Feminism, Islamism, and Left-Wing Antisemitism
by Daniel Burston
On March 20, 2024, California State University, Long Beach sponsored an event entitled “Weaponizing Sexual Violence in Conflict Zones,”1 featuring Nada Elia, a visiting associate professor of Cultural Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Western Washington University, and Tina Beyene, an assistant professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at California State University, Northridge. The first speaker, Elia, alleged that Israel invented claims of Hamas’s sexual assault on Israeli women on October 7, 2023, to justify genocide, despite the fact that many of Hamas’s crimes were filmed by the perpetrators themselves and the videos were later sent to many of the parents and families of victims in the aftermath of the pogrom. Indeed, for several weeks after October 7, Hamas and its supporters gleefully celebrated their mind-boggling brutality as the first installment in a renewed effort to “liberate Palestine.” Then, in a baffling reversal, many of these same people denied that these events occurred in the first place, though the evidence was abundant and incontrovertible.
Elia’s talk was sponsored by the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department at California State University, Long Beach. A more recent event with a similar message, entitled “Feminist and Queer Solidarities with Palestine,”2 featuring three speakers and moderated by Paola Bacchetta from the Gender and Women’s Studies Department at University of California, Berkeley, took place on February 11, although this event convened off campus and over Zoom. Finally, Elia was reportedly scheduled to speak again, this time at the University of Ottawa on February 25, however the event listing for her talk, entitled “Weaponizing Feminism in the Service of Genocide” and sponsored by the university’s Institute of Feminist and Gender Studies, has since been removed.3
If these were isolated incidents, they would be depressing enough. But deplorable events and statements like these are now commonplace in activist circles, making it distressingly obvious that much of mainstream feminism has been severely compromised (if not completely captured) by ostensibly “progressive” voices that embrace and espouse a toxic blend of postmodern and pro-Islamist (anti-Western) ideologies. The activists’ claim that feminism is incompatible with Zionism nullifies the courageous efforts and accomplishments of thousands of Jewish women who worked to defend and promote the welfare, dignity, and rights of women at home and around the world in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
This tragic and shameful chapter in the history of the women’s movement merits careful documentation and analysis elsewhere. Meanwhile, note that this pseudo-scholarly propaganda shares the same well-worn playbook with Holocaust denialism and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. In this scenario, victims of mass murder (or their lineal descendants) are charged with fabricating or grossly exaggerating the extent of the crimes committed against them, with a view to extorting some unfair advantage and justifying (or covering up) their own dishonest agenda. In the process, the perpetrators of these crimes are recast as the victims of a Jewish or Zionist conspiracy to mislead and manipulate a credulous (non-Jewish) public in the service of a nebulous but sinister worldwide conspiracy.
In many instances, this rhetorical strategy is employed quite deliberately and tailored to fit whatever horrors it was designed to minimize, excuse, or distract us from. After all, it has demonstrated its ability to mobilize anti-Jewish mistrust and hatred among diverse groups very effectively for well over a century! Many who twist the truth in this way are often quite conscious of the fact that they are fabricating stories and/or denying reality for political gain. They know what they are doing when they are doing it, and why. Another group that endorses statements like these doesn’t know—and more importantly, doesn’t care—if the claims they endorse are true or not. Truth is expendable or irrelevant to them. If their false claims and accusations produce the intended results and perform the rhetorical work they were designed to do, they are satisfied with their pronouncements.
For the sake of convenience, let us call the first group “the haters” and the second group “the cynics.” Finally, among attendees at events like this there is a third group: credulous consumers of propaganda who sincerely believe that this pernicious nonsense is true rather than a willful misrepresentation of reality. For them, truth matters, although they themselves are quite unaware of what it actually is. It may be impossible to quantify precisely how many “true believers” fall into each of these categories in any given instance—or at any given event. But if recent experience is any indication, the first two groups comprise the most hateful and intransigent antisemites and are unwilling or incapable of engaging in meaningful dialogue with Israelis or Zionists. But while it is tempting to write them all off completely, some credulous consumers of antisemitic propaganda are acting on misplaced idealism and may eventually come around.
What are the psychological characteristics that these groups share, and what are the differences between them? The haters—those who knowingly invent and disseminate antisemitic propaganda—are quite conscious of their motivations for doing so. But the cynics, who are indifferent to the truth or falsity of their beliefs, and the credulous consumers who march and chant alongside them are mostly unconscious of the mental processes that produce their reality distortions. The mental processes that facilitate their collective flight from reality presumably include Freudian defense mechanisms like displacement, denial, projection, reversal, splitting, and rationalization (among others). But while their reliance on defense mechanisms may be relatively transparent to outsiders, their motives for clinging so fiercely to their illusions—and for deploying these defense mechanisms in the first place—are equally, if not more, unconscious.
In addition to misplaced idealism, the many motives at play among the more credulous type of feminist anti-Zionists may include guilt, ressentiment, a need to belong, and a narcissistic need to be experienced by others as especially virtuous or politically astute, progressive, etc. But whatever the underlying motives and mechanisms, they engender a seemingly insatiable appetite for lies, provided that the lies they swallow comport with their pre-existing beliefs and prejudices and come from an authoritative or “trustworthy” source that validates their belief system.
