When you walk into the grand Casino du Liban in Jounieh, you are immediately transported back to a lost era. The walls of the entrance hall and main galleries are lined with large black-and-white photographs from the 1960s and early 1970s. There is President Camille Chamoun greeting foreign dignitaries; Charles Helou smiling beside international statesmen; Fairuz performing at the height of her fame; Hollywood stars and European royalty mingling with Lebanese elites at lavish parties; images of a confident, glamorous Beirut filled with elegance, possibility, and modernity. As you stand there, it is almost impossible not to pause and ask: What happened to Lebanon?

In the early 1960s, Israel’s Ministry of Tourism dispatched a high-level delegation to New York. Their mission was to sit down with one of America’s most prestigious advertising agencies and figure out how to transform Tel Aviv into another Beirut on the Mediterranean.

At that moment, Beirut stood as the undisputed crown jewel of the Middle East, a city routinely called “the Paris of the Orient.” In the 1960s, it was the financial capital of the Arab world. Gulf oil money flowed through its sophisticated banks, making Lebanon the region’s premier financial hub. It was the medical capital, home to the finest hospitals and specialist clinics, attracting patients from across the Middle East and beyond. It was the educational capital, anchored by the American University of Beirut, an institution so renowned that it was often described as the Harvard of the Middle East. Its campus, perched on a hill overlooking the Mediterranean, produced generations of doctors, lawyers, engineers, and intellectuals who would go on to shape the region.

Beirut’s streets hummed with cosmopolitan energy. Elegant French architecture lined the Corniche. Nightclubs, theaters, and cafés stayed open late. Fashion houses, art galleries, and publishing firms flourished. Tourists from Europe and the Gulf mingled with local elites. Lebanon’s economy boomed. Its currency, the Lebanese pound, was one of the strongest in the developing world. Its press was the freest in the Arab region. Its universities attracted the brightest minds. For a brief, glittering window, Beirut represented what the Middle East could have been: prosperous, open, and modern.

Lebanon’s Maronite Christians, along with substantial Greek Orthodox, Melkite Catholic, and Protestant communities, had built and sustained the country’s most vital institutions. They had established the banking system, and nurtured the leading educational centers. They had built the hospitals that earned Lebanon its reputation, and cultivated a legal and political culture that allowed for greater freedom, pluralism, and economic dynamism than anywhere else in the Arab Middle East.

The Decline

While Lebanese Christians poured their energy into building, large segments of the Muslim population remained preoccupied with religiously motivated causes that had little to do with Lebanon. For many Muslims, Lebanon was never an end in itself. It was viewed as part of a larger Islamic ummah. The ultimate loyalty was not to the Lebanese republic but to the broader struggle against perceived enemies of Islam, chief among them the emerging Jewish state.

When the Arab-Israeli War broke out following Israel’s declaration of independence, Lebanon was under strong pressure from the Arab League to join the military coalition against the new Jewish state. Christian leaders, particularly the Maronites, were deeply reluctant. Many saw no strategic reason for Lebanon, a small, fragile, multi-confessional country, to risk its stability in a distant ideological conflict. Yet the Muslim political class, backed by pan-Arab sentiment and pressure from Cairo and Damascus, insisted that Lebanon must participate.

In the end, Lebanon sent only a token force, a single infantry battalion that saw limited action, but the decision to join the Arab coalition, however symbolic, marked the first time the young republic subordinated its own interests to a broader Islamic cause. Christian politicians, wary of being labeled traitors to the Arab nation, acquiesced. It was the beginning of a pattern that would repeat for decades: Christians compromising their own vision of Lebanon in the name of national unity, while Muslim leaders treated that unity as a tool to advance larger ideological objectives.

The pattern accelerated dramatically in the 1950s and 1960s under the influence of Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser. Nasser’s pan-Arab nationalism presented itself as a secular, modernizing ideology. In reality, it served as a powerful vehicle for reasserting Islamic identity and political goals under a more palatable banner. Nasser’s radio broadcasts, his calls for Arab unity, and his fiery anti-Western and anti-Israel rhetoric resonated deeply with Lebanon’s Muslim population. For many Muslims, Nasser’s movement was not merely political; it tapped into long-standing religious sentiments about restoring Muslim power and dignity against historical enemies.

Christian leaders initially tried to accommodate this wave. They hoped Arab nationalism could be domesticated within Lebanon’s confessional system. Instead, it systematically undermined Christian political dominance. In the 1958 crisis, Muslim demands for greater power and closer alignment with Nasser’s United Arab Republic nearly tore the country apart. President Camille Chamoun, a Maronite, was forced to call in American Marines to restore order.

By the late 1960s, the arrival of armed Palestinian militias, the fedayeen of the PLO and other factions, and under intense pressure from Nasser’s Egypt and radical Arab states, the Lebanese government signed the Cairo Agreement. This infamous pact effectively granted the PLO extraterritorial rights inside Lebanon. Palestinian camps became sovereign enclaves beyond Lebanese army control. The south of the country was transformed into “Fatahland”, a de facto launching pad for cross-border attacks on Israel.

Lebanese Christians watched as their country was turned into a base for a foreign guerrilla war. The Palestinian cause was never really about Palestinian statehood in the eyes of Muslims; it was part of the larger Islamic struggle against the “Zionist entity.” Once again, Muslim leaders in Lebanon pressured the Christian political class to accept this arrangement in the name of Arab solidarity. Christians, still clinging to the dream of coexistence, compromised. The result was catastrophic. The PLO’s presence radicalized Lebanese Muslims, destabilized the south, and provoked Israeli retaliation. What began as “tolerance” for a supposedly secular nationalist cause became the vehicle for embedding a religiously driven war inside Lebanon itself.

After Israel’s 1982 invasion forced the PLO’s expulsion from Beirut and southern Lebanon, the underlying dynamic did not disappear. It simply mutated. In the power vacuum left by the departing Palestinians, a new force emerged: Hezbollah inherited the mantle of “resistance.” Unlike the PLO’s secular façade, Hezbollah presented its war against Israel not as jihad but as legitimate “national resistance”, a cause that even some secular Lebanese could be pressured to support.

Once again, parts of the Lebanese political class, including some Christians, were drawn into accommodating or at least not confronting this new actor. Hezbollah gradually entrenched itself in Lebanon’s institutions, built a parallel state in the south and the Shiite suburbs, and used the country’s resources, territory, and political system to pursue its religiously motivated objectives.

The pattern that destroyed Lebanon was always the same: Christians, driven by a genuine desire to build and coexist, repeatedly compromised with groups whose ultimate commitments were theological and expansionist. Muslims, whether under the banner of Arab nationalism or Palestinian liberation or “resistance,” consistently subordinated Lebanon’s national interest to a larger civilizational and religious struggle, with Israel as the central symbol of that struggle. Each concession was sold as pragmatism or unity. Each time, it further eroded the Christian-built foundations of the state.

The New Lebanon

The Christian-built West is being systematically transformed into the new Lebanon. What is happening today is a coherent process in which Islamic political causes, rebranded as secular and humanitarian struggles, have been granted entry into the very institutions Christians once created. The result is a coalition of convenience in which disparate groups, each with its own agenda, have converged on a common project: using the West as a launching pad against Israel while simultaneously hollowing out the West itself.

What was once openly declared as jihad now travels under more palatable banners: “Palestinian rights,” “anti-colonial resistance,” “global justice,” “intersectional liberation,” and “human rights.” These slogans allow Islamic supremacist goals to infiltrate Western universities, media, NGOs, political parties, and even churches without triggering the instinctive alarm that would have been raised in earlier generations. The cause remains the same, the theological and civilizational rejection of Jewish sovereignty and, by extension, of the Christian West that supports it, but the packaging has been updated for Western consumption.

This rebranding has proven extraordinarily effective at recruiting non-Muslim allies who would never openly embrace Islamic theology. The coalition is broad and seemingly contradictory, yet it holds together because each partner gains something vital from the weakening of the existing order.

Younger Westerners, particularly those educated in the last three decades, have been steeped in a narrative of civilizational guilt. They have been taught that their own societies are irredeemably racist, colonial, and oppressive. For them, aligning with the “oppressed”, currently embodied in the Palestinian cause, offers moral absolution and a sense of purpose. They do not see themselves as participants in a religious war; they see themselves as fighting for justice. Their hatred is not of Jews per se, but of the civilization that produced them. Israel becomes the perfect symbol of everything they have been conditioned to despise: Western success, military strength, and unapologetic particularism.

Traditional antisemites, both on the far right and among certain segments of the old left, have discovered in anti-Zionism a socially acceptable vehicle for their ancient hatred. What was once confined to fringe conspiracy theories or outright neo-Nazism can now be expressed in the respectable language of human rights reports, academic conferences, and street protests. Anti-Zionism has become the acceptable modern form of antisemitism, one that allows respectable people to traffic in the same tropes their grandparents would have recognized.

Communists and hard-left ideologues see in the Palestinian cause a continuation of their historic project. For them, Israel is the last outpost of Western capitalism and imperialism in the Middle East. Bringing it down is a necessary step toward dismantling the broader liberal order. They do not care about Islamic theology; they care about power. The alliance with Muslims is purely tactical, useful idiots on both sides, each believing they will ultimately prevail.

Globalists and one-world-order advocates view strong nation-states with distinct civilizational identities as obstacles. National sovereignty, cultural particularism, and the Judeo-Christian moral framework that undergirds the West stand in the way of their vision of borderless governance and homogenized humanity. By eroding the West’s confidence in its own foundations, they accelerate the transfer of power to supranational institutions and global norms. The Palestinian cause, with its universalist framing, serves as a useful battering ram against the particular.

And then there are the Muslims themselves, those operating from an explicitly Islamic framework. For them, the cause is theological. From the river to the sea is not a slogan about borders; it is a statement of eschatological intent. They are not seeking a two-state solution. They are advancing the same civilizational project that motivated the PLO, Nasserism, and now Hezbollah and Hamas: the eventual submission of the West to Islamic dominance, with Israel as the immediate and symbolic obstacle.

What makes this coalition so dangerous is that it is not coordinated from a single command center. It does not need to be. Each group brings its own institutional power, cultural capital, and demographic weight. The left controls the universities and much of the media. The globalists dominate international organizations and large foundations. Muslims provide the foot soldiers, the demographic momentum, and the uncompromising ideological core. Together, they have achieved what no single faction could have managed alone: the capture of Western moral language, the weaponization of Western institutions against the Jewish state, and the gradual erosion of the West’s will to defend itself.

The process mirrors Lebanon with eerie precision. In Lebanon, Christians believed they could contain and domesticate the forces arrayed against them. They compromised again and again in the name of unity. Each concession further empowered the very groups that ultimately destroyed the state they had built. Today, the West is making the identical mistake, only the stakes are global. The same tolerance that allowed Palestinian militias to turn southern Lebanon into “Fatahland” now allows ideological enclaves to function as bases for a larger civilizational assault.

The destruction is not coming through tanks and artillery this time. It is coming through lawfare, demographic transformation, institutional capture, and the steady hollowing out of cultural self-confidence. The West is being turned into a platform, a new launching pad, from which the war against Israel, and ultimately against the Christian civilizational order that made the modern West possible, can be waged more effectively than ever before.

And like Lebanon before it, the West is financing its own demise. Its universities train the activists who march against it. Its media amplifies the narratives that delegitimize it. Its legal systems are being used to shield those who seek its replacement. Its political class, terrified of being called intolerant, continues to extend the very tolerance that is being weaponized against it.

The Christian-built West is repeating Lebanon’s error on a civilizational scale. The question is how far it will be allowed to go before the realization comes, too late, as it did in Beirut.

Danny Burmawi is the chief executive of the Ideological Defense Institute

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Why is the greatest civilization in history so insanely intent on committing collective seppuku? Why has the West regressed from a super-civilized society into the great herd of Gadarene swine stampeding wildly and drowning itself in the sea as in Mark’s Gospel?

Since James Burnham penned his landmark Suicide of the West: An Essay on the Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism in 1964, historians, sociologists, and philosophers have spilled barrels of ink attempting to answer the enigma of Western self-immolation. As it happens, the “suicide of the West” is now a genre in its own right.

Gad Saad, an evolutionary psychologist who has become a social media sensation because he can speak in a style accessible to the commoner, straddle East and West with the dexterity of a cheetah, but most importantly, because his two-word diagnosis of the West’s hara-kiri has gone viral. For Saad, the psychotropic intoxicant fueling the West’s lunacy is “suicidal empathy.”

Shortly after Saad’s book hit the stands in mid-May, “suicidal empathy” rapidly became a byword to explain Western irrationality. Remarkably, each time I pen a piece on some new lunacy pushed by Western governments, academia, the medical establishment, or even Pope Leo XIV and send it to friends, they almost always chime back with two words: “suicidal empathy.”

Saad’s Jewish family was forced to flee Lebanon and emigrate to Canada to escape the Islamic Jew-hatred plaguing the land of his birth. With Canada now leading the West in pathological empathy, there couldn’t be a better illustration of “out of the frying pan into the fire.” Saad is writing from inside the furnace: it’s what gives his book its evocative voice and diagnostic depth.

The British historian Arnold Toynbee had already postulated that “Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.” Saad’s key contribution is to field the question of civilizational kamikaze from the perspective of evolutionary psychology. He builds on his 2020 book The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense, which explored how human cognition can misfire when it becomes “zombified by ideological rapture.”

Saad defines suicidal empathy as the “orgiastic misfiring” of empathy, one of our most noble virtues. Our evolutionary mechanism has hardwired us to be empathetic whether in romantic mate choice, making friends, or in the caring professions like nursing.

While psychopaths lack empathy, there are also psychiatric disorders involving a display of indiscriminate hyperempathy. Our empathy system could also be “hijacked in suboptimal ways” without necessarily being concomitant with a mental disorder, Saad warns, as in the case of “compassion fatigue.”

Similarly, suicide can be viewed through an evolutionary lens “as the activation of evolutionary-based forms of altruism.” It could be understood as noble and virtuous—Saad cites examples of a radical commitment to one’s belief system (death cults), ultimate devotion (Romeo and Juliet), a means of expiation (seppuku), or an alternative to something far worse (Jews at Masada).

