After 9/11

By Iqbal Akhtar

Sunday, September 13, 2026

 

On September 4, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani signed two executive orders ahead of the 25^th anniversary of the September 11 attacks. One made the date a citywide day of remembrance and service; the other tightened the city’s preparations against future terrorism. When he finished, he handed the ceremonial pen to Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch and asked her to pass it along. She gave it to Ramzi Kassem, the city’s chief counsel, whose office had drafted the orders. Kassem, a civil rights lawyer, once represented Ahmed al-Darbi, a Guantanamo Bay detainee who pleaded guilty to terrorism charges and whose brother-in-law, Khalid al-Mihdhar, helped fly American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon. By the weekend, families of the dead were asking the mayor not to come to the 9/11 memorial ceremony.

 

The mayor’s office was probably right that the gesture was routine. Counsel drafts the order, counsel gets the pen. But that is exactly the problem. A quarter century after the attacks, a Muslim mayor of New York and his Muslim chief counsel did not see what everyone else in the room saw. The last time this happened at scale was 2010, when a proposal to build an Islamic community center two blocks from the World Trade Center site, first called Cordoba House and then Park51, set off months of national argument. Its sponsors were sincere. They were also astonished by the reaction, which told you everything about how little they understood the importance of 9/11.

 

These episodes are not accidents of individual judgment. They are symptoms of a community that never did the introspection the 9/11 attacks demanded of it, and that instead built a politics organized around two things—denouncing Islamophobia and turning out voters—while leaving the deeper work undone. That work is theological and institutional before it is political, and it is the only path by which American Muslims can contribute to the American experiment without further polarizing it. And I make this argument as a fellow Muslim.

 

What the attacks asked of us.

 

I was a pre-med student at Washington University when the towers fell. Within months, I had abandoned medicine and changed my majors to political science and Jewish, Islamic, and Near Eastern Studies. Later, after a fellowship to study Pakistan's education system, I served as a civilian in the Air Force and worked as an analyst at U.S. Northern Command, the combatant command created after the attacks to defend the homeland. The experience of watching Islam and Muslims become the existential “other” of American life, almost overnight, was the most formative thing that ever happened to me, and I responded to it by trying to be inside the institutions that were now defining us from outside, such as the military.

 

Neither side quite knew what to do with me. Inside the military, I faced the questions about loyalty you would expect. In my own community, the hostility was sharper. I was trying to get married in those years, and more than one family turned me away because of the uniform. The question I was living, which is the question every American Muslim has been living since 2001, whether they admit it or not, is how one remains faithful to an ancient religion and to a nation whose security is purchased, in part, through violence against people who share that religion. That is not an easy question. It deserved a generation of serious thought. It mostly did not get it.

 

Three evasions.

 

What the American Muslim community produced instead were three ways of not answering. The first was disavowal: The 9/11 hijackers were Saudis and Egyptians, not Americans, so the attacks had nothing to do with us.

 

This was true as far as it went and useless as a response, because it treated the question of Islam's relationship to the American project as if it had been asked in bad faith. Some of it had been. Much of it had not. Ordinary Americans legitimately asked why Muslims did not condemn terrorism, or whether Islam needed a reformation. Muslims did condemn, constantly, and the media often failed to carry it. But behind “Why don’t you condemn?” sat a deeper question about compatibility, and behind “Does Islam need a reformation?” sat a deeper question about authority and interpretation, and the legacy American Muslim community’s leadership treated both as public relations problems rather than as invitations to think.

 

The second evasion was conspiracy. A meaningful minority of American Muslims, and a larger share of the global community, embraced accounts of the attacks that placed Jews generally and the Mossad in particular behind the attacks of 9/11. This was poison, and it was allowed to circulate in mosques and family WhatsApp groups with far less internal resistance than it should have met.

 

The third evasion, and the one that has proven most durable, was to reclassify every criticism as bigotry. Here, the community’s response fused with a strand of the American left that sees history as a permanent contest between the powerful and the powerless. Call it third-worldism, or simply the habit of reading every conflict through the lens of colonizer and colonized. Within that frame, American Muslims, mostly brown and black, are permanent victims of the American experiment, and any demand that they examine themselves is itself an act of oppression. It is a comfortable place to stand. It is also a place from which no positive account of what Muslims are for, as Americans, can ever be built.

 

Institutions we built and the ones we didn’t.

 

Look at what American Muslim organizations actually did with the last 25 years. They built a civil rights apparatus to document and litigate discrimination, and they built get-out-the-vote machinery, first in defensive coalitions and lately in the increasingly assertive campaigns in Michigan, New York, and elsewhere. Both are legitimate. Neither is sufficient.

 

In July, Sada Cumber, who served as George W. Bush’s envoy to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, wrote a piece for the National Security Institute arguing that Muslims in the West have “passion without coordination, resources without strategy, representation without institutional depth.” He held up the Jewish American experience as something to learn from: a community that answered exclusion by building legal organizations, philanthropies, media relationships, and a public intellectual life that could tell its own story.

 

Cumber is right, and I want to pull his argument one step back:  Institutions are downstream of ideas. The Jewish institutions he admires were built on a theological foundation laid by Reform Judaism in the 19^th century, which reworked a covenantal tradition into a vocabulary, tikkun olam (the repair of the world), that any American could understand and many non-Jews adopted. Liberal Protestantism did the same thing so successfully that its ethics became the default moral language of secular America. Even communities that chose separation—the Mennonites, the Amish, the Haredim—developed institutions capable of explaining themselves to the majority in terms the majority could respect.

 

American Islam has produced almost nothing comparable, though there are exceptions. Zaytuna College in Berkeley has spent two decades trying to articulate an Islamic tradition in conversation with the Western canon. But by and large, Muslim institutions in America run in two directions. Either they turn inward, cultivating a tradition insulated from the secular culture around it, or they turn outward into partisan identity politics that treats coalition-building across the political aisle as collaboration. Neither mode can explain to a non-Muslim American what Islam has to offer the country.

 

Where the evasions have led.

 

The consequences are visible in the news. In Texas, a master-planned community near Dallas sponsored by the East Plano Islamic Center, first called EPIC City and later renamed The Meadow, has been investigated by state and federal agencies, denounced by Gov. Greg Abbott as a development that “will never see the light of day,” and made the occasion for a new state law aimed at religious enclaves. The Justice Department and the Texas Workforce Commission found no evidence the project would exclude non-Muslims, and the fear-mongering around it was real. But the developers apparently never asked how a thousand-home Muslim town anchored by a mosque would read to their neighbors in a state where the memory of 9/11 is not abstract. Institutional exclusivity, even when legal and well-intentioned, is a choice with consequences, and a community serious about pluralism would have made a different choice.

 

The same shortsightedness shapes the political mobilization that has produced Mamdani and the campaigns in Michigan. Its animating energy is opposition to Israel, which means its practical effect is antagonism toward American Jews, the one religious minority whose efforts in institution building in this country Muslims most need to study.

 

And the community has still not made its peace with accountability. When the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, an Islamic charity, was convicted in 2008 of funneling money to Hamas, most mainstream Muslim organizations treated the verdict as persecution.

 

That reflex has never gone away. Anyone who cooperates with law enforcement against extremism, or who publicly distances the community from Hamas, is a sellout. Meanwhile the attacks keep coming. In March, a naturalized Lebanese American drove a truck into Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, Michigan and opened fire, in what investigators called revenge for relatives killed in Israel’s war with Lebanon. Every such act resets the clock, and every time the community answers with a statement about Islamophobia rather than a reckoning with the currents inside it that produce these men. It should surprise no one that in Pew’s surveys of how Americans feel about religious groups, Muslims still sit near the bottom, keeping company only with atheists, and have barely moved in a generation.

 

The America that already exists.

 

None of this is the whole story. The lived reality of most American Muslims is pluralism, practiced daily and without ideology. I have called it “covenantal pluralism” elsewhere: the discovery, at PTA meetings and in hospital breakrooms and on corporate boards, that one can hold a demanding faith and still bind oneself in good faith to neighbors who do not share it. That is the raw material. What the community lacks is the translation.

 

The best model we have is 55 years old. In 1971, the Supreme Court unanimously overturned Muhammad Ali’s conviction for refusing induction into the Army, accepting that his objection to the Vietnam War was grounded in sincere religious belief. Ali did not win by denouncing his critics as bigots. He won by making his tradition legible in the moral and legal language of the majority, and in doing so he expanded American religious liberty for everyone. He was punished for it, stripped of his title and his best years. He was also, by the end of his life, among the most beloved Americans alive. That is what witnessing over winning looks like, and it is the tradition American Muslims have most neglected.

 

Theology before politics.

 

So what should the next 25 years look like? I would begin with a rule the Muslim world has been learning the hard way since Napoleon landed at Alexandria in 1798: Ideas precede reality, and theology precedes politics. Every modern Muslim political project, from Islamic modernism to the Muslim Brotherhood to the Iranian Revolution, was first a theological argument about what Islam is and what it demands. American Muslims have never made that argument for themselves. They have imported theologies built for other places and layered American electoral tactics on top.

 

The alternative is to build the institutions that can do the arguing: seminaries and colleges that read the Islamic tradition, in its philosophical and mystical and legal depth from West Africa to China, alongside John Locke and James Madison and Martin Luther King Jr.; think tanks that produce policy from a rational Muslim perspective rather than grievance; philanthropies that fund the professional class, which is the only base such institutions can stand on; and an intellectual culture in which a Muslim can criticize the community without being read out of it. But all this must be built on a theology of what Muslims owe America and what they have to offer it, not on a strategy for accumulating power.

 

The prize is larger than the community. A Muslim minority that worked out, in public and in American terms, how to be both fully Muslim and fully committed to a pluralist republic would be a model for Muslim minorities from Europe to India, and for Muslim majorities struggling with conflicts of power, wealth, and identity in their own countries. That contribution at the intersection of American and Islamic civilizations is worth more than any election. The country just marked its 250^th year. Muslims have been part of it from the beginning, among the enslaved and among the founders’ correspondents, and they have a claim on its next 250. Making that claim requires something the last quarter-century did not produce: the willingness to look at ourselves from the outside, and to build what we see is missing.

Monsters Welcome

By Abe Greenwald

Thursday, September 17, 2026

 

Here’s something to think about: While European countries are slapping sanctions on Israel, they’re ramping up engagement (including on trade) with the Taliban. After the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, of course, the Taliban reimposed all sorts of horrors, including the legalization of violence against females and the vicious punishment of religious heretics. 

 

But Europe is too upset with the democratic State of Israel to care about any of that. 

 

I wrote about this very issue a year ago. Since then, Europe’s outreach to the Taliban has increased considerably. In June, Taliban officials met with EU leaders in Brussels for talks about sending Afghan asylum-seekers back home. This was the first time a formal EU delegation met with Afghanistan’s leaders since 2021. The Taliban came out of it boasting that normal consular relations with the EU are coming next. 

 

Officials from the UK and other individual Western countries now routinely fly to Qatar to meet with Taliban representatives. The Afghan Consulate General in Bonn, Germany, is under Taliban control. And an official appointed by the Taliban serves as the first secretary at the Afghan Embassy in Oslo.

 

The trend toward normalizing relations with the Taliban stretches well beyond Europe. India recently waived sanctions on the Taliban foreign minister so he could travel to New Delhi for talks, and the country is reassessing sanctions on Afghanistan altogether.

 

Less surprising, China, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and others haven’t hesitated to engage with the brutal regime. It’s not at all uncharacteristic of Iran to have sent its foreign minister to Afghanistan last year. Nor is it shocking that Russia is the only country in the world to officially recognize the Taliban.

 

This is what the world looks like when America gives up on doing good beyond its borders. There came a point when the U.S. lost interest in pressuring authoritarian regimes as a matter of morality. And if America wasn’t going to hold the line, you could be sure that no other country would. Everyone is now free to wheel and deal with monsters should the opportunity arise.  

 

Today, easing up on the Taliban is a no-brainer for a West that’s lost its moral true north. Donald Trump’s favorite foreign leader, after all, is a former al-Qaeda soldier. And in the U.S., we’ve got an al-Qaeda-linked candidate running for Congress in New Jersey. 

 

The Taliban’s growing good fortune is also directly tied to the West’s growing accommodation with Israel’s jihadist enemies. Once Hamas terrorists earned the admiration of all those twisted Western minds, the die was cast.

 

You can’t, on the one hand, support a repressive terrorist regime that wages a bloody war on a democratic state and, on the other, condemn a different repressive terrorist regime that wages war within its own borders. You can’t grant Hamas an imaginary state while refusing to recognize the actual state ruled by the Taliban. When you choose barbarism over civilization, you’re not merely switching teams. You’re backing one historical force over another. More and more, European leaders are siding with those who want to rewind history altogether.

Forever Wars Are Good, Actually

By Daniel Foster

Friday, September 11, 2026

 

Twenty-five years after 9/11, the phrase “forever war” — popularized by journalist Dexter Filkins in his book-length account of the early occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan — has hardened from a worry into a despair. A war that lasts forever is ipso facto one that failed. And that is the verdict, nearing consensus, of observers of the Global War on Terror: The United States overreacted, pointed its hegemony at the wrong targets and thereby squandered it, chased “nation-building” and sunk costs, and lacked the wisdom to know when to fold a losing hand.

 

But the truth is more complex. With al-Qaeda and its successors-in-interest destroyed, degraded, or contained; multiple echelons and generations of its leaders killed or incarcerated; governments that had coddled terrorists pressed into counterterrorism cooperation; and multiple terror plots disrupted, the more defensible verdict is that the United States muddled through the post-9/11 era. That through fits and starts, we figured out how to fight a new and very different kind of war. That we built armed forces, intelligence apparatuses, legal architectures, and geopolitical strategies to match it. That we made Americans safer at home by killing and capturing jihadis abroad.

 

We were able to do all this because we conducted and continue to conduct a number of low-intensity wars and quasi-wars against nonstate actors in weakly sovereign states — ignoring borders when we can and respecting them only when we must; using mostly airpower, special operators, irregular forces, and proxies; pivoting from regime change, occupation, and counterinsurgency to a more modest but no less lethal footprint that minimizes “boots on the ground”; and maintaining a mix of precision strikes, targeted killings, intelligence gathering, and support and influence operations that continue to this day in places as far afield as the Philippines and the Caribbean.

 

This way of fighting is expensive in real dollar terms, and in terms of political capital as well, but as the strategy and the tactics coalesced, it settled into a tempo, casualty rate, and psychic load Americans could absorb in exchange for a high level of control over events that protect vital U.S. interests.

 

None of this is to say that the United States didn’t make mistakes. It made many — some of them enormities and tragedies. Invading Iraq in 2003 was obviously one of them. For whatever it’s worth, I opposed it at the time, though as a college freshman my voice did not prove dispositive. Nevertheless, “the Surge” of 2007 was correct because the alternatives were worse. And it is undeniably true that Iraq today, while no Denmark, is a functioning and free-standing state that is neither a Ba’athist dictatorship nor a Salafi emirate.

 

Indeed, the disastrous early occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, the harsh lessons and limitations of the “hearts and minds” counterinsurgency we tried there, led us in turn to the mature strategy that eventually produced tangible gains in those countries and elsewhere. In July 2003, General Ricardo Sanchez, commander of coalition forces in Iraq, called the country a “terrorist magnet,” and he meant that in a good way, adding that “this is exactly where we want to fight them.” Vice President Cheney repeatedly made the same argument, saying the United States would face our enemies “with our military in Afghanistan and Iraq today, so we do not have to face [them] with armies of firefighters, police, and medical personnel on the streets of our own cities.”

