‘Truth’ belongs to those who shout loudest

DAVID SAKS

Domestic economic issues aside, what has particularly provoked unease is Corbyn’s stance on foreign policy issues, which includes supporting Vladimir Putin over the invasion of Ukraine, describing leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah as his “friends” and making a supportive TV appearance on an Iranian state propaganda channel.

The fact that he pointedly declined to sing the national anthem at a memorial service for British war dead did not fail to go unnoticed. The Tories are by and large quite pleased that their traditional rivals, in an apparent overreaction to their reverse at the polls, have opted for a leader whose views are so extreme as to make the party essentially unelectable so long as he is in charge.

One can only but hope that no radical shift in the country’s fortunes – another global economic meltdown for instance – will change that outlook.

So far as Israel is concerned, Corbyn is predictably implacably hostile, and an ardent proponent of the boycott strategy. When addressing a gathering of Labour Friends of Israel recently, he could not even bring himself to refer to Israel by name, a sure indication of his being unable to come to terms with its very existence.

As we have seen, those advocating the Jewish state’s destruction (when not simply resorting to the standard “Zionist entity” phrase) almost invariably precede any mention of it with such epithets as “illegitimate state of….”, “racist”, “colony of” or “apartheid”.

So great is their hatred for Israel that they cannot even bring themselves to say the word. It always bothers me when people like Corbyn are described as “harsh critics” of Israel, since their antipathy clearly goes much further than that.

Corbyn’s election has caused more disquiet within the British left than in conservative circles. Many Labour supporters are seeing it as another sharp lurch away from such traditional liberal-left values of secular democracy, gender and sexual equality and anti-racism on the part of the left-wing establishment.

The phenomenon is by no means limited to the UK. Throughout the democratic world, one will find voices being raised (to little effect, it would appear) against how the above values are being betrayed in what has in reality become an ideological war against the Western democracies.

Some have termed the alliance between radical Islam and the hard-core left as a modern-day “Hitler-Stalin Pact”. In historical terms, this is not accurate, however. The latter was a pragmatic arrangement between two dictatorships in which, inter alia, they agreed not to go to war with one another in the near future; it was not an ideological alliance.

By contrast, loony leftists and Jihadists seem to have found common cause in the realm of ideas, and are collaborating in that arena.

On the face of it, the hard-line left and Islamist right should be utterly opposed to one another. No-one would argue that among the core values that the broader left has in common are secularism (including the right to question and, if desired, mock other religions), gender equality, gay rights and in general a non-judgemental approach to how people conduct their sex lives. Also ostensibly of fundamental importance is an unequivocal rejection of racism, which surely extends to cultural or religious-based prejudice.

One does not have to be an analytical genius to see at once that the Islamist position on every one of these issues is diametrically opposite to what the left holds. This even extends to the left’s supposed opposition to racism and like forms of prejudice.

The overwhelming sense of betrayal that left-leaning Jews are feeling is in large part due to the failure of their ideological “family” to distance itself from the rabid anti-Semitism permeating every corner of the Islamist movement.

The same silence is evident regarding the persecution of Christians and other religious minorities in the Middle East (obviously such reticence has not applied with regard to the occasional vandalising of a church in Israel, the only Middle East country where Christianity is growing).

I have long cudgelled my brains over what the far left and Islamist right might have in common and come up with a few tentative conclusions. In summary, what ultimately unites the two camps would appear to be a resentment-driven victim mentality combined with a fanatical sense of self-righteousness that leaves little room for serious introspection.

The rage is in both cases outward-directed, against an evil “other” exclusively responsible for preventing the coming about of an envisaged global Utopia. In this paranoid, conspiracy theory-ridden world view, the strong and successful are as a matter of course held to be guilty while those who fail to compete with them are righteous victims in no way responsible for their plight.

This explains why the US and Israel are depicted as being the epitome of evil by both the hard left and the Islamists. As a naïve youth, I used to believe that hard facts and common sense would always prevail in the end. Now I know that “truth” belongs to those able to shout the loudest. However, that is not a reason for the rest of us not to keep fighting.