Liberal and Left Movements and the Rise of Islamophobia

Part 1 - the pro-war left

An extract from What is Islamophobia published by Pluto in 2017.

• By Narzanin Massoumi, Tom Mills and David Miller

This chapter focuses on those liberal and left groups and movements that have played a key role in Islamophobic politics. It suggests that collectively these movements can be considered one of the key ‘pillars’ supporting the practice of Islamophobia in the UK and elsewhere. Just as with the other movements discussed in this book, we regard these left and liberal currents as social movements from above. This may seem counter-intuitive, but we suggest that in relation to Islamophobia, the organisations and movements we discuss here have ended up in positions, and undertaking activities, that fit this definition. As we will show in the body of this chapter, a number of the individuals and groups have travelled a long path to this point, beginning their political journeys in social movements from below. This is not terribly surprising. Members of other movements have gone through similar transitions, the best known of which are the neoconservatives, discussed in Chapter 10. Many of the early neocons previously belonged to Trotskyist organisations before moving on to liberal anti-Communism and social democracy, through to extremely reactionary politics. In what follows we focus on four overlapping liberal and left movements:

1. the pro-war left

2. the New Atheists

3. some secularist feminist currents

4. the New Secularists.

We analyse the origins and political trajectories of these distinct but overlapping currents, describing how they coalesced around particular analyses of, and political responses to, events and developments. There is a historical and international context and pre-history to these currents, including the Iranian revolution, the Palestinian intifada and the fall of the Berlin Wall. In the UK in particular, though, we suggest that there were four political conjunctures (though some have wider resonance) which were key in shaping the groupings we discuss below:

(1) multiculturalism as a response to anti-racism;

(2) the Rushdie Affair;

(3) the early ‘War on Terror’ and the 2003 Iraq War;

(4) the domestic ‘War on Terror’ and the Prevent agenda following the London bombings of 2005.

In response to political events and developments such as these, existing networks and movements disintegrate or reconstitute, while new alliances are formed, with individuals and groups coalescing around shared political positions and priorities. In the case of Islamophobia, the relations of left/liberal and secular groups with other Islamophobic currents, most obviously with the neoconservatives and sections of the Zionist movement, but also elements of the far right, have been notable, and are to be expected. By offering an account of the ways in which the above actors and groups have orientated themselves in particular struggles, we show how over time individuals, groups and movements, even those originating in anti-racist struggles (from below), have come to adopt Islamophobic political positions, thereby becoming parts of social movements from above. We turn first to the pro-war left.

The pro-war left

The 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq saw unprecedented levels of public protest around the world, including the largest ever demonstration in British history in London on 15 February 2003. The UK anti-war demonstrations were organised by the Stop the War Coalition (StWC) in partnership with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) and the Muslim Association of Britain (MAB). Stop the War was formed two years earlier, in response to the invasion of Afghanistan, as an alliance between the Labour left, including Jeremy Corbyn and George Galloway, the Socialist Workers Party, which was the dominant political force in the coalition, and other radical left groups. By 2003, however, a host of more mainstream political organisations had affiliated to Stop the War, including the Liberal Democrats, Plaid Cymru and the Scottish National Party. Even a leading national tabloid, the Mirror, supported the demonstration of 15 February 2003 and provided placards on the day.

By that time, StWC and its affiliates could claim support from the majority of the UK public according to some polls, and certainly the overwhelming majority of liberal and left opinion in the UK, which strongly opposed the illegal invasion of Iraq. There were, however, a number of left dissenters who supported the war, and whose opposition to the anti-war movement gave rise to new reactionary political alliances.

The pro-war dissenters included liberal proponents of ‘humanitarian intervention’, who hoped that a greater willingness by the US and its allies to use military force in the Global South might curtail political repression and human rights abuses there, and leftists who identified with a tradition of anti-totalitarianism and left internationalism, and who supported ‘regime change’ in Iraq for similar reasons. Two particularly influential left-wing supporters of the Iraq War in the UK were the journalist and author Nick Cohen, and the long-standing Trotskyist intellectual, Norman Geras.

Nick Cohen was then best known as a left-wing critic of Blairism who wrote a weekly column for the Observer. Through his opposition to New Labour’s treatment of asylum seekers he had got to know London-based Iraqi Kurds, and he claims that it was this which led him to support the 2003 invasion, even while everyone he ‘respected in public life was wildly anti-war’. Cohen subsequently came to believe that the lack of support by the rest of the left for the invasion and occupation of Iraq was a symptom of a profound political malaise that had set in in the wake of the defeats of the radical left as well as the substantive gains won by more ‘mainstream liberal-leftists’ on civil rights. This, Cohen claimed, led a disoriented and morally bankrupt left to advance ‘apologies for militant Islam’ and ‘fascistic governments and movements’, as well as ‘post-modern’ defences of repressive practices in ‘traditional cultures’ (Cohen, 2007).

