Joseph Massad - Islamaphobia and Anti-Palestinianism (2025)

Joseph Massad: Good evening, everyone. Thank you for coming. I'm very honored to be here, and I'd like to thank Dr. Hatem Dazian for arranging to invite me and to be amongst you this evening. I was asked to speak about Islamophobia and anti-Palestinianism. I shall do exactly that. Islamophobia and anti-Palestinianism were born together. It was impossible to separate them at birth a millennium ago. Long before the two ideologies acquired their contemporary names as masks for conquest, what had made Palestinians their target in the 11th century is the same as what makes them their target in the 21st. Namely, the fact that the Palestinians were and remain the native inhabitants of Palestine and that they are, in their majority, Muslim. Palestine has had the misfortune of being the location of the first European settler colony as well as the last one, a calamity from which the Palestinian people continue to suffer and which they continue to resist. Certainly, the Palestinians were not the first Arab Muslims, or Christians for that matter, to be targeted by European armies. The first were the Arab Muslims of Spain and of Sicily and southern Italy. The latter were conquered by the Normans to extend the frontiers of Latin Christendom and wrest these territories from Arab Muslim rule. But unlike the conquest of Muslim Arab Sicily, the Muslims and Christians of Palestine would be the first to be targeted by Latin Christendom in a holy war subsequently known as the First Crusade. The Crusade also inspired the zealotry of the so-called Reconquista, which came to be seen as, quote, a second march to Jerusalem. But unlike Muslim Arab Italy and Spain, Palestine did not border Latin Christendom, even if it was the territory on which the events of the faith to which European heathens had converted originated. The sin of the people of Palestine in the eyes of the Crusaders was precisely that they were not Latin Christians. Similarly, since the Zionist project for the conquest of Palestine began, the sin of the Palestinian people in the eyes of the latest crusaders is that they are not Jews. In both cases, Palestine was identified as a land that the Lord had bequeathed to Latin Christians or since the turn of the 20th century to Jews, both of whom issued from what becomes Europe. While anti-Islam structured the Latin Crusader Wars from the 11th century onwards, by the time the 19th century dawned, it would be European white Christian supremacy and Orientalism that would do so. Islam remained a structuring factor, but was now enmeshed with several questions that Europe articulated and which emerged in the 18th century, namely what the British called the Jewish question and the Eastern question. Still, the war on Muslims between the end of the 18th century and the end of World War I did not subside. Available estimates speak of about five million Ottoman Muslims killed between 1820 and 1914, and six million made refugees. The Palestinian people were spared some of these more recent murderous campaigns, but by the 20th century would be conceived by the Christian West mostly as Arabs, an identity that is most adjacent to Muslim. Still, the Arab designation remained salient until 9-11, when Europe's most recent Islamophobia, which had seen its early manifestations following the triumph of the Iranian revolution, came to be articulated, as President W. Bush put it in 2001, as a new crusade against Arabs and Muslims that, as he put it, is going to take a while. End quote. It was then that Israel and the West re-identified the Palestinians as objectionable Muslims who must be defeated. As Bush intimated, the crusade has indeed been taking a while, and it remains with us. It is important to review the history of the birth of Islamophobia and anti-Palestinianism to understand how this came to be. In November 1095, Pope Urban II declared the necessity of recapturing the land where Christianity was born. Addressing the European converts to the Palestinian religion of Christianity, the Pope averred, and I will quote him, let therefore hatred depart from among you. He's addressing Latin Christians. Let your quarrels end. Let wars cease, and let all dissensions and controversies slumber. Enter upon the road to the Holy Sepulchre. Rest that land from the wicked race, and subject it to yourselves. That land which, as the scripture says, floweth with milk and honey, was given by God into the possession of the children of Israel. Jerusalem is the navel of the world. The land is fruitful above others, like another paradise of delights. This, the redeemer of the human race, has made illustrious by his advent. This royal city, the Pope continued, this royal city, therefore, situated at the center of the world, is now held captive by God's enemies. and is in subjection to those who do not know God, to the worship of the heathens. Jerusalem seeks therefore and desires to be liberated and does not cease to implore you to come to her aid. From you especially, she asks succor. As the