Ten years after I wrote so, Israel’s jihad remains mine. Ten years on, now closer to sixty than not, I am beginning to understand that my jihad, like Israel’s, is a lifelong undertaking. My struggle is Israel’s struggle; our struggle is our compass, our true north, our true religion.

As an observant pluralist Muslim who rejects all forms of Islamism – radical Islam – whether nonviolent or not, I remain on a personal crusade to delegitimize every Islamist who claims to speak for me, who claims to speak for Islam, who dares injure or slay any of God’s viceregents on earth – my fellow mankind.

Atrocities committed against the Jewish people are atrocities committed against me; atrocities committed against Israelis are atrocities against me; atrocities against all of humanity.

When Islamism kills one life, it kills all mankind. We all are now slain by this barbarity, if not in flesh, in soul. We are all killed in our spirit when our brethren are laid lifeless, be they Jew, Muslim or other. But in our anger, in our fury, in our right to avenge the radical Islamists, we rise and we reclaim and we restore justice. This too is our jihad.

In these short days, I have listened to the fear, anger and outrage of my beautiful friends in Israel: bankers, entrepreneurs, commanders. But in this moment, they are suddenly made in their grief, three fragile Jewish Israeli savtas. This war finds deep in me a sorrow, a rawness, a pain which I have not previously known. Israel’s jihad is now personal to me unlike any other.

I am not Israeli. I am American. I am British. I am Muslim. I am Pakistani, but deep inside in these short days, my flesh and blood have become Israeli and ache for my brethren who wear the olive green uniform and leave my savta-sisters to fight my jihad.

Not even a day after the barbarity, a 35-year-old member of the IDF Engineering Corps bid farewell to his mother, wife and children and is already gone to defend and to fight we don’t know where, we don’t know how, and when he calls his mom he encourages her not to worry. I charge her to not look into the abyss.

In Ramat Gan, sun-worn and 70, the retired IDF commander has already signed up as a volunteer reservist. For some time it has been hard for us to talk on the phone because of his hearing, but he knows the operational theory of the Quran and understands the minds of Hamas and Hezbollah, his Arabic is better than almost anyone I know. His knowledge of the Quran outstrips nearly every Muslim I have known. With his wife, his family has served Israel from its genesis, with 62 years of IDF military service and counting.

As their jihad against Islamism is lifelong, so too must be mine.

The veil is fully off.

A bottomless ravine of hate

Hamas is radical revolutionary jihadism fueled by Islamist ideology. Hamas is ISIS. I repeat to millions of viewers, there is no such thing as a Hamas militia or a Hamas military wing – their entire ideology is nihilist. Every action is war-making. There is only terror. There is only violence on a hollow scaffolding of ideology; nihilism on a bed of dehumanization; Islamism as totalitarianism.

Islamism as totalitarianism has never been more distilled. Even ISIS cavorted with a sinew of self – a ‘caliph’ figure, a territorial caliphate of monstrosities; a smattering of manifestos; a grotesque effigy of a fictitious past transmogrified into a heinous reality.

Today, six years after the war with ISIS ended, we see ISIS as it was intended to be, the seed of a new dimension of collective terror that has grown and rooted itself deeply in the Middle East.

Hamas in Gaza has shown us the true horror of these Islamists. In the killing of women, children, the elderly, the disabled, babies; we see you clearly. We do not flinch as we see you. We look into the horror of your hate. There is no self; only void. We peer through their gaze to see what they see.

There is no self, neither us nor them; neither Israeli nor Palestinian. There is only void and death; there is no faith for the Islamist; there is only killing, mutilation, rape, desecration, abduction and objectification. There is no Islam that was revealed to us, there is only an imposter totalitarian façade. Like the aging narcissist, the visage is crumbling away to reveal the deep cold lakes of self-hate within; to reveal that, for Hamas, there is no Palestine for the Palestinians, there is no statehood, no sovereignty, no future, no prosperity, no peace. There is only killing, maiming, violations, debasing. The only abundance is the swelling rivers of accumulated delight in the suffering of the Jew, and all who befriend her; deep within the hollow there lies a void where once a human soul made its home, leaving only an excavated imprint – a bottomless ravine of hate.

