Most of the speakers were members of the WCPI “Central Committee”, including Maryam Namazie, Fariborz Pooya, Bahram Soroush and Shiva Mahbobi. The latter was actually introduced as a member of said committee, but actually all four were; it begs the question of why the views of a small Iranian Marxist sect should be important in the debate over religion and state in the UK. I also wonder if any state they managed to establish in Iran would be much less repressive than the present régime, given that police states tend to recycle their old enemies’ secret police forces (this happened in both Iran and Russia); I had coined the slogan “Shari’ah, yes, Stasi, no” in case we managed to mount a counter-demo. AC Grayling, a popular philosopher, and Terry Sanderson of the National Secular Society, spoke as well. I wonder if they knew who their friends were.

The meeting is to start in Trafalgar Square at 3:30pm GMT this coming Saturday (7th March). They are to proceed to Red Lion Square, the location of Conway Hall, starting from 4:30pm. There is to be a public meeting in the hall from 6pm, with live music (whether in the hall or the square I’m not sure) from 5:30pm.

We should make some effort to counter the demonstration, in particular. This is an anti-Islam demonstration, organised by Communists who pretend to be secular liberals, using “secularism” and “equality” as a cover for their militant atheism and hatred for religion, and particularly Islam, generally. As part of their Iranian manifesto, their party advocates the writing of Persian in Latin rather than Arabic script, and a ban on “children” (this includes younger teenagers) from learning or participating in religion.

While obviously we should behave ourselves and not disrupt the Conway Hall meeting (Conway Hall is pretty small anyway), if their demonstration in support of the Danish cartoons is anything to go by, Muslims will easily be able to make their presence in Trafalgar Square felt, and let everyone know that Muslims can speak up for themselves and don’t need this bunch of Muslim-hating Communists with their deluded or dishonest “liberal” dupes telling us what’s good for us.

The “Iranian Secular Society” has arranged a demonstration tomorrow (Friday 8th Feb) at the Afghan embassy at 31 Princes Gate, London SW7, at noon, to continue until 2pm. Anyone notice something unusual? Yes, it coincides with the Friday prayer, just so that hardly any Muslims (except perhaps a few ladies who either do not go to the prayer or cannot because of the time of the month) will be in attendance. If they were to time it for, say, 2:30pm, they might well have a greater number of attendees, because by all accounts Parwiz Kambakhsh is an innocent man being punished for things his brother wrote about various Afghan politicians. But this front group for the Worker-Communist Party of Iran (Maryam Namazie’s and Houzan Mahmood’s set) is more concerned about showing Muslims in a bad light than saving a man’s life.

“It can be hard to tell whether women wear the veil as an expression of their faith or because they are compelled to do so,” Mr Woolas said.

“Most British-born Muslims who wear it, do so as an assertion of their identity and religion. This can create fear and resentment among non-Muslims and lead to discrimination.

“Muslims then become even more determined to assert their identity, and so it becomes a vicious circle where the only beneficiaries are racists like the BNP,” he said.

(By the way: the Guardian had fairly positive coverage of the issue yesterday, allowing a niqab-wearer named Rahmanara Chowdhury to give her account of “life behind the niqab”; she was also interviewed in the Observer last September. The Independent also had a vox-pop with two niqabi converts allowed to give their point of view; see end of this article which goes PPV after a week.)

So, because some non-Muslims remain ignorant about why many Muslim women in Britain wear the niqab, our women should stop wearing it because of their ignorance despite the fact that women have been dressing this way here for years, decades even? In my observation, there have been numerous incidents where such women have been able to explain this in the media, and if women fear that they are oppressed then they should perhaps ask them, if and when they meet them. I remember there was a student at my sixth-form college who wore it, and it caused no tension whatsoever. When people asked her about it, she answered them. (She eventually took it off, for reasons unconnected with anything happening at college.)

In this country people put up with things far worse than the sight of some women with covered faces. If we’re talking about personal appearance, men going topless in the summer and letting their trousers drop so far as to show their butt crack and women showing most of their legs, their midriffs, their thongs and more than a bit of cleavage are common sources of offence. Nobody is talking about banning such things, not least because such a ban would become unenforceable pretty quickly, leading to such things as roadside inspections with rulers which would become the butt of ridicule and hostility. But the issue of interaction is also relevant here, because they tend to be louder than the ladies in niqab and you often don’t want them interacting with you anyway.

And we cannot shed liberties to appease the far right or to drain their appeal to ignorant poor whites. By doing this, we simply become just as bad as them. The only way of reducing their appeal is to expose their half-baked cod-socialism, the flat-out lies they tell and their record of incompetence when they do get elected. People like the British National Party are simply incapable of appealing to educated voters because it is simply not a party of decent people, but of liars and criminals.

