During the darkest years of World War II, when Jews in Paris were hunted by the Nazis, the Grand Mosque of Paris opened its doors.
Imam Si Kaddour Benghabrit hid Jewish families in the mosque’s cellars, gave them forged Muslim identity papers, and helped many escape.
While the Gestapo searched the streets, it was a Muslim place of worship that became a sanctuary for Jews.
But that was not the first time Muslims stood with them.
When pogroms tore through the Russian Empire in the early 1900s, countless Jewish families fled westward.
In Britain, the government of Arthur Balfour – the same man later gave the “Balfour Declaration” – worked hard to keep the Jews out, pushing through the 1905 Aliens Act to restrict their entry.
While Jews were being slaughtered, Britain was closing its doors.
At that very time, the Ottoman Empire was offering them shelter, as it had done for centuries, including when Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492.
And again, on the eve of the Holocaust, a ship full of desperate Jewish refugees — the MS St. Louis — fled Nazi Germany.
The United States turned it away.
Britain turned it away.
Canada turned it away.
Hundreds of those on board later perished in the camps.
But in Morocco, the Muslim Sultan Mohammed V refused to hand over Jews under his protection, famously declaring:
> “There are no Jews in Morocco. There are only Moroccan subjects.”
History remembers who opened doors and who slammed them shut.
And today, the very same voices that once stirred fear and hatred are weaponising the word antisemitism to silence anyone who stands with Palestine, anyone who dares speak against occupation, genocide and apartheid.
They are inflaming division, twisting a real and painful history of Jewish suffering into a shield for political crimes.
The cruel irony is that the far right — the ones who once waved Nazi flags in the 30s and now march under British ones — stood on a stage in London on 13 September, throwing Nazi salutes next to Israeli flags.
That is the grotesque theatre our politics has become.
Keir Starmer and those like him claim to fight antisemitism, yet by fusing Jewish identity with the actions of Israel, they are making Jews less safe, not more.
They are repeating the same cowardice that history knows too well — when moral clarity was needed, they chose alignment with power.
To my Jewish fellow citizens:
When fascism rises again — and the signs are all around us — it will not be Starmer or his friends who stand with you or us.
It will be people like me, people like you, people who still believe in humanity, in justice, and in standing beside the oppressed.
We were there when your ancestors were hunted, and we will be there again if darkness falls.
The others — the opportunists, the flag-wavers, the merchants of fear — some will fall silent, but many will be cheering the marching crowds.
Ahmad Baker
October 2025