“Suicidal empathy” is the bastard child of Mr. Virtuous Martyrdom and Mrs. Orgiastic Compassion. The suicidally empathetic person engages in this form of ritual disembowelment as the supreme path to attaining and parading one’s virtue. Like Narcissus, they take hubristic pride in their superior virtue. The disorder then spreads like a contagion through society. “Suicidal empathy is a deadly contagion of one of our most noble virtues,” Saad warns. “If not properly contained, it will destroy the West.”

Saad cites the classic illustration of suicidal empathy from Aesop’s fables: an orgiastically compassionate farmer sees a viper freezing to death and tucks it into his coat to keep it warm. The snake bites the farmer as soon as it recovers. One of the many human tales of orgiastic empathy in the book is that of Karsten Nordal Hauken, a Norwegian man raped by a Somali immigrant. When a Norwegian judge decided to deport the rapist back to Somalia, Hauken was traumatized, worrying that his rapist might lead a difficult life in his homeland.

A central argument of Saad’s book hinges on a paradigm shift in Western epistemology (the theory of knowledge). For centuries, Western civilization was predicated on the rigour of the scientific method—the epistemology for seeking truth. It is what contributed to Western greatness and superiority. Jettisoning an epistemology of truth in favour of an epistemology of care leads to a grotesquely perverse epistemological empathy: “I empathize, therefore I am.”

Saad explains how the West was built on deontological principles. Misguided empathy, however, uses consequentialist rather than deontological ethics. Progressive academia, for example, censors “forbidden knowledge” by banning sensitive research topics lest they lead to “negative consequences” for “marginalized” communities. If research on a topic finds Blacks superior on a given task, it is celebrated. If the results find whites superior, it must be binned. One must, of course, be empathetic to serial plagiarism if practised by Black academics like Harvard’s Claudine Gay. Saad’s book was released just before the scandal of Cambridge University’s Jason Arday.

Paradoxically, “marginalized” communities like Muslim migrants may be intent on destroying the host community that welcomes them. But the host refuses to distinguish between embracing the in-group while remaining cautious of the out-group. We do not mete out our “empathy equally to all,” Saad writes. “Suicidal empathy eradicates this evolutionary-based calculus.” In this twisted scheme, there are, nevertheless, out-groups like the Jews who, despite their status as an “out-group,” must never be the recipients of empathy.

Saad applies the construct of “suicidal empathy” to the entire gamut of Western brain sickness, showing how it demonstrates a preferential option for the diversity, inclusion, and equity cult over meritocracy, illegal aliens over citizens, criminals over victims, squatters over homeowners, transwomen over biological women, drag queens over children’s innocence, Hamas over Zionists, socialism over capitalism, wanton foreign aid over judicious reciprocity, and Islam over all other religions.

Saad draws on a range of diverse scholarship, from economist Thomas Sowell’s book on how self-congratulation becomes a destructive basis for policymaking to ethicist Peter Singer’s idea of expanding our moral circle to animals. The book is packed with hair-raising illustrations of the catastrophic cancer of suicidally empathetic policies that are rapidly devouring the West.

Readers who reject evolutionary biology or psychology can still benefit from Saad’s conclusions, while remaining hermeneutically suspicious of his methodological tool. In a later edition, Saad might perhaps delve deeper into the question of why the West has a unique penchant for suicidal empathy. Can evolutionary biology explain this phenomenon?

Why is it that the 57 member states in the Organization of Islamic Cooperation or the 22 Arab countries are unwilling to display the same level of empathy and rehome Gazan refugees? Why do Singapore, Japan, or India not exhibit extravagant empathy as do Germany or Sweden?

Would a metaphysical explanation of how the West is rooted in biblical ethics of compassion and love for the Other, even the enemy, offer a better way to understand the West’s madness by positing that in a post-Christian context it has turned the biblical imperative to love the other into a heresy?

G.K. Chesterton defined heresy as “a truth taught out of proportion.” In his book Orthodoxy, he elaborated: “The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone.” In a West that has rejected its biblical foundations, it is almost as if a hubris-filled collective is enthroning itself as divine by replicating what the God of the Bible has done for humanity by dying for us “while we were his enemies,” as the Jewish rabbi Paul would write to the Romans.

The Messiah suffered and died to save us in the “out-group” by atoning for our sins—a concept Jesus derived from the Servant Songs of the prophet Isaiah. Godless Westerners reject the Gospel, yet with a self-affirming messianism and savior complex, they believe they are saving the ‘marginalized’ other by ‘dying to be kind’ and becoming self-canonized martyrs.

Policymakers, pastors, and Pope Leo XIV would benefit from reading this book. It might stem the nauseating tide of saccharine suicidal empathy oozing from politicians and pulpits of many churches and from platitudinous papal disquisitions that read as if Greta Thunberg had ghostwritten them. A health warning: do not take the book with you on a beach holiday. It contains too many horror stories of how the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Rev. Dr. Jules Gomes is a senior fellow at the Ideological Defense Institute

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The West, Aleksandr Dugin says, has mistaken its own historical experience for a universal model. Individual rights, liberal democracy, freedom of conscience, these are not truths applicable to all of humanity. They are the products of one particular civilization that has arrogantly imposed itself on the rest of the world. His multipolarity is presented as the cure: let Russia be Russia, let Iran be Iran, let China be China. The West has no right to demand that you become like it.

It sounds, on the surface, like a defense of diversity. It is not. It is a philosophical project to abolish the only principles that have ever given ordinary people, inside Russia, inside Iran, inside China, the standing to resist the power of those who rule them. What Dugin calls the cage of Western universalism is, for the dissident in a Moscow prison, the only key that exists.

Western civilization produced a specific set of ideas about the relationship between the individual and power. Every human being possesses an inherent dignity that no ruler, state or collective can erase, not earned through service to the state, not granted by government in exchange for loyalty, but existing before the state and placing limits on what it may do. Law stands above rulers. The king is not the source of law. He is subject to it. Conscience precedes political authority. What a person believes, how he worships, what he says, these are not gifts from the government, revocable at its pleasure. They belong to the person before any government exists. Rights are not granted by states. They are recognized by states. If rights come from the state, the state can take them back. If they exist before the state, its only function is to protect them.

These ideas were encoded in the Magna Carta, the English Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence. Dugin’s argument depends on a claim that these principles are Western, historically contingent products of one civilization’s experience, with no more universal validity than any other civilization’s arrangements. The claim is false.

There is a reason more than 175 nations adhere to civil and political rights treaties manufactured in the West. The non-Muslim in an Islamic country and the Shudra in India are protected, theoretically, at least, by those laws, not by their religious or caste standing. Because if they were left to the traditions of any other civilization, they would have no protection at all: their own traditions are precisely the thing the treaties protect them from.

Western civilization globalized its Judeo-Christian principles. The intrinsic value of the human being, the premise adopted by all those signing nations, comes from Genesis: if man bears the image of God, then his worth comes from God, not from his religious affiliation or social rank. No caliph grants it; no caste assigns it; it arrives at birth, from above every throne.

The limitation of power comes from the same source. If God stands above every ruler, then the ruler answers to a law he did not make. In Deuteronomy the king is commanded to write out the law with his own hand and read it all the days of his life, “that his heart be not lifted up above his brothers,” the king as the law’s copyist, not its author. The ruler is not the source of law. He is its subject.

And freedom of conscience comes from there too: if conscience is the place where the individual stands alone before God, then no political authority can legitimately occupy that space.

These ideas did not originate in London or Philadelphia, they originated in Jerusalem. The West translated them, through centuries of legal development, through the Reformation’s insistence that Scripture stands above rulers, through the Enlightenment’s rendering of theological claims into political language. John Locke wrote that the reason no one may harm another is that human beings are “the workmanship of one omnipotent Maker.” The verse on the Liberty Bell, “proclaim liberty throughout the land”, is from Leviticus. The Declaration of Independence grounds rights not in the wisdom of the founding generation but in a Creator.

Dugin is therefore not attacking Western preferences. He is attacking the political consequences of a theological claim about the nature of the human person, a claim that preceded the West and will outlast it.

Dugin presents multipolarity as liberation. Each civilization, freed from Western universalism, organizes as it likes. Russia can be Eurasian, Iran can be Islamic, China can be Confucian, or Marxist-Leninist, or whatever civilizational identity the Party finds convenient that decade.

What does that mean for the human beings actually living under each civilization? In Russia, journalists are imprisoned for reporting on the war in Ukraine under laws that criminalize the word “war” itself. Alexei Navalny died in February 2024 in an Arctic penal colony above the polar circle, because his fate was decided by the principles of a non-Western civilization.

In Iran, women who remove their headscarves face arrest, torture and death. Mahsa Amini died in the custody of the morality police in September 2022, and the young women who took to the streets afterward, who cut their hair and burned their hijabs, did not appeal to Shia jurisprudence. They appealed to the right to determine what happens to their own bodies, to freedom of conscience, to the proposition that no government owns the person. These are Western impositions.

In Afghanistan, the Taliban erased women from schools, universities, parks, and finally from windows, a 2024 edict ordered that new buildings deny women even a view of the street. The girls studying in secret basements are not appealing to Islam. They are appealing to an idea that the West globalized.

There is a reason the peoples of the world aspire to the Western model: it is universal. It is the destination, for justice, liberty, equality before the law, rather than one culture among many. If the totalitarian governments of the world achieve Dugin’s dream, each “civilization” decides what is good and what is evil, which means the men holding power decide. They will decide whose life outweighs whose: the believer’s over the infidel’s, the Party member’s over the peasant’s, the ruler’s clan over everyone else.

Multipolarity delivers every human being to whoever rules the ground he stands on. This is not the liberation of civilizations. It is the liberation of governments from their people.

Dugin calls Western universalism a cage, but in reality for the people inside the civilizations he celebrates, the cage is the multipolarity he is building. No one smuggles himself toward Tehran, no one crosses an ocean on a raft bound for Pyongyang. The migration of the modern world runs overwhelmingly in one direction, toward the societies built on the very ideas Dugin describes as parochial.

Ali Siadatan is a fellow at the Ideological Defense Institute

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Christian colonialism is an oxymoron—a contradiction in terms. Jesus said: “My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would fight.” Islamic imperialism is a pleonasm: it’s like saying “frozen ice.” Muhammad’s farewell speech: “I was ordered to fight all men until they say, ‘There is no god but Allah,’” became the doctrinal underpinning of Islamic expansionism. The Qur’an declares that Allah has made Muslims “his agents, inheritors of the earth” and “promised to… make them rulers in the earth” (24:55, 6:165).

Christian rulers who established empires in Jesus’ name were flagrantly flouting their founder’s teachings. Muslim colonizers who founded empires in Muhammad’s name were following their master’s model and mandate. The Western, ostensibly Christian, colonial project began around 1500. Islamic empire-building began when Muhammad established Medina as the first Muslim state in 622 CE. By the end of the 20th century, Western/Christian empires were as extinct as dinosaurs. In the 21st century, the world confronts the specter of a global Islamic caliphate.

The historical data is undeniable. Yet, for academic activists, the millenarian existence of Islamic imperialism is discombobulating. They would eagerly echo the famous line spoken by Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce’s novel, Ulysses: “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” These academic insurgents plot to subvert the Judeo-Christian West using Critical Theory and its bastard child, postcolonialism, but the reality of Islamic imperialism effectively dismantles their theoretical framework. In the fable of The Emperor’s New Clothes, Islamic imperialism is the little boy who, watching the fatuous parade of Postcolonial Studies, cries out: “The emperor is naked!”

Postcolonialism: The Trojan Horse of Muslim Academics

Now, in a feat of mega gaslighting, Muslim academics are flipping the imperialist paradigm and using postcolonialism as a Trojan Horse to infiltrate academia. Their goal is two-fold: subvert the West and supplant it with Islam. On August 15, The Spectator reported that Farah Ahmed, an assistant research professor at the Cambridge Faculty of Education, is using Postcolonial Theory to promote Qur’anic creationism through the Islamic Educator Learning Community (IELC) project at Darwin College, Cambridge. The irony is staggering on multiple levels.

First, the college is named after Charles Darwin, the father of evolution and a Cambridge alumnus. Second, a Christian academic promoting biblical creationism at Cambridge would be tarred, feathered, and drowned in the Cam. Third, none of the apostles of postcolonialism would dream of applying the discipline to Islamic imperialism. Fourth, Ahmed is a former supporter of Hizb ut-Tahrir—a movement aiming to revive Islamic imperialism by establishing a caliphate, i.e., a global Islamic empire, as I wrote in my essay The Closing of the Cambridge Mind.

Ahmed’s chapter on “The Western Education System and the British National Curriculum,” in the book Education and Identity: The Dilemma of Muslims in the West, first published as a Hizb ut-Tahrir pamphlet, trashes Western education as inimical to Islam. She insists that Western education is unsuitable for Muslim students, “as the ‘adeeqah [belief system] of the Muslim is in complete contradiction to this.” She excoriates English as “one of the most damaging subjects” because Muslim students who are taught to identify myths and legends in their English courses might conclude that the story of Muhammad riding on a winged horse is as phony as Odysseus escaping from the Cyclops by clinging to the belly of a giant ram.

Ahmed, in case you hadn’t heard, is also a colleague of sociologist Jason Arday, who killed himself after the exposure of his legendary plagiarism and pathological lying went viral.

Islamic Creationism in the British Classroom

For Ahmed and her fellow ideologues, Western education is a tool of imperialism festooned in the fancy dress of “objectivity.” Her colleague, Usama Javed Mirza, also a Muslim academic in the Cambridge Faculty of Education, presents an alternative paradigm he labels: “Islamic Scientific Critical Consciousness.”

British education brainwashes students with “a Western oppressive monoculture of secularised ‘modern’ science,” contends Mirza in his paper “Islamic Scientific Critical Consciousness as a theoretical framework for Muslim science educators.” Muslim students should be taught to identify “colonial ideology being taught as ‘objective’ knowledge.”

Mirza says that “countering colonial hegemony in science education for Muslims” could include “identifying gaps in fossil records to make the case that the evidence of humans descending from apes is inconclusive.” The paper is published on the IELC website and funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Mirza doesn’t pretend to be objective. He honestly identifies himself as a “decolonial scholar-activist” who wants to promote Qur’anic creationism in the classroom. The great enemy of the Muslim student exposed to Western science is “fitna” (trial, temptation, sedition against God), which occurs 28 times in his paper.