As might be expected, the Worker-Communists have weighed in on this as well, with Houzan Mahmoud of their front group “Organisations of Women’s Freedom in Iraq”, contributing this article to Comment is Free. She wheels out the standard tropes of the WCPI, alleging that, contrary to what the wearers themselves say, the veil is never just a matter of personal choice but it is a political statement on behalf of “political Islam”. I’d like to know what survey she’s done of what proportion of niqab-wearers in the UK support what has come to be known as political Islam, and how many wear it by personal choice.

The fact that, in some countries, there are particularly vicious armed gangs who demand that women wear the hijab - and usually not the niqab - doesn’t detract from this in the least, and in countries where girls grow up seeing women wearing niqab, they often regard veiling as a sign of grown-upness rather than of oppression. It depends how oppressed their own mothers and the women they know are, of course. Almost nowhere are girls forced to wear the veil - at least not across the face - from as early as four or five, and when given a headcover at that age, what’s the big deal? Perhaps you should ask them whether they find that humiliating or oppressive rather than projecting your own opinions onto other women.

Houzan makes the point about “how women’s oppression and terror against women is top priority for every Islamic regime, whatever its stripe”, but in the Muslim world where secularists hold sway, the rights of religious women are trampled underfoot, as in the case of Turkey, where they were forced to give up their studies after the military-orchestrated removal of the Refah government, and Tunisia where such women report harrassment by the authorities. The latter country in particular is a dictatorship and a police state, one of a number of countries described earlier this year as “enemies of the Internet”. She does not acknowledge this; she only acknowledges where the religious oppress women; clearly, the rights of women who do not share her political views, and the atheism they dictate, mean nothing to her.

The fact that it is always women who bear the brunt of secularist as well as religious oppression, and that the likes of Houzan Mahmoud are content with this, suggests that the secularists actually hate religious women far more than the men; imagine the frustration of offering “liberation” to women of a completely foreign culture and finding that they usually want something else! As with the pseudo-feminists in France, freedom and equality is only for the women who behave as they like, not the women they hate; they are content to see the latter kicked into the gutter.

Technorati Tags: houzan+mahmoud, iraq, peter+tatchell, lgbt, terrorism, worker+communist

Yesterday evening there was a meeting held by the Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association, at which Peter Tatchell (OutRage), Ali Hilli (OutRage’s Middle East spokesman) and Houzan Mahmoud of the so-called Organisation of Women’s Freedom of Iraq spoke. It was held at Conway Hall in Holborn, London, a well-known venue for secularist meetings. The theme was “Women, Gays and Secularists in Post-War Iraq”, and I found it advertised in this post by Brett Lock at Harry’s Place. The meeting was held in the library, which turned out (I’d never been to Conway Hall before) to be rather a small venue, although with just about enough room for this audience. I found myself right at the front and literally a metre from the three speakers (and I suspect I was right in front of Norm as well).

Ali Hilli told us that he had received an email earlier the same day from a contact in Baghdad, who told him of various new developments. He accused the police and interior ministry of being in league with the militias. His friend reported that police had been stopping long-haired males in the street and demanding that they cut their hair as it looked too modern or trendy, and that men had been killed for wearing shorts, and that there was talk of a ban on jeans. In parts of Baghdad women were no longer allowed to drive. He said that many Iraqis had been excited after Saddam fell, and although he had never supported the war, he did not imagine that the situation would get as bad as it has. (He also mentioned, toward the end of the meeting, that he had been told of gangs of men trying to “cure” lesbians by raping them.)

Most of the killings, he alleged, were the work of the Badr and Sadr militias, both southern-based Shi’ite groups (strangely, Zarqawi and his group were never mentioned). He claimed that they had assassinated, among other people, Sunnis, moderate Shi’ites, trade unionists, women’s rights activists and gays. His group had investigated a fatwa issued by “Ayatollah” Sistani, which called for gays to be killed in the “worst, most severe way possible”, and said they found that nothing like it existed elsewhere in Islamic literature, and that those who run the website eventually gave into pressure to remove the fatwa from the website, although it was not revoked. (Even so, I suspect it referred to judicial penalties for men caught in the act of sodomy, not to the murder by armed gangs of men they accused of being gay.) Hilli alleged that a new fatwa had been issued since, to the effect that gays and lesbians should be killed and burned. He claimed also that the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq had an office in London and a huge influence on Iraqis here, that their agents had been monitoring and threatening him, and that people had asked him how dare he challenge Sistani who was such a “holy man”. He said that Sistani was a man, but not at all holy.

The next speaker was Houzan Mahmoud, about whom I have earlier written this. She thanked OutRage for supporting her campaign from the beginning, and said that it was not just gays but also women, students and people generally who were under threat in Iraq. Women, she said, were 60% of Iraqi society and had lost nearly all their rights; that the US and UK had installed a right-wing reactionary regime full of “ayatollahs” and “mullahs”, and that a religious constitution had been promulgated which was full of insults to women. They wanted to bring back Shari’a and install a regime akin to that of Iran or Saudi Arabia (note: Iraq last had Shari’a law under Ottoman rule, which was not akin to Iran or Saudi Arabia).