There is no Muslim in Hamas, only the Islamist, no Islam, only Islamism: all-consuming, never sated; only the hollowness left by the erasure of self in pursuit of erasing the Jew; the dehumanization of Muslims rendered Islamists, believers rendered husks. As they dehumanize the Jew they dehumanize themselves, a loss of life force in pursuit of the erasure of Jewish life; all this nihilism to make way for the fascist apocalypse; the erasure of all morality to commit genocide. Hamas has become the new Nazi. It was there all along, but we didn’t want to see it.

Ten years lends clarity. Wisdom. And hope never leaves the soul, but it is time I admitted the enemy will never be appeased. The IDF is waging jihad not only to defend the State of Israel from Islamist annihilation; the IDF is waging my jihad. The tanks and the gunships and the trajectories of the Iron Dome, the footsoldiers and the pilots in the air and the naval divisions in the sea; they wage not only my jihad as a Muslim who fights Islamism; they fight the jihad of the Yazidi; they fight the jihad of the Kurd; they fight the jihad of the Uighur; they fight the jihad of little red riding hoods in Malala’s Mingora; they fight the jihad of the Sufi; the Hazara; the Ismaeli; the Bahai; the Rohingya; they fight for the child soldiers snatched back from the Taliban; they fight for the child soldiers reclaimed from ISIS; they fight for the girls abducted by Boko Haram; they fight for us all.

Abu Hurairah has recounted that the Prophet Mohammed Messenger of God has said of his pious believers in the face of hostility: “When I love him, I become his hearing with which he hears; his seeing with which he sees; his hand with which he strikes; and his leg with which he walks; and if he asks something of me; I give him; and if he asks of me my refuge, I protect him”

As the IDF prepares to turn Hamas into ashes; to defend all human life from these fascist nihilists who desecrate God’s creatures, God’s earth, who tear apart God’s vicegerent, God’s worshippers, God’s children, God’s infants, know that Hamas is not meeting merely the IDF in battle, Hamas is making war with God himself for beside all the IDF, stands God.

I have become you

While you are six thousand miles from where I am now, to every man and woman in Israel’s defense forces, I am both with you and I have become you. You are fighting my jihad. You are fighting for the Muslim, for the Christian for the Catholic for the Protestant, for the Druze, for the fellow Jew, for the Bahai, for the Hindu, for the Buddhist; for the Yazidi; for the Uighur; for the Rohingya; for the agnostic; for the atheist; you fight for us all. But you do not fight alone

Be not afraid, for you go not alone. The IDF goes with God. Alongside you, beside you and above you, and beneath you, within you and surrounding you My LORD is your Lord, He is your Shade, your Shelter, your Commander. You are invincible because so is Our Lord. You are victorious for He will triumph. Never forget: In slaying forty babes even perhaps as – God help us – their mothers looked on, Hamas has brought God’s war against themselves, Hamas that showed unfathomable cruelty to pious souls even in their cradles.

Tonight Hamas does not know its war is with God. But soon it will be revealed.

You, my IDF soul soldiers, go not alone into the tunnels, into the war, into the labyrinth, into the dark. You go with God, he goes with you, you go into His light and with His strength. He will shepherd you back to Peace in ways we cannot know, vanquishing Islamism we, none of us, know how.

And when it is done, Hamas will be none, and we will be one.

The announcement of political activist Linda Sarsour’s appointment as Bernie Sanders’ 2020 campaign surrogate comes as little surprise to those who understand the enamorment of some on the political left with Islamism. The tendency for some on the left to assign the prestige of select victimhood as the pinnacle of American culture, allows them to be duped into believing Islamism is de facto Islam and not its appalling imposter.

In reality, Islamism’s right-wing supremacist totalitarian origins are only masked as a minority religion. Add to this the ill-disguised but virulent anti-Semitism that passes for anti-Zionism among some on the left, and American democracy has now mainlined Islamism into a presidential election.

