Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

Podcast: How radical Islam taught the progressive Left to blame the Jews

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 my 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…

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