The radical left and Islam – a marriage heading for the rocks
ROBERT JAMES
POLICIES undertaken out of spite or mischief seldom end well. The left’s obsession with changing Britain with massive unsustainable immigration is now reaching what technocrats like to call an inflection point, a smarty pants word from differential geometry which to the rest of us means change – for the left as much as anyone else.
Last Saturday in Whitechapel, east London, a proposed protest by Ukip was banned by the police; into its place sprang a big demonstration by masked and balaclava-wearing Islamists shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’, ‘Zionist scum off our streets’, ‘From the river to the sea’, praise for the murderers in the ranks of Hamas and other pro-Palestine caterwauling. Alongside them were the far left in the form of Stand Up To Racism. There was some ill-tempered jostling between the apparent allies, some of which was caught on video and went viral online.
Despite what the far-left claimed, it wasn’t the UKIP protest that terrified people in the capital, it was the masked men screaming “Allahu Akbar”.
“We’re on the same side bruv.” One far-lefty screams.
“Nah we’re not” man in mask. pic.twitter.com/CgjCAm0IsD
— Alex Armstrong (@alexharmstrong) October 26, 2025
After being shoved out of the way, one hapless lefty pleads with the Islamists: ‘We’re on the same side, bro.’
‘No, we’re not,’ snaps back his masked interlocutor.
So, there’s trouble in the camp.
Soviet communist leaders called Western apologists ‘useful idiots’. Last month, after an actress’s typical Free Palestine platitude at the Emmys (which was praised by Hamas), the New York Post came up with a brilliant update: ‘Useful infidel’. That hits the nail on the head.
When history comes to be written, the story of the left’s infatuation with radical Islam will be depressingly predictable to those who have studied folly down the ages. It starts with a hazardous chestnut: my enemy’s enemy is my friend. When the Soviet Union fell apart, Western communists looked for another force that might stand up to the great fortress of liberty, the USA. The centre left contented itself with the slightly parochial dream of dissolving Britain into the federalists’ decaf version of the Russian experiment, the European Union. But the hard left saw in that only the objects of their hatred: trade, property, banks and money. The eurocommunists’ sedulous, sneaky, control-freak abolition of nation states was far too slow and vanilla for them. The loony left want hot revolutions: riots, rucks, righteous pillaging, plus the abolition of bourgeois society, imperialism, racism, sexism and private property by next Wednesday at the latest; maybe a few firing squads if poss, and all dressed up in the mantra of a Miss World contestant: ‘I just want world peace and love.’
After the 1979 revolution in Iran, the left settled on radical Islam as a useful bedfellow in the war against the West. The ayatollahs and their followers were bellicose, possessed of a manic ideology and they hated America with the assiduity of the average Islington nose-ringer. Petty details about the totalitarian, theocratic fascism of the regime, never mind the horrific abuses of power and medieval attitudes towards women, Jews and homosexuals were not to be thought about too hard – a clear instance of the moral relativism which always drives loony left behaviour. Even Iran’s 1989 fatwa on Salman Rushdie over a work of fiction did not prove to be a wake-up call for the right-on.
In the following decades in British and American universities Marxism evolved into post-colonial studies and identity politics of an ever more narrow and one-eyed nature. Outside the la-la land of academia things were moving fast. A devious wheeze called globalisation, in which huge amounts of cheap labour and big money could be moved round the world via open borders, dovetailed with left-wing notions of abolishing the nation state. That idea went back to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s Communist Manifesto of 1848: ‘The exploitation of one nation by another will be put an end to.’
Then doctrinal multiculturalism appeared in British institutions and was given a tremendous fillip by the landslide victory of New Labour in 1997, the first left-wing baby boomer government in Britain. They were determined to use their power, and so they did. They set about ‘quango-ising’ the country and marching through its institutions in the Gramscian style. Additionally, as Blair-era speechwriter Andrew Neather went on to reveal, they decided on a policy of vast immigration to ‘rub the right’s nose in diversity’ and change the country for ever.
Doctrinal multiculturalism is an entirely Marxist idea with the movement’s trademark deceit baked in. Officially it contends that all cultures must be treated as equal. Its actual use is as a very effective tool for disestablishing host cultures and handing political and cultural power to minorities and revolutionaries.
Now, four decades in to the project and despite early warning voices in the Eighties, the country is becoming balkanised in its cities. Last weekend’s march through Whitechapel, along with weekly pro-Palestine marches through central London, portend a looming internal conflict and serious social unrest in Britain. Not a civil war, perhaps, but more like the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and the far left, with their idiotic placards, their casual anti-Semitism, their ignorant bullying naivete, their intellectual and moral crossed wires – best summed up by the absurdity of Queers for Palestine’s support for a culture that would spit on them if not stone them to death – will be in the line of fire with the rest of us.
The left have form for loving truculent anti-Western ideologies. In the first half of the 20th century a great many intellectuals, writers and artists fell prey to Marxism because they believed it was a great force for good. Some, among them George Bernard Shaw, visited Lenin and Stalin’s Soviet Union and allowed themselves to believe they were witnessing a workers’ paradise while out of their sight the country was a nightmare prison of mass starvation, torture and murder. There is an echo of that in how our 21st century celebrity radical chic have so little to say about the bestial horror of Hamas’s invasion of Israel on October 7, 2023.
After the Second World War, communists and their fellow travellers kept up their infatuation with the Soviet Union until, for many, the scales fell with USSR invasions of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968.
What, one wonders, will shake today’s radical left from their confederacy with radical Islam? It clearly threatens to become an abusive marriage. How will traditional concepts such as freedom of speech, never mind left-wing fetish subjects such as transgenderism, LGBTQ+, feminism, queer theory, drag queen story hour in schools and the like be sold to devout Muslims? For instance, a teacher who showed his class a cartoon of Muhammad is still in hiding.
Ultimately, the left – for they run all Britain’s institutions and now its government – must either wake up to the world they have created or continue with their dogma and hope they are not ‘first up against the wall come the revolution . . .’
This article (The radical left and Islam – a marriage heading for the rocks) was created and published by Conservative Woman and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Robert James
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