Over at Indigo Jo Blogs Yusuf Smith calls for Muslims to protest against the anti-Sharia demonstration in Trafalgar Square this Saturday – a stunt organised by the Worker Communist Party of Iran. Personally, I think there’s just as good a case for communists to protest against it, given that the sectarian idiocies committed by the nutters of the WPI are a total embarrassment to any real Marxist. The question is – is it really worth organising against an event which in all probability will make the tiny March for Free Expression of 2006, in which the WPI shared a platform with hard-right racists, look like a mass mobilisation?
Category Archives: Left Wing
Tower Hamlets Council Labour Group votes for ban on Hizb ut-Tahrir
Moves have begun to try and get the radical Hizb ut-Tahrir Islamist group banned in Britain after the ruling group on one local authority in East London voted to get it proscribed. The Labour members on Tower Hamlets Council agreed last night (Monday) by a casting vote to get the controversial organisation outlawed.
Council cabinet members abstained from the vote, while the rest of the Labour members were split on the issue, inside sources have told the East London Advertiser tonight. Half voted to get Hizb ut-Tahrir formally banned, the rest voted against. Labour Group chairman Carli Harper-Penman used her casting vote, the sources said.
The resolution was part of a policy discussion which could go before the next full council meeting on February 9 to be adopted. If it is voted through, Tower Hamlets could be the first local authority in the country to call on the Home Secretary to put the organisation on the “proscribed” list – a move that was resisted at the Home Office two years ago.
UK is not sleepwalking to segregation
The head of Britain’s equalities watchdog has come under fire for undermining race relations with “bogus and alarmist” claims that Britain is an increasingly segregated society.
The charge against Trevor Phillips, chairman of the equality and human rights commission, is made in a new book that also condemns him for propagating myths that Britain is blighted by race ghettos and threatened by extremism fostered in isolated Muslim communities.
The book, Sleepwalking to Segregation?, by two Manchester University academics, says there is no statistical evidence of “white flight” from inner-city areas with high numbers of minority ethnic residents. Official statistics reviewed by the authors show white people are, in fact, moving into certain inner-city areas with large ethnic minority populations, such as Leicester, Bradford, Lambeth, Wolverhampton, Wycombe, Manchester and Merton.
The book warns that repeated falsehoods about immigration, integration and segregation are promoting racial division.
Ludi Simpson, honorary professor of population studies and co-author of the book, said: “By propagating myths using bogus and alarmist interpretations of population change, individuals such as Trevor Phillips, Dr Michael Nazir-Ali, bishop of Rochester, and Sir Andrew Green, chair of Migration Watch, are inadvertently promoting racial segregation.”
The authors also rejected claims that segregation bred terrorism, as there was no evidence that Muslims from areas with large Muslim populations were more likely to be charged with terrorism than those from others areas.
A spokeswoman for the equality and human rights commission declined to comment.
Cf. the article “Ghetto Britain” in the Daily Star, which is based on material produced by the Equality and Human Rights Commission.
‘The horror comes home’ – Martin Bright on the Gaza war
“In Britain, the main consequence of the Gaza War has been to provide a rallying point for the motley alliance of totalitarian sympathisers of the hard left and Islamic radical right. It is not the responsibility of the Israeli government to consider the consequences of their actions on the rise of militant Islam in Britain and Europe. But the dangers are real. The Islamist tendency represented by self-appointed representatives such as the Muslim Council of Britain and the Muslim Association of Britain was on the retreat. The Gaza War has given them new life, as shown by their prominence in the recent demonstrations, and across the media.”
Martin Bright in the New Statesman, 22 January 2009
Islam made me an atheist, says Douglas Murray
Over at the Spectator Douglas Murray explains his loss of religious faith:
“Some years ago I started studying Islam. It didn’t take long to recognise the problems of that religion’s texts – the repetitions, contradictions and absurdities…. Gradually, scepticism of the claims made by one religion was joined by scepticism of all such claims. Incredulity that anybody thought an archangel dictated a book to Mohammed produced a strange contradiction. I found myself still clinging to belief in Christianity. I was trying to believe – though rarely arguing – ‘Well, your guy didn’t hear voices: but I know a man who did.’ This last, shortest and sharpest, phase pulled down the whole thing. In the end Mohammed made me an atheist.”
Still, Murray’s rejection of religious belief was not without difficulty:
“My final fear was one which I think a lot of Christians in this country feel, particularly as they see Islam re-emerging and gaining adherents in spite (or perhaps because) of its intransigence and intractability. It is, I suppose, a sense of cultural abandonment. We know how much of what we enjoy and relish comes through Christianity. Can we really go on without it?”