 

And sure enough, Iraq did become a kill box, drawing jihadists from around the world, fixing them in a battlespace where our intelligence, firepower, and logistics could be brought to bear to detain or delete them before they could attack our allies and interests abroad, much less our people and infrastructure at home.

 

On September 10, 2001, the U.S. intelligence community was still in its Cold War hangover, with a reputation as a bloated, deskbound institution too reliant on gadgets and money. The country’s counterterrorism apparatus, led by the FBI, was unduly constrained by a law-enforcement-centered approach ill-suited to handling both the state-sponsored and transnational nature of the threat.

 

After 9/11 those institutions were reshaped into something much more capable and kinetic: a global behemoth of human and signals intelligence, and an elite force of manhunters, multilateral partners, and paramilitary operators.

 

Law changed, too. Our Islamist enemies exploited the seams between sovereign states. The 2001 AUMF and the legal architecture built around issues like rendition and targeted killing were attempts — some worthier than others — to prevent international norms we helped author and vouchsafe from being weaponized against us.

 

That machinery helped capture the mastermind of 9/11, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, in 2003. It killed al-Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in 2006, Osama bin Laden in 2011, and Ayman al-Zawahiri in 2022. And even as it settled old business with the original architects of 9/11, it developed novel approaches to dispatching their successors.

 

The so-called Islamic State lost the last of its caliphate in March of 2019. Its key leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, was killed by U.S. special operations forces that October. But the nihilistic movement that once held vast swaths of territory in Iraq and Syria was destroyed, ultimately, by a coalition of state and substate actors with whom we shared neither morals nor ideals but merely narrow interests. Ironically, the same foreign policy thinkers who chastised our delusion in imposing Western values on Middle Eastern peoples clutched their pearls at “arming the moderate rebels.” But it was such rebels, moderate in the relativistic if not absolute sense, who, bearing Kalashnikovs and M4 carbines and under American air and intelligence cover, helped send Al-Baghdadi to hell and Bashar al-Assad to Moscow.

 

The successes of this more modest, more sober phase of the Global War on Terror show why it was also a mistake for the United States to unilaterally withdraw from Afghanistan. The American political class, beginning under Trump and culminating with Joseph R. Biden, overlearned the harsh lessons of 2003 or 2006, getting locked into frameworks disanalogous with America’s position in 2021, which by then involved a fraction of the troop totals, expenditures, and casualties of those earlier phases. Biden paid for his shambolic retreat in the polls, but many in both parties still share his mistaken way of thinking. That it was unwise to send 150,000 Americans into Iraq to nation-build then does not entail that it is unwise have a few hundred or a few thousand Americans in various Middle Eastern countries now — to gather intelligence, influence clients, and kill bad guys.

 

This is the category error at the center of “forever wars” as a slur. America was not wrong to recognize the threat of transnational radical Islamism or to take dramatic steps to confront it. The folly was the scale of its original ambition, well-intentioned as it was, to remake vast swaths of the Islamic world into liberal democracies via huge occupying armies and open-ended political, economic, and civil-societal commitments.

 

But it turns out that nation-building is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for creating favorable arrangements for the exercise of American power. Sometimes it is enough to have a landing strip, a listening post, a handful of game militiamen or a pliable minister, some drones, and a SEAL team.

 

This version of the Global War on Terror will never result in the permanent eradication of all named enemies. At best, it will maintain an advantageous equilibrium indefinitely, punctuated from time to time by moments of greater promise or more acute peril. But what more is practicable, or required?

 

Whatever this is, then, it is surely something short of a forever “war.” Call it the continuation, by other means, of politics. And nobody ever really thought we’d be rid of that, did they?

Ted Cruz Is Right About the ‘Islamism’ Threat

By Noah Rothman

Friday, September 11, 2026

 

I got into a quarrel on the set of CNN’s NewsNight on Thursday over Senator Ted Cruz’s remarks at the GOP’s midterm convention. On this one, I’m on Team Cruz:

 

 

Here’s the controversial passage in Cruz’s speech, which one left-wing outlet branded a “bizarre bigoted rant”:

 

And on 9/11, could anyone have imagined that Comrade Mamdani would be the mayor of New York? The hate that killed Charlie Kirk, that knocked down the Twin Towers, that led to two assassination attempts on President Trump. It just keeps getting worse and worse.

 

We are witnessing a new and dangerous red-green alliance: communists and Islamists coming together and sweeping over the Democrat Party. They are united because they share the same enemies. They hate Christians. They hate Jews. They hate capitalism. They hate the Constitution, and they hate America.

 

“Islamism likewise produces murder and oppression,” Cruz continued, “from the forced wearing of hijabs to the stoning of rape victims. From the systematic murder of homosexuals to honor killings and the barbarism of October 7 and 9/11.”

 

He’s right, of course. There is a “red-green alliance” overtaking the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party’s DSA-adjacent figures do seem to despise America as it’s presently constituted. They’re not exactly shy about advertising their “hatred of the United States Constitution” — they certainly have unveiled contempt for its fundamentals, like the separation of powers.

 

It doesn’t do us any good to pretend that none of this is true, even if that risks offending the delicate sensibilities of those who find themselves attracted to socialism. My job isn’t to flatter their pretensions and assure them that their intentions are noble, even if those intentions might lead them astray. Rather, it’s to be blunt about the nature of the threat that the progressive left is incubating.

 

God bless Ted Cruz for doing just that.

El-Sayed Shouldn’t Blame Muslim America for His Radical-Islam-Curious Views

By Noah Rothman

Friday, August 14, 2026

 

The thrill America’s Muslims supposedly experienced when Abdul El-Sayed won the Michigan Democratic Senate primary was short-lived, according to the Associated Press. Their “elation” was soon “tempered by awareness of persisting and widespread anti-Muslim sentiment across much of the nation.”

 

The evidence the AP marshals for this assertion of bias ranges from the plausible to the absurd. Outgoing Congresswoman Nancy Mace’s allegation that “every single Muslim holding public office in America is a Trojan horse” is certainly ugly. But using the candidate’s full name, as Donald Trump did, is not.

 

El-Sayed himself is hardly shy about accusing his critics of harboring anti-Muslim animus in their hearts. But both the candidate and his defenders seem to imply that El-Sayed’s views and statements are uncontroversial among his fellow Muslims. That assumption deserves to be challenged.

 

For example, most Muslim Americans, like most Americans generally, do not express any sympathy for the terrorist group Hamas. Even though Israel’s favorability among all American adults has declined, the public’s contempt for Hamas has remained static. Yet, while a majority of Americans, including the minorities for whom El-Sayed presumes to speak, can distinguish between Israel and its terrorist enemies, the candidate cannot.

 

“Yes. Killing tens of thousands of people makes you pretty damn evil,” El-Sayed said on the debate stage in April when asked if Israel is “as evil” as Hamas. “It’s not how evil is this one versus that one: Hamas, evil. Israeli government, evil. You can say both.”

 

El-Sayed wasn’t just staking out a rhetorical position. In a candidate questionnaire, the Senate nominee outlined the steps he wants the American government to take to isolate Israel on the world stage, including withdrawing aid. “That’s why I support immediate re-investment in foreign aid, including to UNRWA,” he wrote.

 

At least twelve employees of that U.N. agency in Gaza took part in the October 7 massacre. Indeed, according to the U.N.’s own audit, which “horrified” its leaders in 2024, the agency employed thousands of Gazans who were tied to Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad — findings that compelled the U.S. State Department to withdraw America’s financial support for UNRWA. None of this seems to bother El-Sayed.

