The Horseshoe Embrace
When Red Meets Green, Someone Is the Dinner
The current red-green embrace of leftists with Islamists, united against common enemies (Donald Trump, Republicans, the United States, or just “the man”), will resemble a cannibal’s dinner-invite: the guest discovers the double entendre too late; he’s the menu.
This old joke makes the point:
A doctor and a lawyer, on safari, see a lion charging. The doctor despairs; the lawyer sheds his backpack. “Are you out of your mind?” the doctor asks. “You cannot outrun a lion.” The lawyer shrugs: “I only have to outrun you.”
Under pressure, people drop principle for expediency. That is the red-green alliance: the (necessarily temporary) marriage of radical leftists with Islamists. Their final visions are opposites: secularism, class struggle, and equality vs religious rule, hierarchy, and submission. The inimical, ironic, and ultimately suicidal “Gays for Gaza” makes the point. Yet common hatred creates a brief, ugly intimacy. History is littered with such marriages: in Iran in 1979, Marxists, liberals, and Islamists united against the Shah. Once he fell, the Islamists crushed the left. The men of the Koran more ruthless than the men of Marxian dialectics (as always).
Leftists view Islamists as useful muscle (numbers, passion, street power). Islamists view leftists as useful fools (legitimacy, media access, idiots in the West). The question is never whether the contradictions will surface; only “when” — and who ends up on the other’s menu.
Spain offers the present-day exhibit. At Bilbao Airport in the Basque Country, regional police recently clashed with returning supporters of the Global Sumud Gaza flotilla, who arrived waving Palestinian flags alongside Basque ones and were met with batons and arrests. The Basque Country itself spent decades scarred by Marxist-nationalist separatism and the violence of ETA, which the Spanish state spent forty years suppressing. The grievance industry recycles itself; only the flags change.
And of all European nations, Spain has the least standing to lecture Israel on religious war. The Iberian peninsula spent nearly eight centuries under Muslim rule, from the conquest of 711 to the fall of Granada in 1492.
The Spanish state was forged in the Reconquista; the very nation now lecturing Jerusalem owes its existence to a centuries-long religious war it eventually won. Yet Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez calls Israel’s defensive war a “genocide,” imposes a total arms embargo, recognizes a Palestinian state, and bars Israeli ministers from entering the country. The pot has not merely called the kettle black; it has forgotten it is a pot.
The historical amnesia is breathtaking. A country still managing Catalan and Basque separatism, a country whose Civil War within living memory killed hundreds of thousands and ended in four decades of dictatorship, a country whose sovereignty is now substantially mortgaged to Brussels, presumes to instruct a small democracy fighting for its existence on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean. The Spanish coalition government leans heavily on its hard-left partners; courting that bloc requires the Palestinian cause as currency. The leftists supply the slogans; the Islamists supply the demographic.
Because the demographic is real. Spain’s Muslim population has roughly doubled in three decades to about 2.5 million, with the largest concentration in Catalonia. With a native fertility rate near 1.1 and foreign-born population now above 20 percent, the arithmetic is not subtle. Spain has not yet traveled as far down the road as France or the United Kingdom; it is, however, well on its way. The leftists who today furnish the flotillas and the flag-burnings may discover, as their counterparts did in Tehran, that they were the muscle and never the management.
This is the joke’s second lesson. The lawyer believes he possesses superior strategic insight; he has identified both the threat and the slower runner. Almost everyone imagines himself the man removing the backpack. History occasionally reveals he was carrying it all along.
The Spanish progressive who today denounces Israel from the safety of a Madrid television studio is not the lawyer in the joke. He is the doctor, congratulating himself on his moral seriousness while the lion considers the menu.
