Not sure that this is what he really wanted to illuminate but Seamus Milne explains how the radical left can (indeed should be) on the side of the Mullahs:

By the same token, for
the secular left – which is about social justice and solidarity if it
is about anything – not to have stood with British Muslims over
Islamophobia or the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq would have been
the real betrayal. It is not, and has not been, in any way necessary to
compromise with social conservatism over women’s or gay rights, say, to
have such an engagement; on the contrary, dialogue can change both
sides in positive ways. But it is a chronic flaw of liberalism to fail
to recognise power inequalities in social relations – and the attitude
of some liberals to contemporary Islam reflects that blindness in
spades.

Translation: It’s OK to wonder whether the appropriate penalty for homosexuality is stoning or being thrown off a roof, it’s OK for a woman to be stoned for adultery while the man gets off free (even in the case of rape), it’s OK for a girl to be hanged personally by the presiding judge for her impertinence to him, it’s OK to call for, to glory in each death on the way to that happy day, the extinction of the Jews, as long as while one does so one is on the wrong end of "the power inequalities in social relations".
A very Arab thought, the enemy of my enemy is my friend, so while certain of them may be total scumbags they are, at least, talking truth to power, man.