In February 2025, we (Azi Khalili and Dvora Slavin) led the Allies to Muslims Workshop, where over three-hundred participants attended from around the world. Though the event was virtual, the two of us spent the weekend physically together, thinking through our talks, taking Co-Counseling sessions, and supporting each other deeply. That connection made a difference—not just to us but to participants, many of whom reflected that the highlight of the workshop was seeing a Muslim and a Jewish woman in a loving connection, wanting the best for each other.
AZI KHALILI: BEING AN ALLY TO MUSLIMS
There are between three and one hundred million species on earth. We are one of them—and we are marvelous. Our human intelligence is extraordinary. We’ve invented language, poetry, agriculture, and healing practices. We connect through music, literature, and humor. And yet we are deeply vulnerable to hurt. Undischarged distress—accumulated over more than two-hundred-thousand years—limits our ability to think freshly about the world’s most pressing problems.
What is the good news? We’ve figured out what to do. For the past seventy years, we’ve been working systematically to free our minds. We’ve moved mountains of distress. We are organized, we are learning, and we are growing. We are committed to a permanent revolution in our minds—getting rid of distress, dismantling oppression, and building pro-human movements.
To be true allies—especially to Muslims—we must go back to our own early struggles. Every mind has been shaped to target, scapegoat [blame], or remain silent in the face of violence. These patterns are universal. We are born into societies shaped by sexism, racism, classism, and war.
Oppression begins early. From the beginning, babies are mistreated and not seen as fully human. Meanness, poverty, war, and abuse devastate us before we can understand the world. Our discharge is interrupted, and distress accumulates.
In response, we tend to do one or more of the following:
1. We blame ourselves. We think that something is wrong with us: If only I were different, maybe the mistreatment would stop.
2. We blame others. We project the pain outward. It’s a survival mechanism, but without discharge, it results in blaming, scapegoating, and making enemies, and can end in targeting others with violence.
3. We go numb. We stop noticing the violence. We normalize the inhumane. We pretend not to see.
These patterns don’t just live in individual minds—they are embedded in our institutions. They’ve fueled wars, genocides, and systems that dehumanize people, including Muslims.
Muslims have been targeted globally by these patterns. We’ve been conditioned to see Muslims as inhuman—as ugly, dangerous, and undeserving. These lies are embedded in film, media, laws, policies, and political propaganda. But Muslims, like all people, are fully human: loving, intelligent, creative, peace-seeking. They have been scapegoated for capitalism’s crisis—portrayed as enemies to justify war, and as the “undeserving, dangerous poor” to distract from growing wealth inequality.
Capitalism relies on war, and wars need enemies. Today, those enemies are Muslims from Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Gaza, Syria, Yemen, and so on. The system depends on our silence, our fears, and our manufactured confusion [confusion created intentionally].
But Muslims are not the problem. The problems are oppression, the wealth gap, structural inequalities, and undischarged distress in our minds.
Every human has inherited false messages about Muslims. And every one of us can stand against them. Being an ally is not about taking sides—it’s about standing with all people and against the patterns and conditions that cause violence and genocide. Being an ally in RC is complex. It involves years of discharge, re-evaluation, understanding different groups’ histories, reading, learning, actively listening to divided groups, caring deeply for all people, and taking rational, intentional action for the liberation of all minds.
Being an ally means keeping your eyes on the prize [staying focused on a goal]—always moving in the direction of unity, and dismantling divisions, separation, supremacy, and the ideas of “better than” or “worse than,” superior or inferior. It means walking in as a humble peer and a lover of humans. As a comedian, a historian, a poet, a family worker, a risk taker. As someone who puts everything under the light of discharge. It means being courageous and having integrity.
The role of an ally is not to salute [honor] the feelings and the divisions. It is to create opportunities for groups to reach for one another.
Unity is not the absence of conflict—it’s the commitment to connection, even when everything is pulling us apart. It’s refusing to want something good for our group at another’s expense. It’s standing on the side of all humans.
DVORA SLAVIN: UNITY, COURAGE, AND THE WORK AHEAD
This is our time. We’ve been preparing for this. Everything we’ve recovered through RC—our minds, our perspective, our courage—it’s all mattered every step of the way and it all matters now.
Unity is what we’re after. Unity across all lines of division—to build a pro-human, pro-liberation, pro-planet society. But unity requires us to look directly at the early hurts that keep us divided: the defeats that left us desperate, the separations that made us give up on connection, and the fears that silenced our voices.
War is one of the most destructive institutionalized forms of disconnection. There are no victors in war. Every war enriches the Global North and the owning class while traumatizing millions. War is always about wealth, never justice. There are over eighty active wars right now. Most never make headlines. And far too many target Global Majority and Muslim peoples.
To build unity, we have to take on war—not just as a policy issue, but as an emotional wound. We must discharge on our defeats, our terror, our white racism and internalized racism, and our conditioning to see enemies where there are none.
Harvey Jackins said long ago, “Racism is the oppression that most widely interferes with human progress.” That is still true. Ending racism—especially racism targeting Muslims—is key to any path forward.
To do this work, we must do the following:
1. Discharge on racism.
For white people: discharge on the oppressor role in white racism, the loss of our ancestral connections, and present-day separations.
For Global Majority people: discharge on the experiences of being targeted and on the internalized separations from each other.
For all of us: discharge toward unity to make the needed systemic changes that transform our relationships from exploitative to human.
2. Discharge on our early isolation and defeats—the seedbeds [foundation] for racism and distorted perceptions.
3. Go after the places in our early lives where we got told who were our “enemies” and whose side we should be on.
4. Discharge on our significance and our ability to influence people by listening deeply, by showing our minds and how we think, and by encouraging people to know their own significance to show their minds and to lead. Keep discharging on what gets hard about being visible and powerful.
Recovering our courage will be key in this period. It takes courage to stand by all people, especially those we were hurt into fearing. To challenge inherited beliefs, family stories, and religious and political identities. To discharge early terror and reclaim our integrity.
Being an ally is a personal re-emergence project. It requires us to fight for our own humanity as we fight for the humanity of others. It means putting everything under the light of discharge—our assumptions, our feelings, our loyalties—and reaching for rationality again and again.
We are the ones who get to build the community that reaches for unity. Even if others don’t take on all the understandings of RC, we can model connections that cross all lines. We can create the conditions for people’s minds to open and move. Brick by brick, we lay the foundation for a future built on truth, healing, and love.
Brooklyn, New York, USA