Marxists (Socialists) + Islamists. An alliance? What’s the Deal?
The alliance between Marxists and Islamists seems a strange one, superficially. Far Left Marxists + Far Right Conservative Political Islam?
The alliance is aimed at opposing Western democracy: “by any means necessary”.
Marxists are anti-capitalists (anti-‘imperialists’), so they hate the successes of capitalism more than they hate its problems, because Communism has only problems.
The Islamists want a Caliphate, so they oppose secular democracies.
Both see Jews scoring high on this alliance’s perceived evils.
Secular Jews and Zionists in particular are hated more than far right fundamentalist Jews (who have some religious supremacist tendencies in common with Muslims). Left wing Jews are tolerated in Marxism, while convenient.
The antisemitic perception of the Capitalist Jew controlling the global economy and military appears often enough in the far left’s propaganda. ‘Inadvertantly’, and ‘with regret’ it is often claimed; so often one might think the antisemtism is subconscious.
“Anti-zionism is not Racism”
Let’s check the claim that antizionism is not racism; by comparing it to the claim the left often use, that Islamophobia IS racism.
Zionism and the re-creation of a state of Israel has a very sepcific purpose: it is at its core the creation of a state of Israel, primarily to provide a safe homeland for an ethnic group: Jews (religious or secular). And this is precisely because that group has not only been persecuted for centuries in their ancient homeland*, but the diaspora** of Jews in exile have been persecuted near everywhere, but espacially in Europe, with the Nazi’s Holocaust, and the Soviet Union being particulary horrific. And, despite common claims of ‘semitic brotherhood’ and ‘people of the book’ by many Muslims, Jews have been persecuted in man Islamic states, to the point of zero or near zero Jews remaining (looking at you Pakistan). It is indisputable that Jews are one of, if not the most oppressed minorities – certain most when one accounts for how wide spread it is. Hitler made it very clear that antisemtism was racist, because the crucial factor in determining whether someone counted as a Jew was one’s ‘bloodline’. What would Hitler have done with today’s DNA analysis?
*Disclosure: I’m an atheist an so I think the “God given” claims about Israel are bogus nonsense. My support for Israel is entirely for the secular reasons described.
** Diaspora: the dispersion or spread of a people from their original homeland, a homeland they may continue to acknowledge, and to which they hope to return. How convenient it is for critics of Zionism and Israel to point out that many returning Jews have less right to the land than ‘Palestinians’, as if all Muslim so called ‘Palestinians’ were born there.
And IslamoPHOBIA? A duplicitous word. Islam is very specifically not a race – one ‘grace’ of Islam is that it is not a racist religion; expansionist, so therefore necessarily not racist. However, that’s not to say there are no racists Muslims, for there are plenty. Further more, with death for apostasy and blasphemy, the ill treatment of women, the wide spread use of terrorism, being fearful of Islam is not a phobia (irrational fear); and opposing the self-defined political and judicial Islam is perfectly rational and legitimate. Since Islam is by nature poltical there are even valid reasons for not wanting more Muslims in one’s own country, just as one might not want any more Communists or Nazis, whataver their ‘race’.
So, antisemtic antizionism is racist, but Islamophobia is not, even if one were to accept that Islamophobia was a legitimate term (I do not).
Izabella Tabarovsky‘s article, The Cult of ‘Antizionism’, describes the activities and members of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism and the general infection of US campuses with the old Soviet breed of antisemtism.
The ICSZ’s founders are known figures in the BDS movement and the movement for the academic boycott of Israel. They include Rabab Abdulhadi of San Francisco State University, who tried to bring convicted PFLP terrorist and airline hijacker Leila Khaled to SFSU; Lau Barrios, who has served as campaign manager at Linda Sarsour’s MPower Change and as a co-organizer of the “No Tech for Apartheid” campaign geared at pressuring Google and Amazon to end their work with Israel; and Emmaia Gelman, ICSZ’s founding director, who serves as a trustee of the Sparkplug Foundation, a funder of IfNotNow and Palestinian Youth Movement, and also a co-sponsor of the ICSZ conference.
Izabella Tabarovsky‘s article, The Cult of ‘Antizionism’
Dangerous Alliance
Both political persuasions of the alliance are extremist dogmatic authoritarian ideologies – our way or death had been proven to be their approach to political differences a number of times.
To the antisemitic alliance, Israel, one more Western democracy, and a predominantly Jewish, one is an easy political target, if not so much a military one, as antizionist Islamic states have found to their cost.
If the alliance succeeds, as in Iran, one will win and kill the other. Not that it’s unusual for Marxists or Islamists to kill members of other factions within each ideology.
Eastern Europe, China, Iran, Africa, India have all suffered these ideologies. It takes far longer to get from under their thumb than to be oppressed by them.
This alliance has been covered elsewhere, but here are a couple of books that give examples:
These books describe times when this alliance was increasing in strength in Europe in the late 20th and early 21st century. Malik, a bit of a lefty himself, though happily more rational than many, even describes his meeting with one of his old far left acquatnances, now turned Islamists, while covering the Bradford riots. Abdel-Samad’s book covers the fascist nature of far-right conservative Islam, including the Iranian revolution.
Ramblings 