Ocean of light, ocean of darkness: Quakers and Islamist anti-Semitism

“I saw also that there was an ocean of darkness and death, but an infinite ocean of light and love, which flowed over the ocean of darkness.”

- George Fox

I heard the words above quoted last week at a Quaker funeral - my first, though I've been to ordinary Meetings for Worship. Beautiful words at a beautiful occasion - just the right send-off for a dear friend.

Because of that experience I'm less inclined than I might at other times be to dismiss this with a shrug and a weary "same old same old". Asked to describe the Quakers I spoke to or listened to, I might suggest "gentle, compassionate, principled, sincere, intelligent". Not one of them could I picture in a brown shirt trashing a synagogue.

So how has it come about that a respected Quaker charity has given six-figure funding to an organisation which harbours promoters not only of violent extremism but also of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories? What is it about Quakers and Islamism? What is it about Quakers and Israel?

These are not rhetorical questions but express genuine perplexity. Here, though, is amore rhetorical one. When Quakers meet Jews in the course of the interfaith work to which they are strongly committed, do they say something like "Oh, just so you're aware, we've given a load of cash to some people who think you lot were behind 9/11. We're sure you'll understand."?

I have three hypotheses, not mutually exclusive:-

1. There is a campaign being waged by an activist minority not representative of Quakers at large.

2. The steady drift away from Quakerism's Christian roots creates a creedal vacuum into which secular ideology rushes. I've noted before that the convictions of anti-Israel campaigners seem to resemble an ersatz religion in their own right.

3. Perhaps there is some kind of attraction of opposites going on, giving herbivorous Quakers a perverse fascination with religion in its most violent and intolerant manifestation.

But it still doesn't really make sense. And would not George Fox want to ask those who follow in his footsteps why they choose darkness over light?

Why did they go?

How is Tunisia's now tiny Jewish community faring in the Arab Spring? The BBC's Wyre Davies has been investigating.

It's an interesting piece, but there's no escaping the BBC weltanschauung in anything that touches on Israel. Here we are being invited to contrast an Israeli minister (hysterically Arabophobic) with Ennahda leader Rashid Ghannouchi (moderate, reassuring).

Well, moderation is relative in Mr Ghannouchi's case, however regularly the Beeb bestows the epithet on him. Let's hope that in this instance he means what he says. And that the "general outrage" at extremists baying for Jewish blood (several thousands of them actually, and with Mr Ghannouchi in attendance, greeting the head of the Jew-killers of Hamas) will produce action to safeguard the Jewish community.

I'm particularly struck by Mr Davies' delicate tiptoeing round awkward historical facts. From 100,000 Jews in the 1930s to 2,000 now - why?

As in the rest of the Arab world, Tunisia's Jewish population crashed dramatically after the creation of Israel and subsequent Arab-Israeli wars - thousands emigrating to France or to Israel itself.

And that's your lot. Calls for a bit of explanation, doesn't it? What did Israel's wars have to do with Jews living at the other end of the Mediterranean?

It's no good asking Wikipedia, it's been Got At. When consulted today the "History of the Jews in Tunisia" was skipping seamlessly from the Holocaust to the Arab Spring. Fortunately there are other sources, one of them yielding this:-

After Tunisia gained independence in 1956, a series of anti-Jewish government decrees were promulgated. In 1958, Tunisia's Jewish Community Council was abolished by the government and ancient synagogues, cemeteries and Jewish quarters were destroyed for “urban renewal.”

The increasingly unstable situation caused more than 40,000 Tunisian Jews to immigrate to Israel. By 1967, the country's Jewish population had shrunk to 20,000.

During the Six-Day War, Jews were attacked by rioting Arab mobs, and synagogues and shops were burned. The government denounced the violence, and President Habib Bourguiba apologized to the Chief Rabbi. The government appealed to the Jewish population to stay, but did not bar them from leaving. Subsequently, 7,000 Jews immigrated to France.

In 1982, there were attacks on Jews in the towns of Zarzis and Ben Guardane. According to the State Department, the Tunisian government “acted decisively to provide protection to the Jewish community.”

In 1985, a Tunisian guard opened fire on worshipers in a synagogue in Djerba, killing five people, four of them Jewish. Since then, the government has sought to prevent further tragedy by giving Tunisian Jews heavy protection when necessary. Following Israel's October 1, 1985, bombing of the PLO headquarters near Tunis, “the government took extraordinary measures to protect the Jewish community.” After the Temple Mount tragedy in October 1990, “the government placed heavy security around the main synagogue in Tunis.”

If you feel my source is excessively biased I am open to comments providing alternative accounts.

So I leave you with this thought: Jews hounded out of their country as scapegoats for Israel's wars - for the BBC's Wyre Davies, apparently not a case of scandalous anti-Semitism but a fact of life requiring no elaboration or comment. After all, it's not anti-Semitic to criticise Israel, is it?

