Last Saturday Chartist magazine had a well attended AGM at the Marx Memorial library. Clerkenwell Green. A key speaker, John McDonnell, former Shadow Chancellor, talked on Ukraine and finished by citing his Guardian article on Gaza calling for a Ceasefire. McDonnell has been at many of the protests on the issue.
Nobody could have anticipated that politics on this subject would take this turn.
Last night Yvette Cooper, the shadow home secretary, posted these on X.
Suella Braverman is out of control. Her article tonight is a highly irresponsible, dangerous attempt to undermine respect for police at a sensitive time, to rip up operational independence & to inflame community tensions. No other Home Secretary of any party would ever do this
She’s deliberately seeking to stir up political division around Remembrance Day, a moment when the whole country can come together to pay our respects for sacrifices of the past. And at same time she’s deliberately undermining police ability to deal with problems she whips up
Either Rishi Sunak has licensed this or he is too weak to sack her. Job of Home Secretary is to keep our country safe, not to run an endless Tory leadership campaign If PM can’t get a grip of Suella Braverman’s conduct, means he’s given up any pretence of serious government
Suella Braverman is out of control. Her article tonight is a highly irresponsible, dangerous attempt to undermine respect for police at a sensitive time, to rip up operational independence & to inflame community tensions. No other Home Secretary of any party would ever do this
Suella Braverman seeking to exploit the sensitivities of this moment, and an ignorance of Northern Ireland’s history, to inflame community tensions for her own leadership campaign is an appalling new low. Rishi Sunak must sack her. But he’s too weak.
Braverman's Times oped is a one way bet: if the Met go hard on marchers with "resistance" imagery, or against breakaway station occupations, there will be disorder. If the fascists turn up there will be disorder, whatever the Met does. Either way she gets to be sacked on a high… pic.twitter.com/urOuhzLQgJ
The Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) has suspended four officers of its Manchester branch for statements supporting the right of Palestinians to resist Israeli occupation, according to new revelations by Electronic Intifada‘s Asa Winstanley.!
Thoroughly disappointed to see that PSC, who whilst I praise the efforts in organising weekly marches, have banned four members of their Manchester branch over this banner and mentioning ‘freedom fighters’. They want to suppress the resistance even within organisations. pic.twitter.com/uPdaUPArmY
“The suspension came around two weeks after Manchester PSC displayed a banner supporting Palestinian resistance at a pro-Palestine march and posted an article to its website supporting Palestinian ‘freedom fighters’ in their action against Israel. Manchester is reportedly one of the group’s most active branches.”
Chubby Skwawkbox continues,
“Right-wing groups and publications (sic) attacked PSC Manchester’s support for Palestinian resistance and the criticism appears to have spooked PSC national’s leadership, as national secretary Ben Soffa emailed the Manchester officers, each individually, notifying them of their suspension and telling them that they “must therefore cease from taking actions in the name of your PSC branch whilst your membership remains suspended”, because the earlier posts may “exhibit hateful or discriminatory behaviour, or significantly undermine PSC’s ability to function as a welcoming and inclusive organisation“.”
Small businessman Steve Walker churns out this conspiracy anti-Semetic stuff.,
“As Winstanley notes, the reality of events in Israel on 7 October may be at severe variance with the ‘atrocity propaganda’ that continues to be pushed about them, particularly when Israeli survivors of the day have told their own media that they were well treated by the Hamas fighters and that many and perhaps most deaths were caused by IDF bullets – and that doctors and bereaved families have expressed alarm at the Israeli government’s haste to bury the bodies of those killed even when they have not yet been identified:
..what really happened on 7 October is hotly contested. Hamas itself has denied targeting civilians, and some Israeli survivors of that day have insisted that many of the civilians died at the hands of Israeli forces.
Until Israel allows an independent international investigation, we are unlikely to learn the full truth. But it may already be too late for that – Israel appears to be literally burying the evidence.”
Apart from truth-seeker Walker’s wild claims the suspended PSC officers will remind some people of the unconditional solidarity some on the ‘left’ expressed with the Black September Munich Massacre in 1972.
Arguably no other person has had more influence on the events of the last hundred or so years than Lenin. Arguably without him there would have been no Russian Revolution, no Stalinism, no Cold War, no monolithic state apparatus in China and elsewhere. It is also the case that fear of communism was one factor, although admittedly not the main one, leading to the triumph of fascism and Nazism in the inter-war period.
Yet Marxists would argue that the modern world has been shaped by the emergence of capitalism from feudalism, the class struggle, base determining superstructure etc., not by the role of an individual. Yet, another yet, Marx himself wrote that men make their own history but under already existing circumstances.
Lenin came from a wealthy land-owning background and always had the resources to fund his own activities. The fact that his older brother Alexander Ulyanov was hanged for his involvement in the Narodnaya Volya attempt to assassinate Tsar Alexander III must surely have reinforced his revolutionary beliefs. He was clearly influenced by the writings not only of Marx and Engels but also the founder of Russian Marxism Georgi Plekhanov, as can be seen in his early work on the development of capitalism in Russia. His seminal work ‘What Is To Be Done’ outlined his conception of a tightly-knit party of professional revolutionaries that would lead the proletariat to socialism. The working-class was incapable of developing socialist consciousness spontaneously and therefore needed a vanguard party to show them the way. This was a momentous development, the substitution of party for class as it subsequently unfolded. It led to the split in the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, with Lenin’s Menshevik opponents advocating a more open mass party. Trotsky rightly foresaw at the time the danger that this conception presaged dictatorship over the people as its logical conclusion, but unfortunately perhaps Trotsky changed his mind in 1917.
Maybe if events had worked out differently the Bolsheviks would have remained a marginal force in Russian politics. However, the outbreak of the First World War proved fatal for the Tsarist regime as defeats led to disillusion and scarcity and the spontaneous February Revolution was the result. The Provisional Government that then emerged, based largely on the more moderate socialist parties, did not ultimately have an answer to the Bolshevik demands for “bread, peace and land”. However, until the arrival of Lenin in Petrograd in a sealed German train, the Bolshevik leadership had assumed that Russia would undergo a period of bourgeois liberalism. Then Lenin turns up at the Finland Station and urges them to prepare for the seizure of state power. Without Lenin therefore it is unlikely that the October Revolution would have occurred, since it was not a spontaneous uprising as in February but a planned coup with support from workers and soldiers in Petrograd. It could also be argued though that without the Bolsheviks General Kornilov’s reactionary coup attempt would have succeeded in summer 1917 and Russia might then have been plunged into a bloody counter-revolutionary scenario.
My late friend Tony Polan published a book in 1984 entitled ‘Lenin and the End of Politics’, which focused on Lenin’s work ‘The State and Revolution’, which he wrote in the period before the Bolshevik Revolution. One of Polan’s main themes in this book is that there is no place for civil society in Lenin’s vision of the future. He blames this on Marx’s writings on ‘The Civil War in France’ on the Paris Commune of 1871, in which he described how the Commune combined both executive and legislative functions. However, one of the reviewers of Polan’s book, Wayne Gabardi, suggested that it was Engels rather than Marx who saw the Commune as the blueprint for a future socialist society.
The point about civil society is crucial though. We are talking about democratically elected parliaments, some sort of party system, freedom of speech and the press and the rule of law. Polan argued that all of these were seen by Lenin merely as the outward show of bourgeois rule and not appropriate for life under the dictatorship of the proletariat. “The state, formed under the capitalist mode of production, is appropriate only for that social system”. It was necessary therefore to smash the bourgeois state machine.
Polan concluded that the abolition of civil society represented the end of politics, to be replaced by the arbitrary rule of bureaucrats and inevitably in the end came the Gulag. In the words of Rosa Luxemburg, this system “was worse than the disease it was meant to cure”. The absence of the rule of law meant that there were no legal constraints on the operations of the Cheka, the secret police force established under Lenin and Trotsky, which could arrest people or shoot them arbitrarily. It meant that a march of women protesting about food prices could be fired on. It meant that 2500 Kronstadt sailors could be shot down without mercy.
Bukharin and some other Bolshevik leaders wanted to see a coalition government made up of all the socialist parties. Instead, the road to tyranny was being paved. Elections were held to a Constituent Assembly in 1918 but when the Bolsheviks found that they had received only 25% of the vote they moved to dissolve it. Not only the pro-capitalist Kadet Party but also the socialist parties – the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries – found their newspapers shut down, their members arrested and, in some cases, shot, their parties totally banned. Lenin advised his Menshevik friend Martov to flee the country as he could offer him no protection. Undeniably the scale of repression increased massively under Stalin’s paranoid regime but the repression began well before his rise to power.
So this is how the party came to hold sway over society as it still does in China, North Korea, Vietnam and Cuba. Polan made the point that Lenin’s concept of the vanguard party addressed the problem for Marxists of “the apparent inability or reluctance of the proletariat to act as the self-conscious agency of revolution”. This may not have been apparent in 1902 but was more obvious in the period after the First World War. Marx however wrote in the Communist Manifesto that “the communists do not form a separate party opposed to the other working-class parties”, so it appears that Lenin’s notion of the vanguard party is an epistemological break with Marxism and this makes a nonsense of the term Marxism-Leninism.
Polan also addresses Lenin’s understanding of bureaucracy, which he contrasts unfavourably with that of the German theorist Max Weber. Lenin seemed to believe that once the working-class had seized power only a minimal state would be required á la Liz Truss because the administrative tasks of the state had been immensely simplified by the forces of production. In contrast Weber understood that the modern state requires a sizeable bureaucracy which will include technical experts. It had developed a new complexity. The tasks previously carried out by the family and the community had now been assigned to the new welfare systems in Britain and Germany for example.
Polan made the point that if you abolish the market economy, you have to take on directly some immensely complex tasks and the further point that the political revolution that Trotsky advocated in order to overthrow the rule of the bureaucracy “would not remove the complex tasks which demanded the operation of those necessary functions which the bureaucracy had performed”. He later contrasts Lenin and Trotsky’s narrow view of bureaucrats as motivated solely by economic gain with Weber and Habermas’s more sophisticated view that “the bureaucrat derives a motivation from the functions he performs and a power from the necessity of that function and the skills that he possesses to fulfil it”. (Polan op.cit.)
So the reality of life in post-revolutionary Russia precluded Lenin’s original minimalist view of the post-revolutionary state. It is also noteworthy that in this period Lenin became obsessed with the current practices of American capitalism and advocated one-man management of industry and Taylorism. Workers’ control of industry had never been in the Bolsheviks’ playbook and this is certainly not what happened. Consequently it is difficult to see what the workers of Petrograd ultimately gained from the second revolution which many of them had supported.
What then should we conclude from all this? Any plans to develop a vanguard party that believes it is the sole guardian of truth should be discarded. However, the world is suffering not only from the existence of totalitarian dictatorships and authoritarian regimes that claim to be democracies. It is also suffering from largely unregulated capitalism that, since the Thatcher-Reagan era, has produced a growing gulf between a tiny minority of the super-rich and the growing multitude of the poor. The sustained development of the forces of production is causing immense damage to our world threatening both the future of its human beings and of its other species.
My conclusion is that a rejection of Leninism and an appreciation of where the limitations of Marxism lie should not lead us to rule out the notion that some form of democratic socialism is the way forward. If we embrace Polan’s argument on the need to retain the liberal freedoms of ‘bourgeois’ civil society – freedom of speech, the press, the right to form political parties, the rule of law etc – then we could be envisaging a pluralist socialistic society. Precisely how to square this with the continued existence or abolition or containment of capitalism is problematic and beyond the scope of this article or its author’s capacity to provide a comprehensive solution. Perhaps the most we can hope for currently is something like the programme outlined in the 2017 Labour Party manifesto leading to a more progressive outcome, from which we could hope to make further advancement. Venceremos, but be wary of what this means.
@Chartist48 Dave Lister Obituary : Educationalist and socialist campaigner. Mike Davis remembers a thoughtful long-time friend. https://t.co/jDTkRMzTZC
Thought they were no longer around. Apparently they are.
We fought them so many times in the 1970s…
Yet again, the nazi National Front are allowed to hold a disgusting insult to those who died fighting fascism…at the Cenotaph. From @RishiSunak Suella Braverman, silence. Shameful. (Thanks to those who've DM'd us)@Searchlight_mag@AntiRacismDaypic.twitter.com/oyYBK0LqV0
The image that has been appearing on posters at “anti-Israel” demonstrations around the world – of someone binning a Star of David – looked familiar to me.
And I was right – this is from a 2013 @CST_UK document.
..the question now is whether Labour is capable of effective government – not just in managing the day-to-day administration, but in responding to potentially world-changing events that require moral judgments and fundamental political choices. Gaza has been the most significant test to date of whether Labour is fit to govern.
When Hamas launched its appalling pogrom on innocent Israelis, there was unanimous condemnation across the Labour party and the trade union movement. There was also unanimity that Israel has the right to defend itself.
It is in determining how Israel exercises that right to defend itself that finer moral and political judgment comes into play. Some people would consider that it is here that Labour’s judgment is found to be significantly wanting, alongside a display of inexperience in the political frontline in a time of crisis and a failure of political delivery.
When the Israeli government took the decision to blockade Gaza, preventing the supply of food, water and medicines, it was an absolutely clear breach of Article 8 of the Rome Statute determining war crimes. The article stipulates it is a crime to intentionally use “starvation of civilians as a method of warfare by depriving them of objects indispensable to their survival, including wilfully impeding relief supplies as provided for under the Geneva Convention”. More significantly, it was morally indefensible.
The recitation of ineffective calls for Israel to abide by international law when the indiscriminate effects of its bombing are self-evidents calls into question yet again the moral judgments being made at the centre of the Labour administration.
The same question is being asked about the decision to shelter behind the US’s call for a pause in the bombing and invasion, rather than a ceasefire. When the loss of life has reached more than 9,000 people, how can we morally even consider the proposal that, after a short break in combat, we support the return to the inevitable mass killing of civilians and more children that will ensue from the street-by-street attack on Gaza City?
If there is to be a pause, I would suggest it should be a very brief pause within the Labour party to assess the moral basis upon which decisions are being taken, and for reflection on whether they align with the moral compass that has directed our party since its foundation.
…….
This measured article will be welcomed by many.
Extremely moving display of compassion by Jewish young people singing outside the Foreign Office “Ceasefire now. Justice for all” & “Olam Chesed Yibaneh, We will build this world with love.” @NaamodUKhttps://t.co/uPdBRTCGMD
Spoke today at demonstration for a ceasefire in Gaza, an end to bombing, land invasion, blockade & for the release of the hostages. With the killing of so many innocent civilians, including 2000 children we’re witnessing war crimes & to be silent is complicity. @PSCupdatespic.twitter.com/zLPHfDqTQj
Meanwhile Sheffield Labour Councillors have voted publicly at Council to demand an immediate ceasefire, a cessation of all arms sales and military aid to Israel, to condemn the government’s abstention at the United Nations against a humanitarian truce and to join Sheffield Coalition Against Israeli Apartheid.
This is believed to be the first time Labour councillors have voted for a motion calling for a ceasefire in a public meeting since the Hamas attacks on 7th October. Councillors suggested to the leadership of the Labour council group that many could resign their positions if Labour did not vote to back the motion.
“it is not freedom it wants but control; and it is equally prepared to torture Palestinians to achieve this.”
The latest Private Eye carries this article, “Hamas Watch”.
It begins in 2014 when Hamas “used the cover of an Israeli attack to carry ouf a campaign of abductions, torture and unlawful killings again those whom it accused of “collaborating’ including Fatah supporters.”
There were at least 23 murders.
The piece cites Human Rights Watch in 2018.
