It really should not surprise us that something attributed to Osama turns out to sound like “the free speech movement” of Berkeley in the 1960s. It’s updated, of course, with the latest quackery about globalization and the world of the 2000s of the next generation of the Berkeley commune.

It’s only one piece of circumstantial evidence, of course. But if it is true that what Osama voiced was written by Adam Yahiye Gadahn, born Adam Pearlman, a product of the social chaos of the California 60s, that, too, would seem in character. Gadahn converted to what must be his own brand of Islam after the usual adolescent trek through drugs and heavy metal music. He is said to have been the confidant of Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, the Pakistani Baluch high living top Al Qaeda Osama lieutenant who was captured by the U.S. [Khalid has apparently turned into a treasure trove of intelligence on the whole terrorist network during his incarceration at Guantanamo..]

What seems to be happening is the merging of the movement of the intellectual progeny – and in some cases like Gadahn, the surviving actual personalities themselves – and their largely nihilistic “program” of the 60s with the Islamofascists. For as the brilliant French journalist and political analyst Jean Francois Revel, among others, pointed out long ago, radical reformers and psychopaths searching for magic solutions to world problems, are always subject to “the totalitarian temptation”. They want a formula for a perfect world different from the one the rest of us live with, that is, our world of often messy compromises, which they would gain through a golden key solution to all problems. And often they would get it through subservience to the follies of an all-knowing leader, whether Hitler, Mussolini, Fidel Castro – or Khomeini. With the latter, what better cover for a corrupt totalitarian-wannabe regime than the call for the abdication of free will and individualism to what some call Islam [“submission” to Allah, or one his self-chosen representatives].

It would follow, then, with their twisted logic that the U.S., which perhaps more than any other society, has found compromises – often messy ones – that have produced a maximum of liberty and material progress, would be the principal enemy. That is an issue on which what is left of the old totalitarian left [and alas! its continuing many fellow travelers and apologists] can unite.

Unfortunately, that hard core of dedicated “leftists” shades off into some strains of the thinking of the American elite and what could be labeled “political correctness” [PC], the amateurish but faddish politics of the moment. In the Vietnam Era Jane Fonda could sit in an anti-aircraft gun in Hanoi aimed at American aircraft or become the prop for Communist propaganda with U.S. prisoners of war because it was the political brand of the moment, not from any deep philosophical underpennings or dedication to humanity. That leads to the current spectacle of Hollywood denizens who often cannot run their private lives but have plenty of advice for the world about complicated and vexatious issues such as climate change.

More seriously, it is still reflected in the attitudes of what Jean Kirpatrick labeled “the San Francisco Democrats”, those people in our own society who are always first ready to discount U.S. morality and good works to search for American moral transgression and evil intent. “Blame America first”, she called that syndrome.

Polls – the latest by an interesting group of super American-critics, the BBC, ABC and the Japanese NHK – they tell us, signifies that the world out there hates the U.S. and sees it as the villain in the world conflict. Polls in non-industrialized countries ….mmmmmmm. How does one choose a sample among people who often have illiteracy rates of more than 50 percent? Do we do this by telephone in countries where the cell – where it exists – is a recent arrival? How about in those countries where saying something nasty about the leadership can get you thrown into the pokey without trial for the rest of your life? How about choosing a sample of people who have never been asked by their rulers in their entire lives what they really think about anything much less want? Or how about a sample among an elite that treats the rest of the people in their country as servants? What utter and ridiculous nonsense! But this and similar “polls” are used on an almost daily basis to buttress the criticisms of American strategy and tactics by leaders of the Democratic Party in the U.S., and by America’s critics. throughout the media world, at home and abroad. We must rebuild an international consensus, these people argue, on this basis of purported U.S.’ unpopularity, never mind what part of our own idealism and sacrifice we abandon.

One reason for this frame of mind is that whether in Europe or in the U.S., the democratic left is continuing to confuse its search for nirvana with “understanding” and tolerance for the Islamicists. There must be reasons, valid and sanctified by purposeful U.S. misdeeds, which justify the rage of the Islamofascists, it is said. There must be a search for, the code word is, “basic causes”. But somehow the veil and treatment of women as inferior beings must be excused, even by leftwing feminists, as part of understanding “the other”.

And, therefore, opposition to the excrutiatingly painful American effort to use military force as one weapon in a worldwide effort to prevent the terrorists gaining additional power and creating new victims is in itself objectional, vile, and to be opposed.

It is this confusion of what is at stake in the present struggle which explains how a German judge could call on sharia [often primitive Islamic law] to sanction violence against Moslem women in Germany in an “honor” killing. After all, cultural content must be taken into consideration in all efforts at justice, she argued. It’s why a group of well-meaning [for the most part] New Yorkers do not understand why a school based on Arabic culture funded by the taxpayers would turn into a new fount of Islamic radicalism. One does not know whether to laugh or cry when the would-be principle defines “jihad” – neither as the Islamic “moderates” do, a personal struggle for moral values, nor as the Islamofascists’ call to convert or kill your enemies – but as a part of women’s liberation!

This amalgamation of the old cliches of the left and the muscle of the fanaticism of the Islamicists is a powerful combination, however strange bedfellows they are given their historical origins. Just as some of its most fervent would be terrorists and even “martyrs” appear to be converts who have crossed over from conventional dissidence in Western societies to advocates of Islamic radicalism and martyrdom, so old pseudo-Marixan and economic determinist intellectual currents is still confusing the issues connected with Islamist terrorism for much of the free world’s elite in Europe and America.

That intellectuals and politicians should be bemused by the current threat of violence and how to subdue it is not a new phenomenon given, for example, the history of “appeasement” in the 1930s. But this muddle of primitive Marxism and Islamicist fanaticism is a vicious and pregnant manifestation. And this absurd but growing intellectual cocktail introduces a growing and dangerous element into the war against terrorism.