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It is shamefully the case that some on the Left have participated in the bellicose counter-jihadist strains of Islamophobia as an outgrowth of their support for President Assad of Syria. The crushing of the Arab uprisings triggered in 2011 – a brutal nadir of which has been reached with the fall of Aleppo, after barrel-bombing, chlorine poisoning, the destruction of all hospitals and civilian infrastructure, with Putin’s bombers doing much of the work – is a tragedy for the international Left.
The ‘goodbye’ videos posted by activists and citizens are not merely a testament to that tragedy: they are a lesson. Their spirit is echoed in the graffiti of another besieged and defeated Syrian city, Homs: ‘Remember, when we were still human? Do you remember, Homs?’ These are people who threw off, however temporarily and imperfectly, the rule of a neoliberal tyranny by their own collective agency, and preserved the memory of that uprising in the rubble of their homes. Who imagines that any future revolutionaries will find more favourable conditions or less savage counter-revolution? A Left that slanders and ignores such people, simply because the regime against which they revolted was not a pro-American one, is refusing to learn the lessons of this epoch, the epoch of collapse, rather than that of circa-2003 ‘regime change’.
It is common, on the anti-anti-Assad Left, to hold Turkey and other outside powers responsible for the destruction wreaked on Syria. Salvage holds no brief for the authoritarian thug Erdoğan. Yet the road to the destruction of Aleppo has been paved by a change in Turkish policy, not by support for the Free Syrian Army or any other rebel group. Content from the autumn of 2016 on to pursue its war against the Kurdish PYD, Turkey turned its attention away from the rebels in Aleppo, allowing the Russian-Iranian-regime advance while, as the Financial Times put it, ‘Russia gave Turkey a free hand against Syrian Kurdish forces to whom it had offered temporary and opportunistic support’.
One can easily imagine the fate of the PYD cantons once all hands, including Assad’s, are freed. The mainstream Syrian opposition meanwhile has, according to the Washington Post, offered to ‘work with Trump and Russia’. As if there would be anything with which to work. This follows from a long, and failed, opposition strategy of seeking alliances with states such as Turkey only to learn that these have no permanent allies, only interests. A hard lesson is being taught here, one that will no doubt soon be visited on the PYD: solidarity against rulers, not with them, is the surest strategy.
In the midst of the assault on Aleppo, Sadiq Jalal al-Azm – one of the towering Syrian Marxist intellectuals of whom Western Leftists work hard to be ignorant – died in Berlin. Al-Azm said in an interview two years into the uprising, ‘in its revolution today, Syria spills this much blood in order to atone for all its past sins and erase its shame, and for this reason, I am with it’. How much greater the tally will be now, and how much worse the reckoning.
Yet there are Assad supporters who cheer on the bloodletting in Aleppo on the basis of a crude, barbarised anti-empire sentiment: witness George Galloway’s valediction ‘long live the Syrian Arab Republic’. If antisemitism was last century’s socialism of fools, Islamophobia is this century’s anti-imperialism of fools.
Indeed, as the rise of the alt-right illustrates, the dominance of Islamophobia is hardly any guarantee against the revival of antisemitism. As Enzo Traverso has argued, the segue of one into the other is not accidental. Their raciological metaphors are incredibly similar: ‘The beards, tefellin and kaftans of the Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe [of the early twentieth century] correspond to the beards and veils of the Muslims today … Judaism and Islam both function as negative metaphors of alterity; a century ago, the Jew as painted by popular iconography inevitably had a hooked nose and sticking-out ears, just as Islam today is identified by the burqa’. While much of the neo- and post-fascist Right has made a conscious effort to shed pre-war variants of biological antisemitism, the cultural tropes of Jew-baiting were visible in the Trump campaign and are all over the pro-Trump far-right media, most notoriously Breitbart.
Tellingly, some of the loudest advocates for this refulgent Streicherism are staunch apologists for Israel. The Zionist Organisation of America’s dinner date with Steve Bannon, and Alan Dershowitz’s defence of Bannon against well-founded charges of promoting antisemitism, shocked liberal Jewish opinion, but it was just the loudest of a chorus of hard-right Zionist defences of the alt-right. This is cause for disgust but not amazement: Israel and its hasbara merchants, as a logical corollary of the colonial struggle against Palestine and the identification of Israel’s survival with US global power, have been among the most vitriolic traducers of Islam as, per Efraim Karsh’s claim, an ‘imperialist’ creed.
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