Islamist terror. Mass migration visibly reshaping our societies. Growing communities whose values can be fundamentally at odds with those of the societies absorbing them. I cannot help but stand dumbfounded as all of this unfolds before my eyes.

What possible explanation is there for this madness?

The problem is not just the leaders.

So many people in our societies have found themselves supporting ideologies and groups that would happily slaughter them, just as Hamas slaughtered innocent young people partying at the Nova music festival.

Islam is hardly known for its liberal treatment of women, gay people or religious minorities in the places where it dominates. Even here in the West, polling among some Muslim communities has shown substantial support for elements of Sharia law.

You would think this would set off alarm bells among people who claim to be champions of human rights.

But it doesn’t.

They don’t seem to see the contradiction. They believe they are on the “right side of history”, as they so often like to remind everyone else.

A West at War With Itself

Underneath all of this sits a much deeper hostility towards the West itself.

Capitalism, strong borders, the nation-state and many of the institutions that gave us the privilege of living in some of the most prosperous and free societies in human history are increasingly portrayed as forces of oppression.

Strong borders become an extension of “white supremacy”. The nation-state becomes something backwards that should eventually be replaced by some kind of universal, borderless system, regardless of how disastrous that might actually be in practice. There is, among parts of the Western Left, something approaching contempt for their own countries.

You see it in the way the police are discussed.

Police officers are vilified for attempting to maintain law and order. This is not to say that police never make mistakes or that they should be above criticism. They shouldn’t. But these are also men and women who risk their lives every day to keep our streets safe.

That did not stop “defund the police” from becoming a serious political slogan.

What makes these views particularly striking is that so many of the people pushing them are college-educated, relatively well-off and living comfortable, protected lives. They can afford to entertain ideas whose consequences will often be felt first by people living nowhere near their university campuses and affluent neighbourhoods.

This divergence in worldview becomes even clearer when you look at geopolitics.

The Great Inversion

Nowhere is it clearer than Israel, Palestine and Iran.

Israel is fighting some of the most barbaric terrorist organisations of our time. Organisations that operate from civilian areas, fight without uniforms and have recruited children into their “struggle”.

Hamas itself showed the world what its idea of “resistance” looked like on October 7. The terrorists filmed themselves doing it.

Yet when the blue-haired “Free Palestine” activists pour into Western streets screaming about “genocide”, many have no idea that they are helping to advance the propaganda of an Islamist terrorist organisation. Perhaps some of them do know. I’m not sure which is more frightening.

Hamas could never defeat Israel on the battlefield. But it has achieved something extraordinary in the information war: people who would be persecuted, imprisoned or even killed under the Islamist ideology Hamas represents have become some of its loudest defenders in the West.

You have “Queers for Palestine” marching through Western cities—sometimes half dressed—against the only country in the Middle East where gay people enjoy the kind of legal protections and freedom they take for granted at home.

The contradiction is almost absurd. Across the surrounding region, including in some of the wealthiest Arab states on earth, gay people face criminal laws and severe restrictions that would be unthinkable in Israel. Yet these activists have chosen Israel as their enemy.

You have women marching against the one country in the region where women enjoy the same fundamental legal and political rights as men, while championing a Palestinian movement dominated by an Islamist organisation. These are not obscure differences; they are enormous. Yet somehow the freest society in the region is the one they have convinced themselves represents oppression.

Then you have black activists marching against an “apartheid state”, despite Israeli citizens of different races, religions and ethnicities living under the same body of civil law.

Meanwhile, black Palestinians have spoken about being called abeed—“slaves”—because of the colour of their skin. Think about how grotesque that is: black people being called slaves.

If black communities anywhere in Europe, or America, were routinely spoken about this way, it would rightly be regarded as horrifying racism. Yet somehow this barely penetrates the worldview of activists who obsessively describe Israel as a racist state.

The inversion is extraordinary. This is, without a doubt, one of the most impressive propaganda achievements of my lifetime.

How did such an inversion of reality become mainstream?

Toe the Line

Part of the answer can be seen in what happens when someone refuses to toe the line.

Celebrities are usually among the quickest to reflect whatever opinion has become fashionable. But the backlash against Ed Sheeran showed what happens when someone doesn’t sufficiently conform.

Sheeran hardly presents himself as some great defender of Israel. That didn’t matter. His reluctance to turn his concerts into political rallies still brought enormous pressure and, eventually, enormous public backlash that seemed to threaten his entire career.

That tells you something about the political culture surrounding this movement. Silence isn’t enough. Sympathy isn’t enough. You are expected to publicly declare yourself—to bend the knee and repeat the almost cult-like phrase:

“Free Palestine.”

Increasingly, anything short of that is treated as betrayal.

Leaders Who Know Better

Then there are our leaders.

They are not ignorant people. They have intelligence services, diplomats and access to military assessments and information ordinary citizens do not.

The British government understands the kind of threat Israel faced on October 7. Western leaders know Hamas started this war with an attack of extraordinary savagery, with the purpose of creating a cascading effect that would destroy the entire country.

They know Hamas has repeatedly made clear that its struggle is not merely about negotiating slightly different borders. No Western country would suffer what happened on October 7 and simply accept that it might happen again.

But these leaders can also read polls.

They can see that the anti-Israel position has become deeply entrenched among parts of the Left. They can also see its support among parts of the growing Muslim populations in their countries.

And instead of moral clarity, too many choose political convenience. They pander to narratives they should know are false or grossly distorted, even as their own countries confront some of the same ideological questions Israel has been confronting for decades.

And Then There Is Iran

If Israel exposes the contradiction, Iran makes it impossible to ignore.

Here you have a people who have been begging for freedom. They took to the streets knowing what could happen to them, and they went anyway.

They were butchered on an enormous scale.

Doctors inside Iran have described hospitals overwhelmed by casualties, bodies piling up and medical systems unable to cope with the number of people being shot. Medical workers trying to establish the scale of the crackdown have done so while the regime restricted communications and information leaving the country.

The true death toll remains fiercely disputed. What is not seriously in doubt is the scale and brutality of the crackdown. This was an apocalyptic level of death, and it is hard to even comprehend the scale of what happened.

These are people fighting against an Islamist regime—for freedom from a government that represses women, executes dissidents and has sponsored armed groups across the Middle East.

If the rhetoric of Western progressives actually meant what it claims to mean, these people should be heroes.

Yet where are the marches? Where are the celebrities? Where are the Western activists filling the streets demanding a free Iran? Where are the people who spent years telling us that silence is violence?

Instead, when America and Israel confront the Islamic Republic, much of the outrage in the West somehow turns towards America and Israel. Then, at the first opportunity, European leaders return to dealing with representatives of the same regime.

That contrast is difficult to ignore.

Diplomacy has a place in international affairs. Governments sometimes have to speak to terrible regimes. But symbolism matters too.

What message does it send to Iranians who watched friends and family members die in the streets when Western officials return to treating representatives of that regime as ordinary diplomatic partners?

This is the contradiction at the heart of all of this.

A liberal democracy fighting Islamist terrorists becomes the villain, while people fighting an Islamist dictatorship become an afterthought. The people who claim to care most loudly about oppression somehow cannot see the contradiction.

Before It Is Too Late

That is why I think we are living through an incredibly dangerous moment.

Too many people in the West have been taught to despise the civilisation that gave them the freedom to despise it. Too many of our leaders are terrified of standing on principle. They would rather appease whichever voices are loudest and most willing to punish them politically, while the problems continue to grow.

We desperately need leaders willing to look at the world as it actually is: leaders capable of recognising the dangers facing their own societies, and willing to defend the institutions, freedoms and countries they have been entrusted to lead instead of apologising for them.

Most of all, we need leaders with enough courage to say what they can plainly see.

I believe that, in the end, truth wins. The question is how much damage we will allow ourselves to suffer before we finally admit what is standing directly in front of us.

Let’s hope that when the West finally pulls its head out of the sand, it isn’t already too late.

And what is their cause?

I’ll give you a hint: it’s not to “free Palestine”.

If “Free Palestine” were an actual humanitarian movement, it would rage about the indoctrination of hate shoved into the minds of Palestinian children. Children taught to hate Jews, conditioned to die for the so-called “resistance”. A dark culture of death.

It would rage at the treatment of Palestinians at the hands of Hamas. You can literally watch videos of Palestinians being tortured and beaten in the streets of Gaza. Why are they so silent when it comes to that? Why is there so little outrage directed at the authoritarian regime that has ruled Gaza with an iron fist?

It would rage at the enormous resources poured into building a sophisticated terror-tunnel network stretching hundreds of miles—roughly half the length of the New York subway system—instead of building a city Palestinians could prosper in.

If this were a humanitarian movement, the fact that Hamas has fought from civilian areas, with fighters operating in civilian clothes, would be shouted from the rooftops. This terrorist organisation has repeatedly placed Palestinian civilians directly in harm’s way.

Why are they so silent about that?

Because this movement does not care about Palestinians first.

It cares about hating the only Jewish state.

We’ve seen the same type of mass-pressure campaigns in the past. Ones that require you to bend the knee by publicly expressing your support, or you’re automatically branded as evil. Black Lives Matter and gender ideology are good examples of this.

Any kind of nuance—or a position that doesn’t 100% affirm the ideology—is interpreted as a grave transgression.

You’ve sinned against the ideology.

Increasingly, that sin is treated as so egregious that you deserve to lose your livelihood, your reputation and, in the most extreme cases, even your life.

However, in my opinion, this “Free Palestine” movement—and the pressure it is placing on the shoulders of ordinary people and celebrities—is the worst of the lot.

It is deeply dangerous to the Western world and our societies.

Why?

Because the entire movement is built on lies.

It’s an inversion of reality.

It’s a poison pill that carries within itself hatred of the West, support for jihadism, Jew-hatred and the sacrifice of truth. It’s mass psychosis. It has become a type of cult.

A death cult.

The more Palestinians die, the more ammunition the movement has to attack Israel, which is fighting an enemy that has promised to repeat October 7 over and over again.

If this were primarily a humanitarian movement, it would have jumped at every opportunity to get Palestinian civilians out of harm’s way.

Instead, what did we get?

Outrage whenever civilians were evacuated. Outrage whenever the possibility of taking refuge in surrounding countries was proposed.

Palestinians became the one population in a war zone who were expected to remain there.

Every celebrity who publicly bends the knee gives this ideology greater legitimacy and accelerates the self-destructive nature of this lie. What worries me is that many of the people supporting this movement are either knowingly—or unknowingly—supporting something profoundly destructive.

Which brings us to Ed Sheeran.

Macklemore hijacked someone else’s stage

To put it briefly: Macklemore asked to be a supporting act for Ed Sheeran, who agreed.

But Macklemore, being the parasite that he is, used the opportunity he was given—performing in front of a crowd that wasn’t his—to make a political statement.

For two nights at MetLife Stadium, he went onstage wearing a keffiyeh, shouting about “Free Palestine” and “genocide”. He performed “Hind’s Hall” while images of Gaza played in the background.

As usual, Hamas almost completely disappeared from the story.

Anyone listening with no knowledge of the situation could be forgiven for thinking Israel woke up one morning and decided to start bombing Gaza for the fun of it.

People who go to watch Ed Sheeran are not there to hear about his—or any other act’s—political stance.

They are there for the music.

The audience is a diverse group of people, including families and children. They bought expensive tickets. Some had to find babysitters. Some travelled long distances, booking hotels and B&Bs.

As a family man myself, I completely understand the effort that goes into something like that.

Wanting to go to a concert and enjoy a bit of escapism is a completely justified position. Ed Sheeran wanting to provide that atmosphere for his fans is also completely justified.

After Macklemore’s performances, several venues made clear that they would not host the remaining shows with him on the bill, and the promoter removed him from the tour.

Somehow, Ed Sheeran became the villain.

In the eyes of the mob, refusing to transform his entire tour into a “Free Palestine” rally apparently made him complicit.

Then he folded

Sheeran initially explained that he did not want his concerts turned into political battlegrounds, that the decision to remove Macklemore ultimately belonged to the promoter, and that cancelling stadium shows would affect hundreds of thousands of fans and workers.

It did nothing but make the crowd angrier.

Then, at his Philadelphia show, he folded a little.

He called the October 7 massacre horrific. But he also described Israel’s campaign in Gaza as “catastrophic and unjustifiable and disproportionate”, spoke about civilian deaths and the West Bank, and apologised for mistakes he believed he had made in handling the controversy.

Perhaps that is genuinely what he believes.

But if he hoped this would calm the attacks on him, he was wrong.

It would have been much better for him to hold the line on the fact that his shows are not a political battleground. Because once you accept the premise that you owe the mob a political statement, there will always be another statement demanded of you.

As much as I have nothing against the guy—and I think he is largely a victim in this situation—I think he is completely wrong about the war itself.

The Israeli military campaign in Gaza was not only morally justified after October 7. It was morally necessary.

Multiple things can be true at once.

Yes, civilian deaths are deeply tragic. The devastation of Gaza is tragic.

But this was a war started by a genocidal terrorist organisation. Starting a war by massacring civilians, committing sexual violence and taking hostages, and then losing that war, does not make the war a “genocide”.

That’s insane.

Despite the devastation, and despite Hamas fighting from within one of the most difficult urban environments imaginable, Israel managed to fight this war without simply flattening Gaza on October 8th, while civilians were still in their homes.

It used evacuation orders, phone calls, text messages, leaflets, designated evacuation routes and other measures intended to move civilians away from combat zones. Israel has gone over and above what many other nations have done—or would do—in comparable urban wars in its effort to minimise civilian casualties.

Yet the simplistic story being sold is that Israel entered Gaza with the objective of slaughtering Palestinians.

That is an inversion of reality.

Meanwhile, as the world obsesses over Gaza, other catastrophes barely register.

Gillian Anderson recently used her platform to talk about Sudan.

Sudan is currently the largest humanitarian crisis on planet Earth. Tens of millions of people need humanitarian assistance. Millions have been displaced. Hunger has consumed huge parts of the country.

Yet most people scrolling through Western social media feeds could probably tell you almost nothing about it.

So Gillian Anderson tried to raise awareness of the suffering of the Sudanese people.

Do you know what appeared throughout her comment section?

People from the “Free Palestine” movement angry that she wasn’t talking about Gaza instead.

Think about how insane that is.

Someone tries to draw attention to the greatest humanitarian crisis in the world, and instead of caring about the people suffering there, your reaction is anger that she has diverted attention away from Palestine.

Like I said.

It’s a cult.

Ed Sheeran is not entirely blameless

Ed Sheeran seems like a decent person who mostly wants to make music.

But because of the actions of the parasitic opportunist Macklemore, he has now had the displeasure of facing this rabid crowd demanding obedience.

To be fair, Ed is not entirely blameless.

How could he not know the type of artist Macklemore had become? His politics were hardly a secret. Neither was the controversy surrounding the costume Macklemore wore in 2014—complete with a large hooked nose—which many Jews regarded as an antisemitic caricature.

If Sheeran knew all of that, why did he think bringing him onto a stadium tour was a good idea?

That was a mistake.

But it does not justify what followed.

Do not bend the knee

This movement will accept nothing but complete obedience.

Things are only going to get worse.

The pressure on politicians, celebrities and ordinary people is only going to become more intense. The mass psychosis will spread further if people continue rewarding it.

The answer is not to continually produce better-worded statements proving that you care.

The answer is to refuse to bend the knee.

Stop apologising for refusing to accept a lie.

Stop allowing accusations of hatred to frighten people into silence.

Stop treating a movement as humanitarian simply because it has wrapped itself in the language of human rights.

If a political movement demands your public obedience, punishes neutrality, excuses jihadism, treats Jewish self-defence as uniquely evil and needs Palestinian suffering to sustain its narrative, then feeding it more obedience will not make it disappear.

It will make it stronger.

Ed Sheeran’s mistake was believing there was a statement he could make that would satisfy the mob.

There isn’t.

So stop trying.

Do not bend the knee.

I’m not saying people didn’t always hold opinions I find abhorrent. Of course they did. It’s just that lately, those views seem more popular—or at least louder, more confident and less ashamed of themselves.

There are things I thought we had largely agreed on.

Terrorism is evil. Killing someone because they hold different political opinions is wrong. Hating people because of their ethnicity is horrible. The Western world, with all its faults, has been a net positive for humanity. Capitalism is imperfect, but it remains the best economic system we have come up with, lifting billions of people out of poverty.

And yet, looking at the last few years, it sometimes feels like we can no longer agree on even the most basic distinction between right and wrong.

Apparently I couldn’t have been more wrong.

I’ve been trying to figure out why everything feels so off-kilter. I don’t think there is one single explanation. But I can point to a few moments where something seemed to shift.

Covid and the collapse of trust

The first major shift I remember was Covid.

I genuinely believe that period drove many of us a little crazy. Millions of people were forced into lockdown as we watched this mysterious disease spread across the world. One day we were living normally. Then, almost overnight, governments reached into our lives in ways most of us had never experienced before.

We were suddenly dealing with masks, social distancing, lockdowns and vaccine passports. In some cases, people were effectively forced to take a vaccine we were told would protect us and, perhaps more importantly, protect the people around us.

The response was almost immediately divided between fierce resistance and equally fierce agreement.

“Two weeks to flatten the curve” became a refrain. Plenty of well-meaning people took the vaccine because they genuinely believed they were playing their part in solving a terrible situation.

At the time, I wasn’t following politics nearly as closely as I do now. But I remember feeling uncomfortable with how deeply the state was inserting itself into people’s private lives.

I was a live musician, so most of my gigs disappeared.

Even then, I tried to understand. This was something new. Governments were dealing with a disease they did not fully understand, and I didn’t feel I could blame people for being overly cautious.

But as the months dragged on, especially here in Europe, some of the rules became increasingly difficult to make sense of—even for someone like me with absolutely no background in virology.

You could go to a restaurant, but you had to wear a mask while walking through the door, only to remove it once you sat down. You had to remain seated. Singing was banned in some places. And much of this continued even after vaccination.

It was a bizarre time.

Vaccination also became political. If you didn’t take the shot, you were a “grandma killer”, or something close to it. Walking around without a mask could make you a social pariah. Meanwhile, we gradually learned that many of the masks people were relying on offered far less protection than they had been led to believe. Views that challenged the prevailing consensus were often treated not simply as wrong, but as dangerous.

Large public gatherings were condemned, with public-health professionals warning that they could spread the virus.

Then George Floyd happened.

Black Lives Matter protests swept across the world, and thousands upon thousands of people poured into the streets.

Suddenly, some of the same voices that had warned people against gathering in crowds were making an exception. Protesting, we were told, was important enough to justify the risk.

Whatever your opinion of those protests, I think something important happened at that moment.

For a lot of people, the idea that these institutions were operating purely according to neutral scientific principles stopped being believable. It seemed that ideology could influence the rules too.

That damaged trust.

I haven’t spent years studying every Covid policy, every scientific paper or every decision our governments made during that period, so I’m not going to pretend I can neatly separate every justified criticism from every conspiracy theory that came afterwards.

What I do know is that when the restrictions disappeared, we stepped back into a fundamentally different world.

Trust in institutions had taken a massive nosedive.

For good reasons and bad ones.

And once people stop trusting the institutions that are supposed to tell them what is true, everything becomes much harder.

October 7th and the moral split

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine effectively ended the Covid era.

For the most part, especially here in Europe, people seemed to understand what had happened: an expansionist power had launched an illegal invasion of its neighbour.

Even that became politically divisive. In America especially, I thought the Biden administration did a terrible job explaining the war to ordinary people. The conflict was often moralised in a way that seemed to further divide a population already deeply suspicious of its institutions.

But the biggest turning point for me was October 7th.

Hamas broke into Israel and proceeded to massacre whoever they could get their hands on.

They didn’t just brutally kill people. They filmed themselves doing it.

The cruelty, the bloodlust and the euphoria were difficult to comprehend.

Watching those videos, hearing terrorists celebrate as they spilled blood, still sends shivers down my spine.

That moment felt like it set the world on fire.

I found myself scrambling to understand the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I read more history. I tried to understand Gaza, Hamas, the wars, the peace negotiations, the settlements, the land disputes, the Palestinian national movement—all of it.

But the more I learned, the more bewildered I became by the reaction in the West.

People I had once considered intelligent, serious thinkers suddenly seemed incapable of saying something incredibly simple: massacring civilians is evil.

Instead, the terror inflicted upon Israelis became “resistance”.

Rape, kidnapping and torture were explained away, relativised or ultimately laid at Israel’s feet.

Israel was responsible for what had been done to Israelis.

And from there, almost every uncomfortable fact seemed to disappear.

It didn’t matter that Israel had offered the Palestinians a state multiple times. It didn’t matter that Israel withdrew from Gaza. It didn’t matter that Hamas deliberately embedded itself among civilians, fought from civilian areas and operated around schools, mosques and hospitals. It didn’t matter that enormous sums of money had flowed into Gaza while Hamas simultaneously built an extraordinary underground military infrastructure beneath it.

It didn’t seem to matter that Hamas leaders lived incredible lives of luxury abroad while ordinary Palestinians suffered under their rule.

So I kept coming back to the same question:

How could they not see this?

Whatever disagreements someone has with Israel, how could there be any confusion over whether a country was justified in going to war against an organisation that had just slaughtered its citizens, kidnapped hundreds more, and promised to do it again?

This was as close to a clear confrontation between good and evil as I had ever witnessed.

And yet millions of people across the Western world seemed willing to justify, excuse or explain away what happened.

That disturbed me far beyond the Israeli-Palestinian conflict itself.

Because the more I watched, the more I realised this wasn’t really about Israel.

