Do you see the US, UK, and Israel as greater threats to world peace than North Korea and Iran? If so, chances are you might be suffering from sympathy for violent extremism.
This, at least, is one of the hypotheses set out by a new study titled "Violent extremist tactics and the ideology of the sectarian far left". Funded by the UK Commission for Countering Extremism, the study is authored by Daniel Allington, Siobhan McAndrew and David Hirsh, all lecturers at British universities.
The authors use the term "revolutionary workerism" to describe "the belief system disseminated by the sectarian far left"—distinguishable by such concepts as "Capitalism is essentially bad and must be destroyed", "Industry should produce for need and not for profit", and "The wealthy make life worse for the rest of us".
The study compares individual support for the above concepts with support for phenomena like "Violence as part of political protests", "Committing terrorist acts", and "Street violence against anti-democratic groups". Surveyed individuals were also asked to select up to three countries—from a group that includes the US, UK, Israel, North Korea, China, Russia and Iran—that "represent the greatest threat to world peace". (We already know the wrong answer to that one.)
The upshot: while the authors found "no evidence that sectarian groups on the British far left currently have the capacity or the inclination for direct organisational involvement in terror activities of any sort", they have nonetheless determined that there is a "positive relationship between sympathy for violent extremism and both revolutionary workerism and an 'anti-imperialist' geopolitical outlook". READ MORE AT THE NEW ARAB.