Left Socialist Blog
Exclusive on Russia Today John Wight backed US air-strikes on the Islamic fascists in Iraq.
This is entirely welcome comrade!
Yes this is the same John Wight, more widely known for insane rants like this one,
The Guardian newspaper has published an ad by supporters of the apartheid State of Israel, which among other things smears the Palestinian resistance as ‘child killers’. Given that Israel’s latest massacre of Palestinians in Gaza has up to now involved the slaughter of 400 children, this is beyond parody. The right wing Times refused to carry the ad, while the supposedly progressive Guardian published it.
“Germans! Defend yourselves! Do not buy from Jews” (“Deutsche! Wehrt Euch! Kauft nicht bei Juden!“).
Police are investigating comments made by George Galloway during a speech in which he said Bradford had been declared an “Israel-free zone”.
The Respect MP told a meeting of party activists in Leeds on Saturday that Israeli tourists were not welcome in Bradford. West Yorkshire police said they had received two complaints and were investigating the Bradford West MP’s comments.
Reports the Guardian.
The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign more generally known as the “Don’t Buy Yid‘ movement, has yet to comment.
Islamists Will Face US Air-Strikes.
Confronted with the threat of mass murder in Iraq by the genociders of the Islamic State (ISIL) the American President, Obama, has issued this statement.
Today I authorized two operations in Iraq — targeted airstrikes to protect our American personnel, and a humanitarian effort to help save thousands of Iraqi civilians who are trapped on a mountain without food and water and facing almost certain death.
……
First, I said in June — as the terrorist group ISIL began an advance across Iraq — that the United States would be prepared to take targeted military action in Iraq if and when we determined that the situation required it. In recent days, these terrorists have continued to move across Iraq, and have neared the city of Erbil, where American diplomats and civilians serve at our consulate and American military personnel advise Iraqi forces.
To stop the advance on Erbil, I’ve directed our military to take targeted strikes against ISIL terrorist convoys should they move toward the city. We intend to stay vigilant, and take action if these terrorist forces threaten our personnel or facilities anywhere in Iraq, including our consulate in Erbil and our embassy in Baghdad. We’re also providing urgent assistance to Iraqi government and Kurdish forces so they can more effectively wage the fight against ISIL.
Second, at the request of the Iraqi government — we’ve begun operations to help save Iraqi civilians stranded on the mountain. As ISIL has marched across Iraq, it has waged a ruthless campaign against innocent Iraqis. And these terrorists have been especially barbaric towards religious minorities, including Christian and Yezidis, a small and ancient religious sect. Countless Iraqis have been displaced. And chilling reports describe ISIL militants rounding up families, conducting mass executions, and enslaving Yezidi women.
…
In recent days, Yezidi women, men and children from the area of Sinjar have fled for their lives. And thousands — perhaps tens of thousands — are now hiding high up on the mountain, with little but the clothes on their backs. They’re without food, they’re without water. People are starving. And children are dying of thirst. Meanwhile, ISIL forces below have called for the systematic destruction of the entire Yezidi people, which would constitute genocide. So these innocent families are faced with a horrible choice: descend the mountain and be slaughtered, or stay and slowly die of thirst and hunger.
I’ve said before, the United States cannot and should not intervene every time there’s a crisis in the world. So let me be clear about why we must act, and act now. When we face a situation like we do on that mountain — with innocent people facing the prospect of violence on a horrific scale, when we have a mandate to help — in this case, a request from the Iraqi government — and when we have the unique capabilities to help avert a massacre, then I believe the United States of America cannot turn a blind eye. We can act, carefully and responsibly, to prevent a potential act of genocide. That’s what we’re doing on that mountain.
The Stop the War Coalition has published this a couple of days ago (from the most recent Labour Briefing)
ISIS barbarians threatening Iraq: who they are and where they come from.
Sami Ramadani states,
We should support secular-democratic efforts to rebuild a measure of peaceful co-existence between the sects, religions, ethnicities and nationalities of Iraq and the Middle East. Keeping quiet about ISIS throat-cutters and their assorted allies, just because we oppose the Maliki regime’s policies, is a recipe for disaster.
Having pillaged large parts of Syria and terrorised its religious and ethnic minorities, as well as its women, they are now marching towards Baghdad, joined by Saddamist officers and Muslim Brotherhood and Salafi zealots. This will lead to a sectarian bloodbath.
ISIS will not flinch from burning Baghdad’s remaining books and removing its girls from schools. They want to punish millions of “idolatry” Shia and crucify its remaining “Nassara” Christians. They were funded, armed and trained by the US and its allies: Turkey and the amoral sheiks and princes of Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Israel helped them by bombing raids on Syria and treating their wounded in Israeli hospitals before re-arming them to go back to Syria to escalate the carnage.
We need to face the fact that popular activity in west and north west Iraq, just like in Syria, has been effectively highjacked by sectarian and racist forces. I cannot possibly remain silent about movements, no matter how popular, that are led by racist, sectarian and nihilist forces. In Mosul, Tikrit and Fallujah, they have capitalised on popular demands and are now dominant.
Ramadani is critical of the Iraqi government, led by Maliki, which he describes as sectarian and brutal,
What Iraq needs, and sadly lacks today, is strong secular, democratic organisations that can unite the people to overthrow the occupation-built sectarian institutions, and rid Iraq of US intervention and that of all regional powers. This cannot be achieved by replacing Maliki’s corrupt regime with a regime led by the above organisations. Maliki is a passing phase, but, if the barbarians win, they will destroy what is left of Iraqi society, following its devastation by the US-led occupation.
It is for the Iraqi people to remove Maliki and not for the US and its proxies to impose a more pliant ruler. This is the devastation that evolved in Syria and we must not ignore its probable evolution in Iraq. For the winners will be the oil companies, arms manufacturers, and sectarian war lords plunging the entire Middle East into a blood bath.”
The evidence is that Baghdad is ruled by a sectarian government.
As Patrick Cockbrun states in the latest London Review of Books,
Iraq’s Shia leaders haven’t grappled with the fact that their domination over the Iraqi state, brought about by the US overthrow of Saddam Hussein, is finished, and only a Shia rump is left. It ended because of their own incompetence and corruption and because the Sunni uprising in Syria in 2011 destabilised the sectarian balance of power in Iraq.
He indicates that the genociders have powerful backing from outside Iraq and Syria,
The foster parents of Isis and the other Sunni jihadi movements in Iraq and Syria are Saudi Arabia, the Gulf monarchies and Turkey. This doesn’t mean the jihadis didn’t have strong indigenous roots, but their rise was crucially supported by outside Sunni powers. The Saudi and Qatari aid was primarily financial, usually through private donations, which Richard Dearlove, the former head of MI6, says were central to the Isis takeover of Sunni provinces in northern Iraq: ‘Such things do not happen spontaneously.’
If a “a new and terrifying state has been born.” perhaps it will die of its internal contradictions.
It may well be that US intervention will not solve anything.
Unfortunately the Christians, Yezidi and Shia of Iraq cannot wait or pose these questions.
They need help now.
Can we stand by, criticise Obama, and let nothing be done to come to their aid?
Some of us would accept help from anyone if we were in the plight of the potential victims of the Islamist genociders.
Updates:
France prepared to give military support for action in Iraq against the Islamic State, without giving details of what this entails. Libération.
Why are the Yazidis threatened with genocide?
They are not “people of the Book”:
“Yazidis are a Kurdish-speaking people who follow an ancient religion blending elements of Zoroastrianism, Islam, Christianity and local folk beliefs. Several hundred thousand followers live in Sinjar and Sheikhan, two regions just west and east of Mosul.
Smaller communities of Yazidis live in Syria, Armenia and Germany.
At their unique conical temples, they worship a peacock deity called Melek Taus and hold elaborate ceremonies that involve fire and water.
“Yezidism is a syncretic religion that takes from a variety of different traditions, some Zoroastrianism, Islamic and a little bit of animism,” said Austin Long, professor of international affairs at Columbia University in New York. “It’s a mixed religion with a long-standing history in Iraq. Most are Kurds, ethnically.”
Through the centuries, Yazidis have often been persecuted by Muslims who say the faith is forbidden. In 2007, hundreds of Yazidis in Sinjar died in a series of massive explosions orchestrated against them by al-Qaida in Iraq — the precursor of the Islamic State.” from here.
More: Why you really need to pay attention to Iraq’s Yazidi community
“It’s a good atmosphere, you know? You’re not living under oppression. You’re not living under rule.” says British Jihadist.
Thousands of Christians are reported to be fleeing after Islamic militants seized the minority’s biggest town in Iraq.
The Islamic State (IS) group captured Qaraqosh in Nineveh province overnight after the withdrawal of Kurdish forces.
An international Christian organisation said at least a quarter of Iraq’s Christians were leaving Qaraqosh and other surrounding towns.
IS has seized large parts of Iraq and Syria to create an Islamic caliphate.
Kurdish forces, known as the Peshmerga, have been fighting the Sunni militants’ advance in the north for weeks.
In a separate development, the United Nations says it has rescued some of the thousands of people trapped by IS militants in mountains near the town of Sinjar.
Up to 50,000 members of the Yazidi religious minority fled there after IS overran Sinjar at the weekend.
More on the BBC site.
The French journal L’Express carries this report, Irak: 100 000 chrétiens en fuite, les djihadistes enlèvent les croix des églises.
100, 000 Christians flee as Jihadists take Church crosses down.
40,000 Iraqis stranded on Sinjar mountain after Islamic State death threats
Tens of thousands of members of Iraqi religious minority groups are dying of heat and thirst on Mount Sinjar, human rights groups say, after death threats from Islamic State – formerly Isis.
Tens of thousands of members of Iraqi religious minority groups driven from their homes for fear of the jihadist group Islamic State are dying of thirst and heat on a desert mountainside in the north of the country, according to the United Nations and human rights groups.
Some 40 children have already died from the heat and dehydration, the UN children’s organisation Unicef says, while upwards of 40,000 more are sheltering in the bare mountains, without food or water or access to supplies. It says 25,000 children may be stranded.
Yesterday’s Newsnight broadcast a video of a British man fighting for ISIS (The Islamic State’s Syrian wing) next to a corpse.
Their recruitment video (which you can see in all its obscenity here) of this gang features the following.
..men who claim to be from all over the world including Britain, Belgium, Morocco, Finland and Indonesia. They talk about how happy they are to be in a Muslim society and encourage others to join them.
It’s a good atmosphere, you know? You’re not living under oppression. You’re not living under rule,” Abu Abdullah Al-Habashi said, speaking in a British accent. “As Muslims, that’s what we want and that’s what we need. We don’t need any democracy, we don’t need any communism, we don’t need anything like that.”
The news above illustrates what this “atmosphere” means for thousands of civilians.
Let us have no more of these apologies for the British volunteers going to support these genociders (21st July 2014),
Muslim leaders in the UK have warned against laws that automatically brand British fighters in Syria as terrorists.
It comes as Home Secretary Theresa May launches a campaign today to discourage young men from going to fight in Syria and Iraq. A short film will focus on the distress it can cause their families.
But some in the Muslim community have told Sky News the Government’s legal stance on fighting abroad could “increase the risk” to the UK.
Abdullah al Andalusi, a senior researcher at the Muslim Debate Initiative, said: “It’s hypocritical of the UK Government to expect Muslims not to go, if they feel they want to fight in a just war.
“Bertrand Russell, George Orwell – they went to the Spanish civil war, people were going to fight Gaddafi in Libya and that was all fine.
“So I worry that the British Government should dictate to us what is fine and what is not fine about where to go, when the situations could be arguably very similar in all those places.”
Communist Party of Australia’s View of Imperialism.
Imperialism, anti-Imperialism, and the Left. A reply to Andrew Murray.
Imperialism, the Marxist historian Victor Kiernan claimed, shows itself, “in coercion exerted abroad, by one means or another, to extort profits above what simple commercial exchange can procure.” Andrew Murray begins Imperialism has Evolved since 1914, but it still Rules to World (Morning Star. 2.8.14. reproduced on 21st century Manifesto), by citing this assertion to observe that the “wars of 1914 and 1939 are the outstanding examples of what happens when that international system of extortion breaks down.” “Break-down and crisis” are as much a feature of “imperialism” as growth and slump are of capitalism. We might explain this, as a critic of Kiernan once noted, as the result of an inherent “atavistic” tendency to revert to type. (1)
Murray paints a picture of contemporary ‘imperialism’ in which there are “instruments of inter-imperialist mediation and control” such as Nato and the IMF, which bear some marks of “ultra” or “super” imperialism. That is, as Lenin put it in 1915, the view that there was underway an “international unification of national (or more correctly state-bound) imperialisms which “would be able to eliminate the most unpleasant, the most disturbing and distasteful conflicts, such as wars, political convulsions which the petty bourgeois is so much afraid of.”(2) At its most developed the idea of ‘ultra-imperialism’ would foresee a “single world trust” that would swallow up all states and enterprises. This, Lenin argued, simply would not happen.
Does the past show us the future? We can clearly set aside any idea of a single Capital dominating capitalism. Politically the existence of inter-state institutions, including international justice systems, does not eliminate rivalry between countries. There is no effective “global governance”. Conflicts have a recurrent source. “The shaper contradiction is between that world order managed and maintained by US power and those big powers which stand to a significant extent outside of it. There are two – Russia and China.”
Dominant, naturally, is the “US-led bloc”; the imperialism “constitutes the dominant system in the world today”. This is bound, hand and foot, to a policy of aggression, “the main driver of war lies in the policy of the US and the imperialist world order it has created to further its leading business interests, and those of its capitalist allies, Britain pre-eminent among them.” That is, despite signs of US “retreat” and “difficulties in the Middle East, it is “commanding” with world-wide military bases, and control of the (above) “inter-imperialist” bodies, like the IMF and Nato.
Anti-Imperialism.
Threaded into this analysis Murray states, “anti-imperialism now is at the heart of any serious progressive politics”. Sometimes it may lead progressive to “deal with contradictory cross currents”. One, is that “Russia’s role as a challenger to global US hegemony and the legitimacy of many national demands arising from the break up of the Soviet Union, may often mandate contingent support for the positions of the Putin government”. That is with the “contradictory” recognition that Russia has “corrupt oligarchic and repressive” practices, in “restored Russian capitalism.”
It is odd that anybody would consider that backing any aspect of Russian foreign policy is ‘anti-imperialist‘. It may be done with reasons, but if the government of Putin is the head of a capitalist state, meshed into the imperialist system, then how exactly it is a consistent part of anti-imperialism? It is hard to see many people rushing to the defence of one group of oligarchs fighting another.
One wonder how many other ‘challengers’ to US hegemony also “mandate” contingent support? To be supported (or in real terms, given kind words and some public show of endorsement) how far can a foreign policy trump a domestic one? A debate has begun on the US-left, with echoes in Europe, on Hamas. The American International Socialist Organization reject any backing for the violent, reactionary ISIS and Islamic State Islamists in Syria and Iraq. But they offer “unconditional but critical” support for the Gaza wing of the Muslim Brotherhood which has right-wing anti-socialist and anti-liberal policies. (3) The importance of their anti-imperialist battle with Israel over-rides their anti-democratic and corrupt practices.
Others might argue that it would be better simply to oppose Israel’s actions in attacking the Palestinians and depriving them of their rights than in to offer any succour to a group with a proven record of hostility to any form of left-wing and progressive politics. No amount of bluster about solidarity can disguise this side of Hamas. Israel’s actions need to be fought by a coherent movement, one not entangled in this dead-end. Such a push requires co-operation with Israeli citizens opposed to their state’s policies, and not a call to drive them into the sea. This is not to “blame” Hamas, it is simply not to take their political side.
Romantic third-worldism appears to have survived the collapse of any specific “non-capitalist” development after the fall of Official Communism and the rise of neo-liberal economics and politics. Perhaps we are seeing signs of a part others about to plunge into a second-youth, digging out dusty copies of Frantz Fanon to find inspiration for their “anti-imperialism”. (4) It continued to exist in the half-life of university “post-colonial” theory and some marginal groupuscules, like the French Les Indigènes de la République. These self-appointed representatives of the “natives” battle against neo-colonialist secularism and Marxism. They really are unconditional backers of Hamas, and treat the racist anti-Semite, ‘anti-Zionist’, and Holocaust denier, Dieudonné with great tenderness.
It is perhaps unfair to draw such conclusions from what are, at present, straws in the wind. But it is disingenuous to claim that you give “unconditional” support to a movement or party when you reserve the right to be “critical”. Heroes do not generally appreciate unfavourable comments, even if made very discreetly, from their fans. No doubt politics is full of tales of unrequited love. The left groups that popularised this and similar formulae in the 1960s and 1970s, notably the Trotskyist United Secretariat of the Fourth International, knew many such disappointments, from African national liberation movements, to the IRA, to cite but a few.
People often comment on a distinct strand of visceral anti-Americanism in what is left of post-war leftism and Communism. It could be said that sometimes it plays a role not dissimilar to Marx’s eminently forgettable phobia against Tsarist Russia (Revelations of the Diplomatic History of the 18th Century, mid 1850s) That led Marx to make some claims which can only be described in terms of conspiracies, the “secret collaboration between the Cabinets of London and St. Petersburg” back to Peter the Great(!). Today it is frequent to see people throw responsibility for wars and exploitation on the US in terms of intrigues, spying, most recently, through the etheral spheres of the Net.
The Communist Party of Britain (CPB) is, one hopes, made of sterner stuff. While there is a continuing regret at the demise of ‘actually existing socialism’ only a few have found a new home in the national conservatism of Putin’s Kremlin – though many more indulge its media, such as Russia Today. Andrew Murray notes that the Russian Federation’s actions in Ukraine have been circumscribed by the need to maintain “economic links with important Ukrainian enterprises”. The Communist Party of Britain, and some left groups, contains people who do not consider Russia imperialist. Murray suggests “otherwise” – on the basis of its international economic interests. This is indeed an illustration of how the left cannot “conditionally” align with any existing capitalist power. But mroe deeply is he seriously suggesting that it might be a good thing if Russia stood by the separatists? Why exactly? What socialist objective does that meet? It is bad enough having a right-wing pro-EU pro-US government with far-right involvement. But does a break-away solve the problems of the Ukraine? What criteria are being used to determine this?
Imperialism Otherwise.
It is the case that the “territorial” and “economic” mechanisms that states are caught up are shaped by the hegemony of one great power, the United States. ‘It’, or rather the fractions and networks that dominate the country’s economic and politics, has played a key (though, as is obvious, by no means exclusive) role in spreading the neo-liberal economic agenda. It has tried to exert, with no great success, territorial rights in the Middle East, Afghanistan, and across the globe. These actions have been a major cause of great, and continuing, bloodshed. (5)
But Murray’s “otherwise” has to be extended. There are plenty of ‘other’ factors to consider behind conflicts in the world today.Nor are things reducible to the US-leadership. However, adding the European Union to this list of powers still leaves us short of determining the overwhelming influence of a new ‘concert of imperialist nations’. To give one example, the failure of the ‘Arab Spring’ can hardly be reduced to the machinations of the Pentagon, the EU, or the galaxy of US-inspired think tanks and ‘advisers’ on democracy. Domestic politics, state structures, and the rise of the “micro-powers” of Islamic coercion, and the pressures of economic flows, could be put into the very long list of causal factors at work behind the (still unsettled) outcome of these revolts.
If there are forces for the left to support they can probably be best found in those determined to put democracy and social justice above religious and national concerns. Göran Therborn recently argued that the “new middle classes” in the developing world could divide into those who take sides, “either with the oligarchs against the poor, or with the people against the oligarchs. (6) This expresses a theme popular amongst journalists, that democracy is the central issue of our time and the basis for new cross-class alliances led, in the South, by a “modern” Westernised professionals and the intelligentsia.
The recent record (from the Arab World to Turkey) of such movements is not one of success. Syria has apparently melted down to a confessional war, stained by state mass murder and the rise of the totalitarian genocidal ISIS, which has spread into the Iraqi Islamic State. In Baghdad a confessional Shiite regime clings to power. Egypt has returned to a repressive military oligarchy. States founded on religious authority, repression, and sexual apartheid, from Iran to Saudi Arabia, remain in place.
Many Marxists have always argued that democracy is tied to the struggles of the labour movement, a more permanent, and more radical and better-founded basis for change. Therborn may be right that economic change means that its class bases have weakened. Yet it’s worth noting that Tunisia, a case apart in the Arab Spring, in which some hopes may still be placed, is marked by opposition to the domination by Islamists of a, sometimes stormy, partnership between intellectuals and the powerful trade union federation the UGTT (Union Générale Tunisienne du Travail).
Western governments may create, or exacerbate wars. Their prime concern remains the economy. Neo-liberal economics do not rely on heavy-handed domestic repression. In Europe and elsewhere, it is the privatisation of the public sphere, and exploitation by a new class of rentiers, that is the most pressing threat.
How does this affect internationalism – something basic behind genuine open-minded ‘anti-imperialism’? Globalisation and mass migration have created a sense that the “distance” between lands is far less than it was 100 years ago.This is a fight that could unite people across the world against the ‘empire’ of those enlarging their grossly unequal territories, not divide them. On this democratic and socialist basis we could be said to be “anti-imperialist”. But there is nothing, absolutely nothing, that corresponds today to the Comintern’s Fourth Congress, “anti-imperialist united front”, nor, given the diversity of world politics and states, does one look likely to reappear. There is no division of the world into clear-cut “camps” to choose. We have to make our own choices. (7)
References.
(1) Page 58. Imperialism. Pioneer of Capitalism. Bill Warren. NLB 1980.
(2) Page 12. V.I. Lenin. Introduction to Imperialism and the World Economy. N.Bukharin. (1915). Merlin Press. 1972.
(3) What do socialists say about Hamas? July 31, 2014
“We differentiate between utterly reactionary Islamist movements such as ISIS, and Islamist movements such as Hamas and Hezbollah. The latter two movements came into existence to resist imperialism and entered into many confrontations and struggles with Zionism and imperialism in defence of the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people and the Lebanese people.
We consider Hamas, which originated in the midst of the first Palestinian Intifada at the end of the 1980s, and won wide popularity among Palestinians because of its rejection of the concessions and surrender which Fatah offered to the Zionist enemy and the United States, and through its military resistance to the brutal Israeli assault on Gaza, to be a resistance movement against Zionism and imperialism.
From this perspective we unconditionally support Hamas when it is engaged in military or non-military struggles against Israel, because it weakens the Zionist state and terrifies the Arab regimes and the United States, and therefore strengthens the potential for class struggle in the Arab states against this imperialist system.
Our unconditional support for Hamas is not uncritical, however, because we believe that the movement’s strategies in the struggle to liberate Palestine – like the strategies adopted by Fatah and the Palestinian left before it – have failed and will fail in the future.”
(4) See: Capitalism, Class and universalism: escaping the cul-de-sac of postcolonial theory. Vivek Chibber. Socialist Register. 2014.
(5) “In the course of four decades of unremitting struggle, a military and political order was constructed that transformed what had once been a merely hemispheric hegemony into a global empire, remoulding the form of the US state itself” Page 110. Imperium. Perry Anderson. New Left Review. No 82 (New Series) 2013. See also, Imperium. Perry Anderson. Critical Thoughts. Andrew Coates. “The Bush administration’s shift towards unilateralist, towards coercion rather than consent, towards a much more overtly imperial vision, and towards reliance upon its unchallengeable military power, indicates a high-risk approach to sustaining US domination, almost certainly through military command over global oil resources. Since this is occurring in the midst of several signs of loss of dominance in the realms of production and now (though as yet less clearly) finance, the temptation to for exploitative domination is strong.”(P 75) The New Imperialism. David Harvey. Oxford University Press. 2005.
(6) New Masses? Göran Therborn. New Left Review. 2nd series. No 85. 2014.
(7) The anti-imperialist united front. Alliance for Workers Liberty. 2013.
Warsi resigns (1)
Foreign Office minister Baroness Warsi has resigned from the government, saying its policy on the crisis in Gaza is “morally indefensible”.
She wrote on her Twitter feed that she was leaving with “deep regret”.
Lady Warsi, who was previously chairman of the Conservative Party, became the first female Muslim cabinet minister when David Cameron took office in 2010.
She grew up in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, and worked as a solicitor before entering politics.
Lady Warsi was demoted from the cabinet to a middle-ranking Foreign Office post in 2012. She was made minister for faith and communities at the same time.
She wrote on Twitter on Tuesday: “With deep regret I have this morning written to the Prime Minister & tendered my resignation. I can no longer support Govt policy on #Gaza.”
‘Great unease’
Lady Warsi’s resignation letter says it is “morally indefensible, is not in Britain’s national interest and will have a long term effect on our reputation internationally and domestically”.
She adds that the decision “has not been easy” but there is “great unease” within the Foreign Office over “the way recent decisions are being made”.
BBC.
The Huffington Post reports,
Now that she has quit the government, the Tory peer wants to “speak more freely” on this issue and her first demand after handing in her resignation letter is for the UK to introduce an arms embargo. “It appalls me that the British government continues to allow the sale of weapons to a country, Israel, that has killed almost 2,000 people, including hundreds of kids, in the past four weeks alone. The arms exports to Israel must stop.”
Unusually this has been reported, straight away, on the French media, “Démission d’une secrétaire d’Etat britannique en désaccord avec la politique du pays sur Gaza” Libération.
And the German, “Protest gegen Gaza-Politik: Britische Außenstaatssekretärin Warsi tritt zurück” Der Spiegel.
This is the right decision and one can only agree with her statement.
Warsi has also made this admirable reflection (November 2013),
Warsi: Christian minorities ‘endangered’ in Middle East
Baroness Warsi said Christians were in danger of being driven out of countries, such as Syria and Iraq, where the religion first took root.
Syria’s civil war and the instability in Iraq has seen many leave.
Baroness Warsi said politicians had a duty to speak out against persecution and appeal for religious tolerance
But before anybody goes overboard in admiration for the unelected Warsi this should be remembered,
“Warsi was the unsuccessful Conservative parliamentary candidate for Dewsbury at the 2005 general election, becoming the first Muslim woman to be selected by the Conservatives. During the election campaign she was criticised for election literature which was described as “homophobic” by the gay equality group Stonewall.” Wikipedia.
Unable to get elected this happened:
“On 2 July 2007, Warsi was appointed Shadow Minister for Community Cohesion. To take up the post, she was created a life peer as Baroness Warsi, of Dewsbury in the County of West Yorkshire, on 11 October 2007 and was introduced in the House of Lords on 15 October 2007. On joining the House of Lords, she became its youngest member.”
Then there is this (National Secular Society),
Baroness Warsi’s partnership with the OIC means it is only a matter of time before we are completely silenced in the name of religious freedom, argues Anne Marie Waters.
Baroness Warsi, our unelected “Minister for Faith”, in a speech at Georgetown University in Washington on Friday, stated that the UK is “committed to working with the United Nations Human Rights Council to implement Resolution 16/18.”
We are? I can’t remember agreeing to this – can you?
She then went on to make this hilarious statement: “The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) also remains a key partner in our quest to promote religious freedom.”
I genuinely don’t know whether to laugh or cry.
It is difficult to know where to begin with this, so I’ll start with Resolution 16/18 – a proposal which received the support of the United States back in 2011. Hillary Clinton, who could well be the next US President, set up a meeting in Washington D.C. that year. The aim of this get-together was to explore ways to implement the provisions of Resolution 16/18 around the world.
Resolution 16/18 calls upon UN member states to combat “intolerance, negative stereotyping and stigmatization of, and discrimination, incitement to violence and violence against, persons based on religion or belief.” It was initially introduced in March 2011 at the UN Human Rights Council by the OIC. This coterie, dominated by Islamist states, had made several previous attempts to have a resolution passed which aimed to criminalise “defamation of religions” but had failed. This time, due to some clever re-wording, the tactic worked and non-binding resolution was agreed.
