The dark comedy of the Islamo-left alliance

The 7 October 2023 pogrom in southern Israel, when several thousand Hamas militants set out to kill and rape as many Jews as possible, seemed to energise bourgeois leftists across the West. They seemed thrilled by what they eagerly portrayed as an act of ‘resistance’. Excited by what they conceived as a righteous uprising by Palestinians against ‘settler-colonial’ Israelis. Charged by what they painted as a radical blow against an outpost of Western imperialism.

It proved to be a pivotal moment. The left had long flirted with anti-Semitic Islamists and other Islamic activists, but 7 October truly solidified it. Since then, this grim Islamo-leftist coupling has become a prominent feature of the Western political landscape.

That’s certainly been the case in Britain over the past year. Our cities have continued to fill up on a near monthly basis, as plummy-voiced Guardianistas have marched hand in hand with Islamists, issuing calls to ‘globalise the intifada’ and ‘put the Zios [Jews] in the ground’. They did so even on the same day as two British Jews were slain at their Manchester synagogue by an Islamist. Posh campus ‘radicals’, their privilege now draped in the flag of Palestine, have continued to throw their lot in with the Islamist cause. Some went so far as to stage quasi-celebratory events on last year’s 7 October anniversary to ‘honour the resistance’. One student society even advertised a ‘Palestine bake sale’, complete with the menacing strapline, ‘Time for dessert’.

Over the course of the past year, not one but two political parties, in the shape of Your Party and the Green Party of England and Wales, have adopted an Islamo-leftist platform – a toxic combination of rainbow-flagged identity politics and maniacal anti-Zionism, leavened by some light-hearted talk of a magical ‘wealth tax’.

The phenomenon of Islamo-leftism did not come from nowhere. From the 1960s onwards, a combination of disillusionment with Soviet Communism and a growing estrangement from the working class prompted a then emergent New Left to look elsewhere for a challenge to capitalism and increasingly the West itself. And so they looked to anti-colonial movements in the so-called Third World. Islamism, a thoroughly anti-Western form of religionised politics, born in colonial Egypt and India in the early 20th century and resurgent in the 1970s, soon began to make inroads in the West – and not just among the Muslim population. Think of the admiring glances some Western leftists cast on the Ayatollah Khomeini on the eve of the Iranian Revolution in 1979. Or more recently, think of the coalitions and alliances left-wing groups sought to form with assorted militant Muslim groups during the 1990s, and again in opposition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan during the 2000s. Indeed, the very term ‘Islamo-left’ emerged to refer to the left’s bridge-building efforts of this period.

Over the past two-and-a-bit years, the Islamo-leftist alliance has flourished. The bourgeois left’s increasingly reactionary hatred for Western modernity has pulled them closer to militant Islamists than ever before. Thirty or 40 years ago, leftists might have seen Islamist groups as flawed but useful, as channeling a ‘feeling of revolt [that] could be tapped for progressive purposes’, to quote a well-known 1994 tract by a Socialist Workers Party activist. Today, the roles seem to have reversed. It’s as if the left itself – wearing keffiyehs, chanting Islamist slogans and waving flags in support of Hamas, Hezbollah and the Islamic Republic of Iran – is being ‘tapped’ for Islamist purposes.

Yet towards the end of 2025, in Britain at least, we have also seen signs that this political coupling might just be starting to come apart. That middle-class ‘progressives’ are slowly discovering they don’t have as much in common with the uber-reactionaries on their Islamic flank as they might have thought. That sharing a demented loathing of the world’s only Jewish State might not be enough to sustain a relationship between the choose-your-own-pronoun crew and ultra-conservative Muslim men.

The first signs of strain between Muslim sectarians and the woke left became apparent during Mothin Ali’s campaign to become a Green Party deputy leader. On 7 October, the day of Hamas’s massacre, he said Palestinians had the right to ‘fight back’. In 2024, he celebrated his election to Leeds City Council with shouts of ‘Allahu Akbar!’, declaring it ‘a win for the people of Gaza’. Ali is certainly keen on the Greens’ anti-Israel zealotry and general anti-Western misanthropy. Yet, as a committed Muslim, he is rather less keen on the Greens’ Pride-filled, trans-rights activism. And so during his deputy-leadership campaign back in August, he refused to sign ‘pledges’ on behalf of the Greens’ various LGBTQIA+ groups – much to those activists’ apparent shock and dismay.

But the tensions in the Green Party were nothing compared with those that have humiliated Your Party in recent weeks and months. Semi-launched last July, amid bickering and squabbling over precisely who Your Party belonged to, this Corbyn 2.0 vehicle was clearly designed to exploit the surge in Islamo-leftist sentiment. Fronted by Jeremy Corbyn himself, sometime ‘friend’ of Hamas and Hezbollah, and onetime Labour MP and permanent sixth-former Zarah Sultana, it also featured four independent, ‘pro-Gaza’ Muslim MPs: Shockat Adam, Adnan Hussain, Ayoub Khan and Iqbal Mohamed.

The ‘pro-Gaza’ Muslim men were certainly on board with Your Party’s anti-Israel zealotry. But it seems they were less keen on Your Party’s support for every hue of gender-identity politics. And so, following criticism from Your Party’s leftist fanboys, fangirls and fantheys, Hussain flounced off in mid-November, citing ‘veiled prejudice’ and ‘generalised accusations and offensive slurs’ towards Muslim men. He was quickly followed by Mohamed, who also complained about ‘false allegations and smears made against me’.

The cultural chasm between let-it-all-hang-out ‘progressivism’ and illiberal Islam was fully exposed at Your Party’s calamitous conference in late November. In between denunciations of Israel, a series of pasty-looking social inadequates stumbled up to the lectern to shout their pronouns and denounce the ‘transphobia’ of their ‘socially conservative’ (ie, Muslim) comrades. The absurdity of the Islamo-woke coupling has been laid bare. Activists who think bearded men can be women marching alongside bearded men who don’t want women to be seen in public. How was this ever going to last?

Another event in Tower Hamlets in late October captured the emerging conflict in starker terms still. The setting was, absurdly enough, a counter-protest against a UKIP march that had already been cancelled and moved elsewhere. It was here that leftist activists, marching under the banner of Stand Up to Racism, coalesced with hundreds of masked Muslim men chanting ‘Zionist scum, off our streets’. Phone footage captured a momentary exchange between one of the left-wing marchers and one of their supposed allies. ‘There’s no need for that’, the leftist activist says in relation to something or other, ‘We’re on the same side, bruv’. The masked Muslim man’s response is sharp: ‘No, we’re not.’

These are portentous words. Leftists might not realise it yet, but as that masked man said, they are really not on the same side as Islamists and Islamic activists on the vast majority of political issues. They have allowed their shared loathing of Israel, animus towards the West and turn against modernity to blind them to this most blatantly obvious of truths. The crumbling of this silly and sinister alliance cannot come soon enough.

Tim Black is associate editor of spiked.