Julie Bindel - word of warning
Please avoid Julie Bindel when she strays away from feminism and attempts to comment on international politics.
I like Julie Bindel. She is feisty and fearless and has spoken out at considerable personal cost on important matters like porn and prostitution and then, since the early 2000s, has been one of the first and foremost critics of gender ideology (which is the main topic of this blog).
So, it’s with a heavy heart that I write to criticise her analysis of the whole issue of Gaza / Israel / Iran / international politics, as represented by her biased op-ed in the biased Murdoch-owned Sun newspaper – to which she added on her own Substack.
As I commented to her, what people constantly overlook in discussing the evils of Iran is how it was the 1953 coup d’état that was backed and funded by the United States and the United Kingdom that led to the 1979 Ayatollahs’ revolution and the mess we are in today.
In 1953 the USA and UK helped overthrow the democratically-elected secular Arab nationalist prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh and install the despotic Shah as Iran’s leader. The UK’s interest was in supporting the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (later renamed BP).
Western governments have a history of overthrowing secular Arab nationalists – or trying to. The UK and France conspired with Israel in a failed attempt to remove Nasser from Egypt in 1956. In 2003 the USA, with support from the UK, but against opposition from most of the rest of the West and from the UN, waged an illegal and unjustified (no WMDs) war on Saddam Hussein in Iraq. (Saddam was a secular, not a religious despot.)
Writing in the Sun, Bindel wrote “hard-left activists broke into an RAF base in Oxfordshire and caused millions of pounds worth of damage by spraying red paint into the engines of two military planes in protest at the UK’s support of Israel over the war in Gaza. Palestine Action, the extremist group responsible — soon to be proscribed as a terrorist organisation — is supported by dozens of pro-Palestinian organisations.”
Maybe I’m one of the “hard-left activists” myself? I support spraying red paint on and into military aircraft in protest at the UK’s support for Israel over Gaza by Palestine Action. It’s outrageous that Palestine Action may be proscribed as a terrorist organisation.
I was at the Gaza demo on Saturday 21 June (from Russell Square to Kingsway, where I had to leave it). I heard no chants from organisations such as the Stop the War Coalition calling for the destruction of Israel. Then Bindel reports that: “One supporter this weekend was seen making a Nazi salute during the demonstration”. I missed that too. Was she there? Did she see this? Odd, isn’t it, how these unsubstantiated, single-case reports emerge from an event attended by thousands of people?
I was with a team of ex-Peace News staff and, between us, we collected £675 for Medical Aid for Palestinians from people who were (in my opinion) full of heartfelt concern for the genocide in Gaza and none of whom expressed vitriolic hatred for Israel. (The only vitriolic person I saw was a woman on her way past as we were waiting for the march to come down Kingsway who was on her way to the counter-demo at the Aldwych: she shouted at us about how Palestine is ‘not even a country’ and asked, ‘What’s the capital of Gaza?’ Nothing terrible in itself but the contorted anger in her face and her wish to sound off and move on before anyone could reply made me think she was both deeply frightened and full of righteous anger, as well as intolerant.)
One of our team was Andrea Needham, who wrote The Hammer Blow: How Ten Women Disarmed a Warplane, a tale that sounds almost identical to the red-paint job by Palestine Action.
Coming back to the question of Julie Bindel, this is not the first time that the whole issue of Gaza / Israel / Iran / international politics has set me against people with whom I’m an ally when it comes to the trans debate.
How can people on the gender-critical (or any side) be so lacking in a sense of history outside their chosen sphere of interest?
How can Julie Bindel, a target of cancel culture herself, be so blind to the obvious shutting down by the state of nonviolent direct action?
Why? Isn't she entitled to her opinion just as you're entitled to yours?