THE RED-GREEN CONVERGENCE

Overlapping Ecosystems can Reinforce One Another without Sharing a Headquarters a Doctrine or a Final Political Destination

Ken Robinson 

 

 

There is an analytical mistake democracies make repeatedly when confronting ideological movements they do not understand: they begin by asking whether the movement is illegal. By the time that question becomes decisive, the more important work may already have been neglected. The first requirement is to understand a movement on its own terms—what it believes, what it tells its adherents, which institutions it seeks to influence, what it considers illegitimate about the existing order, how it intends to acquire power, where it compromises tactically, and which principles it regards as beyond compromise. The final question is the one democracies are often least comfortable asking: what would the movement do if it succeeded?

George Kennan approached Soviet communism by studying the system rather than caricaturing it. He examined history, ideology, political psychology, internal contradiction, strategic patience and the regime’s conception of its adversaries. Andrew Marshall, working from a different discipline, insisted that strategic competition be understood dynamically. A snapshot of present strength mattered less than trajectories, asymmetries, institutional behavior and the assumptions upon which a competitor’s strategy depended. Neither method requires us to pretend that unlike movements are equivalent. Socialism is not fascism. Islamism is not communism. The Muslim Brotherhood is not al-Qaeda, and a Muslim American voting for a socialist candidate is not thereby participating in jihad. The historical lesson is narrower: democracies have repeatedly paid a price for dismissing ideological movements before understanding what those movements themselves said they intended to change.

Political Islam and the resurgent revolutionary Left deserve that same analytical seriousness. Something consequential is occurring where portions of those traditions meet. It is not adequately described as a conspiracy, because much of the convergence is public, nor as a merger, because the movements retain profound disagreements about the society each ultimately desires. The useful intelligence question is whether historically incompatible movements have discovered enough common adversaries, political vocabulary, institutions and electoral opportunities to cooperate—and whether that cooperation can mature from episodic protest into durable political power.

An Alliance That Should Not Make Sense

On first inspection, the contemporary radical Left and political Islam should be adversaries. The revolutionary Left descends from a largely materialist tradition suspicious of organized religion and generally embraces secular government, abortion rights, feminism, LGBT equality and the primacy of civil law. Islamism begins from a different premise: in varying degrees, it treats Islam not only as personal faith but as a source of principles governing society and political authority. Its conservative manifestations can therefore conflict directly with the progressive Left over family, sexuality, gender, religious authority and the permissible reach of the state.

 

 

Yet political scientists Emmanuel Karagiannis and Clark McCauley identified more than a decade ago what they called an emerging “Red-Green Alliance.” Their 2013 study did not argue that Islamists and radical leftists had reconciled their doctrines. It examined how both could mobilize through common frames, especially anti-capitalism, anti-globalization, anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism. Once politics is organized around a common adversary, agreement about the eventual destination becomes less important than agreement about what must first be opposed. American power, Western capitalism, Israel, colonialism and the existing international order can therefore become points of convergence for people whose preferred social orders would otherwise collide.

That is the phenomenon worth measuring: a coalition of adversary more than a coalition of destination. Its durability cannot be inferred from a march, a campus encampment or a shared slogan. It must be tested through institutions, money, leadership relationships, candidate recruitment, electoral performance, foreign relationships and the persistence of alliances after the immediate grievance has passed.

The Muslim Brotherhood: The Long Game

There is a photograph from Egypt in 1928 that, in retrospect, marks the beginning of one of the longest political contests of the modern Middle East. Hassan al-Banna was a twenty-two-year-old schoolteacher when he founded the Society of the Muslim Brothers in Ismailia. He was not simply establishing another mosque. He was building a movement that treated Islam as a comprehensive framework for individual conduct, social organization and ultimately political life.