The answer, according to Murray, is for non-Muslim non-believers to counter the threat posed by Islam by becoming “cultural Christians”.
This peculiar Islamophobic version of atheism, which rejects God but upholds the need to defend Christian civilisation against the Muslim hordes, appears to derive from Richard Dawkins, who thinks that the increase of Islamic influence at the expense of Christianity would be “a poor exchange” and has stated: “This is historically a Christian country. I’m a cultural Christian…. I’m not one of those who wants to purge our society of our Christian history. If there’s any threat to these sorts of things, I think you will find it comes from rival religions and not from atheists.”
Update: Over at Shiraz Socialist Jim Denham of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty recommends “this extraordinary account by Douglas Murray” to his readers. Of course, it’s hardly unexpected that an AWLer should ally himself with a vicious anti-Muslim bigot like Murray (“It is late in the day, but Europe still has time to turn around the demographic time-bomb which will soon see a number of our largest cities fall to Muslim majorities. It has to. All immigration into Europe from Muslim countries must stop…. Conditions for Muslims in Europe must be made harder across the board”). After all, we recently witnessed Denham’s former comrade Alan Johnson enthusiastically promoting another hardline right-wing Islamophobe, Andrew Bostom. Surely it can only be a matter of time before Denham and Johnson find merit in the views of Nick Griffin.
Dutch Labour Party joins attack on Muslims, migrants and multiculturalism
Under the headline “From the left, a call to end the current Dutch notion of tolerance”, John Vinocur reports from the Netherlands (“a country whose history of tolerance was the first in 21st-century Europe to clash with the on-street realities of its growing Muslim population”) on the latest attack on migrants and multiculturalism, this one by the chair of the PvdA:
“Two weeks ago, the country’s biggest left-wing political grouping, the Labor Party, which has responsibility for integration as a member of the coalition government led by the Christian Democrats, issued a position paper calling for the end of the failed model of Dutch ‘tolerance’…. If judged on the standard scale of caution in dealing with cultural clashes and Muslims’ obligations to their new homes in Europe, the language of the Dutch position paper and Lilianne Ploumen, Labor’s chairperson, was exceptional.
“The paper said: ‘The mistake we can never repeat is stifling criticism of cultures and religions for reasons of tolerance.’ Government and politicians had too long failed to acknowledge the feelings of ‘loss and estrangement’ felt by Dutch society facing parallel communities that disregard its language, laws and customs. Newcomers, according to Ploumen, must avoid ‘self-designated victimization’. She asserted, ‘the grip of the homeland has to disappear’ for these immigrants who, news reports indicate, also retain their original nationality at a rate of about 80 percent once becoming Dutch citizens.
“Instead of reflexively offering tolerance with the expectation that things would work out in the long run, she said, the government strategy should be ‘bringing our values into confrontation with people who thinkotherwise’…. And that comes from the heart of the traditional, democratic European left, where placing the onus of compatibility on immigrants never found such comfort before…. Labor’s line seems to stand on its head the old equation of jobs-plus-education equals integration. Conforming to Dutch society’s social standards now comes first. Strikingly, it turns its back on cultural relativism….
“Ploumen says, ‘Integration calls on the greatest effort from the new Dutch. Let go of where you come from; choose the Netherlands unconditionally’. Immigrants must ‘take responsibility for this country’ and cherish and protect its Dutch essence.
“Not clear enough? Ploumen insists, ‘The success of the integration process is hindered by the disproportionate number of non-natives involved in criminality and trouble-making, by men who refuse to shake hands with women, by burqas and separate courses for women oncitizenship. We have to stop the existence of parallel societies within our society’.”
Vinocur’s article concludes with a quote from Frits Bolkestein, former leader of the right-wing VVD (“who began writing in 1991 about the enormous challenge posed to Europe by Muslim immigration”): “The multi-cultis just aren’t making the running anymore. It’s a brave step towards a new normalcy in this country.”
New York Times, 29 December 2008
Daniel Pipes hails what he terms “A Dutch fissure in the Leftist-Islamist alliance“.
Update: Under the heading “Dutch Left calls for an end to suicidal notion of tolerance” Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch also applauds the PvdA’s stance:
“For years I have insisted that the resistance to the jihad and Islamic supremacism is not a Left/Right, liberal/conservative issue, but one of the defense of our common civilization – however, hardly anyone on the Left has ever demonstrated any awareness of this, perhaps because they have increasingly discarded the values of that common civilization altogether. However, harsh reality is causing some people to wake up in the Netherlands.”
