7 February: the new socialism of fools

An old friend Mike Rowley writing on the Mohammed cartoons concludes that 'a serious apology is owing to the Muslim community'. Good on you Mike, and a great big raspberry to those people 'on the left' which have called this a 'free speech issue' (Spiked) or dubbed the cartoons 'anti-islamist' (AWL). It's not the first time that the former have sided with the BNP (another group boasting of having published the cartoons online). In a previous incarnation, 'Spiked' was the magazine Living Marxism, the publication of a party called the 'Revolutionary Communist Party'. As the RCP started to go down the pan, in the mid-1990s, it dissolved its activities into a series of front organisations, pushing the issue of free speech. I remember being in Sheffield in 1995-8, when the main activities of the group were to promote showings of such films as Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will. Leading BNP activist Mark Collett always boasts that he joined the BNP, through the activities of one such RCP front, 'When I came to Leeds University I joined the Free Speech society to fight against political correctness. Then a BNP speaker got expelled, which I thought was absurd. He invited me to a BNP meeting in Burnley and I felt right at home. They were my kind of people.' He made the same point at his recent trial. As for the idea that anti-Muslim racism is 'anti-Islamism', I have written a criticism of such politics here. Finally, if anyone doesn't believe that people in the West have ever published racist cartoons about Muslims in the past, I'd urge them to look at this useful site, which gives a number of examples of the ways in which Mohamed has been represented in images in the past. 

5 December 2005: the Left and anti-Muslim racism

A friend wrote to me recently, to ask why it was that many people in the trade unions in Britain and on the left had agreed to side since 9/11 with 'the Muslims'? Weren't we just propagating a false idea, religion? Weren't we complicit in the way that this religion, like all religions, oppresses its own followers? My friend is also Jewish, and for me that it one of the most dispiriting features of this new racism, the way it sucks up people who should know better: people on the left, people who think they understand racism. The issue, it seems clear to me, is prejudice. Or a different word, discrimination. In a society where there is a sharp increase in racism against a particular group, for someone on the left to start from the principle that people in this group are 'a religion', and they are 'against religions', is not a position of solidarity.

A struggle against religion means a struggle against people. Which people? Those whose identity is defined by their belief, those who inherit an identity on the basis of their parents' or grandparents' belief. It means a struggle against people who see themselves as Muslim (even when they don't believe in Islam) and a struggle against Jewish people who see themselves as Jews (even when we don't believe in Judaism). Ah, but Jews are different, my friend would argue, unlike Muslims, we're a race. Our religion is non-proselytising. If you believe that, read Abram Leon on the difficulties the Nazis had in trying to demonstrate the racial content of Jewishness. It didn't and doesn't work. Race and religion were connected in the 1930s and are connected now.

Seventy years ago the problem with 'the Jews' was that we were money grabbing, we had strange religious customs, we didn't fit in. How much of any of that myth was true: does it matter if the answer is 'all' or 'none of it'? I'd say even if everything that was said about the Jews had been true - every word - anti-Semitism would still be wrong. Seventy years later, the specificity of the racism changes but the logic is the same: here are the outsiders, these are our excuses for disliking them.

I've never met a political Muslim who objected to me describing myself as an atheist. But the precondition of serious work in the community - now, not in the 1970s - is some sense that people's religious beliefs are under attack, and precisely because they are under attack have become the central way that people define themselves. The people in the 1970s who called themselves 'black' or 'Asian' don't any more: they call themselves Muslims. Their identity works in very similar ways to the identity of those who define themselves as Jews. None of my family read religious books, but they call themselves Jewish, by which they mean in practice a loyalty to previous generations, plus a tendency to meet up as a family on Fridays. The vast majority of my Muslim friends are the same. The Koran, the hadith, the men in cotton hats telling them what to think mean nothing at all to them, but fasting for Ramadan, spending time with their family, they make you a 'Muslim'.

My friend concluded their email by referring to Tony Cliff, the founder of the British SWP, a Palestinian Jew, and one of the main parties associated with this 'defence of Islam'. What, he asked, would Cliff have made of the current lines? Here's my answer: Cliff wouldn't have worried a second about the accusation of anti-Semitism. I think he would be rather proud of people on the left for seeing the way that racism is currently affecting young Muslims most of all, and taking their side. He would have been scornful of the way that most of the trade union and socialist left thinks that they know what's going on in the head of Muslims (often because they've picked up a watered-down version of Polly Toynbeeism). He would have hated the state, economic and institutional discrimination experienced by Muslims and rebelled against it. So should we.