OTTAWA — U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio denounced radical leftism as a “unique evil” driven by hatred and resentment Thursday as he opened an international conference on political terrorism.Rubio made the remarks at the State Department’s Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism, which brought together representatives from more than 60 countries.“This is a distinctive and unique evil,” Rubio said. “It has always been driven by a hatred — above all else, a hatred for civilization itself.”Rubio described radical leftism as a revolt by people incapable of building or creating against those who can.“It is a revolt of the worst against the best, a revolt of the weak and the cowardly against the strong and the good,” he said.“It is perpetrated by those who cannot build, who cannot create, who cannot achieve great things and take their revenge upon the world for their own inadequacy by seeking to destroy those who can.”.Rubio said left-wing extremist movements have adopted different names and causes throughout history but share the same underlying motivation.“They can call themselves anti-capitalist or anti-imperialist or communist or anarchist or Marxist, but the fundamental character is always the same,” he said.“It is a poisonous resentment, cloaked in the language of equality and justice and liberation.”Rubio accused extremists of wanting to “tear down what greater men have built” while using violence and terrorism to impose their ideology on others.He argued that left-wing political violence has been overlooked despite its historical prevalence."Between 1970 and 1980, 93 per cent of terrorist attacks in the West came from the far extremist left,” Rubio said.“These are numbers that would shock most Americans today because we’ve been taught to believe that this kind of political violence simply doesn’t exist or it’s being exaggerated. But it does exist, and we’re actually underestimating it.”Rubio said the United States is now facing “a new wave of this old evil.”He pointed to attacks on immigration officers, sniper attacks, explosives and armed ambushes, along with the shooting at a Catholic elementary school, the killing of a health-care executive and political assassination attempts.“These are not abstract statistics,” he said. “Americans have seen what those numbers mean.”Rubio said the threat extends beyond the United States, claiming far-left violence increased by more than 40 per cent in Germany over the past year and that left-wing and anarchist actors are responsible for more than 80 per cent of radical violence in Greece.He also accused governments, prosecutors and media organizations of minimizing violence when it advances a left-wing cause..Rubio pointed to the riots that followed George Floyd’s death in 2020, saying local governments refused to prosecute people who burned and looted American cities.He recalled television coverage showing a reporter standing near burning buildings while a headline described the protests as “mostly peaceful.”“So many people in positions of power have repeatedly dismissed acts of violence and even terrorism as legitimate forms of political expression, so long as they served a left-wing cause,” Rubio said.The State Department said the meeting was intended to strengthen international co-operation, disrupt terrorist financing and improve protections for law enforcement and critical infrastructure.“Through violence and through terror, they once again seek to impose their ugliness on all of us,” Rubio said.
