Omar Suleiman, the founder of the pro-Caliphate Yaqeen Institute headquartered in Irving, Texas, is over the moon. Soon after Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs designated Suleiman as one of the top 10 antisemitic influencers in the United States for 2025, the glamourous imam with a perfectly sculpted beard and a good makeup artist—or maybe just a good online video filter—took to YouTube to celebrate. After admiring his presence on the list of antisemites displayed on his iPhone, Suleiman wearing a map of “Palestine” (which of course erases Israel) on his lapel, gazes into the camera to declare, “When I sent this to my father, he responded with, ‘Congrats, you made the honor list.’”
The Zionist project is entirely built on Palestinian extermination.
Suleiman—who has more than 500,000 followers on YouTube and a million followers on X—then suggests in the April 15, 2026, video that the designation will only draw more attention to the accusations of “genocide” that he and others like him have leveled at Israel in the aftermath of the October 7 massacre that resulted in the deaths of 1,200 Israelis in 2023.
“Israel, we’re not afraid of you,” he says defiantly. “And I want you to know, whoever compiled this report, that we’re going to do everything that we possibly can do to make sure that we’re on your 2026 report and your 2027 report or however long you continue to traffic in this nonsense.”
Suleiman’s gloating demonstrates that the October 7 massacre that cost 1,200 Israelis their lives serves not a source of shame or embarrassment for Suleiman and his allies at the Yaqeen Institute, but as an opportunity to incite hostility toward Israel and its supporters in the West and to advance the establishment of a worldwide ummah or caliphate. Instead of condemning Iran and its proxies—Hamas and Hezbollah—for starting a fruitless war that has cost thousands of Muslims and Arabs their lives since the end of 2023, Suleiman tells his supporters that it is Zionism—not Islamist Jew-hatred—that is costing people their lives in the Middle East. “The Zionist project is entirely built on Palestinian extermination,” he declared on X in April 2025.
On this score, Suleiman follows in the footsteps of Father Charles E. Coughlin, the Canadian-born Catholic priest from Royal Oak, Michigan, who used the nascent technology of broadcast radio to demonize Jews in the 1930s. In his radio address and writings, Coughlin portrayed atheist Jews as the spear tip of Communism’s war against Christianity; these days, Suleiman portrays atheist Zionists as the spear tip of Western civilization’s war against Muslims.
“They don’t even believe in God, but somehow they believe that the God that they don’t believe in promised them that land,” Suleiman declared in a video posted on his personal YouTube channel in July 2025.
Understanding the similarities between Coughlin’s and Suleiman’s antisemitism reveals how both men weaponized religious narratives and advanced media technology to demonize an entire community of people all to generate a community of followers—and alienate these followers from their fellow Americans. Just as Coughlin’s hateful agenda was used to enlist angry, isolationist Christians into the Christian Front, a militant organization that planned to overthrow the U.S. government in the 1930s and 40s, Suleiman’s rhetoric serves to enlist disaffected Muslims living in the United States into Yaqeen’s pro-Caliphate agenda.
The Arc of Coughlin’s Bigotry
During his time in the limelight, Coughlin deployed a number of rhetorical strategies to incite hostility toward Jews. These strategies included invoking the Passion narrative to portray Jews as guilty of cosmic sin and as singularly responsible for the deaths of Christians in Communist Russia, Spain, and Mexico.
Of course, Coughlin relied on the trope of Jews as evil money lenders, railing against the Rothschilds, whom he demonized for making a fortune in the capital markets in the aftermath of Napoleon’s defeat in the 1800s.
In a 1932 radio address titled “God of Gold,” Coughlin spoke of Nathan Rothschild whom he described as “a little money changer who already had made a considerable fortune by loaning gold to princes and to dukes for the purposes of carrying on their petty wars.” According to Coughlin, this little money changer made an even bigger fortune by spreading false rumors of a British defeat at Waterloo before purchasing English bonds that “were selling for almost nothing” as a result of these rumors. Through this financial chicanery, “The Rothschilds won the battle of the world!” and in so doing, rendered every human being “victims of a system of international finance.” As it turns out, it was a lie—but that didn’t stop Coughlin from using it to make a point.
