As you all may know, I am quite busy in Argentina these days, but I think that I _have_ to say something on this issue that Jared Israel has brought to everybody's attention on this list. In fact, I salute him, because up to this moment Jared has been waging a single man battle against the trend of many in the Left to diminish the anti- Jewish tendencies that can be clearly perceived within a good deal of the Islamicist movement in the Arab countries.
I will now join him in that battle, sharing with him the credit of having both been steady defenders of the rights of the Palestinians, and in fact with full knowledge that the current Palestinian leadership (whether you like them for "bourgeois" or not, is an entirely different matter) shares what I will say here. Some fool may say, "here, here, you see these Nestor and Jared are both Hebrews. Ah, these Jews, they are good up to the moment when someone pokes the finger in their nose, but then they go and scream 'anti-Semite' when they are shown wrong!". But politics and war have not been invented for fools (though they make profit of fools), so that I won't even leave a single second to a debate on that argument. I would like to draw everybody's attention somewhere else, however. Jared has a deep knowledge of Islamicism through the Balkan (particularly Yugoslavian) experience. This experience should, in itself, be sobering enough for anyone who, from the Left, wants to support the Arab (not Palestinian, Arab) nation. It is this background which rises to his mind's eye every time he deals with Islamicists. For some people this may be a slanted vision. Not for me. But it can be argued that Islamicism, which has played an obviously reactionary role in the Balkans, and which has been indeed created by imperialism, nevertheless carries within itself the seeds of a renewed revolutionary wave in the Middle East, in the same way that the Russophile Serbs of the 19th. Century were bound to put an end to pan-Slavism by the simple development of their own positions (see Marx on these issues). In my opinion, this argument is tremendously wrong. What was good with the pan-Slavism of the Serbs was that it worked _in the sense of the construction of a multi-ethnic, multi-racial, nation with full respect of anyone's religious beliefs_ against the ethnocentric, racist and religiously sectarian Ottoman Empire. This is not the case in the Middle East. Islamicists are not seeking to build a multi-ethnic, multi-racial and religiously open Middle East, they are simple the negative copy of the ethnocentrism and bigotry of the theocratic State of Israel. The eventual popular forces within them are smothered by the reactionary ideology, and I don't see any trace of a movement whereby these forces break the straitjacket of Islamicist reactionarism and turn the glove outwards. Thus, the basic and most reactionary trait of Islamicism is that it runs directly _against_ the concept and practice of an Arab nation, by deflecting the rage of the Arabs and the plight of the Palestinians away from the only battle that would bring them a victory, the battle for the constitution of an United Arab Nation from the Atlantic to the Persian Gulf. This is another important reason why the "Islamicist" arguments of battle between Arab and Jew (not between Arab and Israeli) gains momentum, particularly in the imperialist media. While the "explanation" of the events remains on this ground, Israel has the moral ground on their side, and this is something we revolutionaries and socialists cannot accept. Hugs to all in the midst of wuthering days, N�stor Miguel Gorojovsky [EMAIL PROTECTED] ********************************************************************** * Compa�eros del exercito de los Andes. ...La guerra se la tenemos de hacer del modo que podamos: sino tenemos dinero, carne y un pedazo de tabaco no nos tiene de faltar: cuando se acaben los vestuarios, nos vestiremos con la bayetilla que nos trabajen nuestras mugeres, y sino andaremos en pelota como nuestros paisanos los indios: seamos libres, y lo dem�s no importa nada... Jose de San Mart�n, 27 de julio de 1819. ********************************************************************** * ****** _______________________________________________ Leninist-International mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international
