By Mustapha Ezzarghani in Athens, Georgia
(Publicity Photo)
I was not born carrying hatred; it was placed gently in my hands, like an heirloom no one thinks to question. As a child in Morocco, I inherited stories about Jews long before I ever met one. They were shadows in conversations, warnings disguised as wisdom, conclusions handed to me without evidence. I accepted them the way a child accepts the horizon, distant, unquestioned, and always there.
Then life, in its quiet defiance, introduced me to a truth no story had prepared me for. I met a Moroccan family whose daughter’s fragile heart had been mended by Israeli doctors. In that moment, something within me shifted, not loudly, not dramatically, but with the soft certainty of dawn. The stories I had carried began to crumble, not because I rejected them, but because they could no longer stand.
In the lands I come from, narratives are not merely told; they are cultivated like fields meant to yield obedience. For decades, across the Middle East and North Africa, a single story about Jews was sown into minds through classrooms, speeches, and the quiet authority of repetition. It was a story of enmity, of suspicion, of a people reduced to a symbol of all that is feared. Leaders gave these ideas the weight of legitimacy, and societies absorbed them as truth. Gamal Abdel Nasser once spoke of Jews not as individuals, but as a singular adversary, his words echoing far beyond his time, settling into the consciousness of generations. And so the narrative endured, not because it was true, but because it was familiar.
These ideas did not live only in speeches; they were woven into the everyday fabric of life. Textbooks repeated distortions until they felt like history. Television dramas turned caricature into character. Even casual conversations carried the same undertone, as if suspicion had become a social instinct. Over time, this constant reinforcement created something deeper than prejudice, it created certainty. And certainty, when it is built on falsehood, is among the most dangerous things a society can possess. It leaves no room for doubt, no space for encounter, no possibility for correction. It closes the door before truth has a chance to enter.
What troubles me now is not the memory of those stories, but their distant echo in a place I once believed immune to such simplicity. In the United States, I listen, and I recognize. The language is more polished, the tone more measured, but beneath it lies something I have heard before. On university campuses, in the language of activism, in the selective framing of media, I see a pattern unfolding: the quiet merging of identity with accusation, the slow erosion of nuance, the comfort of moral certainty where complexity should live. It feels, at times, as though I am watching an old film in a new theater. I know the script. I have seen its ending. And there is something unsettling in witnessing others applaud scenes that once led only to sorrow. I do not speak as an observer of history, I speak as someone who has walked through its consequences.
In recent years, data has begun to mirror this unease. Reports from organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League have documented a sharp rise in antisemitic incidents across the United States, on campuses, in public spaces, and online. What was once whispered has, in some places, become shouted. Jewish students speak of feeling unsafe expressing their identity. Synagogues increase their security not out of paranoia, but out of necessity. These are not isolated moments; they are signals. And signals, if ignored, become patterns.
For history is not a distant teacher; it is a patient one. It waits for us to forget before it repeats itself. George Santayana warned that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to relive it, and Alexis de Tocqueville reminded us that the strength of a democracy lies not in its institutions alone, but in the moral habits of its people. When a society begins to excuse the dehumanization of even one group, it loosens a thread that can unravel the whole fabric. America, in its essence, is not merely a nation, it is an idea, fragile and enduring at once. But ideas, like all living things, can weaken. If the language of exclusion becomes acceptable, if hatred is rebranded as virtue, then the loss will not belong to one community alone. It will belong to all.
History offers us more than warnings, it offers us evidence. The twentieth century stands as a testament to what happens when words are allowed to harden into doctrine. In Europe, antisemitism did not begin with violence; it began with narratives, with exclusion, with the gradual normalization of suspicion. By the time the consequences became undeniable, the foundations had long been laid. The lesson is not that history repeats itself in identical form, but that it follows familiar paths. And those paths are visible long before they reach their end.
And so the question returns to us, not as a demand, but as a responsibility. What do we do when we recognize the shadow before it grows? For those of us who belong to minority communities, who know what it means to be misunderstood, to be judged before being known, the answer cannot be silence. Muslims, especially, must find the courage to stand against antisemitism, not because it is expected of us, but because it is right. To defend the dignity of another is to defend our own. It is also to reclaim something within our own traditions, principles of justice, of protection for the “other,” of moral clarity that transcends politics.
I have chosen this path, and it has not been without cost. There are days when the weight of speaking feels heavier than the comfort of silence. There are moments when the distance from one’s own community feels like exile. Criticism comes easily; understanding rarely does. Yet I have come to believe that silence, too, has a cost, a quieter one, but far more enduring. It is the cost of becoming complicit in a story we know to be untrue. And if we are to build a future different from the past we inherited, then we must begin by refusing to pass that past, unchanged, to those who come after us.
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Mustapha Ezzarghani is a Moroccan-American Peace Activist Advancing Muslim–Jewish Dialogue. He is the Founder and President of the Moroccan–Israeli Friendship Association