The war criminal Ratko Mladic has finally tasted justice: today at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, he was sent down for life, having been found guilty of crimes including genocide for the massacre at Srebrenica in July 1995, when more than 7,000 Muslim men and boys were murdered, and sniping and shelling attacks on besieged civilians in Sarajevo.
The cowardly thug shouted “I’ll fuck your mother” before being forcibly removed from the courtroom.
Mladic was indicted in 1995, but went into hiding in Serbia where he was sheltered by the army. But it’s worth remembering that it wasn’t just Serb nationalists who supported and excused him, Karadzic and Milsosevic: a lot of the so-called “left” have some answering to do, as Stan Crooke explains below. The particular culprits here are the SWP, who a few years later started puffing themselves up as “fighters for Muslims”. At the time they refused to side with the Bosniac and Kosovar Muslims fighting Serb conquest, focusing their sympathies on Serbia as the victim of NATO. They quietly went along with those who anathematised the Bosniac Muslims (mostly secularised) as the catspaws of Islamic-fundamentalist conspiracy.
It’s come to something, hasn’t it, when (not for the first time) “communists” ally with fascists…
We’re talking SWP and their equally shameful, Chomskyite offshoot ‘Counterfire’… and perhaps most notoriously, the so-called ‘LM‘ outfit (since reborn as ‘Spiked Online’ and ‘The Institute of Ideas’).
We republish, below, an article by Stan Crooke written just after the arrest of Mladic in May 2011, and published in Workers Liberty’s paper Solidarity:
Above: Mladic (left) and Karadzic in Bosnia, April 1995
The “safe haven” of Sarajevo was besieged for 44 months by Serb forces, the longest siege in modern warfare. Serb forces stationed on the surrounding hills used artillery, mortars, tanks, anti-aircraft guns, heavy machine-guns, multiple rocket launchers, rocket-launched aircraft bombs, and sniper rifles against the civilian population.
An average of 300 artillery shells a day hit Sarajevo during the siege. On just one day in 1993 more than 3,500 shells hit the city. Overall, an estimated 10,000 people were killed and another 56,000 wounded during the siege. 35,000 buildings were destroyed, including 10,000 apartment blocks.
Ethnic cleansing and war crimes were also carried out by the forces of the Croatian Republic of Herzeg Bosnia.
In February 1994 an American-brokered deal, the Washington Agreement, brought an end to the fighting between Bosnian and Croatian forces. In September 1995, NATO finally moved against Milosevic and his allies, in a month-long bombing campaign.
Workers’ Liberty commented: “Yes, the Western powers are hypocrites… But to reckon that NATO’s bombardment of Mladic’s siege guns calls for protest meetings, and Milosevic’s atrocities do not, is to condone Serbian imperialism… Sarajevo relieved by a NATO offensive designed as a lever for an imperialist carve-up is bad; Sarajevo still besieged is worse.”
Others on the left rallied to a “Committee for Peace in the Balkans” focused on denouncing NATO. They said NATO action was about “enforcing Western interests” on Serbia. Back in 1991, the SWP had disdainfully said “neither of the nationalisms currently tearing Yugoslavia apart has anything to offer”. It had maintained the same disdain towards the Bosniacs’ struggle against Serbian conquest and ethnic cleansing. It backed the anti-NATO campaign.
In fact, the NATO bombing paved the way for an American-brokered peace deal, the Dayton Agreement. It ended the massacres, and set up Bosnia-Herzegovina as a quasi-independent state, for most purposes a loose confederation between Serb and Croat-Bosniac units, with an external “High Representative” as overlord.
In the course of the war between 100,000 and 176,000 people had been killed. More than 2.2 million had fled their homes. 530,000 of them had managed to reach other European countries, despite the European Union responding to the outbreak of war by imposing a visa regime on Bosnians.
After the end of the fighting Mladic continued to live openly in the Serb-controlled area of Bosnia. In the late 1990s he moved to Belgrade. Only after the overthrown of Milosevic in 2000 did Mladic go more or less underground.
Meanwhile Kosova, an area under tight Serbian control but with a 90% Albanian-Muslim majority in the population, was stewing.
The Kosovar majority organised a virtual parallel society, with underground schools, hospitals, and so on, beside the Serbian-run official institutions.
The big powers opposed Kosovar independence, but pressed Milosevic to ease off. From mid-1998 Milosevic started a drive to force hundreds of thousands of Kosovars to flee the province. The big powers called a conference and tried to push Milosevic into a compromise deal.
