While America’s longest-lasting ideological adversary of the 20th century, Communism, was obviously leftist, most observers find the new main enemy, jihadism, much harder to place on the usual left-right spectrum. Not The Nation’s Joshua Holland, though. In a Wednesday article pegged to last weekend’s mass murder at a gay-oriented nightclub in Orlando, Holland declared that “Islamic terrorism is right-wing terrorism…All conservative religious traditions…want to return to an idealized vision of an earlier, simpler time. When you get down to brass tacks, they’re all right-wingers.”
Holland congratulated himself and his fellow lefties for “reject[ing] the religious supremacy, hostility toward LGBT people, and insistence on traditional gender norms that’s embraced by virtually all conservative people of faith, whether they express it with violence or discrimination or strange laws governing where people pee.”
From Holland’s piece (bolding added):
In the hours after any mass shooting or domestic terror attack, many of us [on the left] secretly hope that the perpetrator will turn out to be a Christian right-wing extremist rather than a Muslim like Omar Mateen…We dread the inevitable outpouring of bigotry against all Muslims that follows if the shooter is Muslim, and understand that violence by Christian or Jewish or Hindu (or whatever) extremists isn’t counted against those communities in the same way…
But we should stop feeling a sense of dread at news that a terrorist has a foreign-sounding name and acknowledge that Islamic terrorism is right-wing terrorism…
…The Pakistani scholar and author Ali Eteraz…writes [of] the Muslim right…
…These Muslims leave themselves wide open to be preyed upon by savvy propagandists. Thus, hateful tricks like invoking the dangers of homosexuality, attacking sexual liberation, demonising religious minorities and foreign cultures, and censoring anything that smacks of critical thinking, are all used to keep the ideological base stirring.
That sounds a lot like Ted Cruz’s base…
So whether it’s Robert Dear shooting up a Planned Parenthood clinic or Baruch Goldstein massacring Muslims at prayer or a guy named Omar going on a killing spree in a gay nightclub in Orlando, it’s all religiously inspired right-wing terrorism. Let’s stop worrying about which holy text some killer cherry-picked to justify his crimes and call it what it is.
