Having examined the reasons why a Catholic should not feel “obliged”—whether for theological or pragmatic reasons—to support the Zionist cause, we now turn to the other side of the coin: the reasons why a Catholic should not feel morally compelled to support the opposing cause either, namely the Palestinian one. As previously noted, polarization is a perspectival illusion, media-driven for geopolitical purposes. In this regard, it must be acknowledged that the Holy See has consistently maintained a prudent stance of equidistance in recent years.

We reiterate in this article the caveat regarding the ultimate purpose of these studies. The aim here is to distinguish between individuals and the state apparatuses that claim to represent them. My analysis does not seek to target either the Jewish or the Arab people, but rather, to examine the ideological and political structures that fuel the conflict. I therefore express my deepest solidarity with all innocent victims—Jews, Arabs, Christians, and others—who have suffered violence, abuse, or exploitation, regardless of the motivations behind such acts.

The critique expressed here is directed at political and theological views that are incompatible with Catholic doctrine, not at the dignity of individuals or their natural right to life and the pursuit of truth. Any interpretation that blurs this distinction between people and ideological structures misrepresents the meaning of my words.

It is important to make a clarification closely related to the subject of our analysis. When referring to the Palestinian people, one does not speak exclusively of the Sunni Muslim majority but also of the Arab Christian minority living in both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. This aspect helps explain why many Catholics choose to actively support the Palestinian cause.    

However, it is essential to understand that, beyond the legitimate humanitarian initiatives that individuals may undertake, the Palestinian cause is part of a broader geopolitical project. This project, developed primarily in Europe and to some extent in the United States, is based on a strategic and functional alliance between Marxist Left movements and political Islam.

It is an alliance that appears contradictory, given that the political Left—at least in the West—is a conglomerate of more or less divergent ideologies (though in reality, the Left tends to exhibit far greater homogeneity and conformity of thought than the Right, understood here as the spectrum of liberal-conservative ideologies). These ideologies are based on supposed values such as the primacy of the state over the individual and the public sector over the private one (statism), and the exclusion of religion from public life (secularism). On the other hand, political Islam seeks to impose a socio-legal vision of allegedly divine origin across the world—namely, sharia.

Sharia is the body of Islamic legal norms based on the Koran and the tradition (sunna) of Muhammad. The way in which sharia is concretely applied in the daily life of Islamic societies varies depending on the school of thought, but it remains a broadly shared concept. Shiite Muslims, for example, also apply sharia, though in a different manner from Sunni Muslims—who, it should be noted, make up the vast majority of the Islamic world (approximately 85–90 percent).

The recognition of Palestine by numerous European states—particularly where left-wing governments are in power—should primarily be understood in light of an internal issue of political consensus. Western leftism, lacking any transcendent reference point and therefore compelled to adapt its doctrine to historical contingencies, interprets every political issue through a utilitarian rather than truth-based lens. Within it, there is no stable principle, but rather, a constant oscillation between what is expedient and what allows for the perpetuation of its cultural hegemony.

In this specific case, support for the Palestinian cause serves a dual purpose: on one hand, to capture the growing support of Islamic populations residing in Europe; on the other, to perpetuate the Third-Worldist and anti-colonial narrative that remains one of the last ideological relics of the post-Marxist Left.

This convergence of interests explains why governments and parties that are nominally secular and progressive lend, at least symbolically, their support to movements inspired by a totalizing religious and legal vision such as political Islam. At its core, this is a strategic alliance. The Left needs Islam as a new “international proletariat”—an oppressed subject that legitimizes its moral struggle and restores its revolutionary identity. Islam, in turn, finds in Western progressivism a useful vehicle to advance culturally and demographically within a spiritually disarmed Europe.

