By Grant Jones

The thesis of this book is stated in the sub-title on the cover “Radical Islam and the American Left.” In this work Horowitz addresses both the nature of the American Left and its new affinity with Islamic terrorists. As an example of this alliance, Horowitz chronicles the career of Lynn Stewart who is a long time member of what he calls the “legal left.” At the bequest of William Kunstler and Ramsey Clark, in 1995, Stewart became the defense attorney for the Blind Sheik, Omar Abdul Rahman. Rahman has been convicted for his part in the 1993 World Trade Center attack.

Stewart went way beyond defending the Sheik. On February 10 2005, Stewart was convicted for smuggling messages from her client to his terrorist followers in Egypt. Steven Lubet, director of Northwestern University's program on advocacy and professionalism, dismissed Stewart’s claims of being a victim, "This case has nothing to do with zealous defense."

However, Horowitz notes that Lubet’s viewpoint was not shared by many in the legal profession. Stewart was defended by the ACLU, the American Bar Association, the National Lawyers Guild and the Center for Constitutional Law. Seventy-Three law students, over half the class, at the City University of New York voted her Public Interest Lawyer of the Year.

Horowitz quotes Stewart at the Socialist Scholars Conference on February 15, 2003 delivering the credo of the anti-globalization far left and their reasons for jumping in bed with the Islamofascists:







[Capitalism is] a consummate evil that unleashes its dogs of war on the helpless; an enemy motivated only by insatiable greed…In this enemy there is no love of the land or the creatures that live there, no compassion for the people. This enemy will destroy the air we breathe and the water we drink as long as the dollars keep filling up their money boxes.
As Horowitz concludes this passage, “The enemy was the Great Satan, the same enemy that motivated Stewart’s client to plot destruction of the World Trade Center and the Lincoln and Holland tunnels. [Unholy Alliance, pg. 200-01]

The apocalyptic language Stewart uses emphasizes the reasons behind the leftist, anti-capitalist mentality. According to Horowitz this reason is the left’s utopianism. Horowitz discusses “moderate” socialist Todd Gitlin as someone who holds America to an impossible standard. Gitlin states this process himself with respect to the Vietnam War, “It inflamed our hearts. You can hate your country in such a way that the hatred becomes fundamental…By the late 60s, this is what became of much of the New Left.” That legacy of hate is still very much alive.

Horowitz then quotes Gitlin at length citing the familiar litany of America’s past crimes, both real and imagined. Horowitz debunks this standard fare and concludes, “On what grounds, therefore, would this litany persuade one to renounce his native land? Insofar as these claims are justified, they reflect human problems, not particularly American ones. Gitlin’s rejection of America can be explained only by the utopian illusions of a worldview that has no anchor in any human reality and whose complaints, therefore, can never be assuaged or redressed.” [Pg. 86]

Of course, socialism has always been utopian in nature. Marx himself wrote disparagingly of “utopian socialism” as exemplified by Robert Owen. The religious nature of this utopianism are evidenced in this quote from English historian Eric Hobsbawm, “The months in Berlin made me a lifelong Communist, or at least a man whose life would lose its nature and its significance without the political project to he committed himself as a schoolboy, even though that project has demonstrably failed, and as I know now, was bound to fail. The dream of the October Revolution is still there somewhere inside me.” [Pg. 61]

Interestingly Horowitz does not comment on Eric Hoffer’s insight about mass movements, “Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil.” This is from Hoffer’s book, The True Believer. In the case of the utopian left they have not one but two devils to hate: the United States and Israel. The Great Satan the the Little Satan which, they believe, are all that stand in the way of their utopian fantasies becoming reality.

This hostility to America goes back many decades. In Ayn Rand’s collection of essays Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, there is an essay of hers written in 1965 “The Obliteration of Capitalism.” In this essay Rand quotes from a New York Times article from July 1964 written by C. L. Sulzberger “Should the Old Labels Be Changed?” Sulzberger’s article is about an United States Information Agency survey on why they don’t like us, “Having analyzed conclusions of its poll-takers in both hemispheres, the U.S.I.A. study observes: ‘Capitalism is evil. The United States is the leading capitalist country. Therefore, the United States is evil.’” There it is wrapped up in a neat syllogism over forty years ago.

The U.S.I.A. and Sulzberger’s answer was, of course, appeasement, “Might not the U.S.I.A. attempt another survey seeking ways of announcing our social and political system in a manner more acceptable to those abroad whose opinions we would influence.”

Rand’s response with a statement that could have been written yesterday, “It is to the Mohammedans, the Buddhists, and the cannibals (the literal cannibals, this time)—to the underdeveloped, the undeveloped, and the the not-to-be-developed cultures—that the Capitalist United States of America is asked to apoligize for her skyscrappers, her automobiles, her plumbing, and her smiling, confident, untortured, un-skinned-alive, uneaten young men!”

