Left wingers just hate the West. And they hate Israel (Jews) because it/they is/are seen as Western/White.
Zohran Mamdani, Third-Worldism, and the Algerian Revolution
"Mamdani’s Third-Worldism
Zohran Mamdani is routinely labeled a socialist or an Islamist sympathizer. The right brands him a radical. The establishment (whatever that vague term encompasses) casts him as a provocateur, a liar who eats with his hands for clout. But these tags overlook the deeper ideological current animating his worldview. Mamdani, in truth, draws from a very distinct left-wing tradition: Third-Worldism, a postcolonial moral project born in the mid-twentieth century that recast politics as a global uprising against Western hegemony.
I recognize this tradition viscerally. As a Moroccan, I grew up amid the lingering echoes of decolonization, which continue to mold perceptions of justice and power, albeit less overtly than in the West. I should say that I’m Berber, and I’ve always felt somewhat detached from that way of thinking. From high school onward, Third World rhetoric permeated everyday discourse on climate change, Palestine, or inequality. The issues evolve, but the lens persists, as it’s fundamentally a moral binary logic that divides the powerful from the powerless.
Mamdani’s speeches evoke that same architecture of thought. His convictions echo the Algerian Revolution’s core belief that the oppressed occupy history’s moral vanguard and that their liberation redeems human dignity. In the United States, a nation without colonies, he adapts this anti-imperial ethos to a society steeped in guilt and redemption narratives. Mamdani repurposes the lexicon of Third-World liberation for American soil, transforming decolonization into a scaffold for moral and political identity.
In general, the perennial political challenge lies in identifying one’s true adversary. Each era masks its conflicts, and ours is even more difficult given the trickeries of language. Anglo-American conservatives, trained to debate policies and principles, are unprepared for this kind of politics. They face a movement that treats moral certainty as innocence or the pursuit of “real justice” and disarms opposition by framing power as compassion or the pursuit of “real common good”. Wokeism was only the beginning, showing that moral language can sustain ideology more effectively than doctrine or policy. Mamdani represents the next stage. He turns this moral framework into political practice, carrying it beyond culture and identity into economics and foreign affairs.
Algerian Revolution and Mamdani’s Language
It is worth examining the language that shaped Zohran Mamdani’s worldview, a language that first crystallized in the late 1950s during the Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962). Thinkers such as Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, and Jean-Paul Sartre transformed anti-colonial resistance into a moral epic, portraying liberation not only as political emancipation but as the rebirth of the human spirit itself.
In the Francophone world, the tradition survived through networks of writers, students, and militants who kept the spirit of decolonization alive after independence. The ethos of the Algerian struggle carried into the May 1968 uprisings in France, when young people turned their anger at De Gaulle’s authority into a broader revolt against capitalism and Europe’s moral exhaustion. Many in Paris saw themselves as heirs to anti-imperial liberation, replacing distant colonial wars with domestic cultural rebellion. From that point on, the language of decolonization merged with the language of personal emancipation and identity, dissolving the boundary between private grievance and global injustice. It was the end of the beginning, the moment the revolutionary gave way to the citizen activist.
Which is why what Mamdani represents is not a new movement but the return of an older sensibility that America itself once resisted and outlasted. His stances on housing, policing, and Palestine channel global anti-imperial heritage into American realities. The landlord morphs into the colonizer, the tenant into the colonized. The NYPD becomes the occupier. New York’s boroughs serve as metaphorical battlegrounds in the decolonization process. It transcends socialism, unmoored from class or ownership, and eludes Islamism, unbound by theocratic aims. Here, Islam serves as an emblem of subjugation with universal resonance, a faith recast as resistance and moral cohesion against Western dominance...
Western intellectuals projected a redemptive, almost spiritual quality onto the struggles of the colonized. For Sartre, the Third World was not just a geopolitical zone. It was the new subject of history, the moral substitute for the exhausted European left. The future of politics. That moralization of politics, where suffering becomes the ultimate source of legitimacy, is precisely what survives in Mamdani’s rhetoric.
The Algerian Revolution, not the Iranian one, is the real origin of this sensibility. The Iranian Revolution unsettled the Western left because it spoke in religious terms, while the Algerian struggle was secular and universal, allowing French and Western radicals to identify with it. Fanon’s idea of violence and Sartre’s defense of it turned Algeria into a moral event that promised redemption for both colonized and colonizer. It deserves closer study because it remains the clearest expression of Third-Worldist politics, uniting anti-imperial struggle with the quest for moral renewal. Today, it is often overlooked, overshadowed by the Iranian Revolution and by newer decolonial theories that ignore its intellectual depth.
