That the anarchic miscreants of Occupy LA would lionize a demonic killer like Dorner, who left behind a manifesto revealing his hard-left worldviews (funny, the mainstream media didn’t have much to say about that), came as no surprise. The Left’s fetishes for revolution and totalitarianism, however, do not only exist on its fringes. Take Marc Lamont Hill, for instance. An associate professor of English education at Columbia University and a regular guest on cable news programs, he went on CNN and portrayed Dorner’s trail of dead bodies as “kind of exciting”:
This has been an important public conversation that we’ve had, about police brutality, about police corruption, about state violence. As far as Dorner himself goes, he’s been like a real life superhero to many people. Now don’t get me wrong, what he did is awful, killing innocent people is bad.... Many people aren’t rooting for him to kill innocent people, they’re rooting for somebody who was wronged to get a kind of revenge against the system. It’s almost like watching
Django Unchained
in real life. It’s kind of exciting.
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Hill apparently believes it’s an absolute gas to see innocent people slaughtered by a psychotic killer.
Salon.com
and Alternet, two widely read online leftist publications that ran stories sympathetic to Dorner, seemed to agree with Hill’s glowing assessment. Salon, for instance, ran a piece called “Were Dorner’s Complaints Legitimate?” that essentially went on to answer in the affirmative.
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But nothing compared to the Left’s angst when Venezuelan tyrant Hugo Chavez died of cancer in March 2013. Chavez, a close ally of Iran and Hezbollah and an avowed enemy of the United States, was mourned by the likes of the BBC, which announced his death in solemn tones,
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and the widely read liberal Huffington Post website, which one writer dubbed a “Hugo Chavez Fanpage” for its fawning remembrances of Chavez’ supposed legacy. “Hugo Chavez was a man of many talents,” read one top story at HuffPo. “He played ball, sang songs, pulled out pistols, and got down and groovy—and that is precisely how we’ll remember the Venezuelan leader.”
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Personally, I’ll remember Chavez as a crude Marxist thug who jailed political opponents, shut down opposition media, funded Colombian narco-terrorists, and openly rooted for the demise of the United States and Israel, while working closely with the Iranian regime to help make it happen. But to each his own, I guess.
Celebrity leftists like Sean Penn, Oliver Stone, Michael Moore, and former President Jimmy Carter also praised the late dictator,
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and professional race-baiter Jesse Jackson Sr. led a delegation to Chavez’ funeral in Caracas, saying he was “deeply saddened” by the tyrant’s passing.
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Another Democrat, New York Congressman Gregory Meeks, also attended the funeral, and his Democrat colleague, New York Congressman José Serrano, mourned Chavez from afar, tweeting, “Hugo Chavez was a leader that understood the needs of the poor. He was committed to empowering the powerless. R.I.P. Mr. President.”
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Just as elements of the Left recast a brutal despot like Hugo Chavez as a devoted champion of workers and the poor, or a crazed murderer like Christopher Dorner as a sort of heroic whistleblower fighting a corrupt system, so, too, do they excuse Islamic suicide bombers as oppressed victims rising up against occupation and imperialism.
In his landmark 2004 book,
Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left
, conservative commentator David Horowitz writes that the Islamo-leftist alliance, like the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939 that brought together two divergent ideologies, seems incomprehensible on the surface. In the late 1930s, American leftists liked to call themselves “anti-fascists.” Yet, they turned on a dime when Josef Stalin signed the non-aggression pact with Hitler’s National Socialist regime. As Horowitz explains, “When it came to choosing between the interests of the Soviet state and their ‘progressive agendas’—even their opposition to Fascism—American Communists and their progressive allies did not hesitate to choose the former.” This same impulse, Horowitz writes, animated leftist opposition to the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan in the wake of 9/11. By extension, it drives the broader leftist romance with Islamists today. “The readiness of a large segment of the Left to actively oppose America’s war against the Taliban indicated that their opposition to America was greater than their support for ‘progressive values,’” Horowitz notes. “In short, they had become ‘frontier guards’ for any opponent of American power.”
