red and black (redux)

[Earlier posts on this subject are here and here.]

Last fall, 60s radical turned neocon David Horowitz published Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left. One of the better reviews of the book was by Joshua Kurlantzick, in the December 2004 Commentary. Although said review is now behind Commentary's rather strict archive firewall, I was able to track it down via LexisNexis.

Kurlantzick's piece is worth quoting at some length. But despite extensive excerpts, I'm up to more in this post than copy-and-pasting. Do stick around for the punchline: this is one of those cases where I fervently hope that I am wrong, but fear that I am not.

Over the past century, [Horowitz] argues, the radical Left in Europe and the U.S. has come to define itself as a “movement against, rather than a movement for.” Primarily, of course, its target has been the United States, no matter what the United States has stood for. For Horowitz, the historical roots of today's “red-green” alliance (green being the color of Islam) are to be found in the American Left's long-standing obsession with the treatment of blacks and Native Americans and especially in its loudly proclaimed solidarity over the years with Fidel Castro, the North Vietnamese, and Communist rebels in El Salvador and Nicaragua. When the U.S. declared war on terror, it was time, once again, for the Left to lionize whomever America opposed.

The fact that radical Islamists hold social and cultural values diametrically opposed to those of American leftists is not, Horowitz maintains, as big a problem for either party as it might appear. As in a previous era, when the hard Left dealt with Stalin's widely acknowledged crimes by turning its attention to more attractive proxies of the cause like Vietnam and Cuba, today's radicals tend to pay tribute not to al Qaeda but to groups like Hamas, whose extensive social-service network can be invoked to soften the horrors perpetrated by its terror cells. (Interestingly, though, few if any of today's leftists have decamped for Teheran or Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, as some once did for the workers' “paradises” of Cuba and North Vietnam.)

For their part, the prophets of radical Islam have not only borrowed from the Left in recent decades—citing Bernard Lewis, Horowitz notes that anti-Americanism seems to form the one exception to their categorical hatred of Western ideas—they have learned to appeal to leftist sympathies. The Arab media now constantly condemn the U.S. for victimizing the third world and supporting tyrants. Many Islamists have even mastered the rhetoric of class struggle and anti-colonial resistance. As Horowitz observes, the Ayatollah Khomeini sought to portray his revolution in Iran as a movement of the oppressed, thus gaining the support of elements of the global political Left.

What Horowitz and Kurlantzick call the “red-green alliance” others—such as Amir Taheri—label the red and black alliance, as Red-Green already has a customary meaning in European politics. Semantics aside, however, it is worth asking just how the United States became the bête noire of the domestic and international Left. Two years ago Lee Harris addressed this question in a masterful Policy Review piece, The Intellectual Origins Of America-Bashing—a must-read, albeit beyond the scope of this present post.

Kurlantzick's review also addresses subjects neglected by Horowitz.

Horowitz provides few details about the actual political and financial connections, as opposed to the ideological affinities, between Islamists and radical leftists in the U.S. More disappointingly, he does not turn his attention to Europe, where such connections abound, thanks to the large and growing presence of Muslim immigrants and the interest groups that cater to them.

In early 2003, several British left-wing parties—Marxists, socialists, Labor radicals—came together with Islamist groups, including the local branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, to create a joint steering committee. Its co-chairmen (to give something of its flavor) were Andrew Murray of the British Communist party and Muhammad Asalm Ijaz of the London Council of Mosques. On the Continent, at roughly the same time, similar alliances were cemented between Islamist organizations and leftist parties like France's Trotskyist Workers' Struggle.

These links were quickly put to use. Throughout 2003 and 2004, Islamists and anti-globalization activists in Europe have held a number of joint protests, marches, and conferences. A February 2003 demonstration in London, co-sponsored by the Muslim Association of Britain and the Stop the War Coalition, drew some one million people. In France, several anti-globalization groups helped to lead marches protesting the government's order that headscarves could not be worn in public schools. At all of these rallies, Islamist and anti-Semitic ideas have become commonplace (a precedent set, as Horowitz correctly notes, by the notorious UN World Conference against Racism held in South Africa in 2001). Islamists and anti-globalization activists have other pan-European activities planned for 2005.

Still more worrisome is the fact that the leftist-Islamist partnership has been able to convert its cooperation into votes. In 2004 elections for local offices throughout Europe and for seats in the European Parliament, Islamic groups either worked together with leftists on joint lists or helped promote Left candidates in Belgium, Great Britain, and France, where the hard Left won 5 percent of the vote, a substantial figure for any small group. The electoral advantages of this united front can only grow as immigration and high birthrates add to Europe's already sizable Muslim population.

But perhaps nowhere in Europe has the red-black alignment evolved further than it has in Italy. A year before the publication of Horowitz's book, his FrontPage Magazine published a piece by Lorenzo Vidino: Italy's Fifth Column.

