The Left’s most recent bout with insanity is, at least in part, due to increasing turmoil and carnage in the Islamic world. Progressives oppose most of the Islamist agenda — the subjugation of women, execution of gays, slaughter of innocents — but their belief that Western Culture, Western Imperialism, and (worst of all!) Western Cultural Imperialism are responsible for all of the world’s ills make it impossible for them to speak out against any culture but their own. Instead, they attack such proxies as they can find in the West with an intensity that is all out of proportion to the offences they claim to perceive.

Any resistance to allowing men dressed as women to use women’s restrooms is denounced with a fervor that would be far more appropriate were it reserved for the routine execution of homosexuals in some Muslim countries. Micro-aggressions against women perceptible only to themselves are the focus of a rage that would be understandable were it directed against the execution of Muslim women for the “crime” of being raped. Their conflation of distasteful speech on college campuses with violence and rape lies in sharp contrast with their disregard for ISIS’s violent rape of thousands. Their promiscuous use of the word “genocide” in connection with cultural evolution would make sense were it in response to the wholesale slaughters of Christians, Jews, and Yazidis in the name of Allah.

Like the drunk who searches for his keys under a street light, the Left searches for injustice only in the West. And find (or invent) injustice they must, because that’s the only way they can prove to themselves and others that they care. As their ideology requires them to discount the elephants of Islamic violence and hatred, so the gnats of Western injustice they denounce become ever more microscopic in order to demonstrate just how exquisitely attuned they are to human suffering.