Mick Hartley

The idiocy of the hard-left embrace of Islamism was neatly exposed on Saturday when a protestor at the Whitechapel demo, clutching a “Refugees Welcome” placard, replied to some inaudible invective from a masked marcher. “There’s no need for that, we’re on the same side, bruv” he says. The Islamist responds, witheringly, “No we’re not”.

Potkin Azarmehr, an Iranian activist who fled to Britain following the 1979 revolution, writes in the Telegraph – Islamo-socialist alliances don’t last, just ask the Iranians.

For some time now, I have watched with growing unease an echo of history repeating itself. Though British political life is still far from the violent upheavals of Tehran in 1979, then, as now, the Left believed it could ride the beast of political Islam and steer it toward their cause.

During the Iranian Revolution, the Western-educated secular Left joined forces with violent Islamist revolutionaries to overthrow the Shah, only to be annihilated by the very movement they helped bring to power. They believed the mullahs’ rule would be merely a transitional phase – a provisional government of sorts, like Kerensky’s in Russia – one they could later sweep aside, just as the Bolsheviks had done in 1917.

Things did not unfold as they had imagined. They failed to grasp the true nature of political Islam; the Ayatollahs swiftly devoured them as soon as they were no longer needed and Iran was thrust into decades of tyranny, repression and backwardness.

And now we’re seeing the same grotesque misapprehension on the part of the deluded left here in the UK.

The Left in Britain believes it has found allies in political Islam – fellow “oppressed” fighting a common enemy in the so-called “far-Right”. But many Muslims, including those increasingly taking an active role in politics, do not see it that way. Their vision for society is diametrically opposed to the progressive ideals the Left claims to champion: free speech, gender equality, secularism, and LGBT rights.

What we are witnessing is the same fatal miscalculation that took place in Iran.

And another reverberation from 1979 is the weakness and incompetence of the political establishment. In the final year of the Shah’s rule, the regime tried desperately to appease its enemies. It jailed its own supporters and released violent radical prisoners in a futile attempt to calm the streets. In its fear of seeming repressive and its eagerness to appease the radical Islamists, it caused its own downfall.

Does that all sound familiar? Today in Britain, our own leaders are doing something similar.

The police, terrified of being accused of “Islamophobia”, have become hesitant to enforce the law evenly. Peaceful demonstrators carrying “Hamas are terrorists” signs are arrested, a Star of David is treated as a provocation, while those who issue threats and incite violence are indulged and appeased. The Government, concerned about losing votes from its Muslim constituents, neglects the threat of extremist networks openly recruiting in mosques, prisons, schools and online. It does this while lecturing ordinary law-abiding Britons about “extremism” and labelling them “far-Right”.

Just like Tehran in 1979, Left-wing elites are too weak to confront the forces that seek to overthrow their own values, and too naïve to recognise that those forces are not partners in progress but architects of regression.

The Left in Iran learned the hard way that when you go to bed with Islam, you do not wake up in a democracy. You wake up in a theocracy. Britain’s Left should take heed.

But they won’t.

It becomes clearer, decade after decade, that countries that once lived under a communist dictatorship – Russia, China – are left disastrously and deeply disfigured. But still the hard left persists in believing in the great socialist alternative to our flawed but still functioning liberal democracy. If only Trotsky instead of Stalin: what a wonderful world it would be. We seem a long long way from all that now, but still they carry on, each new generation, with absolutely no lessons learned from history. So will they learn a lesson from Iran about the folly of forming an alliance with Islamists? Of course they won’t.