It’s fashionable to pretend that Islam is some sort of “blind spot” or inexplicable “hypocrisy” of the Left.
No. The reigning ideology does not make mistakes. And a massively decentralized ideology based on doctrine rather than diktat, does not have random inexplicable idiosyncrasies. Their patronage of Islam is *completely* in alignment with their ideology.
Left-liberal ideology is based on the belief that if a group is backwards in some way (economically or morally), and *especially* if they are violently attacking more “forward” groups in this respect, this backwardness must be the result of oppression by the forward groups and the violence must be the expression of rage against such oppression.
(This is also where the “Left sees humans as inherently good” meme comes from. It’s not true—they don’t see all humans as inherently good—they just see a golden heart within every “Noble Savage”.)
Thus whether it is Muslims doing terrorism in non-Muslim countries, or Muslim states terrorizing non-Muslims, both are seen as revolutionary acts against some historical oppression that the non-Muslims must have done against Muslims. The fact that (1) many of these non-Muslim groups are market minorities and (2) they don’t violently revolt against it or even complain about it like Muslims do, strengthens this case.
If you expect Left-liberals to support non-Muslim minorities in Muslim states, it means you think “oppression” is *actually* the physical cause for Left-liberals to take up a cause. No, the Left just takes the case of any (economically or morally) backward group, and “oppression” is the in-universe rationalization they come up with. They support Muslims in India not because they’re actually oppressed (they’re not; the very suggestion is laughable), but because Muslims behave in sub-human ways, which “proves” (in their framework) that they are oppressed.
(And they fabricate a fake narrative to justify this rationalization, which is why we’re here right now, pretending like “some Muslim got kicked for doing namaz in the middle of a highway” or “after 9/11, people crossed the street to avoid Muslims” are at all even in the same league as global terrorism or the systematic mass-murders, rapes and bridenapping of non-Muslims in Muslim countries.)
Since non-Muslims in Muslim countries do not behave in sub-human ways, they are not seen as “oppressed” in the language of the Left regardless of ground reality.
(And also, since they’re not dumb, they can easily detect fake subhuman-ness. Some group cannot just start behaving sub-human-ly to earn the favour of the Left. They can easily tell that the sub-human-ness is just instrumental for you, and you actually care about other puruṣārtha. Only when you have truly proved beyond doubt that you are genuinely dedicated to being a sub-human—only when you have let go of all things besides this sub-human cause—will they patronize you.)
We will spare a brief discussion on the various incorrect or incomplete models of Left-liberal ideology in popular understanding and political science, and explain where each of these wrong/partial models of the Left comes from.
Supporting the oppressed? This model comes in three flavours:
That the Left supports the currently-opppressed.
That the Left supports the historically-oppressed. This framing is used (by means of talk about “societal trauma” and such pseudo-scientific drivel) when confronted with the fact that the Left-liberal claims of oppression are largely invalid. The examples of Hindus and Jews suffice to refute this model.
That the Left supports groups with poor outcomes, as these poor outcomes are seen as “evidence” of oppression. This is closest to the truth: per section 3.1.2, “supporting the oppressed” is the in-universe rationalization of Left-wing ideology within itself. Groups and entities are chosen for worship based on their economic or moral backwardness, and believed by Leftists to be oppressed and worshipped for this reason. However, the word “support” would still be wrong:
Section 3.1.3: rather than uplifting the sacred groups, their backwardness is seen as something to be sacralized and perpetuated, never abolished—for that backwardness is what makes them sacred to the Left.
Section 3.1.5: the Left does not care for (and strictly opposes) any policy that would materially uplift their sacred groups without hurting their supposed “oppressors”—their focus is only zero-sum framings that may be used to sow division and mobilize the sacred groups into a revolt against Value.
Supporting the out-group? As a result of the contradictions of the supporting-the-oppressed self-presentation of the Left, many Western right-wingers have come up with the following alternative theory: right-wingers feel most affinity to those closest to them (family > race > nation > humanity > other species > non-living things) while the left feels it in reverse: they are most attached to those furthest to them.
However, this is impossible: unlike the right, the left is an international and universalizing ideology. An Indian Leftist and a Western Leftist despise the same groups, they just tend to specialize in their respective countries’ contexts (and even that is not always so: many Western Leftists specialize in “fighting Hindutva/Brahmanical Patriarchy” and many Indian Leftists specialize in “fighting White whateverism/Zionism”).
Besides, if leftists just hated their own and worshipped people different from them, a middle-class leftist would be equally likely to worship poors and billionaires; a Mexican leftist would be equally likely to worship Whites and Blacks. This is not so.
“Economic interventionism + personal freedom”? This is the autistic “political compass” model, and should be self-evidently wrong to anybody with a modicum of intelligence. Left-liberals have certainly proven themselves totally willing to employ every type of authoritarianism against their right-wing enemies—whether the brutalities committed by the old Congress regime against Hindus and the Saṅgh, or the mass-arrests in the U.K. of those blowing the whistle on the Pakistani rape-gangs or the brutal online censorship in the West during Pax Woke and COVID. Their emphasis on “personal freedom” is restricted to social libertinism (i.e. drinking, drugs, being gay and doing abortions) and their indefinite pretense of being the insurgency/counter-culture and opposed to the establishment, even when they have conquered it (so they just can’t be authoritarian, you see—they can’t have any authority!).
Just coalition dharma? This is the most cynical take: that there is no basic principle, there are just political coalitions between groups and the left happens to be one of them.
But this cannot be so: there are certainly patterns to what groups the Left patronizes. And when an “elite” group is a significant part of its coalition—e.g. upper-castes in the old “savarṇa secular” coalition, Chinese in the communist movements of Southeast Asia, or Indians, Asians and suburban whites in the modern Democratic Party—the Left does not prostrate themselves before those groups.
Most importantly of all: as we explain in section 3.1, the Left’s policies do not actually materially benefit the client groups. Thus even the belief that their policies and ideology benefit these client groups, is not based in reality but only in the leftist theology—the choice of policies, therefore requires explanation.
Stupid big-brain wordcel theories Now we have the big-brain polsci theories that midwits enjoy repeating:
“left = change, right = tradition/conservatism”
“left believes humans are inherently good, right believes humans are inherently corrupt”
“left = flourishing, right = survival”
While these are dumb things to say, we can now also see where they come from. “Left = change, right = tradition” is how the Left restricts the frame of the debate and establish the “recursive revolution”: they are the only allowed change (anything else is reactionary!); the most their enemies are allowed to do is stand athwart history and yell “Stop!”—never to have any goals or desires or pursuits of their own. No other beliefs, no other morality can be legitimate besides the Leftist one—no other revolution can be legitimate besides a Leftist one. And whenever the Left accomplishes some change, that is now the new “tradition” that the right is obliged to defend while the Left pulls further.
Certainly, there are things that right-wingers seek to conserve: namely, all those beliefs and ideologies that the Left seeks to tear down. But everybody wants to conserve what their side has (the Left is of course quite “conservative” about the socialist secular characteristic of our dear republic, or of the various Left-wing cultural and institutional victories in the West), and the right also supports “change” of its own: economic and technological progress, deregulation, innovative new economic mechanisms etc.