No Respect

On Socialist Unity, a report of a Respect Meeting at Birmingham Central Mosque attended by, among others, Gorgeous George Galloway and Yvonne "Stockholm Syndrome" Ridley. The Socialist Unity write-up helpfully points out that Galloway said, in relation to Afghanistan, spoke movingly of "the people of Afghanistan who have a right to resist the occupation of the country". And who are those agent of resistance? The Taliban, of course: women-hating, gay-hating, aid-worker-killing clerical fascist bastards. What an utter, utter wanker the man is.

David T at Harry's Place gets upset by the fact that the seating was segregated, men at the front, women at the back, at the meeting. It's thoroughly objectionable, of course, but I'm not surprised: it was held in a mosque, after all. What is far more illuminating and entertaining to my mind is the knots the sinister little Respect cultural relativists and Islamists justifying the segregation in the comments on the SU piece tie themselves into when challenged on it by David T. All of a piece with the SWP's jettisoning of gay rights by Lindsay "shibboleth" German back in the day, before Galloway's Respect won the communalist battle for east London Muslim votes among the cynical far left.

More fall-out from the Jenna Delich business

It's good to see Andy Newman at Socialist Unity (surely one of the most ironically named websites of all time - the comment threads normally end up a vastly entertaining bearpit of SWP v the rest of the far Left) sticking up for Harry's Place in the whole 'UCU-Israel boycott-daft 'academic' links to former KKK Grand Wizard  website' saga (see below). Good on him. But the comment thread is revealing. "johng", for example, is reasonably typical in being far more concerned that the confidentiality of an email list has been breached, than one of his fellow union members is so mired in anti-Semitism - barely disguised as 'anti-Zionism' - that she doesn't notice that the site she's linking to is neo-Nazi. "The labour movement has a word for people who spy on their fellow workers", he says, of the person who leaked Jenna Delich's email. As so often when talking about the far Left and anti-Semitism, one is reminded of the last lines of Animal Farm.

An important ps - I'm not a fan of HP publishing Delich's photo.