“Fitna,” Mirza warns, “may occur, for example, when a Muslim student in the science classroom begins to believe that humans emerged on Earth without any role played by the Creator.” In contrast, “in the Islamic science tradition, research was viewed as an act of worship, and the scientific discourse was embedded in an Islamic world view and ethical framework.”

Mirza reminds his readers that “there is no compulsion in religion” (Qur’an 2:256). But isn’t that a half-truth? Islamic jurisprudence does frown on forced conversion. What Mirza won’t tell his readers is that the alternative to conversion for the kufr is dhimmitude. Robert Spencer explains in The Critical Qur’an: “They enforce subservience upon those who refuse to convert, such that many of them subsequently convert to Islam to escape the humiliating and discriminatory regulations of dhimmitude—but when they convert, they do so freely.”

And Mirza’s paper is a not-so-subtle manifesto for Islamic dawa (proselytization) aimed at converting the secular kufr. In another paper titled “Regime Change: The Need for Scientific

Critical Consciousness” published in the International Journal of Critical Diversity Studies, Mirza calls for “regime change” to “help overcome the hegemonic ideas” like “scientism, patriarchy, racism and colonialism.”

European colonial powers have committed “epistemicide” by killing “the Islamic Science Tradition in Muslim-majority lands ranging from North Africa to the Asia-Pacific,” he writes. This includes presenting “beliefs in empiricism, positivism, reductionism and determinism as indisputable rational ideas about the nature of the world.” Mirza attempts to subvert this colonial paradigm by offering a “revamped” curriculum of the Cambridge Assessment International Education O Level physics in his paper.

I am not faulting Mirza or Ahmed. They are faithful Muslims carrying out Muhammad’s missiological mandate with Machiavellian finesse. Here are the big questions: why is Darwin’s university feeding the Trojan Horse that is railroading Islam into British education? And why are the experts in postcolonialism silent when it comes to Islamic imperialism?

Cambridge Capitulates: From Newtonian Physics to Postcolonial Poppycock

Mirza holds a position at the university where Newton developed the reflecting telescope, Thomson discovered the electron, Chadwick discovered the neutron, Cockcroft and Walton split the atom, and Crick and Watson discovered the double-helical structure of DNA. Yet he dares to warn Muslims that this “secular Eurocentric ‘monoculture’ of modern science” poses a threat to their religion and identity. And his woke academic colleagues genuflect before him, Ahmed and Jason Arday, as if the three just invented fully autonomous nanobotic medicine to cure genetic diseases at the cellular level.

Why this cringing obsequiousness? “The answer is always: whoever is fighting the West,” writes Dan Burmawi. “The left and Islam make strange bedfellows, but they share a common enemy, and in the logic of the left, that is enough,” he explains in his incisive essay “The Philosophy Behind the Left-Islam Alliance.” Since Islam “is fighting Western power, it serves the interests of the oppressed, which is the only moral category that matters.” The same is true of Postcolonial Theory, which makes it possible to rewrite history because “history is made by men and women, just as it can also be unmade and rewritten,” as Edward Said wrote in his book Orientalism.

The goal of Postcolonial Theory is to deconstruct the West. In their book Cynical Theories, Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay succinctly sum up what Ahmed, Mirza & Co. are in effect saying: “The West has constructed the idea that rationality and science are good to perpetuate its own power and marginalize nonrational, nonscientific forms of knowledge production from elsewhere. Therefore, we must now devalue white, Western ways of knowing for belonging to white Westerners and promote Eastern ones (to equalize the power imbalance).”

This is also why woke/Muslim academics love wallowing like pigs in the muck of Postcolonial Theory, even though it has been largely discredited together with its siblings like Gender Studies, Queer Theory, and Disability and Fat Studies. Remember when James Lindsay and Peter Boghossian, two respected scholars, wrote a hoax academic article titled “The conceptual penis as a social construct?” to debunk the Mickey Mouse discipline of Grievance Studies? The article was published in the Cogent Social Sciences journal after peer review. It outrageously claimed that “the conceptual penis…is the conceptual driver behind much of climate change.” When the authors revealed that they were pulling a fast one on academia (remember Jason Arday?), the article was retracted and woke academics had egg on their faces.

Islamic Imperialism: The Elephant in the Room

The biggest problem with Postcolonial Theory is that it is congenitally blind to the camel in the faculty lounge—Islamic imperialism. A few biblical scholars have engaged in a postcolonial critique of empires like Assyria and Babylon in the context of ancient Israel, but that only reinforces the case for including Islam in the club of the great colonial powers.

When I taught Islam at a British university, I would project a map of the Middle East, North Africa, Turkey, and Persia. I would then explain that these territories were predominantly Christian, Jewish, Sabean, Zoroastrian, or polytheistic. The seven churches in the book of Revelation are in Turkey. Before Muhammad, Mecca had a small but influential Christian population. Syrian merchants were preaching the Gospel in Mecca. Even members of Muhammad’s Quraysh tribe had converted to Christianity. I then showed my students a second map of the same regions. It took Islamic imperialists just a few decades to conquer these lands and convert their inhabitants or subjugate them as dhimmis paying a burdensome tax. “All the regions conquered by jihad were governed by Islamic legislation,” writes Bat Ye’or in her book Islam and Dhimmitude: Where Civilizations Collide.

Within twelve years of Muhammad’s death, Muslims subjugated Iran and snatched Egypt and Syria from Byzantine rule. By the eighth century, they had conquered Central Asia and much of the Indian subcontinent up to the Chinese border and besieged Constantinople. If not stopped at the Battle of Poitiers (732), they would have entered France and swept over Europe.

Within a century of Muhammad’s death, Islam had created the world’s largest empire (caliphate), “spreading from Arabia at a whirlwind speed to Transoxiana and Sindh (India) in the East, conquering all of Egypt and North Africa and had reached the heart of France in Europe,” M.A. Khan writes in Islamic Jihad: A Legacy of Forced Conversion‚ Imperialism‚ and Slavery.

Non-woke historians are not shy of recording the facts of Islamic imperialism in books published by university presses. “From the first Arab-Islamic empire of the mid-seventh century to the Ottomans, the last great Muslim empire, the story of Islam has been the story of the rise and fall of universal empires and, no less important, of never quiescent imperialist dreams,” observes Efraim Karsh in his book Islamic Imperialism (Yale University Press). The historian Johannes Kramers famously remarked that in medieval Islam there were never real states but only empires, more or less extensive, Karsh notes.

Islam is the quintessentially imperialistic ideology. It remains the only world religion that upholds imperialism as doctrinal indicative and missiological imperative. “Religion is integral to the conquests and the evolution of an Islamic Empire,” asserts Robert G. Hoyland in In God’s Path: The Arab Conquests and the Creation of an Islamic Empire(Oxford University Press).

Muslim colonialism wasn’t benign: lust for booty drove the rapacious invaders; slavery (riqq) of colonized peoples was systemic, endemic, and significantly informed by sharia; and indigenous cultures and civilizations across three continents were expunged and Arabized. Local knowledge bases were plagiarized or erased: Umar, the second caliph, ordered the Great Library of Alexandria to be burned in 642 when Muslims conquered Egypt.

The Illusion of Islamic Science

If Islamic science is greater than Western science, why do students from Muslim countries flock to Western universities to complete doctorates in science and engineering and not return home? Can the reader name a single life-changing invention (lightbulb, steam locomotive, motorcar, television, airplane, refrigerator) that was invented as the fruit of Islamic science?

Why is it that only three Muslims (four if you count one Ahmadiyya—a “heretical” sect) have been awarded the Nobel Prize in the 125-year history of the award? Why is it that, as of 2024, only about 280 of 29,553 scientific journalsoriginate from Arab Muslim countries, accounting for less than 1 percent of the total? In the same year, there were 3,536,265 scientific papers published globally, but only 20,780 from Arab Muslim countries, making the Islamic world’s contribution just 0.59 percent of scientific documents published globally.

If Islamic academics like Ahmed, Mirza & Co. are so confident that Islamic science is great and Western science is the product of an oppressive monoculture, perhaps they might consider following the medical advice of their Prophet? In a hadith from Sahih al-Bukhari, Muhammad ordered his followers in Medina who fell ill to drink camel urine as a medicine. One can only speculate when The Lancet will recognize the glories of Islamic medicine and publish a peer-reviewed article on the “Therapeutic Benefits of Drinking Camel Urine as a Postcolonial Prophylactic Against HIV.”

Rev. Dr. Jules Gomes is a fellow at the Ideological Defense Institute

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Justice, oppression, mercy, equality, liberation, concern for the poor and the stranger, peace, and human dignity may sound secular today, but they are biblical ideas. The left hijacked these principles and weaponized them, pushing them far beyond their original purpose.

In the Bible, these ideas belong to a moral order in which each principle is limited by others. Justice is joined to mercy, mercy assumes judgment, compassion does not cancel responsibility, equality does not erase every distinction. Care for the stranger does not abolish the nation, peace does not forbid self-defense.

Once these principles are removed from that moral order, they no longer serve their original purpose. They begin to serve the opposite.

The Bible has no patience for injustice, but biblical justice is not a political alliance with the weak against the strong. Exodus explicitly warns judges not to favor a poor man merely because he is poor. The biblical justice is based on conduct, not social position. Poverty does not make a person righteous, and wealth does not make a person guilty. A weak man can be wicked. A powerful man can be innocent.

The judge is supposed to ask what happened, who did wrong, and what justice requires. The left asks: who has power?

Once people are divided into oppressors and oppressed, the moral judgment follows the category. The oppressed are granted explanations that would never be offered to the people classified as powerful. Their violence is placed inside a history of colonialism, poverty, humiliation, racism, exclusion, or trauma. Their motives are studied, and their anger is contextualized. The victim may receive none of that attention if he belongs to the wrong group.

That is not biblical justice. It is precisely the kind of partiality the Bible warns against.

Mercy also changes when it is detached from the moral framework that gave it meaning. Biblical mercy assumes guilt. You forgive someone because there is something to forgive, you show mercy because punishment would otherwise be deserved. There is no contradiction between mercy and judgment because mercy only makes sense where judgment is real. Once guilt becomes uncomfortable, mercy becomes confused with the refusal to judge.

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The criminal becomes a victim of circumstances, his upbringing must be considered, his poverty must be considered, his trauma, social environment, mental state, and disadvantages must all be considered. Then punishment itself starts to look immoral, the offender becomes the person society must understand.

The biblical basis for human equality gives every human life dignity before race, class, wealth, status, or political power enters the picture. A king and a beggar stand before the same Creator. No race possesses a higher grade of humanity.

But equality before God never meant sameness. Parent and child are not interchangeable, judge and defendant are not interchangeable, citizen and stranger are not interchangeable, innocent and guilty are not interchangeable. Equal worth does not mean equal role, equal ability, equal responsibility, or equal outcome.

If equality is the highest principle, what must be made equal? Income? Representation? Academic achievement? Wealth? Social status? Political power?

Equality means applying the same rules to everyone. For example, two job applicants should be judged by the same standards regardless of race or sex. But if you decide that equal treatment should also produce equal results, then when one group gets fewer jobs, admissions, promotions, or contracts, you may conclude that the system must be unfair. From there, you can justify treating groups differently to force the outcomes to become more equal.

So the paradox is: in the name of achieving equality, you can end up abandoning equal treatment. That is how institutions can discriminate by race in the name of ending discrimination by race.

The Bible repeatedly commands Israel to treat the stranger justly. But those commands appear inside a Torah that also assumes a distinct people, a land, borders, rulers, laws, inheritance, and obligations that Israelites owe specifically to one another.

The stranger must not be abused, that does not mean Israel must stop being Israel. The radical left keeps the first half and discards the second. Concern for the stranger becomes suspicion of the distinction between stranger and citizen, border enforcement becomes evidence of cruelty, a government’s preference for the welfare of its own citizens can be presented as morally backward.

The biblical principle was designed to restrain a nation from treating outsiders unjustly. It was not designed to make national existence itself morally suspect.

Peace is another biblical good that becomes dangerous when treated as absolute. The Hebrew prophets look forward to a world in which swords are beaten into plowshares. Christianity blesses peacemakers. Neither tradition glorifies war for its own sake, but neither teaches that peace must be preserved at any price.

A peace purchased by surrendering the innocent to an aggressor is not justice, a ceasefire that rewards the party willing to commit enough violence can become an incentive for more violence.

When peace becomes the highest good, the aggressor gains an advantage over the society that fears conflict. The aggressor attacks, the victim responds, then the pressure for restraint falls more heavily on the victim because the victim has the strength to exercise restraint, the stronger side becomes responsible for ending the conflict, while the weaker aggressor benefits from the fact that he has fewer options.

A principle meant to restrain unnecessary violence can then be used to restrain legitimate defense.

The Bible did not hand Western civilization a collection of isolated moral slogans. It gave it a moral order: Justice had to coexist with mercy, mercy had to coexist with judgment, compassion had to coexist with responsibility, equality had to coexist with real differences between people, care for the stranger had to coexist with duties toward one’s own household and people, peace had to coexist with the obligation to defend the innocent.

None of these principles was ultimate. God was, that is what held them together. Once God is removed, the principles remain, but nothing above them determines their proper place.

@DanBurmawy is the Chief Executive of the Ideological Defense Institute

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How does a political movement that claims to champion women’s rights, gay rights, free speech, and secularism end up defending an ideology that rejects all of them? The answer is philosophy. The left and Islam make strange bedfellows, but they share a common enemy, and in the logic of the left, that is enough.

To understand the alliance, you have to understand the fundamental disagreement about what drives human behavior.

The Western liberal tradition, and capitalism as its economic expression, rests on the premise that ideas shape the world. This is what philosophers call idealism. A society’s values, beliefs, and convictions determine what kind of civilization it builds. Freedom produces prosperity. Dignity produces justice. A culture that glorifies conquest produces tyranny. A culture that prizes individual responsibility produces order.

From this perspective, Islamic violence is exactly what it appears to be: the product of a specific set of ideas. Ideas about divine obligation, about the duty to subjugate unbelievers, about the virtue of martyrdom.

Marxism begins from the opposite premise. For Marx and every tradition that flows from him, socialism, critical theory, postcolonial studies, intersectionality, ideas are not the cause of reality but its reflection. Material conditions come first: who owns what, who exploits whom, who holds power over whom. Everything else, morality, religion, law, culture, is built on top of this economic foundation, and serves to justify it. The ruling class produces the ruling ideas, in Marx’s famous formulation. Ideas are instruments of power, not independent forces.

As a result, if material conditions produce ideas rather than the reverse, then people do not kill because of what they believe. They kill because of their circumstances. Theology is not a cause; it is a symptom, a rationalization of underlying grievance. When someone commits violence in the name of a religious doctrine, the materialist does not ask “what does this doctrine say?” He asks “what economic or political condition made this person feel desperate enough to act?”

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The Logic of the Alliance

The leftists looks at the Muslim world and sees a region that whose people occupy the bottom of the global economic hierarchy. He then looks at jihadist movements, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamic State, and applies his analytical framework. These movements arise from oppressed populations. They direct their violence against Western power and its regional allies. Therefore, whatever their stated ideology, their functional role is resistance. They are the proletariat with weapons. They are the global South striking back at the imperial North.

The ideological content of Islam is therefore irrelevant to this analysis. The left does not ignore the fact that Islam subordinates women, criminalizes homosexuality, executes apostates, and rejects democratic governance because it approves of these things. It ignores them because its framework does not process ideological content as a causal factor. To the materialist, the question “what does Islam believe about women?” is the wrong question. The right question is “whose interests does this movement serve?” And since the movement is fighting Western power, it serves the interests of the oppressed, which is the only moral category that matters.

This is why Western feminists who march for abortion rights will march alongside Muslims who would criminalize abortion entirely. This is why LGBT activists who would be executed in Gaza will express solidarity with Hamas. This is why secular academics who have spent careers arguing for the separation of church and state will defend the most theocratic regime on earth.

The Enemy of My Enemy

If human behavior is entirely the product of material conditions, if people kill because of economic despair, colonial humiliation, or structural oppression rather than because of what they believe, then no individual or culture is genuinely responsible for what they do. The suicide bomber is a mechanism produced by poverty and geopolitics, not a moral agent who made choices. The society that produces him is a mechanism produced by history, not a community with a culture that might be better or worse than another.

This is the worldview that cannot say some ideas are better than others. It cannot say that a civilization that protects individual dignity is superior to one that celebrates its destruction. It cannot say that freedom of conscience is genuinely more valuable than submission to divine authority. It can only say: whose side are you on?

And the answer is always: whoever is fighting the West.

The supreme irony is that this position, presented as anti-imperialism, is blind to the one imperialism that most deserves the name. Islam is an imperial ideology, one that spent its first century conquering from Spain to the borders of China, that developed a comprehensive legal framework for the subordination of conquered peoples, that has never produced a doctrine of genuine religious equality or political pluralism from within its own foundational texts. The left sees imperialism in a McDonald’s opening in a third world country. It does not see it in the fourteen-century history of conquest, dhimmitude, and forced conversion that built the Muslim world.

The movements the left defends are not the oppressed striking back. They are the representatives of a totalizing system that would, given sufficient power, impose on the left’s own constituents, women, gay people, atheists, political dissidents, a form of subjugation that makes Western capitalism look like a liberation movement.

Danny Burmawi is the chief executive of the Ideological Defense Institute

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Like Humpty Dumpty on the wall, Cambridge University has just had a great, epic fall. And all its woke academics spouting gender studies sociobabble and all its Islamophilic critical theorists wailing before Allah like the prophets of Baal can’t seem to put Cambridge back together again.

It’s been a triple whammy for my alma mater—and all in the course of a week. First, the anti-hubris legend of Jason Arday: a sociology professor who, like a DEI Icarus, has his fake feathers burned to a crisp and comes crashing down into a pool of plagiarized Critical Race Theory slop.

Second, the Kafkaesque tale of Farah Ahmed: an educationist who turns out to be a former punter for Hizb ut-Tahrir—a movement aiming to establish a global caliphate and ban bacon butties. Ahmed is also cross that British schools dole out condoms but frown on child marriage.

Third, the cautionary parable of vice-chancellor Deborah Prentice: a COVID-19 tyrant from Princeton who has pioneered the discipline of “collective delusion,” but allowed Cambridge to be spellbound by Arday’s DEI Black magic. She also ignored a whistleblower who reported misogynistic bullying at Cambridge University’s Institute of Astronomy.

Cambridge hadn’t yet gone down the rabbit hole of Islamo-wokeism when I was finishing my doctorate at the university in 2004. Many of my batchmates were Americans who had fled to British universities to escape the smog of woke groupthink in American Ivy League schools.

But there were signs of Islamo-wokeist creep into faculties like sociology and education. Islam was taught by a white convert without a doctorate, like Mormon Sunday School, with no heavy-duty critical tools applied as we did in biblical studies. And when Edward Said came to deliver a series of guest lectures, he was welcomed like a Palestinian Nelson Mandela.

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By 2005, the university’s student newspaper was trumpeting: “Cambridge is woke—that’s no bad thing.” Sure, it isn’t a bad thing if Islamofascists who now dominate Western academia wish to eliminate critical thinking—the foundation of Western education since Descartes, actually starting earlier with the Hebrew prophets and Greek philosophers like Socrates and Aristotle.

But critical thinking and ideological/dogmatic conformity cannot co-exist. Critical thinking is prophetic: it uses intentional questioning and evidence-based argumentation to evoke a vision and version of reality that offers an alternative to the ideologies that seek to domesticate and draw us back into the slavery of Pharaoh, with the lure of state-subsidized cucumbers and melons the Hebrew slaves ate in Egypt (Numbers 11:5).

Hence, the ideology of wokeism and the dogma of Islam, which both vie for hegemony, must collude, at least temporarily, to neutralize their chief rival—critical thinking. The crisis involving Arday and Ahmed—Cambridge’s poster boy and poster girl in its department of education—illustrates penetratingly how wokeism and Islam have colluded to kill critical thinking.

The Closing of the American Mind: A Warning Unheeded

We might have saved British academia if we had heeded prophetic warnings from America. In 1987, the philosopher Allan Bloom published his groundbreaking book The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students. Bloom showed how postmodern relativism had destroyed American higher education.

“There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative,” Bloom wrote. “The danger they have been taught to fear from absolutism is not error but intolerance.”

“The study of history and of culture teaches that all the world was mad in the past; men always thought they were right, and that led to wars, persecutions, slavery, xenophobia, racism, and chauvinism. The point is not to correct the mistakes and really be right; rather it is not to think you are right at all,” he summed up.

Bloom recounts an experiment he would conduct, asking his Harvard students if the British rulers of India were right to abolish the Hindu practice of sati—where a wife is forced to immolate herself on her husband’s funeral pyre when he dies. The students, mentally muzzled by relativism, could not/would not answer. I ran the experiment with my university students in England years later. The results were the same.

From Relativism to Wokeism: A Logical Conclusion

All Jason Arday had to do was drive relativism off the cliff’s edge where his academic forebears had parked it for decades. With objective standards defunct, intersectional identity—defined by race, gender, sexuality, or class—becomes the primary lens for defining reality.

Maria Krylova’s essay “From Relativism to Wokeism: A Path of Confusion, Fallacy and Self-Destruction” traces the descent from the “tolerant relativism” of the 60s and 70s to current fanatical wokeism. And Karlo Broussard shows how wokeism is actually relativism in new clothes in his book The New Relativism: Unmasking the Philosophy of Today’s Woke Moralists.

So why did academics like Professor Hilary Cremin, the head of Cambridge’s Faculty of Education, gush over Arday, calling him “the best in the world” in terms of his research? Because to “judge” the intellectual output of a Black DEI appointee would be to blaspheme against the Gospel of Critical Race Theory, which is predicated on the conviction that the Original Sin of Western education is its Eurocentricity.

According to CRT’s ex cathedra dogma, other paths, including Arday’s sociobabble, Haitian voodoo, and Islamic Salafism, are, epistemologically speaking, equally valid.

When Mr. Woke Met Ms. Islam

That’s where Mr. Woke meets his doppelgänger, Ms. Islam aka Farah Ahmed—the two have a torrid affair in Cremin’s faculty lounge. In 2025, Cremin named Ahmed an assistant research professor in the Faculty of Education. Never mind her past links with Hizb ut-Tahrir—a terrorist movement aspiring to establish a global Islamic Caliphate.

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Ahmed’s philosophy of education is unblushingly anti-Western and unapologetically Islamic. I obtained a copy of her chapter, “The Western Education System and the British National Curriculum,” in the book Education and Identity: The Dilemma of Muslims in the West. It was first published as a Hizb ut-Tahrir pamphlet.

“Those of us who have been through the Western education system, and have subsequently started practicing Islam, can recognise the effect on our personalities. It takes many years before even the most obvious Kufr concepts and values can be completely removed and our behavior substantially improved,” Ahmed warns in her screed, masquerading as scholarly discourse.

Ahmed attacks English as “one of the most damaging subjects.” Why? Because children are taught to identify genres of myths, legends, and fables and might end up identifying the story of Mohammad riding a winged horse as “also a made-up legend.” Ahmed trashes religious studies because it puts Islam “on the same level” as Christianity and other religions and promotes the idea of “inter-faith” and “religious tolerance.”

“Issues such as the definition of women’s awrah [body parts that must be covered] and the concept of men being allowed to marry up to four wives are put on a forum for discussion. Hence, the words of man are being placed above the words of Allah (swt) and His Messenger Mohammad (saw),” Ahmed cautions.

The Western education system “will not be suitable to the needs of Muslim students as the ‘adeeqah [belief system] of the Muslim is in complete contradiction to this,” she emphasizes.

“The Islamic State produced mathematicians who surpassed each other in their brilliance, yet this fact is completely ignored,” she laments. “The impression is given that science is purely a Western discipline and that this is part of what makes Western civilisation superior.”

The Closing of the Muslim Mind: Oxymoronic “Islamic Education”

Really, Farah? Isn’t “Muslim education” as oxymoronic as “Jewish bacon?” Actually, Jews can buy “Facon” (fake bacon), which is beef cured to taste like bacon! Similarly, I’ve published several reports reviewing textbooks in Qatar, Jordan, and the Palestinian territories, where I show how “Facon Muslim education” in these countries celebrates jihad, demonizes Jews, condemns Christianity and Judaism as corrupt religions, and promotes Islamic supremacism.

Surely if Muslim education is so great and Western education is so dysfunctional, Ahmed should be teaching at Al-Azhar University, no? But she won’t because Muslim education, or at least its Sunni version, began its intellectual euthanasia in the second year of the reign of Caliph Ja’afar Mutawakkil (847-861), Robert Reilly argues in his book The Closing of the Muslim Mind.

It was the Ash‘arite sect and its leading theologian, Imam al-Ghazali (d.1111), who switched off the life support apparatus, leaving much of Islam clinically brain-dead, Reilly explains. Because reason leads to questioning, it is inimical to Islam, which demands unquestioning submission to Allah, al-Ghazali observed in his treatise The Incoherence of the Philosophers. Rather than the confusion and contradiction generated by the rationalism of Plato and Aristotle, one should rely solely on the clarity of Qur’anic revelation.

In his foreword to Reilly’s book, philosopher Roger Scruton writes: “Policy makers beware: unless you are ready to admit that you are facing an essentially theological problem in the Middle East, do not go about prescribing solutions, for you may actually make matters worse—particularly by creating the false impression that economic, sociological, or political programs can fix what is, in fact, a delusion of faith.”

Dogmatic Delusions Vs. Critical Inquiry

Wokeism and Islam are both delusions of faith. Both demand servile submission to an ex cathedra authority. Western education, in contrast, has its roots not in a religion of uncritical compliance but in the Judeo-Christian tradition of robust questioning and critical inquiry beginning with Abraham and culminating in the Reformation.

It is no accident that the Passover narrative used in the Haggadah on Pesach is triggered by Jewish children asking questions. “Judaism is the rarest of phenomena: a faith based on asking questions, sometimes deep and difficult ones that seem to shake the very foundations of faith itself,” Rabbi Jonathan Sacks preached in a sermon on Parashat Bo (Exodus 10:1-13:16).

“Judaism is not a religion of blind obedience,” Sacks concludes. As a university chaplain in London, I remember debating with Muslim students. I would open my critical editions of the Hebrew Bible and the Greek New Testament and show them the textual apparatus. “I’m happy to rigorously question even my most sacred texts,” I’d say. “Now let’s do that with the Qur’an.” The response was always the same: “We cannot dare to question Allah. It’s blasphemy.”

Cambridge University’s old Cavendish Laboratory features a famous inscription on its door from Psalm 111:2: “Great are the works of the Lord, studied by all who delight in them.” Isaac Barrow, the first Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge and Isaac Newton’s mentor, would say that God had written two books—the Book of Scripture and the Book of Nature. And both were to be studied with equal rigor. No wonder the atom was first split at the Cavendish Laboratory and not at Al-Azhar University.

Rev. Dr. Jules Gomez is a fellow at the Ideological Defense Institute

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Until recently, Aleksandr Dugin was a name most Americans had little reason to know. The Russian political philosopher has spent decades arguing against the liberal West and for a new world order built around competing civilizations rather than shared political values. His actual influence inside the Kremlin gets exaggerated more often than not, but that hardly matters, Dugin’s importance stems from the fact that he has given a coherent philosophical language to anti-Western regimes such as Russia, China, and Iran.

Dugin’s rhetoric is appealing to Western conservatives because he talks about the collapse of the family. He talks about a national sovereignty he thinks the West has thrown away, a spiritual emptiness sitting underneath its consumer comfort, and a liberal culture too embarrassed by its own Christian inheritance to defend it. But in reality Dugin does not want the West to recover the religious and moral foundations it has abandoned. He wants the whole era of Western universalism to end.