Milosevic refused. NATO started bombing Serbian positions, apparently thinking that a short burst of military action would make Milosevic back down. Simultaneously the Serb chauvinists stepped up the slaughter and driving-out of Kosovars. After two and a half months of bombing (March-June 1999) the Serbian army finally withdrew. By then around 850,000 Kosovars had fled.
From 1999 to 2008 Kosova was under UN rule. During that period there were a number of persecutions of the small remaining Serb minority in Kosova. In 2008 Kosova declared independence.
Far from being converted by the war into a crushed semi-colony of some big power, Serbia benefited from its defeat. In October 2000, following rigged elections, Milosevic was ousted by mass protest in the streets, and Serbia’s chauvinist frenzy began to dissipate.
Dispute on the left over the Kosova war was sharper than over Bosnia. Workers’ Liberty said that, while we could not and did not endorse NATO, the main issue was Kosovar self-determination. The SWP and others threw themselves into a “Stop The War Campaign”, later recycled for use over Afghanistan and Iraq and still in existence.
“Stop The War” here meant “stop NATO and let Milosevic have his way”. On Milosevic, their main message was that he was not as bad as painted; and on Kosova, that the reports of massacre were probably exaggerated, that nothing could be done about it anyway, and that the Kosovar revolt was undesirable because it could destabilise the whole region.
Michael Barratt Brown, a veteran socialist economist, was typical of a whole school of thought on the left claiming that the driving force in what he called “The Yugoslav Tragedy” was a conspiracy by Germany in particular, and the West in general, to gain “control over the oil supplies of the Middle East”.
He wrote “Once Croatia’s independence was recognised … war between Serbs and Croats was assured inside Croatia.” In fact the big powers pressed the subject peoples of Yugoslavia not to declare independence. Germany was less convinced about that than other states, but even Germany did not recognise Croatia until six months after the outbreak of war. And why shouldn’t states recognise Croatian independence demanded by over 90% of the people?
Consistently, Brown wrote of the actions of Milosevic and the Serbian government as if they were mere responses to the actions of Bosnian and Croatian nationalists, rather than the expression of an aggressive regional imperialism.
“Nationalists in Serbia followed enthusiastically where Slovenes and Croats had led”, he wrote, but he praised the “federal” army, which had already committed a succession of war crimes by the time Brown wrote his book, as “the one remaining force representing Yugoslavia”, and one which was engaged in “a state-building project.”
In To Kill a Nation: The Attack on Yugoslavia, published in 2000, Michael Parenti argued that the West’s hostility to Milosevic was triggered by the Serbian government’s commitment to the defence of the country’s “socialist heritage”:
“After the overthrow of Communism throughout Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, Yugoslavia remained the only nation in that region that would not voluntarily discard what remained of its socialism and install an unalloyed free-market system… The US goal has been to transform Yugoslavia into a Third World region, a cluster of weak right-wing principalities.
“As far as the Western free-marketeers were concerned, these enterprises [in Serbia] had to be either privatised or demolished. A massive aerial destruction like the one delivered upon Iraq (in the first Gulf War) might be just the thing needed to put Belgrade more in step with the New World Order.”
In fact, the Serbian government pursued privatisation and pro-market policies of its own volition from the late 1980s, imposing cuts in public services and increasing social inequalities. And its old reformed-Stalinist structure was nothing to cherish.
After the arrest of Slobodan Milosevic in 2001, the International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic said:
“Crimes were committed in Yugoslavia, but not by Milosevic. … His real offence was that he tried to keep the 26 nationalities that comprise Yugoslavia free from US and NATO colonisation and occupation.”
The chapter on the Bosnian war in The Liberal Defence of Murder, written by the SWP’s Richard Seymour and published in 2008, has similar arguments: Milosevic’s regime and its war crimes were not as bad as they were made out to be; the Bosnian and Croatian governments were not only at least as bad as that of Milosevic but were also guilty of the same kind of atrocities.
“In the run-up to that atrocity” [the Srebrenica massacre], he claimed, “a wave of terror, including rape, by Bosnian Muslim forces in surrounding areas had killed thousands of Serbs”.
The SWP itself, mostly, did not bother discussing the atrocities one way or another. It simply stated that NATO was “imperialism” and the job was to oppose “imperialism”. In other words, it put its opportunist concern to “catch the wind” of miscellaneous disquiet about or opposition to NATO military action in a region which most people knew little about above any internationalist concern for lives and freedoms in the region … (read the full article here).
Let’s be clear from the outset: the death of Carl Sargeant was a tragedy and no-one should be using it to score points or make political capital.
That’s why I’ve hesitated before writing anything on the subject, and I certainly have no intention of seeking to pre-empt the findings of either the coroner or the independent inquiry ordered by Welsh first minister Carwyn Jones.
