Labour Must Fight “Anti-Terror” Witchhunt

Racist Cop Dragnet in Toronto

On June 2-3, 400 heavily armed cops staged jackboot raids in the Toronto area arresting 15 Muslim men, including five teenagers. Two others charged in connection with the raids were already in jail and on August 3 another arrest brought to 18 the number rounded up in this chilling dragnet. No claim was too outlandish: the 18 were said to be plotting to seize the CBC and bomb a military base, the Toronto Stock Exchange and CSIS headquarters using explosives made from ammonium nitrate fertilizer. Wilder yet was the claim that they were plotting to take MPs hostage and behead the prime minister.

This new terror scare follows the now familiar path of the bourgeoisie’s “anti-terror” crackdowns. Like the rest, it stinks to high heaven. The RCMP claims the group “posed a real and serious threat.” In fact this appears to be a classic state-manufactured terror scare whose purpose is to regiment the population through fear. Angry youth were egged on by police provocateurs or informers until the cops felt there was enough concocted “evidence” to entrap and arrest them. As befits a show trial, the accused were demonized and their legal rights trampled. In an effort to extract potentially damning information, they were kept in 24-hour isolation, barred from speaking with family members and denied the right to meet privately with their lawyers. Five have been now released on bail, itself a backhanded admission that even the state doesn’t think they pose a danger. The rest remain in jail.

Having hurled out the most damning allegations, the state slapped a publication ban on the legal proceedings. One of the few facts to emerge from behind the wall of judicial secrecy is that it was undercover RCMP cops who delivered fake fertilizer to some of the accused. The cops had been watching these young men since 2004, even talking to their parents. Indeed, Toronto-area mosques are known to be infested by government spies. By delivering phony “bomb-making materials,” the cops sought to give substance to their claim that the men were about to commit acts of terrorism on a large scale. This is pure entrapment: that is, the state itself is the main instigator of the crime for which it then arrests others.

This is a witchhunt and it’s shot through with anti-Muslim racism. As CSIS operatives warned darkly of the threat of “homegrown terrorists,” the media raved about a “Jihad Generation,” the new “enemy within.” A Toronto mosque was heavily vandalized and an imam in Montreal was assaulted. We condemn these raids and the ensuing racist backlash and demand immediate freedom for those still in jail. Drop all the charges!

The ruling class is waving this supposed “terror plot” like a bloody shirt in order to convince people that there are deadly threats to “our liberties” and “way of life.” Targeting Muslims first, the government wants the population to accept as normal what are gross violations of people’s rights. The ultimate targets of such draconian assaults on civil liberties are any perceived opponents of the government, above all the multiracial working class and its organizations.

This state panic has been met with considerable skepticism, and that is a good thing. The crazed headlines about “storming” and “beheading” were derided in plenty of workplaces. Even right-wing columnist Margaret Wente quipped that “us locals found these headlines less scary than amusing.” She continued, “After all, many of us would like to storm the CBC. Decapitating the PM also has a certain appeal in some quarters...” (Globe and Mail, 8 June). We note that Wente remains at liberty.

The working class must mobilize against this witchhunt and the entire “war on terror.” Standing squarely in the way of this are the NDP and the misleaders of the organized labour movement. Toronto’s NDP mayor David Miller was in on the operation for months while federal party leader Jack Layton hailed the raids. On June 5 Layton declared: “We join with all Canadians in saluting the efforts and cooperation of our law enforcement and intelligence gathering agencies…. Canadians must come together as a nation to stand firm against those few who seek to divide us.” To fight against the bosses and win, workers need class unity across ethnic, national and religious lines; workers must understand that their interests are counterposed to those of the capitalists. In upholding “national unity” and hailing state repression against a vulnerable Muslim minority Layton and the NDP tie workers to their class enemy.

For their part, the pro-capitalist leaders of the unions have mainly been contemptibly silent. An exception is Winnie Ng, Canadian Labour Congress Ontario Regional Director, who addressed a June 23 meeting on “National Security, Arbitrary Arrests and the Criminalization of Dissent in Canada,” called following the June raids. A comrade of the Trotskyist League spoke from the floor at the same meeting, stating our solidarity with the Muslim and other communities under the gun. When he explained that we look to the power of the working class to fight racist capitalism and then attacked the NDP, reading aloud Layton’s grotesque statement “saluting” the cops, our comrade won loud applause.

