1. Pro-Muslim Progressivism
Leftists have been trying to promote the cause of the oppressed for as long as I can remember. When I was in college, they mainly thought of the oppressed groups as women, blacks, and the poor. In the last 20 years, the ranks of oppressed groups have grown. Of particular interest, Muslims are now thought of as an important oppressed group, on whose side good progressives must fight. After warning about racism and patriarchy, the left is also eager to warn against “Islamophobia”. Left-wing protestors now seek to silence speakers who criticize Islam, as happened to Richard Dawkins when he was scheduled to speak in Berkeley. (Dawkins rejects all religion, but only his anti-Islam comments anger people on the left.)
It was also woke activists who got the film Jihad Rehab cancelled. This was a documentary containing interviews with ex-terrorists who were being rehabilitated at a Saudi detention center. It was initially critically acclaimed, before Muslim/woke filmmakers embarked on a campaign to label it “Islamophobic” (with no rational basis) and keep it from being publicly shown.
After the Hamas attack on October 7, left-wing students on American university campuses began passionate anti-Israel protests, among which you could find such slogans as “queers for Palestine” displayed unironically. Immediately after the attack, a group of 33 Harvard student organizations released a statement blaming Israel entirely for the attack.
2. The Strangeness of Pro-Islamic Progressivism
Let’s review what is odd about this.
a. Women
Progressives usually speak against what they view as the oppression of women in Western nations, e.g., the fact that women earn 20% less money than men on average (which is due to their choosing different kinds of work). Women in Muslim countries, however, are actually oppressed.
In Saudi Arabia, women have male guardians (typically their fathers or husbands). Until very recently, they needed the permission of their male guardian to get a passport, get married, get official documents, or get a job. Only in 2017 did the Saudi patriarchs decide that women could be allowed to drive.
In Islamic tradition, women are expected to cover their heads. In Iran and Afghanistan, women are legally required to wear the hijab. The most committed Muslims want women to cover their faces as well.
Some forms of Islam consider female genital mutilation mandatory, to prevent women from ever experiencing sexual pleasure.
b. Gays
For context, recall that gay marriage was legalized in the U.S. by the Supreme Court in 2015. Before that, this was a major issue for progressives, who viewed the lack of recognition for gay marriage as a form of intolerable oppression of gays. Even now, many still regard America as oppressive towards gays.
In many Muslim nations, however, the idea of gay marriage is completely beyond the pale; just being gay is illegal. In Saudi Arabia, Iran, Yemen, Mauritania, Nigeria, and Brunei (all majority Muslim countries), homosexuality is a death penalty offense.
Given how much progressives criticize America for its alleged mistreatment of women and gays, one would expect that they would be apoplectic about the horrific oppression of women and gays in many Muslim nations. Yet among those who are most vocal about the oppression of minorities in other contexts, it’s hard to find a critical word spoken about Islam.
3. Progressive Explanations
How could progressives explain this?
a. It’s only a few extremists
Perhaps progressives would say that these forms of oppression are only supported by the more extreme, fundamentalist Muslims and that we should avoid allowing our general view of Islam to be colored by a few extremists.
But we’re not just talking about a small, fringe element in the Islamic world. Again, multiple Muslim nations literally, legally prescribe death to homosexuals. After the October 7 attack, 72% of Palestinians surveyed supported the attack — an attack that massacred teenagers at a music festival, raped and mutilated women, and burned babies.
Progressives don’t seem particularly concerned about portraying Americans, white people, or men as oppressive. Yet the forces of intolerance within each of those groups are a minute fraction of what they are within the Islamic world.
b. US/Israel is worse
Perhaps progressives would say that Israel and the U.S. have caused more harm to Muslims than Muslims have caused to Israel and the U.S.; therefore, it’s more important to protest Israel and the U.S. Perhaps progressives just don’t want to dilute this most important message by adding criticisms of Islam.
