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How Politicians, Profiteers, and Foreign Governments Are Playing You

 

You’re not wrong to be angry about Islam. You’re just angry at the wrong people.

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.

 

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 47 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 47 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.

 

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 single 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.

 

James S. Coates writes about AI ethics, consciousness, and the intersection of faith and technology. 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 The Signal Dispatch and his academic work appears on PhilPapers. 

© 2026 James S. Coates

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How Zionism Betrays Judaism, Endangers Jews, and Dehumanises Semitic Peoples

An Articulation of the Torah-Based Jewish Anti-Zionist Position

Introduction: The Inversion

There is a claim so audacious, so contrary to mainstream discourse, that most people dismiss it before examining the evidence. The claim is this: the State of Israel is the single most antisemitic entity currently operating on the planet. This is not the position of fringe activists or hostile outsiders. It is the stated, theologically grounded conviction of Torah-observant Jewish communities who have opposed Zionism since its inception — communities like Neturei Karta, the Satmar Hasidim, True Torah Jews (Natruna), and organisations such as Torah Jews and Voice of Rabbis.

Their argument is not emotional. It is systematic. It rests on theology, history, documented policy, and observable consequences. And it demands to be heard in full, because the stakes — for Jews, for Palestinians, and for the integrity of the word “antisemitism” itself — could not be higher.

1. The Theological Betrayal: Zionism as the Negation of Judaism

Judaism, as understood by Torah-observant Jews for millennia, is a covenantal faith. It is defined by the relationship between God and the Jewish people, expressed through Torah, mitzvot, and the prophetic tradition. Jewish identity is fundamentally spiritual and religious.

Political Zionism, founded by Theodor Herzl in the 1890s, performed a radical act of redefinition. It took a religious identity rooted in divine covenant and transformed it into an ethnic-nationalist political project. Herzl and many of the founding Zionists were secular, some openly contemptuous of religious Judaism. The movement’s foundational premise was not that Jews are a people in covenant with God, but that Jews are a nation without a state — and that the “problem” of Jewish existence could be solved through sovereignty and military power.

This, anti-Zionist rabbis argue, is itself an acceptance of the antisemitic premise. The antisemite says: Jews do not belong among the nations. Herzl agreed — he simply proposed a different solution. Rather than challenging hatred, Zionism internalised it.

The Talmud (Ketubot 111a) records the Three Oaths, which anti-Zionist Jews interpret as divine prohibitions: that Jews shall not ascend to the Land of Israel en masse by force; that they shall not rebel against the nations; and that the nations shall not oppress Israel excessively. The establishment of the State of Israel through political manoeuvre and military conquest, in this reading, constitutes a direct violation of sacred law. It is not merely a political disagreement. It is, in the vocabulary of Jewish theology, an act of rebellion against God.

Rabbi Yoel Teitelbaum, the Satmar Rebbe and one of the most respected Talmudic authorities of the twentieth century, devoted an entire work — Vayoel Moshe — to this argument. His was not a marginal voice. Before Zionism reshaped the landscape, opposition to Jewish political sovereignty prior to the messianic era was the mainstream rabbinic position. Zionism did not fulfil Judaism. It displaced it.

2. Replacing God with a Flag: Zionism as Idolatry

Anti-Zionist Torah Jews go further. They argue that Zionism constitutes a form of avodah zarah — idolatry — the gravest sin in Jewish theology. The state replaces the covenant. The flag replaces Torah. Military power replaces the messianic hope. The obligation to be “a light unto the nations” is replaced with ethnic nationalism and territorial expansion.

When a Jew pledges allegiance to the State of Israel, when the state becomes the locus of identity and the object of ultimate loyalty, something sacred has been substituted with something profane. The prophetic tradition of Isaiah, Amos, and Jeremiah warned repeatedly and explicitly that sovereignty without justice leads to destruction, that God desires mercy and righteousness, not sacrifices and national power. Anti-Zionist Jews argue that modern Israel is repeating precisely the pattern the prophets condemned — and that fidelity to the Jewish tradition requires saying so.

3. Manufacturing the Danger: How Israel Produces Antisemitism

Perhaps the most strategically devastating argument is this: Israel claims to be the solution to antisemitism, but it is the primary engine generating it.

By claiming to act and speak in the name of all Jews everywhere, the State of Israel makes every Jewish person on earth a potential target. When Israeli forces carry out airstrikes, enforce occupation, expand settlements, or enact policies that provoke international outrage, the backlash lands not only on the state but on Jewish communities globally. Synagogues are vandalised. Jewish individuals are harassed. Antisemitic incidents spike in direct correlation with Israeli military operations.

This is not a bug. Anti-Zionist Jews argue it is a feature. The entire architecture of Zionism depends on the premise that Jews can never be safe among the nations. Rising antisemitism validates the Zionist project. It drives aliyah — Jewish immigration to Israel. It silences critics. It justifies the security state. Israel needs antisemitism the way an arms dealer needs conflict.

The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, now adopted by numerous governments, illustrates the mechanism. By including criticism of Israel as a potential form of antisemitism, it achieves two things simultaneously: it shields the state from accountability, and it collapses the distinction between Jewish people and Israeli state policy — which is exactly what genuine antisemites do. The conflation is the point.

4. “You Don’t Belong Here”: Zionism’s Shared Premise with Classical Antisemitism

There is a message that has echoed through centuries of anti-Jewish persecution, from medieval expulsions to Nazi ideology to modern neo-Nazism. The message is: Jews do not belong here. Jews are foreign. Jews should leave.

Zionism does not challenge this message. It affirms it.

When Israeli leaders respond to an attack on a synagogue in Paris by calling on French Jews to “come home to Israel,” they are completing a sentence that the antisemite began. The antisemite says: you don’t belong in France. The Zionist agrees — and offers a destination. The underlying premise is identical: that Jews are fundamentally alien wherever they live outside of Israel, that coexistence among the nations is impossible, that the only answer is separation.

This is not a rhetorical parallel. It is a structural alignment of ideology. And it has a historical pedigree that cannot be ignored.

The Haavara Agreement of 1933 stands as the most documented example. This was a formal arrangement negotiated between the Zionist Organisation and the Nazi regime — Adolf Hitler’s government — to facilitate the transfer of German Jewish assets and the emigration of Jews to Palestine. The agreement was designed to work in tandem with Nazi persecution. The Nazis wanted Jews out of Germany. The Zionists wanted Jews in Palestine. The interests converged. The mechanism was transactional: persecution created the pressure, and the Zionist movement provided the pipeline.

