Authored by Charles Lipson via RealClearPolitics.com,

The virulent anti-Israel protests across America and Europe throw a glaring light on the bizarre alliance between left-wing activists and militant Muslims. That odd combination has been the bedrock of political activism at universities and in the streets for years. It began in universities, where it now dominates political discourse, threatens Jewish students, and intimidates anyone brave enough to voice their dissent. We can now see how it has spread far beyond the campus.

What makes the alliance so strange are the deep-seated differences between leftists and Muslim fundamentalists over core beliefs.

The left supports women’s rights and full equality in the workplace and public sphere. Militant Muslims oppose them.

The left supports gay rights and gay marriage. Militant Muslims toss gays off buildings. None would dare hold a public march in Pakistan, Iran, or Saudi Arabia.

The left supports abortion rights. Militant Muslims oppose them.

The left supports religious freedom, including the right to reject religion altogether. Militant Muslims believe heretics should be executed.

The left rallies against book banning. Militant Muslims embrace it for any book they believe insults Islam or supports Israel.

The left opposes the death penalty. Militant Muslims endorse it and praise their governments for using it.

These beliefs are not marginal for either group. They are foundational, and they are profoundly opposed to each other. Still, the two groups have formed a long-standing alliance. How do they deal with these profound differences? And why are they allied?

They deal with differences very simply: They never mention them when they act jointly, primarily against Israel and its supporters across the world. They have joined together to form a more powerful coalition against shared enemies. They would destroy that partnership by raising issues where they differ.

Far better to focus on their agreement, which goes beyond hating Israel to claim Western capitalism has oppressed, degraded, and ruined the world. Since the U.S. is now the world’s greatest power, it is tagged as the main source of that malignancy, at home and abroad. As they see it, Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America are poor because they have been oppressed by capitalist nations and their corporations. If they have terrible governments, they have them only because the West has installed and sustained them.

This critique is based on a shared, but muddled, ideology. The heart of that ideology is its illiberalism. Both groups are fundamentally opposed to the forbearance of individual differences, including very different views and goals, that are essential to Western constitutional democracies. In their place, these opponents rely on a toxic brew of ideas drawn from:

• Karl Marx, of course

• Franz Fanon (“The Wretched of the Earth”)

• Edward Said (“Orientalism”)

• Herbert Marcuse (and the Frankfurt School of “cultural Marxism”)

• And, for the most extreme Muslims, revolutionary theologians like Sayyid Qutb, the intellectual father of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood and its subsidiary in Gaza, Hamas

The mixture of these ideas makes a confused jumble. But “incoherent” doesn’t mean “useless.” It serves as a kind of makeshift glue that binds disparate groups in opposition to what they see as the West’s oppressive bourgeois culture, its tolerance for divergent views, and the unequal outcomes produced by market competition (softened by transfer payments). Overturn it all, they say, in the name of “social justice.” They have no idea of what to replace it with. In fact, the coalition would break apart if either side emphasized its proposed alternatives.

This negative, often nihilistic, ideology inverts the old adage, “might makes right.” Their implicit claim is that “weakness and poverty make right.” It doesn’t. What’s right or wrong has nothing to do with who has wealth and power and who does not.

These self-proclaimed champions of the poor add one more sloppy argument to the mix. They claim people are poor and weak only because they have been oppressed and exploited.

One implication is that people in poor countries would be far better off if they had never been touched by the West and its institutions. They would thrive under their own social and political systems (and, in the West, some version of socialism). That, at least, is the unspoken claim underlying the coalition of the left and militant Islam. Some progressives (who aren’t poor) make common cause by self-flagellation. They are “repentant oppressors.” Their remorse has all the religious fervor of medieval monks who wore hairshirts and beat themselves with whips for their sins.

The idea that the West is responsible for the world’s poverty has a core of truthful criticism next to a mountain of lies. One doesn’t have to apologize for colonialism to note that almost everyone on planet Earth lived in grinding poverty until the cumulative effects of industrialization began to take hold after 1800. That process began in northwestern Europe and gradually spread across the world, lifting income, health, diet, and life expectancy. Where it failed was in countries racked by civil unrest or governed by rapacious regimes that didn’t provide public order or secure property rights and stole the revenues needed to provide essential public goods.

As for human liberation, no societies voluntarily ended human bondage until the West did it, mostly in the 18th and 19th centuries. Britain spent enormous sums stationing its navy off the African coast to prevent the transshipment of slaves, which had been captured and sold by local tribes. Britain gained nothing financially from that effort; it did it for moral reasons. In America, “free states” in the North and Midwest abolished slavery well before the Civil War. The war itself ended slavery, though blacks were still oppressed for another century by Jim Crow laws (in the South) and segregation (everywhere). Those practices were always inconsistent with the Western ideal of human equality and were finally outlawed in the mid-1960s by the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act.