 

 

The distinction between Islam and Islamism is indispensable. Islam is a religion practiced by nearly two billion people across an extraordinary range of cultures, governments and theological traditions. Islamism is a political proposition: that Islamic principles should shape the organization and authority of the state and society. Islamism itself is not synonymous with violence, and a jihadist prepared to employ terrorism occupies a further category. Collapsing those distinctions is bad intelligence analysis because it implicates enormous populations that pose no threat while obscuring the much smaller networks that may.

Al-Banna’s answer to colonialism, secularization and the dissolution of the Ottoman Caliphate was not merely renewed private devotion. Brotherhood thought envisioned transformation proceeding outward—from the individual and family into the community, its institutions and eventually government. Britain’s 2015 government review described the Brotherhood as fundamentally political, documented a history of secrecy and organizational ambiguity, and concluded that aspects of its ideology and activities ran counter to British values including democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty, equality and mutual tolerance. The review did not reduce the Brotherhood worldwide to a single terrorist organization. That ambiguity is not an inconvenience to be edited out of the story; it is central to understanding it.

 

 

 

The Brotherhood’s enduring organizational insight was that political power need not begin with political office. Schools, charities, mosques, professional associations, student groups, media outlets and community organizations can create legitimacy, leadership and networks long before a movement wins an election. Governments can close a headquarters, ban a party or imprison a leader. An idea distributed through civil society is considerably harder to extinguish—and, in a democracy, much of the activity through which it spreads may be entirely lawful.

The Problem of Violence

Any serious account of the Brotherhood has to confront a history that neither its defenders nor its critics should simplify. The early movement developed a clandestine armed apparatus and became involved in political violence in Egypt. Al-Banna was assassinated in 1949 amid escalating conflict between the organization and the Egyptian state. Under Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Brotherhood endured severe repression; thousands were imprisoned, and that experience helped produce some of the twentieth century’s most influential radical Islamist thought, most famously through Sayyid Qutb.

The Brotherhood later emphasized political participation and officially professed nonviolence, particularly in Egypt. That evolution was real. So were the contradictions. Britain’s review found senior Brotherhood figures reiterating commitments to nonviolence while others failed to repudiate calls for retribution, and it found Brotherhood-associated actors in Britain expressing support for terrorist attacks by Hamas. The proper conclusion is neither that every Brotherhood organization is terrorist nor that the movement’s relationship with violence is historically uncomplicated. The British government called that relationship “highly ambiguous,” a useful description precisely because it resists both absolution and collective indictment.

Political movements reveal themselves not only through violence they directly commit but through the violence they excuse, romanticize or condemn selectively. Muslim civilians have been among the greatest victims of modern Islamist violence, from Algeria and Iraq to Pakistan, Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen and Nigeria. Brotherhood organizations have condemned many terrorist attacks, and the record should say so. The harder inquiry is whether outrage changes according to the identity of the perpetrator, and whether violence against some targets is granted a political legitimacy denied to violence against others. Where documented, that inconsistency is legitimate territory for intelligence analysis and journalism.

Hamas Changes the Argument

Hamas emerged from the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood tradition, a lineage well established in the historical record. Since October 7, 2023, the United States government has moved beyond treating that relationship as merely historical. On January 13, 2026, Treasury designated the Egyptian and Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood branches as Specially Designated Global Terrorists for material support to Hamas, while State designated the Lebanese Muslim Brotherhood as both a Foreign Terrorist Organization and a Specially Designated Global Terrorist. Treasury explicitly described Hamas as inspired by and serving as a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood.

 

 

The government went further in July 2026. Treasury targeted Mahmoud al-Abyari, whom it identified as a senior Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood leader, and organizations it said supported Hamas through ostensibly charitable or financial networks. These are formal U.S. government findings concerning specified actors. They do not establish that every organization influenced by Brotherhood thought participates in terrorism, and Washington has not converted every Brotherhood-associated organization worldwide into a single designated entity. Precision matters because the difference between ideological affinity, organizational affiliation and material support is the difference between analysis and guilt by association.

