Desperation. posted by Richard Seymour

There's a kind of joy to be had in drawing the venom of the increasingly absurd Nick Cohen . God bless him, the poor man has hardly been able to find a good word to say about the war which he so ardently supported before it began. He could find barely a word to say about Abu Ghraib, or the Lancet study. This is curious, since Cohen is known for wearing his spleen on his sleeve. Indeed, he has been bilious about the alleged desertions of the Left, the supposed fallacies of the antiwar movement and has presented the usual array of fanciful allegations of crimes and complicities. His polemic becomes all the more extreme just as he senses he is losing or has lost the argument. Hence, the Stop the War Coalition, at the height of its powers, was the biggest threat to Iraqi democracy in the world. And today, the Respect coalition, which could well evict the pro-war Blairite MP Oona King from her Bethnal Green & Bow constituency, is variously maligned as anti-Semitic, a vehicle for fascism and so on.

I get the joke, of course. Galloway is a moustache wearing ex-Labour MP campaigning in the East End. So was Oswald Mosely. Ha ha. I got the joke when Oona King's election agent, unfortunately named Graham Taylor, first cracked it at the beginning of this month. I am bereft several ribs, as you must gather.

Well, before despatching what Cohen knows full well to be lunacy and nonsense, I think it's worth pointing out that no one in Respect is guilty of supporting a war which would eventually put British soldiers ('the armed wing of Amnesty International' Cohen called them) in the docks for torture, crippling beatings, rape and so on. Never mind a 'conservative estimate' of 100,000 dead as of last year (how high must the figure be now). After all, Cohen never minds. Or does he? Guilt is one of the primary sources of aggression, and no one is looking shiftier than jolly old Saint Nick.

Working by connotation rather than denotation - as per usual - Cohen avers that in the fight for the East End:

[T]here's a whiff of old hatreds in the air. Oona King, the Labour candidate, is getting fed up with Respect supporters bringing up her Jewish mother, although she says it makes a change from the British National Party bringing up her black father.

This charge has been repeated often enough, but with what cause? What evidence does King present to justify these ridiculous claims? Nil. King remarked that it was Respect "canvassers" who had told people not to vote King on account of her Jewish background, which would be disgusting if true. Sadly for her, Respect had not started canvassing in Bethnal Green & Bow when King made her remarks. Moreover, there is ample evidence to show that King has no particular respect for the truth, at least in this campaign. Here she is hoping the campaign doesn't get too dirty , here she is libelling her opponent and paying an out of court settlement, and here she is repeating the libel . When she was caught encouraging postal voters to send their ballot papers to her campaign headquarters, she claimed that "We are working to an agreed set of rules we have had for decades" , despite the fact that the laws allowing anyone to apply for postal voting were introduced in 2000. Cohen may be right to say the Oona King is a strong woman. She's strong enough to be out the country when there's a vote as to whether her single mother constituents will have their benefits cut. Strong enough to vote for tuition fees and foundation hospitals against the wishes and needs of her constituents. Strong enough to send quite a few of them to war. But, given the above, and also the little gaff when she sent out Eid Mubarak cards to all constituents with faintly Asian names (thus offending her Hindu supporters - who's playing the 'communalism' game now?), I would suggest that whatever else Oona King is, the woman is as thick as shit.

Now, to the latest folly from the King campaign, also recycled by Cohen. It was alleged by King that Respect supporters were behind the disgraceful egging of a war memorial service attended by many Jewish people, King among them:

Last week, King and a group of mainly Jewish pensioners gathered for a 60th anniversary memorial service for the 132 people who died in the last V2 rocket attack on London in 1945. Muslim youths spat and threw eggs at the mourners and shouted: 'You fucking Jews.'

In a letter to the Guardian, members of Respect said there was 'no evidence that this egg-throwing was anti-semitic'. Although it didn't condone them, 'such episodes do occur', and Galloway, John Major, Tony Blair and John Prescott had all had eggs thrown at them.

What can you say to that? Either it's slyly trying to avoid alienating potential supporters or Respect is so morally shrivelled it can't tell the difference between disrupting a political speech and attacking a service for the victims of fascism.

There's not much clarity about who was actually behind these attacks, or what their motives were. King has suggested that the target was her, to which the letter from several Jewish members of Respect can be seen to respond. Jonathan Freedland, who was present, wrote yesterday in The Guardian :

Within minutes, the mourners were pelted, first with vegetables, then with eggs. Some said they saw stones; others said they had been spat at. Gathered in old age to remember their dead, they felt under siege.

Looking around, it was difficult to spot individual culprits. All that were visible were groups of young Asian men, standing on the balconies of the rebuilt block.

Among the dignitaries at the service was the local MP, Oona King. When she spoke, she attacked the "ignorance" of the assailants and insisted that their real target was her ... suggesting the attack was part of an increasingly vicious contest between herself and George Galloway, who is seeking to win Bethnal Green and Bow for his anti-war Respect party.

Indeed, the episode became part of a new escalation in hostilities between the two candidates which would later include King's charge -emphatically denied - that Respect activists were seeking to whip up Muslim antagonism against her by highlighting her Jewish background.

I was there and I must confess it did not look like an attack on Oona King to me. She was not especially visible, and no slogans were chanted or words uttered - as surely they would have been if this was merely a stance against King's support of the Iraq war.

...

