These and other calls for secularism and opposition to Islamism were rejected by  the Coalition, which explained that ‘we will have more people on our marches if we do not raise too much politics,’ and that ‘the call for secularism will alienate the hundreds and thousands of Muslims on our marches.’ (p.8)

And – although this is preaching to the converted here – the words of Ramzi Isalam are a useful reminder that this isn’t just a matter of some on the left naively but well-meaningly reaching out to those with horrible views (though with some that may be all it is, to be fair), but of coldly excluding dissenting Muslim and ex-Muslim voices.

OutRage! campaigner Ramzi Isalam, a gay Muslim who came to Britain to avoid being killed by Islamists in Algeria, said Qaradawi is ‘a cleric who provides theological justification for the homophobia of the people who wanted to kill me.’ He asked: ‘Why is the mayor prepared to have a dialogue with fundamentalists like Dr Qaradawi and the Muslim Association of Britain, but not with liberal and progressive Muslims and not with the victims of Islamist repression and dictatorship?’(p. 98)

It’s a really useful report. I do just want to pause on one point:

“In fact, Islamophobia is a political term used to scaremonger people into silence and stop criticism of Islam and Islamism by conflating criticism of religion and belief and of a far-Right political movement with an attack on Muslims.’ (p.47)

This is sometimes the case, certainly, and this publication provides plenty of evidence for this. But given that the word Islamophobia is so often used where anti-Muslim bigotry would work just as well – and anti-Muslim bigotry is tackled effectively in this companion publication which is a great source of information about organisations such as SIOA - I think it would be helpful to qualify that initial assertion about Islamophobia with a ‘sometimes’.  This would still be compatible with objecting to the term.

I watched only the first season of “The Sopranos,” but it was enough to appreciate what a fine actor he was.

Leonardo Calvo Cárdenas, Manuel Cuesta Morúa and Juan Antonio Madrazo Luna

The Washington Post’s leftwing columnist Harold Meyerson recently met the Afro-Cuban dissident Leonardo Calvo Cárdenas– who, as the former director of Cuba’s Lenin Museum, “hasn’t always been on the outside looking in.”

Calvo Cárdenas’s days in the Lenin stacks came to an abrupt end in 1991, when he and his friend Manuel Cuesta Morúa, a historian at Havana’s Casa de Africa Museum, lost their jobs after publicly criticizing the Castro regime’s lack of democracy. The two went on to form a democratic socialist organization that the regime routinely harasses but, atypically, hasn’t stamped out.

“We were the first alternative political movement that publicly opposed the U.S. embargo,” said Cuesta Morúa, who accompanied Calvo Cárdenas on his visit [to Washington]. “That makes it more difficult for the Cuban government to give us the kind of treatment that other dissidents have gotten.”

In 2008, the two joined other activists to form the Citizens Committee for Racial Integration — an organization whose very name is an indictment of their beleaguered workers’ paradise. “The Afro-Cuban population is stagnant, at the bottom of the social pyramid,” Juan Antonio Madrazo Luna, the committee’s national coordinator, said during the recent trip. As in virtually every other nation in the Western hemisphere, Calvo Cárdenas added, “Cuba has traditionally had a racially stratified workforce. And despite the egalitarian rhetoric of the government, African descendants remain excluded from the most promising jobs.”

Of course this is more than half a century since Fidel Castro came to power with a pledge to fight racial discrimination in Cuba.

“When we hold public forums at the community level, we’re often arrested,” said Cuesta Morúa. “But then they let us go. The tactics of repression have changed. Long prison sentences didn’t weaken the human rights movement; they strengthened it.”

The committee leaders entertain no illusions that the regime’s fall and the institution of a democratic government would in themselves eliminate Cuba’s racial stratification. “The existence of multiple political parties guarantees the democratization of the state,” said Cuesta Morúa. “It doesn’t guarantee the democratization of society.”

Nevertheless , the committee leaders are emphatic that Cuba can’t become more egalitarian until it becomes radically more democratic. Cuesta Morúa marveled that there are still some in the American left who marched with Martin Luther King Jr. or identify with him today yet support a Cuban regime that would never permit a similar march in its own country.

“We have a message for the American left, especially the African American left,” he said. “There are forgotten Cubans, invisible Cubans, many of them Afro-Cubans, many of them not. They do not live in the utopia that some Americans still imagine. They live in Cuba.”

