Founded in 1969, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) is a coalition of 57 Muslim-majority nations, making it the second-largest intergovernmental organization in the world after the United Nations. Stretching from Morocco to Indonesia, and from Kazakhstan to Nigeria, it represents roughly a quarter of the world’s countries and speaks collectively on issues affecting the Muslim world.
OIC Member states
One of the organization’s longstanding positions is that extremist groups claiming to act in the name of Islam do not represent Islam. Over the years, the OIC has repeatedly condemned organizations such as:
ISIS (Daesh) — for attacks across Iraq, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, and Nigeria, all OIC member states.
Al-Qaeda — for attacks in Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia, Iraq, and other Muslim-majority countries.
Boko Haram — for its insurgency in Nigeria, Niger, Chad, and Cameroon.
Al-Shabaab — for attacks centered in Somalia and extending into neighboring countries.
ISIS-K (Islamic State Khorasan Province) — for terrorism in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) — for its campaign against the government and civilians of Pakistan.
The common thread is unmistakable. Every one of these organizations has waged war against governments, civilians, or institutions in Muslim-majority countries, mostly members of the OIC itself.
The OIC has consistently argued that Muslims have been among the principal victims of jihadist terrorism. These groups bomb mosques, seek to overthrow Muslim governments, and destabilize OIC member states are denounced as terrorists and rejected as contrary to Islam.
Yet one jihadi terrorist groups is not called out. It is embraced.
Hamas is an Islamist movement whose founding charter and rhetoric have long drawn on jihadist themes and whose October 7, 2023, attack deliberately targeted civilians. Nevertheless, the OIC has not designated Hamas as a terrorist organization or issued the kind of sweeping institutional condemnations that it has directed at ISIS, al-Qaeda, Boko Haram, Al-Shabaab, ISIS-K, or TTP.
The most obvious distinction is not the use of Islamist ideology or armed violence. It is the target: Israel, the Jewish State.
For an organization that frequently states that terrorism has no religion and that Muslims are among terrorism’s greatest victims, its record reveals a clear pattern. When jihadist groups attack the Muslim world, the OIC is unequivocal in its condemnation. When an Islamist movement wages jihad against the Jewish state, the organization’s response is support.
Standing before a grieving audience, Bono argued that the terrorists wanted more than bodies. They wanted souls. They wanted free people to surrender their openness, joy, and humanity. His message was simple: we cannot become monsters to defeat the monsters.
But that never meant the monsters should be left undefeated.
A decade later, Bono’s words resonate with renewed force. Islamist terrorists butchered hundreds at the Nova Music Festival in Israel on October 7, 2023, turning a celebration of life into a killing field. Yet Nova has refused to surrender. The festival has returned, even as Hamas and its supporters continue to mock the victims and celebrate the massacre.
That is the challenge every free society faces.
Love is not an alternative to defeating evil. Without security, there can be no concerts, no festivals, no freedom to gather. Evil must be confronted and defeated, or it will make love, music, and joy impossible.
The West must therefore pursue twin imperatives: defeat those who seek to destroy civilization, while steadfastly embracing the values of love, creativity, and human dignity that make civilization worth defending. Terror must never be allowed to decide either who lives or how we live.
Noa Beer, one of the SuperNova X music and arts festival organizers.
Shopping used to be simple. You bought food because it tasted good.
Today, every purchase arrives with a moral résumé.
The coffee is Fair Trade.
The chocolate is Rainforest Alliance Certified.
The eggs are Cage-Free.
The tuna is Dolphin Safe.
Soon the carton will tell you whether the chicken enjoyed equitable access to leadership opportunities.
With such established groundwork, the assertive red-green alliance / socialist-jihadi umbrella will undoubtedly develop a new standard for consumers to evaluate purchases:
Ethical Jihad Certification™
I imagine the following questionnaire for companies and organizations to complete, developed by the International Ethical Jihad Standards Council (IEJSC).
Supplier Ethics and Sustainability Review
If your organization employs child soldiers, is recruitment gender-balanced?
