Mick Hartley

A companion piece, as it were, to that previous post. Adam-Louis Klein:

The Western and academic left has fundamentally failed to understand the Middle East—not just politically, but cosmologically. It approaches the region through a narrow, narcissistic lens of anti-colonialism, in which only those voices that oppose “the West” in the correct idiom are granted legitimacy. In this schema, Arab nationalist and Islamist narratives are elevated as the sole authentic expressions of regional resistance, while the vast plurality of Middle Eastern peoples—especially non-Arab, non-Muslim, and heterodox groups—are erased, ignored, or pathologized. The region’s deep civilizational and religious diversity is flattened into a symbolic stage upon which the Western left performs its own rituals of self-absolution.

This is not pluralism. It is a narcissism of anti-colonialism, a moral performance that reflects Western guilt back onto itself while using the Middle East as a mirror. And in this mirror, only one figure can be seen clearly: the anti-Western, Arab-Muslim actor. All others—Kurds, Jews, Christians, Copts, Yazidis, Armenians, Assyrians, Maronites, Zoroastrians, and others—are dismissed as Western proxies, “collaborators,” or imperial residue. Their struggles are not treated as decolonial, but as betrayals. Their voices are rendered foreign. This logic reproduces the very dynamic of exclusion that Arab nationalist and Islamist hegemonies have long imposed on minorities, now legitimized by the Western academy under the banner of postcolonial solidarity….

In short, the left’s vision of the Middle East is not anti-colonial—it is colonial in a new key. It replaces the real plurality of the region with a convenient morality play. It denies the legitimacy of non-Arab and non-Muslim Peoplehood. It enforces an epistemic dhimmitude not only on Middle Eastern minorities, but increasingly on itself. And in doing so, it ensures that no true solidarity can emerge—only the repetition of erasure, in a different voice.