As we noted last Sunday, this weekend Toronto is host to a Marxist-Islamist convergence titled, “MARXISM 2007: A Festival of Resistance,” featuring a true rogues’ gallery of radical Muslims, malignant Stalinists, enviro-Nazis, sex-change advocates, black-shirt anarchists, and “progressives” of all stripes. The new “Marxism” is a grab-bag of every fringe idea in the book, mixed with virulent hostility toward the society and culture that allows them to hold conventions like this.

I doubt Karl Marx would think very highly of his new fellow travelers. I wonder how many were wearing iPods?

Here’s a report on the festival of lunacy at The National Post: Karl’s comrades.

Rather than focus on the evils of capitalism, the unlikely top billing of the opening night of the festival was devoted to a discussion about building unity between Muslims and the left; the keynote speaker was the controversial Islamic thinker Zafar Bangash, director of the Institute of Contemporary Islamic Thought, who is in the news these days because he is in the midst of a heated battle to open a mosque in Newmarket — not because he wants to see a dictatorship of the proletariat.Desperate for new brothers in arms, Marxism appears to be doing some serious social networking. If this weekend’s series of workshops at the festival is any indication, Marxism has a disparate cadre these days: green activists, the anti-war movement, the transgendered, members of First Nations, traditional Islam.

Inclusiveness is the buzzword here, where the members of this hodge-podge gathering can be overheard calling each other brother and sister. Participants call this membership drive “building unity,” a much-repeated mantra throughout the opening night. Self-proclaimed Marxist James Clark, who helped organize the event, said that while there are disparate groups in attendance, they can all still rally around a slogan like “Out of Afghanistan and into Kyoto.”