Ted Lapkin diagnoses the Left's political version of the battered wife syndrome:
With each new beating, the scarred and bruised victims of spousal abuse tend to excuse and rationalize the actions of their tormentors. A stubborn unwillingness to accept the proposition that their partners are violent louts plunges these woeful women into a morass of self-deception that spawns only further violence.
The far Left has similarly proved unable to liberate itself from the web of rose-tinted delusions that it has spun about the nature of Islamic extremism. After each al Qaeda outrage, leftist ideologues are quick to castigate their own countrymen for a catalogue of sins, both real and imagined. With a perverse combination of self-loathing and adoration of the enemy, the radical Leftist mantra preaches that if only we were nicer, the jihadists could not fail to love us. It's our own fault if Osama bin Laden doesn't realize what good people we are.
And all the while, these "progressive" academics, pundits, and politicians engage in ridiculous intellectual contortions designed to mitigate the guilt of the terrorist perpetrators. When push comes to shove, some intellectuals believe that Islamism is simply an understandable reaction to what they describe as "Western imperialism."
A case in point might be London mayor Ken Livingstone who said just a day or two ago that were it not for the sins of the West these atrocities would not be happening. Matthew D'Ancona of the U.K. Telegraph writes of the mayor:
So it was all the more depressing to hear him revert to type yesterday as he spouted the fatuous Left-wing mantras for which he earned his notoriety in the 1980s. While claiming that he felt no sympathy for the suicide bombers and (naturally) that "killing people is wrong", he resurrected the pernicious old doctrine of moral equivalence, beloved of the Left in the Cold War. "I don't just denounce the suicide bombers," he said. "I denounce those governments that use indiscriminate slaughter to advance their foreign policy" - by which he meant Israel, and, one presumed, America.
So, too, he deployed the whiskery argument that western imperialism is at the root of all evil. If we had only left the Arab nations alone after the First World War, the mayor said, "and just bought their oil, rather than feeling we had to control the flow of oil, I suspect this would not have arisen".... Does Mr Livingstone really think that the legacy of the Great War is what drove the Leeds terrorist cell to commit their atrocities?
Is he truly blaming the murder of 56 commuters on the Balfour Declaration, and the 1920 San Remo Conference? And would the mayor be willing to tell the bereaved relatives of Shahara Islam, the 20-year-old from Plaistow who was buried on Friday, or of James Adams, 32, from Peterborough, and Monika Suchocka, 23, a Pole who was living in north London (both of whom were named as among the dead on Tuesday), that their loved ones would still be alive if not for the Treaty of Versailles?
Read the rest of Lapkin's column here.
