The fashion police, at least, have already arrived, a decade early and without any help from Islamists. But rather than forcing women to wear the burqa or niqab, their job is to force them not to. Earlier this month Italian police in the northern city of Novara fined a Tunisian immigrant, Amel Marmouri, €500 for being veiled in a post office. Belgian police are likely to be doing the same after the Brussels parliament outlawed the burqa. France expects to pass a similar law by the autumn. Holland could follow suit. The Spanish city of Lleida has forbidden the burqa in public buildings; the Minister of Labour and Immigration Celestino Corbacho has hinted at a national ban. In Canada, the Quebec government has drafted an anti-burqa law. Australian politicians are demanding one too.

The rhetoric accompanying the bans has been as gushing as the oil spewing into the Gulf of Mexico. Jean-Francois Copé, leader of the majority UNP party in French National Assembly, has talked of ‘a reaffirmation of our ideals of liberty and fraternity’. For the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, the bans are nothing less than a ‘defence of the Enlightenment’. According to Celestino Corbacho without a burqa ban it would not be possible to protect ‘the values of our society’.

There is certainly something medieval about the burqa and the niqab. The idea that in the 21st century women should be hidden from view for reasons of modesty or religious belief is both troubling and astonishing. Yet, there is also something surreal about the way that this piece of cloth has been turned into a battleground for Western values and about the idea that the burqa poses some kind of existential threat to the West.

The campaign against the burqa is particularly puzzling when in reality so few women choose to wear it. The sight of a burqa in Paris or Brussels is almost as rare as a glimpse of a bikini in Riyadh or Karachi. France has a Muslim population of 5 million. Its government estimates that fewer than 2000 women wear a niqab or burqa. (The original survey, conducted by DCRI, the French secret service, came up with the oddly precise figure of 367; that was so low that the Interior Ministry told the DCRI to count again.) In Holland some 500 women in a Muslim population of one million do so, in Denmark the estimate is fewer than 200 out of 170,000 Muslims.

So why, at a time when Europe is beset by so many fundamental economic and social problems, have legislators become so obsessed by this piece of cloth? There are three main kinds of arguments against the burqa: practical, political and existential.

The burqa, Jean-Francois Copé has suggested, ‘poses a serious safety problem at a time when security cameras play an important role in the protection of public order’. Many worry that the burqa would allow terrorists to evade airport security or provide the perfect camouflage for bank robbers. Others fret that wearing the burqa makes it difficult to perform certain jobs, particularly those that require face-to-face contact with clients or the public – doctors, nurses, teachers, police officers.

There are clearly practical problems that come with wearing the burqa. It is, after all, a piece of clothing designed for feudal life, not the modern world. Practical problems, however, can usually be solved on a case-by-case basis without the need for national soul searching or draconian legislation. Airports already require veiled women to reveal their features when passing through security. Police have no problem demanding to see faces when checking ID cards. And if banks insist that people should not wear bulky clothing, so be it. But that is very different from the state imposing an outright ban on such clothes.

If wearing a burqa is incompatible with the needs of particular jobs, then those particular employers – hospitals, schools, shops even- can legitimately demand that employees not be clad from head to foot. But again, one can impose dress codes for certain jobs without banning a type of clothing for everyone. After all, we don’t have judges and teachers wearing bikinis on the job either.

The practical arguments for a ban on the burqa are weak and shallow. More profound is the political case. The burqa, proponents of a ban argue, undermines gender equality and makes social integration impossible. It is, Bernard-Henri Lévy has written, ‘not a dress, it’s a message, one that clearly communicates the subjugation, subservience, the crushing and the defeat of women.’

The burqa is certainly demeaning to women, and often used to enchain them. Many other practices and rituals that Western societies tolerate are, however, also degrading. Orthodox Jewish women must shave their heads and wear a wig when they marry. The Catholic Church forbids women priests. Many Protestant evangelical churches insist that wives must ‘obey’ their husbands and that the role of women is to breed new evangelicals. Nobody seriously suggests that Jewish marriage rituals be banned or that the Catholic church be forced to accept gender equality or that evangelical wives be saved by state legislation from being baby factories.

A liberal society accepts that individuals should be free to make choices that may not be in their own interests and that, to liberal eyes, demean them. This applies even to particularly distasteful expressions of degradation, such as the wearing of the burqa.

What of the suggestion that women are forced to wear the burqa, and so need protection from the law? It is true that in countries such as Saudi Arabia or Yemen women have little choice but to cover up their face. That in itself is a good reason for liberal societies not to impose coercive dress codes.

If women are forced to do something against their will, the law already protects them in democratic countries. But what evidence exists, suggests that in Europe most burqa-clad women do not act from a sense of compulsion. According to the DCRI report in France, the majority of women wearing the burqa do so voluntarily, largely as an expression of identity and as an act of provocation. A second French report by the information authority, the SGDI, came to similar conclusions. Burqa wearers, it suggested, sought to ‘provoke society, or one’s family’, and saw it as a ‘badge of militancy’, and of ‘Salafist origins’. The burqa ban will only deepen the sense of alienation out which the desire for such provocation emerges.

The burqa is a symbol of the oppression of women, not its cause. If legislators really want to help Muslim women, they could begin not by banning the burqa, but by challenging the policies and processes that marginalize migrant communities: on the one hand, the racism, social discrimination and police harassment that all too often disfigure migrant lives, and, on the other, the multicultural policies that treat minorities as members of ethnic groups rather than as citizens. Both help sideline migrant communities, aid the standing of conservative ‘community leaders’ and make life more difficult for women and other disadvantaged groups within those communities.

What of the impact of the burqa on social integration? The veil has been rightly described as ‘ghetto walls that a person wears’. It often inhibits normal social interaction – that, after all, is its very purpose – and may preclude those who wear it from integrating into society. But given that virtually no Muslim woman actually wears the burqa, it can hardly be held responsible for creating a sense of social separation.

The real significance of the burqa is that it has become a symbol of the anxieties that have come to beset Western nations. What does it mean to be French? Or British? Or Swedish? Most Western nations have undergone a crisis of identity as both traditional values, and trust in the institutions in which those values were invested, have become eroded. Unable to define clearly the ideas and values that characterize the nation, still less to win people to those ideas and values, politicians have taken the easy step of railing against symbols of ‘alienness’. In this sense the burqa bans are similar to the prohibition imposed last year by the Italian city of Lucca on kebab shops ‘to protect our culinary tradition’ or to the decree by the mayor Rome that schools can no longer serve couscous or Chinese fried rice but only ‘regional cuisine dishes’. They are attempts to define ‘Western values’ or the republican tradition by showing what such values or traditions are not at a time when politicians find it increasingly difficult to express what they are.

And this takes us to the existential argument against the burqa. ‘This is not about the burqa’, Bernard-Henri Lévy claims. ‘It’s about Voltaire. What is at stake is the Enlightenment of yesterday and today, and the heritage of both, no less sacred than that of the three monotheisms. A step backwards, just one, on this front would give the nod, all fanaticism, all the true thoughts of hatred and violence.’

The idea that the entire weight of the Enlightenment tradition should rest on banning a piece of cloth worn by a few hundred women shows how absurd has become the debate about the burqa. Certainly, it is important to defend liberal social values, the secular society and the heritage of the Enlightenment. But we cannot do so by promoting illiberal policies, stigmatizing immigrants, or banning symbols of ‘otherness’. The very values that Lévy believes are undermined by the burqa demand that we oppose any attempt by the state to ban it.

recently, i gave up posting on pickled politics, partly because of the level of personal animosity i was facing, but mostly just in frustration at my apparent inability to get my point across. now, i suppose i have nobody very much to blame for that apart from myself, but i’ve never felt that was a problem before now. now, i think i’m starting to work out what it is that is bothering me; certainly, it’s not about the denizens of one blog, or even the blogosphere, or even the media. it’s not any one set of views, not any one person, but a set of trends, a collective movement i sense in wider society.

one of the things i like about the spittoon and my co-contributors is that they take a robust approach towards the cosy relationship between the left and the various apologists for, supporters of and partisans of islamist extremism. they take, of course, an equally dim view of other forms of clerical fascism, whether it be jewish, christian, or hindu, although, of course, we are often excoriated for not writing sufficiently on these subjects. and why is that? well, the answer that “they’re not as big a problem” simply won’t do. clearly, the activities of the likes of rss/shiv sena in india, or hardcore fundamentalists in the american south ultimately affect all of us. for me personally, the behaviour of both the extreme west bank settlers and that of rejectionist ultra-orthodoxy evokes both profound heartache and deep anger – just as the “as-a-jew” clique that only appear as jews in order to display their preening self-importance whenever an opportunity to attack israel arises. however, i would nonetheless argue that, from the perspective of wider UK society, these concerns are less immediate, in that these groups have no meaningful accommodation with either our government or the UK media, however influential they may be in the communities they come from. what bothers me, really, is what the effects of ongoing and intensifying fundamentalism on me, my family and community and wider society – in this, locally speaking, islamists are in the vanguard, as the leading proponents and practitioners of violence against my community specifically and, generally, against UK civil society.

the question inevitably arises – who’s really worse? well, i think i would on balance come down in favour of the idea that wherever a particular group becomes influential and the closer they come to the levers of power, the more of a problem they are in a particular country. thus, in the UK, the utterly misguided, racism-of-lower-expectations the-west-is-ultimately-responsible-for-everything-bad-y’know attitude has allowed the entryism of islamist organisations and sympathisers everywhere from the police to government to the left-wing media. but would it be any different anywhere else? i expect not – militant fundamentalist christians are busily inching closer to the levers of power in washington, india has had already had one bjp government and i think we’re all aware of the subversion of mainstream democracy and the processes of civil society in israel by the religious parties and the settler lobby. we’ve got a lot of muslim fundamentalists here in the UK and, in a profound act of ignorance and credulity, we’ve allowed islamic education to be systematically outsourced to salafi and wahhabi dawa organisations for a generation, with entirely predictable results – i think we can say the same of many european countries, although i would fall well short of the apocalyptic and hysterical “eurabia” scenario – in fact, i’d be more worried personally about the behaviour of the catholic party in poland led by an anti-semitic priest and any prospective alliance of a russian political party with the orthodox church – not trend anyone jewish can afford to ignore.

of course, in europe particularly, this isn’t the first time we’ve been here. there was of course an “enlightenment”, which consisted in large part of reaction against the authoritarianism of various forms of christianity, whether by trying to eliminate it altogether and replace it with a sort of ersatz state paganism, as in france, or whether to regulate it as a sort of national industry, as in germany and scandinavia, or whether to simply satirise and philosophise it into a manageable social pressure and community support lobby, as in britain. the enlightenment taught that religion was nothing but a corrupt power structure which only the mad, the bad and the deluded would indulge. as we also know, removing religion simply forced the mad, the bad and the deluded to find other channels for their unpleasant attitudes and activities. we still see this outdated and reductionist position being reinvented for modern times using all the tools of modern cultural influence, from popular science to childrens’ books to comedy. religious people are portrayed as knaves or fools. there appears to be no middle ground, no compromise possible – religion must be rooted out, cleansed and exterminated.

of course, we’ve been there before too – modern fundamentalism, as karen armstrong (before she started to become part of the problem by sucking up to the goons at MPAC-UK) pointed out in her still masterful study of fundamentalism “the battle for G!D” evolved largely as a reaction against the enforced, clumsy and often brutal imposition of modernity on societies all around the world. the fundamentalisms we have today have reached their current forms because of the political, technological and social realities of the societies in which they evolved. their priorities and obsessions are driven by the battles they originally fought, against pluralism, liberalisation of dress, behaviour, increased social equality (or inequality), against practically irreversible geopolitical realities, against the aftereffects of wars and economic dislocation. those who give aid and comfort to fundamentalists are inevitably picking and choosing where they have shared priorities and obsessions – anti-imperialism, anti-abortion, anti-homosexuality, anti-israel, social breakdown, the emancipation of women, the legacy of slavery – but they are always at odds with fundamental features of the societies they criticise.

