What you have to understand about the hard Left is that the don’t believe anything. There are no principles guiding their behavior. Functionally, they are nihilists, whose sole reason for being consists in membership in a cult which uses the words and rhetoric of morality for anti-moral, anti-principled ends.
The history of Western Europe, and to a lesser extent America, from the Spanish conquest of the New World (to them) through perhaps the 1960’s, was one of colonialism, which can also be called Imperialism. In some respects, collectively, Western Europe was conquering the world. The British, at the height of their Empire, controlled more land than any nation in history, including the Mongols.
Watching this, and craving a global domination of their own, the Soviets and their allies expended considerable effort denigrating and denouncing these conquests, all while doing everything within their power to increase their own land holdings, first in the reconquest of Central Asia, then in the functional annexation of Eastern Europe.
The club of anti-Western denunciation was founded by propagandists, who saw no objection in principle to supporting conquests and empires, merely ideological incompatible conquests and empires, which of course were called one name, while regimes founded on torture and repression, like Cuba and China, were called another. They were called “liberated”.
You cannot be a Leftist and not find comfort in cognitive dissonance. It is the icing on the cake, the salt on their meat. It is the very craven, slavish conformity to blatantly subservient narratives which constitute the eradication of freedom and validation of cruelty which leftists so need and seek.
To my point, though: logically, if Western Imperialism is defined somehow as the acme of evil, then it is not enough simply to oppose it, but rather one must counter it through the “spontaneous” expression of alleged subalterns. Thus, Obama’s attachment to Islamism.
Now, it seems clear that Islamism is the result of long term Soviet propaganda operations, beginning in the 1960’s and extending until that Empire’s dissolution in 1990 or so.
But Islamism is categorically a world-conquering narrative. It began as such and after a long hiatus, it longs to continue as such, And so weak and decadent are the Europeans, that, as Mark Steyn has argued, demographics alone may deliver the cradle of Western civilization, the home of the idea of universal rights and generalized political freedom, to Sharia, a law rooted in political, social,and economic stasis; which seeks to create nothing, to change nothing, to improve nothing, because perfection has already been achieved. And perfection, as I have already stated, consists precisely in universal and craven submission (this is the meaning of Islam) to laws which seek to eradicate the moral man ,the choosing man, and replace him with the conforming man, the company man, the drone, the insult to the opportunity God granted us to pursue our personal Enlightenment.
Like many of the ideas floating around for the past century or two, I find this prospect repugnant. But it seems only America has the balls to even begin to resist this insult. And we have been corrupted and infiltrated by people who hate Goodness, who hate freedom, and who love the ideas of tyranny and the inflicting of pain.