IRAN

1.8m jobs created by 97,000 active cooperatives

July 5, 2021 -  By Faranak Bakhtiari  TEHRAN TIMES

TEHRAN – Some 97,000 cooperatives are active across the country, which have created more than 1.8 million direct jobs, Minister of Cooperatives, Labor, and Social Welfare, Mohammad Shariatmadari, said in a message on the occasion of World Cooperatives Day 2021.

The United Nations International Day of Cooperatives is celebrated annually on the first Saturday of July. The aim of this celebration is to increase awareness about cooperatives, highlight the complementary goals and objectives of the United Nations and the international cooperative movement.

In 1992, following a concerted lobbying effort by the cooperative members of the International Co-operative Alliance (ICA) and COPAC members, the United Nations General Assembly proclaimed the International Day of Cooperatives by the UN by resolution 47/90 of December 16, 1992.

This year, the International Day of Cooperatives is celebrated on July 3 as “Rebuild better together”.

In the world, 280 million jobs have been created by cooperatives and in our country, there are more than 97,000 active cooperatives that have created more than 1.8 million direct jobs, Shariatmadari stated.

He went on to note that fortunately, in Iran, after the creation of a comprehensive smart system for the cooperative sector, unique and laudable measures have been taken to create e-government and increasing transparency in cooperatives.

Speed and accuracy in the processes of creating and registering cooperatives and smart monitoring of the processes are among the characteristics of this system, which has been welcomed by all key actors in the field of cooperatives, he emphasized.

“Development of creativity and innovation system in cooperative businesses through the establishment of innovation centers and development of cooperatives, forming cooperative think tanks as facilitators between members of the country's cooperative sector, and also paving the way for the transformation of ideas into products are among the new functions of cooperatives.

Supporting the activities of emerging knowledge-based cooperatives and developing new types of cooperatives are the other measures taken,” he further explained.

Elsewhere in his remarks, he pointed to the readiness of cooperatives to take over the smart system of distributing goods and services with the approach of eliminating unnecessary intermediaries in order to reduce the cost of goods and services, adding that establishing a direct relationship between producers and consumers is another feature of cooperatives in the country.

How cooperatives work

Cooperatives have been acknowledged as associations and enterprises through which citizens can effectively improve their lives while contributing to the economic, social, cultural, and political advancement of their community and nation.

Cooperatives also foster external equality. As they are community-based, they are committed to the sustainable development of their communities - environmentally, socially, and economically. This commitment can be seen in their support for community activities, local sourcing of supplies to benefit the local economy, and in decision-making that considers the impact on their communities.

Despite their local community focus, co-operatives also aspire to bring the benefits of their economic and social model to all people in the world.

FB/MG

 

Ancient tombs, relics, architectural vestiges discovered in southern Iran

July 5, 2021 - TEHRAN TIMES

TEHRAN – A team of Iranian archaeologists has unearthed some ancient tombs, relics, and architectural vestiges in a survey they recently conducted in the southern Fars province.

The survey probed into Hirbodan hill and its surroundings, which is estimated to date from some 4,500 years ago.

“The findings of this excavation include human burials, architectural structures and inscriptions carved on the edge of an earthenware vessel,” Iranian archaeologist Sepideh Jamshidi-Yaganeh, who leads the survey, said on Sunday.

In this archaeological season, five trenches were carved, which also resulted in the discovery of relics, which are known as Kaftari Ware, distinctive ceramic vessels dated to the late 3rd and early 2nd millennia BC.

According to Encyclopedias Iranica, Kaftari ceramics were named and first characterized by Louis Vanden Berghe based on surface surveys and limited soundings carried out in the Marv Dasht region of the Kur River basin in highland Fars. The range of stylistic variation in the ceramics that fall under this name has been most clearly shown by more systematic surveys across the Kur River basin and excavations at the site of Tall-e Malyan, both led by William Sumner.

Hirbodan hill was is located near the once heart of the Achaemenian Empire (c. 550–330 BC), which was stretching from Ethiopia, through Egypt, to Greece, to Anatolia (modern Turkey), Central Asia, and India.

Throughout the late prehistoric periods, Elam was closely tied culturally to Mesopotamia. Later, perhaps because of domination by the Akkadian dynasty (c. 2334–c. 2154 BC), Elamites adopted the Sumero-Akkadian cuneiform script.

The modern-day provinces of Ilam and Khuzestan were once the seat of power of the Elamite kingdom.

Elamite language, extinct language spoken by the Elamites in the ancient country of Elam, which included the region from the Mesopotamian plain to the Iranian Plateau. According to Britannica, Elamite documents from three historical periods have been found. The earliest Elamite writings are in a figurative or pictographic script and date from the middle of the 3rd millennium BC.

Documents from the second period, which lasted from the 16th to the 8th century BC, are written in cuneiform; the stage of the language found in these documents is sometimes called Old Elamite.

The last period of Elamite texts is that of the reign of the Achaemenian kings of Persia (6th to 4th century BC), who used Elamite, along with Akkadian and Old Persian, in their inscriptions. The language of this period, also written in the cuneiform script, is often called New Elamite.

AFM

 

Bronze Age, ancient relics unearthed near once residence of ‘Iran’s Napoleon’

July 5, 2021 - TEHRAN TIMES

TEHRAN – Iranian archaeologists have unearthed arrays of relics and ruined structures near a once resident of Nader Shah, often called the “Napoleon of Iran.”

