The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the Muslim Brotherhood are frequently presented as belonging to different moral universes: one a uniformed arm of a hostile state, the other a supposedly “non-violent” social movement operating within civil society. This distinction has been politically convenient, but intellectually indefensible. Both are animated by a totalising ideology that rejects pluralism, disdains democratic accountability, and treats the liberal state not as a legitimate home but as terrain to be contested, infiltrated, and ultimately overcome.
The habit of explaining away such movements by reference to culture, grievance, or foreign policy missteps has become a substitute for analysis. Worse still, it has allowed British institutions - charities, universities, community organisations, even regulatory bodies - to be treated as neutral spaces, rather than as arenas in which ideas compete and power is accumulated. The result has been a slow erosion of vigilance, masked by a vocabulary of “engagement” and “dialogue” that too often functions as a one-way concession.
This paper confronts a further evasion: the idea that hatred of Israel is merely another foreign policy disagreement. In reality, it has become the ideological meeting point at which Islamist extremism and segments of the Western radical Left clasp hands. Under the banner of anti-Zionism, ideas once regarded as disreputable - collective guilt, conspiratorial thinking, the moral exemption of violence - are laundered into respectability. The Jewish state is not criticised; it is demonised, and through that demonisation, a broader hostility to liberal democracy is smuggled into public life.