The Three Stooges Go to Lebanon

On Sunday, Hezbollah founding leader Hassan Nasrallah was buried in Beirut. A huge crowd filled the stadium, honoring the man whose organization has sowed death and destruction for decades. Yellow Hezbollah flags fluttered in the breeze; black-swathed women pumped their fists in the air or wiped tears from their faces. When Israeli warplanes flew overhead, the crowd chanted, “Death to Israel, death to America, we respond to your call, Nasrallah.”

Confident that “Death to America” does not mean them, a trio of Americans was also there. This announcement was made, of course, on X, where genocidal anti-Jewish rhetoric vies with frolicking baby pandas for likes. “American Communist Party [ACP] Executives Haz-Al-Din, Chris Helali and Jackson Hinkle attended the funeral of the martyred Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah as a show of solidarity to the people of the region from America,” the ACP’s tweet reads. The accompanying photo shows the three men in the stadium, a mural of Nasrallah and his ill-fated successor, Hashem Safieddine, in the background. The American emissaries are solemn in dark suits, though Hinkle wears a bright-yellow scarf, the color of the Hezbollah flag, over his coat. You can taste their pride, their sense of being stiff-necked rebels of U.S. imperialism in the heart of the Resistance. Although more likely, they’re wondering how many more followers they’ll get.

The comrades (their word) have apparently been on quite a journey in the Middle East. In “occupied Palestine,” Hinkle interviewed Hamas leader Basem Naim, posting the video afterward for his 2.8 million X followers. Hinkle, who a few years ago was a San Clemente teen surfer, tells the terrorist leader on behalf of Americans, “We love you guys.” He also met with Hamas members in Doha and had media appearances on Hezbollah’s Al Manar TV, Al-Mayadeen News and Iranian 3rd Channel. When he wasn’t orating into a microphone or posing heroically in a keffiyeh, Hinkle tweeted his adulation for Putin, China and assorted members of the Arab, Palestinian and Iranian “Resistance,” and his fanatical hatred of Israel. He was accordingly praised by Houthi Brigadier-General Abdul Ghani Al-Zubaidi, a man who has pledged to strike British and American targets.

Helali, the ACP’s International Secretary, also interviewed Basem Naim, as well as Hamas leader Osama Hamdan. Helali soared to fame last year, when he ran in Orange County, Vermont as a write-in candidate for bailiff (essentially a stand-in for sheriff: a curious choice for an avowed communist). Helali won with a stunning 446 votes, 2.5% of the electorate. His other vocation is as a high school social studies teacher. His personal experience with Hamas and Hezbollah will certainly be beneficial for his job educating Vermont’s children. 

The group’s intellectual, such as it is, heft seems to come from Al-Din, the ACP’s Executive Chairman and the force behind the YouTube show Infrared. Al-Din is apparently the source of the seemingly-paradoxical ideology—“MAGA communism”—for which he and Hinkle are known. The “MAGA” reference is enough for many commentators to describe Hinkle and his co-thinkers as “right” or “far-right,” but although the group orients to Trump’s working-class following, these really are creatures of the left. They call themselves “Marxist-Leninists,” brandish a modified hammer-and-sickle symbol, denounce Democrats and Republicans, and invoke proletarian causes and history and Marxist theory. 

Last Dec. 31, Al-Din delivered the party’s official New Year’s address from outside the tomb of Lenin in Moscow, near where, he notes, American Communist John Reed and IWW leader Bill Haywood are buried. “Comrades!” he cries—using the endearment no fewer than 10 times in a six-minute speech. The eyes of the party’s bold and hirsute Great Leader blaze into the camera, giving his flock inspiration and hope. Communism suffered a setback after 1991, Al-Din acknowledges, but a new flame has been relit in the reconstitution of the American Communist Party. He extols Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao, predicts an unprecedented period of war and class struggle, rails against “cowards and liquidators mincing in the face of these new developments,” and thunders that communism is not dead — “far from it.” As someone who knows a fair bit about communism, I feel qualified to say: These people are communists. 

The ACP is the latest in an endless stream of sectarians claiming that their party is the embodiment of genuine Marxism. The group was founded last summer in a flurry of pompous declarations, in opposition to what most people think of as “the” Communist Party, the Communist Party USA. The over-100-year-old CPUSA has responded with some consternation to these upstarts trying to claim their name and heritage, and the two groups have lobbed acrimonious accusations against each other. This too is par for the sectarian left-wing course.

What’s a bit novel is the enthusiastic hitching of Western Communism to Middle Eastern jihadism. The trend first emerged around 1978-79, when Western leftists saw the Iranian masses in revolt, and decided not to be too particular about what kind of world these oppressed Iranians, and their leader Ayatollah Khomeini, were actually fighting for. The Iranians were denouncing U.S. imperialism, and that was thrilling enough. 

This red-green alliance deepened with the post-9/11 wars on terror. The result is two totalizing ideologies, each with a bloody history of crushing its avowed enemies, each of which has pledged to dominate the world, that have joined hands despite having belief systems at complete odds with one another. One is rooted in materialism, supports expanding rights for the oppressed including women and is, traditionally, atheist; the other is a fervently patriarchal movement dedicated to creating an Islamic fundamentalist caliphate.  

This red-green alliance deepened with the post-9/11 wars on terror. The result is two totalizing ideologies, each with a bloody history of crushing its avowed enemies, each of which has pledged to dominate the world, that have joined hands despite having belief systems at complete odds with one another.

And the balance of forces is clearly not with the leftists. As slightly-more-savvy Marxists I once knew used to say: “You and the Islamists may climb into the foxhole together, but only one of you will come out.” The comrades of the ACP — and recycling, blue-nail-polish-wearing leftists from Queers for Palestine to Jewish Voice for Peace — may learn the hard way that when the Resistance declares war on all infidels, they don’t mean “except for the ones wearing keffiyehs.” 

“Stooge” is defined as one who plays a subordinate or compliant role to a principal. In the trio’s current glad-handing with Middle Eastern terrorists, it’s clear enough who is the principal and who the dupe. Hinkle may soon decide that fame is better served by casting off the “communist” label, and this fledgling group may fizzle out as so many others have done. Still this Terrorist Fanboys Tour is, at the very least, an outrage against decency. Does American freedom mean there are no consequences for boosting fomenters of terror?

Kathleen Hayes is the author of ”Antisemitism and the Left: A Memoir.”