Middle East Solidarity Day School 2016

Middle East Solidarity Day School 2016

Speakers include: Omar Barghouti, Ala’a Shehabi, Sameh Naguib, Joseph Daher, Adam Hanieh, Muzna al-Na’ib, Anne Alexander and others

This dayschool will provide an essential guide for activists and trade unionists who want to understand more about how ordinary people across the Middle East continue to resist military intervention and dictatorship in their day-to-day struggles for justice and dignity. Join the debate with leading activists from Palestine, Bahrain, Egypt and Syria who offer analysis of the region which cuts through the picture of confusion and despair in the mainstream media. We will also hear hidden stories of courage and resilience which continue to inspire, five years after the revolutions which shook the region and beyond.

Sessions on:

• Palestine and the struggle for justice
• Counter-revolution, military intervention and crisis in Syria
• Egypt: strategies for resistance
• Sectarian polarisation in the Gulf

Djam Lecture Theatre, SOAS, Russell Square, London, WC1H 0XG

£5 unwaged / £10 waged
Organised by Middle East Solidarity magazine with support from SOAS Unison, Egypt Solidarity Initiative, MENA Solidarity and Bahrain Watch

International Socialism #149 out now

The latest issue of International Socialism is now online, and while there is a host of material relating to Marxist theory and history, from debates about the level of class struggle in Britain to the struggle for climate justice, and discussion of figures from Erich Fromm to Leon Trotsky and E.P. Thompson, it leads with Mark L Thomas on the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn, while Jane Hardy looks at debates in radical and Marxist economics. Other key pieces include Anne Alexander writes on ISIS, imperialism and the war in Syria, and Alex Callinicos analyses the strategy and tactics for anti-imperialists in the West as they set about resisting the long war on 'terror' underway, in Britain through re-building the Stop the War Coalition. As he concludes:

One thing is clear, amid the chaos, confusion and bloodshed in the Middle East: imperialism is a key part of the problem there. The US, Britain, France, Russia and the rest, can do no good there. They should get out of the Middle East and leave its peoples to find their own way to the goals of democracy and social justice that inspired the revolutions of 2011. In the meantime, the task of the Western left is to rebuild the anti-war movement, and mobilise as many people as possible in a campaign to force our governments finally to end the long war.

Don't Bomb Syria

Take action now through the Stop the War Coalition to stop Cameron's drive to war

Refugees are welcome here day of action Saturday 12 September

Refugees are welcome here - National Day of Action Saturday 12 September 2015,

London details - assemble 12pm, Assembly point Marble Arch 2pm Rally,Downing Street

National day of action, Called by Stand up to Racism, BARAC, Stop the War Coalition, Migrant Rights Network  War on Want, Peoples Assembly Against Austerity, Unite Against Fascism, Movement Against Xenophobia, Love Music Hate Racism and Black Out London
 https://www.facebook.com/events/1629390697300657/

Conference: The Arab Uprisings Four Years On

The Arab Uprisings Four Years On
A conference organised by MENA Solidarity, Egypt Solidarity Initiative and BahrainWatch
6-9pm Friday 13 February – 10-5pm Saturday 14 February
School of African & Oriental Studies, Thornhaugh Street, Russell Square, London WC1H 0XG 
£5 student or unwaged / £10 waged

Four years after uprisings swept the Middle East millions of people still struggle for freedom and social justice. In 2011 dictators fell and new movements emerged in countries from North Africa to the Gulf. Their demands won support worldwide and inspired a host of campaigns for radical change.

Challenged by the prospect of democracy, regimes have since attempted counter-revolution. Some have used extreme violence; some have encouraged sectarian division or attempted to co-opt and control organisations of the mass movement. Activists across the Middle East nonetheless continue to work for change.

This conference addresses achievements of the revolutions and the challenges that now confront them:

• what can we learn about struggles from below and the responses of the state?
• have attempts at counter-revolution been successful?
• how are activist networks sustained – and how can we support them?

The conference will draw on experiences in Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Bahrain, Yemen, Libya and Morocco – and other countries in which activists have attempted to launch movements for change. It will consider the centrality of Palestine for movements across the region – and the impact of the uprisings within Palestine. Speakers will include activists from the front line, with assessments from academics, human rights experts and media analysts.

