• Global left radicals (the “Reds”) and Islamists (the “Greens”) may hold vastly different beliefs, but they exhibit similarities in their respective all-encompassing ideologies and ways of political and militant action.
• Both feature uncompromising and enforced dogmas and both believe that their religious or political solutions will solve humanity’s historical ills.
• The Red-Green Alliance’s common enemy is the West: socialists believe the West is exploitative, oppressive, inequitable, and hegemonic. Islamists believe the West corrupts traditional morals, is overly focused on materialism, and wishes to dominate them.
• Aggressive practices of “revolution” and “resistance” are common to Left radicals and Islamists.
• Both movements exploit the poor and marginalized of their societies to mobilize armed struggle.
• Though ideologically fierce and focused, the societies born of socialist thought and Islamism are severely flawed. Their ideologies ultimately appeal to naïve followers in the West – “useful idiots” – who serve the corrupt Red-Green Alliance’s metaobjective of world domination.

Since Hamas’s October 7, 2023, massacre, radical Westerners have excused and even justified Hamas’s brutal atrocities committed against more than 1,400 Israeli citizens, residents, and visitors, claiming the massacres were “resistance” to Israel’s “occupation and colonialism.” This is not a new charge. It emanated since the 1960s with the rise of “Third Worldist” liberation movements, from Cuba to Algeria to Vietnam, that championed “armed struggle” by the colonized against Western “imperialism.”

The Palestine Liberation Organization adopted the ideology of these schools of thought under the influence of the Chinese, Soviets, Vietnamese, Cubans, and Algerians. The PLO’s Palestine Research Center, headquartered in Francophone Beirut during the terror organization’s exile there, was run by Fayez Sayegh, who was profoundly influenced by the writings of Martinican foundational theorist of postcolonial studies, Frantz Fanon, who had fought in Algeria with the FLN. Accordingly, one of the PRC’s first propaganda works distributed argued that “Zionism is colonialism.”

The meeting of Red and Green in the 1970s reflected Iran’s 1979 Revolution. Iranian Marxists and Islamists banded together to the approval of Western Marxists and radicals, though the regime betrayed leftists shortly thereafter. The Iranian Revolution’s Islamist element jived with the spirit of Third Worldism in that it transformed Iran from a Western-aligned monarchy to a non-aligned state, infusing the Revolution with crossover appeal to Western leftists of the day. The Revolution inspired secular Palestinians, including PLO operatives, to believe that Islamism could motivate the masses to support their cause.

While Western Marxist progressives – the Reds – are identified with the far left, and Islamists – the Greens – the far right (by virtue of the fact they are reactionary and fanatically religious movements), the Palestinian cause in the form of Hamas, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and other minor religious organizations aligns them. For the Greens, this alliance serves political convenience. But for the Reds, it is true solidarity. Examining both groups, though, reveals a striking symmetry in thought and action, which may explain their mirror image: opposites attract compatibility. What are the Red-Green alliance’s points of symmetry and synergy in reified ideology, “praxis” in Marxian terms, and how much do they matter?

1. Worldview and Eschatology

Marxian socialism self-identifies as “progressive,” a term also associated with the far-left flank of the Democratic Party in the United States. Those unfamiliar with Marxist theory may overlook its origins. It stems from a theory that a society with a socialist “consciousness” – mindset – is “progressing” purposefully towards Marx’s vision of “the end of History.” This is where the popular term “the right side of History” originates – that is, any action that helps humanity progress toward the “end of History” is a positive one. The final attainment of communist materialist (and in neo-Marxism, social) equity constitutes the “end of History” and, therefore, true communism. Under communism, capitalist exploitation, imperialism, and colonialism will have been eradicated. Traditionally, communists pursued or purported to pursue this goal through war, rhetoric, “active measures,” agitprop (propaganda for agitation purposes), cultural and military revolutions, and people’s war.

