Imperialist threats against Iran have been stepped up once again, writes Communist Students member James Turley:
Last July, during a Youtube debate, Barack Obama (now de facto official Democrat presidential candidate) promised he would talk to the leaders of what are perceived as anti-American states - Venezuela, Cuba and Iran among them.
This rather mild pledge, in another reminder of the general state of US politics at this time, has turned up again in attempts to smear the White House hopeful as ‘soft’. Obama, for his part, is having none of it - first, he declared last month that non-specified diplomatic “preparations” would be required.1 Then last week, at the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (Aipac) conference, he went much further, claiming that “by pressuring Israel to allow Palestinian elections with Hamas participation”, and by going to war against Iraq when “Iran was always the greater threat”, administration foreign policy had made Israel “less secure”.2
Aipac has a deceptively neutral name - in fact it is the motherlode of the so-called ‘Israel lobby’ in the US. Obama was not the only candidate to give a speech at the conference, and all were gushing in their admiration for America’s most steadfast ally in the Middle East. There is little wonder that the Jerusalem Post called the Aipac conference “an expression of all that is wonderful about America and about the US-Israel relationship”.3 What with Obama’s comments and John McCain’s now infamous rendition of the Beach Boys’ 60s hit, ‘Barbara Ann’, as “Bomb Iran”,4 Americans once more go to the polls to choose between two sabre-rattlers.
Last weekends Hands Off the People of Iran (HOPI) school was an excellent event. You can read a report from Green Party comrade Jim Jepps at his blog, ‘The Daily (Maybe),’ here. To enable those who weren’t able to get along to also experience the school, HOPI will be putting a number of videos from the event up on their website soon. As a taster, here we have the beginning of left-Labour MP, John McDonnell’s contribution:
Discussion on Imperialism, the threat of war and the women’s movement in Iran.
During the meeting we are asking for organisations and trade union branches to read out messages of solidarity which will be recorded and put online. We want to make this meeting a meeting of solidarity against war and patriarchy.
7pm on 24th June at the Catholic Chaplaincy to the University of Manchester, Oxford Road (Opposite the students’ union).
With Yassamine Mather (HOPI Secretary) and Tina Purcell (Permanent Revolution).
Here is the timetable for the Hands Off the People of Iran weekend school, which take place on Saturday-Sunday, June 14-15, 11am, University of London Union, Malet Street.
Delegates to the conference of ASLEF, the train driver’s union, voted overwhelmingly this morning to affiliate to Hands Off the People of Iran. This is great news after last week’s affiliation by civil servant’s union PCS, and shows once again that HOPI’s opposition to both war and the Iranian regime is far from ‘too complicated’ for people to understand, as the Socialist Worker’s Party would have us believe. On the contrary, this sort of working class solidarity is part of the ABC’s for most trade unionists, and at the ASLEF conference, in the absence of any SWP delegates, there was no opposition to the motion.
Hopefully we will continue to bring more British unions on board, and deepen our links with the trade unions, women’s, and student’s movements in Iran. This will allow us to provide the most effective solidarity possible; in their daily struggles against the theocracy, and against the threat of sanctions and outright war.
Posted by daistation
