THE BORROWED BANNER OF FAITH
Rest of the World (Special) Report
PART ONE: THE CLAIM AND THE DISSENT
Aviva Kutnick lost her job at the City University of New York in July 2025. She is Jewish. She is anti-Zionist. She was not fired for being Jewish. She was fired for opposing the policies of the Israeli state, and the institution that dismissed her did not trouble itself with the distinction.
In Kabul, ten months earlier, the Taliban’s Ministry of Education barred girls from attending medical schools, extending a ban on female secondary and university education that had already stood for two years. The decree was issued in the name of Islamic law. Ahmed el-Tayeb, the Grand Imam of al-Azhar, one of the highest seats of authority in Sunni Islam, said the ban contradicted Sharia. The Taliban did not answer him. The girls did not go back to class.
These two events turn on one identical mechanism. A political movement claims a religion as its exclusive property, then treats any challenge to the movement as an attack on the religion itself.
This is not a report claiming that Zionism and the Taliban are equivalent. They are not. One is a decades-old nationalist movement contested from within a global diaspora religion of roughly fifteen million adherents, most of whom hold no formal relationship to the Israeli state at all. The other is an armed insurgency that seized and now governs a single country. Its reading of Islamic law is rejected by the leading institution of Sunni religious authority and by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, representing fifty-seven member states. The European Union’s own asylum-adjudication research body has gone further, finding that the specific rules the Taliban enforces exist nowhere else among the world’s Muslim-majority states.
What is identical is not the legitimacy of the claim. What is identical is the tactic built on top of it.
The Claim
Zionism, in its dominant contemporary form, asserts that it speaks for Jews as a people. The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism has been adopted or endorsed by dozens of governments, including the United States. Its illustrative examples include “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination.” They also include applying a double standard to Israel. That means holding it to a standard of conduct no one demands of any other democratic nation. In May 2024, roughly 1,200 Jewish university professors signed an open letter opposing the codification of that definition into US federal law. They argued that criticism of the Israeli government is not inherently antisemitic.
The Taliban asserts that it speaks for Islam. Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid has repeatedly defended restrictions on women’s education, movement, and public presence as “Islamic law compliant,” a framing that forecloses the question rather than answering it.
Neither claim was arrived at by consensus of the religion it claims to represent.
The Dissent That Already Exists
Neturei Karta, “Guardians of the City” in Aramaic, are Haredi Orthodox Jews who oppose the existence of the State of Israel on explicitly religious grounds, reading the Three Oaths as forbidding Jews from reestablishing a state by force ahead of the Messiah. The group has met publicly with Palestinian political leaders, including members of Hamas, and has been excluded from mainstream American Jewish institutional life as a result.
Jewish Voice for Peace, founded in 2004, is rooted in the social-justice wing of Reform and Reconstructionist Judaism. Its campus chapters have been repeatedly suspended; Columbia in November 2023, George Washington University in August 2025.
IfNotNow was founded in 2014 when young American Jews organized a public recitation of the mourner’s Kaddish to protest that year’s Gaza war. Independent Jewish Voices, founded in 2008, brings together rabbis and communal leaders critical of Israeli state policy who have been repeatedly labeled antisemitic for doing so.
The Jewish Labor Bund held that Jewish equality should be won in the countries Jews already lived in. Agudat Yisrael opposed Zionism on religious grounds before the Holocaust changed its position. Reform Judaism’s 1885 Pittsburgh Platform declared Judaism a religious community rather than a nation. The American Jewish Committee identified as non-Zionist on its own letterhead until 1967.
Geoffrey Levin, professor of Middle Eastern and Jewish studies at Emory University, documents in his 2024 book Our Palestine Question that Israeli diplomats pressured the American Jewish Committee to remove Don Peretz, its first Middle East consultant, after he wrote about Palestinian refugees.
The Dissent Islam’s Institutions Have Already Registered
Ahmed el-Tayeb’s December 2022 statement said the education ban contradicted Sharia, which he said urges men and women to seek education “from cradle to grave.” The Taliban has not lifted the ban since.
