Islam, Islamism and the Far/Hard Left

Hamas is an Islamic Party

2010-04-23T10:23:00.001-07:00

[Image to the right: British student (SWP) 'helpers' of Hamas.]

Contents:
i) Introduction
ii) Palestine: the Sacred Land
iii) The Umma and the Caliphate
iv) Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood
v) Hamas and the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO)
vi) The 1987 Intifada
vii) Epilogue: Hamas Hates All Non-Muslims

Introduction

The more one knows about the history of Islam, the nature of Islam itself, as well as the views and beliefs of Muslims through the centuries, the more one realises that Palestine is not unique. Indeed it is not even seen as the holiest Islamic ‘land’. It can easily be argued that Saudi Arabia (because of Mecca and Medina), and even Iraq (primarily because of Baghdad), are just as ‘sacred’. In addition, because of this the more one also realises that far leftists, left-liberals and other anti-Zionists have effectively been hoodwinked by Hamas and numerous other Muslims. Palestine is just one more bone of contention for Islam. It is just one more ‘occupied’ territory or state. More broadly, but just as importantly, the situation in Israel and Palestine is just one more battle in the never-ending war between good and bad – between Islam and all that is non-Islamic.

Palestine: the Sacred Islamic Land

Hamas’s overall position is summed up well in its well-known slogan:

“Allah is the goal. The Prophet is the model. The Koran is the constitution. The jihad is the path. And death on Allah’s path is our most sublime aspiration.”

How much clearer could Hamas be about its religious affiliations and motives? But, of course, Islam, or religion generally, is nothing but an epiphenomenon of much deeper and more important socio-economic and political factors. That’s the Marxist fairytale.

If you are left-liberal, words like the above are nothing more than Hamas posturing with rhetoric. All it really wants is the West Bank, Gaza and a good standard of living for all Palestinians.

How wrong they all are. More importantly, Hamas itself knows they are wrong.

Islam was, and still is, at the heart of the entire Hamas project, from the annihilation of Israel, to the death of every Jew and the subsequent creation of an Islamic state in the place of Israel.

Hamas continues in this honest and truthful vain when it tells us how all these things, or all these ‘aspirations’, will be brought about. Through jihad. As the Hamas charter puts it:

‘There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavours.’

If only the far leftists and the left-liberals would believe Hamas when they say, or write, such things.

If such people want yet more honesty from Hamas, take the following, again from the charter, as a little extra evidence:

‘Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it.’

So is all this mere fluff and bravado? Or are they the epiphenomenal sighs of the more important ‘material conditions’ underneath? After hundreds of thousands of bombs, hundreds of suicide attacks, along with all the rest, I most certainly don’t think so. And neither should anyone else.

To Hamas, ‘the soil of Palestine is sacred’. It is also incumbent on every Muslim, Hamas believes, to liberate ‘every inch of Palestine from the Jews’. Clearly then, this is not a question of only liberating ‘the occupied territories’. It is also about liberating ‘every inch of Palestine’. Two-state theorists must surely know that this is Hamas’s position.

More specifically on the ‘sacred’ nature of Palestine. In Hamas’s charter it states the following:

‘The Islamic Resistance Movement believes that the land of Palestine is an Islamic Waqf [consecrated land held as an Islamic trust] consecrated for future Muslim generations until Judgement Day. It, or any part of it, should not be squandered: it, or any part of it, should not be given up.’

Here again we are not only talking about the West Bank and Gaza, ‘or any part’ of Israel/Palestine. Hamas believes that no part of Palestine ‘should be given up’. How can Hamas make its position any clearer?

So it is certainly not only because the Jews have taken over a Islamic land which primarily motivates Hamas. It is not even primarily because of ‘the Nakba’ that Hamas is doing what it is doing. The prime reason why Hamas is fighting - and attempting to annihilate - Israel is Islamic in nature. Palestine is a ‘sacred’ land. As Sheik Yasin, the first leader of Hamas, succinctly put it:

‘Jihad is a duty on every Muslim if the Muslims’ land is violated.’ (59)

What Hamas says about Israel could, and sometimes is, also said about certain areas in China, Russia, etc. and indeed about many - or all! - Arab countries. It can even be applied to Spain and those parts of France which were taken over by Muslims in the century 8th century. Palestine is just another ‘Islamic country’ amongst many others. Indeed, ultimately, as Anjem Choudary (of Islam4UK) put it (to paraphrase):

The whole world belongs to Allah and therefore Islam.