The anguish of Carl Sargeant’s family and close personal friends is entirely understandable: but that doesn’t mean we have to simply go along with what they say.
Less still do we have to go along with those who are not family or friends of Carl Sargeant, but simply people who think the whole issue of sexual harassment in politics has ‘gone too far’, and have seized upon this tragedy as – supposedly – evidence that the whole sexual harassment business is now ‘out of hand’, etc, etc, with wrongly accused men as the main victims.
From the outset of the sexual harassment in politics scandal, we were assured by Charles Moore in the Telegraph, that women were now on top and the worry is whether they will share power with men or just “crush us”. Peter Hitchens, in the Mail On Sunday, warned that the “squawking women” would end up in niqabs if they carried on. Meanwhile, David ‘Mr Somewhere’ Goodhart tweeted that it was only the women of the metropolitan elite who were bothered about sexual harassment.
As news of the Carl Sargeant suicide broke, the Daily Mail’s front page claimed he’d been “THROWN TO THE WOLVES” and denied natural justice by Carwyn Jones and the Labour party.
But what, exactly, is Carwyn Jones supposed to have done wrong? As far as I can judge, he did indeed do things (as he has said), “by the book”. Carl Sargeant was, apparently, made aware of the general nature of the allegations, but not (at the early stage of the investigation) given precise details or the names of his accusers: he would, as I understand it, have received this information in due course and then been given every opportunity to defend himself. In the meanwhile, he was dismissed from his ministerial post and suspended from the Labour party. Carl Sargeant’s family were not satisfied, which is understandable; opportunistic calls for Jones’s resignation, eminating from the Tories, sections of the press, some in Plaid and even some Labour people, are not.
It may be that the coroner and/or the independent inquiry will point to shortcomings in the way the case against Carl Sargeant was handled, and it may be that more support should be offered to all those mixed up in allegations of this sort – especially when peoples’ mental health is at risk. But it would be outrageous for anyone to seek to use this tragedy to downplay the seriousness of sexual harassment, or to deny its prevalence in politics and public life.
Mr Tony Greenstein has seen through the right wing (and, no doubt, Zionist) conspiracy.
Sexual harassment in the Labour party? It’s all been got up by the right wing, and the “BBC’s Tory Kuenssberg” says Mr Greenstein – just like “anti-Semitism.”
He’s especially upset about poor Kelvin Hopkins – and just look at the photos of the woman making the allegations!
Here’s Mr Greenstein’s blog-post, complete with comments about Ava Etemadzadeh’s dress and appearance (written by him, not me, I should emphasise):
Sunday, 5 November 2017
The Framing of Kelvin Hopkins MP
First it was ‘anti-Semitism’ now the Labour Right (& the BBC’s Tory Kuenssberg) are weaponising Sexual Harassment
Sexual harassment is much like anti-Semitism. No one wants to be accused of it and the immediate thought when faced with the accusations made against Kelvin Hopkins is that there is no smoke without fire.
Kelvin Hopkins
The use by a man of pressure, by virtue of an economic or other relationship of dependancy, because it is nearly always a man, on a women to gain sexual favours is by definition despicable. That was why George Bernard Shaw described marriage as a legalised form of prostitution.
I know this because in my Momentum group in Brighton for the first few months a number of people thought that I must be guilty if I was suspended for ‘anti-Semitism’. It was only after people like Jackie Walker and others began to be accused of the same crime that it dawned on people that this was a cynical ploy by the Right to divide the Left. And because the Left has a conscience, because socialists as opposed to the neo-liberals of the Right don’t act like cynical automatons, people do take these things seriously. The same is true of sexual harassment.
Perhaps more so with sexual harassment because all men are, to a greater or lesser degree, guilty of possessing power in relationships and using that power. I doubt if there is any man who can honestly say they haven’t, at some point in their life been guilty of some form of sexual harassment or coercion or pressure. You live in this world and are part of it, a world framed by patriarchal relations. You can’t live outside the social relations that you are a part of.
Ava dressed up as a schoolgirl by her Telegraph minders for her interview
That is why just like anti-Semitism has been weaponised, so sexual harassment can be and it would appear is being weaponised at this moment. It is clear that the Tories epitomised by the monstrous lech Michael Fallon are clearly guilty of gross acts of abuse and worse. However there is a determined effort by the BBC and the Tory press to turn the attention on Labour. The Right are doing all they can to encourage this and the Left should stand up and ask where the proof is, because apart from Ivan Lewis MP there seems none.
