Victims of jihadist persecution find common cause with Jewish communities
Dr. Charles Jacobs says his new International Freedom Coalition gives communities targeted by jihadism a collective voice the world cannot easily ignore.
By Ricardo Brooks ·
Jihadist movements may count Jews and Israelis among their foremost enemies, but they are far from the only targets. Druze, Christians, Alawites, Yazidis, Kurds and other Muslim communities have also faced persecution by radical jihadists, and for Dr. Charles Jacobs that shared experience forms a natural alliance between the Jewish people and persecuted minorities worldwide.
That conviction led Jacobs to co-found the International Freedom Coalition (IFC) earlier this year: a non-partisan human rights and advocacy organization confronting jihadist violence, exposing Islamist influence and defending vulnerable communities. One persecuted group is easy for the world to ignore, he told The Jerusalem Post. Many voices raised together are not.
Jacobs has pursued that work for decades. In 1994 he co-founded the American Anti-Slavery Group, which fought chattel slavery in Sudan and helped build momentum toward South Sudan's independence. In his early 20s he traveled illegally into Sudan with a rabbi to free enslaved people in time for Passover. "What else should Jews do on Passover but that, right?" he quipped. He also founded the David Project in 2002 and now leads Americans for Peace and Tolerance.
Anticipating accusations of Islamophobia, Jacobs said the coalition supports Muslim victims of jihadist violence as strongly as any other community, and its members include anti-Taliban fighters, anti-Houthi fighters and Somaliland organizations. Those who invoke Islamophobia to shield movements affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, he argued, often stay silent when Muslims themselves are murdered by the very groups they defend.
In a recent campaign, the IFC paid for a truck to drive through Detroit with a message for incoming Michigan Democratic Sen. Abdul El-Sayed: "Abdul El-Sayed, end your silence about the jihad murder and enslavement of black Africans in Nigeria and Sudan." Sudan's Muslim Brotherhood-inspired government of Omar al-Bashir, which took power in 1989, armed militias that abducted Dinka and Nuba civilians, and Human Rights Watch documented children sold in slave markets. In Nigeria, Boko Haram and its splinter factions have abducted thousands of civilians, subjecting captives to forced marriage, labor and sexual slavery.
El-Sayed "should speak out," Jacobs said, arguing that Americans would instinctively want to help if they knew, but that awareness is blocked by political correctness and fear of being accused of Islamophobia.
The campaign met with violence. Jacobs said the driver was dragged from the truck, beaten and robbed of his phone, while police reportedly made him switch off the signs, an episode he called a "troubling" attack on free speech. He vowed to send more trucks. "IFC members from Sudan, Nigeria, Darfur, and Biafra wanted black American citizens to see their plight and come to their aid," he said.
Asked why Western leftists align with Islamist groups that oppose their stated values, Jacobs pointed to "white guilt" and what he called an "illogical coalition" bound by shared hostility to Western liberalism, democracy and Israel. He cited the 1979 Iranian Revolution, when leftists and Islamists joined forces to overthrow the shah, as a warning: "The day after, all the leftists had their throats slit."
The mass killing of protesters in Iran in January and the executions that followed show the risks of challenging an Islamist regime, and since accusations of foreign influence come regardless, Jacobs argued, persecuted communities have little reason to avoid seeking Jewish and Israeli support. At the IFC's inaugural conference in Washington in July, 15 groups came together: "The Sudanese were talking to the Iranian dissidents, the Iranian dissidents were talking to the Coptic Christians, the Copts were talking to the Darfuris, and the Darfuris were talking to the Alawites."
Its second achievement, he said, was clarifying that the enemy is jihadism, not Islam or Muslims: "The urgency is that people in the West need to see the enemy stripped of its religious garb." Sustaining momentum means recognizing these conflicts are interconnected and turning awareness into policy changes, sanctions and local initiatives, so no persecuted community has to fight alone.
