Naturally, you would expect the Left to come out in strong opposition to censorship, inequality of the sexes, theocracy, and tyranny. Yet it is now the most prolific place along the political spectrum in this country to defend Islamists and the ideology which drives them. 

I’ve tried to find some rationale as to why Leftist forums are now featuring pro-Hamas, pro Islamist thought, and my conclusion is that they cannot, in the main, seem to recognise fascism when it is not white supremacism. Especially when that fascism is weaker, politically or militarily, than what that fascism opposes.

We all love an underdog. Someone who struggles against adversity in the face of uneven odds and triumphs. And we like to support those people and root for them. Yet not everyone who is stronger or more influential is an aggressor, and not everyone who is less powerful or less influential is a victim. 

But some people have to be victims, whether their words show them to be victims or not. Such is a discussion I recently had on a prominent leftist forum on Islamist terrorism, in which a commentator informed me that such terrorism was grievance based. I disagreed with his assertion, and then came the interesting part.

I agreed that terrorism was partially to do with grievance, but that fundamentally a supremacist reading of Islam was the primary motivator for their actions, an interpretation which was a fringe reading, but nonetheless seeking to gain influence. I submitted two pages of literature on the subject espousing everything from hatred of nonbelievers to the point where one should not even associate with them, to military conquest against non-believers in their lands of origin solely because they were unbelievers. 

The response I received initially was that my comments were removed, as if they had never existed. The second was being accused of racism and Islamophobia, and the third was to delete my rebuttals to those accusations while allowing the accusations themselves to stand. One claimed that I had called all Muslims Nazis, a slur which nobody reading after my deletion would be able to see was false. I was censored so arbitrarily after that point that it wasn’t worth it any more, although to their credit, a few people did clarify my position when they weren’t deleted themselves.

Not a big deal though, right? Tales of moderation on a forum hardly matter much to anything. But it does seem to hold well with what I call the “unthinking left,” who respond to debate with insult when they have no argument or analysis of their own. In the minds of some, I wasn’t exposing religious supremacism; I was being racist towards people espousing it. They were my victims, and as a victimizer I had to be silenced.

Islamophobia is one of those terms which is predictably thrown around and, predictably, is rarely analysed. Firstly, Islamophobia is not a diagnosable mental illness. It is not listed in either the DSM V or the ICD-10. There are no medications or therapies to treat it. It is a neologism; a stick to beat your opponents with when your brain has caved in and you’ve got no rational objections left. There is no other religion in the world which has a so-called phobia in its honour, and it’s incredible that anyone can take that term seriously.

It is possible to use criticism of religion as a tool with which to demonize its followers as a whole. But that is a very fine line to cross, and still harder to demarcate. A person saying Jews bake matzoh cookies with the blood of gentile children would fall under that category, and so would a person saying all Muslims are terrorists. But neither of those things are phobias. They are not fears, they are deliberate fabrications (unless you live in a country where that kind of talk is common; then you’re just brainwashed). Criticism of religion, rational criticism, is not and will never be a mental illness. You’d think with the frequency with which Christianity it criticized that this would be entirely apparent. It’s not. 

But even so, in the case of Islamism, which is a religious supremacist dogma, caveats of how it is a fringe ideology divorced from the mainstream did not stem the Pavolovian name-calling. It’s curious how criticism of that ideology has been wedded to racism when the ideology is not racially based and has adherents of all races. But facts shouldn’t get in the way, of course. I suppose the unthinking left view radical Islamists as a homogeneous group of brown-skinned persons and won’t have it any other way. And the left loves to see an issue of race where nobody else would think of it: a recent article arguing for an Islamist to remain in this country suggested that people wanted his deportation because they didn’t like his brown skin or his “scary beard.” 

How did the left manage to get so blindsided by Islamists? They’re desperate to do the right thing, most of the time. And they have their hearts in the right place, most of the time. But it’s their desire not to be seen as oppressors, persecutors, or racists – their own good natured humanitarianism – which is being cynically exploited by men who share absolutely none of their core values and quite openly state the opposite of those values. And it is because the left can’t see past its dichotomy of oppressor and oppressed, strong and weak, that elements of it are turning into a mere caricature of what it ought to represent. The absurd sight of seeing articles on women’s rights next to opinion pieces supporting the Sharia requires a superhuman level of cognitive dissonance.

It would be amusing if it were not so tragic. The Left is gradually losing its credibility under the weight of its own ironies. Civilization is much poorer as a result of these inescapable contradictions: champions of equality and democracy siding with its avowed enemies. Will it apply its opposition to its antitheses consistently, or will it be remembered for apologizing for everything it used to stand against?

What has become of the left is creating a vacuum that right wing parties are going to end up filling if they don’t stop arguing for fascists just because they’re not white or powerful fascists. The left needs to ask itself why people are turning to the right in increasing numbers, but I have a feeling the unthinking sorts will simply say this is occurring “Because we’re a nation of racists.” It’s becoming inevitable at this point that a swing to the other side of the political spectrum is a reaction in part to the failure of the left to oppose that which opposes its loftiest ideals.

It is selling itself out. And while it is selling itself out, its supporters consider canned insults an acceptable form of debate. 

R.I.P, Old Left. You’d rather be apologists for Islamists than suffer spurious accusations of bigotry, and so we had to let you go. But you were really something in your heyday.