No Safe Sentence: Part III

The bigot I refuse to become and the silence I refuse to hold, means there are no safe sentences about Islam.

Part I and II are below.

Most alliances have a mythology they believe justifies the goal of their partnership. The one cementing the Western left to Islamism is depicted most clearly in Tehran during the cold winter of 1979. It’s with those who didn’t survive that year, unable to write the message down. The Marxists of the Tudeh and Fedayeen, along with students, filled the avenues throughout the city. Alongside the mullahs, they undid a king.

The crowd was supplied by the left. Along with clerics who brought short tempers and long rope.

Within two years, the same revolutionaries who chanted for freedom were imprisoned or in the pits nearby. Michel Foucault, who earlier flew in to consecrate the uprising as a “political spirituality,” was back in Paris without having witnessed anyone hanged.

That story is true. It’s also a myth of the red-green alliance.

It was no single revolution. Handshakes grasped in the Egyptian centers of 2011, where liberals and the Muslim Brotherhood toppled a strongman during the Arab Spring. It was offered up throughout the antiwar coalitions during the years after, when Trotskyists shared microphones with theocrats while assuring each other that the enemy of theirs could be controlled.

It can always be kept on a leash, they thought. Right up to the hour it can’t.

This odd coupling eventually earned itself a title. Karagiannis and McCauley referred to it as the “red-green alliance.” They traced how these two movements sharing no heaven or Gods learned to chant in unison against a common foe. France was ground-up over islamo-gauchisme, deciding if it described a reality or was a conjuring of phantoms aimed at frightening politicians.

After October 7, this perspective climbed out of academia and took shape: we saw it wearing a kiffiyeh and holding a trans banner. It had its own voting bloc. The DSA rose past a hundred thousand members, and with a single season put a mayor in NYC’s city hall. What was once thought by specialists now governed the most famous city in the US, and is presently being talked about throughout the world.

Think about what these two groupings want, because their incompatibility is complete and neither will confess to it. One imagines a world with no gods and no masters. The other has a world with one God who is master. One would dissolve the family into the collective. The other sanctifies family and stands watch over it. One preaches the body’s inviolability. The other legislates it’s covering.

One sings “above us only sky.” One would execute whoever sung as much. One would rid the hierarchy of divinity. The other would bring it to earth and celebrate.

There is no synthesis at the end, no Marxist dialectic merging sharia law into socialist utopia. There is a transitional commitment, however, an agreement to postpone this incompatibility until the common enemy they agree upon is vanquished.

It becomes cruel when placed upon the backdrop of values the left hold.

A man will march for a movement whose leaders hurl men who love men from rooftops.

What does it mean for a feminist to raise her clenched fist for a law that limits her daughter’s inheritance? How do we rationalize an activist who filters English sentences for harm staying quiet to a code prescribing lashes?

Such forgiveness is extended to no other.