the RESPECT party

On 28 January 2012 at the United States Embassy in London, Stop the War held a rally to launch the Don't Attack Iran campaign. Among the speakers were Tony Benn, Kate Hudson, John Rees, Roger Lloyd Pack, Andrew Murray, John McDonnell MP, Sarah Colborne, Kevin Ovenden, Jeremy Corbyn MP, Shadia Edwards-Dashti. To watch all the videos visit the Stop the War Coalition website.

Public meeting
On the first anniversary of the fall of the Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak....
WHERE NOW FOR EGYPT AND THE MIDDLE EAST?

Speakers include:
Dr Kamal El-Helbawy, Chair of the Centre for the Study of Terrorism
George Galloway, Founder of Viva Palestina
Kate Hudson, General Secretary of CND
Andrew Murray, Founder and former Chair of the Stop the War Coalition
The meeting will be chaired by Seumas Milne, Guardian columnist

Sunday 12th February, 3.30pm, Khalili Lecture Theatre
School of Oriental and African Studies, Russell Square, London, WC1

Organised by The Respect Foundation

We are saddened, upset and rather stunned to learn of the death of Gayle O’Donovan on Saturday, 21st January 2012 in Norwich. It is a fitting measure of her character that we have all been left feeling helpless and lost at her passing.

Gayle was admired by the Respect Party and more widely throughout the environmental and anti-capitalist movements in Britain. She was a popular and excellent choice as the Green Party council candidate for Manchester Hulme where she worked. Her positive and constructive engagement with events such as the Convention of the Left and the Free Gaza movement typified the qualities she brought to a British body politic in desperate need of overhaul, even overthrow.

Gayle was possessed of powerful principles that governed her life. She found a political home in the Green Party as she sought to find a suitable mechanism for taking leftwing, anti-imperialist, socialist, feminist and environmental ideas to a wider world. Her easygoing manner on the doorstep alongside her fierce determination proved an excellent forge for spreading such messages.

George Galloway, founder of the worldwide Viva Palestina movement, arrived today in Jakarta, Indonesia.

This is the start of a two week speaking tour of the Far East in support of the Right of Return of all Palestinians whose families were driven from the country by the Catastrophe of 1948 and subsequently.

Galloway will address public events in Jakarta and Bandung - birthplace of the Non Aligned Movement (NAM). He is scheduled to meet parliamentarians ministers and opposition leaders, including Mrs Megawati Sukarnoputri, the daughter of NAM founder member President Sukarno.

Galloway moves on to a similar programme in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia on February 3rd.

Galloway was received on arrival by leading figures from the governing coalition party PKS and met later with representatives of Mrs Megawati Sukarnoputri's foundation.

HANDS OFF IRAN & SYRIA
PROTEST SATURDAY 28 JAN, 2PM called by Stop the War Coalition

The first major protest against an attack on Iran and Syria is scheduled for next Saturday, January 28, outside the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square, London.

The prospect of a new war in the Middle East is growing. As well as tightening sanctions, covert operations, assassinations and cyber attacks on Iran there is clear evidence of hostile US troop movements in to the region. The right in the US is pushing hard for intervention and these kind of provocations could spark war at any time. Meanwhile calls for intervention in Syria are getting louder and, as Jonathan Steele reported in the Guardian this week, there is a NATO backed military build up on Syria's borders too.

We need to start mobilising the anti-war majority now to swing the argument away from war. We are asking our supporters to do everything possible to publicise this protest and organise other protests and meetings locally.

Invite friends on Facebook - http://on.fb.me/yR9Q3i Tweet to spread the word - http://twitter.com/#!/STWuk

For more information or to help organise in your area please phone the Stop the War office on 0207 801 2768.

In this recommended article from The Guardian Mehdi Hasan argues that "Killing our enemies abroad is just state-sponsored terror – whatever euphemism western leaders like to use."

On the morning of 11 January Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, the deputy head of Iran's uranium enrichment facility at Natanz, was in his car on his way to work when he was blown up by a magnetic bomb attached to his car door. He was 32 and married with a young son. He wasn't armed, or anywhere near a battlefield.

