Allied Menace
Islamists, Marxists, and the radical Left make common cause
DANIEL PIPES
‘Here are two brother countries, united like a single fist,” said socialist Hugo Chávez during a visit to Tehran last November, celebrating his alliance with Islamist Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Che Guevara’s son Camilo, who also visited Tehran last year, declared that his father would have “supported the country in its current struggle against the United States.” They followed in the footsteps of Fidel Castro, who in a 2001 visit told his hosts that “Iran and Cuba, in cooperation with each other, can bring America to its knees.” Ilich Ramírez Sánchez (“Carlos the Jackal”), for his part, wrote in his book L’islam révolutionnaire (“Revolutionary Islam”) that “only a coalition of Marxists and Islamists can destroy the United States.”
It’s not just Latin American leftists who see potential in Islamism. Ken Livingstone, the Trotskyite mayor of London, literally hugged prominent Islamist thinker Yusuf al-Qaradawi. Ramsey Clark, the former U.S. attorney general, visited Ayatollah Khomeini and offered his support. Noam Chomsky, the MIT professor, visited Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and endorsed Hezbollah’s keeping its arms. Ella Vogelaar, the Dutch minister for housing, neighborhoods, and integration, is so sympathetic to Islamism that one critic, the Iranian-born professor Afshin Ellian, has called her “the minister of Islamization.”
Dennis Kucinich, during his first presidential campaign in 2004, quoted the Koran and roused a Muslim audience to chant Allahu akbar (“God is great”), and he even announced, “I keep a copy of the Koran in my office.” Spark, youth paper of Britain’s Socialist Labour party, praised Asif Mohammed Hanif, the British suicide bomber who attacked a Tel Aviv bar, as a “hero of the revolutionary youth” who had carried out his mission “in the spirit of internationalism.” Workers World, an American Communist newspaper, ran an obituary lauding Hezbollah’s master terrorist, Imad Mughniyeh.
Some leftists go farther. Several — Carlos the Jackal, Roger Garaudy, Jacques Vergès, Yvonne Ridley, and H. Rap Brown — have actually converted to Islam. Others respond with exhilaration to the violence and brutality of Islamism. German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen termed 9/11 “the greatest work of art for the whole cosmos,” while the late American novelist Norman Mailer called its perpetrators “brilliant.”
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Why, then, the formation of what David Horowitz calls the Left-Islamist “unholy alliance”? For four main reasons.
First, as British politician George Galloway explains, “the progressive movement around the world and the Muslims have the same enemies,” namely Western civilization in general and the United States, Great Britain, and Israel in particular, plus Jews, believing Christians, and international capitalists. ........
Second, the two sides share some political goals. A mammoth 2003 joint demonstration in London to oppose war against Saddam Hussein symbolically forged their alliance. Both sides want coalition forces to lose in Iraq, the War on Terror to be closed down, anti-Americanism to spread, and the elimination of Israel. They agree on mass immigration to and multiculturalism in the West. They cooperate on these goals at meetings such as the annual Cairo Anti-War Conference, which brings them together to forge “an international alliance against imperialism and Zionism.”
Third, Islamism has historic and philosophic ties to Marxism-Leninism. Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian Islamist thinker, accepted the Marxist notion of stages of history, only adding an Islamic postscript to them; he predicted that an eternal Islamic era would come after the collapse of capitalism and Communism. Ali Shariati, the key intellectual behind the Iranian revolution of 1978–79, translated Franz Fanon, Che Guevara, and Jean-Paul Sartre into Persian. More broadly, the Iranian analyst Azar Nafisi observes that Islamism “takes its language, goals, and aspirations as much from the crassest forms of Marxism as it does from religion. Its leaders are as influenced by Lenin, Sartre, Stalin, and Fanon as they are by the Prophet.” ........
Fourth, power: Islamists and leftists can achieve more together than they can separately. In Great Britain, they jointly formed the Stop the War Coalition, whose steering committee includes representation from such organizations as the British Communist party and the Muslim Association of Britain. Britain’s Respect party amalgamates radical international socialism with Islamist ideology. The two sides joined forces for the March 2008 European Parliament elections to offer common lists of candidates in France and Britain, disguised under party names that revealed little.
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