Following this, the Istanbul Process was created in July 2011. This meeting was attended by Hillary Clinton who praised the US and the EU for agreeing the resolution at the Human Rights Council. The conference had been convened by Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, Secretary-General of the OIC. This is a man who frequently speaks out against Islamophobia, and calls for a “proper understanding of Islam“.
The Istanbul Process continues and last met in Geneva in June 2013.
Baroness Warsi’s commitment (on behalf of the UK) to work with the OIC to implement Resolution 16/18 seems to be grounded in the idea that the OIC are equally committed to religious freedom. In making such claims, Warsi shows herself to be either a) completely stupid, b) a damn liar, or c) both.
…….
So to summarise; Sayeeda Warsi, a woman who failed to secure an elected place in Parliament in 2005, now enjoys a seat at the Cabinet table despite the fact that she remains unelected. She has used this position to commit the UK to assisting in the implementation of a resolution which will effectively criminalise anyone who dares to tell the truth about what happens in the name of Islam (this would be “negative stereotyping” you see). She has no mandate for this, and she wouldn’t have if the people were ever asked our opinion on the matter.
And if anybody on the left doubts where she stands there is this (November 2013),
Faith is being put back at the “heart of government,” as it was under Sir Winston Churchill and Baroness Thatcher, a minister will say today.
The Coalition is one of the “most pro-faith governments in the West,” Baroness Warsi, the Minister for Faith, will say. “More often than not, people who do God do good.”
Churchill and Thatcher would have welcomed the Coalition’s promise to protect the right of town halls to hold prayers and the creation of more faith schools under Michael Gove’s Free Schools programme, she will say.
Public policy was “secularised” under the previous, Labour government, Lady Warsi will tell an audience at the Churchill Archives at the University of Cambridge.
But Churchill saw totalitarian regimes as “godless” while Thatcher regarded politics as second to Christianity in defining society, she will say.
“We see flickers of Churchill’s flame and echoes of Thatcher’s sermons in all we do,” she will say. “But this was never inevitable. When we came back into power in 2010, I felt that some of the reverence for religion had disappeared from politics. I found that the last government didn’t just refuse to ‘do God’ – they didn’t get God either.”
The Coalition ruled out a ban on the full-face veil out of respect for religious liberty, she will say, also citing the welcome it gave to a ruling which saw Nadia Eweida win the right to wear a small crucifix at work for British Airways.
Lady Warsi, a former chairman of the Conservative Party, will say that religious groups must be allowed to provide public services without the state being “suspicious of their motives”.
“I know that Mrs Thatcher would have approved of devolving power to faith communities,” Baroness Warsi will say.
“As she once said: ‘I wonder whether the State services would have done as much for the man who fell among thieves as the Good Samaritan did for him?’ ”
Cynics (hat-tip DO), may also recall this (2012),
Warsi demoted in cabinet reshuffle
Update.
And Lo and Behold!
Baroness Warsi’s resignation has more to do with the reshuffle than it does with Gaza
Dan Hodges,
Baroness Warsi has just resigned from the Tory front bench over the Government’s policy towards Gaza. At least that’s the official line. In truth Baroness Warsi has resigned over the government’s policy towards Baroness Warsi.
It’s been an open secret in Westminster that Warsi has been angered since her demotion from Tory party chair. “She’s going to do a Clare Short,” one Tory MP told me a few months ago.
Well, she has done a Clare Short, ostensibly resigning over an issue of foreign policy.
As the first Muslim Cabinet minister Warsi adopted some brave stances on a number of controversial issues – such as proposals to ban veils – and had spoken out about wider Islamophobia. Neither stance saved her from abuse and threats of violence from extremist elements in the Muslim community.
But the reality is Warsi was an ineffective party chair, and an unpopular member of the Government. “She was proof of why most ministers – from whatever party – should always come from the elected House of Commons, rather than being parachuted in via the Lords. She really didn’t understand the grass roots at all,” said one Tory MP on news of her resignation.
The loss of Baroness Warsi is a blow to David Cameron’s attempts to give his government a more diverse face. But her resignation is more to do with events in last month’s reshuffle than events in Gaza.
(1) “Dear Prime Minister
For some weeks, in meeting and discussion, I have been open and honest about my views on the conflict in Gaza and our response to it.
My view has been that our policy in relation to the Middle East Peace Process generally but more recently our approach and language during the current crisis in Gaza is morally indefensible, is not in Britain’s national interest and will have a long term detrimental impact on our reputation internationally and domestically.
Particularly as the Minister with responsibility for the United Nations, The International Criminal Court and Human Rights I believe our approach in relation to the current conflict is neither consistent with our values, specifically our commitment to the rule of law and our long history of support for International Justice. In many ways the absence of the experience and expertise of colleagues like Ken Clarke and Dominic Grieve has over the last few weeks become very apparent.
This decision has not been easy. It has been a privilege to serve for 3 years in your Shadow Cabinet and over 4 years in your Cabinet. Introducing you in Blackpool in 2005 as you made your bid for leadership I had the pleasure of being there at the start of the journey and it would have been rewarding to have been there til the end.
The last decade has given me the opportunity to work with some of the best in the Conservative Party and indeed in Government. William Hague was probably one of the finest Foreign Secretaries this country has seen and has been inspirational. He dismantled foreign policy making by sofa government and restored decision making and dignity to the Foreign Office. There is however great unease across the Foreign Office, amongst both Minister and senior officials, in the way recent decisions are being made.
Eric Pickles has supported me tirelessly in our work on combating hate crime. Challenging anti-Semitism and Islamaphobia and the pioneering work of celebration faith in the public sphere. This new found confidence in Government has allowed me to take the very public International lead on religious freedom, specifically on the ever growing crisis of the persecution of Christians. However, early evidence from the Home Office and others shows that the fallout of the current conflict and the potential for the crisis in Gaza and our response to it becoming a basis for radicalisation could have consequences for us for years to come.
From both Eric and William I learnt the art of reconciling passion and idealism with pragmatism and realism, but I always said that long after life in politics I must be able to live with myself for the decisions I took or the decisions I supported. By staying in Government at this time I do not feel I can be sure of that.
It is therefore with regret that I am writing to resign.
You will continue to have my personal support as leader of the Conservative party as you continue to ensure that our Party evolves to meet the challenges we face in Britain today and ensure that the Party is relevant and responsive to all communities that make up today’s Britain.
Yours sincerely
More updating (prompted by reading below).
Sayeeda Warsi’s Tory colleagues are really, really sad that she has quit. A Tory source tells Guido:
“Warsi’s resignation is classic Warsi. Attacks her own team, pure grandstanding, and shows that she is a quitter. Her resignation does nothing to help the innocent civilians on both sides who are suffering. She had a much better chance of helping support the ceasefire if she had stayed inside Government. But instead she has thrown in the towel.”
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From Rudaw (Kurdish Media Network).
COPENHAGEN, Denmark — Protests are ramping up around the world against Islamic extremists who have purged Iraqi Christians from lands they have inhabited for 2,000 years.
Demonstrations against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) have been held in England, Canada, Germany, France, Unites States, Sweden, Denmark and Australia since the militia began threatening Christians in Mosul to convert or be killed and blew up a tomb believed to be the burial place of the Biblical prophet Jonah last week. ISIS took control of Iraq’s second-largest city, where Christians have lived for the past 2,000 years, in June.
In many protests the demonstrators displayed the Arabic letter “N” for “Nasrani,” which means Christian in Arabic. With slogans such as “Save the Christians of Iraq” and “Stop ISIS!” the protests have also attracted many Arab and Kurdish Sunni and Shia Muslims, Yezidis, Faylis and other minorities showing solidarity with persecuted Christians.
“I’ve come here to show that we all stand together and say no to discrimination, regardless of religion and ethnicity,” Khalil Yassin, an Arab Sunni and leader of the Iraqi Cultural Centre in Copenhagen, told Rudaw.
“I show my support for my Christian brothers and condemn in the strongest terms ISIS’ threats and actions,” Mossa Rashid, head of the Kurdistan Democratic Party in Denmark, said.
The protests began after Louis Raphael Sako, Chaldean Catholic Patriarch of Baghdad and the leader of Iraq’s biggest church, issued a plea for international support.
“The control exercised by the Islamist jihadists upon the city of Mosul, and their proclamation of it as an Islamic State, after several days of calm and expectant watching of events, has now come to reflect negatively upon the Christian population of the city and its environs,” Sako maintained.
Copenhagen Catholic Bishop Czeslaw Kozon said more western leaders need to denounce ISIS’ attack on Christians.
“Once again we see that persecution of Christians is not historical, but is happening right now,” he said. “It is worrying that so few are aware of what is happening and that there is very little press coverage.”
Most of those who fled Mosul in recent weeks are now in the Kurdistan Region. Mosul is the capital of Nineveh province, which was once home to around 60,000 Assyrians, Chaldeans and other Christians.
“We are grateful to anyone who provides assistance to Christians in need,” Kozon said.
There are about 4,000 Iraqi Christians in Denmark. Despite the distance, they are impacted by the violence in Mosul and elsewhere, said Marcus Sabri, the organizer of the demonstration in Copenhagen and a leader in the Iraqi Christian Mar Abba parish.
“These are inhumane acts against Christians in Iraq. That is our country, where we have always lived. These are our historic buildings, heritage and churches that are being destroyed by ISIS,” Sabri said.
Jens Juul Petersen, a Danish aid worker who works on Iraq, said Iraqi Christians are often wrongly viewed as “western lackeys … despite the fact that they are among the world’s oldest Christian communities.”
Christians in Iraq are splintered among different groups, aren’t closely tied to the Vatican and don’t have a unified stance that would help them lobby for western support. They also don’t have militias, making them more vulnerable to Islamic extremists, Petersen said.
Alan Pary, a poet originally from Sulaimaniya, is a self-described Chaldean-Kurdish-Christian living in Denmark. He also criticized silence of western leaders.
“It’s horrible that ISIS comes in and expels people from their homes. The west went into Iraq in 2003 to create freedom, but now there is terror and turmoil,” he said.
In Paris, where two senior ministers offered asylum to Iraq’s Christians last week, 100 members of the French parliament joined demonstrators against ISIS. In addition, protests took place in Washington, outside of the British Parliament in London, and in front of the United Nations building in the Kurdistan Region capital, Erbil.
In Australia, the National Council of Churches urged the government to pressure the UN Security Council to address the plight of Iraqi Christians. The council has donated $30,000 to the Christian refugee camps in Erbil.
This directly affects the Kurds,
Reuters, Sun Aug 3, 2014 – Islamic State Sunni insurgents have captured the northern Iraqi town of Zumar and a nearby oil field after a battle with Kurdish forces who had control of the area, witnesses said on Sunday.
Islamic State, which staged a lightning advance through northern Iraq in June, has warned residents of nearby villages along the border with Syria to leave their homes, suggesting they were planning an assault, witnesses said.
The militant group, which controls large swathes of northern and western Iraq, has threatened to march on Baghdad but has stalled its campaign just north of the town of Samarra, 100 km (62 miles) north of Baghdad.
But it has been trying to consolidate its gains, setting its sights on strategic towns near oilfields, as well as the border with Syria so that its fighters can move easily back and forth and bring in supplies.
An official in the Northern Oil Company said Islamic State fighters had taken control of the Ain Zalah oil field and a nearby refinery. The insurgents had already seized four oil fields, which help fund their operations.
In a statement on its website, Islamic State said its fighters killed scores of Kurdish fighters in a 24-hour battle and then took over Zumar and 12 villages.
“Hundreds fled leaving vehicles and a huge number of weapons and munitions and the brothers control many areas,” Islamic State said, including Zumar and “the area of Ain Zalah which is rich with oil.
“The fighters arrived in the border triangle between Iraq, Syria and Turkey,” it said.
These events mark France’s entry into the First World War.
On the 31st of July 1914 Jean Jaurès was assassinated.
On the 2nd of August France declared a general mobilisation of the country’s troops.
This is how the press of the time hailed the .
«Nos soldats partent à la guerre et ils partent gaiement» .
Adapted from a special article in today’s Libération
The daily, «L’action française» quickly affirmed its identity as an anti-republican and nationalist supporter of the war. The active support it gave to Vicky resulted in it being banned in 1944.
“Pour l’Alsace-Lorraine !” For Alsace-Lorraine!
French nationalism was stirred by the thought of taking back these provinces, annexed by Germany in 1871 after the Franco-Prussian War.
This was the last issue of «l’Aurore». Launched in 1897 and initially run by the ‘Tiger’ Clemenceau, is still known today for its publication of Zola’s J’accuse, Its editor, Marcel Brossé, joined his artillery regiment. It did not reappear. Clemenceau would become Prime Minister ( 1917 to 1920). The “Père la Victoire” (Father Victory) he was one of the principal architects of the Treaty of Versailles at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 .
JAURÈS, «APRÈS SA MORT»
The Socialist deputy, Marcel Sembat, who became Minister of Public Works in the National Unity (l’Union sacrée) government wrote,
Jaurès is dead, Jaurès is gone, War has come. He would have refused to have believe that war was inevitable, even after the general mobilisation, and our task is to agitate with force for pace. The blow of that pistol – it has struck our minds, our hearts, and our Party, and above all, it has struck at France…….For us, in these difficult times, we wonder, what would Jaurès have thought ?”
L’Humanité was soon to back the National Unity War Government.
The new Editor, Pierre Renaudel, supported the war in the name of the defence of the Republic.
Jaurès was killed blindly, yet with reason:
‘let us have drums to beat down his great voice’.
The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy. Geoffrey Hill.
A hundred years ago today, Jean Jaurès the leader of French socialism (SFIO, Section française de l’Internationale ouvrière), and Editor/Founder of l’Humanité were preparing an article against the coming war. Jaurès had supported the call of the Socialist International, launched by Keir Hardie and the Frenchman, Édouard Vaillant, to launch a general strike if armed fighting broke out.
By 1914 Europe was on the brink of war. At the end of July an emergency meeting of the Socialist International was held in Brussels, which endorsed a call for peace. On the 29th of July Jaurès spoke with Rosa Luxemburg, at a rally of seven thousand people against militarism and the coming confrontation at the Cirque Royal. He had already warned that fighting would lead to a catastrophe, “Quel massacre quelles ruines, quelle barbarie!” (Discours de Vaise. 25th July 1914) Now he talked of his “hatred of our chauvinists” and that we would not “give up the idea of a Franco-German rapprochement”. This looked less and less probable. Jaurès’ newspaper column (published after his death) would describe of the climate of “fear” and “anxiety” spreading across the continent.
Jaurès paused from his journalism and went to the near-by Café du Croissant to eat. At 20.45, the nationalist student Raoul Villain approached him and fired two bullets. One stuck his neck and was fatal. Villain claimed to have acted to “eliminate an enemy of the nation.”
The assassin was associated with Alsatian nationalists close to the far-right Action française. But hatred of Jaurès had been whipped up across the political spectrum. The Catholic libertarian socialist, poet, critic and Dreyfusard, Charles Péguy had been baying for his blood. Péguy described the Socialist leader as the representative of “German imperialism” in France, a “traitor” to the motherland in the service of “bourgeois parties”. (1)
Geoffrey Hill asked if Péguy had effectively incited the killer. (2) But there were many, many, others – not least amongst the ranks of the Action française and the ‘terre et ses morts’ nationalists like Maurice Barrès – who loathed the inspirational clarity of Jaurès internationalism.
Today, as commemorations of the murder take place in France, Jaurès remains a moving figure for many people, in his home country, and in the socialist movement across the world.
The ‘Jaurésian synthesis’ has in many respects outlived the historical record of Jaurès the founder of the first united French socialist party. That is, his ability to capture and bring together ideas from Marxism, above all the ‘class struggle’, the understanding of capitalism and its historical development, with “social republicanism”, support for democracy and human rights.
One of his most celebrated campaigns was to back Dreyfus, a combat that led him into conflict with anti-Semitism, and religious intolerance. Jaurès advocated strongly secular public institutions, above all in education, a position which has still to make headway in countries like Britain where religious authority still holds sway over a large part of the left – with pretensions today to “multi-culturalism”. Secularism, he argued, does not mean imposing atheism, it is to free our common institutional life from the hold of any particular faith. Absolute freedom of personal belief was his watchword. These views, backing the 1905 law on the separation of Church and State, reflected the importance of the issue in France during the first decade of the 20th century. They were opposed, with venom, by nationalists and the majority of practicing Catholics.
Above all Jaurès, while perhaps inclined to a romantic vision of the universalism of the French Revolution and its enduring influence inside French institutions, was equally prepared to fight with all his might against chauvinism, nationalist hatred….and war.
This, all of this, should be remembered.
On France-Inter this morning it was noted that the French Prime Minister, Michael Valls, claimed this year that Jaurès would have supported his deal with the employers, the ‘pacte de responsibilité”. Former President Sarkozy claimed him for his educational ‘reforms. Even Marine Le Pen’s party organiser, Louis Alio, has hailed his patriotism, suggesting during one European Election that the SFIO (the French section of the Workers’ International) would have backed the Front National. (3)
It is fitting that Jaurès should have made his last major public speech in the company of another martyr, the beloved Rosa Luxemburg. One doubts if any of the figures cited above would have felt comfortable in her company.
Reformist, compromiser, agent of German imperialism, able to bring people together, or to divide them, there are as many judgements of Jaurès as there are books and articles.
The war that broke out in earnest in the first week of August 1914 redrew the political map, as socialist parties across Europe rushed to support ‘their’ governments in the battle. It is worth recalling that some of his most virulent critics on the left, such as Gustave Hervé and Jules Guesde became rabid nationalists during the Great War, the latter joining the Union Sacrée as a Government Minister.
Villain was put in gaol and stayed there during the war. He was brought to trial in 1919. The murderer was acquitted in a jury trial on March 29. Jaurès’s wife, plaintiff, was convicted in costs. Villain later fled to Spain where he was killed by Republican soldiers during the Spanish Civil War.
Jaurès, above all the controversies, continues to loom large, and for many of us, flaws included, remains greatly honoured.
(1) Notre Partie. Vol. ll. Oeuvres en prose de Charles Péguy. La Pléaide. 1959
(2) “Did Péguy kill Jaurès? Did he incite the assassin? Must men stand by what they write as by their camp-beds or their weaponry or shell-shocked comrades while they sag and cry?” The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy. Geoffrey Hill. Collected Poems. 1985.
(3) This use of Jaurès, which extends right through the French political spectrum, was recently analysed in L’art de tuer Jaurès. Jérôme Pellisier, Benoît Bréville. Le Monde Diplomatique. July 2014. See also Le Monde. Mélenchon, Valls, Aliot, Sarkozy… tous jaurésiens !, Jaurès, un héritage très disputé. L’Humanité « Jaurès, un être engagé, complexe, comme chacun d’entre nous »
This is the FN’s claim,
Update.
See also this, generous, piece, “Jean Jaurès Leon Trotsky Kievskaya Mysl July 17, 1915.
France: 100 years after Jean Jaures’ murder, his name still inspires. Dick Nicolas. Links.
Gauche Unitaire à la commémoration des 100 ans de l’assassinat de Jean Jaurès
The Missing Picture.
Cambodia court begins genocide trial of Khmer Rouge leaders
Cambodia‘s UN-backed Khmer Rouge court has begun a second trial of two former regime leaders on charges including genocide of Vietnamese people and ethnic Muslims, forced marriages and rape.
The complex case of the regime’s two most senior surviving leaders has been split into a series of smaller trials, initially focusing on the forced evacuation of people into rural labour camps and related crimes against humanity.
The first trial against the most senior surviving Khmer Rouge leader, Nuon Chea, 88, known as Brother Number Two, and former head of state Khieu Samphan, 83, was completed late last year, with the verdict – and possible sentences – due to be delivered on 7 August.
At the opening hearing of the second trial on Wednesday, judge Nil Nonn read out the charges against both suspects as more than 300 people watched the proceedings from the court’s public gallery.
A few days ago Le Monde published an account of how the paper reported on the Khmer Rouge victory, ” Le jour où… « Le Monde » salue l’arrivée des Khmers rouges“
“17 avril 1975 : l’envoyé spécial du « Monde » décrit l’« enthousiasme populaire » qui accompagne l’entrée des Khmers rouges à Phnom Penh. Au fil des mois, face aux révélations des exécutions de masse, tiers-mondistes et anticommunistes de la rédaction s’affrontent par éditoriaux interposés.”
17th April 1975, the special reporter of Le Monde described the “popular enthusiasm” that greeted the entry of the Khmers rouges into Phnom Penh. During the months that followed, faced with revelations about mass execution, ‘third-worldists’ and anti-communists fought each other, through rival Editorial comments.
This dispute was echoed across the world, with particular effects on the left which had previously backed the Khmer Rouge as a national liberation movement – without much first-hand knowledge.
Crucial witness accounts emerged that revealed the genocide underway.
François Ponchaud’s book, Cambodia: Year Zero ( Cambodge année zéro) was particularly inlfuential. Ponchaud, a French priest, had lived in Cambodia and spoke Khmer. He also painted a picture of mass deaths caused by the Khmer Rouge. French scholar, Jean Lacouture, formerly a sympathizer of the Khmer Rouge, reviewed Ponchaud’s book favorably in the New York Times Review of Books on March 31, 1977.
The revelations by François Bizot were also of great significance (Wikipedia),
In October 1971, Bizot and his two Cambodian colleagues were captured by the Khmer Rouge. During his captivity on charges of being a CIA agent at the Khmer Rouge Camp M.13 at Anlong Veng, he developed a strangely close relationship with his captor, Comrade Duch, who later became the Director of the infamous Tuol Sleng concentration camp in Phnom Penh. During his three-month imprisonment he came to understand the true genocidal nature of the Khmer Rouge long before other outsiders. He was finally released in December 1971 after Comrade Duch wrote a detailed report that convinced the Khmer Rouge leadership of Bizot’s innocence. Bizot’s Cambodian colleagues were executed soon after Bizot’s release.
When the Khmer Rouge poured into Phnom Penh in April 1975, Bizot, like most other foreigners in the country, wound up in the French Embassy in Phnom Penh. Because of his fluency in Khmer, he soon became the primary point of contact and unofficial translator between the embassy officials and the Khmer Rouge. He left Cambodia when the Khmer Rouge expelled all foreigners and sealed off Cambodia’s borders. He returned to Cambodia in 2003 and met his former captor Duch, who was waiting for his trial for crimes against humanity, for about one hour and a half (a few minutes of the encounter were put on film). These moments can be seen in the documentary “Derrière Le Portail” (“Behind The Gate”). Comrade Duch was on trial at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia and received a 35 year sentence, later increased to life from an appeal. Bizot was the first witness to testify at the trial.
Noam Chomsky was perhaps one of the best known genocide deniers at the time.
He called these, and other revelations (Cambodia Genocide deniars),
“third-rate propaganda” and part of a “vast and unprecedented propaganda campaign” against the Khmer Rouge. He said Ponchaud’s book Year Zero was “serious and worth reading” but “the serious reader will find much to make him somewhat wary.” Chomsky said that refugee stories of Khmer Rouge atrocities should be treated with great “care and caution” as no independent verification was available.
In case anybody thinks that Cambodia genocide denial has gone away, the US ‘leftist’ Counterpunch has provided a comfortable refugee for at least one of them, Israel Shamir.
In 2012 he wrote on the fiercely ‘anti-Zionist’ site,
New Cambodia (or Kampuchea, as it was called) under Pol Pot and his comrades was a nightmare for the privileged, for the wealthy and for their retainers; but poor people had enough food and were taught to read and write. As for the mass killings, these are just horror stories, averred my Cambodian interlocutors. Surely the victorious peasants shot marauders and spies, but many more died of American-planted mines and during the subsequent Vietnamese takeover, they said… Noam Chomsky assessed that the death toll in Cambodia may have been inflated “by a factor of a thousand”… To me, this recalls other CIA-sponsored stories of Red atrocities, be it Stalin’s Terror or the Ukrainian Holodomor… [The Vietnamese] supported the black legend of genocide to justify their own bloody intervention.
Pol Pot Revisited. September 2012.
Released today: Video reportedly produced by Islamic group ISIS shows Iraqi prisoners, including what appear to be children, piled onto trucks before being driven off for execution.
Lying face down in the dirt, the prisoners are systemically executed by a small band of jihadists
From here. These and other images were issued today.
Without comment.
David Icke Resurrects Blood Libel
As the Everyday Anti-Semitism project (here and here) has just been set up here is a prime case to pursue (if need be, by the courts).
Icke is beyond a joke figure peddling “”New Age conspiracism” after this.
Monday 28th July. 2014.
And while it is true that many of the ‘enlightened’ countries of the West such as America, Great Britain and others who worship at the altar of money, power and empire and who therefore engage in this modern-day form of human sacrifice known as serial warfare in appeasing these dark gods, there is one country in particular whose involvement in the grisly, gory business of human sacrifice operates on a very different, personal, primal, and primitive level, and that country of course is Israel.
Whereas the aforementioned countries deal in death not necessarily for death’s sake but rather as an unavoidable consequence of attaining the blessings that the aforementioned gods of money and power bring, when it comes to Israel however, the shedding of blood–innocent, defenseless blood–holds particular ‘sentimental’ significance.
More personal than just business, when it comes to the trappings, teachings and traditions of Judaism, blood is as intrinsic to its identity as bread and wine are within some Christian ceremonies. It is, after all, that ‘old time religion’ that functions as the beating heart of the Jewish state and which sustains and maintains who it is, what it is, what it does, and how it lives.’
Sunday 27th July.
More in the same vein.
The Rothschilds own 80% of Israel, according to Simon Schama. They built the Israeli Supreme Court. They own Reuters and the Associated Press (AP), the two biggest media agencies in the world. They have a controlling share in the Royal Dutch oil company, the Bank of England and the LBMA (London Bullion Market Association). They foment wars, install presidents, dethrone kings and bankrupt nations, such is their power.
The Rothschilds typically operate behind the scenes. In the case of Israel, the Rothschilds engineered WWI and waited until 1917 when Britain was in trouble. The Rothschilds then promised the British Government that they could get the US to enter WWI (on the side of Britain) and thus ensure Britain’s victory of Germany et al. However, they wanted something in return: Palestine. Thus the Balfour Declaration was created, which is an official letter from the British Government Foreign Secretary James Balfour to Baron Rothschild. It states that: ” His Majesty’s government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object.”’
Icke is already known for his view that ,”The ‘Jewish homeland’ was from the start a Rothschild fiefdom orchestrated through the global secret society network of interbreeding families known as the Illuminati.”
In the present context these expressions of hate have become more vehement and potentially damaging.
Thousands of people took part in a pro-Palestinian demonstration in Paris on Saturday despite a police ban on the rally. Scuffles broke out between a hardcore element throwing projectiles and police, who said they made around 50 arrests.
The demonstration got under way at around 3pm at Place de la République amid a tense and uncertain atmosphere after rioting erupted at a similar protest last week.
Despite a calm start to the demonstration, which had attracted upwards of 4,000 people, by 6pm police were using tear gas to disperse 200 to 300 hooded youths throwing projectiles at police. France 24
It is hard not to endorse the view of the Parti Communiste Français that the march should not have been banned.
But there remain concerns about the groups behind the demonstration.
The ‘informal collective’ is composed of (according to Le Monde) members of the l’Union générale des étudiants de Palestine (GUPS), the Mouvement des jeunes Palestiniens (PYM France), de Génération Palestine, from the Union juive française pour la paix (UJFP), du Nouveau Parti anticapitaliste (NPA) and the Parti des indigènes de la République (PIR).
