The left and islam

Prominent NZ lefty Chris Trotter, in a recent book review, mentions as a deeply troublesome issue the left cosying up to fundamentalist Islam while vociferously rejecting Christianity.
While not denying this is an issue and something we on the left would do well to keep in mind, I think the explanation is easily found. (And it isn’t “the left is riddled with hypocrisy”, either.)
The answer is this: intercultural oppression trumps intracultural oppression.
The left’s general position on intracultural oppression is to give the oppressed support and tools and get the hell out of the way while they fix it themselves. Islamic fundamentalists oppressing Islamic women, for example, is ultimately not a problem we have any right to solve – all we can do is support Islamic women and let them do the job.
The left, by which we mean the Western political left, is rightly far more concerned with the intercultural crisis, the “clash of civilisations” being pursued so eagerly by the Western political right. Defusing and opposing this crisis is a much higher priority than engaging with the many sins of fundamentalist Islam on its own terms.
Pointing out the sins of fundamentalist Islam to we on the left should give us pause, and it is right to acknowledge that there are massive inconsistencies between the worldviews of Islam and any given instance of “the left”. But it should also reinforce our commitment to setting aside these differences for the time being, as we engage in a more important battle.
Or, rephrased: we in the West have to take the log out of our own eye before we have any right to point at the splinters in theirs. Where the log is oppression, and the splinters are also oppression. I’ve never liked that aphorism. A log in the eye would be kind of painful and I’m sure we’d be way more keen to get rid of it than to help anyone else with splinter-removal. And how the heck could we do something as delicate as using tweezers to remove splinters when we have in our eye a big ol’ log? (…perhaps it isn’t such a bad metaphor after all…)
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The new terrorist activity in the UK is kinda worrying, suggesting that they are in for a long IRA-style campaign of infrequent and small but vicious attacks. I await the evidence in support of claims that the attacks are linked to any large conspiracy of terror (Al-Qaeda or any other major network). The timing for just after Gordon Brown’s ascension to Prime Minister is clearly a signal that Brown is held to account just as much as Blair for the UK’s sins (supposed and real).
Lots of people visited yesterday the blog entry I wrote about barmy conspiracy-theorist rent-a-quoter David Capitanchik, suggesting he has been wheeled out by the UK media to make some ridiculous pronouncement or other. And people have googled his name, and found my post on Capitanchik. Because it is at the top of the google rankings for his name. Ah, I love that feeling.