The writer, journalist and broadcaster Nick Cohen.
It seems that the Left has finally begun to eat itself and drive away the very people who once supported it, and who once made up the backbone of the Left’s more decent supporters. One such decent Leftie is the writer Nick Cohen. Cohen, wrote a book in 2007 called ‘What’s Left?’ in which he described what had gone wrong with the Western Left. In particular he concentrated on the Western Left’s inexplicable infatuation with Islam, even though Islamic ‘values’ are poles apart from the enlightened values that many on the left believe they hold and which they believe society should subscribe to.
Now, 8 years after the publication of ‘What’s Left?’, it seems that Nick Cohen has finally had enough of the Left and what it has become. In a piece in the Spectator, Mr Cohen stated that the recent election of Jeremy Corbyn showed that the ‘decent’ Left does appear to support the indecent Left a political current which panders to Islam, supports overseas dictators and doesn’t speak up in any meaningful way about, for example, the way women are treated in much of the Islamic world. The Labour party has shown its indecency by electing Jeremy Corbyn, despite his unsavoury views and associations as their party’s leader.
Mr Cohen said:
“Jeremy Corbyn did not become Labour leader because his friends in the Socialist Workers party organised a Leninist coup. Nor did the £3 click-activist day-trippers hand him victory. He won with the hearty and freely given support of ‘decent’ Labour members.
And yes, thank you, I know all about the feebleness of Corbyn’s opponents. But the fact remains that the Labour party has just endorsed an apologist for Putin’s imperial aggression; a man who did not just appear on the propaganda channel of Russia, which invades its neighbours and persecutes gays, but also of Iran, whose hangmen actually execute gays. Labour’s new leader sees a moral equivalence between 9/11 and the assassination of bin Laden, and associates with every variety of women-hating, queer-bashing, Jew-baiting jihadi, holocaust denier and 9/11 truther. His supporters know it, but they don’t care.
They don’t put it like that, naturally. Their first response is to cry ‘smear’. When I show that it is nothing of the sort, they say that he was ‘engaging in dialogue’, even though Corbyn only ever has a ‘dialogue’ with one side and his ‘engagement’ never involves anything so principled as robust criticism.
A few on the British left are beginning to realise what they have done. Feminists were the first to stir from their slumber. They were outraged this week when Corbyn gave all his top jobs to men. I have every sympathy. But really, what did they expect from a man who never challenged the oppression of women in Iran when he was a guest on the state propaganda channel? You cannot promote equality at home while defending subjugation abroad and it was naive to imagine that Corbyn would try.
The women’s issue nicely illustrates the damage he can do, even if he never becomes prime minister. When Labour shows by its actions that it doesn’t believe in women’s equality, the pressure on other institutions diminishes. Secularists and liberal Muslims will feel a different kind of prejudice. They will no longer get a hearing for their campaigns against forced marriage and sharia law from a Labour party that counts the Muslim Brotherhood among his allies.
The position of the Jews is grimmer still. To be blunt, the new leader of the opposition is ‘friends’ with men who want them dead. One Jewish Labour supporter told me, ‘I feel like a gay man in the Tory party just after they’ve passed Section 28.’ Another described his position as ‘incredibly exposed’. He had ‘come to understand in the last few weeks, quite how shallow the attachment of the left is to principles which I thought defined it.’
There is little I can disagree with Mr Cohen on in this section. The left, and especially the Labour Party left, are the lunatics that a considerable number of Labour Party members seemed to want to put in charge of the asylum. What does that tell us about the Labour Party as a whole? Well for one thing it tells the British citizen that Labour doesn’t care for the working man, but they do care for immigrants and they care for some of the most god-awful Islamic savage groups on the planet. It shows that Labour is as relaxed about allowing Shariah Law to enslave Islamic women as Blair’s New Labour were with the idea of individuals acquiring wealth. Jeremy ‘Hamas’ Corbyn is the leader that today’s Britain-hating, sneering, authoritarian, Hamas-fellating, Islam-appeasing Labour Party deserves, and it deserves him because the Labour party itself is Britain-hating, sneering etc etc. The Labour Party looked in the mirror and it saw Jeremy Corbyn.
Mr Cohen continued:
“The half-educated fanatics are in control now. I do not see how in conscience I can stay with their movement or vote for their party. I am not going to pretend the next time I meet Owen Jones or those Labour politicians who serve in Corbyn’s shadow cabinet that we are still members of the same happy family. There are differences that cannot and should not be smoothed over.
I realise now what I should have known years ago. The causes I most care about — secularism, freedom of speech, universal human rights — are not their causes. Whatever they pretend, when the crunch comes, they will always put sectarian unity first, and find reasons to be elsewhere.
So, for what it is worth, this is my resignation letter from the left. I have no idea who I should send it to or if there are forms to fill in. But I do know this: like so many before me, I can claim constructive dismissal”
I’ve read What’s Left several times and it’s a fabulous book. In it Mr Cohen lays out roughly where he comes from with regards his own Leftism and points out where the wider Left has gone wrong morally and politically. It was an appeal to the Left’s common sense and better nature, neither of which have been much in evidence on the Left since 2007, but Mr Cohen’s appeal has fallen on deaf ears.
I don’t blame Mr Cohen for saying ‘that’s it, I’m off’, and to be quite frank it’s a political journey that many of us are taking or have taken. Mr Cohen may believe that he has left the Left, but in reality, the left is now so disgusting and wrong, that I would say that the Left has left him. As the Left descends into the madness of Islamopandering and knee-jerk anti-Westernism, so many more thoughtful individuals may also ask whether it is morally right to stay loyal to a political current that is not only destroying the world today, but destroyed it yesterday as well. We must all take care that the Left is not allowed to destroy tomorrow as well.
Link
Original article from the Spectator magazine in which Nick Cohen says he is leaving the Left
http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9637452/why-ive-finally-given-up-on-the-left/
