An unholy alliance to wage war on the war on terror
Douglas Davis, in Britain's The Spectator, on Marxists and fundamentalists burying their differences
POLITICS makes strange bedfellows. Stranger still when the odd couple are fundamentalist Islam and the secular Left. The evolving black-red alliance is growing in France, Germany and Belgium. But, based on the successful British model, it is now going global to declare war on the war on terror...
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 the surface...
The Left, a once-dwindling band of communists, Trotskyites, Maoists and Castroists, had been clinging to the dregs of a clapped-out cause; the Islamists could deliver numbers and passion, but they needed a vehicle to give them purchase on the political terrain. A tactical alliance became an operational imperative.
Indeed, the first to advocate the black-red alliance was none other than Ayman al-Zawahiri, deputy to Osama bin Laden and ideologue of al-Qai'da. 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 fighting extradition to the US 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."
