re: #395 Talking Point Detective

I really am not trying to be an irritant - but I care about this issue a lot. What do you mean by “the basic problem?”

Do you mean that the basic difficulty with the “left,” as a whole, vis—vis the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is an anti- American/anti-Israel bias that blinds lefties to the mysogeny and repressive nature of fundamentalist Islam?

I don’t know about the ‘left’ as whole. That’s a very big category.

I will say that there is a very high degree of misinformation and bias against Israel that has spread through much of the American and European ‘left’. I will also say that there is an increasing resistance in the same group to examining the increasing power of fundamentalist Islam, or criticizing Islamic fundamentalism, and that I have seen this resistance grow among people I know and people I read, in the years since I was in college—the same years that Hamas rose to prominence, and the face of Palestinian radicalism became increasingly fundamentalist. I think this is all connected. It also has roots in the response of left-leaning Americans to our current set of foreign adventures—some rational, some less so—and I think there is also an element of backlash to the trashing of Muslim culture by parties we could all name.

Now, none of this should be taken as a sweeping indictment of any particular person or group. (OK, ANSWER, Sabeel, al-Awda, even goofy old Code Pink, I AM looking at you). There’s a whole doctoral thesis in here, one I will probably never write. It is certainly not an attack on the average American progressive, regardless of their opinion about Israeli and the Palestinians, although I do believe that most such people are not getting all the information they need to form informed opinions, and ARE being told flat-out lies by many sources.