This was not a desperate rescue operation. It was a strategic partnership between a movement that wanted to remove Jews from Europe and a movement that wanted to collect them in Palestine. The Jews themselves — their safety, their agency, their right to remain in their own countries — were secondary to both parties’ objectives.

The pattern continues today. Every act of fearmongering, every declaration that Jews in Europe or America are living on borrowed time, every campaign designed to make diaspora Jews feel unsafe in their own homelands serves the same function the Haavara Agreement served: it creates the conditions under which Jews feel they must leave. The method has evolved from formal agreements with persecutors to sophisticated media campaigns and political pressure, but the logic is unchanged.

Jewish communities have lived in France for over a thousand years. Jews have been part of British life since the Norman era. American Jewish communities are woven into the fabric of the nation. To tell these people that their homes are not truly their homes, that their citizenship is conditional, that they should uproot their lives and relocate to a state in the Middle East — this is not protection. It is displacement. And it echoes, with uncomfortable precision, what every antisemitic movement in history has demanded.

Torah-observant anti-Zionist Jews make this point with particular force. The divine exile — the galut — is, in their theology, ordained by God. Jews are meant to live among the nations until the messianic era. Their homes in London, Paris, New York, and Buenos Aires are not temporary arrangements to be abandoned at the first sign of trouble. They are where God has placed them. To tell a Jew that their divinely ordained home is illegitimate and that they must relocate to a state that violates divine law is, in this framework, a double act of spiritual violence.

The convergence between Zionist rhetoric and neo-Nazi ideology on this point is not coincidental. White nationalist movements in Europe and America have openly praised the concept of Israel as an ethno-state, seeing it as a model and a convenient destination for the Jews they wish to expel. When Richard Spencer called himself a “white Zionist,” he was not being ironic. He was identifying a genuine ideological kinship: the shared belief that ethnic groups should be separated into their own territories, and that Jews living among non-Jews is a problem to be solved.

That Zionism finds its logic validated by white supremacists should give pause to anyone who claims it is a defence against antisemitism. A movement whose core premise — that Jews cannot and should not live among other peoples — is affirmed by the very forces it claims to oppose has not defeated antisemitism. It has absorbed it.

5. Instrumentalising the Holocaust

The exploitation of Holocaust memory is central to the Zionist project, and it is one of the charges anti-Zionist Jews make most forcefully.

The Holocaust — the Shoah — is sacred memory. Six million Jews were murdered. Anti-Zionist Jews honour this with absolute solemnity. What they refuse to accept is the weaponisation of that memory to justify a political state and silence dissent.

They go further. Historians and anti-Zionist scholars have documented troubling evidence that Zionist leadership during the 1930s and 1940s prioritised the state-building project over the rescue of European Jews. There were documented instances of selectivity — prioritising young, healthy, secular, productive Jews for immigration to Palestine while showing indifference to rescue efforts that did not serve the Zionist goal. The Haavara Agreement, as discussed above, was the earliest and most formal manifestation of this, but the pattern extended throughout the war years. When rescue routes existed that would have taken Jews to destinations other than Palestine, Zionist leadership was at times indifferent or actively obstructive.

The charge is stark: Zionism did not arise to save Jews from the Holocaust. It arose before the Holocaust, negotiated with its perpetrators, and then used the catastrophe retroactively as its ultimate justification. Anti-Zionist Jews consider this a desecration of the highest order.

6. The Erasure of Anti-Zionist Jews

If Israel is the guardian of Jewish identity, what happens to Jews who reject it?

They are erased. Delegitimised. Excommunicated from their own faith.

Anti-Zionist Jews are routinely labelled “self-hating,” “kapos,” and traitors. Their voices are dismissed as inauthentic. Their Judaism is questioned. They are told, in effect, that they are not real Jews — that their millennia-old theological tradition does not count unless it aligns with a political ideology barely 130 years old.

This is not a minor rhetorical tactic. It is an act of violence against Jewish identity itself. When Benjamin Netanyahu claims to speak for “the Jewish people,” he is asserting ownership over an identity that predates his state by three thousand years. When anti-Zionist rabbis — men who have devoted their lives to Torah study, who observe every mitzvah, who trace their scholarship through unbroken chains of transmission — are dismissed as irrelevant, something deeply antisemitic has occurred. A secular political project has appointed itself the gatekeeper of who qualifies as a Jew.

The Zionist message to anti-Zionist Jews is unambiguous: your Torah does not count. Your rabbis do not count. Your reading of Jewish law does not count. Only loyalty to the state counts. This is, by any reasonable measure, the suppression of Jewish religious freedom by a political ideology.

7. Persecution Within: Israel’s War on Religious Jews

The persecution is not merely rhetorical. Within Israel itself, anti-Zionist Orthodox communities face harassment, social ostracism, and in some cases violence. Members of Neturei Karta and allied groups have been physically attacked for their views.

The early Zionist project was explicitly hostile to traditional Jewish life. Yiddish — the living language of Ashkenazi Jewry — was actively suppressed in favour of Modern Hebrew, which the Zionists fashioned into a nationalist tool. Mizrahi and Sephardic Jews — Jews from the Middle East and North Africa — faced systematic discrimination upon arrival in Israel. The Ringworm Affair, in which thousands of Mizrahi children were subjected to dangerous radiation treatments, remains one of the darkest chapters. Yemeni Jewish families experienced the alleged disappearance of their children, a trauma that has never been fully resolved.

The ongoing battle over military conscription of ultra-Orthodox men crystallises the conflict. For yeshiva students whose lives are devoted to Torah study, being forced into military service for a state they consider religiously illegitimate — to fight in wars they believe violate divine law — is not a policy disagreement. It is coercion of religious conscience.

A state that persecutes its own religious Jewish citizens for refusing to violate their interpretation of God’s law is not a Jewish state. It is, in the eyes of these communities, a state at war with Judaism.

8. Stealing the Name: “Israel” Is Not a Country

The very name “Israel” is contested. In Torah, Israel is not a political entity. It is a spiritual designation — the name given to Jacob after his encounter with the divine, signifying the people who wrestle with God. It refers to a covenant community defined by its relationship with the Creator, not to a modern nation-state with borders, an army, and a seat at the United Nations.

By appropriating this name, the Zionist state has achieved a profound act of theological identity theft. Every time the word “Israel” is spoken in a news broadcast, it reinforces the conflation of a spiritual reality with a political project. Every time a scripture that speaks of “Israel” is cited to justify settlements or military operations, the sacred text is being conscripted into the service of nationalism. Anti-Zionist Jews argue this is a desecration — a violation of what the name means and has always meant in Jewish theology.

