Anthony McIntyre's Blog, page 1171

Equality Not Sharia

Maryam Namazie continues with her campaign against Sharia Law.
A close examination of the workings of ‘Sharia’ Councils and the Muslim Arbitration Tribunal reveal serious failings that flout principles of the rule of law and undermine the rights of women in fundamental ways. These forums use fundamentalist and ultra-conservative definitions of ‘Sharia laws’ in highly selective and authoritarian ways; they seek to impose a social culture of ‘Zina’ which compel women to resolve marital and family disputes using ‘Sharia laws’ or risk becoming social outcastes and worse.

Evidence from the UK and elsewhere shows that such religious arbitration bodies function primarily as a means of exercising control over female sexuality and autonomy. They do not treat women as full persons before the law, but instead subject them to degrading questions and investigative procedures and impede them from leaving violent relationships even if they experience torture or ill-treatment and are at risk of losing their lives. The emphasis is centrally on reconciliation even if this conflicts with the protection principle and gender equality. Questions of marriage, divorce, inheritance, financial and children arrangements as well as polygamy and other cultural forms of harm, must be determined by the civil and criminal laws of the land and not so called ‘religious laws.’ This also means that all religious marriages must be registered by law.

Politicians and lawyers would do well to listen to the voices of over 300 abused minority women who signed a letter last year describing how their rights are violated on a daily basis. Any incorporation and recognition of religious forums would sanction the place of religious leaders in making decisions about women's lives and normalise deeply patriarchal value systems.

We therefore urge caution in accepting the suggestion that a ‘compromise’ involving regulation and training provides a way forward. Regulation is neither desirable nor viable for the following reasons:

The sheer diversity of religious interpretations would make regulation unachievable;
Parallel legal systems create and legitimise arbitrary systems of ‘justice’ which means less scrutiny by state institutions out of fear of ‘causing offence’;
There will not be sufficient resources to offer impartial judicial oversight of religious arbitration bodies to ensure compatibility with anti-discrimination and human rights law;
In the wider society there is continuing public scrutiny and revision of law and policy and under a democratic parliamentary process but religious law is not open to such scrutiny;
There is no political will to reform from within – religious forums around the world have been resistant to progressive reforms on women;
Self regulation through bodies such as The Mosques and Imams National Advisory Board (MINAB) and the Board of Sharia Councils has failed to ensure the rights of women and children are protected;
The accommodation of such forums, will amount to state sponsorship of fundamentalist and authoritarian forms of governance that encourage intolerance, misogyny and homophobia.

As black and minority women, we demand adherence to one legal system grounded within universal human rights principles. We cannot and will not settle for anything less.


Signatories:


Pragna Patel, Director, Southall Black Sisters

Yasmin Rehman, Trustee, Centre for Secular Space

Maryam Namazie, Spokesperson, One Law for All

Diana Nammi, Executive Director, Iranian & Kurdish Women's Rights Organisation

Sadia Hameed, Spokesperson, Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain

Gina Khan, Spokesperson, One Law for All

Houzan Mahmoud, Cofounder, Culture Project

Rahila Gupta, Writer and Journalist

Sara Khan, CEO, Inspire

Nasreen Rehman, Forced Marriage Commission

Marieme Helie Lucas, Founder, Secularism is a Woman's Issue

Fatou Sow, International Director, Women Living Under Muslim Laws.

Gita Sahgal, Director, Centre for Secular Space



Maryam Namazie is a political activist and writer.

Follow Maryam Namazie on Twitter @MaryamNamazie    

Derek Robinson

Mick Hall obituarises:

Derek Robinson, a son of working class, a trade unionist, communist, and toolmaker by trade.

   

For a period in the 1970s few union leaders were better known than Derek Robinson, who has died aged 90. As the convener of one of the largest manufacturing complexes in the country, the British Leyland motor company’s Longbridge plant on the edge of Birmingham, and an unabashed member of the Communist Party, he was known in the media as Red Robbo.

Born in Cradley Heath, Staffordshire, Robinson came from a family that had worked in the chain making industry, and through encouragement from his mother became an avid reader. At 14 he began his engineering apprenticeship at Longbridge (which he continued to call “the Austin” after its old company name) and qualified as a toolmaker. Two brothers also worked there. He became a shop steward and joined the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1951, remaining a member until the 1990s.

He was a protege of the long-serving convener Dick Etheridge, another communist, whose championship of his members’ interests did not prevent the then BL chairman, Donald Stokes, giving a party for him when he retired in 1975. Robinson succeeded Etheridge at the moment when BL was running out of money. Stokes was dispatched and the unions were drawn into the discussions for the Ryder report, which brought the huge investment that they had sought and promises of the participation that had been a key goal of the stewards.

Robinson favoured nationalisation of the industry, yet worked with management in its replacement of the old piecework system, widespread in the Midlands. This paid workers by the amount they produced, but a maze of different rates meant that every time a new component or model was introduced rates had to be renegotiated, and industrial disputes and strikes followed. It occupied hours of management and union time and individual plants could have two or three stoppages a day as a result.

Robinson’s support for change brought criticism from Trotskyists shop stewards - Alan Thornett was the most prominent -  who were active in Leyland plants. But he declared his commitment to the company’s success: “If we make Leyland successful, it will be a political victory. It will prove that ordinary working people have got the intelligence and determination to run industry.”

On the national stage he opposed the social contract agreed between the TUC and the Labour government, which attempted to restrain runaway inflation by agreeing wage restrictions in exchange for new employment legislation. In reality it was designed to make workers pay for the Labour governments failure to control inflation.

Leyland’s troubles worsened. Skilled workers, members of Robinson’s own union, the Amalgamated Engineering Union (now part of Unite), embarked on a lengthy strike. He opposed it, fruitlessly, and it damaged his reputation amongst some skilled workers. In 1977 when the Anglo-South African businessman Edwardes arrived he gave Robbo little credit for opposing the AEU strike and began to plot his removal from Leyland.

When Robbo refused to withdraw his name from a pamphlet issued by the Leyland combined shop stewards committee putting a socialist alternative to the cuts demanded by BL’s management Edwardes had him fired.

When a strike ensued, Edwardes held a meeting with Robinson’s AEW national union executive, which was dominated by Labour right-wing Midlanders politically hostile to him, and they did the bosses bidding and agreed to what became a sham inquiry. Robinson continued to be paid, but the inquiry as was always it's intention found against him. Having taken so long to come to their decision time ran out for him to fight for an industrial tribunal settlement.

Robbo had no choice but to accept their decision and in later years said:

I did a better than average job in the interests of BL workers. When the critics say we were just a bunch of militants, they forget we were actually fighting for jobs. We didn’t come out on strike just for the sheer fun of it.

Like many trade unionists who become unemployed he found himself blacklisted. He made numerous applications for engineering jobs which were always rejected and failed in an attempt to become a Midlands organiser due to the armlock the right wing had on his union in that region.

Far from being a raging militant Robbo was like most Shop Stewards and Convenors of his day, a passionate trade unionist who believed management and unions could work together to achieve gains for the workforce which benefited both parties.

He could never have survived as a site conveyor without the trust of the men and women he represented, he was sacked unjustly because management had become emboldened by the social market economy policies advocated by Keith Joseph and eventually put into practice by that dreadful woman. Rather than saving the British car industry Thatcher turned it into a rusting hulk.

Former Communist Party industrial organiser Mick Costello summed up comrade Robinson well:

He was an outstanding trade union leader who was a fighter and a thinker who also knew how to listen to people. He explained that Leyland conspired with Thatcher’s guru industry secretary Sir Keith Joseph, who charged MI5 with gathering and inventing — dirt as part of a witch hunt against Mr Robinson .... One Sunday newspaper printed notes concocted by one of the spies that were put across as minutes of a meeting of communist stewards at Longbridge. to their credit, no other newspaper’s industrial reporters used it as they doubted what was, in fact, what these days is called fake news.

Derek Robinson, trade unionist, born 1927; died 31 October 2017

*Info for this obit came from many sources including the Guardian, Morning Star and Birmingham Mail

Mick Hall blogs @ Organized Rage.

Follow Mick Hall on Twitter @organizedrage

UVF – Behind The Mask

Gareth Mulvenna with A Few Thoughts On UVF – Behind The Mask.

