The Left-Islam Alliance & the Legacy of Said
The West has learned to despise its heritage, and in doing so has become an unwitting ally of the jihad
The Mechanics of Asymmetric Exemption
The Incoherent Alliance: The Left and Radical Islam
One of the most confusing and baffling alliances today is that between the left and radical Islam. They should be ideological enemies, considering that Islam, especially the radical strain that follows Sharia to the letter, does not believe in gay rights, women’s rights, freedom of speech, or many of the other Western Enlightenment ideals that the left claims to be defending from conservatives in their own country. So the real question becomes: why does Islam get a pass, but the left’s own neighbors do not? These are the neighbors who share the church, tradition, culture, schools, hospitals, grocery stores, and many other community spaces with them for as long as they have been alive. Yet there has been a growing notion that because white people are not considered “diverse,” they are inherently evil and bear the inherited sin of colonization. The deeper question then becomes: does a perceived injustice from hundreds of years ago, inherited by the modern West today, somehow trump the actual atrocities being committed by the left’s allies, atrocities substantially worse than the colonization they claim to oppose?
Edward Said and the Origins of the Narrative
If we want to trace this back to where it all began, we would have to start with Edward Said, a Columbia professor who grew up in fabulous privilege as the son of another Columbia professor in the United States of America. He wrote a book called Orientalism that purports that the West is guilty of putting all of the Orient into a single box and treating it as monolithic, a position that stems from the idea that Western academics believe themselves superior to those of the East. The irony is striking, considering Said himself was a Western academician who grew up in the heart of Western academia. What authority, then, did he have to speak for both the West and the East? Is he inherently an Eastern scholar because of his Lebanese descent, or is he actually a Western scholar, given that it is the culture he was raised in? It seems he wanted to have his cake and eat it too, yet no one else was permitted the same perspective.
Even though Said was neither a historian nor an archaeologist, he made claims as if he were and dismissed those who had actually conducted rigorous research into Middle Eastern studies. Like Howard Zinn, the left flocked to his book for the sole reason that it offers a harsh critique of Western ideology. They do not care about the facts; they care about the rhetoric that casts the West as the villain of history.
The Problem of Biased Sources
What is even more ironic is that Said relies on primary sources from Muslim authors who are not permitted to criticize Islam. As a result, these sources will always present a rose-colored view of Islamic history, absent the kind of self-critical analysis that characterizes Western academia’s engagement with its own past. This means the West actually has the capacity to criticize itself, while Islam does not.
It does not make sense to take Muslim scholars entirely at their word, given that they operate under an enforced bias. The West, for instance, can genuinely grapple with the behavior of its colonial period and the atrocities committed therein. Islam does no such thing, even though it effectively eliminated the Coptic Christian population of the Middle East and expanded as far as Tours in France and Vienna, Austria. Islamic scholars will invariably frame this as a glorious expansion of the faith. During that expansion and colonization by Islamic forces, acts were committed far more atrocious than anything perpetrated during the Western colonial period. So why are they not held to the same standard of accountability that leftists demand of the West?
The Left’s Historical Ignorance
The primary reason is that the left is genuinely uneducated about history. Its adherents are content to receive talking points, distortions, and propaganda from non-Western sources aimed solely at tearing down the Enlightenment ideals upon which Western civilization was built. What is further ironic is that Muslims can flee to the West, but Christians cannot flee to the East, not if they value their safety, for fear of persecution, violence, and even genocide.
Increasingly, the left views the West as an open-borders society where participation is a right rather than a privilege. Because of this, we have seen radical Islam infect Western societies with an ideology fundamentally at odds with Western values. This is why you see women walking the streets of Dearborn, Michigan, or Birmingham, England, in full burqas and hijabs. We are importing Third World cultural and religious frameworks into the freest societies ever constructed.
The Neuroscience of Empathy and Its Political Consequences
So why does this dynamic persist? Consider a study conducted in the mid-2000s at University College London. Men and women were placed in MRI machines and had their brain activity monitored while watching two people play a prisoner’s dilemma game. One player was identified as a cheater; the other was playing fairly. Each player had a shock device attached, and whenever they lost, they received a shock. When the fair player was shocked, both men and women showed activity in the brain’s empathy centers, indicating that both sexes view fairness as a positive ideal.
