Question any keffiyeh-clad students whether they are right wingers at your own peril – at best you’ll be laughed at. Why should you even ask? Pro-Palestine means Left – and that’s a high percentage of college students. According to a Pew Research survey released in April 2024, younger Americans, two thirds of whom vote Democratic and identify as Liberal or Left, sympathize with Palestinians. Fully 34% say Hamas’ reasons for fighting Israel are valid while 35% are unsure. Hamas is a terrorist organization that deliberately enslaves and murders Palestinians. Yet in March 2025, a Harvard/Harris poll found that that half of all 18- to 24-year-olds say they support Hamas over the Jewish state, by far the largest demographic to do so.
But far from reflecting a strong intellectual commitment to a violent, antisemitic, anti-American, totalitarian religious movement, evidence also indicates that most of these self-styled revolutionaries know little to nothing about Islamism in general and Hamas in particular. The problem is far more insidious, reflecting the widespread misconception of what constitutes Left and Right. Increasingly, Left is used throughout the mainstream media to connote progressive (with positive connotations) while Right is all but synonymous with racist/fascist.
Fortunately, most Americans can judge for themselves when presented with clear evidence. Take the 7th of October 2023, for example, which did more to expose the truth about jihadism than all the informational warfare tactics of cynical manipulators who take advantage of what V.I. Lenin called “useful idiots.” Radical tactics have evolved over time, as different players, motivated by often vastly divergent interests, became witting or unwitting bedfellows. This resulted in an improbable axis of Muslim sectarians, German geopolitical strategists, Bolshevik internationalists-turned-pseudo-nationalist, fascists, Nazi pan-Aryans, Soviet apparatchiks, Third-World kleptocrats, neo-Marxist jihadists, and progressive intellectuals – neo-Marxists whose penchant for self-criticism has long ago turned suicidal. What holds this motley crew together is the use of ideology to justify violence.
Cain’s hate-filled resentment and hubris sufficed to kill his brother. But once his ever-growing progeny had to survive in a crowded world, they had to adapt by turning demagogue.
Jihad Against Infidels
War always has been with us. Ideological aggression came later. Eventually, it would span the globe. In the case of Islam, insurgencies and violent actions, whether against foreign domination or religious heresy, usually required a declaration of offensive jihad. Known as Jihad Al-talab waal-ibtida, it sanctioned total war, which obliges every Muslim to participate, on pain of eternal damnation. But once the Prophet Mohammad died, violent jihad became far more routine.
It worsened as the Prophet’s dream of a global community of Muslims continued to disintegrate after the fifteenth century, and desperation set in. The idea arose of a Pan-Islamic alliance engaged in global jihad, which seemed the only way to unify Islam for the purpose of eventual supremacy. It reached a peak toward the end of the nineteenth century, when according to Middle East historian Martin Kramer, “Muslims, separated by distance, language, and history, first thought to make their world whole by assembling in congress.”
They did so around 1878, when Jamal Al-Din Al-Afghani (1838/9-1897) recommended to the caliph, who was the chief Muslim leader in Istanbul, that he unite the Ottoman Empire with India and Afghanistan, to eventually prevail worldwide. Though his plan did not materialize, the seeds of a new Islamism for the modern age had been sown. While incorporating reason and science, it was still predicated on returning to Islam’s “basic principles,” which were meant to “shake the entire world with its force.” However religiously rooted, its goal was hegemonic, totalitarian, ideological.
Once the Ottoman Empire fell to an officers’ junta in the early 20th century, the idea recurred, albeit in a quasi-secular fashion. Modernization ensued when it took charge of a fragmented society that sought a modicum of unity in what they called “Ottomanism” or “Pan-Islamism.” The junta, known as the Young Turks, was a secret society originally established in 1889 by young cadets. After deposing the Sultan in 1908, they enthroned a puppet in his place who would have little or no power. The group eventually splintered among warring factions and soon brought the country to its knees.
