How the Left Became the Nazis of Our Time

Once champions of justice and equality, the modern radical left now fuels antisemitism, defends terrorism, and mirrors the very fascism it claims to oppose.

The modern left, once seen as a force for human rights, equality, and truth, has become something else entirely. It now functions not as a check against authoritarianism, but as a carrier of it. It claims to resist fascism, but its tactics, alliances, and justifications increasingly resemble those of the very fascists it once fought. This is no longer the principled left of civil rights marches and anti-apartheid boycotts. This is a movement that celebrates terror, spreads hatred, and distorts history. The clearest and most damning example is the way the radical left has embraced Hamas and turned the Jewish state into a global scapegoat.

This transformation did not happen overnight. It has been brewing for years through the slow capture of academic institutions, activist circles, and media platforms by those who mix post-colonial rhetoric with a deeply selective moral compass. The left claims to be anti-racist, but it tolerates antisemitism so long as it comes wrapped in the Palestinian flag. It claims to stand against imperialism, but it champions groups whose aims are explicitly imperial, religious, and genocidal. It claims to oppose far-right ideologies, yet it aligns itself with far-right Islamists whose worldview is rooted in misogyny, homophobia, totalitarianism, and bloodshed.

There is no clearer symbol of this collapse of principle than the support for Hamas. This is a group that throws dissenters off rooftops, executes accused collaborators without trial, and systematically suppresses women’s rights and LGBTQ+ existence. It is a group that started its founding charter by citing the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a fabricated antisemitic document, as though it were factual. Hamas openly calls for the extermination of Jews, not just Israelis. It uses civilians as human shields, fires rockets from schoolyards, and stores weapons in hospitals. Yet across the Western left, this group is celebrated. They are painted not as religious fascists but as heroes of resistance. The victims of their terrorism, Jewish families, Israeli civilians, and peace advocates, are portrayed as villains.

The justification for this inversion of morality is always dressed up in the language of anti-Zionism or anti-imperialism. But peel back the slogans and you will find something darker. The daily campaigns against Israel are not just about supposed war crimes or human rights abuses. If they were, these same activists would be equally outraged at the mass slaughter in Sudan, the oppression of Uyghur Muslims in China, or the use of child soldiers in Congo. But they are not. Their outrage is reserved almost exclusively for the Jewish state. And the substance of their arguments is rarely about Gaza or the West Bank alone. It is about the legitimacy of Israel itself.

This is the dirty truth. While accusations of genocide or apartheid are hurled loudly, the underlying motive is quieter but persistent. It is not just a critique of policy. It is a rejection of Jewish statehood. Most activists in this movement do not simply want Israel to behave differently. They want it gone. The debate is not over what Israel does, but over whether it should exist at all. Every conversation is forced into the same exhausting loop, where Jews are required to re-educate others on basic historical facts. They have to explain, again and again, that Israel was not created as a colonial outpost, but as a refuge for a persecuted people. They have to clarify that Jews are indigenous to the land, not white invaders. They have to recount that six million Jews were murdered in Europe while the world looked on, and that even after the Holocaust, Jews were denied protection in many countries and forcibly expelled from Arab lands. They have to cite the countless times peace was offered and rejected, the way Palestinian leaders walked away from negotiations or used terror to derail compromise. Each time a lie is repeated, someone has to take the time to correct it. Each time a slogan is screamed, someone must counter it with facts. It is not a debate. It is a war of attrition, waged in classrooms, comment sections, and city squares.

To be a defender of Israel today is not merely to argue policy. It is to fight a tidal wave of propaganda, to withstand the collective pressure of a movement that has decided that Jewish nationalism is uniquely unacceptable, that Jewish survival is a provocation, and that Jewish self-defence is a crime. No other people is subjected to this kind of campaign. When Tony Blair joined the war on Iraq in 2003, many rightly protested it. The war was later condemned as illegal. But no one responded by saying that the United Kingdom had no right to exist. No one suggested that Britain should be dismantled or returned to a pre-colonial state. Yet that is exactly what is said about Israel, over and over. Every conflict, every skirmish, every military operation is used not just to criticise Israel’s actions but to question its very existence. The war on Israel is not just fought with rockets. It is fought with narrative. It is fought through education, or rather miseducation. It is fought by taking the complexity of a centuries-old conflict and reducing it to slogans. It is fought by comparing Jews to Nazis, by accusing them of crimes they did not commit, and by insisting that their very presence on their ancestral land is a form of violence.

