The Alliance for Workers’ Liberty have a letter up on the Educationet.org messageboard which provides an interesting illustration of the nature of the alliance with radical Islamists which the SWP has formed.
At last week’s NUS conference, the AWL reports that the SWP joined the islamist Federation of Student Islamic Societies (FOSIS) – a Muslim Association of Britain front – in a walkout when guest speaker Houzan Mahmoud addressed the Conference.
Why would the SWP join FOSIS in a walkout? Perhaps Houzan Mahmoud is, in SWP-speak, a “collaborator”? Nope, she’s a vocal opponent of the Iraqi government who called the elections “phoney”. She’s also a member of the Worker-Communist Party of Iraq.
Her key error appears to have been that she is the UK head of the anti-occupation Organisation of Women’s Freedom in Iraq which is a vocal opponent of Islamism. The fact that she has campaigned to bring human rights abuses by US and UK troops to public attention wasn’t sufficient to save her from the walkout; she evidently blotted her copybook by condemning the Baathist and Islamist terrorists for which the SWP cheerlead.
AWL note a few other high points of the SWP/FOSIS alliance, including opposing “a motion that called for a secular, state-funded education system and the abolition of religious schools” on the grounds that “secularism meant the forcible banning of religion, rather than the separation of church and state and the expulsion of religion from the public sphere”
In the meantime, while the NUS executive was busy ignoring a GUPS leaflet which proclaimed the Protocols of the Elders of Zion to be genuine, and Lenin’s socialism to be a device to defend jewish nationalism, the FOSIS organiser Jamal el-Shayyal managed to get the AWL’s own briefing on the MAB banned as “islamophobic”.
Happy days!