Article43

Unholy Islamic – Secular – Marxist Alliance.

The hypocrisy is almost blinding, yet few dare to call it out. In the West, Muslim organizations march arm in arm with liberals, Marxists, and progressives, invoking the language of human rights, minority protections, and multiculturalism. They demand sensitivity, recognition, and protection from alleged Christian-right persecution. Their rhetoric is saturated with words like “justice,” “tolerance,” and “freedom.” But cross the Mediterranean or the Hindu Kush, and those same virtues vanish as if they never existed. In Muslim-majority countries, the very people Islamists court in the West—atheists, secularists, leftists—are jailed, tortured, or slaughtered without hesitation. What passes for principle in London or New York is treated as blasphemy in Jakarta or Karachi.

Indonesia in 1965 offers one of the starkest examples. Islamist militias joined the military in the extermination of half a million alleged communists, many of them peasants and trade unionists. The rivers of Java ran red, and the corpses piled high—all in the name of cleansing the land of atheism. Iran in 1979 followed the same script. The ayatollahs turned their guns on the Marxists and secular democrats who had helped topple the Shah. Thousands were executed in the 1980s, their bodies dumped in mass graves. In Afghanistan, leftists were hunted and killed first by the mujahideen, then by the Taliban, as “godless” enemies of Islam. Algeria’s civil war in the 1990s saw intellectuals, journalists, and artists—secular or socialist—assassinated on the streets by Islamist death squads. And in Saudi Arabia, atheism itself is legally defined as terrorism, punishable by death.

Pakistan writes the script in blood. Blasphemy laws there are wielded not merely against Christians and Hindus but against liberal Muslims, journalists, and secular thinkers. Bangladesh has seen secular bloggers hacked to death in daylight by machete-wielding fanatics. Turkey imprisons leftist intellectuals on charges of “insulting religion” or “undermining the state.” In almost every Muslim-majority nation of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Marxists and secularists have faced persecution as systematic as any Christian crusade.

And yet, in Berlin or Chicago, Muslim lobbyists embrace progressives as natural allies. They appeal to liberal guilt, to postcolonial shame, to Western anxieties about racism. They demand freedom of speech when cartoons offend their religion but demand censorship when secularists critique their dogma. They plead for tolerance of hijab in Paris but deny tolerance to unveiled women in Tehran. They insist on the right to proselytize in London but outlaw Christian or atheist proselytization in Riyadh.

This is not a minor inconsistency; it is a civilizational double standard. In the West, human rights become a shield to deflect criticism, a weapon against the Christian right, and a bargaining chip with leftist allies. In Islamic nations, human rights are dismissed as Western decadence, secularism is denounced as godless poison, and Marxism is treated as treason against Allah. The alliance with Western liberals is therefore not rooted in shared values but in shared enemies. It is opportunism masquerading as principle, strategy masquerading as solidarity.

The cost of this duplicity is not borne by Western liberals, who remain comfortably insulated in their democracies, but by the countless Muslims who dream of secular freedom in their own countries. They are silenced, imprisoned, exiled, or murdered, abandoned by the very left that champions “Muslim rights” in the West. The Marxists slaughtered in Jakarta, the feminists hanged in Tehran, the atheists stabbed in Dhaka—all of them died because Islamist double standards were indulged by a West too timid to confront them.

It is time to stop the charade. Muslims in the West cannot demand liberties they deny at home, nor can progressives pretend that the alliance is anything but tactical convenience. Human rights are either universal or they are nothing. The selective invocation of tolerance is not tolerance—it is hypocrisy weaponized. And if the left continues to blind itself to this reality, it will not only betray its own principles but also condemn millions of liberals, leftists, and secularists in the Muslim world to perpetual persecution.