The SWP's attitude to religion is one element of a more generally flawed political approach - not independent working-class politics, but different variants of "my enemy's enemy is my friend". SWP members will often pretend that their difference with Workers' Liberty is that they defend Muslims and people of Muslim background against racism, while we, as "Islamophobes", do not. In fact this sort of "anti-Islamophobia" is common ground. The real difference is that they are increasingly unwilling to criticise not just Islam as a religion, but even right-wing political-religious (Islamist) currents.
This does not just go for Islam. In various forums - the Hackney anti-cuts campaign, for instance - the SWP denounced the idea of protesting against the Pope's visit to Britain. SWP members claimed that the anti-Pope campaign could only mean pandering to the British tradition of anti-Catholic bigotry.
Those who went on the anti-Pope demonstration in London on 18 September will know that this is simply rubbish. It was a left-wing demonstration, dominated by secularist, feminist and LGBT activists and slogans. Socialist leafleting and paper-selling got a positive reception. There were no right-wing contingents of any sort to be seen, and if there had been they would certainly have received a rough reception.
That is not to deny that anti-Catholic bigots may have organised around the edges of the campaign in some areas (for instance, Protestant sectarians in Scotland). Nor am I claiming that all the demonstration organisers, or all those that spoke from the platform, were left-wing. At a recent SWP public meeting in Hull, the speaker (SWP student organiser Dave Sewell) claimed that Richard Dawkins had used the London rally to describe Catholicism as "the world’s second most evil religion" - a blatantly Islamophobic statement, even if Dawkins did not actually come out and specify which faith takes the top slot.
I didn't hear Dawkins' speech. I strongly suspect Sewell, who was not at the demo, was garblings things, confusing the speech with comments made in the New Humanist magazine in the run-up to the Pope's visit (see here). But let us assume that he got it right! In any case, the AWL does not think Islam is more evil than Catholicism any more than we think Muslims are less deserving of human rights than non-Muslims. We condemn such views.
But note the SWP's double standards! This is a group which this year merrily promoted and took part in the Al Quds march, a supposedly pro-Palestinian protest launched by the Iranian government and organised in Britain by pro-Iranian Islamists. This is an event explicitly in support of one of the most repressive and anti-working class regimes on the planet - but the most criticism you can elicit from SWPers is that they "don't agree with everything" the Al Quds organisers say! And they simultaneously argue that comments made by one speaker on the anti-Pope platform mean it was wrong for socialists to take part...
For consistency on the left! Against all religious reactionaries of all stripes!
