countering platforms: one that unequivocally expresses support for British Jews and their heritage and history in the Jewish Promised Land. And a second that declares that every country – including Israel – has an unambiguous right to decide who to permit into its country and to admit as citizens. As such, there is absolutely no so-called “right of return” of descendants of Arabs who once lived in the territory of Israel.
The Greens put their position to a vote. Now Labour, the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats should do the same. At their next party conferences, each should introduce resolutions affirming these two simple principles.
Condemning the Greens is easy. Put the alternative on the ballot and let British political parties tell the country – and British Jews – where they actually stand.
On October 4, 2026, as Jews marked Simchat Torah and the third Jewish-calendar anniversary of the Hamas-led massacre that killed about 1,200 people and saw 251 taken hostage, Britain’s Green Party voted to declare Zionism a form of racism.
By 1,022 votes to 813, the party formally declared itself anti-Zionist and endorsed replacing Israel with a single Palestinian state throughout the pre-1948 region of Palestine.
An earlier vote at the same conference was even more revealing about the party’s attitude towards Jews.
Jewish Green member Sam Alston proposed an amendment protecting Jewish members from being pressured or disciplined because they belonged to synagogues and other Jewish institutions associated with Zionism. He warned that without such protection the policy could result in “indirect religious discrimination.”
The Greens rejected his safeguard, 1,026 to 684.
So at this same conference, Jewish members were provided a safe room because some feared for their safety during the debate about Jews and the Jewish State, while rejecting their proposed protection from its new racism policy.
“We continue to see antisemitic sentiment appearing with increasing frequency,” – Laurence Taylor, the head of counter-terrorism policing
There may also be a legal problem.
Adam Wagner KC, a prominent British human-rights barrister, has warned of a “strong risk” that the resolution contravenes the Equality Act 2010. British law protects qualifying philosophical beliefs, and Wagner argues that Zionism is likely capable of qualifying for that protection.
There is already precedent from the other direction. David Miller, the former University of Bristol professor, successfully established before an employment tribunal that his anti-Zionism qualified as a protected philosophical belief under the Equality Act. Greens for Palestine cited the Miller case in defending anti-Zionist beliefs before the conference.
British law may already protect both the anti-Zionist and the Zionist.
The Green Party is no longer a fringe environmental entity. Membership has surged above 200,000, tripling its total in a single year.
Their electorate also looks markedly different from Britain as a whole. Analysis of the 2024 Green vote found an average age of 42 compared with 49 across the electorate. Green voters were more female, much more likely to be university graduates and less likely to own their homes. They were also twice as likely to be Muslim – 6 percent versus 3 percent nationally – and considerably more likely to have no religion.
The two conference votes reveal something more troubling.
While the voters against Zionism and protection for Jews stayed roughly the same – 1,022 and 1,026, respectively – 16 percent of those supporting Israel did not vote on protections for Britain’s Jewish community.
That leaves a question extending well beyond this conference: As hostility to Zionism moves deeper into the politics of the alt-left, who will insist on protecting Jews whose religious and communal lives remain connected to it?
Two Iranian men – Salam Ahmadyan, 36, and Rahman Salehi, 34 – charged with attempting to bomb a synagogue in Manchester on Yom Kippur 2026, one year after other Jews were stabbed to death in the city
This Simchat Torah, I keep thinking about what is missing.
For some families, the absence is unbearable and permanent. A child, a parent, a spouse, a friend who was alive on the last Simchat Torah before October 7 and is no longer here. Every holiday marks time, but an anniversary holiday also measures absence. Another year has passed. Another place at the table remains empty. Another circle forms with someone missing from it.
Aryeh Ziering with his parents, killed as he responded to the massacre by Gazans on October 7, 2023
Loss is embedded in Simchat Torah itself. We reach the end of the Torah and lose Moses.
The man who confronted Pharaoh, led us through the sea, brought down the commandments and carried an impossible people through the wilderness does not cross into the Jewish Promised Land. The Torah does not soften his death or pretend it did not happen. It records it and we read it aloud.
Moses seeing the Promised Land before he dies by James Tissot (1896-1902)
Over the past three years, other things have felt as though they have gone missing as well.
