Halo, Halo (2023)

The Halo Halo! column from the October 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘The fact that a believer is happier than a sceptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality of happiness, and by no means a necessity of life’ (George Bernard Shaw Androcles and the Lion).

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La République est laïque. The Republic is secular. French women want to play football. Bon. They petition to continue their religious repression by wearing hijabs when playing. Not bon.

French Football Federation says Non! If you want to play, remove them. Bon. The decision has to do with separatism rather than the obvious one, if in situ, how are they going to head the ball? How are you going to slow a forward who’s got a yard in pace more than you, with no hair to grab? Female basketball players are also prohibited from same. Who knew basketball was played in France? (BitterWinter, 30 June)

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Is female Islamic sport haram (forbidden)? An ‘expert’ says no, providing no men can see it, participants wear modest, covering clothing and the sport does not lead to any argument or conflict. Also, don’t copy female unbelievers’ hairstyles, clothing or names (Islam Question and Answer 18 September 2015). Some good stuff from the Imam there; no arguments or conflict. Pity religions don’t follow their own advice.

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It’s not all levity at Halo Halo. ‘A German woman who joined the Islamic State (IS) group has been jailed for nine years for crimes including keeping a Yazidi woman as a slave. She was also found guilty of crimes against humanity and membership of a foreign terrorist organisation. A Koblenz court said the 37-year-old had abused the young Yazidi woman for three years while they lived in Syria and Iraq and that encouraged her husband to rape and beat the woman. “All of this served the declared purpose of IS (Islamic State), to wipe out the Yazidi faith,” said prosecutors. In 2014, IS fighters stormed into Sinjar and thousands of men and boys over the age of 12 were summarily killed after being given the ultimatum to convert or die. Some 7,000 women and girls were enslaved and subjected to brutal abuses’ (BBC 22 June).

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Isn’t it odd how some religions eschew ‘love your neighbour’?

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A devout young female Mormon relates how, at age nineteen, she was sent to Argentina as a missionary, and was ecstatic to do so. Whilst there she says she developed horrendous health issues. She claims that indifference was shown to her health problems by the Mormon official in charge. When she asked for proper medical help the response given was, we’ll say a prayer for you. An acolyte of Mary Baker Eddy, do you think? She, and her family, are no longer members of the Mormon organisation (tinyurl.com/36xfsu49).

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The Mormons were founded by Joseph Smith following a visitation from an angel. Information regarding their wealth is hard to come by but like all ‘churches’ it’s beyond the dreams of avarice.

DC

Shamima Begum, the Demon Bride (2023)

From the January 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Jihadi bride’ Shamima Begum and her fight for repatriation are back in the news. This time there appears to be evidence to suggest she and her two companions were trafficked, with various newspapers carrying the latest story. It may come as no particular surprise that Shamima and her two school friends Khadiza Sultana, now dead and Amira Abase, presumed dead, were recruited and helped with their journey from the UK via Turkey to Syria in February 2015. All the girls were between 15 and 16 years old.

A BBC online news article on 30 August reads ‘Shamima Begum and her two friends were smuggled into Syria by an intelligence agent for Canada’ (bbc.in/3h7Cbbd). In Reuters Europe (21 November) it says: ‘Likely a victim of child trafficking her lawyers also said that Begum and her friends entry into Syria was “facilitated” by a Canadian agent working for ISIS’ (reut.rs/3VUKFB7). It seems that the information for those articles comes from a claim made in the book The Secret History of Five Eyes by Richard Kerbaj. Five Eyes is the network of intelligence sharing between Britain, the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. This information may have been known as early as 2015.

There was a Reuters (Ankara) news article on 12 March 2015 by Tulay Karadeniz in which the writer states: A spy who worked for a country in the US-led coalition that is fighting Islamic State had helped three British girls to cross into Syria to join the militants has been caught, the Turkish Foreign minister said on Thursday’ (reut.rs/3iJGLN5). This information came only a month after the girls left the UK. The British public will have heard about this only recently.

