by Tim Black, spiked (Image: Unsplash)
The New Left of the 1960s paved the way for the cult of Palestinianism and its war against the West.
Just three days after the third anniversary of Hamas’s pogrom in southern Israel, the Islamo-left was once again on the march in central London. Amid barely veiled anti-Semitic chants of ‘Zionist scum’ or ‘From the river to the sea…’, onlookers could also hear, ‘In our thousands, in our millions we are all Palestinians’. This little ditty serenaded the keffiyeh-clad protesters as they threw insults at counter-protesters and trampled on poppy wreaths laid at the foot of a Battle of Britain memorial.
A week later, the Islamo-left was to the fore once again during the protests-cum-riots that continue to engulf urban France. As cars burned and tear gas scorched the Parisian air, a Palestine flag was raised over the statue of Marianne, an abiding symbol of the French Republic.
These two scenes, a week apart, capture well the essential worldview of Islamo-leftists. They combine a near-total identification with the cause of Palestine with a near-total estrangement from their own societies and their culture and heritage. They wilfully efface and sometimes desecrate symbols of the nation in which they live in the name of a nation that doesn’t exist.
They will claim that they are protesting against Israel or the actions of its government – an monomaniacal obsession that is troubling in itself. But they are ultimately protesting against us, against our societies and even our broader civilisational heritage. Clinging ever-more tightly to that free-floating signifier of virtue, ‘Palestine’, the Islamo-left is seeking nothing less than the poppy-trampling, Marianne-effacing ‘decolonisation’ of Western society in general.
This reactionary alliance of middle-class ‘progressives’ and de facto Islamists has been a long time in the making. What we’re seeing, in short, is the culmination of the ‘radical’ left’s decades-long degeneration, its descent into reactionary identitarianism and anti-Westernism – a process that has ultimately led it into a grim coupling with Islamism. These are now two parties bonded by their shared animosity towards modernity, united in their war on the legacy of the Enlightenment, and currently channelling all this ideological energy into hatred of the world’s only Jewish state.