Estimated to date from the Bronze Age to the Qajar era (1789–1925), the objects were found near the northeastern villages of, Khalaj, Qolleh Zu, and Garu in Kalat county, Razavi Khorasan province.

“So far, 127 historical relics and ruined monuments have been identified, covering the period from the Bronze Age to the Qajar era,” ISNA quoted Hamed Tahmasbizadeh, a senior local archaeologist, as saying on Sunday.

The ruined structures are related to watermills, Asbads (windmills), water irrigation systems, qanats (underground aqueducts), roads, stairways, and walls were part of the discoveries, Tahmasbizadeh said.

Moreover, the archaeologists have discovered a cemetery, which is estimated to date back to the Iron Age and Bronze Age, Tahmasbizadeh added.

An ancient mine and the ruins of towers, fortresses, mosques, public bathhouses, bridges, and historical gardens were also found in the vast archaeological survey, the report said.

The three villages are situated near Qasr-e Khorshid (literally ‘the Sun Palace’), an 18th-century iconic monument that was once a royal resident for Nader Shah of Persia (1688–1747) who created an empire that stretched from northern India to the Caucasus Mountains.

Narratives say the ‘palace’ is named after Khorshid who was one of Nader’s wives. However, it was never completed due to an ambiguous state of affairs that poured in following Nader Shah’s sudden death.

Some believe that foreign artisans were engaged in the construction of the monument as its exterior panels bear pineapple and pear motifs, which are deemed to be unknown in the then Khorasan region. Evidence suggests the building was used as a residential headquarters during the early Qajar era (I785 to 1925).

Nader Shah is widely considered as one of the most powerful rulers in the history of the nation. He assumed power when a period of chaos overwhelmed Iran. The powerful monarch managed to reunite the Persian realm while repelled invaders. He is sometimes referred to as the Napoleon of Persia (Iran) or the Second Alexander, according to Encyclopedia Britannica.

Born Nader Qoli Beg, Nader had an obscure beginning in the Turkish Afshar tribe, which was loyal to the Safavid shahs of Iran. After serving under a local chieftain, Nader formed and led a band of robbers, showing marked powers of leadership. In 1726, as head of this group of bandits, he led 5,000 followers in support of the Safavid shah Ṭahmasp II, who was seeking to regain the throne his father had lost four years earlier to the Ghilzay Afghan usurper Mahmad.

Nader reformed Iran’s military forces and utterly defeated the Ghilzay Afghans in a series of brilliant victories, after which he restored Tahmasp to the Iranian throne. In 1736 Nader deposed the youthful ʿAbbas III (as Tahmasp II’s son was styled) and ascended the Iranian throne himself, taking the title of Nader Shah.

Although brilliantly successful as a soldier and general, Nader Shah had little talent for statesmanship or administration, and Iran became utterly exhausted during the later years of his reign. Tens of thousands of people perished in his ceaseless military campaigns, and the exactions of his tax-gatherers ruined the country’s economy.

AFM

 

Iran national library preserves 560-year-old divan of “Parrot of India”

July 5, 2021 - TEHRAN TIMES

TEHRAN – A rare manuscript of a divan of Amir Khosrow Dehlavi, the greatest Persian-writing poet of medieval India who was known as the “voice of India” or “Parrot of India”, is preserved at the National Library and Archives of Iran (NLAI).

This manuscript dating back to 560 years ago is the oldest copy of the divan, which is the first book of five divans written by the poet, an NLAI bibliographer Hamzeh Moradi-Bahram said in a press release on Monday.

The divan entitled the Tohfat al-Seghar (“A Gift from Childhood”) contains the poems Amir Khosrow Dehlavi composed between 12 and 20.

The book has been inscribed by Ghias ad-Din ibn Vali Qasemi in 880 AH during the Timurid period (1370–1507). 

Quatrains by Persian polymath Omar Khayyam Neyshaburi have also been written on the margins of the pages in the divan. 

Nasser ad-Din Abul-Hassan Amir Khosrow Dehlavi, (1253-1325) was a son of Amir Sayf ad-Din Mahmud, a Turkish officer, and an Indian mother. He was born in Patiyali and early on displayed his poetical talent, encouraged by his maternal grandfather, Emad al-Molk. 

His master in poetry was Shahab ad-Din Mahmera Badauni, who had written religious and panegyric verse. Khosrow took service with Sultan Balban’s family, accompanying his son Boghra Khan to Bengal and later his eldest son to Multan. 

There the prince was killed by the Mongols in 1284 and the poet captured. Afterwards, he went with the governor Hatam Khan to Oudh and returned to Delhi in 1289. 

He was a favorite of Sultan Jalal ad-Din Khalji (1290-96) and of his assassin Ala ad-Din Khalji (1296-1315), under whom he wrote most of his works. 

After enjoying the favor of Qotb ad-Din Mobarakshah (1316-20), Ghias ad-Din Toghloq (1320-25), and for a short time Mohammad Toghloq, Khosrow died in 1325. One should not blame him for his shifting allegiances in a confused political situation; this was the normal practice of medieval poets.

