Tarek Fatah: The Left has failed to confront Islamism

As the world struggles to understand and cope with the rise of pan-Islamism and international jihadi terrorism within western countries, one thing is becoming increasingly clear.

The success of the Islamists is partly due to what I believe is a grand betrayal of civil society by the political left in the western democracies.

Instead of leading the fight against the fanatics’ religious obscurantism, they have embraced it.

The refusal of social democrats, liberals and leftists to stand up to Islamofascism in the democracies of Europe, North America, India and South Africa, has also had an unintended consequence.

It has paved the way for an anti-immigrant backlash against all non-whites, in which the left are portrayed as apologists for religious fanaticism.

An unnecessary rise of xenophobia that could have been avoided, had the left led the struggle against Islamofascism, is now entrenched.

Imagine if Labour in the UK, Democrats in the U.S., the Congress and CPM in India, socialists in France and the left in Canada had not catered to Islamists, but instead drawn a line in the sand on such issues as gender apartheid.

Think how different things would be today.

Instead we’ve had more than a decade of appeasement...

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Search for International Terrorist Entities (SITE) Intelligence—an American outfit monitoring global jihadist movements online—posted a report to its website showing a video of Nassar bin Ali al Ansi, the leader of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), encouraging terrorist actions in the West...