The Left and Islamism: Antisemitism and Antikurdism

by Peshraw Mohammed

The following essay originally appeared in German in Siebter Oktober Dreiundzwanzig: Antizionismus und Identitätspolitik, ed. Vojin Saša Vukadinović (Berlin: Querverlag, 2024), and appears here in English translation by permission of the author. Translated by Russell A. Berman.

More than ever, leftists, political Islam, and postcolonial intellectuals have joined forces in an unholy alliance. Lacking an understanding of the history of Islamic expansionism, Arab colonialism, and Islamic antisemitism, parts of the Western left have come to regard any countermovement to the West as a fight against American imperialism. Therefore, the Islamic Republic of Iran and Islamist movements such as Hamas and Hezbollah are understood to be part of an anti-imperialist bloc. These tendencies were already observed in connection with the rise of the “Islamic State” (IS). When its terrorists attacked the Kurdish city of Kobanê, Kurdish militias fought IS in cooperation with U.S. forces. Some leftists in Germany, Britain, and the United States demanded that the United States stop its bombings.

What was the point of their demand? The United States carried out air strikes to support Kurdish ground troops in order to defeat Islamic terrorism. Failure to bomb IS positions would have resulted in IS conquering Kurdish areas in order to enslave or kill women and children. In the end, as in the case of the Yazidis, genocide could have been the outcome. The anti-Zionist cultural historian Hamid Dabashi compares the Kurds to the Jews and sees a prospective establishment of an independent Kurdistan as the “second settler-colonial Israel.”

The fixation of large parts of the left on the United States while simultaneously remaining indifferent to Russian, Chinese, Iranian, or Turkish imperialism has led to serious political misjudgments. This includes the idea that every form of Western thought, art, or literature is part of a colonial project. The works of progressive philosophers such as Rousseau, Hegel, Marx, Sartre, and even Frantz Fanon are now viewed as contributing to the reproduction of European white hegemony and are consequently rejected.

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