To this collective the struggle in Israel is ” la lutte contre colonialisme”, indeed the last fight against colonialism.
The NPA, according to the same article, is sometimes concerned by the religious slogans of some of the groups that associate with these protests, notably the pro-Hamas, Collectif du cheikh Yassine
But for the leading figure of the Collectif, , Omar Al-Soumi, ( Mouvement des jeunes Palestiniens) the essential is that,
« Cela ne nous dérange pas dans la mesure où nous soutenons toutes les résistances et la lutte armée. La diplomatie et la négociation n’ont jamais abouti. »
That does not upset us, in so far as we back all resistance and the armed struggle. Diplomacy and negotiation have never led to anything.
There were a few incidents on the day (41 People arrested).
Libération reported,
Un groupe de supporteurs du PSG de la tribune Auteuil scande des slogans de soutien à Gaza et reprend une parodie du Chant des partisans popularisée par Dieudonné («la sens-tu, qui se glisse dans ton cul»).
A group of PSG (football) supporters from the Auteil stand, shouted slogans backing Gaza, and sang Dieudonné’s parody of the Chant des partisans (do you feel ‘it’ (the cock) slipping up your arse-hole).
We’re off to the rue des Rosiers (Jewish quarter in central Paris) to beat up the Jews (in ‘verlan’), one heard.
We would not wish to exaggerate these – troubling – incidents. Little happened apart from stone-throwing and a heavy-handed police response. One could add that there are also definite problems caused by the interventions of the far-right ‘Ligue de défense juive’ (Jewish Defence League). But the fact that the incidents represent something about the people behind the march is undeniable.
Le Parti des indigènes de la République (cited as one of the organising groups) this April received favourable publicity from ‘anti-racist’ Richard Seymour (here)
Houria Bouteldja, a leading member of Le Parti des indigènes de la République is published saying, in explaining her attitude to Dieudonné,
Now, the trouble is that we are not integrationists. And integration through anti-semitism horrifies us just as much as integration though White universalism and national-chauvinism. We abhor anything that seeks to integrate us into whiteness; anti-semitism being a pure product of Europe and the West. As a decolonial movement, it is self-evident that we cannot support Dieudonné. Yet we could not condemn him in the manner of the white Left, because there is a certain dimension that has escaped the Left, but one that is clear to any indigène with a modicum of dignity.
At the same time, I feel ambivalent. I would start by saying that I love Dieudonné; that I love him as the indigènes love him; that I understand why the indigènes love him. I love him because he has done an important action in terms of dignity, of indigène pride, of Black pride: he refused to be a domestic negro. Even if he doesn’t have the right political program in his head, his attitude is one of resistance.” I now add that in the eyes of the indigènes, this is what they see in him first and foremost, rather than seeing the nature of his allies. A man standing upright. Too often were we forced to say “yes bouana, yes bouana.” When Diedonné stands up, he heals an identitarian wound. The wound that racism left, and which harms the indigènes’ personnality. Those who understand “Black is beautiful” cannot miss this dimension, and I emphasize, this particular dimension in Dieudonné.
Jacobonism replied,
As I’ve argued before, Left-wing apologetics for the far-Right frequently rest on an appreciation of complexities, ambiguities and nuance the rest of us apparently lack. Either Seymour has not understood what he has posted and endorsed or he has accepted the sophistry of Bouteldja’s meaningless distinction between malevolent and virtuous anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism is what it is: a hatred of Jews, and whether it appears in the pages of The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, Mein Kampf, the Hamas Charter, or on Richard Seymour’s Leninology blog, it is always justified in the name of the same thing: the struggle against domination, oppression and conspiratorial power.
If Seymour believes that Bouteldja’s narrow disavowal of an anti-Semitism “that seeks to integrate us into whiteness” inoculates her against charges of racism, he has missed something even more sinister and obvious: that while she demonstrates a bottomless capacity for self-pity, her solipsistic contempt for the Holocaust and its victims demonstrates a complete absence of ‘out-group’ compassion. It is in the pitilessness of this kind of chauvinism that we find the germ of fascism.
The following reply holds for those who cooperate with the Indigènes de la République
Undeterred, Seymour has accepted the challenge presented in Bouteldja’s opening four-point preamble. He has opened up his Eurocentric mind and deferred to her experience “as a colonial subject”; he has prostrated himself before the scorn she has heaped on the hypocrisies of the white, radical Western Left, of which he is a privileged representative; and he has looked her prejudices in the eye and he has not flinched. She has dared the white Left to join her on the far-Right and Richard Seymour – persuaded by her rhetoric that to do so would be an act of radical political courage – has obliged.
I’m not entirely sure what he expects to get in return. If it’s the respect of people like Houria Bouteldja, he can think again. She holds the politics of self-abasement to be beneath contempt. On this she could hardly be more clear. It is the virility of unapologetic fascists like Dieudonné M’bala M’bala that she values.
In the present context, it is undeniable (as Seymour’s Blog cited on the 18th of July) that, “certain pro-Palestinian groups, some of which supporters(sic) of Dieudonné and Alain Soral” – Holocaust deniers – exist.
How far the involvement of the indigènes contributes to isolating them may be judged from the – small – incidents cited above.
But more significantly the ideological climate is moving away from the ideas of self-important, and self-appointed, defenders of the “indigènes” ‘(‘Natives’).
Since this exchange Le Monde Diplomatique has published the important article by Vivek Chibber criticising “post-colonial studies”, L’universalisme, une arme pour la gauche. (May 2014)
It was originally published in the Socialist Register 2014, Capitalism, class and universalism: Escaping the cul-de-sac of postcolonial theory (full text here).
Chibber criticises ‘post-colonial’ critiques of the left’s ‘universalism’ and its rejection of Marxism. He points out that capitalism has become globalised , so a universal interest in social rights, “for liberty, for dignity, for basic well being” has developed. Anti “Eurocentrism” has resurrected particularism, essentialism, and the denial of any universal politics. Against this Chibber argues for “affirming two universalisms – our common humanity and the threat it to it posed by a viously universalising capitalism.” ( see also, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital by Vivek Chibber 2013)
The Le Parti des indigènes de la République could be said to be a politicised version of “post-colonial studies.”
It seems odd that a Marxist group from the Trotskyist tradition like the Nouveau Parti anticapitaliste should be so closely associated with them.
What does this imply for their engagement in the protests over Gaza?
They back the reactionary Hamas movement and other “resistance forces” uncritically and to the hilt.
No doubt informed by that special “appreciation of complexities, ambiguities and nuance the rest of us apparently lack.”
There are many causes worth supporting at the moment.
The appeal to stop Israel’s actions in Gaza is one.
But this is of utmost urgency as well.
Owen Jones has said,
Those of us on the left – who advocate religious acceptance and diversity – must surely speak louder about the persecution of Christians. The suffering and oppression is real, and in many places, getting ever worse. If we do not speak out, the danger is it will be left to those with ulterior motives who wish to hijack misery to fuel religious hatred – with disastrous consequences.
Why the left must speak up about the persecution of Christians
These are two protests.
Wider action, including from the progressive and labour movement, would be welcome.
The Islamic State, which last month declared a “caliphate” comprising large swathes of northern Iraq and Syria, has threatened a Christian presence in the region spanning close to two millennia.On Monday the United Nations Security Council denounced militant persecution of Christians and other minorities in Iraq, warning such actions can be considered crimes against humanity.Before the 2003 US invasion, more than a million Christians lived in Iraq, including more than 600,000 in Baghdad and 60,000 in Mosul, as well as a substantial number in the oil city of Kirkuk and in Basra.Until their forced exodus over the weekend, Christians had been continuously present in Mosul for about 16 centuries.Read more: (The Daily Star :: Lebanon News)
Picture from L’Humanité.
Pro-Palestinian protesters took to the streets of Paris once more on Wednesday to march against Israel’s military assault on the Gaza Strip, the first authorised demonstration since a July 13 rally ended in clashes.
There had been fears of further violence ahead of the march, particularly after ugly scenes at two banned demonstrations over the weekend that saw protesters hurl rocks at police, who responded with volleys of teargas.
More than 1,000 undercover and uniformed officers were deployed along the march route, carrying riot gear and teargas in case trouble broke out.
But the march passed largely without incident, as the protesters made their way from southern Paris towards Invalides in the centre of the capital.
Police said around 14,500 people attended the rally, while organisers put the figure at 25,000.
There were hundreds of CGT stewards (‘service d’ordre’) present to prevent trouble and any expression of anti-Semitic views. The stewarding on the day was carried out by activists from the CGT, NPA, Parti de gauche and the PCF (up-date from PD – Paris).
Libération reported this comment,
A l’avant du cortège, des jeunes crient «Israël assassin, Hollande complice». Un membre de l’Association France-Palestine solidarité (AFPS), appelle à la mesure :«Nous sommes tous des enfants de Gaza. On ne doit pas instrumentaliser la cause palestinienne pour propager l’antisémitisme. On se bat contre une politique agressive. Pas contre un peuple tout entier.»
At the head of the march youths shouted, “Israel – Murderer, Hollande – Henchman”. A member of the Association for France-Palestinian Solidarity called for moderation, “we are the children of Gaza. We must not use the Palestinian cause to spread anti-Semitism. We are fighting against aggressive policies. Not against a whole people.”
The march was organised by the “ Collectif National pour une Paix Juste et Durable entre Israéliens et Palestiniens.”
This group demands:
Pour l’arrêt immédiat des bombardements sur Gaza – an Immediate end to the bombardment of Gaza.
Pour l’arrêt de l’agression israélienne en Cisjordanie et à Jérusalem For an end to the Israel aggression in the West Bank and in Jerusalem
Pour la levée du blocus, illégal et criminel, de Gaza Lifting the illegal and criminal blockade of Gaza.
Pour des sanctions immédiates contre Israël jusqu’au respect du droit international For immediate sanctions against Israel until it respects international law.
Pour le soutien au peuple palestinien et au gouvernement d’entente nationale. Back the Palestinian people and for a national unity government.
La cause palestinienne n’a rien à voir avec l’extrême droite et n’accepte aucun soutien de leur part – the Palestinian cause has nothing to do with the far-right, and (we) will accept no support from that quarter.
Left groups, le NPA, le PCF, le Front de gauche, the Ligue des droits de l’homme, and the ‘altermondialiste’ Attac, backed the march. (1)
A decision whether to permit a planned demonstration on Saturday – organised by the same people who led the Barbès march marked by violent incidents the previous weekend – has yet to be reached (Libération).
(1) Full List: Agir Contre le Colonialisme Aujourd’hui (ACCA) – Alliance for Freedom and Dignity (AFD) – Alternative Libertaire (AL) – Américains contre la guerre (AAW) – Association des Travailleurs Maghrébins de France (ATMF) – Association des Tunisiens en France (ATF) – Association France Palestine Solidarité (AFPS) – Association Nationale des Elus Communistes et Républicains (ANECR) – Association pour la Taxation des Transactions financières et pour l’Action Citoyenne (ATTAC) – Association pour les Jumelages entre les camps de réfugiés Palestiniens et les villes Françaises (AJPF) – Association Républicaine des Anciens Combattants (ARAC) – Association Universitaire pour le Respect du Droit International en Palestine (AURDIP) – Campagne Civile Internationale pour la Protection du Peuple Palestinien (CCIPPP) – Cedetim / IPAM – Collectif des Musulmans de France (CMF) – Collectif Faty Koumba – Collectif interuniversitaire pour la coopération avec les Universités Palestiniennes (CICUP) – Collectif Judéo-Arabe et Citoyen pour la Palestine (CJACP) – Comité de Vigilance pour une Paix Réelle au Proche-Orient (CVPR PO) – Comité Justice et Paix en Palestine et au Proche-Orient du 5e arrt (CJPP5) Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT) – Confédération paysanne – Droit-Solidarité – Ensemble – Europe Ecologie les Verts (EELV) – Fédération des Tunisiens pour une Citoyenneté des deux Rives (FTCR) – Fédération Syndicale Unitaire (FSU) – Gauche Unitaire (GU) – Génération Palestine – La Courneuve-Palestine – le Mouvement de la Paix – les Alternatifs – les Femmes en noir – Ligue des Droits de l’Homme (LDH) – Ligue Internationale des Femmes pour la Paix et la Liberté, section française de la Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) (LIFPL) – Mouvement contre le Racisme et pour l’Amitié entre les Peuples (MRAP) – Mouvement Jeunes Communistes de France (MJCF) – Organisation de Femmes Egalité – Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste (NPA)) – Parti Communiste Français (PCF) – Parti de Gauche (PG) – Participation et Spiritualité Musulmanes (PSM) – Une Autre Voix Juive (UAVJ) – Union des Travailleurs Immigrés Tunisiens (UTIT) – Union Générale des Etudiants de Palestine (GUPS-France) – Union Nationale des Etudiants de France (UNEF) – Union syndicale Solidaires
Now to Take a Back Seat?
The co-President of the Parti de Gauche, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, has expressed his weariness, and his wish to take some distance. He estimates that the Front de Gauche has suffered a setback.
(Interview à Hexagones,Exclusive Interview with Jean-Luc Mélenchon. The leader of the Left Party announces his willingness to take a step back, recharge his batteries, and says that it is time for him to pass the baton of leadership to others. He also noted the failure of the Left Front, and denounced the role of the media in the electoral breakthrough of the National Front.)
Mélenchon cited the need to escape from the pressures that his intense political activism, over the last five years, have brought.
He expressed the view that as a “big tree” he risked stunting the growth of the others in the left political “forest” from growing.
It is time, the former Presidential candidate for the Front de gauche said, for new faces inside the Parti de gauche (his own group inside the bloc) to take a more prominent roles.
Mélenchon offered a critical balance-sheet of the Front de gauche, notably against the Parti Communiste Français (PCF) and their electoral arrangements with the Parti Socialiste (PS).
He did not hesitate to criticise the “functionaries” who had attempted to isolate the great man. (1)
concluded that his time would be spent in giving a detailed content to the general ideas of the left. Above all, “La question pour nous n’est pas de faire un parti révolutionnaire, c’est d’aider à la naissance d’un peuple révolutionnaire». The issue for us is not to build a revolutionary party, but to help a revolutionary people be born.
Adpated from Libération.
This follows troubles inside the Parti de Gauche earlier this month.
A small number of leading figures resigned their posts, protesting at the “centralisation” of the small party.
Tensions et démissions au sein du parti de Jean-Luc Mélenchon 3.7.2014.
The set-back of the European elections has produced a number of responses.
The Parti Communiste Français has talked of building a “people’s front”, (Passer du Front de gauche au front du peuple.)
It is known that dissatisfied members of the ruling Parti Socialiste (‘frondeurs’) are upset above all with plans to cut spending and toe the line of budgetary ‘rigour’.
Ensemble, the third force in the Front de gauche (grouping a number of left currents), has proposed expanding to a broader “anti-austerity” front.
Is something like a French People’s Assembly on the cards?
(1) Les Echoes fills in the dots,
“Sans les nommer, il met en cause Pierre Laurent, le secrétaire national du Parti communiste ainsi que Ian Brossat, adjoint communiste d’Anne Hidalgo, responsables d’une stratégie d’alliance qui a « complètement décrédibilisé ce qu’était le Front de Gauche, explosé entre ceux qui ne voulaient pas d’alliance avec le PS et ceux qui se sont vautrés dans cette alliance.»
Se montrant très critique sur la ligne adoptée par le Parti communiste « plus institutionnelle, plus traditionnelle, où on continue à penser que la gauche est une réalité partiaire, organisée et qu’on peut rectifier le tir du Parti socialiste »,
Shahid Akmal, “white women have the least amount of morals.”
The Birmingham Mail has just revealed another scandal behind the ‘Trojan Horse’ allegations,
Undercover report reveals Birmingham school chief claimed women are ‘emotionally weaker’ and that British people have ‘colonial blood’.
By Nick Sommerlad
One of the ringleaders of the Islamist plot to take over British schools is exposed today as a sexist, racist bigot.
School chief Shahid Akmal told an undercover reporter from Birmingham Mail sister paper the Mirror, that “white women have the least amount of morals”, white children were “lazy” and that British people have “colonial blood”.
Akmal claimed that women were “emotionally weaker” than men and that their role was to look after children and the home.
He defended jailing or exiling gays and adulterers under Sharia Law as a “moral position to hold”.
Until he was removed last week, Akmal was the chairman of governors at Nansen Primary School in Birmingham, where music was banned and inspectors found pupils were not sufficiently protected from radicalisation.
The hardliner revealed he has plans to set up a series of after-school tuition centres to instil “our morals and our values and our principles” in impressionable youngsters.
Over a series of meetings, Akmal made a string of extraordinary statements and defended Britons fighting in Syria and Iraq as “freedom fighters”.
In a defiant attack, Akmal claimed the Government wanted to keep Muslims “suppressed” so they are easier to control.
Asked if white children were lazy he said: “Exactly. Thank you very much. And they don’t want to accept that.” He insisted: “I tell you, our women are much, much better consciously in the heart than any white women.
“White women have the least amount of morals.”
He argued that girls should be taught skills like cooking and sewing while boys should be taught trades like construction and mechanics.
Akmal attacked women who became “high flying” politicians: “She has to sacrifice her family, she has to sacrifice her children, she has to sacrifice her husband, all in the name of equality. And there are so many marriages that have broken up because of this.”
He appeared to defend British Muslims joining rebels in Syria and Iraq, despite official warnings of a terrorism threat when they return to the UK.
He said: “The fact that he has gone there to fight, they say that he is supporting terrorists. Because they don’t believe in the freedom fight.”
The alleged Trojan Horse plotters had been attacked for “wanting the best for our children”, claimed Akmal. He said: “They basically don’t want the children to do any better because they will demand education, they will demand better qualifications, they will want to go to Oxford and Cambridge and that’s a white only place. Very few non-whites go there.
“They want to keep us suppressed. It’s easier to control. If you get education you get a mind. When you get a mind, you ask questions. They don’t like that.
This comes as the Clarke report into Birmingham schools was formally presented.
Amongst its findings ITN highlights this,
Teachers at schools involved in the ‘Trojan Horse’ investigation allegedly claimed the murder of Lee Rigby was “some kind of staged event or hoax”, according to a government report.
The report’s author, retired counter-terrorism officer Peter Clarke, analysed the contents of a social media discussion between teachers at Park View School who called themselves ‘The Park View Brotherhood’.
The teachers allegedly joked about Lee Rigby’s death on the WhatsApp messaging service. Credit: Daniel Reinhardt/DPA/Press Association Images
Clarke’s report says the group of teachers exchanged “highly offensive comments about British service personnel” on the WhatsApp messaging service.
He also described the general contents of the teachers’ discussions as “grossly intolerant of beliefs and practices other than their own”.
School chiefs and parents ‘involved in promoting Islam’
Last updated Tue 22 Jul 2014
Governors, deputy and acting headteachers, trustees and parents were involved in a pattern of behaviour “moving between schools” in Birmingham, an inquiry into alleged ‘Trojan Horse’ schools has found.
In a 151-page report for Birmingham City Council, Ian Kershaw concluded: “The evidence shows individuals have been seeking to promote and encourage Islamic principles in the schools with which they are involved, by seeking to introduce Islamic collective worship, or raising objections to elements of the school curriculum that are viewed as anti-Islamic.”
Mr Kershaw’s report said the problems had been allowed to run “unchecked” due to what he branded “weaknesses in the system and poor oversight of governance” mainly by the city council, but also by Ofsted, the Education Funding Agency and the DfE.
In his report, Mr Clarke, who served as head of the Metropolitan Police’s counter-terrorism unit, said he “neither specifically looked for, nor found, evidence of terrorism, radicalisation or violent extremism in the schools of concern in Birmingham”.
But he went on to say: “I found clear evidence that there are a number of people, associated with each other and in positions of influence in schools and governing bodies, who espouse, sympathise with or fail to challenge extremist views.”
The inquiry concluded: “There has been co-ordinated, deliberate and sustained action, carried out by a number of associated individuals, to introduce an intolerant and aggressive Islamic ethos into a few schools in Birmingham.
It said witnesses had expressed three key concerns about the impact of the situation on pupils:
Criticising the role of Birmingham city council, the report concluded the authority was “aware of the practices and behaviours that were subsequently outlined in the ‘Trojan Horse’ letter long before the letter surfaced”.
It goes on to say that the council has not supported headteachers faced with “aggressive and inappropriate behaviour”.
Mr Clarke also warned that the DfE had allowed Park View Educational Trust (PVET) – the trust at the centre of the allegations – to move from running a single school to being responsible for three too quickly, without systems in place for holding the new academies to account.
” There has been no evidence of direct radicalisation or violent extremism,” she said. “But there is a clear account in the report of people in positions of influence in these schools, with a restricted and narrow interpretation of their faith, who have not promoted fundamental British values and who have failed to challenge the extremist views of others.
“Individuals associated with PVET in particular have destabilised headteachers, sometimes leading to their resignation or removal. Particularly shocking is the evidence of the social media discussion of the Park View Brotherhood group whose actions betray a collective mind-set that can fairly be described as an intolerant Islamist approach which denies the validity of alternative beliefs.”
She said that it was “upsetting” that efforts to encourage more British Muslims to become school governors had been “damaged by the actions of a few” and urged parents to continue to come forward to serve on governing bodies.
A new education commissioner is to be appointed at Birmingham City Council to oversee action to address the criticisms of the authority in the Clarke and Kershaw reports.”
Shiraz Socialist commented a few days ago,
So we now have a situation in which the two reports commissioned into ‘Trojan Horse’ have both concluded that there was a real issue of organised, ultra-reactionary Islamist influence in some Birmingham schools. The newspaper at the forefront of the campaign of denial that followed the allegations has now relented and faced reality. The leader of Birmingham City Council has acknowledged what happened and apologised. But will those on the left (in particular, but not only, the SWP), who took the Guardian ‘line’ now admit their mistake? More importantly, will the NUT leadership, instead of prevaricating on the issue, now take a clear stand in support of secular education?
One solution: secular education!
Boot Religious Authority out of Schools!
Last Known Sighting of Ben: I Make Fun Stuff !
Popular Ipswich MP, Ben Gummer (Unofficial Minister for Ipswich, Honorary Mayor of Ipswich, Acting Editor, Ipswich Star, Benefactor of the Shrine of Lady Lane), has been less than visible lately.
His last major political achievement was this, “February 2014 BISHOP’S HILL LIGHTS STOPPED.”
Sadly the sprightly Latin scholar, and author of the definitive guide to the Black Death (1), does not appear to have benefited from the recent Cabinet Reshuffle.
His position as Michael Gove’s PPS has, well, lapsed.
For all his prestigious unofficial and honorary posts, Ben did not figure in the roll of honour that was at the command of Leader David Cameron.
Rumours that Ben is seeking a bolt-hole in the West County have flourished in the absence of any more definitive news.
We hope to be informed of developments on this front.
The fate of the Gummer dynasty is in the balance.
(1) Fittingly the last outbreak of bubonic plague in England occurred on the nearby Shotley Peninsula in 1910 (Here).
Defying the Ban on pro-Palestinian marches in France, on Saturday,
About 6,000 mostly peaceful protesters assembled in the Barbès area of northern Paris in defiance of a government ban. When the march was blocked by police lines after only 500 metres, a minority of young protesters started to hurl stones, bottles and sticks at the riot police.
There is a range of accounts of the responsibility for the incidents that took place, see L’Humanité, and Libération and an important direct reportage in the same paper, here.
A leader of the Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste (NPA) said, “«La solidarité avec les Palestiniens doit pouvoir s’exprimer à Paris», a expliqué samedi à l’AFP Sandra Demarcq, membre de la direction du NPA, qui juge l’interdiction «illégitime et scandaleuse». We should be able to express solidarity with the Palestinians, explained to AFP Sandra Demarq, part of the leadership of the NPA, who judged the ban “illegitimate and scandalous”. According to the reporter at around 15.40,
Soudain, des groupes extrêmement équipés et organisés ont commencé à fendre la foule pour monter au contact des CRS. Ils avançaient en ligne, le visage couvert. A l’évidence, ils n’avaient rien de militants venus défendre la cause palestinienne. Certains arboraient des tee-shirts du virage Auteuil, une tribune du Parc des Princes.
Suddenly, extremely well organised and kitted out groups pushed their way through the crowd towards the front row of the CRS (riot police).
They advanced en bloc, faces covered. From what could be gleaned they had nothing of the look of activists who’d come to defend the Palestinian cause. Some of them were wearing the colours of Auteuil, a supporters’ group named after a football stand at the Parc des Princes.
In Sarcelles on Sunday however events took a clearly and illegitimate anti-Semitic turn,
France’s interior minister on Monday slammed “intolerable” acts of anti-Semitism after a rally against Israel’s Gaza offensive descended into violence pitting an angry pro-Palestinian crowd against local Jewish businesses.
Sunday’s demonstration in the north Paris suburb of Sarcelles was the third to deteriorate in a week, as shops were looted and riot police lobbed tear gas and rubber bullets at the crowd.
The rally had been banned amid concern the Jewish community would be targeted after protesters last weekend tried to storm two synagogues in Paris.
“When you head for the synagogue, when you burn a corner shop because it is Jewish-owned, you are committing an anti-Semitic act,”Bernard Cazeneuve told reporters outside the Sarcelles synagogue.
In the Paris suburb sometimes nicknamed “little Jerusalem” for its large community of Sephardic Jews, the rally descended into chaos when dozens of youth – some masked – set fire to bins and lit firecrackers and smoke bombs.
Eighteen people were arrested after looters wrecked shops, including a kosher foodstore and a funeral home as protesters shouted: “Fuck Israel!”.
The Independent says,
Riot police held back a mob of youths who tried to attacks two synagogues in the town of Sarcelles in the northern Paris suburbs.
A pro-Gaza demonstration in a town with a large Jewish population began peacefully but degenerated into attacks on Jewish and Chaldean businesses and four hours of running battles between youths and police. Several cars were burned. Three shops, including a Kosher grocery (1), were burned and pillaged. A railway station was severely damaged.
The interior minister, Bernard Cazeneve said today: “When you menace synagogues and when you burn a grocery because it is Jewish-owned, you are committing anti-semitic acts… That is intolerable. Protest against Israel is legitimate. Nothing can justify such violence.”
…..
Roger Cuikerman, head of the French umbrella groups of Jewish organisations, CRIF, said there was a growing anxiety amongst French jews.
Protest against Israeli government actions was one thing, he said. Attacks on Jews for being Jews were “deeply disturbing”. “They are not screaming ‘death to the Israelis’ on the streets of Paris,” he said. “They are screaming ‘death to the Jews’. They are attacking synagogues which are places of prayer.”
Bernard Cazeneuve, speaking at Sarcelles this morning, said (Le Monde),
Devant la presse, il a estimé qu’il était « légitime » de pouvoir exprimer une position sur les événements de Gaza, où au moins 502 Palestiniens ont été tuésdepuis le 8 juillet. En revanche, il a jugé « intolérable que l’on s’en prenne à des synagogues ou à des commerces parce qu’ils sont tenus par des juifs. Rien ne peut justifier de telles violence ». Dix-huit personnes ont été interpellées après les heurts, selon la police.
In front of the press he considered that it was “legitimate” to be able to express a position on the events in Gaza, where at least 502 Palestinians have been killed since the 8th of July. By contrast he judged that it is “intolerable that people attack synagogues and businesses because they are run by Jews. Nothing can justify such violence.” According to the police 18 people have been asserted after the incidents.
(1) The shop had been already the subject of a grenade attack in September 2013 (see here).
In an important Editorial today Le Monde says that the government’s ban on demonstrations is an admission of its impotence, “Manifestations interdites : l’aveu d’impuissance du gouvernement.”