The Case Americans Should Know

Long before those 2026 actions, the problem had surfaced in Texas. The Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, once the largest Muslim charity in the United States, was headquartered in Richardson. In 2008 a federal jury convicted the foundation and five leaders in a terrorism-financing case. The Justice Department said the defendants had provided approximately $12.4 million in support to Hamas through Hamas-associated organizations and presented evidence that the foundation served as the chief fundraising arm of a Palestine Committee created by the Muslim Brotherhood in the United States.

 

 

The case establishes two propositions simultaneously. The first is uncomfortable for anyone inclined to dismiss concern about Islamist institutional networks as fantasy: such a support network was proved in federal court. The second is equally important for anyone tempted to identify contemporary organizations by historical association alone: the government had to produce evidence. Money was traced, communications were introduced, relationships were demonstrated, defendants were tried and a jury returned convictions. That remains the standard.

The Document From 1991

One document repeatedly appears in arguments about Brotherhood activity in America: the 1991 “Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America,” written by Mohamed Akram and later made public through the Holy Land Foundation litigation. Its language described Brotherhood work in North America in sweeping civilizational terms and contemplated a long process of institutional and social transformation.

 

 

The memorandum is frequently mishandled by both sides. It is not an eternal operations order binding every Muslim organization in the United States, and the appearance of an organization in historical Brotherhood records does not establish present-day Brotherhood control. But the document cannot responsibly be dismissed as invention. It demonstrates that at least some Brotherhood strategists were thinking explicitly about North America as an arena for long-term institutional activity more than three decades ago. What organizational continuity, if any, survives from that strategy today is an evidentiary question, not a matter for presumption.

Its deeper significance is the conception of time. Political movements attract attention when they riot, bomb something or win an election. The Brotherhood tradition also understood power as something that can be accumulated before it is exercised: institutions can create legitimacy; education can shape vocabulary; community leadership can precede legislation; alliances can be cultivated before electoral opportunity arrives. None of that is terrorism. It is political strategy, and democratic countries have every right to study it.

Europe Became the Laboratory

France concluded that political Islam could no longer be examined solely through the familiar categories of immigration, religious accommodation and counterterrorism. In May 2025 its Interior Ministry published a major report, “The Muslim Brotherhood and Political Islamism in France,” after commissioning senior officials to document the phenomenon and explain it to the public. Britain had undertaken its own review a decade earlier. Both inquiries focused attention on the possibility that Islamist influence could be accumulated through religious, educational, charitable and civic institutions without requiring an overtly violent organization.

 

 

In April 2026, two members of the European Parliament introduced a motion calling for a coordinated European assessment and for the Brotherhood to be added to the European Union terrorist list on the basis of established legal and factual evidence. The motion was referred to committee; it was not itself an EU terrorist designation. Europe has not reached a single legal conclusion about the Brotherhood. What has changed is that political Islamism has moved from the margins of security debate into the formal agenda of European institutions.

The difficult category is nonviolent ideological competition inside democratic systems. Terrorism presents governments with familiar criminal and security authorities. A lawful movement seeking influence through civil society, religious institutions, education, community organization and elections presents liberal democracy with a harder problem. The state cannot criminalize belief merely because that belief challenges liberal assumptions. It can insist on transparency concerning foreign financing, organizational relationships, advocacy of violence and the political objectives being pursued.

The Mosque and the Political Message

Mosques perform the same fundamental functions for Muslims that churches, synagogues and temples perform for other religious communities: worship, fellowship, charity, education and spiritual life. Millions of Muslims attend them without participating in Islamist politics. That fact must remain explicit, but it cannot become an excuse for refusing to examine cases in which religious authority is deliberately used for political mobilization.