majority of Jerusalem's native inhabitants at the time were actually Arabic-speaking Christians, or what the Crusaders used to call Suriani, one of the declared motives of the Crusade was to rescue them and the Eastern churches from the Muslims, even though no Eastern Christians had ever complained or appealed to the Latins for help. Indeed, many Latins considered Eastern Christians heretical, just as many Eastern Christians viewed the Latins as heretics. As some historians tell us, the Arab Christians of Palestine, like the Christians of the East more generally, were some of the most unhappy and chief victims of the Crusades alongside Muslims. As for the crime of Palestine's Arab Muslims, these enemies of God, this wicked race of heathens, as the Pope put it, it was their, quote, unlawful possession of the holy places which Latin Christendom coveted. It was in fact during the First Crusade that the fanatical Latin Christians named Palestine the Holy Land, replacing the biblical Old Testament nickname, the Promised Land. The people of Palestine functioned as a foil for the papacy insofar as the internecine wars among Latin Christians were considered sinful by the church and prevented them from serving their God. Unifying the Latins and expanding Christendom territorially were imperative as much as redirecting Latin hatred toward Muslims. And as the Latin Christians deemed the Muslims inconvertible, and the church prohibited making peace with them because they were heathens, according to the Latin Christians, they, the Muslims, would therefore have to be slain and the survivors expelled from the so-called Holy Land. As for the Arab Christians, the Crusaders tried to Latinize them forcefully, but ultimately failed. This is why the survivors among the large Muslim and Christian Arab population and the small community of Arab Jews of Jerusalem were all expelled to make room for the Frankish settlers. When the Crusades slaughtered anywhere between 40 and 70,000 of those Muslims in Jerusalem, at the time, of course, they did so in the city, but also inside Al-Aqsa Mosque in a horrific massacre on the 15th and the 16th of July, 1099, the fanatical Crusaders were incensed that the victims fought back to defend themselves. It is said that actually that made them so angry how dare they defend themselves. Through the Bible and the sword, the Crusades established the first European settler colony in Palestine following the genocidal extermination of its population. They called their settler colony the Latinate Kingdom. After they expelled the entire population of the city, they brought in 120,000 Latin Christian colonists, constituting about 15 to 25% of the population of the larger Frankish settler colony, which extended all over Palestine and beyond. In their settler colony, the Crusaders instituted, as an Israeli historian of the Crusades calls, an apartheid legal system. Perhaps President Donald Trump's current crusade for Gaza and call for the expulsion of its surviving Palestinian population following Israel's genocidal extermination campaign is inspired by the first crusade and what the crusaders had done in Jerusalem. After their defeat in the 12th and 13th centuries and the dismantlement of their settler colony in Palestine, the threat from Latin Christians by the 14th century had temporarily subsided. However, a new Christian threat was on the horizon, namely that of the Protestant Reformation, which emerged in the 16th century with a refreshed interest in the native land of the Palestinians, where Christianity and Judaism were born, and the heightened expectation of what the fanatical Protestants claimed would be the second coming of Jesus Christ. This obsession would develop into an intense messianic, millenarian, and evangelical quest among Anglicans, Calvinists, and Lutherans by the 18th century, with a focus on converting European Jews and dispatching them to Palestine to prepare for the Second Coming. Their zealotry coincided with the emergence of the new secular European field of knowledge called Orientalism, which sought to demonstrate the inferiority of Orientals, especially but not only Arabs and Muslims, to European Christians, and pushed in the 19th century for the necessity of colonizing them and justified it. But it was not just a renewed interest in Palestine about which the fanatical Protestants obsessed at the end of the 18th century. It was also Greece and the idea that Eastern Christians continued to be ruled by heretical Muslims, an argument borrowed from the 11th century Latin Christian crusaders. As Europe was engaged in this period in creating itself as the West that must be cleansed of any Oriental traces, a new movement called Philhellenism was most concerned with the pure essence of Greece before it had been tainted by Oriental corruption. Many European Philhellen volunteers who joined the fighting legions that went to Greece saw their solidarity with the Greek nationalists as part of a sacred crusade against Islam, as they put it, to partake of the battles against the so-called