In 1913, a coup by one of the factions, led by the so-called “Three Pashas” Talaat, Jemal, and Enver, inaugurated a military dictatorship. The economy, unfortunately, did not improve, having all but collapsed on the eve of 1914. Desperate to modernize Turkey’s communications and transportation networks, the Pashas decided to ally the Ottoman Empire with Germany. Though during the war the Turks performed much better than anticipated, Germany called the shots, and would eventually doom the Empire’s political fate. But the Kaiser also would try to enlist pan-Islamism and jihad; religion would be used for political ends again, though unsurprisingly with unforeseen consequences.
Germany Plays the Jihad Card
Germany’s goal was to win the war it had done so much to ignite. In an extraordinary 1918 memoir that records his days as America’s envoy to Turkey, Ambassador Henry Morgenthau, Sr., recorded his astonishment at the casual way in which German Ambassador to Turkey, Baron Hans Freiherr von Wangenheim (1889-1981), disclosed why the Kaiser wanted to push Turkey into the conflagration that was about to erupt:
[Q]uietly and nonchalantly, as though it had been quite the most ordinary matter in the world… puffing away at his big black German cigar, he unfolded Germany’s scheme to arouse the whole fanatical Moslem world against the Christians. Germany had planned a real ‘holy war’ as one means of destroying English and French influence in the world.
Given Turkey’s limited military arsenal, its army was not expected to contribute decisively to the war effort. “But the big thing is the Moslem world,” acknowledged von Wangenheim. What he “evidently meant by the ‘Big thing’ became apparent on November 13 [1914], when the Sultan issued his declaration of war,” wrote Morgenthau. “This declaration was really an appeal for Jihad, or ‘Holy War’ against the infidel. Soon afterward the Sheik-ul-Islam published his proclamation, summoning the whole Moslem world to arise and massacre their Christian oppressors.”
Almost simultaneously, a secret pamphlet also was “distributed stealthily in all Mohammedan countries…. It described a detailed plan of operations for the assassination and extermination of all Christians – except those of German nationality.” Specific instructions for carrying out the plan included: a “heart war,” which required every follower of the Prophet to actively and consistently hate the infidel; a “speech war” through words, spoken and written, to spread hatred wherever they live, anywhere on earth; but above all, a war of “deed” – fighting and killing the infidel everywhere.
Morgenthau described the plan:
The latter conflict, says the pamphlet, ‘is the true war.’ There is to be a ‘little holy war’ and a ‘great holy war’ – the first local, the second global. There are three tiers: first, war carried out by individuals, second, by organized ‘bands’ or terrorist groups, and finally, by ‘organized campaigns’ – i.e., trained armies…. In all parts of this incentive to murder and assassination there are indications that a German hand has exercised an editorial supervision.
The Sultan’s call to jihad fell on deaf ears because most Muslims could not fathom why they should engage in a Holy War against Christians while being allied with two Christian nations, Germany and Austria. But the German-Ottoman partnership had begun. Its real architect was not von Wangenheim, the Kaiser’s loose-lipped envoy to Turkey, but the brilliant Max von Oppenheim, who had promoted it for over two decades and believed in it passionately. As he put it in 1898, it would unleash “Muslim fanaticism that borders on insanity.”
When the Kaiser finally adopted the plan on July 30, 1914, he indicated: “[O]ur consuls and agents in Turkey, India and Egypt are supposed to inflame the Muslim regions to wild revolts against the British.” He hoped that as a result, “England shall lose at least India.” Winning the war was to be the prelude to Germany’s impending imperial ascendance.
Military action was supplemented by a strategy spelled out in a comprehensive plan on “The Revolutionizing of the Islamic Territories of our Enemies.” Max von Oppenheim’s plan identified the enemy as not only the Allied powers but “Christians and Jews who supported the allies.” This amounted to “Germany’s endorsement of a war against civilians and spreading religious hatred,” note historians Barry Rubin and Wolfgang G. Schwanitz in Nazis, Islamists, and the Making of the Modern Middle East. “Thus, German strategy would be intimately involved in the Ottomans’ mass murder of Armenians.” This confirms Morgenthau’s suspicion all along.