It was revealing something much larger about us.

When violence becomes “understandable”

The Israel-Palestine issue became one of the most visceral separations of values I had ever seen.

And as time went on, I started noticing the same moral logic elsewhere.

Luigi Mangione allegedly stalked and killed Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, in cold blood.

The killing itself was horrifying.

But what fascinated me was the reaction.

Brian Thompson quickly became a symbol onto which people projected every grievance they had about the American healthcare system. The internet filled with jokes, celebration, excuses and, in some cases, outright approval.

People like Hasan Piker, along with plenty of others on the Left, talked about “understanding” where that anger came from.

But a man had been killed.

Whatever you think of the American healthcare system, when did assassination become an acceptable political argument?

We seemed to be losing the ability to say something incredibly basic:

You do not murder people because you hate what you think they represent.

That became even more disturbing for me when Charlie Kirk was killed.

That one hit me hard.

I had watched his debate videos for years. I admired his ability to walk into hostile environments and simply talk to people who disagreed with him. He had a young family. He was a Christian conservative who talked constantly about family, personal responsibility and his faith in Jesus.

You did not have to agree with him.

Plenty of people didn’t.

But when he was murdered, what shocked me almost as much as the killing itself was the glee that followed.

People celebrated.

They called him a racist and a fascist and decided that whatever label they had attached to him somehow made his death less tragic.

That is an incredibly dark place for a society to arrive at.

And don’t even get me started on the conspiracy rot that grew around his death. People like Candace Owens and others turning the death of someone they claimed to care about into endless speculation and content.

It’s morbid.

The Lindsay Clancy case has disturbed me for a similar reason.

The deaths of those children are almost impossible to comprehend. A father coming home to discover that his little ones had been taken from him by the mother of his children. Strangled to death, one at a time.

Yet once again, much of the public conversation quickly shifted towards explaining the person accused of killing them.

Mental illness may explain behaviour. It may become incredibly important in determining legal responsibility. But explanation cannot erase the victims.

Three children are dead.

There are many more examples I could pull from, and I’m sure you can think of some yourself.

The point isn’t that every one of these situations is identical.

They aren’t.

The point is that I increasingly see the same moral instinct: if the perpetrator can be placed inside the correct ideological story, people suddenly become willing to excuse things they would otherwise recognise immediately as evil.

The victim becomes an abstraction while the perpetrator becomes the real victim, and morality becomes dependent on which political tribe you belong to.

So what happened to us?

I don’t think this can be explained entirely through politics.

Something deeper has changed.

For decades, much of the Western world has been stripping away the cultural and religious foundations that once gave our societies a shared moral language.

We were told that we could keep the morality while getting rid of everything underneath it.

Maybe we were wrong.

I grew up going to church. And I can honestly say that much of my moral foundation came from the Bible and the stories of Jesus.

It was there that I learned about grace, kindness, forgiveness and sacrificial love, along with the idea that every human being has value. I learned that you should love your neighbour, control your worst impulses and tell the truth even when it costs you something. I learned that strength and mercy are not opposites.

Trying to model myself around those principles grounded me from a very early age.

Which is why, personally, I think I’m going to start cracking my Bible open again.

That may not be your cup of tea.

But I increasingly believe that what we are witnessing has something to do with spiritual emptiness.

We have reduced human beings to the material.

We tell people that fulfilment comes from success, money, politics, sex, identity, status, attention or belonging to the right cause.

And then we wonder why so many people are desperately searching for something bigger than themselves.

The New Atheists believed that once God disappeared from the picture, humanity might ascend into a new age of critical thinking and rational morality.

But that isn’t what happened.

Human beings did not stop being religious. They simply found new gods. Politics, identity, activism and ideology increasingly became substitutes for religion.

Unlike Christianity, these new faiths often offer very little forgiveness. There is no redemption, no grace and no repentance. There are only oppressors and oppressed, victims and victimisers, the righteous and the damned.

Islam has also found fertile ground in this vacuum. Whatever you think about the belief system itself, one thing is undeniable: many Muslims believe deeply in what they believe.

Some are willing to organise their entire lives around it.

Some are willing to die for it.

Meanwhile, much of the West struggles to articulate what it believes in at all. We have rights but little sense of duty, freedom but increasingly little understanding of what that freedom is for, and comfort but very little meaning.

Christianity without Christ

On a more tangible level, many of the values that shaped the Western world were born from, or profoundly influenced by, Christianity.

Whether people like hearing that makes no difference.

The Left often prides itself on compassion, kindness and care for the vulnerable.

But increasingly, I don’t think what we are seeing is compassion at all. It is the language of compassion used as ideological performance. The words are still there—empathy, justice, liberation, protecting the vulnerable—but whether that empathy is actually extended to someone increasingly depends on whether they fit the political story.

If you belong to the right group, almost anything done in your name can be explained away. If you belong to the wrong one, even your suffering can become irrelevant.

That isn’t compassion.

Real compassion does not first ask which political tribe the victim belongs to.

What we are left with is a kind of Christian moral vocabulary stripped of the principles that gave it meaning. There is little grace, little forgiveness and increasingly little belief in universal human worth. Truth becomes secondary to the cause.

And eventually even the language of kindness can be used to justify cruelty.

Some on the Right have their own version of the problem.

They use Christianity as an aesthetic—a cultural symbol or a flag to wave against their political enemies—while ignoring the actual demands Christianity places on the person claiming to believe it.

That is empty too.

Christianity without Christ is hollow whether it comes from the Left or the Right.

What do we do?

So what is the solution?

I actually think the answer is fairly simple—and kind of boring.

We need to build strong, loving families and teach our children to think critically rather than seeing themselves as victims. We should teach them that the world does not owe them happiness, and that telling the truth matters even when it makes them unpopular.

We need to stop being ashamed of loving our countries and cultures, and learn to be proud again.

Enough with the self-hatred.

Part of that means teaching our history honestly.

Western civilisation has done terrible things. Obviously.

But history did not begin with Western civilisation, and evil is not uniquely Western. Obviously.

Students learn endlessly about slavery while often hearing comparatively little about the extraordinary movement that eventually destroyed it. Slavery had existed across civilisations for millennia. What emerged in the West was the revolutionary idea that slavery itself was morally abhorrent and should be abolished.

That matters.

We should be able to acknowledge the sins of our civilisation without pretending there was nothing good about it.

We should be able to recognise injustice without teaching entire generations to despise the societies they inherited.

And above all, we need something worth believing in—something bigger than politics and bigger than ourselves.

We find ourselves in an incredibly strange time. Maybe things get worse before they get better.

But I still believe truth wins in the end.

Our job is to be courageous enough to speak it, take care of our families, raise decent children, stand up for what we believe in and live lives that make the lives of the people around us a little better.

Maybe the way back is simpler than we think. Maybe it starts there.

This is a great step for Finland, and I believe the more time passes, the more justified this decision will look.

“It is important that Finnish taxpayers’ money does not end up in the wrong hands. When it is possible to reduce that risk, it is worth doing so,” Tavio said.

This is precisely the point.

Finland has been giving UNRWA approximately €5 million a year to help fund schools, health clinics and other services for Palestinians. But at every turn, this organisation increasingly appears to be contributing to the radicalisation of Palestinians rather than playing the much-needed role of neutrality and deradicalisation.

It seems remarkably willing to look away from Hamas’s exploitation of civilian infrastructure, yet eager to condemn Israel for its war against Hamas.

UNRWA itself discovered tunnels running beneath its schools in Gaza in 2017. It condemned them at the time. So the organisation has first-hand experience with this morbid practice of placing military infrastructure beneath and amongst civilians.

And yet, since October 7, it has remained remarkably tight-lipped about the broader phenomenon. Its condemnation of Israel is sharp and immediate, often removing Hamas—and its tactics—from the equation entirely.

This, to be fair, is the common way critics of Israel approach this conflict.

In their telling, Israel is bombing civilian infrastructure because it is evil. Or “waging a genocidal war”, as The Helsinki Times puts it.

You would think an organisation that claims to “help Palestinians” would be one of the loudest voices condemning a terrorist organisation for putting those very people at risk—fighting amongst civilians and operating from or around schools, hospitals, mosques and residential areas.

But it isn’t.

Why not?

UNRWA’s hands are becoming increasingly soiled as more information emerges about employees allegedly involved in terrorist activities.

From Israel’s initial accusations after October 7, to UN Watch’s years of research and documentation, to the investigations now being conducted by USAID’s independent Office of Inspector General—it is becoming increasingly difficult to dismiss the problem as a few unfortunate bad apples.

The USAID investigation has now referred more than 100 current or former UNRWA employees for alleged participation in the October 7 attacks and/or affiliation with Hamas’s military wing.

Teachers.

School principals.

Security personnel.

Medical workers.

People employed by an organisation funded by Western taxpayers to provide humanitarian assistance.

To be clear, Tavio’s decision does not stop Finland’s aid to Palestinians. It simply changes the hands receiving it.

That didn’t stop Yle—the BBC of Finland—from writing that:

“Tavio was unable to provide any concrete examples of cases where Finnish tax money had ended up in the wrong hands at UNRWA.”

This is such a narrow framing of the issue that it almost completely misses the point.

Tavio pointed to the USAID investigation. He also brought up cases like Fateh Sharif, a man who worked as a principal at an UNRWA school in Lebanon and headed UNRWA’s teachers’ union there while also being Hamas’s leader in Lebanon.

After his death, Hamas itself publicly acknowledged his leadership role.

That is beyond insane.

Almost any other organisation would be broken by a revelation like that. A Hamas leader was simultaneously running a school under a United Nations agency and heading its teachers’ union.

Yet outlets like Yle still act bewildered that some countries might want to reassess their support?

Remember, UNRWA is an official part of the United Nations—an institution that is, at least in theory, supposed to represent a higher standard of neutrality.

But apparently the bigotry of low expectations doesn’t just extend to the Palestinians themselves. It also extends to institutions that claim to “help” them.

The deeper problem with UNRWA

There is a much bigger problem with UNRWA than meets the eye. Something more subtle.

In my view, it is the snake in the grass. The Trojan horse of the Israel-Palestine conflict. An institution that promises to alleviate the consequences of the conflict, yet in practice plays an important role in making the conflict almost irreconcilable.

For this part, I’m going to lean on Einat Wilf’s excellent book, The War of Return.

Almost every other refugee population on earth falls under UNHCR—the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

The bare-bones philosophy of that organisation is something like this:

This is terrible. I’m sorry for what happened to you. But now let’s help you rebuild your life—somewhere else, if necessary.

Of course, UNHCR does not simply resettle everyone. Its durable solutions can include returning people home when that is realistically possible, integrating them where they currently live, or resettling them elsewhere.

But the direction is important.

The objective is eventually to stop people from being refugees.

Except, when it comes to Palestinians, we have an entirely different system.

They have an entire UN agency of their own.

UNRWA.

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency was established in 1949 following the first Arab-Israeli war.

Israel had declared independence in 1948. The surrounding Arab states rejected the creation of a Jewish state and went to war to destroy it. This was not some ordinary border dispute. Arab leaders openly spoke of a “war of annihilation” and of defeating the Jews so completely that the new state would cease to exist.

Israel survived.

Hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs were displaced during the fighting.

The Nakba.

A term you have probably heard endlessly.

As a side note, the term was popularised by the Syrian intellectual Constantin Zureiq. And what is fascinating about his original use of Nakba, meaning “catastrophe”, is that he was not describing the displacement of Palestinian Arabs. He was describing the catastrophic Arab defeat itself—the humiliation and failure of the Arab world against the newly created Jewish state.

Many Palestinian Arabs fled during the war for different reasons: fear, fighting, expulsions and, in some cases, instructions or encouragement from Arab commanders and local leaders to evacuate particular areas.

But when the war ended, Israel refused to allow a mass return. A major reason was security: it feared that allowing hundreds of thousands of people from a population that had just been at war with the new state back across its borders, would be suicidal.

The Arabs who remained inside Israel, meanwhile, eventually became Israeli citizens.

UNRWA was supposed to be temporary.

Its purpose was to provide relief and rehabilitation to the displaced while a political solution was hammered out. Its early programmes were explicitly concerned with employment, self-sufficiency and eventually getting refugees off international relief.

But that solution never came.

The surrounding Arab states resisted allowing permanent resettlement to replace the demand for return. Palestinian refugees themselves also strongly resisted resettlement, seeing it as potentially surrendering their claim to the homes and land they had lost.

Israel, having just fought a war for its existence, was never going to accept a mass influx of people from populations that had just been at war with it.

And here we find one of the biggest sticking points in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:

The demand to “return”.

The refugee crisis that never ended

Another thing worth remembering is that the Palestinians were not unique in becoming refugees during this period of history.

The Second World War and its aftermath displaced tens of millions of people.

Borders moved. Countries disappeared. Populations were expelled. Ethnic Germans were forced out of large areas of Eastern Europe. Poles, Ukrainians, Jews and countless others lost homes they had lived in for generations.

Millions of people had to find new lives in new places and do the painful work of rebuilding.

That is the tragedy of war.

The world should have pushed much harder on the Palestinian refugee issue too. It should have made clear that whatever political settlement eventually emerged, millions of people could not indefinitely build their future around reversing the outcome of 1948.

As brutal as that reality was for the people who had actually lost their homes, there eventually had to be a path forward.

Instead, “return” became sacred.

And therein lies the problem.

After the 1948 war, UNRWA initially dealt with roughly 750,000 Palestinian refugees.

Today, nearly six million people are registered as Palestine refugees under UNRWA’s mandate.

How is that possible?

Because UNRWA operates an intergenerational registration system. Descendants of the original refugees can themselves be registered as Palestine refugees.

And here is where things become particularly strange.

Refugeehood is normally something the international system ultimately seeks to resolve. People return home where possible, integrate into their new society, receive citizenship, or rebuild elsewhere.

Not here.

Even Palestinians whose families have acquired citizenship elsewhere—including millions in Jordan—can remain registered Palestine refugees under UNRWA’s mandate.

This is an untenable situation.

It has to stop.

UNRWA does not single-handedly create this policy. Its mandate comes from the wider United Nations system, and it does not itself determine the final political settlement.

But UNRWA is the mechanism that keeps the category operational.

It maintains the registry.

It serves the descendants.

It produces the numbers.

Generation after generation, the refugee population remains institutionally alive, and that matters because the refugee question is not some obscure side issue in this conflict.

It is the issue.

It is politically impossible that nearly six million Palestinians are going to “return” en masse to what is today the State of Israel.

There is no going backwards to 1948.

That ship sailed more than seventy years ago.

Israel exists.

Yet Palestinian political culture has enshrined the “right of return” as something sacred—an inherited right that millions of descendants are told remains theirs.

In practical terms, what does that mean?

If millions of Palestinians retain the right to enter Israel because their parents, grandparents or great-grandparents once lived there, then the conflict does not end with a Palestinian state alongside Israel.

The conflict ends only when the demographic reality of Israel itself is undone.

No Israeli government is ever going to accept that.

And no serious peace process can be built around pretending otherwise.

An organisation staffed by the conflict it claims to manage

Then there is the structure of UNRWA itself.

Despite being a United Nations agency, its workforce is overwhelmingly drawn from the Palestinian communities it serves. Roughly 90 percent of its employees are themselves registered Palestine refugees, while approximately 99 percent of personnel are locally recruited.

That brings with it obvious neutrality challenges.

Especially in Gaza.

Polling conducted after October 7 found, at various points, that majorities of Gazans believed Hamas had been right to launch the attack. This is a society in which Hamas has ruled for almost two decades, and where political violence and the idea of “resistance” have been deeply embedded into public life.

UNRWA cannot recruit tens of thousands of people from this environment and magically exist outside of it.

That doesn’t mean every Palestinian working for UNRWA supports Hamas.

But it does mean that when UNRWA employees are discovered celebrating October 7 in Telegram groups, when teachers are accused of belonging to Hamas’s military wing, when school principals appear in terrorism investigations, and when the head of an UNRWA teachers’ union turns out to have simultaneously been a Hamas leader, we should stop pretending these things are completely inexplicable aberrations.

The overlap between the society and the organisation is enormous.

UNRWA is not primarily an army of international humanitarian workers travelling to Gaza from Geneva.

It is, overwhelmingly, Palestinians serving Palestinians beneath a United Nations umbrella.

And when that population has itself been deeply radicalised, neutrality cannot simply be assumed because there is a UN logo on the building.

It has to be proven.

Again and again, UNRWA has failed that test.

On and on the problems go.

But underneath all of them sits something even more fundamental.

UNRWA helps maintain the mechanism through which the Palestinian refugee grievance survives from one generation to the next. It administers a system that tells millions of people, institutionally, that the story of 1948 is still unfinished.

And surrounding that system is a political culture telling them that one day they will return.

That dream has to die if any real solution is going to live.

Ending funding to UNRWA is therefore not only good.

It is necessary.

Hopefully more countries will follow Finland and Sweden.

Palestinians can be helped.

Food and medicine can be provided.

Children can be educated—but not through systems that radicalise them.

Healthcare can be funded—but through institutions that are properly vetted and kept free from terrorist influence.

Whatever comes next has to look fundamentally different from what came before.

Help can continue.

The machinery that helps perpetuate the problem cannot.

If the world actually wants peace, then at some point the message has to become the same painful message that countless other refugee populations throughout history eventually had to hear:

This is terrible. We are sorry for what happened to you.

But now we will help you move forward and rebuild, somewhere else if necessary.

This question seems to have very different answers depending on who you ask.

Left-leaning people will generally say no. Some might say things like: “It’s their culture,” or “all cultures are equal,” and that we shouldn’t discriminate.

To this kind of person, almost any criticism aimed at Islamic ideology—and the practices that flow from it—is in some way bigoted. It’s Islamophobic, they drone in unison.

The problem with this view is that it completely ignores the very real tensions between Islamic ideology and liberal society. It loftily ignores the giant elephant in the room when contending with Islam’s outworking in the real world, and the long-term effect it is already having on our societies.

Often, it denies the existence of the elephant entirely.

To another group of people, like myself, the Islam question is existential. And the careless verbal shrug from the other side, when confronted with evidence of the dangers we are talking about, can be truly infuriating.

Imagine being one of many passengers on a bus with broken headlights, driving down a highway with no street lights.

To make matters worse, you have reliable intelligence that a gaping, bottomless pit lies somewhere in the road ahead.

Armed with this knowledge, you argue that the bus ought to make an emergency stop so the headlights can be fixed before the sun disappears over the horizon. Your argument sways some people, but not the majority.

The people who oppose you—including the driver—claim you’re simply a fearmonger. They confidently assert that there is no pit. Besides, there’s nothing to worry about because the sun is still out.

They take things even further by voting to speed up, because according to them, the dangers of driving in darkness are greatly overblown.

The driver proceeds to put his foot down on the pedal, laughing maniacally.

Your heart sinks.

Now all your attention is on the sun and its slow, steady descent below the horizon. Once it disappears, the darkness will be complete, and falling into the pit becomes almost inevitable.

So what do you do?

You go seat by seat and attempt to convince people of something incredibly simple: the sun will not remain in the sky indefinitely. Night will come. And if we don’t stop the bus, fix the lights and drive more carefully, we’re all done for.

This, I think, gets to the biggest divide between those who believe Islam is an existential problem for the West and those who don’t.

The timeline.

The Real Divide Is Time

You can point to thousands of terror attacks. You can point to parallel societies forming in parts of the West, where young girls are pressured to cover up and can end up living under social expectations that would not look out of place in some of the most oppressive Islamic societies in the Middle East.

You can point to the rise of gang violence in countries like Sweden. You can point to the radicalisation of second—and even third-generation immigrants—who sometimes take Islam more seriously than their parents, despite being born worlds away from the societies those parents came from.

You can raise an even more uncomfortable question: what exactly do we mean when we talk about “radical Islam”?

The comforting Western formulation suggests that radical Islam is some separate corruption of the real thing. But Islamist groups themselves can point directly to Islamic scripture, jurisprudence and history in defence of what they believe.

Hamas, for example, believes it is following Islam accurately. And when you look at the texts and traditions it draws from, it is not so easy to simply prove them wrong and dismiss their interpretation as having nothing to do with Islam.

The West barely wants to wrestle with that idea.

And the things you can point to—including fundamentally different cultural values and different conceptions of the relationship between religion, law and government—are almost limitless.

Many of the people who call these concerns Islamophobic will defend each issue in isolation.

The hijab is “their culture.”

“It’s a woman’s right to choose!”

Sharia is fringe.

The extremists are only a tiny minority.

Each individual issue is separated from the others, defended, explained away, and then forgotten.

What they refuse to do is connect the different issues into one picture and then zoom out. Because the question is not merely what these things mean today.

The question is where they lead in thirty years.

If the UK eventually became 20 or 30 percent Muslim, would that be good for the country?

No.

I believe it would be an unmitigated disaster.

Not because every Muslim thinks the same way. Obviously they don’t. But because demographics eventually become political power, political power influences institutions, and institutions shape societies.

That is the part of the conversation we seem almost incapable of having.

France Has Already Written the Warning Down

On May 21st, 2025, a report was shared with French President Emmanuel Macron. At the centre of the report was the Muslim Brotherhood and what it described as a “threat to national cohesion” in France. It warned about the spread of “political Islamism.”

I want to interject briefly here, because even the phrase political Islam reveals something about the Western approach to this subject.

The neat separation between Islam and “political Islam” is largely a Western way of understanding this religion.

Islam historically contains not merely spiritual teachings, but ideas about law, government, family, society and political authority. Yet the West continues to approach it as though we are dealing with another private religion that can simply be slotted into the liberal order without friction.

