Monday, April 18, 2005
Jewish-Muslim solidarity in the East End. posted by Richard Seymour
Jonathan Freedland was right to note that Jews and Muslims in Britain have more in common than many realise. He wrote:Prewar Jews, like today's East End Muslims, also lived in unforgiving poverty. They too were herded into the cramped streets of East London as the first stop for new immigrants. They too were reviled as outsiders, branded as parasites on the indigenous society. And they too were feared as a potential fifth column, suspected adherents of a violent, supranational ideology. The "Jewish menace" was said to be first anarchism and then Bolshevism. Today's "Muslim peril" is jihadism.
The East End of London has been the home of every great wave of immigrants fleeing oppression or seeking a better life. It has been the better for it. The great symbol of today's East End is the Jamme Masjid mosque on Brick Lane. The building was first founded as a Huguenot Church for Protestants fleeing Catholic oppression in France. It was then used by Methodists before being converted into a synagogue for Jews who had fled Eastern Europe and Russia, the Machzike Adass. As the Jewish community dispersed, the building became a mosque for Bangladeshis in 1976.
Some people imagine that the Middle East is an inevitably divider, cleaving the communities in twain. I don't think so. Some of the finest examples of Muslim-Jewish solidarity I have seen have been on antiwar and pro-Palestine demonstrations. Did I not see orthodox Jewish men holding up Free Palestine placards? Jewish left-wingers selling their magazine, the Jewish Socialist (featuring an interview with the excellent author Kinky Friedman)? Have not Muslims spoken up against the killing of innocent Jews? Did not the antiwar movement contain Jews and Muslims, as well as not a few Christians, Buddhists and Jedis? Does not Respect, which is fighting for seats in the East End, contain socialist Jews as well as left-wing Muslims?
The issues of Palestine and Iraq are universal issues, they are about human rights - not religion or identity, although they inevitably gets entangled in these. This is why organisations which predicate their politics on ultra-identitarian nonsense like Hizb'ut-Tahrir hate Respect. They hate that it unites Muslims with people of other faiths and no faith. They hate that it is an organisation that defends the rights of gays and women. They hate that it stands for election since for them voting and democracy are kufr. They hate the antiwar movement, saying "Don’t Stop the War – Except Through Islamic Politics". (More here ).
So, to the pro-war 'left' carpers, I say get a grip. Yes, you don't like us. No, we don't care.