Category Archives: Left Wing

Drink-soaked former Trotskyist popinjay speaks out

Posted on by Bob Pitt

HitchensChristopher Hitchens joins in the attack on Galloway: “By George Galloway’s logic, British squaddies in Iraq are the root cause of dead bodies at home. How can anyone bear to be so wicked and stupid? How can anyone bear to act as a megaphone for psychotic killers?”

So, if the atrocities weren’t motivated by the British government’s participation in Bush’s wars of imperialist aggression, what grievances did lie behind them? Christopher explains:

“The grievance of seeing unveiled women. The grievance of the existence, not of the State of Israel, but of the Jewish people. The grievance of the heresy of democracy, which impedes the imposition of sharia law. The grievance of a work of fiction written by an Indian living in London. The grievance of the existence of black African Muslim farmers, who won’t abandon lands in Darfur. The grievance of the existence of homosexuals. The grievance of music, and of most representational art…. All of these have been proclaimed as a licence to kill infidels or apostates, or anyone who just gets in the way.”

Daily Mirror, 8 July 2005

Champagne Peter denounces mayoral capitulation to homophobia

Posted on by Bob Pitt

outrageprotest2The Daily Telegraph (30 June 2005) reports: “Ken Livingstone is ever eager to ingratiate himself with London’s gay community. But his antics appear to cut little ice with gay rights activist Peter Tatchell, who was attending the the mayor’s Pride event on Monday night.

“‘This all about ticking boxes on a page’, opined Tatchell, sipping on a glass of pink champagne. ‘Ken just wants to be able to say he supports gay rights, but when it comes to the crunch it’s all meaningless: he’s still more than happy to welcome a homophobe like Yusuf al-Qaradawi to City Hall’.”

And apparently also happy to welcome an Islamophobe like Peter Tatchell – who proceeds to knock back the free champagne and while slagging off his host to the Tory press.

Perhaps Tatchell should ponder the comments of a member of Imaan, the lesbian and gay Muslim group: “It can be argued that over the years Ken Livingstone’s record on empowering Gay and Lesbian Rights is more impressive than Peter Tatchell’s, which frankly, at times, has been more self-indulgent than effective.”

Labour left fails to stand up for right to incite anti-Muslim hatred, AWL complains

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Outlawing incitement to hatred on the basis of religious belief, as opposed to ethnicity, is a major attack on freedom of speech. It means extending the blasphemy laws which still, at least in theory, protect Anglican Christianity from rational public debate, to shield all religions with authoritarian impartiality.

“The bill is partly a cynical pitch to win back Muslim voters outraged by Blair’s warmongering and erosion of civil liberties (like the expansion of state funding for faith schools, and defence of the hijab) and partly the brainchild of a Prime Minister with a lot of respect for religious superstition and very little for human rights.

“So why did the left of the Parliamentary Labour Party, whose leaders have boasted that they will be ‘setting the agenda’ for this Parliament, fail to rebel?

“Unfortunately, on this issue as on many others, these MPs are highly representative of a left which is increasingly losing its political bearings. The ‘religious hatred’ law has elicited not a squeak of protest from the trade union movement; meanwhile the National Union of Students, on the initiative of the SWP and their Stalinist friends Socialist Action, has positively endorsed new Labour’s assault on respect for rational thinking and free speech.”

Sacha Ismael of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty and Houzan Mahmoud of the Worker Communist Party of Iraq provide us with a good illustration of which section of the left has really lost its bearings. The section of the left that supports the right to incite hatred against Muslims and sneers at the defence of the right to wear the hijab.

Solidarity, 23 June 2005

Opposition to anti-incitement bill defeated

Posted on by Bob Pitt

So the predicted backbench rebellion failed to materialise, and yesterday the new bill outlawing incitement to religious hatred passed its second reading in the Commons by 303 votes to 247. Interesting that the Lib Dems found themselves in a bloc with the Tories in opposing the bill.

It’s not every day that this member of the Islamophobia Watch collective applauds the politics of Gerald Kaufman MP, but I can’t help approving of the attack he launched on the Tories in the course of the debate:

“The problem with interventions by Conservative Members is they are totally unrepresentative of the population as a whole in that hardly any of them are open to the kind of humiliation that many members of our communities are open to. If they were, they would not be criticising this legislation.”

He went on to refer to “the case of Mrs Shahzada, a constituent of mine who went to a shop in central Manchester soon after 9/11. She wears a veil over her face, and the shopkeeper refused to serve her because she was, to his perception, a Muslim. That was hatred against an individual, not a criticism of Islam. It is about time that we had an Opposition who understood the kind of country that we live in today.”