I have watched context disappear from too much of the media coverage of Israel and the Middle East. Iran can threaten Israel and the region through proxies, missiles and terrorism, yet somehow vanish from the frame through which individual events are reported.
I have watched the United Nations lose all credibility as an institution capable of treating Israel with the same standards it applies elsewhere. Its institutions can devote extraordinary attention to Israel while regimes and movements that openly threaten Jews and Israelis often recede into the background.
I have watched universities where “Globalize the Intifada” could become part of the vocabulary of protest after Jews had just experienced the deadliest day since the Holocaust. A recent report on American antisemitism could devote enormous attention to Israel, Palestinian Arabs, race and politics while ignoring the jihadist antisemitism that helped produce October 7 in the first place.
And increasingly, I wonder whether I am losing the Democratic Party I knew.
Senator Chris Coons is not someone I associated with the anti-Israel fringe. Yet he spearheaded legislation that would authorize American sanctions connected to construction in E1, including against foreign persons who simply submit bids for construction tenders. Threatening private parties with the force of the American financial system for bidding on residential construction near Jerusalem represents a place in that debate I never expected mainstream Democrats to reach.
Senators Elizabeth Warren and Chris Coons threaten financial retribution against firms considering building residential homes in Jerusalem suburbs
Some losses happened in a morning. Others have accumulated slowly enough that it took me time to recognize them.
Judaism does not ask us to pretend that loss isn’t real. The Torah certainly doesn’t.
Moses dies. But then we do something remarkable.
We don’t pause to mourn Moses on Simchat Torah. We stand up, sing and dance. We lift the Torahs and our children. And when we have read the Torah’s final words, we refuse to leave the scroll there. We immediately return to Bereishit, to the beginning.
We don’t erase the loss or manufacture comforting explanations for it. We don’t avert our eyes from the people and institutions we have lost or from the lessons their loss may teach us. But neither do we build our lives around the empty spaces.
That may be the lesson I need most this Simchat Torah.
Notice who is missing. Remember them. Look clearly at what else we have lost since October 7 and understand why. Fight where something worth preserving can still be preserved.
Then look around the circle and see who is still there. Hold them a little closer.
The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights released a 220-page report on September 26, 2026 on the explosion of antisemitism on American college campuses after October 7, 2023. Search those 220 pages for “jihad,” “Islamist” or “radical Islam” and you find nothing.
Columbia University’s SJP chapter featured “Islamic political activism”
That is an extraordinary omission because October 7 was not the opening battle in a campus dispute between supporters of Israel and Palestine. It was a massacre carried out by Hamas, a jihadist organization with a long history of explicit antisemitism. Yet the Commission largely interprets what followed through a political framework: Jewish and Israeli students on one side, Muslim and Palestinian students on the other, each reporting hostility and discrimination while universities struggled to balance Title VI, political expression and the First Amendment. Indeed, the Commission describes its own inquiry principally in terms of institutional and federal responses to allegations of antisemitism following the Hamas attack, with substantial attention to the distinction between unlawful discrimination and protected political expression.
In that framework, Jews increasingly become the pro-Israel constituency in an Israeli-Palestinian political dispute. What largely disappears is that some of what erupted on campuses reflected a very different phenomenon: jihadist antisemitism.
Brown University chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine “by any means necessary”
Hamas’s history should have made that an obvious subject of inquiry. Its 1988 founding covenant placed the struggle within an Islamic religious framework, declared that there was “no solution” to the Palestinian question except jihad, trafficked in antisemitic conspiracy theories and invoked a hadith envisioning Muslims fighting Jews.
Gazan jihadist calls parents to celebrate his slaughter of Jewish civilians
Nor did Hamas remain thousands of miles away from the American campus debate as an abstraction. The Commission itself received evidence of faculty-sponsored protests featuring “Long Live Al-Aqsa Flood,” Hamas’s name for its October 7 operation, along with a flag of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which the report identifies as a U.S.-designated terrorist organization.
Berkeley celebrates the “Al-Aqsa Flood” massacre, named for the Islamic shrine atop the Jewish Temple Mount in Jerusalem
The Commission saw the evidence but never seriously followed the ideological trail.
