The Crisis of Jewish Leftist Islamism

By Sultan Knish

Every now and then the left discovers someone who tells them what they already think, but puts a glossier edge on it, and elevates him to the status of “Serious Thinker”. This is the office for which Peter Beinart has been briefly nominated.

The chief prerequisite for becoming a serious thinker on the left is to state what is obvious to the left without actually seriously considering its obviousness. This is what Peter Beinart delivers by providing an indulgence for leftist Israel bashing by telling the bashers that they aren’t bad Jews, it’s the Israelis who are bad Jews, bad Democrats and bad people all around.

As ideas go, this is about as original as old lefties reassuring each other that all the Kulaks had it coming or Bund members telling themselves that the Jews brought this on themselves. It’s the feeble mutterings of bad people trying to convince themselves that they are good people because their victims have it coming. And what’s a few more dead Jews in Tolouse, when Peter Beinart has a book deal.

There are two basic ways to resolve the “crisis” of liberal Zionism. One is to question liberalism, the other to question Zionism. The people most likely to screech “Israel Firster” at dinner parties and op-ed pieces have chosen their side. “Israel Firster” isn’t their denunciation of disloyalty to America, but disloyalty to progressive ideals. It’s an old charge delivered by Lenin and repeated by the left in its long crusade against Zionism.

Is there really a crisis of liberal Zionism? Beinart insists that there is a split between a conservative and liberal Zionism. It would be more accurate to say that there is a split within liberalism between the left and more traditional liberals. There is no crisis of liberal Zionism, there is a civil war among liberals, particularly Jewish liberal who are being edged out by the radical Anti-Jewish left.

There is no crisis of Liberal Zionism. There is a crisis of Jewish Leftist Islamism, that horrible chimeric beast which insists that cheerleading for the Muslim terrorists is somehow the essence of Jewish values, while supporting Israel is a betrayal of those values. That is the crisis which is being articulated by serious Jewish liberal thinkers. That is the crisis that Peter Beinart is covering up under a cloud of Israel bashing.

The left rejected the Jewish national project before the modern state was even created. The Beinarts can pretend that the latest round of their rejection is somehow premised on settlements and civil rights, but that’s a shameless lie. The left’s rejection was based on a constellation of reasons, some of them anti-Semitic, some anti-nationalist, but that rejection did not derive from Palestinian rights cooked up much later in Moscow by the machinery of the same Communist state which had outlawed Zionism.

The liberal Zionists believed that Israel had a right to exist and defend itself, as they also believed that America had a right to exist and defend itself. They saw Islam and Communism as totalitarian ideologies. There was no contradiction between liberalism and Zionism, because they measured both Jews and Arab Muslims by the same standard, and chose between the two.

They did not agree with everything that Israel did, but they saw it in a larger context. This larger context does not exist in Beinart’s screeds, which recycle all the usual attacks on Israel with a feigned tone of sadness teetering into outrage, without any of the context at all. The reason there is no context is that there is a Crisis of Leftist Islamism.

There is no contradiction between traditional liberalism and Zionism. There is a contradiction between the left and Islamism. But that contradiction is never addressed, instead it is funneled into more denunciations of America and Israel.

Is there more of a contradiction between a liberal cheering on the IDF, or the left standing together with the Muslim Brotherhood? That is a question which genuinely serious thinkers on the left like Nick Cohen have addressed. But that question would demand genuine soul searching, rather than Beinart’s shoddy mainstreamed propaganda, which hasn’t altered much from its original sources in the copy boys of the Arab League and its strutting whores in the American Council for Judaism.

If the modern left really opposed Israel because they oppose colonialism, checkpoints, settlements and all the rest of the 99 theses that the Martin Luther Pipkins keep nailing to the synagogue while pounding their sunken chests and beaming for the cameras, then they would be at least as outraged at Turkey or China. But it isn’t Israel’s deeds that outrage it is– it is its existence.

There is nothing Israel could do that would appease its enemies, and I don’t mean the House of Saud, Hamas or Abbas– I mean its leftist Jewish enemies like Norman Finkelstein, George Soros or Peter Beinart.

Their enmity toward Israel is not uniquely Jewish, but their Jewishness gives it an edge. They are “Left Fisters” who are perpetually shamed by the Zionist Entity and its resistive form of Jewish identity. Unitarian, Presbyterian and Jewish leftists hate Israel for the same basic reasons that they hate America, but the Jewish leftist uniquely experiences both leftist guilt and Jewish guilt over Israel, and kills one to appease the other.

Peter Beinart isn’t a liberal Zionist. He’s a leftist Anti-Zionist. In a better and more honest world, he would own up to that and make his argument. But the midden camp of the leftist Anti-Zionists is oversaturated and there aren’t nearly as many book deals to be picked up by rehashing the same old bashing as if it were new.