The current fight over millions of illegal immigrants obscures one fact common to all modern states and two crucial features of American history. The common fact is that state sovereignty includes the essential right to control who can enter each country. What makes U.S. history so unusual is that it has welcomed tens of millions of legal immigrants and integrated them, by fits and starts, into a society where common citizenship transcends ethnic and religious heritage. Today, most Americans appreciate the fruits of that integration in art, music, food, and culture, drawn from multiple cultural traditions. The left, with its focus on identity politics, damns much of that sharing as “cultural appropriation.” It is a deliberate attempt to divide the country into separate, opposed camps, based on birth.

The depth of this ideological rot is most visible on college campuses, where some students (and a few faculty) hate America and Israel so much they have actually rallied in support of Hamas and attempted to justify its atrocities as somehow the liberation of the poor and oppressed. It’s a disgusting idea.

It’s high time Americans went beyond revulsion and defended their basic, liberal ideals and the constitutional democracy founded upon them. We don’t have to accept the mantle of “oppressors” because of events that happened long before we were born, for which we are not responsible, and from which we never profited. We don’t have to accept the damning slur that our success is due to “privilege” rather than hard work, time-tested values, and a good education. The greatest “privilege” is not inherited wealth or status. It is being raised in a stable home by loving parents, living in an orderly community, and growing up in a country where each of us is free to pursue our own goals and define ourselves as we choose.

We can and should recognize America’s flaws – and work toward correcting them – without falsely painting our nation’s past as primarily a legacy of slavery and stolen wealth (the “1619” project and its twin, “decolonization” studies).

America is a great nation, for all its flaws.

Its greatness lay in the experiment of 1776 and establishment of a democracy that has endured and slowly incorporated all its people into the body politic.

The values that undergird that democracy are worth remembering, worth cherishing, and worth fighting to keep, even as a vile coalition celebrates those who kidnap and murder in the perverted name of religion. That’s not “social justice.” That’s an age-old crime.

The United States provided more than $50 billion in aid to over 150 countries and territories, regional funds, and NGOs in 2021.

Each year, Congress appropriates foreign assistance based on national security, commercial, and humanitarian interests.

In this map via Visual Capitalist's Bruno Venditti, USAFacts uses data from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to highlight the countries that received the largest portion of aid.

Food Assistance and the War on Drugs

In 2021, the U.S. directed its aid towards nations grappling with internal conflicts and humanitarian crises.

Following the withdrawal of American troops that same year, Afghanistan emerged as the primary recipient of substantial aid, receiving billions of dollars annually as part of the humanitarian response.

Among the top countries benefiting from U.S. assistance are various African nations contending with both famine and internal conflicts. Notably, Colombia stands out in the top 10, receiving millions of dollars to combat drug trafficking.

Israel Leading in Aid Over Time

Since the end of World War II, the U.S. has disbursed more than $3.75 trillion in foreign aid (adjusted for inflation).

The post-war years saw foreign aid peak, primarily because of the Marshall Plan. This initiative aimed to assist in restoring the economic infrastructure of post-war Europe.

At its height in 1949, U.S. foreign aid totaled nearly $100 billion.

Israel has been by far the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign assistance. Since the 1940s, Israel has received more than $300 billion, with most of it in military support, aiding the country in developing a missile defense system and other projects.

The primary reason for this foreign aid has been to guarantee U.S. interests in the region, given Israel’s proximity to Syria to the northeast, Hezbollah-influenced Lebanon to the north, and an Islamist insurgency in Egypt’s Sinai to the south.

After a two-decade conflict that took millions of Vietnamese lives and roughly 58,000 American lives, Vietnam is Washington’s second-largest recipient of financial support. This money is used for economic and technological cooperation, military support, and even to aid cleanup efforts from the U.S. military’s use of Agent Orange in Vietnam during the war.

Since 1975, Egypt has been a significant recipient of substantial foreign aid from the United States, primarily as part of diplomatic efforts to mitigate tensions in the Arab-Israeli context.

Washington also sent large aid packages to South Vietnam, South Korea, and other countries during the Cold War.

Since 2003, much of the money has been directed toward Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

The Debate Surrounding U.S. Foreign Aid

According to a recent report by the Congressional Research Service, foreign aid can serve as a means to bolster the United States’ global influence, tackle worldwide challenges, and advance common values.

Nonetheless, the same report reveals that certain Americans and Members of Congress consider foreign aid an expenditure the country cannot afford, given current budget deficits and competing budget priorities.

In 2021, U.S. assistance to other countries accounted for around 0.7% of the federal government’s total expenditures.

Authored by Victor Davis Hanson via X (@VDHanson),

Take note that a trapped Hamas in extremis will go to desperate lengths to survive, from trying to prompt lone-wolf killings in Western cities to drawing in Arab nations to share in their jihad to enlisting Western elites and expatriate Muslims both to deny Hamas is a murderous organization and simultaneously to cheer on its macabre killing.

In this regard, the anti-Jewish nature of Iran and Hamas (read its 1988 Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement) should have been obvious, but Westerners suffered from a pathological desire to be deluded.

But to aid Israel in overcoming the current genocidal agendas of its enemies, we should remember first how we in the past have unfortunately contributed to this nightmare.

