In the aftermath of the Bondi Beach massacre on Dec. 14, 2025, when a father and son inspired by ISIS murdered 15 Hanukkah celebrants in Sydney, Australia, some observers—particularly on the political right—rushed to assign blame not only to the perpetrators, but to “the left.” Their argument takes several familiar forms: that progressive politics have tolerated antisemitism under the guise of anti-Zionism; that progressives are unwilling to call out Islamist extremism for fear of offending minorities; and, echoing Benjamin Netanyahu, that the Australian Labor government has created a permissive environment for antisemitism, not least in its support for a Palestinian state alongside Israel.
These claims should not be dismissed out of hand. But taking them seriously leads to the opposite conclusion from the one their proponents intend. This is also important to understand in light of the recent polling by the American Jewish Committee that young adults in America increasingly view Hamas as “the resistance” fighting for Palestinian liberation.
Both the right and the left need to understand that ISIS-inspired terrorism, like the terrorism of Hamas, Hezbollah, and Al-Qaeda, belongs to the reactionary far right that has surged in the last generation. This is crucial to understand because, as Iona Italia wrote in Quillette, we have to name the antisemitic hatred that has washed over Australia—and much of the world—since Oct. 7, 2023. But naming and assigning responsibility must be done with precision.
Identifying militant jihadi Islamism with the left rests on category errors, rhetorical conflation, and bad faith. ISIS-style jihadism is an ultra-reactionary, theocratic, ethnonationalist movement whose ideology, social vision, and politics structurally align with the global far right—not the left.
Those who blame “the left” and “woke politics” generally make three arguments. First, they argue that progressive movements have fostered antisemitism within pro-Palestinian activism, allowing hatred of Jews to masquerade as criticism of Israel. Second, they claim that liberal governments and institutions, especially media and universities, have downplayed or euphemized Islamist jihadism, treating it as a “reaction” to Western or Israeli policy rather than a coherent belief system deeply infused by reactionary antisemitism. Third, they contend that multiculturalism has fostered parallel societies made up of immigrant families in which radical ideologies can incubate.
These critiques resonate because they touch on genuine failures. Antisemitism has indeed surfaced in some progressive spaces. At Columbia University, when protestors howled “We are Hamas,” or when an individual praised the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades (Hamas’s military wing), they identified themselves with a group steeped in violent antisemitism. More recently, a member of the NYC Democratic Socialists of America pushed back at Shahana Hannif, a progressive on the city council seeking DSA endorsement, who had condemned local protesters for chanting in favor of Hamas. At another campus, some protestors shouted “Go back to Auschwitz!” at Jewish students.
In responding to these outbursts, moral clarity has often been sacrificed in favor of ideological caution—put bluntly, administrators too often fail to see when free speech is also antisemitic. Bigotry is bigotry, and all universities have (or should have) clear rules for governing racial and religiously motivated abuse, and those rules should be enforced.
Identifying militant jihadi Islamism with the left rests on category errors, rhetorical conflation, and bad faith.
But acknowledging these failures does not mean accepting the deeper claim that ISIS or Hamas jihadist violence belongs to, or is nurtured, politically or ideologically, by the left. On the contrary, this claim collapses under even minimal scrutiny. ISIS, like Hamas, is obviously not a left-wing movement gone awry. It is an authoritarian project that belongs squarely within the global far-right resurgence of the last generation.
Consider what defines leftist politics in any coherent historical sense: egalitarianism, universal rights, secular governance, social emancipation, and the extension of legal and civic equality. ISIS rejects every one of these principles. It seeks not equality but hierarchy. It advances not liberation but submission. It advocates not pluralism but enforced uniformity. Its vision of society is rigidly patriarchal, violently anti-democratic, and obsessed with purity—religious, moral, and social.
ISIS’s underlying values are like those of Al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, and Hamas. They are not revolutionary in the leftist sense. They are restorationist. Like European authoritarian movements of the twentieth century, ISIS imagines history as a story of decline from a mythic golden age and justifies violence as a means of civilizational purification. Its goal is not a more just future but the resurrection of an imagined past governed by absolute authority and sacralized violence.
