Left-wing/Right-wing Scorpions in a Bottle:  Where’s the Beef?

by Robert D. Crane

  The website, .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address), which is the out-reach arm of the group known as “Sociology of Islam and Muslim Societies”, is one of the few Muslim websites that address economic justice.  On March 24th, 2010, it highlighted the article in Common Dreams by Peter Dreier, who exposed the mounting right-wing attacks on President Obama and the progressivist movement. 

  Unfortunately, the progressivist movement itself is vulnerable to attack for its bluster about dismantling America with no strategy for perfecting the existing system.  This is why we need a “just third way.”  If we do survive as a civilization, it will be despite the progressivists, not because of them.  So far, President Obama has shown the right instincts but seems to be ignorant of any long-range, productive solutions.

  Unfortunately, a substantial proportion of Muslims in America go along with the progressivists’ deconstructive fulminations, perhaps because they reflect the pseudo-Marxist nonsense that pervades American universities.  Since Muslims are the most educated minority in America, they are most vulnerable to becoming dupes of those who want to concentrate power in the government rather than to devolve state power by giving equal access for everyone to capital ownership in a capital-intensive society so that everyone can afford quality education and health care. 

  The entire thrust of classical Islamic thought in haqq al mal is to sanctify private property ownership by broadening it as the only way to avoid the creeping concentration of tyrannical political power in so-called Islamic empires.  Unfortunately, such classical thought on human responsibilities and rights has been dead or at least moribund for six hundred years.

  The entire health-care debate is part of the progressivist agenda, which is designed to concentrate power in the mob rather than to devolve it.  The only balanced solution to the economic injustices of society is to provide equal opportunity for both health care and education for everyone at no cost to the government merely by using the tools already available, as outlined at http://www.cesj.org.  This is why we need an independent party, http://www.americanrevolutionaryparty.us, which Norm Kurland and I founded four years ago, not to compete politically but to educate the two major parties on how to win votes.

  Both major parties promise a lot, but we must ask, where’s the beef?  In the long run who, if anyone, will really benefit?