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Even Athens, the birthplace of democracy and supposedly of free expression, had its limits. The playwright Aristophanes, the father of political comedy, was hauled into court by Cleon, the most powerful politician in the city, for the crime of making Athens look bad in one of his plays. And the same democracy that invented satire forced Socrates, its greatest philosopher, to drink poison, for disrespecting the gods of the city. Further east, the Great King of Persia required every man who approached him to perform proskynesis, to throw himself face-down on the ground, the posture of worship. When Alexander the Great conquered Persia and adopted the practice for himself, his own court philosopher, Callisthenes, refused to bow. He did not survive the refusal.

In 1579, an English writer named John Stubbs published a pamphlet objecting to Queen Elizabeth’s plan to marry a French Catholic prince. For that, the state laid his right hand on a block and severed it with a cleaver. Fifty years later, a lawyer named William Prynne wrote a book attacking the theater as immoral, at the very moment the Queen of England happened to be enjoying performing in court plays. Reading his book as an insult to her, the state cropped off his ears. And in France, a young writer was thrown into the Bastille, the royal prison, for circulating verses that mocked the man ruling the country. His name was Voltaire, the future giant of the Enlightenment, and his career in free thought began in a cell for the crime of a joke. Europe had a legal name for this crime: lèse-majesté, literally, “injured majesty.” To mock the ruler was treated as sacrilege, as violence against something holy.

Power has never feared the sword as much as it fears the joke. An assassin can kill a king, but the king dies a king, a martyr, even. A satirist makes the king ordinary. He drags the throne down to eye level, where everyone can see that the man sitting on it sweats, lies, lusts, and fears like everyone else. Armies can be defeated and replaced. Awe, once punctured, never fully reinflates.

This is why every despotism in history has criminalized laughter. Ridicule is a solvent. It dissolves the invisible substance that authoritarian power is actually made of, not tanks, not treasuries, but sanctity.

The Civilization That Sanctified No One

Around the tenth century before Christ, the king of Israel took another man’s wife, impregnated her, and arranged for her husband to be killed at the front to cover it up. This was standard behavior for a Bronze Age monarch; the pharaohs and the kings of Babylon did worse before breakfast, and their court scribes recorded only their glory. But into David’s throne room walked a prophet named Nathan, a man with no army and no title, and he told the king a story about a rich man who stole a poor man’s only lamb. When David burned with anger at the thief, Nathan pointed at him and said: “You are the man.”

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I was wrong. Within days, familiar narratives resurfaced. “It didn’t start on October 7,” critics insisted. “If Israel had just given the Palestinians a state…,” “Netanyahu’s government brought this on itself.” The victims, it seemed, had somehow provoked their own massacre.

This reaction did not surprise me as much as it should have. Years earlier, living in Egypt, I witnessed something eerily similar. A woman in Cairo was sexually harassed and assaulted in public. Instead of outrage directed at the perpetrators, many, including other women, blamed the victim. “She was asking for it,” they said. “Look at how she was dressed,” “She shouldn’t have been out alone.” I was stunned. Why would women turn on one of their own when any of them could have been in her position?

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A new poll commissioned by Policy Exchange and conducted by JL Partners between April 16 and 27, 2026, surveyed 1,006 British Muslims in the parts of England where Muslim populations are concentrated, Greater London, the West Midlands, Greater Manchester, West Yorkshire, and parts of Lancashire, South Yorkshire, and Merseyside. The findings are not ambiguous, and they are not the work of a fringe outlet. Policy Exchange is the most influential center-right think tank in Britain. JL Partners is a member of the British Polling Council. The results confirm what every previous serious poll of British Muslims has shown: no other community in the United Kingdom comes close to matching the levels of antisemitism, sympathy for terrorist organizations, hostility to liberal democratic norms, and divided loyalty seen within Britain’s Muslim population.

Twenty-five percent of British Muslims polled hold a favorable view of Hamas, an organization that on October 7, 2023, slaughtered, raped, and kidnapped Israeli civilians in the worst single attack on Jews since the Holocaust. Sixteen percent hold a favorable view of the Islamic State, the organization that carried out genocide against the Yazidis, enslaved Christian women, and beheaded captives on camera for global broadcast. Fifteen percent hold a favorable view of al-Qaeda, the organization that flew passenger aircraft into the World Trade Center. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Tehran regime’s instrument of regional terrorism and the body responsible for arming the Houthis, Hezbollah, and Hamas, holds a net positive favorability among British Muslim respondents. These are not narrow majorities expressing reservations. These are minorities ranging from one in seven to one in four expressing approval of organizations the British government has formally designated as terrorist.

On the relationship between Islam and the laws of the country in which they live, the numbers are sharper. Sixty-three percent of British Muslims polled want the burning of the Quran made a criminal offense. Fifty-two percent want depictions of Muhammad criminalized. Twenty-four percent, nearly one in four, believe violence is a legitimate response to either. Hundreds of thousands of British Muslims, maybe even millions, hold the view that a fellow citizen who burns a book or draws a cartoon may be killed for it.

On Jews and Israel, forty-five percent of British Muslims polled believe Jews wield excessive influence over the British media. Thirty-nine percent believe the same about Parliament, more than twice the rate found in the general public. Twenty-one percent admit unfavorable feelings toward Jews directly, compared with eleven percent nationally. These are the standard antisemitic conspiracy theories, Jews controlling the media, Jews controlling the government, held at rates that would be disqualifying for any other constituency in British public life and that the political class has, for thirty years, decided to overlook for this one.

When asked which identity comes first, sixty-three percent of British Muslim respondents answered Islamic. Twelve percent answered British. The remainder gave mixed or hedged responses. The country has admitted, settled, and granted citizenship to a population of roughly four million people, and a majority of them, when asked the most basic question of political loyalty, name a religious community above the country whose passport they hold.

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These figures are not new. They are consistent with a polling record that goes back more than a decade.

The 2016 ICM survey commissioned by Channel 4, conducted face-to-face with over a thousand British Muslims, found that twenty-three percent supported the introduction of Sharia law in Britain, thirty-nine percent agreed that wives should always obey their husbands, and thirty-five percent believed Jewish people had too much power in Britain. The Henry Jackson Society poll conducted by JL Partners in February and March 2024 found that forty-six percent of British Muslims agreed Jews have too much power over British government policy, while only one in four accepted that Hamas committed murder and rape on October 7. The Pew Research Forum has tracked British Muslim attitudes for years and shown the same pattern, substantial minorities holding views directly hostile to the liberal democratic order, with younger British Muslims more radical than their parents rather than less. British Social Attitudes data shows the same. The findings are not the result of one outlier survey, one biased question, or one partisan researcher. They are the consistent finding of every serious polling operation that has examined the question, across more than a decade, with different methodologies, different sponsors, and different commissioning purposes.

The contrast with every other major community in Britain is the analytical move that matters most.

Practicing Christians remain the largest religious bloc in Britain. They are more socially conservative than secular Britons on questions of family and faith. Their views on terrorism, blasphemy violence, and antisemitism are dramatically milder than those recorded among Muslims. Christian sympathy for Hamas, the Islamic State, or al-Qaeda is statistically negligible. Christian belief that Jews wield excessive power over British institutions runs at a small fraction of the Muslim figure.

The Hindu and Sikh communities of Britain offer an even sharper contrast. Both are smaller than the Muslim community, but both have grown rapidly through immigration in recent decades, meaning the comparison cannot be dismissed as a function of length of settlement. British Hindus and Sikhs rank among the most economically successful and socially integrated minorities in the country. Polling consistently shows low antisemitism, near-zero sympathy for Islamic extremism, strong identification with British civic norms, and warm favorability ratings toward Jews and toward the West. Hindus and Sikhs face violence from Muslim communities with depressing regularity in parts of Britain, at school gates, on city streets, in their own places of worship, and the British political class has noticed this even less than it has noticed the antisemitism.

Across antisemitism, terrorism sympathy, blasphemy violence, divided loyalty, and rejection of basic British political norms, the British Muslim population stands apart. Not by a small margin. By an enormous one. And the gap is not closing with time, contact, or generation. The polls show younger British Muslims are more hostile to Britain than their parents.

Islamic terrorism has been the dominant security threat in Britain for a generation. The overwhelming majority of terror plots disrupted by MI5, the overwhelming majority of arrests under the Terrorism Act, the overwhelming majority of Prevent referrals, all derive from the British Muslim community. Parallel social structures have emerged in cities and towns across the country, with Sharia councils operating outside the British legal system, with grooming networks that targeted thousands of British girls across two decades while authorities looked the other way for fear of “community tensions,” with street-level enforcement of Islamic norms in neighborhoods where ordinary British citizens no longer feel safe. Since October 7, 2023, antisemitic incidents in Britain have surged to levels not seen in the modern history of the country, and the British Jewish community now reports openly that ordinary public life, wearing a kippah, sending children to a Jewish school, walking past a mosque on a Friday, has become very risky.

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The 2021 census recorded just under four million Muslims in the United Kingdom, six percent of the total population, up from 4.8 percent a decade earlier. The Pew Research Forum’s mid-range projection has the Muslim share of the British population reaching 17.2 percent by 2050 under continued high-migration assumptions. The Muslim population is younger than the general population, with a higher fertility rate, and is concentrated in specific urban areas where the local share is already much higher than the national average.

The standard response of the British political class to data of this kind has been to suppress it. The 2016 ICM survey was attacked by every Muslim advocacy organization in Britain and dismissed by significant portions of the political class. The 2024 Henry Jackson Society poll was attacked along the same lines. The 2026 Policy Exchange poll will be attacked along the same lines. The strategy is consistent. The numbers are the problem; therefore the numbers must be denied, the methodology must be impugned, the researchers must be smeared, and the topic must be redirected toward “Islamophobia”, a term constructed precisely to make the discussion of the polling impossible. The strategy has failed because the polls keep coming, and they keep finding the same thing. Britain is now living with the cumulative cost of three decades of refusing to discuss what its own data has been telling it.

A serious response to the findings requires three things. First, an honest public conversation, conducted in plain English, about what the polling actually shows and what it implies. Second, a re-examination of the immigration policy that has produced the demographic outcome the polling describes, including a pause on high-volume immigration from regions whose source populations consistently produce these numbers when polled in Britain. Third, the dismantling of the parallel legal, educational, and social structures that have allowed the unintegrated portion of the Muslim community to consolidate its separation from the rest of British life.

Khaled Hassan is a fellow at the Ideological Defense Institute

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Within days, President George W. Bush stood before the Islamic Center of Washington and declared, “Islam is peace.” British Prime Minister Tony Blair echoed the sentiment. European leaders followed suit. The message was uniform: the attacks had nothing to do with Islam itself. A tiny fringe of extremists had hijacked a noble religion. True Muslims were victims too, victims of misunderstanding, of prejudice, of the very terrorists who claimed to speak for them.

The exoneration was not born of ignorance. Intelligence agencies had tracked jihadist networks for years. Scholars of Islamic texts knew the doctrinal foundations of offensive warfare, of abrogation, of the permanent state of war between Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb. Yet fear overrode clarity. There was the immediate terror of backlash: the FBI recorded a seventeen-fold spike in anti-Muslim hate crimes in 2001, from 28 incidents the previous year to 481. Media outlets amplified every reported slur, every mosque vandalism, every suspicious glance. The narrative solidified: Muslims were now the vulnerable minority in the West, and any criticism of their faith risked igniting pogroms. Geopolitical calculus reinforced the denial. The United States needed allies in the Muslim world for the coming invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Egypt, none could be alienated by the suggestion that their state religion was the problem. Oil flowed. Bases were secured. Coalitions were built on the polite fiction that the enemy was “al-Qaeda,” not the theology that produced it.

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So the script was written: terrorism was “radical,” “extremist,” the work of a handful of deviants who had twisted a peaceful faith. The term “Islamist” had not yet been massaged into its modern usage, but the distinction was already being drawn. Islam was innocent. Muslims were innocent. The West owed them not merely tolerance but active protection and accommodation.

The consequences unfolded. Doors that might have been narrowed after the worst attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor were instead flung wide open. In the United States, the Muslim population, already growing through the 1990s, accelerated. Pew Research data show roughly 2.35 million Muslims in 2007; by 2015 the figure had climbed to approximately 3.3 million. In Europe the surge was even more dramatic. Between mid-2010 and mid-2016 alone, an estimated 3.7 million Muslims entered the continent, more than half through regular migration channels rather than refugee status. France, Germany, Britain, Sweden, the Netherlands, each saw its Muslim population swell by hundreds of thousands in the decade following 9/11. Mosques multiplied. Islamic schools proliferated. Demands for halal food in public institutions, prayer rooms in workplaces, gender-segregated swimming sessions, and exemptions from standard curricula became routine bargaining chips in the politics of “inclusion.”

This was not mere demographic drift. It was reparation dressed as compassion. The West had briefly entertained the uncomfortable thought that Islam might be the issue; having quickly repented of that heresy, it now paid penance through policy. Every new mosque became a monument to atonement. Every accommodation, Sharia councils in Britain, taxpayer-funded Islamic centers in Germany, university prayer spaces in Canada, was presented as proof of moral superiority.

Muslims, sensing the opening, doubled down. The very grievance of being “unfairly accused” after 9/11 became the lever. Innocence declared, they pressed their advantage. Integration was reframed as oppression. Criticism of any Islamic practice was recast as racism. The faith itself was placed beyond scrutiny.

And the attacks kept coming.

Madrid 2004. London 2005. Beslan. Mumbai. Fort Hood. Paris 2015. Brussels. Nice. Manchester. Orlando. San Bernardino. The Bataclan. The Pulse nightclub. The Manchester Arena. The list stretches across continents and decades. Trackers such as the French think tank Fondapol have documented more than 66,000 Islamic terrorist attacks worldwide between 1979 and April 2024, the overwhelming majority occurring after 9/11, claiming at least a quarter of a million lives. Yet each fresh atrocity triggered the same ritual: swift condemnation of the act, followed by even swifter exculpation of the religion. “This has nothing to do with Islam,” officials repeated like a catechism. “The vast majority of Muslims reject violence.” The perpetrators were always “lone wolves,” “mentally ill,” “radicalized online,” anything but faithful executors of a fourteen-hundred-year-old command to fight the unbelievers until they submit.