The Wast al-Hayat was another divan he collected between 1273 and 1284. The Ghorrat al-Kamal carries poems written between his 34th and 43rd years. 

In 1316, Khosrow collected the Baqiya-ye Naqiya, and shortly before his death, the Nehayat al-Kamal.

Photo: The Tohfat al-Seghar by poet Amir Khosrow Dehlavi is preserved at the National Library and Archives of Iran.

MMS/YAW

 Iran remains unmoved as Israel resorts to military threats

First we take Tel Aviv...

July 5, 2021 - TEHRAN TIMES

TEHRAN - With the Vienna nuclear talks hitting a deadlock after the sixth round, Israel finds itself more isolated on Iran and is unable to influence the talks, something that prompted it to try out a new military stunt in order to get the talks moving in line with Israel’s interests.

During his recent trip to Washington, Chief of Staff of Israeli Armed Forces Aviv Kochavi reportedly conveyed clear messages to the U.S. administration regarding the possibility of the U.S. returning to the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement. These messages included threats of an Israeli military attack inside Iran. The Israeli general held behind-closed-doors meetings with several high-ranking American officials including Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, CIA Director William Burns, and DIA Deputy Director Suzanne White.

In these meetings, Kochavi claimed that Israel had made a decision to dismantle the alleged Iranian military nuclear program a year before the U.S. 2020 presidential election and the start of the buzz over a return to the nuclear deal, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). According to Israeli reports, Kochavi also told his American interlocutors that the Israeli army has devised at least three military plans in order to thwart the Iranian nuclear program, and that the previous Israeli government, led by Benjamin Netanyahu, put aside funds for these plans, and that the current government, led by Naftali Bennett, pledged to add large sums in order to fill gaps related to readiness as soon as possible.

This saber-rattling came against a backdrop of a diplomatic war of words between Iran and the U.S. after the sixth round of the Vienna talks which resulted in little progress compared to previous rounds. The U.S. demanded a commitment from Iran to discuss other thorny, non-nuclear issues such as Iran’s missile program and its regional influence while rejecting Iranian demands regarding the lifting of all Trump-era sanctions and the provision of a guarantee that Washington would not withdraw from the deal again once it is revived. In fact, disagreements between the two are so deep that the mere resumption of the talks now hangs in the balance, with Russia is now insinuating that the talks may not be resumed any time soon.

This charged atmosphere has led Israel to remarkably increase diplomatic contacts with the U.S. in the hope that these communications would affect the U.S. stance toward the Vienna talks. But the Israelis themselves have acknowledged that they are unable to influence the U.S. Iran policy. 
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported Monday that Tel Aviv can no longer influence the new deal that the Biden administration seeks, one that would be “longer and stronger” than the existing one that is the JCPOA. 

But the Israelis seem not to be giving up on their anti-JCPOA crusade. They appear to have reverted to the decades-long dream of getting the U.S. to do their own job with American blood and treasure: an American military strike against Iran. Haaretz reported that Israeli officials are trying to convince the U.S. into bringing up the military option against Iran if it continued its nuclear activities, hoping that making hostile announcements would create deterrence against Iran. 

But one diplomat predicted that the Biden administration was less likely to attack Iran if it violated the terms of the agreement, Haaretz said, adding, Americans do not currently want the potential for a military conflict in terms of their priorities.

In doing so, the Israelis signal their assessment that threats of military strikes work with Iran, something that belies the most recent bouts of escalation during the Trump administration. Over the course of the Trump presidency, the U.S. issued a whole range of stark threats against Iran from attacking cultural sites to starving the Iranian people but none worked with Tehran. In addition, the Israelis themselves launched what they call the “campaign between wars,” a military doctrine mostly aimed to confront Iran’s spheres of influence in the region while keeping the confrontation below the threshold of an all-out war, to eliminate its regional influence and undermine its nuclear program. But they failed to achieve their goal as Iran’s nuclear program continues to advance and the country’s sway continues to expand.

Haredim, not Arabs or Iran, are the biggest threat to Israel - opinion

The rapidly expanding haredi state-within-a-state's current dynamic cannot continue without ending Israel’s brittle tenure as a Western-style democracy with per capita income to rival UK or France.

By DAN PERRY
JULY 5, 2021 21:29


A CELEBRATION for 63 haredi men who were released from prison in April 2018. They had been arrested for their failure to show up at the army recruitment office.
(photo credit: FLASH90)

Israel’s new leadership calls itself the “Change Government” because the long-serving Benjamin Netanyahu has been finally displaced. But its ideological disparities risk blocking the real changes that are needed, including on the primary threat the country as currently constituted faces.

It’s not from the Palestinians, important though they are (as I argued on these pages), nor from the wider Arab world or even Iran. The greatest danger is from within: the rapidly expanding haredi state-within-a-state whose current dynamic cannot continue without ending the country’s brittle tenure as a Western-style democracy with per capita income to rival Britain or France.

As we know, the haredim cling to a rigid interpretation of Judaism which tolerates little deviation from ancient traditions. They can be found in the US, Belgium, Britain and elsewhere, always forming tight-knit communities, but only in Israel is there a toxic firewall between them and fellow citizens.

This can be traced to the decision some 70 years ago by David Ben-Gurion to grant draft exemptions to students at yeshivot. Back then this applied to several hundred genuine scholars.