Here we reach the deepest core of the issue: if current demographic trends are not reversed, Europe is destined—within the next thirty years, perhaps even sooner—to become a continent with a Muslim majority not through military conquest but through spiritual implosion. Where jihad in the military sense has historically failed, demographic replacement jihad is proving effective. The collapse in birth rates makes an anthropological shift inevitable—one that the Left, rather than resisting, facilitates and accelerates, convinced it will yield ideological and electoral gains. Yet this is a short-term benefit that will ultimately prove destructive in the long run. Here we reach the deepest core of the issue: if current demographic trends are not reversed, Europe is destined to become a continent with a Muslim majority not through military conquest but through spiritual implosion. Tweet This

In this context, it is important to distinguish between the Left as an ideological whole and the so-called “Wokeism,” which represents a specific subset—almost a terminal metastasis. While traditional Leftism at least maintained a dialectical logic and a notion of social justice (albeit flawed), Wokeism is a purely revolutionary accelerator: a subculture lacking internal coherence, built on the systematic destruction of all forms of identity which it views as harmful cultural constructs.

Paradoxically, it is precisely within the woke world that political Islam today finds an unexpected foothold. The Palestinian cause is thus reinterpreted not as a geopolitical issue but as a symbolic struggle against the oppressive West, the “white male,” and “Christian civilization.” This convergence does not stem from spiritual affinities but from a shared adversary: the natural and Christian order of things.

The Alliance Between Socialism and Islam

Although Socialism and Islam operate on different planes—the former being secular and immanentist, the latter religious and theocratic—they nonetheless share a natural affinity, which can be understood from two perspectives: historical and juridical.

From a historical perspective, both emerge as collectivist reactions to a perceived moral and social disorder. Socialism seeks to regenerate society through the redistribution of wealth and the standardization of behavior, aiming for an artificial equality imposed by the State; political Islam, for its part, strives to unify humanity under a single religious law—sharia—which governs every aspect of private and public life. In both cases, the individual is conceived as a functional element of a dominant social class—the ummah in the Islamic world, the State in the socialist one —where goodness does not arise from freedom ordered toward truth but from unconditional obedience to the established order.

It is interesting to note, among other things, that modern statism—particularly in its tax-funded form—began to develop between the 14th and 16th centuries, partly due to the emulation of Muslim political models and in response to pressures, especially military ones, coming from the East.

From a juridical perspective, the affinity between the two worlds is even more evident. In both visions, goodness is imposed primarily through coercion rather than persuasion. Both Socialism and political Islam share, albeit from different standpoints, a legal positivist outlook: for the former, rooted in humanist origins; for the latter, based on a theocratic and revealed foundation. Sharia—which conflates religious precept and civil norm—does not recognize the distinction between law and morality, between internal and external forum, between sin and crime. As a result, Muslim jurists struggle to conceptually separate moral authority from civil power, tending to merge them into a single governing body.

It is precisely this fusion that has made Islam particularly receptive to modern statist models. The modern State, founded upon and legitimized by itself, appears “compatible” with Islamic legal sensibilities, as do the various socialist and communist ideologies that are its direct offspring. It is therefore no surprise that the Islamic world has developed forms of Islamic socialism, in which class struggle overlaps with religious struggle: one need only think of Gaddafi’s Green Book or the Baʿath Party in Syria and Iraq. Nor is it surprising to see the emergence in Europe of parties that openly identify as both Marxist and Islamic.

The distinction between moral authority and civil power is one of Catholicism’s great (and often forgotten) achievements—a living legacy of the Greek, Roman, and Germanic worlds that the Church has successfully integrated and baptized. It is precisely this distinction—without separation—that has allowed the Church to safeguard the libertas Ecclesiae: an inner and juridical freedom from all earthly power, founded on revealed truth and defended through concrete means, including private property and economic independence. To explore the issue from a geopolitical perspective, I discussed it here.

The Alliance Between Wokeism and Islam  

The first and most evident point of convergence between Wokeism and political Islam is their deep aversion to Christianity. Both perceive it as the main obstacle to the full realization of their anthropological project, especially in its Catholic form: the woke see it as the root of “patriarchy,” “moral colonialism,” and the dominant value-based distinction between good and evil (which influences even those who are not Christian); Islamists view Christianity as a denial of monotheism, a degeneration of the worship of Allah, even a blasphemy in asserting the union of human and divine nature in Jesus.

