Nick Cohen, for whom I have a great deal of time, does not identify the "Iranian Leftists" who are apparently following Ken Livingstone around. I doubt that they bear too much resemblance to the North West Durham Constituency Labour Party. Surely, he cannot be advocating support for the sectarian, Marxist Left?
Like him, I have no truck with the alliance between such people and the followers of Sayyid Qutb and Sayyid Abul Ala Maududi. I have never been active in the Stop the War Coalition precisely because I have never been able to associate myself with either of them. I managed to swallow very hard and vote for Respect in the first European Elections after the invasion of Iraq almost as a sort of prayer for the pro-life Catholic, who was never so much as Tribune Group member while he was an MP, who was that party's front man.
(Last time, I voted for No2EU - Yes To Democracy because its candidates around the country included Peter Shore's old agent, the former Leader of the Liberal Party, and leaders of the Visteon and the Lindsey oil refinery workers. But, again, an inability to ally with Communists and Trotskyists was why I did not seek to become one of its candidates, even though, however remote the chance of election, I was given considerable cause to believe that an attempt to be selected would have met with some success. Subsequent developments have proved my wariness correct.)
But then, in lining with the neocons against Iran, and in peddling claims with the same amount of factual basis as Saddam Hussein's giant paper-shredder, his weapons of mass destruction or his links to the events of 11th September 2001, Nick Cohen is himself supporting just such an alliance, between Saddam's beloved PMOI/MEK on one side and Jundullah on the other.
Now that he is writing for the Jewish Chronicle, and that despite angrily insisting that he was not remotely Jewish while joining in the choral shrieking of "anti-Semitism" against the slightest criticism of the Iraq War, will Cohen turn his attention to the country in which the governing coalition includes people who believe that Gentiles were created as beasts of burden, the country in which those who wish to adhere to historic Rabbinical orthodoxy face denaturalisation by another coalition party and so increasingly live on territory outside the State's borders, the country in which everyone born into certain ethnic minorities is automatically subject to Sharia judges who are appointed and paid by the State, the country in which the only city on earth to be governed according to the teachings of Qutb has voted overwhelmingly to remain, the country in which at least one elected Member of Parliament calls for the capital city to be made that of the Caliphate, the country that is shaping up to give the demographic centre of Shi'ism the nuclear final solution of the Wahhabis' dreams? One for his Observer column, perhaps.
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Why does nobody on the Right ever ask what it says about Boris Johnson, that he is so enthusiastically supported by Cohen, Martin Bright and Andrew Gilligan? What sort of "Tory" would they ever support?
ReplyDeleteAsaduddin Owaisi, wouldn't he want Delhi to be the capital of a caliphate again?
ReplyDeleteIf anything (and I am sure that he is absolutely loyal to the Constitution of India), he would want it to be at Hyderabad, preferrably under a restored Nizam.
ReplyDeleteThere wasn't originally anything All India about what is now called the All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen, and it is notable that Hyderabad remains its only Lok Sabha seat.
Hyderabad was the 21-gun salute state, but then it would never have come into existence as a kingdom if we had not been destabilising the Mughal Empire at the time.
The memory of either of them, respectively in the South and in the North, does of course underlie, on the one hand the All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen and various other staunchly Indian Muslim movements in the South, and on the other hand, the Darul Uloom Deoband's ferocious hostility to Jinnah's two nations theory.
After all, if at least two highly successful Caliphate states have existed in what is now India, one at Delhi (incorporating all of present-day Pakistan and most or all of present-day Bangladesh) and the other at Hyderabad, both with huge and even predominant populations of Hindus and others, then such states manifestly can exist, and therefore could exist again. One to watch, I fear.
As is the increasing courtship of Muslims by the BJP, tapping into that nationalistic sentiment, including by always including Urdu among the Indian languages to be promoted instead of English, while accusing Congress, not without cause, of taking Muslim votes for granted and of corruption in the administration of waqf funds and amenities.
India is endlessly fascinating.
All hail the Mossad Martyr of the Daily Telavivagraph!
ReplyDelete"Iranian Leftists"? An obvious swing constituency in London. People who want a Tory mayor should come out and say so.
ReplyDeleteI would have voted for No2EU if you had been on their list. At the next European elections every Lib Dem seat will be up for grabs. Think about it.
Cohen has apparently rejoined the Labour Party. Several of the blogosphere characters who peddle this sort of thing are certainly in it.
ReplyDeleteI don't hold with the London Mayoralty, London being really run by central government quangoes and by the Borough Councils. But it is supposed to be terribly important. And in any case, it is an elected office, and that alone is the present point.
Yet there they are, campaigning for Boris Johnson. So, what do you have to do to get expelled from the Labour Party these days?