Quiet on the anti-interventionist front

[Originally posted at NOW]

Is it just me, or have America’s latest killings of jihadists in Iraq generated less resentment – not to say rage – than similar efforts typically did in the previous decade?

A glance at the reaction – or, rather, lack thereof – from anti-interventionist circles over the past few days suggests that is indeed the case. Barring the sheer crackpottery of such outfits as Britain’s Stop The War, which said it was “vital that we oppose” the operation that rescued over 20,000 Iraqis from certain death at ISIS’ hands (and which, when it’s Russia rather than America doing the invading, turns out to be remarkably flexible on the principle), there simply has not been much noise made about it. Even so cacophonous a demagogue as George Galloway hasn’t been able to denounce the strikes per se, grumbling instead (on Russian state TV) that they’ll be ineffective because the Americans “sat on their hands” the whole time ISIS was growing – a criticism that, he apparently doesn’t see, works at the expense of the anti-interventionist position.

Why, then, this quiet? A generous reading might point to the highly idiosyncratic circumstances of the Mount Sinjar case – easily identifiable militant locations, clearly segregated from a purely civilian populace facing unambiguous and imminent genocide. It’s a moral philosopher’s hypothetical example brought to life – if ‘Responsibility to Protect’ doesn’t apply here, it doesn’t apply anywhere.

Yet there is likely a second reason, plainly (if inadvertently) detectable in Galloway, which is that many anti-interventionists have for three years now energetically premised their case precisely on their enmity toward ISIS and its predecessors, who (having been the “resistance” in Iraq back in the 2000s) then became the Zionist-imperialist traitors against the “fortress of Arab dignity” that is the Assad regime. That’s why neither Lebanon’s Hezbollah nor Tehran have made any public condemnations of the operations – call someone a “takfiri” or “terrorist” once, and it’s not easy to complain when someone starts killing them. How embarrassing it must be for the “anti-imperialists” to suddenly find Empire fighting on their side.

Galloway's attack on Nawaz plumbs new depths of hypocrisy

[Originally posted at NOW]

I have twice had the honor and pleasure of interacting with Maajid Nawaz; first when he was kind enough to sign my copy of his remarkable memoir, Radical, at the 2012 Edinburgh Book Festival; and second when I interviewed him by phone shortly afterward in NOW’s own pages. On both occasions the winsome charisma and quick intelligence for which he’s renowned were in full evidence.

We didn’t agree on everything – he is a believing Muslim who opposed any kind of intervention in Syria – but these facts, if anything, only make it more outrageous that he should have become the target this week of a takfir campaign launched by Islamist fascists after his tweeting of a cartoon along with the words: “This [...] is not offensive & I’m sure God is greater than to feel threatened by it الله أكبر منه.” The former Hizb ut-Tahrir zealot turned counter-Islamist democracy activist, who recently succeeded in convincing the head of the anti-Muslim ‘English Defence League’ skinhead mob to step down, has now received “credible” death threats, and has felt compelled to issue a statement of “regret.”

Loathsome as this assault is, it’s perhaps only to be expected from the Islamists, who are at least open about their utter rejection of “godless” liberalism and “man-made” democracy. In a sense, their behavior here is fitting, even reassuring (to discover anew that one has made an enemy of the theocratic far-right is, or ought to be, a source of satisfaction). Much less stomachable, however, was the solidarity offered to the scrofulous thugs by MP George Galloway, who took it upon himself to tweet:

“No Muslim will ever vote for the Liberal Democrats anywhere ever unless they ditch the provocateur Majid [sic] Nawaz, cuckold of the EDL.”

It’s just astounding what the man gets away with. Bad enough that Galloway – who is actually a sectarian Roman Catholic, who argues against Scottish independence because the resulting peninsula would contain too many Protestants – supposes himself eligible to speak on behalf of “Muslims.” Far worse that, in so doing, he equates all “Muslims” with the crackpot fringe minority represented by Nawaz’ would-be-murderers (precisely the sort of vile smear that was, incidentally, the stock-in-trade of the EDL).

Yet it’s his rancid hypocrisy that most churns the gut. Galloway has spent the best part of the last three years defending Bashar al-Assad, whose merciless regime has slaughtered tens of thousands of Muslim civilians, as an enlightened and secularist bastion against the “takfiri fanatics” and “beasts” of the Syrian opposition. America, he now tells us, is “in bed with al-Qaeda.” But whenever Galloway is back home, it’s precisely the brethren of those very same takfiris and fanatics who are his dearest comrades. Indeed, he’s even dabbled in the takfir business himself, slandering his Muslim rival in a recent by-election as a hopeless alcoholic, and thundering thuggishly that “God KNOWS who is a Muslim. And he KNOWS who is not […] I, George Galloway, do not drink alcohol and never have. Ask yourself if the other candidate in this election can say that truthfully.”