Consider “Globalize the Intifada.” The phrase appears only once in the report, in its discussion of Rutgers. Yet contemporary campus reporting documented it many times among the very universities the Commission selected for study. At Stanford, students chanted “From Stanford to Gaza, globalize the Intifada.” At Cornell, protesters chanted both “globalize the intifada” and “There is only one solution, intifada revolution.”
SJP chapter for D.C., Maryland and Virginia
Cornell was not some campus the Commission lacked information about. The university supplied nearly 2,000 pages of material and received one of the longest individual university treatments in the report. Yet “Intifada Revolution” appears zero times.
Cornell professor said he was “exhilarated” by the October 7 massacre of Jews. The NY Times reported a story about Jews taking away public funds from students.
The gap becomes even more striking when compared with the Commission’s treatment of other ideological sources of antisemitism. The report examines far-right antisemitism, describing Jews portrayed as conspiratorial financial elites, competitors with white Americans and secret manipulators of political power. It discusses neo-Nazis and white nationalism. It also examines antisemitism arising from the political left, including depictions of Jews as privileged, capitalist or oppressive and the intersection between those ideas and hostility toward Israel.
Where is the corresponding examination of jihadi antisemitism?
Where is the history of Hamas’s antisemitic ideology, the examination of Hamas rhetoric about Jews, or the investigation of how the language and symbols of violent extremist organizations appeared in American campus protests immediately after October 7?
The Commission instead devotes considerable attention to deciding when anti-Israel rhetoric should be understood as political speech rather than discrimination. It examines “From the River to the Sea” at length, including competing interpretations of the slogan. It notes that “Intifada” can be frightening while remaining protected expression. At Rutgers, for example, it records “Globalize the Intifada” among the protest activity Jewish students said made them feel unsafe.
Imagine – feeling unsafe around a jihadist cry to kill non-Muslims everywhere.
Rutgers “Glory to the martyrs”, praising the jihadists murderers
But cataloguing whether a slogan is legally protected is different from investigating the ideology being expressed by the people using it. The First Amendment can protect vile political speech. That does not make its ideological origin irrelevant to a federal investigation trying to understand antisemitism.
The omission is particularly consequential because the language of the campus protests did not develop in an intellectual vacuum. American universities have increasingly employed professors who view Israel through a settler-colonial framework. In its most categorical form, that theory casts Jews as foreign colonizers and Palestinians as the indigenous population resisting them. This screed is about Jewish presence in their homeland, not particular Israeli policies. It attempts to sever Jews from the land at the center of their history, religion, language and national identity and then uses that manufactured foreignness to challenge Jewish national self-determination. It is rank antisemitism that provides a logic other than Islamic supremacism to excuse Muslims preventing Jews from living and having self-determination “in any part of Palestine.”
“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.” – First One Through July 2025
In such distorted worldview, October 7 becomes “resistance.” Hamas’s “Al-Aqsa Flood” becomes liberation. The intifada becomes something to globalize. Zionists become people to exclude, while Jews who object to any of this are reduced to the pro-Israel participants in a contentious political debate.
This is where the Commission missed the virulent strain of antisemitism it was supposed to investigate. The fear that swept through many Jewish communities after October 7 was not simply that Palestinian students disagreed with Jews about Israeli policy or conduct. Jews had watched an organization steeped in antisemitic ideology slaughter Israelis and take hostages. They then watched people in the West celebrate or rationalize the attack with the vocabulary of “resistance,” “intifada” and “Al-Aqsa Flood.”
While the Commission’s own evidence contained pieces of that story, its analytical framework never assembled them.
Columbia University encampment with “Intifada Revolution”
That failure has consequences. America has learned to recognize white-supremacist antisemitism – your father’s antisemitism – as an ideology rather than merely a collection of offensive statements. A swastika does not need to be accompanied by a dissertation on National Socialism before institutions understand the hatred behind it. The same intellectual seriousness should apply when antisemitism emerges from another extremist tradition.
