Dexter Van Zile, the Middle East Forum’s Violin Family Research Fellow and the editor of Focus on Western Islamism (FWI), spoke to a February 16 Middle East Forum Podcast (video). The following summarizes his comments:
On January 13, 2024, one hundred days after the October 7th Hamas massacre in southern Israel, the Islamic Society of Boston (ISB) held a fundraiser gala for a Roxbury mosque headed by Islamist radical Imam Abdullah Faaruuq. Faaruuq is a case study of how Islamists “ingratiate themselves in the public square, despite the anti-democratic impulses that motivate their agenda.”
The high-profile draw for the fundraiser was Tania Fernandes Anderson, the first Muslim elected to serve on the Boston City Council. Post-October 7th, Fernandes Anderson passed a resolution praising Faaruuq, despite his anti-Israel and anti-U.S. activism. Her Twitter feed regularly features pro-Hamas propaganda, and she recently endorsed a failed city council resolution referring to Hamas’s October 7th barbarism as “a military operation.” Despite these pronouncements, she has not been marginalized.
The principal message delivered at the gathering, comprised primarily of “middle to upper class Blacks and immigrant Muslims,” held that Zionist Jews were the source of Gazan Palestinian suffering, and that Arab violence against Jews occurs only because of Israel’s founding in 1948. Denying that Muslim supremacism accounts for Islamist hostility towards Jews, the “happy dhimmi” narrative presented to the gala’s audience is the Muslim Middle East version of the “happy darkey myth” used by white supremacists in the American South. That myth claimed that the source “instability and suffering” in the South was the demand for rights by previously enslaved blacks.
Islamists apply a similar myth to Mideast Jews who were “dhimmis” in the Muslim world – purportedly a “protected” people living under Islamic dominance, but actually subjugated to second-class status, humiliated, and mistreated by Islamic supremacists. The goal of Hamas’s October 7th attack was to impose dhimmi status on Israel’s Jews and “turn back history” by restoring Muslim control over the lands comprising ancient Judea and Samaria formerly under Muslim rule.
The Islamist argument is that if Israel’s Jews gave up Zionism and the right to self-governance as a sovereign people, the Middle East would be problem-free. The disturbing effect of advancing this specious claim is that Faaruuq’s espousal of hate towards Israel and the U.S. has not marginalized him. Politicians return his calls, considering him a “high-profile player” in the Greater Boston Interfaith Organization (GBIO), a non-profit organization promoting “progressive issues” such as affordable housing and a food pantry led by Faaruuq’s mosque. After October 7th, interfaith activists organized an anti-Israel march in Boston in which Fernandes Anderson participated, weeping over the Palestinian children killed as collateral damage in Israel’s campaign to eradicate Hamas, but saying little about Hamas’s invasion of Israel and butchery of its civilians that precipitated the war.
Benjamin Weber, a politically prominent Jew recently elected to Boston’s City Council, withdrew a resolution calling for Hamas’s release of the Israeli hostages because it was “too divisive.” Islamists are emboldened to mainstream their hostile motives by using Jews like Weber as human shields to provide cover against accusations of antisemitism. The ISB’s founders were allies of the Muslim Brotherhood whose theoreticians believed that “Islam is a solution, Jews are the problem.” Boston’s Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC) acquiesces to work with the ISB on larger campaigns such as affordable housing, fearing that if they object to the ISB, politicians will not return JCRC members’ calls and will marginalize them.
The October 7th atrocities exposed what has become a “referendum” gauging how much a civilized world will tolerate anti-Jewish violence. The Boston City Council is but one venue advancing Jew-hatred; it is being repeated in rallies, on campuses, and in state legislatures across the U.S. At January’s ISB gala, “Imam Faaruuq and his allies were able to portray without objection, Jews as legitimate targets of a mass killing. It was done obliquely, but it was done nonetheless.”