While the Cuban regime’s western leftwing apologists like to portray the island’s dissidents as reactionary tools of the Yankee imperialism, Calvo Cárdenas and Cuesta Morúa are among the opponents who make it hard to do so. As was the late Oswaldo Paya, who rejected “the myth that we have to choose between socialism and freedom.”

McKinney is the 9/11 truther who took seriously a claim that the US government dumped the bodies of 5,000 executed prisoners in a Louisiana swamp during the week of Hurricane Katrina; who ran as the Green Party candidate in the 2008 presidential election and finished with one-tenth of one percent of the vote (the party’s website still links to some of her commentaries); and who has participated in antisemitic conferences, endorsed antisemitic conspiracy theories and become a favorite of the worldwide and American antisemitic Right.

Of course George Galloway was pleased to feature a friendly interview with McKinney on the Iranian state-funded Press TV.

Now comes news that McKinney, along with convicted felon and former Congressman James Traficant and Gun Owners of America head Larry Pratt, will appear on the Fourth of July at an event called “Freedompalooza” in Pennsylvania.

According to The New York Times, the Gun Owners of America, though much smaller than the National Rifle Association, played a key role in blocking Congress from approving tighter background checks for gun buyers.

Part of the group’s mission, Mr. Pratt said, is to stay on top of the N.R.A. “when we don’t think they’ve gone far enough.”

The Right Wing Watch website reports that Freedompalooza is hosted by one Paul Topete.

Topete heads the rock group Poker Face, which got national attention in 2010 when the Anti-Defamation league reported that it had licensed a song to and defended the violent right-wing Hutaree militia. Topete himself is an unabashed anti-Semite who, according to the ADL, once called the Holocaust “one of the largest if not THEE largest scam every played on humanity” (sic).

Topete’s anti-Semitic view of world history doesn’t stop there. He has also claimed that “the Rothchilds set up the Illuminati in 1776 to subvert the Christian basis of civilization.”

Responding to the ADL’s report, Topete’s band issued a statement saying, “We are not anti-Semitic, but, we will shine the spotlight on those of Jewish faith who use their heritage to escape criticism, especially when it comes to crimes against this country, but also against their own people.” In the statement, the group also doubled down on its speculation that Israel was behind the 9/11 attacks: “Was Israel involved? It’s not beyond the scope of reasonable doubt.”

…..

In 2010, the Colbert Report reported that now-Sen. Rand Paul attended a gun rally where Topete threatened an armed revolt against the government.

Pratt… has a history of ties to unsavory characters. In 1996, he was forced to step down as a co-chair of Pat Buchanan’s – Pat Buchanan’s — presidential campaign when it was discovered that he had delivered an address to a group of neo-Nazis, shared a stage with an Aryan Nation official, and served as a contributing editor to an anti-Semitic publication.

Update: Wow. This gets freakier and freakier.

The crony capitalists of the farm belt are lining up to suckle once again at the taxpayer tit and at the expense of consumers, who pay higher prices at the grocery store.

I would dearly love to see a Republican from the farm belt, even once, denounce Archer Daniels Midland as a welfare queen, with the same passion as some of them do when discussing the single inner-city mom raising two kids.

Josh Marshall writes of this picture of Pat Robertson and Donald Trump at the just-concluded Faith & Freedom Coalition’s “Road to Majority” Conference:

I think we’ve found the photo that captures the modern GOP.

While Robertson routinely rails against the moral decline of the nation, Trump– who said his hard work was a “very good reason” for his two divorces– was executive producer of a faux-reality TV show called “The Girls of Hedsor Hall,” featuring “self-described ‘nymphomaniac’ Brianna, heavy drinker Samantha, bad-tempered Margie, high school-dropout Jenna, gutter-mouthed Lillian, wild child Amanda, party girl Kim, snobby bitch Jen M, foul-mouthed Maddy, booty-baring punkette Hillary, bar brawling Paola, and Jennifer, the self-proclaimed ‘Blackout Queen of North Carolina’.”

A reviewer for Newsday observed:

Most of these women have substance-abuse problems – the substance in question being alcohol – and what do producers do? Serve them alcohol at a party.

Still, I’m sure Trump and Robertson were able to find common ground on… something. Abortion, maybe. Obama, surely.

That, and a shared history of questionable business ventures.

Israel.

As Haaretz reported this month:

Israel has union fever. In the first five months of 2013 alone 60% more workers organized than in all of 2012, and the number of new union locals established between January and May has already surpassed last year.