Bear in mind, however, that hundreds of millions of people in the world live in Islamic theocracies. So this really doesn’t seem like a kind of oppression that someone whose political worldview revolved around oppression could afford to overlook.
Progressives are also not usually very sympathetic to the “someone else is worse” defense. For instance, during the Cold War, they didn’t see as a good reason suppress their criticisms of the United States that the Soviet Union was worse. They don’t hold off from attacking America’s history with slavery when informed that Arab slavery was worse; they regard that as quite irrelevant.
c. The obligation to fix one’s own society
Perhaps progressives would say that they tend to focus on problems with the West, America, Christianity, etc., because we have an obligation to fix the problems in our own society.
I’m not sure, though, why it wouldn’t also be important to address huge problems in other societies — at least important enough that you would frequently hear progressives talking about the oppression of women and gays in the Islamic world.
Progressives living in America also don’t seem to have any reticence about criticizing Israel, so it doesn’t seem as if the relevant distinction is between one’s own and other societies. It seems that the distinction is Muslims versus (Jews & Christians).
4. Hate
I have a suspicion about the answer. It is not a nice explanation, but it seems to me to fit the evidence.
When did Muslims gain favor with the American left? As far as I recall, it started after 9/11/2001. Before that, I can’t remember the left caring about the plight of Muslims or including them in their “diversity” goals. Before that, Islam wasn’t really on the radar screen of American politics.
Right after 9/11, most Americans were horrified and enraged. But not everyone. Some people on the far left gleefully seized the chance to blame America, just as those Harvard students took the chance to blame Israel for the October 7 attack. An Ethnic Studies professor at the University of Colorado posted an essay on “the justice of roosting chickens”, seemingly explaining the attack as the natural and just consequence of American evil. He compared America to the Nazis and justified killing people in the World Trade Center thus:
“As for those in the World Trade Center... Well, really, let's get a grip here, shall we? True enough, they were civilians of a sort. But innocent? Gimme a break. They formed a technocratic corps at the very heart of America’s global financial empire … If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I’d really be interested in hearing about it.”
Needless to say, the idea that Islamic terrorists are crusaders for socialism and progressive causes as Western leftists understand them is a narcissistic delusion. Al Qaeda, Hamas, and other Islamic extremist groups don’t give two craps about American leftist causes. They are crusaders for Islam. Osama bin Laden attacked America because he wanted to end U.S. support for the Saudi government, so that he could depose them and establish a different, more extreme fundamentalist theocracy in Saudi Arabia. Many people fail to understand this because they can’t imagine a society having completely different issues and different belief systems from ours.
Returning to the point: What do far leftists like about Islam? They like that Islamic extremists hate America. That’s what really matters to them. It’s more important to hate America than to recognize democracy, or free speech, or to treat women or gays like human beings.
The far left’s hatred of America is not explained by America’s mistreatment of this or that group, else they would hate the countries that treat those groups far worse. Rather, hatred of America is a fundamental ideological axiom. Their complaints about America’s alleged oppression of minorities are not driven by concern for those minorities; they are just a tool for attacking America. That is why woke activism doesn’t focus on practical steps to improve the lives of minorities (e.g., programs to reduce out-of-wedlock births, increase graduation rates, or reduce gang violence); it focuses almost entirely on convincing everyone that America is evil.
Granted, most people on the left side of the political spectrum are moderate leftists who don’t really hate America (just as most rightists are moderate rightists, not white supremacists). But people on the left stick together: they’re afraid to criticize anyone on the left side of the spectrum, however extreme. They’re afraid even to undermine the messaging that anyone on their side has undertaken. Hence, even moderate leftists won’t criticize Islam, since that would show disloyalty to their side, since the extremists have decided that the Islamic world is a leftist ally.
Why do the extreme leftists hate America? I still don’t know. This is very strange because most people throughout history, regardless of the society they lived in, had a very strong bias in favor of their own society. What trauma have left-wing extremists suffered that left them with such a deep-seated resentment toward their own society?
