by Danielle Greyman-Kennard
TERROR AFFAIRS: Jewish activist Charles Jacobs has launched a global coalition bringing together Jews, Christians, Yazidis and other minorities facing jihadist persecution.
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Dr. Charles Jacobs has co-founded the International Freedom Coalition in the belief that jihadist persecution transcends individual communities, and that the voices of those targeted are harder to ignore when spoken in unity.
Jihadists may point to Jews and Israeli as being among their foremost enemies, but they are far from the only ones in their crosshairs. Across the globe, Druze, Christians, Alawites, Yazidis, Kurds, and other Muslim communities have also faced persecution at the hands of radical jihadist movements.
It is this shared experience of persecution that Dr. Charles Jacobs believes creates a natural alliance between the Jewish people and minority groups worldwide.
While sections of the Western left-wing movements have increasingly cast Jews as oppressors and booted them from the “victim bench,” those with a real understanding of the dangers of jihadism have not abandoned that partnership.
For communities that have experienced radical Islamism firsthand, the jihadist threat is not an abstract political debate.
They understand that the so-called Red-Green alliance between Islamists and elements of the far Left is often united less by shared values than by a common opposition to the West, Jacobs told The Jerusalem Post. They also believe that those who stand with Islamists may find themselves among its next victims.
International Freedom Coalition unites communities persecuted by jihadism
Jacobs believes these communities recognize the importance of standing alongside the Jewish people, just as Jews have an obligation to stand alongside them.
This conviction led him to co-found the International Freedom Coalition (IFC) earlier this year, bringing together communities whose struggles have too often been treated in isolation.
As Jacobs would later explain, it is easy for the international community and private organizations and institutions to dismiss the grievances of a single persecuted group, but it becomes considerably harder when multiple voices come together, demanding to be heard.
Although the IFC is a new undertaking, Jacobs has spent decades putting its founding principles into practice. His work defending human rights and religious freedom spans several decades and organizations.
In 1994, he co-founded the American Anti-Slavery Group, which sought to combat chattel slavery and human rights abuses in Sudan. The organization’s grassroots advocacy helped build the political momentum that ultimately contributed to South Sudan’s independence.
His commitment to the cause was not merely academic. While still only in his early 20s, Jacobs traveled illegally into Sudan alongside a rabbi on a mission to secure the freedom of enslaved people in time for Passover, the Jewish festival commemorating the Israelites’ exodus from slavery in Egypt.
“What else should Jews do on Passover but that, right?” he quipped.
His earlier work included co-founding Boston’s branch of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis and, in 2002, he went on to establish the David Project, an educational organization focused on Israel and antisemitism.
He currently serves as president of Americans for Peace and Tolerance (APT) as well, which is a Boston-based nonprofit that describes its mission as combating Islamist antisemitism.
Jacobs newest project, the IFC, is a non-partisan human rights and advocacy organization that was founded to confront global jihadist violence, expose Islamist influence, and defend persecuted or vulnerable minority communities worldwide.
Accusations of Islamophobia
Aware of the accusations of Islamophobia that could be leveled against him and the IFC, Jacobs stressed that the organization supports Muslim victims of jihadist violence just as strongly as it does any other persecuted community.
Its membership groups include anti-Taliban fighters, anti-Houthi fighters, and Somaliland organizations.
He argued that those who invoke Islamophobia to shut down criticism of Islamist movements, including organizations affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, have often remained conspicuously silent when Muslims themselves are murdered by the very groups they seek to defend.
In a recent campaign, for example, the IFC paid for a truck to travel through Detroit carrying a message directed at incoming Michigan Democratic Sen. Abdul El-Sayed.
The billboard read: “Abdul El-Sayed, end your silence about the jihad murder and enslavement of black Africans in Nigeria and Sudan.”
In Sudan, the Muslim Brotherhood-inspired Islamist government of Omar al-Bashir, which came to power in 1989 with the backing of the National Islamic Front, armed and supported militias responsible for abducting black African civilians, particularly members of the Dinka and Nuba communities.
Women and children were taken during village raids, transported away from their homes, and forced into unpaid domestic labor, herding, and sexual servitude. Human Rights Watch documented cases of children being sold in slave markets and women being held as enslaved people in domestic spheres.
In Nigeria, Boko Haram and its splinter factions have abducted thousands of civilians, particularly women and girls, subjecting captives to forced marriage, labor, sexual slavery, and religious coercion.
The Post previously spoke with a Nigerian priest about the targeting of Christian women by these jihadist groups.
Sayed, Jacobs said, “should speak out. He has been repeatedly hectored with questions about whether his mother or sister is affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, but he can easily dismiss those as ‘guilt by association.’ We are not interested in his mother or his sister.”
“What we want is to help, particularly by reaching the black community, which has been kept in the dark about this news for all the reasons I have mentioned. It is not ‘politically correct’ news,” he said.
“These Africans need the help of free people in America. If Americans knew what was happening, I believe they would instinctively want to help. That is an American instinct. But awareness is being blocked by political correctness and fear of being accused of Islamophobia,” Jacobs continued.
The campaign, however, was met with violence. According to Jacobs, the truck’s driver was dragged from the vehicle, violently assaulted, and had his phone taken. Police reportedly insisted the driver turn off the signs, an incident Jacobs described as a “troubling” attack on free speech. He then insisted that more trucks would be sent to ensure the message got out.