This arrangement turned Torah study into an arguably unprecedented obsession in which all haredi men are pushed to lifelong seminary duty, first to avoid the draft and then essentially as a source of welfare. Whereas other university students pay tuition, haredim receive stipends for as long as they study, if possible for life. Over 150,000 men now in these schools are indoctrinated in the faith that stricture and rabbis supersede the laws and officials of the state.

To maintain the insularity, most haredi high schoolers are sent to the community’s schools that teach little or no math, science and English; in recent days Israel’s chief rabbi, who is haredi, called such studies of secular subjects “nonsense.” Israel funds these schools even though their unfortunate graduates are essentially unemployable in a modern economy.

As a consequence less than half of haredi men are part of the workforce, the lowest participation level of any identifiable group in Israel – and, tellingly, far less than haredim in other countries. The minority who do work tend to populate a vast religious bureaucracy that includes supervisors of the mikvaot ritual baths, kashrut food certifications, and other apparatchiks.

Women in the community are banished from haredi parties’ candidates lists and encouraged to procreate with such vigor that they on average produce 7.1 children – far more than in any identifiable group in Israel. They live in a poverty rendered minimally tolerable by state subsidies for each child at the expense of working Israelis. Thus the community doubles itself every 16 years, four times the rate of the rest of Israel. The haredim have grown to about 12% of the 9.5 million people – almost 20% of the country’s Jews. Unless something changes – and the attrition rate is estimated at less than 5% – they will constitute a majority of Israel’s Jews in a few decades.

Clearly this economic setup could very well collapse, and the haredim will have to work. Perhaps the haredim might bestir themselves to somehow change their ways. But it is hard to see this happening fast enough for much to survive of the “Start-up Nation” that is a world leader in cybertechnology, agrotech and venture capital, punches way above its weight on Nobel prizes and exported television formats, is a global leader on gay rights and decriminalizing cannabis and has developed Iron Dome to zap rockets out of the sky. Indeed, it’s hard to see such an Israel compelling the secular to stay; the people responsible for all of the above can be expected to flee and take their global innovation skills with them.

TENSIONS HAVE long been high because of the ballooning draft exemptions, a flashpoint amplified by the almost uniform haredi support for the right wing (ironic, given early haredi opposition to Zionism). Many see this as perpetuating a conflict in which they refuse to fight (they are also a disproportion of West Bank settlers).

The COVID-19 crisis further raised the temperature when a considerable slice of the haredi population refused to shut schools and end large gatherings for prayers, weddings or funerals, ending up with spectacularly high infection rates (exacerbated by crowded living conditions) that contributed to Israel being the 2020 world leader in national lockdown days. (Netanyahu refused experts’ urgings for targeted lockdowns for fear of upsetting the haredim.) Occasional reports of haredim enforcing gender segregation or preventing women from singing in public wherever they gain a foothold cause further angst, as does ongoing haredi interference with public transportation and commerce on Shabbat.

It is out of deference to the haredim that Israel continues to allow all religions monopoly over formal marriage, granting Orthodox Judaism (not the majority stream in the United States), with its strict approach, authority over conversions. Thus many of the Russian-speaking immigrants are not recognized as Jews and mixed couples in general are driven to the absurdity of traveling abroad to marry.

This entire arrangement is acquiesced to and funded by Israel’s non-haredi majority whose way of life it stands to destroy by virtue of the birthrate. Partly that is out of fear of being branded intolerant – a classic problem of liberals in dealing with illiberalism.

It is possible that Israel will find a way to reboot its deal with the haredim, enforcing a core curriculum, ending yeshiva salaries, scaling back child subsidies, canceling the draft exemptions, and ignoring their wishes on matters of marriage, conversions and the Sabbath (certainly in secular areas).

It is even conceivable that this could happen within the framework of the Change Government, which does not rely on haredi parties. The right-leaning parties in the coalition – including Prime Minister Naftali Bennett’s Yamina – do contain religious members, but these are more modern religious people like Bennett himself, who might if anything wish to rescue the brand of Judaism from the haredim.

For Right-leaning parties to join the Center-Left in upending the current suicide march, they would need to abandon all hope for a future government that is uniformly right wing – because the Right cannot muster more than perhaps 40% of the seats in the Knesset without them.

This means that the fate of Israel rests with the Palestinians. If Israel and the Palestinians find a way to reach peace (or at least defang the conflict), a critical issue that gives the right wing meaning in Israel will disappear.

If they do not, then the Right may never find the courage to break decisively with its haredi flank.

Anyone who cares about Israel surviving therefore has a second reason to yearn for peace.

The writer is the former Cairo-based Middle East editor and London-based Europe/Africa editor of the Associated Press, and a former chairman of the Foreign Press Association in Jerusalem. He is the managing partner of the New York-based communications firm Thunder11. Follow him on Twitter: @perry_dan

UK
Keir Starmer Is Dragging Down the Labour Party

BY RONAN BURTENSHAW

JACOBIN

Labour held on in Batley and Spen in spite of Keir Starmer's unpopular leadership, not because of it. An effective local campaign kept him as far away as possible. In thrall to focus groups and media groupthink, Starmer is still guiding Labour onto the rocks.
Britain's Labour Party leader Keir Starmer (R) accompanies Kim Leadbeater (L), Labour's newest MP, as she addresses supporters following her victory in the Batley and Spen by-election. (OLI SCARFF/AFP via Getty Images)

And so, Labour survives in Batley and Spen. Botched efforts to capitalize on England’s Euros enthusiasm aside — “Labour is coming home,” apparently — the result is clearly a shot in the arm for the party’s beleaguered leadership. Written off as lost by commentators, MPs, and staffers in recent weeks, retaining the seat is a rare piece of good news and offers a window of opportunity to stop the slide of the past six months.

