Sunday, 25 January 2026

 

Pax Judaica and the War on Islam

Art by Safia Latif

“When you understand your obligations to the Creator, only then can you understand your obligations to society.” - the shahid Imam Amin al-Jamil 

“Islam is as much the source of Western civilization as classical Greece and Rome, Islam’s anti-clericalism made it the first “Protestant” revolution, its rationalism made it the first “Enlightenment” — the father of Islamic Studies in the US, the shahid Ismāil al Farūqi

The world in this moment feels like a snake-oil salesman in a fraying suit, knocking on our door again with the same measly cracked bottle, promising cure while hawking poison: only now, the salesman is not so subtle. 

We will have them turn over 50 million barrels of oil!  We are locked and loaded to save the protestors from the Ayatollahs! 

Words so contrived, callous and cheap they’ve lost all meaning. We’ve heard this pitch before, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and watched it end in ruin, yet the crooked salesman returns, smugger, insulted that we didn’t buy his poison last time. 

All the while, the streets of the imperial core bleed red—not from some distant foreign “regime” or tyrant, but from homegrown IDF-trained ICE raids that kill and maim mothers, from homelessness festering in plain sight, from a social fabric shredded by cold indifference and brute force. The moral sermon of saving another dangerous “foreign” country abroad from “tyranny” while unleashing bloodshed against their own people rings hollow. What’s that saying about chickens roosting and boomerangs.. boomeranging?

The student encampments constituted the last bastion of resistance to this boomerang, but they were dismissed as extremist, woke, Marxist agitators. Those who crushed their voices sided with genocide instead. This is why movements based on liberal hypocrisy like the “No Kings” movement fail and ring hollow. Those who did not draw the line at the collective punishment and annihilation of Gaza will not draw the line at coldblooded murder on their own doorstep. 

Like I said in my previous post, the more one sees clearly the more painful it is.

It is a sick joke performed on loop, where the script never changes, only the target does, and we’re expected to pretend to accept this dysfunctional dystopia. 

This C-Rated film ultimately keeps happening because, God forbid, Zionist-backed governments and interests leave Islam and Muslims alone.

The truth is, the Israeli state-sponsored rhetoric of eternal Jewish victimhood immunizes expansionist power-seeking from accountability, even when actual victims of a genocide still plead for their lives before our eyes. It is astounding. The bombs fall at the behest of victimhood tropes/culture/narrative on antisemitism vs. actualhuman lives, actual victims, actual semites get brutally exterminated. 

The moral obscenity deepens when that rhetoric is paired with the increased stoking of anti-Muslim animus globally by Evangelical, Hindutva, far-right and Zionist instigators—casting Muslims as an existential threat—while Muslims are, in reality, among the primary victims of this century’s state terror, mass surveillance, bombardment, displacement, and collective punishment from Gaza to Kashmir to Guantánamo’s enduring afterlife. 

But victims does not connote victimhood. Muslims have God as our ultimate victor. Muslims do not need to milk their victimhood status to assert a “chosen people” complex and use that as an excuse to suppress others. They are not our teachers, alhamdulilah

Yet, to add insult to injury, it is an Arab government, the UAE, that funds much of this global Islamophobic campaign and has even pledged to back Israel’s genocide in Gaza “by all means necessary.” The UAE officially designated the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) as a terrorist organization in November 2014, ten years before Gov. Abbott in Texas moved to do so in November 2025. 

According to Andreas Krieg, Abu Dhabi’s mode of statecraft is an attempt to mimic the burgeoning days of the British Empire, the same empire that handed over Palestine to the Zionists and carved up the Arab world. It so desperately wants to prove its “civility” to its masters by attempting to assert itself as the leader of the Arab world by castigating Islam and Muslims and unleashing the dogs of mass violence and surveillance upon them. Abu Dhabi insidiously focuses on building networks of private firms and proxies to project power to establish regional dominance and counter perceived threats from average Muslims who believe in the central edicts of Qur’an. Of course, banning the “Muslim Brotherhood” is just a stand-in for banning mainstream Islamic political and ethical consciousness. 

But all these hysterical moves rest on fickle ground. The UAE, like the US and Israel, are overplaying their colonial hand. Abu Dhabi is increasingly isolating itself and its arrogance and hubris will be its downfall: it will go down in the dustbin of history as the shameless Arab Uncle Tom of Pax Judaica. 

This pervasive war against Islam is not accidental. It is reaching its zenith. I wouldn’t be surprised if the UAE has already started to fund policies to ban the Qur’an, calling it an “antisemitic” book.

All this aligns with long-articulated strategic visions such as the Yinon Plan (1982), an Israeli strategic paper arguing that Israel’s security would be best ensured by the fragmentation of surrounding Arab states along sectarian and ethnic lines, Kurdish, Armenian, Druze, etc., producing weak, divided entities incapable of challenging regional dominance like its recent move to recognize Somaliland; and the Clean Break policy (1996), drafted for Netanyahu by U.S. neoconservatives, which urged abandoning land-for-peace, confronting Syria, weakening Iraq, and reshaping the region through force and regime change under the guise of “security” and “moderation.” 

