This guy spent 10 years proclaiming that he does not believe in the concept of the nation-state, and that his ultimate goal is to establish the Islamic caliphate and destroy Israel. Since he took over, his army has been repeating the same thing every day. But because he put on a suit two years ago, Israel is now expected to trust him; otherwise, Israel must be condemned by everyone.

So what if a Muslim wins an election in America and becomes a congressman or senator? Why is that any different from a Buddhist winning an election? Because Buddhism is a religion. Islam is a state. Islam has a population: the ummah. It has a constitution: Sharia. It has courts, criminal law, family law, taxation, rules for minorities, doctrines of war and peace, and a foreign-policy framework governing relations between the land of Islam and the lands outside it. The ummah is not tied to Egypt, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, or any other modern country. It crosses all of them. Islam's population "Muslims" belong to one political-religious community. That is fundamentally different from Buddhism. A Buddhist American may practice Buddhism faithfully, but Buddhism does not give him a second universal political order with its own law, sovereignty, territorial doctrine, and theory of government. Islam does. This is why reducing Islam to “just another religion” misses the point. Muslim officeholders are literally citizens of another existing country, and their loyalties can never be American first, because the two projects are contradictory.

Before I left Islam, I was debating a Sudanese Christian who challenged me to name one good thing about Muhammad. Just one. I thought: easy. We Muslims practically worship Muhammad as the greatest man who ever lived. So I tried to recall good qualities, honesty, compassion, mercy, love, anything, any single story, and I couldn’t remember one. So I went to Google and typed: “the qualities of the Prophet.” Islamic websites came up, and I thought, good, now I’ll have plenty of examples for this guy. I opened them and was stunned: even the Islamic websites offered no good qualities in the sense he’d challenged me to find. They praised his courage in spreading Islam, his fighting of Allah’s enemies, his physical strength, and his strictness. Not one of the qualities the man had asked for. Even the famous mercy at Mecca, sparing the people who had supposedly persecuted him, turned out to be for strategic reasons. And when I started digging into the Quran and the sira for myself, I found that he married a child, he took Safiyya, a Jewish woman, the same day he killed her father, her brother, and her husband, trading his companion Dihya seven other captives for her, and posting a guard by the tent in case she tried to avenge them while raping her. He had the men of the Jewish tribe beheaded, down to boys checked for pubic hair. He raided trade caravans and took other tribes’ treasures. He lied and broke truces he asked for. He slept with all of his 9 wives the same night. He killed anyone who mocked him. He recruited raiders with the promise of other cities’ women. And when his own fighters hesitated to touch married captives, because their husbands were alive and watching, Muhammad told them it was fine because allah said so. Even the pagans of Arabia had higher morality than he did. Every one of these acts was stamped with Allah’s approval. He even married his adopted son’s wife by divine decree. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. I left Islam when I met this disgusting man, a man who turned his qualities into a religion, transmitted it to every generation of Muslims since, and made himself the ceiling of their morality. This is the man Mamdani wants you to learn from.

Israel is behind the hatred of Muslims and Islam in general. The 250,000 girls raped in the UK by Pakistani Muslims have nothing to do with it. The thousands of Islamic terror attacks have nothing to do with it. Fourteen centuries of Islamic conquest have nothing to do with it. 9/11 has nothing to do with it. Eighty years of religious war against the tiny, only Jewish state has nothing to do with it. The 57 Islamic countries that were once 100% non-Islamic have nothing to do with it. The divine mandate to take over the world and establish the caliphate has nothing to do with it. The killing of artists who draw Muhammad has nothing to do with it. The killing of apostates has nothing to do with it. The killing of authors has nothing to do with it. Turning women into property has nothing to do with it. Sex slavery and the mass murder of the enemies of Allah have nothing to do with it. It was Israel.

I know Pastor Nuhad Hassan personally. He is a Kurd from a Muslim background who converted to Christianity and led a church in Lebanon for over a decade. On July 19, Pastor Nuhad went to Syria to visit his village, and on July 20 he was arrested by al-Julani’s government over posts he made during the Afrin massacre against the Kurds. I just hung up the phone with friends and family members who are seriously concerned that he will be sentenced to death, the judges in Syria today are former ISIS jihadists, and they will sentence him according to sharia. I will contact the members of Congress who support al-Julani and urge them to intervene for Pastor Nuhad’s release. Please pray for him.

There was a time when the ideological lines were clear: Islamic jihad represented terrorists, and the left stood for secularism, feminism, and liberal democracy. But today those lines have been obliterated. The Islamic movements have embedded itself within the American left, not by sharing its values, but by exploiting its weaknesses. At the center of this manipulation is the issue of Israel. For the left, Israel has become a proxy for every postcolonial grievance: the “white settler,” the “imperialist outpost,” the supposed last bastion of Western oppression. For Islam, the hatred of Israel is older, deeper, and more theologically rooted. But Muslims know they can’t sell that openly in the American public square. So instead, they wrap their agenda in the language of justice, decolonization, and civil rights. They present themselves as just another oppressed minority struggling for liberation, knowing the left will embrace them as ideological kin. And it works, because the left, obsessed with identity politics and historical guilt, has lost the ability to see when it’s being played. Islamic groups flood the American public square with slogans about “resistance,” “apartheid,” and “liberation.” But behind that façade lies a very different agenda, rooted in jihad theology, Islamic supremacy, and the long-term goal of dismantling both Israel and the foundations of Western civilization. This alliance is deeply cynical. While the left parades rainbow flags and demands transgender inclusion, it turns a blind eye to the very ideology it empowers, an ideology that throw gays off rooftops, veil women, and silence dissent. Facts don’t matter when grievance is the currency and victimhood is the path to power. Islamic movements have learned the language of the left, colonialism, white supremacy, intersectionality, and speaks it fluently. But it is a Trojan horse. Inside the language of justice is a theology of domination. Inside the calls for equality is a scriptural command for conquest. And behind the tears for Palestine is a hatred not just for Israel, but for the Judeo-Christian West itself.