The sociologist Steve Bruce stated in his book The Red Hand (1992) that it would appear to be ‘sour grapes’ if one were to criticise another author writing on the same subject. Bruce’s target was Martin Dillon and the weak cod-psychology he adopted in trying to explain the psychopathic behaviour of the ‘Butchers’ leader Lennie Murphy. The writer Iain Turner states in his excellent Balaclava Street blog that Bruce’s ‘…conclusions in The Red Hand regarding the Murphy gang rest on a sounder basis than the imaginary couch upon which Dillon places often long-dead men.’ Despite Bruce’s brilliant deconstruction of Dillon’s portrait of Murphy as suffering from pathology due to his Catholic surname, The Shankill Butchers continues to sell well and is often held up as an essential and accurate account of some of the more notorious loyalist paramilitary actors who operated during the ‘Troubles’.

I now fear that UVF – Behind the Mask by Aaron Edwards (which Dillon has written the foreword to) will come to be regarded in the same light. Indeed, many uncorroborated myths are pushed in the book and so, like Bruce in 1992, I feel that I have to make some kind of intervention to raise awareness of a few of this book’s various failings and weaknesses.

In the blurb on the back of Behind the Mask, the tabloid journalist Hugh Jordan, not known for his nuanced understanding of loyalism, promises that the book ‘will be seen as the definitive history of the…Ulster Volunteer Force’. Given his pedigree as a historian – he has written popular accounts of Mad Mitch in Aden and the Northern Ireland Labour Party – as well as his claims of ‘unprecedented access to leading members of the UVF’ the appetite was well and truly whetted for Aaron Edwards’s book.

There are a number of glaring weaknesses and inaccuracies in Edwards’s book, however, that means that it falls far short of being anywhere close to definitive. I do not intend to deconstruct Behind the Mask in the same manner that Bruce did with Dillon’s Butchers, but throughout this article I do intend to highlight some of the aforementioned and numerous weaknesses and inaccuracies. I do this in the hope that the general reader will be forewarned – or at least retrospectively informed – of the unreliability of this account of paramilitary loyalism.

At this stage, it is only fair that I disclose that I have written on the same subject as Edwards (hence the Bruce/Dillon analogy). Tartan Gangs and Paramilitaries – The Loyalist Backlash was published in 2016 to a great reception by many in the loyalist community, but also by nationalist journalists, demonstrating that it wasn’t merely ‘preaching to the choir’.

***

Turning to Edwards’s book.

The omens are not good when the reader opens the book to be confronted with a dramatis personae that has the late Hughie Smyth’s date of death as May 2012, rather than 2014. Smyth was a popular loyalist politician and former leader of the PUP. Billy Hutchinson’s year of birth is claimed as 1957 rather than 1955. Such errors could be forgiven as typos but are sadly indicative of what is to come. As anyone who lived through the Troubles will testify to, the fine margins of being two years older or younger at a certain point in time could sometimes be the difference between getting ‘involved’ and not.

Edwards’s prologue, ‘The Two Billys’ should have been an excellent way of introducing the tensions which emerged within loyalist paramilitarism and which have tested the long peace in Northern Ireland. Billy Greer and Billy Mitchell – two popular UVF commanders who died shortly after one another in July 2007 are the ‘two Billys’ referred to and are key figures in any historical account of the organisation. Edwards makes a credible point when he states here that ‘It [the history of the UVF] is at its heart a story of ordinary men like…Greer and Mitchell, who became involved in paramilitary activity for a variety of reasons. They both rose to prominence through their ability to get the men and women under their command to do things they wouldn’t have otherwise done. Yet, their stories also demonstrate why some individuals remain involved in militarism, while others go against the grain and ask serious questions of what had brought them to the point where they advocated, planned and participated in violent acts’.

Sadly, in describing his attendance at such a solemn event as Greer’s funeral, Edwards feels the need to adopt a condescending tone towards those in attendance: ‘There seemed to be more chiefs than Indians in attendance. All of them dressed in smart suits and sensible shoes, even if some of them insisted on the addition of not-so-sensible white socks. The sweet smell of cheap deodorant and aftershave wafted through the air…’.
Billy Mitchell in front of Billy Hutchinson
If Edwards had tempered his condescension and embarked on a biographical study of Mitchell and the East Antrim UVF this book might have been a fantastic and perhaps authoritative account of the complexities of a man’s journey within loyalist paramilitarism; from the evangelical Bible Protestantism of 1960s Paisleyism, through loyalist feuding and a genuine prison conversion into a key architect of loyalist community activism and politics. Edwards obviously felt close to Mitchell and this shows in his ability to understand the complexities of a man who a former UVF leader called ‘Red Billy’ when I brought him up in conversation; but a man who also flirted with the National Front before settling on a brand of Christian Socialism which saw him become an important figure in community relations in North Belfast and East Antrim in his post-jail life.

However, it is when writing about Mitchell and the origins of the book that Edwards’s hubris gets the better of him: ‘The person who originally suggested that I write the book was…Billy Mitchell. At a meeting in Monkstown in October 2005 he asked me: ‘When are you going to write the history of the UVF?’ Mitchell was a clever man, and well-liked among certain sections of the UVF. However, as my own conversation with a former higher-ranking UVF leader [see paragraph above] testifies to, Mitchell was not universally liked. The UVF is and always was [as Steve Bruce has excellently observed] a central reservation which cut through various and often transient political, military, intellectual and emotional journeys. While it was certainly more disciplined than its larger rival the UDA, the UVF had a number of often conflicting processes and personalities coursing through its veins which would make it inherently difficult to write ‘the history’ of the organisation. Being ‘asked’ to write ‘the history’ of the UVF by Mitchell, then, will immediately subtract credibility from the book in the eyes of many former members before they have even moved past the acknowledgements.

The start of the preface is toe-curling, as Edwards describes an afternoon spent drinking with veteran UVF members in Monkstown, ‘discussing the finer points of English premiership football and horse racing…’. Of course, it just so happened that this was no ordinary day – it was what became known as ‘9-11’, and Edwards describes watching those infamous televisual images, writing that ‘The irony was not lost on me as I watched these events unfold on the other side of the Atlantic. Mass-casualty terrorism was unleashing its devastating killing potential across the most iconic skyline in the world while I sat quietly and comfortably opposite men who had probably been responsible for sustaining one of the longest-running campaigns of terror in British history’.

This anecdote, along with the description of Billy Greer’s funeral tells me that Edwards wants the reader to see that he was among the men of violence – however fleetingly; it is the sort of validation-seeking that no serious historian should communicate directly in the text. Indeed Edwards has often bemoaned so-called ‘outsiders’ writing about loyalism – that no-one else has either the authority or legitimacy to write about the community from which he hails. With Edwards at the centre of the narrative in certain parts, the reader is presented with a hard-boiled tabloid-esque style which would make most people wonder whether the book is about the UVF or Edwards himself.

***


It is in making mistakes about some basic and fundamental events in recent history in Northern Ireland that Edwards show a real careless streak. He drops a serious clanger when he states that the IRA bombing of the Four Step Inn took place in Sandy Row, whereas it is well known that the Four Step was on the Shankill Road. This cataclysmic event calcified rapidly hardening attitudes within the loyalist working class with many people calling for an intra-communal reaction. Immediately afterwards the DUP was formed, with Paisley using the immediate shock among people on the Shankill to announce his latest political project. In the background the UDA was formed. Most of the Shankill men I spoke to in my own research talked eidetically about rushing to the scene – many of them arriving onto the road having been at Windsor Park to watch a European Cup fixture involving Linfield and Belgian side Standard Liege. They described the carnage they witnessed on the night, and shortly thereafter the funerals of the two men killed. The funeral of Ernie Bates (uncle of Basher) and Alexander Andrews was the largest in the city since that of Edward Carson. To make such a fundamental factual error relating to a hugely important turn in the road toward loyalist paramilitarism for many young men is unforgivable. The funeral procession of Andrews and Bates makes it way down the Shankill

***

Irritatingly the author states that the Red Hand Commando was ‘formed in 1972 by William ‘Plum’ Smith, Winston Rea and twenty-year-old Stevie McCrea’. This is untrue – the organisation was formed by a group of young loyalists under the leadership of former Paisleyite and Shankill Defence Association leader John McKeague in 1970. This is noted by me in my own book under the unambiguous sub-heading ‘Birth of the Red Hand’ (pp.69-74). The late Plum Smith had previously mentioned it in his autobiography (pp.26-27) Indeed, it is incredible that McKeague – such a pivotal figure in early UVF history – is notable by his absence from the book (apart from one mention in a paragraph about Lennie Murphy’s time in Long Kesh). For such an individual to be overlooked subtracts any credibility from the narrative.