infidel Turks. They believed in the benevolence of organized Christianity, in the hateful inferiority of the Turks and Muslims, and in liberal internationalism. It was the combination of Philhellenism and evangelical Protestant Christianity that breathed fresh life into Islamophobia and anti-Palestinianism. Already influenced by the French Calvinist Huguenots and their fanatical millenarianism, the Catholic Napoleon Bonaparte's invasion of Palestine was the occasion for him to issue in 1799 the first political call by a European leader for Europe's Jews to self-expel and colonize Palestine. Napoleon called on the Jews, or what he called the rightful heirs of Palestine, to conquer your patrimony, as he put it. He declared, and I quote him, hasten, now is the moment which may not return for thousands of years to claim the restoration of your rights, your political existence as a nation among the nations, unquote. he also sought this is napoleon also sought to restore constantinople to christendom The twin projects of philhellenism and evangelical Protestantism can be parsimoniously summarized as follows. Greece, located in the eastern Mediterranean, part of its peoples and histories, was cast as Western in origin, and as it had to be liberated from Muslim yoke, was abducted by the Europeans as part of the newly invented West. On the other hand, European Jews were cast as Asiatic Orientals by origin and had to be converted to Protestant Christianity and dispatched to the East, specifically to Palestine, as its new Protestant colonial population, and prepare the world for the second coming of Jesus Christ. It was in many ways a most innovative demographic exchange, and not only at the symbolic level. What this exchange aimed to achieve politically and territorially was the liberation of Constantinople and Jerusalem from Muslim yoke as its express goal. In an ideological and military alliance with the European Christian powers, the Greek nationalist war of independence would become the first modern Islamophobic war targeting Muslims for being Muslim. Wherein even Greek speaking Muslims were depicted as Turks and massacred at will. And Turkish speaking and Greek speaking Christians from the Turkish areas were identified as Greeks who had to be saved from the Muslims. The double conquest of Constantinople and Jerusalem would become the paramount and immediate goals for the new European crusaders. Even the Russian Tsarina, Catherine the Great, herself a German Lutheran, originally a German Lutheran, had designs through what she called the Greek Project to recapture Constantinople during her conquest of the northern Ottoman territories, which became New Russia. Despite the failed attempts throughout the 19th century, a new plan would be hatched a century later in what came to be known as the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 between Britain, France, and Russia, whereby Jerusalem would be captured by the European Protestants and Catholics, British and French alike, and Constantinople would go to the Russian Orthodox. When Vladimir Lenin exposed the Sykes-Picot secret agreement after the Russian revolutionaries overthrew the Tsar, he declared immediately that the new Soviet government fully supported Constantinople's status as Turkish and Muslim forever. The Greek Crusaders, who would have none of this, and in collaboration yet again with the European Christians during and after World War I, they were successful in displacing hundreds of thousands of Ottoman Muslims and Christians once more. Their final attempt to lay siege to Constantinople in the summer of 1922, however, failed as a result of British imperial reluctance and hesitation and the military strength of the Turkish nationalists. Thus, what began as a European-sponsored Philhellenism in Germany and spread to the rest of Europe as part of inventing a past for this emergent Europe of the Enlightenment, let alone for the modern inhabitants of Greece, and in which a good part of the Europe-based Greek diasporic intelligentsia and the Greek merchant class participated at the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century, armed with a Christian anti-Muslim zeal and a nostalgia to an invented ancient Greece, as well as to the Eastern Roman Empire, left millions dead and millions of refugees in its wake. This Christian, European, and Greek quest finally achieved its goals of the religious cleansing of Ottoman Europe and of Turkey through the Lausanne Treaty of 1923. The struggle to retrieve and abduct Constantinople, now Istanbul, to Christendom and Europe, which began with Catherine the Great, was not to be. Constantinople, unlike Greece, would never be Christian or European again. Soon attention would turn to that other city that was lost to European Christians in the hope of it being recaptured, namely the Palestinian city of Al-Quds, named as such since the ninth century, but which Europe insisted on calling solely by its ancient biblical Aramaic name, which many mischaracterize as Hebrew, Jerusalem. Throughout the 19th