Friday, January 30, 2009
The reactionary right-wing politics of the Gaza demonstrations, by Francis Chartrand
Israel's offensive in Gaza is in the tradition of the US-British slaughter of Iraqi conscript soldiers retreating from their occupation of Kuwait at the end of the first Gulf war in 1991. An American soldier described that as "like shooting fish in a barrel". So in Gaza now.
Israel has immense technical superiority over Hamas. And the Hamas "fish" swim in the "waters" of a densely-packed civilian population. At least a third of the casualties, maybe far more, have, inevitably, been "civilians".
The demonstrations all over Britain since the Israeli offensive on Gaza began on 27 December have been heavily fuelled by justified outrage at the human cost to the Palestinians of what Israel is doing.
The disproportion between the damage being inflicted on Israel's people and what Israel is doing to the Palestinians of Gaza makes it seem beside the point that this is a two-sided war, that Hamas is waging war on Israel too. The slaughter in Gaza cancels out awareness of everything else.
The coverage in the press has focused heavily on the slaughter, on the horror, and on the number of civilians being killed in Gaza. So have the nightly images on the TV screens.
The Guardian and other media have done most of the work in conjuring up the demonstrations; and the "left", especially the SWP, have done much of the organising for the demonstrations.
But the politics of the demonstrations have been provided by the Islamic chauvinists. In terms of its politics - support Hamas, support Arab and Islamic war on Israel, conquer and destroy Israel - the big demonstration on 10 January in London was an Arab or Islamic chauvinist, or even a clerical-fascist, demonstration. Their slogans, their politics, their programme, echoed and insisted upon by the kitsch left, have provided the politics of the demonstrations, drowning out everything else.
The clerical fascists have politically hegemonised the demonstrations to an astonishing degree. These have not been peace demonstration, but pro-war, and war-mongering, demonstrations - for Hamas's war, and for a general Arab war on Israel.
Calls for a general Arab war on Israel have been the rhetorical stock-in-trade of George Galloway back as far as the demonstrations against the then-upcoming war on Iraq in 2002-3. On Saturday 10 January in Londo many placards portrayed Arab heads of state, depicting them as traitors for not going to the aid of the Palestinians.
In their political slogans and chants, the dominant forces on the demonstrations have been not only against what Israel is doing in Gaza now, but against Israel as such, against Israel's right to exist. Opposition to the Gaza war, and outrage at it, only provide the immediate justification for the settled politics of seeking the root-and-branch extirpation of Israel and "Zionism".
Such politics have long been a central theme of "anti-war" demonstrations, but my strong impression is that they are bolder, cruder, and more explicit now than they have ever been.
On 10 January SWPers on loudhailers chanted: "Destroy Israel". The chant "From the river to the sea/ Palestine will be free" - demanding an Arab Palestine that includes pre-1967 Israel - was pretty pervasive. Placards called for "Freedom for Palestine", which, for Arab and Islamic chauvinists and kitsch-left alike, means Arab or Muslim rule over all pre-1948 Palestine. It implies the elimination of the Jewish state, and since that could be done only by first conquering Israel, the killing of a large part of the population of Israel.
Placards denouncing Arab leaders for not attacking Israel - amidst the chants and other placards - meant more than just attacking Israel to relieve the pressure on the people of Gaza.
Placards equated Israel with Nazism, and what Israel is doing in Gaza with the factory-organised systematic killing of Jews in Hitler-ruled Europe. Placards about 60 years since the Nakba - though not many of those - complemented the chants about "Palestine... from the river to the sea" and pointed up their meaning.
The dominant theme, "stop the slaughter in Gaza", understandable in the circumstances, could not - in the complete absence of any demands that Hamas stop its war - but be for Hamas and Hamas's rocket-war on Israel. Even the talk of "the massacre" subsumed Hamas into the general population, and was one variant of solidarising with Hamas, its rocket war, and its repressive clerical-fascist rule over the people of Gaza.
Talk of "genocide" in Gaza implied an absolute equation of the people of Gaza with Hamas, and absolute solidarity with Hamas.
