Robert Spencer has an illuminating piece about the 2003 Cairo Conference—a Moronic Convergence of epic proportions, attended by representatives of the Western far left and the Islamic world’s most radical ideologues: Consummated in Cairo.

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.