Shortly after the jihadist massacre in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, the American Jewish community was betrayed by its erstwhile allies on the left.
The feminist movement, trans and homosexual groups, Black Lives Matter, socialist Latinos and labor unions—all of whom Jews supported with passion, brains, political and financial capital—stabbed Jews in the back and passionately took the side of the Hamas murderers. Many were eager to ignore or even deny the slaughter, rape and other atrocities done to Hamas’s Jewish victims. This left-wing betrayal of the Jewish state soon developed into a fearsome, often kinetic animus against American Jews believed to be supporting Israel.
It took two-and-a-half years after this betrayal for a major Jewish establishment leader, William Daroff, CEO of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, to confess to The Times of Israel that “ … our erstwhile friends and allies … abandoned us,” concluding that “We need to rethink how we define allyship.”
Jews—who are every day losing influence, respect and safety—do not have to wait more years to figure out who their real friends are.
Indeed, the Jewish community has always had obvious natural allies: Christians, especially evangelicals, classical conservatives, and, yes, an overwhelming percentage of Republicans. Jewish leaders rejected them. But a quick pivot and sincere outreach could get them back.
Less obvious: There is another set of allies, vast in numbers, waiting in the wings. Tens of millions of people around the globe are victims and targets of jihadism. These, too, were and are ignored by Jewish leaders blinded by neo-Marxist frameworks.
The idea of uniting jihadism’s victims with Jews and Israel has already been tested. The African Jewish Alliance (AJA) was formed in 2024 to unite African Christians living in the United States whose relatives are under assault in Nigeria, Sudan and elsewhere on the continent, with U.S. Jews. A year later, the Chicago City Council adopted a resolution condemning jihad massacres and slave raids in Africa. Much more visibly, anti-regime Iranians across America, Canada and parts of Europe, even inside Iran, regularly join with Jews during their protests.
It is time to extend these alliances worldwide.
The list of people who are targeted and victimized by jihadism is quite extensive. In the Middle East, it includes Alawites, Arab and Turkish secularists, Druze, Copts in Egypt, Christians in Lebanon and Syria, Iranians, Israelis, Kurds, South Yemenis and moderates across the region. From Africa come Amazigh (Berbers), black Mauritanians, Nigerian Christians and Igbos (Biafrans), Somalilanders, South Sudanese and, as jihadists are now active in 20 African countries, many more. And there are enormous numbers of Hindus and rapidly growing numbers of Europeans who are resisting what they perceive as a jihadist invasion of the continent.
These groups form a special category of the oppressed and assaulted, yet the plights of these many millions are generally ignored by Western rights behemoths like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, who have shamed themselves by their abandonment of jihadism’s victims and targets. Nearly all liberal institutions have followed suit, most notably the media and the professoriate. It seems that leftist ideology (“Islamophobia”) and fear of jihadist violence (think 9/11; Charlie Hebdo; Salman Rushdie; no-go zones, grooming gangs; Christmas markets) have paralyzed the West’s instinctive desires to help innocent victims, especially blacks, women and religious minorities.
The International Freedom Coalition (IFC), a confederation composed of leaders and spokespeople for these jihad-targeted groups, will launch in early March. The IFC is headed by this article’s author, Dr. Charles Jacobs, who will serve as president, and Dr. Walid Phares, its vice president. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, world-renowned author, human-rights activist and former parliament member for the Netherlands, is publicly endorsing the IFC. Its board and council of experts will include seasoned academics and authors; its council of representatives will have two dozen NGOs from diverse ethno-religious communities.
For Jews and Israelis, siding with these peoples under jihadist assault is obviously a moral imperative. Needless to say, the value of this global friendship to the Jewish community and Israel is potentially enormous:
• The IFC unites representatives of hundreds of millions of people, allied with Israel in the battle against jihadism in a powerful way. Each of these victimized ethno-religious and national communities no longer needs to fight alone. They can understand their struggle, not as an isolated battle but as one front in a united war against a global threat.
• This union will educate the Christian world about the jihad currently killing Christians worldwide, a catastrophe that now threatens the entirety of Western civilization, most obviously in Europe. More Christians than ever understand this threat, but there is a growing cohort of Christian antisemites (led by the likes of far-right political commentators Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes) who we will force to publicly reckon with a stark moral dilemma: Help the abandoned Christians under jihadist assault or abandon Christian martyrs to focus on hating Jews and Israel.
• The IFC exposes the human-rights community as frauds, failures, hypocrites and traitors. In order to attack Zionism and Jews, they betrayed blacks, minorities and women under jihad assault, the very groups they historically championed and the groups that today face untold cruelty and mass slaughter.
The IFC launches on March 1. Its founders have been invited to unveil this effort in person on a panel at the JNS international policy summit from April 15-17 in Jerusalem.