The full report also mentions the Palestinian Authority,
Both the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank and the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) in Gaza have in recent years carried out scores of arbitrary arrests for peaceful criticism of the authorities, particularly on social media, among independent journalists, on university campuses, and at demonstrations. As the Fatah-Hamas feud deepened despite attempts at reconciliation, PA security services have targeted supporters of Hamas and vice versa. Relying primarily on overly broad laws that criminalize activity such as causing “sectarian strife” or insulting “higher authorities,” the PA and Hamas use detention to punish critics and deter them and others from further activism. In detention, security forces routinely taunt, threaten, beat, and force detainees into painful stress positions for hours at a time.
Accusations of torture in Gaza, in 2021, were not investigated.
In August of this year six men were hanged for “collaboration” after peaceful protestes were held.
The column concludes by saying that Gazans are living under a “terrorist dictatorship”. The author accuses Hamas of turning its citizens into “not just as human shields, but into weapons.
………
Full article, (hat-tip Jim D)
“
Hamas Watch (from Private Eye 3 Nov 2023):
THE sheer brutality Hamas displayed against innocent people in Israel on 7 October shocked and appalled the world.
Partly this is because people cannot comprehend how any human being can carry out such acts. But had they studied Hamas’s record, they might have been less surprised: Hamas has been honing its brutality for years on another group of innocents – the people of Gaza whom it purports to protect.
Hamas may claim to want freedom for Gaza. But its actions show it is not freedom it wants but control; and it is equally prepared to torture Palestinians to achieve this.
This was clear in 2014 when Hamas used the cover of an Israeli attack to carry out a campaign of abductions, torture and unlawful killings against those it accused of “collaborating”, including Fatah supporters.
At least 23 people were extrajudicially murdered, some of whom had been in jail for years. They included Atta Najjar, a former police officer with a mental disability, who was jailed in 2009 for “collaboration”. His body was returned to his family looking, his brother told Amnesty International, “as if you’d put it in a bag and smashed it.”
The pattern has continued ever since. A 2018 Human Rights watch investigation, based on 147 interviews and a review of photographic and video evidence, medical reports and court documents, concluded that Hamas used arrest to deter and punish criticism, with torture in custody not only routine but actual Hamas government policy.
In 2021, Palestine’s Independent Commission for Human Rights (ICHR) received 193 complaints of torture by Hamas in Gaza, but said no steps are taken to investigate this. Accounts of torture included beatings with truncheons, gun butts, hoses and wire, whipping of soles of feet and prolonged and painful stress positioning, forcing detainees to stand or sit on tiny chairs for hours or even days.
Torture sites included Internal Security’s Gaza City detention centre and a disused outpatient clinic besides Al-Shifa hospital. In 2022, a UN Human Rights Council Report accused Hamas of using excessive force against its people, who have occasionally tried to complain peacefully to their “government” about living conditions and shortages.
When, this August, the complaining turned to peaceful protest, Hamas responded with violence, restricting public access to the streets and arresting and assaulting Palestinian journalists like Ihab Fasfous, Mohammed Abdlrazeq al-Baba and Bashar Ahmed Taleb. That same week it was announced that six men were to hang for “collaboration”, the sudden escalation to death sentences looking like a clear warning to others.
While Gazans have been living under a terrorist dictatorship, with no right to complain, dissent, or, since 2006, to vote, Hamas has practiced its brutality on them, erasing its own humanity in the process. Now, in brutalising Israelis, it has turned Gazans not just into human shields, but into weapons, probably hoping that provoking their deaths by hiding among them will eventually lead to the destruction of Israel. It is as disgusting as it is cynical.
Hamas has failed its people, but we should not. All of which means the near-impossible must be achieved. Gazans must be protected, but Hamas must be held to account.
Police said they were investigating after the first incident in Birmingham on Monday in which what appeared to be mice painted red, black, green and white – the colours of the Palestinian flag – were released into a McDonald’s in the north of the city.
Other videos posted on social media showed what appear to be two similar protests at different McDonald’s branches.
In one video, staff can be seen trying to contain dozens of rodents under a plastic box, with one onlooker saying they had been “dropped off”.
Another video appeared to show a group of masked men enter a McDonald’s while chanting “Free Palestine” and throwing a box of rodents on the ground near to staff.
West Midlands police said: “We’re investigating after live rodents were thrown into a restaurant off Watson Road, Nechells. We understand the distress this will have caused and it’s not acceptable in any circumstances.
“This is currently being treated as a public nuisance offence and we’ve active lines of inquiries to identify, and then arrest, who was involved.”
They urged anyone with information, photos or video footage of the incident to submit it to the force.
In the first incident, video footage shows a man with what appears to be a Palestinian flag draped around his head carrying the rodents from the boot of a car into the McDonald’s and tipping them on to the floor, in front of horrified customers.
As the animals scurry around the floor, diners can be seen running away. He can then be heard shouting: “Boycott Israel” and “Fuck Israel”.
Videos from a separate incident in Birmingham on Tuesday showed a group of people entering a McDonald’s and shouting “Free Palestine” as box of what appeared to be mice was thrown on to the floor.
McDonald’s UK said: “We are aware of a second incident in one of our Birmingham restaurants. The restaurant has been fully sanitised and our pest control partners have carried out a full inspection. We are working with West Midlands police on both incidents.”
Calls to boycott the global fast food chain have stemmed from McDonald’s Israel saying that it had given thousands of free meals to Israeli military personnel.Gang release mice in third McDonald’s branch as company hits back at online ‘misinformation’
Islamabad issued an ultimatum in early October to 1.7 million Afghans it says were living illegally in Pakistan: leave by November 1 or face arrest and expulsion. The government has blamed recent militant attacks on Afghans living in Pakistan. Faced with the impossible choice, many Afghans are now choosing to leave the country despite having made their homes there.
Bid to join other far-right groups in elections, rejected, for now.
The Party Of Islam's application to register as a political party has been rejected by the Electoral Commission because the party's proposals "did not meet the requirements set out in electoral law". I wonder if the commission was bemused/worried by the novel word, "lingure". pic.twitter.com/mmEoUXtV1q
“A new “Party of Islam” has been rejected by the Electoral Commission in the UK. A spokesperson for the commission said “We refused the application. The proposed constitution did not satisfactorily set out the structure and organisation of the party.” Reports EU Today.
The party had applied to register with the commission, which is the independent body that oversees elections and regulates political parties in the UK.
The application was submitted on October 13th, just days after the Hames atrocities committed in Israel left more than 1,400 Israelis, mostly civilians, dead.
In its official application, the Party of Islam states “We are a party who has been created to help all of the minority in the land of Great Britain have a voice.”
The Party of Islam has also stated its intention to “help all of the minority in the land of Great Britain have a voice,” further stating: “We will make sure that all problems which lingure (sic) in the great country of Great Britain is defeated.”
he commission said that it had considered the party’s application “in line with the legal tests set out in the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000″.
“We refused the application,” the spokesperson said. “The proposed constitution did not satisfactorily set out the structure and organisation of the party.
“Their proposed financial scheme did not meet the requirements set out in electoral law. Their application form was also non-complaint with electoral law. They have not been registered as a political party.”
The party has the right to appeal the decision.
Previously, The Islamic Party of Britain, formed in 1989, claimed to be the very first national Islamic political organisation in the UK and the only Islamic political party in the non-Muslim Western world.
The lynch mob which stormed the airport in Dagestan, Russia to search for Jews as a plane was landing from Tel Aviv has found its first “suspected Jew”
He tells them he is Uzbek, but they don’t believe him
When word spread that a plane from Tel Aviv was landing in Dagestan, Russia, a mob stormed the airport in what can only be described as a modern-day pogrom. pic.twitter.com/1G6phfdraz
Airport in Russia’s Muslim southern region closed after hundreds storm tarmac and climb on to planes
A mob in Russia’s mostly Muslim region of Dagestan has stormed the airport in Makhachkala in search of Jewish passengers arriving from Israel.
In the past day, local people have besieged a hotel in search of Jewish guests and stormed the airport after reports emerged that a flight from Tel Aviv was arriving in the city. Passengers were forced to take refuge in planes or hide in the airport for fear of being attacked.
Local health authorities said that 20 people had been injured, including two who were critical. The RIA news agency said nine police officers had received injuries in the incident, two of whom were being treated in hospital. The passengers on the plane were safe, security forces told Reuters.
Plusieurs dizaines d’hommes ont pénétré, dimanche, sur le tarmac et dans le terminal de l’aéroport de Makhatchkala, capitale de cette république russe à majorité musulmane, à l’annonce de l’arrivée d’un avion en provenance d’Israël.
Dilly graduated from the University of East Anglia, Norwich, with a BA Honours in Politics in 2009. He went on to complete his NCTJ Certificate in Print Journalism in 2010 while reporting for the Bedfordshire on Sunday.
He left Bedfordshire on Sunday in 2011 and worked as a freelance documentary researcher at Press TV. (Iranian regime state channel) Dilly has also contributed to numerous Islamic publications like Al Jumuah Magazine,The Revival Magazine and Islam21c.
Dilly regularly appears on Sky News, Channel 4 News, BBC Look East, BBC South, BBC One,Islam Channel, Russia Today and BBC radio stations discussing Middle East and North African politics, and domestic topics concerning British Muslims. He is also a blogger for the Huffington Post, a columnist for the Middle East Eyeand Pakistan Today, and a freelance contributor for Al Jazeera English, the Ceasefire Magazine and the Foreign Policy Journal.
He enjoys reading and writing, as well as keeping up to date with current affairs. Dilly is also keen on learning about different cultures, traditions and history. He speaks fluent Bengali, and good Hindi, Urdu and Punjabi (Kashmiri).
Dilly plays Saturday league cricket, is a member of Bedford Amateur Boxing Club, and is an avid Liverpool FC and UFC fan. He loves reading historical fiction, crime novels and watching documentaries, as well as travelling and the gym.
Dilly is a British born Bangladeshi, raised and residing in Bedford.
“Over 600 people packed into a hall and two over-spill rooms at Socialist Workers’ London Palestine meeting this week.”
Tariq Ali.
“When I heard that Hamas decided to go in and say to the Israelis, “Here we are, get out of our territory, lift the siege”, I was actually very happy.”
He adds, with a tear in his eyes, ” Obviously, I was not happy by the death of civilians anywhere.”
Ali avoids mentioning what this “hit back” from Gaza involved. The October the 7th massacres. ” Hamas murdered 1,400 people on 7 October, there are not one or two Israelis captive in Gaza, but 220 – among them children, the elderly, and dual and foreign nationals. Netanyahu must now decide what price Israel is willing to pay for their safe return, if it is even possible while waging a war against Hamas that has killed more than 7,000 Palestinians.” (Guardian)
Ali then recalls, through the fog of ages, Vietnam,,
I thought then about the Vietnam War—the press reported another [Vietnamese resistance] bombing of a café in Saigon, which was then controlled by the Americans. The Vietnamese replied, saying, “Yes, we did it. All the places we’ve bombed are used by US soldiers. We don’t like killing civilians, but if the US leave Vietnam, we will stop bombing these places.”
Then Algeria, and the 1966 film by Gillo Pontecorvo, The Battle of Algiers,
In one part, a resistance fighter is asked why they bombed cafes where French families were killed. He replied that they [the resistance] would be more accurate if the French gave them an air force.
If Ali think this detail in the Pontecorvo has aged well, it has not. The bombing of targets like the Milk Bar, ( Algeria’s Milk Bar Bomber). It might be helpful were he familiar with such details as this: La Bataille d’Alger was this, “The Battle of Algiers was a campaign of urban guerrilla warfare and terrorist attacks carried out by the National Liberation Front (FLN) against the French authorities in Algiers, and by the French authorities, army, and French terrorist organisations, against the FLN] Both sides targeted civilians throughout the battle.”
Would he like to see something like that again?
From cosy Camden Ali continues,
On the first occasion the Palestinian resistance decides to hit back, there has been complete criticism. But there’s no criticism in Palestine, nor on the streets of Cairo, nor Rabat in Morocco.”
The Arab Street, which the former leftist knows well, speaks. He listens.
“The global fight, of course, will carry on. I appeal to the Palestinian Authority to stop the collaboration with Israel. Here’s your opportunity to break with them, say you will no longer sit at the table with Netanyahu and the outright fascists in his government today.”
Ali does not mention what the other fascist body, Hamas wants…..
The one time IMG member, admirer of Boris Yeltsin, one time Liberal Democrats voter, Green voter, self-identifying Corbyn’s one time best friend, Brexit ultra and associate of Communist Party of Britain’s Andrew Murray, now SWP star, still has fire in the belly.
“And say you won’t talk until they end the siege of Gaza. They should say to Israel that, “You can’t obliterate us. We refuse to die, and we are going on, and large parts of the world are with us.”
Ali wrote this on the New Left Review Blog. recalling one of his essays as pupil at Saint Custard’s, when he’d just read Franz Fanon and Malcom X,
.”.they know this must be resisted by any means necessary. Earlier this year, Palestinians watched the demonstrations in Tel Aviv and understood that those marching to ‘defend civil rights’ did not care about the rights of their occupied neighbours. They decided to take matters into their own hands.
Do the Palestinians have a right to resist the non-stop aggression to which they are subjected? Absolutely. There is no moral, political or military equivalence as far as the two sides are concerned. Israel is a nuclear state, armed to the teeth by the US. Its existence is not under threat. It’s the Palestinians, their lands, their lives, that are. Western civilization seems willing to stand by while they are exterminated. They, on the other hand, are rising up against the colonizers.”
Comrade John McDonnell, by contrast, speaks for internationalists,
Spoke today at demonstration for a ceasefire in Gaza, an end to bombing, land invasion, blockade & for the release of the hostages. With the killing of so many innocent civilians, including 2000 children we’re witnessing war crimes & to be silent is complicity. @PSCupdatespic.twitter.com/zLPHfDqTQj
The family of #ArmitaGaravand are not even allowed to take her body to their hometown and bury her there. The regime is forcing them to bury her in Tehran.
Armita didn't die, she didn't pass away, she didn't leave this earth. She was murdered by the Islamic Republic. Just like… pic.twitter.com/2oqYBennA4
“Iran has stepped up measures over the past few months against women and businesses who breach the hijab rules.
In September, lawmakers voted in favour of toughening the penalties, which include jail sentences of up to 10 years for women who violate the dress code.
With the left coalition NUPES rapidly disintegrating in France and the formation of a new party led by Sahra Wagenknecht in Germany, it’s been a dramatic period for Europe’s progressive forces. NICK WRIGHT assesses the situation https://t.co/nqvywPq1ig
The Morning Star, independent of the Communist Party of Britain (CPB) and published by the co-op, carried this story yesterday by a top Tendance Coatesy contributor.
(note I have added the vexing absent accent in the article original for Mélenchon)
“LAST weekend saw big upsets on the left in France and Germany. The economic crisis that goes with Europe’s submission to the US strategy of tension with Russia — with its openly proclaimed objective of limiting Chinese influence — expresses itself in a political crisis that has inevitably drawn in the left.”
Despite this bizarre beginning, though perhaps Wright knows something about French left politics and its relationship to the US “strategy of tension” that has escaped other commentateurs, he makes some reasonable points about the crisis in the French left alliance, NUPES, Nouvelle Union populaire écologique et sociale. This brings together La France insoumise, Communists, Socialists, Greens and some small parties and has 151 MPs in the National Assembly, rather more than the MPs from Wrights own party, the CPB.
Now NUPES is falling apart.
The French Communist Party (PCF) has concluded that NUPES is at an impasse and has called for the opening of “a new page in the coming together of the left and ecologists.” The objective is to constitute a “new popular front” capable of being in the majority.
Among the factors leading up to the division (note this particular split extended right through the LFI) was the reinstatement in the parliamentary group of La France Insoumise (LFI), the biggest component of NUPES, of the deputy Adrien Quatennens, an ally of LFI leader Mélenchon, despite his conviction for domestic violence and against the opposition of of many, including feminist deputies.