That misunderstanding makes it incredibly difficult to construct sensible guardrails.

The French report warned:

“The reality of this threat, even if it is long term and does not involve violent action, poses a risk of damage to the fabric of society and republican institutions (...) and, more broadly, to national cohesion.”

Think about what this is saying for a moment.

There are forces operating within French society that are causing enough concern about long-term social change that the French state produced a report warning about damage to its institutions and national cohesion.

And notice those words again:

Even if it is long term.

That is precisely the point.

The report describes Islamism spreading “from the bottom up”—primarily at the local level. It does not require some spectacular revolution.

It happens neighbourhood by neighbourhood, institution by institution, election by election.

This is something we increasingly see across Europe and, in different forms, in the United States.

When Demography Becomes Political Power

As Muslim communities become larger and more politically organised, they naturally become more influential voting blocs.

Dearborn, Michigan, is one example of the political influence a concentrated Muslim population can develop.

Look at the UK.

The “Muslim vote” is becoming increasingly formidable—large enough that politicians desperate for votes are having to respond to specifically Muslim political demands.

That is simply how democratic politics works.

But once again, the important question is:

What happens when this grows?

The polling should at least force us to take this seriously.

In one ICM poll, 40% of British Muslims supported introducing Sharia law in predominantly Muslim areas of Britain. A 2016 survey conducted by ICM for Channel 4 found that 52% of British Muslims believe homosexuality should be illegal.

American Muslims are often regarded as among the most assimilated Muslim populations in the Western world.

Yet according to Pew polling from 2026, 44% of Muslim Americans surveyed had a favourable view of Hamas.

These are not fringe numbers.

And once again, the question is not merely what they mean today.

What happens as these communities grow?

An excerpt from Le Monde describing the French report put the concern this way:

The report highlighted the “subversive nature of the project,” saying it aims “to gradually bring about changes to local or national rules,” particularly those concerning secularism and gender equality. Such “municipal Islamism” risks affecting the public sphere and local politics, the report said, pointing to “the creation of increasingly numerous Islamist ecosystems.”

Again:

Gradually.

This is not primarily an argument about tomorrow morning.

It is about the direction of travel.

As I write, another enormous mosque is being built in Strasbourg. A proverbial chef’s kiss on the state of “Islamism” in France and the broader continent.

Islam Is Not Just a Private Religion

Islam is a problem for Europe, ultimately, because it is a religion that has proven extraordinarily resistant to reform.

It is also a religion in which the separation between religion and political authority has historically been far less clear than it became in Christianity.

Islam did not develop around the Western idea of separating church and state. From its earliest history, religious belief, law and political authority were deeply intertwined.

Islam was not simply concerned with how an individual worshipped God. It developed rules governing family, criminality, commerce, war, government and society itself.

That matters.

Because the Western world continues to treat an ideology with a deeply embedded political and legal tradition as though it were simply another benign private religion that can be neatly separated from the state.

It isn’t.

And listen, I’m not talking about individual Muslims.

People are unique. People are complicated. Millions of Muslims live completely ordinary lives, disagree about their religion, practise it to different degrees, or barely practise it at all.

I am talking about the ideology.

An ideology is like a seed.

If watered, protected and allowed to grow, it develops in a particular direction.

It is the seed—and what happens when that seed begins shaping communities, institutions and eventually nations—that I am worried about.

If we refuse to wrestle with this issue, our societies will change regardless.

We Are Falling in Slow Motion

We’re driving down the highway as the sun sinks.

We are falling in slow motion.

The steady, long-term drip and grinding of this ideology within Western societies has the power to change the West forever.

And in some ways, this slow surrender frightens me even more than terrorist attacks committed by unstable individuals.

I fear the day when walking through the streets of major European cities reveals a sea of hijabs and burkas—not simply because individual women have freely chosen them, but because entire communities have recreated the same religious expectations from which women elsewhere have desperately tried to escape.

I fear calls for Sharia law going from fringe-sounding impossibilities to real political movements.

I fear Western values—shaped over centuries by Greek rationality, the Judeo-Christian tradition and the long development of liberal democracy—being gradually swallowed by a seventh-century ideology frozen in time.

There is a reason some Iranians who fled Iran after the 1979 revolution look at developments in the West with horror. They watched Islamists take over their country, aided by leftists and communists who believed they could work alongside them.

They know that enormous political transformations do not always announce themselves all at once.

Sometimes they happen gradually.

Then suddenly.

We still have time to change things.

But it will require political courage.

And above all, it will require honest conversations about Islam that the West has spent far too long being afraid to have.

We have faced protest after protest. Thousands pouring into the streets. From New York to Copenhagen, the same chants—from the river to the sea—rang out from passionate voices.

Social media flooded with constant, overwhelming condemnation of Israel for having the audacity to fight against a terrorist organisation—one that was still holding hostages it had kidnapped, mind you. Students at universities like Columbia barricaded buildings and intimidated Jewish students. Even countries like Finland weren’t spared from this manic fervour to “free Palestine”.

The conflict accumulated enough political weight that pressure—and at times threats—directed at politicians began to move them. The demand to label Israel’s military actions a “genocide” became enormous, and it remains so.

Mainstream media fed the flames with alacrity.

Articles upon articles. Interviews. News segments. Personal opinions.

The BBC, CNN, Yle, NBC, the New York Times—Gaza became inescapable. And throughout the war, some of the world’s largest news organisations made high-profile errors while reporting stories that portrayed Israel in the worst possible light.

From October 7th, 2023, I watched this grotesque narrative slowly lift its monstrously gigantic head. Its every breath seemed to shake the world.

People I had thought to be rational, intelligent individuals lost their minds over the Palestinian issue. It was as though someone flipped a switch and, all at once, Palestinians became the most oppressed, hungry and destitute people on the face of the Earth.

And Gaza? Apparently this was now the worst war ever fought. The deadliest. The most destructive. The greatest humanitarian catastrophe mankind had ever witnessed. At least, that was the impression you could easily come away with from the sheer scale of the hysteria surrounding it.

Other wars existed, of course. Other people were starving, being displaced or slaughtered in numbers that dwarfed what we were watching in Gaza.

But none of them seemed to matter quite like this one did.

And that is where things went deeper.

The conflict became symbolic of something much larger.

Palestinians stopped being treated as people with agency—people capable of making good decisions and bad ones, capable of being victims and perpetrators, capable of choosing leaders, embracing ideas and bearing some responsibility for the societies they create.

Instead, in the eyes of this movement, they became the epitome of the oppressed.

Israel became the epitome of the oppressor.

So when people poured into the streets, sometimes violently, they were no longer simply protesting a war in a region many of them could barely point to on a map. Gaza had been elevated into a moral test: one that could certify your righteousness or condemn you as evil.

Pure evil.

I know that sounds insane. It is. But if you paid attention to what was happening, it became difficult not to see it.

Having said that, if you didn’t look too deeply, you could be forgiven for thinking these were simply passionate people who cared about “freedom” for those they perceived to be oppressed. If you were really out of the loop, you might even admire them: people standing up for those who supposedly cannot stand up for themselves.

Unfortunately, I don’t think that is what we have been watching.

Because when another genuinely oppressed people rose up against their oppressors, something strange happened.

The passion disappeared.

The Test Came in Iran

On December 28th, 2025, protests erupted in Iran and quickly spread across the country.

The Iranian people were rising against the Islamic regime—a regime that routinely imprisons, tortures and executes its own citizens, and which has spent nearly half a century imposing its Islamist ideology upon a population of almost 90 million people.

The stories of oppression are well documented.

Imprisonment. Torture. Intimidation. Sexual violence. Executions.

All features of life under a regime that has choked one of the world’s great civilisations with its ideology.

Money that should have gone towards building Iran was instead poured into exporting terrorism and instability abroad. Hamas. Hezbollah. The Houthis. Militias in Iraq. Billions were spent constructing what the regime itself envisioned as a “ring of fire” around Israel, while ordinary Iranians lived with the consequences at home.

Then Iranians began pouring into the streets.

The videos were stunning.

Demonstrations spread across the country. Young people. Older people. Men. Women. Merchants. Students. Ordinary Iranians risking everything while chanting against the regime.

Many openly called for Reza Pahlavi, the exiled Crown Prince of Iran.

That was significant because this was no longer merely a protest over one particular law or economic grievance. The demonstrations had evolved into something far more fundamental.

They wanted the Islamic regime gone.

They wanted freedom.

The kind of freedom we in the Western world possess and so often take for granted.

And suddenly, many of the people who had spent the previous two years presenting themselves as the great defenders of oppressed humanity had remarkably little to say.

The people who had been inconsolably passionate about oppression when Gaza was involved could not summon anything approaching the same passion for Iranians risking their lives against an actual theocratic dictatorship.

Nor did Iran consume Western culture in anything resembling the way Gaza had.

There were no months of encampments across universities. No comparable wave of demonstrations paralysing Western cities. No celebrities falling over one another to signal their solidarity. No vast cultural movement insisting that silence was violence.

The contrast was impossible to ignore.

And then the regime began killing people.

Where Were the Humanitarians?

The Iranian authorities shut down the internet as the crackdown intensified, effectively pulling a curtain across the country while security forces opened fire on their own population.

Hospitals and morgues were overwhelmed. Thousands were arrested. Videos and eyewitness accounts showed security forces firing live ammunition into crowds. Reports emerged of torture, disappearances and sexual violence.

The regime did everything in its power to hide what was happening. It cut the country off from the outside world, restricted information and made independent verification extraordinarily difficult. Meanwhile, accounts coming from inside Iran have consistently described a massacre on a staggering scale, with estimates running into the tens of thousands and some placing the number above 40,000.

What we know already is horrific enough.

Thousands upon thousands of Iranians were killed for demanding freedom. And there is every reason to believe the final number, if it is ever fully known, could be vastly higher than the figures outsiders have so far been able to verify.

Here you had virtually every ingredient the Western protest movement claimed to care about: an oppressed population confronting a brutal state, peaceful demonstrators demanding fundamental rights, women resisting an Islamist system that has controlled their bodies and lives for decades, and young people willing to risk everything for a future outside the Islamic Republic.

People were being shot for demanding freedoms that those marching through New York, London and Helsinki already possessed.

And yet the silence from much of the pro-Palestine movement was deafening.

Why?

When you point towards other wars in the Middle East or Africa that have produced enormous death tolls, the response is often that doing so is “whataboutism”.

But Iran presents a harder problem.

Because this isn’t simply about comparing body counts.

Iran fits almost perfectly within the moral framework these activists claim to hold.

Here was an oppressed population confronting people who were quite literally oppressing them.

In fact, solidarity with the Iranian protesters should have been considerably easier.

There was no October 7th hanging over this movement. No massacre of families. No kidnapped children. No rape and torture of civilians that had to be explained away as “resistance”.

The Iranian protesters had not crossed a border and butchered hundreds of people.

They walked into their own streets and demanded freedom.

This was a genuine grassroots uprising of a brutalised people against the state brutalising them.

And still: nothing approaching the same moral outrage.

No comparable protests. No comparable social-media frenzy. No comparable obsession.

And when many of these voices finally did speak about Iran, some appeared more animated by America or Israel attacking the Islamic regime than by the Islamic regime massacring Iranians.

Others dismissed reports of the killings, questioned whether the uprising was genuine or claimed the protesters were somehow agents of Mossad.

The same political culture that has often treated numbers coming from Hamas-controlled Gaza as authoritative suddenly discovered extraordinary scepticism when Iranians themselves described what was happening inside their country.

Perhaps that shouldn’t surprise us.

Many of the same ideological circles spent months disputing or minimising evidence of sexual violence committed during October 7th.

But the hypocrisy itself is not actually the most important part.

The hypocrisy reveals something deeper.

This Was Never Just About Compassion

Peel back enough layers of the modern “pro-Palestine” movement and I don’t believe compassion is what you eventually find.

You find an ideology.

An ideology with a very specific understanding of the world: the West is oppressive, Israel is an extension of Western oppression, and anyone perceived to be fighting either of them is therefore placed somewhere on the side of liberation.

That framework produces extraordinary moral absurdities.

Hamas rules Gaza with an iron fist. It has tortured and executed Palestinians. Yet many people who claim to care deeply about Palestinians barely mention Hamas’s oppression of them. Some actively make excuses for it.

Why?

Because within this worldview, certain groups have been assigned the role of “oppressed”.

And the oppressed cannot easily become oppressors, no matter how brutally they behave.

Iran exposes the same contradiction from another direction.

The Islamic regime funds Hamas. It funds Hezbollah. It has spent decades presenting itself as part of the “resistance” against Israel and the West.

So suddenly the moral categories become uncomfortable.

The Iranian people are oppressed.

But their oppressor is anti-American.

Their oppressor is anti-Israel.

Their oppressor funds the very organisations Western radicals have spent years romanticising as “resistance”.

Who, then, are they supposed to side with?

Iran exposes the contradiction at the heart of this worldview. And when reality contradicts the ideology, too many simply choose the ideology.

This is why the silence matters.

It tells us something.

If your compassion disappears the moment an oppressed person wants Western-style freedom, rejects Islamism, waves the Lion and Sun flag, supports Reza Pahlavi or welcomes help from Israel and America, then perhaps oppression was never really the organising principle of your worldview.

Perhaps something else was.

Wolves Dressed Like Sheep

When malice dresses itself as compassion, it can travel surprisingly far.

It can enter universities, newspapers, cultural institutions and eventually the halls of political power.

That is what should concern us.

The ideology we are watching spread throughout the Western world does not exist in isolation. It draws from different traditions—revolutionary Marxism, anti-Westernism, Islamism and post-colonial politics—and creates strange alliances between groups that would otherwise have very little in common.

What binds them together is not a coherent vision of human freedom.

It is the enemy they share: the West, Israel, and liberal civilisation itself.

And so our moral compass gradually turns upside down.

The West—a civilisation that developed institutions capable of criticising, reforming and improving itself—is treated as uniquely evil.

Meanwhile Hamas can be transformed into “freedom fighters”. A theocratic dictatorship can massacre thousands of Iranians and still struggle to generate a fraction of the rage directed at Israel. Terrorism becomes resistance. Fanaticism becomes liberation. And people demanding the freedoms we already enjoy become inconvenient.

That is not compassion.

It is ideology wearing compassion as a costume.

And we cannot afford to be passive about it.

We need to keep our eyes open and recognise what is happening in front of us.

Because the wolves have learned to dress like sheep.

This question has always confused me.

Often, if I’m honest, it isn’t really a question. It’s an insult.

I’ve received emails and comments calling me a “slave” to the Jews. A “house Negro” for supporting Israel. Some go even further and call me a traitor to “my people” simply because I call out Jew-hatred.

Many of the people sending these messages appear to be Arab. Other Black people who publicly support Israel get the same treatment.

But the racism is certainly not limited to Arabs. For some reason, white liberals also seem to feel completely comfortable saying astonishingly racist things to Black people who refuse to hold the political opinions expected of them.

I’ve had a sprinkling of that too.

They all seem to be making the same argument: because I am Black, there is a side I am supposed to support.

My race is brought up constantly whenever I defend Israel from the endless stream of lies and distortions now circulating online. Which is strange, because skin colour has very little to do with how I understand this conflict.

Many Israelis are just as brown as the Arabs around them. Often, you couldn’t tell one from the other simply by looking at them.

I view this conflict primarily through the prism of history, ideology and political culture.

Yet many Westerners have managed to superimpose the racial politics of America and Europe onto a Middle Eastern conflict. Palestinians become emotional stand-ins for Black people, while Israelis are transformed into representatives of “whiteness.”

The entire framework starts collapsing the moment you look at the people who actually live there.

A very large share of Israeli Jews are Mizrahi or Sephardic, with roots in the Middle East and North Africa. After Israel’s creation and the wars surrounding it, hundreds of thousands of Jews fled or were driven from countries across the Arab and Muslim world. Ancient Jewish communities—some of them thousands of years old—were shattered through persecution, violence, dispossession, political pressure and expulsion.

Many eventually made their way to Israel.

You will hear endless discussion of the Nakba. You will hear considerably less about the disappearance of Jewish communities from much of the Middle East and North Africa.

Then there are Israel’s Arab citizens, who make up roughly a fifth of the population. There are Ashkenazi Jews, Ethiopian Jews, mixed families and people from almost every conceivable background.

Whatever else Israel is, describing it as some kind of homogeneous “white” colonial society is detached from reality.

And yet that caricature survives because it is politically useful.

It allows people to force the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into a familiar Western morality play: white oppressor, brown victim.

That is also one reason the word apartheid has become so popular.

I routinely get told that Nelson Mandela would be ashamed of me.

Why?

Because I’m Black, and therefore my political sympathies have apparently already been assigned.

Apartheid Was About Race

I grew up in South Africa. Apartheid was a system of racial segregation imposed by law. People living under the same state were classified and treated differently because of their race.

That is an important distinction.

Arab citizens of Israel vote, hold public office, become judges, doctors, lawyers, soldiers and members of parliament. They possess Israeli citizenship and, under Israeli law, the civil rights attached to it.

Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank are in a fundamentally different political category. They are not Israeli citizens. Gaza has been governed by Hamas, while Palestinians in parts of the West Bank live under the Palestinian Authority, within an unresolved territorial conflict involving Palestinian self-government and varying degrees of Israeli military control.

That situation can be criticised. Israeli policy can be criticised. The legal and political status of the West Bank can be debated endlessly.

But calling every restriction, checkpoint or security barrier “apartheid” simply because Palestinians and Israelis are treated differently strips the word of its historical meaning.

Those restrictions did not arise because Arabs have darker skin.

They arose in the context of decades of war, terrorism, suicide bombings, insurgency and territorial conflict.

That distinction matters.

Palestinians Are Not Black South Africans

Palestinians are routinely placed into the mould of Black South Africans under apartheid or African-Americans during the civil-rights movement.

Once you accept that framing, people like me become confusing.

How could a Black man possibly oppose the side represented as the oppressed brown population?

Palestinians are the poor, colonised brown people. Israelis are white Europeans. America is the imperial power funding them.

Everything fits neatly into a political template imported from somewhere else.

The reality is considerably uglier and more complicated.

Palestinian society has endured decades of radicalisation. Hamas openly embraces jihadism and the destruction of Israel. The Palestinian Authority has spent years glorifying terrorists and financially rewarding the families of Palestinians who attack Israelis. Children have been exposed to propaganda glorifying martyrdom. Palestinian political culture has repeatedly elevated the dream of eliminating Israel above the compromises required to build a functioning Palestinian state.

That does not mean every Palestinian believes the same thing.

It does mean we should stop pretending that Palestinian politics resembles the American civil-rights movement.

There is no Palestinian Martin Luther King.

There is no Palestinian Mandela.

And on October 7, the world saw something very different from a civil-rights struggle.

Civilians were brutally massacred. Women were raped. People were kidnapped. Families were slaughtered in their homes. Young people were hunted down at a music festival.

That violence was not incidental to Hamas’s worldview.

It was an expression of it.

And I am supposed to support this because I am Black?

How dare anyone make that demand of me.

What Exactly Do Black People Owe Arabs?

I’ll take the argument further.

If we really want to reduce politics to racial inheritance, what exactly do Black people owe Arabs?

I have received some of the most openly racist messages imaginable from Arabs because I refuse to support the pro-Palestinian movement.

Again: why should my race obligate me to them?

Arab and wider Islamic societies were involved in the enslavement of Africans for more than a thousand years. Enslaved Africans were transported across the Sahara, through the Red Sea and across the Indian Ocean into North Africa, Arabia and the wider Muslim world.

The exact scale is difficult to calculate because the trade stretched across centuries and the historical records are incomplete. Estimates vary considerably, but they run into the many millions. Some historians have placed the overall number enslaved through the Arab and wider Islamic slave trades in the range of roughly 12 to 18 million, with the true number potentially higher.

And the brutality of that trade is often strangely absent from modern conversations about slavery.

Africans were marched across enormous stretches of desert, with many dying along the way. Women and girls were sold into domestic and sexual slavery. Boys and men were often times castrated.

This was not some brief historical episode. It went on for approximately 1300 years!

And anti-Black prejudice did not magically disappear when those slave systems declined.

Racism against Black people remains a serious problem in parts of the Arab world today. Even the Arabic word abeed—literally “slaves”—has historically been used as a derogatory term for Black people. In Gaza, a neighbourhood commonly referred to as Al-Abeed has long been associated with Afro Palestinians.

I normally dislike analysing history this way.

I do not believe modern Arabs inherit personal guilt for what Arabs did centuries ago, any more than I believe modern Europeans inherit personal guilt for the transatlantic slave trade or everything Europeans once did.

That is precisely the point.

But if someone insists that racial history should determine my political loyalties, then the argument cuts both ways.

You cannot tell me I must support Arabs because I am Black while conveniently forgetting one of the longest and most brutal histories of African enslavement in the world.

The Hypocrisy Is the Point

This is what irritates me most.

The hypocrisy.

The people calling me a “house Negro” imagine themselves to be anti-racists while racially policing the political opinions of a Black man.

They accuse Israel of being uniquely racist while ignoring racism throughout the societies they romanticise.

They invoke apartheid while disregarding the fact that Arab citizens of Israel participate in Israeli society under the same legal citizenship framework as Jewish citizens.

They speak endlessly about colonialism while barely acknowledging centuries of Arab conquest, imperial expansion and slave trading.

They accuse Israel of intolerance while holding up societies in which women, religious minorities and gay people face real persecution and sometimes death.

And then they call me the slave.