It is almost certain that Kelvin Hopkins is innocent of the charges against him. I must confess that when I first saw Etemadzadeh I rubbed my eyes. Why is she dressed up as a schoolgirl? Is this to try and suggest she is young, virginal and innocent? She must be at least 23-24, what is this school girl image for? And the poppy? No socialist activist would be seen dead wearing a symbol to British military imperialism.
A very different Ava E in her Linkedin profile
I confess on Friday night, after just coming out of hospital, I had BBC News 24 on and the news goes round in cycles and Etemadzadeh seemed to be on interminably as I half listened, and got on with writing and posting a blog. Perhaps because I listened to her more than once it gradually occurred to me that she had been very carefully coached – her interview seemed incredibly staged and even forced. At the end she described an alleged conversation where Kelvin said that if he were young, he would have been proud to have her as her lover and then she said ‘and if he was young he would be happy to have her as a lover’ and then the killer punch ‘but he’s not’ made me feel that this was not spontaneous. It now appears that it was a put up job with John Pina.
More details have come about concerning Ava. She is a member of Progress and she has been working with the Telegraph, hardly a Labour paper. She seems to have been put up to it by a Progress MP (Wes Streeting?) just as the Jewish Labour Movement have constantly run to the Times and Mail when they wanted an anti-Labour story printed.
Too much of this story doesn’t hang together. The one conflict of evidence is where Etemadzadeh says that Hopkins rubbed his crotch against her when saying goodbye at Essex. If that is the case, then why the hell did she go out of her way to make further contact with him? It’s not as if she had to. There was no financial or contractual or employer-employee relationship between them.
There were 3 separate messages sent by Etemadzadeh to Kelvin Hopkins, none of which square with his alleged behaviour. And why wait 3 years if indeed all this transpired? It may well be the case that Hopkins told her that if he was young he would happily fall in love with her. That is no more than saying that he found her a nice woman. Certainly you can question his appalling sense of judgement but it hardly constitutes sexual harassment. She doesn’t allege that there was any further alleged physical or sexual contact.
She was also an intern with Michael Dugher, who was special adviser to the most right-wing of all Labour MPs, John Spellar, an old associate of the Electrical Trades Union and its anti-communist leadership. Dugher was also a special adviser to Geoff Hoon, Blair’s Defence Minister and latterly he worked as a corporate lobbyist for American multinational Electronic Data Systems (EDS), one of the government’s largest IT contractors.
Left-wing men of course feel very queasy about standing up to this and that is precisely the problem. The Labour Right, both men and especially women, are unscrupulous in using peoples’ abhorrence of sexual harassment or racism for their own devious political purposes. Taking out left-wing men is a game to these people.
I am referring to people like Jess Phillips who is quite happy to say she’d stab Jeremy Corbyn in the front rather than the back or who tells Dianne Abbot, who unlike her has a record of standing up to oppression racist bullying, to ‘fuck off’, without of course meriting any punishment from Labour Party HQ.
Phillips is the archetypal right-wing feminist, a woman who attacks left-wing men as the ‘enemy’ but seems more than happy to be friends with the backwoodsman Tory Jacob Rees-Mogg, a man who believes that a woman who is raped should be denied an abortion. His chivalry apparently bowls the simpleton over.
No self-respecting woman could count a misogynist like Rees-Mogg, the man who never changed a nappy, as a friend. Phillips is a fraud and a fake as are most right-wing feminists, precisely because they see their liberation as taking place at the expense of the most oppressed women. That is why some of the vilest Zionists happen to be women on the Labour Right. We have a good example of that in Brighton Labour Party where the execrable racist Progress Councillor, the mad and bad ‘Poison’ Penn, willingly use scurrilous allegations against socialist men, in order to pursue a far-Right Zionist and racist politics.
I include Hattie Harman in this, a woman whose feminism didn’t prevent her cutting benefits for single parents as soon as she became a Cabinet Minister in 1997. Read the rest of this entry »
What is the relationship between open disrespect of women and rape? Let’s examine the case of Tariq Ramadan.
In 2009, the American Academy of Religion invited Tariq Ramadan, a professor at Oxford, and the grandson of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, to give a plenary address at the Annual Meeting. He spoke at the meeting in November, which was held in Montreal (and Canada permitted him to enter). The AAR fought to bring Ramadan to the US, against the opposition of the US government. They sued, along with the ACLU and another organization. In 2010, then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton “issued orders that appear to end the exclusion from the United States.”
A couple of years later (April 12, 2011), the Egyptian feminist Mona Eltahawy engaged in a debate on BBC Newsnight on the question of whether the burqa should be banned. Ramadan continually talked over Eltahawy to try to prevent her from speaking.
