Every fight in Western politics — the mayor of London, the mayor of New York, a Black US president, immigration, criminal gangs, violence in the streets — summons the same stream of pundits, politicians, preachers, influencers and YouTubers to defame one thing: Islam. In a political climate this charged, moving at the speed of a meme, thick with people claiming to be in the know — some styling themselves ‘scholars’ — this series talks about what no one else will: the sleight of hand, the propagandist’s hand in your pocket while the other points at a horizon that isn’t there. It is not apologetics. You do not have to believe a word of Islam to see you are being lied to about it. That is where Fireline Press lives and works: between what is true and what is scorching the political landscape of the West.

A woman in Kansas walked into an American courtroom to collect a debt her husband owed her. She walked out with nothing. Not because her claim was weak. Because of a law her own state had passed to protect her.

Her husband had signed a marriage contract. In it he promised her a dower — in Islam, the mahr, the wife’s own property, hers by right the moment it is agreed, not a gift he can claw back later. Hers was 1,354 gold coins. Around $677,000. When the marriage ended she asked the court to make him pay what he had put his name to. The court refused to enforce the contract.¹

Weeks earlier, Kansas had forbidden its judges to give any effect to “foreign” religious law. The politicians who passed it called it a shield for women. Read that again. A law sold as protection for Muslim women — and weeks later, a Kansas court stripped a Muslim woman of $677,000 that was hers.

Now cross the country. In New York, another woman brought her religious marriage contract to another court. Hers was a ketubah, signed under Jewish law. The court enforced it without blinking.² No statute stood in her way. Nobody had written one.

Two women. Two religious contracts. Two American courts. One walked out whole. One walked out robbed. The only difference between them was the faith on the paper — and a law written to make that difference the whole point.

So ask the question they are counting on you never to ask. What is this “Shariah” they passed a law to ban — the thing not one of them could define if you stopped and made them try?

The thing they couldn’t define

Start with the man who wrote the ban, because he let the point slip once. David Yerushalmi drafted the model bill that statehouses across the country copied, and he told the New York Times what it was really for. Its value, he said, was “heuristic” — his word.³ Not legal. Heuristic. No American court had ever forced Shariah on anyone; there was no danger to guard against, and his laws changed nothing on the ground. Their purpose was to plant the word in the public mind as a menace and keep it there. The point was never to stop Shariah. The point was to keep you afraid of it.

And the fear runs on one trick: the word only frightens you while you cannot define it. A thing with no shape can be made any shape you dread. So they keep it shapeless. Shariah is the blank, and they fill it with whatever nightmare sells.

And fill it they did. More than forty states have seen these bills. Roughly a dozen passed them. In 2025 it reached Congress: Representative Randy Fine of Florida introduced the “No Sharia Act,” to bar any US court or public body from enforcing a judgment or contract rooted in Sharia.⁴ A nationwide war on a word — and not one of the ones waging it can tell you what it means.

I can. Here it is.

There is no book called Shariah. You cannot buy it, ban it, or hold it up at a podium. The word is Arabic for the path to water — the road across the desert to the spring that keeps you alive.⁵ It is not a code of law. It is a direction: the belief that a life should be lived toward God.

And here is the thing they need you never to hear. Shariah — the divine path — is one thing. What human beings made of it is another, and it carries a different name: fiqh. Fiqh is the human work — fourteen centuries of scholars reading scripture and reasoning their way out to the questions of ordinary life. Shariah is held to be perfect, because it is God’s. Fiqh is human, and Muslims have said so from the beginning: fallible, partial, argued over without end. When a congressman vows to ban “Shariah law,” he is aiming at fiqh — at a library of human opinion that Muslims themselves have never stopped fighting about.

Because fight about it they do. There is no pope in Islam. No head office. No single volume anyone could seize off a shelf. There are schools — five that survive, four Sunni and one Shia, each named for the scholar who founded it — and they contradict one another.⁶ On how to stand in prayer. On the terms of a divorce. On how an estate is divided, what a contract may hold, what may be sold. Put one question to Shariah and you do not get an answer. You get four, sometimes five, each with a thousand years of argument behind it, each certain the others are wrong.

It does not even hold still. Fiqh was built to move — to meet the new century, the new machine, the question the founders never dreamed of, and to reason it through again from the source. That is what a politician swears to abolish with a single vote: a fourteen-hundred-year argument, with no book, no central authority, and no last word, that Muslims have run among themselves since before England had a parliament.

And the part they scream about — the amputations, the stonings — is the smallest corner of the whole. The rest is prayer and fasting, charity, marriage, inheritance, trade, how a man washes before he prays. The penal code they wave in your face is the practice of a few dictatorships, not the faith of nearly two billion people. And even that, as you are about to see, they took from an older book.

So when the next candidate promises to ban Shariah, hear the trap in his other favourite question — do you reject it? For a Muslim, the heart of Shariah is not a punishment. It is the declaration of faith, the five daily prayers, the fast of Ramadan. It is being Muslim at all. To reject it is to stop being Muslim. To demand a Muslim reject Shariah and call that moderation is to demand a Christian spit on the Nicene Creed and call it reform.

The Bible says it too

Here is what the fearmongers never mention, because it detonates their whole case. The punishments they hold up as proof of Islam’s savagery — the stoning, the amputation, the death for apostasy — did not begin with Islam. They begin in the Bible.

Open Deuteronomy. It commands death for the Israelite who turns to other gods — death for apostasy, by name. Open Leviticus. It lists the capital crimes and assigns death to each.⁷ These are not buried verses. They are scripture, shared by Jews, Christians and Muslims alike — the same God, the same page. The death sentences they brand as uniquely Muslim sit, in black ink, in the book on the pulpit of every church in the country.

So what became of them? Every faith did the same thing with them. It stopped.

Judaism prescribed those deaths and then, two thousand years ago, buried them under procedure. No execution without two eyewitnesses to the act itself. No conviction without a warning delivered in the seconds before, and proof the accused had heard it and gone ahead anyway. Courts ordered to seize on any excuse to acquit. The Mishnah passes sentence on any tribunal that still managed to kill: one that executed so much as once in seventy years, it says, was a court of butchers.⁸ The verses stayed on the page. The killing stopped. And when the Temple fell, the court that alone could have ordered it was gone.

Christianity took the long road, over a mountain of corpses. For more than a thousand years, Christian authorities burned apostates and heretics on precisely the scripture their heirs now brandish at Muslims. Aquinas taught that heresy earned death. The Inquisition carried it out. Calvin’s Geneva burned a man alive over a point of theology.⁹ The stake worked its way across Europe until the wars of religion had bled the continent white and the Enlightenment shamed it into stopping. Today the Catholic Church’s punishment for leaving the faith is a letter of excommunication. Not a blade.¹⁰

Most of the Muslim world has done the same. The great majority of Muslim-majority countries run civil or mixed law and reach for nothing like the old punishments; those cling on in a handful of regimes and in the sermons of their clerics.¹¹ Where the state still swings the sword, it is a state that has seized religion to control its own people — the oldest trick there is, wearing a holy book. It is not the faith of the grandmother in Jakarta, the schoolteacher in Dakar, the shopkeeper in Sarajevo. It is the whip of the ones who rule them.

Which leaves the people crusading against Shariah holding a live grenade. The savagery they parade as Islam’s is sitting untouched in the Old Testament on their own nightstands. The charge against the Qur’an is a charge against the Bible, word for word. The only difference is that no one is drafting a bill to ban Leviticus.

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The Jewish court down the street

No one is writing laws against the Bible. They are writing them against Shariah courts. So let me tell you what a Shariah court in America actually is, because it is nothing like the thing they put in your head.

It is not a courthouse. It is an arbitration panel — a room where two people who both agreed to walk in bring a private quarrel and accept a ruling on it. A divorce. An inheritance. A soured contract. It does not replace the law of the land. It cannot. Its rulings run exactly as far as American law allows and not an inch further. It has no power over crime. It has no power over anyone who did not choose to be there — not one non-Muslim, and not a Muslim who declined to come. Whatever it decides, an ordinary judge reviews on the same terms as any private deal: freely made, fair, lawful. Nobody is sentenced. Nobody is bound who did not choose to be — and those who chose are held to it exactly as you are held to any contract you sign. That is the whole of its power. The force of a promise, and nothing past it.

If that sounds familiar, it should, because the Jews have been doing it in this country for over a century. The Beth Din.¹² Jewish couples take their divorces and their disputes to it, and American courts enforce its rulings like any other arbitration, under the same law that governs a builder’s contract or a union grievance.¹³ In New York, in London, in a dozen cities, a rabbinical court sits every week of the year. No legislature has ever lifted a finger to ban it.

And it is not only the Jews. Christians do it too. Evangelical and Catholic bodies run their own conciliation panels, settling disputes between believers by scripture, their rulings enforced by the same secular courts under the same arbitration law.¹⁴ American judges uphold Christian arbitration exactly as they uphold the Beth Din. Three faiths. One arrangement. Identical standing in law.

The Muslim tribunals were often built on the Jewish model on purpose, because it worked.¹⁵ And they are the only one of the three anybody has ever moved to outlaw. Strike the word “Muslim” from the bills and they would shut the Beth Din and the church panels in the very same sentence. Which is exactly why they are written to name Islam, and only Islam. These laws do not target a practice. Every faith shares the practice. They target a people.

So go back to the two women. The Jewish woman’s contract was honoured because that is what courts do — they treat a religious marriage contract as the binding agreement it is. The Muslim woman’s was torn up for one reason and one reason only: a law written to make her faith the exception. Her contract was sound. Before Kansas passed its ban, American courts enforced Muslim marriage agreements the same way they enforce Jewish and Christian ones.¹⁶ The ban shielded her from nothing. It reached into a protection every other believer in America keeps, and pulled hers out by name.

The country they told you to defend

So America carves one faith out of a protection every other faith enjoys. Ugly enough. But the ugliest version of this is not in Kansas or Tennessee. It is in the one country these same crusaders hold up as the last wall of Western civilisation.

Israel runs Shariah courts.

Not tolerates them. Runs them. They are organs of the state — paid for by it, staffed by judges it appoints, topped by a Sharia Court of Appeal, the whole apparatus sitting under the Ministry of Justice.¹⁷ The qadis who preside swear their oath to the State of Israel. Over Israel’s Muslim citizens these courts hold sole authority on marriage and divorce, and share the rest of family law with the civil bench.¹⁸ This is not some tolerated tribunal on the Beth Din model. This is Islamic law, run by the Jewish state as a working arm of its own government.

And it is no accident of the moment. Israel took the system from the Ottomans, who let every religious community judge its own marriages, and kept it through the British Mandate and into statehood. The state runs a full set of official religious courts to this day — rabbinical for Jews, Shariah for Muslims, others for the Druze and the recognised Christian churches — each with authority over its own community’s family life.¹⁹ The Shariah court is no grudging concession. It is a load-bearing pillar of the state, there from the first day.

And it goes further than anything in America. Israel has no civil marriage at all. There is no way to marry lawfully inside the country except through a religious court — the rabbinate if you are a Jew, the Shariah court if you are a Muslim.²⁰ The nation sold to you as the bulwark against creeping religious law is bound to religious law, in the most private corner of its citizens’ lives, more tightly than any American state now writing bills to ban it.

Then think again about the man who wrote it. Yerushalmi — the lawyer whose model bill the states copied — is, by the account of those who have tracked his work for years, a veteran of the Israeli settler movement.²¹ A devoted partisan of the one state on earth that runs the very courts his law was built to destroy in our nation. That is not an accident. It is not a secret. It is only something the people parroting his talking points would rather you never found out.

Britain swallowed it whole

The fever did not stay in America. It crossed the Atlantic, and Britain drank it down without reading the label.

Turn on a British broadcast or open a British paper and you will meet the same warning that runs in Oklahoma: sharia courts, spreading through the country, a shadow legal system taking root. There is one problem with the British version. It is not even true on the surface. What Britain calls “sharia courts” are not courts. They are councils — and a council has no legal power whatsoever. It cannot marry you or divorce you in law. It cannot fine you, jail you, seize a penny, or bind a soul who walks out the door. Its ruling carries the legal weight of a priest’s blessing, which is to say none. The 2018 government review stated plainly that “sharia councils have no legal jurisdiction in England and Wales.”²²

So what do these councils actually do, if they can do none of the things the panic promises? In the main, one thing. They help Muslim women get divorced.

Here is the part the alarmists will never tell you, because it turns their story inside out. Many British Muslim couples marry in a religious ceremony the state never registers as a civil marriage. In the eyes of British law those women were never married — so British law will not divorce them either. To get out, a woman needs the religious authority that married her to release her. That is who walks into these councils: not conquerors imposing a caliphate, but women asking for the way out of a marriage. When the British government finally sat down and studied the councils, in a formal review, that is exactly what it found — that the great majority of the people using them are women seeking a religious divorce. The shadow empire of the headlines turned out to be a queue of women trying to get free.

And the review did not call for a ban. It called for the opposite: more protection, not less. Its central recommendation was to change the marriage law so that a Muslim religious wedding carries a civil registration with it — the way British law has long handled a Jewish or a Quaker one. Register the marriage and the woman gets a civil divorce, and the councils lose the only real hold they have over her. The government stared at the thing everyone was frightened of and concluded the cure was to pull Muslim women further inside the protection of British law, not to slam the door on them.

None of it stopped the politicians. In 2025 Robert Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary — a man who has read, or could read in an afternoon, his own government’s report — stood up and demanded that “sharia courts” be banned.²³ Courts, he called them. Bodies with no legal power, that mostly help women leave, that his own party in government had studied and moved to reform rather than abolish. He wants them gone, and he wants you to cheer while they go.

And all the while, in the same country, under the same law, the London Beth Din hears its cases week after week — the identical arrangement, the identical Act of Parliament, the identical religious arbitration — and not one British politician has ever risen to demand its abolition. The Jewish court is fine. The Christian panel is fine. Only the Muslim one is a danger to the realm. Britain had its own evidence sitting on the shelf, disproving the fear in black and white. It swallowed the fear anyway.

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The next rung

Now strip these laws down to what they actually do. They are not banning stonings. No American legislature was ever going to stone anyone; no American court was ever asked to. What they are banning is the marriage contract, the arbitration panel, the religious divorce — ordinary religious practice, the same practice every faith in the country carries out in the open. The amputation is the poster. The practice is the target.

And here is why it should frighten you even if you never meet a Muslim in your life. A government that teaches itself it can strike one faith’s practice out of the law has not learned a lesson about Islam. It has learned a lesson about power. The machine does not care about the label once it is running. Build a mechanism to carve Muslims out of the protection everyone else enjoys and you have built a mechanism that carves. Whoever holds it next gets to choose the next name.

The courts saw it coming. When Oklahoma wrote its ban into the state constitution, a federal court struck it down — and not as a favour to Muslims.²⁴ It fell because the Constitution forbids the government from singling out any one religion for special disfavour, full stop. That is not a Muslim protection. It is the protection standing over the Beth Din, the church conciliation panel, the Quaker meeting house, and your own pew on a Sunday morning. One clause, shielding all of them at once. Pull the thread loose for Islam and it runs for every faith behind it.

Notice what Oklahoma’s own lawyers were forced to admit in that courtroom: that no court in the state had ever once applied Shariah to anybody. The law fixed nothing, because nothing was broken. It was never meant to fix anything. It was built to mark a people — and to find out whether the state could get away with marking a faith and calling it safety. This time the answer was no. But they keep coming back, bill after bill, state after state, because the ban on Shariah was never the prize. The power to ban a religion is the prize. A government that wins that power does not give it back, and it does not keep it aimed where you first pointed it.

So understand where you are standing. This is a ladder, and the rung marked “Muslim” is only the bottom one — chosen first because they judged it the rung you would be least troubled to watch them climb. Your church is on this ladder. Your synagogue is on this ladder. The hand that clears the lowest rung is already reaching for the next. The only question these bills are really asking is whether you will hold the ladder steady while they climb it — or kick it over while it can still be kicked.

Read it yourself

Go back over what you were handed. A word, dropped in your lap as a threat — Shariah, coming for your courts, your family, your country. Now look at what is left of it.

There is no book to ban. There is an argument fourteen centuries old, with no final answer, that Muslims wage among themselves. The savagery pinned to it is older than Islam and abandoned by everyone, sitting in the Bible on the accuser’s own shelf. The courts they want outlawed are the courts the Jews and the Christians run, in the open and unbothered — the courts the State of Israel runs for its own Muslims. And the man who drew up the ban is a partisan of the one nation on earth that keeps the very thing he would abolish here. Every plank of the fear, pulled up and turned over. Nothing underneath any of them.

So the fear was never about your safety. It was a product. Someone built it, priced it, and sold it — for votes, for clicks, for the donation your outrage triggers on its way past. You were not the one these laws were meant to protect. You were the customer. And the sale only closes if you never stop to read — never read the contract, never read the verse, never read the report a government commissioned and then buried. Fear is the one product a single afternoon of reading destroys. That is why they need you frightened, they need you incurious, and they need you exactly there.

You are no longer there.

And here is the last thing they would keep from you, because it turns the knife around in their hand. The word they taught you to fear traces back to the Qur’an — so open it. In it, God commands justice, and good to one’s neighbour, and forbids oppression. He tells the believer to stand firm for what is right even against himself, his own parents, his own kin.²⁵ That is the source they are pointing at when they say “Shariah.” The woman in Kansas, robbed of what was hers by a law that spat on the contract in her hand — that book commanded the justice their law denied her. The oppression was never in her faith. It was in the ones who wrote the ban, and in every hand that has helped them carry it since.

They will keep selling the fear; it is what they do. But a product survives only while the buyer stays ignorant — and you have just read to the end. Tell someone what you found here. It is the one thing they cannot afford.

If this resonated with you, consider sharing it — that’s how the fire spreads.

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Image: See Li (See Li Photo Capital), London, 28 April 2014. Via Wikimedia Commons, licensed CC BY 2.0. Cropped for banner.

James S. Coates writes about geopolitics, international law, and the decline of civilisational accountability. His books include A Signal Through Time, The Threshold, The Road to Khurasan, the memoir God and Country (published under pen name Will Prentiss) and his forthcoming Neither Gods Nor Monsters. He publishes regularly on Fireline Press and The Signal Dispatch, and his academic work appears on PhilPapers. He lives in the UK, with his family and dog who has no interest in any of this.

© 2026 James S. Coates All Rights Reserved. Fireline Press · fireline.press

Endnotes

¹ Soleimani v. Soleimani, No. 11CV4668 (Johnson County Dist. Ct., Kansas, 28 August 2012); Kansas House Substitute for Senate Bill No. 79 (2012).

² Avitzur v. Avitzur, 58 N.Y.2d 108 (1983).

³ Andrea Elliott, “The Man Behind the Anti-Shariah Movement,” New York Times, 30 July 2011.

⁴ No Sharia Act, H.R. 5512, 119th Congress (2025), introduced by Rep. Randy Fine (FL-06), co-introduced by Rep. Keith Self and cosponsored by Rep. Chip Roy; companion measure introduced in the Senate by Sen. Tommy Tuberville. On the state wave: more than 200 anti-Sharia/foreign-law bills introduced across some 43 states since 2010, roughly a dozen enacted (Southern Poverty Law Center; National Conference of State Legislatures).

⁵ Qur’an 5:48; on the etymology (”the path to a watering place”), standard lexical references.

⁶ On the distinction between Shariah (the divine path) and fiqh (its human jurisprudence), and the surviving schools (madhāhib), see Wael B. Hallaq, An Introduction to Islamic Law (Cambridge University Press, 2009).

⁷ Deuteronomy 13; Leviticus 20.

⁸ Mishnah, Makkot 1:10 (”A Sanhedrin that executes once in seventy years is called bloody”).

⁹ Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 11, a. 3 (on heresy); the execution of Michael Servetus, Geneva, 1553.

¹⁰ Code of Canon Law (1983), canon 1364 (apostasy, heresy and schism incur excommunication, not death).

¹¹ Council on Foreign Relations, Understanding Sharia: The Intersection of Islam and the Law (updated 2021).

¹² The Beth Din of America (Rabbinical Council of America / Orthodox Union); the London Beth Din.

¹³ Federal Arbitration Act, 9 U.S.C. §§ 1–16; Arbitration Act 1996 (UK).

¹⁴ On Christian religious arbitration, see the Institute for Christian Conciliation; Encore Productions, Inc. v. Promise Keepers, 53 F. Supp. 2d 1101 (D. Colo. 1999); and Pew Research Center, Applying God’s Law: Religious Courts and Mediation in the U.S. (2013).

¹⁵ Michael J. Broyde, Sharia Tribunals, Rabbinical Courts, and Christian Panels: Religious Arbitration in America and the West (Oxford University Press, 2017).

¹⁶ Odatalla v. Odatalla, 355 N.J. Super. 305 (Ch. Div. 2002) (a Muslim mahr enforced on neutral contract principles).

¹⁷ Qadis Law, 5721-1961 (Israel): the Sharia courts sit within the state system under the Ministry of Justice; qadis are appointed by a state committee and sworn to the state. See Library of Congress, Global Legal Monitor (2017).

¹⁸ Jurisdiction is exclusive over the marriage and divorce of Muslim citizens and concurrent with the civil family courts over other personal-status matters since the Family Court Law (Amendment No. 5), 2001.

¹⁹ Israel’s system of separate state religious courts derives from the Ottoman millet system, continued under the British Mandate: rabbinical, Sharia, Druze and recognised Christian courts each hold jurisdiction over their community’s personal-status matters.

²⁰ Israel provides no civil marriage; marriage within the country is conducted only through recognised religious authorities.

²¹ Southern Poverty Law Center, extremist file on David Yerushalmi.

²² The independent review into the application of sharia law in England and Wales, Cm 9560 (2018), chaired by Mona Siddiqui: sharia councils have no legal jurisdiction (”Sharia law has no jurisdiction in England and Wales”); the majority of those who use them are women seeking a religious divorce; the review recommended amending marriage law so that civil registration accompanies religious marriage, as already provided for Jewish and Quaker marriages.

²³ Robert Jenrick, Shadow Justice Secretary, remarks calling for sharia courts to be banned (2025).

²⁴ Awad v. Ziriax, 670 F.3d 1111 (10th Cir. 2012), enjoining Oklahoma’s “Save Our State” amendment (State Question 755); the court applied heightened scrutiny because the measure singled out one religion (see Larson v. Valente, 456 U.S. 228 (1982)), and the state conceded that no Oklahoma court had ever applied Sharia law.

²⁵ Qur’an 16:90 (God commands justice, good conduct and generosity, and forbids indecency, wickedness and oppression) and Qur’an 4:135 (stand firm for justice, even against yourself, your parents and your kin).

And antisemitism is being weaponised. Not by everyone, not always cynically, but systematically and to documented political effect. The charge is being deployed to silence Palestinian advocacy, to discipline Jewish dissent, to delegitimise protest under counter-terrorism law, and to manufacture consent for a domestic crackdown on speech and assembly. The Forde Report, commissioned by the Labour Party itself, concluded as much in 2022.⁶ The High Court found the proscription of Palestine Action unlawful in February 2026.⁷ The Metropolitan Police Commissioner is currently the subject of a formal legal complaint for false claims about Palestine march routes.⁸ These are not fringe assertions. They are findings of record.

Both things are true at once. And here is the harder truth that neither side of the argument is willing to say plainly: the second feeds the first. The weaponisation of antisemitism increases antisemitism. The cycle is self-reinforcing. The people most harmed by it are ordinary Jews — the people in whose name it is conducted, and on whose fear it depends.

The cycle’s operators are not, in fact, hiding the logic. In May 2026, a poster appeared on a lamppost in midtown Manhattan, circulated approvingly on X by the Israeli writer Uri Kurlianchik. It read: “The more you attack Jews around the world, the more you prove Israel must exist.”⁹ The text was rendered with a Star of David and addressed not to Jews but to the world — a public instruction in how to read the rising attacks on Jewish life. Read it again. The argument requires antisemitism to keep rising in order to justify the Israeli state. It is not a case for Israel. It is a case for keeping diaspora Jews afraid forever. The people most harmed by that calculation are the Jewish people in whose name it is made.

This essay is about the language that holds the cycle together. Not the conflation itself — that has been documented elsewhere. Not the institutions that profit from it — those have been named. This essay is about the working vocabulary: the specific verbal moves, deployed live and in real time, that keep the dissenting Jewish voices off the table and the cycle running. From Hannah Arendt to Peter Beinart, from Avi Shlaim to Omer Bartov, the Jewish dissenting tradition has been trying to break this cycle for a century. The vocabulary exists to make sure they can’t.

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The Cycle

The cycle has six steps. They are observable in the public record, they have been operating for at least two decades, and they have accelerated since October 2023.

Step one: antisemitism rises. The causes are real and overlapping — the radicalisation of online conspiracy ecosystems, the displacement of class anger onto ethnic targets, the resurgence of explicit fascism on the European right, and the spillover of rage about the Gaza war onto Jewish communities who are not the Israeli state. The CST data is not invented. The Heaton Park attack in October 2025 was real.¹⁰ The Kenton firebombing was real. The Golders Green stabbings were real. Jewish institutions have hardened their security to a degree that should embarrass any country that calls itself civilised.

Step two: institutions and pro-Israel commentators respond by collapsing all criticism of Israel into antisemitism. The mechanism is the IHRA working definition and its accompanying examples, which equate certain forms of criticism of the Israeli state with hatred of Jews. The mechanism is also rhetorical: the slippage from “anti-Zionism” to “antisemitism” in mainstream discourse, the redefinition of opposing the existence of the State of Israel as opposing Jewish existence as such, the systematic conflation of a 19th-century European political project with a 3,500-year-old religion. Each individual instance is indefensible on its own terms, but each is institutionally excused. The cumulative effect is a discursive trap in which any argument with Israeli policy becomes an argument with Judaism itself.

Step three: the conflation lands, and the public fractures. Those who began with sympathy for Israeli civilians watch protesters criticise an actual Israeli government — its settlement expansion, its bombing of Gaza, its assassinations in foreign capitals, the Jewish supremacy and Arab hatred that B’Tselem itself has named, the wholesale dehumanisation of Arabs and Muslims with Arab Christians lumped without distinction into the category of “Muslim terrorist,” the propaganda and the lies, war crimes of insurmountable scale committed in response to war crimes of lesser scale, the disproportionality, the flagrant violations of international law — and watch all of it reclassified, by the institutions, as antisemitism. Some deny the criticism outright. Others conclude it is dishonest.

A second audience reacts differently. Those whose sympathies were with Gaza, or with Palestinians more broadly, watched the same conduct on their screens for two years. They were then told that the only acceptable framework for what they had seen was one that classified them as antisemitic for having seen it. They concluded the institutions were not merely dishonest. They concluded the institutions were captured. Either way, their trust in mainstream institutions collapses.

Both audiences look elsewhere for explanations. “Elsewhere” is where actual ethnic and cultural racism and antisemitism lives. The conspiracy theorists, the explicit racists, the people who really do think Jews control the world. The institutional refusal to distinguish good-faith critique from ethnic hatred drives ordinary people — from opposite starting points, by different routes — toward the precincts where ethnic hatred is on offer.

Step four: the conflation also licences existing antisemites. If every critic of Israel is by definition antisemitic, then antisemites can recast themselves as merely critics of Israel. The far right has noticed this. Tucker Carlson has noticed this. The very people most hostile to Jewish people in their own countries can now wrap their hostility in the language of anti-Zionism, because the institutional definition of anti-Zionism has been stretched wide enough to accommodate them. The conflation, designed to protect Israel, has provided cover for the people most threatening to diaspora Jews.

Step five: antisemitism rises further. The genuine kind — graffiti, harassment, assault, arson — increases because the discursive environment has been deliberately confused. The strategically useful kind — the kind that justifies legislation, march bans, terrorism designations — also increases, because every act of conflation is registered as antisemitism in the data even when the underlying conduct is political speech. The CST counts “from the river to the sea” as antisemitic in its incident reporting. So does the Met. The phrase, in its mirror form, has been Likud party policy since 1977 — “between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty” — and remains in the Likud platform of 1999, has been quoted by Netanyahu, Uri Ariel, Gideon Sa’ar, and Tzipi Hotovely, and has never been rescinded.¹¹ One version, chanted by a Londoner protesting for freedom and self-determination for Palestine, is logged as a hate crime. The other, voted into the platform of the governing party of Israel, is policy. The numbers go up. The fear goes up. The political case for emergency measures goes up.

Step six: the rise in antisemitism is then deployed to justify the next round of weaponisation. Marches must be banned because antisemitism is rising. Speech must be policed because antisemitism is rising. Palestinian advocacy organisations must be proscribed because antisemitism is rising. Jewish dissenters must be marginalised because antisemitism is rising and they are giving cover to it. The cycle closes, and the next iteration begins from a higher baseline of fear and a narrower aperture of permissible speech.

This is not a theory. It is a process operating in plain sight, documented across police statements, government legislation, court rulings, journalism, and the testimony of the dissenting Jewish tradition. The Palestine Action proscription, ruled unlawful by the High Court after 2,787 arrests for holding placards, is a perfect specimen.¹² The Metropolitan Police Commissioner’s claim that Palestine Solidarity Campaign marches “set out with intent to march near synagogues” — false on the documented record, currently the subject of a formal legal complaint — is another. The reclassification of the Golders Green attacker’s first stabbing victim, the Muslim man Ishmail Hussein, as a personal dispute within hours, while the second and third stabbings of two Jewish men were declared antisemitic terrorism on the same timetable, is a third.¹³

Each instance is institutionally excused in isolation. The pattern is the indictment.

