Adam Louis-Klein in the JC – “Core liberal values in Europe are coming under threat from an ever-expanding jihadist ideology bound up with antizionism”:
At a moment in which believing that Western nations have a right to exist is treated as unsavoury, it’s worth considering how any commitment to the nation came to be coded as inherently reactionary, rather than as a force of freedom and progress.
It was Jewish intellectual Hannah Arendt who located the great catastrophes of the 20th century not so much in the nation-state, but in its failure.
Whereas Enlightenment liberalism guaranteed the end of feudal and hereditary rule through institutions meant to protect the equality and liberty of the citizen, states that failed to preserve civic values exploded into renewed imperial expansionism.
In The Origins of Totalitarianism, she located Pan-Slavism and Pan-Germanism as precursors to Soviet communism and Nazi fascism, cross-border movements that transformed the older notions of hereditary superiority into new projects of racial supremacy and conquest.
Today, pan-Islamism and jihadism present a parallel challenge, rejecting national borders as obstacles to their own caliphatist ambitions.
Many of the world’s worst mass atrocities and genocides in recent decades have been carried out by Islamist extremist movements and regimes rather than the “Western colonialists” who are blamed in universities, NGOs, and liberal governments.
That record includes the genocide in Darfur in the 2000s and renewed genocidal violence since 2023, Isis’s genocide against the Yazidis in 2014, the atrocities committed by Boko Haram, al-Shabaab, and the Taliban, and the mass killing and persecution of Christians and Muslims by jihadist movements across Africa and the Middle East.
Defenders of human rights ought to focus their attention on the ideologies actually responsible for so much violence.
The same distortion extends to the indigenous non-Muslim and non-Arab peoples of the Middle East and Africa, who have faced centuries of conquest and subjugation under Islamic expansionist projects.
Those who exploit the rhetoric of indigenous rights have remarkably little to say about their oppression.
Anthropologist Mahmood Mamdani, father of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, for example, refused to acknowledge the Darfur genocide of black African tribal groups, rejecting the characterisation of Arabs as foreign settlers – a racialising narrative he has nevertheless embraced in his attacks on Israelis.
It’s astonishing, the degree to which Arab/Islamic expansion is ignored in the historical record. As I’ve noted before, whoever’s doing the PR for the Arabs has been doing an incredible job. A brutal imperialist expansion across the Middle East and Africa, which continues to this day in places like Darfur in the ongoing genocide of the indigenous black tribes, along with a slave trade of longer duration and comparable figures to the European slave trade – and yet they’re the biggest victims ever in Palestine.
Today’s obsession with casting any form of immigration restriction as fascist, and any Islamic expansionist movement perversely as liberatory, leads to the dissolution of core liberal values of equality, justice, and human rights.
And yet portions of the left, incredibly, see Islamism – probably the most reactionary ideology on the planet – as preferable to the liberal democratic western tradition that they’ve been taught to despise.
The solution is not reducible to a policy fix. We need a renaissance of universal values against the corrosive nihilism of the red-green alliance.
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