It’s clear from the Signal non-scandal that the leftist establishment finds Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth deeply threatening, and wants him gone. And now it isn’t just Signal; leftists and their pro-jihad allies have found a new reason to vent their rage at Hegseth, and it’s about as consequential as the mountain leftists are making out of the Signal molehill. It turns out that Hegseth has a tattoo on his right arm that says “kafir,” or unbeliever, in Arabic, and that is apparently a tremendous insult to Islam and all decent people. Yes, you’re right: they’re really scraping the bottom of the barrel now.
Nonetheless, Newsweek scraped away as energetically as it could, reporting Thursday that Hegseth “has ignited controversy after revealing a previously unnoticed tattoo on his right forearm that reads ‘كافر’ (kafir) in Arabic—a word that translates to ‘infidel’ or ‘nonbeliever.’” Note how Newsweek frames the supposed “controversy”: Hegseth “ignited” it, although he didn’t do anything but get photographed in a short-sleeved shirt that revealed the tattoo. He didn’t say anything about the tattoo or call attention to it in any way, but since leftists hate it, Hegseth has “ignited controversy.”
Your "kafir" (disbeliever in Arabic) tattoo.
— Nihad Awad (@NihadAwad) March 27, 2025
Leadership demands respect for all, not divisive gestures. Mocking beliefs, especially as a public figure, is not strength—it's immaturity. We deserve better. This is a first grader's behavior, not a secretary of defense of the US https://t.co/EqDCDSAa90
“Hegseth's tattoos are drawing criticism,” USA Today chimed in, “for what some say is a sign of hostility against Muslims.” The far-left propaganda rag quoted Nihad Awad of the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), who was in a fine froth, fulminating against Hegseth with all the venom of a man who is both a true believer and an armchair psychologist: “Tattooing the Arabic word kafir–which essentially refers to a person who knowingly conceals or denies fundamental, divine truths–on his body is a sign of both anti-Muslim hostility and personal insecurity.”
Not content to smear Hegseth as some kind of a nut, Awad (who notoriously said that the Oct. 7 Hamas massacre of 1,200 Israelis made him “happy”), added:
It appears Islam lives so rent-free in Pete Hegseth’s head that he feels the need to stamp himself with tattoos declaring his opposition to Islam alongside a tattoo declaring his affinity for the failed Crusaders, who committed genocidal acts of violence against Jews, Muslims and even fellow Christians centuries ago. You don’t see American Muslims running around with tattoos declaring their opposition to Christianity because we are secure in our own faith, we respect the beliefs of our neighbors and, in any case, most Muslims do not wear tattoos for religious reasons.
You will likely not be surprised to discover that the beloved Awad is not being quite honest here. The irony is that while he claims that Muslims are “secure in our own faith” and would never wear tattoos declaring their opposition to people of another faith, one of the central preoccupations of Islam is the evil of those who don’t believe in it. For many years, when I spoke to hostile audiences (i.e., on college and university campuses) around the country, I would often challenge those who were touting the peacefulness and tolerance of Islam to find one page of the Qur’an, any page, that didn’t contain a furious denunciation of unbelievers. No one ever succeeded in doing so, because there are no such pages.
The Moroccan ex-Muslim Brother Rachid pointed out another problem with Awad’s rage at Hegseth: “The executive director of CAIR claims that getting a Kafir tattoo is disrespectful to Muslims. But Islam refers to Christians and Jews as Kafirs in both the Quran and Hadith— isn’t that disrespectful? Yet, if someone gets the same term as a tattoo, it becomes disrespectful?”
Related: States Are Establishing Muslim Heritage Month, But Where's the Muslim Heritage?
It was an excellent point. Hegseth is a Christian. The Qur’an says that those who believe in the divinity of Christ are unbelievers: “They indeed have disbelieved [kafara, a plural form of kafir] who say, Indeed, Allah is the Messiah, son of Mary. Say, Who then can do anything against Allah, if he had willed to destroy the Messiah son of Mary, and his mother and everyone on earth? To Allah belongs the dominion of the heavens and the earth and all that is between them. He creates what he wills. And Allah is able to do all things.” (Qur’an 5:17, cf. 5:72) It also says: “And the Jews say, Ezra is the son of Allah, and the Christians say, The Messiah is the son of Allah. That is their saying with their mouths. They imitate the statements of those who disbelieved [kafaru] before. May Allah curse them. How perverse they are.”
So Awad and his leftist media allies are excoriating Hegseth for calling himself something that the Qur’an itself calls him, claiming that when he takes this Qur’anic word upon himself, he is somehow insulting Islam and Muslims.
Yeah, that and the Signal chat is all they’ve got. All this shows how deeply threatened the left is, and how much it is flailing.
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