The Moroccan man recently arrested by the Italian police for coordinating the riots in Milan and other Italian cities on 17 October published a guide in January on how to lay the groundwork for a revolution against the West.
In his commentary on Tuesday, Giulio Meotti refers directly to this guide, which Youssef Siher posted on his Substack on 26 January 2026.
In short, the method consists of urging the diasporas of non-Westerners living in major Western cities not to assimilate, but to remain autonomous, to train themselves for resistance and to look to their countries of origin for inspiration.
Siher writes in an academic code of language in which he conceals the fact that this is about an Islamic revolution intended to defeat the West as we know it, but this picture becomes clear in the light of his activities and other writings.
Let us take a closer look at how well he packages his message. Even the headline serves to camouflage what he really means: ‘Why the Western Left will not carry out a revolution’. OK, reassuring, one might think.
In a flood of words, Siher lets it be known that the West should be crushed, but that the Left will not be able to do such a thing, for it is, after all, Western itself:
The disruption of the established order based on Western imperialism cannot be thought of as a simple political event or as the outcome of a reformist dynamic within the imperialist system itself. It presupposes, first and foremost, a deeper fracture: an ontological rupture, that is, a radical questioning of the way in which the West—with its structures, institutions, left-wing parties, trade unions, and revolutionary movements—conceives of itself, the world, and its position of dominance within it. However, such an ontological rupture is unthinkable without a prior epistemological revolution capable of dismantling the cognitive, moral, and political mechanisms through which the West has historically legitimized its power.
The structural error of much of the contemporary Western left lies precisely in the illusion that the revolutionary subject can emerge spontaneously from the very heart of the societies that have produced and benefited from imperialism. To expect those who derive material, symbolic, and geopolitical advantage from a system of domination to generate within themselves a subjectivity radically antagonistic to that system is to adopt a stance that is, at best, negatively utopian and, at worst, intrinsically reformist. This is not to deny in the abstract the possibility of a revolutionary consciousness in the West, but to recognize that, in order to become hegemonic and mass-based, it would have to break with the very essence of Western privilege—individual, class, and systemic. It is precisely this contradiction that makes such a prospect extremely fragile.
Siher thus paints a portrait of the West as an empire. And what has this empire done, in Siher’s view? Acquired colonies which it exploits. So now it is time for revenge. And since Israel is part of the West, the Palestinians become part of the revolutionary movement. The Western left is itself too lax and corrupt to take part in it:
The Palestinian question is emblematic of this impasse. The lack of support—or strongly conditioned support—for Palestinian resistance, particularly in its forms incompatible with Western liberal political discourse, has thrown Western leftists into crisis, revealing their structural limitations. With few exceptions, they have shown an inability to understand resistance as a phenomenon historically situated within a colonial and imperialist context, preferring moral, legal, or cultural filters that ultimately neutralize the radical scope of the struggle. This attitude has not only produced a rift between the Western left and subaltern peoples, but has also prevented the construction of real revolutionary premises in the West itself. Palestine, from this point of view, is not an exception, but a mirror.
People from what Siher perceives as ‘the Western colonies’ who have moved to the West are thus referred to by him as ‘subordinate’. Yet it is these people who will defeat the West, and the left along with it:
It follows that when revolution comes, it will not be a revolution of the West, but a revolution against the West—and, therefore, inevitably against all its components, namely its structures, its institutions, its left-wing parties, its trade unions, and its revolutionary movements—as we know it today: against its epistemic centrality, against its abstract universalism, against its role as the normative center of the world. This does not imply a simple geographical reversal of the conflict, but a profound redefinition of the historical subjects of transformation.
The West has already imported such actors; they harbour a fierce grudge against our civilisation, and this motivates them to destroy us:
In this context, the diasporas of subaltern peoples, located in the heart of imperial metropolises, embody one of the most profound and potentially subversive structural contradictions of the Western order. Diasporas are themselves a direct product of imperialism: forced migrations, economic exiles, political and military displacements. Precisely for this reason, they occupy a contradictory but potentially explosive position: they live in the heart of imperial metropolises, but they carry with them a historical, material, and political memory of the systemic violence of the West. This makes them a potential revolutionary political subject of primary importance.
First, however, revolutionary training is required, and the first rule is not to become Westernised oneself. Assimilation is forbidden:
This potential does not automatically translate into a revolutionary subject. Diasporas must guard against the risk of political assimilation, which often takes the form of weakened reformism—see citizenship—or, in some cases, reactionary alignment with Western power structures in exchange for recognition, security, or social mobility. Uncritical integration into the dominant political discourse is not a solution, but a neutralization of conflict.
The next step is the political education required to turn one into a combat-ready adversary of the host society. One must look to one’s own countries of origin to learn:
For diasporas to play a revolutionary role, a process of awareness-raising, political education, and autonomous organization within the diaspora is necessary. However, this process must maintain a direct, non-symbolic, and non-paternalistic link with forms of resistance in the countries of origin. This is not abstract solidarity, but a political and material continuity of struggles, capable of breaking the separation between the ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ of the empire.
The method is demanding, but Siher predicts that it will succeed:
Only in this tension—between center and periphery, between metropolis and colonies, between diaspora and resistance—can a subjectivity truly antagonistic to the imperial order emerge. A subjectivity that does not seek to reform the West, but to disarticulate it; that does not ask for inclusion, but that undermines the very conditions of exclusion. In the absence of this epistemological and ontological rupture, any revolutionary project will remain confined within the limits of what the West is willing to tolerate — and therefore, by definition, already defeated.
Youssef Siher does not mention Islam once in this text, but he does so in other writings.
In another text on Substack on 24 August 2025, he accuses the left of being false friends of Islam. He believes that a left-wing journalist such as Valerio Renzi is far too cautious in his support for the Palestinians.
This is why few in the West, on October 7, 2023, could understand—without ifs or buts—the Al-Aqsa Flood Operation for what it was: a revolutionary act of decolonization.
He portrays it as almost inappropriate that pro-Palestinian individuals are asked to distance themselves from Hamas.
Siher is himself a passionate Palestine activist, and at the same time a prominent Islamic figure – as evidenced by the fact that he has led a Muslim students’ association in Milan and organised a public iftar meal there.
He portrays his revolution as anti-imperialist, but Islam lurks in the background.
Elsewhere, he writes:
Islam is indeed the great nightmare of the West, and with it, the capitalist-colonial system on which it has built its global hegemony.
Given that the Islamist terrorist movement Hamas is Youssef Siher’s prime example of the struggle against ‘colonisation’, and given that the diasporas in the West are to learn from their kindred spirits from outside the West, it follows logically that the struggle against Israel is part of the struggle against the West, in which the rest of us are also the enemy in our capacity as colonisers.
‘Israel is us,’ said Fiamma Nirenstein many years ago. It is high time we learnt that now. We may have had a foretaste of 7 October at the Bataclan eleven years ago.
But Israel has understood what this struggle is about. The Europeans have not. Whether the Americans have is yet to be seen.
Siher is clearly eager to inflict upon us the nightmare that is Islam. And since he has been a leading figure in organised Islam in Italy, he undoubtedly has many supporters in this endeavour.
The only thing that is so strange is that he proclaims his agenda as clearly as he does online, even though the torrent of words camouflages it somewhat. But people in the West do not seem to understand what threatens them, even when the enemy is right under their noses, and they may not understand until they themselves come face to face with the scimitar.
‘War is deception,’ said the Prophet Muhammad of Islam. The world clearly wants to be deceived, and deceived it is.