Libya: Mr Grumpy in "over-optimism" shock

Back in March I wrote a post on Libya in which I suggested six possible outcomes of Western military intervention, five of which were likely to be worse than the outcome of leaving Gaddafi to get on with it. It was a pessimistic piece - but not pessimistic enough. I covered the scenario where the rebels are at each others' throats as soon as they have toppled Gaddafi, also the one where the rebellion helps Islamists into power, and also the danger of a prolonged stand-off between government and rebel forces. What I failed to suggest was that a blend of all three scenarios would see Islamist rebels begin disposing of their non-Islamist rivals long before there is any sign of Gaddafi deciding he has a plane to catch.

It's an absolute fiasco, rendered perfect by the fact that General Younes was murdered just two days after the UK recognised the rebels as the government of Libya. So was that the turncoat Gaddafist General Younes we thought we were recognising - doh! - or was it the doughty champions of freedom and democracy in the Obaida Ibn Jarrah Brigade? The truth is that we haven't a clue.

One consequence of this farce is very clear. We might send a plane or two to Syria once we're very sure we know who's going to win, but that will be it. We condemn, we sympathize, we pray, but we keep out. Call it humanitarian non-intervention. It will require us to have strong stomachs, but it's the way it has to be.

Or am I, even now, underestimating the obdurate sentimentality and vanity of the politicians who think it is their mission to jolly well make the rest of the world behave itself?

Extreme varieties of nothinginparticularism

Edwin Greenwood notes that, whilst British media types have complied meekly with Indian officialdom's belated two-fingered gesture towards the Raj of turning Bombay into Mumbai, the locals are less enthusiastic.

I feel sure that they are also less reticent than the BBC about naming the cause which has claimed a further 18 lives in the city. I was originally going to link the previous sentence to this item. But now, on reading the Beeb's account of the latest Bombay bloodbath, I find that it makes my point just as well. Just as the estimable young Jordanian is tackling "extremism" with his computer games, so we have speculation as to whether the blasts were the work of "home-grown militant outfits like the Indian Mujahideen (IM)", or, as in 2008, of "Pakistani-based militants".

Extremism has to be an extreme form of something. You can't be a militant without something to be militant about. Pardon me for repeating myself, but it's one thing (and bad enough) for government to adopt this mealy-mouthedness as a matter of policy; for the organization we pay willy-nilly to bring us the news to follow suit is unconscionable.

Islamophobia (the real thing)

As ever. Just the kind of story to make you feel extra good about our civic duty to hand out passports to hate preachers.

Double standards and self-deception: Barack Obama on the Ground Zero mosque

A brief questionnaire...

1. Should the construction of a mosque at Ground Zero be

(a) allowed in the name of religious freedom

or

(b) prevented on the grounds that it is grossly offensive to those bereaved by 9/11?

2. Should the Catholic convent at Auschwitz have been

(a) closed down on the grounds that it was grossly offensive to Jewish Holocaust survivors

or

(b) allowed to stay in the name of religious freedom?


Would I be wrong in thinking that a broad swathe of liberal opinion would reflexively choose answer (a) to both questions?

True, not a few conservatives would offer a (b) in both cases. That, however, would arguably be less inconsistent since the parallel is not an exact one. The Nazis did not claim Auschwitz as a Christian project; indeed they were very happy to murder Christians there, not least one who perished 69 years ago today. 9/11, on the other hand, was of course the work of men who saw themselves as Muslims acting in the name of Islam - and the fact that they sacrificed their lives for this conviction might seem like reasonably strong evidence that they held it sincerely.

Barack Obama, however, supporting the Ground Zero mosque, thinks he he knows their minds better than they did:-

'"Al-Qaeda's cause is not Islam," he said, "it is a gross distortion of Islam"'

Apart from anything else, this is simply a cowardly way to argue for religious freedom. 'Liberty, if it means anything, is the right to tell people what they don't want to hear' says the banner at Harry's Place (and whilst I'd rather not hear the gross dishonesty of pieces like this, I certainly don't want them banned). Religious freedom is a costly good. The cost would be a small one if it could be assumed a priori that all religions are just different ways of articulating a belief in motherhood and apple pie. They aren't.

And who made Obama an authority on what is Islamic and what is not? Undoubtedly many Muslims would agree with him about Al-Qaeda, and that is naturally very much to be applauded. But who will adjudicate between them and the many Muslims who take the opposite view?

