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On the BBC Newsnight television programme on Wednesday evening, the host, Jeremy Paxman, was joined by a Sudanese government official working in Britain, and a young fellow from the Muslim Council of Britain, to discuss the plight of a woman who faces the prospect of being jailed or flogged with 40 lashes for the crime of allegedly insulting Islam.
You can read the details of her supposed misdemeanour here. At the very worst, this woman is unwise for not realising the depths of mental insanity that is gripping the country she has chosen to live in, but she is guilty of nothing in my eyes. Quite what the British government does about this, including the possible use of military action, is another matter. At the very least this country should persuade any remaining Britons to get out of Sudan, break off diplomatic relations.
What I found so interesting about the BBC show last night was Paxman’s performance. He sat in the middle of these two men as they “debated” the issue of whether the thugs of the Sudanese authorities should show “mercy” to this woman. The Sudan government guy, who spoke with a subtle hint of a grin, kept going on about how this woman should have realised the “sensitivities” of the situation; his performance was one of the most hateful that I have ever seen on such a show. The MCB guy, who seemed very young and almost terrified, was pleading in the most abject fashion for the punishment not to be carried out. No wonder, this story hardly is going to make folk think well of his faith, now is it? All the while, Paxman, who is usually an aggressive interviewer to the point of gratuitous rudeness, sat almost dumbfounded as these two men spoke. But maybe it was deliberate: from his body language I could tell that Paxman thinks that Islamists like the Sudanese official are beneath contempt. Sometimes you are glad of Mr Paxman being around for a programme like this.
Grayson Perry to be exact, a Brit artist, of the sort that makes you want to reach for the sneer quotes. But, I do give this Other Perry two cheers if not three for saying even this much:
“I’ve censored myself,” Perry said at a discussion on art and politics organised by the Art Fund. “The reason I haven’t gone all out attacking Islamism in my art is because I feel real fear that someone will slit my throat.”
This may seem like a half-arsed attack on Islam and/or Islamism, but it is way better than nothing, I think. Half an arse is better than no arse at all. These kind of remarks are adding up. The project of denouncing Islam as the evil crap that it is gradually gains ground, inch by inch, and what Other Perry says is another inch advanced. And I do mean attacking Islam, rather than merely those accused of ‘betraying’ it by… doing what it says. The word is gradually spreading.
If you are a serious Islamist, who does believe in doing what Islam says, we infidels, even our artists, are starting seriously to understand you. Watch out. We take our time to understand these kinds of things, but we get there, and when we do… On the other hand, if you are, as so many Muslims are, a nice person, and accordingly not a serious Islamist, but if you merely say periodically in a self-hypnotic way that you do believe in Islam, then for goodness sake read the damn stuff properly and stop saying that you believe in it. You are trying to have it both ways. Stop this. Stop encouraging something that you say you don’t believe in. Make up your mind.
A good first step in denouncing Islam as the scary stuff that it is is to admit that you are scared of it, and not in any ‘phobic’ way but for good solid reasons. Grayson Perry has admitted this, and rather than complaining that he goes no further, I say, good on you mate, for at least going this far.
A Muslim is somebody who believes that a man called Muhammad… passed on certain revelations and instructions directly from God Himself. By logic, a non-Muslim is somebody who does not accept that Muhammad was any such prophet, and thereby rejects his teachings as not having come from God… If, contrary to Muhammad’s claims (assuming he has been represented correctly), we do not believe that he was any such prophet from God, what do we truly think of the man?
The answer must be one of three possibilities: either Muhammad was a liar, or he was deluded, or he was mad. These are the only possible conclusions of the intellectually honest non-Muslim. Let us ponder one of the three possibilities – that Muhammad was a liar. Would it be unreasonable then to posit that a man willing to deceive many thousands of people, perhaps out of hunger for power or self-aggrandisement, could be labelled as ‘evil’? If so, on what basis do we object to an extremely negative portrayal (either graphic or prose) of such an ‘evildoer’?
Whether or not such a portrayal may appear ‘gratuitous’ or provoke widespread anger, it would nonetheless be a justifiable expression of dissent. Therefore, to place legal sanctions on any such piece of literature is to necessarily outlaw opposition to, and disagreement with, Islam to a logical denouement; this suggests we are implicitly calling for the abolition of the right to proclaim oneself a non-Muslim in clear and in certain terms. That is, one may still be a nominal ‘non-Muslim’ free of harassment, but one cannot explain and defend one’s position in any significant detail without committing the act of blasphemy.
