Islam and the Left

On the Red-Green Alliance:

Just days ago the former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair had a piece in the Times with the title, “We must end left’s unholy alliance with the Islamists”. It is good to see he and others finally catching on this. Perhaps the best example of this bizarre alliance comes in the form of Mamdani in NYC. I quite like how Ayaan Hirsi Ali began her latest article on this matter:

Aristotle called it the first law of thought: a thing cannot simultaneously be and not be. A proposition is either true or it isn’t. This seems obvious until you watch an entire political civilization organize itself around ignoring it, most clearly seen in the unstable partnership between Muslim activists and the progressive left.

 

Whatever its failures, almost the only consistent virtue of Islam is that it does not ignore Aristotle’s maxim. The tradition makes totalizing claims—about God, about governance, about the hierarchy of the sexes—and it has carried those claims across centuries without revision. I find those claims wrong—some of them monstrously so. But they are, at minimum, coherent, corresponding to themselves. The faith is honest about what it is. The same cannot be said, however, of the coalition now courting its voters.

 

The rise of Muslim political power in America is less a demographic shift than a slow-motion collision of irreconcilable worldviews. Muslim Americans are winning elections at a pace that would have seemed fanciful twenty years ago. New York City now has a Muslim mayor in Zohran Mamdani — a democratic socialist who ran with enthusiastic backing from progressive institutions, LGBTQ+ advocacy groups, and the organized, activist left. https://www.restoringthewest.com/

Many have been warning about this alliance for quite some time now. And the same phrase has been used as well. Over two decades ago David Horowitz wrote the important volume, Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left (Regnery, 2004). In it he documented how the radical left and radical Islam are quite happy to share a large, ugly bed together as they both war against the West.

Horowitz was Jewish and a former Marxist who became a leading conservative later in life. Now we have a similar sort of volume just released by Michael Youssef, an Egyptian-born, American-based Christian writer and speaker. It is called An Unholy Alliance: How Progressivism Brought About an Islamist Invasion (Ascaine Press, 2026).

His new volume is also quite helpful, and for those not up on the conflict we are now facing in the West, his discussion of what has been termed the Omnicause is well worth reading. If anything, things are even much worse than when Horowitz was sounding the alarm 22 years ago. Youssef also upholds Mamdani as a key example of this dangerous alliance:

Zohran Mamdani is the embodiment of the strange union of radical Islamism and radical far-left Progressivism. During his campaign, Mamdani refused to say whether he believes Israel has a right to exist, and he refused to distance himself from the phrase “Globalize the Intifada” – a rallying cry associated with murder and violence against Jews around the world.

 

After Mamdani won the Democratic primary, his supporters at victory parties around the city chanted “Globalize the Intifada!” Mohammed el-Kurd, the Palestinian correspondent for the far-left magazine The Nation, tweeted his election night thoughts about Mamdani’s victory: “Consider the Intifada globalized.” (p. 8)

It was Lenin who famously spoke about the “useful idiots” – those clueless wonders in the West who championed barbaric Communism while denouncing their own homelands. Today they still exist, especially as they shill for barbaric Islam. They are still as clueless as their predecessors were.

Youssef says he does not like using Lenin’s term to describe folks like Greta Thunberg and other young activists “because she’s definitely not an idiot. She’s intelligent and articulate – but she’s woefully misguided and indoctrinated. In fact, many of the kaffiyeh-clad activists protesting on campuses across the country have only a vague notion of what they are shouting about.” (p. 10)

Today we have masses of ignorant and uninformed Westerners who are just as committed to promoting Muhammad and Islam as a previous generation was in promoting Marx and communism. In both cases trying to educate these folks is a major part of our job today.

As such, Youssef reminds us of three great waves of Islamic jihad. The first was the age of the Caliphs (622-750). The second was the rise, expansion and fall of the Ottoman Empire (1299-1924). The third wave is now upon us and is primarily spread by stealth and by infiltration. Millions of these jihadis now live among us in the West, working overtime to establish a universal caliphate.

