Conservative despair about the liberal erosion of the West is delivering it to its mortal foes. Op-ed.
(JNS) The tacit alliance between the Western left and the Islamists—Muslims intent upon conquering the West for Islam—has long been a source of deep concern.
Left-wingers, who exercise outsize influence over Western culture, sometimes make common cause with Islamists over their mutual aim of destroying the West and the State of Israel. This is even though the Islamists’ theocratic denial of democracy and human rights, their oppression of women and their persecution of gay people and dissidents run wholly contrary to the Western left’s professed values.
As if that axis isn’t dangerous enough, there’s now disturbing news of a parallel attraction developing between Islamists and conservatives. In a long and important article in Focus on Western Islamism, Sam Westrop has detailed a burgeoning alliance between Islamists and American Republicans.
This has some precedents. In the 2000 presidential election, according to some estimates, as many as 70 percent of Muslims voted Republican.
After the anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist argued that socially conservative Muslims formed a natural GOP constituency, the Republican Party—dismissing the threat to America of Islamist entryism—reached out to people who turned out to be radical Islamists.
After 9/11, that alliance foundered. Conservative alarm over Islamism peaked in 2007 when the Holy Land Foundation trial saw many prominent American Muslim organizations and their leaders and activists named as “unindicted co-conspirators.”
Enraged by the war in Iraq, Islamists turned for support to the left which denounced all concerns about the Muslim world as “Islamophobic.”
Now, writes Westrop, this is changing again. Many Islamists no longer regard the left as a useful ally but as a harmful influence because of its agenda of gay rights, transgender identity and sexual license that it is pushing so aggressively.
A small but growing number of Muslim activists, says Westrop, are promoting the idea that American conservatism makes a better fit with Islamic principles of family life and faith.
In Berkeley, California, Abdullah bin Hamid Ali, the head of Zaytuna College’s Islamic Law Council, has urged American Muslims to join him in a “new political vision” that rejects “neoliberalism” and paints conservatism as a more natural home. His Twitter feed includes dozens of Tucker Carlson clips and comments about the follies of anti-capitalist and anti-racist protest movements.
Some Islamists even regard the “far right” as allies. In February, the leading Islamist Daniel Haqiqatjou invited onto his YouTube channel Mark Collett, a prominent British neo-Nazi. The two bonded over shared fears of liberalism, secularism and the perceived threat of the left.
At the same time, elements in the Republican Party are making common cause with Islamic extremists. Republican Party officials recently joined radical Islamists in demanding that “LGBTQ” books promoting “pornography and homosexuality” be removed from school libraries in Dearborn, Michigan.
In July, Minnesota’s Republican Party officials and politicians were present at a large gathering to celebrate Eid al-Adha. They were pictured alongside one Islamist who had reportedly cited Islamic scripture in accusing Jews of spreading “corruption in the land” and had instructed Muslims to place Sharia law above “man-made” laws,” and another who had posted sermons on social media about the “massacre” of Muslim people by the “Jews of Israel.”
The fanatical ideologues who developed modern Islamism in the 1920s and 1930s drew upon both communism and Nazism. In their paranoid hatred of the Jewish people, the Islamists have long made common cause with both the far left and the far right.
Now, though, this alliance has spread into the conservative mainstream. The reason surely lies in the ideological turmoil that has convulsed conservatives in America and Britain ever since the fall of the Soviet Union.
That event caused them to believe that their fox had been shot. Searching for a new cause to promote, they alighted upon liberty.
Their error, however, was to detach liberty from the historic network of duties and obligations that protects it, along with other core values of civilization, within a cohesive society based on inherited tradition. Those duties and obligations were, of course, fundamentally Jewish values, enshrined in the Christian basis of the West.
These “conservatives” failed to realize they were thus occupying the same territory as the hyper-individualistic left that was intent upon destroying those values and that society.
Now, perceiving the terrible damage that’s been done but still unable to grasp their role in it, conservatives increasingly despair that the West can save itself from sliding off the edge of the cultural cliff.
Some of them seem so desperate for allies they are blind to the dangers this might pose. Thus the conservative commentator Dinesh D’Souza praised the radical Hassan Qazwini, head of the Islamic Institute of America, for his “socially and culturally conservative” efforts to “stir up the mobilization of Muslim parents in Dearborn.”
Publications such as the American Conservative, says Westrop, publish columns denouncing defenders of the “blasphemous” author Salman Rushdie (recently badly injured in an Islamist attempt on his life) or endorsing portrayals of Islam as a bulwark against “the spread of utopian progressivism.” Far from conserving core Western values of human rights, free speech and religious dissent, these “conservatives” are helping destroy them.
Not surprisingly, Islamists are exploiting this gullibility and ignorance. Yasir Qadhi, a graduate of the hard-line Salafi movement and one of the best-known Islamic religious leaders in the West, approvingly retweeted right-wing coverage of the Dearborn protests and declared: “Conservative Christians and Jews need to understand that Muslims are their allies in wanting a purer and morally upright society.”
But they are not allies of the Jewish people. These Islamists are using social conservatism to try to turn Christians against the Jews.
In response to “LGBTQ” teaching in Britain and the Netherlands, writes Westrop, Islamist activists published cartoons on social media adapted from neo-Nazi publications, illustrating Muslims and Christians standing together against Jews, blacks, homosexuals and an array of symbols of the apparent evils of progressivism.
If Western conservatives believe that the Islamists are fighting the same battle against progressivism, they are very much mistaken.
Social conservatives oppose progressivism in order to save the West. Islamists oppose progressivism as part of their agenda to destroy the West.
Social conservatives oppose liberal excesses because they believe these are eroding core Western values such as truth, morality, bedrock institutions such as marriage and the truths of biological sex differences. They see liberalism undermining respect, tolerance and human rights and promoting instead anti-white racism and anti-Semitism.
Islamists, by contrast, don’t support human rights; they don’t have respect for every individual life. They oppress women, kill gay people, hate Jews, want to eradicate Israel and are working to conquer the West. They view liberal excesses as further proof that the West needs to be destroyed.
For their part, liberals also don’t understand the fundamental difference between Western social conservatives and Islamists. Blind to the oppressive and illiberal nature of their own “progressive” values, liberals assume instead that Western social conservatism is oppressive and illiberal and so is a natural fit with Islamic values.
American Jewish liberals therefore don’t realize the danger they are in. For the Islamists have them squarely in their sights.
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And far from defending them by upholding and defending core Western values, some conservatives who are repudiating liberalism altogether are now themselves drifting towards theocracy—and are therefore ripe for becoming radical Islam’s useful idiots.
There have long been warnings that, if mainstream society abandons the defense of Western values, the resulting vacuum will be filled by people with other, sinister agendas.
It has commonly been feared that this would mean an autocratic strongman of the right coming to power. Now, though, it seems that some on the right are instead outsourcing this role to Islamists—and are thus handing the defense of the West to its mortal foes.
Melanie Phillips, a British journalist, broadcaster and author, writes a weekly column for JNS. Currently a columnist for The Times of London, her personal and political memoir Guardian Angel has been published by Bombardier, which also published her first novel, The Legacy. Go tomelaniephillips.substack.comto access her work.
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