The Umma and the Caliphate

Why did Osama bin Laden hardly mention Palestine until fairly recently? If the Palestine-Israeli situation ‘is the prime concern and worry of all Muslims’, Islamists and terrorists, why has al-Qaeda, and other extreme Muslim groups, not spoken as much about Palestine as, say, the UK’s Guardian or even British Muslim organisations? Because to bin Laden, and many other Muslims, the ‘Palestine problem’ is just one of many problems which face Muslims today. For example

i) The fact that US soldiers are still in Saudi Arabia.
ii) The fact that non-Muslim soldiers are still in Iraq and Afghanistan.
iii) The fact that many states with a majority of Muslims are still not properly Islamic states.

Thus it is easy to see that Palestine is just the latest Islamic issue and conflict in over 1,500 years of Islamic/Muslim history. Palestine is just one more place which Muslims should conquer and then annihilate the infidel enemy. The same is required in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Philippines, the Sudan, Somalia, etc. What all these conflicts share is that they are all attempts to increase the Islamic umma; and in so doing ‘carry the banner of Islam’. If the Muslim Palestinians are successful, Palestine will be just another, and the latest, addition to the Islamic umma. Perhaps Andalusia (Spain) will be next. There a still ‘occupied territories’ in other parts of the world which, according to many Muslims, need to be liberated in order to become part of the Islamic umma (e.g., places in current China, Russia, etc.).

Let’s put it this way. It is very possibly the case that al-Qaeda, and other Islamist groups and individuals, think less about Palestine than the British and American far left. Indeed perhaps bin Laden thinks more about ‘occupied’ Saudi Arabia than he does about ‘occupied’ Palestine! This is no surprise. The Jihad had been going on for over a thousand years before ‘the Zionist entity’ was created. And long before Israel’ creation, Muslims had tried to conquer and re-conquer many countries for Islam. Some of these countries, such as Egypt, also have Muslim majorities and are far more populous (they have more Muslims) than Palestine. Only Western left-liberals and far leftists think that a solution to the Palestine problem will solve all the problems of the Middle East; and even help prevent Islamic terrorism in the West. This is dangerously naïve.

One way to show that Palestine is just one more problem for Muslims is by highlighting what Muslims themselves think of Palestine and what its real nature or status is.

Is it not only Zionists, and Zionist sympathisers, who argue that there never was a Palestinian state. Many Muslims did and still do. More than that, Hamas, or at least some individuals within it, accept this. More precisely, one senior Hamas leader, al-Zahar, has freely admitted that

‘Islamic and traditional views reject the notion of establishing an independent Palestinian state In the past, there was no independent Palestinian state… [hence] our main is to establish a great Islamic state, be it pan-Arabic or pan-Islamic.’ (219)

Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood

According to Hamas’s own charter, the

‘Islamic Resistance Movement [Hamas] is a wing of the Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine, and the Muslim Brotherhood movement is a world organisation.’ (80)

Thus, if Hamas is a ‘wing’ of the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Muslim Brotherhood is a ‘world organisation’, then Hamas too is a ‘world organisation’. This should show us that Palestine, the ‘oppression and suffering’ in that country, is far from being the only piece in Hamas’s ideological armoury. Perhaps the ‘liberation’ of Palestinian by the ‘Islamic Resistance Movement’ is just the beginning of a global jihad coordinated by Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, al-Qaeda, and other Muslim groups and organisations.

The Muslim Brotherhood was formed in 1926. That was around twenty years before the creation of Israel in 1947. It was around 40 years before Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza in 1967. In other words, the Brotherhood’s prime or only concern was not Palestine. Its primary aim was, and still is, the establishment of the Islamic caliphate and thus the parallel increase in the size of the Muslim umma.

