Eli Goldman | אלי גולדמן

Epic 😎

The Red-Green Alliance is the surprisingly durable partnership between sections of the radical left and political Islamism, united less by any shared vision of the future than by a mutual loathing of the present. Reds supply the language of anti-imperialism, anti-capitalism and identity grievance. Greens supply the street muscle, the demographic weight and a ready-made narrative of civilisational victimhood. The result is visible wherever Palestinian flags fly beside hammer-and-sickle banners, or where campus activists who would normally police micro-aggressions fall silent about the treatment of women, gays and apostates under the systems they now defend as 'resistance'. The arrangement is older than the current wave of tent cities. Western Marxists cheered the 1979 Iranian Revolution as a blow against American power, only to discover that the ayatollahs had little use for them once the Shah was gone. The same pattern has repeated, in milder form, whenever secular leftists have helped Islamist parties into power and then found themselves surplus to requirements. Shared enemies—Israel, the United States, liberal institutions—have proved elastic enough to paper over the theological and sociological abyss between the two camps for decades. The practical dangers are less theoretical. The alliance has normalised a form of selective universalism in which the rights of Jews, women and sexual minorities become conditional on the identity of the perpetrator. It has also handed Islamist networks a progressive vocabulary that shields them from ordinary scrutiny: criticism is recast as bigotry, and solidarity becomes a one-way street. In Europe the combination has appeared in successive waves of urban disorder, in universities it has produced environments in which Jewish students are told their physical safety is a secondary concern to the greater cause. Most ironically, the progressive wing of the bargain may prove the more expendable. History offers little comfort to secular revolutionaries who imagine they can harness a theocratic movement and then discard it. The Greens, after all, possess a coherent eschatology and a demonstrated willingness to enforce it. The Reds, for the moment, mainly possess slogans.