Ramadan: And we are alway trying to come with new rules and reducing the freedom of expressions of Muslims against the minarets, against the hijab, against the burka. We don’t – what does it mean? Does it mean that the only right way of being a Muslim in Europe today, a good European Muslim is an invisible Muslim, who don’t want to see them, don’t want to see them in the street, don’t….
Moderator, asking Eltahawy: Why are you shaking your head?
Eltahawy: I’m shaking my head because I disagree with just about everything that Tariq just said. It’s interesting that he used the word invisible, because that’s what the niqab does.
Ramadan, interrupting: That’s because you are working with the neocons in the States.
Eltahawy: I’m working with the who?! Can you prove that? This is libelous what you are saying. I am not working with the neocons!
Ramadan, interrupting: We know who you are working with!
Eltahawy: Did you hear what he just said? This exactly the problem that a Muslim and a feminist actually faces.
Ramadan, interrupting: You are, you are! Of course, you are working in exactly the same direction.
Eltahawy: You have to stop talking now, because it’s my turn. (Ramadan, interrupting: Yes, a feminist). This is exactly what happens when a Muslim and a feminist speaks out – she is silenced. They are trying to silence me by saying that I’m a neocon. That is absolute nonsense!
Ramadan, interrupting: I’m not trying to silence you. Don’t play the victim, don’t play the victim!
Eltahway: This is what you’re supporting. I’m not a victim, I’m no one’s victim! You are supporting the very thing you claim to be attacking. You support the invisibility of women. The niqab renders women invisible. And let’s be real here. Feminist organizations on the ground will tell you that women have no say in this.
Ramadan, interrupting: I’m all for freedom. I’m supporting women wearing whatever they want.
Eltahawy: Stop talking! I’m talking! (Ramadan guffaws). Women on the ground have no say in this, because when they start to talk, you silence them. People like you silence them. The Muslim right wing has been encroaching on women’s rights gradually, and no one has said anything!
Ramadan, interrupting: No, no, you don’t want to hear them, you don’t want to hear the women.
Eltahawy: Other groups have said nothing. The left wing has been silenced while Muslim women have been disappeared, all for the sake of fighting Islamophobia. I fight Islamophobia. I was standing outside of that mosque in New York. I wrote opinion pieces against the minaret ban.
Ramadan: Stop talking about yourself….
Eltahawy: You cannot sit there and try to libel me.
In the last few days a series of extremely nasty stories about Ramadan’s sexual abuse of women has come out. A report in the New York Times states that a French activist and author, Henda Ayari, filed a police complaint accusing him of sexually assaulting her in 2012. A second woman (unnamed) has accused him of rape and assault in 2009. (The same year that he was honored by the AAR). The assault accusations have been highlighted by Mona Eltahawy on Twitter.
The second woman, whose name has not been published by the news media, gave an account of an extremely violent assault to two French newspapers, Le Monde and Le Parisien.
A 45-year-old Muslim convert, she said she had also corresponded with Mr. Ramadan on Facebook and met him in his hotel on the sidelines of a conference to discuss religion. When she went to his room, she said, she was raped and beaten.
She said she suffered months of threats afterward to keep her silent.
Another article, in the National (published in the United Arab Emirates), shows that French officials knew about Ramadan’s violent attacks upon women, and did nothing.
A French official has admitted knowing Oxford professor Tariq Ramadan was “violent and aggressive” sexually, but denied hearing anything about rape.
Bernard Godard, who was considered the “Monsieur Islam” of the French Ministry of the Interior between 1997 and 2014, was well acquainted with Mr Ramadan, a prominent Islamic scholar and grandson of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.
When asked whether he had any knowledge of the rape and sexual assault that Mr Ramadan is now being accused of, Mr Godard insisted he had “never heard of rapes” and that he was “stunned.”
“That he had many mistresses, that he consulted sites, that girls were brought to the hotel at the end of his lectures, that he invited them to undress, that some resisted and that he could become violent and aggressive, yes, but I have never heard of rapes, I am stunned,” he told French magazine L’Obs.
“I have twice argued w/Tariq Ramadan on BBC TV.This is 1 of the times. Many of us have long known him 2b a misogynist.”
Leta Hong Fincher wrote in reply: “Jesus, Mona, I would have just been struck dumb in that situation. So chilling given what we now know about him. Bravo!”
Eltahawy replied: “Thank you @LetaHong – it was astounding then in 2011 when it happened & astounding now. He is a misogynist shit.”
So why hasn’t Oxford already suspended Ramadan? Three professors at Dartmouth (in psychology and brain sciences) have been put on paid leave while there is a criminal investigation into allegations of “sexual misconduct.” In Ramadan’s case, criminal complaints of rape have been filed against him. Shouldn’t he also be suspended while the accusations are investigated by the French legal system?
