Mick Hartley

Why do supposed left-wingers, like the Women's March leader Tamika Mallory, and indeed like Barack Obama before his presidency, associate with the Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan – with his crude and blatant antisemitism, and his deranged apocalyptic rants? Mallory, on being called out, just kept on digging - "If your leader does not have the same enemies as Jesus, they may not be THE leader." It's not hard to hear the old canard there about the Jews killing Christ. 

Seth Frantzman, in the Jerusalem Post:

We tend to know right-wing racism when we hear or see it. This is mostly because we are used to the clichés of such racism. “Angry white men” is the most clear stereotype of what constitutes the racism of the Right. Those who are “left behind by globalization and multi-culturalism.” In the West these angry racist right-wing voices are seen to be behind the rise of President Donald Trump in the US and Brexit in the UK, as well as right-wing politics throughout the EU. The notion is that they are out of step with our liberal world order.

The problem with the liberal world order, however, is that while it fights right-wing racism with one hand it often grasps at left-wing racism with the other. This is because voices that claim to be on the Left have also embraced forms of far-right racism, religious fanaticism and bigotry. There is no shortage of discussion of this online, whether it is the Women’s March and its unwillingness to distance itself from antisemitism or the antisemites who have come to roost in the UK’s Labor Party.

On the Left the major racism embraced tends to be antisemitism, because numerous groups, whether it is far-right Islamists or the far-right types around Farrakhan embrace antisemitism while claiming to oppose “racism.”

What unites these groups is antisemitism. The values of “intersectionality,” where one left-wing cause partners with another and that one partners with another, has led to a bifurcation of antisemitism and racism. This pattern of antisemitic comments keeps tripping up some of those who are ostensibly members of the “Left"….   

The real intersection in intersectionality is between the radical Right and Left: it has allowed far-right racist and religious extremist views to escape the cordon sanitaire that the West tried to put around them and allowed them to run over to the Left, put on a new mask and say “we’re leftists now, being leftist, being good.” That’s how you get a room full of “leftists” listening to someone shout “if you're leader does not have the same enemies as Jesus, they may not be THE leader.” That sounds kind of like radical Right religious intolerance, doesn’t it?

Well yes – but isn't it, really, simpler than that? Isn't it that the Nation of Islam, which grew out of the civil rights struggle against racism in America, has always been seen as part of that struggle, and therefore on the left? Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali, iconic figures both, are part of that history. Farrakhan's antisemitic views are then excused as merely a quirk, and even understandable given that in the power structures in the US the blacks are at the bottom and the Jews are (seen as) at the top. So the Nation of Islam gets a free pass from much of the left despite the fact that its doctrines are grotesque, and its theology toxic.