Has the American Left Joined Our Enemies?

Not consciously, for most, but perhaps:

Now look at the behavior of the Left since 9/11, both in this country, Europe, and even Israel. Rather than feel righteously angered by the terrorist mass murder of 3,000 innocent people, large parts of the Left have adopted the aggressors' point of view. They keep telling us that the Islamic fascists were right to blow up innocent people who had done them no harm; some of them have taken on conspiracy theories, claiming that Bush or Israel really committed the atrocities. At the same time they are in deep denial about the danger of future terrorist attacks on American soil, and blindly refuse to see the rising threat of nuclear proliferation by stateless terror groups. Instead, they "displace" their fear and anger on George W. Bush. To the Left, once Bush is gone, the terror problem will simply and magically go away.

Yet we know that small amounts of radioactive materials --- like the Polonium 210 that was used just two months ago to poison Alexander Litvinenko in London --- could be turned into a "dirty bomb" in anybody's garage. It wouldn't take any more technical skill than was used in 1995 to blow up the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City.

Terrorists with dirty bombs are a murderous threat to all of us, but the Left denies it. Twisting reality is the hallmark of mental pathology.

The Left's behavior looks just like identification with the Islamofascist aggressor. Just as the concentration camp Kapos wore pieces of Nazi uniforms to magically assume the power of their killers-to-be, the radical Left adopts the symbols and slogans of Hezbollah and Al Qaida. Strikingly, their inetllectual leader Noam Chomsky is the son of a Talmudic scholar --- a man who devoted his life to the study of Jewish scripture, and who would therefore be a ready target for today's fascists. Chomsky must have grown up as a child in a most devout household. No doubt many of his family members were murdered in the Nazi Holocaust. Yet last year Chomsky flew to Lebanon to be publicly photographed shaking hands with Hassan Nasrallah, who was even then preparing to launch many hundreds of short-range missiles at Jewish civilians in Israel --- including, no doubt, Talmudic scholars. Chomsky has been a radical Leftist all his life, even before he became famous as a linguist. Identification with the aggressor? It certainly would explain his very odd life course.

In London, during the Hezbollah war in Lebanon, demonstrators from George Galloway's Respect Party (an offshoot of the Socialist Workers' Party) carried signs reading "We are all Hezbollah now." They literally adopted the aggressors' point of view. This has been happening all over Europe, where the Left still reigns supreme, and on American university campuses as well --- probably for the same psychological reason.

The rise of anti-Zionism (and of course anti-Semitism) in Europe can also be seen in this light. If only those six million Jews in Israel were to disappear like magic, goes the wishful thought, all the danger and trouble would go away. Europe's Muslims would become as peaceful as lambs, and Iran's zealots would learn to love us. It is a childlike surrender to fear.

Notice that this is exactly what the Left did during the Cold War. I do not remember a single passionate demonstration against the Soviet Union, which had nuclear-armed missiles aimed directly at Europe and the US. Instead, the most extreme and feverish passions were aimed straight at the United States, the country that led and protected the West from Soviet aggression.

The other side of "identification with the aggressor" is "blaming the victim." In Nazi concentration camps the Kapos would act out sadistically to other victims, blaming them for Nazi crimes. A decade ago the phrase "blaming the victim" was on everybody's lips, when feminists loudly accused all men of blaming rape victims for being raped. That seemed to disappear along with the Bill Clinton saga and his blatant sexual abuse of a young intern, to the deafening silence of the feminist Left. Today we can plainly see "blaming the victim" among Islamic fascists, who often accuse young girls of being sluts if they are gang-raped by men. Islamic radicals always blame their victims. That is what makes them incapable of guilt toward their victims.


The real oddity is that the Left has enthusiastically joined the new fascists. We no longer hear the old trope of "blaming the victim" from feminists. Rather, feminists on the Left have joined Islamofascists in blaming the United States --- for being the fire brigade that is trying to put out the fire. The Left even defends women being pressured to wear the burqa, the ancient sign of women's submission and sexual slavery in the most retrogressive kind of tribal Islam. Shari'a law prescribes exactly how women are to be physically slapped for failing to obey fathers and husbands. Feminists are silent.

The Left claims to value "peace" above all things; but that means that self-defense ranks nowhere. It's not an option --- at least not when Republicans are in office. If we leave out self-defense against Iranian nukes or El Qaida truck bombs, there is no option except submission. That is what "identification with the aggressor" comes down to. It is a Stockholm Syndrome for millions of people --- most of the readers of the New York Times and the UK Guardian, just for starters.

I'm leery of psychological explanations en masse for behavior more easily explained by other things. The Left spent much of the last century bashing America for being intolerant and xenophobic. When foreign madmen hijacked our planes and rammed them into our skyscrapers, the Left had to choose between allying with the intolerant xenophobes who in their eyes make up a significant portion of their countrymen or find some way to justify the actions of the terrorists. Is it that surprising that the most doctrinaire chose the latter?

Think of the pro-German folks like Charles Lindbergh who pooh-poohed Nazi atrocities before and during WWII.

Or of the American Left's malleability on the subject of human rights and environmental issues so long as it happened to be Communist governments abusing people or ecology.

One's worldview is not so easily changed, and people will go to utterly inexplicable lengths to maintain it, even in the face of brutal evidence to the contrary.

I don't believe that makes them mentally unbalanced, just stubborn and foolhardy and arrogant.