Despite its Islamic idiom, ISIS’s antisemitism also structurally parallels the global far-right antisemitic tradition. ISIS’s doctrinal antisemitism, like that of Hamas, Hezbollah, and Al-Qaeda, rests on theological foundations developed by Islamist thinkers like Sayyid Qutb and his acolytes, who maintain that Jews are perennial enemies of Islam, and ground this view in Qur’anic polemical verses and hadiths. White Christian nationalist terrorists, like the murderer at the Chabad house in Poway, Cal., in 2019, likewise justify their violence by referring to sacred scriptures. They also share conspiratorial theories that assert that Jews control global finance, media, and governments, and that Jews orchestrate Western policy, secularism, feminism, liberalism, and moral decay.
In practice, ISIS has been one of the most violently anti-left forces of our time. It has systematically murdered trade unionists, secular Arab nationalists, feminists, journalists, and socialists. Some of its fiercest enemies on the ground have been Kurdish leftist movements, particularly those experimenting with democratic confederalism, gender equality, and secular governance. A movement that exterminates apostates cannot plausibly be described as left-wing.
Why, then, does the confusion persist?
One reason is a persistent category error: the assumption that opposition to the United States or the West or Israel is inherently leftist. When unreflective leftists, liberals, and others fall for this nonsense, they not only co-sign anti-Jewish violence but also serve to sanction the violence against the left perpetrated by these groups. They fail to recognize that many far-right movements, including ISIS, define themselves against liberal and leftist universalism and egalitarianism. Anti-imperialism alone does not make a movement emancipatory. ISIS opposes Western power not to abolish hierarchy, but to impose a harsher one.
A movement that exterminates apostates cannot plausibly be described as left-wing.
Another key reason is rhetorical convenience. Blaming “the left” shifts attention away from the uncomfortable fact that jihadist ideology shares structural features with other authoritarian movements that many conservatives readily embrace: contempt for liberal democracy, glorification of violence, embrace of rigid gender roles, hostility to minorities, and a belief that moral order requires strength through force. Associating ISIS or other militant jihadists with “leftists” avoids confronting these similarities. Ultimately, ISIS mirrors white Christian nationalism, just as it mirrors Jewish supremacists in Israel like Itamar Ben-Gvir (leader of Otzma Yehudit/Jewish Power) and Bezalel Smotrich (leader of the National Religious Party-Religious Zionism).
This mistake matters because it distorts our understanding of the threat. If we imagine jihadist violence as a byproduct of progressive excess, the solution becomes cultural retrenchment or partisan score-settling. If we recognize it instead as part of a broader global authoritarian backlash—religious in form, authoritarian in structure—we are forced to confront a harder truth: liberal societies face enemies not because they are too left-wing, but because they have yet to deliver on the promises of what scholar Jonathan Israel calls “the radical Enlightenment,” the intellectual origins of modern democracy.
Understanding this actually ups the ante of responsibility for progressives. Antisemitism must be confronted wherever it appears, including within left-leaning movements. Moral clarity about the dangers of jihadist Islamist ideology is not Islamophobia; it is intellectual honesty. Indeed, groups like ISIS kill more Muslims than non-Muslims. To collapse ISIS into “the left,” or to blame ISIS-inspired radicalization on “the left,” is not only inaccurate—it obscures the real dangers that underpin the Bondi Beach massacre.
The Bondi Beach massacre was an act of antisemitic terror rooted in a worldview of hierarchy, exclusion, and the sacralization of violence. It belongs to the same family of ideas driving authoritarian movements across the globe. Mislabeling that threat may serve short-term political narratives, but it weakens our capacity to confront it. Understanding ISIS as part of the global right makes clear why progressives must denounce the dangers of jihadist Judeophobia in all its guises. But also, clearly placing ISIS, Al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, and Hamas as part of the global right enables us to confront the dangers to democracy that such groups represent.