A reminder
A decent article on Comment is Free (!) by Martin Bright:
There are even some on the centre ground of British politics who are beginning to talk about a 'popular front' of progressives opposed to the rise of militant Islam in an alliance modelled on the democrats of left and right who united to oppose fascism in the 1930s. But this will be impossible while deep divisions exist over the conduct of the war in Iraq and Israel's savage attack on Lebanon, both of which will help build support for radical Islam across the Muslim world and in Britain. But the principle is a good one.
Professor Chetan Bhatt of Goldsmith's University in London is one of the few thinkers on the left to have developed a coherent position on the religious right. In an essay to be published later this year, he argues that the left must rethink the way it deals with Islamists at the exclusion of genuinely progressive secular and religious voices within Britain's south Asian Muslim communities. 'The left, despite its knowledge of the horrifying politics of communal and religious sectarianism in south Asia, has often been unable to grasp the existence of the "fascisms of the powerless" or the small communal "fascisms" in everyday civic life. Acknowledging this means facing numerous political directions at once, as painstakingly complicated and difficult as this initially seems.'
Meanwhile, the Foreign Office seems determined to press ahead with courting radical Islamists. Just this month, the British government paid for Yusuf al-Qaradawi to attend a conference in Turkey to discuss the future of European Islam. At home, it funded two Islamist youth organisations, the Federation of Islamic Student Societies and Young Muslim Organisation, to help run a roadshow of Muslim scholars to tour the country. Fosis and YMO, while condemning violence, are ideological allies of the Muslim Brotherhood and Jamaat-i-Islami. It is ironic that conservative thinkers categorise these organisations accurately as part of an Islamist extreme right, while many on the left continue, wrongly, to see them as part of some wider international Muslim liberation movement.
While this situation remains, there is no shame for those on the left opposed to the rise of radical Islam to build alliances with conservatives prepared to call fascism by its real name.
That's my emboldening
How true. Perhaps documents like the Euston Manifesto can help build that consensus.
-posted by Roy
