Andrew Higgins has an excellent dispatch in the Weekend Journal on London Mayor Ken Livingston and the alignment of Islamofacists with elements of the hard left:

Hezbollah shows that "resistance," whether fuelled by religion or secular zeal, "can break governments and roll back the American project," says John Rees, a former editor of the journal International Socialism and a leader of Britain's anti-Iraq war movement. Hezbollah, he says, isn't a terrorist outfit but a social movement seeking better living conditions for its supporters. "It is better to think of it as an AFL-CIO with guns," he says.

…

As anger at the U.S. mounted in 2003 ahead of the invasion in Iraq, the snowballing antiwar movement took on a curious aspect, particularly in Europe: an alliance of forces that previously loathed each other.

Mr. Rees, the British radical who attended last month's Beirut conference, played a big role, allying his own organization, the Socialist Workers Party, with the Muslim Association of Britain, a group that says it wants to bridge Muslim and non-Muslim communities yet is accused by critics of siding with radical Islamic groups. The two organizations spearheaded the antiwar campaign in Britain. Today, Mr. Rees says he has reservations about some of his Islamic allies' views, particularly those regarding women and homosexuals.

"If there were a level playing field, I might choose different allies," he says. But he says America's own policies left him with no choice: "I find myself on the same side as Hezbollah, as Chávez. I didn't choose them. America did."

At a big Islamic festival this summer supported by London's mayor, Mr. Livingston, Islamist activists and left-wing politicians declared their solidarity. "Muslims and the left must and can come together, because we face the same enemies -- imperialism, colonialism and racism," said Redmond O'Neill, a senior aide to Mr. Livingston.

I've written on this subject for several years now. In 2004, I looked at the anti-liberal alliance of Communist red and Islamist green:

The most dramatic example of the conjoining of the hard left and Middle East extremism can be found in a French prison -- in the person of Carlos the Jackal, the most famous terrorist of the 1970s. Born Illich Ramirez Sanchez in Venezuela, Carlos led numerous terrorist attacks in the name of the Palestinian cause and other revolutionary undertakings; he is now serving a life sentence. Once a convinced Marxist-Leninist, he has converted to Islam on the grounds that "only a coalition of Marxists and Islamists can destroy" the United States and its allies. In a book he managed to sneak out of prison and publish on the first anniversary of 9/11, Carlos lauds Osama bin Laden and praises "revolutionary Islam" as the only route to just societies.

None of which stopped Deputy Police Commissioner Brian Paddick from explaining—on the day of the London train bombing!—that "As far as I am concerned, Islam and terrorists are two words that don't go together."

More recently I penned a follow-up about the response to the Danish Muhammed cartoons for the Sun. Harry Siegel, my son and Cities on a Hill co-editor, resigned as editor-chief of New York Press after ownership made a last-minute call not to let him run the cartoons. He made a point at the time worth noting that Americans cities don't have the same sort of Muslim street as in much of the Middle East and Europe, and that the response to those papers that did run the cartoons was minimal, six guys with signs leaving once the TV crews had their shot. In the coming weeks I'll elaborate on the differences between America's Muslims, and Europe's.

Finally, Fred Halliday's Open Democracy dispatch The Left and Jihad is a must-read—un-ideological in the best sense of the word—history of the relationship.