what i see developing, however, is a sort of multi-lateral polarisation in which the first casualty is moderation, the second is tolerance and the third is social consensus. the effects of this, however, touch all of us, but the effects are peculiarly corrosive on those of us who are able to combine amd integrate reason and religion and deal with the subtleties of creation, revelation and evolution. we are frequently at odds with obscurantists and bigots within our faith, but we are now fighting a rearguard defence against anti-religious forces, without any letup in the attack on reasonableness, complexity and dialogue that continues from reactionary fanatics. both sides, naturally, accuse us of giving aid and comfort to the other in its mission to destroy them – if we’re not with them, we’re against them – and no prisoners will be taken.

so, on one hand, we have the forces of militant anti-religion mounting attacks on everything from headgear to faith schools, on the other we have the walls of the ghetto being built anew, only with gun-ports this time. we can also see the social contract of the enlightenment renewed; previously, the deal was “give up your difference and you’ll get rights as a citizen” – this time, it’s “you’ve abused your rights as a citizen, we can no longer tolerate your differences”. the behaviour of religious fanatics, in their quest to dominate their own communities, has destroyed the delicate balance which allowed religion to be an integrated part of civil society. naturally, comes the response: they want all or nothing? fine – let them have nothing. but what of those of us who always wanted to co-exist? who prize our cultural and spiritual distincitiveness? oh no, distinctiveness is still allowed – but religion will no longer be a valid reason for it. diversity in sexuality, gender, disability, intelligence, talent, wealth – all these are permitted, but not religion. we are offered the choice – everything or nothing. well, we want neither.

i refuse to hide in the ghetto. i contribute to this society. i work. i pay my taxes. i don’t walk about naked, nor do i hide my face from the world. i will not assimilate, nor will i act as if i am living in another country or another century. i refuse to eat foods that are forbidden to me and i refuse to forbid those foods to others who may want them. i refuse to give up the sabbath, the festivals, the Torah and my other sacred texts – and i refuse to impose my vision of them on those who do not share my perspective. if i am attacked, i will defend myself. if i am insulted, i will respond in kind. i am not looking for a fight, but i will not shrink from one. i will not allow others to define what i am. the search for social consensus has been a long and painful one – and now it has been destroyed again, by the hubris and arrogance of religious and anti-religious fanatics. i do not know if we can put the pieces back together again, but there has to be a basis for us to live together – both enforced segregation and enforced assimilation are fascistic responses.

judaism has always been not so much a culture or a religion as it has been a 3000+ year-old argument. there is nothing so boring as loads of people violently agreeing with each other – except perhaps two groups of people refusing to concede anything that the other is saying has any value or validity. the counter-enlightenment is in full swing, without any sign that it has learnt anything from the enlightenment.

The white liberal is an unhealthy type of creature that you will undoubtedly have encountered, if not in real life, certainly via the media. By ‘liberal’, I do not mean simply someone who has a generally liberal outlook, in the sense of a ‘live and let live’ philosophy, nor do I mean liberals in the sense of the classical liberals of the conservative tradition. By ‘white liberal’, I mean a white Western individual who is likely to come from a middle class background and have a university education, considers him or herself to be both ‘left-wing’ and socially ‘liberal’, and almost certainly reads The Guardian or The Independent. White liberals espouse an artificial and pretentious form of ‘egalitarianism’, a patronising and hypocritical approach to ethnic minorities and non-Western cultures, and – in a re-hash of the notion of the ‘white man’s burden’ – devote themselves to a delusional Messianism in which they seek to ‘save the world’ through protesting against war (in real terms, protesting against non-white people having a chance at freedom and democracy), Israel (the one truly liberal society in the Middle East), globalisation (thereby opposing the one great vehicle by which poorer nations can develop), and so on, while making themselves feel and look ‘good’ by flaunting their pious support for campaigns to end poverty in the Third World (which will do no such thing, as Dambisa Moyo, Stephen Pollard, Marian L. Tupy, and others rightly point out ), and boasting about how ‘progressive’ they are by showing ‘solidarity’ with genocidal Islamists in Gaza.

White liberals, despite viewing themselves as intelligent and open-minded, are actually some of the most illiberal and narrow-minded people in society today. Their reactions to the idea that anyone might think differently to them range from gut-wrenching despair to pure hatred of the kind seen in the most fanatical of ‘true believers’. White liberals are, by and large, incapable of serious adult debate (preferring innuendo and accusations of bigotry), or of dealing with the fact that not everyone will agree with them (despite their supposed love of pluralism and a multiplicity of different ‘voices’), and tend to see any view which deviates from their cultic leftist script as a form of irredeemable moral evil. White liberals do not base their world-view on rational analysis and sensible argument, but instead on an almost religious faith that they possess the ‘truth’, and just as we see in so many fundamentalist religious cults and sects, the devotees of the white liberal faith burn with hatred for the ‘sin’ that surrounds them, and indeed, all too often for the ‘sinners’ themselves. White liberals, who are the intellectual equivalent of stroppy, rebellious teenagers, have sought to subvert and undermine Western civilisation, and some offer support for authoritarian and even terrorist movements as part of their attack on ‘racism’ and ‘colonialism’.

White liberals approach issues of race and racism from an essentially irrational, moralistic standpoint. White liberals do not simply judge racism to be based on bad thinking and criticise it for its illogical collectivism. Instead, white liberals make the issue of racism, as with other issues, all about them. White liberals have colonised the discourse of racism and anti-racism because it offers them an opportunity to boast of the superiority of their virtue and to demonstrate their purity and holiness through ostentatious and vacuous public displays of self-flagellation. Just as early Christianity imbued adherents with a deep sense of guilt and sinfulness, so the white liberal finds in reflecting on the history of white racism the opportunity to both revel in the guilt of the sinner and to make atonement through ‘anti-racist’ initiatives, thereby offering them the opportunity to further present themselves as a holy elite tasked with saving the world. And just as at various points in the history of Christianity an overarching sense of guilt derived from an intense awareness of, and obsession with, the supposedly inherent sinfulness of human beings and of the ‘world’ led ‘holy’ men and women to conclude that the path to holiness is found in the hatred of self, world, and the human condition, white liberals indulge in a form of self-hatred which is designed to project the image of penitence and sanctity, while actually being transparently pretentious, self-aggrandising, and destructive.

Ideological white racists are collectivists who adopt the irrational position that white people form some kind of world-wide ‘brotherhood’ with a unified history and culture. The huge variations in the historical and cultural experiences and manifestations of the various majority white nations is seen to be of little importance in the bigger picture. Ideological white racists are frequently people who have made little or no personal contribution to the development and advancement of Western civilisation. You won’t find many ground-breaking inventors and innovators, great scientists, artists, composers, and so on in the ranks of the modern white supremacist movement, but you will find many bitter and insecure individuals who make themselves feel important by piggy-backing on the achievements of others. When white racist activists and ideologues talk of ‘white unity’ and ‘white pride’, they almost always claim to be ‘proud’ of the ‘superior’ achievements of white people throughout history. Ideological white racists will point to great men and women of the past and present who happen to share their skin colour and state how great the ‘white race’ is. So, you will find the absurd phenomenon of drug dealing, dole scrounging morons who somehow feel Shakespeare and Mozart can be claimed by them as great men of ‘their race’. Clearly, stating yourself ‘proud’ of things that you have not made or done just because they were made or done by people who look or looked similar to you has no rational basis.

On this point, white liberals will agree. However, at the same time, white liberals advocate an inverse form of the same collectivist nonsense by proposing that whites should feel collective guilt for the negative actions of white people of the past. It’s clearly stupid for a skinhead thug to claim to feel ‘proud’ of the works of Beethoven, yet it is also equally stupid for a white liberal to claim to feel ‘guilty’ for the actions of white slave traders or marauding white colonialists. But the white liberal simply will not accept this. White liberals hold an almost universally negative view of the history of Western civilisation and claim that modern Western whites should apologise and make amends for the actions of whites of previous generations and even previous centuries. If a Mayor of London made a public speech tearfully extolling the superior virtues of white people who happened to live in London in the past most people would be shocked by this act of collectivist posturing and irrational bigotry. However, when the tables are turned and a Mayor of London makes a tearful ‘apology’ for long dead Londoners’ involvement in the slave trade, this is seen by white liberals to be a moral and righteous act.

Here’s how The Guardian reported a 2007 case of exactly this collectivist irrationality:

Ken Livingstone yesterday marked the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade with an emotional and tearful ceremonial apology on behalf of the capital city and its institutions. The London mayor wept as he told a commemorative service of the cruelties inflicted on the millions transported from Africa and the legacy that confronts them today.

Before an audience of politicians, writers and dignitaries, he twice paused during his address. As he voiced the apology, the US civil rights leader the Rev Jesse Jackson walked over and placed his arm around the mayor. Mr Livingstone completed the long awaited statement, dabbing tears from his eyes, his voice shaky.

Ken Livingstone – known as ‘Red Ken’ for the far-left views he espoused for many years of his political career – took it upon himself to express collective guilt on behalf of an entire city in his role as Mayor of London. In doing so, he acted as the archetypal masochistic white liberal idiot.

As is so often the case with white liberals, Livingstone’s pathological sense of white guilt has also affected his ability to think rationally about people who happen to have a darker shade of skin than him. For white liberals like Red Ken, criticism of any non-white person is suspected to be a cover for ‘racism’, ‘imperialism’, and so on. Consequently, when Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi – an Islamist ‘scholar’ who advocates the death penalty for gay people, the beating of wives by their husbands, and calls Hamas terrorists ‘martyrs’ – came to London in 2004, Livingstone, acting in his official capacity of Mayor of London, publicly welcomed him and went so far as to embrace him before the cameras of the media.

Rational criticism of this disgusting act of grovelling to a retrograde theocratic ideologue had no effect on Livingstone. Taking white liberal idiocy to its logical conclusion, he went so far as issuing yet another of his vacuous apologies, stating that ‘On behalf of the people of London, I would like to apologise to the Sheikh for the outburst of xenophobia in sections of the media’. Livingstone’s decision to ignore Al-Qaradawi’s reactionary views was typical of the kind of double standard adopted by many white liberals. Livingstone seems to be one of the white liberal drones who thinks that while white people have been – and continue to be – somehow collectively responsible for an endless list of crimes and transgressions, the same cannot possibly be said for someone of another ethnicity. If a white leader advocated the same things as Al-Qaradawi, white liberals like Livingstone would be up in arms, denouncing the evils of homophobia, sexism, and any other ‘ism’ that could be thrown at them, and would probably go on to issue tearful apologies and dredge up issues like slavery.

Speaking of the similar attitudes of white liberals in Canada, liberal Muslim author Tarek Fatah nailed it when he told the Canadian Jewish News:

there is a tremendous amount of white guilt. The intelligentsia in this country in a selfish way tries to assuage this guilt. It caters to the most idiosyncratic behaviour of the immigrant and practices the racism of lower expectations. It sets standards of behaviour for our community, but when dealing with immigrants and especially the Muslim community, it does not expect them to live by the same standards.

