October 7 and the death of assumptions

I boarded my flight to London on the morning of October 7, 2023, thinking ahead to a week of meetings with Shiʿa scholars that I hoped our conversation would push my interfaith connections forward. My project aimed to deepen interfaith understanding through theological exchange, building bridges across centuries of difference. It was a familiar rhythm: careful dialogue, mutual curiosity, and the patient work of scholarship.

But by the time I landed at Heathrow that evening, the world, and my work, had changed irrevocably.

A Day That Shattered the World

News had trickled through while I was in the air, but it wasn’t until I turned my phone back on that I saw the scale of the horror: Hamas had launched a meticulously planned, unprecedented terrorist assault on Israel. As the details emerged, the picture grew darker by the hour. More than 1,200 people were slaughtered, families executed in their homes, elderly Holocaust survivors dragged from their houses and paraded through Gaza, women raped and mutilated, babies murdered, young people massacred at a music festival. The perpetrators filmed their brutality and shared it with pride.

It was the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust. For anyone with moral clarity, this was not a moment of nuance but of unambiguous evil.

Yet as I discovered less than twenty-four hours later, that clarity was not universal.

October 8: The Streets of London

The next morning, I stepped into central London expecting a city stunned by grief. Instead, I found thousands of demonstrators waving Palestinian flags, chanting “From the river to the sea” and denouncing Israel as an “apartheid state.” The most shocking part was not the vitriol, though it was unmistakable, but the speed. Israel had not yet launched a single retaliatory strike. Still, the protests were already underway, some permits filed within hours of the massacre, before many victims had even been identified.

The narrative was prepared in advance: Israel was the aggressor; Palestinians were the victims. The facts of October 7 barely registered.

As I moved through the crowd, I heard more than anger over policy. I heard erasure. “Israel is a colonial project.” “Zionism is racism.” “Make the intifada global.” These were not requests to talk things over or find a middle ground. They wanted to erase a people’s home from the map. People often used words like “justice” and “freedom” that were full of hate for Jews.

A Collision of Ideologies

It was then that the assumptions I had built over years of scholarship began to crumble. What I was witnessing was not simply outrage over a war. It was the convergence of two ideological currents, each powerful on its own, but far more dangerous when fused together.

From Islamist movements comes a deep well of theological and historical antisemitism, drawing on polemics that stretch from Qurʾanic exegesis to medieval social hierarchies. From parts of the Western activist left comes the vocabulary of postcolonialism and social justice, which casts Israel as the embodiment of Western imperial sin. Together, these strands create a narrative in which Zionism is original transgression, Israel is illegitimate by definition, and Jews,  even when massacred, are recast as oppressors.

In this worldview, the murder of civilians is reframed as “resistance” or dismissed as a footnote. Jewish suffering is not denied so much as it is deemed irrelevant — a casualty of a moral universe that has already assigned guilt and innocence before the facts emerge.

From Dialogue to Dissection

Until that moment, I believed dialogue, careful, empathetic, rigorous engagement with Islamic thought, could bridge divides and build shared understanding. I still believe in its value. But London in October 2023 convinced me that dialogue is no longer enough.

What I witnessed demanded a deeper response: not conversation, but dissection. This ideology, with its theological roots, historical evolution, and modern political expressions, must be studied with the same critical rigor we apply to any worldview that justifies hatred or violence. We cannot dismantle what we do not understand.

October 7 was not just a geopolitical rupture. It was an intellectual reckoning.

The Messianic Dimension

This change in focus has changed the way I am doing my current research. I now look at how feelings of eschatological urgency, or the idea that sacred history is coming to an end, affect how religious movements make political decisions. In particular, I look at how Iranian Shiʿa thought since 1979 has drawn on expectations of the Mahdi’s return to justify moral claims, mobilize communities, and frame political strategies.

This messianic framework has profound implications for antisemitism. In many Islamist narratives, hostility toward Jews is not merely political or historical — it is theological. It is portrayed as divinely ordained, even as an essential prerequisite for the realization of sacred history. These kinds of beliefs turn prejudice into a cosmic command, giving old hates a new meaning in the end of the world.

Understanding this dimension is essential. Islamic antisemitism is not a marginal sentiment but a deeply embedded ideological structure, one that will continue to shape political realities long after today’s regimes and conflicts have passed.

A New Mandate

October 7 was a day of horrors. October 8, for me, was a day of awakening. The protests I saw, their timing, their tone, and their ideological underpinnings revealed a truth I can no longer ignore: antisemitism today is not simply a lingering prejudice. It is a globalized, evolving ideology, drawing power from sacred texts and modern activism alike.

My task as a scholar has changed. Dialogue remains vital, but it is no longer sufficient. Now I must interrogate, expose, and confront — tracing the links between scripture and street slogans, between theology and terror, between the rhetoric of justice and the reality of hatred.

The stakes of this work extend far beyond academia. They touch the foundations of civilization itself.