☐ Boys and girls equally represented ☐ Nonbinary recruitment targets adopted ☐ Diversity metrics forthcoming
If child brides are supplied, are they ethically sourced?
☐ Local ☐ Organic ☐ Family-owned supply chain
If weapons are stored among civilians, are they distributed equitably across community institutions?
☐ Hospitals ☐ Schools ☐ Mosques ☐ Balanced portfolio across all three
If hostages are held underground, are the tunnels built with recycled concrete?
If political opponents require corrective kneecapping, please confirm that your organization follows an equitable enforcement policy.
☐ Applied without regard to race, religion, gender, or political affiliation ☐ Accessibility accommodations provided during the disciplinary process ☐ Impact assessment completed ☐ Stakeholder feedback incorporated into future kneecappings
If political opponents are subjected to “involuntary rooftop relocation,” (tossed off of rooftops) please indicate which governance standards were followed.
☐ Community stakeholders notified ☐ Staff received annual safety training ☐ Proper signage installed ☐ Liability waivers completed
How does your organization incorporate the LGBTQ+ community?
☐ Rainbow headbands replace green ones during Pride month ☐ Local imams considering ordaining transwomen ☐ Gay men’s decapitated heads disposed of in another jurisdiction
☐ International NGOs ☐ Foreign correspondents ☐ Western university researchers ☐ Social media advocacy networks
Has your organization retained celebrity spokespersons to improve international brand perception?
☐ Actor ☐ Musician ☐ Influencer ☐ Climate activist
Has your organization demonstrated continuous improvement in expanding the number of international agencies, committees, or special offices devoted exclusively to your cause?
☐ Year-over-year growth achieved ☐ Additional mandate secured ☐ Dedicated rapporteur established ☐ Additional entities under consideration
Before issuing historical claims, has your organization completed a Heritage Simplification Assessment?
☐ Archaeological evidence destroyed ☐ Conflicting evidence omitted ☐ Timeline reduced to a convenient starting date ☐ Approved historical narrative distributed ☐ Site renamed in Arabic with only Islamic grounding
Has your organization’s founding charter undergone an independent review for language that may be inconsistent with modern human rights standards?
☐ Terminology modernized without changing intent ☐ Currently undergoing reputation management with select NGOs ☐ Using reputational management software to block viewers from finding foundational charter ☐ We prefer not to revisit founding documents
Has your organization successfully persuaded international stakeholders that your adversaries have no legitimate historical connection, cultural heritage, or rights associated with the land?
☐ Global awareness campaign exceeded expectations ☐ Educational materials updated accordingly ☐ Approved terminology adopted ☐ Further stakeholder engagement required
Has your organization successfully repositioned itself from perpetrator to primary victim in international discourse?
☐ Independent observers persuaded ☐ Media narrative successfully reframed ☐ Stakeholder sympathy increased ☐ Further communications investment required
Successful applicants receive one of four ratings:
Bronze: Mass violence, in recyclable packaging. Silver: Child soldiers recruited inclusively. Gold: Hostage facilities powered by solar panels. Platinum: Calls for genocide delivered with a complete ESG report.
For foods, there is an addition to the consumer label. For example:
Nutrition Facts
Calories: 140 Protein: 4g Sodium: 120mg Carbon footprint: Low Gender equity: Certified Child soldiers: Inclusive Child brides: Ethically sourced Weapons near civilians: Institutionally diversified Support for genocidal jihadists: Values-aligned
May contain traces of sesame.
May also contain an entire moral civilization that has forgotten the difference between auditing evil and opposing it.
The English language is constantly changing. Sometimes a person’s or group’s name becomes a verb.
We boycott because of Charles Boycott. We lynch because of William Lynch. We pasteurize because of Louis Pasteur. We sandwich because of the Earl of Sandwich.
The verb survives because it captures something distinctive that no existing word quite conveys.
What if the same happened with Hamas?
At first glance, someone might say, “We already have a word. It’s called pillaging.”
