By Zion Jenkins —
For 20 years Michael Gamal was a Muslim — and he learned to hate Israel.
“But suicide bombing is clearly wrong, right?” he asked a buddy in Islam when he started. “Without skipping a beat, he looked at me. He said, ‘Habibi (dear friend), this is all we have.’ At that moment, alarm bells went off in my head cuz this is crazy.”
Nevertheless Gamal bargained with himself. He set out to “moderate” his new friends of the faith. Instead, they radicalized him.
“When you’re around extremism for so long and you don’t speak out against it, you actually become extreme,” Gamal says.
Michael Gamal was born to Coptic Egyptian parents in Massachusetts, but he abandoned his Christian faith because he identified with buddies who spoke the same language and shared his culture in college in California.
Slowly he warmed up to the ideas of the Free Palestine movement: All Israelis were legitimate targets because all Israelis either were or are going to be Israel Defense Forces soldiers. Even babies.
Israel has no right to the land. Terror attacks by Islamists are actually done by Mossad, Israel’s spy agency.
“The way their mind works is no matter what Israel has to be at fault,” he says. “So, you reached the conclusion first and then you worked backwards to to justify it.
“They use the word justice, which sounds very noble and paints a very pretty picture,” he adds. “But we actually saw what their version of justice is on Oct. 7. This is something that they talk about amongst themselves: this is what we want to do. Oct. 7 was a fulfillment of everything that they’ve been talking about, what they wanted to do to Israeli Jews for the longest time.”
Some of the lies were too flagrant for even Gamal to parrot. He knew Hamas operatives had raped and gang-raped. His buddies called it untrue. He saw Islamists killing Copts, his ethnicity. His buddies blamed Mossad.
The house of cards of lies began to collapse when in San Diego he saw a poster on a utility box of Israeli hostages. He couldn’t get out of his head images in the news of activists in London, Toronto and New York had scraping the posters off.
His blood evaporated. “You’re not such a piece of crap that you would ever deface the posters of the hostages,” he said.
The final straw was a video forwarded to his phone from a buddy. It was about Hitler, the perpetrator of the Nazi Holocaust. “Did he know something we didn’t know?” the text said.
“He was really asking me to consider that Hitler was right,” Gamal says.
It was March 2025.
He withdrew from his Muslim buddies, shut down his social media and declared himself to be a Zionist.
Today, Gamal has returned to his Coptic faith and now is known as the Coptic Zionist on the new social media channels he started.