 

 

The British review found that Brotherhood-associated and influenced groups had at times acquired significant influence in national organizations, charities and some mosques that claimed to represent Muslim communities. The important word is some. Similar sermons in distant cities do not by themselves establish centralized command; that requires common source material, identifiable distribution systems, financial relationships, instructions or documented communications. Yet political messaging becomes analytically relevant when it repeatedly portrays Muslims as permanently besieged by Western society, converts religious identity into a political bloc, imports foreign conflicts into domestic politics or treats democratic participation principally as a mechanism for accumulating communal power. Freedom of religion protects the imam’s right to preach. It does not require the analyst to pretend that a political sermon is apolitical.

Migration and the Question Europe Was Afraid to Ask

The migration crisis after 2015 added another combustible dimension. Some major flows into Europe were disproportionately composed of younger men, a demographic fact that quickly became trapped between two political caricatures: either every arrival was represented as a helpless refugee family or every young Muslim man was treated as a potential extremist. Neither proposition was true. Demography alone cannot establish Islamist intent, much less prove that the Muslim Brotherhood organized migration flows.

 

 

The harder question came afterward: could European governments provide sanctuary while also producing political and cultural integration? Millions of Muslims and other immigrants have integrated into European societies, built businesses, entered professions, served in government and raised families whose identities are thoroughly European. Other communities remain more segregated. European governments consequently confront a mixture of foreign financing of religious institutions, radical preaching, Islamist organization, imported sectarian conflict and legitimate religious conservatism. Those categories cannot be collapsed without losing the very distinctions required to manage them.

A Muslim is not necessarily an Islamist; an Islamist is not necessarily violent; a nonviolent Islamist can nevertheless advocate a political order incompatible with liberal democracy; and a jihadist prepared to use terrorism represents another category again. Democratic societies need enough intellectual confidence to hold all four propositions in mind at the same time.

The Arab Governments Reached Their Own Conclusions

Several governments in the Muslim world reached much harsher conclusions about the Brotherhood than Western governments initially did. Egypt outlawed the organization after the 2013 removal of President Mohamed Morsi and designated it a terrorist organization. Saudi Arabia designated the Brotherhood a terrorist organization in 2014. The United Arab Emirates has pursued an aggressive policy against Brotherhood-associated political Islam and has repeatedly warned Western governments about Islamist networks operating through civil institutions.

 

 

Their judgments cannot simply be accepted at face value. Governments that suppress political opposition possess obvious incentives to define opponents as security threats, and authoritarianism complicates the evidentiary environment. Yet the reverse inference is equally unsound: an authoritarian government can still possess accurate intelligence. The relevant question is not whether Cairo, Riyadh or Abu Dhabi dislikes the Brotherhood. Plainly they do. The question is whether particular claims concerning financing, organization, foreign direction, extremist rhetoric and support for violence can be independently corroborated.

Qatar, Turkey and the Politics of Access

Qatar illustrates why the Brotherhood cannot be understood solely through the language of terrorism. For decades Doha provided a home and platform to Yusuf al-Qaradawi, one of the most influential Sunni Islamist scholars of the modern era and a figure closely associated with Brotherhood thought.

 

 

Qatar also hosted Hamas political leaders while maintaining close relations with Washington, housing a major American military presence and serving as an intermediary in negotiations involving Israel and Hamas. The apparent contradiction is better understood as statecraft: Qatar has accumulated influence by preserving access to actors that often refuse to speak directly to one another. The same caution applies to Al Jazeera. Ideological sympathy, editorial bias, state influence and Brotherhood operational control are four different propositions and should not be collapsed into one.The apparent contradiction is better understood as statecraft: Qatar has accumulated influence by preserving access to actors that often refuse to speak directly to one another. The same caution applies to Al Jazeera. Ideological sympathy, editorial bias, state influence and Brotherhood operational control are four different propositions and should not be collapsed into one.

Turkey: Ideological Kinship Meets Statecraft

Turkey presents a more revealing case because the relationship between Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party, or AKP, and the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood has been both close and conditional. The AKP is not simply a Turkish branch of the Brotherhood. It emerged from Turkey’s own National Outlook tradition and developed within a political system very different from Egypt’s. Even so, the ideological kinship and political cooperation after the Arab uprisings were substantial enough to be documented without speculation.