Frame-Ups, Lies and State Repression

The “war on terror” is not a war in the military sense, but a political weapon in the hands of the bourgeoisie. Immediately after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, we warned that the U.S. rulers, joined by their Canadian junior partners, would respond with imperialist retaliation abroad and repression at home. Five years later Iraq and Afghanistan lie in ruins, devastated by imperialist war and occupation, and a vast machinery of domestic state repression has been set in motion.

Everywhere the racist roundups and terror scares have rested on frame-ups and lies. In Britain on August 10, cops arrested some two dozen British-born Muslims, claiming that they had engaged in a conspiracy to blow up airplanes flying to the U.S. The record of British security in combating “terror” includes the July 2005 killing of Brazilian-born electrician Jean Charles de Menezes, who police later admitted had nothing to do with the London subway bombing that month, and the shooting of a young Muslim in his London home this summer, then releasing him and his brother without charges. The criminal 2005 bombing was carried out by individuals of whom British security had never heard. So why should anyone believe anything issuing from the Blair government about the latest arrests?

The Canadian government’s “successes” are cut of the same cloth. The last big “terror” roundup was “Project Thread” in 2003 which saw 23 mostly Pakistani students arrested and jailed, accused of plotting to blow up the CN Tower and the Pickering nuclear power plant. Lacking any reality, “Project Thread” collapsed under the weight of the state’s lies. Yet its targets were branded as terrorists and deported.

Now the government claims that the Toronto 18 were going to blow up everything from the Stock Exchange to CSIS. The cops lie all the time, and frame-ups and false charges are their stock-in-trade. So we have no reason to believe any of this. At the same time, it is important to be clear on the Marxist attitude to individual terrorism. Even when carried out by misguided leftists, it is counterposed to mobilizing the social power of the proletariat. But Marxists also distinguish between indiscriminate attacks on ordinary people, e.g., on subways or airplanes, which are simply criminal, and those against institutions of capitalist class repression. As we wrote regarding the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon:

“The attack on the World Trade Center was indeed a criminal act of terrorism that murdered nearly 3,000 everyday working people. However, unlike the World Trade Center, the Pentagon is the command and administrative center of the U.S. imperialist military, and being a military installation, the possibility of getting hit comes with the territory. That recognition does not make the attack on the Pentagon an ‘anti-imperialist’ act, nor does it change the fact that terrorism almost always gets innocent people—in this case, the passengers on the plane as well as the maintenance workers, janitors and secretaries at the Pentagon.”

—“Moussaoui Case: 9/11 Show Trial,” Workers Vanguard No. 870, 12 May

Down With the Anti-Terrorism Act!

The timing of the June terror sting was most convenient for the Harper Tory regime. Conjuring up a picture of a Canada under siege by Al Qaeda, the government and its security agencies aim to bolster support for the extremely unpopular military occupation of Afghanistan as it is set to expand. In case anybody missed the point, the Toronto Star headlined “Threat on the home front” (3 June). The raids coincided both with Supreme Court hearings over the constitutionality of “security certificate” detentions and a parliamentary review of the Anti-Terrorism Act under which the 18 Toronto men were charged.

Citing the supposed “threat of terrorism,” the Globe and Mail called for the act’s extension. A frankly xenophobic June 14 editorial also endorsed “security certificates” as “an acceptable tool” in dealing with “dangerous newcomers who fight deportation tooth and nail.” The years-long detention of five Muslim men under these “security certificates”—without charges or even access to the purported evidence against them—is a racist crime of the capitalist class. After two years in jail, in February 2005 Adil Charkaoui was finally released under the most restrictive bail conditions. This May Mohamed Harkat was released to a “freedom” that amounts to house arrest. We demand immediate freedom for the remaining detainees and an end to vindictive deportation proceedings which they all face.

The Anti-Terrorism Act defines “terrorism” and “material support” to groups the state deems terrorist so broadly as to encompass anyone whose political views run afoul of the reactionary bigots who run this country. When the act was introduced, the Canadian Auto Workers union protested that such definitions “could be used to apply to many trade union activities.”

This repressive law, created by the Chrétien Liberal government after September 11, is an anti-democratic outrage. It allows the authorities to detain people without charge and permits court hearings in which suspects are not allowed to remain silent. The lawyer for Mohammad Momin Khawaja, the first and until now only person to be charged under the act, compared the law to such racist atrocities as the 1885 imposition of a head tax on Chinese immigrants and the internment of Japanese Canadians during World War II.

