On Saturday, January 13, marking almost 100 days after the Muslim terror group Hamas’ savage massacre in Israel last October 7, thousands of left-wing, pro-Palestinian demonstrators rallied at the White House. They were united there to condemn President Joe Biden for his administration’s defense of Israel and to demand that he press the Jewish state for a ceasefire in its righteous campaign to eliminate Hamas once and for all.
The aggressive mob shook a temporary security fence so violently that a section of it became dislodged as the Secret Service and police officers tried to keep protesters from storming the grounds. The rioters hurled water bottles, bloodied dolls, and sticks broken from their Palestinian flags at the officers, while others tried to scale the fence. They shouted obscenities about Biden in addition to the usual genocidal call to make “Palestine” free “from the river to the sea.” White House personnel and journalists were forced to evacuate the area as a precaution. And yet no arrests of these violent anti-Israel activists were made.
This shockingly fearless demonstration in support of Islamic terrorists, of the erasure of Israel, and of the genocide of Jews was just one of a torrent of similar protests, marches, and riots from Sydney to London, from Santiago to Istanbul, from Canada to Ramallah after the atrocities of October 7. They involved hundreds of thousands of Muslims and their leftist allies aggressively massing in defense of the “Palestinian” people whom their defenders claim are being not only oppressed but even eradicated by the “colonizers” of Israel.
The protesters in America included such prominent left-wing activist organizations as the Marxist revolutionaries of Black Lives Matter (BLM) and the anti-American “women for peace” of Code Pink, who charge Israel with having “blood on its hands” but who turn a blind eye to the bloody hands of Palestinian terrorists. BLM Chicago went so far as to tweet an image honoring the Hamas paragliders who descended onto a music festival on October 7th and slaughtered hundreds of unarmed young concertgoers.
Perhaps most surreally, the protest groups included the anti-Israel Queers for Palestine, whose flamboyant members would be perfectly safe protesting in the streets of LGBT-hospitable Israel but would likely be killed attempting to march in Palestinian-controlled Gaza, where open celebrations of gender diversity are not exactly welcome. Indeed, most of the Middle East and North Africa’s Muslim-majority countries have laws criminalizing homosexuality and transsexuality, some of which carry the death penalty. “‘Queers for Palestine’ must have a death wish,” wrote Brendan O’Neill in The Telegraph. “Queers for Palestine,” said former Muslim Ayaan Hirsi Ali in a November interview, “is another manifestation of how our society is really becoming stupid.”
Why are queer activists, who literally would be strung up by the neck from cranes in Iran or otherwise brutally executed in Muslim-majority territories like Afghanistan, Iraq, or Pakistan, protesting alongside Muslims in alliance with the barbaric homophobes of Hamas? Why does the left, which shouts “Love is love” from the rooftops, keep silent when the adherents of sharia law hurl bound homosexuals from rooftops to their death?
The left launched the #MeToo movement demanding that we #BelieveAllWomen, even unprovable and/or false, politically motivated accusations. And yet the left rejects the horrific, thoroughly documented evidence of Hamas’ gang rapes, sexual torture, and savage murders on October 7th; they dismiss them as Israeli “propaganda” or try to justify such war crimes by viewing them in the political “context” of Palestinian “resistance.”
The feminist left does not hesitate to denounce America for its “toxic masculinity” and patriarchal “rape culture.” Why have they for decades turned a blind eye toward, or found ways to rationalize, the actual rape cultures under sharia law, in which women accused of adultery are stoned to death?
In short, why are radical leftists and Islamic fundamentalists, whose values seem so diametrically opposed to each other – at least in terms of sexual license and gender expression – apparently such staunch allies?
This is a counterintuitive mystery that continues to perplex and amuse many in the West who don’t understand that these movements have more in common than it seems on the surface.
The short explanation is that today’s Progressivism and Islamic fundamentalism have a common enemy in Western civilization, most specifically America and Israel – or, as the Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini referred to them during the Islamic revolution of 1979, the Great Satan and the Little Satan. America and Israel are despised because they pose the greatest obstacles to the leftist and Islamist lust for power and to their differing utopian visions for all mankind.
