The American Left and Its Fascist Doctrines

In 1946, Victor Kravchenko, a former Soviet official who escaped to this country wrote "I Chose Freedom", a harrowing recount of life under Stalin, with its show trials, murders, gulags, which killed more people than the Nazis did, as many as 30 million according to many sources.

Today, American leftists are fond of predicting the imminent arrival of fascism in this country, even as they themselves, more than our government, promote the doctrines and beliefs of fascism.

Over the past three years I have witnessed first-hand, via vituperative e-mails and subtle threats, the authoritarianism of the American left and its Islamist allies. It started with my efforts as a member of the US Green Party to overturn an anti-Israel resolution adopted by the party as a result of internal pressures from radical Islamists acting on behalf of one of the most radical Islamist groups extant, Al Awda (Palestine Right of Return).

Prior to this my interest in radical Islam had been limited to anger over the oppression, enslavement, abuse and murder of women in Muslim countries. As I began learning about these issues, the absence of the American left and most American liberals from the debate over the oppression of women under Islam was striking. Liberal feminists like Phyllis Chesler came under vicious attack and blackballing for even raising these issues.

The only place where public discourse even took cognizance of Islamist misogyny, anti-Semitism, suppression of civil liberties and promotion of violent resistance against American "imperialism" and Israeli "apartheid" was in the right-wing media. The US Green Party adoption of a resolution for a boycott of and divestment from Israel seemed to me to be a clear example of a double standard of moral judgment: Israel's treatment of Palestinians was judged to be of supreme importance whereas sharia law, Hamas suicide bombings and rocket firings, and the massacre of hundreds of thousands of black animists by Sudanese Muslims were not deemed worthy of notice.

In the US Green Party's international and media committees, a Muslim convert, Aimee Smith, denied that the murders in Darfur were genocide, claiming that "Zionists" were to blame. Others in the party hewed to a similar anti-Semitic and pro-Hezbollah/Hamas line. Here are some of their statements:

AN INSIDE LOOK AT WHAT THE U.S. GREEN PARTY AND SOME OF ITS CANDIDATES THINK ABOUT ISRAEL

David Cyr, member NY Green Party State Committee:
"The creation of the state of Israel was a greater crime against the Jewish people than the ovens were. It is better to be murdered by a fascist than to become one. Israel does not have a right to exist and should not." "Israel provides a simple near-perfect example of fascism, with pictures from Palestine that look like the Warsaw Ghetto uprising but with Jewish Nazis
in the tanks." (Source: NYS GP State Committee listserv, 2/06 and 7/31/06)

Owen Broadhurst, Green Party candidate for MA state
legislature:
"Israel widely implements its policy to kidnap, savagely beat and relentlessly torture Palestinian children for little more than the entertainment value that such acts of child abuse apparently provide." (USGP National Committee list, vol. 27 #10)

Todd Chretien, Green Party candidate for US Senate, CA:
"Hezbollah has emerged as the hero to millions of Arabs and Muslims"..."Muslims and Arabs in the U.S. bare(sic) the brunt of the 'war on terror;'" "We must build a movement that openly embraces Arab and Muslim forces" (Counterpunch, 8/15/06; Campaign web site, 8/15/06)

"I believe the Israeli government (just like the American) is a danger to all people." (Source: Todd Chretien website)

Howie Hawkins, Green Party 2006 candidate for US Senate, NY:
Hawkins urges support of terrorist sympathizer Imam Warith Deen, trained in Wahhabi extremism in Saudi Arabia, who called the 9/11 bombers martyrs: "I call on the government to stop its harassment of Imam Umar and all Muslims." (source: Press release of 6/06, on NYSGP State Committee listserv)

Aimee Smith, member of US Green Party GPAX and Media committees:
"Genocide is what the Zionists are continuing to unleash on Palestinians." Regarding Darfur: "Zionists and Cruise Missile folks have been pushing the projection (of genocide) in order to compell (sic) the US or UN to invade...The crisis there (Darfur) is horrendous but not larger in reach or harm that that in Congo." (Source: US Green Party National Committee minutes, 6/06)

Ron Francis, co-chair, MA Green Rainbow Party (now MA Green Party):
"Jewish priviledge (sic) nature of the state of Israel is apartheid." (Source: web site of Somerville Divestment Project, 6/14/06)

"Palestinain (sic) are 100 percent correct in calling for the end of apartheid Israel and all of its explicitly racist laws developed after the ethnic cleansing project of 1948."

