It is nearly the weekend.
So let me offer some entertainment of the kind that asks just a little extra of you - like the eleventh rep at the gym when you had decided to stop at ten.
I know this week's posts have drawn on your patience with me - but as with muscles, the little grey cells do well from being stretched slightly past the edge. And think of me, who has to dream it up, dig, piece it together, sum it up, verify it and make it interesting for you.
And there you sit, finding it hard to read for a couple of minutes? 😅
I do it because it is good for both of us.
We pick up where we left off yesterday, with Islamo-gauchisme - the peculiar convergence of political Islam and the radical left. Because it does take some explaining, how two movements so opposed end up in the same procession.
Follow along.
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THE WORKER WAS REPLACED
On May 10, 2011, thirty years to the day after Mitterrand was elected, a think tank in Paris published a report with a title you could fall asleep to every single night for three years running.
It is so dull it beats sleeping pills from the doctor -
"The Left: Which Electoral Majority for 2012?"
The think tank is called Terra Nova and stands close to the French Socialist Party. The report said something nobody on the left had said out loud before.
The working class, which the whole left had stood on for a hundred years, had shrunk, and the workers who remained had begun to vote for the right. The majority of the future therefore had to be gathered somewhere else - and the authors proposed that it should be -
The young, women, the highly educated, minorities and the neighbourhoods of the suburbs.
Terra Nova has since said that it was never meant as a farewell to the workers, and naturally they must be allowed to say so. But that is how it was read, and that is how it was used.
The one who was most furious was Jean-Luc Mélenchon. He was running precisely to bring the workers back into the light, he said - whoever they are by now - and the year before he had called it vote-fishing when another party of the left put up a candidate in a headscarf.
In November 2019 the same Mélenchon then joined the march against "Islamophobia" in Paris that I wrote about yesterday. And at the presidential election in 2022, 69 per cent of Muslim voters in France voted for him, against 37 per cent five years earlier - and the map of his voters today looks remarkably like the drawing he raged against.
So there lies the answer to the question I left standing yesterday - why do they do it?
How does a movement that lived, and still lives, on women's liberation and rainbow flags end up beside its own diametrical opposite?
It does so because a place became vacant.
Marxism has always needed an oppressed class to carry the revolution - which they still believe is needed - and for a hundred years that was the worker. But the worker got a car and a house and a summer holiday, and he would rather keep them than overthrow the system that made it possible for him to keep them.
Herbert Marcuse wrote it as early as 1964 - the working class had been bought into the system, and hope now lay with those outside it. Our model of society had, in other words, created a situation where "the worker" was doing well. Too well. And Marcuse and the New Left saw that as a problem, because a man with a car, a house and a holiday can no longer be moved to overthrow the society that gave them to him.
Three years earlier Sartre had written the preface to Frantz Fanon and pointed the same way, out towards the Third World. The role of the oppressed who will redeem the world stood empty, and into it moved first the colonised, then the immigrant, and finally the Muslim.
You could call it the replacement proletariat.
And once you have one of those, you no longer look at what a movement wants. You only look at where it stands in the scheme - "oppressor or oppressed".
If it stands on the right side, it is progressive, whatever it thinks about women, homosexuals and apostates, and that is why Judith Butler could say Hamas and the left in one sentence without blinking. Though I will grant that it takes quite a distortion of reality to have talked oneself into it.
I want to say one thing clearly before this first part ends. Many of those who go along with this convergence do so from a decent heart. They see people who are having a hard time and want to stand beside them, and there is nothing wrong with that impulse - it is, as it happens, DEEPLY Christian. It is the scheme there is something wrong with.
Because the scheme asks only one question - who is the weak one?
And when it has found him, it stops asking anything else. It does not ask what the Islamist himself intends for women, for homosexuals and for those who leave the faith, on the day he is no longer the weak one.
The communists in Tehran did not ask either.
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THE WORD THAT CLOSES THE CONVERSATION
On May 21, 2025, the French president gathered his defence council in the Élysée Palace. On the table lay a report of 73 pages, commissioned by the government itself, and it was not about tanks or terror, but about associations, schools and town councils.
The report is called "The Muslim Brotherhood and Political Islamism in France", and it describes a movement that works not with bombs but with patience - Islamism from below, it calls it, through the sports club, the homework café, the mosque association and the list for the council. You may have followed the debate. Critics have objected that the report stigmatises perfectly ordinary Muslims, and that the Brotherhood in France is a small group, which the report itself concedes. Both are worth hearing.
But what matters is not the number. It is the method.
Above I wrote about the left's bet - use the Islamists to bring down the existing order, and settle with them afterwards. So let us turn to the other side of the table, because the Islamists also have a plan for the left, and it is older and considerably more patient.
The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in Egypt in 1928, and it has never hidden that the goal is a society ordered according to Islam. The road there in Europe simply does not go through force - it goes through words.
And one word above all.
Islamophobia.
The word is not new, but it has been made big. A British think tank gave it its breakthrough with a report in 1997. The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, which gathers 57 countries, set up an observatory in 2007 to monitor it. And since 2022 the UN has had an international day against it, every year on March 15, adopted on a proposal from Pakistan on behalf of the Islamic countries.
The organisation behind the march in Paris, the one the French state later dissolved, had the word in its very name.
Notice what the word does. Hatred of Muslims exists, and it is as wrong as hatred of Jews and every other hatred of human beings.
Criticism of Islam is something else - it is criticism of a teaching, a set of ideas about law, women, apostasy and the state, and in the Western world ideas must be able to bear being weighed. The word Islamophobia glues the two together, so that you cannot say the one - without being convicted of the other.