9. The Corruption of Global Jewish Life

The damage extends far beyond Israel’s borders. Anti-Zionist Jews argue that the Zionist project has corrupted Jewish communal life worldwide.

Synagogues, community organisations, schools, and charitable institutions that might otherwise focus on Torah study, acts of justice, prayer, and spiritual growth have been conscripted into defending or justifying the policies of a foreign government. Communal resources are redirected toward Israel advocacy. Internal dissent is policed. Young Jews who raise moral objections to Israeli policy find themselves marginalised, shunned, or expelled from their communities.

The result is a hollowing out of diaspora Judaism. The faith tradition becomes secondary to the political project. The question “What does Torah teach?” is replaced by “What is good for Israel?” And Jews who insist on asking the first question are treated as enemies.

This, anti-Zionist Jews argue, constitutes a spiritual catastrophe — an internal erosion of Jewish life carried out in the name of Jewish survival. It is antisemitism wearing a Star of David.

10. The Semitic Question: Who Are the Real Antisemites?

There is a final dimension to this argument that challenges the very language of the debate.

The term “antisemitism” was coined in the 1870s by Wilhelm Marr as a self-applied label for his anti-Jewish movement. It was always, in practice, about hostility toward Jews. But the etymology tells a different story. “Semitic” refers to the descendants of Shem — a broad family of peoples that includes not only Jews but Arabs, Palestinians, and other Middle Eastern populations.

If we take the word at its root, then the systematic dehumanisation, dispossession, ethnic cleansing, and violence visited upon the Palestinian people — a Semitic people with ancient roots in the land — constitutes antisemitism in its most literal and expansive sense. The denial of Palestinian identity, the erasure of their history, the destruction of their homes, the killing of their children — this is hatred directed at a Semitic people, carried out by a state that claims to be the antidote to such hatred.

The irony is not subtle. It is staggering. A state founded in the name of fighting antisemitism practises it — in the original, etymological sense of the word — as a matter of daily policy. It wages war on Semitic peoples while claiming a monopoly on the word used to describe such acts.

Linguists will note that words derive meaning from usage, not etymology. That is a fair technical point. But the moral argument transcends linguistics. A state cannot claim to oppose hatred of Semitic peoples while systematically destroying the lives, homes, culture, and future of another Semitic people. The contradiction is not semantic. It is existential.

11. The Prophetic Warning

The Hebrew prophets spoke to this moment with terrifying clarity.

Amos declared: “I hate, I despise your feasts, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies… But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” Isaiah warned that God rejects worship offered by hands stained with blood. Jeremiah told the people of Judah not to trust in the deceptive words “The Temple of the Lord, the Temple of the Lord” — as though the mere invocation of sacred identity could substitute for actual justice.

Anti-Zionist Jews hear in these words a direct indictment of the modern state that bears the name Israel. A state that invokes Jewish identity while practising oppression. A state that uses sacred language to cover profane acts. A state that says “Never again” while enacting the very patterns of dispossession and dehumanisation that the prophets condemned.

The prophetic tradition does not offer comfort to the powerful. It offers warning. And the warning, Torah Jews insist, has never been more urgent.

Conclusion: The Most Dangerous Antisemitism Comes from Within

External antisemitism — the hatred of Jews by those outside the community — is visible, identifiable, and resistible. It can be named, confronted, and fought.

What Zionism represents, according to Torah-observant anti-Zionist Jews, is something far more insidious. It is an antisemitism that wears Jewish symbols, speaks Hebrew, quotes scripture, and claims to be the fulfilment of Jewish destiny. It redefines Judaism to serve a political agenda. It endangers Jews worldwide by making them complicit in actions they may abhor. It tells Jews their homes are not their homes, echoing the oldest antisemitic demand in history. It negotiated with Nazis and today finds its logic affirmed by white supremacists. It excommunicates Jews who object. It persecutes religious communities within its own borders. It instrumentalises the Holocaust. It corrupts diaspora Jewish life. And it wages war on a fellow Semitic people while claiming a monopoly on the language of anti-Semitic victimhood.

This is why Torah Jews, Voice of Rabbis, Neturei Karta, and the broader anti-Zionist Orthodox movement call Israel the most antisemitic entity on earth. Not because they are indifferent to Jewish welfare. Precisely because they are not.

They speak because they believe Judaism is worth more than a flag, a state, or a military apparatus. They speak because they believe Jewish identity is defined by God, not by a government. They speak because the prophetic tradition demands it.

And they speak because silence, in the face of what is being done in their name, would be the greatest betrayal of all.

This article presents the theological and ethical arguments of Torah-based Jewish anti-Zionism as articulated by communities including Torah Jews, Voice of Rabbis, Neturei Karta, and allied movements.

Article by BrJimC © 2026

 

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Bismillah Ar-Rahman Ir-Raheem (In the Name of Allah, The Most Merciful, The Most Beneficent)

by James S. Coates

Introduction

“And hold firmly to the rope of Allah all together and do not become divided. And remember the favour of Allah upon you—when you were enemies and He brought your hearts together and you became, by His favour, brothers.” — Qur’an 3:103

I have worked with a number of major Muslim organisations and movements in America. I have organised events with them, raised funds for them, defended them in the media, and built bridges between them. I have also been praised by them, shut out by them, and ultimately expelled by some of them. I have seen the best of our community and the worst.

I originally wrote this article in 2007, when these experiences were fresh and the wounds still raw. I have since stepped back from active involvement in the organised Muslim community in America. I am revisiting and revising this piece now because, while some things may have changed in the intervening years, structural divisions along ethnic, tribal, and movement lines do not disappear quickly. If even some of what I witnessed remains true, then naming it is still necessary. I offer this not as a definitive account of how things are today, but as a testimony of what I experienced and an invitation for others to reflect honestly on whether these patterns persist in their own communities.

What follows is an account of the divisions I have witnessed within the American Muslim community—divisions along ethnic, national, tribal, and doctrinal lines. I write this not to condemn but to name what many of us know but few will say openly. If we cannot name a problem, we cannot solve it.

The Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) said in his final sermon:

“All mankind is from Adam and Eve. An Arab has no superiority over a non-Arab, nor does a non-Arab have any superiority over an Arab; a white has no superiority over a black, nor does a black have any superiority over a white—except by piety and good action.”