Her “Organisation of Women’s Freedom in Iraq” was founded in June 2003, and its main aim is secularism, because in their view as long as religion has a role in the state or in education, there can be no progress or freedom. They want to see religion “privatised” world-wide. OWFI was not purely a local group, she said, but part of a worldwide movement.

Women had been attacked and killed in Iraq for not wearing the veil; many gangsters were kidnapping women and young girls and boys for trafficking purposes. Islamists were making lists of women to kill in one suburb called al-Dora as part of some cleansing process. The puppet government was put together on sectarian lines, and had no relevance to the people and were incapable of protecting people or providing basic services. The “Iraqi Freedom Congress”, of which OWFI are a part, were mobilising people to resist both the occupation and the religious takeover of the country. The militias are not a mass movement, but are well-funded, including by leftists in the west. The occupation must end, but not at the cost of a religious regime similar to that of Saudi Arabia, Iran or the Taliban.

The final speaker was Peter Tatchell, who obviously addressed from a gay point of view, pointing out how recent developments brought home to the community in the UK how they are the lucky ones; that they can’t imagine how difficult things are in other parts of the world, not just in Iraq but also Jamaica and Zimbabwe among other places. Much of OutRage’s work has been building solidarity with gay communities in other countries. The situation facing gays in Iraq had not even been reported in the gay press, not because of deliberate oversight but because people simply did not know about it. OutRage wanted to bring the story to people to raise solidarity.

Tatchell said that the sex industry had been growing because people were selling their bodies just to raise money for basic necessities. People were becoming trapped by gangs who made sure to photograph them in sexual acts, which they threatened to publish if those involved decided to leave the industry. Their families may also be endangered, because families are blamed for their children’s homosexuality. It is also known for the militias to threaten to kill the families of homosexuals who have gone beyond their reach unless they surrender.

Tatchell urged the community to demand that pressure be put on the Iraqi government to abide by their own purported commitments to human rights and to their own constitution, flawed as it is (he pointed out that it had exceptions for honour killings). He asked for money to be raised to establish safe houses in safer parts of Iraq, to help people escape to Syria and Jordan, and to pay for equipment, communication and travel costs.

The meeting was then opened up for questions, and the first was whether they considered that Islam itself was to blame for the situation they were facing. Ali Hilli replied that he did not believe this; that Islam was a religion of peace and love (Houzan interjected that this was not true), but people use it for whatever purposes they want, as with other religions.

Sacha Ismail of Workers’ Liberty then stood up and apologised for the British Left, some of whom had remembered only what it was against and forgotten what it was for. Houzan Mahmood told us that she was an atheist who saw no good in Islam; she believed it was not progressive and did not allow a space for everyone to live peacefully. She believed that it did not belong to this century.

Lesley Mansell of the TUC’s National LGBT Committee told the speakers that she and her associates had been trying to raise these issues in the TUC and planned to do so at a forthcoming session. She asked if gay organisations had tried to contact trade unions, to which Ali Hilli replied that they had not, but were trying, and that they presently numbered only thirty people who were presently involved in a media campaign against homophobic fatwas.

Various other questions were fielded, among them at least two from “gay Muslims” seeking to defend Islam from Houzan Mahmood’s attacks; one of them said she had not come to defend her faith, but found herself forced to. Ali Hilli told the meeting that he did not have any hope for Iraq now, and blamed the invasion for the present situation. He said that Saddam Hussain was an evil man and oppressed religious people, but under his rule people did at least live peacefully together and there was a sense of Iraqi nationhood which has disappeared since.

As far as I can tell, I was the only ordinary Muslim to have ventured in (as opposed to Gay Muslim or communist of Muslim ancestry), although I didn’t stop for long to ask anyone else. I must say I was moved to sympathy with the gay aspect of the situation presented last night; of course, as Muslims, we don’t condone homosexual behaviour, but we absolutely condemn gangsterism, kidnapping, blackmail, armed thugs presuming to be moral vigilantes, and the threatening of families for one member’s deeds. What annoyed me immensely was Houzan Mahmood’s portrayal of her Worker-Communist front group as some sort of authentic mainstream secularist feminist movement, when it is in fact a militantly atheist Marxist movement. Houzan Mahmood, in both her dress (a purple top and tight jeans with holes) and her attitudes, is not at all representative of Iraqi women. Many, if not most, Iraqi women are religious to a greater or lesser degree and would not benefit from her idea of “freedom”; a read of the manifesto of the “Iraqi Freedom Congress” reveals that they seek to “confiscate and repossess all the properties and estates belonging to religious foundations and utilise them to meet social, recreational and political needs of the people”, and the “complete separation of religion from state and education”. Such demands could only come from either secular nationalists of the Turkish variety, or communists - and we all know about Houzan’s commie pals Maryam, Homa and so on.

