tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-53800900498527216712021-05-08T22:52:12.464-07:00JacobinismPamphleteer For The Counter-Counter-EnlightenmentUnrepentant Jacobinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09256579083755037018noreply@blogger.comBlogger33125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5380090049852721671.post-66031631993400511872016-05-03T00:18:00.000-07:002016-05-10T18:06:15.811-07:00Labour's Impoverished Expectations<span style="font-size: large;"><b>Or, Why I Cannot Join the Centre-Left in Voting for Sadiq Khan</b></span><br /><span style="font-size: large;"><b><br /></b></span><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-nywgj9pOCZA/Vyfv-mnTdTI/AAAAAAAAAnM/j1VL0tJywnACWXohF42vK_AR6jYEljwNQCK4B/s1600/sad.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-nywgj9pOCZA/Vyfv-mnTdTI/AAAAAAAAAnM/j1VL0tJywnACWXohF42vK_AR6jYEljwNQCK4B/s1600/sad.jpg" /></a></div><br />During the course of a bitter and often tawdry mayoral campaign in which neither side has particularly distinguished itself, the British Labour Party has once again had to explain and defend a candidate's past links to Islamic extremism. In his defence, Sadiq Khan and his supporters have tended to rely on one or more of the following claims:<br /><ul><li>That Khan’s progressive record on social issues, particularly gay rights, precludes him – as a matter of logical consistency – from having any sympathy with extremist views.&nbsp;</li><li>That any connection Khan has ever had with extremists is a wilful misreading of his laudable concern for human rights.&nbsp;</li><li>Ergo, any remotely progressively-minded opponent of Khan is motivated by bad faith and probably anti-Muslim prejudice.</li></ul>Not one of these responses is convincing.<br /><br /><b>I</b><br /><br />It is true that since his election as a Labour Member of Parliament for Tooting, Khan's voting record has reflected a consistent support for gay rights (Conservative Party candidate Zac Goldsmith’s record is identical). It is also true that Khan’s support for gay marriage earned him death threats and even a fatwa issued by a Bradford cleric declaring him to be an apostate. People have been assassinated for less, so this is no trivial matter.<br /><br />Even so, before becoming an MP, Khan repeatedly shared political and campaigning platforms with religious fanatics whose murderous hatreds are by no means limited to gays. So whatever their differences on gay marriage, these self-evidently did not prevent collaboration in other shared areas of interest. A single example of this proclivity should be sufficient to illustrate the problem here.<br /><div><br />In 2004, in his capacity as chair of respected human rights NGO Liberty, Khan appeared at a 'conference' organised by a Palestinian advocacy group called Friends of al-Aqsa (FOA). FOA’s founder Ismail Patel is an open and enthusiastic supporter of the Palestinian terrorist organisation Hamas, and a spokesman for the UK Muslim Brotherhood affiliate, the British Muslim Initiative. FOA, meanwhile, has close ties to Interpal, a Hamas front organisation <a href="https://www.treasury.gov/press-center/press-releases/Pages/js672.aspx">proscribed by the US Treasury in 2003</a> as “Specially Designated Global Terrorists” on the grounds that it had been “a&nbsp;principal charity utilised to hide the flow of money to Hamas.” <br /><br />This is almost certainly why the Co-Operative Bank closed FOA’s account last year, <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/co-op-bank-shuts-down-account-belonging-to-palestinian-charity-friends-of-al-aqsa-without-a6798576.html">stating</a> that the bank is obliged to ensure that customers’ funds are not used for “illegal or other proscribed activities . . . Unfortunately, after quite extensive research, the charities involved did not meet our requirements or, in our view, allow us to fulfil our obligations.” Furthermore, the counter-extremist website <a href="http://standforpeace.org.uk/friends-of-al-aqsa/"><i>Stand for Peace</i> states</a> that FOA…<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">…has published writers such as Palestinian journalist Khalid Amayreh, whose post claimed that Jews control America, and that the Iraq war “was conceived in and planned by Israel through the mostly Jewish neocons in Washington”; Paul Eisen, a notorious Holocaust denier; Gilad Atzmon, who claims “Hitler might have been right after all”; and Israel Shamir, who has said, “In the Middle East we have just one reason for wars, terror and trouble — and that is Jewish supremacy drive.” </blockquote>The FOA event in Khan's future constituency was entitled ‘Palestine – The Suffering Still Goes On’. Billed as a conference, it was actually just a three-hour outpouring of hatred and self-pity from a panel of conspiracy theorists and religious fanatics. And as is routine at events organised by Islamic fundamentalists, the meeting was segregated by gender, with female attendees instructed to enter via a separate entrance "on Lessingham avenue, next to the snooker club". Advertised to appear alongside Khan were FOA chair Patel; conspiratorial antisemites Eisen and <a href="http://hurryupharry.org/2015/02/01/stephen-sizer-in-tehran/">Reverend Stephen Sizer</a>; Interpal chair and trustee Ibrahim Hewitt; radical Islamist Azzam Tamimi, an open <a href="http://hurryupharry.org/2010/01/15/kaboom-and-brum/">supporter of suicide terror</a>; Daud Abdullah, former deputy secretary general to the Muslim Council of Britain and a signatory to the jihadist <a href="https://www.hurryupharry.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/istpdf.pdf">2009 Istanbul Declaration</a>; and fanatical cleric Suliman Gani, who subsequently&nbsp;<a href="http://www.wimbledonguardian.co.uk/news/8451539.Worshippers_told_to_boycott_Ahma%20diyya_shops/">agitated for a boycott of Ahmadi businesses</a> in Tooting, and with whom Khan has shared a platform&nbsp;with on at least eight other occasions.<br /><br />Link-laden articles like this one itemising extremist connections and networks can be tiresome to read, particularly for those unfamiliar with the <i>dramatis personae</i>. It is tempting to surrender to the suggestion that this is all just so much defamatory smoke. As the <i>Guardian</i>'s Mehdi Hasan <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/mar/01/moderate-sadiq-khan-london-mayor-muslim-labour">protested in March</a>, “This is not merely guilt by association; this is the rightwing media’s favourite game of ‘six degrees of Islamist separation’.” <br /><br />So consider this analogy: a candidate for public office is revealed to have participated in a panel discussion about Palestine peopled by neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers and sponsored by a white supremacist charity strongly suspected of handling funds for internationally proscribed militias and their allies. I do not expect that anyone on the Left - least of all Hasan - would be answering objections by re-directing attention to the candidate’s voting record on gay rights, abortion, or the environment, still less returning accusations of bigotry.<br /><br />Khan’s support for gay marriage elsewhere is simply irrelevant. In <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/commentators/owen-jones-the-1-per-cent-have-an-interest-in-demonising-ken-livingstone-7640660.html">a 2012 article for the <i>Independent</i></a> that has dated particularly poorly, Owen Jones enthused that disgraced former mayor Ken Livingstone is “the British equivalent of Harvey Milk.” But as Jones was already aware, that had not prevented Livingstone from embracing the Muslim Brotherhood’s foremost cleric, Yusuf al-Qaradawi when the latter visited Britain in 2004. “I don't agree with the position of Dr Qaradawi on lesbian and gay rights,” Livingstone <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/4165691.stm">cheerfully explained</a>. "We won't be seeing him on the next Pride march. But here is the force that we need to engage with if we are to actually get a dialogue between the West and the Muslim world." <br /><br />Qaradawi’s condemnation of 9/11 was evidently a bar low enough to reassure Livingstone that the he was in fact some kind of progressive. Unsurprisingly, so was Qaradawi’s profound hatred of Israel and American foreign policy. Khan vehemently objects whenever his politics are described as 'radical' on the grounds that this is an attempt to taint him with a reputation for religious fanaticism. But Khan's own stated views on Islamist terrorism and the West have perfectly reflected&nbsp;those of Livingstone, who is an atheist. Here’s Livingstone <a href="http://www.standard.co.uk/news/politics/ken-livingstone-sparks-controversy-after-claiming-londons-77-bombers-gave-their-lives-for-their-a3124356.html">on <i>Question Time</i></a> last year:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">I remember when Tony Blair was told if you go into Iraq, we will be a target for terrorism. He ignored that advice, and it killed 52 Londoners.</blockquote>And here’s part of <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4786159.stm">an open letter</a> to which Khan was a signatory, published in 2006, a little over a year after he was elected as an MP and a mere <i>three days</i> after British security services foiled a jihadist plot to bring down multiple passenger jets over the Atlantic:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">The debacle of Iraq and now the failure to do more to secure an immediate end to the attacks on civilians in the Middle East not only increases the risk to ordinary people in that region, it is also ammunition to extremists who threaten us all.&nbsp;</blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">Attacking civilians is never justified. This message is a global one. We urge the Prime Minister to redouble his efforts to tackle terror and extremism and change our foreign policy to show the world that we value the lives of civilians wherever they live and whatever their religion.</blockquote>Livingstone’s language is a good deal more blunt, but the Corbynite message is the same in both cases: that Western democracies bear primary responsibility for Islamist violence and that elected governments must therefore hand terrorist cells a veto over foreign policy decisions. The letter’s demands for appeasement are not only morally craven but suicidal, so it should not come as a surprise to discover that Khan’s co-signatories were a gruesome salad of <a href="http://hurryupharry.org/2016/04/24/the-way-they-were-labour-leaders-versus-sadiq-khan/">Islamist activists, affiliates, and supporters</a>. On matters as consequential as these, the company one chooses to keep and the arguments&nbsp;one makes are at least as important as the side one chooses to take. <br /><br /><b>II</b><br /><br />Given the above, it should hardly come as a shock to discover that, like Livingstone before him, Sadiq Khan has found himself called upon to explain his indulgent attitude towards Yusuf al-Qaradawi. Khan’s remarks about the Muslim Brotherhood cleric were made in November 2004 when Khan <a href="http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200405/cmselect/cmhaff/165/4111602.htm">appeared before the Parliamentary Select Committee on Home Affairs</a> in his capacity as chair of the Muslim Council of Britain’s legal affairs committee. Also giving evidence were two representatives from the Board of Deputies of British Jews and Khan’s MCB vice-chair Khalid Sofi, previously a director of <a href="http://standforpeace.org.uk/muslim-aid/">Muslim Aid</a>, an Islamist charity established by activists from the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamaat-e-Islami">Jamaat-e-Islami</a>. <br /><br /><div>Under discussion was the impact of Islamist terrorism on community relations and Qaradawi’s controversial visit to the UK earlier that year cropped up. Given the MCB’s professed abhorrence of terrorism, select committee member and Labour MP David Winnick inquired, why does the organisation insist on defending such a man? Qaradawi – as Khan will have been fully aware – had previously declared the genital mutilation of young girls to be desirable (a fatwa he reversed in 2009); had sanctioned the physical chastisement of disobedient wives; had recommended that homosexuals should be lashed; had encouraged the use of suicide terror against Israeli civilians; and, with respect to Jews more generally, <a href="http://www.memritv.org/clip/en/2005.htm">has since said this</a>:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">Throughout history, Allah has imposed upon the Jews people who would punish them for their corruption. The last punishment was carried out by Hitler. By means of all the things he did to them – even though they exaggerated this issue – he managed to put them in their place. This was divine punishment for them. Allah willing, the next time will be at the hand of the believers.</blockquote>But in <a href="http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200405/cmselect/cmhaff/165/165ii.pdf">written evidence</a> to the select committee, the MCB had reverentially described Qaradawi as “one of the world’s most influential Islamic scholars” and “the leading Muslim figure for peace”; a noble and wise man who was being defamed by the 'Islamophobic' media and an unspecified “pro-Israeli” source. Winnick was unimpressed. He pointed out that Qaradawi had beseeched Allah to “deal with the enemies of Islam…the tyrannical Jews…[and] the rancorous crusaders”. He then asked if Khan would support the invitation of an Israeli fanatic who spoke that way about Muslims.&nbsp;</div><div><br /></div><div>Khan might have offered a qualified defence of the need to protect even the most reprehensible opinions in a free society. Instead, he rambled vaguely about an ongoing “dialogue” in the Letters pages of the <i>Guardian</i>. He made a perfunctory reference to “rights and responsibilities”. He made a diversionary appeal to the moral authority of the Home Secretary and the Mayor of London, both of whom had approved the visit. He reminded the committee that Qaradawi had visited the UK on many previous occasions. But most of all, he was keen to stress that Qaradawi was misunderstood. <br /><br />“What I do know,” Khan concluded, “is in a very long interview he gave to the BBC a few months ago a 15 second snippet was used to try and demonise him.” [As the investigative counter-extremism blogger habibi has <a href="http://hurryupharry.org/2016/04/13/sadiq-khan-on-yusuf-al-qaradawi/">noted</a>, in the <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/3874893.stm">Newsnight clip in question</a>&nbsp;Qaradawi proclaims: “Allah Almighty is just; through his infinite wisdom he has given the weak a weapon the strong do not have and that is their ability to turn their bodies into bombs as Palestinians do.”]<br /><br />“My question,” Winnick persisted, “is if someone, an Israeli cleric, rabbi or whatever, a scholar as he may be, had made those remarks about the Islam religion and about Muslims, would we not be right in trying to prevent such a person from coming into our country, whatever the Home Secretary of the day may or may not wish to do?” <br /><br />Khan replied that in this hypothetical example of course such a person ought to be banned. But on the occasion of this <i>actual</i> example, the Home Secretary had said it was okay. And in any case, “I think it is unfair,” he complained, “for the MCB to be held to account for actions taken by the Home Secretary and the mayor of London. There is a consensus amongst Islamic scholars that this man is not the extremist he is painted to be by certain quarters.”<br /><br />Khan’s campaign spokesman now claims that Khan was “not speaking as Sadiq Khan, he was acting as a lawyer for MCB reflecting his clients’ views in a quasi-legal setting.” Which only leaves us to wonder why a solicitor with a professed commitment to human rights would want to work for an organisation that champions and sanitises Qaradawi’s Hitlerian views in the first place. <br /><br />The words “human rights lawyer” have been asked to excuse a great deal during the course of Khan’s campaign. There exists a widespread perception that such work is synonymous with the disinterested pursuit of welfare and justice, and that to engage in it is to place oneself above reproach or scrutiny. But it ought to be acknowledged that the vast majority of human rights advocates come from the activist Left, and bring all sorts of axioms and baggage with them. Positions taken by NGOs and advocates – particularly those relating to bitterly contested matters such as the Palestinian conflict and the American-led war on terror – are therefore often heavily ideological. This is not to gainsay the value of human rights work, but to caution that the political biases of those involved sometimes disfigure judgement.<br /><br />At a time when controversial Western anti-terror laws and security measures are disproportionately affecting Muslims, links between human rights activism and religious or political radicals are not particularly unusual. But nor are they necessarily a mark of ethical hygiene. It is one thing to defend a person’s narrow right to due process or free speech, but quite another to lend political cover to their politics. For instance, between 2001 and 2002, Khan was engaged by the radical American separatist organisation the Nation of Islam and its leader Louis Farrakhan to help overturn a Home Office ban preventing Farrakhan from setting foot in Britain. <br /><br />Khan might defensibly have argued that the ban was a violation of Farrakhan’s right to free expression and movement. But, just as he would later argue in defence of Qaradawi’s reputation, Khan further claimed that his client was being traduced. “[Farrakhan] is preaching a message of self-discipline, self-reliance, atonement and responsibility,” <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/1959105.stm">Khan announced</a> to bemused reporters. “He's trying to address the issues and problems we have in the UK, black on black crime and problems in the black community. It's outrageous and astonishing that the British Government is trying to exclude this man.” It’s not really that astonishing when one stops to consider that Farrakhan has been praising Hitler since <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1984/07/17/us/farrakhan-again-describes-hitler-as-a-very-great-man.html" target="_blank">at least 1984</a>.<br /><br />This kind of indignant spin belongs in the mouth of an unscrupulous <i>consiglieri</i> not a principled defender of universal human rights. In the wake of an initial ruling (later reversed) overturning the ban, Khan <a href="http://www.jweekly.com/article/full/16128/farrakhan-now-welcome-in-u-k-much-to-jewish-dismay/">had explained</a> that “a lot of quotations used to exclude Louis Farrakhan are misquotes, misrepresentations, or words not said by him.” Farrakhan, he added, “is not anti-Semitic and does not preach a message of racial hatred and antagonism.” This frankly contemptible assertion doesn’t even qualify as spin. It’s just a squalid and <a href="http://www.adl.org/anti-semitism/united-states/c/farrakhan-nation-of-islam-noi-in-his-own-words.html#.VyL7XKMrLMU">easily-disprovable</a> lie.<br /><br />It is important to bear in mind that, as a solicitor, Khan was free to represent whomever he chose. But when asked to defend those choices today, he prefers to give the impression of a surgeon asked to defend the politics of those he treats. “I have never hidden the fact that I was a human rights lawyer,” <a href="http://www.jewishnews.co.uk/sadiq-khan-i-represented-unsavoury-individuals-but-extremism-claims-are-desperate/">he has said</a>, as if that were what he is being asked to do. “Unfortunately, that means that I had to speak on behalf of some unsavoury individuals. Some of their views made me feel deeply uncomfortable, but it was my job.”<br /><br />So why on earth did he elect to represent extremists with <a href="http://www.conservativehome.com/localgovernment/2016/04/sadiq-khan-is-still-dodging-questions-on-his-extremist-links.html">such regularity</a> if doing so caused him so much discomfort? This curious interest in people he now professes to find politically repellent continued after Khan became an MP and his job description required nothing of the kind. It is true that many people, including the Conservative mayoral candidate, campaigned to prevent the extradition of Babar Ahmad to the United States citing various objections to the terms of the extradition treaty Britain had signed. <br /><br />However, it was Khan who distinguished himself in 2006 by <a href="http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200506/cmhansrd/vo060712/debtext/60712-0009.htm">advising the House of Commons</a> that Ahmad’s case was being neglected because he was “not photogenic, middle class, or white” and who described him as “a caring and helpful member of our community [who] worked with people of all ages” and for whom he could personally vouch as a Tooting constituent whom he had known for “the past 12 or 13 years”. Ahmad, he went on, “should be presumed innocent until he is found guilty. Moreover, he is in fact innocent”. Inconveniently, however, Ahmad eventually <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-25322782">pled guilty</a> to “conspiracy and providing material support to terrorism” as part of a plea deal, in which he further admitted that "he [had] solicited and conspired to provide funds [and] personnel for the Taliban regime in Afghanistan" and "recruited men to travel to Afghanistan for mujahedeen training and sought out gas masks to send abroad."</div><div><br />In short, Sadiq Khan’s extravagant recent claim that “I have spent my whole life fighting extremism” is entirely false. On the contrary, he has supported extremists, he has aligned with extremists, he has shared their platforms, he has circulated petitions advancing their arguments and interests, he has euphemised their blood-curdling incitement as mere <a href="http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/politics/6917684/Sadiq-Khan-attended-rally-with-extremist-Muslim-leader-who-threatened-fire-throughout-the-world.html">“flowery words”</a>, and he has repeatedly used his position as a human rights advocate and an MP to lend extremists’ arguments a spurious legitimacy. And while he has energetically defended the rights of Al Qaeda sympathisers and operatives like Babar Ahmad and Shaker Aamer, Khan has had precious little to say about a campaign of incitement - exposed in the <i>Wimbledon Guardian</i> <a href="http://www.wimbledonguardian.co.uk/news/8451668.Relgious_hate_leaflets_found_in_Tooting__Streatham_and_Kingston/">as far back as 2010</a> - by the sectarian organisation Khatme Nabuwwat to boycott and ostracise peaceful Ahmadi Muslims, conducted for years on <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-35928848" target="_blank">his own south London doorstep</a>,&nbsp;and supported by the <a href="http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2016/03/the-questions-nobody-wants-to-ask-about-asad-shahs-murder-2/" target="_blank">imam of the mosque</a> he attends. <br /><br />It is astonishing that Khan’s chairmanship of Liberty and work as a solicitor is being offered in mitigation of his behaviour. In fact, it only brings discredit on Khan and on the organisations and causes he was ostensibly representing. If anyone who has been paying attention cannot see any of this, it is because they don’t want to.<br /><br /><b>III</b><br /><br />But there are plenty of people who&nbsp;<i>don’t</i> want to see it. An entirely foreseeable consequence of the Corbyn leadership has been a dramatic collapse in expectations on the social democratic Left. Many writers, bloggers, activists, and MPs on the centre-Left who were among Jeremy Corbyn’s most strident critics a few months ago are now devoting considerable time and effort to making excuses on behalf of Sadiq Khan. And they are employing the same language of “dogwhistles” and “smears” to deflect the same concerns about the political Left’s tolerance and worse of radical Islam and the justifications it offers for political terror. <br /><br />This might have been understandable were Khan’s principal opponent in the mayoral race a foaming Powellite demagogue. But, notwithstanding some cynical and reprehensible campaigning gambits, Goldsmith is a political centrist. The misuse of accusations of anti-Muslim bigotry and even racism to dismiss his perfectly legitimate questions about Sadiq Khan’s sketchy record on religious extremism have been both intellectually dishonest and wildly irresponsible.<br /><br />In a rather histrionic&nbsp;<a href="http://www.thetimes.co.uk/redbox/topic/london-mayoral-elections/zac-goldsmiths-dog-whistle-is-becoming-a-scream">article for the <i>Times</i></a>, Labour MP Yvette Cooper described Conservative attacks on Khan’s past associations as “disgraceful, divisive” and “shrill . . . a full-blown racist scream”, before blithely repeating the lie that Khan has spent a lifetime battling extremism. Her centrist colleague Chuka Umunna <a href="http://www.msn.com/en-gb/video/news/chuka-umunna-accuses-david-cameron-of-islamophobia/vp-BBs1MJx">has likewise accused</a> Khan’s critics of “Islamophobia” and of attacking Khan for “the crime of being a Muslim”. Both Umunna and Khan <a href="http://www.standard.co.uk/news/politics/zac-goldsmith-s-attacks-on-sadiq-khan-would-make-trump-proud-blasts-chuka-umunna-a3228641.html">have compared</a> Goldsmith to the American populist Donald Trump. <br /><br />“If not Sadiq Khan, then tell me,” demanded civil liberties campaigner Mike Harris <a href="http://littleatoms.com/if-not-sadiq-khan-which-progressive-muslim-candidate-will-you-vote">in Little Atoms</a>, “when will you vote for a Muslim candidate?” This challenge says more about Harris’s own impoverished expectations than it says about Khan’s critics. After all, Harris is implying that it is unrealistic to hope for a Muslim candidate who is not burdened by the wretched record on extremism described above. It is also a straw man, since at issue is not Khan’s faith but his political judgement, the convictions – if, indeed, he has any – that have informed it, and the choices he has made, for which no remotely satisfactory explanation has yet been provided.</div><div><br />And it was Khan, not his opponents, who introduced religion as a matter of electoral concern to begin with, when he argued during <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/jul/02/a-muslim-mayor-of-london-would-send-message-to-the-haters-says-sadiq-khan">an interview with the <i>Guardian</i></a> last July, that the very fact of his being Muslim would strike some kind of devastating public relations blow against Islamic State. (I find this prediction to be <i>extremely</i> dubious, but that has not prevented it being thoughtlessly repeated by his supporters.)<br /><br />That interview, as it happens, also included a petty but nevertheless telling example of Khan’s capacity for casual cynicism and duplicity. Khan revealed that in a private meeting with the Prime Minister in the aftermath of 7/7, he had faced down an improbable attempt by Tony Blair to place collective blame for the atrocity on the Muslim community. Such was Khan’s furious indignation that he refused to participate in a subsequent press conference. Only it turned out that the three other Muslim MPs who attended the same meeting did not share what they described as “Khan’s self-serving revisionism”.&nbsp;In a <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/jul/15/sadiq-khans-version-of-77-meeting-is-at-odds-with-our-recollection">letter to the <i>Guardian</i></a>, they wrote:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">To misrepresent the words of a British prime minister and to mischaracterise a significant meeting in the wake of the tragic loss of 52 lives a week earlier is frankly beyond the pale, and we write today not to defend Blair but to defend the truth.<br /><br />Khan’s depiction of his bravado is almost comical, and if the events of 7/7 were not so grave, it would be unworthy of response. But this was a profoundly grave episode in our history, which necessitates challenging those who would seek to exploit it for personal gain.&nbsp;</blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">While we agree with Khan that it would be great to see a Muslim mayor for London – as indeed it would to see a black mayor or woman mayor – above all it would be good to see a mayor who could truly command the trust of Londoners irrespective of their colour, creed, race, or gender.</blockquote>Exactly so. <br /><div dir="ltr" style="margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><br /></div>At the time of writing, <a href="http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/london-mayoral-election-2016-sadiq-khan-has-almost-enough-support-win-first-round-1557394">opinion polling suggests</a> that Khan’s election win is now a foregone conclusion, and that Labour will be able to take some short-term comfort in rescuing the mayoralty from what looks to be a day of otherwise dismal results on May 5. <br /><br />But the centre-Left may yet repent the long-term costs at their leisure. A number of hostages to fortune have been carelessly surrendered during the course of this campaign, and both the Labour Party and British Muslims risk paying a price for the diminished expectations offered in defence of Khan's candidacy. His past associations and statements - not to mention his slippery idea of what constitutes personal integrity - have the capacity to bring further embarrassment upon Labour. And his billing as the most progressive politician the Muslim population of Britain are capable of producing will do Khan's co-religionists no favours in the long run, especially those Muslims who have never felt inclined to launder the reputations of dangerous fanatics or to endorse their ghastly politics. <br /><br />These days, of course, Khan makes much of his determination to confront Islamic extremism. "On day one I am going to put us on a war footing with these terrorists,” <a href="http://www.standard.co.uk/news/mayor/sadiq-khan-ill-put-london-on-a-war-footing-to-deal-with-threat-of-terror-a3225236.html" target="_blank">he has vowed</a>. But his failure to provide <a href="http://hurryupharry.org/2016/04/28/the-speech-that-would-make-me-vote-for-sadiq-khan/">a transparent account</a> of his former views and sympathies, or an intelligible explanation of their evolution from appeasement to bellicosity, make it impossible to know for sure whether this represents a sincere transformation of worldview, an unprincipled opportunism, or just a collection of empty words. We shall now have to wait and see. But so long as the Labour Party continues to field candidates - irrespective of faith or ethnicity - who share Khan's history of deplorable alliances and statements, it should get used to the entirely justifiable scrutiny and criticism that follows.</div><div><br />In the meantime, the Khan campaign has provided a painful reminder of two things. The first is the utterly dismal state of contemporary Labour Party politics. And the second is the Left’s refusal to be honest about its unfortunate recent history of fellow-travelling with radical Islam. </div></div>Unrepentant Jacobinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09256579083755037018noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5380090049852721671.post-40211408984304109362015-08-14T08:25:00.000-07:002015-08-16T08:19:14.487-07:00Tomorrow Belongs To Us<div class="tr_bq"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>Thoughts On Totalitarian Violence and Ideology</b></span><br /><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-EP5C63LvM9g/Vb6-iDh3gWI/AAAAAAAAAgQ/Jl4HAaopxmA/s1600/DSC_0113-650x430.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-EP5C63LvM9g/Vb6-iDh3gWI/AAAAAAAAAgQ/Jl4HAaopxmA/s1600/DSC_0113-650x430.jpg" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption"><b><i><span style="font-size: small;">(L-R) Abdul Wahid&nbsp;(Chairman of the UK Executive Committee), Jamal Harwood (UK Executive Committee), and Taji Mustafa (Media Representative) at a Hizb ut-Tahrir event in Whitechapel in 2013. (The misplaced hyphen on the event backdrop adds an unintentionally comical touch.)</span></i></b></td></tr></tbody></table>In <a href="http://anonymousmugwump.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/think-again-david-cameron-conveyer.html" target="_blank">a post published</a> in the wake of British Prime Minister David Cameron's <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/extremism-pm-speech" target="_blank">July 20 speech on counter-extremism in Birmingham</a>, the anonymous mugwump attacks 'Eustonites', the counter-extremist think-tank Quilliam, and of course Cameron himself in an effort to demonstrate that "there is no causality between Islamism and terrorism".&nbsp;</div><br />Mugwump links to a number of studies and reports which I have not addressed here, since they are used to support an argument I believe has been built on faulty premises. Instead, most of this post is devoted to an alternative reading of the Prime Minister's speech which reflects my understanding of the government's view, as well as some wider thoughts about the nature of Islamist ideology.<br /><br />Incidentally, while I am happy to accept the 'Eustonite' label, the <a href="http://eustonmanifesto.org/the-euston-manifesto/" target="_blank">2006 Euston Manifesto</a> (the only document 'Eustonites' have in common) takes no line on the relationship between Islamism and jihadism. So, in what follows, I speak for no-one but myself.<br /><br /><br /><b>The 'Conveyor Belt Theory'</b><br /><br />Mugwump's post accuses Cameron of blithely accepting a fatuous 'conveyor belt theory' of radicalisation, which he alleges has been foisted on the credulous Prime Minister by uninformed advisors at Quilliam. <br /><br />To describe the 'conveyor belt' idea as a 'theory' is to over-promote it. A more accurate description would be a rather poor analogy, which seems to have its origins in a <a href="http://www.bits.de/public/documents/US_Terrorist_Attacks/Hizbut-ahrirIslam%27sPoliticalInsurgency.pdf" target="_blank">2004 report on Hizb ut-Tahrir</a> published by the Nixon Center, and authored by its then director of International Security and Energy Programmes, Zeyno Baran.<br /><br />The limitations of the analogy's explanatory value are readily apparent. Items on a conveyor belt have no individual agency or psychology; they are passively processed by a machine before being churned out, fully reconstituted, at their final destination. But Baran's use of the term was never intended to suggest this kind of direct causality or mechanical and unidirectional progression.<br /><br />She was speaking more generally about what she called "ideological preparation" as part of a "division of labour", and the recurrent formation of more radical splinter groups&nbsp;such as Palestinian Islamic Jihad (1958), Al-Muhajiroun (1996), Akramiye (1996), and Hizb un-Nusrat (1999), by HT activists who had lost patience with the organisation's gradualist revolutionary strategy. Like every serious analyst dealing with counter-extremism, Baran was perfectly well aware that not every HT activist goes on to become a jihadist.<br /><br />Nonetheless, Islamists were not slow to seize on the manifest failings of their own literalist interpretation of the term and to use them - absurdly - to claim that Islamist ideology therefore makes no contribution to Islamist terror at all. But pointing out that not everything with four legs is a dog does not alter the fact that dogs are quadrupedal. Unless and until someone produces a jihadist who is not also an Islamist, it ought to be possible for reasonable people to agree that Islamist ideology is a necessary but not sufficient precondition for Islamist terrorism.<br /><br /><br /><b>The Quilliam View and the Cameron Speech</b><br /><br />In his blog post, mugwump extracts and emphasises the following lines from Cameron's speech:<br /><blockquote>[Y]ou don’t have to support violence to subscribe to certain intolerant ideas which create a climate in which extremists can flourish . . . [We must confront] groups and organisations that may not advocate violence – but which do promote other parts of the extremist narrative.</blockquote>Mugwump then remarks:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">The basic idea is that non-violent Islamist ideology -&gt; violent Islamist terrorism. It’s an idea referred to as the “conveyer-belt theory of terrorism” propounded by (mostly non-academic) bodies like the Quilliam Foundation.&nbsp;</blockquote>No evidence is provided of Quilliam's advocacy of the conveyor belt idea, and if it is as central to the organisation's thinking on radicalisation as mugwump claims, it is reasonable to suppose there would be a substantial amount of Quilliam literature devoted to explaining and defending it. When I contacted the founding chairman Maajid Nawaz by email for comment, he was adamant: "Neither Quilliam nor I have ever advocated the ‘conveyor belt theory’ as understood by its straw-man building critics."<br /><br /><a href="http://www.quilliamfoundation.org/about/faqs/" target="_blank">In their FAQs</a>, the organisation argues that Islamist ideology pushes a grievance narrative which provides "the mood music to which suicide bombers dance" - a metaphor first used in <a href="http://www.quilliamfoundation.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/publications/free/pulling-together-to-defeat-terror.pdf" target="_blank">Quilliam's 2008 launch publication</a> - which reflects the more complex relationship indicated by Cameron's reference to "a climate in which extremists can flourish".<br /><br />So while Cameron and Quilliam are indeed making a link between Islamist ideology and Islamist violence, the language they are using falls significantly short of describing the direct, causal link mugwump spends the rest of his post energetically attacking. Causality implied by the formulation "X -&gt; Y" demands that effect Y necessarily follows from cause X, a relationship Cameron does not come close to asserting and which Quilliam's freely-available information explicitly refuses to endorse.<br /><br />As Quilliam's FAQ page elaborates:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">IS THERE ANY PROOF THAT EXTREMISM LEADS TO TERRORIST VIOLENCE? Certain factors, whether they lead to terrorism or not, are highly problematic in themselves in terms of social and national cohesion. It is our contention that ultimately, seeking or demanding empirical proof for complex human behaviour patterns is unhelpful. Just as there is no direct proof that the spread of neo-Nazi or Fascist ideas in society leads directly to violence against Jews or other minorities, we would nevertheless find it extremely problematic if such views were to spread, and would be concerned from a common sense approach about the danger of this rhetoric provoking violence. It goes without saying that all violent neo-Nazis were at some stage non-violent neo-Nazis before they commenced to attack their victims. The same is true of Islamism.</blockquote><b><br />The Totalitarian Analysis Part 1:&nbsp;</b><b>Identity and Victimhood</b><br /><br />There are, I believe, two ways of analysing and understanding Islamism. The first approach seeks to understand it as a religious phenomenon. That is to say, to examine Islamism through the prism of Islamic theology and religious history. The second is to consider Islamism as a totalitarian political ideology.<br /><br />These analyses overlap and both are valuable to a deeper understanding of what Islamism is and how it developed. But it is the latter which, to my mind, offers a clearer insight into Islamism's otherwise mysterious allure and the dangers it presents to liberal democracy. Not least because Western totalitarian ideas exerted a profound influence on Islamist thought, which first emerged in the writings of a handful of Egyptian theorists following the dissolution of the Ottoman Caliphate in 1924.<br /><br />In the section of his speech immediately following his mention of "certain intolerant ideas which create a climate in which extremists can flourish", Cameron elaborated on what those ideas are.<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">Ideas which are hostile to basic liberal values such as democracy, freedom and sexual equality. </blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">Ideas which actively promote discrimination, sectarianism and segregation. </blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">Ideas – like those of the despicable far right – which privilege one identity to the detriment of the rights and freedoms of others. </blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">And ideas also based on conspiracy: that Jews exercise malevolent power; or that Western powers, in concert with Israel, are deliberately humiliating Muslims, because they aim to destroy Islam. In this warped worldview, such conclusions are reached – that 9/11 was actually inspired by Mossad to provoke the invasion of Afghanistan; that British security services knew about 7/7, but didn’t do anything about it because they wanted to provoke an anti-Muslim backlash. </blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">And like so many ideologies that have existed before – whether Fascist or Communist – many people, especially young people, are being drawn to it. We need to understand why it is proving so attractive.</blockquote>Cameron sketches an ideological framework which is anti-democratic, sectarian, supremacist, conspiracist, and anti-Semitic. His concluding lines, which directly compare Islamist ideology to the totalitarian ideologies of Communism and Fascism, invite us to consider Islamism, not as a primarily religious phenomenon, but as the inheritor and most recent incarnation of one of the twentieth century's most destructive and potent political myths.<br /><br />This myth rests on a cosmic and paranoid but powerfully seductive view of world history, in which the righteous and the chosen have been dispossessed and persecuted by corrupt and powerful elites from without, and beset by treacherous forces from within. (Cameron returned to the theme of conspiracism repeatedly in his speech, mentioning it no less than nine times, in reference to both Islamist conspiracy theories and to those circulated about Muslims by the nativist far-right.)<br /><br />This is not to suggest that Islamist ideology can be disentangled and neatly separated from Islam. On the contrary, Islamism is explicitly and fanatically Islamic, and Cameron was clear about his refusal to further indulge those who seek to decouple one from the other. But he was also careful to point out that, in the first instance, Islamism appeals to Muslims as members of an embattled community which uses Islam as a marker of identity. In this respect, its narrative closely shadows that of previous totalitarian mass movements.<br /><br />For the Nazis, the victimised chosen few were the Aryan race. For revolutionary Communists, they were the Proletariat. For Islamists, they are Muslims, all members of a pan-national community of believers known as the <i>Umma</i>. In each case, grievance, resentment, alienation, and a paranoid siege mentality are encouraged and exploited where they already exist. Where they do not, they are sown and then carefully cultivated where the soil is found to be fertile.<br /><br />Victimology is central to all Islamist propaganda, and as <a href="http://daviddpaxton.com/2015/08/06/charlie-and-the-jihadi-factory/" target="_blank">David Paxton's recent essay</a> reminds us, it was a point of repeated emphasis in Osama bin Laden's 1996 Declaration of War, which Paxton describes as "wallow[ing] in the tropes of Muslim victimhood and conspiracism".&nbsp;In keeping with this narrative, anti-Semitism - the world's oldest conspiracist hatred, enjoining the inflammatory scapegoating of Jews (latterly referred to as 'Zionists') - turns out to be salient to all three ideologies.<br /><br />Palestine. Kashmir. Chechnya. Iraq. Afghanistan. Bosnia. Burma. Sykes-Picot. European colonialism. American bases on sacred soil. Domestic counter-terrorism measures perceived as a mere pretext for the subjugation of Muslims. In the mouths of Islamist propagandists, real instances of persecution become indistinguishable from the complexities of ongoing conflicts and historical grievances stretching back decades, even centuries. Western intervention undertaken in defence of Muslim populations is disregarded, and the persecution and oppression of Muslim populations by other Muslims is either downplayed or somehow blamed on the West (and/or Israel) by proxy.<br /><br />All of this stuff is simply grist to the anti-Western, anti-Zionist conspiracist mill, identified by Cameron in his speech, which contrives a version of reality in which the world of unbelief is at war with history's eternal victims.<br /><br /><br /><b>The Totalitarian Analysis Part 2:&nbsp;</b><b>The Utopian Promise</b><br /><br />Totalitarian ideologies offer a millenarian, triumphalist answer to this selective and confected narrative of victimisation and despair - the marshalling of a revolutionary vanguard which will establish a peaceful, orderly, earthbound paradise in which the wretched will be redeemed, their tormentors will suffer, and justice will at last be served. The message may be summarised as: "We are the world's forsaken. But tomorrow belongs to us".<br /><br />The establishment of a neo-Caliphate in defiance of Western power, international law, and even state borders has given this narrative its biggest shot in the arm since the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran, and, as Cameron pointed out, it has helped to persuade many of its adherents that their redemptive hour is finally at hand:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">[L]ike any extreme doctrine, it can seem energising, especially to young people. They are watching videos that eulogise ISIS as a pioneering state taking on the world, that makes celebrities of violent murderers. So people today don’t just have a cause in Islamist extremism; in ISIS, they now have its living and breathing expression.</blockquote>For an anecdotal example of the pull this kind of utopian promise can exert on Western Muslims already persuaded that they live in a dystopian nightmare, consider&nbsp;<a href="http://justpaste.it/m4sy" target="_blank">the statement released by the Mannan family</a>&nbsp;(unverified but generally thought to be genuine) which describes British democracy as "totalitarian" and the Islamic State as a "land that is free from the corruption and oppression of man made law and is governed by the Shariah, the perfect and just laws of Allah":<br /><blockquote>Yes, all 12 of us and why should this number be shocking, when there are thousands and thousands of Muslims from all corners of the world that are crossing over land and sea everyday to come to the Islamic State? That are willingly leaving the so called freedom and democracy that was forced down our throat in the attempt to brainwash Muslims to forget about their powerful and glorious past and now present. &nbsp;</blockquote>The simplicity and flexibility of the victimhood-and-utopia message on which mass movements are built is what has made it such an adaptable and resilient meme; one with an appeal so broad, it offers almost unlimited routes to identification and embrace. It knows no boundaries of class or gender and may seduce the educated and the unlettered, the young and the old, the rich and the poor, the urban and the rural.<br /><br />For those in search of meaning, mass movements provide an instantly comprehensible view of the world. For those&nbsp;estranged&nbsp;from the self, they provide identity. For the alienated, they provide belonging.&nbsp;For the frustrated, they provide purpose. For the lost, they provide order. They remove the need for independent thought, critical reflection, an appreciation of complexity, and personal responsibility, and they provide a convenient receptacle for every kind of personal, political, and psychological grievance, with the comfort of a shared redemptive struggle against injustice in the name of virtue.<br /><br />And, perhaps most important of all, ignorance is no barrier to acceptance. Albert Camus once remarked that no-one was persuaded to become a Communist by the writings of Marx. "First they convert," he observed. "Then they read the scriptures". An unexamined belief in the manifest corruption of the West, 'Zionist' moral turpitude, and the hypocrisy of democratic ideas comes first; the prescriptive detail - whether found in Mao's Little Red Book or in 7th Century religious texts and the writings of the Islamist theorist <i>du jour</i> - follows.<br /><br />But follow it must. Mass movements depend for their effectiveness on ideological discipline, which is why Islamist groups - from Raqqa to London's East End - devote so much time and attention to the indoctrination of hitherto uninformed recruits in 'study circles'.<br /><br />When Cameron referred in his speech to the threat posed by Islamist ideology, he was not talking about the nuts-and-bolts of this-or-that recommended <i>Hudud</i> punishment for apostasy, homosexuality, or theft, but about a conspiracist worldview which insists that reality as we experience it is an illusory fraud. Muslims are the 'new Jews'. Zionists are the new Nazis. Democracy is despotism. Freedom is slavery. Truth is falsehood. Totalitarianism is emancipation.<br /><br />In this light, Islamism is best understood, not simply as a religiously conservative strain of Islam presenting a threat to social cohesion and tolerant pluralism (although it is indubitably that too); it is foremost a supremacist revolutionary ideology, aggressively irredentist and imperialist in aim and politically fascist in character, which presents an existential threat to liberty and democracy.<br /><br />Listening to Cameron's speech, I was reminded of something Michael Weiss said during <a href="https://youtu.be/4MbRvqr34UM?t=3798" target="_blank">a discussion at the International Peace Institute</a> about <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Isis-Inside-Terror-Michael-Weiss/dp/1941393578" target="_blank"><i>ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror</i></a>, the book he co-authored with Hassan Hassan:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">At one point we were interviewing an ISIS fighter who was giving us this sense of having been completely brainwashed and having seen the true cause of the revolution through the eyes of ISIS clerics. And it reminded me of the end of [Koestler's]&nbsp;<i>Darkness at Noon.&nbsp;</i>Rubashov is going to his death, and he misremembers a passage in his own memoir [which] says something like: "We are past the ethical ballast of the 19th Century". In other words, all the morality - your false consciousness - is taken away from you, and you are seeing the world anew.&nbsp;</blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">And that's not just something resonant with Soviet Communism. If you read Orwell's review of <i>Mein Kampf</i> in 1940, he says "I don't understand. How is it that the most industrialised, civilised nation in Western Europe bows down before somebody who says 'I offer you death?'" Well, what happens when the late failure of radical hopes and liberal democracy turns to ash? Strong men come along with a very tidy understanding of the way the world works; they promise you absolution; they promise you heaven - either on earth or afterward - and you bow down.&nbsp;</blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">I keep saying that one of the problems US foreign policy has today is that we are thinking in a 'post-Cold War mentality' a little too much for our own good. Students of totalitarianism would have a better go at understanding ISIS - the appeal and how to fight it - than people who only know counter-terrorism.</blockquote><br /><b>'Non-Violent' Extremism and the</b><b>&nbsp;Inevitability of Totalitarian Violence</b><br /><br />Early in his post, mugwump offers the following distinction:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">[A]n Islamist believes in the political application of Islam. A violent Islamist believes in the violent application of Islam. This is the dividing line between non-violent and violent extremism. Both are problems that should be tackled but the Quilliam view treats them as part of the same problem. Both are ideologies - which is why the idea that this isn’t an “ideological” problem is wrong, what matters is which ideology we’re talking about. </blockquote>This strikes me as a very poor piece of analysis indeed.<br /><br />First of all, Islamists all believe in both the political <i>and</i> the violent application of Islam given that, once established, an Islamist theocracy will reserve for itself a monopoly on violence with which to enforce Islamic law. Islamists diverge, not over the <i>application</i> of Islam, but over how to go about establishing the totalitarian society in which Islam is to be applied.<br /><br />Secondly, an ideological commitment to jihad and the veneration of martyrdom are central to <i>all</i> Islamist doctrine. What separates 'jihadists' from those Islamist groups euphemistically termed 'non-violent' is a separate distinction between 'offensive' and 'defensive' jihad, and an understanding of the conditions under which each is permissible.<br /><br />'Defensive jihad' refers to the use of violence (including terrorism) to overthrow illegitimate 'apostate' regimes on occupied Muslim land. This includes every country which has - at one time or another - fallen under Islamic rule, including the Balkans, Spain, and Southern Italy. 'Offensive jihad' refers to an expansionist holy war of conquest waged on the wider world of unbelief. 'Non-violent' Islamists and 'jihadists' agree that both of these are religious obligations, but the former hold that 'offensive' jihad may only be waged once the Caliphate has been successfully established. In the meantime, if 'non-violent' groups appear to renounce a commitment to 'defensive' jihad in certain theatres of operation, it is not a matter of ideology, but a tactical consideration, contingent upon what is conducive to the attainment of their strategic goals.<br /><br />In most of the countries in which it operates, the Muslim Brotherhood professes to have foresworn terror for democratic activism and politics. The group's Palestinian chapter, however, is an avowedly jihadist organisation, and its commitment to the violent destruction of Israel is "an individual duty" repeatedly mandated in its <a href="http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/hamas.asp" target="_blank">foundational charter</a>. As an organisation, it retains its foundational slogan which avers: "Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. The Qur'an is our law. Jihad is our path. Martyrdom in the way of Allah is our dearest aspiration."&nbsp;<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCJZQSwVKy0" target="_blank">As recently as 2012</a>, the Brotherhood's Egyptian President-to-be Mohammad Morsi could be heard defiantly bellowing these words into a rapturous Cairo rally.<br /><br />Hizb ut-Tahrir, another Islamist group habitually referred to as 'non-violent', currently has activists in over 40 countries working to create the conditions for a seizure of power by violent coup within the Islamic world, and for the overthrow of non-Muslim nations once the Caliphate's subsequent war of conquest finally gets under way. At <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXGPqyK3Srg" target="_blank">an HT rally in London</a> in 2006, Asim Qureshi - research director at CAGE, another putatively non-violent Islamist organisation - said: "it is incumbent upon all of us to support the jihad of our brothers and sisters in [Chechnya, Iraq, Palestine, Kashmir, and Afghanistan]"&nbsp;and, in 1988, HT's magazine <i>al-Fajr</i> issued an official edict sanctioning the hijacking of Israeli airliners and the murder of Jewish hostages. (I know of no Islamist organisation - Sunni or Shi'ite - which does not sanction and defend 'martyrdom operations' in Israel.)<br /><br />In one of a series of 'Letters to the Youth', Hasan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, justified the organisation's imperial ambitions with explicit reference to its fascist antecedents (this extract, previously unavailable in English, has just been translated from the original Arabic by Valentina Colombo, a senior fellow at the European Foundation for Democracy):<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Hijaz, Yemen, Tripoli, Tunis, Algiers, Marrakech, and every inch of earth upon which there is a Muslim who says "there is no God but Allah", all this is our great nation that we shall liberate, save, free and whose parts we shall bring together one after the other. If the German Reich imposed itself as a protector of all people who had German blood in their veins, then [the] Islamic faith compels every strong Muslim to consider himself a protector of all who have been impregnated by the teachings of Qur'an [. . .] Andalusia, Sicily, the Balkans, Southern Italy, and the islands of the Mediterranean were all Islamic colonies and must return to Islam. The Mediterranean and the Red Sea have to become again two Islamic seas as it used to be. If Mr. Mussolini considered as his right to recreate the Roman Empire, whose so-called ancient empire was built on nothing but avarice and pleasure, then it is our right to restore the glory of the Islamic Empire which was founded on justice, fairness, and spread light and guidance among the people.</blockquote>Even if an Islamist revolution were somehow to be achieved without a shot being fired or a neck being severed, consolidating and expanding power and control will unavoidably demand the purging - with extreme prejudice - of the ideologically impure, and the forcible imposition of ideology upon those recalcitrant free-thinkers unwilling and unable to submit to its conspiracist message.<br /><br />In his short 1951 book about mass movements,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-True-Believer-Movements-Perennial/dp/0060505915" target="_blank"><i>The True Believer</i></a>, the American writer Eric Hoffer made the following observation about the limits of propaganda and the inevitability of totalitarian violence:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">Were propaganda by itself one-tenth as potent as it is made out to be, the totalitarian regimes of Russia, Germany, Italy, and Spain would have been mild affairs. They would have been blatant and brazen but without the ghastly brutality of secret police, concentration camps and mass extermination. </blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">The truth seems to be that propaganda on its own cannot force its way into unwilling minds; neither can it inculcate something entirely new; nor can it keep people persuaded once they have ceased to believe . . . </blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">Propaganda by itself succeeds mainly with the frustrated. Their throbbing fears, hopes and passions crowd at the portals of their senses and get between them and the outside world . . . Indeed, it is easier for the frustrated to detect their own imaginings and hear the echo of their own musings in impassioned&nbsp;double-talk and sonorous refrains than in precise&nbsp;words joined together by faultless logic. . . [But] to maintain itself, a mass movement has to order things so that when the people no longer believe, they can be made to believe by force.&nbsp;</blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">Words are an essential instrument in preparing the ground for a mass movement. But once the movement is realised, words, though still useful, cease to play a decisive role. So acknowledged a master of propaganda as Dr. Goebbels admits in an unguarded moment that "a sharp sword must always stand behind propaganda if it is to be truly effective".</blockquote>In 2000 Abdul Qadeem Zallum,&nbsp;Hizb ut-Tahrir's global leader between 1977 and 2003, published&nbsp;<i>How the Khilafah was Destroyed </i>in which he described what would be required once the Caliphate had been successfully established:&nbsp;"To spread Islam and to carry its&nbsp;message even if the disbeliever did not attack us.” The killing of civilians in pursuit of this aim would be permissible, he explained, and the massacre of 'apostates' - "even if they number millions" - would be compulsory.<br /><br />To describe this ideology as 'non-violent' is to empty the term of meaning. No strain of Islamist doctrine is untainted by the cult of suicide and death because, whether or not an individual Islamist decides to engage in violent activity, violence is inextricably bound up in the logic of the ideology to which all Islamists adhere, just as it is inextricably bound up in the logic of all totalitarian ideologies. <a href="http://www.quilliamfoundation.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/publications/free/pulling-together-to-defeat-terror.pdf" target="_blank">Quilliam's 2008 launch publication</a>&nbsp;put it like this:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">There remains a core of Wahhabite-Islamist activists and groups who continue to advocate separatist, confrontational ideas that, followed to their logical conclusion, lead to violence. </blockquote><a href="https://twitter.com/anonmugwump/status/626746504775122944" target="_blank">On twitter</a>, mugwump pulled these 25 words from a 4000 word document and proffered them as conclusive proof of Quilliam's supposed commitment to the 'conveyor belt' idea. But, in so doing, he simply confirmed that he is at cross-purposes with those he attacks.<br /><br />Belief in a 'conveyor belt' transporting radicals from non-violent Islamism into a violent variant presupposes that these categories can be neatly separated into two discrete and mutually exclusive groups in the first place. But this is mugwump's presupposition, not Quilliam's. If, on the other hand, violence is hardwired into Islamist ideology, then the problem becomes the ideology itself, as Quilliam contend. This requires a substantially more subtle and sophisticated reading of the relationship between ideology and violence than mugwump's myopic focus on notions of linear causality will allow.<br /><br />As Quilliam's website makes clear, the "complex human behaviour patterns" which move an individual to decide that he or she will kill and die in the name of 'resistance' or to further their revolutionary goals are opaque, and likely to remain so: a murky mix of circumstance, strategy/expedience, and individual psychology.<br /><br />But that some will be so moved should be neither controversial nor surprising, any more than the self-evident fact that Maoist ideology formerly inspired a plethora of revolutionary Marxist groups to radical action in pursuit of their aims. Is it precisely what revolutionary propaganda is purpose-built to achieve among those predisposed to accept it: the steady background drone of humiliation and despair, and the patient stoking of disaffection, hatred, rage, and paranoid despair - the mood music in Quilliam's eerie metaphor.Unrepentant Jacobinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09256579083755037018noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5380090049852721671.post-58289846793120595742015-07-22T16:55:00.000-07:002015-07-22T16:57:32.155-07:00The Lonely Nobility of Brendan O'Neill<b><span style="font-size: large;">FGM &amp; The Case Against The Case Against Intervention.</span></b><br /><div><b><br /></b><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-YuzwjP2cuck/VbAsFniWyzI/AAAAAAAAAfw/byPSo2a9Rbc/s1600/Screen%2BShot%2B2015-07-23%2Bat%2B00.47.27.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-YuzwjP2cuck/VbAsFniWyzI/AAAAAAAAAfw/byPSo2a9Rbc/s1600/Screen%2BShot%2B2015-07-23%2Bat%2B00.47.27.png" /></a></div><div><br />In <a href="http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/2015/07/the-crusade-against-fgm-is-out-of-control/">an angry article for the Spectator</a>, Brendan O’Neill inveighs against provisions in the <a href="http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2015/9/contents/enacted">Serious Crime Act (2015)</a>, which authorise the confiscation of passports, and mandatory vaginal examinations of young girls thought to be at risk of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM).<br /><br />O’Neill’s writing is often described as a merely contrarian. But, while his irritation with consensus and received wisdom is dependably palpable, his objections are more-often-than-not libertarian in impulse. And since libertarianism is primarily concerned with the defence of personal autonomy, he tends to be reflexively hostile to any intervention by the state in the lives of its citizens.