We profess this. We must ask ourselves whether we live it.

The Divisions

The topics I address in this article are:

  1. Immigrant versus Indigenous American Muslims (not new converts)
  2. Immigrant versus American Muslim Converts
  3. Immigrants versus their American-born Children (2nd generation)
  4. Jamaat-e-Islami versus Muslim League
  5. Ikhwan versus other Movements
  6. Salafi versus other Madhabs (schools of thought)
  7. Tablighi Jamaat versus other Movements
  8. Summary of Alliances and Divisions

Please bear with me as I explore and explain these divisions. Some of what follows will be uncomfortable. But the Prophet (peace be upon him) told us that the best jihad is a word of truth spoken to an unjust ruler. Sometimes the injustice is within our own house.

1. Immigrant versus Indigenous American Muslims

In this divide, you have approximately 30% of the Muslims in America being indigenous to the Black American community—descendants of former slaves taken from Islamic areas of Africa. Many of them are in poor communities. Some are Muslims from birth through family lineage; others came through the Nation of Islam and, like Malcolm X, realised it was not true Islam, left, and joined the broader Muslim community. They form their own communities and sometimes intermingle with the general Muslim community at large.

On the other side, you have foreign-born Muslims. Other than the approximately 2% of whites, Hispanics, and others who are indigenous or convert to Islam, the first-generation immigrant population makes up roughly 68% of Islam in America. Many came in the 1940s fleeing Communism in former Soviet bloc countries. Pakistanis came from South Asia fleeing famine and drought. In 1948 and 1967, the wars with Israel brought both Christian and Muslim Palestinians. The mid-1960s marked a significant increase of Muslim immigration from Pakistan, Turkey, Indonesia, and other Eastern and Arab countries, coming with the oil and other industries, seeking education or jobs.

What I Witnessed

I have seen a severe divide between indigenous Black American Muslims and immigrants—to the extent that they have formed entirely separate communities. When I was raising money for ICNA to build the Freeman Center in Houston, which is in a Black American community, I heard immigrant Muslims question why I was doing such a deed. One said, “Every time you see a black, they have their hand out.” It didn’t matter that the area had Muslims in it; they were indigenous former slaves and lumped into the larger stereotype of Blacks in America.

In the 1960s and 70s, Black Muslim communities, joining the fight for civil rights, attempted to ally with first-generation Muslims. According to one Imam in Houston, the first-generation community viewed Black Muslims as having serious doctrinal issues. Instead of attempting to correct such issues, they ostracised the Black indigenous Muslims and treated them as apostates—to the extent that Black Muslims had to form their own masajid (mosques).

At the Texas Dawah Conference 2003, a Canadian-born Islamic scholar told the conference that it was good they got together, but all he saw was Pakistani and Arab faces. He urged them to get indigenous Black American Muslims represented as an active part of the conference since they represent such a significant portion of the Islamic community in America.

So at the Texas Dawah Conference 2004, I attempted to heal this rift. I invited the Black indigenous Muslim community to be a part of the conference. The Black leaders I spoke to were eager to participate, even in a small way, and repeated to me the need to heal this rift—but were concerned with how the immigrant community would treat them.

When I spoke to the organisers, it was initially met with cautious optimism. The concern was what the Black Muslims would be “teaching” at the conference and whether it was sound doctrine. So it went through the ranks, and the main organiser dispatched an email putting a dead stop to it on the basis that the indigenous Blacks’ doctrine was not sound—even though they acknowledged the Black indigenous Muslims were Muslims in need of education in Islam. Instead of working with them in a way that addressed their concerns, they completely shut them out of the conference. There was no indigenous American Muslim representation on an official basis, and virtually none showed up to attend.

The conference is billed to the community as a unifying force to bring organisations together. It failed to bridge the gap between indigenous American Muslims (30% of the community) and the immigrants (the organisations represented at the conference).

The divide between immigrant and indigenous Black American Muslims is deeply felt and will not be healed soon, since the immigrant community continually views them as beggars, shuts them out, and ostracises them.

2. Immigrant versus American Muslim Converts

According to the majority of Islamic scholars, one of the primary reasons Muslims have to live in a non-Muslim nation is for the purpose of dawah (propagation of Islam)—making converts. Yet making converts in a non-Muslim land creates a paradox for immigrant Muslims, and the experience is often frustrating for new converts.

One of the best moments in a convert’s life is first becoming Muslim. It is a sense of freedom, belonging to a greater community, brotherhood, and guidance. As converts grow in their new faith, they acquire knowledge of Islam from the immigrant perspective, are inundated with an array of political ideas (typically anti-Western), and struggle to understand the inner workings of the faith, various cultures, and the Arabic language.

The Language and Cultural Barrier

When I became involved in the Islamic community, I struggled for clear answers from knowledgeable Muslims because of the language barrier. Most of the Imams and scholars in the West are not American, or at least were born in another country and immigrated to America, even if they acquired citizenship. They are ESL (English as a second language) people from Egypt, Pakistan, or elsewhere. The same applies for the majority of Muslims in the masajid. They speak English at an academic level but do not understand street lingo or common American English. They also have little or no connection to the plight of Americans, our history, or how our country operates outside of what they know from back home.

The prominent undercurrent of ideology in the masajid reflects people who come from countries with brutal regimes, where law enforcement agencies are arms of dictatorships, where there is constant turmoil and often poverty. Attitudes towards the West are dominant, and to oppose these attitudes publicly can put one’s conversion in question. First-generation Muslims in the masajid are on constant lookout for infiltrators, and new converts feel heavy pressure to go along with the flow and view anti-Western politics as Islamic, even when it is not.

One of the first things that happened to me was that I was questioned about my view of the Israeli-Palestinian crisis. Even though I somewhat agreed with the stance of most Muslims, I didn’t convert to Islam for such ideology. I wasn’t at the meeting for a contemporary political discussion but to learn about Islam. As time went on, constant inundation with various Muslims’ political ideology made me more comfortable with radically different ideologies since it seemed to be the norm. Eventually, I grew out of that. However, a large number of converts do not.

The “Lap Dog” Experience

New converts are seen by foreign-born Muslims as people who can help the plight of Islam among non-Muslims much easier than themselves. However, when it comes to matters of Islam, politics, or social integration, first-generation Muslims often view converts—no matter how educated or how long they have been Muslim—as uneducated in Islam and having little bearing on the direction of the community and its organisations. For example, as a Muslim now for 28 years, I am still told that I know nothing about Islam when it suits their point of view.

