On the Red-Green Axis: Why the Revolutionary Left and Political Radical Jihadist Islam Keep Finding Each Other
James Simpson's Red-Green Axis 3.0 and Robert Spencer's discussion of it rest on a political question that will not go away. How does a revolutionary Left that champions secularism, sexual liberation and radical social experimentation repeatedly find itself marching alongside movements whose religious and social doctrines may reject much of that programme? The short answer is that political coalitions do not always require common values. Sometimes a common opponent is enough.
That is the useful insight behind the "Red-Green" thesis, once its more sweeping claims are stripped away. The revolutionary Left and radical political Islam do not want the same final society. They can nevertheless cooperate against institutions and political arrangements that both regard, for very different reasons, as objectionable.
Some terminology is essential at the outset. "Red" here means the revolutionary or strongly anti-capitalist Left, particularly those currents shaped by Marxism, post-colonialism and anti-imperialism. "Green" means radical political Islam: organised Islamist movements that seek substantial political or legal change according to their interpretation of Islam, including at the extreme end revolutionary and jihadist organisations. It does not mean Muslims generally.
The overwhelming number of ordinary Muslims going to work, raising families, running businesses and practising their religion are not what this argument is about. Nor does criticism of Islamism amount to criticism of Muslims as a people. The subject is a political phenomenon and the alliances that sometimes form around it.
Iran in 1978–79 provides the classic warning. Various forces opposed to the Shah found themselves on the same side of a revolutionary struggle despite having radically different visions of what should replace him. Sections of the Iranian Left initially accommodated themselves to Ayatollah Khomeini's revolutionary movement, only to discover that victory over a common enemy did not produce a common political future. The subsequent Islamic Republic repressed much of the secular and revolutionary Left.
That history matters because it illustrates the fundamental mechanism of a tactical alliance: agreement about what must be removed can temporarily conceal profound disagreement about what should replace it. The same logic was articulated unusually clearly from the revolutionary Left itself.
In 1994 British socialist Chris Harman published The Prophet and the Proletariat. Harman rejected the simple identification of Islamist movements with fascism and argued that socialists had to respond to Islamism according to concrete political circumstances. The position subsequently became famous in compressed form: "With the Islamists sometimes, with the state never."
That was not an endorsement of Islamic theology. Harman recognised deep conflicts between Islamism and socialism, including over secularism and women's rights. It was instead a rule for tactical politics. Where Islamists confronted imperialism, capitalism or a state regarded by revolutionary socialists as oppressive, circumstances could put the two movements on the same side of a particular struggle.
That political logic has not disappeared. The modern Western campus provides some obvious examples. Socialist and other radical-Left organisations have participated alongside Palestinian and Muslim activist organisations in demonstrations, encampments and campaigns concerning Israel and Gaza. The participants need not agree about religion, sexuality, feminism, economics or the ideal constitution of society. Agreement on the immediate political cause can be sufficient.
That is the point missed when critics simply laugh at the apparent contradiction. The alliance can look absurd if examined by comparing ultimate values. A radical secular activist committed to unrestricted sexual autonomy and an Islamist committed to traditional religious morality plainly do not share a social philosophy. But political coalitions are often formed around what their participants oppose rather than what they ultimately want.
Anti-imperialism provides one bridge. Post-colonial theory provides another. Palestinian politics provides perhaps the most powerful contemporary meeting point. Concepts such as oppression, colonialism, resistance and marginalisation can provide a common political vocabulary even when the people using that vocabulary understand the world very differently.
This helps explain otherwise strange scenes in which activists committed to causes such as LGBT rights simultaneously support political movements whose social doctrines would be profoundly hostile to those rights. The contradiction is real, but contradictions do not prevent tactical cooperation.
Simpson is strongest when he concentrates on institutions rather than imagining a single command centre directing everything. Modern political movements operate through universities, advocacy organisations, charities, legal organisations, foundations, activist networks, political parties and social media. Different organisations can therefore converge without receiving instructions from the same headquarters.
Progressive organisations may approach immigration through humanitarianism, multiculturalism or opposition to nationalism. Muslim advocacy organisations may approach the same questions through concern for Muslim migrants, refugees or discrimination. Islamist organisations may have still other ideological reasons. The motives are different, but particular political objectives can overlap.
The same is true of Palestine. A Marxist organisation may understand Israel primarily through capitalism, imperialism and settler-colonialism. A radical Islamist organisation may understand the same conflict through religion, Islamic history and the status of Muslim territory. They have not reached the same destination intellectually. They have nevertheless arrived at the same demonstration.
The distinction matters because it eliminates the need for a conspiracy theory. There does not have to be a secret Red-Green committee issuing orders. Coalitions can emerge organically because different movements discover that cooperation advances an immediate objective.
