War and Terror

What’s wrong with “Stop the War”?

The Stop The War Coalition enjoyed its heyday around the time of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, but has regained some prominence since David Cameron’s government first proposed the bombing of Syria in August 2013. Feeding on perceptions that UK involvement in the Middle East has led to prolonged campaigns of bombing, loss of life, and the creation of unstable regimes, with very little of the humanity supposed to exist in “humanitarian intervention”, the STWC has called a number of demonstrations and got some media coverage for its opposition to the UK and US involvement in coalition bombing of...

Prevent script is authoritarian

I was very interested to read recent articles and correspondence regarding the government’s Prevent strategy (Omar Raii, Solidarity 390, Patrick Murphy, Solidarity 391, Jim Denham, Solidarity 394). As part of being formally inducted into a new role, I had the pleasure of receiving a session on Prevent. This consisted of a heavily prescribed and standardised script and DVD presentation. It was clear the tutor was not allowed to depart from the script, expand or engage in discussion. I was a little surprised that the “main terrorist threat to this country” is still regarded as being from Al...

US-UK bombing won't stop Daesh!

On Wednesday 2 December (after we go to press) the House of Commons will vote on proposals to extend UK air strikes to Syria. As Jeremy Corbyn has given Labour MPs a free vote, Cameron is likely to have a majority for extending the bombing. The government says the renewed military campaign, now including UK, US, France, Turkey and the Gulf States, will be aimed at pushing back Daesh (Islamic State). But it is unlikely to make a decisive impact on Daesh’s position. It is more likely to perpetuate the current stalemate between all the military-political forces in Syria. That is, in fact, the...

The 13 November attacks in Paris: the terror of the Islamic State, the state of emergency in France, our responsibilities

Pierre Rousset and François Sabado are prominent members of the Nouvel Parti Anticapitaliste (New Anticapitalist Party, NPA), France's largest far-left party. They are both veterans of the Ligue Communiste Revolutionnaire (Revolutionary Communist League, LCR), the Trotskyist group which founded the NPA and then dissolved into it. This article was originally written for the Spanish-language site Viento Sur, and is online here . It was also reproduced on the Secularism Is A Women's Issue site, here . Workers' Liberty also republished Rousset's comments after the attacks on Charlie Hebdo...

Taliban consolidating gains in Afghanistan

It has been fourteen years since United States forces invaded Afghanistan following the September 11 attacks in New York. The ostensible reason for the invasion and subsequent toppling from power of the Taliban-controlled government was due to their links with Al-Qaeda and jihadist networks. Since then, though it is undeniable that large parts of Afghanistan have much improved, the country is still plagued by many problems such as corruption, and all the while the Taliban have shown recently that they are far from a spent force in the country. Last month, the Taliban managed to claim what was...

Close Guantanamo Bay!

Shaker Aamer, the last British resident held in Guantanamo Bay detention camp, has finally been released after being held there for 13 years without trial. Aamer was captured by bounty hunters in Afghanistan in 2001 and sold on to US forces. He was then taken to Guantanamo Bay, the US military prison in Cuba. He was held there from 2002 until now, but no charges were ever brought against him and he never faced trial. Aamer alleges that he was repeatedly beaten and tortured during his time in captivity. He says that when he was tortured in a US prison in Bagram, Afghanistan, British...

US and Afghan forces clash with Taliban

Afghan and US forces have found themselves under intense criticism after the bombing of a Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) hospital in the city of Kunduz, during an attempted recapture of the city. Kunduz, an ethnically mixed city in the north of the country and close to the border with Tajikistan, has previously been under threat from Taliban forces that have long held sway in provincial areas around the city. Following a planned offensive on 28 September, the Taliban captured most of the city. After being embarrassed by the fact that even now, fourteen years after they were...

Oppose drone attacks

Cameron’s original justification for drone strikes in Syria, killing two British nationals, was that the “targets” were an “imminent threat” to UK security. He needed to explain contravention of a 2013 House of Commons vote outlawing military action in Syria. Cameron said he had seen intelligence that both Reyaad Khan and Ruhul Amin were in touch with others in the UK who planned to launch attacks to coincide with the VE Day anniversary, 8 May 2015. But the drone strikes which killed them did not occur until 21 August 2015... Then a letter from the British ambassador to the UN Security Council...

Cameron's hypocrisy on extremism

On 20 July 20 David Cameron spoke to a selected audience at an academy school in Birmingham about tackling violent extremism in Britain. While there were fleeting references to the far right and Islamophobia, the main focus of his speech was the extremism that led, among other things, to hundreds of young people leaving their homes in Britain to join Daesh (Islamic State). The speech was fundamentally about Islamist extremism. Cameron’s approach to tackling extremism was, as he claimed, based on four core principles. His government would confront the ideology, tackle non-violent as well as...

Challenging fundamentalism: Workers' Liberty in further conversation with Marieme Helie-Lucas

In March 2015, Algerian sociologist and revolutionary socialist-feminist Marieme Helie Lucas spoke to Solidarity , the newspaper of Workers' Liberty, about the Muslim far-right, and the struggle for secularism, women's rights, and socialism (click here ). Here, we continue the conversation. Workers' Liberty: You argued that the "religious"/"Islamic" character of Islamism is dubious. You pointed out that often, Islamists twist religious doctrines to suit political ends, and that Islamism should be understood politically as a far-right, populist phenomenon, similar to fascism. This all makes...

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