Tolerating Terror

Cliff May reviews Jamie Glazov's United in Hate: The Left’s Romance with Tyranny and Terror (2009) in National Review:

Glazov’s book indicts artists and intellectuals of the Left -- e.g. George Bernard Shaw, Bertolt Brecht, and Susan Sontag -- for having "venerated mass murderers such as Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, and Ho Chi Minh, habitually excusing their atrocities while blaming Americans and even the victims for their crimes."

Following the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Left spent several years wandering in the wilderness. Many of them, Glazov suggests, looked upon the terrorist attacks of 9/11 less as an atrocity than as an opportunity to revive a moribund revolutionary movement.

Jimmy Carter, Michael Moore, Noam Chomsky, Ramsey Clark, Lynne Stewart, and Stanley Cohen are among the luminaries of the Left Glazov accuses of having found common ground with Islamists.

He notes that the novelist Norman Mailer called the 9/11 hijackers "brilliant" and their terrorism "understandable" because "everything wrong with America led to the point where the country built that tower of Babel which consequently had to be destroyed."

Dario Fo, the Italian Marxist who won the 1997 Nobel Prize for literature, said that Wall Street speculators "wallow in an economy that every year kills tens of millions of people with poverty, so what is twenty thousand dead in New York?" Similarly, media mogul Ted Turner called the 9/11 terrorists "brave," adding that "the reason that the World Trade Center got hit is because there are a lot of people living in poverty out there who don’t have any hope for a better life." The German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen called 9/11 "the greatest work of art for the whole cosmos." . . .

Glazov concludes that the Left’s "romance with Islamism is just a logical continuation of the long leftist tradition of worshipping America’s foes. . . . The Left clearly continues to be inspired by its undying Marxist conviction that capitalism is evil and that forces of revolution are rising to overthrow it -- and must be supported." On that basis, militant Islamism is regarded as a "valiant form of ‘resistance’ against American imperialism and oppression."

Crazy, yes, but old news.