But, beneath the surface, there are plenty of reasons to be worried about the result. Labour’s margin in Batley and Spen has fallen from 3,525 in 2019 — a result we were told was the worst imaginable for the party — to just 323. In fact, its vote has fallen from 29,844 just four years ago to 13,296 today. The mortar that once attached this particular brick to the “red wall” has disintegrated.

More worryingly for the party, there are plenty of reasons to believe that the factors which led to the narrow victory in Batley and Spen could not be repeated on a national level. There is a consensus that Labour’s Get Out the Vote operation was crucial in delivering the result — but the party’s activist base is dwindling, with CLPs across the country reporting declining numbers of members engaged on a regular basis. In a general election, or even a national campaign of local elections, these cannot be funneled into one constituency for a concentrated period of time.

Furthermore, the campaign in Batley and Spen was hyper-local. Not only was the candidate, Kim Leadbeater, particularly popular and well known in the area, but she focused almost exclusively on local issues — from fly-tipping to safer roads — which would more typically be the preserve of council elections. That proved remarkably effective in a one-off by-election, but in a general election taking place amid a national political debate, it is very difficult to replicate.


In truth, Leadbeater’s campaign was shaped in large part by the Labour Party’s deep unpopularity at a national level. Her literature throughout the campaign was pink instead of the party’s traditional red — and her last leaflet didn’t even include Labour’s name, but did feature the word “local” six times. Party leader Keir Starmer didn’t feature in her narrative at all during the final weeks, while her Tory rival was heavily dependent on Boris, the government, and the Tories’ record on both Brexit and the vaccine rollout.

By contrast, Batley and Spen provided plenty of evidence that Labour is in trouble. After a loss in Hartlepool and disastrous local election results which saw the party lose voters in both directions — older postindustrial voters to the Tories and younger urban voters to various smaller parties — West Yorkshire saw another section of the party’s core vote break away, with thousands of Muslim voters alienated by the party’s failure to speak out over Palestine and Kashmir.

George Galloway’s 22 percent of the vote was not exclusively Muslim, of course, and included a broader segment of disillusioned working-class people, but his campaign was built on the back of deep-seated anger in West Yorkshire Muslim communities. When you compare this result to his vote share in successive elections since 2016 — 1.4, 5.7, 1.4, 1.4, and 1.5 percent — it is clear that something has changed significantly in the political landscape which made a campaign targeting Labour among the party’s long-time supporters viable once again.

Unfortunately, the party leadership and its outriders appear committed to learning no lessons from this at all. Rather than engage seriously with the reasons why people who had voted Labour for decades were turning their backs on the party, Muslims were instead treated to sweeping generalizations about their reactionary views.

First, a senior Labour official was quoted telling the Mail On Sunday that the reason the party was “haemorrhaging” Muslim votes was because of “what Keir has been doing on antisemitism.” In other words, the local Muslim community was motivated by a hatred of Jews. Then, a deeply unpleasant incident in which an anti-LGBT activist from outside the constituency accosted Kim Leadbeater on the street was turned to cast Muslims in general as homophobic — a claim disgracefully repeated by Paul Mason in the New Statesman today.

Mason wasn’t alone, though. A Labour source told the Times that the party had “lost the conservative Muslim vote over gay rights.” No one should deny that homophobia is a problem which can be weaponized by cynics during election campaigns, especially when candidates themselves are LGBT. But focusing blame for this problem on Muslims is a cynical position in itself — ignoring the reality that anti-LGBT bigotry is stirred up almost every day by our national press, including fearmongering campaigns about what children are taught in school.

Sadly, there was no end to the smears that Muslims in Batley and Spen could expect. Paul Mason even went so far as to brand people who had voted overwhelmingly for Jo Cox and Tracy Brabin as “anti-feminists.”

But this approach of caricaturing your problems rather than dealing with their real basis is consistent with Starmer’s leadership so far. Its monthslong war on “Corbynites” has been motivated by a belief that the Left is something like the Socialist Workers Party: a marginal sect with little if any purchase in wider society.

Seen from this perspective, the only political utility of the Left for Labour is as a punching bag — and the more it is punched, the greater the favor that is gained among the general public. Keir Starmer’s leading cheerleader on the NEC, Luke Akehurst, made this explicit last night, saying “voters like it when Labour leaders put the Hard Left back in their box.”

That hackneyed view might go down well among Britain’s habitually lazy commentariat, but it bears little semblance to reality. In fact, what Labour is now discovering is that the Left represents a real social constituency: a diverse group of those disillusioned by our political and economic system.

This includes young people angry at low wages, sky-high rents, and university debts; Muslims of all ages who have treated the party with growing suspicion since its central role in the War on Terror; minority ethnic voters frustrated by the persistence of deep racial inequalities; and working-class people who came to see little difference between Labour and the Conservatives on issues that impacted their lives over many years.