The claim that Stevie McCrea was involved in forming the RHC is pure fantasy; indeed, I – and former prominent members of the organisation who I have spoken to – would be interested in meeting his source for this information. McCrea, who would later become a legend within loyalist paramilitarism for his attempted ‘X-Ray’ escape from Long Kesh did however join the organisation (becoming a member of the Village platoon in South Belfast, initially part of ‘A’ Company – Shankill) and was arrested for murder on 31 October 1972 (not 1973 as Edwards claims). Indeed, the episode in which McCrea was apprehended would make for a gripping addition to any history of paramilitary loyalism – involving as it did a chance encounter with a police officer, a police dog and a potential melee near Windsor Park with a group of UDA men.

Also, why did the author not probe the close relationship between Gusty Spence and the RHC? When Spence was ‘abducted’ in July 1972 it was the RHC who were at the forefront of this operation. Of course, the UVF had a big role to play, with a masked Geordie Orr (another pivotal UVF figure notable by his absence from the book) and others prominent at Spence’s famous interview with ITN reporter David Boulton. Spence’s son-in-law (Winkie Rea) and nephew (Frankie Curry) were both members of the RHC. This is a personal suggestion and not a criticism. Although Spence’s re-arrest is mentioned in the book, his being spirited away after his daughter’s wedding is confusingly not even introduced.
Gusty Spence, flanked by Geordie Orr (in balaclava)

***

When it comes to the Shankill Butchers, the author devotes two full chapters to the subject. As we know from Dillon’s 1989 book and posts on various internet message boards, this episode in loyalist paramilitarism has attracted its own subculture, similar to the ‘Ripperologists’ who have devoted huge amounts of time to solving the identity of the mystery person behind the gruesome Whitechapel murders of 1888.

There is a fascinating story about how Lennie Murphy tried to murder Hughie Smyth during the Shankill feud of late 1975 on foot of Smyth being friendly with the Balmer family [Dessie Balmer being a rival of Murphy’s on the Shankill at the time], but the matter is dropped without any explanation of what happened. Did the UVF not see an opportunity to take action against Murphy? Did Smyth not want the feud to escalate? The latter is perhaps a plausible reason as to why Murphy was not killed outright. There are a number of occasions in the book where Edwards dangles a fascinating vignette and then leaves it hanging with no follow-up, seemingly moving on to a completely different event apropos of nothing.

One contemporary of Murphy found this anecdote particularly lacking in credibility, stating to me in a recent conversation that if it had Chuck Berry who had tried to kill Smyth, he would have believed it.

Later, Edwards makes an horrific mistake when he states that a ‘second twist’ to Lennie Murphy’s assassination (in November 1982) ‘was that he died yards from where Billy Moore and other members of the Shankill Butchers gang had dumped the body of their final murder victim, twenty-year-old student Stephen McCann’. To the unfamiliar reader, the book clumsily absolves the Butchers of some horrific crimes.
Stephen McCann

McCann, whose horrific murder was carried out in late October 1976, was Not the last Butchers victim. Indeed, the murder of Joe Morrissey in February 1977 stands out as a particularly nasty, abhorrent and vicious killing. It was at this point where I questioned whether Martin Dillon had even read Behind the Mask. In Butchers Dillon writes poignantly about how it was seeing the post-mortem photographs of young Stephen McCann and the poems that he had written before his murder that drove him to reveal the grisly details of what the Butcher gang inflicted on their defenceless victims. In fact, the insensitivity is repeated on the following page where Edwards repeats details of the same ‘ironic twist’ about the interment of Murphy and the ‘last’ Butchers victim.

At the end of the two Butchers chapters Edwards quotes a ‘woman from the Shankill area’ who allowed the gang to use her house for meetings. From his conversation with ‘woman from the Shankill area’, Edwards derives a Dillon-esque revelation that John Murphy – Mr B in Dillon’s original book and who later died in a car crash was the ‘real’ leader of the Butchers.

As dead men can be safely accused of anything, this paragraph made headlines without any reporters actually scrutinising the real lack of evidence. While John Murphy may have been a UVF member, he did not hold the rank or seniority of his younger and more charismatic brother. The contention that Murphy being behind bars and unable to give orders (according to ‘woman from the Shankill area’) holds no water. Murphy was a ruthless terrorist who was able to kill inside jail, so it is not a stretch to imagine him giving orders from behind bars. Indeed, it is likely that many assassinations in Northern Ireland started with an ‘order from prison’.

It is during the sections on the Butchers that some confusing interview material is put forward without dissection or explanation. ‘Bill’, a CID detective that the author interviewed has this to say about the Butchers’ modus operandi: ‘…the plan was hatched to abduct the target. There was no noise, no commotion. Later the victim would be reported missing. By then the gang would have taken him away, killed him, then burnt their clothes. Nothing sadistic – who better than a butcher. It was premeditated. Hold him for three days’ suffering and then kill him – out of sight, out of mind’. Edwards does not attempt to break that excerpt down, perhaps because if it is broken down logically then its credibility might be called into question while it makes little sense (unless he is talking about the killing of Joe Donegan in October 1982). However, still – ‘nothing sadistic’ – really?

‘Bill’ further states that ‘Murphy came from a mixed background’, seemingly alluding to Martin Dillon’s theory that Lennie was tortured for having an alleged Catholic heritage and, indeed, a Catholic father living in relative solitude in his terraced house in Percy Street. That ignores the significant number of people with Murphy, Molloy etc. as surnames in the Shankill area. Not to mention that William Murphy, Lennie’s father, is honoured in death as a UVF member.

***

I haven’t been able to hear Edwards talk about the book, but observing his online interactions his stock response to any public criticism or challenge is to state ‘I will definitely look again at all the issues you raise and ensure that the section is properly revised for a future edition’. This particular response emerged on Twitter when Ciarán MacAirt wrote an article challenging Edwards on his account of the McGurks pub bombing of December 1971.


The bombing, carried out by the UVF, killed MacAirt’s grandmother and the identity of the perpetrator of the atrocity was the subject of cynical disinformation at the time. In response to Edwards’s book, MacAirt wrote the following piece, which like much of Edwards’s book (and indeed MacAirt’s) is full of supposition and conjecture (e.g. in MacAirt’s article he constructs sentences such as ‘…if it was the UVF Billy Mitchell, his name would have been well known to British Military Intelligence…’, which puts one in mind of the old saying ‘if your auntie had balls she’d be your uncle’ ). Ifs, buts and maybes are three terms that crop up repeatedly in weak accounts of the Troubles. Edwards’s response to MacAirt, offering a revision, should leave any reader with a feeling that – in the parlance of John Lydon – they are being cheated.

***

Most of this review, or rather short collection of observations, about Edwards’s book has focused on the 1970s. I have noticed a number of errors in the 1980s and 1990s material, and have been alerted to inaccuracies in the 1960s chapter by someone close to the UVF of that period.

The book looks as though it hadn’t been proof-read, with numerous spelling mistakes causing the overall product to appear unprofessional.

Despite this, those people who read casually about the Troubles will be titillated and thrilled by Edwards’s book; but for those of us with an intimate knowledge of loyalism it is frustrating to see such an error-strewn book hit the shelves. The book does not progress the story of militant loyalism. Like the work of Martin Dillon, the book is constructed around anecdotes and conjecture rather than hard historical interrogation.

Having previously spoken at length to a number of former UVF and RHC members, I certainly didn’t feel that I was getting ‘behind the mask’ while reading this book. Although the UVF, the YCV [the story of which is incredibly not mentioned at all], and the RHC were responsible for a number of murders, the truth is – as Edwards alludes to – that the vast majority of their members were normal young men with skilled jobs who found themselves killing in response to the IRA and the orations of clean-handed politicians.

That is the uncomfortable truth that needs to be written, but this book didn’t reveal much of the personalities behind the mask.

I just felt disappointed as I turned the final page, and had to sadly nod in agreement when I later saw a comment on Twitter that the book resembled a ‘feature-length’ copy of The Sunday Life.
Aaron Edwards, 2017. UVF: Behind the Mask. Publisher Merrion Press ASIN: B071WXKS99

Gareth Mulvenna is the author of Tartan Gangs and Paramilitaries – The Loyalist Backlash

Who Gets To Speak About Anti-Semitism?

Shaul Magid writes in Tikkun Daily.
Who Gets to Speak about Anti-Semitism? “Anti-Semitism and the Struggle for Justice” at the New School for Social Research
I attended the sold-out event and below I share a few reflections that I hope will be informative and foster further conversation. I will not be too descriptive as a video of the event is on-line for those who are interested to judge for themselves. Below I make five basic observations.

