A multipolar world
The UK’s 2024 general election was notable for several reasons. Apart from the Labour Party’s landslide victory, along with Nigel Farage’s Reform UK’s surge, there was some success for independent candidates, particularly those calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. The Gaza Independents (GI), as we shall call them, have tended to garner votes in low income significantly Muslim areas, taking the place vacated by George Galloway’s shrinking base. What is noticeable regarding some of these GI supporters is not only their exclusive commitment to Gaza, all other atrocities seemingly being of no interest, but also support for Vladimir Putin’s call for a multipolar world. The latter refers to a world in which economic and military power is no longer monopolised by the United States, but rather is spread across other nations. At first sight this would seem to be a highly desirable state of affairs. Yet, it soon becomes clear that Putin merely wants himself along with his current allies, i.e. president Xi of China and the leader of North Korea, all armed with nuclear weapons, to engage in neo-colonialist policies, such as the invasion of Ukraine, Tibet and, in the future, Taiwan. However, for GI supporters these ideas take second place to Gaza, which would seem to have turned into a religious duty for Muslims. So let us begin by addressing the religious dimension of the GI movement.
Sayed Qutb and the formation of Hamas
Central to the current situation in Gaza is the 7th October 2023 Hamas attack on Israel; which begs the following questions: firstly, what manner of organisation is Hamas and, secondly, why did its supporters choose to attack Israeli citizens? It is important to note that prior to the 1967 Six-Day War with Israel, much of the Arab world, particularly in North Africa, was predominantly secular; for example, in Nasser’s Egypt women in head scarves were a rarity. The 1967 defeat proved to be a major challenge to Arab nationalism and Islamist ideas, which had previously been suppressed by nationalists, began to take centre stage. A key element in the rise of political Islam in some Arab nations was the formation of the Muslim Brotherhood, inspired by the Egyptian writer Sayed Qutb. After visiting the United states, he rejected what he saw as the decadence of American culture, its selfish individualism and sexual freedom in particular. Qutb was no supporter of women’s equality, though he wrote about their sexual attractiveness, and he had little positive to say about African American culture. Allegedly plotting the assassination of his former friend President Nasser, Qutb was executed in 1966. Becoming a martyr after his death, his later writings, advocating violent jihad as a means of establishing sharia law in a “pristine” Muslim state, were much admired by the then small and marginalised Muslim Brotherhood. However, Qutb was aware of the Leninist inspired Eastern bloc during the cold war, but deplored its economic failure, especially Stalin’s collective farm policy. His most famous book, Milestones, became the key source for those in the Brotherhood seeking to replace secularism with sharia law by means of a vanguard leadership; an idea taken from the Bolshevik secularists.
The setting up of the state of Israel in 1948 was a major theme in Qutb’s writings and, like many others, understandably called for the overthrow of the colonial Zionist settler state. Unfortunately, Qutb was also a believer in a number of anti-Semitic conspiracies, including denial of the Nazi holocaust. Holocaust denial and antisemitism tended to suppress secular Arab socialist ideas which, for instance, sought common cause with the Israeli working class in a secular Palestine. In so far as Qutb’s Islamism has a political/economic agenda, to this day it tends to be small trader capitalism, with charitable donations (Zikat) providing a rudimentary social safety net. Following their involvement in the assassination of Egyptian president Sadat, the Muslim Brotherhood was eventually elected into government. The Arab Spring movement in Egypt, which was largely secular and often female, demonstrated against the Brotherhood’s policies and in 2013 General al-Sisi organised a military coup and banned the Brotherhood throughout the country. Taking Qutb’s ideas with them, key members of the Brotherhood crossed the border into Gaza to join Hamas, which was backed by Iran, Turkey and Qatar in terms of money and weapons,. Elected to power in both Gaza and the West Bank, Hamas was later ousted from the latter by the more secular Palestine Liberation Organisation. In keeping with Qutb’s Jihadist philosophy, like the Taliban in Afghanistan, women in Gaza were forced to cover up and remain largely excluded from public space.
