(Reviewer: Gary Selikow, Vol. 65, No. 2, Rosh Hashanah 2010)
In this book Jamie Glazov, managing editor of Front Page magazine, deals with the strong support for totalitarian states and terrorist organizations by left wing radicals from the 1920s until today. The author would know a lot about totalitarianism from first hand as his father was a leading Soviet dissident.
It has always been galling to witness how little humanity left wing radicals have displayed towards victims of those totalitarian regimes or bloodthirsty terrorist movements they have supported over the last century. A shameful death cult odyssey has lead these radicals of the intellectual elite – academics, lawyers, writers, entertainers and others – to continually identify with some of the most evil regimes and leaders on the planet and to turn a blind eye to the death and destruction they have sowed. This is what Glazov explores in this analytical, penetrating book, one that is scholarly yet truly elicits anger and horror, especially when it confirms the tip of the iceberg that we have seen before reading it. As Glazov argues, the Leftist wishes to punish the West for their rejection of Marxism and so has found in the Islamist terror new heroes to venerate as those who are able to defeat the West and the individual freedom it represents.
At the roots of this phenomenon would seem to be a nihilistic death impulse rooted in the resentment by Western Leftists of their own societies, one that leads them to identify with anything that is adversarial to the Western culture they so despise, no matter how murderous and destructive. Referred to by the author as “the adversarial culture of negative identification”, this erases any empathy for the victims of these regimes and terror networks.
The central issue that this boils down to, Glazov believes, is that Leftists have not found satisfaction or meaningful relations in their own life, despite their accumulation of wealth and luxury (the Western Left is almost always drawn from the ranks of the well off, and not of from working classes). This is what fuels their rage against their own societies, leading them to look to Utopian but non-Spiritual solutions. He writes:
…the believer is utterly indifferent to the real life suffering of the actual human beings victimized by the regimes that he glorifies. The victims of the adversarial ideology do not fit into the believer’s agenda, and so they do not matter, and they are not, ultimately even human is his eyes. Because they are not human for him, the believer sees them as enemies and therefore supports their extermination. Once again, in the mutated Judeo-Christian imagery, blood cleanses the world of its injustices and then redeems it transforming it into a place where the believer will eventually find a comfortable home.
Thus the author illustrates how the Leftists who venerated Lenin and Stalin would not feel any sympathy for the victims of their purges, dekulakization and forced famine. The admirers of Mao would not feel anything for the millions of victims of the Cultural Revolution or the tens of millions of Chinese who starved to death during the Great Leap Forward.
Similar callousness would be shown towards the victims of the Khmer Rouge – a third of Cambodia’s population – or towards the many thousands tortured and murdered by the Castro regime in Cuba or the Sandinistas in Nicaragua (who engaged in ethnic cleansing of that nation’s Miskito Indians Revolutionary regimes often pursue genocidal policies against minorities).
The Left’s unholy death cult worship of Arab and Islamic terror is no different. For the Leftist, Christians killed by the PLO in Lebanon, the myriad victims of the 1979 Islamist revolution of 1979 (in which 20 000 were killed within the first two weeks), Israeli women and children massacred by Arab terrorist groups like Hamas, Hezbollah and the PLO and the victims of the 9/11 terrorist destruction by Al Qaeda of the World Trade Centre were either deserving of their fate or expendable.
Thus, one sees the likes of Ward Churchill blessing the 9/11 attacks and describing the victims as ‘little Eichmanns’ and Noam Chomsky saying after the attacks that America had got what it deserved. One sees Michael Moore in April, 2004, describing Al Qaeda terrorists, who have killed thousands of Iraqi women and children, in the following terms: “The Iraqis who have risen up against the occupation are not ‘insurgents’ or ‘terrorists’ or ‘the enemy’. They are the REVOLUTION, the Minutemen, and their numbers will go up and they will win!”
Chomsky similarly paid a pilgrimage to the murderous Hezbollah in May 2006, marking the latest in his long tradition of making pilgrimages to such bloodthirsty tyrannies as Red China under Mao, to North Vietnam and to the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. Meeting with Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, Chomsky echoed his view that President Bush was the “top terrorist” and that the United States was “one of the leading terrorist nations”. One recalls here as well the passionate declarations of support for Hamas and Hezbollah by Chomsky’s ardent disciple Norman Finkelstein, and the various visits he has made to these Arab-Islamist equivalents of the Nazi Party.
In light of all this, one sees how when Jimmy Carter met with the radical Islamist Hamas movement and embraced their leaders, he was fulfilling the long tradition of the Left’s romance with America’s totalitarian adversaries. All indications are that the USA’s current pro-Islamist and radical-left President Obama is following in exactly the same path, a phenomenon that is both frightening and depressing.
The author dissects the hypocrisy of the Left’s lust for death and destruction. A striking example is the venomous hatred of Leftist homosexuals for Israel, despite its being the only nation in the Middle East where homosexuals are not persecuted. Similarly, their are Western (often Jewish- born) feminists, such as Naomi Klein and Andrea Dworkin, who are virulently anti-Israel and anti-West, while engaging in some of the most appalling apologetics for the Islamic oppression of women. Part of this might stem from their hatred of feminine sexuality, hence their covert approval of the Islamists’ brutal suppression of this, regardless of the suffering of the Muslim women involved.
It follows, of course, that an important unifying factor between Islamo-Fascists and the Radical Left is their common hatred of Israel and mainstream Jewry, largely because of the individual freedom and value of human life that Israel and Judaism affirms. During the ruthless ‘Al Aqsa Intifada’ – the five-year terror war waged from 2000 against the Israeli people by a collective of Palestinian terror networks – the international Left became increasingly enamored of Palestinian terror and hateful of Israel the greater the carnage the terrorists carried out. This, too, forms part of a distinct pattern over the last century; Leftist support for tyrannical regimes such as Communist Russia, Mao’s China, Castro’s Cuba and Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnam, has always been greatest when the carnage and terror carried out by these regimes has been at their peak.
Regarding Israel, the fact that Israelis are seen as insufficiently egalitarian means that in the eyes of the International Left, they must die en masse. This is what would indeed happen if ever Israel was ever erased. Iranian dictator Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s vows to ‘wipe Israel off the map’ greatly boosted his stature within the Left, and he was welcomed to American university campuses in the wake of them.
It is indeed tragic that others must pay for the psychological need of radical leftists to purify an imperfect Earth with blood and fire.
United In Hate: The Left’s Romance with Tyranny and Terror by Jamie Glazov, WND Books, 2009, 264 pp.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]
Gary Selikow is a researcher and media activist. His reviews of books of Jewish and Middle East interest appear regularly online and elsewhere.