9/11 was not the work of callow converts. Nearly all the perpetrators were born and bred in Saudi Arabia. So is Saudi Arabia a genuinely Islamic society or isn't it? Was the Islam these men absorbed from families and mosques real or bogus? If it was real, when and why did they stop being real Muslims? When they started drawing particular practical conclusions from the doctrine of jihad? That was a very bad thing to do and, to repeat, makes them very bad Muslims in the eyes of very many Muslims, but how did it turn them into non-Muslims, Mr President?

If his choice of a place of worship in Chicago is anything to go by, I'd say Barack Obama is a less than perfect Christian. If my church started putting material from Hamas into the parish magazine I'd protest, and if that didn't work I'd walk. What this doesn't do, though, is make Obama a non-Christian. Far worse people than him have been bad, but real, Christians.

It is widely believed among Muslims that 9/11 was not the work of Muslims at all, and that no Jews were killed because they'd all been warned to stay off work. Others believe that 9/11 was fitting punishment for America's crimes against Muslims. Are these non-Islamic beliefs? If they are, can Mr Obama assure us that none of these non-Muslims will be plausible enough to insinuate their way into the Ground Zero mosque?

Places of worship can be powerful symbols of reconciliation. The reconstructed Frauenkirche in Dresden is topped with a cross made in Britain by the son of an airman who took part in the bombing of Dresden. Reconciliation doesn't happen to order, though. If I was a Muslim wanting to build a mosque at Ground Zero, I'd wait to be invited.

Father forgive them, for they know not what they do

'Zabihullah Mujahid, a Taliban spokesman, said bibles translated into Dari had been found.

'"Yesterday at around 0800 (0330 GMT), one of our patrols confronted a group of foreigners. They were Christian missionaries and we killed them all," he told the AFP news agency.'

I'm more or less at a loss for words over this. The BBC lives down to expectations: you have to get past the headline and the first four paragraphs before you find a hint that this is a story of religious intolerance (whether the Taliban actually fired the shots is virtually irrelevant in this respect - they want to claim the credit).

One word I hope I won't hear today is "Islamophobia". I won't be answerable for the consequences if I do.

From the Nazi-Islamist connection to Holocaust-denying Hamas

Harry's Place is a blog whose praises I can't sing highly enough at present. I have my disagreements with its contributors, but it is an exemplary political blog in that, whilst it knows its mind, it deals in research at least as much as opinion.


While I'm doing my own research on my 'favourite' topic, here are a couple of HP titbits to provide some context for my next Big Post. First, a post on Hamas's official embrace of Holocaust denial tellingly draws on Al Jazeera to expand on what the BBC had to say on the subject, and makes plain UNWRA's wretched failure to stand up to the bigots. And secondly, lest anyone should suppose that Hamas's stance is an aberration, here's one that sheds light on the movement's ideological roots by documenting the Nazi sympathies of Muslim Brotherhood founder Hasan al-Banna.


So: what kind of Christian charity is it that would cheerfully legitimize this gang of murderous, intolerant, racist bigots by taking Hamas fellow-travellers into partnership?

Appeasers, resisters and a Sandalista Mass

Honestly, it wasn't just that I forgot the clocks were going forward. I'd been meaning for ages to pay an exploratory visit to my local Catholic church, and with 11 o'clock Mass substituting nicely for 10 o'clock Holy Communion it seemed clear that a suitable occasion had arrived.


I can't deny, though, that low expectations lay in large measure at the bottom of my procrastination. I also can't say that those expectations were exceeded. On this evidence the wasteland created by the trendy lefty interpretation of Vatican 2 is as dire as Damian Thompson says it is.


The church was full, mind, but that's no great achievement in a city as cosmopolitan as this one now is. A solitary parish priest is obviously grossly overstretched and, as he reminded us this morning, with blocks of flats springing up on every pocket handkerchief of empty land the parish is on track to double its population, recession notwithstanding. With a church packed to bursting-point with Africans and Poles, what chance is there that mission to the heathen natives will get a look in?


A special dishonourable mention must go to the music. It was like the drippiest variety of Evangelical happy-clappy with added Valium, a fitting counterpoint to the puke-green wall behind the altar. The fact that it was still being rehearsed at three minutes past eleven merely added insult to injury.


So it is with increased fervour that I join Damian T in his approbation of the Scots Catholic composer James MacMillan. He has proved that contemporary music need not contribute to stripping the liturgy of reverence and mystery - try his sublime Mass. And for good measure he has his head screwed on politically as well. Last week he laid succinctly into the editor of the Guardian over the paper's support for Islamism.


Support for Islamism? Some mistake, surely? You've been at the Melanie Phillips again, Grumpy, haven't you? What about this...

'It is also true that a document signed by Mr Abdullah [deputy general secretary of the Muslim Council of Britain] at a recent international conference is in many ways offensive, with sweeping threats against those who stand with Israel and a slip into racialised language in relation to the Jewish state.'