The irony here is that Sarsour recently announced, “I would be so proud to win, but also to make history and elect the first Jewish American president this country has ever seen,” even as she has long endorsed an anti-Zionism consistent with Islamist sympathies.

Sarsour, the Muslim American of Palestinian origin, co-chair of the 2017 and 2019 Women’s March and former executive director of the Arab American Association, openly embodies contemporary anti-Zionist sympathies typical of an Islamist ideologue.

Her actions have long demonized Jewish Zionists and been perceived widely as anti-Semitism both in the Jewish community and beyond, including among those who work to combat contemporary anti-Semitism.

Sanders’ embrace of Sarsour means that the future of the Democrats as the progressive left envisions it will be defined through the lens of racist anti-Zionism.

The Sarsour-Sanders collaboration typifies a well described Islamo-Left alliance which has infected the British Labor Party, or Corbynism, and has taken a stronghold within the American Democratic party. But less recognized is the role of a rising radical feminism and intersectionality as an effective vector of virulent anti-Semitism

Adding this intersectionality and fourth wave radical feminism to a major campaign makes an Islamist sympathizer almost unassailable. This is why Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Rep Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and Sarsour have been so successful at deflecting their significant critics. Islamism’s duplicity, the false construct of Islamophobia, and today’s lionization of all victims — other than those who are Jewish — provide these firebrands with a Teflon shield from political and judicial consequences.

Islamism, masquerading as the great monotheism of Islam, is an artificial manmade 20th Century totalitarian ideology that steals the language and metaphors of Islam but holds at its core a cosmic enmity with all matters pertaining to Jewry, Judaism, Zionism and Israel.

Islamists claim to be a besieged religious minority. Claiming the freedoms afforded to religions in secular liberal democracies, Islamism is shielded from political and intellectual scrutiny.

Those lacking knowledge of Islam — and Islamism — under the prevailing climate of political correctness are unable to challenge any assertions made in the name of Islamism or by Islamist sympathizers.

Sarsour, who wears a hijab, covers all the desirable bases of an intersectional icon. She is a woman of color, daughter of immigrants, and a Muslim (which in the U.S. is a minority religion even as it is the world’s second largest faith.)

I am also a woman of color, daughter of immigrants and a Muslim. But unlike me, Sarsour is an unapologetic anti-Zionist embracing the potently anti-Semitic BDS movement.

Academics have described intersectionality as the “sum of all virtue signals” and a “quasi-religious” anthropological phenomenon. Gabriel Brahm, Director of Michigan’s Center for Academic and Intellectual Freedom, identifies intersectionality as uniquely hostile to Jews.

While intersectionality’s origins were humane and based on a narrow legal decision to protect all factory workers, today’s intersectionality as conceived by radical feminism has become a conduit for virulent anti-Semitism and anti-Israeli sentiment.

Unsurprisingly this radical feminism has become the most valuable asset in the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions movement as intersectionality adopts the value of the symbolic victim narrative applied to as many groups as possible.

As the co-founder of the Women’s March in 2017, Sarsour claimed Zionism and feminism could not coexist. The Women’s March thus excluded Jewish Zionist feminists.

“It just doesn’t make any sense for someone to say, ‘Is there room for people who support the state of Israel and do not criticize it in the movement?’ There can’t be in feminism,” Sarsour said. “You either stand up for the rights of all women, including Palestinians, or none. There’s just no way around it.”

In this era of Democrats struggling with anti-Semitism in their ranks, the Sanders’ campaign’s ill-advised choice purportedly in the spirit of inclusivity indicates that affiliation with Islamist anti-Zionism and thereby anti-Semitism has become a badge of belonging among the progressive left. In their eagerness to seem inclusive they are embracing patently Islamist anti-Semitism.

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Qanta A. Ahmed, Visiting Fellow, The Independent Women’s Forum. Member USC Shoah Foundation, Member, Council on Foreign Relations. Follow her on Twitter.