The greater someone’s indifference or hostility to the truth, the more dogmatic they are, and therefore the more likely they are to harbor authoritarian tendencies. As Theodor Adorno and Else Frenkel-Brunswik point out in The Authoritarian Personality, traits like dogmatism and antisemitism are both highly correlated with authoritarianism. But while Adorno et al. focused exclusively on right-wing antisemitism, Holocaust minimization and denial now flourish on the extreme right and the extreme left. This comes as a surprise to many people, including many social scientists, because left-wingers see themselves as emphatically anti-authoritarian and embrace many causes that right-wingers typically oppose, like trade unions, reproductive rights for women, LGBTQ rights, indigenous peoples’ struggles, racial and environmental justice, universal healthcare coverage, etc. Canadian social psychologist Bob Altemeyer, a leading researcher in this field, even declared that left-wing authoritarianism is “like the Loch Ness Monster: an occasional shadow, but no monster.”4
The tacit implication of this remark is that left-wing authoritarianism is a rumor with no substance. But if recent studies are any indication, right- and left-wing authoritarians both disdain liberal democratic norms and institutions, harbor intolerant or openly hostile attitudes toward those who don’t share their worldview, and share a pronounced willingness to resort to violence and intimidation to persuade others to dance to their tune. Moreover, they often embrace conspiracy theories that give voice to their irrational fears and wishes, cover up contradictions, and fill in gaps in their explanatory models and narratives about the way the world works.
So, let’s face it, shall we? There was always antisemitism on the left, which is why August Bebel denounced it as “the socialism of fools.” Granted, left-wing antisemitism was less powerful and conspicuous in North America than it was in Europe and the Middle East until recently. But it has been proliferating steadily since the collapse of the Oslo peace process and the Durban Conference on Racism, and it now constitutes a grave and growing threat to Jewish communities—as well as to serious scholarship—all around the globe.
So, let’s ask ourselves: what accounts for the deep-seated ideological differences between right-wingers and left-wingers, as a rule? The crucial difference, psychologically speaking, may lie in the patterns of identification and idealization that they exhibit or embrace. Right-wing authoritarians typically idealize and identify with the charismatic leader, the strongman, or the aggressor. They value tradition and hierarchy, and they are fixated in stage three or stage four of what Lawrence Kohlberg identified as “conventional normativity.” By contrast with their right-wing counterparts, left-wing authoritarians identify with and idealize the (real or imagined) victims of aggression. Their ethical sensibility does not align with pre-conventional, conventional, or post-conventional morality (in Kohlberg’s terms) but is often anti-conventional in character. This yields different ideological outcomes and cognitive distortions than one finds on the extreme right. Right-wing authoritarians typically divide people into two categories, e.g., the strong versus the weak, the winners versus the losers, the superior versus the inferior, the pure versus the impure. By contrast, their left-wing counterparts bifurcate humanity into the oppressed and their oppressors, imperialists and anti-imperialists, the good and the bad, BIPOC and white people. These different ways of carving up humanity prompt right-wing authoritarians to insist on racial or religious purity as a condition of group membership. Left-wing authoritarians, by contrast, aspire to be more inclusive on race and religion but nevertheless insist on ideological purity.
For example, consider this quote from John Molyneux of the Socialist Workers Party (UK). He claimed that “an illiterate, conservative, superstitious Muslim Palestinian who supports Hamas is more progressive that an educated liberal atheist Israeli who supports Zionism (even critically).”5 This illustrates the left-wing authoritarians’ tendency to idealize and identify with members of groups that he or she believes are oppressed and, conversely, to devalue, denigrate, or dismiss any member of a group that he or she identifies as oppressors. The fact that the illiterate, conservative, and superstitious Hamas supporter is likely to be intensely patriarchal, misogynistic, and anti-LGBTQ+, embracing a political movement that is theocratic, authoritarian, and antisemitic to the core—while the liberal Zionist has few, if any, of these attributes—is irrelevant in this political calculus. The former is deemed more “progressive” by virtue of his membership in an oppressed minority, while the latter failed the test for ideological purity, which consists of a resolute rejection of Zionism, coupled with the tacit acceptance or active support of an Islamist organization—one that trains young children to hate and kill Jews, not just Israelis.
In 2008, when Molyneux made this absurd claim, many people on the left still regarded a statement like this as over the top, if not absolute rubbish. But not anymore. Now it is simply conventional wisdom in many, if not most, activist circles—a litmus test that determines whether someone is deemed eligible to participate in “progressive” spaces. So, let’s address the elephant in the room, shall we? The more deeply enmeshed the left becomes with Islamist organizations and movements, the more authoritarian and estranged from reality it becomes. Unless or until these trends are addressed and reversed, antisemitism will continue to flourish in its ranks.
Daniel Burston is Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, and Editor-in-Chief of Kesher: Journal of the Association of Jewish Psychologists. He is the author of Anti-Semitism and Analytical Psychology: Jung, Politics and Culture (Routledge, 2021) and co-editor (with Kurt Jacobsen) of Authoritarianism in All Its Guises: Right, Left and Center (Routledge, 2025).
Topics: Israel Initiative
“Weaponizing Sexual Violence in Conflict Zones,” California State University, Long Beach, Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Department event listing, https://cla.csulb.edu/departments/wgss/upcoming-event-weaponizing-sexual-violence-in-conflict-zones-a-discussion-by-dr-nada-elia-and-dr-tina-beyene/.
“Part II: Feminist and Queer Solidarities with Palestine,” UC Berkeley event listing, https://events.berkeley.edu/events/event/283401-part-ii-feminist-and-queer-solidarities-with.
Casey Babb (@DrCaseyBabb), X post, January 26, 2025, https://x.com/DrCaseyBabb/status/1883702324201173395; “Weaponizing Feminism in the Service of Genocide,” Eventbrite listing (archived), https://web.archive.org/web/20250127023114/https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/weaponinzing-feminism-in-the-service-of-genocide-tickets-1207794147809; “Weaponizing Sexual Violence in Conflict Zones,” AllEvents event listing, https://allevents.in/ottawa/weaponinzing-feminism-in-the-service-of-genocide/100001207794147809.
Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1996), p. 216.
Quoted in David Hirsh, Contemporary Left Antisemitism (New York: Routledge, 2018), p. 63.