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mises
Joined: 05 Nov 2007
Location: retired
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 Posted: Tue Jul 08, 2008 11:06 am Post subject: The Islamist-Leftist Allied Menace |
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[The Islamist-Leftist] Allied Menace
National Review
July 14, 2008
"Here are two brother countries, united like a single fist," said socialist Hugo Ch�vez during a visit to Tehran last November, celebrating his alliance with Islamist Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Che Guevara's son Camilo, who also visited Tehran last year, declared that his father would have "supported the country in its current struggle against the United States." They followed in the footsteps of Fidel Castro, who in a 2001 visit told his hosts that "Iran and Cuba, in cooperation with each other, can bring America to its knees." For his part, Ilich Ram�rez S�nchez ("Carlos the Jackal") wrote in his book L'islam r�volutionnaire ("Revolutionary Islam") that "only a coalition of Marxists and Islamists can destroy the United States."
It's not just Latin American leftists who see potential in Islamism. Ken Livingstone, the Trotskyite former mayor of London, literally hugged prominent Islamist thinker Yusuf al-Qaradawi. Ramsey Clark, the former U.S. attorney general, visited Ayatollah Khomeini and offered his support. Noam Chomsky, the MIT professor, visited Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and endorsed Hezbollah's keeping its arms. Ella Vogelaar, the Dutch minister for housing, neighborhoods, and integration, is so sympathetic to Islamism that one critic, the Iranian-born professor Afshin Ellian, has called her "the minister of Islamization."
Dennis Kucinich, during his first presidential campaign in 2004, quoted the Koran and roused a Muslim audience to chant "Allahu akbar" ("God is great") and he even announced, "I keep a copy of the Koran in my office." Spark, youth paper of Britain's Socialist Labour party, praised Asif Mohammed Hanif, the British suicide bomber who attacked a Tel Aviv bar, as a "hero of the revolutionary youth" who had carried out his mission "in the spirit of internationalism." Workers World, an American Communist newspaper, ran an obituary lauding Hezbollah's master terrorist, Imad Mughniyeh.
Some leftists go farther. Several � Carlos the Jackal, Roger Garaudy, Jacques Verg�s, Yvonne Ridley, and H. Rap Brown � have actually converted to Islam. Others respond with exhilaration to the violence and brutality of Islamism. German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen termed 9/11 "the greatest work of art for the whole cosmos," while the late American novelist Norman Mailer called its perpetrators "brilliant."
And none of this is new. During the Cold War, Islamists favored the Soviet Union over the United States. As Ayatollah Khomeini put it in 1964, "America is worse than Britain, Britain is worse than America and the Soviet Union is worse than both of them. Each one is worse than the other, each one is more abominable than the other. But today we are concerned with this malicious entity which is America." In 1986, I wrote that "the U.S.S.R. receives but a small fraction of the hatred and venom directed at the United States."
Leftists reciprocated. In 1978-79, the French philosopher Michel Foucault expressed great enthusiasm for the Iranian revolution.
Another French philosopher, Jean Baudrillard, portrayed Islamists as slaves rebelling against a repressive order. In 1978, Foucault called Ayatollah Khomeini a "saint" and a year later, Jimmy Carter's ambassador to the United Nations, Andrew Young, called him"some kind of saint."
This good will may appear surprising, given the two movements' profound differences. Communists are atheists and leftists secular; Islamists execute atheists and enforce religious law. The Left exalts workers; Islamism privileges Muslims. One dreams of a worker's paradise, the other of a caliphate. Socialists want socialism; Islamists accept the free market. Marxism implies gender equality; Islamism oppresses women. Leftists despise slavery; some Islamists endorse it. As journalist Bret Stephens notes, the Left has devoted "the past four decades championing the very freedoms that Islam most opposes: sexual and reproductive freedoms, gay rights, freedom from religion, pornography and various forms of artistic transgression, pacifism and so on."
These disagreements seem to dwarf the few similarities that Oskar Lafontaine, former chairman of Germany's Social Democratic party, managed to find: "Islam depends on community, which places it in opposition to extreme individualism, which threatens to fail in the West. [In addition,] the devout Muslim is required to share his wealth with others. The leftist also wants to see the strong help the weak."
Why, then, the formation of what David Horowitz calls the Left-Islamist "unholy alliance"? For four main reasons.
