Two recently published articles come insightfully and incisively at the same problem from two completely different directions, and both are worth carefully considering by anyone concerned with questions involving the contemporary political Left around the world. First, in a commondreams.org article, “Iran and Leftist Confusion,” Reese Erlich expresses amazement and bewilderment at the tendency of some of the Western Left to express support for Ahmadinejad and Khamenei and oppose or denounce the protesters. In fact, this is only the latest manifestation of a very common phenomenon plaguing the Western Left: being guided by the idiotic assumption that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend," and that therefore any political actors in the developing world that oppose US foreign policy must somehow or other be worthy of support. This has extended in some circles to include fascists like Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic and others, theocratic fanatics like the above-mentioned Iranian thugs, Hezbollah and Hamas, and in some extreme cases even involves passing flashes of regard for nihilistic monsters like bin Laden, Zawahiri and Zarqawi.

In an article entitled “What it means to be a Palestinian leftist,” from the June 30 edition of the Palestinian newspaper al-Ayyam (now translated into English by ATFP), Hassan Khader takes aim at an analogous phenomenon among Palestinian leftists, describing how much of the Palestinian Left has essentially abandoned its social, economic and other principled positions in favor of a simplistic nationalist line that can easily degenerate into the support of right wing fundamentalist reactionaries like Hamas. Khader pointedly asks, “if challenging the right-wing fundamentalism is not a responsibility and task of the left, then how can it be worthy of that name?” and “if secularism and the issues of poverty, corruption, and civil rights, and especially and above all the issue of women’s rights, are not central concerns of the Left, then what exactly are its issues?” I have made similar points about the state of the Arab left many times in the past.

These positions are analogous for a number of reasons, most notably in their logic. In both cases, most traditional leftist values are pushed to the side and one principle is raised to primacy enabling the embrace of forces that should be utterly anathema to any respectable incarnation of the political Left. In the case of the Western leftists who find themselves in sympathy with the Iranian ruling elite, it is a fixation with battling Western imperialism and supporting all those who would confront US foreign policy. This support is adopted at all costs, and without regard for the other issues at play in Iran, or in the other cases I cited. If the international approach of the Western Left were simply to degenerate into a reflexive and knee-jerk policy simply in automatic opposition to any and every aspect of US foreign policy and automatic support for any forces that oppose it, it will be adopting an entirely unprincipled, and indeed incoherent, position.

As for the Arab and Palestinian Left, if all other values are abandoned or subordinated to the cause of nationalism, then the Left has in effect ceased to exist, and will simply become, as Khader describes, the handmaidens of more malevolent, conniving and capable forces of the political Right and religious extremism. Khader correctly maintains that for Palestinians, there is no contradiction between the confrontation with the occupation and the need to confront a plethora of unacceptable social conditions, especially on women’s rights. He is absolutely correct that if the Palestinian Left cannot stand up to the forces of extreme right wing reaction and robustly defend causes such as women’s rights, it isn’t a worthy of the name. In the West and in the Arab world, the Left must be the Left, or there will be no earthly reason for anyone to give it a second thought.