 

Similarly, when El-Sayed refused to say that the neutralization of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was a good thing, he attributed his reticence to his deep well of compassion for his fellow Muslims. “There are a lot of people in Dearborn who are sad,” he said of the death of a brutal dictator with American blood on his hands.

 

It’s improbable that the majority of American Muslims — even those who observe Sharia-compliant practices, as El-Sayed sometimes does — feel the same. Only 12 percent of American Muslims are Arab, the demographic that dominates Dearborn. The Iranian diaspora, which makes up a healthy portion of the American Muslim population, was hardly given to lamenting the death of the Persian people’s erstwhile tormentor. And that is to say nothing of the majority of American Muslims who were born in the United States and have deep roots in a nation that has been at war with the Islamic Republic for nearly a half century.

 

It’s unsurprising, therefore, that most American Muslims are as fearful of radical Islamist terrorism as anyone else. Indeed, they feared it long before Israel bought up all the real estate in activist progressive heads. So, when El-Sayed refused to unequivocally condemn a terrorist attack on a synagogue with 140 preschool children under its roof without condemning Israel in the same breath — reasoning that “hurt people do hurt people” — he wasn’t deferring to the consensus among American Muslims. He was speaking for himself.

 

Nor is it so much that El-Sayed lacks discretion when associating with unsavory elements in the American political landscape. He’s extremely discerning, in fact, because he seems to select for those unsavory elements.

 

El-Sayed is a longtime associate of the activist Linda Sarsour — a figure who called for a “jihad” against Donald Trump, and who contributed to the dissolution of the Women’s March amid a series of investigations into the activist network’s antisemitism. He surrounded himself with Nation of Islam leaders, including “two lieutenants of the group’s leader, Louis Farrakhan, who themselves have railed against ‘the Jews,’” the Washington Free Beacon reported. Then there is Hasan Piker, the Maoist streamer who became a fixture at El-Sayed campaign events and who has said that America deserved 9/11, described Hamas as morally superior to Israel, and called for the outright murder of Republican elected officials.

 

“Of course I don’t think 9/11 was justified,” El-Sayed said of that particularly “dumb statement” from his unofficial campaign surrogate. At the same time, El-Sayed steadfastly refused to criticize his associate, calling it a “gotcha game” and contending that ostracizing figures like Piker is “exactly why Democrats too often fail to get our message out to everybody.”

 

Michigan’s voters will have to draw their own conclusions about where El-Sayed’s reticence comes from, just as they will have to consider the candidate’s support for the sequence of events that briefly brought the Muslim Brotherhood, subsequently a U.S.-designated terrorist group, to power in Egypt. They’ll have to parse El-Sayed’s apparent comfort with the $115,000 his campaign raised from individuals associated with the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), an organization named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation terrorism-financing scandal.

 

To the extent that Democrat-friendly media outlets have confronted any of this, it is only to allege that the public’s possible discomfort is due entirely to America’s latent “Islamophobia.” And some Republicans have made the press’s job easier by playing to the cheap seats. But even journalists’ defenses of El-Sayed contribute to the indictment of his judgment.

 

“Today, there are more than 230 elected Muslim officials,” the New York Times reported, “including four Muslim Americans in Congress, the highest number ever.” If this candidate stands out among them, it is no mystery as to why.

Spain and Europe’s Crisis of Meaning

By Joshua S. Treviño

Tuesday, August 04, 2026

 

The immediate Ceuta crisis may have receded, with most of the 60,000 invaders having returned to Morocco, but it leaves in its wake a series of follow-on crises for Spain, Europe, and America alike.

 

The Spanish predicament engages problems both foreign and domestic. The Moroccan state, having demonstrated its ability to overrun Spanish territory at will, has experienced neither counter nor penalty and is unlikely to do so. At the strategic level, Spanish defense confronts a problem long-known and also long-ignored, in the imperative to keep the difficult-to-defend Plazas de Soberanía strewn upon the North African coast secured: a challenge that becomes acute when Morocco leverages hybrid warfare. That level of warfare, exploiting “civilian” means and targeting systemic non-military vulnerabilities, is uniquely effective when its targets will not recognize it as warfare, and therefore do not bring the full array of capabilities to bear against it. Spanish governance is therefore confronted with three interrelated imperatives: to maintain a qualitative superiority versus Moroccan means, to recognize hybrid warfare as such, and to use the full spectrum of state power against it. This is easy to diagnose but exceptionally difficult to undertake, especially for a Western government of the left.

 

That government of the left, in Madrid’s case, is another of Spain’s problems. It is manifestly true that the Moroccan state bears direct responsibility for the immediate crisis, but its actions ought to be seen as opportunistic. That opportunity was presented by the government in Madrid. The Socialist regime of Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has signaled throughout its tenure that it is inimical to Spanish identity, heritage, and sovereignty: from waging cultural war upon Spanish and Catholic Church sites and symbols within Spain, to pushing through a hasty and ill-considered program of legalization for extraordinary numbers of illegal immigrants, to forming its own government upon a base of concessions to territorial separatists. Based upon the record of the past three years alone, a Moroccan calculus that now is a good time to test Spanish territorial integrity is not irrational.

 

Sánchez has further achieved something extraordinary, brought to light in the international reactions to the Ceuta crisis, that he did not expect after posturing himself as the anti-Trump leader of the global left: near-total isolation of Spain in its moment of crisis. Having assiduously courted global anti-Israeli and pro-Palestinian sentiment, and having sought maximum visibility in his opposition to the American war upon Iran, Sánchez gained no support whatsoever from the Arab and Muslim world when his nation’s territory was invaded by one of their own. Having positioned himself as the stalwart counter to an unpopular-in-Europe American leadership, Sánchez received no meaningful support whatsoever from European nations when Spanish territory, which means European Union territory, was violated. Worse than that, the general discussion within Europe centered upon how to isolate and punish Spain for failing to do its part in securing European borders. Having made Spain the sole NATO power to refuse the 5 percent defense-spending mandate, Sánchez was confronted with well-earned American remonstrances and reminders that American policy increasingly favors Morocco, which is at least a state with fruitful direction and purpose.

 

Spain is a victim in the Ceuta crisis, it is true: but the Spanish political leadership in power is its primary victimizer.

 

The Spanish political leadership not in power, facing a national election in the coming year, is now confronted with its own choices. Spain’s political landscape features two major parties of the right. One, the venerable Partido Popular, may be broadly described as a technocratic right, managerial and experienced. It is the larger of the two. The other, Vox, is smaller but historically more oriented toward issues of Spanish cultural inheritance. Both parties’ leaders, Alberto Núñez Feijóo of Partido Popular and Santiago Abascal of Vox, have seen fit to go to Ceuta in the wake of the crisis — as has, it should be noted, Sánchez himself. (One may ask why King Felipe VI has not gone, as might seem appropriate, and the probable answer is that the Socialist government has blocked the trip.) Whether Spain’s right, across both parties, can leverage this moment into something larger remains to be seen. The movement writ large, across the past 20 years, has not been as aggressive in the defense of Spanish identity and heritage as the left has been aggressive in diminishing both. If 60,000 Moroccans storming a Spanish city of 80,000 citizens does not inspire resolve, it is difficult to imagine what will.

 

Something must, because Spain is on its own. The enervated project of the European Union has shown its quality in this crisis just as much as Spanish Socialism has, and it looks just as weakened in its own way. The European powers have had much time and opportunity to reflect upon their self-defense and its challenges, from the 2014 Russian seizure of Crimea, to the 2015 migrant crisis, to the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine proper, to the post-2024 American reorientation away from European defense, to the 2026 Iranian attacks upon European territory and energy supplies. Now, a European-power city is briefly overrun, and the general reaction of Europe is directed against that European power, and not against the Moroccan state proximately responsible for the overrunning. At this writing, 22 EU member states have called for an “emergency” meeting on Spanish irresponsibility and remedies for it. On the one hand, Spain’s Socialists deserve it; on the other hand, European preference for focusing upon process changes within Europe to the exclusion of confronting the external threat speaks volumes.