But a cycle running this consistently across decades, jurisdictions, and political regimes is not held together by accident. It is held together by language. Specific words, deployed at specific moments, perform specific functions. They take voices off the table. They foreclose argument before argument can begin. They mark certain speakers as illegitimate so that the substance of what they say never has to be answered.

That language is what this essay is about.

The Vocabulary

On 5 May 2026, Einat Wilf posted to X: “Motion to replace the term ‘self-hating Jews’ with ‘Pick Me Jews’. (I think it reflects the underlying psychology and incentive structure far better).”¹⁴

Wilf is not a fringe figure. She is a former Knesset member for the Israeli Labour Party, a Cambridge PhD, an intelligence officer who served in Unit 8200, the founder of the Oz Party, and the author of seven books defending Zionism.¹⁵ Her phrase is not careless. The word she chose was motion. A motion is a piece of formal procedure — something tabled, debated, and adopted by a deliberative body. It is the language of a community deciding, in session, who counts and who does not. The phrase she proposed for adoption, “Pick Me Jews,” is borrowed from a misogynistic internet pejorative — the “pick me girl,” a woman who performs anti-feminism for male approval — and applied to Jewish anti-Zionists, recasting them as performatively betraying their own community for outsider applause.¹⁶

The motion was not new. It was the most recent specimen of a procedure that has been running, under different names, for more than a century.

The progenitor was Theodor Herzl. In The Jewish State, published in 1896, Herzl described his Jewish opponents — the Jews who would not endorse his political project — as “disguised antisemites of Jewish origin.”¹⁷ The construction is worth pausing on. The dissenter is not engaged. The dissenter is reclassified. By Herzl’s formula, a Jew who opposes Zionism cannot be a Jew acting in good faith from inside the tradition; he must be an antisemite wearing Jewish clothes. The Jewish opponent is, by definition, not really Jewish — or not really opposed for Jewish reasons. The argument is removed before it can be made.

Two years later, the formula was used against Herzl himself. The Viennese journalist Karl Kraus, an opponent of Zionism, observed that Herzl shared with the antisemites of his day a preoccupation with Jewish difference and a desire to remove Jews from Europe.¹⁸ But Herzl’s coinage proved more durable than Kraus’s reply. Within three decades it had been compressed into a single phrase. The Viennese writer Anton Kuh used the term Jewish self-hatred in the aftermath of the First World War; the philosopher Theodor Lessing’s 1930 book Der jüdische Selbsthass — Jewish Self-Hatred — popularised it.¹⁹ Lessing was, at that point, a recent convert to Zionism. He used the term against academics opposed to it.

By the post-war period, “self-hating Jew” had become standard issue. It is the workhorse of the vocabulary — the most-deployed, longest-running specimen. It performs its function with elegant efficiency. It does not engage the dissenter’s argument. It pathologises the dissenter. The dissenter is not wrong; the dissenter is sick. The dissenter does not believe what he says; he says it because he hates himself. The argument cannot be answered, but it does not need to be answered, because the speaker has been removed from the category of speakers whose arguments must be answered.

What Wilf understood — and her precision deserves credit here — is that “self-hating” had aged. The pathologising frame still worked, but its psychiatric register had grown stale. “Pick Me Jews” updates the move into the vocabulary of contemporary internet discourse. It replaces the clinical with the contemptible. The dissenter is no longer pitied as ill; the dissenter is mocked as a sycophant. The function is identical. The packaging is younger.

The catalogue extends from there. Each item is a different procedure, deployed in different settings, but each performs the same operation: it takes a voice off the table without engaging what the voice was saying.

There is kapo — the most aggressive specimen in the vocabulary. Originally the word for prisoners conscripted by the SS to police other inmates in Nazi camps, it has been deployed against anti-Zionist Jews since at least the 1980s.²⁰ The deployment is not metaphor; it is accusation. The dissenting Jew is being charged with collaboration in the murder of his own people. The charge is absurd on its face — a Jewish dissenter from Israeli policy is not a concentration camp guard — but absurdity is not the point. The point is that no argument survives the comparison. To answer “kapo” is to descend into a debate about the Holocaust on terms set by the accuser. Most dissenters decline. The voice is removed.

There is as a Jew. This is the inverse procedure. Where “self-hating” and “kapo” remove dissenters by reclassifying them as not really Jewish, “as a Jew” removes them by reclassifying them as performing their Jewishness — making the identity itself the ulterior motive. A dissenter who opens a sentence with “as a Jew, I oppose…” is treated, by the operators of the vocabulary, as having confessed to the deployment of identity for political effect.²¹ The framing is symmetrically perverse: the Jews who endorse Zionism speak as Jews and are heard as Jews, while the Jews who dissent are accused of merely invoking Jewishness instrumentally. The procedure turns the dissenter’s identity into evidence against the dissenter’s argument.

There is anti-Zionism is the new antisemitism. This is the macro-procedure — the parent claim under which most of the others operate. Its function is epistemic capture. Once the equivalence is established, every act of criticism of the Israeli state becomes, by definition, an act of hatred against Jews; and every Jewish dissenter from that state becomes, by definition, an antisemite. The phrase is not an argument; it is a definitional move. It does not establish that anti-Zionism causes antisemitism, or that anti-Zionists are antisemitic in their conduct. It simply asserts that the two are the same thing, and proceeds as though the assertion were a finding.²²

Beneath the macro-procedure, the institutional machinery codifies the move into law. The 2016 IHRA working definition of antisemitism — drafted under different auspices a decade earlier by the American Jewish Committee’s Kenneth Stern — is the codification.²³ The definition itself, taken alone, is uncontroversial: “Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews.”²⁴ The eleven illustrative examples that accompany it are not. Seven of the eleven concern criticism of Israel rather than hatred of Jews.²⁵ Adopt the examples and the move is made: certain forms of criticism of the Israeli state become, definitionally, antisemitism. Stern, the lead drafter, has spent the last decade publicly objecting to the institutional adoption of his text. He has called its weaponisation “an attack on academic freedom and free speech.”²⁶ The man who wrote the definition says it is being used for purposes he never intended and explicitly opposes. The institutions that adopted it have not noticed.

Beneath the codification, the criminalisation. The phrase from the river to the sea is now logged as an antisemitic incident in the data of both the Community Security Trust and the Metropolitan Police.²⁷ The phrase globalise the intifada was, until 29 April 2026, treated as potentially incitement to terrorism — the basis on which the 80-year-old Anglican priest Peter Tatchell was arrested for holding a placard. The Crown Prosecution Service dropped the case that day, on the eve of trial, having concluded there was no realistic prospect of conviction.²⁸ The dropping of the charge did not undo the chilling. It clarified what the charge was for. The charge was not meant to convict. The charge was meant to remove a voice from the public square for the time it took the case to be dropped.

And beneath the criminalisation, the asymmetry. The vocabulary’s most revealing feature is not what it covers but what it exempts. The institutions most active in policing anti-Zionist speech as antisemitism have shown no comparable interest in policing the actual antisemites operating openly on the political right. Elon Musk can endorse a Great Replacement post — the same antisemitic theory cited by the Tree of Life synagogue shooter — by replying “You have said the actual truth” to his 163 million followers, and twelve days later be personally welcomed to Israel by the Prime Minister and given a guided tour of Kfar Aza, broadcast live on the same platform from which the endorsement was issued.²⁹ The Republican base from which Donald Trump draws his political power is, on every available measure, more antisemitic than the British or American left;³⁰ yet the institutional vocabulary that polices anti-Zionism on the left has been remarkably restrained when it confronts antisemitism on the right. The asymmetry is not random. It tracks utility. Antisemitism that can be useful to the Israeli state — antisemitism that frightens diaspora Jews into closer political dependence on Israel — is treated with a different procedure than antisemitism that cannot.

Step back and look at what we have. The vocabulary is not a collection of insults. It is a working operating system. Every item in the catalogue is a procedure, and not one of them is an argument. Each of them performs the same operation: it removes a voice from the conversation without engaging what the voice was saying. The cumulative effect is the foreclosure of the argument the cycle cannot survive — the argument that the conflation of political Zionism with Judaism is the project’s deepest danger, not its protection. That argument has, for a century, been made most clearly by Jews. The vocabulary exists to make sure they are not heard making it.

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The Voices the Vocabulary Was Built to Silence

A vocabulary this elaborate is not built to police casual antisemites. Casual antisemites do not need to be named with this much precision; they can be ignored, or refuted, or — when they are politically useful — quietly tolerated. The vocabulary is built for harder targets. The targets it was calibrated to remove are the people whose arguments cannot be answered and whose standing cannot be denied. Those people are, almost without exception, Jews.

Among the people who would have to be classified as “Pick Me Jews” under Wilf’s proposed motion are the witnesses without whom the post-war Jewish intellectual tradition cannot be reconstructed.

Hannah Arendt warned in 1948 that the project of an exclusively Jewish state in Palestine, defended by force against an Arab majority, would, if it were not careful, become the kind of nationalism it had escaped from in Europe.³¹ She was the philosopher who gave the world the analysis of totalitarianism. Her warning was specific, technical, and based on her own life’s work. The vocabulary in its 1948 form had a name for her — the precursors of “self-hating Jew” had been in circulation for half a century by then — and that name was applied. Her warning has been substantially borne out. The vocabulary’s reply, eight decades later, is to call her a “Pick Me Jew.”

Martin Buber, the philosopher of I and Thou, proposed binationalism — a single state in which Jews and Arabs would share political power. He was ignored.³² Albert Einstein declined the Israeli presidency in 1952, partly on the grounds that he could not endorse the direction of the political project.³³ Judah Magnes, the founding chancellor of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, opposed the establishment of an exclusively Jewish state and advocated for a binational solution until his death in 1948.³⁴ These are not figures who can be removed by the vocabulary. They were removed anyway. Their arguments — which the vocabulary’s contemporary operators decline to engage on substance — were placed outside the boundary of legitimate Jewish thought.

The Israeli historian Avi Shlaim, born in Baghdad, raised in Israel, knighted in the United Kingdom, is the foundational scholar of the 1948 war. His work on the documentary record of that war is canonical.³⁵ Ilan Pappé’s The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine — drawing on declassified Israeli archives — forced Israeli academic acknowledgement of Plan Dalet, the systematic expulsion of Palestinian villages in 1948.³⁶ The Holocaust scholars Omer Bartov and Amos Goldberg, both Israeli, both of whom built their careers on the rigorous scholarship of genocide, have published in the past two years explicitly identifying Israeli conduct in Gaza as genocide.³⁷ Bartov is one of the world’s foremost scholars of the Holocaust. When he uses the word genocide of Israeli conduct, the vocabulary’s response is not to engage his argument; it is to apply the procedure.

Gideon Levy of Haaretz has reported from the West Bank and Gaza for forty years.³⁸ The IDF veterans of Breaking the Silence have published more than a thousand testimonies of conduct they witnessed in uniform.³⁹ Auschwitz survivors signed a public letter against the Gaza war in 2024.⁴⁰ Peter Beinart, raised in the American liberal Zionist tradition, edited The Forward and now edits Jewish Currents; his book The Crisis of Zionism marked the breaking of the American liberal Zionist consensus, and his more recent writing has argued that the safety of American Jews depends on America being a country that distinguishes them from a foreign state.⁴¹ Naomi Klein, the author of The Shock Doctrine, declared in her 2024 Passover address that “our Judaism cannot be contained by an ethnostate” — the equation of Jewishness with Zionism, in her telling, being among the deepest threats to Jewish life in the diaspora.⁴² Norman Finkelstein, the son of two Holocaust survivors, has spent his career documenting the political instrumentalisation of Holocaust memory.⁴³

And in July 2025, two of Israel’s most prominent human rights organisations — B’Tselem, the country’s foremost Israeli–Palestinian rights group, and Physicians for Human Rights Israel — published reports concluding, after 22 months of war, that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza.⁴⁴ B’Tselem titled its report Our Genocide. The pronoun is the argument. An Israeli institution, staffed by Israelis and Palestinians, looked at the conduct of the Israeli state and named the conduct as belonging to its own society. “Nothing prepares you,” said B’Tselem’s Executive Director Yuli Novak at the press conference, “for the realisation that you are part of a society committing genocide.”⁴⁵ This is not the voice of a foreign critic. It is the voice of Israelis refusing to be the alibi.

These are the names. The list is not exhaustive. Beneath the named figures sit the institutional voices: Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow in the United States; Jewish Voice for Labour, Yachad, Na’amod, and the Jewish Socialists’ Group in the United Kingdom; the anti-Zionist Haredi communities of Neturei Karta. Each of these is a Jewish organisation. Each holds positions closer to the actual range of Jewish opinion in its host country than the institutional voices the press treats as authoritative.⁴⁶ Each is, by the procedure of the vocabulary, a “Pick Me Jew.”

The argument these voices share is not unanimous on every question. Beinart’s liberal Zionism is not Pappé’s anti-Zionism. Bartov’s careful scholarly distinctions are not Finkelstein’s polemic. Klein’s broad analysis is not Levy’s daily reporting. The Auschwitz survivors are not the Haredi anti-Zionists. The disagreements among them are real. But they share a single observation, made from inside the tradition, and made with the standing only the tradition can confer: the conflation of political Zionism with Judaism is not the protection of Jews. It is the project’s deepest danger, and Jews are the people who pay the cost.

Beneath that observation sits a deeper one, and it is the premise the vocabulary works hardest to suppress. Nation states do not have a right to exist. People do. A state is a political instrument — a particular constitutional arrangement, with a particular set of borders, a particular flag, a particular legal framework — assembled at a particular moment in history for particular purposes. Such instruments come into being and pass out of being. They merge, dissolve, partition, federate, and reconstitute. The Soviet Union had no right to exist. The Ottoman Empire had no right to exist. Yugoslavia had no right to exist. Czechoslovakia had no right to exist; the Czech Republic and Slovakia have no right to exist either; and the people of all those countries continue to exist regardless of which state, or no state, they live under. Rights inhere in persons, not in administrative arrangements.⁴⁷

The conflation of antisemitism with anti-Zionism depends on smuggling this premise past the listener. It treats the State of Israel as having the moral standing of a person — its existence framed as something the world has a duty to protect — rather than as the political instrument it is. Once the premise is named, the conflation collapses. To question whether a particular state should exist in its current form, with its current borders and constitutional arrangements, is not to question whether the people living within those borders should exist. The two questions are entirely separate. They have always been entirely separate. The vocabulary exists to make sure they cannot be asked separately.

This is the argument the vocabulary exists to remove from circulation. Not because it is weak. Because it is strong. The vocabulary’s procedures do not engage the argument — none of them does, none of them needs to, that is the point — they remove the speaker, on the grounds that no Jew who makes that argument can be a Jew making it in good faith.

The cycle requires this. The conflation of antisemitism with anti-Zionism cannot survive a credible Jewish voice that refuses to make it. So the vocabulary marks every credible Jewish voice that refuses, in advance, as not-credible. The procedure is older than Wilf and older than her formulation. It is older than “self-hating Jew” and older than Lessing. It is older than the State of Israel. It begins with Herzl, in 1896, and it has been running, in updated forms, ever since.

The vocabulary does not work on the people it removes. It does not need to. Arendt did not stop being Arendt because she was called the precursor of “self-hating Jew.” Bartov is not less a Holocaust scholar because Wilf’s followers will call him a “Pick Me Jew.” The vocabulary works on the public — on the listener who needs a quick reason to discount the dissenter without engaging the dissenter’s evidence. The vocabulary provides that reason. It is the procedural instrument by which the discussion is kept narrow enough for the cycle to keep running.

The cycle is broken when the vocabulary stops working. The vocabulary stops working when the listener notices what it is.

What This Requires

Naming the vocabulary is not the same as dismantling it. The vocabulary has institutional momentum. It has political backing. It has the rhetorical advantage that any attempt to describe it can itself be described as antisemitism — the procedure defending itself, in real time, against the act of being named. Anyone who writes this essay will be accused of antisemitism. That is not a failure of the essay. It is the vocabulary working as designed.

Three things are required to refuse it, and none of them are easy.

First, the real thing must be acknowledged without qualification. Antisemitism is rising. British Jews are afraid for reasons grounded in observable fact. The arsons are real. The CST data is real. The Heaton Park attack was real. The Golders Green stabbings were real. Anyone who attempts to relativise this is conceding ground that does not need to be conceded. The honest observation about weaponisation gains nothing by minimising the underlying harm and loses everything by appearing to.

Second, the weaponisation must be named with equal directness. The Forde Report is public. The High Court ruling on Palestine Action is public. The legal complaint against Mark Rowley is public. The Mahmood quote about “the eyes of the state on you at all times” is public.⁴⁸ The £240 million Palantir contract is public.⁴⁹ The reclassification of the Hussein attack is public. None of this is hidden. The institutional incentive is to treat it as separate from the discussion of antisemitism. It is not separate. It is the second half of the same picture, and pretending otherwise is what allows the cycle to continue.

Third, the vocabulary itself must be refused. Each time “self-hating Jew” is deployed against a Jewish dissenter, the listener should hear it as what it is: not an argument, but the foreclosure of one. Each time “Pick Me Jew” is offered as a more contemporary update, the listener should notice the procedure beneath the new packaging. Each time “kapo” is hurled at an Israeli historian of the Nakba, the listener should ask why no answer is being offered to the historian’s documentation. Each time “as a Jew” is treated as a confession of identity-deployment rather than as a statement of standing, the listener should ask whose Jewishness is being treated as transparent and whose is being treated as suspect. The vocabulary works because the listener does not yet see it. It stops working the moment the listener does.

And the listener should see what the deployment of the vocabulary actually is. To tell a Jew that her dissenting Jewish voice is not really Jewish — that she is self-hating, that she is a Pick Me Jew, that she is a kapo, that her invocation of “as a Jew” is performance rather than identity — is to deny her right to be Jewish on her own terms. It is to make Jewish identity conditional on political compliance with a foreign state. It is to insist that there is only one acceptable way to be a Jew, and that Jews who refuse it are not Jews at all. By any honest definition of antisemitism, that is antisemitism. The IHRA working definition itself includes the denial of the Jewish people’s right to self-determination as an example of anti-Jewish hatred. The vocabulary, deployed at every dissenting Jewish voice, denies that right to individual Jews daily. The institutions that police antisemitism by deploying it are, in this exact operation, committing it. They protect a state by abusing its people.

This is the most that one essay can do. It cannot dismantle a system that has been operating, in updated forms, since 1896. It can put a name on the procedure, identify the specimens, foreground the voices the procedure was built to silence, and trust that the next reader who encounters the vocabulary in the wild will recognise it.

The cycle is not unbreakable. It is being held together by institutional pressure, by media compression, by political incentive, and by a vocabulary that has been doing its work for so long that most listeners no longer hear it as procedure. Once the procedure is named, it can be refused. Once it is refused, the voices it was built to silence can be heard. And once they are heard — Arendt, Buber, Einstein, Magnes, Shlaim, Pappé, Bartov, Goldberg, Levy, Klein, Beinart, Finkelstein, Breaking the Silence, the Auschwitz survivors, B’Tselem — the conflation that powers the cycle cannot survive.

Both things are true at once. Antisemitism is rising. Antisemitism is being weaponised. The second feeds the first. The people most harmed by the cycle are the Jewish people in whose name it operates, and whose dissent has been marked, in advance, as not-Jewish, so that the cycle does not have to answer them.

Refusing to hold both is not balance. It is complicity in a system that has been failing the people it claims to protect for more than a century. The first refusal is the one this essay attempts: to name the language, identify its function, and trust the reader to do the rest.

If this resonated with you, consider sharing it — that’s how the fire spreads.

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Banner image: Stephen Kapos at UCL, May 2024. Photo: Alisdare Hickson / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

James S. Coates writes about geopolitics, international law, and the decline of civilisational accountability. His books include A Signal Through Time, The Threshold, The Road to Khurasan, the memoir God and Country (published under pen name Will Prentiss) and his forthcoming Neither Gods Nor Monsters. He publishes regularly on Fireline Press and The Signal Dispatch, and his academic work appears on PhilPapers. He lives in the UK, with his family and dog who has no interest in any of this.

© 2026 James S. Coates All Rights Reserved. Fireline Press · fireline.press

Endnotes

¹ Community Security Trust, Antisemitic Incidents Report 2024 and Antisemitic Incidents Report 2025.

² “Jewish volunteer ambulances set on fire outside London synagogue in antisemitic attack,” CNN, 24 March 2026; Hansard, “Hatzola Ambulance Attack,” 23 March 2026.

³ “Two teens arrested over arson attack at Kenton United Synagogue in north London,” ITV News, 20 April 2026; “Kenton synagogue targeted in suspected arson attack,” Jewish News, 19 April 2026.

⁴ “Golders Green attack,” reported across UK and international press, 29 April 2026.

⁵ UK Government statement raising the national terrorism threat level from substantial to severe, 30 April 2026.

⁶ Martin Forde QC, The Forde Report, Labour Party, 19 July 2022.

⁷ R (Ammori) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2026] EWHC 292 (Admin), 13 February 2026.

⁸ “Legal complaint filed by Palestine activists against Met Police chief over synagogue remarks,” Middle East Eye, 6 May 2026.

⁹ Uri Kurlianchik (@VerminusM), post on X, 7 May 2026.

¹⁰ “Manchester synagogue attack,” Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation, 2 October 2025.

¹¹ Likud Party Platform, 1977; revised 1999 platform. See The Nation, “It’s Time to Confront Israel’s Version of ‘From the River to the Sea,’” 22 November 2023; Mondoweiss, 25 January 2024; Al Jazeera, 3 November 2023.

¹² R (Ammori) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2026] EWHC 292 (Admin); “UK appeals High Court ruling that granted Palestine Action a victory,” Al Jazeera, 28 April 2026.

¹³ “Legal complaint filed by Palestine activists against Met Police chief over synagogue remarks,” Middle East Eye, 6 May 2026.

¹⁴ Einat Wilf (@EinatWilf), post on X, 5 May 2026.

¹⁵ Wikipedia, “Einat Wilf”; JNS, “’Shape the Future’: Einat Wilf Outlines Her New Party’s Manifesto,” 4 December 2025; The Times of Israel, “Einat Wilf: Fall of Iran an opportunity to uproot ‘Palestinianism’,” 10 March 2026.

¹⁶ The Atlantic, “The ‘Pick Me Girl’ Trend, Explained,” 2022.

¹⁷ Theodor Herzl, The Jewish State (Der Judenstaat, 1896); Lev Topor, “A Short History of Jewish Self-Hatred,” San Diego Jewish World, 12 August 2024; My Jewish Learning, “Self-Hating Jews.”

¹⁸ Karl Kraus, response to Herzl, 1898; Paul Reitter, On the Origins of Jewish Self-Hatred (Princeton University Press, 2012).

¹⁹ Theodor Lessing, Der jüdische Selbsthass (Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 1930); Reitter, On the Origins of Jewish Self-Hatred.

²⁰ Antony Lerman, The Making and Unmaking of a Zionist (Pluto Press, 2012); Norman Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry (Verso, 2000).

²¹ Bret Stephens, “The Progressive Assault on Israel,” New York Times, 2019; Peter Beinart, “Anti-Zionism Is Not Antisemitism,” Jewish Currents, 7 March 2019.

²² Natan Sharansky, “3D Test of Antisemitism: Demonization, Double Standards, Delegitimization,” Jewish Political Studies Review 16 (Fall 2004); Judith Butler, Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (Columbia University Press, 2012).

²³ International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, “Working Definition of Antisemitism,” adopted 26 May 2016.

²⁴ Ibid.

²⁵ Ibid.

²⁶ Kenneth S. Stern, “A Bad Deal,” Knight First Amendment Institute, Columbia University; The Nation, “How a Leading Definition of Antisemitism Has Been Weaponized Against Israel’s Critics,” 27 December 2023.

²⁷ Community Security Trust, Antisemitic Incidents Reports 2024 and 2025; Metropolitan Police public statements, 2023–2026.

²⁸ “CPS drops case against Peter Tatchell over ‘globalise the intifada’ placard,” The Guardian, 29 April 2026.

²⁹ Elon Musk, post on X, 15 November 2023; Time, “Elon Musk Calls Antisemitic Post on X ‘The Actual Truth,’” 16 November 2023; CNN, “Elon Musk visits Israel, meets Netanyahu in wake of antisemitic post,” 27 November 2023; Rolling Stone, “Netanyahu Welcomes Elon Musk to Israel After Antisemitic Post,” 27 November 2023.

³⁰ Anti-Defamation League, Antisemitic Attitudes in America: Topline Findings, annual surveys 2022–2024.

³¹ Hannah Arendt, “To Save the Jewish Homeland: There Is Still Time,” Commentary, May 1948; The Jewish Writings, ed. Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman (Schocken, 2007).

³² Martin Buber, A Land of Two Peoples: Martin Buber on Jews and Arabs, ed. Paul Mendes-Flohr (Oxford University Press, 1983).

³³ Albert Einstein, letter to David Ben-Gurion declining the Israeli presidency, 18 November 1952; Fred Jerome and Rodger Taylor, Einstein on Race and Racism (Rutgers University Press, 2005).

³⁴ Judah Magnes, Like All the Nations? The Life and Legacy of Judah L. Magnes, ed. William M. Brinner and Moses Rischin (SUNY Press, 1987); Arthur A. Goren, Dissenter in Zion (Harvard University Press, 1982).

³⁵ Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (W.W. Norton, 2000); Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew (Oneworld, 2023).

³⁶ Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oneworld, 2006).

³⁷ Omer Bartov, “Infinite License: The World After Gaza,” The New York Review of Books, 24 April 2025; Amos Goldberg, “Yes, It Is Genocide,” The Palestine Project (Medium), April 2024.

³⁸ Gideon Levy, The Punishment of Gaza (Verso, 2010); ongoing column in Haaretz.

³⁹ Breaking the Silence, Our Harsh Logic: Israeli Soldiers’ Testimonies from the Occupied Territories, 2000–2010 (Metropolitan, 2012).

⁴⁰ “Holocaust survivors call for an end to Israel’s brutal assault on Gaza,” open letter, The Guardian, 15 February 2024.

⁴¹ Peter Beinart, The Crisis of Zionism (Times Books, 2012); Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning (Knopf, 2025).

⁴² Naomi Klein, “We need an exodus from Zionism,” The Guardian, 24 April 2024.

⁴³ Norman Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering (Verso, 2000).

⁴⁴ B’Tselem, Our Genocide, 28 July 2025; Physicians for Human Rights Israel, Destruction of Conditions of Life: A Health Analysis of the Gaza Genocide, 28 July 2025; CNN, “For first time, two leading Israeli human rights groups accuse Israel of genocide in Gaza,” 28 July 2025.

⁴⁵ Yuli Novak, B’Tselem Executive Director, press conference, Jerusalem, 27 July 2025; Democracy Now!, “’Our Genocide’: Israeli Human Rights Groups Accuse Israel of Destroying Palestinian Society in Gaza,” 29 July 2025.

⁴⁶ Survation polling for the Jewish Chronicle, 2015–2024; Forde Report, 2022.

⁴⁷ UN Charter, Article 1.2; International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Article 1; UN General Assembly Resolution 2625 (XXV), 1970; “Does Israel have a right to exist? The impact of Statehood,” Pearls and Irritations, 22 December 2024.

⁴⁸ Shabana Mahmood in conversation with Tony Blair, January 2026; “Britain’s Home Secretary wants AI so the eyes of the state can be on you at all times,” Boing Boing, 26 January 2026.

⁴⁹ “Palantir, the controversy, the contracts and the campaign against the FDP,” The Lowdown, 1 April 2026.

Every fight in Western politics — the mayor of London, the mayor of New York, a Black US president, immigration, criminal gangs, violence in the streets — summons the same stream of pundits, politicians, preachers, influencers and YouTubers to defame one thing: Islam. In a political climate this charged, moving at the speed of a meme, thick with people claiming to be in the know — some styling themselves ‘scholars’ — this series talks about what no one else will: the sleight of hand, the propagandist’s hand in your pocket while the other points at a horizon that isn’t there. It is not apologetics. You do not have to believe a word of Islam to see you are being lied to about it. That is where Fireline Press lives and works: between what is true and what is scorching the political landscape of the West.

SOMEONE posts it like a trump card. A thread about Islam, a fight about immigration, a comment under a news story — and there it is. Taqiyya. Dropped with the confidence of a man who thinks he has found the cheat code to an entire religion. Muslims are allowed to lie to non-believers. It’s called taqiyya. Look it up.

He hasn’t looked it up. He couldn’t name the verse, or the man it was revealed for, or a single condition that governs it. He doesn’t know that most of the world’s Muslims have never used the word in their lives. But he doesn’t need to know any of that, because the word isn’t doing the work he thinks it’s doing. It’s doing a different job, for people he has never heard of.

The word travels a long way from that comment section. It’s the reason a Muslim’s reassurance gets heard as a threat, and his denial as a confession. It’s why a professional of the counter-Islam movement can look at the most peaceful Muslim in the room and call him the most dangerous — because the quiet ones, the argument runs, are the ones doing the concealing. Taqiyya isn’t an insult. It’s an instruction: whatever the Muslim in front of you says, don’t believe him.

That instruction wasn’t improvised in a comment section. It was built and paid for. Here is the key.