So far so good, but I reckon if I ask you to guess what the next word is you won't have too much trouble. Close your eyes, and read on when you've had a stab at it.

'But '


Well done! You'd certainly have seen it coming if you've already read this in the leader:-


'Hazel Blears, had decided to cut contact with the largest Muslim civil society group until its deputy general secretary, Daud Abdullah, was sacked - a perverse decision if the aim is building the broadest possible alliance to take on the extremists.'


So someone undeterred by anti-Semitic language from signing a call to Jihad on behalf of Hamas is an invaluable member of the anti-extremist alliance. To coin a Wodehousean phrase, this is vastly well. There seems to be genuinely no limit to what we may be enjoined to accept in order that still worse things may be warded off:-

'A month ago the Guardian revealed that the government was considering setting arbitrary criteria to define extremists, such as support for sharia law - an approach that would have branded many mainstream Muslims enemies of the people. Thankfully the idea was ditched [...]'


Get that: 'mainstream' Muslims think it is not extreme to call for the introduction of a parallel theocratic jurisdiction in Britain, therefore nobody else has any business thinking it is.

Can you imagine the Grauniad telling us that in the interests of building an alliance against the far Right we must take care not to alienate 'mainstream' BNP voters by telling them their views are extremist? Of course not - the BNP aren't nearly scary enough.

Continuing to scan the papers, Ruth Gledhill of the Times is admirably robust on Dr Abdullah. I agree with her that this quote from David T of Harry's Place is telling:-

'The exposure of one faux-moderate as an extremist creates a domino effect. You just watch for the statements of outrage, and of support for the poor maligned nutter, and you uncover their constituency.'

But then we come to Damian T's Torygraph colleague, the dashing trendy vicar George Pitcher. Barely able to contain his glee over Dr Michael Nazir-Ali's decision to hand in his mitre, he writes:-

'It is said he was disappointed not to have been made Archbishop of Canterbury, but in truth he would have been awful in that role; his comments on British Muslims alone, had they emerged from Canterbury, could have left blood on the streets.'

'Blood on the streets'. No need to ask whose blood, or who'd have spilt it. Dr Nazir-Ali witnessed how Christians were intimidated into compliance in his native Pakistan. Has he given up hope that a repetition of the process in Britain can be prevented? It would be tragic if he has, though this kind of official flannel from the C of E would make such a conclusion understandable.

'As we rejoice in the power of his Spirit,
may God grant us today the faith of the apostles,
the boldness of the prophets
and the strength of the martyrs.'

When the Society of St Francis included this prayer for Pentecost in its office book, published in 1992, being a Christian in Britain was still pretty much the same cosy business it had been for a couple of centuries. Seventeen years on, it begins to look as if the prayer ought to have that well-known warning appended to it: be careful what you pray for - you might get it. Personally, I don't have the boldness of the prophets or the strength of the martyrs, and I'm not at all sure I want them, thank you very much. But how much longer is meaningful Christian witness in this society going to be possible without them?

Beyond belief

Anti-Semitic in the Thirties and still is

'MacShane looks at the set texts of radical jihadi Islam and finds them full of abuse of Jews. He observes that the idea of an aggressive Jewish conspiracy is not a marginal strand in Islamist radicalism, but the essential premise. An ideological edifice of murderous hatred towards Jews is being erected in communities around the world and yet many people think anti-semitism is something that once happened in pre-war Europe. Worse, many left-leaning, liberal intellectuals seem to think that anti-Israel rhetoric is one of the more reasonable bits of the jihadi agenda - that on Zionism, at least, the terrorists have a point. Except that, by Zionists, al-Qaeda means Jews and its reason for hating them is that they are conspiring to control the world. Any complicity with that notion was anti-semitic in the Thirties and it still is.'

- Rafael Behr reviews Labour MP Denis MacShane's new book Globalising Hatred: The New Anti-Semitism for the Observer (hat tip: Engage). MacShane is, as Behr notes, not Jewish - a notable glimmer of hope.

Missing: Christopher Howse's marbles

A humbling confession: I spent a day or so last week in the grip of a conspiracy theory of my own creation.

How it happened: on Wednesday I read a post on Christopher Howse's Telegraph blog, with the title 'Salman Rushdie taught liberals to hate Islam'. Mr Howse is a man whose writing I have on occasion admired. On this occasion I thought to myself 'this man has taken leave of his senses'. It was that bad.

The following day my browser history told me the address was wrong, and I was struck by a sudden illumination: suppose Islamists had somehow hacked into the paper's site and passed their views off as Howse's? The more I thought about the contents of the post the less plausible it seemed that they could really be the thoughts of a senior Torygraph hack, and the more plausible my conspiracy theory became.

But, finding a day later that the post was still there, I was left with the maginally more prosaic explanation: Christopher Howse of the Telegraph has taken leave of his senses.


