For more than a decade-and-a-half, a striking convergence has taken shape between Western liberal rhetoric and the worldview of political Islam – commonly called Islamism.
It started in June 2009, when Barack Obama addressed “the Muslim world” from Cairo University and promised “a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world.”
Obama adopted the same pan‑Islamic framework Islamists had long used to turn local grievances into a single civilizational cause. Instead of speaking to the Arab world, he addressed a supposed transnational Muslim polity and underscored the point by pressuring Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak to allow leaders of the banned Muslim Brotherhood – the regime’s most menacing opponents – to attend the historic event.
That was a clear signal that the U.S. would no longer treat groups like the Brotherhood as untouchable pariahs as long as they operated – or claimed to operate – within nonviolent electoral politics. The highly symbolic gesture coincided with State Department efforts to systematize contacts with Islamist movements.
Obama bet that if the U.S. treated Muslims as a single political bloc, courted its most organized Islamist forces – above all, the Sunni Islamist Brotherhood – and reassured Iran’s Shiite Islamist regime through a conciliatory nuclear deal, anti‑American rage would subside and a new Middle East order would emerge.
So, the administration intensified dealings with Brotherhood leaders across the region, welcomed their rise in Egypt as proof of democratic openness, and pursued an Iran nuclear agreement on terms that legitimized the monstrous regime while leaving its regional aggression and genocidal antisemitism essentially untouched.
Were it not for the decisive intervention of the Egyptian army after Mubarak’s fall, Egypt would likely have become another Iran – an Islamist theocracy consolidated under the banner of revolution. The episode echoed Jimmy Carter’s betrayal and abandonment of the Shah in 1979, when Washington, seeking to ingratiate itself with Iran’s Islamist revolutionaries, helped clear the path for precisely the kind of regime Egypt narrowly escaped.
Far from defusing the Islamist project, Obama’s “outreach” helped entrench Islamist actors as America’s presumed interlocutors in Arab societies and signaled to Iran’s rulers that the U.S. was more interested in accommodating their ambitions than in constraining them.
That shift in partners and vocabulary inevitably reshaped how Washington talked about Israel. In Cairo and in subsequent addresses, Obama framed the conflict as a wound at the heart of the Muslim world, insisting that Palestinian statelessness was a source of tension between America and “Muslims around the world.”
When he later declared that the borders of Israel and a future Palestine “should be based on the [pre-June 1967] lines with mutually agreed swaps,” the move was read in the region as aligning with long‑standing Arab and Islamist talking points about Israeli illegitimacy beyond those lines – boundaries that even the late Israeli foreign minister, Abba Eban, widely seen as a dove on territorial compromise, famously referred to as “Auschwitz borders.”
By treating Palestinian demands as the litmus test for reconciliation with a global Muslim audience, while normalizing Islamist actors as representatives of that audience, the Obama administration helped to complete a transformation the Muslim Brotherhood had been promoting for decades – from a limited Arab–Israeli dispute into a struggle in which every policy argument about Israel immediately becomes a story about justice for Muslims worldwide.
If Obama supplied the Presidential rhetoric for this shift, a tenured Columbia University professor, Mahmood Mamdani, was a key figure in supplying the intellectual justification. In his widely taught “good Muslim/bad Muslim” thesis, Mamdani argues that the post‑9/11 distinction between “moderate” and “extremist” Muslims is a Cold War-era conception in which Washington relabels pro‑American Muslims as good and anti‑American Muslims as bad, while refusing to recognize its own “imperialist violence.”
According to Professor Mamdani, to scrutinize Islamist doctrine is to lapse into “culture talk.” The target of judgment is no longer the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood or Hamas. The target is America.
His son, Zohran, translates that worldview into electoral politics. As New York’s first Muslim mayor and a standard bearer of the Democratic Socialists of America, he presents his faith, far-left views, and extreme anti‑Zionism as a single, indivisible stance – a politician who portrays himself as confronting “strategic Islamophobia” at home and Israeli “oppression” abroad. He treats the “dignity of the Palestinian people” as the paramount progressive cause – and the central moral test for Muslims everywhere.
Like his father, Mamdani rejects the category “Islamist,” instead folding a pan‑Islamic frame into the language of civil rights and anti‑racism. The effect is to normalize Islamist ideology.
Before Mamdani’s meteoric ascent to power, October 7, 2023, tore away the last pretense. Hamas named its massacre “Al‑Aqsa Flood” and proclaimed it a religious war – a summons to Muslims “in all Arab and Islamic countries” to join the battle.
Within days, Western campuses and streets were chanting the same words, celebrating the attack under its official Hamas title, calling to “globalize the intifada,” and recasting a jihadist slaughter, rape, and kidnapping of civilians as anti‑colonial “resistance.”
Reports from multiple media outlets show that Mayor Mamdani’s wife, Rama Duwaji, used her personal Instagram account to “like” numerous posts on and immediately after October 7 that praised Hamas’s assault as “breaking the walls of apartheid” and promoted New York rallies “to stand with Palestinian resistance.” She also liked a post dismissing the documented Hamas sexual atrocities as a fabricated “mass rape hoax” – activity her husband has tried to downplay by reiterating his own condemnation of Hamas and the attack as a war crime.
In his first statement after the attack, however, candidate Mamdani didn’t mention Hamas at all. Instead, he “mourned hundreds of people killed across Israel and Palestine,” blamed Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli government for the “ongoing violence,” and called for ending “occupation” and “apartheid.”
In Congress, Ilhan Omar and Mamdani’s DSA comrade Rashida Tlaib, along with their allies, provided a legitimizing soundtrack, branding Israel an apartheid state and insisting that outrage over Hamas atrocities be read primarily through the lenses of Islamophobia and “devalued Palestinian lives.”
In short, Islamist jargon became the default vocabulary for much of the American left.
Across the Atlantic, the same story has unfolded with European characteristics. In the U.K. and France, Muslim Brotherhood–linked networks have spent years building Islamic ecosystems – mosques, schools, charities, NGOs – using “Palestine” as the emotional glue to bind diverse Muslim communities. Any scrutiny of Islamist influence is routinely dismissed as persecution.
After October 7, marches in London, Paris, Brussels, and Berlin echoed Hamas slogans almost verbatim – “intifada revolution,” “Je suis Hamas,” and open praise for “Al‑Aqsa Flood” – turning European boulevards into conduits for jihadist venom.
These scenes reflect a deeper change in how the West understands – and speaks about – the region.
The older language of “the Arab world” has largely disappeared – and with it, the sense of a shared civic space in which Muslims, Christians, and secular voices might contend as citizens. The new language of “the Muslim world” erases those minorities and elevates Islamist actors as the natural voice of hundreds of millions of people.
From Obama’s Cairo Outreach to Zohran Mamdani’s fusion of identity with radical socialism – and a denial of Israel’s right to exist – Western elites have steadily learned to speak in the idiom of their most determined ideological adversaries.
As we approach the 25th anniversary of 9/11, the bitter irony is impossible to ignore. The rhetoric once associated with the terrorists and the movement that inspired them has, in important respects, become part of the lingua franca of the American academy, the Democratic Party’s activist wing, Mamdani’s DSA, and, following his stunning electoral victory last November, even the leadership of America’s greatest metropolis – home to the largest Jewish population outside Israel – and the city at the center of the deadliest attacks on American soil since Pearl Harbor.
What we are witnessing is nothing less than a capture of the terms in which the West now discusses Israel, terrorism, and its own security.
Recovering clarity requires rejection of this imported ideological framework. It means recognizing that what is being globalized on our streets and campuses is a religious war narrative – and deciding that citizens of the free world need not speak its language.