First, to the question as to why these four people should have the right to speak about anti-Semitism? This was not an academic panel, nor a panel of “experts.” This was a panel of activists, progressive people working in the streets of America on a variety of issues dealing with inequality, injustice, bigotry, and hatred. Anti-Semitism is one of those. So there were no clever readings of Foucault or any intricate critical analysis comparing Gavin Langmuir to Robert Wistrich (two historians of anti-Semitism) or discussions of historical precedent or comparative genocide. No clever Lacanean, Deleuzean, or Zizekean twists. Everyone on the panel was very clear about who they were, what they do, and how this issue impacts their work and their lives and why it matters.

As Annette Yoshiko Reed said to me, this was about positionality in the best sense. And here perhaps the biggest lesson for me was why American Jews have such a hard time understanding where these people are coming from. For the panelists, anti-Semitism is not sui generis (at this point many American Jews just stop listening); it is one of a variety of forms of unacceptable hatred. Yes anti-Semitism has its own long and painful history, as does racism in America, and I do not suggest collapsing all forms of hatred into one neat package. But for these panelists anti-Semitism is not something that has to be examined as categorically distinct from other forms of bigotry. This very point remains a point of contention in the academic study of Holocaust and genocide studies. And anti-Semitism is certainly not only about Israel but also about the Jew more generally. The fact that this point needs to be made, and it does, is itself indicative of the problem we face today. The underlying premise of the panel is one of intersectionality, a notion that drives American Jews crazy, a notion that subverts simultaneously championing Black Lives matter and AIPAC, the idea (not new by the way, it already existed in a different form in New Left “internationalism”) that all forms of oppression are connected, in principle and in practice (note: this may be different than the original definition of “intersectionality” coined by feminist civil rights activist and race theorist Kimerlie Williams Crenshaw but is nonetheless a definition that is often used in today’s activist communities).
This strikes at the heart of an often reflexive Jewish exceptionalism and harkens back to the difficult challenge for Jews in America that they are not the most othered other; coming to terms with the fact that race trumps anti-Semitism in this fruited plain, that racism, and not anti-Semitism, is part of the very structure (legal, cultural, political) of our country, that a person of color is more likely to be harassed in the streets of one of our cities than a white Jew, more likely to be arrested by our police, and imprisoned by our system. There is certainly anti-Semitism in our society that needs to be addressed, each panel readily acknowledged that; but it is not what threatens to tear this country apart the way it did in Weimar Germany. Race does.

These panelists have right to talk about anti-Semitism the same way they have a right to talk about gender disparity, and racism, and police brutality, and poverty. Because in all of those, and more, they are in the streets fighting every day. Did they make “mistakes”? Yes, certainly. When they ventured too far into history, or even the analytical realm, they made factual and even descriptive errors. But I kind of liked the ragged edges of it all; they made no claim to be experts and their errors did not undermine their basic message.

Second: Defining anti-Semitism: Did they “define” anti-Semitism? Not really. But that is fine with me, as anything more than a working “definition” here is a trap in my view (on this see Gavin Langmiur’s Toward a Definition of Anti-Semitism or David Engel’s essay “Against Defining Anti-Semitism”). They did describe it, passionately, and also contextualized anti-Semitism as part of a larger fabric of hatred in America. They all acknowledged anti-Semitism on the white supremacist right, the progressive left, and in the Muslim world. As I happen to be working on Meir Kahane I can’t help adding something he said. Much of what Kahane thought and said I disagree with but here I think he got it right. As we know Kahane fought his entire career in America against the left (Jewish and American), against anti-Semitism in the Black Nationalist movement, in the Arab community etc. In an interview in the early 1970s when he was asked which was more dangerous in America, anti-Semitism on the right or on the left he said emphatically that it is no contest, anti-Semitism on the right is far more dangerous for Jews than any anti-Semitism on the left, including the Black Panthers, including the Muslim world. So for our panelists too, agree or disagree, there is no comparison between the anti-Semitism that exists in the anti-Israel campaign and Charlottesville. Perhaps because for so many American Jews Israel has become their religious dogma, their “civil religion,” this is sometimes hard to see. To acknowledge that there may be anti-Semites who are pro-Israel, even Zionist, is dissonant for many of us. But it is real. And this blind spot is dangerous indeed. The fact that the ZOA can invite Steve Bannon and Sebastian Gorka and Morton Klein can write in Breitbart News is far more startling, and dangerous, to me than Jews marching with Linda Sarsour.

Third: On Sarsour: In many respects the event was as widely publicized as it was, and was as contentious as it was, because of Sarsour. She kind of reminds me of someone who once said of the Grateful Dead guitarist and counter-cultural icon Jerry Garcia. “Jerry Garcia never really existed, he was just a figment of Robert Hunter’s imagination.” Linda Sarsour has become the figment of the anxious American Jewish imagination. In some way, she fills the role Edward Said played in the 80s and 90s. Except Said out Occidentalized the Occident; he was a classical pianist, wrote scholarly essays on Joseph Conrad and English Literature, dressed in Brooks Brothers suits, spoke more like an Oxford don than a schoolyard bully, was a Palestinian Christian and not a Muslim. But still, an academic colleague once said to me, “The problem with Said is that he is pro-Palestinian.” “No,” I responded, “he is not pro-Palestinian, he IS Palestinian.”

Sarsour, on the other hand, is not a professor in an Ivy League university, she looks like she comes from Baghdad and talks like she comes from Bensonhurst. She can talk street jive yet uses her hands like a ballet dancer. She is a Brooklyn in-your-face activist. And she is a proud Palestinian-American who is openly against what she says is “Israel, the apartheid state.” You are welcome to disagree, she is fine with that, but she certainly has the creds, and the right, to say it. She has the cadence of Malcolm X but is not as militant. Like Malcolm she is consummate performer. Give her a mike and she has the audience in the palm of her hand in 10 seconds. Watch some Malcolm X videos and you will see what I mean.

I think the thing about Sarsour that is maddening for many center-left American Jews is that she is actively engaged in many issues they agree with. Progressive issues like prison reform, rights of migrant workers, Transphobia, Islamophobia, gender discrimination, labor unions, poverty, health care reform, etc. Her political hero in a Jew from Brooklyn named Bernie Sanders. I could go on. So when she comes out wearing hijab against Israel it drives some of us crazy. She posed an interesting question to American Jews: she said, “I am a Palestinian-American, my grandparents were born and raised in Palestine, as was my family for generations, and they were displaced by the Zionist state. You tell me, what should I think about Zionism?” It reminds me of the anecdote of a Zionist being asked to define Zionism. “Sure,” he said, “Zionism is like a man jumping out of the third floor window of a burning building….and landing on someone else’s head.” Zionism landed on the head of Sarsour’s family (like so many other Palestinian families). So is she supposed to be pro-Zionist? Is she supposed to be sympathetic to the Jewish narrative (which she, like Said before her, unequivocally acknowledged as legitimate) while her Jewish interlocutors reject her narrative? Or don’t even care to listen to it? Or claim she has no right to speak while her extended family remains under a brutal occupation? Should she be what Israelis call one of the “good Arabs”? Is that our standard for her right to speak on these issues? She says she favors a liberal democracy in Israel, a state for all its citizens. Is that anti-Semitic? I know many Jews who agree, Israelis too, and I too am sympathetic to that stance. Would that be the end of the Jewish state? I don’t think so. If Israel granted citizenship to all Palestinians tomorrow and even if the population was 55% Palestinian and 45% Jewish Israeli, it would still be a Jewish state in practice for the foreseeable future (Likud member Moshe Ahrens has been making this point for years).

In any case, Sarsour has been a champion of many progressive causes, has fought discrimination more than most of us, has been arrested many times defending many different communities, and has been recognized as a serious activist. She has stood and worked with Jewish activists like Jill Jacobs of T’ruah, she raised $162,000 from Muslim-Americans to help restore the damaged Jewish cemetery in St Louis and then gave the remaining proceeds to restore a Jewish cemetery in Colorado. She is also against Israel as presently construed. I don’t think American Jews know what to make of that. In this way she is much more complicated than Said. She said that she is fine with people criticizing her, just not criminalize her right to hold a position (BDS) she thinks is both legitimate and reasonable from where she stands. Does this make everything ok? No, it does not. Anti-Semitism is not ok, which is precisely why the panel challenged the way some use anti-Semitism as a policing tool to stop others from speaking, even when what they are saying may not be anti-Semitic. Yes, Sansour thinks “Zionism is creepy.” I may disagree but that does not, in my view, constitute anti-Semitism.

