Posts Tagged ‘middle-east’
Harlem Shake from Tunisia to Egypt.
There have been quick condemnations by the Islamist Ennahda-led government and other religious figures. The Minister of Education, Abdellatif Abid, a member of the once ‘socialist‘ party, Ettakatol, who has called the dancing ‘indecent‘.
From Tunis to Beirut or Cairo, Arab youths have posted YouTube videos where one person starts dancing before the video cuts to a large group of people, in costume or in their underwear, moving frenetically to electronic music.
While in the West the “Harlem Shake” is the latest bizarre — and hilarious — internet trend, the break-dancing performances have turned into a light-hearted way to protest against Islamists in several Arab countries.
Dozens of Tunisian university students scuffled this week against Salafi extremists, who were trying to prevent them from filming what they regard as “indecent” dancing.
There doesn’t appear to be much the Islamists can do to stop young people enjoying themselves and demanding freedom.
Tunisian Human Rights and Trade Union Activists Mobilise Today: Pacte de Tunisie des droits et libertés.
PARIS : Great event “Signing for a Tunisia of freedoms.”
Launch of the International Campaign in support of the Tunisian Pact of Rights and Freedoms Tunisia, Freedom, Human, Rights, Pact, FIDH, IADH, 2013, Civil, Society
Théâtre Dujazet, Paris, France 41 Boulevard du Temple, 75003 Paris
Monday, February 25,20:00 to 23:00
IADH, FIDH and Opinion Internationale launch this international campaign in support of the Tunisian Pact initiated by IADH with the support of the Tunisian Workers General Union (UGTT), the Tunisian League for Human Rights (LTDH), Tunisian Journalists Workers Union (SNJT), National Order of Tunisian Lawyers (ONAT), Tunisian Association of Democratic Women (ATFD), Tunisian section of Amnesty.
The Pacte of Tunisia is available in French at http://www.fidh.org/Signez-pour-la-Tunisie-des-12904
It begins, “Affirmer que la protection des droits et des libertés, qui y sont proclamés, est un espace partagé où s’épanouit la citoyenneté et s’affirme l’appartenance à la communauté des peuples épris de libertés. Affirmer que la promotion des droits et des libertés est un choix patriotique, pour nous comme pour les générations futures. C’est également une méthode pour la construction de la société démocratique nouvelle. More on site.
This affirmation of human rights by the Tunisian labour movement and human rights activists is of great importance.
It comes after the assassination of comrade Chokri Belaid – a crime many suspect can be laid at the door of the Islamist “Leagues for the protection of the Revolution.”
This killing has international repercussions.
In Egypt, this was reported over the weekend,
“As Tunisia reels from the implications of the assassination of Tunisian opposition leader Chokri Belaid, once again, events in the small North African country are reverberating further east in Egypt. A video of the ultraconservative cleric Mahmoud Shaaban posted on YouTube days before the assassination has since gone viral, leading to nationwide condemnation from all sides of the political spectrum. In the video, Shaaban condoned the killing of opposition figures, specifically singling out Mohamed ElBaradei and Hamdeen Sabbahi, two longtime activist figures and former presidential candidates. Egypt Independent.
The Tunisian Islamist Ennahda-led government has appointed the hard-line Justice Minister, Ali Laarayedh, as the new Prime Minister.
The Pacte for freedom is important initiative.
The battle over the new Tunisian constitution, between those who support universal human rights, and those who think they were elected by god to impose Islamic law, promises to be fierce.
Socialist Action, a Response to the SWP Crisis.
Sam Marcy lives!
Socialist Action is a descendant of the International Marxist Group (IMG).*
A descendant.
It has now waded into the SWP crisis, asking,
Why the bourgeois media offensive against the SWP?
There are answers:
There are really two issues involved. First, why this crisis in the SWP has developed. Second why the capitalist media, who are implacable enemies of anything progressive, have decided to take such an interest in the matter. As will be seen the two issues are very different.
Before seeing how SA responds their own political background has to be borne in mind.
Socialist Action is best known for its close co-operation with Ken Livingstone.
Amongst Livingstone’s ‘bag carriers’ were (Wikipedia reports) Socialist Action supporters, chief of staff Simon Fletcher, deputy chief of staff and director of public affairs and transport Redmond O’Neill, economic adviser John Ross, green adviser Mark Watts and culture adviser Jude Woodward.
In 2007 Livingstone changed the GLA rules so that his eight key advisers, four associated with Socialist Action (including John Ross and the late Redmond O’Neill), who as temporary appointments would not normally have been entitled to severance pay, received an average of £200,000 each.