Meanwhile, the Syrian-born Muslim scholar Bassam Tibi has told Germany’s Der Spiegel magazine that ‘Europeans have stopped defending the values of their civilization’ because ‘they confuse tolerance with relativism’. White guilt is an irrational, intellectually and culturally crippling pathology, yet white liberals who embrace this nonsense have a huge influence in almost all the powerful and influential sectors of our society.

For white liberals, the fear of being accused of racism is a matter of constant concern. The idea that someone might be a racist has taken second place only to the idea that someone might be a paedophile. Racism continues to be a highly contentious issue, and one in which white liberals take a particularly keen interest. However, as with everything else, most white liberals get this issue completely wrong and in doing so greatly hinder the development of an intellectually honest and rational society, and a society in which racial collectivism and prejudice is eradicated.

A good working definition of racism would be that it is the belief that one or more ethnic groups are inherently, biologically inferior to another. Racists work on the deterministic assumption that people can be collectively viewed as a single group based on ethnic ancestry alone and that membership of this group connotes certain fixed, unchanging, and unchangeable factors, such as intelligence, character, and aspirations. Racists are race essentialists – they do not see individuals but rather view ethnic groups as monolithic groups whose cultures, traditions, religions, and so on in some sense spring from their genetic make-up. While I’m far from an Ayn Rand acolyte, her analysis of racism in The Virtue of Selfishness is spot-on:

Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism. It is the notion of ascribing moral, social or political significance to a man’s genetic lineage — the notion that a man’s intellectual and characterological traits are produced and transmitted by his internal body chemistry. Which means, in practice, that a man is to be judged, not by his own character and actions, but by the characters and actions of a collective of ancestors.

Racism claims that the content of a man’s mind (not his cognitive apparatus, but its content) is inherited; that a man’s convictions, values and character are determined before he is born, by physical factors beyond his control. This is the caveman’s version of the doctrine of innate ideas — or of inherited knowledge — which has been thoroughly refuted by philosophy and science. Racism is a doctrine of, by and for brutes. It is a barnyard or stock-farm version of collectivism, appropriate to a mentality that differentiates between various breeds of animals, but not between animals and men.

Like every form of determinism, racism invalidates the specific attribute which distinguishes man from all other living species: his rational faculty. Racism negates two aspects of man’s life: reason and choice, or mind and morality, replacing them with chemical predestination.

When it comes to racism, a sensible approach would be to say that as the central assumptions which underpin it are false, racism is irrational and consequently a belief system that is of no value and is positively harmful. Many white people are hard-working and make a positive contribution to society; however, many do not. The same applies across all ethnic groups. A sensible approach to the issue of race is to judge individuals on their personal merits, not on the colour of their skin or their country of ethnic ancestry. The white racist would prefer to live next to a white dole scrounger than a hard-working Asian. This fact illustrates the fundamental irrationality of racism, and the indiscriminate collectivism upon which it is based. Racists are often seen as people who ‘discriminate’. In reality, they show themselves to be fundamentally incapable of discrimination, given the fact they see only undifferentiated masses termed ‘races’, instead of vastly differing individuals.

White liberals take a very different approach to the issue of racism than the one outlined above. White liberals do not predominantly base their positions on reason, but rather on emotions, moralism, and an almost religious devotion to concepts such as egalitarianism and ‘human rights’ (although their support for human rights varies according to whose rights are at stake). As moralists, white liberals see racism as evil and essentially ‘sinful’, and for them racism violates the holy precepts of ‘rights’ and ‘humanity’. White liberals are incapable of logically and adequately addressing issues of race and racism, because their moralism is not rationally founded.

In the Hebrew Bible, we find the idea of generational curses, in which God punishes the descendants of transgressors. For example, in Exodus 20:5, God is said to have stated: ‘I the Lord your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and the fourth generation’. White liberals approach racism from a similar perspective. As we have seen, white liberals feel an almost pathological sense of guilt over the white racism of the past and this is central to their overwhelmingly negative assessment of the West and its history.

This combination of moralism and guilt has resulted in white liberals going from one extreme to the other. In attempting to avoid the mistakes of the past and to somehow atone for the sins of their forefathers, white liberals have adopted a position towards ethnic minorities and non-Western cultures in which they feel that it is not morally permissible for white people to criticise any non-white groups, belief systems, cultural phenomena, and so on. Consequently, white liberals are – for example – wholly opposed to asserting the superior values of Western modernity over the comparative backwardness of the so-called Islamic world, and indeed devote much of their time to promoting the idea that the West is in fact grossly deficient and shot through with ‘racism’.

Multiculturalism is the inevitable result of this white liberal outlook. Unable to assert the particular value of Western civilisation and the developments of modernity, white liberals have encouraged multiculturalism because a large part of their flawed ‘anti-racist’ strategy is the promotion of cultural relativism. Cultural relativism is the irrational position that no culture – or aspect of cultural belief or practice – can in any sense be stated to be better than another, and it is an important aspect of the pseudo-religion of ‘equality’. The simplistic idea underpinning cultural relativism is the view that if all cultures are seen as equal, then all races will be seen to be equal, and never again can whites assert racial superiority over non-whites. However, the white liberal approach to racism is wrong on two fundamental levels: firstly, it is irrational, and secondly, it is actually based on racist ideas.

The white liberal notion that ‘discrimination’ is an intrinsic evil involves an abuse of the concept of discrimination and the application of a moral principle that makes no sense, and is not even consistently followed by white liberals. Despite the fact the word is now so loaded it automatically conjures up images of bigotry and injustice, discrimination is a perfectly normal and legitimate concept. To discriminate is simply to choose one option from a series of options. The fact that railway companies no longer build steam locomotives is the result of superior advances in rail technology. When building new trains, rail companies could choose to build a new fleet of steam locomotives. Of course, they do not do this as to do so would be a step backwards and would be commercially harmful. In choosing to build trains using the latest technology, rail companies are using a process of discrimination. Go and see the managers of a rail company and try telling them that all trains are ‘equal’ and that they should not ‘discriminate’ against steam locomotives, but should rather use equal numbers of steam and electric locomotives. They would probably laugh in your face and call you an idiot. And they would be right. Even white liberals would find the notion of railway locomotive ‘equality’ completely absurd and irrational. However, when it comes to looking at beliefs, cultural practices, ways of ordering society, and so on, white liberals suddenly adopt the same irrational argument as used in my train example. All cultures are ‘equal’, they assert. To think otherwise is immoral and bigoted and shows that you are a ‘racist’.

In reality, white liberals do not really consider all cultures to be equal. They may say they do, but even white liberals are not actually that stupid. White liberals to do not want to live in a society ruled on theocratic lines; they don’t want to be enslaved to following ancient writings of ignorant men; they don’t want their daughters to be genitally mutilated; they don’t want to be forced into arranged marriages; they don’t believe men should be in a position of ‘authority’ over women; they don’t accept sexism, misogyny, and anti-gay prejudice; they don’t think the answer to criminality is to enact barbaric laws involving public whippings, amputation, stoning, and beheading; they don’t think people should be executed for ‘crimes’ such as homosexuality and ‘sorcery’. The West was once based around all these principles, however, a slow development away from rule by religious authority and unelected leaders, and a society ordered along brutal feudal lines and permeated with superstition, took place in the West over a number of centuries, and was particularly accelerated thanks to the Enlightenment. The often hysterical reaction to Christian fundamentalists exhibited by white liberals, and their support for the notion that harshly criticising and even ridiculing Christianity is admirable and ‘progressive’, shows where they stand when it comes to traditional Western religion and religious authority. Because of its long history in the West, white liberals tend to perceive Christianity as somehow a ‘white’ religion (despite the majority of practising Christians in the world today being non-white and non-European), and as a result are more than happy to see it dissected, neutered, and pilloried. Naturally, white liberals do not consider criticism of Christianity and theocratic Christian groups to be a form of ‘anti-white racism’, and they are right, as it isn’t, and has nothing to do with race.

Given white liberals are very clear about the way in which they wish to live, and the rights they consider essential – free speech and expression, freedom from sexism, freedom from homophobia, democratic rights, individual rights, freedom from religious authority, freedom from State oppression, and so on – you might expect them to take the position that every citizen in the West (and indeed the whole world) should share a respect for, and enjoy the benefits of, these freedoms. However, because of white liberals’ bizarre misunderstanding of what racism is, they suddenly throw out any universal commitment to such values when they find that non-white societies and ethnic minority groups in majority-white societies do not respect these freedoms. The clearest example of this bizarre and hypocritical attitude is currently found in the way white liberals approach Islam and Muslims. According to the white liberal anti-racist creed, to criticise Islam, to state that Muslims living in the West should abide by the social mores of the West, and even to criticise political Islam (Islamism) is an act of ‘racism’. How can this be perceived to be racism? According to white liberals, criticism of Islam is ‘racist’ because the majority of Muslims in the world – and in the West – are non-white, and Islam is a religion that emerged in a non-white land (the Arabian peninsula). For the white liberal, criticism of Islam, because it is a predominantly non-white belief system, must by definition in fact be based on racist contempt for non-white people, because Islam is ‘their culture’ and to criticise ‘their culture’ is to criticise ‘them’. White liberals, haunted by memories of slavery, colonialism, and white supremacist ideologies of the past, have concluded that cultures and races are integrally intertwined. Islam, they believe, is a non-white and ethnic minority belief system, which is therefore an extension of the non-white and ethnic minority communities that adhere to it. In the light of the white colonialism and racism of the past, white liberals claim, white people have no right to pass judgement on other cultures, and to do so is to engage in a racist ‘cultural imperialism’.

The notion that criticism of a culture, cultural practice, or ideology is a form of racism is, ironically enough, actually predicated on a racist outlook. When white liberals cry ‘cultural racism’, they are merely engaging in a politically correct form of a racist idea which originally formed the basis of many theories of white supremacy. Early Western proponents of notions of the inferiority of non-white people, racial hierarchies, and so on, initially based their beliefs on assumptions derived from anthropology, before going on to create full-blown pseudo-scientific racial theories that drew on such bogus ‘scientific’ methods as craniology and phrenology. These anthropological racists came into contact with various non-white peoples through exploration and colonialism. Upon finding that many non-European peoples were living in societies bereft of the technological and philosophical advances found in the West, white supremacists concluded that the reason these peoples lived in primitive conditions which lacked any evidence of modernity was not that they – for various geographical and sociological reasons – had yet to go through the radical changes from living in pre-modern societies to living in modern technological and industrialised nations that had recently occurred in the West, but rather was a result of an inherent intellectual and sociological deficiency in their ‘race’ that derived from their genetic make-up. According to the Western theorists of white supremacy, the cultures of non-white peoples were external manifestations of an innate racial essence, and it was quite impossible to hope that these peoples would ever advance from the state in which they were found, because they were biologically incapable of ever advancing or developing. Such thinking provided an ‘intellectual’ justification for slavery, for example, in that it adjudged black people to be a lesser form of being, lacking intellectual potential and aspirations, and consequently a being whose ‘natural’ role was to live in subservience to white people. When white liberals claim that criticism of Islam or Islamic politics – so-called ‘Islamophobia’ – is a form of racism, they are making exactly the same connection between culture and race. In this white liberal form of racism – the racism of lower expectations – it is seen to be bigoted to suggest that non-white people should leave behind the very same primitive ideas that once held sway in the West (fanatical devotion to religion, intolerance of critical thinking and other beliefs, persecution of gay people, and so on). Yet the true bigot here is the white liberal, who assumes that cultural ideas that have developed in non-white societies are somehow integrally intertwined with, and innately derived from, the racial groups in those societies. The racism of lower expectations views non-white people as inferior to white Westerners, but masks this racist assumption in politically correct language about ‘diversity’ and ‘respect’ for cultures.