But pillaging isn’t nearly enough to convey the particular depredation.
The Vikings pillaged. They raided villages, stole livestock, carried off treasure, and sometimes took captives. Their brutality was driven by conquest and material gain. History rightly remembers them as ruthless raiders.
Yet even “to pillage” fails to capture what the world witnessed on October 7.
If “to Hamas” became a verb, it would not simply mean to rob, raid, or kill.
It would mean to deliberately massacre civilians, rape and murder, burn families alive, and carry away even the bodies of the dead – not merely to deny burial, but to torment loved ones and use the dead as bargaining chips. It would mean celebrating those acts publicly, then, when the victims fight back, proclaiming yourself to be the true victim. It would mean embedding fighters among civilians, hiding like cowards behind women and children while forcing every effort to rescue hostages or defeat you into another propaganda opportunity.
Dead Israeli woman hauled back to Gaza by Hamas, spat on by local Gazans on October 7, 2023
The cruelty is not only in the violence itself. It is in the inversion.
“To Hamas” is to attack and demand sympathy for committing crimes against humanity. The hostage-taker claims oppression. The organization that began the war insists the people searching for their murdered and kidnapped relatives are the real aggressors.
Hamas genocidal jihadist in Israeli kibbutz, celebrating killing families
“To Hamas” is to invite the world to join the crime and taunt the victims. To call “globalize the Intifada” in the streets of the Global North. To say the victims are not welcome on street signs. To taunt worshippers working into prayer halls.
Language evolves because sometimes old words are no longer enough.
If someone someday asks, “Are you going to Hamas me?” they would not be asking whether you’re going to steal from them or rape them. They would be asking something far darker.
Vikings pillaged. English already has a word for that.
“To Hamas” is to commit heinous atrocities, run for physical and emotional cover, and call for support to exploit the victims further.
Many Jews are being Hamased daily. It is time to label it clearly.
Social scientists have long observed that ideas do not need majority support to transform a community. Research on social norms has repeatedly found that once a committed minority reaches roughly 25 to 30 percent of a group, opinions once considered beyond the pale can become normalized. The Overton window shifts. People become more willing to voice views they once kept private because they no longer fear social disapproval.
That is what makes Pew Research Center’s July 2026 findings so alarming.
In 2024, Pew found that 37% of American Muslims viewed Hamas favorably. Two years later, that figure has risen to 44%.
July 2026 Pew Poll showing 44% of American Muslims support Hamas, almost the same as the Palestinian Authority. This is a gross outlier relative to all other Americans.
Vile extremism has not only been mainstreamed in the American Muslim community, it is accelerating.
Hamas is not merely another Palestinian political movement. It is a U.S.-designated terrorist organization that carried out the October 7 massacre. Its members murdered civilians, took hostages, committed widespread sexual violence, and burned families alive. Hamas has long promoted antisemitic ideology, seeks Israel’s destruction, refuses to disarm or allow civilians to use its protective shelters, and has repeatedly embedded military operations among civilians, leaving Gaza’s population to be destroyed.
Forty-four percent is not a fringe. It is well above the level social scientists associate with changing social norms. It IS the norm.
Viewed through that lens, the chants heard on American streets become easier to understand. “Globalize the Intifada” is no longer merely the slogan of isolated radicals. Celebrating the killing of Jews no longer needs to be hidden but can be posted on social media.
For American Jews, this is not an abstract polling result. Hamas and “Globalize the Intifada” mean antisemitic violent jihad. It is the embrace of a death cult. A poll showing growing favorability of Hamas inevitably deepens fear that the moral barrier has been broken and violence is near.
But this is not only a Jewish concern.
No society should become comfortable with growing support for a terrorist organization whose defining acts include the deliberate murder of civilians, hostage-taking, and an explicitly antisemitic ideology. When favorable views of such an organization increase rather than decline after its atrocities, the implications extend beyond the community it targets. They speak to the moral health of the the American Muslim community.
