My respondent Pat, from the comments:
Obviously, you choose what you want to do. However, I would suggest that you reprioritize your time and energy on your blog and devote a far greater percentage of your time and energy to mobilizing people against the primary cause of the current violence, US occupation, and less of it to obsessing with the relatively minor problems of hypocrisy within the western “left”.
In my previous post I wrote: “I think it’s important not only to oppose U.S. aggression, but to confront the myopia (at best) of an antiwar movement that presumptuously expects my support.” I can’t imagine a better example of that presumptuousness than the passage above. There are probably a gazillion blogs that reflect Pat’s viewpoint, but for some reason he thinks it’s important that this one do so as well.
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: I opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and I support John Murtha’s call for redeployment and ultimately withdrawal of U.S. troops. I marched in the street in ’04 against the Republican convention. I welcomed the fall of Saddam Hussein but I also think that the invasion has created the conditions for Islamist militarism to flourish in Iraq — on this, Pat and I agree. (Although let’s not overstate the “secularism” of a dictator who added the words “Allahu Akbar” to the Iraqi flag and deployed the rhetoric of jihadism when it suited his political purposes.)
The single biggest thing that we can do now to help [the Iraqi people] (since we already allowed our government to conduct this disasterous invasion) is get the US out of Iraq, not lecture people over types of resistance.
I find this notion that I’m “lecturing” very curious. Pat seems to think that Iraqi brutality should be condemned but that we shouldn’t “lecture” the perpetrators. It all reminds me of the Troops Out Now Coalition statement from earlier this year:
“It is time for the antiwar movement to acknowledge the absolute and unconditional right of the Iraqi people to resist the occupation of their country without passing judgment on their methods of resistance.”
I’m not suggesting that Pat agrees with this, but I do note a similarity in the notion that we in the West can’t “pass judgment” on the mass murderers currently heading up the “resistance.” And I do not think amoral — in fact immoral — left-wing stances such as this are “a relatively minor problem,” as Pat says. Because this sort of nonjudgment, in too many cases, leads straight to acceptance.
We began by discussing Arundhati Roy, but of course she’s not operating in a vacuum. In the leadup to a Stop the War Coalition (UK) peace conference the other day, George Galloway spoke of the importance of “forging links with the people of Iraq who are resisting and grinding the neo-con juggernaut into the sand”. As usual, he drew no distinction between nonviolent resistance and, say, kidnapping and beheading. But note his choice of a violent image, which can’t have been an accident.
Then there’s Yvonne Ridley, a British former journalist and convert to Islam who ran for office recently on Galloway’s RESPECT ticket. Ridley’s disgusting response to the Amman hotel bombing can be read in its entirety here. One of her points is this:
“Interesting though, that the bombers chose the bars serving alcohol for their martyrdom operations in two of the hotels. Now while we know alcohol is strictly haram, it’s an Islamic ruling which the King of Jordan chooses to openly ignore, and in a Muslim country.”
Now, how has it come to pass that an al-Qaeda apologist such as Ridley is running for office on a peace-and-justice ticket? Is that a “minor problem” within the left? I’d say it’s a wholesale betrayal of left principles. If more people were speaking out against this sort of nonsense, I’d be happy to direct my attention elsewhere.
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