 

 

“Hamas is not a terrorist organisation, it is a liberation group, ‘mujahideen’ waging a battle to protect its lands and people.” Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, NATO Ally

Carnegie’s study of the relationship records that Ankara moved quickly after Hosni Mubarak’s fall to provide Egypt political, financial and technical assistance, committing roughly $2 billion in development aid. During the 2012 presidential campaign, the AKP sent election specialists and advisers to assist Mohamed Morsi and the Brotherhood. Erdoğan treated Morsi’s victory as a strategic opportunity, and both Morsi and Hamas leader Khaled Mashal appeared at the AKP’s 2012 party congress. The relationship therefore extended beyond rhetorical sympathy: Turkey invested political capital, expertise and money in the success of a Brotherhood-led Egypt.

Morsi’s removal in 2013 transformed the relationship. Erdoğan condemned the military intervention, the AKP organized demonstrations supporting Morsi and the Brotherhood, and the Rabaa hand sign became a conspicuous symbol of Turkish solidarity with the movement. In the years that followed, Istanbul became an important center for Egyptian Brotherhood exiles, organizations and media. The broad proposition that Turkey offered political space and sanctuary to Brotherhood-associated figures after the Egyptian crackdown is well supported. What the evidence does not justify is converting that relationship into a permanent command structure in which Ankara directs a unitary international Brotherhood.

The later reversal is equally important. As Turkey sought rapprochement with Egypt and Gulf states, Ankara began constraining Egyptian opposition media and Brotherhood-linked activity on Turkish soil. That evolution exposes the limits of ideological fraternity. Erdoğan’s government was willing to provide access, sanctuary and political support when those relationships served its regional ambitions; it was also willing to narrow that space when normalization with Cairo became more valuable. Turkey is therefore best understood as a state whose Islamist political affinity created unusual access to Brotherhood networks, but whose policy remained subordinate to Turkish national interest. That is a more useful intelligence judgment than either denying the relationship or imagining an immutable alliance.

Now Look at the Other Side of the Coalition

The Democratic Socialists of America should be examined by the same rule: allow the organization to describe itself. Its current electoral literature is unusually explicit. DSA’s National Electoral Commission says the organization is committed to becoming an “independent mass socialist party” within a global working-class movement, with a program intended to permit the working class to rule and “end capitalism.” Its 2026 endorsement criteria require candidates to regard themselves as “socialist organizers first, and legislators second,” identify publicly with socialism, help expand DSA and cooperate with other DSA officeholders.

 

 

There is another distinction worth making because American political language frequently obscures it. Democratic socialism is often introduced to voters through the familiar vocabulary of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal or the prosperous welfare states of Scandinavia. Those analogies can describe particular policies—universal health care, stronger labor protections, subsidized education or a more generous social safety net—but they do not necessarily describe the economic destination DSA itself identifies. Postwar European social democracy largely reached an accommodation with private ownership and competitive markets: capitalism would remain the principal engine of production while taxation, collective bargaining and public programs distributed its benefits more broadly and protected citizens against some of its failures.

DSA’s own literature describes a more ambitious objective. It does not merely propose regulating capitalism more aggressively; its electoral strategy explicitly contemplates building political power capable ultimately of replacing it.

The distinction matters because Scandinavian social democracy and democratic socialism may share policies without sharing an endpoint.

 

 

That does not make DSA clandestine; much of the strategy is published. Nor is socialist political participation illegitimate in a constitutional democracy. The significance lies in understanding elections as instruments of organization rather than treating every candidate as an isolated campaign. The relevant measures are therefore not merely congressional seats won in a particular cycle, but membership, chapters, organizers trained, municipal and state offices captured, durable constituencies created and the capacity to convert issue mobilization into repeatable electoral machinery. When an organization says openly that campaigns are part of building a mass socialist movement, analysts should neither sensationalize the statement nor explain it away.