To sustain the illusion, Western academia and institutions performed a linguistic sleight of hand. They invented “Islamism.” The term, once a neutral descriptor for the political application of Islamic doctrine, was repurposed as a firewall. Islam, we were told, is a beautiful faith of peace and justice. Islamism is the regrettable political distortion practiced by a minority. The distinction allowed policymakers, professors, journalists, and NGOs to defend the faith while condemning its most visible consequences. It shielded the source code, Qur’an, Hadith, Sira, the doctrine of abrogation, the example of the Prophet, from examination. Question the distinction and you were no longer a critic of terrorism; you were an “Islamophobe,” a bigot, a threat to social cohesion. The very act of noticing the pattern became evidence of prejudice.

By the mid-2010s the inversion was complete. Islam had been granted total immunity. Sixty thousand-plus attacks across more than seventy countries, rivers of blood from Mindanao to Mali to Manhattan, and still the default position in polite society was that Islam bore no responsibility. To suggest otherwise was not merely controversial; it was eccentric, almost indecent. The West had convinced itself that the problem was everywhere except the one place the perpetrators kept naming: the religion itself.

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The Perfect Target

October 7, 2023, was the day Islamic terrorism finally hit its perfect target.

Not office workers in New York. Not commuters in London or Madrid. Jews. The one people on earth against whom no justification has ever been required. The one people history itself has already condemned in the eyes of their enemies: they deserved it, just as they “deserved” expulsion from a hundred countries across the centuries. The old blood libel needed no update. It only needed a new stage, and Hamas delivered it in living color, bodycams, livestreams, babies burned in ovens, women paraded naked, elderly Holocaust survivors dragged into tunnels. Barbarism so pure it should have ended every conversation. Instead, it became the moment both Islam and the radical left dropped the mask together.

For twenty-two years the West had clung to the fiction that jihad was the work of “Islamists,” a political perversion, not the faith itself. That firewall had protected Islam from scrutiny after every terrorist attack. But on October 7 the target was Jews, and suddenly neither Muslims nor their new leftist allies could afford the old distinction. They did not want to distance themselves from the slaughter. They wanted to celebrate it. They wanted to own the triumph.

So Muslims claimed Hamas outright. Not as a “radical faction.” Not as “extremists who hijacked the religion.” As Islam. Pure, unadulterated, straight from the Qur’an and the Prophet’s example. For the first time since 9/11, the theology was not denied. It was embraced. The chants were not “Not in our name.” They were “From the river to the sea,” “Globalize the intifada,” and open calls for more October 7ths. Imams and influencers who had spent decades parsing “Islam versus Islamism” dropped the parsing. Hamas was not a distortion. Hamas was the faith in action. The mask was not just off; it was thrown away because the victims were Jews and the victory felt too sweet to disown.

The radical left, which had spent the same two decades polishing that same “Islamism” distinction to shield its favorite victim group, did not hesitate either. It claimed Hamas too. Immediately. Enthusiastically. The very people who had once called bin Laden’s followers “deviants” now marched with the same killers’ flags. Why? Because the target was Jews. Because Israel is not merely a country to them; it is the living symbol of the West, its competence, its resilience, its refusal to apologize for existing. To both ideologies, Israel is the final proof that the old order still breathes: Judeo-Christian roots, Western values, individual dignity, technological triumph grafted onto ancient soil. Smash it, and you smash the West without firing a shot in Manhattan.

So the left supplied the language the Muslims had always lacked in polite society. What Hamas filmed as religious ecstasy, jihad, conquest, humiliation of the infidel, the left translated into “resistance,” “liberation,” “anti-colonialism,” “decolonization.” The rapes became metaphors for “settler violence.” The baby-killings became “context” for 1948. The massacre of festival-goers became “armed struggle against occupation.” Suddenly the oldest hatred on earth had a progressive gloss. Jihad was no longer medieval; it was intersectional.

This was not alliance. It was convergence. Two anti-Western projects, Islam with its fourteen-century mandate of submission, Marxism in all its postmodern, critical, decolonial flavors, had hunted for a common symbol for generations. They found it in the Jews. Demonize Israel and you delegitimize the entire Western project. Legitimize violence against Jews and every other anti-Western grievance becomes instantly righteous.

The proof came fast. Within weeks, Osama bin Laden’s 2002 “Letter to America,” the manifesto that had justified 9/11 by blaming US support for Israel, went viral on TikTok, racking up tens of millions of views. Young Westerners who had never read a page of history suddenly declared it “eye-opening.” The murder of three thousand Americans was retroactively reframed not as religious fanaticism but as righteous blowback against “Zionist imperialism.” What al-Qaeda could never achieve in the years after 9/11, mainstream legitimacy, was handed to them on a platter by the very people who had once called the attacks un-Islamic. October 7 did not just justify itself; it reached back in time and justified everything that came before it.

The demonization of Israel never stopped. Israel was not defending itself after the worst pogrom since the Holocaust. It was a “genocidal settler-colonial state,” the last outpost of Western empire. Every targeted strike on Hamas infrastructure became “indiscriminate bombing.” Every civilian death, deliberately engineered by Hamas’s human-shield doctrine, was proof of Israeli sadism. The West itself was on trial by association. Support Israel and you support colonialism, capitalism, whiteness, patriarchy, every sin on the progressive ledger. Oppose Israel and you stand with the oppressed, even if the “oppressed” are openly calling for your own civilization’s erasure.

In that single inversion, both ideologies won. Islam got its theological victory celebrated in the streets of London and New York without having to hide behind “Islamism.” The radical left got its moral cover to mainstream conquest while pretending it was still fighting “oppressors.” Together they produced the perfect hybrid: jihad with a human-rights vocabulary, medieval barbarism dressed in academic jargon. Hamas’s crimes were not crimes; they were justice. Bin Laden’s massacre of Americans was not fanaticism; it was anti-imperialism. And any defense of Israel, or of the West that still dared to stand behind it, became proof of complicity in original sin.

The streets told the story. Palestinian flags flew beside rainbow banners and Che Guevara icons. Queers for Palestine marched beside people who would throw them from rooftops. Feminists chanted “globalize the intifada” while women in Gaza were still being stoned for “honor.” Marxists who had spent decades denouncing religion suddenly discovered that one particular religion was sacred when it killed Jews. The shared symbol had done its work. Israel had become the hinge on which two dying civilizations could briefly unite to tear down the one that still worked.

What happened after October 7 was not merely the repackaging of Islamic terrorism. It was the mutual legitimization of two irreconcilable projects that hate the West more than they hate each other. By claiming the same enemy, they claimed each other.

The Betrayal from Within

October 7 did not just expose the Red-Green alliance. It pulled in a third, far more dangerous partner: segments of the American right who call themselves patriots, America Firsters, realists, and defenders of Western civilization. These were not the usual suspects from the campus left or the Muslim diaspora. These were voices that had once stood against cultural surrender. And yet, when the moment came, many of them did exactly what their enemies hoped they would: they joined the chorus demonizing Israel, laundering jihad as “blowback,” and treating the Jewish state as the root of every American problem. How does a man who claims to love his country end up carrying water for the very forces that want to bury it?

They are useful idiots in the classic Leninist sense, except this time they wear MAGA hats and quote the Constitution. Some did it out of cowardice. Some out of something uglier. Some out of genuine delusion. And some because the money was too good. Each group reveals a different fracture in the right’s soul, and together they show how even those who swear they are defending the West can become the instruments of its undoing.

The largest contingent, and the most disappointing, were the cowards who once professed love for Israel. These were the people who had cheered the Abraham Accords, who had mocked the left’s obsession with “Zionist influence,” who had correctly identified radical Islam as the civilizational threat of our time. After October 7 they watched the propaganda machine go into overdrive: campus encampments, TikTok floods, legacy media footage of Gazan children framed as victims while Israeli children lay in morgues. Suddenly “pro-Israel” became a political liability. The polls shifted. The donor class wavered. The online right began calling anyone who defended Israel a “neocon” or a “dual citizen.” And these men folded. They did not deny the massacre, they simply stopped talking about it. They pivoted to “What about Gaza?” They discovered a sudden interest in “civilian casualties” they had never shown when Muslims slaughtered Christians in Nigeria or Yazidis in Iraq.

They told themselves they were being “consistent” or “anti-interventionist.” What they were really doing was dropping the one frontline state that still fights the enemy on its own soil. They failed to understand that Israel is not a favor the West does for Jews. Israel is the West’s proof of concept: a nation rebuilt from exile, armed with the Western values that Jerusalem gifted the world, and unapologetic self-defense. Abandon Israel in the face of this assault and you are not saving American blood or treasure. You are signaling to every jihadi and every decolonial theorist that the West no longer has the will to defend its own principles. You are handing the enemy the moral high ground they could never seize on their own.

Others needed no conversion. They had been waiting for this moment their entire lives. The old antisemitism, never fully extinguished on the fringes of the right, finally found respectable cover. For decades it had been socially radioactive to say the quiet part out loud. Now the left had made hatred of Israel the central moral cause of the age. Suddenly the same tropes that had once been confined to 4chan comment sections were being mainstreamed by Ivy League professors and CNN anchors: “Zionist lobby,” “genocide,” “apartheid,” “dual loyalty.” The antisemites on the right did not have to invent new language. They simply borrowed the left’s. They could now post memes about “Zionist Occupied Government” and be retweeted by millions who thought they were merely criticizing “forever wars.” October 7 gave them the perfect alibi. They were not bigots; they were “anti-Zionists” fighting the same empire the progressives were fighting. The fact that their new allies would happily throw them into the same ditch once the Jews were gone never seemed to register. Hatred is a powerful solvent. It dissolves principle faster than any ideology.

A smaller but vocal group genuinely believed the propaganda. These were the sincere realists, the paleoconservatives, the libertarians who had spent years warning against neoconservative overreach. They watched the same footage the rest of us did, but they swallowed the narrative whole. Hamas’s atrocities became “resistance.” Israel’s response became “genocide.” They convinced themselves that if America simply cut off support for Israel, the jihad would evaporate and the Muslim world would suddenly become a partner in peace. They ignored fourteen centuries of doctrine. They ignored the Muslim Brotherhood’s own words. They ignored what every former Muslim from the Middle East has been screaming for years. Instead, they listened to Dave Smith explaining that the attack was “predictable” or Tucker Carlson wondering why we care so much about a country “the size of New Jersey.” They believed the Muslims when the Muslims told them the problem was Israel. They believed the leftists when the leftists told them the problem was “colonialism.” They flipped because they mistook tactical grievance for strategic truth. In doing so they became the perfect marks: patriots who thought they were saving America by betraying its strongest ally in the only theater where the enemy is already engaged.

Then there are the ones who were never sincere to begin with. The paid actors. Qatar, Turkey, and their Gulf proxies have spent billions building influence networks inside the American right. Think tanks quietly funded, influencers on retainer, podcasts with suspiciously large sponsorships. Some of these voices suddenly discovered a deep concern for Palestinian children right around the time their bank accounts got fatter. The money does not buy outright lies; it buys selective blindness. It buys the decision to platform certain guests, to soft-pedal certain doctrines, to treat Hamas as a “resistance movement” rather than a death cult. Foreign funding has always been the quiet corruption of American discourse. After October 7 it simply found a new cause célèbre.

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Finally, the most human and most tragic category: those who have nice Muslim friends. They know Ahmed from the gym, Fatima from the PTA, the friendly imam down the street who always smiles and talks about “peace.” These people cannot square the images of October 7 with the pleasant, assimilated Muslims in their daily lives. So they perform the mental gymnastics required: “My Muslims are different. This is just politics. This is not real Islam.” They have never read the Qur’an. They have never sat through a Friday sermon in Arabic. They have never asked their nice Muslim friends what they really think about apostates, about Jews, about the caliphate. Personal experience becomes the ultimate authority, and the doctrine is dismissed as “extremist.”

All of them, cowards, antisemites, true believers, paid voices, and the willfully naïve, share one fatal misunderstanding. They think the war is about Israel. It is not. Israel is the symbol, not the cause. The real war is between two competing projects, Islam’s total submission and the radical left’s total deconstruction, against the last remnants of the West that still refuses to kneel.

The Re-Zionization of the West

Zionism began in the late nineteenth century as a desperate Jewish political project: a movement of exiles who had been hunted across continents, stripped of their land, their dignity, their right to exist as a people. Theodor Herzl and the early Zionists were not dreaming of empire or supremacy. They were trying to survive. They wanted one small patch of earth where Jews could finally stop running, stop apologizing, stop dying for the crime of being Jewish. A nation-state. A refuge. A place to plant vineyards, build hospitals, and raise children who would not have to hide their names or their prayers.

That project succeeded beyond anything Herzl could have imagined. Israel rose from the ashes of the Holocaust, from pogroms and expulsions, from the centuries of dhimmitude under Islamic rule. It became a miracle of resilience: a democracy in a sea of theocracies, a technological powerhouse in a desert of failed states, a people who turned swamps into cities and turned “never again” into actual policy. But somewhere along the way, Zionism outgrew its original skin. It stopped being merely a Jewish national movement and became something far larger, far more universal.

It became the Western civilization project itself.

Because what Israel defends on the front lines of the Middle East is not just Jewish land. It is the last unapologetic outpost of everything the West once claimed to believe in: the sovereignty of the individual, the rule of law rooted in Judeo-Christian morality, the right to defend yourself without begging permission from the international community, the refusal to submit to tribal theocracy or postmodern relativism. Israel does not apologize for its borders. It does not apologize for its strength. It does not pretend that every culture is equally equipped to build free societies. It simply exists, thrives, and wins, under the most hostile conditions imaginable. In doing so, it proves that the West’s ideas are not historical accidents. They are superior. They work. Even when surrounded by enemies who want to erase them.

This is why the alliance we have watched form since October 7 hates Israel with such primal intensity. It is not about settlements or checkpoints or the size of the country. It never was. Islam sees in Israel the theological insult of a dhimmi people who refused to stay dhimmi. The radical left sees in Israel the living rebuke to its entire worldview: a nation that rejects victimhood, rejects deconstruction, rejects the idea that history is nothing but a chain of oppressions. Both projects, Islam’s total submission and Marxism’s total dismantling, require the West to kneel. Israel refuses. And because it refuses in full view of the world, it has become the symbol of everything the West must still be if it wants to survive.

That is the re-Zionization of the West.