If white liberals really believed that all cultures are ‘equal’, you would expect to see them spreading out across the world, queuing up to gain entry to countries such as Iran or Saudi Arabia. In fact, most white liberals certainly do not hike off around the world, seeking to make their homes in Islamic States. The major traffic between Islamic States and the West comes in the form of a steady flow of immigrants trying to gain entry to the West because they know they will have a better life here. Societies that attempt to organise themselves using Islam as their foundational philosophical basis are demonstrably vastly inferior to the West. One need only glance at the human rights records of Islamic States such as Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Iran to see that this is the case. None of these States has a properly functioning democracy or the freedoms we take for granted in the West such as freedom of speech and expression, freedom of belief and religious adherence, freedom of association, gender equality, and freedom of choice in personal and sexual relationships. The legal systems in these States are barbaric, prejudiced, and corrupt. Law enforcement does not adhere to any proper system of due process. Saudi Arabia is ruled with an iron fist and is marked by institutional superstition, as seen, for example, in its execution of people accused of ‘witchcraft’ and ‘sorcery’. Yemen fiercely clamps down both on individual freedom and the rights of political groups. Arbitrary house searches and arrests are common, and capital ‘crimes’ include homosexuality. Child marriage, meanwhile, is promoted by Yemeni clerics, who cite Muhammad’s marriage of a child as the authoritative precedent for this practice. Iran is governed by a Holocaust-denying Islamist lunatic who incites hatred of the West and grants police the right to detain individuals for such bogus ‘crimes’ as ‘Satanism’ or having the wrong hairstyle. Iran also executes gay men, including teenagers.

To state that life in Western democracies is demonstrably better than life in Islamic States should hardly be controversial, yet many white liberals cannot bring themselves to acknowledge what they must logically believe to be the case, because to do so would be to ‘discriminate’ and to engage in ‘cultural imperialism’, ‘Islamophobia’, and ‘racism’. Yet who is the racist here? – The honest individual who notes that modern Western civilisation is superior to that of Islamic States, or the white liberal who enjoys the freedoms of the West but claims that we cannot ‘impose’ our ‘Eurocentric’ perspective on others, because to do so would be to claim that peoples and races living in Islamic States are themselves inferior? The subtext is rather clear in the white liberal’s cultural relativism: Islamic States are the way they are because they are the creation of non-white peoples, and therefore to criticise political Islam is to pass judgement on the ethnic groups in those States. A sensible person who is not clouded by racial prejudice should be able to see that Islam and Islamic States have nothing to do with race, and everything to do with culture. Culture does not derive from race, and therefore to criticise a culture cannot be seen as a racial criticism (unless that criticism is articulated in the language of genuine ideological racism). To assume that it can be seen as that is actually to endorse the view that culture does derive from race and that therefore the backward, superstitious, and authoritarian nature of Islamic societies is actually the result of non-white peoples being inherently backward and superstitious.

The same issue applies to white liberals’ approach to Islamists living in the West. When Islam, Islamism, and Islamists are criticised, many white liberals work themselves into a frenzy, frothing at the mouth about supposed ‘Islamophobia’ and ‘racism’. In doing so, white liberals seem to be seriously proposing that non-white immigrants and children of immigrants are inherently predisposed towards theocratic and illiberal outlooks. White liberals practice the racism of lower expectations in their dealings with immigrant communities. When Islamic groups are shown to be sexist, homophobic, anti-Semitic, anti-freedom, and anti-Western, white liberals do not oppose them – instead they support the bigotry and backwardness of Islamic extremists in immigrant communities by announcing that such prejudices and anti-freedom views and ideologies are ‘their’ culture and are no better or worse than the predominant culture in the West. The fact that white liberals are being racist in doing this is easily illustrated by the fact that when white racist parties and organisations promote anti-democratic views and hatred for minorities such as gay people, white liberals immediately condemn them. When the Christian Right comes out with views that are backward, superstitious, and opposed to personal freedom, white liberals start ranting about theocracy and ‘fascism’. White liberals are happy to attack bigotry, irrationalism, and extremism when it comes with a white face – they don’t claim that ‘far-right’ homophobia and anti-Semitism is somehow ‘different but equal’ to white liberal views, nor do they start making excuses about ‘understandable grievances’ when white supremacists rave about Jewish conspiracies or Christian extremists bomb abortion clinics. If virulent criticism of white racist ideologies and religiously conservative Christianity is not seen by white liberals to constitute a form of ‘anti-white racism’, then why on earth should criticism of political Islam be seen as a form of ‘racism’? The only way in which opposing political Islam can be spun as a form of ‘racism’ is to claim that Islam constitutes an expression of a racial ‘essence’, as opposed to being one cultural form among many. To claim that criticism of Islam is ‘racist’ is to claim that Islam is derived from biology. This is nonsense. It is the same as the white supremacist claim that Western civilisation is great because the ethnicity of its progenitors is great. When white liberals claim criticism of Islam or any other non-white belief or culture is racist they show themselves to be racist to the core. White liberals have a condescending approach to non-white people because in actual fact they do not view them as equals at all. White liberals are the true racists, and their ‘tolerance’, relativism, and obsession with calling other people racists is in fact an attempt at covering up this very fact.

SR: I don’t know how unfashionable this is, but I think there are universals. I think there are things that are universally true and I think there are such things as universal rights. They are not culturally specific, in my view. The argument made by relativists is that it is culturally specific to argue that there are universals. I think there are other ways of approaching it.

One way of approaching it is to say that there are things which are essential to our nature as human beings, wherever in the world we come from. To go back to what I was saying about Ibn Rush’d, one of those essential characteristics that we all share is the characteristic of language. We are a language animal which always, from the beginning, has used language in order to understand itself, and in order to define and shape the kind of creature that it is. So then, if you begin to restrict, limit, forbid, circumscribe how language can be used, you are committing an offense which is not culturally specific: you are committing an existential offense. We have to be allowed to use language to understand ourselves. Therefore, to defend the freedom of language as a universal human right is justifiable not by appeal to this or that cultural tradition but simply to the biology of the beast.

So it seems to me that it is possible in this way to argue for the universality of certain rights. We are a dreaming animal. We live very richly through things that we imagine. Were it not for the capacity of imagination, there would be very little progress in human rights, in human existence. All through human history, imagination precedes reality, and things move constantly from the border — through the border — between imagination and reality. What starts as a dream becomes reality. So again, to start restricting our ability to dream and envision, and to tell us that there are things we can dream about, and other things that are bad dreams, which we must not have — it’s a crime against humanity.

I think relativism is the dangerous death of liberalism. If you will justify anything that anybody does because it comes from their tradition, it means you abdicate your moral sense and you cease to be a moral being. Going back to the article you mentioned which talks about the question of women, if you were to take religion away as the justification, nobody would tolerate that for a minute. The kinds of limitations that women have been placed under and the crimes against women in the name of religion are so profound, and yet somehow people don’t get as agitated about them as when the same things are done by somebody who wasn’t using God as the reason. That seems like nonsense to me.

Exhibit A, published by I-W on June 25th, is the story of Sureyya Ozkaya:

These are the shocking injuries inflicted upon schoolgirl Sureyya Ozkaya during a brutal daylight assault near her Thornton Heath home.

The 14-year-old’s hair was set on fire and her hands and feet were cut with glass during the attack in Grangewood Park, before her attackers smashed her head against a tree and left her bleeding in a bush.

She was stumbled upon by a woman walking her dog and carried home to nearby Kitchener Road following the attack, at about 7.30pm on June 9.

Sureyya’s mother Pemdegul Kale, 39, said three girls taunted her daughter about her Muslim faith as they carried out the assault, before burning her hair with a lighter and stealing her trainers.

Exhibit B, published by I-W on June 28th, is about Tariq Ramadan:

Academic Tariq Ramadan, sacked by Rotterdam city council last year, is asking for €75,000 compensation for wrongful dismissal.

Ramadan lost his job as city integration adviser after officials discovered he presented a tv show for a broadcast company financed by Iran. The city said this could not be combined with his other roles. Erasmus University also ended his contract as a visiting professor.

Court hearings over the compensation claim began on Monday. Ramadan claims the sacking damaged his reputation as an Islamic scholar.

The first discusses the shocking and gutless physical assault on a young muslim girl. She was targeted specifically because she is muslim and there is a clear-cut indication of anti-muslim bigotry in the motivation to the violence.

The second is about Tariq Ramadan who has decided to take his erstwhile employers to court on grounds of wrongful dismissal. Rotterdam City Council decided that Ramadan’s links to an Iranian TV channel would conflict with his role as an academic at Erasmus University.

Question: Why is the story of Tariq Ramadan, suing Rotterdam City Council in this case, Islamophobic?

There is no commentary by Bob Pitt to tell us why. There is simply the vague suggestion from the title of the piece that implies Ramadan was dismissed on grounds that were Islamophobic. But this is not articulated in the article, which is cut and pasted verbatim from Dutch News.

When two completely divergent stories are juxtaposed in this manner, it has two effects:

1) By offering no distinction between the two cases, it seeks to conflate the fate of ordinary muslims with the travails of seasoned political Islamists. It does this by claiming that violent anti-muslim bigotry suffered by ordinary people who are targetted because they are muslim is of the same qualitative order as political action taken against right-wing Islamists.

2) There is the attempt to bolster Tariq Ramadan’s story by listing it alongside the story of real violence against a real victim. Tariq Ramadan is not a victim of any kind, but what this juxtaposition does is to objectify the pain of Sureyya in particular, and devalue and disrespect the real victims of anti-muslim bigotry in general.

Islamophobia-Watch is replete with this kind of sophistry and moral relativism. Political Islamists will be the first to claim to be victims of “Islamophobia” but will be the last to be on the receiving end of real anti-muslim bigotry.

But the take-away point to remind oneself when one reads the blog is this:

Islamophobia-Watch uses ordinary muslims to protect the interests of right-wing Islamists.

Proponents of multiculturalism usually put forward two kinds of arguments in its favour. First, they claim that multiculturalism is the only means of ensuring a tolerant and democratic polity in a world in which there are deep-seated conflicts between cultures embodying different values. This argument is often linked to the claim that the attempt to establish universal norms inevitably leads to racism and tyranny. Second, they suggest that human beings have a basic, almost biological, need for cultural attachments. This need can only be satisfied, they argue, by publicly validating and protecting different cultures. Both arguments are, I believe, deeply flawed.

By that definition, Sunny Hundal is a textbook proponent of multiculturalism. A few months ago he wrote a piece on his blog, Pickled Politics, and called it Minorities and power, in liberal democracies. Not only was it is a clear-cut example of Kenan’s definition of multiculturalism, Hundal provides a complete proof-positive validation of Kenan’s thesis with this astonishing disclosure:

After a while the race and the religion doesn’t even matter: it comes down to numbers. If your numbers or clout is large enough then the establishment will pay lip service. Perhaps the mistake Latinos in the US made was to tilt too far towards the Democrats… removing the Republican incentive to avoid pissing them off. Although it looks like Republicans are paying the price already.

Perhaps what I’m trying to say is that the only way a minority can get over the bigotry is either by expanding in large numbers, or getting very close to the establishment.

That’s what current affairs tell us, right?

[caveat: I'm not saying all minorities should vote along ethnic lines, I'm merely pointing out that in extreme circumstances (draconian immigration laws for example, they have an incentive to]

What Hundal is advocating here, and what multiculturalists in general want, is surmised in the second of Malik’s two-point exposition. Multiculturalists want people to organise themselves along the lines of some or other ethnic or religious descriptor, say as “brown people” or as “Muslims” or as “Sikhs” etc, in order to oppose or protect themselves from some or other putative draconian or adverse law.

