"Dwell on the past, lose an eye...." Russian Proverb

When we consider the specter of Islam ascending, the Left is truly conflicted. Their knee-jerk reaction is to jump on the Anti-Imperialist bandwagon and to give support to what in the 50's and 60's was the Pan-Arabist movement of self-determination and liberation. The fact that Egypt's Nasser or any oriental despot, despite rhetoric to the contrary, was only interested in what he himself had "determined" politically expedient is now a moot point. This is axiomatic: no Marxist worth his weight in historical self-delusion ever gave a damn if its textbook program could be applied humanely to human beings. Likewise, no Arab-dominated government in history ever cared a whit for liberty or the happiness of its populations. What Islamicists do care deeply about, in concert with the Left, is raw unmixed power. Unlike the old wisdom, the Left prefers the Devil they know not.

So let us dispense with the haunted bromides of Imperialism, for indeed that train left the station long ago. The Left's stale procrustean ideology is stuck with Islam in a time warp and their identification with a rising secular Middle East is hopelessly outdated due to a dearth of democratic institutions and the reemergence of the Islamic shroud that would strangle modernity. Meanwhile, the West's Collectivists, having to choose between Islam's retrograde, theocratic, tyrannical, and obsolete ideology and their own minds' jaded phantasm of the American traditional Judeo-Christian worldview, will invariably lean towards the former. Their convoluted preconceptions will not allow them to bridge the chasm between free conscience and the minimalist regime. Having been shackled for so long to a yoke of jaundiced self-loathing at America and her values, the Left has grown accustomed to such fetters and would wither and die without its object of hatred par excellence to rent their garments against.

The Left's moral and cultural relativism, coupled with its ideological investment in "Contra-Americana," has irrevocably demolished its powers of judgment. That's why feminist organizations are strangely subdued over acid tossed in little girl's faces for going to school in Afghanistan or in the blatant misogyny inherent in Shar'ia law. One need only ruminate on Islam's handling of: divorce, child custody, polygamy, capital punishment for perceived adultery, infant genital mutilation, and honor killing of females in order to clearly perceive the Islamicist charnel house of human existence. With a remorseless hypocrisy, the Left, which reputedly holds sacred the ideals of autonomous freedom of conscience, cannot bring themselves to dwell upon Shar'ia's death penalty for apostasy or the Arab States' pitiful record as to freedom of conscience and the cultivation of positive and negative liberty apart from the assent of the regime.

The Left, having lost its proverbial eye, is still fighting the long dead ghosts of Anglo Imperialism, McCarthyism, and Jim Crow and have therein not perceived that it is the Devil's Hands they have gripped tightly in common cause. Having shunned the moral- political foundations of the classical liberal West before our civilization lost its faith and began offering holy fire to strange gods, the Left presses headlong to its own Marxian constructed gallows and its foreordained appointment with extinction. Because they have long ago lost the ability to evaluate moral distinctions or to think in terms outside their collectivist hive mentality, they cannot recognize true evil, nor even hold that it exists -- even when it unblinkingly stares into their eyes with uplifted sword.

Glenn Fairman is retired and has taken up writing to stave off senility and to keep from following his wife around the house. He blogs as the Eloquent Professor at www.palookavillepost.com or can be contacted @ arete5000@dslextreme.com.