Israel is an imperfect country. Like every democracy, it contains racism, political problems, religious tensions and policies worth criticising.

But it is also a country in which Jews, Arabs, Muslims, Christians, Druze, Black Israelis, gay Israelis, secular Israelis and religious Israelis live under one political system and argue openly about the future of their country.

Israel carried out extraordinary operations to bring Ethiopian Jews to safety. Jewish history itself contains slavery, persecution, expulsions, pogroms and genocide.

None of that makes Israel morally infallible. It simply makes the racial caricature absurd.

I do not support Israel because I am Black, and I certainly do not support Israel because I am anyone’s “slave.”

I support Israel because I have read the history, looked at the societies involved and considered the values they represent.

I refuse to allow my skin colour to dictate my politics.

But if the people calling me a racial traitor insist on making race the standard by which my loyalties must be judged, they may not like where that argument leads.

Because even by their own standard, I would still choose Israel.

The precise form varies. Sometimes it is the hijab, sometimes the niqab, and in its most extreme form, the burqa. In some societies these coverings are enforced by law. In others, they are enforced through family expectations, religious obligation, community pressure or the threat of social exclusion.

But these practices did not emerge from nowhere. The requirement that women conceal parts of their bodies from men is deeply rooted in Islamic scripture and centuries of Islamic jurisprudence—Sharia. Muslim scholars have disagreed over precisely how much a woman must cover, which helps explain the differences between the hijab, niqab and other forms of Islamic dress. But the underlying principle remains: a woman’s modesty requires her to conceal herself in the presence of men outside her immediate family.

The garments are different. The underlying idea is not.

Women are expected to conceal themselves because the female body is treated as something dangerous: something capable of provoking men, tempting men and corrupting men. Instead of demanding mastery over male behaviour, the burden is placed upon women to prevent it.

The weakness of men is sanctified while the bodies of women are criminalised.

Once you understand that, the covering itself becomes more than clothing. It becomes the visible expression of a much deeper understanding of the relationship between men and women.

In societies where this ideology has been allowed to fully express itself, the consequences are not difficult to see. Women become functionally second-class citizens, subjected to restrictions that touch nearly every part of their lives. They are beaten, sexually abused, forced into marriages, denied basic freedoms and often treated as though their lives exist beneath the authority of men.

Under the Taliban in Afghanistan, this logic has been pushed to its most horrifying conclusion. Women have been driven almost completely from public life. Their education, movement, employment and ability to participate openly in society have been systematically restricted until they have become voiceless, faceless and invisible.

The point is not that every Muslim woman lives under identical conditions, nor that every form of covering represents the same degree of coercion. The point is that the ideology behind these practices does not suddenly become benign because it crosses a European border.

When the Covering of Women Becomes Normal

And yet something very strange has happened in the West.

As Islam has grown within Western societies, some of the practices associated with its view of women have travelled with it. Instead of being examined critically, the covering of women is increasingly defended and sometimes even celebrated.

Across Europe, hijabs, niqabs and other Islamic coverings have become increasingly visible. Even here in Finland, where I live, I rarely leave the house without seeing women—and increasingly young girls—wearing them. In some areas, it has become so common that pretending this is merely an occasional cultural curiosity no longer makes sense.

The same phenomenon is far more established elsewhere in Europe and in concentrated Muslim communities in North America, like Dearborn, Michigan. And this matters, because the question is not simply what an adult woman chooses to put on her head one morning.

The larger question is what happens when an ideology that has historically imposed profound restrictions upon women begins establishing itself inside societies built upon very different assumptions about female freedom.

Many people find that question uncomfortable. I do not.

I think we have spent far too long approaching this issue with excessive caution because nobody wants to be called insensitive, intolerant or bigoted. But societies cannot survive indefinitely by refusing to make moral judgements.

At some point, we have to be capable of looking at competing ideas and deciding that one is better than another. A civilisation that believes women should live freely and openly is better than one that teaches them to conceal themselves because men may not control their desires.

That should not be difficult to say.

The Liberal Defence: Women Can Choose

The responses to criticism of Islamic coverings are familiar. We are told that criticism is Islamophobic, that this is simply another culture, that religious freedom must be respected and, most importantly, that women should be free to wear whatever they want.

That final argument is the most serious one.

Of course women should generally be free to wear what they want, as men are. That freedom is one of the achievements of the liberal civilisation in which we live.

But the argument becomes strangely circular when the freedom created by liberal society is invoked to protect practices emerging from an ideology that does not extend the same freedom to women inside its own communities.

Because there are really two freedoms at stake here.

There is the freedom to wear the hijab, and there is the freedom to take it off.

Western liberals seem passionately concerned with defending the first. They appear considerably less interested in investigating whether every girl and woman genuinely possesses the second.

The Feminist Contradiction

This is especially strange when the defence comes from liberal and left-wing feminists.

These are often the same people willing to scrutinise Western society for the slightest trace of sexism. They rage against Christian conservatism, traditional gender roles, advertising, workplace expectations and supposedly oppressive beauty standards. Yet when women are told that modesty requires them to conceal their hair or bodies because of the sexual reactions of men, suddenly the moral certainty disappears.

The language changes. We begin hearing about cultural sensitivity, religious tradition and the dangers of prejudice. Ideas that would be condemned immediately if they emerged from a Western Christian context are treated with remarkable delicacy when they come from Islam.

Meanwhile, some of the fiercest critics of Islamic covering are women who actually grew up within these cultures.

Ex-Muslim women and dissidents have repeatedly described what these practices can mean when they are not viewed from the comfortable distance of a Western university seminar. They understand that coercion does not always arrive through legislation or through the police.

Sometimes the pressure comes from your father or brother. Sometimes it comes from your husband, your extended family or the wider community around you. Sometimes nobody needs to threaten you explicitly because you have understood from childhood exactly what a “good Muslim girl” is expected to look like and what happens socially when she refuses.

That pressure may never be written into law.

It is still pressure.

And this is the contradiction modern feminism has failed to seriously confront. It has become more passionate about defending a woman’s right to cover herself than ensuring that another woman has the freedom not to.

Choice Does Not End the Argument

The obvious response is that many Muslim women in Western countries freely choose to wear the hijab.

I have no difficulty believing that. Some undoubtedly do. Some believe deeply in Islam, some consider covering an expression of religious devotion, and some may even describe it as empowering.

But that does not end the argument.

An individual can freely choose to participate in a practice while the wider social system surrounding that practice remains deeply coercive toward others. Both things can be true at the same time.

One woman may freely wear the hijab while another fifteen-year-old girl understands perfectly well that removing hers would mean humiliation at home, conflict with her parents, rejection from her community or worse.

The existence of the first woman does not erase the second.

Yet our discussion of Islamic covering in the West often stops the moment someone says the word “choice.” We rarely ask what conditions shape that choice, what happens to girls who choose differently, or how much pressure exists inside communities whose internal norms remain largely invisible to the wider society.

And perhaps most importantly, we rarely ask what happens when those communities become larger, more concentrated and more confident.

More Than Clothing

This is why reducing the argument to clothing misses the point.

A hijab is not a burqa. The degree of restriction is obviously different. But they emerge from the same broader ideological framework: the belief that female modesty carries a religious obligation to conceal the body from men.

That is the idea I reject.

Not because fabric itself possesses some magical power of oppression, but because we know where this understanding of women can lead when it gains political, religious and social power.

We have seen women punished over their hair. We have seen morality police patrol streets. We have seen girls driven from classrooms and women steadily pushed out of public life. These are not theoretical possibilities invented by paranoid Westerners. They exist in the real world.

And it is extraordinary that Western societies can observe these realities abroad while convincing themselves that the ideology responsible for them becomes entirely harmless once practised within our borders.

How Normalisation Works

Nobody wakes up one morning in Paris, Helsinki or London and suddenly finds themselves living under the Taliban.

That is obviously not how cultural change works.

It happens gradually.

A practice that first appears unusual becomes familiar. Familiarity becomes normalisation. Once normalised, criticism becomes more difficult because criticism is increasingly interpreted as an attack on the people practising it. Before long, defending the practice becomes synonymous with tolerance itself.

At the same time, communities large enough to sustain their own social norms begin exerting greater influence over the people living inside them. None of this requires the government to mandate anything. Parallel societies can exercise enormous power while the state remains formally liberal.

That is precisely what should concern us.

A girl living inside such a community may possess every legal right enjoyed by every other citizen. On paper she may be free to dress differently, reject religion, date whom she wants, marry whom she wants or walk away from the faith entirely.

But rights written into law mean considerably less when exercising them can cost you your family, your community, your reputation or even your physical safety.

This is where simplistic appeals to “choice” become inadequate.

Tolerance Has Limits

This brings us to the deeper question.

What does a tolerant society do with an ideology containing deeply intolerant ideas?

For decades, the Western instinct has been to answer by expanding the definition of tolerance itself. We tell ourselves that pluralism requires us to accommodate increasingly different values, that religious freedom demands restraint in criticism, and that minorities must be protected from hostility.

Those principles are worth defending.

But tolerance cannot mean moral paralysis.

A society confident in its own values must be capable of protecting religious freedom while still saying that some religious ideas are abhorrent. It must be capable of protecting Muslims from discrimination while criticising Islam. It must be capable of defending an adult woman’s legal right to wear a hijab while simultaneously opposing the ideology that tells girls they ought to cover themselves in the first place.

Otherwise tolerance becomes something very different.

It becomes surrender.

The Freedom Not to Cover

We are approaching a point where these questions can no longer be treated as obscure cultural debates.

The next ten or twenty years will help determine what kind of societies our children—and their children—inherit. The debate about the hijab may appear small, but it is a microcosm of a much larger question confronting the West as Islam grows within it: what happens when Islamic beliefs and practices come into direct conflict with the freedoms and values Western societies claim to defend?

This is not an abstract question about every culture or religion. Islam is growing within Western societies now, and with it come ideas about women, sexuality, religious authority and individual freedom that often conflict with our own. The question is whether the West still possesses enough confidence in its civilisation to recognise those conflicts when they arise—and enough moral clarity to say that our values are worth defending.

A society can speak endlessly about women’s equality, individual liberty and freedom of conscience. But those principles only mean something when they survive contact with cultures and religions that do not share them. Tolerance cannot simply mean allowing every practice to take root and then calling its existence an expression of choice. Choice means very little if the social, religious and familial pressures surrounding a woman make one choice infinitely more difficult than the other.

This is the inversion at the heart of the debate. We have become so concerned with defending the freedom to cover that we risk becoming blind to the freedom that matters even more: the freedom not to. The language of tolerance should never become a shield behind which coercion, however subtle, is allowed to flourish. Nor should religious freedom require us to stand by while girls grow up under restrictions that contradict the freedoms of the society around them.

The real test of freedom, then, is not whether a Muslim woman in Helsinki can choose to wear the hijab.

Of course she can.

The real test is whether her daughter can grow up, look at her family, her community and her religion, decide that she does not believe what they believe, remove it, and walk outside uncovered without fear.

That is what freedom looks like.

And every girl growing up in the West should inherit it.

Any society that loses the courage to defend that freedom will eventually discover that tolerance, when stripped of judgement, can become the very thing that destroys it.

Depending on your worldview, that sentence is either an obvious statement of fact or an expression of outright bigotry.

That reaction is revealing.

It exposes one of the deepest divides in the modern West.

One side sees culture primarily as a collection of food, festivals, clothing and traditions that people are free to exchange without fundamentally changing the society around them.

The other sees culture as something far deeper: the set of values, beliefs and assumptions that ultimately shape the kind of civilisation a society becomes.

Europe is increasingly becoming the place where these two visions collide.

The events in Ceuta are merely the latest manifestation of that divide.

Ceuta Was Never Just About Immigration

Pedro Sánchez is facing fierce backlash over the situation in Ceuta, Spain’s small North African enclave.

At the end of July 2026, thousands of Moroccan illegal migrants came streaming ashore. The footage was extraordinary. A tangle of running bodies, punctuated by jeering, laughter and celebration, surged across the beaches. It genuinely looked like an invasion.

Those who defend illegal migration often point to women and children as evidence that the issue is purely humanitarian, suggesting that anyone who objects must simply lack compassion. That argument becomes much harder to sustain when confronted with the reality of Ceuta.

The overwhelming majority were young, healthy, military-aged men.

Morocco is approximately 99% Muslim. It is therefore reasonable to assume that the overwhelming majority of those arriving shared not only a nationality, but a common religious and cultural background.

That matters because culture is not value-neutral. It shapes how societies understand everything from religious freedom to the role of women.

If culture influences the kind of society people build—as I believe it does—then it is entirely reasonable to ask what effect large-scale migration from one civilisation may have on another.

Nor did this happen in a vacuum.

Earlier this year, Sánchez announced plans to regularise hundreds of thousands of illegal migrants already living in Spain. More than one million applications followed. Predictably, the policy was defended using familiar language: compassion, multiculturalism and openness.

But governments do not simply respond to incentives; they create them.

How could policies signalling that illegal entry may ultimately lead to legal status fail to encourage others to attempt the same journey?

Ceuta is not merely a border crisis.

It is a symptom of a much larger civilisational debate.

Culture Shapes Society

Culture is the backbone of society.

By culture, I do not simply mean food, music or national customs. I mean the deeper beliefs that shape how a society understands freedom, justice, family, authority and human dignity.

It is the accumulated inheritance of history, language, religion and philosophy—the story a civilisation tells itself about who it is and what it values.

Culture determines what is admired and what is condemned. It influences how strangers treat one another, how families raise children, what laws are written and what behaviours are tolerated. It creates the invisible assumptions that make societies function long before governments intervene.

It is, in many ways, the operating system beneath politics.

For much of the Western world, that operating system emerged from Christianity and Greek rationality.

Our understanding of justice, the intrinsic dignity of every human being, compassion, forgiveness and equality before the law did not appear by accident. They developed over centuries within a particular civilisational tradition. Even many of those who reject Christianity today continue to live within a moral framework that Christianity helped build.

Immigration Is a Civilisational Question

Leaders like Pedro Sánchez—and many across Europe and North America—tend to approach this question almost exclusively through an economic lens.

“Diversity is our strength.”

Migrants fill labour shortages. They offset declining birth rates. They contribute to economic growth. Refugees deserve protection.

These arguments focus almost entirely on short-term material concerns. Within that framework, opposition to migration is often dismissed as irrational fear or xenophobia.

But many of us are asking a different question altogether.

We are viewing migration—particularly from Islamic societies—not primarily through economics, but through the long-term lens of civilisation.

The issue is not whether individual migrants can contribute positively to society.

Many do.

The question is whether cultures consistently produce different social outcomes—and whether importing large populations from societies built upon fundamentally different values eventually changes the society receiving them.

That is a far more important question.

It is also the one Europe increasingly finds itself answering.

A Civilisation Without Confidence

The modern West has become remarkably uncertain of its own identity. It constantly interrogates its own history, often reducing it to a catalogue of oppression and injustice. Patriotism is viewed with suspicion. National identity is treated as something embarrassing rather than something worth preserving.

Islamic civilisation, by contrast, largely does not.

It believes its moral claims are universal. Its scriptures present Islam as the final revelation, not simply another tradition among many. Throughout history, that certainty has often been accompanied by expansion, conquest and the belief that every society ought to submit to Islamic law. Even today, some of the world’s deadliest terrorist organisations draw both their justification and their willingness to die from that same worldview.

When these two outlooks meet, the result is predictable. Islam encounters a civilisation so tolerant that it often defends intolerance in the name of tolerance.

It encounters people willing to condemn the civilisation that produced their freedoms while hesitating to criticise those who reject them—like Islam.

And among those Westerners who have come to despise their own inheritance, it often finds willing allies. Or as some would say: “Useful idiots”.

The Contradictions of Multiculturalism

Nowhere is this contradiction more visible than in discussions surrounding women.

It is remarkable how often self-described feminists remain silent about the treatment of women throughout much of the Muslim world.

More remarkable still is their reluctance to confront similar realities emerging within parallel societies across Europe.

Women and girls living in Western countries are, in some communities, pressured to cover their hair, their bodies and sometimes even their faces. The pressure to conform to Islamic norms within these communities can be every bit as powerful as in the countries from which those traditions originated.

Yet criticism is frequently dismissed with a single defence:

“It is their culture.”

Ironically, the very people who insist that all cultures deserve equal respect often leave vulnerable women trapped within cultures they would never tolerate for themselves.

In the name of multiculturalism, they become unwilling to defend the very liberal values they claim to champion.

The Paradox of Tolerance

This leads to a question the West has spent decades trying to avoid.

Should tolerant societies tolerate intolerant ideologies?

Karl Popper famously described this as the paradox of tolerance. A society that extends unlimited tolerance to movements fundamentally opposed to tolerance eventually creates the conditions for its own destruction.

The issue, then, is not whether the West should become intolerant.

It is whether it should become unapologetically intolerant towards intolerance itself.

That may include restricting migration from regions where intolerant ideologies remain deeply embedded—not because people belong to a particular ethnicity, but because ideas have consequences, cultures matter, and societies have both the right and the responsibility to preserve the conditions that made them free.

Europe Is Already Showing the Consequences

This is why I believe migration is ultimately a civilisational question.

Europe is already beginning to demonstrate what happens when these concerns are ignored.

Sweden, once regarded as one of the safest countries in the world, now struggles with gang violence and terrorism. Germany fortifies Christmas markets against vehicle attacks carried out in the name of Allah. France, the United Kingdom and Italy face many of the same tensions. Even countries as geographically distant as Finland are beginning to display early signs of similar challenges, albeit on a much smaller scale.

By contrast, countries that have severely restricted large-scale migration—Poland being one notable example—have largely avoided many of these problems.

These comparisons deserve honest discussion rather than immediate dismissal.

Some Cultures Produce Better Societies

This is ultimately why the opening sentence matters.

Some cultures—and the stories they tell themselves—produce societies more conducive to human flourishing than others.

That does not mean every individual within one culture is morally superior to every individual within another. Nor does it mean societies cannot reform or improve.

It simply recognises an obvious reality: ideas shape cultures, cultures shape institutions, and institutions shape the lives people are able to live.

If we refuse to acknowledge that some cultural foundations are better at protecting liberty, equality before the law, freedom of conscience and the dignity of the individual, then we lose any meaningful reason to preserve those foundations ourselves.

The freedoms enjoyed throughout much of the Western world remain remarkably rare in human history.

They did not emerge by accident.

They were built over centuries, inherited by successive generations, and entrusted to us.

If we believe all cultures are equally capable of producing the same society, we lose any reason to preserve the one that gave us liberty, equality before the law, freedom of conscience and the dignity of the individual in the first place.

Those freedoms are not merely achievements of the past. They are an inheritance—one I hope to pass on to my children, and to the countless generations that come long after I’m gone.

Migration is not merely an economic question.

It is not merely a humanitarian question.

It is a civilisational one.

So no.

All cultures are not equal.

He was, of course, informed that the Mayor of New York has no authority to dictate American foreign policy.

But while the promise itself was always political theatre, the video served another purpose entirely. It became a carefully crafted piece of propaganda, capitalising on the attention surrounding the controversy to present a deeply distorted account of the war in Gaza.

That should concern everyone.

When elected officials use the authority of their office to repeat misinformation about one of the world’s most scrutinised conflicts, they do more than mislead the public. They erase the context that explains why this war exists in the first place, obscure the atrocities committed against Israelis on October 7th, and provide political cover for a terrorist organisation that openly celebrates the murder of Jews.

Mamdani’s video is a textbook example.

He calls Netanyahu a “war criminal.” He claims Israel has killed 73,000 people. He declares the war a “genocide”—a legal conclusion that has not been reached by the International Court of Justice. Throughout the video, responsibility for civilian suffering is placed entirely on Israel, as though the war began because Israel simply decided to invade Gaza for sport.

If someone knew nothing about this conflict, they would come away believing exactly that.

What they would not learn is just as important.

Mamdani never tells his audience that the widely cited figure of 73,000 comes from the Hamas-run health authorities, whose casualty figures do not distinguish between civilians, combatants, or those who died from natural causes. They do not account for Palestinians killed by Hamas itself—a documented occurrence—or by the countless rockets fired by Palestinian terrorist groups that fall short and land inside Gaza.

That lack of distinction is not an accident.

Hamas has every incentive to blur the line between civilian and combatant. The less the world understands who was killed and how they died, the easier it becomes for activists, journalists and politicians to repeat inflated or misleading narratives that portray Israel as uniquely barbaric while shielding Hamas from scrutiny.

Reality looks rather different.

John Spencer, one of the world’s leading experts on urban warfare, has described Israel’s campaign in Gaza as having one of the lowest civilian-to-combatant casualty ratios in the history of modern urban warfare. Whether one agrees with every Israeli decision or not, that assessment alone should make anyone hesitate before casually throwing around words like genocide.

The Context Mamdani Left Out

To understand why, we first need to understand what urban warfare actually looks like.

Urban warfare is among the most brutal forms of combat. Civilians and fighters are packed into the same dense environment, making it extraordinarily difficult to strike legitimate military targets while minimising civilian casualties. Innocent people are, tragically, often caught in the crossfire. That is the horrific reality of war, and it becomes even more acute when the battlefield is a city.

Gaza, however, presents an even greater challenge.

For more than two decades, Hamas transformed a strip of land just 25 miles (40 kilometres) long into a military fortress. Beneath it lies a vast underground tunnel network—roughly half the length of New York City’s subway system—with entrances hidden inside homes, schools, hospitals, mosques and civilian buildings. Any opening in the ground could conceal a tunnel from which armed terrorists emerge to attack Israeli forces.