In parallel, Islamism – political Islam – views human history as progress towards an Islamic world. The Muslim Brotherhood, established by Hassan al Banna in Egypt in 1927, preached a three-stage method: dawa – missionizing non-Muslims to “revert,” siyasa – political activism, and inqilab – military action and takeover through persistent kinetic jihad, struggle.

The Iranian Revolution took on a specifically Shiite version of political Islam, a “modern Mahdism” – Messianic and revolutionary, nostalgic for the early mythical years of Islam. As written in a hadith, the Revolution imagined a future in which one of Muhammad’s descendants, “the Mahdi,” would fill the Earth with justice and righteousness, defeating the iniquity that Muslim tyrants had brought the world, and replace it with the Islamic justice of the true Mahdi, before the end of the world. The Iranian Revolution influenced Sunni Muslim Brotherhood Islamism, as can be perceived in ISIS/ISIL, Al Qaeda, and Hamas’s thoughts and actions.

In classic socialist ideology, Revolution must be constant — a “protracted conflict” — until communist domination and perfection are achieved, creating a self-transformed “New Man.” According to Iranian Marxist dissident Chahla Chafiq, parallel to this, the Iranian Islamist Revolution created a narrow model for the “Islamic man” to parallel Marx’s “Socialist man.”

On an organizational level, the socialist state demands that citizens comply with the party’s will, in contrast to a liberal democratic ethos. Noncompliance makes one “counterrevolutionary.” A citizen’s very existence rests on their oneness with party groupthink and a willingness to die for the cause. Similarly, in Islamist movements, compliance with state or organizational Islam is required, as is martyrdom at times. Both communist and Islamist struggles are active, aggressive, and constantly in pursuit of the ultimate goal.

Parallel to communism’s World Revolution that overturns old and oppressive systems and creates world peace, Islamism offers sharia following the World Caliphate of Islamic equality and peace. Both ideologies present an all-encompassing panacea for human problems.

2. The Common Enemy: the West

The enemy “factor” in both Islamist and socialist ideologies is the Western liberal order, viewed as fundamentally corrupt and irreparable. The socialists’ main criticism of the West is an unequal distribution of wealth and status, with exploitation and discrimination built into the capitalist system. Neo-Marxists also shun “meritocracy,” which affords different outcomes. Western “imperialism” aims to dominate the world to facilitate capitalism, often working through colonialism, to further exploit foreign people and resources.

Capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism, therefore, go hand in hand. In addition, some neo-Marxists oppose the nuclear family and traditional gender roles and norms since they believe them to perpetuate a societal structure of oppression and exploitation. In the same vein, racism is an integral part of the neo-Marxist agenda, which relates colonialism to the oppression of “Global South” peoples in a movement known as “Postcolonialism.”

These ideas all fed into Soviet and Chinese support for the Palestinian cause beginning in the 1960s. Since the late 1970s, with the release of Marxist Edward Said’s two pathbreaking “postcolonial studies” books, Orientalism and The Question of Palestine, the Palestine movement has become an academic centerpiece of the global left agenda. Around the same time, Islamists gained absolute power in the form of the Islamic Republic of Iran, which coalesced Islamists, secular Marxists, and “Islamic Marxists” to revolt against the Western-aligned Shah. These groups all viewed the West as a bitter and hegemonic enemy.

Yet political Islam did not begin in Iran. It had been formulated 50 years earlier by Muslim Brotherhood ideologues, most importantly Indo-Pakistani Sayid Mawdudi and Egypt’s Hassan al Banna and Sayid Qutb, who preached jihad against the West which, between the two world wars, possessed colonial mandates on Muslim lands. Sayid Qutb’s influential foundational writings identify central issues of contention that Islam maintains with Western culture: sexual mores, “selfish individualism,” lack of community, and materialism.

In parallel, the critique of Western materialism was also central to neo-Marxist ideology. Herbert Marcuse, “the father of the New Left,” wrote an influential book, One Dimensional Man, that dealt with the rampant materialism of advanced capitalism in 1964.