Every community contains extremists. The defining question is whether they remain isolated or become influential enough to reshape what is considered acceptable. Pew’s findings suggest that sympathy for Hamas is no longer confined to the margins of American Muslim opinion. It has become substantial enough to influence public discourse and to shape the boundaries of acceptable speech, and likely action.
The Hamas Charter is the most antisemitic governmental charter ever produced
The issue has grown beyond Hamas in Gaza. It is American Hamas – the normalization of support for a terrorist organization within American society. If support for Hamas among American Muslims has risen from 37% to 44% in just two years, Americans should ask not only what this means for Jews, but what it says about the values we are willing to tolerate in America.
The greatest danger is not merely that extremists exist. It is that extremism ceases to be recognized as extreme.
One of the most enduring images of the American Revolution is not a musket fired at Lexington or a cannon at Yorktown. It is a flag.
“Spirit of ’76” by Archibald Willard, 1875
In paintings celebrating the American Revolution, men advance carrying banners while drummer boys beat the cadence beside them. Often these figures are unarmed or lightly armed. To a modern observer, this seems irrational. Why would an army send men into battle carrying flags and drums instead of rifles?
Because they were not there to fight but to remind others why the fight mattered.
The flag represented the regiment, the cause, and the emerging nation. The drum provided rhythm and cohesion amid the chaos of battle. Neither was a weapon. Yet both were indispensable.
While tools like weapons help achieve an objective, symbols give meaning to the objective.
The Declaration of Independence was not a weapon. Neither was the America flag. Yet without them, the American Revolution would have been little more than a military rebellion. The cause and symbols transformed a collection of armed colonists into a people united by a common purpose.
The same lesson appeared thousands of years earlier in the Torah.
Moses’ staff began as an ordinary shepherd’s stick. In Egypt it became a symbol of divine authority. It was present during the plagues, at the splitting of the sea, and throughout Israel’s journey in the wilderness.
Similarly, during the battle against Amalek, Moses stood on a hill overlooking the fighting. When he raised his hands, Israel prevailed.
The rabbis famously ask whether Moses’ hands actually won the battle. Of course not. Joshua and the soldiers were the actual fighters. Like the flag carried by a Revolutionary soldier, the Moses’ raised arms pointed upwards. It reminded the warriors that victory depended not only on military strength but on the faith that united them.
Moses’ arms raised during fight with Amalek
Unfortunately, Moses later forgot the important distinction between symbol and tool. In Numbers 20, God instructs Moses to speak to a rock to make it produce water but instead Moses used the staff to hit the rock.
“And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, Take the tent and gather the congregation together, you and Aaron your brother, and speak to the rock before their eyes, and give them water from it,… And Moses lifted up his hand, and smote the rock with his rod, and there came out abundant water,… And the LORD said unto Moses and unto Aaron, Because ye believed me not, to sanctify me in the sight of the children of Israel, therefore ye shall not bring this congregation into the land which I have given them.”
Had Moses held the staff and spoken to the rock, it would have been clear that Moses was acting as an agent of God. However, by using the staff to hit the rock, the appearance to the congregation was that Moses produced the water through his physical actions. The important symbol was converted into a mere tool.
That temptation remains with every generation.
Today, neither America nor Israel doubts the superiority of its weapons. The United States and Israel possess military capabilities far beyond those of the jihadist movements that seek their destruction.
But this war is not only about weapons and short-term military victory.
The jihadists understand the power of symbols. They flew their flags over burned civilian homes and corpses of families. Their propaganda celebrates martyrdom of their own people. Their movements are built around vile narratives and identity.
So the engagement with the enemies must be beyond tools and include symbols.
The challenge facing America as it approaches its 250th birthday, and Israel as it continues its long war against jihadist movements sworn to its destruction, is not merely maintaining military superiority. It is ensuring that the superiority of their cause is just as visible.
For Israel, that means rebuilding the communities of the Gaza Envelope, returning families to their homes, raising the flag over places terrorists tried to erase, and celebrating Jewish life where jihadists sought death.
