Middle East

Statement by the Association for Iranian Studies on the war in Israel/Palestine

A statement from the Association for Iranian Studies, reposted from X/Twitter. Dear colleagues, As we watch the devastating war and massacre in southern Israel, and the indiscriminate bombardment of, and carnage in, Gaza, it is impossible not to be affected by these grim events and the enormous human suffering this intractable conflict has inflicted. We are a community that cares deeply about the seven decades of dispossession that the Palestinians have endured. We feel profound sympathy for Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, and elsewhere in the world, many of whom have faced...

Statement by Marksist Tutum: Palestinian people in the grip of imperialist war

A statement by the Turkish Marxist group Marksist Tutum on the war in Israel/Palestine, reposted from their website . On 7 October, several Palestinian organisations, led by Hamas, launched a major attack on Israel from Gaza. In a short period of time, nearly 5 thousand rockets were thrown into the Israeli territory and thousands of Palestinians, including paramotor and motorbike militants crossed the border. They carried out military actions in Israeli territory, and captured many Israelis. Israel, on the other hand, with the declaration that “we will leave no stone unturned”, embarked on an...

Worker-communist Party of Iran (Hekmatist) statement on the war in Israel/Palestine

A statement from the Worker-communist Party of Iran (Hekmatist) . More statements on the war in Israel-Palestine here. On Saturday 7 October 2023, hundreds from the military arm of Hamas attacked cities in south of Israel. The first attacks were carried out in an area near Gaza where a music festival was being held. Many young women and men were murdered, military installations were hit and tens of thousands both military and civilian were captured and taken to Gaza. Simultaneously, Hamas fired more than 25000 rockets into 20 cities in central and southern Israel. According to the Israeli...

Jews in the anti-racist imagination

In Outcast: How Jews were Banished from the Anti-Racist Imagination , Camila Bassi seeks to reintegrate a critique of antisemitism into a critique of racism. Moreover, she makes a case for a more universalist, humanist anti-racism — a confrontation with racism that is also a critique of race. She does this through a confrontation with left-academic discourse around Jews, antisemitism, and Israel/Palestine. (A disclaimer at the outset: Bassi wrote a foreword for my own book on left antisemitism, and I provided a cover quote for hers. Both our books were published by the same imprint, No Pasaran...

Lebanon’s crisis brings uptick of sexism

Dozens of women’s rights activists and journalists gathered in Sidon, Lebanon, on 21 May, in solidarity with a woman harassed by religious reactionaries for wearing a swimsuit at a public beach. Two men demanded Mayssa Hanouni Yaafouri and her husband leave a public beach because Yaafouri was wearing a one-piece swimsuit. “They said it’s their law — the power of the sheikh,” Yaafouri told Al Jazeera. When the couple refused to leave, the men returned with at least a dozen others surrounding them. They began kicking a football around the couple, and kicking sand at them. Lebanese law does not...

Nick Wright, Qatar and "mal-information"

The so-called Qatargate scandal, involving corruption and influence-buying by Qatar and Morocco in the European Parliament has led to the arrest of several MEPs, an NGO secretary general and a union bureaucrat on charges of corruption, money-laundering and “participation in a criminal organisation”. The Morning Star has carried two lengthy reports by Communist Party of Britain member Nick Wright (who, being based in Italy, seems to be the paper’s de facto Europe correspondent), going into often fascinating detail about the inner workings of the Socialists and Democrats (S&D), the group to...

The Tory that (some) lefties love

There is a section of the left that seems to love it when an avowed right-winger backs their cause. The Morning Star recently quoted, with approval, Henry Kissinger in support of their line that Ukraine should capitulate to Putin. But for a significant section of the left, the journalist Peter Oborne is the right-winger of choice. This can be explained by Oborne’s political evolution from being (in his own words) a “conventional Conservative” working for right-wing publications like the Spectator and the Daily Telegraph , to being transformed by the Iraq war into someone who (again, in his own...

Letter: Morocco, another Qatar-type scandal

Arrested: former Italian MEP Antonio Panzeri, Greek MEP Eva Kaili, ITUC general secretary Luca Visentini The person at the heart of the Qatar-ITUC financial scandal, who gave disgraced International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) general secretary Luca Visentini his €50,000, is former Italian MEP Antonio Panzeri. Panzeri was an MEP for Article One, a supposedly left-wing split from Italy’s centre-left Democratic Party. He was touted as a “human rights advocate”. Yet the Financial Times has revealed that during his time in the European Parliament, and since, he has been an active advocate not...

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