In the fall of 1976, I was a student at Loyola University in Chicago for one semester. I was 22 years old, a Marxist, and a recent exile from the Soviet Union—a combination that seemed contradictory to almost everyone I met, and that made perfect sense to me. I had not fled Marxism. I had fled a state that had betrayed it. The distinction mattered enormously to me at the time.

In the hallways of that university, I met Iranian students who were organizing for a revolution back home. They were quite public about it. They talked about the shah, about American imperialism, about the need to overthrow a corrupt, Western-backed regime and return Iran to its people. They were passionate, intelligent, and entirely convincing.

What puzzled me was that they were simultaneously Marxist and Islamic. For a complete atheist steeped in historical materialism, this was difficult to parse. Marxist ideology does not merely ignore God—it structurally excludes him. Religion is false consciousness, the opiate administered to the oppressed to reconcile them to their oppression. How could the same people speak of Allah and dialectical materialism in the same breath, with the same conviction, as though no tension existed between them?

I never resolved that puzzle at Loyola. We spoke the same language—oppressor and oppressed, imperialism and resistance, the arc of history bending toward liberation—and the shared grammar was enough. It felt like fraternal solidarity. It felt like being on the right side of history.

Three years later, Ayatollah Khomeini came to power. Within a year or two, many of the Marxists who had marched alongside the Islamists were imprisoned, tortured, and executed. The revolution devoured the people who had helped make it—as revolutions tend to do, though rarely with such ideological precision. The Marxists were not collateral damage. They were targeted because they represented a competing claim on the revolution’s meaning.

Years later, I encountered several of those Iranian students by accident. They had lost their enthusiasm. They wanted to explain things to me. But by then, I had moved in a different direction—Gorbachev’s perestroika had opened the Soviet Union without violence, and that felt like the more important story. I had also lost my own enthusiasm for the Iranian Revolution, for many reasons, but above all because it had made Israel its primary target. The society it created in Iran, and the wars its clerical rulers subsequently initiated, eventually returned my attention to those hallway conversations of 50 years ago.

What had I been standing in the hallway with? What was the actual nature of that movement, and why had its Marxist and Islamic components cohered so naturally—right up until the moment the Islamists no longer needed the Marxists?

After considerable reading, I arrived at an answer. It comes in three colors.



**RED**

  
To understand the intellectual machinery underneath the ideology of those Iranian students, you have to go further back than 20th-century Europe. Further back than Marx. Further back even than Hegel, who was Marx’s most important early teacher.

You have to go back to a text older than Western philosophy itself.

The Hebrew Bible. Specifically, the Book of Exodus.

That is where you find, for the first time in human thought, the idea that history has a direction. That the oppressed are history’s chosen agents. That slavery is not a permanent condition but a stage on the way to liberation. That there is a promised destination—and that reaching it gives meaning to everything endured along the way.

This is not a Greek idea. The Greeks believed in cycles, in eternal return, in the tragedy of repetition. Civilizations rose and fell and rose again. There was no destination, no liberation, no end of history toward which suffering pointed. There was only the wheel.

  
The idea that history moves—that it has a direction, a trajectory, a moral arc—is a Jewish idea. It is one of the most radical and consequential ideas in the history of human thought. And it entered Western philosophy through Hegel, who took the Jewish narrative of exile and redemption and transformed it into a secular theory of how history itself progresses: through contradiction, negation, and synthesis, toward an absolute endpoint of freedom. The *Ruach Elohim*—the Spirit that moves through creation—became, in Hegel’s system, the Spirit that moves through history.

Marx then took Hegel’s structure and stripped out the theology. No more *Ruach Elohim*, no more Spirit, no more sacred destination, no more God. Just the material engine of class struggle moving through history toward its inevitable resolution—the communist liberation of the oppressed. He secularized the structure through Ludwig Feuerbach’s materialist philosophy, retaining the architecture while demolishing its foundation.

The Jewish God was removed. The Jewish structure remained.

And then Ali Shariati arrived in Paris in 1959.

He was a young Iranian intellectual—brilliant, romantic, voraciously well-read. He studied Sartre and absorbed him. He read Fanon and recognized in the Algerian revolution unfolding in the streets around him the living proof of a theory. He translated Heidegger into Farsi. He was precisely the kind of mind that could take incompatible materials and forge them into a new synthesis—which is exactly what he did.

What Shariati constructed, in his lectures and writings over the following two decades, was a revolutionary Islam built entirely on Marxist foundations. Islamic history became a class struggle. The prophet’s migration from Mecca to Medina became a revolutionary transition from bourgeois society to communal equality. The Shia clergy were recast as collaborators with the oppressor—keepers of false consciousness, servants of a corrupt order. Every sacred symbol, every prophetic figure, every theological concept—jihad, martyrdom, the struggle of the faithful—was reloaded with Marxist content and returned to the believer as authentic Islam.

This was not a return to tradition. It was the most radical modernization imaginable—an Islam remade from within using the philosophical tools of the Western university.

