It continues to confound liberals and conservatives alike: Why would the Left defend Islamists?

The latest victim of this fascinating alliance is Richard Dawkins, the English left-wing atheist who was disinvited by a Berkeley left-wing radio station after it was discovered that Dawkins said Islam is the world’s “most evil” religion.

It did not matter to KPFA that Dawkins has made a career out of bashing Christianity, especially Catholicism—that was laudatory—but it did matter when he ripped Islam. Why did that bother the Left?

On the surface, it makes no sense for the Left to embrace Islamists. After all, the Left counsels a sexual free-for-all, and Islamists want a sexual noose on women and gays. How can libertinism and sharia be squared?

Scratch beneath the surface and it quickly becomes apparent that what unites the Left and Islamists is hate: hatred of the West. They hate America, they hate Europe, and they would like to destroy Israel.

It is that animus that commits the haters to targeting the Judeo-Christian ethos, upon which the West was built. That is why they want to gut it. The Left will support any movement that seeks to disable the West. Even after 9/11, the Left attacked Christianity, not Islam.

Dawkins finds it ironic that a Berkeley radio station is silencing him, noting that Berkeley is home to the Free Speech Movement of the 1960s. If he were an independent thinker, he wouldn’t be so shocked. A closer look at that event reveals how little the activists valued free speech.

Sol Stern was involved in the Free Speech Movement on the campus of Berkeley. Like so many other young activists at the time, he later evolved into a neo-conservative: his writings at the Manhattan Institute, on a range of social issues, are some of the best in the nation. Three years ago, he wrote a splendid piece in City Journal on the 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement.

In 1964, the administration at Berkeley made a boneheaded decision to limit student clubs from setting up tables at the entrance to the campus; it should have left well enough alone. Radicals on the campus seized on this infraction and set off the alarms, demanding an expansion of free speech rights.

Today, as Stern observes, Berkeley now “exercises more thought control over students” than ever before. But as he points out, this is less a perversion than a perfection of what the activists actually sought.

Stern says the idea that the students were fighting for free speech “was always a charade.” Indeed, “the struggle was really about clearing barriers to using the campus as a base for radical political activity.” No wonder they cheered the gag orders of Fidel Castro and the terrorism of Che Guevara.

In other words, the Free Speech Movement activists hated liberalism, properly understood: they had no use for free speech—their sponsorship of it was nothing but a useful tool to advance their radical politics.

Dawkins doesn’t get it. He makes the mistake of attributing to his left-wing censors the belief that Islam is a race, not a religion. As he sees it, this allows them to think that critics of Islam are racists. Wrong—they are not that stupid—they know the difference.

The Left is the secular wing of totalitarianism; radical Islam is its religious wing. Once this verity is grasped, their apparent differences dissolve. What they both seek is total control, and total decimation of the West.

Traditional Catholics and evangelical Christians have much in common, the latest example of which happened recently.

Following an event on July 11th where U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions addressed the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), ABC News, NBC News, and CNN smeared ADF, portraying it as a hate group. Donohue quickly came to the defense of ADF and just as quickly came words of gratitude from ADF founder Alan Sears and ADF president Michael Farris.

The Catholic-Evangelical alliance began in the 1980s when Paul Weyrich and Rev. Jerry Falwell founded the Moral Majority. It was formalized in the 1990s when Catholic theologian Father Richard John Neuhaus and evangelical leader Chuck Colson came together to bridge the differences between the two faith communities, focusing on their common interest in defending traditional moral values and religious liberty.

The alliance was further strengthened when Christian Coalition president Ralph Reed and Family Research Council president Gary Bauer reached across the pew in the 1990s to embrace Catholics.

The big moment came in 2004 when Catholics such as Deal Hudson and Donohue found common ground with evangelicals such as Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council and Dr. James Dobson of Focus on the Family. It was values voters who carried the reelection of President George W. Bush in 2004. Today we have evangelicals such as Rev. Jerry Falwell Jr. and Rev. Franklin Graham working with Catholics.

There is much work to be done. Most important, we must push for religious liberty, with a concentration on religious exemptions. We must also fight for the rights of the unborn, as well as the dispossessed, and stand up to those who seek to bully us. We will not be intimidated by anyone.

Steven A. Krueger, president of Catholic Democrats, lashed out at EWTN branding it a “Catholic-right media outlet” akin to the extremist outfit, Church Militant. The latter is a screwball website with little or no influence. EWTN is a well respected source of Catholic teaching and commentary, one that has won the plaudits of many bishops, as well as millions of Catholics, both at home and abroad. Founded by Mother Angelica, EWTN is the most influential Catholic media outlet in the world.

Krueger’s occasion to smear EWTN was a column he wrote defending a poorly conceived, and wrongheaded, analysis of Catholic-Evangelical relations; it was written by Father Antonio Spadaro, editor of a Jesuit publication in Rome, and a Protestant minister. The co-authors argued that Church Militant was an example of why the alliance between Catholics and Evangel-icals is troubling.

In point of fact, Church Militant has never been a player in this alliance, so the criticism is absurd, showing an ignorance of American political culture that is stunning. By contrast, EWTN has certainly sought good relations with all religions, and for that it should be applauded. So what is Krueger’s beef with it?