What has just been said about the Muslim Brotherhood can also be said about its offshoot, Hamas, even if to a lesser extent. As Karsh puts it, Hamas

‘has followed in the footsteps of its Egyptian parent organisation, which viewed it violent opposition to Zionism from the 1930s and 1940s as an integral part of the Manichean struggle for the creation of a worldwide caliphate rather than as a defence of the Palestinian Arabs’ national rights.’ (219)

Indeed many Muslim Brotherhood members, and even leaders of Hamas, have often said that to concentrate on Palestine alone is tantamount to 'nationalism'. And nationalism is not an Islamic phenomenon. (Arabism was similarly rejected and criticised by the Muslim Brotherhood.) Instead the caliphate is something which should apply to the entire world. That is why it is often named ‘the global Islamic caliphate’.

So Palestine is not the be all and end all of every Muslim. Indeed it is not even the be all and end all for Hamas. If only far leftists and left-liberals actually read Hamas’s propaganda. That is, the propaganda Hamas aims at fellow Muslims rather than the propaganda which is designed exclusively for Western ears and eyes. If they did truly understand Hamas, they would soon realise that Israel’s ‘occupation of Palestine’ is not the only festering sore in the Middle East and in the world generally.

Hamas and the PLO

Hamas’s very creation, of course, was mainly a response to the Palestinian Liberation Organisation’s secularism. However, we can ask ourselves how secular can an Arabic movement actually be? Much has been made of the secular - and even Marxist - orientation of the PLO. Of course it was partly leftist in orientation. However, even Arafat’s Fatah organisation, which was the main group within the PLO, was originally built as an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, just like Hamas. Indeed even the name, Fat’h’, means ‘holy crusade [for Islam]’ in Arabic. Nonetheless, that lack of Islamic credentials was the main reason why Hamas was formed and why it was against much of what the PLO stood for. (The other reasons were that the PLO simply wasn’t seen, by many Palestinians, as being at all successful against the Israeli state not to mention the fact that it was also hugely corrupt in the Arab style.)

However, at first Hamas did cooperate with the PLO (or the other way around). But even from the very beginning Hamas demanded something that the PLO could not, or would not, agree to. That was the creation of an Islamic state after the ‘Zionist entity’ was defeated. Sheikh Yasin, Hamas’ first leader, put it this way:

‘There must be a mutual common ground, based on commitment to Islamic values and principles, without violating them in times of resistance. There must also be prior agreement that after liberation, the state will be Islamic. We opposed the Palestine national charter because if we had accepted the establishment of a secular state, we would have violated Islam.’ (71)

Actually Yasin, broadly speaking, demanded two things from the PLO. Firstly, as we have said, he wanted the PLO to commit itself to the creation of an Islamic state. But even before that, Yasin demanded a ‘commitment to Islamic values and principles’ – even ‘in times of resistance’ and not just in times of victory.

Yasin could not have put it simpler. He stated that even if the PLO defeated Israel and then established a secular state to go in its place, then it ‘would have violated Islam’ itself. The PLO wanted to destroy Israel just as much as Hamas itself. Hamas did not have a problem with that. Hamas was against the PLO because it did not call for the creation of an Islamic state in what was, and still is, Israel. There could not have been a greater bone of contention than that. The PLO was made up of Muslims, for sure. But it was not an Islamic party. And neither did it call for the establishment of an Islamic state.

The Hamas charter was explicit about Hamas’s main problem with the PLO. That problem, quite simply, was it secularism. The charter states:

‘The PLO endorses secular ideas… Secular thought is incompatible with religious thought, completely incompatible.’ (82)

Quite simply. Hamas rejected the PLO because it was not an Islamic party. It was a secular organisation. Not only that, the PLO’s secular ideas were seen as ‘completely incompatible’ with ‘religious thought’.

These are the other additions which also distinguished Hamas from the PLO:

i) PLO fostered Palestinian and Arab nationalism. Hamas did the same but also added the upholding of moral/Islamic purity.
ii) The PLO engaged in various forms of social action. So too did Hamas. But with the addition of the possibility, or actuality, of Muslims receiving divine grace through military action.
iii) The PLO offered a homeland to the Palestinians. So too did Hamas. But also with the added bonus of salvation – both of the mind and after death.

The 1987 Intifada

Many think that the first intifada, in 1987, was a ‘spontaneous event’. (Indeed many think that about the following intifadas.) If it was spontaneous, then that spontaneity required a lot of organisation! And that organisation was primarily supplied by Hamas. And it is far from being the case that Hamas has actually denied this. Hamas’s Ibrahim al-Quqa has said that it was the

‘decision of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas), which set the precise zero-hour in the sanctuaries of the mosques.’