Where Islamists and Socialists differ sharply is in their attitudes to gender roles and sexual morality. This is why a puzzling phenomenon such as “Queers for Palestine” can exist only as a “one-way street” of solidarity from the “Reds” to the “Greens” but not vice versa.

3. Repressive and Militant Political Culture

Socialist political culture and political Islamist culture mirror one another. Where socialists are doctrinaire, seeing world events and problems through the lens of Marxian social justice thought, Islamists see them as fundamentally spiritual ailments caused by a lack of adherence to Islam.

Socialist political culture and Islamist political culture are equally intolerant of differing views and behaviors and tend toward totalitarianism and authoritarianism. In China, the USSR, and under ISIS, the Taliban, and the Iranian regime, torture, beatings, and imprisonment are norms. Outsiders and foreign ideas are suspicious and punishable in non-liberal societies: communists call subversives “counterrevolutionary” while Islamists call subversives “kufr” – apostates.

“Struggle” represents another point of symmetry for Reds and Greens. Jihad means struggle—spiritual and military—and it is the motivating factor in political Islam. Struggle in the Soviet or Maoist sense is perfecting the practice of ideological adherence to the precepts of the communist doctrine and the “armed struggle” against capitalist oppressors and states.

Citizens who are at odds with doctrine in communist countries were often put through “struggle sessions” to correct “blasphemous” views of counterrevolutionary “false consciousness” before being “brainwashed” (a Maoist term), tortured, or executed. On two opposite ends of the spectrum, communist China’s treatment of its Muslim Uyghur minority parallels the authoritarian Islamist regime in Iran that has “reeducated” and punished apostates, such as the Marxist Tudeh party, and feminists, with repression, forced confessions, torture, and executions. Likewise, preventatively indoctrinating youth against the enemy is a common tactic by Islamists, away from Westernized jahaliyah (Islamic ignorance). And by socialists, the common tactic is indoctrination against capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism.

4. Aggressive Political and Kinetic Warfare

Both socialist World Revolution and jihad seek to subjugate all peoples, supposedly for their own material and moral good. Intifada, which means uprising (literally shaking off), a term first popularized in 1987 for West Bank unrest against the Israel Defense Forces, is often interchanged with “revolution” and “resistance” by pro-Hamas activists. Hamas believes that it must reclaim Islamic lands by “shaking off” the Zionist invaders in what is considered a “defensive jihad” obligatory upon each individual Muslim. Bin Laden took a similar political Islam approach in a fatwa written in 1998 against the West.

The familiar rhetoric of “revolution” and “resistance” is a meeting point between the Reds and the Greens. To socialist-oriented activists and ideologues, revolution refers to overturning the capitalist, Western-aligned order. In the Palestinian context, it relates to the overturning, eradication of, and liberation from the “occupation” – any Jewish settlement in the State of Israel, the West Bank, or Gaza – on “Arab” territory deemed “Palestine.” Likewise, the Palestinian cause was consciously associated with both Third Worldist “liberation” movements (by Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat, and in its 1968 Charter) and Islamic movements (from Haj Amin al Husseini to Hamas, “the Islamic Resistance Movement”). Revolution, resistance, and jihad all came to be the plan and praxis (applied ideology and theory) to reclaim Dar al Islam for Muslims (or Arab lands in the heyday of Arab nationalism). Jihad can take the form of rhetoric, lawfare, and politics – the same tools radical movements use.

Here, the rhetoric that has fueled and mechanized the Palestine movement again finds intersection and symmetry with socialist rhetoric and terminology: “Protracted conflict” is the term used by Maoists to depict a never-ending struggle ending in a World Revolution; jihad is a drawn-out struggle waged to transform the world into a Global Caliphate.

