It Was Fascination

Many extreme American leftists have a strange fascination with Islam. I do not mean the old, “mysterious East” fascination that people for the last three centuries have had with caravans, sheikhs, harems, ancient and dangerous cities, convoluted intrigues, and desert adventures. There is nothing particularly strange about that. It is simply romanticism and the lure of the exotic.

What I am talking about is a political infatuation with Islam. It is odd because so many of the things secular leftists are supposed to find repugnant in traditional dogmatic Christianity – intolerance, damning of dissenters, a history of brutality, rigid patriarchy, the subjugation of women, a culture of repression – are present in spades in Islam. Yet the fascination is there. It is not merely a reasonable and laudable effort to promote understanding, reject stereotyping, and avoid tarring all Islamic people as terrorists. It goes beyond that to willful blindness, apologetics, and special pleading, including the sort of strained attempts to create bogus moral equivalencies that were the standard procedures of anti-American leftists during the Cold War. In some circles we almost have Mohammedan chic, with Islamics enjoying the fawning attention and general immunity from criticism formerly reserved for Third World communists.

The reason for this cannot be a straightforward congruence of ideology, as it was at least in part during the Cold War. It seems likely that it has almost nothing to do with Islam itself, but rather with the fact that there are people warring on America in the name of Islam. The simplest explanation is that some extreme leftists hate this country so profoundly that they will idolize and idealize the values and culture of anyone who opposes it. That is harsh, but it fits the facts and matches the emotions. One has to wonder whether - if by some quirk of history Nazis regained power in Central Europe and threatened the United States - they would find something good to say about the reborn Reich and trade in their Che Guevara T-shirts for new models featuring Reinhard Heydrich.