Hopefully this wakes people up. Taught to Hate Jews. Below is just one story of how some folks are brought up to hate. Sadly this reminds me of how a few Progressives use hate like this that I and several of my moderators have received from a few from the left. I want to thank the Free Press for this great article. Here is just one story.
“It’s like asking me how often I drink water. Antisemitism was everywhere.”
I was 17 and living in Vancouver, Canada, when a teenage boy came up to me at school and pointed to my black hijab.
“You’re Muslim?” he asked.
“Yes,” I replied, a little surprised he knew, since Muslims and women in hijabs weren’t a common sight in Vancouver at the time.
He smiled at me and said, “I’m Jewish! We’re cousins.”
I remember recoiling and scrunching my face in disgust. He was understandably shocked. I’m ashamed of this reaction, but it was involuntary. It’s how my Islamist mother and her extremist Sunni husband raised me. After my mother and biological father divorced, she met a man in Canada who was living in a mosque at the time. He took her as his second wife, which is permissible in Islam.
Antisemitism was part of my Islamic education, and it was part of the colloquial discourse when I lived in Egypt for two years in my teens. It was infused into my family’s culture. How often did I encounter antisemitism? It’s like asking me how often I drink water.
One time at the market, when I was about eight, my aunt picked up a cucumber and said, “Gosh, the cucumbers are so small this year. The Jews are putting cancer in the vegetables.” I told her that was impossible, but she insisted that “Jews can do anything.”
At 19, I was forced to marry an al-Qaeda terrorist named Essam Marzouk. My mother and her husband were sympathizers of a group called the mujahideen, which, after 9/11, would be folded into al-Qaeda, and they knew that Essam was a terrorist. My mother said I needed a man who was strong enough to control me, so that’s who she chose.
He was 36 and acting as Osama bin Laden’s counterpart in Canada. I didn’t want to get pregnant, but in Islam, wives can’t refuse their husbands. I gave birth to my daughter at 20.
A year later, I took my mother to the hospital, and an agent from CSIS, Canada’s version of the CIA, approached me and told me that I was married to a terrorist. I knew he terrorized me—he beat me mercilessly, and once he punched me so hard that he broke his wrist—but I didn’t know that he was an actual terrorist.
It took a little bit of time, but eventually, I got out. I did it for my daughter’s sake; my mother and Essam planned to have her circumcised, an abhorrent practice known as female genital mutilation, or FGM.
When I was 25, I filed a restraining order against Essam while recovering from a miscarriage at my mother’s house. About eight months later, a woman from CSIS knocked on my door and handed me a black-and-white photo of Essam behind bars in Egypt. I was finally, truly free. I wrote a book called Unveiled: How Western Liberals Empower Radical Islam, and I now run a nonprofit called Free Hearts Free Minds, which supports ex-Muslims living in Muslim-majority countries and all over the world. As far as I know, my ex-husband is still in jail in Egypt, but I do what I can to protect my daughter from him.
Yasmine Mohammed is an author and podcast host. She was born in Vancouver, Canada. She uses a pen name to protect her safety and has withheld her location and age.