The best he could do—or is he plain lazy?—was to quote the titles of a few recent shows. As evidence of EWTN’s nefarious agenda, he cites a show called, “Reality Check, The Last Four Things: Death, Judgment, Heaven, Hell.” Doesn’t take much to scare this guy.

What is Krueger afraid of? Losing, that’s what. One might have thought he would have become accustomed to it by now. After all, he’s the founder of the disgraced Voice of the Faithful, the dissident organization that has less money than a homeless man in Peoria. A good Democrat, he defends Roe v. Wade, the decision that legalized abortion-on-demand, a position most Americans reject.

Another Catholic teaching that Krueger rejects is the apostolic status of the bishops. He recently told his pro-abortion friends at the New York Times that “the centralized, institutional authority of the Catholic Church is often conflated by the general public to represent the views of all Catholics. However, Catholics in the pews cover the spectrum of political thought, as do our bishops.”

Krueger is wrong. He does not speak for the Church. Donohue does not speak for the Church. No one does but the bishops. Just as there are Catholic Democrats who are pro-life, they do not speak for the organization by that name: Krueger does. That’s because he exercises an institutional authority that is centralized—in him.

There is another organization that “advocates and supports programs and policies that respect and promote life from conception to natural death. This includes, but is not limited to, opposition to abortion, capital punishment, and euthanasia.”

That is not the mission of Catholic Democrats—Krueger would only agree on the sanctity of human life as applied to convicted serial murderers and rapists. The mission statement belongs to Democrats for Life. It exists because Catholic Democrats, like rank-and-file Democrats, are pro-abortion.

Krueger has every right to be worried about the Catholic-Evangelical alliance. It is getting stronger, led by a president who, unlike his predecessor, opposes child abuse in the womb.

God bless EWTN for trumpeting the truth, and for its inclusiveness—Evangelicals and Catholics work well together. No need to be scared, Krueger, just worried.

Rep. Ben Ray Luján, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, told The Hill on July 31 that when it comes to abortion, “There is not a litmus test for Democratic candidates.” He made it clear that when it comes to funding, candidates who are not champions of abortion rights could still qualify.

The idea that a Democrat can be pro-life, even marginally, was enough to set off a firestorm of condemnation by abortion extremists. Spokesmen for Planned Parenthood, the All* Above Action Fund, the Women’s Health and Rights Project at the Center for American Progress, and EMILY’s List, hammered Luján. No one went more ballistic than Ilyse Hogue, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America.

Hogue noted with anger that Luján’s position was previously voiced during the presidential campaign by Sen. Bernie Sanders, and more recently by Rep. Nancy Pelosi. She will have none of it. She stood by her gal, Hillary Clinton, saying she “ran the most progressive campaign on abortion rights ever.” She certainly did.

Did Hillary lose because of abortion? It played a role: Who can forget her unbelievably cold response to a question about partial-birth abortion during one of the debates? Her lack of empathy for the child—not a trace was detectable—left most Americans uncomfortable, if not revolted.

Reading the accounts of Hogue, and the other fans of abortion, makes one wonder if they sincerely believe that women are a monolithic group, all committed to abortion rights. “Democrats can’t fight Trump without women,” Hogue writes. Reality check: Trump lost the women’s vote and won the election.

Obama did better with women than Hillary did: he won the women’s vote 55% to 44%; she won by a margin of 54% to 42%. Among white women, 58% broke for Trump; Hillary won only 39% of their vote.

Hogue lives in such a bubble that she cites the Women’s March on Washington, held after the election, as proof that women are anti-Trump. She did not mention that pro-life women’s organizations were barred from marching in this “inclusive” event.

The pro-abortion activists need not worry too much. The fat cats who work at Goldman Sachs, the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Tides Foundation, the Arca Foundation, and the various entities run by Warren Buffett and George Soros, will always grease whoever pledges to go to the mat for abortion rights.

There is one problem, however: the American public does not support abortion-on-demand, yet the Democratic Party supports it for any reason and at any time of gestation. The leadership will have to decide who matters most: donors or voters.

If they lighten up a little, they will incur the wrath of the death industry. Just ask Rep. Luján. If they don’t lighten up, they may wind up unemployed. Just ask Hillary.

Most atheists are not terrified by religion, but the activists in their ranks are in a state of hysteria these days. Prominent among them is the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF).

FFRF has written a threatening letter to Dan Hughes, mayor of Henderson County in Tennessee. The issue? A biblical verse from Psalms etched in the wall of the local county courthouse; it has been there for more than a half century.

It’s time for FFRF to do the manly thing and sue the U.S. Supreme Court.

If the militant atheists were to visit the Supreme Court, they would be apoplectic before entering: Moses and the Ten Commandments are inscribed near the top of the building.

Assuming they survived this indignity, their sensibilities would be assaulted again—even before they actually entered—by noting the Ten Commandments engraved on the lower portion of the two oak doors.

EMS personnel would have to be summoned next: inside the high court, right above where the Justices sit, is another display of the Ten Commandments.

If the atheist fundamentalists think they can escape God by walking around Washington, they are wrong: the federal buildings and the monuments will give them no relief—Christian proverbs and images are everywhere, so much so that they pose a clear and present danger to their health.

Congress needs to authorize warning signs in the D.C. airports, alerting atheist lunatics of the need to guard their health before walking the halls of government. That would be the Christian thing to do.