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Why
Zarqawi and Katrina Van Den Heuvel? - Friday, February 25,
2005 6:21 PM |
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I’ve been mulling over the picture grid that everybody is
having fits about and believe I have come up with a solution. That will have to
wait a day or so while we put the grid in order. However, I have received some
stimulating questions about the grid the answers to which will inform the
structure of the new grid we put up. Here is one of the more articulate
questions from Rogier van Bakel whose blog is here and my response:.
Van Bakel: It’s hard to think of Islamic terrorists as being on the left
in the first place. These people have mindsets that are straight from the
Middle Ages. They abhor all the freedoms that the American Left, for better or
for worse, has fought for, from abortion to equal rights for women, from
separation of church and state to freedom of speech. Pundits on the right
habitually call extremist Arabs ‘Islamo-fascists,’ which is an apt enough
label, one that I’ve frequently used myself. But you can’t have it both ways.
If animals like Atta are on the extreme left, can they also be on the extreme
right?
Horowitz: My entire book Unholy
Alliance:Radical Islam and the American Left is addressed to
this question. If leftists are, as you say, for human rights and the
Islamo-fascist enemy is Medieval and, well, fascist, then how come the American
left went out in force to save Saddam’s bacon? The gravamen of my book which
contains a long section called “The Mind of the Left” is that he way to look at
the modern left is not through its positive agendas. The left hasn't had a
coherent unifying agenda since the death of Stalinism in 1956. What unifies the
left is its anti-Americanism and anti-Israelism, its determination to carry out
the destructive part of the revolutionary agenda – bring the mother down,
without bothering about what will come next.
What the modern left shares with Islamic radicals is a negative vision: America
as the Great Satan, the root of all evil. In the eyes of the Left, America is
the guardian of private property everywhere – “globalization” and this has been
regarded by leftists as the root of all evil since Rousseau identified it as
such. Both Islamicists and leftists have a fantastic vision of the utopian
future when the beast is slain. For the Islamicists like Zarqawi
this redemptive future is the garden of Allah and 72 virgins; for
leftists like Katrina Van Den Heuvel it is "social justice." For
both, the path to an earthly paradise is through the destruction of the Great
Satan -- which is us.