Re: [A-List] Populism or Neoliberalism?

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
> Class politics, from above and below, exists in the Middle East,
> including Iran.  It is just not politics that aims to establish
> socialist society.  In that the Middle East does not differ at all
> from the rest of the world, including much of Latin America.

No, class rhetoric exists in the Middle East. People like Ahmadinejad 
are very good at the rhetoric but are not very good at much else. 
Somebody who had genuine class politics would never have invited David 
Duke to speak at a conference. In fact, much of Ahmadinejad's utterances 
on the Palestinian question suffers from a failure to draw class 
distinctions. Here is our brilliant anti-imperialist speaking to the UN:

>>The battle that is going on in Palestine today, therefore, is the 
frontline of the conflict between the Islamic world and the Oppressor 
World. It is a battle of destiny that will determine the fate of 
hundreds of years of conflict in Palestine.

Today, the Palestinian nation is fighting the Oppressor World on behalf 
of the Islamic umma (nation). Thank God, from the day the Palestinian 
nation moved towards an Islamic struggle with Islamic objectives and an 
Islamic environment, and made Islam the dominating force in its 
behaviour and orientation, we have been witnessing the progress and 
successes of the Palestinian nation every day.

I must say that you have chosen a very valuable title for your gathering 
[World Without Zionism]. Many are sowing the seeds of defeat and despair 
in this all-out war between the Islamic world and the Infidel Front, 
hoping to dishearten the Islamic world.<<

What stupid garbage.

Compare it to a Fidel Castro speech to the UN:

Mr. President: There is no doubt that the problem of the Middle East has 
turned into one of the situations of most concern in current affairs. 
The sixth summit examined the matter in its two-fold dimension. On the 
one hand, the conference reaffirmed that Israel's determination to 
continue its policy of aggression, expansionism and colonial settlement 
in the territories it has occupied with the support of the United States 
constitutes a serious threat to peach and world security. At the same 
time, the conference examined the problem from the viewpoint of the 
rights of the Arab peoples and the Palestinaian question. for the 
nonalined countries, the Palestinian question is the crux of the Middle 
East problem. Both form an integrated whole which cannot be resolved 
separately. The basis for a just peace in the region begins with the 
total and unconditional withdrawal of Israel from all occupied Arab 
territories and presupposes for the Palestinian people the return of all 
their occupied territories and the recovery of their inalienable 
national rights, including the right to return to their homeland, to 
self-determination and to the establishment of an independent state in 
Palestine in accordance with Resolution 3236 of the General Assembly. 
This implies the illegality and nullity of the measures adopted by 
Israel in the occupied Palestine and Arab territories as well as the 
establishment of colonies or settlements in Palestinian lands and the 
other Arab territories, the immediate dismantling of which is a 
prerequisite for the solution of the problem.

As I said in my speech to the sixth summit, we are not fanatics. The 
revolutionary movement has always affirmed its abhorrence of racial 
discrimination and pogroms of any kind, and deep in our hearts re 
repudiate with all our strength the unrelenting persecution and genocide 
that Nazism unleashed in its time against the Jewish people. But I 
cannot recall anything so similar in contemporary history than the 
eviction, persecution and genocide carried out today by imperialism and 
Zionism against the Palestinian people, stripped of their land, expelled 
from their own homeland, dispersed throughout the world, persecuted and 
murdered. The heroic Palestinians are an impressive example of 
abnegation and patriotism and are the living symbol of the greatest 
crime of our age. [applause]

Can anyone find it strange that the conference found itself forced, for 
reasons that do not arise from any political prejudice but from the 
objective analysis of facts, to point out that the policy of the United 
States plays a fundamental role in preventing the establishment of a 
just and complete peace in the region of alining itself with Israel, by 
supporting it, by working toward partial solutions that are favorable to 
Zionist objectives, and by safeguarding the fruits of Israeli aggression 
at the expense of the Arab people of Palestine and the whole Arab nation.

The facts, and only the facts, led the conference to condemn U.S. 
policies and maneuvers in the region. When the heads of state or 
government reached a consensus condemning the Camp David accords and the 
Egypt-Israel treaty of March 1979, the formulations were preceded by 
long hours of thorough study and of profitable exchanges which made it 
possible for the conference to consider those treaties not only as the 
total abandonment of the cause of the Arab peoples but also as an act of 
complicity with the continued occupation of the Arab territories. The 
words are hard, but true and just.


full: http://www.newhumanist.com/1979un.html