There’s a parasitic wasp called Glyptapanteles that lays its eggs inside a living caterpillar. The larvae grow slowly, feeding off the flesh and keeping the host alive, rewiring its behaviour and steering it about its business until the larvae are ready to emerge. The caterpillar doesn’t know what’s going on but probably thinks something weird is happening, something a bit off. It has no idea of the seriousness of the situation because it’s now essentially a zombie. It walks, but it isn’t going anywhere of its own choosing – kept alive only insofar as it provides a useful residence and resource centre for a grand project that hasn’t yet declared itself in full.
This is a metaphor for something that’s happening in the West: an ideology inserting itself into progressive institutions that scarcely understand what they’ve got themselves into. But what is this ideology, you ask? Militant Jainism? Radical Quakerism? The horse-and-buggy menace of aggressive Amish expansionism?
Not quite. It’s the other one. You know exactly what I’m talking about. We all do by now.
Political Islam is, in its very nature, an ideology of conquest. That’s not lazy polemical shorthand, by the way. It’s a simple reading of the text. Surah 9:29 – to take one passage among many – instructs believers to fight those who do not embrace Islam “until they pay the tax, willingly submitting, fully humbled”. Sayyid Qutb – the Egyptian theorist whose writing became the intellectual foundation for al-Qaeda, Hamas, and ISIS – built an entire political programme on verses like this. For Qutb, any society not governed by Islamic law was a form of barbarism that Muslims had a duty to overthrow. A growing number of people in our societies seem quite enamoured of the idea, with some making their enthusiasm known in Christmas markets and concert halls across Europe.
Progressives, on the other hand, affect not to know what we’re talking about, deflecting instead to the idea that all grievances deserve a hearing. Sure they do. Except it might be a good idea to first distinguish between a claim that deserves protection and an ideology that would abolish the institution doing the protecting. The refusal of our institutions to make this distinction is the caterpillar meeting the wasp.
And before a progressive reader of this article calls the police over a category error, let me emphasise that I’m talking about political Islam, not Muslims as people, many of whom suffer under its tyrannical application. We’re taking aim at an ideology, at Islamists, not your next-door neighbour, Hamed, who’s lovely and helped fix your burst water pipe that time.
If you struggle with this distinction, you probably won’t much like what’s coming next.
Political Islam is a strange bedfellow for a liberal worldview that values free inquiry, women’s rights and individual liberty. How did the two things find common ground? The answer is simple. Political Islam barged in through liberalism’s front door, the one labelled ‘minority rights’, laid out a prayer mat, and started rearranging the furniture. The owners of the house, condescending to the last, thought it was all rather exotic and fascinating and congratulated themselves on their open-mindedness and tolerance.
I’ve watched political Islam rearrange the furniture for a quarter of a century – actually more, because even as a child I found the Salman Rushdie affair deeply ominous. Why are these people so very cross with a man about his book? – I wondered. This mild-mannered novelist had become enemy number one to a million maniacs calling for his blood. It all seemed a bit extreme. 9/11 confirmed my suspicions. The countless bombings and stabbings since have not changed my view.
While all of this went on, the institutions seemed to experience a different reality entirely – a sort of hallucination the rest of us weren’t in on. Except it was something worse: early-stage zombification, the caterpillar oblivious to what was happening, while the rest of us looked on first in bewilderment, then in disbelief, now in fury.
October 7th was the moment the larvae broke the skin. Hamas murdered, raped, and abducted over a thousand people in a single morning. This didn’t happen in the heat of battle. It wasn’t an accident or tactic of war gone awry. It was a declared statement of what political Islam, in its most coherent and literal form, actually intends. They WhatsApped it in case there was any doubt.
What followed was more revealing than the attack itself. The liberal West’s institutions issued bland statements that treated massacres like weather events and Israel’s military response as the real cause for moral anguish and condemnation, not the savagery that prompted it. This was a zombie’s response to evil.
Then came the student unions in Britain and America, who took official positions supporting the perpetrators within days. In Western capitals, marches calling for the elimination of the world’s only Jewish state enjoyed a police escort – like a pride parade but without the dog masks and S&M gear. When Jewish students were blocked from entering their own university buildings, institutions reached for phrases like “community tensions” – because of course they did.
This is the caterpillar in the final stages. It’s at this point that the metaphor falls a little short, because the caterpillar doesn’t merely submit uselessly to the ideological invasion. It defends it. The caterpillar, fully zombified, actually protects the larvae against other threats – standing guard over the very thing killing it.
