Has it really been seventeen years since United in Hate first came out? Jamie Glazov’s definitive book about the red-green alliance has now been updated and expanded, and remains the most cogent book on the topic. It’s also more relevant than ever – which is unfortunate, because that means that the ties between the Western left and jihadist Islam have only grown stronger. After all, before the Hamas atrocities of Oct. 7, 2023, how many sensible, civilized people would have imagined that the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust could be followed by months of demonstrations in European and American streets in which leftists acclaimed Hamas and spewed vitriol about Jews?
How to make sense of obscenity? Well, if you want to understand the left’s infatuation with Islam, you’ve first got to understand the left itself. Hence, the first half (roughly) of United in Hate recounts the history of the left’s enthusiasm for tyranny, beginning with the early days of the Soviet Union. It’s largely a litany of famous, fatuous fellow travelers – and what’s appalling is that most of them, despite their perfidy, are still extolled today. Lincoln Steffens, for instance, continues to be revered for his pioneering 1904 work The Shame of the Cities, even though, after three weeks in the USSR in 1919, he notoriously said: “I have seen the future, and it works.”
In 1957, the New York Times made Fidel Castro famous – and when the New Left came along soon after, it worshiped him. So did Jack Nicholson, Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, and other useful Hollywood idiots. Glazov quotes at length from the then doyenne of the leftist intelligentsia, Susan Sontag, who in 1969 assured her American readers, after a visit to Cuba, that “No Cuban writer has been or is in jail, or is failing to get his work published.” That same year, as it happens, my best friend in eighth grade was a boy named Jose Diaz, who’d recently fled Cuba with his parents, his father having been a journalist whom Castro not only imprisoned but tortured and blinded. Was Sontag a liar or a fool?
Sontag also celebrated North Vietnam. But by the late 1960s, she was far from alone in that regard. It was the left’s heyday. The year I turned fifteen, All in the Family began lecturing to us every week that working-class white patriots were ignorant bigots, and David Halberstam, one of America’s most honored authors, published Ho, a paean to Ho Chi Minh. And Jane Fonda’s love for the North Vietnamese earned her the everlasting wrath of millions but only enhanced her career: two Oscars, a lucrative workout business, and a marriage to America’s largest landowner and media mogul. Communism pays!
By the time I was in college, the flavor of the month was Mao. A guy who lived down the hall from me had a poster of him that covered an entire wall of his dorm room. Nobody complained. In 1975, Shirley MacLaine gushed over Mao in You Can Get There from Here. She loved the “self-criticism sessions,” designed to reinforce Maoist orthodoxy. And while presenting herself in the West as a gay “ally” (she won an award for her support for “LGBTQ+ rights” as recently as 2023), she approved of China’s severely enforced sexual puritanism, which included the death penalty for homosexuality. And let’s not forget Nicaragua, which Glazov calls “the last Communist hope.” Supporters of the Sandinistas included the likes of Ed Asner, Allen Ginsberg, and Günter Grass – none of whom suffered in the slightest for applauding tyranny.
A whole generation of us grew up, then, watching this parade of progressive traitors – and scratching our heads. What ailed these clowns? Over the years, some of us picked up a clue or two. But boy, did that take a while. If only I’d had Glazov’s book in my hands when I was a confused ten-year-old trying to make sense of hippies! For he not only recapitulates the left’s morally bankrupt meandering from one evil idol to the next; he also catalogues the attributes of the leftist psyche – among much else, a feeling of alienation; a belief in one’s own moral superiority; an illusion of belonging to a virtuous subculture; a sense of guilt over one’s own wealth or status; an ability to deny basic realities; and a genius for convincing oneself that Western democracy is oppressive while truly oppressive regimes are liberating.
Yes, some of us know all or most of this. But half of the American people, to judge by recent election results, don’t. A terrifyingly high percentage of young Americans think socialism is peachy keen. Every word of the first half of this book would be a revelation to them. Indeed, that first half alone is as fine a primer in the history of the Western left’s follies as you could hope to find.
But what lifts this book to the next level is the fact that the first half – which exposes the roots of the left’s “lust for destruction” and its “love affair with despotism” – sets the stage perfectly for the explanation, in the second half, of why its attachment to jihadist Islam is a logical inevitability. Yes, some would argue otherwise. How can self-styled “liberals” cheer the most illiberal force on the planet? Wasn’t it George W. Bush who, days after 9/11, said “Islam is peace”? Isn’t Tucker Carlson arguing, even now, that the American right – the Christian American right – and Islam are natural allies?
But no, Islam isn’t Christianity with hummus, hijabs, and hijrahs. It’s a violent supremacist ideology that happens to come equipped with its own religious rituals. And what it has in common with the left is that both seek to sacrifice humanity for “the idea.” Both reject outright the sacredness of the individual and the pursuit of happiness in favor of a lockstep collectivism and utopian perfectionism. Both, as Glazov puts it, seek “to create an earthly paradise by washing the slate clean with human blood.” Far from being appalled by acts of jihadist terror, the Western left admires them – just as it admired the Gulag and the Cultural Revolution.
A word about a word – namely, “Islamism.” I tend not to use it because it’s often used to draw a false distinction, with “Islam” denoting the religion itself, which is purportedly good and peaceful, and “Islamism” denoting a bloodthirsty movement that is allegedly a perversion of Islam. This distinction is a fantasy: Islam is and always has been a religion of brutal conquest. But Glazov defines the word “Islamism” differently: citing Paul Berman, he employs it to describe the modern, Western iteration of Islam – or, as Berman says, putting it the other way around, “the Muslim variation on the European idea.”
In short, although Islam, at its core, is unchanging, rooted eternally in the strict tenets of the Koran, the Western left has influenced much of the rhetoric used in modern times to articulate those tenets. Indeed, Islam’s intimate interaction with Communism (as well with fascism and Nazism) goes back at least as far as Sayyid Qutb (1906-66), who, in addition to being an influential early member of the Muslim Brotherhood (founded in 1928), was a student of Marxism.
No wonder, then, that at those rallies that took place in Western streets after October 7, Palestinian flags could be seen side-by-side with big red Socialist Party banners – a brand of fusion cuisine that should make any freedom-loving individual sick to his or her stomach, and that may well end up poisoning all of Western civilization. In United in Hate, Jamie Glazov, by explaining the mentality of the people who despise us, makes us better prepared to defend the things we love.
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