Now the diametrically opposite position to this would be if “white people” were to bind together politically in order to oppose this or that piece of legislation, corporate marketing or even other “brown people”.

But if “white people” were to organise themselves to ‘publicly validate and protect their culture’, as Kenan Malik would describe it, would multiculturalists like Sunny Hundal find it acceptable or even desirable? Surely that is the nature of the dynamics of a multicultural system, and surely that would include sub-cultures of “white people”?

Fat chance. As Sunny demonstrates, “brown” multiculturalists don’t like it when “white multiculturalists” assert themselves along the lines of a multicultural grouping.

In the case of a football t-shirt campaign for example, Hundal contradicts everything he has previously advocated for “brown minorities” and goes into hypocricy overdrive to deny this cherished multicultural privilege to that sub-culture known as “England supporters”. He then produces not one but two blog articles in a fit of apoplectic rage. And don’t be surprised if more still are on the way in the Pickled Pipeline.

It is inevitable that exponents of multiculturalism will tie themselves into intellectual and ethical knots, in the same way Sunny Hundal continues to do. We will leave it to him and his admirers to help him out of that predicament. It’s going to be long haul by the looks of things, but it is very entertaining to point and laugh.

I suggest the rest of us glean as much as possible from Kenan Malik’s article and ponder what a truly plural society, not just a multicultural society, would entail.

The irony of multiculturalism is that, as a political process, it undermines what is valuable about cultural diversity. Diversity is important, not in and of itself, but because it allows us to expand our horizons, to compare and contrast different values, beliefs and lifestyles, and make judgements upon them. In other words, because it allows us to engage in political dialogue and debate that can help create more universal values and beliefs, and a collective language of citizenship. But it is precisely such dialogue and debate, and the making of such judgements, that contemporary multiculturalism attempts to suppress in the name of ‘tolerance’ and ‘respect’.

A truly plural society would be one in which citizens have full freedom to pursue their different values or practices in private, while in the public sphere all citizens would be treated as political equals whatever the differences in their private lives. Today, however, pluralism has come to mean the very opposite. The right to practice a particular religion, speak a particular language, follow a particular cultural practice is seen as a public good rather than a private freedom. Different interest groups demand to have their ‘differences’ institutionalised in the public sphere. And to enforce such a vision we have to call in the Thought Police.

Multiculturalism is an authoritarian, anti-human outlook. True political progress requires not recognition but action, not respect but questioning, not the invocation of the Thought Police but the forging of common bonds and collective struggles.

According to the report, the Occupied Palestinian Territories, which comprises the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, are classified in this broad-based UN Index as having “Medium Human Development”. It places its position at 110 of 182 countries, putting the Palestinian Territories in neither the top nor bottom groups.

And most surprising of all, the country’s HDR index places it ahead of the muslim-majority countries Egypt (123), Indonesia (111), Pakistan (141) and Bangladesh (146).

Where is data of the alleged ‘exteme humanitarian crisis’ and the starving Gazans that the Left insists on holding up as examples of said crisis?

Here is an image of a people “starving” at a fruit and veg market bursting with produce in Gaza:

And one of “destitution” at the lady’s souk:

But back in Bangladesh, there’s no poverty or starving people at all, is there? No flotilla for this young girl:

Nor for these children in Pakistan,

And of course these people in Egypt have no experience of social deprivation at the hands of a corrupt and venal government administration do they?

Wait! I thought they were in league?? I’m getting all confused here, because according to certain defenders of human rights Amnesty was acting LIKE the Taliban. All very confusing isn’t it…. or not.

But surely countering human rights abuses is the the kind of thing Amnesty was set up to do? Wasn’t highlighting human rights abuses rather than contextualising “defensive jihad” precisely their remit? Shouldn’t Amnesty be unapologetic advocates of universal human rights instead of forging partnerships with Cageprisoners whose business is to promote jihadist Islam and its exponents such as Anwar al-Awlaki and Ali al-Timimi?

There was a time, well before Gita Sahgal magnificently blew the whistle on them, when Amnesty UK took pride in publicising events such as this one, called ‘Stop the Spread of Guantanamitis”, held in October 2009.

Take a look at the list of speakers there:

Louise Christian from Christian Khan Solicitors
Imran Khan from Imran Khan Solicitors
Kevin Laue from Redress
Amnesty Representative
Sunny Hundal from Pickled Politics
Representative from Reprieve
Helen Bamber from Helen Bamber Foundation
Andy Worthington journalist and author of ‘The Guantanamo Files’

Organisations in support include;
Redress
London Guantanamo Campaign
Cage prisoners
Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers

[My emphases]

Oh dear, Sunny Hundal and Cage Prisoners sharing an Amnesty platform. That explains a lot, doesn’t it?

Had Amnesty International issued a press release with news of a discontinuation of their partnership with Defensive Jihadists, then that would have been a legitimate reason for joy. Unfortunately Amnesty UK have not done anything of the sort.

No doubt there will be more reports made to the public to smokescreen their covert activities with organisations such as Cage Prisoners, while closing down all debate internally, so that buffoons like Hundal and his confrères can feel vindicated.

Nevertheless, let us end on a winning note. Amnesty have not organised any more events with Cage Prisoners that we know of. So no more international speaking tours and no poetry reading soirées for Moazzam Begg on the Amnesty ticket.  And that is surely an indication, albeit a small one, that Gita Sahgal’s whistleblowing campaign has had some effect.

So carry on Hundal!

As is sadly so often the case, the nuances in the lecture Rowan Williams delivered at the Royal Courts of Justice in February 2008 failed to have any impact on those whose closed minds alit on the word “sharia” and decided he was talking nonsense yet again. In fact, Dr Williams addressed this point very early on when he quoted Tariq Ramadan’s chapter on sharia in his book Western Muslims and the Future of Islam. “In the West,” writes Ramadan, currently Professor of Contemporary Islamic Studies at Oxford, “the idea of Sharia calls up all the darkest images of Islam…It has reached the extent that many Muslim intellectuals do not dare even to refer to the concept for fear of frightening people or arousing suspicion of all their work by the mere mention of the word”.

The example of Saudi Arabia undoubtedly has much to do with this. But it is important to stress that to look at that country and then to assume that its version of sharia is the only one, or the one to which Muslims all secretly aspire, would be akin to holding up a vision of Torquemada’s Inquisition and concluding that this was what real Christianity was. It is unrepresentative and, many would argue, a perversion. Equally important is the fact that the punishments that cause the greatest outcry – flogging, stoning etc – come under the hudud laws, which are implemented in Saudi Arabia and were introduced by General Zia ul-Haq in Pakistan in 1979, but are the exception, not the rule, in most Muslim countries.

Okay, so I understand that Sholto Byrnes, the author, is not advocating hudud laws. Fine, but he begins this piece by begging the question regarding hudud laws, and produces an advocacy piece in support of shariah because, as he says, most Muslim countries, with the exception of the KSA and Pakistan, do not implement hudud. Seems like an odd reason for supporting shariah, when most Muslim countries which formally implement constitutional shariah (and Malaysis is not one of them, sorry) only do so solely to implement the specific punishment laws of hudud.

The author spends a lot of space and time in this article on what sharia isn’t but almost nothing on what sharia should entail. The only real-world example he cites to support his thesis is one story from the Times about an incident involving a British journalist’s experience with a sharia court in Malaysia. But this minor anecdotal evidence is too meager to be representative of the life experiences of people who have to live under shariah. How many muslim countries implement shariah because they think its inheritance laws are good laws fit for today’s world? Absolutely none of them.

But as the author develops his argument and follows up his promise of more detailed explanations for championing shariah law in subsequent articles, I hope he can provide justification for two particular non-hudud shariah principles:

1) Muslim daughters must inherit only half of that due to a son, as prescribed by this Quranic verse:

“Allah commands you regarding your children. For the male a share equivalent to that of two females. ” [Quran 4:11]

2) The witness of a woman is equal half that of a man.

Since neither of these legal principles fall under hudud, I presume Sholto Byrnes regards them beneficial and even worthy of support. Oh but how I want to hear him justify laws which have been the basis of cultural patriarchy in muslim societies.

Starting a series of articles in defence of shariah based on one logically absurd position seems to be a very silly thing to do indeed.

I look forward to reading the New Statesman’s reasons why inheritance laws, and laws undermining the rights of muslim women need the support of unprincipled western, middle-class, left-liberal blokes, who champion religious laws that they will never need to live with or be affected by.

Here is an excerpt from an article which compares the unequal responses by political groups, the media and various human rights organisations in Pakistan to the Flotilla atrocity with the mosque massacre of Ahmadis in Lahore. It highlights the skewed moral relativities and the morality bypass which turns some into vocal critics of violence perpetrated against muslims when committed by non-muslim actors (particularly when they are Americans or jews), but maintain a studied silence when muslims savagely oppress their own people.

Just a few days ago to be precise 5 days ago in our own heartland Lahore 100 Ahmedis were slaughtered by the barbaric Taliban. They were not there on any political gathering or any political point scoring. They were not going to war zone. They were just offering their ‘Jumma Prayer’ to their Lord which they think is as farz (obligatory) on them as on any other Muslim. They were in their mosque, peacefully standing in straight lines bowing in front of the same lord as of the Muslims, Jews and Christians. There is no different version of this story. The enemy didn’t say that they (Taliban) acted in ’self defence’. Their enemy clearly mentioned their intention that they came to kill them indiscriminately irrespective they were men, women, children, young and old. Its pointless to mention that the barbaric didnt regretted the loss of human life because that’s what they wanted and came for. They took pleasure from the blood of the Ahmedis. In a short time span of few minutes they killed 100 Ahmedis.

Now when i compare the response of this bigger, more ruthless, more blood thirsty attack on totally peacefully non political non partisan people with a regrettable event of Israeli attack on the Gaza Flotilla, I see a drastic and huge difference. I see not a single protest for Ahmedis, not a single burning of flag or slogans against the Taliban culprits [who proudly owned the responsibility].

I also noted that the whole Pakistani media with very very few exceptions, media and journalists were calling their mosques as ‘place of worship’ , their martyrs as ‘halak’, their ‘Jumma Namaz’ as ‘religious gathering’ and their city Rabwah as ‘Chanab Nagr’.

I didn’t see any human rights organization protesting for them on roads. I must however acknowledge and appreciate bold remarks by Salman Taseer, Rehman Malik, Asma Jahangir and few other people – not to mention this very blog LUBP which is a leader in human rights and minority rights in Pakistan.

The so-called civil society was sleeping in the lap of Taliban and to my utmost astonishment few labelled the Ahmadi massacre as a handiwork of Mossad, Raw and CIA. Leaders of the rightist parties used very ‘careful’ language when condemning the attacks. Within 2-3 days, this grave incident was systemically wiped out from the media’s ‘Islam friendly’ eyes.

I think this whole episode shows a great bias which lives in the hearts and minds of most of us [if not all]. Because the people dying in Lahore were Ahmedis and as most of us hate them (deep in our heart) so if they got killed by our ‘brothers in faith’ its ok.

This, I’m sorry to say, is how it strikes me as being with Christopher Hitchens’s piece in Slate supporting the French move to outlaw the burqa. He has plenty of arguments, but not one of them is compelling. Christopher tries, first, to present the agents of the prospective legislation as not seeking to impose a ban.

