469)Another Off-Topic Gem; An Unholy Alliance That Could Lead To Nuclear Armageddon: The Left Romances The Jihad, By Clifford D. May and Jamie Glazov.

Clifford D. May: The left romances the jihad

By CLIFFORD D. MAY
Saturday, Apr. 18, 2009

Ask those on the left what values they champion, and they will say equality, tolerance, women's rights, gay rights, workers rights and human rights. Militant Islamists oppose all that, not infrequently through the application of lethal force. So how does one explain the burgeoning left-Islamist alliance?

I know: There are principled individuals on the left who do not condone terrorism or minimize the Islamist threat. Author Paul Berman, a man of the left, has been more incisive on these issues than just about anyone else. Left-of-center publications, such as The New Republic, have not been apologists for jihadism.

But it is no exaggeration to call The Nation magazine and such groups as MoveOn.org pro-appeasement. Further left on the political spectrum, the A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition sympathizes with Islamists as well as with the Stalinist regime in North Korea -- which is in league with Islamist Iran and its client state, Syria. Meanwhile, Hugo Chavez, the Bolivian socialist Venezuelan strongman, is developing a strategic alliance with Iran's ruling mullahs and with Hezbollah, Iran's terrorist proxy.

In a new book, "United in Hate: The Left's Romance with Tyranny and Terror," Jamie Glazov takes a hard look at this unholy alliance. Glazov's book indicts left artists and intellectuals for having "venerated mass murderers such as Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, Castro, and Ho Chi Minh, habitually excusing their atrocities while blaming Americans and even the victims for their crimes."

Following the fall of the Berlin Wall, the left spent several years wandering in the wilderness. More than a few, Glazov suggests, looked upon the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, less as an atrocity than as an opportunity to revive a moribund revolutionary movement.

He notes that novelist Norman Mailer called the 9/11 hijackers "brilliant," their terrorism "understandable" because "everything wrong with America led to the point where the country built that tower of Babel, which consequently had to be destroyed."

German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen called 9/11 "the greatest work of art for the whole cosmos."

And then there is Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, aka Carlos the Jackal, who in 2003, from his prison cell, published a book called "Revolutionary Islam," which urged "all revolutionaries, including those of the left, even atheists," to accept the leadership of militant jihadists, Osama bin Laden key among them. His reasoning: "Only a coalition of Marxists and Islamists can destroy the United States."

Glazov quotes British lawmaker George Galloway, elaborating on the rationale for this coalition. "Not only do I think (a Muslim-leftist alliance is) possible, but I think it is vitally necessary, and I think it is happening already," Galloway said. "It is possible because the progressive movement around the world and the Muslims have the same enemies. Their enemies are the Zionist occupation, American occupation, British occupation of poor countries, mainly Muslim countries."

There also is an older tradition to build on. In the 1970s, the Red Army Faction -- West German Marxist terrorists also known as the Baader-Meinhof gang -- went to Jordan to train with the Palestine Liberation Organization. And in 1979, the success of the Islamist Revolution in Iran depended, in large measure, on the support given by the Iranian left to the Ayatollah Khomeini. Once firmly in power, the clerical regime repaid its leftist enablers with executions, assassinations and prison sentences. Evidently, no lessons were learned.

Glazov concludes that the left's "romance with Islamism is just a logical continuation of the long leftist tradition of worshipping America's foes. ... The left clearly continues to be inspired by its undying Marxist conviction that capitalism is evil and that forces of revolution are rising to overthrow it -- and must be supported."

If such values as equality, tolerance and human rights are crushed in the process, that's a price many on the left are willing to pay. Those on the left who disagree should perhaps speak up more loudly and more often.

Clifford D. May is president of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a policy institute focusing on terrorism. His e-mail is cliff@defenddemocracy.org.

http://www.unionleader.com/article.aspx?headline=Clifford+D.+May%3A+The+left+romances+the+jihad&articleId=83cc1feb-31ee-4ca4-8aa2-131020b37fba

http://www.defenddemocracy.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=11785228&Itemid=105

Related:
http://www.torontosun.com/comment/columnists/salim_mansur/2009/04/18/9153766-sun.html

http://www.torontosun.com/comment/columnists/salim_mansur/2009/04/25/9240706-sun.html

http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2009/01/436darth-vader-gets-tripped-up-by.html


Islamism and Democracy by Joshua Muravchik
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/07/383an-interesting-off-topic-diversion.html



Easy Nash

If there are 23,000 jihadist websites and blogsites out there in cyberspace, there is no reason why we should not create 100,000 non-jihadist websites and blogsites: Easy Nash(2007)