 

An American with ordinary historical consciousness might note that Europe finds itself in the era of America’s own Articles of Confederation, but with no Americans to set it right. What does Europe mean if Europe will not preserve itself?

 

From that American perspective, we learn much, little good, of the state of Spanish and European governance now. Yet there are reasons for optimism, if we discern them. The European response is insufficient, but it is also the opposite of 2015: The general reaction is to solidify borders, not open them, and this is progress. Spain will have elections no later than late-summer 2027, and the Spanish right — which contains within itself many good patriots whom Americans would recognize as such — may rescue both the situation and their country. Finally, the United States since January 2025 has arrived at the right policy formula for dealing with threats like the ones confronting Ceuta and Europe at large. Borders must be sealed, mass migration must be ended, benefits to illegal entry (from state welfare to remittances and beyond) must be stopped, human traffickers must be confronted and pursued, terror designations must be issued, state sponsors must suffer state consequences, and the full array of national power, including the military, must be brought to bear for all of it. All this requires recognizing hybrid warfare for what it is. What the Americans have imposed with much success in the Caribbean basin is equally appropriate for the Mediterranean basin. We have the lessons and the experience — we only await the partners with whom to share both.

The Quiet Force of Moderate American Muslims

By Ayaan Karan

Monday, July 27, 2026

 

If we were to believe Republican Reps. Andy Ogles and Brandon Gill, all 4 million American Muslims are wholly radicalized, inclined to violence, and unassimilable. Indeed, back in March, Ogles stated that “Muslims don’t belong in American society.” Around the same time, Gill said, “Importing Islam will annihilate America as we know it.” While radicalization within the American Muslim community is undeniable, this broad claim of complete unassimilability is untrue and puts American Muslims at risk of violence.

 

After October 7, Palestinian flags populated the downtowns of major American cities as Muslims and non-Muslim leftists alike took to the streets in jubilation. Earlier this year in New York City, hijab-clad women led chants in support of Hezbollah and Hamas. After the death of Iran’s tyrant, Ali Khamenei, a mosque in Manassas, Virginia, held a memorial for him. At University of California, Berkeley—where I currently study—the Muslim Student Association holds rallies and posts on social media in explicit favor of Hamas and Palestinian terrorism. A Pew poll of American Muslim adults shows a staggering 37 percent approval of Hamas, in contrast to 8 percent of all American adults.

 

Some Muslims, then, are definitely extremists. But how do Muslims themselves view this type of extremism? As the writer Pradheep J. Shanker put it in March, “those Muslims that want to live peacefully are silent, because they are scared to speak because of extremists in the community.” Indeed, let’s remind ourselves that 58 percent of American Muslim adults disapprove of Hamas. But we never see this group of Muslims on the news or speaking for the Muslim community. This “third force” of Muslims is alive in America. But third-worldist institutions within their own community suppress them.

 

The dichotomy between third-worldist and third force Muslims runs deep, and not just within the United States. Third-worldism and its subsidiary ideologies, like much of pro-Palestinianism, contend that the West is an imperialist force that exploits the third world and its people. Developed out of the anticolonial movements of the mid-20^th century, it advocates for the unity and solidarity of all third world peoples to participate in violent resistance against the West. Third-worldism, as Hudson Institute fellow Zineb Riboua put it, is “a global theory of power that divides the world between oppressive Western structures and the communities that resist them… This universal script—oppressor versus oppressed.”

 

Notably, the worldview isn’t well developed beyond third-world unity, violent resistance, and grievance. This lets third-worldism bend and take different forms. In the Muslim world, third-worldism simply adopts the lexicon of Islam while pushing the same ideas. For example, the leader of the Islamist terror group Hezbollah, Naim Qassem, wrote in 2007 that “Resistance for us is a societal vision in all its dimensions. … It is the resistance of the people and the mujahidin.” The same third-worldist worldview that organizes the world as “oppressed vs. oppressor” is simply painted over with Islamic rhetoric.

 

These calls for “unity and resistance” are often symptomatic of failed Islamic governance like in the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Gaza Strip. These transcend innocent calls for communal unity among different Muslim sects; instead, they call for the unity of all Muslims around a third-worldist political cause to distract from domestic crises. What develops is a culture of grievance where all Muslims are victims of the West.

 

The third force Muslims are different. Coined by British writer Alistair Horne, the phrase “third force” originally referred to the politically moderate Muslims of French Algeria. Today, the third force is characterized by a general disdain for extremism and fundamentalism, as well as ideologies that ruin the image of Islam as a religion of peace. It favors pragmatism and is suspicious of movements that promote violent uprising. However, being a third force Muslim is not indicative of an ideology per se; it’s indicative of a reserved and pragmatic demeanor toward politics. During the Algerian War (1954 to 1962), the third force sought colonial reform over armed struggle, rejecting the ideological extremism and increasing violence of the Front de libération nationale (FLN), a terrorist organization whose methods to achieve Algerian self-determination included targeting civilians.

 

Applied today, the label suggests that the average third force Muslim likely supports Palestinian self-determination, but refuses to follow the path of violent resistance or stubborn extremism. Simply put, third force Muslims reject the far-left idea of violent revolution and align with most Americans in participating in politics peacefully.

 

So why are these third force Muslims absent from the conversation? To their political loss, third force Muslims—like many pragmatists—lean quietist. Their levelheaded disposition toward politics leaves them unable to organize effectively against the populist exhortations of the third-worldists.

 

In addition to this disadvantage, the Muslim community must also contend with ideological purity tests. From the beginning of the conflict in Palestine in the 1920s, the Zionist cause was portrayed by Arab Palestinian leaders as the most egregious example of Western colonialism and Jewish aggression. Over time, that image was burned into the minds of successive generations of Muslims by Arab leaders trying to build mass support for their case against the Jewish state. Today, that image has been successfully laundered into Muslim identity worldwide.

 

The real-world effects of this are serious. For example, in 2025, a Shia Muslim cleric from the United Kingdom by the name of Sayed Ali Abbas Razawi had a planned religious lecture at a Houston mosque. Before he could begin his lecture, a portion of the attendees walked out in protest. Why, you may ask? Because Razawi signed the Drumlanrig Accords, a 2025 pact of respect and tolerance between senior U.K. Muslim and Jewish leaders. Razawi was thereafter labeled a “Zionist” for even discussing religious dialogue with Jews who supported Israel’s continued existence. In 2022, Saudi Arabia’s decision to appoint Mohammad bin Abdulkarim Al-Issa, a staunch opponent of antisemitism, as the imam to deliver the sermon during the annual hajj pilgrimage sparked outrage from many Muslims because he visited Auschwitz with the American Jewish Committee and some Israeli Jews as a symbol of Jewish-Islamic solidarity.

 

The solution to this fear-based echo chamber is empowering the third force. During the Algerian War, the French rejection of the third force as a political ally only polarized Muslims more toward the FLN. It therefore seems logical that the political establishment embrace the third force, not only in the interest of stamping out extremism, but also properly representing Muslim citizens in a republic.

 

But ever since October 7, Republicans have increasingly rejected the notion that Muslims have any place in America. The sitting lieutenant governor of Indiana, Micah Beckwith, has said, “I hate Islam. It’s a demonic death cult.” The aforementioned Reps. Ogles and Gill have continually painted American Muslims as terrorists or terrorist sympathizers. This flawed view assumes that third-worldism and extremism are essential parts of Muslims. But as we saw with the poll on Hamas, that’s clearly untrue.

