A few days ago Bassam Abu Sharif a veteran Palestinian Communist and former leader of the Marxist-Leninist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) sought to incite the government of the United Emirates against what he called the “infiltration” of the Muslim Brotherhood in the rich Arab state.
More to the point Abu Sharif blamed “armed mercenaries” for the ordeal of Palestinian refugees at the Yarmuk refugee camp near Damascus.
He refused to hold the genocidal regime of Bashar Assad responsible for the murder of more than 700 Palestinian refugees.
For those who forgot Abu Sharif was the number-2 man of the PFLP whose founder and long-time chief George Habash authored the iconic slogan the liberation of Jerusalem starts from Riyadh Kuwait and Amman .
This should give us an idea about the extent to which Abu Sharif morphed himself from a “Communist internationale” into a pliant servant in the service powers seeking to undermine Islam and Muslims.
I am not oblivious to the man’s struggle against Israel a struggle which never the less didn’t dissuade the Zionist entity from allowing him to enter the West Bank and have a luxurious villa in Ramallah.
But his ostensibly warm support for the genocidal regime of Bashar Assad caricatures a man deeply inculcated with Stalinist genocidalism one who doesn’t understand the most elementary elements of human rights civil liberties let alone democracy political liberty and even simple human dignity and decency.
I mentioned Abu Sharif as an example because he constitutes more or less an epitome of Arab leftists who would side with the devil including the United States Israel’s guardian-ally against Islamic groups and movements.
This is not an exaggeration. I do realize that leftists are not carbon copies of each other. I do know that there are conscientious honest and progressive leftists who wouldn’t trade their humane principles for a mountain of gold. But I also know equally well that there are too many leftists who are quite morally bankrupt brashly dishonest notoriously hypocritical and cheap in character and ideologically inconsistent.
During the Soviet era Arab leftist were completely at Russia’s beck and call. Their blind subservience to the Kremlin was immortalized by the iconic Iraqi joke which tells the story of an Iraqi communist who would don a heavy coat in Baghdad even though temperature in the Iraqi capital was 45 or 50 Celsius. And when the comrade was asked what was the matter with him he would simply tell that “I have just received a telegram from Moscow that it is snowing there”!!
Following the disintegration of the Soviet Union Arab leftists and to less extent secular pan-Arab nationalists became suddenly like orphans. Their ultimate god was dead. For better or worse they needed another god!
Facing crippling ideological demoralization financial bankruptcy and above all the new emerging forces of Islamic revivalism many of the leftists almost systematically began joining western-funded NGOs.
The task of having a high representation of leftist activists especially in American-funded NGOs in countries such Egypt Jordan the occupied Palestinian territories and North Africa was not particularly difficult.
The ultimate sin qua non set up by the donor or funding agency was always (and continues to be) that the applicant must be completely free of any Islamist credentials affiliation or association with any Islamist group such as Hamas or the Muslim Brotherhood. This was a very comfortable (and inducing) condition for many leftists who thought they would “hit two birds with one stone” namely receive a hefty salary from the NGO they were working for and at the same time prepare reports tarnishing the image of Islamists in their region of activity.
It is highly likely that some of these demoralized leftists played a role in carrying out dirty CIA operations against Islamist suspects of terror. Others collaborated and colluded with repressive regimes in the Arab world against the Islamist opposition.
The Arab Spring
The left’s hatred and vindictiveness toward the Islamists skyrocketed following the Arab Spring. Many Leftists both in their home countries and expatriates in Europe and North America suddenly became “accomplished experts” on Islam and Islamist movements. Listening to their ranting and ravings one would get the impression that the Islamists represented the forces of darkness and that women and non-Muslims in general would experience a new age of inquisition in such countries as Egypt Tunisia and Libya.
As the Islamists whether in Egypt or Tunisia proved more resilient and solidly entrenched in popular consciousness despite decades of persecution and repression many leftists lost their composure and mental equanimity and began disseminating malicious lies and black propaganda against the Islamists. One leftist in Egypt claimed that the new Islamist-dominated parliament would introduce a legislation allowing the so-called one last sexual intercourse with one’s newly deceased wife. Other canards would have us believe that the Islamists would impose poll taxes on Christians impose female circumcision and outlaw female education and tourism.
Some journalists shamelessly drew corrupt comparisons between the Nazi party and the Muslim Brothers. Well Nazism utterly destroyed Europe and killed or caused the death of more than 60 millions around the world. The Brotherhood is not perfect. No mortal is perfect. However to compare a group of social reformers who have been thoroughly repressed and tormented by the tyrannical political authority to the worst regime under the sun is beyond the pale of commonsense.
The truth of the matter however is that the leftist rabble in addition to the thugs of former President Husni Mubarak attacked and murdered Islamists and torched the headquarters and offices of the Muslim Brotherhood. Until this moment there is no solid evidence that the Brotherhood retaliated in likewise manner which shows who is behaving in barbarian manner and who is being a law-abiding citizen.
The casual reader might think that the Arab left is going to give up. But Nay those morbid-minded people hate Islam and true Muslims more than they love their children let alone their countries.
They would go to unimaginable extents to thwart or impede the Islamists. They would even ally with Israel against the Islamists as they had allied with the Zionist left against the Arabs in 1948. One professor of Chemistry who was a former member of the Egyptian communist party recently tweeted that “Israel was far less virulent than the Muslim Brotherhood.” He received a lot of praise from Israeli and Zionist contributors.
Facing overwhelming frustration many Arab leftists have reached a point where they can no longer make a distinction between facts and fiction. Thus for them Hamas is a Zionist movement created by Israel in order to beat true nationalists and Muhammed Mursi is a fascist leader who is carrying out instructions from Tel Aviv and Turkey. As to the Muslim Brotherhood they are an obscurant force dedicated to allow Israel to spread its supremacy and hegemony all over the Arab world.
In fact the sickening vagaries and morbid delusions of the Arab left have taught me not to take them seriously.
These liars would claim they are the ultimate democrats when they are ultimate liars rather than ultimate democrats.
But then they are the first to question the validity of the elections if they lose. They would even try to incite the army to intervene and carry out a coup against democracy and the will of the people. Wasn’t this what Egyptian leftists and liberals tried to do in the run-up to the referendum on the draft constitution recently?
In order to take them seriously one would have to believe that Israel is the innocent poor victim of the conflict in the Middle East and Hamas is the original sin. One would also have to believe that Bashar Asad is the ultimate paragon of virtue and liberty and that the man and his regime never really indulged in Nazi-like extermination of the Syrian people.
So don’t be surprised. We are talking about the same people who sided with Milosevic against the people of Srebrenica who sided with the Soviet Union against its many victims in Eastern Europe and Afghanistan. And if you ask any of them about the Gulag and the extermination by way of starvation of more than 10 million they would shamelessly argue that “they all deserved to be annihilated because they dared stand against the will of the people”….just as they have now the audacity to accuse freedom fighters in Syria of working for American imperialism Zionism and wahhabism.!!!
