Egyptian scholar warns U.S. left that Islamist alliance could repeat Iran 1979

A Muslim scholar who fled Egypt after criticizing Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks is warning that America’s far left risks repeating the fate of Iran’s leftists in 1979 if it continues its alliance with Islamist movements.

Dalia Ziada, a Middle East scholar and coordinator at the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy in Washington, D.C., said the pattern she saw in her native country is now visible in the United States.

Her comments come as organizers prepare “Nakba 78” protests across the U.S. and in dozens of other countries this weekend. Critics say the demonstrations, timed to the anniversary of Israel’s founding, challenge the Jewish state’s legitimacy and in some cases call for its elimination.

“For five or seven years now, we have been seeing some kind of a ‘sinful marriage’ between the radical left and the radical Islamism, the groups that hate Western liberal democracies and desire to destroy them,” Ziada told Fox News Digital.

She said Islamist groups, including those linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, have used the Palestinian cause to build alliances with Western activists. She described the partnership as a “red–green alliance” that targets Jewish communities, which she called a pillar of liberal democratic systems.

“They agree on one thing, that they need to destroy the West as we know it today and replace it with something else,” she said. “For the radicalists, they want to replace it with the Marxist system. For the Islamists, they want to replace it with an Islamist system.”

A Fox News Digital investigation found that roughly 425 organizations, including communist groups, Muslim advocacy organizations and anti-Israel coalitions, form a coordinated protest network with combined annual revenues of about $1 billion. The groups have scheduled an estimated 736 events across 39 countries this weekend.

Ziada said the Oct. 7 attacks and the subsequent war in Gaza have given the movement what she called a “moral umbrella” to accelerate its goals.

She pointed to the 1979 Iranian Revolution as a warning. “We saw this exactly happening in Iran in the 1970s,” she said. “The Islamists used the left because the legitimacy of the left is stronger. They allied the communists there, made them believe that we all are going to change Iran and make it a better place. And how it ended in 1979, the Islamic Revolution happened. The Islamists took over the country and the first group they sacrificed … was the communists, the leftists in Iran.”

Ziada said the same dynamic could play out in the United States if the ideological alliance deepens. She argued that the groups share short-term opposition to Western democracies but hold fundamentally incompatible long-term aims.

She said the weekend protests are likely to follow the pattern of earlier demonstrations, with participants labeling Israel an “apartheid” state and accusing it of “genocide.” She added that the term “Nakba,” originally used in part to fault Arab leaders for rejecting a proposed Palestinian state, has been stripped of that context in current messaging.

“I have seen my native Egypt being destroyed by these groups, by these people, and I’ve seen the entire Middle East actually falling under this,” Ziada said. “I don’t want to see the United States, the country that has given me my education, has given my career, has given me a refuge when these radicals tried to kill me — I don’t want to see being destroyed by the same bad guys.”