Former Islamist recruiter from Egypt now supports Israel

He became a recruiter for the Egyptian Islamist organization Al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya which tried to overthrow the government and institute Sharia law.

Salam’s earliest memory was the death of President Nasser, the anti-Israel socialist. When Andwar Sadat, the next Egyptian president, signed peace treaty with Israel, Salam cried; he saw it as a betrayal. Every day he had to pass by the Israeli Embassy on his way to school, and he would spit on it, going and coming.

“Every problem we had in the 70s and 80s were blamed on Israel,” explains Salam (@IbnAlwarraq on X). “Rising prices,
corruption in the government, the Palestinian cause? It’s Israel, it’s the Zionist doing this.”

But when he decided that Islam was incoherent and left, his own father turned him over to the authorities, and Salam was given a prison sentence. He has been disowned by his family and has no communication with members, he says.

After rejecting Islam, Salam decided to study the Palestinian question. After a year of sifting through history, he came to a conclusion: “Israel had the right to exist and every single person who died since October 7 is on Hamas.”

“The whole Palestinianism story is a historical fiction, where you have event that happened but it’s manipulated and retold from the Nakba to the land acquisition to the whole war,” Salam says. “From the Arab perspective it’s extremely Machiavellian where Palestinians never do anything wrong, they are always right, and the Israelis can do absolutely nothing right.”

When Hamas killed, raped and took hostages out of Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, Salam didn’t even want to watch the video documentation of the evils done by Hamas. He already knew; when he was in jail, he learned what Islamist terrorists were capable of.

But he began tweeting in favor of Israel, at first anonymously, then openly. He realized the old axiom applied: “Not to speak against evil is evil itself.”

He has lost friends as a result.

Salam has lived in several places in the Middle East after his release from Egyptian prison, including Lebanon. But he had never visited Israel, until recently. Everyone was gracious and hospitable, he says, and an Orthodox family invited him to celebrate Shabbat.

One spoke up: “It’s so amazing to have a former enemy as a friend.”

Hamas has released 140 hostages and continues to hold about 50, including two Americans.