This is a modified version of a presentation delivered at the ISO’s 2015 national convention by Paul D’Amato, and appeared that year in an internal bulletin. Though there were a number of members who disagreed with its main arguments, no responses were written, and the debate came to an abrupt end, despite efforts to solicit responses. The lack of a response to this document was presented, some years later, as proof that the ISO national leadership systematically “suppressed” debate in the organization. Several people at the 2019 convention attacked this document, and its author (as well as Gilbert Achcar), as being “Islamophobic.” The intensity of the attacks, which came from the other panelists at a Sunday morning session, as well as from the floor—many of them ad-hominem (for example, Todd Chretien ridiculed the fact that the author couldn’t read French)—led me to leave the convention hall and not return. Outside the hall, an ISO member approached me angrily and appeared to me to be ready to engage in a physical assault, and so I left the vicinity. We publish this for the public record, and also because we consider the debate to be relevant to the Left more generally.

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In 1901, Lenin wrote a draft statement of the editorial board of the new newspaper Iskra the following on the question of debate and clarity of ideas in the Marxist movement:

Open polemics, conducted in full view of all Russian Social-Democrats and class-conscious workers, are necessary and desirable in order to clarify the depth of existing differences, in order to afford discussion of disputed questions from all angles, in order to combat the extremes into which representatives of various views, various localities, or various “specialities” of the revolutionary movement inevitably fall. Indeed, we regard one of the drawbacks of the present-day movement to be the absence of open polemics between avowedly differing views, the effort to conceal differences on fundamental questions.[1]

In the final statement that appeared in Iskra, he points out that unity based on paper over or ignoring differences is a false unity:

Before we can unite, and in order that we may unite, we must first of all draw firm and definite lines of demarcation. Otherwise, our unity will be purely fictitious, it will conceal the prevailing confusion and hinder its radical elimination.[2]

I’m not drawing an exact parallel, but I think those words apply to the far from rigorous attitude we have to debate in the ISO. There is a need for greater political clarity, sharpness of views, expressed fully, in the open, and without reservation. Without such discussion and debate, the result is a kind of “Live and let live” eclecticism, coupled with peripheral debates—sometimes degenerating into gossip—which codifies confusion rather than clarity. That’s one reason this debate is important.

I want to add an important qualification, however: this debate is between comrades in struggle who are agreed on key fundamentals. We all agree, as the title of first statement we issued: “don’t let them turn tragedy into bigotry”—on the main components of our response to this crisis, as noted by Don Lash in his January 19 Socialist Worker piece on free speech, “The starting point for the discussion is a shared opposition to Islamophobia internationally, and a determination to resist the exploitation of the killings at Charlie Hebdo by those who seek to increase repression and Islamophobia. There is also agreement that the use of the issue of free speech among government actors and in the mainstream media in has been hypocritical and racist, positing free expression as a civilizing Western value under threat from freedom-hating Muslims.”[3] We should conduct our debate accordingly.

I thus reject outright the idea that anything we have written, including the ISO statement, what we have published since in Socialist Worker, or what I say here, mirrors the ideology of the ruling class, or equivocates on defending Muslims against racism and the denial of their religious rights. The idea that the ISO statement written in response to the Paris massacre did not defend Muslims…without reservation or qualification,” is completely unfounded, unless “without reservation or qualification” means not criticizing reactionary political Islam or the politics that motivated the individuals who perpetrated the massacre.[4]

Though the debate began over the content of the ISO statement published in SW in the immediate aftermath of the killings in Paris, I do not consider the debate at this stage to be so much one about the precise wording of a sentence or a few sentences in the statement. The debate, which was left hanging in midair, raised a number of questions but by no means settled them—questions that are of primary significance to us and which have implications for our politics and practice that go far beyond the specifics of this event (since similar scenarios are likely to be played out in the future), and which involve matters of principle as well.