In the labour movement the LFI in general and Mélenchon in particular are criticised for the disrespect they displayed towards the unions during the powerful pensions protests which earlier this year so dramatically weakened President Macron’s standing.
This is also the case, and the Tendance reported on this in details – noting for example the stand of the PCF in the Parisian suburb of Nanterre where the rioting began.
“More immediately Mélenchon’s tone-deaf take on the urban violence which followed the death of teenager Nahel Merzouk — shot by a police officer during a traffic stop — has caused an open breach.”
So far so accurate, and this Blog reproduced their statements at the time.
In the judgement of the PCF, this stance failed to connect with the growing sense that people living in working-class neighbourhoods were those most affected by the violence.
These tensions were heightened over recent days by divisions over the Hamas military assault on the Israeli border settlements.
Mélenchon’s failure to characterise the Hamas action as terrorism resulted in Green leader Marine Tondelier arguing that he had “removed all credibility from the left coalition,” while Socialist Party leader Olivier Faure called for a “break with the Mélenchon method.”
In an argument with with Fabien Roussel, Mélenchon compared the PCF leader to Jacques Doriot, a pre-war PCF renegade who led a fascist formation.
In a posting Mélenchon said: “History repeats itself, there is a Doriot in Roussel.”
For those who have not heard of Doriot, he was a leading Communist, deeply rooted in the working class Parisian suburb of Saint Denis who became this,
Jacques Doriot (French: [ʒak dɔʁjo]; 26 September 1898 – 22 February 1945) was a French politician, initially communist, later fascist, before and during World War II.
In 1936, after his exclusion from the Communist Party, he founded the French Popular Party (PPF) and took over the newspaper La Liberté, which took a stand against the Popular Front.
During the war, Doriot was a radical supporter of collaboration and contributed to the creation of the Legion of French Volunteers against Bolshevism (LVF). He fought personally in German uniform on the Eastern Front, with the rank of lieutenant.
Perhaps I have missed something, but it was one of Mélenchon’s LFI deputies, MPs, (the Leader of the rally does not actually sit in the French Parliament) who said this, “La députée LFI Sophia Chikirou, proche de Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a publié cette semaine un message comparant le chef du PCF à Jacques Doriot, ancien communiste passé à la collaboration dans les années 1940. Invitée de LCI ce dimanche, la députée Nupes Sandrine Rousseau fustige cette déclaration.”
Fabien Roussel comparé au collaborationniste Jacques Doriot : le PCF condamne « l’appel à la haine » de Sophia Chikirou
“The NUPES project is not quite in ruins, but the PCF summarised the situation: “All this prevents us from meeting the challenges. This prevents us from being as strong as the left could be regarding social combat. This prevents us from fighting effectively against the far right by trivialising Nazism. And it prevents us from building the rallies we need to demand peace in the Middle East. This is why we are calling for a new gathering on the left that is broader, clearer, and more useful to our common struggles.”
This story has been carried on TC, drawing on L’Humanité.
“It is time to build a gathering that is useful, respectful of our differences and all the living forces of our society,” states a resolution from the Communist Party, adopted very widely.
A different dynamic is at work in Germany where the growth of the right-wing Alliance for Germany (AfD) threatens to breach the cordon sanitaire around the far right.
Now this is where Wright gets seriously dodgy.
“Sahra Wagenknecht, former Bundestag leader of Die Linke (the Left), and nine deputies have broken away from the party.”
……
Capitalising on Wagenknecht’s great personal popularity in Germany — 20 per cent say they would consider voting for a party led by her — the new formation is called the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance — for Reason and Fairness (In German: Bundnis Sahra Wagenknecht/BSW — fur Vernunft und Gerechtigkeit).
…….
The war in Ukraine has brought some of the divisions to a head. BSW’s members say they no longer see any place for their political positions in Die Linke.
Referring to the massive February 2023 “Uprising for Peace” rally organised on Wagenknecht’s initiative, they say: “Tens of thousands gathered in front of the Brandenburg Gate. Although and precisely because around half of the population rejects the government’s military course, the country’s entire political establishment resisted and defamed the rally.
“Instead of supporting us in this dispute, the Left party leadership stood shoulder to shoulder with the other parties: they accused the initiators of the rally of being ‘open to the right’ and were thus the keyword for accusations against us.”
They accused them and they were 100% correct.
Alongside a clear anti-imperialist and anti-war stance, (note some would say an implicitly pro-Putin line) the strategic orientation of the new project is to shape a clear class challenge the growth of the right-wing AfD, which has grown particularly in the former GDR lander.
Its opponents, both in the government parties and in Die Linke itself, characterise the new formation as left-wing on economic questions and “conservative” on social questions.2
……
A bit like the Morning Star’s old mucker, now consigned to utter darkness, George Galloway and his little band, the Workers Party of Britain in fact.
It is true that it takes a detailed class position on the main economic and social questions and is highly critical of what it described as Die Linke’s focus on identity over class, but its position on immigration is more nuanced than its opponents claim.
Set in the context of “an innovative economy with fair competition,” it argues that action should be taken against growing inequality and a reliable welfare state should be created.
Sounds like a pretty similar stand to Keir Starmer…
The group’s chair Amira Mohamed Ali said: “Immigration is an enrichment if the infrastructure is not overwhelmed.”
There follows some puff on her Spiked like views on urban elites, Greens, and what one might call Woke.
In essence neither of these developments are due to either of the personalities involved. In the case of Mélenchon, a former member of the ferociously anti-communist Lambertiste Trotskyists, his political approach is notoriously confrontational.
The PCF describes him as “hegemonic,” the Socialist Party says that where once he was a factor for unity he is now the source of division.
Mélenchon, was not only a Lambertist in his youth (a cadre in fact) but on joining the Parti Socialiste in 1976, an admirer of President Mitterrand (Le Choix de l’insoumission Co-auteur :Jean-Luc MélenchonCo-auteur :Marc Endeweld. 2016) who sees himself as a leading figure in the French Republic, one capable of creating a new Sixth Republic…
Here Wright flutters his eye-lashes at his heroine.
“Wagenknecht is a brilliant leader with a real connection to millions of voters, but the source of division in Die Linke was not her personality (although the resentment and envy was palpable) but in Die Linke’s drift away from its working-class orientation and the alienation of its base, particularly in the lander of the former socialist Germany.”
It’s the Americans again…
At the root of Europe’s present economic and political trauma, and especially the German economic crisis, is the failure of the European elite to resist the drive by US capital to frustrate any challenge to its global position.
For social democracy — competing to manage the system — the crisis is destroying their electoral base.
What distinguishes the Wagenknecht initiative is a willingness to challenge the basis of foreign policy and war while making a direct claim for working-class support on a class basis.
….
When will Galloway Return to the pages of the Morning Star?
A serious intra-left backlash is brewing in France as others distance themselves from Mélenchon’s approach. “Mélenchon, the whole of the left’s problem,” declared Le Monde in an editorial. Reasonable voices on the French left know that after months of division he is no longer fit to lead them, and seem ready for this to be the last straw. The Socialist party has, at the urging of Hidalgo and others, suspended its participation in Nupes, and the Communist party has called for “a new type of union” for the left.
Mélenchon may have made a name for himself as a gifted orator in his younger days, but what is left of whoever he once was seems to consist of delusions of grandeur, petty insults and a deep bitterness that the French have overwhelmingly refused to elect him president.
Mélenchon is interested in fire, rage, revolution and fuelling a vision of France that is disconnected from reality. This has only worked to make everything more extreme, though not necessarily in Mélenchon’s favour. If the French were to find themselves facing a 2027 ballot choice between Marine Le Pen and Jean-Luc Mélenchon, Le Pen would win. It would not even be close. Whether some new grouping forms or not, what’s clear is that the left must dump Mélenchon, and swiftly. For its own good, and for that of France.
Statement which resonates with many not in the AWL.
There are some X/Twitter accounts which offer good sense on the war.
Sense of perspective:
Did you know Assad besieged Syrian cities and towns for years cutting off food water and medical supplies and in the process killing thousands it's not Myth it actually happened you probably never heard about it because hardly anyone noticed or cared. pic.twitter.com/v6ID85ryf5
Nearly three weeks later and people are still screaming at me every day for saying killing civilians is morally wrong. Different people from the first week, but still furiously denouncing me for not endorsing their bloodlust.
I will block each & every one of you without regret.
Deeply concerned by the inadequate response to the targeting of Israeli civilians by Hamas – a disturbing trend in the global left's political culture. On the statement signed by tens of Israel-based academics & activists committed to peace & human rights: https://t.co/1pjsRXzkfIpic.twitter.com/IHiFlBawB1
The population of Gaza faces an increasingly desperate situation. Blockaded and besieged by Israel, with access to basic utilities and aid having been cut off, a humanitarian crisis mounts. As of 23 October about 5,000 have been killed. Over 10,000 are injured. UN statistics estimate that 25% of homes in Gaza are damaged or destroyed.
Israel has instructed 1.1 million people, over half of Gaza’s population, to evacuate the north of the enclave. The instruction is a practical impossibility. Some humanitarian aid has entered Gaza via the Egypt-controlled Rafah crossing. Aid workers say the quantities – of food, medical supplies and equipment, and other vital necessities – fall well short of what is needed. The transport of aid will be impeded by bomb damage to Gaza’s roads. Hospitals in particular are in grave danger of running out of fuel.
Israeli troops mass on the Gaza border. A ground invasion seems imminent. That invasion will see many more civilian deaths, inevitable in an area as densely populated as Gaza.
Israel’s ultimate aim in Gaza is far from clear. Its leaders talk about the total destruction of Hamas, and of being prepared to turn Gaza into a “city of rubble” in order to achieve it. But even if Israel succeeds in destroying Hamas as a military force, what then? An attempt to reoccupy Gaza and rule it directly would mean indefinite war (even if low-level at first) and large Israeli military casualties.
Hamas does not exist only as a response to Israel’s action, but as an expression of distinct national and regional political-religious currents. Nevertheless, like many fascistic movements throughout history, it draws on real social grievances. Unless the social conditions on which Hamas’s eschatological Islamic-nationalism feeds are changed, then it – or an even-worse, more-reactionary successor, closer to Al-Qa’eda or ISIS – will regrow.
In the West Bank, the Palestinian territory subject to a 56-year-long Israeli occupation and de facto military dictatorship, hundreds of Palestinians have been killed, some by armed settlers, some by the Israeli army. Friday 20 October saw images circulate of Palestinian men stripped and bound by settlers, along with allegations of sexual abuse.
In the West Bank, the Palestinian territory subject to a 56-year-long Israeli occupation and de facto military dictatorship, hundreds of Palestinians have been killed, some by armed settlers, some by the Israeli army. Friday 20 October saw images circulate of
Deep wounds have been caused to Israeli Jewish society, too, where the death toll from Hamas’s attacks of 7 October has reached 1,400. The Israeli security forces have revised their estimate of the number of hostages held in Gaza upwards to over 200. Hamas has begun releasing videos of the hostages, and a burgeoning movement in Israeli society is calling for more effective action to be taken to secure their release, with many family members of hostages indicting Netanyahu’s strategy for putting them at greater risk. A few more hostages have been released from 20 Oct.
Beyond Israel-Palestine, many Arab and Muslim states have seen large demonstrations. In Tunisia, a mob attacked and partially destroyed the historic Al Hammah synagogue – an antisemitic outrage that does nothing to help the Palestinians, but only helps to entrench chauvinist politics. In other countries, antisemitic and anti-Muslim incidents have spiked. Wadea Al-Fayoume, a six-year-old Palestinian-American child was stabbed to death in Illinois. Samantha Woll, the president of a synagogue in Detroit, was stabbed to death on 21 October.
The Israeli state has dispossessed, displaced, and colonially subjugated the Palestinian people over many decades. In that conflict, between Israeli occupation and the Palestinian people’s right to national self-determination, any consistent democrat, let alone socialist, should be on the side of the Palestinian people. This does not mean, however, that we side with Hamas in the immediate military conflict with Israel. Or with Hezbollah if outright war also breaks out on the northern border, initiated either by Hezbollah or by Israel.
This is a crucial point.
The US socialist theorist Hal Draper once said that, if war is the continuation of politics by military means, socialists should determine their attitude to a war based on their attitude to the politics of which the war is a continuation – on both sides. Of what politics is the war between Israel and Hamas a continuation?
On Israel’s side, it is a politics of collective punishment, stretching Israel’s legitimate right to defend its civilian population past breaking point. Its war is inextricable from its policies of blockade and occupation towards the Palestinians; some of its leading politicians now talk more-or-less explicitly about ethnic cleansing. One possible endgame of the current war, from Israel’s perspective, could be the wholesale expulsion of the Palestinian populations into Egypt (from Gaza) and Jordan (from the West Bank). Like all the other outcomes, that does not seem “likely”, but one of the “unlikely” outcomes will occur nonetheless. All the options Israel might pursue through a continued and escalating war will involve massive civilian death tolls and displacement.
And on Hamas’s side? Does Hamas’s war against Israel merely express the Palestinian people’s legitimate right to defend itself, to resist occupation? Is Hamas’s aim simply for Palestinian self-determination? No. The statements of Hamas’s own leaders make clear that their aim is for the driving out of the Jews. Hamas is for a theocratic Islamic state in all of pre-1948 Palestine. It resists Israel in the name of these, reactionary, aims. The slaughter on 7 October was an expression in miniature of what Hamas would unleash on a bigger scale if it had the means to do so.
Those on the global left who, like the UK Socialist Workers Party, “rejoiced” at Hamas’s attacks are not aiding the Palestinian cause. In fact they are saying that that cause should be confiscated by one of the most violently reactionary political forces in Palestinian society, whose maximum horizon is not the “secular, democratic state” the SWP used to say it favoured, but a vicious war between rival imperialisms (Iranian and Israeli) in which not only Jewish, but Palestinian, self-determination would surely be drowned in blood.
For now, Hamas is limited in the damage it can inflict on Israel. Israel is capable of inflicting much more widespread damage on the Palestinians. But it cannot undo their existence as a national people. The two peoples will remain. There can only be a political, not a military, solution to the disparity of rights between them. As the Palestinian-Norwegian human rights activist İyad el-Baghdadi put it: “Regardless [of] what anyone thinks, nobody will exterminate anybody. When this is all over, be it in 20, 50, or 100 years, there will be Jews and Palestinians – our children – living in the Holy Land. May it be in peace, love and equality.”
El-Baghdadi has a liberal-humanitarian (and liberal-religious) outlook rather than a class-struggle Marxist one. But people with el-Baghdadi’s politics have generally responded to the current war with far more moral clarity than the vast majority of the organised Marxist left. There, a perspective that sees world politics as a dualistic struggle between “imperialism” and “anti-imperialism”, with Israel the quintessential expression of imperialism, has led many left groups to cheer for anything that wounds Israel and Israelis, even wounds inflicted by political forces hostile to basic left-wing principles of democracy and equality.
Abandoning that perspective, a poisonous legacy of Stalinism, and re-anchoring socialist politics in universalist, humanist and democratic principles will make the organised left a far more effective advocate for Palestinian rights. It is only on the basis of those principles that we can advocate for the Arab-Jewish workers’ unity that is a prerequisite for any socialist future in the Middle East.
The political force in Israeli society that currently best represents a politics of coexistence and equal rights is Standing Together, a grassroots Arab-Jewish coalition led by Israeli and Palestinian socialists. Since the war began, they have combined anti-war agitation with community self-defence and mutual aid efforts, organising especially in “mixed cities” to establish “Solidarity Committees” to resist attempts by the racist right to stoke intercommunal violence. Out of such common organising, a cohesive political alternative to chauvinism could emerge.
