Palestine Saviourism Has Ruined The West
The West’s naïve embrace of ‘liberation’ movements is enabling extremist entryism and eroding its own foundations.
Since 7 October 2023, the pro-Palestinian crowd in the West has been on a tireless loop, branding Israel “genocidal,” “terrorist,” “illegal,” and a “coloniser” state - words that seem to lose all meaning with repetition. They chant in support of a Falastin arabiyah (Ar. “Arab Palestine”) from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, leaving one to wonder where Israel’s seven million Jews are meant to go. Meanwhile, they glorify their “martyrs” (also known as Hamas terrorists) while demanding a “ceasefire now” - though, conveniently, only one side is ever expected to cease anything.
But fear not! This noble brigade of keyboard warriors and jihad enthusiasts is nothing if not egalitarian in its boundless zeal. Having spent months intimidating Jewish communities and turning Western cities into their personal rally grounds, they’ve now set their sights on Muslims with the audacity to think for themselves, because nothing enrages them more than a co-religionist who refuses to bow to the diktats of radically anti-West fanatics.
On 27 February 2025, I attended an event hosted by the student-run Geopolitics Forum at King’s College London, which is to be expected as I am a member of the organising team. The topic was inspiring: “From Conflict to Connection: Israelis and Iranians in Dialogue.” Representing the Iranian side was Faezeh Alavi, a devout Muslim artist born and raised in Iran, who (rather inconveniently for the regime) has risked her own safety to advocate peace between Israel and Iran. By all accounts, the event was set to be an enlightening and thought-provoking discussion. Challenging, perhaps, but nothing that couldn’t be handled in a robust Q&A. Or so one might have naïvely assumed.
Approximately 25 minutes into the event, when Faezeh referred to the ancient Iranian Lion and Sun flag used during the Pahlavi era as “the national flag of Iran”, the event descended into chaos. One of these valiant warriors of the Palestinian resistance rose to her feet, stumbled incoherently through her rehearsed cries of “genocide,” then opted to shriek at a pitch only a banshee could envy - naturally joined by five others in a sinister call-and-repeat spectacle, as if summoning something far less intelligent than themselves.
Attendees were intimidated into leaving, speakers were hounded out of the lecture theatre, and security staff found themselves helpless against this particularly feral display of intolerance. The event could not proceed and later had to be cancelled for safety reasons. What had been advertised as dialogue, was turned into disaster. As footage of the event went viral on social media, Faezeh took to 𝕏 to express her shock and disappointment: “I felt as if I were under Islamic regime occupation again.” Videos of the riot have since been broadcast to audiences numbering in the tens of millions.
Given the orchestrated shrieking and relentless filming by those aligned with the rioters, the tactics on display could have been lifted straight from a Muslim Brotherhood playbook. Hamas, an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, has employed this exact strategy in Palestinian universities, especially against supporters of the (comparatively) less fanatical Fatah faction. Small groups would start the disorder while others gathered information on opponents to use for intimidation or targeted attacks. It is curious that one of the demonstrators has since been exposed as a Salafist extremist of Nigerian descent, who celebrates Sudanese jihadist groups on social media.
This method is by no means new - it’s a well-established pattern of Islamist movements aiming to dominate public discourse through fear, chaos, and surveillance. Yet, as someone who has worked in countering misinformation, propaganda and extremism for several years now, something about this circus act didn’t sit right with me. What was novel in this particular descent into madness was the trigger itself. The fanatics who hijacked the event sat in wait, biding their time until Faezeh uttered something that could, if one squinted hard enough, be construed as disrespectful to a sacred relic of the Islamic regime’s ongoing stranglehold over Iran: the flag.
The flag that Faezeh referenced, once adorned with the Lion and Sun, was supplanted after the 1979 Revolution by an emblem of Islam, with the words “Allāhu akbar” boldly inscribed across its folds. In replacing the centuries-old flag of enlightenment with one of submission, Ayatollah Khomeini was marking the triumph of a new order that erased the symbols of the past in favour of a divine claim to power. That the protestors would choose this particular comment as cause for escalation points to a tacit alliance with elements of the Islamic regime’s Praetorian elites - the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).
What we’re witnessing in our universities and academic institutions is the quiet infiltration of two Islamist extremist factions: the Muslim Brotherhood and the IRGC. While they might be at theological odds across Sunni and Shi’a divides, their objectives are disturbingly aligned: to worm their way into progressive and liberal spaces, cloaked in the rhetoric of tolerance and understanding. Once they’ve gained a foothold, they exploit the blind trust of well-meaning individuals with the sole aim of dismantling the very structures that allowed them in. These groups excel in the most corrosive form of entryism, seeking to impose authoritarian, jihadist theocracies from within our institutions.
All of this is wrapped in the deceptive guise of “liberating Palestine,” though the only thing the West finds itself liberated from is its own democratic freedoms. These are insidiously swapped for values that are not our own, replaced by terrorist ideologies that have since been ruthlessly driven out of the very countries from which they originated.
The crisis of Palestine saviourism goes beyond the grotesque and shrill screeching of arrogant, privileged fools, though there is no shortage of them in the West. It has, however, provided a golden opportunity for Islamist operatives to infest our academic spaces, manipulating them to further the agendas of the world’s most oppressive regimes. This Machiavellian brand of institutional indoctrination is then rewarded by the unholy trinity of faculty, administration, and naïve students, all too eager to play along.
In its quest for tolerance, the West has reached its breaking point. The troubling part of this situation is that it is not merely an isolated event, but part of a growing trend. Across universities and intellectual circles, we are witnessing the subtle but steady erosion of the values that have made the West a beacon of freedom. The infiltration of terror-auxiliaries is not a sudden occurrence but a calculated and sustained effort to reshape public discourse. This is not a fight for justice or liberation - it is a fight for control, and it is being waged from within. The integrity of our academic institutions, the values of liberal democracy, and the very concept of free thought, have all been sacrificed in the name of progressivism.
How much longer will we stand by as this poison seeps deeper into the very foundations of our society? How many more dialogues need to be shut down, activists silenced, and ordinary people violently intimidated, before the West finally wakes up to the catastrophic failures it has enabled for decades? The writing is on the wall: if we in the West do not apply maximum pressure to this extremist poison, there will be no West left to defend.