-OpEd-

BERLIN — It is one of the most bizarre romances of the past decades: The love of many leftists for Islam. If their ideological ancestors once maintained that "There is no better being, no god, no emperor or tribune", as sung in the famous socialist "The Internationale" anthem, the wind has now turned. The stanzas have been rewritten.

People are protesting alongside Islamists who call "Allahu Akbar" against the state of the Holocaust survivors and their descendants, they view the apocalyptic Iranian cutthroat regime as the ideal anti-imperialist power and chant: "Hijab is Empowerment." At the same time, queer-feminist murder is carried out on icons such as Alice Schwarzer, and the liberal female Imam Seyran Ates is given the "haram" stamp: not allowed.

And then Frankfurt am Main. The city has just recovered from the excitement of an exhibition on "modest" Muslim fashion at the Museum of Applied Arts. It then moved on to the following battleground: the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University.

Because professor Susanne Schröter decided to invite people to a conference titled "The Islamic Headscarf: Symbol of Dignity or Oppression?", some students felt compelled to engage in a hate campaign against the head of the Frankfurt Global Research Center for Islam. "Schröter out" is the name of the hashtag slogan on Instagram. "No room for anti-Muslim racism."

When Iranian lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh was sentenced to more than 30 years imprisonment and 148 lashes, among other things, for "sinful behavior in public without a headscarf," those people remained silent. When her compatriot Vida Movahed was sentenced to one year in prison for her famous 2017 anti-hijab protest for so-called incitement to "corruption," there was hardly a breeze. Only when some experts come together for a free exchange of views on an educational institution, there are protests.

It will take generations of pop psychologists to make this new left understandable. Is it civilization fatigue? Maoism-masochism? Stockholm Syndrome? One can only wish that these leftists will never have to live in the society that they are rooting for.

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