Hansard, 21 June 2005

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AWL: No ‘pandering to the Islamists’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

John O’Mahony (Sean Matgamna) of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty takes issue with Ridley Scott’s film Kingdom of Heaven:

“The Islamics [sic], played by Arab Muslim actors, have tremendous dignity, in contrast to some of the film’s most prominent Christians. The Islamics are merciful and humane, the Christian villains blindly and bigotedly brutal, war-provoking, and evil.”

This is “the reverse of the general situation in our world”, O’Mahony asserts. “In our world, it is not the non-Muslims and anti-Muslims who now shout with fanatical faith in their religion like the Crusaders in one of Ridley Scott’s scenes who shout ‘God Wills It!’. It is a large part of modern Islam.”

He concludes: “It is a shame for any reason to pander to the Islamists as this film does, concocting a fable not of enlightenment but of a Guardian-style quisling spirit towards assertive political Islam, one of the worst enemies of enlightenment and tolerance in the world we live in.”

Solidarity, 2 June 2005

Elsewhere in the same issue, under the headline “Muslim school stopped”, the AWL reports approvingly that “campaigners in Nottingham have stopped a local school becoming the fourth Muslim state primary in the country”.

An anonymous comment on the AWL’s website reads: “I am in favour of secular education. But I fear for the AWL when you run a story as this with no mention of racism. When you say local people were worried about lack of resources ummm don’t people say the same about asylum seekers and immigrants etc. These questions are never as straight forward as is portrayed in this article. By the way why choose a muslim school to be refused?” See here

Interview with Tariq Ramadan

Posted on by Bob Pitt

SIThere’s an interesting interview with Tariq Ramadan in the current edition of the French journal Socialisme International. Among other issues, Professor Ramadan deals with the media bias against him, the hostility he provokes among a section of the far left, Islamophobia and racism, relations between Muslims and the left, and his views on Malcolm X and Karl Marx.

Socialisme International, Spring 2005

The journal is not available online but subscription details can be obtained from their website or from John Mullen at john.mullen@wanadoo.fr

Because of the prominent role he has played in the European Social Forum, Tariq Ramadan has been a controversial figure on the French left. Catherine Samary mounted a vigorous defence of Ramadan’s participation in the 2003 ESF (see here and here), though her article does not pretend to offer an overall evaluation of Ramadan’s ideas and political engagement.

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Gay Palestinians tortured and murdered by PLO and Hamas says Outrage

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Outrage engages in its now annual disruptive stunt at the “Free Palestine” demonstration in London. “The Palestinian administration tolerates the so-called ‘honour’ killing of women who refuse to submit to the strict rules of orthodox Islam”, Tatchell claims.

Outrage press release, 23 May 2005

For a comment on Outrage’s antics last year, see Yoshie Furuhashi’s useful article, “Queering Palestinian solidarity activism”, at Critical Montages.

Or if you have problems with that link try here.

Tatchell crosses the line

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Outrage“A friend of mine told me that Peter Tatchell was again at the Free Palestine demo yesterday. Apparently he was with a group of about thirty people (with a police escort) bearing placards saying ‘Stop the Honour Killings’. The expression ‘honour killings’ is usually used to refer to domestic murders of women deemed unworthy. It’s used by western Orientalists to suggest that there is something worse about this than the two women killed by men every week in the UK. So why is Tatchell using the expression to condemn the killing of gays in Palestine? And why does he see fit to demonstrate against Palestinians at a Free Palestine rally? When he first invade the demo last year he bore a placard with the inane slogan ‘Israel stop persecuting Palestine – Palestine stop persecuting queers’. Now by conflating homophobia in the third world with extreme domestic violence, and putting as orientalist a spin on it as he could think of, he’s crossed the line from seeking to embarrass Palestinian officialdom to full-blown anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia.”

Mark Elf at Jews sans Frontieres, 22 May 2005

The WPI and Islamophobia Watch

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The latest English language broadcast from the Worker Communist Party of Iran’s television station includes an interview with Bahram Soroush replying to criticisms of the WPI by Islamophobia Watch. (As regular viewers will be aware, an “interview” on WPI TV consists of Maryam Namazie feeding rehearsed questions to fellow members of the party’s central committee and then expressing enthusiastic agreement with everything they say. Jeremy Paxman it ain’t.)

Soroush’s response to accusations of Islamophobia is, essentially – guilty as charged. He declares that the WPI are indeed Islamophobes in the sense of being deeply hostile to Islam, as are many other people, and that this is a healthy reaction to the crimes of Islamism. The “interview” concludes with the bizarre allegation from comrades Namazie and Soroush that by criticising the WPI our site is setting them up for assassination by Islamists.

So the WPI broadcasts a TV programme in which they publicly proclaim their Islamophobia, while at the same time denouncing us for endangering their lives by … exposing their Islamophobia. Go, as they say, figure.