The Organization of Islamic Cooperation has repeatedly condemned the restrictions. In December 2024 the OIC expressed “serious concern,” and the Taliban’s own published account of that meeting quietly removed the section describing the OIC’s call to lift the restrictions.
Al Arabiya commentator Heba Yosry has written that the Taliban do not represent Islam. Aiman Mazyek, chairman of the Central Council of Muslims in Germany, called the 2021 takeover “a disaster for Muslims worldwide.”
The European Union Agency for Asylum has found that the Taliban’s specific restrictions “cannot be found in any other country with Islamic populations.”
Once a movement has asserted the banner, it demands that criticism of the movement be treated as an attack on the religion itself.
PART TWO: THE SHIELD AND THE WEAPON
The Shield
The Anti-Defamation League’s 2024 audit found a fourth consecutive record year: 9,354 documented antisemitic incidents, 58 percent involving language referencing Israel or Zionism. “In 2024, hatred toward Israel was a driving force behind antisemitism across the U.S.,” said Oren Segal, the ADL’s senior vice president for counter-extremism and intelligence.
CUNY’s Aviva Kutnick sits exactly inside the gap this creates. She is Jewish. Her activism was in support of Palestinian rights. CUNY fired her for the political position and treated her Jewishness as irrelevant to whether the firing constituted antisemitism at all.
The Taliban runs the same play. Deutsche Welle reported in September 2021 that many Islamic scholars remained quiet about the Taliban’s takeover because they feared criticism would be read as “paternalism or even betrayal.”
The Weapon
Former executive director of Human Rights Watch, Kenneth Roth, told the European Centre for Populism Studies in 2025 that the Israeli government is “cynically using allegations of antisemitism to silence criticism” of what he characterizes as mass atrocity in Gaza. “Netanyahu and his supporters are not defending Jews worldwide,” he said. “They are sacrificing them.” He added that this cheapens the concept of antisemitism at the moment it is needed most.
The Taliban’s version of the weapon comes from its own numbers. In December 2025, Taliban officials released figures showing Taliban courts had flogged 1,118 people that year on charges described as “un-Islamic acts” and had carried out six public executions. The United Nations independently corroborated a comparable figure in March 2026 reporting, citing at least 1,110 floggings and noting 2025 alone exceeded all prior years combined. Supreme leader Haibatullah Akhundzada’s November 2022 order set this in motion. When international condemnation followed, the Taliban called the condemnation itself “reprehensible” interference.
UNAMA documented 98 cases of arbitrary arrest or detention in the first two quarters of 2024, alongside 20 instances of torture and nine former security-force members killed. The UN Secretary-General’s 2025 report on conflict-related sexual violence, submitted to the Security Council in spring 2026, documented 21 cases of sexual violence against 15 women and 6 girls, attributed to Taliban officials.
Moral Cover
The International Crisis Group documented settler violence in the West Bank in late 2024. The settlers involved made no security argument at all. Instead, per the Crisis Group’s field research, they claimed “a divine right as Jews” to settle what they called the historic Land of Israel. The Los Angeles Times reported in March 2024 that Religious Zionist factions now hold outsize influence in Israel’s governing coalition. Most of those factions, the paper reported, believe in a divine right to govern.
Every Taliban restriction is issued as religious law rather than policy choice. Mujahid’s defense of restrictions as “Islamic law compliant” is not a description. It is a foreclosure.
PART THREE: THE OPPORTUNISTS
The Anti-Zionist Wedge
The Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League have documented, across decades, how figures including David Duke and the Ku Klux Klan adopted anti-Zionist vocabulary specifically to traffic in classical antisemitic tropes while claiming a political target.
In October 2025, Nick Fuentes appeared on Tucker Carlson’s platform before a reported audience in the tens of millions. He told Carlson the “real problem” in America is “organized Jewry” and described “Zionist Jews” as enemies of the conservative movement, remarks reported by PBS, the Guardian, and the American Jewish Committee. The ADL has separately documented a Fuentes speech in which he said “I love you, and I love Hitler” while using the phrase “Talmudic Jews.”