“Genocide” would not be coined for another three decades, in 1944, by the jurist Raphael Lemkin; but sociologist Irving Louis Horowitz observed: “The fate of the Armenians is the essential prototype of genocide in the twentieth century.” Even if race was not explicitly invoked by way of justification for genocide, religion surely was – providing one more excuse for mass murder based on group identity. If not quite in scale, certainly in ideology, observes Horowitz, “the declaration of war on the Jews was roughly matched by the earlier war of the Muslims against the Christian Armenians.”
The German-Bolshevik Conspiracy Against the Tsar
What Morgenthau could not have known was that Germany had another operation that proved even more successful in changing the map of the world. Equally masterminded by von Oppenheim, and involving von Wangenheim, it had the makings of an implausible script for a B-rated movie.
In 1915, the savvy German ambassador met a wealthy arms merchant and advisor to the three Pashas who by that time ran Turkey, named Alexander Parvus. Born Israel Lazarevich Gelfhand (1867-1924) in an Odessa shtetl (Jewish settlement), Parvus had become a Marxist, befriended Vladimir Lenin, and joined the Bolsheviks. In 1910, he moved to Istanbul to make his fortune but continued his revolutionary activities. His clever articles soon would earn him a considerable reputation. His proposal that revolutionaries could ally with the tsar’s enemies in an international war to destroy the Russian regime brought him to German attention as early as 1905. This was a full decade before von Wangeheim was to make his acquaintance.
The Kaiser’s own attitude toward the Jews was not hostile; mainly, he wanted to solve Germany’s “Jewish problem” by getting Germany rid of them. Like many Germans at the time, he was open to encouraging Jewish emigration to Palestine, so long as it did not antagonize the Arabs. For this reason, many Jews who had emigrated to Turkey and Palestine hoped for the support of the Sultan, as well as the Germans, in creating a Jewish state.
As soon as von Wangenheim learned about Parvus, he instantly grasped the man’s importance and dispatched the financier to Berlin, in March 1915, with a proposal to use German funds to pay off the Bolsheviks. Parvus’s plan to bring down the tsarist government by subterfuge was adopted immediately. Soon, through Parvus’s networks in Denmark and Istanbul, money started flowing to Lenin. German and Bolshevik collaboration would change history more radically than any could ever have anticipated.
Simultaneously, von Oppenheim was busy working on the Islamic front. He proceeded to hire a Middle East expert on the German General Staff, Otto von Wesendonk (1885-1933), along with German experts, as well as more than two dozen who were mostly Muslim. It was an impressive think tank; by war’s end, it comprised a veritably army of some sixty specialists. The Muslims included Tatars, Indians, Persians, Tunisians, Algerians, and Egyptians, notably Abd Al-Aziz Jawish (1876-1929), who, unbeknown to Ambassador Morgenthau, had been the actual author of the infamous secret version of the Sultan’s fatwa in November 1914.
Though it soon became apparent that the immediate effect of that fatwa was negligible, it was not irrelevant. Its real impact came later, when conditions had become ripe. Many, if not most, Muslims throughout the Middle East were seething at the way the disastrous Versailles Treaty of 1919 divided the world among the victorious Allies on the basis of Allied interests alone, with no regard to local sensibilities.
The coup de grace came on October 29, 1923, when the Turkish National Assembly declared Turkey a republic, followed by the abolition of the caliphate on March 3, 1924. Though its role had long been mostly nominal, the caliphate’s symbolic presence had postponed the reality of Islam’s eclipse. Many took its abolition to mean that Islam itself was on life support.
To its zealous and passionate followers, renewed efforts to resuscitate a moribund faith seemed long overdue. Organization was key, as was ideological acumen. The re-radicalized Muslims’ German training came in handy; it was hardly coincidental that the key advisor to Hasan Al-Banna (1906–1959), founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, was the same Abd Al-Aziz Jawish who had ghost-written the Sultan’s proclamation. Jihad could now be lifted to the next level – from mere fatwa to tactical implementation. Though few could grasp its full import at the time, it is widely acknowledged that establishing the Brotherhood marked the start of the modern Islamist movement.