<br /><br />But the state does not present the only threat to liberty. Young girls undergoing FGM at the hands of their own families are forcibly restrained and may be subjected to a combination of one or more of the following:&nbsp;<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clitoridectomy">clitoridectomy</a>, labial excision, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infibulation">infibulation</a>, and – in the most extreme variant of the practice – cauterisation of the vagina’s interior. The harrowing procedure is usually suffered without anaesthetic.<br /><br />20,000 British girls are estimated to be at risk of FGM of one kind or another every year. This is also, I submit, an intolerable assault on personal autonomy, and one which state-sponsored FGM prevention is specifically intended to eradicate.<br /><br />The monitoring of young girls most vulnerable to this kind of abuse, the restriction of their freedom to travel, invasive medical exams and so forth, indeed constitute state infringement of personal liberty. But a thoughtful and intellectually honest libertarian analysis must acknowledge the corresponding costs of inaction. If it does not, it risks sacrificing the defence of personal autonomy to a perverse opposition to state intervention, irrespective of intention and consequence.<br /><br />O’Neill expresses his alarm that excessively broad guidelines alerting school and law enforcement authorities to indications of abuse may well result in false positives. This is a legitimate problem, but it is one without an obvious solution.<br /><br />In the UK, FGM is a covert cultural practice conducted within closed communities behind closed doors. Until comparatively recently, the West preferred to turn a blind eye. However, awareness-raising campaigns (often led by victims of FGM) and gathering public anxiety about cultural relativism have resulted in widespread revulsion and official condemnation, which only encourages greater secrecy among those convinced of FGM’s necessity.<br /><br />How many false positives is O’Neill prepared to tolerate to prevent the mutilation of a single child’s genitals? Ten? Three? Zero? He does not say. Instead, he condemns state prevention efforts that profile young British girls of African heritage while neglecting to acknowledge the perfectly obvious reason for this. “Guess whose vaginas would be interrogated?” O’Neill wonders scornfully of proposals to subject young girls at risk to gynaecological examinations. “Not little Chloe’s – just little Abebi’s.” To which one can simply return the question: guess whose vagina will be mutilated in the absence of action?<br /><br />O’Neill is at pains to insist that he is no cultural relativist. “I’m happy to say FGM is a backward, barbaric act,” he announces. “Those who say it’s just another cultural practice, and we should respect it, are moral cowards, incapable of making judgements.” Well, good. But his implacable opposition to state intervention on ostensibly libertarian grounds desires the same state paralysis, nonetheless.<br /><br />Like a self-flattering pacifist who prefaces every anti-intervention argument with a mumbled acknowledgement of the cruelty of the totalitarian regime at issue, O’Neill’s condemnation of FGM feels suspiciously pro-forma. He offers nary a constructive proposal to counter those he denounces, and which might better serve the interests of the young girls in whose defence he professes to write.<br /><br />Instead he closes on a solipsistic note, with a defiant declaration of conscientious objection to an illusory state-enforced racism. At which point, his article’s true subject swims into focus, and it is neither FGM nor its victims. It is the lonely nobility of Brendan O’Neill.<br /><br /><i><b>This article was <a href="http://leftfootforward.org/2015/07/the-crusade-against-fgm-is-better-than-the-alternative/" target="_blank">first published by Left Foot Forward</a> on July 21.</b></i></div></div></div>Unrepentant Jacobinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09256579083755037018noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5380090049852721671.post-70540945206532818792015-07-19T12:24:00.000-07:002016-12-13T13:01:55.584-08:00On Motes and Beams<b><span style="font-size: large;">"Islamic State Is An Enemy Of Freedom But...."</span></b><br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-6Xn7hmOo7LY/Var3lylzU5I/AAAAAAAAAfc/ny_0gVbDciU/s1600/image-resizer.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-6Xn7hmOo7LY/Var3lylzU5I/AAAAAAAAAfc/ny_0gVbDciU/s1600/image-resizer.jpg" /></a></div><br />Last week, <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/13/trojan-horse-school-islamic-state-propaganda" target="_blank">the <i>Guardian</i> reported</a> on an intriguing new counter-extremism initiative. Organised in partnership with a Muslim charity called <a href="http://www.upstandingneighbourhoods.org/" target="_blank">Upstanding Neighbourhoods</a>, it has been launched in response to alarming instances of young Muslims absconding to live in the Islamic State. Schools such as Saltley Academy in Birmingham - which only last year was embroiled in the Islamist 'Trojan Horse scandal - have been inviting young Yazidi refugees from Iraq to address pupils with unsparing accounts of what life in the Islamic State is actually like.<br /><br />The <i>Guardian</i>'s report, however, prompted&nbsp;<a href="http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/stay-in-britain-or-else/17192#.VaqIARNVhBd" target="_blank">an indignant response</a> from Ella Whelan over at <i>Sp!ked Online</i>. Whelan offered two objections, the first of which is strategic, the second of which is philosophical.<br /><br />On the subject of strategy, she had this to say:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">[I]n the absence of being able to say what British society stands for, what its values are, and why, therefore, it is superior to IS, the state instead uses a group like Upstanding Neighbourhoods to scare pupils into staying in Britain.&nbsp;</blockquote>The language is tendentious and shrill, but this sentence carries the seed of a legitimate criticism: that any approach to counter-extremism, which focuses on the brutality of the Islamic State at the expense of a thoroughgoing advocacy of the benefits of life in the West, is of limited use. In this much, I concur. But why should one preclude the other? Whelan elaborates:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">[I]t is also odd that some think this is educational. Trying to scare children into line with tales of the bogeyman works with five-year-olds. But when it comes to older children, or young adults, and the problem of terrorist organisations, society and schools should be engaging all pupils in a real conversation about freedom, not selecting Muslim students and scaring them rigid with gory details and nightmarish scenes.</blockquote>In other words, Whelan objects to the initiative <i>per se</i>. She seems to believe that these young Yazidi women are merely&nbsp;instruments of propaganda&nbsp;in the hands of a cynical state, used to terrify credulous children into conformity. The "bogeyman", bear in mind, is a fiction.<br /><br />But Iraqi refugees are not being asked to lie to children. On the contrary, they are being asked to testify to the punishing reality of life in the Islamic State, a reality totally at odds with the utopian propaganda used to seduce young recruits, and a reality from which Whelan - perversely - seems to want children protected, even as she protests their infantilisation.<br /><br />Education involves the provision of information to allow for informed choice, a necessary part of which is a frank discussion of risk and consequence. Those disinclined to believe the claims of politicians (whom Whelan casually depicts as incompetent and mendacious) or the media (which she accuses of over-hyping the terrorist threat) may therefore benefit from the hair-raising testimony of those who have actually experienced life in Raqqa firsthand, and whose warnings are not so easily dismissed. That is, of course, unless they are persuaded by articles like Whelan's that such voices are merely circulating falsehoods on behalf of sinister state power.<br /><br />And what of the philosophical objection - the "real conversation about freedom" Whelan demands? On this score, she is determined to make the perfect the enemy of the good.<br /><br />When the state of Oklahoma badly botched the execution of convicted murderer Clayton Lockett in April 2014, my twitter feed was suddenly awash with histrionic claims that the United States had now conclusively forfeited its right to criticise, say, the Islamic Republic of Iran for its use of the death penalty. Self-examination and sober reflection metastasised into a deranged moral equivalence which held that a democracy allowing for the use of lethal injection in a narrow set of circumstances is morally no better than a theocracy mandating the public stoning of adulterers and the hanging of gays from cranes.<br /><br />By the same token, &nbsp;Ella Whelan is not convinced that Britain is qualified to sit in moral judgement on the genocidal Islamic State. She concludes her article with the following:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">The British government is keen to posit IS as an enemy of freedom, and rightly so. But Britain is compromised, too. It is a society in which the freedoms of its citizens are increasingly restricted by assorted speech laws; in which the therapeutic state all too readily seeks to nudge and nanny its citizens through their daily lives. The West can criticise the elimination of freedom abroad, and endlessly pretend that our own liberty is intact, but until we protect and celebrate freedom at home, the argument against IS will never be that convincing.</blockquote>Undergirding this paragraph's various problems is a peculiarly absolutist view of freedom. That is to say, either you have it or you don't. And, as Whelan would have it, until such time as the West (childishly denigrated in her preceding paragraph as "supposedly civilised") has succeeded in constructing a perfectly free society, it has no moral authority on the subject of individual liberty. So an article which began by demanding that we defend Western values instead of terrifying children, concludes by claiming that any such defence is invalidated by the West's less-than-perfect adherence to what it preaches. This is, I'm afraid, cynicism without even the benefit of coherence.<br /><br />Whelan appears to believe that she is unmasking a fraud. But the arrogant pretence of Western perfection is characteristically asserted, not by the West's defenders, but by its enemies who then proffer every flaw as a self-discrediting hypocrisy. It is news to no-one that Western democracies are riddled with inconsistencies, absurdities, and contradictions. Some result from explicitly pernicious ideas, others from the unintended consequences of well-meaning ones.<br /><br />But defending the West and harshly judging theocracies does not require a stipulation that Western nations are themselves perfect, still less that their governments and/or populations are so. It requires an understanding that liberal democracy provides a framework within which all people can best win and defend their own emancipation. Democratically-accountable governance. Wide parameters of freedom of speech and inquiry. The separation of revelation from reason. An independent judiciary. An acknowledgement of the universal rights of individuals. Developments midwifed by Enlightenment thought, and essential to the subsequent pursuit of incremental Western progress.<br /><br />The perfectly liberal and free society Ella Whelan apparently demands before she will seriously entertain Western criticisms of Islamic State will never materialise, and for the same reason that utopians favour totalitarianism as a means of achieving their ends: that liberal democracy renounces the pursuit of the perfect for the pursuit of the good. And, in so doing, it is able to offer something more valuable than a utopian mirage: a stuttering process of self-correction which has eventually led the West, stumbling through trial and error, to reverse the historic errors of slavery, empire, and discrimination and to enshrine rights and freedoms in law still denied to much of the world's population by despotism.<br /><br />Western self-criticism - of which Whelan's article is a particularly crude example - has, of course, been instrumental in achieving such gains. But there is a tendency amongst those who take them for granted to surrender to a self-lacerating masochism as a means of advertising their own moral virtue. The democracies of secularised Christendom, with their internalised narratives of sin and redemption, are more vulnerable to this tendency than honour/shame cultures. It was Christ, after all, who is said to have cried:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye.</blockquote>Human fallibility being what it is, no eye will ever be completely free of blemish. And the world being what it is, the complete suspension of all moral judgement is neither possible, nor desirable. And so, instead, when evaluating imperfection, it is important - in the name of perspective, moral clarity, and sanity - to make unapologetic distinctions between motes and beams, and to remember which is which.Unrepentant Jacobinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09256579083755037018noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5380090049852721671.post-28842452899963253672015-07-16T13:09:00.006-07:002015-07-16T18:49:34.680-07:00Reactionary Radicals<b><span style="font-size: large;">Owen Jones and the Rainbow Qur'an</span></b><br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-RxjsRo4rIz0/VahfC10ksPI/AAAAAAAAAfM/YN-QK34AwGM/s1600/OJKoran.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-RxjsRo4rIz0/VahfC10ksPI/AAAAAAAAAfM/YN-QK34AwGM/s1600/OJKoran.png" /></a></div><br />In <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/jul/10/stand-mehdi-hasan-torrent-islamophobic-abuse">a 2012 article</a> for the <i>Guardian,</i>&nbsp;Jonathan Freedland had defended his friend Mehdi Hasan by convicting Hasan’s critics of a strange form of racism:<br /><div><blockquote class="tr_bq">[Subtle examples] can be confusing, because they often dress up in progressive, Guardian-friendly garb – slamming Islam as oppressive of gay and women's rights, for example – but the thick layer of bigotry is visible all the same. Call it progressives' prejudice.</blockquote>An example of the pitfalls into which this kind of thinking can lead the Left was recently provided by a fractious twitter exchange on the subject of gay rights and Islam involving Freedland’s <i>Guardian</i> colleague Owen Jones [<a href="https://storify.com/LiberalAtheist6/saif-rahman-desi-liberal-and-owen-jones-on-lgbt-is">storified here</a>].<br /><br />The US Supreme Court ruling legalising gay marriage had been handed down a few days earlier and the summer’s Pride festivities had just begun. Profile avatars superimposed with solidarity rainbows swept social media in celebration of both; a touching display of the breadth and depth of support the once-lonely campaign for marriage equality has come to enjoy.<br /><br />A mischievous variation on this theme was an image of the Qur'an, tweeted by the ex-Muslim writer and activist Saif Rahman, which a twitter user calling himself ‘Colt’ then gave a speculative punt in the direction of Owen Jones:<br /><br /><blockquote class="twitter-tweet tw-align-center"><br /><div dir="ltr" lang="en">Owen, give this a shove for those LBGT muslims out there <a href="https://twitter.com/OwenJones84">@OwenJones84</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/solidarity?src=hash">#solidarity</a> <a href="https://t.co/Y6jPmVC3Pg">https://t.co/Y6jPmVC3Pg</a></div>— Colt (@_coltseavers) <a href="https://twitter.com/_coltseavers/status/616312547604627456">July 1, 2015</a></blockquote><script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script><br />When Rahman asked why this had not been dignified with a response, Jones answered: "Because I think this is self evidently trying to provoke [rather] than win people over to LGBT rights? Are you LGBT (genuine question)?"<br /><br />Owen Jones is a notoriously thin-skinned and bad-tempered tweeter, so the petulant tone was hardly a surprise. But I would imagine Jones is also understandably anxious to avoid accusations of bigotry from people like Jonathan Freedland.<br /><br />The difficulty here is that Islamic homophobia is not a mere calumny or figment of ‘progressive prejudice’. Muslims are not simply the hapless victims of Western prejudice, as Jones and Freedland apparently prefer to believe; they are individuals perfectly capable of holding bigoted views of their own, which it is surely every progressive’s responsibility to oppose. <br /><br />A 2006 <a href="http://www.populus.co.uk/uploads/download_pdf-131206-Policy-Exchange-Poll-of-Muslims---Living-Apart-Together.pdf">Populus poll</a> conducted for Policy Exchange found that 61% of UK Muslims thought "homosexuality is wrong and should be illegal", a figure consistent across genders and social class. This figure is admittedly nearly 10 years old, but the Populus also reported that younger generations were less tolerant on this issue than their elders, which does nothing to inspire optimism that things have been moving in the right direction.<br /><br />Nevertheless, their survey did provide a reminder that UK Muslims’ views on homosexuality – whilst profoundly dispiriting – are not uniform. A majority appear to be deplorable and reactionary, but a minority – evidenced by projects like the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inclusive_Mosque_Initiative">Inclusive Mosque Initiative</a> – are enlightened and progressive. The aim of gay rights activism, surely, is to stigmatise the former and empower the latter. And on this point, Colt's tweet to Jones was specific.<br /><br />If Rahman's original image of the Qur'an was intended to mock the incompatibility of modernity and the Qur’an's 7th Century ideas, Colt's additional reference to LGBT Muslims and solidarity invites another interpretation: that LGBT Muslims living in communities and families hostile to the open expression of their sexuality deserve support in their struggle for acceptance under a modernised, gay-friendly Islam. <br /><br /></div><div>But, sensing a trap, Jones reflexively counterattacked with a spurious distinction between 'provocation' (bad) and advancing LGBT rights (noble), before accusing Colt and Rahman of the former. <br /><br />To see a self-professed radical advance an argument of such painful conservatism makes me cringe for Jones. Had his activist forebears afforded reactionary attitudes the respect he demands from contemporary critics of Islam, he would not enjoy the freedoms he takes for granted today.<br /><br />The overthrow of religious authority in the West – a necessary precondition of sexual liberty – was not achieved simply by the polite suggestion of a rationalist alternative. It also required the unrelenting mockery of its Enlightenment enemies who took great pleasure in making its ideas look ridiculous. <br /><br />Nor was the later movement for gay liberation and acceptance bashful about provoking its opponents, for whom its mere existence was an affront. Provocation and offence were understood by activists to be engines of change, not its regrettable by-products.<br /><br />In 1971, for instance, radical Gay Liberation Front activists in drag invaded a meeting of Mary Whitehouse's Christian pressure group, the Nationwide Festival of Light, held at Westminster's Methodist Central Hall, and began kissing one another and unfurling sloganeering banners before shutting off the power. The queer art, literature, music, theatre, and cinema that proliferated with the rise of gay activism likewise revelled in its capacity to generate traditionalist outrage. <br /><br />Had he been alive, would Owen Jones have pursed his lips in disapproval and defended the sensibilities of offended conservative Christians?<br /><br />But times have changed, and in the process radical opposition to reactionary inter-cultural ideas seems to have mutated into a perverse solidarity. Multiculturalism's emphasis on the need to show deference to cultural and religious difference, and the concomitant empowerment of all kinds of identity politics, has meant that a declaration of offence taken is no longer presumed to be the start of a discussion but its final word.<br /><br /></div><div>"Are you LGBT?" Jones had demanded of Rahman in his first tweet. An irrelevance to the matter at hand, but a question of pressing importance to Jones who - as an openly gay man - reserves for himself the right to decide who may and may not advocate for gay acceptance and under what circumstances. <br /><br />"If you want to be a straight ally, welcome," Jones instructed Rahman. "But I'm done with people only mentioning LGBT rights when Islam is involved." When an Indian ex-Muslim calling himself ‘Desi Liberal’ pointed out that it was Jones who was proving himself to be a feckless ally by downplaying Islamic homophobia so as to comport with politically correct niceties, Jones retorted: "I'm not going to be lectured on LGBT rights by a straight man. Incredible."<br /><br />It is undercover of this politics of identity and broad-minded respect for other cultures that, as a non-Muslim, Jones excuses himself from criticising even the most regressive elements of another minority group. In his own mind, it is not his business to do so.&nbsp;</div><div><br /></div><div>So, instead, he declares his unconditional and indiscriminate solidarity with all Muslims, irrespective of how hostile a given individual's views and values may be to his own. And, consequently, he finds himself objectively defending the Islamic religious right from the pressures of progress at the expense of those they victimise.<br /><br />The message for LGBT Muslims may be the unintended consequence of a well-meaning impulse, but it is clear, just the same: gay liberation for me, but not for thee. </div>Unrepentant Jacobinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09256579083755037018noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5380090049852721671.post-23673264357177607162015-03-06T13:49:00.001-08:002015-03-06T16:13:53.245-08:00The Ballad of Jihadi John<b><span style="font-size: large;">Terror, Apologists, and the Vindication of Gita Sahgal</span></b><br /><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-vJDsm2PwHcg/VPmHZzzospI/AAAAAAAAAco/jM_mOMvFdEU/s1600/Asim%2Band%2BEmwazi.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-vJDsm2PwHcg/VPmHZzzospI/AAAAAAAAAco/jM_mOMvFdEU/s1600/Asim%2Band%2BEmwazi.png" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b style="font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL: Mohammed Emwazi (Left) and Asim Qureshi of CAGE (Right)</b></td></tr></tbody></table><blockquote>You might be surprised to know, but the Mohammed that I knew was extremely kind. Extremely gentle. Extremely soft-spoken. [He] was the most humble young person that I knew. We're gonna release all the emails . . . and what you'll see when you read those emails is somebody who, despite going through great difficulties in his personal life, he belittled that difficulty.</blockquote>These were the now-notorious words Asim Qureshi, research director for the Islamist pressure group CAGE, used to describe Mohammed Emwazi, a British Islamic State fighter wanted for his part in the beheading of at least 5 hostages. They were offered at a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MngUaaOIVqg" target="_blank">catastrophic press conference</a> called by CAGE in the wake of the <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/jihadi-john-the-islamic-state-killer-behind-the-mask-is-a-young-londoner/2015/02/25/d6dbab16-bc43-11e4-bdfa-b8e8f594e6ee_story.html" target="_blank">Washington Post's unmasking</a> of Emwazi as the IS executioner hitherto known as 'Jihadi John'. CAGE, the Post revealed, had been in contact with Emwazi before he left for Syria.<br /><br />Listening to Qureshi's lachrymose little eulogy, I was reminded of a Guardian profile of Mohammad Sidique Khan, published just one week after the 7/7 terror atrocity, which had claimed the&nbsp;lives of 52 people and maimed a further 700. It was headlined&nbsp;<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2005/jul/14/july7.uksecurity5" style="font-style: italic;" target="_blank">Mentor to the Young and Vulnerable</a>, and it began like this:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">Born in Leeds, suicide bomber Mohammad Sidique Khan spent his working life with young, vulnerable children. The 30-year-old, father to a 14-month-old daughter, Maryam, was a mentor in primary schools for children with learning difficulties. He is known to have taught hundreds of children [. . .]&nbsp;One child who was taught by him at Hillside said: "He seemed a really kind man, he taught the really bad kids and everyone seemed to like him. He was there about three years and then he went on holiday and never came back. We just knew him as Mr Khan."</blockquote>The narrative being advanced in both instances is of a harmless individual, naturally inclined to selflessness and compassion for the disadvantaged, transformed into a pitiless foot-soldier for the Islamist slaughterhouse by the actions and policies of the West.<br /><br />The Guardian's profile of Khan had appeared under the joint byline of its then-crime correspondent Sandra Laville and a 27 year old trainee named Dilpazia Aslam. The day before, the Guardian had published an opinion piece by Aslam entitled <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/jul/13/religion.july7" target="_blank">We Rock The Boat: Today's Muslims Aren't Prepared to Ignore Injustice</a>. "I think", Aslam had written...<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">...what happened in London [on 7/7] was a sad day and not the way to express your political anger. Then there's the "but". If, as police announced yesterday, four men (at least three from Yorkshire) blew themselves up in the name of Islam, then please let us do ourselves a favour and not act shocked.</blockquote>"Shocked," he went on, "would be to suggest that the bombings happened through no responsibility of our own." This responsibility, he explained, lay with British support for the US-led war in Iraq in general, and the counter-insurgency operation in Fallujah in particular. Aslam noted that the Iraq war had resulted in "22,787 civilian Iraqi casualties to date", but neglected to mention that the vast majority of these were victims of the same jihadist terrorism that had just been visited upon his fellow citizens in London. Apparently, the injustice of Muslims - both Sunni and Shia - being blown to pieces in the marketplaces and mosques of Iraq by their co-religionists was not sufficient to stir his sense of moral outrage.<br /><br />Nor did the language Aslam used to describe the crime suggest that he was exactly overburdened with disgust at the use of suicide terror as an instrument of protest. On the contrary, his article sought to valourise a new generation of Muslim activists who refused to fall into line behind the British establishment.&nbsp;"The don't-rock-the-boat attitude of elders," he concluded ominously, "doesn't mean the agitation wanes; it means it builds till it can be contained no more."<br /><br />Last week, Mohammad Emwazi's behaviour was likewise explained as a consequence of Western actions, only this time his treatment at the hands of British intelligence was to blame. As CAGE's research director would have it, this mild-mannered and thoughtful bearer of "posh baklava" had been subject to a campaign of surveillance and harassment which had left him with no option but to behead aid workers and journalists.<br /><br />Invited to condemn Emwazi's actions <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0X7Cwl8QlUU" target="_blank">on Channel 4 news</a>, Qureshi found himself conspicuously reluctant to do so. He preferred to emphasise the extravagant efforts CAGE had made to secure the release of Alan Henning, and accused Jon Snow of anti-Muslim prejudice for having the temerity to even ask him such a question. Undeterred, Snow pressed Qureshi for an answer and was finally rewarded with this:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">Absolutely. If it's somebody, whether it's Tony Blair, George Bush, Dick Cheney - when somebody's involved in war crimes, they should be condemned for those war crimes and they should be held accountable for those war crimes.</blockquote>"I am asking," Snow persisted impatiently, "about Mohammed Emwazi. Do you condemn what he's doing?" Qureshi:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">Of course I condemn...erm...the...the...act of killing people or assassinating them or executing them. That is not really the way in which I think they should be going about doing things . . . But coming back to what CAGE thinks is important: when you have a cycle of violence; when you see things like Guantanamo Bay taking place; when we see the images of torture coming out of Abu Ghraib, and Guantanamo and everywhere else, then what that does - that sends a message to other parts of the world that you can treat human beings like animals, and what we are seeing in Iraq right now is a manifestation of what we have seen elsewhere.&nbsp;</blockquote>The similarities between the sentimental narrative of self-pity offered on behalf of Mohammed Sidique Khan by Dilpazia Aslam and that offered on behalf of Mohammed Emwazi by Asim Qureshi are striking, right down to the last trope. Bombing tubes and buses is "not the way to express political anger" and beheading bound and helpless hostages in front of a video camera is "not really the way to go about doing things." This is not a coincidence.<br /><br />Aslam, <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/guardian-man-revealed-as-hardline-islamist-299681.html" target="_blank">it turned out</a>, was then a member of the Islamist organisation Hizb ut-Tahrir, an openly imperialist, totalitarian, racist, and homophobic political organisation, with extremely regressive views regarding women's rights and emancipation. And while&nbsp;Hizb ut-Tahrir&nbsp;may not openly endorse&nbsp;violent jihad to establish the theocratic caliphate for which it yearns, it is extremely reluctant to criticise those who do, and happy to voice its support for the doctrine of 'defensive jihad'.<br /><br />While Asim Qureshi denies any current affiliation with Hizb ut-Tahrir, his views are indistinguishable from theirs. At a Hizb rally outside the US embassy in London in the summer of 2006, he boldly declared:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">When we see the example of our brothers and sisters fighting in Chechnya, Iraq, Palestine, Kashmir, Afghanistan then we know where the example lies. When we see Hezbollah defeating the armies of Israel, we know what the solution is and where the victory lies. We know that it is incumbent upon all of us to support the jihad of our brothers and sisters in these countries when they are facing the oppression of the West. [<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXGPqyK3Srg" target="_blank">video link here</a>]</blockquote>Notice the use of the word "incumbent" here. Holy war under such circumstances is not held to be a preference or a negotiable tactic, but a religious obligation.<br /><br />When Dilpazia Aslam's Hizb ut-Tahrir connections were exposed in the week after his 7/7 articles appeared, <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/media/2005/jul/22/theguardian.pressandpublishing1" target="_blank">the Guardian acknowledged</a> that "several colleagues and some senior editors" were already aware of Aslam's involvement with the group, and conceded that his political affiliations ought to have been clearly disclosed. This oversight had apparently been an unfortunate error, not a deliberate attempt to mislead.<br /><br />Be that as it may, a more pressing question remained. What was the Guardian doing with an Islamist propagandist on its payroll at all? It is inconceivable that it would employ a trainee it knew to be a committed BNP activist to speak on behalf of the white working class, still less to provide informed commentary in the wake of a white nationalist terror outrage.<br /><br />But the Guardian was indignant and, in <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/media/2005/jul/22/pressandpublishing.uknews" target="_blank">an article credited to an unidentified 'staff reporter'</a>, it accused "rightwing bloggers from the US" of engaging in a politically-motivated and "obsessively personalised" witch-hunt:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">[This] episode was a striking illustration of the way that blogs and bloggers can heat up the temperature and seek to settle scores - as well as raise legitimate concerns about journalism and transparency - when something awful happens in the streets of London.</blockquote>Nevertheless, in the face of gathering press criticism, the paper asked Aslam if he would resign his membership of Hizb ut-Tahrir. When he refused, they asked him to resign. When he refused to do that either, the paper "<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/media/2005/jul/22/theguardian.pressandpublishing" target="_blank">regretfully concluded</a> that it had no option but to terminate Mr Aslam's contract with the company."<br /><br />Aslam may have been left without a job, but he could reasonably say that his personal integrity was intact. The Guardian, on the other hand, had willingly compromised its values to accommodate a member of a fascist organisation.&nbsp;Aslam's Islamist apologetics were, after all, indistinguishable from much of the opinion on jihadist terror offered by its own columnists. He shared their hatred of Bush, Blair, Israel, and the West and this, apparently, was enough to set his eccentric views about democracy, the place of women, and the impermissibility of homosexuality to one side.<br /><br />CAGE - <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cageprisoners" target="_blank">formerly known as Cageprisoners</a> - meanwhile, has sought to position itself as a legitimate member of the human rights establishment. <a href="http://www.cageuk.org/about" target="_blank">On its website</a> the organisation describes itself as:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">An independent advocacy organisation working to empower communities impacted by the War on Terror. The organisation highlights and campaigns against state policies, striving for a world free from oppression and injustice.</blockquote>What it actually does is to agitate for the unconditional release of any and all Islamists held on terrorism charges, irrespective of whether they languish in extra-judicial detention or they have been lawfully convicted by a properly constituted court under due process.<br /><br />On 20 February 2010, for instance, Cageprisoners carried a post on its website [<a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20100222002917/http://www.cageprisoners.com/campaigns.php?id=970" target="_blank">cached here</a>] announcing a demo organised by 'The Women of Hizb ut-Tahrir' to protest the imprisonment of Aafia Siddiqui (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aafia_Siddiqui" target="_blank">also known as 'Lady al-Qaeda'</a>). Siddiqui had been tried before a New York jury and, on 3 February 2010,&nbsp;duly convicted on all seven counts, including two of attempted murder. For this, she naturally blamed Israel.<br /><br />In 2011, the counter-extremism blog <a href="http://hurryupharry.org/2011/02/25/queen-mary-and-terrorism/" target="_blank">Harry's Place reported</a> that Asim Qureshi had given a lecture at Queen Mary University in East London at which he had denigrated secular Palestinians, praised Hamas and the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, endorsed the use of suicide terrorism (euphemised as "martyrdom operations") against Israeli civilians, and advised students of the legal and religious legitimacy of volunteering for jihad in Palestine, Chechnya, and Iraq. CAGE also maintained links with notorious extremists like Abu Qatada and al Qaeda operative Anwar al-Awlaki (at least until the latter found himself on <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-15121879" target="_blank">the receiving end of an American drone</a>.)<br /><br />But none of this prevented CAGE from cultivating relationships with ostensibly respectable NGOs, journalists, activists, MPs, and celebrities who were all mesmerised by the organisation's groovy rhetoric about oppression and injustice and its opposition to rendition, extra-judicial detention, control orders, and Guantanamo Bay. Human rights organisations like Liberty, Amnesty International, and Reprieve have all forged links of various kinds with the group, co-sponsoring campaigns and co-signing letters; Peter Oborne, Clive Stafford-Smith, the Labour MP Sadiq Khan, and Vanessa Redgrave (of course) have spoken at the group's conferences and shared platforms with their activists; and CAGE has been pleased to accept six-figure donations from the Roddick Foundation and the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust. All of this has damaged the reputation of the organisations and individuals concerned in the eyes of those who have been paying attention, whilst - disgracefully - helping to launder the reputation of CAGE in the wider public perception.<br /><br />In 2010, the head of Amnesty International's gender unit Gita Sahgal attempted to warn her organisation of the dangers posed by its links with former Guantanamo detainee and Cageprisoners director Moazzam Begg. She maintained that while it was right that Amnesty should campaign for the release or trial of Begg and others likewise held in extra-judicial detention, they should not be decorating such people with their own moral legitimacy, nor forging links with Islamist organisations of any kind, irrespective of overlapping concerns. In an internal email, Sahgal protested:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">I believe the campaign fundamentally damages Amnesty International's integrity and, more importantly, constitutes a threat to human rights. To be appearing on platforms with Britain's most famous supporter of the Taliban, whom we treat as a human rights defender, is a gross error of judgement.&nbsp;</blockquote>When her objections were brushed aside, Sahgal went public in <a href="http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/news/world_news/article197042.ece">a Sunday Times interview</a>, an act of principle and moral courage for which she was rewarded with a P45 and a tsunami of abuse, perhaps the most <a href="http://www.pickledpolitics.com/archives/8791" target="_blank">egregious example of which</a> came from blogger-turned-Guardian columnist Sunny Hundal:<br /><div><blockquote class="tr_bq">Listen Gita, we get it: you’re angry. No one rallied to your support other than a bunch of discredited neocons who are best known for their mealy-mouthed apologies for torture.<br />Oh and Salman Rushdie, the man offering moral guidance after signing a letter supporting child-rapist Roman Polanski. I suppose not many sane people would be heartened with that kind of support. But Gita bravely kept giving more interviews to Christopher Hitchens so they could together take down Amnesty. Brave stuff.</blockquote>Five years on, Sahgal has every reason to feel vindicated. As CAGE's credibility implodes in the wake of Qureshi's ill-advised paean to Mohammed Emwazi, those previously proud to stand beside its activists are suddenly scrambling to find a way to distance themselves without admitting that they had ever been wrong.<br /><br />In 2013, the Community Security Trust&nbsp;<a href="http://www.thejc.com/news/uk-news/130959/cst-warned-charity-about-cage-links-extremists" target="_blank">warned the JRCT</a>&nbsp;that CAGE were an extremist-linked and anti-Semitic organisation, but their concerns, like Gita Sahgal's, were waved away. However, on 2 March, in the wake of the disastrous Emwazi press conference, the Charity Commission announced that it was launching an investigation into the Roddick Foundation and the JRCT, and on 6 March, the <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/news/charity-commission-statement-charities-funding-cage" target="_blank">Commission announced</a> that&nbsp;"both the Roddick Foundation and the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust have ceased funding CAGE and will not be doing so in future."<br /><br />CAGE have every reason to feel betrayed by this unseemly flight. Like Dilpazia Aslam, they have never been ashamed about who and what they are, and their narrative of victimhood and innocence has been remarkably consistent. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afdeFuJbK3E" target="_blank">Interviewed by Andrew Neil</a> on the BBC's This Week programme, Qureshi was unembarrassed by questions about his associations with Hizb ut-Tahrir ("a non-violent organisation") and his support for jihad ("the right to self-defence"). It is not CAGE that has changed but the political environment.<br /><br />In 2001, the belief that America was somehow to blame for the attacks of September 11 was fairly widespread on the political Left. A generous interpretation of this phenomenon might be that it was - at least in part - an attempt to rationalise an event that was otherwise incomprehensible, and that this appearance of an explanation was nourished by a pre-existing reservoir of hostility to American hegemony and power. Likewise, there was a certain amount of misplaced sympathy for the idea that the Madrid and London atrocities were an inevitable consequence of misguided wars that the Left despised. If anything, this retrospectively reinforced the idea that 9/11 was an understandable - if excessive - blowback caused by American foreign policy (although exactly which aspect of American foreign policy was seldom specified).<br /><br />But as time has worn on, the appetite for this kind of sickly, reprehensible masochism has been diminishing. Bush and Blair are both long gone. The righteous protests against the Iraq war are a receding memory. Yet still the attacks continue. And with every new Islamist atrocity committed on Western soil, fewer people are prepared to accept that this is somehow the fault of the victims.<br /><br />Gazing at the moving scenes of crowds pouring onto the streets in the wake of the Paris attacks, I wondered if we were finally witnessing a perception shift. Since the controversy over the Danish cartoons in 2005/6, a lot more people seem to have concluded that what is being demanded of open societies is unacceptable, and that the punishment being meted out to those who disobey has become intolerable.<br /><br />At the Guardian, a chasm opened up between columnists above the line, who were perversely committed to the idea that fanatical sensibilities were to be respected, and commenters below the line who had wearied of this craven tune. After all, even if cartoonists agreed to desist from depicting Islam's purported prophet, what on earth were Jews supposed to do?<br /><br />And in the background, across the Muslim world, Islamist violence has run totally out of control. When people open their browsers now or watch the news, they see scores of defenceless children being massacred in Pakistani schools. They see the wholesale slaughter of villages by Boko Haram and the summary execution of mall shoppers by al-Shabaab. And they see the pornographic cruelty of the Islamic State: beheadings, crucifixions, mass graves, immolation, slavery, ethnic cleansing. None of this is intelligible as a resistance to American or Zionist imperialism anymore. The sheer arbitrariness of the spiralling carnage - in which cruelty is an end, not a means - inspires only revulsion and horror.<br /><br />CAGE do not seem to have realised that with all this harrowing mood music, Muhammad Emwazi was always going to be a tough sell as a sweet-natured naif, no matter how florid the language marshalled in his defence. Nor is he simply some nameless beard rotting in a cell for something or other he may or may not have&nbsp;done somewhere miles away in the midst of some hated war. Long before Asim Qureshi delivered his pitiful defence, Emwazi's reputation as a ruthlessly malevolent sadist who barks demands and then slaughters his victims like livestock was already firmly-established.<br /><br />Apologetics for terrorism depend upon a reversal of cause and effect. But in seeking to persuade people that Emwazi became a fanatic following interest from the security services rather than vice-versa, CAGE wildly over-reached. Given the available evidence, many understandably concluded that the problem here wasn't a surfeit of MI5 interest but the exact opposite.<br /><br />For too long, much of the liberal commentariat and the widely-respected NGO establishment have allowed a combination of credulity and ideology to blind them to the toxicity of Islamism and those who espouse it, even as the corpses have stacked up before their eyes. And while CAGE looks to be finished, liberal apologia for others like them will not disappear overnight. Just as the controversy over Dilpazia Aslam's employment changed nothing at the Guardian, I suspect that the errors which led Amnesty and others into the arms of CAGE will remain uncorrected once this row blows over.<br /><br />Nonetheless, Gita Sahgal and her supporters can take satisfaction in Sahgal's vindication. The humiliation of CAGE, and the collateral damage inflicted on its enablers, have been worth the wait for their own sake.<br /><br /><b><i>My previous essay about CAGE, Moazzam Begg, and philo-Salafism can be found <a href="http://jacobinism.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/facts-and-context-be-damned.html" target="_blank">here</a>.</i></b><br /><br /></div>Unrepentant Jacobinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09256579083755037018noreply@blogger.com15tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5380090049852721671.post-9712134483896823932015-02-07T16:03:00.000-08:002015-04-29T16:33:32.548-07:00Charlie Hebdo: Free Speech and its Enemies [3]<b><span style="font-size: large;">Part Three: The Unreasonable Man</span></b><br /><b><i><br /></i></b><b><i>This is the final part of what was originally a 3-part essay. Parts One and Two can be read <a href="http://jacobinism.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/charlie-hebdo-free-press-and-its-enemies.html" target="_blank">here</a> and <a href="http://jacobinism.blogspot.com/2015/02/charlie-hebdo-part-two.html" target="_blank">here</a>, respectively.</i></b><br /><br />Caroline Fourest is a feminist, writer, and journalist, and co-founder of the French anti-racist, anti-fundamentalist, and secularist magazine ProChoix. Unlike Will Self, she does not cringe with embarrassment before the imperfections of liberal democracy. And unlike Alan Rusbridger, she can find no reason to indulge Islamists like Tariq Ramadan in the name of open-minded toleration. In 2004 she published a book entitled&nbsp;<i><a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Brother-Tariq-The-Doublespeak-Ramadan/dp/1458779165" target="_blank">Frère Tariq</a>,</i>&nbsp;in which&nbsp;she painstakingly analysed Ramadan's 15 books and his countless essays and speeches and concluded that, in their desperation for an eloquent spokesperson for a modern and moderate Islam, liberals were being hoodwinked by a duplicitous reactionary.<br /><br />Two years later, when Jyllands Posten published its cartoons of Muhammad, she was working as a contributor at Charlie Hebdo. As Danish embassies burned, and Will Self was busy with his eccentric observations about what does and does not constitute legitimate satire, Fourest drafted a short manifesto.<br /><br />Originally entitled&nbsp;<i>Together Against A New Totalitarianism</i>&nbsp;(later translated and re-published as&nbsp;<a href="http://www.thegully.com/essays/world/060403_islam_totalitarian.html" target="_blank"><i>The Manifesto of the 12</i></a>), it first appeared in Charlie Hebdo on 1 May 2006, co-signed by 11 secularists - one signatory for each of the 12 Jyllands Posten cartoons&nbsp;- some of whom were practising Muslims. It began:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">Having overcome fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism, the world now faces a new global totalitarian threat: Islamism. We - writers, journalists, intellectuals - call for resistance to religious totalitarianism and for the promotion of freedom, equal opportunity and secular values for all.</blockquote>Unencumbered by moral relativism, Fourest's lucid analysis derives from a straightforward belief that the ideas of the Enlightenment and the progressive politics they midwifed are worth defending. What was unfolding, her manifesto declared, was to be a bitter struggle for ideas and values in which the excuse-making of apologists would only aid fanaticism at the expense of universalism and liberty:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">[N]othing, not even despair, justifies choosing obscurantism, totalitarianism and hatred. Islamism is a reactionary ideology that kills equality, freedom and secularism wherever it is present. Its victory can only lead to a world of injustice and domination: men over women, fundamentalists over others . . . We defend the universality of the freedom of expression, so that a critical spirit can be exercised in every continent, with regard to each and every abuse and dogma. We appeal to democrats and independent spirits in every country that our century may be one of enlightenment and not obscurantism.</blockquote>Having published Fourest's manifesto, Charlie Hebdo was virtually alone in re-publishing the Jyllands Posten cartoons. Death threats followed, and in November 2011, Charlie Hebdo's offices were completely destroyed by a petrol bomb. A year later its editor, Stéphane Charbonnier, explained his refusal to compromise by remarking "I would rather die on my feet than live on my knees". On 7 January 2015, along with eleven others, he did just that.<br /><br /><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-3mbqcsp-JnQ/VNQSHUgCChI/AAAAAAAAAbI/UztX_VEyMGs/s1600/Couv.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-3mbqcsp-JnQ/VNQSHUgCChI/AAAAAAAAAbI/UztX_VEyMGs/s1600/Couv.png" height="320" width="226" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 12.8000001907349px; text-align: center;"><b>The Post-Massacre Issue</b></td></tr></tbody></table>At this point, the surviving staff could surely have been forgiven for throwing in the towel. Instead they produced a new issue featuring a cover illustration that is striking in its simplicity and humbling in its courage, its humanity, and its generosity: a stricken Muhammad declaring his solidarity with the dead beneath the words "Tout Est Pardonné". All is forgiven.<br /><br />Two days after the massacre, Will Self had informed readers of his Vice article that: "When the demonstrators&nbsp;stood in the Place de la Republique&nbsp;holding placards that read "JE SUIS CHARLIE", they might just as well have held ones reading: "NOUS SOMMES LES TERRORISTES" "<br /><br />Charlie Hebdo's post-massacre cover decisively answered his bitterness. The magazine's response to the massacre of its staff and fellow citizens was as dignified as Will Self's was reprehensible and squalid.&nbsp;<a href="http://tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/188320/the-charlie-cover" target="_blank">Writing in Tablet</a>,&nbsp;Paul Berman described the illustration as "a masterpiece . . . inspiring, moving, slightly mysterious, and entirely beautiful."<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">It is inspiring because, in the face of the ultimate in terrorist pressure, the editors and cartoonists have chosen to go ahead and put the drawing on the cover. The cover of this week’s Charlie Hebdo is the most defiant newspaper cover in the history of journalism—a bolder cover even than the cover of the 1898 Paris newspaper that presented Zola’s article,&nbsp;<i>J’Accuse&nbsp;</i>. . . Zola knew that, by publishing his accusation against the enemies of Capt. Dreyfus, he ran a danger of persecution, arrest, and imprisonment, but probably not murder. The editors, staff, cartoonists, printers, truck-drivers, and kiosk vendors of Charlie Hebdo are in danger of murder. And they are unfazed.</blockquote>Courage is not the absence of fear, but its conquest. The surviving staff of Charlie Hebdo had seen the power of the weak explode into their own offices and had decided that no, their&nbsp;<i>raison d'être</i>&nbsp;was not for negotiation. Richard Malka, the magazine's lawyer&nbsp;<a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/11340358/Charlie-Hebdos-Wednesday-edition-to-include-Prophet-Mohammed-cartoons.html" target="_blank">was blunt</a>:&nbsp;"We will not give in, otherwise all this won't have meant anything."<br /><br />In&nbsp;<a href="http://edition.cnn.com/videos/tv/2015/01/18/former-charlie-hebdo-writer-speaks-out.cnn" target="_blank">an interview with CNN</a>, Fourest was similarly matter-of-fact. "After what happened - after this slaughter - it was really impossible for my colleagues and friends to not do a cover about what happened and it could only be a cover about, of course, Muhammad." Pressed by the (somewhat reluctant) anchor to accept responsibility for the subsequent violence that had erupted in Kurachi, where protestors burned French flags, and in Niger, where mobs burned churches and desecrated Bibles, Fourest was unequivocal: "But you understand that, when you put it that way, you are blaming, not the people who are killing because of the cartoons, but you are blaming the cartoonists. This is cowardice and it is exactly what the terrorists want."<br /><br />When the French-Algerian academic and Guardian commentator Nabila Ramdani&nbsp;<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuQZwZhFJaw" target="_blank">appeared on This Week</a>&nbsp;to discuss the new cover, she likewise accused Charlie Hebdo of "inciting violence" and held the staff explicitly responsible for the violent protests that had erupted in the Pakistan and Africa. Michael Portillo responded by saying he was outraged. Were he to have then physically assaulted Ramdani in a fit of offended fury, I wonder if she would have been prepared to accept moral responsibility for her own injuries. If not, then she should be made to explain her apparent refusal to consider African and Pakistani Muslims as moral actors.<br /><br />Ramdani had&nbsp;<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jan/13/charlie-hebdo-cover-right-image-prophet-muhammad-right" target="_blank">already written</a>&nbsp;that the cover "symbolises egalitarian bigotry" (whatever that might be). Not to be outdone, her Guardian colleague Joseph Harker, the paper's assistant comment editor no less, had ruled in the same item that, by depicting Muhammad, Charlie Hebdo was "deliberately offending the vast majority of Muslims around the world . . . adding insult to injury . . . lashing out at potentially 1.6 billion people . . . [and most bizarrely of all] spreading guilt by association".<br /><br />Nevertheless, even the Guardian&nbsp;<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/jan/13/charlie-hebdo-cover-magazine-prophet-muhammad" target="_blank">finally relented</a>&nbsp;and reproduced a two-inch high image of the cover on their website, albeit with a warning in bold type alerting readers to an appalling affront to decency that awaited them as they scrolled down. This placed them a rung or two above Murdoch's Sky News,&nbsp;<a href="http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/nick-cohen/2015/01/hebdo-murdoch-tv-smears-moderate-muslims-while-bowing-to-the-demands-of-murderers/" target="_blank">which cut away from Caroline Fourest</a>&nbsp;and apologised to its viewers, the moment Fourest attempted to display the magazine's new cover illustration.<br /><br /><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-YAEopD4XsyM/VNQ87Ae05eI/AAAAAAAAAbo/JFeD02h3Dps/s1600/AVT_Caroline-Fourest_4637.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-YAEopD4XsyM/VNQ87Ae05eI/AAAAAAAAAbo/JFeD02h3Dps/s1600/AVT_Caroline-Fourest_4637.jpeg" height="320" width="222" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 12.8000001907349px; text-align: center;"><b>Caroline Fourest</b></td></tr></tbody></table>It is tempting to argue that Charlie Hebdo's courage and defiance puts an end to all excuse-making, at least from those like Stephen Pollard who need no persuading as to the merits of the re-publication arguments. Would that it were so. The dilemma with which sympathetic editors are faced remains unaltered. We do not yet know what price will be exacted by religious fanatics for Charlie Hebdo's insubordination. Days after the massacre in Paris, a German tabloid which had re-printed Charlie Hebdo's cartoons on its front page had already been firebombed. While it is important to emphasise that editors re-publishing cartoons of Muhammad - or, better still, commissioning originals - bear no moral responsibility whatever for any violence visited upon them as a result, that does not alter the fact that printing such images makes violent reprisal more likely.<br /><br />Western democracies and those journalists who still understand the need to defend basic liberties are confronted with an impossible, disgraceful choice. Submission to Islamist demands will only inflame an appetite for further concessions. But to resist is to court lethal danger. The staff of Charlie Hebdo have gone back out on a limb. No-one asked them to - they did so on a point of principle they were determined to uphold, and they did so of their own volition. But they are out there on behalf of us all, exposed once more.<br /><ol></ol>I cannot bring myself to describe the reluctance of those who have not followed Charlie Hebdo's example as prudent. To do so would be to reduce what the staff there have done to an act of foolishness. It is too noble for that. But nor is it fair to accuse someone like Pollard of cowardice; only Charlie Hebdo's own staff have earned the moral authority to do that. From anyone else, it is not an approach conducive to persuasion. Ordinary people are bound to be frightened and to feel a responsibility to the well-being of their colleagues. What Charlie Hebdo's staff have done marks them as extraordinary people. As Robert Shrimsley&nbsp;<a href="http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/6ddff0c2-95c4-11e4-a390-00144feabdc0.html#axzz3QkDSJ8EI" target="_blank">remarked in the Financial Times</a>&nbsp;before Charlie Hebdo's new cover appeared:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">Charlie Hebdo’s leaders were much, much braver than most of us; maddeningly, preposterously and — in the light of their barbarous end — recklessly brave. The kind of impossibly courageous people who actually change the world. As George Bernard Shaw noted, the “reasonable man adapts himself to the world while the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself”, and therefore “all progress depends upon the unreasonable man”. Charlie Hebdo was the unreasonable man. It joined the battle that has largely been left to the police and security services.</blockquote>Nonetheless, it surely remains beyond dispute that the more brazen the defiance of fundamentalist demands, the more frequent, and the more widespread, the less risk there is for all involved. While it is relatively straightforward to pick off isolated publications who dare to defy them, terrorists cannot murder the entire Western press. The failure to stand alongside Jyllands Posten made it more not less likely that vengeance would be the reward for the few that did.<br /><br />But to defend something, it is necessary to understand its value and to refuse to become discouraged by resistance. Having seen his pleas for solidarity roundly ignored, Timothy Garton-Ash conceded defeat. In&nbsp;<a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2015/feb/19/defying-assassins-veto/" target="_blank">an essay</a>&nbsp;for the New York Review of Books he concluded that getting journalists to act in concert is as futile as herding cats and he made a confused recommendation (in which I don't think he really even believes) involving linking to controversial material hosted on an anonymous website in Iceland. Defeatism like this gets us nowhere.<br /><br />It also misses some encouraging signs. It is easy to be cynical about the huge protests, the hashtag activism, the opportunistic gestures of solidarity by world leaders, and so on. But Jyllands Posten benefitted from none of these things. Meanwhile, the number of publications and networks prepared to re-print and broadcast drawings of Muhammad is slowly increasing, and the number of rioters attending furious demonstrations across the Muslim world is diminishing.<br /><br />There is nothing to be done but to keep repeating that no compromise should be considered. The freedom to criticise ideas in open societies must be universal and indivisible. As&nbsp;<a href="http://jacobinism.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/isolating-dissent.html" target="_blank">the 'Jesus and Mo' controversy</a>&nbsp;last year reminded us, it is not just the liberty of white Westerners that suffers from a craven observance of Islamist blasphemy codes. Liberal, secular, and reformist Muslims, not to mention those wishing to discard Islam altogether, are their first and worst victims. They deserve our solidarity as much as courageous free-thinkers like Stéphane Charbonnier, Caroline Fourest and all of those at Charlie Hebdo, whenever and wherever they choose to take a stand on the matter.<br /><br />As Fourest observed during her CNN interview, "If we do not show the drawings that the fanatics do not want to see, we are killing ourselves. We are killing our rules of democracy if we cannot show a simple drawing due to fear . . . we cannot live under Pakistani law. We are in France. We are a satirical newspaper respecting French law, and French law is very clear: blasphemy is a right."Unrepentant Jacobinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09256579083755037018noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5380090049852721671.post-1121984364716623032015-02-06T15:49:00.000-08:002015-04-29T16:31:57.656-07:00Charlie Hebdo: Free Speech and its Enemies [2]<b><span style="font-size: large;">Part Two: Re-Publish or Be Damned</span></b><br /><b><i><br /></i></b><b><i>This is the second part of what was originally a three-part essay. Part One can be found <a href="http://jacobinism.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/charlie-hebdo-free-press-and-its-enemies.html" target="_blank">here</a>.</i></b><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><blockquote class="tr_bq" style="text-align: right;"><div style="text-align: left;">I think next week there should be a European media week of solidarity. Every major newspaper, broadcaster and platform should re-publish a selection of the title covers of Charlie Hebdo - as Slate magazine has already done - carefully explaining why we're doing this: We wouldn't usually do this, but we are doing it show that violent intimidation does not pay. That the assassins' veto will not prevail. I think that without that solidarity, fear will have won and the assassins' veto will have won.&nbsp;</div></blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq" style="text-align: right;"><i>~ Timothy Garton-Ash</i></blockquote><div>Islamism's attack on democracy and liberalism operates in two ways. The first is to menace and terrorise. The second - more insidious and dangerous - is to undermine from within. The latter serves to compromise our ability to resist the former. A combination of the two explains why, in the UK - unlike in France and Germany - very few papers were prepared to re-publish Charlie Hebdo's back-catalogue of Muhammad cartoons.<br /><br />But it is important, I think, to distinguish between those who resisted the urgings of Garton-Ash,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.indexoncensorship.org/2015/01/stand-free-speech-publish-charlie-hebdos-cartoons/" target="_blank">Index on Censorship</a>, and&nbsp;<a href="https://www.change.org/p/editors-and-journalists-around-the-world-publish-charlie-hebdo-s-mohammed-cartoons-in-solidarity-with-the-victims-of-censorship-and-violence" target="_blank">others</a>&nbsp;because they were afraid, from those who have been persuaded - violence or no violence - to see things from the fanatics' point of view.