"New leftist" turned arch-conservative David Horowitz has written some great material over the years, but his writing can also be hyperbolic and provocative almost to the point of self-parody. I wasn't sure which Horowitz wrote Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left, and the press release from Regnery Publishing - "David Horowitz exposes America's most lethal enemy - the American Left" - did not fill me with confidence. I share Horowitz's (and Regnery's) animosity toward the far left, but I still think Osama bin Laden is a more lethal enemy than, say, Ward Churchill.

Fortunately, Unholy Alliance is a more sober and learned volume than the hyperbolic press release would make it appear, and it does a reasonably good job of making Horowitz's point: that the American extreme left has entered into a de facto alliance with their nation's Islamofascist enemies, and that the more moderate left is either unaware of or indifferent to this disturbing development. But there's little here that regular readers of conservative weblogs - or Horowitz's online magazine, FrontPage, from which much of the book appears to have been adapted - won't already know about.

Tens of thousands of Americans demonstrated against the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, and it would be unfair to dismiss all of them as knee-jerk radicals who hate their country. The same cannot be said about the people who organized the protests, however. International ANSWER, perhaps the most prominent of the groups which sprung up to oppose the American response to the 9/11 attacks, is a front group for the Workers World Party, an organization founded in 1959 by supporters of the Soviet invasion of Hungary, and most of America's other (seemingly interchangeable) "antiwar" groups are similarly infested with Marxists, Maoists and "anarchists" at their highest levels. Even "Win Without War", an organization founded to put a more moderate face on the "peace" movement, has many of the same old moonbats on its board of directors.

Far from opposing war per se, many leaders of the "peace" movement have openly expressed support for "insurgents" fighting the American military in Iraq and Afghanistan (not to mention Palestinian terrorist organizations, of course, since the ultra-left sees the United States and Israel as more or less interchangeable). Lawyer Lynne Stewart, recently convicted for providing material support to the suspected terrorists she was representing, described Muslim extremist groups as "forces of national liberation" who deserve the support of the progressive left. (In the same interview, with the Marxist magazine Monthly Review, she said Mao, Stalin and "especially Fidel" were justified in jailing dissidents, who are really capitalist stooges. Gotta love these free-speech activists.)