Politics, it is often said, can make for strange bedfellows. There is perhaps no stranger alliance today than that of progressives and Islamists. And history tells us that few are more fateful.
In his campaign to be Michigan’s next senator, Abdul el Sayed has received the support of numerous pillars of the far Left. Progressive icon Bernie Sanders and a bevy of progressive groups have campaigned on his behalf.
El Sayed has tried to position his current campaign as fixated primarily on working-class issues. Accordingly, when reports emerged that his half-sister, Eman Abdelhadi, praised their mother for belonging to the Muslim Brotherhood, it might, at first glance, be thought to give his allies pause.
Social media posts unearthed by the Washington Free Beacon certainly contradict el Sayed’s own categorical assurances that his family never belonged to the group.
In one 2012 tweet, Abdelhadi said: “My family has long been MB [Muslim Brotherhood].” When Mohammad Morsi, a Muslim Brotherhood member who was briefly the president of Egypt, was deposed in a 2013 coup, Abdelhadi said: “Praying for all my family that support the #MB in #Egypt. Lie low, stay safe.”
Lying low has been a Brotherhood specialty since its founding in 1928 in Ismailia, Egypt, by Hasan al Banna. The organization, with its calls for “civilizational jihad,” or holy war, has learned to camouflage its aims. After decades of being alternately used and targeted by Middle Eastern governments, the Muslim Brotherhood knows that secrecy itself is essential to its survival.
The Muslim Brotherhood has spawned some of the most infamous terrorist organizations in the world. Terror groups like Hamas and al Qaeda, among many others, count themselves as its offshoots and ideological descendants.
The Brotherhood is fiercely antisemitic, anti-Western, anti-women’s rights, and anti-gay rights. It is antithetical to Western liberal values.
The movement seeks to establish an Islamic state ruled by sharia law. Osama bin Laden’s one-time mentor, Abdullah Azzam, was a member of the Ikhwan (Brotherhood), as was his successor, Ayman al Zawahiri. It was the incubator for their long and bloody careers as jihadists.
In every sense the Brotherhood is a proponent of a retrograde ideology that seems utterly at odds with the progressives who think of themselves as forward looking.
But one doesn’t need to look far to see that this very alliance, between Islamists and the far Left, is among the most salient today.
It is all over the West, from the burning streets of Paris to the gleeful celebrations that erupted all over college campuses after Hamas invaded Israel and carried out the largest slaughter of Jewish civilians since the Holocaust on Oct. 7, 2023.
Islamists and progressives have openly marched together, seemingly hand-in-glove, participated in the same rallies, and even endorsed the same candidates ever since. But this isn’t entirely new.
The late Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, used to warn about an alliance between “the red and the black,” with red representing the communist Left and the black representing Islamist clergy.
The Shah’s warnings that this convergence of forces sought his ouster were dismissed as conspiratorial. Some of the conspiracies that the Shah believed to be lurking in the shadows were indeed fanciful. But his belief that the global Left was joining forces with Islamists was more right than wrong.
The Soviet Union, the foremost communist power of the time, undertook a series of active measures to sow discord between the Shah and his chief ally, the United States.
In 1961, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev told John F. Kennedy that Iran would one day fall like a rotten fruit into Soviet hands. The next year, a Soviet agent attempted to set off a car bomb on a route used by the Shah, but it failed to explode.
Between 1967 and 1973, Soviet agents constructed a series of landing sites and arms depots throughout the country, all “probably intended for use in the event of a popular uprising against the Shah’s regime,” according to seized KGB archives cited in the 2005 book The World Was Going Our Way.
The Iranian leftists believed that Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the septuagenarian cleric who had been exiled by the Shah, would alternately be a mere figurehead or open to compromise. They were dead wrong. Khomeini brutally crushed the leftists who facilitated his rise, murdering and imprisoning them. He vowed to “break their teeth,” and did.
Those on the left who thought they could harness the energy and political power of Islamists were themselves used and disposed of. Many were hung from construction cranes. Thousands were buried in unmarked graves.
Budding Islamists throughout the Middle East were inspired by Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution. Islamists like Azzam, bin Laden, and al Zawahiri saw proof that an Islamic state could indeed be created in the modern era.
It might seem counterintuitive that self-styled progressives would work with those who look not to the future, but to a medieval past. But they are both utopian movements united by a shared objective: the destruction of the West.
WITH ABDUL EL SAYED WIN, MICHIGAN DEMOCRATS FALL TO THE MAMDANI LEFT
“Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God,” the philosopher Eric Hoffer warned eight decades ago, “but never without a belief in a devil.” The red and the green agree on who the devil is.
The U.S., Khomeini and his acolytes charged, is the “Great Satan.” One hears the same thing from many in the Democratic Socialists of America and their fellow foot soldiers today.
Sean Durns is the director for the Counter Extremism Research Center (CERC) at the Capital Research Center.
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[ H/T Washington Examiner ]