If you're after rational thoughts on the same subject, I would encourage you to read George Weigel's appreciation of Pope Benedict in Standpoint magazine. What I have to say in response to Christopher Howse really ought to be obvious to anyone still in possession of their marbles. But evidently it does need saying, not to speak of the therapeutic benefits to myself.

'Muslims are denied the right to take offence when their most holy emblems are deliberately pilloried'

Of course Muslims have the right to be offended by what others say about their faith, as I - like Mr Howse no doubt - am regularly incensed by Christian-baiting in the media. Being offended, however, does not give them or me the right to commit murder. There really cannot be the slightest hint of compromise on this point. Bearing in mind that the threats breathed against Salman Rushdie were not idle, and though he escaped with his life others were not so fortunate.

'Now, Salman Rushdie has declared that he has nothing against true believers until their faith spills over into the public sphere and becomes "my business". That, he must know is a fallacious distinction.'

Islam, like Christianity, has a public dimension and, indeed, that is not in itself bad. But you can't have it both ways. If your religion has public consequences you must expect to be accountable to collective, public standards of morality - standards expressed in laws saying, for example, that you can't kill someone just because you don't like a book he has written or a film he has made.

'So why not, the film-maker [Theo van Gogh] thought, project the holy words of the Koran on to the exposed body of women? Tee-hee, he chortled in his Dutch way.'

One of the less endearing traits of some religious believers is the arrogance which assumes that only believers ever act out of passionate moral conviction. Theo van Gogh's film may have been deliberately provocative, but he surely knew the risk he was taking (as did his collaborator Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who is less easily dismissed as a clown), and he took it because he was genuinely outraged by the contempt shown for Dutch liberal values by Moroccan immigrants.

And, as a good liberal, he managed to find a way of taking offence publicly which did not involve killing Muslims. So even if you take the dimmest possible view of his motives, that is not, repeat NOT, an excuse for condoning a do-it-yourself death sentence.

Hirsi Ali has in common with Salman Rushdie a Muslim background, of course. So what Howse is effectively demanding is that Western states should take on the task of policing dissidence within Islam at the behest of its most intolerant and reactionary representatives.

'The secularist haters of Islam pretend that that they have a sacred principle of their own, which is freedom of speech, freedom to publish.


'In Britain this is a very lowly idol, since the most unenlightened fly-by-night businessman can stop the mouth of the press with a libel suit.'

This argument, if you can call it that, falls at every possible fence. Three objections will suffice. First, two wrongs don't make a right. Second. arguments against free speech always have a double standard built in: it is never my speech which should not be free; my declaring that I find Christopher Howse's views offensive will not, I suspect, suffice to silence him. Third, free speech is not just some arbitrarily selected idol. It is a good because it serves the cause of truth, and for Christians truth must be an absolute good.

Christians have sincerely believed that truth was best served by lighting bonfires under heretics and their books. Then, after the passage of untold amounts of suffering, came the Enlightenment, which was not just a reaction against Christianity but also a recognition by Christians that the way of the bonfire had actually been fundamentally un-Christian. Pope Benedict sees this with tremendous clarity. Christopher Howse may, we must hope, catch up with him once he has been reunited with his marbles.

So: Salman Rushdie must be heard - as Muslims must be heard - because his voice, his unique experience, has its part to play in the unending conversation through which we inch towards the truth. Here's the Pope, quoted in the George Weigel article:-

"On the one hand, one must counter a dictatorship of positivist reason that excludes God from the life of the community and from public organizations ... On the other hand, one must welcome the true conquests of the Enlightenment, human rights, and especially the freedom of faith and its practice, and recognise these also as being essential elements for the authenticity of religion. As in the Christian community, where there has been a long search to find the correct position of faith in relation to such beliefs - a search that will certainly never be concluded once and for all - so also the Islamic world with its own tradition faces the immense task of finding the appropriate solutions to these problems. The content of the dialogue between Christians and Muslims will be at this time especially one of meeting each other in this commitment to find the right solutions. We Christians feel ourselves in solidarity with all those who, precisely on the basis of their religious convictions as Muslims, work to oppose violence and for the synergy between faith and reason, between religion and freedom..."

'Since that day there has been a creeping racialist antipathy towards Muslims, by the Left.'

If Howse believes that 'liberals hate Muslims' he should get out more and try reading some liberal papers. You would need to be psychic to divine any such sentiment, since, transcending all Left liberal feuds, there is an absolute taboo against identifying Islam per se as a problem.

Beyond that unifying principle, the Left liberal camp splits into three: the well-meaningly woolly, the rationalists and the romantics.

Little needs saying about the woolly variety. Of course they don't hate Islam. They are in no doubt that if they are nice enough to it, it will turn out to be as nice as they are. That is the assumption on which multiculturalist liberal orthodoxy has beem founded. Hope continues to triumph over experience.

