How D'ya Like Me Now?
Aug. 2007
Anti-Americanism rejected by “The Left” in the Middle East
FrontPagemag.com reports some surprisingly good news coming from the Middle East, which you will surely not hear about on the Bush hate pipeline CNN. What is this good news? The liberals of the Middle East see Bush as a force for good. Let’s gather some facts from this A-Plus article.
• While elements of the Left in the United States and Europe are calling on Western democracies to abandon Afghanistan and Iraq to the Taliban and al Qaeda and surrender to the Khomeinists in Iran, new alliances are emerging against the jihadists in the Middle East.
• In Iraq, two rival Communist parties, along with Social Democrats and other center-left groups, supported the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and continue to play a significant role in the new pluralist system.
• In Lebanon, Walid Jumblatt's Progressive Socialist Party is at the heart of the democratic movement against the Islamic Republic's attempt to dominate the country through its Hezbollah surrogates.
• In Iran, virtually the whole of the Left rejects President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's anti-Americanism and calls for normalization of ties with the United States.
• The recently created independent trade-union movement is emerging as a vocal challenger to Khomeinism.
• Before the U.S.-led interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq in 2001 and 2003, much of the Middle Eastern Left shared these views of its U.S. and European counterparts with regard to America.
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"We looked to the Left in the West and imitated it," says Awad Nasir, one of Iraq's best-known poets. "We heard from the United States and Western Europe that being Left meant being anti-American. So we were anti-American. And then we saw Americans coming from the other side of the world to save us from Saddam Hussein - something that our leftist friends and the Soviet Union would never contemplate."
• Mustafa Kazemi, spokesman for the new Afghan front, expresses similar sentiments. "Our nation is still facing the menace of obscurantism and terror from Taliban and al Qaeda," he says. "Thus, we are surprised when elements of the Left in the United States and Europe campaign for withdrawal so that our new democracy is left defenseless against its enemies."
• Tareq al-Hashemi, vice president of Iraq, has also gambled his impeccable progressive record on the success of the pluralist experiment in his country. "Our enemy is al Qaeda, not the United States," he says.
• Jumblatt, the Lebanese leader, says he realized that his life-long anti-Americanism had been misplaced when he saw "long lines of people, waiting to vote in Iraq, in the first free election in an Arab country."
• Samir Qassir, a Lebanese center-left leader murdered by the Syrians, often spoke of anti-Americanism as "the last refuge of the scoundrel" in the Middle East.
• Having all but abandoned its traditional opposition to capitalism and the bourgeois democratic system, much of the Western Left is forced to cling to anti-Americanism as its backbone.
• In the Middle East, however, a good part of the Left, while not especially enamored of the United States, sees it as an ally against Islamist and totalitarian pan-Arab movements.
• "Anti-Americanism is a luxury we cannot afford in the Middle East," says Adnan Hussein, a leftist Iraq writer recently picked by the Financial Times as one of the 50 most influential columnists in the world.
• Parviz Khosravi, a veteran of Iran's Communist movement, cites history as justification for the Left's rejection of "banal anti-Americanism."
• "During the Second World War, all movements of the Left supported an alliance with the Western democracies led by the United States because the common enemy was Fascism," he says. "Today, we are in a similar position.
• Progressive forces in the Middle East are threatened by an Islamist version of Fascism. An alliance with Western democracies is not only desirable but necessary."
• President Bush has a better image among liberals, leftists, secularists and even moderate Islamists in the Middle East.
• While Chomsky and Moore see the United States as "an evil power," many leftists in the Middle East see it as a force for good that ended the tyranny of the Taliban in Afghanistan, dismantled the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq and forced the Syrians out of Lebanon after 30 years of occupation.
• "In our region, the United States has become a force for the good," says Jumblatt, who recently met President Bush at the White House for a surprise meeting.
Get the full scoop
Betrayed
By Amir Taheri
The New York Post | April 11, 2007
Our take
Sometimes it is tough to see the bigger picture when the mainstream media only allows you the small! This was an excellent job by FrontPageMag.com showing us that there is good news happening that don’t agree with the Left’s portrayal of events here.
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