Worth a read.
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 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.
Mick Hartley 
Leave a comment