UK Needs to Learn From French ‘Islamo-Leftism’ Label, Says Analyst

Undated photo of protesters in Parliament Square during a pro-Palestine march in London. James Manning/PA

The UK needs to learn from the term “Islamo-leftism” to address the alliance between radical Islamists and the far left-wing, a designation openly used in France, a geopolitical expert has said.

Since aligning with the Palestinian cause on Oct. 7, 2023, far left-wing groups in the UK have shown support for actions by groups like Hamas, leading to significant protests across England, raising fears that radical Islamists are finding common ground with communist ideologies.

While “Islamo-gauchisme' is recognised in France as a willful blindness to the violent and anti-Western teachings of radical Islam, UK authorities and Cabinet ministers are seemingly just beginning to explore the relationship after recent controversies.

France

Alexandre del Valle, a French/Italian professor of geopolitics and international relations at IPAG Business School told The Epoch Times that France’s freedom to discuss Islam allows for the use of such terms.

Furthermore, he said that France has a strong tradition of secularism, which despite the country suffering from more deadly Islamist attacks, enables discussions with prominent figures openly condemning Islamo-leftism, citing its disruptive influence in universities and its potential links to terrorism.

For example, France’s Minister of Education, Jean-Michel Blanquer, publicly denounced islamo-leftism declaring that the ideology “wreaks havoc” in French universities and can “lead to the worst,” evoking ‘“intellectual complicities” with terrorism.

In 2021, French Minister of Higher Education Frédérique Vidal also said that “Islamo-leftism not only pollutes universities but the whole of society.”

Free to Talk?

Mr. Del Valle told The Epoch Times the term is used because France, unlike the UK, is free to “talk about Islam.”

“In Anglo-Saxon countries, there has been a tolerance for Islamism,” he said.

The professor has argued that radical Islamism is a “totalitarian ideology that mix politics and religion and aims to dominate the entirety of humanity, like Nazism or Communism.”

He also said there is a disparity in freedom of expression regarding depictions of the Prophet Muhammad, noting that such portrayals are restricted in the UK but widely seen in France.

“You can’t show the Prophet Muhammad on large British TV channels. But in France, everyone saw it after Charlie Hebdo,” he said, of the attack on the French satirical weekly magazine by Islamists in 2015.

“The only reason we can talk about Islamo-leftism is because we are a laic country,” he said

“We have a moderate left, an anti-authoritarian left,” he added.

“In France, even the politically correct left and the socialist anti-Trotsky left denounces the Islamist leftist alliance,” he added.

Police at the scene of a knife attack near the former offices of satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, in Paris, on Sept. 25, 2020. Thibault Camus/AP Photo

Mr. Del Valle said he once met an MI6 agent in 1998 as a French civil servant working on radicalisation. He asked him why the UK has so many Islamists, why it had given shelter to terrorists that had committed acts in France and why England wouldn’t extradite them.

He said that the MI6 agent replied (“he was very proud to say it”) because we can keep a “close eye on them, we know why they are doing it, and that’s why we don’t have terrorist attacks.” He said that a good image of tolerating Islam was important to relations and the state didn’t want to be seen as “Islamophobic.”

However, this was before the UK’s first Islamist suicide attack, the 7/7 central London bombings in 2005.

“Now the politicians, now they understand there is a change,” he said, but he added that there is a “huge Islamist power in London. It’s not just the left, it’s the Capital.”

Mr. Del Valle said that while Islamist terrorism remains a significant threat in Western Europe, the UK is influenced by a “powerful Muslim lobby,” particularly due to investments in infrastructure, universities and more from Middle Eastern monarchies like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, and Egypt.

He added that in the UK, the issue now is that mass migration has “privileged Commonwealth countries, notably with Muslims from Pakistan and India” after Brexit, as opposed to European, so issues connected to Islamism are likely to continue.

“England has been tricked by the political liberalism of John Locke,” he said, bringing up the 17th-century philosopher who favoured religious tolerance, a template for contemporary British multiculturalism as opposed to French assimilation.

“And Islamism takes advantage of liberty,” he added.