In my limited time I want to cover three points that I think are important:

1. On the question of free speech. First, the argument that saying the attack was a violation of journalistic free speech brought us “dangerously close to repeating some of the dominant frameworks of the mainstream media.”[5] Second, whether we should support legal restrictions on racist or reactionary speech—a position argued by Keith Rosenthal in an SW letter on the grounds that “all laws under capitalism are used against the oppressed,” democratic freedoms are “abstract,” and the bourgeois preaching of “universal rights” is “hypocritical and hollow.”[6]
2. On the question of terrorism in general, and reactionary Islamic fundamentalist terrorism in particular—not only what we say about it, but when and in what way, and whether criticism of it, or the particular words we use to criticize it, lead us to reflect the dominant discourse.
3. On the question of the French left, in particular the NPA, and its response to themassacre. In particular, I want to address what I think has been a kind of ill-informed assumption that the French left is, and has been, uniformly bad on the question of the oppression of Muslims in France, and that once one understands this, nothing more needs to be known.

I. On free speech

Let me just say outright that it is indisputable that Islamic fundamentalists, like all religious fundamentalists, are violently opposed to freedom of speech, along with other basic democratic rights. The politics of fundamentalists Islamists in power as we know, whether it is Saudi Arabia, Iran, or the Islamic State, is clear on this matter.

Reactionary Islamists actively organize against and oppose what they consider blasphemy toward Islam and the prophet Mohammed. To offer some examples: In 1989 Khomeini issued a fatwa calling for the death of Salman Rushdie, whose Satanic Versus was denounced as blasphemous toward Islam. Al-Qaeda has issued a list of 13 journalists whom it has targeted for death. Recently in Bangladesh an atheist blogger was hacked to death by Muslim reactionaries.

Of course, these sorts of attacks are not limited to one type of fundamentalism. One of India’s most famous artists, MF Hussain, was forced to leave the country in the mid 1990s after being threatened by the Hindu right for painting Hindu goddesses. In the US, evangelical Christian fundamentalist organizations have conducted a highly successful, decades-long campaign to ban books and even entire historical and scientific subjects from being taught in schools.

It will not do to claim that press freedom can only be threatened by states. The 2015 World Press Freedom Index recently issued by reporters without borders cites numerous cases of non-state actors of various sorts, from guerrilla armies to criminal syndicates, who attack journalists.[7] Among the examples they cite: Four journalists killed by different Islamist groups in Libya; three in Yemen. In Colombia, the “paramilitary group Aguilas Negras (Black Eagles), among the main predators of press freedom in the country, continues its efforts to intimidate journalists.” In Mexico “more journalists are killed in the course of their work than anywhere else in the Americas.” In Italy there are hundreds of Mafiosi death threats issued against journalists every year. The authors of the report note that in the Central African Republic (CAR), both the Muslim-dominated Séléka militia and the “anti-balaka Christian militias” attack journalists who expose their abuses, forcing many journalists into exile.

It is, in my opinion, a weak argument to deny that the attack on Charlie Hebdo was an attack on free speech. A newspaper was attacked for its offensive depictions of the prophet Mohammad. Naturally, like all attacks on journalists, it wasn’t directly motivated by a general desire to suppress freedom of speech, but by a specific desire to murder journalists who engaged in a particular sort of work.

Of course, this is not the most important question regarding the attacks. As anyone familiar with the ISO’s coverage in the aftermath, our main emphasis has been to expose the use of the attack to stoke the fires of Islamophobia and reinforce the “clash of civilizations” rhetoric to justify racism, repression and austerity at home and war abroad. A substantial part of our debate has focused on this issue because that was a bone of contention: some comrades insisted that even to make passing reference to the attack on Hebdo as an attack on free speech is to come “dangerously close to repeating some of the dominant frameworks of the mainstream media.”  But the main emphasis of our coverage from day one has been to expose the Western ruling classes and their cynical use of the issue of “free speech” to impose restrictions on free speech, attack Muslims, and whip up support for war.[8]

Why deny the truth simply because it is being cynically manipulated by our main enemy? Ronald Reagan praised the Polish mass workers’ organization Solidarnosc that emerged in 1980 as “freedom fighters.” That did not stop us from supporting the Polish workers struggle against the Stalinist bureaucracy. The US is conducting a hypocritical “war on terror” and fighting “Islamic fascists”—that doesn’t prompt us to deny that Al Qaeda or Boko Haram engage in vicious and reactionary terrorist acts, sectarian slaughter against other religions, including against other Muslims, kidnap and enslave young girls and force boys into military service, and so on.

