Romancing the Jihad

[JamieElizabeth]

May: Romancing the Jihad


Submitted by SHNS on Thu, 04/16/2009 - 11:54.

Ask those on the left what values they champion and they will say equality, tolerance, women's rights, gay rights, workers rights and human rights. Militant Islamists oppose all that, not infrequently through the application of lethal force. So how does one explain the burgeoning left-Islamist alliance?

I know: There are principled individuals on the left that do not condone terrorism or minimize the Islamist threat. The author Paul Berman, a man of the left, has been more incisive on these issues than just about anyone else. Left-of-center publications such as The New Republic have not been apologists for Jihadism.

But it is no exaggeration to call The Nation magazine and such groups as MoveOn.org pro-appeasement. Further left on the political spectrum, the A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition sympathizes with Islamists as well as with the Stalinist regime in North Korea -- which is in league with Islamist Iran and its client state, Syria. Meanwhile, Hugo Chavez, the Bolivarian socialist Venezuelan strongman, is developing a strategic alliance with Iran's ruling mullahs and with Hezbollah, Iran's terrorist proxy.

In a new book, "United in Hate: The Left's Romance with Tyranny and Terror," Jamie Glazov takes a hard look at this unholy alliance. Glazov's book indicts left artists and intellectuals for having "venerated mass murderers such as Lenin, Stalin and Mao, Castro, and Ho Chi Minh, habitually excusing their atrocities while blaming Americans and even the victims for their crimes."

Following the fall of the Berlin Wall, the left spent several years wandering in the wilderness. More than a few, Glazov suggests, looked upon the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 less as an atrocity than as an opportunity to revive a moribund revolutionary movement.

He notes that the novelist Norman Mailer called the 9/11 hijackers "brilliant," their terrorism "understandable" because "everything wrong with America led to the point where the country built that tower of Babel which consequently had to be destroyed."
The German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen called 9/11 "the greatest work of art for the whole cosmos."

And then there is Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, A.K.A. Carlos the Jackal, who in 2003, from his prison cell, published a book called "Revolutionary Islam" which urged "all revolutionaries, including those of the left, even atheists," to accept the leadership of militant Jihadists, Osama bin Laden key among them. His reasoning: "Only a coalition of Marxists and Islamists can destroy the United States."

Glazov quotes the British lawmaker, George Galloway, elaborating on the rationale for this coalition. "Not only do I think (a Muslim-leftist alliance is) possible, but I think it is vitally necessary and I think it is happening already," Galloway said. "It is possible because the progressive movement around the world and the Muslims have the same enemies. Their enemies are the Zionist occupation, American occupation, British occupation of poor countries, mainly Muslim countries."

There also is an older tradition to build on. In the 1970s, the Red Army Faction -- West German Marxist terrorists also known as the Baader-Meinhof gang - went to Jordan to train with the Palestine Liberation Organization. And in 1979, the success of the Islamist Revolution in Iran depended, in large measure, on the support given by the Iranian Left to the Ayatollah Khomeini. Once firmly in power, the clerical regime repaid its leftist enablers with executions, assassinations and prison sentences. Evidently, no lessons were learned.
Glazov concludes that the left's "romance with Islamism is just a logical continuation of the long leftist tradition of worshipping America's foes. ... The left clearly continues to be inspired by its undying Marxist conviction that capitalism is evil and that forces of revolution are rising to overthrow it -- and must be supported."

If such values as equality, tolerance and human rights are crushed in the process, that's a price many on the left are willing to pay. Those on the left who disagree should perhaps speak up more loudly and more often.

(Clifford D. May is president of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a policy institute focusing on terrorism. E-mail him at cliff(at)defenddemocracy.org)
May: Romancing the Jihad | ScrippsNews

[Grimmlok]

Oh good, more propaganda from nutjob sites, not actual news outlets.

[Sasha]

Yeah, cuz conservatives are so concerned with tolerance and human rights. *rolleyes*

[twitchy2.0]

So how does one explain the burgeoning left-Islamist alliance?

It's a hallucination produced by a combination of your paranoia and overactive imagination.

[BBDSP]

JamieElizabeth, I suggest that you try reading the occasional newspaper or magazine published by a legitimate news source. No, I'm not suggesting that you read only liberal-leaning news outlets, I'm suggesting that you read some of each. Then think about the discrepancies you see among the different sites that you read, and then attempt to formulate an original thought or idea of your own.

[*DIVA!]

Again with this?

[celeb_2006]

You rock Jamie

[twitchy2.0]

Rocker. Off.

(Clifford D. May is president of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a policy institute focusing on terrorism.

Foundation for the Defense of Democracies

"Daniel McCarthy expressed an enhanced view of FDD's origins in the November 17, 2003, issue of The American Conservative.[1]
In early 2001, a tightly knit group of billionaire philanthropists conceived of a plan to win American sympathy for Israel's response to the Palestinian intifada. They believed that the Palestinian cause was finding too much support within crucial segments of the American public, particularly within the media and on college campuses, so they set up an organization, Emet: An Educational Initiative, Inc., to offer Israel the kind of PR that the Israeli government seemed unable to provide itself."Source

[mrs.v]

Ugh.Get a clue.

[JamieElizabeth]

JamieElizabeth, I suggest that you try reading the occasional newspaper or magazine published by a legitimate news source. No, I'm not suggesting that you read only liberal-leaning news outlets, I'm suggesting that you read some of each. Then think about the discrepancies you see among the different sites that you read, and then attempt to formulate an original thought or idea of your own.

This came from my local paper.

[Grimmlok]

what's the name of your local newspaper?

[JamieElizabeth]

I think the Herald Democrat.
I think there must be a huge retirement community of veterans.

[sputnik]

It's a hallucination produced by a combination of your paranoia and overactive imagination.

[bychance]

"United in Hate: The Left's Romance with Tyranny and Terror,"

What? Really now, is that so? Because all the Paultards have told me that there is no difference between Democrats and Republicans.