On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, I was—as were a group of terrorists—on a plane out of Boston. I was flying to Washington, D.C., to testify before a Senate committee about the genocide and slavery then underway in Sudan, Africa’s largest nation.
At the time, I was president of the American Anti-Slavery Group, an organization I founded in 1993 to expose a truth that mainstream human rights groups knew but chose to sideline: Arabs in North Africa owned black slaves.
For 18 years, a Muslim Brotherhood-backed military regime in Sudan had waged a self-declared “holy war” against the country’s black, largely Christian south. Two million Africans were dead, and an estimated 200,000 were taken as chattel slaves. Arab militias armed by the government would raid black villages, kill the men, burn the houses, rape the women and girls, and cart them off to the north where they would live as concubines.
In those days, most Americans had never heard the word “jihad.”
Before the Senate hearing on Sept. 11, I was to speak at a press conference arguing for a bill to bar Wall Street companies from doing business with Khartoum. With me were the late Joe “Black Eagle” Madison, a popular black radio host, and the Rev. Walter Fauntroy, the activist who organized Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 March on Washington (which I had attended as a teen). That spring, both had come with me to Sudan, where we witnessed our partner organization, Christian Solidarity International, liberate 2,952 slaves from their masters with money our two organizations had raised.
A quarter-century has passed and, as I accidentally predicted in that speech I never gave, the jihad did not stay in Sudan.
As the plane turned toward Reagan National, I looked over the notes for my speech one last time. They ended with a line I remember to this day: “If we sit here and allow this in Africa, who is to say radical Islamists won’t reach us here?”
I never got to deliver it. As we were setting up, TV screens on the wall inside the Rayburn Building on Capitol Hill showed something impossible: a Boeing 767 crashing into a building in New York City. A Capitol policeman burst in: “Everybody out! Now! The building is being evacuated!”
As security herded us toward the exits, we heard that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. Then, someone whispered, “The Pentagon was just hit.” Later, as we ran, someone said, “And there’s a plane heading for the Capitol Building right now.” We burst out onto the streets of Washington in a daze.
When we learned who the hijackers were, it was clear to us that the men enslaving Africans in Sudan and the men who flew those planes into buildings filled with people were driven by the same doctrine: jihadism. They sought the conquest and domination of everyone, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, in the name of Allah. Those 19 murderers sought in America the victories their counterparts were winning in Africa.
Nor was the link solely doctrinal: Khartoum’s Islamist regime sheltered Osama bin Laden from 1991 to 1996 while he planned global jihad under its protection.
A quarter-century has passed and, as I accidentally predicted in that speech I never gave, the jihad did not stay in Sudan.
In some 18 nations in Africa, jihadist movements now slaughter and enslave Africans, mostly Christians but also Muslims who get in the way. Each jihadi group has its own name: Boko Haram and the Fulani militias in Nigeria, al-Shabaab in Somalia, ISIS in Libya, Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin across the Sahel, the Allied Democratic Forces in the Congo and so on.
In the Middle East, the same assaults fall on Alawites, Christians, Druze and Kurds in Syria while Christians are under siege in Lebanon. Egypt’s Copts, who once made up nearly the entire population of the country, are now a subservient and persecuted class who constitute only a tenth of Egyptians. Meanwhile, in Israel, the jihadi movement calls itself Hamas.
Oct. 7 shook me because it was, almost detail for detail, the same as the Sudanese slave raids described to me by their survivors. What the world called “Israel’s 9/11” taught me the lesson I should have drawn in 2001: There is one jihad, not many.
Now the jihad is in Europe: Ceuta and Melilla have been stormed; British girls have been raped by the tens of thousands; churches are burned down regularly across the continent.
So, what can be done?
The great weakness of the persecuted is that they have not been united in a joint cause. Every targeted community has understandably believed that its persecution is a local matter, an isolated dispute or a legacy of colonialism. Nigerian Christians petition officials alone. Assyrians, Copts, Druze, Kurds and Israelis all present their cases individually. Divided, each is a minority that can be easily ignored. Each has already learned that the great human rights institutions will not come to their aid.
Together, however, they are not a minority at all. They are hundreds of millions of people under assault by one ideology.
That is why I, along with my colleague Dr. Walid Phares, a Lebanese-born scholar and U.S. government advisor on global terrorism, have built the International Freedom Coalition: a confederation of peoples under jihadi assault.
We bring these communities’ sufferings together as a single record of atrocities. We do so before Congress, the U.S. State Department and the media. We prove that the crimes committed against these communities are part of a unified campaign rather than numerous unrelated tragedies. What the human rights establishment will not do for them, they will now do for one another.
On Sept. 11, 2001, I was carrying a warning I never got to deliver. Twenty-five years on, anyone willing to take a serious look can see that it is almost too late. What is needed now is a global alliance of people willing to stand up to global jihad.
