Catherine Perez-Shakdam: The most clear, honest and courageous fighter of our time
In a remarkable interview, crucial for our times, Catherine Perez-Shakdam talks to Winston Marshall. I urge readers to watch the interview in its entirety. Here, though, I discuss three of her insights and warnings from that interview that had the most powerful effect on me.
1
If you try to rationalise evil and actually convince people that is not as bad as it looks, it means that you are then free, or at least excused, not to act. And it's so easy to claim that out of a sense of morality and the desire to save the innocent lives, you are willing to not stand up to evil, then allowing that evil to grow and become impossible to deal with later, or at least, at a greater cost. They think that they can have this halo and claim the Nobel Peace Prize. But I'm going to ask something of people. Think about this for a second, because I hear this a lot when people say, "But what about Gaza?" Fine, what about Gaza? Let me ask you this.
What does it mean to be innocent? And whom do we owe protection to?
So my way of thinking is this. If me becoming a monster and claiming lives with my bare hands, means that I will save those I am responsible for, my children, I am willing to do it, because I am protecting the innocent, mine. I'm sorry, but I'm not the Messiah. I'm not Jesus. I'm not Mushiach. I'm not whatever culture, whatever religion you want to refer to. I am not the Saviour. I can only be responsible for the innocent that I am responsible for. So that goes with your family, your tribe, your nation, your religious group, whatever. You pick one. You have a group. Everyone has one. What would you be willing to do to defend those people?
Don't tell me that you want to save the other side, because if you do, you are condemning yours to die. That makes you a coward in my book. But then again, you know, I do believe that we fought the Nazis on the basis that the innocent ought to be saved. And the true innocent in our story are the generation yet to be born. Do we want them to be born into slavery or do we want them to be free? If the answer is free, you fight today so that you could be kinder to the future generations, or you let them deal with it and then you're gonna go explain why grandma and granddad were so cowardly that they could not stand up from their sofa.
In the jihad waged on the West, we, the victims, have posited what we term “moderate Muslims” as the “innocents” and we, the victims, have assumed responsibility for those “moderates” and consider ourselves virtuous for doing so. Not only must “the moderates” not die in this war initiated by their own side, Muslims, our responses to their war on us must not inconvenience "the moderates" in any way. In particular, we must protect them from any possible fallout, and we must take extra-special care at all times never to alienate “the moderates,” even going so far as to either help them “against the extremists,” or help them “reform Islam.” We have taken upon ourselves responsibility for enemy innocents of our own imagining at the expense of responsibility for our own very real innocents, whom we are ready to disenfranchise, jail and even kill to protect those enemy innocents. The prevailing attitude towards Tommy Robinson is a very clear case in point.
It does not end there. Positing “moderate Muslims” means positing “moderate Islam”, but moderate Islam already implies that Islam is not moderate, that moderate Islam is a departure from what is authentic. Our next trick was to switch around the authentic and the fake: turn “moderate Islam” into “Islam” and Islam into “fundamentalist Islam”, or “radical Islam”, or “extremist Islam”, or “jihadist Islam”. The lie becomes truth when these adjectives become nouns: “Fundamentalism”, “Radicalism”, “Extremism” and “Jihadism”. It is no accident that the adjective keeps changing; it has to keep up with (moderate) “Islam” continually exposed as fake and “radical” Islam always confirming itself as the real thing.
This continuous conjuring up of new adjectives to differentiate Islam from itself does nothing more than to, in our own minds, disconnect Islam from itself, and to distance Muslims from their own actions. For our contrived “moderate Muslim” innocents, we have therefore contrived an "innocent" Islam, as opposed to a guilty "Islamism." We feel it incumbent on ourselves to protect innocent Islam from "Islamism," ourselves from the "Islamists," and "innocent Muslims" from ourselves. In our own minds, we have managed to place ourselves in the position of those who attack us, and feel virtuous for doing so.
