En Passant

These latest Zionist untruths are a backhanded compliment to Socialist Alternative because fake leftists and Labor apparatchiks like Peter Baldwin know in the long run such revolutionary groups are attracting young idealists who want to change the world and who see through the lies of Zionism. This is very different to the Labor Party which attracts at best a few young careerists and hacks or turns the few idealists the Party does attract into careerists and hacks in a short period of time. Being rabidly pro-Zionist is almost a right of passage to greater things in the ALP.

As Omar Hassan in an article in Red Flag called Zionist students use lies, abuse to silence Palestinian solidarity activists wrote in August 2014:

There is evidence to indicate that this behaviour is a conscious strategy to undermine [Palestinian] solidarity activism on campuses.

Exactly, and the lie that Socialist Alternative organised this 11 March Sydney University ‘riot’, ‘violent protest’, in other words peaceful demonstration by the protestors, is just another untruth for that purpose.

Jeff Sparrow in Overland: It’s shameful to use bogus allegations of anti-Semitism to shut your opponents down.

We on the left must defend Socialist Alternative, its right to free speech and to organise.

If you support Palestine, and if you support free speech, I call on you to support Socialist Alternative at Monash University and across Australia in defence of Palestine, in opposition to Pyne’s higher education armaggedon and to join the fight against political repression.

On the surface this deal with various Labor factions appears unprincipled and further confirmation that for Socialist Alternative in Australia top down politics has overtaken bottom up approaches to building struggles.

Subscribe to Red Flag newspaper today. Help maintain a strong voice for the Palestinian resistance and counter to corporate media lies.

“Extremism” is a common trope of the establishment commentariat when decrying anyone whose views fall outside the narrow neoliberal political range of the major parties writes James Plested in Red Flag. The kind of people who write diatribes against the “extremism” of Socialist Alternative are the same people who, for example, see any real attempt at addressing climate change as tantamount to a communist conspiracy, and who positively gushed over the government’s decision to spend more than $12 billion on fighter jets, at the cost of health, education and welfare.

My hope is that there are sections within Socialist Alternative who understand there are real and serious problems and are trying to push against the tide of ‘revolutionary’ conformism to make their voices heard and influence the debate, if not win it and the battle against mindless militancy, adventurism and substitutionism.

Australian politicians and media commentators – Liberal and Labor, conservative and liberal alike – love telling us about their democracy and how great it is writes Ben Hillier in Red Flag. The thing is, they seem to be turning people off it.

In the circumstances of reformism’s despair and degeneration, abuse becomes a substitute for politics. To win laughter back we on the left need to help organise the fight, fight, fight against the neoliberalism of both parties which renders so many on the soft left, in their passivity, humourless and without hope.