The Skeleton Key

Taqiyya reaches the comment section from an industry. Not a figure of speech — an industry, with revenue and a paper trail. By the count of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, working from public tax filings, more than a thousand charities channelled money to thirty-nine counter-Muslim organisations between 2014 and 2016 — an apparatus with a combined revenue capacity of at least $1.5 billion.¹ Some of it came from cranks. Much of it moved through household donor funds — Fidelity, Schwab — and faith-based charities that let the giver stay anonymous. That is the scale of the industry. And of everything the money buys, taqiyya is the one claim it cannot do without.

It’s the claim the professionals never surrender. The Middle East Forum has published taqiyya as a standing doctrine of deception — permitted, sometimes obligatory, aimed at the non-believer.² Frank Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy told its readers that every practising Muslim engages in it, and defined it as religiously mandated lying.³ Robert Spencer built a following on a single line: that a Muslim cannot take an oath of office honestly, because his faith commands him to lie.⁴ Clear away the footnotes and the reports, and the message underneath runs to one sentence. Don’t believe them.

They never surrender it because it’s the key to everything else on the shelf. Every other accusation can be checked, and most of them fail the check. Taqiyya is the one claim built so that it can’t. Watch it turn. A Muslim says something reassuring: that could be taqiyya. He denies the charge: that’s taqiyya. A scholar sits down and explains what the word actually means: advanced taqiyya. Whatever the Muslim says, the key turns and the words fall away — because saying anything at all is treated as proof of the accusation. It needs no evidence. It survives all of it.

That is what taqiyya is for. Not to describe Muslims — to pre-empt them. To turn a man’s own words into the case against him before he has finished speaking, and to leave anyone who reads the rebuttal feeling naïve for having read it. It’s a rule for refusing to listen, passed off as a fact about Islam. Every other lie in the catalogue leans on this one, because every other lie can be corrected — unless the correction has been ruled inadmissible before it’s spoken.

So it’s worth taking the key apart. Not because the people holding it can be talked out of it — they can’t — but because the man with the screenshot can be, and because the word, once you actually read it, turns in the hand and convicts the people wielding it. What follows is the verse they cite, the man it was revealed for, the law that governs it, and the plain fact that the accusers’ own scriptures and their own history run on the very thing they call uniquely Muslim.

Start with the word itself.

The Wrong Word

Take the word apart, and the first thing that falls out is where it comes from.

Taqiyya is Arabic, from a root that means to guard, to shield, to protect oneself.⁵ Its home is Shia Islam — the minority tradition, roughly one Muslim in ten — where it hardened into a formal doctrine for a plain reason. The Shia spent centuries as a hunted minority under Sunni rule, and a hunted people learns to conceal what it believes in order to stay alive. That is the soil taqiyya grew in. Persecution. Not conquest.⁶

The counter-Islam writers know the word turns up in Sunni books too, and they’ll say so the moment you call it Shia. They’re half right. The term surfaces in Sunni commentary on the Qur’an, and Sunni exegetes have discussed it for centuries.⁷ But the ordinary Sunni Muslim has never organised his life around a doctrine called taqiyya; most have never had cause to use the word at all. The Sunni ground for the same question — what is a person excused for when something is forced out of him — is called idtirar: necessity. It’s the rule that lets a starving man eat pork, a dying man drink wine, a man with a blade at his throat say whatever will spare him.⁸ It isn’t a strategy. It’s the recognition that God does not hold a person to account for what is torn out of him under duress.

So set the sectarian point aside; it isn’t where the case turns. Shia doctrine or Sunni principle, the thing on the page is the same, and it’s small: permission to survive when your life is the price of telling the truth. That is the whole of it. There is no version — Shia or Sunni, ancient or modern — in which it means lie to your neighbour, deceive the man who trusts you, hide a plot behind a smile. They took a doctrine about the blade at the throat and recast it as a doctrine about the knock at the door. They didn’t misread the word. They inflated it — from what a man may do to stay alive into what every Muslim is supposedly commanded to do to everyone else, always.

And then they fixed that inflation onto nearly two billion people, most of whom would not know the word if you said it to them.

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The Man in the Verse

So read the verse. Every accusation about taqiyya runs back to one passage of the Qur’an — chapter 16, verse 106 — and the ones who wave it have never told you where it came from. Here is where it came from.

Makkah, the earliest days of Islam. The faith had no army, no state, no power of any kind. Its first followers were the people with the least to lose and the least to shield them — the poor, the enslaved, the ones no tribe would stand up for. The Quraysh, the tribe that ran the city, did not argue with them. They tortured them.

Among the first to believe was a family of slaves with no protection at all: Yasir, his wife Sumayyah, and their son Ammar. When the Quraysh learned they had converted, they made an example of them. The family was dragged into the open under the midday sun, beaten, stretched across the burning sand, and told the price of their faith was pain and the price of relief was to renounce it.

Sumayyah would not. Abu Jahl — one of the most powerful men in Makkah, and among the cruellest enemies of the Prophet — ran her through with a spear. She died refusing to hide what she believed. Islam remembers her as its first martyr. Not a warrior. A slave, and a woman, killed for the very thing the accusers say her faith licenses her to conceal.

Yasir was killed as well.

Ammar lived — but not whole. They broke his body until, as the sources tell it, he no longer knew what his own mouth was saying, and under that he spoke the words they demanded: a curse on the Prophet, praise for their gods. Then they let him go.

He went to Muhammad in tears. Not frightened of the Quraysh — frightened of God, certain the words torn out of him had cost him his soul. The Prophet asked him one question. How do you find your heart? Ammar answered: firm in faith. And the Prophet told him — if they do it again, do the same.

Then the verse came: whoever renounces God after belief is condemned, except one forced, while his heart holds firm.⁹

That is the origin of taqiyya. Not a scheme. Not a licence to work into a man’s trust and betray it. A dispensation handed to a tortured man so the words beaten out of a breaking body would not damn him. Permission to survive.

And even that permission has a ceiling. Al-Tabari, whose Qur’an commentary is about as authoritative as Sunni scholarship gets, reads the verse narrowly: concealment is excused only under mortal danger — and even then, the one who refuses to conceal and accepts death has taken the nobler road.¹⁰ The door opens both ways. God permits survival; he honours the martyr more. Neither door leads where the accusers are standing.

So look again at where the verse was born. A woman run through with a spear because she would not conceal her faith. Her son forgiven for concealing his, only because his body had been broken first. The whole account is about people who would sooner die than hide — and a God who would not condemn one of them for breaking under torture. On that, the counter-Islam industry has built a doctrine of infiltration and betrayal. They took the verse revealed over Sumayyah’s body and turned it into proof that her descendants cannot be trusted to tell you the time.

The Man at the Bottom of Hell

Set the exception aside now and look at the rule, because the rule is the thing they need you never to see.

Islam’s baseline on lying isn’t soft, or partial, or hedged. It’s a flat prohibition, stated and restated across the most widely taught collections in the faith. The Prophet: truthfulness leads to righteousness and righteousness to Paradise, and a man keeps telling the truth until God records him as truthful; falsehood leads to wickedness and wickedness to the Fire, and a man keeps lying until God records him as a liar.¹¹ Elsewhere, flatly: whoever cheats is not one of us.¹² The honest merchant, another hadith promises, will stand on the Day of Judgement among the prophets and the martyrs.¹³ This isn’t a faith that treats a lie as a tactic. It treats it as a road to Hell.

And it keeps a particular place in that Hell for one man above all: the hypocrite. The munafiq — the man who shows one face and hides another, who says with his mouth what he doesn’t hold in his heart — is no minor offender in Islam. The Qur’an sets him beneath the open disbeliever, in the lowest depths of the Fire.¹⁴ The Prophet drew his portrait in three strokes: when he speaks, he lies; when he promises, he breaks it; when he is trusted, he betrays.¹⁵

Read that portrait again, slowly. A man who lies as a matter of course, breaks his word, and betrays the trust of everyone who relies on him. That isn’t the Muslim of the faith. It’s the Muslim of the accusation — the taqiyya-practising infiltrator of the blog posts and the videos, smiling while he deceives. The counter-Islam industry has drawn its portrait of the typical Muslim, and it’s line for line the portrait the Qur’an draws of the man it sends to the bottom of Hell.

Even the exceptions refuse to help them. Islam does allow a lie in a few narrow places, and the hadith that lists them — on the authority of Umm Kulthum bint Uqba — gives the complete set: to make peace between two people at odds, to speak in war, and between a husband and wife to keep a marriage whole.¹⁶ Three. That is the entire list. Read it a hundred times and you will not find deceive the non-believer on it, or hide your faith to convert his children, or lie your way into his institutions. The exceptions are as narrow as the rule is broad, and there is no room in either for the thing the accusers describe.

So this was never a misreading. A misreading gets the emphasis wrong; this gets the faith backwards. They took the one figure Islam damns below all others — the two-faced man, the liar, the betrayer of a trust — and fixed his face onto every Muslim alive, and called that the doctrine. They didn’t misunderstand taqiyya. They took the man Islam sends to the bottom of Hell and told you he was the man in every mosque.

The War They Need

There’s one card left in their hand, and it’s the only one worth playing. The list of permitted lies has war on it, and war, they’ll tell you, is exactly the point — because Islam considers itself at war with the West. So the war-licence covers you: the neighbour, the commuter, the man at the next desk. This is the sophisticated version of the argument, the one the professionals reach for when the crude version fails. It fails too. It fails on the meaning of the word, and then it fails on what it reveals about the people making it.

Start with the word. The hadith says war is deceit, and the word behind “deceit” is khud’a — a battlefield stratagem, a ruse. Al-Nawawi, explaining it, is plain: it means misleading the enemy in combat, and it’s permitted in the state of war.¹⁷ It’s the feint, the false position, the army that looks weak the night before it strikes. And there’s nothing Islamic about it. The Hague and Geneva Conventions permit the ruse of war in so many words; every commander from antiquity to the last century has used it; Washington used it, and so did Eisenhower.¹⁸ Even the Middle East Forum’s own man, laying out the case against taqiyya, concedes that Sun Tzu and Machiavelli and Hobbes all sanctioned deceit in war. Deceiving an enemy on a battlefield isn’t a Muslim doctrine. It’s soldiering.

Now the part they never quote. The same scholars who permit the ruse draw a hard line through the middle of it. Al-Nawawi again: deceive the enemy in war by any means — except by breaking a treaty or a trust. That is forbidden.¹⁹ Treachery has its own name in Islamic law, ghadr, and it’s condemned outright; the Qur’an curses those who break their covenants, and the tradition warns that God hands the treacherous over to their enemies. Read that against the caricature. The smiling infiltrator who wins your confidence and betrays it — the very portrait they paint of the taqiyya-practising Muslim — is the one act the war-rule expressly outlaws. They reached for the exception that convicts their own picture.

And it convicts them twice over, because the rule was never only about armies and treaties. The Muslim who takes citizenship, leave to remain, or a visa — who agrees to stay for a length of time or live under a country’s laws in exchange for its protection — has entered a covenant, and the Qur’an commands the believer to honour his oaths. This isn’t a concession to the West; it’s a divine command. The Prophet set the precedent himself: when his first followers were hunted in Makkah, he sent them to shelter under the Christian king of Abyssinia, where they lived by their host’s law, kept their faith, and plotted against no one.²⁰ By that standard the Muslim who takes a country’s protection and then turns on it isn’t practising his religion — he’s breaking it. The loyalty they say he fakes is the very thing his faith demands.

And there’s a last turn they never see coming. For a great many Muslims, it is safer to practise Islam in the West than in much of the Muslim world — freer in London or New York than in Riyadh or Cairo, where a sermon against the regime can cost a man his liberty or his life. The very countries the fearmongers say Islam is scheming to bring down are, more often than not, the ones where a Muslim can live his or her faith freely. They have more reason than anyone to keep the covenant. It is the thing protecting them and worth protecting in return.

Which leaves only the bridge, and the bridge is where the whole argument gives itself away. To make a rule about the battlefield reach your neighbour’s kitchen, you have to claim the battlefield is everywhere — that Islam is at war with the West right now, in your street, at your border, in every mosque. That isn’t the belief of mainstream Islam; the Qur’an itself commands the believer to deal justly and kindly with the non-Muslim who is not fighting him.²¹ It was the belief of Osama bin Laden — that the world is permanently at war between Islam and everyone else, that there is no such thing as a Muslim living honestly under a non-Muslim government, and that any peace between them is a fiction waiting to be broken. The counter-Islam campaigner has to pick up that reading — al-Qaida’s reading — and press it onto two billion people who spend their lives disproving it, as neighbours, as citizens, as the family next door. And when one of them says he isn’t at war with you, the campaigner has his answer ready. Taqiyya.

So follow it all the way down and see where they’re standing. To convict the ordinary Muslim of a doctrine of war-deceit, they must first agree with the terrorist about what Islam is. The Islamophobe and the man in the cave hold the same article of faith — that Islam and the West are locked in permanent war — and every Muslim who denies it stands against them both. One side calls that Muslim an apostate. The other calls him a liar. Neither will let him simply be what he is: a man who is not at war with anyone.

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The Only One Charged

Here is where the accusation falls apart — not on the doctrine, but on the double standard. The act it describes — conceal what you believe when the truth would get you killed — isn’t a Muslim invention. It’s the oldest survival instinct there is, and every faith and every people that has ever been hunted has practised it. Islam’s one peculiarity is that it gave the reflex a name. For that, and that alone, Muslims are called uniquely deceitful.

Start with the book the accusers say they’re defending. It doesn’t merely permit concealment under threat — it takes the people who lie to save a life and makes them heroes.

When Pharaoh orders the Hebrew midwives to kill every newborn boy, Shiphrah and Puah refuse. Then they stand in front of the most powerful man in Egypt and lie to his face — the Hebrew women, they tell him, are too vigorous, they deliver before we ever arrive. It’s a fabrication, invented to cover a capital act of disobedience. And Scripture answers it in a single line: God dealt well with the midwives, and gave them households of their own.²²

Then Rahab. Two Israelite spies slip into Jericho and shelter in her house, and when the king’s men come to her door after them she has already hidden the two on her roof under stalks of drying flax. She looks the soldiers in the eye and tells them the men were here but left at dusk, and sends them chasing toward the fords of the Jordan while the spies lie flat above their heads. For that lie — not despite it, for it — she and her household are the only souls spared when Jericho falls. And the tradition doesn’t quietly forgive her. The Letter to the Hebrews sets her among the champions of faith, beside Abraham and Moses. The Letter of James holds her up as proof that faith shows itself in action — and the action he singles out, the works that justify her, is the deception at the door.²³ David, hunted and cornered, feigns madness before a hostile king to get out of his city alive, clawing at the gates and letting spit run down into his beard, and Scripture lets the ruse stand without a word of rebuke.²⁴ These aren’t obscure verses. They’re founding stories, and the lesson in each is the same: a lie told to keep a life is no sin in the biblical tradition. It’s counted as faith.

Then the history — and the people who lived it under the same knife the first Muslims did.

When the Spanish Inquisition gave the Jews of Iberia the choice to convert, flee, or burn, thousands took a fourth road: bow to the Church in the daylight and stay Jewish behind the shutters. The Conversos had their children baptised and taught them the Shema in secret; they ate pork at a Christian table and kept Passover in a locked room. No honest person reads that and calls them liars. They’re remembered as heroes of endurance, and their descendants keep their memory still. And every Yom Kippur eve, in synagogues the world over, the cantor chants Kol Nidre — the prayer that releases a soul from its vows — which Jewish memory has long bound to exactly those forced converts and the oaths wrung out of them under threat.²⁵

Now watch what was done with that prayer, because you’ve already seen it done once in this piece. For centuries, antisemites held Kol Nidre up to the world as proof of what they had decided in advance: that a Jew’s word is worthless, that here in his own liturgy he unbinds himself from his oaths on the holiest night of his year, that no promise a Jew makes can be trusted because his own religion dissolves it. They lifted the prayer clean out of its history of persecution and waved it as evidence of something rotten in the blood. They even had the mechanism wrong — Kol Nidre releases vows made to God, not promises made to other people, a distinction the rabbis had spelled out for centuries to anyone honest enough to ask.²⁶ Read that back slowly, and it is the same play they run on taqiyya: a prayer of the persecuted, torn from its context, stripped of its real meaning, and brandished as proof that a whole people is deceitful by blood. Same distortion, same theft, same conclusion — a different minority, an earlier century. The ones who sell taqiyya today are running the exact play their forerunners ran on the Jews, and failing to see that is how you fail to see it running now.

The Christians lived it too, wherever the power turned on them. In the first centuries they buried their dead and held their rites in the catacombs beneath Rome, and scratched a fish on the wall to tell a friend from an informer, because to be known was to be sent to the arena.²⁷ In Elizabethan England, Catholic families cut hidden chambers into the walls of their houses — priest holes, some barely larger than a coffin — and when the priest-hunters came hammering at the door, they lied, and held the lie steady while a man crouched silent behind the panelling for two days at a stretch. We don’t call those families deceivers; their church calls a number of them saints.²⁸ In Japan, after Christianity was outlawed in 1614, the Hidden Christians kept the faith alive for two and a half centuries with no priests and no churches — disguising the Virgin Mary as Kannon, the Buddhist goddess of mercy, so a statue on the shelf would read to the authorities as devotion to the wrong god, and passing the prayers down by mouth, in secret, generation after generation, until missionaries returning in the 1860s found them still there.²⁹ And within living memory, when Europe filled with cattle cars, Christians across the continent forged baptismal certificates, wrote false names into parish registers, and lied to the Gestapo across a kitchen table to keep the family in the cellar out of the ovens. We have a name for those people. We call them the Righteous Among the Nations, and their names are cut into stone at Yad Vashem — honoured for the courage of the lie.³⁰

And beneath all of it, quietly, the law itself agrees. Every Western legal system throws out a confession wrung from a suspect under duress, on the plain and ancient understanding that a man will say whatever he must to stop the pain, and that words forced out of him are not the truth. That’s taqiyya — the whole principle of it — sitting in the statute book of every country now being taught to fear the word.³¹

So here it is, laid flat. The principle is human, not Muslim. The Jews lived it and were smeared for a prayer about it. The Christians lived it and are canonised and memorialised for it. The law wrote it into its own foundations. Islam gave it a name — and for the single offence of naming what the whole human race has always done, its followers alone are branded the liars. The accusation was never about the doctrine. If it were, it would have to charge Rahab and the midwives, the Conversos and the priest-hole families and the Righteous of Yad Vashem, and the founding logic of Western law, all in the same breath. It charges none of them. It charges only the Muslim. Which tells you, in the end, what it always was. Not an argument about lying. An argument about who.

Who Holds the Blade

Return to the man with the screenshot — the one who posted the word like a trump card. Look at what’s left in his hand.

Nothing. No book called taqiyya to hold up. A Shia dispensation born of persecution, and a Sunni principle of necessity in the face of danger — neither of which means what he was told. A verse revealed to console a man tortured half to death, whose mother had been murdered for refusing to hide her faith. A religion that sends the liar to the bottom of Hell, and a battlefield rule that forbids the very treachery he thinks it commands. A principle every hunted people on earth has lived, and every court in the West has written into its law. Turn the accusation over, and there’s nothing on the other side of it.

So why does the lie hold? Because it was built to.

Look at what taqiyya actually requires, then watch the ones who wield it fail every part of it. Taqiyya needs a blade at the throat — mortal danger, real compulsion. It needs a heart that stays true beneath the forced words. And it answers, in the end, to God, who sees what the tongue hides. Real taqiyya is a frightened man’s dispensation, accountable to heaven for every use of it.

Now the industry. No one holds a blade to Robert Spencer’s throat. No one compels the Middle East Forum to cut the verse from its context, drop the story of Ammar, bury the war-rule’s own limits, and hide the plain fact that every scripture on their own shelves rests on the thing they call uniquely Muslim. They conceal all of it — freely, safely, for profit. Concealment without a single one of the conditions that ever excused it. They do the very thing they accuse, stripped of the only circumstance that ever made it forgivable.

That’s the case in one sentence. Taqiyya is what a man does when there’s a blade at his throat. What they do is hold the blade — and call him a liar for flinching.

And here’s why they can afford to. What they sell was never a fact; a fact can be checked, and thrown out when it fails. It’s a permission never to listen — a claim built so that every answer a Muslim gives counts as proof against him. A claim like that never wears out. It keeps a man suspicious for life, deaf in advance to every correction, sealed off from every Muslim who might have told him the truth. That’s why they need it in the air, and why they need you never to notice you’re the one breathing it.

The key only turns in your hand. That’s the trick, the whole of it: the claim works for exactly as long as you hear a Muslim’s answer as a confession instead of an answer. Every time you do, you turn it for them. Refuse, and it’s scrap — a key is nothing without a hand to work it, and the hand is yours to take away. You’ve read where the word comes from now, met the man it was revealed for, watched the war-rule forbid the very treachery it was supposed to license. You know the key for what it is.

So it is already dead in your hand — not because the men who forged it were argued out of anything, but because it was never built to work on a reader who lets a Muslim's answer be an answer. That is the one thing it cannot survive: an honest hearing.

But not everyone will. Some have already decided that a paid stranger on a screen knows a Muslim’s faith better than the Muslim does — and no verse reaches a man who picked whom to trust before the evidence arrived. Leave them. They were never the ones in play, and you don’t need them. The ones in play are the crowd behind them, far larger: the people who repeated the word once without staking anything on it, who can still be shown what it costs to carry. So put it in their hands and make them look. The ones who sell the lie have survived being wrong for years — what they can’t survive is being ignored. Every hand you reach is a hand that never closes around the key again. And a lie this size doesn’t die in an argument. It dies when the room stops filling.

Image: An auto-da-fé of the Spanish Inquisition and the execution of sentences by burning heretics at the stake in a market place.” Engraving by Bernard Picart. Credit: Wellcome Collection. CC BY 4.0.

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James S. Coates writes about geopolitics, international law, and the decline of civilisational accountability. His books include A Signal Through Time, The Threshold, The Road to Khurasan, the memoir God and Country (published under pen name Will Prentiss) and his forthcoming Neither Gods Nor Monsters. He publishes regularly on Fireline Press and The Signal Dispatch, and his academic work appears on PhilPapers. He lives in the UK, with his family and dog who has no interest in any of this.

© 2026 James S. Coates All Rights Reserved. Fireline Press · fireline.press

Endnotes

¹ Council on American-Islamic Relations, Hijacked by Hate: American Philanthropy and the Islamophobia Network (Washington, DC: CAIR, 2019). Figures for 2014–2016 drawn from publicly available IRS tax filings via GuideStar and the Foundation Directory Online, including the donor-advised-fund and faith-based-charity channels (Fidelity Charitable, Schwab Charitable, the National Christian Foundation, the Jewish Communal Fund).

² Raymond Ibrahim (associate director, Middle East Forum), “How Taqiyya Alters Islam’s Rules of War,” Middle East Quarterly 17, no. 1 (Winter 2010); see also “Islam’s Doctrines of Deception,” Middle East Forum, 2009.

³ Center for Security Policy, Shariah: The Threat to America (2010), which casts taqiyya as religiously mandated deception practised by observant Muslims; documented in Center for American Progress, Fear, Inc.: The Roots of the Islamophobia Network in America (2011).

⁴ On Robert Spencer’s use of taqiyya to argue that Muslims cannot swear oaths honestly: Southern Poverty Law Center, extremist-files profile, “Robert Spencer.”

⁵ Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed., s.v. “Taḳiyya”: the term derives from the Arabic root w-q-y, “to guard” or “to protect oneself.”

⁶ On the Shia as roughly a tenth of the world’s Muslims: Pew Research Center, Mapping the Global Muslim Population (2009). On taqiyya’s development as a formal doctrine among the Shia under Sunni-majority rule: Etan Kohlberg, “Some Imāmī-Shīʿī Views on Taqiyya,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 95 (1975).

⁷ On the term’s presence in Sunni Qur’anic exegesis, see al-Tabari and Ibn Kathir on Qur’an 3:28.

⁸ Qur’an 6:119 (”He has detailed to you what He has forbidden you, save that to which you are compelled”); idtirar (necessity) and ikrah (coercion) are the Sunni juristic categories governing what is excused under duress.

⁹ On the family of Yasir, the martyrdom of Sumayyah bint Khayyat, and the revelation of Qur’an 16:106 in response to Ammar ibn Yasir’s ordeal: the sira of Ibn Ishaq and the occasion-of-revelation (asbab al-nuzul) tradition, as recorded in the tafsir of al-Tabari and Ibn Kathir on the verse.

¹⁰ Al-Tabari, Jami’ al-Bayan, on Qur’an 16:106: concealment is excused only under mortal danger, and the one who refuses and accepts death takes the nobler course. The same preference for martyrdom over the dispensation is recorded in Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani, Fath al-Bari (commentary on Sahih al-Bukhari).

¹¹ On truthfulness leading to Paradise and falsehood to the Fire: Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim (narrated by Abdullah ibn Mas’ud).

¹² “Whoever cheats is not one of us”: Sahih Muslim.

¹³ On the truthful and trustworthy merchant standing among the prophets, the truthful and the martyrs: Jami’ al-Tirmidhi.

¹⁴ Qur’an 4:145 (”the hypocrites will be in the lowest depths of the Fire”).

¹⁵ On the three signs of the hypocrite: Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim (narrated by Abu Hurayra).

¹⁶ On the three circumstances in which a lie is permitted — reconciliation between people, war, and speech between spouses: Sahih Muslim, on the authority of Umm Kulthum bint Uqba (no. 2605).

¹⁷ “War is deceit”: Sahih al-Bukhari (no. 3029) and Sahih Muslim (no. 58). Al-Nawawi, in his commentary on Sahih Muslim, glosses khud’a as a stratagem for misleading the enemy, permitted in the state of war.

¹⁸ On the ruse of war as lawful in the international law of armed conflict: Hague Regulations (1907), Art. 24, and Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions (1977), Art. 37(2) (ruses permitted; perfidy prohibited). On the universality of military deception across commanders and traditions: Joel Hayward, “War is Deceit: An Analysis of a Contentious Hadith on the Morality of Military Deception” (Royal Islamic Strategic Studies Centre); the same universality — Sun Tzu, Machiavelli, Hobbes — is conceded in Ibrahim’s article at note 2 above. On the two commanders named: George Washington’s battlefield deceptions in the War of Independence (feints and inflated estimates of his strength), and Eisenhower’s Operation Bodyguard — its Fortitude component the fictional army group that fixed German forces at the Pas-de-Calais and away from Normandy in 1944.

¹⁹ Al-Nawawi: deception of the enemy in war is permissible by any means “except breaking a treaty or trust,” which is forbidden. The principle of amān (safe-conduct) binds the one who receives it: a person admitted under a guarantee of safety may not betray it — a rule the classical jurists of siyar, al-Shaybani and al-Sarkhasi, apply to anyone who enters under protection, and which modern scholars extend to a visa or residence granted by a host state, so that betraying the country one lives under is itself treachery. On the prohibition of treachery (ghadr) more broadly: Qur’an 8:56–58, and the report of Ibn Abbas in Malik’s Muwatta (”no people betray their covenant but that God gives their enemies power over them”).

²⁰ On the command to honour oaths and covenants: Qur’an 5:89 (see also 5:1; 16:91). On the first migration to Abyssinia — the Prophet sending his persecuted followers to live under the Christian king (the Negus), where they kept their host’s law and practised their faith unmolested: the sira of Ibn Ishaq.

²¹ Qur’an 60:8 (”God does not forbid you from being righteous and just toward those who do not fight you over religion or drive you from your homes”). The reading that places Islam in a state of perpetual active war with all non-Muslims (dar al-Harb) is the militant one, exemplified in the bin Laden statements marshalled in Ibrahim’s article at note 2 above.

²² Exodus 1:15–21 (the Hebrew midwives Shiphrah and Puah; “God dealt well with the midwives”).

²³ Joshua 2 (Rahab conceals the spies); Hebrews 11:31; James 2:25 (”justified by works”).

²⁴ 1 Samuel 21:10–15 (David feigns madness before Achish, king of Gath).

²⁵ On the Conversos (Marranos) of the Spanish Inquisition: standard histories. On Kol Nidre: the prayer is attested well before the Spanish Inquisition (Geonic period, 8th–9th centuries), and its popular association with forced conversion is traditional rather than a settled historical origin. See Encyclopaedia Judaica, s.v. “Kol Nidrei.”

²⁶ Kol Nidre annuls only vows between a person and God, not obligations to other people — a distinction rabbinic authorities have stressed for centuries against precisely this misreading.

²⁷ On the early Christian catacombs and the ichthys (fish) as a covert identifier: standard histories of the early Church.

²⁸ On Catholic recusancy and the concealment of priests (”priest holes”) in Elizabethan England: standard histories.

²⁹ On the Kakure Kirishitan (Hidden Christians) of Japan — the faith outlawed in 1614, the surviving communities rediscovered in 1865: standard histories.

³⁰ On the Righteous Among the Nations, honoured at Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center.

³¹ On the inadmissibility of confessions or testimony obtained under duress, a foundational principle of Western legal systems.

When his father died, his Palestinian mother took him home to Lydda. He was raised there. He received his Christian faith from her. He grew up in Palestine, lived in Palestine, and was martyred by Roman Pagans in or near Lydda in 303 CE for refusing to renounce his faith. He is buried in Lydda, where his tomb still stands today in the Greek Orthodox Church of St George.

The original cult of St George began in Palestine and only later spread to Cappadocia and the West. Palestinian Christians at Al-Khader, near Bethlehem, have venerated him as one of their own for seventeen hundred years. Palestinian Muslims revere him under the name Al-Khidr, “The Green One,” whom the Qur’an names. Christian and Muslim Palestinians celebrate his feast day together on 6 May.