As bad as this was her attempt to bring Iraqi trade unionists into her “struggle” as if communists were any friends of trade unions. It’s a well-known fact that free trade unions do not exist in communist dictatorships (the only place in the old eastern bloc where we heard from the unions was Poland, and we all know what happened there); free trade unionists tend to coincide with other types of freedom, such as freedom of religion. There should really be no conflict between Islam and trade unionism per se; in fact, one of the well-known Islamic scholars of Syria, Shaikh Abdul-Rahman Shaghouri, was a trade union activist earlier in his life. It certainly would not benefit workers if Muslims were to be alienated from unions because they are dominated by people hostile to Islam, or trying to hijack them for their revolution.

I wonder if all of those leftists who indulge these Worker-Communists are aware of their real agenda? Peter Tatchell is a member of the Green Party, so surely he is aware that communism led to environmental disasters such as Chernobyl and the dreadful pollution which was in evidence in industrial areas in the old eastern bloc. (Of course, the western bloc put out its fair share of pollution as well, and continues to do so, but here people are not afraid to talk about it and about means of making the devices which cause pollution cleaner and more efficient.) The “Decent Left” routinely attacks other figures on the British left for associating with Socialist Workers and Islamists, but they still build alliances with this sect and present them (like Nick Cohen) as feminists or secularists, and not as militantly atheist Marxists, and invite them to talk of the situation in Iraq without mentioning their total contempt for the religious feelings of most Iraqis. The fact is: they are in no position to talk of liberating women (or anyone else) in Iraq, because they have nothing in common with most of them.

(Photos to follow, insha Allah.)

The BBC did report it, but their attached picture does not convey how much space there was around the people. There were two Muslim speakers, one of them Sayyida Rend Shakir (whose speech is reproduced at the Muslim Action Committee blog here) and the other an Iraqi called Ali, whose argument was based mostly on things he told us happened in Iraq involving people being jailed or tortured for opposition to Saddam Hussain’s regime. Among the first things that happened when I got there was the announcement that someone had been arrested for holding a particular poster because someone had complained that they found it offensive. The whole crowd was therefore asked to pass it round, because they could not arrest everyone. The poster was the work of some Iranian communist organisation, and I saw one of the protesters see what it was and refuse it. I saw one guy with a placard saying “All religion is anti-human”, and I remarked to those who refused the banner that there was no religion more anti-human than communism.

I was able to stand on the steps, which would not have been possible at a really well-attended rally, and snap away until my battery ran out, which was sadly after taking only about 25 or so pictures, some of which I’ve uploaded to Flickr (note: some of these show people holding up banners containing the offensive cartoons). I heard Keith Porteous Wood of the National Secular Society, the implacable opponents of religious state schooling, tell everyone that the blasphemy law was still on the statute book and was not the dead letter it was made out to be; he told us about the sentences people had received under it in the distant past and how someone from the Gay News died prematurely from the stress of a blasphemy case in the 1970s. (I can’t remember whose name he mentioned; the editor Denis Lemon fell ill with AIDS five years later, and died in 1994.)

My memory’s like a sieve; I can’t really remember much of what I heard yesterday afternoon even though much of it really was quite ridiculous. I should start taking a tape recorder with me when I go to these things. I heard, for example, the famous “first they came for the Jews …” speech, which was followed by a quite ridiculous assessment that it “started with political correctness” and so on. Well, the last time round, cartoons vilifying ethnic groups had an awful lot to do with it, I recall, and political correctness really didn’t. Free expression was inhibited to prevent criticism of the ruling party, not the races and religions they disliked. How stupid and tastless for people to claim persecution in this way when they demand the right to vilify minorities!

Another specious claim was that the famous proverb attributed to Voltaire (I may not agree with what you say etc.) was being put into practice by some of the groups present. What, like Maryam Namazie’s Worker-Communists? She was there to show her enmity for Islam. Nothing more or less than that. The hypocritical demand for “unconditional freedom of expression” is not something she would honour were she to become part of any communist Iranian government. They would refuse to even allow children to be taught Islam, or indeed any other religion:

One of the immediate tasks to guarantee children’s right to a happy, secure and creative life is to protect children from religion’s interference and abuse. To protect children from religion and religious institutions, the Worker-communist Party of Iran would call for the following to be implemented: 1- Prohibition of religious or religious institutions and material or moral interference with children under the age of 16. Prohibition of recruitment of children under 16 to religious sects, ceremonies and religious assemblies. Prohibition of veil for anyone under the age of 16. Prohibition of genital mutilation or circumcision of children.

