Headscarves and binary choices

I agree with this. I think an important point to consider here is who our propaganda is aimed at. Dundee was ranting on on another thread about ‘that sort of stuff having no appeal to his grandmother’. I think that a lot of anarchists go on about appealing to ‘normal people’. Take this argument to its extremes, and you end up with something like Class War. I think that our target audience isn’t ‘normal people’, who ever they are, but actually class conscious workers, and workers in struggle. As you say we don’t have the influence, and power, and that I think that our role on these type of issues is to point out how the campaign is being used, and which interests are behind it, and why. I think that it is important to recognise that fact. There is another alternative, which is to take on the role that I understand the SWP have done in the UK, and end up as apologists for Islam. I think that it is a mistake for us to be getting involved in all of those sort of ‘campaign’ politics, which are actually used as power struggles between different anti-working class factions.

Yes, we would. I think that this is a very different issue here, and that there is a class interest though. I don’t think that fighting for the right to wear turban is at all in the class interest. What we have a problem with in France is the fact that this is being used as a racist campaign, and we are opposed to the racist campaign. I don’t particularly care about women’s right to wear turban. I do care about a racist campaign to divide the working class.

Incidentally in Turkey, where this is not at the heart of a racist campaign, it is also presented as a binary opposition. Those who oppose the ‘freedom’ to wear headscarves, are saying that ‘if you let it go on this issue, the next thing that they will want is to force all women to wear bags on their heads’. If one had to chose between these two position, I know which side my sympathy would lean towards.

On the point of a worker being disciplined, there was a case in Turkey last year, which made the first TV news item on all channels, and had quite far reaching developments. There was a teacher in a small town in the South-West, I think it was somewhere like Aydin, or Uşak, who was refused a promotion because she wore a headscarf while travelling to, and from work on the grounds that it set a bad example to the ‘school children’. One of the Islamicist newspaper ran this on the front page with the pictures of the ‘guilty’ judges who had made this decision. A few days later, a guy walked into the court, and started shooting at the Judges killing one.

The next day there was a spontaneous demonstration against Islamic fundamentalism. All well, and good one may say. However, it was the type of spontaneous demonstration where state employees were give time off to attend, and it was held at Atatürk’s mausoleum.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4993444.stm

I think that this gives some idea of how this is all being used as a faction fight between two different factions. In some ways it has got to the point of absurdity with things like the president refusing to allow the Prime ministers wife into his house because she wears a headscarf. I think that the tasks of communists is to point out that this is a state campaign, and that the important thing is for workers to defend their own interests.

I think that in France the situation is very different as it is being used as part of a racist campaign, and dividing the working class along lines of race is directly against working class interests. The point is not though to form committees to defend rights alongside the Imams, but to explain to class conscious workers, some of whom may feel that an attack against religion is a positive thing, that this is part of a racist campaign, and hopefully these people will take up our arguments in their workplaces, and communities.

To conclude, on the point of a worker being disciplined for wearing a headscarf, I would support her as I think that it would be a racist attack on a worker. In Turkey, I would feel much more wary about it. In neither case though would I be running across the road to my local mosque to help set up some campaign for democratic rights.

As an end note, the only reason I referred to the state doing it is because in both Turkey, and France it is the state that was doing it. It is a state campaign. If I was in your workplace in Northern Ireland, and some poxy jumped up racist little boss tried it on, I would have the same attitude as you.

Devrim

Please continue.
Devrim

Treeofjudas, can I just give, once again, just a rather crass example.
In Turkey it is illegal to spread religious propaganda. In fact at blind eye is turned to certain Islamic groups, but that is the law.
Certainly it is illegal to spread 'Christian propaganda'. So groups like the Mormons, or the Jehovah's witnesses get arrested, and deported when they knock on people's doors bothering people with their god.
At the moment I am working in central Europe for a few months, and two lots of god bothers have knocked on my door.
In the last ten years in Turkey this only happened once, Mormons.
Yes, I think that the Islamicists shouldn't be allowed to bother me when I am relaxing at home either, but I am certainly not going to go out on the street for the right of religious loons to harass me in my house.
Devrim

Jack I split this, but I am interested in your reasoning.
http://libcom.org/forums/thought/normal-people
Devrim