Instead, this federal civil-rights report has provided universities with a framework that can make jihadist antisemitism remarkably difficult to see. While Jew hatred expressed in the vocabulary of white supremacy arrives already classified as extremism, similar hostility wrapped in the language of decolonization, resistance and intifada can be processed as politics, scholarship or protest. The Jewish student confronting it becomes the “pro-Israel” participant in a dispute, rather than a target of noxious hatred.
Jihadi antisemitism does not become benign when its vocabulary is translated for an American campus. Leaving that vector out of a federal investigation leaves universities less prepared to identify it, challenge it or protect the Jews it threatens.
The Commission set out to expose the forces driving contemporary campus antisemitism and instead helped preserve one of their safest hiding places: the assumption that when hatred of Jews arrives speaking the language of “resistance,” it is merely politics.
For the Palestinian Authority, Jews who visit Jerusalem during Sukkot, one of Judaism’s three pilgrimage holidays, are “terrorist colonists.”
What did these Jewish “terrorists” do? According to WAFA, the Palestinian Authority’s official news agency, they prayed, sang and clapped together. They gathered among themselves for peaceful Jewish worship at Judaism’s holiest site during a Jewish pilgrimage holiday.
This is terrorism?
This is the language of jihad. It begins by transforming ordinary religious practice into aggression. A Jew praying becomes a provocateur. A group singing together becomes a threat. A religious pilgrimage becomes an invasion. Once worshippers have been labeled “terrorists,” hostility toward them has already been given a vocabulary of supposed self-defense.
That is radical Islam applied to one of the most contested religious sites in the world: not simply insisting upon Muslim rights, but denying equivalent Jewish religious rights and portraying their exercise as an attack.
Every global leader taking the podium at the United Nations should condemn this screed. So should political leaders around the world asking voters to believe they oppose antisemitism and religious extremism.
The question is simple: Do you condemn the Palestinian Authority calling Jews engaged in prayer at their holiest site “terrorist colonists”?
Ignoring this rhetoric while rallying to the defense of the Palestinian Authority encourages the targeting of Jews around the world. The people WAFA describes are not firing weapons or fighting soldiers. They are Jews praying, singing and observing Sukkot.
Islamic supremacy does not only call for expelling every Jew. It also means insisting that Jews remain religiously subordinate – that Muslim prayer is a right while Jewish prayer is a provocation.
Calling Jewish worship terrorism is where the demand for Islamic domination becomes even darker. It turns Jews practicing Judaism into the enemy and fuels a global jihad.
In July, 2026 the United Nations and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation convened a conference in Cairo devoted to Jerusalem. The UN described Jerusalem as sacred to the three monotheistic religions and the conference as an “important platform for interreligious dialogue.”
Then it offered a remarkable description of what that dialogue looked like: “Muslim and Christian leaders reflected on Jerusalem’s profound significance to the three monotheistic faiths.”
Three religions. Two of them discussing what Jerusalem means to all three.
This was not a conference where religion was incidental. Its first substantive session was a two-hour panel titled “Saving the Holy City, Safeguarding the historic status quo at the Holy Sites.” The speakers included representatives of the Hashemite Fund for the Restoration of Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock, Al-Azhar, the Latin Patriarchate, the Jerusalem Awqaf and Al-Aqsa, and the Coptic Orthodox Church.
There was no Jewish religious representative.
That absence was consistent with the conference’s design. The UN announcement said the gathering would highlight the “concerns of Christian and Muslim leaders regarding restrictions on worship and threats to Holy Sites.”
Not Jewish leaders.
That left an empty chair at precisely the discussion where a Jewish voice might have asked some uncomfortable questions.
Start with the name of the place being discussed.
The conference repeatedly spoke of Al-Aqsa Mosque and Al-Haram al-Sharif. But this same 144-dunam platform is the Temple Mount, location of the First and Second Temples and the holiest site in Judaism. Yet throughout the conference, the Islamic name and Islamic religious administration were the starting point for discussing the site. Where was the Temple Mount? A conference devoted to Jerusalem’s “multireligious character” could have acknowledged both names.
Then there is the considerably larger question of worship.
