Welcome to the era of champagne jihadism

Forget champagne socialism, we are now in the era of champagne jihadism.

The GQ poster boy of this movement is multimillionaire Hasan Piker, who has proclaimed that America deserved 9/11, that his favourite flag is Hezbollah’s and that he would ‘vote for Hamas over Israel’. Awkwardly, if he lived under Hamas, he wouldn’t be able to vote for anyone.

Champagne jihadis needn’t actually believe in God, let alone Islam. They simply need an unshakeable conviction that the West (aka the Great Satan) is the root of all evil, and that anyone fighting it must therefore be on the side of good, no matter their methods.

You can find champagne jihadis speaking from positions of privilege throughout the West. They can be found cosplaying holy war by cheering on the ‘Glorious Martyrs’ of 7 October from the comfortable surrounds of £10,000-a-year Glasgow University, where they’re probably studying queer theory – sadly not on the syllabus at schools in Gaza. Or they can be seen in New York shouting ‘long live Hamas’ during a vigil organised by Israelis for Peace to remember the Israelis and Palestinians killed since 7 October.

More recently, as rioters destroyed French businesses and historic buildings, the champagne jihadis were seen bravely manning the barricades of their verified social-media accounts. ‘Capitalism doesn’t need your grief’, commented actress and sometime Dior model Christina Ricci beneath a post lamenting the looting of a Dior store in Paris. The champagne jihadi is, in fact, the ultimate capitalist, capable of commodifying absolutely anything, including the destruction of capitalism itself. No doubt Ricci’s next Dior campaign will feature her throwing a Dior J’adore Molotov cocktail at a cop car in a $710 DIO(R)EVOLUTION t-shirt.

But the rioters are not destroying capitalism – one Bangladeshi phone shop at a time – for the love of la patrie. They’re doing it for Palestine, the flag of which has largely replaced the tricolore during the riots. I support a free Palestine, but I’m not sure how destroying a North African man’s shop in the French capital helps achieve that. Whether it’s the suffering of ordinary Gazans under Hamas or the destruction of an immigrant’s livelihood in Paris, the revolution demands sacrifice. Preferably someone else’s.

For a masterclass in champagne jihad, watch Sciences Po activist Lola-Fleur Whittaker justify the looting by explaining poverty to Jhemima Sheilha – a woman who arrived in France from Congo aged nine, spent three years in an immigrant hostel and went on to build a chain of bakeries, which rioters just trashed. Whittaker claims her mother, a teacher, struggles financially. But her father reportedly held senior positions at Shell and Alcatel Submarine Networks.

I get it, Lola-Fleur, I really do. When I was a kid I used to pretend to be from the streets, too. It’s the same for kids now, only now it seems those streets have to be in Kabul.

The French have had a word for this unlikely marriage of the radical left and political Islam for over 20 years: Islamo-gauchisme. It signifies those united by their opposition to Western imperialism and Zionism. In 2026, the British Greens are giving the concept an environmental makeover.

The champagne jihadi means well. Who wouldn’t support protests calling for more money for schools? Even though setting fire to the schools themselves is a rather unconventional way of demanding it. But by refusing to condemn the violence, the champagne jihadi, who despises the far right, becomes Marine Le Pen’s unwitting recruiting sergeant.

Many of my champagne jihadi friends eagerly denounce certain other riots – like the horrible attacks on mosques and migrant hotels in the UK after the Southport stabbings in 2024. But there is an eerie silence on their normally crowded social-media feeds when it comes to the surge in racially aggravated attacks against Jewish people, such as the alleged one in Hackney a few days ago, or the one before that, or the one before that, or… In France, the rising tide of anti-Semitism and anti-Westernism has been washing over the riots, with pupils filming themselves chanting ‘M*R*H’, a rap song by BORO700 invoking the Bataclan massacre and Mohamed Merah, the terrorist who murdered three Jewish children in 2012. At this point, champagne jihad goes from LARPing to seriously alarming.

It seems that when the perpetrators of racial violence aren’t uniformly white and right-wing, champagne jihadis find themselves paralysed by the quantum sudoku puzzle of intersectional anti-racism.

Take Elwan Benoît, another privileged, white star of the French student protests. He demonstrated his commitment to anti-racism by assuming a woman was from the slums of Marseille because she was black. Sarah Lélé, a Belgian comedian of Cameroonian heritage, summed it up well: ‘It’s not the “go back to Africa” kind of racism, it’s more complex, a sort of racist anti-racism.’

The champagne jihadi’s worldview is so patronising that it says only white Westerners were clever enough to perpetrate conquest, colonisation and empire. Even in our self-loathing, we have to be the best at everything. So naturally, we must declare jihad on ourselves, because Islamic extremists couldn’t manage without our help.

The irony is that there can be no greater testament to what a wonderful place the West is than its ability to produce and tolerate an entire political class that believes it should be burnt to the ground. This is why there’s nowhere in the world I’d rather live than the Great Satan.