In another sermon against the evils of international finance, Coughlin reported that Jesus,“who came into the world as the Prince of Truth courageous enough to confront the Pharisees and call them whited sepulchers,” was put to death because “’He stirreth up the people’ by preaching a Gospel of brotherhood and justice and charity to them.” Jesus, Coughlin declared, “left the world knowing that thirty pieces of silver were clinking in the purses of the … Pharisees ready to be used in buying paupers’ graves for the oppressed people of Jerusalem.”
After this setup, Coughlin stated, “We hope that the modern Pharisees who have erected a cruel system of financial socialism will at least, have generosity enough to purchase paupers’ graves for the brothers of Christ whom their policies are murdering.” With rhetoric like this, Coughlin portrayed the malefactors as enemies of humanity. As will be detailed below, Suleiman does the same thing, using the Christian crucifixion narrative to portray Jews as the enemies of the ummah.
In sum, if anyone did something evil in the modern world, Coughlin cast that person as in league with the Jews responsible for the death of Christ. In a letter to the men who kidnapped the son of Charles Lindbergh in the early 1930s, Coughlin wrote, “Like another Judas you have taken and crucified him and yourself with Him.”
Father Charles Coughlin, described Kristallnacht—the anti-Jewish pogrom during which Nazi mobs destroyed synagogues, vandalized Jewish businesses, murdered Jews, and terrorized Jewish communities across Germany—as a “defense mechanism” against “Judeo-Bolshevism.” Omar Suleiman and his allies have portrayed the October 7 massacre as an act of defense against Zionism.
Coughlin cemented himself in the annals of American antisemitism in a now notorious radio address broadcast on November 20, 1938, just 10 days after Kristallnacht, an antisemitic attack that resulted in the deaths of 100 German Jews, the destruction of 1,400 synagogues and the incarceration of 30,000 Jewish men. In his November 20, 1938, speech, Coughlin downplayed Nazi violence against Jews even as he condemned it, declaring that while Germany had expelled its foreign-born Jewish population prior to Kristallnacht, it had left its native-born Jews alone. Yes, the country had done bad things to foreign-born Jews, Coughlin admitted, but up until Kristallnacht,“official Germany has not yet resorted to the guillotine, to the machine gun, to the kerosene drenched pit as instruments of reprisal against Jew or gentile.”
Throughout his speech Coughlin voiced formal condemnation of the violence and sympathy for its victims, declaring, “I add my voice in protest against persecution.” But Coughlin then complained about how much attention the Jewish victims of Kristallnacht received for suffering that, he argued, paled in comparison to the suffering endured by Christians who died at the hands of Jewish-led communists. “[N]o story of persecution was ever told half so well, one-half so thoroughly” as the $400 million dollar fine imposed on German Jews for the death of the German diplomat whose assassination served as the pretext for the pogrom that began the Holocaust, Coughlin declared.
For Coughlin, “Kristallnacht was an opportunity to talk about the real victims”—namely Roman Catholics who had been murdered by “Jewish communists” in Russia, Spain and Mexico, reports Charles R. Gallagher, author of Nazis of Copley Square: The Forgotten Story of the Christian Front (Harvard University Press, 2021).
Coughlin’s narrative about the evils of “Judeo-Bolshevism” was rooted in Catholic theology, Gallagher reports. Coughlin’s followers bought into the narrative that just as Jews “had killed the earthly body of Christ” in first century Jerusalem, they were “under the guise of Bolshevism … persisting in that most horrifying sin by killing Christ’s Mystical Body” in the modern era.
The Impact
Catholics and others who bought into this rhetoric started a militant organization called the Christian Front that prepared to engage in acts of violence against the U.S. government until the FBI arrested its members and charged them with sedition in the early 1940s. They were found not guilty, but the movement largely fell apart before their story was swept under the rug by Catholic and political leaders in the decades since. It remains a shameful episode in the history of Catholicism in America.
Suleiman Follows Coughlin’s Footsteps
What does any of this have to do with Suleiman? A lot, because simply put, Suleiman uses similar rhetoric to Coughlin’s—with similar effect. For example, instead of invoking the Rothschilds as a symbol of sneaky Jewish power, Suleiman repeatedly invokes the Epstein files as proof of Israeli/Mossad control over world leaders through blackmail and pedophilia, tying it directly to support for Israel and the “genocide” in Gaza. This functions as a modern analogue to the Rothschild story.