French prosecutors are investigating allegations by two women who say they were raped by Tariq Ramadan, a renowned Islamic scholar and Oxford professor.
One of them, Henda Ayari, told a French TV interviewer that Mr Ramadan had assaulted her in a Paris hotel in 2012.
“He literally pounced on me like a wild animal,” she said.
In a Facebook post Prof Ramadan denied the accusations, calling them “a campaign of lies”, and said his lawyer was suing the women for “slander”.
Just like Trump.
He is a controversial and influential figure among Muslim scholars. He challenges fundamentalist Islam, but some critics accuse him of promoting political Islam.
A Swiss national, he is the grandson of Hassan al-Banna, who founded the Muslim Brotherhood.
Since 2009 he has been professor of contemporary Islamic studies at St Antony’s College, Oxford. He has also sat on a UK Foreign Office advisory group on freedom of religion.
That’s fairly typical BBC waffle. Ramadan “challenges fundamentalist Islam” only so far, and it’s not just a few eccentrics who can see that he promotes Islamism aka political Islam aka theocracy. And he’s been professor of contemporary Islamic studies at St Antony’s College, Oxford in a chair funded by Qatar.
The net is closing, thanks to special counsel Robert Mueller’s relentless investigation: Paul Manafort and Rick Gates have been indicted for money-laundering, tax evasion, failure to register as agents of foreign interests and conspiracy to defraud the US government. Michael Flynn (fired in May after he was exposed as having lied about his conversations with the Russian ambassador), Jeff Sessions and Mike Pence, have all been involved in the Russia scandal. These were not rogue individuals acting independently on their own.
The former Trump foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos, who is now cooperating with the FBI on the Russia investigation, was supervised by Attorney General Jeff Sessions during the campaign.
A March 2016 Washington Post story listed the members of Trump’s foreign policy team who worked under Jeff Sessions, “For the first time, Trump also listed members of a team chaired by Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) that is counseling him on foreign affairs and helping to shape his policies: Keith Kellogg, Carter Page, George Papadopoulos, Walid Phares and Joseph E. Schmitz.”
The White House has been trying, desperately, to create a wall of denial between the President and the scandal, but there is path running through the Russia scandal that runs straight into the Oval Office and stops at the desk of Donald Trump. The odds on impeachment have just shortened again.
Trump won’t go quietly and the ace up his sleeve is the movement behind him. It is a genuine mass movement, plebeian in character (often sole traders, shop keepers, small business owners, lumpen blue collar workers, the unemployed, farmers, etc) and radical in the sense they don’t defer to authority. If he wanted he could probably mobilise enough of them to turn up outside the Capitol with guns and set up camp. There is a history of this kind of thing happening in the US at state level.
The impeachment of Trump would in all likelihood enrage his mass base, fuelling ‘deep state’ conspiracy theories and resentment against bourgeois democracy: fertile ground for American fascism.
That doesn’t mean that the left shouldn’t use the charge of treason and collaboration against Trump, or not campaign for his impeachment. Some on the left (and even the liberal-left) have recoiled against this, on grounds of supposed “McCarthyism” (a claim that Trump himself has raised): but that’s nonsense. The suggestion of collusion with Putin is not comparable to the anti-communist witch-hunts of the 1950s and ’60’s: Putin is behind an ultra right wing international campaign to promote reaction, nationalism and isolationism wherever he can. He’s backed Brexit, Trump, Le Pen and a host of other ultra-right and semi-fascist movements.
It’s not McCarthyism to denounce Trump for his links with Putin, up to and possibly including outright treason. But it’s not enough: the US left must also engage with Trump’s working class base and convince them that this billionaire racist, shyster and charlatan offers nothing worthwhile to American workers.
“Men can behave in dreadful ways towards women,” Socialist Worker argues this week, in an article on how to get rid of sexual abuse and violence. Actually, it’s not a bad article, except that it comes from the SWP …
Socialist Worker:
Recent revelations about Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein’s abuse and rape of women have exposed the sexism at the heart of society.
Many people knew about Weinstein’s behaviour, yet it continued for decades.
Several women have said they didn’t come forward because they felt Weinstein was so powerful he would destroy their lives.
The violence and harassment he is accused of are all too common for women and girls across the world. But why does it happen?
Statement from the National Union of Journalists (UK):
The NUJ joined the European and International Federations of Journalists in condemning the murder of Maltese investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, who was killed by a car bomb on 16 October in the town of Bidnija, near her family home.
Daphne Caruana Galizia, 53, was known for her investigative journalism and her blog Running Commentary, which was one of the most widely read websites in Malta.
