For years, conversations about Islamic antisemitism in the West have usually stayed far too shallow. Most explanations follow familiar patterns: imported prejudice, Middle Eastern politics spilling over into Europe and America, failed integration, or religious extremism carried through immigration. There is truth in all of those explanations, but none of them fully explains what has happened over the last several decades.

Something larger has developed beneath the surface: a growing convergence between certain Islamist moral frameworks and Western ideological systems that increasingly view Jewish continuity, Jewish influence, and especially Jewish sovereignty as obstacles to a morally redeemed world.

What makes this especially important is that the convergence did not emerge in just one form, but rather through at least two overlapping streams. One is the Shiʿi revolutionary model tied closely to the Islamic Republic of Iran, while the other is a Sunni Islamist model that became much more embedded within Western universities, activist spaces, nonprofits, journalism, and progressive political culture. The distinction matters because it shows that Islamic antisemitism in the modern West is not simply inherited hatred frozen in time. It adapts. It learns the moral language of the culture around it, and gradually reframes itself in ways that sound ethical, liberatory, and socially acceptable.

The Shiʿi revolutionary model is more centralized, theological, and openly ideological. Since the Iranian Revolution in 1979, the Islamic Republic has incorporated antisemitism alongside a sacred political vision in the guardianship of the jurist (wilāyat al-faqīh) where political authority is clothed in a kind of suspended sacred legitimacy linked to the Hidden Imam rather than real-world authority that can only arrive with the Mahdi’s return.

This structure is important because it elevates political conflict with Israel beyond ordinary geopolitics. Jewish self-determination itself becomes symbolically intolerable because it constitutes a rival claim to legitimacy within a framework already steeped in narratives of humiliation, restoration, revolutionary redemption and sacred fruition – hence the tendency for Iranian talk about Israel to slip into apocalyptic, cosmic language. Israel is not simply a state rival or an occupying power. The conflict is at once political, civilizational and theological.

Contrastingly, the Iranian revolutionary model has achieved far less mass social reach in the West outside of activist networks, online propaganda spaces, specific academic relationships, and those whose worldview has been significantly shaped by a knowledge of Iranian geopolitics. Despite being one of the Middle East’s most prolific sponsors of Islamist militants, having outfitted Hezbollah with a sophisticated broadcast and communications network, and despite launching an international Arabic-language satellite news channel staffed in large part by Lebanese Hezbollah members in 2007, Iran’s reach in spreading its revolutionary ideals lies far short of that embodied by the Sunni Islamist movements. It flourishes best within highly politicized spaces that already tend toward anti-Western and anti-imperialist ideas; here Iranian revolutionary themes can be seamlessly fused with ideas about colonialism, oppression, humiliation, resistance, and liberation. The........

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