2
The whole aim and ambition of the regime in Tehran is to acquire the seat of Islam. So Mecca and Medina are the two holiest cities of Islam and they happen to be under the custodianship of King Salman and of course his son, Muhammad bin Salman, the Crown Prince, and they understand that if they were ever to lead the Islamic world, they would have to claim to their name and their ideology those two holy cities.
When you hear “Death to Israel. Death to America”, the reason they say "Death to Israel. Death to America" is that number one, Israel is a very useful Trojan horse in that anti-semitism and anti-Zionism (the new anti-semitism of today), come naturally, unfortunately, in the Middle East, and in the Islamic world its something that they've been taught. And I think that the West responded quite well to the ideology. So it took aim and while people are busy hating the Jews and Israel, they don't see that actually their very cities and countries are being surrounded and potentially standing to be put under siege.
Now, if you look at the map of the Middle East you will see that the regime in Iran, for some reason, decided to invade, maybe not completely, but at least ideologically, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and Iraq. Now, you look at Saudi Arabia, where is it on the map, but surrounded by those friendly, friendly regimes. So, the question is, what do they do now? They lost their proxies.
My contention all along has been that the Abraham Accords have a great deal more to do with Saudi Arabia than it has to do with Israel, and that Saudi Arabia is the initiator of the Abraham Accords. While it is true that Saudi Arabia is sitting on an economic time bomb, that economic time bomb is misconceived. The Saudi economy does have to be diversified away from a single-sector economy, but the driver to do so is more fundamental. The country is sitting on a demographic time bomb, as does every other Gulf state, whether an Abraham Accords enthusiast or not.
Without going into it too much here, my understanding is that Gulf demographic pressures are the real motive for social change, including economic diversification, and that it just so happens that Saudi dependence on its oil sector is becoming an issue. The real impediment to solving both the demographics and the economy is Islam. This has to do with the Islamic predisposition towards plunder, which precludes economic development.
I have argued, therefore, that the portrayal of Sunni Arab interest in the Abraham Accords as motivated out of geopolitical fear of Shi’a Iran is misleading. Their motivation is to escape Islam. This cannot be portrayed as dismantling Islam because they are walking a very delicate theological tightrope that both Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood can easily exploit. At the same time, their position is not as fragile as was that of Mustafa Kemal a hundred years ago. The Saudi population itself, especially those under 40, constitutes a far more sustainable basis upon which to dismantle Islam than was available to Kemal at the end of the Ottoman Caliphate. The same holds for the other Gulf states, including Iran.
After the collapse of the Assad regime in Syria, Israel had all her regional enemies in disarray. I argued that the effective destruction of both Hezbollah and the Syrian state created a vacuum in the Sunni-Shi’a jihad rivalry. This vacuum the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood, in the form of the Turkish regime, was bound to fill in order to seize jihad hegemony back from Shi'a Iran. I argued that Israel needed to be prepared for such a development. What I had not done, was join the Abraham Accords dot to the jihad hegemony dot. Catherine Perez-Shakdam helped me see that the “ring of fire” is not around Israel, as is so often claimed, but around Saudi Arabia. This added a deeper dimension to my understanding of both the Abraham Accords and the civil war slowly intensifying within Islam.
The Iranian regime is not only rivalling the Muslim Brotherhood for hegemony over jihad, it needs to salvage Islam itself from the leading Sunni states’ attempts to first neuter it and then dismantle it. The Iranian regime can only spread its “Islamic Revolution” if it saves Islam, and it can only save Islam if it subsumes Sunni Islam. It can only subsume Sunni Islam if it seizes the two holy mosques. I am unaware of whether Catherine Perez-Shakdam sees all of it this way, but her insight has led me here.
