"Support our comrades, always and everywhere"

I got into politics at the time of the anti-globalisation movement and the Seattle riots. We believed that capitalism was not the best of all possible worlds; we believed in comradeship and justice and freedom. The atmosphere evoked Hunter Thompson's words that "there was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning." Now the anti-war movement demonstrates in Manchester and hold up placards calling for an Islamic caliphate and the right of theocratic regimes to develop nuclear bombs. What happened? What the hell happened?

I'm especially pleased to see that it's in Adbusters magazine that Max Dunbar is asking these questions. I've been asking the same sort of question myself lately (as in here, here and here).

Dunbar continues:

. . .We forget that most victims of Islamic zealotry are Muslims - from the bombings ordered by the cleric Sheik Abdullah bin Jabreen to the genital mutilation suffered by countless young women in the Islamic world. It shouldn't make the slightest difference that some of the fanatics also have a problem with Dubya. By supporting these fanatics, the left is backing the oppressor over the oppressed and the rich over the poor.

Read it all.