Islamism and the USSR
In the aftermath of its defeat in 1918, a Germany reeling from its wounds temporarily suspended geopolitical intrigue. “During the early 1920s,” write Rubin and Schwanitz, “the leading role in fomenting revolutionary movements in the Muslim world had passed from Germany to the Soviets, who urged Muslims to overthrow their European rulers.” Enver proved eager to cooperate with the Soviet regime, and with Lenin’s personal support, he immediately was hired to direct its Asian department. Before long, “Enver would persuade Lenin to support an Islamic religious revolt based on a plan drawn up for the Kaiser.”
It took a while for Soviet Russia’s Islamic outreach to bear fruit. It was hard for Muslims to forget tsarist imperial ambitions, and militant atheism held no appeal for them. But a powerful “Manifesto of the Congress of the People of the East,” issued at a conference designed to rally the “people of the east,” provided a ringing endorsement of jihad that complemented perfectly the Sultan’s secret message of six years earlier.
The conference would be the first of many venues of cooperation between the USSR and the Islamic world. Over the ensuing decades, the Soviet regime provided assistance – logistical, financial, military and ideological – to Palestinian organizations, undemocratic regimes, and assorted anti-Western groups dedicated to the Islamist cause. Above all, however, the Kremlin helped fine-tune the narrative of Islamist jihad, which advanced the Soviet regime’s global strategic agenda by undermining Western democracy.
While the Kaiser’s willingness to collaborate with the Muslims against the Allies was driven by geopolitical considerations, Adolf Hitler’s pragmatism clashed with his deeply visceral antipathy to everyone plagued by dark pigmentation. To him, Arabs and Muslims were just a notch above Jews – borderline human. What finally persuaded him to overlook their appearance was a pseudo-historical belief that the people of ancient Egypt and India had been a part of the Aryan culture. Above all, however, he applauded the Islamist war spirit. It was, after all, like his own.
Among his most devoted Muslim acolytes was the Syrian-born Mufti of Jerusalem, the infamous Haj Amin Al-Hussaini (1895–1974). After fighting alongside the Ottomans against Arab nationalists, Hussaini turned against his former friends, then decided to spy for Britain and help Syrian Arabs against the French. He then switched once more and joined the French.
Drawing inspiration from fellow-Syrian Rashid Rida (1865-1935), Hussaini rejected his own father’s antipathy to politicizing Islam to join the battle. He emerged as a formidable organizer, fundraiser, and spokesman for the cause of jihad. This meant making common cause both with Hitler and Lenin, for Hussaini understood that Communism and fascism had the same national enemies as the Muslims. Both pseudo-egalitarian monistic ideologies permitted no dissent; they were thoroughly totalitarian and fully consistent with an Islamist politico-religious vision. Writes Laurent Murawiec in The Mind of Jihad:
Starting in the 1920s and 1930s, the Communist Party of Palestine (CPP) was the great instructor of the Pan-Islamist nationalist movement led by the Grand Mufti Al-Husayni in the fine arts of Communist agitprop, the conveyor of crucial Marxist-Leninist concepts, such as ‘imperialism’ and ‘colonialism.’ Most of the ugly repertoire of modern Arab and Muslim antisemitism came from the Soviet Union (with only the racial-biological component added by the Nazis). The CPP taught the Arab extremists the use of Bolshevik rhetorical devices previously unknown. The ‘anti-imperialism’ so imported by the Communists was remarkably ingested by the Muslim extremists, to the point of becoming integral to their conceptions and expression.
While Berlin served as the perfect venue for Islamist networking between the two world wars, a similar effort was taking place in Moscow. In 1927, the USSR started bringing Muslim leaders to the Communist International Academy’s International Lenin School for a three-year course that targeted future party leaders and influencers. Observed Walter Laqueur in 1956: “It cannot be mere coincidence that the main proponents of fascism in Egypt, Syria and Iraq cooperate nowadays with the Communists in the framework of sundry national, anti-imperialist and ‘peace’ fronts.”