However, when the cheating player was shocked, women showed the same empathetic response they had shown for the fair player. Men, by contrast, showed no such activity in the empathy center. What did activate in men was the region of the brain associated with pleasure. This suggests that women are more inclined to apply emotional judgment when determining punishment, even when a wrongdoer has caused harm to an innocent party, preferring leniency even when it is unwarranted.
How This Applies to Cultural Infiltration
How does this connect to the broader argument? It means that even when a society is objectively backward and hostile to Western values, women will be inclined to view that society as a victim, simply because it lacks the same social dominance as the host population. This dynamic becomes clearer when one examines shifting demographics in academia: women now represent approximately 60% of college enrollees, while men account for roughly 40%, and that gap continues to widen. Women increasingly dominate not only the humanities but also business and STEM programs.
This means that rather than providing a well-grounded, rigorous, and logically disciplined education, universities are increasingly becoming vehicles for propagandistic and polemical rhetoric that does not teach students to think but instead relies on rote memorization to advance an agenda. It is one reason more men are opting out of college entirely, viewing it as a six-figure piece of paper that merely certifies the memorization of propaganda.
Reforming Academia
To reverse this, we need to return to earlier academic curricula and standards, before the infiltration of a feminist, Islamist, and radical left agenda that turned universities from institutions of free inquiry into institutions of ideological enforcement. This means that humanities departments across all universities need to be fundamentally restructured around patriotic, Western-values-affirming scholarship that rewards free speech and challenging ideas rather than punishing them. Even so, this would be only a partial remedy.
Judicial Accountability
We see this same pattern of misplaced empathy in our court systems. The most direct way to address it is to hold judges accountable for their decisions. For example, consider a recent case in Seattle in which a judge deemed a man mentally unfit to stand trial after he shot a woman and her children in their car for no apparent reason, and subsequently released him to a mental institution from which he could be discharged at any time, at the discretion of the staff. If that man were to so much as steal a glass of water from a restaurant, the judge should be held legally liable for every crime he commits from that point forward, up to and including murder. In theory, this could expose a judge to trial for multiple murders carrying the death penalty. Only consequences of that magnitude will restore a justice system in which the public feels genuinely safe.
Voting Standards and Civic Investment
We should also implement knowledge requirements for voting, not merely basic civics, but an understanding of Western cultural ideals and what distinguishes the West as the most open and free civilization in history. A voter who actively seeks to undermine foundational rights, such as the First Amendment, as is currently happening in California with the STOP Act, should be ineligible to cast a ballot. It is worth remembering that the Founding Fathers did not extend suffrage universally, and that this was arguably a feature rather than a flaw: those who voted were directly invested in the continuation of America’s founding ideals. History views this as prejudice, but in practice, it helped produce the greatest nation in the world, not only in terms of military and economic power, but in terms of freedom of speech and protection from government tyranny.
The Paradox of Unlimited Democracy
Paradoxically, the more we allow unconstrained democracy to determine the country’s direction, the more we watch our freedoms erode. It is only those who genuinely believe in and love the United States of America, its founding principles, its history, and its culture, who should be voting and holding office. It is therefore troubling that figures like Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib hold federal office. In a country that authentically values freedom, their platforms would find no constituency. Unfortunately, our institutions have been steadily reshaped by a leftist framework that treats every culture, every religion, and every set of values as equally valid. That is simply not true. While human beings may be equal before God, they are not equal in intellect, values, or outcomes, and if people are not equal in those respects, then societies and cultures certainly are not. It is precisely the cultures that are antithetical to Western ideals that we should be most cautious about importing. They have their own nations, their own land, their own people. Importing Third World problems into the most advanced civilization on Earth serves no one.
The Call to Action
What remains is action, action to implement these difficult but necessary measures that will restore America to its rightful place, not merely as the world’s leading power, but as the world’s leading culture: one defined by freedom of speech, the right to bear arms, and the freedom to use both to defend against a tyrannical government.
Some will read this and call it extremist, alt-right, or fascistic. But as recently as thirty years ago, these were broadly understood truths in American society, held by both Democrats and Republicans alike.