Africans and Jews form kinship against terrorism

Terrorist attacks like the 7 October massacre in Israel are committed every few days in Africa against innocent Christians and moderate Muslims, according to the African-Jewish Alliance (AJA), a new organisation formed to highlight the extent of the global jihadist movement on this continent.

AJA, headquartered in Washington, D.C. was formed to raise awareness that “the slaughter and kidnapping of Israelis on 7 October is but one arm of a global jihadist movement that extends to Africa and beyond”, according to the organisation’s founder, Dr Charles Jacobs, speaking to the SA Jewish Report from Washington, D.C.

The AJA was formed to highlight the shared origin of these crimes against humanity: Islamist supremacist ideology. “The same ideas motivate Hamas in Gaza; Boko Haram in Nigeria; the Janjaweed and its derivatives in Darfur; and many other actors throughout Africa. All operate in the same manner: raids, murder, torture, burning, rape, and abduction of innocents for ransom or use as slaves,” says Jacobs.

A speaker at the AJA’s recent inaugural conference was Simon Deng, who witnessed the pillaging of his village and was abducted into slavery as a boy in Sudan, eventually escaping. “On 7 October 2023, I watched the news and felt sick,” he wrote recently in Tablet magazine. “I knew exactly how those terrified hostages were going to suffer. Israelis had been raped, tortured, mutilated, and burned alive just like my people had been for centuries. I’ll never forget the fires and burned bodies. They looked exactly like what I saw the day my village was destroyed.

“The Jewish people were slaves in Egypt, just down the Nile from where I was a slave. Later, they were slaves in Auschwitz. Now, they are slaves in Gaza. Our people have both survived slavery, and we will continue to survive it. We will triumph over the murderers who do their best to enslave and exterminate us,” says Deng.

AJA hosted its groundbreaking summit at the end of June. There, representatives from the African and Jewish communities joined United States (US) officials and journalists to expose the ideological connections between the “free Palestine” movement in the US and Islamic terrorism in Africa and Israel. “The goal of this terrorism isn’t ‘liberation’ for anyone, nor is it a response to US or Israeli policy; it’s simply Islamic conquest of all non-Muslim nations and people,” says Jacobs.

Attendees at the conference included Olga Meshoe Washington of the Institute for Black Solidarity with Israel and the daughter of South African politician Dr Kenneth Meshoe; Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center; as well as many other important voices in the human rights space.

In his article, titled “First they came for my people, then they came for the Jews: a South Sudanese former slave recognised the Palestinian pogrom on October 7”, Deng writes, “What Hamas did was precisely like what Arab Sudan’s genocidal government did to my people.” Deng recently went to Israel to “show my solidarity with my Jewish brothers and sisters and with the enslaved hostages. I walked twice from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and back along the highway to show that we Africans love and care about Israel.”

Living in New York, he witnessed protests against Israel. “These manifestations of sympathy for evil should disgust all decent people,” he writes. “They disgust me because Hamas is made up of the same people, acting on the same colonising and imperial motivations, who enslaved me and murdered four million of my black brothers and sisters.”

Jacob says such atrocities in Africa have been called a “silent genocide” because they have been “shockingly ignored and under-reported” in the West. He has long fought for the rights of the voiceless in Africa, helping Christian abolitionists liberate black slaves in Sudan in the 1990s, for which he was given the Boston Freedom Award.

“After 7 October, we formed the AJA to unite the Jewish community and African communities in the US. So far, we have been joined by Muslim Africans from Darfur; the Igbos; the South Sudanese; and Black American Zionists. We’re a coalition of those whose peoples are victims of jihad and Islamist oppression. Our mission is to educate officials, journalists, and the public about the nature and extent of Islamist extremism and jihad, and work to liberate slaves and hostages of global jihad.”

The scourge is closer to home than one might think, and Jacobs hopes the South African Jewish community will highlight this. He says most Christians murdered for their faith in 2023 were killed in Sub-Saharan Africa. In addition, on South Africa’s border, ISIS-Mozambique, also called Ansar al-Sunna, is a jihadist group that seeks the overthrow of the Mozambiquan government and the establishment of a strict Islamic state. The Mozambiquans have experienced mass killings, kidnappings, and burning down of churches and houses.

During the organisation’s recent conference, “we visited several Congressional offices, explained that we wanted Congress to pass a resolution condemning the jihad currently taking place in nine African countries, including the killing, burning, raping, and kidnapping of innocent Africans. We got some good press from both days,” says Jacobs.

“Olga Washington, who is one of our most eloquent speakers and attended the conference, is from South Africa and knows about African Zionism and its foes,” he says. “The South African Christian community mirrors so many other communities in Africa, many of whom are siding with Israel and are experiencing Islamist assaults.”

At this point, the organisation is “in start-up mode, raising funds, gaining supporters from across the political spectrum; building our social media; and connecting with news sources in Africa so we can report on the ongoing assaults to inform Americans,” says Jacobs. “We have just published a fundamental critique of ‘intersectionality’, where ‘Islamophobia’ is the shield that protects Arab and Muslim human rights violators from criticism. It functions as a rhetorical sword to shame any who dare acknowledge the plight of the victims of jihad, even when those victims are Muslims.”

The organisation wants to pair Jews and Africans in different cities, so they can work together. “And, of course, we need to broadcast the horrors constantly taking place in Africa that the media won’t report, due to ‘Islamophobia’,” says Jacobs.

He recalls that “years ago, I had the privilege of speaking to leaders of the Jewish community in Cape Town. Given the current situation and the fire storm of antisemitism around the world, I worry for the community. I hope you can form an alliance with African Christians, and I’d love it if you became part of our movement.”

“True survivors aren’t victims,” says Deng. “Both Africans and Israelis stand tall and won’t rest until all of our people are free. Our Jewish brothers can count on us to be there for them.”