Mamdani keeps that dynamic alive in a new setting.
The Jew, the Israeli, and Mamdani’s Third Worldism
But what I find notable is that Zohran Mamdani found his audience at a moment when that voice had returned to prominence. The aftermath of October 7 and the surge of anti-Zionist activism on university campuses created the perfect moral terrain for his message. Across American institutions, decolonization has shifted from academic theory to political instinct, giving young activists an ethical framework for interpreting conflict. Mamdani speaks that language fluently.
He channels the same emotional power that once animated anti-imperial movements, but now within the American political system. In this moral landscape, Israel holds a special place. It stands as the final embodiment of Western domination, a state seen as the successor to the colonial powers that once resisted by the Third World.
During the Algerian War of Independence, that same struggle against Europe often blurred into hostility toward Jewish communities. When independence came in 1962, violence against Jews in Algeria accelerated their mass exodus to France. The revolution’s rhetoric of liberation carried an undercurrent of exclusion that cast the Jew as Europe’s privileged double. Many Algerian Jews were poor and socially marginalized, but they were depicted as embodiments of colonial privilege and moral complicity, seen as sharing in the power that oppressed them.
This pattern extended across the post-colonial world. From the 1960s onward, Third-Worldist movements increasingly framed their politics through anti-Zionism, portraying Israel as the last fortress of Western imperialism and Palestinian resistance as the moral center of a global struggle. Mamdani draws directly from this legacy.
In his politics, Israel becomes the final expression of colonial Europe, and the Jew is recast not as a victim but as a symbol of enduring Western power. Opposition to Israel thus functions as a continuation of decolonization, a moral conflict that transforms the old fight against empire into a permanent contest between innocence and guilt.
Conservatives often fail to grasp these shifts, and Anglo-Americans even more so. They treat Third-Worldism as a policy platform when it operates as a moral creed. Its power lies not in practical solutions but in its claim to moral purity and its ability to turn resentment into virtue. Universities have nurtured this sensibility for decades, replacing historical complexity with ideological certainty and teaching generations to interpret politics through the binary of victim and oppressor. Mamdani’s rise is the political outcome of that education."
Zohran Mamdani, Islam as Language, American Third-Worldism
"“The man who no longer expects miraculous changes either from a
revolution or from an economic plan is not obliged to resign himself to
the unjustifiable. It is because he likes individual human beings,
participates in communities, and respects the truth, that he refuses to
surrender his soul to an abstract ideal of humanity, a tyrannical party,
and an absurd scholasticism. . . . If tolerance is born of doubt, let
us teach everyone to doubt all the models and utopias, to challenge all
the prophets of redemption and the heralds of catastrophe.”
― Raymond Aron, The Opium of the Intellectuals
American Third-Worldism
... Mamdani’s rhetoric on Israel, Islamophobia, 9/11, and minimizing Hamas’ atrocities does not emerge from the American civil-rights tradition, progressive politics, or constitutional thought. It stems from a decolonial vision of the world.
Three foundations sustain Third-Worldism and the political style it produces in the United States.
The first is the belief that imperialism is not an episode in Western history but its permanent feature. As Samir Amin argued in Unequal Development and Eurocentrism, capitalism depends on maintaining the periphery in a state of dependency. Anti-imperialism, therefore, becomes by definition anti-Americanism since the United States is cast as the final form of empire, the axis through which global exploitation flows.
The second is that the bourgeois persists. Third-Worldism inherits the Marxist critique of the bourgeoisie and the capitalist class, but extends it to a civilizational and, often, geopolitical scale. The bourgeoisie becomes synonymous with the West, and capitalism becomes closely associated with Western modernity. Within that frame, the Jew is placed at the symbolic center of the system, identified with finance and cosmopolitan life. This produces a subtler form of antisemitism, and anti-Zionism becomes the ethical language through which anti-capitalism is expressed.
The third is the redefinition of the proletariat. For Marx, the proletariat consisted of industrial workers. For the Third-Worldists, there is a global hierarchy, global struggle, global cause, and therefore the proletariat becomes the collective of the world’s oppressed peoples...
