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To: genefromjersey; ScaniaBoy
I'm actually more curious as to whether the Socialist Workers' Party is (covertly) linked to ETA and the Islamists.

I don't know much about the Socialist Workers' Party in Spain, but there is of course the background of Soviet-PLO-ETA links mentioned above in this thread, and I think there's good evidence of links between socialist/communist groups and the Islamists in other countries in Europe--here's a good link on that:

Consummated in Cairo

By Robert Spencer

FrontPageMagazine.com | January 16, 2004

George Galloway, the maverick British parliamentarian who was expelled from the Labour Party after his outspoken opposition to the war in Iraq led to charges that he incited Iraqis to fight against British troops, was there. Tony Benn, another former Labour MP and prominent defender of Socialism, also made the trip. So did Ramsey Clark, former U.S. Attorney General (for Lyndon Johnson) and a high-profile advocate for the impeachment of George W. Bush, the freeing of Leonard Peltier, and a host of other fashionable Leftist causes. At the 2003 Cairo Conference held in mid-December by The International Campaign Against U.S. & Zionist Occupations, these high-profile antiwar advocates had a chance to rub elbows with their newest ideological bedfellows: radical Muslims who openly advocate the restoration of the caliphate, the politico-religious ruler of a unified Muslim world, and the establishment of an Islamic world order under the rule of Islamic law, the Sharia.

That such an alliance was an actual goal of the Conference was hinted at by Salma Yacoob, an activist with the Muslim Association of Britain as well as chair of the Birmingham chapter of the Stop the War Coalition. In Cairo, she told the assembled dignitaries that “it is because we are potentially so strong together that our enemies try to divide us.” “Us” in this case would be the amalgamation of Islamists (that is, Muslims who see Islamic law as the only rightful way to order society), secular socialists, and Arab nationalists.

[SNIP]

Ben Bella waxed sentimental about his old friend and comrade Che Guevara: “Che was a courageous fighter who had to struggle unremittingly with a body wracked by asthma. Once, when I climbed with him to the Chrea Heights overlooking the town of Blida, I saw him suffer an attack that turned him green in the face. I first met him in autumn 1962 on the eve of the Cuban missile crisis and the blockade decreed by the US. I was due to attend the September session of the UN in New York at the first Algerian flag-raising ceremony.”

But since he met Che, Ben Bella has changed. Imprisoned for years after he was deposed in Algeria, he read the only book allowed in prison: the Qur’an. “And if,” says Al-Ahram, “over the years Ben Bella has held tenaciously to his leftist, progressive ideals, in later years an infusion of Islam — what he terms the spiritual element sadly lacking in doctrinaire Marxism — has seeped into his own brand of socialism.”

With Galloway, Benn, and Clark publicly linked to Ben Bella, Hudaybi, and Yacoob, it is difficult not to conclude that the seepage is going both ways. Ben Bella himself asked the Conference to make sure that it would. After denouncing “Bush and the insane clique surrounding him” and castigating the Washington-led “globalization movement,” he recommended that the Conference “actively participate in incorporating the Arab world more and more” into the resistance to that movement. In other words, the aging Islamist called upon the Conference attendees to infuse the global antiwar movement with more of an Islamic character.

The Cairo Conference demonstrated that Socialist antiwar activists don’t mind sharing a podium with radical Muslims who want to establish Sharia states in Iraq and elsewhere. Of course, the peace movement has betrayed a taste for totalitarianism and brutality before. Today’s radical Muslim terrorists are worthy heirs of Lenin, Stalin, Feliks Dzerzhinsky, and all the rest who filled the Gulag for the sake of peace. Evidently nowadays as long as the struggle against “imperialist aggression” is won, a few amputations and stonings along the way will be just fine.

15 posted on 03/13/2004 5:18:09 PM PST by Fedora
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To: Fedora
BTTT
16 posted on 03/13/2004 5:50:13 PM PST by visualops (Two Wrongs don't make a right- they make the Democratic Ticket for 2004!)
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