By Hussein Aboubakr Mansour | January 28, 2022

In the modern liberal world, few issues are treated like Muslim antisemitism. In journalistic and academic circles, Muslim antisemitism is not a respectable issue to bring up, which turned it into one of the giant elephants in the room of our modern world. Given the scale of the problem, its political salience and its rising potency, the silence is becoming as dangerous as the family secret. 

The new year had not settled in before Malik Faisal Akram terrorized the American Jewish community in Colleyville, Texas. Akram flew across the Atlantic to take hostages during a Shabbat service in the Texas synagogue. The incident, thankfully, ended without casualties aside from Akram. In a bizarre and shameful twist, the FBI initially denied the incident had anything to do with Jews. That a man with Islamist allegiance and a history of antisemitic utterances just happened to take hostages who happened to be Jewish would sound a joke worthy of Soviet living conditions. Despite this the error that was later amended, the incident betrayed the extent to which American institutions try to conceal Muslim antisemitism. 

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Many people are aware of Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, and his famous November 1941 meeting with Adolf Hitler, to which we can trace the roots of Arab antisemitism. However, a few other figures with strong ties to the Nazis who have been largely overlooked by historians, had equal or even greater impact in cementing lingering antisemitism in Arab society. Come hear our own Hussein Aboubakr Mansour as he discusses certain figures who had crafted a brilliant, albeit evil, methodology of instilling Jew-hatred within the Arab population.

His critical intellect led him to find out more about Israel and Jews and to forge friendships with Israelis. As a result, he was arrested and tortured by the government of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak under suspicion of being an agent of the government of Israel.

Hussein received political asylum in the United States under President Barack Obama in 2012 and worked as an instructor for language and culture at the Defense Language Institute at Monterey, California. He then went on to work as an educator and public speaker for StandWithUs, educating students about cultural and geopolitical issues in the Middle East and helping them counter antisemitism.

Hussein wrote an autobiography, Minority of One: The Unchaining of the Arab Mind, and his articles have appeared in Commentary, Newsweek, the Jewish Journal, JNS.org, Times of Israel and Mosaic Magazine. Hussein has worked for EMET since September 2020, and has been integral in crafting the ideas behind the Israel Normalization Act of 2021, based on his own personal experiences.