Unlike much of the left, which sees all Israeli Jews as legitimate targets, Workers’ Liberty believes Israel has a right to defend its civilian population. However, between its “Iron Dome” missile interception system and its existing military supplies, it surely already has the equipment it needs to carry out legitimately self-defensive activities. (Israel is a major military exporter, and UK military exports to it, of components not systems, are minor).
Palestinian trade unions have called for workers’ action to block arms shipments to Israel. Further arms shipments will inevitably be used offensively, as part of the bombardment or ground invasion of Gaza. Supporting the Palestinian unions’ demand is not incompatible with supporting Israel’s right to self-defence.
The National Executive Committee of the RMT union has voted to support moves by workers to block the transportation of arms to Israe
The call to block arms shipments has most publicly been taken up by political currents who oppose not only Israel’s policies but its very existence, and their perspective on that must be challenged. Political narratives arguing that Israel is an artificial creation or implantation of specifically British imperialism must also be challenged.
Nevertheless, the general call itself, to block arms shipments to Israel, should be supported. The four largest exporters of arms to Israel are the USA (70.2%), Germany (23.9%), Italy (5.9%), and Canada (0.05%) Therefore, the workers with the most power to block arms shipments to Israel are in the military industries of these countries. The Italian “base union” SI Cobas has said it will seek to organise action to block shipments from Italy.
Many people will be motivated to donate and fundraise for “mainstream” humanitarian initiatives such as Medical Aid for Palestinians and the International Red Cross. In the absence of any independent labour-movement infrastructure for providing aid, those efforts are the best-available humanitarian projects to which people can donate.
But the most effective political step socialists and trade unionists who want to advance struggles for democracy and equality can take is to make direct links with activists and organisations engaged in those struggles on the ground.
Standing Together is conducting a fundraising drive to support its mutual aid and community self-defence work. It has also published an online briefing giving guidance on what its international supporters can do to give practical support. Supporters in the UK have launched a network to coordinate solidarity activity. The Democracy and Workers Rights Centre, a Palestinian labour organisation active in both the West Bank and Gaza, is also calling for support.
We need to seek solutions not another war, says Alon-Lee Green, National Co-Director of Standing Together pic.twitter.com/Vaqp24TNgb
— 🟣 Standing Together UK 🟣 עומדים ביחד 🟣 نقف معًا (@omdimbeyachadUK) October 24, 2023
Statement from the Democracy and Workers' Rights Centre, active in the West Bank and Gaza calling for protection for Gazan workers in Israel (11.10). (One of a collection at www. https://t.co/O9faWqLdcJ)https://t.co/Mw1qCCvTMc
— Workers' Liberty ✊🏿🏳️🌈 ⚧️ 🇺🇦 (@workersliberty) October 20, 2023
While the world’s attention turns to Gaza, Russia’s colonial war in Ukraine and Turkey’s colonial war against the Kurds are continuing. Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad’s brutal assaults on his own people go on. The Chinese state’s colonial repression of national and ethnic minorities such as the Uyghurs also continues. The clerical-fascist regime of Iran continues to suppress opposition and dissent; trade unionists like Reza Shahabi languish in its jails. All of these struggles are no less deserving than the Palestinian national struggle of international attention and support.
The campist left hides its support for Hamas behind slogans like “freedom for Palestine” (would a Palestine under Iran-sponsored Hamas rule be “free”?), often whilst indulging in apologism for the colonialism, authoritarianism, and brutality of other imperialist powers. The alternative is a politics of consistent democracy, supporting rights for oppressed minorities whilst not vicariously adopting the politics of reactionary political forces within them.
For freedom and democratic rights for all peoples – against all colonialisms, against all imperialisms – for solidarity and workers’ unity! Self-determination for Palestinians and Israeli-Jews – two states and equal rights!
The Morning Star makes no mention of her stand on immigration.
The Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance — for Reason and Fairness Party will be formally launched in January, in time for European Parliament elections in June.
Three state elections in the east of the country will follow next autumn.
The project was launched at a time national polls show the right-wing conservatives leading and the far right Alternative for Germany (AfD) in second place with around 20 per cent support.
Ms Wagenknecht grew up in East Germany and joined the ruling Socialist Unity Party in 1989.
She was a prominent figure in its successor organisation and then from 2005 in the Left Party (die Linke), when eastern former communists merged with western socialists.
We then get to the bit that interests the Morning Star:
She has clashed with the party leadership repeatedly since the Ukraine war began, calling for peace negotiations and an end to arms supplies to Kiev.
Ms Wagenknecht said that with the economic sanctions against Russia “we have cut off ourselves off from cheap energy without there being viable alternatives.”
She accused Mr Scholz’s government of abandoning “the important tradition of detente” and argued that “conflicts cannot be resolved militarily — that goes for Ukraine, that goes for the Middle East and it goes for many other parts of the world.”
Another leading left MP, Sevim Dagdelen, has also joined the new party, arguing that a combative left was needed to battle the far right.
She said: “Democracy needs diversity of opinion and open debate. The government’s inability to deal with the crises of our time and the narrowing of the accepted corridor of opinion have flushed the AfD to the top.
“We want to build a new political force, a democratic voice for social justice, peace, reason and freedom.”
Ms Wagenknecht left the Left party on Monday along with Amira Mohamed Ali, the co-leader of its parliamentary group and now the chair of Ms Wagenknecht’s alliance, Ms Dagdelen and seven other MPs.
The New Statesman, has this more accurate piece but which ends in ruins….
Wagenknecht wants to rebuild the old, dying left in her own image. She took nine of the party’s 38 MPs with her. She says she wants to revert to the old industrial model that has served Germany so well and reopen the pipelines that formerly carried cheap Russian gas to Germany. She opposes economic sanctions and weapons deliveries to Ukraine. She wants to cap immigration, the issue of greatest disagreement with the Left Party. She positions herself in opposition to what she calls the political representatives of the liberal metropolitan elites. Familiar as this phrase may sound, it is unusual to hear it from the left in Germany.
Wagenknecht has been compared to Rosa Luxemburg, co-founder of the German Communist Party, murdered in the Spartacist Revolution of 1919 (!!!!!). Wagenknecht, who grew up in East Germany, remained a communist all the way through unification. In the 1990s, she completed a PhD in economics, and in 2015 became co-leader of the Left Party’s parliamentary group. She is married to Oskar Lafontaine, who has the dubious distinction of having been a leader of both the Social Democrats and later the Left Party, falling out with both of them during his long career. Lafontaine currently has no role in the new party, at least not officially. There is not much glamour in German politics, but Wagenknecht and Lafontaine come as close as it gets.
The Wagenknecht phenomenon is not unique to Germany, of course. Ideas of the left and the right commingle elsewhere in Europe and the US. Marine Le Pen combines elements of French nationalism and socialism. There was an element of this in the Brexit campaign when the left vote split between the metropolitan cities and industrial towns. The so-called American New Right also combines pro-worker and anti-free market positions. Typecasting movements such as Sahra Wagenknecht’s as left or right is pointless. This is how we end up underestimating them.
To which one can only reply,
“When someone asks me whether the division between parties of the right and the left, between people of the left or the right, still has any significance, the first thing that comes to mind is that whoever asks the question is certainly not not from the left. “
Alain (real name Emile-Auguste Chartier), French journalist, essayist and philosopher, (1868-1952), Elements of a Radical Doctrine , 1925
Sahra Wagenknecht announces that her new party will initially be called 'Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht' (Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance) but this name is only temporary. pic.twitter.com/eOfMkEnszV
Many English language commentators have stuck the label ‘populist’ on Wagenknecht. This given that she comes from the German left part, recalls the heady days of the rise of Podemos and La France insoumise’s formation (LFI). She was even involved in setting up a movement, Aufstehen, rise up, in 2018 which tried to emulate these parties stand against the ‘oligarchy’ and the political class. How far she went in for the ideas about populist ‘charismatic’ leaders and ‘federating the people’ is debatable.
Mélenchon, the leader of LFI, is a famous, genuinely talented, Orator, giving a degree of credence (at one point) to his claims about the focus on unifying figures – something one has yet to hear about Wagenknecht. Recently he has managed to fall out seriously with other parts of the French left alliance, NUPES on a range of issues, including Israel and Hamas, an issue of great sensitivity in France. Podemos, renamed Unidas Podemos, as a broader alliance, and more recently Sumar, has declined dramatically. 49 MPs in 2015, 5 in 2023.
In the days of Aufstehen Wagenknecht and her national comrades already had a thing about halting immigration, which stands in contrast to the views of Podemos founder Pablo Iglesias and Jean-Luc Mélenchon.
The formal head of the registered association behind Aufstehen is theatre-maker Bernd Stegemann. Last year he published a book on populism, calling for a ‘self-criticism of liberalism’ as ‘the only solution’. The political economists Wolfgang Streeck, a former SPD member who left when the party failed to expulse anti-immigration ideologue Thilo Sarrazin, is another active supporter. In recent years, Streeck established himself as a critic of neoliberal capitalism, and especially of Eurozone politics. Recently, he also put forward a critique of liberal immigration policies. Another proponent of Aufstehen is Peter Brandt, historian, SPD member, and son of the former German chancellor Willy Brandt (1969-1974).
…..
The one issue that has divided the German left since the intensification of the ‘refuge crisis’ in Germany is immigration. It will be the most controversial issue to agree upon for participants in Aufstehen – as the well-known left-wing journalist Jakob Augstein, among others, has highlighted. Many declared supporters of Aufstehen have criticised liberal immigration policies. The political economist Martin Höpner has cited a lack of understanding of labour migration as a social issue, and its effects on the labour market, housing, and education, within the left. Wagenknecht herself has rejected calls for ‘open borders for everyone’ as ‘unworldly’ and referred to ‘capacity limits and limits of the readiness of the population.’ For such positions, she received not only a lot of criticism from other parties, but also her own one. At a party congress in 2016, an anti-fascist activist threw a pie in her face.
Her more recent stands include the book “Die Selbstgerechten (“The Self-Righteous”) in which she criticises so-called “left-liberals” (“Linksliberale”) 2021 for being neither left nor liberal but rather supporting the ruling classes’ and, to some extent, their own interests. The book features, among several other topics, a discussion on immigration’s alleged negative impacts on the domestic working class. It reached number one in the German non-fiction bestseller-list as published by Der Spiegel.
In other words, she makes something like the attacks on anti-cosmopolitan liberals and greens by figures like Paul Embery in the UK with a dash of Spiked (anti-green) and attacks on urban elites in the vein of Christophe Guilluy. from the standpoint of ‘peripheral France,’ not to mention overt red-brown sovereigntists in Michel Onfray’s Front Populaire magazine.
The Left Party’s Sahra Wagenknecht, one of Germany’s most controversial politicians, has finally announced plans to form a new party. Analysts say the far-right AfD should be most worried.
prominent left-wing politician Sahra Wagenknecht finally announced that she was founding her own party on Monday, potentially posing a threat to both the socialist Left Party she is leaving and the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD).
At a press conference in Berlin, she announced the foundation of an association named Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (“Sahra Wagenknecht alliance”), to collect donations and prepare the ground for the new party.
Speaking to a crowd of reporters, Wagenknecht made clear that her main target was the German government, which she condemned as “possibly the worst government” the federal republic had ever had.
Many analysts have speculated that Wagenknecht’s unique political position — left-wing on economic issues, but closer to the far-right on issues like immigration and gender diversity — could pose a threat to the recently surging AfD.
The politician Sahra Wagenknecht is also targeting previous AfD voters with her planned new party . “Of course there are a lot of people who vote for the AfD, not because they are right-wing, but because they are angry, because they are desperate,” said the former left-wing politician on Monday evening on ZDF’s “heute journal”. That is also one reason why she and her colleagues are starting the new project.
Many people are angry about government policy and don’t know what to vote for. “Many have drawn the conclusion that, okay, if there is nothing else for now, we will vote for the AfD. We want to give these people a serious offer note, (i.e. proposals) ,” said Wagenknecht.
Left Party leader Martin Schirdewan called on MPs on Monday to hand over their mandates. Then other left-wing politicians could move up to the Bundestag. Otherwise this would be a “highly immoral theft” of the seats, Schirdewan quoted a statement from the three directly elected left-wing MPs Gesine Lötzsch, Sören Pellmann and Gregor Gysi.
The 38-member left-wing faction in the Bundestag is therefore on the verge of being dissolved, as if Wagenknecht and her colleagues leave, they would no longer have enough members for parliamentary group status in the Bundestag . Until the party is founded, the group of ten around Wagenknecht still wants to remain part of the left-wing faction – according to Wagenknecht, also out of consideration for the faction’s employees.
Sahra Wagenknecht joined by nine other MPs in migration-sceptical party which will court unhappy voters on left and right
Wagenknecht, who was born in the former East Germany to an Iranian father and German mother, denounced “unchecked migration” – which she said was aggravating “problems … in poor neighbourhoods” – as well as “blind, haphazard eco-activism that makes people’s lives more expensive without doing anything to help the climate”.
She has previously said that Nato and the west were responsible for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, has opposed sending arms to Kyiv and imposing sanctions on Moscow, and has called for a negotiated solution to the conflict, a position she denied made her “pro-Russian”.
Economic sanctions against Russia had “cut us off from cheap energy without viable alternatives”, she said on Monday, adding that Scholz’s government had abandoned “the important tradition of detente” and conflicts “cannot be resolved militarily”.
During the Covid pandemic, Wagenknecht also regularly fanned doubts about government measures to control the spread of the virus.
The new party would further scramble Germany’s fracturing political landscape — and likely peel away support from the far right.
A Wagenknecht party could also achieve something no mainstream party has ever managed — peeling away support for the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), which has been ascendant in polls of late, reaching 22 percent support.
Her critics say she could do this because she is parroting AfD policies: While maintaining a traditional leftist stance on an expansive welfare state, for example, Wagenknecht has drifted right on a number of social issues, creating some ideological crossover.
Like the AfD, she accuses the German government of catering to urban elites and ignoring the concerns of rural voters. She also rails against the ruling coalition’s attempts to hasten the green energy transition — or, as she called it today, “blind, unplanned eco-activism” — by pushing through new rules on how Germans heat their homes.
Libération comments on somebody the daily called in 1995 the last diehard Stalinist and says she does not hide her wish to compete against the far-right AfD on immigration issues,
“Since the unification of the two Germanys, this young girl has led the hardest and orthodox faction of the former East German Communist Party, renamed the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS). As such, it is the bane of reformers in search of a renovated image and democratisation. Is she really threatening them? The Communist Platform that she leads has only four thousand members, most of them cadres from the old regime who are well past retirement age. “But we also have around thirty young members in the West,” Sahra proudly corrects, “in Hamburg, Hanover and West Berlin!” Stiff and diligent, she declaims her commitment, her eyes glued to space. Joining the SED, the all-powerful Communist Party of the late GDR, in 1989, a few months before the death of the regime, the very young Sahra wanted to “improve the GDR and not fight against it”. For her, Gorbachev is not the great reformer praised by the whole world, but “the main person responsible for the collapse of the socialist world. He did not try to change the system in a positive way. He destroyed it, unmade it. He provoked the political capitulation of the East.”
Our country is not in good shape. For years, governments have ignored the wishes of the majority. Instead of rewarding performance, money was redistributed from the hardworking to the top ten thousand. Instead of investing in a competent state and good public services, politicians have served the wishes of influential lobbies and thereby emptied public coffers. Instead of respecting freedom and diversity of opinion, an authoritarian political style is spreading that wants to tell citizens how they should live, heat, think and speak. (!) The government appears haphazard, short-sighted and simply incompetent on many issues. Without a new political beginning, our industry and our small and medium-sized businesses are at stake.
Many people have lost trust in the state and no longer feel represented by any of the existing parties. You rightly have the impression that you no longer live in the country that the Federal Republic once was. They are worried about their future and the future of their children. They want a responsible policy to maintain our economic strengths, for social balance and a fair distribution of wealth, for peaceful coexistence between peoples and the preservation of our natural resources.
