On Tuesday, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the American woman most responsible for the current refugee crisis in the Middle East, blasted Republicans for not wanting to accept unvetted Syrian Muslim refugees in the aftermath of last week’s Paris terror attacks.

She tweeted:

We’ve seen a lot of hateful rhetoric from the GOP. But the idea that we’d turn away refugees because of religion is a new low. -H — Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) November 17, 2015

This, to be sure, is odd. Hillary decrying hateful rhetoric smacks of irony – she despises Republicans so much that she labeled them her enemies during the first Demoratic debate. Furthermore, Hillary is no fighter for religious freedom. In April, she told the Women in the World Summit that “deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed” to allow for abortion. And in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s egregious same-sex marriage decision in June, Hillary explicitly called for the government to force churches to sanction homosexuality, explaining, “Our work won’t be finished until every American can not only marry, but live, work, pray, learn and raise a family free from discrimination and prejudice.” Pray – as in attend church “free from discrimination and prejudice.”

But she’s sure hot and bothered about what she terms discrimination against Muslim refugees. This isn’t particularly surprising – the entire left has a peculiar soft spot for Islam.

That seems weird, given Islamic countries’ fundamental rejection of leftist values ranging from same-sex marriage to abortion to women driving. But it isn’t so weird when considered in the context of Marxist philosophy, which sees Islam not as a religious philosophy of its own, but as a sort of bizarre cultural outgrowth of poverty. Impoverished people believe weird things, say the Marxists; if we just gave ISIS jobs, they’d stop all this nonsense and start behaving like members of the ACLU. Leftists see Islam not as an ideological force converting millions, but as a knee-jerk response to lack of basic living standards.

In fact, leftists see all religion this way: as the refuge of the weakminded underclass. As Marx wrote, “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.” Barack Obama agrees: as he said back in 2008, poor people “get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them.”

The view that all religious practice is essentially the domain of the exploited would cut in favor of seeing all religious practices as equally worthy of dismissal.

But the left prefers Islam to Christianity. They’ll fight against anyone drawing pictures of Mohammed, but they’ll lose their minds if Christians complain about an “artist” soaking a statue of Jesus in urine.

Why do leftists treat Christianity and Islam differently, if both are merely chimerical responses to the vicissitudes of life? Because leftists see Christianity as the creator of Islam’s rise, and Christians as the victimizers of Muslims. The Obama State Department won’t recognize Christians as victims of incipient Muslim genocide in the Middle East, but President Obama will equate ISIS violence in 2015 with the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition. President Obama believes, like many on the left, that Western civilization was founded in racism, sexism, homophobia, and other bigotry – and that Christianity, as its wellspring, provided that impetus.

Furthermore, Obama believes that Western civilization has exploited the rest of the world, and that it therefore bears culpability for the poverty that gave rise to the Islamic wave. Muslims are benighted victims of poverty; Christianity made them victims of poverty in the first place. Christianity thus bears blood guilt for the sins of Islam, but Islam bears none of its own. As Dinesh D’Souza puts it, Obama is an anti-colonialist and believes “that the rich countries got rich by looting the poor countries, and that within the rich countries, plutocratic and corporate elites continue to exploit ordinary citizens.” Taken one step further, those rich countries – Christian countries – exploited non-Christian countries, impoverishing them and opening them to the opium of Islam.

How else to explain the left’s romance with Islam and simultaneous dismissal of Christianity? How else to explain the left’s preoccupation with allowing Muslim refugees into the Christianity-founded West while demanding nothing of Islamic countries which are murdering Christians en masse?

Hillary Clinton says it’s hateful for Western countries to discriminate in choosing refugees based on religious philosophy. It’s far more hateful to suggest that Christianity must bow and scrape before Islam, particularly when Islamic terrorists target non-Muslims the world over.

Ben Shapiro is Senior Editor-At-Large of Breitbart News, Editor-in-Chief of DailyWire.com, and The New York Times bestselling author, most recently, of the book, The People vs. Barack Obama: The Criminal Case Against The Obama Administration (Threshold Editions, June 10, 2014). Follow Ben Shapiro on Twitter @benshapiro.