Egypt already had become home to the radical Muslim Brotherhood. Like Al-Banna and Rashid Rida, Hussaini adopted the concept of salafiyya, which meant a “return of the ways of the ancestors.” Al-Banna already had articulated the violent vision that would define the jihadist movement in an address to the Fifth General Conference of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1938, that Islam can be understood by everyone. This transferred Islam to the realm of lay religion.
Like Judaism and Christianity, this creed transcends individual nation-states, eternally true across space and time, meant for all humanity. “Its prescriptions regulate all matters of man in this world and hereafter… Islam is dogma and ritual, homeland and nationality, religion and state, spirituality and practice, Quran and sword.” Since Islam means “submission,” totalitarianism is its fraternal twin brother. Explains Murawiec:
When the world stage was dominated by the rivalry between the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ culture of pluralist democracy and Prussian inspired authoritarianism, the heart of the Arab elites throbbed for the latter. When this was vanquished, its tyrannical successors, Soviet Bolshevism, Italian fascism, and German national socialism became the rage of the Arab and much of the Muslim world.
Al-Banna grasped all these similarities. This newly energized, super-belligerent Islam addressed the entire world, guaranteeing that once it had all become Muslim, it would reach a perfect harmony with an essentially egalitarian distribution of resources. Though Al-Banna’s economic vision has been described as “neither capitalism nor socialism,” he regularly invokes the principle of “social justice.” German scholar Ivessa Lubben summarizes Al-Banna’s economic recommendations as follows:
He wanted to reorganize the collection and distribution of obligatory alms [zakat] in a modern social institution. He asked for the prohibition of interest-based loans and the restriction of monopolies… [as well as] a redistribution of income by raising low salaries and capping higher ones.
For several decades, the Brotherhood was broadly accepted in Egypt, until the government sequestered most of the organization’s assets in 1948. The man who took over the leadership of the Brotherhood was the austere Sayyid Qutb (1906–1966), whom most Islamic scholars consider to be the intellectual father of modern Islamist terrorism. Qutb’s seminal work Milestones (Ma‘ālim fī t-tarīq), an Islamist blend of the Communist Manifesto and Mein Kampf, is a clarion call to Armageddon.
Qutb first redefined Jihad not as a “defensive war” in the narrow Western sense, but broadly as a “defensive movement” whose aim is “to wipe out tyranny. It would introduce true freedom to mankind, using whatever resources are practically available in a given human situation.” He has in mind “the end of man’s arrogance and selfishness, the establishment of the sovereignty of Allah and the rule of the divine Shari’a [Islamic law] in human affairs.” The victory of the “realm of peace,” Dar al Islam, “means that din [the law of the society, or human law] should be purified for Allah, that all people should obey Allah alone, and every system that permits some people to rule over others be abolished.”
In A Fury for God: The Islamist Attack on America, Islam expert Malise Ruthven notes that the “message of revolutionary anarchism implicit in the phrase that ‘every system that permits some people to rule over others be abolished’ owes more to radical European ideas going back to the Jacobins than to classical or traditional ideas about Islamic governance.” He adds: “The vanguard is a concept imported from Europe, through a lineage that also stretches back to the Jacobins, through the Bolsheviks and latter-day Marxist guerillas such as the Baader-Meinhof gang. Rueven concludes: The implicit “totalitarian menace is clear…. The argument is not dissimilar to that deployed by Communists during the 1930s. Qutbism is distinctly modern, both in its adoption of the revolutionary vanguard and in the way it addresses a contemporary phenomenon – the modern crisis of faith.”
Like Al-Hussaini and Al-Banna before him, Qutb cooperated both with both Nazis and the Communists. Revolution to him was the only credible instrument of attaining social justice and of applying the shar’ia as “the only proper remedy for decaying societies. Zalzalah (shaking) or revolution is the word used to describe the first step in the process of building a new society.” Not that European concepts translated perfectly into an Islamic context. The idea of tawhid, meaning “the unity of God” reflected by unity on earth under shari’a, was not equivalent to “totalitarianism,” a word first used in a specifically Italian context.