A society whose most powerful actors are only driven by the motivation to make more money out of money leads to growing inequality, the destruction of our natural resources and war. We counter this with our ideas of community spirit, responsibility and togetherness, which we would like to give a chance to all again by changing the balance of power. Our goal is a society in which the common good takes precedence over selfish interests and in which it is not tricksters and gamblers who win, but those who make an effort and do good, honest and solid work.
Following in the footsteps of the ‘Electronic Intifada’.
Now people have been disputing many of the stories coming out from the war in Gaza, rightly. Those who have kept their heads are sceptical about the claims made by the IDF to begin with. Then the pro-Hamas claims.
But this, the Asa Winstanley angle, is unique.
Many details of what transpired on Oct 7 continue to be shrouded in mystery, including how the 1,400 Israelis who died were killed. A growing number of reports indicate the Israeli military was responsible for civilian and military deaths https://t.co/AoHOnroeGF@Mondoweiss
Jewish Voice for Labour has some fine members. This Blog does not agree with them but that is the nature of politics. One thing I note is that is many of those I know, or know of, only became Labour members when Jeremy Corbyn had got elected.
The present claims are too wrong to bother to go into in much details except to link to Wikipedia.
The Morning Star, one of two English Langage dailies which self-identify as socialist says,
A UNION organiser and a Greenpeace activist won seats in the Commons today as Labour trounced the Tories in two by-elections.
Sarah Edwards, 35, and Alistair Strathern, 33, overturned huge Conservative majorities to sweep to victory in Tamworth and Mid Bedfordshire respectively.
Unite general secretary Sharon Graham said she was “particularly delighted” that former Unite organiser Ms Edwards had won.
Ms Graham said: “The result shows the power of organisation that underpins the labour movement. She will be a bright star in Parliament.”
Ms Edwards, formerly a NHS governor and Oxfam worker, hailed her “historic victory” after overturning a majority of more than 19,000 to beat her Tory rival Andrew Cooper by 1,316 votes.
The by-election was held after the resignation of former Tory deputy chief whip Chris Pincher, following his Commons suspension for groping two men.
Ms Edwards said the people of Tamworth had “voted for Labour’s positive vision.”
Mr Strathern, meanwhile, said that “nowhere is off limits” for the party after he overturned a Conservative majority of almost 25,000 votes in Mid Bedfordshire, winning by a margin of 1,192.
The former maths teacher, whose partner Megan Corton-Scott is a political campaigner for Greenpeace, dressed as a zombie during a protest by the environmental charity outside the Home Office last November.
He has also protested outside Parliament against public order laws aimed at preventing Just Stop Oil protests.
The former Waltham Forest councillor, who was backed by the GMB union, took Nadine Dorries’s former seat, which had been held by the Conservatives since 1931.
Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer said: “Winning in these Tory strongholds shows that people overwhelmingly want change and they’re ready to put their faith in our changed Labour Party to deliver it.”
GMB political officer Gavin Sibthorpe said: “Rishi Sunak and the Tories have shown working people again and again they have no plan, no competence and no mandate to govern this country.”
Ms Strathern was among hundreds of Labour members who condemned Oxford Labour Club for endorsing Israel Apartheid Week, a series of rallies against the Israeli government’s treatment of the Palestineians, in 2016.
Friends of Al-Aqsa chairman Ismail Patel told the Morning Star that the party must show leadership, both internationally and domestically, adding: “Labour is taking for granted individuals who want justice for Palestinians.”
In other words Labour did not really win the by-elections but Greenpeace and the unions did.
Though the Morning Star is perhaps better than this:
Labour fail to win as many votes in the Mid Bedfordshire and Tamworth by-elections as they did under Jeremy Corbyn's leadership in 2017 despite Tory MPs resigning in disgrace pic.twitter.com/HagH4992uh
PALESTINE rights activists targeted Labour offices across England and Wales today over the party’s support for “Israeli war crimes and genocide in Gaza.”
The action comes ahead of the national day of action in London tomorrow.
Demonstrators chanted: “Labour Party, blood on your hands,” “Shame on you,” and “No more money for Israel’s crime” while protesting outside the party’s HQ in London.
They continue…
‘Misinformation is rife’ and Labour ‘has no backbone’: Thousands march in solidarity with Palestine in Birmingham pic.twitter.com/ZldlceogYW
Smashing the forces of imperialism and Zionism will be no easy task, but there is a force strong enough in society to smash the system and rebuild society anew.
….
The unity that runs from the Israeli butchers to BP to Rishi Sunak has to be met by a revolutionary unity of workers and the poor across the globe.
That’s why Socialist Worker doesn’t just agitate for revolution but also for a revolutionary party to unite, organise and direct the mass explosion of workers’ anger and power.
Everyone who struggles against low pay, racism, war, sexism and oppression must be brought together in a fight aimed at the system.
Channelling that collective anger to bring the system down means
Battling for victory in Palestine and against the system that caused and shapes Palestine’s oppression.
The SWP has the cheek to cite Hal Draper in their support,
Hal Draper, a Marxist who took part in the struggles of the 1960s in the United States, explained a central division on how this can be done.
“Throughout the history of socialist movements and ideas, the fundamental divide is between Socialism From Above and Socialism From Below,” he wrote.
“The unity that runs from the Israeli butchers to BP to Rishi Sunak has to be met by a revolutionary unity of workers and the poor across the globe.”
How this involves standing with the authoritarian Islamist fascists of Hamas who will murder, Jews, socialists, feminists and LGBT people with glee is hard to fathom.
“A small group of protesters held a separate demonstration in central London on Saturday in which a large banner read “Muslim armies, rescue the people of Palestine”.
Speakers addressed the group of about 100 people in Arabic as they gathered in Balfour Mews, just off the path of the main protest.”
Hizb ut-Tahrir is an international Islamist movement seeking to unite Muslims under one Islamic caliphate. Hizb ut-Tahrir members have been linked to violent acts in multiple countries. The group itself has been banned in at least 13 countries, including many Muslim-majority countries.
There is no doubt that Williamson, the inventor of the Vegan Croissant, close ally of George Galloway, is one of the most kenspeckle renegade former leftists also a one time Blairite, in the UK.
Yet it is far from clear that this eructation is a hate crime. I’d say it is an utterly ridiculous charge. The man is wrong, very wrong, but the ‘hate’ bit,
“A hate crime is defined as ‘Any criminal offence which is perceived by the victim or any other person, to be motivated by hostility or prejudice based on a person’s race or perceived race; religion or perceived religion; sexual orientation or perceived sexual orientation; disability or perceived disability and any crime motivated by hostility or prejudice against a person who is transgender or perceived to be transgender.'”
“
The offence of incitement to hatred occurs when someone acts in a way that is threatening and intended to stir up hatred. That could be in words, pictures, videos, music, and includes information posted on websites.
Hate content may include:
messages calling for violence against a specific person or group
web pages that show pictures, videos or descriptions of violence against anyone due to their perceived differences
chat forums where people ask other people to commit hate crimes against a specific person or group
Chris Williamson: Former MP's Israel comment prompts hate crime probe https://t.co/S4164xcVyp
Police are to investigate whether a former MP committed a hate crime in a social media post about Israel.
Chris Williamson, ex-Labour MP for Derby North posted on X, formerly Twitter, on Tuesday night that “Israel has forfeited any right to exist”.
Derbyshire Police said they had received “multiple reports” about the comment.
The force said it would now consider whether the post constituted a hate crime.
A spokesperson said: “The force has received multiple reports relating to a tweet posted by Chris Williamson on the evening of 17 October regarding the Israel/Palestine conflict.
“We take reports of potential hate crimes seriously while also being mindful of freedom of speech and the rights of individuals to express their views.
“Sometimes the opinions will be made robustly and may cause offence but that does not necessarily mean that a law has been broken.
“It is important that we consider all elements of this report and we have recorded a non-crime hate incident to establish if any crime has been committed.
“This will be reviewed in due course and, once a decision has been reached, those who have reported the incident will be contacted directly, and an update posted on the force channels.”
‘Waste of police time’
In response, Mr Williamson said accusations of hate crime were “bogus”.
He also described the complaints as “an obvious waste of police time”, which he said was itself an offence under the Criminal Law Act.
Mr Williamson was elected as Labour’s MP for Derby North in 2010 and re-elected in 2017 after losing the seat to the Conservatives in 2015.
This Blog is not AWL, I’m not a Trotskyist or Leninist to begin with, though I have, like many on the left, who are also not Trotskyists, written a few things for their paper.
But as said before they are voice for sanity on this issue. I make no apologies for reproducing their statement in full which says many things that need to be said.
Stop the siege of Gaza: ceasefire now! Against Hamas’s attacks Against the collective punishment of Gaza in response Against settler attacks in the West Bank End the occupation: for peace and workers’ unity For an independent Palestine alongside Israel: two states and equal rights
1,300 Israelis were killed in Hamas’s attacks and 126, including many children, have been taken hostage. Over 2,500 Palestinians, including many children, have been killed in retaliatory air strikes, with many more sure to die as Israel tightens its siege and prepares a ground invasion. Palestinians, including children, have also been killed by settlers in the West Bank. The civilian population of Gaza is suffering under a brutal siege, with access to basic utilities cut off by Israel. Israel has told 1.1 million Gazans to evacuate – an impossible task. Israel’s siege of Gaza represents a crime against humanity. It is an act of vengeance that will devastate Gaza and will bring neither peace nor security to Israelis.
Palestinians and Israelis have a right to security and to life. In the face of attacks on its civilian population, Israel has a right to self-defence. Some on the left oppose this, believing all Israeli civilians are legitimate targets. This “leftism” is a grotesquely distorted caricature of the principles on which our politics should be based.
But Israel’s response – cutting off utilities to Gaza, devastating air assaults, a potential ground invasion, and further intensification of its military dictatorship over the West Bank – goes way beyond “self-defence”. Israeli leaders talk of reducing Gaza to “a city of rubble.” Much of what Israel does in the name of “self-defence” is unjustifiable collective punishment. Even if it is successful in immediately undermining Hamas’s military capacity, the humanitarian crisis Israel is creating will kill thousands, displace hundreds of thousands, and will encourage Palestinians to see Israel only as a hated oppressor.
The slaughter and brutality must end: hostages must be freed, there must be an immediate ceasefire. Basic utilities must be restored to Gaza, and humanitarian aid urgently increased. Longer term, peace and justice requires a framework that guarantees equal rights to both Palestinians and Israeli Jews, including an equal right to self-determination: an end to the occupation, and the establishment of a genuinely independent Palestinian state, alongside and with equal rights to Israel.
The Palestinians are a colonised people. They have a right to resist and to defend themselves against military attack, although Gaza’s pummeled civilian population has little means of doing so. They need international support, via diplomatic pressure on Israel; governments like the US and UK must end their public carte-blanche attitude to Israel’s actions and demand it ends the siege.
However, it does not follow from the principle of supporting Palestinians’ right to resist that we must support any action undertaken in the name of “resistance”. Hamas’s attacks on Israeli civilians – indiscriminate rocket firing at civilian targets, and gunning people down in their homes – cannot possibly serve emancipatory and democratic ends. One video circulating on social media appears to show fighters parading the mangled corpse of an Israeli child, stripped almost naked, through the streets on a truck, whilst chanting “god is great”. These are actions carried out by partisans of a violently reactionary ideology, hostile not only to the Israeli military or state but to Israelis as such, and specifically to Jews. Socialists who cannot see this worldview has nothing in common with our own — egalitarian, democratic, humanist — perspective have lost their bearings.
Hamas is, in any case, not merely an abstract expression of “resistance”. It has a developed political programme and social project, and is allied to several of Israel’s regional-imperialist rivals, including the clerical-fascist regime of Iran. Hamas uses brutal means because its ends, the imposition of a theocratic state, are brutal. Other Palestinians, women, LGBT+ people, atheists and others, have also been victims of that brutality. Some leftist commentators initially celebrated Hamas’s actions as an advance for “democracy and human rights”. But democracy and human rights cannot be advanced by a political force that explicitly opposes both.
Some have argued those who support Ukraine’s right to militarily resist Russian invasion should support all Palestinian resistance on the same basis. Politics by analogy is always limited, but the relevant parallel here would be to a hypothetical scenario in which a far-right Ukrainian militia was attacking Russian towns, indiscriminately shooting at civilians, and taking Russian civilian hostages, all on the basis of a political programme that advocated the wholesale destruction of Russia. There is no such situation in Ukraine, but if there was, there would be no socialist or anti-imperialist principle that could justify any support for that.
Hamas’s attacks were not merely reactive, but a proactive pursuit of their reactionary political aims. Nevertheless, the situation cannot be understood outside of its context. The current Israeli regime is the most far-right government in the country’s history, with an explicitly Jewish-supremacist policy. Leading figures use quasi-genocidal language about Palestinians. Settler violence is at an all-time high, with settler gangs carrying out pogroms against Palestinians. Israel’s occupation of the West Bank has intensified its repression. The residents of Gaza continue to live in abject conditions, with widespread poverty. All of this cannot but have deepened a sense of desperation amongst the Palestinian people, which will have bolstered support for Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
While Hamas can inflict significant damage, they cannot militarily overwhelm Israel by themselves. They could only hope to do that as part of a regional, possibly global, conflict, in which Hezbollah, Iran, Syria, and other states also intervene against Israel. Such a conflict would be a bloodbath out of which no democratic outcome could emerge, and in which any prospect for distinct Palestinian self-determination would almost certainly be squeezed out by the regional-imperialist aspirations of competing states.
Hamas’s incursion was launched a week after a Qatar-brokered deal saw Israel reopen border crossings from Gaza to allow residents who work in Israel to cross. The deal itself followed demonstrations at the border, to which Israel responded violently. In launching its incursion, Hamas has evidently decided to risk its own relations with Qatar — which may, in any case, have soured recently for other reasons. According to an article in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, Hamas has also claimed that Qatar has also unilaterally reduced the amount it pays to Gaza in aid. Although, according to a deal with Israel, it is meant to pay $10 million per month, for the last several it has, Hamas says, paid just $3 million.
It may also be the case that part of Hamas’s aim is to snuff out prospects for a “normalisation” deal between Saudi Arabia and Israel. Any such deal will be for the benefit of the Saudi and Israeli ruling classes rather than the Palestinian people. But if Hamas’s alternative is to spark an all-out war, that will harm, not help, the Palestinians. Recognition by surrounding states of Israel’s right to exist will be a necessary part of any future peace settlement.
That Israel, one of the most militarised states in the world, and possessing the most developed security apparatus in the region, was caught unawares by attacks that were clearly meticulously planned, and must have taken weeks of preparation, is extraordinary and, for now, inexplicable. Israel tells its people that militarisation, the occupation, and its periodic raids on Gaza are all necessary in order to protect Israeli Jews. That claim has been spectacularly undermined.
The risk of a wider war is now acute. If Hezbollah, or Iran itself, intervenes, it will be in pursuit of Iran’s own regional-imperialist and ideological aspirations, not in pursuit of democracy and equality for Palestinians. Civilians on all sides will pay the price. Whatever happens in the immediate term will set back, rather than advance, prospects for social transformation that improves life for the Palestinians.
The activity of the sizeable Palestinian minority inside Israel will be an important factor in the developing situation. Although they face intensifying racism and discrimination, they have substantially more freedom to act than the occupied and blockaded Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza. Significant mobilisation, including strikes, by Palestinians in Israel for democratic demands could check the warmongering of the Israeli government, especially if such activity is able to unite in any way with continuing mobilisation by the anti-occupation wing of Israel’s democracy movement.
