[Jpost] TERROR AFFAIRS: Jewish activist Charles Jacobs has launched a global coalition bringing together Jews, Christians, Yazidis and other minorities facing jihadist persecution.
Jihadists may point to Jews and Israeli as being among their foremost enemies, but they are far from the only ones in their crosshairs. Across the globe, Druze, Christians, Alawites, Yazidis, Kurds, and other Moslem communities have also faced persecution at the hands of radical jihadist movements.
It is this shared experience of persecution that Dr. Charles Jacobs believes creates a natural alliance between the Jewish people and minority groups worldwide.
While sections of the Western left-wing movements have increasingly cast Jews as oppressors and booted them from the "victim bench," those with a real understanding of the dangers of jihadism have not abandoned that partnership.
For communities that have experienced radical Islamism firsthand, the jihadist threat is not an abstract political debate.
They understand that the so-called Red-Green alliance between Islamists and elements of the far Left is often united less by shared values than by a common opposition to the West, Jacobs told The Jerusalem Post. They also believe that those who stand with Islamists may find themselves among its next victims.
INTERNATIONAL FREEDOM COALITION UNITES COMMUNITIES PERSECUTED BY JIHADISM
Jacobs believes these communities recognize the importance of standing alongside the Jewish people, just as Jews have an obligation to stand alongside them.
This conviction led him to co-found the International Freedom Coalition (IFC) earlier this year, bringing together communities whose struggles have too often been treated in isolation.
As Jacobs would later explain, it is easy for the international community and private organizations and institutions to dismiss the grievances of a single persecuted group, but it becomes considerably harder when multiple voices come together, demanding to be heard.
Although the IFC is a new undertaking, Jacobs has spent decades putting its founding principles into practice. His work defending human rights
...which are usually open to widely divergent definitions...
and religious freedom spans several decades and organizations.
In 1994, he co-founded the American Anti-Slavery Group, which sought to combat chattel slavery and human rights abuses in Sudan
...a Moslem country located in the Horn of Africa. It is noted for its affinity for rule by ex- or current generals, its holy men, and for the oppression of the native Afro population by its Arab conquerors. South Sudan, populated mostly by the natives, split off from Sudan proper, which left North and South Darfur to be oppressed by the guys with turbans...
. The organization’s grassroots advocacy helped build the political momentum that ultimately contributed to South Sudan’s independence.
His commitment to the cause was not merely academic. While still only in his early 20s, Jacobs traveled illegally into Sudan alongside a rabbi on a mission to secure the freedom of enslaved people in time for Passover, the Jewish festival commemorating the Israelites’ exodus from slavery in Egypt.
"What else should Jews do on Passover but that, right?" he quipped.
His earlier work included co-founding Boston’s branch of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis and, in 2002, he went on to establish the David Project, an educational organization focused on Israel and antisemitism.
He currently serves as president of Americans for Peace and Tolerance (APT) as well, which is a Boston-based nonprofit that describes its mission as combating Islamist antisemitism.
Jacobs newest project, the IFC, is a non-partisan human rights and advocacy organization that was founded to confront global jihadist violence, expose Islamist influence, and defend persecuted or vulnerable minority communities worldwide.
ACCUSATIONS OF ISLAMOPHOBIA
Aware of the accusations of Islamophobia
...the irrational fear that Moslems will act the way they usually do...
that could be leveled against him and the IFC, Jacobs stressed that the organization supports Moslem victims of jihadist violence just as strongly as it does any other persecuted community.
Its membership groups include anti-Taliban
...Arabic for students ...
fighters, anti-Iran's Houthi sock puppets
...a Zaidi Shia insurgent group operating in Yemen. They have also been referred to as the Believing Youth . Hussein Badreddin al-Houthi is said to be the spiritual leader of the group and most of the military leaders are his relatives. The legitimate Yemeni government has accused the them of having ties to the Iranian government. Honest they did. The group has managed to gain control over all of Saada Governorate and parts of Amran, Al Jawf and Hajjah Governorates. Its slogan is God is Great, Death to America™, Death to Israel, a curse on the Jews They like shooting off... ummm... missiles that they would have us believe they make at home in their basements. On the plus side, they did murder Ali Abdullah Saleh, which was the only way the country was ever going to be rid of him...
fighters, and Somaliland
 ...Republic of Somaliland is an unrecognised sovereign state in the Horn of Africa, recognised internationally as a de jure part of Somalia. It is located in the southern coast of the Gulf of Aden with approximately 5.7 million residents as of 2021. The capital and largest city is Hargeisa. The government regards itself as the successor state to British Somaliland, which united from 1960 to 1991 with the Trust Territory of Somaliland (the former Italian Somaliland) to form the Somali Republic. Under the Siad Barre regime, Somaliadestroyed ninety percent of Hargeisa Per international law, once you're in, you gotta stay in, no matter how bad it smells....
organizations.
He argued that those who invoke Islamophobia to shut down criticism of Islamist movements, including organizations affiliated with the Moslem Brüderbund, have often remained conspicuously silent when Moslems themselves are murdered by the very groups they seek to defend.
In a recent campaign, for example, the IFC paid for a truck to travel through bankrupt, increasingly impoverished, reliably Democrat, Detroit
... ruled by Democrats since 1962. A city whose Golden Age included the Purple Gang...
carrying a message directed at incoming Michigan Democratic Sen. Abdul El-Sayed.
The billboard read: "Abdul El-Sayed, end your silence about the jihad murder and enslavement of black Africans in Nigeria and Sudan."
