When Dr. Abdul El-Sayed won Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary earlier this month, the reaction split along predictable lines. Progressives hailed a grassroots victory over the party establishment. Critics saw something else entirely: the latest proof point in what’s become known as the “Red-Green alliance,” the increasingly visible convergence between the socialist left and political Islamism.
It’s a provocative label. It’s also, on the evidence, one that deserves more scrutiny than either side has given it.
The term isn’t new, and neither is the phenomenon. Its intellectual roots trace back to Iran’s 1979 revolution, when Western Marxist intellectuals—Michel Foucault, most famously—cheered Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s rise as a blow against Western hegemony, seeing in political Islam a revolutionary energy their own movements lacked. The alliance was transactional from day one: the Reds needed a mass movement with real force behind it; the Greens needed intellectual cover and Western sympathy.
That transactional logic hasn’t changed. What’s changed is the scale.
Strip away the theology and the economics, and the socialist left and Islamist movements converge on four things: opposition to American power abroad; hostility to global capitalism; suspicion of Western liberal institutions; and, increasingly central, opposition to Israel. None of these require shared values. They only require a shared enemy.
That’s the mechanism critics of the alliance point to, and it holds up. Anti-imperialism and anti-Zionism function as connective tissue broad enough to fit a secular Marxist and a religious fundamentalist into the same coalition, marching under the same banners, even though their visions of the world they’re fighting for could not be more different.
Here’s where the alliance gets genuinely uncomfortable for its Western left flank—not the Gaza question, but the Iran question.
Nowhere has this convergence been more visible than in the Democratic Socialists of America’s response to the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. The organization’s International Committee has, in the years since, repeatedly framed Hamas-aligned violence as legitimate “resistance,” and individual members have gone further—one prominent DSA figure publicly mocked concerns about rhetoric glorifying groups the U.S. government designates as terrorist organizations.
In May, a “Nakba Day” rally co-sponsored by a DSA chapter reportedly featured the flags of Hezbollah, Hamas and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine alongside its own banners.
This is not guilt by association but documentary record. And it’s not one-sided.
Islamist leadership has been explicit about using Western progressive energy for its own ends. Iran’s Supreme Leader publicly thanked American student protesters for their role in what he calls the resistance. Hamas’s own leadership has done the same. The intellectual permission structure for this goes back decades: a well-known 2006 remark by theorist Judith Butler at the University of California, Berkeley, describing Hamas and Hezbollah as progressive movements belonging to a “global left,” still gets cited approvingly in some corners today. Even she later drew a line: after Oct. 7, she condemned the massacre itself without qualification, even as her broader framework—casting these groups’ anti-imperialism as a form of left solidarity—held.
That distinction matters because it shows the intellectual scaffolding for this alliance survives even when its architects recoil from the violence it enables. Whatever these Western activists believe they’re building in solidarity, the Islamist movements they’re marching alongside have been candid about seeing them as useful—a word their own sympathizers have used without apparent irony.
That tension spilled into public view this month. On Aug. 5, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) chaired a Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing titled “Hidden in Plain Sight: Confronting the Muslim Brotherhood Network in America,” with testimony from a retired FBI agent and counterterrorism analysts. Every Democrat on the subcommittee stayed away. Cruz called the empty chairs an embarrassment; Democratic leadership countered that the hearing amounted to a show trial dressed up as oversight.
Cruz’s core claim was blunt, and he built it methodically. He asked his witness directly whether the Muslim Brotherhood partners with DSA, and whether that alliance rests on shared hatred of America, Israel, Western civilization, capitalism and democracy. The witness didn’t just agree; she went further, describing the alliance as united around a revolutionary objective aimed at overthrowing the U.S. Constitution itself.
Even the hearing’s allies couldn’t agree on what it proved. Laura Loomer—a controversial, self-described “proud Islamophobe” with a long history of incendiary and conspiratorial claims, so her framing should be read as commentary rather than analysis—publicly broke with Cruz the same day, arguing that the real story wasn’t a communist takeover at all but an Islamic one, insisting the country “call it what it is.”
That disagreement is worth sitting with, regardless of what one thinks of Loomer. If the loudest voices sounding the alarm cannot agree on which half of the alliance is actually driving the bus, the “alliance” is doing a lot of narrative work that the facts alone may not support.
Here’s where the alliance gets genuinely uncomfortable for its Western left flank—not the Gaza question, but the Iran question.
DSA and allied groups mobilized instantly and massively after Israel’s response to Oct. 7, organizing dozens of marches across major Western cities within months.
Where was that same mobilization in November 2019, when Iranian security forces killed hundreds of protesters within days? Where was it in 2022, after 22-year-old Mahsa Amini died in the custody of Iran’s so-called “morality policy,” and Tehran’s own crackdown followed—a response a U.N. fact-finding mission later concluded killed more than 500 people and swept up more than 22,000 detainees, finding the Islamic Republic responsible for crimes against humanity through disproportionate, unlawful use of lethal force?
Where was it during the 2025-26 uprisings, as the regime’s violence against its own citizens reportedly escalated further still?
The silence gap is the tell. If the animating principle were genuinely anti-imperialism, anti-authoritarianism or human rights, Iranian state violence against Iranians would draw the same outrage as Israeli military action against Palestinians. It largely hasn’t. What that suggests is a movement organized less around consistent principle than around a consistent adversary—the United States and its allies, regardless of who’s doing the oppressing elsewhere.
The alliance was transactional from day one: the Reds needed a mass movement with real force behind it; the Greens needed intellectual cover and Western sympathy.
It’s worth asking DSA’s own members and sympathizers to sit with the comparison honestly: a state that offers free healthcare, free education and cradle-to-grave social provision, delivered by a theocratic government willing to kill its own citizens in the streets to stay in power. If that’s the trade-off implicit in the “free everything” vision some in the movement gesture toward, then it deserves to be named plainly rather than left as subtext.
The pattern isn’t new, and it doesn’t end well for the socialists. In Iran in 1979, Marxists who helped topple the shah were purged, imprisoned and executed by the same Islamist movement they’d helped install within a few short years. Egypt saw a milder version of the same story after the Arab Spring began in 2011, as secular and leftist coalition partners found themselves sidelined once Islamist parties consolidated power.
In other words, the alliance has always been temporary on one side and sincere on the other. Islamist movements have been consistent about their ultimate aims—religious governance, not egalitarian socialism. Western leftists entering these coalitions are the junior partners in every sense, and junior partners in this particular arrangement have a documented history of being discarded once they’re no longer useful.
None of this is uncontested, and it shouldn’t be presented as though it is.
DSA members and Palestinian rights advocates reject the “Red-Green Alliance” framing outright, arguing that solidarity with Palestinian civilians is a human rights position, not Islamist sympathy, and that lumping calls for universal healthcare in with Iranian theocracy is a rhetorical sleight of hand designed to delegitimize the left rather than describe it honestly. They have a point worth taking seriously: not every DSA member endorses Hamas, and conflating a movement’s activist fringe with its rank and file is its own kind of distortion.
But the documentary record—the flags at the rallies, the statements from DSA’s own committees, the praise from Hamas and Iranian leadership for their Western allies, the silence on Iran’s domestic repression—doesn’t require speculation to assemble. It only requires paying attention.
El-Sayed disputes the socialist label. Zohran Mamdani governs New York now, not a movement pamphlet; his own embrace of Shia religious framing in describing his political fight is itself part of the story this piece is telling. The theoretical becomes electoral the moment these candidates hold power—and history suggests that’s exactly the moment alliances like this one start to reveal which partner was ever really in charge.