Activists in that movement must resist the nationalist drive for “unity” behind Israel’s war. Several survivors of Hamas’s massacres, and relatives of the kidnapped and killed, have already made inspiring statements condemning Netanyahu’s response. The son of Vivian Silver, an activist in Women Wage Peace who has been taken hostage, has said “vengeance is not a strategy.” There is a burgeoning campaign in Israel society demanding more effective government action to ensure the release of hostages. Protests were held in Tel Aviv on 14 October. Standing Together is forming community self-defence organisations to resist attempts by far-right politicians such as Itamar Ben-Gvir to stoke racism against Palestinian communities in Israel.
There has never been a “military solution” to the political crisis in Israel/Palestine – neither for Israel, whose military occupation will never extirpate Palestinians’ aspiration for a national future in their historic homeland, nor for the Palestinians themselves. Progress is only possible on the basis of a framework that guarantees equal rights to both peoples, Israeli Jewish and Palestinian Arab, including an equal right to national self-determination via two independent states. However remote the prospect of such a framework is, and it is surely remote, it remains the only possible platform for moves towards the future unity and confederation that internationalists advocate.
In a frightening and tragic context, fighters for real democracy and equality in Israel/Palestine, such as the Standing Together movement, will have to redouble their efforts of advocacy and mobilisation. The best role we can play is to support them.
l’Humanité is a real newspaper unlike a certain British daily which claims to be on the left (suivez mon regard), and is a serious source of information.
Hundreds of people were killed Tuesday evening in a bombing on the compound of the Ahli Arab hospital, located in downtown Gaza, reported the Health Ministry of the Palestinian territory controlled by Hamas.
An information war is raging around the origin of this explosion which affected vulnerable civilians: Israel claims to have proof of the involvement of Islamic Jihad, one of whose rockets would have fallen by accident on the hospital, which denies the Islamist organisation, which described the Israeli army’s statements as “ lies” .
Several cities in the Arab world were the scene of massive demonstrations in reaction to this bloody explosion.
United States President Joe Biden arrived in Tel Aviv this Wednesday to reaffirm his solidarity with Israel and discuss humanitarian aid for the residents of the Gaza Strip. His planned visit to Amman was canceled after Jordan’s King Abdullah II and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, whom he was due to meet in the Jordanian capital, said they would not attend the meeting after the hospital explosion.
The UN Security Council will meet urgently this Wednesday, at the initiative of Brazil, which wants to pass a resolution intended to find a common position in the face of this deadly spiral.
The European Union announced the opening of a humanitarian air bridge to the Gaza Strip which will pass through Egypt.
Since October 7, more than a million Palestinians have fled the north of the Gaza Strip, through the streets devastated by bombings, towards the south of the enclave. The Israeli government issued an ultimatum last Friday, ordering the 1.1 million residents of northern Gaza to flee to the south.
Israel has announced that it is preparing to launch “ major military operations” once civilians have left the northern Gaza Strip.
Lebanese Hezbollah and Iran threaten to enter the conflict if Israel follows through on its threats of a ground invasion.
On the 11th day since the launch of operation “Al-Aqsa Flood” by Hamas, the human toll continues to rise: >1,400 dead and more than 3,200 injured have been recorded, at this time, side Israeli. >21 French people are among the victims of the Hamas attack. There are also several missing French people, including 4 children. > 3,000 people, including more than 700 children, died and 9,700 were injured on the Palestinian side, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health.
The “complete siege” of the Gaza Strip, controlled by Hamas, continues this Wednesday.
A Hadash lawmaker and leading Communist Party of Israel (CPI) member, Ofer Cassif, has told Al Jazeera that his party warned about events like Saturday’s deadly Hamas attack on Israel if the country’s government continued its occupation of Palestinian territories.
The attack launched on Saturday left at least 700 Israelis dead and 2,000 wounded, including dozens of soldiers. Meanwhile, at least 436 Palestinians have been killed and more than 2,200 others wounded in Israeli bombardments of the besieged Gaza enclave.
Cassif said he warned the situation would “erupt” if the far-right government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did not change its policies towards Palestinians. “We condemn and oppose any assault on innocent civilians. But in contrast to the Israeli government that means that we oppose any assault on Palestinian civilians as well. We must analyze those terrible incidents [the deadly attacks] in the right context – and that is the ongoing occupation,” Cassif said.
“We have been warning time and time again… everything is going to erupt and everybody is going to pay a price – mainly innocent civilians on both sides. And unfortunately, that is exactly what happened,” he said.
“The Israeli government, which is a fascist government, supports, encourages, and leads pogroms against the Palestinians. There is an ethnic cleansing going on. It was obvious the writing was on the wall, written in the blood of the Palestinians – and unfortunately now Israelis as well,” he added. “The only thing Netanyahu cares about is not the well-being of the citizens of Israel, let alone of Palestinians in the occupied territories,” Cassif said. “He is interested in surviving. He just wants to stay out of prison. That is the only motivation and incentive that drives him.”
The Knesset’s winter session opened on Monday with a moment of silence for the more than 1,300 Israelis murdered in Hamas’s attack on Israel last week. After opening statements by Knesset Speaker Amir Ohana, President Isaac Herzog, far-right Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and opposition leader MK Yair Lapid, the proceedings were disrupted twice by sirens.
Racist Otzma Yehudit party announced shortly after the moment of silence that party MK Limor Son-Har Melech would initiate a vote to expel Hadash MKs (the alliance the Communists are part, note) from plenum hall.
'Rivers of Blood' – Israel headed for CIVIL WAR?
Amid Israel's ethnic cleansing of Gaza, the Netanyahu government is passing legislation to imprison Israeli dissidents and distributing weapons to fascist militias.@dancohen3000 speaks with Israeli member of Knesset @ofercasspic.twitter.com/XeHiEaIeqO
"Il n’y a pas de solution militaire, seulement politique: la fin de l’occupation et l’avènement de l’indépendance palestinienne." Ofer Cassif, député communiste israélien.
El Partido Comunista de Israel: "No hay una solución militar, solo política: el fin de la ocupación y la independencia de Palestina"
Ofer Kassif, miembro de la dirección del Partido Comunista de Israel (MAKI), dijo a Al Jazeera que su partido había advertido de acontecimientos + pic.twitter.com/PPbUn0dz9K
“The Israeli Communist Party, commonly known by its Hebrew acronym Maki (מק״י), is a communist political party in Israel and forms part of the political alliance known as Hadash. It was originally known as Rakah (רק”ח), an acronym for Reshima Komunistit Hadasha (“New Communist List”), after breaking away from the original Maki in the 1960s.”
Before the 1977 elections the party joined with some other small left-wing and Arab parties, including some members of the Israeli Black Panthers to form Hadash. After the original Maki had disappeared after merging into Ratz in 1981, members of Rakah decided to change the party’s name to Maki in 1989.[6] The party remains the leading force in Hadash, and owns the Al-Ittihad newspaper.
For 100 years, Maki has been the leading force for Jewish-Palestinian equality in Israeli politics, yet it has failed to unite Arab and Jewish workers into a viable movement. Was it doomed from the start?
I have not found Bell that funny or acute for a long time (prefer Martin Rowson’s political cartoons), but the Tendance defends his right to be unfunny to the death.
This move is outrageous. It is wrong in so many ways, starting with the attack on the freedom for satire to exist.
The cartoon, featuring Netanyahu operating on his own stomach, showed a cut in the outline of the Gaza Strip.
Bell said the cartoon was spiked after a phone call from the paper suggested it may reference Shakespeare’s Shylock’s “pound of flesh” line.
He said it was inspired by a 60s cartoon of President Lyndon B Johnson.
Writing on X, Bell said he submitted the image earlier this month and “four hours later… I received an ominous phone call from the desk with the strangely cryptic message ‘pound of flesh’…”
Bell said he responded: “I’m sorry, I don’t understand,” and the reply from the desk was: “Jewish bloke; pound of flesh; antisemitic trope.”
Moneylender Shylock, from Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, is considered to be one of the most notorious Jewish stereotypes in English literature due to his greedy nature.
In the Bard’s famous play, Shylock asks for a pound of Antonio’s flesh if a loan isn’t repaid within three months.
Bell told the BBC that the interpretation by the Guardian “made no sense to me, as there is no reference to that play in my cartoon, which shows Netanyahu, poised to perform a surgical operation on himself while wearing boxing gloves, the catastrophic consequences of which are yet to be seen.
“The image itself was inspired by the late, great David Levine’s cartoon of President Lyndon Johnson (LBJ) showing off his operation scar, which Levine draws in the shape of a map of Vietnam.”
A GNM (Guardian News and Media) spokesperson says: “The decision has been made not to renew Steve Bell’s contract. Steve Bell’s cartoons have been an important part of the Guardian over the past 40 years – we thank him and wish him all the best.”
The issue has arisen during a time of heightened tension following the Hamas attacks on Israel earlier this month and the subsequent retaliatory strikes on Gaza.
It is not the first time Bell has been accused of using antisemitic imagery.
A 2020 drawing featuring Sir Keir Starmer holding Jeremy Corbyn’s head on a plate was interpreted by some as a reference to the head of John the Baptist, which was presented to Salome, the daughter of the Jewish King Herod.
In the same year, senior Conservative MP Sajid Javid tweeted that Bell’s cartoon – depicting former Home Secretary Priti Patel and ex-Prime Minister Boris Johnson as bulls with rings through their noses – was “incredibly offensive”.
Mr Javid said it was “reminiscent of antisemitic cartoons from the last century,” adding the Guardian “should know better”.
Martin Rowson, the artist who drew it, also apologised.
The cartoon that has got the brilliant Steve Bell fired is based off this one from the sixties by David Levine depicting LB Johnson during Vietnam war. #SteveBellpic.twitter.com/5iXmIbIy80
Cartoonist Steve Bell, who has worked for the @Guardian for 4 decades, has been sacked over an allegedly 'anti-Semitic' drawing of Netanyahu. Let's call this what it is: creeping zionist control of our media.
The PCF adopted a resolution this Sunday by almost 93% describing the current union as a “dead end” calling for “a new page in the coming together of the left and environmentalists”.
This is deeply saddening, and is a new stage in which has become a fractious relationship. The details are riven with both personality clashes and serious political divisions, between the different parts the French left (electoral and Parliamentary) alliance, NUPES which brings together La France insoumise (LFI) of Jean Luc Mélenchon, Socialists, Greens, Communists and smaller left groups.
In a declaration adopted on Sunday, the PCF national council sharply criticised La France insoumise and affirms its desire to create “a new type of union”.
Uneasy in the current Nupes undermined by dissension, the PCF is looking for an alternative. Without expressly indicating that it is slamming the door of the union formed with LFI , the PS and the ecologists, the Communist Party noted that it has become “a dead end” and called this Sunday, October 15 to “open a new page of the of the alliance of the left and environmentalists.”
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“The insults from LFI leaders, comparing the leadership of the PCF to Nazi collaborators, are therefore unacceptable and have caused widespread outrage, because they trivialise the extreme right and seek to divide the left,” underlines the party. A reference to the comparison drawn by the LFI MP Sophia Chikirou and Jean-Luc Mélenchon between the national secretary of the PCF Fabien Roussel and Jacques Doriot , a communist who had switched to the side of Nazi Germany.
Another recent sticking point between the PCF and LFI, the refusal by La France insoumise ” to qualify as terrorist acts the atrocities committed by Hamas , deliberately against civilians”. Beyond semantics, the PCF states this stance “weakens rallies and protests needed for peace in the Middle East and the fight against the war crimes of the Israeli army”, affirmed the PCF.
Le Parti communiste français a toujours combattu le Hamas. En Israël, des actes barbares ont été perpétrés par cette organisation terroriste contre des femmes, des enfants des personnes âgées. Il faut qualifier ces actes et cette organisation pour ce qu'ils sont. #RousselNicepic.twitter.com/IeOqzYhOUC
The PCF adopted this Sunday a resolution by almost 93% describing the current union as a “dead end” and calling for “a new page in the coming together of the left and ecologists”, “a new stage for the left with a new type of union.
The original text of the resolution was strongly against La France insoumise.
INFO @libe : Si le texte voté par le PCF concernant la #Nupes ce dimanche est plus soft que prévu, le projet de résolution (ci dessous) était plus virulent contre la direction de LFI. Il expliquait clairement que le parti « suspendait toute discussion » avec la tête de LFI. pic.twitter.com/YV8nM7ZFbc
Fabien Roussel : « Nous appelons à tourner la page de la Nupes »
What does Nupes suffer from? Do you agree with Marine Tondelier, national secretary of EELV, who estimated on Saturday that Jean-Luc Mélenchon “removed all credibility from the left coalition”, when Olivier Faure, first secretary of the PS, called on Thursday to “ break with the Mélenchon method”?
Hasakeh (Syria) (AFP) – Turkish bombardment has damaged more than half of Kurdish-held northeast Syria’s power and oil infrastructure, dealing a blow to its energy-dependent economy, the Kurds’ top commander said.
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On October 5, Turkey launched a bombing campaign in Syria’s northeast after it said militants who were behind an attack in Ankara came from and were trained in Syria.
The semi-autonomous Kurdish administration has denied the claim, and says at least 44 people, including security personnel and civilians, have been killed in the attacks.
“More than half of oil and electricity facilities were damaged” as Turkey struck dozens of sites including power plants and gas infrastructure, Abdi said.
His forces spearheaded the battle to dislodge Islamic State group (IS) fighters from their last scraps of Syrian territory in 2019.
The assault has left residents without power since Thursday, in a region already struggling to provide just 10 hours of electricity per day.
“The Unites States’ position has been weak” in the face of the attacks, Abdi said.
“American forces limited their action to protecting their positions… but did nothing to stop” the onslaught, he said.
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Ankara views the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) that dominate the SDF as an offshoot of the banned Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which has been waging an insurgency against Turkey for decades.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan vowed on Wednesday to intensify strikes against Kurdish fighters in Syria and Iraq.
Li Kampa #Mexmûr`ê di dema nimêja eşayê de mizgeftek hat bombebarankirin û piştî bombebaranê agir bi mizgeftê ket pic.twitter.com/8Yeejqy8mE
#BREAKING Destruction of Gaza by air, ground attacks, bombing of mosques, and deaths of innocent civilians are never acceptable: Turkish President Erdogan pic.twitter.com/qsCjIMjpT1
A teacher at Gambetta College in Arras since September 1, 1999, “Monsieur Bernard” was murdered this Friday, October 13 within his establishment. The middle and high school students present tell Charlie the macabre sequence of the start of the day. Narrative.
This 57-year-old teacher killed by Mohammed M., Friday October 13, had worked in the establishment for a long time. Three other people were injured in the attack.
The attack took place in the northeastern town of Arras, home to large Jewish and Muslim populations.
Police arrested the suspected attacker, Mohammed Moguchkov, who had cried the Arabic phrase “Allahu Akbar!” (God is greatest), according to the preliminary elements of the investigation.
Authorities have suggested a probable link to the ongoing violence in the Middle East, with President Emmanuel Macron denouncing the incident as an act of “Islamist terror”.
The deployment of the soldiers from Operation Sentinelle will be completed by Monday evening, according to the Élysée presidential palace.
🇫🇷 The attack on a school in #Arras, northern #France, was the result of "barbaric Islamist #terrorism" said French President Emmanuel Macron.
🔴 FRANCE 24's James Vasina follows Macron's words with the details and context. pic.twitter.com/DNBFCj38Vu
The Israeli army demanded on Friday morning the evacuation of the northern Gaza Strip. Hamas has denounced “psychological warfare” and urges residents to stay at home. The United Nations is asking Israel to reverse its decision, “impossible [to apply] without devastating humanitarian consequences,” according to a spokesperson. “
“Saturday morning’s breakout (my emphasis) from what David Cameron as UK prime minister in 2010 called the largest open air “prison camp” in the world was not remotely like the 9/11 attacks in 2001.”
