Why the Left Must Condemn Hamas and Islamic Extremism
The Left has Historically Hated Religious Bigotry, and Islamic extremists, unlike bigoted Christians, Jews and Hindus, don’t merely dislike other faiths; they kill practitioners of other faiths.
By
David Gottfried
From its very birth, the Left has decried religious bigotry and intolerance. The left, in its earliest manifestations at the time of the French and American revolutions, believed in freedom of speech, religion and assembly. Of course, left of center politics radically changed with the advent of Marxism as Socialists condemned capitalism. However, both Eighteenth Century liberalism which applauded the free market (l8th century liberals are equivalent to contemporary conservatives) and Marxism condemned religious bigotry. George Washington visited a synagogue and was quite amiable toward Jewry, and Vladimir Lenin thundered against pernicious anti Semitism.1
Indeed, because the left was adamantly opposed to
Antisemtism, Hitler perceived the left and the Jews as working together, sometimes thought that Russian Bolsheviks were a creature or manifestation of Jewishness, and believed that Jewish bankers and communists were conspiring to ruin Germany. Incidentally, although Nazis always accused Jews of causing financial ruination, it was a German Jew, Walter Rathenau, who served Germany as a finance and foreign minister during the Weimer Republic, who negotiated a trade agreement with the Soviet Union which buoyed the German economy after the severe inflation of 1923 and 1924 and was responsible for Germany’s soaring economy in the late 20’s. (Rathenau was assassinated by a Nazi in the waning days of Weimar)
Of course, religious bigotry is not unique to Muslims, jihadists or Hamas. I must concede that American fundamentalists, right wing allies of Bibi Netanyahu and Hindu absolutists are all somewhat, or exceedingly, bigoted, believing that their faith is true and all other faiths are a mishmash of lies, fables and paranoia. However, there is a big difference between bigoted Muslims and Jews, Christians and Hindus; Jews, Christians and Hindus don’t believe in killing members of other faiths.
However Islamic extremists constitute the only religious group (or should we say gang, ala a street gang in a big city – but perhaps that is unfair to urban youths in big cities as they have never beheaded infants from alien gangs) that still slaughters people associated with other faiths.
Although some “leftist” “scholars” will tell us that Islamic extremists are not anti-Semitic and are only anti-Zionist, the charter of Hamas expressly calls for the extermination of the Jews.
Catholics and Protestants used to have a terrible capacity for religiously induced slaughter (There is a painting in the Vatican which, I have heard, honors or even celebrates a battle in which French Catholics slaughtered French Protestant Huguenots), but that sort of slaughter started to die down centuries ago and had completely vanished by modern times (Except, perhaps, in Northern Ireland). In the Thirty Years War (1618 to 1648), the chief combatants were allied with states of different faiths, and this European conflagration marked the beginning of the end of inter faith battles in Christendom. (In that long war, Catholic France was fighting against Catholic Austria, and France, through Cardinal Richelieu, forged an alliance with Protestant Sweeden and the Muslim Ottoman Empire so they would direct their fire power against Austria.)
These days, both Catholicism and Protestantism are relatively pacific, and have finally realized that Jesus, unlike Muhammed, was not exactly a man of war. Although Judaism has a certain warlike militancy, largely fueled by chronic and severe anti Semitism, Judaism has never held that members of other faiths should be killed or punished or discriminated against.
However, Muslims have unveiled their bloody-thirsty predilections throughout the world. In the Indian subcontinent, they routinely attack Hindus. In Lebanon, they decimated the Christian community of Maronites. In the Ottoman empire (the antecedent of modern Turkey), they committed genocide against Christian Armenians. In the Balkans, Albanian Muslims assisted the Nazis in putting Jews and Eastern Orthodox Serbs into the Jasenovac concentration camp. In Nigeria, they starved Biafrans to death. In Egypt, they periodically massacre Christian Copts. And I think we all remember the travails of Darfur. The people of Darfur called their Islamic murderers the Janjaweed, which in English means “Devils on Horseback.”
But Muslims don’t only kill non-Muslims. They are quite emphatic about the God-given necessity of killing all Muslims who disagree with the maxims of their particular white-robed (white hooded ?) old fart pig of a preacher. And if you think I sound a bit too extreme, just remember the recent bloodshed between Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq.
Most Muslims are either Shiite or Sunni, and they need to hate Christians and Jews because when they don’t have Christians and Jews to hate to relieve their interminable depression, they start killing each other.
The New Yorker, a left of center journal which is not known for jingoist news coverage and has always bent over backwards to be receptive and sensitive to third world points of view, carried many illuminating articles about the ways in which Sunnis and Shiites killed each other in Iraq a few years back.
One Shiite Warrior was quoted as saying that killing a Sunni with an ordinary gun would not suffice. He said he liked to use power tools to drill holes in the heads of Sunnis as they deserved an especially bloody death. Sometimes, a Sunni or a Shiite would nab and waste a large number of members of the opposing sect by blowing up their mosques when they were at prayer. Sometimes, they developed a certain fetish in selecting favored victims. According to one article in the New Yorker, a gang of Muslims got their psychotic religious rocks off by killing people who distributed refrigerators, ice or ice makers. Why ? Refrigeration did not exist in the time of the prophet. Ergo, using Refrigeration and availing oneself of ice cubes was simply Satanic.
Fine. Not only refrigeration, but also penicillin and electrical equipment did not exist at the time of the Prophet Muhammed.
News reports indicate that trucks are once again driving into Gaza with supplies. Let’s help those twits become very good and obedient Muslims by ensuring that only products, available at the time of Muhammed, enter Gaza. That would mean no equipment associated with high tech armaments.
Lenins’ numerous condemnations of anti-semitism:
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=3&ved=0ahUKEwiNoPLF_NjXAhUNkeAKHUR-B5sQFggzMAI&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.marx2mao.com%2FPDFs%2FLenin%2520CW-Vol.%25209.pdf&usg=AOvVaw3XA1lX2lqvHT58o5nO5XS5
Lenin at page 178: The government is distributing arms right and left, and bribing all comers to beat up and massacre Jews, “democrats”, Armenians, Poles, and so on.
Lenin at Page 262: Only the Jewish Bund is campaigning against the Duma elections, and at big meetings held in various cities ... the workers in general have taken a categorical stand against the State Duma, from which they are excluded.
Lenin at Page 443: Nicholas the Bloodstained’s “Constitutional” Manifesto has been followed by countless new killings organised by Trepov and his thugs. The ferocity of the Cossacks, the anti-Jewish pogroms, the shooting down in the streets of freshly “amnestied” political offenders, the pillage conducted by the Black Hundreds with the aid of the police— everything has been brought into play so as to crush the revolutionary struggle.
Lenin at page 458: The white terror is rampant. Wherever they can, the police are inciting and organising the dregs of capitalist society for pillage and violence, plying the scum of the urban population with liquor, staging antiJewish pogroms, exhorting to violence against “students” and rebels, and helping in “giving a lesson” to Zemstvo members