Norman Geras, a Marxist academic who had served on the editorial board of New Left Review and the Socialist Register – the foremost journals of the anti-Stalinist New Left – went through a similar political transition as a result of his outspoken support for the 2003 Iraq War. In the run-up to the invasion, Geras found himself uncomfortably at odds with liberal and leftist friends and colleagues, and wrote that he had come to find the opinion pages of the Guardian, his ‘newspaper of choice’, ‘repellent’ (Geras, 2003a). At that time, with the left, and increasingly much broader publics, mobilising against the planned invasion, Geras found common cause with a small group of intellectuals similarly ‘dismayed at the tenor of supposedly progressive opinion’ who circulated amongst themselves ideas and online material (Geras, 2003b). Like Nick Cohen and Christopher Hitchens, whom he often quoted, Geras quickly became the classic political apostate – pertinacious, contrarian and moralistic. Shortly after the invasion, he gave a talk to a radical left conference condemning ‘the marching, the petition-signing, [and] the oh-so-knowing derision of George Bush’ as ‘a calamitous compromise of the core values of socialism, or liberalism or both’. The ‘opposition to the freeing of the Iraqi people’ – which he assumed to be motivated by ‘an uncontrollable animus towards George Bush and his administration’ – was, he charged, ‘as shameful a moral failure of liberal and left opinion’ as the apologias for Stalinism (Geras, 2003a). Geras subsequently set up his own blog, which was to become a prolific and influential operation in pro-war left circles. New to the world of blogging, he was assisted by politically sympathetic bloggers, notably the financier Oliver Kamm, who later became a leader writer at The Times, and another influential pro-war left blogger using the pseudonym ‘Hatchet Harry’ (Geras,2003c).

‘Hatchet Harry’ had earlier set up a blog, Harry’s Place, in response to the 9/11 attacks. He claimed to be interested in developing ‘democratic socialist politics’ that would exhibit a ‘progressive morality’ and perhaps stake out a third way between Blairism and the radical left. A Marxist in his youth, ‘Harry’ introduced his blog by stating that he still considered historical materialism a preferable framework of analysis ‘to any of the alternatives – especially religion’, and lamenting that the ‘old socialist left’ had become ‘essentially reactionary’ (‘Hatchet Harry’, 2002). The Harry’s Place blog, to which ‘Hatchet Harry’ was initially the sole contributor, quickly became a major hub for ostensibly liberal and left-wing supporters of the Iraq War. For a period, its regular contributors included the award-winning young political journalist, Johann Hari, who was later suspended from the Independent newspaper after allegations of plagiarism. Articles by other ‘mainstream’ writers also regularly featured, or were linked to, on the blog, amongst them pieces from Christopher Hitchens, Nick Cohen and the former Communist columnist David Aaronovitch, who like Kamm later joined The Times.

Harry’s Place, along with Geras’s ‘Normblog’, became something of a centre of gravity for a cluster of pro-war left blogs. A common theme for the many voices in this newly constituted online echo chamber was the idea that socialists and liberals had betrayed their universalist and/ or internationalist moral commitments in favour of a pathological antiimperialism, anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism, and had formed morally dubious alliances with Muslim groups and movements that were not only reactionary, but invited comparison to European fascism. Insofar as the pro-war left displayed any political vision, it was a rather hackneyed blend of muscular liberalism and contrarian leftism, inevitably peppered with allusions to Orwell. Often, though, there was little politics of any substance. Harry’s Place, in particular, rather than offering much in the way of an alternative political project, acted as something of a trailblazer in political trolling. Contributors, who were often anonymous, attacked the anti-war movement over its opposition to American, British and Israeli militarism, and focused particularly on the left’s relationship with politically engaged Muslims. Behind the relentless and bitter trolling though there was some sort of political vision, or at least vendetta. In essence, the politics of the War on Terror had radicalised liberals and leftists who were in any case uncomfortable with the multiculturalist settlement, especially post-Rushdie, and who in the context of Iraq were propelled into a reactionary politics that still claimed continuity with left traditions and values. For the pro-war left, it was the rest of the left that had lost its way by embracing the multiculturalism and ‘moral relativism’ thought to characterise post-1980s racial politics, which had blinded them to the dangers of ‘Islamism’, which, they charged, animated much if not all of the involvement of Muslim groups in the anti-war movement.

