This is a cross post from Howie’s Corner
Last night’s news that the BNP leader was visiting Lebanon and Syria as a clear guest of Hezbollah and the Syrian Government was shocking enough. It seems that Griffin is part of a much wider delegation consisting of all the Fascist parties in the European Parliament and including not just the BNP but also the French National Front and the openly anti-Semitic Jobbik party from Hungary. If that’s the kind of “friends” President Assad has to rely on for support in Europe then he really is scraping the proverbial barrel.
However the already discredited far-left organisation the Socialist Workers Party also provided a shock in the latest edition of their weekly rag Socialist Worker.
Despite the fact that the six men convicted of planning a terrorist attack on an EDL march were thoroughly immersed in fundamentalist and Jihadist literature, the SWP decided to put their own spin on these failed murderers. Socialist Worker tells us that:
The racist English Defence League (EDL) and the fascist British National Party are allowed to peddle their foul Islamophobia on the airwaves and the streets.
Is it a surprise that some decided they couldn’t take any more and planned an attack on an EDL rally?
That’s what six men in the West Midlands, who have been jailed for up to 19 and a half years each, were guilty of.
They took a bomb, knives and shotguns to an EDL rally in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, last June.
They arrived after the EDL rally had finished and the attack didn’t happen.
Some have said that the actions of the Dewsbury men are equivalent to the violence of the fascists.
This argument says that there are extremists on both sides and that socialists should oppose both equally.
But this ignores racism and oppression.
The plan to attack the EDL was a reaction to discrimination.
It is not equal to the violence of the state, or of racists or fascists who attack people because of their race or religion.
It was an act of despair against racist thugs.
Excuse me? These Islamists are just as bad as the boneheads of the far-right. The Jihadists see all non-Muslims as inferior, discriminate against women, gays, Jews and frankly anyone else that doesn’t agree with them.
For the SWP to try and deny the real nature of the ideology that motivated these men to attempt to perpetrate a violent assault that would have injured or even killed not just EDL members, but probably police, anti-fascist demonstrators and innocent by-standers is a disgrace. But it is what we have come to expect from this cult which operates its own form of “sharia courts” inside the SWP and has clearly abandoned women’s rights no matter how much they try and protest the opposite.
In the same edition of the paper they also seem to have developed relations with Jimas, a sort of Salafist organisation that marched with the EDL in Ipswich recently. This group also turned on a local blogger Andrew Coates resulting in a visit from the constabulary. You can read about this here:
You would have thought the SWP would have learnt a lesson from their previous entry into the murky world of religious politics when they got their figures burnt in Respect. Obviously not.
This strange love affair between the SWP (and it has to be said some other sections of the far-left)and the Islamists is bizarre.
As far as I am concerned the far-left, the far-right and the Islamists are a danger to democracy and should be treated as such.
