Syrian-American Muslim rapper Mona Haydar has a zealous commitment to “Palestine,” as she obsessively tweeted on May 15, 2018, views that round out her previously discussed anti-American, woke ideologies. Such ideologies undermine the charming image she recently displayed in the PBS documentary series Great Muslim American Road Trip, in which she and her husband traveled America’s historic Route 66.
“The nation state called Israel is a modern lie,” Haydar wrote in her tweet, for the “true Israel is built upon the tenements of liberation and it does not exist except for in the Bible.” “We MUST Boycott, Divest, and Sanction” (BDS), she added in support of the antisemitic economic warfare campaign against Israel. Aware of the angry backlash this would unleash, she knowingly observed to her fans to “please look it up. I will not link it because then this post will be intentionally buried by algorithms.”
For justification, Haydar cited Israel’s “perpetuation of colonization” and ranted:
Israel is an apartheid state and if you are for justice, peace, and love, you must support the Palestinian people as they resist this oppression. If you believe that life is sacred, you must support Palestinian life. Otherwise, take the words peace, justice and equality out of your mouth.
In another tweet that same day, Haydar emphasized that
Israel is an apartheid state on the wrong side of history as it segregates people into an unjust caste system. It carries the karma of stolen land while it literally imprisons Palestinians in inhumane encampments—70 years of this.
Minutes later, Haydar reiterated her religious antisemitic themes that Israeli Jews have no relation to Biblical Israel and that Jesus, a Jew considered messiah by Christians, would oppose Israel. She tweeted that her
concern is for justice, truth, dignity and love. Not for the divisive politics of land grabs and business deals cut by politicians. Jesus spoke truth to that domination and said No. Israel is on the wrong side of that fight- it has aligned itself with hate.
“Our people dance in spite of the bombs and guns used against them,” Haydar later tweeted in July 2018 while personally identifying with fellow Palestinian Arabs. “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be Free!!!!” she enthused with the euphemistic phrase that calls for Israel’s destruction between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Later in November 2018, CNN fired the BDS-supporting, antisemite Marc Lamont Hill as a commentator for uttering precisely these words in a pro-terrorism, anti-Israel rant at the United Nations in New York City.
Haydar also celebrated the July 29, 2018, release from Israeli prison of Ahed Tamimi. The teenager, who comes from a Palestinian family notorious for promoting and engaging in terrorism against Israel, gained international notoriety for slapping Israel soldiers while videoed. Yet Haydar strangely perceived a “Western media silence” and lamented “White supremacy” and “White privilege in full effect,” although the Tamimi family is rather Caucasian in appearance. The Tamimi clan possibly reflects the historic Bosnian immigrant roots of many “Palestinians.”
By September 29, 2018, Haydar had even accused Israel of “genocide,” an all-too common slander against Israel that has no basis in fact. The next year the febrile Haydar imagined that Israel coordinated so that “EVERY SINGLE YEAR ISRAEL BOMBS PALESTINIANS AT THE ONSET OF RAMADAN.” “These are religiously targeted attacks,” she added, and not merely Israeli responses to incessant Palestinian jihadist terrorism.
While Haydar demonizes Israel, she attributes violence among Muslims not to any religious doctrine, but rather Muslim victimization, as indicated in a 2017 interview with the website Hardcore Humanism. Violence is “not an authentic expression of Islam. It’s an expression of Islam that’s born of severe oppression” and “colonization” and “proxy wars,” she stated. “People who are so marginalized and traumatized by the world that we live in…have nothing to lose” and “express themselves in violent and horrific and tragic ways.” By contrast, they “don’t behave that way when they’re happy, when they’re fulfilled, when their life is going well,” a socioeconomic analysis refuted by studies on jihadists, who often are not disadvantaged.
Haydar’s hate against Israel is merely one more example of why no viewer should take at face value any politically correct, feel good film directed by Great Muslim American Road Trip executive producer Alex Kronemer. “Muslims came to America for the same reason that others came,” this Muslim convert comfortingly said in a recent news report on the documentary series, namely a “better way of life.” Yet his films always twist facts in the same manner as Nathan Lean, an Israel-hating scholar of “Islamophobia” and leftist thug whom Great Muslim American Road Trip lists among its “Scholarly Advisers.”
There is more than meets than eye, for example, in the Quran verses Haydar references in the series’ final third episode. She notes passages from the Quran’s sura (chapter) 19, in which Jesus’ birth occurs while his mother Mary sits under a palm tree. Haydar makes no mention that such narratives originated in documents rejected as false by Christians that predated Islam’s emergence in seventh-century Arabia.
Muslim health clinic workers also note to Haydar the claim that the Quran speaks of saving one life as symbolizing the saving of all humanity, a ubiquitous Islamic apologetic. In reality, Quran 5:32-33, read in context, justifies the most brutal of executions for those who in any way challenge Islam.
Such textual analysis belies the documentary series’ feel-good soundtrack, with the music of Cat Stevens, who later converted to Islam and changed his name to Yusuf Islam, closing out the opening episode. Yet no melody can erase how Islam expressed support for the 1989 fatwa of Ayatollah Khomeini, the Islamic Republic of Iran’s Supreme Leader, calling for the killing of British writer Salman Rushdie. In years since this blasphemy sentence for his book The Satanic Verses, unknown assassins answering Khomeini’s call, perhaps Iranian state agents, have left a bloody trail worldwide among book translators and publishers. On August 12, 2022, this violence caught up with Rushdie himself, who has often lived under police protection, when a murderous American supporter of Iran’s Islamic Republic grievously wounded Rushdie with a knife. Such bloody realities aside, Kronemer casts Haydar in a groovy mood in the final episode with Steppenwolf’s memorable Born to be Wild, the theme song of the 1969 counterculture classic film, Easy Rider.
Easy Rider’s motorcycle-riding, drug-dealing protagonists make far more sense in their radical individualism than Haydar’s confused religious and political ideas. Kronemer’s series clearly aspires to nonconformist Beatnik pretensions with Haydar reading from Jack Kerouac’s 1957 novel On the Road. However, the real Haydar merely parrots stale woke nostrums about Western evils in America and beyond, including apologetics for Palestinian jihad against Israel. PBS’ viewers might enjoy the virtual ride with Haydar, but should ideologically pass her by and take the exit ramp.