Converts often feel similar to how I felt since 9/11. When they needed us after 9/11, they thrust us in the public eye to defend Islam and put a clean, sanitised face on Islam and Muslims. However, when it comes to listening to our opinion on the direction of the communities, Islamic thought on issues regarding the religion, and running for or holding office in the organisation, they will not have it. It is extremely rare for an American Muslim to hold leadership positions—I know of only one case where a Black American Muslim was voted into local office as President of ICNA’s Houston Chapter, and that wasn’t without bitter rivalry.

I, and others I associated with, felt like a lap dog. I worked feverishly night and day, sacrificing time with my family while they enjoyed theirs, and it amounted to nothing. They love to pat you on the head and sing your praises when you’re in public making them look good, but they don’t want you to say anything meaningful or try to be a significant part of their immigrant-controlled organisations.

First-generation Muslims will profess that we are all equal in the sight of Allah. But they almost never relinquish control of their organisations to an American convert (unless they feel they can control him), nor are they hiring American Muslim scholars in the masajid. They will almost always hire scholars who are not American, and they will not allow many qualified American Muslims to give sermons in the masajid for Friday prayers or other events.

Double Standards

Furthermore, there is a pattern of double-speak. They condemn terrorists or extremists breaking our laws while supporting them through their actions. If a convert supports an immigrant, then great—but if you disagree, or speak to law enforcement about criminal activity in the community, they will brand you an infiltrator and claim you’re not really Muslim. Blood is thicker than water; it becomes tribal. They won’t play fair, following through on the teachings of Islam they instilled in you. They won’t give you opportunity to explain yourself. Instead, they will expel you from their organisations even though your work is what earned them a trusted name. If that is not all, they will post your name and photos everywhere in an attempt to threaten and intimidate you. It is exactly what happened to me.

The last I checked, Islam stood for justice, not lawlessness, and didn’t require us to protect lawbreakers simply because they are Muslims, nor on the basis they are from Pakistan, etc. It certainly forbids Muslims from threatening other Muslims.

The immigrant and convert divide is stark. It is not only different cultures meeting but different approaches and resolutions to life’s issues. It’s a different approach to Islam since most American Muslims are proud to be American and Muslim, while many who immigrated are here to benefit from America, their minds on returning home at some unknown point in the future, but not to become American or integrate into American society to show non-Muslims that we are not all terrorists. It’s almost as if things go south, they have somewhere else to go, but American Muslim converts do not have such options. It makes for a different worldview between us.

Where the Energy Goes

When I put on a Justice For Allah Rally in 2003, speaking out against Israeli atrocities against Muslims in Palestine, it was easy to get 400 people to show up and voice their opinion. But trying to get them to feed the homeless on a regular basis, give clothes to the needy, have a friendly meet with their neighbours, or do dawah work was worse than pulling teeth.

Save one instance that deserves merit: when they found out it would benefit them publicly to help the Hurricane Katrina evacuees, they came together and did some good work. But it wasn’t without some of them trying to take all the credit in front of the cameras from the others, and private threats from one organisation to the next. If it wasn’t for a Christian interfaith organisation (that I had a chance to work for as a Muslim liaison) that helped get past the petty rivalries, they would never have pulled it off.

3. Immigrants versus their American-born Children (2nd Generation)

A large portion of first-generation Muslims in the United States are not citizens and seem to have the intention of returning to their home countries after they receive their education or retirement. However, it is a common joke—and I heard this at the Texas Dawah Conference 2004—that immigrants come with the intention of returning to their countries, but every year they postpone it. Then, after years of delay, when they finally tell their kids (who were born and raised in the USA) that they want to move the family back home, their kids question the sanity of such an idea: why would they leave America when this is the only home they’ve ever known?

Cultural Clashes

Cultural values of the immigrant population are in stark contrast to those of their American-born children. The elder generation tends to adhere to archaic cultural values based from their home countries. An example of this is marriage. Many immigrant families have an understanding that they will bring their children back to Pakistan (or wherever they are from) to find a suitable spouse (oftentimes cousins) when their children are old enough. Furthermore, they tend to want to make the choice for their kids without any significant input or protest.

When presented with such an idea, the children typically dread such a concept. Their children, after all, grew up in America where this is not a cultural norm. Islamically, the children are right to consult the parents, but in Islam the parents are not the deciding factor on whom they marry. Islam encourages ethnic mixing and the freedom for children to choose their own spouse on the basis of piety.

The Generational Divide in the Masajid

Another divide is in the religious community. Second-generation children tend to grow up with Western values which allow for more free thought, and these are infused into their Islamic understanding of the world and the community. They are young, idealistic, and have a lot of energy. When children of immigrant Muslims grow old enough, they see the flaws in the community their immigrant fathers (“Uncles” they call them) are running—how it is run and how Islam is being taught—and have a strong desire to change it. They are frustrated when they see the community politics, backstabbing, underhanded behaviour, and when they are shut out of any meaningful effect or ability to hold office.

This division is very much like that of the division between converts and immigrant Muslims, except that the second-generation Muslim children are still very much united by ethnicity and their parents’ tribal affiliations that American Muslim converts do not have.

Muslim communities are seriously stifled from progress and growth due to the elder generation of first-generation Muslims’ power struggles, tribal warfare, false accusations, politicking to get rid of moderate Imams and scholars or those they just don’t like, seizure of power, destruction of property, and refusal to allow fresh blood into control of the governing and consultative bodies and the presidencies.

4. Jamaat-e-Islami versus Muslim League

An underlying divide among Pakistani immigrants in America, not evident to the general public, is a political divide originating in Pakistan. Jamaat-e-Islami is a religious and political movement in Pakistan that elevates and follows the teachings of Syed Maududi. It is a movement that aims to get back to the basics of Islam and has representation in the Pakistani National Assembly.

The Jamaat propagates its ideology worldwide in the masajid and founds organisations in various countries that reflect its ideology. In the United States and Canada, they have founded the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA) and ICNA Relief. Since ICNA cannot operate as a political party in the USA and Canada, they have founded the movement as a religious organisation whose purpose is to propagate Islam according to its movement’s ideology.

According to an ICNA official that I spoke to privately on this issue, the Muslim League is the “other” party. They are the ruling class that originally received the handoff of power from the British after the ending of colonial rule and the subsequent founding of the nation of Pakistan. They are seen by Jamaat supporters as puppets of the West and a corruption of Islam in Pakistan.

