Jeremy Balcombe🎗

Yesterday I posted about growing up in Lebanon with Mein Kampf and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion on the shelves of Arabic book fairs; books I held before I ever held a Quran. That post went viral. And the most common response I am receiving is this: "So it's okay to kill people based on the books they read?" Let me be direct: no one said that. And you know no one said that. I am one of the children I described. I was handed that literature before I was old enough to choose for myself, and no one in my community thought that was strange. So I am not talking about punishing anyone. I am talking about what we were given; and what it did to us. We do not hesitate to analyze how Nazi propaganda shaped an entire generation of Germans. We do not flinch when scholars examine how Soviet literature produced authoritarian thinking across the Eastern Bloc. But the moment someone points to the same dynamic inside Arab and Islamic culture, the conversation immediately collapses into: "are you calling for violence?" That is not a response. That is a way of avoiding one. Ideas have consequences. Culture has consequences. What children are handed shapes what they become; that is not a controversial claim, it is the most basic principle of education. The question worth sitting with is not whether I am justifying harm. The question is why you are so determined to change the subject. You cannot protect the next generation of Arab and Muslim children from ideological poison if every attempt to name that poison is treated as an act of aggression. The most honest thing I can do for my own people is tell the truth about what we were given to read; and refuse to pretend it did not matter.

Mein Kampf has been one of the most sold books in Arabic libraries for more than a generation; and I say this from personal experience, not from statistics. Three of my uncles in Lebanon were book publishers. Growing up, I attended Arabic book fairs every year. And I remember clearly that among the first books my hands fell on as a young Muslim in Lebanon were the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Mein Kampf; books I read before I ever read the Quran, because my parents were liberal Arab nationalists, not devout Muslims. This is not an abstraction. This is the culture that Arab and Muslim children grow up swimming in.

This is insanity Why do they behave like they’re helpless? Change the law, close the gates, make the system better If they’re not deciding the who is!? Yvette Cooper, the Foreign Secretary, and Shabana Mahmood, the Home Secretary, are understood to have raised concerns that seizing tankers in British waters would allow Russian mercenaries to exploit the asylum system.