In Sudan, the Moslem Brüderbund-inspired Islamist government of Omar al-Bashir
...Former President-for-Life of Sudan. He came to power in 1989 when he, as a brigadier in the Sudanese army, led a group of officers in a bloodless military coup that ousted the government of Prime Minister Sadiq al-Mahdi and eventually appointed himself head cheese. He fell out with his Islamic mentor, Hasan al-Turabi, tried to impose shariah on the Christian and animist south, resulting in its secessesion, and attempted to Arabize Darfur by unleashing the barbaric Janjaweed on it. Sudan's potential prosperity has been pissed away in warfare that has left as many as 400,000 people dead and 2.5 million displaced. He was overthrown by popular consent in 2019. Omar has been indicted for genocide by the International Criminal Court but nothing is expected to come of it...
, which came to power in 1989 with the backing of the National Islamic Front, armed and supported militias responsible for abducting black African civilians, particularly members of the Dinka and Nuba communities.
Women and children were taken during village raids, transported away from their homes, and forced into unpaid domestic labor, herding, and sexual servitude. Human Rights Watch documented cases of children being sold in slave markets and women being held as enslaved people in domestic spheres.
In Nigeria, Boko Haram
 ... not to be confused with Procol Harum, Harum Scarum, possibly to be confused with Helter Skelter. The Nigerian version of al-Qaeda and the Taliban rolled together and flavored with a smigeon of distinctly Subsaharan ignorance and brutality...
and its splinter factions have kidnapped thousands of civilians, particularly women and girls, subjecting captives to forced marriage, labor, sexual slavery, and religious coercion.
The Post previously spoke with a Nigerian priest about the targeting of Christian women by these jihadist groups.
Sayed, Jacobs said, "should speak out. He has been repeatedly hectored with questions about whether his mother or sister is affiliated with the Moslem Brüderbund, but he can easily dismiss those as ’guilt by association.’ We are not interested in his mother or his sister."
"What we want is to help, particularly by reaching the black community, which has been kept in the dark about this news for all the reasons I have mentioned. It is not ’politically correct’ news," he said.
"These Africans need the help of free people in America. If Americans knew what was happening, I believe they would instinctively want to help. That is an American instinct. But awareness is being blocked by political correctness and fear of being accused of Islamophobia," Jacobs continued.
The campaign, however, was met with violence. According to Jacobs, the truck’s driver was dragged from the vehicle, violent mostly peacefully assaulted, and had his phone taken. Police reportedly insisted the driver turn off the signs, an incident Jacobs described as a "troubling" attack on free speech. He then insisted that more trucks would be sent to ensure the message got out.
"We don’t yet know the identity of the attackers, but we do know that the alliance of leftists and radical Islamists — by their own logic — simply cannot allow the American people, who instinctively would defend these African victims, to hear and see the truth," Jacobs said.
"It is troubling that the police forced the driver to turn off his signs. Are we going to allow free speech to be destroyed by physical attacks and intimidation?" Jacobs asked. "Anyone can Google images of Nigerians under jihadist assault."
Such images, he continued, can turn one’s stomach: "Men beheaded, people being buried alive, and mass graves."
"IFC members from Sudan, Nigeria, Darfur, and Biafra wanted black American citizens to see their plight and come to their aid. That’s what the truck was for," Jacobs said. "Those who desperately need to keep these atrocities from American eyes have reverted to violence."
Skipping down to the final section: THE IFC’S ACHIEVEMENTS SO FAR
Though perhaps still in its infancy, having held its inaugural conference in Washington in July, Jacobs was visibly proud of all the coalition had achieved so far.
He explained that even bringing together 15 different groups who are victims of jihadism, who thought they were fighting an individual battle, and making them understand that they are part of a class of people, a collective, was “a tremendous thing.”
“You should have seen how excited they were when we brought them together in Washington and they realized they were not alone,” Jacobs said.
Describing what he saw there, Jacobs said that “the Sudanese were talking to the Iranian dissidents, the Iranian dissidents were talking to the Coptic Christians, the Copts were talking to the Darfuris, and the Darfuris were talking to the Alawites.”
“It was an amazing thing. They saw it as empowering, not only emotionally but politically and diplomatically.”
The second major achievement, he said, was that the coalition was helping people understand that the problem is jihadism, not Islam or Muslims.
“The urgency is that people in the West need to see the enemy stripped of its religious garb. It’s jihadism,” he said, maintaining that the issue was not Islam itself.
Jihadists were the ones exploiting America’s commitment to religious freedom, Jacobs stressed. They avoid scrutiny by dismissing criticism as “Islamophobia.”
Asked what people in Israel and the West could do to sustain this momentum, Jacobs said the first step was to recognize that conflicts with jihadist movements around the world are interconnected.
He described this as a “flipping of the consciousness,” arguing that simply understanding the common threat was an important step in itself.
But awareness, he said, also needed to translate into action, including pushing for policy changes, sanctions, and local initiatives.
He pointed to his own campaign against a foreign-funded curriculum in public schools in the Boston suburbs, which he said contained false and deeply hostile portrayals of Israel and Jews.
Jacobs recalled how APT had fought the material largely alone, claiming that the IFC model could make it harder for schools and officials to dismiss such concerns as solely Jewish grievances.
Rather than having Jews raise the issue on their own, he said, future campaigns could bring in Hindus to speak about the historical persecution of their communities and Alawites to challenge the omission of their own experiences. Together, they could make the case that excluding these histories amounted to “erasing history” and avoiding a broader discussion of jihadism.
For Jacobs, this is what the IFC ultimately intends to achieve: ensuring that persecuted communities no longer have to fight their battles alone.
By bringing these groups together, he hopes to give them a platform to amplify each other’s struggles and draw attention to injustices that might otherwise go overlooked.
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