The billions of dollars that poured into Gaza from around the world were not spent building a thriving society. Much of that investment was instead diverted towards military infrastructure designed for a single purpose: preparing for war with Israel.

That underground network is only part of the strategy.

Hamas has deliberately embedded its military operations within civilian areas because civilian casualties are not merely tolerated—they are strategically valuable. When Israeli forces respond to attacks launched from neighbourhoods, schools or hospitals, Hamas knows much of the international media will focus on the resulting destruction rather than asking why military operations were being conducted from protected civilian sites in the first place.

The battlefield itself becomes a weapon.

The deception goes further still.

Hamas fighters routinely operate without uniforms, blending into the civilian population. The Hamas-run health authorities classify anyone under the age of eighteen as a “child”, even though Hamas has a documented history of recruiting teenagers aged fifteen, sixteen and seventeen into its ranks. Casualty figures are then presented without distinguishing between civilians and combatants, creating statistics that generate maximum outrage while revealing remarkably little about who was actually killed.

Each of these practices violates the very principles of international humanitarian law that critics accuse Israel of breaking.

Mamdani’s audience hears none of this.

Nor does he mention that more than 200 hostages—including women, children and the elderly—were dragged into Gaza on October 7th to be used as bargaining chips. He says nothing about the systematic murders, the rapes, the torture, the mutilation of bodies, or the fact that Hamas proudly filmed and celebrated these atrocities themselves.

Instead, his version of events begins after Israel responded.

That omission changes everything.

The Rules of War—and How Hamas Exploits Them

So how should we think about a war like this?

It helps to begin with something much closer to home.

When we live in a functioning society, we rarely think about the immense machinery that keeps it functioning. If someone breaks into your house, assaults your family or robs your business, you don’t take justice into your own hands. You call the police.

The police are entrusted with a monopoly on force. They are authorised by the state to use violence when necessary, but that authority is constrained by law. They cannot act however they please. Their power exists to preserve order, protect innocent people and deter those who would do them harm.

That is the social contract.

National defence operates according to the same principle, but on an international scale.

The crucial difference is that there is no global police force.

When conflict breaks out between states, there is no higher authority capable of stepping in, arresting the aggressor and restoring peace. Nations ultimately defend themselves. However uncomfortable that reality may be, it has been the story of human civilisation since the beginning.

The world we wish existed is not always the world we inhabit.

That is precisely why, after the Second World War, nations sought to establish rules governing how wars are fought.

This is where many people misunderstand international law.

International humanitarian law was never designed to make war impossible. Wars themselves are not illegal. In many cases, they are unavoidable. Instead, these laws attempt to make war less barbaric by regulating how military force may be used.

One of the most fundamental principles is distinction. Civilians may not be deliberately targeted. Combatants may. If a legitimate military target is located near civilians, military action may still be lawful, provided commanders weigh the anticipated military advantage against the expected civilian harm and take reasonable precautions to minimise that harm.

These rules were written on an important assumption: that both sides would at least attempt to respect them.

Groups like Hamas shattered that assumption.

Rather than separating themselves from civilians, they deliberately embed themselves among them. Rather than wearing uniforms, they disguise themselves as civilians. Rather than moving military assets away from protected sites, they place them inside hospitals, schools, apartment buildings and mosques. Rather than helping civilians leave dangerous areas, they have repeatedly encouraged them to remain where fighting is expected.

In other words, Hamas exploits the very laws designed to make war more humane.

The protections afforded to civilians become military assets. Civilian deaths become strategic victories. International law, intended to restrain violence, is transformed into another battlefield.

That is why reducing this war to casualty figures alone is so deeply misleading.

Those numbers tell us how many people died.

They tell us almost nothing about why they died, where they died, who put them in harm’s way, or how either side conducted itself during the fighting.

And that is exactly the gap propaganda exploits.

Despite fighting an enemy that systematically violates almost every principle of international humanitarian law, Israel has still taken extraordinary measures that few militaries in history have attempted at this scale: dropping leaflets, making phone calls, sending text messages, issuing evacuation orders and, in many cases, delaying or cancelling strikes altogether.

None of this suggests Israel has conducted a flawless campaign. No war is flawless.

But it does explain why respected military analysts such as John Spencer have concluded that Israel’s civilian-to-combatant casualty ratio is remarkably low by the standards of modern urban warfare—particularly given the unprecedented challenges Hamas deliberately created.

Why This Lie Matters

This is why Mamdani’s video matters.

At first glance, it looks like another political disagreement over the Middle East. It isn’t.

It is an attempt to reshape how Americans understand one of the defining geopolitical conflicts of our time.

Words like genocide are not political slogans. They are among the gravest accusations that can be levelled against a nation. They invoke the Holocaust, Rwanda, Bosnia and the deliberate extermination of entire peoples. To deploy that language while stripping away the context that produced the war is not simply misleading. It fundamentally alters the moral picture presented to millions of people.

More importantly, it rewards Hamas’ entire strategy.

Hamas cannot defeat Israel militarily. It never could.

Its greatest weapon has always been the suffering of its own civilians. Every tunnel beneath a hospital. Every rocket launched from a residential neighbourhood. Every fighter disguised as a civilian. Every casualty reported without distinction. Every hostage hidden beneath the streets of Gaza. Every one of these tactics serves the same objective: ensuring that international outrage is directed not at the terrorists who engineered the battlefield, but at the democracy forced to fight on it.

When influential public figures repeat that narrative, they are not merely criticising Israel.

They are validating Hamas’ strategy.

But the implications extend far beyond Israel.

Israel is America’s closest ally in the Middle East. To accuse Israel of committing genocide is also to accuse the United States of financing, arming and diplomatically shielding a genocidal state. It is an attack not only on Israel’s legitimacy, but on the moral legitimacy of American foreign policy itself.

That is no small accusation.

It encourages Americans to view their own country not as a force that, however imperfectly, has helped preserve the post-war international order, but as the patron of one of history’s greatest crimes. It teaches distrust not only of Israel, but of the broader Western alliance that has underpinned liberal democracies for generations.

That is precisely the objective of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Hamas and every other movement that seeks to weaken the West. They understand they cannot defeat the United States on the battlefield. Their best hope is to convince Western societies that their own civilisation is fundamentally illegitimate.

Mamdani’s video advances that narrative.

Not accidentally.

Deliberately.

Because omissions of this magnitude do not happen by chance. When you remove October 7th from the story. When you erase Hamas’ tactics. When you ignore the hostages. When you present casualty figures without explaining what they measure—or what they omit—you are not giving your audience an incomplete picture.

You are constructing a false one.

That is why this deserves to be called out.

Not because Mamdani criticised Israel.

But because he used the credibility of public office to persuade millions of people to judge one of the world’s most complicated wars without first telling them the truth.

This was particularly egregious because of the sinister image it painted—of Israelis as monsters capable of withholding food from millions. Being accused of engineered famine is a modern-day blood libel. Especially when the exact opposite was true.

Israel facilitated millions of tonnes of food and aid into Gaza, according to COGAT figures. But facts never stopped the narrative. The UN, which oversaw much of the internal delivery, stayed mostly tight-lipped about the truth—even though the vast majority of its own aid trucks never reached their destinations.

Almost a year later, the UN finally admitted the truth. It was Hamas all along—hijacking aid from the people who needed it most. Unable to stay silent any longer, Dr. Ramiz Alakbarov released this official statement:

“I strongly condemn the recent obstruction of humanitarian operations in Gaza by the de facto authorities, which endangered humanitarian personnel, intimidated workers delivering lifesaving food assistance and disrupted life-saving humanitarian operations.
Yesterday, humanitarian workers were forced to halt food distributions after armed personnel affiliated with the de facto authorities forcibly entered the Abu Rashid food distribution point in Jabalia, North Gaza. The forces also entered a WFP warehouse and reportedly assaulted two truck drivers who were delivering humanitarian supplies.”

The statement still falls short of naming Hamas directly, but things must have gotten completely out of hand for them to say even this much. It’s infuriating that so many humanitarian organisations clung to a comfortable narrative instead of speaking the truth. The only people who suffered the consequences were the Palestinian civilians.

The Mid-2025 Frenzy

The starvation story hit its crescendo in mid-2025. The online outrage was insane—every post a condemnation, every feed flooded with the same recycled pictures of sickly-looking people portrayed as victims of Israeli cruelty. Most were suffering from unrelated illnesses, but that didn’t matter. To the mob, it was irrefutable proof. The images being debunked did little to change people’s minds. The same image would pop up again, and again, regardless.

The world was set ablaze. Condemnations poured in from every direction. Countries like the UK, France, and Canada seized the moment, using the frenzy as cover to recognise a “Palestinian state”. That move was striking: a political decision framed as punishing Israel for an accusation they surely knew was being fuelled—or outright manufactured—by terrorists on the ground.

The outrage only intensified.

The New York Times ran a harrowing image of an emaciated child, skin stretched tight over bones, held by his mother. His spine protruded like ridges through his leathery skin.

It was made to look like a healthy baby had been reduced to skin and bones by deliberate starvation.

If the fire of outrage was burning before, it was now a raging inferno.

The Problem: It Was a Lie

The only problem? It wasn’t true.

The New York Times eventually issued a correction. The child suffered from a severe pre-existing condition affecting his brain and muscle development—not famine. But the damage was done. The image had already done its work.

In reality, the widespread famine narrative never stood up to scrutiny. Yes, there were pockets of genuine hunger amid the chaos of war. But Gaza was no Yemen or Sudan. Videos posted by Palestinians themselves told a different story: markets with goods, people who didn’t look starved. Israel let the aid in. The failure happened inside.

The UN and its partners rejected armed IDF escorts to preserve “neutrality.” Without protection, the trucks were sitting ducks. Hamas, gangs, and desperate crowds looted them relentlessly. Between May 19 and August 5, of 2,604 aid trucks collected by the UN after crossing the border, 2,309 never reached their destinations. That’s well over 80 percent. An insane number.

Piles of food and supplies were sometimes left rotting in the sun near crossings like Kerem Shalom—aid Israel had approved, but which never moved forward.

Much of what was stolen resurfaced in black markets at exorbitant prices. Another Hamas tool for control and profit. Distribution was always the choke point. It ended up in the wrong hands.

Even during the worst of it, Hamas fighters uploaded videos of themselves gorging while others went hungry. There was hunger, yes—but not for lack of food entering Gaza. It was easier to blame Israel than confront the thieving terrorists.

The Rot Runs Deep

The West has been lied to. Young people have been emotionally tricked into supporting movements that would rip them apart in the same way those on October 7th were. They were manipulated by social media, the pressure to fit in, the desire to be on the “right side of history”—all turbo-charged by once-trusted entities like the UN and charities such as Amnesty International. These organizations, through complicity or silence, have fed young people into an anti-West narrative soaked in Israel hatred.

From corrupt UN rapporteurs with insidious agendas—denying the mass rapes of October 7, siding with Hamas, or receiving money from hostile forces like China—to charities declaring “genocide” without legal authority, the pattern is unmistakable.

This conflict is fraught with lies, half-truths, and distortions like nothing I’ve ever seen. Lies spread across the world in moments, while the truth is buried in the aftermath. It’s jarring to watch trusted institutions participate in the disinformation.

Everything used as a slanderous lie against Israel is slowly being revealed. This gaping, festering wound of falsehoods is finally getting its band-aid peeled off. Underneath, we see raw Jew hatred and a broken, compromised system geared to protect terrorists who love death and destruction. A bent system that grotesquely twists itself to villainies Western democracies while turning a blind eye to barbaric, anti-human Islamist entities like Hamas.

During the same frenzy, videos emerged of Israeli hostages held by Hamas—emaciated, skeletal figures forced to dig in tunnels or shown wasting away in captivity. These were people who actually looked starved, deliberately malnourished by their captors. The hypocrisy was glaring: genuine starvation of hostages (used as human shields and bargaining chips) barely registered compared to the manufactured outrage over Gaza.

Israel even tried to cut through the choke point by collaborating with the U.S. on the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF)—a mechanism designed to deliver aid more directly to civilians and bypass Hamas control. Some Palestinians reportedly said it was the first time they actually received food without having to pay for it. Yet many so-called humanitarians and media outlets seemed more upset about Israel helping get aid to Gazans without Hamas skimming it than they were about the actual theft and diversion.

This wasn’t the action of a party trying to destroy a people. It was an attempt to feed them—something the narrative machine simply couldn’t tolerate.

The true scale of the rot will gradually be exposed as time goes on. And when it is, the real indictment won’t just be on Hamas—it will be on every institution that enabled the lies while real people suffered.

When I first heard the news, I was taken aback—and frankly, really sad. I haven’t followed his career for very long, but I became an admirer when I saw how firmly he stood up for the Iranian people. He was one of the few politicians who truly understood the horror of the Islamic regime and its brutal treatment of Iranians. He spoke highly of Reza Pahlavi, the Crown Prince, whom the majority of anti-regime Iranians have chosen as the leader of their revolution.

For a high-ranking American official to recognize someone like Reza Pahlavi was a breath of fresh air. It made the Iranian people feel seen and heard. They truly loved Graham and affectionately called him “Uncle Lindsey.” There’s an iconic image of him holding up the Lion and Sun flag at the Global Day of Freedom, surrounded by hundreds of thousands of Iranians desperate for a free Iran.

A True Neocon: Peace Through Strength

The Senator was what you would call a true neocon. He believed in confronting terror with strength—peace through strength, as some have dubbed it.

I understand the criticism of this worldview, especially in a post-Iraq world. But I believe much of America—on both the Right and the Left—came away from that war, which devolved into a quagmire, with entirely the wrong lesson. Some now preach strict non-intervention as the answer. In my opinion, that stance conflicts with reality. Just because you choose not to act doesn’t mean the enemies of the West will sit idle. They will fill any void an isolationist America leaves behind. It’s a luxury belief held by those who benefit from America’s current superpower status. In truth, it puts America—and the broader West—at greater risk.

The real lesson from Iraq is that precision intervention can and should be used when necessary to safeguard American interests. Hostile forces around the world are foaming at the mouth to fracture and destroy U.S. superpower status. I believe that would be catastrophic for the world. The last thing we need is for China, Russia, or the myriad of terrorist groups to gain a monopoly on power and enforce their will globally.

A clear example is the Islamic regime’s attempts to control international waters. It has been—and should remain—America that guarantees safe passage for international shipping. That’s one of the key reasons the West has prospered since World War II.

Lindsey Graham believed this passionately. He was a hawk on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. He understood something many seem to have forgotten: Russia is an enemy of the West and of America. The Kremlin is well known for sowing division and chaos, exploiting cultural cracks through bot farms and influence campaigns.

He was equally hawkish on Iran. He grasped the destabilizing nature of the Islamic regime—not just in the Middle East, but across the globe. He knew the regime had declared war on America 47 years ago: a death-cult entity that routinely executes dissidents as enemies of the state and “enemies of god.”

Any “god” that demands such barbarity doesn’t deserve the capital G, in my view.

Standing Firm in Trump’s Corner

Having someone like Graham in Trump’s corner—clear-eyed and resolute—was a balm for those of us who worry the President is sometimes surrounded by people with a childish, naive understanding of the world. People who fail to grasp that some ideologies cannot be reasoned with—they can only be defeated. Something JD Vance may have learned in his interactions with the Islamic regime. Hopefully.

But I doubt it.

People like the Senator were often accused of “loving war,” but that couldn’t be further from the truth.

He loved the idea of destroying those who hate life, hate America, and seek to impose their will through terror. And you know what? I can respect that. In an age when hostile forces across the globe are rearing their heads, we need more people like him.

Not long after thousands of Iranians were massacred in the streets for protesting, many of us waited anxiously to see if America would answer their desperate cry for help. I, like countless others, posted constantly, pleading for Donald Trump to act—to support a people held hostage by this anti-human regime.

In that emotionally tumultuous time, when the President seemed to oscillate between action and hesitation, Lindsey Graham was a rock. Millions of Iranians (and I) clung to him for sanity.

He kept affirming that Trump would act. He went on television and called the President “Reagan Plus”—a nod to Ronald Reagan’s hawkish foreign policy. He said these things without undermining Trump. It was clear he was gently urging him toward helping the Iranian people and delivering long-overdue justice to the Islamic regime.

He brought us hope in that dark time.

It’s one thing for millions to tweet at the President. It hit differently when Lindsey Graham posted a picture of himself and Trump after a round of golf, captioned with “Reagan Plus.”

I’ll admit that after the war began, things grew less certain. The unwelcome ceasefire and the even more unwelcome MOU negotiated by the Vice President created doubts. There was pushback—even from me—when Graham seemed to support the MOU. But it later became clear he was walking a fine line: showing loyalty to the President while relying on his endorsement.

Trump is not someone you openly defy. Even so, Graham often still spoke his mind, navigating the political realities with principle.

He also stood firm in support of Ukraine against Russian aggression, even when it was unpopular in this administration. His last recorded video showed him pushing a bill in support of Ukraine. He held to his principles until the very end.

The Ugly Reaction from the Left

When news of his passing broke, I knew some prominent leftists would celebrate. I wasn’t wrong.

I was disgusted to see the likes of Ana Kasparian and Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks lap up the moment. Hours after his death, Ana tweeted “Good riddance” and said she was “glad he was gone.” Cenk posted the usual braindead slop in the same venomous vein.

This angered me on a basic human level—much like the lunatics who celebrated Charlie Kirk’s tragic death. These are the same people who portray themselves as humanitarians, obsessed with “genocide” in Gaza, yet silent about the 40,000 Iranians butchered in the streets for demanding freedom.

It’s pure hypocrisy.

There is something sinister about people like Cenk and Ana. They consistently side with terrorism. Their hatred of Israel is so intense that they’ll back the most barbaric entities if they oppose Israel and America. Ana has posted “long live the resistance” and mocked Lebanon’s president for an MOU aimed at removing Hezbollah’s occupation—a terrorist proxy of the Islamic regime that dragged Lebanon into war at Tehran’s behest. Cenk recently supported a Senate candidate with a Nazi tattoo and a shady past—Graham Platner—until fresh rape allegations surfaced, all because Platner opposed Israel. Even then, he still claimed it was some kind of “false flag” by the “Israeli lobby”.

Yet we’re supposed to believe they care only about humanity and “Medicare for All.”

What’s more baffling is their constant railing against insider trading and politicians enriching themselves “off the backs of the American people.” Lindsey Graham served in the military and spent 31 years in Congress. His net worth at death was around $1.5 million. Compare that to Democratic Congressman Ro Khanna, whose wealth reportedly ballooned from $27 million to over $230 million in just nine years.

Whether you agreed with Lindsey Graham or not, he was above reproach on personal integrity. A man who loved his work and did what he believed was best for America.

Ana and Cenk are horrible human beings.

Charlie Kirk once said, “You can tell a lot about people by how they react when someone dies.” That’s especially true when the deceased is a fellow citizen who served his country for more than half his life.

A Lasting Legacy

I wrote this piece to honour the Senator. I honour his steadfastness. I honour his service. I thank him for standing on the side of life—for supporting Israel, the Iranian people, and the Ukrainians.

His legacy will age like fine wine as time passes and good triumphs over evil.

Rest in Peace, Lindsey Graham.

May your memory be blessed.

We seem to judge Western civilisation differently from every other civilisation.

Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not saying the West shouldn’t be criticised. It should. Like every civilisation before it, the West has committed terrible acts throughout its history. Empires have conquered. Nations have oppressed. Innocent people have suffered. That is the story of humanity, not of one particular civilisation.

What I find curious is something else.

Why do we seem to judge the West by a different standard?

When we talk about Western history, we rightly demand honesty. We expect it to confront slavery, colonialism, racism and every other dark chapter in its past. We expect its mistakes to be taught in schools, debated in public and remembered for generations.

But why do we expect so much less of everyone else?

Why is it that the civilisation most willing to expose its own failures often finds itself under the greatest moral suspicion, while many societies that have never seriously confronted their own histories seem to escape the same level of scrutiny?

The West doesn’t simply tolerate criticism.

It preserves it.

Walk into almost any major museum in Europe and you’ll find exhibitions dedicated to colonialism, slavery, antisemitism or war. Open a history textbook and you’ll find entire chapters devoted to the darkest moments in Western history. Turn on the television and you’ll find documentaries, debates and investigations examining the failures of Western governments and institutions.

When you stop and think about it, that’s actually quite remarkable.

The West has built societies where people are free to criticise their own civilisation—often more harshly than anyone else ever could. It publishes books questioning its own history, opens its archives, allows journalists to investigate those in power and teaches its children about the worst things it has ever done.

History suggests that this is far from normal. Many societies have responded to uncomfortable truths very differently. Some denied them. Others buried them. Many simply carried on as though nothing had happened. The West, by contrast, gradually developed a culture in which examining its own failures became an expectation. Looking honestly in the mirror became one of its defining characteristics.

Could that be part of the reason we perceive the West so differently?

Could it be that we know more about the failures of Western civilisation simply because Western civilisation has spent so much time exposing them?

The West actually preserves the evidence against itself.

The Other Half of the Story

Take slavery as an example.

Few institutions have left a darker stain on human history. For centuries, millions of people were bought, sold and treated as property. It remains one of humanity’s greatest moral failures.

Yet the story we tell about slavery often begins surprisingly late.

For many people, it begins with European ships arriving on the west coast of Africa and transporting enslaved Africans across the Atlantic. That story is true. But it isn’t where the story begins.

Long before Europeans became involved, slavery was already deeply embedded in many parts of Africa. Rival kingdoms and tribes enslaved prisoners taken in war and sold them through established trading networks. European demand undoubtedly expanded that system, but it did not create it.