The statement notes that President Hollande is right to be concerned about the “importation” of the Israel-Palestinian conflict into France.
But they note that the right to demonstrate, within reasonable limits, is part of the foundations of the Republic.
They cite the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man, “ nul ne doit être inquiété pour ses opinions, même religieuses, pourvu que leur manifestation ne trouble pas l’ordre public établi par la loi ».
Article 10, “No one shall be disquieted on account of his opinions, including his religious views, provided their manifestation does not disturb the public order established by law.”
Le Monde then accuses the government, through its ban on demonstrations of solidarity with the Palestinians, of playing, “aux pompiers pyromanes.” (firefighting arsonists, figurative, “fig., personne qui provoque volontairement les maux qu’elle est censée combattre.”, somebody who creates the very problem they claim to be solving).
“Toute manifestation doit être déclarée à la Préfecture de police, en indiquant, au moins trois jours avant, sa date, son heure et son parcours. En d’autres termes, le droit de manifester fait partie des libertés publiques, mais il est légitimement encadré.”
Every demonstration, its timings, and its route, must be notified to the Police authorities, at least 3 days in advance. In other respects the right to demonstrate, within defined limits, is part of our public freedoms.
Le Monde is absolutely right.
Positions of left parties:
Parti de Gauche “L’interdiction de la manifestation de soutien à la population de Gaza contre l’agression décidée par le gouvernement israélien était bien une provocation et une manipulation.” NPA, “La solidarité avec les Palestiniens est légitime et n’a rien à voir avec de l’antisémitisme !” Front de Gauche, “”Amplifier la solidarité avec le peuple palestinien, défendre le droit de manifester”.
Update: Declaration today (Monday 12st July) against ban on demonstrations by the Ligue des Droits de l’Homme, GAZA CROULE SOUS LES BOMBES, ISRAËL S’ENFERRE DANS LA RÉPRESSION, LES INTERDICTIONS DE MANIFESTER DU GOUVERNEMENT FRANÇAIS ATTISENT LES TENSIONS
Demonstration on Wednesday now authorised, Le Monde.
Islamists Force Christians to Leave Mosul.
BAGHDAD (New York Times) — By 1 p.m. on Friday almost every Christian in Mosul had heard the Sunni militants’ message — they had until noon Saturday to leave the city.
Men, women and children piled into neighbors’ cars, some begged for rides to the city limits and hoped to get taxis to the nearest Christian villages. They took nothing more than the clothes on their backs, according to several who were reached late Friday.
The order from the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria came after Christians decided not to attend a meeting that ISIS had arranged for Thursday night to discuss their status.
“We were so afraid to go,” said Duraid Hikmat, an expert on minorities who had done research for years in Mosul. He fled two weeks ago to Al Qosh, a largely Christian town barely an hour away, but his extended family left on Friday.
Islamic State Group Claims Baghdad Bombings
By SAMEER N. YACOUB and RYAN LUCAS Associated Press. Baghdad.
Is there a left response?
Socialist Worker (USA -no longer closely linked to SWP UK) published this on the 7th of July.
Several revolutionary Marxist and socialist organizations from the region–the Revolutionary Socialists (Egypt), Union of Iraqi Communists (Iraq), al-Munadhil-a (Morocco), Revolutionary Left Current (Syria), Leftist Workers League (Tunisia) and Socialist Forum (Lebanon)–issued a joint statement calling for revolutionary working-class unity against both sectarianism and imperialism. Here, we reprint their statement, which appeared originally at the al-Manshour website.
…….the most flagrant transgressions in the context of this campaign were the sectarian massacres committed by ISIS. There are stories about mass executions–with unparalleled brutality–of hundreds of prisoners, out of the thousands who had surrendered. This is in addition to all sorts of acts of repression, deportation and persecution for religious and ethnic reasons, not to mention the use of rape against women and girls or forcing them to marry fighters from the armed group.
- – – – – – – – – – – – – – – -
ISIS’S CONTROL culminated in the imposition of strict Sharia rules after the announcement of the “city paper” in Mosul–a 16-article document dictating the lives of citizens. One of the articles indicates that the Islamic State will be the sole authority in control of the city’s resources, and that it will punish anyone who steals from public funds. On the other hand, ISIS seized the equivalent of hundreds of millions of U.S. dollars from banks, government facilities and municipalities, and it confiscated countless quantities of weapons left behind by fleeing soldiers and officers.
The document advises all men to participate in collective prayers and prohibits the sale and consumption of alcohol, drugs and tobacco, among other Sharia restrictions. It also bans all councils, assemblies and banners under any name, in addition to carrying weapons, considering these acts as divisive and deserving of the death sentence.
The document reveals the position adopted by ISIS concerning statues and shrines, which it threatens to demolish, in addition to destroying the graves of saints. It calls on women to remain at home except in emergency situations. In summary, ISIS’s rule has left people fearful for their lives, including the armed militias “allied” to them (information indicates around 23 groups joined the campaign).
*******
1. All types of intervention in Iraqi affairs by the U.S., Iran, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey and others must be rejected, as they are not only completely incompatible with the interests of the people of Iraq, but also fuel the fire of a terrible sectarian war. We call on the UN General Assembly, in particular, to hold all countries accountable for their intervention in this situation and subject them to sanctions, according to the Uniting for Peace mechanism.
2. All political disputes in Iraq must be solved by appealing to the opinion, will and interests of Iraqis themselves. This should be through an advanced democratic process from outside the sectarian system, which ensures active political participation of all citizens, without any type of discrimination, whether in building their new state structure or through local government in all the cities and governorates.
3. The Iraqi people and liberationist factions must be at the forefront of confronting the bloody terrorism of ISIS and the counter-terrorism against it. This necessitates the self-organization of people in cities, slums and villages in armed popular committees and councils to counter the attacks of obscurantist terrorist organizations and all the opposing confessional militias. These groups should be incapacitated, defeated and their presence eliminated from Iraq.
However, this also contains an international task–a mobilization for the widest global campaign to support Iraqis in their efforts to confront the hostile forces and militias on the one hand, and the existing dictatorial sectarian capitalist regime on the other, aiming for its overthrow. This would advance the aspirations of Iraqis for a future based on justice, freedom and human dignity and prevent the disintegration of the country or its partition.
4. In the above context, the revolutionary left and democratic, feminist and progressive groups in the Arab region should work together to confront the sectarian and confessional approach and policies of Arab regimes, on the one hand, and obscurantist and reactionary right-wing groups, on the other. This is in order to defeat the sectarian/confessional threat, which is the main weapon used by the counter-revolution to attack the revolutionary space that could unite the peoples of the region.
5. Finally, there is an urgent need to provide the necessary aid to refugees and the displaced, through all sorts of international organizations, to reduce and control the impact of the current humanitarian crisis.
The regional and international conspiracy against the Iraqi people must be defeated.
Down with all imperialist interventions in Iraq.
Defeat the obscurantist assault by ISIS and its brethren.
Victory to the Iraqi people against their internal and external enemies.
For a democratic, secular, revolutionary, sovereign and independent Iraq.
Long live international people’s solidarity.
Signatories:
Revolutionary Socialists (Egypt)
Union of Iraqi Communists (Iraq)
al-Munadhil-a (Morocco)
Revolutionary Left Current (Syria)
Leftist Workers League (Tunisia)
Socialist Forum (Lebanon)
June 28, 2014
This is the pitifully truncated account Socialist Worker (UK), 1st of July, gives of this stirring declaration,
Revolutionary socialist organisations in Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Tunisia, Syria and Morocco have issued a joint statement condemning the sectarianism ripping Iraq apart.
The revolutionaries blame the “interventions of regional and international powers” for the chaos.
In December 2012 a popular movement for justice erupted in Sunni majority areas. This movement was met with brutal violence from the Iraqi government.
The left appeal to “all the oppressed in Iraq” to make a revolution “against the entire system” that is breeding hate. This includes the US occupation, sectarian forces, Isis, the Iraqi government and others.
Note the absence of the words, “ democratic” and “secular”…..
SWP Placards, No Answer to Real Problems.
Is the Guardian finally seeing sense?
This report has just appeared.
Birmingham council a ‘disastrous failure’ over Islamism in schools
Independent investigation sparked by ‘Trojan horse’ letter finds officials failed to act for fear of being accused of Islamophobia.
Birmingham council “disastrously” failed to act when a group of Muslim men began to promote, sometimes illegally, a fundamentalist version of Islam in some schools, because officials were afraid of being accused of racism or Islamophobia, a report has found.
The investigation, carried out by the independent adviser Ian Kershaw, was commissioned by Birmingham City council (BCC) as a result of concerns raised in a letter dated 27 November 2013, known as the “Trojan horse” letter, which suggested a number of schools in the city had been “taken over” to ensure they were run on strict Islamic principles.
The Birmingham report, compiled by Kershaw and overseen by a review group that included senior Home Office official Stephen Rimmer and representatives of the West Midlands police, interviewed many of the same witnesses and reviewed the same documents as the former counterterrorism police chief Peter Clarke, who was commissioned by the then education secretary Michael Gove to address extremism in Birmingham schools.
The article continues and states this,
The report found that a small group of governors had:
• placed unreasonable demands on head teachers to “modify curriculum provision, which denies students their right to access a broad and balanced curriculum, including the right to understand other world religions and the right to sex and relationship education”.
• placed “inappropriate demands on head teachers by repeatedly requesting information”.
• been “overly challenging and sometimes aggressive in the management of head teachers”.
• inappropriately appointed friends and relatives to the school staff.
• undermined head teachers during Ofsted inspections.
Kershaw found that elements of the five steps referred to in the Trojan Horse letter for taking over schools were present in a “large number of the schools considered as part of the investigation”.
These five steps were to: target poorly performing schools in Muslim areas; select parents to turn against schools; install governors to encourage Islamic ideals; identify key staff to disrupt from within; and to instigate a campaign of pressure.
Kershaw found evidence of all five steps at Golden Hillock School, Moseley school, Nansen primary school and Saltley school. All of those schools, with the exception of Moseley, were recently put into special measures after emergency Ofsted inspections downgraded them to “inadequate”.
There was no evidence of all five at Park View Academy, which has been at the centre of the controversy.
Kershaw concluded that the evidence collated to date “does not support a conclusion that there was a systematic plot to take over schools”.
He added: “There are concerns which require immediate attention, but the evidence is not sufficient to lead me to construe the behaviour to be a coordinated plan to improperly influence the direction and management of schools (or academies) serving schools of predominantly Islamic faith or Muslim background.”
More here.
Has the Guardian changed? Have all their writers now dropped the automatic resort to charges about ‘Islamophobia’ when these problems were reaised.
Not really.
It remains trapped in religious multi-culturalism, as this accompanying article by Usama Hasan illustrates.
The Trojan horse plot shows we must clarify religion’s place in state schools
….we need to clarify the place of religion in state schools. For example, is it reasonable to expect a school with a majority Muslim population to hold Christian prayers during assembly, daily worship apparently being a legal requirement? Should it offer Islamic prayer instead or different assemblies for pupils of different religious and non-religious backgrounds? Does modern religious diversity mean we do away with collective worship at school or adopt a multi-faith approach? Schools around the country regularly grapple with such issues.
And,
As a result of this unfortunate episode, we need to put measures in place to ensure that the teaching of religion in schools is objective, balanced and non-discriminatory, while all school activities and practices are inclusive and devoid of narrow religious or political influences. While state schools must remain sensitive to the cultural needs of all pupils, isolationist and xenophobic tendencies must be challenged robustly and not accepted as part of faith or cultural practice. Governance structures also need to be improved so that schools are more careful about whom they appoint. Extremists, even if they are non-violent, should not be allowed to work in schools or be governors, and attempts to impose puritanical agendas on schools in the public sector must not be allowed to happen again.
How about simply removing religion from “school activities and practices”, and teaching about it within the context of philosophy and cultural anthropology in schools?
The BBC reports,
A Malaysia Airlines jet carrying 295 people has crashed in east Ukraine on a flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur.
There are no signs of survivors at the scene of the crash near the village of Grabovo, in rebel-held territory close to the border with Russia.
Both sides in Ukraine’s civil conflict accused each other of shooting down the plane with a missile. It is still not clear why the plane came down
It was only an instant and the conspiracy theorists ran over the fresh graves of the victims of the crash.
“The US has spent over $5 Billion to destabilize the Ukraine, and that doesn’t even include money from classified budgets. The US/NATO has already been widely accused of Operation Gladio false flag terrorist attacks in the Ukraine.”
Hat-Tip: Heggy.
Russia Today carried this story at one point,
Malaysian Airlines MH17 plane was travelling almost the same route as Russia’s President Vladimir Putin’s jet shortly before the crash that killed 298, Interfax news agency reports citing sources.
“I can say that Putin’s plane and the Malaysian Boeing intersected at the same point and the same echelon. That was close to Warsaw on 330-m echelon at the height of 10,100 meters. The presidential jet was there at 16:21 Moscow time and the Malaysian aircraft – 15:44 Moscow time,” a source told the news agency on condition of anonymity.
“The contours of the aircrafts are similar, linear dimensions are also very similar, as for the coloring, at a quite remote distance they are almost identical”, the source added.
Before it’s News raved,
Stephen: Like many of you, on first hearing today that a Malaysian Airlines Flight (MH17) with 295 people on board has been shot down over the eastern Ukraine, the first thought that comes to mind is false flag – that this must be another last ditch effort to retain power.This has also occurred just as Israel has sent tanks into Gaza. A tragic distraction perhaps? It’s all too convenient, no?
1) Malaysian Air involved AGAIN after their “lost plane” false flag event a few months back.
2) The markets were looking for an excuse to hit the collapse button
3) Gold and Silver have been rumored to be “allowed” to run up very soon.
4) European banks are in deep, deep trouble and need an excuse.
5) Ukrainian gov’t came out immediately after the news hit with a story that they know that the Russians shot the plane down.
6) Obama and the EU have just laid new sanctions on Russia and are looking for support from the world.
All of the above leans me towards the conclusion that this is just another false flag event in a long, long string of many that our controllers have pulled off.
Let me be clear…this is just my hunch and it usually takes a few weeks/months before all the “conspiracy facts” come out proving the motives and methods behind the occurrence.
We are living in dangerous times so look at everything with a skeptical eye.
May the Road you choose be the Right Road.
The there is this,
777 Shot Down Over Ukraine : Getting Past The Lies
By Gordon Duff with Jim W. Dean, Veterans Today – July 18, 2014 – http://www.veteranstoday.com/2014/07/17/777-shot-down-over-ukraine/
Unconfirmed: Malaysian plane mistaken for Putin’s private jet which had flown over the area only moments before, leaving Israel and the Kiev junta as prime suspects. This may well have been an assassination attempt on Putin.
We have people on the scene now (1:45PM EST) who have found a bag of passports and medical equipment. We will keep you updated.
With the beginning of the Israeli ground attack on Gaza, might they well claim the plane was:
1: An “Egyptian horse barge,” shot down by mistake
2: Spying on Israeli troop movements
(ref: USS Liberty Israeli cover stories)
Not to mention this,
As to the plot or reason, simply blaming Israel is not supportable, no more than blaming Hamas for murdering the 3 children a few short weeks ago.
Thus, we assume these as high probability:
◾An aircraft was used, most likely an American built F15 because of range and capability.
◾Azerbaijan was used because we know of clandestine bases there, which were confirmed by military officers who defected to Iran in 2013.
◾We know Israel has some role, yet undefined, because they are spreading stories blaming Russia.
◾As this is a second Malaysian Airlines plane to go down, we look for false stories regarding Israel and Malaysian planes and reassess their meaning.
◾As is always the case, que bono, who benefits?
We ask readers to watch the world news and those in the region, report directly to our bureau there.
A French site, Le Nouvel Ordre Mondial, suggests that this may have been involved (and links it to the flight MH370 which disappeared en route from Malaysia to China in March).
un message occulte qui était en fait un ordre secret donné à quelqu’un, afin de préparer un sacrifice rituel ou de créer une opération sous fausse bannière (false flag attack)?
A hidden message, which was in reality a secret order to somebody, to prepare a ritual sacrifice, or to create a false flag attack.
In the US there is this,
Rush Limbaugh couldn’t help himself on Thursday after news broke that a Malaysian Airlines jet had crashed in eastern Ukraine.
The radio show host called the disaster “an opportunity” for media outlets to distract viewers from the controversy surrounding President Obama and US border security. He suspected that CNN had already swept the immigration crisis under the rug andretreated back to its “wall-to-wall” coverage of the plane.
Limbaugh called the whole thing “very eery.”
“Talk about an opportunity to abandon the bad Obama news at the border,” he said. “I’m not suggesting anything other than how the media operates.
Update.
Socialist Unity star writer, John Wight, has also a unique take on the tragedy,
….the mind boggles that a civilian passenger aircraft should be flying anywhere near a war zone, especially one in which fighter jets, military aircraft, and military transport aircraft are playing such a key role in hostilities.
The alacrity with which Washington and its allies have sought to exploit this tragedy to attack Russia is as unedifying as it’s despicable. Whoever was responsible for downing the Malaysian passenger jet, it was clearly an accident. Moreover, the underlying causes of the conflict in eastern Ukraine, despite efforts to argue otherwise, is the toppling of the last legitimate democratically elected Ukrainian government of Viktor Yanukovich by an armed mob in Kiev in February, in which avowed fascists and neo-Nazis played a key role. Those fascists now occupy ministerial offices in the regime led by Petro Poroshenko and are prevalent in the violence that has been visited on the people in the east of the country, who have risen up in resistance to Kiev and its sponsors in the West.
To mild criticism Wight responds,
I’m not surprised this is your response. I just have to think back to your support for the ‘revolution’ in Libya and the ‘revolutionaries’ in Syria to be reminded of the left cover you continually provide for your own government and its foreign policy.
I still chuckle when I recall you stating during the Maidan riots that you would be on the side of the Right Sector thugs in attacking the police, doing your best of course to ensure you were throwing your rocks from a separate pile than theirs.
Trotsky, I’m sure, would be proud of the political movement he has spawned.
Workers Liberty (the paper of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty) has just made a carefully weighed assessment of the horrendous Israeli attacks on Gaza.
Since the latest round of Israeli air bombardments of Gaza began on 8 July, around 200 Palestinians have died.
77% of have been civilians according to UN estimates. Many have been children
On 14 July, Israel ran a ground-troop operation in Gaza, and said it would expand its list of targets for bombing to include civilian institutions with suspected links to Hamas, the Islamist party which governs Gaza. Given that Hamas’s political infrastructure is substantially enmeshed with the frail Gazan state, this could include almost any target Israel chooses. Also on 14 July, Israel began a leaflet-dropping campaign instructing residents of northern Gaza to evacuate as it was preparing to widen its bombing campaign. Hamas has instructed Gazans to stay put.
On Tuesday morning 15 July, Israel announced that it had accepted a ceasefire proposal from Egypt, but Hamas hesitated, and later that day Israel was bombing again.
Gaza’s economy, always sore beset by Israeli restrictions, managed to grow nearly 15 per cent in 2011 and 7 per cent in 2012. Hamas was also boosted by the Palestinian “unity government” announced on 2 June this year, which allowed it to hope that public-sector workers in Gaza would be paid by the Palestinian Authority.
However, since a military-dominated government took over in Egypt in July 2013, ousting Muslim Brotherhood president Morsi, Egypt has shut down many of Gaza’s routes to the outside world, and unemployment in Gaza has risen. The Palestinian Authority has stalled on paying wages: public sector workers in Gaza struck over that on 26 June.
Hamas wants to put pressure on Egypt and Israel to ease their grip on Gaza. Right-wing Israeli prime minister Netanyahu wants to keep Hamas off balance, and is under pressure from a growing far right in Israel.
The current conflict grew after three Israeli teenagers, Eyal Yifrach, Gilad Shaar, and Naftal Frenkel, went missing on 12 June in the West Bank. Israeli forces raided thousands of homes in the West Bank, arresting 570 Palestinians and killing several (5 by one report, 10 by another) in the process. The teenagers were found dead near the Palestinian town of Hebron on 30 June.
Far-right Jewish nationalists abducted and murdered 16-year-old Palestinian Mohammed Abu Khdeir on 2 July. Hamas began a barrage of rocket fire, and has now launched nearly 1,000 rockets at Israeli towns. It has also threatened to attack Ben Gurion International Airport in Tel Aviv. So far, no Israelis have been killed. Israel responded by bombing Gaza.
No state, Israeli nationalists claim, should tolerate rocket barrages, however poorly aimed and ineffective, against its civilian population. That is the rational kernel to the Israeli case. But Israel’s actions go well beyond self-defence. Aerial bombardments of a densely-populated area, with an impoverished and essentially captive population, by one of the best-armed states in the world against are so disproportionate as to undermine the self-defence argument.
The Palestinians, too, have the right to defend themselves. Hamas rockets do not provide that defence.
Israel’s bombardments cannot be abstracted from Israel’s longstanding oppression of the Palestinians. Likewise, Hamas’s rockets are aimed at civilians and must be considered in the context of the social and political project of Hamas. Hamas is a clerical-fascist political party, which, despite the recent concessions to bourgeois diplomacy of some of its leaders, states its hostility to the Israeli-Jewish people even existing in historic Palestine.
Israel’s war on Hamas cannot possibly have a progressive outcome. While Israel continues settlement building in the West Bank; while it keeps the population of Gaza under semi-permanent siege; discriminates against Arabs within its own borders; and operates a regime of walls and checkpoints, it creates the conditions in which Hamas grows.
The only way out is peace. And, for peace, Israel holds all the cards. Ending the siege of Gaza, dismantling West Bank settlements, ensuring equality for Israeli-Arabs, and allowing the Palestinians their right to set up a genuinely independent state in contiguous territory alongside Israel would allow peace — and security for Israel’s people.
The hope for the future of both the Israeli and Palestinian people lies in the political potential of the Palestinian labour, women’s, and LGBT movements, and the potential of the labour movement and internationalist, anti-war left inside Israel. Those movements can provide an alternative politics for Israeli and Palestinians that cut across the nationalism and chauvinism of both sides.
That potential can be glimpsed in the demonstrations which have taken place in Israel, on 3 July and 13 July. On 3 July, thousands demonstrated in Tel Aviv demanding an end to the atmosphere of incitement and vengeance following the deaths of the Israeli teenagers. On 13 July, hundreds of anti-war activists, many from the Israeli political left, demanded an end to the bombing, and faced violent reprisals from far-right nationalists.
As Yacov Ben Efrat, wrote in the left-wing Israeli magazine Challenge following the Israeli assault on Gaza in 2010:
“Solidarity between Jewish and Arab workers is the only way to overcome the cycle of bloodshed. The supreme interest of the workers on both sides of the conflict is to build a political and social alternative, egalitarian and humane, against a right-wing Zionist chauvinism and an Islamic fundamentalism that are leading both peoples into catastrophe”.
This editorial would seem to be the right framework for any serious left-wing discussion of the issues this catastrophe raises.
Update (hat-tip JV)
This is essential and very depressing reading, With the Oslo dream shattered, Israel must do the creative thinking. (Haaratz)
The Palestinians do not recognize the Jews’ right to a state, so Israel must take steps on its own to improve the atmosphere.
Far-Right Racist Attacks on Socialist Minister Taubira.
This was a major story on the French media this morning.
A former French local election candidate for the far-right National Front (FN) has been sentenced to nine months in prison for comparing the country’s black justice minister to a monkey. (1)
The court decision has sparked controversy in France, with anti-discrimination associations welcoming it as a reminder that racism should not be allowed to flourish but the party itself denouncing the move as “grotesquely disproportionate” and politically motivated.
Anne-Sophie Leclere provoked a storm last year when she compared Christiane Taubira to a monkey on French television and admitted to posting a photo-montage on Facebook that showed the justice minister, who is from French Guiana, alongside a baby chimpanzee.
The caption underneath the baby monkey said “At 18 months,” while the one under Taubira’s photograph read “Now”.
Leclere had been an FN candidate in Rethel in the northeastern Ardennes region for 2014 local elections, but the party soon dropped her and went on to do well in the March polls.
On Tuesday, a court in Cayenne — the capital of French Guiana — sentenced her to nine months in jail, barred her from standing in elections for five years and fined her 50,000 euros ($68,000).
It also slapped the FN with a 30,000-euro fine, putting an end to a case brought by French Guiana’s Walwari political party founded by Taubira.
On France-Inter it was suggested that the absence of the accused (in French Guiana – South America) played a role in determining that there was a prison sentence.
Leclère said,
«Je n’ai pas tenu de propos racistes, j’ai juste reçu un photomontage sur Facebook dont je ne suis pas l’auteur. Je ne suis pas raciste», a affirmé l’intéressée, d’un ton empreint de colère contenue. «C’est une injustice, c’est un jugement partisan et politique», a-t-elle ajouté.
«On n’a trouvé aucun avocat pour nous représenter à Cayenne et je n’avais pas les moyens de me payer le billet d’avion», a expliqué Anne-Sophie Leclère au sujet de son absence au tribunal de Cayenne, saisi d’une plainte du mouvement guyanais Walwari destinée à «dénoncer le fond idéologique d’extrême droite du parti de Marine Le Pen».
I did not make racist remarks, I just cut and pasted a photomontage on Facebook (which I did not create). I am not racist” she asserted, her voice marked by anger, “It’s not right, it’s a politically biased decision.”
“I couldn’t find a lawyer to represent me at Cayenne, and I don’t have the resources to pay for a plane ticket there.” Anne-Sophie Leclère went on, explaining why she did not attend the Court in Cayenne, which was dealing with a complaint initiated by the Guianese movement, Walwari, which was aimed at “denouncing the basis of the extreme-right ideology of Marine Le Pen.”
There will be appeals.
(1) The insult was truly vile: Taubira/guenon (female ape).
Reactions here.
Humanists Show the Way Forward.
Faith Schools Undercover: No Clapping in Class (Monday 14th July at 8pm on Channel 4) revealed:
The programme began with concerns at Oldknow Academy Birmingham. A parent had complained at Christmas not being celebrated and got short shrift. He wrote to the PM.
The most important item was on Park View school,
A former teacher said, on camera, but anonymously that,
“about 60 male pupils were given a worksheet saying women couldn’t say no to sex with their husbands.
She says: “The work sheet categorically said that you know the wife has to obey the man. Well I think it makes the boys feel that they have got that power over girls. The east Birmingham area has one of the highest rates of domestic violence in the country.”
This was flately, and not very convincingly, denied, by the school.
Local MP Khalid Mahmood says: “I am not talking about here extremism in schools although ultimately it could lead to it, and that’s my fear, is that when you are grooming young people into that sort of a mind-set then its very easy once they leave school is to go that extra additional step.”
He also dismissed suggestions the controversy smacks of Islamophobia.
“Over 200 people complaining to the local authority about what’s gone on and you can’t really claim that it’s a witch-hunt,” said Mahmood, whose own actions have shown him sensitive to the difficulties raised by racist attacks on Birmingham Muslims.
There was a report on Olive Primary School in Blackburn.
During this there was evidence that music in school was discouraged, that clapping was not encouraged, and that other “un-Islamic,” practices were frowned on.
Olive Primary is run by the Tauheedul Education Trust, with two other secondaries in Blackburn.
The Lancashire Telegraph draws attention to one feature of the Trust’s activities,
The programme revealed trust schools hosted lectures by three extremist preachers, including Mufti Ismail Menk banned from six UK universities for preaching same-sex acts were ‘filthy’.
It showed him saying of gay people: “With all due respect to the animals, they are worse than animals.”
