Progressive-Left Racism

Karam

It is one of the great sickening ironies of today's political moment that the movement which describes itself as "anti-racist," that is the progressive-left movement in the United States and in the west, is far and away more racist than is either the Republican Party or the conservative movement. The grassroots / netroots of the Democratic Party, and the activist base of the progressive movement, is absolutely crawling with the most vicious self-deluded racists that anyone would hate to meet.

As a movement, as a whole, the progressive-left is invested in projecting hatred toward Israel and in an imperialist condescension to people of color, particularly Arabs and, even more so, Palestinians. The left's problem with anti-Semitism and it's problem with Arab bigotry mirror one another in ways that are upside-down and opposite. For example, while most progressives, as individuals, are not anti-Semitic, most are, in fact, bigoted concerning Arabs and Muslims. While the relatively small amount of anti-Semitism found on the progressive-left represents the spreading of hatred, the far larger degree of bigotry pointed at the Arab and Muslim world is defined more by the old 19th century imperial attitude of "White Man's Burden." Because the left tends to view people of color as backward, helpless, and weak (and because they carry around the burden of historical colonial guilt) they do not expect, and thus do not encourage, non-white people outside of the west to meet common standards of basic human decency.

If Arabs in Pakistan kill their daughters out of a sense of abused honor or if Muslims in Iran hang Gay people from cranes, well, what can anyone expect from people who have suffered under the heal of western imperialism for centuries? If they do little things like blow up their own children in suicide bombings or plough liner jets into tall buildings in the United States, it just must be our fault or, more likely, the fault of the Jews in the Middle East. The people who actually commit these crimes are never held responsible by progressive-left racists who do not see them as fully human adults and thus fully responsible for their own behavior.

It is for this reason that progressive-left racism towards Arabs and Muslims takes the form of imperial condescension. In the progressive-left imagination 300 hundred million weak and impoverished Arabs must be protected from those vicious militarist Jews and if some of those Arabs perpetually shoot rockets at Israeli townships or if some of them sneak into Jewish homes and chop the heads off of babies, well?, whose fault is that, really? The only reason that some Arabs behave this way, or so progressives would have you believe, is because the Jews of the Middle East (as well as their supporters in the diaspora... which basically means all of us) are just flat-out mean and we pretty much deserve whatever we get.

It is for this reason that if you read the ongoing conversation around the Arab-Israeli conflict in progressive-left venues, such as Daily Kos, you find constant hatred spit at the Jews and perpetual apologetics in defense of Arab or Muslim misbehavior. If one only received one's information on the conflict from such venues, one would soon conclude that the 5.5 million Jews of the Middle East are essentially evil and that the 300 to 400 million Arabs of the Middle East are the victims of those 5.5 million Jews. The Arabs are always and forever the misunderstood victims and the Jews are always and forever the rapacious victimizers.

This is the default position of the progressive-left on the Arab-Israeli conflict and it is racist to the core. The progressive movement, as it constitutes itself today, is a horrific caricature of what it once was. They still claim to stand for anti-racism even as they spread poisonous hatred toward the Jews of the Middle East and infantilize people of color all over the world. The only progressives who seem not to fall into this trap, generally, are the so-called "progressive Zionists," but that's just because they happen to usually be Jewish supporters of Israel and therefore have not swallowed the Palestinian narrative of perpetual victimhood whole. They've usually swallowed too much of it for my liking, but they neither spread hatred toward Israel nor condescend to Arabs, Muslims, or Palestinians.

It's too bad about the Progressive movement and the Democratic Party. There was a time when that movement and that organization helped move Americans away from the old-fashioned racist tendencies of the Jim Crow era. Today that movement and that party is absolutely crawling with truly corrosive forms of hatred towards Israel, or at best indifference toward hatred spit at that country from their ideological peers and allies, and vile condescension towards Muslims, Arabs, and people of color.

The progressive-left is thus dead as a movement. By choosing the multicultural ideal over universal human rights, progressives and Democrats threw their very reason to be into the toilet and now stand for nothing.

The movement is dead and I wish someone would bury it because it's stinking up the joint. It certainly stunk-up downtown Oakland recently, that much is certain.

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