Even the most visible Jews on the Saturday 10th demonstration - Neturei Karta, a Jewish equivalent of Hamas, who for religious reasons want to put an end to Israel - fitted into the general clerical-fascist politics.
On the January 3rd demonstration, a group of political Islamists near me, some with faces covered by scarves or balaclavas with only eye and mouth holes, pointedly raised their fists and started to chant Allahu Akhbar (God is great) as we passed the House of Commons.
Platform speakers on Saturday 10th nonsensically equated Israel - pre-1967 Israel too - with apartheid, and told us that Israel could be eliminated as apartheid white rule was in South Africa.
The "left" and the ex-left were heavily represented on the platform on Saturday 10th. Andrew Murray of the Communist Party of Britain (chairing), Tariq Ali (the rich "fun revolutionary" of long ago, all suffused in a grey-white tinge as if he had been dug out of the freezer, the ghost of anti-war demonstrations past!), Tony Benn, George Galloway, and Jeremy Corbyn spoke. Lindsey German, convenor of the Stop The War Coalition, wore a vivid red coat, but that was the only thing red about either her or the platform.
No criticism of or even distancing from the Arab or Islamic chauvinism or Islamic clerical-fascism of so much of the demonstration. Only one-sided anti-war war-mongering - pro-Hamas; demanding, in different degrees of boldness and clarity, the end of Israel. Craig Murray, a former British diplomat, made the most clear-cut demand for the rolling-back of 60 years of history and the elimination of Israel.
There was no criticism of the Arab and Islamic regimes other than for their "treason" to the Palestinians in not making war on Israel. And no reference whatsoever to the Israeli working class or to the idea that (even if in the not-near future) the Arab and Israeli workers should unite.
Thus, the "left" was entirely hegemonised by the politics, slogans, and programme of Arab and Islamic chauvinism and, explicitly, of the clerical fascists of political Islam.
The current demonstrations have had a six to seven year build-up, during which that "left" has promoted the politics of Islamic clerical-fascism, and even its organisations, the British Muslim Initiative and the Muslim-Brotherhood front, Muslim Association of Britain. Hamas is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood.
The "left", from outside the mainly-Muslim communities in Britain - it is still very much outside: the evidence is that the SWP has gained very few recruits from Muslim backgrounds from its half-decade of accommodating to Islam and posing as the best "fighters for Muslims" - has done all it can to push the youth of the Muslim communities behind Islamist political and religious reaction. It has courted and promoted the forces of political, social, and religious reaction within those communities. Instead of organising anti-war movements on the basis of secular, democratic, working-class, socialist politics, it has organised an "anti-war" movement on the basis of the politics listed above.
Instead of advocating and building working-class unity on ideas and slogans such as "black and white - Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Hindu, atheist - unite and fight", kitsch-leftists have made themselves into communalists, the best "fighters for Muslims". On the political basis of Muslim communalism, no working-class unity could conceivably be built.
Instead of helping the secularising, rebellious youth of the Muslim communities to differentiate from their background, instead of using the anti-war demonstrations to give them a focus broader than their starting point, the kitsch-left has "related" to the communities as such, and to the conservative and reactionary elements within them - including clerical-fascists - and that has helped those right-wingers to control, and the political-Islamist organisations to recruit, the youth, including women.
It has to be said here that the flood-tide of world-wide political Islam has worked and is working against separating large forces of youth from Islamic reaction. The predominant form of "rebelliousness" there seems to be against assimilating, "moderate" forces, and for political-Islamist militancy.
Even so, much could have been done. Instead the kitsch-left committed political hara-kiri, coloured itself Islamic green - and helped ensure the domination of conservative, reactionary, Islamic-chauvinist politics in the Muslim communities.
Two seemingly contradictory things dominated the demonstration. The politics of Islamic chauvinism and clerical fascism gave it its political character - an Islamic chauvinist demonstration in which the forces of the kitsch-left sunk their identity, rather as the crazily ultra-left Stalinist German Communist Party in the two or three years before Hitler came to power sunk its own identity into fascist-led concerns with "liberating" Germany from the Treaty of Versailles.