Jewish Voice for Peace has stated that misstating what antisemitism is hands white nationalists a fog to hide in, because a definition too broad to be credible stops functioning as a warning system for anyone.
The Islamophobic Wedge
Tell MAMA documented a sevenfold increase in Islamophobic attacks in the UK after the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks. Far-right actors did not distinguish between Hamas, the Taliban, and Muslim individuals with no connection to either.
Zionism’s claim to represent Jews is a genuine live debate within Judaism. The claim that Islam is fairly represented by Hamas or the Taliban is not a live debate at all. Al-Azhar and the OIC’s fifty-seven member states have already rejected it. That settled verdict doesn’t stop the wedge from working. Islamophobic actors deploy the conflation with just as much force anyway, because they were never interested in the theological question to begin with.
Why the Wedge Is the Point
No one here is confused about the difference between a political movement and a religious community. The white nationalist hiding behind anti-Zionism knows the difference. The bigot hiding behind anti-Hamas rhetoric knows it too. The conflation is not their mistake. It is their tool.
THREAD FOUR: THE DOUBLE BIND, AND WHAT THE RECORD ACTUALLY SHOWS
A Jew who criticizes Israeli policy risks being told the criticism itself is antisemitic. A Muslim who criticizes the Taliban risks being told the criticism amounts to betrayal. In both cases the movement wins regardless of which way the individual moves.
The documented record on the Taliban side runs from UNAMA’s arrest figures through the Taliban’s own execution and flogging data, laid out in full in Thread Two. The documented record on antisemitism in the United States runs through the ADL’s 2024 audit, also laid out there. Held side by side, the two records do not describe equivalent movements. They describe two different processes that end in the same place.
PART FIVE: THE LETTER, AND THE WORD
The mechanism this report has traced is not only historical. It is active this week, in a specific and citable form.
On September 8, 2026, Creative Community for Peace published an open letter, ultimately signed by more than 5,000 people, rejecting the description of Israel’s conduct in Gaza as genocide. Signatories included Boris Johnson, Deborah Lipstadt, Irwin Cotler, Steven Pinker, and entertainment figures including Debra Messing, Mayim Bialik, Shari Redstone, and Haim Saban, along with the ADL and the American Jewish Committee.
The letter’s central argument rests on intent. “A crucial difference between war as tragedy and war as genocide is intent,” the letter states. “In this war, only one side intended to commit genocide, and that is Hamas.”
The 1948 Genocide Convention does require specific intent, dolus specialis, to destroy a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. What the letter does not mention is that the specific-intent question in Israel’s case has been examined by the international bodies charged with examining it, and answered in the opposite direction from the letter’s claim.
The UN Human Rights Council’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry published its finding in September 2025 and reiterated it in June 2026. It found that Israeli authorities and security forces had committed four of the specific acts the Genocide Convention defines as genocide. It also found that the required specific intent was present.
The letter’s framing, that the Nazis had documented intent and Israel does not, therefore this is not genocide, rests on a premise about how intent gets established that the law itself does not support. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia’s Trial Chamber found genocide at Srebrenica in its 2001 Krstić judgment. It reached that finding without a discovered manifesto or declared plan. Intent was established instead through a pattern of conduct: the scale of killing, the systematic character of the campaign, the targeting of a group as such. The International Court of Justice adopted the same pattern-based approach in its 2007 Bosnia v. Serbia ruling. Current proceedings, including Ireland’s intervention in South Africa v. Israel, continue to follow it.
A letter can dispute the Commission’s finding. What it cannot honestly do is write as though the finding doesn’t exist.
This is the shield from Thread Two, working in real time. A claim of protective intent, offered on behalf of a people, deployed to close off scrutiny of a specific and documented finding, rather than to answer it.
Closing
Aviva Kutnick did not stop being Jewish when CUNY decided her politics disqualified her from representing Jewish interests. The girls barred from Kabul’s medical schools did not stop being Muslim when the Taliban decided their absence from those classrooms was what Islam required. Neither movement asked either of them what the religion actually demanded. Neither did the letter ask what its own claim of intent actually requires it to prove.