Another specious claim was attributed to some guy who had been in prison in Soviet Russia, who had said about western Europeans that he had lived our future and it wasn’t very good, or something to that effect. It was commented at Harry’s Place that NO2ID should have been there, but were not in evidence; in the hour I was there, very little was said about the authoritarian laws which have been introduced by Tony Blair, much less by George W Bush; the talk was nearly all about religion, and not merely about the religious hatred laws, but about the general tendency towards avoiding giving offence regarding people’s religions: for example, the fact that no British newspaper reprinted the Danish cartoons was noted as a point of shame.

Towards the end, we were introduced to someone who had made a donation towards the event: none other than Labi Siffre, the author of one of the most irritating songs of the 1980s, Something Inside So Strong. Siffre opined that not all opinions deserve any respect, among them sexist, racist and homophobic beliefs and the belief that one knows there is a God. And he went off on a general anti-religious diatribe. There was also Sean Gabb from the Libertarian Alliance, who named Nick Griffin, Abu Hamza, David Irving and Frank Ellis, the university lecturer who has been suspended after a controversy about his racialist opinions, as people who have been victimised for exercising free speech - “among other things” in the case of Abu Hamza. Obviously he mentioned these four people because they are the sort of people whose right to free speech people in general would not go very far to defend, to which I would reply: for very good reasons, particularly in the cases of Griffin and Abu Hamza, although I happen to think Frank Ellis’s racialist views need not prejudice his teaching of Russian unless he should let it. The truth is that I worry too much for people’s life and limb, particularly those of the Muslims of West Yorkshire, to care about Nick Griffin’s freedom of speech.

As far as I could see the whole affair was very orderly; the organisers tried to make the event “inclusive”, inviting Sayyida Rend Shakir and disassociating themselves from a rally organised by a pro-deportation group in Copenhagen. However, the turnout seemed mostly to be a mixture of those generally hostile to religion and those specifically hostile to Islam, and the comparison of laws aimed at curbing inter-communal hostility with persecution of people because of their political opinions simply does not ring true. Poking fun at politicians and other powerful people is not the same as vilifying a minority group by such means as insulting their religion; the former is among the ways of bringing the powerful to account, while the latter is the beginning of persecution, or worse. It never seems to occur to people that Muslims object to this vilification not because they want to silence debate about religion, but because they fear that it may lead to violence, particularly when it is accompanied by rhetoric about Muslims grooming and pimping white girls in Yorkshire.

One commenter at Harry’s Place reported that he “got followed by a group of hostile muslims, unbeknownst to us, who ran in the pub and tried to tear up another bloggers Toonophobia placard, nearly came to blows” (he also blogged the rally, and the guy in the bottom picture between the two police photographers, and in the second to bottom picture with his face above the black speaker’s microphone, is me), but despite the five Asian men trying to cause a fight in a pub after the event, nobody attempted to disrupt the event while I was there. In fact, Muslims stayed away from this en masse, demonstrating either that they did not know about it, or that they had no desire to cause a fight. If anyone thinks that Muslims in this country are out to destroy free speech, they might ask themselves why they made no attempt to disrupt or obstruct this demonstration.

When I got there, I somehow thought it was in meeting room 6, which is in the locked West Wing of the Beit Quadrangle. In fact, it was in room 3, something I found out only when I got to the security lodge to find the security guard discussing the invasion of the meeting with someone from the Union. It turned out that the meeting was only meant to be for students at the college, and that outsiders were not welcome. A number of known wreckers were present, and the union guy wanted Security to throw them out.

The union guy and the security guard took the lift, so I headed up the stairs to the third floor, where all the meeting rooms at the Imperial College union are. When I got there, it appeared that Iranians were the majority of those present. Despite it being a Respect meeting, it seemed that none of the group’s MAB wing were there. There were hardly any beards and no hijabs, for one thing. The two men I met at the security lodge explained to everyone that the meeting was only for students, and that if non-students did not leave, the speaker would not appear - it was that simple. It was also suggested that other security people could come along and “help” the unwelcome guests out.

I sat about two rows from the back, next to a young white woman who was next to a guy who looked middle-eastern and middle age, who was Imperial College staff. He said he didn’t know who the people were. The Iranians insisted that the only reason the speaker did not want to address them as well as the students was that she had something to hide. They also protested that they had been invited by student friends, and that some of them had come a long way.

The upshot was that the organisers said they would go and see Rostami and try and find some compromise. While all this was going on, the visitors argued very loudly, mostly in their own language (Persian, probably) but with bits of English thrown in. Bits of paper were passed around detailing various atrocities by the Iranian régime, in particular, against the Ahwazi Arabs; there was a picture of two men hanging, named as Ali Afrawi and Mahdi Nawaseri. The flyer alleges that the régime “treats Ahwazi women as less than dogs”. But I can recognise Arabic, though not understand it, and the language they were speaking wasn’t Arabic. They alleged that Rostami wanted to tell lies and to brainwash the students.