“We don’t yet know the identity of the attackers, but we do know that the alliance of leftists and radical Islamists – by their own logic – simply cannot allow the American people, who instinctively would defend these African victims, to hear and see the truth,” Jacobs said.
“It is troubling that the police forced the driver to turn off his signs. Are we going to allow free speech to be destroyed by physical attacks and intimidation?” Jacobs asked. “Anyone can Google images of Nigerians under jihadist assault.”
Such images, he continued, can turn one’s stomach: “Men beheaded, people being buried alive, and mass graves.”
“IFC members from Sudan, Nigeria, Darfur, and Biafra wanted black American citizens to see their plight and come to their aid. That’s what the truck was for,” Jacobs said. “Those who desperately need to keep these atrocities from American eyes have reverted to violence.”
Why the Left betrayed those it claimed to protect
Asked what makes Western leftists stand with Islamist organizations that oppose everything they believe and represent, Jacobs answered simply that it was “white guilt” and feeling the need to distinguish themselves from “the oppressive class.”
“When you buy your ‘amnesty card,’ you get to stand up in front of the world, beat your chest and say, ‘I’m not the bad white guy.’ You prove it by pointing out the bad things white people do,” he said.
“But when I ask that person, or Amnesty [International], why they won’t help me free black slaves held by Muslims, it gets in the way of what they’re doing. It actually contradicts their message, because they need to maintain that Western sins are the greatest sins,” Jacobs pointed out.
“Suddenly, I’m telling them there’s something worse than that, and it’s being done by people who, through this protection racket, have some kind of Teflon coating. They can’t criticize them because they’d be accused of Islamophobia, or because the perpetrators are dark-skinned or poor,” he explained.
“That really throws them off, so they will never help free an enslaved black person ... It’s a ritualistic ‘purification card’ that they’re getting,” the doctor said.
Still, Jacobs rejected the suggestion that jihadists had won the political Left over completely, instead describing what he called an “illogical coalition” between the two.
He argued that the alliance was held together by a shared opposition to Western liberalism, democracy, and Israel, which he said the Left increasingly portrays as a symbol of imperialism and colonialism.
He pointed to the 1979 Iranian Revolution as a warning, recalling how leftists and Islamists joined forces to overthrow the shah, only for the Islamists to turn against their former allies once they had seized power.
“We know how well this worked out for the Left when they joined with the Islamists in Iran to overthrow the shah,” he said. “They won, right? The Red-Green Alliance overthrew the shah. The day after, all the leftists had their throats slit.”
For Jacobs, the double standard of when to react and to whose suffering is precisely why persecuted minorities must look beyond traditional human rights organizations and build alliances with the Jewish people, even when ties to Israel and Jewish communities can be weaponized against them.
Islamist actors, including figures within Iran’s ruling regime, have repeatedly sought to discredit such relationships by portraying them as evidence of foreign influence or disloyalty.
The mass killing of protesters in Iran in January and the wave of executions that followed have demonstrated the dangers faced by those who challenge an Islamist regime.
However, Jacobs argued, such accusations are likely to be made regardless of whether these alliances exist, and are often used to justify repression and atrocities.
There is therefore little reason for persecuted communities to hold back from seeking support from Israeli and Jewish organizations, he said.
The IFC’s achievements so far
Though perhaps still in its infancy, having held its inaugural conference in Washington in July, Jacobs was visibly proud of all the coalition had achieved so far.
He explained that even bringing together 15 different groups who are victims of jihadism, who thought they were fighting an individual battle, and making them understand that they are part of a class of people, a collective, was “a tremendous thing.”
“You should have seen how excited they were when we brought them together in Washington and they realized they were not alone,” Jacobs said.
Describing what he saw there, Jacobs said that “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.”
“It was an amazing thing. They saw it as empowering, not only emotionally but politically and diplomatically.”
The second major achievement, he said, was that the coalition was helping people understand that the problem is jihadism, not Islam or Muslims.
“The urgency is that people in the West need to see the enemy stripped of its religious garb. It’s jihadism,” he said, maintaining that the issue was not Islam itself.
Jihadists were the ones exploiting America’s commitment to religious freedom, Jacobs stressed. They avoid scrutiny by dismissing criticism as “Islamophobia.”
Asked what people in Israel and the West could do to sustain this momentum, Jacobs said the first step was to recognize that conflicts with jihadist movements around the world are interconnected.
He described this as a “flipping of the consciousness,” arguing that simply understanding the common threat was an important step in itself.
But awareness, he said, also needed to translate into action, including pushing for policy changes, sanctions, and local initiatives.
He pointed to his own campaign against a foreign-funded curriculum in public schools in the Boston suburbs, which he said contained false and deeply hostile portrayals of Israel and Jews.
Jacobs recalled how APT had fought the material largely alone, claiming that the IFC model could make it harder for schools and officials to dismiss such concerns as solely Jewish grievances.
Rather than having Jews raise the issue on their own, he said, future campaigns could bring in Hindus to speak about the historical persecution of their communities and Alawites to challenge the omission of their own experiences. Together, they could make the case that excluding these histories amounted to “erasing history” and avoiding a broader discussion of jihadism.
For Jacobs, this is what the IFC ultimately intends to achieve: ensuring that persecuted communities no longer have to fight their battles alone.
By bringing these groups together, he hopes to give them a platform to amplify each other’s struggles and draw attention to injustices that might otherwise go overlooked.
Danielle Greyman-Kennard
Source: https://www.jpost.com/international/islamic-terrorism/article-914018
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