Thread by @HusseinAboubak

The point I’m trying to make is that the assumption that Islamists are somehow disingenuously manipulating progressivism is wrong. Perhaps this is the case for the older generation of Islamist male leaders but not for the new one. The new antisemitism in America is a potent /1

eclectic mixture of deadly toxins from both East and West. This is what's responsible for the upsurge in the popularity of terrorists such as Leila Khalid and Ghassan Kanfani, icons from the era of international Marxist Palestinian terror, and not say, Sayyed Qutb or Sheikh /2

Ahmed Yassin. Anyone familiar with the history of antisemitism knows of its remarkable ability of transmutations. In last November’s Zahara Billoo’s speech, one can hardly find references from the traditional Islamist repertoire. Instead, her speech with filled progressive /3

platitudes about Black Lives Matter, police accountability, homelessness, poverty, the environment, and Palestine. To assume that both Billoo and her Muslim audience were engaged in some elaborate theatrics of pretending to be progressive while secretly planning to take the /4

world back to 7th century Arabia requires the same level of imaginative delusional thinking required by the belief in a global Jewish conspiracy. I take them for their words. The new antisemitism is hip, young, cool, and educated. It is diverse, multicultural, articulate, /5

well-traveled, progressive, and upwardly mobile. It is queer, poetic, with a lisp, and good on social media. The new antisemitism is not about Christ-killers, racial pathogens, immoral capitalists, or conspiring internationalists, it is about the enemies of equality, human /6

rights, and progress. The irony of course, and the heartbreak, is that American Jews quintessentially defined progressivism. And just like what happened with religion once before, what was once a Jewish endeavor is quickly becoming THE anti-Jewish endeavor.

There is a case for here for authoritarian affinity and for a totalitarian impulse that is underlying the ideological structure. Thinking that progressivism is a fixed ideology of good words and good deeds and that those antisemites don't represent "real progressivism,"

or don't represent "real" feminism, is any less naive, or really narcissistic, than saying this is not "real" Islam or that was not "real" communism. Those who seek power seek power whether it was in the name of the proletariat, the umma, the future generations,

liberation, or "our communities of color." The impulse to total power so one may totally transform a totally bad reality to a totally good reality can be be done for the sake of the workers, Allah, minorities, women, etc.