Doha Dispatch: Naming Two Hatreds in a World of Colliding Traumas

DOHA—Tucker Carlson drew a crowd that filled the vast Al Dafna hall at last week’s Doha Forum, held at the Sheraton Grand Doha Resort & Convention Hotel. Elsewhere at the sprawling conference center—in a room barely a tenth the size— far quieter and reflective panelists introduced the Granada Declaration, a new framework arguing that Islamophobia and antisemitism should be confronted together rather than treated as rival grievances.

The Granada Declaration on Combatting Islamophobia and Antisemitism, co-sponsored by Spain and Qatar, was drafted by a working group that paired Muslim and Jewish scholars. The authors argue that the two prejudices, while historically distinct, increasingly operate together—amplified online, manipulated by political actors, inflamed by the Israel-Palestine conflict.

“The aim here is to end the perception that confronting one undermines the struggle against the other.”

Panel moderator Khalid bin Fahad Al-Khater, who convened the working group, wears two hats: director of policy and planning at Qatar’s Foreign Ministry and founder of New Ground Research, a think tank that opened its Granada headquarters specifically to work on the declaration. Over three years, the organization held four annual roundtables—three in Doha, Qatar, one in Granada, Spain—before arriving at the final text unveiled at the Doha Forum.

Qatar’s role as mediator in the October 7 hostage negotiations put the country’s leadership in intense contact with Israeli and Jewish families—a relationship that shaped the urgency Qatari officials brought to the Granada Declaration’s launch.

Al-Khater framed it plainly: “The future must be one of ‘us,’ not ’us and them.’”

The declaration takes its name from New Ground Research’s Granada headquarters—a city that symbolizes convivencia, the historical coexistence of Muslims, Jews, and Christians in medieval Spain. Al-Khater said the initiative extends the work of the UN’s genocide-prevention community. “This is part of a broader effort, not merely political, to prevent atrocities.”

Dov Waxman, the UCLA professor who co-authored the declaration, knows what it means when frameworks fail. Born in London and educated at Oxford, he’s spent years writing about fractures within the Jewish world. His 2016 book Trouble in the Tribe examined American Jewish conflicts over Israel.

He also knows the cost when communities can’t talk to each other. In spring 2024, a pro-Palestinian encampment at UCLA led to violent clashes, over 200 arrests and a federal lawsuit filed by Jewish students alleging they were blocked from parts of campus and felt unsafe. Off-campus in Los Angeles, a Jewish-Muslim dialogue group called NewGround—a different organization, founded in 2006—ran a high school leadership program pairing Muslim and Jewish teens. They kept meeting through what one interfaith leader called a “crisis point” for trust. Waxman lives in that landscape.

On stage, he explained that the document provides “a shared conceptual vocabulary” for understanding both hatreds as forms of racism with structural, institutional, and interpersonal dimensions.

The declaration’s core argument: neither antisemitism nor Islamophobia can be understood solely as theological animus. Both rely on systems (legal, political, cultural) that reproduce bias regardless of individual intent. 

“Accusations are often framed as coming at the expense of the other,” Waxman told me. “The aim here is to end the perception that confronting one undermines the struggle against the other.”

The working group noted that after every Israel-Hamas escalation, antisemitic and Islamophobic incidents spike. The declaration’s tenth principle rejects collective responsibility: Jews as Jews need not answer for Israel’s actions, nor Muslims as Muslims for any Muslim-majority government.

The document calls on governments, institutions and companies to integrate these principles into educational curricula, media standards and legal frameworks—moving beyond aspirational language to concrete policy shifts.

Waxman also pointed to weaponization. Accusations of antisemitism and Islamophobia have become political currency, deployed to silence criticism or score points. “Misuse cheapens the concepts,” he said, “and prevents us from addressing real discrimination.”

Critics surfaced, particularly in Spain and Latin America, saying Jewish community bodies weren’t consulted. Waxman didn’t dismiss the concerns but contextualized: “Declarations are produced by working groups. They aren’t meant to claim universal representation. Communities should evaluate it on substance.”

The drafters anticipated tensions around where to draw lines. The declaration explicitly states that criticizing Israeli government policies is not inherently antisemitic, and that criticizing practices in Muslim-majority countries is not inherently Islamophobic. Targeting people based on identity, however, is both.

Waxman’s hope is that policymakers and educators will use the principles as benchmarks for actual strategies, not leave the text as an aspirational manifesto. “This is not intended to live solely in academic language,” he said. “It’s a tool.”

Ahmed Shaheed—former UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief, now at the University of Essex—was another panelist at the Doha Forum session.

Hailing from the Maldives, Shaheed twice served as his country’s foreign minister and helped lead the transition from a 30-year autocracy to a democracy. In 2007, he resigned after accusing the parliament of being a rubber stamp for the dictatorship. What followed: intimidation, harassment and a presidential primary in which he finished third. He then threw his support to Mohamed Nasheed, who won, ending three decades of autocratic rule. When Shaheed returned as foreign minister in 2008, Islamist parties attacked him for cooperating with Israel. In 2009, he was named “Muslim Democrat of the Year.”

Shaheed explained why the Granada Declaration matters in practical terms. “The function of racism is to divide and exclude. The function of the declaration is to unite and include.”

