The naked and the left

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UNHOLY ALLIANCE:RADICAL ISLAM AND THE AMERICAN LEFT

By David Horowitz, Regnery, $27.95, 256 pages

"If the United States did not exist, the Communist empire would still be standing, the Taliban would rule Afghanistan, Saddam Hussein would be in power, and the world would be a place of infinitely greater cruelty, injustice, and tragedy than the world that confronts us today."

Such is the concluding sentence of David Horowitz's fiery manifesto, which every American ought to read at a time when large elite sectors in the democratic world have turned against the United States. Such hatred was never evidenced against the Soviet or Chinese dictatorships or, for that matter, against Saddam Hussein. It is safe to say that, given a choice, these radical egalitarians would have preferred a return to the bloody days of Saddam and the incumbency of the Taliban and Osama bin Laden to a Bush re-election victory.

The madness that has seized many elite opinion-makers is, says Mr. Horowitz, based on three assumptions: "(1) America can do no right; (2) even the rights America appears to do are wrong; (3) these wrongs are monstrous." These "articles of faith" are part of Norman Mailer's ideological baggage and shared by the editors of New York Review of Books, writes the author.

When Iraqi mass graves were uncovered, it proved that Saddam was responsible for the mega-deaths of his own people. Wasn't it then a good thing to have rid the world of such a monster, asks Mr. Horowitz? No it was not, according to Mr. Mailer himself, because the United States was responsible for this slaughter. How's that again? Because the United States encouraged "uprisings" against Saddam which led to the slaughter. Proof? There isn't any. For anti-American propagandists like Mr. Mailer, the mere accusation legitimizes the indictment.

The downfall of the Soviet Union and the global repudiation of communist ideology has spurred what Mr. Horowitz calls a "Neo-Communist Left" alliance with "Arab fascists and Islamic fanatics." The alliance seems incomprehensible, says Mr. Horowitz, because Islamist movements embody values, e.g., attitudes toward women, which are antithetic to Western leftist progressivism. The differences between the two movements are not insurmountable, says Mr. Horowitz: "Radicalism is a cause whose utopian agendas result in any ethic where the ends outweigh and ultimately justify any means."

A confluence of events contributed to the alliance between American and Islamist radicals: Iran's 1979 Islamist revolution, creation of an Islamist jihad in Afghanistan following the Soviet invasion in 1979 and the transformation of the Palestinian struggle against Israel into a full-fledged Islamic holy war, accompanied by suicide bombings. Swirling above this ideological alliance, is the so-called social justice movement, says Mr. Horowitz, "the anticapitalist nihilism that had inspired radicals since the collapse of the Soviet experiment."

But there is another ally of Islamist radicalism, says the author: Democratic Party leaders. On April 10, 2003, the day after American forces liberated Baghdad, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi told a press conference: "I have absolutely no regret about my vote [against] this war." The Democratic Party got its answer Nov. 2. Clearly American voters did not approve of even a hint of an alliance between radical Islam and the Democratic Party left. If anybody should, Mrs. Pelosi ought to make reading Mr. Horowitz a must, at the latest, before the next election.