England did not adopt him as patron saint until King Edward III in the fourteenth century — over a thousand years after his death.

By mother, by upbringing, by faith, by life, by martyrdom, by burial, and by the seventeen centuries of continuous local devotion in the land of his death, St George was Palestinian.

The cross he died under is not a weapon against his own people. It belongs to a saint who refused to bow to empire.

SOURCES

1. Yolande Knell, “Why St George is a Palestinian hero,” BBC News Magazine, 23 April 2014. Cited as an authoritative external reference by Encyclopædia Britannica. Quotes Greek Orthodox Archbishop Atallah Hanna confirming St George as a Palestinian martyr.

2. St. George, Encyclopædia Britannica. “St. George (flourished 3rd century—died, traditionally Lydda, Palestine) … His remains were taken to Lydda, the homeland of his mother.”

3. 9 Things You Didn’t Know About St George, English Heritage (UK official heritage body). Confirms Palestine as the place where St George “lived and died” and as the home of his tomb and the centre of his earliest cult.

4. Editor, “St George’s Middle East links and legends,” Embrace the Middle East (UK registered charity 1076329), 22 April 2024. Section titled “St George the Palestinian.”

5. Anthony Cooney, St George of Lydda: Patron Saint of England (UK pamphlet, Royal Society of St George affiliated material). States: “George was born in 270 AD to Christian parents in Lydda, now Lod, located on the Plain of Sharon, Palestine.” Author of The Story of St George and Saint George: Knight of Lydda.

6. History of St. George, The Royal Society of Saint George (England’s official society, founded 1894, Royal Charter, Patron HM King Charles III). Confirms Lydda burial: “his remains are said to have been buried in the church that bears his name in Lydda.”

7. St George, Martyr, Vatican News (Holy See official). Confirms move to Palestine, life there, martyrdom, and burial in Lydda.

8. Eusebius of Caesarea, Historia Ecclesiastica (4th century). Records the building of a church in Lydda during the reign of Constantine I (r. 306–337) — the earliest documentary reference to the site that became the Church of St George.

9.Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem, Church of St George, Lod. The continuous Christian shrine over the tomb of St George since the 4th century.

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James S. Coates writes about geopolitics, international law, and the decline of civilisational accountability. His books include A Signal Through Time, The Threshold, The Road to Khurasan, the memoir God and Country (published under pen name Will Prentiss) and his forthcoming Neither Gods Nor Monsters. He publishes regularly on Fireline Press and The Signal Dispatch, and his academic work appears on PhilPapers. He lives in the UK, with his family and dog who has no interest in any of this.

© 2026 James S. Coates All Rights Reserved. Fireline Press · fireline.press

Endnotes

They demand the attacks stop. They require guarantees the war won’t be restarted the moment it’s convenient. They insist on compensation for the damage. They refuse any settlement that doesn’t cover all fronts — not just the one the US feels like negotiating. And they assert their sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz — a waterway they have controlled for centuries.

Does that sound crazy? Ask the people making the demands what happens when they try to negotiate instead.

On 1 April 2026, an airstrike hit the Tehran home of Kamal Kharazi — Iran’s former foreign minister, head of the Strategic Council on Foreign Relations, and an adviser to the late Supreme Leader. His wife was killed. He was pulled from the rubble gravely wounded. Just weeks earlier, he had told CNN: “Trump had been deceiving others and not keeping with his promises, and we experienced this in two times of negotiations — that while we were engaged in negotiation, they struck us.”¹

That sentence is not propaganda. It is a factual description of what happened — twice. And it was spoken by a man whose home has now been bombed.

Set aside, for a moment, everything you think you know about Iran. Set aside the cable news framing and the congressional sound bites and the op-eds that treat the Islamic Republic as a monolith of irrationality. Ask a simpler question: if a country were attacked during active peace negotiations, its leader killed on the first day, its universities and hospitals bombed, its civilians buried under rubble — what would that country ask for before it agreed to stop fighting?

It would ask for exactly what Iran is asking for.

The problem is not that Iran’s demands are irrational. The problem is that the United States does not understand the framework that produced them — the civilisational identity, the moral logic, the cultural and religious architecture through which Iran processes conflict, obligation, and resolution. And because the US does not understand that framework, it cannot read what Iran is saying. It hears noise where there is signal. It sees madness where there is a coherent tradition older than most Western legal systems.

This is not a defence of the Islamic Republic. This is not an argument that Iran’s government is just or its conduct beyond reproach. This is something more basic: you cannot negotiate with someone whose language you refuse to learn. And right now, the United States — from the Oval Office to the Pentagon briefing room to the Fox News desk — is negotiating blind, with a country it has decided in advance is incapable of reason.

That is not strategy. It is arrogance. And it has a cost that is measured in the lives of the people on both sides who will die while their leaders talk past each other in languages neither has bothered to understand.

The country the United States is bombing is not the country the United States thinks it is bombing.

Ask most Americans what they know about Iran and the answers will cluster around 1979: the revolution, the hostages, the ayatollahs. Maybe the nuclear programme. Maybe Ahmadinejad. Iran, in the American imagination, begins with the Islamic Republic and extends no further. It is a theocracy, a rogue state, a problem to be managed. It has no depth. It has no past worth knowing.

Iran has a past worth knowing.

The Persian Empire under Cyrus the Great was the largest the world had seen when it was founded in the sixth century BCE — more than two thousand years before the United States existed. When Cyrus conquered Babylon in 539 BCE, he did something no conqueror before him had done: he freed the enslaved, permitted exiled peoples to return to their homelands, and declared that his subjects could worship as they chose. The decree he issued — inscribed on a clay cylinder now held in the British Museum, with a replica at the United Nations — has been called the first declaration of human rights.² Scholars debate that characterisation, and they should. But the impulse behind it — that governance requires tolerance, that empire is sustained by consent rather than coercion, that diverse peoples can be administered under a common framework of justice — is not debatable. It happened. It was Persian. And it predated the Magna Carta by nearly two thousand years.

This is not ancient trivia. It is the civilisational identity that Iranians carry with them every day. Persian contributions to mathematics, astronomy, medicine, poetry, architecture, and philosophy shaped the foundations of what the West claims as its own intellectual heritage. The algorithms that power your phone trace their name to the Persian mathematician al-Khwarizmi. The medical canon that European universities taught for centuries was written by the Persian physician Ibn Sina. The poetry of Rumi — the best-selling poet in America — is Persian. The gardens that gave English the word “paradise” are Persian.³

When Iran’s leaders speak about sovereignty, dignity, and the right to be treated as equals, they are not posturing. They are speaking from a civilisational memory that stretches back millennia — a memory that regards the current conflict not as a dispute between a superpower and a rogue state, but as an assault by a country barely two and a half centuries old on one of the oldest continuous civilisations on earth.

The American reader does not have to agree with that framing. But they need to know it exists. Because every signal Iran sends — every condition it sets, every demand it makes, every refusal to beg — is shaped by it. Miss this, and you will misread everything that follows.

Now place yourself inside Iran on the morning of 28 February 2026.

Negotiations were underway. Not hypothetical negotiations. Not back-channel feelers. Actual, mediated, internationally witnessed talks aimed at preventing a war. Three rounds of Omani-mediated indirect negotiations had taken place — the first in Muscat on 6 February, the second and third in Geneva on 17 and 26 February. On the eve of the third round, Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi told India Today that a deal was achievable and warned that war would be “devastating.”⁴ After the Geneva session concluded on 26 February, Oman’s Foreign Minister Badr bin Hamad Al Busaidi reported “significant progress.” Technical teams were scheduled to meet in Vienna the following week to begin drafting an agreement. On 27 February — one day before the strikes — Al Busaidi appeared on CBS News in Washington and told the American public that a peace deal was “within our reach.” He disclosed that Iran had agreed to never stockpile enriched uranium, to downgrade its existing stockpiles, and to submit to full IAEA verification.⁵

On 28 February, the United States and Israel struck. The Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was killed on the first day.⁶ Schools were hit. Hospitals were hit. Residential buildings were hit. Cultural heritage sites were hit. Within hours, Iran’s national security council issued a statement promising retaliation, and the country was at war — a war it had been actively trying to prevent through the very diplomatic channels the US claims to value.

From inside Iran, the sequence is not ambiguous. They were negotiating. They had made concessions. A mediator was on American television saying it was working. And then they were bombed. The supreme leader was assassinated. Their cities were on fire.

The US calls this a pre-emptive strike. Iran calls it a betrayal — an attack launched under cover of a peace process. And the historical record gives Iran’s reading considerable weight: the June 2025 ceasefire had already collapsed after eight months. The JCPOA — the nuclear deal Iran negotiated, signed, and complied with — was unilaterally abandoned by the US in 2018 while Iran was still in compliance. From Tehran’s perspective, the pattern is not complicated. The United States negotiates until it decides not to. Then it attacks. Then it asks to negotiate again.

That is the context in which Iran’s conditions were issued. Not in a vacuum. Not from a position of irrational aggression. From the wreckage of a peace process that was working until the other side decided to start killing people instead.

And the killing has not stopped at military targets. Ali Larijani — secretary of the supreme national security council, former speaker of parliament, former chief nuclear negotiator, the man who helped steer the JCPOA — was killed by an Israeli airstrike on 17 March 2026.⁷ His son died with him. His bodyguards died with him. He was the tenth senior Iranian official killed since the war began. He had been seen days earlier walking the streets of Tehran during the Quds Day rally. He had been considered one of the more pragmatic figures in the Iranian establishment — a man who might have brokered a transition at the end of the conflict. Israel killed him anyway. The US had placed a $10 million bounty on his head.⁸

Iran’s national security council announced his death in the language of martyrdom: “After a lifetime of struggle for the advancement of Iran and of the Islamic Revolution, he ultimately attained his long-held aspiration, answered the divine call, and honourably achieved the sweet grace of martyrdom in the trench of service.”⁹

Western audiences hear that language and dismiss it as propaganda. It is not propaganda. It is how Iran processes the death of its people. Martyrdom in the Islamic tradition is not a euphemism for dying. It is a theological category — it confers honour on the dead and obligation on the living. Every official killed, every civilian buried under rubble, every student who died when a university was hit — their deaths create a moral debt. In Iran’s framework, the blood of the innocent is not “collateral damage” to be regretted in a press briefing and moved past. It is an obligation. The dead have rights. The living owe them justice.

This is the worldview that produced the five conditions. Not madness. Not theocratic delusion. A civilisation processing an act of aggression through a moral framework in which unpunished harm to the innocent is an offence against God, and unanswered blood is unfinished business.

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On 25 March 2026, as reported by Press TV and confirmed by NPR, Al Jazeera, CNBC, and PBS, a senior Iranian political-security official set out five conditions for ending the war.¹⁰ Foreign Minister Araghchi insisted these were not “conditions” but “what reason dictates” — a phrase that carries more weight than Western audiences realise. In Iran’s intellectual tradition, reason and faith are not opposed. What reason dictates and what God requires are understood to converge. Araghchi was not making a rhetorical point. He was invoking a framework.¹¹

Here are the five conditions, and what each one actually means.

Stop attacking us.

This is not a negotiating position. It is a moral starting point.

In Iran’s framework — shaped by both Islamic theology and Persian civilisational identity — war is only legitimate as defence. The Quran is explicit: fight those who fight you, but do not transgress.¹² The prohibition on aggression is not a guideline. It is a boundary with the force of divine command behind it. The demand that the aggressor stop is not the first item on a wish list. It is the precondition for any conversation at all.

Western audiences hear “stop the attacks” and think: of course, that’s what ceasefires are for. But Iran is not asking for a ceasefire. It is asserting a principle — that the party who started the killing has a moral obligation to stop before anything else can be discussed. From inside this framework, asking Iran to negotiate while the bombs are still falling is not diplomacy. It is asking the victim to set terms while being beaten.

Araghchi’s insistence that these are “what reason dictates” rather than conditions makes sense here. Iran is not bargaining. It is stating what it considers self-evident: the aggressor stops first. Everything else follows from that.

Guarantee it won’t happen again.

This is the condition that reveals most clearly why the US and Iran are talking past each other.

Iran is not asking for a ceasefire. Araghchi has said this repeatedly, in interviews with NBC, CBS, Al Jazeera, and the BBC: “We do not want a ceasefire. We want the war to end in a way that it does not repeat.”¹³ The distinction matters enormously, and the US either does not understand it or has decided it does not care.

A ceasefire is a pause. Iran has seen what American pauses look like. The JCPOA — the nuclear deal Iran negotiated, signed, and complied with — was unilaterally abandoned by the US in 2018 while Iran was still in compliance, because a new president decided his predecessor’s agreement was inconvenient.¹⁴ The June 2025 ceasefire lasted eight months before the US and Israel struck again.¹⁵ Now, in 2026, negotiations were underway — three rounds of Omani-mediated talks, technical teams scheduled for Vienna — and the US launched a war in the middle of them.

The pattern, from Iran’s perspective, is not complicated: the US negotiates until it decides not to. Then it attacks. Then it asks to negotiate again. And the people who do the negotiating get killed.

Ali Larijani — former chief nuclear negotiator, the man who helped steer the JCPOA — killed by an Israeli airstrike alongside his son on 17 March 2026.¹⁶ Kamal Kharazi — former foreign minister, head of the Strategic Council on Foreign Relations — pulled from the rubble of his own home on 1 April 2026, gravely wounded, his wife dead beside him. Weeks earlier, Kharazi had told CNN he saw “no room for diplomacy” with the US, but had also been quoted saying Iran had not shut down all avenues for negotiation.¹⁷ Both men were among the more pragmatic figures in Iran’s establishment. Both were seen as potential bridges to a settlement. Both were targeted.

So when Iran demands “concrete mechanisms to ensure the war is not reimposed” — it is not being difficult. It is responding rationally to a demonstrated pattern. In Iran’s legal and moral tradition, a binding agreement is fundamentally different from a truce. A truce is a pause in fighting — temporary, revocable, built on nothing but the other side’s word. What Iran is asking for is a contractual commitment with structural guarantees and enforceable consequences for violation.¹⁸ The historical model they draw from — the Treaty of Hudaybiyya of 628 CE — is a case in which the Prophet Muhammad accepted disadvantageous terms to secure a genuine, binding peace. Not a tactical pause. An end.¹⁹

Iran has watched the US break the JCPOA. It has watched the US break the June 2025 ceasefire. It has watched the US launch a war during active negotiations. It has watched its negotiators get killed. The demand for structural guarantees is not obstruction. It is the rational response of a country that has learned, through repeated experience, that American promises have an expiration date — and that expiration date is whenever America decides it is.

Pay for the damage — because the dead have rights.

This is the condition Western audiences are most likely to dismiss, and the one they most need to understand.

Iran’s demand for reparations is not a financial shakedown. It is a moral claim rooted in a principle that predates Western tort law by centuries: when you harm someone, you owe them. Not an apology. Not a press conference expressing regret. A material acknowledgment of what was done, with consequences attached.

In Iran’s moral tradition, the response to harm follows a hierarchy. The victim has the right to proportional retribution — but compensation is preferred, and forgiveness is praised as the highest response.²⁰ Forgiveness, however, is a choice the victim makes. It is not something the aggressor gets to claim by default. You do not get to bomb a country’s universities, hospitals, and homes, kill its leader, kill its negotiators, kill its civilians — and then expect the conversation to move on because you are ready to move on.

The dead have rights. That is not a metaphor in Iran’s framework. It is a legal and theological principle. Every civilian killed, every student buried under a collapsed university, every family destroyed by a strike on a residential building — their blood creates an obligation that does not expire when the news cycle moves on. Unanswered blood is unfinished business. For Iran, moving forward without that acknowledgment is not pragmatism. It is moral capitulation — a betrayal of the dead by the living.

And before anyone dismisses this as uniquely Islamic or exotic: the West knows exactly how this works. The Treaty of Versailles extracted 132 billion gold marks from Germany.²¹ The UN Compensation Commission made Iraq pay $52.4 billion to Kuwait over thirty-one years — funded by Iraqi oil revenue — for the damage caused by its invasion.²² Libya paid $2.7 billion for the Lockerbie bombing — $10 million per victim.²³ The United States designed those enforcement mechanisms. It built them. It operated them. It collected the money.

Iran is asking for the same thing. The only difference is who is asking.

Everyone at the table, or nobody.

Iran will not make a deal that leaves Hezbollah, the Houthis, or Iraqi militias exposed. Araghchi told Al Jazeera: “We don’t believe in a ceasefire. We believe in ending the war on all fronts … and that we witness peace throughout the region, in Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq, Iran and other countries of the region.”²⁴

Western analysts hear this as obstruction — Iran linking unrelated conflicts to complicate negotiations. But inside Iran’s framework, these conflicts are not unrelated. They are threads in a single fabric. The groups Iran supports are not pawns to be sacrificed in a bilateral deal. They are allies under fire, and the prohibition on abandoning allies is foundational.

This principle goes back to the Constitution of Medina — the earliest Islamic political charter, which bound diverse tribal and religious communities into a mutual defence pact. The principle it established is simple: you do not make peace for yourself while your people are still at war. Leaving your allies behind is not pragmatism. It is dishonour.²⁵

The strategic dimension is real — Iran understands that the US wants to peel off its allies one by one through bilateral agreements, isolating each in turn. But the refusal is not purely strategic. It reflects a worldview in which solidarity under fire is a moral obligation, not a negotiating chip. The theological and the strategic align — and when they align, they reinforce each other in ways that make the position unshakeable from the inside, even when it looks inflexible from the outside.

The West, again, already understands this concept. The Allies did not negotiate with Germany while leaving Japan out of the conversation. NATO is a mutual defence pact — an attack on one is an attack on all. The principle of comprehensive settlement is not alien to Western diplomacy. It is just considered unreasonable when Iran invokes it.

Recognise our sovereignty over Hormuz.

This is the demand that generates the most outrage and requires the least explanation.

Iran has controlled the northern shore of the Strait of Hormuz for centuries. The strait’s shipping lanes pass through Iranian and Omani territorial waters. The demand is not for new territory. It is for acknowledgment of something that already exists — and has existed for longer than the United States has been a country.²⁶

The monetisation angle — Iran charging ships for passage — has drawn particular fury. But Egypt charges for the Suez Canal and earns $700–800 million a month from it.²⁷ Turkey controls the Bosporus under the Montreux Convention of 1936.²⁸ Nobody calls them rogue states. Nobody calls their sovereignty over a strategic waterway irrational. The principle that a nation can regulate and profit from a waterway that passes through its territorial waters is established international practice — when Western-aligned nations do it.

Iran sees Hormuz as two things simultaneously: a sovereign right and a guarantee. If the US breaks its word again — as it broke the JCPOA, as it broke the June 2025 ceasefire, as it broke the Geneva negotiations — Iran retains leverage that does not depend on American honesty. Hormuz is the guarantee Iran can enforce itself, because it has learned that guarantees dependent on American goodwill have a shelf life measured in election cycles.

The legal picture is genuinely complicated — Iran signed but never ratified the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, and its position that innocent passage rather than transit passage applies gives it broader regulatory authority than most maritime lawyers would accept.²⁹ This article is not going to resolve that legal dispute. But the reader should understand that the demand itself — sovereignty over a waterway that passes through your territory — is not radical. It is normal. It is only treated as outrageous because Iran is the one asserting it.

There is something else nobody in Western media has identified, and it may be the most important signal Iran is sending.

Iran has anchored its conduct in international law from the start. Araghchi invokes illegality constantly. The war violates the UN Charter. It violates the sovereignty of a member state. It was launched during active negotiations. Iran’s public position — repeated in interviews with NBC, CBS, Al Jazeera, the BBC, CNN, and India Today — is that it is the aggrieved party operating within the law, responding to an illegal war of aggression.

But where Iran has deviated from international law, it has done so with a specific and consistent logic: it mirrors. It waits for the other side to cross a line, and then it crosses the same line — and only that line.

On 7 March, Iranian Foreign Minister Araghchi accused the US of striking a desalination plant on Qeshm Island, cutting water to thirty villages. His statement on X was precise: “The US set this precedent, not Iran.”³⁰ The next day, an Iranian drone hit a desalination plant in Bahrain.³¹ When Israel struck the Mobarakeh and Khuzestan steel plants, Iran declared six steel plants in Israel and five regional countries as retaliatory targets.³² When coalition strikes hit the South Pars gas field, Iran struck the Haifa oil refineries.³³ When strikes hit the Natanz nuclear facility, Iran fired on Dimona — the site of Israel’s own nuclear programme.³⁴ When the Tehran University of Science and Technology and Isfahan University of Technology were struck, the IRGC declared all American and Israeli universities in the region legitimate targets, and gave the US until noon on 30 March to officially condemn the bombing of Iranian universities — or face retaliation.³⁵

The pattern is not escalation. It is equivalence. Iran waits for the other side to open a category of target, and then it responds within that category. Desalination for desalination. Steel for steel. Gas for oil. Nuclear for nuclear. University for university.

Iran’s parliament speaker, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, made the principle explicit on 10 March: the Islamic Republic would apply an “eye for an eye” policy.³⁶ He repeated it a week later. The phrase is not a metaphor. It is a direct reference to the Quranic principle of proportional retribution — respond with the equivalent of what was done to you, no more. The Arabic term is qisas: like for like, measured, bounded.³⁷

Whether you agree with this or not — and there are strong arguments against it, particularly when the “equivalent” targets are in countries that did not start the war — it is a coherent moral framework. It is operating. It is shaping targeting decisions in real time. Iran sees itself as the disciplined party in this conflict — the one that held to international law until the other side violated it, then applied its own principle of equivalence category by category. The US hits whatever it wants and calls it strategy. Iran hits the equivalent and calls it justice.

The reader does not need to accept Iran’s framing to understand that it exists. But they do need to understand that it exists — because it is shaping every signal Iran sends, and the US is either not seeing it or has decided it does not matter. Both options lead to the same place: a negotiating table where one side does not understand the language the other side is speaking.

The United States is in a war it launched during a peace process, against a country whose civilisational identity it does not understand, whose moral framework it has never bothered to learn, and whose conditions for ending the war it has dismissed as irrational — while making identical demands every time it finds itself in the same position.

This is not the first time.

The United States invaded Vietnam — a civilisation with a thousand years of resistance to foreign domination — and reduced it to a domino on a board game. It lost. It invaded Afghanistan — a civilisation at the crossroads of Persian, Central Asian, and Indian cultures, governed by tribal structures, honour codes, and community obligations the US never made any effort to understand. It spent twenty years there. It built nothing that lasted. It left. It invaded Iraq — Mesopotamia, the cradle of civilisation, the land of Babylon and the Abbasid Caliphate that preserved and advanced the knowledge Europe forgot during the Dark Ages. It dismantled the state, disbanded the army, and imposed a governance model with no understanding of the sectarian, tribal, and religious dynamics that actually hold Iraqi society together. It created ISIS. And now it is bombing Iran — one of the oldest continuous civilisations on earth — and it cannot tell you what the other side’s conditions mean, where they come from, or why they take the form they do.

The pattern is not complicated. Ancient civilisation with deep internal logic. American intervention with no cultural literacy. Catastrophic failure. Withdrawal. And then the same mistake again, somewhere else, against someone else the US has decided in advance is incapable of reason. Vietnam. Afghanistan. Iraq. Iran. The laboratory changes. The experiment is always the same. And it always fails — because the United States does not lose wars on the battlefield. It loses them at the negotiating table, where it sits down across from people it has never bothered to understand and discovers, too late, that it doesn’t speak the language.

Iran’s five conditions are not crazy. They are the product of a civilisation processing an act of aggression through a framework built on three things the US has refused to engage with: a civilisational pride that stretches back thousands of years and will not accept being treated as a subordinate; a religious and moral obligation to the innocent dead that does not expire when the news cycle moves on; and a principle of proportional, bounded response that Iran has applied with more consistency than the country bombing it.

Every one of these conditions has a Western precedent. Reparations — Versailles, Kuwait, Lockerbie. Structural guarantees against recurrence — NATO, the Marshall Plan. Sovereignty over a strategic waterway — Suez, the Bosporus. Comprehensive settlement covering all fronts — the Allied settlement of the Second World War. The demands are not foreign. They are only treated as foreign because Iran is the one making them.

You do not have to agree with Iran to understand Iran. But you do have to understand Iran to negotiate with Iran. And right now, the United States is not even trying. It has decided in advance that the other side is incapable of reason, and it is conducting its diplomacy accordingly. The results are on the evening news every night. They were on the evening news after Saigon. They were on the evening news after Kabul. They were on the evening news after Baghdad. And they will be on the evening news after Tehran — because the United States refuses to learn the lesson that every failed war has tried to teach it.

Understanding is not agreement. Understanding is not sympathy. Understanding is the minimum requirement for competent diplomacy. And the United States has never met it. Not in Vietnam. Not in Afghanistan. Not in Iraq. Not now.

That failure has a name. It is called arrogance. And it is measured in bodies.

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James S. Coates writes about geopolitics, international law, and the decline of civilisational accountability. His books include A Signal Through Time, The Threshold, The Road to Khurasan, the memoir God and Country (published under pen name Will Prentiss) and his forthcoming Neither Gods Nor Monsters. He publishes regularly on Fireline Press and The Signal Dispatch, and his academic work appears on PhilPapers. He lives in the UK, with his family and dog who has no interest in any of this.

© 2026 James S. Coates All Rights Reserved. Fireline Press · fireline.press

Banner image: Azadi Tower, Tehran, October 2020. Photograph by Mojde fr / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Endnotes

¹ Kamal Kharazi, interview with CNN, quoted in Al Jazeera, “Iran’s ex-foreign minister Kharazi ‘gravely wounded’ in attack on his home,” 2 April 2026. Kharazi’s home in Tehran was struck on 1 April 2026; his wife was killed and he was hospitalised with serious injuries.

² The Cyrus Cylinder (539 BCE) is held in the British Museum, with a replica at the United Nations headquarters in New York. It has been widely described as the first declaration of human rights, a characterisation promoted by Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in the 1960s and endorsed by the British Museum for its US tour in 2013. Specialist scholars on the Persian Empire, including the British Museum’s own C.B.F. Walker, have noted that the cylinder is more accurately described as a building inscription in the Babylonian tradition. The debate over its characterisation does not diminish the substance of its content — religious tolerance, the return of exiled peoples, the restoration of temples — which was remarkable for its time.

³ The word “paradise” derives from the Old Persian pairidaēza, meaning an enclosed garden. Al-Khwarizmi (c. 780–850 CE), born in Khwarazm (modern Uzbekistan) in the Persian cultural sphere, gave his name to the concept of the algorithm; his work Kitāb al-Jabr also gave English the word “algebra.” Ibn Sina (Avicenna, 980–1037 CE), a Persian polymath born near Bukhara, authored The Canon of Medicine, which remained a standard medical textbook in European universities into the seventeenth century. Rumi (Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī, 1207–1273) has been described as the best-selling poet in the United States; see Rozina Ali, “The Erasure of Islam from the Poetry of Rumi,” The New Yorker, 5 January 2017.

⁴ Araghchi’s pre-Geneva comments reported by India Today, 25 February 2026. He warned that war would be “devastating” and stated that a deal was achievable.

⁵ Al Busaidi’s CBS News appearance, 27 February 2026. He described the talks as “really advanced, substantially” and disclosed Iran’s agreement to never stockpile enriched uranium, downgrade existing stockpiles, and accept full IAEA verification. See also Al Jazeera, “Peace ‘within reach’ as Iran agrees no nuclear material stockpile: Oman FM,” 28 February 2026.

⁶ US-Israeli strikes on Iran began 28 February 2026. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed on the first day. See Congressional Research Service, “U.S. Conflict with Iran,” R48887, 26 March 2026; Wikipedia, “2026 Iran war.”

⁷ Ali Larijani killed by Israeli airstrike, 17 March 2026. His son and bodyguards died with him. He was the tenth senior Iranian official killed since the war began. Patrick Wintour and Lorenzo Tondo, “Iran’s national security council confirms death of its chief, Ali Larijani,” The Guardian, 17 March 2026.

⁸ The US offered a reward of up to $10 million for information on senior Iranian military and intelligence officials, including Larijani, as part of a list of ten figures linked to the IRGC. The Guardian, 17 March 2026.

⁹ Statement of Iran’s supreme national security council on Larijani’s death, quoted in The Guardian, 17 March 2026.

¹⁰ Iran’s five conditions reported by Press TV, citing a senior Iranian political-security official, 25 March 2026. Confirmed by NPR, Al Jazeera, CNBC, and PBS.

¹¹ Araghchi’s “what reason dictates” phrasing reflects the concept of maṣlaḥa (public interest/welfare) in Islamic jurisprudence — a foundational principle in which reasoned assessment of the common good is a legitimate source of legal and policy guidance. In Twelver Shi’a jurisprudence, the role of ʿaql (reason) as an independent source of law is a distinguishing feature of the Ja’fari school.

¹² Quran 2:190: “Fight in the way of God those who fight you, but do not transgress. Indeed, God does not love transgressors.” The word ʿudwān (transgression/aggression) carries legal weight across all major schools of Islamic jurisprudence, including the Ja’fari (Twelver Shi’a) school that governs Iranian law. See N.A. Shah, “Use of Force under Islamic Law,” European Journal of International Law, vol. 24, no. 1, 2013.

