Yoshie may not be offering in these recent discussions the correct answers but I think she has been asking some of the right questions (without which, of of course, one cannot find the right answers). Some of the questions are: How do we as mostly secular leftists relate to religiously minded people, such as militant Islamists who might be engaged in anti-imperialist struggle? In fact ought we relate to the religious who share many of the same enemies as we do, but who might dream of a religiously based utopia, unlike ourselves?
These issues are not confined to the Middle East. In Europe, secular leftists have found themselves confronting the same issues too, as more and more of the proletariats there become comprised of immigrants from Muslin countries. In the UK there has been, for some years an ongoing debate on the radical left over these issues. The British SWP, for instance, has decided to cooperate with Muslim activists. The new political party, Respect (who most well known figure is politician George Galloway) is based, in part on alliance between the SWP and other secular leftists and Muslim activists. Other groups on the radical left in Britain think this approach to be wrongheaded. I don't think there is any clearcut answers to these questions. But these are the sorts of questions that we ought to be asking.
Jim F.
-- "Wojtek Sokolowski" <sokol at jhu.edu> wrote: Doug:
Yoshie thrives on pissing people off, which is almost inevitable (except for a few sad fellow travelers). It's her oxygen. It makes her feel radical and important. Many times I've been tempted to boot her, but I haven't yet. But her sort of trolling is very bad for list ecology. If the apology isn't forthcoming, that might be a good time to get out the steel-toed boots.
[WS:] Pleased don't. The stuff that she posts is generally useful. Her main sin is not trolling but failing to summarize the points she is making, and using long verbatim quotes instead. However, poor writing style hardly qualifies as a capital offence.
Wojtek
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