The distinction between immediate policy and ultimate objective is particularly important. A campaign can quite sincerely seek cheaper housing, stronger unions or expanded public services while simultaneously serving a larger organizational purpose. Marshall would have separated the capability being accumulated from the policy used to accumulate it. DSA’s own electoral literature makes that relationship unusually visible: campaigns are expected not simply to win office but to recruit members, strengthen chapters, train organizers and increase the independent political capacity of the socialist movement. The relevant analytical question is therefore not whether every voter supporting a DSA candidate seeks the abolition of capitalism. Plainly they do not. It is whether electoral victories are increasing the capacity of an organization that says it does.

October 7 Became the Bridge

The Gaza war created an unusually powerful bridge among constituencies that otherwise share surprisingly little. Palestinian nationalism, Muslim political mobilization, revolutionary socialism, anti-colonial activism, university protest organizations and portions of the racial-justice movement increasingly encountered one another through a common vocabulary of settler colonialism, imperialism, oppression, resistance, capitalism, Zionism and decolonization. Those terms can translate very different grievances into a common theory of power without requiring agreement about the society that should ultimately replace the one being condemned.

 

 

The movement from protest toward electoral organization is already visible. The Uncommitted campaign during the 2024 Democratic presidential primaries demonstrated that Gaza could mobilize a substantial bloc of voters and build networks that survived the primary itself. By 2026, activists from the broader progressive and pro-Palestinian ecosystem were supporting or contesting elections, with Michigan providing an obvious laboratory. None of this is inherently subversive. Arab-American and Muslim-American citizens organizing voters, raising money, defeating incumbents and electing candidates are exercising the same constitutional rights as every other constituency. The security question begins only where evidence suggests foreign direction, prohibited financing, material support to designated organizations or deliberate concealment of organizational relationships.

This distinction is essential because a democratic society can simultaneously defend Muslim political participation and investigate Islamist political networks. Confusing the two damages both objectives.

The Coalition’s Great Contradiction

The convergence contains a structural contradiction that may ultimately determine its durability. The progressive Left and conservative political Islam can cooperate effectively while politics is organized around common opposition, yet their assumptions about a legitimate social order diverge sharply. Secular authority, the political role of religion, private property, abortion, homosexuality, women’s autonomy and the circumstances in which religious doctrine may constrain legislation are not peripheral disagreements; they concern the source of authority itself. A coalition can postpone those disputes while confronting a shared adversary. Governing eventually forces them into the open.

This is why the Red-Green convergence may prove stronger as an opposition coalition than as a governing one. Israel provides an unusually effective bridge because the same conflict can be interpreted through two different ideological languages. An Islamist can understand Palestine through religion, communal solidarity and the history of Muslim lands, while a revolutionary socialist can interpret the conflict through colonialism, capitalism, race and Western imperial power. They can arrive at the same demonstration without arriving at the same political philosophy. The fact that they stand together establishes coalition behavior, not ideological identity.

The Question Democracy Must Ask

The United States has confronted ideological challenges before, but historical analogy is useful only when differences are preserved. Fascism rejected liberal democracy as decadent. Soviet communism understood capitalism as a system whose contradictions would ultimately destroy it. Jihadist movements concluded that terrorism and armed struggle could accelerate political and religious transformation. Contemporary political Islamism presents a different challenge when it operates nonviolently through civil society and democratic participation. Democratic socialism presents another when its adherents openly seek electoral authority to replace capitalism with a different economic order.

 

 

Neither project becomes illegitimate merely because it is ambitious. Democracy permits citizens to advocate profound constitutional, economic and cultural change. Political liberty, however, does not require intellectual indifference. A society entitled to choose its future is also entitled to understand what competing movements propose to do with power.