Speakers include: Ali Abdulemam – Gilbert Achcar – Anne Alexander – Miriyam Aouragh – Joseph Daher – Kamil Mahdi – Nadine Marroushi – Sameh Naguib – Ala’a Shehabi and others.

Sessions include:

• Revolution and counter-revolution: the people and the state
• Neo-liberalism and struggles for change
• Sectarianism
• Gender matters: women and the movements
• The workers’ movement and social justice
• Democratic agendas
• Solidarity and regional links
• Palestine and the struggle for liberation in the Arab world

The Bassem Chit Internet Archive

Friends of the late Lebanese Marxist Bassem Chit (1979-2014) might be interested to know that his selected writings are slowly being compiled online at the Marxists Internet Archive - here: http://marxists.org/history/etol/writers/chit/index.htm

Alex Callinicos on the multiple crises of imperialism

If the United States remains the command centre of global capitalism, a multiplicity of crises has been flashing up on its screens in the past few months. Let’s consider them in ascending order of importance from the perspective of US decision makers. First, there was Israel’s latest war on Gaza—not a crisis for Washington, more the kind of violent outburst through which a kind of equilibrium is re-established, but for growing numbers of people around the world an outrage and a crime. Secondly, there was the war—now halted by an uneasy ceasefire—between the pro-Western government in Kiev and Russian-backed forces in south eastern Ukraine. Thirdly, there is the US bombing campaign to halt the advance of the jihadi group that calls itself the Islamic State, but which we will continue to call ISIS, in Iraq and Syria. And, finally—not yet a crisis, but potentially the most serious conflict—there’s the increasingly intense interstate competition in East Asia in response to China’s growing power...

For revolutionaries, opposing Obama’s bombing campaign—and whatever other military actions follow—should be straightforward. (We should also, of course, oppose NATO expansion in Central and Eastern Europe.) But this opposition needs to be informed by an understanding that the latest US intervention in the Middle East takes place against the background of a renewal of inter-imperialist rivalries on a scale not seen since the end of the Cold War. Anti-imperialism during that era required, not simply opposing our “own” imperialism, but also refusing to prettify the actions of its rival and acknowledging that it too operates according to an imperialist logic. The same stance is required today, with the complication that today we are seeing multi-polar interstate competition. This is clearest in East Asia. On a global scale, the US remains the only world power, but it faces serious regional challenges from Russia and China, and within the Western bloc Germany and Japan are newly assertive.

Grasping this complexity is not an academic exercise. If we assign a “progressive” role to America’s rivals, we lose hold of the thread of class struggle. The main antagonism in the world becomes that between states rather than classes. But, beyond their real conflicts of interest, all the leading capitalist states are united by their common dependence on the exploitation of wage labour. As Lenin and Luxemburg understood so well in 1914, the critique of the imperialist system is an essential political tool in uniting workers against capital.

Read the full article, from the forthcoming issue of International Socialism, online here

The hypocrisy of the West over Syria

 In 1970 the Senate reported: "The US has dumped on Vietnam a quantity of toxic chemical (dioxin) amounting to six pounds per head of population." This was Operation Hades, later renamed the friendlier Operation Ranch Hand – the source of what Vietnamese doctors call a "cycle of foetal catastrophe". I have seen generations of children with their familiar, monstrous deformities. John Kerry, with his own blood-soaked war record, will remember them. I have seen them in Iraq too, where the US used depleted uranium and white phosphorus, as did the Israelis in Gaza. No Obama "red line" for them. No showdown psychodrama for them.
The sterile repetitive debate about whether "we" should "take action" against selected dictators (ie cheer on the US and its acolytes in yet another aerial killing spree) is part of our brainwashing. Richard Falk, professor emeritus of international law and UN special rapporteur on Palestine, describes it as "a self-righteous, one-way, legal/moral screen [with] positive images of western values and innocence portrayed as threatened, validating a campaign of unrestricted political violence". This "is so widely accepted as to be virtually unchallengeable".
It is the biggest lie: the product of "liberal realists" in Anglo-American politics, scholarship and media who ordain themselves as the world's crisis managers, rather than the cause of a crisis. Stripping humanity from the study of nations and congealing it with jargon that serves western power designs, they mark "failed", "rogue" or "evil" states for "humanitarian intervention"...
  From John Pilger 'The silent military coup that took over Washington'

