This is Labour's definition of patriotism. A nation dedicated to self-abasement, restitution, reparations, apology, self-annihilation. The British Museum, testimony to our commitment to science, knowledge, exploration and humanity at large, is turned into something sordid.

OJ and @AaronBastani have - typically - now blundered into a trap of their own making here. Having vested so much political capital in Israel and the Joos as being an evil settler-colonialist regime, what is the Left going to say to the working classes of European countries that now have c. 15-20% of their population born abroad? The Left have granted blood-and-soil nationalism for the Palestinians but no one else. How long did they think people would allow them to set the terms of what constitutes legitimate blood-and-soil nationalism and bad blood-and-soil nationalism?

Are these guys not Blackshirts, literally dressed all in black, enforcing blasphemy laws?

The Man Who Was Friday: Global Islamism after Unipolarity americanaffairsjournal.org/2… In advance of the 25th anniversary of 9/11, I’ve had a piece published in American Affairs providing an overview of the Global War on Terror, and the prospects for jihadism, political Islam and global Islam itself in an era of US decline. The question behind the piece is simple – what happens to jihadism, Islamism and global Islam as US leadership of the international system ends? 9/11 happened at the peak of US unipolarity. Since then the US has obviously declined, but this has had little if anything to do with the efforts of Al Qaeda or any other Islamist or jihadi organisation. What will Islamists do when the Great Satan becomes the Little Satan? And why is Islamism declining in its historic core, the Arab Middle East? The paradox, I argue, is that Western decline and Islamist decline are going to go in hand in hand. This is because both Islamism and global Islam itself – at least as they emerged since the 1970s – are predicated on the rise of US unipolar hegemony. Now, they will decline together. The inter-relationship between US power and Islamism / jihadism goes far beyond the well-documented and well-established links between the CIA and jihadism, stretching all the way back to the Afghan war in the 1980s, in which the US armed jihadis to fight its wars, a policy that continued right through the 1990s across the Balkans. This alliance broke down with the attacks of 9/11, before being restored in the 2010s as part of the NATO effort to oust Arab nationalist regimes in Libya and Syria. Beyond the ebb and flow of the US-Islamist alliance, I argue that the spread of jihadism and the spread of global Islam itself was rooted in US-led hyper-globalisation. This reflected the spread of new communications technology, open borders and financialization. More importantly, globalisation was predicated on suppressing the nation-state and with it, national sources of political obligation and loyalty that might have substituted Islamic radicalism with national solidarities. This has critically undermined states in the post-colonial world, where states were already weak. Paradoxically, the Ummah – the transnational Islamic community of believers – could flourish in unipolarity because there was a single overarching centre of political authority – the US itself. Jihadis, blue helmets and aid workers were all different prongs of the same political order of cosmopolitan globalization. Alongside UN protectorates, aid corridors defended by multinational troops, no fly zones policed by NATO bombers, and refugee camps abandoned by governments to NGO rule, we had the development of insurgent Islamic emirates in regions battered by war and military interventions. Jihadism took advantage of state failure everywhere, not only in peripheral areas such as the Horn of Africa and the Sahel but in the West too. Brussels, capital of the transnational European Union, became one of the epicentres of jihadi atrocities in Europe. With lawless districts overseen by hapless security forces, the central state in Belgium had been deliberately decentralised and disorganised by complex multilayered administrations intended to devolve power to Belgium’s sub-national groups and administrative fiefdoms over the course of decades. With the central state crushed between the transnational bureaucracy above and devolved sub-national administrations below, jihadis found they could operate as easily in Brussels as in Bamako. As indicated by failure of the Belgian state at the very political core of the European Union, globalization complemented the post-political vision of the Ummah because both were predicated on repressing the sovereign state as a mediating institution for the purposes of political representation and resolving conflicting social interests. As US supremacy declines, geopolitical pluralism returns, and the globalised world economy cracks up, so too the unipolar Ummah will begin to buckle and come under strain. I argue that the signs of that are already all around us. As the West crumbles as a geopolitical entity, so too Islamic radicals will be deprived of being able to blame a palpably weakened West for the challenges besetting the Middle East and the wider Islamic world. Back when Al Qaeda attacked London’s mass transit system on July 7 2005, their deputy leader Ayman al-Zawahiri denounced British Prime Minister Tony Blair as a leader of the ‘crusader empire.’ While British forces were embroiled alongside US forces in Iraq, the day of the attack was chosen to coincide with Britain presiding over the G8 summit, as well as being the first day that Britain assumed the rotating six-month presidency of the European Union, and when Britain was announced to host the 2008 Olympics. In short, the day of the jihadi attacks on the British capital was the peak of early twenty-first century globalist Britain, when Britain crowned a nexus of overlapping transnational institutions, commitments and status. It is hard to imagine any British citizen holding Britain in as high esteem today as the jihadis did back then; perhaps radical Islamists and jihadis are the last to still believe in Western greatness as it exonerates them of their own victimization. Today, the Islamic dialectic of fascination and repulsion with Western life will decline alongside the decline in Western cohesion and productivity, at the same time as interallied feuding will make it more difficult to attribute the malignant failures of the modern Middle East on the imperialism and cultural contamination of a Western foil that no longer exists. In the West, Islamopopulism is the rearguard manoeuvre in which the Left seeks support among Muslim voters to substitute for the defection of working class voters to national-populist parties. How long this electoral alliance stays in place remains to be seen. The question for us all is whether the nations that are left behind after the withdrawal of the US imperium can build functioning and independent institutions for the purposes of collective self-government and political order. This is an overview of the argument; it is developed at greater length in the piece, with more historical evidence and elaboration concerning the relationship between global Islam, Islamism, jihadism, the role of communism, neoliberalism, the failure of nation-building and the Global War on Terror, the works of Olivier Roy, Gilles Kepel and Faisal Devji (among others), as well as Middle Eastern history and scans of the wider Islamic world. Comments welcome; this is a debate that will continue as we transition to a multipolar world.