What is "Islamo-leftism"?
by Thierry Meyssan
Thursday 11th of March 2021
France, and to a lesser extent several other European countries, is crossed by a debate on "Islamo-leftism"; personalities of the left who support political Islam despite the example of Daesh. Contrary to what one might think, this is not a momentary electoral tactic, but a consequence of a Cold War strategy, rekindled by the Biden administration.
In the 16th and 17th centuries, Europeans distinguished the “public sphere” visible to all, from the more intimate “private sphere”. However, in the 18th century, the French Revolution gave a different definition of these two expressions: the "private sphere" became the domain of work, family and religion while the "public sphere" that of politics and the nation. . Therefore, if political activists find in religions the strength of their commitment, it seems incongruous that they support particular religions.
However, this view is now undermined by the support given by some personalities and political groups to “Islamist” movements. By Islamism, I do not mean anything having to do with the Muslim religion, but a political ideology which instrumental this religion. As Muhammad was a prophet, a political leader and a military leader at the same time, his legacy is easy to misappropriate.
Political Islam
In practice, political Islam consists of mobilizing crowds by invoking the Muslim religion. This can be done with very different means and opposite objectives, depending on the conception we have of this religion. Using religious arguments to engage in politics creates a sense of limitless sacrifice that can quickly turn into fanaticism. The contemporary Arabic language, which values emotions more than reasoning, probably makes Arabs much more receptive than others to this type of engagement.
In the 20th century, the British asked the mufti of Al-Azhar to determine a unique version of the Quran to counter the Mahdi sect in Sudan. Until then, there were about forty different ones. They also asked Hassan al-Banna to create a secret society, the Brotherhood of the Muslim Brotherhood, on the model of the United Grand Lodge of England to have a means of pressure on Egyptian power. During the Cold War, the CIA placed two of its agents, Sayyed Qtob and Saïd Ramadan, in this Sunni secret society to theorize about jihad.
Other contemporary schools of political Islam developed first within Sufism against the Russian and Chinese empires, then with Rouhollah Khomeini within Shiism against the British Empire. If the Sufi school has made an alliance with the Brotherhood of the Muslim Brotherhood around President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the Shiite school has on the contrary made a reciprocal non-interference agreement with them. However, all fought together against the Russians and under NATO orders during the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. At the time they thought they shared the same ideology, but today they all consider that it was and still is not the case.
The French trace the support of left-wing thinkers to Islamism to Ayatollah Khomeini's exile in the Paris region (1978-9). At the time Jean-Paul Sartre and Michel Foucault had met him and had given him their support. They had fully understood his fight against Western imperialism, while Zbigniew Brzeziński (President Jimmy Carter's national security adviser) mistakenly viewed it as superficial.
But what we are talking about today is of a completely different nature: left-wing thinkers attribute to Muslims as a whole the same popular vanguard function as to the proletariat of the 19th century. It's stupidity. Indeed:
- Muslims belong to all social classes;
- Islam is absolutely compatible with the most unbridled capitalism.
In reality, they understand Muslims differently depending on whether they are Sunnis or Shiites. The former would be progressive, while the latter would be reactionary. They supported pro-US Muslim Brother Mohamed Morsi in Egypt, but denounce nationalist Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran. However, President Morsi never sought to improve the living conditions of the poorest, while President Ahmadinejad did so successfully until the end of his mandate. Identically, Mohamed Morsi only became president by threatening with death the magistrates of the electoral council and their families [ 1], while Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was democratically elected. It is clear that the Islamo-leftists are not determined by the internal action of the people they support, but by their foreign policy. They endorse pro-US political Islam and denounce anti-imperialist political Islam.
Islamo-leftism only exists in Western countries, with the exception of Tunisia. The exiled opponent Moncef Marzouki supports the Brotherhood of the Muslim Brotherhood and becomes the first president of the Arab Spring Republic. He served as a screen for the Ennahdha Brothers and was removed from power in the 2014 presidential elections.
