Note: The following article summarizes and advances the arguments made in this video.
October 7 was not simply another outbreak of Middle East violence. It was an attempt to restore a social order that existed before the modern state of Israel—one in which Jews and Christians lived as subordinated, “blameworthy” peoples under Muslim rule. Three years on, that impulse has migrated onto American college campuses, where leftist organizations have helped create an environment that drives Jewish students into the shadows. Here are five things people need to understand.
1. October 7 Was an Effort to Force Jews Back into Dhimmi Subordination
The massacre was an attempt to put Jews back in their place. Israel’s creation in 1948 knocked the teeth out of a long-standing system of oppression imposed on Jews and Christians throughout the Middle East in Muslim-majority countries. Under classical Islamic rule, conquered non-Muslims faced three choices: death, conversion to Islam, or acceptance of dhimma—a treaty of obligation that made them dhimmis—subordinate subjects living under a structure of Muslim male supremacism.
A whole apparatus of rules enforced this submission. Christians could not ring church bells. Jews and Christians wore distinctive clothing. On the road they had to give way to Muslims. The jizya tax was not merely fiscal; as Mark Durie documents in The Third Choice: Islam, Dhimmitude and Freedom, the ritual surrounding payment often involved a symbolic striking of the neck to remind the payer he was ransoming his life. When Christians or Jews agitated for equality, they became legitimate targets for renewed violence. October 7 sought to revive that hierarchy.
2. Dhimmitude has modern echoes—’Islamophobia’ is one of them
Mark Durie reports that the word *dhimmi* derives from an Arabic root associated with blameworthiness. Those who refused Islam rendered themselves blameworthy and therefore subject to the pact formalized in traditions linked to the Pact of Umar. Non-Muslims were not free to criticize Islam.
In the modern era, the charge of “Islamophobia” often functions as a recapitulation of that restriction: non-Muslims are told they have no legitimate right to speak critically about Islam or Islamism. This is one reason free-speech controversies over Islam are so intractable, especially in places such as the United Kingdom.
Historically, the consequences of challenging this hierarchy were severe. When Christians in Anatolia began pressing for rights in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—often with European support—it provoked fury. Between roughly 1894 and 1924, as Benny Morris and Dror Ze’evi detail in The Thirty-Year Genocide: Turkey’s Destruction of Its Christian Minorities, 1894-1924, some two and a half million Armenian, Assyrian, and Greek Christians were murdered. Islamist hostility fueled these killings.
As an ideology of Muslim Male Supremacism, Islamism represents an effort to restore Muslim dominance over non-Muslims and male dominance over women, and to expand that system into Western democracies. Wherever large, autonomous Muslim communities form, the same impulses—legalism and the demand for autonomy—reappear. Daniel Pipes documented these impulses in In the Path of God: Islam and Political Power. They are not ancient history.
3. ‘Everything was fine before 1948’ is a Lost Cause myth
Think of October 7 as the modern equivalent of what white Southerners attempted after the Civil War and the emancipation of Black slaves. Humiliated by the loss of mastery over Black people, they used riots, lynchings, and cultural propaganda—most notoriously The Birth of a Nation—to restore a racial hierarchy and to portray themselves as the true victims. It took nearly a century for the civil-rights movement to confront that system in earnest.
A parallel narrative now circulates among Islamists and some of their Western sympathizers: everything was harmonious between Muslims and Christians (and Jews) until Zionism and “Christian Zionists” ruined it. That claim erases centuries of dhimmirestrictions and periodic massacres that long predated 1948. I have heard versions of it at Christ at the Checkpoint conferences among West Bank Christians. It is the Middle Eastern cousin of the “happy slave” myth. It is false, and it serves the same purpose: legitimizing the restoration of supremacy. For a deep dive into this issue, please read “Uncle Tom and the Happy Dhimmi: Reimagining Subjugation in the Islamic World and Antebellum South.”
4. The Leftist Harassment of Jews on College Campuses After October 7 is a Manifestation of ‘Neo-Dhimmitude’ that Advances the Ideology of Muslim Male Supremacism
Within days of the massacre, groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine, the Palestinian Youth Movement, and the Democratic Socialists of America worked to drive Jews into the dark corners of campus life. Students stayed in their dorms. Visible Jewish identity invited mobbing. Some incidents involved physical assault. Administrators largely failed to stop it.
The false accusation of genocide against Israel became the new language of blameworthiness. It is not the classical dhimma text, but it has the same effect: it marks Jews and those who support Israel as legitimate targets for hostility and exclusion. Leftist organizations that present themselves as champions of equality are, in practice, helping establish conditions in which an ideology of Muslim Male Supremacism—Islamism—will advance.
Jewish students returning to campus this fall are being asked to carry an unfair share of the burden of defending a civilization that some activists are actively trying to undermine.
Christians who know better have an obligation to stand with them.
5. The ‘Genocide’ Charge Inverts the Reality of the October 7 War
Hamas murdered civilians on October 7 and deliberately targeted them. That is a genocidal impulse on display. International humanitarian law does not outlaw all killing of civilians. As Helen M. Kinsella explains in The Image before the Weapon: A Critical History of the Distinction Between Combatant and Civilian, the principle of distinction requires parties to refrain from directly attacking civilians, to take feasible precautions, and to minimize harm—not to achieve zero civilian deaths.
Hamas violated these rules.
Israel, on the other hand, has warned civilians and urged them to move out of harm’s way. Civilian deaths in Gaza are real and tragic. They are also the foreseeable result of a war Hamas started and of Hamas’s practice of embedding among civilians.
There is no way to disarm and defeat Hamas without civilian casualties. That is a sad reality of modern warfare.
Conclusion
The American left has sided with Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran—retrograde, anti-modernist forces that seek to drag the Middle East into a regional war to bring the region back into the Middle Ages.
Anyone who treats Hamas as the innocent party and Israel as uniquely blameworthy should be ashamed. October 7 was an attempt to put Jews back into submission, just as white supremacists tried to put Black people into a position of subordination after the abolition of slavery.
It is time to direct the abolitionist impulse at dhimmitude.
Published originally on August 26, 2026