Some are holding their breath that a Muslim-style NATO might finally be formed to confront the UAE and what I call the Axis of Treason, but I fear that the door for collective moral action has long been shut by the inaction during the Sudan and Gaza genocides. Remember, whatever reaction these Muslims states take is based on fear, not virtue. Any reactive move built on fear is bound to fail. The armies that did not move for Gaza will likely end up moving against their own people. After all, the torture dungeons full of dissidents in Arab states don’t lie. These Muslim states still resemble the UAE domestically, even if they are trying to part with it on a foreign policy level. Across the Middle East and its peripheries, both state elites and explicitly anti-Muslim currents have increasingly mobilized pre-Islamic civilizations as symbols in a broader cultural reorientation meant to relativize or displace Islam’s role in national identity. 

In Egypt, the heavy investment in pharaonic imagery—most visibly through the recent reopening of the Egyptian Museum, parades of mummies, and state rhetoric about “ancient greatness”—often functions less as historical appreciation than as a signal that Egypt’s true essence predates Islam, subtly recasting Islam as a late layer rather than a constitutive core. Symbolic moves like this are not ambiguous about the age of the return of Pharaoh. 

In “Saudi Arabia”, this reorientation has taken a more concrete and programmatic form, most clearly in projects such as Al-Ula, where Nabataean and pre-Islamic sites like Hegra are elevated through lavish festivals, art installations, and global tourism campaigns that consciously frame the kingdom’s heritage as ancient, cosmopolitan, and pre-Islamic.

From the Saudi “Ancient Kingdoms Festival” of Al-Ula

A parallel move appears in Iran, where appeals to ancient Persia and Zoroastrian symbolism are amplified by nationalist and secular actors to suggest that Islam was an external imposition that disrupted an authentic civilizational trajectory. In both cases, the past is selectively curated to construct a narrative in which Islamic civilization is framed as foreign, derivative, or accidental, while pre-Islamic antiquity is elevated as the “real” foundation of the nation—revealing how history is weaponized not to understand continuity, but to renegotiate legitimacy in the present.

Together, these frameworks help explain why “Pax Judaica” is sold as nostalgic distortion, a pre-Islamic world view, a world where the moral, deterrent force of Islam preferably never existed. 

But every accusation they make against Islamic civilization is actually a confession, revealing the jealousy it harbors towards ummatic power and unity. “Greater Israel” invokes “stability” while requiring endless war, decries “terrorism” but sponsors it, speaks of “peace” but is on a bloody rampage. 

The paradox of our moment is that Islam is demonized precisely as Muslim bodies continue to pile up. 

The force-fed fear of a Muslim takeover is to distract from the fact that Zionism already has. 

Darryl Li’s white paper, “Anti-Palestinian to the Core”connects the so-called War on Terror, and Zionist dreams of reshaping the Middle East by creating a Pax Judaica, and makes a blunt claim: Islamophobia in the U.S. did not begin with 9/11—it was incubated through hostility to Palestine.Long before the “War on Terror,” U.S. law learned to speak the language of terrorism by targeting Palestinian liberation, criminalizing solidarity, and treating Arab and Muslim political life as inherently suspect. 

That legal architecture—material-support laws, surveillance regimes, immigration exclusions—was later expanded wholesale onto Muslims at large. In short, anti-Palestinian animus became the prototype for the intensified anti-Muslim policies we are seeing today

Palestine is not merely the testing ground, it is the ground zero—the lab—where Muslims became the permanent suspect class globally. 

Demonize Islam—> silence Palestine—> normalize anti-Muslim repression —> and then export that logic everywhere else.

This is why Palestine is the lynchpin. Not because Palestinians are morally superior or more important than the Sudanese, the Syrians, or the Iranians, but because Palestine is the nucleus of the dynamics that undergird global politics. 

This much is clear: the 20th and 21st centuries have been a long war on Islam and the erasure of Islamic political sovereignty, and Palestine has been singularly at the forefront of defending the House of Islam. 

This dis-order’s war on Islam has revealed the failure of the structures that claimed so hard to represent order, morality, and authority in Islam’s absence.

In other words, the campaign against Islam has not actually made it weaker, rather, the case for a world in need of the moral restraint of Islam is made stronger. 

Absent of this analysis, we cannot have a productive debate on any issue related to Iran/Syria/Gaza/Sudan, etc. because whether we like it or not, these events are all interconnected to a geo-strategic crucible of wickedness that has been brewing for decades. It will be tempting to tack on Islam’s dormant civilizational power to Pax Sinica, or Pax Russica, but what if we dared instead to envision what a path towards a universal Pax Islamica or a Pax Palaestīna could look like? 

Surely, following the ˹heavenly˺ Record, We decreed in the Scriptures: “My righteous servants shall inherit the land. (Our’an 21: 105)

For a Muslim, all humanity’s problems are our problems. It is no longer optional for us to view things through a narrow nationalistic lens while burying our heads in the sand of the greater picture of the ummah, of humanity. It is our mandate as Muslims to view things from the vantage point of being a khalifa (vicegerent) of God to humanity. 