However, what is less well known is Israeli prime minister Netanyahu’s double dealing with Hamas. One courageous opponent of the Israeli occupation of Gaza is Tal Schneider who, writing in The Times of Israel, October 8th 2023, offers the headline: For Years, Netanyahu propped Up Hamas, now it’s blown up in our faces. She explains how Netanyahu cynically sought to prevent a single representative voice of the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, so as to weaken their attempts to create a state in which people of all faiths and none could live in peace. In order to prevent such a unified voice, successive coalition governments led by Netanyahu privately negotiated with Hamas leaders in Gaza and turned a blind eye to foreign government funding for the allegedly “terrorist” organisation. Schneider explains further that Netanyahu sought to support the Hamas leadership by allowing Gazan workers to be employed inside Israel. As long as they were relatively ineffective, the firing of rockets into Israel by Hamas was used as a reason for Netanyahu not to negotiate with the Palestinians and continue to encourage Israeli settlers to grab more land in the West Bank. Surely, it is important for us to reject Qutb’s antisemitism and offer our support to the sizeable chunk of the Israeli population coming onto the streets of their country’s towns and cities to protest against their ultra-Zionist government, with its war on Gaza and its attempt to abolish the independence of the Israeli judiciary. Let us now turn to the multipolar aspects of the GI movement.
The British Communist Party on Putin’s invasion of Ukraine
There are currently a mass of press reports on alliances between Islamists and “the left”. Quite what is meant by the spatial metaphor “the left” or even the “hard left” remains unclear. Insofar as the various pro-Bolshevik groups in Britain are being referred to, it is important to be aware that they consist of utterly marginalised individuals, with only a few thousand members between the lot of them, who turn up on most demonstrations in the hope of selling a few papers. Their hero, Lenin, hated the Russian Orthodox Church, but was better disposed towards those Muslims in what became the Central Asian republics following events in 1917. After Lenin’s death, there developed a bitter leadership rift, ending with Trotsky’s exile and eventual murder. Stalin had no time for Muslim culture and unleashed his wrath; closing mosques and refusing to grant autonomy to the predominantly Muslim republics. Following in Stalin’s footsteps, the Chinese Communist Party, which took control in 1948, continued to suppress Muslim culture and to this day Uighurs face serious obstacles in practising their faith; a fact which most GI supporters ignore.
Given these anti-Muslim practices, it is surely strange to see links developing between the GI movement, with its calls for a multi-polar world, and the pro-Stalin British Communist Party. Clearly, there ought to be united calls for a ceasefire and troop withdrawals in both Gaza and Ukraine; however, here the waters become very muddied. Calling for an “immediate ceasefire” in Ukraine, in February 24th 2022 the British Communist Party’s Political Committee issued a statement, see Communist Party (2022), following the Russian invasion. Correctly noting the anti-war demonstrations in several Russian cities following the invasion, the statement condemns the arrest of pro-peace demonstrators by Putin’s police and military. Again correctly describing Putin’s Russia as a “capitalist power”, the statement continues: “support must be given to peace marchers everywhere including those in Russia”; adding support for those wanting to live “in peace and determin(e) the future of their own society free from outside domination…Putin represents the interests of Russia’s big business oligarchs”, the statement continues, “who profit from the theft of that country’s economic assets from the Russian working class”. Crucially, the statement adds: “The Ukrainian government represents the Ukrainian oligarchs who…stash their stolen wealth in Western banks…and launder money much of their money through the City of London. However, whilst the above is all true, the full statement is at best ambivalent and at worst offers support for Putin’s gangster “capitalist” state. For instance, sounding very much like the propaganda put out by Putin’s RT channel, the statement refers to the 2014 “fascist backed coup” and the “UN-backed Minsk II Agreement” along with offering support for the Donetsk and Lugansk “People’s Republics”.
Such claims require testing by, firstly, pointing out that the hero of the British Communist Party Joseph Stalin, cleverly moved ethnic Russian workers into the various republics of the USSR and all parts of Eastern Europe, including Donetsk and Lugansk, following 1945, i.e. behind the Iron Curtain, in order to undermine claims for independence by the local populations. To describe Ukraine as a “fascist” state, in line with RT rhetoric, is a ludicrous claim. As with most countries around the world, there are fascists and Ukraine, as in the rest of Eastern Europe is no exception. Putin himself uses fascist thugs to quell demonstrations who, for example, regularly attack black students in Moscow. In Britain, given the disbandment of the BNP, fascists probably vote for Nigel Farage’s party. Citing the pro-Nazi Azov Battalion, one Gaza Independent supporter recently claimed, mouthing Putin’s RT propaganda, that the whole of the Ukrainian military is “neo-Nazi”; when the vast majority of the mainly conscript Ukrainian army are not. In point of fact, both sides have Muslims and Jews fighting for them and on the Russian side alone it is estimated that over 500,000 men have been killed or seriously injured.