The problem for America in all of this is that its capacity to impact diplomatic negotiations is limited by the fact that its record of asserting its military power stands squarely at odds with its pretensions of moral authority. For all America's condemnations of chemical weapons, the people of Falluja in Iraq are experiencing the birth defects and deformities in children and increases in early-life cancer that may be linked to the use of depleted uranium during the US bombardment of the town. It also used white phosphorus against combatants in Falluja.
Its chief ally in the region, Israel, holds the record for ignoring UN resolutions, and the US is not a participant in the international criminal court – which is charged with bringing perpetrators of war crimes to justice – because it refuses to allow its own citizens to be charged. On the very day Obama lectured the world on international norms he launched a drone strike in Yemen that killed six people.
Obama appealing for the Syrian regime to be brought to heel under international law is a bit like Tony Soprano asking the courts for a restraining order against one of his mob rivals – it cannot be taken seriously because the very laws he is invoking are laws he openly flouts....
From Gary Younge, 'The US has little credibility left'

A quick salutation to Miliband

No, not Ed - but Ralph:

[The] ‘acceptance of the legitimacy of military intervention on the ground of the exceptionally tyrannical nature of a regime opens the way to even more military adventurism, predatoriness, conquest and subjugation than is already rife in the world today.The rejection of military intervention on this score is not meant to claim immunity and protection for tyrannical regimes... Tyrannical regimes make opposition extremely difficult: but they do not make it impossible. And the point is to help internal opposition rather than engage in military ‘substitutism’...

A blow to imperialism - and a victory for the anti-war movement!

It looks after Cameron's defeat in the parliamentary vote over Syria as if British troops may well - as when Harold Wilson was forced by the anti-Vietnam war movement to keep Britain out of Vietnam - have been kept out of the looming possible Western military intervention in Syria - what a blow to imperialism and what a victory for the anti-war movement!  As Philip Hammond, the Tory defence secretary, admitted on Newsnight, 'the result shows there is a "deep sense of unease" about involvement in the Middle East to do to with Iraq. It's a "legacy experience", he says. Just as the US took many years to get over Vietnam, Britain will take many years to get over Iraq. Iraq has "poisoned the well" of public opinion, he says (using the phrase Cameron used in the debate)'.

To all those who said the Stop the War movement in Britain achieved nothing - this vote is final vindication that it changed British politics fundamentally - never let it again be said that mass movements from below for change do not make a difference - the past (and present) actions of Stop the War activists were absolutely central to the historic and glorious vote in parliament tonight.  Cameron is now weaker than ever - this is the biggest and most serious defeat Cameron and the Coalition government has  received since coming to office.  Now is the time to go on the offensive and bring this government down - this Saturday's anti-war demonstrations should reinforce the message delivered tonight in Westminster - and everyone should then descend on the Tory party conference in Manchester to protest against the cuts and privatisation on September 29th - and to say 'Welfare not Warfare - it is time for the warmongering Tory scumbag Cameron to go'.

Edited to add: Stop the War Coalition statement
and see also Socialist Worker

Emergency protest / National Demonstration: No attack on Syria

From the Stop the War Coalition:

No attack on Syria

Protest 5pm, Wednesday 28 August, Downing Street, London

Britain, France and the US are committing to another disastrous military intervention. Apart from the inevitable casualties, any attack on Syria can only inflame an already disastrous civil war and would risk pulling in regional powers further.

Most people in this country have learnt from the disasters of Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. According to a Telegraph/YouGov poll on Sunday only 9% of the British public would support troops being sent to Syria, and only 16% support sending more arms to the region. Our politicians however have learnt nothing.

 We need the maximum level of protest to stop them plunging us in to yet another catastrophic war.

 Edited to add:
 National Demonstration: Saturday 31 August, 12 noon, Embankment, London

Edited to also add, read Joseph Daher, Alex Callinicos, Judith Orr and see this statement from Syrian revolutionary socialists.