Islamism

Iranian workers protests spread

On 27 September 17 workers employed by the Iranian company, the National Steel Group, were sentenced to prison and flogging. The trial took place in the southern city of Ahvaz. The workers were charged with, “disrupting public order by inciting disturbance and controversy” and their “crime” was to demand wage increases, and that the company implements the very basic protections provided by Iran’s employment law. The workers can avoid three-month prison terms if they pay fines of 2.5 million tomans (about £40). The fine will be difficult to pay as the working-class has been the main victim of...

Jina Mahsa Amini, one year on

September marks one year since the murder of Jina Mahsa Amini, a young Iranian-Kurdish woman who was killed in detention following her arrest for allegedly violating Iran ’s compulsory hijab law. Her murder sparked the most significant protests against the Iranian regime since the 1980s and the strength of the uprising prompted the Iranian regime to take the notorious morality police off the streets. CRACKDOWN It has been confirmed that more than twenty thousand people have been arrested and hundreds killed in the subsequent crackdown, with the real number expected to be much higher. Sentences...

Oborne, Corbyn and antisemitism

In Solidarity 661 I described the journalist Peter Oborne’s largely uncritical attitude to Islamic regimes and Islamist movements; in issue 663 I showed that his claim that the Birmingham Trojan Horse affair was a “hoax” is incorrect. I will now go on to examine his attitude towards claims of antisemitism within Labour under Jeremy Corbyn and, in particular, his role in making and promoting the Al Jazeera series The Labour Files . It is important to note that Al Jazeera is owned by the Qatari state and in 2019 produced a video claiming that the holocaust had been “exaggerated” by the “Zionist...

Making "Prevent" worse

The official review of the UK’s Prevent “counter-terrorism” strategy led by William Shawcross has finally come out , after much delay. Amnesty International UK’s racial justice director Ilyas Nagdee has responded that the review “has no legitimacy. William Shawcross’s history of bigoted comments on Muslims and Islam should have precluded his involvement in this review in the first place.” That is right. As Solidarity flagged up in May last year, Shawcross is a radical right-winger with a startling history of anti-Muslim commentary. The idea that the UK government appointed a former director of...

Oborne and the Trojan Horse affair

A previous column about the right wing journalist Peter Oborne ( Solidarity 661 ) described how this one-time “conventional conservative” had been transformed by the Iraq war into someone feted by sections of the left. I described his politics as “right wing isolationism”. That column described Oborne’s largely uncritical admiration for Islam and Islamic regimes, including some ultra-reactionary Islamists. I will now go on to examine Oborne’s long-standing interest in the Birmingham Trojan Horse affair — an alleged plot or campaign by some conservative Muslims to take over Birmingham secular...

The Tory that (some) lefties love

There is a section of the left that seems to love it when an avowed right-winger backs their cause. The Morning Star recently quoted, with approval, Henry Kissinger in support of their line that Ukraine should capitulate to Putin. But for a significant section of the left, the journalist Peter Oborne is the right-winger of choice. This can be explained by Oborne’s political evolution from being (in his own words) a “conventional Conservative” working for right-wing publications like the Spectator and the Daily Telegraph , to being transformed by the Iraq war into someone who (again, in his own...

Hindu nationalism, communalism and the left

Professor Dibyesh Anand spoke with Daniel Randall about the recent rise of the Hindu right in Britain, and how the left should approach questions of communalism and chauvinism within and between minority communities.

Citizens spurned by the UK

Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe (on right) and her husband join protest to demand freedom for Alaa Abd el-Fattah Jailed Egyptian democracy activist Alaa Abd el-Fattah, whose profile rose during COP27 because the summit was in Egypt and he is a UK citizen, is still alive. His family has finally been allowed to see him , and reports his hunger strike was broken by the regime, which forced him to take intravenous fluids. They revealed many harrowing new details of the most recent period of his decade behind bars. There are over 60,000 political prisoners in Egypt’s jails. The UK labour movement should...

NUS: debate, not summary sacking!

The President of the UK National Union of Students (NUS), Shaima Dallali, has been sacked for alleged “significant breaches of NUS’s policies”. The sacking comes as a result of an ongoing (and still to report) KC-led inquiry into allegations of antisemitism in the NUS. It is the first time in NUS history that a President has been sacked, although officers have previously been suspended by the organisation’s full-time staff. It is very concerning that the sacking has occurred before the antisemitism inquiry reports: the action risks prejudicing responses to that report. A brief statement from...

Iranian protests spark wider fightbacks

While raising pictures of Mahsa Amini and calls against oppression, a number of women have held a rally ( 2 October ) in front of Beirut’s National Museum in solidarity with the protesting women of Iran. Lebanese women held banners that said: “Our anger is one, our struggle is one”, “Women’s hair is not sinful, your oppression is sinful”, “The veil is a personal freedom, not a governmental matter”, and “My body and my hair belong to no-one but me.” The demonstrators refused the attendance of Abbas Yazbek, a Shia cleric opposed to the Iranian regime, at the vigil because of their stance against...

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