First, as British politician George Galloway explains, "the progressive movement around the world and the Muslims have the same enemies," namely Western civilization in general and the United States, Great Britain, and Israel in particular, plus Jews, believing Christians, and international capitalists. In Iran, according to Tehran political analyst Saeed Leylaz, "the government practically permitted the left to operate since five years ago so that they would confront religious liberals."
Second, the two sides share some political goals. A mammoth 2003 joint demonstration in London to oppose war against Saddam Hussein symbolically forged their alliance. Both sides want coalition forces to lose in Iraq, the War on Terror to be closed down, anti-Americanism to spread, and the elimination of Israel. They agree on mass immigration to and multiculturalism in the West. They cooperate on these goals at meetings such as the annual Cairo Anti-War Conference, which brings leftists and Islamists together to forge "an international alliance against imperialism and Zionism."
Third, Islamism has historic and philosophic ties to Marxism-Leninism. Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian Islamist thinker, accepted the Marxist notion of stages of history, only adding an Islamic postscript to them; he predicted that an eternal Islamic era would come after the collapse of capitalism and Communism. Ali Shariati, the key intellectual behind the Iranian revolution of 1978�79, translated Franz Fanon, Che Guevara, and Jean-Paul Sartre into Persian. More broadly, the Iranian analyst Azar Nafisi observes that Islamism "takes its language, goals, and aspirations as much from the crassest forms of Marxism as it does from religion. Its leaders are as influenced by Lenin, Sartre, Stalin, and Fanon as they are by the Prophet."
Fourth, power: Islamists and leftists can achieve more together than they can separately. In Great Britain, they jointly formed the Stop the War Coalition, whose steering committee includes representation from such organizations as the Communist party of Britain and the Muslim Association of Britain. Britain's Respect Party amalgamates radical international socialism with Islamist ideology. The two sides joined forces for the March 2008 European Parliament elections to offer common lists of candidates in France and Britain, disguised under party names that revealed little.
Islamists benefit, in particular, from the access, legitimacy, skills, and firepower the Left provides them. Volkert van der Graaf, an animal-rights fanatic, killed Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn to stop him from turning Muslims into "scapegoats." On a larger scale, the Indian Communist party did Tehran's dirty work by delaying for four months the Indian-based launching of TecSar, an Israeli spy satellite. And leftists founded the International Solidarity Movement to prevent Israeli security forces from protecting the country against Hamas and other Palestinian terrorism.
Writing in London's Spectator, Douglas Davis calls the coalition "a godsend to both sides. The Left, a once-dwindling band of communists, Trotskyites, Maoists and Castroists, had been clinging to the dregs of a clapped-out cause; the Islamists could deliver numbers and passion, but they needed a vehicle to give them purchase on the political terrain. A tactical alliance became an operational imperative." More simply, a British leftist concurs: "The practical benefits of working together are enough to compensate for the differences."
The burgeoning alliance of Western leftists and Islamists ranks as one of today's most disturbing political developments, one that impedes the West's efforts to protect itself. When Stalin and Hitler made their infamous pact in 1939, the Red-Brown alliance posed a mortal danger to the West and, indeed, to civilization itself. Less dramatically but no less certainly, the coalition today poses the same threat. As seven decades ago, this one must be exposed, rejected, resisted, and defeated. |
http://www.meforum.org
Womyns rights, gay rights, religious freedom. These have all been thrown under the bus. They share the same enemy. They are stronger together. |
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On the other hand
Joined: 19 Apr 2003
Location: I walk along the avenue
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| Posted: Tue Jul 08, 2008 11:43 am Post subject: |
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The article is basically just a compendium of every time that someone on the left of the political spectrum has said something positive about Islam, or expressed support for some Islamic political activity. And no context is provided for any of the quotes. (Though I don't doubt that some of them are as bad in the original.) Furthermore, the left is postulated as including everyone from moderate Democrats to hardcore Stalinists, as long as they once said something nice about Islam. Whereas you could probably do the same thing with right-wingers as well, since I know that Bush has called Islam "a religion of peace" etc etc.