<br /><br />In a series of tweets posted in the immediate aftermath of the murders [<a href="https://twitter.com/stephenpollard/status/552815711903830016" target="_blank">here</a>,&nbsp;<a href="https://twitter.com/stephenpollard/status/552815829881221120" target="_blank">here</a>,&nbsp;<a href="https://twitter.com/stephenpollard/status/552816300742160384" target="_blank">here</a>,&nbsp;<a href="https://twitter.com/stephenpollard/status/552816629726580736" target="_blank">here</a>,&nbsp;<a href="https://twitter.com/stephenpollard/status/552818595634610179" target="_blank">here</a>,&nbsp;<a href="https://twitter.com/stephenpollard/status/552818930382024704" target="_blank">here</a>,&nbsp;and&nbsp;<a href="https://twitter.com/stephenpollard/status/552821726296682496" target="_blank">here</a>], Stephen Pollard, the editor of the Jewish Chronicle, was admirably frank about his hesitancy:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">Easy to attack papers for not showing cartoons. But here's my editor's dilemma. Every principle I hold tells me to print them. But what right do I have to risk the lives of my staff to make a point? Because this isn't a mere debate about principles. As today showed, this is about lives. These people are butchers.&nbsp;</blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">No, Charlie Hebdo didn't provoke anyone. It published cartoons.&nbsp;</blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">Get real, folks. A Jewish newspaper like mine that published such cartoons would be at the front of the queue for Islamists to murder. None of my points mean we shouldn't or wouldn't publish. I'm simply explaining it's a dilemma and not a simple issue of principle.&nbsp;</blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">Thing is, every argument people are making to me about why we must print cartoons is not just valid but vital. But so are those not to print.</blockquote>Timothy Garton-Ash's impassioned plea was made at&nbsp;<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znV5tlEtb6U" target="_blank">a&nbsp;<i>Guardian</i>-sponsored event</a>&nbsp;held the evening after the Paris massacre. The event's moderator, the Guardian's Giles Fraser, invited his editor, Alan Rusbridger to respond. Compare his reasoning with that of Pollard:<br /><div><blockquote class="tr_bq">Well, we talked about this a lot this morning because there was a kind of twitter feeding-frenzy last night I think to provoke people to print more and more offensive material. We did print 4 or 5 of the images from Charlie Hebdo, last night and this morning and that wasn't enough for some people. Some people were tweeting me saying, "Yes, but you haven't chosen the really offensive one" and then they wanted to choose a still more offensive one. And there are some very offensive ones that the Guardian would never in the normal run of events publish.&nbsp;</blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">It was a replaying of the debate over the Danish cartoons. I didn't want to republish some of the Danish cartoons because the Guardian is the Guardian and the Danish newspaper [Jyllands Posten] is the Danish newspaper and Charlie Hebdo is [Charlie Hebdo]. We completely defend Charlie Hebdo's ethos and values and the right to offend in the way that they did. But it felt to me as though there was a sort of tokenism in demanding that the Guardian should change, and I take [panelist] Sunny [Hundal]'s point here, and I think the thing that is important is that we don't change as a result.&nbsp;</blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">If they want us to change, and they want us to be more inflammatory, and to contribute to the hardening of attitudes in society, then I think one of the things the Guardian could do is&nbsp;<i>not</i>&nbsp;change, and that it should continue to apply its normal editorial values about what it should publish. And that we will carry on publishing [panelists and Guardian cartoonists] Steve [Bell] and Martin [Rowson]. And that was the decision we reached collectively as a paper this morning.</blockquote><div>The aphorism often misattributed to Voltaire holds that "I disagree with what you say, but I defend to the death your right to say it." Usually these noble words are employed in&nbsp;<i>defence</i>&nbsp;of free speech. But in the wake of the Paris atrocities, they were most often heard falling from the lips of those who wished to put as much distance between themselves and Charlie Hebdo as possible, without forfeiting their right to be considered defenders of liberty.<br /><br />What Rusbridger did not make clear was that the offensive images to which he referred were Charlie Hebdo's representations of Muhammad, and that it was a refusal to publish these pictures in particular that Rusbridger and his staff felt constituted a defence of their paper's values. He went on to point out that re-publication was by no means the only way of expressing solidarity, and&nbsp;that the Guardian Media Group&nbsp;<a href="https://twitter.com/arusbridger/status/553298181568884737" target="_blank">had contributed £100,000</a>&nbsp;to Charlie Hebdo to help ensure that it was able to continue publication.<br /><br /><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-VbCPueGH1Dc/VNQ8lA02zEI/AAAAAAAAAbg/_iOFBPztvD4/s1600/alan%2Brusbridger.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-VbCPueGH1Dc/VNQ8lA02zEI/AAAAAAAAAbg/_iOFBPztvD4/s1600/alan%2Brusbridger.jpg" height="320" width="250" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 12.8000001907349px; text-align: center;"><b>Alan Rusbridger</b></td></tr></tbody></table>This was undeniably an act of meaningful and generous solidarity and one which would have a practical bearing on the magazine's ability to survive. It is also a change of subject. The images of Muhammad were not incidental to the deaths of nine journalists but the explicit reason given for their execution. The right to draw and print such pictures in a free society is precisely what is - or what ought to be - at issue.<br /><br />It is clear now that all those - myself included - demanding the widespread re-publication of Charlie Hebdo's cartoons were making a tactical error. It was too prescriptive a demand and it allowed the discussion to get diverted away from the central issue of the taboo which Charlie Hebdo had repeatedly violated and into a separate - and frankly irrelevant - debate about whether the&nbsp;<i>manner</i>&nbsp;in which the taboo had been violated was something others ought to endorse.<br /><br />If Charlie Hebdo's representations of Muhammad were not to Rusbridger's taste, but he nevertheless felt that the right to depict him was one worth defending, he could have simply commissioned his own. But Rusbridger gives every impression of agreeing with the assassins that satire of Islam's most revered figure is something we would all be better off without. He is consequently far more preoccupied by the need to resist those who would pressure him into re-publishing such images than he is by the threat to free expression posed by masked fascists.<br /><br />Alan Rusbridger is not frightened. His reasoning doesn't put him in a position where he needs to be, which is probably why he wasted not one syllable on considerations of security or safety. But in 2012 his paper had&nbsp;<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2012/sep/28/andres-serrano-piss-christ-new-york" target="_blank">illustrated an article</a>&nbsp;about Andres Serrano's&nbsp;<i>Piss Christ&nbsp;</i>with a large and prominent photograph of the blasphemous exhibit. This artwork is far more objectionable than anything Charlie Hebdo ever produced, and yet it was - rightly - reproduced with nary a thought for the religious sensitivities of devout Christians.&nbsp;So, contrary to Rusbridger's protestations, the Guardian has&nbsp;<i>already</i>&nbsp;changed - it has made an exception for Islam, and it is an exception Rusbridger is determined to protect even as people are dying for disagreeing.</div><div><br />This should not come as a surprise to anyone who has been paying attention to the vast majority of the opinion and commentary that has appeared in the Guardian's pages since 9/11. In the debates around terrorism and multiculturalism, the paper has been a consistently wretched defender of universalism and secularism, and a reliable platform for Islamists and their miserable apologists to advance a narrative of&nbsp;Muslim victimhood that excoriates Israel and insists on the total culpability of the West.&nbsp;</div><div><br />Two days later, true to its editor's promise that it would not compromise on this line, the Swiss Ikwanist Tariq Ramadan appeared in the Guardian&nbsp;<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jan/09/paris-hijackers-hijacked-islam-no-war-between-islam-west" target="_blank">to lecture us as follows</a>:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">To have a sense of humour is fine, but to target an already stigmatised people in France is not really showing much courage . . . media organisations [are] intent on publishing the most offensive Charlie Hebdo cartoons, claiming that it would strike a blow for free speech. I support free speech, but I would urge them to desist, for what they plan to do is not courageous and will do nothing to afford people dignity. It will be another example of targeting all Muslims.</blockquote></div><div>In the fraught quarrel over re-publication, any distinction that has put Stephen Pollard on the same side of the argument as Tariq Ramadan has been false. It is for precisely this reason that those who want to publish pictures of Muhammad but are afraid to do so must speak up, so that the proper distinctions may be made with greater clarity. Pollard understands the value of what Charlie Hebdo have been doing. Alan Rusbridger, hostage to a neurotic tolerance of even the most reactionary Islamic beliefs, does not.<br /><br />Pollard may be afraid, but his reasoning is not the enemy of press freedom. The termites which have hollowed out the Guardian and Will Self's cranium have not yet been allowed to inflict anything like the same damage on the Jewish Chronicle.<br /><br /><b><i>The concluding part of this essay can be found <a href="http://jacobinism.blogspot.com/2015/02/charlie-hebdo-part-three.html" target="_blank">here</a>.</i></b></div></div></div>Unrepentant Jacobinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09256579083755037018noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5380090049852721671.post-86641763852825738712015-02-05T23:04:00.001-08:002015-04-29T16:32:25.337-07:00Charlie Hebdo: Free Speech and its Enemies<span style="font-size: large;"><b>Part One: All Are Guilty (or Self-Flagellation)</b></span><br /><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-By0_C9ZhozA/VNP-y7DoEpI/AAAAAAAAAa4/tN2fR4fGQeg/s1600/Untitled-1.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-By0_C9ZhozA/VNP-y7DoEpI/AAAAAAAAAa4/tN2fR4fGQeg/s1600/Untitled-1.png" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 12.8000001907349px;"><b><i>LEFT: "100 LASHES IF YOU DON'T DIE LAUGHING"; RIGHT: "IT'S HARD TO BE LOVED BY IDIOTS"</i></b></td></tr></tbody></table></td></tr></tbody></table>One of the most pernicious arguments advanced to persuade us that the murdered staff of Charlie Hebdo were unworthy martyrs to free expression - or were even deserving of much in the way of sympathy - has been the notion that they were the victimisers of a persecuted minority:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">But the question needs to be asked: were the cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo really satirists, if by satire is meant the deployment of humour, ridicule, sarcasm and irony in order to achieve moral reform? Well, when the issue came up of the Danish cartoons I observed that the test I apply to something to see whether it truly is satire derives from HL Mencken's definition of good journalism: it should "afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted". The trouble with a lot of so-called "satire" directed against religiously-motivated extremists is that it's not clear who it's afflicting, or who it's comforting.&nbsp;</blockquote>My objections to this argument, formulated here by the author Will Self in <a href="http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/will-self-charlie-hebdo-attack-the-west-satire-france-terror-105" target="_blank">an article</a> for Vice magazine, are great and numerous. For a start, I would have thought it self-evident than anyone who thinks it acceptable to answer cartoons by murdering cartoonists is in pressing need of moral reform, thereby invalidating Self's objection by his own lights.<br /><br />Furthermore, the job of the satirist is to scorn hypocrisy, double-standards, fallacious reasoning, and pomposity wherever it occurs and without political prejudice. That Self would prefer it if satire were a kind of comedy-activism, preferably mocking only those deserving of his own contempt, is beside the point. H. L. Mencken is of no use to Self here since (a) the quotation he cites is <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finley_Peter_Dunne#Legacy" target="_blank">misattributed</a>&nbsp;and originally intended to <i>satirise</i>&nbsp;journalistic moral vanity not endorse it, (b) journalism is not the same as satire, and (c) in any case, journalism ought to concern itself with the pursuit of truth, not the affliction of comfort.<br /><br />But most important of all, in the service of an argument designed to transform victimisers into victims and vice versa, Self misrepresents the motives of the assassins. It was not the mockery of religious extremists to which they objected, but the disrespect shown to a religious figure they venerated. "We have avenged the prophet!" they cried as they fled the scene of a bloodbath they had committed in his name.<br /><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Z8tvuoAo0gA/VNQ8TRwpAoI/AAAAAAAAAbY/pv_X3uZCXfc/s1600/will_self_600.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Z8tvuoAo0gA/VNQ8TRwpAoI/AAAAAAAAAbY/pv_X3uZCXfc/s1600/will_self_600.jpg" height="320" width="251" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b>Will Self</b></td></tr></tbody></table><br />Muhammad, Islam's purported seer, claimed to be the vessel of the final and perfect word of god, and he is consequently considered to be a figure of considerable power and authority&nbsp;by Islam's ~1.5 billion Muslims. (He has also been dead for nearly 1400 years, which is about as comfortable as it is possible to get.)<br /><br />Were Islam a quietist faith, whose adherents wanted nothing more than to be able to retreat from the fallen world, Self's argument that its absurdities are the business of no-one but its adherents might be more persuasive. But Islam is proselytising faith, and in its radical political form - also known as Islamism - it constitutes an aggressive ideology which is expansionist, totalitarian, and revolutionary in character, as well as being both triumphalist and (paradoxically) self-pitying.<br /><br />Saïd and Chérif Kouachi, the assassins of Charlie Hebdo's journalists, are said to have been the cadres of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, and as such would have held extremely definite and retrogressive views about the ways in which, not just journalists, but also women, gays, and non-believers of all stripes are required to behave, and all of which derive from a literalist interpretation of Muhammad's own ostensibly inerrant utterances.<br /><br />In the Shi'ite theocracy of Iran, the Sunni monarchies of the Gulf, and the nascent Caliphate in Iraq and Syria, radical Islam enjoys the privilege of State power and its cruelty and retrogressive effects on individual rights and liberty are manifest. But in the West's liberal democracies, radical Islam is (mostly) the province of immigrant minorities from North Africa and the Asian sub-continent. An analysis that goes no further than identifying the underdog will spare its ideology scrutiny and ridicule, and insist that it be treated with the deferential respect its adherents demand. Even, apparently, as religious proscriptions are enforced at the point of a blazing kalashnikov.<br /><br />Those for whom power imbalance is the only prism through which to understand the moral calculus in a given conflict make two mistakes. The first is to place scant significance on what either side is actually fighting for - if one's person's terrorist really is another's freedom-fighter then it makes no difference whether democrats are fighting to overthrow totalitarian State or totalitarians are fighting to destroy a democratic one. The second mistake is a failure to appreciate the coercive power of the weak: the use of arbitrary violence to intimidate, destabilise, and terrify.<br /><br />To Self such objections appear to be of negligible importance, and he scorns the assistance Charlie Hebdo accepted from the French government in the aftermath of the violent catastrophe visited upon them, as if this tarnishes a claim to ideological purity to which he has already made it clear the magazine is not entitled:&nbsp;"[S]o, now the satirists have been co-opted by the state, precisely the institution you might've thought they should never cease from attacking."<br /><br />He chides the journalists of Charlie Hebdo for their lack of responsibility, secure as he is in the knowledge that his own sensitivity to the plight of the weak means he will never have to answer to their vengeful hatreds. This strikes me as not just conceited, but also foolish. It is not beyond the realms of possibility that some capricious jihadi might take it upon themselves to demand the suppression of a Will Self novel because it violates this or that medieval edict, and it is not hard to imagine the high dudgeon that would immediately result.<br /><br />And let it not be overlooked that four Jews were also murdered by the Kouachi brothers' co-conspirator for no other reason than that they happened to be Jews; a reminder that Islamism's murderous rage is by no means confined to those who denigrate the faith. In 2006, Self publicly renounced his Jewish heritage - an ostentatious display of disgust occasioned by some Israeli policy or other that failed to meet with his approval. I'm dubious as to whether this will inoculate him against Islamist anti-Semitism, should he ever find himself at its mercy.<br /><br />Self is a man whose languid verbosity tends to be taken for wisdom by the unwary. It would be silly to deny the man's talents as writer, but they prop up childish political instincts. His tutorial on the limits of free speech is followed by the news that he won't be conscripted into a defence of "the Enlightenment project". His objection is of the "who-are-the-real-monsters-anyway" variety.<br /><br />The reasons that a revolution built upon the Declaration of the Rights of Man spiralled into the gory despotic excesses of the Red Terror are complex and fascinating, but for Self they illuminate nothing more than the unfitness of the Enlightenment's inheritors and "boosters" to pass judgement on anyone but themselves. Like the religious fanatics they denounce, the West's fundamentalists of reason are in pursuit of a chimeric utopia&nbsp;"that if it's perfected it will render the entire population supremely free and entirely good."<br /><br />No source is provided for this ventriloquised hyperbole because, as far as I'm aware, none exists within the realm of sane commentary. Not content to have damned the Enlightenment's messy inception, Self proceeds to deride its progressive legacy:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">[S]uch rarefied progress is precisely what is mocked, not only by the murdering of Parisian journalists, but by the drone strikes in Syria, Iraq and Waziristan, which are also murders conducted for religio-political ends. It is mocked as well by the clamouring that follows every terrorist outrage for the suspension of precisely those aspects of the law that exist to restrain our worst impulses; in particular the worst impulses of our rulers: namely, due process of law, fair trials, habeas corpus and freedom from state-mandated torture and extra-judicial killing.</blockquote>Self opens his article by announcing he wishes to be clear, before demonstrating a thoroughgoing contempt for moral clarity. He describes the premeditated murder of journalists for perceived lapses in taste and propriety as "evil", but with his casual ruminations on responsibility and the nature of satire, he floats the notion - without having the courage to actually defend it - that the murdered journalists and cartoonists were partly culpable in their own deaths.<br /><br />And he is at pains to remind us that, while we share the Kouachis' capacity for evil, in our moral complacency we may have exceeded it. Terrorists pursue their delusory utopia at our expense using automatic weapons, while we pursue ours at theirs using drone warfare. In Self's mind, Islamist barbarism convicts us all, its chauvinism and cruelty simply reflects our own. All are guilty, so none are guilty; an exoneration of terrorism by default.<br /><br />Not only does such lamentable moral equivalence fail to distinguish between the firefighter and the fire but, at a time when much of the Middle East, North Africa, and Pakistan are being torn to pieces by religious fanaticism, are the civilisational benefits of universalism, rationalism, and self-criticism really so difficult to discern?<br /><br />It would be nice if beneath all this contempt there lay some sort of coherent moral argument. Alas, all I can find is the perverse vanity of radical self-disgust. For if the pitiless Deobandi fanatics of the TTP wish to subjugate Pakistan's Swat valley, or if the demonic Takfiri lunatics of the Islamic State wish to enslave Yazidis, crucify Christians, and massacre Kurds, then what right have we to object, still less assist those resisting such violence, when we are burdened with the legacy of Robespierre, Danton, and Saint-Just?<br /><br /><span style="text-align: right;">As Christopher Hitchens remarked when he found himself confronted by an argument of comparable masochism at the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=unWi8AhYVU0#t=4212" target="_blank">2007&nbsp;</a></span><span style="text-align: right;"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=unWi8AhYVU0#t=4212" target="_blank">Freedom from Religion Foundation</a>:</span><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq" style="text-align: right;"><div style="text-align: left;">Well, there you have it ladies and gentlemen. You see how far the termites have spread and how long and well they have dined. When someone can get up and say that in a meeting of unbelievers - that the problem is Western civilisation not the Islamic threat to it - that's how far the termites have got.</div></blockquote><b><i>This is the first part of what was originally a three-part essay. Part two can be read <a href="http://jacobinism.blogspot.com/2015/02/charlie-hebdo-part-two.html" target="_blank">here</a>, and the concluding part can be read <a href="http://jacobinism.blogspot.com/2015/02/charlie-hebdo-part-three.html" target="_blank">here</a>.</i></b>Unrepentant Jacobinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09256579083755037018noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5380090049852721671.post-38915719318320609962014-12-16T23:22:00.002-08:002015-04-05T21:48:07.078-07:00Instrumentalising Suffering<b><span style="font-size: large;">On 'Rape Culture' &amp; the Denigration of Progress</span></b><br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-G8xZ0XEj4tU/VI8Xte0ozXI/AAAAAAAAAZc/hv7NWD7Er5g/s1600/UVA001.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-G8xZ0XEj4tU/VI8Xte0ozXI/AAAAAAAAAZc/hv7NWD7Er5g/s1600/UVA001.jpeg" /></a></div><blockquote class="tr_bq" style="text-align: right;"><div style="text-align: left;">"Rape culture" is a very useful way to describe the idea that rapists are given a social license to operate by people who make excuses for sexual predators and blame the victims for their own rapes.</div>&nbsp;<i>- Amanda Marcotte, Feminist Blogger</i></blockquote><div>Marcotte is one of a number of prominent feminists vehemently arguing that America - and the West in general - is presently in the grip of an epidemic of sexual violence, normalised and institutionalised by what they call 'rape culture'. Such arguments have gained considerable traction in progressive discussion, but they have not done so without meeting resistance from the libertarian Right, and from dissenting voices within feminist circles and the broader Left.<br /><br />Disputes over whether use of such a sweeping term is justified by actual incidences of rape and sexual assault have focussed on fiercely-contested statistics derived from wildly divergent empirical studies (more of which in a moment), and the murky grey areas regarding what does or does not constitute meaningful consent.<br /><div><br /></div><div>But when Rolling Stone published contributing editor&nbsp;Sabrina Rubin Erdely's essay "A Rape On Campus" in late November [since deleted, but <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20150404090041/http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/features/a-rape-on-campus-20141119" target="_blank">cached here</a>], it ground all debate to a halt. Front-and-centre of Erdely's sensational article was a story of male sexual sadism, institutional indifference, and innocence defiled, so stark in its moral simplicity, and so devastating in its implications, that it appeared to bulldoze all nuance in its path.<br /><br /></div><div>In the autumn of 2012, a beautiful and guileless young&nbsp;University of Virginia (UVA)&nbsp;freshman named 'Jackie' was invited to a party at an elite&nbsp;fraternity house by a 3rd year student with whom she worked as a lifeguard. Jackie, we were told, was a "chatty, straight-A achiever from a rural Virginia town . . . initially intimidated by UVA's aura of preppy success". She had dressed herself in "a tasteful red dress with a high neckline" and "she wasn't a drinker":<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">"I remember looking at the mirror and putting on mascara and being like, 'I feel really pretty,' " Jackie recalls. "I didn't know it would be the last time I wouldn't see an empty shell of a person."</blockquote>Upon arrival at the party, Jackie's naive faith in the goodwill of men allowed her to be lured by her date into a darkened room on the second floor of the fraternity house. Once inside, she was grabbed by unseen hands and thrown through a coffee table. Pinned down on the shards of broken glass and pacified with a blow to the face, she told Erdely that she was then raped by seven men and vaginally assaulted with a beer bottle as jeers and catcalls rang in her ears. Jackie claimed this horrifying ordeal lasted an agonising three hours.<br /><br /></div><div>But, nauseating though the specifics of Jackie's gang-rape were, it was from the implications of her subsequent treatment at the hands of callous friends and colleagues and an indifferent campus administration that the article drew its full impact. As the subheading forewarned, it was when Jackie tried to hold those responsible for her ordeal accountable that "a whole new kind of abuse began".<br /><br class="Apple-interchange-newline" />Abandoned by her tormentors, Jackie fled the fraternity house past partygoers - not one of whom expressed any concern for her well-being - and, stumbling into the street, she telephoned three friends, begging for help. But when they arrived they displayed a grotesque lack of concern for her distress, instead professing themselves preoccupied by how their involvement might affect their social standing at the college. The counselling and advice she subsequently received from university admin and support groups likewise proved grossly inadequate.<br /><br />Erdely's article purported to expose, not just a singularly terrible crime, but also the rotten culture which allowed such acts of sadism to be committed with impunity by the privileged against the vulnerable. The curtain had been pulled back on the hidden squalor of American rape culture, and Erdely was inviting her audience to appraise a fraudulent civilisation unmasked, and daring them to turn away.<br /><br />Knowing what we know now, it is hard to believe that this narrative - which owes more to the lurid exploitation films of the 1970s than to anything approaching the reality of contemporary American college life - was ever considered remotely credible. That it took nearly a fortnight for serious cracks to appear in Erdely's story, while uncritical outrage swept through social media like a forest fire, suggests that America is in the grip - not of a culture of rape glorification and apologetics - but, rather, a kind of moral panic. <br /><br />But questions were inevitably raised - tentatively at first, and then with greater insistence - about the extraordinarily callous behaviour of the story's supporting cast. Was such behaviour possible? Well, theoretically, yes. Was it plausible? No, not really. Not unless one is prepared to accept, <i>a priori</i>, a view of humanity so jaundiced and unforgivingly misanthropic that it can only be described as nihilism. Erdely's feminist narrative, marbled with a crude anti-elitist populism, presupposed that the civilising influences of Enlightenment thought, progressive politics, and feminist activism had succeeded only in constructing a veneer of privilege-serving hypocrisy, beneath which lay a society as pitiless and cruel as that of the world's most backward theocracies and failed States.<br /><br />What has been most disturbing and fascinating about the unravelling of Rolling Stone's story is the vehemence with which Jackie's ostensible defenders have clung to Erdely's apocalyptic version of reality and its politics of despair. As the evidence stacked up that Jackie had almost certainly not been subjected to a three-hour ordeal of torture, it became apparent that there were many who preferred and, indeed, desperately <i>wanted</i> to believe that she had. Without even realising what they were doing, those earnestly presuming to speak on Jackie's behalf were systematically depersonalising her and until her name was little more than an ideological cudgel.<br /><br />When <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/author-of-rolling-stone-story-on-alleged-u-va-rape-didnt-talk-to-accused-perpetrators/2014/12/01/e4c19408-7999-11e4-84d4-7c896b90abdc_story.html" target="_blank">it transpired</a> that Erdely had not approached the accused for comment, and was unwilling to confirm whether or not she even knew their identities, legitimate doubts about the <i>prima facie</i> plausibility of her narrative gave way to equally legitimate questions about the rigour of her reporting.<br /><br />Rolling Stone published Erdely's story on November 19. It was not until December 1, with gaps in Erdely's story multiplying, that <a href="http://reason.com/blog/2014/12/01/is-the-uva-rape-story-a-gigantic-hoax" target="_blank">Robbie Soave at Reason</a>&nbsp;found the courage to print the word "hoax" for the first time, albeit qualified with a question mark. At the New Republic, Judith Schulevitz cautiously <a href="http://www.newrepublic.com/article/120450/sabrina-rubin-erdelys-uva-gang-rape-reporting-raises-questions" target="_blank">echoed Soave's doubts</a> and wondered whether Erdely and Rolling Stone had not fallen victim to confirmation bias. <a href="http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-goldberg-uva-rape-rolling-stone-20141202-column.html" target="_blank">In the LA Times</a>, Jonah Goldberg implied the same, pointedly remarking that Erdely had disapprovingly referred to UVA as a college lacking a&nbsp;"radical feminist culture seeking to upend the patriarchy".<br /><br />In a sign that the disinterested search for truth was already in direct conflict with radical feminist dogma, opinions like these were met with a scornful backlash. In articles and blog posts which were long on invective but noticeably short on reasonable argument, Soave, Goldberg, and other understandably sceptical journalists found themselves accused of <a href="http://jezebel.com/is-the-uva-rape-story-a-gigantic-hoax-asks-idiot-1665233387" target="_blank">stupidity</a>&nbsp;and&nbsp;bad faith, and of participation in a cynical campaign to <a href="http://scienceblogs.com/denialism/2014/12/03/nyt-helps-in-typical-rape-victim-smearing/" target="_blank">smear the victims of rape</a>. The feminist writer Jessica Valenti took to twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/JessicaValenti/status/539565649874255872" target="_blank">to declare that</a>&nbsp;Soave's article was "the last nail in [Reason magazine's] credibility coffin". This rather over-hasty judgement, offered without substantiation, was retweeted 73 times.<br /><br />On December 5, the fraternity at the centre of Erdely's story&nbsp;<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/statement-u-va-fraternity-responds-to-rape-allegations/2014/12/05/e810832a-7cb0-11e4-84d4-7c896b90abdc_story.html" target="_blank">released a statement</a> refuting key elements of the story. Rolling Stone responded by hastily appending an unpardonably self-serving update to the top of their story, distancing themselves from their source. Erdely went to ground, refusing all further requests for interviews and has not been heard from since. At this point a number of journalists realised that the game was up and decided <a href="http://jezebel.com/rolling-stone-partially-retracts-uva-story-over-discrep-1667329573" target="_blank">to cut their losses</a>&nbsp;rather than run the risk of looking any more silly.<br /><br />Others, however, doubled down, adopting a new line that rested on the following conflicting premises:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">1. As a victim of a violent sexual assault, Jackie's testimony is to be uncritically accepted. &nbsp;</blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">2. As a victim of a violent sexual assault, Jackie's&nbsp;account will <i>obviously</i> contain 'discrepancies', all of which can be explained away with reference to post-traumatic stress affecting the clarity and reliability of memory. &nbsp;</blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">3. Erdely ought to have been more sceptical of Jackie's account. </blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">4. Anyone now displaying precisely the kind of scepticism Erdely lacked, was almost certainly pursuing a suspect agenda.&nbsp;</blockquote>Reconciling these claims resulted in arguments as comical in their incoherence as they were defiant in their unapologetic contempt for objectivity.<br /><br />In <a href="http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/12/why-we-believed-jackies-story-113365.html#.VI0H52SsWQ4" target="_blank">an article for Politico</a>,&nbsp;Julia Horowitz, assistant managing editor at UVA’s student newspaper, fretted about the manifest shortcomings of Rolling Stone's reporting before deciding that "to let fact checking define the narrative would be a huge mistake." Was hypothesising that something <i>might</i> have happened really so different from asserting it had? she wondered.<br /><br />In a thoroughly retrogressive <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/12/06/no-matter-what-jackie-said-we-should-automatically-believe-rape-claims/" target="_blank">OpEd piece for the Washington Post</a>&nbsp;arguing that upholding the presumption of innocence in cases of rape and sexual assault was "in important ways...wrong", the feminist writer Zerlina Maxwell wrote: "'Rape culture,' as it is often called, is real. Because rape it is [sic] such a poisonous charge, we are so careful not to level it until we can really prove it." Maxwell was apparently unconcerned that the second sentence directly contradicted the first.<br /><br />And in&nbsp;<a href="http://feministing.com/2014/12/08/on-rolling-stone-lessons-from-fact-checking-and-the-limits-of-journalism/" target="_blank">an unintelligible piece</a>&nbsp;of rage-blogging on the Feministing website, self-declared (presumably in order of importance) "feminist and former fact-checker" Maya Dusenbery concluded:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">[J]ournalism can lie, just as feminism can lie, because they are both created by the fallible humans who live in it. And journalism lies far more than feminism does about the nature of the truth. Journalism lies and acts as if it’s the only game in town — as if it is not just one of many ways of telling the truth.</blockquote>Some writers and activists insisted openly, and without embarrassment, that the truth of what actually happened to Jackie was less important than the political value of her fabrications. Others sought to&nbsp;<a href="https://twitter.com/AmandaMarcotte/status/542359746687553536" target="_blank">re-describe truth as lies</a> so they could continue to pretend they were upholding the former, largely by assailing the corrective reporting of Washington Post and others as "irresponsible" and attempting to <a href="http://skydancingblog.com/2014/12/11/thursday-reads-did-nepotism-at-the-washington-post-contribute-to-irresponsible-reporting-on-the-uva-rape-story/" target="_blank">discredit the reporters in question</a> with a battery of crass and childish <i>ad hominems</i>. <br /><br />For those ideologically so-inclined, stratagems like these were feminism at its most fearless, radical, and uncompromising. For the rest of us, they were intellectual dishonesty at its most breathtaking.<br /><br />By December 12, the three friends libelled in Erdely's story as heartless sociopaths had come forward&nbsp;with <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/u-va-students-challenge-rolling-stone-account-of-attack/2014/12/10/ef345e42-7fcb-11e4-81fd-8c4814dfa9d7_story.html" target="_blank">an alternative account</a> of events, letting it be known that Erdely had never approached them for comment, either. Whatever remained of Jackie's credibility as a witness now lay buried beneath the rubble of Erdely's own reputation.<br /><br />The same day, the New York Observer <a href="http://observer.com/2014/12/source-rolling-stone-editor-tendered-resignation-wenner-declines/" target="_blank">reported</a> that Rolling Stone's deputy managing editor Sean Woods had offered his resignation to the magazine's founder and publisher Jann Wenner (who - for reasons best known to himself - declined to accept it). A post-mortem is now underway at Rolling Stone, which will in time doubtless produce a lengthy correction and apology, featuring all the usual contrition-speak about mistakes made, lessons learned, and changes moving forward.<br /><br />Sabrina Rubin Erdely&nbsp;is surely finished, her sacking and&nbsp;disgrace now a mere formality. It is unclear at this point whether the single source on whom she so unwisely relied is a mendacious fraud or a damaged and disturbed fantasist. If it turns out to be the former, then 'Jackie' should be stripped of whatever remains of her victimhood mantle and made to answer for the defamatory falsehoods she has helped to circulate. But if it turns out to be the latter, then Erdely's responsibility for exposing a vulnerable and unstable young woman will stand as a further indictment of her unscrupulous and disgraceful abdication of journalistic ethics.<br /><br />It is a rather satisfying irony, however, that, in seeking to expose America's culture of victimisation, Erdely has instead exposed a cult of victimhood run totally out of control, and the self-discrediting lengths to which its adherents will go to defend it.<br /><br />There is, after all, a self-refuting paradox at the heart of Erdely's story. If her article had been published in a country in which, as Marcotte would have it, "rapists are given a social license to operate by people who make excuses for sexual predators and blame the victims for their own rapes", then Jackie's ordeal would have had no purchase on precisely the kind of moral outrage it was designed to generate. Jackie's gang-rape was somehow at once a shocking indictment of American culture, and at the same time almost banal.<br /><br />In an "I-Believe-Jackie" <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/dec/08/who-is-jackie-rolling-stone-rape-story" target="_blank">article for the Guardian</a>, the feminist writer Jessica Valenti blithely remarked that&nbsp;"one in five women is sexually assaulted at American universities – so Jackie’s story wasn’t so uncommon." With predictable cynicism, Valenti presented this hair-raising statistic unburdened by either qualifying caveats or links, intentionally creating an impression that it is uncontested.<br /><br />In fact, this figure has long been the subject of intense controversy, with <a href="http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/no-1-in-5-women-have-not-been-raped-on-college-campuses/article/2551980" target="_blank">critics arguing</a> it is little more than alarmist agitprop, extrapolated from unrepresentative studies, themselves disfigured by low response rates and deeply problematic methodologies. On December 15, two of the researchers responsible for one such study were moved to detail their own caveats in <a href="http://time.com/3633903/campus-rape-1-in-5-sexual-assault-setting-record-straight/" target="_blank">an article for Time</a>, echoing many of their critics' key concerns.<br /><br />Meanwhile,&nbsp;on 11 December&nbsp;the&nbsp;Bureau of Justice Statistics (a sub-division of the US Department of Justice) <a href="http://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&amp;iid=5176" target="_blank">published their latest findings</a> which revealed, inter alia, that the rate of rape and sexual assault is 0.61% of female students aged 18-24, and 0.76% of female non-students. These findings have remained almost unchanged since publication of the <a href="http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/vvcs02.pdf" target="_blank">previous BJS study</a> in 2005, which found rates of 0.6% and 0.79%, respectively. But even if one is tempted to argue that the BJS studies are an over-correction, the 1 in 5 (or 20%) statistic remains an affront to common sense.<br /><br />In a <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2014/12/college_rape_campus_sexual_assault_is_a_serious_problem_but_the_efforts.html" target="_blank">brilliant and detailed essay</a>&nbsp;critically analysing claims of a rape epidemic on American campuses, the Slate columnist Emily Yoffe noted that this figure - if accurate -&nbsp;"would mean that young American college women are raped at a rate similar to women in <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/12/world/africa/12congo.html">Congo</a>, where rape has been used as a weapon of war." The implications of this comparison make it clear just how absurd the casual fetishisation of victimhood in radical feminist discourse has become. For if young women in America are no better off than those forced to survive the Congo's war zones, then it follows that women in the Congo are no worse off than those studying on American college campuses. To say this diminishes the suffering of Congolese women is an understatement.<br /><br />It is doubtful that such a comparison will give the prophets of Western rape culture and their credulous disciples much cause for reflection, still less embarrassment. An unthinking denigration of the West and its achievements is, after all, a characteristic hallmark of self-regarding radicalism in First World Left-wing politics. But it is unsurprising that a Somali-born dissident like Ayaan Hirsi Ali subjects this kind of thoughtless cultural equivalence to <a href="http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/ayaan-hirsi-ali-destroys-american-feminism-by-discussing-the-real-war-on-women/article/2556419" target="_blank">withering scorn</a>. Having crossed the yawning chasm that divides the patriarchal societies of the East from the egalitarian societies of the West, she understands the incalculable value of progress far more clearly than those fortunate enough to have known nothing else.&nbsp;</div><div><div><br />It is long past time that the falsehoods and distortions undergirding the rape culture myth are subjected to the scrutiny, derision, and scorn they so urgently merit. Not simply because they are reactionary and false, but because the irresponsible fear-mongering they encourage has the power to inflict enormous damage on men and women alike.<br /><ul><li>At the moment, widespread belief in a pandemic of campus sexual violence is somehow managing to co-exist with <a href="http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=372" target="_blank">a 4:3 ratio of women to men</a> enrolled in American universities. But should America's rape panic gain further traction, it could start to affect the willingness of young women to enter university at all.&nbsp;</li><li>As Emily Yoffe's <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2014/12/college_rape_campus_sexual_assault_is_a_serious_problem_but_the_efforts.html" target="_blank">Slate essay&nbsp;documents</a>, a mass media hungry for click-bait sensationalism, combined with an opportunistic and intellectually lazy political class, has already produced deeply illiberal legislation which is feeding a feverish assault on egalitarianism, due process, and civil liberties.</li><li>A prevailing climate of paranoia and fear is being allowed to foster an unnecessary but deeply corrosive suspicion and mistrust between the sexes. Young women are being instructed that the campuses on which they live and study are in fact threatening arenas of predatory male hostility and violence, and young men are <a href="http://www.vox.com/2014/10/13/6966847/yes-means-yes-is-a-terrible-bill-and-i-completely-support-it" target="_blank">being told</a> that it their own base sexuality necessitates the introduction of draconian new legislation which will ensure they experience "a cold spike of fear" before they even contemplate sex with a partner.</li></ul></div><div>In the quote with which I opened this essay, the American feminist blogger Amanda Marcotte revealed perhaps more than she intended when she&nbsp;<a href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2014/03/18/rainn_attacks_the_phrase_rape_culture_in_its_recommendations_to_the_white.html" target="_blank">explained</a>:<br /><div><blockquote class="tr_bq">"Rape culture" is a very useful way to describe the idea that rapists are given a&nbsp;social license to operate by people&nbsp;who make excuses for sexual predators and blame the victims for their own rapes.</blockquote><div>Notice that Marcotte does not defend the term on the basis of its accuracy, but on the basis of its utility. She concedes, in other words, that 'rape culture' is less a matter of objective fact than an instrument of ideology. And, as the Rolling Stone affair has so clearly demonstrated, so are its purported victims.<br /><br />Herein lies the value of 'Jackie' as a pawn of gender warfare, and the reason why Marcotte, Valenti, and like-minded allies steeped in their reactionary cynicism were not prepared to give her up without a fight, no matter how ridiculous it made them look in the short-term. Contrary to their own pious and self-serving claims, the interest of these activists lies not in alleviating the suffering of women, but in manufacturing and instrumentalising it.<br /><br /><br /><b>UPDATE 6/4/15:&nbsp;</b>The Columbia School of Journalism's investigation into <i>Rolling Stone</i>'s reporting of Erdely's 'A Rape On Campus' story has finally been published. It is a careful, sober analysis and a devastating indictment, cataloguing failures of journalistic ethics, of editorial process, of basic fact-checking and fair-mindedness, and of dispassionate rigour and critical thinking. "The problem of confirmation bias&nbsp;–" the report's authors observe with characteristic understatement, "the tendency of&nbsp;people to be trapped by pre-existing assumptions and to select facts that support their own views while overlooking contradictory ones – is a well-established finding of social science. It seems to have been a factor here."<br /><br />While I take on board the distinction made in the report's conclusion between Erdely's failures and the whole-cloth fabrications of Jayson Blair, I nevertheless find it astonishing that Jann Wenner <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/06/business/media/rolling-stone-retracts-article-on-rape-at-university-of-virginia.html" target="_blank">has announced</a> that not a single head will roll over this fiasco, and that Erdely will remain a Rolling Stone reporter.<br /><br />The full 13000 word, 25 page report can be read here:<br /><br /><a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/features/a-rape-on-campus-what-went-wrong-20150405">http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/features/a-rape-on-campus-what-went-wrong-20150405</a></div></div></div></div></div>Unrepentant Jacobinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09256579083755037018noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5380090049852721671.post-33368227188932014702014-11-21T04:49:00.000-08:002014-11-21T06:29:29.886-08:00Stigmatise, Shame, and Silence<b><span style="font-size: large;">Progressive Authoritarianism &amp; the Death of Debate</span></b><br /><b><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></b> <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-asGInP79UJA/VGwwick2V8I/AAAAAAAAAY0/2O1Up3JOuPg/s1600/2356458331_ffa9b281e8.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-asGInP79UJA/VGwwick2V8I/AAAAAAAAAY0/2O1Up3JOuPg/s1600/2356458331_ffa9b281e8.jpg" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">"It is error only, and not truth, that shrinks from inquiry."&nbsp;</div><div><div style="text-align: center;">&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;<i>- Thomas Paine</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i><br /></i></div>Before I get into describing the abysmal state of disrepair in which progressive thought currently languishes, I should start by pointing out that there never was a time when Leftist politics existed in a state of harmonious consensus. From the birth of the concept of left-right politics, when internecine quarrels amongst French republicans were settled beneath the blade of the guillotine, through to the bitter intra-socialist sectarianism of the Cold War, the Left have been a disputatious bunch, bickering over the narcissism of their various small differences.<br /><br />The progressive movements of the early New Left were no different, encompassing a broad plurality of views, often at odds over ends and means. But there was, nevertheless, general agreement that the principal basis for civil rights activism and struggle lay in liberal, egalitarian, and universalist values. Relativist and separatist arguments were advanced by some, of course, but, until relatively recently, they lacked any meaningful currency. What galvanised activists were internalised Enlightenment-derived ideas of liberty, equality, and solidarity. For if people are fundamentally the same, irrespective of skin colour, gender, or sexuality, then on what basis can rights and protections be afforded to some groups or individuals and denied to others?<br /><br />With the clarity of arguments like these, progressive politics in the West achieved much. Activism, and the emergence of a vibrant and aggressively liberal counter-culture, precipitated a change in societal and political attitudes, which in turn led to the passing of transformative legislation: voting and labour rights were won; segregation was abolished; reproductive rights were enshrined and expanded; discrimination in all sorts of areas was outlawed; hiring and employment practices were reformed; attitudes to everything from racism to domestic abuse evolved (and continue to do so), while sexual and creative permissiveness flourished. As taboos collapsed with stunning rapidity, conservatism and traditional social values were forced into retreat.<br /><br />But then something interesting began to happen. Having fought for and (mostly) won parity under the law, progressive activism found itself faced with an existential dilemma. What was it now for? It was, after all, not simply a vehicle for social change; it was also a productive receptacle for anti-authoritarianism and a valuable crucible of radical thought. Where was all this energy to be directed next?<br /><br />In response to this challenge, progressivism took a dismaying and thoroughly retrogressive turn. Since inequity in society indubitably persisted, often disproportionately affecting minorities and women, it became increasingly fashionable to question whether universalist struggles had actually achieved anything of consequence at all.<br /><br />Having built progressive movements on the basis of liberal values, it became an imperative to kick those values apart with the same enthusiasm, just as a child might destroy a sand-castle which hadn't turned out quite as well as expected. The spread of French critical theory, multiculturalism, and post-colonialism in radical circles midwifed a thoughtless denigration of the West, scorn for the perceived complacencies of "the Enlightenment project", and the dismissal of the 'Dead White Males' whose ideas and writings had done so much to unshackle Europe from feudalism and superstition.<br /><br />The arrogance of Western cultural supremacism, it was argued, was the status quo now in need of vigorous radical assault. A commitment to universalism was replaced by the fetishisation of difference and specificity; a belief in egalitarianism gave way to demands for exceptionalism and double-standards (only this time favouring the 'oppressed'); and the language of emancipation and liberty was replaced by a cult of victimhood, self-pity, and a brooding, masochistic solipsism. "We have nothing to lose but our chains" was drowned out by the resentful injunction "Listen to my suffering".<br /><br />In academia, the humanities began a process of decline as the demands of rigorous and fair-minded scholarship gave way to the requirements of a stultifying and increasingly censorious political correctness. The pursuit of objective truth and knowledge fell before endlessly competing claims from subjective 'lived experiences' and 'narratives', and international solidarity fell before a grotesque cultural relativism, itself informed by a neurotic culture of self-lacerating guilt. The lexicon of political activism - originally developed to identify irrational judgements made about people based on their &nbsp;unalterable characteristics - assumed a metaphysical dimension. Racism, misogyny, and homophobia were no longer alterable matters of law, belief, and practice - they became immovable structural toxins, against which not even the most broad-minded liberal could be reliably immunised, and to which well-intentioned people were often subject without their knowledge.<br /><br />As the Left's progressive movements splintered into a kaleidoscope of bitter, competing interests, sectarianism was transformed from a by-product of radical squabbles into an ideological imperative, and a divisive grievance hierarchy was constructed, based upon the intersection of privileged characteristics. The jargon of -phobias and -isms proliferated as every group sought to weaponise language to its own advantage, and arguments from remote etymology were deployed to police the expression of views and ideas. Over time, invective replaced argument and persuasion, and those committed to identity politics lost their ability to engage in constructive debate, to disagree, and - most damaging of all - to think critically about their own ideas and suppositions. Why bother when it is less effort to simply accuse your opponent of bigotry of one stripe or another, or of ignorance and bad faith?<br /><br />We are now reaping the harvest of liberalism's agonising slow death on the Left. Consider the following recent examples:<br /><ol><li>According to <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/media-network/2014/nov/14/mehdi-hasan-demonising-press-coverage-of-muslims">a report in The Guardian</a>, the political director of Huffington Post UK, <a href="http://jacobinism.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/victimisers-as-victims.html" target="_blank">Mehdi Hasan</a>, has just publicly recommended the introduction of what amounts to a <i>de facto</i> blasphemy law in order to combat what he calls 'Islamophobia'. The press, he announced, has been “singularly unable or unwilling to change the discourse, the tone or the approach” of its coverage. Casually eliding matters of race, ethnicity, and belief, he continued: “We’re not going to get change unless there is some sanction, there is some penalty. This is not just about Muslims; it is about all minorities.” Similarly, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vln9D81eO60" target="_blank">on an American talkshow</a>, a visibly distressed Ben Affleck responded to Sam Harris's criticisms of Islam by denouncing them as "gross and racist".<br />&nbsp;</li><li>Dr. Matt Taylor, one of the scientists responsible for the awe-inspiring <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/sep/15/comet-landing-site-rosetta-philae-67p-churyumov-gerasimenko">Rosetta satellite mission</a>, found himself vilified by incandescent feminists when he appeared on television wearing a bowling shirt adorned with images of scantily-clad young women. It later transpired that the shirt had been <a href="http://ellyprizemanupdate.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/decisions-and-comments.html">hand-made for him as a birthday gift</a> by a female friend and, as a rather touching token of appreciation, he had worn it on his big day. But an <a href="http://www.theverge.com/2014/11/13/7213819/your-bowling-shirt-is-holding-back-progress">article for Verge</a> decided that it was a symptom of the misogyny allegedly endemic within the scientific community, and reported Dr. Taylor's televised appearance beneath the headline "I don't care if you landed a spacecraft on a comet, your shirt is sexist and ostracizing".<br /><br />The <a href="http://freethoughtblogs.com/greta/2014/11/14/notes-from-a-pornographer-on-sexism/">most risible offering</a> in this embarrassing row came from (supposedly) sex-positive feminist Greta Christina, who spent the first paragraph of her post on the subject itemising her own involvement in the production of pornography. This, she appeared to think, placed her in the unique position of being able to explain that "freedom for me does not mean freedom for thee" as she policed the clothing of another adult:&nbsp;"[D]oing an interview about your team’s big science achievement while wearing a shirt with scantily-clad pinup girls does not say, “Sex is awesome!” It says, “Women are for sex.”<br /><br />Christina seemed oblivious to those who would seize on this argument to call for the suppression of her own work, as well as all other kinds of pornography and erotica she defends in her writing. Nor was she moved by arguments that men, like women, should be judged on what they say and do, not on how they choose to dress themselves. Nonetheless, clearly shaken by the uproar, Dr. Taylor ended up offering a tearful and humiliating&nbsp;<a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/space/11231320/Rosetta-mission-scientist-Dr-Matt-Taylor-cries-during-apology-over-offensive-shirt.html">public apology to his critics</a>. It will be an individual of uncommonly thick skin who dares to transgress in this way in the future.<br />&nbsp;</li><li>Last Wednesday, the Independent ran <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/i-helped-shut-down-an-abortion-debate-between-two-men-because-my-uterus-isnt-up-for-their-discussion-9867200.html">an article</a> by an Oxford University student named Niamh McIntyre, in which she crowed defiantly about the success of her campaign to cancel a debate between two male speakers, organised by a pro-life group to debate abortion. She explained herself thus: "The idea that in a free society absolutely everything should be open to debate has a detrimental effect on marginalised groups". <br /><br />Doubling down on her behalf, Tim Squirrell - the President of the Cambridge Union, no less! - took to twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/timsquirrell/status/535037444983640064">to declare that</a> "shouting 'free speech' doesn't help anyone without a more nuanced conception of its impacts + aspects". He went on: "People have the right to feel...[s]afe from the expression of ideas which have historically been used to oppress them in very real ways."<br />&nbsp;</li><li>Late last year, in response to <a href="http://www.city-journal.org/2008/18_1_campus_rape.html">long-disputed and empirically dubious</a> claims of an omnipresent culture of rape besieging women on university campuses, activists campaigned to have Robin Thicke's song <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwT6DZCQi9k&amp;oref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DzwT6DZCQi9k&amp;has_verified=1">Blurred Lines</a> banned from their Student Unions. When UCL joined upwards of 20 other Unions in <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/nov/12/robin-thicke-blurred-lines-banned-another-university">banning the song from its premises</a>, its Women's Officer Beth Sutton said: "UCLU have just passed motion to not play Blurred Lines in union spaces &amp; events. Solidarity with all survivors!"<br /><br /><i>[The same panic over 'rape culture' and anger over low prosecution rates for sex crimes has also led to unapologetic attacks from the Left, similarly advanced in the name of "solidarity with survivors", on the presumption of innocence, the rule of law, and due process. An analysis of this disturbing facet of the effort to delegitimise liberalism lies beyond the scope of this post.]</i><br />&nbsp;</li><li>A few months ago, the New Statesman columnist Sarah Ditum wrote <a href="http://www.newstatesman.com/sarah-ditum/2014/03/when-did-no-platform-become-about-attacking-individuals-deemed-disagreeable">a rather good article</a> protesting the illiberal use of 'no-platforming' to silence unpopular views held by those "deemed disagreeable". However, her arguments were offered mainly in support of Julie Bindel, a radical feminist labelled 'transphobic' and 'whorephobic' for her views on trans rights and sex work. Ditum is, from what I can tell, largely sympathetic to Bindel's positions on these issues, which made her defence of Bindel's right to speak a relatively straightforward affair, causing her no significant ideological discomfort.<br /><br />But when it came to the no-platforming of a repellent male chauvinist and self-styled pick-up guru named Julien Blanc, Ditum's principled defence of free expression evaporated, and she wrote a new blog post explaining that <a href="http://sarahditum.com/2014/11/18/there-is-no-free-speech-defence-for-julien-blanc/">this was a very different matter</a>. "There is no free speech defence for Julian Blanc" she concluded. (In response to the outcry, Blanc has since been denied a visa to enter the UK.)<br />&nbsp;</li><li>This is not to mention the recent fracas over the Exhibit B installation, deemed unacceptable by anti-racist campaigners (which I covered <a href="http://jacobinism.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/siding-with-philistines.html">in an essay here</a>), or the hounding of feminist Adele Wilde-Blavatsky for her opposition to the veil and the demonisation of 'white feminists' (which I covered <a href="http://jacobinism.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/racism-censorship-disunity.html">in an essay here</a>). The latter post, incidentally, led The Feminist Wire to <a href="http://thefeministwire.com/2014/01/moving-on/">describe what I wrote</a> as "racist and anti-Black specifically", and an attempt "to maintain white supremacy".</li></ol><div>This handful of examples barely scratches the surface of the problem. Not one of the writers or campaigners above was detained by the need to establish a causal link between the expression of ideas they dislike and consequent harm. Censors never are, despite the fact that, in an open society, the burden of proof ought to rest with those who would restrict individual freedom. Instead, those inclined to defend free expression were variously tarred with the brush of racism, misogyny, Islamophobia, or rape apologism (depending on what was at issue).<br /><br />When taken together, these individual cases - niggling and petty in and of themselves - speak to the flowering of a deeply sinister and censorious tendency amongst self-identifying progressives, invariably justified in the name of protecting the weak, the vulnerable, and the voiceless. In their righteous zeal to place certain people, views, and ideas beyond the pale, and secure in the complacent belief that their own opinions are beyond reproach, not one of these well-meaning men and women appears to have considered that their own liberty will, in the end, fall victim to the very same arguments they advance to silence others.<br /><br />It should hardly be a surprise that in the midst of this reckless and dangerous onslaught against liberal values and the belief in the axiomatic nobility of the oppressed, there should be no room for sympathy with the Middle East's only functioning liberal democracy. A Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions [BDS] campaign, ostensibly mounted in support of Palestinian nationalism, but <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifZLk6Ei9-U" target="_blank">actually aimed</a> at the disestablishment of the only Jewish State, has been slowly gathering mainstream support and legitimacy in the West.