The left’s current Anti-Zionist strategy is to feign moderation, to fake right while playing left. The money is in those groups and individuals who can shift that stolid mass of the Jewish community over to the left by making Israel bashing seem acceptable. Beinart, like J-Street, is another beneficiary of the fortunes being tossed by leftist billionaires at the left’s long project of educating Jews out of their tribal loyalties.

The real victims of Beinart’s narrative aren’t even the tragically oppressed terrorists, that ancient invented people who have been around for less time than the Ford Galaxie. The real victims are liberal Zionists, a group that somehow includes Barack Obama, who have been betrayed by a Jewish state which insists on protecting its citizens, instead of putting a gun to its head and pulling the trigger.

Beinart exonerates leftist Zionists and Anti-Zionists, telling the former that they were abandoned by the awful Jewish state and telling the latter that hating Israel is the truest expression of their liberal and Jewish values. And what indeed could be more Jewish than hating Israel? Perhaps boycotting Israel, as Beinart suggested in an Op-Ed, in order to save Israel. Only by destroying Israel can the idea of Israel be saved.

The left’s perverse mission in American Jewish life has been to eviscerate the guts of Jewish identity and fill it with the stinking viscera of the left, slabs of rotting Tikkun Olam, green eco leaves and civil rights marches. Now the left is conducting its long march through Jewish institutions to make supporting Israel seem un-Jewish and transform bashing Israel into a Jewish value.

What do the Beinarts pretend they want? That ideal Israel where Islamists live side by side with gay bars? That wonderful country of the imagination that only briefly exists when leftists and Islamists conduct mutual protests against Israel. A country that can only fail to come into existence when Israel is destroyed, when another of the left’s projects in the Middle East end up like Egypt and Iran.

The real crisis of liberal Zionism is that it is under attack by the left, besieged by angry midgets who have rewritten all the definitions and are out to ban the dictionary. And the crisis of the left is that it is insane. It is capable of criticizing everything and everyone, but it never looks in the mirror long enough to see the insane twisted gargoyle face leering back at it.

The left is full of expert denouncers and informers, and Beinart isn’t the best they have. But none of them are capable of asking what the cause gains if Israel is destroyed and Hamastan rises in its place? And what of Europe which is speedily becoming Eurabia? Where will there be room for the agenda of the left then? While they ceaselessly manufacture one crisis after another, the real crisis is in the souls that they don’t believe they have anymore.

There is no crisis of Zionism, which is what it has always been. Ariel is as much of a settlement as Tel Aviv. There is as much need for the IDF in 2012 as there was in 1962 and only a liar would pretend otherwise. Israel has not changed. If anything it has made more concessions and become more generous to its enemies than in the halcyon days of the liberal Zionist.

It is the liberal that has changed. The left has overrun liberalism and angry midgets pretend that they are the representatives of liberal values, and even more absurdly Jewish values, unleashing a century’s worth of hate against the very idea of a Jewish state. Like their attacks on the War on Terror every word they utter is hollow and senseless, because they do not recognize that there is a war on.

If you see a man sawing another man’s leg off, then it’s reasonable to be shocked and outraged. But if the first man is actually a doctor and the second man has a serious infection that will kill him, then the context completely changes. The left denies that context, it ridicules it, it bans if it can. But what it does not do is seriously address it, because its goal is that the infection succeed and the man die.

What can we say of the moral outrage of the gangrenous left? The left which clasps hands with Islamists and then denounces Israel for war crimes? Which hugs a religion whose creed preaches the genocide of the Jewish people, and claims to do it all in the name of Jewish values? What is all this if not a crisis of Jewish Leftist Islamism?

The Passover holiday is all but upon us, but the exodus and the journey to Israel is repeatedly interrupted by agitators who demand that the nation turn around and go back to Egypt. It wasn’t enough for them to turn back on their own. They knew that the Egyptians would have no use for a small group of wannabe slaves. But if they could return at the head of the nation, they would become the new taskmasters.

The Beinarts aren’t satisfied with being defectors, smirking turncoats in the camp of the enemy, they are eager to prove their value by leading the entire nation back to Egypt. Their ideology is just as pathologically hostile to the Jewish people as it was in 1917 and the only way for them to disguise that to their own people is to lie constantly to them so that they never see the iron curtain descending or the green crescent rising.

But the contradiction is theirs. Zionism was meant to break the Jewish people out of the cycle of appeasement, the cycle of ghettos, oppression and terror. It is natural enough for the left to want to drive the Jews back there. It is certainly natural for the Islamists to want to drive the Jews back there. What do the Jews get out of it though?

When Peter Beinart praises the Muslim Brotherhood as non-violent, does he imagine that when Qaradawi praises Hitler for doing Allah’s work and calls for Jewish genocide, does he seriously imagine that the Brotherhood cleric means every Jew but Beinart? This is the crisis of Jewish Leftist Islamism, the crisis of Jewish “Left Firsters” who denounce Jews and embrace their murderers, only to discover that despite their devoted service– to the murderers they are still Jews.