In Hackney illegal Jewish religious schools (for the ultra-orthodox) exist,
Channel 4 Dispatches discovered that more than 1,000 boys aged 13 to 16 have disappeared from registered schools in the London borough of Hackney.
Instead they are being sent by their parents to be educated in yeshivas – fee-paying schools where the curriculum is solely religious.
We have identified more than ten unregistered, illegal, schools.
And what’s really shocking is that Hackney Council, the Department for Education and Ofsted have all known about these schools for years.
We’ve seen internal government briefing documents that reveal as early as 2008 the Department for Education was aware of the issue. One document states the Department knows a number of schools are ‘operating illegally and without the most basic health, safety and child welfare checks’.
In 2012 the Department acknowledged those running the schools were breaking the law, but said they preferred to work cooperatively with the community.
There were shots of a school, including a room where Hasidic instruction and disputation was taking place. Students went in an out till late in the day.
The conclusion of this section was very unsettling.
Dispatches contacted the schools featured but have received no response.
Hackney Council, Ofsted and the Department for Education told Dispatches their concerns date back many years and they are aware of all the schools on our list.
They say they’ve been working to get them registered.
The Department for Education, who Ofsted and Hackney say have the power to take action against the schools, told Dispatches that ‘where applications for registration are still not forthcoming we will press for a prosecution as it is a criminal offence to operate an unregistered illegal schools.’
The programme seemed to suggest that the Council, out of concern for religious and cultural feeling, was unwilling to act.
Andrew Gilligam reports,
Government documents obtained by Channel 4’s Dispatches and the Jewish Chronicle newspaper say that many of the schools are “operating illegally and without the most basic health, safety and child welfare checks”.
Many boys in the Orthodox Jewish community in Stamford Hill, London, “will stop secular studies at the age of 13 or 14 and start attending ‘yeshivas’ where the curriculum is solely religious,” the documents say.
Between 800 and 1000 boys aged between 13 and 16 are “missing” from the school system in the borough of Hackney alone, the papers add.
Undercover filming by Dispatches in and around the schools shows the boys packed more than 50 to a classroom in dirty, run-down buildings, some converted houses. More than a hundred boys were filmed going in to an illegal school in Lynmouth Road, Stamford Hill, arriving from 7.30 in the morning and leaving late at night. The establishment is believed to be one of twelve illegal schools in the neighbourhood.
In 2011, about one third of the 20,000 state funded schools in England were faith schools, approximately 7,000 in total, of which 68% were Church of England schools and 30% were Roman Catholic . There were 42 Jewish, 12 Muslim, 3 Sikh and 1 Hindu faith schools.
The British Humanist Association says,
“Around a third of all state-funded schools are schools ‘with a religious character’ – the legal term for ‘faith’ schools. This number has grown in recent years as successive governments have increased the influence of religious groups in the state-funded education system.”
That is, with the introduction of Academies and Free Schools, this percentage is believed to have risen.
Faith Schools Undercover noted their role in encouraging ethnic and cultural segregation.
The idea that parents have the right to run, publicly funded, education that promotes their religion, is fundamentally wrong.
Some liberals seem unable to respond to the issues raised.
There are those who claim to be on the left who find excuses for these arrangements.
They claim that criticisms of, notably, the Birmingham schools, are an ‘Islamophobic’ conspiracy.
This completely fails to look at the problems religiously-run schools create – as indicated by the Channel Four Dispatches documentary.
It indicated that concerns had a solid basis.
The National Secular Society sets out a much better position that those wishing to sweep the subject of Faith education under the carpet.,
Rather than facilitating the segregation of pupils along religious lines, we would like to see steps taken to ensure children of all faiths and none are educated together in a respectful but religiously neutral environment.
As long as faith schools are publicly funded, we campaign for an end to exemptions from equality legislation that allow them to select pupils on the basis of the religion, or religious activities, of the child’s parents.
We are concerned that the Government’s desire for greater proportion of academies and free schools, which are independent and self-governing, will see more and more control of state funded education handed to religious organisations.
Dispatches showed more than enough reasons to back this stand.
The author of many of the pro-religious education policies, Michael Gove, is now Chief Whip.
He has been replaced by even more faith-influenced minister, Nicky Morgan, a Tory MP who voted against same-sex marriage, as education secretary. She “continues as minister for women and equalities”.
LAGOS (Arab News): The head of Nigeria’s Boko Haram Islamists, Abubakar Shekau, has voiced support for the extremist Sunni Islamic State (IS) militant group, which has taken over large swathes of Iraq and Syria, in a new video seen Sunday.
“My brethren… may Allah protect you,” Shekau said in the video given to AFP on Sunday, listing IS chief Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, Al-Qaeda head Ayman Al-Zawahiri and Taleban leader Mullah Omar.
Baghdadi has proclaimed himself the new Islamic “caliph” and has urged all Muslims to obey him.
The IS has been condemned by Muslim scholars and other Islamist movements, including Al-Qaeda affiliates, for being too extremist.
In the 16-minute video, Shekau’s Boko Haram claimed responsibility for a June 25 bombing in the capital Abuja and an attack hours later in Lagos, which the authorities tried to cover up.
Shekau also mocked the social media campaign Bring Back Our Girls, which emerged to call attention to the plight of the more than 200 schoolgirls kidnapped on April 14 by the Islamists from the remote northeastern town of Chibok.
“We were the ones who detonated the bomb in filthy Abuja,” Shekau said, referring to the attack a popular shopping centre that killed at least 22 people.
Later that day, a huge blast rocked the Apapa port district of Lagos, which the authorities blamed on cooking gas explosion, with no casualties.
An AFP investigation has revealed the blast was a deliberate attack involving high explosives.
“A bomb went off in Lagos. I ordered (the bomber) who went and detonated it,” Shekau said in the video, which shows him flanked by at least ten gunmen in front of two armored personnel carriers and two pickup trucks (Arab News).
Malala: I Wish to See My Nigerian Sisters Released
Adebiyi Adedapo in Abuja with agency report
Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani girl-child education campaigner, who survived an assassination attempt by the Taliban, has called on Boko Haram terrorists to free the abducted Chibok schoolgirls.
Malala, who commenced a three-day visit to Nigeria on Saturday, celebrated her 17th birthday in Abuja at a dinner held in her honour at Transcorp Hilton hotel.
She spoke exclusively after the dinner that ended at about 10.40 p.m, the News Agency of Nigerian (NAN) reported.
“On my 17th birthday my wish is to see every child go to school and I want to see my Nigerian sisters being released from their abduction and I want them to be free to go to school and continue their education,” she said.
******
This has been Boko Haram’s response (DT),
Boko Haram issued a new video yesterday mocking the bring back our girls social media campaign that highlighted the plight of the 223 schoolgirls kidnapped by the group in north-east Nigeria.
In a taunting broadcast apparently released to mark the girls’s third month in captivity, Boko Haram’s leader, Abubakar Shekau, said the girls would not be freed until the government released the “army” of Boko Haram fighters held in Nigerian jails. Shekau also claimed responsibility for three bombings last month and voiced support for the Islamic State, the fellow extremists who have seized much of northern Iraq.
The video, video obtained by AFP, served as a direct snub to Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani schoolgirl and women’s rights campaigner who arrived in Nigerian capital, Abuja, over the weekend to voice support for the bring back our girls campaign.
Ms Yousafzai, who moved to Britain after being shot by the Taliban, met with parents of the missing girls yesterday and was also expected to hold private talks with Goodluck Jonathan, the Nigerian president.
However, as she did so, serious doubts emerged about the girls’ chances of ever being rescued. In briefings with The Telegraph over the weekend, Western diplomats said that despite the huge international publicity that the social media campaign has generated, the efforts to find the hostages were little further on than they were back in May, when Britain, America and France began to help. With neither a prisoner swap or a rescue considered likely, they said there was little real prospect of any “breakthrough” in the case in the foreseeable future.
Happier Days for ‘Red’ Charlie Kimber.
How a respectable public schoolboy fell amongst reds and came to a horrible end.
“Young Charlie Kimber was a real hard red,
He even read Das Kapital in bed,
At Eton, where he studied hard,
The scholars thought him quite a card.
When Kimber, he was twenty-three,
His daddy bought him S.W.P.
His comrade, the honorable Alex,
Was both his helpmate and his bollix.
Charlie stopped the port and vintage wine,
and going out to restaurants to dine.
Just mushy-peas and Mars-bars fried,
no more tomatoes ripe sun-dried.
He dropped his ‘aitches one by one,
And shouted when the Gunners won.
He drank white cider by the bucket,
And stacked his tinnies on the buffet.
One day their paper made a joke,
A first – against a younger Eton bloke.
A Bear and death, were cause for fun,
And a very laboured pun.
Dukes and Lords, they cut him out
The papers loathed the filthy lout,
Kimber, he was full of glee,
He kept right on his prolo spree.
One day he journeyed to the Zoo,
It was a conservationist do.
He drank Jack Frost till he was tight,
And then he sailed off to the night.
Pausing by a large black cage,
A Polar bear in hopeless rage.
A paw reached out, and struck him dead.
That was the end of Charlie Red.
Moral
It is the duty of the wealthy man,
Not to ape the artisan.
Polar Bear in London Zoo: not unlike the one that thumped Charlie Kimber.
Below: Socialist Worker. See The Independent.
Grandma Gilles on Ipswich Demo. (Thanks Ellie).
Over 300 people came to the demo in Ipswich called by the Trades Council and local unions, Suffolk Needs a Pay Rise, yesterday.
In Ipswich there were well attended pickets at the Russell Road Borough and County Council offices, at Crown Pools, the Borough Council Waste depot (dust-carts – the majority of which did not go out), and HMRC offices in Lower Brook Street.
59 Suffolk schools were affected by strike action and 17 closed for the day.
At the march and rally there were members of UNISON, GMB, FBU, UNITE, PCS & NUT, NUJ, DPAC, the Peoples Assembly, other unions and campaigns, as well as members of the public.
The Suffolk People’s Assembly (Facebook) report notes,
Many speakers at the rally expressed their anger at the wage freeze public sector workers have faced over the past 4 years. This has led to a 20% decline in real wages at the same time as increased workload. One PCS member said that he was now doing 2 peoples’ jobs and facing constant performance reviews, which was destroying his job satisfaction.
A parent talked of her support for the teachers’ strike, to defend her and other people’s education. The Ipswich NUT Secretary, Margaret Bulaitis, spoke about how the the Education Secretary, Michael Gove, denigrated the work of her profession, and was more interested in promoting academies and privatisation than the needs of school students.
Martin, from Disabled People Against Cuts (DPAC), gave an impassioned speech on the effects cuts and changes to the benefit system were having on those with disabilities.
Support came from the National Union of Journalists (NUJ). Their representative suggested that Grandma Gilles (above) would not have put up with the attacks on public services by the Liberal-Conservative Coalition.
Ipswich Tory Attacks Strikes.
Ipswich Tory MP, Ben Gummer, disagrees.
He said (Ipswich Star) that, “public sector workers had fared better than the private sector during the recession.”
He said striking teachers were damaging the education of the children in their classes.
And he said the government was taking action to clamp down on tax avoidance by the rich and to help the low paid.
“This government has lifted two million people out of paying income tax altogether and the gap between rich and poor is getting smaller for the first time in 20 years.”
Gummer’s figures are certainly creative.
Sky news states (May 2014),
“The gap between rich and poor in Britain has become wider, with 10% of the population now owning almost half of the nation’s household wealth.
Those same one in ten households own assets worth over £1m – that’s almost 1.4 million homes.
Teachers’ Unions argue that it is Michael Gove’s ‘reforms’ are undermining education.
Their dispute about pay, pensions and working conditions, is linked to the government’s efforts to devalue teaching, and open the way to private companies profiting from the schooling system.
Gove’s changes have created excessive workloads, and let free schools operate without democratic control and public accountability.
On public sector workers’ pay the TUC says,
Public sector workers are £2,245 worse off as a result of the coalition’s austerity policies, according to the Trades Union Congress.
NHS staff, teachers, firefighters and local government workers are among those that have lost out following pay freezes and limited pay rises since the government took office, the TUC said.
The figures, which show the average fall in real terms pay suffered by workers since May 2010, were published a day before a wave of strikes among UK public sector workers over pay, pensions and working conditions. Government policies on public sector pay have had a big impact on the spending power of almost six million UK households, according to the TUC.
The Liberal-Conservative Coalition has one overarching policy for the public sector: turning it into a source of profit for private companies.
As Thomas Picketty has noted,
“Instead of holding public debt via their financial investments, the wealthiest European households would becomes the direct owners of schools, hospitals, police stations, and so on. Everyone else would then have to pay rent to use these assets and continue to produce the associated public services.”(Page 541. Capital in the Twenty-first Century. Thomas Piketty. Harvard University Press. 2014.)
The trade unions, backed by the People’s Assembly, are fighting back!
Update: this how private companies making money out of public services in Suffolk fail to deliver:
Suffolk: Serco defends fresh criticism of delays over equipment provision for vulnerable patients
Matt Stott.
Bosses at the private firm providing community healthcare in Suffolk have defended themselves following concerns over equipment provision.
Jane Basham, Labour’s parliamentary candidate for South Suffolk, criticised the Serco-run Suffolk Community Healthcare after patients spoke of equipment delays.
Ms Basham heard how one elderly woman was told she would have to wait three weeks for a walking aid, while she also heard of delays for equipment for paediatric services as they were no longer stored in Suffolk.
It comes after concerns were raised in January about the performance of the Community Equipment Service (CES), part of Serco-run Suffolk Community Healthcare.
In October 2012, Serco took on the role of providing community health services to 600,000 patients in Suffolk.
The CES is an integrated service providing equipment for people with health and social care needs.
Martin Smith (Comrade Delta) is back!
Hat-Tip Howie’s Corner.
Apparently with the support from some people based in France.
By an obvious oversight, and no doubt mindful of some ‘other’ controversies involving members of political parties, Smith does not mention his most celebrated achievement.
But this is what he and his new mate say,
“Over the past 30 years both of us have been involved in one way or another with the struggle against racism and fascism.
On this blog we will carry news, discussion and debate on the rise of the far right and fascism — and the movements that are developing to challenge this threat both in Britain and Europe.
But our interests are many and varied. We will also write about other political and cultural matters.
If you don’t like football, you should look away from posts about West Ham or Spurs!
Please feel free to join the debate by posting comments.
We welcome serious comments and discussion — whether you agree or disagree.
We hope you enjoy the site.
Martin Smith and Tash Shifrin”
The site posts this poem.
A Dream Deferred
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore — And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over — like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
Langston Hughes
No sores on Delta then!
Our old comrade Tony Greenstein offered in 2013 the best summary of (what most people thought) lay behind Smith’s career-ending débâcle ,
SWP Crisis Over Cover-up of Rape & Sexual Harassment Allegations against former National Secretary Martin Smith
The catalyst for the crisis in the SWP were the allegations of rape by one member of the SWP and the sexual harassment of another member by Martin Smith, former SWP National Secretary. It is of course impossible to know whether there is any foundation to the rumours, although it is unlikely that there is no smoke without fire, but how they were dealt with by the SWP leadership speaks volumes about the mentality of the leadership clique led by Alex Callinicos and Charlie Kimber and their attitude to ordinary members. It also speaks volumes about their commitment to socialism since it is difficult to imagine a more serious and vile act than rape by a senior member of the leadership of a political group against a young comrade.
Martin Smith is, regardless of the truth of these allegations, a particularly unpleasant individual, both politically and personally. Weekly Worker of 12 July 2007 Stop thuggery in workers` movement described how Simon Wells, who was expelled from the SWP, was attacked without provocation by Smith, at Marxism 2007, when he refused to hand over the ticket he had paid for when queuing to go into a session: “The SWP`s national organiser angrily demanded comrade Simon`s ticket to the Marxism event and, when he refused, Smith instantly attacked him. Wrestled to the floor, comrade Simon sustained bruising, abrasions and back strain.”
It was also Smith who was primarily responsible for the SWP hosting and politically defending Gilad Atzmon against accusations of anti-Semitism. From 2005 to 2009 the SWP was content to make use of Atzmon’s status as a leading jazz musician, regardless of his racist views. Martin Smith, a devotee of John Coltrane and jazz, was content to ignore Atzmon’s views as taking secondary priority to his musical affections.
We believe Smith is no longer a member of the SWP.
But we were wrong about the end of his ambitions.
There are many articles about this whole affair.
This is one particularly worth looking at: Martin Smith: a retrospective.
In his capacity as head of LMHR Smith also embarrassed the party by forging a relationship between our organisation and the jazz musician Gilad Atzmon. Smith invited him to speak at Marxism in 2004, when Atzmon began spouting some of the anti-Semitic rubbish he now specialises in. Despite SWP members challenging Atzmon from the floor, Smith continued inviting him to SWP events, and to perform with him at concerts as late as 2007.
Update: Two British leftists (originally linked to the SWP), France based, SWP influenced, and members of Ensemble, Colin Falconer (Gauche anticapitaliste, one of the components of Ensemble), see: Le Nouveau Poireau Rouge) and John Mullen (also in Ensemble, see :John Mullen à Montreuil -Blog anticapitaliste) participate in Martin Smith’s enterprise (as can be seen, publicly named by a Mullen article, Guest post from France: the need for a united fight against the fascists on it).
Anybody reading their attacks on the French secular left should remember who this pair are prepared to work with.
One wonders if other members of Ensemble are aware of their comrades’ British connections.
How Should We Look at Work?
The Work Agenda: What happened to the leisure society? Rory O’Kelly.
Chartist Free E-Book.
O Laziness, have pity on our long misery! O Laziness, mother of the arts and noble virtues, be thou the balm of human anguish!
Paul Lafrague. The Right to Be Lazy. 1880.
One of the sections of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twentieth Century deals with the justification of colossal salaries and wealth. The media, he observes, is full of stories about business ‘stars’. They are used to indicate how graft and talent are rewarded. There is a “just inequality, based on merit, education, and the social utility of elites.” (1) Everything is slanted to suggest that that the majority of high-earners and the well-off deserve their rewards. Criticisms of pay and bonuses come when these are gained without apparent hard work.
Piketty enjoys pointing out that is impossible it is to demonstrate any connection between effort and reward in the modern economy. The part of social wealth going to Capital, and the well-off, increases regardless of individual cleverness or toil. Much depends on “luck”, the ability of top mangers to fix their own pay, and the influence of the wealthy to press for low taxes. Entrepreneurs, like Bill Gates, turn into rentiers, with more cash as they get older, they live off an initial innovation that was rarely one person’s discovery in the first place. In sum, to those that have, shall be given.
Many accept this case. But there are deeper problems. It is not just that certain kinds of elite work are valued, leaving others – the majority – aside. Why is ‘work’ itself such a self-evident virtue that it makes those not-in-work look as if they are afflicted by vice? O’Kelly begins the excellent and thought-provoking The Work Agenda, by stating, “Work is seen as good in itself and maximising the number of people working and the amount of work done as self-evidently right.”
This assumption looks strange in the light of 1960s (and much later) predictions about automation and the ‘leisure society’. Paul Lafargue looked forward to a time when, thanks to the abundance created by technology, slogging your guts out was not the goal of existence. The 1970s and 1980s saw criticisms of ‘productivism’ and the cult of labour in socialist ideology. André Gorz’s Adieux aux proletariat (1981) took up these ideas. He suggested that in a “post-industrial” society people should control what is produced. They could share work according to need, and wants, with a universal guaranteed income, and more and more free-time. More modestly the French left in the late 1990s thought that the 35 Hour week would be a step in this direction.
Today, however, O’Kelly says, the obsession with the absolute value of ‘work’ blocks people from considering a “rational way of sharing the output of a society across all the members of society.” Many people may well spend time on benefits, over the course of a lifetime. Others, of a whole range of reasons, may be on them for much longer. Structural long-term unemployment is a feature of all Western societies, as is the need to help those who are incapacitated
Instead of recognizing this, and adapting social spending to it, governments, from Tony Blair onwards, have tried to push everybody into work – regardless of their medical condition, the needs of the labour market, and the rights or wishes of those to be pushed in this direction.
Putting the Disabled to Work.
The Work Agenda does not dwell on the ideology of work. Instead it is devoted to how the doctrine is used to undermine the basis of social benefits. This is most obvious from changes to the benefits for the disabled. The idea that ‘work is the best form of welfare’ is applied to the sick (which covers a multitude of diverse categories of people). There is an economic rationale, “Getting people into work is pursued primarily as a way of reducing transfers between working and non-working people; in simple terms: the cost of benefits.”
Fitting square pegs into round holes barely begins to cover the injustices that have resulted from these policies. Known to the general public through the scandals surrounding ATOS, and the ‘assessments’ of those claiming disability benefits, these are part of a much wider picture. O’Kelly’s background in the social security system helps him come to grips with the detail. He clearly knows the operations of what is now the DWP inside out, and uses them to great advantage.
The Work Agenda lays out the history and rationale of the present structure, “The driver behind the Welfare Reform Act 2007 and the creation of Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) was the belief that by changing the definition of incapacity sick or disabled people could be made capable of work.” As he notes, “Until recently the medical situation was taken as an objective starting point to which the benefit system then had to respond. The great change in 2007 was to take the needs of the benefit system as the starting point (my emphasis) and to change clinical definitions to conform to those needs.” This was, as we know, a Labour government, or ‘New Labour’, that made this turn.
O’Kelly argues (on the basis of close acquaintance with the civil service decision-making) that there never was a time when large numbers of people were classified as medically unfit in order to reduce the unemployment figures. There were always rigorous tests. What has changed is that governments have decided to change their nature.
Now it might seem reasonable – and it’s repeated often enough – to assert that there are large numbers of people who “choose” not to work. But in the case of invalidity benefits there is a simple way of determining this: medical advice. Present legislation is designed to alter the character of this criterion. Instead even ill people can be judged “capable” of working – according to a fairly loose test of what being able to carry out basic tasks is, including those even those objectively unwell can do. This O’Kelly says, means. “Effectively moving sick people into employment without improving their health”. This process is “likely simply to transfer the costs of sickness from the benefit system to statutory sick pay and private sick pay schemes.”
The problem then is not that ATOS is a particularly venal organisation – though opinions might differ on this after the company’s dissembling and bleating about being harassed. It is the changed nature of the tests for incapacity that drives the injustices that they have caused.
A persistent case is that mental troubles are rarely easily definable according to a check-list of questions and a short interview with an assessor. There are plenty of other not always ‘visible’ illnesses. As the pamphlet indicates, “It is a striking fact that the classes of people whom the government is most anxious to take off benefits for incapacity overlap very largely with those whom no rational employer (in either the public or the private sector) would want to take on.” As somebody who has sat, during various employment courses, with people with very serious mental-health issues, and others with deep health problems, we might equally ask why they are obliged to take these “preparation for work” training schemes.
Back to First Principles.
Returning to question the principles he began with, O’Kelly makes the observation that “Work (i.e. paid work) is essentially economic activity; the creation of goods and services. It is not a form of welfare, it is not a form of therapy and it is not a punishment. It can of course be used in any of these ways, rather as a stiletto heel can be used to hammer a nail into a wall. It does not do the job very well, however, and it is not very good for the shoe either.”
The work agenda is used, in effect, to “Micro-manage the lives of the poor”. Not only the disabled on what is now the Personal Independence Payment (PIP), but anybody on benefits,
are now subjected to close surveillance over their lives. This erodes personal autonomy, and increases dependency. The DWP, and private companies gaining rent from public contracts, are entrusted with the power to grossly interfere in people’s lives. They claim rights over claimants. They have fewer and fewer responsibilities to them.
For those “success stories” who get off benefits, O’Kelly notes, “The present system does also however offer scope for giving notional employment (or self-employment) to people who are able to do very little and who will continue to get the great bulk of their income through the benefit system whether nominally ‘employed’ or not. Some of these people will get psychological benefits from ‘working’; for others the effect will be the reverse.”
It might be suggested, as O’Kelly does, that the Ministers in charge of these policies have little experience of the world of ordinary work themselves. More insidious is the influence of the welfare-to-work industry. They influence policy to an undue degree, essentially with their claims to propel people into the – self evidently good – world of work. That claimants dislike them and that they are unable to meet the demands of their contracts (notoriously over the Work Programme) and capable of dissembling about their operations, is ignored.
In the meantime few people question the absolute value of this “work”, or why so many people spend their lives in low-paid, insecure, unrewarding employment. Or why those with Capital get so much more, including a slice of the revenue of those obliged to claim benefits – forced onto the welfare-to-work schemes run with the profits of wealthy private contractors foremost in mind. The culmination of this process will come when claimants will, as the Help to Work programme intends, have to work for their benefits. (2)
*******
(1) Page 419 Capital in the Twenty-first Century. Thomas Piketty. Harvard University Press. 2014.
(2) Picketty suggests that some free marketers propose the following “Instead of holding public debt via their financial investments, the wealthiest European households would becomes the direct owners of schools, hospitals, police stations, and so on. Everyone else would then have to pay rent to use these assets and continue to produce the associated public services.”(Page 541 – 2 Op cit). This is in effect happening in the United Kingdom, beginning with PFI. The welfare-to-work industry in effect is given a chunk of the welfare state and everybody’s taxes are used to pay rent to the owners of their enterprises.
You can read The Work Agenda as a free E-Book by clicking here.
Thunderclap Callinicos.
Thunder on the left (International Socialism Issue: 143) Alex Callinicos
Alex Callinicos begins and ends his latest assessment of the “present situation” by resigning himself to the weaknesses of the “radical left”(1). A paradox, given, apparently, the SWP leader asserts, that capital is also weak.A feeble economic recovery after the Bank crisis of 2008 is not met by any renewed left. Indeed there is a “weakness of credible anti-capitalist alternatives.” Not only in the larger continental European organised parties, he modestly cites his own small group the SWP’s ‘troubles’, a subject which his article addresses.
The King’s College academic stops short of advocating the “communist pessimism” of Pierre de Naville or Walter Benjamin,. But he finishes by citing Daniel Bensaïd need for “a slow impatience”—in other words, “an active waiting, an urgent patience, an endurance and a perseverance that are the opposite of a passive waiting for a miracle”. This implies, an ” effort to intervene in and shape the present …”
Callinicos claims that there was a time when all seemed sailing towards a renewed radical left. This was, “the era of good feelings (1998-2005) the impulse of a growing movement was to play down or finesse political differences in the name of unity.” Not everybody will recall the creation of communalist groups like Respect, and the part played in its formation, and self-destruction, by the megaphone Ego of George Galloway, in the same way. The “Split” in this lash-up, in 2007, was apparently of great importance, though only the SWP (the splitters) took it as the milestone it apparently was – for the SWP. The subsequent misadventures of this ‘party’ are passed over, as if they had been written out of history.
Nor is the judgement that, “The radical left began to have an impact on the bourgeois political scene” quite as secure as it might appear. The May 2005 French referendum on the European draft constitution, lost by the neo-liberals backing it, was certainly significant. But the effect this had on the French left, notably the scission of what is now the Parti de Gauche from the French Parti Socialiste, and the formation of the Front de Gauche, are apparently (for Callinicos) of less significance than the fact that the LCR/Nouveau parti anticapitaliste, lost three tendencies (he does not bother to name them or describe their politics) to the FdG, one at its formation in 2009 (Gauche Unitaire) the other two in May 2005.
Callinicos manages to avoid discussing the mass basis and actions of the Front de Gauche (which has plenty of its own problems, starting with Jean-Luc Mélenchon) not to mention its election results (11,11 % for Mélenchon in the 2012 Presidential election’s first round, 10 MPs, and 4 MEPs this year) . He does however devote space to criticising the much more successful electorally Greek left bloc/party Syriza (26.5% of the vote in the 2012 European elections), apparently on the slippery slope to neo-liberalism after backing Juncker as European Commissioner.