When Starmer’s leadership refuses to outline a vision for a fundamentally different economy, when it refuses to commit to transforming our political system, when it refuses to stand up against injustice internationally, it believes it is practicing winning politics by distancing itself from the hated Left and the Corbyn years. What we have now seen — from Batley and Spen to Hartlepool, and Bristol to Sheffield — is that Labour’s voters understand this to be an attack on their values and are increasingly unprepared to be treated with contempt.

Keir Starmer won his position as leader on a promise to be electable. But the fact remains that winning a general election today requires 40 percent or more of the vote. This cannot be achieved by chasing a fixed center ground of the broadly satisfied, something which no longer exists. It requires the building of a coalition on increasingly shifting sands — and that means, at a bare minimum, an enthusiastic base and a compelling vision for broader society. Despite Kim Leadbeater’s commendable victory, Batley and Spen shows that this remains a long way off.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ronan Burtenshaw is the editor of Tribune.

UK

How Labour Alienated Muslim Voters
By Taj Ali

Keir Starmer's party might have held Batley and Spen, but its approach to both domestic and foreign issues has turned away swathes of supporters in the Muslim community – as well as showing a total lack of moral fibre.


Credit: Christopher Furlong / Getty Images

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Muslim support for the Labour Party is falling. A poll of 504 British Muslims, carried out in mid-June by Survation on behalf of the Labour Muslim Network, found a net -12% drop in favourability for the Labour Party. The findings on support for the Labour leadership were even more damning: Keir Starmer has a net favourability rating of -7%.

Starmer’s potentially tenuous position and recent concern about different forms of prejudice among both major parties mean this was a subject of particular note in the lead-up to the Batley and Spen by-election. But this isn’t the first time many Muslims have felt disillusioned with the Labour Party. In fact, some of the most severe damage done to the relationship took place twenty years ago.

Tony Blair’s New Labour government adopted a neoconservative foreign policy stance that caused death and destruction in the Middle East, the legacy of which the region is still grappling with today. The illegal invasion of Iraq was, perhaps, the biggest foreign policy mistake in the post-war period: the disastrous war would lead to the deaths of nearly half a million people, and the use of depleted uranium bombs led to high incidence of birth defects, including among half of the babies born in Fallujah between the invasion and 2012.

In order to justify that mistake, Blair’s government relied heavily on fearmongering and the construction of a threat. Islamophobia became a political tool to achieve both domestic and foreign policy objectives, scapegoating Muslims for society’s various problems.

New Labour introduced domestic policies which undermined civil liberties and disproportionately targeted Muslims, framed as crucial to ‘national security’. A series of draconian pieces of legislation were passed which extended detention without trial and expanded surveillance powers, drastically increasing the powers of the police and intelligence services which had long been hostile to all minority groups.

Some of these processes had started well before the invasion of Iraq. In 2000, the Labour government passed the Terrorism Act, which expanded stop-and-search powers. In 2003, over 32,000 searches of ‘suspected terrorists’ were made, but less than one percent of those then arrested were actually charged with terrorism-related offences. Searches on Asian people between 2001 and 2003 increased by 300 percent.

The European Court of Human Rights later stated that the Terrorism Act attacked the right of individuals to privacy, and was both overused and misused. Similar observations have been made by human rights groups about the Prevent agenda, which New Labour set up in 2006, and which has been condemned for deliberately targeting British Muslims, particularly children.

In 2010, the newly-elected coalition government acknowledged the previous government’s counterterror legislation was ‘a significant source of grievance within the Muslim community’. They were right, but these were, of course, hollow words, and this government would build on New Labour’s authoritarian legacy by expanding the Prevent programme’s scope. By 2015, Cameron and Clegg had passed the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act, and made Prevent statutory duty: public sector workers, including teachers and doctors, were now required by law to make referrals against ‘radicalisation’, often with inadequate guidance.

The destruction of the Middle East speaks for itself; domestically, too, these policies have fuelled far-right extremism by legitimising a racist narrative that characterises Muslims as the enemy within. Today, some centrists aim to rehabilitate Blair’s image and gloss over his foreign policy disasters, but many in the Middle East are still living with their consequences, and Blair rightly remains an extremely unpopular figure within the Muslim community. A return to Blairism and its associated policies—through, for example, bringing central Blairites back into the party’s core—will only further erode support.

In 2017, however, 85% of British Muslim voted for the Labour Party. Many attributed this widespread support to the popularity of Jeremy Corbyn with the Muslim community: Corbyn’s voting record stood in stark contrast to those associated with the Blair years, particularly on issues pertaining to foreign policy and civil liberties. He was known for his strong opposition to the Iraq War and his vocal support for Palestine; outside Parliament, he had served as chair of the Stop the War Coalition and a patron of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign.

This longstanding commitment is markedly contrasted with Starmer’s team’s rush to plaster half-hearted concern about Kashmir, Palestine, and Tory Islamophobia over their campaign literature in Batley and Spen. After the equivocation evident since the start of Starmer’s leadership—stark in its contrast with the Corbyn years—it was inevitable that local Muslims would question this support’s authenticity.