¹³ Araghchi’s rejection of a ceasefire in favour of a permanent end to the war stated in interviews with NBC (”Meet the Press,” 8 March 2026), CBS (”Face the Nation,” 15 March 2026), Al Jazeera (18 March 2026), and at his weekly press conference in Tehran (16 March 2026, reported by Xinhua).

¹⁴ Trump announced US withdrawal from the JCPOA on 8 May 2018. At the time, the IAEA confirmed Iran was in compliance. General Joseph Dunford and Secretary of State Pompeo both acknowledged Iran’s compliance. See Jim’s “Just for Fun: The War in Iran, Part II” (Fireline Press) for detailed documentation.

¹⁵ The June 2025 ceasefire (Twelve-Day War ceasefire) was brokered by Qatar on 24 June 2025. Trump declared it a “victory for everybody.” The US and Israel struck Iran again on 28 February 2026, approximately eight months later.

¹⁶ Larijani killing: see endnote 7.

¹⁷ Kharazi attack and CNN interview: see endnote 1. Additional reporting: Shargh, Etemad, and Ham Mihan newspapers confirmed Kharazi’s hospitalisation. Al Jazeera’s Mohamed Vall, reporting from Tehran, confirmed the attack and Kharazi’s grave injuries.

¹⁸ In Islamic jurisprudence, ṣulḥ (conciliatory agreement) is a contractual commitment distinct from hudna (temporary truce). It must fulfil three conditions: (1) terms must be clearly quantified to exclude ambiguity; (2) the agreement must not involve anything forbidden; (3) it must not waive something that cannot be alienated.

¹⁹ The Treaty of Hudaybiyya (Ṣulḥ al-Ḥudaybiyya, 628 CE) was a ten-year peace agreement between the Prophet Muhammad and the Quraysh of Mecca. Muhammad accepted terms widely regarded as disadvantageous to secure a binding peace. The treaty was broken by the Quraysh, not by the Muslims — a point consistently misrepresented in counter-Islam literature. See Mustafa Abu-Sway’s analysis (Palestine-Israel Journal).

²⁰ Quran 2:178 establishes the hierarchy: qisas (proportional retribution) is permitted for intentional harm, but diyya (compensation) is preferred, and ʿafwa (forgiveness) is praised as the highest response. The concept of diyya applies to any harm caused, not only homicide, and functions as restorative rather than punitive justice.

²¹ Treaty of Versailles (28 June 1919), Article 231 (the “War Guilt Clause”) and Articles 232–247 established Germany’s obligation to pay reparations. The London Schedule of Payments (1921) set the amount at 132 billion gold marks (approximately $33 billion at the time).

²² United Nations Compensation Commission (UNCC), established 1991 under Security Council Resolution 687. Iraq paid $52.4 billion to approximately 1.5 million successful claimants over 31 years, funded by Iraqi oil revenue. Iraq completed its final payment in January 2022. See UN News, “Iraq makes final reparation payment to Kuwait for 1990 invasion,” 9 February 2022.

²³ Libya’s Lockerbie settlement: $2.7 billion ($10 million per victim of Pan Am Flight 103), finalised 2003, with additional payments through a $1.5 billion fund established in 2008 covering Lockerbie, the 1986 Berlin discotheque bombing, and UTA Flight 772. See Kreindler & Kreindler case history; Al Jazeera, “$2.7billion Lockerbie settlement reached,” 14 August 2003.

²⁴ Araghchi interview with Al Jazeera, 18 March 2026. See also “Iran rules out ceasefire: Araghchi says aim is to end war ‘on all fronts,’” The National, 18 March 2026.

²⁵ The Constitution of Medina (al-Ṣaḥīfah, c. 622 CE) established a mutual defence pact among the diverse tribal and religious communities of Medina, including Muslim, Jewish, and pagan groups. Its provisions included collective defence obligations and prohibited separate peace agreements that would leave allied parties exposed.

²⁶ Iran’s control of the northern shore of the Strait of Hormuz is longstanding. In 1971, Iran took control of the Greater and Lesser Tunbs islands west of Hormuz, extending its control of the navigation channels. Both Iran and Oman expanded their territorial seas to 12 nautical miles, effectively closing the strait under their combined territorial waters by 1972. See Wikipedia, “Strait of Hormuz”; Washington Institute for Near East Policy, “Clarifying Freedom of Navigation in the Gulf,” July 2019.

²⁷ Egypt’s Suez Canal revenue: $700–800 million per month in a typical year, though revenues dropped sharply during 2024–2025 due to Red Sea disruptions. See CNN, “Iran has a new demand to end the war — and it could bring in billions,” 28 March 2026.

²⁸ The Montreux Convention Regarding the Regime of the Straits (20 July 1936) governs passage through the Turkish Straits (Bosporus and Dardanelles), granting Turkey sovereignty and regulatory authority over the waterway while permitting certain categories of transit.

²⁹ Iran signed UNCLOS in 1982 with a declaration that only states parties would benefit from its provisions, including transit passage rights. Iran enacted a 1993 national maritime law asserting the right to require prior authorisation for warships and nuclear-powered vessels exercising passage through its territorial waters. The US has not ratified UNCLOS but treats transit passage as customary international law. See EJIL Talk, “The Legality of Iran’s Closure of the Strait of Hormuz,” March 2026; Lawfare, “The Strait of Hormuz and the Limits of Maritime Law,” March 2026; ASIL Insights, “Transit Passage Rights in the Strait of Hormuz.”

³⁰ Araghchi statement on X, 7 March 2026, following the alleged US strike on a desalination plant on Qeshm Island: “Water supply in 30 villages has been impacted. Attacking Iran’s infrastructure is a dangerous move with grave consequences. The US set this precedent, not Iran.” See Al Jazeera, “Schools, water, industry: What civilian targets have US, Israel, Iran hit?,” 30 March 2026; Wikipedia, “2026 Qeshm Island desalination plant attack.”

³¹ Bahrain Interior Ministry statement, 8 March 2026, confirming Iranian drone damage to a desalination plant. See Al Jazeera, “Bahrain says water desalination plant damaged in Iranian drone attack,” 8 March 2026.

³² Israel struck the Mobarakeh and Khuzestan steel plants in Iran. In response, Iran declared six steel plants in Israel and five regional countries as retaliatory targets. See Tasnim News Agency, reported in CNN, “Airports, plants and ports: The civilian targets increasingly under threat in the Middle East,” 30 March 2026.

³³ Iran struck the Haifa oil refineries in response to coalition strikes on the South Pars gas field. See Ynet News, “’The fire isn’t random’: Iran’s retaliation strategy shows command and control still intact,” 1 April 2026.

³⁴ Iran fired on Dimona — the site of Israel’s nuclear research centre — in response to strikes on the Natanz nuclear facility. See Ynet News, 1 April 2026.

³⁵ IRGC statement declaring all American and Israeli universities in the region legitimate targets following strikes on Tehran University of Science and Technology and Isfahan University of Technology. The IRGC gave the US until 12:00 noon Iran Standard Time on 30 March to officially condemn the bombing of Iranian universities. See Inside Higher Ed, “Iran Targets U.S. Universities in the Middle East,” 30 March 2026; The Tribune (India), “All Israeli, US universities in region now ‘legitimate targets,’ warns Iran,” 30 March 2026.

³⁶ Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, 10 March 2026, declaring Iran would apply an “eye for an eye” policy. Repeated 17 March 2026. See Ynet News, 1 April 2026.

³⁷ Qisas (proportional retribution) is a Quranic legal principle (see Quran 2:178, 5:45) permitting response in kind — but only in kind. The principle establishes an upper bound on retaliation: the response may not exceed the original harm. In practice, compensation (diyya) and forgiveness (ʿafwa) are presented as preferable alternatives.

At thirty-six minutes past one on the morning of the twenty-third of March 2026, three masked figures approached the car park of the Machzike Hadath Synagogue on Highfield Road, Golders Green. They carried petrol. Security camera footage, later shared with media outlets worldwide, shows them dousing the vehicles methodically and without hesitation. Then they ran.

What they set on fire were ambulances.

Four ambulances belonging to Hatzola Northwest — a volunteer-led, free emergency medical service run by members of the Jewish community — erupted in flames outside the synagogue. Oxygen canisters on board exploded. Windows shattered in the adjacent block of flats. Thirty-four residents were evacuated into the March night. Six fire engines and forty firefighters responded. The blaze was brought under control by 03:06. No one was killed. But four of the organisation’s six ambulances were destroyed.¹

Hatzola is not a political organisation. It is not an arm of any government. The first Hatzola chapter in the United Kingdom was established in Stamford Hill in 1979. Hatzola Northwest — the unit whose ambulances were destroyed in Golders Green — handles over five thousand calls a year, with an average response time of under five minutes. It serves everyone, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, in a 2.5-mile radius of its base in northwest London. It is staffed entirely by volunteers, funded entirely by community donations, and receives no government money whatsoever. There are seven Hatzola chapters across the United Kingdom, with units in Manchester, Gateshead, Hertfordshire, and Canvey Island.²

The Metropolitan Police declared the attack an antisemitic hate crime. Counter-terrorism police took charge of the investigation. Three suspects are being sought. As of this writing, no arrests have been made.³

The question this article exists to answer is not who did this. The police will find that out, or they will not. The question is why. Why would anyone attack a volunteer ambulance service whose sole purpose is to save lives? If this attack was connected to the ongoing conflict in the Middle East — and while the investigation is in its earliest hours, the targeting of a Jewish institution suggests it may well have been — then a question demands answering: why would anyone destroy emergency medical equipment — equipment that might save a life tonight, any life, regardless of faith — and believe they had struck a blow for justice?

The answer is a lie. A lie told so often, reinforced so relentlessly, and defended so aggressively that it has become, for millions of people from every political persuasion and background, indistinguishable from the truth.

The lie is that the Jewish people and the State of Israel are the same thing.

They are not. And until that lie is dismantled — in law, in media, in the assumptions that people carry without examining — every Jewish institution in every country on earth will remain a proxy target for anger at a foreign government’s policies. A volunteer medic in Golders Green will be treated as though he bears personal responsibility for decisions made by politicians in Jerusalem. A community ambulance will be treated as a military asset. And the people who pay the price will be the ones who had nothing to do with it.

This is not the first time. Five months ago, on the morning of Yom Kippur — the holiest day in the Jewish calendar — a man drove a car into worshippers outside the Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation Synagogue in Manchester and attacked them with a knife. Two innocent men were killed: Melvin Cravitz, who was killed by the attacker, and Adrian Daulby, who was struck by police gunfire during the armed response. Three others were seriously injured. The attacker, who was shot dead by police, was wearing what appeared to be an explosive vest.⁴

The rabbi of that synagogue, Daniel Walker, said afterwards that the attacker had shouted as he stood on the steps looking through the window at the congregation: “They are killing our kids.” Rabbi Walker’s response captures the entire problem this article addresses: “The ridiculousness of suggesting that two of the nicest people you are ever going to meet would ever harm a fly, let alone kill anyone’s kids. But this accusation is on every Jew in the world, that we are somehow collectively killing kids.”⁵

Every Jew in the world. Collectively.

That is the conflation. That is the lie. And it is burning ambulances in Golders Green.

British Jews, British Institutions

The Jewish community in Britain is not a recent arrival. It is not a transplant from the Middle East. It is not an outpost of a foreign state. It is one of the oldest continuous minority communities in Western Europe, and its institutional life predates the State of Israel by centuries.

The London Beth Din — the rabbinical court of the United Synagogue — has functioned as the central religious authority for British Jewry since the early eighteenth century. It handles civil disputes, divorce, conversion, genealogical research, and the supervision of kashrut through the largest kosher certification organisation in Europe. The Sephardi Beth Din serves the UK’s Sephardi community with the same range of religious functions. The Manchester Beth Din and the Federation Beis Din operate independently alongside them. These are not shadow courts. They are religious arbitration bodies operating within and subject to British law, deriving their authority from the Arbitration Act 1996. Their rulings, where both parties have voluntarily agreed to be bound by them, are enforceable through the High Court — but the civil courts retain the right to intervene in any case where the award is considered unreasonable or contrary to public policy.⁶

This is what religious freedom looks like in a functioning democracy. A community maintains its own traditions of dispute resolution, its own dietary standards, its own processes for marriage and divorce — and does so within the framework of the law of the land, not in opposition to it.

Beyond the courts, British Jewish communal life is an ecosystem of institutions that exist for one purpose: the welfare of the community and its neighbours. Hatzola, whose ambulances were torched in Golders Green, is one example. Shomrim, the neighbourhood watch organisation that was among the first to condemn the arson attack, is another — a volunteer-run community safety group that works alongside and in cooperation with the Metropolitan Police. Jewish schools educate thousands of children across the country. Jewish welfare organisations, burial societies, and charitable foundations serve needs that have nothing to do with geopolitics and everything to do with the daily life of a religious community rooted in Britain.⁷

These institutions are not Israeli. They are not funded by Israel. They do not answer to Israel. Many of them predate the Zionist movement entirely, let alone the state it produced.

And yet they are targets.

The Community Security Trust, which monitors antisemitic incidents and provides security for the Jewish community in Britain, recorded 3,700 antisemitic incidents across the United Kingdom in 2025 — the second-highest annual total in its history, and more than double the 1,662 incidents recorded in 2022, before the current conflict in the Middle East began. Of those incidents, fifty-one per cent referenced or were linked to Israel, Gaza, the Hamas attack of 7 October 2023, or the subsequent war. There were 1,766 incidents showing explicitly anti-Zionist motivation — instances where the terms “Zionism” or “Zionist” were used as euphemisms for “Jew” and “Jewish,” or in conjunction with other antisemitic abuse. For the first time in the CST’s history, over two hundred incidents of anti-Jewish hate were recorded in every single calendar month.⁸

The pattern is unmistakable. When the Israeli government acts, British Jews pay the price. When Israeli forces conduct military operations in Gaza, antisemitic incidents in the United Kingdom spike. When the conflict dominates the news cycle, Jewish children in British schools face harassment. When politicians in Jerusalem make inflammatory statements, synagogues in Manchester and London are vandalised, threatened, and now burned.

The Yom Kippur attack in Manchester — in which Melvin Cravitz and Adrian Daulby were killed at the Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation Synagogue on 2 October 2025 — was the first fatal antisemitic terrorist attack on British soil since the CST began monitoring incidents in 1984. Greater Manchester Police reported that antisemitic hate crime tripled in the three weeks that followed.⁹

And now Golders Green. Ambulances. Volunteer ambulances that save lives regardless of faith, burned to shells outside a synagogue, because someone could not — or would not — distinguish between a Jewish community and a Jewish state.

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What Is a Jew?

To understand how the conflation works, it helps to understand why it works so well. And that requires engaging — carefully, respectfully, and honestly — with a question that has no clean answer: what, exactly, is a Jew?

This is not an idle question, and it is not asked here to provoke. It is asked because the conflation of Israel with the Jewish people depends entirely on the ambiguity of Jewish identity, and anyone who wants to dismantle the conflation must first understand the ambiguity it exploits.

Rabbi Morris N. Kertzer, in his widely respected introduction to Judaism, What Is a Jew?, opens with a disarmingly honest admission: “It is difficult to find a single definition of a Jew.” He then proceeds to offer not one definition but five. A Jew is one who accepts the faith of Judaism — the religious definition. A Jew is one who seeks a spiritual base in study, prayer, and daily routine dedicated to Jewish wisdom — the spiritual definition. A Jew is one who, without formal religious affiliation, regards the ethics, folkways, and literature of Judaism as his or her own — the cultural definition. A Jew may also be understood through an ethnic definition — though Kertzer notes that this definition is, in his words, “going the way of the dinosaur,” as the Jewish community increasingly includes converts and those raised with no ethnic identity in particular. And Judaism has been called a civilisation — a people linked by a common history, a common language of prayer, a vast literature, and above all a sense of common destiny. In this sense, Jews are a people, not in the national or racial sense, but in a feeling of oneness.¹⁰

Five definitions. None of them complete on its own. All of them true simultaneously. And — this is the point that matters for this article — none of them mention a state.

Kertzer is equally clear about what a Jew is not. Jews are not a race. Their history reveals, as he puts it, countless additions through marriage and conversion. There are Jews of every physical appearance, from every continent. There are black African Jews from Ethiopia, Chinese Jews from Kaifeng, Jewish communities across the Indian subcontinent. Nor are Jews a nation in the modern sense. Jewish, Muslim, and Christian citizens of Israel do constitute a nation, Kertzer acknowledges — but there are no national ties that unite all Jews throughout the world. Jews, he writes, are part and parcel of every community in which they live.¹¹

And no one speaks for all of them. Kertzer devotes an entire chapter to this point. There is no Jewish pope. No single authoritative body to which all Jews owe allegiance. Reform, Conservative, Reconstructionist, and Orthodox Jews all maintain their own synagogues and rabbinic organisations. Each congregation does what it thinks best. There is wide diversity within all synagogue groups, and no element of compulsion. The old expression captures it: “Where you find two Jews, you find three opinions.”¹²

I have a personal encounter with this complexity. Years ago, before my conversion to Islam, I attended Jewish conversion classes. I did not complete them — I needed to resolve the question of Jesus as Messiah first, and that journey led me elsewhere. But during those classes, the rabbi explained something that has stayed with me. He told me that if I completed the conversion, I would have rights as a Jew. But without a Jewish mother, I would not be considered Jewish in the fullest halakhic sense — though my children would be.¹³

I later discovered, through maternal DNA testing, that I am three per cent Ashkenazi Jewish by ancestry. That means somewhere on my mother’s side, a third to fifth great-grandparent was Jewish. By the ethnic definition, I carry Jewish heritage. By the religious definition, I am not Jewish and never was. The two frameworks do not agree, and they were never designed to. Jewish identity was not constructed to be legible to outsiders. It was constructed to maintain a covenant community across millennia of displacement, and it did so with extraordinary success — precisely because it could not be reduced to a single category.

This complexity is not a weakness. It is the defining feature of one of the most resilient identity structures in human history. But it is also the crack through which the conflation enters.

If Jewishness were purely religious, then criticism of the State of Israel would obviously be a political matter — no more connected to Jewish identity than criticism of Saudi Arabia is connected to Islam. If Jewishness were purely ethnic, then Israel’s religious claims to the land would be irrelevant, and the state would be judged as any other state is judged: by its actions. It is the fact that Jewish identity is both — and neither cleanly — that allows the conflation to operate. The ambiguity creates a space in which political criticism can be reframed as ethnic hatred, and ethnic hatred can disguise itself as political criticism. Both the defenders of Israel and its most vicious opponents exploit the same confusion. The Israeli government says: to criticise us is to attack the Jewish people. The antisemite says: the Jewish people are responsible for what Israel does. Both claims rest on the same false premise — that Israel and the Jewish people are one and the same.¹⁴

They are not. And the people who most urgently need that distinction to be made are Jewish people themselves — the ones who are being attacked in Manchester and Golders Green for a conflation they never asked for and many actively reject.

A hostile reader might object at this point: but most Jews do support Israel. Doesn’t that make the conflation natural, even if imprecise?

It does not. And the evidence comes from within the Jewish community itself.

Kertzer addresses this directly. “Almost all Jews in North America are Zionists,” he writes, “in the sense that we all support the right of Jews to have a Jewish state, even though we continue to consider ourselves an integral part of the lands in which we live.” That last clause is the one that matters. Supporting the right of a state to exist is not the same as being represented by its government. Kertzer himself acknowledges that official Israeli government policy sometimes falls short of Jewish ethical expectations, “at which time Jews may object to the Israeli government, much as Americans protested during the Vietnam War.” The analogy is precise: an American who protested the Vietnam War was not anti-American. A Jew who objects to Israeli government policy is not anti-Jewish. And neither is represented by the government they are criticising.¹⁵

Contemporary polling confirms what Kertzer observed. A 2024 J Street survey of American Jewish voters found that ninety per cent believe someone can criticise Israeli government policies and still be pro-Israel. Sixty-eight per cent disapprove of Prime Minister Netanyahu. A 2025 Washington Post poll found that sixty-one per cent of American Jews believe Israel has committed war crimes in Gaza — and yet seventy-six per cent still say Israel’s existence is vital to the long-term future of the Jewish people. These are not people who have abandoned Israel. Whether Israel deserves that loyalty given its conduct — a question I have addressed at length elsewhere — is not the point here. The point is that even among those who extend it, the conflation is rejected. They are people who refuse to let a government speak for them — who insist, as Kertzer insisted, that supporting a state and being represented by its leaders are entirely different things.¹⁶

The conflation does not survive contact with what Jewish people actually think. It survives only in the minds of those who have never asked them.

The Machinery of Conflation

The conflation of Israel with the Jewish people did not arise organically. It was built. It is maintained by specific mechanisms, operated by identifiable actors, and it serves identifiable interests. Understanding those mechanisms is essential to dismantling them.

The first mechanism is Israel’s claim to speak for all Jews everywhere.

In February 2015, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared: “I went to Paris not just as the prime minister of Israel but as a representative of the entire Jewish people.” On 1 March 2015, preparing to address the United States Congress, he repeated the claim: “I feel that I am an emissary of the entire Jewish people.”¹⁷

The response from Jewish leaders was immediate and sharp. Senator Dianne Feinstein, herself Jewish, called the claim “arrogant” and said flatly: “He doesn’t speak for me.” The editors of The Forward, one of America’s oldest Jewish publications, wrote: “We’ve learned to find vitality and sustenance in a dynamic pluralism that resists centralisation… We wouldn’t presume to speak for all Jews. Neither should anyone else.” J Street, a liberal pro-Israel lobbying group, publicly contested the claim. Jewish members of the United States Congress boycotted the speech.¹⁸

What makes this claim extraordinary is that it contradicts Israel’s own founding commitment. In 1950, in the Ben-Gurion–Blaustein Agreement between Israel’s first Prime Minister and the president of the American Jewish Committee, David Ben-Gurion stated “without any reservation, that the State of Israel represents and speaks only on behalf of its own citizens and in no way presumes to represent or speak in the name of the Jews who are citizens of any other country.”¹⁹

That agreement was not a casual remark. It was a formal diplomatic understanding, negotiated precisely because American Jewish leaders were alarmed at the suggestion that a new foreign state might claim authority over their identity. Ben-Gurion understood the danger and disavowed it explicitly. Netanyahu reversed that disavowal. In doing so, he did not merely make a political claim. He asserted ownership over an identity that — as Rabbi Kertzer’s own analysis makes clear — has no single owner, no pope, no central authority. And he made every Jew on earth a potential proxy for his government’s actions.

The second mechanism is the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism.

The IHRA definition, adopted in 2016 and since endorsed by dozens of governments and hundreds of institutions, defines antisemitism as “a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews.” So far, unremarkable. But the definition is accompanied by eleven illustrative examples, seven of which relate to Israel. Among them: “Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour.” And: “Applying double standards by requiring of it a behaviour not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.” And: “Holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel.”²⁰

Read that last example again. The IHRA definition lists, as an example of antisemitism, the act of holding Jews collectively responsible for the actions of the State of Israel. On this point, the definition is correct — it is antisemitic to hold Jews collectively responsible for Israel’s actions. But the definition simultaneously creates the conceptual framework in which that collective responsibility becomes almost inevitable, because it treats the state and the people as so deeply intertwined that criticism of one is presumptively an attack on the other.

The definition includes a caveat: “Criticism of Israel similar to that levelled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic.” But in practice, as over a hundred human rights and civil liberties organisations — including Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union — warned in a letter urging the United Nations not to adopt the definition, “the IHRA definition has often been used to wrongly label criticism of Israel as antisemitic, and thus chill and sometimes suppress, non-violent protest, activism and speech critical of Israel and/or Zionism.” Even Kenneth Stern, the American Jewish Committee lawyer who was the principal drafter of the original text, has publicly objected to its institutional adoption, saying it was designed as a data-collection tool, not a speech code.²¹

The effect is circular. The definition says it is antisemitic to hold Jews responsible for Israel’s actions — but the broader framework of the definition treats Israel and the Jewish people as so deeply connected that separating them becomes an act requiring justification. The conflation is embedded in the very instrument designed to combat the hatred that the conflation produces.

The third mechanism is Christian Zionism — a force that reinforces the conflation from outside the Jewish community entirely.

This article is not the place to rehearse in full the history of the evangelical movement’s embrace of the State of Israel; I have documented it at length in “Holy War: How Evangelical Christianity Captured American Foreign Policy.”²² But the essential point bears repeating here. Evangelical theology — the theology that drives Christians United for Israel (with over ten million members), that shapes Republican foreign policy, that told American troops God anointed their president to trigger Armageddon in Iran — cannot distinguish between Jews and Israel. In its eschatological framework, they are literally the same thing. The Jewish people are prophetic instruments. The State of Israel is the fulfilment of biblical prophecy. To criticise Israel is to oppose God’s plan. To support Israel is to hasten the Second Coming — after which, in the theology’s own terms, Jews will convert or be destroyed.

Christian Zionists do not conflate Israel with the Jewish people out of ignorance. They do it because their theology requires it. And they are the most powerful external force maintaining the conflation in the Western world.

These three mechanisms — Israel’s claim to speak for all Jews, the IHRA definition’s embedding of the conflation into the language of anti-hatred policy, and Christian Zionism’s theological inability to separate a people from a state — operate together. They create a world in which a volunteer medic in Golders Green and a politician in Jerusalem are, in the minds of millions, the same thing. And when anger at the politician’s decisions reaches a certain temperature, it is the medic’s ambulance that burns.

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The Consequences

Numbers tell part of the story. The Community Security Trust’s 3,700 antisemitic incidents in 2025 are not an abstraction. They are 3,700 moments in which a Jewish person in Britain was harassed, threatened, assaulted, or had their property damaged because they were Jewish. They are 3,700 instances in which the conflation crossed the threshold from bad theory into lived experience.²³

But the numbers do not capture the texture of what this means for a community.

It means Jewish children walking to school past security guards. It means synagogues that cannot operate without bollards, CCTV, and community volunteers trained in threat assessment. It means a Jewish student on a university campus being asked to explain — or apologise for — the actions of a government she may never have voted for, in a country she may never have visited, on the basis of nothing more than her identity. It means a Jewish family in Golders Green waking to the sound of oxygen canisters exploding and the smell of burning ambulances drifting through their windows.

It means, in the words of one Golders Green resident who could smell the smoke from his living room: “It’s a terrible, terrible act what happened… Why is it happening to us? We’re living in scary times.”²⁴

The CST’s data reveals a direct and measurable correlation. Fifty-one per cent of the antisemitic incidents recorded in 2025 referenced or were linked to Israel, Gaza, the Hamas attack of 7 October 2023, or the subsequent war. The worst month was October 2025, with 463 incidents — sixty-three per cent higher than September’s figure — driven in part by the aftermath of the Yom Kippur attack in Manchester. When Jewish communities are perceived to be vulnerable, antisemites exploit that perception. When the conflict in the Middle East intensifies, the violence follows British Jews home.²⁵

The Yom Kippur attack deserves particular attention, because it illustrates the conflation in its most lethal form. On the morning of 2 October 2025, a man drove his car into worshippers arriving at the Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation Synagogue in Manchester and attacked them with a knife. Two men — Melvin Cravitz and Adrian Daulby — were killed. Three others were seriously injured. The attacker, Jihad al-Shamie, a thirty-five-year-old British citizen born in Syria, was shot dead by police. He had been wearing what appeared to be an explosive vest, later determined to be fake.²⁶

As the attacker stood on the synagogue steps, looking through the window at the congregation inside, he shouted: “They are killing our kids.”

They. Not the Israeli government. Not the IDF. Not a named politician or a specific policy. They. The people inside a synagogue in north Manchester, gathered to observe the holiest day of their calendar — a day devoted to atonement, fasting, and prayer. In the attacker’s mind, those worshippers were not Melvin Cravitz, a man whose bravery saved lives, or Adrian Daulby, a man described by those who knew him in terms of profound affection. They were they. The Jews. The ones who are killing kids. Collectively responsible. Interchangeable with a state.²⁷

That is what the conflation produces. Not just statistics. Not just policy debates. Dead people. In Manchester. In Golders Green. In the communities where Jewish families have lived for generations, practised their faith, raised their children, and served their neighbours — and are now being made to pay for the actions of a government that does not represent them, in a conflict they did not start, on the basis of an identity they share with a state only in the minds of those who cannot or will not see the difference.

The Double Standard

There is another community in Britain that knows what it looks like when religious institutions are reframed as outposts of a foreign threat. I know this because I am part of it.

British Muslim communities operate religious institutions within the British legal framework in ways that closely parallel the structures just described. Sharia councils handle marriage, divorce, and inheritance matters in an advisory capacity, subject to British law — just as the Beth Din does. Muslim welfare organisations, schools, community centres, and charitable foundations serve the daily needs of a religious community rooted in Britain — just as their Jewish counterparts do. Muslim volunteer networks provide services to their neighbours regardless of faith — just as Hatzola does.

And these institutions are routinely treated — not as expressions of a religious community’s life in the country where it lives, but as evidence of divided loyalty, foreign infiltration, or civilisational subversion. Sharia councils are presented in tabloid headlines as parallel legal systems threatening British sovereignty. Muslim schools are subjected to suspicion that would never attach to a Jewish or Christian school operating under identical legal frameworks. The word “mosque” carries, for a significant portion of the British public, connotations of extremism that the word “synagogue” does not — though both are simply houses of worship where communities gather to pray.²⁸

The mechanism is identical. A religious community’s institutions are reframed as arms of a foreign enemy. For Jews, the foreign enemy is Israel — and the reframing turns synagogues into targets. For Muslims, the foreign enemy is variously ISIS, Iran, al-Qaida, or an imagined global caliphate — and the reframing turns mosques into suspects. In both cases, the people who suffer are British citizens practising their faith in their own country, being held responsible for the actions of actors and governments they have no connection to and no control over.

