I am not from the “right,” and in Islam there is no right or left-only religion and laws. For this reason, I allow myself to speak about the Western left and how it is going through a deep crisis from France to the United States. Faced with the rise of nationalist right-wing movements, the Western left has lost many of the cards it once relied on. Today, it is the right-not the left-that addresses people’s concerns regarding security, health, and economic stability.
So the question is : what happened to the left?
Zahran Mamdani’s victory as mayor of New York is not, in my view, a triumph for the left ; it was a vote cast against Trump-a reaction to the highly provocative right-wing faction within the American political landscape on issues that deeply affect the country.
Where does the problem of the left lie?
It suffers from a crisis of values. Its notion of liberty in social matters has no limits, and its advocacy for civil rights has evolved into unjustified violence and a monopolization of a cause it refuses to let anyone share. This is a mistake.
The Western left also continues to defend Palestine from a fundamentally flawed standpoint: they denounce Israel rhetorically, yet practically view its existence as legitimate and inevitable. They wrongly believe that the issue in occupied Palestine is merely the dominance of the Zionist right and the weakness of the Zionist left. This is incorrect. Right or left in Tel Aviv, they stand united in depriving an entire people of its right to self-determination.
The moral bankruptcy of the Western left reflects a poverty of ideas and an inability to provide convincing answers to many internal crises. It also reveals weak electoral mobilization. In the United States, for example, Republicans vote consistently according to their convictions embodied in their candidate, while this cohesion is absent within the left. If I am mistaken, I welcome correction.
Anyone observing America’s mosaic will be struck by a patchwork lacking any true harmony. Florida, for instance, has nothing to do with California. This stark contrast masks a profound division within America’s political establishment and value system.
So will the left continue to defend losing causes from a position devoid of a strict moral and ethical compass-leaving it with no real influence and no weight ?
