United in Hate: The Left's Romance with Tyranny and Terror [Hardcover]

Why does an openly oppressive theocratic movement appeal to those who enjoy the benefits of freedom, especially to so many of the highly privileged adhering to an ideology which claims to oppose everything that religion represents? This book reveals an unholy alliance and the motives of westerners that hate their own society, often expressed in their own words.

Alain Besançon's seminal study of Communism, Nazism and the Holocaust is called A Century of Horrors. Jamie Glazov connects the dots between the totalitarian massacres of the 20th century, murder in the name of religion and the mutual attraction between the radical left and radical islamists. As Eric Hoffer has shown in The True Believer, movements are interchangeable to a surprising extent. Both the radical and the reactionary hate the present. The temperament, not the ideological content, is crucial: fanatics often move from one form of extremism to another: communism, fascism, xenophobic nationalism, religious intolerance.

Part 2, titled Romance With Tyranny, charts the love affair between western leftists and murderous regimes throughout the 20th century. Intellectuals and celebrities venerated monsters like Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, & Ho Chi Minh. The New Left of the 1960s didn't have a change of heart, just a change of icons from Stalin to third world tyrants. The homicidal and sadistic Che Guevara is still held up as a hero whilst leftards never tire of Cuba's supposedly superior health system.

After the communist victory and resultant slaughter in Vietnam, few of Hanoi's western supporters expressed shock or regret. These true believers do not care about the victims who are merely eggs to be broken in order to create the perfect utopian omelet. The last communist hope in Nicaragua was shattered by Ronald Reagan. After that, the collapse of the Soviet Empire left the Left aimless. The ideological offspring of the 'progressives' that were hoping the West would lose the Cold War became the nihilist leftovers of today.

Hatred of the United States is one great attractor. Jihadists share a desire for cathartic violence with radical leftists; that's why the latter could not conceal their glee in the wake of 9/11. They blamed America and opposed the US campaign to oust the Taliban. The lust for sacrifice remains, expressed in loathing for Western culture, for capitalism, for the West's Judeo-Christian heritage and for Israel. Glazov shows how modern Islamism was incubated by both Nazism and Marxism. In the 1930s the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj al-Amin al-Husseini, became a supporter of Hitler, eventually settling in Berlin where he encouraged the annihilation of European Jewry, hoping to become the leader of the Arab world in expectation of an Axis victory.

The Mufti promoted Nazism amongst the Arabs, blending National Socialism with fundamentalist Islam. After the war he fled to Cairo where he accommodated fleeing Nazis and planned the destruction of Israel. Al-Husseini did not only targeted Jews but also moderate Arabs and the democratic West in general. Nazism was the spiritual and physical bridge bringing ideological extremism to the Arab world. When the Soviet Union became the champion of the Arab cause, hatred of Israel started migrating to the Left. Arab leaders like Gamal Abdel Nasser, Saddam Hussein and Yasser Arafat were all influenced by the Mufti's ideas.

The impulse to create an earthly paradise through human sacrifice is common to both secular & religious totalitarianism. Suicidal & homicidal martyrdom is the favorite expression of the radical desire for utopia. The Dragons Of Expectation by Robert Conquest is most illuminating in this regard. Bloodlust & anti-Americanism go hand in hand with anti-Semitism. All totalitarian ideologies despise modernity, the rule of law and the sanctity of human life, notions that emerged from Judaism. In addition, Jews personify individual achievement and love of life.

Wearing different masks, the forces of evil are very similar in their methods and their madness. That's why the so-called `peace protests' of 2003 were organized and led by both the Far Right & Far Left as observed by Nick Cohen, Julie Burchill and Christopher Hitchens amongst others. Ayn Rand called them collectivists, Bruce Walker calls them sinisterists but these followers of totalitarian ideologies are all the same. They employ the lie in order to attain power over our minds & bodies. The political spectrum is not linear but circular; there is a spot where the Far Left, Far Right and Radical Islam converge. Their latest idol is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his proxies Hamas and Hezbollah.

Bernard-Henri Levy's Left in Dark Times confirms much of what Glazov exposes here - a global convergence of totalitarians of all stripes, united by their hatred of capitalism, individual freedom, America & the Jewish State. United In Hate concludes with notes, a bibliography and index. It's a worthy contribution to the growing body of literature which includes Eurabia by Bat Ye'or, Liberal Fascism by Jonah Goldberg, Unholy Alliance by David Horowitz, While Europe Slept by Bruce Bawer and Globalising Hatred: The New Antisemitism by Denis MacShane.

