A reader emphatically recommends this piece by Marty Peretz in The New Republic. In a few short paragraphs, three grand themes emerge; the enormity of the genocide in Darfur, which is being documented as it happens; the minor importance, by comparison, of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; and the unctuous discourse of Arab leaders who wax lyrical about Palestine while backing up the genocidaires of Khartoum.

Some version or other of these arguments has been in circulation for more than five years: but that is precisely what’s significant. The fact that they are still in circulation is testament to the collective moral and political failure which Darfur represents. And Peretz expresses them with almost savage passion:

“Even if not in numbers, the Darfur genocide is of the same order of moral magnitude as the shoah. It will haunt us in whatever day of judgment we face, and it will haunt us when civil and civilized people at last come to bring some just order to the world, including the moment when some court renders justice,” he says. “…[H]ow can the Arabs feign such great agitation about the unfortunate Palestinians when they maintain such composure about the truly bitter fate of the Darfuris? It is the blood of their blood who are committing the genocide. It is their diplomats who protect the murderers, pass it all off as if it were nothing when it is the rankest mass blood-letting in a decade.”

If the cause of Palestine provides an excuse for the Arab regimes to puff and pontificate, it strikes me, then for much of the western left it’s been nothing short of canonized. Why this is so is a perpetual question for us at Z Word. Those wishing to explore possible answers might want to consult this essay by Gabriel Brahm in the new Democratiya. The 1990s, a decade stained by the genocides in Rwanda and former Yugoslavia, hinted at new, human rights-based directions in foreign policy. But for a disoriented, marginalized left, that would have meant a pact with the proverbial devil. Hence, 9/11 came as something of a relief. We now have the catch-all term “resistance” to encompass reactionary movements from Gaza to Sudan. As Brahm eloquently says:

“Out of the jaws of victory - near-consensus on the superiority of human rights, political freedom, and individual liberty - the post-left sought to snatch defeat. 9/11 was our fault and Islamism was now ‘the resistance’. The emergent post-left would thus come to be defined by its willingness to apologise for suicide mass-murderers, misogynist theocrats, and antisemites. When this new ingredient was added to last century’s ‘leftovers’ - postmodernist cultural relativism, post-Marxism, postcolonial theory - the result was something qualitatively ‘other’ to all canons of traditional leftwing progressivism. All the departures (’post’-this and ‘post’-that) had added up. A post-left was born.”