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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).