The divide between these two groups is kept very private, but it is very evident in the Islamic community in America when one looks at the community politics in the masajid. This barrier is very real and originates long before the two parties immigrated to America.

5. Ikhwan versus other Movements

The Ikhwan are highly active people who engage in many facets of society. Like other movements, they propagate their ideology around the world in the masajid, but in addition they also propagate among Muslims in universities. The Ikhwan can be cautious about public statements regarding some of their ideology due to their Egyptian history of government persecution. However, they have aspirations of being politically active in the West and will engage in society and attempt to affect change positively through the political process.

In the United States, they have founded their organisation as the Muslim American Society (MAS), and in universities and schools they have founded the Muslim Students’ Association (MSA). They have also founded a political organisation called MAS Freedom Foundation and a worldwide relief organisation called Islamic Relief.

Working with the Ikhwan

The real division between Ikhwan and other movements in the American Islamic community is that the Ikhwan have a strong desire to be seen publicly and to be looked at by the Islamic community as being effective and moderate. However, in my experience, some can act as bullies in the community, pressuring other organisations to let them take the lead or take credit for joint efforts. Any event they are involved with becomes a struggle for other organisations to control, as well as a struggle over who actually is recognised in the end for their work and organisation. So other organisations find it difficult to work with them.

6. Salafi versus other Madhabs (Schools of Thought)

Among the various groups in the masajid are the Salafi. The Salafi movement traces its methodology to the Salaf—the first three generations of Muslims (the Companions, the Successors, and those who followed them). Opponents of the movement often call them “Wahhabi” after Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, a reformer in 18th-century Arabia, though Salafis themselves rarely use this term and generally reject it as a label designed to malign their movement.

The movement was founded during a time when Arabs in the Arabian Peninsula had distorted Islam to the point of reverting to old pagan ways. Its aim was to bring people back to Islam through sound teaching based on Qur’an, Sunnah, and the understanding of the Salaf. Eventually, the movement formed an alliance with the Saudi government, and it is traditionally associated with the Hanbali school of fiqh (jurisprudence).

Like other movements in Islam, Salafi teachings are propagated around the world in the masajid. It is among the most strict and literalist forms of Sunni Islam. It is not uncommon for Salafis to oppose becoming involved in the political process of non-Muslim countries, viewing it as a system of kufr (disbelief). So the only way many will engage politically is if an Islamic system of government is already established. Some Salafis view their religious methodology as superior to others, to the extent that they will pronounce takfir on other Muslims (declare them apostates) not part of their group—though this practice is condemned by mainstream Salafi scholars.

The Salafi are not recognised as a separate school of thought by mainstream Sunni Muslims, who recognise only four schools (Maliki, Hanbali, Hanafi, and Shafi’i). However, their strict methodology puts them in contrast with the general community at large. They are often very vocal in the masjid and propagate their way aggressively, which creates division.

7. Tablighi Jamaat versus other Movements

The Tablighi Jamaat is a movement whose origins are in India, begun during a time when Muslims were reverting to the ways of Hinduism. The purpose of the Tabligh is to do dawah (propagate Islam) among Muslims and call them back to Islam. It is their practice to leave behind family and friends occasionally for an extended period of time to travel from community to community to encourage people to adhere to Islam and recruit into their ranks. They typically just show up in an unsuspecting community, make friends, and stay with people they meet who feed and support them for the duration of their stay, or with other Tablighis. Sometimes they stay in the masajid themselves.

The Tabligh operate in the US and Canada as their own organisation with a hierarchy apart from most institutions. There is criticism among the general community that their teachings are from books containing weak hadith (teachings of the Prophet that cannot be confirmed as authentic) and thus are somewhat inaccurate. They are often not allowed to operate within the masajid without consent and sometimes without prior approval for what they will be teaching or books used in their sermons. Some communities have restricted them due to their transient lifestyles.

It is not uncommon for a new recruit of the Tabligh to be encouraged to abruptly leave their home to go on a two- or three-week mission to another community to propagate Islam (according to the Tabligh) or learn more about Islam and the Tablighi way.

The movement is rather large and largely made up of Indian and Pakistani members. However, the movement has gained considerable ground in the Black American Muslim community.

Summary of Alliances and Divisions

Ethnic and Generational Divisions:

  • First-generation Muslims versus indigenous American Muslims, converts, and their 2nd-generation children born and raised in America
  • Second-generation ethnic children of first-generation Muslims group together and often separate on ethnic lines from indigenous American Muslims and converts
  • Indigenous Black American Muslims follow the natural segregation lines in society when it comes to integration with other groups

Movement Alliances and Rivalries:

  • Jamaat-e-Islami (ICNA, ICNA Relief) is a religious movement allied with the Ikhwan in the USA (MAS). The Jamaat is opposed to the group representing the Muslim League in Pakistan, who have formed cultural centres to promote Pakistani culture rather than the religion of Islam.
  • The Ikhwan (MAS, MSA, MAS Freedom Foundation, Islamic Relief) tends to go it alone among all of the groups. Other movements are in constant struggle over how MAS controls, assimilates, and takes over their events. MAS (Ikhwan based in Egypt from the teachings of Syed Qutub) and ICNA (based in Pakistan from the teachings of Syed Maududi) have discussed merging their two movements in the United States and Canada. However, due to the stark nature of both movements, their cultures, and differing levels of Islamic knowledge, this has proven very difficult.
  • The Salafi movement is relatively isolationist while at the same time not ashamed to publicly and vocally oppose other movements. They are often academic scholars but can lack tact and the ability to deal with people without giving offence.
  • The Tablighi Jamaat operates largely independently, focused on internal Muslim revival rather than engagement with broader society or other movements.

A Path Forward

I have worked with all of these groups and know people and scholars from all of them. These findings are mine, based on my personal experience, talking with organisational officials, common folks, and scholars.

I write this not to condemn any group but to name what we all know exists. The Prophet (peace be upon him) said:

“The believers in their mutual kindness, compassion, and sympathy are just like one body. When one limb suffers, the whole body responds to it with wakefulness and fever.” — Sahih Muslim

We are not acting like one body. We are acting like competing tribes, each convinced of our own superiority, each protecting our own power, each suspicious of the other.

What would it look like to actually change?

