The Intellectual Supply Chain of the Global Anti-Israel Left
Hussein Aboubakr Mansour, is based in Washington D.C. He writes for the Middle East Forum and previously worked in roles fighting antisemitism and to promote human rights. Follow his writings here, and follow his Twitter account to stay in touch.
While digging through some old computer files, I stumbled upon this short passage I wrote back in 2021. It was intended to be part of a much larger work on the nature of modern radicalism—a project that publishers, in their infinite wisdom, decided the world wasn't quite ready for, and was thus set aside.
Reading it again now, the dynamics it describes feel not only relevant but urgently so, having accelerated from a quiet hum into a deafening roar. My only regret is purely vain: had this seen the light of day back then, it might have spared everyone a lot of confusion in the aftermath of October 7th. And, of course, it would have cemented my status as a misunderstood genius, which is really the main goal of any writer.
I am publishing it here as I wrote it then—a time capsule from a not-so-distant past. I believe the framework it offers is a useful tool for understanding the strange and often invisible currents that shape our world.
How could self-declared secular and progressive leftist activists in the West defend jihadist movements such as Hezbollah and Hamas, or even attempt to mitigate the culpability of al-Qaeda, despite their manifest disregard for women’s rights, secularism, and other liberal-progressive values? What about the supposed commitments to feminism, to individual liberties, to the separation of religion and state?
The answer lies in the role of the critical intellectual within the milieu of the international Left. In Western societies, this figure’s task is not to uphold universal liberal norms but to re-interpret events — especially those emerging from revolutionary movements in what came to be called the Global South — through the lens of anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist theory.
The process works as follows: the “native” critical intellectual in a Muslim or Arab revolutionary context generates acts of resistance — military, political, or cultural — against Western power, capitalism, and Zionism. These acts, and the narratives surrounding them, are received in the West as raw “input” by sympathetic academics, journalists, and activists.
The Western critical intellectual then reframes these actions as legitimate resistance against the global structure of capitalist exploitation and imperial domination. The religious, illiberal, and often authoritarian nature of these movements is not ignored so much as bracketed — treated as a historically contingent detail that will dissolve in the long arc of liberation. In the meantime, such movements are re-imagined as exotic ornaments that add authenticity, diversity, and revolutionary vigor to the West’s own radicalizing theories of anti-capitalism, anti-Westernism, and anti-Zionism.
Within this circuit, the Western radical intellectual does not merely act as a translator of distant struggles, but as an active agent of domestic transformation.
By reframing foreign militant actions as chapters in a universal story of anti-imperialist liberation, they provide Western youth with a morally charged, oppositional identity that rejects the moral and political premises of their own societies. University campuses, activist networks, and digital media become the transmission belts for this reframing, transforming revolutionary Islamism, armed anti-colonialism, and other movements into instructive exemplars for Western struggles.
In this way, the imagery, rhetoric, and defiance of the “native” vanguard are repurposed as tools for eroding the legitimacy of Western political institutions, recasting them as structures of systemic oppression in need of dismantling. The exoticism of these movements — their difference from Western liberal norms — becomes a pedagogical advantage, allowing them to be celebrated not despite but because of their illiberalism, which is reinterpreted as a purer, unmediated form of revolutionary will.
This output — the Western intellectual’s affirmation — does not remain in the West. It often travels back to the “native” revolutionary vanguard as an endorsement from within Western intellectualism itself, a validation that their cause has not only local but global legitimacy. This feedback loop helps explain why, when U.S. forces killed Osama bin Laden, they found in his hideout a number of books by Western leftist scholars, including Noam Chomsky. Such works provided ideological ammunition, rhetorical framing, and moral reassurance that jihadist violence was not an isolated fanaticism but part of a broader, righteous struggle against Western hegemony.
These exchanges form what might be called an intellectual supply chain — constantly busy and two-way reciprocal — that has been active for decades. There are many such supply chains linking militants, activists, journalists, NGOs, and academics into a single global conversation. Together, they constitute an imagined community that styles itself as “the international Left.” This is not a clandestine conspiracy, but a transnational network of self-identifying radicals, an “imagined body” with a shared moral vocabulary and shared enemies.
Judith Butler, the influential radical scholar and activist, once expressed this with disarming frankness, describing Hamas and Hezbollah as “part of the global Left.” The international Left thus encompasses an expansive constellation: activists, reporters, professors, journalists, political movements, parties, and sympathetic politicians. It also includes institutional infrastructures: NGOs, human rights organizations, conflict-resolution agencies, development bodies, and international media outlets such as Al-Jazeera — and, increasingly, segments of the American legacy media establishment.
It is important to emphasize, however, that this transnational apparatus was not conceived in Doha or any other foreign capital. The intellectual and institutional supply chain that now binds Western academia, activism, media, and global revolutionary movements is, in its origins, a Western creation.
Its theoretical architecture, operational culture, and ideological grammar were all forged in the seminar rooms, publishing houses, and protest movements of Europe and North America. Foreign actors — chief among them Qatar — have in recent years moved aggressively to invest in, sponsor, and extend this network across nearly all its components. But their role is not that of the architect; it is that of the wealthy patron.
These Gulf sheikhs are wagering heavily on what they perceive as the most destructive horse in the race — a system of Western-made radical critique now turned, with their financial and political encouragement, into a globalized engine through which they can advance their own strategic interests.
