A group of 500 Islamists and their leftist supporters gathered online on October 7, 2024, to celebrate the one-year anniversary of the massacre that cost 1,200 Israelis their lives. They gathered to hear speakers recruited by the U.K.-based pro-terrorist lobby group CAGE International vilify Israel for its efforts to defeat Hamas in the year since the massacre. Ignoring the horror of the attack itself, they instead used the anniversary of the massacre as a pretext to assail the legitimacy of Western democracies and their efforts to disrupt Islamist networks within their borders.
“The world will never be the same again; the world has changed forever because of the outrageous, visible, shameless double standard and hypocrisy of the West,” said Amanj Aziz, founder of the Swedish organization Institute for Social Analysis (INSAN), during an hour-long discussion livestreamed on Cage International’s Instagram and X feeds, titled October 7th: A Year of Resistance to Repression Across Europe.
Aziz and five other speakers from across Europe made no mention of the slaughter, torture, rape, and kidnapping of innocent civilians by Hamas in southern Israel on that date in 2023, nor did they mention the dozens of hostages still held in captivity by Hamas. Instead, they framed October 7 as the start of “a global war on Gaza” and a pretext for “Islamophobic” restrictions on Muslims in the West.
“It is not just a war on Palestinians, but a war on humanity itself,” warned Mansoor Adayfi, a former Guantanamo Bay detainee from Yemen. “The War on Terror is a war on Muslims and on Islam. . . . Now new language is being used—‘political Islam,’ ‘Islamism.’ They keep narrowing the circle so they can target more and more groups,” he added.
CAGE believes—or wants its supporters to believe—that there is a ‘global war on Islam and Muslims’ led by the U.S. and Western states and that the Palestinian struggle is a part of that.
The event, moderated by CAGE International’s U.K.-based outreach coordinator Shezana Hafiz, featured presentations by CAGE staffers from Denmark and Austria. Ehmad Ibrahim of the French advocacy group Perspectives Musulmanes (“Muslim Perspectives”) appeared as well. The leader of this group, Elias d’Imzalene, faces trial later this month on charges of incitement. D’Imzalene had asked on September 8, 2024, “Are we ready to lead the intifada in Paris? In our suburbs? In our neighborhoods?”
CAGE’s Hafiz described the massacre as “a pivotal moment in the ongoing struggle against Israel’s genocidal machinery,” emphasizing that it “highlights the relentless, inhumane conditions Palestinians have endured for over a century—first under British colonial rule, then under the apartheid Zionist regime.” She added, “It is important that we understand the cycle of colonial violence and the ways in which it operates. It’s physical, it’s mental, it’s structural, it’s systematic.”
Perspectives Musulmanes’ Ibrahim even assailed Western efforts to bring peace to the Middle East through support for the Abraham Accords, asserting they promoted the “normalization” of Israel’s “occupation.” October 7, he said, “was a reaction to the rebirth of the U.S.A’s New Middle East project” which would create a “Middle East dominated by the West that will deliver all the oil and petrol the West needs.”
Speakers used the anti-Israel panel to assail the efforts of European nations to counter Islamist activism within their borders. Nehal Abdallah, a researcher at CAGE Austria, said that the Austrian Muslim community’s relatively muted response to the “genocide” in Gaza was a result of the Austrian government’s November 2020 Operation Luxor, during which law enforcement arrested Muslim Brotherhood-related activists and confiscated €500,000 from a Palestinian relief charity, Rahma Austria.
“There is a huge intimidation. People are scared. Within the already organized Muslim community, the players who used to play a significant role in mobilizing protests, for example, were quite silent,” Abdallah declared, further complaining that European ministers and experts are collaborating across borders to defeat violent extremism. “They talk about clearly Islamophobic laws as best practice examples. So, they learn from each other and they radicalize each other’s Islamophobic measures,” she said.
Abdallah also came to the defense of Samidoun, an organization that, after the webinar, was banned in the United States and Canada, with officials declaring it a “sham charity.” Abdallah condemned Germany’s December 2023 ban on Samidoun. She also lamented that in January 2024, the Documentation Center for Political Islam in Austria produced a report on Dar al Janub, a pro-Palestinian solidarity organization, claiming that they are the Samidoun of Austria. “This report will then be used as grounds to start charges against not only the members but also to ban Dar Al Janub,” she said.
Abdallah called on Muslims in the West to support the Palestinian cause by creating “their own platforms on social media, in schools, universities, and via professional networks,” adding, “We have something these states are scared of. They are spending millions of taxpayer dollars to suppress a message that we Muslims carry in our hearts. We need to create solidarity structures to redefine what it means to be oppressed—and support and keep doing this work.”
Damon Perry, Associate Research Fellow at Kings College London’s International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation (ICSR), said the webinar indicates that “CAGE believes—or wants its supporters to believe—that there is a ‘global war on Islam and Muslims’ led by the U.S. and Western states and that the Palestinian struggle is a part of that.” This narrative, he said, “ignores the unique history of the emergence of the state of Israel, the plight of the Palestinians, and the numerous efforts to terrorise and annihilate Israel—all of which predate the War on Terror.”
“CAGE’s use of the date on which jihadist terrorists brutally killed, maimed, and raped hundreds of Israeli civilians, not to mention foreign nationals, to commemorate a year of ‘genocide’ and ‘repression’ of Palestinians—and the complete silence of the panel about these brutal acts—shows how ideologically locked in it is. It has said very clearly that Israel has no right to exist. But Israel, as they make clear, is just a part of a larger problem for Muslims. We should all be aware.”