Ovenden is a member of the Stop the War Steering Committee. He is a graduate of Oxbridge University and, amongst his many talents, speaks fluent broken French.
“Kevin Ovenden (born 1968) is a British, left-wing, political activist who was a member of the Respect Party‘s leadership.[He is an organiser of Viva Palestina. Ovenden was for many years a leading member of the Socialist Workers Party.”
He was expelled during the split between the leadership of the SWP and the activists organized around George Galloway. He worked in the Westminster and Bethnal Green offices of then MP, George Galloway.”
Which is an odd background for an ‘anti-racist’.
He is now closely associated with the revolutionary socialist groupuscule, Counterfire led by Stop the War leader Lindsey German. Her partner John Rees is the other best known figure in this splinter group.
They are perfectly entitled to hold a pro-Palestinian march, and back the pro-religious and sexual Apartheid far right Hamas regime against what they claim is Israeli apartheid.
When I see academics, especially those who claim to be socialists, posting on social media that kidnapping Jewish woman and children “seems completely fair and reasonable to me”, then I have to consider they have lost all sense of humanity and sunk into a sewer.
These same Clerical Fascists of Hamas murdered Twelve Thai workers and kidnapped 11 more and killed 10 Nepalese workers. Their reactionary pogrom and abductions have done nothing to advance Palestinian national freedom.
Israel has a right to defend itself. Or, put another way, Israeli civilians in the places Hamas and PIJ have attacked, or may yet attack, have a right to security and to life. But the probable form of Israel’s response, devastating air assaults on Gaza that kill many more civilians, and further intensification of its military dictatorship over the West Bank, will stretch the definition of “self-defence” past breaking point. Much of what Israel has done, and will now do, in the name of “self-defence” is morally unjustifiable, disproportionate, collective punishment.
Israel’s right to even proportionate self-defence is opposed by many on the far left. But those who oppose any action to protect civilians or to free civilian hostages are saying, in effect, that all Israeli civilians, including children, are legitimate targets. Indeed, some on the left do explicitly say exactly that. This “leftism” is a grotesquely distorted caricature of the principles on which our politics should be based.
Against Hamas’s attacks
Against the collective punishment of Gaza in response
Against settler attacks in the West Bank
End the occupation: for peace and workers’ unity
For an independent Palestine alongside Israel: two states and equal rights
Some organisations doing important work on the ground:
One can condemn Israel for its actions and policies towards the Palestinians, and be in favour of a Two States solution, without losing your moral compass.
I have, at the moment, no further comment to make.
People across with the world stand with Narges Mohammadi and her fight against the Islamic Republic Or Iran and its hated hijab laws.
2023 #NobelPeacePrize laureate Narges Mohammadi has dedicated her life to fighting against the oppression of women in Iran and promoting human rights and freedom for all. For this the Iranian regime sentenced her to 31 years in prison. She has been in prison since 2015.
Mohammadi has campaigned for women’s rights and the abolition of the death penalty and an improvement of prison conditions inside Iran.
She is serving multiple sentences in Tehran’s Evin prison amounting to about 12 years’ imprisonment, according to the rights organisation Front Line Defenders, the latest of the many periods she has been detained. Charges against her include spreading propaganda against the state.
“The Norwegian Nobel committee has decided to award the 2023 Nobel peace prize to Narges Mohammadi for her fight against the oppression of women in Iran and her fight to promote human rights and freedom for all,” the committee said in its citation.
Mohammadi has been active from within prison, warning of nationwide protests by publishing letters about the state of prisons and detention centres and violence against prisoners and detainees.
The award will be viewed as a tribute to the Woman, Life, Freedom movement in Iran that rocked the clerical establishment last year but has been suppressed with many activists either killed or in jail. The protests were sparked by the death in police custody of a young Kurdish woman, Mahsa Amini, after she had been arrested for not wearing the hijab in line with state rules. The conflict over the wearing of the hijab continues.
There are naturally some exceptions to this welcome.
Disgraced ‘academic’ David Miller, who’s now a tout for the Islamist regime, tweets today,
There has been some speculation that the Tories have given up on winning and are preparing the way for a shift even further to the right. They think that will win the election after the next.
Given the furore alt right MP Tom Hunt has created with his attack on multi-cultrual Ipswich one imagines this strategy is not going to work.
Woodbridge top toff Tory and leading East Anglian conservative intellectual, writes from his Golf course,
Laurence Fox, one time author at Spiked on Line (The fall of Britain 2020), is short of defenders these days,. Brendan O’Neill recently wrote, after the latest scanda,) “Yes, Fox’s comments were loathsome – but so is the hypocrisy of these privileged virtue-signallers who spend their days siding with bepenised people against women and then think they can get on their high horse over a sexist jibe on a news channel. Get real, fellas.”
🚨BREAK: Laurence Fox’s house has been raided by The Metropolitan Police this morning 👮
It comes off the back of yesterday’s Rumble interview with Maajid Nawaz, where on ULEZ, he said he’d be ‘out there with my angle grinder’ and would be ‘happy to be arrested’ pic.twitter.com/UgBYBzcKBD
After the arrest, the broadcaster GB News, which last week suspended Fox after he made misogynistic remarks about the political journalist Ava Evans while on the Dan Wootton Tonight show, said it had “ended its employment relationship” with him.
In a statement, the broadcaster said its working relationship with the regular presenter Calvin Robinson, who had issued a statement expressing solidarity with Wootton, was also over. The internal investigation into Wootton, who was also suspended, was continuing, it said.
Fox’s the Reclaim Party has been called, a right-wing populist party, “Who are the Reclaim Party and what do they stand for? Conservative councillor Anthony Allen defects to Laurence Fox’s populist ‘anti-woke’ collective ahead of North Shropshire by-election.”
They say, “The Conservatives are no longer conservative or governing for all. The Labour Party is not fit to be in Opposition. We need a new way of doing things.
Reclaim intends to change freedom of speech laws and to depoliticise the police and other public institutions.
Reclaim stands for patriotism and believes hard work should be rewarded. We believe in protecting our borders, supporting forgotten working class communities and, above all, true equality for all Britons – rather than dividing us into narrow, protected groups.
We will field candidates at the next General Election – both to directly take seats and to actively target and unseat MPs who’ve sold Britain down the river.
For us political sociologists and historians of confusionism, Foxy is a extreme example of a ‘party leader’ who’s built his little empire on a murky mixture of prejudice, unwitty anti-woke themes, and the culture of narcissism. He shows how the way the Right in the epoch of social media is, at least in the UK, not far from the days when Spode was swanking about with the Black-shorts in footer bags Have you ever in your puff see such another perfect perisher?
Tom Hunt defended the Home Secretary’s vile comment that multiculturalism had failed in Britain and claimed it is not xenophobic “to not want to feel like you’re living in a foreign country” when you walk into your town centre. His comments came in a heated debate in which an audience member questioned whether their language was stoking racism.
Speaking at the Conservative Party conference in Manchester, he told a packed room of Tory activists the “important thing” was to consider a number of factors when deciding what level we want net migration to be. “We should view it in the round not purely through lenses of GDP – [but] GDP per capita, pressure on public services, and actually cohesive communities,” he said.
“Because, being frank, it is not xenophobic to – when you walk into your town centre – to not want to feel like you’re living in a foreign country. I don’t think that makes you a xenophobe.” He added that he thinks it makes you someone who wants “shared values” in your community.
A group of Conservatives elected in 2019 will set out their own manifesto ideas, including banning “gender ideology” from being taught in schools and slashing taxes.
They are two points from the New Conservatives’ five pledges, which also demands curbs on legal migration by halving the number of visas awarded to foreign workers.
The Tory MPs are arguing for the current set of rights and equalities laws, which enshrine the freedoms in the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), to be replaced with a so-called “British framework”.
We are the New Conservatives.
Join us at conference on Monday for the Rally for the Manifesto and Tuesday for the launch of the New Conservative tax plan for families and small businesses.#Newconspic.twitter.com/RAlzgQjsDv
Made up of the likes of Devizes MP Danny Kruger, Ipswich MP Tom Hunt and Miriam Cates, the MP for Penistone and Stocksbridge — as well as having the support of deputy Tory chairman Lee Anderson — the group said so-called gender ideology should be banned in schools and parents should have the right to oversee the sex education their children received.
A report in March by right-leaning think tank Policy Exchange said schools were “increasingly becoming influenced by gender ideology”, claiming single-sex spaces were being compromised and that “gender identity beliefs” were being taught unchallenged in Relationships, Sex & Health Education lessons.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said he was “very concerned” about the report’s findings but the new transgender guidance he promised for schools has yet to be published.
Meanwhile, the New Conservatives, as part of their pledges, said students who fail their A-levels should not be allowed to access taxpayer-funded loans to attend university, with more money invested in apprenticeships instead.
BRUSSELS, SEPTEMBER 29, ARMENPRESS. The Europeans for Artsakh movement will hold a massive gathering on October 1 at Schuman Roundabout in Brussels and elsewhere across Europe in support of Nagorno-Karabakh and to condemn Azerbaijan’s policy of ethnic cleansing and genocide.
European leaders are “criminals against the Armenian people, they are shedding the blood of the Armenian people”. These words are those of one of the organizers of a demonstration which took place on Sunday October 1 in Brussels, Belgium. Thousands of Armenians, from several European countries, converged there to denounce Europe’s “complicity” after a lightning offensive by Azerbaijan to reconquer Nagorno-Karabakh, controlled for three decades by Armenian separatists who ended up capitulating and agreeing to lay down their arms last week. Since then, the enclave has been almost entirely deserted by its inhabitants ,more than 100,000 refugees having fled to Armenia for fear of reprisals from Azerbaijan.
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Marseille (Bouches-du-Rhône) has a large community of Armenian origin, generally estimated at around 80,000 people, arriving notably in the 1920s after the massacres and deportations by the troops of the Ottoman Empire.
Participants in this demonstration, called by the network of organizations Europeans for Artsakh, the Armenian name for Nagorno-Karabakh, accuse Azerbaijan of carrying out “ethnic cleansing” in this region. The latter refutes these accusations and assures that the inhabitants of the enclave are free to leave or stay.
“France condemns Azerbaijan’s action” in Nagorno-Karabakh, government spokesperson Olivier Véran declared on Sunday. It is “a humanitarian drama” , “almost the entire Armenian population was forced to leave (…) a territory in which they live legitimately” , he noted on BFM-TV. “Things must be done within the framework of the United Nations ,” added Mr. Véran, citing three priorities: “the restoration of humanitarian conditions, support for the population and the mobilization of the international community . ” The World Application The Morning of the World Every morning, find our selection of 20 articles not to be missed Download the app
Also on Sunday, Armenia’s ambassador to France, Hasmik Tolmajian, called on the international community and the United Nations to establish “decent conditions” for the return of Armenian refugees to Nagorno-Karabakh. “There is another alternative to being a refugee” , namely the return of these populations, she declared on Franceinfo, stressing that “no one wants to be a refugee when they can stay in their country” .
A United Nations mission arrived in Nagorno-Karabakh the same day – for the first time in thirty years – in order to assess the humanitarian needs there.
“The history of humanity has shown that impunity encourages the recurrence of crime”
“If the international community, with all the international mechanisms, the United Nations system, the entire prevention system, was not able to prevent the crime, we cannot say that the international community was up to the task, that she did not fail in its mission ,” responded Hasmik Tolmajian. She also urged sanctions, while “the history of humanity has shown that impunity favours the recurrence of crime” .
“To stop the aggressors, the crime, we need sanctions which can be economic or diplomatic. Without action, autocrats, criminals never stop ,” she insisted. “Since the creation of the United Nations, this is the first time that we have seen a republic disappear before our eyes ,” the diplomat ended up lamenting, warning that this could create a precedent.
Third GB News presenter Calvin Robinson suspended – as channel boss condemns Laurence Fox comments
Calvin Robinson’s suspension follows an earlier post supporting suspended colleague Dan Wootton, in which he said he would not appear on Dan Wootton Tonight without him. Meanwhile, the channel’s boss has criticised Laurence Fox’s remarks.
Calvin Robinson has become the third GB News presenter to be suspended from the channel after comments made by Laurence Fox on air.
It follows channel boss Angelos Frangopoulos saying Fox went “way past the limits of acceptance” in his “appalling” comments on GB News about journalist Ava Evans.
Actor-turned-political-activist Foxmade a series of remarks about Ms Evans – a journalist for the website PoliticsJOE – in which he asked show host Dan Wootton: “Who would want to shag that?”
Both Fox and Wootton, who could be heard laughing during the episode, were suspended by GB News in the face of an internal inquiry and an investigation by broadcast regulator Ofcom, which received around 7,300 complaints.
In a post on X, formerly Twitter, Robinson wrote: “I have been suspended from GB News.”
*****
Could not have happened to a better chap.
From Anthony Corella
I hate to judge, but this one really did come easy so here goes
Calvin is an ex video game journalist, ex teacher, failed local news reporter, failed Conservative party and Brexit Party candidate, he was refused ordination to become a Church of England priest, because of his extreme regressive views, he then became an outspoken critic of the church and sought to be accepted into a more ideologically backward church, so joined the ‘Global Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans’, and was ordained as a deacon in the ‘Free Church of England’, seems like anything to get a ‘dog collar’ and tunic, all to spread the word… of right-wing Christian fundamentalism.
He’s an irrational, egocentric self-serving political wannabe, a shameless, pseudo religious caricature, an attention seeking, ‘dog whistle politics’ encourager, media spotlight chasing exhibitionist, pandering to everything and everyone that is destroying the UK.
He uses ecclesiastical backdrops, exaggerated costumes and accoutrements to try and gain a modicum of legitimacy and to camouflage his, and the views of other bigoted and hateful sycophants, to persuade the public his ideologies are British values.
He is given unjustifiable airtime and is supported by the Right-Wing media and their billionaire owners. He seeks the company of like minded establishment stooges to validate his and their morally corrupt views.
“Liaison Committee for the Fourth International. “
Tony Greenstein after defying Zionist attempt to have him jailed ( thinke Ian means gaoled…) for direct action against Israeli crimes. Unite to support Palestinians! Down with Heresy hunts!
Dear Tony,
We condemn the statement (https://azvsas.blogspot.com/2023/09/why-palestine-solidarity-movement.html) you initiated calling for the ostracism of Peter Gregson from the Palestinian Solidarity movement for supposed ‘anti-Semitism’. We note that this accusation is false: the only definitions of anti-Semitism that count are the ones in authoritative dictionaries, such as the Oxford Dictionary which defines anti-Semitism as “Hostility to or prejudice against Jewish people”, or Merriam-Webster (note the charming US dictionary which nobody here uses, howdy pardners!) which defines it as “hostility toward or discrimination against Jews as a religious, ethnic, or racial group.”
It is clear that no such hostility is present in the political activities of Pete Gregson. Nowhere does he advocate hostility or discrimination against Jews. We don’t know what definition of anti-Semitism you are using, but it certainly is not any of these. And these are the only ones that the labour movement should recognise.
And so on and so on..
“There is a lot more of a case for labour movement activists to campaign against supporters of the dubious, pro-Nazi Ukraine Solidarity Campaign, than against Pete Gregson. It is especically strange to be ..”
Just sod off Ian….
Fraternally
Mark Andresen (Marxist activist, Torquay)
Anna Brogan (Black Activist and Marxist, London)
Ngungu Chileshi
Mara Costello
Diana Isserlis (Marxist activitist, Bristol)
Jon de Rennes (Thailand)
Ian Donovan (Marxist activist, London)an Donovan (Marxist activist, London)
Jane Elliot (Palestine solidarity activist, Glasgow)
Nagorno-Karabakh: Thousands flee as Armenia says ethnic cleansing under way. BBC.
