Last year, with assistance of the Sunday Telegraph, the Tory right waged an extended campaign to remove Baroness Warsi from her position as co-chairman of the Conservative Party. They succeeded in accomplishing that particular objective last September, but their victory was far from complete. Although he did replace her as co-chair, at the same time David Cameron gave Warsi a senior ministerial position in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and also appointed her as Minister for Faith and Communities.

This was probably enough to appease the reactionary membership in the shires who had been outraged that a Tory party chairman should be anything other than white, Christian and male, but the neocon-Zionist component of the anti-Warsi opposition was far from satisfied. It was obviously only a matter of time before the latter faction would make another attempt to remove Warsi from her position of influence in the party and government.

An opportunity afforded itself last month when Warsi appeared as a platform speaker at a conference in the House of Lords organised by the Federation of Student Islamic Societies, which was billed as a “critical discussion around the way Islamic societies and Muslim students are represented in the media”. FOSIS is the NUS-recognised representative organisation of Muslim students in the UK, and among those speaking alongside Warsi at the conference were Universities UK CEO Nicola Dandridge, NUS president Liam Burns and the Liberal Democrat peer Lord Hussain, who also hosted the event. This didn’t offer much of a pretext for relaunching a witch-hunt against Warsi, you might think.

However, Warsi’s participation at the FOSIS conference was seized on by the misleadingly titled group Student Rights, which in fact includes few if any students and functions as a front organisation for the right-wing propaganda organisation the Henry Jackson Society. They launched their attack on Warsi with a piece (“FOSIS conference at the House of Lords hides its promotion of extremists”) that appeared on the Student Rights website on 3 April. Tellingly, the first of their objections to Warsi’s participation was that “FOSIS openly endorse a boycott of Israel”, which Student Rights held to be an example of FOSIS’s “divisive methods”. They then went on to accuse FOSIS of associating with “extremists” such as Hamza Tzortzis of iERA, the Muslim group who were recently the victims of a stitch-up over a meeting at University College London, and of questioning the reliability of the conviction of Dr Aafia Siddique.

Continue reading →