I turned round and asked a few of the students behind me if they knew who the visitors were. I asked if they were the Worker-Communist Party of Iran and if the woman two rows in front of me was indeed Maryam Namazie. I explained that I wanted to know for my own purposes and wasn’t working for anyone’s secret service, and got the reply that if I was, I’d know who they were. I also explained that certain Iranian communists had a habit of passing themselves off as secular liberals and are fêted even by American neo-cons. One of them claimed that the US government would only support fundamentalist mullahs, not communists, but then, I wasn’t talking about the government, but about a certain neo-con website. He wasn’t in any mood to hear any defence of “the mullahs”, not that I had one to offer.

I tried to suggest a compromise of my own: that the group might get hold of a PA system of some sort, so that Rostami could speak into a mike in that room and the guests she did not want to meet could hear it in another room. Trouble was, I had to speak across one of the noisy Iranians, who proceeded to show me some of his pictures of people hanging and to tell me that they weren’t barbaric, like the mullahs. (Not until they get to power, at least.) When I tried talking personally to one of the organisers, she explained that it was late and that the room where they might get such equipment was locked.

Anyway, by about 7:30pm, the organisers (I didn’t get any names the whole evening) came back in and told everyone that Rostami had gone home, so there was going to be no meeting and they might as well all go home now. So that was that. I had seen pretty much all I had come to see, anyway. Some people I spoke to as I made my way down the stairs said that the Iranian guests talked much of democracy, but their behaviour was not really consistent with that. I replied that democracy, in any case, is for members of a group, not outsiders; in the same way as non-citizens of a country cannot vote in its elections, people outside a union can’t dictate to it who it invites, or doesn’t invite, to its meetings. Myself, I’ve a world of disagreements with the Iranian régime, from a Muslim perspective, but would this rabble be any better if they were in power? Absolutely not!

David T’s article is more positive than you might expect (although perhaps not given the recent history of the publication). The PDF is composed of images rather than text so I can’t copy and paste it (perhaps that’s the idea, but it’s usually the sign of a badly-composed PDF), but it’s on page 13 and is entitled Racists in Secularist Clothing, it takes apart conspiracy theories, in which:

Familiar arguments about non-white immigrants have been recast as critiques of Islamism, complete with conspiracist fantasies - usually about something called “Eurabia” - which bear more than a superficial resemblance to antisemitism. In its purest form, all Muslims are thought to be engaged, either consciously or unwittingly, in a demographic and cultural plot to destroy western society generally.

As for Houzan Mahmoud, they have allowed her to spout an anti-Muslim diatribe while posing as the “UK representative of the Organisation of Women’s Freedom in Iraq”, which is a somewhat gramatically-challenged name for a front group for the Worker-Communist Party of Iraq. I’m not sure if the GALHA know that she is a communist; the western media were quite happy to play along with the “Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan” for quite some time without noticing what should have been obvious from their name: that they are Marxists and as such highly untypical of the women of Afghanistan. Right now, the Worker Communists are the toast of liberal society and able to use such venues as Conway Hall for their speaking engagements, which may well be why they use the language of gender equality and other liberal causes. But women’s experience in real communist states has been characterised by the double burden of work and childcare and by “equal opportunity brutality”.

Houzan Mahmoud starts off on the topic of the Jyllands Posten blasphemy case, in which the Danish newspaper ran twelve cartoons of the Prophet (sall’ Allahu ‘alaihi wa sallam), in various poses including one with a bomb-shaped turban. Muslim community organisations took the case to court and, as might be expected, lost. Houzan’s article leaves out the obvious defamatory content of the cartoons, preferring to concentrate on the fact that Muslims object to the drawing of pictures of the Prophet (sall’ Allahu ‘alaihi wa sallam):

The common denominator - whatever the political size or relative weight of these protestors - is that all preach that people cannot use that most intrinsic of human capabilities - our imagination - to depict the prophet (sic). Islamists assert that Mohammed never sat for a portrait, so - by definition - his pictorial representation is an act against Islam, a blasphemy.

The author asserted that various foreign ambassadors “fired off letters of complaint to the Danish prime minister and demanded he condemn this newspaper and clamp down on it”, something the governments of certain countries have been known to do when the western media criticise them, not just Islam or the Prophet (sall’ Allahu ‘alaihi wa sallam). The fact remains that a newspaper appears to have decided to offend Muslims’ sensibilities for its own sake, taking advantage of an anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant political climate. Even if Muslims in Europe are as powerful as some haters suppose we are, insulting our religion really does nothing to redress any injustice; insulting people’s religions generally has the same effect as insulting people’s parents, which is exactly the reason Allah ta’ala gives for telling us, in the Qur’an, not to curse others’ idols. There are good reasons why social taboos exist for delivering such insults. And it’s a fact that Muslims can revere the Prophet (sall’ Allahu ‘alaihi wa sallam) without needing to know what he looked like.

