In the wake of the massacre of civilians by Hamas in Israel

On 10/7/2023.

The photographs above all feature non-Jews who were attacked by Hamas in the terrorist assault that started the recent war. With the exception of the Filipiné woman in the final photo, whose name is Angeline, and the man in medical scrubs in the third photo, whose name is Tarek Abu Arar and who survived an encounter with Hamas, I don’t have their names – I’m furiously scrolling through the website formerly known as Twitter to find them, because I forgot to write them down even though I knew I would want a record of their names precisely in order to honour them at a moment like this. All I know for certain is that, with the exception of Angeline (a nurse who chose to stay and die alongside her elderly patient), all of them are Muslims and all of them are Arabs. We’ve also learned that at least one Thai Buddhist and at least one Nepalese Hindu have been kidnapped by Hamas. At times like this, as a Jewish convert to a non-Jewish faith who cares very much to stand in solidarity with those non-Jews who humanize me, I want to lift these people up and make known that I value their lives. I’m proud to do that today. The world needs to know that the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood may indeed hate Jews more than it hates anyone else, per Qur’án sura 5 ayah 82, but ultimately its goals are to conquer and Islamize the whole world, and it has no respect for the lives of any non-Muslims anywhere, or for any Muslims who humanize the hated kuffar and treat us as equals, period. All decent people – Jews, Muslims, Christians, Hindus, Bahá’ís, Sikhs, Buddhists, Zoroastrians, Druze, Jains, Unitarians, Inayatis, atheists, agnostics, and all others – need to unite against a horrendous evil like this.

What follows is an unedited reproduction of a post I wrote on my personal Facebook account on the day of the initial massacres of Israeli civilians by the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood (“Hamas”) and its allied terror groups on the 7th of October, 2023. It is framed as a warning to the specific group of people who interact with me there, but its content is applicable to any discussions of this conflict whatsoever, so I will not be editing it to remove or alter content that marks it out as a Facebook post rather than a typical essay.

CONTENT NOTE for contentious political argumentation. There’s some rough language in this one – you’ve been warned.

I have a lot to say about the current conflagration in the Middle East, but the first thing I need to articulate is that I would like to respectfully request that anyone who is in favour of Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Hezbollah, Leila Khaled, Rasmea Odeh, Dalal Mughrabi, the thankfully late Fatima Bernawi, or any of the other jihadist or jihad-adjacent groups and individuals who are working to exterminate Israel (and to slaughter all Jews except perhaps those who renounce our right to have redeclared our indigenous sovereignty in the only land to which we have ever been indigenous) to please get the fuck out of my life as quickly as you came and never return. I don’t care who you are or what our prior relationship has been like. If you are in favour of the destruction of Israel and/or the massacre of random Jewish civilians, I need you out of my life right the fuck now. If you are a Muslim or a jihad-supporting non-Muslim Leftist and you don’t respect those few brave Muslims who humanize and stand with the Zionists and are working to protect and defend us (may God’s effulgent glory be upon Zuhdi Jasser and Noor Dahri and Lucy Aharish and Raheel Raza and Ala Wahib and Salim Mansur and Abdirizak Bihi and Mufti Abu Layth and Bassem Eid and Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury and Tufail Ahmad and Soheib Bencheikh and Yahya Mahamid and Hassen Chalghoumi and Khaled Abu Toameh and Bassam Tawil and Rania Fadel and Tahir Aslam Gora and Ahmed Aboutaleb and Abdul Hadi Palazzi and Sajid Javid and Rama Yade and Mithal Al-Alusi and Supna Zaidi and Ahmed Vanya and Mohammad Tawhidi and Nadiya Al-Noor and Oubai Shahbandar and Hasan Mahmud and Farid Ghadry and Muhammad Al-Kabour and Asra Nomani and Sherkoh Abbas and Ahmed Subhy Mansour and Abdullah Saad Al-Hadlaq and Musa Drammeh and Jamal Hasan and Munir Pervaiz Saami and Falach Hayib and Anett Haskia and Ahmad Al-Adwan and Fahad Almasri and Usama Hasan and Thomas Haidon and Rawaf Al-Saeen and Farahnaz Ispahani and Sarah Idan and Irshad Manji and Naser Khader and Tawfik Hamid and Alaa Al-Saegh and Muhammad Khan Sherani and Ghanem Nuseibeh and Suleyman Ahmad Schwartz and Nazir Afzal and Hisham Kabbani and Khudayr Taher and Wasiq Wasiq and Ismail Khaldi and Sophia Shramko and Muhammad Kabiya and Zainab Zeb Khan and Arif Humayun and Loay Al-Shareef and Farzana Hassan-Shahid and Jalal Zuberi and Qanta Ahmed and Iftekhar A. Hai and Fehd Fallah and Muhammad Al-Husseini and Maryam Al-Najjar and Mohammad Zoabi and Zainab Al-Suwaij and Anila Ali and Hamid Abu Arar and Nuseir “Nas” Yassin and Naveed Anjum and Towhidul Islam and Manar Al-Sharif and Rafat Harb and Mohammad Ghaoui and Naeem Hassan and Elham Manea and Salman Sima and Sohail Raza and Abdallah Abdalghani and Dalia Ziada and Mohammad Rizwan and Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib and Soraya Deen and Shaan Taseer and Haras Rafiq and Muhammad Murad and Khaled Hassan and Jamal Varaqi and Rimmel Khan and Ahmed Al-Khalidi and Ed Husain and the brave Swedish Yemeni truth-teller Luai Ahmed and the luminous British Palestinian freethinker John Aziz and the awe-inspiringly courageous lapsed Shí’ah activist Hussain Abdul-Hussain and all the other Muslim defenders of Israel everywhere, and ave atque vale to Tashbih Sayyed and Abdurrahman Wahid and Courtney Lonergan and Abdalla Mwidau and Tarek Fatah and Hussein Mohammed Ali Abu Yussef and Ali Salem and Aziz Shehadeh and all our valiant fallen), or if (God forbid!) you endorse the Muslim theological argument according to which all of historic Israel/Palestine belongs to Islam in perpetuity and therefore compromise and a two-state solution are impermissible, you need to get the fuck out of here.