Among the rationalists there may indeed be varying degrees of hostility towards Islam per se, but what gets articulated is hostility to religion in general. Some may indeed loathe Islam as such, but find it imprudent to break the taboo. Others have 'issues' with religion generally - usually with special freference to Christianity - and find Islamist excesses a useful stick to beat it with. The obvious irony here is that nothing confirms the rationalist religiophobe's prejudices more perfectly that seeing Christians like Christopher Howse take it upon themselves to defend the indefensible in the name of 'faith'.

And the romantics? Well, this is the strain of leftist on whom violent radicalism exerts an irresistible fascination. They've been fellow-travellers with Stalin, with Che, with Mao (not with the Dalai Lama, of course), with the Provisional IRA, and what could be more natural than that Hamas and Hezbollah should take their turn? Hatred of Islam? You must be kidding. Even Comrade Seumas, of the Grauniad and the Communist Party of Britain, has got religion now that religion is globally the most popular reason for killing Americans. There's no solidarity with Rushdie or van Gogh on offer from this quarter.

Three dead ends, three reasons why I don't belong on the Left. Woolly liberalism respects only half of our Lord's injunction to be 'wise as serpents and harmless as doves'. If there are wolves at large it's no good pretending they are really sheep. I've got romantic leftism out of my system by the simple expedient of growing up a little. I have considerable sympathy with the rationalists, but their religiophobia is deeply objectionable and leaves them ultimately without a leg to stand on in defending liberal values againt trendy relativism. There is a fixated irrationality about it which is itself the best proof that reason on its own cannot be enough.

If the Left liberals don't get it, who does? The Pope, for sure. Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali does (would that he were a less lonely figure among the purple shirts), and so does Dominic Grieve (an Anglican), who told the Guardian this about multiculturalism:-

"In this vacuum, both the BNP and Hizb ut-Tahrir rise. They are two very similar phenomena experiencing a form of cultural despair about themselves and their identities. And it's terribly easy to latch on to confrontational and aggressive variants of their cultural background as being the only way to reassure themselves that they can survive."

Returning to our starting point, it seems there's another variation on the theme of cultural despair to be included in the equation. One which loathes liberals so much that it would love to see the Sharia boys come and sort them out. It's the kind of conservatism that helped Hitler to power, preferring him to liberal democracy (vide Alfred Hugenberg). It may be somewhat exotic at present, but it'll bear watching.

Burning our own books

It is, naturally, a blogger's inalienable privilege to declaim about matters he/she knows **** all about. Doubtless I've been guilty often enough. One field where I do have a bit of insider knowledge, though, is the book-publishing business. I've totted up a dozen years of employment in it, and even one who is no more than a rude mechanical in the eyes of the literary lunching brigade does pick up a thing or two along the way.

So I claim above-average qualifications for fishing the red herrings out of the water in the latest self-censorship affair. Notably, any suggestion that one of America's leading publishers pulled the plug on a new novel because, having taken scholarly advice, they reaIised it was crap.

HELLO. Big publishers (and most little ones) are publishing crap all the time. Indeed one may fairly safely say that most of what they publish is crap. It's publishing crap that enables them to fund those occasional worthy volumes that advance the cause of human knowledge, wisdom and culture and barely break even.

The piss-poor soft porn with a shag on every third page in which one of my former employers (also a leading player in the evangelical Christian market, as it happens) specialises. The assorted quackery in the Mind, Body and Spirit section of your local bookshop, which mostly emanates not from collectives of Tuvan shapersons but from Big Ink. The countless unreadable academic tomes which exist solely because the authors' careers require that they be Published... I could go on, but must call myself to order. OK, not before I've mentioned Jeffrey Archer.

I'm thus quite prepared to believe that The Jewel of Medina is indeed crap. I must shamefacedly admit that the mere fact that it is written by a person named Sherry inclines me towards the view that this may not be the Satanic Verses of the Noughties.

But that's not the point, is it?

Do you suppose that when Bloomsbury were sent a manuscript about a school for wizards they forwarded it to half a dozen Associate Professors in Magic Studies to make sure it had got its facts right?

There's a feminist novel which recounts the life of Jesus from the perspectives of Mary Magdalene and other female dramatis personae. Frau Grumpy once encountered it in a women-only reading group, and came home fuming over the author's invincible ignorance of New Testament scholarship. Fuming Christian theologians were not sufficient to prevent the publishers getting the thing onto the bookshelves. They thought it would sell and it did.

No, next time you read a really bad book, don't just sit there fuming. Threaten to kill or maim the author, anyone who works for the publisher, anyone who sells it, translates it or gives it a good review. Might take a bit of getting used to, but the nice thing is that once you've done it a few times you won't even need to utter the threats, as the mere perception that you have form will suffice to effect the pulping of the offending volume.