5. The Personnel of the Revolution: “The Oppressed”

Another essential conceptual similarity in the Red-Green alliance is that of “people’s war” – a Maoist concept expressing that the communist world revolution would come from outlying, rural areas. Opposed to the Russian model, the Revolution wouldn’t trickle down from the elite but “bump up” from peasants to urban areas. This is why the Maoist people’s war was applied to the Palestinian cause, with Palestinian Marxists imagining a revolution of fellahin – local farmers – in the struggle against Zionism. Mao himself saw the Palestinian cause as a marginal yet pivotal point in achieving world revolution. In parallel, in Islamist ideology, the community of Muslims – the ummah – must actively come together to fight jihad to protect co-religionists, keep the integrity of Dar al Islam, and spread Islam further.

Neo-Marxist ideological developments of the 1960s allowed for a fertile “cross-pollination” between these communist and Islamist ideals of struggle and war. Marcuse recognized the difficulty in fomenting the communist revolution in advanced capitalist societies where most citizens were materially comfortable, impeding their socialist consciousness. He suggested that this required that intellectual, academic elites who had achieved socialist consciousness band together with the marginalized “ghetto population” (in his terms, poor residents of the inner cities) who were still motivated to rebel.

In terms of the Palestinian movement, its leaders and supporters have perpetuated the conflict by purposely not resettling refugees and directing Palestinian ire towards Israel instead of fixing their corrupt system. For example, Yasser Arafat refused to allow the Israeli government to help rebuild Gaza in the 1970s. UNRWA and United Nations General Assembly resolutions also perpetuate the conflict. Hamas’s terror and ideology also fit this pattern. Arafat’s guiding principle sumud – steadfastness – corresponds to the revolutionary motivation, and he believed it to be more easily extracted from the desperately poor and underprivileged, as in the case of the Iranian Revolution’s Basij and Bin Laden’s fatwas, which also appealed to the poor.

Though Islamic ideals give no credence to the victimhood “ratings” used by the intersectional movement, social justice has been invoked by the movement: everything from the 2002 “Letter to America” attributed to bin Laden to the Iranian regime and Hamas. Not only as a critique against the West, Islamists hold that breaches of Dar al Islam are a desecration of Islamic “social justice.” This travesty of justice is often explained by invoking anti-Jewish tropes both from Islamic and other sources.

“Useful Idiots”?

The concept of “useful idiots” – those who can be manipulated for political causes, especially those of the enemy – has been long associated with the cynical use of Western liberals by communists. Yet, from Iran’s 1979 Revolution and throughout the history of the Palestinian cause, Islamists have used Western progressives as useful idiots. Arafat himself consulted with master propagandist General Nyguen Giap of Vietnam, who told him to advertise the Palestinian cause as one of “human rights” as opposed to one of eradicating the Jewish state to replace it with another Arab and Muslim one. Post-October 7, Islamists have openly used Western liberals and progressives as “useful idiots,” with Hizbullah, Hamas, and Iranian regime leaders congratulating American college protestors on their part in the “resistance.” See Supreme Leader Khamenei’s letter to American university students.

Despite the symmetry and synergy in both ideology and practice, the Red-Green alliance’s various parts are far from consistent in applying theory. The Soviet Union (whom the Chinese criticized as “not real communism”) and later China (which has been described as authoritarian “state capitalism”) were wont to truly apply their lofty socialist theories. Other authoritarian regimes, such as Iran and North Korea, also show how theoretical principles are ill-applied and, indeed, unwillingly accepted.

Yet, theoretical doctrines provide a front for Red-Green authoritarian dictatorships to project “aspirations” for the “useful idiots” outside of their own societies – progressive Westerners. They wish to foment subversion, uprisings, and revolutions in their own societies. When progressive Westerners are indoctrinated with communist, Maoist, and postcolonial ideals in their own educational systems, their praxis, for now, are protest movements and political activism.

Since modern progressive Westerners have no real experience with life in authoritarian or communist countries, they can only hope, as Marcuse suggested, to negate the stalemates of advanced capitalist society and its false consciousness by aiming for an amorphous “new sensibility.” This requires the abolition of the old society – and all those aligned with it – to make room for the new, imagined one. Many miles away, states who wish for the fall of Western society for their own power goals, applaud radical efforts for accomplishing from the inside what is nearly impossible for them to do from the outside.

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Notes