To the contrary, they are attempting to lift a ban: a ban on the right of women to choose their own dress, a ban on the right of women to disagree with male and clerical authority…

This is sophistical. For any woman wanting and choosing to wear the burqa or the veil, a law against doing so imposes a ban. Christopher is consequently obliged to suggest that there are no such women: ‘we have no assurance’, he says, ‘that Muslim women put on the burqa or don the veil as a matter of their own choice. A huge amount of evidence goes the other way’. He says, again, that ‘the right of women to show their faces… easily trumps the right of their male relatives or their male imams to decide otherwise’. Well, I don’t know what the proportions are as between Muslim women covering their faces out of choice and those doing so because they are compelled to, but I’ll give Christopher good odds that the number in the former category is not insignificant, and for all of them the law would constitute a ban. As for ‘the right of women to show their faces’, in democratic societies this is already protected by law, and if there are men breaching that law to force women to cover their faces against their will, then it can and should be activated accordingly.

Norm ends with a single inarguable, so-obvious-it’s-cliché take-home lesson for the French authorities and, sorry to say, Christopher Hitchens, who finds himself in an illiberal conceptual cul-de-sac of his own making:

“Anyway, from a liberal point of view, it might be said that the hard line here is that people should be able to wear what they like.”

Read the remaining six.

“Do Anglicans, even moderates, really think of G!D as a sexless being? I was under the impression that most moderate religious people still think of G!D as male. People could use the singular ‘they’ and refer to a ‘parent’ if they were really that bothered.”

i think she could with some justice aim this question at judaism, but it is, nonetheless, a bit of an old chestnut. the best way i can answer it is that in the same way that we deal with anthropomorphism in the text: G!D Isn’t male any more than G!D Has a “hand”, or a “back”, G!D Forbid. when the Text speaks in these terms, it is only to be understood as the way *we* understand the interaction, not the *actual reality* – hence, when we speak of G!D as “Father” or “King”, these are merely the interactions and relevant relationships that are being described, not the Ultimate Reality of the Divine. by the same token, a number of incredibly important Divine Names and interaction/relationships are *female*, such as “E-L ShaDaY”, which comes from the word ShaDaYiM (breasts) and “Ha-RaHaMaN”, which comes the word ReHeM (womb), not to mention the considerable symbology of the Divine Feminine in kabbalah around the SheKhiNaH (Divine Presence) and “Matronit” and the male-female interrelationships actually *within* the G!DHead. one might also mention the idea that the “community of israel” is synonymous with G!D’s “bride” on some level, so that would require one of us to be “male” and the other “female” in that particular situation.

“And then there’s Jesus – no-one could lead themselves to believe he was genderless. Judaism has Moses, Islam has Mohammed – all these prophets are male. How does a person get around that one?”

perhaps by mentioning the seven major jewish prophetesses, sarah, miriam, deborah, hannah, abigail, huldah and esther – (talmudic reference: BT megillah 14a)? according to the great authority rashi, rebecca, rachel and leah should also be included.

a more serious criticism, i believe, is the following:

“If one accepts and follows traditions without question purely on the basis that they are traditions, this leaves the door wide open for all kinds of nasty things. In general, it silences and disables those who disagree with the traditions and would like to do things differently. It’s those ‘harmless’ traditions which can make people feel stifled and like there’s only one right way to do things. At the very least, they discourage creativity, critical thinking and independence.”

this is certainly a position with which we at the spittoon can identify – certainly within judaism (and, i and others would argue, within islam as well) the idea that there is One True Way Of Doing Stuff is a corrosive and oppressive idea not borne out by a truly insightful examination of the texts involved. however, the accompanying analysis is flawed:

“One can usually assess how harmless a tradition is by examining what the penalties are, if any, of not following it. In your example, I would imagine that a Jewish/Muslim pork-eater would face many negative reactions from their community, plus residual religious guilt, and that this is probably the real reason why they ‘like following the tradition’.”

now, this might be a perfectly adequate summary of how the uneducated “feel” about the law in question, in fact, the penalty in halakhah is the indication of exactly how important the principle incurring the penalty is in the first place. in fact, halakhically, the penalty is thirty-nine lashes, a comparatively light penalty compared to breaking shabbat, which is a stoning offence. now, before you get all bent out of shape on how unpleasant it is to get lashed, you’d have to also consider the standard of evidence, which required five further tests before the lashes could be administered:

1. the pork-eating in question would have to be done in front of two kosher witnesses (many, many difficulties in establishing what one of these looks like)
2. the two witnesses would need to have absolutely no discrepancy in their statements.
3. the pork-eater would have to receive a warning from the witnesses that by so doing, he would incur a penalty of lashes.
4. the pork-eater would have to respond that he had understood the warning and the penalty, reiterating precisely what they both were.
5. the eating would then have to occur within 3 seconds of this response.

incidentally, to be binding, the verdict would also have to be handed down by a properly constituted and duly authorised religious court – and there hasn’t been such a court for approximately 1500 years, but considering the re-establishment of such courts is a religious duty, i personally would prefer to rely on the other safeguards. even so, i hope you can see from the standard required that anyone who actually meets it is clearly out to make a point. oh, and, incidentally, if you ran away before the verdict was carried out, you couldn’t be re-arrested. in such a case, the negative feeling from your community is likely to be the only sanction.

another interesting challenge is made here:

“To what extent, for a religious person, is their holy book really their holy book, if they disregard most of its teachings (or haven’t even read it all the way through)?”

for jews, as we were born into a covenantal relationship, we are as subject to it as to the laws of the country we were born into. the same obtains with UK law. presumably amy’s not suggesting that i’m not obliged to follow the regulations of her majesty’s revenue collectors despite the fact that i may never have read them or heard of their provisions? by the same token:

“To align oneself with a movement, an organisation, that one disagrees with at least in part, knowing that in doing so you are giving it power – numbers at least, and in many cases, money too?”

i am not sure how this is different from being a citizen of a country whose policies you may or may not agree with – you’ve still got to pay your taxes.

as part of this discussion, i analysed deuteronomy 22:29 in its context. this provoked a number of further responses including:

“Regarding the Deuteronomy verse (22:29), it says that ’she shall be his wife, because he hath humbled her’ – humbled? That’s rather chilling, no? Is that a mistranslation too?”

not only that, but it is also misrepresenting what the text says, which is ‘AiNah” – “forced”, but not in a *physically* violent way, as in verse 25, more in such a way as to give her no choice but to marry him. i would say that this represents bringing about a marriage by “putting the woman in a compromising position”; if you know pride and prejudice, it’s what wickham does to lydia bennet to get money out of the family; he has to be bribed to marry her. the Torah is trying here to prevent the woman becoming unmarriageable; there is nothing to say that she can’t *then* divorce *him* (after betrothal and before final marriage), thus retaining her autonomy and a hefty divorce payout; it is just that *he* is forever prevented from divorcing *her*, not the other way around. i would understand this verse as a face-saving exercise.

amy then goes on to say:

“Regardless of whether rape occurred or it was ‘just sex’, isn’t it a bit sexist to generally suggest that it’s okay to buy a woman in this way?”

now, i’m not sure you can really project your attitude back to the bronze age as if human values and relationships have always been the same; i mean, that is the same sort of point of view that would reduce shakespeare’s “merchant of venice” to simple antisemitism. the initial audience of the Torah (as opposed to G!D) wouldn’t really understand what you’re getting at here. the thing is, you aren’t “buying a woman”; you’re contracting for procreative services, as it were, which can only be done by ensuring exclusivity on the woman’s part. the woman must enter into the contract without coercion and of her own free will and can exit it at her discretion on virtually any grounds (including bad breath) and is, for the duration of the contracted marriage, entitled to a statutory level of maintenance (and alimony), clothing, housing and sexual satisfaction, breach of which by the husband is, needless to say, grounds for divorce. this quite simply was revolutionary within the context in which the Torah was given; not only in that the woman had to agree, but that she maintained her rights, her property and right of cancellation. in fact, it compares positively to modern civil law in most respects – most people agree that merely falling in love is a rather worse basis for marriage than shared values and clear responsibilities on both sides! both sides contribute assets – the wife’s contribution is *not* a dowry, but her reproductive capabilities, hence:

“(Following your interpretation, it’s a bit like having to pay for something you broke in a shop – fair enough if it’s a vase, but a person? Why does having sex make you a broken person?)”

well, it doesn’t, nor is this implied, although permit me to observe, tongue-in-cheek, that most of us would pay more for new underpants than for second-hand. the statutory levels, in any case, are nominal – in reality, these would in the past have been negotiated, in the case of a woman who had emancipated herself from her father (or previous husband by divorce or widowhood) possibly by the woman herself. and there’s more:

“If God is a supremely knowledgeable being, with ultimate powers, and is perfectly good and moral, why couldn’t he send a clear message – even in the bronze age – that women are people, not property?”

the same reason that G!D also didn’t send the clear message “don’t drive on the wrong side of the road” – it wouldn’t have made sense at the time, only now. the clarity would in fact have been precisely the opposite.

“What stopped him from telling these citizens in no uncertain terms that it’s okay for women to have sex, they don’t have to be virgins until they’re married, and it’s not right to buy and sell them?”

the fact that this wasn’t a student dorm at berkeley, it was bronze age canaan – and if you hopped behind a bush with someone, you’d be liable to end up with your throat slit, or sold into slavery, thus precipitating a blood feud; it wasn’t like there was a police force and cctv; this was the wild fecking west! people took what they could get and, like it or not, if a woman didn’t have protection from a father, guardian or husband, she might be fair game, unless she stayed within the protection of the law. to be honest, this feels somewhat anachronistic reasoning, based on a very different axiomatic substructure, as the following statement identifies:

“I find it quite convenient that you’re explaining away misogyny as mistranslation, and contradictions as just not knowing the ‘right’ context of the verses in question. You seem to be taking it as your a priori assumption that there can’t possibly be any real inconsistency in the texts, there can’t possibly be any real misogyny. Why not? Why can’t there be?”

the answer to this is that if, axiomatically, one believes, as i do, that the Torah is a Divine document, any inconsistency in the texts is there to teach us something and the basis of traditional methodologies is the ability to identify the root cause of the inconsistency in order to illustrate the teaching point concerned. this has certainly been our approach as long as we can remember -and, more to the point, this is documented quite a long way back. secondly, in the conception we have of G!D it would make no more sense for G!D to Be a “misogynist” than it would for G!D to have a “hand”, or to “be angry”; these things are simply expressions of how we experience what we interpret out of the text. we believe that G!D Expects us to behave with respect and compassion to each other, not to systematically disadvantage half the human race. now, obviously, if you have different assumptions, then these might include a priori that any statement in the Torah reflects bronze age sensibility and capability in terms of gender relations, science and critical reasoning and therefore there can’t possibly be any real lessons to be learned from it. on this i suspect i might have to differ from you, seeing as how our culture is based almost entirely on this document and in most respects is generally considered to have produced major leaders in each field who are also committed to some of the same assumptions about the document. this is not to say that they are all going to agree with each other all the time:

“Why is your ‘methodology’ necessarily going to result in a clear, unequivocal message?”

because it is based on a clear set of assumptions and underpinned by a unified philosophical structure – i’m not saying that this necessitates clarity and unequivocable messaging in all cases, because it doesn’t, but in the case of this particular verse, it clearly precludes certain interpretations such as “G!D Is a misogynist” as nonsensical. there are some other pertinent questions that obtain:

“On what do you base your faith in it?”

on the fact that this way of doing things has preserved the sole remaining diaspora culture of the ancient world through several millennia of unremitting and occasionally genocidal hostility. in other words, it works.

“How do you know that the eventual interpretation is right, in any case?”

the principle we test it against is “after the majority shall you incline” (exodus 23:2) but we *also* preserve minority opinions (BT bava metzia 59b) in case eventually they become majority.

