Please consider supporting our mission to help everyone better understand and become smarter about the Jewish world. A gift of any amount helps keep our platform free of advertising and accessible to all.
This is a guest essay written by Lucy Tabrizi, who writes about politics, philosophy, religion, ethics, and history.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
Liberal democracies are buckling under the weight of their own contradictions.
But the collapse didn’t start with invasion. It started with doubt, a slow unmooring from the values that once held the West together.
This internal decay left the West exposed — to confusion, and to attack. Ideologies born as self-critique were weaponised by adversaries eager to accelerate our decline.
Severed from its Judeo-Christian roots, liberal democracy created a moral vacuum. “Woke” ideology, obsessed with identity and oppression, grew in Western soil but flourished because hostile actors helped tend the garden. As the scaffolding gave way, Marxism, Islamism, and Soviet-era narratives moved in — ideologies that exploit Western guilt to advance anti-Western aims.
Marxism made inroads first, not in its economic form, but as a cultural force that redefined justice as power and freedom as struggle. It doesn’t offer solutions, only conflict. Everything becomes oppression.
Ironically, the new revolutionaries are the most privileged people on earth; elite university students convinced they’re the vanguard of the oppressed.
The oppressor-versus-oppressed binary is now the Left’s default moral framework, a blend of post-colonial theory, critical studies, and identity politics that flattens complexity into dogma. It offers clarity in chaos, promising the disoriented a ready-made revolution and the privileged a cost-free sense of virtue.
But this binary unravels when you look beyond its curated examples. What about Arab slave trading and anti-Black racism in North Africa? Or the persecution of Kurds, Yazidis, and Copts by non-Western powers? These injustices are often more brutal, but they’re awkward for a framework that only sees oppression when it’s Western.
Lumping all “people of colour” into one oppressed category isn’t just wrong; it’s racist. To assume only white people can oppress is white centrism. It abandons victims. Ask a Uyghur about Chinese imperialism, or a Nigerian Christian about jihadist terror in the Sahel. Some victims don’t fit the script, so they’re ignored.
This is the danger of Marxism’s modern mutation: It fixates on a convenient oppressor and filters out the rest.
Take Jews — historically persecuted, diasporic, cast as outsiders — now routinely labelled “white.” Never mind that most Israeli Jews are non-white, and that even the so-called “white” ones were hunted across Europe for being racially impure less than a century ago. Today, whiteness is a stand-in for power, and Jews have gone from symbolising powerlessness to being recast as its embodiment.
Which brings us, inevitably, to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which crystallises liberalism’s collapse like no other. The breakdown of dialogue, the rise of tribal dogma, moral inversions, double standards — they all collide here. I return to this not from obsession, but because the hysteria it provokes, right here in my own backyard, exposes the rot at the heart of our civilisation.
The slogans now chanted on Western streets weren’t born organically. The script was written decades ago. Not in the halls of academia, but in the backrooms of Moscow.
In the 1960s, the Soviet Union launched a campaign to manufacture a distinct Palestinian identity, not out of solidarity, but as a Cold War strategy. Led by KGB chairman Yuri Andropov, the Zionistskiye Gosudarstva campaign painted Israel and the U.S. as fascist, imperialist aggressors.
“We had only to keep repeating our themes,” said Andropov, “that the United States and Israel were fascist, imperial-Zionist countries bankrolled by rich Jews.”
These talking points stuck. The propaganda laid the groundwork for today’s popular narratives: that Israel is a settler-colonial “apartheid” state, Zionism is racism, and Zionists are Nazis. Spend five minutes on campus or online and you’ll hear them, slogans lifted straight from the Soviet playbook.
The Soviets also backed Yasser Arafat, who headed the Palestine Liberation Organization for 35 years shortly after its founding in 1964 — years before any Israeli “occupation” of the West Bank or Gaza. The goal was never about ending an “occupation”; it was about ending Israel itself.
Arafat worked relentlessly to frame his cause as part of a global anti-colonial struggle, casting Israel as a Western colonial implant. He courted Black liberation movements in America and newly independent African nations, embedding a narrative that survives to this day: that opposing Israel is standing with the oppressed, rather than perpetuating an old hatred.
This Marxist foundation found fertile ground on the Western Left, not just in its watered-down campus form, but in the real thing: vanguardism, class struggle, and a sustained effort to tear down liberal democracy.
In this worldview, Israel isn’t merely a country; it’s an outpost of everything they despise about Western civilisation: capitalism, tradition, borders, nationhood. And so, it must be dismantled.
