[FREE IRAN Project] In The Spirit Of Cyrus The Great

[stefania]

The Left and the Islamists

December 14, 2004
Commentary
Joshua Kurlantzick
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article.asp?aid=11805036_1



The Manhattan attorney Lynne Stewart has been wedded to activist causes since the 1960’s, defending a long train of leftists who have had run-ins with the law. A grandmotherly woman with a wide, jowly pink face and graying hair in a bowl cut, she has represented antiwar demonstrators, aging yippies, and Black Panthers. In one well known display of her skills, she convinced a jury in the late 1980’s that Larry Davis, a drug dealer who had wounded six policemen in a shootout, was himself the victim of corruption and racism, and won his acquittal.

When Stewart arrived at a federal prison hospital in Minnesota in May 2000, however, she met a client from a very different milieu. In the visiting room, Stewart sat down across from Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, the infamous blind Egyptian cleric imprisoned for life in 1995 for inciting the 1993 World Trade Center attack and plotting to blow up the FBI’s office in Manhattan as well as the United Nations and the Holland and Lincoln tunnels.

Though roughly the same age as Stewart, Abdel Rahman seems to have missed out on many of the famously tolerant ideals associated with her generation of activists. He has called for the slaughter of Jews, and for women to have little public role in society. Yet, with Sheik Omar, Stewart allegedly took a step beyond mere legal advice. Videotapes reportedly show that Stewart loudly spoke nonsense words while her client, under the din, instructed a man traveling with Stewart and posing as a translator to execute a new terrorist plot. For this, Stewart has been charged with providing material support for terrorism, since the dangerous sheik is forbidden from contacting his followers.

At Stewart’s trial this fall, an FBI agent told the court that Sheik Omar later issued a proclamation, found in Stewart’s office, announcing that “Any statement that comes from her . . . should be taken as if I said it.” Also at the trial, an Egyptian reporter for Reuters testified that, at roughly the same time as this proclamation, he had received a call from Stewart relaying a message from Omar to his followers that they should break their cease-fire with another Islamist group.

Revelations of her complicity with known terrorists left Stewart nonplussed. “We hit if off,” she gushed to the Washington Post about her interactions with the sheik. “He’s really an incredible person.”

The seemingly improbable partnership that has emerged in recent years between figures like Lynne Stewart and Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman is the subject of David Horowitz’s new book, Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left.* According to Horowitz, links that began to form between Islamists and American leftists at the end of the cold war have been cemented by 9/11 and the Iraq war. Calling this alliance the “Hitler-Stalin pact of our times,” he warns of its potential impact, especially in undermining the war on terror.

Horowitz, the founder of the online magazine FrontPage and a former radical leftist, is at his best in documenting the intellectual connections between these strange bedfellows. He shows, for instance, how the anti-American pronouncements of Noam Chomsky have become increasingly indistinguishable from those of the fire-breathing clerics who appear on Arab satellite TV stations. Horowitz dredges up reams of similarly incendiary quotations from a range of American and Arab radicals. At the organizational level, he documents occasions on which leftist Western lawyers like Stewart have defended Muslim groups accused of abetting terrorism, and he points to the participation of militant Muslims in some of the most publicized antiwar rallies.

Horowitz also provides useful historical context for this unlikely romance. Over the past century, he argues, the radical Left in Europe and the U.S. has come to define itself as a “movement against, rather than a movement for.” Primarily, of course, its target has been the United States, no matter what the United States has stood for. For Horowitz, the historical roots of today’s “red-green” alliance (green being the color of Islam) are to be found in the American Left’s long-standing obsession with the treatment of blacks and Native Americans and especially in its loudly proclaimed solidarity over the years with Fidel Castro, the North Vietnamese, and Communist rebels in El Salvador and Nicaragua. When the U.S. declared war on terror, it was time, once again, for the Left to lionize whomever America opposed.

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. (Interestingly, though, few if any of today’s leftists have decamped for Teheran or Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, as some once did for the workers’ “paradises” of Cuba and North Vietnam.)

For their part, the prophets of radical Islam have not only borrowed from the Left in recent decades—citing Bernard Lewis, Horowitz notes that anti-Americanism seems to form the one exception to their categorical hatred of Western ideas—they have learned to appeal to leftist sympathies. The Arab media now constantly condemn the U.S. for victimizing the third world and supporting tyrants. Many Islamists have even mastered the rhetoric of class struggle and anti-colonial resistance. As Horowitz observes, the Ayatollah Khomeini sought to portray his revolution in Iran as a movement of the oppressed, thus gaining the support of elements of the global political Left.

Horowitz’s Unholy Alliance is among the first serious examinations of this troubling and relatively new relationship, and for that he certainly deserves credit. But there is a good deal more to be said about the origins of this ideological convergence and the concrete ways in which it has already found expression.