Acknowledging that the Hebdo attack was a violation of freedom of speech is not at all to draw an equivalency between our arguments and those of the ruling class. That’s because our framework—genuine support for freedom of speech, exposure of the state’s hypocrisy on “free speech” while it suppresses the democratic rights of Muslims and others—is the opposite of the ruling classes’ framework.

Let me use one more example to illustrate my point. The US for some time now has pretended to be concerned about women’s rights in the Middle East and South Asia to justify its military invasions and occupations in the region—some have called in “imperialist feminism.” How have we responded? Not by denying that women face oppression in Afghanistan and other countries, but by exposing the hypocrisy of this position—how the US oppresses women at home and fails to go after its own home-grown anti-women Christian fundamentalists; how its key ally in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia, deeply oppresses women. That is, we do not deny that there is women’s oppression in these countries, but that its existence is being used as an excuse for military intervention by a state that has absolutely no interest in helping women anywhere in the world. We don’t say, for fear of mirroring the dominant ideology, that women’s oppression is an “abstract concept,” and so on.[9]

Some members have argued that the purpose of the attack wasn’t to suppress free speech, but to provoke the French state into a reaction in order to boost the fortunes of reactionary political Islam. The latter point is absolutely true. As we’ve noted, the attackers were not combatting Islamophobia—they were deliberately provoking it. (It’s no accident that they targeted Hebdo and not a publication of the National Front, for example.) Like the Zionist movement before it, which believed that anti-Semitism could not be overcome and looked to it as a “spur” to encourage Jews to emigrate to Israel, the aim the reactionary Islamists is to stoke Islamophobia rather than combat it, to thereby increase the level of alienation and marginalization of Muslims, and drive them into the arms of fundamentalist reaction. But it isn’t clear to me why these points should be counterposed as if they are mutually exclusive.

As noted, it would be foolish for us to think that non-state actors, like trade unions, political parties, crime syndicates, guerilla armies, paramilitary death squads, etc. are incapable of attacking freedom of speech. And it would be foolish for us to deny that there are people in the crosshairs of fundamentalist Islamist forces for what they write and depict regarding Islam.

Hence it is completely wrong for Joel Reinstein argue, in reference to the Hebdo/Kosher market massacre, that it is a “mistake for socialists to raise political concerns over isolated threats to racist speech—speech that’s not threatened but largely endorsed by those in power, and that actually threatens the rights of an oppressed group.” It is wrong because it is not “isolated” (indeed, a copycat attempt was made in Denmark recently)—but it is also wrong because implicit in this statement is the idea that if “racists” are targeted for death, socialists really have nothing to say about it, i.e., it implies a selective approach to threats to free speech: If racists are targeted, we don’t care (even if it is racist anti-Semites and reactionaries who are the perpetrators!)[10] Reinstein has moved the goal post—admitting that perhaps the attack did violate journalist free speech, but that we don’t really care.

As Marxists, we are (or should be) consistent in our defense of the extension of democratic rights, whereas the ruling class is not. They proclaim it and then systematically violate it. At the very moment that the French ruling class is suppressing free speech and expression, it would be wrong for us to deny that it is an issue for us. After all, a manifestation of that denial of free speech in France is a law against the right to wear the veil in public. At this very moment, when the French state has been furiously arresting Muslims for their speech—how can we possibly argue for that same state to ban racist or reactionary speech?[11] This position allows the ruling class to stake itself as the defenders of free speech and democracy while we stand on the sidelines with nothing to say; or worse, we counterpose their relativism (“free speech except for those we wish to deny it to because it threatens our rule”) with ours (“free speech only for progressive speech but we call on the state to suppress reactionary speech”).

