Double Trouble: The Leftist Threat and the Islamist Threat

I am sometimes criticized for focusing too much on the Islamic threat to the West and not paying enough attention to the more immediate threat from the political left. One of the reasons I concentrate on the former is that the threat from the left is more obvious and is widely covered by numerous columnists in major periodicals. Most Catholics who are paying attention realize by now that the left-leaning Obama administration is no friend to Catholics, and that it constitutes a threat to crucial freedoms that Americans have long taken for granted.

Focusing on Islam, however, does not preclude worrying about the left. Both are worrisome. More to the point, they are not unrelated threats. It is unrealistic to think of the two ideological movements—the one secular, the other religious—as separate and distinct, as though we can afford to tackle the immediate threat first and the remote one later. In reality, leftism and Islamism are best understood as a combined threat. Radical leftists and radical Islamists share similar ideologies and goals and have formed numerous alliances, both tacit and not-so-tacit. www.crisismagazine.com/2014/double-trouble-…