I come from a family in Scotland that always voted Labour (Democrats in U.S. terms), as I did myself. I support, as a matter of principle, universal healthcare along the UK’s NHS or Israel’s model. I cannot debate the economics, or whether Obama’s version is flawed and there’s a better way to implement that goal (I simply don’t know enough). But I believe the goal is right.
What makes no sense to me is the lack, or appearance of a lack, of an effective Republican alternative.
I often find myself agreeing with many of President Obama’s other policies. Of course I am not an American. If I were, I would be on the right of the Democratic Party or the left of the GOP.
That being said, there is a huge weakness and critical flaw in the mindset of the American Left. It is a flaw that can kill this country, and I mean that literally.
Oh, and please do not refer to the Left as “liberal.” As my dear friend – and former British Nazi – Ray Hill says, “There is nothing more intolerant than a liberal,” at least to those who do not share their beliefs. And never insult everyone else by calling the Left by its favorite title, “progressive.” That’s a title leftists bestow on themselves, happily implying that those who do not share their worldview are “regressive” or at best “stagnant.”
The weakness one finds among American leftists (and certainly among European leftists too) is a pathological self-inflicted blindness to the dangers posed by domestic political Islam and Islamists.
They will simply hear nothing said against it or them, period.
President Obama is particularly guilty of this and, frankly, he sounds very stupid every time he studiously avoids any reference to the word “Islam” whenever there is a homeland Islamic terrorist incident. The most he can ever manage is to denounce the perpetrators for their failure to understand that Islam is a religion of peace. Foolish man.
I have thought long and hard about people who hold values that are often noble and good and even (sometimes) progressive, and yet ally themselves with those whose views are fascist.
I could cite a long list but perhaps the best example is former British MP George Galloway – sometime buffoon, powerful speaker, and quintessential embodiment of the Left’s Islamo-Fascist Blindness Syndrome.
During a March 9 interview at the University of Dhaka, Bangladesh, Galloway called for a global alliance between Muslims and progressives because, according to Galloway, they “have the same enemies.” He means the U.S. and Israel, by the way.
Of course, many on the British Left consider Galloway a fool and a clown. Huge numbers, though, do not.
After his ejection from the Labour Party in 2003. Galloway went on to found the Respect Party – an unthinkable alliance between the Trotskyite Socialist Workers Party and political Muslim groupings. Nick Cohen of The Observer newspaper summed it up as an “Alliance… between the Trotskyist far left and the Islamic far right.”
Can you have such an alliance? Oh yes indeed! Just ask those on the far Left.
But you don’t have to travel to the edges of the political Left to find the axis between “progressives” and political Islam.
In 2010 there was a surprisingly candid admission from the Labour party after its general election defeat. Party officials conceded they had been encouraging large numbers of immigrants from Muslim countries. The reason: the newcomers would naturally vote Labour.
There is one other factor that prompts the Left to turn the blindest of blind eyes to the threat incubated within the Islamic diaspora. It happens to be the world’s oldest hatred.
One of my personal heroes, both as a writer and a man, was George Orwell. In his essay on British anti-Semitism he concluded with a challenge:
“I defy any modern intellectual to look closely and honestly into his own mind without coming upon nationalistic loyalties and hatreds of one kind or another. It is the fact that he can feel the emotional tug of such things, and yet see them dispassionately for what they are, that gives him his status as an intellectual. It will be seen, therefore, that the starting point for any investigation of anti-Semitism should not be ‘Why does this obviously irrational belief appeal to other people?’ but ‘Why does anti-Semitism appeal to me? What is there about it that I feel to be true?’ ”
The Left (and of course to some extent the Right as well) is riddled with anti-Semitism. Leftists deny this to themselves and others by funneling it into expressions of moral indignation against the state of Israel for alleged crimes they blithely ignore in scores of other states.
The perception exists among some that the European Left is more aggressively anti-Israel and anti-Semitic than the American Left. But while there may be some difference in tone, the Left here in the U.S. (and remember, it is the Left) acts and thinks much as its European counterpart.
From IRS investigations of charities that support Republican or Israeli causes, to Obama’s attempt to neuter Congress by making it subservient to the United Nations, the single biggest threat facing the United States today comes from political Islam and its supporters, apologists, and facilitators on the American Left.