The Fanonite

Denis MacShane MP, a member of the UK Israel Lobby Labour Friends of Israel’s Policy Council, never lets an opportunity go by to spit venom at Muslims. In the wake of the Istanbul bombing in 2003 he caused much outrage when he called on Muslims to choose between the ‘British way’ or ‘the way of terrorists’ (How many other alternatives do they have after all?). Under fire from Muslims and people within the Blair government MacShane quickly altered the text of his speech. So the statement,

[It is] time for the elected and community leaders of British Muslims to make a choice: the British way, based on political dialogue and non-violent protests, or the way of the terrorists against which the whole democratic world is uniting

Was changed to,

It is time for the elected and community leaders of British Muslims to make a choice…It is the democratic, rule of law – if you like, the British or Turkish or American way, based on political dialogue and non-violent protests like the one we saw in London yesterday – or it is the way of the terrorists.

However, in the wake of recent eevents, he wrote: ‘I regret now my temporising’. In the same article, he misrepresents the statement which had caused the outrage by publishing the altered version of the speech, which was change as a result of the furore. So he writes,

I made what I thought were banal points, saying a choice had to be made between “the democratic rule of law, if you like the British or Turkish or American or European way, based on political dialogue and non-violent protests, or the way of the terrorists, against which the whole democratic world is now uniting. We need to move away from talk of martyrs and I hope we will see clearer, stronger language that there is no future for any Muslim cause anywhere in the world that validates, or implicitly supports, the use of political violence in any way.”

The statement is no less Islamophobic of course, as once again it implies violence is intrinsic to Muslim’s own ’way’, and the statement is also rather amusing coming from someone who has arrogated Britain and US the right to use political violence in Iraq and Afghanistan. But nevertheless, it is a distortion of a different nature. Muslims did protest, but it was against his earlier, more extreme statement.

But what of the rest of his politics?

MacShane and France

In the leadup to the 2007 French presidential elections, the pro-Israel MacShane supported the far-Right Sarkozy, son of a Nazi sympathiser, and engaged in smearing the Socialist candidate Segolene Royal. He wrote,

Royal has driven France’s Jewish voters into Sarkozy’s camp by appearing to endorse a venomous anti-Semitic attack on Israel by Islamist fundamentalists during a visit to the Middle East.

He is referring here to a statement by a Hizbullah MP to the effect that their organization draws inspiration from the French resistance during WWII. Since most sane people won’t detect the purported ‘antisemtism’ in that statement, one can forgive Royal for not having reacted in the Zionist’s desired manner. But for a Labourite, his other barb at Royal is downright amusing.

Her language is like that of Labour in the 1980s – hostile to America, to Europe, and to open world economics.

MacShane and Israel

With Israel’s declining image in the aftermath of its invasion of Lebanon, MacShane participated in the damage-control operation that relied on the familiar ploy of ascribing criticism of Israel to a resurgent antisemitism. Norman Finkelstein writes,

“So, predictably, just after Israel faced another image problem due to its murderous destruction of Lebanon, a British all-party parliamentary group led by notorious Israel-firster Denis MacShane MP (Labor) released yet another report alleging a resurgence of anti-Semitism (Report of the All-Party Parliamentary Inquiry Into Antisemitism, September 2006). To judge by the witnesses (David Cesarani, Lord Janner, Oona King, Emanuele Ottolenghi, Melanie Phillips) and sources (MEMRI, Holocaust Education Trust) cited in the body of the report, much time and money could have been saved had it just been contracted out to the Israel Foreign Ministry.”

It is worth noting here that when this report was issued, the committee had not status, and its members were self-selected. More tellingly, the committee was comprised exclusivley of the supporters of the invasion of Iraq.

MacShane and Venezuela

A New Labour MP, MacShane seems to have great admiration for Margaret Thatcher. He called Chavez ’sensible’ because he was behaving as a ‘Thatcherite’, but he found the 2002 coup predictable. ‘What has happened in Caracas is no surprise but it should be a warning’, wrote MacShane, went on to label Chavez ‘a ranting, populist demogogue’. With great prescience he added, ‘Hugo Chavez, the former President, was a political leader who lived by permanent mobilisation…This week the people of Venezuela did mobilise, but it was against Senor Chavez.’ The president was restored to his seat of course — by popular mobilisation.

In the face of the subsequent embarassment, MacShane has tried to recast his endorsement of the coup as a call for the restoration of Democracy. Except, his exact statement was ‘Venezuela now needs to move swiftly to restore full democracy’ — as opposed to Chavez’s democracy, which presumably wasn’t ‘full’. MacShane is also sceptical of the Venezuelan people’s capacity to act in their best interest since he is convinced they ‘deserve better’ than the government they elected. Incidentally, most Venezuelans hold exaclty the same view of the British people.

For an admirer of Thatcher, he seems to show a great deal of concern for the poverty of ’social justice’ in Venezuela. Even the conservative Financial Times was left bemused by MacShane’s glee at the overthrow of the democratically elected government of Venezuela (April 15, 2002). It wrote, ‘at least the White House did not go as far as Denis MacShane, British junior foreign office minister. MacShane described in The Times newspaper on Saturday how Chavez had at times acted as a “ranting, populist demagogue”‘. However, MacShane charitably lays our fears to rest. He assures us, ’Hugo is no Hitler’.

As one similar propagandist was one once asked, ‘Have you no shame, sir?’