Progressive-Left RIP

The contemporary left is dead. It is gone. Say, "bye-bye."

The contemporary progressive-left trashed the concept of universal human rights and betrayed Jews, women, and Gays, in the process. The movement has, thus, given up the ghost and its very reason to be.

This is the proverbial 800 pound gorilla in the living room. What virtually no one discusses is the fairly obvious fact that the ideal of universal human rights, which resides at the very heart of progressive thinking, is entirely incompatible with ideological multiculturalism which views all cultures, societies, countries as morally equivalent.

{The only exceptions are the US and Israel, which tend to be thought of as morally inferior.}

The contemporary left had an unspoken choice to make between supporting Gays, Jews, and women or supporting the multicultural ideal which derived from the New Left of the 1960s. This choice was made organically by millions of people, but it was definitely made.

The left chose to throw us under the bus.

Jews in the Middle East have been under siege for almost one hundred years. It was in the 1920s that the Arabs launched the Long War against us and that war goes on to this day. The only thing that has really changed is that the western left has chosen to side with the Arabs. The western left, as a group, as a political movement, has also decided to stand with the Islamists against Gay people, who are hung from cranes in Iran, and to side with Islamists against women, who suffer gender apartheid throughout the Muslim world.

Among the reasons that the left made the choice that it has made is because of the confluence of Arab political efforts in the west with post-colonial and post-structuralist theories in the academe. As Saudi Arabia endowed chairs in American universities for Middle East studies, the academia itself relativized both morality and truth. Post-colonial theory relativized morality through suggesting that Muslim and Arab violence against Jews in the Middle East was a matter of "resistance" to western imperialism.

What they failed to consider, of course, was the 1,400 year history of Jewish dhimmitude in the Arab world. That, in itself, is fairly mind-boggling. 1,400 years of Jewish second and third class citizenship just gets erased because it doesn't fit the post-colonial model.

They relativized truth through post-structuralist theory (post-modernity) which suggested that there is no such thing as truth and that scientific and scholarly discourse is really all about maintaining a hegemonic and reactionary global political system.

It was for this reason that someone like Ilan Pappe could say:

Indeed the struggle is about ideology, not about facts. Who knows what facts are? We try to convince as many people as we can that our interpretation of the facts is the correct one, and we do it because of ideological reasons, not because we are truthseekers.

The truth is that the Jews of the Middle East have been under almost constant attack since the Mufti cried to the throngs that the Jews were attacking the Al Aqsa mosque in the 1920s. They were rioting then, and throwing rocks, just as they are rioting now, and throwing rocks.

Our imperative today is to simply understand who our friends are and who they are not.

The progressive-left is not.