It’s an old joke at this point in pro-Israel circles:
“Queers for Palestine? Isn’t that a bit like chicken for KFC?”
The alliance simply does not make sense. How is it that left-wing, secular Americans who advocate for broad tolerance of LGBTQ+ people domestically, then choose to ally with Muslim fundamentalists internationally who actively execute LGBTQ+ people?
How could loudly radical feminist women choose to back a misogynistic, patriarchal terrorist group like Hamas, which perpetrated the most shocking, brutal, public gang rape and torture of women this century on Oct. 7, 2023?
Previous generations have offered their answers in notable books which are worth reading. Regnery published the late David Horowitz’s * Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam And The American Left *in 2004. Encounter Books published Andrew C. McCarthy’s
I worked with both men and edited their articles for years. They saw this phenomenon primarily around the concept of anti-Americanism. Both left-wing radicals and Islamist radicals shared the same goals of bringing down “Western Imperialism,” therefore they were willing to set aside their long-term disagreements about minor things like whether the godless sodomites should strangle to death in agony as they hung by their neck from cranes.
There’s still a lot of merit to this analysis, hence why I can still encourage people to read the books.
However, it was never really the whole story. And it’s even less of the story today in 2026 than it was when those books emerged 22 and 16 years ago. The world has changed, new generations have emerged onto the global stage, and a much more simple explanation now explains why so many secular leftists have embraced such a strange blindspot for the oppressions which women and LGBTQ+ individuals face in non-western, patriarchal Muslim countries.
David and Andy argued that leftists and Islamists found themselves in a political alliance in the standard “my enemy of my enemy is my friend” moral calculation.
Today I’m arguing something very different: the main factor today driving this alliance isn’t any kind of political goal, it’s just boring old racism.
In 2023 and 2024 I had the opportunity to interview tons of Zionist student activists while I worked as U.S. Correspondent for Jewish News Syndicate (now renamed as Jerusalem News Syndicate.)
In an op-ed for The Algemeiner titled “Campus Activists Want to Revive the Black-Jewish Partnership,” I shared some important reflections from Keron Campbell and Kameron Smith who were then seniors at the historically Black Morehouse College, and Kamala Kenny, then a junior at Brown University:
[make quoted text]
I asked Smith why there have been divisions between Blacks and Jews. He said, “Number one, as it relates to the conflict between Israel-Palestine, there is an association of skin color,” he said. “There are Jewish people that look like me … but I don’t think the Black community as a whole fully realizes that.” Kenny noted that on her campus there was a group of Black Jewish students and she wanted to collaborate with them.
Smith described the echoes of slavery some Black Americans perceive: “I think a lot of my people view it as Israel has really captured these people and put them behind walls … I partly blame our United States history system for this. … In school, the United States always portrayed Jewish people as white …. partly a result of the historical context of trying to teach about the Holocaust.”
[End quoted text]
It’s simply culturally imprinted on most Americans that Jew = white. James Baldwin explained that antisemitism in Black communities was largely more simply an extension of anti-white bigotry than anything particular about Jews.
A whole lot of people – and not just the secular leftists – choose to sympathize with the Muslim world broadly over the alliance of the U.S., Israel simply because they regard Muslims as “people of color,” while Americans and Israelis count as “white.”
That’s it.
Now you can and should go and read David’s and Andy’s books and you’ll learn a lot from them. There’s also a new book which came out this year which sounds compelling, * An Unholy Alliance: How Progressivism Brought About an Islamist Invasion* by Michael Youssef, an Egyptian-born mega-church founder and televangelist who gives the theme more of a religious, civilizational frame.
But the real key thing going on here, you probably already knew and now you’re just getting a journalist who’s spent nearly two decades writing and investigating these topics to confirm your suspicions, on the basis of what the students themselves say about their own communities.
More and more people — especially in Gen-Z and Gen-Alpha — have taken in the message that “whiteness” is the source of all the world’s problems.
Thus, they are willing to look the other way at the brutalities and excesses of non-white groups. To make people of color look bad in any way is to in turn make “whiteness” look good. There is one moral standard for white people. And another moral standard for people of color.
This perverse moral arithmetic has also seen a horrifying revival on the other end of the political spectrum. Just as those on the far-left hate this made-up concept of “whiteness,” those on the far-right idolize it.
And the Jews get stuck in the middle.
The far-left hates Jews because they see them as white oppressors.
The far-right hates Jews because they see them as not white and instead as allies with the Black and brown hordes rushing in to poison the blood of America. The infamous “Great Replacement Theory” claims that Jews seek to facilitate more illegal immigration in order to take away white people’s jobs. This conspiracy theory inspired the most lethal antisemitic terrorist attack in American history. Robert Gregory Bowers murdered 11 Jews and wounded six at the Tree of Life – Or L’Simcha Congregation on October 27, 2018,
Jews are too white for one side and not white enough for the other side.
This is how the Jewish people have had to play the game for centuries. Heads I win, tails you lose.
And then the absurdity of the “Queers for Palestine” slogan comes into focus.
It’s really just “leftists for looking good pretending to advocate for poor brown people so they can feel better about themselves.”
Meanwhile, we Zionist activists need to update our joke to keep up with the new Big Kahuna of the fried chicken fast food world:
“Queers for Palestine? Sounds like chicken for Popeye’s!”
If you appreciate these kinds of analyses of global antisemitism today, please subscribe over at God of the Desert Digital Media Studios. Premium subscriptions are deeply appreciated as we launch further investigations into Far-Right antisemites. You can also support our work with donations through Buymeacoffee.com.