If Israel must fall, so must the West. As one Columbia University student coalition put it, without a hint of self-awareness: “We are Westerners fighting for the total eradication of Western civilisation.”
This ideological alliance between Marxists and Islamists (known as the “Red-Green Alliance”) helps explain the West’s baffling sympathy for Hamas and other Islamic theocracies. It’s not about coherence. It’s about shared opposition to liberty and the foundations of the West.
Former Supreme Leader of Iran Ruhollah Khomeini’s Little Green Book could be mistaken for a post-colonial manifesto, railing against Western materialism, decadence, and secularism. The speeches of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, former President of Iran, echo the same themes: anti-imperialist slogans, anti-Zionist rhetoric, and calls to resist Western hegemony. Strip away the clerical garb, and you’re left with Islamic double speech: jihadist aims disguised in the language of liberation.
Like the Soviets, Islamist ideologues mimic the language of Western guilt and weaponise it. They don’t need to challenge liberalism head-on. They just need to out-moralise it. And they win over a prepackaged army of anti-colonial, anti-Western university graduates eager to peddle their talking points for them.
The result is ideological whiplash. Jews become colonisers, Islamists become freedom fighters, universal values are ditched for tribal loyalty. Morally disarmed and intellectually confused, the West loses the resolve to resist.
How lost are we?
The Chicago chapter of Black Lives Matter tweeted support for Hamas just hours after it brutally murdered two Tanzanian agricultural interns, Joshua Mollel and Clemence Mtenga, during the terror group’s October 7th assault.
In any other context, they’d be mourned as martyrs of the global South. Yet even as Hamas targets Black victims, Black Lives Matter stood in solidarity with a group that keeps a Gaza neighbourhood for Afro-Palestinians, which they call Al-Abeed, meaning “the slave.”
Why does this inversion stick?
Because Marxist ideology needs an “oppressor.” And Israel fits. Never mind that Israel is a multi-ethnic democracy, born from genocide, surrounded by hostile regimes. In this narrative, it’s the villain.
Many fall for Marxist promises, blind to the wreckage — a legacy that claimed over 100 million lives in the 20th century. The same wishful thinking leads them to project ideals of peaceful coexistence onto Islamists, ignoring centuries of conquest, slavery, and persecution. The aims are clear. The scriptures are clear. Islamist ideology sees Western freedoms not as values to embrace, but as weaknesses to exploit.
This isn’t a condemnation of Muslims. Many are peaceful people who simply want to raise families, contribute to their communities, and practise their faith without violence or coercion. In fact, they’re often the first victims — especially women, minorities, and dissidents. The very people whom the Left claims to defend, just not when it’s inconvenient.
Hamas is often framed as a Palestinian resistance movement, but its ideological DNA is unmistakably jihadist. Its vision aligns with groups like Al-Qaeda, ISIS, and Boko Haram, not just in theology, but in method. These are the groups that carry out massacres like October 7th: not acts of resistance, but campaigns of terror aimed at dismantling secular democracy and imposing Islamic rule.
From the September 11th attacks in New York to the recent massacre of tourists in Kashmir, the Manchester Arena bombing targeting children at a pop concert, and the stabbing of police officers in France, these acts are not isolated. They are manifestations of the same theocratic mission. Between 1979 and May 2021, at least 48,035 Islamist terrorist attacks occurred globally, resulting in over 210,000 deaths.
Much of the Arab world sees the threat clearly. Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates have banned the Muslim Brotherhood — not out of “Islamophobia,” but because they understand what many people in Western democracies refuse to. This is the same ideological movement that gave rise to Hamas, Al-Qaeda, and other jihadist offshoots. Those countries also blocked Al Jazeera, viewing it as a mouthpiece for that same agenda.
The West, meanwhile, gives platforms to Muslim Brotherhood-linked speakers and amplifies Islamist narratives, all under the guise of “freedom of speech.” Qatar funds jihad with one hand and polishes its image with the other, whispering Islamist ideology in the language of liberation. Western elites applaud, oblivious to the agenda — and enriched by Qatari money. Our failure to see the through-line is suicidal.
In any other era, we’d call this foreign interference. Today, we call it “diversity.”
It’s time to abandon the delusion that our values are universal. Some flee tyranny in search of freedom. Others bring with them ideologies that reject it. Open societies no longer seem to know the difference.
We confuse coexistence with assimilation. The former is about living alongside; the latter is about shared values. Western democracies once assumed assimilation would happen by default. Today, they lack the confidence to demand it.