Shamima is now 23 years old and is still languishing in a detention camp in Northern Syria. Her UK citizenship was revoked in March 2019 by the then Home Secretary Sajid Javid. The British government is not in theory allowed to deprive a British citizen of their citizenship if that is the only form of citizenship they have. Article 15 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that ‘Arbitrary deprivation of nationality which means deliberately moving to make a citizen stateless is prohibited under these instruments’.

The UK government contended Shamima could apply for Bangladeshi citizenship as her parents were Bangladeshi nationals and as she was under 21 at the time she supposedly could automatically qualify for Bangladeshi citizenship. Bangladesh has continuously denied that possibility. In any case Shamima was born in the UK and has never even been to Bangladesh, her culture is British.

Shortly after arriving in Syria she was married to a Dutch fighter and convert to Islam and went on to have three children who all died young. Her youngest was born in a refugee camp and died within a month of a lung infection. The conditions in these camps were appalling, with temperatures reaching 50 degrees Celsius in summer and below freezing in the winter, bad sanitary conditions and almost non-existent healthcare.

Responding to the death of her last child in the camp Jeremy Hunt stated ‘Shamima knew when she made the decision to join Daesh she was going to a country where there was no embassy, no consular assistance, and I’m afraid those decisions awful though it is, they do have consequences’ (bbc.in/3iLmkzi). But how could a 15-year old have had any idea of what was in store for her when she left the UK?

What makes a girl not yet 16 willingly leave her home, travel to Syria to marry a man she had not even met? Is it romantic notions of marriage and children of her own, a life away from the boredom and monotony of Bethnal Green, or the seduction of going to help her religious compatriots in the face of perceived injustice and alienation, or was it just an ill-thought-out teenage adventure? Shamima maintains she was just a housewife looking after the house and children and said she was assured they (Isis) would take care of her and she would have a perfect family life, but whether she was just a housewife as she claimed or she allegedly sewed explosives into suicide bombers’ vests we probably will never know.

The hypocrisy of accepting that girls of the same age and older were trafficked and abused in the Jeffrey Epstein case but not for Shamima and her even more unfortunate school friends is striking. She has been vilified and demonised in the press, and the British public seemed to be in agreement with her being made stateless. Could it be that women are traditionally regarded as the caring nurturing sex and Shamima was an abomination, or was she made the scapegoat, an example of the government showing it was doing something, picking on the easy target of a young girl?

Since the fall of the Caliphate, the international community was faced with dealing with more than 52,000 ‘foreigners’ stranded in Syria. Thousands returned to their respective countries independently and unmonitored and thousands of others were repatriated to some, including women facing arrest and imprisonment. Out of more than 400 former fighters believed to be back in Britain only about 40 (in 2019) have been prosecuted, most have been placed in rehabilitation schemes. It not as easy for women and children to make their way back home.

The Guardian (26 November 2020) reported that 35 children and 15 British women were being held in barbaric conditions at a camp in Northern Syria. A report by the Rights and Security International charity described conditions as inhumane and degrading, unsafe environments, physical violence common and psychological trauma. Children living in the camps suffering from malnutrition, dehydration and hypothermia with the effect on these children of starting the whole cycle of alienation again. You have to wonder what kind of society turns a blind eye to deliberately causing suffering to women and children, somehow making them responsible for nationalism and war.

The Shamima Begum situation brings up so many issues. The fact that the government can take away what we consider fundamental rights but which turn out to be mere privileges which can be given or taken away arbitrarily. What constitutes a danger to security and the state, your political beliefs, like being a communist in McCarthy’s America? What constitutes an illegal organisation, one that is contrary to the status quo? The misogyny of not only the Islamic fighters wanting what could be described as ‘comfort women’ and the attitude of the British government towards making an example of a young girl. Islamophobia and nationalism rearing its ugly head, seeing them as the savages, fanatics, the ‘other’, dividing workers with god on both sides. The state’s lackeys, the media, constantly pushing the official narrative, hiding news from the public, guiding our opinion to suit the state agenda. We have no idea what is ‘fake news’ anymore.

The world is divided with constantly changing borders, constant wars. The arms industry is the second biggest industry in the world. How many other Shamimas are out there? It does not have to be like this, we could live in a borderless, stateless moneyless society where we co-operate rather than compete. All it takes is a little imagination and the belief that we humans are not the greedy aggressive creatures we are told we are. We are family after all.