The journalist had been sued many times for her blog posts in which she revealed several corruption scandals involving Maltese politicians. In 2016, she was named by Politico as one of “28 people who are shaping, shaking and stirring Europe”, after being the first to break news of Maltese politicians’ involvement in the Panama Papers leak.
In February this year, The EFJ denounced the freezing of her bank accounts and libel suits filed against her by Maltese economy minister and his consultant, following a report revealing that both men visited a brothel during an official trip in Germany.
Mogens Blicher Bjerregård, EFJ president, said:
“We are appalled by yet another killed journalist in Europe. This killing and its circumstances must be swiftly and thoroughly investigated. It reminds us that the safety of journalists must still be considered a priority in the European Union.”
According to a media report, Daphne Caruana Galizia had filed a police report 15 days ago saying she was being threatened.
By Charlotte Zalens(this article also appears in the present issue of the AWL paper Solidarity)
On Friday 11 August the Sun newspaper published an article by Labour MP Sarah Champion under the headline ″British Pakistani men ARE raping and exploiting white girls … and it’s time we faced up to it″.
The article is incredibly confused and naive (at one point Champion suggest that despite being the director of a children′s hospice until becoming an MP in 2012, she only heard the abbreviation CSE for Child Sexual Exploitation a few months after becoming an MP). Champion talks of British Pakistani men, but also references recent events in Newcastle where most of the men convicted were not Pakistani. She seems to conflate race, ethnicity, and religion throughout. Champion′s claim that ″Britain has a problem with British Pakistani men raping and exploiting white girls″ is crude, inaccurate, and wrong.
Champion has tried to distance herself from the article, saying that it was edited to take the nuance out of her comments. But her choice to publish such an article with the Sun, well known for dog-whistle racism often targeted at Muslims, where her article appeared alongside an editorial which called for MPs to tackle ″the Muslim Problem″, condemns her. Champion is the MP for Rotherham where large scale child sexual exploitation, involving an estimated 1,400 children between 1997 and 2014, was exposed in 2014. That case, unlike Newcastle, did involve British-Pakistani men.
In other respects the Rotherham case bears many similarities to that of Newcastle. There were multiple factors involved there: vulnerable young women, poverty, the use of drugs and alcohol, authorities disbelieving or in some cases blaming victims as well as, the patriarchal attitudes of some men, attitudes which are prevalent in many communities, in different forms, and which make women and girls “fair game” for sexual exploitation.
At the time of the Jay Report into CSE in Rotherham we wrote: ″What happened in Rotherham is happening in other areas of the country; although there will be particular local circumstances, there will be a wide range of abusers and victims. ”
The Jay Report cites the hesitancy of social workers and practitioners over reporting the ethnicity of abusers as Pakistani, for fear or being accused of racism. This is a problem. It points to a dishonest way of dealing with racism.
″For many years Labour-led Rotherham council has relied upon tokenistic ‘multicultural events’ and communicating almost exclusively with self-appointed ‘community leaders’, often religious ones rather than engaging and building strong links with communities.
″This does not deal with racism in an open way; wrongly presumes the opinions of Muslim communities can and should be communicated by ‘community leaders’, and disenfranchises others.″
Unfortunately Corbyn’s response to these events was to flatten out all these complex issues and pose the problem as one of child sexual abuse alone. Our responses must talk about the multiple factors involved in abuse. Anything else makes it possible for “community leaders” and others in positions of power to say “nothing to do with us”. That situation makes it very difficult for women’s groups and others in Muslim communities who are pushing hard for more discussion about attitudes to sex, sexuality and respect for women.
As we said in relation to Rotherham, it also endangers Muslim girls. ″… the council and social services ignored the possibility that abuse may be happening within the Pakistani community. An image was established of Pakistani men abusing white girls. In fact such abuse usually happens to those closest to the abuser. The under-reporting of abuse from minority ethnic victims is a problem.″
It appears some lessons have been learnt from the Jay Report; police did at least actively pursue gangs in Newcastle, but other lessons have not, and many vulnerable young women continue to suffer abuse.
George Galloway is facing the threat of bankruptcy in a bitter feud with the former parliamentary aide who once complained that she had to buy his underwear.
Aisha Ali-Khan, a Muslim women’s rights activist, has issued a petition to bankrupt the former MP, according to records at the Bankruptcy Court.
Ms Ali-Khan has been engaged in a long-running dispute with Mr Galloway. Last year she accepted costs and damages, believed to be a five-figure sum, to settle a libel battle over his allegation that she had used his home for trysts. He issued a public apology in a statement read by his lawyer in the High Court.