The truth is, to remedy our way out of this as Muslims rests in leaning into the Prophetic courage to be disliked. We cannot wait for anyone to save us, like us, accept us. We have to be the exemplars and heroes we are waiting for. Resist the urge to be “the good Muslim”, to fit back into the Sykes Picot order which has already been broken. To “have a seat at the table” which doesn’t even exist anymore. 

Nobody likes to be the pariah, but we have to stick up for Islam even when the empire, tribalist nationalists, secularist leftists and colonized anti-Muslim enthusiasts from our diasporas throw it under the bus. 

A final rumination: this upcoming Friday marks the anniversary of Isrā’ wal Mi’rāj, the miraculous journey the Prophet Muhammad undertook overnight from Mecca to Jerusalem, and from al-Aqsa to the heavens, where he lead all the former prophets in prayer. 

It is precisely this moment of the prophetic group prayer in Palestine that signifies the leading role of the Prophet Muhammad and his community as trustees of all of humanity. Whether liked or not, whether they insult or stone us, or call us “radical jihadists,” so be it. Scorn is a small price to pay for the truth. We no longer have the option to cower, to feign our covenant to God, to betray the truth. 

To be Muslim, then, is verb, it is a demanding mandate, even more so in times of trial and tribulation. It is the religion of the brave, the honorable, and the final revelation for the true and the just.

I’ve learned through firsthand experience that living by the truth is not at all lucrative or popular, but it is quite rewarding to unclasp yourself from fear. It is also not as dangerous as most people think it is. To be a fake and deceitful is much more dangerous for the soul in this neo-jahili age. 

Preserving and speaking the truth is our Divinely commanded mandate, even if it feels thankless. Even if it feels useless. Allah thanks you. That is enough. 

Whoever does good willingly, Allah is truly Appreciative, All-Knowing. (Qur’an 2:158)

When the Prophet returned from the night journey, he was out of sorts from the gravity of what happened, and out of all people, at that moment, he encountered his arch enemy, Abu Jahl, who saw him in the state and said, ‘What is it?’

‎The Prophet Muhammad ﷺ could have chosen to evade him to avoid conflict, but did not lie. He spoke plainly and said, “I was taken on a Journey last night.”‎

Abu Jahl asked, ‘“Where to?”

‎“To Bayt Al-Maqdis (Palestine).”

‎He said, “Then this morning you were among us?”

The Prophet ﷺ said, “Yes”. 

Abu Jahl relished in this and said, “Do you think that if I call your people, you will tell them about what happened?” 

The Prophet called them and said, “yes!” He had nothing to hide nor fear. The truth is with him. 

‎ Abu Jahl then said, “O people of Bani Kab bin Lu’ay!” People got up from where they were sitting and came to join them. Abu Jahl said, “Go on, tell your people what you told me.” And he did. 

‎‎They began to clap their hands together and put their hands on their heads in astonishment at this “lie” – as they claimed it to be. They said, “Can you describe the Aqsa sanctuary to us?” Among them were some who had travelled to that land and seen the sanctuary, so the Prophet started to describe it, and then later reported, 

‎ “Until I reached a point where I was not sure about some of the details, but then the Aqsa sanctuary was brought close and placed near the house of Uqayl – or Iqal – so I could look at it and there was nothing they asked me about but I told them about it i.e. described it in detail.”

That night, how many of us neglect to notice, not only did the Prophet sojourn to Jerusalem, the Sacred Sanctuary came back—in a clear vision—to Mecca the next day.

We forget that when day broke after the miraculous night, the first qibla ascended upon the second qiblasignifying the status of Palestine as a timeless confirmation for truth. It represents the true “Abrahamic accord” based on justice for all, not just the Palestinian people: the locus of unity between the message of Isaac and Ismael. Between the sanctity of the two qiblas lay what it truly means to be Muslim, to be human. 

So whenever you are in doubt or fear in this moment of snake oil salesmen and silver-tongued soothsayers, do not waver. Speak the truth as you are mandated to do, as the Prophet before you did, even among his greatest enemies and persecutors. Do not feign the truth for temporary “safety,” for in that path is spiritual danger: it is a road paved with wretchedness and hypocrisy. 

When you feel afraid, recall the confirmation of Bayt al-Maqdis: that to be a Muslim is to be a trustee for all the oppressed. For all former revelations. For all people. 

Even when they fight you, imprison you, stone you or lynch you. 

For that is not the worst outcome. The worst outcome is to meet your Creator as a coward. 

O Allah, forgive my people, for they do not know — The Prophet Muhammad ﷺ 

Relevant past posts: 

Give Up Your “Good Muslim Life”

The Abraham Accords the Tunnels of State Treachery

Returning to the First Qibla

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  Pax Judaica and the War on Islam Art by  Safia Latif “When you understand your obligations to the Creator, only then can you understand yo...