Reject Bush and Ahmadinejad: Rebuttals to an (Islamic) Republican

[IndianaGreen]

Reject Bush and Ahmadinejad: Rebuttals to an (Islamic) Republican

By Norman Markowitz

1-26-06, 9:50 am

Politics makes strange bedfellows. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the rightwing adventurer who got himself elected President of Iran, has proclaimed his desire to see Israel destroyed and Ariel Sharon die. Pat Robertson, who will support Israel to the last unconverted Jew, has issued a statement to the effect that Sharon’s stroke was the Lord’s revenge on him for turning over God-given land to Palestinians.

Mahmoud and Pat aren’t as far apart as one might think, even though they are selling different brands of clerical reaction. Pat believes in supporting Israel to the hilt since that will facilitate the final judgment, the conversion of those Jews who will convert, and the end of all others who will not ascend to heaven with the Christians. Ahmadinejad is on record as saying that Israel was created for the purpose of antagonizing "the Muslims" and has made other cynical and vulgar anti-Jewish racist statements to appeal to the sort of constituents that GW Bush appeals to when he states that Al Qaeda and Iraq were working together to foment global terrorism.

Ahmadinejad’s statements have pleased global media by enabling them to simply forget all the real injustices that the Iranian people have suffered at the hands of British and U.S. imperialism and see the present government as in league with Hitlerian Holocaust deniers. They have also provoked a rash of stories that Israel will attack Iran’s alleged nuclear facilities or Iran itself. Any attack would of course be completely indefensible and would have disastrous consequences for the region and the world.

The statements themselves, particularly those expressing "doubt" about the genocide directed against the Jewish people of Europe during World War II echo the contentions of Nazis and neo-Nazis who have campaigned for decades to deny the reality of the Holocaust in order to make open anti-Jewish racism or anti-Semitism acceptable again.

Progressive people generally have not responded to Ahmadinejad’s demagoguery because they fear that such responses may aid the Bush administration in fomenting an attack on Iran or the Israelis in once more acting as a military middleman for U.S. imperialism by attacking Iran.

http://www.politicalaffairs.net/article/articleview/2638/1/146/

[Coastie for Truth]

1. Further excerpts...

PoliticalAffairs.Net - Marxist Thought On Line 1/23/06-1/29/06
The following are left responses to the president of Iran and the reactionary clerical forces that have led the Iranian revolution away from serving the masses that ousted the Shah in 1978. They are responses that reject reactionary Jewish nationalism, but refuse to see such nationalism as special, different, greater or worse than any other reactionary nationalism.

These responses draw a clear line, as Marxists always must, between those who condemn the policies of successive Israeli governments against both the Palestinian people and in service to the U.S./NATO imperialist bloc, and those who both denounce "Zionism" and Israel in what are Reaganesque "evil empire" terms, either supporting or silently assenting to vicious libels and slanders against Jewish people in the name of fighting "Zionism." Although most Communists and socialists have always rejected and condemned the latter views, they are certainly on the rise today.

The first view condemns Israel’s repressive policies toward the Palestinians as representing legitimate and realistic politics. The second view blurs all distinctions between Israel’s government and people and the Jewish people of the world through either ill-defined or crudely simplistic assertions about Zionism is an updated version of what 19th century Marxists called "the socialism of fools," i.e., so-called "Christian" and other anti-Marxist "socialists" who sought to deflect mass hostility to the evils of capitalism by blaming those and other evils, including revolutions, on Jewish capitalists and "Jewish" Marxist socialists and the Jewish people generally.

In this case, one might call the hysterical attacks on "Zionism" as an all-powerful force controlling world politics and the Israeli people and nation as "the Zionist entity" as an "anti-imperialism of fools" which objectively strengthens imperialism.

<<<snip>>

The social and economic conditions of the Iranian masses continued to deteriorate, creating the conditions where Ahmadinejad, a political adventurer with strong ties to the reactionary military and police sectors of the clerical regime, catapulted himself into the presidency from his post as mayor of Teheran.

While his regime today does nothing to alleviate the suffering of the masses, which was a central factor in his election, Ahmadinejad panders to religious fanatics in his country and the region. Such people exist in all countries and today are core constituencies for the Republican Party and the Bush administration. Ahmadinejad does so by portraying Israel and the Jewish people of the world the way right wing U.S. politicians long portrayed the Soviet Union and Communists throughout the world, a global "force of evil."

<<<snip>>>

The Markowitz also makes the following points

1. Ahmadinejad’s statement that the "West" created Israel to attack the Muslims of the world is incorrect.

2. Although Arabic nations have fought a number of wars with Israel, they have done little in a positive sense to assist the Palestinian people, who have been the biggest losers in these conflicts. While left and socialist forces have both existed and at various times had some influence in a number of these nations, particularly when they received aid from the Soviet Union, it is wrong to see any of them, the secular states, as advancing workers rights or committed to anything beyond a self-aggrandizing bureaucratic state capitalism.

3. The author notes that the "friend of the Palestinian people" have consistently used hostility to Israel as political theater for their own oppressed peoples, whether they are secular or clerical regimes.

4. Pre-1948 Jewish minorities in Muslim countries, and Jews and Muslims, one should understand, generally got along better with each other than either did with Christian regimes, or Jewish minorities did in Christian countries.

5. There was and is nothing in Islam as a religion, however right-wing clerical elements may interpret some Muslim teachings, for anti-Jewish purposes that is in any way comparable to the use of Jesus crucifixion to encourage anti-Jewish incitement among Christians over the centuries.