Bankruptcy Court records show that Mr Galloway applied last month to set aside a statutory demand for payment…
The former MP withdrew his accusations Samuel Osborne Monday 20 June 2016
George Galloway has agreed to pay undisclosed damages to a former aide over claims she conspired to run a “dirty tricks campaign” against him.
The former MP withdrew his allegations against Aisha Ali-Khan and agreed to pay damages along with legal costs.
Ms Ali-Khan brought libel proceedings in London’s High Court after the Respect Party leader published a statement on his website in October 2012.
George Galloway’s firm goes bust, owing £100,000 tax
Company set up by George Galloway, the left-wing firebrand, to channel earnings from Iranian state-funded broadcaster was put into liquidation with £100,000 debts Telegraph 27th February 2016.
“People were waving scarves, flashing phones, torches, flapping their windows back and forth, crying for help … At first people [on the ground below] were trying to help them, pushing at cordons. I could see the smoke billowing behind them and in some cases I could see the flames, until they disappeared … [by 4am] there was no sign of life. Everyone was in a resigned state of shock. We couldn’t do anything and we were coming to accept the fire brigade couldn’t do anything either … I’ll never forget the sound of those screams: the screams of children and grown men” (would-be rescuer Robin Garton, quoted in The Times).
The faces look out from the newspaper, smiling in happier times. Many of them black or Middle Eastern with names like Khadija Kaye, Jessica Urbano and Ali Yawa Jafari. But also Sheila Smith and Tony Disson. Then you read about people throwing their children out of high windows in the hope that someone would catch them, people jumping (some on fire) to almost certain death (shades of 9/11) and mother of two Rania Ibrham sending a Snapchat video to a friend who described it: “She’s praying and she’s saying ‘Forgive me everyone, goodbye’.”
This all happened in 2017 in one of the wealthiest boroughs in London, under a Tory council and a Tory government. But these people weren’t wealthy: they were amongst the poorest in the city, living cheek by jowl with people of enormous wealth.
It turns out that the local residents’ group, the Grenfell Action Group, had repeatedly warned the council and the so-called Tenant Management Organisation (ie the landlord) that a disaster was coming. In November of last year Edward Daffarn published a post on the Grenfell Action Group blog, entitled Playing with Fire, in which he warned that “only a catastrophic event will expose the ineptitude and incompetence of our landlord, the Kensington and Chelsea Management Organisation (KCTMO) and bring an end to the dangerous living conditions and neglect of health and safety legislation that they inflict upon their tenants and leaseholders.”
Local (Labour) councillor Judith Blakeman attempted to raise concerns with council officials and the management body “ad nauseam” since refurbishment of the block began in 2014: “They kept reassuring us that everything was fine” she said.
The refurbishment involved encasing the building with cladding that fire safety experts have long warned compromises the safety of tower blocks whose original “compartmentalised” design had incorporated rigorous fire safety standards (it also meant that advice to residents to “stay put” in the event of a fire was fatally inappropriate). An “external cladding fire” had caused the death of six people in Lakanal House tower block in South London in 2009. At the inquest into that disaster, the coroner had recommended that the government should review fire safety guidance to landlords and, in particular, the danger of the “spread of fire over the external envelope” of buildings (ie the use of external cladding). She also recommended that sprinkler systems be fitted to all high-rise buildings. None of this happened.
So why were the warnings ignored? Why did Gavin Barwell, who was housing minister until he lost his seat last week (and is now Theresa May’s chief of staff) fail to act on the warnings prompted by the Lakanal House fire? Why did his predecessor Brandon Lewis, tell MPs that it was “for the fire industry”, not government, to “encourage” the installation of sprinklers rather than “imposing” it? Why did then-communities secretary Eric Pickles treat the Lakanal House coroner’s recommendations as “advice” to local authorities rather than as instructions? And why didn’t Grenfell Tower even have a building-wide fire alarm?
The answer is as simple as it’s shocking: these residents are poor working class people, many of whom are also ethnic minorities and migrants (in an especially tragic twist, the first body to be identified is that of a Syrian refugee, Mohammad al-Haj Ali). Such negligence and cost-cutting would never be tolerated in the luxury high-rise flats and offices peopled by the rich: these are built to the highest standards, using the safest materials.
This is ruling class contempt for the poor – also exemplified by May’s refusal to meet with local people during her brief and tightly-policed visit to the scene earlier today.
Let no-one tell you this was simply a “tragedy” as though it was some sort of natural disaster. This was criminal negligence by the ruling class and their political party, the Tories. Our response – and the only response that will truly honour the victims – must be to pursue the class struggle with renewed vigour. Starting by kicking out the Tories as soon as possible.
Shiraz Socialist 