Then again, there’s a warped sort of consistency here (and not just because, before Galloway started disliking al-Qaeda, he was lauding them as a “resistance” force in Iraq). Much like America’s televangelist millionaires, one never quite knows whether ‘Gorgeous George’ sincerely believes the things he says, or if he’s just doing too well for himself to stop now. There’s reason to think it’s the latter; in other words that he’s found a highly lucrative niche as the go-to propagandist for whichever mass-murderer is the international community’s bogeyman-of-the-day.

For example, a 2007 British parliamentary inquiry found “strong circumstantial evidence” that Galloway received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Saddam Hussein regime; money siphoned out of the UN Oil-for-Food Programme that was, incidentally, supposed to buy relief for Iraqi civilians rendered destitute by years of international sanctions.

And since becoming an MP again in 2012, Galloway has been forced to disclose some other fascinating sources of income, including at least $119,000 a year for his twice-monthly show on the staunchly pro-Assad al-Mayadeen TV station here in Beirut, as well as “several £20,000 ($33,000) payments for presenting programmes on Press TV,” the Iranian state channel, from which platform he memorably declared last year’s chemical weapons attack outside Damascus to have been the work of al-Qaeda in cahoots with Israel (and then lied about it in parliament). No doubt impressed with what they saw, and realizing the potential value of his services, the Putin regime has since given him a weekly slot on their RT channel, in return for as-yet-untold sums.

But at the same time, there’s also reason to believe that what he says comes largely from genuine conviction. He certainly goes above and beyond the call of duty of a mere mercenary. His record on LGBT rights, for instance, is notoriously shady – he both denies that Iran executes gays and says the ones it does execute are either rapists or pedophiles. Rape itself, as it happens, is something he’s willing to pardon as long as the right people are doing it – commenting on the Julian Assange allegations, Galloway shrugged that “not everybody needs to be asked prior to each insertion.” And his support for censorship has been expressed repeatedly and unambiguously: “Of course in this country there’s freedom of speech, but it cannot be an unlimited freedom of speech and other freedoms must trump it, including the freedom not to be terrorized in your own home, not to have your prophet insulted, your religion insulted.”

Perhaps these too are purely cynical statements, calibrated solely to win votes and fatten pockets. But I’m tempted to think Galloway is also one of those authoritarians still lurking on the ostensible left for whom the very idea of liberal democracy is a bourgeois abomination. There’s far more “revolutionary” excitement, after all, in the Castros and Chavezes and Saddams of the world, whose despotism, no matter how bloody, can always be excused for the good of the cause (even when “the cause” is nothing more than petty dynastic perpetuation). Ultimately, for Galloway no less than the Islamists, Nawaz’ original sin was committed the moment he put down the black-and-white flag of the caliphate, and turned his back on totalitarianism tout court. It’s incumbent on all who wish to live neither in Stalinist nor Salafist serfdom to offer their full support to Nawaz, and their full contempt to his adversaries.

A regime so "leftist", it hosts the most right-wing man in Britain

[Originally posted at NOW]

Within hours of the savage butchery of a British soldier by a British citizen in Woolwich, East London, three weeks ago today, a hundred or so portly football enthusiasts congregated outside a local pub, costumed in balaclavas and England flags, to bellow semi-coherently about the demerits of “the Muslim scum” as well as to attack the very police force that had apprehended and arrested the soldier’s loathsome murderers.

The leader of these fine exemplars of contemporary British culture, who goes by the pseudonym Tommy Robinson, is habitually denounced for his craven, limp-wristed moderation by Nicholas Griffin, the British National Party leader, Holocaust denier, and Member of the European Parliament who has been spending quality time this week in Damascus as the guest of the Bashar al-Assad regime. Granted, says Griffin, Robinson may be perfectly sound on the question of the evil (or should that be ‘The Innocence’?) of Muslims. But he hopelessly fails to grasp the utter subservience of Downing Street to the machinations of global Jewry (euphemized by Griffin in public, though not in private, as “Zionism”).

