The Elder was kind enough to publish my second weekly column for EOZ entitled, The Death of the Left. This is the type of material that readers of Israel Thrives will be familiar with:My problem with the progressive-left is not that I am either a conservative or a Republican who opposes western-liberal values, but that the western-left has betrayed its own values, as Phyllis Chesler would certainly understand.The betrayal of universal human rights by the western-left is nothing less than a betrayal of its own reason to be as a political movement. The abandonment of women, Gays, Jews, and Christians to the violence and suppression of political Islam is perhaps the greatest unspoken political betrayal of the current century.
The western Left, as a political movement, claims to believe in universal human rights. It believes that people the world over, in every society, deserve to be treated in a decent and respectful manner consistent with contemporary western ideals of human justice as derived from the political Enlightenment prior to the American and French Revolutions. Progressives also claim to believe in the ideal of multiculturalism. As alleged anti-racists they refuse to condemn social practices or ideologies of "indigenous" peoples - by which they mean anyone who is neither white, nor Jewish - because to do so represents a white imperialist racist imposition onto the natural autonomy of other peoples.
Anyway, read the rest.
I live in Jerusalem. I came here to live and work among the Israeli people, whom I admire since they continue to practise justice and mercy in the face of almost overwhelming odds. I find the media of the West and indeed the American Left's attitudes unconscionable but not without precedent, in particular their mistaken belief that inclusivism is not without price. As religious disillusionment set in in Europe in the 1500's, it paved the way, not only for the Reformation but for the invading Turks and their new religion which seemed superficially to favor the common man more fairly than their Popish overlords. The Islamic agenda has not changed.
ReplyDeleteI'm still struggling to understand just why it is that radical Islamism has so quickly rocketed up the charts, if you will, of ideologies / identities which are considered generally untouchable by large parts of the Western 'progressive' left. Particularly as many of the leading Islamists, themselves, continue to move closer to, and make alliances with, their more natural partners on the far right.
ReplyDeleteIt reminds me of that great quote, I forget by who, which went something along the lines of "American corporate leaders denounce business regulations as communism, while they move our jobs to China."
These are, indeed, very 'interesting' times in which we live...
Or as we used to say when the Americans came to town "Yankee go home! (and take us with you!!)".
DeleteI suppose that's really a two-part question or a three part question. Why is anti western Islamism so popular among certain sectors of the west? Why is antisemitism so closely tied in with anti western thought? Why is there little material difference between antisemitism that originates from places with zero Jews and places with noticeable Jewish populations?
In some ways, radical Islamism has ALWAYS been around and it's a matter of who exploited it. Wahhabism is from the 16th century. But Tamerlane was a fundamentalist fanatic a hundred years earlier. And the Almohads were even more fanatical 300 years earlier than him.
Islam has always struggled with the distinction between fanaticism and piety. It always will. So it's been and will be ripe for exploitation by others to suit their own ends. Most recently both the Soviet Union and the US have leveraged Islamic fanaticism against each other. The Soviets backstopped the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1950's to pressure the British in the Maghreb and to keep a fire lit under the Egyptians all through the 1950's and 60's. After 1979 the Soviets used the Muslim Brotherhood to ratchet the pressure on Egypt when they switched allegiance from the 3CP to the US. Similarly the US employed Islamic extremists in Afghanistan against the Russians. And so on. So it's a natural consequence that leftist aggression against the west is coupled with Islamic violence. It's painted as a 'remedy' against 'colonialism', 'capitalism', 'globalism' and 'zionism' of course. Mohammed's black flag of war has been adopted by the radical western left as the banner of 'authenticity' of indigenous purity freeing those people with strange headgear from the 'oppression' of the west.
Zionism was thrown into the mix from the first days of modern Zionism. The British opposed it, the French opposed it because they didn't want another political movement in the English or French Mandate. The Russians opposed it because they just hate Jews and want to crush them. Even the US after WW2 used "zionism" as a clandestine weapon by telling the Arab states that it was a secret Communist plan to overthrow them and force them to become godless heathens. The US State Department actively pursued an propaganda program to that end. So Arabs have a half century of being told that Jews = Zionists = the Communists = heathens on top of 1300 years of dhimmitude which told them it was acceptable to enslave, rape, kill all Jews they liked. So first they hated Jews because their Koran told them to. And then they hated 'zionists' because they were told the zionists were a direct threat to them.
And finally the question of why is antisemitism in places where virtually no one has ever met anyone who's met anyone who's met anyone who's met anyone who's a Jew interchangeable with the antisemitism of Kansas City or Brandeis U? Because that's the nature of pure hate. It's the existence of hatred in the absence of any reason for holding that belief. It IS an act of faith in and of itself. It is contra to fact, reason, reality, history and personal experience. It is supernal. To the Arabs and Muslims, Jew hate exists outside of time. Jews were to be hated before the creation of the world and until the end of time. To the westerners and leftists, Jews have always controlled everything in the world, all banks, governments and media, they make Matzoh from goyishe blood, poison all the wells, caused communism and fascism and capitalism and socialism and atheism through their nefarious lobby which appears not to exist at all but that's only what they want you to believe.