I was amused to read about the spat that broke out on Greta Thunberg’s flotilla between conservative Muslims and members of the LGBTQ+ community. According to newspaper reports, the convoy stopped in Tunisia on its way to Gaza and picked up a self-described ‘communist queer militant’, along with other gay activists. This led to the departure of several devout Muslims. ‘Why involve these dubious activists serving other agendas that do not concern us and have nothing to do with Gaza?’ said one of the aggrieved participants.
Linking the plight of Palestinians to every other woke cause is relatively new
Why indeed? The surprise isn’t that this unlikely coalition fractured somewhere in the Mediterranean, but that these schisms don’t occur more often. One of the more eye-catching developments in British politics was the election last month of Mothin Ali as the deputy leader of the Green party. What attracted this Islamic radical to join a party most of us associate with sandal-wearing tree-huggers? The answer is that the Greens have been fully captured by hardcore Corbynistas and are now to the left of Labour on most issues – hence the victory of Zack Polanski in the leadership election. During the hustings, he described his policy platform as ‘redistributing wealth, funding public services and calling out the genocide in Gaza’, sounding a lot like Magic Grandpa. He left out his strong support for LGBTQ+ rights, including the right of trans women to use women’s lavatories, but he clearly sees no tension between these different positions – ‘One struggle, one fight’, as the protestors chant on their weekly marches.
Support for the Palestinians has long been a hallmark of the bien pensant left, who’ve been wearing keffiyehs to Islington dinner parties for decades, but linking their plight to every other woke cause is relatively new. As Jake Wallis Simons says in Never Again?, Gaza has replaced race as the primary cause for progressives of all stripes. What should we call this strange alliance between conservative Muslims and pink-haired they/thems? The best I’ve come up with so far is the People’s Front of Sharia. Lionel Shriver memorably called this indiscriminate take-up of different causes as selecting your politics from the prix fixe menu and urged people to go à la carte instead. But the omni-cause seems to be unstoppable at the moment.
I’ve been puzzling over whether the cognitive dissonance required to espouse these different positions is unusual, even by the standards of strange political bedfellows. When I think about the various members of the anti-woke coalition, we’re a fairly disparate bunch as well, encompassing feminists, evangelical Christians and conservative nationalists, among others. But the difference is we think of ours as a temporary alliance, held together by the need to defeat the identitarian left, and there is no equivalent ideological convergence. It’s as though Greta Thunberg’s fellow travellers have become wilfully blind to their long-standing disagreements over issues such as female emancipation and are pretending they’re all members of one progressive movement.
Perhaps it’s naive to think that successful political movements need to have a basic level of theoretical coherence. Embracing the omni-cause is partly about status-signalling – letting your peers know you’re a member of the university-educated, soy latte class. It’s also about abasing yourself at the altar of the new secular church. From that point of view the less intellectually defensible your set of beliefs, the better, since it demonstrates how devout you are. Then there’s the zealous policing of group norms within the political tribe, something social media has made easier. If a student were to say on Instagram that they were concerned about the fate of gay Palestinians such as Ahmad Abu Marhia, who was kidnapped from Israel in 2022 and taken to the West Bank where he was decapitated, they would quickly get labelled an apologist for ‘settler colonialism’. And finally there’s the polarisation effect, whereby each side in the culture war becomes more extreme in reaction to the other, creating a purity spiral. Of course, I don’t think of my side as being as nutty as the flotilla of woke gobbledegook, but the other side regard us as Nazis and white supremacists.
I like to hope that the squabble that broke out on Greta’s convoy is a sign of things to come. At the Free Speech Union we recently defended a Jewish cabbie who got into trouble for joking about a reality show in which members of Queers for Palestine were relocated to Gaza. He called it Homos Under the Hammer. At some point, the penny will surely drop.
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