Choosing a Theory on the Left and Islam

In the past I have given a bunch of theories (see below for a list) on the strange alliance of the left and Islam (which to be more accurate is an alliance of Western leftists and the Muslim right), but I did not prefer any of them. They all seemed, despite some glimmers of insight, equally bad. But now I’m going to pick one, theory number 11 (the We-Don’t-Want-To-Admit-That-We’re-Wrong theory), as the one that explains it all. However, I’m going to elaborate on what I said about it to make it more plausible.

The left is obviously in denial about what is going on in the world. By now we can’t explain this alliance by saying the left isn’t aware of the many things Muslims do that would bother them, because there have been plenty of incidents that have received publicity. The left must be in denial, and the question is why. I am not a psychologist, and I don’t have any great insights on denial, but I suggest that there is something blocking them from seeing the truth. What is it? I suggest it is Vietnam.

Here’s why. Whatever is blocking the left from seeing what is going on is something that for them is enormous. You don’t support people who want to kill you and destroy your movement unless you are in denial about them, and to be in denial about people who want to kill you entails that whatever is causing this denial is enormous. For baby-boomer leftists, Vietnam is enormous. That alone doesn’t show that Vietnam is at the heart of all this madness, but it does suggest it. Moreover, given that baby boomers represent a large slice of the left, and given that there is no significant breach between the boomer leftists and later generations of leftists, then it is entirely possible that the boomer leftists have led the way on Muslims with later generations following, and if so, then it is possible that for boomer leftists, the trouble goes back to Vietnam.

I suggest that the left-Muslim alliance was the result of leftist fears that they would have to admit they were wrong about Vietnam. Let me note that Vietnam represents a huge mental investment for baby-boomer leftists. It was the most important issue of their youth in the sense that it generated the biggest protests and probably caused the most leftist ink to be spilled during that period compared with other issues. In addition, as nothing about the situation changed as time went on, young liberals and leftists became more and more radicalized. Admitting to being wrong about Vietnam, then, is tantamount to admitting that one’s life as a leftist has been a waste of time, and almost no one on the left will admit that (while remaining a leftist). Even today few on the left will admit that they were wrong on Vietnam, and at the time of the relevant year in question, which is in fact about 1980, Vietnam was still fresh in everyone’s mind. Baby-boomer leftists thought, “We were right about Vietnam, and the conservatives were wrong.” From this they generalized to, “We are friends of the Third World, and they are their enemies.”

Why 1980? It was about then that leftists could see for the first time that there was a problem with fundamentalist Muslims because that is when the Shah of Iran was evicted, a theocracy was established, and the bloodletting of Iranian liberals and leftists took place.

Now if you are a friend of the Third World, you are of course anti-imperialist, and you are against all regimes which are (or which you perceive are) nothing but puppet regimes. And so you were against the Shah’s rule in Iran, as I was during the 1970s. The Shah was, like Mubarak, a brutal dictator, but in retrospect one can see that he was rather liberal. Under his rule, a liberal abortion law was instituted in the late 1970s, but of course that wasn’t enough for the left. He simply had to go.

But once he was gone, and once the news reports came in of all the bloodletting, my response was immediate, and I still think it was the most sensible and rational response one could have: I decided that the perpetrators were equal to the worst malefactors of any other era. Nothing the left has said in recent years has made me change my mind on this. Nothing they have said inclines me to think that supporting a faction that wants to kill liberals and leftists is anything sensible or moral or obligatory. Sheer self-preservation ought to make everyone who is left-of-center be against the Muslim right.

However, I seem to have been almost alone in having such a reaction. For most liberals and leftists, to say that the new rulers in Iran were worse than the Shah meant big trouble, apparently. Here is a list of the problems that they saw.

The first problem was simply admitting that they were wrong about something. Naturally, no one wants to admit to being wrong, leftists perhaps more than others. This is what I said in theory number 11, but I now realize that a lot more can be said.

A second problem was that admitting that it was wrong to want the Shah out meant admitting that changes can be bad, yet the left is always pushing for change. Accordingly, to have admitted that this change was bad meant taking the risk of having that particular change flung in their face by conservatives whenever they pushed for other changes.

A third problem was that the Shah was evicted following massive protests, but admitting that it was a mistake to evict the Shah meant admitting that this tactic had backfired, when using protests to push for change was something that the leftists had used in many instances during the Sixties, especially against the Vietnam War.

A fourth problem was that acknowledging that they hated the new regime meant that the left could not claim to be a friend of the Third World. If you hate some people in the Third World, then you aren’t a friend of the Third World, at least not of all of it. Even worse, think about the difference between the new regime and what the Iranian left wanted. Obviously, the new regime had a better claim to being a genuine, Third-World, non-Western regime than yet another socialist experiment cobbled together by Western-leaning (or Soviet-leaning) Iranians.

A fifth problem was that, if leftists admitted that the new regime was evil, the leftist idea that imperialism is bad would be threatened. This is because a strong case could be made that the new regime represented the default mode of Iranian culture, and if that was the case, if Iranian culture was just plain incapable of achieving something progressive on its own, then it needed an imperialist to come in and impose a progressive regime on it.

This leads to the sixth problem. The left had long thought of America as a problem because it didn’t accept socialism, but in the Sixties they began thinking of it as positively evil because of Vietnam. Yet, if an American puppet in Iran, installed after America booted out an Iranian leader, turned out to be more progressive than an Iranian regime, all that talk of America the horrible imperialist had to be scrapped.

