When the first survivors’ accounts came out of Israel’s kibbutzim, I had the terrible sense that I had heard them before. And I had, in south Sudan.
More than two decades earlier, I traveled to Sudan to witness Christian Solidarity International free 2,952 black Africans from slavery. My American anti-slavery group had helped raise funds to buy back their freedom.
The freed slaves told us that the raiders came at dawn, screaming Allahu akbar! (“God is great!”) and murdered at will. They gang raped the women and girls, then dragged them off as captives, to use as concubines, domestics or to sell.
On Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas carried out the same raid.
They came at dawn. They went house to house through the kibbutzim of Be’eri, Kfar Aza and Nir Oz, raping, shooting and killing entire families. At the Nova music festival, they hunted and slaughtered young people in cold blood, ignoring pleas for mercy. They raped and sexually tortured women and girls, even some young men. They drove 251 captives back into Gaza. Noa Argamani reported that they used her as a domestic slave. One raider called his parents from a murdered woman’s phone to boast that he had killed 10 Jews with his own hands.
The enemies of the Jews called Oct. 7 a desperate act of “resistance,” but it was a classic jihad raid—an act as old as the conquests throughout Egypt, Persia, India and North Africa, and as recent as the murderous assaults on Africans in Nigeria and Darfur, and on Alawites, Christians, Kurds and Druze in Syria.
Both Hamas and the National Islamic Front regime in Sudan, which carried out the slave raids, are both branches of the Muslim Brotherhood. The 1988 Hamas charter calls openly for the worldwide extermination of the Jews in order to destroy the only nation in the Middle East that won back its homeland from jihad conquest. In Europe, only Spain, in recapturing Andalucia, accomplished that.
The ties between jihadists who massacred and enslaved Israelis and those who did so to Africans (and have done it to Middle Easterners and Europeans) are also material. For years, Sudan gave Hamas refuge and served as the corridor for weapons smuggled from the Islamic regime occupying Iran headed to Gaza. Strikes attributed to Israel hit weapons convoys on Sudanese soil in 2009 and a munitions factory in Khartoum in 2012. The jihadists who massacred and enslaved Africans helped arm the movement whose men came through the fence on Oct. 7.
Before Israel had even identified all its dead, the justifications began. We were told the massacre had a “context.” There was an “occupation,” a “siege,” a “cycle of violence.” A collection of 27 students groups at Harvard University declared Israel “entirely responsible” for the atrocity visited upon it.
Ask the people of South Sudan what occupation they were guilty of. Ask the Christians of Nigeria’s Plateau State, nearly 200 of whom were butchered in their villages on Christmas Eve 2023. Ask the Yazidi women sold in ISIS slave markets, or the 21 Copts beheaded on a Libyan beach in 2015. None of them was occupying anybody’s land, and the killers came for them all the same—with the same slogans, the same methods and the same appetite for captives.
The “context” for Oct. 7 is not Judea, Samaria or Gaza. It is 14 centuries of jihadist conquests, many of which have also killed and enslaved Muslims who got in the way, as in Nigeria, or who refused to give up their African cultures and become Arabized, as in Mauritania and Darfur.
In the 1990s, I learned that the great human-rights organizations knew that Arabs owned black Africans as slaves in Sudan and chose not to make a fuss because the perpetrators were not the white Western villains their constituents want to shame in self-purification rituals that relieve them of their white guilt. For that, they abandon the victims of jihadism.
After Oct. 7, the same institutional reflex kicked in. U.N. Women took nearly two months to condemn the sexual violence against Israeli women. Prominent human-rights groups hurried to put the massacre in “context” and then spent the next three years decrying Israel’s response. Campus activists tore down posters of kidnapped children. For the Dinka of Sudan and the Jews of Israel alike, the lesson was the same: the human-rights establishment will not come when you are tortured, killed or enslaved. Or, as I titled an op-ed I wrote in The Boston Globe in 2002, “Why Israel, and not Sudan, is singled out.”
Israel treats Oct. 7 as its own war—a battle over its borders, fought and explained alone. Nigerian Christians do the same. So do Assyrians, Copts, Yazidis, Druze and Kurds. Each petitions the world separately, and so each is a minority the world can safely ignore. This is a strategic error.
These are not separate wars, but multiple fronts of one. The same doctrine drives the jihadist militias in Nigeria, al-Shabaab in Somalia, the jihadists who massacred Druze and Alawites in Syria, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Basij murderers who wiped out tens of thousands of innocent Iranian protesters in two days, and the Hamas terrorist organization in Gaza. Taken together, their targets are not a minority at all: They represent hundreds of millions of people.
That is why Dr. Walid Phares and I founded the International Freedom Coalition: to bring the peoples under jihadist assault together into one alliance, with one record of atrocities, presented with one voice before Congress, the U.S. State Department, the European Union, the International Court of Justice, the public and the press. Israel’s suffering belongs in that record, and so does its strength. No nation has done more to show that jihad can be resisted.
Some call Oct. 7 “Israel’s 9/11.” That’s only half-right. It was also South Sudan’s, Nigeria’s and Syria’s. It was the same raid, carried out by the same movement, against another community that was told it stood alone.
Victims of jihadism no longer need to stand alone.