The Future of Third-Worldism
Several forces explain why Third-Worldism is resurging today. I want to highlight three of them:
The first is the institutionalization of its language within universities. I am not opposed to decolonial studies per se. Understanding decolonization is crucial to comprehending global history. Civilizations rise and fall, people migrate, mix, and transform one another, and every culture bears the imprint of conquest, triumph, and exchange. In that abstract sense, the study of decolonization is a study of human history itself. However, what passes for decolonial thought in the modern academy often departs from this universal and honest inquiry. It has evolved from a study of historical processes into a moral enterprise.
Students are encouraged not to analyze but to condemn, approaching history as a courtroom where the past must answer for the present.
The second is the exhaustion of domestic progressive politics. The racial and sexual paradigms that once energized the Democratic coalition have reached saturation. Wokeism, built on individual identity, has failed to deliver material change. Third-Worldism offers a new kind of enthusiasm and energy through its collective, global, and seemingly economic aspects. It shifts the terrain from the personal to the planetary, reintroducing class and empire in a language that feels both righteous and modern.
The third is the expansion of anti-Israelism under a broader ideological canopy. Within the decolonial imagination, Israel is not viewed as a nation among others but as the visible machinery of American power, the frontier through which U.S. hegemony operates. This view inherits a distinctly Marxist logic that interprets nations and conflicts as reflections of economic structures. Zionism, in this sense, represented a bourgeois accommodation to the capitalist order. Within this logic, Israel can achieve peace only when American power collapses, and America can only purify itself if it gives up on its ally in the Middle East, since Israel is portrayed as the instrument of that power rather than an independent state.
Unfortunately, I fear it will spread further.
China and Russia use the language of anti-imperialism, Global-South solidarity, and “multipolarity” to legitimize their ambitions. Moscow presents its wars as struggles against Western domination, while Beijing portrays its rise as a peaceful alternative to U.S. hegemony. Through their media, diplomatic networks, and development programs, both powers now disseminate this narrative across Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America, lending the ideology the support of state sponsorship and a global reach. There is nothing more effective in an asymmetric struggle than convincing the population of another country that it no longer deserves its own success. That is the essence of contemporary ideological warfare. The danger is that this message is gaining traction within the United States itself, carried by intellectuals and activists who echo its language. Figures like Alexander Dugin devoted their lives to this project.
More importantly, anti-Americanism, once the banner of the ultra-radicals, now passes as moral talk under the guise of “decolonization”. Older leftist movements broke apart over class and identity, but Third-Worldism binds them together through enmity. It subtly gathers cultural bitterness and moral righteousness into a single story with a single villain: the United States. It’s a winning talking point for groups that have exhausted all rhetorical options.
On Islam
I found a poll about Mamdani fascinating, as it revealed that he was unpopular among Protestants (36%), Catholics (28%), and Jews (16%), but favored by Muslims (50%) and voters with no religion (71%). One would expect Mamdani to command far greater support among Muslim voters.
Many today label every political expression of Islam as “Islamist,” but that is a mistake. Islam’s fusion of theology and politics gives it an activist edge, but its meaning is always contingent on who invokes it and to what end.
Under a decolonial lens, Islam assumes a different, explicitly ideological function. It is no longer treated as a faith rooted in ritual and law (sharia), but rather as a symbol of protest. In the decolonial framework, Islam is the religion of the oppressed, a universal language through which the marginalized can articulate resistance to empire and hierarchy.
Marx, in his Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, wrote that “religious misery is, on the one hand, the expression of real misery and, on the other hand, the protest against real misery.” Religion, in his view, both reveals the suffering of man and gives that suffering a voice. Mamdani’s version of Islam follows this logic almost perfectly. Faith is a social instrument, a language of protest against injustice rather than a structure of divine truth. Islam, for him, does not reveal God, it reveals oppression.
The irony is that this worldview subverts Islam itself. It is almost amusing to see Gulf Arabs, whose societies still link religion to prosperity, honor, hierarchy, and self-assertion, mocking Mamdani on social media. Their reaction is revealing. They instinctively recognize that what he promotes is a sort of victimhood mentality that is incompatible with a religion that promoted merchants and warriors. Perhaps the Muslims in New York with this sensibility did not vote for Mamdani precisely because of this, and why they voted for Trump 2025.
In a way, what Mamdani does with Islam is similar to what Soviet ideologues once attempted to pursue. They tried to recast Islam as an anti-imperialist ally, a revolutionary theology compatible with socialism and valuable to the state."
