Robert Spencer Reviews Horowitz's "Unholy Alliance"

National Security & Defense
Exposing Leftists' Radical Islam Connection
by Robert Spencer
Posted Sep 29, 2004

http://www.humaneventsonline.com

I have long insisted that the problem of radical Islam is not a liberal or conservative issue; it's a human rights issue. The unfortunate fact, however, is that largely it is only conservatives who care about it. In the face of the global jihad, the left is strangely silent: no protest marches, no angry full-page ads in the New York Times. When the Left does notice an adulterous woman being stoned to death under Sharia law, or some other outrage in the Islamic world, it is usually dismissed as an aberration or somehow blamed on their all-purpose bogeyman: the United States government. Why? Because to the left any conflict in the world must be the result of Western aggression, either historic (the Crusades, colonialism) or current. And as David Horowitz illustrates in harrowing detail in his new book Unholy Alliance, the American left not only shares the radical jihadist view of America as the source of all evil in the world, but is now actively making common cause with America's enemies."The demise of the Cold War involving the USA and the Soviet Union at the beginning of the 1990s left military strategists in the West searching for a new enemy"--and they fastened on radical Islam. This was the assessment of Pakistani journalist Abdus Sattar Ghazali. But it isn't original to him. Horowitz shows that it has become a commonplace among Westerners as well. He quotes Columbia professor Eric Foner in the wake of 9/11: "I'm not sure which is more frightening: the horror that engulfed New York City or the apocalyptic rhetoric emanating daily from the White House."
The left, Horowitz recounts, quickly turned its attention entirely away from the murder and mayhem of 9/11 to half-baked "analyses" of the "real causes" of the atrocities of that day. This search for root causes, he says, "was a code for the utopian agendas of the left. It was a declaration of war against the War on Terror"--a war that is being waged with particular ferocity in the 2004 presidential campaign.This anti-anti-terrorism is motivated by an anti-Americanism that was born, as Horowitz details, in Communism and the Vietnam-era antiwar movement.

Although the revolutionary fact (the Soviet bloc) has been consigned to the dustbin of history, the revolutionary illusion persists, and continues to identify America as the chief obstacle to its utopia. Horowitz quotes another Columbia professor, Nicholas De Genova: "Peace is not patriotic [but] subversive. . . . Peace anticipates a very different world than the one in which we live -- a world where the U.S. would have no place." De Genova, of course, won nationwide notoriety when he declared just before the beginning of the Iraq war: "The only true heroes are those who find ways that help defeat the U.S. military. . . . I personally would like to see a million Mogadishus." Horowitz explains that "as long as America continues to maintain the will and ability to protect what radicals regard as the global order of 'social injustice,' all reforms and social advances within the existing structure of American democracy will be illusory."
In other words, it won't be enough for the left to elect John Kerry: America itself must be brought down. What's more, this creates a peculiar harmonic convergence between the left and radical Islam. "The goals of radical jihad," says Horowitz, "are purification and social justice, both of which are to be achieved through the institution of Islamic law in the states conquered by Islamic arms." Hence we see the phenomenon, which Horowitz traces in detail, of leftists like lawyer Lynne Stewart, who has been indicted for aiding and abetting the terrorist activities of her client, Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman. Rahman is currently doing time for his role in the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. For this Stewart has been stoutly defended by the ACLU, the American Bar Association, and other stalwarts of the left. "In their defense of America's terrorist enemies," Horowitz notes, "the organizations of the legal left are reminiscent of Communist Party fronts of the Cold War era."Ghazali was right about one thing: Communism and radical Islam are indeed quite similar in many ways. And as Horowitz outlines in this book, the American Left is once again showing what side it's on.

Mr. Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and the author of Onward Muslim Soldiers: How Jihad Still Threatens America and the West (Regnery Publishing -- a HUMAN EVENTS sister company) and Islam Unveiled: Disturbing Questions About the World's Fastest Growing Faith (Encounter Books).