American debate often fails at precisely this point. One pole sees Islamists wherever Muslims organize politically; the other can become reluctant to acknowledge political Islam as a distinct ideology at all. One pole uses “communist” as a synonym for almost any progressive; the other can discuss socialism as though the twentieth century raised no enduring questions about concentrated political and economic power. Neither posture constitutes analysis.

What Would Kennan and Marshall Ask?

Kennan would begin by reading the movements themselves: speeches, internal debates, resolutions, publications, campaign literature, fundraising appeals and, where politically relevant, sermons and foreign-language communications. He would compare what organizations tell sympathetic audiences with what they tell the broader public, while resisting the temptation to treat every rhetorical inconsistency as proof of conspiracy. The purpose would be to understand the movement’s conception of itself, its grievances, its vocabulary of legitimacy and the political future it considers desirable.

Marshall would turn that qualitative understanding into a competitive assessment over time. Membership would matter, but so would the institutions capable of surviving individual leaders: schools, charities, media platforms, political action committees, professional networks, campus organizations, local chapters and elected offices. Money would be traced not merely by amount but by source and purpose. Candidate victories would be evaluated alongside recruitment, geographic concentration, coalition behavior and the capacity to reproduce success in successive elections. Foreign relationships would be distinguished carefully among ideological sympathy, financing, sanctuary, lobbying, direction and operational control. Above all, the assessment would search for indicators that predict future political capacity rather than simply count what is visible today.

That is a better question than whether America is already experiencing an Islamist or socialist “takeover.” It is not. The United States remains a vast constitutional republic in which both movements are minorities and face substantial political resistance. The Democratic Party itself contains centrists, liberals, progressives and socialists who frequently disagree. American Muslims are politically diverse. Brotherhood-derived movements are fragmented internationally, and the relationship between Turkey and the Egyptian Brotherhood demonstrates how quickly state interests can reorder ideological alliances. A snapshot, however, is not a trajectory. The proper concern is direction, rate of change and institutional persistence.

The Intelligence Test

A serious examination therefore requires reciprocal discipline. A Muslim should not be called an Islamist without evidence, an Islamist should not be called a terrorist without evidence, and a socialist should not be called a communist because the terms are rhetorically convenient. Attendance at the same demonstration does not establish organizational control; ethnic or religious identity does not establish foreign direction; criticism of an Israeli government does not establish support for Hamas. Those distinctions are not concessions to political correctness. They are the elementary standards of competent intelligence work.

The same discipline must operate in the opposite direction. Hamas’s Brotherhood lineage should not be treated as imaginary. Federal terrorism-financing convictions should not be dismissed because defendants operated through charitable structures. Formal Treasury designations of Brotherhood branches and financial networks are facts that belong in the assessment. DSA should not be described merely as a movement for Scandinavian-style social programs when its own electoral organization says it intends to build an independent mass socialist party and end capitalism. Political Islam should not be exempted from scrutiny because examination of it may be denounced as Islamophobic. The antidote to prejudice is precision, not blindness.

Islamophobia is a political and social term constructed to identify prejudice or hostility toward Muslims or Islam; also used to end debate, stigmatize or suppress legitimate criticism of Islamic beliefs, institutions, or political Islam.

The Long Game

The deeper story may ultimately be about time. The Brotherhood learned almost a century ago that political power can be accumulated before it is exercised. Institutions can precede elections; cultural legitimacy can precede legislation; a generation can be educated before it governs. The contemporary American socialist movement, though emerging from a radically different tradition, understands a related organizational truth. DSA’s own electoral literature treats campaigns not simply as contests for office but as opportunities to recruit members, expand chapters, train organizers and construct a durable political movement.

 

 

There is an additional reason intermediate political objectives matter. Movements do not need every participant in a coalition to accept their maximum program. A tenant voting for rent control need not desire the replacement of capitalism; a Muslim protesting civilian deaths in Gaza need not support the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas or political Islam. Successful movements expand precisely because immediate grievances can mobilize constituencies much larger than their ideological core. The intelligence problem is therefore not solved by counting committed socialists or committed Islamists. Marshall would ask whether those smaller ideological organizations are acquiring disproportionate political capacity by organizing much larger populations around intermediate objectives they genuinely share.