Of the dozen or so people I approached, most struggled to converse in English. But not all. Syed Mumin, a 24-year-old student who has lived all his life in the block, was adamant. It was nothing to do with King. "And it's nothing to do with Iraq or Palestine or anything to do with religion," he said.

Instead, Syed explained, the area was overcrowded and rundown. "There's a lot of aggression." The result is that when the police show up they get pelted. If even a resident drives in with a newly clean car, he'll get "egged". Here was a group of outsiders, so they got the treatment too. His friend Bokkar Ali added: "They're just kids having a laugh. They do it to everyone."

Except the culprits did not look like kids; most seemed to be in their late teens or 20s. And there's the testimony of Aminur Rahman, 18, who told me: "There's a lot of hatred towards the Jewish. We've got hatred towards them." He knew Sunday's group were Jewish because of the skullcaps and he knew the story of the 1945 bomb. So was it wrong to attack people who were grieving? "It was wrong in a way, but I think they deserved it because they came into a Muslim community."

I don't know who speaks for his neighbours, Syed or Aminur. Maybe the truth is halfway between them.

I don't doubt that some of the stupider locals will be prejudiced, although it has always been known that King is Jewish, and she has never before had a problem winning a majority of the electorate in a heavily Bangladeshi area. But what is notable from Freedland's account is that it was Oona King, and no one else, who tried to make it into an election issue. From day one it has been clear that her campaign would seek to make it seem as if Respect's challenge was about religious sectarianism. Hence, before the mourners tears are even dry, King is appropriating the incident for her political campaign. Fabulous respect for the dead in that. And the fact is that the only people who are making race an issue in this campaign are Oona's rent-a-crowd .

Cohen goes on to repeat some of the siller charges about Respect - "boring old causes" like gay rights are to be dropped in pursuit of an alliance with Muslims, he claims. Remarkable stuff, but here is the text of a motion passed overwhelmingly at the last Respect national conference:

Motion 57: Gay Pride - Tyneside

This conference welcomes the production of a Respect leaflet for London Pride.

It supports the policies outlined in that leaflet, ie
- an end to discrimination against lesbians, gay men, bisexuals and transgender people
- for equal partnership and pension rights
- for strong policies to tackle homophobia in all public bodies
- for an increase in public services that meet the needs of lesbians, gay men, bisexuals and transgendered people, rather than money wasted on war

Conference instructs the incoming National Committee to produce similar material for all Pride events next year and urges local groups to make sure material is distributed at events in their area.

Those policies go further than anything advocated by Labour or the Liberal Democrats. (Incidentally, in case anyone is asking that old question, here is part of the text of Motion 38, also passed overwhelmingly: "Respect ... opposes any change in legislation that restricts abortion rights and supports a woman's right to choose").

Cohen continues:

As the line changed, the party's paper tried to reconcile anti-capitalism and religious fundamentalism by calling on the comrades to protest against Spearmint Rhino lap-dancing clubs.

Galloway's propaganda follows the same pattern. It features a picture of Oona King with a cheesy smile and a low-cut dress. The headline doesn't say 'Decadent Western Bitch', but then it doesn't need to.

The SWP has always protested against these bloody lap-dancing clubs, and it has nothing to do with puritanism and everything to do with sexism. It was a group of our female members who floured the Miss World contest a few years back on national television (the first time Channel Five actually looked half-interesting was when that protest kicked in). I suppose Cohen is entitled to think that Spearmint Rhino clubs are an embodiment of Western secular freedom - aye, when Baghdad and Kabul rock to the sound of drunken salesman roaring at some dancing girls, we will know that freedom has finally greeted those benighted people. Yes, Baghdad Bukakke! I'm sure Nick Cohen's semiological reading of Galloway's election 'propaganda' (not, say, 'campaign material'?) is worthy of comment, but I'm afraid incredulity overwhelms me.

Oh, I could go on. Cohen recycles the old charges against Galloway - he saluted Saddam's indefatiguability. Yes, right he did, although some of Cohen's new allies in the Whitehouse went further and armed the bastard. While Galloway was trying to save lives (fancy that), a certain hard-faced Republican was helping him kill when he popped in for a cuppa. Similarly, the Gorgeous One is maligned for having called Iraqi trade unionists "quislings". This is a beautiful rhetorical technique, by the way. Suppose I criticise a group of people who defend Israel's occupation of Palestine, I remark that they are apologists for mass murder. But say the people thus identified are all Jewish. Now, you can say "the proprietor of Lenin's Tomb has described Jews as apologists for mass murder". The Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions does not represent all Iraqi trade unionists - it certainly doesn't, in its support for the occupation and for the old Allawi regime that crushed all other trade unions and murdered Fallujah - nor does it represent the majority of Iraqis. When IFTU representatives attended the Labour conference and allowed themselves to become the tools of the leadership, circulating leaflets urging union leaders in Britain to reject the wishes of the overwhelming majority of their members and support a continued occupation, I don't suppose it is a remarkable fact that those opposed to the occupation criticised such activity. Yet, to do so is to be guilty of - what? - a thought crime. One is in league with the far right for doing so.

Respect, which Cohen cannot touch on its policies, is thus mangled through his kangaroo court, in which only the prosecution may speak and in which any charge, no matter how false or ridiculous, stands. Insinuation, guilt-by-association, blacklisting and interrogation with the use of phoney testimony form the bulk of Cohen's repertoire when attacking the Left. Well, I hate to reply in kind, but that too sounds very familiar.