century, when the Greeks were chipping away at the Ottoman Empire in the hope of one day taking over Constantinople and expelling the Muslims, European white fanatical Protestant missionaries embarked on the colonization of Palestine. If the Crusaders of old were armed with the Bible and the sword when they launched their wars of conquest, the fanatical Protestant colonists of the 19th century were armed with the Bible, racial science, and the navy ships of their white supremacist original homelands. But unlike the Latin Crusaders, the Protestant fanatics of the 19th century called their project for the conquest of Palestine as the peaceful crusade. It was the new Evangelical British Church Missionary Society, or CMS, established in 1799, the year Napoleon invaded Palestine, and the London Society for the Promotion of Christianity Among the Jews, established in 1809, which would pioneer the effort to transform Palestine into a European Protestant state and wrest the country from its heretical Muslim captors. Both the CMS and the London Society for the Promotion of Christianity Amongst the Jews were sponsored by the elite of English society and politics, including then British Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston, and his evangelical son-in-law, Lord Shaftesbury, among others. Palmerston approached the Ottoman Sultan to allow the European Jews return, quote unquote, to Palestine. The idea was that through settler colonialism and imperial coercion of the Ottomans, Palestine could be wrenched from them and from its Muslim and Christian population without a military expedition. The London Society for the Promotion of Christianity, on its part, converted many Jews in Britain. 250 of whom became Anglican clergymen, and many of the latter had actually been rabbinical scholars before their transformation and conversion to Christianity. By 1841, the position of patron of the London society was conferred upon the Archbishop of Canterbury, the head of the Anglican Church. The British fanatics, in alliance with the British government, were able through blackmail to coerce the Ottomans in 1841 to allow them to build the first Protestant church in the Ottoman Empire, which they built in Al-Quds in Jerusalem. Along with the fanatical German Lutherans, the British Anglican missionaries also demanded that the Ottomans approve the establishment of a Protestant bishopric the same year. Once established, the British dispatched the first Protestant bishop to Palestine to take charge of it. The chosen bishop was a German converted Jew, originally from the German-occupied Polish province of Posen by the name of Michael Solomon Alexander. Originally, his name was Wolf. He had been a rabbi, and then he became. So he had been in England since 1820 and was immediately consecrated in 1841 before arriving in Palestine in January 1842 on a Royal British war frigate aptly named The Devastation. Alexander had served as rabbi of Plymouth before his conversion to Protestantism. His mission was to build a Christian Anglican church based on converted Jews in preparation for the arrival of the Messiah. The German-British rabbi turned bishop entered al-Quds with an escort of 100 horsemen, including his wife and his children, who rode on donkeys on the Muslim Eid al-Adha on the 2nd of January, 1842. Protestant efforts to Christianize Palestine proceeded apace. Presbyterian American missionaries had been dispatched to Palestine in the 1820s to convert Arab Christians, but mostly to convert the less than 4,000 Palestinian Jews of Andalusian origins, as well as the 4,000 Messianic Lithuanian Jews who had arrived in Palestine just prior to the American missionaries in anticipation of the arrival of the Jewish Messiah. Muslims, it seemed, remained inconvertible. The Americans only stayed until 1844 when they moved to Syria and the Lebanon in light of the establishment of the British Anglican Mission in Palestine, which made the presence of the Americans redundant. The Americans, however, managed to distribute thousands of copies of their Protestant Bible before they left Palestine in the secure hands of their British coreligionists. As part of this so-called peaceful crusade, American Protestant millenarians and restorationists joined in the crusade and established farming colonies in the Palestinian city of Jaffa and hoped to convert the few thousand of Jews they encountered in Palestine and teach them farming, though they found them to be, as they put it, quote unquote, lazy and resistant to conversion. A group of American Seventh-day Adventists, known as Millerites, settled in Bethlehem in 1851 alongside European Christian settlers in the village of Artas, but later moved to Jaffa where they founded the colony of Mount Hope, which did not survive for long. Another fanatical group, the Dixons, established the American Mission Colony in Jaffa in 1854, which was resisted immediately by local Palestinians. The colony was attacked in 1858, and several of the American fanatical colonists killed. The rest were repatriated to