The alliance between the radical left and jihadists begs the question: What do these odd bedfellows have in common? It cannot be their views on LGBT+ rights, because homosexuality is punishable by death in Gaza, Iran and other Islamist areas. Demonstrators holding signs declaring “Gays for Palestine,” are either ignorant, delusional, or have a death wish.
Nor can it be their views on women’s rights. Women are considered property under Sharia law and there is no Muslim country in which they have equal rights. Under the ISIS Caliphate, girls were married off at or before puberty to men they didn’t even know, to be one of multiple wives. Women were treated as little more than slaves.
It certainly isn’t ethnic or religious tolerance. Witness genocidal jihadist attacks and massacres against the Yazidis in Iraq, the Kurds, the Blacks of Darfur, Greeks and Armenians in Turkey, and Jews and Christians throughout the Muslim world.
But in spite of these fundamental differences, there are two issues on which the radical left and jihadists are in sync: hatred of the United States of America and hatred of Jews and the Jewish State. It is these twin hatreds that, at least for the moment, bind them together.
Anti-Americanism
While some on the right, like Mark Levine, have taken to calling today’s woke left “Marxist,” I believe this gives them too much credit. Marxism, after all, was a well-thought-out economic theory that flowed logically if you accepted its false premise. By contrast, today’s pro-Palestinian left has no coherent theory of economics, history or anything else. They have slogans like “from the river to the sea,” the meaning of which they themselves do not grasp. Marxism had as its goal a utopian ideal of economic equality. What is the goal of the pro-Hamas left? Anarchy? Nihilism? An Islamic caliphate as aspired to by the jihadist terrorists they support?
My parents were actual Marxists, members of the Communist Party USA during the McCarthy era, when being a member of the party often had dire consequences. Like all communists, my parents had no respect for what was then called the “new left,” and saw it as comprised of people whose dedication to the cause never went beyond empty slogans. Communists did not believe these useful idiots had the intellectual capacity or discipline to understand Marxist economic and historical theory, nor did they have the courage of their convictions, if they had any convictions at all.
Following the death of Stalin, his successor Nikita Khrushchev revealed Stalin’s purges and mass murders at a closed session of the Congress of the Communist Party in Moscow[i] Once this information leaked to the West, my parents, along with most American Communists, abandoned the Party, which thereafter declined to irrelevance. The left’s disillusionment with communism continued with the Soviet Union’s brutal crushing of democratic uprisings in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 and finally the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
While today’s American left no longer has communism as its ideal, it has retained one key aspect of Soviet propaganda: its anti-Americanism. Hatred towards Western democracy in general, and the United States in particular is what unites today’s radical left with Islamic jihadists like Hamas. The jihadists at least have a clear goal: an Islamic caliphate under Sharia law. The woke left has no positive program, no goal other than to tear down Western society, and no coherent idea of what would replace it. This unholy alliance between the radical left and Islamic jihad is as absurd as it is untenable in the long run. Were they to succeed in their goal of destroying the United States, the organized, disciplined Jihadists would make quick work of their woke fellow travelers, just as the Bolsheviks did to their erstwhile liberal allies following the Russian Revolution.
Antisemitism
Muslim immigrants have imported primitive, violent, antisemitism to the streets of Europe and American college campuses, and here, too, the radical left has come onboard. One would think woke leftists would be uncomfortable with antisemitism, and yet they have wholeheartedly embraced it. Intersectionality, anti-colonialism, and anti-Americanism do not fully explain the the murderous antisemitism we recently saw in Washington, D.C., Boulder, Colorado, and in the firebombing of Pennsylvania Governor Shapiro’s home. Leftwing antisemitism, especially European antisemitism, has deep roots, which include centuries of Christian demonization of the Jews and modern guilt over the Holocaust. It apparently assuages European guilt over the Holocaust to believe that the Jews would have done the same thing had they been in power. That is why civilian deaths in every other war are called collateral damage, but invariably labeled war crimes in the case of Israel. That is why the left is so ready to believe Palestinian claims of “massacres” and “genocide” that are not merely baseless, but a reversal of the truth. The left, especially in Europe, always seems far too eager to believe the worst about the Jews and to accept the most transparently false Palestinian propaganda.
You may be thinking that the woke left can hardly be called Christian, and that is true. In fact, it is often as anti-Christian as it is antisemitic. However, just as the formally Marxist left has retained only its anti-Americanism, so too has the formally Christian left retained only Christianity’s antisemitism.
This absurd and unholy alliance of the radical left with Jihad is destined to fail, as is their pipe dream of bringing down the United States and Western civilization. The only question is what damage they will do in the meantime.
[i] 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, February 25, 1956
Devin Sper 