by Auguste Meyrat

France is on fire — again. Hundreds of French schools have closed for periods or remain shut down, and the rioting continues, even spreading to neighboring Belgium. Beginning with a faculty protest at Saint-Exupéry High School over budget cuts, students soon joined in and similar protests broke out across the country. To no one's surprise, activists almost immediately co-opted these demonstrations, taking advantage of the situation and organizing "fiery but not so peaceful" protests in the streets.

As many have now observed, including President Trump, the rioters are largely Muslim immigrants and radical leftists. Thus far, nearly 7,000 rioters have been arrested, more than 1,000 have been injured, and one teenager has lost his hand while another has reportedly partially lost his sight in clashes with police.

As writer John Daniel Davidson recently argued, the current riots in France illustrate yet again the alliance of Islamists and communists, or the Red-Green Alliance: "This is the Red-Green alliance of the socialist/Antifa left and Muslim immigrants, operationalized to bring the country to its knees through widespread rioting ahead of national elections next year." Despite their many differences, the two groups have united "to tear down western institutions and the Christian faith on which they were built."

If history and theology are any guide, there is even more uniting these two factions. Davidson correctly points that "on issues like women's rights, transgenderism, gay marriage and the sexual revolution in general, [Islamists and radical leftists] are not aligned." But these differences are mere window dressing to their core similarities: spreading their ideology through aggression and confiscating the wealth of others.

These two principles are fairly well known as features of communism, but most Westerners have been conditioned not to associate them with Islam. Nearly all Western schools, underfunded or otherwise, have done their utmost to obscure the fact that Islam was spread by the sword as well as by theft. As historian Raymond Ibrahim details in his classic history Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War Between Islam and the West, starting with the Prophet Muhammad and continuing with his many successors, Muslim armies would invade, pillage, terrorize, and enslave neighboring kingdoms, forcing their populations to submit to Allah, face martyrdom, or live as second-class citizens (dhimmis).

Besides its unbridled military aggression, Islam's expansion was greatly aided by its parasitic approach to war and government. When it comes to winning battles, the deciding factor often comes down to logistics: Whoever could better supply and compensate an army would usually win. For most of history, generals fed and paid their armies through the spoils of war, allowing soldiers to plunder their enemies' riches and enslave their people. For Christians, such actions are gravely sinful, but in Islam, they are fully allowed in the name of spreading the faith.

This helps explain why Muslim militaries had such a huge advantage over Christian militaries during the Crusades despite their technological inferiority (as noted in God’s Battalions by Rodney Stark). While Christian kings and their vassals went bankrupt funding their military campaigns, Muslim generals could easily entice their armies to fight with promises of spoils. While Christian knights had everything to lose by taking up the cross and fighting in the Holy Land, Muslim soldiers had everything to gain. Even when Christian men were not forced to convert, some would convert voluntarily so that they could take the infidels' women and property and never have to actually work. True or not, Christianity was seen as for chumps.

Even though this was an effective formula for enabling rapid expansion in the short run, it also kept Muslim societies backward and unproductive in the long run. This is why even the richest and most advanced formerly Christian cities (Constantinople, Alexandria, Córdoba, and Antioch) would deteriorate into squalor after a few generations. These places would inevitably experience stagnation and decline since Islam never prioritized scholarship or industry. The only way they could sustain the wealth of their dominions was through slavery, piracy, and large-scale raiding.

This same attitude informs Islamists and their sympathizers today. Hence, Muslim migrants will move into a place with the intention of collecting public entitlements and ignoring all civic duties, such as finding employment, paying taxes, assimilating into the culture, and following the laws. Yet they will do all this with a clear conscience because their faith largely sanctions it. Even though most Christians have misgivings about taking from others, most Muslims feel entitled to take what they can, especially if it comes from infidels.

This is why today's communists are joining forces with today's Islamists, and why Muslim socialist politicians like Zohran Mamdani and Abdul El-Sayed exist. Both ideologies hate the West, yes, but they also hate working. Their idea of democracy is that the mob can "vote" for stealing money from wealthy people, and their idea of justice is to do whatever they want while living off others in perpetuity. As such, unless an autocrat emerges to guard a nation's wealth and impose law and order through draconian measures, both communist and Islamist republics will soon become impoverished, dysfunctional failed states in chronic need of foreign aid and protection.

Of course, when the revolution starts, these consequences are far from every ideologue's mind. They see instant wealth and power for the taking, and nothing in their worldview will persuade them that they have to work for these things. On the contrary, the tenets of socialism and Islam will justify the aggression, lies, and barbarism of the radicals and demagogues while assuring the passive complicity of the self-identified "moderates."

So even if the two factions of the Red-Green Alliance may have disagreements about certain cultural and moral questions down the road, this should offer little comfort to most people today. Whatever their professed beliefs, both groups mean to destroy the West — after they rob it blind first.