According to union figures, more than 21,000 newly unionized workers formed around 40 locals or branches. In 2012, itself a record-breaking year, 13,284 workers organized in 39 workplaces. In 2011 national unions organized 12,165 employees into 22 locals.

Mounting concerns over living costs, job security, pension security and growing economic inequality are thought to be behind the upturn in unionizing in Israel. Employees of the Hot cable television provider, represented by the Koach La Ovdim union, recently made headlines in their fight against management’s plan to switch them to working for outside contractors. Workers at Paz Oil Company chose to rejoin the Histadrut Labor Federation, 19 years after leaving Israel’s umbrella organization for organized labor.

In the past week alone three groups joined unions or began the process: employees of McDonald’s, the Knesset’s 200 parliamentary aides and the 300 adjunct faculty members of the Academic College of Tel Aviv-Jaffa. One-third of the Knesset aides and the college teachers joined the union, enough to gain union representation.

In the year to date 8,000 workers in 23 organizations have joined the Histadrut, including 6,000 at Cellcom, which is still in the process of forming a local. A new labor federation targeting young workers called Hareshet – Histadrut Hatze’erim B’Israel has signed up 7,400 members since it began operations late last year. Among the “shops” it has organized so far are local burger chains Agadir and Burger Ranch, where a collective bargaining agreement has been signed.

In terms of relative population, that would be like US unions organizing 830,000 workers in five months– in today’s political and economic environment, an unimaginable feat.

Histadrut labor federation officials attribute the surge in unionizing to the bullying of workers by companies such as like Hot, Pelephone and Clal Insurance. Tactics to prevent workers from organizing, such as towing away their leased cars, monitoring their movements and filming organizing meetings have backfired in many cases, they say, increasing employees’ willingness to join unions.

A January ruling by the National Labor Court, presided over by Judge Nili Arad, prohibiting employers from harassing or monitoring employees to dissuade them from organizing has also contributed to the newfound popularity of organized labor. The ruling bars employers from using scare tactics or threatening to fire workers for organizing, and even prohibits management from expressing opinions that are critical of unionizing efforts.

Another possible reason for the union trend is a package of labor laws initiated in April 2009 by the Histadrut as part of the negotiations for the Labor Party, then under Ehud Barak, to join Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition. One law obligates employers to negotiate with any new union local established in their organizations, and carries a NIS 250,000 fine for violators. Another law prohibits employers from barring workplace access to Histadrut representatives.

In the US, by contrast, weak labor laws and weakened enforcement make it relatively easy for employers to resist unionization. And there’s a whole industry devoted to “persuading” workers to reject unions.

Acting on behalf of the growing segment of the workforce on contract rather than employed directly, the Histadrut led a general strike that produced significant gains for these workers.

Of course not everyone in Israel is pleased with organized labor’s strength. The Israeli business publication Globes reported:

Minister of the Economy Naftali Bennett wanted to send the army into the ports in the event of a strike; now he wants to “exterminate” them, but wraps this in the form of a pun. In the latest post on his Facebook, he wrote, “That’s it. The ants are impossible. I came home and realized that something had to be done. They’re in the kitchen, the living room, the guest room. The whole house is filled with ants. I called in the exterminator.”

In Hebrew, the word for “ants” and “ports” is the same – nemalim. The reference to workers at Israel’s seaports and their unions is unmistakable…

What a card.

Bennett targeted the ports during the election campaign, when he called for a fight against powerful unions. On Sunday, Bennett said that he had drawn up a plan, “Code 1981″, which featured sending the IDF into the ports in the event of a wildcat strike over the government’s plans to build a new private-owned port. The plan’s name was inspired by US President Ronald Reagan, who broke the air traffic controllers strike that year.

Anyway, if you were a Martian trade unionist who had just landed in Israel, you might think labor unions everywhere would be eager to declare solidarity with their Israeli brothers and sisters and to learn what they are doing right.

Halevai. While the US labor movement maintains strong bonds with Israel, many union leaders elsewhere (as we’ve had to report far too often) have turned decidedly hostile.

The JTA reported in April:

Members of U.S. labor unions raised $1.4 million for the Yitzhak Rabin Center in Tel Aviv last year, 45 percent of the center’s total 2012 fundraising. Since 2005, American unions have raised $12 million for the center.