Carla D.

Letter: Words and Propaganda (2016)

Letters to the Editors from the February 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Editors

I read ‘What is the Islamic State’ (Socialist Standard, December). I’d also got the Nation at the same time and read ‘No Cause for War’ by Juan Cole. The Paris attacks have filled newspaper pages and the airwaves since 13 November and last week.

The article cites Juan Cole’s blog site as a source. Because words have sensuous power, words matter. Cole for his part uses the term ‘Islamic State’ the first time and then introduces the term ‘Daesh’ that is commonly used for the group in the Arabic press. It is Daesh that Cole uses from then on.

Propaganda works. We tend to categorise new information according to a generalisation of the prototype that heads each of our mental categories. Using the label ‘state’ tends to reify a gang of Mafioso or a drugs cartel into a conceptually real state. This is ideological thinking and we should avoid doing it and spreading it.

Look what the USSR did to the perception of socialism through the power of a misapplied word. Cole introduces the commonly accepted term, defines it away and uses the new signifier in its place which I think is perhaps a proper practice to achieve greater clarity.

Joe R Hopkins. 

Florida, USA.

Terrorism and War: Is There Any Difference? (2016)

From the October 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

We say terror is terror whether unofficial and illegal terrorism or legalised state-sponsored terrorism through conventional warfare.

Since the turn of the century, rarely has a day gone by where there are no terror related stories in the news. Whether it is the Taliban, Al-Qaida or Islamic State, the perceived threat of terrorism against the United Kingdom has always appeared to be a real and ongoing danger to our lives. Whilst such media stories use the term ‘terrorism’ rather freely, they do so with no clear definition of what terrorism actually is. Such is the perception, exacerbated by tabloid news outlets, many individuals could be forgiven for believing that the majority of terrorist acts are committed by those of a radical Islamist background. However, the reality lies deeper than just Islamic State.

Trying to find a definition for terrorism is not easy, as there are a number of differing perspectives of what terrorism truly is. The official government definition in the United Kingdom can be found in the Terrorism Act of 2000, a summary of which is given as;

 ‘The use or threat of the action of violence against a person, serious damage to property, endangerment to a person’s life (other than that of the person committing the action), or serious interference with an electronic system, where the use or threat is designed to influence the government or to intimidate the public or a section of the public and the use or threat is made for the purpose of advancing a political, religious or ideological cause.’

This definition can certainly be linked to Islamist terrorist acts such as 9/11, 7/7, and the recent surge of attacks in Paris, but the general interpretation of this definition fails to acknowledge such acts committed by a state. Violent government responses to the threat of terrorism have been commonplace throughout history, with the wars in Iraq and airstrikes in Syria being recent examples. These have been framed as ‘counter-insurgency’ operations as part of the ‘war on terror’, despite involving acts identical in nature to those committed by radical Islamist terrorists.

The only significant difference between the acts of ‘terrorism’ and ‘counter-insurgency’ is their purpose. Whilst groups such as Islamic State are pushing the ideals of radical Islam, capitalist governments from states such as Britain and the United States strive to achieve a change of government in countries which stand in the way of them pursuing their interests. To disguise the real aim, the American military is said to have been forced to rename their operations in Iraq from ‘Operation Iraqi Liberation’ to ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’, due to fears of suspicious glances towards the acronym OIL.

It is also an expression of the globalisation mentioned by Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto, the constant requirement for accumulation of capital resulting in the need for capitalism to spread everywhere: ‘The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.’

Whilst the threat of terrorism often haunts a conflicted society like capitalism, the heightened media coverage inflates the issue. This fear-mongering allows the state a justification for military action. For the media, any politically or religiously influenced violent act perpetrated by opponents of a capitalist state is defined as terrorism, while the violent acts committed by capitalist states are praised as ‘fighting terror’. This confirms the view of the early 20th century Dutch criminologist Willem Bonger, that acts are only defined as criminal when the resulting damage is to capitalist interests. Violent and destructive state intervention is not regarded as criminal as it is aimed at defending the interests of the ruling class and capitalism as a whole.