For example, on January 31, 2026, Suleiman declared on X, “The most surprising thing about the Epstein files is how unsurprising they really are. … The question for all of us is do we continue to function normally now that it’s proven the world is being managed by a bunch of compromised pedophiles caught in the web of an Israeli Mossad agent?” On February 4, 2026, Suleiman took to X to declare, “Your political elites are being exposed as pedophiles? $4 billion to Israel, stat.”
A few weeks later, Suleiman took to X and Facebook to describe U.S. policy makers as “war-mongering pedophiles” perpetrating a genocide in Gaza. In early 2026, Suleiman attacked Miriam Adelson on Facebook, declaring that she “oozes evil.” When Coughlin demonized Nathan Rothschild, at least his target was deceased; here, Suleiman incites hostility toward a living, breathing human being.
It Gets Worse
As awful as his incitement against Miriam Adelson is, Suleiman’s rhetoric against the Jewish state goes much further. In a speech streamed on March 3, 2026, titled, “Why The Epstein Empire Attacked Iran,” Suleiman explicitly tied the Epstein files scandal to the moral corruption of the “elites” of Bani Isra’il (the Children of Israel) as described in the Quran. He asked his audience to imagine what the Epstein files would have looked like in the time of the Jewish tribes, complete with political scandals, sexual exploitation of captives, and grotesque moral decay among their ruling class. Citing Surah Al-Isra, the 17th chapter of the Quran, Suleiman explained that when Allah wants to destroy a people, He allows their elites to sink into complete moral corruption, bizarre lusts, and domination by any means necessary—signaling that divine punishment is near.
He then drew a direct line from ancient Bani Isra’il to today’s “Zionists,” portraying the Epstein revelations and the “war on Iran” as desperate distractions by a satanic, blackmail-compromised elite whose exposure proves their impending doom.
This is classic Coughlin-style rhetoric updated for the 21st century. Just as Coughlin invoked the crucifixion and “Judeo-Bolshevism” to cast Jews as cosmic enemies whose corruption justified Christian suffering, Suleiman weaponizes Islamic narratives about the sins and destruction of Bani Isra’il to demonize the modern State of Israel. He explicitly states that “everything the Zionists accuse the Palestinians of, they did,” framing Zionists as the latest incarnation of a historically treacherous, morally rotten people whose scandals and wars of distraction reveal their true nature. In doing so, Suleiman reassures his followers that Israel’s end is divinely ordained while hardening Muslim hostility toward the Jewish state and its supporters.
Crucifixion Narrative
Suleiman used a similar tactic in a sermon he delivered on April 3, 2026, in which he invoked the Quranic account of the crucifixion (which Muslims deny) to portray Israel and its supporters as arrogant, spiritually blind enemies doomed to fail. Referencing Quran 4:157—“They neither killed him [Jesus] nor crucified him, but it was made to appear so to them”—Suleiman described how the opponents of Jesus projected triumph and certainty after what they believed was his death, even while internally doubting and toiling in assumptions. He then explicitly mapped this ancient narrative onto the present day, criticizing leaders who boast “We just keep on winning. We win. We win. We win,” a clear reference to Israeli and pro-Israel rhetoric amid the conflicts in Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran. Suleiman reassured his audience that such projected victories are illusions born of insecurity, just as the enemies of Jesus celebrated a false triumph while divine reality proved otherwise.
This rhetorical move serves the same purpose as Coughlin’s use of the crucifixion narrative: it casts the targeted group—in Suleiman’s case, “Zionists”—as cosmic enemies of God’s righteous servants whose apparent worldly success is actually a sign of delusion and impending divine destruction. By framing Israel’s military and political actions as hollow projections of power built on moral corruption and falsehood, Suleiman hardens his followers’ hearts against any reconciliation with the Jewish state and reinforces the belief that history is repeating itself, with the ummah ultimately victorious on Allah’s timeline.
