Just received an email touting a DVD of a benefit concert for the Stop the War Coalition that took place on November 27 of last year. (It hits the stores in October.) Performers included Brian Eno, Rachid Taha, Imogen Heap and Mick Jones of the Clash. I own records by all these people and I think highly of them. Their political judgment, however, is poor.
At the bottom of the email there’s this:
The StWC is a UK anti-war group set up shortly after the attacks on the World Trade Center. The “war” in the Coalition’s title refers to the various wars that are claimed to be part of the war on terrorism. The Coalition has been the most prominent group in Britain campaigning against the war in Afghanistan and the invasion of Iraq.
The most prominent group — true that. But the StWC didn’t simply campaign against the war in Iraq. They campaigned in support of the so-called Iraqi resistance, a force that has found time between attacks on U.S. troops to slaughter many thousands of Iraq’s Shia Muslims. The Sunni “resistance” is now party to a civil war that it played a significant role in instigating. As Michael Bérubé observes in his lively four-part takedown of the extremist left [update: oops, part five is here], novelist and essayist Arundhati Roy took the following stand:
I just feel that that resistance in Iraq is our battle too and we have to support it. And we can’t be looking for pristine struggles in which to invest our purity.
Bérubé: “I can’t help pointing out that, for Roy, while the party trying vainly to unseat the Cheney Administration was not worthy of ‘our’ support in 2004, the Iraqi ‘resistance’ was, on balance, good enough.”
These days Roy is undertaking similar apologetics for Hezbollah. The Stop the War Coalition, better termed the Start the War Coalition, is worse, marching in the streets under the yellow flag of the Party of God. I don’t know about Imogen Heap and Brian Eno and friends, but this doesn’t inspire me to break into song.
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