In doing so, the left has become indistinguishable from the fascists it claims to hate. It does not wear brown shirts. It wears keffiyehs and Che Guevara T-shirts. It chants “from the river to the sea” instead of “blood and soil.” But the message is the same. It is exclusionary. It is supremacist. It is violent. It demands purity and punishes dissent. It rewrites history to fit ideology. It justifies terror as a moral act. It scapegoats a people based on collective guilt. This is not progressivism. This is totalitarianism with a social justice mask.

The irony is that leftist thinkers themselves warned of this transformation. Theodor Adorno, one of the leading philosophers of the Frankfurt School, wrote extensively about how mass movements can adopt the very authoritarian structures they oppose. He warned of the seductive power of ideology, the way it can flatten complexity, suppress thought, and turn empathy into fanaticism. Herbert Marcuse, another member of the Frankfurt School, spoke of the danger of “repressive tolerance,” where a society tolerates only those views that fit a narrow ideological frame. That is exactly what we see today. If you support Israel’s right to exist, you are silenced. If you condemn Hamas, you are deplatformed. If you defend Jews as a people, you are accused of being a colonialist. The conversation is not only hostile. It is rigged.

Marx himself never advocated for this kind of blind tribalism. When he said the working class has no country, he meant that workers everywhere should unite across borders, not that national identities were inherently evil. He did not support the erasure of people’s histories, nor the silencing of dissent. But his modern followers have taken his language and twisted it into a weapon. They do not want internationalism. They want ideological conformity. They do not want liberation. They want domination.

This perversion of leftist values has been seen before. During the Iranian Revolution, Marxist groups supported the overthrow of the Shah alongside Islamist movements. They believed that by joining forces with religious conservatives, they could eventually steer the country toward socialism. Instead, they were betrayed. Once the Islamists had seized control, they turned on their Marxist allies. Thousands were imprisoned, tortured, or executed. The very people who had helped bring about the revolution were consumed by it. The same happened in Egypt, in Algeria, in parts of Latin America and Afghanistan. The left has a long history of aiding extremists, believing it can control them, and then being destroyed by them.

And yet, it keeps happening. Today’s radical left does not support Hamas because it shares its values. It supports Hamas because Hamas is seen as an enemy of the West, and therefore, in this warped ideology, an ally. It is not reasoned alignment. It is reflexive opposition. If America or Israel stands for something, then the opposite must be good. That is the extent of their political analysis. That is how shallow this movement has become.

There is nothing progressive about defending an organisation that indoctrinates children to hate, that builds tunnels instead of schools, that uses aid money to fund violence instead of healthcare. There is nothing anti-racist about justifying the murder of Jews because they were born in Israel. There is nothing liberating about a movement that wants to replace one oppression with another. And there is nothing courageous about joining a mob that chants slogans it barely understands, while attacking those who dare to speak the truth.

The reality is that the modern left has lost its moral compass. It has become a movement of double standards, selective outrage, and ideological aggression. It demands accountability from others but offers none for itself. It claims to fight for peace but celebrates violence. It says it opposes fascism but mimics its structure. It says it fights racism but promotes one of the oldest forms of it in modern disguise. What we are witnessing is not a struggle for justice. It is the collapse of reason. It is the triumph of dogma over thought. It is the rise of a new authoritarianism that marches not in military boots, but in the soft shoes of the activist class. They tweet, they march, they write think pieces. And in doing so, they fuel hate, justify terror, and destroy the very principles they claim to defend.

The question is not whether Israel is perfect. No nation is. The question is why Israel alone is treated as uniquely illegitimate. Why must its people, and only its people, argue for their right to live, again and again? Why is its defence criminalised while terrorism is romanticised? Why must Jewish history be erased so that others can pretend this is a simple story of white colonisers versus brown victims? The answer is as old as it is disturbing. Because the world, and increasingly the left, has found new ways to hate Jews while pretending it is something else. The banners change. The rhetoric evolves. But the target remains the same.

And that is why we must not be silent. History is not just repeating itself. It is being rewritten. The modern left has become the very monster it once fought. It no longer fights fascism. It has become its mirror. And those of us who still care about truth, justice, and human dignity must have the courage to say so.