Houzan falsely asserts that Islam has become “the exceptional religion”, “with the clear implication no one has the right to even mildly criticise it” (grammatical oddity hers). Anyone who has looked on the internet for long enough the past few years, especially (but not only) since 9/11, will know that there are entire websites dedicated to slandering Islam and Muslims and entire books published with the same purpose. There have been flurries of anti-Islamic sentiment in response to every major incident involving Muslims, or thought to involve Muslims, which have involved Muslims, or Sikhs mistaken for Muslims, being shot or stabbed. Despite the complaint on the page of GHQ following Houzan’s article, most Muslim children are not educated in Muslim schools but in second-rate secular state schools, and those that exist were not established as Muslim state schools, but as private schools. If people want dedicated secular humanist schools, as opposed to neutral state schools, they are quite at liberty to set them up.

The “brutal truth”, according to Howzan, “is that Islam - in the contemporary Middle East - has justified people killing, stoning, imprisoning, veiling and forcing women into burqas. Women are imprisoned in the name of political Islam - a crime against all of humanity”. She does not elaborate on where or how they are “imprisoned”. She also alleges that “progressives and secularists of all kinds have been persecute simply because they challenged political Islam’s intrusion on the private realm of human beings …”, which if true, refers to governments acting in excess of what Islam permits, let alone demands, and the practices found in a number of Muslim countries are widely criticised by Muslims as well as others. Her definition of “freedom”, as ever for Worker Communists, does not apply to religious people:

So-called ‘freedom of choice is cited to impose the veil on young girls and ‘freedom of expression’ to open Mosques, religious schools to bring up a brain washed generation of young people, and to silence those of us who want to tell the truth about them to society.

Communist states, remember, traditionally do not shy from the brain-washing of young people themselves; in many cases they have even encouraged them to spy and inform on members of their family who refuse their indoctrination. They have no respect for the autonomy of young people under the arbitrary age of 18, which is why, in their briefing no. 143, they demanded that the British government “is duty-bound to intervene now and ensure that Shabina Begum has the right to an education - whether she likes it or not - just as it intervenes to ensure children don’t work or smoke, despite their preferences”.

Houzan then goes on to accuse “the Islamists” of using “the western states’ espousal of ‘multiculturalism’ to inflict violence against women and girls and practise the most barbaric ‘traditions’ within these so-called ‘Muslim communities’”. This is simply not true. Islamists have nothing to do with such matters as female genital mutilation, to which they are often opposed, as anyone with knowledge of what Islamic literature actually says on the subject would be. As for violence against women, wife beaters are wife beaters, regardless of their ideology.

The hypocrisy remains to the final paragraph:

Freedom of speech and expression should be protected. Criticism of all religions and Islam must be viewed as a normal right of all people. The progress of any human society can be measured by how free it is from religion. Questioning, criticizing and finally separating religions from politics is the only guarantee for a healthy, secular and egalitarian society.

And the reality we see from actual Communist-ruled countries is that they are not egalitarian at all; rather, there is a privileged class, namely the party’s leadership and those surrounding them, with their Zil limousines and opulent dachas, and there is the struggling mass of the population and a persecuted underclass of those the party dislikes, such as those who dared to actually vote in an election rather than assist the party in stuffing the ballot boxes. And this is at best; at worst, we see the notorious excesses of Mao’s China, Nicolae “Socialism in One Family” Ceausescu’s Romania (I’ve heard this used as a byword for a miserable and fear-ridden household) and Pol Pot’s Cambodia. The excesses reported from Iran, such as the incident of a judge personally killing a female defendant with whom he was angry, are to be condemned by Muslims as well as everyone else (if they are true), as is the notorious Khomeini personality cult, but it remains to be seen if Houzan Mahmood’s communists would allow us the same freedom to criticise the excesses of their judges, police and politicians if, Allah ta’ala forbid, they ever gain power anywhere.

Jeremy Corbyn, who was chairing the session, took four or five questions from WPI supporters. He answered one himself, explaining that whatever their views on the present government all Iranians would agree that they didn’t want their country bombed by the USA. The problems began when other contributors took a different line from the WPI, who shouted them down along with the ambassador’s replies and refused to allow the meeting to continue. They were then ejected from the room. As they were bundled out, one was heard to shout “Bomb the fascists!”

Phobewatch also notes that they distributed a poster containing pictures of the Mashhad hanging, the victims of which were said to be two “boys” whose crime was consensual sodomy. In fact, this claim is disputed, with Human Rights Watch and others not convinced that the crime was not in fact rape. Pedro Carmona points out that homosexual rape is not generally equated with homosexuality in Iran - even in this country, a substantial percentage of perpetrators and victims are heterosexual, hence the slang “bully ramming”.