The ruling class should be exposed for claiming the mantle of free speech at the very moment and under whose cover they are attacking the civil rights and free speech of Muslims and the left in France (including banning a few months ago a pro-Palestinian demonstration).[12] That can’t be done if we are promoting our own calls for similar bans, or implying that while we decry threats to left-wing or progressive speech, we support, or at the very least are indifferent to, threats to racist speech. If we support a ban on “hate speech,” then how are we to draw a line between the hate speech of anti-Muslim racists and Salafist reactionaries who spew violent, hateful rhetoric against all manner of targets, including atheists, other Muslims and other religions, women, and the left? No such logical line can be drawn.

Freedom of speech is a fundamental aspect of Marxism and is not to be toyed with, along with freedom of assembly and other democratic rights that the working class has historically had to fight long and hard to achieve, maintain, and extend. These are the air that socialists and the working-class movement breathe, without which a fundamental transformation of society becomes far more difficult.

Marxists are the most consistent fighters for the fullest and most complete democracy, including unrestricted universal suffrage, right to assembly, and free speech. We criticize bourgeois society because even in the most democratic republic these freedoms are stunted, curtailed, and, ultimately, are freedoms that extent fully only to the ruling class. As Lenin writes, “capitalist democracy is always bound by the narrow framework of capitalist exploitation and consequently always remains, in reality, a democracy for the minority, only for the possessing classes, only for the rich. Freedom in capitalist society always remains just about the same as it was in the ancient Greek republics: freedom for the slave-owners.”

Capitalist democracy, as we well known in the United States, finds ways to impose thousands of little “restrictions” that “exclude and squeeze out the poor from politics and from an active share in democracy.” The working class fights for the fullest extension of democracy within the framework of capitalism in order to burst the bounds set on it by capitalism. We do not point to the hypocritical and stunted character of democratic freedoms under capitalism as a means to minimize or deny their importance (as Colin Wilson does in a recent article on the RS 21 site, which concludes that “freedom of speech is an ambivalent concept which can be mobilized politically in a variety of ways” and makes no real defense of democratic rights), but to organize the struggle to extend them.[13]

Marxists never support a step backwards in this aspect of the class struggle—we never hand the state better tools with which to suppress our side. We know that whatever legal restrictions on free speech, assembly, etc., imposed by the state, not matter who it claims to be directed against, can be used against the working class, social struggles, and our organizations. Remember, the ban on the veil in public schools in France does not say, “we ban the veil,” but rather religious symbols. But everyone in France knows against whom it is directed. Bans against protests outside abortion clinics have been used not against the anti-abortionists, but against pro-abortionists trying to defend the clinics and a woman’s right to choose. Many other examples could be cited.

Our battle against racist and reactionary press has to be organized and conducted by the working-class movement, not by demanding state intervention, which will only be used against our side. Our position is best articulated by Trotsky in an article we republished in SW, in which he responds to a Mexican CP trade union leader Toledano who calls for the Mexican state to ban the reactionary press in Mexico:

Theory, as well as historic experience, testifies that any restriction to democracy in bourgeois society is eventually directed against the proletariat, just as taxes eventually fall on the shoulders of the proletariat. Bourgeois democracy is usable by the proletariat only insofar as it opens the way for the development of the class struggle. Consequently, any workers “leader” who arms the bourgeois state with special means to control public opinion in general, and the press in particular, is a traitor. In the last analysis, the accentuation of class struggle will force bourgeois of all shades, to conclude a pact: to accept special legislation, and every kind of restrictive measures, and measures of “democratic” censorship against the working class. Those who have not yet realized this, should leave the ranks of the working class….

It is essential to wage an unrelenting battle against the reactionary press. But the workers cannot leave a task they have to fulfill themselves through their own organizations and their own press, to the repressive fist of the bourgeois state. Today the government may seem well disposed towards workers’ organizations. Tomorrow it may fall, and it inevitably will, into the hands of the most reactionary elements of the bourgeoisie. In this case the existing repressive laws will be used against the workers. Only adventurists who think of nothing but the moment’s needs can fail to guard themselves against such a danger.[14]

A note on “equivalence”

The Charlie Hebdo massacre was not a blow against anti-Muslim racism, and was not intended as such, as I have pointed out. Indeed, it was a racist, anti-Semitic act as well. Are we to give a “pass” to the racism of Islamic fundamentalism but not to Charlie Hebdo, merely because the state does the reverse? This would be, as Achcar says in his excellent interview, “orientalism in reverse,” a point he makes in a recent SW interview in response to the idea that one cannot use the term “barbarism” to describe the Paris massacre.

