Left wing terrorism has been part of Europe and the United States since before most people had ever heard of the word 'jihad'.
Groups like West Germany's Red Army Faction/Baader-Meinhof Gang, America's Symbionese Liberation Army, Italy's Red Brigades, Spain's First of October Anti-Fascist Resistance Groups, Portugal's FP-25, Action Directe in France and the IRA in Britain were left wing terrorist groups who committed numerous atrocities including targeted killings, bombings, kidnappings and torture on a wide scale.
At a time when most people correctly thought of Mosques as places of peace and holiness, these far-left groups put fear into the hearts of many in the west throughout the 1970s, 1980s and in some cases into the 1990s and beyond.
The violence of these groups should not be surprising. Violence is part and parcel of extreme left-wing militant politics.
The Bolsheviks were able to conquer the great Russian Tsardom not through the powers of persuasion as the left would like many to believe, but through a campaign of total terrorism. Civilians were massacred, women were raped by the hundreds, the legitimate leader of Russia was executed next to his family including his young children, priests were slaughtered, places of worship destroyed.
Even the hardliner Marxist thinker Karl Kautsky called the Bolsheviks terrorists and condemned their atrocities. Some estimate that the Bolsheviks killed 1.5 million people, mostly Russians, during their early reign of terror.
Of course the far-right are also killers, fascism remains the most wicked blood-soaked ideology the world has known and there is nothing I personally decry more than the far-right fascists who are currently in control of the Ukrainian regime and who have a large presence in much of Eastern Europe including and especially in Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania.
Russia was never a country bewitched by nor in love with communism. Russia was a country of proud patriots and remains so today. It was these patriots who won the Great Patriotic War against Hitler's fascism. I support the Soviet Union and decry the Communist Party of the Soviet Union that destroyed that great state in 1991. I equally decry the Communists who destroyed the great Russian Empire in 1917. Many Russians loved the Soviet Union not because of but in spite of Communism.
In this sense Communism destroyed the Russian state twice, whereas fascism only destroyed Europe once in a formal sense.
This is not to say that fascists are not once again trying to destroy the Russian state, they very much are but this time it is deeply unlikely that they will succeed. They are thankfully losing the battle against the heroic Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republics who stand as the anti-fascist bulwarks against far-right aggression.
But whereas Eastern Europe and Russians historic borderlands are teaming with fascism, the problem in western Europe and North America is now as it has been through much of the later half of the 20th century, left-wing terrorism that has forged a strange alliance with Salafist ideology.
The group Antifaschistische Aktion, better known as Antifa openly advocates and practices political violence against peaceful demonstrators and even those who are not engaged in any demonstrable political action. In this sense Antifa is the new Baader-Meinhof Gang - the new IRA.
The Liberal Democratic Party of Russia has recently condemned any and all forms of political violence. When will western leaders do the same?
Perhaps it is not surprising that they do not. It is western leaders who funded al-Qaeda and al-Qaeda clone groups in 2011 during the illegal war against the Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya. It is western governments that continue to fund, arm and train Salafist/Wahhabist terrorists in Syrian Arab Republic and it is the western backed Israel which continues to exercise a policy of violence and aggression against secular Arab governments, including and especially that of Palestine, but also of course Syria. In Syria, Israel is on the same side as the terrorist group Hamas.
Why then should it surprise people that western leaders are totally complicit in the funding of violent left-wing groups by the well-known mega-rich fifth columnist George Soros?
Why should it surprise people that Hezbollah which is a legitimate political party in Lebanon whose votes are only increasing is named as a terrorist group by the United States (though not by Russia or China and most of the wider multi-polar world) while Antifa who actually commit acts of unprovoked violence against western citizens in western countries is not named as such?
The dots are easy enough to connect, but the fact remains that there is a supreme awkwardness in the fact that Antifa, who are mostly secular terrorists are now on the same side as the blood-soaked jihadists and also on the same side as right wing Zionist aggressors.
It is even more surreal that in attacking people who have been brainwashed by the liberal mainstream media into falsely equating peaceful, holy Islam with jihadism are actually proving an important point that left-wing terrorists have statistically killed and harmed more people and property in the west than any jihadist group has done to date or is likely to do.
I for one do not agree with people like Milo Yiannopoulos when they say that Islam is tantamount to Salafism. Indeed, secular, mainstream Muslims, both Shia's and Sunni (though increasingly Shi'a) are usually the first victims of jihadism. But how can one add factual content to Milo's peaceful, legal and necessary debates when a terrorist group like Antifa joins with the jihadists in assaulting the peaceful right of Milo's peaceful supporters to engage in free speech?
How too can the west claim to be anything but barbarous when Antifa terrorists can physically assault a philosopher and musician like Gilad Atzmon for the 'crime' of wanting to engage in a peaceful Socratic seminar discussing his new book on moral philosophy socio-political trends and identity politics? Ironically, Atzmon's book is anti-party political, anti-fascist and anti-communist.
The only moral, ethical and just thing to do is to condemn all forms of violence, including and especially political violence. One must condemn fascism, violent left-wing terrorism, Salafist jihad and random hooliganism all in the same breath. Anything less is worse than hypocrisy - it is both a crime and a blunder.
Comment: More on Antifa: