Comrade Steele again

The massacre of 40 Sunnis in Baghdad is of course an appalling crime. But it's funny (and I don't mean ha ha) how this immediately 'revives fears of civil war' and sets Comrade Steele fretting about 'sectarian pogroms', whereas the massacre of 66 Shias last weekend passed - like scores of similar incidents - without any comment from him. Well, the Sunnis were killed by a 'rampage', which is presumably much. much worse than merely being blown up by a bomb - and in any case Comrade S. was far too busy last week talking the Israeli offensive in Gaza up into a terrorist outrage (so far the only deliberately murdered non-combattant has been an Israeli teenager) to spare a thought for victims of the legitimate resistance struggle in Iraq.

In the post I linked to on Friday, Eve Garrard writes 'It's hard to avoid the conclusion that Mr Steele's opinions about how to respond to political violence (and indeed about how to describe it) are entirely dependent on whether the violence in question is being practised by the side he supports.'

And it keeps getting harder.

Grauniad in 'Steele backs Bush' shock

Seriously. George W says it's high time Kosovo got its independence, and Jonathan S is right behind him.

To which Grumpy's immediate reaction is 'yes, that's all very well, but what's to stop an independent Kosovo going from 90% Albanian to 100% Albanian before you can say "ethnic cleansing"?' What's Jonathan's answer? I wish I could tell you, but since he doesn't address this aspect of the problem at all I'm in the dark. Veteran Steele-watcher though I am (see my old blog) I confess to being just a little surprised. I don't get the impression that giving the majority its head is always his preferred solution to ethnic conflicts of this kind. Certainly not, for instance, when the minority are Northern Ireland's Catholics or Iraq's Sunni Arabs.

Must have been a tricky call for the Man of Steel. He must have been sorely tempted to side with Putin, if only for old times' sake. But there's no room for sentimentality here. Never let it be said that al-Grauniad is less Muslim-friendly than Bush! Tactics, comrades, tactics!

Steering clear of Charybdis

I see the 'Ahmadinejad was mistranslated' myth is alive and well and being peddled by al-Grauniad's incorrigible Jonathan Steele. David Aaronovitch in the Times provides the simple and definitive refutation: go and look at the man's official website. If I may be allowed a modest mention of the fact, I was on to this somewhat earlier than Aaro.

Aaro's on fine form - the David Edgar quote in the last paragraph is superbly apposite, and a nicely ironic touch given that Edgar is surely the very embodiment of the Guardianista literary/theatrical establishment.

I can't quite give him ten out of ten, though. This is a crucial passage:-

'It is hard to steer these days between the Scylla of Tullochism (just don’t invade them and they’ll go away) and the Charybdis of the currently fashionable Londonistan paranoia. Tulloch may have been through hell, but that doesn’t make him right when he agrees to that same notion of unique Muslim victimhood that Khan was so desperate to assume. And the mirror image of the Islamic world containing a unique villainy is in the same way both an analytical error and a political one.'

I do agree about the danger of foundering on Charybdis, but I think it's marked at the wrong place on Aaro's chart. The next sentence is characteristic of the kind of analytical error this leads him into:-

'The admixture of victimhood and religious extremism leads to violence [...]'

So Islamist terror is just an instance of a broader sociological phenomenon. But the generalization is wrong - or else it is tautologous. Consider, for example, the Jehovah's Witnesses. I'd say theirs is a fairly extreme form of religion, and I doubt if Aaro would disagree. They are bound to a rigid fundamentalism which announces the imminence of the Apocalypse at regular intervals, and they are expected to spend a large chunk of their waking hours ringing doorbells and flogging the Watchtower. As for victimhood, many are poor and black.

Do we need to go in fear of a JW immolating himself in a tube train? Not unless they scrap their commitment to absolute pacifism. So 'religious extremism' has to mean 'violently intolerant religious extremism', and Aaro's Law becomes pure tautology.

Does the Islamic world indeed contain a unique villainy? Clearly at the very least in the sense that every villainy is unique, it does. Suicide bombing is a villainy replicated (initiated, actually) only by the Tamil Tigers, who are a big problem for Sri Lankans but not for the rest of us (and they're another exception to Aaro's Law, since their motivating ideology is non-religious). It really doesn't help anyone to insist that it's nothing whatsoever to do with Islam. To say that is not to say that it is either a typical or an unalterable phenomenon within Islam. It's just stating the blindingly obvious: there is a connection.