I'm sure there are a lot of macho posers on the left who are attracted to the romance of Islam as the last great resistance to McWorld or whatever. Not to mention a few of the more straight-laced feminist contingent penning apolgia for the veil as the ultimate in female emancipation. It would be funny to read a take-down of some of those types, based on first-hand accounts. But the National Review article falls far short of demonstrating that any grand movement is coming together between Islam and the left. |
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On the other hand
Joined: 19 Apr 2003
Location: I walk along the avenue
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| Posted: Tue Jul 08, 2008 11:48 am Post subject: |
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| And I'd just like to add that, among leftists of my acquiantance, Galloway's Respect Party, probably the most openly Islamic-identified group on the left, is regarded with suspicion at best, outright contempt at worst. And it's his alliance with homophobic Muslim spokesmen that seems to be the biggest objection. |
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mises
Joined: 05 Nov 2007
Location: retired
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| Posted: Tue Jul 08, 2008 11:57 am Post subject: |
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| On the other hand wrote: |
| The article is basically just a compendium of every time that someone on the left of the political spectrum has said something positive about Islam, or expressed support for some Islamic political activity. |
No it isn't.
The first third is a summary of some significant lefties and their pandering and outright support for regressive religion.
Then there is a brief discussion of how bizarre this is as the two ideas are so opposed to each other.
Then there is a long series on the 4 major reasons, in opinion of Pipes, that the left has sold itself out so significantly to be aligned with islam.
Then there is a discussion about how the two factions benefit from this.
The the concluding paragraph rightly labels this as "one of today's most disturbing political developments, one that impedes the West's efforts to protect itself". Damn right. |
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mises
Joined: 05 Nov 2007
Location: retired
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| Posted: Tue Jul 08, 2008 12:28 pm Post subject: |
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It is worth noting, that it is the left wing diversity police, as much as the koranic literalist, that silence actual muslim moderates.
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�Liberal Muslims are not only silenced by literalist Muslims, but also by those non-Muslims who have developed the hollow pattern of being �fair� and �tolerant� to every religion. The existence of �political fairness� among large circles of non-Muslim activists is actually a much bigger obstacle than extremist Muslims because those non-Muslim activists dominate the media outlets across the world and often ignore genuinely liberal Muslim voices.�
~ Tahir Aslam Gora ~ |
The highest values have been devalued and replaced with the false value that all values are equal. If we want moderate islam to dominate muslim communities in the West, we should support them in their battle against the regressive radicals rather than the current strategy of pretending the regressive radicals aren't in control now. |
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Kuros
Joined: 27 Apr 2004
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| Posted: Tue Jul 08, 2008 5:23 pm Post subject: |
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| National Review wrote: |
| The burgeoning alliance of Western leftists and Islamists ranks as one of today's most disturbing political developments, one that impedes the West's efforts to protect itself. When Stalin and Hitler made their infamous pact in 1939, the Red-Brown alliance posed a mortal danger to the West and, indeed, to civilization itself. Less dramatically but no less certainly, the coalition today poses the same threat. |
The 'Leftist-Islamist' coalition poses the same threat as the Red-Brown alliance did?
Firstly, I agree with OTOH that some high-level meetings do not a coalition make. The only real coalition I see here is between Chavez and Ahmenijehad, and their combined relative power is a mere fraction of Hitler's and Stalin's.
Secondly, does not this all not sound a little McCarthyite? |
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Fishead soup
Joined: 24 Jun 2007
Location: Korea
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| Posted: Tue Jul 08, 2008 6:12 pm Post subject: |
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Didn't Marx say, " Religion is the Opium of the masses".
Didn't Moe say," Religion is poison". |
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Gwangjuboy
Joined: 08 Jul 2003
Location: England
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| Posted: Wed Jul 09, 2008 9:13 am Post subject: |
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| Although I agree that the article fails to sufficiently establish a mass conspiracy between the forces of Islam and the left working in tandem against the west, it does raise some fair points. I am sure some of those on the far left harbour romantic illusions of a far left revival bolstered by miltant Islam as its military wing. Many of those on the far left based in Europe realise that they have been frozen out of the political process by the electorate, and that the closest the electorate are prepared to go are rebranded centre left parties such as New Labour. There is no doubt that George Galloway and his ilk would like to see a complete overhaul of the west's economic and political institutions. The far left has a sentimental attachment to Islam and it's pretty obvious that he symapthises with the causes of its more extreme elements. The far left believe that 9/11 and 7/7 are the moral equivilents of Israeli offences in Palestinian territories, or even the American involvement in Iraq. |
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Beej
Joined: 05 Mar 2005
Location: Eungam Loop
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| Posted: Wed Jul 09, 2008 1:22 pm Post subject: |
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| Fishead soup wrote: |
Didn't Marx say, " Religion is the Opium of the masses".
Didn't Moe say," Religion is poison". |
No, Moe didnt say that. I think it was Larry or Curly. |
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