Which is by no means all the man has in common with Hezbollah. Griffin’s is the instinctive bigotry of the parochial white reactionary, whose revulsion for foreigners is proportionate to the “alienness” of their appearance. Since Lebanese Shiites have shorter beards than Syrian Sunnis (and Assad doesn’t have one at all!), he’s cast his lot with the former, whom he said via Twitter were “doing [a] better job than the [London police] dealing with ‘British’ Jihadi cut-throats.” That Hezbollah fighters are themselves jihadists is evidently of scant concern – like the Israeli military establishment before him, Griffin has concluded that some ‘terrorists’ are more terrorist than others.

Surprised though some may have been to see the leader of Britain’s ultra-right shaking hands with the prime minister of a regime better known for befriending George Galloway, the contradiction only exists if you imagine Assad and his gargoyles were remotely “leftist” in the first place. From the first day of the uprising, Assad’s policy has been one of maximum violence, deliberately targeting the men, women and children of the Sunni majority sect. A seasoned hatemonger and thug like Griffin ought to feel right at home.

Let's be clear: They're not anti-imperialists

[Originally posted at NOW Lebanon]

Lebanese demonstrators on March 8, 2005, holding signs "thanking" Syria's Assad for occupying their country for 29 years (AP)

Twitter is abuzz today with recommendations of an intellectual “demolition” of what the author dubs “Assad’s useful idiots.” In a deeply-researched 4,000 word juggernaut, the Global Mail Middle East correspondent Jess Hill comprehensively details the manner in which Assad apologists from The Guardian’s Seumas Milne to the journalist John Pilger to the author Tariq Ali to British MP George Galloway are “willfully twisting the narrative on Syria to score points against the ‘imperialist West’” and thereby “excusing and providing intellectual cover for the Assad regime.”

It’s an excellent job, and one I thoroughly endorse, save for one slight but significant objection. Throughout the piece, Hill unironically labels these stooges “anti-imperialists” and even “leftists.” In a particularly regrettable lapse, she describes Lebanon’s Al-Akhbar as “the leftist Hezbollah-friendly newspaper.” Such misnomers sully the good names of these political traditions, which can and must be rescued from the villains who masquerade under them. Put simply, Assad, Hezbollah and their cheerleaders are not anti-imperialists but rival imperialists, whose contempt for liberalism places them not on the left, but the very-far-right.

An extreme example is Amal Saad-Ghorayeb, who calls herself both an “anti-imperialist” and a “Greater Syria nationalist” (an ideology, incidentally, that drew heavily on the fascism of 1930s Europe). Her ravings can often be found on Al-Akhbar, where she infamously once wrote that supporting Assad’s “struggle” against the opposition was the “litmus [test] of [...] commitment to the Palestinian cause.”

And where these “leftists” aren’t openly advocating ethno-nationalist expansionism, they’re making excuses for violent and totalitarian theocracy. As Michael Weiss drily noted to me after Max Blumenthal’s resignation from Al-Akhbar, “He was fine with writing for [it] when it was just pro-Hezbollah…”

It’s high time we started calling spades spades. An Islamist cannot also be a leftist, nor can a supporter of (say) the Syrian occupation of Lebanon be an anti-imperialist. Genuine leftists and anti-imperialists deserve better than being lumped in with such sinister company.

"Progressives", spare us

[Originally posted at NOW Lebanon]

What exactly is it about those who describe themselves as “progressives” that sends me into such snarls of revulsion?

It isn’t just the California campus accent I hear every time I read it – the kind that throws half a dozen question marks into every sentence (“My name is Karen? and I find it really offensive? when you’re insensitive about somebody’s voice like that?”).

Nor is it that I depart significantly from the typical “progressive” in politics itself. When MJ Rosenberg writes that, “For progressives like me […] there is no choice but to vote for Obama”, I don’t at all disagree with his conclusion.

No, what I think piques me most is the profound insult the word implies about my (and your) intelligence. “Excuse me,” I want to say, “but I’ll decide what’s ‘progressive’ by myself, thank you.”

After all, is there a political person on earth who doesn’t believe their stance or ideology offers humanity a better alternative? Hitler sincerely believed that ridding the world of Jews was doing the rest of us a great service. Lenin thought that establishing a totalitarian police state was a supremely virtuous act. American Christian fundamentalists, messianic Jewish settlers and Lebanon’s very own Islamists all believe that they alone hold the secrets to progess, or Progress.