But there is more. If Sansour is sincere in her claims to protest only against Israel as an “apartheid state” and not against the very existence of Israel in any form, or against Jews more generally, she has to come clean about positive remarks she has made about people like Louis Farrakan. Normalizing a figure like Farrakhan who has called Jews “bloodsuckers” and suggested that contemporary Jews “are not really Jews but are in fact Satan,” is not acting as part of what she defines as a “movement” to fight for justice, equality, and fairness in our society. To truly move from a successful progressive activist to a national leader for progressive causes, and certainly to achieve support from progressive Jews like myself, I think Sansour should publicly respond to her support, tacit as it may be, of people like Farrakhan who are not making our country a more just and safe place to live and raise our families. She openly acknowledges that anti-Semitism exists on the left and thus I hope she fights as strongly against that as she has against anti-Semitism and Islamophobia elsewhere in our society. Pressing Sansour to come clean about her thoughts on Farrakhan is not out of bounds, in my view, but would serve to strengthen her position in “the movement” where she now plays such a prominent role.

Fourth: Lena Morales, a queer Latinx/Ashkenazi Jew from the south side of Chicago (who teaches Yiddish) made some interesting points about her Jewishness and her anti-Zionism. She said, “I became an anti-Zionist right after my birthright trip when I saw that in Israel, Palestinians are treated no better, and worse, than blacks on the south side of Chicago. It was then I realized I could not support it.” She claimed that “I am an anti-Zionist because of my attachment to my Jewishness. I think Zionist was a terrible mistake.” One can certainly disagree with that. But is that anti-Semitic? That is something we hear more and more from Millennial Jews in groups some of whom identify with IfNotNow, although IfNotNow also has many members who claim to be Zionists. That needs to be taken seriously and not discounted as out of bounds. She too, and people like her, deserver a place at the collective Jewish table.

Fifth: Rebecca Vilkomerson gave a cogent and very impassioned case for JVP. She made the case why JVP, as a harsh critic of Israel, even as an organization that supports BDS, is not “anti-Semitic,” and her remarks, as opposed to the others, were mostly about Israel. You can disagree with JVP or not, I think she made a good case that undermined much of the center-left critique of JVP as an organization that should not have a place at the table. For those who only know about JVP from its critics, I suggest listening to her remarks. I find the hysteria in the Jewish center about JVP somewhat baffling. JVP has become kind of a Jewish version of Sansour, largely because of its support of BDS, even though many of those critics supported BDS is other cases, such as apartheid South Africa. This is not to equate the two but only to suggest that BDS is a tactic of a non-violent protest. One can disagree that it should apply in this case but to criminalize it and those who support non-violent protest by calling it “anti-Semitic” by definition, is, in my view, part of why this panel was necessary.

Finally, to respond to critics who said “this is nothing but a leftist panel talking to leftists,” in one sense this is true. But so what? How many academic panels have I sat in on that are academics simply talking to academics, all of whom share the same canon, have the same bag of tricks, make the same clever moves. Or how many panels on anti-Semitism (even whole conferences) have I attended where the entire panel consisted of pro-Israel advocates who decry the state of anti-Israelism as anti-Semitism. I teach at a university that has an entire institute for the study of anti-Semitism that has hosted numerous conferences on the subject. I have published on the Holocaust and anti-Semitism and yet have never once been invited to any of those conferences in my home university. Why is that? I think the reason is obvious. The conveners know I will not say what they want to be said. And they are right. This is fine with me, I attended the conferences anyway. It is just to say this is nothing new.

The call for parity in every instance is a trick often used by those critical of the left. I once invited Peter Beinart to speak at my synagogue. A member came up to me angrily afterward and said, “Now you have to invite someone from the other side.” “Why,” I asked, “a few years ago we invited Jewish feminist Letty Pogrebin, do I now have to invite an anti-feminist? And if I invited Alan Dershowitz, would you come to me and say that next year you have to invite Peter Beinart?” The panel at the New School was a panel of progressive activist all of whom deal with matters of inequality, injustice, and bigotry. Anti-Semitism is included as part of that. They have every right to speak. To suggest otherwise is simply perpetuating what is wrong in our society articulated so beautifully in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?’.

In sum while one can, and should, be critical about various things that were said, or not said, I learned a great deal from this event, about activism vs. intellectualism, about the American Jewish anxiety regarding who gets to speak and who doesn’t, about the way liberalism has a hard time thinking outside of itself, especially in regards to progressive radicalism, and about how easy it is for us baby boomers to be only one step away from standing outside on our porch in a bathrobe with a broom screaming at the neighborhood kids to “get off my lawn.”


Shaul Magid, Jewish Thought and Culture Editor of Tikkun magazine, is the Jay and Jeanie Schottenstein professor of Jewish Studies at Indiana University/Bloomington, a Kogod Senior Research Fellow at The Shalom Hartman Institute of North America, and rabbi of the Fire Island Synagogue. He is presently the NEH Senior Research Fellow at The Center for Jewish History in Manhattan. His latest book is Hasidism Incarnate: Hasidism, Christianity, and the Making of Modern Judaism with Stanford University press, 2015. 

The Strategy Of Tory Universal Credit

Finnian O Domhnaill is scathing of the UK's Tory government.


Divide and conquer is alive and well for the Tories tactics and this time they are using apathy instead of conflict to roll in their power and policies.

Does anyone in Derry give a dam about those affected by universal credit in Norwich? What about those who will be effected in Slough or Hull? Do you think people in Dundee or the Outer Hebrides will care about a fella's dole being cut for six weeks in Hackney?

Its hardly surprising that the answer would most likely be no. Those living in Ballymena or Lisburn have things to do and people to see. They don't have time to think about those on the other side of the union. However, when a government is introducing policies that will effect those in Belfast or Liverpool, Derry or Bolton, Isn't it time to join together in mutual agreement and protest together as one unit?

The Tory party know full well the implications of what universal credit means to the people of the U.K.

They understand that people are fuming over the plan to lump 6 benefits into one and hand it to the poor, disabled and low income families on a monthly basis. On top of this, people will have to wait up to six weeks until they are paid.

The main issue that the Tories are aware of is that they know that they could not introduce it to the whole of the U.K at one go. Instead, universal credit will be rolled out in different regions of the U.K. In turn, you will not have a mass nation wide up roar opposing it.

Its better to implement it in places like Newcastle first so people in London are unaffected. Its better to bring it in to Belfast while people in Coventry will simple be unaware of it going on.

It is a very clever ploy the Conservative government have done to chop up the voices of the working class and most vulnerable people in society. It is easier to ignore the faint voices of protesters from time to time, a few in Manchester one week, another few in Sheffield the other.

These weekly or monthly voices that will inevitably fall on deaf ears are exactly what the Tories have planned out to do. Their strategy has worked and is still working. Unless their is a U.K wide protest against the removal of the inhumane introduction of universal credit, unless all working class people unite in this protest and demand it to be removed, then nothing will change and it will be the working class and most vulnerable who will continue to suffer under the Tory regime.

So why don’t you, that sits on the sidelines and watches your opportunities flutter away, get involved? Why don’t you, that cries ‘’injustice!!’’ but goes home and puts up with it anyway, get out there out there and protest and join in the movement? You, that is enough, you, that does have a voice and a say in your future. you, that can make a change. You, me, us, together and collectively can actually make a change and bring a fairer society.


Finnian O Domhnaill is a political writer from Donegal, currently living in Derry. He is the creator of the political page No Bones About It.

Two Meetings

The Uri Avnery Column reflects on Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin.
During The last few days, I met with two old friends: Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin.

Well, the term "friends" may not quite be appropriate. Certainly, Arafat called me "my friend" in a recorded message for my 70th birthday, but Rabin called nobody "friend". That was not his character.

I am glad that I knew both from close up. Without them, my life would have been poorer.

I Don't think I ever met two more different people than these two.

Arafat was a warm person. An emotional person. His embraces and kisses were ceremonial, but they also expressed real sentiment. I brought many Israelis to meetings with him, and they all recounted that after ten minutes in his company they felt as if they had known him for years.

Rabin was the exact opposite. Like me, he abhorred physical contact. He was remote. He did not exhibit feelings. Only on close acquaintance did he reveal himself as having quite strong feelings indeed.

But these two so different persons had one thing in common. Both were fighters throughout their lives. Rabin gave up academic studies in order to join the illegal Palmach ("shock troops") during the time of British rule. Arafat gave up a career as an engineer in Kuwait in order to set up the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization). Rabin was six years older.

Both devoted the major part of their adult life to fighting for their peoples – and against each other. Both were not gentle in their wars. Rabin once ordered soldiers to "break their (the Palestinians') arms and legs!" Arafat ordered many cruel actions.

After a long life of war, both turned towards the way of peace. That was much more dangerous. Rabin was murdered by a Jewish fanatic. Arafat was murdered (as I believe) in a more sophisticated way by the agents of Ariel Sharon.

