Kelsey Reinhardt on August 12, 2026
Something unusual happened on October 8, 2023.
The morning after Hamas slaughtered 1,200 people in southern Israel, after women were raped, children were burned, and families were dragged into tunnels, demonstrators took to the streets and college campuses across the US, not in mourning, but in celebration.
Progressive activists marched alongside Islamist organizers. Transgender flags flew next to keffiyehs. Students at elite universities declared a sadistic massacre to be the opening act of a revolution.
It was, as one observer noted, Bolshevik demagoguery at its finest. The raped and murdered were recast as oppressors. The rapists and murderers became the oppressed.
What you were witnessing has a name.
Scholars and analysts call it “the red-green alliance”: a working coalition between the radical secular left and Islamist political movements. It is not a formal organization. It has no single headquarters. But it is real, it is growing, and its ambitions are not modest.
To understand it, you have to understand what holds it together: because on the surface, it makes no sense at all.
The radical left champions women’s autonomy, sexual liberation, and secular governance. Islamist political theology holds to the authority of Sharia, traditional gender roles, and the supremacy of religious law. These are not minor differences. They are irreconcilable visions of human life and social order.
And yet they march together. They fundraise together. They are reshaping Democratic primaries together.
What binds them is not a shared vision of the future. It is a shared enemy: the Judeo-Christian foundations of Western civilization, our natural law tradition, our ordered liberty and our understanding of the human person as made in the image of God and therefore possessed of an inherent dignity that no state can confer or revoke.
Both movements, in their activist forms, are united by what they oppose. And that opposition has proven sufficient to make them allies.
Both movements, in their activist forms, are united by what they oppose. And that opposition has proven sufficient to make them allies.
This is not a new observation.
Muslim reformers and scholars have been raising alarms about this alliance for years, often at great personal cost.
Dalia Ziada, an Egyptian Muslim scholar and activist who fled her country after publicly criticizing Hamas’ October 7 attacks, has called this partnership a “sinful marriage.” She argues that both movements share a hatred of Western liberal democracy, but with incompatible end goals: Marxists want a Marxist system; Islamists want an Islamist one. The alliance is tactical, not philosophical. It is a coalition of grievance rather than a community of belief.
Asra Nomani, a Muslim reformer, journalist, and author of Woke Army: The Red-Green Alliance That Is Destroying America’s Freedom, has documented extensively how this partnership operates through campus activism, political organizing, and social-justice rhetoric that obscures what is actually being advanced.
Zineb Riboua, a research fellow at Hudson Institute’s Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East, puts it plainly: in the hierarchy of progressive identity politics, Muslims have now been elevated to the position once reserved for other minority groups. This did not happen by accident. It reflects, she argues, decades of deliberate ideological preparation.
These are not voices from the political right. They are Muslim women who understand the tradition from the inside — and who see clearly what is being done in its name.
The logic of the alliance, once you see it, is not complicated.
Both movements are expert at weaponizing the freedoms of liberal societies against those societies themselves. The radical left has spent decades using Western institutions — courts, universities, media, corporate HR departments — to advance an agenda of a cultural revolution that does not seek to win arguments.
Islamism, in its political form, pursues a parallel strategy. Analysts describe it as “jihad by democracy”: using Western legal systems, financial influence, and political organizing to infiltrate institutions, elevate sympathetic figures, and gradually reshape the landscape of what is permissible to say, fund, or believe.
Both strategies share a common logic: exploit the openness of the system to close it.
This alliance is no longer theoretical.
Zohran Mamdani’s recent electoral success is its most significant political achievement to date. He has denied Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state and proposes to govern by redistributionist means with the full support of the coalition’s activist infrastructure. The cooperation that produced this outcome is now being replicated in Democratic primaries across the country.
Just take a look at Michigan, with Socialist Abdul El-Sayed winning the Democratic U.S. Senate primary thanks in part to the massive vote of Muslims.
We should be clear-eyed about what this means. This is a revolutionary coalition whose constituent elements, for all their internal contradictions, agree on one thing: the civilization that produced constitutional self-government, freedom of conscience, and the inherent dignity of the human person must be dismantled.
The paradoxes are shocking, but also deliberate. LGBT activists rallying for a movement whose governing ideology would strip them of every freedom they have ever claimed is the logic of revolutionary alliance: you use whoever is useful, until the revolution is won.
Catholics, of all people, should not be surprised by this.
The Church has never promised that history moves only forward. It has always been known that civilizations can be lost. Pope Benedict XVI warned the West about building public life “as if God does not exist.” When reason is severed from faith, and when faith is expelled from the public square, what remains is not neutral secularism. It is a vacuum. And vacuums are filled.
The cut flowers of Western culture can look beautiful for a long time after they have been severed from their roots. But they do not last.
Catholics should not respond with fear. Or with silence.
Fear is what this moment is designed to produce. Silence is what the coalition requires to advance.
Our answer is discernment — the capacity to see what is actually happening — and courage: the willingness to say true things in public, to support candidates and institutions that take the civilizational stakes seriously, and to refuse the moral blackmail that labels clarity as bigotry and principle as hatred.
And our answer is also prayer: prayer for conversion and renewal by rebuilding of a culture that remembers what it owes to the tradition that formed it. That work begins in families. In parishes. In the daily choices of ordinary Catholics who refuse to let their children grow up as cut flowers.
The civilization being contested is not ours to own. It is ours to pass on.
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