Suleiman’s approach closely mirrors that of Naim Ateek, the Palestinian Anglican priest and founder of the Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center. As documented elsewhere, Ateek has repeatedly cast Palestinians as the “crucified Jesus” of today and Israel as the modern equivalent of the evil political and religious powers that killed Christ — most notoriously in his 2001 Easter message describing the West Bank and Gaza as “one huge Golgotha” where “the Israeli government crucifixion system is operating daily.”
Like Ateek, Suleiman weaponizes the crucifixion story (even while denying its historicity in Islamic terms) not for theological reflection, but as a political cudgel to delegitimize Israel and portray its self-defense as cosmic evil. Both men repurpose Christian (or pseudo-Christian) imagery to frame contemporary conflict in stark moral terms: righteous victims versus irredeemably oppressive powers, thereby hardening opposition to the Jewish state among their respective audiences.
Uses Gaza to Prove Zionists, Americans are Genocidal
Instead of portraying Jews as “Judeo-Bolshevists,” responsible for the death of Christians, Suleiman accuses evil Zionists and their American supporters as promoting a “genocide” in Gaza and facilitating a “spiritual death” of the U.S. republic. He leveled these charges in a September 2024 YouTube video in which he described the tragic deaths of civilians in Gaza as “the first genocide in history where its victims are broadcasting their own destruction in real time,” adding that a “healthy conscience cannot ignore the dead bodies of tens of thousands of Palestinian children.”
Suleiman then pivots to alleged war crimes perpetrated by U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, accusing the U.S. of attempting to “impose its will on the Muslim world”—an odd accusation coming from an imam who has founded an institution that promotes the expansion of an Islamic Caliphate into Western democracies. (More about that below). Predictably, during his talk, Suleiman invokes the destruction of hospitals, schools, and mosques as evidence of a “genocide” without, of course, acknowledging that Hamas has for decades used these buildings as staging grounds for rocket attacks against Israeli civilians as part of its “human shields” strategy.
In his indictment of Israel and U.S. support, Suleiman fails to come to grips with the dilemma Israel faces as described by Thane Rosenbaum in his book, Beyond Proportionality: Israel’s Just War in Gaza (Wicked Son, 2025): “No one wants to see dead Palestinian children; but to protect them Israel would have to choose not to defend its own children.” By portraying Israel’s self-defense as “genocide,” Suleiman recasts the October 7 massacre as an act of self-defense against “Zionism,” much as Coughlin portrayed Kristallnacht as a “defense mechanism” against “Judeo-Bolshevism.”
By falsely accusing Israel of genocide, he renders the prospect of peace with Israel inconceivable, declaring in a January 7, 2026 post on Facebook that “Normalizing with the genocidal apartheid state of Israel is complicity, not diplomacy.” He goes on to condemn “every country, Arab or non-Arab, Muslim or non-Muslim,” intent on pursuing peace with the Jewish state.
Calls for Defense of the Ummah
In a brief video posted on Facebook in 2025, Suleiman mimics the manner in which Coughlin used the suffering of Christians in Russia, Spain, and Mexico to unify his Christian supporters in their hostility toward Jews. Suleiman does this by condemning Muslims in the West who, judging from the context, seem to pay more attention to their social media accounts than to the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza, whom he presents as representatives of the Muslim ummah as a whole—just as Coughlin invoked Christians in Russia, Spain, and Mexico as representatives of the “Mystical Body of Christ.”
“This is what my ummah has time for?” Suleiman asks from the perspective of Palestinians in Gaza. “This is what you’re doing? This is what you’re occupying yourself with? We’re dying over here! Holding down the fort—literally—for the entire ummah in this small strip of Gaza! That’s what you’re occupying yourself with oh Muslims? … You think Allah will be pleased with that?”
October 7 as a ‘Catalyst’
For Omar Suleiman and his allies at the Ummatics Institute, the October 7 massacre during which Hamas and its supporters murdered civilians, kidnapped families, burned homes, and desecrated Israeli communities was not a source of shame, but an opportunity to inflame hostility toward Israel, rally the ummah against Zionism, and advance a broader Islamist political agenda.
