Mick Hartley

Tim Black has a "long read" at Spiked on the moral and political degeneration of the left, with its hopelessly ill-conceived alliance with radical Islam – The sinister rise of the Islamo-left, and how ‘progressives’ became the allies of Islamist reactionaries:

The Prophet and the Proletariat, a 1994 pamphlet written by Chris Harman, the then editor of the Socialist Worker, captures the way in which parts of the British left were starting to cosy up to Islamism. In it, he admitted that Islamism can approximate fascism in its opposition to modernity, its murderous intolerance and its less-than-liberal attitudes to women and minorities. But it’s not all bad, Harman said. Islamists, he wrote, have opposed ‘the state and elements of imperialism’s political domination… Hezbollah in southern Lebanon and Hamas in the West Bank and Gaza have played a key role in the armed struggle against Israel’. Islamism, he concluded, is born of a ‘feeling of revolt [that] could be tapped for progressive purposes’.

Ha! The Iranian revolution should surely have put paid to any such delusions, as the hopelessly naive left-wingers who supported the Shah's overthrow were quickly and brutally eliminated by the mullahs.

The Stop the War movement of the 2000s consolidated the fledgling relationship between sections of the hard left and actual Islamists. It also helped to accelerate the political and moral degeneration of the broader left. It reduced anti-imperialism to little more than anti-Westernism, turning regressive Islamists from Iran or Gaza into anti-colonial heroes.

There's a comparison to be made here with the astonishing central role played by Heidegger in left-wing intellectual circles. He was, according to Radical Philosophy's Jonathan Rée, important because of his critique of the "imperious dehumanising movement of western modernity". Well yes, but he was a Nazi. And not just a Nazi of convenience, but a committed Nazi. So yes, he was most certainly not a fan of western modernity – or, indeed, of Jews.

And here we are again. As soon as a movement arises in opposition to liberal western democracy, sections of a desperate left will clamber aboard and claim them as allies.

Hatred of Jews comes as an added bonus.