He ticked through what the declaration does: creates alliances between groups fighting antisemitism and those fighting Islamophobia; clarifies the boundary between free speech and hate speech without demanding new laws; identifies three layers where both phenomena operate—interpersonal, institutional, structural; recognizes that one form of hatred often generates others.

“None of us is safe until all of us are safe,” Shaheed said.

Brian Klug also addressed the session. The Oxford philosopher, who has spent decades writing on antisemitism, Islamophobia and interfaith engagement, brings a complicated portfolio to this work. His 2004 essay “The Myth of the New Anti-Semitism” argued that some accusations of antisemitism were being weaponized to silence Israel criticism, a position that made him controversial in parts of the Jewish community. He co-drafted the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism to create clearer boundaries around when criticism of Israel crosses into antisemitism. At Doha, he didn’t dismiss Jewish concerns about antisemitism. He argued that treating the two hatreds separately leaves both communities more vulnerable.

Klug shared a story about his seven-year-old granddaughter, who came home from school this past March upset by remarks other children had made to her about the Gaza war. He used the incident to think through what constitutes antisemitism versus what is politically charged but not inherently anti-Jewish—the exact line the Granada Declaration tries to draw.

“If Islamophobia and antisemitism are treated entirely separately,” he told the audience, “each community ends up fighting its own battle. But the world we live in requires us to hold them together—to see how they overlap even when they differ.”

He pointed to the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, which casts Muslims as demographic invaders and Jews as hidden manipulators. Simultaneously Islamophobic and antisemitic.

Then he turned to the data. In the UK, the Community Security Trust recorded 4,103 antisemitic incidents in 2023—more than double the previous year—with 66 percent occurring after October 7. Tell MAMA (Measuring Anti-Muslim Attacks), the British monitoring group for anti-Muslim hate, recorded a 335 percent  increase in Islamophobic incidents in the four months after October 7 compared to the same period the year before. In the United States, the pattern was similar: the Anti-Defamation League documented a 337 percent spike in antisemitic incidents, and the FBI reported a 300 percent increase in anti-Muslim hate in the two months after the Hamas attack.

“The surges happen together,” Klug said. “They’re not coincidental.”

But Klug issued a caution: Declarations often die on the page. “The theme of this year’s Doha Forum is ‘Justice in Action,’” he said. “The Granada Declaration must also become a foundation for action.”

Implementation, he argued, must flow through organizations that already hold credibility within their communities. In the UK, that means two institutions: the Community Security Trust (CST), the primary body documenting antisemitic incidents, and Tell MAMA, which tracks Islamophobic incidents and supports victims.

Both are trusted because they deal with real-world harm, not abstract theory. “Approach them first,” he advised. “Get them on board. Let implementation move through communities rather than being imposed from outside.”

When we spoke after the panel, Klug expanded on the idea of concrete assistance. UK Jews and Muslims live with heightened vulnerability—some fears justified, others possibly overstated. In Britain, roughly 280,000 Jews and 3.9 million Muslims live as minorities in a majority-Christian country. Both communities are visible, concentrated in the same cities, exposed to the same public tensions. A framework like this could “help diffuse anxiety and encourage people to focus on common ground.”

He was less concerned with semantic quarrels about “Granada” in the name, which some critics argue implies Spanish Jewish endorsement. “It’s a misunderstanding of naming conventions,” he said, invoking his role in the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism. “Declarations are named for where the convening body sits, not for who was consulted. The deeper concern is anxiety about the implications. That’s understandable. But it’s not about geography.”

In a conversation after the session, Avraham Burg, the former Speaker of Israel’s Knesset and former head of the Jewish Agency, began with a metaphor. “There is the envelope, and there is the letter,” he said. The envelope was Doha itself, a forum open enough to host both Klug and Tucker Carlson under the same roof. “That, in itself, is a virtue,” he said. “Even if the contradictions are enormous.”

The letter was the declaration. “Addressing antisemitism and Islamophobia together is a seed for a long-term conversation,” he said. “Not only to confront those who hate Muslims and Jews, but also to confront those within Judaism who cannot stand Islam, and those within Islam who cannot stand Judaism.”

Burg resisted the idea that the declaration—or the Doha Forum—should be interpreted primarily through the lens of Israel and Palestine. The text of the Granada Declaration itself makes no mention of either. Instead, it establishes universal principles: that Jews should not be held collectively responsible for the actions of any state, and that no one should be required to condemn a government simply because of their religious identity. Gaza and Israel were unavoidable themes at the forum, Burg acknowledged, but Syria was mentioned just as often, alongside Iran, Russia and Ukraine. “Maybe the lesson is that we are not as central as we think we are.”

It was a telling argument from someone who has himself moved from envelope to letter—from the institutional shell of Israel’s Labor establishment to the substance of what he now calls a more universalist vision of Judaism. Burg has spent the past two decades calling for moving beyond “Herzlian Zionism,” evolving into one of Israeli politics’ sharpest critics. His presence in Doha, praising Qatar’s willingness to contain contradictions, mirrored his own journey of wrestling with them.

“Everything here is full of contradictions,” he said. “But the contradictions are universal.”

Top image: Qatar’s Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim bin Jaber Al Thani greets Rabbi Mendy Chitrik, chair of the Alliance of Rabbis in Islamic States, at the Doha Forum. Photo credit: Eli Chitrik.