Strange Times We Live In: The Red-Brown-Redneck Alliance

One of the most fascinating things for me as I have explored the depths of blogdom and activism is the ideological alliance that has coalesced among the strangest of bedfellows, who find common cause at the intersection of antisemitism and Israel hatred.

It has often been mentioned how Israel exercises power far out of proportion to its tiny size - economically, militarily, and culturally - and to that list we can also add the extraordinary way it has brought together Jihadis, survivalists, and supposedly secular far-leftists.

Attend any ANSWER-type political rally nowadays, or look at almost any web-based discussion of Israel - whether it be in the comments section of a CNN article or Youtube video, or at a blog such as Daily Kos, or a dedicated anti-Israel and antisemitic website such as Mondoweiss - and you will notice three distinct and seemingly incompatible affiliations, all brought together:

1) Jihadis: Their motivation in the game is clear, and they have an unhidden genocidal hatred of Jews and Israel. Online, their presence is characterized by mangled spellings and grammar (e.g. the famous "BUT can yoo handle the truth with facts??!!"), copious broken links to Jihadist and Iranian regime websites, and random interjections of 100 variations of AhaLlu AkBar, all featuring different spellings and capitalizations. At ANSWER-type rallies, they can be seen waving Hamas flags, dressing children up in suicide bomber regalia, and doing those ominous "Yehuuuudi" chants.

2) Survivalists: They are obsessed with Jewish and Israeli influence in the US government, and are tweaked by all of the insane conspiracy theories, from 9-11 to the USS Liberty and beyond. This group is mostly middle aged and older Caucasian males, usually bearded, who are on the margins of society. Online they are obsessed with the USS Liberty and display significant support for Ron Paul. At ANSWER-type rallies, they have the barely coherent often hand-made signs charging vast conspiracies of Jews and Israel.

Many would think of these people as some sort of Neo-Nazis, but while there are similarities, I think there is a distinction because they are not usually affiliated with actual Neo-Nazi groups, and they have a completely different aesthetic and age distribution - tending toward older, bearded, health-afflicted, and lazy, rather than young, built, and looking for a fight. They really exist at the aesthetic intersection of redneck, hippie, and petty paranoia. However, they are far lazier than those who would act physically on their hatred. The best word I could think of to encompass all of the converging strands is 'survivalist'. Basically BigAl (for those familiar with Daily Kos) is the model for this person, but they can be seen all over fringe rallies and websites.

Why would people who are fundamentally pretty racist be so eager to ally with Arab and South Asian Islamists? I think it is because the survivalists' combination of racism and laziness manifests in a desire not for race war but for America to completely withdraw from contact with the rest of the world, and Jihadis of course are their allies in this. But it gets even stranger with group #3:

3) Secular far-leftists: The secular far-leftists tend to be the organizers of, and strive to be the public face of the alliance. They are the ones who organize the rallies, who form the leadership of far-left organizations such as ANSWER, and who run the websites such as Mondoweiss and Adalah at Daily Kos. They thrive off the support from, and in turn provide rhetorical support to, the Jihadis and the survivalists. Without the Jihadis and the survivalists, ANSWER-type rallies and Mondoweiss and Adalah would have a small fraction of the bodies that they do now, with the accompanying irrelevance.

It is tough to discern the actual core values of this group of secular far-leftists, because they have absolutely no problem making common cause and perpetual alliance with the awful people described above, not to mention other fundamentally illiberal villains such as the Cuban or Venezuelan regimes. They also, to put it mildly, tailor their message to the audience, speaking of "human rights" and "peace" when speaking to liberals, and speaking of "revolution" and "resistance" when talking to others.

So what do they actually believe and seek? I don't know, but it seems to be some sort of world anti-Capitalist and anti-American revolution that absolutely has to start in Israel, and somehow things will just work out from there.

The secular leftists are of course the most surprising contingent of the alliance, because it seems like they should know better than to make common cause with the other two. After all, they spend their time sitting around coffee houses reading Marx and Sartre, right? And they really care about human rights, alternate sexuality, and patriarchy, right? Well, I don't know.

What I do know is that they have adopted Muslims and Arabs, and in particular the Palestinian Arabs, as the major symbolic representatives of everything that is wrong with, and victimized by, American and Western military and economic power, Capitalism, and so forth. And in turn, the Arab world's major self-declared mortal enemy, Israel, has become the symbolic representative of Western, American, and Capitalist military and economic power.

Now I will be the first to state that there are many problems with the manifestations of extreme Capitalism and American military overreach - I am a liberal after all. However, I recognize the fundamental illiberality of Jihadists and conspiracy nuts, and of seeking to deny self-determination to only one ethnic group in the world - the Jews - which also happens to be the most persecuted group in human history.

But that's me. The secular far-leftists in question don't believe so. They see Israel - population 6 million, with gay rights, universal health care, environmental stewardship, and universal suffrage - as the necessary starting point for a world revolution. Unfortunately, this strange belief has been creeping in from the extremes of the far left into more mainstream leftist thought, at places such as Human Rights Watch and even Amnesty International.

The amazing thing is that all of this has already been tried before by the secular left, to disastrous results. They seem not to be aware of, or not to want to learn from, obvious history. Many people forget that the Iranian Islamic Revolution was initially largely supported by the secular liberals and Communists in that country and among its exiles. They figured that once the Shah was dealt with and the old order was overthrown, they could maneuver in the post-Shah system to achieve their goals.

Boy were they wrong! Iran's leftists and Communists quickly learned that their position once the Ayatollahs took over was not going to be at the negotiating table or in the Parliament, but rather in the prisons and torture chambers, behind veils, and for the lucky few, in exile. The same will no doubt be the case in the unlikely scenario that certain Western far-leftists succeed in bringing about revolutionary change through their alliance with Jihadis.

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This analysis applies to what I would call the 'true believers' from each camp - those that are genuinely convinced of the ideological righteousness of their cause. Of course beyond those types, in these sorts of movements, there are the opportunists who are willing to do anything to sell a book, become famous, drum up support for their regime, sell pot, or whatever else it might be. Those people would probably need an entirely different analysis, because their motivations are quite different than true believers.