“United in Hate” is an apt title for Douglas Davis’ new Spectator article about the “Black-Red Alliance” between Islamofascists and the extreme Left. The steering committee of Britian’s Stop the War Coalition draws its membership from groups ranging from the Communist Party through the Labour Party’s anti-Blair wing through the London Council of Mosques.
Points of potential disagreement between the hard Left and radical Islam — democracy, human rights, xenophobia, free-expression, feminism, homosexuality, abortion, among many others — would seem to pose insuperable barriers to the union. Not so. The hurdles have been neatly vaulted in the interest of mutual hatreds: America, Israel, globalisation, capitalism and imperialism. Anti-Semitism is never far from thesurface. . . .
Spark, the organ of Arthur Scargill’s Socialist Labourparty, . . . hailed Asif Mohammed Hanif, the British suicide-bomber who attacked a beachfront bar in Tel Aviv, as a ‘hero of the revolutionary youth’. Hanif, declared the paper, had carried out his mission ‘in the spirit ofinternationalism’. . . .
[T]he first to advocate the Black–Red alliance was none other than Ayman al-Zawahiri, deputy to Osama bin Laden and ideologue of al-Qa’eda. In a message delivered in August 2002, he called on sympathisers to seek allies among ‘any movement that opposes America, even atheists’. This sentiment was refined in London by Abu Hamza al-Masri, the hook-handed Islamist from Central Casting who is currently fighting extradition to the United States on terrorism charges. ‘We say to anyone who hates the Americans and wants to throw the Jews out of Palestine — Ahlan wa Sahlan (welcome). The Prophet teaches that we could ally ourselves even with the atheists if it helps us destroy [the] enemy.’
The secular leftists no doubt rest confident that they can use the Moslem zealots for their own ends, then discard them when those ends are attained – just the way that German rightists in 1933 assumed that they could control Adolf Hitler. It’s clear, though, who really holds the upper hand. The alliance advocates first and foremost the causes dear to Islamofascism. Where conflict between its views and the Left’s is unavoidable, it is the Left that gives way. Davis cites the lament of a left-wing dissenter:
One Trot describes SWP advocates of the Black–Red alliance as ‘demoralised Guardian readers with headscarves’, a withering allusion to the SWP organiser who ordered secular, socialist women to cover their heads while demonstrating with their Muslim sisters outside the Israeli embassy in London. And he is scathing of SWP monitors who enforced gender segregation to mollify Muslim sensibilities at a demonstration in Trafalgar Square. ‘Marxists are secular or they are not Marxists,’ said the Trot with principled purity.
His ideological comrades are not so pure. They have many temptations not to be. Moslem extremism is an “unexpected and deep hinterland from which to draw support”. Without it, the leftist elements of the Stop the War Coalition would be a “dwindling band of communists, Trotskyites, Maoists and
The implementation of the agenda of the London Council of Mosques, whose head once suggested that death was “perhaps too easy” for Salman Rushdie, would, it goes without saying, be disastrous for all that the Left professes to support. The democratic West is closer to it on every question of policy. The far Left will not align with the West, however, for it realizes that the “revolution” will never come through democratic processes. It looks forward to an Islamic uprising that will overthrow capitalism and then be ousted in turn by the “vanguard of the People”. An audacious strategy, but Lenin was audacious, too.
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