Alex Callinicos one of the SWP’s leading lights has an article about the Italian Rifondazione Comunista party in this week’s Socialist Worker.
Half a million demonstrated in Rome last Saturday. The slogans of the march were “Free Giuliana” and “Free the Iraqi people”. The first slogan referred to Giuliana Sgrena, a journalist with Il Manifesto, the centre left daily paper. She is being held hostage in Iraq and was shown on video last week appealing to the Italian government to withdraw its troops from Iraq.
She is being held hostage in Iraq. What a remarkably neutral phrase to use, especially from a man who prides himself on ‘analysis’. How strange that Callinicos forgets to let the readers of Socialist Worker know who has taken Sgrena hostage?
Could it be perhaps because it is the ‘resistance’ which Callinicos and his party supports that has kidnapped the left-wing journalist?
Il Manifesto isn’t by any reasonable description a ‘centre left’ paper, which is how Callinicos describes it, but is proud to declare itself a Communist publication.
Callinicos’s ‘resistance’ have kidnapped a writer for an anti-war communist newspaper. He forgot to mention that.