The Totalitarian Left and Their “Escraches”

The Totalitarian Left and Their "Escraches" / 14ymedio, Carlos Alberto
Montaner

14ymedio, Carlos A. Montaner, Miami, 2 July 2016 – Cesar Nombela is the
chancellor of the Menendez and Pelayo International University located
in Santander, Spain. He is a renowned researcher in the world of
microbiology. It occurred to Dr. Nombela and the Governing Council to
award former Colombian president Alvaro Uribe the institution's Medal of
Honor, as they had done previously with other politicians from the
democratic West, and immediately the totalitarian left, which has it in
for Uribe, launched a protest.

In the face of the orchestrated scandal, the institution's authorities,
startled, decided to delay the award ceremony and to "widen the
inquiries." Uribe, who had exerted no effort to receive the unexpected
honor, asked that it be revoked and urged the Chancellor to promote a
good debate about the topic of Colombia. A person whose enemies have
tried to assassinate him 15 times is more interested in substance than
vanity.

This is a perfect example of the growing climate of intolerance
cultivated in Spain by the totalitarian left. In 2010, then-professor
Pablo Iglesias organized an escrache at Madrid's Complutense University
in order to prevent Representative Rosa Diez, an open and tolerant
social democrat, from being able to express her ideas. Escrache is a
sinister lexicographic contribution from Argentina, apparently of Langue
d'Oc origin, which describes violent acts undertaken to silence an
ideological adversary.

A few weeks ago it was the turn of psychology professor Haim Eshach from
Israeli university, Ben Gurion. It was a very important topic. They had
invited him to the Autonomous University of Madrid to explain how his
country teaches science and technology to very young children, which
might explain, at least partially, why the small Middle Eastern nation,
with five times fewer inhabitants, generates forty times more patents
and scientific discoveries every year than does Spain.

He could not speak. The totalitarian left, which is usually
pro-Palestinian—that is one of its most visible distinguishing features,
its strings pulled and financing managed, in part, by Hezbollah and
Hamas—prevented him as part of an obscene anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic
campaign called the BDS Movement (Boycott, Divestment and Sanction)
created in 2005, whose strategy is to isolate Israel in order to cause
its disintegration even though that course will be severely detrimental
to some one million or more Islamic Arab Israelis who live in the country.

The Palestinian argument for trying to demonstrate that the BDS Movement
is anti-Israeli but not anti-Semitic is that some Israeli organizations
and some Jews from the academic world, like linguist and political
activist Noam Chomsky, support it.

That is true, but it is as absurd a proposition as trying to justify
Nazism because (as historian Cesar Vidal tells us), the Jew Hans Sander
was decorated by the Nazi Party, while there were also Jewish generals
in Hitler's army, Helmuth Willberg and brothers Johannes and Karl Zukertort.

We are living in a shameful era of escraches, extortions and assaults on
freedom of expression. In Cuba, "acts of repudiation" began in 1960 and
are still constantly carried out 56 years later. The political police
recruit school children and certain rough-and-ready militants from the
Communist Party, and drive them to churches in order to abuse the Ladies
in White, or take them on buses to the homes of the democratic
opposition to insult them and sometimes beat them.

Ecuador has one of the most restrictive press laws in the west. The
autocrat Rafael Correa can order the arrest of a person for making a
gesture of displeasure to him, persecute journalists for revealing
uncomfortable truths, or unleash a virulent campaign against innocent
people, accusing them of being "CIA agents" as just happened to Dr.
Karen Hollihan, victim of a disinformation operation typical of the
intelligence services.

Will the totalitarian left manage to silence democrats? I do not believe
so, but even if they did, the quotation from Cervantes would still be
true: "Liberty, Sancho, is one of the most precious gifts the heavens
gave to men; all the treasures of the earth and the sea do not equal it:
For liberty, as for honor, one can and should risk one's life."

Translated by Mary Lou Keel

Source: The Totalitarian Left and Their "Escraches" / 14ymedio, Carlos
Alberto Montaner – Translating Cuba -
http://translatingcuba.com/the-totalitarian-left-and-their-escraches-14ymedio-carlos-alberto-montaner/