Marxism and Islamism are utopian, promising a future in which harmony, equity, and altruism will replace conflict, unfairness, and corruption. Both embrace historicism, the doctrine that ineluctable historical laws -- economic in one case, divine in the other -- make eventual triumph inevitable. Each is fundamentally anti-nationalist, hostile to the very notion of the nation-state; today's states and borders are illegitimate artifacts of an oppressive order, ultimately to be replaced by Communism or a Caliphate. Accordingly, both movements conceive of themselves as inherently internationalist, operating across borders as readily as within them. Though these movements regard seizing and using state power as essential, they do not want control of any particular government; they want control of the world.
And this:
For ultimately, both have as their greatest asset -- and perhaps their deepest similarity -- a genius for disguising a brutal and self-serving political agenda as a quasi-religious mission of world salvation. Both claim not only to solve all political and social problems, but to answer all questions worth asking. Both thus inspire fanatical devotion worldwide. Each movement's local varieties are always idiosyncratic, but everywhere the followers recognize a commonality of interest. That shared interest is to tie down and harass the United States, to destabilize pro-American regimes, to foment class or religious conflict, and to weaken the capitalist West.
Just go read the whole thing.
