The Failures of Progressive-Left Zionism: Political Islam

Mike L.

When I look at Israel Thrives site statistics, I am pleased to see that the piece below, The Failures of Progressive-Left Zionism: Political Islam, originally published on May 9, 2012, continues to be among the most read bits of analysis that I have done here.

The failure of progressive-left Zionism can perhaps be forgiven due to the fact that we are now in a transitional phase of Jewish / Israeli world politics.  We are at this moment directly in between the Oslo era and whatever is following. Progressive-left diaspora Jews do not wish to give up Oslo because they see no other alternative to it beyond the single-state solution and, therefore, are desperately trying to hold back a speeding train.  The problem is that they cannot stop the train and, yet, they refuse to let go.

History has no such compunction.

We are now officially in the post-Oslo era.  If Barack Obama helped kill Oslo via his foolish demand for "total settlement freeze," Mahmoud Abbas and the international community buried the damn thing entirely when they voted to recognize "Palestine" as a non-member state, thus abrogating the terms of the agreement.  This means, sadly, that all bets are off and anything can happen.  One thing that is certain is that the situation looks grim.  The Palestinians, with a little help from their European and American friends, are even so emboldened as to protest that Jews living in Lod, a small city within the borders of Israel proper, represent "settlements" and therefore vow resistance.

This is, of course, pure anti-Jewish racism of the type that we have known century upon century for millennia.  Palestinians refuse to allow Jews to live in freedom on historically Jewish land and the reason that they do so is because Jewish sovereignty on any bit of land that was ever a part of the umma is considered a desecration of Islam.  Thus the rise of political Islam throughout the Middle East should be of primary concern to Jewish people everywhere, but it is not.

Progressive-left diaspora Jews cannot bring themselves to really discuss in a public manner the rise of political Islam because they know in doing so they risk being smeared as racists... they should know this very well because they certainly indulge in this contemptuous practice enough themselves.

In any case, the brief piece below remains among the top read pieces published at Israel Thrives.

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The Failures of Progressive-Left Zionism: Political Islam

Progressive-left Jewish Zionists are failing the Jewish people.

The first way in which progressive-left Zionism is failing is in its ostrich-like reluctance to acknowledge, and seriously discuss, the rise of the Jihad throughout the Muslim Middle East. This failure is exceedingly dangerous because the Jews of the Middle East represent something like 1/70th of the total population there and much of that total is moving toward genocidal Islamism. Just as progressive diaspora Jews were basically silent during the rise of Nazi Germany, so they are silent now. We cannot know what the rise of political Islam will mean to the Jewish people in the long term, but we do know that this particular trend is anti-Semitic, and genocidal, to the core.

The failure of progressive-left Jews to address this issue represents a very dangerous form of cowardice and / or ideological blinkertude.

Throughout the 1990s and the Bush II era I did not give much credence to Republican or conservative concerns about terrorism or, as they might say, "Islamofascism." During the Clinton years I assumed that Islamist terrorism was a bogey-man and during the Bush years I resented what I took to be the using of the so-called War on Terrorism to cynically move funds in various directions and to bolster the political careers of prominent conservatives and Republicans.

It is this, by the way, which represents the backdrop for progressive Jewish unwillingness to understand that times have changed. And times have changed. When I was still a Democrat the radical Jihad was pretty much limited to Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, Qaeda, and the Taliban. One country and a number of fringe organizations, one of which gave us 9/11.

Now we have Iran, Hez, Hamas, Qaeda, the Taliban, and increasingly, Turkey, Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Lebanon, Morocco, Yemen, Bahrain, Nigeria, and Sudan. When progressive-left Jews ignore the Jihadi fruits of the so-called "Arab Spring," or explain it away as "the blessings of democracy," as Obama does, they are veiling the fact that the entire Middle East is going through an Islamist awakening, not a democratic one. The Muslim Brotherhood, an organization with an historical provenance that goes to Nazi Germany, is finally taking over Egypt.

The American president does not mind and, sadly, neither do progressive-left diaspora Jews.

I would suggest that this is a major problem, but the question is "why?" Why do progressive-left diaspora Jews absolutely refuse to acknowledge, and seriously discuss, what is the foremost geo-political happening since the demise of the Soviet Union? How is it possible that, just as with the rise of Nazi Germany, progressive-left Jews are failing to acknowledge what is before their very eyes? The answer is cowardice and ideological blindness. They are afraid to say anything, or even really think anything on this question, not out of fear of Jihadis, but out of a social fear of their fellow progressives for whom any reference to political Islam is taken as a form of "Islamophobia."  The Jews of the Middle East are increasingly surrounded by a vicious political movement which would see them dead, yet progressive-left diaspora Jews close their eyes and turn away because they do not want to be called mean names by their fellow progressives.

They are, in a sense, swapping Political Correctness for the well-being of the Jewish people. The best that they will do is go after safe, but largely irrelevant, targets like fringe-right Skin-heads or Klansmen, wherein their fellow non-Jewish progressives will give them a nice kitsel behind the ear.

This represents the first, but not the only, sad failure of contemporary progressive-left Zionism.

{They might as well be mutes.}