And... it was a heavily a-political demonstration. A large part of the demonstrators, perhaps the majority, have not sifted through the politics of the Israeli-Arab conflict, considered the options, studied the implications of slogans, and made deliberate choices, but react "raw" to the horrors of the Israeli offensive in Gaza and take the slogans, ideas, and programmes stamped on the demonstrations by the Islamists and their "left" allies as things given.
For instance, "Freedom for Palestine", for many of the marchers, does not mean that they understand what the slogan means to those who raise it: Arab rule over all pre-1948 Palestine, slightly encoded. "Free Palestine", to such people, probably means freedom for the Palestinian-majority areas - Gaza and the West Bank.
The predominance of clerical-fascism on the demonstrations is in part a result of this political underdevelopment. The precondition for it - for making people who react "raw" into demonstration-fodder for clerical-fascism - is the politics of the kitsch left vis-a-vis political Islam.
The demonstrations have also been undisguisedly anti-semitic, more so than ever. Placards equating Zionism and Nazism and about Israel's "Holocaust" all have implications way beyond Israeli politics and Israel itself. Calls for a boycott of Israeli goods, understandable enough on the face of it, were pretty much central. The main argument against such a boycott is that it is an indiscriminate weapon against all Israelis, and that it would quickly become a targeting of Jews everywhere, in Britain too. A small event on 10 January illustrated the point: a Starbucks café was attacked by some of the demonstrators seemingly because some people thought that it is owned by Jews.
The 10 January demonstration shows that political Islam now has a serious political presence in Britain. Nor can socialists and secularists draw comfort from the experience in the first half of the 20th century when superstition-riddled Jewish communities quickly assimilated and generated large-scale left-wing commitment by secularising Jews. The heavy political-Islamist politicisation of the Muslim communities is not something specific to Britain, nor is it simply a movement of oppressed people.
The Muslim communities are part of a world-wide movement which includes states and some of the richest people on earth (in Saudi Arabia, etc.) This world-wide movement is, in political terms, very reactionary. It is not likely that it will soon shed its present reactionary character.
The serious left has to find ways of supporting the Muslim communities against racism, discrimination, and social exclusion, without accommodating politically or socially to their reactionary traits, and without falling into the suicidal idiocy of pandering to Islamic clerical-fascism. Involvement of Muslim workers and youth in the labour movement, combined with militant labour-movement commitment to defending the communities against racism and discrimination, is our chief method here.
Our keynote politics have to be of the type of "black and white, unite and fight", not the adaptive Islamic communalism that has reigned on the left for the last decade. Within that general approach we must fight Islamic clerical-fascism and help its opponents in the Muslim communities.
The kitsch-left has a lot to answer for over the last decade. There is no way of measuring exactly what could have been done to wean sections of Muslim youth away from political Islam, but if the "left" - in the first place the SWP - had maintained a principled working-class socialist, internationalist, secularist stand, and combined that with defending Muslims against racism and discrimination, for sure more people of Muslim background could have been won to socialism. The clerical fascists would not have had the virtually unchallenged political ride they have had, and still have.
It has to be said here that the flood-tide of world-wide political Islam has worked and is working against separating large forces of youth from Islamic reaction. The predominant form of "rebelliousness" there seems to be against assimilating, "moderate" forces, and for political-Islamist militancy.
Even so, much could have been done. Instead the kitsch-left committed political hara-kiri, coloured itself Islamic green - and did its best to help ensure the domination of conservative, reactionary, Islamic-chauvinist politics in the Muslim communities.
It has done everything it can to boost Islamic clerical fascism, promote it, and render it politically respectable in the labour movement. We are probably far from seeing the full consequences of the politicisation of sections of the Muslim communities under clerical-fascist hegemony that has taken place and continues now.
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Labels: Communism, Francis Chartrand, Human mistake, Islam, Religion and fanaticism, United Kingdom
# posted by Francis Chartrand @ 11:00 PM 
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