In early September [2003], the beautiful town of Assisi—birthplace of Saint Francis—served as a venue for the Anti-imperialist Camp, a one-week meeting organized by militants from Italy's extreme Left. United under the banner of anti-Americanism and “anti-imperialism,” an odd mix of neo-fascists, anti-globalization advocates, radical Islamists and hard-core leftists (the type who still worship the effigies of Lenin and Mao) gathered to proclaim their support for the Iraqi “resistance.” But the organizers of the Camp decided not to limit their support to sympathetic statements. They also collected funds, using a poster bearing the slogan, “10 Euros for the Resistance, Free Iraq,” and the picture of a Palestinian child lobbing a Molotov cocktail as a means of soliciting donations. (One wonders what a Palestinian child has to do with the Iraqi resistance.) Given the success of the initiative, Iraqlibero decided to continue its fundraising efforts on its website, where it provides a bank account (courtesy of demon capitalism) and a toll-free number. […]

This unusual hodgepodge of Italian militants provide material support to an organization that is fighting against allied (that is, Italian) troops. Unlike charities whose assets have already been frozen for supporting terrorism, Iraqlibero does not even make an attempt to disguise the real destination of its fundraising efforts, and openly admits that it is collecting money for violent activities directed toward killing its fellow countrymen.

Fast forward now to events of this past month. On 4 February, Giuliana Sgrena—who the BBC rather preciously calls a “former left-wing militant”, despite her current propagandistic journalistic position with the Italian Communist paper Il Manifesto—was taken hostage in Iraq. This came as rather a shock to her colleagues; the Beeb quotes them as saying “Sgrena's outspoken anti-war stance should have endeared her to Iraqi insurgents fighting the US-led forces.” If nothing else, we can safely assume that she is not a disinterested observer.

On Friday 4 March, Sgrena was released by her captors into the custody of Italian intelligence agents, including one Nicola Calipari. While travelling through Baghdad, the convoy taking her to the airport approached an American checkpoint and was fired upon by US troops. Sgrena was slightly injured; Calipari was killed.

That much all involved agree upon. But as always, the devil is in the details. The US military maintains that the car carrying Sgrena and Calipari approached the checkpoint at high speed, and ignored both light signals and warning shots; as the driver's behavior was then indistinguishable from that of a suicide car bomber, the troops then fired at the car. But Sgrena claims that the shooting was “no accident”—and moreover suggests that US troops were specifically trying to kill her.

Yet as Jeff Goldstein notes, Sgrena offers no evidence to support these charges, and the conspiracy theory grossly exaggerates her own importance. (Perhaps the reported $10 million ransom might have something to do with her exalted self-image.) What is more, her story is—shall we say—evolving. LGF has more: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7. For my part, I take Sgrena to be a fabulist, liar, and propagandist. Perhaps that is going too far (though I doubt it); but what cannot be denied is that she is a charter member of the Italian red-black alliance. This fawning BBC profile drives the point home, even if in spite of itself.

I will leave the parsing of Sgrena's tales to more capable bloggers. What I am more concerned with here is the bigger picture.

Although Italy has denied paying kidnappers in past hostage releases, Agriculture Minister Gianni Alemanno told the Corriere that “very probably” a large ransom had been paid in this case.

Italian newspapers have speculated that anything up to 8 million euros ($10 million) may have been paid.

“We need to get the guilty punished and an apology from the Americans,” Alemanno said. “We are trustworthy allies but we must not give the impression of being subordinates.”

Italy's minister for parliamentary relations, Carlo Giovanardi, has also said he did not believe the U.S. version of events.

A national outpouring of grief and anger put pressure on Berlusconi, an ardent supporter of Bush and his war on terror, to get answers from Washington on what went wrong.

“All 57 million Italians who were united in the anticipation of Giuliana Sgrena's liberation have the right to know what happened,” said Romano Prodi, the former prime minister and leader of Italy's center-left opposition.

Berlusconi summoned the U.S. ambassador immediately after the event and will need to present some answers from Washington when he addresses parliament Wednesday.

He led Italy into the conflict in Iraq where it has some 3,000 soldiers, a decision opposed by a majority of Italians and the opposition which is seeking to unseat him at a general election next year and weaken him at regional polls next month.

It all comes down to electoral politics. Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is despised as a reactionary right-wing zealot by the broader European left, and vilified as well for his support of Coalition efforts in Iraq. If the Italian Left—supported in spirit, if not in action, by the political class within the European Union—can use the Sgrena incident to damage Berlusconi's prospects in next month's elections, then perhaps next year they just might succeed in bringing down his government.

A year ago this week, ten bombs tore through commuter trains in Madrid. In the election that immediately followed, the Spanish turned out the government of Jose Maria Aznar, electing instead a party of Socialist appeasers who all but tripped over themselves in haste to withdraw their garrison from Iraq. Perhaps this time it will be the Italian Left that will do the heavy lifting for their Islamist allies, forcing another rupture between Washington and the rest of the West. This time without bombs, or for that matter without so much as firing a shot.

As Wretchard put it last week:

The casual outside observer would conclude, from the apparent fact that the Western ideal can find no public defenders, that it is not worth upholding. Radical Islam, on the other hand, must self-evidently be an idea of great worth, as so many are publicly willing to die for it. And to a limited degree they would be right, for something must be terribly wrong with the West to cause such self-hatred.

America has shown itself apt at striking the visible parts of its enemy but seems unable to touch its foundations. On the contrary, every blow it deals seemingly reverberates within it, spreading cracks throughout its own base. Sometimes I think this is fortunate because I am beginning to suspect that the foundations of Barad-Dur lie within the West and not within Islam.