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And what better way to confront American power than to demonize the U.S. military? On the very day U.S. forces invaded Iraq in 2003, a leftist (what else?) anthropology professor named Nicholas De Genova made abundantly clear which side he wanted to win, telling an audience of three thousand at Columbia University, “I personally would like to see a million Mogadishus.” De Genova was referring to the slaughter of nineteen U.S. servicemen in Somalia during 1993’s Black Hawk Down incident. He added:
U.S. patriotism is inseparable from imperial warfare and white supremacy. U.S. flags are the emblem of the invading war machine in Iraq today. They are the emblem of the occupying power. The only true heroes are those who find ways that help defeat the U.S. military.
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“C’mon, Stakelbeck,” you might be tempted to say. “This De Genova guy is just another wacked out, lefty college professor. He’s in no way representative of the average liberal, who loves and supports the U.S. military.” Oh, really? Have you tuned in to that bastion of mainstream liberal thought, MSNBC, lately? One week before Memorial Day 2012, MSNBC host Chris Hayes said he was “uncomfortable” calling fallen American military members, “heroes” because such a phrase, according to the painfully effete Hayes, would be “rhetorically proximate to justifications for more war.” Whatever that means. Hayes later apologized for his comments after receiving a firestorm of criticism. But a few months later, his fellow leftist MSNBC colleague, Melissa Harris-Perry, doubled down, telling viewers of her weekend show—correctly—that the U.S. military is “despised as an engine of war by many progressives.”
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Funny, Islamists feel the same way. No wonder the two sides get along so well.
Virtually all of the above-named examples, whether they excused the murderous behavior of Christopher Dorner, exalted the tyranny of Hugo Chavez, or castigated the U.S. military, hail from mainstream institutions. Some work for major television networks, others for widely read publications, and still others for prestigious Ivy League universities. Some have Oscar-winning Hollywood pedigrees and one was a former American president. This is extremely telling because it shows how the so-called fringe has become mainstream in the Democrat party—as President Obama and other leading Democrats’ support for Occupy Wall Street showed.
Remember, these are the same Democrats who, at their national convention in 2012, booed lustily at the suggestion that God and an undivided Jerusalem should be included in their party’s official platform. And the same Democrats who, from President Obama on down, have gone all in with the Muslim Brotherhood. Presidents Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy, while not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, would not recognize their party today. Both were military veterans, defenders of America’s national interests, and staunch anti-communists. Henry “Scoop” Jackson, Daniel Moynihan, and other prominent, hawkish Democrats of previous eras would find that today the national security wing of the Democrat Party does not exist.
Instead, Democrats are falling over themselves to embrace and appease an Islamist enemy that seeks America’s destruction. This disturbing reality was on full display in March 2011 when New York Congressman Peter King had the temerity—ten years after 9/11 and a decade into a supposed war against Islamist extremism—to hold the first of what would be a series of hearings on Muslim radicalization in America. King, who was then chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, was blasted, one after another, by his Democrat colleagues on the panel as a bigoted, Islamophobic McCarthyite for daring to suggest that the American Muslim community might have a terrorism problem (the arrests of dozens upon dozens of American Muslims on terror charges over the past few years clearly bears King’s argument out).
I attended that first hearing and remember leaving it extremely discouraged. By the end of the proceedings, it was clear that an entire side of the political aisle had decided to not only take a pass on confronting the Islamist enemy, but to attack anyone who dared even broach the subject. Their targets included Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, a devout Muslim and true moderate who bravely testified about the danger of the Muslim Brotherhood in America only to be slammed by the Democrats on the panel as little more than a pawn of conservatives and Islam haters.
