Words are weapons

David Hirsh, Sociology Lecturer, Goldsmiths College, University of London, outlines how cheap rhetoric by “toy town revolutionaries” here can have lethal consequences elsewhere

In the UK, you can say what you like. If you are ever-so-radical then you can denounce people as stooges of imperialism and collaborators and traitors and scabs. Doesn’t matter how silly or hysterical – say it and then go to the pub and chat about it with your mates. Nobody is going to have you sacked. Nobody is going to kill you. Its just part of the political knock about.

But in Iraq, for example, or in Palestine, for example, such talk is taken much more seriously by some people. And some of the people who take it seriously have guns and bombs.

Hadi Saleh, for example, was tortured and murdered in Iraq after the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU), of which he was a leader, was denounced as a ‘yellow’ union in the UK.

Sari Nusseibeh, philosopher and President of Al Quds University in East Jerusalem, was denounced as a ‘collaborator’ by people in the British Palestine Solidarity Movement because he spoke out against their plans for British academics to ‘boycott’ their Israeli colleagues. A Palestinian Teachers union has called for his sacking. Leaflets are circulating in East Jerusalem and in the West Bank calling for his assassination.

The pumped-up self-importance of people taking the ‘correct revolutionary position’ in Britain can cost brave people their lives.

Last October, at Labour Party Conference, Abdullah Muhsin, the Foreign Representative of the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions, spoke at a fringe meeting organised by IFTU with the help of Labour Friends of Iraq. He told the story of how, following the overthrow of Saddam, it has been possible to begin again the work of building free trade unions.

He told of the Saddam loyalists, the Sunni supremacists and the Islamic Fundamentalists, groups that the leadership of the anti-war coalition in London think of as the ‘resistance’. He told how these groups are trying to bathe the new democracy movement, the Trade Union movement, the women’s movement, the Lesbian and Gay movement in blood. He told that if the British and American troops should pull out, and if the so-called ‘resistance’ should be allowed to take state power, then all of the possibilities that currently exist for free association, freedom of speech and for building the organisations of Iraqi civil society would be drowned in terror.

The Communist Party of Great Britain said that the leaders of the IFTU were ‘in collusion with imperialism’. The Revolutionary Communist Group called Abdulla Mashdani a ‘collaborator’. George Galloway, one of the best known leaders of the British Stop the War Coalition denounced the IFTU as ‘quislings’ in the Arab press. The Guardian printed Sami Ramadani’s claim that the IFTU were collaborators. Socialist Worker and the Stop the War Coalition cried out that ‘fake unions won’t help Iraqi workers’.

At the European Social Forum in the same month, an IFTU delegation from Iraq, including people who had spent years in Saddam’s jails, were stopped from talking by a group of anarchists and ‘socialists’ who stormed the platform. Officials from the Socialist Workers Party said that the IFTU should never have been invited to speak.

Firstly these toytown revolutionaries are wrong: IFTU is not a ‘yellow’ trade union. IFTU is building in the space that was made possible by the overthrowing of the Saddam regime. Political activity, free association and free speech, under Saddam would have led to the torture chambers of Abu Ghraib. Life under occupation is far from perfect; but in many parts of Iraq there is now an emergent civil society. The oxygen of some basic freedoms is allowing people to think, discuss and organise. There are free trade unions in the oil fields and in the schools, in the civil service and in the factories – for the first time in many decades. There are women and Kurds and Shias in the democratically elected government of Iraq.

Secondly, the fact that these British Rik Mayalls think that IFTU are nothing but traitors, is an illustration of a sickness and disorientation on parts of the British left. Many of us predicted that it would be a terrible mistake for Britain and the US to invade Iraq; we predicted that it would make things worse, not better; we predicted that there would rise up a national liberation movement like the one in Vietnam, which would, in the end, defeat the Americans. We were wrong.

But some on the British left would prefer to close its eyes to the complex and contradictory reality of present-day Iraq, than to admit that events have gone, in some ways, differently from how they expected. So out of its own vanity and political disorientation, the anti war coalition would rather pretend that its predictions were right, than listen to Iraqi trade unionists who tell them that all sorts of exciting things are now possible in Iraq that were not possible before. The British fake left would prefer to call them collaborators than to admit that their own focus on criticising Bush and Blair has forced them to shut their eyes to what is happening in Iraq.

Thirdly, the killings and the threats to life are concretely connected to the denunciations of the British dilettantes. The fake left in the UK is so used to the idea of their own irrelevance that they cannot believe that what they say could have any effect in Iraq. But it does. And it can get people killed.

Hadi Saleh was tortured for many hours in January of this year and then killed by remnants of the old regime; forces that some in Britain cheer on as the resistance. Nozad Ismail is in danger (see LFIQ’s Global Appeal on this page).

The British fake left had a very short-lived success recently in the AUT, the university lecturers union. It passed a motion at AUT conference in April calling on British academics to boycott Israeli universities. The broader membership of AUT were so outraged that they forced their union to call a Special Conference in May to reverse the policy.

See reported on 23 May that a Palestinian teachers union has called for the sacking of President Sari Nusseibeh, of Al-Quds University, for ‘normalising ties with Israel’ and ‘serving Israeli propaganda interests’.

The two Jerusalem Universities, Al-Quds and the Hebrew University agreed to further joint work and co-operation and they made a joint statement against the AUT boycott.

‘This constitutes a strong blow to the Palestinian national consensus’ said the Palestinian Union of University Teachers and Employees (PUUTE). ‘We call on all concerned parties within the Palestinian Authority to take the necessary measures to put an end to this behaviour.’

The call for Nusseibeh sacking is already a disgrace – the idea that academics can be sacked for challenging a ‘national consensus’ is frightening enough.
But Nusseibeh is also in physical danger. Anyone who lives in East Jerusalem and is labelled a ‘collaborator’ lives with a threat to their life.

Those who pose as being serious about solidarity with Palestinians and who glibly denounce Nusseibeh must know this.

The glib denunciations of the pretend left in the UK resonate in Palestine. Leaflets are circulating in the West Bank denouncing Nusseibeh as a collaborator. Why? Because he stood up against the boycott of his colleagues in Israeli academia. Because he took the position that has now been overwhelmingly endorsed as the right position by British academic trade unionists.

Sometimes political fights on the British left seem pointless and irrelevant to the real world. The self-importance of student politics; the pumped-up superiority of the toytown revolutionaries; the absurd non-sequiturs and hypocrisies of some of those who claim to champion the oppressed. But we should realise that what we say in the UK can have deadly consequences.