3
It was revenge against an idea, an ideology that I thought was genocidal. It's not for me. It was more. It wasn't just about Israel. We do say that whoever saves a life, it is as if one has saved the whole of humanity. The same goes for those who try to take life, you are destroying the universe. I was thinking, you want to take this to a level that is so sickening that you want to extinguish the light in my mind. And I'm not saying that we're special people. I'm just saying that they wanted to extinguish the light of a tradition that has survived thousands of years, just because we don't want to take a knee. And I just couldn't. They tried in the 1930s. It did not take, and it's not going to take now, because people like me, people like so many others who are doing an amazing job at fighting anti-Zionism and anti-semitism, will continue to do so and we will win. We will survive this. We will outlive this evil. There's no doubt in my mind. But for me, it became a personal fight in that I had been confronted with the face of evil. I knew its name and I was going to fight and beat it. That was my purpose.
I did not leave Islam because of a so-called “battle of ideas”, as obfuscators like Maryam Namazie and so many others would have it, I left Islam because of the cruelty of Muslims, plain and simple. At the time, it did not even rise to the philosophical level of the inhumanity of Muslims. I had no idea of how the inner structure of Islam drives Muslims towards barbarism and deceit, both of others and of themselves. Although I had left Islam in 1979, the horrors of the new Islamic regime only started filtering through to me during Ramadan of the next year. I thought that the people who told me such things only wanted to intimidate me back to Islam.
It was not before the rise of ISIS that I finally started seriously studying Islam, even though Muslims had been claiming already since 9/11 that such people, “are not real Muslims.” When I came to understand how Islam creates these bizarre charming-monstrous people called Muslims, how it stunts both women and men, and what a danger Muslims, as the practitioners of Islam, pose to the world, it was clear that Islam is an abomination. But even that was not what got me to where I am today.
When I left Islam, I lived in a Muslim environment where no one was going to kill me for doing so, and I did not give much thought to the deeper significance of this practise until after Muslims claimed that Muslim terrorists are not Islamic. My first response to the mandatory killing of apostates was purely in the realm of ideas: if someone has left Islam, then, surely, Islam no longer has jurisdiction over him or her, and the ruling becomes moot. Only later did I come to the realisation that jihad, the violent imposition of Islam, makes all reasoned argument, whether right or wrong, irrelevant. It is a fight, plain and simple, in which the more powerful, in all respects, will prevail. This realisation laid the basis for what came next.
Because Muslims arrogate unto themselves the right to kill me for the singular act of leaving Islam, that I need do nothing more for death to be my fate, then it makes absolutely no difference whatsoever whether I quietly disappear and for the rest of my life keep my head down, or go after Islam to do as much damage to it as I possibly can before some Muslim’s knife reaches my neck. The outcomes of both courses of action are exactly the same: at any moment, some Muslim can kill me. I set myself on the latter course of action. I vowed to do as much damage to Islam as I possibly can for as long as I can.
That their religion tells them to end my life makes it personal, a fight between me and Muslims. This is why I have no Muslim friends and have no patience with those who want to make excuses for "moderate Muslims," or want me to find nice things to say about Islam. Every single Muslim is guilty by virtue of the simple fact that they freely declare themselves Muslim. It is only a fight because I choose to fight back, rather than capitulate. To hear Catherine Perez-Shakdam express this same resolve, and with the same determination, was enormously gratifying and inspiring.
It is not clear why Catherine Perez-Shakdam is not the most important person in Israel.
Picture credits:
Screenshot from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUcT8p3frxk
Comments:
On 2 August 2025 at 12:52, Ben Dor A. wrote:
Dear Anjuli Pandavar
Thank you for posting these important thoughts on Islam.
Have shared your opinion.
I started listening to the interview of Ms. Shakdam but had a very difficult time understanding her, so after a few moments, I just turned it off and started reading your views.
I wish that more people will be able to see clearly what you understand.
BTW, I read the following information shared by a friend from NZ. I think you will find it interesting:
https://kabbalahmedia.info/en/sources/DIKpvrLy
Best Regards
Ben Dor A.