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Sheffield: Row over "No To IDF No To Hamas" Placard (repost)

you can be utterly against the killing of civilians, and thus against the IDF actions in Gaza and Hamas actions when they kill civilians; this is a legitimate position to hold.


Being against the Gaza atrocities does not equate to supporting Hamas and if someone at a demo protesting the attacks in Gaza wishes to make this point then that is entirely reasonable.



the placard says

No to IDF
No to Hamas

Not IDF = Hammas or Hamas = IDF.
 
Divisive Cotton said:
What about Neither the IDF nor Hamas but International Socialism?
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Quite. I really wonder how manay leftist organisations actually support the idea of socialism in the Middle East anymore - as doing so would put them at direct odds with the Islamists.

I wonder if a "socialism for the middle east" placard would be similarly ripped down?
 
Mana from heaven for the BNP.

Edited to add: But even if it wasnt it does look a particularly disgraceful incident. I think some people loss of perspective is increadible.
 
the organisers of the london picket asked for and recieved police support to remove AWL and placard last week according to an awl guy i was speaking to at teh londonpicket .. and again he said swp supported this .. piss poor
 
Udo Erasmus said:
What? You actually think that there is no qualitative difference between an organisation that arises from occupation and is the democratically elected representatives of a people under occupation & the occupier, who is backed to the hilt by the most powerful countries on earth.

As to soft nationalism, I think it is pretty much an ABC for socialists that while we oppose nationalism, we recognise a qualitative difference between the nationalism of the oppressed and the oppressor.

For example, in the 60s people in the US tried to equate white racism backed up by the state and a massive amount of power with Black nationalism that was a reaction to oppression that arose out of some of the poorest, most powerless people in the country.

We can criticise the politics of Black nationalism, but we take as our starting point that the root problem is the oppressor not the oppressed.
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i think udo is a SWP computer just throwing out these meaningless crass phrases
 
Udo Erasmus said:
Well, no, the placard has "No to IDF" and "No to Hamas" in equal sized letters, to most bystanders this could only be seen as saying that these two organisations are equally part of the problem. .
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well to me it simply says that neither are part of the solution .. by implication you are saying hamas are part of the solution hence you condemn palestinian women to hamas and sharia .. nice
 
Udo Erasmus said:
A simple political point: In the 1970s would you equate the British state and the IRA? No, you'd recognise how the IRA arose out of Bloody Sunday & the British state's smashing of the civil rights movement. You would criticise the politics of republicanism and Irish nationalism based on the catholic community in the North of Ireland as being incapable of re-uniting Ireland and solving the problem, but you'd recognise that they arose out of oppression.
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there are plenty of socialist who would legitimately have carried a banner saying "NO to the Troops No to the IRA"
 
One AWL member's response:
DOES OPPOSING MORE THAN ONE FORCE AT THE SAME TIME MEAN "EQUATING" THEM?

Clearly not. The Israeli state is obviously the "main enemy" here and opposing its assault on Gaza (and its ongoing colonial occupation of Palestinian territories) is the primary task. But the existence of a main enemy does not transform other enemies into friends, and given the pro-Hamas/Hezbollah politics of many Palestine solidarity demos since the 2006 war on Lebanon, we feel it's important to make it clear that opposing the Israeli state doesn't mean supporting whichever force happens to be fighting them regardless of what they represent politically. If war is the continuation of politics by forcible means, then your attitude to wars depends on your attitude to the politics of which they are a continuation. This doesn't mean claiming that the war parties are evenly matched or capable of wreaking equivalent slaughter/destruction, but unless you're incapable of holding more than one idea in your head simultaneously then I can't see why this is so difficult for people to comprehend.
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Zionist scum :mad:
 
durruti02 said:
well to me it simply says that neither are part of the solution .. by implication you are saying hamas are part of the solution hence you condemn palestinian women to hamas and sharia .. nice
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You keep repeating these lies even after you've been corrected. What is your agenda in this misportrayal? There are many things to pick Hamas apart for, but lack of support for female political representation (Muslim, non-Muslim, secular) is not one of these.

Women MPs vow to change face of Hamas said:
Ask Huda Naeem how she intends to use her influence as a newly elected MP for Hamas and she ticks off a list of wrongs done to women in the name of religion.
Forced marriage, honour killings, low pay and girls being kept out of school are her priorities for change in the Palestinian parliament. That is when she is not preparing her 13-year-old son to die in the fight against Israel.

"A lot of things need to change," she said. "Women in Gaza and the West Bank should be given complete rights. Some women and girls are made to marry someone they don't want to marry. This is not in our religion, it's our tradition. In our religion, a woman has a right to choose.

"As a woman and an MP, there are areas I want to concentrate on but that does not mean we have forgotten our struggle for our homeland, and preparing our children to die when the homeland calls for it."

Mrs Naeem, a 37-year-old social worker at the Islamic University in Gaza City and a mother of four, is one of six women elected to parliament on the Hamas ticket in the Islamist party's landslide victory last month. They will be sworn in when the new parliament opens today.