Which were themselves built on a Jewish foundation that no one acknowledged.

Consider what this means. The revolutionary grammar that Shariati assembled—the oppressed against the oppressor, history moving toward liberation, the cosmic struggle that consecrates all means—originates in the story of the Exodus. In the experience of the Jewish people. In a text that Jews have read at their Passover tables for 3,000 years.

Hegel borrowed the structure and credited it to Spirit. Marx materialized it and credited it to class. Shariati re-theologized it and credited it to Islam. At every transmission, the Jewish origin was erased. And the movement that resulted—built on Jewish ideas, assembled from Jewish moral vocabulary, powered by a Jewish vision of history—made Jews its primary target.

This is not irony. It is the central fact around which the entire ideological history organizes itself.

Because the erasure is not accidental. It is necessary. If you acknowledged that the entire revolutionary grammar descends from the Hebrew Bible—if you acknowledged that the idea of the oppressed as history’s chosen agents is a Jewish idea—the ideological edifice would collapse. The Jews cannot be the cosmic oppressor if they are the source of the very idea of cosmic liberation. The contradiction would be visible to everyone.

So the source must be erased. The weapon must be turned against the people who forged it. And the movement must never look back at where its ideas came from.

The Western university produced the blueprints. Shariati built the weapon. And the people whose ancestors wrote the original text became the weapon’s designated target.



**GREEN**

  
The puzzle I could not solve at Loyola—how could the same people be simultaneously Marxist and Islamic?—turns out not to be a puzzle at all. It has a precise answer.

They were not two ideologies awkwardly cohabiting. They were one ideology wearing two coats. Underneath the Islamic symbolism and the Marxist framework was a single philosophy of history: a cosmic struggle between oppressor and oppressed, a sacred horizon of liberation toward which all of history moves, a point at which all means become consecrated because the end is not political but apocalyptic.

You do not negotiate your way to an apocalyptic liberation. You annihilate the forces that stand in its way.

This is why, when the revolution came, it no longer needed the Marxists. They had served their purpose. The grammar they shared with the Islamists was real, but the Islamists had always understood where that grammar was going. The Marxists had not.

But the story has a further turn that is equally instructive.

Khomeini did not only devour the Marxists. He devoured his own intellectual father.

Ali Shariati—the man whose lectures had electrified a generation, whose synthesis of Islam and revolutionary theory had built the mass movement that made 1979 possible—was a man Khomeini needed completely and could not tolerate at all. The reasons are revealing. Shariati’s Islam was, in its way, anticlerical. He believed the faithful themselves were the agents of liberation, not the clergy. His vision had no place for a supreme clerical ruler administering the revolution from above, which was precisely Khomeini’s vision of the velayat-e faqih, the guardianship of the jurist that became the Islamic Republic’s governing doctrine.

Shariati was suppressed during his lifetime. He died in London in 1977 under circumstances that were never fully explained, two years before the revolution he had done more than almost anyone to make possible. He was 33 years old. He did not live to see what was built on his foundation.

Once the revolution succeeded, Khomeini systematically erased the debt. The Islamic Republic presented itself as purely, authentically, anciently Islamic—with no acknowledgment of the Marxist intellectual scaffolding that had given it its revolutionary form, and no acknowledgment of the man who had built that scaffolding.

The pattern, by this point, should be familiar.

Hegel took the Jewish structure and credited it to the Spirit. Marx took Hegel’s structure and credited it to class. Shariati took Marx’s structure and attributed it to Islam. Khomeini took Shariati’s revolution and put Allah there.

At every stage: use, discard, erase. At every stage, the ideas travel forward, and the acknowledgment travels nowhere.



**BROWN**

  
There is a third element to this history that is almost never spoken aloud, even by people who understand the red and the green.

The Palestinian national movement was not a bystander to European fascism. It was a participant.

Haj Amin al-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem and the dominant leader of the Palestinian Arab national movement in the first half of the 20th century, spent the Second World War in Berlin as Hitler’s personal guest. He was not a peripheral figure who made an unfortunate wartime accommodation. He was an active architect of the final solution’s reach. He recruited Muslim SS divisions in Bosnia. He broadcast Nazi propaganda in Arabic across the Middle East. And when the opportunity arose to exchange Jewish children for German prisoners of war—to save lives through a negotiated transaction—he personally intervened to prevent it, insisting those children be sent to the death camps instead.

This is documented. It is not disputed. And it was never repudiated.

This is the man whom Malcolm X, in 1964, described as a “cordial man of great dignity.” The American Black revolutionary tradition and the Palestinian national movement found common moral ground in a figure who had worked to extend the Holocaust.

The ideology that al-Husseini represented was absorbed, transformed, and transmitted into the movement that followed. The specific targeting of Jews—not as a political enemy to be negotiated with or a population to be managed, but as a cosmic enemy whose elimination is the precondition for liberation—entered the movement’s DNA and was never removed.

