Holy Smoke: how radical Islam taught the progressive left to blame the Jews

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🗓️ 30 July 2019

⏱️ 34 minutes

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Summary

It's less than four years since Jeremy Corbyn's hard-left sect seized control of the Labour Party, and yet already its anti-Semitic views – so alien to Labour tradition – seem too deeply rooted to eradicate.

Today's 'Holy Smoke' podcast puts this sinister development in the broader context of the 'Red-Green' alliance – the love affair between the progressive Left and the Jew-haters of jihadist Islam.

On the face of it, this is an unlikely, even surreal, relationship. But as Damian's guest, the historian Richard Landes, argues, the two have something in common: millennialism, the belief that some sort of Heaven on Earth, is not only imminent but historically inevitable.

In theory, progressives believe that this transition to a new era will be peaceful; Jihadists, by definition, don't. But, as Landes explains, it's not as simple as that...

Holy Smoke is a series of podcasts where Damian Thompson dissects the most important and controversial topics in world religion, with a range of high profile guests. Click here to find previous episodes.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Holy Smoke, the Spectator's Religion podcast. I'm Damien Thompson.
0:14.0	How do we explain the flirtation, amounting sometimes to a love affair, radical Islam and the Western Progressive Left,
0:24.1	as represented by, for example, Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party.
0:29.9	Professor Richard Landers, an American medieval historian, now based in Jerusalem,
0:35.2	has a fascinating theory about this.
0:38.1	He was co-founder and director of the influential Center for Millennial Studies at Boston University,
0:45.0	which did groundbreaking research into religious and political apocalyptic prophecies
0:50.6	in the period immediately before and after the year 2000. Western liberals, he argues,
0:58.0	have allowed their vision of universal peace and justice to be tainted by the apocalyptic fantasies
1:06.0	which are predicated on the notion of a global Jewish conspiracy.
1:11.9	He joins me today.
1:14.0	Richard Landis, your academic specialty, is millennialism,
1:18.5	which is the study of the belief in, as you put it, in your most recent book,
1:24.5	Heaven on Earth.
1:26.2	The belief that we're moving towards a just, equal, perfect
1:31.7	society is held in common by all sorts of different political and religious movements,
1:37.3	and it can take peaceful, progressive forms, or it can take violent forms. Now, in recent years, we've seen something that baffles a lot of
1:48.0	people, which is what's known as the Red Green Alliance, which is an alliance between the global
1:54.8	progressive left who have always preached, or at least in recent years, have preached equality and peace,
2:02.2	with a special emphasis on peace, peace studies, peace marches, and global jihadism,
2:08.5	which preaches anything but peace. A peace will only come after the infidels have been defeated.
2:14.3	So explaining why a peaceful version of transformation and a violent vision of
	...

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