I Was privileged to hear from both how and why they made their fateful turn towards peace.

Arafat's explanation was simpler. It went more or less like this (in my words):

I always believed that the Arab armies would in the end vanquish Israel on the battlefield, and that the Palestinians must only give the push. True, I was the commander-in-chief of the Palestinian forces, but I knew that the Palestinians by themselves could not succeed in defeating Israel.

Then came the October 1973 war (called the "Yom Kippur War" in Hebrew). The two strongest Arab armies attacked Israel. They achieved total surprise and on the first day obtained imposing results. The Egyptians overran the Israel Bar-Lev line, and the Syrians approached the Sea of Galilee.

And lo and behold, in spite of these initial successes, the Arabs were defeated in the war. When a cease-fire was imposed, the Israeli army was close to Damascus and their way to Cairo was open.

From that I drew the conclusion that there was no way to overcome Israel on the battlefield. Therefore I decided to attain the Palestinian aims by peaceful means.

So Arafat entered the path which began when his emissary, Sa'id Hamami, started secret talks with me in London, the path that eventually led to Oslo.

The Path of Rabin towards peace was more convoluted. He explained it to me at length one Shabbat afternoon at his home after the Washington handshake (to which he did not invite me, unlike Begin, who invited me to a dinner with Sadat in Egypt. Rabin was Rabin.)

Here is Rabin’s story (in my words): After the Six-Day War, I believed, like almost everybody else, in the so-called "Jordanian Option". Nobody believed that we could hold on to the territory we had conquered, and we thought that King Hussein would make peace with us if we returned all the territories, except East Jerusalem. After all, the king's capital was Amman, so what did he need Jerusalem for?

That was a mistake. One day the king declared that he no longer had any connection with the West Bank. We were left without a partner. Somebody invented an artificial partner, the "Village Leagues". Within a short time it became clear that this was nonsense.

I took the initiative and invited all the local leaders in the West Bank, one after the other. All of them expressed their readiness for peace with us, but in the end they concluded: our address is Yasser Arafat.

Then came the Madrid conference. The Israelis agreed to a joint Jordanian-Palestinian delegation, not including Faisal Husseini, who was a resident of East Jerusalem. The moment the deliberation reached the Palestinian issue, the Jordanian members stood up and said: "Sorry, this does not concern us." The Israelis were left in the room alone with the Palestinians.

Husseini sat in the adjoining room, and whenever the discussion reached a sticking point, the Palestinians said "now we must consult with Faisal". This soon became ridiculous, so Faisal was invited into the room.

At the end of every day of discussion the Palestinians said "Now we must phone Tunis to get instructions from Arafat." This situation looked ridiculous to me. When I returned to power, I decided that if this is the situation, let's talk directly with Arafat. That was the background of Oslo.

I Wish I could honestly say that I influenced Rabin in the long conversations we had, nearly all of which had one sole subject: peace with the Palestinians. But I am not sure that this is so. It was almost impossible to influence Rabin. He analyzed facts and drew conclusions. Both of them, Rabin and Arafat, the soldier and the engineer, were logical thinkers. They analyzed facts and drew conclusions.

My conversations with Arafat started in Beirut, when I entered the beleaguered city. The meeting attracted attention throughout the world. It happened after my long secret discussions with his emissaries, Sa'id Hamami and Issam Sartawi (who were both murdered by the agents of Abu Nidal, the leader of an extreme Palestinian group). I reported to Rabin about these conversations, after Arafat encouraged me to do so.

After the evacuation of the PLO from Beirut, I visited Arafat many times in Tunis and other places. When Arafat came back to Palestine, after Oslo, we met first in Gaza then in the Mukata'a (a former British police building) in Ramallah. Twice, when it seemed to us that his life was in immediate danger, my friends and I went to live there as a "human shield". Sharon later admitted that our presence there had deterred him from killing Arafat then and there.

My conversations with Rabin took place in his Balfour Street office, mostly on my initiative. In between we met at various parties, generally near the bar. Since he had attended the British academy for senior officers, Rabin was addicted to whisky (and only whisky). Several times we met at the place of my friend, the sculptress Ilana Goor, who arranged parties for the secret purpose of getting us two (and sometimes Ariel Sharon) to meet. After midnight, when all the other guests had gone home, Rabin – completely sober after innumerable glasses of whisky – gave me detailed lectures.

All these conversations were about the Palestinian problem (except one, when he chastised me for publishing damning exposures about his party members in my magazine.)

Some Days ago I went to visit Arafat's tomb in Ramallah. Nobody stopped me on my way there, and to my surprise, nobody stopped me on my way back. It's not that I was recognized and waved through – it was just that the roadblocks were not manned.

The last time I had visited the place was at his funeral. Now the grave is a tasteful small building with two ceremonial guards. Behind it is Arafat's office, and the rooms where he used to meet the Israeli delegations which I brought to him, and even his small, spartan sleeping quarters. I paid my respects.

My meeting with Rabin was a few days later, at the annual mass event on the anniversary of his murder, at the same square which now bears his name.

It was the most curious event I ever took part in. This year it was not called by the Labor party, whose new leader wants to keep as much distance from peace as possible. By default, two groups – previously unknown to me – took over. One consists of former army officers, one is of obscure origin.

Their arrangements were bizarre. They decreed that the slogans would not touch the subject of peace, but only Rabin's military and party career. Within the peace camp, a violent discussion broke out – to attend or not?

I strongly advised attending. To my mind, the slogans of the initiators were immaterial – important was only the number of those coming to pay respect to the man and his heritage. Rabin and peace with the Palestinians are inseparably linked.

In the end, nearly a hundred thousand people attended, shouting peace slogans and completely ignoring the directions of the organizers. When a leader of the West Bank settlers (who was invited!) made a speech, the whistling of the crowd was deafening. I must admit, to my shame, that I whistled with the rest.

To my own surprise, it turned out that I am a pretty good whistler.

Uri Avnery is a veteran Israeli peace activist. He writes @ Gush Shalom

Dominion Status

Dominion status is the only workable option for Sinn Fein to achieve some form of Irish unity, according to controversial commentator, Dr John Coulter, in his latest Fearless Flying Column today.
Sinn Fein has been able to wrong-foot the DUP for much of this year, beginning with bringing down the Stormont institutions in January, but the DUP has hit back with the Brexit Bounce.

While this year’s annual Sinn Fein conference had a tribute to the late Martin McGuinness with a shout of ‘Up The Rebels!’, the DUP has used its Commons veto and close ties to the Conservative Party to deliver a political body blow to the Republic with a ‘Starve The Rebels!’ financial tactic on Brexit.

With British PM Theresa May having to substantially back-track on any deal over the border after consulting with the DUP, the latter has now created a scenario whereby a hard border will – not maybe or could – condemn the republic’s economy to the status of a third-rate African state.

So what should be Sinn Fein’s reaction to the DUP master stroke so far as Unionism is concerned? Firstly, Sinn Fein needs to keep quiet politically and let the rival Southern parties – Fine Gael and Fianna Fail – wallow deeper into the political quagmire which the DUP has dumped the republic into.
Fine Gael Taoiseach Leo Varadkar will be wheeling out every political big gun imaginable to try and persuade the DUP to adopt some form of concession which will allow a deal on the border to proceed.
The hard border lobby in Unionism is cock-a-hoop at Dublin’s dilemma and judging by the daily rants coming from the corridors of Leinster House, the DUP has backed the republic into an economic corner – just when the Celtic Tiger was beginning to recover from its latest financial banana skin slip.
The obvious tactic for Sinn Fein would be to hold yet another special meeting and change the rules on taking seats at the House of Commons. Even the dogs in the street know the Tories are about to become totally engulfed in a civil war over Brexit, and if there’s another General Election soon, it will be Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn who will be in the driving seat.

However, like Theresa May, Corbyn may need to form a coalition with someone to ensure he’s got the keys to 10 Downing Street. He cannot rely on a massive Labour revival in Scotland given that the Tories seem to be fast emerging as the main political opposition to the SNP.

Okay, so the SNP suffered more losses than expected in this year’s Westminster poll, but if Scottish nationalists can use the Brexit drum to bash out a message of a second independence referendum then there’s the chance further losses to the Tories or Labour could be severely curtailed.

It would be a supreme irony for Corbyn if all he needed to become Prime Minister was the seven Sinn Fein MPs, so he may be asking – does Sinn Fein have a price, or is there a form of words which could be conceived which would allow Sinn Fein MPs to take their seats in the Commons and give Labour those vital votes? After all, look at the impact which devout republican Bernadette Devlin had when she took her Commons seat in the late Sixties.

