Weekly Worker Chickens Out of Israel Debate

Submitted by martin on 20 September, 2008 - 9:14 Author: Sean Matgamna

Song of the Weekly Worker

I'm so small! But I'm poisonous too;
What I say is at best but half-true:
I spread gossip thin,
So they'll think I'm well in;
But I'm useful, torn up in the loo!

Readers may remember that on 3 August I challenged the people who publish the Weekly Worker to "debate with me publicly on the Israel-Palestine question, at a meeting presided over by a commonly agreed chair".

That was in response to a ridiculous campaign they were - and are - running around the assertion that I, in Solidarity 3/136. "excused an Israeli nuclear attack on Iran". It is a straightforward lie.

After having fulminated in print that we should be "driven out of the labour movement", they meekly agreed to organise a joint meeting and debate with us! But then the squirming and backsliding started.

In the course of the phone and email exchanges with them about arranging such a debate, something strange to behold has happened. The heroes of fierce at-a-distance, envenomed polemic, who snipe from ambush and whose comments on others are often peculiar in their violence and hysterical vindictiveness, have turned shy and bashful on us.

They are now proposing a debate betwen AWL and a shadowy outfit in which they are the main stake-holders, called the "Campaign for a Marxist Party". Their side is to be represented by Moshe Machover, a member of the "Campaign".

Machover as the other speaker will certainly make for a better debate. But there is a slight drawback. Although Moshe Machover has implicitly endorsed the WW's libel, he has (pointedly?) not repeated it in so many words - and, most importantly, he and the Weekly Worker group have different positions on the Israel-Palestine question!

A reader of WW can be forgiven for not knowing this, but, last time we heard, the Weekly Worker group was, like AWL, for a "two-states" settlement of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Moshe Machover is not. Moshe Machover's position will be found in an article on this website: "I think that Israel has no right to exist as presently constituted or in anything like its present form..."

WW are not the ones to let this political issue inhibit them when they see an advantage in baying along with the loudest pack, here the "Israel-is-the-source-of-all-evil" reactionary anti-imperialists.

We will debate with Moshe Machover. It's a shame that the unprincipled little scoundrels who run the Weekly Worker group - Mark Fischer and Jack Conrad, the Chickenshit Kids, the blowhards' blowhards - are such god-awful wimps.

Comments

Submitted by martin on Thu, 09/10/2008 - 22:45

On 3 August, as noted above, Sean Matgamna challenged the Weekly Worker to a debate on the issues around Israel and Iran.

In mid-August, we had some phone messages from Mark Fischer which indicated that the WW was ready to debate. So I wrote on 19 August: "We propose a debate in London, on a weekday evening, preferably a Thursday, late-ish in September to allow adequate time to prepare".

About two weeks later I phoned Moshe Machover to suggest a debate with him. Moshe had published an article in the Weekly Worker of 28 August denouncing Sean's original article on Israel and Iran.

As Sean noted in his reply to that article of Moshe's, "Most — not all — of [the] contribution is a perfectly legitimate piece of polemic against what I actually wrote". In other words, it argued actual political positions (which we disagree with), rather than just using "political" jargon as verbal makeweight for propping up ridiculous lies, in the old Stalinist style which Mark Fischer obviously learned so well in his long time... as a Stalinist. (See not only the original lie about Sean "excusing" an Israeli nuclear attack on Iran, but Mark Fischer's series of articles in WW 738, 739, 740...).

So we wanted to debate. The proposal to debate with Moshe was distinct from the proposal to debate with the WW. Had to be, if only for the reason that Moshe has a different position from WW on Israel/Palestine. WW nominally agrees with AWL on "two states" in Israel-Palestine, and Moshe never has done. Also, Moshe, while offering some contorted aim and comfort to the WW's libels, has notably refrained in his articles from directly repeating them. So, a different debate.

On the phone, Moshe said that he would debate. But... then he said that we would have to approach Hopi to fix up the debate, because on the issue of Iran he regarded himself as committed to Hopi rather than a freelance.

A problem that, because Hopi had told us, some time back, that it would not debate with AWL.

Long negotiations were meanwhile proceeding between Sacha Ismail, for AWL, and Ben Lewis, for WW, over a debate. As noted above, we had suggested a weekday evening in September; they insisted on a weekend in October. We conceded. But in the meantime, in response to our challenge for an AWL-WW debate, WW had (without explanation) started talking about quite a different debate. They were proposing dates, times, and venues for a debate... between AWL and Moshe Machover, with Moshe speaking under the auspices not of Hopi but of the "Campaign for a Marxist Party".

On 16 September, Sacha Ismail wrote to Ben Lewis asking for a straight answer: "What's happened to the proposal for an AWL-CPGB debate?". What was the WW's answer? Why were they evading the question by proposing a different debate instead? Sacha also asked for confirmation or denial of the Hopi refusal to debate.

Ben Lewis replied: "Yes [i.e. yes, Hopi won't debate], and we have chased you for that [AWL-WW] debate ever since".

Surreal, when approached for a debate, to say: "Oh, you can debate someone else instead - someone we don't agree with" - and then to claim that you are "chasing" for debate? Yes, surreal, but typical WW.

Long article by Mark Fischer in the WW recently, if you're interested, trying to take up that "chasing" claim by reference to cases where we didn't specially want a speaker from WW, on their chosen subject, at our summer school, and suchlike: no explanation in that article about why WW has evaded the August proposal to debate.

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