I wrote a piece on Zizek on Muftah and I'm publishing here a few points that didn't make it to the piece:
There’s a serious crisis on the Left when condemnatory leaflets of Zizek were passed around in the same building where Marxist intellectual Tariq Ali spoke without any noticeable controversy in spite of his putatively anti-war speech in London last November where he argued that the entire Syrian opposition is either Al-Qaeda or ISIS—that is every single Syrian who is opposed to the barbarous regime of Assad is an extremist. Most Far-right groups basically agree.
Ali went further in suggesting that the United States should “logically" join an alliance with the Russian and Syrian government to “bomb ISIS.” Russian and Syria airforces, incidentally, have overwhelmingly focused on attacking areas under rebel-held control rather than ISIS. As Syrian authors Robin Yassin-Kassab and Leila Al-Shami exhaustively document in their book, Burning Country, the Assad regime since the uprising against it has focused on destroying communities where alternative democratic forms of governance have emerged. For instance, in January, when Russia and Syria were fiercely bombing rebel-held areas in Aleppo, Al-Qaeda’s branch in Syria, Jabhat Al-Nusra, deployed around 1000 troops to the city and within days more than half have left because popular protests have driven them out.
Tariq Ali, meanwhile, doesn’t merely argue that we—on the Left, presumably—should be neutral in a conflict between a defenceless population and a murderous dictator with an airforce, Ali is arguing that we have to stand with and ally with Assad and Russia to crush an uprising. Tariq Ali’s case isn’t an exception. Patrick Cockburn, for example, wrote a column for The Independent in October arguing that we should welcome Russia’s intervention Syria, lied repeatedly in Judith Miller-esque proportions and argued that the “moderate” opposition numbers only a few hundred people, a claim refuted by a leading scholar of Syria's warring factions. Patrick Cockburn is cited by esteemed figures as Noam Chomsky and, curiously, Rand Paul as valuable authorities on Middle-Eastern politics. Cockburn went on to be invited by the leader of the Labour party in Britain in order to brief Jeremy Corbyn and other MPs on Syria.
A far-right candidate (whose former leader party who has praised the Wehrmacht) came extremely close to winning the popular vote for the presidential elections in Austria. No such race has come so unforgivably close to becoming a reality since the Second World War. Thus, it really doesn't bear spelling out that portends such as these ought to compel the Left to reconsider it approach to the politics of intolerance. How so? When the Left—in proving itself to be ‘realistic’ and not naive—concedes the point to the right that there are good Muslims and bad Muslims, the Left is essentially digging its own grave.
Today, esteemed figures on the Left ranging from Stephen Kinzer, Tariq Ali, Patrick Cockburn, Noam Chomsky, Robert Fisk and a plethora of liberal/progressive publications have adopted the line that Syrian refugees are “good” and "not terrorists." But when they are in Syria defending their communities against the barbarous Assad regime, they are either fanatical extremists or stooges of western imperialism. In other words, those Syrians are the Muslim baddies. This is the fatal concession to the far-right. Minus the defence of Syrian refugees as being the “good Muslims”, this is the exact position of practically every far-right group in Europe.
Suppose, for the sake of the argument, that Zizek is genuinely concerned about the rise of the far-right in Europe and elsewhere. Regardless of his wrong-headed approach, it’s arguable that he senses that there’s something profoundly wrong in the way that progressives, liberals and the left talk about refugees and, by proxy, Muslims. It's arguable that the success of the far-right depends largely on the weakness of the Left. Is it the case that Leftists and liberals in Europe and North America are so ensconced in their solipsistic and Eurocentric epistemology that they’re inadvertently providing the far-right with ammunition? Maybe.
The question is simple: how does one defend someone while robbing them of their voice, agency and history? A defence of minorities deducted from abstract notions of liberal tolerance is a strategy bound to fail those it aims to defend.
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