– from On the Right to Give Offence by Steve Edwards quoted today by David Thompson
The Malaysian carmaker Proton has announced plans to develop an “Islamic car”, designed for Muslim motorists.
Any suggestions as to a name?
Dr Muhammad Abdul Bari, head of the Muslim Council of Britain, has given an interview to the Telegraph which neatly puts on display the vast cultural gulf and complete lack of understanding on the Muslim side when they discuss how Muslim and Western cultures can learn from each other. Dr. Bari says…
“Terrorists are terrorists, they may use religion but we shouldn’t say Muslim terrorists, it stigmatises the whole community. We never called the IRA Catholic terrorists.”
The various global franchisees of Al Qaeda do the things they do precisely because of their interpretation of the values and imperatives of Islam. They are motivated 99% by religion and therefore they can only be correctly described as Muslim or Islamic terrorists. Describing them as ‘Asian’ as the BBC often does (as in “two Asian men were arrested today and held under the Prevention of Terrorism Act…”) is a grotesque bit of racism, because their race and ethnicity is utterly irrelevant to why they were arrested. They were arrested because they are suspected Muslim terrorists, not Asian terrorists.
The IRA on the other hand was a secular Marxist Irish nationalist paramilitary organisation that just happened to be drawn from the Catholic community. What they were not doing was trying impose Catholicism on anyone. They were trying to end British sovereignty in Ulster and make Ulster part of the Irish Republic, hence they were called ‘Republican’ terrorists…Being a Catholic but supporting the Union still made you an enemy of the IRA, as many people found to their cost. This is also why opposing paramilitary outfits like the UDA were usually called ‘Loyalists’ paramilitaries rather than ‘Protestant’. If anyone seriously thinks the Troubles in Ireland were a religious conflict, they have clearly not been paying attention. That Dr. Bari did not bother to figure this out suggests to me that like so many of his ilk, he cannot see the world through anything other than the distorting lens of religion.
Sir Salman Rushdie should never have been knighted, he says. “He caused a huge amount of distress and discordance with his book, it should have been pulped.”
The ‘Satanic Verses’ should have been pulped by whom? I assume Dr. Bari means the State, in order to prevent ‘distress and discordance’. So if a large number of non-Muslim British people find the Koran causes them “distress and discordance”, as well it might, is Dr. Bari really wise to want the State to take upon itself the role of pulping books in order to sooth people’s distress and prevent discord?
According to a recent report by the Policy Exchange think-tank, the bookshop at the east London Mosque, which Dr Bari chairs, stocks extremist literature.
“The bookshops are independent businesses,” he says. “We can’t just go in and tell them what to sell … I will see what books they keep, if they have one book which looks like it is inciting hatred, do they have counter books on the same shelf?”
So he wants Rushdie’s book pulped but is quite sanguine about Islamic books calling for violence and hatred just so long as contrary Islamic views are also available. All animals are equal but some are more equal than others, eh Dr. Bari?
He says we should look favourably upon arranged marriages and learn from Islam by become less overtly sexual and more modest. Why exactly? I met many Bosnian ‘Muslims’ who had learned quite the opposite lesson and saw no reason not to wear miniskirts and enjoy their sexuality rather than becoming psycho-sexual cripples.
But when I read this bit, it became clear to me that Dr. Bari was not merely well meaning but wrong:
Is stoning ever justified? “It depends what sort of stoning and what circumstances,” he replies. “When our prophet talked about stoning for adultery he said there should be four [witnesses] – in realistic terms that’s impossible. It’s a metaphor for disapproval.”
I see…
Don’t worry, dear, what we are about to do to you is just a metaphor It is pictures like that which fill my mind with homicidal rage. The Muslims depicted partially burying this Muslim woman, in preparation for her being stoned to death in accordance with the Koran, all deserve nothing less than a bullet in their brains, to be put down like rabid dogs. And when I hear people like Dr. Bari describing this practice as a “metaphor for disapproval” rather than a method of theocratic execution, my feelings towards him move from mere disagreement into transcendent loathing. Take a moment and really look at that fucking picture because that actually is how it is done: the victim is partially buried and then battered to death by having rocks thrown or dumped on them. According to Dr. Bari, if there were four witnesses, that is perfectly okay then. Try getting your head around that.
