In 1979, Marxists allied themselves with radical Islamists in a marriage of convenience during the Iranian revolution. Both the Marxists (Red) and Islamists (Green) believed they would dominate after the Shah was gone, but found unity in the overthrow of the established pro-Western, pro-American order.
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had no intention of sharing power. The Marxist groups that played a significant, some claim a decisive, role in the revolution were systematically slaughtered after Khomeini's cutthroats took power.
The Tudeh Party, a traditional pro-Soviet group, mobilized labor unions, intellectual networks, and oil field workers for street demonstrations. The Organization of Iranian People's Fedaian Guerrillas (OIPFG) was a major secular, Marxist-Leninist guerrilla movement that took an active armed role in the uprising. They organized street strikes, launched raids against police stations and military barracks, and engaged in armed clashes against the Shah’s security forces (SAVAK) leading up to February 1979.
Middle East Forum's Gregg Roman writes, "The shared hatred of the Shah and of American “imperialism” blinded the left to what it was installing. The Islamists did not return the courtesy. Once in power, they purged the universities in 1980, turned on the Mojahedin and the independent left from June 1981, and finished with the Tudeh itself."
Amnesty International had recorded well over 4,000 executions since the revolution by 1982.
After the Ayatollah's purges of Communists, the belief in the West was that Communism and Islamism were too incompatible to ally with each other.
That was then; this is now.
Once again, Islamists and radical leftists have found common cause, this time in the West. And while their ultimate goals may be wildly different, their intersecting interests on the streets, on campuses, and in the halls of power are once again threatening the peace and security of America and the West.
"The Center for Renewing America argues the phenomenon deserves greater attention as debates over socialism, capitalism and American institutions increasingly play out in politics, on college campuses and among younger generations," reports the National News Desk (NND).
Wade Miller, executive director of the Center for Renewing America, says, "They believe in two different things," describing the competing visions as "a global communist world power on the one hand, and then a global caliphate on the other."
Miller believes the Alliance should be seen in context "alongside the growing popularity of democratic socialism among some younger Americans," according to NND. "Instead of class-based issues, government programs and how much they're spending on people, now it's more of identity and identitarian grievances and oppressor versus oppressed," Miller said.
If there's a soft spot to attack in America, it's the left's obsession with race and identity. No other issue unites the left and animates their protests quite like putting people in their proper pigeonholes.
"The younger generations have been steeped in that," he added.
National News Desk:
Polling has shown younger Americans are generally more receptive to socialism than older generations, although surveys can produce significantly different results depending on how socialism, capitalism and other political systems are defined.
The discussion also turned to where legitimate criticism of the United States ends and opposition to the country's constitutional system begins.
Americans have broad First Amendment protections to criticize the government, advocate major political changes and express views that others may consider offensive or anti-American.
Miller acknowledged those protections.
But Miller argued there is a cultural distinction between advocating changes within the American system and seeking the destruction of the institutions underlying that system.
"I think where it just crosses a line, at least culturally, where people should say, 'This is not for us,' ... is when they start advocating for the overthrow of Western civilization, the end of capitalism," Miller said.
"The most effective antidote the West has to the Marxist-Islamist alliance now working through its universities, its city halls, and its street protests is the young Iranian diaspora," writes Gregg Roman in Middle East Forum. "While masked activists occupy American campus lawns for Hamas, young Iranians in Los Angeles, Toronto, London, and Washington carry the pre-1979 Lion and Sun flag, march beside Israeli flags, and demand the destruction of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps by name."
Those Iranians know what the Red-Green Alliance has accomplished. It destroyed Iran and has given the Iranian people a half-century of oppression and pain.
"Progressives who would not survive a week under Hamas anchor the coalitions that defend it," Roman writes. "The Iranian diaspora is the one constituency in Western politics that reads that scene with the correct historical dread, and it has paid for the reading in harassment, lawsuits, kidnap plots, and knife attacks."
Just ask Masih Alinejad. Since she was forced into exile in 2009, Alinejad has worked tirelessly for freedom for Iranians and, in parallel, for women's rights in the Islamic state.
She has been trying to remove the blinders from the Western media for more than a decade. They refuse to listen. And if they do hear her, they dismiss the story as irrelevant to their readership.
Very soon, the Red-Green Alliance will become very relevant to their readers and to the rest of us.
