Asra Nomani on The Limits of the Red-Green Alliance

Asra Nomani, senior editor of investigations at Fox News, spoke to a June 22 Middle East Forum podcast (video). The following summarizes her comments:

Middle East Forum investigations concluded that 25 percent of the approximately 8,000 Islamic organizations in the U.S. have a degree of Islamist influence over their operations. Despite this, public rallies for Islamist causes draw only a few hundred participants from the millions of American Muslims. Instead, pro-Hamas rallies and anti-Israel encampments in 2024 drew mostly leftists who demonstrated for the Islamists and only a handful of Islamist organizations were involved. Islamist groups had gained more power under the Obama administration when they allied with the Democratic Party. It was in the wake of October 7 that the “unholy alliance” between “Islamist groups that were the most anti-Israel and the most radical” aligned with leftist, socialist, communist, and Marxist groups.

Nomani, a Muslim columnist who challenged the status quo through her investigative journalism into extremism within Islam after 9-11, found that the “normative orthodox interpretation” of the faith fed extremism. The Islamic concept of “ijtihad,” or critical thinking, has been her guide as her writing took on greater urgency in 2002 after Daniel Pearl, her friend and Wall Street Journal colleague, was kidnapped and beheaded by al Qaeda in Pakistan.

While the Middle East Forum’s investigations revealed that a majority of American Muslims embrace a “more moderate interpretation,” American Muslim groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine, American Muslims for Palestine, and the Council on American-Islamic Relations dominate the American Muslim diaspora by spearheading “street warfare” as a mechanism to advance their propaganda.

Cloaked in the imagery of red, white, and blue patriotic symbolism, Islamist and leftist organizations produce posters, crop videos, and wage campaigns to promote “the myth of the marching millions” in the population centers of U.S. cities. After the most recent Iran war, anti-American leftist groups such as the Party for Socialism and Liberation, Indivisible, and Move On “use[d] the Palestinian issue to further their recruitment.”

Islamists and socialists use a psychological concept of “shamelessness” to promote their ideological belief system within the “shame-based culture” of Muslim communities. “Even the idea of Nakba Day is about humiliation and shame.” From street activism to candidates, many of the voices are the same who “appear like a formidable threat” because of the corrosive influence on the culture and political environment. The effect is evident from the massive support for streamers like Hasan Piker, who promotes Marxism while advancing Islamist causes, and from the election of socialist/Islamist Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York City.
Mamdani was a protégé of Linda Sarsour, a Palestinian-American activist who advocated for the destruction of the State of Israel and espoused anti-American sentiments. Sarsour became the face of the Women’s March, barring Zionist feminists and helping develop Mamdani into the candidate who was elected mayor. By canvassing for many candidates currently running in Democratic primaries across the country, she exemplifies the Islamist machine “and their myth of the marching millions.”

Sarsour allied with Medea Benjamin of Code Pink, who supports the communist regimes of Cuba and China. Benjamin has also traveled to the Islamic Republic of Iran and has met with Hamas leaders in Gaza. Code Pink, along with organizations called the People’s Forum, Breakthrough News, and the Marxist-aligned movement TriContinental, is funded in the millions of dollars by Neville Roy Singham, an American self-avowed Marxist living in Shanghai. Singham’s hundreds of millions have been instrumental in building the leftist alliance with Islamist groups through U.S. organizations and nonprofits.

The alliance is significant because its aim is “to sow discord and chaos in the streets of the United States.” Employing “agitprop, agitation propaganda,” these groups use the same tactic “of classic Soviet propaganda.” Massive anti-Israel demonstrations waged by Islamists and leftists are now a “global phenomenon.” Moreover, they have organized into an “ecosystem” to infiltrate democratic institutions “like the Labor Party in the U.K. or the Democratic Party in the U.S.” These penetrations have been decades in the making and “emerged through several generations.”

The irony is that the feminist groups in Code Pink ignore the fact that “two out of three mosques in America have the segregated space [between men and women] in the United States” which ultimately imposes “an erasure of the women from the public space.” Yet to popularize the “activism chic” and the myth, these feminist organizations use the very image of “strong young women as activists” on the streets that is not permitted in mosques, thereby betraying “true liberal values.”
Islamist organizations create their own schools and set up their own residential areas, which may well mean less moderation in Islamic communities. One such initiative, the EPIC homeowners association outside of Dallas, was begun by Yaser Qadhi, a Texas-based sheik and “one of the architects of the American Salafi movement, which is that interpretation of Islam that is very orthodox, that is sending foot soldiers into the streets to destroy the State of Israel” and actively undermine America. It seeks to create an American alternative society that mirrors its interpretation of Islam that is “not one of assimilation, but separation.”

Arresting this movement will require transparency through reporting and exposés, enforcement of U.S. laws governing nonprofits that are used as a cover for the Islamists’ ideological work, and promotion of the message that assimilation into the American way of life “leads to successful integration in the United States of America.”