Ben Shapiro’s new 'Infidels' campus movie accused of weaponising Islamophobia against pro-Palestine activism

A new film produced by Ben Shapiro’s right-wing media platformThe Daily Wire is facing accusations of Islamophobia, with critics saying it attempts to revive the post-9/11 anti-Muslim panic and exploits heightened Israel-Palestine tensions to cast Muslims and pro-Palestine activists as a collective "terrorist" threat.

Titled Run Hide Fight: Infidels, the film centres on a Delta Force veteran who joins students in fighting what its own promotional material calls "radical Islamic terrorists" after they seize a liberal US college campus and impose "Sharia law".

The official synopsis depicts the militants taking over a pro-Palestine protest encampment, establishing a "makeshift caliphate" and executing "infidels" — a premise that fuses a real-world student protest movement with the most enduring tropes of the US-led "war on terror".

The full trailer, released on Thursday, shows armed men carrying an Islamic State group flag discussing a war against western "infidels" before taking students hostage.

Jonathan Majors, who plays the veteran Clayton Saunders, tells an audience at the university that Islam will "conquer the West" through "immigration, the wombs of our women", and by exploiting US freedoms — language echoing long-running far-right conspiracy theories about a Muslim demographic takeover.

An earlier teaser had already provoked backlash online. It juxtaposed footage of Islamic State group executions and the 11 September 2001 al-Qaeda attacks with scenes from the 2024 pro-Palestine campus encampments, footage from Gaza and crowds waving Palestinian flags.

It culminated in an Islamic State group flag flying over a fictional US university, accompanied by the call to prayer and the message: "Coming soon … or already here?"

Shapiro, a right-wing pundit and co-founder of the Daily Wire, has been a fierce defender of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza. In 2024, he said he did not simply condone Israeli government and military actions, but "celebrates and lauds them", amid mass Palestinian killing, displacement and the destruction of civilian infrastructure.

He has also been a prominent opponent of the pro-Palestine demonstrations that swept US campuses in 2024. In that context, the film’s vision of a Palestine solidarity encampment as a staging ground for armed Islamists appears to be a culture-war fantasy designed to delegitimise the mass protest movement against Israel’s war on Gaza.

Announcing the new trailer on X, Shapiro wrote: "The threat of radical Islam is real. Hollywood has refused to tell that story for three decades. Now, we’re saying the thing with the biggest, most audacious, funniest and most kickass film Daily Wire has ever released."

Critics, however, have described the film as an exercise in anti-Muslim propaganda: a deliberately inflammatory spectacle that collapses Muslim identity, Palestinian solidarity, migration and political dissent into a single imagined terrorist threat.

The film appears to repackage familiar Islamophobic myths – particularly the baseless theory of Muslims imposing Sharia law in the US and across the Western world – at a time when Palestine activism has become a central target of the American right.

Sue Obeidi, senior vice-president of the Muslim Public Affairs Council’s Hollywood Bureau, criticised the film in a Los Angeles Times op-ed as "xenophobic and Islamophobic". She wrote that it was "rehashing 40-year-old tropes while invoking conspiracy theories of Muslims bringing sharia law to America, because outrage is cheap to produce and easy to monetize."

The film has also renewed scrutiny of Majors, who began working with Shapiro’s company after Hollywood studios and Disney dropped him following his 2023 conviction for reckless assault and harassment in a case involving his former girlfriend, Grace Jabbari. He was sentenced to a 52-week domestic-violence intervention programme and probation.

Majors’ wife, actor Meagan Good, was previously part of a group of US television actors who took part in a week-long 2017 trip to Israel organised alongside Israel’s then Ministry of Strategic Affairs.