This is where we find the institutions today. They have not been conquered so much as converted. The BBC editor who platforms an Islamist and suppresses a gender-critical academic is not confused – or not merely confused. She’s doing what the parasite’s logic demands, and in acquiescing to it, calls it conscience. The institution now treats the parasite’s defence as its own. Any challenge to the ideology reads, to the zombified host, as a personal attack.
Enter the magic word “Islamophobia” – a polysyllabic incantation now treated by NGOs, academic departments, and quangos almost like a legal term, invoked to imply racism. When someone tries to talk plainly about what’s happening following a terrorist incident, the word acts like a smoke alarm, clearing the building before anyone can put out the fire. Every time someone tries to return to the scene, the alarm goes off again. Eventually, people who shouldn’t stop asking questions stop asking questions. The journalists and lawyers, the police and carers stay quiet.
Is-lam-o-pho-bi-a… Like “abracadabra”, except the trick makes the subject disappear instead of the rabbit.
This is an extraordinary achievement. No other political movement, not even Marxism, has made criticism of its ideas equivalent to hatred of people in quite this way. We don’t talk of anti-Marxist hatred. Nobody has ever been cancelled for criticising Mormonism. There is no parliamentary working group on a definition of Protestantophobia. Only political Islam has managed to blend ideology and identity so completely that the liberal systems meant to protect individuals – including Muslims and ex-Muslims – now end up protecting the very doctrine that oppresses them.
The parasitised institution is not motivated by cynicism alone – although that’s part of it. It’s also full of true believers: the DEI administrator and civil servant activist; the BBC editorial executive who genuinely believes she is doing the enlightened thing, i.e., protecting a vulnerable minority (there’s that condescension again).
Practically all of them went to a university, which explains why they cheerfully platform an Islamist who believes women are worth half a man’s testimony in court, but remove a gender-critical academic for creating a hostile environment. That takes serious intellectual manipulation. Imagine the cognitive dissonance, the constipated moral reasoning it must take to frame intimidation of Jewish students as a safeguarding complexity while treating any scrutiny of that intimidation’s ideological roots as potential hate speech.
They cannot see what they are doing because the larvae grow slowly but implacably, feeding off what remains of their critical faculties. The caterpillar never feels a thing.
The solution to all this moral stupor is clarity, which means recognising political Islam as a separate ideology, distinct from Muslims and open to the same scrutiny as Marxism, Christianity, or any other set of ideas. Institutions must follow their original principles: free inquiry, individual rights, equality before the law, and the separation of church and state. These were the architecture of liberal civilisation. They have been quietly gutted and replaced with progressive imitations so convincing that the people running these institutions can no longer tell the difference.
There’s another word for what happens to caterpillars: metamorphosis. We usually think of it as something hopeful – the caterpillar, untroubled by parasites, becomes something sublime. But when a wasp takes over, something different emerges. Not a butterfly, but new wasps, each of which will go on to do the same thing to another caterpillar, and so it goes on.
The metamorphosis is not yet complete, at least not for the West as a whole – too many of us will not submit to it. As for our institutions, the cultural establishment, and the captured political class, their butterfly days are over.
They are the walking dead, mere hatcheries for wasps.
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Clarity and plain speaking on these issues feel more urgent than ever – which is what I'm attempting here. Good-faith arguments and criticism are welcome. If I've got something wrong, factually or otherwise, I want to know. Comments are open to paid subscribers.
This piece is open to all readers for now – I want it to reach as many people as possible, especially those who might be in an early stage of zombification.
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Very powerfully stated. Fundamental Islam has been regrouping since the fall of the Ottoman Empire in the 1920s. Since then the Muslim Brotherhood has been raising money to build mosques far and wide, in order to radicalise new generations of men….probably resulting in the Iranian Revolution. We are now seeing this play out in the West alongside other aspects of jihad- birth numbers, immigration, infiltration of institutions and govts. Radical Islamists regard themselves as being in a state of war until a caliphate is achieved- only then will there be peace. They are compelled to spread Islam in whatever way they can. Moderate Muslims are currently irrelevant. The radicals are now too numerous and our dear leaders are allowing them an open door and for them to proliferate and terrorise us into silence. I’m sure that there are plenty of Muslims who would love Western leaders to do something to stop this spread but suicidal empathy has infected so many westerners like the parasite you mention. The red/ green alliance of leftists and Islamists achieved the Iranian Revolution only for the leftists to be rounded up and executed. They really need to learn some history and I for one don’t intend to lie back and allow my future female family members to end up like the women in Afghanistan.