Re: Making generalisations and false accusations

Submitted by Aymenn Jawad (United Kingdom), May 8, 2009 at 18:50

Dear Orange Yonason:

You falsely assert that I claimed the entire political Left disapproved of eugenics. This is simple misrepresentation of what I said. I said that most social democrats would not have approved of eugenics because the social-democrat Left have been associated with anti-racism movements. To give you an example, the NAACP was founded by social democrats, and Martin Luther King Jr espoused social democracy as his political philosophy. By the way, looking at the popularity of eugenics amongst political entities today, I see that it is largely associated with groups like the BNP (see their manifesto). I suspect you would also charecterise the BNP as "left-wing".

You also claim that the Left does not want to be exposed for "who they are". Excuse me one moment whilst I blow my nose. It is simply the thought of a conspiracy theorist to think that the entire political Left is secretly trying to destroy the West. Yes, a substantial portion of the radical Left (socialists and communists) is rightly seen as treacherous, but not all on the Left are treasonous.

It should be pointed out that some of the leading critics of communism and Marxism were themselves men of what you would regard as the Left (e.g. George Orwell, John Maynard Keynes and Bertrand Russell) and we have social democrats like Oliver Kamm and Norman Geras on our side in the war against Islamism. With regards to foreign policy, I think the Left as a whole is simply naive in presuming that Islamists have legitimate grievances since they assume that all humans are motivated by the same passions and goals in life (as Dr Pipes refutes in his article "God and Mammon"). I would say the same thing concerning some leftists' support for the FARC; it is just naivete. I am not here to defend the Left (I am not a leftist myself), but I do believe that it is paranoia to see the entire left as part of a conspiracy against the free world.

In addition, you simply set up a straw man when you implied that I was unaware of the Palestinians' collaboration with the Nazis in WWII. How could you at all infer this from my previous comment? ...

Yours faithfully,

Aymenn Jawad.

Note: Opinions expressed in comments are those of the authors alone and not necessarily those of Daniel Pipes. Original writing only, please. Comments are screened and in some cases edited before posting. Reasoned disagreement is welcome but not comments that are scurrilous, off-topic, commercial, disparaging religions, or otherwise inappropriate. For complete regulations, see the "Guidelines for Reader Comments".