And so when a man who cannot bring himself to unequivocally condemn such barbarity tells us that we have anything whatsoever to learn from what he sees as Islam, it would be fair to say “I do not think so”. As I discovered in Bosnia in the 1990’s, being a Muslim and accepting the norms of western post-Enlightenment civilisation is entirely possible… ‘Muslim’ becomes more of an ethnic identity rather than a religious one, in which you just have to ignore large chunks of the Koran or ‘interpret’ them into something harmless (and face it, there are parts of the Old Testament most Christians prefer to gloss over too). The key is that the Bosnian Muslims became more and more secular (i.e. less religious), more western, the west did not become more like them.
That said I am sure you can be a practising Muslim and still embrace western modernity. I would be astounded if Tory MEP Syed Kamall, who is well and truly on the libertarian wing of his party, would have any problem whatsoever condemning stoning as a barbarous throwback regardless of how many witnesses there were to a woman’s infidelity. People like Syed have simply grafted many of the best bits of the European enlightenment onto their religion and as a result made themselves wholly compatible with any pluralistic tolerant society. Is it still Islam? Well I am sure Syed would say it is and I have no reason to doubt him.
But sadly the Pakistani and Saudi flavour of Islam that Dr. Bari is part of have done nothing of the sort and show no signs they actually want to embrace modernity at all. Their notions of Islam, which is clearly the most evangelical version of the religion, is a toxic political and philosophical creed that is simply incompatible with liberal modernity and Dr. Bari’s equivocation about stoning people to death tells you everything you need to know about where he is coming from intellectually.
I was watching the Channel 4 news coverage of the state visit of the King of Saudi Arabia to Britain, when something I saw nearly made me fall off my chair laughing.
So what does the British Army band for the guard of honour strike up as The Man himself steps out of his limo to high-five Her Majesty?
The Darth Vader March from Star Wars (click on ‘watch the report’ to see for yourself). I kid you not.
Someone somewhere deserves a medal.
For quite some while now, I have been meaning either to write this myself or to come across someone else writing this. Since the Australian blogger Russell Blackford beat me to it and I read him saying it this afternoon, here it now is:
Unfortunately, the impression has been created by many Muslim leaders that Islam seeks to control all aspects of individuals’ lives and does not shrink from using secular power to achieve its aim. We are all well aware of extreme examples in recent history, such as Afghanistan under the benighted Taliban regime. Until that fear is laid to rest, it is quite rational for the rest of us to fear Islam’s political ambitions – which is one reason why the word “Islamophobia” is so stupid. A phobia is an irrational fear, but secular Westerners actually have perfectly rational reasons to be at least wary of Islam …
In my experience there is nothing quite like the best sort of Australian academic or intellectual for calling bullshit bullshit.
Forgive me if someone has already said this exact thing here already. What many writers and commenters here have definitely said many times is that much of the art of the propagandist lies in the inventing of and the destruction of words. The bad guys invent bad words and destroy good ones. We good guys invent good words and destroy bad ones. And “islamophobia” is a very bad word indeed.
Insofar as the Americans are now winning in Iraq, as they do now seem to be, this is, first, because Al Qaeda have shot themselves in their stupid murderous feet by being stupid and murderous, and pissing off the Iraqi people; and second, because the Americans switched strategies, from (the way I hear it): sitting in nice big armed camps doing nothing except maybe training a few Iraqis to do the nasty stuff, to: getting out there themselves and doing it, thereby giving the Iraqi people something to get behind and to switch to, once they had worked out what ghastly shits AQ really are.
The first bit is very interesting, but this posting is about the second bit. Instapundit linked yesterday to this, and I particular like the first comment. Here, with its grammar and spelling cleaned up a little, it is:
The Democrats missed a great opportunity. Bush would not have changed strategy if the Dems did not win as big as they did. They could have said it was them that made Bush change to a successful strategy.
Over the summer I reread one of my favourite books of the century so far, How The West Has Won: Carnage and Culture From Salamis to Vietnam by Victor Davis Hanson (which was published in October 2001). In this, Hanson makes much of the Western habit of what he calls “civilian audit” of military affairs. Armchair complaining and grilling of often quite successful generals for often rather minor failures in the course of what often eventually turn into major victories. Sidelining Patton for winning some battles but then slapping a soldier. Denouncing Douglas Haig forever for winning too nastily on the Western Front. Votes of Confidence in the Commons during the dark days of World War 2. Most recently, General Petraeus being grilled on TV. That kind of thing.
Above all, there are the journalists, wandering around the battlefield being horrified and sending photos back of people who died during disasters, or during victories, thereby making those look like disasters also (which they were for the people who died.)
