Craig Considine, Middle East Forum Writing Fellow, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at Rice University, and author of When Marx Meets Islam: Navigating Radical Ideologies in the Defense of the West, spoke to an October 19 Middle East Forum podcast (video). The following summarizes his comments:
A university undergraduate during the 9/11attacks, Considine was inspired to pursue interfaith dialogue as an antidote to global conflict. After writing books on religious pluralism and on bridge-building with Islam, he came to realize “a lot of the interfaith work I was doing was not met on the opposite side with good intentions.” Political dogma and identity politics replaced interfaith coexistence. Many of his Muslim colleagues and interlocutors turned against Considine for his support of the Abraham Accords and for “looking at Israel as a democratic Western country in the Middle East.”
October 7 was the breaking point for him. After calling out Hamas as a terrorist group on his social media, he faced significant backlash for criticizing student protests.
October 7 was the breaking point for him. After calling out Hamas as a terrorist group on his social media, he faced significant backlash for criticizing student protests. This inspired Considine to write When Marx Meets Islam, which explains how classical liberalism became hijacked by a “Red-Green alliance” of leftist Marxists with Islamists.
The Marxist ideology that subsumed liberalism originated in Germany’s Frankfurt School in the 1920s and 1930s. Marxist scholars repackaged the classic Marxist binary of the bourgeoisie and landowners vs. the proletariat as a struggle between oppressors and the oppressed. The new binary found a home in the contemporary identity politics of the left, mushrooming throughout the institutions of higher education that were fueled by billions in foreign funding. Rather than teaching “enlightenment thinking and free thought and democracy and pride for your nation,” the widespread narrative now being taught is that of Third World minorities vs. the Western culture of white Christians, with the latter villainized as supremacists and oppressors.
In Western academia, Marxism courses proliferate throughout the curricula, particularly in the social sciences, history, and the humanities. The number of such courses increased further post-October 7 when the identity politics of cultural Marxism became turbocharged into massive protests on university campuses. The Red-Green alliance, wedded to its anti-American tunnel vision of “hatred of the West, Western civilization, and Judeo-Christian values,” remained blinded to the terrorism of Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Student groups supporting the alliance became entrenched in academic institutions.
The U.S.-Israel alliance is a specific target of the Marxists and Islamists because “if you can take down the United States, you can take down the West.” The Red-Green alliance portrays Israel as a Western colonial outpost in the Middle East. In a “tactical coalition,” Marxists and Islamists share a strategic goal in believing that “if you can take down the U.S., you can take down Israel.” Their alliance indoctrinates leftist activists to parrot the terms “settler colonialism, apartheid, genocide, imperialism, colonization” as clarion calls to propel the mob. Islamist groups are giddy hearing student chants that mindlessly echo the programmed slogans across campuses and serve their ends.
Looking back in history, the Red-Green alliance has precedents. Prior to the Cold War, the Bolshevik Revolution included marginalized Muslims who joined against Czarist Russia. However, the Muslims were eventually purged since they did not toe the Communist party line. During the 1979 Iranian Revolution, as the Islamic regime ascended to power, the Marxists who were part of the coalition with the Islamists and contributed to the regime’s success were marginalized or eliminated since they were no longer useful.
The dynamic playing out in the current culture clash is a “soft war.” A useful analogy for understanding the Red-Green phenomenon is comparing it to pieces on a chessboard. In chess, “it’s not one part that wins the game; it’s all the parts coordinating together.” The students and activists are pawns doing the dirty work for mostly authoritarian regimes. Pawns who march in protests are largely ignorant of the issues they are mobilized to advance, and they are disposable when they are no longer useful to the cause.
Pawns who march in protests are largely ignorant of the issues they are mobilized to advance, and they are disposable when they are no longer useful to the cause.
The next level on the chessboard are the bishops. These pieces represent the professors and academics who indoctrinate their students with the former’s Marxist narrative and identity politics. Leftist academics who tell students what to think rather than how to think “provide justification for the protests, for the harassment of Jewish students, for the public declarations that they hate the United States.”
Feckless university administrators protect these professors. “The pursuit of inquiry or knowledge has been replaced by this hierarchy of identities,” and criticism and ideas “that challenge the racial/religious hierarchy” are censored. Criticizing the use of Islam as a political agenda, much like criticizing any religion that exploits faith as a political weapon, is subject to a double standard. The cudgel of “Islamophobia” is weaponized to muzzle free inquiry into Islam, cowing the critic into silence with accusations of racism.
The next piece on the board are the knights. They represent the civil society organizations that provide cover for the pawns and the bishops. By engaging in fundraising and lobbying, they infiltrate the halls of government and spread their influence into houses of worship. Some of the entities in question include the Council for American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), Code Pink, and the People’s Forum.
Next are the rooks, who are the progressive “woke” politicians such as New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Rep. Alexandrea Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Rep. Rashida Talib (D-MI), and the emerging Abdul El-Sayed, Democratic U.S. Senate candidate for Michigan. They are the most dangerous because they work to “turn the campus slogan or the syllabus or the mission statement of the organizations into actual policy.” Their policies can become laws that undermine the very system of freedom, thereby enabling these rooks to advance.
The final pieces on the board are the king and queen. They are the foreign patrons such as Qatar and Turkey. Aside from the billions it spent to undermine Western values on American universities, Qatar also provides cover for Hamas and spreads its anti-Western propaganda through its media arm, Al Jazeera. It is now setting its sights on infiltrating K-12 schools in the U.S. China is also undermining the West through individuals like Neville Roy Singham, a billionaire who funds the People’s Forum, an open communist group actively instigating unrest on the streets of Western capitals.
Karl Popper, a philosopher and critic of authoritarianism, argued that “unlimited tolerance can ultimately empower the intolerant and lead to the destruction of a tolerant society.” In other words, “if a society is too tolerant of intolerant groups or intolerant ideas, it allows those ideas and groups to get oxygen.” To enact Popper’s approach, three strategies should be pursued. The first is that “The truth matters more than anything.” Follow paper trails by using primary source documents to expose the truth, such as exposing El-Sayed’s well-documented links to the Muslim Brotherhood. The truth is not some Marxist post-modern version of relative truth, where the “Red-Green alliance likes to manipulate language” and turn truth on its head. “The truth is the truth.”
Use historical truth to understand what is right and what is wrong and teach the lessons of history.
The next strategy is to have moral clarity, such as calling out the groups that target the U.S. and Israel as immoral. Use historical truth to understand what is right and what is wrong and teach the lessons of history. Finally, accountability is needed, starting with financial accountability and transparency in university funding sources and hiring practices. Scrutinize departments to weed out any vestige of the Frankfurt School influence and defend “enlightenment principles and the true authentic engagement of inquiry.”
The ideological threat is not only rampant in the U.S. The Red-Green alliance replicates its strategy in a transnational framework that is global. “The structure, the brainwashed students, the indoctrinating professors, the civil society organizations, the progressive or woke politicians, and the international patrons” are all at play in many Western countries. Moreover, they implement the same operations and use the same strategies.
“So, I’m semi-optimistic, even with the downfall of the Red-Green alliance—like the U.S.-Israel alliance is still holding strong—but that also means that the Red-Green alliance will persist in the future.” For now, “we’re in the trenches of this war.”