Yes, yes, I know - a comprehensive history of violent intolerance within Christianity would fill many volumes. Nevertheless, I think Christians are entitled to point out that a religion centred on a man who went to a gruesome death without violent resistance is not the same as one whose founder led armies and made converts by the sword. After it had been in business for three centuries Christianity made a convert of the most powerful man in the world and became a state religion, with an exceedingly mixed bag of consequences which it has taken a very long time to unravel. But it is possible for Christians to see these consequences as a secondary accretion to their faith in a way which is not so obviously open to Muslims.

Purely by chance I've just come across this passage in a book by the Pope which I'm reading:-

'It was through Christianity that the idea of the separation of church and state first came into the world. Up to then there had only been the identity of political order and religion. It was common to all cultures that the state bore the sacred within itself and was its real and supreme guardian.'

('Salz der Erde', Munich 1996, p. 254 - my translation)

In Islam the identity of state and religion is powerfully reasserted. It's certainly an overgeneralization, but one supported by many observations, to say that for the individual Muslim this tends to mean that living under a non-Islamic state is easily felt to be 'victimhood' in its own right. There are certainly counter-traditions within Islam - I've linked before to a lecture by Rowan Williams which says interesting things about the history of minority Muslim communities. But the global reach of Islamism seems capable of overarching the most diverse of local conditions and making minority status problematic just about everywhere.

As others have noted, although it's many years since Aaro's membership of the Communist Party of Great Britain lapsed, there's still a whiff of historical materialism about him, making belief systems like religions merely superstructures of the economic forces which are the real drivers of history. Of course this won't do. Ideas have consequences, and big ideas - of which Islam certainly is one - have big consequences.

Aaro makes a superb case for taking what the Ahmadinejads and the Abu Hamzas say seriously. Well, one of the things they say is that they are inspired by their religion. And not by the Bible or by the Talmud or by the Mahabharata or by the Communist Manifesto. Islam says things which are distinctively Islamic, and they make a difference. The Charybdis to be rigourously avoided is the perception that it is a source of nothing but evil. But the assertion that it has a unique and causal relationship with a particular manifestation of evil needs assessing and debating, not ruling out a priori.

PS Shuggy also has the measure of Jonathan Steele.

Baroness Tonge and Hamas: from understanding to praise

The list of speakers at IslamExpo last month reads like this blog's Most Wanted list. Comrades Steele and Milne of al-Grauniad were there, arm in arm with Gorgeous George, as was their colleague Maddy of the Sorrows. Tariq Ramadan, Rowan Williams' favourite Muslim intellectual, was there, and, talking of the Archbishop, Sarah Joseph was there. Ilan Pappé was there, assuredly with the blessing of his fans in the Deutsche Volksunion.

Sorry if I'm doing them an injustice, but I can't picture any of these characters as innocents abroad who, expecting to encounter 'Europe’s largest celebration of Islamic culture, tradition, innovation and art', were horrified to discover they had stumbled into a Hamas/Muslim Brotherhood rally. If I discover that any of them used it as a platform to denounce Hamas as an anti-Semitic terrorist organization, he/she will get a fulsome apology from me. But I'm not expecting to have to take the trouble.

I certainly won't in the case of the speaker who said this:-

“I would like to say a thank you to the three speakers before me…I hope you (audience) realise how much guts it takes to speak like they have…they are very brave and deserve a tribute from all of us.”

The immediately preceeding speaker was Azzam Tamimi, Hamas's Special Envoy and as such, unsurprisingly, an open supporter of suicide bombers. The tribute came from former Christian Aid trustee Baroness Tonge. Stephen Pollard, from whose blog the quote comes, comments:-

'Let there be no doubt now about what Baroness Tonge believes. She no longer even bothers hiding behind the ambiguity of ‘understanding’ why people become suicide bombers. As her remarks at IslamExpo show, she now thinks that those who explicitly praise and honour suicide bombers “are very brave and deserve a tribute from all of us.”'

David T of Harry's Place says simply 'He's right, isn't he?' He is indeed.

More about the Baroness to come.

Fisk of the day

OK, taking al-Grauniad's Jonathan Steele apart is perhaps not the most intellectually demanding of tasks, but Eve Garrard does it in style.

(update: I've been debating with someone who is less impressed than I am by EG's piece here)