<br /><br />Reprehensibly, the BDS movement seeks not simply the boycott of Israeli goods (which would be bad enough); it also explicitly attacks academic freedom. In the foreword to a recently released collection of essays entitled&nbsp;<i><a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Case-Against-Academic-Boycotts-Israel/dp/0990331601" target="_blank">The Case Against Academic Boycotts of Israel</a>, </i>the American political theorist Paul Berman argues that BDS activists are only able to make such arguments because they have convinced themselves of a misperception: they see what they are doing as "modern and progressive" when in fact it is "retrograde and disgraceful".<br /><br />The same must be said of the examples itemised above. Even as they thoughtlessly stigmatise those who defend free expression as "right wing", these activists, writers, and campaigners have succumbed to the right's most regressive autocratic tendencies. Dogmatic and unbending in their misanthropic view of human sexuality and race relations; unapologetic in their advocacy of an infantilising, separatist agenda of 'safe spaces'; ferocious in their intolerance of views they deem unacceptable.<br /><br />Gazing with mounting dismay at the escalating authoritarianism on the left of the political spectrum where my own political sympathies lie, I have been repeatedly reminded of <a href="http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2013/05/the-journey-back.html" target="_blank">a post published by the late Marxist theorist Norman Geras</a> five months before his death. With a minimum of preamble, Geras quoted&nbsp;Chris Brown, Professor of International Relations at the LSE, as follows:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">I think the biggest shift that has taken place in my thinking over the past 30 years is that I'm a lot less tolerant of relativist ideas, and multiculturalist ideas than I used to be. And that's something that when you say it, it induces shock and horror sometimes. 25 years ago, I was writing material that, if it wasn't poststructuralist, was at least 'fellow traveling' with the poststructuralists, arguing essentially anti-foundationalist ideas, arguing that the Western liberal tradition was just one tradition among other traditions, and so on. In a way, I think I was in bad faith over a lot of that. I believed that liberalism would always be there, and so one can afford to attack it. The events of the last 20 years have shown that that's really not the case, that a lot of the traditional liberal values of freedom and tolerance are seriously under attack and need to be defended. So I've become a defender of the Enlightenment project in a way that I wasn't maybe 30 years ago - that's a big shift.</blockquote>Unfortunately, there appears to be scant appetite for Professor Brown's&nbsp;critical self-examination on the postmodern Left. Instead it clings to its metaphysical conspiracism, and disdains empiricism and a meritocracy of ideas derived from free and open debate in favour of the imposition of speech codes designed to stigmatise, shame, and silence.<br /><br />In the name of a righteously-espoused 'inclusivity', such people have submitted to the worst kind of authoritarian elitism, and forgotten an elementary truism of Enlightenment thought. As the revolutionary 18th century pamphleteer and Dead White Male Thomas Paine observed in the short dedication with which he opened <i>The Age of Reason</i>:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">You will do me the justice to remember, that I have always strenuously supported the Right of every Man to his own opinion, however different that opinion might be to mine. He who denies to another this right, makes a slave of himself to his present opinion, because he precludes himself the right of changing it.&nbsp;The most formidable weapon against errors of every kind is Reason. I have never used any other, and I trust I never shall.</blockquote></div></div>Unrepentant Jacobinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09256579083755037018noreply@blogger.com13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5380090049852721671.post-15249226520664118132014-09-30T13:27:00.002-07:002015-01-02T11:02:12.109-08:00Siding with the Philistines<span style="font-size: large;"><b><i>Exhibit B</i> and Index on Censorship's Julia Farrington</b></span><br /><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Yug3Otjckoo/VCjOjrSLneI/AAAAAAAAAXQ/2qQJalwz8B8/s1600/exhibit-b.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Yug3Otjckoo/VCjOjrSLneI/AAAAAAAAAXQ/2qQJalwz8B8/s1600/exhibit-b.jpg" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b><i>A promotional still for Brett Bailey's installation, </i>Exhibit B.</b></span></td></tr></tbody></table>On the 24 September, the UK saw the closure of yet another controversial artwork in response to the mobilisation of protests. The installation&nbsp;<i>Exhibit B</i>, conceived and directed by the South African artist and provocateur Brett Bailey, takes as its starting point the 19th century phenomenon of '<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_zoo" target="_blank">human zoos</a>', and is <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2014/aug/11/-sp-exhibit-b-human-zoo-edinburgh-festivals-most-controversial" target="_blank">described by Bailey</a> as follows:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">What interests me about human zoos is the way people were objectified. Once you objectify people, you can do the most terrible things to them. But what we are doing here is nothing like these shows, where black people were brought from all over Africa and displayed in villages. I’m interested in the way these zoos legitimised colonial policies.</blockquote>Since 2012,&nbsp;<i>Exhibit B</i> has played in some 19 cities before arriving in London and received considerable acclaim. Lynn Gardner in the Guardian <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2014/aug/12/exhibit-b-edinburgh-festival-2014-review" target="_blank">called it</a> "both unbearable and essential", Allan Radcliffe in the Times <a href="http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/arts/visualarts/article4176470.ece" target="_blank">called it</a> "remarkable . . . powerful and upsetting", and Neil Cooper, reviewing the installation for the Edinburgh Festival (and perhaps putting his finger on the masochistic pleasure in which Bailey invites his Western audiences to marinate),&nbsp;<a href="https://edinburghfestival.list.co.uk/article/63682-exhibit-b/" target="_blank">revealed that</a>&nbsp;"the guilt [<i>Exhibit B</i>] provokes is devastating".<br /><br />Others, like Laura Barnett at the Telegraph <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/edinburgh-festival/11024307/Edinburgh-Festival-2014-Exhibit-B-Playfair-Library-Hall-review-confrontational.html" target="_blank">were less sure</a>. Acknowledging its merits, she nevertheless found <i>Exhibit B</i> to be&nbsp;"a highly problematic" and possibly exploitative piece of work. She did not, however, call for its closure. Nor, to my knowledge, did any other serious-minded writer, whatever their view of its worth. And, whether it succeeded or not, Bailey's work was generally agreed to have been at least <i>intended</i> as an indictment of Western colonialism.<br /><br />But self-styled&nbsp;anti-racist activists were in no mood to be so tolerant or broad-minded, and they did not hesitate to accuse both artist and production of outright racism. In Berlin, Bailey's work was greeted with <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-10-03/black-human-zoo-fury-greets-berlin-art-show.html" target="_blank">furious protests</a>&nbsp;and, upon learning that <i>Exhibit B</i> would be performed at The Barbican in London, a Birmingham activist named Sara Myers <a href="http://www.change.org/p/withdraw-the-racist-exhibition-exhibition-b-the-human-zoo#news" target="_blank">started an online petition</a>, demanding the immediate withdrawal of Bailey's "racist" work.&nbsp;"If Brett Bailey is trying to make a point about slavery" Myers instructed, "this is not the way to do it." This sentiment was rewarded with nearly 23,000 signatures.<br /><br />Protests outside the venue followed, blockading the road, and on 24 September, the Barbican announced, with regret, that it was cancelling all shows:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">Due to the extreme nature of the protest outside the Vaults, regrettably we have cancelled this evening's performance of Exhibit B as we could not guarantee the safety of performers, audiences and staff. We respect people's right to protest but are disappointed that this was not done in a peaceful way as had been previously promised by campaigners.</blockquote>For those committed to the defence of free inquiry and artistic expression, this is not a complicated matter. And it would be only slightly more complicated if the work in question <i>were</i>&nbsp;indisputably racist. The right of artists to express themselves as they see fit must be inviolate, as must the right of audiences to make up their own minds about the merits of what they produce. It bears repeating that an axiom of free speech advocacy is the willingness to defend the expression of opinions with which one vehemently disagrees.<br /><br />But in <a href="http://www.indexoncensorship.org/2014/09/barbican-brett-bailey-exhibit-b-julia-farrington/" target="_blank">a dismal op-ed</a> for the anti-censorship advocacy organisation Index on Censorship, its associate arts producer, Julia Farrington, found herself unable to do any such thing. Her article, it should be noted, appeared on the Index website on 22 September - that is, after the petition and protests had been launched but before <i>Exhibit B</i>'s cancellation. By 25 September, Index had found it necessary to issue an unsigned clarification of their official position, <a href="http://www.indexoncensorship.org/2014/09/exhibit-b-censorship-pure-simple/" target="_blank">stating</a>:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">Those who read [Julia Farrington's] article following the cancellation and our short comment on it have interpreted our stance as one that in some way excuses or condones the protesters and the cancellation of the piece. This was certainly not our intention . . . People have every right to object to art they find objectionable but no right whatsoever to have that work censored. Free expression, including work that others may find shocking or offensive, is a right that must be defended vigorously. </blockquote>This must be news to Farrington, whose defence of Bailey's right to conceive and present his work is tepid in the extreme. Instead, her article takes the side - with minimal equivocation - of those noisily declaring themselves offended by it.<br /><div><br />Although Sara Myers's petition explicitly demands the Barbican cancel its performances of Bailey's work - and although Farrington does mention this fact - she persistently misdescribes Myers's transparently censorious campaign against venue and artist as "a boycott". And it is the protestors to whom she awards credit, without irony, for "ensuring dialogue is happening".<br /><br /></div><div>Like them, she had not seen the work for herself at the time of writing. Nevertheless, "what interests me here," she explains, "is the&nbsp;mindset of the institution&nbsp;presenting this piece of work and whether it considered, if at all, the possibility of a hostile response." Contrary to appearances, it is the Barbican which is unmasked as the real villain. They did, she concedes, commission a public debate on the matter, but their hand was forced by the protests which, she argues, were themselves a product of the venue's insensitivity and incompetence. Farrington justifies this conclusion by declaring her belief that:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">The role of the arts institution . . . is to manage the space between the artist and the audience.</blockquote><div>And with that she burdens the venue with responsibility for the row. Actually, the role of an arts institution - be it a cinema, theatre, or gallery - is neutral: to provide space for the exhibition of work and to promote said work as it sees fit. Those who elect to exhibit challenging material should be supported in their efforts, not presented with further obstacles.<br /><br />To insist that venues and institutions "manage the space between the artist and the audience" as a precondition to exhibiting potentially controversial content will only help further deter the emergence of provocative art. ("We are thinking of exhibiting Pier Paolo Pasolini's<i> Salò</i> at your local. Please read the attached synopsis and let us know your thoughts.")</div><div><br /></div><div>Not only would such a process be time-consuming, cumbersome, and - I would imagine - expensive, but it would also present a number of practical problems. Who, for instance, decides what level of potential offence and provocation demands prior consultation with outraged community activists? And who decides which of the activists' subsequent demands are reasonable? And, most importantly, what exactly does this alleged obligation to "manage the space between the artist and the audience" actually require of the venue?&nbsp;</div><div><br /></div><div>To Farrington, I imagine the phrase seems collaborative and cuddly. But in this context "manage the space between the artist and audience" sounds a lot to me like a euphemism for "listen to community concerns and make the requested changes accordingly."</div><div><br /></div><div>It is instructive to listen to Sara Myers <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b04jjt1w/newsnight-25092014" target="_blank">debating one of the actresses</a> in the work on <i>Newsnight</i>. Amid Myers's various complaints about offence and bad taste, and her demands for an apology and "holistic reparations", she averred that she would "not necessarily" seek to interfere with an artist's vision. All she wanted, she announced, was to be consulted.&nbsp;</div><div><br /></div><div>But then would she feel satisfied if, once her views had been heard and taken into account, the work in question remained unchanged? Interestingly, by way of an answer to this yes/no question from presenter Kirsty Wark, Myers turned her attention to the moral deficiencies she perceived in the production:</div><blockquote class="tr_bq">There's no whiteness in that exhibition. All there is is black people standing in various cages with chains...</blockquote><div>A reductive piece of critical analysis, to be sure. To Wark's hypothetical that scenes involving the degradation of blacks required a "white representation," she nodded: "Yes, it needed to be balanced." I don't know what I dislike more; the presumption of the words in that sentence or the pedagogical tone in which they were uttered.</div><div><br />Myers never did get around to giving Wark a straightforward answer, but it was evident to me that she was not about to be appeased by any amount of consultation so long as the show went ahead unaltered. Had it done so, I imagine she would have denounced the consultation efforts as a cosmetic sham designed to shut her up and pressed for further direct action.<br /><br />But Farrington was not satisfied that the protestors' concerns had been adequately dealt with either. She described the two hours alotted to the public debate commissioned by the Barbican as "woefully inadequate", and welcomed the activists' call for further "engagement and dialogue":</div><blockquote class="tr_bq">As anticipated the debate changed nothing in the short term, the work will open this evening as planned, but there was an urgent call for a longer, fuller discussion which hopefully Barbican will respond to as a matter of urgency.</blockquote><div>Myers's petition is unambiguous in its demand for the censorship of <i>Exhibit B</i>. And the jubilation with which she and her supporters welcomed the news of the performance's closure, two days after Farrington's article appeared, speaks to their true motivations. These are not people interested in opening dialogue but in policing it and closing it down.&nbsp;</div><div><br /></div><div>How on earth did a free speech advocate find herself so far on the wrong side of an elementary free speech debate? The nature of the performance, its subject matter, and perhaps most importantly, the skin colour of the protesters, appear to have presented Farrington with a conflict. She is a free speech advocate. But she is also clearly sympathetic to the view that structural racism and institutionalised white privilege are the 'root cause' of everything. Certainly, as far as UK arts and culture goes, she accepts its alleged 'institutionalised racism', <i>a priori</i>. As she puts it:<br /><blockquote>Surely it cannot be possible for the Barbican to stand by a work that purports to confront “colonial atrocities committed in Africa, European notions of racial supremacy and the plight of immigrants today” and not see that it is holding up a mirror to itself.</blockquote>Index on Censorship does not speak for the victims of 'structural racism'. There are other organisations which devote their time and resources to that. In her capacity as a writer for Index, Farrington ought to have shelved her reservations about such matters, and concentrated on the most immediate threat to free speech: the intimidation of artists and venue by a censorious campaign.<br /><br />But she prefers to resolve her ideological dilemma with a rhetorical sleight of hand. She concludes her article:</div><blockquote class="tr_bq">I defend Brett Bailey’s right to present these horrendous atrocities from the past – anything else is censorship . . .&nbsp;But the more potent issue here, is the perpetuation of institutionalised mono-cultural bias preventing the Barbican, and the vast majority of British arts institutions, from fostering and delivering a truly relevant cultural programme. This untenable form of censorship must be addressed and continue to be addressed long after Exhibit B has been and gone.</blockquote><div>So it turns out that Farrington has been anti-censorship all along. Not the common-or-garden type right in front of her eyes, of course, but something more profound and subtle; the censorship of minority voices by stealth.&nbsp; </div><div><br /></div><div>In support of her accusation, Farrington relies on two rather dubious expert witnesses. She quotes Mark Sealy, artistic director at Autograph Black Photographers, who demands that&nbsp;public funding be withdrawn from those who don't fall into line by employing the right people or producing the right kind of content. The basis for this draconian recommendation is a highly implausible (and unsubstantiated) claim that "since 1980s it is progress zero". Part of what is needed, we may infer, is the involvement of more people like Sara Myers who will arbitrate on what kind of material is and is not acceptable to their respective communities.<br /><br />Then we meet Jenny Williams, described as an "independent arts consultant". Williams appears to think what's needed is a thoroughgoing policy of Multiculturalism in the arts and a stricter balkanisation of funding allocated to minority communities:</div><blockquote class="tr_bq">The Arts Council funding of arts infrastructure is not fairly representing the 14% black and minority communities. 14% of ACE’s overall three-year investment of £2.4bn would equate to £336m – that’s £112m per year. The black and minority ethnic community contribute around £62m per year into the overall arts budget. Yet, the current yearly figure currently invested in black and minority ethnic-led work is £4.8m.</blockquote><div>The outrage of this apparently monstrous pie-dividing injustice, by the way, appears to rest on an assumption that black and minority ethnic audiences won't look at or listen to anything not made by their own ethnic or racial group. But by enlightened roads such as these will we journey to a land where all art and culture is politically acceptable and socially responsible.&nbsp;</div><div><br /></div><div>As Farrington must surely be aware, the fanatical pursuit of this conformist dystopia is not restricted to the arts. A <a href="http://www.spiked-online.com/freespeechnow/fsn_article/academic-freedom-is-a-big-deal" target="_blank">recent article</a> in <i>Spiked</i> by Frank Furedi entitled "Academic Freedom <i>Is</i> a Big Deal" looks at troubling examples of this kind of doctrinaire thinking on campus:</div><blockquote class="tr_bq">Intolerance towards the academic freedom of other colleagues is invariably represented as not what it really is – the silencing of unconventional or objectionable views – but rather as an enlightened defence of those who would be offended by unconventional or objectionable views. From this perspective, the advocacy of a genuinely open intellectual culture, where scholars are encouraged to take risks and question everything, is an abomination.</blockquote><div>Academic freedom and artistic freedom - both of which, in different ways, are dedicated to the pursuit of truth - are extraordinarily precious components of open societies. And both are in danger of being compromised, not just by moral puritans of the right, but also by moral puritans of the left - those for whom the enforcement of their own idea of 'social justice' and the immediate redress of grievance trump all scholarly and aesthetic concerns.</div><div><br /></div><div>It is fantastically unwise for an organisation like Index on Censorship to indulge such people. Anti-censorship advocates, whatever their views about related issues, owe it to themselves to defend art and scholarship from the manoeuvres of activists like Sara Myers,&nbsp;and to do so without equivocation.&nbsp;Farrington's article subordinates that responsibility to ideological views concerning the nature of racism, social justice activism, and identity politics, which are wildly beyond her brief. In a confused attempt to position herself as the friend of the weak, Julia Farrington has misidentified both villain and victim and sided with censorious philistinism. The people power embodied by Myers and her fellow malcontents, of which Farrington writes with such admiration, was a sinister and coercive force from the start.<br /><br /></div><div>I take no pleasure in criticising Index on Censorship. They do valuable work and are, by some accounts, a rather embattled organisation at present. But in their handling of this controversy, they abdicated their responsibility to defend those in whose interests they speak. When their associate arts producer marvelled at the 22,500 signatures the petition to close Bailey's work had by then accrued, she should have stopped to consider this: it is precisely at times like these that artists and performers engaged in challenging work most need the support of people like her.</div></div>Unrepentant Jacobinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09256579083755037018noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5380090049852721671.post-59153449847338484532014-09-04T18:13:00.000-07:002014-09-07T12:33:22.031-07:00Euphemism, Dysphemism, and Masochism<b><span style="font-size: large;">On the Quarrel Over Lydda</span></b><br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-5xkaWa2ODYM/VAgHYuZraBI/AAAAAAAAAWw/uR7xjYyfqLg/s1600/LyddaAirportCapture.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-5xkaWa2ODYM/VAgHYuZraBI/AAAAAAAAAWw/uR7xjYyfqLg/s1600/LyddaAirportCapture.png" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b><i>Lydda (now Ben Gurion) airport, captured by the IDF in 1948.&nbsp;</i></b></span></td></tr></tbody></table>At Mosaic magazine, a fascinating dispute recently concluded over an incident that took place during Israel's 1948 War of Independence. The cause of the trouble, at least in the first instance, was a chapter in Ha'aretz journalist Ari Shavit's bestselling book, <i><a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/My-Promised-Land-Triumph-Tragedy/dp/1922247545/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1409818645&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=ari+shavit" target="_blank">My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel</a></i>, which deals with the conquest of the Arab city of Lydda. More specifically at issue was Shavit's description of what occurred there as a massacre, for which he held Zionism explicitly responsible.<br /><br />For those unfamiliar with the story, a quick&nbsp;<i>précis</i>:<br /><br />On 14 May 1948, as the last of the British forces withdrew, bringing the curtain down on Mandatory Palestine,&nbsp;Israel declared its independence. The next day, Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, refusing to recognise the new state, declared war and invaded from the south, east, and north, respectively. Only 3 years after the Holocaust had ended, a state created as a refuge for a persecuted nation found itself faced with an eliminationist - and possibly genocidal - war on three fronts.<br /><br />On 11 July, as the war turned in Israel's favour, Israeli forces approached the city of Lydda. The operational order of 26 June, codenamed <i>Larlar</i>, described their mission as follows:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">To attack in order to destroy the enemy forces in the area of the bases Lydda-Ramla-Latrun-Ramallah, to capture these bases and by so doing to free the city of Jerusalem and the road to it from enemy pressure.</blockquote>The battle for Lydda began with a charge of armoured vehicles during the course of which dozens of Arabs and nine Israeli soldiers were shot dead. The Arab irregulars stationed in Lydda, stunned by the ferocity of the raid, watched as Israeli forces took up positions in the town. The inhabitants were rounded up and ordered to report to the Great Mosque and the Church of St George where they were temporarily confined. It was assumed that Lydda had been taken and pacified.<br /><br />The next day at noon, two Jordanian armoured cars entered the city, surprising the IDF. A firefight broke out and pandemonium erupted. Armed Arab irregulars, perhaps believing the Jordanian cars heralded further reinforcement, began to fire at Israeli soldiers, who were also reporting that grenades had been thrown from in or around a building known as the Small Mosque (distinct from the Great Mosque, where unarmed detainees were being held).<br /><br />In response to the uprising, Israeli troops returned fire wildly, threw grenades into houses, and fired an anti-tank missile at the Small Mosque killing a large number of those inside. It was all over in 30 minutes. The IDF lost just four soldiers. The exact number of Arab casualties is disputed, but the losses are generally thought to be in three figures. Over the next 24 hours or so, the detainees were released and those Arab inhabitants of Lydda not already fleeing the city were expelled into the West Bank.<br /><br />Part of the problem posed by Shavit's handling of these events is that he's dealing with history but approaching it as a journalist; this is a personal, emotional work, not a scholarly one. And because he's therefore concerned with the demands and possibilities of narrative and style, complexities inevitably get collapsed into big symbols and themes.<br /><br />Shavit has structured his book so that each chapter represents a particular historical event, movement, or development. Thus, the chapter on Lydda represents the 1948 war - the triumph of Zionism and the tragedy of Palestinian defeat and expulsion, encapsulating his book's subtitle rather too neatly. It is partly for this reason, I suspect, that it was the chapter selected in advance of the book's publication to appear <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/10/21/lydda-1948" target="_blank">in abridged form in the New Yorker</a>. When the article appeared on 21 October 2013, it generated a great deal of attention and comment. So did the book when it was published a month later.<br /><br />Shavit conceives of what happened at Lydda in grandiloquent, quasi-Biblical terms: 'Zionism' - the Jewish quest for self-determination in their historic homeland - is here personalised as a vengeful deity descending on Lydda, massacring its people, and smiting the city. But it is on the ashes of these crimes, Shavit insists, that Israel has built a democracy worth defending. His story of Zionism and Lydda, then, is one of sin and redemption; an experience in expiation.<br /><br />Shavit loves his country but feels he must atone for 1948. He invites the reader - or rather, the <i>Zionist</i> reader - to join him in a display penitence for events which occurred nine years before his birth. The sins for which Shavit and his liberal Zionist audience want absolution are also of a Biblical nature - they are the sins inherited from previous generations and passed down from parent to child like a curse.&nbsp;Lydda, Shavit warns portentously, symbolises "our black box", inside of which "lies the dark secret of Zionism". As an Arab town at the very heart of Israel, he writes...<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">Zionism could not bear Lydda. From the very beginning, there was a substantial contradiction between Zionism and Lydda. If Zionism was to be, Lydda could not be. If Lydda was to be, Zionism could not be.</blockquote>The ugly truth, Shavit tells us, is that it was "Zionism" which "carrie[d] out a massacre in the city of Lydda". Then, as tens of thousands of Arabs stream out of the city and into the Jordanian West Bank, he states: "Zionism obliterates Lydda". Shavit's use of the term "obliterates" is obviously figurative. But is his use of the term "massacre" intended to be figurative or literal?&nbsp;The casual mixture of the literal and the figurative makes it hard to tell. There were, however, no shortage of people happy to take him at his word without inquiring further. I was one of them.<br /><br />But when Ari Shavit's claim of a massacre at Lydda caught Israeli historian Martin Kramer's sceptical eye, he decided to look into it. In July of this year, Mosaic magazine published the results of his investigations: a 9000 word essay, entitled <i>What Happened at Lydda</i>, in which Kramer methodically analysed Shavit's version of events and found it wanting.<br /><br />Unlike Shavit, Kramer's first responsibility as a practising historian is not to good storytelling but to establishing what most probably happened. Kramer contends that what happened at Lydda was not a massacre but a battle, albeit a chaotic one with highly disproportionate losses to the Palestinian side. Damagingly, he unearths further testimony given by Shavit's own interviewees that either contradicts or significantly complicates his version of events.<br /><br />And, as Kramer invites us to notice, it turns out that Shavit's omissions and elisions&nbsp;all point in the same direction and&nbsp;support the same narrative demands. This happy coincidence is unlikely to result from sloppy scholarship. Shavit is just doing what storytellers have always done: fashioning a story in his own way, so as to emphasise the themes he wishes to explore. But in so doing, Kramer argues, he had helped to further defame an already slandered state.<br /><br />Ari Shavit, regrettably, declined to respond. So in the interests of furthering the discussion, Mosaic invited the historian Benny Morris to weigh in.<br /><br />Morris is well-placed to comment. As a member of those Israeli scholars who became known as the 'New Historians', he has emerged as one of Israel's leading authorities on the 1948 war, writing four books on the subject between 1988 and 2008, and editing a fifth.<br /><br />The New Historians emerged following the declassification of large parts of the Israeli archives in 1978. This development prompted a surge of revisionist scholarship devoted, not just to updating the record, but to critically re-examining some of Israel's most sensitive foundational myths. Some of what they wrote has since been rejected or updated; much of it has become a part of accepted consensus; other areas - like this one, apparently - remain fiercely disputed.<br /><br />Furthermore, it is on Morris's work that Shavit reveals he has relied for Lydda's casualty figures and his description of what occurred there as "a massacre". In his 2008 book, <i>1948: The First Arab-Israeli War</i>,<i>&nbsp;</i>Morris summarised what happened at Lydda like this:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">A firefight ensued, and the locals joined in, sniping from windows and rooftops. The jittery Palmahniks [Israeli soldiers] responded by firing at anything that moved, throwing grenades into houses and massacring detainees in a mosque compound; altogether, "about 250" townspeople died and many were injured, according to IDF records. [pp. 289-90]</blockquote>Morris, however, declared himself unimpressed by Shavit's account which, he wrote, "distorts in the grand manner". And he rejected Shavit's central contention that Zionism needed to be indicted. Lydda was not and is not Zionism's black box.<br /><br />But then, nor was Morris all that persuaded by Martin Kramer's contribution, which he accused of trying to whitewash the Israeli crimes of massacre and expulsion. And he agreed with Shavit's claim (derived, as it was, from Morris's own writing) that "Lydda was the biggest massacre of the 1948 war".<br /><br />Thereafter, the debate sets Ari Shavit's book aside and refocusses on trying to establish what actually occurred over 30 minutes in Lydda on July 12, 1948. From what I can tell the gaps between Kramer and Morris about the events themselves are fairly narrow. But the debate about numbers and testimony is complicated by mutual suspicion of a perceived agenda relating to how these events ought to be&nbsp;described.<br /><br />Benny Morris is the sworn foe of euphemism. As a Zionist, he insists that Israel must be defended for what it is, not what we would like it to be, and that this requires historians to catalogue its crimes and mistakes with unsparing frankness.<br /><br />Martin Kramer agrees that Israel should be defended for what it is. But what worries him is an overcorrection into dysphemism. Euphemism distorts reality by sanitising it and reducing argument to apologetics. Dysphemism - the substitution of a neutral term with a pejorative or inflammatory one - does the reverse; it distorts reality by poisoning it and reducing argument to invective.<br /><br />And so, once the available facts had been disputed and discussed, the debate's conclusion turned on a question of language. About half-way through their final exchange at Mosaic, entitled <i>The Meaning of Massacre</i>, almost as an aside, Benny Morris suddenly appears to concede the point:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">Perhaps part of the problem stems from the meaning of the word “massacre.” Of course, all would agree that if you line up 100 civilians or unarmed POWs against a wall and shoot them, you have a massacre. But what occurred in Lydda was more complicated.<br />A firefight with two Jordanian armored cars and sniping by armed townspeople provoked mass killing by a small IDF contingent that felt vulnerable and panicky: 300 to 400 men in the center of a town that they thought had surrendered (it hadn’t) and that contained tens of thousands of locals and refugees. And the Arabs were the ones who had started the war.</blockquote>Here Morris defines "massacre" as I would understand it in this context: the deliberate mass killing of unarmed civilians or detainees. Since Morris acknowledges that this is not what happened in Lydda,&nbsp;that would appear to settle the matter. But he then stubbornly defends his use of the term anyway, only in a metaphorical sense - to covey recklessness and vastly disproportionate losses:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">But whatever the extenuating circumstances, had IDF troops acted in such a manner today, given current legal and moral norms, they would most likely have been put on trial—by Israel. One can argue that one shouldn’t “judge” soldiers’ behavior in the past by today’s standards. Agreed. But this doesn’t change the fact that they committed a massacre.</blockquote>This is a slippery defence, and its potential to mislead is large. When Morris writes in <i>1948</i> that Lydda witnessed "the massacring of detainees in a mosque compound", it evokes lurid images of helpless men, women, and children being arbitrarily dragged from their houses and having their throats slit by rampaging soldiers. Morris's use of the term "slaughter" during his debate with Kramer only reinforces this impression.<br /><br />This obscure semantic dispute is important precisely because the rhetoric deployed against Israel has become so thick with abuse, that causal dysphemism is now central to the way the entire conflict is debated, reported, and discussed. In the most recent Gaza war, Israel was widely and routinely accused of committing "massacres", the term often meant to reflect the disproportionate casualty figures, but understood by many to mean the deliberate mass murder of civilians. Thus is the picture created in the mind of the uninformed or hitherto neutral observer of a state which pitilessly liquidates innocents.<br /><br />But to misapply the term to the War of Independence, as Kramer argues Shavit and Morris have done, is to concede something of even greater value to those who would delegitimise the very existence of the Israeli state: the notion that it was created in sin. Such people are not interested in Zionism's redemption or liberal Zionists' tormented confessions.<br /><br />For Israel's enemies, the only acceptable act of contrition would be the disestablishment of the whole rotten state. And to that end, if Israel's sin is indeed original, it may legitimately be denied credit for any achievement and condemned twice over for every crime. This accusation is made explicit by a Zionist in Ari Shavit's book: Zionism committed a massacre in Lydda, and it was a massacre without which Israel would not and could not&nbsp;have been created.<br /><br />Massacres <i>were </i>sometimes<i>&nbsp;</i>committed&nbsp;during the 1948 war, of course. But in trying to ascertain how many, it is no more useful to re-describe a battle as a massacre than it is to whitewash a massacre as a battle. To do either creates not just a category confusion but also a moral one. And yet this confusion persists, in part, because it satisfies a peculiar need.<br /><br />I find it interesting to note that, by Kramer's account, those most effusive in their praise for Shavit's book, and for the Lydda extract in particular, have not circulated his rebuttal. There are many possible reasons for this, but one of them, I suspect, is that Kramer's analysis did not offer them the same easy but perverse satisfaction as Shavit's account: the satisfaction of feeling good about feeling bad.<br /><br /><br /><i>The entire discussion can be found collected into a single 36 page .pdf document <a href="http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/martinkramer/files/what_happened_at_lydda_kramer.pdf" target="_blank">here</a>. It includes a contribution from historian Efraim Karsh, unmentioned above, which appeared in Mosaic after Kramer's essay but before Morris's first reply. I encourage those who have enjoyed this post to read the whole exchange. Aside from the issues at hand, seeing history debated this way is its own reward.&nbsp;</i>Unrepentant Jacobinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09256579083755037018noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5380090049852721671.post-21076778624930426352014-06-29T19:11:00.000-07:002014-06-29T19:36:14.190-07:00Defending the Indefensible<b><span style="font-size: large;">Honour Killings and the Limits of Free Speech</span></b><br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Yo-h592Gdds/U6-y-_aBCZI/AAAAAAAAAUU/2XypQ4V8NN0/s1600/729567-uthman-badar-1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Yo-h592Gdds/U6-y-_aBCZI/AAAAAAAAAUU/2XypQ4V8NN0/s1600/729567-uthman-badar-1.jpg" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><span style="font-size: small;">Hizb ut-Tahrir spokesman Uthman Badar</span></b></td></tr></tbody></table>On Tuesday 24 June, the Sydney Opera House announced the cancellation of a talk entitled "Honour Killings Are Morally Justified", scheduled to be delivered at the annual Festival of Dangerous Ideas by Uthman Badar, a Sydney-based spokesman for the Islamist organisation Hizb ut-Tahrir. The <a href="http://d16outft0soac8.cloudfront.net/uploadedFiles/About_Us/Media/Media_Releases/Corporate_2014/Statement%20from%20Sydney%20Opera%20House%20-%20Uthman%20Badar%20at%20Festival%20of%20Dangerous%20Ideas%202014.pdf">full statement</a> read as follows:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">The Festival of Dangerous Ideas is intended to be a provocation to thought and discussion, rather than simply a provocation. It is always a matter of balance and judgement, and in this case&nbsp;a line has been crossed. Accordingly, we have decided not to proceed with the scheduled&nbsp;session with Uthman Badar. It is clear from the public reaction that the title has given the wrong&nbsp;impression of what Mr Badar intended to discuss. Neither Mr Badar, the St James Ethics Centre,&nbsp;nor Sydney Opera House in any way advocates honour killings or condones any form of violence&nbsp;against women.</blockquote>Simon Longstaff, the executive director of the St. James Ethics Centre, which is organising and curating the Festival, then posted the following <a href="https://twitter.com/SimonLongstaff/statuses/481405942353768448" target="_blank">statement on twitter</a>:<br /><br /><blockquote class="twitter-tweet tw-align-center" lang="en">The session to explore 'honour killing' has been cancelled. Alas, people read the session title - and no further. Just too dangerous.<br />— Simon Longstaff (@SimonLongstaff)&nbsp;<a href="https://twitter.com/SimonLongstaff/statuses/481405942353768448">June 24, 2014</a></blockquote><br />It is unclear from Longstaff's use of the passive voice whether he reluctantly assented to the talk's cancellation or whether it was a decision imposed upon him by the venue. Either way, he was clearly unhappy. But, like the venue, <a href="https://twitter.com/SimonLongstaff/statuses/481469560260808704" target="_blank">he conceded</a> the title had been "a mistake" unreflective of Badar's arguments.<br /><br />The difficulty with this is that by Badar's own account (which I have yet to see disputed by anyone connected with the event), the title of the session&nbsp;was not his idea, but was suggested by the St James Ethics Centre. He then wrote the talk to order. So if the title really does not match the content, it is because Badar did not deliver on his brief, which was the unambiguous defence of a barbaric practice. In&nbsp;<a href="https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=695998727132843&amp;id=238728026193251" target="_blank">a facebook post</a>, published after the furore erupted but before the event was cancelled, Badar protested that this was indeed the case:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">As for the content of my presentation, I wont [sic] be revealing much before the event itself. Surprise, surprise. I will, however, say that the suggestion that I would advocate for honour killings, as understand [sic] in the west, is ludicrous and something I would normally not deem worth of [sic] dignifying with a response. Rather, this is about discussing the issue at a deeper level, confronting accepted perceptions, assumptions and presumptions and seeing things from a different perspective. Is that too much to ask of the liberal mind?</blockquote>Had the talk's title been framed as a question rather than an assertion, this would be an acceptable defence. But it wasn't, so it's simply an admission by Badar that he had failed to defend the pre-agreed proposition. That this failure is now being used to berate his critics is both an amusing irony and indicative of his lack of integrity.<br /><br />But even his protestation of failure is not entirely honest, since it is obvious from the pompous tone of the accompanying abstract that Badar <i>did</i> feel he had defended the proposition, at least to his own satisfaction. Having agreed to argue that honour killings are justified, he approached the topic as a student might approach an exam question which doesn't quite fit the answer he's pre-prepared. The brief abstract originally published (now deleted) on the Festival's website informed us:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">For most of recorded history parents have reluctantly sacrificed their children—sending them to kill or be killed for the honour of their nation, their flag, their king, their religion. But what about killing for the honour of one’s family? Overwhelmingly, those who condemn ‘honour killings’ are based in the liberal democracies of the West. The accuser and moral judge is the secular (white) westerner and the accused is the oriental other; the powerful condemn the powerless. By taking a particular cultural view of honour, some killings are condemned whilst others are celebrated. In turn, the act becomes a symbol of everything that is allegedly wrong with the other culture.</blockquote>Or, more succinctly: "Mind your own business."<br /><br />While this is not an assertion that honour killings are morally justified, Badar's apparent demand for moral neutrality precludes anything approaching condemnation, least of all from secular (white) Westerners.<br /><br />Longstaff - who <a href="https://twitter.com/SimonLongstaff" target="_blank">describes himself</a> as "a philosopher focusing on the ethical dimension of life" - reckons this is all fascinating, and has said he finds Badar's arguments to be "<a href="https://twitter.com/SimonLongstaff/status/481468508979470336" target="_blank">sophisticated</a>" and "<a href="https://twitter.com/SimonLongstaff/status/481469560260808704" target="_blank">nuanced</a>". It's really neither of these things. Nor is it remotely surprising or unusual coming from its author. This is simply the expected jargon-sprinkled moral equivalence and cultural relativism which are the bread and butter of Hizb ut-Tahrir's&nbsp;tedious propaganda. No matter how grotesque the traditions and practices of the Muslim world may appear to be, it is always the West - demonic monopoliser of the planet's wealth and power - which is found to have the beam in its eye.<br /><br />As for what illiberals like Badar may reasonably expect from what he scornfully calls "the liberal mind", the outcry which followed the announcement of the session was entirely foreseeable, not least because no-one - liberal or otherwise - likes to have their intelligence insulted.<br /><br />Some may, as Longstaff claimed, not have bothered to read past the title, but given its lack of ambiguity that's perfectly understandable. Others may have decided to accept its plain declarative English over the burbling obscurantist sophistry of the attached abstract. Some may have resented the dishonesty of what appeared to be a bait-and-switch, and that it was an indictment of their own alleged hypocrisy to which they were to be treated. Or perhaps it was Badar's cynical racialisation of the argument they disliked. Or the re-description of those men who murder their kin as more properly belonging amongst the ennobled ranks of "the powerless".<br /><br />For me, Badar's most objectionable claim is that condemnation of honour-based violence is particular to the West. Not only is this assertion demonstrably false, dismissing at a stroke the courageous women and men organising to fight for human rights in the Global South, but it carries the implication that those forced to submit to honour codes accept their subordination and abuse with uniform passivity and equanimity. These people, we are given to understand, have no need for peculiarly 'Western' notions of gender equality and individual autonomy, or the freedom to love and marry as they choose.<br /><br />Nevertheless, for a number of reasons, the Sydney Opera House's decision to cancel the talk was disappointing, and the latest in a regrettable string of incidents in which speakers have been stood down or disinvited in response to outraged protests. The title ought to have been altered so that it accurately reflected Badar's arguments and an apology ought to have been issued, but the session should have proceeded as planned rather than folding before a censorious campaign. After all, if the West's liberal press and academics&nbsp;are permitted to make identical arguments from moral equivalence, then why not a besuited fanatic at a Festival dedicated to the expression of supposedly dangerous ideas?<br /><br />Instead, the event's cancellation has afforded Uthman Badar, an Islamist spokesman for a racist, misogynistic, theo-fascist organisation, the opportunity to denounce the West for its disgraceful 'Islamophobia' (which was, in any event, the idea all along) and to complain with righteous bitterness about his victimisation:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">Things were assumed and outrage ensued. That is the way Islamophobia works. The assumption is ‘we know what the Muslims will say’. This a very instructive case as far as that goes. I think the hysteria says a lot about Islamophobia and about the extent and the depth of it in this country. It says a lot about the reality of freedom and the space that minorities have to move in in this country, Muslims in particular.</blockquote>You don't say. It is difficult to escape the suspicion that an activist like Badar anticipated this endgame from the moment he agreed to speak. If anyone is guilty of naivety it is the St James Ethics Centre who have inadvertently helped to promote the Islamists' victimhood agenda and accomplished nothing else besides making themselves look ridiculous. But with dismaying predictability,&nbsp;<i>The Guardian</i>&nbsp;found it necessary <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jun/26/uthman-badar-both-islamophobias-victim-and-unwilling-accomplice" target="_blank">to clear space</a> for one Yassir Morsi to defend Badar as a guileless naif and unwitting pawn of the 'Islamophobia' industry:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">Badar ought to have intuitively known better that this is what Muslims endure. He should have known about the industry of stereotyping. It was bad enough that the festival’s organisers were so insensitive. For a publicity stunt, they exploited the feelings about victims of, and those left to deal with, "honour" killings. What was also distasteful was their exploiting of a persistent Islamophobia to increase ticket sales and gain attention. It says everything about how attractive the Muslim is as a commodity that sells.</blockquote>Islamists who complain of 'Orientalist' paternalism are quite prepared to assume the role of bewildered children when evading personal responsibility for their own choices and actions, and newspapers like <i>The Guardian </i>can be relied upon to provide mainstream support. In <a href="http://discussion.theguardian.com/comment-permalink/37448805" target="_blank">a comment</a>&nbsp;posted below Morsi's article, the Council of Ex-Muslims Forum could barely contain its disgust:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">[Hizb ut-Tahrir] have utilised the rhetoric of identity politics and multicultural tolerance to position themselves as victims, and this enables a liberal newspaper to publish apologia for them despite being far-right extremists . . .&nbsp;The Left should be on guard against far-right fascists and misogynists who superficially use the rhetoric of progressive causes to peddle their agenda. Let this be a wake up call for everyone about the decadent arrogance of cultural relativists on the Left who seem obliviously naive about who they empower and enable, and the far-right Islamists who make hay in their sunshine. Enough is enough.</blockquote>Morsi&nbsp;neglects, of course, to remind his readership that the organisation of which Badar is a spokesman seeks the imposition of a totalitarian medieval Caliphate in which dissent is crushed, homosexuality and apostasy are punished by death, women and non-Muslims are subjugated, adulterers are stoned, murderers are publicly crucified, and thieves have their limbs amputated. The inclusion of such information might have required him to recalibrate the degree to which Badar’s hitherto wholesome reputation had been traduced.<br /><br />Had Longstaff wanted Badar to defend a 'dangerous idea' in which he does believe, then any of these would have sufficed. The Hizb ut-Tahrir constitution is not short on 'provocative' material. On the other hand, had Longstaff really wanted the defence of honour killings their title advertised, he should have found a speaker prepared to provide it.<br /><br />Simon Longstaff and the St James Ethics Centre's wish to provide a platform for dangerous or taboo ideas is a laudable and important one. Rationalism - the idea that all arguments must be fought and won on the basis of reason - is one of the most important and valuable legacies of the Enlightenment, and no-one has the right to declare a point of view unsayable or unhearable, no matter how controversial or repellent. As John Stuart Mill famously argued in <i>On Liberty</i>, "If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind."<br /><br />Bestiality, paedophilia, incest, infanticide, euthanasia, ethnic cleansing, slavery, torture, eugenics, Holocaust denial, female genital mutilation or any other taboo or abhorrent practices must remain acceptable topics for debate for as long as there are people willing to defend them, either as a critical exercise or from a position of unapologetic advocacy. And the unpleasant reality is that there are plenty of people alive today who hold that honour killing is not simply justifiable but a moral requirement and duty.<br /><br />A particularly horrifying example occurred in May of this year when a young, pregnant woman named&nbsp;Farzana Parveen was <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/may/27/pregnant-pakistani-woman-stoned-to-death" target="_blank">stoned to death</a> by her family in Pakistan for marrying against her family's wishes.&nbsp;"I killed my daughter as she had insulted all of our family by marrying a man without our consent, and I have no regret over it," her father was reported to have said when he was arrested.<br /><br />The <a href="http://hrcp-web.org/hrcpweb/">Human Rights Commission of Pakistan</a> reports that 869 women were slain in honour killings in 2013 alone, although this is thought to be a very conservative figure. But what made this particular case so shocking is that Parveen was murdered on the steps of the High Court in Lahore in broad daylight, allegedly in front of police officers who stood by impassively as her skull was smashed with bricks. A mere two days later, her husband, hitherto presented as a traumatised widower,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/may/29/pakistan-man-protesting-honour-killing-admits-strangling-first-wife" target="_blank">casually revealed</a> that he had strangled his first wife in order to marry his second.<br /><br />For many in the West who have internalised the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, the full implications of this terrible story are incomprehensible. But this is partly due to a reluctance to listen to what cultural chauvinists and religious fanatics actually say. Invaluable online resources like that of the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) are making this easier to do. Quite apart from the need to defend the universal principle of free expression, it is now counterproductive to simply declare that the defence of honour violence must be suppressed or confined to mosques and madrasas far away from liberal eyes and ears. On the contrary, it would be instructive, I think, if Western audiences were to hear the murder of Farzana Parveen&nbsp;defended by those who truly value this tradition's survival. For if the honour code's pitiless and lethal misogyny is occasionally laid out by its impenitent defenders, it can no longer be dismissed as an Orientalist's fantastical misrepresentation.<br /><br />The Festival of Dangerous Ideas are not of course obliged to provide a platform to views like these. But when organisations do, they should not be criticised unless they affirm endorsement. Bring the advocates of honour violence forward. Let them explain why women must be made to bear the honour of their family, while men are excused responsibility. And why this burden of honour necessarily requires women to forfeit their autonomy. And why they must pay with their lives if they resist.<br /><br />It may then become clearer to those disinclined to criticise any culture but their own how the lives of women can be considered so cheap that families are able to murder their own mothers, sisters, wives, and daughters without the disturbance of conscience. And it may become harder for Islamists like Badar and ethical thinkers like Longstaff to relativise away the benefits of liberal, secular democracy, and the suffering of those not fortunate enough to enjoy its rights, freedoms, and protections.<br /><br /><br /><i><b>UPDATE:</b> As I was completing the first draft of this post,&nbsp;<a href="http://edition.cnn.com/2014/06/28/world/asia/pakistan-honor-murders/index.html" target="_blank">CNN reported</a>&nbsp;that a young newly-wed couple had been decapitated in Pakistan by the bride's family, who then turned themselves in.</i><br /><script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script>Unrepentant Jacobinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09256579083755037018noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5380090049852721671.post-21538145516861690932014-06-14T17:07:00.000-07:002014-06-14T17:21:10.443-07:00Resistance is Futile<b><span style="font-size: large;">Owen Jones and the Surrender of Iraq</span></b><br /><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-oS-Vs-uX51Y/U5yvhSrU6FI/AAAAAAAAAT8/Apaa-aDfCx0/s1600/49790image1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-oS-Vs-uX51Y/U5yvhSrU6FI/AAAAAAAAAT8/Apaa-aDfCx0/s1600/49790image1.jpg" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div>In response to news that the al Qaeda splinter group, the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), had <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/11/mosul-isis-gunmen-middle-east-states" target="_blank">seized control of Mosul</a> and surrounding territories in Northern Iraq, the <i>Times</i> journalist David Aaronovitch <a href="http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/columnists/article4116149.ece" target="_blank">summarised the desperate situation</a>&nbsp;[£] as follows:</div><blockquote class="tr_bq">Isis [now] loosely controls a big stretch of territory in eastern Syria and western Iraq and has captured millions of pounds of cash in Mosul banks and tonnes of Iraqi military equipment donated or sold by the United States. It threatens the existence of a unitary Iraq, the safety of the Kurdish autonomous region and the stability of the whole area.</blockquote><div>These same events prompted Owen Jones to publish his own&nbsp;<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jun/12/anti-war-protesters-iraq-invasion-bloody-chaos" target="_blank">article for the Guardian</a>, which began like this:&nbsp;</div><blockquote class="tr_bq">I have encountered no sense of vindication, no "I told you so", among veterans of the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ysva-csAg8A">anti-war protest of 15 February 2003</a>&nbsp;in response to the events in Iraq.</blockquote><div><div>The first thing one notices is that this sentence looks very silly indeed sitting beneath a headline which flatly declares: "We anti-war protesters were right: the Iraq invasion has led to bloody chaos". </div><div><br /></div><div>Secondly, Jones's use of the term "veterans" to describe peace activists just a week after commemoration of the Normandy landings is unfortunate, to say the least. D-Day veterans are the survivors of a mission in which thousands gave their lives in defence of democracy. By contrast, those peaceniks (including Jones himself), valorised with this term in Jones's article, merely marched through London in lawful demonstration against government policy, and at no risk to themselves whatsoever.&nbsp;</div><div><br /></div><div>And, lest it be forgotten, they did so in opposition to an attempt to build a democracy on the ruins of Saddam Hussein's fascist despotism.&nbsp;</div><div><br /></div><div>Whatever one's related views about the threat posed by Iraqi WMDs, there is, I'm afraid, no getting around this awkward fact. One might argue that the <i>casus belli</i>&nbsp;was manufactured and/or repeatedly altered, but the stated goal of democratisation, one central to neoconservative ideology, remained consistent throughout. Given that the anti-war movement were not exactly preoccupied with devising an alternative, peaceful means to this end (beyond the occasional, woolly reference to the 'Iraqi grassroots'), this left them objectively defending a totalitarian status quo.</div><div><br /></div><div>Not that this is a morally reprehensible position <i>per se</i>. The utilitarian case for war can be countered with a utilitarian case against it; in other words, one can hold that the consequences of intervening have been worse than the probable consequences of not intervening, and that the West's stated goals were always unattainable and unrealistic. The problem is that, since the war <i>did</i> occur, a retrospective consequentialist argument for non-intervention depends upon acceptance of an unknowable counterfactual. We only have the facts of one half of the argument, and the consequences of non-intervention in Syria do not speak to an attractive alternative.</div><div><br /></div><div>Nonetheless, it&nbsp;is with this kind of far-sighted thinking that Jones wishes to vindicate the arguments of the anti-war movement:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">The catastrophic results of the Iraq invasion are often portrayed as having been impossible to predict, and only inevitable with the benefit of hindsight. If only to prevent future calamities from happening, this is a myth that needs to be dispelled. The very fact that the demonstration on that chilly February day in 2003 was the biggest Britain had ever seen, is testament to the fact that disaster seemed inevitable to so many people.</blockquote></div><div>The February demonstration was testament to the breadth and depth of opposition to the war. It tells us nothing, by itself, about the marchers' reasons. Apocalyptic predictions of disaster are part and parcel of opposition rhetoric before any kind of armed conflict, and were just one of a battery of ever-evolving objections to the war in Iraq, many of which contradicted one another, and many of which have not been borne out.</div><div><div><br /></div><div>What in fact drove opposition to the Iraq war wasn't sober and wise prognostication&nbsp;at all. On the contrary, opposition was ideological and visceral. In the wake of 9/11, America experienced a surge in support for a right wing President the European Left already mistrusted. Reflexively uneasy with national pride, they became uneasier still as they watched it being mobilised in support of not one but two Middle Eastern wars. Pacifists and those already inclined to believe that America had, to some degree or other, brought the 9/11 attacks upon itself were soon joined by those who felt that al Qaeda's atrocities were being exploited to advance a hegemonic geopolitical agenda. Some saw hubris, others saw something more sinister and dangerous. Suspicion only increased as the British and American governments sought to terrify their publics into supporting the approaching invasion with fear-mongering speeches and lurid intelligence dossiers filled with alarmist misinformation.&nbsp;</div><div><br /></div><div>What united opponents of the war was not a rational analysis of the likely effect on Iraq's Shia, Sunni, Kurdish and Marsh Arab communities; it was hostility to the governments who would lie to their citizens and take them for fools, and hostility to American power in the hands of an administration they despised. One can sympathise with this kind of thinking or not but, either way, it requires no consideration of either Iraqis or their interests.&nbsp;</div><div><br /></div><div>Such consideration remains conspicuous by its absence from anti-war arguments offered today. The first part of Jones's column is a self-aggrandising reminder of how prescient he and the anti-war camp were; the second of how wrong and generally unsympathetic everyone else is:</div><blockquote class="tr_bq">The commentators who cheered on the conflict, far from being driven from public life are still feted: still writing columns, still dispensing advice in TV studios, still hosting think tank breakfasts.