The SWP and Charlie Hebdo

Submitted by Matthew on 14 January, 2015 - 11:29

Those familiar with the Socialist Workers’ Party’s politics won’t have been surprised by its statement responding to the Charlie Hebdo attack. It was the most crude example of the kind of response we have seen from parts of the left in the UK.

The SWP’s statement included one line implying opposition to the killings and nothing at all about the basic principle of the right to free speech.

The group’s claim that Charlie Hebdo’s “provocative” and “racist” cartoons provide essential background to the attacks is pure obfuscation. But if the Islamist killers had been outraged by racism, then they had plenty of targets in France (such as the Front National).

They attacked the cartoonists of a left-leaning paper (and a kosher shop) because this suited their own Islamist politics and in particular their attitude “blasphemy” and Jews.

The idea that imperialism creates “deep hatred” is no doubt true, but the use of that argument in relation to these killings is part of the lazy assertion that attacks like these are simply a knee-jerk response to Western imperialism, completely denying the role of Islamism as a functioning ideology.

Billions of people, and millions of Muslims, face oppression and hardship but do not go onto murder people, and would not thank the left for making excuses for those that do. People set out to murder in this way because they are guided to do so by a particular ideology, where targetted killing is a strategic policy.

The left should organise to defend Muslims against an inevitable right-wing backlash. But the left has a duty to combine that with defence of basic freedoms, support for secularism, and opposition to the self-evidently reactionary politics of Islamism.

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