Posted on 08/28/2017 12:19:29 AM PDT by Eleutheria5
While pundits across the political spectrum criticized President Trump’s initial response to the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia earlier this month, one prominent left-leaning American jurist and lifelong Democrat is calling out the progressive-left for its own failure to condemn violent extremism.
Alan Dershowitz, a famed defense attorney and professor emeritus at Harvard Law School, criticized President Trump’s response to the killing of a demonstrator in Charlottesville by a white supremacist, writing in The Algemeiner that the president “has a special obligation to single out for condemnation… individuals and groups that claim… to speak in his name.”
But Dershowitz also noted that the American left had largely failed in this regard as well, with mainstream liberals increasingly “willing to excuse” the “anti-liberal bigotry” of “hard-left violent bigots, like the Antifa protest movement.
Speaking on Fox News last week, Dershowitz accused the American far-left of seeking to “tear down America”.
“Many of these people, not all of them, many of these people are trying to tear down America,” Dershowitz said of the Antifa movement. “A radical American, anti-free market communist, socialist, hard-left organization that tries to stop speakers on campuses from speaking. They use violence and just because they’re opposed to fascism and to some of these monuments shouldn’t make them heroes of the liberals.”
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(Excerpt) Read more at israelnationalnews.com ...
"I also believe that it is the special responsibility of decent liberals to do the same with regard to hard left bigoted extremists. I must acknowledge, as a liberal, that we have not done as good a job as decent conservatives have done. Perhaps this is because hard left extremists often march under banners of benevolence, whereas, hard rights extremists tend not to hide their malevolence.
Consider, for example, Antifa, the radical hard left group, some of whose members violently confronted the Nazis and Klansmen in Charlottesville. As reported by the New York Times, the organization is comprised of a “diverse collection of anarchists, communists and socialists” with its “antecedents in Germany and Italy.” According to the Times, “Its adherents express disdain for mainstream liberal politics” and support “direct action” by which they mean “using force and violence,” rather than free speech and civil disobedience. Their leaders claim that violence is necessary because “it’s full on war.”
Nor is this merely rhetoric. On university campuses, particularly at Berkeley, “black-clad protestors, some of whom identified themselves as Antifa, smashed windows, threw gasoline bombs and broke into campus buildings, causing $100,000 in damage.” They model themselves on the “Weathermen” of the 1970s, who were responsible for numerous acts of violence.
They claim to be using counter-violence in defense against the violence of Neo-Nazi and Klansmen, but that is not true. They also use violence to shut down speakers with whose worldviews they disagree: they include not only right wing extremists, but also mainstream conservatives, moderate Zionists and even some liberals. They reject dialogue in favor of intimidation, and force.
As a liberal, I will not give these hard-left violent bigots a pass. It is true that the Nazis and KKK are currently more dangerous in terms of physical violence than hard left groups. (It is also true that the most violent groups by far are radical Islamic terrorists, who are not the targets of Antifa protests.) But the violence of the racist right (and radical jihadists) must not lead us to ignore the reality that Antifa and its radical allies pose real danger to the future of our nation, because of their increasing influence on university campuses where our future leaders are being educated. The recent events in Charlottesville and elsewhere have made them heroes among some mainstream liberals, who are willing to excuse their anti-liberal bigotry because they are on the barricades against fascism.
It’s far too easy to self-righteously condemn your political enemies when they step (or leap) over the line to bigotry and violence. It’s far more difficult to condemn those who share your wing, whether left or right, but who go too far. But that is what morality and decency require, as Buckley taught us.
So President Trump must stop being even handed in his condemnations...." and he's back to his usual crap.
But coming from Alan Dershowitz, this is pretty man-bites-dog.
For those with more patience then I have, here's the link to the full Algemeiner article.
https://www.algemeiner.com/2017/08/22/alan-dershowitz-the-president-has-a-special-obligation-to-condemn-the-racist-right/
There’s nothing special about bigotry.
Newly-crowned Henry V had to disavow Falstaff, because they had been buddies beforehand. Trump, however, quit the Reform Party when David Duke came on board. He never was associated with Duke, and had no special obligation to especially disavow him, just because he gratuitously mentioned his name.
As for leaving it up to the Left to disavow anti-fa and BLM...yeah, right. Like that’s sure going to happen. But even so, it’s good that Alan Dershowitz acknowledges that the Left is in bed with these rabid clowns, and ought not to be, which is why I considered his article worthy of comment.
It is the nature of all Leftist revolutions; they can’t stop until they destroy society and, ultimately, themselves.
I’m now reading Stephen King’s The Stand, and Mother Abigaile would agree with that.
Bigotry is synonymous with the Democrat party. They are very astute convincing the public the Republicans are bigots
“They model themselves on the “Weathermen” of the 1970s, who were responsible for numerous acts of violence”
Wash, rinse, repeat... Bill Ayers was one of ‘em.
I think Stephen King has gone a lot farther left since he wrote “The Stand”. Would not be surprised if he is okay with the Atifa movement.
They are confronting people cut from the same cloth. The Neo-Nazi movement and the KKK are not "right wing" in any way, shape, or form. This is a case of socialists violently opposing socialists.
The decent thing for democrats everywhere to do is stop calling themselves democrat, they are communists, nothing more, nothing less.
Reality101:
“There is no moderate islam. There is only islam.”
“There is no far-left. There is only leftism.”
You have no power, Alan. You can bang on the soap box, but you have little to do with the left anymore. You have no influence on the marching orders and your voice is a lone whisper among a chorus of chaos. Your liberal mantle of power has been usurped to anarchist and communist and any other group that indeed wants to tear society down.... and just like war-lords in Afrika or military coups in South America, promise themselves to rebuild something better, in their image, which always fails but to leave people to learn how to deal with blood and ashes long term... typically overthrown themselves rather quickly.
dershowitz states nazis and kkk groups are currently more violent and dangerous than the antifa.
I don’t recall hearing about acts of violence from the kkk or Nazi fringe crowd lately.
Who did you vote for Alan? Yeah, thought so.
He’s a writer whom you can enjoy without reference to his politics. The matriarchical old black lady in The Stand nailed the difference between good and evil people. The former build, the latter tear down, and that’s an eternal truth. So did Ezra Pound in one of his last mini-cantos, when he wrote briefly, ‘be a man, not a destroyer’. Ezra Pound was a fascist, and for most of his life anti-Semitic, but when a writer says something valid, it’s valid. But I guess we have to get anti-fa to dig up his grave and piss on his corpse, and of course take down the sculpture of him by Gaudier-Brzeska.
Now just a cotton pickin’ minit here. Let’s be fair. He only voted for Hillary once. How many Dems can actually say that?
Americanism vs Totalitarianism
They keep coming back for more. Don’t they ever learn?
Eternal Battle
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