Hedging their bets, “Socialist Action has also participated in Respect – The Unity Coalition since the 2007 split in that party. Several of its supporters became members of the party and one serves as its national treasurer.”
A failure to secure Livingstone’s re-election led to Respect being given more priority. However Kate Hudson’s exclusion from the Galloway orbit (she was O’Neill’s partner though had been in the Communist Party of Britain), may have meant that this strategy was downgraded.
What is SA’s ideology?
Socialist Action has evolved far from the Trotskyism and new leftism of the IMG. Very far. Its ideology is often described as “Marcyism‘ after the former US Trotskist Sam Marcy (Sam Ballan, 1911 – February 1, 1998).
Marcey saw the main duty of the left was to “defend the existence of the USSR and its satellites in spite of their bureaucracy”. He supported the Soviet military intervention, in Hungary 1956, arguing that the initial worker uprising had attracted class elements that sought to restore capitalism.
After the collapse of the Eastern Bloc and Soviet Stalinist states SA has defended ‘anti-imperialist’ forces of any kind.
Jane West and Tom Castle’s articles on the Socialist Action site define everything in the world in terms of the fight against ‘imperialism’ – the US and to a lesser extent the European Union.
If you be bothered to wade through them you will learn that,
The class struggle in Egypt is still unfolding. Recent steps in foreign policy by President Morsi have been progressive – including the decision to visit Iran for the non-aligned summit and to pay a state visit to China before making one to the US. But so far domestically there has been only a limited response from the Muslim Brotherhood to demands of the Egyptian masses for improvements in their living standards and in standing up to the army, behind which stands the US.
Most immediately at the heart of the relationship of forces in the region now lies the struggle in Syria, where the imperialist-sponsored, financed and armed Free Syrian Army is seeking to overthrow Assad in order to break the Iran/Syria/Hezbollah axis which has successfully resisted the Israeli state and is one of the chief obstacle to untrammelled imperialist control in the region.
More recently Castle opines,
The US is encouraging its junior imperialist partners to step up their military role in Africa, with the US providing intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance rather than the key fighting forces. This is to allow the US to continue prioritising its ‘pivot’ to Asia, which is aimed at stepping up its presence in the Pacific as a curb on China, partly aimed at forcing a diversion of Chinese resources into defensive military spending in an attempt to curb the growth of the Chinese economy.
Human Rights? Forget it.
The SWP ‘Crisis’ to the SA.
Socialist Action begins by listing various crises in the SWP’s recent past, largely to do with their own hot and cold, very cold, relations with windbag Galloway.
Then comes the Macryite line,
The real roots of this crisis are that the SWP was founded on a wrong analysis of the international class line of divide between the international working class and imperialism which led to major misunderstandings of the class struggle. Its famous strap-line ‘Neither Washington nor Moscow but international socialism’ expressed its analysis that the Soviet Union was a variation of capitalism, dubbed ‘state capitalism’. No class distinction could be drawn between this ‘state capitalism’ and the capitalist and imperialist powers.
The SWP failed to understand that the destruction of the USSR, and the re-establishment of capitalism constituted a great victory for imperialism which set back the class struggle internationally.
This is followed by a tortuous paragraph,
Throughout the last two decades the SWP’s comrades have therefore been led to expect a major upsurge in the struggle in the imperialist centres, which has failed to materialise, while turning their faces away from the really progressive developments in world politics such as Chavez in Venezuela, Castro in Cuba and the whole advance of the left in Latin America. This over-heated view of the possibilities in the class struggle also led to a sectarian and wrong attitude to other forces pursuing limited but progressive struggles within the imperialist centres – one of the issues which lay behind the wrong approach of the SWP in Respect.
Put simply they didn’t keep on Galloway’s bandwagon, or support unconditionally Chavez and Cuba.
The SWP, Socialist Action condescends to say, did, apparently, stand on the right side against ‘imperialist interventions’.
What the Bourgeois Offensive against the SWP?
The bourgeois media thinks, accroding to SA, that a Labour victory in the next election is probable.
So,
This therefore leads to the ruling class’s second goal: to reduce, divide, weaken and confuse any potential leftward pressure on Labour or emergence of forces to its left. This is why the bourgeois media is jumping on the crisis in the SWP to run a campaign against it. It is taking the opportunity of the SWP’s crisis to weaken as much as possible a significant component of the left that would oppose Labour’s austerity policies and help organise the resistance to it. And to discredit and smear the left in general.
In other words it should be clearly understood that the current attack on the SWP by the Daily Mail and its ilk is not carried out to ‘improve’ the left but to damage it as much as possible.