Both radical leftism and Islamic fundamentalism are totalitarian movements driven to “fundamentally transform” the world, as former President Barack Obama would put it. The left dreams of engineering a global, collectivist society in which the inequitable Western freedoms provided by capitalism and individualism have been eradicated in order to liberate the oppressed and to establish “social justice.” In reality, this dream is nothing more than the nightmare of communism, but marketed more slickly today as environmentally-conscious, personal freedom (“You will own nothing – and you’ll be happy,” goes the slogan from the globalist elites at the World Economic Forum.)
For Muslim fundamentalists, the world is divided between Dar al-Islam – or the House of Islam, the parts of the world where sharia law rules, such as Afghanistan and certain boroughs of London – and Dar al-harb – the House of War – the lands ruled by infidels. The Islamists’ conviction is that they are obligated to wage perpetual jihad until all of Dar al harb submits to Allah and is subsumed into Dar al-Islam, and the whole world is justly ordered in a Muslim political-religious state called a caliphate, ruled by a successor of the Muslim prophet Muhammad known as a caliph. This is the same imperialist dream that inspired seventh-century Muslims to conquer, within a mere one hundred years after the death of Muhammad, an empire larger than the Roman Empire had ever been.
To political conservatives, who recognize that our flawed humanity cannot shape heaven on earth without resorting to totalitarian coercion, these dangerous visions seem like unrealizable fantasies, but to the visionaries themselves they are not only realizable but already underway and gaining momentum throughout the West.
In the United States, for example, the far left took the White House in 2020 and has since dedicated itself to destabilizing the economy, subverting the military, disempowering America on the world stage, opening the southern border to an ungovernable flood of migrants and drugs, exacerbating racial tensions, and fomenting lawlessness and disorder in cities across the nation.
In Europe, meanwhile, thanks to unrestrained mass migration from North Africa and the Middle East, the late Libyan leader Muammar Gadhafi’s threat “that Allah will grant Islam victory in Europe” and “turn it into a Muslim continent within a few decades” is coming to pass. For example: between its “woke” leadership and aggressively unassimilated Islamic subculture, the once-great country of England is in danger of having its English identity wiped out entirely. France, which has the largest Muslim population on the continent, is undergoing a similar “fundamental transformation.”
The October 7 terrorism against Israel, which the left tries to dignify as a “military operation,” was the most devastating single attack on Jews since the Holocaust, and Islamists and their Jew-hating left-wing allies are positively giddy about it. They promise more to come.
And so, both the radical leftist and Muslim fundamentalist see their goal within reach: the subversion of the capitalist West and its most prosperous and powerful exemplar, America, and the wiping of its ally, the Jewish state, from the map. They smell blood in the water, and this emboldens them to take to the streets from Sydney to London in ugly displays of joint dominance.
This “red-green,” or communist-Muslim, alliance has a long history, as Freedom Center founder David Horowitz details in his essential 2004 book Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left. He writes that “[t]he moralistic fervor of Islamic fanatics has not proved an obstacle to collaboration” with the secular radical left. They both view America as “a satanic force in the modern world, the linchpin of a global order of hierarchy and privilege that is responsible for the misery of the world’s impoverished masses.”
In the mid-20th century, Islamic fundamentalists were hostile to Communism and its western sources. When the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, met with Adolph Hitler in Berlin in November 1941 to pledge his cooperation with the Nazis, it was because he believed the Arabs and Germany were natural allies since they had the same enemies: the English, the Jews, and the Communists.
But as Horowitz notes in Unholy Alliance:
“In the 1950s [Muslim fundamentalists] began assimilating ideological influences with anti-American and anti-Western agendas. They recognized that the condition under which the Western left could join an international coalition with Islamic jihadists was the existence of a ‘liberation’ struggle backed by Islamic regimes (however brutal) that were opposed to some degree by the United States.”
And so, by the time of the Iranian revolution in 1979, the dour cleric Khomeini was able to rally the support of the political left in Iran and abroad “by portraying his movement as a revolution of the oppressed… Consequently, at its inception the Islamo-fascist regime was supported by both the Iranian Communist party and the international progressive left.”
Horowitz adds:
“[w]hile the elements necessary for an alliance between American and Islamic radicals were present to some degree at the outset of the Middle East conflict, it was a confluence of events occurring in the last quarter of the century that allowed them to reach critical mass. These events included Iran’s Islamic revolution, the creation of an Islamic jihad in Afghanistan in 1979, and the subsequent transformation of the Palestinian struggle from a secular movement inspired by fascism and Communism into a full-fledged Islamic holy war.”