Let us state clearly. This analysis of left retreat is lop-sided. The results of the May European elections indicate that the ‘radical left’ did not do badly at all. Indeed in Spain they reached historically high levels of support, adding to the weight of the Greek Syriza. In France (FdG) and Germany (Die Linke) left groups remained at stable levels of support. But the Front de Gauche (for all its internal problems) remains a player in the political and social game. These observations would be extended across the continent. Only if we take the ‘revolutionary left as a measure of left influence can we reach Callinicos’s conclusions about weakness and marginalisation.
Callinicos observes that for some parties may be in crisis, but the movements are fine. On the basis of some well-publicised protests (beginning with Callinicos ‘ high moment’ Seattle protests of 1999, though this remains firmly stuck in the – good – period of “good feelings” ) there has been a ” panorama of decentralised horizontal struggles that simultaneously subvert capital and outflank the ‘old left'”. These (initially referring to Paul Mason’s wildly over- enthusiastic, Why its All Kicking off Everywhere 2012 – really? ), “started with the Arab revolutions (rebellions as much against the polarising and impoverishing effects of neoliberalism as against autocracy) and the echoes it gained in the North with the 15 May movement in the Spanish state and Occupy Wall Street and its numerous imitators.Other protests—somewhat earlier (British students, 2010) or later (Brazil and Turkey, 2013)….”
Callinicos does not discuss the view widely circulated by commentators, that these are protests of the liberal middle class, or their inability to effect any substantial change in any government’s policies- a serious balance-sheet. They have all, in other, words, been kicked into the long grass, if not brutally suppressed. The sole exception, Tunisia, looks increasingly, a ‘normal’ democracy, a welcome result compared to the alternatives. As with the mass ‘centrist’ parties (see definition of the ‘radical left below) this is carried our without any serious examination of these movements, in all their diversity. Above all there is no serious attempt to grapple with politics of the ‘movement’ that has become the focus of British activists, trade unionists, and the grass-roots left: the People’s Assembly. Instead it is largely dismissed on the basis of the strategy of the union, UNITE, to “reclaim Labour”.
Instead, the SWP theorist reminds us of the timeless truth, “The trouble is that the state, the broader political process of which it is the focus, and the parties that struggle over it remain fundamental determinants of the social, whatever autonomists and neoliberals fondly claim. ” Furthermore, “The wager of Leninism is that a revolutionary party can intervene in the political field in order to help bring about the overthrow of capital. From this follows, as Bensaïd also stressed, the centrality of strategy—of the determined, persistent, organised effort to relate specific tactics to the overarching aim of socialist revolution. ” There views are bolstered, by appeals to Gramsci. One might say that citing Leninist aims does nothing to answer those who see Leninist practice, or rather the SWP and other groups, in the multiple crises Callinicos only begins to sketch.
Callinicos finally gets to some genuine meat, ‘anti-politics’. “The structural divorce of the political class from the citizens it is supposed to represent and its integration into the moneyed world encourages popular rejection of all parties, summed up in “¡Que se vayan todos!”—All of them must go!—the slogan of the Argentinian revolt in 2001-2. This rejection—which can be called “anti-politics. He continues, “on the whole the right-populist currents that have been most successful in exploiting this mood are not themselves “anti-politics”.” This is not new. Known in France as “anti-system” parties, these are have been a long-standing feature of European politics, going (in the case of the Hexagone) back to General George Boulanger’s at the end of the 19th century.
If this is fast becoming a commonplace – a much better starting point for looking at the May European elections, and the rise of groups like M5S (Italy) and UKIP, as well as the Front National, there are some systematic difficulties with Callincos’s analysis. One certainly does not have to accept a neo-Foucaulean analysis of the articulation of a neoliberal subjectivity to see that these materialised policies have sapped the basis of left politics. Thomas Picketty is a better guide to the ideology of justly reward success – underpinning the growth of the share taken by owners of capital, and high earners – offers an indication of how the “losers” despair at overcoming their inequality by collective action.This is a structural feature of Capital in the 21st century, a deeper causal mechanism behind economic restructuring, and the inability of the workers’ movement to oppose neo-liberalism. The transformation of the state into a gigantic renting operating – by which most of the population pay rent to private owners of public services – is a greater challenge than the venality of the political class.
Significantly Callinicos does not discuss the one leftist bloc, the Spanish Podemos, which has attempted to combine ‘anti-politics’, new methods of organising, with electoral participation and the building of a ‘broad party’.
Attacking the claim that the Leninist ‘model’ has had its day is a necessary task for a leader of the SWP. Awareness of the largely forgotten writings of Alain Badiou on the new “political organisation” that will replace Leninism, or John Holloway’s writings, at least indicates an awareness that Lenin is not an unchallenged authority. It would take longer than this brief notice to discuss Lars Lih’s reconstruction of Lenin’s political ideas. The same applies to Callinicos’ observations of feminism – which others will not doubt discuss in detail.
But one point stands out in Thunder on the Left: what is wrong with broad parties of the left? Why, given the present ideological and political diversity of the left, are they not the ideal vehicle (wide enough…) to work out differences? What is wrong with broad democracy – on the network model? Those who have elft the SWP, engaged in such groups inside Left Unity, are unlikely to be convinced by a few warm words about feminism, and criticism of the tortuous liberalism of “intersectionality”.
Why does a Leninist ‘Combat Party’ – to all the evidence in terminal decline, riddled with problems, from democracy onwards – still fascinate people like Callinicos? Some of us, who recognise strengths in Lenin’s analysis of political conjunctures, have never adopted the model of the Leninist ‘party’ in the first place. Even the Acts of the Apostles were never much of a guide to historical Christian practice. Hankering after a party’s glory years, whose first acts on taking power were to suppress opposition groups – an ever-widening number – raises more problems than it solves. All the evidence is, that we will have to hang around for a long time for a new revolutionary Party that fulfils the role of a Messiah that can do better than these imperfect, “centrist” (as the Leninists call them) broad left parties.
But then the leader of the SWP shows every sign of waiting, impatiently, a very long time in Perry Anderson’s Watchtower.
Update:
This is worth reading,
Alex Callinicos: take a look in the mirror Louis Proyect.
It ends with, “Displaying a shamelessness on the order of a Washington bourgeois politician, Callinicos spends a thousands words or so defending his party’s understanding of the “woman question” against Sharon Smith of the ISO who views Tony Cliff’s analysis as lacking to say the least. If Callinicos can’t make the connection between a certain theoretical deficiency in the SWP and the commission of inquiry that asked the female rape victim about her drinking habits, then he is beyond help.
In his conclusion, Callinicos writes:
The present crisis is much more diffuse, but in some ways more threatening, because the revolutionary left is much weaker than it was in 1979. This makes the attempts to split and even to destroy organisations such as the NPA and the SWP so irresponsible.
Now I have no idea what is going on in the French NPA since the comrades are not particularly engaged with the English-speaking left (who can blame them?) but I doubt it has anything to do with a rape investigation that had more in common with those conducted in the American military than what we would expect from a Marxist party. In terms of attempts to destroy an organization, my suggestion to Alex Callinicos is that he takes a look in the mirror at his earliest convenience. There he will find the miscreant most responsible.”
As can be seen above, we do know what happened in the NPA and Callinicos is talking bollocks.
People left it because they saw the Front de gauche (which the NPA denounced – as they memorably described their politics, “between us and the Parti Socialiste, there is nothing“) as the best way forward for broad – mass – left politics.
*******
(1) Callinicos, “By “radical left” I mean those currents that reject neoliberalism, whether on an explicitly revolutionary basis or in a manner that avoids the choice between reform and revolution or even embraces some version of left social democracy. This is the spectrum from the NPA and the SWP to the Front de Gauche and Die Linke, with Syriza somewhere in between. In this article I concentrate mainly (though not exclusively) on Europe.” On this definition alone his claim that the left has precipitously declined is false. Taking the crisis of the remaining ‘Leninist’ groups for the left is, of course, just one of his solipsistic errors.
Podemos Tries to Build New Organisational Model.
Podemos, the Spanish radical left alliance, has created a lot of interest in Europe and further afield.
In the May European elections they got 7.97% of the vote and 5 seats.
The Izquierda Plural,(Plural Left) IP, an older left alliance, got 10.03% of the vote and 6 seats.
Podemos however presented itself in the ballot box for the first time this year, while the Izquierda Plural, notably its main component, the Izquierda Unida, has been around in various forms since the mid-1980s.
The best known public figure of Podemos, Pablo Iglesias, cites the Greek Coalition of the Radical Left (SYRIZA) led by Alexis Tsipras as an inspiration.
It appears that Podemos, like Syriza, is itself being taken as a possible political model for leftist groups in the rest of Europe.
Adria Porta Caballe writes on RS21 (one of the groups that left the British SWP), shortly after the above results, offering an explanation for their success
Podemos has achieved this with a different method that rejects the traditional conception of party militancy and an unconditional commitment to popular self-organisation. In particular, the last 5 months offer three examples of Podemos’ participatory nature. First, when Pablo Iglesias made the first step, he also made clear from the very beginning that he would not go further unless he was backed by at least 50,000 people. He easily achieved that number in a day, establishing a precedent of direct democracy from start.
The second and most important example of how Podemos achieved popular empowerment was the creation of so-called “Circles”, local spaces of debate and action where everybody can attend no matter his or her political affiliations. Today there are around 400 Circles spread over the Spanish State and anywhere else where its citizens have had to exile since the crisis started for economic reasons (London, Berlin, Brussels, etc). The motto “all power to the circles” represents a dose of democracy to the regime and an unprecedented tool of popular empowerment.
Finally it is also worth mentioning that Podemos is the only party in the country which used open primary elections to choose its candidates. A quick glance to the more than 50 candidates who run in the open primaries is enough evidence of what distinguishes Podemos from the rest: workers, unemployed, precarious, students, teachers… but no professional politician. No wonder that with this different method, Podemos could not reach an agreement with the traditional euro-communist party Izquierda Unida to run together in the elections. Apparently the latter was only worried about exchanging some seats in a common candidature, while Podemos was obviously demanding a much more fundamental change in the way the left approaches internal democracy.
This model has not been settled.
Nor is at all clear that they have “achieved popular empowerment”.
The French site Ensemble noted that following the elections there was a “lively” internal debate inside Podemos, opposing
some of the party’s base, who advocate greater power for the ‘circles’ in the process of decision making, and the self-styled Podemos “promoter group”, which defends a model with less power for circles and which is all open to all citizens and voters. The fundamental question, ultimately, is to define the organisational form to be taken by Podemos and the role of the circles, and that of those not enrolled in them, in the decision-making party people.
(El País – reporting this) has so far identified in this debate two sides supposedly in confrontation. On the one hand, there is the Izquierda Anticapitalista (IA, anti-capitalist Left), a political party built around the initiative since its inception and, secondly, the promoter Podemos group, headed by Iñigo Errejón, and Juan Pablo Iglesias and Carlos Monedero.
In the El País article on the 9th of June supporters of the “promoter group” are cited accusing the “base” (Iquierda Anticapitalista, IA) of wanting Podemos to be the “izquierda de Izquierda Unida” – the left of Izquierda Unida”. Pablo Iglesias’s right-hand man, Juan Carlos Monedero went so far as the accuse the IA of attempting a “coup d’état” ( “golpe de Estado”) inside the organisation – as a party within a party.
The Izquierda anticapitalista is in sympathy (that is, affiliated) with the Fourth International (USFI).
One of its supporters, Teresa Rodríguez, is said to be the “Number 2″ of Podemos.
Not surprisingly the Fourth International has published an article by that refers to this dispute suggesting that the El País report may not be entirely trustworthy (given the daily’s own political allegiance, which was, in the past, with the Spanish Socialist Party, the PSOE).
Dick Nicols in Links on the 1st of July (Spanish state: Eruption of Podemos sparks turmoil left and right) does not downplay the dispute as revealed by El País and has its own analysis of the problems facing Podemos,
According to a report in the June 9 El País, close Iglesias collaborator, fellow university lecturer and La Tuerka co-presenter Juan Carlos Monedero at one point explained the need for a closed list in these words: “The idea of the [closed] lists doesn’t seem very sensible to us, but there are people conspiring to lay hold of Podemos and we don’t feel like copping that. People with responsibilities in other parties have sent emails to sympathisers giving instructions as to what to do on June 14 [date of a national meeting of Podemos sympathisers].”
This was a reference to the Anti-capitalist Left (IA), co-founder of Podemos along with Iglesias and his supporters. In response to Monedero’s comments, which included the observation that some Podemos sympathisers wanted to convert the organisation into “the left of IU”, a June 9 statement of IA said: “Whoever sees conspiracies and coups where there is only democracy has very little faith in the intelligence of Podemos people…Only those who are afraid of democracy fear debates.”
Earlier Monedero had said: “Maybe this has to break up, maybe there are two incompatible models inside Podemos, some want to turn it into a party of delegates and into an old party…If we carry on with this line of talk, what happened with 15M could happen again—we were radically democratic and radically ineffective.”
He continues,
One concern was the role in Podemos given to the maverick politician and political consultant Jorge Verstrynge, ex-leader of the post-francoist Popular Alliance and variously PSOE member, adviser to the Communist Party of Spain (PCE) and the Venezuelan military, and exponent of a massive program of deportation of migrants from Spain.
Another was the decision, taken by election campaign team to incorporate a portrait sketch of Pablo Iglesias into the official Podemos ballot paper logo, on the grounds that Iglesias had much greater visibility than the name Podemos.
A third was the removal from the final Podemos election program of any specific support for the November 9 consultation in Catalonia, even though Iglesias continued to speak out for the Catalan right to decide.
The incessantly churning Spanish social networks have not been slow to comment on such choices, with Iglesias being tagged as “the little Napoleon”, and much worse. More soberly, many have pointed out that internet-driven decision-making in “new” party-movements can cohabit with “all power to the charismatic leader”, as in Beppe Grillo’s Five Star Movement. There the leadership (basically Grillo?) decides what the options for voting by internet are, after which “the membership decides democratically”. For the recent decision as to which European parliamentary group the Five Star movement’s MEPs should join, Grillo offered his members the “choice” of Europe of Freedom and Democracy (chairman Nigel Farange of the xenophobic United Kingdom Independence Party), the European Conservatives and Reformists group(dominated by the British Tories) or No Grouping.
Many, on the basis of what we so far can tell, will agree with Dick Nichols’ conclusion,
Podemos will face critical questions that can’t be solved from a “people v. politicians” formula. Critical will be the concrete basis for unity with IU and left-nationalist, left-regionalist and green forces. This is particularly pressing in the Spanish state because of the disproportionality in the rigged national Spanish electoral system, which only starts to disappear after a party wins 20% of the vote. (That score wins 18% of seats, while 15% wins 10.3% of seats and 10% of the vote just 5.1% of seats.)
The consolidation of Podemos as a revolutionary-democratic movement against austerity with rigorously democratic functioning and the convergence of its advance with that of a reformed IU will surely determine the fate of the anti-capitalist struggle in the Spanish state.
But it is by no means certain that the complicated ‘on-line’ democracy and the ‘circles’ at the base of Podemos, – the one drawing to leadership power, the other away from it, will help in this.
A Respectable 51 Votes Yesterday.
GUE/NGL MEP Pablo Iglesias presents his candidacy for President of the European Parliament:
“The exceptional political situation today in Europe requires not more of the same failed policies, it requires an exceptional response. Perhaps the most important lesson we can draw from the European Election results is that citizens all across Europe have rejected the status quo. People have seen that the neoliberal economic model based on greed, free market principles, and the protection of financial interests at all costs is responsible for the ravaged economies in periphery counties, particularly in the south of Europe. Hard fought for gains have been swept away: social rights, democratic principles, equality, and popular sovereignty.
“Austerity decided by the few has diminished democracy and has ruined the social fabric in southern countries and destroyed labour protection laws. You’ve seen that submission to the dictates of the Troika is economically inefficient and dramatic in terms of social and human rights and poverty.”
“All of us, as elected members, have a duty and a responsibility to defend these gains, and stop Europe being governed behind the backs of citizens. We know all too well that these methods have been proven not to work: we have a continent ruled by a self-serving group of financial elites while the majority of people from the southern countries of Europe continue to be punished by poverty, inequality, and this loss of sovereignty.”
European United Left/Nordic Green Left European Parliamentary Group
Yesterday’s votes:
Martin Schulz (S&D, DE) 409: Mr Schulz duly elected President of the European Parliament
Sajjad Karim (ECR, UK) 101
Pablo Iglesias (GUE, ES) 51
Ulrike Lunacek (Greens/EFA, AT) 51
Pablo Iglesias is a member of PODEMOS,
“Podemos (meaning “We can” in Spanish) is a Spanish political party created on 11 March 2014 by Spanish leftist activists associated with the 15-M movement that emerged from the 2011–12 Spanish protests.[2] Its defacto leader is Pablo Iglesias Turrión[2] a writer, professor of Political Science at the Complutense University in Madrid and occasional Spanish television presenter for a regional political discussion program Fort Apache.[3]
This is the axis of their programme:
1. Recuperar la economía, construir la democracia
2. Conquistar la libertad, construir la democracia
3. Conquistar la igualdad, construir la democracia
4. Recuperar la fraternidad, construir la democracia
5. Conquistar la soberanía, construir la democracia
6. Recuperar la tierra, construir la democracia
Wikipedia explains,
There was a significant article in Le Monde yesterday on Pablo Iglesias and PODEMOS L’«indigné» espagnol qui veut bousculer l’Europe.
We await its equivalent in the mainstream English language media.
In the meantime International Viewpoint published this highly informative analysis of Podemos The rise of Podemos by
In the European election Podemos got 8% of the vote (5 MEPs). The other left bloc Izquierda Unida, got more votes than Podemos, at 10% (6 MEPs).
As one can imagine there is plenty of scope for controversy to explore there.
See: Débats au sein de Podemos…
Podemos, frente al reto de decidir qué tipo de democracia interna desea.
These focus on how to “construir una nueva forma de organización política.“
Arrivée de Nicolas Sarkozy à l’Office anti-corruption de la Police judiciaire, le 1er juillet à Nanterre. (Photo Dominique Faget. AFP)
The Guardian reports,
Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy has been taken into police custody for questioning as part of an inquiry into alleged abuse of power.
The unprecedented step followed the arrest of Sarkozy’s lawyer and two magistrates who are under investigation for allegedly using their influence to obtain information about legal cases against him.
Detectives are trying to establish whether the former leader promised a top-level job in Monaco to a magistrate in return for letting him know whether corruption allegations against him would go to court. Sarkozy denies any wrong-doing.
The police move on Tuesday represents a blow to Sarkozy’s hopes of making a political comeback in 2017. The former president is said to have been hoping to profit from the disarray and lack of leadership in his centre-right UMP party, which is itself also mired in legal investigations, to stand for president again.
(Note: This has been a major story in the French press.It’s often forgotten in the UK that the success of the Front National has affected the classic Right as much as the left).
It is alleged that information obtained from tapping the former leader’s phone conversations with his lawyer, Thierry Herzog, a controversial and unusual step, suggested there had been what was referred to as a “traffic of influence”.
Police were listening in to Sarkozy’s calls as part of a separate investigation into claims he accepted illegal donations from former Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi for his 2007 presidential election campaign. Sarkozy served one term in office before being beaten by the Socialist candidate François Holland in 2012.
When he discovered his phone was tapped, Sarkozy allegedly obtained another phone under the pseudonym Paul Bismuth, to talk to his lawyer.
In the taped conversations, detectives allegedly heard information that Herzog had been tipped off by a magistrate about a legal decision over yet another police investigation into whether or not Sarkozy also accepted illegal campaign funds from France’s richest woman, the L’Oréal heiress Liliane Bettencourt.
Comment: in France traditionally these cases, or ‘affaires’, become so involved and intricate that they recall the famous remark by Lord Palmerston,
The Schleswig-Holstein question is so complicated, only three men in Europe have ever understood it. One was Prince Albert, who is dead. The second was a German professor who became mad. I am the third and I have forgotten all about it.
I simply remember this,
Sarkozy Nous Voila !
Juncker: Flirted with Trotskyism.
The pasts of European Commissioner José Manuel Durão Barroso and the new President of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker have been brought up by the French Communist daily L’Humanite.
The former is well known for his youthful involvement in the extreme anti-Communist (and violent) MRPP (Movimento Reorganizativo do Partido do Proletariado).(1) Indeed he was one its leaders. This ‘Maoist’ group, which was also supported by French ‘philosopher’ Alain Badiou and his group, the Union des communistes de France marxiste-léniniste (UCFml).
In the aftermath of the ‘Carnation Revolution’ (1974 -5) the MRPP was known for its physical attacks on Communists, trade unions, democrats and the far-left.
Barroso has more recently alleged that his support for these thugs was because he saw them as the best anti-Communists around.
L’Humanité alleges they were closely bound to the CIA. For the paper, the “Top level agent of the CIA, Carlucci handled and financed the MRPP .”
Which perhaps also sheds a light on Alain Badiou’s curious reticence about his own past in backing the group.
Juncker has a youthful background marked by much less explicit political engagement on the far-left.
Rue 89 in Dix choses que vous ignorez sûrement sur Jean-Claude Juncker states,
“In an interview published in 2009 on the site of the Government of Luxembourg, Jean-Claude Juncker wanted us to believe he was a rebel before he became the aged grey man mocked by his enemies:
“At 17, as a rebel, I flirted with the IV th International. I explained to my father and my mother that their bourgeois life, meant nothing at all to me.”
The former Prime Minister of Luxembourg refers to the broad Trotskyist movement in the late 60s, of which the Nouveau parti anti-capitaliste (NPA) of Olivier Besancenot is the heir.
Juncker was not a very much of an activist: he did not leave many traces of this leftist past.”
He says that he soon grasped that this stand was misguided , although he lays claim to some enduring sympathy for the workers that he learnt from his youth amongst a steel-worker family and neighbours.
l”Humanité alleges both figures have links with the CIA.
Juncker in particular,
was forced to resign his mandate after a colourful case of espionage. Witnesses suddenly became mute,although leaks suggest that the special services of the United States, including the famous NSA, have maintained discreet links with Jean-Claude Juncker…..
They conclude,
There are revealing comparisons. Barroso and Juncker were both members of so-called “far left” with direct or indirect relationship with the CIA and special service organisations in the United States.
(1) Tony Cliff. Portugal at the crossroads (1975).
MRPP
The biggest “revolutionary” organisation in the University, it seems to recruit sons of upper class CDS supporters. Its membership is characterised by a religious fervour. It was quite heroic under fascism, but even then spent much of its time denouncing the rest of the revolutionary left. Typically, today it runs slogans like “Long live the glorious MRPP – Arnaldo Matos (Secretary of MRPP), glorious leader of the proletariat”, etc.
It gained some influence in a few firms when the Communist Party was involved in strike-breaking – e.g. it has some influence in TAP and the TLP (telephone workers).
But its influence is restricted in Lisbon to at most five workers’ committees.
It is extremely unpopular with COPCON rank and file because of its references to them as the “new PIDE”.
Its position used to be distinct from that of the PCP ML/AOC, in that it did not openly back the Socialist Party. But the Socialist Party saw an advantage in claiming to defend the MRPP against the Communist Party. And recently the MRPP has provided a convenient weapon for the Socialist Party to use to break the hold of the Communist Party on certain unions in Lisbon (journalists, bank workers, clerks).
The MRPP sees the events in the North as a “peasant uprising against social fascism”. When the Communist Party defended its headquarters in Leiria, the MRPP spoke of it “shooting down peasants”.
There seems to be some sort of convergence here between the sons of the bourgeoisie and their parents.
Venus in Furs.
“But the Almighty Lord hath struck him, and hath delivered him into the hands of a woman.”
Judith, xvi. 7.
Gilles Deleuze once suggested that Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Fur was not only the inspiration for the modern word masochism but illustrated the paradoxes of punishment (Présentation de Sachar-Masoch.1967). Traditional legal systems threatened, and inflict pain, supposedly as a deterrent. By contrast the ‘desiring machine’ Severin von Kusiemski, wishes to suffer. As a parody of law, a contract reigns over and demands the whiplash. The Biblical epigraph that heads the novel is equally misleading. Far from embodying worshiped female superiority, the Goddess Wanda, is a creation, Pygmalion style, of the narrator. In these ways one can see how the theme can take us from sexuality to forms of power.
It is a measure of the achievement of David Ives‘ 2010 play Venus in Furs in Roman Polanski’s cinematic adaption, that it embodies these contradictions in a compelling joute between two players.
The film pans onto a Parisian boulevard. In the background is a looming thunderstorm. An unkempt actress (Emmanuelle Seigner, Polanski’s wife), Vanda, hurries into a shabby theatre. She is auditioning for a production of Venus in Furs. Inside the director, Thomas (Mathieu Amalric) is about to leave, bemoaning on his mobile the talentless candidates he’s already seen. Vanda, late beyond excuse, but pushy to the point of breaking boundaries, persuades him to let her perform.
Vanda already has the script by heart. Alternatively thick and knowing, using the vocabulary of vulgarity and erudition, she dominates Sevrin’s delirium. His infantile ecstasy when punished by a sable-wrapped aunt (playing a role not dissimilar to Mademoiselle Lambercier for Rousseau) has swollen into an infatuation for a heartless Venus. Wanda, of the play, acts this out against the backdrop of a crackling fire. At regular intervals Vanda rails at the “sexism” of the whole scenario.
If a knife and physical pain play a role, psychological cruelty that spins at the centre of the film’s drama. As the novel says, “.Nothing can intensify my passion more than tyranny, cruelty, and especially the faithlessness of a beautiful woman.”
Vanda gets her claws into the inauthenticity of Thomas’ cosseted life with a highly-educated, monied, fiancée as one senses more than a flicker of longing for submission to her edgy presence, at the borderline of the pute. Pushing an implicit conclusion Wanda suggests that his real desire is for her handsome Officer admirer, and she helps a deliciously helpless Sevrin with make-up for his new role.
Echoes of Polanski’s films, from Knife in the Water 1962 (a weapon wielded by Wanda) to Rosemary’s Baby, 1968 (the storm outside) have been noted by critics. At its best Venus in Furs rivals Pinter’s The Servant (1963) with its intense power struggle. There one significant difference from the original novel is absence of three African women. Their presence might have given an additional theme – the ‘race play’ fashionable in some leftist sado-masochistic circles. (1)
The strengths of the film Venus in Furs (though not the original book which is as vulgar in its pretend elegant way as Vanda) lies in its language, the conversation. This – in different registers of French – is wholly lost in the subtitles, which mix Valley Girl slang with the vocabulary of American Pie. There is no charm and little humour (though you will be able to avoid them on the DVD) It is hard to imagine the original, well received, US play by David Ives written like this.
In an age when somebody is convicted in connection with a sexual obsession with pig slurry the theme of ‘perversion’ has lost its ability to interest, let alone shock. Masochism reminds many of us more of Fifty Shades of Grey (though that was apparently female) than any deep experience or insight. But in Polanski’s film, as for the psychology – the picture is up there with the greats.
(1) Lest we forget (from the Charnel House):
After the above talk is cancelled the Guardian publishes an article by Yassir Morsi (Hat-tip JB)
Uthman Badar: both Islamophobia’s victim and unwilling accomplice
In the last two days we have seen an eruption of Australia’s public and moral outrage, regarding Hizb ut-Tahrir’s media spokesman, Uthman Badar, and his planned talk on morally justifying “honour” killings at Sydney’s Festival of Dangerous Ideas. In response to the planned event, which was cancelled after a massive backlash, we have yet again heard the typical Islamophobes scream the usual condemnation all over our televisions, our radios, our Twitter feeds and in The Daily Telegraph: “Kick Hizbut Outta Here.”