Similarly, the closest to Western-style political “revolution,” was thawra, meaning rising, excitement, rebellion. It was conveniently refurbished by Muslims eager for a major shake-up. They realized that to be effective, modern Islamism had to become a genuinely political religion and emulate the tactics used by Western-style secular movements.
It finally happened, though in unexpected circumstances. For notwithstanding Qutb’s success in overhauling Islamism, the Islamist Revolution that appropriated the name would be waged not by his Sunni brothers, but by their Iranian rivals.
Their sectarian differences aside, Sayyid Qutb and Ruholla Khomeini (1902-1989) had both been disciples of Abul Ala Maududi (1903–1979), a Pakistani philosopher who came to believe in an Islamic Revolution of millenarian proportions. According to Maududi, the Prophet Muhammad had been “the greatest Revolutionary of all.” A true “Muslim,” writes Maududi, belongs to “that ‘International Revolutionary Party’ organized by Islam to carry out its revolutionary program.” These words were music to the ears of Qutb and Khomeini: they both agreed fighting is mandatory if Islam is to survive.
Maududi’s principal contribution to modern Jihadism was to weaponize it by reconciling secular and religious ideals and language in ways appealing to young and old alike, to the pious and the iconoclasts, and to utopians of all stripes. To him, Islam is more than a religion; it is “a revolutionary ideology and programme which seeks to alter the social order of the whole world and rebuild it in conformity with its own tenets and ideals.” “Jihad,” wrote Maududi, “refers to that revolutionary struggle and utmost exertion which the Islamic Party brings into play to achieve this objective.”
But just as the Communist revolution first succeeded in Russia, defying its German architects who had expected it to erupt in the West, the ideology that seemed ripe to explode in a majority Sunni country would end up overturning a Shiia kingdom instead. To nearly everyone’s surprise, the cataclysmic upheaval that changed the Middle East eventually came not to Egypt but to Iran. The self-proclaimed Muslim messiah, the Ayatollah Khomeini, turned out to be a skillful practitioner of taqiyya (deception). As the Iranian-born scholar Amir Taheri points out, “originally, the Khomeinist leadership itself had hesitated to use the ‘Islamic’ label, speaking instead of a ‘popular uprising’ (qiyaim mardomi) so as to attract leftist groups and reassure the middle classes that feared religious rule. Soon, however, they realized that they needed Islam to mobilize the muscle required to neutralize the shah’s armed forces.”
Like Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler, Khomeini saw no reason not to assume complete control of the state for the good of the “people.”
Jihad Turns Woke
One of the Iranian regime’s main theorists, the mullah Morteza Motahhari (1919-1979), who was eventually assassinated by political opponents, explained that Islam rejects “Western freedoms” designed primarily to promote sexual license. Comments Taheri:
If Allah granted man any freedoms, according to Khomeinism, it was not on an individual basis. The human individual has no meaning outside the ummah, which is a theatrical device – like ‘the people’ or ‘Das Volk.’ This is perhaps why Khomeini and his successors have spoken of ‘the ummah that is always present on the stage to play the role required of it.’
Documents obtained during the 2011 raid that killed Osama bin Laden reveal that al-Qaeda and covert Iranian agents had first attempted to broker an unlikely agreement more than two decades earlier. The effort had followed Saddam Hussein’s blanket rejection of al-Qaeda’s request for military assistance. Once the agreement was in place, Iran provided a veritable lifeline for the severely wounded terrorist organization: starting with wives and volunteers, soon the most high-ranking al-Qaeda leaders arrived in Iran intending to stay and galvanize the outfit. Write journalists Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark:
They were marshaled by Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian thug who would form Al-Qaeda in Iraq, the forerunner to ISIS. [Others] included Abu-Muhammad Al-Masri … wanted by the FBI for involvement in the 1998 embassy attacks … [and] Abu Musab Al-Suri, one of the most important strategic voices in the movement. Immediately, a reformed al-Qaeda military council planned its first attack from within Iran, according to Mahfouz, striking three residential compounds in Saudi Arabia, killing more than 35 people (including nine Americans) in 2003.