</blockquote><div>Jones also writes columns and dispenses advice in TV studios, and he sits on the National Advisory Panel of a left wing think tank called the Centre for Labour And Social Studies. So the juxtaposition of pro-war elitism with his self-flattering portrait of principled grassroots stoicism is unpersuasive. What really irks him is that, having been so completely right about something so completely important, the West's most influential media organisations and foreign policy think-tanks have not been filled up with people who think like Lindsey German and Tony Benn.&nbsp;</div><div><br /></div><div>As for those commentators who ought to be shamed from public life to make way for them, Jones singles out David Aaronovitch&nbsp;and his article in the <i>Times</i> for particular opprobrium. He finds it simply incomprehensible that Aaronovitch is not broken by shame and remorse.</div><div><br /></div><div>Irrespective of the hostages to fortune Aaronovitch unwisely conceded back in 2003, he never struck me as all that interested in quarrelling over the wording of Security Council resolutions or the dossiers about WMD. Along with a minority of like-minded Leftists, he decided that he wanted to see the back of Saddam Hussein's regime more than he hated the Bush administration, and that the mission to replace a Ba'athist dictatorship with a democracy was one worth supporting, not opposing.&nbsp;</div><div><br /></div><div>Mindful of the risks of doing so, Aaronoviotch arrived at this conclusion with considerably more reluctance and unease that Jones allows. But having offered Iraqi democrats his support, he has been consistent in his loyalty to their struggle ever since. Why should he apologise for positions he still holds? And why should he renounce his support for Iraqi democracy just as it faces its moment of greatest peril?</div><div><br /></div><div>For Owen Jones and the war's opponents, the very idea of democracy in Iraq had to be smothered at birth. It was either derided as a sham - a mere pretext used to justify Western plundering of a Middle Eastern nation - or as a pipe-dream so foolish and quixotic as to be worthy only of scorn. For if Iraq's democratic experiment stood any chance of success, then what exactly were they opposing?&nbsp;</div><div><br /></div><div>In this way, opponents of the war developed a perverse ideological interest in the neoconservative project failing, irrespective of the cost to Iraq and its people in whose name peaceniks invariably claimed to speak. And so it was that they conceded the battle for a democratic Iraq before it had even begun. As the country began its slow, gory slide into civil war in the aftermath of Saddam Hussein's fall and arrest, the bloody-minded schadenfreude from the anti-war camp, briefly silenced by the taking of Baghdad, began to gather confidence and authority, which were only reinforced by the non-appearance of WMDs. Not only was the growing mayhem a vindication of their opposition, but it would ensure that next time peace activists spoke on international affairs, democratic governments would be forced to listen.</div><div><br /></div><div>But democracy in Iraq is not a failure, nor has the idea that Arabs deserve accountable governance been decisively discredited, as Jones and his allies appear to believe. It is a work in progress. A deeply imperfect one, but one in which important, if fragile, gains have nonetheless been made in the teeth of appalling violence. All such gains are now threatened by the advance of ISIS, who seek nothing more noble that the enslavement of the Iraqi nation and its people. Jones, however, appears remarkably eager to excuse ISIS and its forerunners all responsibility for their actions. He will enlist their depredations when they add colour to his canvas of post-war carnage, but condemnation of their culpability remains oddly absent:</div><blockquote class="tr_bq">The US massacres in Fallujah in the immediate aftermath of the war, which helped radicalise the Sunni population, culminating in an assault on the city with white phosphorus. The beheadings, the kidnappings and hostage videos, the car bombs, the IEDs, the Sunni and Shia insurgencies, the torture <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/sep/21/iraq">declared by the UN</a> in 2006 to be worse than that under Saddam Hussein, the bodies with their hands and feet bound and dumped in rivers, the escalating sectarian slaughter, the millions of displaced civilians, and the hundreds of thousands who died: it has been one never-ending blur of horror since 2003.</blockquote><div>Jones is not to be detained by the niceties of who has been killing whom and why. Instead, all post-war violence is simply reported as the by-product the invasion, responsibility for which lies exclusively at the feet of the West. There is&nbsp;no accountability expected for the "never-ending blur of horror" visited on Iraq, except Western accountability.&nbsp;Battles fought to reclaim insurgent strongholds are reported as arbitrary massacres and simply run together with&nbsp;the car bombs, executions and marketplace slaughters carried out by the insurgents themselves.&nbsp;</div><div><br /></div><div>To Jones, such actions are not premeditated acts of mass murder performed by actors who have chosen to pursue a merciless theocratic agenda. They are simply manifestations of abstract and unaccountable 'blowback'; a violent and uncontrollable counter-reaction unleashed by Western actions. They are, Jones avers with barely-disguised satisfaction, simply the chickens of American imperialism and Nouri al-Maliki's Shi'ite sectarianism coming home to roost.</div><div><br /></div><div>The ISIS conquest of Mosul, we are given to understand, is just the latest development in an irreversible process, resistance to which is futile. "In a way," he sighs, "[the] opponents of the war were wrong. We were wrong because however disastrous we thought the consequences of the Iraq war, the reality has been worse."</div><div><br /></div><div>Having remarked ruefully on the anti-war movement's noble failure and righteously denounced the war's unrepentant supporters, he abandons Iraq to despair:</div><blockquote class="tr_bq">What hope, then, for the future? It is difficult to see how the continuing collapse of Iraq can be avoided: the more informed the expert, the more despairing they seem to be. There will be those who champion more western intervention. But whatever happens, this calamity must never be allowed to happen again.</blockquote><div>Jones gives no analysis of his own in support of this hopeless prognosis but, on the word of unnamed experts, we are assured that all is lost, just as he foretold.&nbsp;</div><div><br /></div><div>David Aaronovitch, on the other hand, is not minded to concede Iraq and its people to theocratic fascism just yet. Unlike Jones, he does not perceive ISIS to be a mere force of nature, but an army of organised, committed and extremely dangerous fanatics operating according to their own ruthless logic. Democrats in Iraq, he argues, need to be identified, supported and, wherever possible, protected from this menace. If this means airstrikes against ISIS positions, then so be it. In particular...</div><blockquote class="tr_bq">. . . [t]he Kurdish Autonomous Region of Iraq [KAR] and its 4.8 million inhabitants represent the one incontrovertible gain of the last Iraq war. We must do everything short of putting boots on the ground to help the Kurds to defend themselves against Isis and similar groups.&nbsp;Britain and France should give President Obama whatever encouragement he needs to take this action, and render whatever assistance the Americans might require.&nbsp;We don’t have to agree on anything else — 2003, WMD, Syrian red lines, whatever — just this.</blockquote>This last appeal is completely wasted on Jones. Nowhere in his article, framed in part as an indignant reply to Aaronovitch, is any mention made of the Kurds, a stateless people whose plight was once so important to the Left that Harold Pinter wrote an unwatchable play about them. As the beneficiaries of an invasion he opposed, the Kurds now find themselves forsaken by Jones, whose only comprehensible recommendation in response to the current crisis is a demand for Western penitence and inaction.<br /><br />Should the KAR fall to ISIS, then perhaps the Kurds will reclaim the attention of Owen Jones: for by then they will be just another inevitable casualty of a war he'd opposed, and further evidence that he has been right all along.</div></div>Unrepentant Jacobinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09256579083755037018noreply@blogger.com15tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5380090049852721671.post-70530704743625170252014-06-09T12:15:00.001-07:002014-06-10T21:11:38.598-07:00Victimisers as Victims<div><span style="font-size: large;"><b>Mehdi Hasan and the "New Jews"</b></span></div><div><br /></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-r9PgUxhjl-w/U5FGoa0ymEI/AAAAAAAAATg/8uhlLeZhIrQ/s1600/140604-jewish-museum-shooting-1007_56a4774dc5d4f4ba96aa132cd517aaee.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-r9PgUxhjl-w/U5FGoa0ymEI/AAAAAAAAATg/8uhlLeZhIrQ/s1600/140604-jewish-museum-shooting-1007_56a4774dc5d4f4ba96aa132cd517aaee.jpg" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i><b>The Jewish Museum in Brussels, Begium, where four people, <br />including an Israeli couple, were murdered on 24 May.</b></i></span></td></tr></tbody></table>On the 29th of May, Mehdi Hasan published <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/mehdi-hasan/ukip-ethnic-minorities_b_5409716.html" target="_blank">another piece about Islamophobia</a>&nbsp;at the Huffington Post. It came in the wake of&nbsp;alarming gains made by far-right parties in the European elections. As acknowledged by its author, it also came in the wake of a shooting at a Jewish Museum in Brussels in which an Israeli couple and a Belgian woman were shot dead. A fourth victim, critically injured during the shooting, succumbed to his injuries&nbsp;<a href="http://uk.reuters.com/article/2014/06/06/uk-belgium-shooting-idUKKBN0EH1W420140606" target="_blank">as I was drafting this post</a>.<br /><div><br /></div><div>The only suspect in the shooting, an Islamist jihadi and French national named&nbsp;Mehdi Nemmouche, was not identified and arrested until the day after the publication of Hasan's article. However, similarities to the shooting carried out by Mohammed Merah at a Jewish school in Toulouse in 2012 were already apparent, as was the attack's probable anti-Semitic intent.<br /><div><br /></div><div>Nevertheless, Mehdi Hasan thought that now would be good time to say this:<br /><div><blockquote class="tr_bq">In some respects, Muslims are the new Jews of Europe. The vile shooting at the Jewish Museum in Brussels on 24 May, in which three people were killed, might make this statement sound odd. Anti-Jewish attacks are indeed on the rise in Europe, which is deplorable and depressing, but thankfully anti-Semitism is now taboo in mainstream political discourse in a way in which Islamophobia isn't. These days, most anti-Semitic attacks are carried out by second-generation Arabs and are linked to anger over Israeli policies.</blockquote>For whatever it's worth, I do not believe that Mehdi Hasan is himself an Islamist. By which I mean that I have seen no evidence that he wishes his own freedom to be subject to the demands of State-imposed Islamic Law of any kind. That said, he displays a disturbing readiness to endorse Islamist arguments and talking points, the chief function of which is to re-describe the victimisers as victims.<br /><br />Hasan's reference to the "Jews of Europe" is historically imprecise, but the phrase most immediately evokes the Nuremberg Laws, concentration camps, and gas chambers. In light of Nemmouche's arrest, and the revelation that he is probably a member of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_State_of_Iraq_and_the_Levant" target="_blank">al Qaeda splinter group ISIS</a>, this sounds not merely "odd", but deranged. The qualifier offered by Hasan - that Muslims only resemble the Jews of Europe "in some respects" - is being asked to do more work than history or common sense will allow. The respects in which Muslims living in European democracies today are plainly&nbsp;<i>not</i>&nbsp;like the Jews of pre-war Germany so vastly outweigh the similarities that they invalidate the comparison.<br /><br />But the real function of this risible meme is not to draw a historically literate comparison but rather to circulate the idea that Muslims have now replaced Jews at the top of a perceived hierarchy of suffering. For if Muslims are the "new Jews", then the Jews' own claim to this perversely coveted title must have, by definition, expired.&nbsp;To use the words "but thankfully anti-Semitism", a mere five days after an anti-Semitic multiple murder, strikes me as unwise.&nbsp;To do so as the basis from which to argue that Muslims have a superior claim to victimhood strikes me as political, a feeling confirmed by Hasan's next observation that attacks on Jews no longer come from the nationalist far-right but from "second generation Arabs and are linked to anger over Israeli policies".<br /><br />I'm afraid I'm unable to see why being targeted by the Islamist assassins of al Qaeda is an improvement on being targeted by the nationalist far-right. And what exactly is the nature of this mysterious "link" by which Hasan connects the continuing occupation of the West Bank to the murder of two Israeli tourists in Belgium, who - for all Hasan knows - may have hated the Netanyahu government?<br /><br />In their co-authored book, <i><a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Myths-Illusions-Peace-Finding-Direction/dp/0143117696" target="_blank">Myths, Illusions and Peace</a></i>, the former Middle East negotiator and analyst Dennis Ross and the journalist David Makovsky describe this kind of "linkage" argument as "the mother of all myths" about the Middle East. Having examined the ways in which Arab governments have instrumentalised the conflict in Palestine as a means of pursuing their own political and geopolitical agendas, Makovsky and Ross turn to the matter of terrorism:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">[The linkage idea] has also been used as an explanation for terrorism. By anchoring political violence to grievance, terrorist perpetrators sought not only to justify their actions, but to neutralise those who would oppose them.</blockquote>The authors remind us that, in his earliest fatwas, Osama bin Laden displayed scant interest in the Palestinian conflict. He was instead preoccupied with forcing the removal of "crusader" (ie: American) soldiers from sacred Saudi Arabian soil, with toppling the illegitimate Saudi monarchy, and with re-establishing the Holy Islamic Caliphate under a particularly austere and cruel reading of Sharia Law. But...<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">. . . after 9/11, bin Laden discovered the utility of the Palestinian issue. Suddenly, he began more openly trying to tie his actions to the cause of the Palestinians. In one videotaped message after 9/11, he declared, "Neither America nor the people who live in it will dream of security before we live it in Palestine."</blockquote>As Ross and Makovsky point out, if this <i>ex post facto</i> rationale for the premeditated murder of almost 3000 people is to be believed, it must be reconciled with the knowledge that the 9/11 atrocity was being planned as talks to resolve the conflict in the Middle East were ongoing. Besides which, al Qaeda's broader revolutionary agenda includes a non-negotiable rejection of a Jewish State on Muslim land in any form. It defies plausibility that, had a conflict-ending agreement been signed at Camp David in July 2000, the mission would have been called off. Nonetheless, the idea persists that the conflict in Palestine is responsible, at least in part, for Islamist terror directed at diaspora Jews.<br /><br />It remains to be seen whether or not Mehdi Nemmouche, the alleged Brussels assassin, decides to invoke the suffering of Palestine in his own defence. But during the siege following <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toulouse_and_Montauban_shootings" target="_blank">the shootings in Toulouse and Montauban</a>&nbsp;in 2012, the assailant Muhamad Merah, also a self-described member of al Qaeda, let it be known that he had shot 3 Jewish children and a rabbi dead in order to avenge "Palestinian children".<br /><br />The French&nbsp;Party of the Indigenous of the Republic [PIR] (about which <a href="http://jacobinism.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/prepare-for-integrism.html" target="_blank">I have written previously</a>) responded by <a href="http://www.decolonialtranslation.com/english/PIR-s-view-on-the-murder-spree-in-toulouse.html" target="_blank">releasing a statement</a>, which read in part:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">We also feel anger and bitterness at the act of a young man claiming to support the cause of Palestinians and Afghanis. His act distorts the goals of these just causes, muddies the message and reinforces the side he claims to oppose . . .&nbsp;However, it would be wrong to believe that Mohamed Merah’s vengeful fantasies came out of nowhere. The terrible violence that he displayed this week was fed for years by the cold reason of the murderous wars being led by major powers in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere with the support of the Israeli state.&nbsp;<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">How could we not predict that all this would lead one day to violent actions in which Jewish French people, constantly linked by French propaganda to Zionism, would be the target? . . .&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">How could the possibility of the growing Islamophobia expressed ad nauseam, and becoming a major electoral refrain this year, moving some members of violent sects to action be ignored? Such a political-ideological context could not be ignored.</span></blockquote>Mehdi Hasan would, I think, struggle to disagree with any part of this sophistical attempt to reclothe a murderer of Jewish children in the rags of political martyrdom. After all, the same two mitigating elements deployed by Hasan post-Brussels are present and correct here: injustice in Palestine and Islamophobia at home.<br /><br />Unexamined "root cause" arguments for Islamic terror are highly expedient to Islamists who target civilians - they provide a comprehensible explanation for apparently arbitrary acts of savagery; they help disguise Islamism's supremacist agenda beneath a counter-narrative in which Islamists cast themselves as history's most abject victims; and they shift the focus - and ideally the blame - from the assassins themselves onto the policies to which they object.<br /><br />And they are, of course, also highly convenient to mainstream commentators like Mehdi Hasan, and the broadsheet Left's perverse Noam Chomsky tendency, since they add ballast to their own anti-war arguments. But what makes "root causism" dangerous is that it encourages the idea that democracies are to blame for the political violence committed against their citizens, and that foreign and domestic policy must therefore be altered to meet terrorist demands. This is what's also known as appeasement.<br /><br />Mehdi Hasan's defenders will object most strenuously (they always do) that he has spoken out about what he called the "dirty little secret" of Muslim anti-Semitism, and that he received considerable abuse from his co-religionists in general, and Islamists in particular, for his trouble.<br /><br />Indeed he has, and indeed he did. And returning to <a href="http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2013/03/sorry-truth-virus-anti-semitism-has-infected-british-muslim-community" target="_blank">his 2012 article on the subject</a> today, it should be noted that some of the language he used to describe the problem remains striking and emphatic:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">It is sheer hypocrisy for Muslims to complain of Islamophobia in every nook and cranny of British public life, to denounce the newspapers for running Muslim-baiting headlines, and yet ignore the rampant anti-Semitism in our own backyard. </blockquote>Upon publication, Hasan's courage in addressing this taboo topic was applauded by many unaccustomed to agreeing with him (<a href="https://twitter.com/jacobinism/statuses/314891931211661312" target="_blank">including me</a>). However, what's odd about the piece on reflection is the absence of analysis. Having publicly identified the problem and listed a handful of anecdotal examples, Hasan neglects to explore it:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">The truth is that the virus of anti-Semitism has infected members of the British Muslim community, both young and old. No, the ongoing Israel-Palestine conflict hasn’t helped matters. But this goes beyond the Middle East. How else to explain why British Pakistanis are so often the most ardent advocates of anti-Semitic conspiracies, even though there are so few Jews living in Pakistan?</blockquote>It is interesting to note that in 2014 Hasan argues that European anti-Semitism is largely the product of "Arab anger at Israeli policies". But in his piece about Muslim anti-Semitism a year earlier he had argued that the Middle East was a subordinate factor - something that "hasn't helped" but which does not, by itself, explain the conspiratorial Jew hatred which he tells us is "rampant" in Muslim communities. He was closer to the truth the first time around. But as for "how else" to account for this poisonous phenomenon, no answer if forthcoming. Having opened his inquiry, Hasan abruptly abandons it when its conclusions threaten to become toxic.<br /><br />One of the difficulties faced by Hasan and the 'anti-Imperialist' Left in combatting Islamist propagandising on terrorism and Israel is that their anti-Westernism and anti-Zionism predispose them to agree with most of it. And, having become comfortable endorsing Islamist narratives regarding foreign policy and the Middle East, they find themselves more at ease defending their new allies in the increasingly bitter disputes over multiculturalism, and what has become known as "non-violent extremism".<br /><br />Hasan's&nbsp;<a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2014/06/04/michael-gove-islam_n_5443576.html" target="_blank">lamentable response</a>&nbsp;to the row&nbsp;between the Home Office and the Department of Education suggests it is enough to discredit the 'conveyor belt' theory of radicalisation in order to discredit the government's focus on non-violent extremism. Surely, it ought to go without saying that those who advocate the murder of apostates, gays, and Jews, the subjection of women and non-Muslims, and the restoration of medieval&nbsp;<i>hudud</i>&nbsp;punishments present a threat to the welfare of others, irrespective of whether or not they have foresworn terrorism as a means of achieving these regressive goals.<br /><br />But when Islamist organisations seeking to impose their beliefs on secular space and discourse meet with resistance from liberals and secularists of all kinds, it is by the Islamists' side that Mehdi Hasan tends to stand in solidarity:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">Social media has emboldened an army of online Islamophobes; in the real world, mosques have been firebombed and politicians line up to condemn Muslim terrorism/clothing/meat/ seating arrangements.</blockquote>Hasan's juxtaposition of arson committed by criminals with the condemnation of Islamist terrorism by elected politicians is simply bizarre. Would he prefer it if Muslim terrorism were <i>not</i> condemned? Or would he just like to see it tempered by a bit more Western penitence and moral equivocation? And does he really believe that attempts to introduce gender apartheid and discriminatory dress codes into free societies are of no consequence or concern - matters to be euphemised as false quarrels over "clothing" and "seating arrangements"?<br /><br />It seems to me that there's a struggle going on within Islam to which Hasan has been paying insufficient attention. It is one in which embattled reformers could use his solidarity and support. For such people, the spread of religious veiling and gender apartheid are neither benign nor desirable phenomena, but sinister developments to be resisted in the name of secularism, female autonomy and gender equality.<br /><br />But those Muslims mobilising against Islamism tend not to benefit from Hasan's sympathy.&nbsp;<a href="http://jacobinism.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/islam-and-right-to-offend.html" target="_blank">Time</a> after <a href="http://standforpeace.org.uk/fosis-is-the-problem-not-the-solution/" target="_blank">time</a>, most recently during the row over <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fb1LR6887cc" target="_blank">the Jesus and Mo cartoon fiasco</a>, when multicultural controversy erupts, he has reflexively lined up with the reactionary tendency, recycled their mitigating excuses, and rehearsed their diversionary arguments from victimhood.<br /><br />Perhaps the most galling of these offered in his Huffington Post piece, and one characteristic of the bad faith that informs Hasan's writing on these matters, is his closing invocation of the massacre of over 8000 Muslims at Srebrenica in 1995. Hasan wonders aloud if his fears regarding the current climate of Islamophobia are the result of paranoia, before answering his own question as follows:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">If only. Next year is the 20th anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre. Eight thousand Bosnian Muslim men and boys were lined up and shot in the heart of Europe. It was the worst genocide on the continent since the Second World War and was made possible by a far-right campaign of demonisation and dehumanisation. I wish I could believe the mantra of "never again". But these European election results fill me with dread.&nbsp;</blockquote>If the Srebrenica genocide typified the Muslim experience in Western Europe, then Hasan's fears would be irrefutable. But it doesn't. On the contrary, not only did NATO (eventually) intervene to halt Serbian-backed VRS atrocities, it deployed 60,000 troops to implement the Dayton Accords, provide humanitarian aid and begin reconstruction. Four years later NATO intervened in the Balkans again, this time to protect the Muslim population of Kosovo and, following the subsequent downfall of the Milosovic regime, it extradited Serbia's former leadership and brought it before the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Criminal_Tribunal_for_the_former_Yugoslavia" target="_blank">ICTY</a>&nbsp;in the Hague to face charges of crimes against humanity.<br /><br />And it did all this over the objections of people like Hasan, whose absolute opposition to the use of Western power requires him to watch the slaughter of even his co-religionists - whether in the Balkans or the Levant - with equanimity. As he remarked in&nbsp;<a href="http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2014/03/our-most-powerful-and-hypocritical-leaders-crimes-are-those-others-commit" target="_blank">an unpardonably sanctimonious article</a> at the height of the Ukraine crisis:</div><div><blockquote class="tr_bq">It is “illegal and illegitimate” for Russia to try to detach Crimea from Ukraine by means of a dodgy referendum, Hague says. Indeed, it is. But was it any less illegal or illegitimate for the west to detach Kosovo from Serbia in 1999 with a 78-day Nato bombing campaign?</blockquote>A very silly analogy indeed. But notice that once again the victimiser, in this case Serbian nationalism, is recast as victim in the service of anti-Western polemic. Hasan damns the West for its complicity in the mass-murder of over 8000 Muslims on European soil, and then damns it again for preventing a possible re-run of this atrocity in another part of the Balkans just four years later. (Needless to say, he also compares Putin's annexation of Crimea to Israel's occupation of the West Bank, another analogy that could do with further thought.)<br /><br />Hasan's bitter denunciations of the country in which he lives and for which he affects to feel such pride&nbsp;("My seven-year-old daughter is counting down the days until she can watch England play in the World Cup" he offers), betray a childish and self-pitying ingratitude.<br /><br />Contemporary Britain, for all its faults and imperfections, has been good to Mehdi Hasan. It has offered him the opportunity of a world-class education (he's an Oxford graduate) and a successful career as an influential journalist, broadcaster and opinion-former, and it has affording him complete freedom of conscience as a Shia Muslim to believe, profess and worship, something he would not be afforded in many Muslim majority countries. Not only that, but in spite of his constant bleating about 'Islamophobia', polite society has been&nbsp;<i>exceedingly</i>&nbsp;forgiving of his own bigotry, freely expressed when he thought no-one who would mind was listening.<br /><br />If it is true, as Saif Rahman reported on <a href="http://my.telegraph.co.uk/saifrahman/saifrahman/129/mehdi-hasan-the-great-pretender-2/" target="_blank">a recent blogpost</a>, that Hasan has recently been on a trip to America financed by the Islamist front organisation&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_on_American%E2%80%93Islamic_Relations" target="_blank">CAIR</a>, then it may be that the "joke" he reports telling his American wife about fleeing Europe's terrifying racism for the States is in fact a signal of his intention to do just that. I'm speculating, of course, but an intelligent and eloquent dissembler like Hasan would prove extremely valuable to CAIR. And I have no doubt they have highly agreeable things to say on the subjects of Israel, American foreign policy, and the desirability of using the term 'Islamophobia' as promiscuously as possible. Were CAIR to offer Hasan a position, and were he to accept, then my assumption at the top of this post that he is not an Islamist would start to look very unsafe indeed.<br /><br />But there exists another possibility, although I'm dubious about how much faith or patience it deserves. This is that Mehdi Hasan starts to appreciate the scale of the danger posed by Islamism: a homophobic, misogynistic, anti-Semitic, chauvinistic, misanthropic,&nbsp;conspiratorial,&nbsp;millenarian, expansionist and totalitarian ideology, of which there is no known 'moderate' strain. What&nbsp;separates al Qaeda's Ayman al-Zawahiri from an ostensible democrat like Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, or an imam like Yusuf al Qaradawi from an apparently urbane academic like Tariq Ramadan, is not a matter of substance but one of mere strategy. The oppression of millions across the Muslim world already subject to Islamism's punishing rule and pitiless violence cannot simply be waved away with a reference to Palestine or Iraq.<br /><br />It is not just Islamism that benefits from the excuse-making of people like Mehdi Hasan; when centrists and Leftists fail to confront the threat Islamists present, the xenophobic right and far-right are only too happy to step into the breach. The surge in support for nationalist parties in the European elections, eager to capitalise on fear of and hostility to Islamist designs, is extremely concerning. Reactionary and provincial nationalists are no kind of solution to anything. Armed with their own demagogic and self-pitying grievance agenda, they pose a threat, not just to Muslims, but to everyone.<br /><br />The answer is not to appease Islamist grassroots activism and violence, or to seek refuge in tribal apologetics or to proceed on the suicidal assumption that the enemy of one's enemy is one's friend. It is to organise against, expose, and marginalise all intolerant, identitarian and totalitarian politics, irrespective of whether its provenance is Islamic or European.</div></div></div>Unrepentant Jacobinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09256579083755037018noreply@blogger.com15tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5380090049852721671.post-26771412479445225322014-04-17T11:34:00.001-07:002014-04-18T12:54:24.468-07:00Prepare For Integrism!<span style="font-size: large;"><b>Radical Jew Hatred &amp; the Decolonial Shakedown</b></span><br /><br /><div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-PtMDlGYZOUQ/U0isJwuxagI/AAAAAAAAATA/DMINqZ4c6tU/s1600/article.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-PtMDlGYZOUQ/U0isJwuxagI/AAAAAAAAATA/DMINqZ4c6tU/s1600/article.png" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>Left to Right: Trotskyite Guardian-scribe Richard Seymour;&nbsp;</b></span><br /><span style="font-size: small;"><b>French Fascist Comedian Dieudonné M'bala M'bala performs his <i>Quenelle</i>;<br />Spokesperson for <i>Le Parti des Indigènes de la République</i>, Houria Bouteldja</b></span></td></tr></tbody></table><br />Western critics of regressive values within minority communities tend to elicit one of two accusations.</div><div><br /></div><div>The first is one of misrepresentation. That is to say, the critic in question has - either through ignorance or malice - traduced benign cultures as backward and barbaric. Hostility to views perceived to be, say, homophobic, misogynistic or anti-Semitic, result either from misunderstandings or, more likely, from irrational - and probably racist - scaremongering; an attempt to stigmatise the 'other'. <br /><br />This argument was, for a while, most effectively advanced by the Swiss Ikhwanist Tariq Ramadan, and it finds an intuitively sympathetic audience on the Western secular Left. Not only is its intended effect ameliorative, but it also addresses a particular anxiety - that multiculturalism is incubating illiberal practices and ideas within free societies while they sleep.</div><div><br /></div><div>The second accusation is one of intolerance. This represents a more radical view that, while values and practices with respect to women and gays may indeed be antithetical to those of the West, they are culturally authentic and therefore to be respected. Attempts by the West to universalise human rights and protections are in fact manifestations of an arrogant and moralising cultural colonialism.<br /><br />This sort of nationalist rhetoric finds a (smaller) audience among the West's&nbsp;<i>soi dissant</i> radical Left, who are drawn to its uncompromising political zeal, its hostility to capitalism, and its anti-Imperialist sloganeering, all of which inform a pleasingly trenchant anti-Zionism.</div><div><br /></div><div>A rather marvellous example of this marriage between radical Left and reactionary Right can be found cross-posted by <i>Guardian</i> and <i>New Statesman</i> contributor Richard Seymour at his&nbsp;Leninology blog. It's the transcript of a talk given in February of this year by&nbsp;Houria Bouteldja, an activist of Algerian heritage and a spokesperson for France's first "decolonial" political party, the&nbsp;Party of the Indigenous of the Republic [PIR].<br /><br />Established in 2010, the PIR grew out of a five year-old grassroots movement of the same name, which was founded in the name of the 'indigènes'&nbsp;of France to campaign against "Eurocentrism, Islamophobia, anti-black racism, and..." (naturally) "...Zionism". <sup><a href="#fn1" id="ref1">1</a></sup>The group's <a href="http://www.dialogoglobal.com/granada/documents/MIR-Founding-Statement.pdf" target="_blank">2005 foundational manifesto</a> describes the indigènes in its opening paragraph as follows:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">Discriminated in hiring, housing and health, at school and even at leisure, people from the colonies, former and current, and of postcolonial immigration are the first victims of social exclusion and precariousness. Independent of their actual origins, the inhabitants of the "quartiers"/popular neighborhoods are "indigenized", relegated to the margins of society.</blockquote>Broadly speaking, the party's ideology is a politics of religious and ethnic pride, in which class warfare is replaced by its identitarian equivalent, the privilege of wealth is subordinated to the privilege of 'structural' racial power, and in which the prefix 'white' has replaced 'bourgeois' as the preferred term of abuse. Assimilation and compromise are signs of weakness to be avoided. Integration has failed; prepare for integrism.<br /><br />Bouteldja's talk, ponderously entitled <a href="http://www.leninology.com/2014/03/dieudonne-through-prism-of-white-left.html" target="_blank">"Dieudonné Through the Prism of the White Left, or Conceptualizing a Domestic Internationalism"</a>, is basically a disquisition on why the PIR refused to take a position on the controversy surrounding the 'Quenelle' - an anti-Semitic salute pioneered by a fascist French comedian named Dieudonné&nbsp;M'bala M'bala.<br /><br />Bouteldja introduces her address with a four point preamble, the first three of which can be summarised like this:<br /><ul><li>My decolonial discourse transcends crude Western notions of Right and Left.</li><li>My words are "rooted in the social and historical experience of a colonial subject" (ie: oppression).</li><li>I think "in terms of political stakes, power relations, and strategy . . . not abstract morality and principle."</li></ul>We're not told why, for instance, it might be a good idea to discard morality and principle, but it's a forewarning: If what I say shocks you, it is because you are not ready to understand the experiences of people who look like me and think like me; a people created by your own criminal history.<br /><br />Bouteldja then turns in her final point to the object of her scorn, citing the following words from the Tunisian activist, Sadri Khiari:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">"Because it is the indigènes’ indispensable partner, the Left is their primary adversary."</blockquote>Houria Bouteldja, we discover, has tired of the Western Left. In the 30 years since the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_for_Equality_and_Against_Racism" target="_blank">March for Equality and Against Racism</a>, nothing has changed. Watching a documentary to mark the protest's anniversary, she is horrified to hear an activist claim that the marchers would have eaten ham had it been demanded of them. Bouteldja recoils from such self-abasement, but France's failure to respond to even such total servility was the second, and greater, humiliation.<br /><br />Bouteldja's charge is that the&nbsp;indigènes&nbsp;of France have been failed by the principles of the French Republic and by their erstwhile allies on the Left. The institutional Left has lost touch with ideology, she claims. On the one hand it thrashes about in "abstract humanism" and "moralistic anti-racism", and on the other it fails to address police brutality and the "plagues of drugs and AIDS", it moves against Islamic dress codes, and it pursues neoliberalism at home and neoconservatism abroad.&nbsp;</div><div><br />Meanwhile, what she calls the 'radical Left' has ceased to think strategically, and instead succumbed to Islamophobia, paternalism, and chauvinistic Eurocentrism. "The worn-out moral anti-racism, in the style of [French NGO] SOS-Racism," she announces, "is at death's door."<br /><br /></div><div>It is this disaffection, she claims, which explains the&nbsp;indigènes<i>'&nbsp;</i>re-emergence on the political stage in the person of&nbsp;Dieudonné M'bala M'bala, and in the&nbsp;company of far-right figures like Alain Soral and Marine Le Pen.&nbsp;</div><blockquote class="tr_bq">[It] is a middle finger, a big “fuck you” to the Left. Or if you prefer, a <i>quenelle</i>. This pendulum swing to the right, contrary to appearances, is one of liberation. </blockquote><div>Liberation, Bouteldja, is quick to emphasise, from the Left. The far-Right, with their history of white supremacism, are no permanent political home for France's&nbsp;indigènes.<br /><br />But, for the time being, she takes no small amount of satisfaction in the appalled horror with which the spectacle of this alliance has been greeted by the Left, and in the overwhelming support Dieudonné received from&nbsp;indigène&nbsp;communities.</div><div><br /></div><div>The Left's most intolerable and self-defeating betrayal, apparently, was to turn its back on Tariq Ramadan. In Bouteldja's telling, Ramadan was making an offer of unparalleled generosity; a kind of integration that respected cultural dignity. His rejection, she says, exposed the lie of integrationist aspirations and the hypocrisy of the French Republic once and for all. In its&nbsp;<a href="http://www.dialogoglobal.com/granada/documents/MIR-Founding-Statement.pdf" target="_blank">foundational document</a>, her movement declared: "The Republic of Equality is a myth."<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">It is time that France interrogates its Enlightenment, the egalitarian universalism, affirmed during the French Revolution, repressed nationalism buttressed against the "chauvinism of the universal" that is supposed to "civilise" wild savages.</blockquote></div><div>Which is one way of looking at it, I suppose. Another is that Tariq Ramadan was found out.<br /><br />Leftists, initially inclined to take Ramadan's sermons about integration, secularism and human rights at face value, began to listen more closely and wonder if his occasionally impenetrable rhetoric didn't hide a reactionary, integrist agenda.<br /><br />Their suspicions were duly confirmed when, in 2003, six million viewers watched him refuse to denounce the stoning of women during a televised exchange with Nicolas Sarkozy.&nbsp;"Mr Ramadan!" Sarkozy cried. "If it is regressive not to want to stone women, I avow that I am a regressive!" On an elementary moral question, progressives saw Ramadan outflanked on the Left by France's right-wing Minister of the Interior and concluded they'd been had.<br /><br />It's unsurprising then that Bouteldja has had enough of SOS-Racisme. The French NGO's former president,&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malek_Boutih">Malek Boutih</a>, is said to have concluded a long conversation with Ramadan by informing him that he is "a fascist". His successor,&nbsp;Dominique Sopo, accused Ramadan of promoting "radical anti-Semitism". It was on the basis of this latter charge that Ramadan was eventually excluded from the 2003 European Social Forum.<br /><br />Bouteldja&nbsp;bitterly remarks that the radical Left's failure to support Ramadan in this instance was&nbsp;"an unpleasant, painful and heavily&nbsp;consequential event". And by "consequential" she means that, having rejected the March Against Racism's servility, and Tariq Ramadan's civility, the Left got Dieudonné's effrontery instead. What, Bouteldja wants to know, did they expect?</div><div><br />They might, of course, have expected Bouteldja and the PIR to openly deplore Dieudonné's racism, his Holocaust denial and his hatred of Jews. They are, after all, an anti-racist party, are they not? But&nbsp;Bouteldja&nbsp;will have none of&nbsp;this. And her refusal is not simply born of tribal loyalty or a perverse disinclination to do what the 'white Left' wants. Her reason can be found amongst the itemised sins of France's radical Left, in which she cites the following:</div><div><blockquote class="tr_bq">[F]ocusing on fascism at the expense of structural racism and a critique of white supremacy that cuts across the radical Left itself; the centrality of the Holocaust at the expense of the history of colonialism and slavery; . . .</blockquote>Bouteldja's sympathy with Dieudonné extends to his anti-Semitism. Not only have the Left failed in their duty to embrace the dispossessed, but they have been complicit in defrauding others out of their rightful status as history’s most abject victims. The Holocaust's horrific legacy is now an object of ghoulish envy;&nbsp;a coveted mantle of suffering and entitlement, unjustly denied.<br /><br />Bouteldja would have us understand that Dieudonné’s Quenelle, his racism, and his fearless audacity, are a symbolic blow against this historic injustice. The "political offer" he embodies...</div><div><blockquote class="tr_bq">. . . designates an enemy: the Jew as a Jew, and the Jew as a Zionist, as an embodiment of imperialism, but also because of the Jew’s privileged position. The one who occupies the best seat in the hearts of the White, a place for which many indigènes are fighting. Because they dream of becoming the Prince’s favourites, but without questioning that Prince’s legitimacy: the legitimacy of the White Man.</blockquote>Dieudonné's error hasn't been his resentful hated of Jews, which Bouteldja evidently shares. It has been his failure to also question white legitimacy:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">[W]e are not integrationists. And integration through anti-semitism horrifies us just as much as integration though White universalism and national-chauvinism. We abhor anything that seeks to integrate us into whiteness; anti-Semitism being a pure product of Europe and the West. As a decolonial movement, it is self-evident that we cannot support Dieudonné.</blockquote>What all this means is that the PIR are both proud of Dieudonné and disappointed in him. Disappointed because his association with Soral and Le Pen's Front National has tarnished a more noble kind of racism.<br /><br />This is the same logic which turned the 2001&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Conference_against_Racism_2001" target="_blank">World Conference on Racism in Durban</a>&nbsp;into an orgy of anti-Semitism. Not, we must understand, the crude anti-Semitism of the Third Reich - a vulgar white supremacist doctrine, used by the strong to annihilate the weak - but the righteous anti-Semitism of the weak who seek emancipation from the strong. It is the bitter rage of the persecuted and the forsaken from the <i>banlieues</i> of France to the refugee camps of Palestine. For Bouteldja, indigène hatred of the Jew cannot be considered racism; it has the purity of resistance to injustice.</div><div><br />'White anti-Zionists', she complains, lack the radical political fibre to understand this distinction:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">[Their's] is an anti-Zionism that is supportive of resistance movements that resemble the left (the PFLP for example) and that is contemptuous of those who do not resemble it (such as Hamas at the time of the attacks against Gaza).</blockquote>But she understands the distinction. And Dieudonné’s supporters understand it, too. Which is why the PIR cannot condemn them. And it is why, despite her polite reservations about his “political choices”, Bouteldja and the PIR refused to denounce Dieudonné. On the contrary, we get this:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">I love Dieudonné; I love him as the indigènes love him; that I understand why the indigènes love him. I love him because he has done an important action in terms of dignity, of indigène pride, of Black pride: he refused to be a domestic negro . . . When Diedonné stands up, he heals an identitarian wound. The wound that racism left, and which harms the indigènes' personality. Those who understand “Black is beautiful” cannot miss this dimension, and I emphasize, this particular dimension in Dieudonné.</blockquote>Thus, by mawkish prose, is Dieudonné's crude racism elevated to the status of a romantic and revolutionary act. An act for which the Left is responsible, but which it lacks the political maturity to comprehend or appreciate. Then, having derided, indicted and shamed her audience, she ends with what I imagine she considers a conciliatory suggestion. The answer, she says, is the formation of new alliances that "respect mutual autonomies":<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">We should be considered allies . . . For this to be possible, we must be accepted as we are: a group that is racially and socially dominated, not necessarily clear-cut on several issues: not clear-cut on capitalism, not clear-cut on class struggle, not clear-cut on women, not clear-cut on homosexuality, not clear-cut on Jews.</blockquote><div>I suppose we should be grateful that Bouteldja was honest enough to assert her moral nihilism upfront, because this is a shakedown.&nbsp;</div><div><br /></div><div>The Left's responsibility for Dieudonné, and the&nbsp;indigène shift to the extreme Right that he represents,&nbsp;she insists, is total. It is the "product of the White political milieu and more precisely of the Left and its renouncements"; the Left's callousness&nbsp;and cruelty; its Eurocentrism; its Islamophobia; its theft of the indigènes' rightful claims to historic victimhood; its favour for the Jew and his nation.<br /><br />To make amends, the Left must denounce all the above and renounce the egalitarian universalism and moralistic anti-racism she despises. If they refuse, it is implied, they can expect more unrest of the kind that produced the 2005 riots, and further mortifying scenes like the Dieudonné fiasco.<br /><br />Bouteldja's final move - the misuse of a quotation from C. L. R. James's 1943 essay&nbsp;<a href="http://www.marxists.org/archive/james-clr/works/1943/negro43.htm" target="_blank"><i>The Historical Development of the Negro in the United States</i></a>&nbsp;to imply endorsement of a talk from which he would have recoiled -&nbsp;only serves to confirm her ruthless opportunism.<sup><a href="#fn2" id="ref2">2</a></sup><br /><br />I can't see any particular reason why those who rejected Tariq Ramadan would want to embrace a more belligerent, openly racist alternative. But Richard Seymour, the Guardian columnist on whose blog it is cross-posted, introduces it with the following:</div></div><blockquote class="tr_bq"><i>I have been given permission to publish this excellent paper from the Penser l’émancipation, closing plenary, Nanterre, on February 22, 2014. It was written and delivered by the excellent Houria Bouteldja, a member of Le Parti des indigènes de la République.</i></blockquote>Publication of the post resulted in <a href="https://twitter.com/Pabloite/status/440478581324402688" target="_blank">a bad-tempered twitter exchange</a> with Marxist bloggers Andrew Coates and James Heartfield, during which Seymour repeatedly denied it was anti-Semitic.&nbsp;Bouteldja, he explained, "rejects Dieudonne's antisemitism outright in this talk." When this assertion was met with understandable resistance, he instructed them: "You're confusing description with prescription. [Her talk]&nbsp;takes a complex, ambiguous position on Dieudonne but not at all on antisemitism."<br /><br />As <a href="http://jacobinism.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/wave-white-flag.html" target="_blank">I've argued before</a>, Left-wing apologetics for the far-Right frequently rest on an appreciation of complexities, ambiguities and nuance the rest of us apparently lack. Either Seymour has not understood what he has posted and endorsed or he has accepted the sophistry of Bouteldja's meaningless distinction between malevolent and virtuous anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism is what it is: a hatred of Jews, and whether it appears in the pages of <i>The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion</i>,&nbsp;<i>Mein Kampf</i>, the Hamas Charter, or on Richard Seymour's Leninology blog, it is always justified in the name of the same thing: the struggle against domination, oppression and conspiratorial power.<br /><br />If Seymour believes that Bouteldja's narrow disavowal of an anti-Semitism "that seeks to integrate us into whiteness" inoculates her against charges of racism, he has missed something even more sinister and obvious: that while she demonstrates a bottomless capacity for self-pity, her solipsistic contempt for the Holocaust and its victims demonstrates a complete absence of 'out-group' compassion. It is in the pitilessness of this kind of chauvinism that we find the germ of fascism.<br /><br />What does Seymour imagine would become of France's Jews were Bouteldja ever to be given the whip hand? I feel certain he doesn't care. As a "colonial subject", Bouteldja will never have the whip hand, ergo, he condescends to indulge the bitter hatreds with which she trashes the Enlightenment. And, as a magnanimous act of penitence for the historic crimes of the West and the contemporary betrayals of the feckless Left, he will forfeit his right to judge her values even as she condemns his.<br /><div><br />At the level of gesture and abstraction at which Seymour appears to be operating, universal human rights - specifically the rights of Jews, but also women and gays - are mere ideas that may be casually traded away in the pursuit of radical chic. But within the communities he refuses to judge, the rhetoric Seymour endorses only emboldens those who would impose dress and honour codes, who would ostracise and persecute people for their sexuality, and those, like&nbsp;Mohammed Merah,&nbsp;who would murder French Jewish children in the name of justice for Palestine.&nbsp;<sup><a href="#fn3" id="ref3">3</a></sup></div><div><br /></div><div>Undeterred, Seymour has accepted the challenge presented in&nbsp;Bouteldja's&nbsp;opening four-point preamble. He has opened up his Eurocentric mind and deferred to her experience "as a colonial subject"; he has prostrated himself before the scorn she has heaped on the hypocrisies of the white, radical Western Left, of which he is a privileged representative; and he has looked her prejudices in the eye and he has not flinched. She has dared the white Left to join her on the far-Right and Richard Seymour - persuaded by her rhetoric that to do so would be an act of radical political courage - has obliged.</div><div><br /></div><div>I'm not entirely sure what he expects to get in return. If it's the respect of people like Houria Bouteldja, he can think again. She holds the politics of self-abasement to be beneath contempt. On this she could hardly be more clear. It is the virility of unapologetic fascists like Dieudonné M'bala M'bala that she values.<br /><br /><hr></hr><br /><sup id="fn1">1. The specificity of this description, with which Bouteldja was introduced before <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CszbqynuZ4I" target="_blank">her talk at the Islamic Human Rights Commission</a>, ought to be an immediate red flag. <a href="#ref1" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text.">↩</a></sup><br /><br /><sup id="fn1">2. I find C. L. R. James's description of black chauvinism and nationalism as fundamentally "progressive" to be naive and unconvincing. But it doesn't matter because James was opposed to black nationalism and chauvinism either way. Unlike Bouteldja, James was a committed Marxist, integrationist and internationalist and, as such, he explicitly rejected the kind of provincial separatist demagogy that Houria Bouteldja's views typify. James did not endorse or celebrate the scapegoating of Jews; it was a regrettable reality he sought to (rather indulgently) explain. He plainly did not intend his words to "advise" anyone that, as Bouteldja says darkly,&nbsp;"one must necessarily accept to get one’s hands dirty". Furthermore, James was a partisan of the Enlightenment and the universalist revolutionary ideals of liberty, equality and solidarity over which&nbsp;Bouteldja&nbsp;empties so much invective. As the writer and broadcaster Kenan Malik noted in his <a href="http://kenanmalik.wordpress.com/2013/03/07/from-the-vaults-clr-james-and-the-black-jacobins/" target="_blank">review of James's&nbsp;<i>Black Jacobins</i></a>:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">Today, when Enlightenment ideas are often seen as racist or reactionary because they are the products of European culture, and when the line between anti-imperialist and anti-Western sentiment has become all too blurred, [C. L. R. James's] insistence . . . that the aim of anti-imperialism was not to reject Enlightenment ideas but to reclaim them for all of humanity has become all the more important. <a href="#ref2" title="Jump back to footnote 2 in the text.">↩</a></sup></blockquote></div><div><sup id="fn1">3. The PIR's abysmal official statement in response to the shootings at Toulouse and Montauban can be read <a href="http://www.decolonialtranslation.com/english/PIR-s-view-on-the-murder-spree-in-toulouse.html" target="_blank">here</a>.<a href="#ref3" title="Jump back to footnote 3 in the text.">↩</a></sup></div>Unrepentant Jacobinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09256579083755037018noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5380090049852721671.post-18145794175366471272014-03-08T09:59:00.000-08:002015-10-18T16:27:12.802-07:00Facts and Context Be Damned<b><span style="font-size: large;">Moazzam Begg &amp; Philo-Salafism</span></b><br /><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-PiNg08zqOMQ/UxqBYuTv5uI/AAAAAAAAASo/EvRsx-AlQCE/s1600/moazzam-begg-111894145.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-PiNg08zqOMQ/UxqBYuTv5uI/AAAAAAAAASo/EvRsx-AlQCE/s1600/moazzam-begg-111894145.jpg" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><span style="font-size: small;">Moazzam Begg - From Terror Suspect to Amnesty International Poster Boy and Back Again...</span></b></td></tr></tbody></table>The arrest of former Guantanamo Bay detainee Moazzam Begg has prompted a surly response from Glenn Greenwald and Murtaza Hussain over at the Intercept.<br /><br />Begg was arrested - along with a woman and two other men - on the morning of 25 February on suspicion of attending jihadi training camps in Syria. Begg has since&nbsp;<a href="http://www.west-midlands.police.uk/latest-news/news.aspx?id=406" target="_blank">appeared at Westminster Magistrates Court</a>&nbsp;and been formally charged with&nbsp;"providing instruction and training for terrorism and facilitating terrorism in Syria."<br /><br />In a piece entitled "<a href="https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/02/27/moazzam-begg-arrest-part-effort-criminalize-muslim-political-dissent/" target="_blank">The Moazzam Begg Arrest: Part of the Effort to Criminalize Muslim Political Dissent</a>" (published after Begg was arrested, but before he was charged), Greenwald and Hussain argue that this is part of a campaign on the part of Western governments and security services to harass, intimidate and silence Muslims engaged in what they describe as "aggressive political dissent".<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><b><u>MOAZZAM BEGG</u></b></div><br />To understand what this deliberately imprecise term actually means in relation to Begg, one would need to be aware of his views and activities to date, which the authors of the article nonetheless neglect to include.<br /><br />The Intercept is a site which professes a dedication to&nbsp;disclosure, transparency and truth. In the spirit of&nbsp;which, then, a few redacted facts:<br /><br />1. In 1993, Moazzam Begg flew to Pakistan where he crossed the border into Afghanistan. There he met Pakistani jihadis from the Islamist group Jamaat-i-Islami and was introduced to and, by his own admission, inspired by the notion of violent religious jihad. He describes this experience as "life-changing". Later that year, Begg travelled to Bosnia and was briefly a member of the Bosnian Army Foreign Volunteer Force. A subsequent attempt to travel to Chechnya in 1999 to take part in jihad there ended in failure.<br /><br />2. Back in the UK in 1994, Begg was arrested and charged with Social Security Fraud. The charges were later dropped, but a search of his house by anti-terror police turned up a flak jacket, night-goggles and extremist Islamic literature. His friend and alleged co-conspirator,&nbsp;Shahid Akram Butt, did 18 months after pleading guilty to obtaining money by deception. Butt was later jailed in Yemen for his part in a bomb plot, along with Abu Hamza's son,&nbsp;Mustapha Kamil.<br /><br />3. In 1998, Begg opened the Maktabah al Ansar bookshop in Birmingham, which soon became one of Europe's most notorious purveyors of Islamist and jihadi propaganda. It was raided twice by MI5, in 1999 and 2000, even before 9/11 had caused a spike in security service interest in bearded religious fanatics. An investigative report by Newsweek published in 2004 [and <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2006/oct/05/the-prisoners-speak/?pagination=false" target="_blank">excerpted here</a>] found that:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">Anyone who believes the war on terror has shut down terrorist propaganda centers in US-friendly countries should visit the Maktabah al Ansar bookshop in Birmingham, England. Amid shelves of Qur’anic tomes and religious artifacts are bookshelves and CD racks piled with extreme Islamist propaganda: recordings of the last testaments of 9/11 hijackers, messages from Osama bin Laden and jihad pamphlets by Sheik Abdullah Azzam, the late Palestinian activist who was a bin Laden mentor and early apostle of suicide bombing.</blockquote>4. Two months before 9/11, Begg moved his family from Birmingham to Kabul to live under Taliban rule:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">I wanted to live in an Islamic state - one that was free from the corruption and despotism of the rest of the Muslim world . . . The Taliban were better than anything Afghanistan has had in the past 25 years.</blockquote>He remained an unapologetic Taliban supporter as recently as the publication of his memoir <i>Enemy Combatant </i>(2006)<i>,</i> in which he reaffirmed his support for the pure Islamic society they hoped to build in Afghanistan and expressed his regret that this project was thwarted by the American invasion. This is, needless to say, an eccentric position for a <i>soi-disant</i> human rights activist to take.<br /><br />(The Intercept article, by the way, refers to Begg as the author of "books", plural. He has to my knowledge only written this one. It's a small, petty exaggeration, but a telling one, nonetheless.)<br /><br />5. The Beggs' relocation was at the suggestion of Moazzam's friend and associate Mahmoud Abu Rideh, a UK-based Palestinian and bagman for al-Qaeda. Rideh was arrested in 2001, accused of raising £100,000 for al-Qaeda and funnelling the money through two London-based bank accounts. Following a prison sentence Rideh was handed a control order in 2005 and forced to leave the UK in 2009. In 2010, he was finally despatched to the hereafter&nbsp;<a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/terrorism-in-the-uk/8207784/British-al-Qaeda-refugee-killed-in-Afghanistan.html" target="_blank">by an American&nbsp;drone</a> whilst fighting with the insurgency in Afghanistan.<br /><br />6. Following the terror attacks on New York and Washington, Begg and his family moved to Islamabad in Pakistan. Begg returned to Afghanistan intermittently, and recounts in his memoir how he was taken to see the front line by a group of Pakistani jihadis he had met. The fall of Kabul precipitated a collapse of Taliban positions, and Begg found himself joining the retreat of al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters as they fled to Pakistan through the Tora Bora mountains. (Begg claims he only joined jihadi fighters on that route because he got lost.)<br /><br />None of the above is disputed. I will return to the significance of these omissions later.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><b><u>AFGHANISTAN</u></b></div><br />Moazzam Begg was arrested in Islamabad on 31 January 2002 and taken to Bagram Airbase for interrogation by the FBI. It is only now that Glenn Greenwald and Murtaza Hussain pick up his story. But they pass over what Begg was actually doing in Afghanistan and how his name first came to attention of American authorities there.<br /><br />Begg claims that he travelled to Afghanistan, at Mahmoud Abu Rideh's suggestion, to help with a school-building project there. He likes to cite this as evidence of his humanitarianism. The details of this project, about which Begg is invariably evasive, belie his innocuous account.<br /><br />The schools on which he and Rideh were working were exclusively for Arab speakers. And the enrolment of girls (which Begg and Rideh also liked to emphasise) was permitted at a time when the Taliban regime, for which both had professed much admiration, had closed all girls' schools. These facilities were in fact being purpose-built for the indoctrination of the children of foreign fighters stationed at nearby jihadi training camps. In a moment of unguarded candour, Abu Rideh admitted as much when he bragged that among the fathers of their pupils were "some of the world's most wanted men."