American progressives do not understand the Islamist-far left alliance
If they did, they would be very afraid
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It's not often that Brits can say that the US is behind the UK. But in understanding the dynamic between the successors to the old socialist left and radical Islam, US thinkers have years of catching up to do. It is not as if American commentators are wrong or uninteresting, it is just that, unlike their counterparts in Europe, they have not begun to come to terms with the Islamisation of the worst strains of left-wing politics, and the wider consequences for the progressive cause.
Moderates in the US were pushed into taking a stand after the glorification of murder at a demonstration organised by the New York chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America on 8 October. Mark that date. I hope when historians look back on these times they will notice that in the US and across Europe, the white far left and radical Islamists were organsising rallies to celebrate the attack on Israel. No Israeli retaliation had taken place on 8 October. The blood of the dead was not even dry, Demonstrators were not protesting against an Israeli assault on Gaza city but in favour of the murder of Jewish civilians.
Among Hamas's victims were 260 visitors to a music festival. Hamas terrorists arrived on hang gliders and gunned them down. You can watch a video of one of the speakers in New York celebrating the executions.
"And you might have seen, there was some sort of rave or desert party where they were having a great time, until the resistance came in electrified hang gliders and took at least several dozen hipsters."
The audience whooped and cheered as the speaker described how the Jews had got what was coming to them.
Meanwhile on US campuses Jews at Cooper Union college in Manhattan had to hide from a mob chanting "globalise the intifada" . A Cornell University professor called the Hamas attacks “exhilarating” and “energizing.” A Yale professor dubbed Israel a “murderous, genocidal settler state."
None of the American socialists or academics seemed to know or care that Hamas, Hezbollah and Islamic jihad are ultra reactionary theocratic movements that are against everything the Western left believes in, or pretends to believe in. Indeed, after Hamas's patrons in Tehran took power in the Shia revolution of 1979, they killed Iranian socialists. Today they are arresting and killing Iranian feminists.
So, the Hamas attack provided plenty for decent US progressives to worry about. Before talking about their failures of understanding, let me talk about what they are getting right. Noah Smith, whose Noahpinion Substack is well worth reading, made a lot of sense when he wrote that the far-left does not have many causes it can call its own after the deaths of socialism and communism.
The most imperialist country in the world is Russia, but the far left cannot oppose it because Putin is anti-western, and that is all that matters to them. Most people think that climate change won't bring a radical reordering of society — "we’re just going to build some solar panels and electric cars and stuff," as Smith puts it. There doesn't seem much mileage in shouting about neo-liberalism given that it died in the 2008 crash.
In these circumstances, the Palestinian cause offers a way out of end-of-history ennui. Israel could be described as a colonial state, albeit one founded by refugees fleeing fascism. The struggle against it appeared to fit a classic pattern.
And, as Smith nicely emphasizes, by supporting Hamas, the far left could draw a dividing between itself and the rest of the US progressive movement. A useful tactic because, if you are running a political or religious sect ,you need your members to believe in something that most people will regard as insane: supporting the mass murder of Israeli teenagers, hailing your church's leader as God's chosen, insisting that Joe Biden stole the election from Donald Trump. Sect members not only prove their loyalty to their leaders. Crucially, they cut themselves off from friends, family and acquaintances, who in normal circumstances might moderate their thinking and point out that the slogan "from the river to sea" means the ethnic cleansing of every Jew living between the Jordan river and the Mediterranean, as Hamas has just proved in the most brutal fashion imaginable.
Western leftists began to lean ever harder into the Palestinian cause, making it ever more central to their view of geopolitics, Smith wrote. "While everyone else was arguing about the Ukraine war, tensions with China, genocide in Myanmar, or whatever, for Western leftists it often seems like it’s all Palestine, all day long."
But to leave it, as Smiths does, with the ugliness of far-left groups is to make the mistake progressive British politicians made in the early 2000s when I and others tried to warn of the dangers of new currents on the left. "It's just the communists and the Trots, " they said to me. "They don't matter."
They promptly proved that they did by taking over the Labour party. I am not saying the same could happen to US Democrats today — autres temps, autre mœurs — simply that the British example shows that indulging radical Islam is no barrier to advancement on the left. Understanding why takes you to the heart, not just of the left and its discontents, but of the Palestinian tragedy.
To begin with ask yourselves why is the far left is on the side of organizations they would have no trouble identifying as fascistic, if they were run by whites. It's because nowhere in the world are there Marxists like them fighting oppression in armed rebellion. In Africa, South America and Asia, let alone in its European homeland, Marxism has lost the power to inspire men to kill and be killed. Radical Islamists will fight and kill. And if you close your eyes and learn to love the horseshoe theory they can seem like the descendants of 20th century revolutionaries.
In the UK and France nearly all the far left groups have been thoroughly Islamised. They have allied with exiled Muslim Brotherhood leaders, and contrary to Noah Smith's argument, do not concern themselves only with Palestine. In the UK, the far left capture of the Labour party, was led by Jeremy Corbyn, who had worked as a presenter on the Iranian propaganda channel, and indulged Vladimir Putin.
You can mock and denounce the far left as much as you like, and I have done my fair share of both. But the connection to ultra-reactionary regimes and movements did not bother Labour party members who voted for Corbyn to be their leader – twice! You can blame Labour members as loudly as you like, and I have done my fair share of that too. But the fact remains that if you want to support the Palestinian cause, you have to accept at some level that the most dynamic anti-Zionist force is Hamas not one of the dying secular and socialist parties, and work out how to deal with that uncomfortable fact.
It is not, therefore, just sinister and stupid far-left sects who are caught in a conflict of principles. Unless they are very careful many progressives will find themselves ignoring the victims of Hamas crimes against humanity as Tilda Swinton, Steve Coogan, Charles Dance and 2000 other artists did when they signed a petition condemning Israel that did not even mention the slaughter by Hamas that started the war.
The far left copes with radical Islam by celebrating Hamas. At times it seems many progressive people cope with radical Islam by pretending it does not exist. They cannot look at the Hamas founding charter and see its Nazi-era conspiracy theories about Jews or examine how it enforces a reactionary dictatorship on the people of Gaza. They just talk as if it is not there.
Writing in 2008, the ex-Marxist Christopher Hitchens said that "The most depressing and wretched spectacle of the past decade, for all those who care about democracy and secularism, has been the degeneration of Palestinian Arab nationalism into the theocratic and thanatocratic hell of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, where the Web site of Gaza’s ruling faction blazons an endorsement of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion."
That Hamas dominance suits the Israeli right is the best reason for deploring all on the Western left who cheer it on or pass over its crimes with silence. Throughout his time in power Benjamin Nethanayu has propped up Hamas in Gaza, while doing all the can to weaken the Palestinian authority on the West Bank.
The policy has misfired spectacularly and its failure should finish the old brute off. But you can see its logic. When anyone said that Israel must make peace, he needed only to point to Hamas and the theocratic hell it had created and ask how anyone could be expected to make peace with that! And, after this month's massacres many in the West will agree. Hamas destroys the Palestinian cause as it claims to uphold it,
I am not going to offer false comfort in these terrible times. I will just say that the radical Islamist movement, which was powered by the Iranian revolution, is visibly dying. The Iranian regime is detested by its subject people. All status quos seem impregnable until the moment they fall apart. Perhaps the day is coming when Palestinians will be represented by people you need not recoil from in disgust.
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