 

Most American Muslims oppose the group, and a Pew poll from 2017 found that 8 in 10 Muslims are concerned about terrorism done in the name of Islam. By saying that an entire group is somehow incompatible with America, we concede that American culture and its founding principles are unable to inspire and assimilate all groups. American Muslims are distinctly American in culture and attitude, evidenced by 9 in 10 American Muslims saying they are proud to be American. To drive the point home, nearly 6,000 Muslims serve in the United States military. This differs from the United Kingdom, where at one point more British Muslims (around 600 per one count) joined the Islamic State than served in the British military. In the United States, however, only around 300 American Muslims have joined the Islamic State.

 

What throws another wrench in the GOP’s idea of Muslims being subversive is that third-worldism is embraced by more than just Muslims. A Harvard CAPS/Harris poll found that 40 percent of young people in America, regardless of religion, support Hamas over Israel, compared with only 8 percent of people 65 and older. Indeed, protests at UC Berkeley didn’t just concern the war in Gaza—they fully embraced violence against civilians with chants like “Intifada! Intifada!” Nor did the Berkeley protests, or any other campus protests, involve only Muslims.

 

Repudiating radicalization is necessary. But such repudiations must be armed with facts and not sweeping generalizations that imply that some of our countrymen are invariably radical due to their faith or ethnic background. It’s clear that third-worldism has embedded itself within the American Muslim community and helped develop a purity mentality that silences voices of dissent and pragmatism. But it’s also true that this worldview is separate from Islam as a faith and instead seeks to brainwash swaths of the electorate, Muslim or non-Muslim.

 

The cautionary tale of French Algeria informs us that if the political establishment doesn’t take notice of the third force Muslims, they will cease to exist as a force and extremists will continually be observed as the representatives of all Muslims. The current strategy of assuming Muslims are all deranged radicals won’t lead to any good. Similarly, if we continue to frame this battle as one between America and Islam, we should consider ourselves guilty of providing the fuel that’ll burn down the third force. While there’s no clear panacea, the first step requires the GOP to abandon blatant anti-Muslim rhetoric and instead ally with the third force against the third-worldists.

The U.K.’s Horrific Rape Gangs

National Review Online

Friday, June 19, 2026

 

Not long ago, mentioning England’s grooming gangs — more accurately described as “child rape gangs” — was considered a reprehensible racist “dog whistle.” In fact, simply noticing the demographics of most of the perpetrators and most of the victims risked running afoul of hate speech laws: Derek Heggie was sent behind bars for “grossly offensive” comments on YouTube, such as stating that “young white girls are being raped by these grooming gangs that worship the Prophet Muhammad.” But after Elon Musk amplified the discussion on X in 2025 and resurfaced uncomfortable statistics, the frustrated British public began demanding the truth.

 

Finally, the survivors and whistleblowers have been provided the platform and appropriate privacy protections to describe their experiences. And you can be forgiven for being too horrified by the details to listen for more than just a few minutes.

 

The Rape Gang Inquiry Report, published on Tuesday and exceeding 200 pages, was supported by crowdsourced funding; it lacked certain statutory powers because it was not a government inquiry, although it was led by Member of Parliament and Restore Britain party leader Rupert Lowe. The investigators had limited powers, such as the inability to compel witnesses or require the sort of document production that could corroborate some of the most heinous claims. Viewed with those limitations in mind, the independent report is a damning collection of victim testimonies that vividly portray the sexual terrorism that occurred nationwide for decades.

 

The girls, sometimes as young as eleven, told of being raped daily, drugged, beaten, burned, racially abused, trafficked throughout the country, forced to convert to Islam, and coerced into Islamic marriages. In some cases, the sexual abuse was filmed and distributed, then used as blackmail against the children (and, occasionally, their families too). The girls contracted a range of sexually transmitted diseases, while some experienced multiple pregnancies that ended by miscarriage, abortion, or live birth. But hospital visits were necessary for more than pregnancy appointments: A twelve-year-old was raped and then penetrated with a whiskey bottle that shattered inside her, but she was discharged after treatment without ever being asked how she had incurred the injury.

 

The girls were also subjected to harassment, stalking, and intimidation. One victim was apparently made an accessory to homicide when she was instructed to clean the knives from a scene where two fatal stabbings had occurred. Several girls and young women attempted to escape a gang’s territory by relocating in the country — but they were found and forced back into what is essentially sexual slavery, although they first watched the gangsters destroy their new homes. The abused children and women recounted lengthy struggles with substance misuse and self-harm, while some attempted suicide.

 

These atrocities become more alarming and enraging upon realizing that the British government was not clueless. Virtually every British institution — the police, the judiciary, the social-care services, the health-care system, the schools, and taxi-licensing bodies — had been made aware of the gangs, yet failed to appropriately intervene. The victims recall instances where the authorities entirely ignored their credible claims and corroborating evidence or responded by perfunctorily issuing mild warnings to perpetrators. In some cases, the police allegedly found the girls in compromising situations with pimps in homes or cars but did not even bother to question the men.

 

Even worse, it appears that some government employees actively facilitated or encouraged the abuse. A victim recalled an occasion when a police officer returned her to the children’s home where she resided, and he told the loitering gangsters to “have fun with her.” When a social worker finally initiated a discussion with a 14-year-old about her ongoing sexual exploitation, that person raised the possibility that she audition for a television show that was looking for an actress to play a child victim of sexual abuse. The report offers a succinct and scathing assessment: “The rape gangs did not operate in the shadows, but with the active or passive consent of the British state. The betrayal was total.”

 

But why were the exploited children ignored, disbelieved, and abandoned by the sprawling surveillance state that is so quick to punish benign conduct like carrying a teeny toy replica sword? The answer is that Britain has succumbed to a dangerous ideology that — in the words of the report — emphasizes “diversity, inclusion, and non-judgementalism as supreme virtues.” Pursuing justice for the girls would have revealed uncomfortable demographic trends that challenge the state-sponsored proclamations that celebrate diversity, equity, anti-racism, and large-scale immigration as intrinsic goods. In particular, a thorough law-enforcement response would have made plain the devastating figures showing vast overrepresentation of Pakistanis and Muslims as perpetrators, while further illustrating that white girls tended to be their targets. Despite the efforts to sanitize the data, South Asian men are significantly overrepresented; 62 percent of convicted offenders in group-based child sexual exploitation in Rotherham were recorded as having a Pakistani background, despite amounting to just about 4 percent of the local population.

 

The report recites a previous estimate that there have been 250,000 victims of the rape gangs in Britain, but it underscores that this figure is a “bare minimum.” However, this number was calculated by extrapolating from previous reports focused on particular localities and therefore could be either much too high or low. Still, it is worth acknowledging that this estimate attempts to capture the number of victims — not the number of perpetrators or the number of offenses committed. Several survivors told the inquiry team that they believe they were raped by “hundreds” of South Asian men, while the abuse occurred several times a week or even daily.

 

Unfortunately, it is unlikely that we will ever uncover the exact number of victims and identify every offender, yet a great evil has occurred if even one single girl endured just an hour under the control of the gangsters. The physical, emotional, and psychological damage can never be undone, but hopefully the responsible parties — including government actors who failed to intervene — can be appropriately called out and punished. But first, we must first accept the report’s sober conclusion: “Until the country rejects the fear of being called ‘racist’ and restores the courage to name uncomfortable truths, the conditions that allowed these networks to thrive will remain.”

Why I Won’t Debate Critics of Israel

By Sam Harris

Friday, June 05, 2026

 

Many readers and podcast listeners have been dismayed by my enduring support for Israel and now urge me to debate someone—really anyone—drawn from a growing cast of scholars, grifters, and moral lunatics who have made that beleaguered country their professional or psychiatric obsession. The Making Sense Community seems to have inherited this infatuation, leading to some heated exchanges in recent days. I’ve explained my position on Israel across several podcasts and in my public talks, but it might help to summarize it here.

