Uncomfortable look at terrorists’ apologists

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United in Hate

The Left’s Romance with Tyranny and Terror

By Jamie Glazov

WND Books, 260 pages, $32.50

 

While most of the world was reeling in horror in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, some groups reacted with celebration and a certain grim satisfaction.

CNN documented such displays in places such as Lebanon and the Palestinian territories, but these sentiments were also expressed by several western academics, artists and writers.

Why would such a group, made up largely of secular liberals, have any sympathy with the reactionary fundamentalism that characterizes militant Islam? This is the question that Canadian historian Jamie Glazov, editor of the online journal Front Page Magazine, seeks to answer in this uneven but thought-provoking political history.

Glazov provides an alarming number of examples from those dark days at the end of 2001. Novelist Norman Mailer hailed the 19 hijackers as "brilliant," while film director Oliver Stone compared their acts to the French and American revolutions.

Leading leftists Susan Sontag and Noam Chomsky freely equated 9/11 with American military actions abroad, the former arguing that the deliberate targeting of thousands of civilians by al-Qaida was less offensive and immoral than President Bill Clinton’s 1998 attack on a Sudanese factory, mistakenly believed to be a chemical weapons factory.

Most famously, obscure professor Ward Churchill vaulted to fame by describing Americans as "little Eichmanns" who had provoked the attacks.

The greatest strength of United in Hate is Glazov’s dissection of the cognitive dissonance that characterizes many of the apologists for militant Islam.

Some of the groups, often described as leftists, who oppose western intervention in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere and argue that American and European cultures cannot be judged superior to others, are themselves members of groups that are brutally oppressed in regions where sharia, Islamic law, is in force.

The British group Queer Youth Alliance regularly attends anti-Israel demonstrations, despite the fact that Palestinian homosexuals live in fear of being tortured, mutilated or killed by their co-religionists, and often find sanctuary in Israel.

Post-colonial feminists seek to give Islamic leaders a pass on their persecution of women despite the fact that in Egypt, 97 per cent of girls have suffered female genital mutilation and baby girls are twice as likely to die in infancy as baby boys.

Glazov reserves the full measure of his scorn, though, for Jewish apologists for Islamist anti-Semitism. The son of a Russian Jew who barely escaped imprisonment in the Soviet Union, he sees American Jews like Sontag and Chomsky, and Jewish anti-Zionist Norman Finkelstein, as accomplices to militant Islam, providing it with a veneer of respectability.

While glossing over some of the nuances in the arguments of these and similar figures, Glazov succeeds in pointing out the dark absurdity of feminists, gays and Jews marching in solidarity with groups that seek to impose sharia law when they themselves would be among the first victims in such a state.

Where he is less successful is in seeking to explain why these strange alliances exist. One of his arguments is that the members of the extreme left, who supported the Warsaw Pact over NATO during the Cold War, are motivated by a hatred of western civilization, and simply transferred their affections to Islamist fundamentalists when the U.S.S.R. collapsed.

Elsewhere, he suggests that a profound self-loathing and lack of confidence leads particular groups to embrace a cause that would ultimately destroy them. In his conclusion, he speculates that an almost mystical zeal to purify the world unites Muslim fundamentalists, Marxists and post-colonialists, who see literal bloodshed as the only tool through which humanity can be perfected.

While provocative, none of these explanations is ultimately satisfactory.

Nevertheless, United in Hate is a disconcerting look at tyranny and its apologists. Glazov poses some uncomfortable questions, but in many cases, they are questions that need to be asked.

 

Winnipegger Rebecca Walberg is the president of the Wakefield Centre for Policy Research.