{"id":304,"date":"2009-01-31T16:09:38","date_gmt":"2009-01-31T14:09:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/?p=304"},"modified":"2009-01-31T16:09:38","modified_gmt":"2009-01-31T14:09:38","slug":"workers-liberty-a-muddled-message-on-gaza-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/workers-liberty-a-muddled-message-on-gaza-war\/","title":{"rendered":"Workers Liberty – a muddled message on Gaza War"},"content":{"rendered":"

An online discussion of this article can now be found on the AWL website, here<\/a>.<\/strong>
\n* * *
\n\"yestopeace.jpg\"The most recent issue of Solidarity<\/a> features a number of articles about the conflict in Gaza. These articles do the AWL no credit.
\nIra Berkovic’s \u201cWho speaks for Jewish people in Britain?\u201d reports on the rallies organised by the Jewish community in Britain without once mentioning the politics of those rallies. That’s extraordinary. More than that, it’s dishonest. As even the BBC reported, these rallies called for peace and an end to Hamas terror. They were not the mirror-image of the pro-Hamas rallies which \u2013 as you reported elsewhere in Solidarity \u2013 did call for the destruction of the Jewish state.
\nBut to be fair, I think the comrades of the AWL may not be deliberately misrepresenting the Jewish community rallies. I think the article actually reveals the depth of your ignorance. You don’t actually know what the rally was about — because you weren’t there<\/strong>.<\/p>\n


\nAWL members were busy getting their signs torn up at pro-Hamas rallies \u2013 rallies whose political leaders proclaimed slogans with which you completely disagree. But a rally whose demand was ‘Yes to peace, No to Hamas terror’ was somehow of no interest to you.
\nWhich brings me to Sean Matgamna’s article in the same issue. Sean blasts the Socialist Party for concealing its real views (the two-state solution) for fear of being unpopular, or provoking anger from pro-Hamas demonstrators. The question of political courage runs like a red thread in this article and Sean correctly writes that \u201cthe socialist who is afraid to be unpopular who cannot stand against the tide, or even the stream, is a poor little specimen indeed.\u201d
\nReading these articles, as well as the extensive coverage of the AWL’s brave efforts to get its message across to pro-Hamas demonstrators in Sheffield and elsewhere, I cannot help but wonder why the AWL doesn’t present that same message to a 15,000 strong rally in London? (And a decent sized one in Manchester as well.)
\nOne would think that with your \u201cthird camp\u201d politics, you’d be eager to hold up your placards with their \u201cDown with Hamas, Down with the IDF\u201d not only at pro-Hamas rallies, but even at pro-peace ones organised by the Jewish community?
\nBut you don’t. I wonder why. Could it be that the Socialist Party is not the only group on Britain’s far left with a muddled message, lacking in political courage?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An online discussion of this article can now be found on the AWL website, here. * * * The most recent issue of Solidarity features a number of articles about the conflict in Gaza. These…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-304","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-israelgaza"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=304"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=304"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=304"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=304"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}