There remains strong support for in Ukraine for president Zelensky, who is Jewish, and his defence minister, Rustem Umerovov, who is a Tartar Muslim; an ethnic group that Stalin expelled from Crimea. Both of these men stood on anti-corruption tickets; financial double dealing being the norm in Bolshevik Russia and was raised to a fine art by Putin after the 1991 collapse of the USSR. Turning to the various Minsk agreements, we can refer to comments made by both GI supporters and the British Communist party. Firstly, these proposed agreements were initiated by president Yushchenko and continued by his replacement Yanukovych, both of whom were Putin’s placemen. It is crucial here to note that Putin is an adept ventriloquist who routinely uses his dummies in the former republics of the USSR, such as Georgia, Belarus and the rest, to do his bidding. So these agreements, which mainly concerned with Ukraine’s relationship with the European Union, were always negotiated by Ukrainian leaders who were mere proxies for Putin. In fact, when the agreements were democratically rejected by mass demonstrations by the Ukrainian working class in 2014, Putin’s then puppet leader Yanukovych fled to Moscow. In anger at these demonstrations, the so called Orange Revolutions which date back to 2004, Putin ordered the invasion of Crimea. He also attempted, but largely failed due to the pro-EU thinking of young people of Donetsk and Lugansk, to annex much of the mixed Russian and Ukrainian speaking areas in the East of the country, which have been part of Ukraine since the 1920s. It must be added that a number of referenda have shown Ukrainians to be overwhelmingly in favour of being an independent country.
Crucial to all of this, Ukraine has some of the richest soil of anywhere in the world and as such was often described as the breadbasket of the old USSR. Unfortunately, as mentioned by Sayed Qutb, the Bolsheviks forcibly introduced collective farms as a cover for stealing the produce of the country in order to feed themselves and their largely middle class party member lackeys. Meanwhile, millions of Ukrainians starved to death in the 1930s; a fact which has not been lost on younger generations ever since. The rich history of Ukraine includes a mass anarchist army which fought alongside the Bolsheviks to defeat the western-backed white army which wanted to restore Tsarist rule. Alas, true to form, the Bolsheviks turned on the anarchists and 20 years later, under Stalin’s leadership, signed a deal with Hitler; facts that Putin seems reluctant to recall as they do not tally with his bogus claims regarding Ukrainian “fascists”.
The Trump factor
It may surprise some readers that, given his well documented dislike of Muslims and support for Israeli expansionism, none other than ex-president Donald Trump is well regarded by some Gaza Independent supporters. Presumably getting their information from Fox News et al, these supporters are aware that Trump hates Zelensky. This is because Zelensky scuppered Trump’s plan for a second term in office by refusing to initiate an investigation into Joe Biden and his son’s corrupt practices, as alleged by Trump. Whilst Biden’s son has been successfully prosecuted in the US, there is no evidence that father Joe is guilty of corruption or any other offence in Ukraine or anywhere else. This contrasts sharply with Trump himself who, apart from what he has already been found guilty of doing in the US, is alleged to be in the debt of Putin due to the existence of video footage of Trump consorting with Russian prostitutes. It would seem that several of Trump’s associates, some of whom were put in jail, were involved in corruption in Ukraine during the period when the country was run by Putin’s stooges.
Conclusion
For those of us who want our children, and their children, to live in a peaceful world, we want to see all nuclear weapons banned and an end to all wars. Of course we want to see the power of America’s ruling elites taken away, but not merely replaced by the tyrants and psychopaths who run Russia, China and North Korea, with their fake elections, or indeed no elections at all. We surely also reject a world split into competing religious ideologies, as advocated by Qutb, Modi, Trump or anyone else. Events in Northern Ireland during the troubles, to mention but one example, should act as a warning of where that leads. What we need is an end to capitalism and its replacement by work based democracy, in which we all decide what to produce and how it is distributed so as to ensure that, for the first time in human history, everyone on the planet has sufficient food, clothing and shelter.
Bibliography
Communist Party (2022): https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/british-communist-party-lays-out-a-path-to-end-the-war-in-ukraine/
Wake Up Bradford! 
Leave a comment