The Red-Green Coalition

No, the Red-Green coalition is not a political alliance between members of the Republican Party and the environmental catastrophists of the Green Party. Republicans do not accept that climate change—which has been a feature of the entire history of the earth—is going to burn up the earth because of one of lowest levels of CO2, a compound necessary for life, in the history of the earth. 

Rather, the Red-Green coalition is an alliance of convenience between leftists, including progressives, socialists, and communists, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, Islamists, Muslims who actively pursue the political goals of Islam, such as Islamic supremacism and the punishment of those non-compliant with Islam. 

Leftists dislike, detest, or hate capitalism, individualism, inequality of wealth, status or achievement, and nationalism. They prefer socialism, collectivism, absolute equality (equity), and internationalism. Islamists are mandated by their religion to strive for the triumph of Islam over all other faiths, including secular faiths, such as progressivism and socialism. 

What commonalities bring these two disparate collectivities together? Both leftists and Islamists hate Western countries and Western civilization, and especially the United States of America. 

Islamists hate the West because it was founded as a Christian civilization, and Christianity is still the majority faith. Islamic armies have repeatedly invaded and occupied Western countries, only to be driven out eventually. Now, Islamists are engaged in migration jihad and believe that they will succeed in taking over Europe. 

While succeeding, slowly, in extending their power in Europe, Islamists have not made substantial gains through immigration jihad in the USA, although it has done somewhat better in Canada. But the USA is the most powerful Western country. It has led recent Western attacks in the Dar al-Islam, e.g. in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria, although to good effect only in the latter, with the destruction of the Islamic State.  

 Socialists hate the West because it is the home of capitalism, individuality, and inequality. They hate Western civilization because it was invented and built by men who were white, a race currently unpopular among the left, which is increasingly dominated by feminists and feminists of color. 

 Leftists and Islamists find commonality in chanting “Death to America” and burning American flags. Conveniently, America supports its ally Israel, which is a great scapegoat target, due to the fact that Jews control Israel, and everyone hates the Jews. Islamists hate them because they are not willing to be annihilated by Islamist attacks. Leftists hate them for the spurious myth, false in every element, that they are white, colonial settlers oppressing, through an apartheid regime, an indigenous people of color, the Palestinians. 

This joyous Red and Green coalition has enlivened North America with tent encampments at universities, blockades, harassment of Jewish students and professors, sit-downs blocking public roads and Jewish-owned businesses, and gunfire and Molotov cocktail attacks on Jewish schools and houses of worship. Almost everywhere in Canada, but also in the U.S., particularly in the highly corrupt Ivy League universities, these events were viewed with great equanimity by civic officials and the police, neither of which wanted to take sides, preferring to be even-tempered and even-handed with attackers and victims. University officials were equally passive, except when seeking to pander to the Hamas supporters. 

 But these celebratory public events were just exuberance following the Hamas atrocities in Israel on 7 October 2023. The groundwork for the leftist and Islamist uprising had been prepared for decades, especially in the universities. Marxist-inspired theories—post-colonial theory (blaming the West for all of the ills in the world), decolonization (delegitimizing countries in the Anglosphere), radical race theory, and feminist and queer gender theory—were the dominant teaching and research frameworks in the social sciences, humanities, education, social work, and law. 

Islamist projects, supported by leftists, for many years set out the political priorities of the alliance. The destruction of Israel was the first step, and advocating for that became the main R-G activity in universities. The Boycott, Divest, and Sanction (BDS) movement against Israel was the main discourse in universities by Islamist and leftist student groups. Supporting this were the annual Israel Apartheid weeks at many universities. Student institutions pursue anti-Israel restrictions on student officers, and student newspapers, stridently anti-Israel, refuse any articles defending Israel. No diversity of opinion is allowed!

This movement was directed against Israel and the Zionists in North America who support Israel. But as most North American Jews—even the majority who are leftist in political orientation and not active Zionists—believe in and support Israel as the national liberation movement of the Jewish people, the anti-Israel movement is, in effect, antisemitic. Many activists of the Red-Green Alliance take the shortcut, directly attacking Jews while chanting that they should go back to Poland or be sent to the gas, a reference to the Nazi death camps. 

I had my own run-in with the Red-Green Alliance when I was attacked in a public letter signed by four Muslim student groups and four leftist student groups for my public interest writing, one article of which described tribal and pre-state politics and conflict in the Middle East, based on my academic work, including ethnographic fieldwork in the Middle East and fifty years of study. The letter demanded that my university punish me, although, happily for me, the university declined. This was an exceptional result because, in many similar cases in North American universities, the universities canceled professors about whom they had received complaints from students.  

The problem appeared to be that I was not sufficiently complementary about the Middle East and should have stated how wonderful everything was until Westerners ruined it, which is the position of postcolonial theory. The letter also vilified my other articles, misdescribing their content as deviating from all civilized norms. How many signatories ever read my Middle East article /or other articles is not known, but I doubt it was very many. Mobs, even in universities, follow the leaders and chant the slogans rather than engage in independent inquiry and judgment. 

 While the Islamists and leftists agree that America (and Canada and the West) and Israel must be destroyed, their objectives beyond that are disparate and in conflict. Ayatollah Khomeini arrived in Iran with the support of revolutionary leftists, but his founding of the Islamic Republic required the marginalization and elimination of the leftists, and many were executed by the Islamist regime. Khomeini’s goal was to spread Islam, his idea of the correct form of Islam: Shi’ism, throughout the Middle East and around the world. 

Khomeini was following the Quran and Islamic law in demanding that Islam, as the legitimate and correct faith, dominate human life and societies. Islam is a supersessionist faith, believing that it superseded Christianity and Judaism, which it recognizes as corrupt, imperfect, and incorrect. However, Islam recognizes followers of Christianity and Judaism as “people of the book,” as following traditions from which Islam drew and corrected. Therefore, the people of the book are allowed the special status as “protected,” dhimma, as long as they accept Muslim dominance and are obedient to Islamic law and rules, which in practice involve an inferior status with many practical disadvantages. 

However, Christians and Jews who do not recognize the dominance of Islam and are disobedient to Islamic rules and Muslim rulers are equivalent to infidels. In relation to infidels, Muslims, according to Islam, may lawfully kill them, enslave them, kidnap and charge ransom to release them, or free them. Infidel females are equivalent to slaves and may be lawfully raped. But disobedient Jews and Christians must be punished and subjected to Islamic dominance. 

Islamists are extreme conservatives; their ideal is 7th-century Arabia under the guidance of Mohammed. It is their goal to reconstruct society to conform to that ideal period. Leftists, in contrast, are utopians. They seek the ideal society in which everyone is equal, all assets are distributed equally, and politics is directed by the United Nations. Leftism, encompassing progressivism, socialism, and communism, is a secular religion. Belief is mandatory; disagreement is heresy. Freedom is a corrupt bourgeois rationalization that is forbidden. 

Both leftists and Islamists favor totalitarian societies, although they differ in the nature of those societies. Leftists have proceeded to advance their goal with their march through the educational, media, and governmental institutions of liberal democracies; Islamists have tried to advance their goal by terrorism against small liberal democracies and immigration jihad against strong liberal democracies, where their fecund demography projects dominance in the future. 

Supporters of liberal democracy, whether conservative or liberal, can only look on aghast at the undermining of their societies and the erasure of their culture and values. But, if they want to protect their societies, they had better do more than look on.