 

First, my general attitude: I’m not interested in exploring all the ways that Israel has missed the mark—from Prime Minister Netanyahu’s corrupt alliance with the far right, to the many crimes committed by settlers in the West Bank, to the deaths of innocent noncombatants in several wars—because none of these failings, however grave, will alter my sense that (1) the ethical difference between Israel and her enemies remains vast, and (2) the global preoccupation with the Jewish state, as though it were the worst villain among nations, is contemptible, being the product of perennial lies and delusions.

 

Next, a simple heuristic: As I suggested in at least one Community thread already, if my intransigence on these matters mystifies you, it might help to understand that, for whatever reason, I think militant Islam is ten times worse than you think it is. When I talk about “jihadists” and their various groups—Hamas, Hezbollah, al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, the IRGC, etc.—I’m talking about people who I consider to be worse than Nazis (jihadists being, essentially, Nazis who are certain of Paradise). My views about the conflict in the Middle East will not fundamentally change unless my critics produce evidence that Israel has become as evil as her enemies.

 

However, you can rest assured that if the IDF morphs into a death cult that uses its own civilian population as human shields (and yet somehow remains widely popular), if ordinary Israelis begin to celebrate martyrdom above every earthly priority, producing generations of bright-eyed, suicidal fanatics, if the residents of Tel Aviv condone the taking of Palestinian infants, old women, and other noncombatants as hostages and then gather in crowds of thousands, baying for their blood—if, in other words, the Israelis begin to resemble the Palestinians, then I won’t care who wins this war. Short of this, there remains a world of difference between the two sides, and I believe that we should focus on how brutalizing it is for any free society to confront enemies that can sincerely claim to “love death” more than everyone else loves life—for this has been Israel’s predicament for the better part of a century.

 

The problem in the Middle East is not, and has never been, the existence of the state of Israel. The problem is jihadism, Islamism, Islamic extremism, Islamofascism militant Islam—or whatever words you want to use to describe the belligerence and triumphal lunacy of those who take the most pernicious doctrines of Islam too seriously.

 

I won’t debate the history of the Middle East because it is irrelevant to resolving the conflict there. Of course, many people insist that we must disentangle and reconsider every strand of this history, going back at least a century. The reason I’m convinced that this is a fool’s errand is simple: Palestinians and Israelis have discrepant accounts of the past, and no amount of study or debate will reconcile them.

 

What’s far more important to understand—and I think it really is the only thing worth considering—is what the current inhabitants of Israel, the Palestinian territories, and the surrounding Arab states want out of life now. (Not what they pretend to want or what a handful of royal families want, while their populations want something quite different.) What do the Jews and Muslims in the region really yearn to accomplish? What are they willing to sacrifice for? What are they willing to die for? And what are they willing to let their children die for?

 

When we focus on the present this way, if we’re being honest, we must concede that there are two very different realities on either side of this conflict: culturally, psychologically, ethically, spiritually—in every way that matters. Yes, Israel has its religious fanatics too. But they aren’t the same sort of fanatics we find in Hamas or Hezbollah, and they’re far less representative of the surrounding culture. Notwithstanding everything that can be said against Prime Minister Netanyahu, the Israeli far right, and the settlers in the West Bank—and there is much to condemn—I believe the following remains true:

 

If the Palestinians laid down their arms, there would be peace. There could be a two-state solution; there could even be a one-state solution; it wouldn’t matter. If the Palestinians simply stopped killing Jews and stopped building a culture that celebrates pointless murder and martyrdom as its highest values, there could be a diverse, tolerant, and prosperous society between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. There could have been one eighty years ago. But if the Israelis laid down their weapons, there would be a genocide. This was obviously true on October 7th, 2023. And for anyone who has been paying attention, it has been true on every other day since the founding of the state of Israel.

 

The truth is, I have never known how Israel should have responded to the events of October 7th. I only know that they, along with every other free society, must ultimately defeat militant Islam. How we should do this is genuinely debatable. But that’s not the point of contention among Israel’s critics, especially on the left. To them, worrying about militant Islam—even in Israel, even in the aftermath of the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust—is just more “Islamophobia.” It’s just more “colonialism” and “racism” (as though that last charge made any sense in the Middle East).

 

If you want to understand my view of this conflict, simply ask the one question that clarifies everything in the present:

 

What would each side do if it had the power to do whatever it wanted?

 

Though many pretend otherwise, everyone knows the answer to this question to a moral certainty.

 

If Hamas had the power, it would perpetrate a real genocide in Israel. The group has affirmed its commitment to this project on countless occasions, both before and after October 7th. And while it is true that Jew-hatred throughout the Muslim world has been made immensely worse by a century-long fascination with Nazi propaganda and conspiracy theories, this animus isn’t merely a modern phenomenon. For instance, there is a famous hadith which predicts that the End Times will not come until the very stones and trees cry out “Oh Muslim, there is a Jew behind me, come kill him.” Unsurprisingly, Hamas cited this hadith in its founding charter.

 

Most Palestinians know this, and yet Hamas remains popular. For over a decade, Hamas diverted foreign aid that was meant to improve life in Gaza and used it to build the largest bomb shelter our species has ever constructed—hundreds of miles of tunnels—and yet no Palestinian civilians were allowed to shelter there during the war. Why not? Because Hamas was using these men, women, and children as human shields. And when Israel made phone calls and sent millions of text messages urging civilians to evacuate, the loudspeakers in the nearest mosques warned them to stay in place. And Hamas snipers murdered many who tried to move to safety. The Palestinians know all this, and yet Hamas remains popular. Even after all the devastation that Hamas has brought down on its own people, it remains the most popular Palestinian faction, well ahead of its rival, Fatah. This is why there is no peace in the Middle East.

 

The suffering in Gaza is terrible, and I’ve never pretended otherwise. But the suffering elsewhere—suffering you aren’t thinking about—is just as real. You should ask yourself why you don’t care more about it. This difference, emotionally and politically, is what it looks like to lose an information war.

 

We haven’t seen all the dead children in Yemen, Syria, or Sudan, where the numbers are far worse than in Gaza, but everyone has witnessed the pornography of misery and death that has been steadily manufactured by supporters of Hamas. You might think that your special concern over Israel is due to the fact that we (Americans) supply many of the weapons the IDF uses to kill Palestinians. But we supplied arms to Saudi Arabia and the UAE for a war in Yemen that has killed an estimated 377,000 people. Where were those protests? Where was the celebrity sanctimony over Yemeni dead? Why didn’t Zohran Mamdani trumpet his opposition to this evil while campaigning to become Mayor of New York? Yemen was the world’s worst humanitarian crisis for years, with American weaponry and logistical support fully implicated, and yet it never became the organizing moral obsession of universities, media institutions, activist networks, or leftwing politics the way Gaza has.

 

To point this out isn’t to commit the rhetorical sin of “whataboutism.” Rather, it exposes a glaring moral disparity: The world simply does not care when Muslims kill other Muslims—amazingly, it doesn’t much care when they kill Christians either—but it does care, enormously, when Jews do it. The General Assembly of the UN and its Human Rights Council have passed more resolutions against Israel than against all other nations combined, including North Korea, Iran, Russia, China, Syria, Sudan, and Yemen. A few of these countries have committed actual genocides. None of this makes sense. But this is the world we are living in.

 

Of the world’s 193 nations, two-thirds were created by map makers who merely imagined their frontiers into being, without much regard for the tribal interests of the people living within them. In fact, more than half were created since 1948, the year that Israel was founded. And yet there is only one whose legitimacy is still debated everywhere. There is only one nation on Earth that must continually argue for its right to exist, even when the very survival of its people is threatened by avowedly genocidal enemies.

 

This obsession with Israel, and the double standards to which its people are held, now forms the center of mass of that shapeshifting moral affliction widely known as “antisemitism.”

