Some Islamists recognize this problem caused by the violent wing of the Jihad for the diplomatic wing. One British Muslim writer admonished fellow Muslims on a website: "Don't you know that Islam is growing in Europe??? What the heck are you doing mingling things up???" Likewise, a Muslim watch repairer in London observed, "We don't need to fight. We are taking over!" Soumayya Ghannoushi of the University of London bitterly points out that al-Qaeda's major achievements consist of shedding innocent blood and "fanning the flames of hostility to Islam and Muslims."

Things are not what they seem. Terrorism of the violent wing hurts the strategies of the diplomatic wing of the Jihad and helps its opponents. The violence and victims' agony make this hard to see, but without education by murder from the violent, the lawful diplomatic wing of the Islamist movement would have made far greater gains.

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Those on the Left who support the Communist-Islamist alliance have found not only a revitalizing cause but also an unexpected and deep hinterland from which to draw support. 'The practical benefits of working together are enough to compensate for the differences,' Such opportunism exposes a strain of pernicious racism that allows the Left to indulge outrageous bigotry as long as it is espoused by brown people from the Middle East. Points of potential disagreement between the hard Left and radical Islam - democracy, human rights, xenophobia, free-expression, feminism, homosexuality, abortion, among many others - would seem to pose insuperable barriers to the union. Not so. The hurdles have been neatly vaulted in the interest of mutual hatreds: America, Israel, globalisation, capitalism and imperialism. Anti-Semitism is never far from the surface.

But 'the far Left will always support Third World peoples against what they view as an imperialist West,' notes one analyst who has closely followed the phenomenon. Another says, 'Islamists in the West have skilfully used the tools of intellectual intimidation to build an inviolate wall around Islam, giving it a sacred status that brooks no criticism.' The French Leftist leader Olivier Besançonneau added political piquancy when explaining his inclusivist approach to the Islamists: 'Are these not the new slaves? Is it not natural they should unite with the working class to destroy the capitalist system?'

But there are small voices of doubt. To some within Britain's Trotskyite Alliance for Workers' Liberty, the unholy marriage is outright heresy. One Trot describes SWP advocates of the Black-Red alliance as 'demoralised Guardian readers with headscarves', a withering allusion to the SWP organizer who ordered secular, socialist women to cover their heads while demonstrating with their Muslim sisters outside the Israeli embassy in London. And he is scathing of SWP monitors who enforced gender segregation to mollify Muslim sensibilities at a demonstration in Trafalgar Square. 'Marxists are secular or they are not Marxists,' said the Trot with principled purity.

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