“What do you check it against?”

it’s peer-reviewed. all jewish law has been aggressively picked apart, analysed, defended or amended on this basis. that is what the talmud documents.

“Then you say that two contradictory positions can both be the word of the ‘living god’? How is that even possible – how can a creator of the universe not make his mind up?”

of course – but “it is not in heaven” (deuteronomy 30:10), so we are told we have to work it out for ourselves, on the authority of the Torah itself, so the majority opinion came down on one side at that time. G!D may well Have an opinion, but in the famous talmudic debate of the “oven of achnai” (the reference given above) the majority decision was to say “bugger off, G!D, this is a human decision now, You Said so in the Torah”.

“Not be 100% clear about his message? Do you not find it slightly odd that all this interpretation is necessary?”

no, we find it incredibly empowering that we are being treated like grown-ups responsible for our own actions, not children with no sense of right or wrong.

“Why doesn’t God reiterate his message and clear things up? Hasn’t he got the power to do this?”

well, yes, obviously, but during the “oven of achnai” debate, the position of the majority was “we do not make legal decisions on the basis of Divine Voices from Heaven”.

we still haven’t quite got to the bottom of the equality debate here, however:

“When I talk about a sense of equality, I am talking about equality between men and women – e.g. what is it that leads you to know that stoning a woman to death for not being a virgin is wrong? Would you only know that it’s wrong if you’d read all the scriptures? Or would you know that it’s wrong based on your own empathy and reasoning? I would argue the latter, seeing as I know it’s wrong, and I haven’t read all the scriptures or engaged in textual interpretation.”

i would argue that the case that you are basing it on your own “empathy and reasoning” alone is not a strong argument. nobody grows up in a vacuum. you have these attitudes because you developed them, based on your upbringing. i would argue that you *have* been influenced indirectly by them because they have influenced the society you grew up in. i can even point to the bit of Torah that it comes from: “you shall love the stranger [person who is different from yourself] for you were strangers in egypt” (leviticus 19:34) nor am i saying that my own reasoning is inoperative – obviously, i needed to use it to apply the verse to this situation, similarly the sages needed to apply it in order to get the relevant safeguards in place to prevent it happening unless it really, really, really, REALLY applied. if you’re going to do something as drastic as stoning a woman to death for not being a virgin, you’d better be really sure that’s what the text says – and that what the text says applies to this EXACT situation.

“This is what I’m talking about. A religious person reads such a horrendous verse, thinks ‘That can’t be right’ and proceeds to delve more deeply into the scriptures to find some way of justifying it.”

i don’t really understand why this should be so wrong – it is the way the Torah does thought experiments; under what circumstances might such a penalty apply? what might justify it in *practice*? are you sure? are you really, really sure? what principle is being upheld? that’s not the same as “justifying” it – you can’t be “justifying” it if you end up effectively prohibiting it, which was the actual effect – but then again, you wouldn’t know that if you didn’t know the proper context for Torah, which is as the written component of jewish law, not as a copy of “gender relations for dummies”, which is how it is so often abused by literalist protestants and bible-bashers in particular.

“I doubt that a person starts reading scriptures and then concludes ‘Well whaddaya know? Stoning women is immoral!’”

i agree – and so do the sages! although there are more morally complex issues in the Torah than this one.

amy is also good enough to address a criticism i make of her that she is generalising about religious people:

“Sure, not all religious people follow their religion in exactly the same way, but they do believe in a god/gods, and their holy texts do mean something to them. These are the two aspects of religion that I critique in my piece, and they appear to me to be pretty universal among the faithful. The rest is a critique of the arguments used by religious feminists to defend the misogyny in their holy texts, and examples of religiously-inspired misogyny. What is it that I’m generalising about? What is it exactly that you object to?”

well, i suppose what i object to is the implication that religious feminists are “defending misogyny”, because as i have attempted to show, i don’t think the misogyny is there either in intent or in application – except by people who really don’t understand either the text concerned, or who don’t follow an acceptable standard of textual interpretation. i accept that it *could* result in misogyny, because it *has* – but human beings do get things wrong from time to time and Torah is not easy.

anyway, i hope this is not too irrelevant and that there are enough interesting nuggets here for the conversation to continue here; certainly i would encourage people to take a look at the original piece.

The number of fatalities due to terrorist violence in Pakistan between 2003 and 2009 came to 25,070. The largest number of deaths occurred in 2009, which came to 11,585 in one year alone.

The SATP report where I get this information from also says

“Since media access is heavily restricted in the troubled areas of Pakistan, and there is only fitful release of information by Government agencies and media reportage, the actual figures could be much higher”.

Notice that Hundal enthusiastically signed up to back the US war effort in Afghanistan. When he did that, he presumably accepted carte blanche the killing of Baitullah Mehsud by a drone attack in SWA, Pakistan in June 2009. He does not appear to have too many problems with Pakistani warlords being killed by US military forces. The problem (for Hundal) is that he cannot have it both ways: It is not possible to support the killing by US drone missions of jihadi terrorists like Baitullah Mehsud for tactical reasons, and then complain about plans to do the same with jihadi ideologues and a wanted fugitive such as Anwar al-Awlaki, for ethical reasons.

Considering al-Awlaki’s direct association with two of the 9/11 terrorists, with Ali al Timimi, with Major Nidal Hassan of Fort Hood and latterly, with the Underwear Bomber, the al-Shabaab militia in Somalia and his untold influence over the ideology of the Salafi jihadism, why does a plan to kill Awlaki raise a shrill call for denial of his human rights, whereas complete silence when it comes to, say, Mehsud?

The lesson here is simple: if you’re Muslim then the state can take away your rights and self-appointed champions of human rights won’t say anything at all. That’s how committed they are.

The problem Sunny has is peculiar to a certain “well intentioned”, but wholly deluded, left-leaning liberal perspective. The fact is, the road to jihad is paved with good intentions. But this perspective, of which Hundal is a faithful zealot, is all about how to diminish the implications of terrorism when it’s committed by jihadis. Also on show here is the cognitive dissonance of “defensive jihad” whereby civilian deaths caused by western military action in Pakistan are reprehensible, whereas the deaths caused by acts of terrorism (all 25,000+) are unfortunate side effects of the violence of arbitrary provenance.

Hundal is here selectively championing the human rights of certain jihadists and “defensive jihad” as such, when it suits him (or should I say, now that it suits Cageprisoners and Amnesty International) while going along with the killings of others. But is careful to deflect any criticism with the bogus and fatuous claim that he speaks in the interests of ‘all Muslims’.

Unless he can give us a reasonable, bullshit-free analysis on the tactical and ethical differences between the cases of Mehsud and al-Alwaki and what correlates the two, I call dishonest tripe on this kind of thing by Sunny Hundal.

She wrote this article in response to a masters’ thesis by the University of British Columbia’s Melanie Butler. This is a snippet from Alaina’s article:

No one will ever tell me that Muslim or any women think it’s ok to not be allowed to get educated or to have their daughters sold off at 8 years old or traded off at 4 years old because of cultural beliefs. No one will tell me that women in Afghanistan think it is ok for their daughters to have acid thrown in their faces. It makes me ill to think a 4 year old girl must sleep in a barn and get raped daily by old men. It’s sick and wrong and I don’t care who calls me an Orientalist or whatever I will keep raising money to educate girls and women in Afghanistan and I will keep writing letters and sending them in the back pack of my friend Lauryn Oates as she works so bravely on the ground helping women and girls learn what it is to exercise their rights. I believe in human rights so I believe everyone has the right their own opinion, I just wish that the energy that was used to write that story, that is just not true, could have been used to educate a girl in Afghanistan. That’s what the girls truly want. That’s what the Women in Afghanistan truly want. I have a drawer full of letters from them that says just that.

Terry Glavin calls bullshit on Butler’s thesis, which he says is:

an eruption of “post-colonial feminist theory” that sets out to attack actually-existing feminists who do real work for their real, living sisters in Afghanistan.

Here’s a snippet of Butler’s post-modernist, post-colonial guff, Canadian women and the (re)production of women in Afghanistan:

“In their bid to help Afghan women. . . some feminist groups have failed to distance themselves from the discursive mechanisms that manufacture consent for women’s oppression in the name of Empire. Building on Krista Hunt’s analysis of feminist complicity in the War on Terror (Hunt 2006), this essay draws attention to Canadian feminists’ role in (re)producing neo-imperialist narratives of Afghan women. Focusing specifically on the NGO Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan (CW4WAfghan), it shows how their use of feminist rhetoric and personal first-hand narratives, together with national narratives of Canada as a custodian of human rights, add to the productive power of the Orientalist tropes they invoke.”

Alaina is the cover person for Independent World Report journal this month.

Alaina Podmorow — now thirteen — knew what her choice was. She contacted Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan, and asked if she could join the organisation. She was welcomed with open arms. Thus, Little Women for Little Women in Afghanistan was born — a humanitarian organisation of young girls in Canada, trying to help the girls in Afghanistan. The organisation raises funds in order to support female education in Afghanistan, with the motto: Education = Peace.

In her own words:

“I am the founder of Little Women for Little Women in Afghanistan. I founded this organisation three years ago, when I was nine years old. In the fall of 2006, I found out that the privileges that I have, other girls in our world do not get. I learned about this when I went with my mom to listen to journalist, author and human rights activist, Sally Armstrong speak about Afghanistan. She told stories about the terrible things that happen to little girls in Afghanistan. I was so moved. It was so upsetting to me that these girls were not able to exercise their rights. They were not able to go to school and sometimes they did not go to school because they were afraid they would be hurt or even killed.”

Support Alaina and her campaign here.

Three men from Al-Muhajiroun have been arrested and charged after an attack on George Galloway MP on Saturday 10 April.

George Galloway was set upon by a group of Muslim extremists while campaigning in East London this afternoon. Three men, believed to belong to the extreme sect Islam4UK, the latest name for Al-Muhajiroun, were arrested and subsequently charged with public order offences.
Galloway, who is standing in the Poplar and Limehouse constituency, was with a party of supporters in Watney Market around 3pm when he and his colleagues were first abused and then attacked by the group.

“They called me a filthy Kaffir” said Galloway, “and shouted that no one should shake the ‘filthy Kaffir’s hand’. This lot are the latest incarnation of the banned group Al-Muhajiroun. They don’t want Muslims to vote, they don’t believe in democracy, and because I encourage Muslims to vote and take a full part in our society they hate me. My party, Respect, is the antidote to these despicable extremists.”

Galloway’s assistant Kevin Ovenden had his phone smashed in the incident and other supporters were abused and jostled.

The Al Muhajiroun thugs (after all, that’s what they are) certainly went over the top in demonstrating their disapproval of George Galloway’s communalist, socially devisive and sectarian politics. But that’s religious zealoutry for you. I am sure they can appeal to Amnesty to support their cause, which Amnesty could contextualise as a form of “defensive jihad”. AI could then argue that their arrest is antithetical to human rights!

On the other hand, the Al Muhajiroun could have flung shoes at George Galloway as an alternative to the heavy-handed violence they resorted to. Throwing a well-aimed piece of footwear at George Galloway’s face might no longer be considered an act of violent disorder since the Met have now deemed it a “symbolic political gesture”.

Because in another incident involving muslim protesters and the law, the Met has bowed to “Islamic sensitivities” and allowed protesters to throw shoes as a legitimate form of “ritual protest”:

News of the concession by the Metropolitan police has come to light amid a series of trials of more than 70 mostly Muslim demonstrators who were charged with violent disorder after last year’s Gaza protests outside the Israeli embassy in London.