Bonger’s theory was also confirmed by the Chilcot report released earlier this year. Despite the decision of Tony Blair to go to a war with Iraq being illegal under international law, no criminal charges have been bought, in spite of the 500,000 civilian lives that were lost as a result of this action. All that the report finds on this is that ‘the UK chose to join the invasion of Iraq before the peaceful options for disarmament had been exhausted’.

Clearly there are double standards applied when it comes to defining what a terrorist is, with the media choosing to marginalise a single group of people and to turn a blind eye to what the political elite in charge of the state does. However, it is not the current definition itself of terrorism that is problematic, but the interpretation of it by an international media platform owned by rich capitalists expressing the viewpoint of the rest of the ruling class.

William Horncastle

What is the 'Islamic State'? (2015)

From the December 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

ISIS stems from the breakdown of Iraq. Its core is former officers of the Iraqi army that served under Saddam and were displaced by the Americans when they disbanded the Iraqi army after the conquest of that country. Those officers found themselves marginalised further by the capture of the state by an expressly Shia political party (under the sway of Iran). The army had been dominated by a confessional and cultural Sunni section of society. They were able to turn to their co-religionists to recruit support to mobilise against the new government. Although Islamic State (as a group) was already formed, and had emerged from Al Qaeda in Iraq and other Islamist insurgent groups, it was this lash up with experienced military commanders that allowed them to make their break through, around 2010.

It was their combat expertise, the poor moral of the new Iraqi army, and the general lack of government authority in several Sunni provinces, that allowed ISIS to capture the heavy weapons and advanced military equipment that enabled it to advance quickly and overrun Iraqi army positions to take control of vast swathes of the country in the north. The other contributory factor in its growth was the breakdown of civil order in Syria, which enabled ISIS to become a participant in that civil war.

Tellingly, in the unrest, Fallujah (already twice bloodily pacified during the US occupation) rose again. Whilst ISIS nominally maintains it controls the city, it is reported that the revolt was by local tribes, using ISIS assistance and military support. ISIS is thought to have about 30,000 fighters, and about 8 million Iraqis under their control. That is not sufficient military force to subjugate an entire population (before the uprising, about 1 in 20 of the Syrian population were employed in the Ba’athist security forces, which partly explains the regime's resilience, and gives an indication of the scale of resources needed to completely suppress a population). In order to hold this population, it projects an image, with global reach, claiming to want to create a universal Caliphate and convert the world to genuine (i.e. its brand of) Islam.

The organisation is concerned with having a fearsome reputation, just as every bandit, feudal baron and Mafioso has needed in the past, in order to protect itself and continue its business. It is all about respect and appearance. Hence the, frankly, incompetent terror attacks on Paris, which were more about show and spectacle than about any sensible military strategic goal. Indeed, it has been noted that when they first encountered significant resistance (the Kurds of Kobane) poor morale and training of ISIS forces saw them handsomely beaten.

Their reputation, though, allows them to carry out their commercial operations. According to Channel Four News ISIS has been able to seize over $400 million in bank robberies. A further $40 million comes from kidnap and ransom operations. Its main source of regular income, though, is the $100 million it makes through selling oil, most of it, surprisingly, to the Assad regime in Syria (http://tinyurl.com/oxp3nfv). The American historian and blogger Juan Cole:

“I would argue that Daesh (ISIS) is analogous to the pirate enclaves of the early modern period. Al-Raqqa, Palmyra, Mosul, Falluja and Ramadi function for it as desert ports, as Tortuga and Port Royal did for pirates in the Caribbean and St. Mary’s on Madagascar did for pirates in the Indian Ocean. It is easy to be misled by the organization’s language of “state.” It is a militia of some 25,000 fighters who conduct raids. They don’t actually do much governing of the places they dominate, and mainly extract resources from them. Tribal raiding states in it for the loot have been common in Middle Eastern history, as with Nadir Shah in the eighteenth century. Looting one city pays for the raid that lets you loot the next. They even make the people who want to emigrate and escape their rule pay a sort of exit ransom” (http://www.juancole. com/2015/11/modern-raiding-pirate.html).