Fascists accuse anti-fascists of … supporting fascism
The fascist British National Party has produced a “briefing” on Unite Against Fascism. The document employs the now familiar tactic, adopted by the BNP in imitation of Le Pen’s Front National in France, of turning the accusations made by its political opponents against the accusers themselves.
Thus the BNP condemns UAF as “a racist organisation” whose members are “prepared to to embrace movements (or representatives of those movements) whose ideological roots are fundamentally based on fascistic ideology, and which have close and extensive historical links to Nazism”.
This sets a new standard in brazen hypocrisy, coming from a party whose constitution requires that all its members must be from the “Indigenous Caucasian” racial group and commits it to “stemming and reversing the tide of non-white immigration” and to restoring “the overwhelmingly white makeup of the British population that existed in Britain prior to 1948” – a party, moreover, whose founder and long-time leader was the notorious Nazi admirer John Tyndall (standing on the left of the photograph).
Who are the “fascist groups” that UAF has supposedly embraced? Predictably, they are grouped by the BNP under the heading of “Islamo-Nazism” – a category which, according to the BNP, prominently features the Muslim Council of Britain, the largest and most representative Islamic organisation in the UK. The BNP informs us that “the historical link between extremist Islam and Nazism is well known”, the “evidence” for this assertion being the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem’s attempts to build an alliance with Nazi Germany.
But where does the BNP get all this nonsense about “Islamic fascism” from, and the fantasy about the MCB being an extremist organisation? Well, the main source they cite is none other than Martin Bright. They footnote both his Observer article from July 2006, “Right showing left the way on radical Islam”, and his pamphlet When Progressives Treat with Reactionaries, published in 2006 by the right-wing think-tank Policy Exchange. (As we commented at the time: “When it comes to treating with reactionaries, Bright can evidently speak from first-hand experience.”)
Bright, of course, has used the fascists’ own tactic of generating a smokescreen by accusing his opponents of the very political crimes for which he himself is responsible. A piece on his New Statesman blog, entitled “Where the hard left and extreme right meet”, drew a bizarre parallel between the Holocaust denier Michele Renouf and Islamophobia Watch. In response we pointed to the BNP’s support for Bright’s views and argued that it was more a case of “where liberal Islamophobes and the extreme right meet”. The fascists’ endorsement of Bright’s writings in their latest anti-Muslim rant reinforces that point.
US Right backs Namazie’s ‘One Law for All’ fraud
“Last year, the UK began backing up Sharia judgments with the full force and authority of British civil courts. Now, a campaign has been launched to end the operation of all religious courts in Britain – especially those operating under Islam. Dubbed ‘One Law for All‘, the campaign commenced not coincidently on December 10, 2008, the 60th anniversary of the UN Declaration of Human Rights. Promoters of the No Sharia Campaign wanted to highlight the contrast between human rights and Sharia law….
“A win for the campaign against Sharia would be a win for human rights, and especially the rights of Muslim women in the UK who might otherwise have no choice but to suffer discrimination at the hands of Islamic jurists. More importantly, it would be a statement to those who hold a radical political ideology cloaked in the name of Islam, that Britain stands for freedom and equality, and will not appease those who seek to subvert it.”
Deborah Weiss at Front Page Magazine, 16 December 2008
Former AWL supporter cosies up to right-wing Islamophobe
Now, why doesn’t that surprise me? The former supporter of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty is Alan Johnson, the right-wing Islamophobe is Andrew Bostom, and the interview – in which Johnson helps Bostom set out his case that antisemitism is rooted in Islam – appears in the current issue of Democratiya.
‘One Law for All’ – another Islamophobic WPI fraud
The One Law for All campaign – supported by the National Secular Society – is to be launched in the House of Lords on International Human Rights Day, 10 December.
According to campaign organiser, Maryam Namazie, “Even in civil matters, Sharia law is discriminatory, unfair and unjust, particularly against women and children. Moreover, its voluntary nature is a sham; many women will be pressured into going to these courts and abiding by their decisions. These courts are a quick and cheap route to injustice and do nothing to promote minority rights and social cohesion. Public interest, particularly with regard to women and children, requires an end to Sharia and all other faith-based courts and tribunals.”
The campaign has already received widespread support.
National Secular Society news report, 5 December 2008
Sure it’s received wide support. The campaign is backed by a total of ten organisations, five of which – Children First Now, the laughably misnamed Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain, Equal Rights Now – Organisation against Women’s Discrimination in Iran, the International Committee against Stoning and the Iranian Secular Society – are all front organisations for the Islamophobic far-left sect, the Worker-Communist Party of Iran. You do sometimes wonder whether the WPI has more front organisations than members.