I’m too upset to give a commentary so will leave this to the BBC>
A growing stream of ethnic Armenian refugees are fleeing Nagorno-Karabakh following Azerbaijan’s seizure of the disputed region last week.
More than 13,000 people have so far crossed into Armenia from the enclave, which is home to a majority of some 120,000 ethnic Armenians.
They left after the government in Yerevan announced plans to move those made homeless by the fighting.
Armenia’s PM has warned that ethnic cleansing is “under way” in the region.
“That’s happening just now, and that is very unfortunate fact because we were trying to urge international community on that,” Nikol Pashinyan told reporters.
Azerbaijan has said it wants to re-integrate the ethnic Armenians as “equal citizens”.
Envoys from Armenia and Azerbaijan are due to meet for EU-backed talks in Brussels later on Tuesday – the first such talks since the seizure of Nagorno-Karabakh. US state department spokesman Matthew Miller urged the two sides to reach a lasting peace agreement.
In Karabakh’s main city, Stepanakert, an explosion at a petrol station is said to have badly injured more than 200 people, local human rights ombudsman Gegham Stepanyan wrote in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter.
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As people flee, there are large traffic tailbacks on the Armenian border.
The BBC has spoken to some of the refugees who arrived in the city of Goris in Armenia on Sunday, close to the border to Karabakh.
“I gave my whole life to my homeland,” said one man. “It would be better if they killed me than this.”
A woman, Veronica, told the BBC that this was the second time she had become a refugee. The first time was during the conflict in 2020.
‘We have nothing’
The main square of Goris is crowded. The theatre nearby is turned into a base for the Red Cross.
Tatiana Oganesyan, doctor and head of a foundation of doctors and volunteers that’s now helping refugees in Goris, told the BBC that people who have come to the doctors are exhausted, malnourished and psychologically crushed.
“People are shocked, they are telling us: I need pills, they are blue,” she says. Doctors then need to figure out their medication and find it for them.
“We have nothing,” says an elderly woman who just arrived in Goris. She points at her jumper, saying it’s all she could bring with her from home. Her son is on crutches near her.
In the nearby village of Kornidzor, refugees who were being processed said they did not believe they could be safe under Azerbaijani rule and did not expect ever to be able to return home.
The Armenian government said in a statement on Sunday that hundreds of the refugees had already been provided with government-funded housing.
But it has not released a clear plan of how it could cope with an influx of people. Prime Minister Pashinyan announced last week that plans were in place to look after up to 40,000 refugees.
Armenians the BBC has spoken to have said they are prepared to take refugees into their homes.
Image caption,Many have been arriving in the village of Kornidzor
Meanwhile, more than 140 people have been arrested in Yerevan on Monday following the latest anti-government protests, according to local media quoting the country’s interior ministry.
The Tass news agency said special forces had begun detaining demonstrators who blocked roads in Yerevan.
Police were also stationed outside the main government building, which houses the prime minister’s offices and which demonstrators have been trying to break into.
Mr Pashinyan has been accused of granting too many concessions to Azerbaijan and there are calls for his resignation.
The Armenian separatist forces in the territory agreed to disarm on Wednesday, following a lightning-fast Azerbaijani military offensive.
Armenia has repeatedly said a mass exodus from the region would be the fault of the Azerbaijani authorities.
In a TV address on Sunday, Mr Pashinyan said many inside the enclave would “see expulsion from the homeland as the only way out” unless Azerbaijan provided “real living conditions” and “effective mechanisms of protection against ethnic cleansing”.
He repeated that his government was prepared to “lovingly welcome our brothers and sisters”.
“Yer darn tooting rooting!” were the words of cow-poke John, a leading figure on the American left, as the news that has shaken the Trainspotting world broke.. Taking a sip of his Bud Lite the veteran ‘former’ Spart exclaimed “Hot diddly dog!”.
Discussion on the application of a supporter of Socialist Fight for CPGB membership was opened by Jack Conrad, who said it had been referred by the PCC to the aggregate because of the wider issues of communist unity that are a central issue in our politics. In his application letter the comrade asked to join the CPGB as part of a tendency, although in effect it was an individual application, and so the PCC treated it as such.
The application had arisen from a discussion at Communist University on communist unity, in which CPGB comrades had said to the Socialist Fight supporter, “You’re welcome to join the CPGB with factional rights and subject to the same rights and responsibilities as all members of the party.”1 With these provisos the PCC was in favour of accepting the application in line with our principled position on Marxist unity.
The resulting discussion touched on these wider questions, as well the history of factions and oppositional currents in the CPGB, alongside the specific details of the application itself. All the comrades who spoke in the discussion supported accepting the application. It would be a healthy demonstration of the type of party that we want: namely one which encourages the debating of differences and unity in action. Moreover, we might hope to see more applications of this type and there could be no principled reasons for rejecting the application. Such an approach did not involve ‘soft unity’ or the submerging of differences: on the contrary, communist unity demanded a serious exploration of political differences and a clarification of ideas and strategies.
Summing up the discussion, comrade Conrad said that communist rapprochement was not a process of adding numbers, but was one of serious political discussion and overcoming muddled ideas. What have Marxists to fear in open debate and the honest disagreements amongst comrades committed to the communist programme?
Armenia is ready to host people displaced from the breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh after its surrender to Azerbaijani forces, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has said.
He said accommodation had been prepared for tens of thousands of people, although he saw “no direct threat” to Karabakh’s ethnic Armenians.
Karabakh authorities have warned the population could face ethnic cleansing.
…..
The Armenian people were the victims of the first genocide of the 20th century. Now they face a new threat, the Azerbjanin family dictatorship backed by the state that committed that mass murder, Turkey. Let down by former Russian allies the people of this area face the threat of a forced ‘integration’ into a state they want no part of.
Yesterday Azerbaijan launched a military offensive against the Armenian enclave of Nagorno- Karabakh, bombing its cities and villages in a so-called “anti-terrorist operation”. Last night, in a televised address, Azerbaijan’s president, Ilham Aliyev, claimed complete victory.
Around 200 people are estimated to have been killed and hundreds more wounded, including old women and children. The mayor of the city of Marturi, which was shelled, was one if the fatalities. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan expressed support for Azerbaijan’s military aggression.
Last December, Azerbaijan began a blockade of the disputed region, by closing the Lachin corridor. This created a humanitarian emergency for the ethnic Armenian civilians in the enclave, as food, energy and medical care became increasingly scarce.
Politicians including Montreal Mayor Valérie Plante, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh condemn “rise of hate.”
Thousands of people gathered in cities across Canada on Wednesday for competing protests, yelling and chanting at each other about the way schools instruct sexuality and gender identity and how teachers refer to transgender youth.
Counter-demonstrators, meanwhile, accused protesters of importing United States culture wars into the country and trying to deny students important lessons about inclusion and respect for gender-diverse people.
………..
Comment, reports indicate that the anti-LGBT protesters were headed by the familiar group of alt-right wingers, religious bigots, Christians and Islamists, and conspiracists.
It’s now a full set of Conspiracist apologists for Brand.
Well nearly, we await David Icke and Piers Corbyn…
For those not familiar with the alt-facts site, Grayzone, its chief Max Blumenthal and his minion Kitty Klarenberg, Al Jazeera recently stated,”it has been accused of spreading misinformation and Chinese and Russian government propaganda, including debunked claims about the conflict in Ukraine and whitewashed accounts of Beijing’s repression of ethnic minority Muslims in far-western Xinjian.”
Wikipedia says, “The Russian fake news website Peace Data has republished articles by The Grayzone in order to build a reputation as a progressive and anti-Western media source and to attract contributors.[61] False claims published by The Grayzone are referenced by many Twitter users who back Assad and the Russian government.[38]
There was a brief, strange moment in 2015 when Russell Brand mattered in mainstream British politics. With an election looming, the opposition Labour Party was trailing in the polls against a coalition government that was the very definition of establishment—led by an Eton- and Oxford-educated prime minister in David Cameron and his Westminster- and Cambridge-educated deputy, Nick Clegg, now president of global affairs at Meta. So the Labour leader, Ed Miliband, went seeking the endorsement of Brand, the actor, comedian, and emerging online provocateur whose anti-corporatist screeds to his 9.5 million Twitter followers and 100,000 YouTube subscribers gave him the appearance of a power player. Miliband got Brand’s endorsement but lost the election.
Coment, not just mainstream he spoke at a People’s Assembly march in 2014, Owen Jones had a dialogue with him. and sorely missed comrade Mark Fisher referred to him as following (I and the Ipswich left were not, as far as I know present at this event, we could not stand him even then),
“The day before Brand’s now famous interview with Jeremy Paxman was broadcast on Newsnight, I had seen Brand’s stand-up show the Messiah Complex inIpswich. The show was defiantly pro-immigrant, pro-communist, anti-homophobic, saturated with working class intelligence and not afraid to show it, and queer in the way that popular culture used to be (i.e. nothing to do with the sour-faced identitarian piety foisted upon us by moralisers on the post-structuralist ‘left’). Malcolm X, Che, politics as a psychedelic dismantling of existing reality: this was communism as something cool, sexy and proletarian, instead of a finger-wagging sermon.
The next night, it was clear that Brand’s appearance had produced a moment of splitting. For some of us, Brand’s forensic take-down of Paxman was intensely moving, miraculous; I couldn’t remember the last time a person from a working class background had been given the space to so consummately destroy a class ‘superior’ using intelligence and reason. This wasn’t Johnny Rotten swearing at Bill Grundy – an act of antagonism which confirmed rather than challenged class stereotypes. Brand had outwitted Paxman – and the use of humour was what separated Brand from the dourness of so much ‘leftism’. Brand makes people feel good about themselves; whereas the moralising left specialises in making people feed bad, and is not happy until their heads are bent in guilt..
It is right that Brand, like any of us, should answer for his behaviour and the language that he uses. But such questioning should take place in an atmosphere of comradeship and solidarity, and probably not in public in the first instance – although when Brand was questioned about sexism by Mehdi Hasan, he displayed exactly the kind of good-humoured humility that was entirely lacking in the stony faces of those who had judged him. “I don’t think I’m sexist, But I remember my grandmother, the loveliest person I‘ve ever known, but she was racist, but I don’t think she knew. I don’t know if I have some cultural hangover, I know that I have a great love of proletariat linguistics, like ‘darling’ and ‘bird’, so if women think I’m sexist they’re in a better position to judge than I am, so I’ll work on that.”
‘…….
Since then, Brand’s reach has exploded. His YouTube channel now has 6.6 million subscribers, his X account more than 11 million followers. But his anti-establishment message has morphed, from a broader, almost coherent response to the politics of fiscal austerity that shaped the UK after the 2008 financial crisis to a series of cultish, conspiracy-driven narratives that draw in Covid denialism, Russian disinformation, and the far-right-inspired “Great Reset” theory, united by the meta-conspiracy that the mainstream—the “elites”—have darker agendas based on control.
On Saturday, the UK’s Channel Four aired an hour-long documentary in which several women accused Brand of rape and sexual assault. Before the broadcast, the comedian came out swinging. In a video on his YouTube channel, titled “So, This Is Happening,” Brand not only denied the accusations, but leveled some of his own: “[It] makes me question, is there another agenda at play?” he said.One of Brand’s alleged victims, speaking on the BBC, called his statement “insulting” and “laughable.” But within the alt-media, there was a show of support from figures including Andrew Tate, the misogynist influencer who is awaiting trial for rape and human trafficking in Romania, Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News anchor, who now runs a conspiracy-inflected show on X, and Alex Jones, fined $1.5 billion for lies about the victims of a school shooting. X’s owner, Elon Musk, posted underneath Brand’s video: “Of course. They don’t like competition”—referring, apparently, to those same dark forces referenced by the comedian.
The camaraderie between conspiracy theorists, the alt-right, and the “manosphere,” is grimly predictable. Their shared narrative is one of alienation from the mainstream, outsiderdom, and dark forces massing to thwart them. “Opposite day, but with real consequences for people,” as Marc Owen Jones, an expert on disinformation and social media at Hamad bin Khalifa University in Qatar, puts it.
BrusselsSunday. Protest against sex education programme, EVRAS ‘anti-feminist, anti-abortion and anti LGBT speeches’. Le Soir says about 1,500 took part.
(AP) — Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo said on Friday that he will seek the help of government experts on extremism in the wake of a series of school arsons. Officials believe the attacks are connected to a controversial sexual education school program.
De Croo spoke just hours after a sixth school in the French-speaking Wallonia region was torched this week. Signs protesting the so-called Evras program were discovered in some of the schools, according to authorities.
The program is a required four hours of training for students aged 11 to 12 and 15 to 16, intended to help them develop their relational and sexual lives. The program had been around and available for all age groups for years, but was not compulsory until now.
In Belgium, several schools burnt after a campaign by religious extremists against sex education
The ransacking of the establishments occurred while the programme of courses devoted to emotional life, voted by the Parliament of the Wallonia-Brussels Federation, was the subject of attacks by fundamentalist Muslim and Catholic groups, joined by conspiracy theorists.
..some 1,500 people from gathering in the centre of Brussels on Sunday with a slogan: “Don’t touch our children!” » In a tense atmosphere, Radya Oulebsir, a Muslim activist, self-proclaimed organiser of the protest, and Alain Escada, a leader of the traditionalist Catholic association Civitas, demanded that the course be abandoned. On several of the vandalised establishments, hostile slogans such as “No Evras, otherwise the next ones, it’s you” had been sprayed by the arsonists.
Among those denouncing the new course, we can also find anti-vaccine activists who came forward during the Covid-19 pandemic, followers of conspiracy theories, climate sceptics….
Le Soir. Des discours anti féministes, IVG et LGBT à la manifestation anti-EVRAS (photos)
“around 1,500 people gathered this Sunday in Brussels to protest against the decree on education courses for relational, emotional and sexual life (EVRAS) in French-speaking education. The tone of the demonstration was set from the start of the speeches of the organisers, including Alain Escada, president of Civitas France, Nicolas Lefère, Gilet Jaune, and head of “Good Sense Belgium” (against vaccination, elites and international institutions ), Daniel De Wolff, very active in the anti-vax sphere, and Radya Oulebsir.”
The Tendance has never liked Brand, from his Mockney accent, and his unfunny comedy, to his left phase, when he came to a People’s Assembly protest against against austerity in 2014 (one awaits Cde Lindsey German’s comments on the latest events) to his ‘book’ Revolution (2014) in which he called the Situationist Guy Debord “clever clogs” and cited the French leftist.
Now, he is, amongst many things, and one cannot underline too much the gravity of the sexual abuse charges against him, well,
(Wikipedia) During the COVID-19 pandemic, Brand’s YouTube channel underwent an increase in activity and change in political direction, and was accused of promoting COVID denialism and conspiracy theories.[172][173] According to culture reporter Louis Chilton, his videos are usually “framed with some sort of contrarian take or calling out hypocrisy in the mainstream media”, and often hint “at a vague, world-altering conspiracy”.[174] Finn McRedmond of the New Statesman, which Brand had guest-edited in 2013, proclaimed “We have lost Russell Brand”. The article described Brand as having now melded his “trad-socialist values” with “all the suspicions and anxieties of the new American right”.[175] Brand’s channel saw a rise in popularity, amassing 6.5 million subscribers and more than a billion views.[176][177] His new weekly views rose from a low of under 500,000 in November 2020 to about 14.5 million weekly views during March 2022.[178]
Today, on the anniversary of Mahsa Amini’s death, her father has been detained. Reuters reports about this, citing a source close to the family. It is noted that “security forces” detained Amjad Amini in the west of Iran.
Ipswich this afternoon on the Old Town Steps. Protest in solidarity with Jin, Jiyan, Azadi. Women, life, freedom against the Islamic Republic of Iran.
About 30 to over 40 people, many of whom were Iranians as well as Kurds. There were some of us from the local trade unions and left.
Tendance Coatesy 