Useful as it is to be reminded of the long history of the radical Left’s shifting allegiances, Horowitz scants what is decidedly new in the developments he describes. A decade ago, a red-green alliance would have seemed astounding. On campuses in Europe and America, women’s groups usually avoided Islamist organizations, which often held highly misogynistic beliefs. The primary concerns of hard-leftist groups tended to be local issues, like labor rights and poverty. Few had ties to any Muslim organizations.

One powerful catalyst that changed all this was the birth of the anti-globalization movement. The real and imagined evils of globalization have breathed new life into the international Left, especially among the young. The social dislocation brought about by trade, outsourcing, and economic integration has proved to be a potent issue. But radicals have not rested content with protesting the policies they dislike. They have also sought villains, and they have found familiar ones: America and the Jews.

As Mark Strauss of the Carnegie Endowment has argued in “Antiglobalism’s Jewish Problem” (Foreign Policy, December 2003), this is no accident. Despite the youth of many anti-globalization activists, they have drawn upon and updated venerable tropes of traditional anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism. The Rockefellers and Rothschilds have disappeared as international bogeymen, only to be replaced by theories of Jewish and American intrigue at the World Trade Organization and other supranational economic agencies. In the demonology of the Left, the top-hatted banker in striped pants has given way to the greedy, globe-trotting American consultant and the conspiring Zionist warmonger.

That such images should have found a ready audience in the Muslim world is no surprise. But their dissemination depended on yet another recent development: the Internet. Before the advent of today’s computer technology, the hard Left in Europe and the U.S. would have had no idea how to seek out Islamist sympathizers. A generation ago, it would have been necessary for the two groups to occupy the same physical space—an unlikely prospect, given that traditional Muslims living in Arab-French suburbs, for example, rarely mingle with the college students who frequent Left Bank cafes. The Internet has opened a door between these disparate environments. Since the 1990’s, Europe and America have seen a dramatic increase in the number of homepages on the Web created by both radical Muslims and anti-globalization activists. Creating links among these groups has become, literally, a matter of pushing the right buttons.

Horowitz provides few details about the actual political and financial connections, as opposed to the ideological affinities, between Islamists and radical leftists in the U.S. More disappointingly, he does not turn his attention to Europe, where such connections abound, thanks to the large and growing presence of Muslim immigrants and the interest groups that cater to them.

In early 2003, several British left-wing parties—Marxists, socialists, Labor radicals—came together with Islamist groups, including the local branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, to create a joint steering committee. Its co-chairmen (to give something of its flavor) were Andrew Murray of the British Communist party and Muhammad Asalm Ijaz of the London Council of Mosques. On the Continent, at roughly the same time, similar alliances were cemented between Islamist organizations and leftist parties like France’s Trotskyist Workers’ Struggle.

These links were quickly put to use. Throughout 2003 and 2004, Islamists and anti-globalization activists in Europe have held a number of joint protests, marches, and conferences. A February 2003 demonstration in London, co-sponsored by the Muslim Association of Britain and the Stop the War Coalition, drew some one million people. In France, several anti-globalization groups helped to lead marches protesting the government’s order that headscarves could not be worn in public schools. At all of these rallies, Islamist and anti-Semitic ideas have become commonplace (a precedent set, as Horowitz correctly notes, by the notorious UN World Conference against Racism held in South Africa in 2001). Islamists and anti-globalization activists have other pan-European activities planned for 2005.

Still more worrisome is the fact that the leftist-Islamist partnership has been able to convert its cooperation into votes. In 2004 elections for local offices throughout Europe and for seats in the European Parliament, Islamic groups either worked together with leftists on joint lists or helped promote Left candidates in Belgium, Great Britain, and France, where the hard Left won 5 percent of the vote, a substantial figure for any small group. The electoral advantages of this united front can only grow as immigration and high birthrates add to Europe’s already sizable Muslim population.

In their outreach to Muslim radicals, hard-Left groups in the U.S. lag only slightly behind their European peers. Horowitz singles out one of the best-known of these organizations, International ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism), a New York-based group founded by former U.S. attorney general and long-time radical agitator Ramsey Clark (who has also represented the blind sheik). ANSWER, Horowitz shows, traffics in precisely the same kind of anti-American and anti-Semitic vitriol as the most hateful Islamists.

In fact, ANSWER’s transgressions extend well beyond the dangerous rhetoric cited by Horowitz. In December 2003, the group helped to convene the second annual Cairo Conference, an anti-U.S. hate fest attended by a variety of Islamists, including Osama Hamdan, a top leader of Hamas. ANSWER has also given a seat on its steering committee to the Muslim Students Association (MSA). This American group presents itself as a benign advocate for Muslim college students. But as Jonathan Dowd-Gailey has recently documented in the Middle East Quarterly, the MSA has funneled money to the Holy Land Foundation and other charities accused of funding Hamas and Hizballah. MSA leaders have called for the death of all Jews and have spread pro-Taliban propaganda. The group advises its members that their “long-term goal” should be “to Islamicize the politics of their respective universities.”

