SWP cosying up to Islamic fundamentalists…again

This is a guest post by Howard Fuller

The Socialist Workers Party is renowned for its support for dodgy organisations and movements around the globe with their twisted armchair anti imperialism outlook. Still cheerleaders for the genocidal Hamas and terrorist Hezbollah organisations, it hasn’t taken them long to find another group to cosy up to.

This time the Hefezat-e-Islam party seemingly gets their “revolutionary” approval.

The BBC reported that:

It has traditionally not sought power through elections, but looks to use its street muscle to change Bangladesh’s traditional secular culture and politics through the imposition of what it believes are proper Islamic ways.

The organisations in the Hefazat coalition are based at more than 25,000 madrassas, or religious schools, across Bangladesh.

Teachers at these madrassas belong to these organisations and all students are brought out en masse to participate in street rallies and marches.

Hefazat burst onto the scene in February following the killing of young blogger Rajib Haider.

The murdered blogger and his associates had launched the Shahbag campaign to demand the death penalty for a political leader convicted of war crimes committed in 1971.

Haider and other bloggers were subsequently accused by Islamists of being atheists who had written comments derogatory of Islam and its Prophet.

They served notice on the governing Awami League by gathering half a million supporters in Dhaka on 6 April, where the main slogan was “hang the atheist bloggers”.

The report also includes this rather telling sentence:

Hefazat’s detractors see its activities as little more than a cover of support for Jamaat’s often-violent campaign to derail the war crimes trials.

There is nothing even remotely “progressive” about the reactionary, clerical-fascist demonstrators in Dhaka, and one has to wonder why the SWP National Secretary has even taken to backing these islamist “rednecks”. Could it be they have become so isolated and cut off from reality that they are no longer capable of rational thought (as if they ever were) about what happens overseas?

Do they have no concern for the safety of feminists in Bangladesh, like Taslima Nasreen who was forced to seek asylum in Sweden after violent demonstrations by Hefezat’s predecessor groups in 1994?

Oh I forgot, “feminism” is a word of insult inside the SWP, should have remembered.

Besides aren’t “Marxists” supposed to be atheists, “opiate of the people” and all that?

Answers on a postcard to the Professor please.