‘Hatchet Harry’, a British ‘ex-pat’ originally from Burnley in the North of England, was – rather revealingly – critical of the notion that the riots in Oldham in 2001 were related to racism, explicitly rejecting comparisons to the urban riots of the 1980s, and apparently endorsing the idea that ‘the police have been letting Pakistani youth get away with actions that white youths would be banged up for’ (Powerbase, 2010).

On another occasion, ‘Harry’ complained of ‘no-go areas for whites’ in his hometown, claiming that he was ‘stoned for entering one at the age of 12’ (Powerbase, 2010). As these remarks illustrate, significant sections of the pro-war left would indulge in plainly reactionary political rhetoric, and the movement would go on to quickly intersect with liberal and left movements and the rise of islamophobia contemporary conservative movements similarly mobilised against the multicultural settlement.

The other major contributor to Harry’s Place, alongside ‘Hatchet Harry’, was a corporate lawyer, David Toube, who like ‘Harry’ began blogging after the 9/11 attacks. Toube, a former friend of the tabloid ‘Islamist’ provocateur Anjem Choudary, was one of around 20 people who in May 2005 met to discuss the trajectory of left politics in the UK. Most, though not all, according to Norman Geras, who was a leading participant in that meeting, were supporters of the Iraq War. But all had found themselves ‘out of tune with the dominant anti-war discourse’ and shared a ‘common sense of discord with much current left-liberal thinking’ on ‘terrorism and the fight against it, US foreign policy, the record of the Blair government, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and, more generally, attitudes to democratic values and to movements that reject these’ (Geras, 2006). The group included another corporate lawyer, Adrian Cohen, the Director of Labour Friends of Iraq, Gary Kent, and a handful of former Trotskyist intellectuals, notably the academics Jane Ashworth and Alan Johnson, and the American labour activist Eric Lee. It met twice more, subsequently producing a political declaration called the Euston Manifesto, which was published in the New Statesman along with an accompanying piece penned by Norman Geras and Nick Cohen.

The authors of the Euston Manifesto declared the need for a ‘fresh political alignment’ on the left in favour of democracy, equality and ‘the liberal freedom of ideas’, and in opposition to anti-Americanism, terrorism and tyranny (Powerbase, 2016a). Geras headed the group that produced the Manifesto, with support from fellow members of his pro-war ‘Loop’ group, pro-war left bloggers and several right-wing Labour MPs including Denis MacShane, John Mann and Gisela Stuart. Other notable Eustonites included John Lloyd, another former Communist amongst Britain’s elite commentariat, the aforementioned Oliver Kamm, Marko Attila Hoare, who at one stage was a member of the neoconservative Henry Jackson Society, and the London-based sociologist, David Hirsh.

Speaking at the launch event, the academic Alan Johnson, a co-author of the Manifesto with Geras, said it had emerged in part from campaigning activity of a new sort, developed by networks of a new sort – networks that bridge together cyberspace, the blogosphere and the ‘real world’ of parliament, trade unions and civil society, and which might help to renew social democracy.

For those willing to dig – at normblog, Harry’s Place, Little Atoms; LabourStart, Labour Friends of Iraq and Engage; Unite Against Terror and Democratiya – that’s where the real story is. These campaigns and networks are modest affairs. But they are growing by the day, they punch well above their weight and they signpost a future.

(Johnson, 2006) Johnson would reflect, two years after the Euston Manfesto launch event, that the leading signatories lacked enough of a shared political vision to emerge as a cohesive group. He noted, however, the ongoing work of the various groupings he had alluded to at the event, and observed that it was at ‘the online political journal Democratiya, [that] many Eustonians now gather’ (Johnson, 2008) – a journal of which he was founding editor. Johnson, like many in the neoconservative tradition, had been a Trotskyist, including in the Alliance for Workers Liberty, perhaps as late as 2003. Also like that tradition, he traversed the left to work for a time in propaganda for the government. He was a consultant and researcher for Home Office propaganda unit, the Research, Information and Communications Unit (2008–10) and subsequently (in 2011) joined the UK’s leading pro-Israel lobby group BICOM.

As this tale of the pro-war left and its various iterations and outputs illustrates, the line between the left and the conservative, neoconservative or Zionist right is not always a clear one. The pro-war left was not so very left in the end, but it was more or less united on its suspicions of religion and in particular Islam. A pro-war position that saw the Saddam Hussein regime, Hamas or Hezbollah as ‘fascist’ or used such terms as ‘Islamofascism’ (Molyneux, 2016) was already racialising Muslims. A strong element of this current of opinion was the defence of abstract secularism in opposition to ‘Islamism’ or ‘fundamentalism’, and the tendency for this to veer into obvious racism as demonstrated in particular by the so-called New Atheists, as well as by sections of the formal secularist movement, and it is to these currents that we now turn.