What a lot of the argument boils down to is that we should say anything that might overlap with the language of our enemies. Joel Reinstein’s in his SW letter on Hebdo and free speech argues that though it may be true that it was an attack on free speech, it was an “isolated” threat to racist speech, which we should not speak of because doing so echoes the refrain of the headlines of the bourgeois press. Since the bourgeois press and ruling classes are trumpeting the idea that the Islamists involved in the Paris attack targeted free speech, we must remain silent on this question. According to this logic, we should formulate our analysis not as Marxists, but purely in reaction to whatever the ruling class says—if they say yea, we say nay; if they say nay, we say yea.

The same case was made by Alex Callinicos in an article written in response to the NPA’s statement after the massacre (see appended note).[15]

According to this logic, we should not even call the Charlie Hebdo attack a “terrorist attack,” because at this moment the ruling class is using the phrase “war on terror” to reinvigorate the ideological justification for its overseas wars. Apparently, the only way to highlight and underscore our opposition to the massacres committed by Western imperialism is to deny that any force it opposes engages in anything similar—that is, to fall into campism.

But to condemn both the massacre and the exploitation of it by the French ruling class for its own purposes is not necessarily to see “equivalence” between the two. As Gilbert Acchar notes in an SW interview,

How should anti-imperialists react? There are two possible ways. One is to say, “No, it’s not barbaric.” That’s ridiculous, because it obviously is. Why should one regard as barbaric the Islamophobic rampage perpetrated by Anders Breivik, the Norwegian far-right fanatic, in 2012, but not the massacres of 9/11, or the Paris killings, for that matter? This would be an extreme case of “Orientalism in reverse,” substituting the contempt of Islam with a very naive and uncritical stance toward everything that is done in Islam’s name….

The other way of reacting to it, of course, is to say: Yes, these massacres are barbaric indeed, but they are in the first place a reaction to capitalist-imperialist barbarism, which is much worse. That’s the reaction many on the left had after 9/11. Noam Chomsky was probably the most prominent of those who explained that, as appalling as the 9/11 attacks were, they were dwarfed by the massacres committed by US imperialism.[16]

Hence to use the term “barbarism,” or to denounce both sides is not necessarily to see “equivalence” between imperialism and the fundamentalist reactionaries.

The methodology of those who would claim that discussing “free speech” or calling the attacks “barbaric” is a concession to imperialist discourse is at best questionable for a Marxist. Our first dictum must be to formulate our own, independent policy, not craft what we say according to what is or is not being argued by the ruling class. Naturally, our propaganda must be shaped by the actual course of events, but our line is shaped by the interests of the class struggle and not by a desire not to “appear” in one way or another, an important part of which is to tell the truth. In The Revolution Betrayed, Trotsky answered those who claimed that any criticism of the Soviet Union would be misappropriated by the Western ruling classes:

The final argument of the “friends” [of the Soviet Union] is that reactionaries will seize upon any criticism of the Soviet regime. That is indubitable! We may assume that they will try to get something for themselves out of the present book. When was it ever otherwise? The Communist Manifesto spoke scornfully of the fact that the feudal reaction tried to use against liberalism the arrows of socialist criticism. That did not prevent revolutionary socialism from following its road. It will not prevent us either….[17]

A similar point was made by Hal Draper in a 1965 article, “In Defense of the New Radicals,” in which he explains the inadequacy of the position taken by Staughton Lynd and Tom Hayden, who wrote that they “refuse to be anticommunist” because “the term has lost all the specific content it once had” and only “ serves as the key category of abstract thought which Americans use to justify” US foreign policy. Draper responds first by noting that if this position is applied consistently, then Socialists during World War one should not have opposed Prussian militarism (which was an undeniable reality) on the grounds that the US government was justifying its own militarism with propaganda against Prussian militarism. Should the left during the Second World War have refused to denounce or expose Hitler on the grounds that the US claimed to be fighting a “war against fascism”? He concludes:

One of the greatest humanistic traditions of the world’s radical movements has always been their ready responsiveness to injustice anywhere. American revolutionists eagerly solidarized themselves with Irish revolutionaries and anti-Tsarist conspirators, and in return there were demonstrations in a dozen foreign countries against the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti. Today one of the most remarkable of the arguments heard in some new-radical circles is the one which says that, since we are Americans, we must concern ourselves only with what is wrong with America. This is chauvinism turned inside-out. Fortunately, no one really believes in this despicable principle—when it comes to demonstrating against apartheid in South Africa, or against suppression of student demonstrations in Franco Spain, etc. (Presumably, however, if the U.S. were at sword’s-points with the South African government, the anti-apartheid position would lose all of its specific content…)[18]

II. Terrorism:

We as socialists also must have something to say about acts of individual terror. Think of it this way. Had this been an attack, say, on the French President, by Palestinians with politics we support, we would not have refrained from criticizing the tactic of individual terror, as we always do, as one which expects the passive masses to applaud the heroic individuals, or the way in which such acts merely strengthen reaction and state repression rather than building support for the movement that inspired the attack, however much we sympathize with their political motivation. Clearly, we must do the same in the Hebdo case, but we must add: this particular act of terrorism was committed by reactionaries promoting a reactionary creed, and that it was designed deliberately to provoke an Islamphobic reaction from Western imperialism and drive a wedge between Muslims and non-Muslism. As we wrote in the ISR after the 9-11 attacks (and which is applicable in the current context):

They were not terrorist acts even in the sense described by Trotsky above—misguided efforts by the oppressed to strike a blow against their oppressor. The targets were apparently chosen to kill massive numbers of innocent people.

The perpetrators of the September 11 attacks did not even target those responsible for America’s foreign policy. They targeted thousands of ordinary workers, immigrants and Muslims, many of whom are also victims of the corporate and military policy of the U.S. government.

Moreover, rather than striking a blow against U.S. policies abroad, the attacks have strengthened them by giving Bush and Co. a green light to crack down on dissent at home and pursue their military agenda abroad unhindered. In this sense, September 11 was a profoundly reactionary act. The methods employed on September 11 were methods more common to Colombian fascist paramilitaries or right-wing Cuban terrorists that the CIA trains and the U.S. “harbors.”

III. On the French Left

I want to finally say something about the French Left. First, we should not formulate our views of the French left or the NPA based on ignorance and a few shreds of second-hand information and Facebook gossip. Nor should we treat the French left as if it is an undifferentiated mass. There is no doubt that there is historically on the left a problem with using the cover of Laïcité,  or secularism, to attack the veil. Sharon wrote about it in ISR 35, which became a chapter in her book Women and Socialism. We’ve also written about it in SW.[19]

Others have weighed in on this question Socialist Worker, so I won’t elaborate on the point that Charlie Hebdo was not a fascist publication, but was quite contradictory, acting quite like Bill Maher in regard to its Islamophobia—which we are sharply critical of—but that it also stood for immigrant rights, workers’ rights, women’s rights, and against the National Front. Five of the cartoonists who died were people whose work appeared also in other left publications in France. One of the cartoonists who was killed in the massacre, for example, also did cartoons for the paper of Lutte Ouvriere. It’s important to know these things not because we are apologists for racist cartoons, but because Marxists should know the truth. It will not do for us to say: “All I need to know is that Charlie Hebdo was racist and the state is defending them and attacking Muslims.” We want to know more, not less. It is not a betrayal of our struggle against racism to know the contradictory place the publication had in French politics.

Moreover, we cannot only formulate our views based on criticisms we had of the dispute in the NPA several years ago around a Muslim member of the NPA who ran as an NPA candidate wearing a headscarf, was criticized for doing so by a section of the NPA (and defended by others), and ended up quitting the party. But we should know more, and want to learn more.

I can’t profess here to present a detailed elaboration of what the trajectory of the NPA has been over the past 5 years—which would require a lot more research and knowledge. What I want to do in the little time I have left is to give some sense of what the NPA has done and said regarding Islamophobia in recent years and in response to the Paris massacre. I think what is revealed is, at the very least, that the NPA has published some very impressive statements. 

