Since 9/11 it has become clear that much of the radical left in America supports radical Islam. This phenomenon seems so bizarre that it’s usually ignored. David Horowitz, who does not ignore such things, wrote a book about it in 2004 called Unholy Alliance. His thesis is that leftists hate America and its values such as freedom and personal responsibility, and radical Islam is the movement that is carrying this agenda right now. The destroy-America goal is more important to them than the facts (which should be highly disturbing to them) that radical Islamists oppress women and kill homosexuals.
In 2009 Jamie Glazov, the editor of Horowitz’s FrontPage Magazine, wrote United in Hate, which explores the same theme. The description on Amazon says:
United in Hate analyzes the Left’s contemporary romance with militant Islam as a continuation of the Left’s love affair with communist totalitarianism in the twentieth century. Just as the Left was drawn to the communist killing machines of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and Castro, so too it is now attracted to radical Islam.
Both the radical Left and radical Islam possess a profound hatred for Western culture, for a capitalist economic structure that recognizes individual achievement, and for the Judeo-Christian heritage of the United States. Both seek to establish a new world order: leftists in the form of a classless communist society, and Islamists in the form of a caliphate ruled by sharia law. To achieve these goals, both are willing to “wipe the slate clean” by means of limitless carnage, with the ultimate goal of erecting their utopia upon the ruins of the system they have destroyed.
So both authors attribute the seemingly unlikely alliance to a similar view of western civilization and a similar ruthlessness in achieving their goal of its destruction. (That’s from the descriptions and excerpts and reviews I’ve read; I haven’t read either book in its entirety.)
Today I read a post by Jim Simpson called Radical Islam and America’s Future at the Washington Examiner, which brings up another possibility: Radical Islam is backed by Russia in a continued campaign of aggression against the west. He begins:
Political Islam, i.e. radical Islam, is actually a cutout for continued communist aggession against the West. This is perhaps the most justifiable explanation for the resurgence of radical Islam in recent years, though it receives scant recognition.
We knew this to be true back in the 1970s and 1980s, when the communist-inspired PLO began its operations against Israel. We knew that Hezbollah and the other Muslim terrorist organizations got their training, weapons and support from Syria – a Ba’athist (Stalinist Arab Communist Party) country. We knew by extension that Syria, like all Soviet client states, was acting on behalf of the Soviet Union.
But after the Soviet Union “fell” in the 1990s, suddenly we were confronted with “Muslim” terrorism. Still the same actors, still the same support networks, still the same tactics, yet now it was supposedly a dire new threat.
He points out what Horowitz and Glazov have noted: that jihadists like Osama bin Laden use the same rhetoric that communists and other radical leftists have used to justify their actions. And then there is this startling claim:
Meanwhile, strong evidence has surfaced that al Qaeda is stage-managed by the KGB. This was the assertion of former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko – poisoned in 2006 with radioactive polonium-210 by Putin’s KGB assassins. Litvinenko asserted, among other things, that al Qaeda number two, Ayman Al-Zawahiri is in fact a KGB agent. And it is he, not Bin-Laden, who many believe calls the shots. Other Russian dissidents support this claim.
The links throughout Jim’s post are many and worth reading. And here’s my thought about the connection with refugees and other immigrants:
During the Cold War, there were two fronts to the war at home. One was the ongoing attempt to steal of military and other secrets. Spies like the Rosenbergs (and many others) were recruited and obtained valuable information for the Soviet Union.
The other was the campaign to influence American society from within. This was a long-term project aimed at discrediting American values and ideals, religion, western civilization in general, and our free-market economic system. Early on, both the American government and the American people were aware of the threats and supportive of attempts to fight them. But over the years, the left was pretty successful at discrediting anti-Communism, and with it many other things about our society. It became highly unfashionable among the elites to be anti-Communist — a sign of being an uneducated hayseed. Ideas that had been considered un-American in the past became acceptable and even commonplace as the left spread its influence throughout the universities, the media, the government, and most other institutions.
Fast-forward to the war with radical Islam. Almost all Americans were horrified at the 9/11 attacks. But the left soon asserted its primacy over the culture. Anti-war activity became common on campuses. George W. Bush was demonized so that large parts of the population detested him with a passion not seen since Richard Nixon’s presidency (though Ronald Reagan came close) — and the war on terror became discredited among those people. “Islamophobia” was invented as a new victim category, so it became difficult for those in government and the elites even to identify our enemy.
And — in a campaign that has not been recognized often enough as part of the leftist anti-American enterprise — there has been an intensive effort to demonize Israel as a pariah, Nazi-like nation — automatically creating sympathy for its enemies, the Muslims who have been trying to destroy it since its inception 60 years ago, and even long before it was a state. Israel is our major ally with the most extensive and successful experience in dealing with terrorism by Muslims. In trying to drive a wedge between the U.S. and Israel, the left is attempting to block our cooperation in the war against our common enemy. As Jim Simpson points out, Hezbollah, Hamas, the PLO, and the Ba’athist parties of Syria and Iraq all had connections to the Soviets.
It’s all classic communist strategy. Only unlike the situation during most of the Cold War, the enemy doesn’t have to do very much spying. The government is full of people eager to leak secrets to the New York Times, which is eager to publish them. Elite law firms scramble to defend Guantanamo Bay prisoners who openly state their intentions of destroying America. President Obama gives our enemies legal rights previously reserved for common criminals, and ones who are American citizens at that.
But the culture — what to do about that? Most Americans are repulsed by the Sharia practices of strict Islam — the second-class status of women, the brutal punishments, the total intolerance of others’ beliefs, the polygamy, and so on. Even the leftist allies of radical Islam are not going to defend these things — in fact, if they lived under Sharia law they’d all have been executed long ago.
Enter Muslim immigrants. Even better, Muslim refugees, who tend to be less likely to want to assimilate. They bring customs and religious mandates that are not just alien, but are directly opposite to American traditions. And as Ann has pointed out many times, instead of coming in family by family, and being helped to adjust to American life by churches and individual families, they now come in groups, sometimes in massive groups. There are few or no mechanisms to help them adjust to our ways.
So we see things like Somali workers demanding changes in the schedules and rules at meat packing plants, a change which American workers are supposed to adjust to. We see Somali cabdrivers refusing to carry alcohol. We see polygamous marriages discovered, and covered up by social workers. We see women in headscarves and sometimes even burkas in our cities — and demands by some that their faces should remain covered in their drivers’ license photos. We see large financial institutions complying with Sharia law in order to make loans to Muslims. Just look up “sharia” on this blog’s search function and you’ll see much more. Robert Spencer covered this phenomenon in his book, Stealth Jihad: How Radical Islam Is Subverting America without Guns or Bombs.
This stealth jihad is not exactly comparable to the infiltration of communist ideas, because there is no way to make Sharia law seem consonant with our existing ideas and institutions, the way the left introduced their ideas. But we can become accustomed to living alongside people who practice customs that are now abhorrent to us. In this way we are weakened from the inside.
Thanks to Jim Simpson, I’m now wondering whether this process is part of ongoing Russian subversion. Or whether our own homegrown left is so immersed in the same thought processes as our enemies that they just carry out their agenda all by themselves. Either way, it’s obvious that bringing large groups of Muslim refugees here is not in the interests of America — but it is in the interests of the radicals who would like to see America as we know it destroyed.