Labor leaders say programs at the center, which celebrates the slain Labor Party prime minister who signed the 1993 Oslo Accords and promotes dialogue among Israel’s cultural groups, meshes with their core values.

Rabin’s “commitment to peace in not just Israel but the world is amazing,” said J. David Cox, national president of the American Federation of Government Employees. “He was criticized for his willingness to make compromises, but life is full of compromises. That’s how you arrive at a solution.”

American unions have supported Jewish statehood since before Israel’s establishment in 1948. At the time, Jews were heavily represented in the American labor movement, and Israel, with its socialist roots and collectivist spirit, was seen as a natural ally.

Today, organized labor, particularly in Europe, has overwhelmingly shifted its sympathies to the Palestinians, routinely voting in favor of boycotting Israeli goods or divesting from Israeli companies. But American union leaders say they remain committed to Israel, supportive of what they see as a perseverant Western country with an ethic of social justice.

“There wasn’t a nation here,” said John Coli, head of Chicago’s Teamsters Local 727, who was in Israel in April as part of a delegation hosted by the Rabin Center. “Now it’s totally different. [Tel Aviv] is a modern city. People have access to health care, to education. That’s what we want to build everywhere.”

The best source for information on the Israeli labor movement and its relations with other trade unions is TULIP. Check it out.

As an atheist I think the Bible should be re-written to contain just one sentence:

In the beginning Man created God in his image.

That’s it. The rest is simply a combination of superstitions from the minds of early humans seeking a way to explain a world that they couldn’t scientifically understand which led to a formalisation of belief systems utilised to control people’s minds and introduce a social cohesion. Of course that’s oversimplifying the matter, but for the purposes of this post it serves to give notice that I have no belief in any religion or theology.

Growing up in the 1970s religion was taking a “back seat” but some still sought to impose their beliefs on the rest of us. The Festival of Light led by Mary Whitehouse comes to mind. Two particular incidents have stuck in my mind over the years. The protests over the now classic Monty Python film the Life of Brian and the prosecution of Gay News over some dreadful poem (I’m no fan of poetry either it has to be said) for blasphemy.

It wasn’t until the burning of Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses that I recall either religion or in particular Islam of being of any matter in the general way of politics. Until then, like many other people, I probably saw Islam as “just” the religion of Arabs and hadn’t given it much thought.

However one thing I am firmly in favour of is free speech and oppose censorship vociferously. A group of leftists had planned to publish an advert condemning the death threats against Rushdie and I sent off my cheque to sign the statement in good faith. It was returned shortly afterwards with a covering letter sating that they had decided not to go ahead with the advert as it might be construed as racist.

How exactly supporting a writer from an ethnic minority against threats from within the Muslim community is racist escapes me. The left showed a cowardice from which they have never recovered.

Last night Andy Newman the editor of Socialist Unity published a bizarre article attacking secular activist Anne Marie Waters who he (quite erroneously) describes as an anti-Islam extremist. Mr Newman writes:

I was recently horrified to discover that the anti-Islam extremist, Anne Marie Waters is considered one of the front-runners to be Labour’s candidate for Brighton Pavilion, for the next general election. Indeed, because alongside her bigoted anti-religious views she is also a pro-NHS campaigner, there is a danger that the left and some unions may support her for the Labour candidacy…..

He then attacks the organisation to which she belongs:

...the views of the “One Law for All” campaign are dangerous in a society experiencing a rising tide of Islamophobia and intolerance – giving a cod-leftist gloss to the rantings of the ‘counter-Jihad’ movement and the street thugs of the EDL – but that someone who defines their main political priority as being an “anti-Sharia” campaigner and promotes extremist intolerance against not only Islam but all religions, and who also uses dog whistle comments opposing immigration, is a very unsuitable person to be a Labour candidate for parliament.

Really comrade? Lets see what she actually has to say for herself:

Sharia Councils and Muslim Arbitration Tribunals are discriminatory, particularly against women and children, and in violation of universal human rights.

Proponents argue that the implementation of Sharia is justified when limited to civil matters, such as child custody, divorce and inheritance. In fact, it is civil matters that are one of the main cornerstones of the subjugation of and discrimination against women and children. Under Sharia law a woman’s testimony is worth half that of a man’s; a woman’s marriage contract is between her male guardian and her husband. A man can have four wives and divorce his wife by simple repudiation, whereas a woman must give reasons, some of which are extremely difficult to prove. Child custody reverts to the father at a preset age, even if the father is abusive; women who remarry lose custody of their children; and sons are entitled to inherit twice the share of daughters.