Massachusetts. The US government dispatched a navy ship, the steam frigate the USS Wabash, to the shores of Palestine to pressure the Ottomans into prosecuting the killers. In the next decade, in 1866, another group of fanatical American Protestant artisans and farmers arrived, this time from Maine, to set up yet another colony in Jaffa. The Adams Colony, as it was named, after its evangelical leader, who called himself George Washington Joshua Adams, a former Mormon, had 156 colonists, but managed to survive for two years only. Adams, who had met with the US President Andrew Jackson, the butcher of Native Americans, at the White House to facilitate his settler colonial efforts with the Ottoman authorities, compared the colonization of Palestine to that of the United States. The Palestinians opposed the presence of the colonists, leading the Ottomans to write to the US minister in Constantinople, the ambassador at the time, protesting, driving, quote, the natives from their fields by a colony of Yankees, unquote. The failure of the colony and its indebtedness, however, forced Adams to leave after two years. Upon embarking on his colonization project, Adams had declared that his colony would prepare the land for the return of European Jews, which in turn would expedite the second coming of Jesus Christ. Only 20 American settlers remained in Palestine after the dissolution of the colony. Yet another evangelical Protestant American family set out on a similar mission in 1881 to establish an American colony, this time in Jerusalem. Horatio and Anna Spafford of Chicago led a contingent of 16 colonists to Al-Quds to hasten the Second Coming. They were joined by 55 Swedish fundamentalist Protestants in 1896. Altogether, they numbered at the end 150 by the turn of the century, and they bought a house of the Palestinian landowner, Rabah al-Husseini. They did not seem to want to actively proselytize others, which spared them a lot of local enmity. Their colony survived until the 1950s, when tensions among the colonists brought its demise. The Husseini house they had bought was transformed into the contemporary American colony hotel in East Jerusalem. Those of you who have gone to East Jerusalem might know it. The Protestant colonization of Palestine was not exclusively a British and an American affair. A decade before Germany embarked on its own colonization of Africa, a small group of Germans expelled from the Lutheran Church for their millenarian beliefs reorganized themselves in 1861 as the German Templars, their name of course echoing the Crusaders, Knight Templars. and they embarked on establishing German settler colonies in Palestine. The first was established near Nazareth in 1866, and in 1869 they built another colony in Haifa. As early as 1868, the Palestinians in Nazareth attacked the Templar colonists and protested the sale of land to them. In the early 1870s, the Templars got into a dispute with the local Jaffa authorities regarding their insistence on driving their carts, horse-drawn carts, through Jaffa's crowded narrow streets down the quay. Their leader, a fellow by the name of Hoffman, described the dispute in typical European colonial racism. Quote, it is simply the resistance of barbarism to the advance of culture. I have therefore to take refuge in the might of the German Empire, unquote. The German consul intervened and the colonists could now drive their cars in the narrow streets for only three hours a day. The colonists sought to consciously separate themselves from the local population in pietistic enclaves and aiming to be economically self-supporting as far as possible. Hoffman, who was the leader of the Jaffa colony, published a book in 1875 titled Occident and Orient as a manifesto in which he declared the aim of his group to uplift the East. During the Ottoman-Russian War of 1877 and 1878, German warships came to the shores of Palestine to defend the German colonists in case they were attacked by the natives. And in the process, the German consul forced the Ottomans to finally recognize the Templars' colonies as legitimate, which the Ottomans had refused to do until then. The Templars had in fact sought to turn Palestine into a Protestant Christian state and were hoping that it would be awarded to Germany at the end of that war. When a few decades later, the 1908 uprising of the Young Turks erupted in Constantinople, Palestinian peasants attacked the German colonies. Again, the Germans dispatched a warship to Haifa. The German colonists, in fact, in many ways, were inspirational to others, namely the Zionists, as we will see briefly. On the eve of World War I, there were close to about 2,000 Templars in Palestine. In the 30s, many of them supported the Nazi regime and were ultimately chased out by the British and the Zionists who took over their colonies. Many of them ended up going to Germany, to some of the Russian colonies, or to Australia. Ultimately, after close to a century, the Protestant fanatics, just like the Catholic Crusaders, were only able to convert a few hundred Jews and