Has the union of the far left and the Islamic radicals been authorized by a judicial body?

Seriously, their connection is easy to understand: they both operate out of fear. The far left is deathly afraid of moral courage and the Islamic radicals are deathly afraid of anyone who is one iota more radical. So they worship together, bound in their hatred (and bound in other ways, too).

I don't get a sense that it is the same as the nuclear freeze movement. Freeze supporters were passionate, and their contempt for Reagan was genuine, but I don't remember quite the frenzied display of, well, unhinge-ment for lack of a better word.

That fact that millions (!) of "educated" Westerners are willing to sign up with, not communism and it's "glorious future", but with flat-out murderous, slave-owning, troglodydic cavemen just frightens and sickens me in a way the idealists of the freeze did not.

The freezers were wrong, and we've proved that. These people today are nuts. Stone nuts. And they wuould rejoice in the deaths of you and me, make no mistake.

I look at them, and stare into an abyss I never knew existed two years ago.

How's that different from thinking that the Soviets should defeat the U.S.?

I thought that bin laden would not conspire with a secular leftist like Saddam. Boy this is really confusing. We need a stage manager to put the left back on the left and the fundamentalists back on the right where they are supposed to be.

I should stop writing and just quote Mark Steyn who makes the point with far more wit than I could muster.
It's 'peace' psychosis in a nut's hell By Mark Steyn

"There's "no connection" between Saddam and al-Qa'eda, because radical Islamists would never make common cause with secular Ba'athists. Or so we're told by pro-gay, pro-feminist Eurolefties who thus make common cause with honour-killing, sodomite-beheading Islamists, apparently crediting Saddam with a greater degree of intellectual coherence than they credit themselves."

Go read the whole thing.

This is absolute proof of the emptiness of anti-Americanism. Nothing that all these groups agree on, can possibly have any content.

OJ - I think the difference between pro-Soviet then and pro-Jihadist now is that, even if they acknowledged that "oh, so Stalin and Mao killed 80 million. Gotta crack a few eggs, doncha know", the sick logic leads to that "glorious future for our children", blah blah, that they were ostensibly striving for. Completely wrong, of course, but at least I can put the logic together.

But now such people are forthrightly allied with creatures who literally are all about death, and nothing else. I suddenly see that what I thought would might end up as "maybe they will see the light as to how wrong they are, and think differently", is in reality, "they do see the light of how wrong they are, and thus will destroy everyone and everything they can, just.... for the sake of destroying and the literal worship of death... theirs, yours and mine".

Call me naive, but I didn't see that coming.

Andrew:

If the infidels were all killed, mightn't it usher in a glorious period for the Ummah, when it was in perfect accordance with Allah's commands?

OJ;

Yes, from their point of view. I think Andrew's point is that, as twisted as the means, the Communist's end goal was roughly similar to ours. The rhetoric claimed that it would have personal freedom and material plenty. Of course, it failed radically on both counts but one could see the logical connection could result from a highly abstracted, simplistic world view.

In other words, we fought with the Communists about the means. We fight with the Caliphascists about the ends.

AOG-

The ends promised by Marx are not the ends promised by freedom and its product, Capitalism. The former peaks of a world which is objectively impossible since it negates human nature. Freedom and the resultant capitalism is a celebration of human nature.