Liberalism seeks to respect all beliefs. Islamism permits only one. When tolerance meets absolutism, something gives. And lately, it’s liberalism.
Islamists don’t seek coexistence; they seek dominance. Some even celebrate the martyrdom of their children to achieve it. Believing democratic values will soften that mindset isn’t tolerance; it’s the bigotry of low expectations.
History has warned us. In 1979, Iranian Marxists and university activists allied with Islamists to overthrow their common enemy, the Shah of Iran, a Western-aligned monarch who had been modernising and secularising the country. The Left believed they were fighting for justice and liberation. But once the Islamists seized power, they turned on their former Marxist and student allies, torturing and executing them in the purge that followed.
It also happened in Lebanon. Leftist factions joined forces with Islamists against the Maronite Christian establishment. By the 1980s, Hezbollah had taken over, sidelining or eliminating its former partners. In Afghanistan, the West backed Islamist fighters against a Soviet-aligned Marxist regime. When the Soviets withdrew, the Taliban filled the vacuum.
Liberals repeatedly mistake tactical alignment for shared values — and are usually the first to be discarded. Maybe the harder truth is this: Liberalism simply doesn’t have the ingredients to build a lasting society.
Hamas was already running the same playbook. As far back as the 1990s, its members were strategising how to repackage their jihadist message for Western audiences: out with religious rhetoric, in with “social justice” and “apartheid.” Speak the language of the West, and the West will welcome you.
And despite history screaming otherwise, Western leftists still think they’ll be spared — too consumed by anti-Israel fervour to notice the freedoms they claim to defend are next on the chopping block.
Jihadists don’t care if you are “anti-Zionist.” On October 7th, they killed migrant workers, foreign nationals, Muslims — even peace activists who had campaigned for Palestinian rights. This wasn’t resistance. It was religious war, driven by an ideology that sees all non-believers (and any vision of coexistence) as enemies to be destroyed.
The target isn’t just Israel. The real war is against pluralism, freedom, and dissent itself. Israel is merely the “Little Satan.” The “Great Satan” is the United States. And no amount of self-flagellation or pandering to jihadists will change that.
Yet many still act as if ideological alignment buys immunity. It doesn’t. Just ask one of the revolutionaries, Marina Nemat. At just 16 years old, she protested the Shah’s regime in Iran, only to be arrested, tortured, and nearly executed by the Islamists who replaced it. Her crime: asking for the very freedoms that the “revolution” had promised.
And it’s not just the Left repeating history. The far-Right is taking part in the civilisational suicide too. From Tucker Carlson’s monologues to Candace Owens’ viral hot takes, broadcast to millions, the extremes are starting to mirror each other, especially in their scapegoating of the Jews.
The horseshoe has closed. And, as ever, Jews are caught in the crossfire: a grim, time-tested warning that a civilisation is circling the drain.
The soul of a civilisation doesn’t vanish; it gets outsourced. If you don’t fill the void, someone else will. Jihadists offer transcendence. Marxists offer redemption. What does the West offer? Porn, Prozac, and Pride flags.
Ironically, Israel holds an advantage. It remains rooted in tradition and deeply anchored in identity. Jewish continuity wasn’t shaped by comfort but by survival, a clarity the West can no longer summon.
And while Israel is constantly delegitimised — singled out, excluded, and treated as the Jew among nations — it endures, precisely because it understands what’s at stake. It knows its enemies. It defends its identity. It still believes in borders, sovereignty, survival.
The West, meanwhile, invites its adversaries in and calls it “progress.”
Even anti-Zionist Jews, disavowing Israel in a bid for approval, repeat a tragic pattern. History is full of Jews who turned on their own — and still weren’t spared.
As Israel strengthens its sense of purpose, the West forgets what it stands for. And that’s why, increasingly, those of us who sense the coming collapse are looking to Israel, not as a perfect model, but as one of the few nations that understands the stakes.
Israel is on the front lines of a broader ideological and civilisational assault. And its enemies have been clear: Israel is just the beginning.
Jews have always been the canary in the coal mine of civilisations in decline — targeted first, but never last.
As Iran’s leaders have said: first the Saturday people, then the Sunday people.
Or, in the words of philosopher and neuroscientist Sam Harris: “We all live in Israel now. We just haven’t realised it yet.”
Lucy, until 15 minutes ago I had no idea who you were. Now I will never forget and will actively follow you. What an INCREDIBLE essay!
• Your purpose and clarity would have been enough.
• But your style and prose… seamless weaving together of Jewish history, present dangers and the trajectory of continuing globalized ideologies… just unreal. DAYENU!
horrifying.