The Left's unholy alliance with religious bigotry

Michael Pugliese debsian at pacbell.net
Sun Feb 23 14:51:01 PST 2003


The Left's unholy alliance with religious bigotry

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.

 

nick.cohen at observer.co.uk

 

 

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



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