Mossi asserts that the subject of Honour killings was not the speaker’s own. In fact, “Badar wanted to give a talk at the Opera House on how Muslims are always represented as the “Other”.
“Without uttering a single word in defence of “honour” killings – not that he was ever planning to – Badar had his face plastered all over the nation’s imagination as a bigot, misogynist, and an extremist Muslim.”
Morsi concludes,
Islamophobia is better understood as a sort of unchecked energy that drives a frenzy of media scrutiny. It is marked by rituals, a sense of a story, an element of sensationalism, loaded language, to explain what is wrong with those Muslims who aren’t integrated. It is a set of questions, and a conversation with shallow answers about what it means to be us by talking about them; a ritual to purify the social space that is premised on a suspicion about the danger of those on society’s edges, on fringes defiling us; a danger that manifests itself into the face of a red-tinted Badar who is told to get out. Islamophobia is the exploiting of the Muslim for one’s own fantasies. In that sense Badar was both its victim and its unwitting accomplice.
The Sydney Morning Herald reports,
On Wednesday, Mr Badar would not tell reporters whether he believed ”honour killings” – the murder of women deemed to have brought shame or dishonour on their family – were justified.
He also declined to outline the contents of his cancelled talk, but said he was disappointed the festival had bowed to public pressure.
”I would hope they had more courage, more backbone,” he said. ”This issue has nothing to do with honour killings. Islam does not condone any form of abuse or violence towards women.”
In a speech to reporters that sometimes sounded like a sermon, Mr Badar said the ”hysterical” response to the talk’s title was a clear example of Islamophobia. If honour killings were defended by a ”white man”, the response would have been much more muted, he said. Mr Badar hinted at the issues he would have covered in the talk by saying the Western world wanted a ”monopoly on violence” through wars, invasions and puppet governments it justified with its own ideology.
The Australian newspaper also notes,
Hizb ut-Tahrir released a statement on Monday defending the actions of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) – also known as ISIS – in Iraq, where extremist militants have seized large areas of the country. ”ISIS is being portrayed, in fantastical Hollywood style, as evil incarnate on Earth, having seemingly taken over from al-Qaeda who previously fulfilled this bogeyman role,” the statement said.
”An uprising against the systematically oppressive US-installed and backed Maliki regime is being painted as a takeover by ‘terrorists’ to justify political, and if needed military intervention whereby the interests of Western powers will be protected and furthered.”
It is not at all clear if this means support for ISIL or ISIS. Hizb have a history of essentially supporting their own affiliates – not these groups.
But some degree of sympathy would fit with the general line of Hizb ut-Tahrir (as on their official site)
Besides, fighting to expel the enemy from the Muslims’ lands is part of the established thoughts in the Party culture. It is even one of the important rules of Islam. The party has made the obligation to fight the Kuffar, even with the collaborating rulers as long as it is a fighting against the Kuffar, thus deeming it as part of the Jihad for the sake of Allah, as part of the thoughts related to the Shari’ah rules which entail the regulating of the Ummah’s behaviour in relation to the progress of the state; it has even deemed it as one of the greatest concepts of discipline in existence. It is mentioned in the 6th concept of the “concepts of discipline” in the Party Dossier
What is the best way to react to organisations and individuals with such opinions?
Certainly not by denying their right to free speech (an important principle for many, from socialists to liberals), even if this particular event has all the hall-marks of a stunt.
The St James Ethics Centre (behind the Festival of Dangerous Ideas) is a group promoting debate , “broader than simply business & professional ethics..” This ,”involves the hands on examination of virtually every kind of ethical issue arising in society. Operating both in Australia and abroad, the Ethics Centre remains unique in the world for its support to the general community on ethical issues, creation and management of public debates and application of ethical principles to specific issues in public institutions, not-for-profits and companies.”
It would seem to be appropriate forum to subject the Hizbt to public exposure.
That this has not happened is obviously due the topic: honour killings are not ideas but acts of violence.
A detailed consideration of the issue of honour killings and the problematic arguments by Badar (relativising honour killings, though not condoning them) is given by Sarah AB.
There is room for analysis of the reasons why the talk has been cancelled.
But Morsi however seems have already entered this subject with the ready-made view that any criticism of Islamists of the stripe of the Hizb is “Islamophobia’.
He works himself up into paroxysms of rage describing the Australian reaction.
The Problem with Islamophobia.
There is an extremely sensitive and thoughtful piece by Shaif Rahmen on Islamophobia on Harry’s Place this morning,.
It begins by noting how the term is full of dangers, and
Rahmen concludes,
So when does criticism of Islam become Islamophobia?
When the criticism prejudices and stigmatises Muslims rather than their beliefs.
Hizb ut-Tahrir is rightly attacked for its beliefs.
It is accused, with ample justification, of being an extreme-right wing party which aims to establish a religious dictatorship.
Its social policies are utterly reactionary.
Cod philosophy about the Muslim Other (1), melodrama and histrionics cannot deflect these criticisms.
Or silence them.
But perhaps this is Morsi’s aim?
(1) This is a brilliant unravelling of the pretentious gibberish used by Badar (like Morsi an adept of the Woody Allen school of Sartre and Derrida studies): The accused is the oriental other. Ophelia Benson.
Tony Greenstein in a temperate mood.
Comrade Tony Greenstein’s resignation from Left Unity sent shock waves last month throughout the world progressive, labour, and socialist movement.
The news was published in the august pages of the Weekly Worker on the 5th of June.
Now on his Blog he explains his standpoint.
I resigned from Left Unity nearly a month ago. Set up in a blaze of publicity, it has fallen victim to identity politics and navel gazing. It reports that it has 2,000 members. If so they make next to no impact. There is no internal life in the organisation, no paper or journal, and criticism of policies such as ‘safe spaces’ for women are frowned upon or, as is the case in Manchester subject to censorship and suspension
Using dialectical tools honed in years of struggle Brighton’s Best continues.
It would be a pleasure to reproduce the text in full but for reasons of space and attention-span we confine ourselves to extracts.
Cde Greenstein has no doubt where some of the blame for the rise of UKIP lies,
….most mailings from the Centre have concerned elections for the multiplicity of posts in LU. Barely a word has been issued concerning prioritising campaigns such as the destruction of the NHS or the welfare state. Bogus issues of interest to just a handful of careerists, such as intersectionality, have been deemed of more importance instead.
It is little wonder that LU didn’t see fit to stand candidates in the European elections when it has such pressing internal issues to deal with. The result is that UKIP and its anti-immigration policies have been given a free ride and LU has abandoned what could have been an effective platform for introspective navel gazing.
This post continues in this vein and reaches this conclusion,
LU’s leadership could do worse than to look at the success of Syriza in Greece and try and learn some lessons. However I fear that they are too fixed in their views and politics to learn lessons from anyone. They insist on following the same strategies that embraced Respect and destroyed the Socialist Alliance. Politically LU has demonstrated complete impotence on questions like Ireland. My conclusion is that the time for success has now passed and what is left is a terrible missed politically opportunity.
I have therefore decided that no purpose is served by my continuing to remain a member and I have decided to resign from Left Unity.
In case anybody has sympathy with some of these views – which include criticisms of ‘intersectionality’ (poor old Richard Seymour’s latest hobby horse) and ‘safe spaces’, not to mention Greenstein’s comments on the LU failure to campaign on welfare – this has been brought to the Tendance’s attention (ME),
Daniel Randall and Sacha Ismail Lies, Damn Lies and Tony Greenstein (What Next?)
TO THOSE on the left who derive sado-masochistic entertainment from the more bilious of its internal debates, Tony Greenstein will need no introduction. But for anyone who doesn’t think that spending endless hours on email discussion lists and internet message boards is an appropriate and productive use of their time, it is necessary to provide a little background.
Tony Greenstein is a socialist based in Brighton who engages in a form of political masturbation that consists basically of attacking the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty in the most poisonous terms known to him at every possible opportunity. Tony attacks the AWL for its small size, but he is not on very firm ground arguing numbers with a group more than 100 times the size of his own: the Tony Greenstein sect of one.
Tony’s ferocious hatred of the AWL overrides all rational political thought; so, for example, when Tony stood as a candidate for the Socialist Green Unity Coalition (in which the AWL also participated) in the 2005 General Election, Tony felt it appropriate to write a letter to the CPGB newspaper Weekly Worker attacking the AWL in characteristic terms, even though he knew this would harm the coalition of which he himself was part. This sort of behaviour is illustrative of Tony’s general approach – not rational, worked-out criticism but frenzied slander. His diatribe in What Next? [‘The Alliance for Workers’ Liberty – Britain’s Revolutionary Imperialists’] is no different. It is embarrassing in its lack of rigour, in the way it substitutes anecdotal slander for political critique, and in its use of blatant lies, distortions and half-truths.
More on What next? site.
In a long political career on the outside of the outside left Cde Greenstein has accumulated a broader range of enemies than the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty (AWL) – they extend, let us say, from senior figures in the trade union movement to just about every party and groupuscule on the left (his latest bug-bear is Socialist Resistance).
He has even got the goat of somebody genuinely loathed by all progressives, Gilad Atzmon.
Respect!
Call for Jihad.
Les derniers chrétiens de Mossoul, cible des jihadistes
In Mosul ISIS has imposed on Christians the discriminatory status of “dhimmi“, forcing them to pay a tax (the jizyah) as a guarantee of protection.
Sad news for the last Christians of Mosul. The Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (EIIL) – Daech according acronym in Arabic, – has ordered them to pay the jizyah,a special tax which giving them the status of second-class citizens.
This tax, according to various first-hand witnesses collected by telephone from Mosul, obliges Christian families to pay $ 250 per employed person, or $ 500 for a couple.
“They have a choice between paying, converting or leaving “ said father Tahir Issa, of the small Chaldean Church.
“PACT OF PROTECTION”.
This obligation to pay the jizya for Christian dhimmi – “protected” or a non-Muslim citizens in Muslim state – is compulsory.
It is also open to any non-Muslim citizen, provided they belong to a revealed religion (Judaism, Zoroastrianism, etc..). It is accompanied by other discriminatory conditions, restricted freedom of worship, and the loss of certain rights, in exchange for a guarantee of security for their persons and property.
According to reports from refugees in Kurdistan the jihadists have claimed that a Moslem who steals from a Christian will be executed, while those who steal from other Muslims will only have their hands cut off.
….
There are around 500 Christians left in Mosul, amongst two million inhabitants.
Father Tahrir Issa also asserts that two churches in Mosul, one named the Holy Spirit, which belongs to the Chaldeans and the other, belonging to the Armenian community have recently been completely vandalised. A statue of the Virgin in another church was also destroyed.
There are other reports on this, and the imposition of strict Shariah law in areas under ISIS influence. See also Les seize commandements de l’Etat islamique en Irak et au Levant.
Libération takes a much more robust line than, notably, the Guardian, on these issues.
Organises ‘fun days’ for kids says Franklin Lamb in Counterpunch.
Counterpunch has published some well-informed reports on the unfolding civil war in Iraq, notably by Patrick Cockburn.
The same cannot be said for the latest piece by the notorious Franklin Lamb, who has been linked to the far-right Réseau Voltaire (Voltaire Network) (23 articles, up to 2001).
Will ISIS Create al-Sham Caliphate & Liberate Palestine?
This is written after talks with members of ISIS, the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, presently fighting its way through Iraq , with a serious presence in Syria (which he often cites under its Arabic acronym DAASH).
more than a dozen ardent supporters of The Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), known locally as DAASH whose representatives allowed this observer over the past six months to interview some of its supporters
Franklin’s main interest is in what he calls the ‘liberation of Palestine”.
This is the key to understanding the following comment,
DAASH insists that it has become less active in killing anyone who works for the government of Syria or Iraq including rubbish collectors, a barbaric practice that alienated the Sunni population and that their support is growing as they increasingly provide the essential social services in the forming proto-Caliphate. “Zionists call us masked, sociopathic murderers but we are much more complicated and representative of those seeking justice than they portray us. Are we more barbaric than the Zionist terrorists who massacred at Dier Yassin, Shatila twice at Qana, and committed dozens of other massacres? History will judge us after we free Palestine.”A few years ago the CIA and others estimated that the Zionist occupation of Palestine will collapse in less than a decade. DAASH claims it can do the job in 72 months.
He then allows them to state,
With respect to events surrounding its takeover of Mosel and other social media broadcast exhibitions of mass brutality, ISIS claims it was done for a purpose, the same purpose that other state and non-state actors have used over the past two decade and that is for 90% of the world 1.5 billion Muslims (Sunni) to free themselves from the oppression of the 10% (Shia).
The Reseau Voltaire contributor records this comment,
ISIS appears uniformly contemptuous of the Zionist regime and its army and also appears eager to fight them in the near future despite expectation that the regime will use nuclear weapons. “Do you think that we do not have access to nuclear devices? The Zionists know that we do and if we ever believe they are about to use theirs we will not hesitate. After the Zionists are gone, Palestine will have to be decontaminated and rebuilt just like areas where there has been radiation released.”
Like all groups with the interest of the people at heart ISIS (apart from operating a policy of great religious tolerance) carries out the following.
DASH supporters claim that as soon as they ‘liberate” and area invest in public works such as the new souk in Raqqa, installs new power lines and conducts training sessions on how citizens can do-it-yourself for more self-reliance with fixing infrastructure problems. In addition DAASH claims that it quickly fixes potholes, runs a low fare bus system, has established a ‘green’ program to build parks and plant trees and flowers, helps farmers with harvests and runs a zakat (almsgiving) organization.
Moreover, ISIS has established a number of religious schools for children, including ones for girls where they can memorize the Koran and receive certificates if successful, while also holding “fun days” (1) for kids including all the ice cream they can eat and inflatable slides. For their older counterparts, ISIS has established training sessions for new imams and preachers. Schedules for prayers and Koran lessons are posted at mosques. In a more worrisome development, ISIS runs training camps for “cub scouts” and houses these recruits in the group’s facilities.
Several social media reports and a few eyewitness accounts appear to confirm that DAASH has developed health and welfare programs, operates bread factories and distributes free fruits and vegetables to needy families, passing the goods out personally as well as setting up a free food kitchen in Raqqa as well as an adoption agency to place orphans with families in their areas. Unlike the Taliban and some other regimes which exhibit paranoia about vaccination campaigns, DAASH claims to be more ‘modern” and actively promotes polio-vaccination in its areas to try stop its spread.
There are no plans to attack Europe or “other places”.
With one exception,
With respect to exactly how DAASH intends to liberate Palestine, the Iraqi’s and now the Obama administration is in possession of an encyclopedia of information about detailed DAASH plans, and tactics it will confront the Zionist occupiers with, according to a congressional staffer via email with this observer. Reportedly the employment of large numbers of militarily untrained foreign volunteers as suicide bombers, moving on foot wearing suicide vests, or driving vehicles packed with explosives is just the tip of a deep iceberg of what DAASH is planning…
The visiting Professor of International Law at the Faculty of Law, Damascus University comments,
Time will reveal if DAASH achieves one or both of its objectives. Many believe if they eject the Zionist regime from Palestine, the expanding Islamist group will set in motion historic currents that in all likelihood will be rather different from the Ehud Omert-Condeleeza Rice fantasy of “a New Middle East.
One feels deep disgust at anybody relishing the kind of ‘liberation’ ISIS would bring to Israel.
Certainly it would be unlikely to involve fun days and all the ice-cream you can eat.
(1) Compare: Video: Al-Qa’ida holds family fun day in war torn Aleppo (2013).
Is this Working Out?
Left Unity notched up a success last week with its Homes Not Spikes campaign in London,
“The spikes are gone. Tesco buckled under the outcry after it was found to have put in ‘anti-homeless spikes’ outside a central London store, and the company was forced to remove them.”
The Tendance welcomes this result.
Left Unity has many good policies, and, unlike some of the inward looking UK left, resembles the rest of the (stronger) radical European left . These include calling for continental cooperation to ‘refound’ the EU on a social basis, backing for far-reaching democracy, feminism, and a ‘radical reformist’ set of domestic economic and social policies.
Left Unity has some respected and energetic activists and has inspired a wider audience.
These features outweigh the potential damage caused by the influence of one figure on its race policies, which look like a step backwards to 1980s and Left Unity’s confusing adaption to ‘intersectionality’.
While rightly opposing the deep-seated hostility to migrants and minorities, it treats “communities” as blocs. Indeed it falls victim to its own attack on hostility to “the representation of Muslims as a monolithic bloc” by defending ‘Muslims’ ….en bloc!
It is right to give priority to the racism of the government and parties like UKIP.
But without a strategy to build unity against the oppression that religious ‘communities’ can create Left Unity risks isolating itself from activists fighting for their own emancipation from “community leaders”. This misguided approach can be seen when Left Unity ‘defends’ community leaderships, distant from the left and the labour movement, in the Birmingham academies. The failure to see groups like Islamists as part of an international extreme right-wing movement, further weakens Left Unity’s politics
But I digress.
One area seems to have created rising tension is linked to the ‘safe spaces‘ policy.
The key contentious points include guidelines :
To behave decently toward each other and try to consider other people’s needs (as would be normal in a well unionised workplace).
Venom should be reserved as far as possible for those who would destroy our organisation and our political actions .
Tolerance of other habits and norms will be expected - for example, The Youth and elders might make more noise!
We will not ignore examples of oppression or of transgressions in matters of safe spaces, or situations where transgressions occur.
Discrimination of any kind is unacceptable and will be challenged.
Respect should be offered to each other’s physical (and emotional) boundaries.
Members are asked to try to be aware of the positions and privileges they may be conveying, including racial, class and gender privilege. Be aware of the language you use in discussion and how you relate to others
If a member of an oppressed group requests that you change your use of language, be respectful and change your use of language. Do feel free to ask for clarification on this.
……
There follows a section of Bullying.
The way out of any dispute is said to be through Resolution procedures” operated by “Reconciliation teams.”
These are real problems, shouting, screaming, bullying and harassment, are endemic in political parties of any stripe.
But will these guidelines help solve them?
Anybody with any political experience, or at least most of them, can see the potential for destructive disputes that could come from this policy. Choices of “language”, a call to be aware of “privilege”, “emotional boundaries” “tolerance ” of other people’s habits – all are open to exactly the kind of emotional manipulation (not to say intolerance) that they claim to “protect” people from.
Mike Macanir has unpicked this policy to death. He observes that, “the proposed method of addressing these issues of oppression – by mixing them up with party disciplinary/disputes procedures – has been tried and failed, over and over again, and not merely failed, but proved positively destructive.” “The method of ultimatums backed by prominently displayed anger – “speaking bitterness” – is clearly visible in comrade Dowling’s contribution and those of her supporters. It is inherent in tying together the equalities policy with the disputes/disciplinary procedure in the draft ‘safe spaces’ policy. It was unsuccessful and destructive in the movements of the oppressed in the 1970s-80s and it will be unsuccessful and destructive if we try it again in Left Unity”
Cde Macnair’s detailed argument against rules which encourage people to “speak bitterness” can be seen here.
The Affaire Laurie McCauley.
Now with the Affaire Laurie McCauley some people’s boundaries are being sorely tested.
According to the latest Weekly Worker Left Unity “have suspended Laurie McCauley from membership for having the temerity to write a “public article” in the Weekly Worker.1 Specifically his ‘crime’ was to include “personal attacks”, “breaches of members’ privacy”, “unreasonable attacks on our branch” – and other such outrages against socialist morality. Frankly, the comrades responsible for this move should hang their heads in shame.
Is it a straightforward matter of free-speech?
For those willing to go into the “Affaire Laurie McCauley” this is the offending article, Left Unity: What ‘Safe Spaces’ lead to. (22nd May).
It begins,
I approach this short report with a certain amount of trepidation. Not because of concerns about ‘exposing’ Left Unity’s right wing here in Manchester, but because the levels of dishonesty and sheer lack of vision on show are simply embarrassing. Nevertheless it is important, as a service to the movement – and in the hope of rescuing the branch – that recent goings-on, culminating in the shutting down of the branch’s email discussion list and attempted censure of one member for comments thereon, are documented.
Left Unity was supposed to be different. A pluralist party, we were told, which could accommodate varied views within its ranks. The mistakes of the ‘old left’, of enforcing a false ideological unity that only led to splits, would be avoided. Openness and transparency were to be the order of the day.
Regular readers will know how quickly this has fallen apart in LU’s Manchester branch, where the email discussion list was shut down amidst the unedifying spectacle of one comrade – former deputy leader of Respect Dawud Islam – being demonised for the heinous crime of not coming to a snap judgement on the guilt or innocence of Steve Hedley.1Hedley had been accused of domestic violence by a former partner, but was found to have no case to answer by the RMT union and is not under investigation by the police. Comrade Islam declined to immediately sign an e-petition calling on the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition to withdraw comrade Hedley’s candidacy for the May 22 local elections. He explained, reasonably enough, that he did not know enough about the specific case, and also expressed his view that candidates’ politics are the most important thing.
Comrade McCauley now chronicles the response to this piece (19th June),
This triggered an avalanche of outrage, accusing him of at best not taking violence against women seriously, and at worst of defending those men who perpetrate such violence. Dawud refused to be hounded into signing, however, and restated his position. But the straw that broke the camel’s back was a two-line email from myself suggesting that “innocent until proven guilty” was a pretty progressive principle. This prompted Ian Parker of Socialist Resistance, who had initially posted the petition, to declare the topic “no longer suitable for discussion on this list” – an ad-hoc committee put the list under moderation tout court: all “political” and “personal” postings are blocked, with only banal organisational stuff slipping through the net.
Comrade Parker actually submitted a motion at the next meeting to censure Dawud for his comments – which were not even public statements, existing only on the branch’s internal discussion list – and refer him to LU’s disputes committee. At the most farcical point in this meeting, Ian proposed that comrade Islam actually put his own name to the motion! In the end, comrade Parker backed down after a pseudo-apology from the ‘accused’.
….
Incidentally, the dispute involving Dawud was resolved shortly after publication. But having the branch’s dirty laundry given a good airing in the pages of the Weekly Worker was clearly too much for comrades Parker and Keenan. Their appetite for cracking the bureaucratic whip was evidently only whetted by Dawud’s dressing down, as on June 8 two motions were circulated on the email list calling for myself to be referred to the disputes committee. The first motion claimed that comrades’ interventions in meetings and on email lists should be treated confidentially – hardly the model of transparency LU is supposedly committed to. The second called for my suspension from the branch, until the disputes committee had reached a decision on the case being brought against me. Both motions were unsigned, as if comrades had taken my description of Dawud’s experience as “Kafkaesque” as an encouragement.
And the case against me? The second motion condemned the “personal attacks” and “reports in public of our internal branch discussions” in my Weekly Worker article. The first point can be usefully translated as ‘criticising what someone actually said’. My report did not focus on a critique of comrades’ hairstyles or fashion sense, or anything else that could be remotely construed as a ‘personal attack’. Rather it was the politics – or lack thereof – that I had targeted. As for the second allegation, I have already made the point about transparency.
The second motion also contained nebulous and entirely unsubstantiated claims of “persistent oppressive conduct towards other members” and “persistent disruption of LU internal meetings”. No examples of this “oppressive conduct” or “disruption” have been given – nor had anyone previously pulled me up for such alleged misdemeanours. Anyone present at the meetings I have attended – or who has more than a passing acquaintance with me frankly – can only find these claims risible. I have volunteered to lead off two branch discussions, with no-one complaining. In fact the one time we had a genuine political newbie along was at one of these meetings, and we later learnt that she had decided to join her London branch of LU following our meeting.
For those still with the will to live after reading this, all we know from Left Unity’s site is that the June NC minutes record , “Report to executive on Leeds dispute, with call for Disputes and Appeals Committees to convene ASAP – Felicity Dowling – Endorsed.”
Not knowing the people involved we are not going to get bogged down in personal rancour.
Or in pub gossip.
One thing looks more than probable.
The charges relate to the Safe Spaces policy, even if apparently the Manchester Branch puts them down to behaviour that would not be accepted in any political party.
It could well be that this is not a free-speech issue, or one dependent on the rules we have discussed.
But for many it seem that this is involved, and is being used to settle scores not to end them.
The resulting row must surely exacerbate personality clashes.
It is not, as one Left Unity theorist might say, an aleatory happenstance.
It’s hard not to hope matters will be clarified, but things do not look promising.
There is already talk about another dispute erupting in Leeds involving Workers Power.
That’s Not the Correct Line Comrade on the Left Unity Row.
Oh Yes it is!
The Girl who Talked to Dolphins was on BBC 4 last night.
This was a
Documentary telling the story of the most extraordinary experiment in the history of animal science. In the 1960s a powerful and charismatic scientist flooded a house. He then invited a young woman to live there full-time with a dolphin. Their intention was the ultimate in animal research – they wanted to teach the dolphin to speak English. What happened next would change all their lives. For the first time those involved in the experiment reveal the secrets of the Dolphin House.
This was great.
Trotskyism was also at the forefront of this great leap forward in interspecies communication.
Juan R Posadas, the Argentinian Trotskyist is best known for his pioneering theories on UFOs and the probable existence of higher, communist, civilisations on other planets. He rightly observed that, “These beings from other planets come to observe life down here and laugh at humans, we who fight each other over who has the most cannons, cars and wealth.”
But he did not stop there.
Wikipedia notes,
Posadas led his movement into the development of various ideas that bordered on the New Age with writings about communicating with dolphins and humans giving birth under water.
Fortean Times explains,
Professor Igor Charkovsky’s experiments for the Soviet Academy of Sciences on ‘water birthing’ and his work on communicating with dolphins won the admiration of Posadas, as did unattributed “plans to conceive babies in space.” Charkovsky is today a celebrity of the New Age Californian bourgeois ‘water birthing’ circuit and his forays into human–dolphin communication interfaces are continued by Alexander Yushchencko at Kharkov Polytechnic, Ukraine.
In any event, Posadas’ disciples defended his most esoteric dolphin and water birthing ideas after his death, stating that: “Posadas highlighted the full significance of experiments the Soviets are making in communicating with animals (eg. dolphins) and in space exploration… this is the plane on which Comrade Posadas lived.” They also firmly believed that Posadas’ “radiant and living thought… laid down principles to see further into the future.”
Sadly these writings seem unavailable on the Web.
We await their immediate publication!
ISIS Islamic Justice (from Fightback, Marxist Journal).
A great deal has been said on the unfolding civil war in Iraq.
Tony Blair’s remarks, justifying past, and future, military interventions, have, rightly, caused an uproar.
One of the most respected and reliable writers on the Middle East, Robert Fisk, has observed,
How do they get away with these lies? Now Tony Blair tells us that Western “inaction” in Syria has produced the Iraq crisis. But since bombing Syria would have brought to power in Damascus the very Islamists who are now threatening Baghdad, it must therefore be a mercy that Barack Obama does not listen to the likes of Blair.
…..
Father Frans van der Lugt was a martyr of Homs, refusing to leave his Christian flock and Muslim friends throughout the years of siege, imploring the world to pity the innocent and the starving until, on 7 April this year, gunmen arrived in the church garden and murdered him. They came from the Nusra forces – the Assad regime called them terrorists, the opposition said, of course, that if Assad had not besieged Homs, the 72-year-old Catholic priest would not have died. He is buried a few metres away, his grave a cheap wooden cross surrounded by flowers. From a photograph, his bespectacled face stares at us. The Pope later prayed for Van der Lugt’s soul.
I suppose if the West had bombed Damascus last year – as Blair bombed Baghdad in 2003 – Father Francis might have lived. But then again, he might have been murdered much earlier by the Islamists we would have been helping.
