{"id":1748,"date":"2009-03-08T15:02:28","date_gmt":"2009-03-08T14:02:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/ijwp\/mt.php\/2009\/03\/08\/wcpi_trafalgar_square_it_was_tiny_after_all"},"modified":"2025-10-09T11:38:57","modified_gmt":"2025-10-09T10:38:57","slug":"wcpi_trafalgar_square_it_was_tiny_after_all","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/mt.php\/2009\/03\/08\/wcpi_trafalgar_square_it_was_tiny_after_all","title":{"rendered":"WCPI @ Trafalgar Square: it was tiny after all"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/indigojo\/3337888470\/\" title=\"Maryam Namazie by Indigo Jo, on Flickr\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/farm4.static.flickr.com\/3409\/3337888470_301c3903f1_m.jpg\" width=\"160\" height=\"240\" alt=\"Maryam Namazie\" align=\"right\" style=\"padding-left: 5px; padding-bottom: 5px;\"\/><\/a>I managed to get to the WCPI <a href=\"http:\/\/www.onelawforall.org.uk\/\">&quot;One Law for All&quot;<\/a> rally in Trafalgar Square yesterday afternoon, and as others had advised me it would be, it was tiny after all.  I took some pictures and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/indigojo\/sets\/72157614963743850\/\">posted them to Flickr<\/a>, and they clearly show that the demo was poorly attended: about 100 under the entrance to the National Gallery.  There was an awful lot of &quot;No Shari&#39;ah&quot; sloganeering &#8211; a lot of clich&eacute;s about Shari&#39;ah and comparisons of it to what is practised in Iran, and they concentrated overwhelmingly on Muslim arbitration panels rather than the Jewish panels which have been established for a lot longer.<\/p>\n<p>Most of the speakers were members of the WCPI &quot;Central Committee&quot;, 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 r&eacute;gime, given that police states tend to recycle their old enemies&#39; secret police forces (this happened in both Iran and Russia); I had coined the slogan &quot;Shari&#39;ah, yes, Stasi, no&quot; 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I managed to get to the WCPI &quot;One Law for All&quot; rally in Trafalgar Square yesterday afternoon, and as others had advised me it would be, it was tiny after all. I took some&#46;&#46;&#46;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[32],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1748","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-worker-communists"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p17bgV-sc","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1748","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1748"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1748\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41688,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1748\/revisions\/41688"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1748"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1748"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1748"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}