These were the problems the left was facing back then, and all of these except the second led to a sensitive area: Vietnam. (And the second led to the heart of leftism: making changes.) As I already mentioned, no one on the left wanted to admit that they were wrong about Vietnam back then, and many don’t want to admit it even today. Yet, to admit that one was wrong about wanting the Shah out came very close to admitting that one may have been wrong about Vietnam. If, for example, there’s nothing wrong with imperialism per se, then our presence in Vietnam could have been benign.

So, why was I different? Maybe I wasn’t as bright as they were because I didn’t see that turning against the new regime was going to cause a lot of problems for the left. The way I saw it was as follows. Admitting a mistake just had to be done because the actions of the new regime were so heinous. And admitting that some changes were bad wasn’t any big deal. Obviously, the change in the 1930s in Germany that led to Nazism was a bad change, so why was admitting the evil nature of this new regime something to be avoided? Acknowledging that protests backfired wasn’t any big deal to me since obviously both the left and the right could use protests, though the right seldom did. It was just a tactic.

As for the idea that acknowledging the evil nature of the new regime threatened the left’s claim to being the friends of people in the Third World, I guess I never believed the left could be friends with the entire Third World. I knew all along that there were plenty of awful people in the Third World and that the Muslim world in particular was shot through with sexism. We just couldn’t be friends with all of them. Moreover, as not just a leftist but also a left-hander, I had heard enough tales about how lefties were treated in other parts of the world to know that these people weren’t the innocents that other leftists thought they were. I just wasn’t going to judge a huge spectrum of humanity as good, just because they were victims of Western imperialism.

Regarding the last two problems, obviously America had been on the right side in WWII, and it could be so again, so there was no need to cling to the idea that America was somehow intrinsically evil. Finally, with respect to imperialism, if you are willing to admit that some people in the Third World are reactionaries, then invading becomes a possibility. I doubt if I ever was against imperialism to the degree that the other leftists were.

Anyway, for whatever reason, I split from the left on the issue of fundamentalist Muslims. But I wasn’t aware of this split because in fact very little was said on the left about the matter. The big issue was the plight of the American hostages, after which Reagan came into office and the left spent all its energies dealing with him. The Muslim right had little importance during that period. When the fatwa against Salman Rushdie was issued, I began to get my first glimmer that there had been a split. I expected demonstrations in the streets, but there was silence. It wasn’t until 9/11 that I finally began to realize that all along the other leftists had taken what I still think is a completely irrational line, namely that there is nothing wrong with the current Iranian regime.

Meanwhile, an important book, Edward Said’s Orientalism, tying Western views on the Muslim world to racism was published, so even if leftists had initially been against the Iranian regime, they would have had a big job in defending this stance against a position that many leftists have found attractive. (I admit that Said’s book was published just before the Iranian Revolution, but I doubt if many leftists had yet read it when that occurred.) In addition, ideas on cultural relativism and multiculturalism gained strength, so that by the time of the attacks of 9/11, it seemed the left just had no course other than to take the one they did.

This is nothing but denial, and there have been many other examples of that denial as well. The left is at ease with the murder of Theo van Gogh, and conservatives are more upset by it than leftists are. My favorite book these days on the left and Islam, Karima Bennoune’s Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here, describes example after example of atrocities committed by fundamentalist Muslims against liberals and leftists in the Muslim world. You have to go very far in denial not to credit what she is saying. Many people have pointed out how sexist and homophobic Muslims in the West are, too, but it means nothing to today’s leftists.

But that is not yet the full extent of denial. Muslims have problems with others from the Third World, but the left tries not to notice, and to the extent that they do notice, they will support their friends, the Muslims, against everyone else in the Third World. Not many leftists in the West have commented on the problems in Kashmir, but some have, and I have yet to find one who supports the Hindus over the Muslims in that dispute, even though historically it was the Muslims who were the imperialists. Likewise, we can expect the left to support Muslims against Buddhists and the Uyghurs against the Han Chinese. And it goes almost without saying that they will support Muslims over Jews and Muslims over Third-World Christians (such as the Copts).

This leaves the Sunni-Shi’ite split, but I’ll save that for the next post.

Anyway, this is the best I can make of the unholy alliance at this time. Since some of the views mentioned above (such as the one on imperialism) are deeply held by leftists, no changes can be expected in their views on Muslims. I believe that the best bet for change will come when enough young women decide that they have had it with all the stories about rapes and honor killings to force the other leftists to change their minds. But so far that has not happened.

Here is the list of theories:

1. The Stuck-in-the-Sixties theory.
2. The Contrarian theory.
3. The Oppressors-and-Oppressed theory.
4. The Unity-of-the-Causes theory.
5. The We-Are-Guilty theory.
6. The Near-Enemy-vs.-the-Far-Enemy theory.
7. The Eventually-We’ll-Be-Proved-Right theory.
8. The Leftists-Are-Weenies theory.
9. The Right-Controls-Everything theory.
10. The They-Aren’t-Really-Muslims theory.
11. The We-Don’t-Want-To-Admit-That-We’re-Wrong theory.
12. The America-Is-Always-the-Bad-Guy theory.
13. The Cognitive-Egocentrism theory.
14. The Different-Leftist-Milieus theory.
15. The Avoiding-Another-Holocaust theory.
16. The Leftists-Are-Nihilists theory.

1-6: here

7-9: here

10-12: here

13 and 14: here

15: here

16: here