If you think the Israelis are white colonial occupiers who don’t have any indigenous rights in the Middle East (instead of realizing that even though many of our behaviours towards the Palestinians are unjust, we are indigenous to Judaea, and not only we but also various other non-Muslim or nominally Muslim peoples – the Amazigh, the Mandaeans, the Kalasha, the Yazidis, the Yarsanis, the Maronites, the Melkites, the Assyrians and Chaldaeans and Syriacs, the Kurds, the Baloch, the Druze, the Copts, the Zoroastrians, the Shabaks, the Buddhists of Southern Thailand and the Chittagong Hills, the Hindus and Sikhs of Pakistan and Bangladesh and Afghanistan, the Black African animists of Darfur, the Ahvazi Marsh Arabs of Khuzestan, the Armenians in Turkey and in the land they call Artsakh, the Tamils and Chinese in Malaysia, the beleaguered Christians of Pakistan and Indonesia and Nigeria and Congo and Uganda, the Bahá’ís of Iran and Yemen and Afghanistan and Egypt and Turkey, and others – deserve sovereignty or at least equality of rights and dignity in the Middle East, North Africa, Pakistan, the Muslim regions of East and West Africa, and elsewhere in what we often clumsily call “the Muslim world”), please just leave now.

If you think that the Jewish-majority liberal democracy in Israel, which grants full equality of rights and dignity to citizens who are Muslims, Christians, Druze, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, and others (as well as to Bahá’ís, who are non-citizen staff at the Bahá’í World Centre in Haifa and its associated holy places in Akka – a notable act of generosity, considering the ferocity with which we Bahá’ís and our cousins the Ahmadi Muslims are persecuted in most Muslim environments) and which openly and obviously extends the hand of friendship to all Muslims who are not transparently engaged in a genocidal war of extermination against it (including to the world’s most thriving community of Arab Ahmadi Muslims, as well as to Emiratis and others), has no right to exist, but that a Muslim supremacist tyranny in Palestine (which would and does enslave and subjugate non-Muslims, and which would and does loathe and forbid the freedoms of speech and conscience, like all Islamic supremacist sharí’ah tyrannies do) does have the right to exist, get the fuck out.

And further. If you are a Christian and you believe Jesus the Christ of Nazareth is on the side of the people who are butchering Jewish civilians, raping Jewish women, beheading Jewish children, and parading the mutilated bodies of brutally murdered Jewish innocents through the streets of Gaza, prepare yourself to get roasted in Hell when you actually do meet Jesus the Christ of Nazareth, and certainly get the fuck away from me in the meantime. If – Subhan Allah! – you are a Bahá’í, and (may the eyes of the Blessed Beauty and the Master be shielded from having to witness your filth) you dare disgrace the Cause of God and the Kingdom of El-Abhá by pretending that Their Holinesses Bahá’u’lláh and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá do not weep with the Israelis and would not furiously condemn the Hamas commanders and their friends and cast them into the outer darkness in a manner reminiscent of the Lawh-i-Fu’ád, reorient and anathematize your shameful disservice to the Kingdom or get the fuck out.