"United in Hate" aims to answer one of the most perplexing questions in contemporary politics: why does the Left so often support and take the side of Islamic jihadists whose values are anathema to those that the same Leftists purport to uphold? Why do Leftists consistently pour scorn on their own societies while heaping praise upon totalitarian dictators and terrorists?

Jamie Glazov's new book is the most complete examination yet of the Left's informal alliance with radical Islam. It begins by providing a psycho-social explanation as to why the Leftist (who the author refers to as "the believer", in deference to Eric Hoffer's famous book "The True Believer") ideology so often results in hatred for one's own society and support for dictators and murderers.

At first I was not totally convinced by Glazov's hypothesis, as it seemed too much like pretentious double-speak and/or mere speculation. However, in the next section, Glazov illustrates his formula by documenting how the Left, for EXACTLY THE REASONS he describes in Chapter 2, revered and supported the communist tyrannies of Stalin, Mao, Castro and others. This whole section puts the above "theory" into observable and demonstrable practice and serves as a perfect background to the modern liberal love affair with Islamic jihad.

The next section examines the ideology of the jihadists themselves, and explores the psychological ramifications of Islam's violent, intolerant and misogynistic doctrines on those who take them seriously, and how these constructs mirror those of the Left.

Finally, Glazov documents Leftist support for radical Islam in the wake of the 9/11 atrocities, quoting abundantly from self-loathing left-wing bigots such as Noam Chomsky and Michael Moore. As Glazov writes: "[T]he new generation of believers found their own idols in the terror war. The romance with Islamism is just a logical continuation of the long leftist tradition of worshipping America's foes."

Dealing in specifics, Glazov also covers the leftists' defense of Islamic gender apartheid and their hatred of Israel. Regarding the latter, he makes an unconvincing case that Leftist hatred for Israel is based primarily on antisemitism, an increasingly common right-wing position that I have always opposed because of its striking similarity to the equally imaginary phenomenon of "Islamophobia". Ultimately, some of the other explanations the author presents are far more accurate and persuasive than the "Jew-hate" line.

Overall, United in Hate does the best job of any currently published work of explaining why the Left frequently romances with tyrants and terrorists. It is recommended reading for all those who value Western freedoms and wish to defend them against the totalitarian ideology of jihad.

I have often wondered with both genuine puzzlement and rage, why the radical Left seems to have vigorously supported every murderous tyranny on the face of the earth, providing it is anti-Western.
It has always been galling and sickening how left wing radicals have had no humanity towards anyone who was a victim of the totalitarian regimes or bloodthirsty terrorist movements that they have supported over the last century.
The shameful death cult odyssey that has lead left wing radicals of the intellectual elite, academics, lawyers, writers, entertainers and others to always identify with the most evil and monstrous regimes and leaders on this planet and to pretend to turn a blind eye to the death and destruction they have sowed (while in reality enjoying it) is what the author explores in detail in this outstanding analytical, penetrating book, which is scholarly and yet boils the blood and fills one with horror especially when it confirms the tip of the iceberg that we have seen before reading it.
The Leftist wishes to punish the West for their rejection of Marxism and so has found in the Islamist terror, the new heroes to venerate as those who are able to defeat the West and the individual freedom it represents.

At the roots of this phenomenon is a nihilistic death impulse rooted in the resentment by the Western Leftists of their own societies which makes them identify with anything which is adversarial against the Western culture they so despise, no matter how destructive and murderous.
This erases any empathy for the victims of these regimes and terror networks.
This is what the author refers to as the adversarial culture of negative identification.

The central question that this boils down to is that the Leftist has not found satisfaction or meaningful relations in his or her own life, despite their accumulation of wealth and luxury (as the Western left is almost always drawn from the ranks of the well off, and not of the working classes) and this is what fuels their rage against their own societies, leading them to look to Utopian but non-Spiritual solutions.
"Meanwhile the believer is utterly indifferent to the real life suffering of the actual human beings victimized by the regimes that he glorifies The victims of the adversarial ideology do not fit into the believers agenda, and so they do not matter, and they are not, ultimately even human is his eyes. Because they are not human for him, the believer sees them as enemies and therefore supports their extermination. Once again, in the mutated Judeo-Christian imagery, blood cleanses the world of it's injustices and then redeems it-transforming it into a place where the believer will eventually find a comfortable home".

