You leftists will use anything at election time.

The cultural interpretation of 9 11 as a civilizational clash explains why a number of former leftists have joined conservatives in their hostility to Islam. In the past, most American leftists would have regarded the war in Afghanistan as a neo imperialist venture.

What can American Tea Party enthusiasts, Russian chauvinists, fearful Dutch and Danes, and Singaporean leftists possibly have in common that is driving this anti immigrant sentiment?

PALO ALTO Elections often turn on the state of the economy, especially in hard times. When growth and jobs are down, voters throw out incumbents whether Spanish leftists, French rightists, or Dutch centrists.

Hamas spokesmen speak not of Israelis but of Zionists, as does Iran s President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad. Discussion about the de Zionization of Israel can also be heard at universities worldwide and even among Jewish leftists.

A year ago, Saad al Ketatni, the Muslim Brotherhood leader, would never have dreamed of being Speaker of Parliament. The same applies to the leftists and liberals who now hold around 20 of the parliament s seats.

From the American perspective, Europe is less a model than a historical relic. The continent s national characteristics have returned to the fore Germany with its economic power, France with its terrorists, Greece with its leftists, and so forth.

In the early years, Israel was admired by Western leftists for being a progressive state, run by Polish and Russian socialists. Today s Israeli leaders, however, in their rhetoric and behavior, often sound more like the old European anti Semites.

Like leftists everywhere, the French left favors a large degree of state control of the economy, together with technocratic rather than liberal solutions to social and economic problems. This type of thinking has played a vital role in the development of European institutions.

Even the most moderate Palestinians now reject Israeli leftists offers of help in terms of human support against the actions of Israeli settlers or police. The political dialogue between moderates of both camps is mostly dead, and personal contact has become minimal.

In fact, the announcement that Bouteflika planned to run was enough to unite Islamists and leftists even parties that had previously been co opted by the regime and spur them to stage a boycott of the vote. When the election results were announced, they swiftly rejected the new government as illegitimate.

As the months pass, both parties will probably find that they face their greatest political difficulty in managing the fringes of their own camps rightists in the Conservative Party, who don t like the centrist moderation of the coalition s policies, and leftists in the Liberal Democratic Party who don t want to support a largely Conservative government.

The wheels of Philippine justice need retooling, so much so that the country s Chief Justice himself recently called for an emergency summit to discuss a rash of extra judicial killings that have the claimed the lives of leftists, human rights workers, and journalists under President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo. There have been few convictions for these crimes.

In the late 1990 s and early 2000 s, anti globalization demonstrations targeted the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, the World Economic Forum, and McDonald s. Globalization was seen at this time as in the vision of the 1960 s Italian leftists as the exploitation of the world s poor by a plutocratic and technocratic elite.

The most sinister form of anti Zionism is to be found among leftists who see Israel and the US as the planet s twin evils. Those who see dark American forces behind all that is wrong with the world, from financial crashes to the violence in Ukraine, are prone to detect the malign hand of Israeli or even Jewish lobbies in every US policy.

The European Parliament election in May shocked Europe s elites, as parties of the far right, assorted euroskeptics, and even leftists made strong gains in many countries, fueled in part by popular frustration with the European Commission s concentration of power. Great Britain may be headed for a referendum on EU membership in 2017 unless certain terms of its membership are revised.