But if Sinn Fein sticks to its dogmatic stance of taking Commons funding, but not seats, it’s MPs would be as useful to Corbyn in a tight Parliamentary vote as a condom in a maternity ward.

So apart from staying silent and watching Leo and his pals squirm at the hands of the DUP, what should be Sinn Fein’s Plan B? The DUP does not want a soft border or special status as that smacks too much of a united Ireland under another name.

Besides, if special status is granted to Northern Ireland simply because it voted ‘remain’ during the referendum, then the Scots will go buck mad demanding similar concessions because Scotland was another ‘remain’ region; not to mention specific constituencies in England or Wales which had a ‘remain’ majority.

Likewise, granting special status to Northern Ireland could actually be another stumbling block to getting the Stormont Executive back in business.

Realistically, Sinn Fein must return to its founding roots of 1905 when it was a separatist movement under Arthur Griffith’s influence – not a full-blown, hardline republican movement. Sinn Fein initially set out to achieve dominion status.

The success of the 1998 peace deal was the use of political ambiguity in the language and terminology among the participants. May’s text over Brexit hit the rocks because it was too descriptive, reaching the DUP the EU’s head on a platter.

Dominion status is a term which Sinn Fein can spin to its own advantage. The republican movement just needs to rebrand unity as some form of dominion status similar to Canada, Australia or New Zealand, where a lot of Ulster Scots families have settled.

After all, at one time one of the political movements on the go in Northern Ireland was the British Ulster Dominion Party, which pushed the notion of dominion status for Northern Ireland. Likewise, Sinn Fein should not forget the various loyalist organisations which pushed the concept of an independent Ulster.

These included Ulster Vanguard, the UDA, the Ulster Movement for Self-Determination, and the Ulster Independence Committee.

The PUL community will not swallow anything which smacks of a united Ireland, united island, or unity of any kind. But Unionists could be persuaded into some form of dominion status for Ireland north and south. Looks like Sinn Fein spin doctors have their work cut out for them in the coming weeks, so cancel Christmas, New Year and even Easter!


John Coulter is a unionist political commentator and former Blanket columnist. 

Follow John Coulter on Twitter  @JohnAHCoulter

Old Drogheda Society Journal 2017

Anthony McIntyre with the editorial for this years edition of the Journal of the Old Drogheda Society.
Again, very late in the year, we are pleased to launch the 2017 edition of the Journal of the Old Drogheda Society. What is on offer in the pages that follow should hopefully provide our readers with the same standard of intellectual stimulation they have become accustomed to.

Equally important, it might also act as a catalyst for them to try their own hand at addressing or even redressing the historical record. There are many Droghedians who approach the Old Drogheda Society relaying snippets of information and knowledge about past events. While not lost in the telling most of it is certainly lost after the telling because while paper will not refuse ink it needs ink applied to it in the first place, which it may in turn absorb. Merely conveying the knowledge verbally to someone else is not a good means of depositing information. To truncate a long-standing phrase: the pen is mightier than the word.

If there is to be a genuine process of information retrieval that can then be inserted into the historical record the Journal of the Old Drogheda Society requires more contributions from more writers. No one knows they can write until they try. There is always assistance on hand. Writers’ block or lack of confidence should be no barrier to getting it out there.

We would also appeal to our contributors to submit material to the JODS as early in the year as possible. This year the Journal has basically an editor and a lay out specialist. A small team with a big work load. A flood of material late in the year, while welcome, nevertheless creates pressures of it own. Ideally, we prefer for all articles for the year’s journal to be submitted by May at the latest. This will allow ample time for the editing process to kick in, leading to an October publication.

For now, indulge in the nuggets and gems this year’s journal provides. From some old stalwarts and new contributors alike, collectively they have enabled us to put together a notable edition.

Enjoy.


Anthony McIntyre is editor of the Journal of the Old Drogheda Society.

Anthony McIntyre blogs @ The Pensive Quill.

Follow Anthony McIntyre on Twitter @AnthonyMcIntyre      

Islam Versus Nazism

From Atheist Republic Scott Jacobsen interviews Armin Navabi, Founder of Atheist Republic.



I recently spoke with Armin Navabi, a former Muslim from Iran and the founder of Atheist Republic, an organization with millions of followers worldwide and best-selling author of Why There Is No God: Simple Responses to 20 Common Arguments for the Existence of God. We talk about his opinion on the topic Islam versus Nazism, the reason why both can’t be compared, and his message to Muslims.

Scott: Why can’t people compare Islam and Nazism, according to them, and why do you think they’re wrong?

Armin: Their argument is at a time when you have the rise of the alt-right in the West, when people are discriminating against Muslims, when people who look like Muslims are being targeted and harassed in the streets. Comparing Islam to Nazism is not helpful and fueling hate. It’s helping more people demonize Muslims.

Scott: In my opinion, empowering the wrong people is a bad idea, such as the ethnic nationalists and the people that are neo-fascists. Islam is not people but a set of ideas -- or more precisely a set of ideas plus suggested practices in which people practice in certain degrees and believed in certain degrees. What I think is you can make a comparison if you’re talking about ideas plus suggested practices in a similar way National Socialism or Nazism does have a set of ideas and likely suggested practices.

I suspect that the inclination behind a lot of people are saying is looking at not only a set of ideas as neutral but a set of ideas as bad and then making comparison as both ideas are bad. You can’t compare two ideas that are bad.

When people want to protect those who believe Islam but not those who believe in Nazism, they don’t want to make a comparison in what they want to protect and in what they consider a bad set of ideas, ordinary Muslims and Nazis respectively. However, if you do look at the ideologies and suggested practices, you can make comparisons.

The question that follows from that comparison is, “What is the judgment? What is the ultimate value of either particular claims and the ideologies at large”?

For Armin, the judgment is already there when you compare Islam and Nazism because when you compare two things, you are suggesting that they are the same.

Armin: My response to that is something that would make them hate me more, which is [that] I don’t think Islam is as bad as Nazism. I think Islam is worse than Nazism. They think, “Okay great job, Armin, you just gave the best narrative to the alt-right and white supremacists. You just said that Muslims are worse than Nazis”. I never mentioned Muslims, never mentioned Nazis. I said Islam. You should know that as this is coming from people who criticize Islam and they say we’re criticizing Islam, not Muslims. And when I say Islam is worse than Nazism, they’re suggesting I’m demonizing Muslims, which I’m not. They will say "you’re simplifying it". To that I respond, You’re only listening to my conclusion instead of my entire argument.

Scott: How could you say Islam is worse than Nazism?

Armin: First of all they tell me "you can’t even compare them since they’re apples and oranges. They’re not in the same category." To that I respond, they’re both ideologies. When I compare Christianity with Islam, nobody says anything. When I compare Communism with Nazism, nobody says anything. But when I compare Islam with Nazism, everybody loses their mind.

To be fair, I think most Nazis are way worse than most Muslims. Most Muslims are great people. And this is the problem with Islam. The problem with Islam is that it does better job taking advantage of good people to sell its evil. Nazism doesn’t have the sugarcoating required for you to take advantage of enough good people for it to spread enough.

Religions like Islam and Christianity are destructive, but they also come with these sweet messages like “Love thy neighbor”, “Take care of the poor”, “Be kind to your parents”, “Take care of the elderly”. Stuff that people already did and would have done without religion.

In fact, these simplistic morality messages within these religions were already discussed in way more advanced and nuanced way by ancient philosophers thousands of years ago before the Bible and the Quran.

So it wasn’t their invention and people would have come to this conclusion because people in general are nice. On average, people are more sympathetic to their other fellow human beings. But the Bible and Quran take the credit for this. And by taking credit for it they have an easier job to spread.

If you have an ideology talking about how you are the superior race and how Jews are evil and how everybody else is disgusting, if that’s your main message, it’s really hard for you to sell this and spread it because you have to rely on certain kind of people to spread this.

For example:

If I have a poison pill that tastes like shit and kills you right away, it’s really hard to spread this poison. But if I have a poison pill that is sugar coated and doesn’t kill you right away, then it’s easier for me to start selling this poison and spread it far and wide.

I think that’s the genius of Christianity and Islam. It’s not genius by design; it’s genius because these are memes that survive, just like we have the natural selection for genes. It’s the ideologies that can survive longer spread farther and infect more people.

Scott: How can you say that Islam is even close to what Nazis did?

Armin: Granted, Nazism is way more harmful per year in power. By harmful I mean has more victims. Per year in power, Nazism is way more harmful. But, Nazism cannot survive for long in power. It was in power as a government only in less than one generation. It’s not fully defeated but how many Nazi regimes do we have right now? Zero. How many Islamic regimes do we have right now? More than zero. Islamic regimes last longer. They had victims for the past 1400 years and still have victims today.