In this context, the schizophrenia of “pro-Palestinian” Catholics becomes evident: they mobilize to defend a cause largely hostile to the faith they profess, deluding themselves into believing that the Islamic world respects Christianity. In reality, Islamic tolerance is only superficial and serves the purpose of daʿwah, the proselytizing strategy aimed at the gradual expansion of Islam in non-Islamic societies. Where Christianity is a minority, it is “tolerated”; where it becomes a threat, it is repressed. The only form of Christianity Islam accepts is that reduced to a “religion of the Book”—a minority that can exist only if it pays, cannot evangelize, and cannot worship publicly, thus effectively stripped of its Sacraments. It is a hollowed-out Christianity, able to survive only in a society pacified through submission. In this sense, the dual etymology of the word islām is telling, as it means both “submission” and “peace.”

A second point of convergence is hatred toward Judaism. In the Islamic world, this hatred has genetic roots—that is, theological and identity-based: Islam was born as a synthesis, transcendence, and simultaneous negation of Judaism and Christianity, both considered deviations from Muhammad’s “pure revelation.” The figure of Abraham is adopted as an Islamic patriarch, and Israel is perceived as a historical and religious usurpation. Hence the anti-Israeli hatred, which is less political than eschatological in nature. 

In the woke world, anti-Semitism disguises itself as anti-Zionism and is justified through the rhetoric of oppressor versus oppressed, but the logic is the same: to demonize Judaism as the root of Western civilization and “moral monotheism.” Therefore, woke anti-Zionism is quite different from the anti-Zionism—if the term even applies—of Traditional Catholicism, which I discussed in my previous contribution.

The paradox is that both—woke activists and Islamists—share the same enemy: the natural moral law, perfected in Mosaic Revelation and inherited by Christian Western civilization, which has been sublimated through the process of secularization.

Another point of contact is the hatred of dissent. Both systems view free discussion as a threat to the ideological order they seek to impose. Wokeism demonizes dissent through pathologization—or more precisely, the criminalization —of opposing thought. Those who do not conform to inclusive language or new gender orthodoxies are labeled as mentally unstable or ill—or, more commonly, as dangerous, extremist, or prone to violence. Thus, a true inversion of reality takes place.

Political Islam, for its part, prohibits criticism and dissent through blasphemy laws and punishes free thought as an offense against God, in extreme cases even resorting to the physical elimination of apostates. The result is the same: dialogue is replaced by coercion, logic by violence. Both systems, by their very nature, produce episodes of intolerance and fanaticism because they deny the legitimacy of intelligence in its pursuit of truth.

Another point of convergence—paradoxical, yet telling—concerns women. Wokeism, after decades of idolizing female emancipation, now denies the biological definition of woman, understood as the female of the human species with an XX genotype. In woke thought, the concept of woman (as with man, in the masculine sense) becomes fluid: it is based on subjective perception, independent of biological reality and genitality. Wokeism, contradicting scientific evidence, not only distinguishes but separates genitality, gender identity, and sexual orientation, treating them as autonomous variables. In doing so, it claims the possibility of generating and normalizing hundreds of combinations among them, denying any stable reference to nature, which is thus rejected. Nature does not exist—only culture.

Political Islam, by contrast, reduces women to property and function, denying them legal autonomy and public identity. In both cases, we witness the destruction of feminine essence: the woke dissolve womanhood into gender fluidity; Islamists imprison it in the role of instrument. In the Islamic world, the “male” is dominant —not in the sense of Christian patriarchy, which sees fatherhood as a moral authority ordered toward the common good and service to wife and children, analogous to Christ offering Himself on the Cross for the Church, His bride—but in the sense of machismo: physical and proprietary power, the privilege of the man as male at the genital level. Woman is not a subject but an object of law.