And it is a phobia, no less. A phobia is an illness, and as you probably know, one does not answer an illness. One treats it.
That is why this word - Islamophobia - is the one word both parties in the alliance need. The Islamist gets criticism shut down before it has begun. The radical left gets what it has lacked ever since the worker walked away - an oppressed to defend. Each gets his own, and neither has to talk about what the teaching actually says. No matter how many women are punished for showing their hair, and how many homosexuals are flogged, imprisoned or hanged from a crane for being who they are.
The first to pay for it, by the way, are Muslims. The Muslim woman who wants to take off the headscarf, the young man who wants to leave the faith, the Iranian who fled the rule of the clerics - they are the ones who fall silent when all criticism is called hate.
So the least one can do is to pull the two apart again, every time the word is used. The human being is to be protected. The teaching must be open to weighing.
That is why the word matters so much to those who hate the Western world or want to remake it in their own image. And both of them do - each in his own direction, admittedly.
Because whoever owns the word for the criticism never has to answer it.
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THE EMPTY HOUSE
On January 7, 2015, a novel was published in Paris.
It is called Soumission, it is written by Michel Houellebecq, and it is set in 2022, when France elects a Muslim president - because in the second round the Socialists would rather back the Muslim Brotherhood's candidate than let Marine Le Pen win.
Everyone talked about that election. Almost no one talked about what the book is really about.
The main character is a tired professor of literature in his mid-forties who believes in nothing, loves no one and cannot remember why he gets up in the morning. Nobody forces him to do anything at all. In the end he converts to Islam because it is convenient, and because for the first time in his adult life someone is offering him a place and a meaning.
Soumission means submission.
It is also what the word Islam means.
The two parts above describe an alliance - why the radical left goes along, and what the Islamists get out of it. But when you take a step back, it is not two movements you see.
And I want to say it straight, so it is easier for you to see what it is -
It is two offers to a human being who has lost his footing.
The first I call the Dissolution. It is the radical left's offer, but it is in fact a wave that over the last fifty years has washed across large parts of the political spectrum in the Western world - my own country included, where it has carried off parts of conservative thinking and helped give birth to a libertarian party.
It says that you are free - entirely free - that nothing is given, that any word can mean something new tomorrow, and that there is nothing above you to which you owe anything. It is Freedom without Foundation.
The second is the Submission. Islam. Sharia.
A religion of law from seventh-century Arabia.
It says that EVERYTHING is given, that the Law is written down to the last detail, and that your task is to obey. It is Foundation without Freedom.
We think the two are enemies, and so do they. But they are a division of labour. The Dissolution clears the ground and the Submission builds on it, and Houellebecq's professor is what happens to a human being between the two - he has been so thoroughly liberated that in the end he longs for someone who will decide over him.
And if you are thinking that you simply cannot recognise that anywhere, then take a look around.
The best-selling book series of this century among adults is about a young woman who signs a contract to let a man decide over her. More than a hundred million copies, read by the freest generation of women the world has ever seen. You know the title. Otherwise, ask.
The book that has reached the most young men in the same period is called "12 Rules for Life", and they did not buy it in spite of the title, but because of it.
And the rest of us gladly pay a personal trainer to shout at us at six in the morning, an app to tell us when to sleep, drink water and go for a walk, and a diet plan to forbid us what we know perfectly well we should not eat.
None of it is anything to be ashamed of. But notice the direction. People who have been told that nothing is given, and that they can become anything at all, walk around looking for someone who will say - "this is how you do it, and this is how you don't".
There is even a word for it, from a scene that is at least honest about what it is playing at. I learned it on a podcast I made two or three years ago.
Dom and sub.
The one who decides, and the one who submits. And anyone who has been anywhere near it will tell you that it is not the dominant one who is in demand, because there are always too few of them. It is the many who long to hand over the wheel.
In the bedroom it is a game, and the game has a safe word.
A civilisation has no safe word.
Did you catch that?
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Somewhere in the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus tells a small story that is easy to overlook. A man is freed from something evil that has lived in him. It leaves, he breathes out, and his inner life now stands like a house that has been swept and decorated and put in order. Only nobody has moved in. And because the house stands empty, the thing that was driven out comes back, sees that there is a vacancy, and brings seven others with it, so that in the end the man is worse off than before.
It is a two-thousand-year-old parable, and I know of no more precise description of Europe right now.
We swept the house. We threw out the old - the faith, the duty, everything that stood above us - and we were proud of how clean and bright it became. We simply forgot that a human being cannot live in an empty room for very long, and that a house nobody lives in does not stay empty.
Because the fault does not lie with the one who moves in. It lies with us, who swept the house and walked away from it. The Law lives in one of two places - either inside the human being as Conscience, or above him as Control.
When nobody lives in the Heart any longer, the Law comes down over our heads, and then it hardly matters whether it comes from a state or from the god of a foreign religion.
There was once a place in the world that insisted on both at once.
Freedom and Foundation.
A human being who is free because he is made in someone's image, and bound because he must answer for himself. That place was called the West, and it was not built by some feeble critical theory.
What it was built by is the next thing I will write about.
Because an empty house is not to be guarded.
It is to be lived in.
❤️🔥🪽
Have a good weekend, friends.
Tonight I am taking a break and giving Krisztina some attention. After all, we have only this one life to celebrate and enjoy each other in, and it is a good place to begin if you want to discover more of yourself.
Together with those, and that, which you love.
That was an invitation.
We ought to throw a party together soon.
All of us?