Horowitz, in two chapters, also documents the pre 9/11 alliance between anti-capitalists (anti-globalization), environmentalists, anti-Semites, Islamists, and other assorted nihilists. In the chapter “The New International” Horowitz chronicles the career of the anti-globalization crowd which came of age in Seattle in 1999, “On the surface the ‘antiglobal’ protests involved seemingly disparate issues, but in the eyes of the activists they were all related by a common anticorporate theme and by a shared perspective in which private property and the capitalist system were the root cause of social evils.” [Pg. 156]

Horowitz analyzes these disparate groups which came together as the World Social Forum. Horowitz quotes Alexander Cockburn describing this harmonic convergence of far left nutters, “One issue follows directly into another, as the Berkeley-based International Rivers Network discovered years ago. As the …Network battled dams around the world, it found that dams mostly had one thing in common: financial backing from the World Bank. So the International Rivers Network founded the enormously effective ’50 Years Is Enough’ campaign against the bank.” [Pg. 156]

At the last meeting of the World Social Forum, “Jos Saramago [himself a member of the Communist Party of Portugal] expressed that tension when he called Friday for turning the World Social Forum (WSF) into an instrument for action based on concrete proposals and ideas with broad support, rather than a Mecca for an annual pilgrimage by the Left to engage in discussions and debates on utopias.” Instead the Forum’s recommendations were just the same tired socialist boilerplate, requiring the West to give away their life, liberty and property.

However, the real show of the Alliance’s hatred of all that is decent took place at Durban, South Africa just days before the 9/11 attacks. The United Nation’s World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance met in Durban from August 31 thru September 8, 2001. Horowitz devotes a chapter to this freak show of Jew and America hatred. My only complaint is that he did not expand of this subject further as “It became the first expression of the new global coalition.” The Conference agenda was determined nine months prior in Tehran, a location not known for tolerance of any sort:



The relentless double standard in the U.N. resolutions was the expression of the new radical worldview, which had been refashioned as a result of the Communist fall, and which framed its indictments in terms of gender and racial oppression. Traditionally, Marxists had condemned the Western democracies as ‘class dictatorships.’ But in the wake of the Communist debacle, these rhetorical formulas were less effective in their political impact than the charge of ‘racism.’ The same logic inspired radicals to introduce the term ‘globalization’ to replace ‘international capitalism’ as a description of the oppressor system and to use the term ‘social justice’ as a code of socialist and totalitarian agendas. [Pg. 151]


Secretary of State Colin Powell was so disgusted by the whole thing that he walked out, “I know that you do not combat racism by conferences that produce declarations containing hateful language, some of which is a throwback to the days of ‘Zionism equals racism;’ or supports the idea that we have made too much of the Holocaust; or suggests that apartheid exists in Israel; or that singles out only one country in the world--Israel--for censure and abuse.”

However, as Horowitz relates over fifty American “Non-Governmental Organizations” (NGO) stayed in order to help attack their own country. According to Horowitz, these organizations included, the ACLU, the NAACP, the Mexican-American Legal Defense & Education Fund, the National Lawyers Guild and the Center for Constitutional Rights, all funded by the Ford Foundation. [Pg. 149]

Horowitz concludes this chapter: “Thus the familiar themes of the Communist Left are resurrected under the banner of racial ‘tolerance’ to defend Islamic Jihad, Palestinian terrorism, and the fascist regime of Saddam Hussein. In this ideological framework, opposition to the Marxist radicalism and its anti-Western agendas becomes by definition a form of racism, while the Western democracies are assaulted in the name of the very ideals—racial tolerance and equality—that they first invented and then established as civil rights.” [Pg. 154]

This alliance of convenience goes back quite a ways. In his autobiography Whittaker Chambers notes this policy of the Daily Worker in the late 1920s where he worked as a Communist Party member: “Arab outrages were occurring in Palestine. The Communist International chose that moment to call for the formation of a ‘Soviet Arabistan,’ and to attack the Zionists. Day after day bludgeoning stories and editorials along this mad line appeared in the Daily Worker. Editing them seemed less like a peculiarly trying exercise in party discipline than horseplay in a mental home.” [Witness: Regnery Publishing, 1987. Pg. 255] No doubt the outrages Chambers refers to are the murders of 67 Jews in Hebron in 1929, among others.

In Unholy Alliance Horowitz documents that, sadly, their GHQ is academia. In the book there are numerous citations from leading academics venting their hostility to America. The most famous example Horowitz describes is the “teach-in” at Columbia University on March 26, 2003. Professor Nicholas De Genova, besides his notorious wish for a “million Mogadishus,” also provided a definition for “peace,” “Peace is not patriotic. Peace is subversive, because peace anticipates a very different world that the one in which we live—a world where the U.S. would have no place.” [Pg. 34]

Some universities have gone Columbia one better and have actually hired as professors convicted felons and terrorists. Bernardine Dohrn is a law professor at Northwestern. She is also a convicted Weather Underground bomber and admirer of Charles Manson. Her partner in crime was Billy Ayers now a professor of education at the University of Illinois. Ayers is also an unrepentant terrorist, “I don't regret setting bombs. I feel we didn't do enough."

