United in hate

20 August 2005

Douglas Davis shows how secular Marxists and Islamic fundamentalists have buried their differences to wage war on the war against terror

But there are small voices of doubt. To some within Britain’s Trotskyite Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, the unholy marriage is outright heresy. One Trot describes SWP advocates of the Black–Red alliance as ‘demoralised Guardian readers with headscarves’, a withering allusion to the SWP organiser who ordered secular, socialist women to cover their heads while demonstrating with their Muslim sisters outside the Israeli embassy in London. And he is scathing of SWP monitors who enforced gender segregation to mollify Muslim sensibilities at a demonstration in Trafalgar Square. ‘Marxists are secular or they are not Marxists,’ said the Trot with principled purity.

Dogma runs deep. The Islamists accentuate the positive, noting Galloway’s opposition to abortion and his professed religious faith, which, according to one, ‘will surely be welcomed by British Muslims who see Respect as a real alternative’. And why complain when the Left is so obligingly on message? Take Spark, the organ of Arthur Scargill’s Socialist Labour party, which hailed Asif Mohammed Hanif, the British suicide-bomber who attacked a beachfront bar in Tel Aviv, as a ‘hero of the revolutionary youth’. Hanif, declared the paper, had carried out his mission ‘in the spirit of internationalism’.