That liberal international order—a governing philosophy defined largely by the United States—has guided the use of power in the interests of freedom in the decades since World War II. It is now under attack as never before, say experts, an attack that extends from physical violence to conflict in the halls of global social media.
As the Israeli–Hamas war intensifies, the discourse surrounding it is getting louder. Each side is bolstered by massive social media communities with seemingly no common ground. Many non-profit organizations on both sides have reported massive backlash to their viewpoints on social media, while nuanced viewpoints have also been condemned.
Lack of common ground is not new in the military and political war front between Israel and Palestine. However, never-before-seen social media apparatuses, allowing discourse that in many countries is otherwise state-censored, has upscaled the wider conflict and amplified it within the national political discourse of many countries with sizable Muslim populations or strategic relations with Israel.
Nishakant Ojha, an adviser to various Middle Eastern nations in West Asia on counter-terrorism issues, told The Epoch Times that the conflict between the global left wing and the liberal world order is a complex and multifaceted issue.
“A political converse plays a significant part in shaping and pressing ideological conflicts. Following the attack, there may have been increased debates girding the global left wing’s station on the Israel–Palestinian conflict and the liberal world order’s response to it,” he said.
A Tactical Alliance Between Leftist and Islamist Groups
Experts told The Epoch Times that the online narrative war is also indicative of a tactical alliance between leftist and Islamist groups.For example, consider the anti-Zionist stand of the Party for Socialism and Liberation, the World Workers Party, chapters of the Democratic Socialists for America, and independent chapters of Black Lives Matter, who have expressed support for Hamas’s brutal attack in the name of “resistance” and “liberation” in their respective statements.
“In contemporary geopolitics, the left’s support for the Palestinian cause is often framed within the anti-imperialist narrative. It views Israel as an extension of Western imperialism in the Middle East and Hamas and other Palestinian factions as resistance movements against this imperialism,” said Hamid Bahrami, an independent Middle East analyst and commentator of Iranian origin, currently living in Europe.
Even in the European landscape, leftist parties in many countries, from Greece to Italy, made pro-Palestine statements that either outrightly supported Hamas’s attack or failed to directly condemn it. For instance, in France, the far-left La France Insoumise (LFI) referred to the Oct. 7 attack as an “armed offensive by Palestinian forces,” carried out “in a context of intensification of the Israeli occupation policy.”
The trend is amplified on social media. In the 24-hour period between Oct. 11 and Oct. 12, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) analyzed 128 posts containing glorification and support for terrorist content on X (formerly known as Twitter). ISD found that the posts were primarily connected with the Izz ad-Din al-Qassem Brigades militia group, which attacked southern Israel on Oct. 7.
These posts had a cumulative reach of 16 million on the platform, and post engagement ranging from 2.2 to 50 million. There were also some glaring examples of violent content promoted on global left platforms, according to ISD.
“One pro-Kremlin, Arabic-language account with 199,000 followers posted a video on 11 October showing the desecration of an IDF soldier’s corpse, achieving over 640,000 views—while the post itself is not promoting terrorism, the content was taken from an al-Qassem militant’s GoPro or body cam and has no label or warnings applied by X,” said the report authors, Moustafa Ayad and Tim Squirrell.
China Backs the Left; Allows Antisemitic Surge
Since the Oct. 7 attack, China—which unlike Israel and several Western countries doesn’t designate Hamas as a terrorist organization—has not only refused to specifically condemn the Hamas attack but has allowed an antisemitic surge on its otherwise censored social media. China’s state-backed global media outlets have also focused on condemning the United States for the situation in the Middle East.“The current round of conflict is the result of the U.S. policy of putting the cart before the horse in the Middle East, for which the U.S. should be held responsible,” wrote Chinese state media the Global Times ahead of President Biden’s visit to Israel on Oct. 17.
The tabloid quoted Shanghai International Studies University professor Liú Zhōngmín: “It is time for the U.S. to reflect and correct its longtime failed Middle East policy, which has led the Middle East peace process astray.” The Global Times has published several other op-eds with strikingly similar narratives and pitches.
Mr. Bahrami told The Epoch Times via email that China’s geopolitical interests strongly push it to back leftist anti-imperialist discourse in this conflict. He called China an “opportunist aggressor,” and said that if its interests align with a far-right narrative, it wouldn’t shy away from that.
Burzine Waghmar, an affiliate of the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), the SOAS Center for Iranian Studies, and the SOAS South Asia Institute, London, told The Epoch Times in an email that Beijing’s support for the global left’s anti-imperialism narrative has been long cultivated within its communist culture.
