Why no solidarity with Tamils?
- Thread starter durruti02
- Start date
frogwoman
Let them eat newts
as are the 60 million Tamils on mainland India.
I'd be interested to see what the coverage of the issue is like in mainstream Indian media tbh.
there have been some references to the current economic difficulties in the UK undermining the financial security of those back home in Kashmir too...when I've looked at it * into it in the past I've been underwhelmed.
But shortly before Xmas i was thinking that I might take another looksie...yeah I just looped around Wiki & the Beeb,,,looks like an Endgame in play to me.
david dissadent
New Member
I think I have had the occupied territories wrong. It is not an issue that sucks up media space from other issues, but one that can be a gateway to get people to see and pay attention to other issues around the world. Instead of people only paying attention to Palastine because its in the news, its an issue that can force people to engage with other issues to justify themselves.
I've started a thread in the politics forum if you want to have a look bosky
And endgame in play? How so?
I just saw the other thread...
look forward to "learning" some more.re:endgame...specifically the battle in progress on Sri Lanka atm..but more generally a gut feeling I have that India is under some kind of silent International pressure to sort themselves aaaawt ... I've even suggested, in Meat Space, that this will be used for lobbying the necessity of the Heathrow extension.... to "help" India become truly Westernized.
FridgeMagnet
Administrator
again you have lost me!
Right. So this thread isn't about anything at all then? You repeatedly refuse to actually say what it means.
Udo Erasmus
Well-Known Member
What Durruti fails to identify is the central role of Britain in the Israeli/Palestine conflict, which is far more direct than Britain's indirect role in other global injustices. It is also at the sharp end of global imperialism. Britain and America back Israel as a tool to dominate the oil fields of the Middle East.
It was the British who first offered the Zionists a homeland in an area that didn't belong to them, that our ruling class occupied (The first intifada was actually the 1936 Arab revolt in Palestine against British occupation, part of a wave of anti-colonial struggles across the Middle East - Zionist militia aided the British army in putting down the rebellion).
It is Britain who have bloc-ed with America in blocking ceasefires both in the Lebanon and in the war on Gaza.
It is Britain that leads the EU in blockading Gaza and in the attempts to destabilise the democratically elected administration that the Palestinians have elected.
It is Britain (along with France & Germany) who are offering Israel to send war-ships to blockade the flow of weapons into Gaza, while they relentlessly arm the occupying power.
We could go on.
The idea that this is all an opportunistic ploy of "The Left" to court Muslims is bogus. Actually, the solidarity of the Western Left with Palestine goes back decades. Tariq Ali toured Palestinian refugee camps in the aftermath of the six days war. Or to give an example,the SWPs predecessor organisation the IS were involved in teach-in's at the LSE in '68 in support of Palestine:
http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/art.php?id=11874
If you read a very good book on the history of the PLO by Alain Gresh, he argues that much of the thinking of the PLO - their adopting in '68 of the slogan that they were for one secular, democratic state of Palestine where Jews, Arabs, Christians, Muslims whatever could live in full equality (rather than the slogan of the Arab regimes which had been to drive out the Zionists) was influenced by the participation of Palestinian exiles in Paris May 1968 where people asked them, 'what is the nature of your revolution?'
The Black Panthers supported the Palestinians in the '60s.
The history of solidarity of the western far left with the Palestinians (much of it spearheaded by Jewish trotsyists and non-stalinist socialists like Nathan Weinstock, Isaac Deutscher, Tony Cliff, Maxime Rodinson, Ernest Mandel and others) goes back years.
It was the British who first offered the Zionists a homeland in an area that didn't belong to them, that our ruling class occupied (The first intifada was actually the 1936 Arab revolt in Palestine against British occupation, part of a wave of anti-colonial struggles across the Middle East - Zionist militia aided the British army in putting down the rebellion).
It is Britain who have bloc-ed with America in blocking ceasefires both in the Lebanon and in the war on Gaza.
It is Britain that leads the EU in blockading Gaza and in the attempts to destabilise the democratically elected administration that the Palestinians have elected.
It is Britain (along with France & Germany) who are offering Israel to send war-ships to blockade the flow of weapons into Gaza, while they relentlessly arm the occupying power.
We could go on.
The idea that this is all an opportunistic ploy of "The Left" to court Muslims is bogus. Actually, the solidarity of the Western Left with Palestine goes back decades. Tariq Ali toured Palestinian refugee camps in the aftermath of the six days war. Or to give an example,the SWPs predecessor organisation the IS were involved in teach-in's at the LSE in '68 in support of Palestine:
http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/art.php?id=11874
If you read a very good book on the history of the PLO by Alain Gresh, he argues that much of the thinking of the PLO - their adopting in '68 of the slogan that they were for one secular, democratic state of Palestine where Jews, Arabs, Christians, Muslims whatever could live in full equality (rather than the slogan of the Arab regimes which had been to drive out the Zionists) was influenced by the participation of Palestinian exiles in Paris May 1968 where people asked them, 'what is the nature of your revolution?'
The Black Panthers supported the Palestinians in the '60s.
The history of solidarity of the western far left with the Palestinians (much of it spearheaded by Jewish trotsyists and non-stalinist socialists like Nathan Weinstock, Isaac Deutscher, Tony Cliff, Maxime Rodinson, Ernest Mandel and others) goes back years.
JimW
支那暗杀团
Eh? Wasn't it us who shipped Tamil workers into what was then Ceylon in the first place? After a few hundred years as one of the central actors of imperialism, we were up to our necks in far mor than Palestine.
E2A: Looks like I'm just a touch wrong there: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sri_Lankan_Tamils
Ahem. But we certainly had a direct influence in Ceylon.
Reading on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origins_of_the_Sri_Lankan_civil_war:
This was the thing I dimly remembered about shipping workers in:
nino_savatte
No pasaran!
I dont quite understand that? Why or how would they use Israel to do that?
discokermit
Well-Known Member
are you blind? have you no idea of global politics?
caat have been great for years .. respect
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
Oh FFS.
Why? Because being "best friends" with the state of Israel gives them a foothold for their policies in the Middle east, a "member of the team" in "the enemy's" half of the field.
How? The Arab Middle East regimes know that with a "staging post" in the eastern Med, that any attempts they make to escape from US/UK dominance of the oil trade (and most especially of the refining trade, as many ME oil exporters still operate on the colonialist-era model of shipping raw materials rather than finished products) means that they'll be assaulted, either economically or militarily. The state of Israel has the power to destabilise the entire region, and the Arab ME states really don't want that, especially as many of them only sustain governance of their nation-states through repression.
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