Such comparisons are not far-fetched. The War Measures Act, used against Japanese Canadians, and the Anti-Terrorism Act of today are not fundamentally about actions or even alleged crimes. They are political laws meant to buttress the rule of the capitalist class and provide a ready legal means to repress and silence those who they cannot charge with a single demonstrable criminal act.

Such laws have historically been wielded against the working class, often supplemented by entrapment and provocation. Many left groups and union organizers have experienced first hand the cop infiltrator who always urges violent tactics so as to set up the group for state repression. The leaders of the 1919 Winnipeg General Strike were charged with seditious conspiracy under the notorious section 98 of the Criminal Code. In 1931, in one of the most flagrant show trials in Canadian legal history, nine members of the Communist Party of Canada were arrested and charged under section 98 with being members and officers of an “unlawful association” and with being partners to a seditious conspiracy.

In October 1970 the Trudeau government imposed the War Measures Act and sent the army into Quebec. Hundreds of left-wing activists and union leaders were rounded up at gunpoint, imprisoned without charge and held incommunicado. Their “crime”: an association with the belief that the oppressed Québécois nation had the right to determine its own fate. Martial law thus starkly exposed the enforced subjugation of Quebec, a foundation stone of the Canadian capitalist state. As now, the excuse was a fight against terrorism—the kidnapping of a British diplomat and a Quebec cabinet minister by the left-nationalist Front de Libération du Québec (FLQ). But the real purpose was to suppress growing social and national discontent within Quebec.

The RCMP was notorious for its provocations against the FLQ. It was the RCMP that stole dynamite and blamed the FLQ for this, and in the name of the FLQ issued a call to armed insurrection against the government. These acts aimed to isolate and destroy nationalist and left-wing activists in Quebec, and disrupt and weaken the labour movement. We Marxists advocate Quebec independence as a central part of our fight against the Anglo-chauvinist Canadian rulers, a means to clear the road for common anti-capitalist class struggle.

Under capitalist rule, democratic rights exist in the first instance for the benefit of the bourgeoisie. The only rights the ruling class is unalterably committed to are their own rights to hold private property, to own the means of production—factories, mines, transport—and to exploit wage labour. At its core, the capitalist state, democratic trappings or not, consists of the cops, courts, prisons and military, the instruments of organized violence. This state’s sole purpose is to protect the class interests of the filthy rich capitalist exploiters against the workers.

War on Terror=War on the Working Class

The crude anti-Muslim racism pushed by the bourgeoisie is meant to divide workers and destroy their capacity to resist the bosses’ attacks. When the Toronto 18 were dubbed “homegrown” or “Canadian born” terrorists, the message was plain. As Robert Fisk, reporter for the London Independent noted, “Well, yes, they are Canadian-born. But there’s a subtle difference between this and being described as a ‘Canadian’—as other citizens of this vast country are in every other context. And the implications are obvious; there are now two types of Canadian citizen: The Canadian-born variety (Muslims) and Canadians (the rest)” (Counterpunch, 12 June).

The so-called “war on terror” has brought multiple threats against workers and unions. Seizing on reports that one of those arrested in Britain in August worked at London’s Heathrow airport, Colin Kenny, a Liberal senator and head of the Senate’s national security committee, took direct aim at airport workers. Kenny raved about “criminal gangs” and “corrupt activity,” and demanded that “cargo people, baggage handlers and [airplane] groomers”—who already endure fingerprinting, random searches and, since 1985, background checks—be subjected to even more intense scrutiny.

Working people in this country must come to understand—as their enemy, the Canadian capitalist class, understands very well—that labour will never forge unity in struggle unless it champions the rights of all minorities, not least immigrants and refugees. Consisting of workers drawn from all over the world, the working class in Canada has both the social power and material interest to push back the capitalist rulers’ racist attacks. The strike of heavily Sikh port truckers in Vancouver a year ago—which shut down much of Canada’s largest port—showed the determination and militancy of immigrant labour. It also showed that even a small number of workers can have enormous impact when they act collectively.