The Cairo conference repeatedly invoked freedom of worship and access to sacred places. Yet the historic status quo it sought to protect has restricted Jewish prayer on the Temple Mount. Muslims worship there. Jews have historically been allowed to visit only during restricted periods but denied the same right to pray.
At Cairo, former Jerusalem Awqaf official Atallah Naser warned about “settler incursions and rituals” and what he considered an emerging “temporal and spatial division” of Al-Aqsa. Another speaker complained about increased “religious rituals” by Jews at the site.
At a conference about religious freedom, that should have produced an obvious question: Why is peaceful Jewish prayer at Judaism’s holiest site itself treated as a threat?
Nobody on the panel was there to ask it.
Nor was anyone there to ask why the practical restrictions on Jewish worship received so little attention:
Why should Jewish visits be confined to particular hours?
Why are Jews only allowed to enter the Temple Mount via single portal while Muslims can use any?
Why should Jewish religious practice require close police management?
Why does a conference concerned with restrictions imposed upon Muslim and Christian worshippers not apply the same scrutiny to restrictions affecting Jews?
Then there is the question of who administers the site.
Cairo speakers repeatedly defended the Islamic Waqf and Jordan’s Hashemite custodianship. The Waqf retains the central religious administrative role at a site that is the holiest place in Judaism. Why?
Why should Judaism’s holiest site have an Islamic religious authority but no corresponding Jewish religious authority? Why should Jewish representatives have no formal role in decisions involving Jewish worship there? Why not shared administration? Why not a multifaith governing or consultative structure? Why not Muslim administration of the mosques alongside recognized Jewish religious rights elsewhere on the enormous platform?
Those possibilities were apparently not part of Cairo’s “interreligious dialogue.”
Instead, the conference treated preservation of the “historic status quo” and protection of “freedom of worship” as though they necessarily meant the same thing.
They do not.
If the status quo restricts the religious practice of one faith at its holiest location, preserving that restriction is not the same question as protecting religious freedom.
Palestinian protesters wave Palestinian and Islamic flags as they rally at the Dome of the Rock following the last Friday prayers of the Muslim month of Ramadan, on April 29, 2022. (Photo by Ahmad GHARABLI / AFP)
UN Committee Chairman Coly Seck supplied the principle that should have started this discussion. “For Muslims, Christians and Jews,” he said, “Jerusalem carries prayers, history and hope.” He declared that freedom of worship is a right and that “No worshipper should be stopped because of who they are. No community should feel that its faith is being pushed out of its own city. Jerusalem’s religious character must not be used as a tool of control. It must remain a bridge connecting people from the three major faiths. A meeting point. A shared responsibility.”
Those words raise obvious questions about Jewish worship on the Temple Mount.
Cairo simply lacked someone at the table to ask them.
The United Nations called Jerusalem sacred to three religions and convened an interreligious dialogue in Cairo about protecting their holy places. But only Muslim and Christian representatives came. They pretended to discuss the religious interests of three faiths, while using it as an opportunity to blame all religious tension on the Jews not in the room.
A Jewish prayer book is now a “highly dangerous development” in the Middle East according to the region’s Muslim leaders.
That was the Arab League’s description Sunday of reports that Israeli police are testing allowing Jewish prayer books — siddurim — onto the Temple Mount. The League warned that allowing them could establish new Jewish religious practices and alter the “historical and legal status quo.”
It wasn’t the only alarm sounded during Sukkot.
Over 1,000 Jews visited the Temple Mount on Sunday, with some openly praying and carrying the Four Species.
For perspective, roughly 80,000 Muslims attended the first Friday prayers at Al-Aqsa during Ramadan earlier this year. In normal years, Ramadan Friday attendance can reach 200,000.
For the Muslim world, Muslims were “worshippers” while Jews were “extremist” Israelis conducting “Talmudic rituals.”
Jewish men covered in prayer shawls hold the Four Species as they take part in morning prayers during the holiday of Sukkot at the Cotton Merchant’s Gate entrance to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem’s Old City, September 27, 2026. (Chaim Goldberg/Flash90)
Palestinian Authority spokesman Nabil Abu Rudeineh warned that Israel risked transforming the political conflict into a “religious war.” He declared the entire 144 dunams of the Temple Mount an exclusively Muslim place of worship that cannot be divided or shared.