The Peacehaven mosque arson — which occurred just two days after the Manchester synagogue attack in October 2025 — illustrates the symmetry with grim precision. When Jewish communities are attacked, Muslim communities are attacked in retaliation, and vice versa. The conflation operates in both directions, and both communities bleed.²⁹

This is not a competition between communities. It is not an attempt to centre Muslim experience in an article about Jewish suffering. It is a statement of structural fact: the conflation of a religious community with a foreign state or political movement is the same error, producing the same consequences, regardless of which community it targets. And the people who maintain these conflations — whether they are antisemites who cannot distinguish a Jew from the Israeli government, or counter-Islam activists who cannot distinguish a Muslim from a terrorist — are often drawing from the same intellectual well. The counter-Islam network documented in my forthcoming article, “Antisemitism and Counter-Islamism: The Industry,” overlaps significantly with the machinery that maintains the Israel-equals-Jews equation, because both conflations serve the same political interests.³⁰

The principle at stake is simple, even if its application is contested: a religious community has the right to maintain its own institutions, its own traditions of worship, its own processes for resolving internal disputes according to its own laws — within the framework of the law of the land, not in opposition to it. The Beth Din operates this way. Sharia councils operate this way. Neither is a threat to British sovereignty. Both are expressions of the same principle: that religious freedom means the freedom to live as a community, not merely to believe as an individual.

When that principle is violated — when a community’s institutions are treated as evidence of disloyalty rather than expressions of belonging — the result is what we see in the CST’s statistics, in the charred ambulances of Golders Green, in the blood on the steps of a Manchester synagogue, and in the suspicious glances directed at every mosque in the country after an attack carried out by someone who happened to share a faith with a billion other people.

The conflation is the common enemy. And it will not be defeated by either community alone.

Back to Golders Green

Hatzola Northwest’s ambulances will be replaced. The community has already said so. Phil Rosenberg, president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, said it plainly: “The UK Jewish community will meet the moment with strength, pride and resolve. We will replace the ambulances and continue our service to this nation that we love. We shall not be moved.” Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis called the arson “a particularly sickening assault — not only on the Jewish community, but on the values we share as a society.”³¹

The ambulances will be replaced. The volunteers will go back to work. The next time someone in Golders Green has a heart attack, or a child breaks a bone, or an elderly person falls — Hatzola will respond, as it has for nearly half a century, regardless of the patient’s faith, regardless of whatever political fury is burning through the news cycle that week. That is what they do. It is who they are.

But resilience is not a solution. Replacing burnt ambulances does not address the lie that made them a target. And the lie will keep producing the same results — in Golders Green, in Manchester, in Paris, in Brooklyn, in Melbourne — until it is confronted directly and dismantled systematically.

The lie is that Israel speaks for all Jews. It does not. Israel’s own founding prime minister said so.

The lie is that Jewish identity is inseparable from the State of Israel. It is not. Jewish identity — religious, spiritual, cultural, ethnic, civilisational — predates the state by millennia and will outlast it, whatever its future holds. Rabbi Kertzer’s five definitions do not include “citizen of Israel.” The old expression — “Where you find two Jews, you find three opinions” — does not add “unless the topic is Israeli foreign policy, in which case they all agree.” The diversity is the tradition. The tradition is not a state.

The lie is that criticising Israel is the same as hating Jews. It is not. The IHRA definition itself says so, even as its structure makes the distinction almost impossible to maintain in practice. And the people who most urgently need that distinction to hold are not the critics of Israel. They are the Jewish families in Golders Green and Manchester and every other community in this country who are being made to pay for a conflation they never endorsed.

I write this as a Muslim, as a British citizen, as someone who attended Jewish conversion classes before his own faith journey led him elsewhere, as someone who carries Ashkenazi ancestry in his DNA and one hundred per cent certainty that the people who burned those ambulances are the enemies of everything both our traditions hold sacred. I write it because the same mechanism that turns a Jew into a proxy for Israel turns a Muslim into a proxy for ISIS, and both conflations are sustained by people who profit from the confusion and have no intention of clearing it up.

The untangling is not anti-Jewish. It is the most pro-Jewish thing anyone can do. It is the insistence that a Jewish volunteer medic in Golders Green is not responsible for the actions of a government in Jerusalem. That a Beth Din in London is not an outpost of the Knesset. That Hatzola is not the IDF. That a community’s ambulances are sacred — not because of whose Star of David is painted on the side, but because they save lives, and saving lives is what both our traditions call us to do.

They are not the same. And until we stop pretending they are, the people who pay the price will be the ones who had nothing to do with it.

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James S. Coates writes about geopolitics, international law, and the decline of civilisational accountability. His books include A Signal Through Time, The Threshold, The Road to Khurasan, the memoir God and Country (published under pen name Will Prentiss) and his forthcoming Neither Gods Nor Monsters. He publishes regularly on Fireline Press and The Signal Dispatch, and his academic work appears on PhilPapers. He lives in the UK, with his family and dog who has no interest in any of this.

© 2026 James S. Coates All Rights Reserved. Fireline Press · fireline.press

Endnotes

¹ Metropolitan Police statement, 23 March 2026; CNN, “Jewish volunteer ambulances set on fire outside London synagogue in antisemitic attack,” 23 March 2026; Jewish News, “Jewish community responds to Golders Green Hatzola arson attack,” 23 March 2026.

² Hatzola Northwest, hatzolanw.org; Hatzola (Stamford Hill), hatzola.org; Hatzola Manchester, hatzolamanchester.org; Gateshead Hatzola, hatzola.org.uk.

³ Detective Chief Superintendent Luke Williams, Metropolitan Police oral statement, 23 March 2026.

⁴ “Manchester synagogue attack,” Wikipedia (accessed 23 March 2026); Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, statement to Parliament, 13 October 2025; Counter Terrorism Policing, updates on Manchester attack investigation.

⁵ Rabbi Daniel Walker, quoted in Times of Israel, “’Shut the doors!’: Manchester survivors describe chaos of deadly Yom Kippur terror attack,” 21 October 2025.

⁶ London Beth Din, bethdin.org.uk; “London Beth Din,” Wikipedia (accessed 23 March 2026); Sephardi Beth Din, sephardi.org.uk; Manchester Beth Din, mbd.org.uk; Federation Beis Din, federation.org.uk; Arbitration Act 1996; “Use of the Beth Din as a Forum for Determining Civil Disputes,” Barrister Magazine, 20 June 2023.

⁷ Hatzola Northwest, hatzolanw.org; Shomrim, statement on X, 23 March 2026; Jewish News, “Jewish community responds to Golders Green Hatzola arson attack,” 23 March 2026.

⁸ Community Security Trust, Antisemitic Incidents Report 2025, published 11 February 2026.

⁹ “Manchester synagogue attack,” Wikipedia (accessed 23 March 2026); Counter Terrorism Policing, Manchester attack updates; Greater Manchester Police statements, October 2025.

¹⁰ Rabbi Morris N. Kertzer, What Is a Jew?, revised edition (New York: Touchstone/Simon & Schuster), Chapter 1: “What Is a Jew?”, pp. 7–8.

¹¹ Kertzer, What Is a Jew?, pp. 8–9. On Jews not being a race or a nation: “The Jews are not a race. Our history reveals countless additions to our numbers through marriage and conversion.” And: “It would be equally misleading to speak of the Jews as a nation, though in antiquity they were… But there are no national ties that unite all Jews throughout the world. Jews are part and parcel of every community in which we live.”

¹² Kertzer, What Is a Jew?, Chapter 12: “Who Speaks with Authority for the Jews?”, p. 28.

¹³ Personal account of the author. For the broader context of this period, see Will Prentiss, God and Country (memoir).

¹⁴ For a comprehensive treatment of how the conflation operates theologically and politically, see James S. Coates, “The Greatest Antisemitism: How Zionism Betrays Judaism, Endangers Jews, and Dehumanises Semitic Peoples,” Fireline Press, 2026.

¹⁵ Kertzer, What Is a Jew?, Chapter 11: “What Are Zionists?”, pp. 26–27.

¹⁶ J Street, “Jewish Voters Reject Trump and Republicans, Support Diplomacy, Oppose Netanyahu Government Policies,” election survey conducted by GBAO Strategies, 30 October – 5 November 2024; Washington Post, survey of 815 American Jewish respondents, 2–9 September 2025, published 4 October 2025.

¹⁷ Netanyahu’s February 2015 statement: “I went to Paris not just as the prime minister of Israel but as a representative of the entire Jewish people,” reported in Washington Post, 12 February 2015. His 1 March 2015 statement: “I feel that I am an emissary of the entire Jewish people,” reported in Washington Times, 2 March 2015.

¹⁸ Senator Dianne Feinstein, CNN’s State of the Union, 1 March 2015; The Forward, “Who Speaks for the Jews?”, 11 February 2015; J Street public statement, February 2015. See also: “Benjamin Netanyahu’s Claim to Speak for All Jews Is Disputed, Characterized As ‘Arrogant,’” The American Council for Judaism; Times of Israel, “Sen. Feinstein pans Netanyahu over claim to speak for all Jews,” 1 March 2015.

¹⁹ The Ben-Gurion–Blaustein Agreement, 1950. Cited in Shmuel Rosner, “Does Netanyahu represent ‘the entire Jewish people’?”, Jewish Journal, 2015.

²⁰ International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, “Working Definition of Antisemitism,” adopted 26 May 2016, holocaustremembrance.com; also available at the United States Department of State, “Defining Antisemitism,” state.gov.

²¹ Human Rights Watch et al., letter to the United Nations, 4 April 2023, signed by 104 human rights and civil society organisations including the ACLU. On Kenneth Stern’s objections to institutional adoption of the definition he drafted: see “IHRA definition of antisemitism,” Wikipedia (accessed 23 March 2026), with multiple sourced references to Stern’s public statements.

²² James S. Coates, “Holy War: How Evangelical Christianity Captured American Foreign Policy,” Fireline Press, 2026.

²³ Community Security Trust, Antisemitic Incidents Report 2025, published 11 February 2026.

²⁴ Gedale Weinberg, quoted in CNN, “Jewish volunteer ambulances set on fire outside London synagogue in antisemitic attack,” 23 March 2026.

²⁵ CST, Antisemitic Incidents Report 2025: “The worst month was October, with 463 antisemitic incidents reported, the fifth highest monthly total ever logged by CST and 63% higher than September’s figure.”

²⁶ “Manchester synagogue attack,” Wikipedia (accessed 23 March 2026); Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, statement to Parliament, 13 October 2025; Counter Terrorism Policing, Manchester attack updates.

²⁷ Rabbi Daniel Walker, quoted in Times of Israel, “’Shut the doors!’: Manchester survivors describe chaos of deadly Yom Kippur terror attack,” 21 October 2025. Walker reflected: “The ridiculousness of suggesting that two of the nicest people you are ever going to meet would ever harm a fly, let alone kill anyone’s kids. But this accusation is on every Jew in the world, that we are somehow collectively killing kids.”

²⁸ For a detailed examination of how Jewish courts work within UK law, and the parallels with other religious arbitration bodies, see “The Beth Din: Jewish Law in the UK,” Centre for Social Cohesion / Henry Jackson Society. The Arbitration Act 1996 provides the legal framework under which both the Beth Din and Sharia councils operate.

²⁹ “Peacehaven mosque arson,” referenced in the Wikipedia article on the Manchester synagogue attack (accessed 23 March 2026). The arson attack on the Peacehaven mosque occurred on 4 October 2025, two days after the Yom Kippur attack in Manchester.

³⁰ James S. Coates, “Antisemitism and Counter-Islamism: The Industry,” Fireline Press, forthcoming April 2026.

³¹ Phil Rosenberg, president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, statement to CNN, 23 March 2026; Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis, statement on X, 23 March 2026.

The commander, the NCO wrote, “urged us to tell our troops that this was ‘all part of God’s divine plan’ and he specifically referenced numerous citations out of the Book of Revelation referring to Armageddon and the imminent return of Jesus Christ.” The commander told the room that President Trump had been “anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth.”¹

He had a big grin on his face when he said it.²

The NCO described the commander as a “Christian First” supporter — someone whose religious identity had always been conspicuous but who had never before crossed this particular line. The briefing shocked troops in attendance. The NCO was writing on behalf of sixteen service members: eleven Christians, one Muslim, one Jew, and three whose faith was not specified.³ They were not objecting to Christianity. They were objecting to being told, in an official military briefing, that their war was a holy one.

They were not alone. By the following evening, the MRFF had received more than 110 similar complaints. Within days, the number exceeded 200. The complaints came from every branch of the military — Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, Space Force — spanning more than 40 units across at least 30 installations.⁴ Mikey Weinstein, the MRFF’s founder and a former Air Force officer, described the phenomenon as “unrestricted euphoria” among commanders who believed that the bombing of Iran represented the fulfilment of Christian prophecy.⁵

This was not one rogue officer having a bad morning. This was a pattern. And patterns do not emerge from nowhere.

To understand how a United States military officer could stand in front of his troops in 2026 and tell them — with a grin — that their president was divinely anointed to trigger the apocalypse, you have to understand the infrastructure that made that moment possible. You have to trace the theology, the money, the political alliances, and the decades of deliberate cultivation that turned a fringe eschatological belief into the operating system of American foreign policy.

That infrastructure has a name. Several names, actually. But the one that matters most is the one its architects would use themselves: Christian Zionism.

This is the story of how it captured the Pentagon.

1. The Pentagon’s Prayer Room

A note on sourcing before we proceed. The MRFF complaints are anonymised to protect service members from retaliation. No audio or video recordings of the briefings have surfaced. Snopes, in its investigation, left the claim “unrated” for this reason.⁶ What we do have is over 200 complaints from more than 40 units across 30 installations in every branch of the military, logged by an organisation with two decades of documented work on religious freedom in the armed forces. We have the specific, detailed language of the NCO’s email. And we have a context — a chain of events at the highest levels of the Department of Defense — that makes these complaints not just plausible but predictable.

That context begins with a prayer service.

In May 2025, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth held the first of what would become monthly Christian worship services in the Pentagon’s auditorium. The services were broadcast live on the Department’s internal television network.⁷ They were described as voluntary. Military.com reported that service members and defence contractors had raised concerns about feeling pressured to attend, with one contractor describing the services as “inherently discriminatory” because they provided Christians an opportunity to get face time with senior leadership that members of other faiths were denied. A retired Air Force brigadier general, speaking anonymously for fear of reprisal, told the outlet that contrary to the Pentagon’s assurances, roll call does take place — and that attendance functions as “a litmus-loyalty test for who’s in and who’s out,” with consequences for annual performance reports, promotion recommendations, and contract reviews.⁸ Mikey Weinstein of the MRFF put it more bluntly: service members were being “voluntold.”⁹

None of this surprises me. I worked with the Air Force Office of Special Investigations as an operative on their Joint Drug Enforcement Team, and I worked on base as a civilian for a number of years. I have had many officers and enlisted friends in my employment and social circles, and family members who have served across multiple branches. I know how signals travel down a chain of command, and how the boss’s preferences become the unit’s priorities. What the Pentagon calls voluntary, the rank and file experience as an expectation.

The first service was led by Brooks Potteiger, pastor of Pilgrim Hill Reformed Fellowship in Tennessee — Hegseth’s own church, and a congregation affiliated with Doug Wilson’s Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches.¹⁰ That detail matters: Wilson’s theological network was not introduced to the Pentagon as a later escalation. It was there from the first day. Subsequent services featured Southern Baptist pastors — Chris Durkin of Colts Neck Community Church in New Jersey, who had spurred Hegseth’s renewed interest in Christianity; Mark Dever of Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington; Garrett Kell of Del Ray Baptist Church in Virginia.¹⁰ Conservative, but within the broad mainstream of American Protestantism. What came next was not.

On February 17, 2026, Hegseth invited Doug Wilson to lead the Pentagon’s monthly worship service. Wilson is the founder of Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho, and the co-founder of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches — a network of over 150 churches internationally.¹¹ He runs Canon Press, a publishing house with national reach, and helped build the Association of Classical Christian Schools, a network of nearly 475 schools.¹² He is, in other words, not a fringe pastor shouting into a webcam. He is an institution builder with a decades-long project and a growing sphere of influence.

His beliefs are worth stating plainly, because they are not hidden. Wilson has publicly argued that women should not have the right to vote and should submit to their husbands.¹³ Women are barred from leadership positions in his church and cannot vote in congregational decisions. He believes homosexuality should be a crime. He has described Christian enslavers in the American South as being on “firm scriptural ground” — a position that multiple outlets, including Word & Way and Religion Unplugged, have characterised not as neutral historical observation but as an approving defence of the institution.¹⁴ He advocates for a Christian theocracy in which non-Christians — explicitly including Muslims — would be barred from public worship and public office, and in which the Apostle’s Creed would be incorporated into the United States Constitution.¹⁵ He opened a church in Washington, D.C. in 2025, telling reporters it was part of his plan to make America a Christian nation.¹⁶

This is the man Pete Hegseth calls a mentor.

Hegseth is a member of a CREC-affiliated church in Tennessee. He moved his family there specifically to send his children to a school in Wilson’s classical Christian network.¹⁷ The Pentagon confirmed that the Secretary “very much appreciates many of Mr. Wilson’s writings and teachings.”¹⁸ When Wilson stood at the Pentagon podium, Hegseth stood beside him, praying with his hand on Wilson’s shoulder. The Department of War’s rapid response account on X posted a photograph of the moment with the caption: “We have gathered at the Pentagon for our monthly worship service. We are One Nation Under God.”¹⁹

Hegseth does not hide what tradition he is claiming. Tattooed on one arm is the Latin phrase “Deus Vult” — “God wills it” — the battle cry of the First Crusade. On his chest is the Jerusalem Cross, the coat of arms of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, established in 1099 after Crusader armies massacred the city’s Muslim inhabitants and burned its Jews alive in their synagogue.²⁰ The man running the American military has branded himself, permanently and literally, with the insignia of medieval Christian holy war.

Two weeks earlier, at the National Prayer Breakfast on February 5, Hegseth had gone further. He declared that “America was founded as a Christian nation” and that “as public officials, we have a sacred duty 250 years on to glorify him” — pointing upward as he said it.²¹ He suggested that serving in the U.S. military was a form of Christian spiritual warfare, and that the soldier willing to “lay down his life for his unit, his country, and his creator — that warrior finds eternal life.”²¹

Read that again. The Secretary of War told service members that dying in combat earns them eternal life. This is not a figure of speech. This is not a rhetorical flourish at a fundraiser. This is the civilian head of the American military telling troops that their service has soteriological weight — that it contributes to their salvation.

And then the bombs fell on Iran. And commanders, having watched the Secretary of War spend nine months building the theological infrastructure from the top, did what officers in a hierarchical system always do: they followed the signal. Whether individual commanders watched those broadcasts or read those speeches is beside the point. In a hierarchical culture, the message travels down the chain whether or not every link is aware of its origin. They took the message Hegseth had been broadcasting — that America is a Christian nation, that military service is spiritual warfare, that God’s plan is being executed through American power — and they delivered it to their troops in the only language that was left. The language of Armageddon.

The 200 complaints were not an aberration. They were a harvest.

There is an irony here that should not pass without notice. For two decades, the machinery of the war on terror has projected onto Muslims the image of a hidden theological command structure — a mastermind who radicalises foot soldiers through religious ideology until they are ready to kill and die for the cause. That projection is now a mirror. The theological command structure described in this section is not hidden. It is broadcast on the Pentagon’s internal television network, posted on official social media accounts, and delivered from the podium of the National Prayer Breakfast. The foot soldiers are not radicalised in secret — they are radicalised in uniform, during duty hours, by their chain of command. The only difference is that when the theology is Christian and the foot soldiers are American, we do not call it what it is.

Post-publication update — April 4, 2026:

On April 2, 2026 — less than three weeks after this article was published — Hegseth fired three Army officers on the same day: Gen. Randy George, the Chief of Staff of the Army; Gen. David Hodne, commander of Army Transformation and Training Command; and Maj. Gen. William Green Jr., the Army’s Chief of Chaplains. No official reason was given for any of the three dismissals. Green’s firing was the first time in the history of the United States Army that a Secretary of Defense has removed a chief of chaplains.⁶⁷

The firings came one day after Hegseth had pushed for changes to the chaplain corps, telling chaplains in a video message to be “less therapeutic and more pastoral.”⁶⁸ Green, a Baptist minister endorsed by the National Baptist Convention, had overseen religious support across all faiths in the Army. He was not an evangelical.

Retired Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling, speaking on MSNBC’s The Weekend on April 4, connected the three firings directly to the pattern described in this article. Hertling, who knew Green personally — “he was one of my chaplains when I was a brigade commander” — called Green “one of the finest officers and ministers in the army.” He said the three firings together were “much more damaging” than any single dismissal, and that the officers “were standing up for something.” Hertling connected the firings explicitly to Hegseth’s public statements that soldiers are “fighting for Jesus,” calling those remarks “despicable” — and noted the timing: Passover weekend.⁶⁹

The harvest continues.

2. The Prophetic Clock

To understand what those commanders believed they were telling their troops, you have to understand a theology that most Americans have absorbed without ever learning its name. It is called dispensationalism, and it is the engine driving everything described in this article.

Dispensationalism is not Christianity. It is a specific interpretation of Christianity — a nineteenth-century invention that has, through a combination of publishing, broadcasting, and political organising, been branded to become the dominant eschatological framework for tens of millions of American evangelicals. Its core claim is that human history is divided into a series of “dispensations” — distinct eras in which God relates to humanity under different covenants. The current dispensation, in this framework, is approaching its end. And the end has a very specific sequence.

The theology was systematised by John Nelson Darby, a nineteenth-century Anglo-Irish preacher who developed a reading of biblical prophecy called premillennialism.²² Darby’s ideas crossed the Atlantic and found fertile ground among American evangelicals, amplified by figures like Dwight Moody and James Brookes.²³ But the real accelerant was a book — the Scofield Reference Bible, published in 1909, which embedded Darby’s dispensationalist framework directly into the margins of scripture.²⁴ For millions of readers, the interpretive notes became inseparable from the biblical text itself. The theology appeared to be what the Bible actually said.

The sequence goes like this: The Jews must return to the land of Israel. The state of Israel must be established. The Temple in Jerusalem must be rebuilt. A period of tribulation will follow, culminating in the battle of Armageddon — a literal military conflict in the Middle East. And then Christ will return.

Every step must happen in order. And every step that advances the sequence is, in this framework, doing God’s work.

This is not metaphorical for the people who hold it. A 2017 LifeWay Research poll found that 80 percent of evangelical Christians in the United States believe that the rebirth of Israel in 1948 was a fulfilment of biblical prophecy — and 73 percent said events in Israel are part of the prophecies in the Book of Revelation.²⁵ Eighty percent. That is not a fringe belief. That is a supermajority within a community that constitutes roughly a quarter of the American electorate.²⁶

The political implications are staggering. If you believe — truly believe, as an article of faith — that the state of Israel is God’s prophetic clock, then supporting Israel is not a foreign policy position. It is a religious obligation. Opposing Israeli expansion is not a strategic disagreement. It is an act of defiance against God’s plan. And war in the Middle East is not a catastrophe to be avoided. It is a prophecy to be fulfilled.

Hal Lindsey understood this before almost anyone in the modern media landscape. His 1970 book The Late, Great Planet Earth — a copy of which I was encouraged to read during my time in the Assemblies of God church — translated dispensationalist theology into popular language, selling tens of millions of copies — some estimates claim up to 35 million, including later editions — and becoming the bestselling nonfiction book of the 1970s.²⁷ It told ordinary Americans that the geopolitical events unfolding in the Middle East were the literal fulfilment of biblical prophecy — and that they were living in the last days. Pat Robertson’s 700 Club, launched in 1966 and still broadcasting six decades later — having outlived its founder, who died in 2023 — carried the same message into American living rooms five days a week for decades, reaching a peak audience of millions and building a media empire — the Christian Broadcasting Network — that became the launchpad for Robertson’s own presidential campaign in 1988.²⁸

Robertson understood that theology without political organisation was just talk. In 1989, he founded the Christian Coalition, installing Ralph Reed as its first executive director.²⁹ The Coalition built a grassroots political machine that, at its peak, claimed 1.7 million members and distributed 45 million voter guides in the 1996 election cycle alone.³⁰ It did not merely support candidates. It trained them, organised them, and placed them at every level of government from school boards to Congress. Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, founded a decade earlier in 1979, had already demonstrated the model: take the theology out of the sanctuary and into the voting booth.³¹ The Christian Coalition refined it into a permanent political infrastructure.

This is where the theology of the prophetic clock meets the machinery of American power. Dispensationalism tells you what must happen. Organisations like the Christian Coalition, the Moral Majority, and the 700 Club tell you how to make it happen. And the Israeli government — as we will see — tells you who to call.

I know this theology from the inside. I grew up in an evangelical community in southern Illinois where the leader taught this exact eschatological framework — that Muslim nations were the “dark forces of Satan” surrounding Israel, that the End Times were imminent, and that believers had a duty to prepare. I went on to spend years in the Assemblies of God church and other evangelical congregations, and the teaching was the same everywhere. The theology described in this section is not something I encountered in a book. I absorbed it across multiple churches over many years before I left as an adult. When I hear commanders telling troops that bombing Iran is God’s divine plan, I recognise the language. I grew up in it.

The Ground Level: Toxic Christianity

Before this theology reaches the Pentagon briefing room or the halls of Congress, it lives in the pews. And before it becomes a matter of foreign policy, it starts in the pews not as concern for saving souls and trying to convince them of the best values they espouse as believers in the “God of Love,” but as contempt for other people and other religions.

Scroll through evangelical social media on any given day and you will find posts from organisations like “Operation Heal America” declaring that Allah is a “fake” god — a deity separate from and opposed to the God of Abraham.³² It is not that it is a constructive criticism of the Islamic faith, but that this claim is theologically illiterate. “Allah” is the Arabic word for God. Arab Christians — millions of them — use the word in their liturgy, their prayers, their Bibles. It is the same God. The same Abrahamic tradition. The same root.

But theological literacy is not the point. The claim is part of a pattern of theological projection that runs through this entire article — a movement that accuses Islam of holy war while tattooing Crusader holy warrior insignia on the chest of its Secretary of War, that accuses Muslims of world domination and destruction while broadcasting sermons of sparking Armageddon to troops on the Pentagon’s internal network, and that accuses Islam of hostility towards all Jews while its own history includes burning Jews alive in their synagogues and whose theology envisions that all Jews who do not accept Christ will perish in the very Armageddon they are working to bring about.

The point is not truth. The point is the construction of an enemy. And once the enemy is constructed, the rest follows: the contempt becomes policy, the policy becomes war, and the war becomes God’s will.

A movement that claims to “heal America” by slandering a fellow Abrahamic faith — one that believes in the virgin birth of Jesus, his messiahship, his ascension to heaven, and his second coming to establish God’s kingdom — is not engaged in evangelism. It is not fulfilling the Great Commission. You cannot bring people to Christ through contempt. What it is doing is something more useful to the project described in this article: it is building, at the congregational level, the same hostility toward Islam that its political allies exploit at the policy level, including the foreign nation state of Israel.

The theology of contempt scales. The social media post that calls Allah a fake god and the combat briefing that calls the Iran war God’s divine plan are not different phenomena. They are the same phenomenon at different altitudes. The post teaches the congregation that Muslims worship a false god. The briefing teaches the troops that bombing Muslims is God’s will. The distance between the two is shorter than anyone wants to admit.

3. The Strategic Alliance

The theology described in the previous section would be a curiosity — an eccentric feature of American religious life — if it had remained in the sanctuary. It did not remain in the sanctuary because it was invited out. And the invitation came from West Jerusalem.

The Israeli government’s cultivation of American Christian Zionism as a strategic asset is not a conspiracy theory. It is documented history, openly acknowledged by Israeli political figures, and in many cases celebrated by both parties to the alliance.

It began in earnest with Menachem Begin. When the Likud leader became Prime Minister of Israel in 1977, he recognised something that his Labour predecessors had not fully appreciated: American evangelicals were a vast, politically organised constituency whose theology made them unconditional supporters of the Jewish state. Begin established a special liaison for evangelical Christians and cultivated personal relationships with American religious leaders — most notably Jerry Falwell, who became one of Israel’s most vocal advocates in the United States.³³

The alliance was built on a pragmatic bargain that both sides understood without stating openly. Danny Ayalon, a former Israeli ambassador to the United States, described an agreement between Begin and Pat Robertson: “We are both waiting for the Messiah. When the Messiah comes, we will ask him. And according to his answer we will know who is right.”³⁴ The eschatological disagreement — evangelicals believe Jesus will return; Jews do not — was set aside because the short-term political interests aligned perfectly. Evangelicals wanted Israel supported, defended, and expanded. The Israeli right wanted American political cover, military aid, and unconditional diplomatic backing. The deal was struck.

Ronald Reagan brought Christian Zionists into the White House with enthusiasm, hosting discussion groups that gave figures like Falwell, Robertson, and Hal Lindsey direct access to Congressional and national leaders.³⁵ The relationship cooled somewhat under George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, but the structural alliance remained intact — maintained by organisations like AIPAC that understood the value of the evangelical voting bloc even when the president himself was less receptive.

