Shooting the Messenger - The Left's Only Enemy

Very interesting article in the Jerusalem Post by Caroline Glick titled "The Left's Only Enemy".  She begins with reference to Mahmoud Abbas, whom the left in Israel and the United States holds up as a moderate.  Writes Glick,

"The fact that Abbas was an inveterate Jew-hater who spent four decades in the senior leadership of a terrorist organization and whose doctoral dissertation was a long denial of the Holocaust, was brushed aside."

It is difficult for the left to define an enemy, particularly the Christian left.  What philosophical commitments lead particular individuals and groups to pretend evil does not exist is an open question I suppose.  Glick continues,  

"Abbas’s Israeli supporters are the core of far-leftists who brought us the phony peace process with the PLO. Two thousand dead Israelis later, and with no peace in sight, their camp is much smaller today than it was in 1993. But it is still dedicated. And it is overpopulated by members of the media".  (more)

Calls for Israel to unilaterally withdraw from Judea and Samaria and abandon land to those who vow the destruction of Israel seems a bit less than logical.  And Glick may have found the reason.

"The Left continues to support Israeli withdrawals because its members know that the biggest loser of such an action won’t be Israel as a whole. It will be the Israeli Right. And that is all the Left cares about."

In other words, the immediate political opponent is the only enemy that matters, so it is advantageous in the short term to pretend real enemies don't exist.

Glick ties her thesis to recent actions in the US to curb freedom of speech to avoid the offense of - well - terrorists.  In one case, an offensive movie was denounced and used as a prop to distract from a terrorist attack that killed a US Embassador. YouTube was pressured into removing it with no outcry of censorship, and the producer has been arrested.  In another case, strong words condemning terrorist acts on New York transportation vehicles have been made public only after a long battle in court and then with calls to remove them coming from many, including Jim Wallis.

Key paragraphs from Glick,

"Like the Israeli Left, the American Left doesn’t want Americans to think about the actual threats to the US emanating from the Islamic world. They want the public to think about what for them is the only real threat to their values and their ability to win and wield power.

"That threat doesn’t emanate from the Islamic world where women are treated worse than farm animals, homosexuals are hanged in public squares, Christians are forcibly converted and assaulted, churches are burned to the ground, the annihilation of the Jewish people throughout the world is an ardent desire, and “Death to America” is a political program.

"For the American Left, the primary threat to their way of life comes from people who oppose abortions and gay marriage and gun control. It comes from people who oppose unionization of government workers and nationalization of healthcare."

For the left, there is only one enemy, the political group that opposes them in the next election, and nothing else is worth discussing.  So Jim Wallis can spearhead a major campaign to stop alleged hate and bigotry against Muslims (read telling the truth about terrorism) while telling Pam Geller, who sponsored the anti-jihad bus ads to "stop talking".  Exactly what is it about terrorism that requires such gentleness?

"The reason that Islam is supposed to be immune from criticism is that for American leftists as for Israeli leftists, the only important battle is the one against domestic foes. And just as the abysmal results of leftist policies have left the Israeli Left with no choice but to shoot the messengers, so too the American Left must deal with policy failure by silencing the opposition."

So, Glick concludes with the most damning statement of all:

In America, the Left’s most conspicuous failure is its claim to promote women’s rights, equality and civil liberties in the culture war, even as it defends the Islamic world’s addiction to female genital mutilation, forced marriages, honor killings and executions of homosexuals for the “crime” of being gay. So the Left must silence critics of jihad and Islamism, and hope no one will notice its hypocrisy.

 Politics makes for strange bedfellows indeed.