(Shutterstock)
The outrage over Suleiman’s antisemitic commentary distracts attention from his ultimate agenda: the reconstitution of the global Muslim ummah as the primary political, spiritual, and civilizational identity for Muslims worldwide—a project that explicitly seeks to supersede the modern nation-state system, which he and his allies describe as a colonial imposition designed to divide and weaken Muslims.
In an Ummatics Institute panel that took place in February 2024, speakers framed Gaza not as a humanitarian tragedy but as a historic catalyst and “reminder” that can awaken Muslims from a “century of humiliation,” reject the Abraham Accords and any normalization with Israel, and lay the groundwork for a new world order rooted in Islamic values of justice, equity, and solidarity. Speakers advocated for economic, cultural, intellectual, and “discursive” integration among Muslim societies as stepping stones toward this revived ummah, while maintaining that true leadership and clarity must come from prophetic example rather than Western liberalism or secular nationalism.
Astonishingly enough, Suleiman’s rhetoric was restrained compared to that of the panel’s moderator Ovamir Anjum, founder of the Ummatics Institute, which is closely allied with the Yaqeen Institute.
Still, Suleiman argued that the war started by Hamas on October 7 had a salutary effect of making Muslims feel like “outsiders” in the non-Muslim countries they live in. In other words, Suleiman is glad that the October 7 massacre has alienated Muslims and non-Muslims from each other in an increasingly dangerous world. In sum, Suleiman has sided with Iran and its proxies, Hamas and Hezbollah, which seek to keep the Middle East mired in conflict for another generation and works to enlist Muslims outside the Middle East into that conflict.
Like Coughlin’s efforts to mobilize Christians into the militant Christian Front against perceived Jewish-Bolshevik threats, Suleiman seeks to channel Muslim anger and despair over Gaza into a broader Islamist project: delegitimizing Israel’s existence, undermining U.S.-backed regional order, and ultimately replacing fragmented Muslim nation-states with a restored ummah capable of challenging Western dominance. And he’s doing this in the safety of a Western democracy that affords him the freedom to do so. In the minds of Suleiman and his allies, the October 7 massacre and subsequent war are not a catastrophe to be mourned but an opportunity to accelerate this transformation.
Conclusion
In sum, virtually every one of Coughlin’s rhetorical strategies against the Jews has its analogue in Suleiman’s rhetoric. Moreover, their respective goals are similar. Coughlin promoted a Christian Front to defend against Communism; Suleiman promotes a Caliphate to advance Islamism.
There is, however, one crucial difference between Suleiman and Coughlin. Coughlin sought to defend Christians against the revolutionary ambitions of Communism, whereas Suleiman seeks to unite Muslims behind the Islamist project. To rally the ummah, Suleiman falsely portrays Zionism—an ideology centered on maintaining a Jewish nation-state on a small parcel of land in the Middle East—as a movement bent on corrupting and dominating the world.
Both leaders, howver, portray Jews as a central obstruction to their plans for humanity. To be sure, Suleiman—unlike Coughlin—avoids naming Jews directly, but he regularly demonizes “Zionists” who acknowledge Israel’s legitimacy and its right to defend itself against Arab and Muslim neighbors in the Middle East, far too many of whom have chosen the pursuit of Jewish suffering—not their own survival and flourishing—as the transcendent purpose guiding their personal lives and collective polities.
Of course, Suleiman does not confront this choice made by his fellow Muslims and Arabs who invoke the Islamic tradition to portray Jews as legitimate targets for a hatred that has crippled the community he purports to lead. Instead, Suleiman whitewashes Islamic history of its violence and the oppression and demonizes those who seek peace, i.e., “normalization” with Israel.
Suleiman’s Opponents: Arab and Muslim Modernists
In retrospect, calling Suleiman one of the world’s most influential antisemites was probably not the most effective way to marginalize the imam from Irving, Texas. A better tactic would have been to portray him as an American ally to the forces of anti-modernism that have worked to derail the Abraham Accords in the Middle East and threaten American interests in the region. To make matters worse, he has helped import these very same forces into the American body politic with a terrible impact on the community he purports to lead. Just as Coughlin led Catholics—and other Christians—into the dead end of the Christian Front, Suleiman is leading Muslims into the charnel house of Islamist ideology that has ruined millions of lives over the past 100 years.
