Nick Cohen
Sunday February 23, 2003
The Observer
The satisfaction of an anti-war movement which persuaded one million people
to tell Iraqis they must continue to live under a tyranny has been disturbed
by a dispute among the comrades on the vexed questions of gender and sexual
orientation.
My reference last week to the decision of the Stop the War coalition to ally
with the Muslim Association of Britain has provoked a few of its supporters
to examine the beliefs of their new friends. Not everyone likes what they
see. The association, whose members are mainly Arabs, isn't a strong force
in British Islam. It is a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood which wants a
religious tyranny to enforce Islamic law. A supporter explained to the
communist Weekly Worker that existing Muslim governments were far too
permissive. 'We see no genuine Muslim states in the world today - Saudi
Arabia and places like that profess to be Muslim states but this is untrue.'
The association believes the punishment for Muslims who abandon their faith
should be death and that Israel should be abolished. Although it didn't
support the 11 September atrocities, it refused to condemn the al-Qaeda
killings in Mombasa because Israelis were the target. One small group, the
Alliance for Workers' Liberty, protested that the coalition was promoting
reactionary Islam rather than Muslims with 'democratic, secular and
internationalist ideals', but it was overruled by the Socialist Workers
Party.
In Marxist terms, the Trots have preferred feudal theocracy to bourgeois
democracy which - in non-Marxist terms - is disgraceful and stupid, as a few
members of the far Left are starting to realise.
'I ask all you women haters why you protest against one form of violence
[war] while supporting the violence against women in Islamic countries [and
presumably the West too]?' says one reader of the uk.indymedia website. A
gay reader announces: 'I give this warning to the next SWP paper seller I
see on Gay Pride: keep the hell away from us.'
But before the complaints got out of hand, order was restored and the debate
concluded by a reader who cried that people who condemn fundamentalists were
the victims of a 'desperate' plot hatched by 'MI5/Special Branch.' Well
spotted, comrade.
Single-issue campaigning always brings strange alliances and it's silly to
be over-fastidious. Those of us who can't see any way other than war to
remove a tyrant who has killed hundreds of thousands and forced four million
into exile are in bed with Tony Blair, a novel experience, but there you
are.
It's one thing, however, to see the upholders of sharia law join your
demonstration. It is quite another to invite them to co-host your
demonstration and embrace them as brothers. The absence of principle is
matched only by the absence of intelligence. What is the Left offering Iraq?
It has no strategy other than the continuation of a brutal status quo. It
can't support the Iraqi democrats because they say Saddam can only be
overthrown by violence.
It can't support the Iraqi Kurds because they agree. It has been reduced to
allying with religious bigots, the deadliest enemy of those best and
brightest Muslims who offer that rare commodity in the Islamic world, hope.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003
-- Michael Pugliese
"Without knowing that we knew nothing, we went on talking without listening to
each other. Sometimes we flattered and praised each other, understanding that
we would be flattered and praised in return. Other times we abused and shouted
at each other, as if we were in a madhouse." -Tolstoy