Women played a crucial role in getting out the vote for Hamas, knocking on doors and often getting a sympathetic hearing. Hamas's strategy to build political support through its social programmes - the provision of health clinics, nurseries and food for the poor - sealed the loyalty of many Palestinian women.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/feb/18/israel.islam
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tangentlama said:
Ask me some questions and i will try to answer as honestly as i can.
ps. this only applies to you butchersapron.
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Well, it's only one question really - do you support this sort of physical censorship on UK demos?

(I'm pretty sure that i already know your answer (99.9999%), but i think it needs to be made here by someone like you).
 
butchersapron said:
Well, it's only one question really - do you support this sort of physical censorship on UK demos?

(I'm pretty sure that i already know your answer (99.9999%), but i think it needs to be made here by someone like you).
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e2a: reading up on AWL's antics, their placard was an provocation, an equation that equated wrongfully the IDF with the Hamas. AWL are entitled to free speech, but this means they are welcoming robust debate when the provoke others intentionally. One of their members claims that the AWL were attacked by Hamas supporters at the demo. Totally ridiculous. http:// www.workersliberty.org/ placard

They have assessed the opposition/equation wrongly - we don't live in their nice academic world of symbolic-structuralist binary oppositions. However, within politic of Israel-Palestine conflict, these imperfect binary oppostions can be seen as reflections of each other.

I give you an example.

In 2002, Israel's then ruling Likud party voted overwhelmingly to reject the idea of a Palestinian state, even against their then Leader, Ariel Sharon, who had "acknowledged the inevitability of a Palestinian state". Likud's options at that time were as follows:
1) eternal occupation
2) forced explusion and ethnic cleansing
3) fight to the bitter end = genocide of all non-exiled Palestinians living withing OT and Israel.

As for the 1988 charter, if every state or movement were to be judged solely by its foundational, revolutionary documents or the ideas of its progenitors, there would be a good deal to answer for on all sides. The American Declaration of Independence, with its self-evident truth of equality, simply did not countenance (at least, not in the minds of most of its illustrious signatories) any such status for the 700,000 African slaves at that time; nor did the Constitution avoid codifying slavery as an institution, counting "other persons" as three-fifths of a man. Israel, which has never formally adopted a constitution of its own but rather operates through the slow accretion of Basic Laws, declares itself explicitly to be a state for the Jews, conferring privileged status based on faith in a land where millions of occupants are Arabs, Muslims and Christians.

The writings of Israel's "founders" — from Herzl to Jabotinsky to Ben Gurion — make repeated calls for the destruction of Palestine's non-Jewish inhabitants: "We must expel the Arabs and take their places." A number of political parties today control blocs in the Israeli Knesset, while advocating for the expulsion of Arab citizens from Israel and the rest of Palestine, envisioning a single Jewish state from the Jordan to the sea. Yet I hear no clamor in the international community for Israel to repudiate these words as a necessary precondition for any discourse whatsoever. The double standard, as always, is in effect for Palestinians.

I, for one, do not trouble myself over "recognizing" Israel's right to exist — this is not, after all, an epistemological problem; Israel does exist, as any Rafah boy in a hospital bed, with IDF shrapnel in his torso, can tell you. This dance of mutual rejection is a mere distraction when so many are dying or have lived as prisoners for two generations in refugee camps. As I write these words, Israeli forays into Gaza have killed another 15 people, including a child. Who but a Jacobin dares to discuss the "rights" of nations in the face of such relentless state violence against an occupied population?

I look forward to the day when Israel can say to me, and millions of other Palestinians: "Here, here is your family's house by the sea, here are your lemon trees, the olive grove your father tended: Come home and be whole again." Then we can speak of a future together.
http://www.jewishconscience.org/14.html
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Spion said:
If either of them ever carried placards saying that on a march in the UK I'll stand corrected.

I never saw it tho
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Members of Militant were often on the receiving end of hissy fits from SW provo cheerleaders. The issue of the placards is a bit of a 'red herring' in that even if the placards were not there the ideas were.
 
Fedayn said:
Members of Militant were often on the receiving end of hissy fits from SW provo cheerleaders. The issue of the placards is a bit of a 'red herring' in that even if the placards were not there the ideas were.
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Fair dos. Not many milis on any of the marches I went on
 
Fedayn said:
Which marches?
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Troops out ones in London and a couple of other cities. I'm not going into details. It's irrelevant. I've said I'll stand corrected and have ony said what I didn't see.

Were the milis for Troops out?

And I don't remember there being any SWP either. I think they were 'off' Ireland at that time
 
Spion said:
Troops out ones in London and a couple of other cities. I'm not going into details. It's irrelevant. I've said I'll stand corrected and have ony said what I didn't see.

Were the milis for Troops out?
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There was deffo individual Millitants on Troops Out, Bloody Sunday demos etc.

Not as an immediate demand no they weren't.
 
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