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In France, officials promoted Islam as a weapon against left-wing radicalism in enclaves teeming with Algerian immigrants. Still in shock over the murders of several members of its team at the Munich Olympiad of 1972—i.e., in the years before the emergence of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, and Hamas—Israel, too, deluded itself into nurturing a Palestinian religious turn. The government naively imagined this development would be a boon for Israel: a burr in the saddle of the Yasser Arafat, whose Palestine Liberation Organization was robustly backed by the Soviets.
Like Nasser, however, Arafat was a shrewd Leftist who appreciated the necessity of accommodating Islam. Though Arafat was a domineering Marxist, the PLO was, and is, an amalgam of entities that always incorporated Islamist elements as well as socialists, secularists, and Arab nationalists. Transparently, the American Left’s motive for pinning the purely “secular” label on the PLO and, particularly, on Fatah (Arafat’s base within it), is to promote the fiction that Fatah (now the ruling party in the “Palestinian Authority”) is “moderate” and worthy of U.S. support. The idea is to draw a flattering contrast to the incorrigible Islamist terrorists of Hamas. As we’ve seen, though, Fatah is not strictly secular—the claim that it is relies on the savage zealotry of Hamas to overwhelm the facts. Fatah was propelled by jihadist rhetoric and theory, its charter regards the duty to “liberate” Jerusalem as a religious obligation, and it has a decades-long history of rationalizing terror on Islamic scriptural grounds—these are “moderates” who maintain their own terrorist wing, the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades.
Similarly astute were Pakistan’s Leftists. Zulkifar Ali Bhutto’s legacy, the Pakistan People’s Party, has always couched its secular-socialist ambitions in Islamic rhetoric. With echoes of the Muslim Brotherhood’s slogan, the PPP’s motto remains, “Islam is our faith; democracy is our politics; socialism is our economy; all power to the people.” And for all her pretensions to Western liberalism, Benazir Bhutto, who followed her father’s footsteps to become Prime Minister, was midwife to the Taliban in Afghanistan and stoked jihadist terror in Kashmir—all part of her geopolitical maneuvering against India.
Sadat and both Bhuttos were ultimately killed by Islamists: Sadat slain by the Muslim Brotherhood; Bhutto père executed in the Zia coup d’état, after which Pakistani society underwent a thoroughgoing Islamicization; and daughter Benazir murdered by the Taliban when she reincarnated herself as a crusader for democracy. Fatah, similarly, is holding on for dear life: ousted from the Gaza Strip by Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch, it is hunkered down in the West Bank—hoping that the democracy it purports to champion isn’t taken too seriously (notoriously corrupt, Fatah would be likely to lose a true popular election) and praying that Hamas decides jointly annihilating the Zionist entity is a higher priority than crushing an intramural competitor.
There is a moral to these stories. Revolutionaries of Islam and the Left make fast friends when there is a common enemy to besiege. Leftists, however, are essentially nihilists whose hazy vision prioritizes power over what is to be done with power. They are biddable. Islamists, who have very settled convictions about what is to be done with power, are much less so. Even their compromises keep their long-term goals in their sights. Thus do Leftists consistently overrate their ability to control Islamists. Factoring the common denominator, power, out of the equation, something always beats nothing.
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Andrew C. McCarthy (The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America)