Religion & politics

“Shout her name: Jina Amini”

Protests were held across the world to mark the first anniversary of the murder in custody of Mahsa Jina Amini, killed on 16 September 2022. Jina was beaten by Iran’s so-called morality police, the Guidance Patrol, after being detained for allegedly “improperly” wearing her hijab. Jina was a 22 year-old Iranian Kurd born in Saqqez, north-west Iran. She was killed in Tehran, Iran’s capital after travelling with her family to visit her brother. The Iranian Islamic regime that killed Jina lied to cover up the crime, claiming she had died of an underlying health condition. Her parents insist that...

Choose Life — Have an Abortion: The story of Justyna Wydrzyńska

Since January 2021, Poland has had a near-total ban on abortion. Before this, Poland already had some of the most restrictive abortion laws in Europe, which only allowed for abortions in a small number of scenarios: if the pregnant person has been raped or the pregnancy has resulted from incest; if their life was in danger; or in cases of severe foetal abnormality. The ruling by the Constitutional Tribunal declared the last of these no longer valid. In 2020, there were approximately 1,000 legal abortions. Following the introduction of the new law, that number fell by 90%. Justyna Justyna...

Jina Mahsa Amini, one year on

September marks one year since the murder of Jina Mahsa Amini, a young Iranian-Kurdish woman who was killed in detention following her arrest for allegedly violating Iran ’s compulsory hijab law. Her murder sparked the most significant protests against the Iranian regime since the 1980s and the strength of the uprising prompted the Iranian regime to take the notorious morality police off the streets. CRACKDOWN It has been confirmed that more than twenty thousand people have been arrested and hundreds killed in the subsequent crackdown, with the real number expected to be much higher. Sentences...

Surveillance cameras tighten hijab rule

An Iranian criminal court has ordered a woman to perform 270 hours of unpaid labour cleaning public spaces, for breaking the country’s mandatory hijab law. The work will include cleaning the buildings of the Interior Ministry in Tehran. The verdict was based on images from "smart city cameras,”. There has been an increase in surveillance cameras as part of efforts to enforce the mandatory hijab law and crackdown on protests. In April, national police chief Ahmad Reza Radan announced the launch of a “smart” programme involving surveillance cameras to identify women failing to cover their hair...

Tories lose votes in spite of Starmer's drift to the right

Discussing the 4 May local election results, pollster John Curtice told the BBC: “Perhaps there is a message here that voters are not yet fully enthused about the Labour alternative even if they are clearly disenchanted with the current Conservative government” The Tory vote was down to rhe equivalent of 26% in a general election, from 30% in last year’s local elections. The Tories lost 1,058 council seats, and that after losing over 1,330 when the same seats were contested in 2019. This despite their attempt at voter suppression through new voter ID laws . For the first time in almost three...

Solidarity, not saviour complex (part 2)

Part two of a guest article by Hein Htet Kyaw. Part one here It’s important to note that condemnation against India alone for the occupied Kashmir regions is reactionary to its core. Both Pakistan and India should be equally blamed for the occupation since they both are the main obstacles on the way to an independent, sovereign, autonomous Kashmir region. The western left’s condemnation of India alone over Kashmir has two political reasons. One of them is a guilty conscience about their imperialist government and the “war on terror” colonial invasions against the countries that are majority...

Connolly, the strike, and the children of Dublin

Part of a series of articles on Connolly: workersliberty.org/connolly James Connolly, in support of Jim Larkin, led the workers of Dublin in the great Labour War of 1913-14. The attempt to get strike-bound children to families in Britain and Northern Ireland that would take care of them during the strike was a major event in the Labour War. It led to a sectarian Catholic hue and cry. The then very strong “Catholic Orange Order”, the Ancient Order of Hibernians (Board of Erin), rioted and attacked strikers. Eventually it was direct physical force that stopped the transfer of strikers’ children...

James Connolly's Marxism part six: Socialism or the Catholic Church

Part of a series of articles on Connolly: workersliberty.org/connolly By Emil Vandervelde This article by the Belgian socialist Emil Vandervelde, printed by De Leon in the Weekly People , started the controversy, together with the People’s promotion of German Marxist August Bebel’s book Woman And Socialism . In the United States, where religion is a private matter, an affair of conscience, where no religious sect dominates, or pretends to dominate others, it must be difficult indeed to realise the bitterness of the contest that rages in most of the countries of Western Europe between the Roman...

Marx and Lenin on religion

"Man makes religion, religion does not make man. In other words, religion is the self consciousness and self-feeling of man, who has either not yet found himself or has already lost himself again...

Sunak’s fortune, India’s right-wing media and the Leicester clashes

Rishi Sunak’s connections with right-wing Hindu nationalists are not as glaring as, for instance, those of Priti Patel or Harrow East MP Bob Blackman. Yet his marriage has given him substantial links not only into India’s capitalist class, and its political establishment, but also its Hindu nationalist political networks. These connections are relevant to the upsurge of Hindu nationalist activism in the UK, including recent events in Leicester. The Sunak-Murty family fortune Sunak’s household wealth, making him the first UK prime minister richer than its monarch, is of course a matter of alarm...

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