Even today, opposition members from Islamic countries who dare to uphold the universal validity of human rights and condemn religious fundamentalism face vehement backlash from certain left-wing intellectuals in the West. Rather than embracing their commitment to human rights, these individuals are slandered as imperialist collaborators, perpetuating Islamophobia
Rather than embracing their commitment to human rights, these individuals are slandered as imperialist collaborators, perpetuating Islamophobia.
When Iranian protests burgeoned into a mass movement in 1978, French philosopher Michel Foucault decided to fly from Paris to Tehran. He wanted to understand what enabled the insurgents to sweep away the heavily armed regime of Shah Reza Pahlavi and to deprive the “American imperialists” of one of their most powerful vassals.
In previous years, Foucault had published influential studies developing the thesis that the European Enlightenment’s development of bourgeois discipline had its way paved institutionally in prisons, while a true “dungeon system” was tested in clinics until it had finally subjugated the entire society. Scholar, In short, the critic of the West had discovered Islamism.
Foucault penned enthusiastic articles about this novel form of revolution in the French press and secured an audience with Ayatollah Khomeini, then residing in exile in Paris. However, he appeared unwilling or unable to subject the emerging theocracy of Iran to the same critical scrutiny he applied to bourgeois civil society. Even as the Islamists persecuted dissenters through bloody trials and imposed patriarchal control over Iranian women, while institutionalizing antisemitism, Foucault remained silent. His ire only surfaced when feminist Iranian exiles in France confronted him for overlooking women’s disenfranchisement. He rebuked them, accusing them of reinforcing Western prejudices against Islam and failing to grasp the historical imperative: sacrificing personal concerns for the unique opportunity to liberate the earth from capitalism’s damnation and its European legacy.
Even today, opposition members from Islamic countries who dare to uphold the universal validity of human rights and condemn religious fundamentalism face vehement backlash from certain left-wing intellectuals in the West. Rather than embracing their commitment to human rights, these individuals are slandered as imperialist collaborators, perpetuating Islamophobia. Former colonial powers, now steeped in anti-colonialist rhetoric, assert authority over residents of former colonies, dictating their behavior in the global decolonization process with unrivaled arrogance and self-righteousness.
What is it that makes many self-declared “anti-imperialists” sympathize with reactionary despotisms? It seems they’re endlessly searching for a revolutionary vanguard—some oppressed class or group that can still embody the struggle they no longer find in their own affluent societies. They need a cause, a proxy for their own lost sense of purpose, something that might still achieve the grand emancipation they fantasize about.
For decades, Western revolutionary spirits have sought a replacement to Marx. Initially, they looked to the liberation movements of Asia or Latin America, hoping their heroic struggles would serve as a global model. Later, these movements were abandoned within highly developed capitalist countries who carried the banner of hope. In today’s era of campus radicalism, any group of perceived victims becomes the embodiment for these revolutionary desires.
he imposition of the death penalty for homosexuality in the mullahs’ state failed to deter Michel Foucault from his fervor for “political spirituality,” despite his own freedom to express his sexuality in the supposedly coercive regime of the West. His refusal to confront reality ideologically has since been emulated by many, who prefer the allure of revolutionary attitudes over grappling with harsh truths. The matter is anything but harmless, as can be seen from the encampments that followed October 7.
To see the enthusiasm that the annihilation of Israel, explicitly propagated by Hamas and Iran, generates among millions upon millions of sympathizers of these Palestinian ‘freedom fighters’ has baffled many who just became familiarized with the pro-Palestine movement.
A few weeks before the Hamas massacre, I was asked how one could most effectively fuel antisemitism. Today, the answer is painfully clear: by murdering as many Jews as possible. No event in recent history has intensified hatred of Jews more than the worst mass killing of Jews since the Holocaust.
Hamas has never pretended to care about national equality, social justice, or the prospect of a two-state solution. Its only goal—stated openly and repeatedly—is the destruction of Israel, which it sees as a necessary step in a broader religious war between believers and nonbelievers. This is not conjecture; it is explicit in its founding charter from 1988, a document that is both a collection of the vilest antisemitic conspiracies and a direct call for genocide.
Four decades after Michel Foucault abandoned intellectual honesty in favor of “political spirituality,” the most self-styled sensitive and enlightened youth of the West have forged an alliance with one of the most vicious terrorist manifestations of that very idea. What we’re witnessing isn’t just a rejection of Zionism—it’s a wholesale repudiation of Enlightenment principles, now dismissed as mere tools of Western supremacy.
But while today’s anti-Zionists between Berkeley and Berlin have added their own layers of self-loathing and ideological acrobatics, the core accusation against Jews remains unchanged. The script is old; only the actors have changed. Foucault may have introduced the gun in the first act, romanticizing Islamist revolutionaries as the vanguard of a new political order, but it is the radicalized youth on the streets of London and New York who have eagerly pulled the trigger.
Progressivism, in its current form, is dead. It collapsed the moment its adherents began marching in lockstep with a movement that celebrates the slaughter of civilians. The tragedy is that most of them still don’t realize it.