At least Random House are up front about their cowardice. What's really scary is the way the intellectual climate has changed since the Satanic Verses affair. In the early Nineties the liberal intelligentsia still had something resembling a backbone; the appeasers, though vocal, were a minority. But now... Consider this specimen if you will.

'It was in that same professional capacity that I felt it my duty to warn the press of the novel's potential to provoke anger among some Muslims.

'There is a long history of anti-Islamic polemic that uses sex and violence to attack the Prophet and his faith. This novel follows in that oft-trodden path, one first pioneered in medieval Christian writings.'

- says the Assoc. Professor of History and Middle Eastern Studies University of Texas at Austin.

Well, I'm no apologist for the cruder manifestations of medieval Christianity. But I think one can uncontroversially note that the Prophet was neither a pacifist nor a celibate; that, moreover, he permitted himself more wives than any of his followers and that one of them, Aisha, was distinctly on the young side.

It's true: this was and is fuel for polemic. So what's your problem, Associate Professor Spellberg? Polemic between competing belief systems is what happens in free societies. Passions flair, unfair and hurtful things are said. Offence is taken, and given in return. Polemic, one would hope, is the lifeblood of any university worthy of the name.

'I do not espouse censorship of any kind' declares Associate Professor Spellberg with smooth piety, and moves on without expanding on whether, specifically, she considers self-censorship in response to naked intimidation to be a particularly deplorable phenomenon.

What we have instead from Spellberg, of course, is the Bunting-Armstrong thesis which is now Guardianista orthodoxy. It is not enough that we are cowed into silence by fanatical thugs. We must declare them to be men of peace who have been provoked into violence only by the outrageous suggestion that their creed is a violent one. We must knuckle under, flagellating ourselves as aggressors the while.

George Orwell, you should be living at this hour.

As not featured at Engage

The following comment on this post at Engage apparently hasn't got past the moderation. Why?

OK, the film's a one-sided, manipulative polemic (not a phenomenon entirely unknown on the Left - if someone made a film like this about conservative evangelicals a lot of the folk condemning this one would be in raptures). But, come on... Alongside the indiscriminate slaughter of unarmed civilians, it points to anti-Semitism, homophobia, misogyny, judicial murder and hostility to democracy. None of this is made up. When, exactly, did these become right-wing concerns?

My friends, if you're not careful I might start feeling that my democratic rights stand a better chance of being defended by the likes of Geert Wilders than by people like you.

David T of Harry's Place, another who should know better, comments on the similarity between Wilders' film and Al Qaeda films. Well, given that the subject matter is identical that's not altogether surprising. But you might hope the fact that in the one case the motive for showing scenes of carnage is to shock, whilst in the other it is to inspire, would merit a passing mention. HP often comes down commendably hard on spurious moral equivalences, but really this one takes the biscuit.

PS Due to a variety of circumstances I'm still not finding much time for posting. Doubtless a cause for quiet satisfaction in some quarters. Apologies to readers to whom that does not apply.

Engage, Muslim attitudes and the 'clash of civilisations'

A Gallup poll on worldwide Muslim attitudes gets a somewhat triumphalist write-up from Engage. A more considered reponse, focussing more on the methodology and statistics than on the intensive spin that's been put on them, would not go amiss.

A sample of the spin: 'Gallup found that majorities in many predominantly Muslim countries as well as the United States report experiencing enjoyment, smiling and laughing, and enjoying good-tasting food' it says here. Well, thanks for telling us, but I imagine that even Samuel P. Huntington is able to distinguish between Muslims and zombies, whilst here in the UK there can be few of us indeed who have not enjoyed good-tasting food cooked by Muslims.

Here are just a few points Engage might want to consider:-

1. Is it not absurdly simplistic to reduce the diversity of Muslim attitudes to a binary typology of 'moderate' versus 'radical', determined by responses to just two questions about attitudes to the US?

2. 'Only' 7% are 'radical', the poll finds. Well, OK, but 7% of 1.3 billions is 91 millions - this won't give al-Qaeda too any nightmares about running out of recruits.

3. The bar for 'radicalism' is set pretty high. Not only must the respondent have an 'unfavourable' or 'very unfavourable' opinion of the US, he/she must admit to feeling that the 9/11 attacks were 'completely justified'. Anyone merely thinking they were more justified than not gets to be a moderate.

And on this basis Sheik Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who condemns 9/11 but openly condones suicide bombings in Israel, is a moderate - not a view that has found much favour with Engage up to now. Nor is he in any way an isolated figure: there can be no doubt that if the poll had canvassed opinions on terrorist attacks against Israel it would have presented a very different picture of the fault line between 'moderate' and 'radical'.