It is not about ethnicity. It is not about converting Christians or secularists into Jews. It is about rediscovering the unapologetic civilizational confidence that Zionism now embodies. The West was once Zionist in spirit long before the word existed. It was the civilization that believed that borders mattered, that strength was not a sin, that history could be bent toward justice instead of endless grievance. It was the civilization that was not ashamed of excellence. Israel is that same root system transplanted into hostile soil and still bearing fruit. To defend Israel today is to defend the West’s own possibility of renewal.

Look at what the enemies are really attacking when they attack “Zionism.” They are attacking the idea that a nation can prioritize its own citizens without being called supremacist. They are attacking the idea that some values, liberty, truth, self-defense, are worth dying for and not everything is negotiable. Islam demands submission; the left demands deconstruction. Israel says no to both. It is the living proof that the West can still say no.

The re-Zionization of the West needs is therefore not military or territorial. It is moral and civilizational. It means stopping the endless apologies. It means recognizing that not every migrant is a future citizen, that not every culture is compatible with open societies, that not every grievance is sacred. It means understanding that Israel’s fight against Hamas is not a “regional conflict” but the West’s fight against the same forces that are already inside Western cities, inside it’s universities, its governments, it’s streets.

Re-Zionization of the West is the recognition that the war is not about land in the Middle East. It is about the soul of the West itself. Israel is not asking the West to save it. Israel is showing the West what it must become again if it wants to save itself: clear-eyed, unashamed, willing to name the enemy and willing to defeat it. It is showing that a civilization can be both particular, rooted in its own history and people, and universal in its defense of the ideas that made it great.

Danny Burmawi is the chief executive of the Ideological Defense Institute.

What Is IDI ?

The most trusted source of information on the Middle East, Islam, and the ideological threats facing the West.

Subject-matter experts, former Muslims, Arab Christians, and Western thought leaders, coming together to equip policymakers to prevent destructive foreign ideas from being translated into law, restore confidence in the biblical principles that built the West by empowering the Church to reengage the public square, and provide the public with solid analysis to combat the confusion that is making the West vulnerable.

Support IDI

“And I was talking about, you know, what is the first truly Islamist country that will get a nuclear weapon, and we were like, maybe it’s Iran, you know, maybe Pakistan already kind of counts, and then we sort of finally decided maybe it’s actually the UK, since Labour just took over.”

These words were dismissed by the simpering British commentariat as a wild exaggeration, but I think that Vance taps into an important debate about immigration, integration, and ongoing major political shifts in the UK.

I’m not even sure his words were that hyperbolic and they most certainly invite asking a tough question:

Could the UK, a bastion of liberal democracy and nuclear power, fall to Islamic ideology?

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As always, demography tends to be destiny. The UK’s Muslim population has grown steadily, from about 2.7 million in 2001 to over 3.9 million by 2021, according to census data. Undoubtedly that will now be well in excess of 4.5 million. Projections suggest it could reach 13 million by 2050 if high immigration continues, driven by so called “asylum seekers” from Muslim-majority countries like Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Syria.

If we look at fertility rates among Muslim communities, we see that they are around 2.9 children per woman compared to the national average of 1.6. This will further accelerate this shift. In urban centers like London, Birmingham, and Manchester, Muslims already form significant minorities, with some council wards exceeding 50% Muslim residents. Over time, this is leading to “parallel societies,” where cultural norms diverge from the mainstream, fostering enclaves with Sharia councils handling family disputes, as already seen today.

The Labour Party’s reliance on ethnic minority votes, particularly in inner-city constituencies, means it panders to Islamist-leaning factions. In the 2024 election, Labour secured strong support from Muslim voters amid Gaza-related protests, but this came with strings: candidates faced pressure to adopt pro-Palestinian stances, and some independents ran on explicitly Islamist platforms, winning seats in places like Leicester and Blackburn.

In the most recent Parliamentary by election, the Green Party outmaneuvered Labour in attracting to the Muslim vote. Labour is desperate to try and keep these voters through policies like relaxed blasphemy laws or state-funded faith schools. This craven weakness inadvertently empowers the hardline voices it seeks to appease.

Hypothetically, by the 2040s, coalition governments could include Islamist ministers pushing for reforms: halal standards in public institutions, gender-segregated facilities in schools, or even symbolic recognition of Islamic holidays over Christian ones.

Cultural and legal erosion would follow, amplified by societal pressures. Free speech debates, already strained by hate speech laws, could tilt further. Incidents like the 2022 Batley Grammar School controversy—where a teacher was forced into hiding after showing a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad—highlight how vulnerable we are.

In a “fallen” UK, repeated protests and legal challenges might lead to de facto blasphemy protections, stifling criticism of Islam. Media self-censorship, driven by fear of backlash or “Islamophobia” accusations, could normalize Islamist narratives. The Education curriculum could evolve fostering a generation more aligned with global ummah identities than British national ones.

Economically, stagnation could fuel radicalization. Vance alluded to “high levels of immigration” correlating with “economic stagnation.” He’s right there too!

Hypothetically, by mid-century, economic woes might prompt populist Islamist movements promising welfare reforms inspired by zakat (Islamic charity) or interest-free banking, appealing to broader disaffected groups. International influences, like funding from Qatar or Saudi Arabia for mosques and community centers, could subtly promote conservative ideologies, mirroring trends in other European nations.

The nuclear angle in Vance’s quote underscores the ultimate stakes. The UK, as a NATO nuclear power with Trident submarines, maintains independent deterrence. In this scenario, an Islamist-influenced government might not dismantle the arsenal but could realign foreign policy: withdrawing from alliances seen as anti-Muslim, like supporting Israel, or even sharing technology with sympathetic states.

A “soft coup” through democratic means—via referendums or parliamentary majorities—could install leaders prioritizing Sharia principles, transforming the UK into a hybrid theocracy. Think Turkey under Erdogan, but with Britain’s global clout.

Of course, this is not inevitable. The UK people have a choice. They fight back or they will be erased and the UK will become an Islamic caliphate.

David Vance is a Northern Irish political commentator, broadcaster, and blogger known for his outspoken views on politics, national identity, and security issues in the United Kingdom and Europe. A longtime commentator on current affairs, he has written extensively on Islam, terrorism, free speech, and Western civilization. Vance has contributed to numerous media outlets and frequently appears in public debates and interviews discussing political and cultural developments in the West.

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Practicing Muslims observe Ramadan by praying and fasting. They abstain from food and drink from dawn to sunset and break the fast with the evening meal known as iftar, an often elaborate, multi-course banquet enjoyed with family and friends at festive gatherings. It is the iftar that most non-Muslims promote and participate in during Ramadan.

Much of the non-Muslim support for Ramadan is coming from well-meaning individuals and organizations from across the political spectrum—left, right, and center—and is usually portrayed as part of an effort to promote freedom of religion, inclusion, and tolerance.

Ramadan’s Spiritual Significance

The iftar is much more than a meal; it has great spiritual significance. The signal for Muslims that they may begin the iftar is the Adhan (the Islamic call to prayer) at sunset. The Adhan repeats four times that Allah is “the greatest” of all gods, two times that there is “no god but Allah,” another two times that Allah is “the greatest,” and concludes with the assertion that “there is no god but Allah.” The Adhan falsely declares that Allah is greater than Yahweh, the God of the Bible.

The Adhan at sunset, the fourth of five daily Islamic prayers, is known as the Maghrib prayer, which requires Muslims to acknowledge the sovereignty of Allah. In the prayer, Muslims recite Surah al-Fatiha, the first chapter of the Qur’an, which states that Allah is the “Lord of all worlds,” the “Master of the Day of Judgment,” and emphatically declares, “You alone we worship.”

After breaking the fast (iftar), practicing Muslims recite a prayer known as dua, which states: “O Allah, for you I have fasted and by your provision I have broken my fast.” Muslims then make personal supplications to Allah.

In essence, Ramadan is a festival that celebrates the giving of the Qur’an, a book that elevates a deity called Allah above the God of the Bible and denies the divinity of Jesus Christ. The iftar is a ceremonial meal dedicated to Allah and falsely establishes him as the one true God. This is the theology that non-Muslims endorse when they promote Ramadan and participate in the iftar. The are, in effect, denying the God of the Judeo-Christian Bible.

Ramadan’s Political Significance

Beyond its spiritual significance, Ramadan has great political importance. Many analysts of Islam in the West warn that Islamists (those who seek to reorder Western countries and societies according to the principles of Islam) are “ideologically instrumentalizing” Ramadan to further their aims of Islamizing the West.

Mouhanad Khorchide, head of the Center for Islamic Theology at the University of Münster, notes that the significance of Ramadan in Europe is shifting from religious to political and that Islam is increasingly becoming a principle source of identity. “Religious rituals or visible symbols are increasingly taking their place; not primarily as expressions of inner piety, but as markers of belonging,” he says.

Seyran Ates, founder of the Ibn Rushd-Goethe Mosque in Berlin, adds: “From my perspective, there is unfortunately an instrumentalization of Ramadan by political Islam in Germany at present, which everyone should warn against. In particular, when politicians are invited to the breaking of the fast, they should better examine which organizations are behind it.”

Ates notes that many of the Islamist groups promoting Ramadan in Germany are being surveilled by intelligence agencies due to the threat they pose to the liberal democratic order.

Ramadan Controversies

Austria

Teachers in Vienna, the Austrian capital, are reporting a “worrying dynamic” in classrooms where students are facing “massive” peer pressure to comply with Ramadan fasting rules. Thomas Krebs, a teachers’ union representative, said “surveillance groups” are “meticulously ensuring” that classmates not only abstain from food, but also adhere to “appropriate” dress and behavior during Ramadan. “It cannot be that individual students put themselves above others,” Krebs warned in a special report aired on Austrian television.

Krebs also revealed that lessons are being disrupted by students who spontaneously unroll prayer rugs during class and begin praying. Others are warning that social media acts as a “digital morality police” that is “massively increasing” social control over young people. An Austrian commentator noted: “One has to let this sink in: underage students are establishing a system of social control in European classrooms that resembles a religious morality police.”

Germany

In Göttingen, a city with nearly 125,000 inhabitants, the Adhan was recited publicly for the first time in the city’s history. The occasion was the breaking of the Ramadan fast on February 24. Mayor Petra Broistedt described the public call to prayer as a “moving moment” and “an expression of a pluralistic society.”

The call to prayer on rang out from the city’s Königsstieg Mosque, which is closely linked to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, an Islamist opposed to the assimilation of the Turkish diaspora in Germany. The mosque is well known for promoting Islamism and antisemitism. In 2021, the then-chairman Mustafa Keskin was forced to resign after he spread antisemitic content on social media. In several posts, he claimed, among other things, that Jews were cursed and controlled world politics. He also referred to Armenians as “bastard dogs.”

In an interview with the Göttinger Tageblatt, the current leader of the mosque, Ali Serkan Sabhaz, revealed that the public call to prayer was not a one-off event but a trial run for regular calls to prayer. He said he is discussions with the city hall to obtain permission to sound a call to prayer once a month on Friday at noon. The long-term objective appears to be calls to prayer five times a day.

In a press release, the center-left Mayor Broistedt said the public call to prayer “is not a political symbol, but rather the rule of law in practice.” She added: “We consciously prioritize dialogue, respect, and the protection of our shared freedom.”

Center-right politicians like Hendrik Wüst praised the public call to prayer as a “contribution to integration.” But Islam experts like Ahmad Mansour warns that it is a “demonstration of power by political Islam.”

German commentator Heinz Steiner described the public call to prayer as “acoustic capitulation” to political Islam. “While the mosque publicly presents itself as liberal and open to dialogue, internally it often preaches a hardline, anti-Western, and Islamist agenda. The fact that a German mayor granted this very association permission to broadcast its message through loudspeakers in public spaces demonstrates a shocking level of political naiveté.”

The Alternative for Germany (AfD), a civilizationalist party, stated: “The public call to prayer is not merely an exercise of religious freedom, but an acoustic marking of public space that disturbs and excludes large parts of the non-Muslim neighborhood. We see this as an ideological shift in boundaries that does not fit with our understanding of a secular and tolerant coexistence.”

Also in Germany, primary school children at the Joseph Beuys Comprehensive School in Kleve, North Rhine-Westphalia, were required to eat lunch in secret because doing so might “provoke” their fasting Muslim classmates. The move came after Muslim students began bullying their non-Muslim classmates and ordered them to “fast now” and “throw your food in the trash can.”

A spokesman for the AfD parliamentary group, Götz Frömming, commented: “The events at the comprehensive school in Kleve show that tolerance in many places has long since turned into preemptive submission. Our free and democratic legal order, which rests on a Christian-Roman cultural heritage, not Islam, must be the guiding principle for everyday school life.”

AfD Member of Parliament Birgit Bessin added: “The Ramadan rules of conduct in Kleve further relativizes the Christian identity of our country and reflects the gradual Islamization of everyday school life. It is urgently necessary to push back these Islamization tendencies and demand unconditional respect for German core values.”

Spain

In Barcelona, the City Council’s Office of Religious Affairs issued Ramadan procedures for the city’s schools in order “to create a climate of respect and overcome the stigma, ignorance, and Islamophobia that permeates much of the Western imagination.” The handbook, “Guidelines for Educational Centers on Ramadan,” states that “understanding Ramadan helps avoid stereotypes, prevent discrimination, and ensure equal treatment for all students.”

Among other advice, the guide recommends that schools avoid extracurricular activities such as music or dance, which may be considered “inappropriate” by Muslims during Ramadan, “since it is a month dedicated to spirituality, during which it is especially important to maintain a pious attitude.” Therefore, it would be “advisable to take this sensitivity into account when planning activities or offering alternative options.”

The Barcelona City Council has a long history of mocking Christians during Christmas by setting up “secular” nativity scenes in which Jesus, Mary, and Joseph are represented by empty chairs. Gonzalo de Oro, a spokesman for Vox, a Spanish civilizationist party, said the guide “is further proof of the surrender of the Socialist Party and the mayor of Barcelona to Islam.” He added:

“It’s a surrender that began many years ago with the Ramadan greetings, which then continued with the lack of Christmas greetings, with hiding the Nativity scene, and now they’ve finally dropped the mask. They’re banning pork in public schools, meaning our Christian children cannot eat pork in public schools, which is outrageous, and on top of that they presume to tell us how we should behave during Ramadan.”

