Tears for a Terrorist

WAITING FOR THE school bus on January 17, 1991 with two gentlemen I saw most mornings, a Bengali and a ‘non-Bengali’ as we would call generic North Indians, I had bristled when the Bengali began denouncing Markin samrajjobad (American imperialism) in the jerkish borrowed from CPM rallies. It must have been January 17 because George HW Bush had started expelling Saddam Hussein’s forces from Kuwait the day before. What made me bristle was the automatic inversion of the fundamental morality of a conflict, or what I understood of it. Saddam, who had invaded Kuwait the previous August, was the victim. It was a glimpse of a world where commonsense was not common, nor even sense.

Leftist sympathy for third-world ‘heroes’ swims very close to the Arab eulogising of martyrs, the same heroes when they are no longer so, beaten by ‘American imperialism’ or ‘Zionist colo­nialism’, which are usually seen as one and the same. When the heroes failed spectacularly in June 1967, they became living martyrs. This history goes far beyond the post-Cold War leftist alli­ance with Islamists or even third-worldism in its older or younger avatars. The morality is always selectively but consistently invert­ed: not a word when a sovereign country is invaded in the first war of aggression in Europe after 1945; not a word when terrorists revel in perpetrating what they hope would be a second Holocaust. Hamas are the real victims and Gazans only incidentally. Israelis, not at all. Putin is the hero who resurrected Lubyanka; thus the Ukrai­nians deserved their fate in an act of posthumous Soviet revenge. Muammar Gaddafi was mourned but there was little sympathy for Hosni Mubarak. Mubarak, despite releasing the Islamist-left­ist intellectuals jailed by Anwar Sadat, was after all an American protectee. Instead, the Muslim Brotherhood was cheered.

Despite all the known unknowns and unknown unknowns pertaining to Hassan Nasrallah, a man not seen in public for years, this much was certain: in death he would be a martyr, presuming an Israeli strike would be quicker than nature. Leaving aside the low-intensity war that led to the Israeli withdrawal of 2000 from southern Lebanon and the 2006 war where he fought the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to a stalemate, Nasrallah was also involved in the 1992 bombing of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires which killed 29 people. The 1994 bombing of a Jewish cultural centre in Buenos Aires that killed 85 was the work of Ansar Allah, close as­sociates of Hezbollah. Argentina, a haven for both Jews and Nazi war criminals, designates the entire Hezbollah organisation as terrorist like the US, UK, UAE, Germany, and the Gulf Cooperation Council. And as it happened, the 2006 war was triggered by Hez­bollah’s cross-border raid that killed and kidnapped IDF soldiers. That still leaves out the execution of Nasrallah’s countless smaller kill orders and his everyday terrorisation of southern Lebanon.

Kashmir, Kargil and Lucknow made headlines with anti- Israel protests. Kashmiri politicians of most hues suspended their election campaigns to denounce Israel, mourn Nasrallah, and draw flak from BJP for their tears for a terrorist while not a word has come from the same quarters about the plight of Hindus in post-Hasina Bangladesh.

Last October, CPM had held a protest in Delhi calling for a halt to Israel’s “genocidal aggression on Gaza”. In Kerala, Hamas leader Khaled Mashal had addressed a rally organised by the Jamaat-e- Islami. The backdrop was the inconsistent refusal of Congress and consistent refusal of the Left to call Hamas’ October 7 massacre an act of terror. The Left and Congress along with other Opposition parties had also criticised the government for its abstention from a UN vote that had omitted mention of Hamas.

In the Middle East, the fiercest condemnations of Nasrallah’s killing have come, unsurprisingly, from Shiite Iran and Shia-major­ity Iraq, with a symbolic funeral at Karbala. The Sunni Arab street, on the other hand, has been divided. Some sections of Sunnis in Syria and Lebanon have even celebrated Nasrallah’s death. The reac­tion of Arab officialdom, meanwhile, has been muted or they have quietly cheered the removal of Iran’s most important proxy and, therefore, their enemy. In India too, the protesters were mostly Shia.