In their own, milder way, the “progressives” are every bit as tribal as the violent fanatics. And they are equally blind to the ironies incurred at their own expense. George Galloway was undoubtedly correct when he described Israel’s Operation Cast Lead as a “crime” and “massacre” - words that would presumably outrage many a right-thinking “progressive” New York Times reader. And George W. Bush was also undoubtedly correct when he said in 2005 that the Syrian regime “[uses] murder as a tool of policy” - something that Max Blumenthal, “progressive” par excellence, couldn’t bring himself to write until 12,000 dead Syrians later.

“Progressivism”, then, need not always be the friend of progress. Such reflections, however, are unavailable to the morally certain “progressive”, who deals not in honest self-examination but in smug self-congratulation.

Palestinians and Assad: It's complicated

[Originally posted at NOW Lebanon]

Against the overwhelming condemnation directed by the international community at the Syrian regime for its bloody crackdown on domestic opponents, President Bashar al-Assad has always had one trump card with which to rally supporters to his side: his proclaimed devotion to Palestine. “Who, more than Syria, has offered to the Palestinian cause?” he asked in a speech in January. His allies in Lebanon also routinely reach for the same defense: “Can anyone say that the Syrian regime […] did not support the resistance in Palestine?” asked Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah in February. Even British MP George Galloway recently reiterated his admiration for the regime he describes as “the last castle of Arab dignity,” praising the government’s “[refusal] to cut their relationship with the Palestinian revolution and its resistance.”

Many Palestinians in Lebanon, however, appear to remember things a little differently. NOW traveled to Beirut’s southern suburbs and asked Palestinian refugees if they thought the Assad regime has been good for Palestinians and how they view events in Syria today. Several refused to talk – reluctant, perhaps, to add to the numberless difficulties of life in a camp. But among those who did, there was little consensus, with some defending the regime, most ambivalent toward it and some openly supporting the opposition.

Ibrahim, pharmacist: How could I compliment the Assads? When the Syrians entered Lebanon [in 1976], they massacred Palestinians. Historically, as Palestinians, we don’t like the Syrian system, and this is known. So I am with democracy in Syria and with changes for the system, but only in a manner that serves the interests of Syrians, not the US. There’s a big American project for the Middle East, and we are against this, whether we like Assad or not.

Abu Tareq, grocer: Yes, Assad has been good for us. What’s happening today is not a revolution – a revolution is against your enemy, not your own government. I support every revolution that calls for reforming or improving the system, but this is not the case in Syria; this is started by Israel and its Arab allies. They never did anything for Palestine, so what are they going to do for Syria? This takeover by the Muslim Brotherhood is the biggest victory for Israel, because now they have more reason to build a Jewish state next to the Islamic countries.

Abu Jamil, member of prominent Palestinian political party: One has to separate the social and economic issues from the political ones. In Lebanon, we are forbidden from working in more than 70 professions, whereas in Syria, a Palestinian has more rights – he can be a doctor or an engineer; he has economic freedom. Of all the countries that host Palestinian refugees, Syria offers them the most social benefits and rights. However, politically, we actually have less freedom in Syria. Palestinians there cannot hold a march or form a party. The regime forbids it. So, of course we are for democracy and more rights in Syria, for both Palestinians and Syrians.

Abu Ahmad, arguileh café owner: No, Assad hasn’t been good for us. Listen, I’ve been following politics for 30 years. This so-called revolution is just a conspiracy, not only against Syria but the whole region, and specifically against Muslims.

Abu Muhammad: Yes, Assad has been good for us. Of all the Arab governments, his is the only one that kept the resistance alive, and said no to the US, in a way that protects the Palestinians’ best interests. Of course, no one envies Syrians for the situation they’re in right now. We all want Syria to be safe and sound, as a people and a regime. But we shouldn’t talk about Syrian internal affairs because it’s something for them to decide themselves.

Ramzi, shopkeeper: We Palestinians are against everything that’s happening in the Arab region. Yes, there is injustice and oppression in Syria, and we are against that; we are with the people. But this is not an Arab Spring. It’s chaos and ruin. It’s not only destructive for the regime, because Syria is not only represented by a regime; it’s destructive for the people.

Abu Daoud, shopkeeper: No, Assad hasn’t been good for Palestinians. Today, I see this as a revolution, because the regime cannot satisfy the vision of the people. I hope this situation will soon be resolved for good.

Khaled, shopkeeper: I don’t care about what’s happening in Syria, I’m neutral toward it. Our situation as Palestinians in Lebanon is more important. What has any country ever offered us?

Luna Safwan contributed reporting to this article. Some of the above names have been changed at the respondents’ requests.