The Coalition the West Refuses to Strengthen
In recent weeks, as the Iranian regime crushed nationwide protests, shut down the internet, and killed thousands of demonstrators, U.S. college campuses were nearly silent. This after months of maximalist activism over Israel and Gaza. The contrast is not subtle.
The near-total silence on the same campuses speaks louder than any protest.
This disparity is often described as hypocrisy. That is true, but incomplete. What we are seeing is a deeper structural failure—one with real consequences for Jews, for Muslims, and for the future of pluralistic democracy itself.
The West is bad at protecting and amplifying the Muslim allies it most needs.
Iran’s protesters are not abstractions. They are millions of people—women, students, workers—risking imprisonment or death to oppose a theocratic regime. Their ability to communicate with the outside world depends on smuggled technology, encrypted networks, and extraordinary personal courage. Yet they receive a fraction of the sustained attention lavished on conflicts where outrage is safer, performative, and institutionally rewarded.
That same pattern repeats closer to home. When dissidents confront Islamist ideology directly, the cost of clarity rises sharply.
Consider Salman Rushdie, nearly killed decades after a fatwa was issued against him—attacked in the United States, blinded in one eye for the crime of writing a novel. One must wonder whether his recent statement that he is “over” the attack is an example of self-sensorship, a byproduct of the same problem: Islamists intimidate their critics into silence and the west does little or nothing to push back.
Or consider Ayaan Hirsi Ali, whose life story made her one of the West’s most prominent critics of Islamism. Institutions that pride themselves on dissent canceled her and others forced her to cancel her plans because of Islamist threats from which they claimed they could not protect her.
At this point, critics often object that such figures are “fringe,” unrepresentative, or uniquely provocative. But that argument collapses on inspection. They are fringe not because they lack substance, but because the ecosystem punishes them. When the cost of speaking is high, the supply of speakers shrinks.
That is not a mystery; it is a selection effect.
And the most corrosive part is not simply that boundary-breakers are dismissed as “sellouts,” or that media-friendly outrage is elevated as moral seriousness. It is that genuinely reformist voices—Muslim dissidents who oppose Islamism while defending pluralism—are often not even part of the conversation.
Figures like Qanta Ahmed, Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, and Asra Nomani have each spoken candidly about antisemitism, theocracy, and the moral achievements of liberal democracy. Yet they remain largely unknown outside narrow circles. This is not because such voices do not exist, but because our cultural and institutional filters reward visibility and rhetorical heat over moral clarity. The result is a warped landscape in which those who confront Islamism directly are sidelined, those who offer emotionally legible outrage are elevated, and the coalition the West claims to need is rendered invisible by default.
That distortion does not remain abstract. It concentrates, inevitably, on Israel—not because Israel is uniquely important as an ethnic symbol, but because Israel is a real-world test of the West’s stated ideals under maximal pressure.
As a Jewish and democratic state that fights Islamist extremism while maintaining equal citizenship for a large Arab (mostly Muslim) minority, Israel is demonstrating—under harsher conditions than most Western states face—that democratic citizenship and resistance to jihadism are not mutually exclusive.
And yet here is the hinge: Israel also fails the same test the West fails—the test that determines whether this proof-of-concept can become a scalable coalition rather than an isolated exception. Israel, like the West, has not done enough to recruit, protect, and elevate genuinely moderate Muslims as proud members of the polity.
Part of the problem is that it is difficult to recognize and honor Muslim citizens of Israel who are willing to say, openly, that jihadism is a civilizational threat, that pluralistic democracy is worth defending, and that a Jewish state can be a legitimate democratic home for Muslim citizens. Highlighting a Muslim soldier, police officer, or civic leader as a model Israeli citizen can raise that person’s risk—not only from Islamist extremists who view them as traitors, but also from Western activist ecosystems that stigmatize visible cooperation as “collaboration.”
Still, more needs to be done. The consequences of doing nothing are too great. As the cost of visibility rises, the supply of willing exemplars shrinks, and moderation becomes quieter precisely when it most needs to be confident.
The familiar response—that nothing can be done beyond education to decrease radicalism—is both understandable and insufficient. Education matters, but it operates on a long fuse: it begins with young children, takes years to shape civic norms, and produces results only after a generational delay. Meanwhile, intimidation, radicalization, and institutional abdication operate in real time.
Without parallel efforts to protect dissidents, lower the cost of speaking, and visibly reward civic courage now, the coalition of genuinely moderate Muslims and the majority populations of the United States and Israel will remain fragmented and unsupported.
But the coalition does exist and it can be strengthened.
The question is whether we will finally choose to strengthen it—so that the future is shaped less by intimidation and silence, and more by solidarity: free voices protected, minorities no longer used as proxies, and a West that remembers why its own achievements are worth defending.