This does not prove a unified Red-Green strategy for the United States.

The evidence supports something subtler: overlapping ecosystems can reinforce one another without sharing a headquarters, a doctrine or a final political destination. A protest coalition can create vocabulary and relationships; those relationships can produce organizations; organizations can recruit candidates; electoral victories can create institutional legitimacy; and legitimacy can make yesterday’s marginal proposition part of tomorrow’s ordinary political argument. None of those steps requires conspiracy. Most can occur in public.

That is precisely why the phenomenon deserves serious examination. Fascism and communism were not dangerous because democracies studied them too carefully; they were dangerous in part because too many observers either caricatured them or assumed that their most consequential ambitions could never survive contact with established institutions. Islamist terrorism taught a different lesson: ideological language that appears extravagant to outsiders can matter greatly to people who believe it. Political Islamism poses a more complicated democratic test when its methods are lawful, gradual and institutional rather than violent.

The objective should not be to suppress lawful belief or political participation. It should be to understand the competition before deciding whether there is a threat, where that threat actually resides and which institutions are resilient enough to absorb it. The United States has constitutional mechanisms for confronting bad ideas: argument, exposure, elections, law enforcement where crimes occur, financial transparency where foreign money enters politics, and the insistence that every citizen enjoys equal protection regardless of religion or ideology.

Those mechanisms work best when citizens know what is being contested.

The central question, then, is not whether the radical Left and political Islam have secretly agreed upon the America they wish to build. The evidence does not support that conclusion, and their deepest doctrines suggest the opposite. The question is whether portions of both movements have learned that they can accumulate influence together before they are ever required to settle what comes afterward. If that convergence continues to grow, the contradiction between them will eventually matter. Until then, their common opposition may matter more.

Kennan would have recognized the need to understand the worldview before prescribing the response. Marshall would have insisted on measuring the trajectory rather than reacting to the latest headline. That is the standard this subject requires: neither alarmism nor denial, but disciplined attention to ideology, organization, money, institutions, alliances, time and power. Democracies do not defend themselves by fearing every dissenter. They defend themselves by understanding what is changing while there is still time to decide, democratically and intelligently, what should remain.

Source Note

Emmanuel Karagiannis and Clark McCauley, “The Emerging Red-Green Alliance: Where Political Islam Meets the Radical Left,” Terrorism and Political Violence 25, no. 2 (2013): 167–182.

United Kingdom Government, Muslim Brotherhood Review: Main Findings, 17 December 2015; Prime Minister’s Statement on the Muslim Brotherhood Review, 17 December 2015.

U.S. Department of Justice, Holy Land Foundation prosecution and sentencing materials, 2008–2009.

U.S. Department of the Treasury, “Treasury and State Departments Designate Muslim Brotherhood Branches as Terrorist Organizations,” 13 January 2026; OFAC designation records.

U.S. Department of the Treasury, “Treasury Disrupts Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas Financial Networks,” 23 July 2026.

French Ministry of the Interior, “Frères musulmans et islamisme politique en France,” published 21 May 2025.

European Parliament, Motion B10-0182/2026, “For the inclusion of the Muslim Brotherhood on the EU list of terrorist organisations,” 7 April 2026. The document is a motion, not an EU designation.

Senem Aydın-Düzgit, “The Seesaw Friendship Between Turkey’s AKP and Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 24 July 2014.

Democratic Socialists of America, National Electoral Commission, 2026 endorsement criteria and electoral strategy materials, including “What makes a good DSA campaign?” and “DSA Endorsement,” updated 29 August 2026.

Primary and secondary materials concerning the 1991 Explanatory Memorandum introduced in the Holy Land Foundation litigation. The document is treated here as evidence of the views of its author and milieu, not as proof of present-day control over every organization named in historical Brotherhood records.