What seems to have gone unnoticed in most media discussions of al-Qaeda’s ideology is the contribution of radical Western writings and experience. Among the first to explicitly recommend a form of guerrilla war rooted in both ancient and modern Chinese and Communist insurgencies, was Abu Ubayd Al-Qurashi. He wrote highly influential articles that turned for guidance to Mao Tse Tung, whom he credited with understanding that all operations the revolutionary army undertakes, especially military operations, must serve a political goal.
Like Lenin, and later Mao and Castro, he also expanded Marx’s notion of the proletariat to include the rural poor. Explains Jamestown Foundation Senior Fellow Michael W. S. Ryan in Decoding Al-Qaeda’s Strategy: The Deep Battle Against America:
In introducing the example of rural revolutionary forces, Al-Qurashi is thinking of the Cuban revolution and the writings of [Cuban Marxist] Che Guevara and [French Marxist philosopher and former Che associate] Regis Debray. Al-Qurashi finds no consensus among theoreticians and practitioners of revolutionary or guerrilla warfare concerning the separation of political cadres from the fighters themselves. He points out that Che and Regis Debray and those who participated in the Cuban Revolution “combined political and military authority in one man, Fidel Castro.” For Al-Qurashi, another such man was Osama Bin Laden.
Al-Qurashi’s work reveals a remarkably comprehensive study of history, military strategy, and propaganda techniques. He acknowledges, observes Ryan, “that to gain the people’s support and achieve what [Brazilian Marxist Carlos] Marighella [author of the Mini-Manual of the Urban Guerrilla] refers to as the climate of collapse, it is necessary to ignite social and economic unrest within a society, claiming that most theorists agree this is a key dimension to revolution. Revolutionaries must exploit social and economic injustice, or at least bad conditions, to gain the people’s support for revolution.”
On February 3, 2022, al-Qurashi killed himself, and members of his family, during a raid by the U.S. Joint Special Operations Command. But his ideology has yet to trigger the bomb it has set itself. The narrative of a liberal democratic cabal that keeps underprivileged colored people in poverty, apartheid, and misery sells like hot potatoes on America’s campuses.
For example, in June 2021, Gaza Strip leader Yahya Sinwar told Vice News he wanted to:
[R]emember the racist murder of George Floyd. George Floyd was killed as a result of racist ideology held by some people. The same type of racism that killed George Floyd is being used by Israel against the Palestinians in Jerusalem, the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, and in the West Bank.
The narrative made even further inroads into elite culture, especially the academy. Indeed, “academia may be even friendlier to Hamas than [is] the leftist political world,” writes George Washington University Professor Lorenzo Vidino in the Wall Street Journal on November 3, 2023.
If this is true in America, the situation is far worse in the rest of the world. Ultimately, the West must come to the realization that Green-Red-Black-clad totalitarianism only can be defeated by retrieving our self-confidence. That will take an honest understanding of history, and a renewed respect for the traditional values that have made human flourishing and freedom possible. Left and Right are useless categories to navigate a world in which totalitarians make common cause against communities and families trying to live their lives as best they can.
Technological advances improve everyone’s chances for more prosperity, they also cause great anxiety, dislocation, and susceptibility to corruption, hatred, and resentment. But given the exponentially higher risk of annihilation now, we cannot afford to drown in our own stupidity.
Juliana Geran Pilon is a Senior Fellow at the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization, where she directs AHI’s Washington Program on National Security. Born in Romania, she received her Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Chicago, and has taught at several universities, including the National Defense University, George Washington University, St. Mary’s College of Maryland, and the Institute of World Politics. Pilon is the author of over 250 articles and reviews. Her most recent books are An Idea Betrayed: Jews, Liberalism, and the American Left (2023) and The Utopian Conceit and the War on Freedom (2019).