Pro-Islamist Left
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Email notice received at Head Office from "One Law for All:
Quote:Siding with the Oppressor: The Pro-Islamist LeftA new report by One Law for All entitled “Siding with the Oppressor: The Pro-Islamist Left" exposes Stop the War Coalition, Respect Party, Unite Against Fascism and individuals such as Ken Livingstone and George Galloway and their agenda and methods.
This section of the Left uses accusations of racism and Islamophobia and a conflation of Muslim with Islamist in order to defend Islamism and Islam rather than out of any real concern for prejudice against Muslims or their rights, particularly since Muslims or those labelled as such are the first victims of Islamism and on the frontlines of resisting it.
The report has been written as a companion volume to Enemies not Allies: The Far-Right. Like the far-Right which despises multiculturalism yet benefits from its idea of difference to scapegoat the other and promote its own form of white identity politics, the pro-Islamist Left also uses multiculturalism to side with the oppressor by viewing the ‘Muslim community’ and ‘Muslim world’ as homogeneous entities thereby ignoring and silencing dissenters.
This politics of betrayal sides with the Islamic far-Right and the oppressor. Challenging this perspective is especially important given its wide acceptance as ‘progressive’ in mainstream society.
Any principled point of view must oppose all forms of fascism, including Islamic fascism, and instead side with the countless people, including Muslims, who are fighting and challenging Islamism here in Europe as well as the Middle East, North Africa and the world.
The spokesperson for One Law For All is Maryam Namazie (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maryam_Namazie) who is also executive committee member of the Worker-communist Party of Iran (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker-communist_Party_of_Iran). This is a group in exile founded and led by Mansoor Hekmat (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mansoor_Hekmat).An interview with him at MIA (http://marxists.org/archive/hekmat-mansoor/1992/02/world-today.htm) reads
Quote:Question: What about Lenin and Leninism? Does not Leninism need to be re-evaluated, and do you still consider yourself a Leninist?Mansoor Hekmat: We are living in such a day and age that before we can answer such questions we have to first define our terms. If it is a question of a real assessment of Lenin, of the truth of his views and his practice from the viewpoint of Marxism, of his contribution to the revolutionary thought and practice of the working class, and so on, of course I am a Leninist. In my view Lenin was a genuine Marxist with an essentially correct understanding of this outlook, and a worthy leader of the socialist movement of the world working class.But Leninism as a label which distinguished particular tendencies in the so-called communist movement has its own history. The initiators of the term under Stalin, or the groups which in later splits within the official mainstream of this communism emphasized the term Marxist-Leninist, exploited these designations – just like much other Marxist terminology – to express worldly, and in the main, non-socialist disputes and interests.then a little later
Quote:Question: One major aspect of the current anti-socialist offensive is the economic dimension. Soviet Union’s collapse has given currency to the idea that capitalism and the market provide the most efficient and feasible economic model that humanity historically has achieved. How do you, as a Marxist, reply to this?Mansoor Hekmat: Two things must be differentiated here. One is the comparison of the performance of the different models of capitalism in West and East, and the other, comparison of capitalism (both competitive and otherwise) with socialism as an economic and social alternative. To this day, socialism, in the sense meant by Marxists, has not been set up anywhere. We don’t believe that from a Marxist and working-class view the economic system in the Soviet Union could at any time be called socialist. I’ll deal with the question of capitalism and socialism later on, but first I want to say a few words about the different models of capitalist development in West and East.There is also a Marx-Hekmat Society in Londonhttp://www.marxhekmatsociety.com/
The other spokesperson is even considered bad by Labour Party standards.http://socialistunity.com/anne-marie-waters-the-worst-possible-potential-labour-ppc/
It's Andy Newman, ex-Trotskyist (and ex-Respect Party member) and aspiring Labour councillor, who is wrong here. He's afraid that the stance of fellow Labourite, Anne-Marie Waters, will lose the Labour Party votes from Muslims. It might well but that doesn't make it wrong. It just shows what unprincipled vote-catchers Andy Newman and the Labour Party are. Newman is getting a well-deserved bollocking for this on Urban 75 and elsewhere.
More on the Anne-Marie Waters story from both sides of the fence:http://howiescorner.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/socialist-unity-attacks-secularist.htmlhttp://socialistunity.com/on-not-fearing-muslims/http://hurryupharry.org/2013/06/23/andy-newman-turns-to-the-dark-side-of-the-force/
Quote:Newman and his co-thinkers at Socialist Unity are purveyors of reaction and stand in the same tradition as George Galloway with their pandering to reactionary conservatism. What this man is doing in the Labour Party, witch-hunting secular activists is open to question. He seems intent on wrecking the internal processes of candidate selection in order to keep a member of the Green Party as an MP. The Greens in Brighton are currently in dispute with their own workforce whose wages they have have cut by £4,000 a year.
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