Indeed, for radicals in the U.S. and Europe, any taboo that may once have kept them from openly collaborating with known Islamic terrorists has largely disappeared. As Lynne Stewart’s trial was proceeding in Manhattan in September, an “international strategy meeting” was being held in Beirut under the title, “Where Next for the Global Anti-War and Anti-Globalization Movements?” Among the hundreds of groups in attendance, from over fifty nations, were such pillars of the anti-globalization hard Left as Focus on the Global South, a think tank devoted to issues of international trade; ATTAC, a socialist network with branches across Europe and Latin America and links to European political parties; and CorpWatch, an American group that monitors corporate influence on politics.

And who was on hand as a conference host to welcome the delegates to Beirut—to make sure hotel rooms were acceptable, meals met everyone’s tastes, and delegates could call their loved ones back home? None other than the Shiite terrorist group Hizballah, along with local Islamists and secular leftists. Though the conference did include radical advocates for the rights of women and other minorities, attendees seemed to have no problem taking directions from a group whose clerical overlords believe in a version of Islam that sentences homosexuals and adulterers to death by stoning.

Immediately after this conference adjourned, another left-wing group, this one of a religious cast, descended on Lebanon. A delegation of the American Presbyterian Church met with Hizballah officials in Beirut and praised the terrorist organization. As one of its members helpfully explained on Hizballah television, “Relations and conversations with Islamic leaders are a lot easier than dealings and dialogue with Jewish leaders.”

The partnership between Islamists and the international Left poses its most immediate threat to Jews. As Horowitz rightly worries, the anti-Semitic propaganda spread by the red-green alliance stokes violence against Jewish communities and makes Israel an ever more vilified object of rage. Ultimately, too, Islamists may turn some part of the anti-globalization movement toward violence, just as groups in the 1960’s like the Weather Underground took up guns and bombs as they became more radical. Indeed, many older members of the hard Left have never forsworn such tools. As Lynne Stewart told the New York Times (in an interview cited by Horowitz), there is nothing wrong with using “directed violence” against “the institutions which perpetuate capitalism.”

In the longer term, the ideas propagated by the hard Left-Islamist alliance could also seep into the wider political culture, poisoning the mainstream Left and otherwise sane liberals. Praise for suicide bombers, Horowitz notes, can already be heard at times from members of Europe’s socialist establishment. In France, Belgium, Great Britain, and other European states, some parties of the moderate Left have tried to co-opt Muslim groups while sidestepping their extreme rhetoric, hoping thereby to bolster the parties’ own credibility with dissatisfied radical voters. The French Communists, traditionally one of the larger and more mainstream leftist parties, have been leaders in this regard.

On the American side, too, pressure seems to be building for Washington to engage Islamic extremists more directly, in an effort to blunt some of their sting. According to a recent report in the Washington Post, American diplomats around the world have begun to make contacts with the Muslim Brotherhood despite serious concerns about the organization, which has fomented revolution across the Middle East and “is dedicated,” in the Post’s words, “to creating an Islamic civilization that harks back to the caliphates of the 7th and 8th centuries.” Edward P. Djerejian, a former top State Department official, insists that the U.S. must “know where they [Islamists] are coming from, to influence them.” To demonize the Muslim Brotherhood, warns a former CIA official, “would be foolhardy to the extreme.” As if to confirm this new strategy, the government-funded National Democratic Institute recently hosted a delegation from a Yemeni party linked to the Muslim Brotherhood at the Democratic National Convention in Boston.

As we and our allies try to develop more sophisticated political and diplomatic strategies for dealing with the Muslim world, the temptation will be great to reach out to those Islamist groups that express some willingness to work with us. Signs of apparent reasonableness are difficult to resist, especially for well-meaning internationalist bureaucrats. In its item on the Muslim Brotherhood, the Washington Post reported that some State Department officials believe the group could be persuaded to temper its anti-U.S. stance and even to battle the jihadists.

Such hopes defy reality. They also ignore the long history of Islamist groups in Sudan, Iran, Afghanistan, and elsewhere that have worn a moderate face in their formative years but, once in power, have moved quickly to implement shari’a law, eliminate all opposition, and give aid to terrorists. As Islamists become more visible participants in the politics of the Western democracies, and as their new friends on the hard Left strive to obliterate or gloss over their record of mendacity and violence, the rest of us cannot afford to turn a blind eye to who they are and what they stand for.

JOSHUA KURLANTZICK is the foreign editor of the New Republic.
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