Prisoners of history, the left is desperately trying to recreate a radical Arab politics in the Middle East from a thin gruel of insurrectionary Islamism. For many leftists today, the radicalism of the likes of Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas become a stand-in for the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and People's Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). But just as you can't make a car out of cheese, you can't make democratic, secular and humanist movement, left or right, out of religious fundamentalism. These are not your father's radicals.
There's more to this than 'my enemy's enemy is my friend', though.