The African Union condemned the terror attack on Australia’s Jewish community but refused to call it an Islamist attack by ISIS, exposing its institutional antisemitism. By ignoring Arab, Muslim and Ottoman colonization, ethnic cleansing and slavery against indigenous Africans, the AU embeds a biased narrative. Until it is truly just to indigenous Africans, it cannot be just to the Jewish people.
Israel is singled out, denied observer status and expelled from AU events, while other states with observer status face no such treatment. The AU is controlled by Muslim Brotherhood-aligned states such as Algeria and Djibouti, from which the current chairperson comes, as well as openly antisemitic actors like the corrupt African National Congress leadership in South Africa and Iran’s regional allies, including the Eritrean dictator.
In practice, the AU has become one of the most antisemitic international organizations. It is saturated with Islamists, antisemites and Iranian-aligned dictators.
The chairperson of the African Union Commission—H.E. Mahamoud Ali Youssouf of Djibouti, who was elected in February 2025 and took office on March 13—himself is an Islamist antisemitic. Youssouf has welcomed France’s intention to recognize a Palestinian state, more accurately rewarding Hamas terrorism after the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
Since 2002, the AU denied Israel observer status, which Israel had held in previous years. The status allows Israel to attend meetings and engage with the union, though without voting rights.
In July 2021, Moussa Faki Mahamat, at the time the AU commission chairperson, granted Israel observer status after nearly 20 years of diplomatic efforts. The decision sparked immediate protests by Islamists, antisemites and pro-Iran dictators and regimes, including South Africa, Algeria and Eritrea. As a result, Israel’s observer status was revoked.
Israel is the only non-African state whose observer status was politically mobilized against, frozen and effectively revoked after it was granted. To understand the absurdity, consider some of the countries and entities that hold observer status at the African Union: Cuba, Spain, Ireland, Turkey, Iran, China and Palestine.
There is therefore no surprise that, out of 54 African countries, only Eritrea, despite being ruled by a dictator who is a close ally of Iran and openly hostile to Israel, and Cameroon, do not recognize the so-called “Palestinian state.”
Under Youssouf’s leadership, Israel was forcibly removed from AU events, including the 2023 summit and 2025 genocide commemoration event, a treatment not applied to any other observer state.
Youssouf previously served as Djibouti’s Minister of Foreign Affairs. Djibouti has no formal diplomatic relations with Israel and, in 2021, joined other Arab-speaking African states in formally rejecting the AU’s decision to grant Israel observer status, claiming it conflicted with its support for the Palestinian cause. Djibouti refuses to back U.S. strikes against the Houthis and helps smuggle weapons, oil and goods to them.
But the AU’s rejection of Israel goes beyond a single person or a small group of states; it is institutional and structural. Through its European anti-colonial framing, the AU falsely casts Israel as a settler-colonial state, ignoring that Hebrew language and Judaism are indigenous to the land of Israel, and that only the Jewish people possess the legitimate right to self-determination there. This stance is, in effect, a betrayal of the indigenous peoples of Africa that the AU claims to represent.
While the AU’s European anti-colonial narrative is used to target Israel, it deliberately and consistently ignores centuries-long Islamization, Arab colonization, slavery and ethnic cleansing against indigenous Africans by Arab and Muslim slave owners—acts that continue today in Sudan under the Sudanese Armed Forces and elsewhere under Islamist ideology. By institutionalizing this selective narrative, the AU not only refuses to recognize ongoing Islamist attacks against indigenous Africans and Jews but also actively cultivates hostility toward Israel.
The AU’s selective narrative omits not only Arab and Islamist slavery, ethnic cleansing and genocide of indigenous Africans, but continues to erase atrocities committed by the Ottomans, including ethnic cleansing, slavery and colonization of indigenous Africans (such as the Tigrinya nation), while ignoring contemporary Muslim Brotherhood-driven genocidal attacks against Israel.
This selective narrative exaggerates European colonialism in Africa. At the same time, it ignores Arab, Muslim and Ottoman/Turkish colonization, ethnic cleansing and slavery; and empowers anti-Israel, anti-American, pro-Iran states such as South Africa and Algeria. This selective recognition reveals a deep, systemic bias within the AU that consistently undermines indigenous peoples, both African and Jewish, while shielding Islamist actors from accountability.
South Africa’s corrupt government condemned the attacks in Australia but refused to call them antisemitic Islamist attacks, mirroring the stance of the African Union chair. The ANC is openly antisemitic and aggressively anti-Israel on the global stage. It led the campaign to strip Israel of observer status at the AU, turning a multilateral body into a platform for ideological hostility.
The ANC then dragged Israel to the International Criminal Court in The Hague on a baseless genocide charge. The hypocrisy is staggering. In two years of fighting a terrorist organization in the most densely urban warfare where Hamas hides in schools, mosques, private homes and uses civilians as human shields, Israel has killed half the number of civilians as South Africa did in two years through crime. In just two years, more than 55,000 people have been murdered in South Africa—victims of gang violence, lawlessness and state failure under ANC rule.
The African Union needs to change its narrative. It must incorporate into its institutional frameworks the history of Arab, Islamist and Ottoman/Turkish colonization, genocide and slavery, which continues to affect indigenous peoples across the African continent. Focusing only on European colonialism, which by comparison was far less brutal than the atrocities committed by Arabs, Muslims and Ottomans, is selective and unjust.
Unless the AU becomes truly just to the indigenous Africans it claims to represent, it cannot be just to the indigenous Jewish people. And it will continue to remain an antisemitic organization.