Since 2010, three other Iranian nuclear scientists have been killed in similar circumstances, including Darioush Rezaeinejad, a 35-year-old electronics expert shot dead outside his daughter's nursery in Tehran last July. But instead of outrage or condemnation, we have been treated to expressions of undisguised glee.

Read the full article at The Guardian here

Recommended Article: This article by John Wight first appeared on the Socialist Unity website on 15th January

Public meeting

On the first anniversary of the fall of the Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak....
WHERE NOW FOR EGYPT AND THE MIDDLE EAST?

Speakers include:
Dr Kamal El-Helbawy, Chair of the Centre for the Study of Terrorism
George Galloway, Founder of Viva Palestina
Kate Hudson, General Secretary of CND
Andrew Murray, Founder and former Chair of the Stop the War Coalition
The meeting will be chaired by Seumas Milne, Guardian columnist

Sunday 12th February, 3.30pm, Khalili Lecture Theatre
School of Oriental and African Studies, Russell Square, London, WC1

Organised by The Respect Foundation

It is 12 months since the heroic shabab of Tunisia overthrew EU-favourite Ben Ali and set in motion the Arab masses across the region.

Now we see clearly the response of the ailing Western powers which were thrown off kilter as their system of client states creaked, cracked and began to fall apart. It is war - actual and threatened.

The drumbeats for war with Iran are getting louder, and the escalating provocations by Western capitals are developing a logic of their own. It admits of no alternative and points in only one direction – towards military conflict. Or to put it more accurately, towards open military conflict. The head of Britain's MI6 has already called for covert military operations in Iran - which are, of course, an act of war - and they have been taking place. So are the drone overflights, which are also legally an act of aggression.

Are there great difficulties facing any such venture? There most certainly are - huge ones, which would make it a disaster of world historic proportions. But it is a false, if comforting, logic which says that on account of such catastrophic consequences war with Iran is unthinkable. Many will recall that "unthinkable" was the then Foreign Secretary Jack Straw's response to the proposition a few years ago. We now know, thanks to some first class journalism at the Guardian, that that is no longer the position of the mandarins of the British state. It is, in fact, to sign up our country to a war in advance.

In the recommended article, Mike Davis, author of the acclaimed Planet of Slums looks back at 2011 and forward to the coming year in this editorial for New Left Review

In great upheavals, analogies fly like shrapnel. The electrifying protests of 2011—the on-going Arab spring, the ‘hot’ Iberian and Hellenic summers, the ‘occupied’ fall in the United States—inevitably have been compared to the anni mirabiles of 1848, 1905, 1968 and 1989. Certainly some fundamental things still apply and classic patterns repeat. Tyrants tremble, chains break and palaces are stormed. Streets become magical laboratories where citizens and comrades are created, and radical ideas acquire sudden telluric power. Iskra becomes Facebook. But will this new comet of protest persist in the winter sky or is it just a brief, dazzling meteor shower? As the fates of previous journées révolutionnaires warn us, spring is the shortest of seasons, especially when the communards fight in the name of a ‘different world’ for which they have no real blueprint or even idealized image.

But perhaps that will come later. For the moment, the survival of the new social movements—the occupiers, the indignados, the small European anti-capitalist parties and the Arab new left—demands that they sink deeper roots in mass resistance to the global economic catastrophe, which in turn presupposes—let’s be honest—that the current temper for ‘horizontality’ can eventually accommodate enough disciplined ‘verticality’ to debate and enact organizing strategies. It’s a frighteningly long road just to reach the starting points of earlier attempts to build a new world. But a new generation has at least bravely initiated the journey.

Sanum Ghafoor's latest film for Philosophy Football records a celebration of protest music, verse, street art and football in the year of the Arab Spring. Featuring Reem Kelani, Grace Petrie, Robb Johnson, David J, Palestinian footballer Honey Thaljieh plus contributions from music writer Dorian Lynskey, photo-journalist William Parry, PCS Deputy General-Secretary Hugh Lanning and others.