What follows are some brief annotated quotes of American Middle East insanity [with my annotations in brackets].

Consider our late point man in Iran, and supposed Obama-era expert on Hamas and ISIS, Robert Malley (2008):

It is "a mistake to only think of them [Hamas] in terms of their terrorist violence dimension.”

[Was it a mistake to envision the Third Reich also in terms only of its “terrorist violence,” given that it also promoted a green agenda?]

Malley also included Hamas in his groups of terrorist organizations that "are social and political movements, probably the most rooted movements in their respective societies.” …

[I agree that Hamas is certainly the “most rooted” of the movements in Gaza and perhaps the West Bank as well. And I concur that it is not a mere aberration in Palestinian society but reflects its collective “rooted” values.]

“There is so much misinformation about them …

[Please elaborate: does your “so much information” include things like our ignorance of the fact that Hamas likes to rape Jewish women and desecrate the dead bodies of Jews?]

“I speak to them and my colleagues speak to them [Hamas], and now we may disagree with them, but they have their own rationality … none of them are crazies,”

[Can you please provide transcripts of those occasions when you and your colleagues (also then in the Obama administration?) spoke to Hamas? That was also quite big of you, Mr. Malley, to note that you “may” disagree with Hamas. Was it over which of their killing methods is the most effective? I also agree that Hamas certainly has its own “rationality”. Its recent murder of 1200 Jews—the vast majority civilians—during a religious holiday, which followed a year-long carefully-planned blueprint for mass death and counted on the near-criminal naivete of Western diplomats, might rival the “rational” genocidal agendas of, say, the SS. As for “crazies”—do you mean that Hamas does not crazily fantasize about extermination, but carefully and rationally carries it out? If so, I concur.]

"It has a charity organization, a social branch; it’s not something you can defeat militarily either, and people need to understand that."

[Everything you have stated could have equally applied to the murderous Nazi party: it too was a “political movement” (which did not preclude its use of systematic murder). It too had its own “rationality” (kill Jews and destroy elected governments). It too had “a social branch” and “even charities” (all the better to disguise its murderous agendas). And, yes, one can defeat Hamas “militarily,” as the Allies did Nazi ideology. And yes, “people need to understand that” it is quite possible to ensure that Hamas murders no more.]

John Kerry at Davos in 2016:

“I think that some of it [the millions released to Iran by the Obama administration] will end up in the hands of the IRGC [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps—the terrorism specialists of the Iranian armed forces] or other entities, some of which are labeled terrorists.”

[As for “Are labeled terrorists?”—Mr. Kerry, does your use of “labeled” mean that Iranian terrorists are terrorists in name only?]

“You know, to some degree, I’m not going to sit here and tell you that every component of that can be prevented.”

[“To some degree” ? If American money cannot be prevented from being used by Iranians for terrorism, then does “some degree” mean only 50,000 missiles sent to Hezbollah and Hamas rather than 100,000? Or does “some degree’ perhaps mean,someday, 1200 Jews murdered—rather than, say, 120?]

“There is no way they [the Iranian theocracy] can succeed in what they want to do if they are very busy funding a lot of terrorism.”

[But, Mr. Kerry, what do you think Iran really “want[s] to do”? Isn’t Iran “busy” building nuclear bombs, not subways and hospitals? And their nuke program is complementary to, rather in place of, Tehran’s vast terrorism budget. Or do you mean that if Iran spends the money on terrorism, they won’t have enough funds to complete building their nuclear-tipped missiles?]

Antony Blinken in 2023:

“We have not yet seen evidence that Iran directed or was behind this particular attack, but there is certainly a long relationship.”

[At what upcoming date do you think you will need to amend this ridiculous declaration—in the same fashion you just deleted your recent tweet calling for a ceasefire the moment Israel was posed to strike back?]

State Department spokesman Ned Price (2023):

“Since April of 2021, we have demonstrated in very real and significant terms our commitment to the humanitarian needs of the Palestinian people. We’ve provided over $890 million for Palestinians, including over $680 in humanitarian assistance for refugees in the region through UNRWA … When Secretary Blinken was in Ramallah, he announced another $50 million in funding for UNRWA.”

[You certainly did show your commitment to the “needs” of the Palestinian people, which in the case of Gaza resulted in the most sophisticated, reinforced-concrete labyrinth of military tunnels in history, given the plethora of imported building materials purchased with fungible Western dollars to prepare for the mass murder that we just saw in Southern Israel.]

Ambassador Nicholas Burns:

“The Trump Administration’s decision to end U.S. assistance to Palestinian refugees is wrong on every level… heartless and unwise.”

[What was wrong on every level and certainly heartless and unwise was the Biden State Department’s nihilist decision in the very moments of taking power to resume hundreds of millions of fungible dollars to the Palestinians, much of which no doubt ended up in increased spending for  rockets and tunnels. Note that in 2021 the Biden Administration was warned of just that danger by its own state department—and was ignored by diplomats such as yourself: “We assess there is a high risk Hamas could potentially derive indirect, unintentional benefit from U.S. assistance to Gaza.”]