Mamdani’s Coalition of Socialists and Islamists Could, Like Tehran’s ‘Red and Black’ Alliance in 1979, Boomerang on Leftists

Read the full article in The New York Sun

Modern Iranian history flashes a bright caution sign as America’s far left and Islamist movements converge in our cities and universities. Iranians have seen this movie before, and the American left are playing their role perfectly. It’s only a matter of time until the tragic third act. In the 1960s and 1970s, Marxists and Islamists in Iran joined forces against the Shah, united by anti-imperialist slogans and revolutionary fervor. The Shah called it the “red and black” alliance. Western liberal elite writing in the likes of the New Yorker dismissed the warning as propaganda. Within a few years, though, that alliance brought down one of the Middle East’s most modernizing governments and replaced it with a theocracy that imprisoned and executed the very same leftists who had helped it win. The American version, often called the “red and green” alliance, follows the same logic. It is a coalition of negation, united by what it resents and opposes. The outcome of such partnerships is predictable: the greens will eat the reds, as did the black-turbaned Ayatollah after 1979...

Read the rest of the op-ed here.