Standing for Truth and Defending Your Freedom
Standing for Truth and Defending Your Freedom

Unholy Collusion: The American Left and Radical Islam

Karen VanTil Gushta, Ph.D.

The Women’s March in Washington D.C., held in protest of President Trump’s inauguration, included one unlikely speaker—at least if you consider the beliefs of the group she represented. Nevertheless, Linda Sarsour, an Islamic social activist who has worked to end the New York Police Department’s monitoring of the city’s Muslims and to get NYC public schools to close for observance of two of Islam’s holy days, has quickly been embraced by feminists on the Left. Initially tagged as the “assistant treasurer” for the march, by the time the media was reporting on it, she was identified as a “co-chair” for the event.

Speaking to the crowd at the march, Sarsour said, “I will respect the presidency, but I will not respect this president.” That established her legitimacy in the eyes of her listeners. “We are this nation’s moral compass,” she shouted. “If you want to know if you’re going in the right way, follow women of color.”

Using identity politics, a standard tool of the Left, Sarsour claims she is working on “intersectional movement building” to defend the rights of all marginalized groups. She includes in her list of oppressed groups the “LGBTQIA” community—except when speaking to organizations such as the Islamic Society of North America. Then she is careful not to mention the rights of homosexuals and transgenders—since Islamic sharia law calls for the harsh punishment of such people.

But why has the Left—and especially feminists—welcomed Sarsour, who wears a hijab and is a defender of sharia law, which also degrades and dehumanizes women? The answer lies in the collusion between the Left and Islam, both of whom ultimately view America and western civilization with the same jaundiced eye.   

How is it that non-Muslim political figures on the Left have, as Daniel Pipes writes, “embarrassed themselves by denying the self-evident connection of Islam to the Islamic State (ISIS) and to Islamist violence”—even accusing those who point to these connections as “Islamophobes”? Pipes, president of the Middle East Forum, attributes this in some degree to simple “cowardice” combined with multiculturalism—the idea that all cultures are equally valid and good. But in addition, he says, they don’t want to offend Muslims who might be “more prone to violence if they perceive non-Muslims pursuing a ‘war on Islam.’” And, he claims they worry that focusing on Muslims means would mean recognizing the religious nature of Islamic jihad—and as secularists, they are loath to acknowledge that religion plays a part in any worldview.

This may explain the reticence of many liberals and progressives (in both political parties) to identify the driving agency behind acts of terrorism committed by Muslims. But it goes deeper than that—far deeper.

As Matthew Vadum of the Center for Security Policy explains in Team Jihad: How Sharia Supremacists Collaborate with Leftists to Destroy the United States, “The American Left has entered into an alliance of convenience with Islamic terrorists aimed at taking down their mutual enemy: the United States of America.”

The tools they use are the same: name-calling (Islamists call those who oppose them “Islamophobes;” the Left throws the term “racist” at their opponents); intimidation (Islamists use CAIR and the Left the ACLU to bring lawsuits against those whom they oppose), and the suppression of facts (after 9/11 both groups tried to blame America for provoking the Muslim world into murdering Americans, rather than acknowledge the truth about who the terrorists were who flew the airplanes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon).

As Vadum writes, after 9/11 “leftists urged Americans to look inward, to examine the so-called root causes of Islamic hatred of Western Civilization. They said the problem isn’t with Islam; the problem is with us.” He explains the Left’s view further:

Those on the Left see Muslims as the new underclass. Americans are bullies who have pushed the Islamic world around for far too long. Muslims should not assimilate; Americans should change their culture to accommodate the new arrivals. This is the essence of multiculturalism, that is the poisonous belief that all cultures are equal, which is the foundation for the claim that America is just another country.”

Former President Obama exemplified this attitude when he said that he believed in American exceptionalism, “just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.”

Interestingly, there are ideological connections, according to Vadum, between Marx and Muhammad. “Islam and the Left overlap,” he says. “Socialism is commonly believed to have originated in Europe but it also has roots in the Islamic world. The Arabic word for Islamic socialism is ishtirakiyyal al-Islam.” Vadum points out that Yasser Arafat, Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, Turkish president Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, Indonesian president Sukarno, and Muammar Qaddafi were all socialists. After gaining power, Qaddafi renamed Libya, “the Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya.” 

Another author who has written on the collusion between Muslims and the Left is David Horowitz, a former 60’s radical who is now working to expose the Left’s tactics. In Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left, David Horowitz says, “Radicalism is a cause whose utopian agendas result in an ethic where the ends outweigh and ultimately justify any means. Like the salvationist agendas of jihad, the Left’s apocalyptic goal of ‘social justice’ is the equivalent of an earthly redemption.”

Ultimately, what unites Marxists and Islamists is their common goal—to bring down America. For now, they operate on the principle, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” and willingly collaborate in their efforts. Barack Obama, whose sympathies to Islam derive not only from his leftist ideology but also his personal experience as a child in Muslim Indonesia, appointed a number of individuals with ties to Islamist organizations in his administration. Among them was Kareem Shora, Executive Director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, who, in spite of his record of joining CAIR and other Islamic supremacist groups in lobbying against anti-terror efforts, was appointed to the Homeland Security Advisory Council. Obama also appointed a special envoy to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), giving legitimacy to an organization whose stated goal is to ban criticism of Islam worldwide and advance an Islamic caliphate.

Vadum points out that Mohamed Elmasry of the Canadian Islamic Congress stated at the Marxism-2006 conference that, “the political left is working with conservative Muslims on issues of social justice, with the long-term goal of building a world that lives by peace, through justice.”

As high-sounding as this may be, history has shown that such alliances can quickly disintegrate. Just as the Nazis brokered a Nonaggression Pact with Russia in 1939 (in which they agreed how they would divide up Eastern Europe), and then launched an invasion in 1941 of the communist super-power, the current collaboration between the Left and Islamists is fragile. They differ sharply in their views of who will ultimately win the clash of civilizations. Their present collaboration is primarily a marriage of convenience and neither one sees the other as part of their particular “ultimate solution.”

According to Daniel Pipes, one of the major Egyptian leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood whose writings inspired Osama bin Laden, Sayyid Qutb, “accepted the Marxist notion of stages of history, only adding an Islamic postscript to them: he predicted that an eternal Islamic era would come after the collapse of capitalism and Communism.” Similarly, David Horowitz, observes that because socialists believe that by using state power and violent means to eliminate private property they can usher in their vision of the millennium, once that is accomplished all religions, which are merely “the opium of the oppressed,” will wither away, including Islam.

The unholy dreams of both Islamists and leftists are predicated on their rejection of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Ultimately, however, we know who wins the clash of civilizations and how the story of the ages will end. Jesus Christ will return and every knee shall bow to Him, whether they follow the sign of the hammer and sickle or the crescent moon.