Nor was Africa unique.

Slavery was one of humanity’s oldest institutions. It existed across Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia. For most of recorded history, it was not regarded as a moral outrage. It was regarded as a normal part of civilisation.

That changes the picture.

Slavery was not a uniquely Western evil.

It was a human one.

But if slavery was so deeply woven into human history, why did it begin to disappear?

That is the part of the story we rarely stop to consider.

In Britain, a growing abolitionist movement began arguing that slavery was fundamentally immoral. Men like William Wilberforce spent decades campaigning against the slave trade, driven largely by Christian convictions about the inherent worth of every human being.

Britain eventually abolished the slave trade and later slavery itself. It then spent decades using the Royal Navy to intercept slave ships and pressure other nations to abandon the practice. Across the Atlantic, America would eventually fight a devastating civil war with slavery at its heart.

One of humanity’s oldest institutions, accepted for thousands of years across countless civilisations, was no longer simply criticised.

It was rejected.

That moral revolution changed the world.

Yet when slavery is discussed today, that transformation often occupies only a small part of the story. We remember, quite rightly, that the West participated in slavery. We spend far less time asking why the West became the civilisation that helped bring one of humanity’s oldest institutions to an end.

If one civilisation spends centuries documenting its own failures while another buries them, future generations will inevitably know more about the first than the second. Over time, transparency itself begins to distort our perception. We mistake openness for greater guilt, when in reality it often reflects a greater willingness to confront uncomfortable truths. That doesn’t make the West innocent. But it may explain why its failures occupy such a disproportionate place in our understanding of history.

When Self-Criticism Becomes Self-Contempt

Why does any of this matter?

Because the stories a civilisation tells about itself shape the way it sees itself.

Imagine growing up learning almost exclusively about the failures of your civilisation. You learn about slavery, colonialism, racism and oppression. Those things should be taught. They are part of the story.

But what if that becomes almost the entire story?

What if you hear far less about the ideas that challenged those injustices, the movements that corrected them, or the values that made those reforms possible?

You don’t inherit a balanced understanding of your civilisation.

You inherit a picture of it that is almost entirely defined by its failures.

It should hardly surprise us, then, that many young people now struggle to believe there is anything uniquely valuable about the civilisation they have inherited.

The problem isn’t that we teach the West’s failures.

The problem is that we increasingly teach them in isolation from the ideas and institutions that made the West capable of recognising those failures in the first place.

Self-criticism is one of the West’s greatest strengths. A civilisation that cannot examine itself cannot improve.

But when criticism becomes detached from the story of self-correction, it slowly becomes something else.

It becomes self-contempt.

There is an important difference between believing your civilisation should become better and believing it deserves to disappear.

I worry that we are beginning to lose sight of that distinction.

A Civilisation Without Confidence

That change in attitude doesn’t remain in classrooms or history books.

Ideas have consequences.

A civilisation that no longer believes there is anything uniquely valuable about itself will eventually struggle to explain why its culture should be preserved, why its values should be defended or why newcomers should be expected to adopt them.

That is one of the reasons immigration has become such a difficult conversation across much of the Western world.

For years, slogans like “diversity is our strength” were presented as self-evident truths. Diversity can indeed be a strength. Diversity of ideas, backgrounds and experiences often is. But diversity is not a magic ingredient that automatically strengthens every society, regardless of the cultures, values and beliefs involved.

Successful societies depend on more than diversity.

They depend on trust.

They depend on shared values.

And they depend on enough people believing that those values are worth preserving.

That is why integration matters.

Integration is not simply about learning a language or finding a job. It is about joining a shared civic culture. But that becomes remarkably difficult when the host society itself has become uncertain about what that culture is—or whether it is even appropriate to expect others to embrace it.

Across Europe, we are beginning to see the consequences.

France has warned about the long-term influence of the Muslim Brotherhood on national cohesion. Sweden continues to grapple with unprecedented gang violence. Britain is still reckoning with the failures that allowed the grooming gang scandals to continue for years. Even countries like Finland, where I now live, are beginning to ask questions that would once have been dismissed as alarmist.

These are different countries with different histories and different challenges.

But they are increasingly wrestling with the same underlying question.

What does it actually mean to become part of our society?

That question becomes remarkably difficult to answer once a civilisation loses confidence in itself.

None of this has happened in isolation.

A civilisation that loses confidence in itself inevitably becomes more vulnerable to those who would like to see it weakened.

That should not surprise us.

Throughout history, rival powers have always looked for weaknesses in their competitors. Sometimes those weaknesses were military. Sometimes they were economic. Increasingly, they are cultural.

Russia has become adept at exploiting political and cultural divisions within Western societies. China invests heavily in shaping international narratives while tightly controlling discussion within its own borders. Qatar has poured vast sums of money into Western schools and universities, extending its influence into institutions responsible for educating future generations.

None of these countries are doing anything unusual.

They are pursuing what they believe to be their own national interests.

The more important question is why those efforts have become increasingly effective.

Hostile influence rarely creates divisions from nothing.

It amplifies divisions that already exist.

Propaganda is most effective when it has something to attach itself to. A society that has become deeply uncertain about its own history, identity and values presents fertile ground for anyone seeking to deepen those doubts.

That is why I do not believe this story is ultimately about Russia, China or Qatar.

It is about us.

Our rivals did not invent the cracks.

They simply noticed them.

There Must Be Something Worth Preserving

Perhaps this is why I find the current mood in the West so unsettling.

I grew up in South Africa.

I know what it looks like when trust between people begins to erode. I know what happens when crime becomes normal, when communities retreat into themselves, and when people slowly stop believing that tomorrow will be better than today.

Too many people in Europe and North America speak as though peace, prosperity and social trust are the natural state of human affairs. They are not.

They are achievements.

They were built over centuries, fought for, protected by generations before us, and sustained by ideas and institutions that too many of us now take for granted.

Civilisations are far easier to inherit than they are to build.

They are easier to dismantle than they are to restore.

The purpose of understanding history is not to flatter ourselves.

It is to understand ourselves.

The West should continue examining its failures honestly. Its capacity for self-criticism remains one of its greatest strengths. A civilisation that cannot examine itself cannot improve.

But honesty demands that we tell the whole story.

We should remember not only the West’s failures, but also the ideas and institutions that enabled it to confront those failures. That story did not end with abolition, nor does it belong only to history.

Even today, the West continues to host its own criticism. Journalists investigate those in power, governments are challenged in court, citizens openly protest their leaders and elections allow governments to be removed without violence. People are free to change their religion, criticise their own country and question those in authority in ways that remain impossible in many parts of the world.

These freedoms have become so ordinary to many of us that we barely notice them. Yet millions of people can only dream of living in societies where such things are possible.

The West remains imperfect. It always will. But its imperfections are not evidence of a civilisation beyond saving. They are evidence of a civilisation still capable of recognising its failures and striving to correct them.

That tradition is worth preserving.

Because a civilisation can only preserve itself if its people still believe there is something worth preserving.

Mine would be simple.

Get as many innocent people out of harm’s way as possible.

Preserve life first. Argue about politics later.

That is, after all, what humanitarianism is supposed to mean. Before questions of borders, history or blame comes a more fundamental principle: protect human life wherever possible. Everything else is secondary.

Yet throughout the war in Gaza, something kept nagging at me.

The moment proposals were made to allow civilians to leave the fighting—even temporarily—many of the loudest voices in the pro-Palestine movement objected. Suggestions that Egypt open its border were dismissed. Humanitarian corridors became politically contentious. Even Israeli-designated safe zones were often treated with suspicion rather than cautious support.

The contradiction was difficult to ignore.

If the overriding concern was preserving Palestinian life, why did so many activists seem more interested in ensuring civilians remained inside an active war zone?

That question stayed with me.

Eventually, it led me to a much bigger one.

What exactly is the Free Palestine movement trying to achieve?

A Moral Test

The war in Gaza did not create this question. It merely forced it into the open.

The catalyst, of course, was October 7.

On that morning, Hamas terrorists breached Israel’s border from Gaza. Some civilians followed behind them. Together, they unleashed one of the most grotesque displays of barbarism caught on film. Men, women and children were butchered. Families were torn apart. People were burned alive. Women were raped. Hostages—including the elderly and young children—were dragged back into Gaza.

Much of it was filmed by the perpetrators themselves.

These were not crimes committed in secret like the Nazis did against the Jews. They were recorded, celebrated and distributed as psychological warfare. The point was not simply to kill. It was to terrorise. To humiliate. To leave an entire nation psychologically scarred.

There is something particularly revealing about violence that takes pleasure in its own spectacle. Territorial disputes can explain why people fight. They cannot explain why people delight in torture, humiliation and desecration. October 7 felt less like an attempt to win a military victory than a celebration of cruelty itself.

It was, in every sense, a moral test—not only for Israel, but for the rest of the world.

Moments like these have a way of exposing the principles that actually guide us. They strip away slogans and reveal what we instinctively reward, condemn or excuse when confronted with evil.

To some, however, October 7 was not a day of horror.

It was a beautiful day.

When a Country Becomes a Symbol

What happened next was almost as revealing as the massacre itself.

Before Israel had even begun its military response, demonstrations were already erupting across Western cities. While families were still searching for missing relatives and hostages were being dragged into Gaza, thousands gathered to denounce Israel. Images of kidnapped civilians were torn down or defaced. Chants of “From the river to the sea” echoed through city centres from London to Helsinki, New York to Sydney.

The speed of it all was striking.

There seemed to be very little interest in pausing to understand what had happened, or why. The atrocities of October 7 were not treated as an event demanding moral clarity. They were almost immediately absorbed into an existing narrative in which Israel was already guilty, regardless of what had preceded it.

Over time, I realised this was because Israel was no longer being treated as an ordinary nation.

It had become a symbol.

Not simply a country that could make good decisions or bad ones, but a vessel into which every grievance of the modern activist imagination could be poured. Colonialism. Racism. White supremacy. Apartheid. Imperialism. Genocide. Capitalism. American power. Somehow, all of it converged on one tiny Jewish state.

That helps explain why so many contradictory accusations can coexist without causing much discomfort. Israel is condemned as both a colonial outpost and a foreign occupier, despite the Jewish people’s historical roots in the land. It is portrayed as uniquely expansionist, despite repeatedly exchanging territory for peace. It is accused of genocide while responding to an organisation whose own stated objective is the destruction of the Jewish state. The individual claims are almost secondary. Their purpose is not to describe Israel accurately, but to reinforce what Israel has come to represent.

Once a country becomes a symbol, facts begin to matter less than the role it plays in the story.

Everything is interpreted through that lens. Every action becomes further proof of its guilt. Every piece of contrary evidence is dismissed as propaganda. Nuance itself begins to look like complicity.

That is why conversations about Israel so often feel impossible.

You are no longer discussing a country.

You are challenging an article of faith.

The Humanitarian Test

One of the easiest ways to understand a movement is not by listening to what it says, but by watching what it rewards and what it condemns.

That is especially true of movements that claim the moral high ground.

If humanitarianism is truly the organising principle, then preserving innocent life must come before everything else. Before politics. Before military victory. Before assigning blame.

That principle seems so obvious that it hardly feels worth stating.

And yet, throughout the war in Gaza, it was repeatedly abandoned.

Whenever the possibility of moving civilians out of the fighting was raised, many of the same activists who insisted a genocide was unfolding reacted with outrage. Suggestions that Egypt temporarily open its border were denounced. The idea of neighbouring countries accepting refugees was dismissed as complicity. Even temporary evacuations were portrayed by many as morally unacceptable.

This struck me as extraordinary.

Every major war creates refugees. Ukrainians fled Ukraine. Syrians fled Syria. Millions have crossed borders throughout history in search of safety, often with the hope of returning home once the fighting ends. No one imagines that seeking temporary refuge somehow erases a people’s identity or permanently settles the political questions that caused the war.

Why, then, was Gaza treated differently?

If people genuinely believed civilians were facing extermination, one might expect every available avenue of escape to be welcomed, however imperfect. Humanitarianism demands difficult choices. It does not demand that innocent people remain trapped in an active war zone while political arguments are settled around them.

Instead, something else seemed to take priority.

Protecting the narrative had become more important than protecting the people.

It was around this point that I realised my disagreement with the movement wasn’t primarily about Israel at all.

It was about humanitarianism.

The movement spoke constantly about Palestinian lives, yet again and again seemed willing to subordinate those lives to a political objective. Every civilian death became evidence against Israel. Every proposal that might reduce civilian suffering was treated with suspicion if it complicated the broader narrative.

Gradually, a pattern became impossible for me to ignore.

The movement appeared more committed to condemning Israel than to preserving Palestinian life.

That is an uncomfortable conclusion to reach.

Because if it is true, then the movement is not simply mistaken about Israel.

It has become something fundamentally different from what it claims to be.

Beyond Palestine

If humanitarian concern were the movement’s organising principle, we would expect to see the same moral urgency wherever comparable human suffering exists.

But that is not what we see.

The civil war in Sudan has produced one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes of the twenty-first century. Hundreds of thousands have been killed. Millions have been displaced. Entire communities have been destroyed. Famine continues to threaten vast sections of the population.

Yemen tells a similar story. Years of war have left millions facing starvation, disease and displacement. The scale of human suffering is almost impossible to comprehend.

Yet these crises occupy remarkably little space in Western activism.

There are no weekly marches that bring entire city centres to a standstill. University campuses are not consumed by encampments demanding action. Social media feeds are not dominated by Sudanese or Yemeni flags. Few people organise their political identity around these conflicts.

That disparity deserves an explanation.

The disparity cannot be explained by the scale of suffering. If anything, the comparison only deepens the mystery. Sudan and Yemen have witnessed humanitarian catastrophes on a far greater scale than Gaza, yet they have inspired nothing remotely close to the same moral outrage in the West.

Media coverage undoubtedly plays a role, but it cannot fully explain a disparity of this magnitude.

The question, then, is not why people care about Palestinians.

The question is why this conflict commands a level of moral obsession that humanitarian catastrophes of an even greater magnitude do not.For me, this was the point at which the movement’s priorities became impossible to ignore.

The simplest explanation was no longer that it was primarily motivated by concern for Palestinians.

It was that opposition to Israel had become far more important than caring for Palestinians.

Once that possibility occurred to me, many of the movement’s contradictions stopped looking like contradictions at all.

They became exactly what one would expect.

When Humanitarianism Becomes Ideology

Looking back, I no longer think the modern Free Palestine movement can be understood simply as a humanitarian campaign.

Humanitarian movements organise themselves around people. Their instinct is to reduce suffering wherever they find it, even when doing so requires uncomfortable compromises. They do not ask whether the people in need are politically useful. They ask how their suffering can be alleviated.

Ideological movements operate differently.

They divide the world into moral categories: oppressor and oppressed, coloniser and colonised, victim and victimiser. Once those roles have been assigned, every event is interpreted through that framework. Facts that reinforce the narrative are amplified. Facts that complicate it are ignored, excused or reinterpreted until they fit.

Viewed through that lens, much of the movement begins to make sense.

Israel is no longer treated as one nation among many. It has become the embodiment of everything the movement believes is wrong with the modern West: colonialism, capitalism, American power, racism and oppression. Palestinians, meanwhile, cease to be people with agency, complexity and competing political visions. They become symbols themselves—the permanent victims in a moral drama that has already been written.

Once those symbolic roles are fixed, reality becomes incredibly difficult to accommodate.

Calls for peace become suspect if they leave Israel standing. Hamas’ brutality becomes something to explain rather than confront. The suffering inflicted upon Palestinians by their own leaders receives comparatively little attention, while every Israeli action is treated as further confirmation of an already settled verdict.

The movement itself has become something of a Frankenstein’s monster—a coalition of ideologies and activist causes that often have little in common beyond a shared hostility towards Israel and, more broadly, the West. Under ordinary circumstances, many of these groups would regard one another as ideological opponents. Yet the hate towards Israel has become powerful enough to suspend contradictions that would otherwise seem irreconcilable.

Marxists march alongside Islamists. Secular progressives defend movements whose values they reject almost everywhere else. Feminists excuse organisations that severely restrict women’s freedoms. LGBT activists rally behind movements that have imprisoned, tortured and even killed people for being gay.

Viewed in isolation, these alliances appear bewildering.

In reality however, the coalition does not exist because its members share a coherent vision of the future. It exists because they have found a common enemy in the present.

Israel.

Once I reached that conclusion, I found myself looking back at everything else through a different lens.

The response to October 7.

The opposition to civilian evacuation.

The indifference towards Sudan and Yemen (and other conflicts).

The obsessive need to cast Israel as the singular source of injustice in the modern world.

None of it seemed contradictory anymore. It all pointed in the same direction.

Conclusion

Humanitarianism is one of the noblest instincts we possess.

It asks us to see human beings before politics, before ideology and before tribal loyalties. It insists that innocent life has value regardless of who that life belongs to.

The moment those priorities are reversed, something fundamental changes.

People cease to be ends in themselves and become instruments in a political struggle. Their suffering becomes useful. Their deaths become symbolic. Their lives matter only insofar as they advance the cause.

That is why I no longer believe the modern Free Palestine movement is fundamentally humanitarian.

Because somewhere along the way, Palestinians themselves stopped being the point.

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“There will be no deal with the Islamic Republic except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER.”

What struck me was the clarity of it. It reflected an understanding that has become increasingly rare in the Western world: there are some forces that cannot be reasoned with because their ideology depends upon perpetual conflict. They do not seek peaceful coexistence. They seek victory. The question, then, is whether we have the courage to seek it too.

If there were a button I could press that would instantly bring genuine peace to the Middle East without another missile being launched or another life being lost, I would press it without hesitation. I suspect almost every decent person would. Nobody with a functioning conscience celebrates war for its own sake. War is tragic. It leaves behind broken families, shattered cities and generations forced to carry scars they never asked for.

Unfortunately, there is no such button.

Peace generally refers to a state of harmony and freedom from hostility, violence or mental disturbance. It is one of humanity’s highest aspirations. Yet somewhere along the way, we have begun confusing peace with the mere absence of fighting. We celebrate ceasefires before asking whether they actually resolve the conflict. We praise diplomatic agreements simply because they postpone violence. We convince ourselves that if the guns fall silent for long enough, peace has somehow arrived.

But that is not peace.

Peace is not secured simply because two sides stop shooting at one another. History shows that lasting peace is achieved when the ideology driving the conflict is defeated so decisively that it loses the ability to impose itself through violence. A ceasefire may postpone a war. A negotiated settlement may pause it. But neither necessarily ends it. The question is not whether the fighting has stopped. The question is whether the cause of the fighting still exists.

The Middle East offers a painful illustration of this reality.

The Islamic regime occupying Iran has spent decades exporting its revolutionary ideology across the region while holding the Iranian people hostage inside their own country. Millions of Iranians have risked everything to reclaim their nation, only to be imprisoned, tortured or killed for demanding the very freedoms many of us take for granted. At the same time, the regime continues to arm and finance proxies whose purpose extends far beyond defending its interests. Their mission is ideological.

Hezbollah has turned large parts of Lebanon into a battlefield from which it can wage war against Israel while simultaneously holding the Lebanese people hostage to a conflict many of them do not want. Hamas remains committed to the destruction of Israel and refuses to disarm, despite repeated opportunities to do so. Even now, after so much devastation in Gaza, its leadership remains more committed to its revolutionary cause than to the welfare of the people it claims to represent.

These are not isolated conflicts unfolding independently of one another. They are different fronts in the same ideological struggle, fuelled by a revolutionary movement that has spent decades spreading instability throughout the region.

That is why I find myself increasingly frustrated whenever I hear people say, “Pray for peace.”

I understand the sentiment. I genuinely do. It comes from a good place. But good intentions are not enough if they are built upon a misunderstanding of how peace is actually achieved.

For many people, peace has become synonymous with ending the fighting. Secure another ceasefire. Sign another agreement. Return everyone to the negotiating table. Yet history repeatedly shows that when an ideology is fundamentally committed to conquest, terrorism or perpetual revolution, negotiations alone cannot resolve the problem. At best, they delay it. At worst, they give those committed to violence the time and space to regroup.

What Is Peace?

That is why I believe we should be praying for something else entirely.

Not for peace.

For victory.

That statement will undoubtedly make some people uncomfortable. It sounds too militant. Too uncompromising. In an age where every conflict is expected to end around a negotiating table, calling for victory can almost sound primitive. Yet history tells us that some of the greatest periods of peace have only been achieved after those committed to conquest were decisively defeated.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve watched a number of prominent voices urge people to “pray for peace.” Many of them come from the isolationist wing of the American Right. Interestingly, they often find themselves echoing the same instinct as those on the far Left. Although they arrive there by different routes, both seem to share the belief that war is largely self-inflicted; that if the United States and the wider Western world simply withdrew from international conflicts, the conflicts themselves would somehow fade away.

I find that view profoundly detached from reality.

It assumes that conflict exists because the West chooses to participate in it, rather than because there are movements whose ambitions exist entirely independently of the West’s wishes. The Islamic regime occupying Iran did not spend the last four decades building a revolutionary network throughout the Middle East because America provoked it into doing so. Hamas did not massacre civilians on October 7th because Western governments failed to negotiate hard enough. Hezbollah did not accumulate an arsenal capable of holding Lebanon hostage because Israel refused to compromise.

These organisations possess agency. They make choices. They pursue objectives that they openly declare to the world.

One of the strangest habits of modern political discourse is that we often take ideologies less seriously than the people who actually believe them.