For America, it means reclaiming the language of the Declaration of Independence, speaking unapologetically about liberty and human rights, and using international forums not merely to condemn violence in general but to condemn noxious jihadist violence specifically.
The free world must repeatedly denounce genocidal jihadists like Hamas and Hezbollah and pass resolutions that celebrate democracy, defend religious freedom, and affirm the dignity of every human being.
The current fight matters more than military victory. It requires weapons, and also a proud display of enduring Jewish and Democratic values.
Tools win battles. Symbols sustain civilizations. They are both distinct and required at pivotal moments like today.
Before October 7 reordered the world’s attention, a war in Sudan had already begun killing at scale. April 15 marked the three year anniversary of the latest incarnation of war. It has since produced one of the largest humanitarian crises on earth—millions displaced, famine conditions spreading, entire cities shattered. Over 2,000 healthcare workers killed. And yet it has generated almost none of the global mobilization that defines our era of outrage.
No encampments. No slogans. No sustained moral urgency that travels.
Two forces—the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces—fight for control. Civilians are not incidental to the conflict; they are its terrain. Hospitals are looted, neighborhoods erased, aid convoys blocked. Darfur, a name once synonymous with “never again,” has quietly returned to the same vocabulary of mass killing.
The scale should compel attention. It doesn’t.
For years, much of the global discourse—across media, universities, and international institutions—has sorted conflict through a particular lens: Global North and Global South. The North is cast as inherently evil, colonial and imperial. The South as perpetual victim.
Sudan does not fit neatly inside such lens. There is no clear external oppressor to anchor outrage, no simple narrative that translates easily into the moral shorthand of our time. The violence is internal, complex, resistant to reduction. And so the system hesitates. Attention drifts. Outrage never organizes.
Look at the response architecture. The United Nations convenes, issues appeals, and struggles to convert urgency into action. Funding remains short of need. Access remains constrained. The gap between rhetoric and relief is not marginal—it is structural. Mechanisms that elsewhere become focal points of accountability have not galvanized comparable pressure here. Even institutions like the International Court of Justice sit far from the center of global attention on Sudan, not because the crimes are lesser, but because the political energy that drives action is missing.
The victims do not map cleanly onto categories that travel well. There is no easy compression into a slogan or a symbol. And in a world that increasingly organizes around moral shorthand, what cannot be simplified is often ignored.
This is not only about Sudan. Or Somalia where war has also ravaged the landscape. It is about how the past is taught—and how its lessons travel.
Holocaust education stands as a cornerstone of moral instruction across much of the Global North. Its lessons are intended to be universal. But when it is absorbed as a contained European tragedy, rather than a case study in how societies turn inward, weaponize identity, and destroy their own, its warning loses portability. It becomes history, not instruction. The Global South doesn’t bother to listen to the lesson, and the Global North is focused elsewhere.
In Sudan, mass violence is just statistics without racism and a colonial script. Here is a catastrophe that should activate every alarm built in the twentieth century—and does not. An estimated 400,000 killed in Sudan. Over 500,000 killed in nearby Somalia.
Reducing these to “internal conflicts” explains nothing. It does something worse. It lowers the urgency. It signals, quietly, that this is a tragedy the world can observe rather than confront.
Universities that mobilize rapidly around conflicts that fit prevailing frameworks struggle to sustain engagement here. Media cycles that can fixate for months elsewhere let Sudan and Somalia slip into the margins. International bodies calibrated to respond to pressure find little of it applied.
Sudan is a statistic. Somalia is a statistic. Yet Gaza has a narrative.
Victims should not need a more compelling narrative. They need corridors that function, aid that arrives, and accountability that does not wait for a more convenient story. They need a world capable of responding to human suffering even when it does not fit the frameworks that dominate discourse.
Gazans who launched a genocidal jihadi war never deserved particular sympathy. Especially compared to nearly a million killed in Sudan and Somalia.
