Muslims and Socialists: Unholy Alliance?

This article about the – perhaps weakening – partnership between Muslims and Leftists in this week’s Economist is of interest to many on the right wing, I believe. Excerpt:

An odd marriage of Muslims and secular socialists, united against America, is challenged by pundits of right and left
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This leftist-Muslim partnership exists not just on the streets, but in the protest movement’s heart. Britain’s Stop the War coalition, which has organised more than 15 nationwide protests and hundreds of smaller events, was largely forged by two small, intensely committed bodies—the far-left Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and the Muslim Association of Britain, which is close to the international Muslim Brotherhood. These tiny groups have co-ordinated street protests by up to 1m people.
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Almost everybody in the movement shares the belief that “capitalism and militarism” (both epitomised by America) are the main challenges to human welfare. If political Islam can blunt American triumphalism, then so much the better—even from the viewpoint of those who would never dream of donning a headscarf or upsetting a sexual minority.
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Just as Britain is the heartland of the leftist-Muslim partnership, it is also the main locus of a sharp and trenchant critique of political Islam. At its toughest, the argument of a new school of anti-Islamist leftists—mainly rehearsed on the internet—is that parts of the international left are now making as colossal a mistake as they did over Soviet or Chinese communism. They have let hatred of America and capitalism blind them to darker forces.

Two sorts of people have stressed this point: European ex-Marxists, embarrassed by their errors over Stalin, and dissident ex-Muslims from the Islamic world who have fled to the West and fear their hosts will “go soft” on their persecutors.
(…)
Political Islam, he [Nick Cohen, of the "center-left"] says, is not just a disaster for many causes (like feminism and gay rights) that the left cherishes; it also overturns the Enlightenment idea that diversity of opinion is desirable.

Also, the Economist ends with an interesting prediction…