If you are a Palestine solidarity campaigner, Jewish or Muslim or atheist or Leftist or queer or trans or anything else, and your Palestine solidarity activism makes no space for the fact that Hamas and its friends are evil and are to be full-throatedly and angrily condemned, if it uses the word “terrorist” to describe the Israeli military but not Hamas, if it considers Islamophobic the just and rightful and accurate designation of Hamas as a Muslim supremacist organization striving to fulfill the stipulation in sharí’ah (that is, Islamic law) that non-Muslim sovereign entities have no right to exist on what is believed to be Muslim land, and if in your work you refuse to declare that what is in fact the Palestinian branch of the quintessentially fascist and Islamic supremacist Muslim Brotherhood is fully culpable for these massacres of Jewish civilians and you refuse to hold said Muslim fascists accountable, please leave – it was a mistake for me ever to get to know you in the first place.

There’s more to say, of course, but I’m done for now. I’ll just say one last thing, just so no one gets the wrong idea.

Anyone who knows me knows that I love to burn with white-hot anger against Jewish fascists and supremacists who call for the extermination of Palestinian civilians, rejoice in Palestinian civilian suffering, enjoy watching the Israeli military bomb Palestinian civilians (both sides have factions which have a history of celebrating when innocent civilians on the other side die, and denying it is a form of fascism denial in both cases), proclaim that Jews are inherently superior to Muslims and other non-Jews, foreswear the right of the Palestinians to exist in an independent liberal democratic state of their own in the disputed 1967 lands, and all the rest of that shit. All the more if and when they endorse illiberal recent-vintage Israeli laws such as the “Nation-State” bullshit or the ones forbidding acknowledgement of the “naqba” or the display of the Palestinian flag – rare and numerically few but genuine cases in which Israel *denies* full equality of rights and dignity to non-Jews, a fact I’m duty-bound to admit. I have no time for Itamar Ben-Gvir and Benzi Gopstein and Bezalel Smotrich and Michael Ben-Ari and Yoav Eliassi and Yigal Amir and Baruch Goldstein and Meir Kahane and Ayelet Shaked and Miri Regev and David Amsalem and Avi Maoz and Shimon Riklin and Amichai Eliyahu and their Jewish supremacist fascist clique. I even came close, earlier this year, to renouncing my identity as a Zionist simply because I hate those people so much. I hate those people exactly as much as I hate Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the rest. I don’t want any innocent Palestinian civilians to die. Innocent Palestinian civilian life has always been precious to me.

I’m an ethnic Jew, of course, and have been a Zionist my whole life, and converting to the Bahá’í Faith has strengthened instead of diluting those convictions, but I’ve never supported the occupation of the 1967 lands, and I’ve always been in favour of a two-state solution to the conflict which lets the thousands of Palestinians who have been artificially kept as refugees return to the 1967 lands instead of the 1948 ones and which splits or internationalizes Jerusalem so that both peoples can share it as their capital. I’ve also been working with the humane and liberal and reformist Muslim communities against fascist and supremacist interpretations of Islam and in favour of humane and pluralistic ones since shortly before 9/11 – I even once had the privilege and pleasure to give a speech at a rally in 2014 in support and defence of the Council of Muslims Facing Tomorrow and the Progressive Muslim Institute of Canada. I have been especially vocal in defending the rights and dignity of Muslim sects and denominations that have always stood against supremacist exegeses of the Qur’án and Sunnah, including the Ahmadis, the Sevener Nizari Khoja Ismaili Shí’ahs, the Turkish and Kurdish Alevis, the Mevlevi and Rifai Sufis, the Bektashi Sufis of the Balkans, the Mouridiyyah of Senegal, the Qur’ániyoon of the late martyr Rashad Khalifa (may Allah subhana wa ta’ala exalt him in Jannah!), and others, as well as millions of humane and decent ordinary Sunnis and Ithna’Asheri Shí’ahs who don’t endorse the shaytaani (and often also khawariji) supremacist bullshit. I’ve always believed that Palestine and Islam have honoured places in the family of religions and nations, and I’ve never countenanced genuine bigotry against Palestinians, Arabs, or Muslims. That’s where I stand on all this. I won’t be smeared as an anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, or anti-Palestinian bigot, and woe betide you if you try, because I will open the gates of hell upon you and make you regret that you ever met me. I need you to know that.