Spring break arrives and the terminals fill. Families in flip-flops inch forward. Teenagers clutch boarding passes. Parents juggle passports, snacks, and patience. The line barely moves. Weeks later it repeats on Passover and Easter: travel with checkpoints.
While it feels like inconvenience, it is much more.
It is memory. It is cost. It is consequence.
The line begins with the September 11 attacks, when operatives from the genocidal jihadist group al-Qaeda boarded planes as passengers and turned them into weapons. Nearly three thousand civilians were killed in a single morning. The attack followed a clear logic: target civilians in the West, maximize scale, use the openness of modern Democratic systems against themselves.
Out of that morning came the Transportation Security Administration. The bins. The scanners. The choreography of shoes, belts, and laptops. A system built to harden what had already been breached.
It continues today at scale.
The United States still designates a range of these Islamic superiority groups as terrorist organizations:
al-Qaeda
Islamic State (ISIS)
al-Shabaab
Boko Haram
Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan
Hamas
Hezbollah
They differ in leadership, geography, and strategy yet converge in one place: the justification of violence against western civilians in the name of radical Islam.
Hamas makes the convergence unmistakable. Its founding charter is replete with calls to kill Jews and destroy the Jewish State. Its leadership has framed the conflict in absolutist terms. And on October 7, its fighters carried out coordinated attacks that deliberately targeted civilians—families in homes, people at a music festival—turning them into instruments of terror in a way that was both intentional and public.
Different names and different flags. Same methodology and targets.
Those jihadi ideas do not stay contained to a battlefield. They reshape daily life.
It shows up in synagogues and churches where doors are locked and guards stand watch during prayer. In stadiums and concerts where bags are checked and perimeters hardened. In city streets lined with barriers. In subway systems with armed patrols. In office buildings where access is controlled and monitored.
Islamic extremist Salman Abedi and his brother Hashem Abedi bomb Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, UK
Everyday life has been redesigned around the possibility of civilian targeting.
Every traveler standing in a TSA line is paying part of that price. Every secured synagogue, every guarded stadium, every hardened entrance carries the same cost.
TSA lines at American airports
Aviation remains a focus for a reason. It concentrates civilians. It symbolizes openness. It offers reach. So the security system stays because the threat did not disappear.
As in Israel, faced with daily threats.
Spring break travelers do not think about jihadi ideology when they remove their shoes. Families heading to a Passover seder or an Easter gathering do not connect their delay to Islamic extremist networks.
But they are connected.
To a morning in September. To an idea that still circulates. To organizations that still recruit, plan, and attack.
Which are now being promoted and protected by elected officials and a socialist-jihadi alliance growing inside the West.
We tend to think of “ground zero” as a place, a site of destruction. Where you can point to and say: it happened here.
The new ground zeros are not simply where attacks occur. They are where the vulgar idea stops sounding outrageous.
They form in environments where the rules quietly change, where violence against Jews is never explicitly endorsed, but is no longer cleanly condemned. It is where it is explained. Contextualized. Where the language shifts just enough that the victim is converted into the villain.
You can see it in parts of political culture that elect figures like Rashida Tlaib and Zohran Mamdani without seriously confronting the ideological space around them.
Rep. Rashida Tlaib called Jews conspirators who operate “behind the curtain” to “make money off of racism” at the Democratic Socialist of America convention
Ayman Mohamad Ghazali, the man who came to murder hundreds of children at a Jewish day school in Michigan, lived in Rashida Tlaib’s Michigan district, home to thousand of people who believe Tlaib’s rhetoric, who support – or least excuse – her vile antisemitism.
The same motion can be seen in New York City where Emir Balat, 18, and Ibrahim Kayumi, 19, pledged allegiance to the Islamic State and came to the city that elected a jihadist mayor to rain violence on perceived enemies.
When enough people participate in erasing the moral line, the boundary that once made violence unthinkable begins to weaken. And when that boundary weakens, the outliers don’t need instructions.
They need atmosphere.
The new ground zero is not the place where it happens. It is where it no longer feels impossible.
First One Through 