The leader of Hamas at that time (1987), Sheikh Yasin, also claimed that Hamas helped set off the intifada and that it was Hamas that led and controlled it thereafter. More specifically and Islamically, as it were, the intifada basically began in the mosques of the West Bank and Gaza. These mosques worked as a rallying point for militants and ordinary Muslims as well as the launch pads for demonstrations and other intifada activities. Hamas thus utterly transformed the mosques into centres for Islamic learning as well as the places for all political organisation.

The timing of the jihad, and therefore the first intifada, also proved to be a problem for Hamas and Yasin. They debated about whether or not it should begin after Palestinian society was fully Islamised or before that. Yasin decided that it should begin after the full Islamisation of Palestine. That explains the Muslim Brotherhood’s, and therefore Hamas’s, quiescence in the early days. That is also why the Israelis took Hamas to be a thoroughly religious group with no political aspirations and no interest in political violence. The Israelis were wrong in big way. Hamas was simply preparing the ground for jihad and therefore for the 1987 intifada.

Part of Hamas’s Islamisation project was the propagation of the position that those Muslims who were silent about the occupation of Palestine were actually committing an Islamic sin. That is because Islam requires that every Muslim must engage in ‘holy war’. (And for those who care to look, this Islamic imperative is indeed there in the Koran.) It followed that if certain Muslims failed to act, or to become jihadists, they would be committing ‘fatal treason’. And treason is, of course, punishable by death. Not only that, Hamas stated that if any ‘philosophy’ was seen to be justifying submission to the Israelis (or to any non-Muslims), or encouraging Muslims not to ‘sacrifice their souls’, then it would be seen as an ‘heretical’ philosophy to be immediately stamped out. And every such philosophy was indeed stamped out by Hamas.

More concretely and specifically, Hamas got to work on producing, as well as distributing, thousands of leaflets. All these leaflets began with passages from the Koran and included within them other such Koranic passages. They also contained accounts of various episodes in Islamic history. As for graffiti. The following is a small sample of the graffiti which could be seen before, during and after the 1987 intifada:

“Our land is Islamic, this is the identity.’
‘Islam is the way to return.’
‘Islam is the solution.’
‘Khaibar, Khaibar, O Jews, Muhammad’s army will return.’
‘The land of Palestine is an Islamic waqf, Islamic law forbids its abandonment or bargaining over it.’
‘The destruction of Israel is a Koranic imperative.’
‘There is no solution except by the Koran.’
‘The Koran is the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people.’ (78)

So the 1987 intifada was a thoroughly Islamic event, as it were. At the very least, it certainly began in the mosques. As Hamas leader, Dr. ‘Abd-al-‘Aziz, put it. The intifada began

‘with one fixed outcry, allahu akbar [God is great], and took off from the mosques, where the Koran was being read, and the Islamic songs sung, and the people provided with guidance…’ (60)

Not only was the 1987 intifada utterly Islamic in nature, it was also only a small part of the larger jihad. That jihad had known many conflicts and battles over the centuries. The 1987 intifada was just another ‘phase’ in this ‘eternal jihad’. It was only one mechanism to mobilise the masses into the spirit of Islamic jihad. In effect, the fight against Israel was, and still is, only one part of the Islamic battle against all non-Muslims and all non-Muslim states. (Another part is the re-conquest of Andalusia – Spain.) In other words, the intifada was, and was seen as, only one form of jihad which was itself was a preparation for the later jihads which would then be fully armed. (60)

Apart from the war against Israel, which is Islamic, and the various forms of jihad that war takes, what about the Islamic nature, as it were, of the Islamic soldiers themselves? They too were to be thoroughly Islamised by Hamas. As one commentator put it:

‘The fundamentalist groups offered a special kind of activism that combined patriotism with moral purity and social action with the promise of divine grace. Sheikh Yasin offered the young Palestinian something far beyond Arafat’s ken: not just the redemption of the homeland, but the salvation of his own troubled soul.’ (66)

Epilogue: Hamas Hates all Non-Muslims

If any non-Jewish or non-Muslim group had ‘occupied’ Palestine, Hamas would still have wanted to destroy it. And even if Palestine had been more or less empty of Arab/Muslim inhabitants in 1947/8, Hamas (or their precursors) would have still called for a jihad. Jews are not the only people to be hated by this fanatical group.