Universities have been particularly important because they provide an environment in which these political languages mix. Post-colonialism, critical theory, identity politics and anti-imperialism supplied concepts through which conflicts involving Muslims could be interpreted primarily through relationships between oppressor and oppressed. Islamist and Muslim advocacy organisations learned to operate effectively within that vocabulary.
The resulting coalition can be remarkably broad. Democratic socialists, secular progressives, Muslim organisations, Palestinian nationalists and occasionally much more radical elements can appear within the same protest movement without agreeing about what society should ultimately look like. Recent campus activism over Gaza demonstrates that such cooperation is not imaginary.
But it is important to keep the categories straight. Supporting Palestinian statehood does not make somebody an Islamist. Criticising Israel does not make somebody a jihadist. Being Muslim certainly does not make somebody part of a Red-Green alliance. The argument concerns identifiable political cooperation, not guilt by association.
This is where the historical question becomes interesting. Some revolutionary socialists have regarded religious movements as politically backward but capable of playing a temporary anti-imperialist role. Some Islamist movements, conversely, have demonstrated considerable skill in operating inside secular political systems and forming alliances with people whose ultimate values they do not share.
Neither side needs to believe that the alliance will last forever. Indeed, history suggests considerable reason for doubting that it could. Iran demonstrates the danger particularly starkly. Forces united in opposition to the Shah did not remain united once the question became who would actually govern.
That does not prove that every contemporary Left-Islamist coalition must end in the same fashion. It does prove something more modest and more important: temporary political cooperation tells us surprisingly little about the society each participant ultimately desires.
This is also where the theory needs restraint. "They want to destroy us" makes a dramatic book title, but political reality is usually messier. People participate in activist networks for dozens of reasons: ideology, humanitarian concern, religion, career advancement, community solidarity, electoral politics or simple conformity with their immediate social environment.
Nor should every foundation grant or overlapping campaign be treated as evidence of central coordination. Foundations undoubtedly influence political activism by deciding what organisations and causes receive money. That is not the same thing as operating a political Politburo. Likewise, demographic change can have political consequences without proving that everybody advocating immigration consciously intends those consequences. The distinction between effect and intention is crucial.
Most importantly, the Red-Green thesis becomes useless if it degenerates into suspicion of Muslims generally. A Muslim taxi driver, doctor, shopkeeper or engineer is not transformed into an Islamist because somebody else sharing his religion belongs to the Muslim Brotherhood or supports Hamas. Political Islam is an ideology. Islam is a religion followed by an enormous and internally diverse population. Confusing the two produces bad analysis as well as needless hostility.
Once those exaggerations are removed, however, something important remains. Political movements do not require a shared heaven. Sometimes they require only a shared adversary.
The revolutionary Left and radical political Islam have repeatedly discovered areas in which their immediate political interests overlap, particularly around anti-imperialism, Israel and Palestine, Western foreign policy and aspects of immigration and minority politics. That convergence can occur despite enormous disagreements about religion, sexuality, feminism, economics, freedom of speech and the proper relationship between religion and the state.
Chris Harman understood the possibility decades ago. Iran demonstrated both the power and the danger of such tactical cooperation even earlier. Contemporary Western activism continues to produce examples of secular revolutionary politics and religious political radicalism occupying the same streets and sometimes the same organisations or campaigns.
None of this requires believing that every Muslim is an Islamist, every progressive is a Marxist, or every pro-Palestinian activist supports Hamas. Those distinctions are essential. The real phenomenon is narrower and therefore more defensible: sections of the revolutionary Left and radical political Islam can form tactical coalitions because agreement about an immediate political enemy can outweigh disagreement about the society that should ultimately replace the existing order.
That alliance should neither be exaggerated into an omnipotent conspiracy nor dismissed because its participants contradict one another. Contradictory coalitions are among the oldest facts of politics. The Iranian Left discovered that at terrible cost.
The lesson is not that the West requires a religious war of its own. It is that liberal societies should apply their laws consistently, distinguish peaceful religious practice from political extremism, scrutinise public funding without regard to ideology, defend freedom of expression, and refuse to pretend that radicalism ceases to be radicalism merely because its proponents can temporarily fit themselves into the fashionable political vocabulary of the day.
The Red-Green alliance does not need to be a marriage. A coalition of convenience is enough.
https://pjmedia.com/robert-spencer/2026/09/20/yes-they-really-want-to-destroy-us-the-startling-details-of-the-islamicleftist-coalition-n4957445
https://www.amazon.com/Red-Green-Axis-3-0-Destroyed/dp/B0HJG5MT9D/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0
https://jihadwatch.org/2026/09/yes-they-really-want-to-destroy-us-the-startling-details-of-the-islamic-leftist-coalition