<br /><br />When Jalalabad fell on November 13 2001, Jack Kelly, a reporter with USA Today was allowed to inspect the al-Qaeda training camps nearby. He&nbsp;<a href="http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/attack/2001/11/26/cover.htm#more" target="_blank">reported</a>:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">Plastic explosives, timing devices and sketches of the best places to hide a bomb on an airplane filled the files of Osama bin Laden's terrorist training camps near here. Gas masks, cyanide and recipes for biological agents lined the shelves of his chemical weapons laboratory. Kalashnikov rifles, silhouetted targets and lesson plans teaching children to shoot at their victims' faces lay among the toys and near the swing set at the elementary school bin Laden established.&nbsp;</blockquote>Elsewhere he describes:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">The evidence shows that recruits at bin Laden's two main camps, at least those visited by USA TODAY, were trained in conventional, biological and even nuclear warfare, according to class manuals. They came from at least 21 countries, including Bosnia, Egypt, France, Great Britain, Jordan, Kuwait, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and other U.S. allies, enrolment records show.&nbsp;Nearly all the students were told to return to their countries after training and "await orders" to carry out attacks against the United States, class notes reveal.</blockquote>At the Derunta camp, where Begg later confessed to acting as an "instructor", Kelly reports finding a wealth of terrorist training material detailing bomb-making techniques and identifying civilian targets in the West for attack; counterfeit passports, travel documents and...<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">. . . a photocopy of a money transfer requesting that a London branch of Pakistan's Habib Bank AG Zurich credit the account of an individual identified as Moazzam Begg in Karachi for an unspecified sum of money. U.S. and Pakistani officials say they do not know who Begg is but will try to find him.</blockquote>Six weeks later, Begg was found and placed under immediate arrest.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><b><u>BAGRAM AIRBASE &amp; GUANTANAMO BAY</u></b></div><br />While at Bagram, Greenwald and Hussain report that "[Begg] suffered torture". Even this is misleading. More accurate would be to report that Begg <i>claims</i> he suffered torture. These claims were repeatedly subject to detailed official investigation and review and no evidence was found to support them.<br /><br />Begg's allegations were first made in July 2004 to the United States Forces Administration, and later the same month to the Combatant Status Review Tribunal. In December 2004, Begg was twice interviewed about his allegations by the Naval Criminal Investigation Service, and again in May 2006, in the presence of his attorney, by the Office of the Inspector General [OIG] of the US Department of Justice as part of a wide-reaching review of detainee treatment.<br /><br />The Department of Defence [DOD] conducted no less than three separate investigations into Begg's allegations and, in the absence of any evidence supporting his claims, concluded they were baseless.<br /><br />The OIG Report entitled <a href="http://www.justice.gov/oig/special/s0805/final.pdf" target="_blank">A Review of the FBI's Involvement in and Observations of Detainee Interrogations at Guantanamo Bay, Afghanistan and Iraq</a>,&nbsp;published in May 2008, devoted a section of its findings exclusively to Begg's allegations [pp. 266-76]. It states:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">The DOD provided the OIG with a Report of Investigation prepared by the U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Command dated July 23, 2005. According to this report, the Army reviewed correspondence and statements by Begg and interviewed over 30 witnesses who were stationed at the facilities at which Begg claimed the abuse occurred. The report concluded that "the offences of Communicating a Threat, Maltreatment of a Person in US Custody, and Assault did not occur as alleged." Many of the witnesses interviewed by the Army investigators said that Begg co-operated with military investigators by assisting with translations, that Begg received comforts such as reading and writing materials, and that Begg never complained about mistreatment while at he was Bagram.</blockquote>The Intercept article's additional claim that Begg actually witnessed the torture and subsequent death of innocent <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilawar_(torture_victim)" target="_blank">Afghan taxi driver Dilawar</a> firsthand, while indubitably serving to make the account of his time at Bagram more harrowing and traumatic, is also unsubstantiated.<br /><br />On 2 February 2003, Moazzam Begg was transferred to Guantanamo Bay.<br /><br />Greenwald and Hussain report that Begg calls his time there "torturous". They neglect to mention that while there he signed an 8 page confession, countersigned by his Bagram interrogators FBI agent "Bell" and New York City Police Detective "Harrelson" (both names are pseudonyms) as well as two DOD CID agents. Inter alia, the OIG investigation (linked above) found that:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">Begg’s signed statement indicates, among other things, that Begg sympathized with the cause of al-Qaeda, attended terrorist training camps in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and England so that he could assist in waging global jihad against enemies of Islam, including Russia and India; associated with and assisted several prominent terrorists and supporters of terrorists and discussed potential terrorist acts with them; recruited young operatives for the global jihad; and provided financial support for terrorist training camps.</blockquote>Every paragraph is initialled by Begg at the beginning and end to indicate his assent. Deletions and changes requested by Begg are noted on the document in his handwriting. For example, the OIG report notes that:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">. . . [o]n page 3, Begg apparently changed the statement "I am unsure of the exact amount of money sent to terrorist training camps of the many years I helped fund the camps'" by replacing the word "many" with the words "couple of".</blockquote>Begg now claims this confession was coerced. However, the OIG again found no evidence to support his claim, adding that the additions and deletions provided by Begg "support its voluntariness". Why, after all, request minor changes to a document which is a wholesale fabrication? Furthermore, "Begg even acknowledged that Bell and Harrelson had mentioned the possibility of a plea bargain, witness protection and cooperation with the government" which appeared to support Bell's professed strategy of "building rapport with Begg to obtain his cooperation with other prosecutions".<br /><br />Greenwald and Hussain will of course dismiss such investigations as self-serving and worthless. But such a dismissal is itself of no value. If, on the other hand, they think they can prove the OIG and DOD investigations were not competent, they must do so.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><b><u>CAGE (aka CAGEPRISONERS)</u></b></div><br />And what of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cageprisoners" target="_blank">CAGE (formerly Cageprisoners)</a>, the organisation founded by Begg in 2005 upon his release from Camp Delta and return to the UK?<br /><br />Greenwald and Hussain describe CAGE as a human rights organisation, and produce a handful of pithy quotes from its own website which testify to the nobility of its campaigning.<br /><br />But CAGE is not a human rights organisation. An investigation by Meredith Tax and Gita Sahgal at the Centre for Secular Space found that...<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">[J]udging by the cases Cageprisoners highlights, its principle of selection has less to do with universal, indivisible human rights than with the desire to support activists in jihadi networks . . . And it does not distinguish between prisoners held at Guantanamo whose rights to habeas corpus and due process of law have been violated and prisoners who have been tried and found guilty in a normal courtroom setting.</blockquote>In <a href="http://www.leftfootforward.org/2014/02/no-moazzam-begg-is-not-david-miranda/" target="_blank">a post over at Left Foot Forward</a>, Rupert Sutton protests what he describes as the contempt for due process displayed by Begg's supporters, many of whom are demanding his immediate and unconditional release. Sutton points out that:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">Given CagePrisoners' repeated demands for due process, it is very revealing that when that process begins against one of their members it is reflexively portrayed as unjust, and as a government conspiracy to criminalise Muslim charitable work and political activism.</blockquote>Alas, this contempt for due process is a feature not a bug. The Intercept article notes with approval that CAGE's describes itself as "one of the leading resources documenting the abuse of due process and the erosion of the rule of law in the context of the War on Terror."<br /><br />Following the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gita_Sahgal#Amnesty_International_controversy" target="_blank">controversy surrounding Sahgal's dismissal from Amnesty International</a> for publicly criticising their ties to Cageprisoners, the organisation overhauled its site's design and content, deleting controversial and inflammatory articles, statements, campaigns and interview materials. But until comparatively recently, their ostensible commitment to due process was qualified in the "About Us" section of the site with a declaration [<a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:rwc3kWuDqtwJ:www.cageprisoners.com/about-us%3Ftmpl%3Dcomponent%26print%3D1+&amp;cd=1&amp;hl=en&amp;ct=clnk&amp;gl=uk" target="_blank">cached here</a>] that:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">Cageprisoners relies on Islamic doctrines relating to due process.&nbsp;</blockquote>Which was, in turn, explained like this:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">It is not only the right to a fair trial that Cageprisoners promotes, rather the morality of the law. Thus even though national legislation in various jurisdictions may be given a veneer of legality, in reality they go against the conscience of the law. Thus our understanding of due process goes to the very heart of the counter-terrorism policies that are implemented, whether legally or illegally.</blockquote>What this awful prose means is that, in the eyes of CAGE and its activists, secular notions of justice are subordinate to their own perceived religious obligations. Given that Salafi-jihadi ideology sees jihad as a religious duty, it follows that anyone incarcerated as a result becomes a prisoner of conscience, irrespective of their criminality in the eyes of secular law.<br /><br />Meredith Tax's assessment is blunt:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">The whole structure of human rights is based on the rule of law . . . A group that explicitly disregards the rule of law cannot be considered a human rights group.&nbsp;</blockquote><div style="text-align: center;"><b><u>PHILO-SALAFISM</u></b></div><br />Greenwald and Hussain's misrepresentation of Begg and CAGE, as a human rights advocate and organisation respectively, is an example of what I have decided to call 'philo-Salafism' - a hatred for the West so vehement, it leads the sufferer to become a partisan of Islamist fanatics;&nbsp;to rehearse, without embarrassment, the justifications and excuses they offer for their depredations, and to recycle their anti-Western propaganda.<br /><br />Were the Intercept article protesting Begg's incarceration at Guantanamo, its authors could reasonably argue that his views and previous activities are irrelevant. And, although their account would still be one-sided, I'd have to agree. The indefinite detention of terror suspects and the denial of legal counsel and due process is a disgrace, unmitigated by the professed views and alleged actions of the accused.<br /><br />But the article is not about the injustice of Begg's detention in Guantanamo in 2003. It is about the alleged injustice of Begg's detention in Belmarsh today. By omitting any mention of Begg's jihadi connections, sympathies and experience, its authors are attempting to both exonerate Begg of any taint of suspicion in the reader's perception, and to discredit counter-extremism operations and prosecutions in general by making them seem arbitrary, vindictive and racist.<br /><br />I take no position on the validity of the new charges Begg is facing. How can I? I have no idea as to the nature or reliability of the evidence against him. The wisdom of this prosecution will stand or fall when he gets his day in court. But there doesn't seem to me to be anything particularly sinister or surprising about the arrest of someone with a long history of self-professed extremist beliefs and connections on charges relating to political and religious extremism.<br /><br />Greenwald and Hussain, however, are scandalised. And they want us all to feel scandalised with them. So instead of truthfully recording his past associations and views, they reprint (and implicitly endorse) some conspiratorial speculation offered by CAGE's own spokesperson and a "human rights investigator" about the "timing" of the arrest, and they provide some conjecture of their own about attempts to silence critics of government wrongdoing. No actual evidence is provided for any of this because of course there isn't any, and all the rhetorical questions they ask about the basis for the arrest are thus moot until we get to trial.<br /><br />That doesn't prevent Greenwald and Hussain from supporting Begg's claim to persecution without equivocation. And having established his innocence - at least to their own satisfaction - they then explain that this is all part of an authoritarian campaign of intimidation against what they call:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">. . . Muslim political activists who have been arrested and detained for their public criticisms of the conduct of the War on Terror — usually under the guise of highly-tendentious terrorism charges.</blockquote>The four examples of said 'political activists' then provided are:<br /><ul><li><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarek_Mehanna" target="_blank">Tarek Mehanna</a>&nbsp;- Sentenced to 17 years in April 2012 by a Massachusetts court of conspiracy to kill American soldiers, providing material support to al-Qaeda by publishing propaganda online, and lying to the FBI.</li><li><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syed_Fahad_Hashmi" target="_blank">Fahad Hashmi</a>&nbsp;- Pled guilty to one count of abetting terrorism, for knowing assisting in the provision of supplies to al-Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan. In April 2010 he was sentenced to 15 years by a Manhattan court.&nbsp;</li><li><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jubair_Ahmad" target="_blank">Jubair Ahmad</a>&nbsp;- Sentenced to 12 years in December 2011 for making and publishing a propaganda video for <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lashkar-e-Taiba">Lashkar-e-Taiba</a>, the foreign terrorist organisation responsible for the 2008 Mumbai attacks in which 164 people lost their lives and over 300 were wounded.</li><li><a href="http://www.fbi.gov/pittsburgh/press-releases/2013/pennsylvania-man-sentenced-for-terrorism-solicitation-and-firearms-offense" target="_blank">Emerson Winfield Begolly</a>&nbsp;- Pled guilty in August 2011 to soliciting others to carry out acts of jihadi terrorism within the United States. He was sentenced 102 months by a Pittsburg court.</li></ul>Whether or not the incitement to kill American soldiers or the dissemination of bomb-making materials in jihadist web forums ought to constitute protected speech in post-9/11 America is a perfectly legitimate free expression debate. However, it is one that takes place at the absolutist end of the spectrum. The imprisoning of Muslims - and only Muslims - who happen to disagree with American foreign policy does not.<br /><br />By misrepresenting the former as the latter, Greenwald and Hussain imply there is no meaningful difference between the two, thereby dissolving the distinction between democratic dissent and the incitement of hatred, terror and violence. Counter-extremism measures designed to protect citizens from the kinds of "Muslim political activists" who fly airliners into skyscrapers and blow men, women and children to bits in marketplaces and pizzerias, are then 'Islamophobic' by their very nature.<br /><br />The authors confirm this when, in their most brazen profession of philo-Salafi sympathies, they complain:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">[America]’s largest Muslim charity was <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/nov/24/holy-land-foundation-gaza-hamas">prosecuted on terrorism charges</a> for the crime of sending money to Palestinians deemed terrorists by the U.S. Government.</blockquote>By this point, one doesn't have to follow the link to realise that the "Palestinians" being referred to here are Hamas.<br /><br />Philo-Salafis never appear unduly troubled that their refusal to distinguish between Islamist jihadis and dissenting Muslims committed to democratic debate and activism only stokes the anti-Muslim bigotry and paranoia they claim to oppose.<br /><br />Nor do they seem concerned that the vast majority of Salafi-jihadi victims are not Western at all. In her pamphlet on Cage Prisoners and Moazzam Begg, Meredith Tax cites <a href="http://www.ctc.usma.edu/posts/deadly-vanguards-a-study-of-al-qaidas-violence-against-muslims" target="_blank">a study by the Combatting Terrorism Centre</a> which concluded&nbsp;"that&nbsp;between 2006 and 2008, the most recent period the study examined, fully 98% of al-Qaeda's victims were inhabitants of Muslim majority countries."<br /><br />Tax concludes her pamphlet by expanding upon "5 Wrong Ideas" advanced by Salafis like Begg and those who indulge them:<br /><ul><li>The Muslim Right Is Anti-Imperialist</li><li>"Defence of Muslim Lands" Is Comparable To National Liberation Struggles</li><li>The Problem Is "Islamophobia"</li><li>Terrorism Is Justified By Revolutionary Necessity</li><li>Any Feminist Who Criticises The Muslim Right Is An Orientalist &amp; Ally Of US Imperialism</li></ul>What Tax has here summarised as a list of misapprehensions and errors of understanding that lead anti-Imperialist Westerners to support Islamofascism might also form the basis of a philo-Salafist manifesto.<br /><br />Foreign and domestic terror atrocities, it is held, are caused by the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq and counter-insurgency drone warfare. Of the Middle East's many barbaric Islamic regimes, the philo-Salafi only ever criticises those with whom the West have formed economic and strategic alliances. They blame Orientalism and cultural imperialism for Muslim oppression. And neoliberalism, neocolonialism, and neoconservatism. They denounce Israel as an illegitimate ethnocratic colonial outpost and an intolerable affront to Muslim dignity, and they excuse even its most vicious, racist enemies in the name of resistance. They denigrate those who embrace and defend so-called 'Western values' as traitors - inauthentic "House" Muslims and "Uncle Toms".<br /><br />And so on.<br /><br />Conquest of Muslim Lands abroad; Islamophobia and bigotry at home. Grievance. Victimhood.&nbsp;Resistance.&nbsp;Moral equivalence. Every box on the Salafi's propaganda checklist gets a reassuring tick.<br /><br />These philo-Salafis are the Imran Khans. The Judith Butlers. The George Galloways and Seumas Milnes. The people who insist that the West's democracies bring terror on themselves, but who have nothing to say about the daily slaughter of Muslims in the name of the same hideous supremacist ideology.<br /><br />People, in other words, like Glenn Greenwald, who in April last year <a href="http://www.salon.com/2012/04/13/the_real_criminals_in_the_tarek_mehanna_case/" target="_blank">wrote this</a> in defence of Tarek Mehanna:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">He was found guilty of supporting al-Qaeda (by virtue of translating Terrorists’ documents into English and expressing “sympathetic views” to the group) as well as conspiring to “murder” U.S. soldiers in Iraq (i.e., to wage war against an invading army perpetrating an aggressive attack on a Muslim nation).</blockquote>Greenwald valourises those who would murder him for his homosexuality, his Jewishness, and any number of his libertarian views were he ever to find himself at their mercy. It's all rather squalid and pitiful, really. Philo-Salafism at its most perverse, spiteful and masochistic.<br /><br />Although Murtaza Hussain exhibits many of the symptoms associated with philo-Salafism, the condition is not, as in Greenwald's case, chronic. In the past, Hussain has at least shown himself capable of recognising the utter moral turpitude of the Taliban and its allies, and he is not in the habit of redescribing their cruelty and barbarism as a noble and defiant reply to American power.<br /><br />However, the fact remains that, in this instance, he's jointly responsible for a nasty piece of philo-Salafi propaganda. As editor at the Intercept, Greenwald has boasted that he has been promised complete autonomy to indulge his obsessions, <a href="http://bobcesca.thedailybanter.com/blog-archives/2014/03/glenn-greenwald-the-intercept-wont-have-editorial-obstacles-for-its-reporting.html" target="_blank">unfettered by the hierarchical checks and balances on which good journalism tends to rely</a>. So, in short, we can expect a lot more of this garbage. <br /><br />I'll close this long piece by quoting Greenwald and Hussain's comically inept grasp of the Syrian conflict, which they offer as evidence yet more Western hypocrisy:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">[T]he bizarre spectacle of charging [Moazzam Begg] with “terrorism” offenses for allegedly helping rebels which the U.S. government itself is aiding and for whom intervention was advocated by the U.S. president as recently as last year. Indeed, in 2012, the year Begg made his trip, the widespread view in the West of Syrian rebels was that they were noble freedom-fighters who deserved as much help as possible, not “terrorists” whom the law made it a crime to assist. In the same year another major visiting supporter to the opposition movement was John McCain – an indication of how much mainstream Western support the uprising enjoyed at the time.</blockquote>I'm afraid that this kind of confusion is inevitable if one refuses to distinguish between different kinds of Muslim "dissent". But hey ho. It's all grist to the West-hating mill, so facts and context be damned.<br /><br /><br /><b><i>The pamphlet "Double Bind" by Meredith Tax, which includes a detailed case study on Moazzam Begg and CAGE and expands on much of the above, may be&nbsp;<a href="http://www.centreforsecularspace.org/double-bind-the-muslim-right-the-anglo-american-left-and-universal-human-rights-by-meredith-tax/" target="_blank">purchased here</a>. It is not only a valuable polemic about the embrace of the Muslim Right, but its text &amp; footnotes provide a useful resource of links and information relating to the Begg controversy for which I was very grateful whilst drafting this post.</i></b>Unrepentant Jacobinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09256579083755037018noreply@blogger.com23tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5380090049852721671.post-25081529444160035992014-02-05T20:16:00.001-08:002015-01-02T09:35:33.563-08:00Isolating Dissent<span style="font-size: large;"><b>Maajid Nawaz and the 'Jesus &amp; Mo' Controversy</b></span><br /><br /><blockquote class="twitter-tweet tw-align-center">This Jesus &amp; Mo <a href="https://twitter.com/JandMo">@JandMo</a> cartoon is not offensive&amp;I'm sure God is greater than to feel threatened by it الله أكبر منه <a href="http://t.co/dEwlapWUSi">pic.twitter.com/dEwlapWUSi</a><br />— Maajid Nawaz (@MaajidNawaz) <a href="https://twitter.com/MaajidNawaz/statuses/422342223460855809">January 12, 2014</a></blockquote><script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script> <br />The most recent controversy over an image depicting the Prophet Muhammad has differed from its predecessors in one important respect. In this instance it was not the artist who was targeted - it was a Muslim who shared the image (above) on twitter. So while the vicious Islamic backlash was reminiscent of those that followed the publication of the Danish cartoons in 2005 or the Innocence of Muslims video in 2012, the complexion of the rage was different. As was the complexion of the hesitancy displayed by the British media in covering the story.<br /><br />Maajid Nawaz is an ex-member of the extremist group Hizb ut-Tahrir. Now he runs the counter-extremism think tank <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quilliam_Foundation" target="_blank">Quilliam</a>, which he founded in 2007 with fellow former Hizb member Ed Husain. He is also a Prospective Parliamentary Candidate for the Liberal Democrats in Hampstead and Kilburn. The image he tweeted is taken from the online satirical comic strip <a href="http://www.jesusandmo.net/" target="_blank">Jesus and Mo</a>&nbsp;and, as far as I can tell, Nawaz posted it for two reasons.<br /><br /><ul><li>As a point of liberal principle he objected to <a href="http://www.lse.ac.uk/newsAndMedia/news/archives/2013/12/FreshersFairStatementDec.aspx" target="_blank">the treatment of two LSE students</a> who were told to cover their Jesus and Mo t-shirts or face ejection from their Freshers' Fair.</li><li>As a reminder of the plurality of views amongst Muslims on matters like these. This was mainly for the benefit of those who use a literalist interpretation of Islam's texts to justify the stigmatisation of all Muslims as indiscriminately backward and savage.</li></ul><br />Two of the self-appointed leaders of the Muslim community, however, announced with predictable solipsism that Nawaz's tweet was all about them. It was, they claimed, a deliberate act of self-serving provocation for the benefit of the liberal, secular Establishment with whom Nawaz sought to ingratiate himself. A petition, started by&nbsp;Mohammed Shafiq of The Ramadan Foundation and enthusiastically promoted by vapid media personality Mohammed Ansar, <a href="http://www.change.org/en-GB/petitions/nick-clegg-remove-maajid-nawaz-as-ppc-for-hampstead-kilburn" target="_blank">was posted online</a> calling on the Liberal Democrats to deselect Nawaz as a PPC.<br /><br />Since Nawaz is a Muslim of Pakistani heritage, their complaint could not be framed as one of racism or even 'Islamophobia'. Nor could it easily be framed as one of free expression, since the cartoonist's right to draw the cartoon - which has been freely available online since it <a href="http://www.jesusandmo.net/2005/11/24/body/" target="_blank">first appeared in November 2005</a> - was not at issue. So instead the case made by the petition was that Nawaz had engaged in behaviour unbefitting a PPC (Shafiq is also - improbably - a member of the Liberal Democrats).<br /><br />But the sheer venom of the campaign against Maajid Nawaz, and the inflammatory language used by its leaders, speaks to an even more prosaic reason for the outrage: personal animosity. Mohammed Shafiq and the thousands of Muslims who signed his petition share a visceral dislike of Nawaz which long predates this outcry. Nawaz's crime is that he is a secularist who - <a href="http://jacobinism.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/wrath-of-multiculturalists.html" target="_blank">as I have explained previously</a> - refuses to abide by the identitarian rules of the multicultural game. In other words, this is less a theological quarrel than a political one.<br /><br />In the eyes of Shafiq and his supporters, Nawaz is something worse than a white racist; he's a traitor to the 'Muslim Community'. It is to this community's tribal values - apparently defined by reactionaries like Shafiq - that he is expected to show loyalty, and not to his own freedom of conscience. He is - to use an epithet appropriated by cultural chauvinists - "<a href="https://twitter.com/WasAlRahman/status/424173730781077504" target="_blank">an Uncle Tom</a>".<br /><br />When Nawaz tweeted the cartoon, his enemies immediately saw an opportunity to remind him and anyone else listening that it was the traditionalist, totalitarian tendency which spoke for Muslims, and not the moderate secularists. So, with a demagogue's cynicism and ruthless dishonesty, Mohammed Shafiq set about drumming up a pogrom.<br /><br /><blockquote class="twitter-tweet tw-align-center"><a href="https://twitter.com/MrTickle3">@MrTickle3</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/MaajidNawaz">@MaajidNawaz</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/drusamahasan">@drusamahasan</a> ghustaki Rasool these quillium people<br />— Mohammed Shafiq (@mshafiquk) <a href="https://twitter.com/mshafiquk/statuses/424173243990552577">January 17, 2014</a></blockquote><script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script> <br /><br />The Urdu phrase "Ghustaki Rasool" translates as "Defamer of the Prophet" - a religious charge tantamount to apostasy and punishable by death in Pakistan, where Nawaz travels to work and where he has family. In a sinister echo of the Danish cartoons controversy, Shafiq then declared his intention to "notify Islamic countries" of Nawaz's crime (which knocks apart the idea that this was simply a provincial question of whether of not Nawaz had contravened the Liberal Democrats' code of conduct).<br /><br /><blockquote class="twitter-tweet tw-align-center">We will notify all muslim organisations in the UK of his despicable behaviour and also notify Islamic countries.<br />— Mohammed Shafiq (@mshafiquk) <a href="https://twitter.com/mshafiquk/statuses/424575029599543296">January 18, 2014</a></blockquote><script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script> <br /><br />Not content with the available facts, Shafiq circulated the additional rumour that Nawaz had tweeted a link to the Jesus and Mo website. It would hardly make any difference if he had but, as it happens, this is simply false. Shafiq also alleged that the Jesus and Mo series depicted the two protagonists having sex. This is <a href="https://twitter.com/JandMo/status/425587742270308352" target="_blank">also false</a>, and a homophobic dogwhistle into the bargain.<br /><br /><div>Nawaz began receiving anonymous phone calls and death threats, some of which were <a href="http://hurryupharry.org/2014/02/03/more-horrifying-death-threats-against-maajid-nawaz/" target="_blank">so lurid and elaborate</a> they're better described as torture fantasies. All very regrettable, Shafiq explained when called upon to account for himself, but Maajid Nawaz ought to have known better. Like Rushdie before him, Nawaz had brought this on himself.</div><div><br /></div><div>Shaken by the ferocity of the backlash from his co-religionists, Nawaz responded with <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jan/28/speaking-islam-loudmouths-hijacked" target="_blank">a calm OpEd piece in the Guardian</a> in which he used his prophet's egalitarian legacy to&nbsp;make the following appeal for tolerance:</div><blockquote class="tr_bq">Muslims are not one homogenous tribe requiring representation through a <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03c8nd8">Citizen Khan-</a>like community leader. Neither are we still colonial subjects who must speak through our <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_Sahib">Brown Sahibs</a>. We Muslims are free. Our prophet left no heir. We have never had a pope or a clergy. We are commanded to worship God alone, and for our sins we are answerable to no one but Him.</blockquote>This didn't go down at all well at the 5Pillarz website ("What are Muslims thinking?"). In response its editor&nbsp;Roshan M Salih&nbsp;(who moonlights as a documentarian for the Iranian theocracy's propaganda channel Press TV) demeaned himself more than his subject when <a href="http://www.5pillarz.com/2014/01/29/maajid-nawaz-is-a-donkey/" target="_blank">he denounced Nawaz</a>&nbsp;in racialized language as "a sellout and a coconut".<br /><br />Then Nawaz Hanif replied to Nawaz's piece with a particularly <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jan/31/maajid-nawaz-lib-dem-quilliam-jesus-muhammad-islam" target="_blank">spiteful post in&nbsp;the Guardian</a>. Hanif declared himself uninterested in the matter of offence and instead&nbsp;offered his readers ad hominems, innuendo and a portrait of Nawaz as a vain self-promoter and a traitor:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">The Quilliam Foundation has a reputation for secretly smearing pluralist Muslim organisations. In 2010 <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2010/aug/04/quilliam-foundation-list-alleged-extremism">it prepared a list for security officials</a>, linking peaceful groups such as the Muslim Safety Forum, which works with the police to improve community relations, the Islamic Human Rights Commission, and even the Islam Channel, a TV broadcaster, to the ideology of terrorists. The idea that Quilliam's founder will be regarded as a saviour of Muslims in Britain is therefore laughable.</blockquote>What's laughable - not to mention revealing of Hanif's own regressive relio-political views - is the idea that the Islam Channel, the&nbsp;<a href="http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/douglasmurray/100023272/the-truth-about-the-islamic-human-rights-commission-recommended-by-britains-muslim-police/" target="_blank">Khomeinist&nbsp;IHRC</a> or the&nbsp;<a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/journalists/andrew-gilligan/7908273/Police-Muslim-forum-headed-by-Islamic-extremist.html" target="_blank">Muslim Safety Forum</a>, co-founded by a fanatic named Azad Ali (now <a href="http://hurryupharry.org/2012/02/28/azad-ali-awlaki-fan-opponent-of-democracy-now-vice-chair-of-unite-against-fascism/" target="_blank">vice-chair of Unite Against Fascism</a>),&nbsp;are best described as "pluralist" or among those who "work...to improve community relations". (Notice, by the way, the slipperiness of the formulation "Nawaz has a reputation for...")<br /><br />Much is made by both men of the unrepresentative nature of Nawaz's views amongst Muslims. To be sure, <a href="https://www.change.org/en-GB/petitions/nick-clegg-give-full-support-to-libdem-ppc-maajid-nawaz-and-take-disciplinary-action-against-party-member-mohammed-shafiq" target="_blank">the petition posted in his support</a> has received far fewer signatories than the one denouncing him. And it would be safe to assume, I think, that a good number of signatories to the former would be ex-Muslims and non-Muslims.<br /><br />But so what? The argument being thrashed out here is one of ideas and it is intra-religious as well as secular. The value of dissent in any such battle depends only on the worth of the arguments, not their popularity. How else do societies evolve and progress without dissidents courageous enough to attack religious and political orthodoxy?<br /><br />The controversy over the Jesus and Mo cartoon is part of a struggle within Islam for the right of individuals to unchain themselves from a traditionalist, authoritarian Islamic identity and to embrace liberty, equality and modernity. There are secularist Muslims across Britain and Europe and the Islamic world who agree with Nawaz. They share his anti-totalitarian, universalist impulse and they are tired of being told that political and religious reactionaries like Ansar and Shafiq speak for them. Many others who would like to voice their support are unable to do so due to the penalties dissent may incur. The smaller they are in number, the greater their persecution, the more they require our support.<br /><br />But the significance of this aspect of the debate seemed to get lost in the confused coverage of the row by much of the media. On the one hand, Shafiq's campaign was robustly challenged, on television and radio and in print. But not one OpEd piece defending Nawaz's right to share the cartoon, nor one television report covering the controversy, actually accompanied their story with a picture of the cartoon in question.<br /><br />Jesus and Mo's anonymous cartoonist had the honesty to admit he feared for his life, which is why when he appeared on Newsnight, he asked for his name to be withheld, for his face to be fogged and for his voice to be disguised. Newsnight's editor Ian Katz was perhaps rather less forthcoming when asked to justify his refusal to use the image at the centre of their story:<br /><br /><blockquote class="twitter-tweet tw-align-center">.<a href="https://twitter.com/VictoriaPeckham">@VictoriaPeckham</a> a/ cos use of any Mohamd image causes great offence to many (not just extremists) b/ cos no clear journlistic case to use<br />— Ian Katz (@iankatz1000) <a href="https://twitter.com/iankatz1000/statuses/428667493398634496">January 29, 2014</a></blockquote><script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script> <br /><br />Katz went on to accuse his critics of "journalistic machismo" and "liberal virility", thereby casting himself as the reasonable-minded party. But if it is tolerant and responsible for Newsnight to censor the cartoon, the clear implication is that Maajid Nawaz behaved intolerantly and irresponsibly when he tweeted it. By affecting a position of spurious neutrality, the media establishment has taken a de facto position alongside the religious reactionaries calling for Nawaz's head and left him looking dangerously isolated.<br /><br />This message was not lost on Nawaz. After Channel 4 News obscured Mohammad's face in their report while leaving Jesus's face exposed (irrespective of the offence such a decision might cause Christians), he tweeted:<br /><br /><blockquote class="twitter-tweet tw-align-center">Thank you <a href="https://twitter.com/Channel4News">@Channel4News</a> you just pushed us liberal Muslims further into a ditch <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%23LynchMobFreeZone&amp;src=hash">#LynchMobFreeZone</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%23TeamNawaz&amp;src=hash">#TeamNawaz</a><br />— Maajid Nawaz (@MaajidNawaz) <a href="https://twitter.com/MaajidNawaz/statuses/428254589281120256">January 28, 2014</a></blockquote><script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script> <br /><br />It's interesting to note that secular and progressive Muslims also seem to be those who complain least about 'Islamophobia'. What really drives them to distraction is the refusal of Western relativists to offer them support in their own confrontations with the Islamic far-right.&nbsp;Meanwhile those identitarians who complain most often and most noisily about 'Islamophobia' are often the same people doing their utmost to confirm the bigot's view that all Muslims are childish and intolerant. Not only do they behave in a childish and intolerant way, but they insist that it is they who really represent Islam.<br /><br />And yet, perversely, we insist on indulging these tantrums. Shafiq and Ansar have made themselves look petty, vindictive and ridiculous in the eyes of many, but they have every reason to feel pleased with themselves. Maajid Nawaz will not be deselected as PPC but nor does it look like Mohammed Shafiq will face any disciplinary action from his party for his cynical incitement of violence.<br /><br />Nawaz has been advised by the police to keep a low profile. Moderate Muslims have been put on notice: step out of line and you could be next. And the absurd and infantilising idea that these pictures pose an objective danger, due to the peculiar power they hold over Muslim men and women, has been reinforced by the media's complicity in their unnecessary censorship.<br /><br />It is astonishing how quickly a deeply-entrenched taboo can collapse in a free society once it has been violated. Had the reporting of the Jesus and Mo row been universally accompanied by the cartoon in question (as it would have been in any other context), it would have demonstrated at a stroke how stupid the debate about Islam has become. Shafiq and Ansar understand this perfectly, which is precisely why they have kicked up such a racket over such an innocuous image. If sharing a gently satirical comic strip can attract such outrage, vituperation and hatred, what are the chances of a genuinely provocative, transgressive and iconoclastic satire of Islamic beliefs and ideas emerging?<br /><br />The internalised fear of violent reprisal is an effective tool, and explains the uniformity of self-censorship right across a media establishment not known for its tactful avoidance of sensationalism. But religious zealots know they are aiming at a soft target. Ian Katz and others like him genuinely do seem to be embarrassed to take their own side in this quarrel.<br /><br />This is not simply an error, but a betrayal. A betrayal of the need to defend free conscience, expression and inquiry from religious obscurantists, and a betrayal of Muslim dissidents, like Maajid Nawaz, who believe in these principles and are fighting to uphold them.<br /><br /><br /><b><i>Note: In light of the above, I will now be blogging under my own name and photograph. My blogger profile can be found <a href="https://www.blogger.com/profile/09256579083755037018" target="_blank">here</a>.</i></b>Unrepentant Jacobinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09256579083755037018noreply@blogger.com19tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5380090049852721671.post-72476564500947197332014-01-06T11:50:00.000-08:002015-01-02T11:43:54.885-08:00Racism; Censorship; Disunity<div class="tr_bq"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>On the Hounding of Adele Wilde-Blavatsky </b></span></div><span style="font-size: large;"><b><br /></b></span><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-KGN5kEsDlzg/UsTCpe6Q9qI/AAAAAAAAAQ0/Vy5tVT9Rxs0/s1600/1+Cultural+Relativism.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-KGN5kEsDlzg/UsTCpe6Q9qI/AAAAAAAAAQ0/Vy5tVT9Rxs0/s1600/1+Cultural+Relativism.png" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">There is a damaging idea fast gathering influence on the Left that - like a lot of contemporary postmodern Leftist thought - urgently needs dismantling. This idea holds that racism is only possible when prejudice is married with power.</div><br />The corollary of this premise is that racism may only travel in one direction - from the powerful to the powerless - and it is therefore nonsensical to discuss, still less condemn, racist attitudes expressed by ethnic minorities. In the West, racism is the preserve of the white majority who use it - often, it is claimed, unconsciously - to sustain their advantage and to oppress those they deem to be 'other'. In the geopolitical sphere, meanwhile, this racism is the preserve of the world's wealthy democracies and is expressed as Orientalism, Military and Cultural Imperialism, and Neoliberalism, all of which are used to dominate and subjugate the Global South.<br /><br />Furthermore, racism exists independently of individual prejudice and cultural mores - like the power systems of which it is a part, it is abstract; metaphysical; unavoidable; unchanging. It is all-pervasive, 'structural', endemic, systemic, and internalised to such a degree that even (or especially) white liberal Westerners who perceive themselves to be broad-minded and non-prejudicial are not even aware of it. It is therefore incumbent on every white person, male or female, to 'check their white privilege' before venturing to comment on matters pertaining to minority cultures, lest they allow their unconscious ethnocentricity to reinforce oppressive power structures. Instead, moral judgement of minorities by universal standards should - no, <i>must</i> - be replaced by a willingness to indulge and uncritically accept difference.<br /><br />In the view of this layman, this kind of thinking is wrong, both morally and in point of fact. <br /><br />Postmodernism is notoriously unhappy with anything as concrete as a dictionary definition. However, the inconvenient fact is that racism remains clearly <a href="http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/157097?redirectedFrom=racism#eid" target="_blank">defined in the OED</a>, and by the common usage its entries are intended to reflect, as follows:<br /><blockquote><b>Racism, <i>n</i></b>:<br />The belief that all members of each race possess characteristics, abilities, or qualities specific to that race, especially so as to distinguish it as inferior or superior to another race or races. Hence: prejudice and antagonism towards people of other races, esp. those felt to be a threat to one's cultural or racial integrity or economic well-being; the expression of such prejudice in words or actions. Also occas. in extended use, with reference to people of other nationalities.</blockquote>That the effects of this prejudice and antagonism are aggravated, perpetuated and sometimes institutionalized by the effects of power is undeniable, but this is a separate issue. Many unpleasant aspects of human nature and behaviour (greed, for instance) are also exacerbated by power, but that doesn't change the ugly nature of the behaviour itself, nor allow us to infer that the powerless are incapable of making it manifest.<br /><br />Efforts to effect an official change to this definition should be strongly resisted on grounds of egalitarianism (an idea the Left once cared about deeply). The difficulty with the power + prejudice formulation lies, not just in its dilution of what makes racism so toxic, but in a consequent moral relativism which holds people to different standards. It is manifestly unjust to hold some people to a higher standard of thought and behaviour based on their unalterable characteristics. However, it is <i>far worse</i> to hold others to a respectively <i>lower</i> standard based on those same characteristics, which insists on the indulgence of viewpoints and behaviour by some that would not be tolerated from others.<br /><br />This separatist thinking has given rise to identity politics, moral equivalence, cultural relativism and what Ayaan Hirsi Ali and others have called "a racism of low expectations". As Hirsi Ali remarked in her memoir-cum-polemic <i>Nomad</i> (excerpted <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/may/08/ayaan-hirsi-ali-nomad-extracts" target="_blank">here</a>):<br /><blockquote>This Western attitude is based on the idea that people of colour must be exempted from "normal" standards of behaviour. There are many good men and women in the West who try to resettle refugees and strive to eliminate discrimination. They lobby governments to exempt minorities from the standards of behaviour of western societies; they fight to help minorities preserve their cultures, and excuse their religion from critical scrutiny. These people mean well, but their activism is now a part of the very problem they seek to solve.</blockquote>Identity politics reinforces the racist argument that people can and should be judged according to their skin colour. It rests on the same crude, illiberal determinism, and results in what the French philosopher Pascal Bruckner has described as a "racism of the anti-racists". This, as we shall see, leaves those vulnerable to oppression within 'subaltern' groups without a voice and mutes criticism of chauvinism and out-group hatred when expressed by minorities.<br /><br />The alternative to this, now routinely derided as 'Enlightenment Fundamentalism', is a principled commitment to egalitarianism and universalism - the notion that what separates us (culture) is taught and learned, but that what unites us is far more important and fundamental: that is, our common humanity. On this basis, the same rights and protections should be afforded to all people.<br /><br />This is what underpinned the idealism of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the American Declaration of Independence, two of the most noble documents produced by Enlightenment thought. It was the foundation for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, drafted and adopted in the wake of the carnage of the Second World War. And it is the basis upon which civil rights groups and human rights organisations have sought to reform the laws of nations and&nbsp;and the actions of their peoples.<br /><br />The answer to prejudice, and to the division and inequality it inevitably produces, is not exceptionalism based on a hierarchy of grievance, but to strive for greater equality on the basis that we belong to a common species, divided only by our ideas. As Martin Luther King declared on the steps of the Lincoln memorial:<br /><blockquote>I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal."</blockquote><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; *&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; *</div><br />On 20 December, the feminist writer and activist Adele Wilde-Blavatsky published an article in the Huffington Post entitled <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/adele-tomlin/white-feminism_b_4477351.html" target="_blank">Stop Bashing White Women in the Name of Beyonce: We Need Unity Not Division</a>. Wilde-Blavatsky's post was a rebuke to those - on what she described as the post-colonial or intersectional feminist Left - who use identity politics and arguments from privilege to delegitimise the voices of white feminists speaking out about the abuse of women in the Global South and within minority communities in the West.<br /><br />Wilde-Blavatsky's decision to use a paragraph in an otherwise banal <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/13/beyonce-album-flawless-feminism" target="_blank">review of Beyonce's latest album</a>&nbsp;by Mikki Kendall as the starting point for her argument was, in my view, unfortunate. Not simply because there are better examples of the divisive effect that identity politics has on debate (the <a href="http://jacobinism.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/priyamvada-gopals-double-bind.html" target="_blank">quarrel over gender segregation</a> being only the most recent), but because the comparatively unimportant matter of the politics of Beyonce's music risked trivialising what followed. Nor did the provocative decision to announce a twitter hashtag&nbsp;<a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%23stopblamingwhitewomenweneedunity&amp;src=hash&amp;f=realtime" target="_blank">#stopblamingwhitewomenweneedunity</a>&nbsp;strike me as especially wise.<br /><br />Nonetheless, such grumbles aside, Wilde-Blavatsky's substantive quarrel with the malignant effects of identity politics and the cultural relativists who espouse it is one with which regular readers of this blog will be familiar.<br /><br />She argued, first of all, that Kendall's casual suggestion that "white feminism" is uniformly anti-male and hostile to the self-empowering feminism Beyonce's music represents was an unjustifiable extrapolation from the comments of only a few white feminists. This, she said, ignored the pluralism of experience and opinion amongst white feminists and "literally 'whitewash[es]' me and all other white women to a flesh colour." This was predictably interpreted as special pleading on Wilde-Blavatsky's part, who it was claimed wanted to muscle in on subaltern victimhood. But what she was objecting to here is in fact the straightforward logical fallacy I've addressed above.<br /><br />More importantly, she argued that this pointed to a broader tendency to essentialise 'white feminism' as elitist, arrogant, out-of-touch and coddled by privilege, all of which was being used to disqualify white feminists of all stripes from commenting on vital issues of women's rights within minority groups:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">The clear message [is] that if you're white you cannot criticise anything that is done or said by non-white people unless it follows a certain kind of left liberal 'post-colonial' strain of thought.</blockquote>In support of this claim, she linked to an article by the feminist academic Swati Parashar entitled <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/4444810.html" target="_blank">Where Are the Feminists to Defend Indian Women?</a>&nbsp;in which Parashar wrote:<br /><blockquote>Those who are quick to condemn governments which kill women and children in drone attacks in Afghanistan or Pakistan, or who are quick to point out that Western policies have endangered lives of civilians in many parts of the world, find no words to speak out against the violence women in the Global South face repeatedly and every day.&nbsp;Violence against women that is routinely normalised in certain cultures, in certain societies, in certain countries, and violence that cannot be traced to Western militarism or Western foreign policy does not find easy critics. That would not be politically correct nor would it reflect commitment to anti-racism, perhaps.</blockquote>To which Wilde-Blavatsky added:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">[T]o 'blacken' the name of the work and efforts of white women in the feminist movement and to portray them as the 'enemy' of women of colour is a great disservice not only to white women but also to women in general. In addition, it only serves to further divide women and empower patriarchy and misogyny [...] It is no accident that right-wing, religious, misogynist patriarchs are all too happy to recite post-colonial theory and cultural relativism to justify and perpetuate their power and cultural practices that restrict and oppress women of all colours races and cultures [...]&nbsp;Issues such as marriage, physical safety and autonomy, access to good family planning and health care, pregnancy, abortion, rape, domestic violence, slut shaming, denial of opportunities in work and education and so on still effect women across all cultures, races and nations (albeit in differing ways). If we allow race and 'culture' to divide rather than unite women then the patriarchs have won.</blockquote>The response to this argument from the <i>bien pensant</i> Left ranged from the incredulous to the vitriolic.<br /><br />In the comment thread below her article and in a storm which overwhelmed her twitter handle and her hashtag, Wilde-Blavatsky (who tweets as&nbsp;<a href="https://twitter.com/lionfaceddakini" target="_blank">@lionfaceddakini</a>) was derided with accusations of arrogance, ignorance, bigotry, racism and cultural supremacism. She was advised that she had not listened sufficiently closely to authentic voices of women of colour. &nbsp;Others declared her to be beneath contempt and an object example of white feminism's irrelevance. She was accused of using a fraudulent call for unity as a way of advancing an argument from white victimhood. It was demanded that she immediately re-educate herself by reading various academic texts on the subject. Her "white woman's tears" were repeatedly mocked, as were her protestations that her own family is mixed-race. And, of course, there were the predictable demands for retraction, penitence and prostration.<br /><br /><blockquote class="twitter-tweet tw-align-center">Racist feminists like <a href="https://twitter.com/lionfaceddakini">@lionfaceddakini</a> continue to exemplify how disgusting the world of white feminism is..deluded&amp;drunk off privilege<br />— Voodoo Chile (@thesoulasylum) <a href="https://twitter.com/thesoulasylum/statuses/417052148656906240">December 28, 2013</a></blockquote><br /><script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script> The rhetoric of anti-racism has come a long way since Martin Luther King's passionate call for egalitarian unity, and I submit that it has not been traveling in the right direction. Wilde-Blavatsky retains a faith in King's idealism her critics appear to have lost. And, to their fury, she won't budge. But she knew what to expect. After all, as she points out in the piece itself, she's been here before.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">* &nbsp; &nbsp; * &nbsp; &nbsp; *</div><br />On 21 March 2012, Shaima Alawadi, a 32-year old married Iraqi mother of five living in El Cajon in Southern California, was murdered in her own home. Her skull had been smashed in four places (with a tyre-iron or similar) and she was discovered "drowning in her own blood" by her 17 year old daughter Fatima, who was in the house at the time but claimed not to have heard the assault. Alawadi was rushed to hospital in a coma but on 24 March her life support was switched off and she died. Pictures were circulated of her bereaved husband holding his dead wife's photograph (below, left) and the day after her death, it <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/mar/25/california-iraqi-mother-murder-hate-crime" target="_blank">was reported</a> that a note had been found by her unconscious body which read: "Go back to your own country. You're a terrorist." Speculation was rife that Alawadi was the victim of a racist or Islamophobic hate crime.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/--Q8vu8pTaro/Ur9IgWyx0cI/AAAAAAAAAP0/lPy1qn_Lfvk/s1600/AlawadiMartin.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/--Q8vu8pTaro/Ur9IgWyx0cI/AAAAAAAAAP0/lPy1qn_Lfvk/s1600/AlawadiMartin.png" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div>Barely a month earlier, on 21 February, in a case which received far more attention, a young black teenager, Trayvon Martin (above, right) was shot and killed in Sanford Florida by George Zimmerman a mixed-race Hispanic.<br /><br />Anti-racist campaigners and bloggers were quick to draw a connection - if not a direct equivalence - between the two crimes and to claim they exposed the lie of a supposedly 'post-racial' America under Barack Obama. What clearer evidence could there be of America's endemic racism and that people of colour there live in a state of siege? Martin had been killed for wearing his hoodie. Alawadi had been targeted for her hijab (headscarf). A <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/21/trayvon-martin-hoodie-march_n_1370266.html" target="_blank">1m Hoodie March</a> was organised in solidarity with Martin, and those campaigning on behalf of Alawadi responded by announcing a <a href="http://storyful.com/stories/23919" target="_blank">1m Hijab March</a>. Further protest marches were organised in cities and on campuses across America, uniting the two causes under one banner. Most were well-intended gestures of solidarity but others were promoted using language that was positively inflammatory:<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/--Cxt7soud9M/Ur9PMikixiI/AAAAAAAAAQM/2ikF5ryJtEU/s1600/April7_HoodieMarch.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/--Cxt7soud9M/Ur9PMikixiI/AAAAAAAAAQM/2ikF5ryJtEU/s1600/April7_HoodieMarch.jpg" /></a></div><br />At the time Adele Wilde-Blavatsky was a member of the editorial collective for a website called <a href="http://thefeministwire.com/" target="_blank">The Feminist Wire</a>&nbsp;(TFW). She decided that the equivalence between hoodie and hijab was absurd and dangerous, and on April 13 2012, she published an article on TFW's site explaining why entitled&nbsp;<i>To Be Anti-Racist Is To Be Feminist: The Hoodie and the Hijab Are Not Equals </i>(cross-posted at the Shiraz Socialist blog&nbsp;<a href="http://shirazsocialist.wordpress.com/2012/04/16/the-hoodie-and-the-hijab-are-not-equals/" target="_blank">here</a>).<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">What I take issue with here is the equating of the hoodie and the hijab as sources of ethnic identity and pride. The hijab, which is discriminatory and rooted in men's desire to control women's appearance and sexuality, is not a choice for the majority of women who wear it. The hoodie, on the other hand, is a choice for everyone who wears it. The history and origin of these two items of clothing and what they represent could not be more different; like comparing the crippling footbindings of Chinese women with a `Made in China' Nike trainer.</blockquote><div style="text-align: left;">She accused those making the equivalence of cultural relativism and a misplaced respect for the sanctity of culture, a charge she also used to indict Germaine Greer's notorious claim that attempts to outlaw Female Genital Mutilation represent "an attack on cultural identity" because "one man's beautification was another man's mutilation" (Greer's use of the male pronoun is revealing here).&nbsp;</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">Wilde-Blavatsky insisted that her instincts were libertarian, and that she would not recommend banning practices unless, as with FGM, they resulted in physical harm. But nor would she be compelled to suspend her moral judgement or forfeit the right to challenge the degree to which women's choices to conform with patriarchal religious dress codes were meaningfully free. And even if they were free, she reserved the right as a feminist to challenge regressive choices - whether they be to wear the hijab or to work in pornography - and what those choices represent.</div><br /><div>She warned that respect for cultural difference and a fear of being accused of racism was preventing feminists from addressing issues of misogyny and patriarchal violence within minority communities and ended with an ominous reminder of the folly of seeing oppression and violence as something primarily across cultural divides:</div><blockquote class="tr_bq">[W]hy has there been centuries of caste discrimination and violence in countries like India? Why are Muslim women beaten and murdered by Muslim men for refusing to wear the hijab? How did both these deaths occur in a country that is led by a black male President? How does it explain the fact that about 150 black men are killed every week in the U.S. - and 94 percent of them by other black men?</blockquote>What was needed, she argued, was a reframing of the whole conversation about the defence of women's rights and the need for a feminism that was, if not blind to cultural difference, then at least not subordinate to it.<br /><br />TFW opened the article to unmoderated comments and the initial reaction was indistinguishable from that which greeted her HuffPo piece (which rather emphasises the reluctance of many of her critics to engage with the argument at hand). Wilde-Blavatsky later <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/adele-tomlin/race-above-gender-when-anti-racism-becomes-anti-woman_b_1460469.html" target="_blank">wrote</a> that:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">[My article] generated not only a huge amount of online debate but also abuse in terms of my skin colour (white), character (non-Muslim) and motivation (imperialism). I was called a "racist" and "white imperialist" and was even accused of using the 'ties' of my mixed-race family to "obfuscate my whiteness."</blockquote>There was a brief confusion over the extent to which TFW endorsed the contents of the article when Wilde-Blavatsky <a href="https://www.facebook.com/TheFeministWire/posts/118837211582580" target="_blank">posted it on their facebook page</a> and then began to field responses using TFW's account rather than her own. But while invective was rained down on their colleague, TFW's official response remained a pusillanimous silence. Considering what came next, Wilde-Blavatsky might be forgiven for looking back on this brief interlude with something like nostalgia.<br /><br />Two days later TFW published a scathing open letter (cross-posted <a href="http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/5064/a-collective-response-to-to-be-anti-racist-is-to-b" target="_blank">here</a>) in response to Wilde-Blavatsky's piece, organised&nbsp;by Dr. Dana Olwan and Sophia Azeb and&nbsp;co-signed by no less than 77 feminist activists and academics. The letter - a masterwork of condescension, pompous jargon and passive-aggressive bullying - was addressed to "Our friends and allies at The Feminist Wire". And it began:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">It is with loving concern with which we, the undersigned feminist writers, activists and academics from diverse racial, religious, economic, and political backgrounds, write to this brilliant collective today.</blockquote>It went on to accuse Wilde-Blavatsky of being "[o]blivious to the important cross-racial and cross-ethnic connections and solidarities made in light of the tragic murders of Trayvon Martin and Shaima Alawadi", of "revealing her own [white Western] biases" and "showcasing a lack of knowledge of the history and function of the hijab." She was ignorant. She was patronising. She was not cognizant of her own privilege. "In writing this [article]" the letter's 77 signatories averred...