Tariq Ali and "Dangerous Ideas" Down Under: Terrorists and the Tea Party
Ahead of his Edward Said Memorial Lecture at the University of Adelaide, Tariq Ali has been making waves on the first leg of his Australia tour with his talk for the Sydney Festival of Dangerous Ideas. Entitled "What we can learn from terrorists," this was "perhaps the most dangerous of all," according to The Australian.
Speaking to The Australian before his talk, Ali said
I don't believe that there's any group in the world which is waging a fight that can't be negotiated with ... it's time, as in previous centuries when there were terrorism attacks and people said, "this is what we want"—especially in Europe and North America—finally after outrages, attention was paid to their demands."
In response to the objection that such an approach might "legitimise, indeed encourage, the use of terrorism," Ali points out that "you have to ask if it was worth occupying and invading Iraq and killing a million Iraqis."
His eloquent preface to the forthcoming The Verso Book of Dissent—which includes Nelson Mandela's open admission to "planned sabotage"—further underlines that whilst liberal consensus portrays all radicalism as misguided and all violence as illegitimate, dissident activity, or "terrorism," it often derives from "a calm and sober assessment of the political situation" and has paved the way for freedoms which we now take for granted.
Visit The Australian to read the article in full.
The Sydney Morning Herald also reports from the Festival of Dangerous Ideas that:
that elegant old leftie ... brought cheerful news of Tony Blair's memoirs: "Activists in Britain have been picking up his book and putting it in the crime section." Should the leaders of the coalition of the willing be prosecuted for war crimes, he was asked? "Blair and Bush certainly," Ali replied. "But not Kevin Rudd. He has trials enough of his own."
Visit the Sydney Morning Herald to read the article in full.
Finally, the veteran anti-war activist has been urging Australia "to grow up and pull out of the war in Afghanistan." Speaking on Radio Australia, the author of The Obama Syndrome and contributor to the Nick Turse-edited The Case for Withdrawal from Afghanistan criticised Barack Obama's achievement of "Surrender at Home, War Abroad":
Obama has escalated the war and he's been in power now for two years and during the two years he's launched more drone attacks in Pakistan than George Bush did over eight years. So, as far as Pakistan-Afghanistan is concerned, he is worse than Bush in terms of what's going on ...
Had he decided to make shifts both on the foreign policy level and at home within the first four to five months of being in power, appeal directly to his supporters, with a majority in the senate and the congress, he could have pushed things through. But essentially he is a machine politician ... and he capitulates far too easily, so that he has now got himself in a state where he's scared of even taking on the Tea Party people, who are—quite a lot of them—just simply nutty.
Visit Radio Australia at ABC to hear the interview in full.
