Why does the left support the Palestinians against Israel?
The question is rarely asked. It is simply taken for granted that the left -- Europe, the Western news media, the universities, the liberal churches, the arts world -- supports the Palestinians and the larger Arab/Muslim worlds in their war against Israel.
But the question does need to be asked. For it is completely inconsistent with the left's professed values to side with Israel's enemies. Just about every value the left claims to uphold Israel upholds and its enemies do not.
The left speaks about its passion for democracy ("power to the people"). Yet it is Israel that is a fully functioning democracy, as opposed to all of its Arab and Muslim enemies. Yasser Arafat is precisely the self-aggrandizing, corrupt dictator-type that the left claims to hold in contempt.
The left claims to have particular concern for women's rights. Yet it is Israel that has as highly developed a feminist movement as that of any Western country. It is Israel that conscripted women into its armed forces before almost any Western country. At the same time, the state of women's rights among Israel's Muslim enemies is perhaps the lowest in the world.
The left's greatest current preoccupation is with gay rights. Yet it is Israel that has annual gay pride days, while Egypt and other Arab and Muslim countries arrest homosexuals.
It is Israel that has an independent and highly liberal judiciary. It is Israel that has a leftist press. It is Israel that has been governed more by leftist, even socialist, parties than by rightist ones. Israel's enemies have none of this.
So, why isn't the left out there leading pro-Israel demonstrations?
The answer is as important as it is contemptible.
In general, the left does not care about women, independent judiciaries, minorities, democracy, gays or almost anything else for which it marches. That is why the left opposed America's war in Afghanistan, which liberated women from being treated like animals.
Nearly all the causes the left speaks for are noble-sounding covers for its real agenda -- the overthrowing of Western, especially Judeo-Christian and capitalist, values. Remember the chant at Stanford, "Hey, hey, ho ho, Western civ has got to go"? That is what animates the left.
In psychoanalytic terms, it is antagonism to one's father and his values. In a commencement speech he gave this year, the former president of Dartmouth College, James O. Freedman, a man of the left, said that the purpose of a college education is "to question your father's values." Those of us not on the left believe that the purpose of a college education is to discover what is true and what is good.
America embodies all that the left dislikes. It is the most religious of the industrialized democracies (proudly and uniquely Judeo-Christian). It is also the most capitalist. And, what drives the left especially crazy is that with all this religion and capitalism, America is the most powerful force on earth -- economically, militarily and culturally.
Israel is Little America. It, too, is religious (though a secular state like the United States, it is proudly Jewish). It, too, celebrates capitalism. There are no demonstrations in Israel against McDonald's. On the contrary, even before McDonald's opened there, Hebrew replicas like "McDavid's" were established.
And Israel, like America, celebrates its national identity, not the "world" identity that the left affirms. The left loathes nationalism unless it is anti-Western, like Palestinian or Cuban. America does not jump to attention when world treaties are signed and Israel is the U.N.'s pariah, rendering America and Israel the left's "axis of evil," far more reviled than Iran, Iraq and North Korea.
The question, "Why does the left support the Palestinians?" is an extremely important one. At this time in history nothing so illustrates the left's nihilism as does its support of the Palestinians against Israel.
T Mex is a paid right wing operative, probably from the fascist Free Republic gruop.
PLEASE! DON'T PAY HIM ANY MIND.
When you see his right-wing spam postings the best thing to do is to disregard them -- they're only here to disrupt.
the word "facist" means what you think it means.
Here I am saying that you should be supporting the democratic, tolerant society that recognizes women's rights over the dictatorial homophobic one that treats women like chattel. . . and you're saying I'm a facist??
It is claimed that Israel is the "only democracy" in the Middle East... but how can a settler colonial nation be a "democracy"?
I'm sure Israeli Jews are free to practive self governance... as well they should. But they deny this same right to the Palestinians whose lands they've stolen and illegally occupy.
A settler colonial nation that brutally occupies the native people and denies them basic human rights may be your definition of a "democracy" but it certainly isn't mine.
I think you're confused. It is not the Israelis who deny the Palestinians self-rule. . . It is Chairman Arafat who has done that. Why don't you give him a kiss?
"I don't know something called International Principles. I vow that I'll burn every Palestinian child (that) will be born in this area. The Palestinian woman and child is more dangerous than the man, because the Palestinian child's existence infers that generations will go on, but the man causes limited danger. I vow that if I was just an Israeli civilian and I met a Palestinian I would burn him and I would make him suffer before killing him. With one hit I've killed 750 Palestinians (in Rafah in 1956). I wanted to encourage my soldiers by raping Arabic girls as the Palestinian women is a slave for Jews, and we do whatever we want to her and nobody tells us what we shall do but we tell others what they shall do."
--Ariel Sharon, current Prime Minister, In an interview with General Ouze Merham, 1956
That is democracy to them, and most of the so called democratic world, America Occupied this land and denied the right of the Indians,
Pay no attention to zionist Ariel either.
The quote is a zionist fabrication that will no doubt appear in the corporate media as an example of leftist anti-semitism.
There are plenty of genuine quotes that one can use to demonstrate the racist core of zionism.
Don't be fooled.