There seems to currently be a morbid fixation with Muslims in the West in which they are seen as a mortal danger to society. I am not just referring to Donald Trump who is using Islam and Muslims as a convenient topic to garner favour and support from amongst Republican voters in the US. One has come to expect such a right-winger to indulge in anti-Muslim rhetoric for political gain. The fact that he seems to be succeeding with a sector of the American public is extremely worrying. For Trump the Muslims have rhetorically speaking become the new communists in a new McCarthyism with a twist wherein the suppression of dissent is not the goal but rather the manufacturing of a new kind of assent.

But how can we interpret the same kind of rhetoric from such left-wing politicians in Europe as the Czech President Milos Zeman? In a speech in November last year Zeman described the arrival of high numbers of Syrian refugees across the Mediterranean as ‘an organised invasion and not a spontaneous movement of refugees’ in a fit of paranoia accusing the Muslim Brotherhood of being behind this invasion with the aim of controlling Europe! Trump does not want Muslims to enter the US. Zeman wants to repel them from Europe as one would an invading force; and in this he is similar to Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban who has invoked memories of the past to justify racism of the present.

Zeman revisited this topic in his Christmas message to the Czech people claiming this time that Muslims are not fit for incorporation into Europe because of their different culture: ‘Let them [Muslims] have their culture in their countries and not take it to Europe’ he is quoted as saying ignoring the fact that not all Syrian refugees are Muslim. Left wing President Zeman’s hatred for Muslim immigrants in Europe has led him to ‘join forces’ with far-right politicians and paramilitaries by voicing his opposition to the presence of Muslims in his country and Europe at large.

It seems that Muslims have been made into the glue that unites odd bed fellows on the right and left of politics in the West. When a far-right politician like Trump finds common cause with a left-wing politician like Zeman in countries that are far apart in their history and outlook then we must surely conclude that politics has gone off the rails. The tragedy in all of this is that Zeman a left-winger and atheist does not seem to care about his similarity to Trump the right-winger and believer in God. Nor does Zeman seem to be aware that his own people are treated as outsiders and job-snatchers by the old established Western European countries.

Here we have a case of transitive ethnophobia: the marginal European believes that he must take on the racism of the core European to become a bona fide European. Zeman seems to think he has to prove himself by becoming more European than he imagines Europe to be: a racist and Muslim-bashing place.

It is not surprising that he evinced a similar stance towards Greece during its recent economic crisis which he thought should be forced to exit the European Union making this a condition for his country to join the Euro.

This stance of becoming more Catholic than the Pope so to speak is a mirror image of the ethnic and religious racism of the extremist Islamist ideologies that Zeman we assume wants to combat and defeat.

The irony is that by copying his enemy Zeman validates that enemy. In fact Zeman goes further: he adopts a stance that is little different from that of his enemy. The enemy and counter-enemy become one and the same and in spite of their enmity to each other they both need each other. They both feed on each other. Instead of emerging as mortal enemies both the enemy and counter-enemy in fact transmute into mortal friends.

Yasir Suleiman (University of Cambridge and the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies)