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Youssef Siher
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The Red-Green Activist: What Youssef Siher's Writings Reveal About "Woke" Islamism
Washington - As Italian authorities filed charges against Italian-Moroccan national Youssef Siher alleging he is the mastermind behind the riots that took place in Milan on October 17th, more information has surfaced about his profile. What immediately becomes apparent is his high degree of integration into Italian society, at least from a professional point of view: a graduate of Milan’s prestigious Statale University, a fellow at a prestigious think tank and employed by an American AI company. At the same time, according to Italian intelligence, Siher had in recent years carved out for himself a leadership role in the most extreme cross sections of the pro-Palestinian movement, including running an organization which the security services identified as close to Hamas.
A preliminary analysis of his writings is quite revealing of his worldview, displaying patterns of activism seen throughout the West. His sophisticated analytical skills, Islamist sympathies, and ability to frame his arguments through progressive lenses come together in his essays and speeches, making him a quintessential example of the so-called Red-Green Alliance.
Siher summed it up when he argued in a 2025 Substack post tellingly titled Islam and Western Lefts: false friends? that “in this historical moment, subaltern peoples are rediscovering, through a very difficult process of decolonizing thought, new tools and methodologies for building epistemologies that draw from their history and culture. One of these elements is Islam itself, which is central to the theorization of the Palestinian anti-colonial struggle and the conceptualization of popular revolution against Arab regimes.”
The only issue that he saw as an obstacle in the alliance between the two political movements is the fact that Western progressives “could understand—without ifs or buts—the Operation Al-Aqsa Flood [the name given by Hamas to the to the October 7 attacks in Israel] for what it was: a revolutionary act of decolonization.”
This fusion of seemingly incompatible ideas---religiously centered Islamism and secular progressivism---is not new and I described it in a 2022 essay titled The Rise of “Woke” Islamism in the West:
Many from this new generation of Islamist activists retain only tenuous formal links to established Islamist structures. Most of these young Islamist actors rarely use Islamist references and if they do so, it tends to be done in somewhat veiled terms. Instead, they speak the language of discrimination, anti-racism, internalized oppression, intersectionality and post-colonial theory. Several of the causes they embrace, such as the environment or lowering university fees, have nothing to do with Islamism.
Others can be seen as overlapping with Islamism’s traditional grievances but are framed in typically progressive terms and with no apparent Islamist undertone. For example, Western Islamists’ recent adherence to calls to “de-colonize” school curricula fit the ideology’s inherent anti-colonial nature but are formulated adopting the phrasing commonly used in progressive circles. By largely shedding Islamist tropes and adopting progressive frames and causes, young Western Islamists have forged strong alliances in mainstream society and have come to be widely accepted in Western establishment circles.
While only the courts will assess his role in what happened on October 17th, Siher’s worldview gives us a glimpse of the growth of a hybrid ideology throughout the West.
*Lorenzo Vidino is director of the Program on Extremism at George Washington University.
