More on the unusual alliance Issandr mentioned between leftists and Islamists in this month’s Commentary. It’s the “Hitler-Stalin pact of our times” says David Horowitz’s in his new book, “Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left.”
The fact that radical Islamists hold social and cultural values diametrically opposed to those of American leftists is not, Horowitz maintains, as big a problem for either party as it might appear. As in a previous era, when the hard Left dealt with Stalin’s widely acknowledged crimes by turning its attention to more attractive proxies of the cause like Vietnam and Cuba, today’s radicals tend to pay tribute not to al Qaeda but to groups like Hamas, whose extensive social-service network can be invoked to soften the horrors perpetrated by its terror cells.
I have a hard time taking anything that David Horowitz says seriously. The guy is an ideological fanatic and he uses FrontPage Magazine to carry out hits on any intellectualshe doesn’t like. This idea of a leftist-Islamist alliance has been making the rounds on a lot of right-wing sites like Instapundit and Andrew Sullivan. But I think generally they exagerate the depth of what is essentially a temporary commonality of interests on the two sides against the American neo-con and corporate-con movements. The enemy of my enemy can be my friend, but only to a certain extent. Let’s not forget that the American left has led the improvements of many civil rights that the Islamists would oppose.
Also, Bush has more in common on social issues like gay marriage with Islamists, and his hero Reagan’s administration pioneered the support of what would become the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. It’s facile to be alarmist about a sinister alliance when you’re only looking at the short term history.
The same has happened in Great Britain especially through the Stop the War Campaign and the Respect! election coalition. The Muslim Association of Britain has been very active in both groups, as has the Socialist Workers Party. And th latter have been met with lots of flak for this, especially from the anarchist thought police. Now first of all getting a Muslim association into a mainstream fold could perhaps be looked upon as a victory for integration rather than a sinister statlin-hitler pact. Anoother way to look at it is the left’s obsession with building united fronts etc. often with people that seem opposed to the left’s beliefs. However, this does not mean that there is no debate going on between muslims and leftists about the issues that they disagree over.