A Double Life of Deception: How Iyad el-Baghdadi, a Supposed Liberal Reformer, Tried to Recruit Me for Hamas
The "Human Rights Activist" Who Had Foreknowledge of October 7 and Tried to Involve Me in the Calamity Visited Upon the Peoples of Israel and Gaza
Within hours of the October 7 massacre in Israel, various groups publicly celebrated in cities across Canada. Days later in Toronto, Jewish shops, schools and synagogues were targets of vandalism and violent protest. The timing of these rallies and events has led to a working hypothesis that many of the worldwide protests against Jewish people have been carefully coordinated and funded and that some of the civil society activists leading them and operating in democratic countries had foreknowledge of the October 7 terrorist attack.
I know this to be true at least in some cases because one of those activists, based in Oslo, Norway, tried to recruit me into joining their efforts.
It was a shocking betrayal. For more than a decade, this Palestinian person had told me, and dozens of other human rights advocates, that he was an Islamic reformer. He built his public profile as a self-styled “Islamic libertarian” and believer in the democratic system that unites tolerance, religious freedom and secularism. He had endorsements from a Cato Institute scholar and even gave public speeches at international conferences extolling classical liberal principles. Except he was lying, because Iyad el-Baghdadi is an agent of Hamas, hiding in plain sight.
The circumstances of the attempt to recruit me were accidental. I stayed in el-Baghdadi's home in June of 2023 after I attended a gathering he organized for pro-Palestine activists. Although I reject the Hamas dictatorship, I am a long-time pro-Palestinian advocate who supports a two-state solution as the pragmatic path forward. I was excited for this gathering and made staying with him a precondition of my attendance. At first he had said no, citing privacy concerns, but he ultimately let me sleep on a mattress in his home office. It was in that small room that I found a bookshelf with volumes of classical religious texts in Arabic in a series stacked next to each other. These were dense texts which require great attention and commitment to read and understand for whatever reasons a reader may have them.
The next morning I gently asked about these books and if he was invested in them academically for his research projects or religiously for his own devotional purposes. He explained they were very important to him personally for religious reasons. He told me about how he would stay up late at night reading them for his own sustenance in difficult times when he felt burdened by the immensity of the task ahead.
Then with an unapologetic grin, erroneously believing he was speaking with an ally, he bragged that he is in fact a Hamas operative and Muslim Brotherhood agent “in touch” with Syrian intelligence. He said his real agenda is advocacy to undermine the two-state Oslo Accords framework, which he intensely opposed. He told me that a big “world-changing” event would happen later in 2023, and would result in many deaths in Israel to “teach them a lesson like never before.” It would be “a day of slaughter,” he said coldly, in service of a 20-year vision to establish an Islamist one-state solution.
The mistake he made in that alarming moment was assuming that just because I understood Islamist ideology it meant I agreed with it. I asked him if he had actually read my memoir, and he confessed he had not, which was his major misstep. He just assumed I wrote it for public relations reasons as a cover, not because I firmly believe in my message with honesty.
As an artist, journalist and human rights activist with a deep understanding of the psychology and mindset of radical Islamists, I had formative experiences in Doha, Qatar of being tortured, sexually assaulted and terrorized by them in their attempts to indoctrinate me starting as a nearly seven-year old child and son of an American educated professor. Two decades later, I wrote about it in my memoir.
As I prepared to leave his Oslo apartment, he stated that I still hadn’t given him an answer to his repeated insistence if I’m “in” or not in regards to choosing a “side” especially with “global geopolitics shifting” and “Western hypocrisy growing.” By this point in the conversation, I could barely contain my confusion and silent fury. I asked him to clarify what he meant and to be more direct with me. It felt like a recruitment request. I asked him point blank and he blatantly admitted it, “yes, I am an Islamist” in the mold of the jihadist ideologue “Sayyid Qutb.” And as if he was talking to a person who is the same he added, “so, you do understand then?”
He explained that the “big event” would return the Palestinian cause to global attention and to prepare to mobilize through civil society, social media and street protests, using my perch as a public intellectual. He told me he has pro-Hamas contacts in Canada to introduce me to so we could position ourselves ahead of time. When I was skeptical, he said that whether I joined him or not, my confirmation that he was telling the truth would be when “the event” took place. “That’s when you’ll know I’m the real deal,” were his exact words in response.
When I pressed him on whether or not he’s concerned about the many innocent Palestinians who he said would die, he replied: “we’re counting on it, we can handle it, it’s a small price to pay.” Months later on October 7, after Hamas fighters attacked Israel, inviting a calamity, I definitively came to understand that Iyad el-Baghdadi wasn’t exaggerating when he said, “I’m the real deal.”
It took me weeks to process what it all meant. The people of Gaza deserve better than Hamas and their operatives. My belief is that there is a clandestine network hiding in plain sight, using the freedoms of a democratic society to subvert, manipulate and divide. It is ironic that he lives in Oslo, where he obtained asylum, supposedly fleeing persecution for simply engaging in freedom of expression. He arrived as a celebrated liberal reformer and speaker, but he was then, as he is now, a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
Amir Ahmad Nasr is a Canadian Nubian Khartoum-born writer and the author of the debut memoir “My Isl@m: How Fundamentalism Stole My Mind and Doubt Freed My Soul." He is an artist, journalist and human rights activist. Learn more about him here.