But Nasrallah’s sectarian identity, for the left, is irrelevant. The narrative of victimhood and the patronage of Tehran had brought Sunni Hamas and Shia Hezbollah together long ago. Hezbollah, in fact, taught Hamas the tricks of the trade. In 2017, at the urging of Saudi Arabia, the Arab League had declared Hezbollah a terrorist organisation. In June this year, the League announced it no longer considers Hezbollah terrorist.

Who else likes Hezbollah? In 2015, Russia had proclaimed that it regards Hezbollah as a legitimate socio-political organ­isation. China, neutral on paper, has for long maintained contact with the militants. Cuba alleg­edly allows Hezbollah to run bases on its territory. North Korea is an alleged Hezbollah ally. It is believed that the wholesale upgrade of Hezbollah’s electronic counterintelligence capabilities was the work of not just the Iranians but the Russian FSB.

The Indian Left isn’t just playing to a vote bank it no longer has much of. But together with its allies, the Indian liberals who merely avoid donning red, the Left cannot walk away from the ‘Axis of Resistance’ because the narrative of Palestinian victim­hood would not have gone global without the left, specifically the café-crowding French intellectual left of another era. But it also worked the other way. It still does. The global left would be emasculated without Arab victimhood.

Perhaps Pierre-André Taguieff was the first to use the term Islamo-Gauchisme (Islamo-Leftism) in his La Nouvelle judéopho­bie (The New Judeophobia, 2002). Perhaps not. But Taguieff is credited with predicting the rise of the new anti-Semitism in Eu­rope and elsewhere. His compatriot Pascal Bruckner connected the term with British Trotskyists in his The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism (2006, translated 2010). Those island­ers understood early the disruptive power of reactionary Islam and how the left stood to gain by using Islamists as instruments in a tactical alliance. And yet, it did not begin or end there. And what was to be a tactical alliance became an all-weather pact. Actually, the key may be hidden in plain sight.

American analyst Hussein Aboubakr Mansour, “an Egyp­tian raised on Jew hatred” who became a DC lobbyist against extremism, wrote in a 2022 essay: “Leftist intellectuals such as Judith Butler and Noam Chomsky are… not wrong when they declare that Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran are part of the interna­tional left. A journey of philosophical inversions started from a Hegelian inversion of Christian theology, then a Marxist inver­sion of Hegelianism, a fascist-Nazi inversion of Leninism, the globalization of European thought, the conversion into Arab nationalism, its fragmentation into Arab Marxism and Palestin­ian radicalism, and their inversion back into theology, creating an ideological tornado with antisemitism as its vortex. The aggre­gate result was the gradual decivilization, and moral and social erosion, of entire Muslim and Arab societies, many of which col­lapsed unto themselves in spirals of self-destruction.” That brief history of modern Arab thought traverses its birth in Hegelianism, with its consequent adoration of Nazism, its transformation into Marxism-socialism, its transmog­rification into leftist Islamism and cohabitation with radical Islam, its cooption by the left, and its sub­sequent indispensability to the self-same left. Incidentally, it was FayezSayegh, the“firstArabthink­er to apply Sartre’s critique of rac­ism and neocolonialism to Israel”, whose 1965 booklet Colonialism in Palestine made Palestine a cause célèbre for the global left.

The one constant through all of this has remained anti-Semitism.

The Left, here as elsewhere, cannot call a terrorist a terrorist because doctrine, no matter how pink the current or local version, defines the terrorist as a fellow traveller.

All we can do a year on is remain clear about the real victims of an expanding conflict: the 1,200 Israelis killed on October 7; the hostages dead and alive; the several thousand dead and displaced Gazan civilians; the dead and displaced Lebanese civilians; the displaced northern Israelis.

Jews and Arabs need freedom, respectively, from the hatred and embrace of the global left. That would deprive the interna­tional left of its raison d’être, till it found another. But it would certainly not make the Left and its allies desist from indulging, even mainstreaming, radical sentiment on select Indian streets. Because, when doctrine falls apart, even a vanishing vote bank becomes a failsafe. At least, the Indian Left has, or believes it has, that fallback.

anti-Israel protestHamasHassan NasrallahHezbollahIran-Israel conflict