Dr. Charles Jacobs co-founded the International Freedom Coalition on the conviction that jihadist persecution extends beyond any single community, and that a unified voice is far more difficult for the world to ignore.
While jihadists frequently designate Jews and Israel as primary adversaries, they are far from the only targets. Around the world, Druze, Christians, Alawites, Yazidis, Kurds, and other Muslim communities have likewise suffered persecution at the hands of radical Islamist movements.
Jacobs argues that this shared experience of persecution forms the basis for a natural alliance between the Jewish people and minority groups worldwide.
Even as segments of the Western left increasingly label Jews as oppressors and exclude them from the roster of recognized victims, communities with firsthand experience of jihadism have not abandoned this partnership.
For those who have confronted radical Islamism directly, the threat is not an abstract political debate but a lived reality.
They recognize that the so-called Red-Green alliance between Islamists and elements of the far Left is bound less by shared values than by a common hostility toward the West, Jacobs told The Jerusalem Post. They also warn that those who align with Islamists may ultimately become the movement’s next victims.
International Freedom Coalition Unites Communities Targeted by Jihadism
Jacobs believes these communities recognize the importance of standing alongside the Jewish people, just as Jews bear a moral obligation to stand with them.
This conviction led him to co-found the International Freedom Coalition (IFC) earlier this year, uniting communities whose struggles have too often been addressed in isolation.
As Jacobs explains, the international community and private institutions can easily dismiss the grievances of a single persecuted group, but it becomes significantly more difficult when multiple voices unite to demand a hearing.
Though the IFC is a new venture, Jacobs has spent decades putting its founding principles into practice through his extensive work defending human rights and religious freedom across multiple organizations.
In 1994, he co-founded the American Anti-Slavery Group to combat chattel slavery and human rights abuses in Sudan. The organization’s grassroots advocacy helped generate the political momentum that ultimately contributed to South Sudan’s independence.
His commitment was never merely academic. While still in his early 20s, Jacobs traveled illegally into Sudan alongside a rabbi on a mission to secure the freedom of enslaved people in time for Passover, the Jewish festival commemorating the Exodus from Egypt.
“What else should Jews do on Passover but that?” he quipped.
His earlier work included co-founding the Boston branch of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis; in 2002, he established the David Project, an educational organization focused on Israel and antisemitism.
He currently serves as president of Americans for Peace and Tolerance (APT), a Boston-based nonprofit dedicated to combating Islamist antisemitism.
Jacobs’s newest project, the IFC, is a non-partisan human rights and advocacy organization founded to confront global jihadist violence, expose Islamist influence, and defend persecuted and vulnerable minority communities worldwide.
Addressing Accusations of Islamophobia
Anticipating accusations of Islamophobia, Jacobs emphasized that the organization supports Muslim victims of jihadist violence just as vigorously as any other persecuted community.
Its membership includes anti-Taliban fighters, anti-Houthi fighters, and Somaliland organizations.
He argued that those who invoke Islamophobia to silence criticism of Islamist movements—including organizations affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood—have often remained conspicuously silent when Muslims themselves are murdered by the very groups they seek to shield.
In a recent campaign, for example, the IFC funded a mobile billboard in Detroit carrying a message directed at incoming Michigan Democratic Senator Abdul El-Sayed.
The billboard read: “Abdul El-Sayed, end your silence about the jihadist murder and enslavement of Black Africans in Nigeria and Sudan.”
In Sudan, the Muslim Brotherhood-inspired Islamist government of Omar al-Bashir, which seized power in 1989 with the backing of the National Islamic Front, armed and supported militias responsible for abducting Black African civilians, particularly members of the Dinka and Nuba communities.
Women and children were seized during village raids, transported from their homes, and forced into unpaid domestic labor, herding, and sexual servitude. Human Rights Watch documented cases of children sold in slave markets and women held in domestic bondage.
In Nigeria, Boko Haram and its splinter factions have abducted thousands of civilians, primarily women and girls, subjecting them to forced marriage, labor, sexual slavery, and religious coercion.
The Post previously spoke with a Nigerian priest about the targeting of Christian women by these jihadist groups.
Sayed, Jacobs said, “should speak out. He has been repeatedly pressed with questions about whether his mother or sister is affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, but he can easily dismiss those as ‘guilt by association.’ We are not interested in his mother or his sister.”
“What we want is to help, particularly by reaching the Black community, which has been kept in the dark about these atrocities for the reasons I’ve mentioned. It is not ‘politically correct’ news,” he said.
“These Africans need the help of free people in America. If Americans knew what was happening, I believe they would instinctively want to help. That is an American instinct. But awareness is being blocked by political correctness and the fear of being accused of Islamophobia,” Jacobs continued.
The campaign, however, was met with violence. According to Jacobs, the truck’s driver was dragged from the vehicle, violently assaulted, and had his phone seized. Police reportedly insisted the driver turn off the signs—an incident Jacobs described as a “troubling” attack on free speech. He vowed that more trucks would be deployed to ensure the message reached the public.
“We don’t yet know the identity of the attackers, but we do know that the alliance of leftists and radical Islamists—by their own logic—simply cannot allow the American people, who would instinctively defend these African victims, to hear and see the truth,” Jacobs said.