Proponents argue that the right to be governed by Sharia law is necessary to defend minority rights. Having the right to religion or atheism, however, is not the same as having the ‘right’ to be governed by religious laws. This is merely a prescription for discrimination, inequality and culturally relative rights. Rather than defending rights, it discriminates and sets up different and separate systems, standards and norms for ‘different’ people. It reinforces the fragmentation of society, and leaves large numbers of people, particularly women and children, at the mercy of elders and imams. It increases marginalisation and the further segregation of immigrant communities. It ensures that immigrants and new arrivals remain forever minorities and never equal citizens.

Rights, justice, inclusion, equality and respect are for people, not beliefs. In a civil society, people must have full citizenship rights and equality under the law. Clearly, Sharia law contravenes fundamental human rights. In order to safeguard the rights and freedoms of all those living in Britain, there must be one secular law for all and no Sharia.

Sounds perfectly reasonable to me.

Ms Waters is also active in the National Secular Society, hardly “extreme” in any shape or form.

Socialist Unity ’s politics get weirder as the “discussion” develops. I put discussion in inverted commas as they censor so many contributions, twisting the debate in their favour. For some reason their supporters want to turn the debate about Sharia into one about Jewish laws:

Anne Marie Waters talking up a mythical foreign ‘Other’ and endowing it with everything she dislikes, and Howard Fuller’s hoary old ‘universal in theory, selective in practice’ interpretation of ‘secularism’ (where are the discussions of the dupatta and the sheitel? Where is the condemnation of gittin?).

and

Anyone who does spend their time campaigning against “sharia” is part of the problem. Proponents of Sharia law aren’t the problem….

Actually Socialist Unity is “part of the problem”, providing a “progressive” front for conservative reactionaries who don’t believe in rights for women, gays, Jews or anyone else.

But what else would you expect from cheerleaders for George Galloway?

Sarah adds I am banned from Socialist Unity, but did try to comment in response to an attack on Harry’s Place in the comments.  I pointed out, for example, that I did in fact touch on parallels with Jewish courts in my post on Panorama. I agree with Howie that is absurd to describe Anne Marie Waters as an anti-Muslim extremist and, as Shiraz Socialist reports, Andy Newman misrepresents her views on immigration.  He also fails to mention that she criticises Christian fundamentalists as well as Muslim ones. On the other hand, some of the points she raises later in the short video could be said to treat Islam as monolithic, when in fact some Muslims also have concerns about these courts, or about aspects of their practice.  Concerns Andy Newman completely fails to engage with.

Liam Byrne, the former chief secretary to the Treasury and now shadow work pensions secretary, argues that Labour could achieve more without partnering with the Lib Dems — if it wins the largest number of seats, but fails to win an overall majority:

“We’ve got to think very hard about the virtues of a coalition, because this coalition has lit up in bright lights all the risks.

“I don’t think Britain generally likes coalition politics. It’s fine  in times of national emergencies like war,  but I don’t think many people  think the coalition’s been a great success. And they’re sick and tired of this argy-bargy and blaming each other. I just think today’s coalition offers us only weak leadership.”

Byrne  added that there could be strength in a minority administration:

“They’re often the model adopted elsewhere. Of course you can never rule out a coalition, but I don’t think this government has been a exemplar of coalition.”

He is preaching to the choir for many in the Labour Party who have no desire to form a pact with the Lib Dems.

Labour currently sits on 39%, the Tories on 30% and the Lib Dems on 10%. UKIP are on 14%. In theory that many a majority of 100 seats. However, pollsters believe the Labour lead is soft and could fall away as we near an election.

There is also the concern that Labour’s lead over the Conservatives has dropped to its lowest level for more than a year, according to a recent poll for The Independent.

It suggests that Nigel Farage’s UKIP is eating into Labour’s support as well as harming the Tories. Labour enjoyed an eight-point advantage in April but last month that dropped to five points in May, its lowest since March last year.

This is all despite a flatlining economy and Tory divisions over Europe and gay marriage. Labour should be doing better.

The Indy said that its lead has been on a downward track since February this year, when it was 13 points ahead. The latest weighted average of the polls puts Labour on 35 per cent (down four points on the previous month), the Tories on 30 per cent (down one point), Ukip on 15 per cent (up three points) and the Liberal Democrats on 11 per cent .