The Gaza war started by Hamas is not confined to the Middle East. Firing lines were mobilised almost immediately on streets across the world in a battleground of orchestrated rallies. Protestors cheered Hamas’ barbaric attack on Israel that claimed an equivalent of 40,000 Americans lost compared with 3,000 in 9/11.

Effectively supporting a proscribed genocidal terrorist organisation, ‘pro-Palestine’ demonstrators have included radical Islamists, the woke left, antisemites and fellow travellers. Many well-meaning marchers would be unaware how Hamas cynically leverages the plight of Gazan Palestinians for manipulation of Western public opinion, or how Iran seeks to exploit Gazans for ‘transformation’ of the world order.

Rapid erasure of Hamas’ medieval savagery from the public sphere concealed the militia’s radical Islamism that includes antisemitic libels, and determination ‘to destroy Israel and kill Jews’. Through ‘Jihad of the Sword’, Israel would be replaced with a ‘theocratic state based on Islamic law’.

The scourge of radical Islamism or political Islam is not confined to Israel, and threatens to spill over with the rallies.

Unlike the Sunni extremists of 9/11 and Isis, Iran’s Shia proxies dominate today. As an offshoot of the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood, and now supported by Iran, Hamas bodes ill as a new blend of Sunni and Shia terrorism.

The peril of radical Islamism and its resurgence requires urgent review by Western governments that have consistently appeased extremists, overlooked their ascendancy and shelved counterterrorism measures.

By disregarding the history of political Islam and its leftist links, governments were also caught unprepared for the vast red-green alliance. Moreover, by ignoring the radical Islamism and antisemitism that underpins the Arab Israeli conflict, political leaders have lacked insight into its roots.

Male chauvinist extremists and far-left feminists would seem strange bedfellows, except for woke identity politics and shared aims to dismantle the West in favour of a utopian, totalitarian, borderless global collective. Antisemitism and anti-Zionism are integral to the mix. The red-green  alliance is further strengthened by Western universities captured by neo-Marxist ideology that promotes flexible truth and divides the world into oppressors and oppressed.

Militant Islam and extremism date to the early period of Islamic history. After the Ottoman Empire’s demise in 1922, Muslim soul-searching inspired a retrograde Islamic revival that advocated politicised Islam with aggressive jihad and anti-Westernisation in pursuit of a theocratic Islamic state or caliphate. Age-old antisemitism absorbed within the ideology was intensified, particularly for Palestinian Arabs, by the Nazi collaborator Haj Amin al-Husseini, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem.

Living in Muslim lands for centuries, Jews (and Christians) had already endured  the dhimmi status of second-class citizens subject to the jizya tax and restrictions.

The modern wave of radical Islamism arrived with Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini, but he also adopted leftist doctrines of Ali Shariati, the Islamo-Marxist theorist of the 1979 Shia revolution.

In the same year, seizure of the Great Mosque in Mecca by rogue Saudi extremists led to momentous change. The Saudi monarchy empowered the Islamist Wahhabi clergy, stepping up extremist rivalry between Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shia Iran for religious supremacy in the Muslim world.

More recently, the Saudis renounced extremism, instituted modernising reforms, and contemplated joining the Abraham Accords, already signed between Israel and the UAE, Bahrain and Morocco.

In contrast, Iran remains implacably opposed to the Accords and Israel’s existence, promoting Holocaust denial, antisemitic conspiracy theories and accusations of Israeli colonialism. Ironically, Iran is itself the arch imperialist and terror-master, menacing regional states and American assets via proxy satellite militias: Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza, the Houthis in Yemen, and  Popular Mobilisation Units in Iraq.

Yet the Biden Administration has enhanced Iran’s hegemonic regional and global ambitions through sanctions waivers and reduced enforcement of sanctions for oil exports, enabling Iran to increase annual funding for Hamas more than threefold in the past year.

Is the Palestinian Authority (PA) a radical Islamist organisation? Although paying lip service to recognition of Israel, the PA is largely rejectionist, incites violence and encourages terrorism by ‘pay for slay’ – paying stipends to Palestinians who kill Israelis, and to families of ‘martyrs’.

Like radical Islamists, the PA opposes a negotiated peace with Israel, because the Arab Israeli conflict is essentially a standoff between the Jewish people’s objective to preserve their state and the Palestinians’ objective to destroy it, mainly driven by extremist dogma. The deadlock explains the Palestinians’ rejection of multiple offers of statehood since 1938.

This impasse was broken by the Abraham Accords which marginalised Hamas. Moves by Saudi Arabia to normalise relations with Israel may have influenced the timing of the 7 October attack.

Since the start of the war, imams in the UK have quoted Koranic verses that incite violence, while the Islamist ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood which inspired Al-Qaeda and Isis pervades key UK Muslim organisations. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak deplored the ‘mob rule’ that was ‘replacing democracy’, and fearing for the safety of politicians increasingly at risk, called for new laws to combat extremism.

Conservative MP Mike Freer, who represented a mainly Jewish area, retired in February after serious threats, verbal abuse and an arson attack on his office. But UK politicians have been endangered for years, including Conservative MP David Amess, who was murdered by an Islamic State follower in 2021.

Like the protesters cheering for Israel’s demise, extremist groups around the world are energised, and Al-Qaeda and Isis have instructed supporters to attack the US and Israel.

After the terrorist attack of 9/11, the discourse on radical Islamism was often lost in the impulse for self-blame, appeasement and failure to address the ideology.

In current appeasement mode, the Biden administration is calling for a change of leadership in Israel instead of Hamas or Iran, and demanding a ceasefire by Israel rather than pressing Hamas to surrender and free the hostages to end the war.

While autocratic powers are circling to destabilise the West, our leaders must find the courage to condemn Hamas, stop glossing over Hamas’ radical Islamism and war crimes, and resolutely confront extremist ideology and the woke left.

In this crucible of brutality, malicious antisemitism and malign activism against the West, Israel battles alone on the front lines of our culture and civilisation.