“It is troubling that the police forced the driver to turn off his signs. Are we going to allow free speech to be destroyed by physical attacks and intimidation?” Jacobs asked. “Anyone can Google images of Nigerians under jihadist assault.”
Such images, he continued, are stomach-turning: “Men beheaded, people buried alive, and mass graves.”
“IFC members from Sudan, Nigeria, Darfur, and Biafra wanted Black American citizens to see their plight and come to their aid. That’s what the truck was for,” Jacobs said. “Those who desperately need to keep these atrocities from American eyes have resorted to violence.”
Why the Left Abandoned Those It Claimed to Protect
Asked why Western leftists align with Islamist organizations that oppose everything they purport to believe, Jacobs answered simply: “white guilt” and the need to distinguish themselves from the “oppressive class.”
“When you buy your ‘amnesty card,’ you get to stand up in front of the world, beat your chest, and say, ‘I’m not the bad white guy.’ You prove it by pointing out the bad things white people do,” he said.
“But when I ask that person, or Amnesty International, why they won’t help me free Black slaves held by Muslims, it gets in the way of their narrative. It actually contradicts their message, because they need to maintain that Western sins are the greatest sins,” Jacobs pointed out.
“Suddenly, I’m telling them there’s something worse, and it’s being done by people who, through this protection racket, have a kind of Teflon coating. They can’t criticize them because they’d be accused of Islamophobia, or because the perpetrators are dark-skinned or poor,” he explained.
“That really throws them off, so they will never help free an enslaved Black person… It’s a ritualistic ‘purification card’ that they’re getting,” the doctor said.
Still, Jacobs rejected the suggestion that jihadists have completely captured the political Left, describing it instead as an “illogical coalition” between the two.
He argued that the alliance is held together by a shared opposition to Western liberalism, democracy, and Israel, which the Left increasingly portrays as a symbol of imperialism and colonialism.
He pointed to the 1979 Iranian Revolution as a warning, recalling how leftists and Islamists joined forces to overthrow the Shah, only for the Islamists to turn on their former allies once they had seized power.
“We know how well this worked out for the Left when they joined with the Islamists in Iran to overthrow the Shah,” he said. “They won, right? The Red-Green Alliance overthrew the Shah. The day after, the leftists had their throats slit.”
For Jacobs, this double standard regarding when to react and whose suffering matters is precisely why persecuted minorities must look beyond traditional human rights organizations and build alliances with the Jewish people, even when ties to Israel and Jewish communities can be weaponized against them.
Islamist actors, including figures within Iran’s ruling regime, have repeatedly sought to discredit such relationships by portraying them as evidence of foreign influence or disloyalty.
The mass killing of protesters in Iran in January and the subsequent wave of executions have demonstrated the dangers faced by those who challenge an Islamist regime.
However, Jacobs argued, such accusations are likely to be made regardless of whether these alliances exist, and are often used to justify repression and atrocities.
There is therefore little reason for persecuted communities to hold back from seeking support from Israeli and Jewish organizations, he said.
The IFC’s Achievements to Date
Though still in its infancy—having held its inaugural conference in Washington in July—Jacobs was visibly proud of what the coalition had already achieved.
He explained that simply bringing together 15 different groups victimized by jihadism—groups that believed they were fighting isolated battles—and helping them understand they constitute a collective was “a tremendous thing.”
“You should have seen how excited they were when we brought them together in Washington and they realized they were not alone,” Jacobs said.
Describing the scene, Jacobs said: “The Sudanese were talking to the Iranian dissidents, the Iranian dissidents were talking to the Coptic Christians, the Copts were talking to the Darfuris, and the Darfuris were talking to the Alawites.”
“It was an amazing thing. They saw it as empowering, not only emotionally but politically and diplomatically.”
The second major achievement, he said, was helping people understand that the problem is jihadism, not Islam or Muslims.
“The urgency is that people in the West need to see the enemy stripped of its religious garb. It’s jihadism,” he said, maintaining that the issue is not Islam itself.
Jacobs stressed that jihadists are the ones exploiting America’s commitment to religious freedom, shielding themselves from scrutiny by dismissing criticism as “Islamophobia.”
Asked what people in Israel and the West could do to sustain this momentum, Jacobs said the first step is to recognize that conflicts with jihadist movements worldwide are interconnected.
He described this as a “flipping of the consciousness,” arguing that simply understanding the common threat is an important step in itself.
But awareness, he said, must also translate into action, including pushing for policy changes, sanctions, and local initiatives.
He pointed to his own campaign against a foreign-funded curriculum in Boston-area public schools, which he said contained false and deeply hostile portrayals of Israel and Jews.
Jacobs recalled how APT had fought the material largely alone, contending that the IFC model could make it harder for schools and officials to dismiss such concerns as solely Jewish grievances.
Rather than having Jews raise the issue alone, he said, future campaigns could bring in Hindus to speak about the historical persecution of their communities and Alawites to challenge the omission of their own experiences. Together, they could argue that excluding these histories amounts to “erasing history” and avoiding a broader discussion of jihadism.
For Jacobs, this is what the IFC ultimately intends to achieve: ensuring that persecuted communities no longer have to fight their battles alone.
By bringing these groups together, he hopes to give them a platform to amplify each other’s struggles and draw attention to injustices that might otherwise go overlooked.
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