Review of Islam, Israel and the West by David Schlanger

When I read a book I keep a yellow highlighter handy to mark sentences that I feel are important – ones that I want to re-read or tell others about. Islam, Israel and the West: A Former Muslim’s Analysis by Danny Burmawi turned out to be a 5-highlighter rating for me. Everything in it was worthy of highlighting.

Dan Burmawi, a former Muslim born in Jordan who converted to Christianity and now lives in the West, produced a provocative and bold examination of Islam’s role in the modern world as it relates to Israel and Western civilization. Burmawi’s purpose is urgent: to correct widespread misunderstandings about Islam, explain the deeper roots of the Arab-Israeli conflict, and challenge Western readers to see why the survival of liberal democratic culture is connected to how the world interprets Islam today. His book is an unabashed warning.

Burmawi argues that Islam functions as a political-theological system with expansive global ambitions and that quite frankly, Israel stands in its way. He claims that Islam’s ideological foundations are the real drivers of the Arab-Israeli conflict. His is a forensic and unapologetic inquiry into the ideological architecture of the political theology masquerading as a religion. His aim is “not simply to explain what Muslims believe but to show what Islam produces - institutionally, psychologically, and geopolitically.”

For Burmawi, October 7th changed everything. When he witnessed Islamic jihad being rebranded in Western cities as ‘resistance’ and a struggle for ‘freedom’, he felt he had to speak up and warn the West about the suicidal path it was on. He had fled the very ideology that was now rearing its ugly, destructive head in Western societies. He found himself doing what he never expected to do when he was a younger man – defend Israel! He concluded that the global struggle had one primary undeniable fault line: Israel versus Islamic jihad. He posits that Israel’s existence challenges certain interpretations of Islamic doctrine that historically viewed Jewish sovereignty as incompatible with visions of a unified Islamic polity. Israel cannot exist if Islam is to succeed by recapturing its former glory as a Caliphate.

Islam Israel and the West examines why Islam’s worldview is irreconcilable and incompatible with the West’s moral and political order. He exposes how language has been manipulated to shield Islam from scrutiny. Burmawi argues that terms like “Islamism” are often used to protect Islam from critical scrutiny, when in fact the political aspects are integral to the tradition itself. He challenges the common Western framing of Islam as inherently peaceful and instead asserts that its scriptural foundations and historical traditions reveal a religion deeply intertwined with political power and societal organization.

Burmawi celebrates the achievements of Western culture, its openness and institutional flexibility which contrast sharply with what he describes as Islam’s demands for exclusive allegiance to religious norms. He warns that the Western values of acceptance and tolerance have become the very weapons that Islamic jihad utilizes to infiltrate the Western psyche. He devotes an entire chapter to why Islam is incompatible with the West. He explains how Islam has rebranded itself as the perpetual victim to facilitate the strange alliance with left wing radicalism and Marxism. He presents jihad as feigning a struggle for social justice, a resistor to Western imperialism, and a crusader against inequality where jihadist violence has been recast as an inevitable backlash of colonized peoples against Western domination. This plugs Islam into the moral prestige of progressive activism making jihad relatable to Western audiences who are already invested in anti-racist and anti-capitalist struggles as witnessed on university campuses in Europe and North America. He calls this union ‘the unholy alliance’ between the West’s most illiberal religious ideology i.e. Islam and its most self-destructive political movement, the woke left.

Burmawi devotes a chapter comparing the three Abrahamic religions. He demonstrates how Islam does not produce morality but instead suppression. He shows how many of Islam’s vices are hidden behind veils, and how the religion is based more on fear, a regime of hypocrisy, and a counterfeit of true religion. He builds his case combining quotations from the Qu’ran, quotations from imams, and historical events both past and current. Burmawi explains how Islam views, negates, and abrogates both Judaism and Christianity.

The book ends with a chapter entitled New Frontiers in which Burmawi offers some concrete steps to address the Islamic threat that the entire book postulates. He covers strategies targeting what he calls Islam’s modern advance of bureaucratic jihad which he explains in detail including the Soviet influence and assistance. Burmawi addresses how to combat Islam’s expansion on the policy level internationally, the use of Islamophobia as a weapon, the leveraging of the United Nations, and the expansion of public propaganda against Israel and the West. He calls for the banning of the Muslim Brotherhood and going on offence by exposing NGOs and the United Nations agencies such as UNRWA, and media bias and coverage.

Burmawi calls Israel ‘the soul of conservatism’ representing religious liberty, individual responsibility, family integrity, and reverence for Western civilization – all antithetical to Islam’s political agenda and ideology. Delegitimization of Israel is a prelude to the fall of America. Instead, Burmawi advocates support for Israel as a model for minority survival in the Islamic world.

For Jewish readers, Islam, Israel, and the West offers a perspective that situates Israel’s security and existential concerns within a broader ideological and historical context, helping explain why debates about Jewish sovereignty resonate far beyond diplomacy and borders. For non-Jewish readers, especially those in Western societies, the book serves as an invitation to rethink assumptions about cultural compatibility and the nature of religion and politics. The book opens everyone’s eyes to the danger that Islam presents as a political-theological system with the aim of converting and ruling the world.

Islam, Israel and the West not only deserves a 5 highlighter rating but needs to be read by Western politicians, media influencers, and anyone who thinks Islamic jihad is an innocuous and righteous movement and that Israel is expendable. Dan Burmawi proves that the opposite is true.

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This review was published by the Canadian Antisemitism Education Foundation on January 1st, 2026.