Aquib Salim, 21, an IT student at Queen Mary, London University, who was involved in a shoe-throwing incident, is almost certain to avoid a prison sentence as a result.

Chris Holt, Salim’s solicitor, said he was likely to get a suspended sentence after he pleaded guilty to a single charge of throwing a stick at police lines.

“The court accepted that the earlier shoe-throwing incident was simply a ritual form of protest and therefore not a criminal act of violence,” Holt said.

Judge Denniss agreed that the act of shoe-throwing should not be considered in a charge of violent disorder against the student because it was “a symbolic” political gesture.

This is what happens when ‘well-intentioned’ liberals misinterpret Islamic culture and customs and transform them into public legislation and obligatory religious law on behalf of muslim radicals.

But Galloway breathlessly applauded the Iraqi journalist Muntadar al-Zaidi when he threw his shoes at George Bush in December 2008. He can’t complain if muslims do the same to him, now that it is the law of the land to protect “Islamic ritual protest”.

So send all your old shoes to Al Muhajiroun before May 6. They know what to do with them.

“There is a misunderstanding around this whole thing, because I wasn’t talking about a general concept of jihad in self-defense or anything else. I was referring to the specific views of Moazzam Begg, because he was being accused of being involved in or advocating violence, discrimination and so on. So we looked at what he has said. We have been with him on a number of occasions when he spoke publicly about Guantanamo and did not find anything [to corroborate the accusations against him.]“

If that is all the clarification that Cordone intends to provide on his justification of “defensive jihad”, it isn’t good enough. If he means that oppressed people have a right to use force to defend themselves, then that is perfectly legitimate and defensible. But the “role of jihad in self defence” is also about promoting and maintaining oppressive Salafi Jihadi states. But in addition to that, it means that terrorist attacks becomes a legitimate form of “defence” since that is how “oppressed people” such as ISI-sponsored Taliban militia in the AfPak border do “jihad”. For Asim Qureshi of Cageprisoners, suicide attacks by Muslims is not only a religious obligation but also a legitimate form of “defensive jihad”.

Cordone continues:

“If there is any evidence that Begg or people in the organization he now heads, Cageprisoners, have in fact promoted or condoned views that are antithetical to human rights, then obviously we would revisit our relationship. But so far, we haven’t been given anything specific in that respect by those that accuse him and us of being on the wrong side of the debate, and we haven’t found anything ourselves. And that’s why I’m making the point of fairness. This is about a particular individual and [his] particular views, and if there is something in that respect that shows he is, in fact, promoting violence and all the rest, then obviously we want to know that. But that isn’t the case at the moment.”

Now either he is blind and cannot see the evidence on Cageprisoners or he is being wilfully ignorant and dismissive.

But he can’t have it both ways. Either Amnesty failed to do proper due diligence into Cageprisoners, or they fully understand what Cageprisoners is about but did not think it was problematic.

What a travesty. And a real shame for Amnesty International and its donors if their legal positions are now articulated by the likes of Claudio Cordone.

Dear Eric

Thank you for submitting your resolution on Gita Saghal.

Unfortunately we are not able to accept this resolution.

There is currently an investigation under way at the International Secretariat in relation to Gita Saghal which is being carried out in accordance with the IS’s established human resource policies and UK employment law. The investigation is clearly carried out confidentially in line with established human resource practices and accordingly we do not believe it would be helpful, or carry any weight in the outcome of this investigation, for the AGM to debate the specific issue of Ms Saghal’s employment

If you disagree, you may have 3 minutes time on Saturday morning in plenary to ask conference to overturn our decision. If you get a two-thirds majority, the resolution will be debated.

I’m sorry to disappoint you.

Ruth Breddal
Standing Orders Committee

I’m sorry to see Amnesty unwilling to let its members debate the points Gita Sahgal raised at their own meetings.

Nick Cohen recognises the incident in McEwan’s storyline and recollects the real events that took place at the ICA which involved comedian Chris Morris, author Martin Amis, Andrew Anthony on the panel and an ICA auditorium audience full of irate, sanctimonious, post-modernist, middle class liberals in a marvellous article on what ails the British left. Luckily, Padraig Reidy of Index on Censorship was also in the audience that night.

Here is Reidy’s hilarious account of the events at the ICA from a CiF piece from 2007, ‘When liberals attack!’:

It was at this point that TV’s greatest satirist [Chris Morris], the shaggy-haired Swift of our age, took his turn to speak.

And what a wonderful turn it was.

“How many members of the Muslim Brotherhood have you actually spoken to in your research?” he pronounced, in the tone of the man who’s sure he’s got a dead cert, TKO, killer question.

“Er, quite a few, actually,” replied Anthony.

Needless to say, Morris was somewhat deflated, as the haymaker he was sure would condemn his opponents to the canvas somehow fell short. But like any true champion, he kept plugging away.

“And you’re saying they’re all murderers,” he jabbed.

“I think Islamists subscribe to a murderous ideology,” parried Amis.

“So you mean they’re all murderers?”

“No, but I believe the ideology they subscribe to is murderous.”

This continued for what seemed like years, until Anthony deftly tagged Amis, and immediately set about the exposed belly of Morris’s argument.

“For example, [insert name of prominent member of MCB, well known to Cif readers] supported Osama bin Laden right up to Sept 11 2001, a period including the Kenyan embassy bombings among others.”

Morris, on the ropes, threw out the last lunge any southpaw can in these situations: “Well we supported Saddam Hussein.”

At this point, your humble hack had to consider. Did “we”, Chris? I certainly didn’t, and I don’t remember you doing it. Maybe you did, on your LBC show. I dunno, I didn’t live in England then, so I may have missed it.

This was the signal for everyone else to bail in, raining shibboleths down with great fury: Israel, they cried. What about Israel? Won’t somebody think of the Palestinians! This, of course, despite the fact that I don’t ever remember Amis or Anthony saying anything anti-Palestinian. Remember – this is the liberal world, where disagreeing with Islamism is the same as hating Palestinians. Because, in this world, Palestinians aren’t people – they’re a rhetorical device. You’ll score points in every argument as soon as you mention them.

Amis attempted to rally with a quick point about Israel being surrounded by hostile countries, but Morris slapped him down with the unanswerable “Oh my God, he’s defending Israel now”. Alas, in defending Israel, the once mighty pocket dynamo Amis had forgotten to defend himself. He reeled against the ropes, exposed. Badly exposed.

Then, the final hammer blow. A grizzled old heavyweight rose, extended an arm in Amis’s direction, and proclaimed to the audience “You could read views like this man’s in the Daily Telegraph!” With this, the fight was over. For if there is one thing worse than killing Palestinians, which Amis obviously does on a daily basis, it is having a view that might, possibly, be agreed with by someone who writes for the Telegraph.

With the thorough pounding complete, the undisputed belt of righteousness was retained, and the good people of liberal England could go home, happy that their great white hope, Chris “Killah” Morris, had vanquished the bad, bad men with their bad, bad ideas.

Nick Cohen had also described the events before in an earlier piece titled ‘Martin and the liberals’. Cohen recounts how, on that bad-tempered evening, Amis attempted to reach a conciliatory note with his pious detractors, and in an attempt to find some common ground turned to the audience and asked:

“Would all those in the hall who think they are morally superior to the Taliban please raise your hands”

Only a third did. Only a third of the effete, well-educated, urban, affluent moral relativists at the ICA thought they were morally better than a obscurantist Islamist anomaly, who throw acid in the faces of women for not covering their face or at 10-year old girls for being sent to school, or buried alive homosexual men, or punished any man caught playing music in the privacy of their own homes with a public flogging.

Cohen returns to the vignette:

That a mere third of an ICA audience was intellectually self-confident enough to say they were morally superior to the Taliban has now passed into democratic-left mythology. People who have never read my profile tell me about it as if it ought to be news to me. Now McEwan has taken the confrontation and turned the ICA into a symbol of ignorance and prejudice.

From the ICA’s point of view, this must seem horribly unfair. I know good people who work there and know too that it holds serious and principled debates. The process by which one ill-tempered meeting in the autumn of 2007 has come to stand for a whole compromised intellectual culture, must also seem to the ICA to be so random as to be incomprehensible. If Reidy had not been in the audience, if Arena had not commissioned me to write a profile of Amis, if McEwan had not been Amis’s friend, then the meeting would have been forgotten.

Unfair and accidental, the Institute’s notoriety may be, but it remains jusfifiable for two reasons.

1. If supposed liberals refuse to oppose movements that are “irrationalist, misogynist, homophobic, inquisitional, totalitarian, imperialist and genocidal,” it is always worth condemning them wherever and however they do it.

2. The collapse in liberal principles in the past decade has been so widespread that one vignette was bound to become a representation of the wider disintegration. The ill repute in which many hold the ICA may be accidental, but it was an accident waiting to happen.

Read the whole of it, it’s eye-opening.

Hat tip: Salil Tripathi

I’m interested in the way a whole stratum of the liberal literati (Rushdie, to some extent Ian McEwan, A C Grayling, obviously Amis and Hitchens) – the very people you’d have expected to be guardians of the liberal flame of tolerance and understanding – have, at the very first assault, rushed into these caricatured postures driven by panic. I’m very struck by how those who are making ugly, illiberal, supremacist noises about the superiority of the west are precisely the sort of literary and liberal characters from whom you’d expect more imagination, openness and sensitivity.

Norm defeathers and skins that turkey most elegantly:

Coming from a longtime Marxist this is, if I may so put it, somewhat lacking in dialectical subtlety. What these figures are ‘making noises’ about is not the superiority of the West, but the superiority of liberal values and institutions. That being the case, there is nothing whatsoever illiberal about their not being tolerant or sensitive towards the assault on liberal values currently carried in, amongst other things, the fanaticism of belief, the violence against persons and the oppression of (including violence against) women that Eagleton would appear to want them to be more ‘open’ about.

1) Mention as many times as possible the statements made by present and former officials of Amnesty International, who are paid to tow the official Amnesty line, viz a viz Claudio Cordone, Irene Khan, Widney Brown, Sam Zarifi, Kate Allen et al.

2) Never mention Cageprisoners’ support of jihadi terrorism despite the extensive documentation that demonstrates this support.

3) Never mention Moazzam Begg’s association with Cageprisoners.

4) Never mention the words “partner” or “platform”

5) Never mention the fact that Gita Sahgal has always spoke about the need to protect the rights of Islamists and terrorists from torture, renditions and arbitrary detention.

6) Never acknowledge that Gita Sahgal’s fundamental point is that Amnesty should never have made the individual(s) of point #5 into poster boys or torch bearers of those human rights.

Here is an example of the “Hate Sahgal” template in use at Pickled Politics, which regards itself a progressive Asian blog but which has now become an active detractor of Gita Sahgal.

Criticism of Amnesty on the issues of Moazzam Begg and Cageprisoners should be made if Amnesty is to continue as a champion of universal human rights. Amnesty is a human-rights organisation not a quasi-religion.

Update:

Rumbold of Pickled Politics, has turned direction and stands against the blog’s anti-Sahgal consensus, and issued this remarkable statement:

It’s another reminder of why we need organisations like Amnesty and people like Gita Sahgal. The world isn’t overburdened with people and groups who are willing to stand up and document human-rights abuses. Gita Sahgal had some legitimate criticisms to make of Amnesty, but it doesn’t mean that Amnesty is somehow morally bankrupt either. Too many of us felt it necessary to pick sides, including me, which then caused collateral damage to the very causes that both Amnesty and Gita fight for (by shifting attention away from them). Fortunately I was disabused of that need to pick sides by a very wise woman. Amnesty should reinstate Gita, and both should be left to get on with what they do best: championing the rights of the weakest in the world.