THE LEFT IS THE RIGHT

I could not say it better than Melanie Phillips and shall therefore let her do the talking:

"The red-black-green-Islamic axis
One reason why people find it so difficult to acknowledge the resurgence of antisemitism in the West is that hatred of Jews has been associated with the “far right.” But those who are deeply hostile to Israel are often also deeply hostile to the “far right,” which they believe stands for racism, obscurantism, irrationality and bigotry.

Those left-wingers and liberals who march against Israel and America, denounce the neocons, promote the green agenda and raise the standard of atheistic reason against religious superstition think of themselves as progressive and enlightened. Their Manichean approach means they define themselves in large measure by what they are not. Most people are resolutely un-ideological and recoil from extremist attitudes.
But for those activists within the intelligentsia whose voices are the most shrill, to be on the left, as we have already seen, is to inhabit the sphere of unassailable virtue. Everyone outside it belongs to the party of the damned, otherwise known as “the right”—which quickly shades into the “far right” with scarcely a breath drawn. And “the right” is invested with stupidity, ignorance, prejudice and authoritarianism, so that the left can think of itself as the opposite, waging a principled fight for reason, progress, tolerance and liberty. The left portrays itself historically as fighting heroically against tyranny and fascism.

Except it’s not as simple as that. Indeed, this division is itself ignorant and ahistorical. The fact is that, today as in the past, left and right have common roots and share many characteristics. The idea that one side represents reason and liberty and the other their antithesis is false. In many ways, both left and “far right” form an axis of unreason, anti-modernity and intolerance; and thus they share a number of characteristics with revolutionary Islamism. Indeed, the “reasoned” West has more in common with the “obscurantist” East than people care to recognize.