The strategy of the NED:
alliance of certain Trotskyites with certain Islamists
The support of left-wing figures for the Brotherhood of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Order of the Naqshbandi was organized by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) as part of the Cold War, as early as 1983. President Ronald Reagan had just rallied to him a group of Jewish and New York Trotskyists to fight against the USSR. By virtue of the conflict between the pro-British Trotsky [ 2] and Stalin, these disciples joined the secret service of the “Five Eyes” (Australia, Canada, United States, New Zealand, United Kingdom). They notably founded the NED. In the context of the scandals surrounding the CIA, they envisioned carrying out parts of its operations legally. They recruited Trotskyist personalities from all over the world to join their fight, particularly in the two theaters of operation of the time: Afghanistan and Lebanon.
For its anti-Soviet fight in Afghanistan, the NED recruits the " French doctor " (French doctor) Bernard Kouchner. It was a former Union of Communist Students who left this organization during the purge against the Trotskyists. The young man will take care of the Afghan anti-communists and the Arab mujahideen of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan. At the time, the latter were applauded in the West as “freedom fighters”.
At the same time, during the Lebanese civil war, the NED struggles to recruit. In the end, she chose the splitters of the Syrian Communist Party, Riyad Al-Turk, Georges Sabra and Michel Kilo. The three men sign a manifesto which equates the Muslim Brotherhood with a new proletariat and calls for US military intervention in the Middle East. For Syria, this is clear support for the Muslim Brotherhood putsch in Hama. President Hafez al-Assad therefore has them arrested and imprisoned until they renounce this text.
The war in Bosnia and Herzegovina is the occasion for the NED to recruit the essayist Bernard-Henri Lévy. He will become the media advisor to President Alija Izetbegović. At the same time, he took the neoconservative Richard Perle as political adviser and Osama bin Laden as military adviser.
In the context of the Cold War, all of the above-mentioned figures probably sincerely believed they were doing the best. But once the USSR was dissolved, some of them continued their journey down this nauseating path.
Thus Riyad Al-Turk, Georges Sabra and Michel Kilo became spokespersons for the Pentagon during the events in Syria. In the name of their communist past, they convinced the European left that it was a civil war and not an attack by international jihadists. They even managed to make them believe that the Al-Nusra Front (al-Qaeda branch in Syria) was a Syrian revolutionary organization.
Or Bernard-Henri Lévy, after having made the apology for Guantánamo, became the spokesperson for the Libyan jihadists. He presented the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya - a regime inspired by the French utopian socialists of the 19th century - as a dictatorship. He supported the NATO bombing of Tripoli and the appointment of one of Al-Qaeda's historic leaders, Abdelhakim Belhaj, as military governor of Tripoli. Finally, he even assisted in the official reception of it at the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Paris.
The theorization of Islamo-leftism
If Islamo-leftism is first and foremost a practice of the Western secret services, it became a political theory in 1994 around Chris Harman. This British Trotskyist thinker is an activist of the Socialist Workers Party. In 1994, he published an article in Socialism International entitled “ The prophet and the proletariat ”. He tries to show that Muslims are neither fascists nor progressives, but that they form the new proletariat.
Reagan's Trotskyists like Claude Harman have all adhered to Ygael Gluckstein's (aka “Tony Cliff”) theory of the “deviated permanent revolution” according to which all the so-called “communist” states (China, North Korea, Cuba) are in reality Stalinists. This view allows them both to campaign for the world revolution and to condemn the adversaries of the United States. They were excluded from the Fourth International. It is not therefore a question of assimilating all the adrift Trotskyists.
In view of these elements, Islamo-leftism can not be explained so much by a race for the votes of Muslim immigrants in Europe as by the inversion of values since the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The disappearance of the Communist Parties has left the field open to an Atlanticist left. It spontaneously chose the ideological direction of its US allies. She married her to the point of participating in his twists and turns, especially in his instrumentation of Sunni political Islam.
Now the logic of the secret services as that of ideologies are subverted by the awakening ( woke ) of US puritanism. The latter find in the Muslim Brotherhood the same quest for Purity that drives them. Several members of the Biden administration attended the meeting of the National Security Council on June 13, 2013, to which an official delegate of the Brotherhood, Sheikh Abdullah Bin Bayyah, was invited. There is therefore a real danger of seeing Islamo-leftism now become part of political parties, especially since Westerners have still not assimilated that all the heads of Al-Qaeda and Daesh are or were members of the Brotherhood of the Muslim Brotherhood.
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