The Third Camp against US Militarism and Islamic Terrorism is about Real Lives

international | anti-war / imperialism | other press

Thursday September 14, 2006 14:17

by pat c

This is an introduction to the edited transcript of an interview Maryam Namazie conducted with Hamid Taqvaee. Hamid wrote the Manifesto of the Third Camp against US Militarism and Islamic Terrorism. The programme can be viewed on http://www.thirdcamp.com/indexe.php

The edited transcript can be found at the link at the end of the article.

pat c

Interview with Hamid Taqvaee
Third Camp TV

Maryam Namazie: You wrote the Manifesto of the Third Camp against US Militarism and Islamic Terrorism, which many people are now supporting. Why did you feel the need to write it?

Hamid Taqvaee: If you have a look at the political situation of our era, it seems that there are mainly two forces that actually determine everything in the political arena in the Middle East, the west and even the world. These two forces are the USA and its allies on the one hand and Islamic terrorism on the other. But the fact is that it is not only these two. What we are saying is that neither of these two forces actually represents people. Even people living in Islamist societies, and I can say especially those people, are not represented by political Islam, or by Islamic governments such as the Islamic Republic of Iran. The Third Camp addresses that force which represents the majority of people of the world – a majority which has no interest in the war between these two poles of Islamic and US-led terrorism. They reap no benefits from their war.

In the conflict between the two in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine, it is people who are actually sacrificed. People have no reason to take part in this. But the question is what do they do? Must they stay home, witness the carnage that is unfolding before their eyes and do nothing? Of course not. The Third Camp enables people to make a stand against both poles of terrorism in our era. Since people are losing everything in this confrontation, we must establish and organise a third movement. The third camp is a movement not an organization; it is a movement against political Islam and US militarism.