They also note that Homa Arjomand, of the same communist sect, gained the praises of Alyssa Lappen in Front Page Magazine, and Lappen also appears not to have bothered to dig up Arjomand’s political connections, surprising given the site’s vitriolic anti-communist and general anti-leftist stance, which is written all over it, including its front page.

Cohen, however, presents her as a liberal, which is true only if you exclude only those who believe that religion and politics should be connected in some way from being called liberal:

She ought to be a liberal poster girl. Her life has been that of a feminist militant who fights the oppression of women wherever she finds it. She was born in Tehran, but had to flee with her family when the Iranian revolution brought the mullahs to power. After graduating in America, she went to work with the poor in the Sudan. When the Islamists seized control, she established an underground human rights network. Her cover was blown and she had to run once again. She’s been a full-time campaigner for the rights of the Iranian diaspora, helping refugees across the world and banging on to anyone who will listen about the vileness of its treatment of women.

Of course, women’s rights abruptly cease whenever the rights involved are religious rights. In the WPI Briefing no. 143, Namazie insisted that Shabina Begum’s rights had been breached “but not because she has been banned from wearing the jilbab to school … [but] because the British government has failed to intervene to compel her to attend school for the past several years”. Funny definition of freedom, that, although it’s one with which Cohen and his ilk might sympathise.

Cohen also praises Namazie for using “her description of the obsessiveness of theocracy” as her “best rhetorical weapon”. “The law in Iran not only allows women to be stoned, she says,” as if it doesn’t allow men to be stoned as well in given circumstances, “but it specifies the size of the stones to be used; they mustn’t be too small in case it takes too long to kill her and the mob gets bored; but mustn’t be too big either, in case she is dispatched immediately and the mob is denied the sado-sexual pleasure of seeing her suffer”. Never mind the fact that Islamic adultery laws make it all but impossible to get to the stage of stoning someone (the Iranian version may reduce this somewhat, however); the law specifies that the stones be of moderate size so that the stoning has the desired effect. There are similar rules concerning the nooses used to hang people and the appropriate length, so that the victim, for want of a better word, is neither strangled nor beheaded.

Along with fellow Worker-Commie Homa Arjomand, Namazie was involved in the Canadian anti-arbitration campaign:

It was the decision of broad-minded politicians in Ottawa to allow Sharia courts in Canada which did it for her. They said if they were not established, the Muslim minority would be marginalised and to say otherwise was racism pure and simple.

After years of hearing this postmodern twaddle, Namazie flipped. Why was it, she asked, that supposed liberals always give ‘precedence to cultural and religious norms, however reactionary, over the human being and her rights’? Why was it that they always pretended that other cultures were sealed boxes without conflicts of their own and took ‘the most reactionary segment of that community’ as representative of the belief and culture of the whole.

Never mind the fact that the law under which arbitration was to be implemented had already been in force for years, was already in use by other communities (some of whose religious laws give women less rights than the Shari’ah does) and had nothing to do with criminal law. There were to be no stonings in Ontario! To refuse to grant Muslims equality under the law may not be racism, but it’s unjustified discrimination particularly when the reasons are invalid, either because they are insincere (such as the dhimmi-taunting from Spencer and the gang) or because they apply more to the people already using the system.

Cohen then goes off on a tangent about “cultural relativism”, first quoting Namazie:

‘It promotes tolerance and respect for so-called minority opinions and beliefs, rather than respect for human beings. Human beings are worthy of the highest respect, but not all opinions and beliefs are worthy of respect and tolerance. There are some who believe in fascism, white supremacy, the inferiority of women. Must they be respected?’

There are some people who believe that people should be deprived of the businesses and farms they have worked for generations and that the kulaks must be eliminated. Should these views be respected?

Cohen also cites one Richard J Evans, professor of modern history at Cambridge, who “pointed out in Defence of History that if you take the relativist position to its conclusion and believe there’s no such thing as truth and all cultures are equally valid, you have no weapons to fight the Holocaust denier or Ku Klux Klansmen”. In fact, Holocaust deniers are simply liars, and they need only be refuted with facts, whille the Klan (at least those of the past) were a paramilitary death squad who were fought by force and by law (and by infiltration, notably by someone who passed on their silly rituals to publishers who then used them as the basis for children’s literature, as described in Freakonomics). They cannot in any way be compared to an established religion which is not a male supremacy cult, but which women as well as men embrace and defend.

Cohen’s article is appallingly dishonest and hypocritical. Cohen regularly attacks people of a secular persuasion who co-operate with those of religion; in this case, he praises the National Secular Society for cosying up to someone with a barely-hidden agenda: a communist take-over of Iran. Communists don’t take over a country without shedding an awful lot of blood both in the process and afterwards. Maryam Namazie is not a liberal, and people who admire her “championing of women’s rights” should be aware of this, and not make her out to be any less an “enemy of freedom” than the Socialist Workers or other far-left activists.