Unlike many with similar loyalties to his, who describe all this as a Western weakness, Hanson sees it as a major Western strength. Yes it is messy, and yes it is often monstrously unjust. Yes, it often results in serious mistakes and failures, especially in the short run. Yes the questions put to returning generals and presiding politicians are often crass, stupid and trivial. But the effect of all this post-mortemising and second-guessing and media grandstanding and general bitching and grumbling is to keep the West’s military leaders on their metal in a way that simply does not happen in non-Western cultures.
It must really concentrate the mind of a general to know that there are literally millions of people back home who are just waiting for him to screw up, so they can crow: we told you so.
It also results in Western armies filled with people who know quite well what the plan is and what the score is, having just spent the last few hours, days, weeks or even years arguing about it all. Western armies invariably contain barrack room lawyers and grumblers, to say nothing of people who sincerely believe that they could do better than their own commanders and who say so, courtesy of those interfering journalists.
Central to the whole idea of the West is that you get better decisions, and better (because so much better informed) implementation of those decisions by the lower ranks, if lots of people argue like hell about these decisions first, during, and then again afterwards. In fact if you argue about them all the time.
Take Iraq now. The narrative that is now gaining strength goes as follows: Iraq invaded for dubious reasons, but successfully. Peace lost because no plan to win it. Two or three years of chaos and mayhem. Change of strategy. Now war may be being won. Maybe this story has not quite reached the MSM, but I believe that it soon will, if only because of bloggers like this guy and this guy.
Strangely, Hanson has, during this particular war, been one of the most vocal complainers about the complainers, so to speak. He has gone on and on about how suspect are the motives of the complainers and how ignorant they seem to be of what war is necessarily like and how bad it would be if the West lost this particular war. Yet is not the way this story may now be playing out yet further evidence of the important contribution made by anti-Western kneejerk anti-warriors to the good conduct of Western wars by the West’s warriors? What these people want to do is stop the war by making the warriors give up and lose it. But what they often achieve instead is to bully the warriors into doing better, and winning. They are, so to speak, an important part of the learning experience. Hanson returns again and again to how the West often loses the early battles, but ends up winning the war.
Under heavy political pressure, President Bush switched in Iraq from a failing Plan A to what now looks as if it could be a successful Plan B. Would this switch have happened without all the pressure? Maybe, but it is surely reasonable to doubt it. The next commenter after the one quoted above says that it is still not too late for the Dems to do a switch of their own, and to start claiming that had it not been for them and all their grumbling, the switch by Bush from failure to success would never have happened. If and when they do start talking like that, they will surely have a point.
(Patrick Crozier and I recently discussed VDH in this podcast, more about which here.)
Mick Hartley quoted at some length the other day from this TimesOnline piece by Sarah Baxter, but I have only just read the thing itself. The first few paragraphs, which Mick Hartley did not recycle, are particularly choice, and I do quote them here, now:
A glorious culture clash took place in Iran recently that made me laugh out loud. The children of Che Guevara, the revolutionary pin-up, had been invited to Tehran University to commemorate the 40th anniversary of their father’s death and celebrate the growing solidarity between “the left and revolutionary Islam” at a conference partly paid for by Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan president.
There were fraternal greetings and smiles all round as America’s “earth-devouring ambitions” were denounced. But then one of the speakers, Hajj Saeed Qassemi, the co-ordinator of the Association of Volunteers for Suicide-Martyrdom (who presumably remains selflessly alive for the cause), revealed that Che was a “truly religious man who believed in God and hated communism and the Soviet Union”.
Che’s daughter Aleida wondered if something might have been lost in translation. “My father never mentioned God,” she said, to the consternation of the audience. “He never met God.” During the commotion, Aleida and her brother were led swiftly out of the hall and escorted back to their hotel. “By the end of the day, the two Guevaras had become non-persons. The state-controlled media suddenly forgot their existence,” the Iranian writer Amir Taheri noted.
After their departure, Qassemi went on to claim that Fidel Castro, the “supreme guide” of Guevara, was also a man of God. “The Soviet Union is gone,” he affirmed. “The leadership of the downtrodden has passed to our Islamic republic. Those who wish to destroy America must understand the reality and not be clever with words.”
Don’t say you haven’t been warned, comrade, when you flirt with “revolutionary Islam” as if it were a mild form of liberation theology. …
LOL indeed.