Thus the Leftists who venerated Lenin and Stalin would not feel any sympathy for the victims of their purges, dekulakization and forced famine.
The admirers of Mao would not feel anything for the millions of victims of cultural revolution or tens of millions of Chinese who starved to death during the Great Leap forward.
Similar callousness would be shown to the victims of the Khmer Rouge-a third of Cambodia's population or the tens of tortured and murdered by the Castro regime in Cuba or the Sandinistas in Nicaragua (who engaged in ethnic cleansing of that nations Miskito Indians-Revolutionary regimes often engage in genocide against minorities)..
The Left's unholy death cult worship of Arab and Islamic terror is no different. Thus the Leftist sees the hundred thousand Christians killed by the PLO in Lebanon , the
myriad victims of the 1979 Islamist revolution of 1979 which killed 20 000 people in the first two weeks, Israeli women and children butchered by Arab terrorist groups like Hamas, Hezbollah, the PLO, and the Popular Resistance Committees, and the victims of the 911 terrorist destruction of the Al Qaeda world trade towers as either deserving of their fate or expendable.
Thus you have the likes of Ward Churchill blessing the 911 terror attacks and describing the victims as 'little Eichmann''s , the loathsome Chomsky saying after 911 that America had got what it deserved and Michael Moore describing Al Qaeda terrorists in Iraq who have killed thousands of Iraqi women and children on April 14, 2004 thus: 'The Iraqis who have risen up against the occupation are not 'insurgents' or 'terrorists' or 'the enemy'. They are the REVOLUTION, the Minutemen, and their numbers will go and they will win!"
Chomsky paid a pilgrimage to the mass murderous Hezbollah in May 2006, in a long tradition of pilgrimages to bloodthirsty tyrannies, such as Red China under Mao, North Vietnam and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. Meeting with Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah Chomsky echoed Nasrallah's view that President bush was the 'top terrorist' and called the United States 'one of the leading terrorist nations'. Not to mention the passionate declarations of support for Hamas and Hezbollah of Chomsky's despicable disciple Norman Finkelstein and his various visits to these outfits of murder and Arab equivalents of the Nazi Party.
when Jimmy Carter met with the Islamo-Nazi Hamas and embraced their leaders, he was fulfilling the long tradition of the Left's romance with America's totalitarian adversaries.
All indication are the USA's pro-Islamist and radical left President Obama is following in exactly the same path, which is frightening and depressing.

The author dissects the hypocrisy and evil of the left's lust fopr death and destruction. A striking example of this is the venomous hatred of Leftist homosexuals for Israel despite the fact that the only nation in the Middle East where Homosexuals are NOT persecuted is Israel, and despite the fact that the regimes and terrorist gangs such as the Mullahs in Iran, the Syrian Baathist regime, Hamas and Hezbollah all persecute and murder Homsexuals in areas under their control.

Similarly their are Western (often Jewish born) feminists, such as Naomi Klein and Andrea Dworkin who who are viciously anti-Israel and anti-West and engage in some of the most hideous apologetics for Islamic atrocties against and opression of women. Part of this stems from their hatred of feminine sexuality and therefore approval of the Islamists brutal supression of this, regardless of the suffering of the Muslim women involved.

Of course another unifying between Islamo-Fascists and the Radical Left is the hatred of Israel and mainstream Jewry, largely because of the individual freedom and value of human life which Israel and Judaism affirms.
During the ruthless 'Al Aqsa Intifada' or 5 year terror war waged from 2000 against the Israeli people by a collective of Palestinian terror networks including Hamas, Hezbollah, the PFLP, the PRC, Tanzim and the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, the international Left became more and more enamoured of Palestinian terror and hateful of Israel in the greater the carnage carried out by the terrorists against Israeli men, women and children.

This is part of the pattern of the last century in which Leftist support for tyrannical regimes - such as Communist Russia, Mao's China, Castro's Cuba, Ho Chi Minh's Vietnam, Khmer Rouge, Sandinista Nicaragua and Islamist Iran have always been greatest when the carnage and terror carried out by these regimes has been at their peak.
Regarding Israel the fact that the Israeli people are seen as insufficiently egalitarian means that in the eyes of the by the International Left the Israeli people must die en masse as would happen if ever Israel was erased.Iranian dictator Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's vows to 'Wipe Israel off the map' established great popularity for him on the international Left, and he was welcomed to American university campuses in the wake of these threats.
Tragically others have to pay for the psychological need of the radical Left to purify an imperfect Earth with blood and fire.