<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">...the author has all but stripped women of colour of an intersectional understanding of violence against women, one that is attuned to both patriarchal and racist violence. Instead, Muslim women and women of colour feminists are reduced to a piece of cloth and the experiences of people of colour and practioners of an increasingly racialized and demonized religion are repeatedly questioned and denied.</blockquote>Having dealt with Wilde-Blavatsky, the letter then moved onto shaming TFW, the collective of which she was a member and which had agreed to publish her work:<br /><div><blockquote class="tr_bq">As feminists deeply committed to challenging racism and Islamophobia and how it differentially impacts black and Muslim (and black Muslim) communities, we wish to open up a dialogue about how to build solidarities across complex histories of subjugation and survival. This space is precisely what is shut down in this article. In writing this letter, we emphasize that our concern is not solely with Adele Wilde-Blavatsky's article but with the broader systemic issues revealed in the publication of a work that prevents us from challenging hierarchies of privilege and building solidarity.&nbsp;We hope The Feminist Wire will take our concerns to heart and initiate an honest conversation about privilege, racism, and Islamophobia within feminist collectives and movements.</blockquote>Watching this unfold, the veteran free speech campaigner and US Director for the think tank The Centre for Secular Space, Meredith Tax, decided that she was witnessing a campaign to intimidate and censor.<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">Why should a group of—count them—77 “feminist writers, activists, and academics” have thought it necessary to write a blistering critique of a blog by a young writer of whom they had probably never heard? Was their purpose to make sure this young woman never wrote anything again? Or to prevent the Feminist Wire from publishing anything in future that might contravene the orthodoxy of identity politics?</blockquote>Quite. It is not as if the letter's signatories are simply concerned laypersons of the kind who might sign an online petition. Every one of the 77 names at the foot of the letter carries with it a title which testifies to the signatory's expertise in these matters, and which carries with it the implied weight &nbsp;of their scholarship, experience and pedagogic authority. To describe its effect as merely intimidating is to do its authors a disservice. It was intended to destroy Wilde-Blavatsky and to disqualify her views from legitimate conversation. As Tax pointed out:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">Say the seventy-seven:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">“Adele Wilde-Blavatsky attempts to address the important question of what it means to be an anti-racist feminist in the 21st century. Her article, however, serves to assert white feminist privilege and power by producing a reductive understanding of racial and gendered violence and by denying Muslim women their agency.”</blockquote>Clearly this is meant to end the discussion. Why discuss anything with someone who is racism incarnate—as is shown by her “questioning of women's choice to wear the niqab.[sic]” </blockquote>She concluded:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">Feminists should be encouraging discussion of such questions rather than trying to shut it down. Congratulations to the editors of the Feminist Wire for having had the guts to publish something controversial.</blockquote>Alas, Meredith Tax and anyone else inclined to put any faith in TFW's courage were to be disappointed. Paralysed by the intensity of the initial response, the letter and the subsequent renewal of criticism finally galvanised TFW into releasing&nbsp;<a href="http://thefeministwire.com/2012/04/the-feminist-wire-responds/" target="_blank">a public statement</a>&nbsp;on behalf of the collective.<br /><br />On 19 April, 4 days after the publication of the letter and 6 days after the publication of the original article, TFW published an unsigned and positively craven article, of which its unnamed authors ought to be thoroughly ashamed. There was much agonising about the unintended offence that had been caused and the catastrophic damage that had been done to TFW's reputation. Noticeable in its absence was a single mention of Adele Wilde-Blavatsky by name or any words of explicit support at all. Instead, affecting a spurious balance, the article's authors declared:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">Not all of us agreed with the argument expressed in the original article, nor did all of us agree with the statements expressed in the Collective Response on April 14th. We are diverse, and we absolutely support different viewpoints. But collectively, we all recognize that the author of the original article and especially her Facebook responses failed to advance TFW’s mission. And, more corrosively, the incident eroded trust among the Collective and among our readership, and we have taken, are taking steps to reinstitute that trust.</blockquote>TFW's profession of an "absolute" support for different viewpoints could hardly have been made in worse faith. Earlier that day both Wilde-Blavatsky's article and the letter from the 77 had been removed from TFW's website and their respective comment threads deleted.<br /><br />And, although their statement makes no mention of the fact, one of the steps taken by TFW had been to dismiss Wilde-Blavatsky from the editorial collective, a decision of which she was informed by email. Prior to the publication of the Letter from the 77,&nbsp;TFW's founder&nbsp;Tamura Lomax had assured Wilde-Blavatsky that space would be cleared for her to offer a "refereed response". Her detailed reply to the 77 which she submitted to TFW in her own defence was never published there.<br /><br />Accounts of the events leading up to the removal of her article differ. Wilde-Blavatsky claims she was informed that should she repeat her claim that three members of the collective had read her article and cleared it for publication - and that two of them had described it as "excellent" - she would find herself on the end of a lawsuit. She says that it was her threat to counter-sue that led to the deletions.<br /><br />TFW, meanwhile, dispute this account, improbably claiming that Wilde-Blavatsky's article had been seen and cleared by no-one prior to publication and insisting that it was she who had first threatened legal action.<br /><br />Email correspondence between Lomax,&nbsp;editorial board&nbsp;member Darnell Moore, and Wilde-Blavatsky, in which Lomax thanked Wilde-Blavatsky warmly for her submission, does seem to bear out the latter's version of events. Certainly neither Lomax nor Moore expressed any reservations&nbsp;about the article's content&nbsp;during the exchange as they discussed possible publication dates.<br /><br />In any event, what is not in dispute is that TFW had now tossed their colleague to the wolves. The only question that remained was whether or not they had been right to do so.<br /><br />For many, TFW had done the right thing. They had committed a terrible error of judgement, but they had listened indulgently to the mob's demands and had cleaned house accordingly. Adele Wilde-Blavatsky had sinned and, unrepentant, been swiftly excommunicated. In a move of Stalinist absolution, TFW then purged their site of all her previous writing. It was a defeat for racism and a victory for intersectional tolerance and empathy.<br /><br />But a small number of feminists dedicated to combatting regressive cultural traditionalism and the political influence of the Islamic far-right refused to see it that way. They were aghast at Wilde-Blavatsky's treatment and on 22 April they co-signed the following statement declaring their unequivocal support for the embattled writer. The full statement which was <a href="http://freethoughtblogs.com/maryamnamazie/2012/04/22/hoodie-and-hejab-are-not-the-same/" target="_blank">posted on the blog</a> of the ex-Muslim and Iranian dissident Maryam Namazie, read:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">We extend our full solidarity to Adele Wilde-Blavatsky for such a clear and rare analysis from feminists in Europe and North America, in which women’s resistance to the Muslim Right - including by resisting all forms of fundamentalist veiling - is made visible and honoured, rather than sacrificed on the altar of anti-racism and anti-imperialism.&nbsp;</blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">[Signed by]</blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq"><ul><li><b>Marieme Helie Lucas</b>, sociologist, Algeria, founder and former international coordinator of the international solidarity network Women Living Under Muslim Laws (WLUML), coordinator Secularism Is A Women’s Issue</li><li><b>Fatou Sow</b>, Researcher, Senegal, international coordinator, Women Living Under Muslim Laws</li><li><b>Maryam Namazie</b>, Spokesperson, One Law for All and Equal Rights Now – Organisation against Women’s Discrimination in Iran, Iran/UK</li><li><b>Karima Bennoune</b>, Professor of Law, Rutgers University, USA</li><li><b>Khawar Mumtaz</b>, Shirkat Gah, Pakistan</li></ul></blockquote>The same day over at her Butterflies and Wheels blog, the feminist and secularist writer Ophelia Benson posted <a href="http://freethoughtblogs.com/butterfliesandwheels/2012/04/you-know-what-you-can-do-with-your-collective-response/" target="_blank">her own furious reply</a> to the Letter from the 77 entitled <i>You Know What You Can Do With Your Collective Response</i>. And in a personal note, later made public, Fatou Sow reaffirmed her support to Wilde-Blavatsky as follows:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">Dear Adele,<br />I again congratulate you on your wonderful courage. You are absolutely right: the hoodie is not the hijab. As an African Muslim woman, no one can convince me that the headscarf and the Islamic veil are signs of my female or Muslim identities. I am sorry that such brilliant women have taken up their pens to condemn your arguments as white supremacy. That is facile, when so many women in the world fight against these injustices. I urge you to continue writing to express your anger against all of these alienations that mark us in body and spirit. Please be assured of my support and my friendship.</blockquote>This rather moving and dignified gesture of solidarity might have been the end of it.<br /><br />However, as 2012 drew to a close, long after TFW had consigned Wilde-Blavatsky's article to post-colonial feminism's dustbin, the investigation into the murder of Shaima Alawadi developed in a way that many of the more level-headed commentators, feminists and activists had always feared it might.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">* &nbsp; &nbsp;* &nbsp; &nbsp;*</div><br />On November 9, 2012, police announced they had arrested&nbsp;Kassim Alhimidi, Alawadi's 48-year old husband, and charged him with her murder. His four youngest children had been taken into protective custody. The racist note, according to court reports&nbsp;<a href="http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2012/Nov/09/new-developments-in-iraqi-womans-killing/?#article-copy" target="_blank">seen by UT San Diego</a>, turned out to be a copy not an original (although a copy of what exactly was not specified).<br /><br />Muslim and feminist campaigners unencumbered by the politically correct demands of intersectional feminism and post colonial politics, and who had shared Wilde-Blavatsky's dismay at the hoodies and hijabs campaigns, were incensed. On learning of the arrest, Raquel Evita&nbsp;Saraswati, a practicing Muslim and a feminist campaigner of courage and integrity, tweeted the following:<br /><br /><blockquote class="twitter-tweet tw-align-center">When Shaima Alawadi was killed, I spoke w/several Muslim women on here who also believed it was a family member. Because of loud 1/2— <br />Raquel E Saraswati (@RaquelEvita) <a data-datetime="2012-11-10T02:49:54+00:00" href="http://twitter.com/#!/RaquelEvita/status/267096718183636992">November 10, 2012</a></blockquote><blockquote class="twitter-tweet tw-align-center">assertions that it was ethnically motivated ("hijabs&amp;hoodies" remember?) they didn't feel they could say publicly what they suspected. 2/2— <br />Raquel E Saraswati (@RaquelEvita) <a data-datetime="2012-11-10T02:51:07+00:00" href="http://twitter.com/#!/RaquelEvita/status/267097022249697280">November 10, 2012</a></blockquote><blockquote class="twitter-tweet tw-align-center">Insisting <a href="http://twitter.com/search?q=%23ShaimaAlawadi" title="#ShaimaAlawadi">#ShaimaAlawadi</a> case was ethnically/racially motivated hate crime before case was solved = massively irresponsible. 1/2— <br />Raquel E Saraswati (@RaquelEvita) <a data-datetime="2012-11-10T02:53:40+00:00" href="http://twitter.com/#!/RaquelEvita/status/267097664963870720">November 10, 2012</a></blockquote><blockquote class="twitter-tweet tw-align-center">Not only unfair to victim and gives criminal leeway; but also reduces chances ppl will believe true cases of ethnically-motivated crimes.— <br />Raquel E Saraswati (@RaquelEvita) <a data-datetime="2012-11-10T02:54:33+00:00" href="http://twitter.com/#!/RaquelEvita/status/267097887261990913">November 10, 2012</a></blockquote><div class="follow"><br />The last of these tweets produced the following exchange (which can be seen in tweet form <a href="https://twitter.com/RaquelEvita/statuses/267097887261990913" target="_blank">here</a>) between Saraswati and the Eqyptian-American Muslim and feminist writer, Mona Eltahawy:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><b>Mona Eltahawy:</b> And at the time people would bombard with "aren't you going to tweet in support of Shaima? aren't u?" emotional bullying.<br /><b>Raquel Saraswati:</b> yes, I remember!!! Shame on them. If we didn't, the "sellout" cries came. Shame shame shame<br /><b>Eltahawy</b>: Fuck them all.<br /><b>Saraswati</b>: said it then, I say it now. Agreed.<br /><b>Saraswati</b>: ppl - Muslim women! - felt they couldn't ask Qs about signs pointing to family. That's how intense it was.<br /><b>Eltahawy</b>: Apparently she was going to file for divorce. V sad.<br /><b>Saraswati</b>: they found the divorce papers at the time. Daughter "did not hear" mother screaming while being killed.All obvious.</blockquote></div>Aside from Alawadi's divorce, it transpired that Fatima, the couple's eldest daughter who contacted police to report the crime, was distressed at an impending forced marriage to her cousin and had attempted suicide. Those able to count backwards had also figured out that Alawadi must have married her husband when she was only 11 years old and given birth to their first child when she was just 13. This was not, in short, a family environment in which women were afforded the luxury of choice and agency, still less what the 77 had called "an intersectional understanding of violence against women, one that is attuned to both patriarchal and racist violence."<br /><br />By the time Kassim Alhimidi was arrested, no-one much cared about Adele Wilde-Blavatsky's arguments anymore. But the uncomfortable truth is that they had been vindicated. The Trayvon Martin shooting and the Alawadi murder were not remotely similar or equivalent, and while debate continues about whether or not the jury were right to acquit George Zimmerman of Martin's murder, there is no longer any question that Alawadi's killing has anything to say about racism or 'Islamophobia' in America.<br /><br />But this points to an interesting blind spot in Wilde-Blavatsky's analysis of the crime. For while she understood that undue respect for culture was blinding Western feminists (of all skin colours) to the misogyny and violence against women, she did not apply her reasoning to the facts of the case at hand. Despite the plausible doubts already circulating about the hate crime theory at the time she wrote her article, it did not countenance that Alawadi might have been the victim of an 'honour' killing and instead affirmed that the assailant was a white male.<br /><br />A clue as to why she did this might be found in her recent Huffington Post piece in which she writes:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">The irony of [judging the opinions of feminists by the colour of their white skin] is the whole point of post-colonial theory was to expose such non-inclusiveness and encourage people to recognise and celebrate their differences not to suggest white feminism is a 'one size fits all' for white women either.</blockquote>Wilde-Blavatsky is engaged in an attempt to rescue post-colonialism from the excesses of its misguided new prophets. It was this - I suspect - that enraged her critics more than anything else. But it may also be that in trying to reconcile her arguments with the post-colonial notion that the West is unavoidably racist and xenophobic, she derailed her own analysis. A case, perhaps, of privilege-checking clouding judgement. Or a brief relapse from a writer in post-colonial recovery.<br /><br />I have to wonder if her struggle is worth the effort. The determinism of the identity politics to which post-colonial theory is wedded is not readily reconcilable with universalism. Nor do her intended audience strike me as an especially reflective or receptive bunch. They do not even bother to follow their own rules. They instruct others to listen to the experiences of people of colour, but that experience, it transpires, is only valuable if it confirms their pre-existing ideology. What is actually being sought here is conformity of thought.<br /><br />Those people of colour who dissent are declared outcasts. Ayaan Hirsi Ali is dismissed as a bitter Islamophobe. Mona Eltahawy's essay for Foreign Policy on Arab misogyny was greeted with accusations that she is a 'native informant' reinforcing racist stereotypes. Ed Husain has been described the same way. The Iranian Wall Street Journal critic Sohrab Ahmari was recently described as an "Uncle Tom" by a compatriot. The counter-extremism think-tank the Quilliam Foundation are routinely derided as government stooges and sell-outs, as is Sara Khan, head of counter-extremism think-tank Inspire. The list goes on and on.<br /><br />Just as post-colonial guilt is a cudgel used to shame and silence white men and women, so accusations of &nbsp;'inauthenticity', 'Westernisation' and betrayal of their tribe are used to shame and silence people of colour who will not fall into line and accept their ascribed position as the wretched of the earth.<br /><br />The Feminist Wire and their fellow travellers do not have a monopoly on women of colour’s experiences which, as they are happy to point out when it suits them, are not homogeneous.&nbsp;Adele Wilde-Blavatsky speaks for <span lang="EN-US">herself. But in upholding universal human rights, standards and values, she aligns herself with those progressive activists in the Global South and the West bravely striving for reform of their cultures. Identity politicians and cultural relativists, meanwhile, who insist on respect for cultural difference above all else find themselves aligned with reactionaries and cultural chauvinists in whose interest it is to preserve tradition. This is, to say the least, an odd position for any progressive to take, let alone one espoused in the name of fighting racism.</span><br /><br />When, towards the end of her HuffPo piece, Wilde-Blavatsky states that "It is not acceptable anymore to ignore white privilege and intersectionality in feminist discourse" I think she concedes too much to her enemies. For how is one to quantify the awareness of this privilege? And who will judge that a sufficient level of awareness has been attained before an opinion is offered?<br /><br />To accept that one's unalterable characteristics can play any part in the validity of an opinion is to submit to the tyranny of identity politics and endorse an affront to reason. Arguments about rights and ethics must be advanced and defended on their merits, irrespective of who is making them. There is no other way.<br /><br /><b><i>Following the deletion of The Feminist Wire article and the subsequent Letter from the 77, WLUML archived the whole saga <a href="http://www.wluml.org/news/international-feminist-wire-controversy-documentary-history" target="_blank">here</a>, including Meredith Tax's full comment.&nbsp;</i></b><br /><b><i><br /></i></b><b><i>Adele Wilde-Blavatsky's reply to the Letter from the 77, which The Feminist Wire refused to publish, was posted at Ophelia Benson's Butterflies and Wheels blog <a href="http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2012/the-feminist-wire-censorship-an-unpublished-response/" target="_blank">here</a> on May 1.</i></b><br /><b><i><br /></i></b><b><i>The Feminist Wire responded to an approach for comment with <a href="http://thefeministwire.com/2014/01/moving-on/" target="_blank">this public statement</a>.</i></b></div>Unrepentant Jacobinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09256579083755037018noreply@blogger.com19tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5380090049852721671.post-40608940596608228232013-12-22T04:32:00.001-08:002013-12-30T08:42:13.126-08:00Priyamvada Gopal's Double Bind<span style="font-size: large;"><b>Gender Segregation and the Postmodern Politics of Despair</b></span><br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-aL1R5qtqxkg/UrbYx-2qn7I/AAAAAAAAAPY/o08rr0r0ZWI/s1600/Protest_2762043b.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-aL1R5qtqxkg/UrbYx-2qn7I/AAAAAAAAAPY/o08rr0r0ZWI/s1600/Protest_2762043b.jpg" /></a></div><blockquote class="tr_bq">[M]y concern here is less with postmodernism as a slippery epistemological stance and more with its effect on our political climate and mood - its well-advertised but fictitious radicalism (which rapidly dissolves into a celebration of cultural difference), its privileging of the "local" (as against "master narratives" emphasising universal rights) and, consequently, its curious affinity with the most reactionary ideas of Islamic fundamentalism. For the two share a common ground - an unremitting hostility to the social cultural and political processes of change and knowledge and rationality, originating in the West, known as modernity.&nbsp;</blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq"><div style="text-align: right;"><i>Haideh Moghissi quoted by Meredith Tax in her pamphlet</i> Double Bind</div></blockquote><br /><div><div style="text-align: center;">&nbsp;* &nbsp; &nbsp;* &nbsp; &nbsp;*</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div>In August 2010, Time magazine responded to the leaking of classified documents pertaining to the war in Afghanistan with <a href="http://media.npr.org/assets/news/2010/08/13/time_custom-38fd38975a0d93c651afcb5256218304620c4af1-s3-c85.jpg" target="_blank">a gruesome cover story</a> reminding its readers of the misogyny and sadism of the Taliban. It featured the face of a young Afghan girl whose nose and ears had been cut off after she fled abusive in-laws. The caption read: "What Happens If We Leave Afghanistan".<br /><br /><a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/aug/03/burkas-bikinis-reality-afghan-lives" target="_blank">In the Guardian</a>, a&nbsp;Cambridge-based academic named Priyamvada Gopal declared herself scandalised. "Misogynist violence is unacceptable," she allowed, "but...."<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">...we must also be concerned by the continued insistence that the complexities of war, occupation and reality itself can be reduced to bedtime stories. Consultation with child psychologists apparently preceded Time's decision to run the image, but the magazine decided that in the end it was more important for children (and us) to understand that "bad things do happen to people" and we must feel sorry for them. </blockquote>Gopal, it seems, felt emotionally blackmailed by Time's stark representation of one of Afghanistan's most terrible realities. I feel I ought to assume that some part of her understands that pre-medieval religious codes mandating the mutilation of 18-year olds are completely deplorable. But nowhere in her article could she bring herself to actually say this. For to have done so, in Gopal's mind, would have been to endorse a neo-colonialist narrative which invokes women's rights only to denigrate the "other" and to drum up support for Imperialist wars of aggression.<br /><br />So, instead, she buried her concerns about the spiteful disfigurement of Afghan girls and women, and instead mounted a furious defence of Afghan culture and an equally furious denunciation of the West's alleged hypocrisy. Time's use of such an emotive image, she argued, was simply another instance of the West egregiously misrepresenting the Global South as inferior and backward:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">Formulaic narratives are populated by tireless Western humanitarians, sex-crazed polygamous paedophiles (most Afghan men) and burqa-clad "child-women" who are broken in body and spirit or have just enough doughtiness to be scripted into a triumphal Hollywood narrative.</blockquote>Apparently by now oblivious to the fact that the young girl in question was - and still is - a survivor of real and horrific male violence, Gopal dismissed her image with this:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">The mutilated Afghan woman ultimately fills a symbolic void where there should be ideas for real change. </blockquote>...before concluding:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">[The affluent West's]&nbsp;bankrupt version of modernity has little to offer Afghans other than bikini waxes and Oprah-imitators. A radical people's modernity is called for – and not only for the embattled denizens of Afghanistan.</blockquote>And there it is. Free societies are reduced to bikini lines and talk shows even as theocratic barbarism is defended with accusations of intolerance and demands for context and nuance. Meanwhile, what this proposed "radical people's modernity" consists of or how Gopal's "ideas for real change" were to be attained remains a mystery...<br /><br />Three years later, we find Gopal on the <a href="http://rationalist.org.uk/articles/4481/the-right-may-have-hijacked-the-issue-of-gender-segregation-but-thats-no-reason-to-ignore-it" target="_blank">Rationalist Association website</a> (of all places) fretting about the controversy surrounding gender segregation of public meetings organised by Islamists.<br /><br />To recap: a body known as Universities UK had <a href="http://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/highereducation/Pages/Externalspeakersinhighereducationinstitutions.aspx#.UrbYMLxCGHk" target="_blank">issued guidance</a> recommending campuses segregate audiences by gender at the request of religious speakers. The rationale for this was that a failure to do so would preclude the speaker from appearing and would therefore violate his right to free speech. UUK were evidently concerned that defending the neutrality of public space, the equality of men and women, and the freedom to sit where one likes, might be perceived as the intolerant imposition of Western norms. The satirist behind the <a href="http://www.jesusandmo.net/" target="_blank">Jesus and Mo cartoons</a> had his protagonists explain the Möbius-strip logic of UUK's advice like this:<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-KBP2G5S6Ci0/UrU3LOjB20I/AAAAAAAAAPI/LxKmZ1OXCJU/s1600/2013-11-27.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-KBP2G5S6Ci0/UrU3LOjB20I/AAAAAAAAAPI/LxKmZ1OXCJU/s1600/2013-11-27.png" /></a></div><br />So, naturally, Gopal's article begins with a long attack - not on the religiously-mandated subordination of women, but on its opponents. These awful people, we are given to understand, are the chauvinistic defenders of fraudulent and oppressive 'Western values', or what Gopal describes as&nbsp;"an intolerant Western 'liberalism’ passing itself off as ‘secular’, ‘enlightened’ and more knowing-than-thou".<br /><br />Singled out for particular abuse is a counter-extremism organisation called <a href="http://www.studentrights.org.uk/" target="_blank">Student Rights</a>, whose alleged double-standards (it is strongly implied but not quite stated) betray racist motives. (The Rationalist Association afforded Student Rights a right of reply, and their spokesman Rupert Sutton's patient response to Gopal's litany of insinuations and accusations can be read <a href="http://rationalist.org.uk/articles/4500/right-of-reply-rupert-sutton" target="_blank">here</a>).<br /><br />Beyond a glancing, scornful reference to 'decent nice liberal men', principled left-wing opposition to University UK's dismal guidance is omitted, as is the involvement of what Gopal would call 'people of colour'. All the better to paint the opposition as cynical, reactionary and opportunistic, which is precisely what Gopal spends the first half of her article doing:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">The battle lines were drawn once again between so-called ‘muscular liberals’ (generally, in fact, deeply conservative white males with a commitment to the idea that West is Best) and defenders of the rights of minorities to their own customary or traditional practices. </blockquote>Gopal immediately declares herself tired of this "exhausted binary" but the language with which she describes it makes it clear where her sympathies ultimately lie, and it is not with ghastly, bullying Western secularists and egalitarians.<br /><br />Nonetheless, something does appear to have changed in the three years since Gopal directed her splenetic diatribe at Time magazine. Her bug-eyed loathing of the West remains undiminished, but her discomfort with the treatment of women within some 'subaltern' groups and sects seems to have increased.<br /><br />Of course, once she finally gets around to tackling the issue, the tone of Gopal's article changes completely. Gone is the invective, the derision and the venom with which she attacks the campaign against UUK's advice. In its place is an almost deferential tact with which Gopal now gingerly approaches the messy business of criticising the cultural practices of the already 'marginalised' and 'othered':<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">I grew up in a context where gender segregation in many public spaces is common and ostensibly voluntary but far from making me comfortable with custom, it caused me and others concern [...]&nbsp;Are such arrangements always just ‘harmless symbols’ of community identity? Selective attacks on our communities make the job of self-analysis more difficult but we should not let our thoughts and actions be entirely determined by those we oppose.</blockquote>In seeking to adopt a more critical stance without renouncing her postmodern dogma, Gopal has entangled herself in a double-bind. Her support for the underdog requires her respectfully to suspend criticism of communities she perceives as persecuted. But this seems to be colliding with a nagging suspicion that segregation by gender on the basis of patriarchal religious codes is objectively demeaning to women. And so she furrows her brows and she wrings her hands:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">The fact is that challenging traditions and questioning authority are practices common to all societies; changing in response to circumstances is a human capacity and not one limited to a particular culture. It is at our peril that we, particularly women who come from non-European communities, cede or suppress that capacity in the cause of anti-racism, vital though the latter is.</blockquote>This is in fact remarkably similar to the conclusion reached by a pamphlet on this very subject released by Gita Sahgal's think tank <a href="http://www.centreforsecularspace.org/" target="_blank">The Centre for Secular Space</a>. The pamphlet, written by leftist American academic Meredith Tax, is entitled <i><a href="http://www.centreforsecularspace.org/double-bind-the-muslim-right-the-anglo-american-left-and-universal-human-rights-by-meredith-tax/" target="_blank">Double Bind: The Muslim Right, the Anglo-American Left and Universal Human Rights</a>.</i> In its pages, Tax sets out to explore why the <i>soi dissant</i> anti-imperialist Western Left are prepared to find common cause with the Islamic far-right, when it is perfectly possible to oppose racism whilst also opposing regressive cultural and religious traditionalism within minority communities. <br /><br />The big difference is that, having argued this, Tax goes on to put it into practice, condemning those NGOs and leftists willing to align themselves with the Islamists. Gopal, on the other hand, never gets around to actually condemning gender apartheid. How can she? Meredith Tax, Gita Sahgal and the Centre for Secular Space believe in the universality and indivisibility of human rights. Gopal appears to believe that morality and rights are culturally-specific and therefore relative. So to unequivocally condemn Islamist gender segregation requires a moral judgement she does not feel herself authorised to make. To do so is to risk promoting exactly the kind of Western cultural supremacism she most abhors.<br /><br class="Apple-interchange-newline" />If she starts to embrace moral objectivity and universalism, her cultural relativism will simply fall apart, and she will be forced to confront the unhappy fact that the West's democracies, while imperfect, have a lot to recommend them in terms of the liberties, rights and protections they afford their citizens. On the other hand, now that Gopal has voiced her concerns about&nbsp;religiously-mandated gender apartheid - weak and tentative though they may have been - she can't easily return to a relativist free-for-all in which respect for cultural difference is absolute. On the contrary, her doubts about the beliefs and practices of the Islamic far-right may multiply. So she is trapped. And the predictable upshot is dissonance and paralysis.<br /><br />For all its fulminating, Gopal's article adds up to nothing more radical than a polite request that she be allowed to raise her concerns, providing they are carefully weighed and that she first reaffirm her own anti-racist credentials with a bitter tirade against the alleged agenda of The Right. Like all big political postmodern ideas, when you strip this one down it's just another prescription for agnosticism and inaction. If Gopal can't decide whether or not gender apartheid ought to be defended or condemned, then the chances of her actually doing anything about it one way or the other are nil.<br /><br />The double-bind can only be resolved by agreeing to the universality of individual human rights, the axiomatic worth of liberal, democratic values and the consequent need to defend them where they exist and to support those fighting for them where they do not. This requires discarding the following faulty assumptions governing much of Western postmodern and anti-imperialist thought:<br /><ul><li>The Muslim Right is anti-Imperialist</li><li>"The Defence of Muslim Lands" is comparable to National Liberation struggles</li><li>The problem is "Islamophobia"</li><li>Terrorism is justified by revolutionary necessity</li><li>Any feminist who criticises the Muslim Right is an Orientalist and ally of US Imperialism</li></ul>"Solidarity" concludes Tax, "is the only way to cut through the double bind."<br /><br />Gopal, however, will have none of this. She prefers the late Edward Said's advice: "Never solidarity before criticism". Theoretically, this is good advice, and informs Tax and Sahgal's criticisms of Amnesty's alliance with Cage Prisoners, for instance. Alas, no doubt following Said's own example, Gopal's 'criticism' amounts to accusing anyone disinclined to share her nuanced view of Islamist dogma of bad faith and racism.<br /><br />On twitter, she <a href="https://twitter.com/PriyamvadaGopal/status/412571036220026880" target="_blank">dismissed</a> the leftist journalist Nick Cohen's passionate and principled opposition to UUK's advice (<a href="http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/nick-cohen/2013/12/the-segregation-of-women-and-the-appeasement-of-bigotry/" target="_blank">here</a> and <a href="http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/nick-cohen/2013/12/sexist-extremists-and-borderline-racists-lead-britain-universities-part-two/" target="_blank">here</a>), by <a href="https://twitter.com/PriyamvadaGopal/status/412571036220026880" target="_blank">declaring</a>: "I would fervently hope that nothing I say is as crude or bigoted as Nick Cohen". When asked by Cohen to elaborate she <a href="https://twitter.com/PriyamvadaGopal/status/412571768063160321" target="_blank">replied</a>:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">Yes, didn't think you understand. My critique comes from a very different place from yrs...Mine is not white boy muscular liberalism--zero time [for] it, makes our lives harder.</blockquote>And when the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain asked if they could expect her support in future, she&nbsp;<a href="https://twitter.com/PriyamvadaGopal/status/412689311012630528" target="_blank">retorted</a>:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">When you do something for the right reason and in the right company, certainly. Not impressed with some of your current allies.</blockquote>She rejects Cohen's support because he is white and male. She refuses CEMB's support because they accept Cohen's. She ignores completely the contribution of principled female activists 'of colour' like like Yasmin Alibai-Brown, Sara Khan (who received so much abuse for her position, she locked her twitter account), Gita Sahgal, Nahla Mahmoud, Pragna Patel, Marieme Helie Lucas, Yasmin Rehman and countless others - the very voices she find it expedient to claim are being silenced by the xenophobic, racist right.<br /><br />Given that her exacting standards of what constitutes legitimate criticism or authentic solidarity appear to depend upon the unalterable characteristics of the speaker and not the reasonableness or otherwise of the views they espouse, it's almost comical that Gopal should cry:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">Why are some women pilloried as traitors or ‘Useful Idiots’ if they express a dissenting view from that of traditionalists on such matters [as gender-segregated seating]?&nbsp;</blockquote>...and then immediately follow that with this:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">There is no doubt that both racism and xenophobia is on the rise, with Muslims and Islam singled out for attack. It is essential to fight back.</blockquote>If you aggressively peddle persecution narratives and identity politics and encourage a siege mentality, then this is what happens. Dissent will be treated with suspicion and free thought as betrayal. Open debate will, inevitably, be replaced by fearful conformity. Dissidents in migrant communities - especially women - already face considerable obstacles when it comes to speaking out, from the rigid, patriarchal values they oppose. The kind of divisive tribal narrative Gopal is selling only poisons the environment further. As Tax explains:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">Any feminist in the UK or North America who raises issues of gender politics in Muslim majority countries is likely to be called an Orientalist [...] If she is white, she will be told she is colonialist; if she is a woman of colour or feminist from the Global South, she will be considered to lack authenticity. She will be accused of "essentialising" political Islam and ignoring differences within it; of lacking nuance and failing to contextualise; of having internalised ideas of Western superiority; of perpetuating binaries as progressive vs. reactionary, liberal vs conservative, secular vs fundamentalist; of being a traitor to her community and culture.&nbsp;</blockquote>It never seems to occur to Gopal that it is her strongly-implied argument that gender equality is peculiar to the West that best reflects the paternalistic chauvinism of Imperialism. As the French philosopher Pascal Bruckner&nbsp;<a href="http://www.signandsight.com/features/1146.html" target="_blank">once argued</a>:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">The Enlightenment belongs to the entire human race, not just to a few privileged individuals in Europe or North America who have taken it upon themselves to kick it to bits like spoiled brats, to prevent others from having a go. Anglo-Saxon multiculturalism is perhaps nothing other than a legal apartheid, accompanied - as is so often the case - by the saccarine cajolery of the rich who explain to the poor that money doesn't guarantee happiness. We bear the burdens of liberty, of self-invention, of sexual equality; you have the joys of archaism, of abuse as ancestral custom, of sacred prescriptions, forced marriage, the headscarf and polygamy. The members of these minorities are put under a preservation order, protected from the fanaticism of the Enlightenment and the "calamities" of progress.</blockquote>There was, in fact, nothing remotely sinister about the ad hoc coalition formed to protest the UUK guidance. It was a loosely knit group of activists, writers, bloggers and secularist campaigners, male and female, Muslim and non-Muslim, brown and white, from both the left and the right, all of whom had decided that the principle of gender equality was worth defending for <i>all</i> men and women.<br /><br />And with some success! As a result of the controversy and powerful writing on the subject in the Spectator and the Times, politicians from all three main political parties denounced UUK's guidance and it was <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2013/12/13/universities-uk-withdraws-guidance-over-segregation_n_4441446.html" target="_blank">hastily withdrawn</a>.<br /><br />I can only assume Priyamvada Gopal is dismayed by this development. Or at best conflicted. After all, while segregating people by gender may or may not be "problematic", UUK's retreat was a small but important victory for the 'muscular liberalism' she spent so much of her article denigrating. Gopal, incapacitated by indecision and ensnared in a postmodern double-bind of her own creation, made herself irrelevant to the discussion she claimed she wanted to have. For all I know, she may sincerely believe that her childish hostility to Western modernity and her embrace of the counter-Enlightenment are the stuff of fearless radicalism, but her views could hardly be more reactionary. As Tax remarks:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">Academic postmodernism reached its zenith as part of the rightward political turn of the 1980s and 1990s, when globalised capital appeared triumphant and all hope of radical, positive change faded; it is, in short, the politics of despair. &nbsp;</blockquote></div>Unrepentant Jacobinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09256579083755037018noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5380090049852721671.post-30634167103676092492013-11-10T11:59:00.000-08:002013-11-30T17:34:12.700-08:00Wrath of the Multiculturalists<span style="font-size: large;"><b>Tommy Robinson and the End of the EDL</b></span><br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-CzVVV2PnWzQ/UnR1eOjc7FI/AAAAAAAAAO0/FYbrjPgfMDE/s1600/139017644_robinson__462623c.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-CzVVV2PnWzQ/UnR1eOjc7FI/AAAAAAAAAO0/FYbrjPgfMDE/s1600/139017644_robinson__462623c.jpg" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Maajid Nawaz, Head of counter-extremism think-tank, the Quilliam Foundation (left) and <br />Tommy Robinson, former head of the English Defence League (right)&nbsp;</i></b></td></tr></tbody></table>On October 8, Tommy Robinson and Kevin Carroll, then-leaders of the English Defence League (EDL), <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/oct/08/tommy-robinson-english-defence-league" target="_blank">announced</a> that they were leaving the organisation they had founded to work with the Quilliam Foundation, a counter-extremism think-tank founded by former members of the radical Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir.<br /><br />Anti-racist and self-styled anti-fascist organisations, bloggers and commentators committed to combatting racism and what they call 'Islamophobia' ought to have been delighted. They had expended vast amounts of time and keystrokes warning us all that the EDL posed as grave a threat to democracy, social cohesion and human rights as that posed by Islamic fundamentalism.<br /><br />Now, suddenly, this menace was no more - decapitated at a stroke. Its headless trunk may stagger around for a while but - since the EDL was a street movement as opposed to an organised party - fragmentation, faction-fighting, dwindling commitment and collapse now look likely. And here was its former leadership sitting at a table with exactly the kind of moderate Muslims we are always being told fundamentalists and jihadis do not represent: democrats; secularists; universalists - defenders of what, for convenience, are often referred to as 'Western' values.<br /><br />But the reaction on much of the left has not been one of delight, but one of scorn and cynicism. Robinson, hitherto derided as an ignorant, racist ex-con and brainless neo-fascist ideologue has been recast as a mendacious strategist who has duped the gullible Quilliam Foundation into providing him with a legitimate platform. In a piece entitled&nbsp;"Don't be fooled by Tommy Robinson's political sleight-of-hand", The Guardian's Alex Andreou <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/13/tommy-robinson-english-defence-league-far-right" target="_blank">explained events</a> to his readership as follows:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">There is a pattern of behaviour here. Robinson is doing what leaders of far-right movements have always done and continue to do. Like shyster businessmen, they set up one firm that serves their goals, then declare it insolvent and set up another one with a different name – each time creaming the profit of press coverage and a small shift of the political landscape.</blockquote>Four days previously, <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/09/tommy-robinson-resignation-edl-non-event" target="_blank">in the same paper</a>, academic Matthew Goodwin had described Robinson and Carroll's resignation as:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">...disingenuous nonsense, backed up by the counter-extremism thinktank the <a href="http://www.quilliamfoundation.org/">Quilliam Foundation</a>, itself founded by ex-extremists who have seen the light and – to be blunt – should know better.</blockquote>To Goodwin's jaundiced eye, the whole thing amounted to nothing more than a contemptible exercise in mutual self-promotion.<br /><br />Goodwin and Andreou's opinions were hardly eccentric. In the hours, days and weeks following Quilliam and Robinson's announcement, social media was awash with the same bitter cynicism as those used to regarding Robinson and the EDL as a byword for working class racism tried to make sense of a rapidly changing political reality.<br /><br />This response can be explained in large part by the difficulty the progressive left has always had accommodating Islamism and regressive cultural traditionalism within its complacent dogma of multiculturalism.<br /><br />Multiculturalism is a much misunderstood and widely misused term. A <a href="http://lordashcroftpolls.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Ethnic-minority-poll-Nat-Rep-comparison-full-tables.pdf" target="_blank">recent survey revealed</a> that 90% of UK citizens accept that Britain has become a multicultural country (page 22) and 70% affirm this is a positive development (page 21). The word is not, however, defined in the question. So it may be assumed that these responses are simply evidence that respondents are tolerant, broad-minded people who are, in the widest sense, receptive to and respectful of cultures alien to their own. The UK benefits culturally from migration in many ways, its influences making themselves felt in music, literature, fashion, design,&nbsp;cuisine,&nbsp;arts and crafts and so on, all of which add to the enrichment of British cultural life.<br /><br />But multiculturalism, as a contested&nbsp;idea and as a state-sponsored policy, has a specific meaning and theoretical basis which goes much further than this. It demands that respect for all aspects of cultural difference be non-negotiable, and an embrace of this position sits uneasily with <a href="http://yougov.co.uk/news/2013/09/18/most-still-want-ban-burka-britain/" target="_blank">recent UK polling </a>showing that 61% of respondents favour a ban on face-covering in public places. This demand for non-negotiable respect relies for its legitimacy on three&nbsp;<i>a priori</i> claims:<br /><ul><li>Firstly, that a person's culture is essential to their sense of identity; that is, their fundamental awareness of who they are as an individual and human being. Stigmatising minority cultural or religious beliefs, rites, traditions and practices is therefore directly analogous to racism.</li></ul><ul><li>Consequently, the failure to be sufficiently respectful of cultural difference constitutes oppression, causing minorities to internalise a sense of inferiority and backwardness if their traditions or beliefs are perceived in these terms. This has a catastrophic effect on self-esteem, aggravating cultural dissonance, and leading to alienation and self-hatred.</li></ul><ul><li>Thirdly, that the crimes committed during the West's colonial history oblige it to atone by accommodating minority cultures with tolerance and humility. It is not for Westerners to judge which aspects of other cultures are or are not permissible. To presume to do so is to be convicted of 'cultural supremacism', and of helping to 'other' people who are already marginalised.</li></ul>This has led to the rise of what theorist Charles Taylor described, in an influential essay entitled <a href="http://elplandehiram.org/documentos/JoustingNYC/Politics_of_Recognition.pdf" target="_blank">The Politics of Recognition</a>, as "the politics of difference" at the expense of an egalitarian "politics of equal dignity":<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">With the politics of equal dignity, what is established is meant to be universally the same, an identical basket of rights and immunities; with the politics of difference, what we are asked to recognise is the unique identity of this individual or group, their distinctness from everyone else. The idea is that it is precisely this distinctness that has been ignored, glossed over, assimilated to a dominant or majority identity. And this assimilation is the cardinal sin against the ideal of authenticity.</blockquote>The paradox of multicultural theory is that it is supposedly grounded in a universalist belief that we owe equal respect to the the dignity of all people. But by tying what constitutes dignity to what makes people different as opposed to what makes them the same, this universalist foundation becomes a platform for cultural relativism, reactionary cultural nationalisms and inevitable demands for exceptionalism. As Taylor puts it:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">Where the politics of universal dignity fought for forms of nondiscrimination that were quite “blind” to the ways in which citizens differ [i.e: ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation] the politics of difference often redefines nondiscrimination as requiring that we make these distinctions the basis of differential treatment.</blockquote>So, for example, exceptions are made to otherwise universally applicable animal welfare laws so as to accommodate less humane methods of slaughter compatible with Islamic and Jewish religious traditions. And respect for the equal rights of women becomes subordinated to respect for cultural traditions that do not recognise - indeed, which are a direct affront to - gender equality.<br /><br />Not one of the three claims upon which this state of affairs has been constructed stands up to close scrutiny. Nevertheless, uncritically accepted and taken together, they act as a closed, self-fortifying system: a politics of difference (ie: multiculturalism) is necessary to combat indigenous ethnocentricity, intolerance and racism; ergo, criticism of and resistance to multiculturalism is evidence of intolerance and racism reinforcing the need for....well, more multiculturalism.<br /><br />It is never countenanced that a divisive politics of difference might <i>exacerbate</i>&nbsp;rather than mollify the marginalisation of minority communities. Rather, those who look askance at the inequities of sharia councils, the growing prevalence of regressive religious dress codes and so on stand accused of a failure of empathy and an irrational fear of the 'other', both of which, it is alleged, constitute an intolerable assault on the very core of an individual's sense of self-awareness and self-worth.<br /><br />The EDL confirms the multiculturalist's view that, beneath its politically correct veneer, the West remains deeply hostile to foreigners. Nothing that Tommy Robinson has to say on the subject of Islamic custom, belief or tradition can possibly have any validity since any and all criticisms are simply a reflection of his own failure of understanding. Instead, it is claimed, his views make him the working class poster-child for a supposed pandemic of 'Islamophobia' presently sweeping the nation and terrorizing Muslims - an entrenched intolerance to difference that shames Western democracies and makes a mockery of the their claims to liberalism and accommodation.<br /><br />But the EDL also functioned as a handy means of forcing those who criticise either Islam or point out the incoherences of multiculturalism to defend themselves against charges of racism.<br /><div class="p1"><br />When David Cameron <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VsGQvOq8cEs"><span class="s1">spoke at the 2011 Munich Security Conference</span></a>, he attacked multiculturalism (correctly) as inegalitarian and divisive. He argued (reasonably) that individuals and organisations purporting to represent minority communities be vetted to discover whether they upheld certain values such as a belief in secular democracy and the equality of women and so forth. The <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-12371994"><span class="s1">BCC reported</span></a> the reaction of two Labour MPs as follows:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">The Labour MP for Luton South, Gavin Shuker, asked if it was wise for Mr Cameron to make the speech on the same day the English Defence League staged a major protest in his constituency. There was further criticism from Labour's Sadiq Khan whose comments made in a Daily Mirror article sparked a row. The shadow justice secretary was reported as saying Mr Cameron was "writing propaganda material for the EDL".</blockquote><div class="p1">Muslim journalist Mehdi Hasan then <a href="http://www.newstatesman.com/uk-politics/2011/02/british-cameron-minister" target="_blank">took to the pages</a> of the New Statesman to call Khan "brave" and to complain that the Labour front bench were "shabby" not to have supported him. Hasan described Cameron's criticisms of multiculturalism as "simplistic" and "inflammatory" and "Muslim-bashing".<br /><br />Then, in an Oxford Union debate about Islam held a mere five days after Lee Rigby's barbaric murder in Woolwich by Islamist jihadis, Hasan <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jy9tNyp03M0" target="_blank">addressed his debating opponent</a> Anne Marie Waters, spokesperson for the secularist anti-Sharia campaign <a href="http://www.onelawforall.org.uk/" target="_blank">One Law For All</a>, with the following:</div><div class="p1"></div><blockquote class="tr_bq">I believe you're trying to stand for the Labour Party as MP in Brighton. Well, if you do and you make these comments [those made in her speech], I'm guessing you'll have the whip withdrawn from you. But, then again, UKIP's on the rise. They'll take you! The BNP! I'm sure they'll have something to say about your views!</blockquote>Waters has since <a href="http://www.d-intl.com/2013/10/07/open-letter-to-labour-leader-miliband-your-policies-fill-me-with-fear/?lang=en" target="_blank"><span id="goog_1658108918"></span>resigned<span id="goog_1658108919"></span></a> from the Labour Party, citing Labour's support for "the racist and misogynistic arrangement known as multiculturalism"&nbsp;and the smearing of its critics among her reasons. This is a dismaying development, further confirming that the space available to principled opponents of the Islamic far-right on the left is vanishingly small.<br /><br />I've already written at some length about the ways in which legitimate criticisms of Islamic faith and culture are misrepresented as bigotry in order to stigmatise and silence those making them (<a href="http://jacobinism.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/slurs-segregation-decent-liberals.html" target="_blank">here</a>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<a href="http://jacobinism.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/against-all-saidists.html" target="_blank">here</a>), and about the cynical inflation of Islamophobia (<a href="http://jacobinism.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/day-of-demagogue.html" target="_blank">here</a>). What's remarkable is the degree to which those ideologically invested in the defence of multicultural dogma are prepared to wave away the empirical evidence contradicting what amounts to a faith-based position.<br /><br />When the Telegraph's Andrew Gilligan&nbsp;<a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/terrorism-in-the-uk/10093568/The-truth-about-the-wave-of-attacks-on-Muslims-after-Woolwich-murder.html" target="_blank">published an article</a>&nbsp;comprehensively debunking the hysterical claims of a "massive spike in anti-Muslim prejudice" in the wake the Woolwich atrocity, an academic named Dr. Chris Allen, "advisor to the government on anti-Muslim hate" and author of a book on the subject,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/dr-chris-allen/islamophobia-uk-media_b_3377525.html" target="_blank">responded</a>&nbsp;with the following extraordinary claim:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">Focusing solely on 'numbers' alone is a distraction. You cannot put a value on the damage done by prejudice, discrimination, bigotry and hate, quite irrespective of whether 'numbers' of incidents are on a rise or in decline. The fact that we know that ordinary people - in this case British Muslims - are continuing to be victims of discrimination and hate is what should be concerning us most. It's time to change the narrative, to move away from 'numbers' and focus on the harm, pain and suffering that is caused as a result of Islamophobia.</blockquote><div class="p1">To hell, in other words, with inconvenient statistics - what is important is&nbsp;<i>perception</i>. Allen doesn't stop to consider that if the numbers (a term he consistently places in scare quotes) do not match the perception, then it may be the perception that needs changing.<br /><br />This is no more rational an argument than that offered by a terrified conservative convinced, in the teeth of all available crime data, that we are living in a state of near lawlessness necessitating ever more authoritarian legislation - more prisons, tougher sentencing, new and more more draconian laws etc. Allen's is not an ernest assessment of the nature and threat of the far-right, but a blind and desperate defence of multicultural ideology.</div><br />In fact, no-one should have been surprised that a social model which rejects assimilation and champions separatism and cultural nationalism should produce a chauvinistic white working class variant like the EDL. Nor should they have been surprised to discover that white working class people would object to finding that their demands for what Taylor calls cultural and ethnocentric&nbsp; "recognition" should be uniquely derided, while the demands of reactionaries of every other stripe were being indulged.<br /><br />But all this does is expose the disingenuousness of the claim by multiculturalists that their precepts are, at root, universalist and egalitarian. The post-60s, post-socialist emergence of a post-modern, post-colonial identity politics saw the assembling of a new victimhood hierarchy on the left, and the white working class found themselves abruptly relegated to the bottom of the grievance heap.</div><br /><div>But then, the relationship between the liberal left and the white working class, on whose behalf it traditionally presumed to speak, has long been in decline. As Nick Cohen argued in his polemic&nbsp;<a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Whats-Left-Lost-Liberals-Their/dp/0007229704" target="_blank"><i>What's Left?</i></a>,&nbsp;when the Left gave up on the prospect of a socialist utopia, it also gave up on the working class.<br /><br />The white working class, for its part, regards the liberal left as remote, elitist, condescending and incapable of discussing issues in an honest and straightforward manner. Middle class liberals, meanwhile, have developed a tendency to regard the white working class as lazy, ignorant, reactionary, sexually promiscuous and bigoted; consumers of junk food and junk telly who cannot be expected to understand the nuances of modern political life nor trusted to vote in their own interests. Julie Burchill <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/3637660/Dead-common-and-proud-of-it.html" target="_blank">was right</a>. They are the only group it is still seen as socially acceptable to openly scorn and denigrate.<br /><br />For instance:<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/KB7XaPT71eg" width="420"></iframe></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div>It's partly this kind of snobbery that has led to the widespread misreading of Tommy Robinson.<br /><br />Consider <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-22852764" target="_blank">this exchange</a> between Tommy Robinson and Sarah Montague on Radio 4's Today programme in June:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><b>Montague:</b> But Mr. Robinson you haven't made clear how you would actually change things. As the laws currently stand, how would--<br /><b>Robinson:</b> I'd outlaw Sharia.<br /><b>Montague:</b> But--<br /><b>Robinson:</b> That's one thing. Straight away.<br /><b>Montague:</b> But Sharia isn't in place in this country.<br /><b>Robinson:</b> There's a hundred Sharia Law courts operating in this country. A hundred. And they're--<br /><b>Montague:</b> But <i>you</i> don't operate...<i>you</i> are not judged under Sharia Law--<br /><b>Robinson:</b> That doesn't matter. British women are. British Muslim women are.</blockquote><div style="text-align: left;">The hypocrisy&nbsp;implied by&nbsp;Montague's reasoning - which objectively defends the right of Muslim men to systematically discriminate against Muslim women, so long as it doesn't affect her - ought to be evident to anyone not chained to the belief that all cultures are morally equal and all traditions equally valuable. Robinson has understood something that Montague has not and is quite prepared to complain about it because, unlike her, he doesn't give a damn for the politically correct niceties that dictate what constitutes acceptable debate in a multicultural society.&nbsp;</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br class="Apple-interchange-newline" />Maajid Nawaz, chairman of the anti-extremist think-tank that facilitated Robinson's departure from the EDL, is in a good position to understand the left's peculiar hypocrisies.&nbsp;When he announced he was leaving the radical Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir in 2007 and setting up the <a href="http://www.quilliamfoundation.org/" target="_blank">Quilliam Foundation</a>, he and his co-founders were reviled as traitors and sell-outs. Not just by Islamists and tribally-minded Muslims, but also by multiculturalists, or what Nawaz calls "the regressive left". Seumas Milne's <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2008/apr/21/allmodcons" target="_blank">response to the news of Quilliam's launch</a> takes some beating:</div><blockquote class="tr_bq">[Nawaz's Quilliam co-founder Ed Husain] attacked multiculturalism and declared there were too many immigrants in the country. He also says he supported the invasion of Iraq to overthrow Saddam, but not what took place thereafter. Husain has, meanwhile, compared Hamas to the BNP, described the Arab "psyche" as irredeemably racist, criticised the director of MI5 for "pussyfooting around" with extremists, poured cold water on the idea that western policy in the Muslim world makes terror attacks in Britain and elsewhere more likely, dismissed the idea of Islamophobia and defended the government's decision to ban the leading Muslim cleric Sheikh Yusef al-Qaradawi from Britain because he had defended Palestinian suicide attacks. Whatever else that amounts to, it's scarcely a voice of moderation.