From Ally to Accuser: Hamed Abdel-Samad

There are betrayals that are political. There are betrayals that are personal. And then there are betrayals so vast, so soul-wounding, they seem to echo through generations; this is one of them. Hamed Abdel-Samad, once seen as a solitary voice of courage amidst the storm, a man who dared to confront jihadism, who stood in the face of fatwas and death threats to defend freedom and truth, publicly accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza.

Let us be clear: this is not simply an error in judgment. It is an act of moral suicide. A surrender not to facts, not to conscience, but to the ugliest current sweeping through our time, the inversion of truth, the desecration of Jewish memory, the enabling of antisemitism behind a mask of hollow humanism. I write without hesitation, without apology. Because in this hour, neutrality is treason, and silence is complicity.

Abdel-Samad once looked evil in the face and named it. Now, he distorts his gaze to see evil in the defenders of their own survival. His accusation that Israel is committing genocide is not only intellectually bankrupt. It is morally vile. It spits on the graves of Holocaust victims and trivializes the very concept of genocide, which the Jewish people have paid for with blood, ash, and silence that screamed across the skies of Europe.

What do you know of genocide, Hamed?

The Jewish people don’t merely understand genocide; they survived it. They carry it in their DNA, in the trembling hands of survivors, in the echo of names chanted at Yad Vashem, in the absences, the missing family photos, the unlit Shabbat candles, the generations that were never born.

To accuse these same people of perpetrating genocide as they fight for their lives against a fanatical terror regime that calls for the obliteration of Israel and the murder of Jews everywhere is not only historically illiterate. It is a moral obscenity.

Israel is not at war with Palestinians. Israel is at war with annihilation.

Hamas does not fight for freedom. It fights to destroy a people, not metaphorically, but literally. On October 7, 2023, the world watched, horrified, as Hamas militants streamed murdering innocent people with barbaric cruelty. It was an act of calculation. Of ideology. Of evil.

Israel responded as any sovereign nation must. As any moral state would. Not with vengeance, but with necessity, targeted, measured, and constrained beyond the imagination of any other military. The IDF issues warnings. Hamas issues death sentences. Israel builds shelters to protect its children. Hamas builds tunnels beneath schools to protect its rockets.

And yet Abdel-Samad dares to equate the two? He once warned the West about theocratic fascism. He now mimics its propaganda. This is not the evolution of a thinker. It is the corruption of one.

While others chant for their extinction on the streets of London, Berlin, and New York, they still open their synagogues. They still sing. They still raise their children to love life, even as the world obsesses over their right to defend it. I will say what Abdel-Samad has forgotten: Israel is the front line of civilization. It is the dam holding back a flood of barbarism. It is the refuge of a people for whom refuge was denied. It is the beating heart of Jewish identity, history, and future.

Look at Hamas. Look at Hezbollah. Look at the streets of Gaza, where children are taught to hate before they are taught to read.

To defend Israel is not to pick a side in a geopolitical dispute. To defend Israel is to defend humanity’s last line against the abyss.

Abdel-Samad insists he is not antisemitic. He reminds us of his past support for Jews under attack. But that does not absolve him from the present rhetoric that feeds old hatreds. You don’t need to burn a synagogue to ignite antisemitism; sometimes words are enough.

And so I say it with every fiber of my being: Am Yisrael Chai.