"Whatever means they find necessary"

The Independent reports on a stupefying development in the anti-war movement:

The Stop the War Coalition was accused yesterday of supporting the killers of the British hostage Ken Bigley after it drew up a draft statement saying the Iraqi people should use "whatever means they find necessary" to end the occupation by coalition forces.

Two Labour MPs attacked the anti-war group, claiming that it sent a "scurrilous" e-mail to its supporters that would strongly imply "support for the so-called resistance and thereby acquiesce in the murders of more people such as Ken Bigley, as well as hundreds of ordinary Iraqis". The group responded by accusing the MPs of making an unfounded accusation because the draft statement was not sent out.

If your vision of the international order doesn’t extend beyond the iniquities of the United States and Israel, you will get into a mess like this. There are forces a good deal more iniquitous than western constitutional democracies even at our worst; dignifying them with the heroic term ‘Iraqi resistance’ – the noun evoking a genuinely heroic movement, in occupied Europe, against a genuine tyranny – is an initial step towards abandoning a capacity for making critical judgement. Next one has the position of John Pilger, who believes:

We cannot afford to be choosy. While we abhor and condemn the continuing loss of innocent life in Iraq, we have no choice now but to support the resistance, for if the resistance fails, the “Bush gang” will attack another country. If they succeed, a grievous blow will be suffered by the Bush gang.

The Stop the War ‘Coalition’ can’t be accused of shirking the implications of that premise. How predictable, and how feeble, that it should now maintain the fiction that its repugnant position was articulated in a “draft statement” that “was not sent out”. For fiction it is. Harry’s blog points out:

Firstly, the email was sent out to Stop the War supporters. Who do they think they are kidding? How else do they think the rest of us found out about it? Secondly, the email was clearly labelled as a statement and not a 'draft statement'. Indeed the preamble to the statement explicitly states that it had been agreed by the Coalition's officers. The preamble was signed by Stop the War Chairman Andrew Murray and Convenor Lindsey German.

Let me give a quick reminder of the political complexion of the Coalition. Its Chairman, Andrew Murray, sits on the politburo of the Communist Party of Britain. The party is a declared supporter of what is now, after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, almost certainly the most horrific tyranny on the planet. In his political report to the party’s politburo in March last year, Murray noted:

Our Party has already made its basic position of solidarity with People’s [i.e. North] Korea clear.

The Coalition’s Convenor, Lindsey German, is a leading member of the Socialist Workers’ Party (and was, till she became the London Mayoral candidate for the Respect ‘Coalition’ – the electoral front organisation for the SWP – editor of the party’s journal). In the Iraq war, the SWP urged victory for Saddam Hussein. In Socialist Worker, 23 March 2003, party ideologue Paul McGarr stated:

The best response to war would be protests across the globe which make it impossible for Bush and Blair to continue. But while war lasts by far the lesser evil would be reverses, or defeat, for the US and British forces. That may be unlikely, given the overwhelming military superiority they enjoy. But it would be the best outcome in military terms.

The SWP has a distinctive approach also to Jewish matters. At its Marxism 2004 festival in the summer, its invited speaker on the subject 'How can Palestine be free?' was the jazz musician Gilad Atzmon. Atzmon, once an Israeli reservist, believes that the antisemitic Tsarist forgery The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion accurately depicts the state of modern America. On his web site, Atzmon declares:

[W]e must begin to take the accusation that the Jewish people are trying to control the world very seriously. It is beyond doubt that Zionists, the most radical, racist and nationalistic Jews around, have already managed to turn America into an Israeli mission force. The world's number one super power is there to support the Jewish state's wealth and security matters. The one-sided pro-Zionist take on the Israeli¬ Palestinian conflict, the American veto against every 'anti-Israeli' UN resolution, the war against Iraq and now the militant intentions against Syria, all prove beyond doubt that it is Zionist interests that America is serving. American Jewry makes any debate on whether the 'Protocols of the elder of Zion' are an authentic document or rather a forgery irrelevant. American Jews do try to control the world, by proxy. So far they are doing pretty well for themselves at least. Whether the Americans enjoy the deterioration of their state's affairs will no doubt be revealed soon.

There are many ways in which one could describe Atzmon’s views, but the last term I would reach for when doing so is the one applied by Socialist Worker. In a cloying puff-piece to promote Atzmon’s appearance on an SWP platform, the paper commended the man’s political writings as:

… Gilad’s fearless tirades against Zionism.

It’s also worth noting that Atzmon takes seriously the SWP’s recent discovery that Islamic particularism is a progressive force. At the moment the SWP has gone as far only as describing the consciousness-raising effects on Muslim women of wearing the hijab: as Respect apparatchik Salma Yaqoob argued in the party's journal last autumn (emphasis added):

It is notable that the majority of the Muslims playing a leading role in the Birmingham Stop the War Coalition were women, confident in their Islamic identity and increasingly confident in their ability to present themselves as leaders of this broad movement. Contingents of young Muslim women, well organised and often more forthcoming than Muslim men, were a striking feature of all our demonstrations and protests. I would attribute this effect to the fact that, by wearing the hijab (headscarf), many of these women are constantly conscious of their Muslim identity when interacting in public.

Atzmon, however, goes somewhat further: he looks forward to the day that totalitarian Islamist theocracies are armed with nuclear weapons. Really. This is what he said on the list of another Israeli crank, Israel Shamir (who has been condemned for neo-Nazi sympathies even by other anti-Israel campaigners):

Balance of power is the only key to peace. Islamic militants, when equipped with the right weaponry, would concentrate on Anglo-American military targets. They would never kill civilians or attack what the Americans call 'soft targets'. The Islamic struggle is about liberation not about bloodthirstiness.… If Islamic militants could practically endanger our existence we would have to listen to them with great respect. We would then have to look for a genuine means towards reconciliation. I suggest that we allow the Iranians to be as nuclear as we are, we leave Syria alone, we must help the Palestinians become as armed as their Israeli enemy.

I merely report the facts about the Stop the War Coalition’s ideological make-up. My readers may make their own value judgements on the matter.