Lindsey German of the Stop the War Coalition has commented on Blair,
Stop the War Coalition convenor Lindsey German condemned his discredited views and the airtime he was given to peddle them, including an appearance on the BBC’s Andrew Marr show.
Ms German told the Star: “Blair has yet again been given a lengthy platform to promote his demented warmongering.”
And she said it was precisely the bombing of the country’s infrastructures 11 years ago that lead to “disastrous consequences which are still playing out to the cost of the Iraqi people.”
Ms German called on Mr Blair to step down from his role as Middle East peace convoy.
She said it was a “a job for which he lacks a single qualification.”
Ms German wasn’t alone in her criticisms as politicians and the public piled into the ex-PM.
Former international development secretary Clare Short — who stepped down from her role over the invasion of Iraq — labelled her former boss as a “complete American neocon.”
Mr Blair’s opinions, she argued, were “absolutely, consistently wrong, wrong, wrong.”
“More bombing will not solve it, it will just exacerbate it,” she urged.
Morning Star. More from Lindsey German on the Stop the War Coalition site.
Socialist Worker, as one would expect, simply regurgitates the line that it’s all the fault of the Western Intervention.
Iraq’s spiral into a new sectarian war is a result of the occupation, and the tactics used by western forces to defeat the 2004 national uprising.
At the time, the US and its coalition allies sought to engineer sectarian tensions to divide a growing national liberation movement.
Perhaps they will enlighten us as to what this “national liberation” movement was, and where it has gone.
ISIS.
What stand then should or could people on the left take on the Iraqi tragedy?
Intervention looks set to exaggerbate the horrors: fueled by the conflicts between a wide range of forces opposed to the Baghdad government (and not just ISIS). Whether Iran and the USA will co-operate, and a host of other ‘whethers and ifs’ do not make other predictions about the outcome easy. There is also this important contribution to consider 7 Myths about the Radical Sunni Advance in Iraq which urges caution on the part of the West and a sobre approach to the threats.
In general, and in respect to intervention, the Stop the War Coalition has got strong arguments on its side.
But we should not forget who ISIS (Islamic State in Iraq and Syria or Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham) (Arabic: الدولة الاسلامية في العراق والشام ʾad-dawla ʾal-islāmiyya fīl-‘irāq waš-šām) are.
The Irish left journal Fightback sums up their nature.
The ISIS has its roots in the militias that formed the Iraqi branch of Al-Qaeda. Until recently it was a marginalised group within the Islamist movement which viewed it as too extreme. It gained notoriety for its brutal and barbaric methods of crucifixion and decapitation. It was mainly isolated to desert and tribal areas of western Iraq, where the disintegration of the Iraqi state and the backwardness of these areas allowed ISIS to gain a foothold.
…….
Over the past year, the group has rapidly grown. This, combined with the increased income, allowed it to take bolder initiatives. It is on this basis that the offensive of ISIS could widen out and develop a momentum. From fighting the Iraqi army in the desert and the tribal areas the group moved into the cities. Its success came as a surprise, as it is one thing to to roam around in war ridden Syria and an entirely different matter to fight in Iraq, with its numerically overwhelming army.
The real reason why they could do this is the rotten character of the corrupt gangster regime of Nouri al-Maliki, who has been whipping up sectarian conflict for years. His gangster methods and the widespread corruption has alienated layer after layer of the population. At the same time poverty and unemployment is rife. According to the World Bank, 28% of Iraqi families live below the poverty line. In the event that the country would face a major crisis, such as the armed conflicts of the past year, the organization’s estimates that this rate could increase by 70%. Thousands of families literally feed on garbage and live in landfills and slums.
Whether, as Fightback asserts, ISIS is the “creation of imperialism” is less clear.
The Daily Beast claims the following, “The extremist group that is threatening the existence of the Iraqi state was built and grown for years with the help of elite donors from American supposed allies in the Persian Gulf region. There, the threat of Iran, Assad, and the Sunni-Shiite sectarian war trumps the U.S. goal of stability and moderation in the region.”
More recent funding has come from their control over a variety of rackets and their seizure of oil fields.
This and other aspects of ISIS and their leader, Ibrahim Awwad Ibrahim Ali al-Badri, are analysed at length by specialists.
One thing we can see immediate evidence of is the Sharia law regime they have established in Mosul.
Since taking over Mosul, members of the group have been handing out documents to residents, stating that Islamic law is binding from now on and which ban any contact with the Iraqi government and its institutions.
Police and security forces were given the opportunity to ask for a pardon, and the document stress that those who do not do so are likely to be given a death sentence.
Men will be required to participate in public worship and those who do not will be sentenced to received lashes, while women will be required to cover their faces and remain permanently in their homes and not leave them unless necessary, the documents state.
Robbers and thieves will be sentenced to death, crucifixion or cutting off of hands and feet. Carrying weapons is now prohibited, and the penalty for violating this directive is death.
The group has begun turning southward towards Baghdad, after conquering Mosul and several other northern cities this week in a lightning offensive.
ISIS rebels have also implemented Sharia law in areas of Syria which it has taken over. Steps taken include a ban on mannequins in shop displays as well as a ban on singing and dancing at weddings.
Al-Qaeda affiliated jihadist rebel groups in Syria have also warned citizens against “hurting the dignity” of the prophet Muhammad, threatening those who do so with execution. Here.
We hardly need to be reminded of their utter and undying hatred of Shias.
There are British jihadists fighting with ISIS.
One wonders if anybody will dare compare them to volunteers defending the Spanish Republic.
“Chartist was a very different animal when I took over as Editor in Spring 1974 . The banner headline on the tabloid talked of joining a ‘joint command of revolutionary organisations and preparing for dual power’.”
Editor’s Report. 2014.
An exceptional Chartist AGM took place on Saturday the 14th of June.
The meeting began with a session of the Financial Crisis and Worker Democracy.
Prem Sikka from Essex University gave an overview of the part accountancy, to most people one of the most boring subjects ever invented, had played in neo-liberalism. He illustrated his case by showing how the rules of accountancy underpinned the banking crises, and the ‘outsourcing’ of state functions. This did not mean that the state, viewed in terms of spending public money, had shrunk. It has been “restructured” – to give ever greater subsidies to the private firms who now carry out many of its functions. The present privatising regime had created widespread poverty, not only for the unemployed, but for those working under ‘flexible’ zero hours contracts. Sikka set out a list of reforms that would bring the banking and financial sector under greater public control, increase transparency, and end widespread fraud and short-term profiteering.
Janet Williamson, Senior Policy Officer of the TUC, made the case for looking again at the proposals for worker representation in companies, last brought up by the 1970s the Bullock Report. She argued that having a voice for workers in firms decisions was essential, not just for justice, but for better wealth production and long-term stability.
In the discussion that followed the issues of socialising the banks, the disciplining of the reserve army of the workless by workfare, and whether ‘voice’ was sufficient for socialists who wish employees to have fuller control over their working lives. The ‘shrinking’ of the state was questioned when the transfer of its functions to private companies living off tax-raised funds had real effects on accountability and workers’ conditions.
After lunch John Palmer (former European Editor – the Guardian) spoke of What now for the left after the European elections? Palmer began by talking about the rise of the xenophobic right, particularly in the UK (UKIP) and France (the Front National). They were joined by other hard and far-right parties in Greece (Golden Dawn) and Hungary. Social Democracy, above all in france, had done very badly. Their left competitors, the Front de Gauche, had stagnated. The British Labour Party had got solid results, but had lost the lead to UKIP. Palmer, however, pointed to the good results for the left in Southern Europe, notably Greece (Syriza), Spain (Podemos and the Izquierda Unida). From the floor Italy was added, where the centre-left Democratic Party (Partito Democratico), did well and the further left alliance (L’Altra Europa con Tsipras) re-entered the European Parliament.
Palmer explained very clearly that it was up to the Left to promote a federalist agenda as the only way to unite Europe’s left into an effective force that could shape the European Union in a different, social, direction. We need to change the terms of debate. He cited Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century as a milestone on this journey.It had brought back inequality onto the agenda, showing how rewards to capital has grown at the expense of wage. The left’s agenda needed to centre on the European Parliament. He finished by pointed out how far Britain was isolated in its opposition to Jean-Claude Juncker. By contrast to the British Labour Party, which shares this hostility with the Liberal-Conservative Coalition, the left should be building alliances to fight austerity across the continent.
Chartist has long stood for a pro-European left. Debate and questions raised the problematic stand of some (including Palmer) who back the break-up of Britain yet want a federalist Europe. It was also noted that Picketty’s book came at a time when France’s centre-left was rediscovering the important of fighting inequality. (see The society of equals: Pierre Rosanvallon 2004. French Edition: La Société des égaux, Le Seuil, 2011). Whether Europe, and the EU, had played a negative role in backing US-interference the Ukrainian crisis and interventions in the Middle East and Libya was discussed.
Reports indicated that Chartist has continued to attract a wide-range of democratic socialist contributors. The Editor Mike Davis, stated that the journal is supportive of the Labour Party and progressive forces within it, and the majority do not see the way forward in independent electoral left initiatives. But the publication also attracts Greens, the Left Unity Party, and independent socialists. The magazine backs the People’s Assembly and has played a significant role in the Labour Assembly Against Austerity.
There were two resolutions. One called for support for the Yes campaign for Scottish Independence, and the other for Chartist backing for a London rally calling for Scotland to break away from the United Kingdom.
From the audience concern was expressed at moves to separate people on national grounds. It was also pointed out by another Chartist supporter that the mover of the resolution’s own party, Left Unity, did not endorse these views, that Chartist is not a directly campaigning group with a ‘line’ and that it was said that Alex Salmond was so vain that he drank his own bath water. We might guess who made the latter comments.
The resolution fell, supported only by its two movers.
The Chartist Magazine is now fully on-line.
The new site is up and running.You can access it here.
It is seriously worth reading.
There was a great get-together in the pub afterwards and an excellent meal in a Greek Taverna.
Godard Now Prefers Marine Le Pen.
David Thompson once commented that Jean-Luc Godard, the celebrated, and once leftist, cinéaste was fated to remain a “Young Turk” all his life.
Now approaching his dotage Godard still feels the need to make provocative statements.
Interviewed at length in yesterday’s Le Monde and asked about the European election results he announced,
J’espérais que le Front national arriverait en tête. Je trouve que Hollande devrait nommer – je l’avais dit à France Inter, mais ils l’ont supprimé – Marine Le Pen premier ministre.”
I was hoping that the Front National would come first. I find that Hollande should nominate – I said this on France Inter, but they cut it out – Marine Le Pen as Prime Minister.
Interrogé par le journal sur les raisons de cette prise de position, le réalisateur répond : “Pour que ça bouge un peu. Pour qu’on fasse semblant de bouger, si on ne bouge pas vraiment. Ce qui est mieux que de faire semblant de ne rien faire (rires)”.
Asked by the newspaper the reasons why he took this stand, the film-director responded, “To shake things up, so that we make at least some moves towards changing things, even if they don’t really do so. It’s better than pretending to do nothing.
Jean-Luc Godard continue son propos en rappelant que “le Front national avait deux sièges au Conseil national de la Résistance. A l’époque, c’était une organisation paracommuniste. N’empêche qu’elle s’appelait Front national…”
Jean-Luc Godard continued his theme, recalling that, “The Front National had 2 seats on the National Resistance Council. At that time it was a pro-Communist organisation. Still, despite this it was called the Front National….”
L’organisation en question n’avait rien à voir avec le Front national actuel, créé en 1972 par Jean-Marie Le Pen. “Ce n’est qu’une synonymie…”, font d’ailleurs remarquer les interviewers du Monde. Mais Jean-Luc Godard n’en démord pas :“Non. Si on dit que ce n’est qu’une synonymie, on reste dans les mots, pas dans les faits. C’est un fait. Vu l’importance de la nomination, et de nommer, bien sûr, que c’est une synonymie… Le premier ministre du Luxembourg s’appelle Juncker. C’était aussi le nom d’un bombardier allemand [Junkers]
The interviewers reminded him that this Front National had nothing to do with the present-day Front National, created in 1972 by Jean-Marie Le Pen, and that only the name was identical (a synonymy). Jean-Luc Godard did not back down, “No. If you say its the same word, you are stuck in words, not facts. It is a fact. Given the importance of this nomination, this is also a synonymy as well…the Prime Minister of Luxembourg is called Junker. That is also the name of the German bombers….
Le cinéaste reconnaît qu’il n’est “pas pour eux”. “Il y a longtemps, Jean-Marie Le Pen avait demandé que je sois viré de France. Mais j’ai juste envie que ça bouge un peu… Les grands vainqueurs, ce sont les abstentionnistes. J’en fais partie depuis longtemps”,
The Franco-Swiss film-maker did recognise that he was “not one of them” (the Front National). “Jean-Marie Le Pen wanted for a long time to kick me out of France..but I simply wish that things change. The real winners (of the elections) were those who abstained, and I’ve been one of them for a long time. “
During the same interview asked about his latest film, Adieu au Langage Jean-Luc Godard further illustrated his wide culture and knowledge by asserting that the word Parole did not exist English.
The days of Godard’s radical films, like Le Petit Soldat (1963) , Week-end (1967), La Chinoise (1967), not to mention his involvement in the Marxist Dziga Vertov Group, seem so distant now.
Seamus Milne Hints at Plot to Forge Trojan Horse Document.
The fallacy of relative privation, or appeal to worse problems, is an informal fallacy which attempts to suggest that the opponent’s argument should be ignored because there are more important problems in the world, despite the fact that these issues are often completely unrelated to the subject under discussion.
The word whataboutery has been used to describe this line of argument when used in protesting at inconsistent behaviour. e.g. “The British even have a term for it: whataboutery. If you are prepared to go to war to protect Libyan civilians from their government, then what about the persecuted in Bahrain?” Wikipedia.
Seamus Milne is a master of Wataboutery.
Today in the Guardian he begins an article – Michael Gove’s toxic assault on schools is based on naked discrimination – with another tactic, of ‘contextualisation’ by putting an event in terms of the worst possible context.
“The harassment of minorities on the basis of forged documents has a grim history.”
“So the official onslaught on mainly Muslim state schools in Birmingham, triggered by what has all the hallmarks of a fabricated letter outlining a supposed Islamist plot to take them over, should be cause for deep alarm.”
Left in the dark about this “history” (although we might float the words, Protocols, Elders and Zion, around) we launch into some rhetoric before landing here,
But this extremism turns out to be a different beast from the one first trailed in lurid accusations a few months back. It is nothing to do with terrorism, or even the elastic boo-word of Islamism. The target is religious conservatism – or even just plain religiousness.
It is with interest that Milne takes so lightly criticism of Islamism (overwhelmingly from the left in countries where Islamists have murdered democrats, leftists and feminists) that he calls it a ‘boo-word’.
Milne then largely denies that there is much of a problem about the influence of conservative Islamism in schools, notes the patriotism of Birmingham Muslims, denies that most of the reported incidents of enforcing religious norms took place, and, unable to disprove some of them admits that,
That’s not to say, of course, that there’s nothing behind the allegations, which have clearly been fed by former and current staff – or that there aren’t legitimate grievances. These are not faith schools and some have clearly pushed the schools’ religious boundaries.
He then ends with a classic whataboutery,
“There’s a powerful case for secular education. But it doesn’t exist in Britain’s schools, which are awash with religion. And unless the same rules apply to all, the result is naked discrimination. But has Gove sent inspectors to root out anti-abortionism and homophobia in Catholic or evangelical-sponsored schools, or cultural isolation in mainly white schools where racism is rife?”
No he has not.
He has not disestablished the Church of England.
Or promoted equality and secularism.
He is a dyed-in-the-wool reactionary privatiser.
But does Milne advocate promoting the “”same rules for all”?
We await this call with interest.
This is followed by another whatabout….
But the campaign to bring to heel Birmingham’s schools and humiliate the Muslim community in the process is a wider threat in a country where war-fuelled Islamophobia is already rampant. Dog-whistling to Ukip bigotry might seem a cute electoral trick.
The problem then is not the content of the report on the schools: it’s the context in which it’s made. By this sleight of hand Milne has avoided addressing the issues
Whatabout Iraq!
Indeed.
Secularism Means Freedom, Equality and Solidarity!
The infiltration of public schools in Birmingham by Islamists causes a political scandal.
Le Monde 11.6.2014. (Extracts)
Birmingham is in shock. Across the media the second city of the Kingdom is everywhere. The infiltration by Muslim extremists of six public schools in the Midlands city has stirred up a debate not only on the evolution of British multicultural society but it has also divided the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition led by Prime Minister David Cameron.
On Tuesday Mr Cameron announced that “The promotion of fundamental British values in schools in England will have the support of all” This followed the publication yesterday of an explosive Ostead inspection report on the Islamic practices imposed by Muslim extremists in six schools in Birmingham.
Headteachers and non-Muslims or moderate Muslim teachers were harassed. Boys and girls were separated. Calls to prayer were constantly broadcast by loudspeakers. Private detectives were hired to investigate students in order to uncover their sexual relations and report them back to parents. The Emails of recalcitrant teachers were scrutinised. Several pilgrimages to Mecca were financed with public funds. Hard-line school governors intended to stop the teaching of music and arts . They banned a picture of Jesus in a Nativity play at Christmas.
*********
Four of the six public schools in the spotlight are totally autonomous “academies” , completely free from local authority control, which are in principle charged with the supervision of public institutions. This reform was launched by the Blair government reform and put an end to municipal control of education and the school curriculum. It has been by continued by Mr Gove. The Birmingham case highlights the risk of abuses of a system allowing freedom for schools to manage their own functions.
See also:
Halte à l’islamisation des écoles !
SWP Reacts to Influence of Conservative Islam in Education.
It had to come.
It has come.
Socialist Worker has buried its collective head in the sand about the problems raised by the influence of conservative Islam in education.
Today we read,
A Tory clampdown on schools in Birmingham has unleashed a torrent of racist filth.
The government ordered investigations after an anonymous letter alleged a Muslim “plot” to take over schools. Right wing newspapers devoted pages to personal attacks on Muslim teachers and governors.
The paper of the SWP claims that there is no evidence for any of the Ofstead charges against Oldknow Academy.
Their proof? The Academy has issued this statement stating that the report’s claims are false.
They begin by rebutting the comment about ‘white women’ being ‘prostitutes’. Then that there were anti-Christian chants, and preaching – the list of denials is contained in this excerpt.
This is completely false and taken out of context. The word ‘prostitute’ was used
once by an ex-employee but in an entirely ‘non-offensive’ context. No member of
staff has ever used the term ‘white women were prostitutes’.“And urged to join in anti-Christian chants”The Principal’s investigation found no evidence whatsoever of such chanting having
ever happened.
“Non-Muslims were banned from taking Friday assemblies so that
they could be “preached at”
All members of staff have access to an assembly rota. Non-Muslims are not banned
from taking Friday assemblies. No one has ever been ‘preached’ at. Assemblies would
usually have an SLT member present. However, in all faith assemblies, staff are
always present. This is the first time SLT are hearing of this.
For the writers of the Socialist Worker this must be true, one assumes, because the Academy says so.
By contrast Andrew Gilligham writes (Hat-Tip Howie’s Corner).
The evidence of “incendiary preachers at school assemblies” – Sheikh Shady al-Suleiman, an al-Qaeda sympathiser, at Park View School on November 28 2013 – in fact comes from one of the school’s official newsletters, still available on its own website (see photo above, from page 17 of this PDF).
At another of the schools, Oldknow, an official Education Funding Agency report finds that the Arabic teacher, Asif Khan, led anti-Christian chanting in assemblies (though also records his denial). I too have been told about Mr Khan’s anti-Christian assembly by four separate sources, one of themon the record. There is other on-the-record testimony that Park View’s head, Mozz Hussain, preached “mind-blowing” anti-American assemblies.
The evidence of “segregated classes” comes from both this EFA report and another one, into Park View, Nansen and Golden Hillock schools,leaked to me, which states that “teachers gave [students] seats in which to sit in class by gender to avoid having to mix” and that “students told us that they were required to sit in the places which they were given by teachers,” often with “boys sitting towards the front of the class and girls at the back or around the sides.” The relevant sections of the report are published on this blog.
At Golden Hillock, according to the EFA, non-Muslim pupils “had to teach themselves” in one subject. At Nansen, there is compulsory Arabic (in a primary school!) and no teaching of the arts for one entire year group. Nansen’s deputy head, Razwan Faraz, is administrator of a group called “Educational Activists” which also includes key staff and governors from several of the other schools and which pursues, in Mr Faraz’s words, an “Islamising agenda” in Birmingham’s schools. Park View’s chair of governors, Tahir Alam, is co-author of a document which calls for the teaching of art, drama and dance to Muslims to be restricted and Muslim girls to be veiled in school.
Even if the self-assessment from Oldknow were true, Socialist Worker does not bother to consider the evidence given above from other schools, Park View, Nansen and Golden Hillock.
Socialist Worker, in short, is peddling hysterical rubbish with no concern about the facts of the case.
Its approach is on a par indeed to the false right-wing claim that ‘extremism’ and ‘terrorism’ are involved.
The problem is clearly that ‘conservative Islam’ has influenced some schools in Birmingham.
Unable to deal with the issues this raises, from gender equality, and the shutting down of open-minded thinking, not to mention the undue power of religious authorities, it rants about “racist hounding”.
No doubt the SWP has a unique stand on gender equality in its own organisation.
But their position is not isolated.
Socialist Unity also works by screaming at anybody who questions their support for conservative Islam
They cynically exploit the hatred of the left for the far-right to claim that anybody who questions their position will find, Andy Newman alleges, allies in “Britain First, the BNP, Liberty GB, UKIP, AWL, EDL, SIOE, Gates of Vienna, Pam Gellar, et al.
Apparently secularism “privileges” an indigenous culture.
By not taking sides you ‘objectively’ back a particular party.
This kind of ‘objective’ ‘logic’ is well-known in Stalinist circles.
The Enlightenment, we learn on the authority of these thinkers, was a parochial western affair.
No doubt human rights are also parochial matters and not universal. The Sharia is just one cultural ‘option’ and who are ‘we’ to criticise it from the West?
Newman and his side-kick John Wight have been compressively demolished by Nick Wright, Sandy and Francis King, not to mention Sarah AB on Harry’s Place.
The counter-argument can be summarised: secular education, is, as Jaurès saw it, marked the absence of religious, or other, dogma. The role of the state is to make sure that individual doctrines, faiths or otherwise, do not get between students and the full range of ideas. That each student should be educated in an environment of equality, where religion plays no part in making the rules.
As the socialist Jaurès said,
The day that socialists come to found schools, I consider that the duty of the teacher would be, if I may say, to never pronounce even the word socialism in front of the children . Pour la Laïque (1910)
We should stand for universal values of free-thought, free-inquiry, and critical education without the interference of religious dogma.
No word about that from the SWP.
Instead Socialist Worker froths at the mouth at the entirely reasonable statements made by Labour’s Shadow Education Minister Tristram Hunt,
The Labour Party leadership’s response to the row has been despicable.
It didn’t call for an end to the racist scapegoating of Muslims or a defence of teachers and governors.
Instead Labour condemned the Tories for not witch hunting more.
Shadow education secretary Tristram Hunt said schools had been “skewed to prevent a broad and balanced education”.
He claimed there was “gender discrimination” in schools and that children were being “exposed to extremist views”.
It would be interesting to hear Labour candidate Andy Newman’s comments on his party’s stand on this issue.
Update (Hat-Tip LS).
“Teachers forced out of schools at the centre of the Trojan Horse allegations have been gagged by the authorities.
At least 12 senior staff – most of them heads – were banned from speaking out as part of their six-figure pay-off deals, it emerged last night.
Some claim they were bullied, intimidated and threatened over the bid by extremists to target state schools in Birmingham.”
“Local MP Khalid Mahmood called on the Government and council to ensure that former staff would be released from the gagging clauses.
Mr Mahmood, Labour MP for Birmingham Perry Barr, said: ‘A lot of people are still not speaking even in private because they are frightened of what may happen. “
To those who say, that’s the Mail, will they also accuse Khalid Mahmood?
I know it’s a different league but; the Trojan Horse-shit is running out of the same stable as Iraq war. Pols/media/agencies zero in- BOOM
The “Trojan horse” hoax has morphed into an anti-Muslim witch-hunt in Birmingham which risks spreading further. Shame on those responsible
Who will line up with George Galloway?
Salma Yaqoob makes this bold, but more reasonable, claim,
She has called on Mr Gove to “listen to the voices of the children, parents and community in Birmingham”.
“We are standing up for multicultural education in this diverse city which is inclusive of all our children,” she said.
“We totally reject Ofsted’s actions and conclusions.”
There is indeed little doubt that Gove’s motivations (he supports the institutions which allow faith to intrude ever closer into education) are suspect.
He is no friend of secular freedom.
But…..
Even the Guardian’s John Harris admits,
Much as it may not have amounted to an exercise in so-called radicalisation, there are certainly questions to be asked about “an extended Islamic assembly” held at Park View in November 2013. Publicised in the school’s official literature, it was addressed by Sheikh Shady al-Suleiman, a Muslim cleric who has views running from adultery to geopolitics that a lot of people would find offensive, let alone if he was speaking at a school funded from general taxation – something politely summed up in Ofsted’s finding that “external speakers have not been vetted properly”.
And at Oldknow Primary School – another academy run by a charitable trust, the EFA found that classrooms had been segregated, with girls sitting behind boys, that there was “no evidence that governors have been chosen based on their skills”, and that “staff told us that during Friday assembly occasionally words have been used such as ‘white prostitute’ which they felt were inappropriate for young children”.
At the risk of reopening old wounds on the liberal left, for all the noise from those on the right of culture and politics, it is no good crying “witch hunt” and averting your eyes from this stuff. It should have no place in any state school, and most of it is an offence to any halfway liberal principles. It’s right to point out that there are other state-funded schools which engage in comparable philosophies and practices most of them clustered in the so-called faith sector, but that should not absolve the state schools currently under the spotlight.
The flaw in official ‘multiculturalism’ is that is that is based on an uncritical acceptance of ‘difference’.
Such as the views of Sheikh Shady al-Suleiman and gender segregation.
In this context far from being liberal or left-wing it is an apology for reinforcing fixed cultural and religious identities.
We might say no tolerance for the intolerant!
The Guardian Editorial contains one good section,
This is not to say that the problems Ofsted uncovered in Birmingham were not potentially serious, only to dispute the notion that they are uniquely Muslim. Indeed, if the most damning individual details from across all 21 schools inspected are picked out and lumped together – youngsters hearing about “white prostitutes” in assemblies, private investigators snooping on staff emails – it is possible to paint a very frightening picture indeed, as Mr Gove did in the House. But if what the Guardian saw on the inside of the now infamous Park View academy last month is any guide, the overall picture is different.
It then descends into the habitual Guardian liberal meandering: on the one hand….. on the other…
Faith schools have been a fact on the ground since the Victorian beginnings of state education. Education with a religious flavour is sometimes very good, but disputes between clerics and pious parents on the one hand and politicians and academics on the other about what teachers should teach are inevitable. What seems to be emerging in Birmingham is not a plot to instil jihadist values, but a more familiar tussle between “rational” and religious teaching, in the novel context of non-Christian faith. But where politicians could set boundaries and guide communities calmly through a new form of a familiar dilemma, they scream in panic.
Charges of ‘extremism’ have muddied the waters: the real issue is the role of religion in education.
Instead of British values and any faith whatsoever, education should be based on universal values, of freedom, critical thinking, and the development of every student’s abilities.
If that sounds a bit goody-two-shoes, than Cameron’s call for schools to teach respect for British “institutions” sounds frankly idiotic.
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