Kalam: What Iman Jodeh left out of her October 7 anniversary post

By Ahnaf Kalam | Guest Commentary, Rocky Mountain Voice

On October 8, Colorado State Sen. Iman Jodeh published a statement marking three years since the events of October 7, 2023. Under the heading “Three Years Later,” she wrote, “The question is not what we will say we believed once history has rendered its verdict. The question is what we were willing to say and do to stop a genocide while it was happening.”

It was a curious statement to publish in commemoration of a massacre she did not mention.

There was nothing about the 1,200 people murdered by Hamas, the 251 hostages dragged into Gaza, or the victims raped, tortured, burned alive, and brutalized in the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. There was no mention of the families torn apart, the young people slaughtered at the Nova music festival, or the hostages whose fate would haunt the world for years to come. Not a word.

Jodeh’s Oct. 8 anniversary post on her campaign Instagram account. (RMV screenshot, Oct. 13)

Jodeh was not commemorating October 7. She was commemorating the war that followed it, presenting Israel’s military campaign against Hamas as a genocide already underway and demanding that the world condemn it. The distinction matters. The war began with Hamas’s atrocities; Israel’s military response followed. Whatever judgment one ultimately reaches about the conduct of that war, the events of October 7 cannot be understood honestly by pretending they never happened.

One might call Jodeh a day late and a dollar short. But the problem is not simply that she published her statement a day late, which looks deliberate. It is that her chronology, and the moral priorities it reveals, seem altogether backward. The day that should have been devoted to remembering murdered Jews instead became another occasion to denounce the country against which they had been murdered.

Even New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, whose politics bear considerable resemblance to Jodeh’s, at least acknowledged the massacre before turning his attention to Israel’s conduct in Gaza. Jodeh did not even extend that courtesy. Her silence is especially striking given her long record of political activism surrounding the Palestinian cause.

This post is not just an isolated incident – Jodeh’s record of association with Islamist activism deserves closer examination. For years, she served as a spokesperson for the Colorado Muslim Society, representing an institution whose former senior imam, Karim Abuzaid, preached that homosexuals should be executed, fornicators flogged, and adulterers stoned. He also attributed AIDS to divine punishment for homosexuality and later blamed the coronavirus pandemic on the West and its tolerance towards homosexuality.

Jodeh was the mosque’s spokesperson, a public-facing role that raises legitimate questions about the institution she represented and the views expressed by its leadership. That association does not establish that she personally endorses Abuzaid’s teachings, but it is part of her public record and deserves scrutiny – especially considering her position as an elected public official.

The same record includes the Colorado Muslim Society’s hosting of Linda Sarsour in February 2020. Sarsour has faced extensive criticism over her rhetoric concerning Jews and her support for Islamist terror, so vile in fact that she was forced to resign from her position as one of the principal organizers of the Women’s March in 2019.

The relevant question is not whether Jodeh can be held responsible for every statement made by an associate. It is why these associations, and the ideological questions they raise, have received so little attention in the public discussion of her political career.

These associations do not, by themselves, establish that Jodeh endorses every position held by the people or organizations with which she has been connected. But they make her persistent unwillingness to acknowledge the atrocities of October 7 (and her nasty history of associating with radical Islamists) all the more deserving of scrutiny. A senator who readily invokes the language of genocide ought to be equally willing to confront the mass murder that precipitated the war she condemns.

Instead, Jodeh appears content to offer her constituents a morality play in which Israel is the villain, Palestinians are exclusively victims, and the massacre that began the conflict is an inconvenient detail best left unmentioned. The result is not moral clarity. It is selective indignation masquerading as moral principle.

Jodeh is now on the ballot. More precisely, she is seeking an electoral mandate from voters who deserve to know what their senator believes, what causes she prioritizes, and which atrocities she considers worthy of acknowledgment. Having entered the Senate by appointment rather than election, she now has her first opportunity to make her case directly to the voters of Senate District 29.

They should ask themselves whether a senator who cannot bring herself to acknowledge the murder of 1,200 Jews on the anniversary of their deaths can be trusted to approach the most contentious questions of our time with fairness and honesty.

October 7 was not an abstract political grievance. It was a massacre. Remembering it should not require a disclaimer, a change of subject, or an immediate denunciation of the victims’ country.

The dead deserve better than to be erased from the anniversary of their own murder. And Colorado voters deserve better than a senator who appears to regard their remembrance as less important than advancing her preferred political narrative.

Ahnaf Kalam is a writer and analyst in Denver, CO. His work covering terrorism & counter-extremism, foreign policy, and the Middle East has appeared in publications such as the Middle East Forum, the American Spectator, the Gazette, and others.

Editor’s note: Opinions expressed in commentary pieces are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the management of the Rocky Mountain Voice, but even so we support the constitutional right of the author to express those opinions.