On the eve of the “Je Suis Charlie” mass demonstration, they issued the following statement: “After the dreadful attack on Charlie Hebdo national unity is a trap: let’s unite for democracy and solidarity against racism,” which reads in part:

This murderous violence comes from somewhere. It’s created in the heart of the social and moral violence that is very familiar to large numbers of the young people who live on the working class estates. It’s the violence of racism, xenophobia, discrimination, and the violence of unemployment and exploitation. This barbarous violence is the monstrous child of the social war that the right and the left are waging in the service of finance. On top of this there are the wars they have started against Iraq, in Afghanistan, Libya, Africa and Syria. There is also the decades long war against the Palestinian people. These are wars, the only purpose of which is to maintain the dominance of the multinationals and their right to plunder while empowering the most reactionary fundamentalists. This barbarous military violence creates another sort of barbarous violence. There is no answer to the social decomposition of which the crime against Charlie Hebdo is a dramatic expression unless we fight the politics that make it possible.[20]

The NPA Youth responded to the “national unity” demonstration on January 11 by issuing a leaflet with the heading, “Against national union, islamophobia, and repression,” which read, in part (please pardon the poor translation):

For the government, the policy of National Unity has a clear objective: to justify the introduction of draconian measures. It strives to build and the idea of an internal enemy against which we should guard. These measures are implemented in a context of rising Islamophobia. Thus, there have been nearly 40 Islamophobic attacks in the space of a few days, including on mosques, kebab shops, and on women wearing headscarves. Last weekend, a Muslim man of 47 years died following a knife attack.

Now is the time for resistance. Withstand the pressure of national unity, which carries with it the justification for new wars in the name of the “fight against terrorism,” the restriction of civil liberties and the rise of racist and Islamophobic ideas and policies…. More than ever, it’s time to organize resistance against the government and its racist, imperialist, and anti-social policies![21]

There are other examples of the NPA taking a firm stand against Islamophobia in recent years. Last December the NPA endorsed and participated in a Paris conference entitled “A Day Against Islamophobia.” In the summer of 2012 four kids camp monitors from Granvilliers were fired on the grounds that it was Ramadan, and being Muslim, the monitors would be fasting and therefore not capable of performing their duties properly. The NPA issued a flier denouncing the decision that was titled, “Muslims aren’t the danger, Islamophobia is,” which decried the “stigmatization, discrimination, criminalization, and exclusion” of Muslims in French society.

I’ll finish by citing one more article. In April, 2011, the NPA published an article attacking a new proposed law banning women wearing the Burqa (full covering) in public. Apologies for the bad translation, but it is worth quoting extensively, in particular for its rejection of the ruling class use of republicanism to advance a repressive agenda, its criticism of the idea that banning religious garb will free women, and its criticism of those sections of the French left that have fallen into the trap of national unity:

A certain word is becoming a major thrust to Sarkozy and the UMP for 2012. This is obviously not a real problem, like unemployment or economic crisis … No, this is the word “secularism.” This false debate is hyped by the government and echoed by most of the media. It is only used to target a segment of the population, Muslims, and propagate racism, on which the NF successfully preys.

There is a form of media and political hysteria that aims to contribute to the idea that Islam is a threat to “our republican values.” Since Marine Le Pen launched the debate to ban Muslim prayers in the street, each group tries to one-up the other  [It then attacks a particular newspaper for discussing the “problem behaviors” of Muslims].

The “antiburqa” Law clearly shows this. It is a discriminatory measure that will lead to police harassment of several thousand women. Far from “freeing” them, the law will restrict their ability to travel outside their homes. The dominant ideology exploits republican values, which become the screen of an Islamophobic campaign.

For Sarkozy, this policy has a double intent. First, to divide the population while welding a part of the popular classes around the slogan of “national identity.” Secondly, to weaken the left, much of whom have fallen into the trap of “national unity” and support for republican values in the face of the “Islamic threat.” In the vote in 2010, only the NPA and the Greens opposed the law. PS supported it. Mélenchon has spoken “for a law banning the burqa” and against public street prayers. The PCF abstained… The left is so deeply divided on the issue of secularism and the right profits from it.

