The political far-right certainly has its own share of idiots and lunatics. But the far-left's conspiracy-theorists and identity-politics chieftans have gained a significant amount of mainstream acceptance over the years. Their views have often given (pseudo-)intellectual support to clerical fascists and power-mad thugs.

Time to cut them down a notch.

First, the indomitable Christopher Hitchens lashes out at Noam Chomsky for his less-than rigorous intellectual stance about Osama bin Laden and 9/11:

It's no criticism of Chomsky to say that his analysis is inconsistent with that of other individuals and factions who essentially think that 9/11 was a hoax. However, it is remarkable that he should write as if the mass of evidence against Bin Laden has never been presented or could not have been brought before a court. This form of 9/11 denial doesn't trouble to conceal an unstated but self-evident premise, which is that the United States richly deserved the assault on its citizens and its civil society. After all, as Chomsky phrases it so tellingly, our habit of "naming our murder weapons after victims of our crimes: Apache, Tomahawk … [is] as if the Luftwaffe were to call its fighter planes 'Jew' and 'Gypsy.' " Perhaps this is not so true in the case of Tomahawk, which actually is the name of a weapon, but the point is at least as good as any other he makes.
 

In short, we do not know who organized the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, or any other related assaults, though it would be a credulous fool who swallowed the (unsupported) word of Osama Bin Laden that his group was the one responsible. An attempt to kidnap or murder an ex-president of the United States (and presumably, by extension, the sitting one) would be as legally justified as the hit on Abbottabad. And America is an incarnation of the Third Reich that doesn't even conceal its genocidal methods and aspirations. This is the sum total of what has been learned, by the guru of the left, in the last decade.

And next, we have James Bloodworth in Shiraz Socialist, noting the bizarre dissolution of many Trotskyites, abandoning the working class in favor of identity politics that universally trashes one specific identity:

What is less well-known to some who see themselves as modern day carriers of the Trotskyist flame is that many of their ideas about Israel actually come from a Stalinist section of the Marxist movement in the 1920s. Most of the Trotskyist left at the time argued for Arab-Jewish reconciliation and solidarity in anti-imperialist struggle – along working class lines against the Zionist bourgeoisie as well as against reactionary Arab clerics; and together against US and UK imperialism.
 

One thing that stands out in the Statement of the Fourth International on the Jewish Question is the call for united Jewish and Arab trade unions. Contrast this with those today who wish to write-off Israeli trade unionists entirely in their clammer for boycotts. Interestingly, the Palestinian Federation of Trade Unionists continues to oppose boycotting its Israeli counterpart. Which Palestinians do the modern-day so-called “Trotskyists” listen to however? The pious clerical fascists who call for an immediate severing of all ties with the Jewish state.