 

I’ve lived most of my life believing that dangerous antisemitism was behind us, at least in the West. Unfortunately, the response to October 7th has put that assumption very much in doubt. The atrocities committed by Hamas revealed a level of Jew hatred, globally, that shocked even those of us who have been students of antisemitism for much of our lives. Crucially, this hatred showed itself before Israel invaded Gaza. When the corpses of the young people mutilated and murdered at the Nova Music Festival were still being identified, we had students at Harvard and professors at Columbia—and demonstrators in New York, London, Sydney, and Toronto—celebrating their killers.

 

Why does antisemitism matter? Well, for the Jews, it’s obvious why it matters, but why should it matter to everyone else? It matters because when you look at what antisemites also hate, you find they hate everything that makes culturally rich, diverse, open societies possible. Real antisemites bring with them more than just their hatred of Jews: they bring censorship, political repression, conspiracy thinking, and the politics of dehumanization and scapegoating. So decrying antisemitism is not an act of special pleading. It is a defense of the moral and institutional architecture that makes free societies possible.

 

Let me close with another general point to members of the Making Sense Community: Many of you have written to tell me that you’ve lost respect for me over this issue (or that you still value my work and are giving me “a pass” on Israel). I reject this framing, and you should too. No one should be a part of Community just because they agree with me. I’m not running a political party, and there is no line for me, or for anyone else, to toe. If I’ve fallen off a pedestal because I said something you don’t agree with, the pedestal was the problem, not the disagreement. Of course, if you think I am lying to you, or that I otherwise lack integrity, you should leave and never look back. But if you just think I happen to be wrong, even about something important—especially about something important—I encourage you to keep showing up with better evidence and arguments. This, after all, is what a real intellectual and moral community is for.

The BBC Has Fallen

By Becket Adams

Sunday, May 24, 2026

 

If we’re going to spend the next five, ten, or 20 years investigating the radicalization of young men and women, we may as well also study the radicalization of the news media, because whatever happened to the BBC demands a thorough review.

 

For years now, the state-funded outlet has drifted further to the fringe left (“left” by U.K. standards; by U.S. standards, it’s Pravda with its pinkie out). But last week it outdid itself, publishing a feature that, through unrelenting emotional manipulation, tried to cast the Afghan men who sell their preadolescent daughters into slavery and child marriage as sympathetic characters, while portraying austerity-minded U.S. legislators as villains.

 

If that’s not a backward and radicalized way of looking at the world — choosing, out of sincere reverence for the church of multiculturalism, to blame Western conservatives for the matter of child brides rather than those arranging the marriages for profit — I don’t know what is.

 

“Selling children to survive: Afghan fathers forced to make impossible choices,” the report’s original headline read.

 

The story opens with local color, painting a familiar tableau of poverty and desperation. “My children went to bed hungry three nights in a row,” one Afghan man told the BBC. “My wife was crying, so were my children. . . . I live in fear that my children will die of hunger.” The report cites United Nations figures showing that three in four Afghans cannot meet their basic needs and that 4.7 million are one step from famine. The story then swings back to on-the-ground accounts, quoting a choked-up father: “I got a call saying my children hadn’t eaten for two days. I felt like I should kill myself.”

 

For more than 500 words, readers are immersed in anecdotes about fights over food, desperation, tears, threats of self-harm, pity, and grief, all clearly designed to generate sympathy for these Afghan fathers.

 

It’s only after all this — roughly a third of the way through the 2,000-plus-word article — that the authors finally address the headline’s shocking claim. Only now do we learn that the men the BBC has spent more than 500 words asking us to grieve with are, in objective terms, evil. We learn that these men are not just “selling children,” but specifically selling their preadolescent daughters as domestic slaves and child brides.

 

If you feel contempt for the BBC for stringing you along, just wait. It gets worse.

 

The report continues:

 

Abdul Rashid Azimi takes us into his home and brings out two of his children — seven-year-old twins Roqia and Rohila. He holds them close, eager to explain why he’s making these unbearable choices.

 

“I’m willing to sell my daughters,” he weeps. “I’m poor, in debt and helpless.”

 

“I come home from work with parched lips, hungry, thirsty, distressed and confused. My children come to me saying ‘Baba, give us some bread.’ But what can I give? Where is the work?”

 

Abdul tells us he is willing to sell his girls for marriage, or for domestic work. “If I sell one daughter, I could feed the rest of my children for at least four years,” he says.

 

He hugs Rohila, kissing her as he cries. “It breaks my heart, but it’s the only way.”

 

The BBC then tries to soften the horror of what the reader has just absorbed — the complete commodification of female children by their own fathers — by chalking it up to a mere difference in cultures:

 

The choice to sell daughters over sons is because, culturally, sons are widely seen as future breadwinners. In Afghanistan, with the Taliban’s restrictions on education and work for women and girls, this is even more pronounced.

 

Additionally, there is a tradition in which a marital gift is given to the family of the girl from the family of the boy during marriage.

 

In the universe of evil euphemisms, saying “marital gift” in place for “cash for little girls” has got to be right up there with “gender-affirming care” instead of “mutilation of prepubescent bodies”

 

Still, there is more.

 

One subject, Saeed Ahmad, self-pityingly recounts how he hawked his five-year-old daughter because he couldn’t pay her medical bills (she had appendicitis and a cyst in her liver). The little girl is sold to a relative and expected to marry one of his sons when she turns ten. The BBC none-too-subtly emphasizes that the buyer is a relative, as if to reassure readers: “It’s not as if she was sold to a total stranger.”

 

In reality, the fact that the buyer is a relative makes it even more grotesque. On top of being the type of people who buy and sell children — relatives, at that — the men profiled in the report are evidently also the type who refuse to help family members during a time of famine and destitution. How are we supposed to feel reassured about the child’s purchase when the buyer chose to bid on her rather than help cover her medical costs?

 

The obvious conclusion the reader is forced to confront — that these are bad men making evil choices — is probably why the story quickly pivots to its “real” villain: the Trump administration, which cut as much as $500 million in aid to Afghanistan in 2025. Later in the report, the BBC half-heartedly and begrudgingly concedes that the Taliban also bear some responsibility for the suffering of the Afghan people.

 

What happened to the BBC?

 

The story of Afghan suffering is obviously worth telling, but it calls for a style of difficult and unflattering journalism that the BBC is evidently unwilling to apply — either out of fear of blaspheming “diversity” at home or because of a sincere reverence for “multiculturalism.” A journalist unencumbered by progressivism’s slavish devotion to its articles of faith would have included the voices of everyone involved in the situation, not just the self-pitying Afghan fathers whom the BBC portrays as martyrs. And, boy, do we hear plenty from the fathers. We hear their thoughts; we read about their tears and their woes. We also hear a great deal from the BBC itself.

 

Yet, we hear nothing from the mothers. We hear nothing from the buyers. We certainly don’t hear anything from the tiny human beings who are being traded from man to man like cattle. Better journalists would have spoken not only with the fathers but with those who suffer the consequences of their choices. Better journalists would’ve also asked at least a few questions of the people who buy five-year-old girls, even if those people refused to comment.

 

There was a time when Englishmen such as General Charles Napier, William Sleeman, and Winston Churchill called evil by its name, with no thought of cowering behind the soft pillow of moral relativism or an all-consuming fetish for multiculturalism. The English once possessed the moral clarity and will to recognize and accept that they were ethically bound to force an end to barbaric practices such as sati and to meet the Thuggees with overwhelming force.

 

Now, British state-sponsored media cannot even bring itself to criticize the Afghan men who buy and sell preadolescent girls as slaves and brides.

 

The sun must set on everything, including an empire that at one time knew nothing but light. The BBC isn’t unique in its decay, it’s just a symptom of England’s overall rot.

 

It’s all profoundly sad. Then again, should we really be surprised that the organization that protected Jimmy Savile for so many years would also shed tears for the men who sell their children into bondage?