So when we speak of the red-green alliance—the Marxists and Islamists marching together in Tehran in 1979, or on the campuses of Columbia and Harvard today—we should be precise about what that alliance produces. It is not a paradox requiring explanation. It is a convergence that was always oriented in one direction. Toward the Jew as the obstacle that must be annihilated before liberation can be achieved.

Red and green, braided together, produce brown. That is what I was standing in the hallway with at Loyola in 1976.



**THE RESPECTABLE ENABLER**



None of this required importation from Europe. It had a Chicago address.

Twelve miles south of the Chicago Jewish Cafe stands the University of Chicago, one of the world’s great research universities and a central institution of American intellectual life for over a century. Among its major early patrons was a Chicago businessman named Charles Crane.

Crane was, by the standards of his class and era, a progressive. A supporter of Woodrow Wilson. An advocate for the self-determination of peoples. A man of cosmopolitan cultural interests who funded Russian and Slavic studies and believed in international understanding. In 1933, he traveled to Berlin and became one of the first prominent Americans to meet with Adolf Hitler after the Nazi seizure of power. He came away enthusiastic. He funded Arab nationalist movements and maintained a personal friendship with Haj Amin al-Husseini, whom he supported financially. He believed, with the serene confidence of a man who considered himself enlightened, that the Jews were simultaneously the source of Bolshevism and the masters of international finance—the classic double accusation that places the Jew on both sides of every conflict as the hidden manipulator.

A progressive. A philanthropist. A university builder. With a Jewish exception that revealed everything underneath the universalist language.

Crane is not an anomaly. He is a prototype. Because what he represents—the Western intellectual or institution builder who supports peace, democracy, and self-determination, and makes a specific exception for Jews that aligns him with the most murderous forces of his era—did not die with the 20th century.

He is tenured. He is publishing. He is leading campus organizations, signing open letters, and explaining, with complete sincerity, that his position represents principled opposition to power rather than the latest iteration of the oldest hatred in Western civilization.

The vocabulary has changed. The exception has not.

There has always been a particular kind of Western intellectual who requires a revolutionary subject equal to the grandeur of his prose—a cause operatic enough to be aesthetically satisfying, a violence large enough to justify the scale of his moral imagination. For decades, that cause was Stalinism, and support for Stalin was practically a credential of seriousness among Western writers and artists. To doubt it was to announce yourself as provincial, insufficiently tragic, congenitally unable to rise to the demands of history.

When that enthusiasm exhausted itself, it found new objects. The Islamic Republic of Iran—a revolutionary state built on torture and terror—became an object of avant-garde admiration. I was adjacent to some of the people who made that transition, in those Loyola hallways and later, when I pursued graduate work at the University of Chicago. The progression felt, to those inside it, like consistency. The same anti-imperialism. The same solidarity with the oppressed. The same enemies.

Today, the liberation of Palestine functions in contemporary left-wing culture as a species of revolutionary religion—a sacred horizon that consecrates any means and transforms opponents into metaphysical enemies. The observer who wonders why a movement that speaks constantly of justice cannot produce a politics of peace has not grasped that it was never designed to. Liberation, in this framework, is not a political outcome. It is an eschatological one.



**WHAT I WAS STANDING WITH**

  
I want to return, at the end, to that hallway at Loyola.

Those Iranian students were not villains. They were young people on fire with a vision of history that had been assembled—carefully, brilliantly, over more than a century—from the most prestigious intellectual materials the modern West had produced. They had been given a grammar that made the world legible: one that identified the oppressors and the oppressed, traced the arc of history toward its liberation, and told them what the end would look like and why it was worth everything it cost.

I understood that grammar. I spoke it myself. It was, for a time, my grammar too.

What I did not understand—what took years of evidence and a great deal of uncomfortable thinking to understand—is that a grammar which converts politics into cosmic struggle and liberation into an apocalyptic event is not a road to justice. It is a road to murder and permanent war. When your enemy is metaphysical, you cannot make peace with him. You can only wait and work for his annihilation.

The revolution that Ali Shariati assembled in Paris in 1959—from the West’s own philosophical tools, built on a Jewish foundation that every subsequent transmission erased—is still running. It has changed its name many times. It absorbed a fascist strand that was never repudiated. It found respectable patrons in Chicago, in London, in Washington, who funded it, enabled it, and explained it away. And it is running right now on campuses, in streets, and in institutions, dressed in the language of decolonization, indigenous resistance, and the liberation of the oppressed.

Three colors. One revolution. Built on ideas appropriated from the people it is attempting to destroy, aimed with increasing precision at the same target.

The grammar is as convincing today as it was in that Loyola hallway in 1976. I know this because I know how convincing it was then—how total the certainty felt, how natural the solidarity seemed, how obviously we were on the right side of history.

What we could not see was what the grammar was for.

That is what I have spent 50 years learning to say clearly.

The Revolution That Stole Its Ideas From the People It Wants to Destroy