Palestine Protests

In a 2021 report on “Islamism and the Left” for the think tank Policy Exchange, author and British diplomat Sir John Jenkins wrote that a “network of academics and community activists seem to be in the process of forming a hybrid ideology,” with critical race theory language, which is rooted in Marxism.

“Incorporating a particularly confrontational form of community-based identity politics, it remains as Islamist at its core as it is post-modern and post-colonial in its outer trappings,” he said.

He noted the “remarkable” way in which “critical-theory-infused claims” have found their way into documents such as the 2018 report by the All Party Parliamentary Group on British Muslims on the definition of Islamophobia.

That report spoke of the “intersectional nature of Islamophobia,“ “gendered Islamophobia,” “micro-aggressions,” “lived experience,” the existence of a “binary narrative” about Muslims in the media, the “problematisation” of “Muslimness,” and the “racialisation” and “othering” involved in representations of Islam.

He also warned that both Islamists and the left “essentialise the ”West“ and use ”the same tropes to predict—and welcome—its destruction.”

PSC

In February, minister for security Tom Tugendhat said that the “antisemitism we have seen on our streets is simply vile and completely unacceptable,” in part, due to huge ongoing left-wing pro-Palestinian marches.

Anti-Israel protesters have also been observed at the events, organised by the activist organisation Palestine Solidarity Campaign, cheering for Hamas and the Yemeni Shia Islamist political and military organisation Houthis.

PSC has links to many trade unions in the UK, including the National Education Union and UNISON.

PSC also has support from the Socialist Worker, the UK’s “revolutionary socialist newspaper.”

A few days after the Hamas attack on Israel, the publication wrote, “Rejoice as Palestinian resistance humiliates racist Israel.”

Appeasement

Critics, however, have accused the government of not acting until very recently. In February, former Minister of State for Immigration Robert Jenrick claimed that he had “been smeared for trying to speak out about Islamist extremists.”

In a piece in The Telegraph, Mr. Jenrick wrote that “appeasement has only emboldened Islamists and their extreme Left-wing allies.”

There was no better metaphor for the strength of their movement and the weakness of the authorities than the failure to prevent the genocidal chant “from the river to the sea” being projected onto the Palace of Westminster while, inside, the Commons caved.

He said that when he tried to criticise this, his comments “sent some of the liberal elite into overdrive.”

“They quickly attempted to discredit me for daring to diagnose this epidemic of extremism as of a distinctly “Islamist” persuasion,” he added.

‘All Those Communist Elements Are Within Islam’

Writer and commentator Momus Najmi spoke to The Epoch Times about the relationship between Islamic extremism and its communist origins.

Mr. Najmi said “that all the socialist elements, all those communist elements, are within Islam.”

He believed that Islamism was used as a political tool, as an ideology to overcome the prevailing regional ideology.

Mr. Najmi said that if Islamist extremists consider that “they are at war with you, then their social contract changes with you completely, because religion allows them to change the social contract.”

This, in part, was due to a complex historical understanding of the notion of Taqiyyah, the action of committing a sinful act (such as feigning unbelief) for a pious goal, “an extraordinary measure to be used only in times of extreme necessity.”

On why the UK left is seemingly blind to Hamas’ terrorism extremism, he said that the history of Palestine itself its “steeped in Marxism.”

For example, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the second largest group within the Palestine Liberation Organization, is characterised by its secular Palestinian Marxist—Leninist and revolutionary socialist ideology, making it a significant component of the Palestinian national movement.

The Epoch Times’ “How the Specter of Communism Is Ruling Our World“ has also noted that radical Islam was nurtured by the Soviet bloc as a means of destabilising the Muslim world, when the concept of “Islamic socialism” began to take hold during the Cold War, when the Soviet Union supported Arab states against Israel.

“They see Israel as a symbol of capitalism,” said Mr. Najmi.

“And they see, like anyone, who can destroy them or help them destroy this one big capitalist symbol will mean victory for Marxists. I think that’s at the heart of it. That is why they’re so determined by the ideology,” he added.