Robert Halfon, political director of Conservative Friends of Israel, reviews Michael Gove’s book Celsius 7/7:

“In stark terms, Celsius 7/7 suggests that just as Fascism subsumed tolerant nationalism and communism engulfed moderate socialism, Islamism has subjugated Islam…. In the bleak world that is painted by Celsius 7/7,  it is the free West – just as in the 1930s – that has allowed this rise in Islamism to continue unabated. Through a mixture of short term self interest and so called ‘realpolitik’, it is the West that is the primary author of its own misfortune…. The West’s lack of will to deal with Islamism, is buttressed by huge sections of the media and elements of the left who view the conflict between the free world and Islamism as one of moral relativism and moral equivalence….

“Moral relativism and moral equivalence have provided a cloak in which the left can embrace Islamism as a means by which to express their hostility to capitalism, the West and particularly the United States. Israel becomes the prism which the left and media establishment can unite against. So Ken Livingstone can nakedly court the Islamic vote in London, by making seemingly anti Semitic remarks and virulent attacks on the State of Israel. We have a grotesque spectacle of the re-emergence of the red-brown coalition in which left wingers – previously campaigners for sexual equality and freedom of speech – form common cause with Islamists whose raison d’etre is repression of minorities and dictatorship.

“There are of course some honourable exceptions. Peter Tatchell being a prime example and the group of left intellectuals behind the Euston Manifesto.”

ConservativeHome.com, 21 September 2006

I was going to comment that, as an alternative to a red-brown coalition, Halfron proposes a blue-red one. Except, of course, that Tatchell and the Euston Manifesto signatories long ago abandoned politics that could in any way be categorised as socialist.