There are two “alliances” that I think about constantly. The first is one that I’m involved with, which isn’t a real alliance but a convergence of interest. That is the concentration of both the Right and people like me in calling attention to the excesses of the authoritarian Left. For instance, a lot of the stuff I write about dealing with regressiveness in universities is also highlighted on right-wing websites like The College Fix or Campus Reform. That has led people to call me “alt-right,” but that doesn’t worry me. If I think behavior of some liberals is hurting the Left, or I’m disappointed with college students in some cases, I’ll say so. Just because the Right also does that, as a way to discredit the Left as a whole, doesn’t deter me so long as I emphasize my profound differences with the American Right in other ways. Further, the Leftist media, like the New York Times or the New Yorker, judiciously ignores (or excuses) regressive Leftism, or, in the case of Sarah Jeong, promotes it (see my next post). What is happening, in fact, is that collegiate regressivism metastasizes to the Leftist media as college students enter the work force and become journalists.

The other alliance—and the subject of Nick Cohen’s latest piece at the Spectator (click on link or screenshot below)—is the alliance between the Labour Party (and other moieties of the British Left) and the subset of Muslims that is anti-Leftist in rejecting apostates, free speech, gays, and women’s rights.

This second unholy alliance occurs in the U.S., too, and is the outcome of the Left’s misguided decision when two aspects of liberal philosophy collide: sympathy for oppressed people of color, and sympathy for the plight of other marginalized or “second class” people like gays, nonbelievers, and women. Many Muslims, even those in the West, have regressive views on homosexuality, atheism, apostasy, blasphemy, and women’s rights, and yet because Muslims have somehow acquired the status of OPOC (oppressed people of color), the pigmentation trumps the misogyny, censoriousness, and homophobia. This is THE great philosophical schism of today’s Western Left, and Nick Cohen (a national treasure of British journalism) has expended a lot of words exposing it. He’s also spent a lot of time calling out the Labour Party for not only its Islam-osculation, but also the anti-Semitism that comes along with it. And so he continues in the piece below:

I don’t have much to say today, what with Kavanaugh’s depressing confirmation and my Duck Troubles, so let me steer you to Cohen’s piece and tender a few quotes:

The alliance between the white far left and the Islamist right is a dirty secret in plain sight. Few can bear to look at it. None of the books and documentaries on Corbyn’s takeover of the Labour party asked, even in passing, how people who professed to be socialists and feminists, found themselves promoting theocrats and misogynists. I have no doubt that ‘serious’ scholars will be as negligent when they come to write their accounts. In supposedly stable Britain, there is a psychological aversion to admitting that the dark corners of modern history can be the best place to find the roots of current crises.

However much respectable writers hate to admit it, you cannot understand Brexit without understanding the rise of Ukip from its beginnings on the cranky fringe of James Goldsmith’s Referendum Party. We may one day explain the rise of anti-Muslim bigotry by looking at the shift of today’s Ukip supporters from hatred of the European Union to hatred of Muslims. What applies to the far right applies to the far left: without understanding its toleration of religious extremism, little about modern Labour politics makes sense.

But wait! There’s more!

In 2002, Jeremy Corbyn attended a rally for Palestine in Trafalgar Square. Nothing unusual in that: many on the centre-left had marched for Palestine for years. But 2002 was different. They were no longer marching for the Palestinian Liberation, Organisation whose secular constitution connected it to the western left. In 2002, however, they marched alongside Islamists who believed apostasy from Islam is either “a religious offence punishable by death” or, at least, “an act of mutiny or treason, that is punishable”. 

Even before the great protest against the Iraq war of 2003, the combination of the far left and the religious right could get 100,000 on to the streets. Imagine that: 100,000 people willing to listen to your speeches, wave your placards, vote for you in elections and give you an energy your moribund movement thought it had lost. Radical Islam was crack cocaine for the old left. All Islamists asked in return for the fix invigorating support was that the left ignored and excused religious fanaticism, however violently it manifested itself. They were happy to go further and merge the rump of the old socialist movement with the Islamist right.

But wait! There’s a bit when the Palestine Solidarity Committee asked Cohen (a secular Jew) to become their patron. His response was this:

I experienced the shift when the Palestine Solidarity Committee called and asked me to become a patron. I had not yet realised the modern left required you to think about Israel from the moment you woke up to the moment you went to sleep, and wondered why they wanted me. ‘Because of your name”’. Ah right, I had a Jewish name it would be useful to stick on the letterhead to reassure those who worried that they were straying into racism.

I said that to my mind you had to combine a campaign for an end to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank with principled opposition to Hamas. It was all very well to announce your support for ‘the Palestinians’. They were not a homogenous bloc, but divided between too warring parties. Surely you had to decide which side you were on.

‘Do you condemn Hamas’,’ I asked.

‘We don’t think it’s our business to tell Palestinians what to think.’

‘That’s funny,’ I thought, as I turned down the offer, ‘you seem very keen on telling everyone else what to think.’

Now that is a riposte!

Cohen predicts that in the end, the British Left will suffer from this alliance, for many Muslims have the goal of spreading their faith, and do so by demonizing those who dislike Islam with the label “racist” or “Islamoophobe.” And they’ve succeeded. The rub will come when Labour is finally asked to tolerate sharia law, and I hope that at that point they dismount from the tiger. If Corbyn becomes Prime Minister, then Brits had better start looking in the mirror.