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Yasmine Mohammed – not her real name – first caught my eye on X, formerly known as Twitter, in the days following the Hamas onslaught in Israel on October 7.
It wasn’t just her exceptionally bold stance against Hamas, the anti-Semitism within the pro-Palestine movement and extreme Islam, with tweets such as: “Islamism is a failed ideology”, it was that while social media has seen an increasing number of Muslims – including ex-Hamas member and Israeli spy Mosab Hassan Yousef – bravely speaking out to defend Israel and condemn Hamas, it is extremely rare to encounter a Palestinian who is willing to go public with such views.
Mohammed is the author of the 2019 book Unveiled: How Western Liberals Empower Radical Islam and the founder of Free Hearts, Free Minds, a charity that supports Muslims who want to leave their religious communities.
Born and brought up in Vancouver with a father from Gaza and an Egyptian mother, Mohammed entered a forced marriage at 19 to an al-Qaeda operative. Today she is based in an undisclosed location in Europe, where she and her second husband (“salt of the earth Newfoundland stock”) are spending the year after facing unspeakable threats at home.
When I speak to Mohammed over Zoom, she tells me how hatred of Hamas among Gazans has long been widespread. “My father always hated Hamas. His biggest problem, the thing that horrified him the most, was when people equated Palestine with Hamas. Who wants the face of a terrorist organisation to be the face of their homeland? No good person.”
Encouraging radicals
Meanwhile, she says, the West has been broadly encouraging radical Islam, a subject she addressed in Unveiled. “The biggest problem is that we [in the West] have been trained to never criticise any religions or groups other than our own,” she says. “Western societies are allowed to point to the problems with feminism, liberalism or free speech. But any criticism of Islamic cultures is deemed xenophobic or racist.” This reluctance to apply to Islam the same pressures for change and improvement we apply to ourselves is a form of the inverse racism of low expectations, she says.
Something which she feels is evident in the failure of many Westerners to properly condemn Hamas’ actions on October 7. Instead of heaping continued condemnation on Hamas, as we would do with any other group, she feels that many Western establishments – universities, the media, politicians – imply its behaviour is a fitting response to Palestinian grievances.
To illustrate, she uses a characteristically startling example: “After the Holocaust, would you now expect Jewish people to jump into the homes of German people and start slaughtering families and kidnapping people? Of course not.”
But, when it comes to Arabs or Muslims, Mohammed believes, a different, lower set of expectations is applied – as if barbarism is…
