Lew

I just found something that I wrote back in 2021: How, then, could self-declared secular and progressive leftist activists in the West defend jihadist movements such as Hezbollah and Hamas, or even attempt to mitigate the culpability of al-Qaeda, despite their manifest disregard for women’s rights, secularism, and other liberal-progressive values? What about the supposed commitments to feminism, to individual liberties, to the separation of religion and state? The answer lies in the role of the critical intellectual within the globalized milieu of the international Left. In Western societies, this figure’s task is not to uphold universal liberal norms but to re-interpret events — especially those emerging from revolutionary movements in the Global South — through the lens of anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist theory. The process works as follows: the “native” critical intellectual in a Muslim or Arab revolutionary context generates acts of resistance — military, political, or cultural — against Western power, capitalism, and Zionism. These acts, and the narratives surrounding them, are received in the West as raw “input” by sympathetic academics, journalists, and activists. The Western critical intellectual then reframes these actions as legitimate resistance against the global structure of capitalist exploitation and imperial domination. The religious, illiberal, and often authoritarian nature of these movements is not ignored so much as bracketed — treated as a historically contingent detail that will dissolve in the long arc of liberation. In the meantime, such movements are re-imagined as exotic ornaments that add authenticity, diversity, and revolutionary vigor to the West’s own radicalizing theories of anti-capitalism, anti-Westernism, and anti-Zionism. This output — the Western intellectual’s affirmation — does not remain in the West. It often travels back to the “native” revolutionary vanguard as an endorsement from within Western intellectualism itself, a validation that their cause has not only local but global legitimacy. This feedback loop helps explain why, when U.S. forces killed Osama bin Laden, they found in his hideout a number of books by Western leftist scholars, including Noam Chomsky. Such works provided ideological ammunition, rhetorical framing, and moral reassurance that jihadist violence was not an isolated fanaticism but part of a broader, righteous struggle against Western hegemony. These exchanges form what might be called an intellectual supply chain — busy, reciprocal, and durable — that has been active for decades. There are many such supply chains linking militants, activists, journalists, NGOs, and academics into a single global conversation. Together, they constitute an imagined community that styles itself as “the international Left.” This is not a clandestine conspiracy, but a transnational network of self-identifying radicals, an “imagined body” with a shared moral vocabulary and shared enemies. Judith Butler, the influential feminist scholar and activist, once expressed this with disarming frankness, describing Hamas and Hezbollah as “part of the global Left.” The international Left thus encompasses an expansive constellation: activists, reporters, professors, journalists, political movements, parties, and sympathetic politicians. It also includes institutional infrastructures: NGOs, human rights organizations, conflict-resolution agencies, development bodies, and international media outlets such as Al-Jazeera — and, increasingly, segments of the American legacy media establishment. At the very center of this network stand the universities of the Western world, especially the humanities, which act as both the theoretical laboratories and the human-capital suppliers for the entire system. In the terms of Ibn Khaldun, this international Left possesses a kind of ‘asabiyyah — an intense, cross-border group solidarity animated by revolutionary and critical theories rather than by kinship or tribe. It was this network, in an earlier and less hegemonic form, that embraced the cause of Arab nationalism, then Palestinian radicalism, and ultimately came to adopt the more militant Islamist currents as strategic allies in the wider struggle against the Western-led global order.