</blockquote><div>Sounds familiar, doesn't it? The problem that Nawaz and Quilliam pose for multiculturalists is that they have no use for identity politics and see nothing ennobling about the infantilising, grievance-based victimhood narrative with which multiculturalism seeks to saddle Muslims. They oppose Islamic extremism because they have seen for themselves what it has to offer and have instead declared themselves partisans of the liberal secular democracy it is sworn to overthrow. The same liberal secular democracy that affords Dr. Allen and Mr. Goodwin the luxury of their academic careers, and that affords Milne the freedom to write his bitter, masochistic articles in the pages of The Guardian.</div><div><br /></div><div>And so, in the eyes of their critics, Nawaz and his colleagues at Quilliam have become 'native informants'. By successfully assimilating, they have committed what Taylor called "the cardinal sin against the ideal of authenticity", and thus disqualified themselves from being able to speak on behalf of 'true' Muslims. This helps to explain Dr. Chris Allen's reaction to the following exchange <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5ZqX4AFaPQ" target="_blank">[video here]</a> between Nawaz and Islamic traditionalist Mohammed Ansar on the subject of hudud punishments, specifically limb amputation and stoning:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><b>Nawaz:</b> If an Islamic State existed, should it chop off someone's hand for theft if all the Sharia conditions are met? Please, yes or no?<br /><b>Ansar:</b> I....I....I really--<br /><b>Nawaz:</b> Yes or no?<br /><b>Ansar:</b> I--<br /><b>Nawaz:</b> Yes or no? Please, answer that. Yes or no?<br /><b>Ansar:</b> Look--<br /><b>Nawaz:</b> I'll tell you my answer: no. What's yours?<br /><b>Ansar:</b> On some of my theological views, I'm clear. On other theological views, I'd like to hear what the consensus of the scholars is. And on other theological views, I'm not made up!<br /><b>Nawaz:</b> Okay. Well, if one were to ask me my views on stoning someone to death, whether now, or in a hypothetical ideal Islamic state, I don't think it's morally justifiable to defer the answer and say "I'm not sure if someone should be stoned to death or not." That's morally reprehensible.</blockquote></div>To which Allen, a supposed liberal, <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/dr-chris-allen/tommy-robinson-resurrectio_b_4176385.html" target="_blank">responded with</a>:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">Ansar was a rabbit in the headlights as Nawaz savagely tore into him about his hypothetical views in relation to shariah law, something that would seem to be markedly different to the approach taken by Nawaz about Robinson's actual views about Islam, Muslims and more. Don't forget that just a few weeks ago, Nawaz was claiming that Robinson's decision to quit the EDL without even rejecting an ounce of his insidious ideology, was a&nbsp;<a href="http://www.quilliamfoundation.org/press-releases/quilliam-facilitates-tommy-robinson-leaving-the-english-defence-league/">"very positive change for the United Kingdom...a very proud moment for Quilliam"</a>.</blockquote>Surely, irrespective of what happened "a few weeks ago", on the subject of amputations and stoning we ought to be behind the person prepared to condemn it without equivocation? And surely this ought to go without saying? Not, it seems, to those whose broad-mindedness has reached such stratospheric levels of sophistication they are unable to make a simple moral judgement.<br /><br />Much has been made by Robinson's critics of the fact that he has refused to renounce his formerly espoused views (if he adheres to "an ideology", I'm not aware of it). I think his frankness is to his credit (and hard to square with the idea that he duped Quilliam). But to even expect him to do so in the first place is to misunderstand what he rejected when he left the EDL and what now unites him with Quilliam.<br /><br />Robinson's fundamental complaints about Islam and multiculturalism haven't changed, nor should they. But his remarks about Islam have always been subject to the limitations of chaotic, unsupervised research. The repeated rhetorical confusion between Islam, Islamism and Muslims (pointed out by the talk show host in the clip above) is a serious one. The careless conflation of ideology and people, in particular, led to justifiable uncertainty about Robinson's agenda, alienating potential allies, causing unnecessary fear and anxiety amongst Muslims, and encouraging those with a neo-fascist agenda to gravitate towards the EDL. It is this last development that Robinson claims finally forced him to pull the plug - a problem partly created by his own rhetoric but which he then found himself unable to control.<br /><br />Now that he has unequivocally denounced the unreconstructed racism that blighted his former movement and declared solidarity instead with genuinely moderate, secular Muslims, it ought to put an end to the claim that his criticisms of Islam mask an irrational hatred of all adherents. He seems, instead, to be groping towards a clearer understanding of the plurality of views within Islam and starting to separate out what is benign from what really bothers him. This process could benefit enormously from his alliance with Quilliam, and marks a big step away from the "what about us?" identity politics with which he has frequently framed his arguments until now. He appears to have realised that the fight he wants to pick with cultural traditionalists, religious extremists and their apologists depends for its success upon the support of moderate Muslims.<br /><br />I submit that this is all to be encouraged. Robinson's presence at Karima Bennoune's recent LSE talk about Muslims risking their lives to resist religious extremism and Islamic theocracy worldwide struck me as a positive sign. Muslims are not, after all, simply a useful a talking point as the "first and worst victims of Islam", but also some of the most valuable allies he could have. And in Maajid Nawaz and Quilliam, Robinson has found people who understand and share many of his concerns, who are extremely well-placed to broaden his understanding of Islam and extremism, and who don't patronise him or treat him like a pariah.<br /><br />So, while Matthew Goodwin presumes to lecture Quilliam's former extremists on what they should and should not know and Dr Chris Allen prattles unhappily about hyper-reality in the Huffington Post, Robinson and Quilliam have struck a blow against the politics of difference. Good for them. No wonder the academics are so upset.<br /><br /><br /><b><i>The BBC documentary </i>Leaving the English Defence League<i> can be seen <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEYKgKOv7-c" target="_blank">here</a>.</i></b></div>Unrepentant Jacobinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09256579083755037018noreply@blogger.com20tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5380090049852721671.post-57875761090770389782013-09-19T17:29:00.001-07:002014-12-22T21:52:30.983-08:00Niqab Notes<span style="font-size: large;"><b>Further Thoughts on Face-Covering.</b></span><br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-oK94A5SmNRs/UjjFnUUgNCI/AAAAAAAAAOM/mlQf4tnDTtw/s1600/ALeqM5i5nXvyP91YwwUpBIVm7vqQ0FvgSw.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-oK94A5SmNRs/UjjFnUUgNCI/AAAAAAAAAOM/mlQf4tnDTtw/s1600/ALeqM5i5nXvyP91YwwUpBIVm7vqQ0FvgSw.jpeg" /></a></div><br /><i>Notes on various aspects of the debate, recently reignited by the <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/13/birmingham-college-muslim-veils" target="_blank">Birmingham City College case</a>&nbsp;and the <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/16/muslim-woman-niqab-judge-ruling" target="_blank">recent ruling by Judge Peter Murphy</a> at&nbsp;Blackfriars crown court.</i><br /><br /><b>1. "The State Should Not Tell Women How To Dress"</b><br />The verbatim roboticism with which this argument is repeated speaks to its effectiveness as a talking point. It relies for that effectiveness, however, on a rhetorical trick designed to make a ban sound like the very thing it is intended to combat.<br /><br />The substantive point being made - that the State has no business interfering in such decisions in any way - is a perfectly legitimate one. Its formulation is misleading. "Telling women how to dress" is prescriptive. In other words, the State demands, as it does in theocracies like Iran and Saudi Arabia, that "you must wear this". A ban on the niqab in public places, however, is proscriptive, and makes only one requirement: that people do not cover their faces.<br /><br />A niqab ban would not permit the State any comment on how they dress otherwise. Needless to say, those opposed to totalitarian codes of prescriptive dress have a far greater quarrel with Islamist authority than with a State law intended to circumscribe that authority.<br /><br /><b>2. On Cultural Marxism and Speaking For Others</b><br />During a characteristically unproductive twitter exchange on the subject, I was bluntly informed by someone describing themselves as an "avowed Cultural Marxist" that white males have no place in the veiling debate. "I don't" he announced, "do the whole faux 'white man to the rescue' kind of solidarity". The same argument is made to deride the stated humanitarian goals of the United States' invasion of Afghanistan, in spite of the fact it has led to <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jan/13/burqa-women-afghanistan-taliban-return" target="_blank">concrete improvements</a> in the lives and liberties of Afghan women. (Whether or not these advances are likely to survive the withdrawal of the coalition troops presently defending them is, however, highly dubious.)<br /><br />The demand that we suspend our own moral judgement and defer to that of "Muslim women" is of no use since Muslim women hold a variety of opinions, some traditionalist and conservative, some enlightened and progressive. Alas, when pressed to choose between the two, the Cultural Marxist becomes quite the reactionary, invariably citing the former as the more 'authentic'. Secular Muslim women who eschew and/or condemn Islamic dress codes are deemed to have become 'Westernised', and their opinions tainted. Particular venom is reserved for those Muslim women who have had the nerve to shed their faith entirely; an act, apparently, of unpardonable tribal betrayal that invalidates her opinion entirely and can sometimes result in murder at the hands of her co-religionists.<br /><br />So what then is the Cultural Marxist to do with the case of <a href="http://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2012/05/27/Female-circumcision-trial/UPI-88241338163243" target="_blank">the Guinean couple in France</a> charged with the genital mutilation of their four daughters, not one of whom would co-operate with the State's investigation into the crime? One of the mutilated girls told the jury that she couldn't understand why her parents were being prosecuted.<br /><br />Or take the reasoning of the women in this video, subjected to genital mutilation as children and determined, in an act of grotesque self-validation, to inflict the same on their own:<br /><br /><center><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="344" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/8Yh3QYpKfJs" width="459"></iframe></center><br />Just as an anorexic whose self-perception is deformed by body dysmorphia may insist that his wasted frame is healthy, so a woman hijabed since the age of three may internalise a sense of inferiority and oppression to the point where she avers that prescriptive Islamic dress codes are a "liberation". Declaring that up is down does not make it so, no matter how 'authentic' the speaker.<br /><br /><b>3. The Freedom To Do As You Are Told</b><br />But over at the ever-indulgent Independent, <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/i-wear-the-niqab-let-me-speak-on-my-own-behalf-8824243.html" target="_blank">space was cleared</a> for Sahar al Faifi to do just that, as she upended the English language by claiming that Islam is a "liberation from worshipping anything but the one God". She went on:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">I am a proud Welsh and British citizen, a molecular geneticist by profession and an activist in my spare time . . . I wear the niqab as a personal act of worship, and I deeply believe that it brings me closer to God, the Creator.&nbsp;<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 21px;">&nbsp;</span>I find the niqab liberating and dignifying; it gives me a sense of strength. </blockquote>Coercion does not necessitate physical imprisonment, and religious authority exerts a particularly pernicious hold over those taught from birth to accept it without question. Al Faifi adopted the niqab at the age of 14, against the advice of her parents. So then where, one is entitled to ask, did she learn that such a self-denying act was even required of her by her God? There is certainly no mention of it in the Qur'an. A few paragraphs later she says this:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">Islam is not a monolithic religion and therefore Islamic scholars may differ in their jurisprudence but most agree that in particular cases, Muslim women are allowed to take off their veils – though each case should be dealt with individually. Muslim women like myself do not find this a problem.</blockquote>So accustomed is al Faifi to obeying the dictates of men in robes, and so completely has she accepted this as a necessary and inevitable fact of life, she doesn't realise that her use of the word "allowed" here holes her claim to free choice below the waterline.<br /><br /><b>4. Complicity in the Oppression of Others</b><br />There is a world of difference, however, between this kind of psychological coercion in which the victim may be complicit, and the forcible kind that oppresses those who have managed to unshackle their minds from religious authority. In <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20130721111500/http://www.rationalhub.com/blogs/hypatianjourney/2013/06/24/an-ex-muslim-woman-for-femen/" target="_blank">a riveting post</a> over at Rationalhub.com, a young ex-Muslim woman blogging under the name 'Esha Athena' began with the following:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">My mother and father are both active participants and activists in and for the Islamic community. Me – oh me? I am a godless secular humanist atheist. Unfortunately, I am still in the closet for the sake of my life.&nbsp;I am so sick and tired of pretending to care about &amp; follow Islam.&nbsp;I am so sick of wearing that stupid hijab on my head. (I asked if I could substitute it for a shawl, only to be called a whore in return.)</blockquote>So what do fundamentalists like al Faifi have to say on Esha's behalf? Well, nothing much, as it happens. Not only does al Faifi fail to condemn forcible coercion, she doesn't seem to believe it exists. Instead, she scolds those who denounce the veil in the name of gender equality and human rights:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">The common impression that many people have about those that wear the niqab is that we are oppressed, uneducated, passive, kept behind closed doors and not integrated within British society . . .&nbsp;Jeremy Browne MP is a case in point with his call for a national debate about whether the state should step in to “protect” young women from having the veil “imposed” on them.</blockquote>Because al Faifi doesn't feel coerced, she refuses to believe that anyone does. At which point she becomes complicit in the silencing and oppression of those who are. As do those liberals and libertarians who nod along to pieties like "slavery is liberation" and "freedom is obedience" and uncritically accept this nonsensical double-speak as representative of The Muslim View.<br /><br />Never mind that these same fundamentalists espouse a misanthropic view of individual liberty and human sexuality, and invariably justify their own regressive choices with reference to the contrary decadence of free and open societies and the sluttishness of Western women. And never mind that the voices to which we should be listening belong to those who yearn for the same liberties that we take for granted.<br /><br />The fundamentalist's defiant affirmation of choice excuses the liberal from having to pass judgement and excuses the libertarian of the need to countenance State intervention. So, whilst zealots are welcomed onto the BBC and into the pages of the Independent to defend their freely adopted signifier of purity, secular Muslims, apostates and free-thinkers like Esha are forced to blog about their experiences anonymously from behind a second veil, fearful of the consequences of exposure. Esha closes her post with a scornful denunciation of those Muslim women who collude in the denial of Islamic misogyny:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">#MuslimahPride [a twitter hashtag beneath which proud Muslims defended Islamic dress codes] is an insult to women like me who are oppressed by Islam itself. Their ‘activism’ is alarmingly similar to Jewish Nazi apologia or that of the Anti-suffragists women of the 1910s who had a belief that women had the right to complete freedom within the home and would say, ‘its our choice not to vote.’ This is pure Stockholm Syndrome and sheer ignorance on their part. Sure, you might have had the ‘freedom’ to choose to don the hijab, like I did, but I do not have the very same freedom to choose to take it off without being slut-shamed or threatened. Are my experiences unwarranted? Why the hypocrisy and double standards?</blockquote><b>5. The Paradox of Liberalism</b><br />The belief that the State has no business interfering in the cultural affairs of individuals and groups is untenable in the face of the challenges to equality and liberty presented by regressive religious and cultural practices. The collision of Islamic and Western values is sometimes presented as a one-way street. Islam - inert, passive, abstract, victimised - is dominated by the arrogance of an equally abstract Occidental modernity. But inegalitarian values are not a bit passive or abstract when put into practice - they have real ongoing consequences and victims. State-sponsored multiculturalism ensures that these values are not just defended but given the space to be vigorously asserted.<br /><br />As I argued in my&nbsp;<a href="http://jacobinism.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/blinkered-vision.html" target="_blank">previous essay on the subject</a>, veiling of all kinds&nbsp;in the hands of the Islamist is a political cudgel; an instrument of gender apartheid in a systematic campaign to segregate public space and keep women in subordination, just as blacks were subordinated by racial apartheid. I'm bemused by those who oppose the voluntary segregation of gender by seating, and then oppose - with equal vehemence - a ban on the segregation of public space by veiling.<br /><br />But veiling is also part of a web of apolitical, cultural and quasi-religious traditions such as honour murder and Female Genital Mutilation designed to entrap women in a position of abject servility. Given the multiplicity of challenges this presents to the defence of human rights, an absolutist opposition to state intervention leaves the State powerless to protect vulnerable women and children within minority communities. Effectively countering the problem of FGM, for example, may require invasive inspection of children who are profiled by country of origin, ethnicity and religion.<br /><br />At some point the liberal has to make a choice between disfiguring surgery and an untreated tumour. The laissez-faire approach to liberty in these circumstances is an act, not of principle, but of moral cowardice. Like the pacifist whose only concern is keeping his own hands free of blood, the liberal only concerned with his own reputation for tolerance ends up complicit in the crimes he ignores.<br /><b><br /></b><b>6. The Responsibility to Protect</b><br />While the two situations are not directly analogous, there are, nonetheless, noteworthy similarities between the objections made to humanitarian military intervention in foreign countries and the objections made to state intervention in the matter of the niqab. Concomitant similarities can be observed in the arguments in favour, which speak to a common impulse.<br /><br />Opposition to a niqab ban is frequently undergirded by a suspicion of State power as irrational and indiscriminate as anti-War hostility to American power - in neither case is it conceded that power can be harnessed for benign, progressive or utilitarian ends.<br /><br />Some opponents of a ban are silent in the face of the ongoing oppression of Muslim women, even going so far as to accuse those who do write about the subject of 'Islamophobia'. Similarly, the Stop the War Coalition and its fellow travellers had nothing much to say on behalf of dying Syrians until the possibility of Western military action was announced. When the prospect of Western military intervention retreated, so did the interest in Syrian life. And once the calls for a niqab ban diminish (as they will), so will the professions of concern for the rights of Muslim women.<br /><br />Some opponents of the niqab ban share with the anti-war movement a mistrust of the West and its espoused 'values' which they suspect are a front behind which to oppress, dominate and subordinate the 'other'. Abiding memories of colonialism have left a deep squeamishness about interfering in foreign nations and cultural affairs and the motives of those who seek to do so are immediately suspect. Supporters of a niqab ban are consequently accused of Orientalism and cultural imperialism. Supporters of humanitarian intervention, of enabling Western supremacism and war crimes. Both are accused of paternalism.<br /><br />And those who support military intervention are asked to defend its costs, not as a byproduct of policy, but as if they were its intended consequence. The wisdom of intervention in either case may b disputed, but the motivating humanitarian impulse in both cases is the responsibility to protect and should be debated as such. Just as an interventionist accepts the loss of innocent life needed to prevent greater loss of innocent life, the niqab ban may be supported as an illiberal measure intended to counter a far greater illiberalism. Because, contrary to what you may have heard, Bombing For Peace is not remotely like Fucking For Virginity.<br /><br /><b>7. A Reasonable Alternative</b><br />In a principled and important article for the Sunday Times (<a href="http://www.quilliamfoundation.org/in-the-media/quilliam-chairman-maajid-nawaz-comments-on-the-veil-debate-sparked-by-birmingham-metropolitan-colleges-decision/" target="_blank">reposted here</a>), Maajid Nawaz, a former Islamist now Chairman of anti-extremist think-tank the Quilliam Foundation, offers an alternative solution: on identity- and security-sensitive issues, secular law must trump religious and cultural tradition wherever conflict arises.<br /><br />This would be a big step in the right direction, at once attacking inegalitarian and divisive Islamic exceptionalism and immediately dispensing with specious arguments in its defence from religious freedom. I would hope - although I'm getting accustomed to disappointment - that this is a fair-minded position all progressives could support.<br /><br />It would, however, fall short of delegitimising the garment itself in the eyes of the law and I contend that the specific issue of the niqab goes beyond the problems associated with religious exceptionalism.<br /><br />I have no in-principle problem with the voluntary practice of self-denial, just as I have no in-principle problem with mutually consensual polyamory. The proviso in both cases being that they are egalitarian in application. Polygamy, unless practiced alongside polyandry, is objectively demeaning to women. Just as demeaning is the 'recommendation' or forcible imposition of all forms of gender-based veiling. And, not by accident, but by design.<br /><br />I abhor all religious dress codes designed to restrict the freedom of their adherents and to mark them as separate and unequal human beings. But the idea that a woman's face is so shameful that she must be completely depersonalised is a vindictive and intolerable affront to human dignity. The niqab marks, segregates, depersonalises and degrades those who wear it. It is, objectively, a tool of abuse. And for this reason, its extirpation - not just from Western societies, but from all societies - constitutes a moral imperative.Unrepentant Jacobinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09256579083755037018noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5380090049852721671.post-90669635588875887442013-08-10T20:57:00.000-07:002013-10-23T14:30:49.383-07:00Against All Saidists...<span style="font-size: large;"><b>. . . and in Defence of the West.</b></span><br /><span style="font-size: large;"><b><br /></b></span><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-TM7vw6AX8q4/Uhag8dTa-UI/AAAAAAAAAN8/txhnVssz0qc/s1600/Final.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-TM7vw6AX8q4/Uhag8dTa-UI/AAAAAAAAAN8/txhnVssz0qc/s1600/Final.png" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b>Edward Said (left), author of <i>Orientalism</i> (right)</b></td></tr></tbody></table><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div>The ongoing quarrel over what one is and is not permitted to say about Islam erupted again last week when Professor Richard Dawkins <a href="https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/statuses/365473573768400896" target="_blank">tweeted</a>&nbsp;the following:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">All the world's Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge. They did great things in the Middle Ages, though.</blockquote>Both parts of that statement are demonstrably true. And yet, it was the object of the usual derision and hostility from those who appear to hold that any criticism of 'minority' cultures is racist and prejudiced by definition, irrespective of its accuracy. Especially when said criticism is expressed by a 'privileged' white Western male, who - it is alleged - harbours a racist agenda to embarrass and humiliate the Muslim world.<br /><br />A good part of the blame for this lamentable state of affairs can be laid at the door of the late Columbia professor of comparative literature, Edward W. Said. The influence of Said's writing is undeniable and incalculable. His key works&nbsp;<i>Orientalism&nbsp;</i>(1978),&nbsp;<i>The Question of Palestine</i> (1979), <i>Covering Islam</i> (1981) and&nbsp;<i>Culture &amp; Imperialism</i> (1993)&nbsp;revolutionised the way in which the Middle East is studied, discussed and perceived in the Occident, and the first of these, <i>Orientalism</i>, is credited with having midwifed the birth of Post-Colonial studies in Western academia.<br /><br />Today his work is assigned reading across a head-spinning array of disciplines and many of his arguments and premises have acquired the power of cross-cultural memes - that is to say, so entrenched have they have become in contemporary received wisdom, that one does not have to have read a page of Said's writing to believe in the essential truth of his views.<br /><br />As the neo-Conservative writer&nbsp;Joshua Muravchik allows in <a href="http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/article/enough-said-false-scholarship-edward-said" target="_blank">an otherwise highly critical piece</a> for World Affairs:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">[Said] not only transformed the West’s perception of the Israel-Arab conflict, he also led the way toward a new, post-socialist life for leftism in which the proletariat was replaced by “people of color” as the redeemers of humankind. During the ten years that have passed since his death there have been no signs that his extraordinary influence is diminishing.</blockquote><i>Orientalism</i> is -&nbsp;<i>prima facie -</i>&nbsp;an imposing piece of work. As Muravchik notes, it confronts the reader with a blizzard of assertions, names, quotations and arguments dressed up in the kind of stultifying post-modern jargon often mistaken for scholarly erudition, all of which point to the same damning conclusion: that the West has been engaged in a lengthy, thoroughgoing and systematic attempt to dominate, control and subjugate Islamic society and culture, and that Orientalism, a hitherto respected discipline dedicated to the study of the Near, Mid and Far East, was and is little more than the malevolent handmaiden of Western militarism and Empire. As Said explained in one particularly intemperate passage:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">It is therefore correct that every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was consequently a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric. [Pg. 204]</blockquote>This view, while manifestly absurd, nonetheless chimed with the prevailing view on the Left at the time of <i>Orientalism</i>'s publication that Western culture, and caucasians in particular, had very little of which they could be proud and much of which they should be ashamed.<br /><br />Two wars had devastated the European continent and beyond; technological advances were suddenly in the dock following the summary obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; post-Colonial guilt tormented those horrified by the crimes committed by their forefathers in the name of Empire; the brutal war for independence waged by the people of Algeria had ended in 1962; the bitter struggle for racial equality in the United States&nbsp;had finally been won, but Martin Luther King was dead; and, across the globe, American foreign policy was held in contempt for its military involvement in South-East Asia.<br /><br />In 1967, Susan Sontag informed the readers of <i>The Partisan Review</i> that:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">The truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean Algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Marx, and&nbsp;Balanchine ballets don't redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history.</blockquote>("Only," Tom Wolfe remarked years later, "in the Land of Rococo Marxists.")<br /><br />French philosopher Michel Foucault, whose attacks on the notion of objective truth had seen a resurgence of moral and cultural relativism in the post-War West, was by no means alone in applauding the overthrow of the US-backed Iranian Shah in 1979 by theocratic fascists on this basis. That perverse mentality survives in academia to this day, as evidenced (to take but one example) by the English historian Mary Beard's <a href="http://www.lrb.co.uk/v23/n19/nine-eleven-writers/11-september" target="_blank">blithe pronouncement</a> in the immediate wake of 9/11 that "no matter how tactfully you dress it up, the US had it coming."<br /><br />But aside from indulging a Western penchant for self-flagellation, <i>Orientalism</i> and its quasi-sequels also had a deleterious (and, I assume, unintended) effect on prospects for progress within the Muslim world. As Ibn Warraq, the ex-Muslim scholar and&nbsp;founder of the <i>Institute for the Secularisation of Islamic Society,</i>&nbsp;commented:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">[<i>Orientalism</i>] taught an entire generation of Arabs the art of self-pity - "were it not for the wicked imperialists, racists and Zionists, we would be great once more" - encouraged the Islamic fundamentalist generation of the 1980s, bludgeoned into silence any criticism of Islam, and even stopped dead the work of eminent Islamologists who felt their findings might offend Muslim sensibilities and who dared not risk being labelled "Orientalist". The aggressive tone of <i>Orientalism</i> is what I have called "intellectual terrorism", since it seeks to convince, not by arguments or historical analysis, but by spraying charges of racism, imperialism and Eurocentrism from a moral high ground; anyone who disagrees with Said has insult heaped upon him.</blockquote>This included Muslims like the Iraqi dissident Kanan Makiya, who argued that the gravest problem facing Muslim countries was not their comparatively brief history under European Imperialism or the opinions of nineteenth century Orientalist scholars, but the escalating cruelty of their own autocratic and theocratic rulers in the here and now. For this, Said labelled Makiya a "native informer".<br /><br />The difficulty for Saidists is not that they cannot tell the difference between rational, legitimate criticism of Islam and the Muslim world on the one hand and triumphalist chauvinism and racism on the other. The difficulty is that they don't believe there to be any difference. Western criticism, study, analysis of the Orient undertaken from a position of Western power and 'privilege' are colonialist <i>by their very nature</i>.<br /><br />But the Islamic break with scientific progress and the impediments to progress Islam erected long pre-date the British and French colonial projects in the Middle East.<br /><br />A once intellectually and culturally vibrant part of the world, the region had enjoyed a relationship of productive cultural exchange with Ancient Greece. In the ninth century, the Abassid Caliphs&nbsp;Harun al-Rashid and his son al-Ma'mun&nbsp;moved their capital to Baghdad and there established the House of Wisdom - a vast archive of world knowledge, a translation institute and the most important centre of learning and scientific inquiry of the Islamic Golden Age.<br /><br />However, by the end of the ninth century, its influence was already in decline, not least because the Caliph Al-Mutawakkil believed Greek thought to be un-Islamic. As the traditionalist&nbsp;Ash'arite school of Islam&nbsp;asserted itself over the rationalist&nbsp;Mutazilites, this decline would accelerate and free thinkers in the Muslim world found themselves subject to vicious persecution. The Orientalist Ernest Renan noted in an 1883 lecture that&nbsp;any progress made in the Muslim world during the second half of the Middle Ages occurred despite Islam, rather than because of it:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">To give Islam the credit of Averröes and so many other illustrious [Muslim] thinkers, who passed half their life in prison, in forced hiding, in disgrace, whose books were burned and whose writings almost suppressed by theological authority, is as if one were to ascribe to the inquisition the discoveries of Gallileo, and a whole scientific development it was not able to prevent.</blockquote>As the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg observed in a&nbsp;<a href="http://old.richarddawkins.net/articles/531-a-deadly-certitude" target="_blank">review of Richard Dawkins's <i>The God Delusion</i></a> for the Times Literary Supplement in 2007:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">[T]hough there are talented scientists of Muslim origin working productively in the West, for forty years I have not seen a single paper by a physicist or astronomer worth reading. This is despite the fact that in the ninth century, when science barely existed in Europe, the greatest centre of scientific research in the world was the House of Wisdom in Baghdad. Alas, Islam turned against science in the twelfth century. The most influential figure was the philosopher Abu Hamid al-Ghazzali, who argued in <i>The Incoherence of Philosophers</i> against the very idea of the laws of nature on the ground that any such laws would put God's hands in chains . . . After al-Ghazzali there was no more science worth mentioning in Islamic countries.</blockquote>When the furore over Dawkins's tweet erupted, I happened to be reading&nbsp;<i>Defending the West</i>, a lucid, scholarly and comprehensive demolition of Said's best-known work by Ibn Warraq, upon which I have relied for much of this post. In it, argues that part of what separates Western societies from Islamic ones is the the idea that the pursuit of truth should not be bound by utility, but is an end in itself. This was foundational to Greek thought, exemplified by Aristotle, but has been largely suppressed in Islamic societies since al-Ghazzali. Intellectual curiosity meant the acquisition of knowledge for its own sake; a simple idea but one considered extremely dangerous by religious dogmatists.<br /><br />So instead Muslim scholars began to distinguish between the Islamic sciences, eg: religion (Koranic exegesis, the science of hadith, jurisprudence, and scholastic theology) and language (grammar, lexicography, rhetoric and literature), and the foreign sciences, eg: mathematics, physics, philosophy, natural history, astronomy and so on. The latter, being universalist, were increasingly neglected from the twelfth century on. And while Western Christianity maintained ties its heritage with Athens and Jerusalem, Islam turned its back on the pre-Islamic of the Middle East. Pre-Islamic civilisations were to be forgotten as periods of base ignorance or <i>Jāhiliyya.&nbsp;</i><br /><i><br /></i>In the late nineteenth century there was a brief rationalist resurgence, but from 1950 onwards, as Islamism began to cast its shadow across the region, it died and with it went the Muslim world's hopes of making its belated appointment with modernity. As Weinberg notes, even in ostensibly secular Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood was calling for a complete end to scientific education by 1981.<br /><br />The observable results of the stifling of free inquiry, creativity and unfettered scientific investigation are by no means limited to the distribution of Nobel Prizes. In 2002, the UN's&nbsp;<a href="http://hdr.undp.org/en/reports/regional/arabstates/RBAS_ahdr2002_EN.pdf" target="_blank">Arab Human Development Report</a>&nbsp;noted:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">There are no reliable figures on the production of books, but many indicators suggest a severe shortage of writing; a large share of the market consists of religious books and educational publications that are limited in their creative content. The figures for translated books are also discouraging. The Arab world translates about 330 books annually, one fifth of the number that Greece translates. The cumulative total of translated books since the Caliph Maa’moun’s time (the ninth century) is about 100,000, almost the average that Spain translates in one year.</blockquote>In a <a href="http://physicstoday.org/journals/doc/PHTOAD-ft/vol_60/iss_8/49_1.shtml?bypassSSO=1" target="_blank">2007 article for <i>Physics Today</i></a>,&nbsp;Pervez Hoodbhoy, chair and professor of physics at Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad, reported:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">A study by academics at the International Islamic University Malaysia&nbsp;showed that OIC [Organisation of Islamic Cooperation] countries have 8.5 scientists, engineers, and technicians per 1000 population, compared with a world average of 40.7, and 139.3 for countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.&nbsp;Forty-six Muslim countries contributed 1.17% of the world's science literature, whereas 1.66% came from India alone and 1.48% from Spain. Twenty Arab countries contributed 0.55%, compared with 0.89% by Israel alone. The US National Science Foundation records that of the 28 lowest producers of scientific articles in 2003, half belong to the OIC.</blockquote>But as Hoodbhoy goes on the observe, these depressing statistics are symptomatic of deeper cultural problems. For instance:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">Most universities in Islamic countries have a starkly inferior quality of teaching and learning, a tenuous connection to job skills, and research that is low in both quality and quantity. Poor teaching owes more to inappropriate attitudes than to material resources. Generally, obedience and rote learning are stressed, and the authority of the teacher is rarely challenged. Debate, analysis, and class discussions are infrequent.&nbsp;</blockquote>The West, on the other hand, has gained much from the scientific method and a spirit of academic openness. Emancipation from Christian dogma led to giant strides being made in scientific inquiry and technological innovation, whilst the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake excited a curiosity about the world beyond its cultural borders. Meanwhile, a culture of scepticism, self-doubt and self-criticism helped foster the very academic freedom which nurtured and promoted Edward Said and which he spent his life's energies denigrating.<br /><br />And while Said's work was a convenient cudgel with which to bash the West, it was often misleading and tendentious to the point of outright fraudulence.&nbsp;The Orientalists Said attacks in <i>Orientalism</i>&nbsp;were not the Imperialist stooges of his imagination. They were learned classicists and multi-lingual philologists motivated by a desire to know about and to understand cultures, traditions and peoples unlike their own. Their voluminous research and the translations of Arab texts they undertook have proven invaluable, not only to Western scholars but also - in spite of Said's claims to the contrary - to Middle Eastern scholars, who were grateful for the preservation of their own neglected pre-Islamic history.<br /><br />Which is not to say the Orientalists were always correct. Contrary to Said's insistence that these were people all working in the service of the same conspiratorial colonial agenda, they often disagreed and sharply criticised one another's work. But this is what happens during the course of open research in any field of exploration and discovery.<br /><br />Greater freedom of opinion in the West also allowed for the plentiful publication in the West of material sympathetic to Islam and the Arab world, but Said didn't find it necessary to mention these. Nor, as numerous critics have pointed out, did he manage to examine (or even appear to notice) the vast contribution to European understanding of the Orient made by German Orientalists. The obvious reason is that there was no corresponding or subsequent Imperial German project in the Middle East, and this inconvenient fact reduces the central argument Said advanced in <i>Orientalism</i> to powder.<br /><br />Nor does Said make mention of the Western tradition of self-criticism that naturally sprang from freedom of conscience. Moral and cultural relativism were not new phenomena. An uneasiness with the notion of objectivity and universalism can be traced back to the Greek Sophists who believed only in culturally-informed human convention. Tolerance for, as well as curiosity about, other cultures - with a concomitant reluctance to judge or condemn - has been a constant strain in Western culture to varying degrees. In Michel de Montaigne's celebrated 1580 essay<i> <a href="http://public.wsu.edu/~brians/world_civ/worldcivreader/world_civ_reader_2/montaigne.html" target="_blank">On Cannibals</a>,&nbsp;</i>he wrote:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">I do not find that there is anything barbaric or savage about this nation, according to what I've been told, unless we are to call barbarism whatever differs from our own customs. Indeed, we seem to have no other standard of truth and reason than the opinions and customs of our own country. . . I am not so concerned that we should remark on the barbaric horror of [ritual murder and cannibalism], but that, while we quite rightly judge their faults, we are blind to our own.</blockquote>Montaigne's essay is at least as mad as Sontag's "white race-as-cancer" remark, but it nonetheless demonstrates that a critical view of the West and a corresponding sympathy, or indulgence even, of other cultures has long been a characteristic of Western thought. This noble tradition of self-criticism is why as long as Western colonialism existed, so did a strain of anti-colonialist thought. It is also why the largest demonstrations following the Sabra and Shatila massacres were in Tel Aviv, and why the largest demonstrations against the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq occurred in the West.<br /><br />The notion that we ought not to study or criticise cultures other than our own is nonsensical, conservative, censorious and - in so small part due to Edward's Said's pernicious influence - dismayingly popular on the post-modern Left. But cultures are simply the product of man-made ideas. Sometimes people have good ideas; sometimes they have bad ones. The ability to discriminate and to judge the difference between the two - to reject or overthrow the former and to fight for and defend the latter - is an extremely precious faculty and a necessary precondition to progress.<br /><br /><i>Orientalism,</i>&nbsp;however, is an accusatory and deeply reactionary text, the catastrophic effects of which continue to be felt in both Occident and Orient.&nbsp;Demonstrably ahistorical and flawed though its arguments&nbsp;are, large parts of Western academia (perhaps encouraged by Gulf funding) and Western culture in general have internalised them to such a degree, they are convinced that universalist value judgements about Islamic culture are simply a projection of their own inescapable racism. Consequently, they have fallen silent about human rights abuses committed by anyone but the West (and, naturally, Israel).<br /><br />Meanwhile, in the Muslim world, religious fundamentalists have been adept at weaponising the bitter mindset of conspiracism, victimhood and vengeful grievance that Said encouraged, and directing it towards the West and the Jewish State. There remains a stubborn tendency to blame European Imperialism, American neo-Imperialism, Western cultural imperialism and 'colonial feminism', 'Orientalism', Zionism and sundry other -isms for the parlous state of their societies, rather than the regressive cultural and religious values that inhibit personal emancipation and retard learning, research and political/economic development.<br /><br />In his article for <i>Physics Today</i>, Pervez Hoodbhoy argues that simply increasing funding for research and development is not enough. Profound behavioural and attitudinal changes within Islamic societies are needed:<br /><div><blockquote class="tr_bq">. . . a <i>Weltanschauung</i> that shrugs off the dead hand of tradition, rejects fatalism and absolute belief in authority, accepts the legitimacy of temporal laws, values intellectual rigor and scientific honesty, and respects cultural and personal freedoms. The struggle to usher in science will have to go side-by-side with a much wider campaign to elbow out rigid orthodoxy and bring in modern thought, arts, philosophy, democracy, and pluralism.</blockquote>In his famous essay&nbsp;<a href="http://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/published_works/ac/counter-enlightenment.pdf" target="_blank"><i>Counter-Enlightenment</i></a>, Isaiah Berlin wrote:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">Voltaire, d'Alembert and Condorcet believed that the development of the arts and the sciences was the most powerful weapon in the fight against ignorance, superstition, fanaticism, oppression and barbarism, which crippled effort and frustrated men's search for truth and rational self-direction.</blockquote>They were correct.<br /><br /><b><br /></b><b><i>UPDATE: In response to this post, <a href="https://twitter.com/RaphaelCormack" target="_blank">Raphael Cormack</a> has posted a blog entry arguing for a more nuanced interpretation of Said's work <a href="http://ergamegala.wordpress.com/2013/08/18/on-reading-orientalism/" target="_blank">here</a>. </i></b><br /><script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script></div>Unrepentant Jacobinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09256579083755037018noreply@blogger.com30tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5380090049852721671.post-25097770376687682312013-08-08T16:20:00.000-07:002013-08-09T07:40:02.319-07:00Philology + Fascism<b><span style="font-size: large;">Or<span style="font-size: large;"> . . . </span>How Peaceniks Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Iranian Bomb</span></b><br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-aEXu1vtz-3w/UgP2r_x3JXI/AAAAAAAAAMk/ro_TN1K7Fq4/s1600/EC_080213_Sheneman620x402.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-aEXu1vtz-3w/UgP2r_x3JXI/AAAAAAAAAMk/ro_TN1K7Fq4/s1600/EC_080213_Sheneman620x402.jpg" /></a></div><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">Our dear Imam [the late Ayatollah Khomeini] said that Israel must be wiped off the map and this was a very wise statement. We cannot compromise over the issue of Palestine. </blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq"><div style="text-align: right;"><i>Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, 25 Oct. 2005&nbsp; </i></div></blockquote>The meaning of these words, arguably the most notorious Iran's erstwhile President ever uttered, is neither unclear nor complicated. But within days of being reported in the Western media, they had nonetheless become the subject of a fierce quarrel about the nature and intentions of the Iranian regime. Enemies and critics of Iran's theocracy insisted they were a testament to Tehran's pathological anti-Semitism and proof of its genocidal agenda, the furtherance of which is evidenced by their ongoing and unlawful pursuit of apocalyptic weaponry.<br /><br />Enemies and critics of the West, on the other hand, protested that Ahmadinejad's words had been mistranslated, misunderstood and misused by neo-Imperialists agitating for a pre-emptive attack on the sovereign state of Iran. This was in spite of the fact that the contested English translation had been provided, not by a neo-Conservative think-tank, but by Iranian State media. So Ahmadinejad's quote was subjected to a word-for-word literal translation, which resulted in the following revised version:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">Imam (Khomeini) ghoft (said) een (this) rezhim-e (regime) ishghalgar-e (occupying) qods (Jerusalem) bayad (must) az safheh-ye ruzgar (the page of time) mahv shavad (vanish from).</blockquote>In spite of all the complaining, it ought to be obvious to anyone capable of a dispassionate assessment that both translations explicitly express the same unambiguous belief: that the world's only Jewish State must be destroyed and replaced by a 23rd Arab State. If anything, the revised translation is even more sinister, as it carries the implication that the entire Zionist project be consigned to some kind of ghastly Orwellian memory hole.<br /><br />Nonetheless, the trivial differences between the two versions were enough to persuade Iran's defenders in the Western press that Ahmadinejad's words were completely harmless. As the ever-indulgent Jonathan Steele <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2006/jun/02/comment.usa" target="_blank">explained to his readership at The Guardian</a>:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">[Ahmadinejad] was not making a military threat. He was calling for an end to the occupation of Jerusalem at some point in the future. The "page of time" phrase suggests he did not expect it to happen soon. There was no implication that either Khomeini, when he first made the statement, or Ahmadinejad, in repeating it, felt it was imminent, or that Iran would be involved in bringing it about.</blockquote>Steele concluded by recommending that Ahmadinejad's statement should not only be considered benign, but also appeased and rewarded with immediate, unconditional bilateral talks.<br /><br />Juan Cole, meanwhile, in the midst of&nbsp;<a href="http://www.juancole.com/2006/05/hitchens-hacker-and-hitchens.html" target="_blank">a bad-tempered complaint</a> about (among other things) "the Orientalist Hitchens", offered that:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">[T]he actual quote, which comes from an old speech of Khomeini, does not imply military action, or killing anyone at all . . . The phrase ["vanish from the page of time"] is almost metaphysical.</blockquote>One is entitled to wonder if the implications of "almost metaphysical" phrases change when they are draped across missiles capable of hitting Israeli targets, and <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/sep/23/iran" target="_blank">proudly displayed during official Iranian military parades</a>.<br /><br />Or if they are delivered by the President of a nation pursuing an illegal nuclear programme at a conference in its capital city entitled "The World Without Zionism". And during a speech <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/30/weekinreview/30iran.html?pagewanted=1&amp;ei=5070&amp;en=26f07fc5b7543417&amp;ex=1161230400" target="_blank">in which he also stated</a>:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">I have no doubt that the new wave that has started in Palestine, and we witness it in the Islamic world too, will eliminate this disgraceful stain from the Islamic world . . .&nbsp;Anyone who recognises this regime because of the pressure of the World oppressor [the United States], or because of naiveté or selfishness, will be eternally disgraced and will burn in the fury of the Islamic nations. Those who are sitting in closed rooms cannot decide for the Islamic nation and cannot allow this historical enemy to exist in the heart of the Islamic world.</blockquote>This false philological quarrel erupted again over the weekend, when it was reported that, during an al Quds day rally, the new 'moderate' President-elect of Iran, Hassan Rouhani had said:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">The Zionist regime is a wound that has sat on the body of the Muslim world for years and needs to be removed.</blockquote>Once again, the English translation came from an Iranian source, not an American one. Once again, it was hotly contested. And, once again, <a href="http://uk.reuters.com/article/2013/08/02/uk-iran-israel-idUKBRE9710GL20130802" target="_blank">the corrected version</a> was scarcely less sinister than its predecessor:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">There is an old wound on the body of the Islamic world, under the shadow of the occupation of the holy lands of Palestine and Quds [Jerusalem]. This day, is to remember that the Muslim population, will not forget its historic right and will resist tyranny and occupation.</blockquote>And yet, it was claimed by some that this exonerated the regime of genocidal intent. It is worth bearing in mind that when Rouhani - or any other Iranian official for that matter - speaks of "the occupation", he is not referring to the West Bank and East Jerusalem, but to Israel too.<br /><br />And thanks to the arms and funds Iran provides for its fascist Shi'ite proxy Hezbollah and its fascist Sunni clients Hamas and Islamic Jihad, we know what constitutes Iran's preferred method of "resistance". Hamas are committed by <a href="http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/hamas.asp" target="_blank">their loathsome charter</a> to driving every last Jew from 'historic' Palestine. Not content with that, Hezbollah have committed themselves to the eradication of Jewry worldwide. As their Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah <a href="http://tenc.net/a/graduation.htm" target="_blank">said in 2002</a>:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">Islamic prophecies and not only Jewish prophecies declare that this state [Israel] will come into being, and all the Jews of the world will gather from all corners of the world in occupied Palestine. But this will not be so their false messiah [al-Dajjal] can rule in the world, but so that God can save you the trouble of running them down all over the world. And then the battle will be decisive and crushing.</blockquote>The Iranian regime's material support for these genocidal groups was always an open secret but the nation's Supreme Leader, the Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, helpfully <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iran/9059179/Iran-We-will-help-cut-out-the-cancer-of-Israel.html" target="_blank">confirmed the policy</a> in February 2012:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">From now on, in any place, if any nation or any group confronts the Zionist regime, we will endorse and we will help. We have no fear expressing this . . . We have intervened in anti-Israel matters, and it brought victory in the 33-day war by Hezbollah against Israel in 2006, and in the 22-day war [against Hamas] . . . [Israel is a] cancerous tumour that should be cut out and will be cut out.</blockquote>Evidence of the Iranian regime's implacable hatred of Israel's continuing existence is available in abundance should anyone care to look for it. The statements of its Presidents past and present may be the words of men with no <i>de jure</i> power over foreign policy, but they are indistinguishable from those made by officials across the whole regime, up to and including Ayatollah Khamenei and his closest associates. In January 2010, a Senior Iranian official&nbsp;Mohammad Hassan Rahimian&nbsp;<a href="http://www.memritv.org/clip/en/2342.htm" target="_blank">boasted that</a>:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">We have manufactured missiles that allow us, when necessary, to replace Israel in its entirety with a big holocaust.</blockquote>Later that same year, Khamenei chimed in with this:<br /><br /><blockquote class="twitter-tweet tw-align-center">Ayatollah Khamenei: Israel Is A Hideous Entity In the Middle East Which Will Undoubtedly Be Annihilated http://twitpic.com/2kkrj6<br />— khamenei.ir (@khamenei_ir) <a href="https://twitter.com/khamenei_ir/statuses/22815824658">September 2, 2010</a></blockquote><br />And still it is argued that Iran's nuclear ambitions are peaceable, and that efforts made by the West to thwart its progress are evidence of nothing more than the neo-Imperialist bullying of a pious Muslim nation.<br /><br />Writers like Juan Cole and Jonathan Steele face two obstacles in assessing the threat posed by Iran. The first is that they are not actually all that interested in the intentions of the Iranian regime. They are interested in the intentions of America and Israel, for whom it is argued the use of pre-emptive military force is never legitimate, no matter how grave the risk of inaction. Should evidence emerge of a gathering Iranian threat that might justify military action, the tendency is to attack the source, to rationalise it, to demand attention to 'nuance', to deconstruct its language, or simply to dismiss it altogether as so much empty rhetoric.<br /><br />The second problem is that they are not willing to accept that Iran's problem with Israel is not simply political; it is theological and therefore irrational by definition. Cole's description of Ahmadinejad's words as "metaphysical" was more pertinent than he acknowledged and does more damage to his case than he realises.<br /><br />Twelfth Imamism, to which Iran's fanatical ruling clerics subscribe, holds that their eponymous messiah, also known as the Mahdi or the hidden Imam, will return with Jesus at a time of apocalyptic conflict, to slaughter the infidels and establish peace for the surviving believers under a global Islamic caliphate. It is noticeable that the longer Iran's centrifuges have spun unmolested, the more frequent and confident Iranian officials' predictions of Israel's imminent demise and the consequent return of the 12th Imam have become.<br /><br />When asked whether the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction, which rests on an assumption of rational self-preservation, could prevent a nuclear conflagration in the Middle East, the historian Bernard Lewis <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&amp;v=gEmZAS3DnH8&amp;t=1931" target="_blank">was dismissive</a>:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">In the Muslim perception, there is an endless struggle going on between the true believers and the misbelievers. And this struggle will go on until the Final Stage when the true believers will triumph and the misbelievers will be conquered and either converted or subjugated. There is widespread belief among Muslims at the present time that that time is present or immediately approaching. We live in the End of Times and this is the Final Stage, which means that Mutually Assured Destruction is not a deterrent; it's an inducement.</blockquote>Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Bret Stephens agreed that the Cold War precedent was a poor guide to the likely effects of Middle Eastern proliferation. He pointed out that, while Communism's appetite for mass-murder remains unsurpassed, as materialists they had never been much on mass-martyrdom:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">That is not the case with Shi'ism, which has been decisively shaped by a cult of suffering and martyrdom dating to the murder of Imam Husayn—the Sayyed al-Shuhada, or Prince of Martyrs—in Karbala in the seventh century. The emphasis on martyrdom became all the more pronounced in Iran during its war with Iraq, when Tehran sent waves of child soldiers, some as young as 10, to clear out Iraqi minefields. As Hooman Majd writes in his book <i>The Ayatollah Begs to Differ</i>, the boys were often led by a soldier mounted on a white horse in imitation of Husayn: “the hero who would lead them into their fateful battle before they met their God.” Tens of thousands of children died this way.</blockquote>Whether Iran's clerics volunteer themselves for martyrdom or make arrangements to sit out the apocalypse is an open question (I suspect the latter). But their willingness to sacrifice thousands of their citizens and co-religionists to eschatological destiny is considerably less doubtful. And if they think they can obliterate the Jewish State in the process, it becomes considerably more likely. Unlike Russia or the United States during the Cold War, Israel is a tiny country with only a handful of large cities, so far fewer warheads would be required to devastate its population.<br /><br />Those Western commentators who see pre-emptive military action against any Muslim country as to be avoided at all costs should be made to defend the likely consequences of the inaction they recommend. To wit, a region-wide arms race in the most deeply sectarian and volatile part of the planet. With a poly-nuclear Middle East sitting on a hair-trigger, Israel's continuing existence would be untenable. Given the wealth of evidence demonstrating Iran's sincere and unequivocal wish to see the extirpation of the Jewish State, the insistence on rationalising and excusing the genocidal statements and actions of its leaders and theocrats is simply perverse.<br /><br />Juan Cole insists that Western democracies must take the moral high ground. That the only kind of morally acceptable military action is that undertaken in reprisal or self-defence. But democratic governments also have a pressing moral duty to protect their citizens from harm. And part of doing that is identifying and intercepting a clear and present existential danger before it is too late. That Iran might be obliterated by the United States following a nuclear assault on Israel would be of little consolation to the population of Tel Aviv.<br /><br />It would be wonderful if the Iranian regime could be persuaded to renounce their nuclear ambitions and to admit inspectors. But given that this is unlikely, we need to be honest about the nature of the threat a nuclear Iran would pose and the steps required to prevent it. As Jeffrey Goldberg said, during <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cd1KJnyTAU8" target="_blank">a debate on the subject</a>&nbsp;earlier this year:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">In 1998, I was in Afghanistan in Kandahar, when Osama Bin Laden issued the first big fatwa against crusaders and Jews. And I was with a bunch of Westerners and we heard about this and, frankly, we laughed about it because it seemed crazy; absolutely insane, the audacity of it. And three years later I learned that very often when someone says something that seems crazy and says it over and over again, its worth paying attention . . . in the post-9/11 age, I believe we have to take religious fundamentalists who say they want to kill us seriously.</blockquote><br /><b><i>For the Jerusalem Centre for Public Affairs' dossier entitled </i>The Iranian Leadership’s Continuing Declarations of Intent to Destroy Israel<i>, click <a href="http://jcpa.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/IransIntent2012b.pdf" target="_blank">here</a>.</i></b>Unrepentant Jacobinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09256579083755037018noreply@blogger.com6