Terror and hypocrisy in London...

THERE was understandable shock and anger at the deadly terror attack in London last week. The killer, a British-born convert to Islam, drove his car into pedestrians on Westminster Bridge, killing five and injuring some 50 more before stabbing a policeman to death in the grounds of Parliament.

Muslim leaders throughout the country have condemned Masood’s killing spree, which appears to be the action of one deranged man. Indeed, we may never know the real motives of Khalid Masood who was shot dead by the police soon after. But this hasn’t stopped the bourgeois media from going into yet another anti-Muslim frenzy to justify more intrusive snooping by the secret police on the British Muslim community.

If the media were simply reflecting public anger at a terrorist outrage this would, perhaps, be understandable. But it isn’t. The synthetic rage of the gutter press and the more sophisticated rants from the media pundits that try to mould public opinion follow a clear ruling class agenda to scapegoat the Muslim minority for all the woes of the ailing capitalist economy and to justify further internal repression against the working class and its allies in Britain.

If the bourgeois press seriously wanted to stop terrorism they could start by urging the British government to normalise relations with the elected government of Syria and cease all support for the rebels who have terrorised parts of Syria for over five years now. They could also campaign for the British government to co-operate with the Damascus authorities in the processing of Syrian refugees to weed out those guilty of acts of terrorism in Syria and return them to their country to face justice. They could but they won’t because the mainstream media in this country exists exclusively to serve the interests of the bourgeoisie.

Aleppo: Fall or Liberation?

Vanessa Beeley exposes the "White Helmets"

by New Worker correspondent

 

It was standing room only for late-comers at the Marx Memorial Library as the hall filled to capacity last week to hear campaigning journalist Vanessa Beeley give a report on the struggle against terrorism in Syria. The 65 or so people in attendance at the meeting, sponsored by the New Communist Party (NCP) and Socialist Fight, were shown eyewitness testimonies from civilians fleeing their imprisonment at the hands of terrorist factions inside Syria’s industrial heartland of Aleppo.

Vanessa Beeley, whose reports of the Syrian people’s defence of their popular front government have gone all round the world, exposed those darlings of the imperialist media who call themselves the “White Helmets” as nothing more than the civil defence team of the Nusra Front who rarely went beyond treating injured militiamen in the part of Aleppo the terrorists controlled until December 2016.

She held the audience spell-bound in an hour-long exposé of the crimes of the Nusra Front and other Al Qaeda-linked militias who are financed and armed by imperialism and the feudal Arab oil princes. Theo Russell from the NCP and Socialist Fight’s Gerry Downing both gave rousing support for the Syrian people in the real war against terror.

Whenever Vanessa speaks it attracts the unwelcome attention of Syrian traitors living in Britain and supporters of the reactionary Muslim Brotherhood, and the meeting on 1^st March was no exception. Prior to the meeting the Marx Memorial Library (MML) had received a complaint – and threat of demonstration outside the MML if the meeting wasn’t cancelled – from an American journalist and a telephone call from “an independent journalist based in Turkey with contact with the BBC”, which it quite rightly ignored.

            On the night a number of these elements turned up to leaflet the meeting and hurl abuse at those they deemed to be “Hezbollah scum”. A couple of plants inside the hall detonated stink-bombs in a childish attempt to break up the meeting, and two others launched into a rant against the main speaker during the question and answer session before being escorted out of the building. Able stewarding foiled all attempts to break up the meeting or silence Vanessa Beeley, whose efforts along with other independent journalists working in Syria have done so much to expose the lies of the imperialist media.

The US has lost the battle in Syria

 by New Worker

 correspondent

Dermot and Prof Majid

 

MEMBERS of various parties met on Thursday 31st March in central London at a New Worker discussion meeting on the wars in Syria and other Middle Eastern countries, introduced by Professor Kamal Majid, an Iraqi communist in exile, Theo Russell from the New Worker and Dermot Hudson in the Chair.

Kamal Majid said: “The situation is changing very fast and the war in Syria won't be going on for much longer. Even former Liberal-Democrat leader Paddy Ashdown and former US Deputy Secretary of Defence Paul Wolfowitz admit that the US has lost the battle in Syria. The US has now decided to take over Iraq, with the aim of separating Iraq and Syria, and disrupting Syria's friendship treaties with Iraq and Iran.”

“But,” he said, “in reality the war in Syria is not a local war. The US had been intervening even before the anti-government protests began in 2011, and its real aim was to remove the Russian naval base at Tartus.”

He said: “Eighty-five per cent of ISIS fighters are Iraqis, most of whom blame the US, which has caused all the problems.”

Four million Sunni refugees had fled from ISIS-occupied regions in Iraq and are living in tents and with no toilets."

Kamal said Vladimir Putin was now hugely popular in the Middle East: “After the US defeat in Syria, middle eastern leaders are now moving towards Putin, as the US is seen as unreliable. Russia's foreign policy is to be friends with everyone, even Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Israel and Egypt.”

Commenting on the plan for an autonomous federation in northern Syria, Kamal said: “Up to now the Syrian Kurds have shown support for Syria and Russia, and the leader of the Syrian Kurdish Democratic Union (PYD) has visited Moscow, but the US wants to turn the PYD into its ally.”

Theo Russell said that a year ago it was proving difficult for the Syrian Arab Army to sustain the war, but Russia's limited intervention had transformed the situation and paved the way for genuine peace talks with the Syrian opposition.

He said he said that the Arab League had refused to recognise the Syrian Kurdish federation plan, and backed “the unification of Syrian territories”. But he warned of a possible Kurdish–US alliance and said that there was a US–NATO “Plan B” to divide Syria into separate entities.

He said long-term US policy had been to destroy secular regimes, such as is Iraq, Libya and now Syria, and to destroy nation states, as in the former Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. He added that US power was not limitless, and  had suffered defeats in Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq.

He pointed out that Security Council resolution 2254 (November 2015) supported strikes against “terrorist acts committed by ISIS and the Al-Nusra Front” and their allies, adding that until then the US–NATO bombing had no legal basis.

Theo also said that the US was protecting the Al Qaeda-linked al-Nusra Front: “According to French intelligence, US air strikes against Isis avoided hitting al-Nusra, and US pilots were returning from 75 per cent of missions against Isis saying they couldn’t find targets. And at the Munich security conference John Kerry proposed to: ‘Leave the al-Nusra Front off-limits to bombing, as part of a ceasefire, at least temporarily, until the groups can be sorted out'.”