Political Islam and the Left

Today the imperialists inveigh against “Muslim terrorists” but it was Washington and its allies who literally funded and organized the forces of Islamic fundamentalism as a spearhead for capitalist counterrevolution against the Soviet Union—the state that emerged from the victorious October 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. Following the Red Army’s progressive intervention in Afghanistan in late 1979, the American imperialists unleashed the mujahedin cutthroats, who butchered schoolteachers for the “crime” of teaching girls to read. Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda got their start as U.S. tools against the Soviet Union, Frankenstein monsters that have now turned on their imperialist creators.

Driven by the betrayals of secular bourgeois nationalists and Stalinist Communist Parties in the historically Muslim regions of the Near East and Asia, large sections of the masses have turned to Islam as a political alternative. With the 1978-79 rise to power of the mullahs in Iran, and with the 1991-92 counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union, religious reaction has gained ground both in countries of the Muslim East and among immigrants and their descendants in the imperialist centers. It is further fuelled by the depredations of the imperialists and their proxies from Iraq to Israel.

We defend Muslims against racist attacks and state repression. At the same time, we regard the rise of religious fundamentalism as a retrograde development and antithetical to any perspective for human liberation. This understanding sets us apart from self-styled leftists such as the International Socialists (I.S.), a group which has for years apologized for Islamic reaction. In the course of protesting the war and occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan, the I.S. has politically conciliated Muslim clerics. Invoking anti-Muslim racism, the I.S. tries to justify its embrace of the most backward and reactionary elements in the Muslim community, last year becoming notorious for their grotesque support to sharia courts in Ontario.

The I.S. rejects the fight for the political independence of the working class. On the one hand, they capitulate to Islamic fundamentalism and on the other, to the Canadian capitalists. Their opposition to the Iraq war centered on pressuring the Canadian ruling class to be more benevolent and “stand up” to the U.S. imperialists. They joined with the pro-capitalist NDP and even Liberal Party politicians to campaign for “peace,” i.e., the maintenance of this deeply oppressive status quo.

The I.S. notwithstanding, the Muslim community, like the rest of society, is class divided, and the hold of Islam cripples the capacity of the oppressed to struggle against racist state repression. Religion—be it church, temple or mosque—offers nothing to those youth seeking to shatter the yoke of oppression and struggle against the system of capitalist exploitation. As we wrote in “I.S. Upholds Anti-Woman Religious Courts: Sharia ‘Socialists’”:

“But for the racist Canadian rulers there is no contradiction between attacking Muslims as terrorists and nurturing the most oppressive forces in the Muslim community. Both reinforce the grip of capitalism by scapegoating and regimenting immigrants.”

—SC No. 147, Winter 2005/2006

It is fitting, if ironic, that one of the most prominent advocates of Islamic sharia courts in Ontario, one Mubin Shaikh, has recently crawled into the open to brag about his exploits as a CSIS informer against the Toronto 18.

Our defense of Muslims and other oppressed minorities against state repression and anti-immigrant racism is integral to our struggle for the fighting unity of the working class. As communists and fighters for human liberation, our worldview is shaped by the understanding that human beings, not gods, shape their own history through class struggle in the material world. It is bitter indeed to see that young people look to Islam as an expression of opposition to the imperialists’ atrocities from Iraq to Afghanistan.

It doesn’t take a Marxist to spot a state frame-up and oppose a blatant anti-Muslim backlash. But it is only the revolutionary Marxists who insist that it is the working class that must be mobilized against the government’s assault on civil liberties, in its own defense, and in defense of besieged minorities. The capitalists would have us believe that their rule is inviolable, their state all-powerful. But what they can actually get away with depends on the level of working-class opposition. And in a period of rising class struggle, consciousness changes and youth will be much less inclined to embrace the doctrines of the mullahs, priests and rabbis.

Our purpose is to infuse the working class with the consciousness that it has the class interest and social power to eradicate the system of capitalist imperialism. This perspective demands a political break with the likes of the NDP and the pro-capitalist union bureaucrats, both of whom share a fundamental loyalty to the capitalist state, including its “security.” Against illusions promoted by the pseudo-socialist left in the reformability of the Canadian state, the Trotskyist League fights to assemble and train the nucleus of a revolutionary workers party, section of a reforged Fourth International. Such a party will fight for the proletarian overthrow of the imperialist system. This alone can lay the material basis for jobs, free quality health care and education for all, and put an end to racism, oppression, exploitation and war.