A reply to Jamal El-Shayyal

In a recent blog entitled The relativism of justice??? my fellow NEC member Jamal El-Shayyal attempted to excuse recent comments by the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad about Israel – namely that it should be “wiped off the map.”

Arguments about whether it is possible to advocate the destruction of the state of Israel without being anti-Semitic aside, Ahmadinejad’s comments clearly represent a vein of anti-Jewish racism running through the Islamism of the Iranian government. Ahmadinejad pours vituperative scorn and hatred on “Zionism” in terms he does not use for any other form of nationalism; his hostility for the Israeli-Jewish national entity is special and exclusive, not part of a consistently democratic opposition to all nationalisms and all forms of national oppression. If that isn’t anti-Semitism, what is?

Jamal says that he is “not defending what the Iranian President said,” but he also says “I am not condoning nor condemning” and then, even more explicitly, that “I refuse to attack him [Ahmadinejad] for saying what his people feel.”

Jamal’s blog comes straight off the back of his promotion of the Al Quds Day march where religious zealots of various shades to espouse reactionary politics. This year’s line-up included Yvonne Ridley (who compared the Taliban to the anti-fascist International Brigades of the Spanish Civil War), Azzam Tamimi (defender of the ultra-Islamist and far-right organisation Hamas) and Rabbi Ahron Cohen (a member of an ultra-orthodox Jewish sect that believes the Holy Land will be given over to the Jews following the return of the Messiah). It’s a fine and heart-warming example of Jewish fundamentalists and Islamists united in their common commitment to irrationality, backwardness and reaction.

The blog also follows hot on the heels of Jamal’s decision to vote against NUS support for Holocaust Memorial Day, on the basis that it does not take “other genocides” sufficiently into account.

Nowhere in his blog does Jamal elaborate on exactly what its impressive sounding title means - perhaps that’s because, in fact, it’s him who’s most guilty of maintaining a relativist perspective.

Iran, let’s remember, is a state in which there are not even the limited bourgeois-democratic norms of civil and social liberty that activists like Jamal and myself benefit from in Britain. Student campaigners fighting for democracy have frequently encountered brutal physical opposition from government thugs. Women are legally obliged to wear the veil and have few formal rights. Workers demonstrating on May Day have been arbitrarily arrested and imprisoned and more recent displays of working-class militancy have been met with similar intimidation from the government

What has Jamal got to say about all of this? He claims that Iran’s president is guilty of nothing more than “saying what his people feel.” Are these, perhaps, the same “people” that President Ahmadinejad and the regime he represents have been repressing, torturing and murdering for decades?

Even if it is the case that every single Iranian agrees 100% with Ahmadinejad’s politics on this matter (quite how Jamal is in a position to measure this, I do not know), that would not make them right. This is blatant relativism at work again; extend the logic and you’d end up saying that opposing French Nazi Jean Marie Le Pen is illegitimate or “anti-French” because millions upon millions of French people voted for him and so presumably agree with his views. We should oppose reactionary politics in and of themselves no matter how popular they are and even if we understand and tackle the root causes of why people turn to them in the first place.

Jamal also states that “As British [sic] we should learn from our mistakes of trying to dictate to people how they should live and be governed.” This is the classic defense of relativists against those who argue for international solidarity with progressive struggles; “it’s not our place to tell [insert oppressed group here] how to live.” But solidarity isn’t about “dictating” anything to anyone; it’s about believing that human rights are for everyone and that those fighting for them deserve support, regardless of their nationality or ethnicity.

Relativism (particularly cultural relativism) is, in fact, based on an implicitly racist approach; it divides cultural or ethnic groups up according to those for whom it’s acceptable to advocate human rights and those for whom doing so amounts to “dictating how people should live.” I reject that; human rights are for everyone or they’re meaningless.

Jamal has nothing to say about the need to make practical solidarity with those Iranians fighting for the democratic freedoms he presumably feels himself entitled to, but when Iran’s president drops a blatantly anti-Semitic clanger, Jamal leaps (albeit somewhat tacitly) to his defence.

At an NUS Black Students’ Conference a few years ago, a motion to support Amina Lawal – a woman who faced stoning in Nigeria for adultery – was voted down, and those speaking against it claimed it was “anti-Nigerian.” Maybe, then, Jamal considers it “anti-Iranian” to oppose the Iranian government or support those fighting it.

Some aspects of NUS’s history are somewhat more encouraging. In 2000, NUS Annual Conference elected Iranian student activist Ahmed Batebi as Honorary-Vice President. It was an expression of international solidarity; student activists in the UK were extending their support to student activists in Iran, and saying “your struggle is our struggle.”

What, I wonder, would Jamal had made of that? Would he have voted against Batebi as he voted against the Iraqi socialist-feminist Yanar Mohamed in this year’s Honorary VP election? Probably.

When Jamal motivated his opposition to NUS support for Holocaust Memorial Day, he mentioned the ethnic cleansing of the Kosovar Albanians by Slobodan Milosevic’s government as one of the “other genocides” he felt HMD ignored. I agree that this was indeed an attempted genocide and one that history has forgotten far too quickly, but what is it about NUS backing HMD that makes it impossible for Jamal to raise this?

Why, also, did Jamal not mention, for example, Saddam Hussein’s attempted ethnic cleansing of the Kurds or Turkey’s massacre of the Armenians. His relativist perspective is clear; he picks and chooses which struggles to support, which genocides to remember. When the oppressed-oppressor lines can easily be drawn between Muslims and non-Muslims (as in the case of Kosova) then Jamal is upfront about his support, but when those divisions can’t be made (when, for example, both the oppressor and oppressed group belong to historically Muslim nationalities, such as the oppression of the Kurds by Iraq) Jamal doesn’t have as much to say.

As an aside, it’s also bizarrely ironic that sections of the student movement who’ve become Jamal’s de facto political allies (Student Broad Left joined a FOSIS-led walkout at Annual Conference 2005 during a speech by Iraqi Marxist Houzan Mahmoud) have a rather questionable record when it comes to defending the rights of mainly Muslim nationalities. Socialist Action (a leading force in SBL) supported Stalinist aggression against Afghanistan, acted as apologists for the attempted genocide of the Kosovans and defends Russia’s brutal occupation of Chechnya. Those on the left who Jamal and others have accused of “Islamaphobia” have, by contrast, always defended the rights of these people to self-determination and supported their struggles for national liberation.

I have submitted a motion to the next NUS NEC (8/11/05) condemning President Ahmadinejad’s comments and expressing solidarity with the democratic opposition to his regime. By the time this blog goes online, it may well already have been voted on. I expect Jamal to oppose it.

Against all forms of relativism, what is necessary is a perspective that starts from a belief in universal human rights and solidarity; that democratic rights, women’s rights, workers’ rights and LGBT rights are not “western” concepts but the common property of all oppressed people everywhere. That approach is the opposite of relativism; it is an approach based on supporting struggles for liberation and democracy wherever they occur, and regardless of the nationality, ethnicity or religion of those who are fighting them or of those against whom they are fought.

In solidarity (with all working-class and democratic struggles everywhere!) –

Daniel Randall

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