De Oro concluded: “What this City Council wants is for Barcelona to become like Marrakesh or Algiers. We at VOX will not normalize these guides or these attitudes that are against our civilization.”

The Netherlands

Lawmakers Diederik van Dijk and André Flach expressed concern that Dutch politicians are fully embracing the Islamic iftar, while increasingly erasing the Judeo-Christian tradition. In an op-ed article published by De Telegraaf, the largest Dutch daily morning newspaper, they wrote:

“The large numbers of politicians and administrators attending iftar celebrations may seem sympathetic at first glance. And we understand the purpose: to connect all groups in society. An important task. But one thing is overlooked: the Netherlands has a Judeo-Christian tradition, and the religion they champion is inherently anti-Jewish and anti-Christian. Therefore, it is at the very least questionable to attend iftars where exclusion is preached, under the guise of inclusion.

“Unfortunately, it doesn’t stop there. Many governments in the Netherlands go a step further. They organize or subsidize iftars themselves. At taxpayer expense, imams are thus given the opportunity to spread the message to municipalities, ministries, or the National Police that no god may be worshiped but Allah. Conversely, we have yet to encounter a pastor who is allowed to lead prayers at a ministry’s Christmas reception or Easter breakfast in a town hall. In fact, the terms “Christmas reception” and “Easter breakfast” have often long since been abandoned. This is a double standard, and it flies in the face of the neutrality our government claims to uphold.

“And that brings us to the crux of the matter. In the Netherlands, we are seeing two developments: Islam is gaining an increasingly dominant position; and Christianity is increasingly being pushed to the background, while the Netherlands has Christian roots.”

Van Dijk and Flach concluded: “We stand for freedom of religion, but oppose preferential treatment of Islam. Anyone who cuts off their own history and roots to make room for another religion or ideology uproots themselves and ultimately offers no one else a foundation to stand on.”

Other Ramadan Controversies

Other Ramadan-related controversies and disputes in Europe this year include:

• Austria. A 17-year-old non-Muslim student at a boarding school in Saint Pölten was suspended after complaining about Muslim roommates waking up at 3 AM daily to eat Sahur (a pre-dawn meal consumed by Muslims before fasting during Ramadan) amid loud music. The Deputy Governor of Lower Austria, Udo Landbauer, was indignant: “Our children are being suspended so that others can behave badly? Integration means adapting, accepting our rules, and respecting our local culture.”

• Austria. A major restaurant chain offered special Ramadan menus that are only available after 5 PM. Kronen Zeitung, Austria’s largest newspaper, reported that the issue is “polarizing” for many people because the company does not offer unique menus for Christians or kosher products for Jews.

• Belgium. Almost ten years to the day after 32 people were killed and more than 300 were injured in jihadist attacks at the airport and metro in Brussels, authorities at Brussels Airport hosted an elaborate daily iftar buffet.

• Britain. At least six professional football matches were paused mid-game so that Muslim athletes could break their fast. This follows a formal agreement reached in 2021 to accede to Islamic demands to accommodate fasting during Ramadan. “It is interesting to observe this latest concession to Islamic demands for provision to accommodate fasting during Ramadan,” notes Tim Dieppe of Christian Concern. “Other recent accommodations to Islam include rescheduling exams to avoid Ramadan, Ramadan lights in London, an Iftar in Manchester United’s Old Trafford stadium, provision of Muslim prayer rooms, halal food in many workplaces, and so much more.” According to Dieppe, it is “part of a much bigger trend towards the Islamization of Britain.”

• Germany. In Berlin-Reinickendorf, Emine Demirbüken-Wegner, the Turkish-born mayor, invited representatives of hardcore Islamist mosques and organizations in the borough to participate in an iftar at the city hall at taxpayer expense. The guest list included members of the Turkish-Islamic Union for Islamic Affairs (Türkisch-Islamische Union der Anstalt für Religion, DITIB), the largest Islamic umbrella organization in Germany. DITIB, which is a part of the Turkish Directorate of Religious Affairs (known in Turkish as Diyanet), an organization described as the “extended arm” of the Turkish state, is directly subordinate to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, a tireless propagator of political Islam in Europe.

• Italy. A classroom at the University of Brescia was converted into a mosque, with rugs on the floor and partitions to separate prayer spaces for males and females during Ramadan. The walls were covered with flyers in Arabic calling for invocations to Allah. The university said the move was conceived as “a special opportunity to come together as a community, share profound reflection, and experience together the emotion of breaking the fast during Ramadan.” Silvia Sardone, a Milan City Councilor, noted: “Far from integration, Islamists are now demanding dedicated spaces within Italian universities.”

• Italy. In Cremona, a city in Lombardy, a high school student on a public bus was physically assaulted by two Muslim girls for eating a sandwich during Ramadan. “We’re not eating, it’s Ramadan,” they said. When the 52-year-old bus driver ordered the girls to get off the bus, they assaulted him too and he ended up in the emergency room. Silvia Sardone, a Milan City Councilor, described the incident as “truly alarming” and warned: “We’re at the point of total delirium. Yet there are still some on the left who continue to bow to the growing Islamization, closing schools for Ramadan and even allowing the niqab to be worn in classes. What will be next?”

• Sweden. IKEA showcased a “Ramadan Musthaves” collection ranging from kitchen essentials to table settings. IKEA also offered a “festive Ramadan menu” at their in-store restaurants. Charlie Weimers, a Swedish Member of the European Parliament, noted that while Muslims are “perfectly free and open” to observe Ramadan, he also drew attention to the fact that Christians in Europe are being attacked by Muslim mobs for openly displaying their faith during Ramadan. “With that as a starting point, we can certainly discuss whether Ramadan has its natural home in Sweden or not,” he wrote.

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Soeren Kern is a fellow at the Ideological Defense Institute.

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Subject-matter experts, former Muslims, Arab Christians, and Western thought leaders, coming together to equip policymakers to prevent destructive foreign ideas from being translated into law, restore confidence in the biblical principles that built the West by empowering the Church to reengage the public square, and provide the public with solid analysis to combat the confusion that is making the West vulnerable.

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This scene is more than a moment of dark cinematic absurdity; it is a clinical observation of a specific moral pathology. It perfectly encapsulates what we might call the “Indignant Predator”, a mindset in which the perpetrator views their own violence as mundane routine, and the victim’s self-defense as a personal insult or an act of aggression.

While Hannah Arendt famously coined the phrase “Banality of Evil” to describe the thoughtless, bureaucratic machinery of the Holocaust, Raya represents a different stage of the same disease: an evil that is not only banal but feels itself to be the aggrieved party. It is a psychological inversion in which the act of killing is treated as “work,” and the victim’s struggle is recast as “aggression.”

When we apply this lens to modern academic discourse, specifically the influential work of Edward Said, we find this same sentiment operating through a startling narrative inversion: the “bite” of the historical victim has been reframed as the “stranglehold” of the aggressor.

Said’s Orientalism is often championed as the definitive critique of Western aggression against the East. Yet Said’s narrative performs a massive act of contextual excision. By starting the historical “clock” at the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt in 1798, Said and his followers treat Western intervention as a sudden, unprovoked act of strangling. To sustain this narrative of the West as the original and sole predator, one must willfully ignore over a millennium of actual “strangling” that preceded it, actions that have defined the relationship between the Occident and the Orient since the 7th century.

This omitted history is not composed of minor skirmishes but of world-shaping imperial projects. It includes the devşirme system, through which the Ottoman Empire forcibly took Christian children, converted them, and turned them into Janissaries to further subjugate their own kin. It includes the twice-attempted conquest of Europe at the gates of Vienna (1529 and 1683), campaigns in which the predator was not the Frenchman in Cairo, but the Turk at the heart of Europe. Furthermore, it ignores the Barbary slave trade, which represents a massive, centuries-long stranglehold that the modern narrative has almost entirely sanitized. Between the 16th and 19th centuries, North African corsairs operated a sophisticated industry of human trafficking. It is estimated that over one million Europeans were captured and enslaved, with “Naval Jihad” raids reaching as far as Ireland and Iceland. Coastal villages were emptied, their inhabitants dragged to the slave markets of Algiers and Tripoli. This was not a matter of interpretation. The doctrine was stated plainly by Tripoli’s own ambassador, Sidi Haji Abdrahaman, when asked by Jefferson and Adams why his nation made war upon countries that had done it no injury:

“It was written in their Koran, that all nations which had not acknowledged the Prophet were sinners, whom it was the right and duty of the faithful to plunder and enslave.

Jefferson and Adams had their answer. When Thomas Jefferson re-established the U.S. Navy and the Marine Corps, immortalized in the hymn “to the shores of Tripoli”, it was not born of “Orientalist” ambition or colonial desire. It was a material necessity to stop American citizens from being sold into slavery; a state of affairs that, at its peak, consumed some 20% of the young republic’s annual budget in tribute payments simply to keep the stranglehold loose enough for trade to continue.

By framing the eventual Western response as “unprovoked colonialism,” academics like Said adopt the Raya Persona: they express moral indignation that the victim, after centuries of being strangled, finally refused to submit, and had the audacity to bite the hand at its throat.

The result of this selective history is a profound and dangerous moral asymmetry that governs modern thought. The Orient is granted a history of imperialism, slavery, and conquest, from the early Caliphates to the Ottoman Empire, that is treated as a natural, almost invisible background: a given of history requiring neither examination nor apology. The Occident, by contrast, is denied the right to recognize an enemy. Any attempt to defend itself from, or simply name, centuries of incursion is reframed as the original sin of “racism” or “Islamophobia.”

This asymmetry finds its roots in the earliest theological declarations of expansion. Whether one looks at the letter sent by Muhammad to the Prefect of Egypt, or the later letters of Khalid ibn al-Walid to the Persians, the message was always the same: “Aslim Taslam,” “Submit and be safe.”

In the mind of the Indignant Predator, this constitutes an offer of peace. The predator’s reason holds that if the victim simply allows the rope to tighten, there will be no violence. Therefore, when the victim struggles, it is the victim who is introducing violence into the relationship. In this light, the true “Banality of Evil” is not found in the act of self-defense, but in the intellectual thoughtlessness of the modern historian who sanitizes the predator.

When resistance is labeled as the “cause” of conflict rather than its “consequence,” the perpetrator is granted a moral shield that allows them to continue their work with the same chilling detachment seen in Raya, genuinely shocked that the world views them as the enemy.

In the 1953 film, Sakina is the accomplice: the one who holds the victim down, covers her mouth, and muffles the noise so the neighbors cannot hear the struggle. In modern discourse, much of the media and academia plays the role of Sakina. They function as a voluntary human shield for the aggressor, employing the most dangerous tool in the propagandist’s arsenal: the conflation of a people with an ideology. This conflation creates a condition in which the perpetrator is protected by the very identity of his victims.

We currently witness activists, journalists, and politicians carrying water for some of the most brutal regimes on earth, as long as those regimes define themselves as anti-Western. This dynamic is nowhere more vividly illustrated than in the treatment of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The media routinely conflates the Iranian people, who are currently risking their lives for freedom, with the IRGC (Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps). In reality, the man on the street in Tehran is the primary victim of the theocratic stranglehold. Yet when Western critics challenge the theology of aggression or the ideology of the IRGC, the “Sakina” class of media accuses them of “attacking Muslims” or perpetuating “Western Imperialism.”

This is a masterstroke of narrative manipulation: it protects the hands at the throat by claiming that criticizing those hands is an insult to the throat itself. The predator’s work is thus kept undisturbed by moral scrutiny from the outside world. The same mechanism operates not merely around actions, but around openly stated intent.

Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, one of the most influential Islamic scholars of the 20th century, with a global television audience and the formal chairmanship of the International Union of Muslim Scholars, stated plainly:

“It is our duty to restore the glory of the nation of Islam back to the days where the Muslims were rulers of the world.”

This was not a fringe voice.

In 2004, the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, gave Qaradawi an official reception at City Hall, publicly praising him as “one of the most authoritative Muslim scholars in the world today.” When critics raised the alarm, Livingstone accused them of xenophobia, the Raya reasoning made flesh: the hand is at the throat, the neighbor hears the struggle, and it is the neighbor who is accused of causing a disturbance.

Qaradawi’s words were not hidden; they were broadcast on Al Jazeera, documented in his own writings, and repeated across decades. The Sakina class did not miss them. They heard them, and chose the reception hall over the alarm bell.

The implications of this narrative inversion are not merely academic; they produce a form of civilizational self-harm. By accepting the “Orientalist” critique without scrutiny, the West has been coached into a state of moral paralysis. If every act of self-defense is “racism,” and every recognition of an enemy is “bigotry,” then the only “moral” path left open is surrender. This creates a vacuum in which the most predatory ideologies thrive.

When the history of the MENA region is framed as one of constant, unprovoked Western bullying, we erase the agency and accountability of the Islamic Caliphates that actually ruled the region for fourteen centuries. We also abandon the reformers within those cultures. The liberal, secular, and dissenting voices of the East, the ones who are actually being strangled, are told by Western academics that their struggle is a “colonial import.”

True moral clarity requires us to distinguish between the human being and the ideology of the predator. The genius of Negma Ibrahim’s performance in Raya and Sakina was her ability to make the audience feel the full absurdity of her character’s indignation. We see the hands, we see the victim, and we see the killer, and yet it is the killer who demands our sympathy. Modern academic discourse has made the same demand on our behalf. It has asked us to look at the rope and see a “cultural artifact,” and to look at the victim’s bite and see “unprovoked aggression.”

To break free of this inversion, we must return to a grounded, longitudinal view of history. We must stop being shocked when the victim bites back. And, most importantly, we must stop pretending, as Raya did, that the person with their hands around the victim’s throat, and the intellectual who justifies the tightening of that rope, is anything other than an enemy of human freedom.

Salam Almasri is a fellow at the Ideological Defense Institute.

What Is IDI ?

The most trusted source of information on the Middle East, Islam, and the ideological threats facing the West.

Subject-matter experts, former Muslims, Arab Christians, and Western thought leaders, coming together to equip policymakers to prevent destructive foreign ideas from being translated into law, restore confidence in the biblical principles that built the West by empowering the Church to reengage the public square, and provide the public with solid analysis to combat the confusion that is making the West vulnerable.