People tell me, “How can you say this right after what happened in Charlottesville? You have to adjust what you’re saying and take the political climate into consideration and adjust accordingly for you not to fuel hate.”

And I tell these people, “You’re being very selfish because you’re only looking at the political climate around where you live.”

That woman dying in Charlottesville was an absolute tragedy, but you have to understand while that one person died in the hands of Nazis, there are hundreds of people dying in Yemen because of the religiously-fueled Sunni-Shia-divided Yemen.

I hate Islam because I care about its victims which are mostly Muslims. Being anti-Islam is being pro-Muslim because the main victims of Islam are Muslims. This is not anti-Muslim hate. In fact, you cannot be anything but anti-Islam if you care about Muslims.

If you don’t stand against Islam you’re abandoning Muslim women, Muslim homosexuals, Shia Muslims under Suni regimes, Sunni Muslims under Shia regimes, Baha'i Muslims, Sufi Muslims, Ismaili Muslims etc. Not enough people talk about Yemen because it doesn’t serve the Muslims narrative because these are Muslims killing Muslims. It doesn’t serve U.S. narrative because U.S. gets a shitload of money selling weapons. This is a war crime.

You think we’re being islamophobic? Saudi Arabia is bombing mosques in Yemen. How many people are dying by the hands of Nazis today? They ask me, "what’s the point of comparing Islam to Nazism?" The point is to show people’s priorities. Because people don’t care about their fellow human beings. People care about just what’s happening in their own backyard.

Consider this: which one is worse? The atomic bomb or the Kalashnikov?

Scott: Probably Kalashnikov in the hands of people over a long time.

Armin: Number of people who died by the Kalashnikov is way more than the atomic bomb.

People are more afraid of plane crashes than car accidents. Even though car accidents have way more victims. It's the same with Nazism and Islam. Nazim, when it came to power, managed to destroy many lives in a short amount of time. But If you look at the larger impact of Islam, it should scare us more.

The leftists accuse us of being Islamophobic and we’re trying to tell them that no, we are criticizing ideas not people. My suggestion is forget the leftists, because what’s the point of criticizing Islam? A lot of people who criticizes Islam, they’re trying to warn the West. But Islam is coming and you can’t stop it. Unless you actually talk to Muslims. And more importantly, what you're afraid might one day happen to your Western country, is already a reality for many Islamic countries. We need to stop playing defense. We need to reach out to Muslims in Islamic countries.

The best way to fight Islam is to reach out to Muslims. And the best way to reach out to Muslims is to befriend Muslims. Trying to convince Westerners and non-Muslim Westerners that are afraid, that’s not going to stop anything because this is an ideology and it will continue spreading unless you talk to the people that believe it.

In fact, the more people see Muslims themselves as the threat, the more people will victimize Muslims. The more you victimize Muslims, the more it helps Islam to grow. Religion feeds on being the victim. The only way to stop Islam is try to reach out to people. You can’t stop it by force. You have to actually try to convince people out of it. That’s the only way you can fight Islam.

The people we need to warm [about] Islam are Muslims. To be able to talk to Muslims [about] how bad Islam [is], we have to try to convince them that us being against Islam is not us being against Muslims. That’s a very hard thing to do but not as hard as most people think.

The reason why it’s very difficult is because most Muslims see Islam as part of their identity. But I think Muslims are much more than just Muslims just like an atheist is way more than just an atheist and a Christian is way more than just a Christian.

As an atheist, I’m a husband, I’m a humanist, feminist, Game of Thrones fan. I think every Muslim is more than just a Muslim. But we have to acknowledge that many Muslims see Islam as a major part of their identity. Our attack on Islam is not intended as a personal attack. Even when they see it a personal attack. We should invite them to take our intentions into consideration when they’re judging us. This is very important for Muslims because we are all looking for allies.

I tell Muslims that they might find things we’re saying offensive. But it’s better to be offended than to be discriminated against. We will challenge your ideas, but we will stand with you against those who challenge your rights. We will fight your ideas but we will defend your rights.

So you have to see us as allies because you need allies. We need you as our allies because the bigots are not just your enemies, they're our enemies as well.

You also have to see that the left is not helping you. Not all of them but many people in the left that are saying “Don’t say these things”, “these are offensive”, "you’re attacking Muslims." You must understand that they are the ones being bigots because they’re suggesting that you can’t take criticism. That you are like children who need protection from these Westerners. You can’t handle criticism of your ideas.

They don’t react to us when we criticize Christianity, only Islam. So you have to see that it’s a kind of bigotry because they’re suggesting that maybe Christians are mature enough for us to disagree with them. You must fight that.

What I’m waiting for is the day that some Muslims show the world that they are tolerant, that they’re not sensitive little "snowflakes" by opening their mosque to ex-Muslims speakers. Imagine if your mosque was the first mosque that invites an ex-Muslim speaker. Be that first mosque. Show the world that you can handle criticism.

Contact Armin

My main point is we need to reach out to Muslims instead of the left. If we try to challenge Islam, Muslims should be our target.

It might feel like a personal attack but it’s not our intention.

I usually ask Muslims if they disagree with Christianity and the answer is always “yes”. Are you a Christianophobe or anti-Christian? Do you hate Christians? And they usually say “no”.

That’s just a very simple example to show why disagreeing on an ideology is not the same as hating them because they do it themselves. Every Muslim disagrees with Christianity but most Muslims won’t say they hate Christians or they’re anti-Christian.

Sometimes I hear some Muslims say it’s okay to criticize Islam but just don’t ridicule it. First of all, we must be able to ridicule what we want but whether that’s productive or not, I would tell you that I know a lot of Muslims that came to our page because they found something offensive and they stayed on our page, the Atheist Republic page, long enough for them to eventually doubt their beliefs. It was the offensive things that attracted them until they eventually left Islam.

Second, when we ridicule Islam, we’re not coming to a mosque and ridiculing Islam, we’re not going to a Muslim page and ridiculing Islam, we’re not going into your living room and telling you that your god is fake.

We are doing this on atheist pages, atheist websites, atheist twitter accounts. So if you’re seeing these contents you don’t like, you either don’t know how to block people that you don’t like or you’re actively looking for it. If it’s the first one, I suggest a search on YouTube on how to block a page. It’s either one of those things or if you’re curious, then you can’t tell us to stop because you’re the one on our platform.

If I were to defend mocking Islam when I’m talking to a Muslim, I tell them this:

“When I was a Muslim we used to make fun of other religions. Like I ask a Muslim, “Don’t you find it ridiculous that god could have a son?”

Every religion makes fun of other religions. If it’s okay for Muslims to make fun, then it’s okay for atheists to make fun of Islam.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time, Armin.





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“We Will Never Enter A Coalition With The Right.”

Writing during the Sin Fein ard fheis, Matt Treacy muses on the party's rightward trajectory.There must be a lot of humble pie being eaten by the Sinn Féin “left” this morning. Having stoutly denied that they would ever support being in government with one of the “right wing” parties – obviously the DUP are the Irish equivalent of Syriza – last night they voted to do just that.

Not only did some of their TDs, councillors and leading activists claim not so long ago that this would never happen, but some of them said they would resign should such a decision be made. Of course they won’t. Sheep don’t turn on the sheepdogs.

With Fianna Fáil having already ruled out a coalition, although all these things will ultimately come down to numbers after the seats are counted in, in effect Sinn Féin are saying that would enter a coalition with Fine Gael. That would indeed be the “end of Civil War politics.” It will be interesting to see what Varadkar’s reaction is.

Later today they will vote to deny party members, and one in particular, to be allowed a free vote on the amendment to repeal the 8th amendment. There is also a motion from Cork that allegedly deals with the ongoing issue of internal intimidation. Ostensibly the motion might appear to address the issue but in reality it will be used to attack those who have been expelled, resigned or at in purdah.

In his speech tonight Gerry Adams will announce his retirement at some stage prior to the next general election in the south. Some people believe he has stayed so long because of some Robert Mugabe desire to cling to power. I would imagine that it has more to do with his realisation that when he is gone, that Sinn Féin will lose even more of its historic status. None of his likely successors will hold the thing together. And they won’t be running the show anyway.




Matt Treacy’s book on the 2013 All Ireland championship is available on Amazon.

Matt Treacy’s book A Tunnel to the Moon: The End of the Irish Republican Army is also available @ Amazon. 
Matt Treacy blogs @ Brocaire Books. 
Follow Matt Treacy on Twitter @MattTreacy2