My patience is shot. Somewhere between one thousand two hundred and one thousand five hundred innocent Zionist civilians have been massacred, and others injured or taken hostage, including innocent Muslims and Buddhists and Hindus and Christians and Druze and others whose lives I value as much as any Jewish life, and I need anyone who is in favour of those massacres, or who ultimately believes them to have been justified by the bullshit cockamamie quote-unquote “Palestinian resistance is anticolonial” and “From the river to the sea!” and “Zionism is racism” and “Israel is white supremacist” and “Globalize the intifada!” and “We don’t want no two-state, we want all of ‘48!” narratives according to which Roger Waters and Noam Chomsky and Judith Butler and Norman Finkelstein and Edward Saïd and Hamid Dabashi and Joseph Massad and Steven Salaita and Amer Zahr and George Galloway and Jeremy Corbyn and Davide Mastracci and Susan Abulhawa and Noura Erakat and Russell Rickford and Yolanda Carrington and Zareena Grewal and Louis Farrakhan and Yousef Munayyer and Marc Lamont Hill and Mohammed Hijab and Ken Loach and Nihad Awad and Zahra Billoo and Linda Sarsour and Saira Rao and Rupa Marya and Zakir Naik and Hammam Farah and Yusuf Al-Qaradawi and Muhammad Hussein Yaqoob and Kevin Barrett and Wagdy Ghoneim and Jake Brancatella and Daniel Haqiqatjou and Salwa Al-Mutairi and Anjem Choudary and Safwat Hegazy and Hamza Tzortzis and Jasbir Puar and Dan Freeman-Maloy and Abdel-Bari Atwan and Dhabah Al-Montaser and Ken Livingstone and Brendan Ciarán Browne and Ali Dawah and Abdul Alim Musa and Abby Martin and Max Blumenthal and Shameem Nasrabadi and Tamika Mallory and Bilal Phillips and Walden Bello and Sherene Razack and Gayatri Spivak and Michael Neumann and Ahed Tamimi and Naim Ateek and Cindy Sheehan and Alison Weir and Jill Stein and Ajamu Baraka and Cynthia McKinney and Miko Peled and Ilan Pappé and Mia Khalifa and Shaun King and Ronnie Kasrils and Harsha Walia and Mehdi Hasan and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor and Reza Aslan and Tamara I. Nassar and Stephen Walt and John Mearshimer and the Hadid family and Immortal Technique and Gilad Atzmon and Eli Valley and Carlos Latuff and Stephen Sizer and Ali Abunimah and Sameera Khan and Dua Lipa and Rebecca Wilkomerson and Betty McCollum and Naz Shah and Jenny Tonge and Philip Weiss and Ash Sarkar and Medea Benjamin and Mohammed El-Kurd and Omar Barghouti and David Abdul-Aziz Myatt and Mustafa Tlass and Sami Al-Arian and Eli Clifton and Murtaza Hussain and Joe Sacco and Ted Rall and Saree Makdisi and Munther Isaac and Rashid Khalidi and Alice Walker and Myriam François-Cerrah and Owen Jones and John McDonnell and Seumas Milne and Arundhati Roy and Aaron Bastani and Glenn Greenwald and Sam Husseini and Lowkey and Ahmed Bedier and Ghassan Elashi and Dawud Walid and Sohail Daulatzai and Ilhan Omar and Zara Larsson and Henriette Chacar and Rania Khalek and Mohammed Elibiary and Cori Bush and Omar Baddar and Chris Williamson and Rashida Tlaib and Michael C. Wilson and Fayez Sayegh and Malcolm Harris and Nur Masalha and Richard Boyd Barrett and Patrisse Cullors and Mohammad Jehad Ahmad and Abrar Omeish and Refaat Alareer and Walaa Algaisiya and Salma Yaqoob and Pat Sheehan and Tariq Ali and Diane Abbott and Abdullah Al-Emadi and Rula Jebreal and Regina Jackson and Alicia Garza and Gerry Carroll and Brigid Purcell and Roshan M. Salih and Remi Kanazi and Nora Barrows-Friedman and Dilly Hussain and Mick Wallace and Amerie and all the other despicable Jew-hating (or, if you prefer, “Zionist-civilian-slaughter-justifying” – same difference) liars and fascists and charlatans and Muslim supremacist bigots have been spreading their poison all this time, to get the fuck out. I have no more time for any of you. I don’t wish to be friends with a single person who doesn’t value my life. GET OUT! NOW!