[Amendment Ba.2 to "A socialist response to the actions of the “Islamic State” and Western intervention in Iraq," Left Unity Conference, 15-16November 2014]

Criticisms of the call for the Caliphate must be countered by knowledge and understanding. Painting it as inseparable from violence or empire building is a false association that lacks historical, political and intellectual credibility. The Caliphate represents an alternative political vision that is gathering support amongst Muslims across the Muslim world because, for its adherents, like Hizb ut-Tahrir, it stands for replacing the brutal regimes in which they live with a political system based on Islam that sets up an accountable executive, an organised judiciary, representative consultation, the rule of law and citizenship; such a state could only be a stabilising force for the region and the European Left has to acknowledge and accept the
widespread call for a Caliphate among Muslims as valid and an authentic expression of their emancipatory, anti-imperialist aspirations. The call for the Caliphate, however vague and malleable the concept is, reflects a strong internationalism among Muslims, reinforced and reproduced for hundreds of millions each year by the Haj (Pilgrimage to Mecca), which breaks down and demotes any attachments to nation states of origin.

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That the IS has committed atrocities but that these are not on a different moral plane to ther atrocities committed over recent years in the region; they emerge out of it and the brutalised context resulting from imperialism and the struggle against it.

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That in wishing to establish a Caliphate, IS is directly challenging the Versailles settlement following the First World War that constitutes the framework of national states with in-built religious and ethnic differences, for facilitating imperialist domination of Oil sources, and this, not humanitarian concerns, is why imperialism has moved against it.

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To show solidarity with the people of the Middle East by supporting the end of the structure of the divided nation states imposed by the Versailles settlement and their replacement by a Caliphate type polity in which diversity and autonomy are protected and nurtured and the mass of people can effectively control executive authority.