  • For first-generation communities: Include indigenous Black American Muslims and converts in leadership—not as tokens, but as equals. Hire American-born scholars. Listen to the perspectives of those who grew up here.
  • For converts: Be patient but persistent. Document what you experience. Write books and articles on your experiences, they are valuable. Build alliances with second-generation Muslims who share your frustrations.
  • For second-generation Muslims: You are the bridge. You understand both worlds. Use that position to push for change from within.
  • For all movements: Cooperate on common causes without needing to control or take credit. The goal is the pleasure of Allah, not the reputation of your organisation.
  • For all of us: Remember that the person you are dismissing, ostracising, or threatening is your brother or sister in Islam. On the Day of Judgement, our tribal affiliations and organisational memberships will mean nothing.

“O mankind, indeed We have created you from male and female and made you peoples and tribes that you may know one another. Indeed, the most noble of you in the sight of Allah is the most righteous of you.” — Qur’an 49:13

May Allah help us to see past our divisions and become united for good causes. May Allah help us to forbid the evil and promote the good. May Allah forgive us where we have wronged each other, and may He guide us to be one Ummah as He commanded.

Ameen.

Article by BrJimC © 2007, revised 2026

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Here is the dichotomy, Muslim brothers and sisters.

One one hand, if Muslims do not report dangerous ideas and an investigation ensues involving a load of agents that don’t know the people, culture, faith or religious idea and even the meaning of Arabic words, there is a greater chance of the government getting it wrong and building a case against a person out of ignorance or misunderstandings.

On the other hand, if Muslims do report it, members of our community look at us as government spies who were only there to “entrap” innocent Muslims, nevermind that they were out training in jihadi camps, had radicalized online, had tons of evidence against him/her proving otherwise.

Important things to note:

1. The Muslim community in the US (since I am from the US), is largely distrustful of law enforcement.
2. Most convictions in the community are not entrapment, especially ones involving Muslim agents/informants. If they are entrapped, then the convictions can be overturned on appeal.
3. People around those individuals who have been convicted or carried out a terrorist plot all report seeing signs of radicalism but few report (out of apathy or distrust of authorities) and the cases (or attacks) could have been averted.
4. De-radicalization programs are relatively new and most people (Muslims and FBI) rarely look at those as options, if they even know about them.

In my opinion, especially in this climate of fear and mistrust of Muslims, we need to embrace a pro-law enforcement view rather than a distrustful one (not just pay lip service to it). We need to police our own communities otherwise people in law enforcement agencies who don’t know our faith will trample it trying to solve the problem of extremism which leads to attacks, a problem that only we can solve. If we all don’t take a part, even if it be against our own flesh and blood, then the system fails, mistrust grows and more idiots call for Muslims to be banned, rounded up, interned or even “ethno-religiously” cleansed through mass deportation. Dare I even mention (aside from what Nazi Germany did to the Jews) what happened in Bosnia to cite as one example.  In the end, clowns like ISIS will win through our apathy.

Some of my long time friends suggest that it is not our responsibility to be proactive but passive in our action to confront extremist ideology that can lead to attacks.  It is totally backwards from the teachings of Islam in my opinion.  The Prophet (pbuh) not only established a system of social justice by founding Islam as the religion, but he actively set in place guidelines among Muslims to regulate our behavior.  He actively corrected the Sahabah (companions) when they were in error.  Allah also made us responsible to protect each other from anything amounting to evil

“The Believers, men and women, are protectors one of another: they enjoin what is just, and forbid what is evil: they observe regular prayers, practise regular charity, and obey Allah and His Messenger. On them will Allah pour His mercy: for Allah is Exalted in power, Wise.” Qur’an 9:71

“You are the best nation produced [as an example] for mankind. You enjoin what is right and forbid what is wrong and believe in Allah . If only the People of the Scripture had believed, it would have been better for them. Among them are believers, but most of them are defiantly disobedient.”  Qur’an 3:110

“O you who have believed, be persistently standing firm in justice, witnesses for Allah , even if it be against yourselves or parents and relatives. Whether one is rich or poor, Allah is more worthy of both. So follow not [personal] inclination, lest you not be just. And if you distort [your testimony] or refuse [to give it], then indeed Allah is ever, with what you do, Acquainted.” Qur’an 4:135

We are to avoid suspicion and spying for the purpose of gossip and fault finding, but we still have an Islamic duty to confront extremist ideology and to protect, not only Muslims, but society at large from criminal acts and terrorism.

“The Prophet (ﷺ) said, “Beware of suspicion, for suspicion is the worst of false tales; and do not look for the others’ faults and do not spy, and do not be jealous of one another, and do not desert (cut your relation with) one another, and do not hate one another; and O Allah’s worshipers! Be brothers (as Allah has ordered you!”)” – Sahih Bukhari Book 78, Hadith 94

In light of all of these evidences, we need to be diligent and proactive. Our reactive behaviour that has been our modus since 9/11 is creating huge problems for our communities.

Our survival depends on it.

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Glossary of Terms and Phrases

Abbreviations:

a.s. – English abbreviation of the transliteration of the Arabic phrase, “Alayhi wa sallam”; meaning: The blessing of God be upon him.

BCE – Before Common Era

CE – Common Era

s.a.w. – English abbreviation of the transliteration of the Arabic phrase, “Sallallahu alayhi wa sallam”; meaning: The peace and blessing of God be upon him.

(PBUH)  –  Peace be upon him.

SWT – Subhannah wa T’ala; meaning: Glory be to the Mighty God.

Terms: 

Alhamdulillah – Praise be to God.

Allah – The One God.  The God of Abraham (a.s.), Ishmael (a.s.), Isaac (a.s.), Jacob (a.s.) and all the Prophets and the entire Universe.  The One God of all things created, visible and invisible.  The One God who was not conceived nor begotten nor ever will be.  He has no beginning and no end.  The Almighty God of everything and everyone, who governs the righteous and the unrighteous.  He is not like anything but unique.

Asalaamu ‘alaikum  –  Peace be upon you.

Ashaddu an la illaha ilallah  –  I bear witness that there is no god except God.

Ashaddu anna Muhammadar Rasulullah  –  I bear witness that Muhammad is the [last] Messenger of God.

‘Asr – Late afternoon prayer

Atheism – The theory or belief that God does not exist.

Ayah – English transliteration for the Arabic; meaning: verse; as in chapter and “verse.”

Bismillah – in the Name of Allah.

Canon – A general law or criterion.

Dhikr – Remembrance of Allah

Dhuhr (Thuhr) – Early afternoon prayer.

Dua’ – Supplication or informal prayer.

Eid – English transliteration for the Arabic; meaning: holiday or celebration.

The Enlightenment – The 18th century philosophy emphasizing individualism rather than tradition.

