The Failures of Progressive-Left Zionism: Political Islam (Revisited)

Mike L.

The brief post below is the single most read piece in the history of Israel Thrives, with over 2,000 page views since it was originally published and 124 page views over the course of just the last week.

The fact of the matter is that progressive-left diaspora Jewry, the political movement that I come from, has no stomach to face the foremost political difficulty facing the Jewish people today. The rise of political Islam throughout the Middle East, a development that Barack Obama personally helped along in recent years, is a terrific threat to the Jews of Israel and, yet, against all reason, progressive-left diaspora Jews refuse to face it.

If progressive Zionists cannot bring themselves to face this issue then they are absolutely worthless. And what's worse is that they lambaste those of us who do want to face this issue as "racist."  Thus they won't stand up for Malala Yousufzai. They won't stand up for Tamar Fogel. And they can't stand up for the Jewish people because doing so requires facing this thing which they won't do either out of ideological reasons or because of social cowardice.

During the rise of the National Socialists in Germany the biggest mistake that German Jewry made was in ignoring that political trend in the hopes that it would simply go away.

It didn't.

In this way progressive-left "Zionism" is more a part of the problem than it is part of the solution. After all, if even Jewish people refuse to acknowledge the problem of political Islam when it directly threatens us why in this world should non-Jews in other parts of the world, who do not feel directly threatened, give a damn?

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.}