Their scepticism has been fuelled by the actions of Keir Starmer himself. Last year, Starmer referred to the Kashmir crisis as a ‘bilateral issue’, abandoning the position of solidarity with Kashmiris under Corbyn. Starmer’s remarks caused outrage among Kashmiri communities in traditional Labour strongholds such as Birmingham, Bradford and, of course, Batley, and as a result, more than 100 British mosques threatened to boycott the party.

Then, in April this year, Starmer pulled out of the Ramadan Tent Project’s virtual fast-breaking event after he was made aware that its CEO, Omar Salha, supported the boycott of Israeli dates grown on illegal settlements in the West Bank. Salha’s position is not exactly niche: according to polling carried out by YouGov, 61 percent of Labour members support the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel, and only eight percent oppose it.

Instead of addressing these valid concerns, commentators and senior Labour officials have resorted to smearing the Muslim community as bigots. A fortnight ago, a senior Labour official briefed the Daily Mail, a bastion of Islamophobia itself, that Muslim voters were being lost because Keir Starmer had taken a strong stance on antisemitism – an insult to the Muslim Labour members who have been committed to tackling all forms of bigotry for a very long time.

Meanwhile, a leaked internal party report last year found widespread anti-Black racism and Islamophobia from senior officials within the Labour party had gone unchallenged. Members of staff in the party’s policy unit had reportedly found it ‘difficult to disagree’ with Douglas Murray’s claim that parties were refusing to admit that terrorism comes from Islam, and said that ‘even so-called moderate Islam’ has ‘hard questions’ to answer about terrorism. The Forde Inquiry into this leaked report has since been kicked into the long grass.

In November 2020, the Labour Muslim Network released a report into Islamophobia within the Party. The report, which constituted the largest ever consultation of Muslim members and supporters of the Labour Party, found 29% of Muslim Labour members had suffered Islamophobia within the Party while 37% had witnessed it. 44% said Labour doesn’t take Islamophobia seriously, and more than half of those surveyed said they didn’t trust the Labour leadership to tackle it.

This should have been the wake-up call for the Labour leadership to take decisive action to win back the trust of Muslim Labour members and supporters – and not just because it serves them electorally, but because support for causes like Kashmir and Palestine is a moral imperative for any party framing itself as ‘progressive’. Six months on, though, it seems support for the Labour Party, and Keir Starmer in particular, has fallen even further.

The task for the Labour Party now is to rebuild its strained relationship, and not with just the Muslim community, but with all communities that have been neglected by the politicians meant to represent them. That won’t happen by sidelining Muslims and ignoring our concerns, and it certainly won’t happen by returning to the Blairite politics of the past.
About the Author

Taj Ali is a freelance writer. His work has appeared in the Huffington Post, Metro and the Independent.

 

No peace treaty in Afghan as US war nears end

A military helicopter is being loaded to a C130 aircraft at the Bagram Air Base near Kabul. Reuters

Robert Burns and Lolita C Baldor, Associated Press

As the last US combat troops prepare to leave Afghanistan, the question arises: When is the war really over?

For Afghans the answer is clear but grim: no time soon. An emboldened Taliban insurgency is making battlefield gains, and prospective peace talks are stalled. Some fear that once foreign forces are gone, Afghanistan will dive deeper into civil war. Though degraded, an Afghan affiliate of the Daesh extremist network also lurks.

For the United States and its coalition partners, the endgame is murky. Although all combat troops and 20 years of accumulated war material will soon be gone, the head of US Central Command, Gen. Frank McKenzie, will have authority until September to defend Afghan forces against the Taliban. He can do so by ordering strikes with US warplanes based outside of Afghanistan, according to defence officials who discussed details of military planning on condition of anonymity.

US officials said Friday that the US military has left Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan after nearly 20 years. The facility was the epicenter of the war to oust the Taliban and hunt down the al Qaida perpetrators of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on America. Two officials say the airfield was handed over to the Afghan National Security and Defense Force in its entirety. They spoke on condition they not be identified because they were not authorized to disclose the handover to the media. A look at the end of the war:

What’s left of the combat mission? Technically, US forces haven’t been engaged in ground combat in Afghanistan since 2014. But counterterrorism troops have been pursuing and hitting extremists since then, including with Afghanistan-based aircraft. Those strike aircraft are now gone and those strikes, along with any logistical support for Afghan forces, will be done from outside the country.

Inside Afghanistan, US troops will no longer be there to train or advise Afghan forces. An unusually large US security contingent of 650 troops, based at the US Embassy compound, will protect American diplomats and potentially help secure the Kabul international airport. Turkey is expected to continue its current mission of providing airport security, but McKenzie will have authority to keep as many as 300 more troops to assist that mission until September.

It’s also possible that the US military may be asked to assist any large-scale evacuation of Afghans seeking Special Immigrant Visas, although the State Department-led effort may not require a military airlift. The White House is concerned that Afghans who helped the US war effort, and are thereby vulnerable to Taliban retribution, not be left behind.

When he decided in April to bring the US war to a close, President Joe Biden gave the Pentagon until Sept. 11 to complete the withdrawal. The Army general in charge in Kabul, Scott Miller, has essentially finished it already, with nearly all military equipment gone and few troops left.

Miller himself is expected to depart in coming days. But does that constitute the end of the US war? With as many as 950 US troops in the country until September and the potential for continued airstrikes, the answer is probably not.