Probably due to space limitations, Horowitz doesn’t go into the history of academic anti-Americanism. Perhaps, two examples will suffice, Leonard Peikoff gave a lecture titled “Assault From the Ivory Tower” in April of 1983. Peikoff, originally from Canada, explains his surprise at the attitude America academics have towards their own country going back to the 1950s:



One of the most striking things to me, when I first came here, was the disapproval, the resentment, even the hatred of America, of the country as such and of most things American, that I saw displayed by American intellectuals; it was especially evident in professors in the humanities and social sciences, whom I came to know best…It happened here, in my opinion, because America at root is an ideology…That is why the professors I mentioned can feel at home and at peace anywhere else in the world, but not here: the fundamental ideas of the Founding Fathers are anathema to today’s intellectuals.


In his presidential address to the American Historical Association in December 1950, eminent historian Samuel Eliot Morison warned his profession of a dangerous trend that had begun with the “progressive” historians in the 1920s:



One result was the mass murder of historical characters. Personality ceased to be important if statesmen were puppets of economic and social forces; hence in many works written in the 1920's and 1930's, there are no great men or leading characters, only automata whose speeches, ideas, or aspirations are mentioned merely to give the historian an opportunity to sneer or smear. Dialectical materialism will admit no highmindedness, no virtue, no nobility of character--unless on the part of a revolutionist. It made a great appeal to young scholars, as perhaps was natural during those two woeful decades, 1920-1940; yet none the less unfortunate. For the "debunkers" and dialectical materialists, by robbing the people of their heroes, by insulting their folk-memory of great figures whom they admired, repelled men of good will from written history and turned other men, including many not of good will, to communism.


Horowitz sums up the situation in academia, which is now held in thrall by the Race-Class-Gender matrix of the neo-dialectical materialists



“In the universities they had come to dominate, Stalinists like Antonio Gramsci, Gyorgy Lukacs, Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, and Eric Hobsbawm were iconic names. The Cuban Stalinist Che Guevara became a saint of the popular culture, along with the Rosenberg spies…” [Pg. 56]


Not In Our Name (NION) is one of the most prominent “anti-war” groups. Michelle Goldberg a writer for Salon online, referring to both NION and International ANSWER, lamented that the “peace movement” was being hijacked by “kooks.” Both in Unholy Alliance and at his website Discover the Network, Horowitz provides much information on who is behind both these groups.

NOIN’s most well-known effort was a full page ad which appeared in many newspapers in the fall of 2002. This “Statement of Conscience” was presented as a full page ad in my local paper the Hilo Tribune-Herald on October 27, 2002. The ad includes signatures by 170 local people. Not surprisingly, academics are overrepresented in the ad. I can readily identify at least 29 professors from either the University of Hawaii at Hilo or its sister community college among the signers.

As Horowitz notes, many of the national signers of this American hating rant are prominent members of the Democratic Party such as Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and former U.S. Senator James Abourezk. In the Hilo Tribune-Herald ad there are at least two signers who are prominent in local Democratic politics, Anson Chong and Chris Yuen.

The academic signers must be very proud of attacking their country in war-time. Two of the signers, professor of Religious Studies Douglas Mikkelson and professor of Womens Studies Amy Gregg, still have the ad displayed, as of last week, on their office door. Clearly, professionalism goes by the board where political activism is concerned.

One of Hilo’s most prominent professor/peace activists is Timothy Freeman (apparently adjunct professors don’t merit their own web page). The bi-monthly Hawaii Island Journal has an interesting write-up on the peace demonstration which took place in March of 2003. In this article Freeman’s radical credentials are documented “Prof. Freeman has been one of the most vocal local teachers. He was in Seattle in Nov. of l999 when protesters disrupted the World Trade Organization meeting. Freeman’s colleagues chime in “Prof. Barry Curtis described how ‘invading Iraq would be armed robbery to get the oil.’ Prof. Catherine Becker detailed ten reasons why Pres. Bush should be impeached.” Of course, when these Leninists speak of “peace” we should remember Nicholas De Genova’s definition.

The political pay-off of all this agitation here in the 50th state, was the “anti-war” resolution passed by the state assembly on February 6, 2003. Although the language is far more restrained than NOIN’s screed and the conspiracy mongering of the professor/activists, its goal is the same: to render it impossible for the United States to pursue the war without permission from Kofi Annan. There was a heated debate in the state senate over this measure which was introduced by Kalani English, “At least a thousand Mauians of all races and ages rallied Sunday afternoon on the Maui Community College campus to show their opposition to a U.S. war against Iraq...’No war, no war, no war,’ chanted state Sen. J. Kalani English, the 6th District Democrat who represents East Maui, Molokai and Lanai, in leading the throng of peace advocates.”

Enough with our local kooks, in Useful Idiots Mona Charen documents the liberal/left’s sympathies to America’s Cold War enemies. Although, a very helpful work, Charon doesn’t go into much detail of why the left is hostile to their country, she just demonstrates that the phenomenon exists. Horowitz in Unholy Alliance goes a long way in explaining the why. These volumes compliment each other and should be on the book shelf of every American who is concerned about the future of his country.