Fajr – Pre-dawn prayer

Fardh Kifaya  –  It is the Fard, that if performed by some (a sufficient number), the obligation falls from the rest.   Example: A group of Muslim brothers meet another group on the way to the masjid. It is their duty to convey the ‘Salaam’ to the other, and so if “one” brother amongst them was to convey the ‘Salaam’ then insha’allah ta’ala the rest will be relieved of this duty.

Fardh ‘Ayn  –  It is the Fard that is a compulsory duty on every single Muslim to perform, [just] like praying and fasting.

Fatwah – English transliteration for the Arabic; meaning: ruling (as in, to make a ruling or judgment.  Plural: Fatawah.

Gentile – English translation of the Hebrew word, “Goy”; meaning: any non-Jew.

Hadith – The written collection of the teachings and sayings of the Prophet Muhammad (s.a.w.), which are verified by authentic sources and compiled in reputable books of the collections of Hadith, such as in the books of Sahih Muslim or Sahih Bukhari, etc.

Hijab – English transliteration of the Arabic; meaning: covering.  Most commonly associated with the covering a woman wears but not particular to a woman.  May, also, be used in the case of a man’s modesty.

Humanism – The system of thought concerned with human matters rather than the divine or supernatural.

Imam – leader of prayer or in some cases leader of a community of Muslims.

Injeel – The original gospel given by God to Jesus (a.s.) which was lost by the last quarter of the first century.  The gospel (Injeel) is not to be confused with the written stories of Jesus (a.s.) life that we see today in the Bible, but rather the sayings or teachings of Jesus when he was on earth.

Insh’allah – God willing

Isa’ – English transliteration of the Arabic; meaning: Jesus; i.e. Jesus the Messiah (Christ) son of Mary.

Isha – Night time prayer

Islam – English transliteration of the Arabic; meaning : peace through submission of the will to the One true God.

Jahiliyya – Days of ignorance or not knowing.

Jazaku Allahu Khair – Goodness of Allah to you

Jennah – Paradise

Jihad – English transliteration of the Arabic; meaning: struggle; as in to struggle against.  Jihad can take on many forms.  One can Jihad against the temptations in his/her heart.  One can Jihad against the philosophies of a society through discourse.  One can Jihad to protect their families against an invading army.  Jihad does not initiate an attack in any of these three areas but is a defensive action.

Ka’aba – English transliteration for the Arabic; meaning: the cube-shaped stone building whose foundations were built by the angels and completed by Prophet Abraham (a.s.), and his son (Prophet Ishmael (a.s.)), in Makkah.

Khamr – English transliteration for the Arabic; meaning: intoxicant.

Ketuvim – English transliteration of the Hebrew; meaning: hidden writings or miscellaneous writings; such as, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, etc.

La illaha ilallah  –  There is no god except “the God.”

La3na  –  A Curse.  Such as, a curse on someone.

Lama – A Tibetan or Mongolian Buddhist Monk; such as in the Dalai Lama of Tibet.

Maghrib – After dusk prayer

Masih – English transliteration of the Arabic; meaning: Messiah or Christ.  Used in reference to Jesus (a.s.) son of Mary.

Mashallah – God has willed it

Masjid  –  A Muslim place of worship.  Plural: Masajid.  Known by people in the west incorrectly as a mosque.

Mikveh – English transliteration of the Hebrew; meaning ceremonial washing; like a baptism.

Musallah – Small prayer room, not a masjid or community center.

Muslim – English transliteration of the Arabic; meaning: believer (i.e. believer in God).  Also, the name of a book of the collections of Hadith, “Sahih Muslim.”

Newer Testament – The final version and collection of the books included in the Christian Bible.  Matthew – Revelations.

Nevi’im – English transliteration of the Hebrew; meaning: Prophets; such as in, Isaiah (a.s.), Jeremiah (a.s.), etc.

Pharisee – English translation of the Hebrew word, “Parush”; pl. “P’rushim”; A Jewish Religious sect; Religious liberals who believed in reinterpreting the Scripture for their time.

Qur’an – Literal meaning, “something revealed.”  The Islamic Holy Book.

Ramadan – A month in the Islamic (lunar) calendar.  The month of fasting in which the Qur’an was originally revealed to the Prophet (pbuh).

Riba – English transliteration for the Arabic; meaning: interest; as in interest on a loan, etc.

Ruh – English transliteration for the Arabic; meaning: spirit; Hebrew, Ruach.

Sadducee – English translation of the Hebrew word, “Tzadok”; pl. “Tz’dukim”; A Jewish Religious sect; Religious “lawyers” who believed in the strictest letter of the law.

Sahih Bhukari (or) Muslim – Volume collections of hadith.

Salaam – Peace

Salaat (Salat) – Formal obligatory prayer

Shirk – English transliteration for the Arabic; meaning: to ascribe partners to God in worship; to ascribe form to God who has no form; idol worship.

Subhanallah – Glory be to God

Sunnah – English transliteration for the Arabic; meaning: The traditions and practices of the Prophet Muhammad (s.a.w.) that are not only recorded in the books of Sahih Muslim and Sahih Bukhari but have been in practice since the day of the Prophet (s.a.w.) until the present.

Surah – English transliteration for the Arabic; meaning: chapter; as in, “chapter” and verse.

Takfir – Pronouncing a Musim a non-believer.

Talmud – English transliteration for the Hebrew; The Oral Torah; the Law of Moses handed down by word of mouth over thousands of years, which describes how the “Written Torah” is to be carried out; also, in today’s written form is The complete set of books which includes what was supposed to have been the “word of mouth” Law of Moses as well as a collection of writings from Rabbinical authorities of old.

Tanakh’ – English transliteration for the Hebrew; meaning: The Holy Scriptures; The Older Testament; The Jewish Scriptures. 

Taraweeh – Extra night time Sunnah prayers said during Ramadan.

Torah – English transliteration for the Hebrew; meaning: The Law; (i.e. the first five books of Moses (a.s.)); part of the Tanakh’.

Qur’an – English transliteration for the Arabic; meaning: The Reading; the collection into one book of the Revelations of God given to the Prophet Muhammad (s.a.w.) via the angel Gabriel;  The Revelations memorized and written down by the Prophet Muhammad (s.a.w.) as taught to him by God through the angel Gabriel.

Ummah  –  Islamic nation including Muslims and non-Muslims.  Commonly misused by many Muslims today to mean only all of the Muslims collectively.

Wa ‘alaikum asalaam  –  And upon you be peace.

Zakat – Mandatory charity of 2.5% of residual wealth given yearly.