I am actually quite optimistic that at least some (more) lefties will wake up, as time goes by, to the absurdity of them being in alliance with radical Islamists. The only rationale for this otherwise ridiculous arrangement is (see above) that the enemy of your enemy (the USA) is your friend, no matter what. If you really do think that the USA is the biggest baddest thing in the world and that curbing its power is the only thing that matters (think Hitler Churchill Stalin), then this alliance makes a kind of primitive sense. Although even if you do think that, encouraging the development of rampant capitalism everywhere except in the USA would make a lot more sense. That really would reduce the USA to the margins of history. But, if you think that lefty-ism is anything at all to do with positive support for civilisation, decency, freedom, female (in particular) emancipation, life being nice even if you do not submit to Islam etc., then you should surely turn your back on all such alliances.
Meanwhile, I cannot help noticing and rejoicing that those Islamists have such a genius for pissing off their potential allies. From what I have been reading, they have achieved this same feat in the last year or two with the people of Iraq, no less. Compared to that momentous own goal, if own goal it turns out to be, pissing off the Guevaras is small potatoes indeed.
Unless of course millions of lefties around the world read of this outrage and exclaim with one voice: “That does it. Not the Guevaras. How dare they silence these hereditary paragons of revolutionary virtue. We will now support the USA against the Islamists until the Islamists are utterly crushed. Then we will sort out the USA.” That would change things a bit.
I make no secret of my boundless admiration for Ayaan Hirsi Ali and so let me strongly commend an article in the International Herald Tribune called A refugee from Western Europe by Sam Harris and Salman Rushdie (the later of whom I confess I may have judged too harshly in the past).
It is important to realize that Hirsi Ali may be the first refugee from Western Europe since the Holocaust. As such, she is a unique and indispensable witness to both the strength and weakness of the West: to the splendor of open society, and to the boundless energy of its antagonists. She knows the challenges we face in our struggle to contain the misogyny and religious fanaticism of the Muslim world, and she lives with the consequences of our failure each day. There is no one in a better position to remind us that tolerance of intolerance is cowardice.
Having recapitulated the Enlightenment for herself in a few short years, Hirsi Ali has surveyed every inch of the path leading out of the moral and intellectual wasteland that is traditional Islam. She has written two luminous books describing her journey, the most recent of which, “Infidel,” has been an international bestseller for months. It is difficult to exaggerate her courage. As Christopher Caldwell wrote in The New York Times, “Voltaire did not risk, with his every utterance, making a billion enemies who recognized his face and could, via the Internet, share information instantaneously with people who aspired to assassinate him.”
“There is no one in a better position to remind us that tolerance of intolerance is cowardice”… truly words worth burning into one’s soul.
Given the craven dishonour of the Dutch government, whose promises to protect her wherever she went have proven to be worthless (as indeed the people of Srebenica discovered in 1995), if anyone knows if someone has organised a place for donations to pay for her security from the fanatical vermin who wish to silence her, I for one am certainly willing to put my money where my mouth is.
The Israeli raid on a Syrian target earlier this month has mostly faded from the news, but to my knowledge there has been no definitive report on exactly what was bombed. My own best guesses are either a big Hezbollah staging area or a Syrian nuclear weapons related facility, but my gut guesses and ten cents will buy you a cup of coffee if you have access to a TARDIS.
This item, by a former Jerusalem Post editor is about the best discussion I have run across.
What’s beyond question is that something big went down on Sept. 6. Israeli sources had been telling me for months that their air force was intensively war-gaming attack scenarios against Syria; I assumed this was in anticipation of a second round of fighting with Hezbollah. On the morning of the raid, Israeli combat brigades in the northern Golan Heights went on high alert, reinforced by elite Maglan commando units. Most telling has been Israel’s blanket censorship of the story – unprecedented in the experience of even the most veteran Israeli reporters – which has also been extended to its ordinarily hypertalkative politicians. In a country of open secrets, this is, for once, a closed one.
Read the article and make up your own mind.
In both the USA and UK, much of the debate about how to react to the military situation in Iraq really strikes me as really odd. If a person thinks the available facts indicate we are not doing well against the insurgents, surely the choices should be either:
- Conclude the enemy will inevitably win and no military and political victory is feasible, therefore accept being defeated and get out completely as soon as possible
- Conclude the enemy can be beaten, but not at an acceptable cost, so accept being defeated and get out completely as soon as possible
- Conclude the enemy can be beaten and therefore reinforce to improve the military force levels (i.e. the ‘Surge’) in order to actually win
What does not make any sense to me is any talk of reducing force levels by a person who does not think we have either already won or already been irretrievably defeated… and the stated position of most politicos on both sides of the Atlantic is neither of those things.
Yet surely to argue for any reduction in military force levels in Iraq by anything less that 100% and to argue that things are not going well, is tantamount to saying you support a policy to make the allied military situation even worse.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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