Essentially, then, in his view ISIS is the most spectacularly successful mafia operation in history.

ISIS, far from being an existential threat to the western way of life, is in fact a species of a phenomenon seen time and again in history. Its economic basis is the availability of a natural resource which can be extracted with little labour but which commands a high price (other examples are metals and diamonds in Africa, or narcotics in South America). It complements this resource by the proximity of a disposable, largely uneducated population, whom it can recruit to do its dirty work and fighting. It extends this principle with the mass kidnap of woman, and institutionalised forced marriage and rape as a reward for its soldiers. It is, in essence, no different from the Mexican drugs cartels that terrorise the border regions of that country, and infiltrate and direct the governments there.

Essentially, unlike capitalists who live off surplus value, ISIS and its leadership live off the direct expropriation of material surplus wealth, much as a feudal aristocracy did. Hence why its medieval economics rely on medieval methods of rule. The local populations do not have to be disciplined or mobilised into its system, the way workers have to be, merely passively present to extract wealth of fighting manpower from whenever it is necessary.

The role of religion in this context is to keep the local population compliant, and to help attract recruits. A common confession of faith creates the idea of a common identity, and legitimises the excesses of the ruling gang. It also helps to attract ideologues and recruits from abroad. Its most useful role is in attracting money and support. ISIS follows the Wahabbist trend of puritanical Islam that is prevalent in Saudi Arabia. This (and links between Iraqi and Saudi tribes) allows it to obtain funding from Saudis. That Saudi Arabia is itself locked in a regional power struggle with Iran, which in its turn uses the Shia strand of Islam to spread its influence, means here are geostrategic elements to the precise doctrine followed by ISIS.

The other use for Islam by ISIS is to set its stall out against the Great Powers of America and Europe, and their legacy in the Middle East. ISIS expressly rejects the boundaries drawn up by the colonial powers, and seeks to mobilise people in the region behind it against the Western Powers. Islam is embedded into the culture and history of the region, and in the state building manner of ‘selective invented traditions’ it is trying to forge a polity against the great gangsters of the Western militaries, who are sufficiently successful to make their grabs (which tend to be in terms of the territories and the resources in the ground, rather than their movables directly) almost invisible to the eye.

Whilst Islam as a religion is not the only mobilising factor in the Middle East, it’s clear that it has managed to take the role of being at the forefront of nationalism from the state capitalism of an earlier period as expressed in Nasserism, the Ba'athist regimes in Iraq and Syria and the PLO.

Pik Smeet

Editorial: Neither God nor State (2015)

Editorial from the December 1915 issue of the Socialist Standard

Paris, 13 November 2015. Yet another atrocity in the name of religion. A deliberate attempt to kill as many innocent people as possible, at a pop concert, an international football match, and at random in the streets. Of course there was a political motive behind it. It was as President Hollande said, an act of war.

The ‘Islamic State’, which governs parts of Syria and Iraq, to which the perpetrators owed allegiance and on whose behalf they carried out the atrocity, is at war with various ordinary capitalist states – Syria, Iraq, the United States, Russia, Britain and of course France as well as others.

Deliberately targeting civilians is against the Geneva Convention but not, apparently, against sharia law nor (if you are on the winning side) against realpolitik, as Dresden, Hamburg, Hiroshima and Nagasaki show. Once a war starts in the end anything goes because, if a state loses, then even the life of its rulers is at stake, let alone their position as rulers or the economic interests of its capitalists.

We are dealing, then, with a war atrocity, and wars arise from capitalism. They occur when, in the competition between states for sources of raw material, trade routes, markets, investment outlets and strategic points and areas to protect and acquire these, the rulers of a capitalist state feel that their ‘vital interests’ are at stake and that they have more to lose by not going to war.

In the Middle East what’s at stake is who controls its oil resources and the routes by which the oil reaches the rest of the world. The US and its allies (‘the West’) have been determined to control this and largely do, but this control has always been challenged by local elites. During the Cold War period these used secular nationalism to win mass support, but in 1979 Iran set a new trend, which has since become dominant, by exploiting religion instead. So, anti-Western feeling there, expressing the interests of local elites, now takes the form of militant Islam.

