Sep 7, 2006

Anti-Arab Racism, Islam, and the Left

Rami El-Amine, founder and editor of Left Turn has been active in and reporting from Lebanon. He has published an article entitled, Anti-Arab Racism, Islam, and the Left. Below is an excerpt critiquing Three Way Fight and particlary the article, Defending My Enemy's Enemy,

"the anti-capitalists who blog at http://www.threewayfight.blogspot.com/ posted an entry titled 'Defending My Enemy's Enemy' during Israel's recent invasion of Lebanon in which they argued that while Israel is the clear aggressor in the conflict and needs to be opposed, it doesn't mean the left should support Hezbollah. The bloggers argue:

…Hezbollah is essentially a right-wing political movement. Its guiding ideology is Khomeini-style Islamic fundamentalism. Hezbollah's political ideal, the Islamic Republic of Iran, enforces medieval religious law, imposes brutal strictures on women and LGBT people, persecutes religious and ethnic minorities, and has executed tens of thousands of leftists and other political dissenters.

If it's not already, this argument will one day become part of one of Hillary Clinton's or even George Bush's (minus the part about LGBT people) speeches justifying a war on Lebanon and Iran. Even though the entry is insignificant in terms of the number of people who probably read it, it articulates a political view that a lot of the left, particularly anarchists and anti-authoritarians, subscribe to but are not as open about -- hence their conspicuous absence from a lot of the organizing against Israel's invasion".

1 comments:

Matthew N Lyons said...

Rami El-Amine is right to criticize widespread anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racism, but he misrepresents my essay "Defending My Enemy’s Enemy," published on Three Way Fight on August 3rd. I criticized Hezbollah as right wing but clearly called on leftists and anti-war activists to join in defending Hezbollah and the Lebanese people against Israeli/U.S. aggression. I specifically rejected characterizations of Hezbollah as "terrorist" or as an organization that supposedly exists to kill Jews.

Mr. El-Amine dismisses my description of Hezbollah as a proponent of Khomeini-style Islamic fundamentalism. It's quite true that Hezbollah cooperates with members of many ethnic, religious, and political groups, and its day-to-day program is largely secular. The party has consistently argued that an Islamic state can only be established when a large majority of the population wants it. But Hezbollah considers advocacy of an Islamic state to be a religious duty, and it regards Iran's brutal theocracy to be the closest thing to a perfect political system anywhere in the world. Although Hezbollah is far from being a puppet of the Iranian government, it is formally subordinate to Iran's supreme authority (first Ayatollah Khomeini, now his successor, Ayatollah Khamenei), who it considers the religious, legal, and political leader of all Muslims worldwide. (For details, see the book Hizbullah: The Story from Within by Naim Qassem, the party's deputy secretary-general.)

No question, Hezbollah is an important opponent of U.S. imperialism, but its anti-imperialism is interwoven with a right-wing philosophy. We can and should criticize the right-wing philosophy even as we defend Hezbollah against U.S./Israeli aggression, the vastly larger threat. As the U.S. government cranks up its drive toward war with Iran's Islamic Republic, this approach becomes increasingly urgent. If defending a target of U.S. imperialism means we have to gloss over the target's political flaws, how in the world are we going to mobilize people to defend Iran against U.S. attack?