Orthodox Christians in Palestine. They failed. Meanwhile, West European Jews had throughout the 19th century become fully assimilated in their own countries, whose languages they spoke, and in whose militaries they served. In France, in Holland, in Germany, Austria, and Britain, those who had not converted to Protestantism amongst the Jews mostly adopted Reform Judaism, a new Jewish sect that sought to emulate Protestant Christianity in its philosophy of religion. In Eastern Europe, the Jewish Enlightenment or Haskalah was successful only in assimilating the business elite and Jewish intellectuals into secular European culture and modernity. European Jews resisted the Protestants' call for the removal of Jews from Europe and dispatching them to Palestine for three centuries. But Jewish resistance was finally broken in the second half of the 19th century when some of these enlightened and assimilated European Jews adopted the project of the Protestants and organized themselves under the banner of a new outfit called the Zionist Organization. The Protestant project, which the Europe-loving Zionist Jews adopted, was not the only ideology they espoused, as they also adopted, or more accurately, were constituted, thank you, were constituted by the European Christian anti-Palestinianism and Islamophobia. The founder of the Zionist movement, the Viennese Theodor Herzl, understood the Palestinians as surmountable objects. In line with the peaceful crusade of the Protestants, he thought the Palestinians could be conquered peacefully. In his political pamphlet, The State of the Jews, or Der Judenstaat in German, he had already anticipated Palestinian resistance. He tells us, and I quote, An infiltration of Jews is bound to end badly. It continues till the inevitable moment when the native population feels itself threatened and forces the government to stop further influx of the Jews. Immigration is consequently futile unless we have the sovereign right to continue such immigration. To achieve this, Herzl had already confided to his diary a year earlier in 1895 that the Jewish colonists would gently expropriate the natives' property and send them packing to the neighboring countries. In his novel, Altneuland, or Old New Land, Herzl described the Palestinians mostly as the numerous Muslim Arabs, as he put it, of Palestine. He described them as dirty and that the Palestinians were inhabitants of blackish Arab villages and looked like brigands. Naked children played in the filthy alleys, unquote. Notice the use of the same adjectives related to dirt and filth which the Crusaders used to describe Muslim Palestinians in the 11th century, and also the anti-Semitic adjectives that European Christian anti-Semites described the Jews as dirty. So it's a very interesting sort of adoption of these anti-Semitic notions and Crusader notions. Lest we think Herzl had forgotten the Crusades, both the early military ones or the ongoing peaceful one, his Zionist protagonist character in his novel, a fellow by the name of David Litvak, volunteers in the novel the following. The Christian holy places have been held by non-Christians from time immemorial. Centuries having passed since the Crusades, a more enlightened view concerning these hallowed sites has gradually found acceptance. Godfrey of Bouillon and his knights, Godfrey of Bouillon, of course, was the first king of the Latinate kingdom, and his knights grieved because Palestine was held by the Muslims. But did the fan de siècle knights and noblemen harbor the same emotions at the end of the 19th century? Would any great power have dared to ask its parliament for an extraordinary grant for the reconquest of the Holy Land? The point was that such a war would have been waged less against the Turkish Empire than against other Christian powers. It would have been a crusade against the cross rather than against the crescent. The conclusion was thus reached that the status quo was the best possible status for all concerned. The idea was that if the Jews were to found a state in Palestine, they would be actually better guardians of the holy Christian places rather than the Christians fighting amongst themselves. Herzl's predictions of a peaceful European-sponsored Jewish conquest of Palestine without imperial military help did not come true, as the British would in fact conquer Palestine a decade and a half later and prevent the French and the Germans who sought to take it over from doing so. After World War I, however, and with the rise of nationalist movements, much of the racism targeting the Palestinians was not only on account of being Muslim, but also on account of being Arab. The division of Muslims into multiple nations since the rise of nationalism had made this inevitable. But regardless how it is articulated, whether as Orientalist Arabophobia or Islamophobia, the Palestinians registered in this Western ideology and for the Zionist movement as they had done before for the Crusades nine centuries ago. Just prior to the British conquest of Palestine, Chaim Weizmann, the head