The reaction extends well beyond the Palestinian Authority.
Jordan condemned Sunday’s Jewish visits and again declared all 144 dunams exclusively Muslim. And Turkey, Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have jointly used the same formulation: the entire compound is exclusively for Muslim worship and the Jordanian Waqf has exclusive jurisdiction to administer it and regulate entry.
Three weeks ago, I wrote about the effort to redefine the Temple Mount “status quo,” transforming restrictions on Jewish prayer into a broader claim that the entire compound is exclusively Muslim.
Sukkot takes the story further.
There is no question that Israel is changing its own practice. For decades, Israeli governments maintained the policy that Muslims prayed on the Temple Mount while non-Muslims visited. Israeli police restricted Jewish prayer and barred siddurim and other Jewish religious objects.
Israel observed those restrictions for decades. But it never enacted a permanent statutory ban on Jewish prayer or agreed that the entire Temple Mount would forever be exclusively Muslim.
Now Israel is allowing some Jews to worship at Judaism’s holiest site.
The response is not simply a demand that Israel return to its previous practice. Multiple Muslim governments are declaring that all 144 dunams are exclusively Muslim. The possibility of a Jew carrying a siddur is described as a “desecration of its sanctity,” and jihadi calls for a “religious war.”
And this is happening during Sukkot, one of Judaism’s three biblical pilgrimage festivals, historically centered on Jews traveling to Jerusalem and the Temple. Jews were making pilgrimage there during Sukkot more than a thousand years before Islam existed.
A small number of Jews praying peacefully at their holiest site during their pilgrimage holiday is used as incitement to jihad. And Muslim governments demanded that the “international community” take actions against the Jews.
Perhaps it is time for the international community to explain to radical Islamists what coexistence means.
We are in the middle of the Jewish holiday season, and Judaism has demanded a lot from us.
Rosh Hashanah asked us to stand in judgment. The Ten Days of Repentance asked us to examine ourselves. Yom Kippur demanded confession, fasting and repentance.
And then Judaism tells us to be happy.
Sukkot is zman simchateinu — the time of our joy.
The pivot can feel jarring. The melodies of Yom Kippur are still in our heads when we leave the synagogue, eat, begin building the sukkah and prepare for a holiday explicitly defined by happiness.
Kohelet, which Jews read on Sukkot, provides an answer: “There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens.”
A time to weep and a time to laugh. A time to mourn and a time to dance. A time to be silent and a time to speak. A time for war and a time for peace.
Kohelet does not suggest that human beings experience only one emotion at a time. We can mourn and feel gratitude. We can love and be angry. We can be frightened and hopeful.
But Kohelet points somewhere else: that emotions and activities do not only exist in time, but time is defined by emotion and activity.
Different moments call for different responses. The emotions we might personally carry do not relieve us of the obligation to recognize what the present moment demands.
Israel offers a powerful example today.
Israel has inflicted extraordinary damage on enemies that sought its destruction. Hamas and Hezbollah have been badly degraded, and Iran has suffered devastating blows. Israelis can feel enormous relief at what Israel has survived and accomplished.
At the same time, Israel faces extraordinary international hostility and diplomatic isolation. The image at the United Nations this week captured that reality starkly: as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took the podium, dozens of delegations walked out, leaving him addressing a largely empty chamber.
So what should Israelis feel today? Relief? Alarm? Both?
Kohelet does not require one feeling to vanquish the other. The challenge is recognizing which response the present moment calls for.
Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks captured something similar in describing the distinctive nature of joy: “Joy lives in the moment. It asks no questions about tomorrow. It celebrates the power of now.”
That may explain why Sukkot follows Yom Kippur so quickly. Judaism does not give us weeks to transition from solemnity to celebration. We finish fasting and begin building a sukkah. We do not need to resolve every worry before experiencing joy. As Rabbi Sacks continued, joy “knows that yesterday has gone and tomorrow is unknown.”
Tomorrow will bring whatever tomorrow brings. Kohelet asks us to recognize today.