There is reason to fear that the law against the niqab is only a first step towards more general ban on the “headscarf.” On April 11, the government released 100,000 posters and 400,000 pamphlets stating, “the Republic is lived openly” to launch its racist campaign against Muslim women wearing headscarves….

Do not let them do this; reject the logic of stigmatization that makes Muslim scapegoats for the crisis. It is urgent to avoid falling into the trap of the French version of the “clash of civilizations.”[22]

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[1] Lenin, “Draft of a declaration from the editorial board of Iskra,” https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1900/apr/draft.htm.

[2] Lenin, “Declaration of the editorial board of Iskra,” https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1900/sep/iskra.htm.

[3] Don Lash, “Who do we trust with our rights?” http://socialistworker.org/2015/01/19/who-do-we-trust-with-our-rights.

[4] Sofia Arias and Wael Elasady, “No tolerance for Islamophobia,” http://socialistworker.org/2015/01/13/no-tolerance-for-islamophobia.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Keith Rosenthal, “How far does free speech go?” http://socialistworker.org/2015/01/15/how-far-does-free-speech-go.

[7] On the role of non-state actors, see http://index.rsf.org/#!/themes/non-states-groups-tyrants-of-information; “Political use of religious censorship,” see http://index.rsf.org/#!/themes/blasphemy-political-use-of-religious-censorship.

[8] See, for example, Elizabeth Schulte, “The racist backlash against France’s Muslims,” http://socialistworker.org/2015/01/12/the-anti-muslim-backlash-in-france.

[9] See, for example, Sharon Smith, “Using women’s rights to sell Washington’s war,” International Socialist Review Issue 21, January 2002; http://isreview.org/issues/21/afghan_women.shtml.

[10] Joel Reinstein, “Is free speech the issue?” http://socialistworker.org/2015/01/22/is-free-speech-the-issue.

[11] See, for example, Sasha Goldstein, “New issue of Charlie Hebdo as France announces 54 arrested for hate speech, glorifying terrorism,” http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/new-charlie-hebdo-france-arrests-54-hate-speech-article-1.2077137

[12] “Outrage as France becomes the first country to ban pro-Palestinian demos,” http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2697194/Outrage-France-country-world-ban-pro-Palestine-demos.html.

[13] Colin Wilson, “Real free speech is subversive, not about defending the status quo,” RS21, February 21, 2015, http://rs21.org.uk/2015/02/24/free_speech/ http://rs21.org.uk/2015/02/24/free_speech/.

[14] Leon Trotsky, “Freedom of the press and the working-class,” http://socialistworker.org/2015/01/29/freedoms-and-the-working-class.

[15] Alex Callinicos, “Paris attacks are a legacy of imperialism,” http://socialistworker.co.uk/art/39717/Paris+attacks+are+a+legacy+of+imperialism.

[16] Gilbert Achcar, “What caused the killings?”, Socialist Worker, February 2, 2015, http://socialistworker.org/2015/02/02/what-caused-the-killings.

[17] Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed (1936), https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1936/revbet/ch12.htm.

[18] Hal Draper, “In defense of the new radicals,” New Politics, September 1965, http://www.unz.org/Pub/NewPolitics-1965q3-00005.

[19] Sharon Smith, “Women and Islam,” ISR 35, May­–June 2004; http://www.isreview.org/issues/35/women_islam.shtml; “Islamophobia and France’s NPA,” Interview with John Mullen, http://socialistworker.org/2010/12/15/islamophobia-and-the-npa.

[20] International Viewpoint, January 11, 2015, http://www.internationalviewpoint.org/spip.php?article3798.

[21] http://jeunes.npa2009.org/spip.php?article1507.

[22] Antoine Bolangé, “Burqa, laïcité « Choc des civilisations » à la française,” May 14, 2011, http://www.npa2009.org/content/burqa-la%C3%AFcit%C3%A9-%C2%AB%E2%80%89choc-des-civilisations%E2%80%89%C2%BB-%C3%A0-la-fran%C3%A7aise.