Unsure whether the cookbook reaction to FlagstaffHank's What About the Threat From Islamic Fundamentalism reflects antipathy to Daniel Goldhagen, the time of day, or something else, I reproduce a British socialist view of Islamic fundamentalism. The Sharia socialists, from Workers' Liberty, begins by quoting a 1994 pamphlet from the British Socialist Workers Party, a Trotskyist group that is the mainspring of George Galloway's Respect Party:
"But [against the state] socialists cannot give support to the Islamists either.
That would be to call for the swapping of one form of oppression for another, to react to the violence of the state by abandoning the defence of ethnic and religious minorities, women and gays, to collude in scapegoating that makes it possible for capitalist exploitation to continue unchecked providing it takes 'Islamic' forms. . . .
continued
The quotation from the SWP pamphlet, "The Prophet and the Proletariat," concludes:
. . . The Islamists are not our allies. They are representatives of a class which seeks to influence the working class, and which, in so far as it succeeds, pulls workers either in the direction of futile and disastrous adventurism or in the direction of a reactionary capitulation to the existing system - or often to the first followed by the second".
Workers' Liberty continue:
The following are all more or less indisputable plain matters of fact.
- A large proportion of Muslims in Britain and Europe are among the most downtrodden, oppressed, poverty-afflicted targets of racism.
- Some who are hostile to Muslims as people, the British National Party fascist Nick Griffin for a noxious example, sometimes present themselves as hostile only to Islam as a religion.
- The outlook of strongly religious Muslims of Britain often has more in common with pre-Renaissance Catholic Europe than the world of 21st century secular people.
- Far from all Muslims have that mindset. According to the rueful calculation of the Islamist Tariq Ramadan, only 40 to 50% of Muslims in Europe are "practising" even on a loose definition.
- Powerful currents of political Islam exist among the devout, feeding demagogically on their sense of grievance and alienation.
- The political-Islamist groups feed off real grievances and alienation, and off a mix of religious self-righteousness and religious outrage against the broad society in which they live.
- In their criticism of the modern bourgeois world, those Islamist currents say some things socialists say, and criticise what we criticise; but they offer as alternative the utopian and reactionary project of "recreating" an Islamic world which they think once existed.
- Broadly speaking, they are near-equivalents of the religio-fascist movements of Europe in the mid 20th century -- the Francoists of Spain, the Blueshirts of Catholic Ireland, the Salazarists of Portugal, etc. Those movements too criticised aspects of capitalism -- as indeed did the Catholic church - and had in them elements of what Marx and Engels called "reactionary socialism". In reality they all served capitalism.
- They are linked to parent movements in the Muslim world - to people who, where they rule, crush with horrendous and sustained violence, and where they do not rule, terrorise and murder secularists, international socialists, lesbian and gay people, advocates of female equality, and those who embrace and actively promote the alien culture of the West.
- The forces of traditional Christian reaction and bigotry and desire for privilege are being encouraged and energised by the example of Islamist militancy.
- Many Western governments have responded to the outcry against the cartoons of Muhammad published in a Danish newspaper on 30 September with abject apologies (Denmark) or placating noises -- including Britain, whose government was already attempting, under Muslim pressure, to inhibit hostile comment on religion. Much of the Western liberal press has expressed little or no solidarity with the right to free expression for the Danish cartoonists or the newspaper which published them. They have tended to blame the cartoonists, and the right-wing Danish paper which published them.
- It is likely that governments like the British have privately influenced newspapers against publishing or saying anything that "would make the situation worse".
- The religio-fascist Islamist groups subscribe, passively or more or less actively, platonically or as practitioners, to the Islamic doctrine of the jihad, understood as active warfare against the non-Muslim world and, often, against the "ordinary" people of Muslim countries whom they consider to be morally blameworthy for not actively supporting their cause.
- The outcry against the Danish cartoons is being fomented, organised, and used by political-Islamist movements and governments (Iran and Saudi Arabia) to mobilise the support of Muslims and Muslim communities worldwide.
- The consequence of the great rallying of political Islam to denounce the Danish cartoons can not but be the strengthening of the clerical-fascist movements of political Islam -- and in the first place against dissenters, unbelievers, socialists, lesbians, gays, feminists etc. in the Muslim-majority countries and in Muslim communities elsewhere.
Which of that list of statements is untrue? What is not there that should be in a list of the dominant facts in the cartoons furore?
If those are the facts, then it will be one of two things with socialists (and, for that matter, liberals).
Either we will fight racism and discrimination against Muslims and Muslim communities in Britain and elsewhere in Europe. Either, while doing that, we will find a way to combine that defence of those communities with opposition to them where they are bases of political, cultural, and civic reaction -- where they are champions of intolerance, bigotry, and sanctified ignorance, trying to spread it from the large areas in the Muslim world where it is the norm, into the bourgeois democracies of the West.
Or, we cease to be socialists and democrats ourselves. In the name of combatting racism and imperialism, we capitulate to reactionary Islamism.
Personally, I think Worksers' Liberty are on target. Nor, I think, is this view uncongenial to Kossacks. Indeed, two polls attached to Daily Kos diaries show that overwhelming majorities of Kossacks who cared enough to vote would support the Rushdie manifesto:
- In Intellectuals' Statement Against Islamism; Poll, 76% endorsed the Rushdie et al. manifesto, 19% said no, and 4% were not sure.
- In Rushdie, et al.'s Manifesto Triggers Blogger Hate, 60% agreed with the manifesto (44% "wholeheartedly" and 16% "mostly" but with reservations about one or more of the signers), 13% agreed with some of it but thought it would h ave an "unnecessary incendiary effect," 18% did not agree "because whatever it says, its undertone equates all Islam with a few extremists," and 6% were "other."
To say this is not to agree with the Bush-Cheny-Rumsfield administration's strategy or conduct. The Rushdie et al. manifesto itself states:
This struggle will not be won by arms, but in the ideological field.
Islamic fundamentalism is not the most important issue confronting liberals and democrats (and Democrats), but neither is it a non-issue.