Each of us in our own way has been devoted to the cause of human rights. Each of us, a Muslim and a Jew, has witnessed the impact on innocents when their human dignity has been crushed.
We have witnessed the shattered remnants of communities tottering on the brink of oblivion, whether meeting survivors of the wars of the Taliban in northwest Pakistan, debriefing scores of Christian survivors of genocide in Nigeria, traveling to Iraq to meet the Yazidi and Kurdish survivors of the ISIS genocide, bearing witness to child soldiers inducted into and surviving both the Taliban and ISIS, or meeting with Uyghur and Tibetan refugees.
In every situation, we tried to help. One a physician tending to the open wounds and psychological scars, the other a rabbi trying to repair broken souls. All our efforts depend on a global infrastructure of human rights and intensive efforts to forge coalitions of faith leaders who, in turn, work to forge a realistic path toward hope.
But what we have witnessed these past hellish seven months since Hamas terrorists’ invasion of southern Israel and their brutal mass murder of families, including babies, the mass rape and killing of hundreds of Israeli women, and the kidnappings and hostage-taking, has shaken each of us to our core.
Not only the scope and brutality of the crimes, not only the real-time videos recorded by the celebrating killers and rapists, not only Hamas and its global supporters’ denial of October 7 but the equally devastating and brutal stone-cold silence of the very international organizations and NGOs that advocate for women and children.
It is nothing short of a conspiracy of silence—the refusal, with rare exceptions, to denounce in real time or ever since the rape, sexual violence, dismemberment, and killing of women because civil society, apparently, has no room or sympathy for those guilty of the original sin of being Jewish.
As the infamous and cynical quote often attributed to Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin says, “One death is a tragedy, a million deaths a statistic.” The silence of the caretakers of human rights, of the vanguard of protecting women and girls, and of the Al Jazeera's of the world have all but rendered those Israeli victims invisible, which we now know was intentional. This has helped pave the way for the next domino to fall: equating the perpetrator with the defender.
An International Criminal Court (ICC) declaration seems to equate the monsters of Hamas with the democratically elected prime minister of the Jewish state, who must eradicate Israel’s next-door terrorists or watch October 7 be repeated again and again. Indeed, for the Jewish people for whom the Jewish state is its rightful place for self-determination, the ICC decision is nothing if not a blood libel against Jewish nationhood.
Just as the medieval church fabricated the monstrous lie accusing Jews of using the blood of children in matzah, a lie that still lives on centuries later, the ICC accuses the leaders of Israel of deliberately taking the lives of Palestinian children and has the audacity of charging the Jewish state with deliberate “extermination”—a term associated with the Nazi Final Solution and the murder of 6 million Jews.
The ICC’s placement of Israel on the same moral plane as brutal genocide-seeking Hamas Islamist terrorists set up the next domino: recognition of a Palestinian state.
Unilateral recognition
While the US is publicly sticking to its policy that a two-state solution must be reached by both parties, an ideal both of us are deeply committed to, three members of the European Union—Spain, Ireland, and Norway—announced they are recognizing Palestine now.
The simple truth is that these three EU members have rewarded the Palestinian butchers of October 7. These countries are rewarding the Palestinian Authority’s pay-to-slay-Jews law; these nations have made zero demands to stop the demonization of Jews in the Palestinian curriculum, a demonization often financed by UNRWA dollars and that has inducted generations of children into a culture of death.
These three nations have reduced the value of innocent Israeli lives to zero and have empowered all Islamist terrorists with legitimacy. In deliberately adopting the Hamas narrative, they have erased all traces of Islamist barbarism, laying the ground for the permanent delegitimization of Israel.
History reminds us that in 1942 Norway shipped over 500 Jewish women and children to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Spain’s draconian expulsion of its Jews in 1492 caused hundreds of thousands of Jews to leave or forcibly convert to Catholicism, an epic calamity, which changed the course of Jewish history. And in 1945, Ireland’s president sent condolences to Germany upon learning of Hitler’s demise.
We believe that in the end, democratic Israel will overcome the terrorist monster. But it has now been wounded by the ICC whose declarations will open the floodgates to even greater antisemitism.
Beyond Israel, there are grave consequences that await the rest of the world. As we witness the cratering of the global human rights nomenclature, terrorists around the globe are taking note of Hamas’ brutal but effective game plan. Political posturing by the ICC and International Court of Justice could end up criminalizing any act of war, even just wars taken by nations responding to invasion or mass atrocity.
As Simon Wiesenthal often said, “It always starts with the Jews, it never ends with the Jews.”
Wake up, world, to October 7. We have all been duly warned.
Qanta A. Ahmed is a senior fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum and a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Rabbi Abraham Cooper is associate dean and director of global social action at the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the immediate past chair of the US Commission on International Religious Freedom.