How to explain the alliance between the Left and Islamism
11-10-2025
Opinion
Bart Jan Spruyt
A Muslim woman carries a photo of the leftist activist Greta Thunberg who attempted to enter Gaza. Photo EPA, Shahzaib Akber
Opinion
The world seems confusing. Pro-Palestine demonstrations regularly include a rainbow flag – and yet Hamas, to the best of my knowledge, has not profiled itself as particularly open-minded on LGBT issues. So how did this alliance come about after all?
At some recent meetings, I noticed that many people do not know what “critical theory” is. Some knowledge of this way of thinking, which is old but still alive and kicking, can help make sense of current phenomena in society and politics.
This theory was developed at the sociological institute of Frankfurt University in the 1930s. The names of (once) well-known Marxist-inspired intellectuals such as Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse and Jürgen Habermas are attached to it. The theory was a major inspiration of the student protests of the 1960s, and, in somewhat differently elaborated form, is still an inspiration to many today.
Critical theory offers an analysis of bourgeois-capitalist society. It is highly critical of that society and therefore wants to change it.
She seems so beautiful, that society. After the criminal failure of communism, Social Democracy had made a decisive contribution to a society in which major differences had been erased. Equalising was the motto. “Spreading of knowledge, income and power,” was the slogan of the Dutch Labour Party's programme. Party leader Joop den Uyl advocated a society in which even the worker could devour a steak once a week, drive an Opel Kadett and go on holiday for a few weeks every year.
Magic world
And we had succeeded. We had achieved the best imaginable world. Everyone at work or on decent benefits. Nobody hungry any more. And watching television in the evening. The only task left seemed to be getting as many people as possible to share in the blessings of the consumer society.
But with that success, something important was overlooked, supporters of critical theory said. True, since the Enlightenment, people had succeeded in freeing themselves from a magic world of myths and irrationalism, but in its place was a rationalism that focused not on truth and values, but only on means and practical ends. That is, progress was defined purely economically. Everything came to revolve solely around economics and consumption, and culture went on sale.
People were well off, had jobs and food. Popular culture and the mass media offered them plenty of entertainment, and advertising showed them what else was available. But with this, they were lulled to sleep and the masses were fed unreal needs. The masses were manipulated. If any people criticised the system of a petty-bourgeois, commercial mass culture, they were offered a lucrative position within that system and would shut up.
Thus, the new rulers concealed –by providing full bellies and entertainment– that although people felt free, deep down they were not. Right-wing people in particular, according to progressive-left critical theory, maintain the system and existing power structures. They are stupid and ill-informed and therefore do not deserve a voice in public debate. They are ‘authoritarian’, conventional, aggressive against those who threaten their traditions in which family and sexual morality are paramount, against art and science, and believe in conspiracies. Right-wingers are fascists.
If the worker is content sitting at home behind his steak, then resistance should come from the students.
Against the hidden power structures that the right has brought into society, there must be revolt, radical and militant, even by undemocratic means. If the worker is content sitting at home behind his steak, then resistance should come from the students. These hidden structures manifest themselves -for those who look closely, and are awake (‘woke’) – in discrimination: of non-white (non-‘white’) people, of migrants, of people whose sexuality deviates from traditional conceptions of male/female and family.
Anyone who is ‘homophobic’ or ‘transphobic’ and violently suppresses a particular sexual identity based on a feeling (even if it is in a pastoral conversation) is as bad as the Israelis who are engaged in genocide in Gaza.
Deeply depraved
Judith Butler, famous for her influential statements on gender as a social, oppressive construct, for example, argues that Hamas' actions on 7 October 2023 should be seen as ‘armed resistance’ and that the ‘colonial structures’ in Gaza that culminate in genocide must end.
The discussion about our use of language and forms of address (‘pronouns’) and the protest against the war in Gaza are part of one agenda and one movement, carried by people who have figured it out and directed against people who are not yet so ‘woke’. And not just in the Netherlands, but elsewhere in Europe, indeed worldwide.
The critical theory of the Frankfurt School has found a translation in Queer Theory, Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality – turning against the ‘deeply depraved’ system of the West. That system would be characterised by belief in a binary creation, by racism deeply embedded in legal system and politics, and by all kinds of discrimination based on gender, caste, ethnicity, social class, sexuality, religion, disability and weight.
So the struggle against ‘oppressive rulers’ these days unites the progressive left and Islamism in violent demonstrations. And these have long since turned not exclusively against the insidious power structures of consumer society, but against the West as such, including the Christian faith that shaped the culture of the West.
This article was translated by CNE.news and published by the Dutch daily Reformatorisch Dagblad on September 20, 2025
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