The decisive moment came in 1995, at AIPAC’s annual policy conference. Until that point, many evangelicals had been wary of Jewish organisations, and the feeling was mutual. But at that conference, AIPAC invited Ralph Reed — the executive director of Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition — to join the proceedings. The two movements discovered they could reach a concurrence of views on the basis of promoting the welfare of Israel.³⁶ Robertson, who had previously publicly decried Jewish influence in America, declared he would stand with Israel and oppose the creation of a Palestinian state. The alliance between the pro-Israel lobby and the evangelical right was formalised, and it has only deepened since.

The numbers tell the story. Christians United for Israel, founded by San Antonio megachurch pastor John Hagee in 2006, now claims over 10 million members.³⁷ That is nearly double the entire American Jewish adult population of approximately 5.8 million.³⁸ The largest Zionist organisation in the United States is not Jewish. It is evangelical Christian. CUFI’s annual summits draw thousands of attendees and feature direct addresses from Israeli political leaders. At CUFI’s 2017 conference, Benjamin Netanyahu declared that evangelical Christians were “one of Israel’s greatest allies.”³⁹

Evangelical Christians now constitute roughly a third of the Republican Party base.⁴⁰ Christian Zionism has become a central plank of the Republican platform — not because Republican strategists are dispensationalists, but because dispensationalists are reliable voters whose single-issue loyalty to Israel aligns with the party’s broader geopolitical commitments. The theology provides the passion. The party provides the power. And Israel provides the strategic direction.

This brings us to February 2026, and a moment that crystallised the entire arrangement in a single exchange.

Mike Huckabee — former Arkansas governor, former Baptist minister, and the United States Ambassador to Israel — sat down for a podcast interview with Tucker Carlson. Carlson asked Huckabee about a Bible verse in which God promises Abraham that his descendants will receive land stretching from the Nile to the Euphrates — a territory encompassing modern-day Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq. Carlson pointed out that this was, in effect, “basically the entire Middle East.”

Huckabee’s response: “It would be fine if they took it all.”⁴¹

He later attempted to walk the statement back, calling it “somewhat of a hyperbolic statement.”⁴² But the damage — or, from the perspective of the project, the signal — was sent. Saudi Arabia’s foreign ministry described the remarks as “extremist rhetoric.” Egypt called them a “flagrant breach” of international law. The State Department declined to comment.⁴³

The Israeli right and American evangelicals are running the same play from different playbooks. One reads the Torah, the other the Book of Revelation. Both arrive at the same conclusion: the land is promised, the borders must expand, and anyone in the way is an obstacle to prophecy.

Israel’s far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich — who gave a speech in 2023 at a podium displaying a map that showed Jordan as part of Israel — appeared to welcome Huckabee’s remarks.⁴⁴ This is the convergence in action: the theological claim and the territorial ambition reinforcing each other, each providing the other with legitimacy it could not sustain alone.

Huckabee was not freelancing. The Likud Party — Netanyahu’s own party, Israel’s governing party — has stated since its founding platform in 1977 that “between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.”⁴⁵ The platform has never been rescinded. When Palestinians use the phrase “from the river to the sea” — a phrase that for many describes freedom from occupation, however contested its interpretation — they are censured, expelled from universities, and accused of calling for genocide. When Likud puts the same territorial claim in its founding charter, it is called policy — and underwritten with American tax dollars.

4. The Convergence Point

There is a place where all of this converges — where dispensationalist theology, Israeli territorial ambition, American evangelical money, and global geopolitical risk meet on a single hilltop in Jerusalem. It is called the Temple Mount by Jews, Haram al-Sharif — the Noble Sanctuary — by Muslims. And it may be the most dangerous thirty-five acres on Earth.

For dispensationalists, the prophetic sequence requires a Third Temple to be built in Jerusalem before the Tribulation can begin. The first two temples — Solomon’s, destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 BCE, and Herod’s, destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE — stood on what some believe is, though no archaeological verification has proven, the same site where the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock have stood for over a thousand years. Al-Aqsa is the third holiest site in Islam, the place from which the Prophet Muhammad is believed to have ascended to heaven. Nearly 2 billion Muslims understand any threat to it as an existential provocation.

The Third Temple movement is not hypothetical. It is organised, funded, and politically connected.

The Temple Institute, based in Jerusalem, has spent decades preparing for the construction of a Third Temple — fabricating priestly garments, recreating ritual vessels, and training descendants of the priestly caste in sacrificial procedures.⁴⁶ Boneh Israel, an evangelical Christian organisation, has imported red heifers from Texas to Israel and raised them under strict ritual conditions required for a purification ceremony that is considered a prerequisite for Temple construction. Israel’s Ministry of Jerusalem Affairs and Heritage has funded development of the site where the ceremony is planned.⁴⁷

There is an irony here that Christian theology cannot easily absorb. The central claim of Christianity is that Christ’s sacrifice on the cross was the final sacrifice — the one that rendered all animal sacrifice obsolete. Evangelical organisations funding the restoration of Temple sacrifice are financing the reversal of the very act their faith considers the most important event in human history.

Yehuda Glick, a former Likud member of the Knesset, has led a growing movement calling for Jewish prayer rights on the Temple Mount — a direct challenge to the status quo that has governed the site since Israel captured East Jerusalem in 1967. Under that arrangement, Israel controls access to the compound but the Islamic Waqf administers the religious sites. The movement to erode this arrangement has gained momentum, with increasing numbers of Jewish visitors ascending the Mount under police escort.⁴⁸

Christian Zionist organisations provide both financial and political support for these efforts. The alliance between dispensationalist evangelicals and Orthodox Jewish Temple activists is, like the broader Christian Zionist alliance, built on a shared short-term objective concealing incompatible long-term theologies. The evangelicals want the Temple built because it triggers Armageddon and the return of Christ. The Orthodox activists want it built because it inaugurates the Messianic Age. Both sides know the other’s endgame. Both sides have decided it doesn’t matter yet.

Hamas understood the explosive power of this convergence. When it launched its attack on October 7, 2023, it named the operation “Al-Aqsa Storm” — and explicitly cited the increasing Jewish incursions into the compound as a provocation.⁴⁹ Whatever else October 7 was, it was a reminder that the Temple Mount is not an abstraction. It is a detonator. And the people who are most actively working to set it off believe the resulting explosion is not a risk to be managed but a prophecy to be fulfilled.

This is the point that most Western commentary misses entirely. When American evangelicals send money to Temple preparation organisations, when Israeli politicians campaign on Jewish sovereignty over the Mount, when red heifers are raised in the Judean hills according to ancient ritual specifications — these are not curiosities. They are operational steps in a project whose architects believe they are building toward the end of the world. And they have the political connections, the financial resources, and the theological conviction to keep building.

The question is not whether they will succeed in constructing a Third Temple. The question is how much damage the attempt will cause — to the Middle East, to interfaith relations, and to the hundreds of millions of people who will interpret any move against Al-Aqsa as a declaration of civilisational war.

There is a theological problem at the heart of this project that its architects never address. Prophecy, by definition, is God’s work. If it requires political lobbying, congressional funding, and cattle breeding programmes to advance, it is not prophecy — it is a construction project with a biblical veneer. To engineer the fulfilment of God’s plan is to declare, in practice, that God cannot or will not fulfil it himself. That is not faith. It is its opposite. And the Christians driving this project might consider a warning from the teacher they claim to follow: “Not everyone who says to me, Lord, Lord, will enter the kingdom of heaven. Many will say to me on that day, Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name? And I will tell them plainly, I never knew you. Away from me.” The full theological case against self-fulfilling prophecy — and what the Christian tradition’s own texts say about those who appoint themselves as God’s architects — is a subject that deserves its own treatment, and will receive it.

5. From 9/11 to Iran

The evangelical capture of American foreign policy did not begin on September 11, 2001. But 9/11 was the accelerant that turned a slow-burning theological project into a five-alarm fire.

Within hours of the attacks, a framing was available — the “clash of civilizations,” borrowed from Samuel Huntington’s 1996 thesis and already embedded in the evangelical worldview.⁵⁰ Five days later, President Bush used the word “crusade” in remarks to the press, then retracted it.⁵¹ But the retraction was for the press. In a 2003 meeting with Palestinian leaders, Bush reportedly told them: “I’m driven with a mission from God. God would tell me, George, go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan. And I did. And then God would tell me, George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq. And I did.”⁵² The White House denied it. The Palestinian foreign minister who was present stood by the account. The framing had already been received by the audience that mattered most: the tens of millions of Americans who already believed that Islam was a prophetic enemy and that conflict with the Muslim world was both inevitable and divinely ordained.

The Iraq War was the proving ground. But it is worth remembering what came before it. During the Soviet war in Afghanistan, American evangelicals were enthusiastic supporters of the mujahideen — on the grounds that they were God-fearing fighters resisting godless communism, a system of the devil. Muslims were allies when the enemy was atheism. They became prophetic enemies the moment the Cold War ended and a new narrative was required. The underlying dispensationalist hostility toward Islam had always been there — but during the Cold War it took a back seat to the greater enemy of godless communism. Back then, Allah was not a “fake god.” Back then, Muslims who believed in the God of Abraham were useful. Once that enemy fell, Islam moved from ally to adversary almost overnight, and the God that Muslims had always worshipped became, conveniently, a false one. The 9/11 attacks — carried out by men from the same broader movement the West had armed, funded, and then abandoned in Afghanistan after the Soviets withdrew — only reinforced the new narrative. The blowback became the justification.

The Iraq war had no connection to 9/11 — a fact that was established at the time and has been confirmed exhaustively since — but it had the support of the evangelical base because it advanced the broader project: reshaping the Middle East in ways that served both American strategic interests and the dispensationalist prophetic timeline. Evangelical leaders provided moral cover for a war of choice. Congregations provided the political base that made the war sustainable even as public support eroded. The alliance between the national security establishment and the evangelical right, forged in the Reagan years, was battle-tested in Iraq and found reliable.

Meanwhile, a new infrastructure was being built — one that bridged the gap between evangelical theology and national security policy. Organisations like Frank Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy, Brigitte Gabriel’s ACT for America, and Daniel Pipes’ Middle East Forum built a counter-Islamism network that translated theological hostility toward Islam into the language of threat assessment and national security.⁵³ These were not evangelical organisations in the traditional sense. They were policy shops. But they served the same function: they provided a secular-sounding justification for the civilisational conflict that dispensationalist theology had already declared.

The pattern continued through the Obama years — when evangelical opposition to the Iran nuclear deal was ferocious and theologically motivated — and accelerated dramatically under Trump. From the moment he was elected in 2016, evangelical leaders christened Trump as “God’s anointed” — a vulgar, thrice-married casino mogul who could not name a favourite Bible verse, recast as a divine instrument chosen to restore Christian America.⁵⁴ The embassy move to Jerusalem in 2018 was celebrated by evangelical leaders as prophecy fulfilled. Netanyahu himself compared Trump to Cyrus the Great — the Persian king who freed the Jews from Babylonian exile and enabled the rebuilding of the Temple.⁵⁵ Banners appeared in Israel proclaiming “Cyrus the Great is alive!” The comparison was not casual. It positioned Trump within the prophetic narrative as a divinely appointed instrument — a non-believer chosen by God to advance the Jewish return, just as Cyrus had been.

The Abraham Accords of 2020 normalised relations between Israel and several Arab states while bypassing the Palestinian question entirely — a restructuring of the regional order that served both American and Israeli strategic interests and that evangelical leaders embraced as further evidence of prophetic momentum.

Then came the wars. The June 2025 strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities — the 12-Day War — established the precedent: the United States would use military force against Iran. The March 2026 full-scale joint operation with Israel, which killed Supreme Leader Khamenei and launched sustained bombing campaigns across Iranian territory, was the culmination.⁵⁶

Each step looks like geopolitics from the outside. The intelligence assessments, the diplomatic cables, the military planning — all of it conducted in the language of national security, threat assessment, and strategic necessity. But among the people in the room when these decisions are made are men and women who believe, with absolute sincerity, that serving God’s timeline is serving America’s national interest — that Armageddon is in America’s interest, that Christ’s return and all the death and destruction that must precede it is in America’s interest, that innocent lives lost are a means to an end that serves America’s interests, and that any war that advances the prophetic sequence is not a cost to be weighed but a duty to be fulfilled. The language of security is the vehicle. The theology is the driver.

When Pete Hegseth stood at the National Prayer Breakfast and told military personnel that the warrior who lays down his life “finds eternal life,” he was not speaking metaphorically. When commanders across thirty installations told their troops that Trump was anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire for Armageddon, they were not freelancing. They were delivering, in explicit terms, the message that the Secretary of War had been transmitting either behind closed doors or in coded terms for nine months.

The capture is complete. The question is what to do about it.

6. The Constitutional Betrayal

The First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States begins with ten words: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” The Establishment Clause. It is the first freedom named in the first amendment — the thing the founders considered so important that they put it before speech, before the press, before assembly, before the right to petition the government.

What Pete Hegseth has built at the Pentagon — monthly Christian worship services broadcast on the Department’s internal network, led by a pastor who advocates theocracy, attended by service members in a hierarchical culture where the boss’s invitation carries the weight of an order — is not a celebration of religious freedom. It is the establishment of a de facto state religion within the most powerful military on Earth.

Fred Wellman, a twenty-year Army combat veteran, called it “an unconstitutional and extreme attack on the 1st Amendment going completely unchecked by Congress.” He wrote: “Hegseth is using his official position to make his religion the official one of the Department of Defense using official facilities, communications channels and personnel.”⁵⁷

Consider who serves in that military. Roughly 20 percent of the U.S. armed forces identify as Catholic.⁵⁸ Doug Wilson — the man Hegseth invited to preach at the Pentagon — has described the Catholic Mass as “idolatry” and Catholic devotion to Mary as “Mariolatry.” In his vision of a Christian America, Catholic public processions would be outlawed as “public displays of idolatry.”⁵⁹ A fifth of the force Hegseth commands practices a faith that his personal pastor considers heretical and would suppress by law.

Then there are the Muslim service members. The Jewish service members. The Buddhists, the Hindus, the atheists, the agnostics — all of them watching their chain of command declare, from the podium of the Pentagon, that this is a Christian nation waging a Christian war.

The Myth of the Christian Founding

When defenders of this arrangement invoke “Judeo-Christian values” as the foundation of the American republic, they are telling a story that the founders themselves rejected.

The founders were not Christians in any sense Pete Hegseth or Doug Wilson would recognise. Thomas Jefferson took a razor to the Bible, physically cutting out every miracle, every supernatural claim, every reference to the divinity of Christ — producing what is now known as the Jefferson Bible, held today by the Smithsonian Institution.⁶⁰ Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, and George Washington were Deists at best, ambiguous on orthodox Christianity at a minimum. The Constitution does not mention God. Not once. The First Amendment explicitly prohibits the establishment of religion. These are not obscure historical footnotes. They are the foundational documents of the nation Hegseth claims to be defending.

And then there is the Treaty of Tripoli. Drafted under George Washington, signed by John Adams, ratified unanimously by the United States Senate in 1797. Article 11 states, in plain English: “The Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”⁶¹ Unanimously. Not a dissenting vote. The founders were explicit.

When Hegseth declares that “America was founded as a Christian nation,” he is not offering an interpretation of history. He is contradicting the founders in their own words, ratified by their own Senate, in a treaty they wrote themselves.

The United States may be a nation populated by Christians, but it was founded as a nation for everyone equally, regardless of the religious make-up of the country. That is what the founders intended. That is what they wrote into law. The demographic composition of the population does not override the constitutional framework that governs it.

What “Christian Morality” Built

But let us take the claim on its own terms for a moment. Suppose we accept the premise that Christian morality shaped the American project. What did it build?

It built a country on the graves of indigenous peoples. Sand Creek. Wounded Knee. The Trail of Tears. The systematic destruction of nations that had inhabited this continent for millennia, justified by a theological doctrine — the Doctrine of Discovery — that was explicitly Christian.

The papal bull Inter Caetera, issued by Pope Alexander VI in 1493, granted European Christian powers the right to claim lands inhabited by non-Christians — a doctrine that drove the colonisation of the Americas for three centuries before the United States existed. The papal bull carried no authority in the Protestant republic that eventually emerged — but the legal principle it established did. In 1823, the Supreme Court adopted the Doctrine of Discovery as the foundation of American land title in Johnson v. M’Intosh, ruling that indigenous peoples held rights of occupancy but not ownership because Christian discovery took precedence.⁶² That ruling has never been fully overturned. Protestant America rejected the Pope’s theology but embraced his permission to take the land.

The Vatican did not formally repudiate the Doctrine of Discovery until March 2023.⁶³ It took five hundred and thirty years to say it was wrong.

It built a country on the backs of enslaved Africans — kidnapped, transported, sold, beaten, worked to death, and bred like livestock for generations. And here is a fact that the “Christian nation” narrative systematically erases: scholars estimate that between 15 and 30 percent of enslaved Africans brought to the Americas were Muslim.⁶⁴ They carried their faith with them in chains. They prayed in secret. They built this country — its agriculture, its infrastructure, its wealth — in bondage. When Wilson and Hegseth declare America a Christian nation, they are not merely wrong constitutionally. They are erasing the forced labour of Muslim people from the nation’s founding story.

The first Muslims in America did not arrive as immigrants or refugees. They arrived as property. And slaveholding was not a contradiction of Christian values at the time — it was entirely consistent with them, defended from the pulpit, justified with scripture, and practised by the faithful for centuries. It took a civil war that killed over 600,000 Americans to change that theology. The values evolved. But they did not evolve on their own.

The defenders of Christian civilisation would do well to read the history they claim to own — in order.

When Omar ibn al-Khattab conquered Jerusalem for Islam in 637, the Christian Patriarch invited him to pray inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Omar refused — not out of contempt, but out of respect: he feared that if a caliph prayed there, future Muslims would claim it as a mosque. He prayed outside instead. The mosque built on that spot still stands, across from the church he chose to protect.

When the Crusaders took Jerusalem in 1099, they burned Jews alive in their synagogue and massacred the Muslim inhabitants until, by the accounts of their own chroniclers, blood ran through the streets.

The Crusaders did not limit their violence to Muslims and Jews. The Fourth Crusade of 1204 never reached the Holy Land at all — instead, the armies sacked Constantinople, the greatest Christian city in the world, looting its churches, destroying its relics, and massacring its Christian inhabitants. Fellow believers were plundered when they stood in the way of the project. That pattern has not changed. Today, Doug Wilson calls the Catholic Mass idolatry. Hegseth’s Pentagon services exclude non-evangelical Christians from the vision of the nation they serve. The new Crusade, like the old ones, devours its own.

When Saladin retook the city in 1187, he spared the Christian population, kept the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Christian hands, and invited the Jews to return — earning comparisons, in the Jewish world, to Cyrus the Great.

The Ottoman Empire governed Jerusalem for four hundred years, and throughout that period Christian holy sites were preserved under a system of religious governance that guaranteed their protection.

Today, under Israeli governance, Christian clergy are spat on and pepper-sprayed in the streets of Jerusalem, churches are vandalised, and Arab Christians have had their homes and land destroyed and confiscated. The Christian population of Jerusalem has fallen from 25 percent a century ago to less than one percent.⁶⁵

David J. Wasserstein, Professor of Jewish Studies at Vanderbilt University, wrote in the Jewish Chronicle: “Islam saved Jewry. This is an unpopular, discomforting claim in the modern world. But it is a historical truth.”⁶⁶ His words, not mine. The history they tell people to read is the history that refutes them.

The line from the Crusades to the Pentagon prayer service is shorter than most people realise, because it was never broken. Between 1096 and 1272, nine Crusades sent Christian armies to conquer the Holy Land, massacre its inhabitants, and establish kingdoms in the name of God. The battle cry was “Deus Vult” — God wills it. The symbol was the Jerusalem Cross. Nearly two centuries of holy war, launched by popes and sustained by the doctrine that killing for Christ earned salvation. The motivation was not merely territorial. The Crusaders believed that Christ would not return until the Holy Land was under Christian control — that the Second Coming required Jerusalem in Christian hands. The theology driving the original Crusades was, at its core, the same eschatology that drives the dispensationalist project today: take the land, fulfil the conditions, trigger the return.

When the formal Crusades ended, the project did not. It continued through the Doctrine of Discovery, which extended the Crusader logic to the entire non-Christian world. It continued through the colonisation of the Americas, Africa, and Asia. It continued through forced conversions, residential schools where indigenous children were taken from their families and forced to adopt Christianity, and the theological architecture of empire. And it continues now — in the Pentagon prayer services, in the Secretary of War’s Crusader tattoos, in the commanders telling troops that bombing Iran is God’s divine plan.

If the nine traditional Crusades ended in 1272, what Hegseth and the Christian nationalist movement are building is the tenth. Though it might be more accurate to say the Crusades never ended. They just changed uniforms. If the current wave began with the establishment of Israel in 1948 — the event dispensationalists treat as the prophetic starting gun — then we are nearly eighty years into the tenth.

7. What This Means for What Comes Next

This article has traced a line from a nineteenth-century Anglo-Irish preacher to a twenty-first-century Pentagon prayer service. From John Nelson Darby’s dispensations to Pete Hegseth’s hand on Doug Wilson’s shoulder. From the Scofield Reference Bible to over 200 complaints filed by service members who were told their war was God’s plan.

The line is not metaphorical. It is institutional. It runs through specific organisations — the Moral Majority, the Christian Coalition, the 700 Club, Christians United for Israel — and specific alliances: Begin and Falwell, Reed and AIPAC, Huckabee and Netanyahu. It runs through specific moments: the 1995 conference where evangelicals and the pro-Israel lobby formalised their partnership, the 2018 embassy move that was celebrated as prophecy, the February 2026 prayer service where a pastor who would bar Muslims from public life preached to the most powerful military on Earth.

And it runs through Iran. Through the 12-Day War of June 2025 and the full-scale operation of March 2026. Through the strikes that killed a head of state, the bombing campaigns that continue as this article is published, and the commanders who told their troops — in official briefings, in every branch of the military, across thirty installations — that all of it was God’s divine plan.

This is not an article about one rogue officer, or one controversial pastor, or one overzealous Secretary of War. This is an article about a capture so complete that the people inside it no longer recognise it as capture. They think it is faith. They think it is patriotism. They think it is destiny.

The Iran war is not only a moral failure. It is a legal one. Article 2(4) of the United Nations Charter prohibits the use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state. Article 51 permits military action only in self-defence against an armed attack — not as a preventive strike, not as a theological project, and not because a movement believes God requires it. The United States ratified the UN Charter in 1945, and under the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution, ratified treaties are the supreme law of the land. The Geneva Conventions, which the United States also ratified, govern the conduct of war and the treatment of prisoners and civilians. These are not aspirational documents. They are binding American law. The Iran war violates them.

And it is not the first time. Vietnam — where villages were burned and civilians massacred at My Lai. The Bay of Pigs. Iraq — launched on fabricated evidence, producing Abu Ghraib, where American soldiers tortured and sexually humiliated prisoners in a war their president said God told him to fight. Guantánamo, where men were held without charge and subjected to interrogation techniques that the Red Cross called torture. Afghanistan — where prisoners were stuffed into shipping containers and left to suffocate while soldiers watched. Libya. Syria. In conflict after conflict, the United States has waged wars that violate the laws it signed and the values it claims — and in war after war, religious conviction has provided the moral cover for a secular republic to behave as though the law does not apply to it.

This is the final betrayal, and it is not constitutional but theological. The movement that has captured American foreign policy does not merely violate the laws of the republic it claims to defend. It violates the demands of the faith it claims to follow. The Sermon on the Mount says “Blessed are the peacemakers.” The Geneva Conventions say protect the wounded and the prisoner. The UN Charter says do not attack a nation that has not attacked you. The Constitution says do not establish a state religion. This movement has broken every one of those commitments — secular and sacred alike — and called it obedience to God. In any other context, a movement that had infiltrated the highest levels of a nation’s military and intelligence apparatus, that operated in service of an ideology its own government’s laws prohibited, and that directed foreign policy toward objectives incompatible with the national interest, would be called what it is: a fifth column.

They have the most powerful military on Earth at their disposal. They have a theology that interprets every escalation as progress toward salvation. They have a political infrastructure that has been decades in the making and is now more deeply embedded in the machinery of American power than at any point in the nation’s history.

And they have one more thing: the absolute, sincere, unshakeable conviction that they are right. That God is with them. That the fire they are lighting in the Middle East is the signal fire for the return of Christ.

The rest of us — Christians, Muslims, Jews, and everyone else who will live with the consequences of this conviction — do not have the luxury of treating this as someone else’s problem. The evangelical capture of American foreign policy is not a culture war story. It is not a religious liberty debate. It is a national security crisis dressed in vestments.

And unless it is named, understood, and confronted with the same seriousness its architects bring to the project, it will not stop with Iran.

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James S. Coates writes about geopolitics, international law, and the decline of civilisational accountability. His books include A Signal Through Time, The Threshold, The Road to Khurasan, the memoir God and Country (published under pen name Will Prentiss) and his forthcoming Neither Gods Nor Monsters. He publishes regularly on Fireline Press and The Signal Dispatch, and his academic work appears on PhilPapers. He lives in the UK, with his family and dog who has no interest in any of this.

© 2026 James S. Coates All Rights Reserved. Fireline Press · fireline.press
Banner image: DOW Rapid Response (@DOWResponse), X/Twitter, February 17, 2026

Endnotes

¹ Jonathan Larsen, “U.S. Troops Were Told Iran War Is for ‘Armageddon,’ Return of Jesus,” Substack, March 2, 2026. Original NCO complaint email reproduced in full.

² Ibid. The NCO’s exact words: “He had a big grin on his face when he said all of this which made his message seem even more crazy.”

³ Ibid. The NCO specified writing “on behalf of 15 fellow troops” plus themselves. The Mirror US (March 5, 2026) reported the breakdown as including 11 Christians, one Muslim, and one Jew.

⁴ Middle East Eye, “US troops told Iran war is ‘anointed by Jesus’ to bring on Armageddon, watchdog says,” March 4, 2026. The MRFF reported over 200 complaints. Military.com confirmed the figures independently (March 3, 2026).

⁵ “US commander said Trump ‘anointed by Jesus’ to attack Iran: Report,” Newsweek, March 4, 2026. Weinstein’s “unrestricted euphoria” characterisation.

⁶ Snopes, “Investigating claim US troops were told Iran war is for ‘Armageddon,’ return of Jesus,” March 3, 2026. Left “unrated” due to anonymity of complainants and absence of audio/video evidence.

⁷ Reuters, “US Defense Chief Hegseth Leads Christian Prayer Service at Pentagon,” May 21, 2025.

⁸ Military.com, “Defense Contractors Report Invite to Pentagon’s Christian Prayer Service,” January 2026. Contractor described services as “inherently discriminatory”; retired Air Force brigadier general confirmed roll call and described attendance as “a litmus-loyalty test.”

⁹ Mikey Weinstein, Military Religious Freedom Foundation, quoted in The Spokesman-Review, December 2025. “Voluntold” characterisation of Pentagon prayer service attendance.

¹⁰ Baptist News Global, “Hegseth promotes Christian America at Pentagon and NRB,” February 27, 2026. Lists the pastors who led prior services.

¹¹ CNN, “Hegseth invited pastor who calls for Christian theocracy to lead Pentagon prayer service,” February 19, 2026.

¹² Baptist News Global, op. cit. Reports Wilson’s network includes nearly 475 schools through the Association of Classical Christian Schools.

¹³ The Wall Street Journal, September 2025 profile of Wilson (cited in MSNBC coverage). Wilson endorses repealing the 19th Amendment and supports a patriarchal society.

¹⁴ The Hill, “Hegseth invited controversial Christian nationalist to preach at Pentagon,” February 19, 2026. Wilson’s published position on slavery.

¹⁵ People For the American Way / Right Wing Watch, “Hegseth Invites Christian Nationalist Extremist Doug Wilson to Lead Pentagon Worship Service,” February 2026. Details Wilson’s theocratic vision.

¹⁶ Associated Press report cited in MSNBC, February 2026. Wilson’s D.C. church planted in 2025.

¹⁷ The Spokesman-Review, “Hegseth invites controversial Idaho pastor and self-described Christian nationalist to lead Pentagon’s monthly prayer meeting,” February 18, 2026.

¹⁸ Pentagon press secretary statement, reported by Military Times, February 20, 2026.

¹⁹ DOW Rapid Response (@DOWResponse), X/Twitter, February 17, 2026.

²⁰ Hegseth’s tattoos documented by Religion Unplugged, Word & Way, and National Catholic Reporter. “Deus Vult” on his arm; Jerusalem Cross on his chest.

²¹ Baptist News Global, op. cit. Hegseth’s National Prayer Breakfast remarks, February 5, 2026. Also reported by People For the American Way.

²² Britannica, “Christian Zionism.” Darby’s development of dispensationalism and its transmission to America.

²³ The Impact of Christian Zionism on American Policy, by William N. Dale, American Diplomacy journal. Notes Darby’s influence on Moody and Brookes.

²⁴ The Scofield Reference Bible (1909) is widely documented as the primary vehicle for popularising dispensationalism in America. See also Timothy Weber, On the Road to Armageddon: How Evangelicals Became Israel’s Best Friend (Baker Academic, 2004).

²⁵ LifeWay Research, 2017 poll. Reported in multiple sources including the LSE Undergraduate Political Review, “The Politics of Apocalypse: The Rise of American Evangelical Zionism,” February 2025.