He reminds us that the West managed to resist and defeat the first two waves, but the third one is winning while we allow their invasion of the West, with progressives actually cooperating with them in their goals. This is nothing other than cultural suicide.

Youssef looks at how this began in earnest with the founding of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in 1928, and traces developments up to today. The Western lefties know nothing about this history, and they know nothing about what life is really like in Muslim-majority nations.

Ignorance is bliss, and Marxists and pro-Islam Westerners share a common hatred: a hatred of America, the West, Christianity, freedom, and rule of law. These secular left progressives are more than happy to unite in their war against the West.

Youssef spends some time looking at the founder of Islam, its holy books, and what it actually teaches. He also makes clear how radically different Islam is from Christianity. He says this for example:

You may have heard some defenders of Islam claim that it is “religion of peace.” Some have even claimed—wrongly—that the word Islam comes from the Arabic word salam, meaning “peace.” But anyone with a knowledge of Arabic knows that Islam actually means “surrender” or “submission”—the word itself suggesting the surrender of a vanquished army, kneeling before a victorious conqueror. It speaks of the power of Allah to subjugate all his enemies, a call for human beings to surrender themselves to the all-powerful Allah.

 

The name Allah comes from pre-Islamic times. According to Middle East scholar E. M. Wherry, pre-Islamic Arabs worshipped many gods they called Allah. Pre-Islamic Allah worship involved worship of the sun, the moon, and the stars, which is why these cults are called “astral religions” (religions of the sky and stars). The crescent moon, which was an ancient symbol of pagan moon worship, is also the symbol of Islam… (p. 72)

It is even more important for the progressives to start to understand this:

Western civilization prizes liberty, tolerance, progress, compassion, and peace, while militant Islamists demand submission to an ancient and merciless code of theocratic laws. Their worldview is a throwback to the 7^th century – yet oil wealth and 21st-century Western technologies have given them the power to destabilize and conquer our civilization.

 

In all the centuries since Muhammad founded the Muslim religion, one thing has never changed: Islam’s goal of world domination. (p. 99)

Youssef looks further at the war of cultures now taking place and how the West seems hellbent on allowing itself to be fully subjugated by this medieval political ideology. He looks for example of someone who is supposed to be the “Defender of the Faith” in the UK, King Charles.

He reminds us of his pro-Islam journey. In 1993 Prince Charles became the patron of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, and gave a lecture titled “Islam and the West”. In 1994 he said that he preferred the term “Defender of Faith” – big difference!

So committed to Islam has he been that in 1996 the grand mufti of Cyprus claimed that he was a Muslim. Charles also studied Arabic so he could read the Quran in the original language. And for decades he “actively championed Islam as more enlightened than Western civilization and more enlightened than Christianity.” (pp. 113-115)

When Western leaders go this full-tilt Islamic, you know we are in big trouble. Indeed, he discusses other influential Westerners and says this:

All across the Western world, there are people … who know how to use our laws and our freedom against us. Our secular left and Progressive leaders in America and Europe have opened the floodgates of rampant immigration, allowing not only needy asylum seekers but dangerous, ideologically driven Islamists into our midst. These leftist leaders are giving away our rights, our safety, and our civilization. They are taking us down the path of cultural suicide. (pp. 122-123)

Near the end of the book he offers some things that we can do to withstand all this. I simply offer them in bullet-point form:

-Be bold in your witness for the truth

-Graciously but firmly expose the irrationality of the left

-Protect young minds from indoctrination

-Treat the news with healthy skepticism

-Hold the government accountable

-Remember that you are not alone (pp. 152-162)

In the book’s Epilogue Youssef speaks of his prayer for all Muslims, and he encourages us to daily keep them in prayer. That is the least we can do. And getting this book, reading it, and sharing it with others, is another important step.

[1543 words]