For this reason as well, consistent Islamists harbor a deep aversion toward Catholicism. In the Catholic veneration of Mary, they see a complete reversal of their conception of womanhood. Mary is the holiest of all creatures not because she is perfectly submissive in a servile sense but because she is free in her obedience. In Islamic language, ḥarām refers to what is forbidden or untouchable; in Christian language, Mary is “all holy” (Panaghía), but her holiness and purity do not exclude her from the world—they redeem it. Mary is Co-redemptrix, the gateway to Christ’s salvation. This ontological difference explains the irreducible distance between Christianity and Islam.

Surah XIX of the Koran, aptly named Maryam, devotes considerable attention to the figure of Mary, mother of ʿĪsā (Jesus). At first glance, it might appear to be a recognition of the Virgin’s holiness; but upon closer examination, a profoundly different image emerges from that revealed by Christianity.  

In the Koranic account, Mary is portrayed as the perfect example of submission (islām) to the divine will, not as a free collaborator in the salvific plan. Her greatness does not lie in the fullness of grace, and even less in divine motherhood —concepts absent from the Koran—but rather in her separation and passive, instrumental obedience to God’s command.

Moreover, the Koranic text reflects the juridical-moral conception typical of Islam: Mary is honored not because she speaks, teaches, or leads, but because she accepts and remains silent. Her virtue is interpreted in a negative sense—as the absence of subjectivity—rather than in a positive one, as being full of grace, free from original sin, and active in charity.

Finally, both Wokeism and political Islam share a hatred of so-called “Western colonization.” The woke see it as the root of all historical evils: racism, slavery, patriarchy, Christianity itself, and so-called cultural appropriations. Islamists, on the other hand, interpret it as a cultural and religious usurpation by Christian Western civilization over Muslim territories.  

Both use the same vocabulary—“decolonize,” “liberate,” “resist”—for opposing yet converging ends: to dismantle Western civilization. What they both despise is not Europe in a geographical sense but Europe in a spiritual sense—that is, the Greek, Roman, Germanic, and Catholic culture.

The woke seek to refound the West in a post-constructivist sense, denying all roots and essence; Islamists aim to replace it with sharia—two projects that appear incompatible yet are, in fact, complementary in their denial of the truth about God and man. Both destroy what remains of the natural order—even before the Christian one—preparing the ground for chaos from which they hope to establish a new form of domination.

A Merely Instrumental Alliance 

The alliance between Wokeism and political Islam is purely instrumental and, by its very nature, destined to dissolve. These two worlds share a common enemy—Christian civilization and the natural order—but they radically diverge on the ultimate purpose of humanity and society.

Wokeism denies any stable truth, dissolves identities, abolishes nature, and replaces Good with subjective perception. Its goal is the perpetual self-construction of the individual, without limits or law. It is, in effect, the antechamber to a transhumanist society. Political Islam, on the other hand, is a form of totalitarianism, albeit theocratic: it asserts an absolute, immutable order founded on sharia, in which the individual has no autonomy, only the duty of submission.

Where Wokeism preaches the absence of truth, Islam imposes a monolithic one; where Wokeism dissolves the masculine and feminine, Islam crystallizes them into rigid, hierarchical roles. Their temporary convergence thus arises not from a communion of principles but from a shared aversion. Both seek to dismantle the Christian roots of the West: the recognition of objective truth, natural law, and a freedom ordered toward the good.

Once the common enemy is eliminated, the two visions inevitably collide. The woke world can never accept the idea of a God who imposes a law external to the self; Islam can never tolerate a system that justifies homosexuality (among other things).

Thus, what today appears to be an anti-imperialist or anti-colonial alliance is, in reality, a heterogenesis of ends: two revolutions that, once the Christian edifice is torn down, will ultimately destroy each other. Only the Catholic vision—which reconciles and perfects freedom and truth, nature and grace, law and love—can prevent the West from falling into either transhumanist utopianism or sterile Islamic submission.