Libya

Chavez (and "Workers' Revolutionary Party") back Qaddafi

Venezuela's Chavez administration has put itself on the line as almost the last people in the world to back the tottering Qaddafi dictatorship in Libya. Al Jazeera reports: Venezuela's top diplomat on Thursday echoed Fidel Castro's accusation that Washington is fomenting unrest in Libya to justify an invasion to seize North African nation's oil reserves. Nicolas Maduro, the Venezuelan Foreign Minister said: "They are creating conditions to justify an invasion of Libya". Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan president, has... tweeted: "Gaddafi is facing a civil war. Long live Libya. Long live the...

Gaddafi, Ken Livingstone, Anti-Semitism, and the left

In the 1980s, fervent - and paid - supporters of Gaddafi were accepted by many as a respectable section of the British left! This article from Socialist Organiser 343, 28 January 1988, tells about it, and the lessons we must learn. Do you like shoddy thrillers? Try this story, then. The cast of characters: A very well-known actress and film star, Vanessa Redgrave. Her brother, a less well-known actor, Corin Redgrave. Colonel Gaddafi, military dictator of Libya. Various unnamed members of the Libyan intelligence service. The Labour leader of the Greater London Council, later to be an MP, Ken...

LSE students force management to break links with Libyan regime

On 22 February LSE students occupied their Director's Office in protest at the institution's links with the Libyan regime. The occupation ended on 23 February after they won their demands. Here is their report. At 11am on February 23rd, a dozen students at the London School of Economics (LSE) stormed the office of Howard Davies, Director of the LSE, around a series of demands (below) regarding the schools associations with the Gaddafi family. The LSE accepted £300,000 from a foundation run by Saif Gaddafi who is a graduate of the LSE. In light of recent events, the LSE has refused to accept...

Libyans fight for freedom and democracy

Following the uprisings in the bordering countries of Tunisia and Egypt the democratic revolution has spread to Libya. And as Solidarity goes to press on 22 February it is unclear whether one of the most brutal and repressive regimes on the planet will survive. With extraordinary rapidity, following demonstrations and then a rising in the eastern town of Benghazi, the regime appears close to collapse. Although clear information is difficult of obtain, it seems that the army has split and those forces remaining loyal to Qaddafi are resorting to great violence. Reports suggest the regime is...

Vanessa Redgrave, the WRP and Libyan money

The British Workers’ Revolutionary Party (WRP) was a sizeable organisation up to its implosion in 1985. From 1976, in order to fund its daily paper, Newsline , the WRP took money from Libya, Iraq and other vicious dictatorships, rewarding its paymasters with anti-Jewish propaganda and support for those regimes, dressed up as “anti-imperialism”. In 1981, actress Vanessa Redgrave, the WRP’s best known member, sued our comrades John Bloxam and Sean Matgamna for libel for comparing the WRP to the Moonie sect and the Scientologists, and for reporting that the WRP used systematic emotional and...

Support the new Middle East workers' movement

Two months after Mohamed Bouazizi, a street fruit-seller in Tunisia, burned himself to death in protest at poverty and official harassment, setting off an upheaval in his country, almost the whole Middle East is socially aflame. Tyrants have fallen in Tunisia (14 January) and Egypt (11 February). As we go to press it looks as if Qaddafi in Libya, the most vicious of them all, is the next to go. Protests have spread to Morocco, Algeria, Yemen, Jordan, Bahrain, and Iraq, and beyond the Arab world to Iran and Iraqi Kurdistan. We can read well-informed analyses telling us why Syria, or Jordan, or...

As we were saying: Megrahi, Lockerbie and British capital's love affair with Libya (2009)

Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi is the Libyan man convicted for the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over the Scottish town of Lockerbie, in which 270 people died. The Scottish government's decision to return him to his home country on compassionate grounds (he has terminal prostate cancer) has generated a lot of noise on both sides of the Scottish border and both sides of the Atlantic. The FBI has condemned Megrahi's release, telling Scottish justice minister Kenny MacAskill: “Your action in releasing Megrahi makes a mockery of the rule of law. Your action gives comfort to terrorists around...

News Line editorial of April 9, 1983, and comment by Ken Livingstone, on "the Zionist connection"

The Zionist connection. News Line editorial, Saturday, April 9, 1983 A powerful Zionist connection runs from the so-called left of the Labour Party right into the centre of Thatcher's government in Downing Street. There is no difficulty what ever in proving this. Top of the list, we have the most recent appointment of Mr Stuart Young, a director of the 'Jewish Chronicle', as youngest-ever chairman if the BBC, having been a governor only since 1981. He is the brother of Mr David Young, another Thatcher appointee who is chairman of the Manpower Services Commission. This is the key organisation...

Dog doesn’t bark

This is an editorial from Solidarity’s forerunner, Socialist Organiser (27 September 1984) SOME readers last year thought Socialist Organiser was wasting time and valuable space when we published an article on the naked anti-semitism of an editorial which appeared in Newsline, the daily paper put out by the Workers Revolutionary Party (with, it is widely assumed, financial help from their friend Col. Gaddafi, Libya's eccentric dictator). The editorial, entitled “The Zionist Connection”, had a smaller headline above it: “From Socialist Organiser to Thatcher and Reagan”. It began: “A powerful...

The 1983 Heresy Hunt: 2

This is article three in the four part series as originally published in 2003. For an edited version of all four articles click here Heresy Hunted 1 Heresy Hunted 2 Heresy Hunted 3 Heresy Hunted 4 Sean Matgamna continues his article on 'The last time we were heresy-hunted', dealing with the campaign against us in 1983 by the Workers’ Revolutionary Party — then a high-profile group with a daily paper, Newsline — for pointing to circumstantial evidence that they were being funded by the Libyan and Iraqi dictatorships. They were — the truth came out soon after, in 1985, when the WRP imploded —...

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