So, so,
Whatever discussions continue on the left about the issues raised by the crisis in the SWP, there should be no confusion about the fact that the bourgeois media campaign against the SWP has no progressive content whatever. It is merely part of an offensive to weaken the left as much as possible now and prevent the emergence of a powerful left campaigning against Labour carrying out austerity policies after 2015.
Quite Right Comrades!
We have been confused by the bourgeois attacks. We have thought they have an oppressive content”, we considered the Daily Mail was out to “improve” the left.
The scales have fallen from our eyes!
More information on Socialist Action, Stalinist, secretive and not left-wing: Socialist Action, the group behind ‘Student Broad Left’
*As is Tendance Coatesy.
Tunisia: Islamists on the Defensive.
“On manifeste contre la France parce qu’elle soutient des gens
qui veulent nous imposer une Tunisie de gauche”.
Les islamistes tunisiens sur la défensive.
L’ Humanité reports today on Saturday’s Islamist Demonstration in Tunis.
After the massive protests over the assassination of Chokri Belaïd Ennahdha has tried to organise an equal response. But their march-on Saturday only drew a few thousand.
The demonstrators attacked France “for interference” in Tunisian affairs .
Present were four leaders of the Islamist party, Ameur Larayedh and Lotfi Zitoune, the government minister, Slim Ben H’midane, of the Congrès pour la république (CPR, centre left) – the President Moncef Marzouki‘s party.
They denounced the assassination as a plot against “national unity”.
They then went on the shout against the “election losers”, who refused to dialogue with the government and called to “protect the legitimacy of the ballot box”. The crowd shouted, “National Unity”. “The people want Ennahdha” and “France respect yourself!”
The French Embassy was targeted. Marchers cried, “Dégage la France! (Piss off France!). A child carried a placard saying, ”Shut up France! (France tais-toi),.
“La violence ? Ce n’est pas nous, c’est eux, la gauche»
Who killed the left leader? To one of the marchers it was clear, “Il son ami et il accuse ses adversaires (He kills his friend and accuses his enemies). » Saïd, said, “It was an internal party fight.”
Set Back for the Demonstration.
One thing is clear: orders were given to make sure that the demonstration looked peaceful and happy.
However this Islamist march, for all its festive air, was a set back.
It showed that the Islamists’ capacity to mobilise is waning.
Black Bloc in Egypt, Anarchism/Autonomism Emerges in the Arab Revolt.
There have been reports in the last few days (see notably this) of the emergence of an Egyptian Black Bloc.
Albawaba has just reported, here.,
In 2013, an anarchist group called the Black Bloc appeared on the Egyptian revolutionary scene and got incredible media attention. Despite their very low numbers (maximum 100 combined in all incidents all over Egypt), the media went into a state of utter frenzy over this new group and the circus started in earnest, culminating in the appearance of one Black Bloc member on a TV show with a sock on his face. The fun thing about this absurdity is that everyone seems to be taking them seriously, but the dangerous thing is that it might continue.
The article suggests, no doubt correctly, that this benefits the Muslim Brotherhood regime,
The genius of turning the Black Bloc into the new enemy is how perfect they are for it. An anarchist group that targets the police, public structures and roads, juxtaposed against the Brotherhood who are always calling for stability. It doesn’t hurt that the Black Bloc has no real structure, charter, spokespeople or leadership.
Nevertheless it is interesting to see that autonomist/anarchist politics have finally breached the frontier of the Arab world.
And there is this: in the Guardian on women sexually assaulted during the anti-Morsi demonstrations.
“Two middle-aged women were guided around the tent to us – the men protecting us had rescued them from the mob. While we were being urged into the field clinic, the group moving out of the square included remnants of the Egyptian Women for Change march, mostly women over 40, which had been attacked and dispersed in the square. Many women made it away from Tahrir, but a few got stuck in the throng – including the women now with us.
One woman, shaking and crying, put her head on my shoulder, and I wrapped my arms around her. Her companion screamed and yelled. Gameela pleaded with her to save her energy; we had no idea what would happen next, or how long we would stay out of sight – and reach – of the mob. Another woman, also rescued from the mob, soon joined us, crying and yelling.
Suddenly men wearing black ski masks and carrying long knives and clubs were jumping the fence to our left. It was impossible to tell which side they were on, but they turned out to be from the Black Bloc and joined those protecting us. Some of them were now trying to rescue another woman stripped naked by the mob metres away.”
I think better, a lot lot better, of the Black Bloc after reading that.
