George Galloway, the maverick British parliamentarian who was expelled from the Labour Party after his outspoken opposition to the war in Iraq led to charges that he incited Iraqis to fight against British troops, was there. Tony Benn, another former Labour MP and prominent defender of Socialism, also made the trip. So did Ramsey Clark, former U.S. Attorney General (for Lyndon Johnson) and a high-profile advocate for the impeachment of George W. Bush, the freeing of Leonard Peltier, and a host of other fashionable Leftist causes. At the 2003 Cairo Conference held in mid-December by The International Campaign Against U.S. & Zionist Occupations, these high-profile antiwar advocates had a chance to rub elbows with their newest ideological bedfellows: radical Muslims who openly advocate the restoration of the caliphate, the politico-religious ruler of a unified Muslim world, and the establishment of an Islamic world order under the rule of Islamic law, the Sharia.

That such an alliance was an actual goal of the Conference was hinted at by Salma Yacoob, an activist with the Muslim Association of Britain as well as chair of the Birmingham chapter of the Stop the War Coalition. In Cairo, she told the assembled dignitaries that “it is because we are potentially so strong together that our enemies try to divide us.” “Us” in this case would be the amalgamation of Islamists (that is, Muslims who see Islamic law as the only rightful way to order society), secular socialists, and Arab nationalists.

The polarities of the Conference were exemplified when Ma’mum Hudaybi, leader of the Egyptian radical Muslim group the Muslim Brotherhood, shared the platform with Revolutionary Socialist Kamal Khalil. The Brotherhood, founded in Egypt in the 1920s, was the first modern radical Muslim organization. It still states that one of its goals is, according to a website operated by a Brotherhood sympathizer, “mastering the world with Islam.” The Brotherhood proclaims: “Allah is our objective. The messenger [i.e., the Muslim Prophet Muhammad] is our leader. Quran is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.”

For his part, Khalil referred in a fiery speech to an antiwar demonstration held in Egypt as the Iraq war began: “I am speaking in the name of thousands of Egyptians who were in Tahrir Square on 20 March. They chanted against the imperialist aggression but they also chanted against the Egyptian state and the Mubarak regime. We want a world without Bush, Blair, Sharon and Mubarak. Let’s link the struggle against imperialism with the struggle against dictatorship and oppression. When the fingers of the Americans burn in Iraq and Palestine, the fingers of the dictator in Egypt will also burn.”

Hudaybi’s presence alongside Khalil heralded the welding of the antiwar movement’s anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist boilerplate to the caliphate and Sharia yearnings of radical Islam. Thus Cairo represented the flowering of the unique political vision of another luminary, who sent a laudatory message to the Conference: the octogenarian former president of Algeria, Ahmed Ben Bella.

Ben Bella embodies this new alliance in his own person. He cites the Egyptian Arab nationalist Gamel Abdel Nasser as his intellectual mentor, but his view of Arab nationalism partakes of none of the secularism that other Arab nationalist leaders have espoused at least publicly. “I am an Islamist,” Ben Bella declared flatly to Egypt’s Al-Ahram Weekly in May 2001, adding that “being a Muslim is an essential, a sacrosanct component of our identity.” He spoke in decidedly Leftist terms of a convergence between ostensibly secular Arab nationalism and radical Islam, praising the terrorist group Hizbullah as the contemporary embodiment of Nasser’s vision: “The essence of Nasserism is to struggle against imperialism and for social justice. I fear that some of those who claim to be Nasserists today might inadvertently mummify Nasserism the way the communists mummified Lenin. We must not speak as if it was still 1956. I believe that the Hizbullah in Lebanon have incorporated many aspects of the Nasserist philosophy. Times have changed.”

Ben Bella waxed sentimental about his old friend and comrade Che Guevara: “Che was a courageous fighter who had to struggle unremittingly with a body wracked by asthma. Once, when I climbed with him to the Chrea Heights overlooking the town of Blida, I saw him suffer an attack that turned him green in the face. I first met him in autumn 1962 on the eve of the Cuban missile crisis and the blockade decreed by the US. I was due to attend the September session of the UN in New York at the first Algerian flag-raising ceremony.”

But since he met Che, Ben Bella has changed. Imprisoned for years after he was deposed in Algeria, he read the only book allowed in prison: the Qur’an. “And if,” says Al-Ahram, “over the years Ben Bella has held tenaciously to his leftist, progressive ideals, in later years an infusion of Islam — what he terms the spiritual element sadly lacking in doctrinaire Marxism — has seeped into his own brand of socialism.”

With Galloway, Benn, and Clark publicly linked to Ben Bella, Hudaybi, and Yacoob, it is difficult not to conclude that the seepage is going both ways. Ben Bella himself asked the Conference to make sure that it would. After denouncing “Bush and the insane clique surrounding him” and castigating the Washington-led “globalization movement,” he recommended that the Conference “actively participate in incorporating the Arab world more and more” into the resistance to that movement. In other words, the aging Islamist called upon the Conference attendees to infuse the global antiwar movement with more of an Islamic character.

The Cairo Conference demonstrated that Socialist antiwar activists don’t mind sharing a podium with radical Muslims who want to establish Sharia states in Iraq and elsewhere. Of course, the peace movement has betrayed a taste for totalitarianism and brutality before. Today’s radical Muslim terrorists are worthy heirs of Lenin, Stalin, Feliks Dzerzhinsky, and all the rest who filled the Gulag for the sake of peace. Evidently nowadays as long as the struggle against “imperialist aggression” is won, a few amputations and stonings along the way will be just fine.

Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and the author of Onward Muslim Soldiers: How Jihad Still Threatens America and the West (Regnery Publishing), and Islam Unveiled: Disturbing Questions About the World’s Fastest Growing Faith (Encounter Books).