When the leaders of the Islamic regime chant “Death to America,” call Israel a cancer that must be eradicated, and repeatedly promise the destruction of both, we are told not to take the rhetoric too literally. When Hamas explicitly states that its struggle will continue until Israel ceases to exist, many still insist that the organisation’s goals are ultimately negotiable. We convince ourselves that enough diplomacy, enough economic incentives or enough carefully crafted agreements will eventually persuade these movements to abandon the very ideas upon which they were founded.

Why?

History gives us remarkably little reason to believe that revolutionary ideologies simply moderate themselves when confronted with goodwill.

Instead, history teaches precisely the opposite. It shows us that movements built upon conquest tend to interpret concessions not as acts of generosity, but as evidence that their opponents lack the will to resist. They do not see compromise as the beginning of peace. They see it as an opportunity to regroup before continuing the struggle.

That is precisely why so many of us looked at the Memorandum of Understanding between the United States and the Islamic regime with deep scepticism.

We were immediately accused of wanting war. Of being “neocons.” Of preferring bombs to diplomacy.

But that criticism fundamentally misunderstands the objection.

The objection is not that we dislike peace. The objection is that we do not believe this is peace.

There is a profound difference between ending a war and ending the ideology that started it. As long as the Islamic regime retains the ability to rebuild its military, finance its proxies and continue exporting its revolutionary vision across the Middle East, the underlying conflict has not been resolved. It has merely been postponed.

That is not peace.

It is an intermission.

The Lesson of History

History has already shown us where the logic of appeasement leads.

In 1938, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain travelled to Munich to negotiate with Adolf Hitler. The agreement that followed allowed Nazi Germany to annex the Sudetenland, a region of Czechoslovakia, in exchange for Hitler’s promise that he had no further territorial ambitions. Upon returning to Britain, Chamberlain famously declared that he had secured “peace for our time.”

It has become one of the most famous misjudgements in modern history.

The problem was not that Chamberlain desired peace. Every decent leader should desire peace. The problem was that he fundamentally misunderstood the nature of the regime with which he was negotiating.

Hitler did not seek peaceful coexistence with his neighbours. His ideology demanded expansion. It demanded conquest. It demanded domination. To believe that one concession would satisfy those ambitions was to misunderstand the ideology itself.

Hitler was not appeased.

He was emboldened.

Every concession reinforced his belief that the democracies of Europe lacked both the confidence and the resolve to stop him. Six months later, Nazi Germany invaded Poland, plunging Europe into the deadliest war in human history.

It is worth asking a difficult question.

How was peace ultimately restored to Europe?

It was not restored because Hitler experienced a change of heart. It was not restored because another agreement was signed or because another diplomatic summit was convened. Peace returned only after the Allies decisively defeated the Axis powers and dismantled the machinery that had driven the war in the first place.

The cost was unimaginably high. Millions died. Entire cities were reduced to rubble. Families were scattered across continents. There is nothing glorious about war.

But there is also nothing peaceful about allowing an expansionist ideology to continue unchecked.

Iran Belongs to the Iranian People

That lesson matters just as much today as it did then.

The Islamic regime occupying Iran has spent nearly half a century building a network of proxies designed to export its revolution throughout the Middle East. Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, the Houthis in Yemen and countless militias across Iraq and Syria are not isolated movements pursuing unrelated objectives. They form part of a broader revolutionary project that has brought misery not only to Israelis, but also to Lebanese, Syrians, Iraqis, Yemenis and, above all, to the Iranian people themselves.

The greatest victims of the Islamic regime have always been the people of Iran.

For decades, millions of courageous Iranians have risked imprisonment, torture and death in pursuit of something most of us scarcely have to think about: the right to choose their own government, to speak freely, to worship freely, to allow women to live as equal citizens, and to build a future without fear.

Time and again, they have poured into the streets believing that this might finally be the moment their country is returned to them.

Time and again, they have been met with bullets.

It is one of the cruellest ironies of modern politics that so many people in the West claim to stand with the Iranian people while simultaneously advocating policies that would leave the very regime oppressing them intact.

The people of Iran do not need another agreement that allows their oppressors to rebuild.

They need the conditions that make liberation possible. That does not mean outsiders should decide Iran’s future. Quite the opposite.

Iran belongs to the Iranian people. It always has.

But before a nation can reclaim itself, the machinery of repression that keeps it enslaved must first be weakened to the point where ordinary people have a genuine opportunity to rise.

That is not a rejection of peace. It is the necessary precondition for achieving it.

Lebanon and the Path to Peace

If the argument I’ve made so far sounds too theoretical, Lebanon offers a glimpse of what it looks like in practice.

For years, Hezbollah has held Lebanon hostage. It transformed large parts of the country into a launching pad for its war against Israel while dragging the Lebanese people into conflicts many of them never chose. As long as Hezbollah remained overwhelmingly powerful, there was little room for genuine peace. No Lebanese government could meaningfully challenge it, and no serious conversation about the future of the country could take place.

That has begun to change.

After nearly two years of sustained military pressure, Israel has severely degraded Hezbollah’s capabilities. Its leadership has been decimated. Its command structure disrupted. Its aura of invincibility shattered.

Something remarkable has happened as a result.

Many Lebanese, who for years were too frightened to openly confront Hezbollah, have begun finding the courage to do exactly that. Conversations that once seemed impossible are now taking place. Cooperation between Lebanon and Israel, however limited it may currently be, is no longer unthinkable.

That is not because everybody suddenly likes one another.

It is because the greatest obstacle to peace has been weakened.

There is still a long road ahead. Hezbollah must ultimately be disarmed if Lebanon is ever to become a fully sovereign nation. But for the first time in years, genuine peace feels like a realistic possibility.

Not because somebody negotiated a better agreement with Hezbollah.

Because Hezbollah is losing.

Peace Is Worth Fighting For

People will inevitably accuse those of us who hold this view of wanting endless war.

They have it backwards. We want the forever wars to end.

Not for six months.

Not until the next ceasefire collapses.

Not until the next terrorist army rearms.

We want them to end once and for all.

That is why so many of us looked at President Trump’s call for “UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER” and saw something far more significant than a political slogan. We saw moral clarity. We saw an understanding that there are some ideologies which cannot be accommodated because they leave no room for peaceful coexistence. They seek domination, not compromise. They do not interpret restraint as goodwill, but as weakness.

Peace is one of humanity’s highest aspirations. It always has been. It is the foundation upon which families are built, societies flourish and ordinary people are free to pursue meaningful lives. Precisely because peace is so precious, we should be careful not to confuse it with surrender, appeasement or temporary pauses in violence.

So no, I will not pray for a pause in the fighting if all it accomplishes is postponing the next war.

I will pray for the kind of victory that makes peace possible.

Because genuine peace has never been the absence of conflict.

It has always been the defeat of those committed to perpetual conflict.

The operation brought the entire regime to its knees. The people of Iran—who are very different from the people in charge—were full of hope. Hope that their 47-year nightmare of being ruled over by these religious lunatics might finally be over.

For Israel, the fall of this regime would have meant peace like they’ve never had before. The head of the snake—the one that funds terrorist groups like Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis—would finally be gone. The threat of being fired upon by thousands of ballistic missiles would be gone.

For America, getting rid of this regime would right a wrong they played a hand in creating 47 years ago. It would remove the possibility of one day having to face a nuclear-powered Islamic regime that could effectively end the United States’ ability to influence that region. A nuclear-powered regime that chants “Death to America” would be catastrophic.

This was, and still is, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to change the world forever. To bring real peace to the Middle East. To change the geopolitical landscape against terrorism, barbarism, and the forces that want to destroy the West.

Victory Was Within Reach

America should have stood firm alongside Israel and continued to degrade this regime until the conditions existed for the people to rise up and take their country back, just as Donald Trump promised. But that promise remains unfulfilled.

Unfortunately, where we stand today, it looks like America has all but surrendered to the Islamic regime—for no reason at all.

To add insult to injury, Israel is currently being restrained from finishing the job against Hezbollah, the regimes proxy based in Lebanon, that has been firing missiles and drones at Israeli communities since October 7th.

They are being restrained by America because the Islamic regime demands it.And how do they have the leverage to demand such a thing?
Because Donald Trump is so desperate to sign a “peace deal” that he seems willing to give them whatever they want.

Having said that, there is a giant BUT in all of this.

The situation is incredibly fluid and evolving constantly. At times, it looks like there’s a bigger plan at play. Other times, it looks like there is no plan at all. A single Trump tweet can completely change how you’re analysing the situation.
Right now, things look depressing. However, by the time this essay is published, the situation may have changed completely.

So how did we get here, and is there any hope?

The Shah's Fall Changed the Middle East

The most important thing to know about Iran is this:

The regime in power—the Islamic regime, as I will refer to them—does not represent the people. They are a brutal theocratic entity that has subjugated the Iranian people for 47 years. The people themselves view this regime as an occupying force. The people are Iran. Not the lunatics in charge.

Iran wasn’t always the way we know it today.

There was a time, under the Shah, when the country was rapidly modernising. In many ways, it looked and felt like other Western countries. Women were finally allowed to vote, study, and pursue careers. The country was Westernising in many different ways.
All you need to do is look at the pictures from that time. You will be shocked by just how different it was.

Of course, all of this came crumbling down with the fall of the Shah.

Leftists, communists, and Islamists came together in opposition to the monarchy. They call it the Red-Green Alliance.
There is an incredible amount of propaganda surrounding the Shah and his rule. So many lies. So many distortions. For 47 years, the Islamic regime has been poisoning the well of his memory. Luckily, some of that is beginning to be undone.

The fall of the Shah was one of the worst things to happen to the Middle East. Because the creature that took his place—Ruhollah Khomeini—not only undid all the progress that was being made, he also declared a religious war on the Western world.

One of the first things he did after taking power was execute thousands of people he viewed as ideological opponents. He also executed thousands of the leftists who had fallen for his rhetoric. He promptly stripped away the freedoms women had been given and began implementing the strictest form of Sharia law.

Millions fled.

This Regime Believes What It Says

The second most important thing you have to understand about Iran is the ideology of the Islamic regime.

They are Twelver Shia Islamists. They have an eschatological vision of the future—one that requires the world to descend into chaos before their hidden prophet is revealed. The “Little Satan” (Israel) and the “Big Satan” (America) must, at the very least, be destroyed.

However, what makes these people unique is that they believe they can help bring about this prophecy themselves. In other words, they don’t simply wait for chaos to arrive. They believe they can create it. Then, when their hidden prophet appears, a great global battle will follow—one from which they believe they will emerge victorious. After that, a global Islamic kingdom will be established on Earth.

Westerners might think this is insane. But the real question is: do they believe it? Because if they do, then it makes little difference what we think.
To answer that question, we have to look at how they act.

Inside Iran, they impose religious laws. They imprison, torture, and execute those who transgress. They are also the world’s largest state sponsor of terror. They fund death-cult-like terrorist groups such as Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis. The wealth of the country is not spent improving the lives of ordinary Iranians. It goes towards drones, ballistic missiles, and nuclear infrastructure.

Some of those missiles can already reach Europe.

At the same time, they have built nuclear facilities deep underground, where they can’t easily be reached.

Their plan was simple: build thousands and thousands of ballistic missiles. Build thousands of drones. Then, when the time is right, race towards acquiring nuclear weapons.

At that point, stopping them becomes almost impossible. The cost of doing so would simply be too great.
They would already possess the delivery systems needed to threaten almost anyone. And eventually, potentially, nuclear weapons. That is where the true danger begins. Because once they possess that capability, the entire world changes.

For the first time, nuclear weapons would be in the hands of actors who genuinely view themselves as participants in a divine struggle.

Yes, North Korea possess nuclear weapons, but they prefer isolation.
That is not true of the Islamic regime. They desire world domination.
And that should concern everyone.

Knowing how weak and soft many European leaders have become, a nuclear-powered Iran under this regime would bully the world and cause chaos on a scale we have never seen before.

Can you imagine them providing a nuclear warhead to one of their proxies?
Can you imagine them threatening Israel, Europe, or America whenever they fail to get their way?
Unlike with the Soviet Union, these lunatics don’t mind dying or sacrificing their people for this holy mission.

During the war, we got a little taste of what the world could look like if these lunatics are ever allowed to acquire truly devastating power.
The regime was attacked, and in retaliation, it launched ballistic missiles and drones at countries across the entire Middle East. The videos are truly shocking.
Missiles hitting Kuwait. Missiles and drones hitting Dubai. The fear. The chaos. The insanity.
In the future, that may be London, Berlin, or even New York. The world cannot afford such a thing.

A Nation Held Hostage

Now, for 47 years, the Iranian people have lived under a brutal regime of executions, imprisonment, and torture.

Despite what you often hear in the media, most Iranians do not support this regime. Only around 5 to 10 percent of the population actively supports it. Over the years, the people have repeatedly tried to rise up against their oppressors. And over the years, they have repeatedly been crushed.

The latest of these uprisings came in January. Millions took to the streets across the country, demanding freedom.
The protests began as a reaction to economic hardship, but they quickly evolved into something much bigger. The people began calling for the return of the Shah. More specifically, they began calling for Reza Pahlavi, the son of the last Shah.

You have to understand what that means. Calling his name in public is all but a death sentence. So imagine the desperation, the courage. Imagine how bad things must be for ordinary people to take that risk.

As always, the regime responded with violence. The protests were crushed. In the span of just a day or two, tens of thousands were killed. The lower estimate sits at around 40,000. Other estimates range as high as 80,000 to 100,000. It’s an insane number.

A few weeks later, America and Israel launched their devastating military campaign against the Islamic regime.

In the opening strikes, Israel eliminated much of the regime’s senior leadership, including Ali Khamenei, successor to Ruhollah Khomeini and Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic.

He was every bit as fanatical as his predecessor.

Every bit as dangerous.

And every bit as responsible for the suffering of the Iranian people.

After his death, the celebrations among Iranians—both in the diaspora and inside Iran itself—were unlike anything I had ever seen.
Inside Iran, those celebrations had to be far more muted, for obvious reasons. But the hope was unmistakable. For the first time in a very long time, a free Iran felt possible.

My own video celebrating with Iranians here in Finland was even featured on the White House social media for a brief moment, by the way.

The military campaign continued for roughly 39 days before Trump declared a ceasefire.
America was targeting nuclear sites and military infrastructure. Israel was targeting ballistic missile production, command structures, and the infrastructure of repression itself. The Basij, in particular—the regime’s street-level enforcers and thugs responsible for terrorising ordinary Iranians.

Israel clearly understood something that many Western leaders do not.

If you want people to rise up, you first have to weaken the machinery that will shoot them the moment they step outside their homes. You have to create the conditions for freedom. Otherwise, calls for revolution are little more than a death sentence. That is exactly what Israel appeared to be trying to do.

The Strait of Hormuz

The regime was on its back foot.

Its senior leadership had been decimated. Its military infrastructure was being degraded. It was beginning to look vulnerable.

So the regime reached for the strongest card it had left.

The Strait of Hormuz.

A narrow stretch of water through which roughly 20 percent of the world’s shipping passes. Oil. Food. Raw materials. A huge portion of global trade flows through this tiny corridor.

The regime effectively closed it.

Its navy had already been devastated, but it didn’t need much to create chaos. Small boats. Drones. Missiles. That’s all it takes to make shipping companies think twice about entering a war zone.

The result was predictable.

Oil prices began to rise. Markets became nervous. Uncertainty spread. And suddenly, the regime had leverage—seemingly. To America’s credit, it responded with something quite clever. Even during the ceasefire, America effectively blockaded the blockade.

Iranian oil shipments were forcefully restricted. Ships attempting to travel to Iran and load oil were stopped. Ships from Iran attempting to leave were stopped. At the same time, international shipping unrelated to Iran was still being facilitated through the straits with American military might.

The regime was losing billions. America was squeezing them.
Their oil pumps were in danger of getting backed up because they didn’t have many options of where to sell it. Apparently the process of unblocking backed up oil pipes is incredibly difficult once it happens.
The pressure was working. America was dominating in every way.

The Deal That Changed Everything

Then, out of nowhere, Trump started acting embarrassingly desperate for a deal.

Any deal.

A deal that would end the fighting.

Before long, a memorandum of understanding was signed between America and the Islamic regime.

From where I sit, it feels like a gigantic disaster. A self inflicted wound on epic proportions.

The agreement allows the regime to sell its oil again without sanctions (which wasn’t even allowed under the JCPOA). It opens a pathway for billions upon billions of dollars to flow back into its hands. It also attempts to restrain Israel—at the demand of the regime—from acting against Hezbollah, a terrorist group openly committed to the destruction of Israel.

The lead negotiator in all of this is JD Vance, who in my opinion is doing a horrendous job. He simply does not understand the Middle East.

At one point, he openly suggested that the regime wanted to “turn over a new leaf”.

You can’t make this stuff up.

Their entire reason for existing is hostility towards the West. It is not some misunderstanding. It is not some diplomatic dispute. It is the very foundation upon which the regime was built.

The blockade was lifted. The money started flowing again.

And just like that, the pressure that had brought the regime to its knees began to ease.
America went from having all the leverage to having very little leverage.

The goals of the war were straightforward:

• Destroy Iran’s ability to build nuclear weapons.

• Destroy or severely limit its ballistic missile capabilities.

• Force it to stop funding terrorist proxies.

• Destroy its ability to threaten international shipping.

• Create the conditions for the Iranian people to take their country back.

Of those objectives, only one appears to have been partially achieved.
Its navy was indeed destroyed.

Now, once again, the regime suffered enormous damage, and I believe America and Israel did a genuine service to the world in the short term.
However, if this regime is allowed to lie, manipulate, and negotiate its way out of the weakened position it finds itself in, we may find ourselves facing a much worse situation only a few years from now.

Peace—or a Historic Mistake?

The only real path to peace in the Middle East is the destruction of the Islamic regime and the freedom of the Iranian people. Everything else is temporary. Everything else merely delays the problem.

Now, I don’t yet know whether this war will ultimately be remembered as a victory or a failure. The situation is still unfolding. Perhaps there is a bigger strategy at work. Perhaps there are things happening behind the scenes that we cannot yet see.

I hope that’s true.

Because if things continue down their current path, history may look back on this moment as one of the greatest missed opportunities of our time. A moment when the regime was on its knees. A moment when the Iranian people could finally see freedom on the horizon. A moment when the world was given a chance to remove one of the greatest sources of instability and terrorism in the Middle East.

And then walked away.

I am not yet ready to say that America has completely fumbled it.

Not yet.

But it is certainly beginning to look that way.

The good news is that the story isn’t over. The Iranian people hate this regime more than ever. The regime itself is weaker than it has been in 47 years. And Israel remains committed to confronting a threat that it understands better than almost anyone else.

There is still time to get this right.

There is still time to finish the job.

And there is still time for America to prove me (and millions of Iranians) wrong.

One way or another, the Iranian people will be free. Whether the international community chooses to help them or not.

Thank you for reading!

I want to explain how I see the situation, and why I fully support Reza Pahlavi playing the key transitional role.

The Bigger Picture

The end of the Islamic regime is something many Iranians and supporters of the Iranian people believe is fast approaching. When that moment comes — when the revolution is truly in full swing — Iran will have to emerge intact on the other side.

History shows that revolutions are dangerous moments. They create opportunity, but they also create instability. Every revolution requires some form of clear direction if the country is going to emerge whole.

Without that, power vacuums appear. Competing factions begin fighting for influence, and the results can be devastating.

Iran cannot afford that.

Pushing separatist ideas in the middle of a revolutionary moment could cause enormous pain and bloodshed that simply does not need to happen. At a moment like this, the country needs unity and stability above all else.

Iran needs to remain intact.

Before anything else can happen politically, the country needs to stabilize.
A nation does not magically transition from dictatorship into a functioning democracy overnight.

Why Reza Pahlavi?

One of the most important things to understand about his position is that he is not presenting himself as the future ruler of Iran, nor is he demanding that the monarchy be automatically restored.

What he has consistently argued for is something much more limited: a transitional leadership role whose purpose is to guide the country from dictatorship to democracy.

He has repeatedly stated that his goal is to function as a bridge—helping Iran move from the collapse of the Islamic Republic toward a democratic system chosen by the Iranian people themselves.

Part of this effort includes a 100-day transition plan, designed to stabilize the country and create the conditions necessary for a democratic process to take place.

To me, this distinction is critical. The goal is not to decide Iran’s future for the people, but to create the environment where the people themselves can decide it.
Whether that ultimately becomes a republic, a constitutional monarchy, or another democratic system — through a national referendum.

The Principles He Is Putting Forward

Another reason I support this approach is the set of principles he has consistently spoken about — principles that many Iranians, regardless of ethnicity or background, can rally around.

These include:

1 — Iran’s territorial integrity

Iran must remain one country. One people under one flag. Not a fragmented nation where different factions fight over their own pieces of territory.

2 — Separation of religion and state

After nearly five decades of clerical rule, this is simply essential. A democratic Iran cannot exist without separating religion from government.

3 — Equality of all Iranians

Regardless of religion, ethnicity, or gender, every Iranian should be equal under the law.

4 — A democratic process

The Iranian people themselves must decide the type of government they want. That decision should come through a democratic process where all citizens are represented.

To me, these principles form a healthy foundation upon which a new Iran could be built.

A Unifying Figure

My support for Reza Pahlavi also comes from what I’ve been seeing and hearing from Iranians themselves.

During protests — both inside Iran and across the diaspora — his name is the one being called in the streets. It has become a rallying cry for the many who are demanding the end of the Islamic Republic.

There is no other figure whose name carries that same weight or functions as a unifying call across the movement. None.
People in Iran were calling his name at the risk of death, imprisonment or torture. They came out to protest by the millions when he asked them to.