Essentially, the Democrats on the panel were willfully running interference for Islamists. To see it played out, live and in person, was a truly disturbing experience, given that the Islamists themselves see their conflict with America as an existential struggle. The spectacle was complete when one of the witnesses, Minnesota Congressman Keith Ellison, a not-so-moderate friend of Muslim Brotherhood–linked groups like CAIR, began weeping theatrically during his testimony as he recounted the story of a Muslim first responder in New York City who died on 9/11.
Ellison, the first Muslim congressman in American history, turned on the waterworks while trying to make a point that his co-religionists were being unfairly stigmatized as being hostile to America. Perhaps he should have a chat with his Democrat colleague in the House, Indiana Representative André Carson—who happens to be the nation’s second elected Muslim congressman. During a 2012 speech given to the Brotherhood-tied Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), Carson didn’t seem very fond of the United States in its current form. He openly fantasized about a female Muslim president “with a hijab on” in the Oval Office
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and suggested that America’s school system should be patterned after Islamic madrasas.
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The people of Indiana’s seventh district, who elected Carson to Congress, must be so proud.
Ellison and Carson, much like Anas Al-Tikriti and his brethren in Great Britain, manage to seamlessly blend their Islamism with hard-left policies. The reason it works, despite obvious contradictions, is simple: at the end of the day, both the Islamists and the Left seek to unravel the traditional fabric of the United States (and Great Britain); this is the ultimate culture war, and it is why Islamists have no trouble collaborating with leftists who celebrate social liberalism that the Islamists otherwise oppose. Islamists take advantage of the Left’s moral relativism, its default approval for non-Western, non-Judeo-Christian forces, and its tendency to pathologize any opposition to its causes as bigotry and “phobia.” For instance, Islamists and leftists alike applauded in August 2011 when the George Soros–funded Center for American Progress—which
Time
magazine once dubbed “Obama’s Idea Factory in Washington”
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—released a study called “Fear, Inc.: The Roots of the Islamophobia Network in America.”
The 132-page hit job targeted a long list of terrorism and Islam experts, like Steven Emerson and Daniel Pipes, as well as conservative voices in the media and political realms, including Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich,
National Review
, and myself, for supposedly stirring up anti-Muslim hatred.
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Interestingly enough, those same claims were echoed one year later in a similar report by the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), yet another Brotherhood-influenced group that is a favorite of the Obama administration. MPAC’s founder, Salam Al-Marayati, was even sent by the Obama State Department to represent the United States at a 2012 human rights conference in Warsaw, despite his past support of Hezbollah and his claim—later recanted—that Israel was behind the 9/11 attacks.
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The report by Al-Marayati’s organization aimed to “expose” what it called the “Top 25 Pseudo-Experts on Islam.” I was proud to once again make the list, along with courageous colleagues like Frank Gaffney, David Horowitz, Brigitte Gabriel, and others. MPAC’s case against our expertise rested on the fact that most of us do not hold degrees in Islamic studies.
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That is why, according to MPAC, retired General Jerry Boykin—a highly decorated, founding member of Delta Force who has stared down Islamic jihadists face to face in hotspots around the world—is not qualified to discuss the Islamist threat. Neither, apparently, is Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, a practicing Muslim and medical doctor also targeted in MPAC’s diatribe. As for myself, I may not have learned about the finer points of Islam from a Marxist, anti-American college professor who applauds suicide bombers, but hey, I have interviewed and spent hours with current and former members of some of the world’s most notorious Islamist groups, including al-Qaeda, Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hizb ut-Tahrir, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, and al-Muhajiroun. I’ve also spent time in mosques and Islamic enclaves throughout America and Europe, traveled in the Middle East, and interviewed top lawmakers and intelligence officials from the U.S., EU, and Israel about these issues. Oh, and I’ve conducted endless background research, going through stacks of books and articles, and hours of broadcast material on Islam, Islamism, terrorism, and related topics for twelve years; in fact, as part of my job, I do that nearly every day. But, sorry: not qualified.