Young people today, who have been taught more about pronoun etiquette than world history, are ignorant about the origins of the red-green alliance. They only have the vague sense that Muslims are an oppressed minority whose struggle against the “settler” regime of Israel and its supporter America is righteous. The Daily Mail reports that many millennial and Gen-Z women have actually been inspired to convert to Islam in the wake of the October 7th barbarism. Lorenzo Vidino, director of the Program on Extremism at George Washington University, says this is because embracing Islam is “the ultimate rebellion” against the West. “What’s more rebellious, what’s more anti-Western and anti-capitalism and anti-establishment, than a conversion to Islam?”
In another example, a December 2023 poll in the Daily Mail revealed that one in five young Americans has a positive view of the late 9/11 mastermind and al Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden, and that three in ten 18- to 29-year-old voters believe bin Laden’s anti-Western views, as outlined in his 2002 “Letter to America” and recently spread virally on the Chinese spy and disinformation app TikTok, are a “force for good.”
These examples demonstrate the successful left-wing indoctrination in the schools, where our youth are taught that their own civilization has not been a force for good in the world, but for the colonialist oppression, exploitation, and genocide of indigenous peoples everywhere, and that America is uniquely guilty because of its role in the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, its supposedly imperialistic ventures abroad, and its purported systemic racism at home.
Speaking of schools, the link between left-wing activism and Islamism is manifested most commonly on campus in Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), the antisemitic, pro-Palestinian activist group founded at the University of California Berkeley in 2001. SJP now has hundreds of branches on campuses across America and plays a key role in college anti-Israel protests. The association has roots in and ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, which has been the mothership of Islamic terrorism for nearly a hundred years. Like all Brotherhood legacy groups in America, from the Muslim Students Association (MSA) to the Council for American Islamic Relations (CAIR), it should be banned.
Another factor instilling a cultural self-loathing in Western youth and blinding them to the illiberalism of Islam is the left’s multicultural mindset. Multiculturalism is a morally relativistic, anti-Western worldview which esteems all non-Eurocentric cultural identities as beautiful, worthy, and guiltless. Thus, the left can rail against the capitalist West’s greed, but refuses to criticize corrupt regimes throughout Africa, Central America, and South America, which impoverish the people while the ruling elite live in obscene luxury.
The multiculturalist left, then, reserves vitriolic condemnations for America and Israel while defending, or at least refusing to call out, even the most barbaric behavior of non-Western cultures such as Islamic countries under sharia law. Hence, they defend Hamas’ sadism with placards that defiantly declare, “You don’t get to choose how we resist.”
Some are optimistic that the red-green alliance cannot survive its irreconcilable differences. A.S. Ibrahim, professor of Islamic Studies at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, believes the honeymoon is over and that the “fragile alliance between Islam and the political left is dying.” The reason is the left’s “LGBTQ revolution,” which is highlighting “the utter dissonance between Islam and the left.”
Ibrahim observes:
“The version of Islam many liberals hope to advance in the West is completely fanciful. Their ‘Islam’ must be a ‘cool’ inclusive religion, judging no one, embracing all, advancing progressive ideals, and, decidedly, advocating LGBTQ rights. They have invented a modern fiction.
This ‘Islam’ doesn’t exist—it has to be invented. It can only exist in ignorance of Islam’s particularities or when knowledge of the Quran and Muhammad’s teachings is nonexistent. After all, Islam’s scripture explicitly condemns homosexuality as the abominable sin of the people of Lot.”
“While Muslim groups have often found a haven under the umbrella of the sociopolitical left,” Ibrahim concludes, “many have now realized that this simply won’t survive theologically.”
I am skeptical. I foresee that the toxic partnership of the radical left and radical Islam will continue to wage war together until either they bring down the Great Satan and the Little Satan – or America and Israel crush that unholy alliance and preserve the West.
Mark Tapson is a writer, screenwriter, culture critic, and political commentator. The Shillman Fellow on Popular Culture for the David Horowitz Freedom Center, he has written nearly a thousand articles about the intersection of culture and politics for FrontPage Magazine, Breitbart News, PJ Media, National Review, The New Criterion, and elsewhere. Among the numerous films Mark has worked on are The Path to 9/11 and the award-winning documentary Jihad in America: The Grand Deception. Mark is also the host of The Right Take podcast and the author of a forthcoming book on the war on masculinity. Follow him at his Substack page, Culture Warrior.