Are Muslims Victims?

An imam told a room of mostly Jewish attendees that Jewish discomfort with the Palestinian cause is a colonial hangover. I didn’t correct him on stage. Here’s why, and here’s what I’d say now.

Last week I sat on a panel in Manchester with an imam, Nasser Kurdy, and a rabbi, Dovid Lewis. The two have built a project out of their own friendship. They travel together and speak at schools, giving Muslim students a chance to meet a Jew, often for the first time, and ask him whatever they want.

I said yes to this panel mostly for that reason.

Children, unlike adults, prioritize friendship and human connection over being right and proving a point, the rabbi told me. That’s how he and Nasser have stayed close. Not by deciding who’s right, but by deciding the friendship matters more. Nasser isn’t an ordained religious authority. He’s a trained doctor, born in Syria like me, who leads prayer at his local mosque and carries the title “imam” from that role.

Before the event we agreed to be mindful of our statements, to avoid offending anyone. I’ll call it what it was: to avoid offending Muslims. That’s a hard needle to thread. Radical Muslims will always find a reason to be offended. Some lines are obvious. Others move depending on who you ask: Erdogan, Nasrallah, Khamenei, child marriage, the full face veil, the definition of terrorism itself.

But one line holds steady across nearly every Muslim community, Sunni or Shia, Arab or not, religious or secular. The Palestinian cause.

That’s the fault line the whole panel sat on. Since October 7th I’ve become a public figure who sides with Israel, in spite of, or maybe because of, my own background. Half Syrian. Half Lebanese. Half Sunni. Half Shia. I knew walking in that I was on thin ice. I trusted the rabbi to be the buffer.

There was one other Muslim in the room: a reporter, Iram Ramzan, who wrote a piece afterward titled “The rabbi and imam making dialogue look easy,” rightly noting it wasn’t easy at all. She also noted that Nasser isn’t representative of Muslim opinion, and that she was almost certainly the only other Muslim present. Two Muslims in a room, then. Call that the full half of the glass.

To me, showing up has never been enough, and it matters even less after October 7th. I’ve done the interfaith circuit before. Dialogue for its own sake changes nothing. Sometimes it does worse than nothing. It validates false claims to protect a fragile connection, in service of a theory about coexistence that doesn’t survive contact with reality.

This panel was a clean example of that. Nasser is a good man, a genuine friend to the rabbi and to Jewish communities in the UK. And his read of the Arab Israeli conflict lines up with our most extreme enemies.

His core message to a mostly Jewish audience that night was: Muslims are victims. Victims of ignorance, but mostly of colonialism, Western colonialism, specifically France and Britain. As one example, he pointed to the Allied naval blockade of Lebanese ports during the First World War, and the mass starvation that followed in Mount Lebanon. He said Syria’s independence came far too late, and that Palestinians today face the same choice Algerians once did: the Algerian model of resistance, or “something else,” the nonviolent path Nasser says he chose himself.

I’ll give him this: choosing nonviolence is not a small thing, and I mean that. But asking Jews, who are living through a surge in global antisemitism since Hamas’s attack, to extend sympathy for Arab colonial suffering, using Algeria as the analogy for the Arab Israeli conflict, is simply the wrong comparison. We have to stop expecting Jews to be the ones who appease, compromise, and concede.

There’s a deeper problem underneath Nasser’s argument, and it’s the same one running through the discipline that produced it. Postcolonial theory, the field Edward Said effectively founded with Orientalism in 1978, alongside Frantz Fanon, Gayatri Spivak, and Homi Bhabha, treats 1492 and Columbus as colonialism’s starting gun.

Not one of its founders turned that same lens on Islam’s own record of conquest and expansion. The Ottoman Empire is only the most recent example: an empire literally named for conquest, which ruled over Arabs, Kurds, Armenians, Levantine Christians, and Jews alike for four centuries, and only collapsed after the First World War. Fourteen hundred years of expansion that came before it never entered the discipline’s field of vision at all.

The scholars who did examine Islamic or Ottoman imperial rule critically were never folded into the canon as forefathers of the field. That’s not an oversight. That’s a choice about whose empires count.

And that choice has a cost. In the name of championing the Middle East’s oppressed, these theorists infantilize us. They write Arabs as pawns of history: no agency, no choices, no responsibility for either. That’s what a falsified history produces, and it’s still what it does to Palestinians today.

Take the blockade Nasser cited, and watch how easily history gets rearranged. It’s true: Britain and France blockaded Lebanese ports during the First World War. It is not true that this is a legitimate basis for Arab anger at the West or at Israel today.
Context matters. Britain and France were at war with the Ottoman Empire, which had sided with Germany. The blockade wasn’t aimed at the Lebanese. It was aimed at cutting Ottoman supply lines. The devastation in Mount Lebanon came from the Ottomans themselves: Jamal Pasha’s forced conscription, his seizure of the harvest to feed an army fighting a war Lebanon had no part in, on top of a locust plague that finished off what little was left.

I didn’t read this in a book. My grandmother told us what her parents lived through.
Which brings me to the real inheritance of Edward Said and the field he built. He and his colleagues demanded to be treated as equals: equal rights, equal standing, equal respect. They never asked for equal responsibility.

So the discipline built a permanent ledger instead. One column for empires worth remembering, prosecuting, and holding to account forever. Another for empires quietly absolved, so long as absolving them keeps the political narrative intact.
Western colonialism sits in the first column, and so does its supposed client in the Middle East: Israel. Fourteen centuries of Islamic conquest and expansion sit in neither. Nobody put them on trial, because an honest trial would collapse the entire blame game postcolonial theory was built on. It would strip the Arab world, and the Palestinians with it, of the victim card they’ve lived on for a hundred years.
It would demand introspection. Fair play. Honest leadership. Responsibility.
Appeasement has never produced any of that. Confrontation might.

By confrontation I don’t mean violence. I mean the opposite of appeasement: naming the lie plainly, applying real political and diplomatic pressure, and refusing to indulge a narrative just to keep the peace in the room.

Confront the Arab and Muslim world instead of indulging it, and lives get saved. Suffering ends. Even if it costs a political project its currency. Even if it costs the Palestinian cause the sanctity it’s been granted for decades.

That confrontation, not another interfaith panel, is what could actually push the rest of the Arab world to do better, the way the UAE already has.

Only then do we get something stable and durable in the so-called Middle East.