Sometimes, it takes the simplest thing to wake up the public to just how radical an ideology is.

And that’s a lesson jihadist Nerdeen Kiswani just learned when she posted about how people shouldn’t have pet dogs.

Kiswani, for those just tuning in, is a virulent Jew-hating Islamist who is co-founder of a group called Within Our Lifetime (WOL), whose mission is eradicate Israel from the map and which features a photo of a protestor carrying a “globalize the intifada” sign on its homepage.

This is a person who:

• Celebrated the invasion of Israel on Oct. 7, describing it as “heroic Palestinian resistance” and calling on people to “honor our martyrs and let the world know that NYC stands with Gaza.”
• Led rallies across New York calling for the “full liberation of Palestine” and declaring that “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”
• Whose acolytes, as the New York Times reported in 2024:

… shut down the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges and snarled Midtown traffic. Their chants of ‘Long live the Intifada!’ outside an exhibition memorializing victims of the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, drew condemnation from as high as the [Biden] White House. Protesters in her orbit sometimes burn Israeli flags and fly the flags of Hamas and Hezbollah.

Get the picture?

But until now, few outside of New York had probably ever heard of Nerdeen Kiswani, or knew anything about her radical beliefs.

Until she decided to badmouth dogs.

In a post on X a week ago, she said that “Finally, NYC is coming to Islam. Dogs definitely have a place in society, just not as indoor pets. Like we’ve said all along, they are unclean.”

Florida Rep. Randy Fine, who is Jewish, responded with a post saying “If they force us to choose, the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one.”

That then prompted Democrats (who seemed determined these days to be on the wrong side of every 80-20 issue) to call for Fine’s censure for “Islamophobia.”

(For the record, “Islamophobia,” like “homophobia” or “transphobia”, is a term that we refuse to use until “Jewphobia,” “Christophobia,” and “normalphobia,” become mainstream).  

Those calls to censure Fine then forced the issue into the national spotlight.

But the reaction from everyday Americans has been furious, with dog lovers everywhere stunned that any religion could view their beloved pets as “unclean.”

Even Kiswani felt compelled to do damage control, saying she was simply responding to a discussion about dog poop on the city’s streets and then resorting to the hackneyed “it was just a joke” defense.

“Illiterate boomers really turned my joke into a national headline,” she said.

If anyone can find the “satire” in her original post, please explain it to us, because it’s pretty clear that, in fact, devout Muslims aren’t supposed to keep dogs as pets.

The lesson here appears to be that nobody cares about radical Islam’s views on Jews, or Sharia law, or female genital mutilation, or executing gays, or terrorism, or creating no-go zones in Europe.

But attack our dogs? As Bugs Bunny would say: “Of course you realize, this means war.”

— Written by the I&I Editorial Board