Comment by thunderfork

The author did not take a stance on the question if Hamas and Iran are leftist Muslims or far-right Islamists, so I dared to ask. You might not believe this, but many German leftist - even moderate ones - supported explicitly the Islamic Revolution, as well as the first or second Intifada. The author might include Hamas and IIR into his conclusion of some groups being "inherently scary to anyone outside the preferred in-group", but by observation, that doesn't seem to be true once your own out-group (i.e., Capitalists, Jews, and Jewish Capitalists) seems even more inherently scary to you than some Islamist thousands of miles away. It's also not true for the governments of Russia or China, which are neither Muslim nor Islamist, thus not part of the proclaimed Iranian "in-group", but they are not at all scared of them.

Furthermore, the author's claims demote "left" and "right" to some kind of synonyms of what they have labeld as "good" and "bad" on their personal moral compass, robbing them of any systematic meaning in political reality; those definitions match neither scientific consensus, nor the way people self-select into groups that call themselves either "left" or "right", nor the way these terms are used to describe policies. The reason is simple: the goals that he attributes to his idea of what "left" means cannot be achieved and sustained on the scale of modern governments and states without the means of authoritarianism, which is, by his definition, exclusively a "far-right" thing.