If that doesn’t count for something, then I don’t know what does.

Iranians from every background have suffered enormously under this dying regime for decades. This moment represents a rare opportunity for the country to move toward something better.

In my view, now is not the time to start drawing dividing lines.

Now is the time to unite around one vision and one flag.
A free Iran.

Unity First, Politics Later

Political disagreements will inevitably come later — and they should. That is what healthy democracies are built on.

But those debates should happen after the Iranian people have regained their freedom and political voice, not while the country is still trying to escape an authoritarian regime.

To reach that point, Iran needs a safe landing.

It needs stability during the transition.

It needs someone who can help guide the country through that fragile moment.

To my eyes, Reza Pahlavi is the person best positioned to do that.

A Chance for a Different Future

Iranians have endured extraordinary suffering under the Islamic Republic.

The coming years may offer a rare opportunity to finally build a country based on freedom, equality, and democratic representation.

But moments like that require unity.

The regime has spent decades trying to divide Iranians against one another. Avoiding those divisions during a revolutionary moment will be critical.

Iran will need stability. It will need a clear path through the dangerous period between dictatorship and democracy.

There is only one figure who already carries the legitimacy, recognition, and unifying pull to help guide that transition.

In my view, that figure is Reza Pahlavi.

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Where are the humanitarians, who for 2 years, tried to convince us that they cared so deeply for human lives? Where is Greta Thunberg and her ‘deep’ desire to help people living under oppression?

How about the celebrities who never miss an opportunity to virtue signal?

Where are they?

Why is the mainstream media so eerily silent?

During the Israel-Gaza war, a Palestinian couldn’t sneeze without journalists tripping over themselves to publish a story about it. Yet, on the day it was reported that at least 30 000 Iranians have been brutally murdered by the Islamic regime — networks like the BBC had nothing on their cover page about it.

As someone who works as an assistant for a Member of the European Parliament, I can tell you this: there is a flavour of left-wing ideology that is incredibly dangerous. It almost betrayed the Iranian people and it will destroy Europe if left unchallenged.

A Regime, Not a Country

Iran is run by the Islamic republic. A theocratic, Islamic regime that took power during the 1978 revolution. Iran wasn’t always a sharia law hell hole.

One that subjugates women. Executes gay people. Imprisons and kills dissidents. A regime that takes money from the people and funds terror across the Middle East.

Propping up terrorist organisations like Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis.

They’ve been holding the entire Middle East hostage for years.

Not to mention, groups like Hezbollah have an international footprint.

In South America, Africa, and yes, Europe.

This regime has given money and drone technology to Russia — who themselves are committing terror in Ukraine.

If you want a basic idea of the ideology this entity has, I’ll give a quick example.

During the Iraq-Iran war (1980-1988), there were entire fields filled with landmines.

But the Islamic regime didn’t want to risk its capable fighters. So it came up with another plan.

Iranian child soldiers — some as young as 9/12 — were gathered up and given plastic keys. Keys they were told opened the doors to paradise.
They were then told to walk through the landmine infested fields.

They used the bodies of these young, indoctrinated children as minesweepers.

This regime is a death-cult.

Now you know the type of people we are dealing with here.

The Protests

In late December protests in Iran started. They began out of frustration.
The economy sucks. The infrastructure is crumbling.
Mostly because the regime uses the people’s money to fund terror and to line their own pockets.

This isn’t the first time massive protests have erupted in the country.

The Iranians, unlike most of the surrounding Arab countries, are not majority Muslim. And they are not Arabs.

They’ve been living under this brutal dictatorship for 46 years and most hate this regime and view it as an occupation.

The protests grew. Millions across the country were coming out. But their chants began to change. They were no longer simply asking for a better life. They were asking for the end of the Islamic Republic. They were demanding a change of regime.

The thing that made this protest so potent and dangerous for the Ayatollahs is the name they were calling on the streets. Reza Pahlavi. Their exiled crown prince. Their Shah. That’s another name for King.

They were chanting Javid Shah. Long live the King.

You must understand how dangerous it is to do such a thing in Iran.

You cannot do that without reasonable expectation of imprisonment, torture and death.

Reza Pahlavi — whose father was the Shah before the revolution — has been planning and drawing up the diplomatic infrastructure to transition Iran from a dictatorship to a democracy, for years. In the case that the regime comes to an end.

He’s offered himself up as a transitional leader. To get the country to a point where they can vote for the type of governance they want. Be it a Republic, a constitutional monarchy — as long as it respects the values of freedom, separation of church and state and a united Iran.

Once the Islamic regime falls, you need such a figure to step in and fill the void.

At the height of the protests, with millions coming out on the streets. It became very clear that Reza Pahlavi was the leader of this new revolution. The protestors carried his picture in the streets. They followed the instructions he gave from exile in America. He is the man that the people are looking to for a better tomorrow.

The Crackdown

But as things began to heat up, the Islamic regime did what they always do. They started to crackdown in the most brutal ways possible. So, to hide their crimes, they shut off the internet. It’s been down for almost a month, as of filming this.

The only way any information makes it through, is via Starlink.

It’s here where things go from dark to pure, unfiltered horror.

Because during this internet shutdown, the regime brought in militia from places like Iraq with one order: To end the public protesting by any means necessary.

You can imagine what happens next.

I’m not going to go into details.
Think of it as October 7th multiplied thousands of times, with no IDF coming to the rescue.

The people are completely defenseless, with nothing but their bare hands.

As of writing this, an estimated 36 000 young people were brutally murdered in a day or two. To be clear, this is one of the lower estimates. It could easily be double that number, or more.

Iran is currently a prison of 90 million people.

Something to keep in mind is that the United States is amassing military assets near Iran as we speak. It’s my belief that the US recognizes the regime has never been so weak in 47 years, and they’re preparing to take advantage of that. Trump promised the people of Iran that “help is on the way”. Whether you like him or not, means absolutely nothing to the Iranian people.

No one but the US or Israel would (or could) do anything.

Europe’s Ideological Blindness

Like I said earlier, I work for an MEP. So I get to see some of the inner workings of the European Parliament. What I saw shocked me.

Left wing ideology in the EU is unhinged.

A resolution passed in the European Parliament a couple weeks ago, with overwhelming support.
One that expresses the EU’s full support for the Iranian people.

It condemns the violence and brutality of the regime.
It calls for diplomatic pressure and sanctions.
It pushes for the IRGC to be recognised as a terrorist organisation.

That’s good.
But there’s a dark underside to all of this.

A resolution is basically a political statement.
And the EU, as an institution, contains many different political views inside it —
Left, Right, and Centre — and they don’t agree on everything, as you might imagine.

Before a resolution is adopted, political groups can propose changes.
These changes are called amendments.
Each amendment is voted on separately, and if it passes, it becomes part of the final text.

This amendment process is the engine room of how the European Parliament works.

In this case, the ECR — a centre-right political group in the European Parliament — proposed an amendment.
Calling for Reza Pahlavi to be invited to address the Parliament.

This is incredibly important to Iranians.

A revolution needs both military action and diplomatic action to be successful. Legitimising Reza Pahlavi as the opposition would be an unbelievable blow to the regime.

However, that amendment was rejected.
The vote was 132 in favour, 387 against, and 96 abstentions.

That alone is revealing.
It’s almost certain that the majority of left-wing groups voted against it or chose to abstain.

But it gets worse.

Some of the amendments proposed by left-wing groups — which were ultimately rejected — included calls to:

• exert pressure on the United States and Israel not to intervene,

• undermine or lift sanctions pressure on Iran — while they’re still butchering people.

• and condemn any external interference in Iran’s affairs.

Think about that.

The people of Iran are almost completely defenceless in the face of this brutality.

This isn’t simply a difference of political ideology.

This is being actively anti human.

It means there’s a group in the European Parliament who would watch Iranians get murdered, maimed and raped.

And not only would they not intervene, if they had their way, they would stop anyone else from intervening.

This is unambiguously evil.

The IRGC has now, thankfully, officially been proscribed as a terrorist organisation.

If you look online you’ll find that the loudest pro palestine voices are silent on Iran. Why? Well, because groups like Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis are funded by this same regime. So admitting that they are dark and twisted would mean recognising that these terrorist groups are cut from the same dirty cloth.

This does not compute smoothly in their minds.

For a certain flavour of left wing ideology, an oppressor can only be from the West. They can only be white. Or Jewish. Even though Hamas executes Palestinians on the streets and controls the people with fear — they are not the oppressors. It’s Israel. Even though the Islamic republic butchers people, destabilizes the entire region. Maimes women and so much more. The real oppressor is America.

In London, there was a pro Palestine march a couple weeks ago. They were openly waving Islamic regime flags.
That’s an unambiguous supportive act towards a murderous dictatorship, on the streets of a Western country. They also openly denied the massacres, just like many did after October 7th.

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What I’m trying to say is this.

Europe has become a breeding ground for terrorist support. It’s wrapped up in this “oppressor - oppressed” narrative born out of Western self-hate. It’s spreading like a poison. It’s making its way into governments, the European Union and onto the very streets we walk on.

It makes us vulnerable and weak at fighting against ideologies and cultures that are not compatible with ours. It makes people accept the brain dead idea, which is: all cultures are equal. No. No they are not. That’s painfully obvious.
Ignoring that fact is incredibly dangerous.

That’s why Iran is such a stumbling block for many with this ideology.

Islam took a country that was pro West and making significant, modern advancements, and turned it into a Sharia Law hell hole. One with a dead economy and crumbling infrastructure. It’s become one of the most sanctioned countries on the planet, with one of the most backward social systems — rivaled only by Afghanistan, perhaps.

The Iranian people want out. They want to be pro West and live free. Islamic culture has been a nightmare and brought only pain and death. Their oppressors are the Ayatollahs. Not America or Israel. On the contrary, the Iranians view them as their possible saviours.

This is very confusing for those who convinced themselves of a certain narrative.

Thanks for reading!

Let me know your thoughts.
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Watch the Youtube video HERE

Europe is at a crossroads.

There is one issue dividing the continent to the point of almost tearing it apart. It was one of the main reasons the United Kingdom chose to leave the European Union. It is also why political movements once considered fringe have become mainstream across much of Europe.

That issue is immigration.

Depending on who you ask, concerns about immigration are either wildly overblown—little more than a convenient cover for racism—or they represent an existential threat: one that will eventually undermine public safety, erode culture, and strain welfare systems beyond repair.

So which is it?

I’m an immigrant myself, living in Finland—a country I call home, among people I’ve come to see as my own. I didn’t come here to change Finland. I respect it for what it is. In fact, I want to see it remain exactly that.

That places me in a somewhat unusual position. I can speak both as someone who moved here, and as someone who has come to understand how European societies actually function—and what happens when those systems are pushed beyond their limits.

To understand why Europe’s attitude toward immigration has hardened so dramatically, you have to go back to one specific moment.

2015: The Year Everything Changed

In 2015, more than one million people fleeing war and instability in the Middle East arrived in Europe in a very short span of time. Most came from countries such as Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

Many crossed the Mediterranean by boat, arriving first in Greece via Turkey. Others reached Italy by sea. In a matter of months, hundreds of thousands of people reached European shores.

This was not just a humanitarian crisis. It was a systemic shock.

Europe simply wasn’t prepared. Existing safeguards failed. Refugees were unevenly distributed across EU member states. Sweden alone took in around 160,000 refugees in a single year—roughly eight migrants per 1,000 inhabitants. Germany accepted close to half a million. France, Austria, Hungary, and the United Kingdom absorbed hundreds of thousands more.

The European Union’s principle of free movement made containment nearly impossible. Although EU law requires asylum seekers to be registered and processed in the country of arrival, in practice this often did not happen. People moved freely across borders.

The result was a demographic shift that permanently altered Europe.

When very large numbers of people arrive rapidly, often unvetted and destitute, and from societies with different norms around authority, religion, gender, and social behaviour, problems are not just possible—they are inevitable.

And they surfaced quickly.

When Europe Lost Control

Countries such as Sweden and Germany learned, almost immediately, how difficult it is to integrate large numbers of newcomers—especially at that speed.

This wasn’t a question of goodwill. It was a question of capacity.

Where do you find the housing? The teachers? The doctors? The language training? The jobs? The funding?

I want to be clear about one thing. I don’t blame people for fleeing war in search of safety. I would do the exact same thing. So would you.

But Europe’s inability to manage the scale and pace of the influx fundamentally altered how immigration was perceived, regardless of the original moral impulse behind accepting refugees.

Before 2015—particularly in Nordic and Scandinavian countries—immigration was often framed as a moral good. Multiculturalism was widely celebrated.

After 2015, immigration stopped being an abstract moral debate and became a concrete systems problem.

And systems have limits.

The Welfare Contract Started to Break

European countries are well known for their welfare states. In the United States, politicians on the left often point to Nordic countries as models to emulate.

I live and work in Finland. Every month, a significant portion of my salary never reaches my bank account. That money doesn’t come from nowhere.

And I don’t resent it. I’m happy to contribute—because when the system works, it works remarkably well.

But a welfare state is not a buffet line. It is a social contract.

Everyone contributes, and everyone benefits: education, healthcare, infrastructure, and support during hard times so people can get back on their feet.

Problems arise when large numbers of people enter a country, draw heavily from that system, and are unable—or unwilling—to contribute to it for extended periods of time.

Nordic societies, in particular, are built on high levels of social trust. Their welfare systems function because people broadly share expectations about work, contribution, and responsibility.

When mass migration overwhelmed those systems, an imbalance emerged: more people drawing from the pot, fewer people filling it.

That imbalance cannot be sustained indefinitely.

When Daily Life Got Worse

Over time, ordinary people began to feel the effects.

Healthcare systems slowed. Doctor’s appointments that once took days began taking weeks or months. Schools faced new pressures: teaching in multiple languages, diverting resources to basic integration, and managing classroom tensions amplified by cultural misunderstandings.

Social housing became harder to access, even for citizens who had relied on it in the past.

Safety and predictability—core features of life in Northern Europe—also began to erode. In several countries, migrants from specific regions became overrepresented in certain crime categories, including gang violence and sexual assault.

In Sweden, for example, gang shootings increased significantly over the past decade. Explosive attacks, once virtually unheard of, became disturbingly common.

It is difficult to argue that these societies are safer today than they were fifteen years ago.

Is it wrong for a local to notice this and call it out?

Or do we just call him racist?

The Political Reckoning

Across Europe, support for right-wing parties surged.

This development is often misunderstood—especially by American commentators. “Right wing” in Europe does not mean the same thing it does in the United States. Yet European politics is frequently interpreted through an American lens, with large segments of the population dismissed as “far right” for expressing concerns about immigration.

That strategy has failed.

Reality has a way of asserting itself, regardless of how uncomfortable it may be. Europe is learning that lesson now.

Denmark is a telling example. It has a left-wing government with some of the strictest immigration policies in Europe—and it is popular. Not because Danes suddenly became racist, but because voters wanted order, continuity, and limits that matched capacity.

Culture matters.

Coming from South Africa, I know what life looks like outside Europe’s relatively safe and stable bubble. Culture shapes trust, institutions, and everyday behaviour.

When a culture changes, the country changes with it.

I have a family here. My daughter is only a few months old. Like millions of Europeans, I find myself asking what this country will look like in twenty years. Will it still be safe? Will social trust still exist?

Those questions do not make someone racist.

They make them serious and aware.

Governments need to take these genuine concerns seriously, or things are going to get much worse — before they (hopefully) get better.

Most people in Finland don’t care about race. They care about how you behave once you’re here.

In my view, that is a perfectly reasonable expectation.

Watch the full youtube video HERE

As an immigrant in Finland, I’ve noticed a gigantic problem.

I see echoes here of something that’s already tearing other Western countries apart — scenes from Los Angeles, London, and Berlin where crowds wave flags and chant slogans about belonging, yet everything about those protests shows how divided the West has become.
Behind all of it sits a strange idea: that all immigrants are one people who ought to think and act the same way — that our allegiance should be to our “community,” not the country we now call home.

It’s a rotten idea that’s quietly ravaging much of the West.
If left unchecked, it will destroy the very trust that holds our societies together.
It’s already fanning the flames of anger, frustration, and division across multiple countries.

If things continue the way they are — and if saner minds don’t start speaking the truth — it will only get worse.

We are not one people.

Allegiance Over Identity

I moved to Finland six years ago. It’s my home now.
I have a family here, and it’s in my interest to make sure this country continues to thrive.

My allegiance is first and foremost to Finland — not to some vague immigrant community.
In my view, that’s how it should be.

The “us versus them” mentality being pushed politically is insane. Some immigrants get drawn into it, often cheered on by locals full of self-destructive “empathy.”

And this isn’t unique to Finland. The same mindset exists across Europe and in the United States — people who move to a country, benefit from everything it offers, and then campaign for ideas that stand completely against the culture that gave them stability in the first place.

The Backlash

When I began talking openly about integration, Finnish culture, and what it means to belong to this society, I noticed something strange.

People flooded my comments calling me a traitor.
A traitor to what? To who?

Some even had the audacity to call me a traitor to black people. Others accused me of “sucking up” to Finnish people for attention — a grifter, an Uncle Tom.
Anything positive I said about this country — or its people — was enough to provoke outrage from a small but loud subset of immigrants and locals who think I’m saying “the wrong thing.”

So what exactly is so wrong about what I’m saying?

What They Expect

The basic assumption seems to be that because I wasn’t born here, and because I’m black, my main priority should be “protecting” others like me.

Let’s put aside the fact that black people and immigrants don’t need my protection in Finland.
Let’s also put aside the fact that here, I’m equal under the law and can benefit from the same resources and opportunities as anyone else — provided I’m here legally.

In the minds of these people, my goal should be to reshape Finnish society — to mould it into something that feels more comfortable for outsiders. Even if that means changing the very character of Finland itself.

And I’d be applauded for it.
If I spent my time digging up stories of discrimination, victimhood, or a so-called “black struggle,” I’d be rewarded with pats on the back from the “tolerant” and “empathetic” crowd.
Some people seem to relish the idea of calling their own countrymen racist.

The Victimhood Trap

For certain immigrants, this narrative offers an easy escape.

If every difficult or unfamiliar experience can be explained away as “probably racist,”
then there’s no need to learn the culture.
No need to understand how Finns think.
No need to work through the natural discomfort that comes with adapting to a new land.

Integration is hard.
It’s awkward.
It can feel lonely.
But it’s necessary.

When people dismiss that process by framing every cultural difference as prejudice, they rob themselves — and the country they live in — of something essential.
That’s why I reject everything about this premise.

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Perspective Changes Everything

Moving to Finland from South Africa gave me perspective.
I couldn’t believe the quality of life people enjoyed here.

Living here hasn’t always been easy.
One of my biggest mistakes was not learning the language intensely from the beginning. There’s a reason for it, but it’s not a good enough excuse.

Because of that, I had to play the integration game on hard mode — and I had no one to blame but myself.

Even during those early, awkward months, I could already see the truth: the quality of life here is unlike anywhere I’ve ever been.

I remember seeing people begging on the streets with nicer iPhones than I had.
I’m half-joking, but it’s true.

Everything people fight for in countries like the United States already exists here:
universal healthcare, free education all the way up to university, affordable and efficient public transport.
I pay around sixty euros a month and can take buses and trains all over the city.

All of this is available regardless of skin colour or ethnicity — as long as you’re a citizen or a legal resident.

No Excuses

In the U.S., people often argue that inequality stems from a lack of access — that minorities struggle because they don’t have the same financial opportunities.
Let’s put aside the fact that some minorities, like Asians, actually outperform white Americans — for the sake of argument.

In Finland, those barriers don’t exist.
So what’s the excuse if you don’t perform well?
What’s stopping anyone from succeeding?

There was no slavery of black people here.
No Apartheid. No segregation.

And yet there’s still a visible performance gap between students with immigrant backgrounds and ethnic Finns — one that persists into the second generation.
That’s something we need to confront honestly, because there are no excuses left.

What Real Disadvantage Looks Like

I know what actual disadvantage looks like.
In South Africa, my family was dirt poor.
I often went to school hungry, watching classmates eat lunches we could never afford.

Public high schools were terrible.
If you wanted a better education, you had to pay for it.
South Africa remains one of the most unequal countries on Earth, and that inequality is still visible along racial lines.

I would have done anything to have the opportunities people here take for granted.

Here, every student gets lunch.
Your parents’ income doesn’t determine the quality of your education.
University is free.

That’s why I have little sympathy for those who constantly complain about Finland.
Where else on Earth can you go that’s better?
If you can’t make it here, you’ll struggle anywhere.

Culture, Not Colour

The solution is simple — though not easy.

Everyone, on all sides, needs to understand a basic truth:
success has nothing to do with skin colour,
but everything to do with culture.

Integration has to be front and center.
It should be expected — and Finland shouldn’t feel ashamed for insisting on it.
Cultural or religious values from elsewhere must take a back seat to the ones that built this country.

That might sound harsh, but it’s about self-preservation — and giving people the best possible chance to succeed.

Finland has done well for itself, despite everything it’s faced.
This country was once dirt poor.
It fought wars, endured famine, and resisted colonisation.
And yet today, it’s one of the best places to live in the world.

That didn’t happen by accident.
It happened because of culture.

Standing With Finland

That’s why, despite being born elsewhere, I stand with Finland completely.
I want to protect and promote what makes this place what it is — because it works.

When a place becomes your home, you defend it.
You look after it.
You add to it.

I am part of Finnish society, and I want to see it continue to thrive.

Watch the Youtube video HERE

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