I understand he is not fond of comparisons with Christopher Hitchens, but there was certainly an air of Hitchen’s fall-out with The Nation in Nick Cohen’s response to Red Pepper’s shameful recent ‘special edition’ on Kurds.
Regular readers will be familar with most of the quotes former Red Pepper contributor Cohen cites in his piece and he again employs the powerful words of Dr Barham Salih, the prime minister of liberated Iraqi Kurdistan, when he spoke to the Socialist International in Rome recently and urged them to back a liberation of Iraq. Cohen rightly argues that the disgraceful avoidance of the Iraqi and Kurdish opposition’s arguements by the left speaks volumes.
“The moral bankruptcy of the anti-war movement lies as squarely in its refusal to attend to or argue with Salih and his comrades as in the decision of Red Pepper to report lies as truth. But, then, why should you guys bother with Kurds? The uppity wogs actually think Saddam Hussein is worse than George Bush.
More presumptuously, they believe they have the right to deploy words like ‘democracy’ and ‘socialism’. They must be taught that they are nothing but mountain people and that the language of anti-fascism is dead.”
