The Left Is Empowering Radical Islam—Again | Opinion

In 2016, there was a march in Washington D.C. billed as a "Women's March" during which millions of women paraded down the streets in the name of women's rights—some of them carrying posters of a woman in hijab. As a woman who risked her life to remove that hijab off my head, I was furious at how people could be so ignorant as to appropriate a tool of female oppression as a symbol of women's freedom. The Islamist propaganda was so successful that these well-meaning women, who seemed like bright and educated individuals, actually bought the lie that this tool of misogyny was a symbol of women's empowerment.

More of you now share in my rage—now that you know about Mahsa Amini and have seen the Women Life Freedom protests in Iran. Now that you have seen women burning their hijabs in the streets and protesters being gunned down by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, many of you can comprehend how grotesque it was to wave a hijab at a Women's March.

But at the time, you didn't know. You were useful idiots of a very large, very powerful, and very well-funded propaganda machine.

I tried to tell you. For the past seven years, I have been singing the same tune to anyone who would listen. I wrote articles, spoke on countless podcasts, went on the nightly news in countries across Europe, North America, and Asia, my message clear: Beware this alliance between the liberal Left and the Islamists.

In 2019, I published my book Unveiled with a clear subtitle: How Western Liberals Empower Radical Islam. I used my own story growing up in Canada in an extremist family who married me off to an Al Qaeda terrorist to illustrate this unholy alliance between the radical Left and the radical Muslims. I risked my life to tell you all this. I understood that I could potentially be putting myself and my whole family in danger to get this message to you. I did my best to tell as many kind-hearted, altruistic Westerners that they were being duped and being used as useful idiots.

And duped you have been. A dozen Muslim majority countries execute people for the "crime" of homosexuality under Islamic Law. People are executed for renouncing Islam; there is no religious freedom, no freedom of speech, no freedom of personal expression under Sharia. It is the antithesis of liberal or progressive values.

Hijab is not a choice for the vast majority of women. Girls and women are abused tortured and killed by their families in honor violence and honor killings across the globe over this piece of cloth. Women have been imprisoned in countries like Iran and Saudi Arabia.

Perhaps most importantly for today's context, radical Islam is viciously antisemitic.

How can a group of people who bleat about diversity and inclusion be aligning with a religion that claims that even the earth itself hates Jewish people? Which hopes and predicts that a day will come when even the rocks and trees will call out, "Oh Muslim, there is a Jew behind me! Come kill him."

I have been shocked and infuriated that I have to explain over and over again that water is wet. How is this not so obvious already? And even though I spend nearly every single day in this endeavor, screaming like Cassandra warning about the Trojan Horse, even I didn't realize how right I was. Even those of us who have been watching this alliance over the years between the radical Left and radical Islam did not see this coming.

It's as if the subtitle of my book leapt off the page and is now walking down the street chanting, "Gas the Jews."

It is now personified in university leaders and politicians who are posting pictures of paragliders and celebrating the mass execution and torture of innocent people.

There could not be a more clear example of western liberals empowering radical Islam.

As Claire Lehmann, founder of Quillette, put it on X, "I have been covering the toxic ideology for years. But if you had told me a month ago that this ideology would lead more than half of Americans under 25 to justify and excuse the torture and mass-murder of a minority group, I would not have believed you."

We are at a very important moment in history. We are at that moment that so many of us have talked about and thought about while studying history or after watching a World War II movie: What would I have done? Would I have been one of those Germans who hid their Jewish neighbors in their attics protecting them from the genocidal Nazis? Or would I have been one of the many Germans who was too scared to do anything but comply? Or worse: Would I have been one of people who was convinced by the hateful propaganda?

Wonder no more, dear reader. Your moment is here.

Yasmine Mohammed is the author of Unveiled: How Western Liberals Empower Radical Islam and the Founder and President of not for profit human rights organization Free Hearts Free Minds.

The views in this article are the writer's own.