Al Awda was doing its job. But they were not alone. Over the past few years, radical Islamism continued its attempts to infiltrate and subvert American campuses, twist the arm of liberal Christian churches, and intimidate American Jews into supporting not just its pro-Palestinian views and goals but a worldwide vicious and unquestionably anti-Jewish campaign to depict Israel as the successor to Nazi Germany.

The irony and big lie of all this is of course the fact that the Muslim world historically supported and allied itself with Hitler and the Nazis and vowed support for its extermination of the Jews. Even one of the most virulent Islamists in the world, (Qaradawi), someone close to bin Laden, has himself drawn the comparison in an admiring commentary on the Nazis. This is not surprising. But let us not distract ourselves from the real question: why has the left in this country and in the UK aligned itself with an ideology and movement that is totalitarian, theocratic and anti-democracy?

Actually, an Italian friend came up with a simple answer, the Occam's Razor answer: the left has ALWAYS been authoritarian. This claim is eminently reasonable, given the past support of the left for Stalin and, today, for demagogues like Chavez and Castro. The campaign in support of fundamentalist authoritarian regimes and ideologies is embellished, of course, with an equally rabid anti-Americanism, lifted straight from the story boards of Noam Chomsky and Ramsey Clark.

Putting aside the lesser hyperbolic journalists like "Christian socialist" atheist-baiter Chris Hedges, let me fast forward to my recent encounter with leftist rabies, in the form of Johann Hari, a writer for The Independent in London, whose claims to fame include blaming USA imperialism for Somali piracy, which he says is nothing less than Somalis protecting their seas and coasts from pollution. Not content to rest on these laurels, Hari has just blasted me for tainting the memory of Islamist martyr Rachel Corrie, who was a member of the International Solidarity Movement, by saying that my description of the ISM was libelous and that he had forwarded it to ISM with the hope that they would sue me.

After spending a delicious hour fantasizing about how much fun such a public trial would be, I returned to reality and the serious issue of civil liberties and freedom of speech. ISM and its offshoot, the Palestine Solidarity Movement, are pretty much the dregs of the communist revolution in this country. They work closely with, and support directly or indirectly, Ramsey Clark's National Action Center, its offshoots ( the violent Workers' World Party, ANSWER, Wheels of Justice, etc.), Hamas, Hezbollah, and not least, Al Awda, Palestine Right of Return....whose founder, Mazin Qumseyeh, and field rep Mohammed Abed, were US Green Party members personally and directly responsible for passing the party's anti-Israel resolution.

Here are individuals and organizations operating with the full protection of our Constitutional freedoms, even to the extent of promoting violence and terrorism (if not actually funding it), who are defending an ideology and regimes dedicated to suppressing these same freedoms in the Muslim world....and who are ready, as Hari says, to support legal challenges to my right of freedom of speech.

In the universities, similar authoritarianism is spreading due to the efforts of the pro-Palestinian groups, who have successfully intimidated college administrators to cancel lectures by people like Nonie Darwish and others critical of radical Islam, thus denying their opponents the right of dissent and free speech, in classic leftist form. This kind of leftist repression echoes the Stalinist witch hunts, which resulted in imprisonment, life sentences at hard labor and executions. I have little doubt that today's leftists would do the same if they were in power, condemning critics like Salman Rushdie, Christopher Hitchens, Irshad Manji and Ayaan Hirsi Ali for ideological treason. (Let us not forget that George Orwell imagined his own list of freethinkers and dissenters that would have ended up imprisoned or dead had the Communists triumphed).

It seems to me that American liberals are looking in the wrong place for civil liberties violations when they curse the Patriot Act and get hot under the collar about mistreatment of Islamist terrorists. Torture is wrong...but keeping terrorists off the streets is right. It is of course regrettable that Bush, Cheney et al badly screwed things up and by violating civil liberties made it possible, even likely, that some terrorists may go free.

However, this does not mean that we need to be lax and less vigilant. Nor does it mean we should not take groups like ISM and Al Awda and the Muslim Brotherhood seriously. Steve Emerson's book, Jihad Inc., has uncovered the dozens of Muslim mosques, "charity" groups and other Muslim centers across this country, (Virginia, Tucson, Michigan, among others), about which serious evidence of terrorist support exists, including raising money for Hamas and Hezbollah.

As for ISM, a collection of ragtag communists, their role is one of brainwashing and recruiting Americans and Jews to become, as Rachel Corrie became, human shields in Gaza at worst, and at best propagandists against America and for jihadists everywhere.