²⁶ Evangelical share of the American electorate estimated at roughly 25 percent. Pew Research Center data.

²⁷ Hal Lindsey, The Late, Great Planet Earth (Zondervan, 1970). Sales figures widely documented; named the bestselling nonfiction book of the 1970s by the New York Times.

²⁸ The 700 Club premiered in 1966. Christian Broadcasting Network audience and reach documented in multiple media profiles.

²⁹ The Christian Coalition was founded in 1989 by Pat Robertson with Ralph Reed as executive director. See Ralph Reed, Active Faith: How Christians Are Changing the Soul of American Politics (Free Press, 1996).

³⁰ Christian Coalition voter guide distribution figures from contemporaneous reporting and Reed’s own accounts.

³¹ Jerry Falwell founded the Moral Majority in 1979. Disbanded 1989. See Susan Friend Harding, The Book of Jerry Falwell (Princeton University Press, 2000).

³² Operation Heal America (@OperHealAmerica), X/Twitter posts. July 25, 2025: “Allah is NOT the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob” (230K views). March 12, 2026: “Allah, the fake monotheistic god of the Koran, is NOT the same as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” September 29, 2025: “Don’t be fooled! Allah, the fake ‘god,’ is not the same as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” Screenshots held by author.

³³ Foreign Policy, “The Fall of Netanyahu Costs American Christian Zionists Their Greatest Ally in Israel,” July 19, 2021. Details Begin’s cultivation of evangelical leaders.

³⁴ Ibid. Danny Ayalon’s account of the Begin-Robertson agreement.

³⁵ William N. Dale, “The Impact of Christian Zionism on American Policy,” American Diplomacy. Reagan’s hosting of Christian Zionist leaders.

³⁶ Ibid. The 1995 AIPAC conference and Ralph Reed’s invitation.

³⁷ Christians United for Israel membership figures from CUFI’s own public statements and multiple media reports. LSE analysis (February 2025) confirms 10 million+.

³⁸ American Jewish adult population figure from Pew Research Center, “Jewish Americans in 2020.”

³⁹ Netanyahu’s remarks at CUFI’s 2017 conference, reported by LSE Undergraduate Political Review, op. cit.

⁴⁰ Evangelical share of the Republican base from Britannica’s Christian Zionism entry and Pew Research data.

⁴¹ NBC News, “Outcry after Ambassador Mike Huckabee suggests Israel has God-given right to Middle East land,” February 22, 2026. Video of the Tucker Carlson interview.

⁴² Ibid. Huckabee’s subsequent characterisation of the statement as “somewhat of a hyperbolic statement.”

⁴³ Ibid. Saudi and Egyptian reactions. State Department non-response confirmed by Al Jazeera, February 22, 2026.

⁴⁴ Al Jazeera, “What is Greater Israel, and how popular is it among Israelis?” February 26, 2026. Smotrich’s 2023 map incident and response to Huckabee.

⁴⁵ Likud Party original platform, 1977: “Between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.” Documented via Jewish Virtual Library, Wikipedia, Responsible Statecraft, The Nation, and NPR.

⁴⁶ Al Jazeera, “What do Texan red heifers have to do with Al-Aqsa and a Jewish temple?” April 9, 2024. Details Temple Institute preparations.

⁴⁷ Ibid. Boneh Israel’s role and Israeli government funding.

⁴⁸ The Daily Beast, “A Christian Group Is Building a Movement That Could Destabilize Jerusalem’s Most Explosive Holy Site,” September 2024. Yehuda Glick and the movement for Jewish prayer rights.

⁴⁹ Hamas named the October 7, 2023 operation “Al-Aqsa Storm.” Ayin Press, “What are we praying for?: Reimagining the Third Temple in Jewish Thought and Politics,” February 2024, documents the connection between Temple Mount incursions and Palestinian responses.

⁵⁰ Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (Simon & Schuster, 1996).

⁵¹ President George W. Bush used the word “crusade” on September 16, 2001. The White House subsequently walked back the language.

⁵² Nabil Shaath, former Palestinian Foreign Minister, quoted in BBC documentary Elusive Peace: Israel and the Arabs, broadcast October 2005. Bush’s remarks at June 2003 meeting with Palestinian leaders. Corroborated by Palestinian minutes reported in Haaretz.

⁵³ The Center for Security Policy (Frank Gaffney), ACT for America (Brigitte Gabriel), and the Middle East Forum (Daniel Pipes) are documented in multiple investigations of the counter-Islamism network, including the Center for American Progress report “Fear, Inc.” (2011) and subsequent reporting.

⁵⁴ Lance Wallnau declared Trump “God’s anointed” using Isaiah 45/Cyrus parallel, 2015-2016. CBS News, Charisma magazine. Pat Robertson, Franklin Graham, and Rick Perry used similar “ordained by God” language. Pew Research found roughly a third of white evangelicals believed Trump’s election reflected God’s will.

⁵⁵ Netanyahu compared Trump to Cyrus at multiple public events beginning in 2018. See also CounterPunch, “Biblical Bloodlust: Huckabee, Cyrus, and the Zionist Greater Israel Fantasy Fueling the Iran War,” March 6, 2026.

⁵⁶ The Mirror US, “US commanders tell troops Trump ‘anointed by Jesus’ to start Iran war,” March 5, 2026. Timeline of the June 2025 12-Day War and March 2026 operations.

⁵⁷ Fred Wellman’s statement posted on X/Twitter and reported by The Hill, February 19, 2026.

⁵⁸ Catholic share of U.S. military estimated at approximately 20 percent. 2019 DoD data reported by Congressional Research Service; also cited in Letters from Leo, “Pete Hegseth’s Pastor Wants to Ban Catholic Processions in America,” March 2026.

⁵⁹ Ibid. Wilson’s characterisation of the Mass as “idolatry” and his vision for outlawing Catholic public processions.

⁶⁰ The Jefferson Bible (formally The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth) is held by the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.

⁶¹ Treaty of Tripoli, Article 11, ratified unanimously by the United States Senate, June 7, 1797. Signed by President John Adams.

⁶² The Doctrine of Discovery, based on papal bulls including Inter Caetera (1493), influenced American law through Johnson v. M’Intosh (1823) and subsequent rulings. See Robert J. Miller, Native America, Discovered and Conquered: Thomas Jefferson, Lewis & Clark, and Manifest Destiny (Praeger, 2006).

⁶³ The Vatican formally repudiated the Doctrine of Discovery on March 30, 2023.

⁶⁴ Estimates of the Muslim proportion of enslaved Africans brought to the Americas vary. Sylviane Diouf, Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas (NYU Press, 1998), is the standard academic reference. Estimates range from 15 to 30 percent depending on region and period.

⁶⁵ Rossing Center Jerusalem, 2024 report: 111 documented anti-Christian incidents. Jerusalem Story, National Catholic Reporter, Arab News, and Armenian Weekly have reported attacks on Christian clergy. Christian population statistics from multiple demographic sources.

⁶⁶ David J. Wasserstein, “So, what did the Muslims do for the Jews?” Jewish Chronicle, May 24, 2012.

⁶⁷ CNN, Reuters, AP, NBC, CBS, ABC, Al Jazeera, Military.com, TIME, Baptist News Global, The Hill, Axios, Stars and Stripes — all confirmed the firings on April 2-3, 2026. Baptist News Global confirmed Green’s dismissal was the first of its kind in Army history.

⁶⁸ AP, “Hegseth asks the Army’s top uniformed officer to step down while US wages war against Iran,” April 3, 2026. Hegseth’s video message telling chaplains to be “less therapeutic and more pastoral.”

⁶⁹ Retired Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling, MSNBC, The Weekend, April 4, 2026.

I know that’s not what you expected to read. You clicked on this because the title confirmed something you already believed — that something about Islam isn’t right, that someone’s running a game, that you’re being played. You’re correct on all three counts. You’re just wrong about who’s doing the playing.

My name is James Coates. I’m a white American, born Catholic, raised in Illinois. I served as a Joint Drugs Enforcement Team operative for the United States Air Force Office of Special Investigations and later an undercover counterterrorism operative for the FBI. In 2004, when I learned that members of an Islamic group I was embedded with were plotting to travel to Iraq and join Al-Qaida’s insurgency against American forces, I acted on it. I wore a wire to their weekly meetings. I ran firearms training at their jihad camp while federal agents watched from the treeline and snipers held positions in the surrounding woods. I did this for two years. When it was over, all four men were convicted. The media called them the “Houston Taliban.”

I am also a published author and expert on Islam who trained officers at the Houston Police Academy on Islamic extremism in America. I have spent decades studying its theology, its legal traditions, its internal fractures, and the way it is exploited by people on every side. I have written publicly about the tribalism in Muslim communities, the ethnic hierarchies, the organisational cowardice that refuses to confront radicalism when it surfaces in their own ranks. I have named these problems and paid for naming them. If you want someone who will tell you everything is fine, you’re reading the wrong article.

But I didn’t write this to tell you what’s wrong with Muslims. I wrote this because your anger — which is real, and in many cases justified — is being exploited by people you haven’t identified yet, for purposes that have nothing to do with your safety or your country. Someone is profiting, and they need you never to find out who.

Let me show you.

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The Industry

There is a multi-billion dollar industry in the United States whose product is your anger toward Muslims. It has an organisational structure, a revenue model, donor networks, legislative infrastructure, and a well-documented track record. It is not a conspiracy theory. It is conspiracy fact. The financial trail is public record for anyone who cares to look. Mainstream American charities have been caught unknowingly funneling millions of dollars to counter-Islam advocacy groups through a financial mechanism called donor-advised funds, which allow wealthy donors to give anonymously through reputable institutions. The money flows from names you’d recognise — household charitable foundations — into organisations you’ve never looked into, run by people who’ve made careers out of your concern. The only people who haven’t told you about it are the people cashing the cheques.

Between 2014 and 2016 alone, auditors identified 1,096 charitable organisations funneling money to 39 counter-Islam groups, with a combined revenue capacity of at least $1.5 billion. Since 2010, over 230 counter-Islam, Muslim ban and counter-sharia bills have been introduced or enacted in state legislatures across the country. This isn’t grassroots concern. This is an industry.

The ecosystem has clearly defined roles. ACT for America — the largest counter-Islam organisation in the country, with chapters in every state and a direct pipeline to legislators — provides the grassroots muscle. The Center for Security Policy serves as the think tank, churning out reports raising the spectre of Shariah law. The David Horowitz Freedom Center operates as the content factory, publishing FrontPage Magazine and funding Robert Spencer’s Jihad Watch blog. Spencer has been barred from entering the United Kingdom for his views. In my decades of studying Islam, I can tell you that much of what he publishes wouldn’t survive five minutes of scrutiny from anyone who’s actually done the fieldwork. But accuracy was never the point. Outrage was.

The funding flows through channels designed for anonymity. Mainstream charitable foundations — commercial, community, and religious organisations — have been exploited as vehicles for funneling anonymous donations from wealthy donors into this network. A donor gives to a credible institution through a donor-advised fund, and that money quietly is siphoned away to organisations whose entire business model depends on keeping the outrage machine running.

And then there’s the political infrastructure. On December 18, 2025, Representatives Chip Roy and Keith Self launched the Sharia Free America Caucus. It now claims 55 members from 22 states, including the House Majority Whip. The caucus has introduced seven bills. The Preserving a Sharia-Free America Act would make advocacy for Shariah law grounds for deportation. Another bill would give Congress the power to designate organisations as terrorist groups through legislation — not through courts, not through evidence, but through a vote.

If that doesn’t concern you, it should. The Patriot Act was sold as a tool to fight Al-Qaida. It was used to surveil American citizens. The TSA was sold as airport security. It became a permanent bureaucracy that hasn’t caught a single terrorist. Every expansion of government power gets sold on the target you agree with and used on the target you didn’t see coming. That’s not a left-wing talking point. That’s American history. Politicians prey on our concerns, stoking fear. Organisations profit off of our concern. And we find that the freedoms we enjoy become less and less over time.

Here’s what none of these 55 members will tell you: every one of those seven bills is a fundraising engine. Every press release generates donor emails. Every media hit drives campaign contributions. They aren’t solving a problem. They’re fundraising off one. And the last thing any of them want is for the issue to actually get resolved — because the moment it does, the donations stop.

You may already be familiar with what the members of this caucus say when they think you’re on their side.

Representative Andy Ogles of Tennessee — whose district includes over 40,000 Muslim Americans — posted on X: “Muslims don’t belong in American society. Pluralism is a lie.” That post received 2.6 million views. The next day he wrote: “Paperwork doesn’t magically make you American. Muslims are unable to assimilate; they all have to go back.” When challenged, his response was: “My comments wouldn’t even be a news story if I had said this about Christians. Cry harder. Christ is King.”

Representative Randy Fine of Florida posted: “If they force us to choose, the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one.” That post received 45.6 million views. Forty-five million. When asked about Ogles’s comments, House Speaker Mike Johnson refused to condemn them, saying there’s “a lot of popular sentiment that the demand to impose Sharia law in America is a serious problem” — validating the lie while pretending to distance himself from its language.

Mike Davis, president of the Article III Project and former Chief Counsel for Nominations on the Senate Judiciary Committee — a man with 475,000 followers and direct access to power — posted a timeline of what he imagines a Muslim’s evening looks like: “6 pm: pray to their pedophile god. 7 pm: eat on the floor like dogs. 8 pm: like posts of Jewish women and their babies getting raped and slaughtered. 9 pm: build dirty bombs. 10 pm: pray to their pedophile god.”

Conservative commentator Benny Johnson, with over 2.5 million followers, posted: “A Muslim flag was raised at Newark City Hall as people chanted ‘Allahu Akbar.’ Mamdani sat on the floor and ate with his hands at New York City Hall. This isn’t assimilation. This is takeover.” That post received 215,000 views. Here’s what Johnson left out: the Newark flag raising was part of New Jersey’s official Muslim Heritage Month, enacted through bipartisan state law in 2022. The US flag flew alongside it, as required by state law. “Allahu Akbar” translates to “God is great.” Sitting on the floor to eat is a cultural tradition older than the United States. Johnson stripped the context, manufactured a threat, and a quarter of a million people absorbed it without checking a single fact. That’s not journalism. That’s a business model.

The popular account Libs of TikTok described a man performing the tawhid gesture — a raised index finger signifying monotheism, used in every daily prayer by every Muslim on earth — as “a Muslim doing the ISIS symbol.” That post received 426,000 views. Major international news outlets have had to issue formal corrections and apologies for making the same false claim. The gesture predates ISIS by fourteen centuries. But 426,000 people now associate a prayer gesture with terrorism, because an account with millions of followers told them to.

Political commentator Stacy Ruth declared: “Buddhism is a religion. Hinduism is a religion. Judaism is a religion. Christianity is a religion. Islam is a political ideology masquerading as a religion.” Representative Mary Miller said she was “proud to stand firmly against this radical ideology that seeks to uproot the constitutional principles and Christian values on which our nation was founded.”

These aren’t backbenchers. These are powerful voices with audiences in the tens of millions. But ask yourself — what has any of them actually done about the problem they keep telling you exists? Have any of those seven bills passed? Has a single one of those posts made your community safer? Or did they just make someone’s follower count bigger and someone’s campaign fund fatter? The question isn’t whether they believe what they’re saying. The question is who else benefits when they say it.

You thought you were forming your own opinion. You were consuming a product. And the product is our anger.

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The Foreign Hand

Before I continue, I need to make a distinction that the people profiting from this deliberately blur, because keeping it blurred protects them from scrutiny.

Some of the most devout Jewish communities in the world — groups like Neturei Karta, the Satmar Hasidim, True Torah Jews — have opposed Zionism on religious grounds since the ideology was founded in the 1890s. They argue that it hijacked Jewish identity for a political project that had no basis in Jewish theology before the nineteenth century. For this, they are called self-hating Jews. They are told they are not real Jews. They are marginalised, smeared, and shut out — by the very apparatus that claims to speak for all Jews everywhere. Ask yourself why. These communities don’t raise money for Israel. They don’t lobby Congress. They don’t fit the model. And when the most religiously observant Jews on the planet tell you that the Israeli government doesn’t represent them or their faith, and get attacked for saying it, that should tell you everything about the operation I’m about to describe. What follows is about the Israeli government’s cash cow, its lobbying apparatus, and where our money is going.

The Israeli government spends enormous sums to shape how we think about Muslims. In 2025, Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs signed a $6 million contract with the US-based firm Clock Tower X LLC to produce digital content and influence how artificial intelligence systems — including tools like ChatGPT — respond to topics involving Israel. The 2025 budget allocated an additional $150 million to the Foreign Ministry for influence operations — a twenty-fold increase over previous years. These funds target American college campuses, social media platforms, and international media.

Then there’s TikTok. In September 2025, Netanyahu sat down with a group of American influencers at Israel’s Consulate General in New York — and the meeting was recorded. His words were not ambiguous. He called social media “the most important weapon to secure our base in the US.” He identified the TikTok sale as “the most important purchase going on right now. Number one. Number one.” He then said of Elon Musk and X: “We have to talk to Elon. He’s not an enemy, he’s a friend. If we can get these two things, we will get a lot.”

Days later, the TikTok deal went through. The US operations were transferred to a consortium led by Oracle, whose co-founder Larry Ellison is a longtime Netanyahu ally and major donor to the Israeli military. Ellison has hosted Netanyahu on his private island. The consortium includes Rupert Murdoch and Michael Dell — Dell posted a photo with the Israeli president captioned “It’s an honor to stand with Israel” and is a major donor to Friends of the Israel Defense Forces.

A foreign head of state went on camera, called our social media platforms weapons, celebrated their purchase by his allies, and told a room full of influencers that controlling these platforms would allow Israel to “get a lot.” Again, that’s not a conspiracy theory. That is a PsyOp by a foreign government on our minds.

The strategic logic is straightforward. Our concern about Islam serves Israeli foreign policy by reframing the conflict as civilisational — the West versus Islam — rather than what it actually is: a political conflict over occupation, dispossession, and the rights of the Palestinian Arabs. The more focused we are on Islam as a threat at home, worrying about what our neighbour is up to, the less likely we are to question what is being done with our tax money overseas.

And it is our money. The United States has provided Israel with over $317 billion in US taxpayer funded aid since 1951, adjusted for inflation, making it the largest cumulative recipient of American foreign aid since World War II. In the two years since October 2023 alone, the US has spent $21.7 billion in direct military aid to Israel, with an additional $9 to $12 billion on related military operations in the region. The Israeli Defense Ministry confirmed that since October 2023, the United States delivered ninety thousand tons of arms and equipment on eight hundred transport planes and one hundred and forty ships.

Israel receives its annual aid in the first thirty days of the fiscal year — no other country gets this treatment. Unlike any other recipient, Israel is not required to account for how it spends US aid, including on settlements that violate stated US policy. Meanwhile, Israel maintains free universal healthcare and free education for its citizens. We are subsidising another country’s social safety net while our own crumbles, and the people telling us to be angry about Muslims are making sure we never connect those dots.

Ask yourself why the conversation is always steered toward Islam and never toward the cheque our government writes every year. Someone doesn’t want us connecting those dots.

The same infrastructure extends into technology — and this is where it comes home. The tech companies taking billions in defence contracts with Israel, paid for by our tax dollars, are the same ones building the surveillance systems being deployed on American soil. Google’s $1.2 billion Project Nimbus contract provides cloud and AI services to the Israeli military. Microsoft’s Azure powers Israeli government operations. Amazon Web Services enables intelligence gathering overseas. These are the same companies providing facial recognition to American police departments, predictive policing algorithms to American cities, and cloud infrastructure to American intelligence agencies. The technology gets tested on someone else’s population, AI designed for warfare, and then deployed on ours. If you think the AI tools being built for foreign military operations won’t eventually be pointed at American citizens, you haven’t been paying attention to how this works. It’s already coming home while we are distracted by the political sleight of hand of our politicians.

Our tax dollars fund the bombs. Our anger provides the political cover. And the people telling us to be angry about Muslims are the same people making sure we never ask why. The road to truth always lies at the end of a money trail.

The Intel

Now let’s look at some of the claims we’ve all heard repeated. Some of them don’t hold up when you check the source.

Shariah is one of the most misunderstood words in this debate. There is no single book of Shariah — you cannot walk into a bookshop and buy one, the way you can buy a Bible or a Qur’an. There are books about Shariah, and there are law books in Muslim-majority countries that reflect local cultural norms — sometimes with an Islamic flavour. But that’s no different from Western nations whose laws carry a Christian influence without being based on the Bible, or Israel, where Jewish identity shapes the state but not every law of the Torah is practised. Shariah is not a legal code waiting to be imposed. It’s a tradition of thinking that different countries apply differently — or not at all. Shariah is a science of interpretation practised across five major schools of thought, each reaching different conclusions on issues ranging from prayer posture to commercial law. Over ninety percent of Shariah has nothing to do with criminal law. It covers prayer, fasting, charity, personal hygiene, inheritance, and business ethics. When politicians ban Shariah, they won’t be banning a book — they will be banning a way of thinking. And once the government can ban one way of thinking, yours is next.

Shariah courts in Western countries — including the United States and United Kingdom — operate identically to Jewish Halakha courts, known as Beth Din. Both handle civil matters on an opt-in basis: divorce, inheritance, contract disputes. Neither imposes religious law on non-adherents. Neither has jurisdiction over criminal matters. The Beth Din system has operated in America for decades without a single “Ban the Beth Din” bill. The forty-seven members of the Sharia Free America Caucus could not define what they are trying to ban — and have never proposed banning its Jewish equivalent. The inconsistency tells you everything about who’s running the game.

In fact, Israel itself — the country our tax dollars subsidise to the tune of $317 billion to expand, operate influence campaigns against us — operates Shariah courts for its Muslim citizens, handling matters of marriage, divorce, and inheritance. The politicians who vote to send that money to a country with Shariah courts are the same ones telling you that Shariah in America is an existential threat. Let that sink in.

The claim that Muhammad was a pedophile is a commonly debunked claim Mike Davis recently shared with 475,000 followers. It is built on a contested hadith — a recorded oral tradition written down two to three centuries after the events it describes. What no one sharing this claim tells you is that the hadith literature contains multiple contradictory accounts, and the weight of the evidence — drawn from independent chronological records, biographical sources, and battlefield participation logs that prohibited anyone under fifteen from military expeditions — places Aisha in her late teens to early twenties at the time of marriage. The single account claiming she was nine requires ignoring all of it. No contemporary of the Prophet — not even his bitterest enemies, who accused him of everything from insanity to sorcery — ever accused him of marrying a girl too young. Meanwhile, US state laws as recently as today permit marriages as young as twelve with parental consent. Before condemning seventh-century Arabia, examine your own legal codes. The person who told you this was counting on you never looking it up.

Halal slaughter requires that an animal be humanely raised throughout its life, removed from the sight of other animals before slaughter, and killed with a single clean cut to the jugular using a razor-sharp knife, with a short prayer said beforehand. This is virtually identical in principle to Jewish kosher slaughter, known as shechita. Both traditions mandate humane treatment and the rapid draining of blood. The “ban halal” crowd has never proposed banning kosher. Ask yourself why. When politicians target one practice and protect an identical one, they’re not legislating food safety or concern for animal cruelty. They’re picking a target and hoping you don’t notice the double standard. Remember the political sleight of hand and who benefits from the outrage.

The idea that Islam is incompatible with democracy or trying to take over isn’t new — and it didn’t convince the founding fathers of our great nation. Thomas Jefferson hosted the first White House iftar dinner in 1805, rearranging the time of a state dinner to accommodate the Ramadan fast of the Tunisian ambassador, Sidi Soliman Mellimelli. Jefferson owned a copy of the Qur’an. And the author of this article served as a counterterrorism operative protecting American democracy — and helped bring to justice people who were plotting against it.

In a nation of many religions — and we often forget that different denominations of Christianity were once treated as separate and rival faiths — this is where we should be most concerned. Article VI of the United States Constitution states: “No religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.” The First Amendment prohibits Congress from making any law prohibiting the free exercise of religion. The Fourteenth Amendment guarantees equal protection under the law regardless of religion. Every bill introduced by the Sharia Free America Caucus — from making Shariah advocacy grounds for deportation to designating organisations as terrorists by legislative vote — violates the foundational principles of the country these legislators claim to defend.

And here’s where it gets personal. What happens when Evangelicals set religious tests for Catholics? Or Protestants for Mormons? Setting the precedent by banning Islam — a religion that believes Jesus is the Christ, that he ascended to Heaven, and that he will return in his second coming — brings it home on just how easy it would be to ban any denomination the group in power deems undesirable or a threat to what they believe is the real religion of the nation. The person who told you Islam is incompatible with America was counting on you never reading your own Constitution. Or just not caring. Benjamin Franklin warned us: “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” He wasn’t talking about Islam. He was talking about us.

The Exit

The people profiting from our anger don’t live in our neighbourhoods. They’ve never set foot in the communities they talk about. They have constructed, for profit and for political power, an image of 1.8 billion people based on the worst acts of a fraction of a fraction — and they’ve made a very comfortable living doing it.

And it isn’t just domestic profiteers. AIPAC and the Israeli government benefit directly from every ounce of our outrage. It is the political cover for a foreign policy that costs thousands of American lives and American treasure — $317 billion and counting — while the recipients enjoy the social programmes we can’t afford. The outrage machine keeps our eyes on Islam so we never look at the line item in the federal budget.

We were never stupid. We were targeted. The same psychological machinery that radicalises a young Muslim man watching jihadi recruitment videos in his bedroom is the same machinery being used on us: curated content selected for maximum emotional impact, an in-group that rewards escalation, an algorithm that serves us more of what makes us angry, and an industry that profits from our inability to see past the noise. The mechanism is identical. Only the content differs.

I know this because I’ve watched radicalisation from every angle a person can watch it from. I was radicalised myself, as a teenager, in a Christian cult that beat me with oak table legs and broomstick handles in the name of God’s authority — I know what it feels like to have a worldview constructed for you by people who profit from keeping you captive. I watched people I was close to get radicalised by online propaganda until they were ready to fly to Iraq and kill American soldiers. I trained them at a jihad camp while wearing a wire, and I helped put them away. And now I watch ordinary, decent Americans get radicalised by a billion-dollar industry that needs our outrage more than it needs the truth.

The machinery is the same every time. A curated feed. An authority figure who profits from our outrage. A community that polices doubt — where questioning the narrative gets you branded a traitor or a sympathiser. And a set of claims that fall apart the moment you verify them independently. The men I helped convict had their Anwar al-Awlaki recordings and their Baghdad Sniper videos. We have our Benny Johnson posts and our Libs of TikTok screenshots. The emotional architecture is identical: select the most inflammatory content, strip it of context, serve it to people who are already angry, and watch the radicalisation compound.

The real-world consequences are already here. In 2024, monitors recorded 8,658 complaints about incidents targeting Muslims across the United States — the highest number ever documented. That’s not a sign of a country getting safer. That’s a sign of a population being manipulated into attacking their own neighbours while the people running the operation cash cheques and win elections. Every incident is a data point in someone’s fundraising deck. Every headline is a donation driver. The outrage isn’t a side effect of the industry. It is the industry.

The exit starts with checking what we’ve been told — and not by asking the people who told us, because they have a financial interest in keeping us in the dark. Not by retreating into our own curated content to reinforce what we already believe. Step out. Challenge the beliefs we’ve been carrying. Beliefs aren’t permanent — they change as we grow, and changing them is a sign of strength, not weakness. Look up the donor-advised fund filings. Read the actual text of the bills being proposed in our name. Search the names I’ve given you and follow the money. See who’s getting paid, and ask yourself whether the people getting rich off our anger have ever done a single thing to make our lives better.

I told you about my work for the USAF Office of Special Investigations and my counterterrorism work for the Federal Bureau of Investigations, I told you about being raised Catholic, my time in a Christian cult and after becoming an Evangelical Christian, but there’s one more thing you should know about the man who wrote this article.

I’ve been Muslim nearly thirty years. But I didn’t abandon Christianity — I grew into Islam through it. I spent years studying the Bible, the Jewish scriptures, and eventually the Qur’an. What I found was that Islam didn’t ask me to reject Jesus — it asked me to revere him, as the Christ, born of a virgin, who ascended to Heaven and will return. My faith deepened. It didn’t break. The men I helped convict didn’t just betray their country — they betrayed a faith that teaches the same reverence for Jesus that your church taught you.

Everything I told you about the profiteers, the foreign influence operations, the manufactured outrage, the claims that fall apart when you check them — I told you as a man who knows Islam from the inside, who has lived it, bled for it, and been exiled for defending it honestly.

Christ himself told us: “You cannot serve God and money.” Every politician, every lobbying group, every influencer, every organisation I have named in this article — ask yourself which one they are serving. The answer has been staring us in the face the entire time.

You just read an entire article by a Muslim and didn’t throw it in the bin. You evaluated the evidence on its merits. You followed the facts where they led. That is the version of you that the hate industry cannot afford to exist — because a person who evaluates evidence is a person who can’t be hustled.

The most radical thing you can do right now is verify.

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James S. Coates writes about geopolitics, international law, and the decline of civilisational accountability. His books include A Signal Through Time, The Threshold, The Road to Khurasan, the memoir God and Country (published under pen name Will Prentiss) and his forthcoming Neither Gods Nor Monsters. He publishes regularly on Fireline Press and The Signal Dispatch, and his academic work appears on PhilPapers. He lives in the UK, with his family and dog who has no interest in any of this.

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