“The Left is value free.”
So ends an article in today’s Australian about Israel and the Left’s supposed love affair with tyranny and “victims.”… At least I’m placed in good company:
In her book The New Anti-Semitism (2005), American feminist academic Phyllis Chesler writes: “The American and European Left have made a marriage in hell with their Islamic counterparts. The same Left that has still never expressed any guilt over its devotion to communist dictators who murdered millions of their own people in the service of a Great Idea has now finally, fatefully, joined the world jihadic chorus in calling for the end to racist Zionism and to the Jewish apartheid state.”
This is an especially interesting comment in view of the fact that, immediately after World War II, this same political Left lent support to the Jewish people and favoured the creation of a homeland for them in Israel. Even the Soviet Union voted in the UN Security Council for the establishment of the state of Israel, albeit for its own political ends. So what went wrong?
To understand why the Left has done a U-turn on this issue, one needs to appreciate that activists such as Noam Chomsky, John Pilger and Antony Loewenstein feed on a constant diet of victims and define the progressive cause by hatred of whichever group they hold responsible for victimisation. Hatred has always been an essential characteristic of leftist ideology, providing the motivating force for its theory of dialectical materialism.…
Clearly journalists should be embedded with political leaders who bomb nations into liberation. My mistake. Shall be corrected in future work.