In 2002 President George W Bush denounced Iran, Iraq and North Korea as an ‘axis of evil’. The US State Department quickly added Cuba, Libya and Syria. These all became targets for ‘regime change’. The first to undergo this was Iraq, then Libya, with disastrous results in both cases. Syria was to be the third. This attempt has had an even worse result. Playing the Sunni Muslim card, financed and armed by Saudi Arabia and Qatar, has created a monster that has taken the already extreme version of Islam imposed in Saudi Arabia to an even further extreme, wanting to go back to the 8th century and employing the barbarous methods of that time to get there.

The reaction in France to the atrocity has been to treat it as an attack on the ‘French nation’ whereas it was more accurately an attack on the French state. The result has been a reinforcement of French nationalism and of the false ‘sacred union’ between workers and the ruling class. Yet atrocities committed in the name of the nationalism of so-called ‘nation-states’ are less than those of religion only because these have not been around for so long.

The anarchist Bakunin raised the slogan ‘Neither God, nor Master’.  Adapting it as our response to the Paris atrocity: Neither God, nor State, but Humanity.

Cooking the Books: Islamist Gold (2015)

The Cooking the Books Column from the October 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Islamic State reveals new gold coins in bid to break the “enslavement” of capitalism’ was the headline of a Yahoo! News (tinyurl.com/oo3e9gn) report on a propaganda video IS released at the end of August. Entitled The Rise of the Khalifah and the Return to the Gold Dinar, the video announced the Islamic State’s plan to introduce a new currency in the areas of Iraq and Syria under its control, or, rather, to reintroduce the currency that had circulated there over 1300 years ago. The gold dinar will weigh the same as then, about 4.25 gm, and according to the video will be worth about $139, or £91. As this will be of no use for everyday transactions there will also be a silver dirham, worth $1, and various small denomination copper coins.

The video wasn’t just about returning to the past. It also contained a criticism of the financial system that has developed over the past three or four hundred years in the West and elsewhere. By all accounts, this criticism echoes familiar currency crank objections to ‘money as debt’, fractional reserve banking and the US Federal Reserve, which the video denounced as ‘satanic’. It is this system that it describes as ‘capitalist’ and ‘enslaving’ people and depriving them ‘of their due’.

In short, it echoes the currency crank theory that we are exploited today by banks by having to earn money to pay interest to them. The Islamic State is ‘anti-capitalist’ only in this limited and misleading sense. They are not opposed to capitalism in the more meaningful sense of production for profit based on the exploitation of wage-labour for surplus value. Far from it. Sharia Law accepts the private ownership of means of production and permits and encourages profit-making, and has developed various convoluted ways of paying the equivalent of interest.

Nor is capitalism incompatible with the circulation of gold and silver coins. Until WW1 this was generally the case. And there are open supporters of capitalism – Ron Paul springs to mind – who, while not wanting to go back as far as 713, still want to go back to 1913.

Meanwhile in another part of Syria something quite different is reported to be happening. In the mountains in the North controlled by the YPG, an affiliate of the Kurdish Nationalist PKK, they are said to be implementing ideas developed latterly by the imprisoned PKK leader, Abdullah Ocalan, and introducing a system there where ‘the concept of money is internally redundant’. An enthusiastic supporter writes (tinyurl.com/obnyq6m):

‘The economic needs of the inhabitants of the KCK [Union of Communities in Kurdistan] system are internally supplied through a communal management of resources. 

Although money is utilised in economic dealings with external systems, internally the concept of money is inconceivable. No person or community within the KCK system feels the need to build a surplus of goods or resources. Surpluses are constantly redistributed, therefore, viably consumed. Reminiscent of pre-hierarchical and pre-exploitative societies, the KCK system adopts a culture of gifting, rather than a culture of exchange. The communal organisation of agriculture ensures a self-sufficient production and consumption of resources, therefore deeming surplus, exchange value and the commodification of goods irrelevant.’

We don’t know if this really is happening but it sounds better. Rather forward, on a world scale and in conditions of abundance, to a society where money is redundant than backward to a time when gold and silver used to circulate as money.