4. From the Yahoo report which Engage quotes:-

'"Ironically, [radicals] believe in democracy even more than many of the mainstream moderates do, but they're more cynical about whether they'll ever get it," said Esposito, a professor of Islamic studies at Georgetown University in Washington.'

That 'even more' is an interesting way of putting it. The poll asked whether 'moving toward greater democracy will help Arab/Muslim societies’ progress.' Whilst 'radicals' were split 50/50 on this one, just 35% of 'moderates' answered affirmatively. We're not exactly talking about moderation in any Lib-Demish sense, are we?

I do take Engage's point that it's essential not to 'paint the Devil on the wall', to use one of my favourite German phrases, and the poll did produce some genuinely encouraging findings. But there is another danger, too: that one day liberals will discover that the 'clash of civilisations' was lost while they were busy looking the other way.

Executed for being poor

'An Iraqi militant group posted a video on the Internet on Monday that appeared to show the 2004 killing of 12 Nepalese men who worked for a contracting firm in Iraq.'

(full story here)

Since the 'militants' have seen fit to remind us of the crime, we should also remind ourselves what the victims were doing in Iraq. My atlas tells me that 40% of the population of Nepal is malnourished. It isn't bang up to date but I don't suppose the situation has changed dramatically. So it's a safe bet that for these men a job enabling them to feed their families was not something to turn down even if they had to go to Iraq to do it (and even though they were officially banned from travelling to Iraq by the Nepalese government).

So remember this case next time you come across someone claiming to be a socialist or a liberal who suggests that Islamist terror is some kind of cry for justice on behalf of the world's poor and oppressed.

Islamophobia Watch

A rash of recent news items with a common theme.

First off, a particularly shocking case of Islamophobia, in which the victim has been terrorized for 15 years - just for daring to choose her own religion (via).

And this confirms that the first case is not a one-off (via). Read the article through and note the strictly limited scope of Mr Bunglawala's indignation. Give that man a knighthood!

Islamophobia is a serious problem in Iraq, too.

And in the little town of Bethlehem things are so bad that a scapegoat is required. Happily, the usual suspects are on hand.

It would be great if the hard-pressed flock could look to its shepherds to speak up for it, wouldn't it? Well, here's the Archdruid. Case Four is indeed the usual suspects' fault - of course. Case Three is George Bush's fault. Cases One and Two: not entirely clear, I wouldn't be at all surprised if he held Israel and Bush responsible here too (plus, presumably, Bush Senior in Case One), but possibly the victims are themselves to blame for working with that 'modern western definition of humanity' which is 'clearly not working very well'.


So thank the Lord for the German shepherd.

Positively the last word on Teddy Mo...

...unless anyone can top this.

Hat tip to Dumb Jon. To paraphrase Jon's point, what's so illustrative of the bankruptcy of multiculturalism is the way Mr Gray can shift, in the course of a week, from respecting Islam because, like all religions, it is cute and cuddly to respecting Islam because it turns people into deranged fanatics who might kill him if he doesn't watch his step (thereby, of course, implicitly tarring all Muslims with the same lunatic brush) - and give no sign of having noticed any difference.

Bears of little brain

'This sad little Sudanese tale is part of a larger story, from the Rushdie affair to the storm over the Danish cartoons, in which some Muslims, and some Muslim governments, seem to be almost searching for slights and fights, to be almost determined to be insulted, pushing aside those ready to take a more tolerant and relaxed view.

'There are objective reasons why Muslims are now more prickly about their rights and about what non-Muslims say about them than they used to be. But the resulting process is one in which the lines which non-Muslims must not cross are being repeatedly redefined, always more restrictively, at times with dire penalties threatened. The majority of Muslims may be much less concerned than the activists and radicals, but it is the activists and radicals who often set the pace. This constant raising of the bar does not increase respect for Islam but instead makes it appear coercive and threatening. In Sudan, it is not the bear which is of little brain.'

You can push even the Grauniad (for that, believe it or not, is the source of the above) too far. Norm comments perceptively.

A major reservation: the last sentence only follows from the one before on the assumption that the Sudanese government's concern is with increasing respect for Islam. On the contrary, it is very happy to appear coercive and threatening, because that is precisely what it is.

In the deepest and truest sense

As my spiritual leader speaks out, the Teddy Mo affair continues to render satire redundant:-

'ABC: Well as I’ve said I don’t think the Sudanese government has done itself any favours with this, as indeed with other policies of theirs in recent years. It would be very good if this sentence were in some ways set aside, if Julie [sic] Gibbons were allowed to return home promptly. I think everyone here is bound to be thinking with enormous compassion and sensitivity, and indeed some indignation about her situation. I hope she knows how strongly she’s supported and how many people are bearing her in mind at this time.'