How wars end: Unlike Afghanistan, some wars end with a flourish. World War I was over with the armistice signed with Germany on Nov. 11, 1918 - a day now celebrated as a federal holiday in the U.S. - and the later signing of the Treaty of Versailles.

World War II saw dual celebrations in 1945 with Germany’s surrender marking Victory in Europe (V-E Day) and Japan’s surrender a few months later as Victory Over Japan (V-J Day) following the US atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In Korea, an armistice signed in July 1953 ended the fighting, although technically the war was only suspended because no peace treaty was ever signed.

Other endings have been less clear-cut. The US pulled troops out of Vietnam in 1973, in what many consider a failed war that ended with the fall of Saigon two years later. And when convoys of US troops drove out of Iraq in 2011, a ceremony marked their final departure. But just three years later, American troops were back to rebuild Iraqi forces that collapsed under attacks by Daesh militants.

Victory or defeat?:  As America’s war in Afghanistan draws to a close, there will be no surrender and no peace treaty, no final victory and no decisive defeat. Biden says it was enough that US forces dismantled al-Qaida and killed Osama bin Laden, the group’s leader considered the mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Lately, violence in Afghanistan has escalated. Taliban attacks on Afghan forces and civilians have intensified and the group has taken control of more than 100 district centers. Pentagon leaders have said there is “medium” risk that the Afghan government and its security forces collapse within the next two years, if not sooner.

US leaders insist the only path to peace in Afghanistan is through a negotiated settlement. The Trump administration signed a deal with the Taliban in February 2020 that said the US would withdraw its troops by May 2021 in exchange for Taliban promises, including that it keep Afghanistan from again being a staging arena for attacks on America.

US officials say the Taliban are not fully adhering to their part of the bargain, even as the US continues its withdrawal.

NATO mission: The NATO Resolute Support mission to train, advise and assist the Afghan security forces began in 2015, when the US-led combat mission was declared over. At that point the Afghans assumed full responsibility for their security, yet they remained dependent on billions of dollars a year in US aid.

At the peak of the war, there were more than 130,000 troops in Afghanistan from 50 NATO nations and partner countries. That dwindled to about 10,000 troops from 36 nations for the Resolute Support mission, and as of this week most had withdrawn their troops.

Some may see the war ending when NATO’s mission is declared over. But that may not happen for months.

Counter terror mission: The US troop withdrawal doesn’t mean the end of the war on terrorism. The US has made it clear that it retains the authority to conduct strikes against al-Qaida or other terrorist groups in Afghanistan if they threaten the US homeland.

Because the US has pulled its fighter and surveillance aircraft out of the country, it must now rely on manned and unmanned flights from ships at sea and air bases in the Gulf region. The Pentagon is looking for basing alternatives for surveillance aircraft and other assets in countries closer to Afghanistan. As yet, no agreements have been reached.

 

Afghanistan: It was always going to end this way

Taliban fighters drive a tank through a city amid cheers from passersby. Reuters

Elizabeth Shackelford, Tribune News Service

The security situation in Afghanistan is deteriorating, prompting many to second-guess President Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw US troops by Sept. 11. This is an understandable emotional reaction, but it isn’t supported by facts. More time won’t change the outcome. If US troops left Afghanistan five years ago or five years from now, it was always going to end this way.

Since the final withdrawal began, the Taliban has advanced rapidly, already taking control of roughly one-third of the country. While some Afghan military units are losing in battle, many of the units the US military trained and supplied for years are surrendering without a fight, leaving valuable military hardware paid for by US taxpayers in Taliban hands. US intelligence analysts are now saying the Afghan government could collapse within six months of the withdrawal.

To use this as a reason for the US troops to stay would be like claiming the fall of Saigon as evidence that America should not have ended its campaign in Vietnam. US troops could have maintained a violent status quo there too, but they couldn’t have changed the outcome — not with two more years or 20.

The inevitability of the outcome does not make it any less tragic, but the tragedy does not make the decision to withdraw wrong. Instead, the rapid decline is proof positive that we were not on track to establish a stable government in the country, nor were our efforts to train the Afghan military putting it on a path to self-sufficiency. As Biden has said, this was not a winnable war.

Twenty years has proved that, while the US military can prop up a government and keep an enemy at bay, nothing it can do will create an effective and sustainable Afghan government or military. The threat environment has also changed dramatically in 20 years, and Afghanistan today is nowhere close to the top of the list. Staying now could only be justified if we had decided that permanently propping up a weak and corrupt Afghan government is in America’s national interest. It is not.

The costs of two decades of war in Afghanistan have been substantial and widely reported. The war-fighting costs alone come in at over $800 billion, but that is a fraction of the total costs borne by the American people, and the opportunity cost for what we might have invested in at home instead.

If you add in all US government spending on the war, including care for veterans who served there and interest paid on money we’ve borrowed to support it, it has cost the American people over $2 trillion. Imagine if that amount had instead been invested in infrastructure, education or health care here at home. Certainly, the American people would have more to show for it.

The Afghan people are facing an uncertain future, but whether it will be more violent isn’t even clear. Two decades of war have brought mass civilian casualties including from airstrikes by US and coalition forces. Fighting could drop if one actor takes dominant control.

Afghanistan