When Siraj Wahhaj, a radical imam from New York City who spoke at the gala, asked the audience for a show of hands from those willing to donate to renovate Faaruuq’s mosque, “virtually the entire crowd put up its hands” even after Faaruuq and Fernandes Anderson made antisemitic remarks about Jews and Israel.
The Boston City Council is but one venue advancing Jew-hatred; it is being repeated in rallies, on campuses, and in state legislatures across the U.S.
Hamas ensured that their videoed atrocities inflicted on Israel’s civilians would inevitably result in Israel’s military response, calculating that Gazan civilian deaths would provide propaganda for Hamas’s Western supporters. Manipulating the sympathies of Westerners by highlighting images of the numbers of dead in a war Hamas started reinforces to sympathizers the idea that Hamas’s violence was “understandable” and “the Jews are not entitled to a state.” Hamas’s objective is to elicit “sympathy or complacency for the jihadist campaign to restore Jews to their subjugated status in the Middle East.”
A December 2023 Harvard Harris Poll survey conducted by the Center for American Political Studies at Harvard University (pp. 48-51) revealed the popularity of the narratives advanced by Faaruuq and Fernandes Anderson: 51 percent of Americans between the ages of 18-24 think Israel should be “ended” and given to Hamas and the Palestinian Arabs, while 60 percent of the same age group think Hamas should be removed from power in Gaza. “More ominously,” 66 percent of that age group think Hamas committed genocide on October 7th, but 60 percent believe the massacre was “justified by Palestinian grievances.”
The survey did not poll responses about Islamism and its “anti-democratic impulses” that have dangerous implications for the West beyond Jew/Israel-hatred. Islamists have contempt for free speech, seek to impose blasphemy laws to silence criticism of Islam, and would subject all women to modesty rules. What’s more, they legitimize violence against objectors and support “the establishment of a caliphate to overthrow the political order in Western democracies.”
Invariably, progressives portray Hamas violence as “an act of liberation,” while too many sympathizers have “internalized the narrative” and acquiesced to hostility towards Israel and Jews. Leftists who have no problem undermining the West will not challenge Islamism and the threat it poses to “natural law” and “the underlying strength of the ideas used to found our country.”
Given the legal firewalls that safeguard Western democracy, many dismiss the possibility of Islamist domination in the West. But “once these [Islamist] impulses are granted an opening, they spread and replicate through a process of complacency, generating ingratiation.” Consider how Faaruuq’s social justice work spreads “neighborly acts of kindness” to recipients and onlookers who are lulled into minimizing the danger of his Islamist ideology and turning a blind eye to his antisemitism.
Survivors of the Hamas massacre and others who have fled Islamist oppression courageously come forward to communicate the dangers of Islamist supremacism against not just Israel, but the West in general.
Abraham Lincoln described a similar tactic in his 1856 Michigan speech about the evils of slavery. In theory, he could have been referring to the evils of Islamism, which “is actually a system by which some Muslims seek to hold their fellow men in bondage.” Lincoln warned against the “foothold” gained by indulging the gradual infiltration of toxic ideas through complacency, and the ISB fundraiser was a contemporary display of the scenario Lincoln warned against.
Defeating the Islamist campaign employs similar techniques “used to delegitimize slavery before the Civil War and white supremacism after the Civil War” by amplifying the supremacism present in both ideologies. Influencing popular culture through books and films can significantly sway public opinion and the interpretation of historical events. “We just need courage” to tell those stories effectively for mass consumption. Truthful and legitimate accounts that illustrate the influence of “Islamism and Islamic supremacism on the lives of Muslims and non-Muslims in the Middle East and the West” are needed to “overwhelm the process of retail ingratiation.”
Survivors of the Hamas massacre and others who have fled Islamist oppression courageously come forward to communicate the dangers of Islamist supremacism against not just Israel, but the West in general. Their testimonies are a challenge to the many who, having “internalized” an anti-Western narrative, fear confronting Islamist leaders who claim victimhood and accuse their critics of Islamophobia. Once their testimonies are widely disseminated and publicized, “the general public will know the truth.”