of the Zionist organization, who had the same contempt for the Palestinians as Herzl, saw the Palestinians as no more than, quote, the rocks of Judea, obstacles that had to be cleared on a difficult path. The British investment in Jewish Zionism had the imperial benefit of setting up a colony to guard the Suez Canal from local Muslim revolts. Their main interest in capturing Palestine during the war, as elaborated by the British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, a fundamentalist Protestant millenarian himself, was the defense of the canal. Weizmann sought to reassure the British, and I quote him, that Palestine is the natural continuance of Egypt and a buffer between the Suez Canal and the Black Sea. In the case of any hostile activity on this latter side, it will constitute an Asian Belgium, especially if it will be developed by the Jews. If some more or less good conditions will be given to us, we can transfer a million Jews to Palestine within the coming 50 or 60 years. England will have a buffer zone and we will have a country." The Zionists would make good on their pledge to protect the Suez Canal in 1956 when they combined their forces with Britain and France in the tripartite invasion of Egypt. Unlike Zionism, which was always an ideology that combined religion and colonial nationalism, Palestinian resistance had in the main remained intrinsically anti-colonial and nationalist. The persistence, however, of these notions can be seen when Hamas was established in 1987. The Israelis who had delegitimized the Palestinians since the 1880s as barbaric Arabs and savages, as anti-Semites, or even later on as Nazis, began to speak of them after 1987 as savage, jihadist Muslims who needed to be crushed. Immediately following the 9-11 attacks, media speculations that it was Hamas which had been behind the attacks were rife. Even though Hamas had never committed an act of resistance outside historic Palestine, it was considered the primary suspect. The twinning of Islamophobia and anti-Palestinianism would be further fortified since. In June 2009, US President Barack Obama addressed not only a local Egyptian audience, but also the entire Muslim world, as he put it, from Cairo University. He spoke about the importance of religious tolerance of Egyptian and Lebanese Christians by their Muslim compatriots, while promising to end institutionalized discrimination against American Muslims, which followed 9-11. Yet, in that same speech, he justified the ongoing murderous American military campaigns in Afghanistan and Pakistan, he could have added Yemen, but he did not, as necessary. These were countries where his administration was killing not only non-American Muslims, but also targeting American Muslims, non-white citizens, for assassinations. In the same vein, Obama also wanted to provide a theological justification for an American-sponsored policy, namely the imposition of a so-called peace between Palestinians and Israelis that preserves Jewish settler colonialism and occupation at the expense of Palestinian rights. To do so, he spoke of how, quote, the holy land of three great faiths is the place of peace that God intended it to be. When Jerusalem, as he put it, is a secure and lasting home for Jews and Christians and Muslims, and a place for all the children of Abraham to mingle peacefully together, as in the Quranic story of Isra, which he mispronounced at any rate. When Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad, peace be upon him, joined in prayer. In doing so, Obama was clearly stating in Zionist fashion that not only do the Jewish colonizers of Palestine not need to be tolerant, but also that they are resisted not because they are colonists, but because they are Jewish. Hence his call for Muslim tolerance and ecumenical peace rather than for an end to Jewish settler colonialism. Of course, since the Iranian Revolution, Islamophobia has come to encompass all Muslims worldwide. But just as the Islamophobia of the Crusades targeted all Muslims, Turks and Arabs alike, it reserved a special hatred toward the Palestinians. Today's Islamophobia is not so different. The Palestinians, as the worst Muslims out there, occupy the most central place in it. Since October 7th, 2023, when the Palestinian resistance attacked Israel, Islamophobia surged in the US and Western Europe, targeting all Muslims or anyone mistaken for them. If Islamophobia birthed anti-Palestinianism as a mask for conquest at the time of the Crusades, today it is anti-Palestinianism that feeds Islamophobia in Europe and in the US. When the Palestinian people stand up and resist the white Christian and Jewish colonizers today, they threaten the entire ideological edifice of the Western world, which is built on the inaugural moment of the Crusades. This is why all the available weaponry of that world, including Islamophobia, have been and must be aimed at the Palestinians to defeat them. Yet the Palestinians continue to resist a millennium later, and the new crusaders persist in trying to defeat them. Thank you.