China has its “own homegrown Maoists, for whom revolutionary Palestinian politics is a noble struggle against imperialism, since Israel was deemed a Western colonial settler state implanted and sustained in the historical region with merely American aid,” said Mr. Waghmar.
He added that for Chinese communists, as well as the larger left and its global allies, the only nationalisms that were laudable and permissible were Afro-Asian nationalisms, as they were waged against capitalist-imperialist forces.
The unfettered anti-antisemitism in Chinese media is ironically not limited to the Oct. 7 attack.
The Vladivostok decision was highly symbolic, as the port had been Chinese, but was ceded to Russia in 1860—one of China’s “humiliations” at a time in its history when it suffered continuous military defeats to Japan and the West, and reluctantly signed away its wealth and sovereignty in various treaties.
Amid the ensuing debate about whether Russia would be forced to return the land, many conspiracy theories appeared on Chinese social media. Alongside theories that portrayed the Russians and Japanese as the perpetrators in China’s humiliation, was another theory that labeled the Jews as the villain.
“Before moving into Palestine” in the early 20th century, “Jewish capital chose to settle in the Northeast [of China],” said a May 19 article by the popular WeChat account “Blood Drink,“ according to the report. The WeChat article claimed outlandishly that the Jews “were even willing to make a Devil’s bargain with the Japanese fascists and give almost all of their money away for this purpose.”
The post, which was read by over 100,000 people, accused the Jews of not only financing Japan’s military industry but of being complicit in the massacre of millions of Chinese civilians.
However, Mr. Waghmar said that China does not historically have a legacy of antisemitism. “This contemporary outburst of bigotry is evinced in conspiratorial, hard-left, ultra-nationalist domains of Chinese cyberspace,” he said.
“Tropes of decidedly European inspiration, hitherto alien to the Sinitic worldview, now frequently circulate alleging COVID-19 was a Judeo-American complot or that Jews universally engender pandemics, global financial crises, and wars.”
Mr. Ojha believes that in the Israeli–Hamas conflict, China is merely projecting the image of a neutral and responsible global player rather than acting like one.
“The Chinese government has always propagated a narrative that places the blame exactly on Israel.”
Violence is a Common Ground
In the aftermath of the Oct. 7 attack, the left-Islamist alliance has also made its presence louder. China is leading this too, according to experts.“Another actor is Islamic groups, which find their interests in alliance with China [and the] global left. The common ground is a melange of ideology, political and economic interests,” said Mr. Bahrami, adding that it’s ironic that such a tactical alliance exists, given the secular nature of most leftist movements and the theocratic nature of many Islamist groups.
Mr. Ojha said it’s important to note that in this context, political alliances and conflicts can vary greatly depending on specific circumstances.
“Chances are that Beijing [is] trying to maintain a delicate balance and wants to place itself as a middleman and ply its influence in the region. China’s engagement in the Middle East is set to increase during this conflict,” he said.
Beijing also hopes to play an enhanced part in ending the war and securing its own best interests, as well as subsidizing Arab countries for a strategic purpose, Mr. Ojha said.
According to Mr. Waghmar, the global left and Islamists have been able to sidestep their glaring differences—such as the left’s “socially lax attitudes towards sexual, ethnic or religious minorities,” which are intolerable to Islamists—because of their common strategic reliance on violence.
“Violence has been an endemic feature of leftists, both progressives and anarchists. The Western left is galvanized by atrocities and terror attacks committed by Islamists, for their aggrieved glorification of violence is deemed both cathartic and imperative towards unraveling Western states,” he said.
Mr. Bahrami said that those fighting the narrative war need to understand that as in other war fronts, pursuing too much power can be counterproductive, because it can provoke counterbalancing coalitions among other states, and in this way, the conflict will always rage on.
Mr. Ojha is of the opinion that tensions over the Al-Aqsa mosque that erupted into violence in 2021 aroused “eschatological sensitivities” among Muslims, including Sunnis—such as Hamas and the majority of Palestinians—and Shiites—such as most Iranians. These groups have apocalyptic notions of a final battle at the end of the world.
The operation by Hamas terrorists was named the “Al-Aqsa Storm,” a reference to the Muslim shrine, which sits atop the Jewish Temple Mount. Left by Israel as a Muslim holy place after it took control of the site in 1967, the mosque has long been a flashpoint in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.
“These ideological narratives spread hatred and provide justification for the tragic events in the minds of both Muslims and Jews. Hardline governments on both sides try to use these narratives to divert attention from numerous internal challenges,” he said.
