What Islam And Socialism Don’t Want You To Know

Just as Islam was created in response to Judaism and Christianity, so Palestinianism was born in response to Zionism. And just as Islam declared a kind of war against those faiths, Palestinianism declares war on Jewish nationalism, and, to a large extent, on Christian nationalism as well, since it draws from a religion built on a violent reaction to Judaism and Christianity as embodied today in America.

Palestinianism and Islam are capable of forming alliances with socialist states and corporations that oppose the visible expression of Jewish and Christian civilization. Islam, secularism, and racism are all late developments in history, clinging to a parallel conceptual world, aiming to realize total power — most often through elimination by war or by swallowing up their predecessors.

Perhaps Judaism and Christianity, in their earliest stages, also passed through such phases. Just as Christianity absorbed Judaism, so too Islam and socialism absorb and distort the products of those who came before them, Christianity and the free market — on which they construct their reaction.

Islam believes it is easier to form an alliance with socialism, since socialism is anti-Jewish and anti-Christian but lacks any religious aspirations of its own. Therefore, once it helps dismantle the competing faiths, Islam can seek hegemony.

Because these movements define themselves almost entirely in terms of reaction and appropriation, rather than humility toward what came before, they struggle to build stable partnerships. A telling example is how both the socialist and the Muslim often attempt to instruct their predecessors in the economic or theological order of the world, while relying heavily on the very achievements of those predecessors in theology or economics.

This leads us to ask whether the fate of religion and spirit is to exist forever in cycles of imitation and commentary, or whether a pragmatic stance, might actually provide the best path for development and survival.

The Arab Spring and the American social justice movement were crucial moments of revival for these collectivist ideologies. For the Arab world, the uprisings gave political Islam new energy, as jihadists found wealthy partners in Qatar and Saudi Arabia. For Western socialism, social justice movements provided alliances with global corporations. Both corporations and terror states, each in their turn, fell in love with these ideological weapons, believing they could use them to generate internal opposition and seize control over societies, as if they had learned nothing from the lesson of German industrialists and Hitler. The cynical belief is that leftists and Islamists alike can serve as useful tools to manufacture conflicts, which in turn make it easier to control democratic Western citizens.

Once socialism adopted a layer of nativism, it became even easier for it to join with Islam. Both socialism and Islam are drawn to the same pseudo-native authenticity they crave as late, artificial, parasitic ideologies. One reason they cling to one another is precisely because they both emerged late, Islam in the East, socialism in the West. And to this false nativism the Palestinian movement also aspires, seeking to undermine the mythological foundation of the West and of liberty itselfת the Jews. Every one of these struggles seeks to borrow legitimacy from this cosmic battle and its claim of “indigeneity.”

Here lies the hope of both Islam and socialism: if the false Palestinian claim to nativism can be accepted, then any Islamist or socialist falsehood can be legitimized, while the West — and the Jewsת forget their ancestors and become enslaved.

Only a new theological synthesis can produce a new language here. And perhaps the time has come to attempt exactly that.