Hamas has also carried out various hate-driven campaigns against Christians, Bahais and secular Muslims. So let me finish with a list which will hopefully also work as a warning:

i) Hamas has brutalised Gaza Christians and ordered them to wear traditional Islamic dress.
ii) Hamas has attacked churches in Gaza.
iii) Hamas terrorists have attacked Gaza’s Latin Church and adjacent Rosary Sisters School, destroying crosses, bibles, pictures of Jesus and furniture and equipment.
iv) Church leaders have been ordered by Hamas to promote Islam.
v) Hundreds of Arab Christians have fled from Hamas-ruled Gaza.
vi) Hamas operates ‘vice squads’ which murder unmarried Muslims who meet together.
vii) Hamas tortures and kills homosexuals.
viii) Other victims of Hamas vice squads are knee-capped, often for visiting internet cafes and music stores. Hamas attempts what it calls a ‘re-education’ of these victims of its rule.

Militant Muslims? Prison's the Best Place For 'em

2010-04-15T02:40:00.000-07:00

Prison is ‘not taming Islamist radicals’. Really? Well how the hell was that supposed to work? After all, these Islamic radicals do not think they have committed a crime. Not even Hamas or Al Qaeda think that they have committed a crime when they blow women and children to pieces. How can it be a crime? Jihad is sanctified by Allah himself.

What were prisons supposed to do exactly? I’m pretty sure that the average prison officer is not deeply steeped in Islamic theology and jurisprudence. Well, actually it’s Muslim chaplains who are supposed to ‘challenge and undermine extremist ideology’. What makes the Government, or anyone else, think they will be successful? This won’t be like persuading an 18 year-old petty criminal to take up a trade which he can then make use of when his prison term ends. These ‘Islamic radicals’ have a mountainous ideology behind them. They’re not likely to be won other by some interfaithing Muslim chaplain or even by an imam (who would probably praise the prisoner anyway).

To be honest. I would love to know how exactly these Muslim chaplains ‘challenge and undermine extremist ideology’. I really would. What do they say? I honestly think that, Islamically speaking, the radicals or extremists are on much firmer Islamic ground than any Muslim chaplain or even the Muslims who appears on Question Time selling 'moderate Islam' to us naive infidels. After all, jihad is there, numerous times, in the Koran... Oh, I forgot! On some translations of the Koran the word ‘jihad’ does not occur. Still, ‘fighting’ and other words for belligerency and anger certainly do frequently appear in the Koran. And does this make even a tiny bit of difference? Of course not… The games Muslims play, eh?

Apparently, these tough, hard-core Muslim inmates see the Muslim chaplains as mere ‘puppets’. You know, like ‘Uncle Toms’ or ‘poster boys’. Every Muslim who is not hardcore, like them, is bound to be seen as an ‘puppet’ or a ‘poster boy’ for the ‘neo-cons’ or ‘Zionists’ or ‘Jews’ or ‘Freemasons’ or the ‘Satanic United States’. Only they know the Truth about what Islam really is. And in a certain sense, they are right. The unpalatable truth of their Islam is actually the unpalatable truth that is Islam. No Muslim chaplain or interfaith zealot is going to change the unpalatable reality that is Islam and the Koran. These hardcore Muslim inmates must know this. They must be laughing at these Muslim chaplains - or planning to kill them. So far, the hardcore Muslim posse has only assaulted these helpless and hapless chaplains.

Actually, the naiveté of the Muslim prison chaplains has been passed on to them, as it were, from the Ministry of Justice. It is this body that is attempting to ‘rehabilitate’ Muslim offenders. It has been working ‘with a number of third-sector partner organisations’ – whatever they are!

There are around 200 Muslim extremists who have been imprisoned since the 2005 London bombings. That does not sound like many. However, it only took a small handful of Muslims to kill fifty or so in London in 2005. Some massive terrorist outrages have been carried out by individuals. Indeed all suicide bombings, in Israel and elsewhere, tend to be the work of individuals even if they are controlled and coordinated by Islamic groups like Hamas.

The frightening thing is that some of these 200 Muslim extremists are now due for release. And just like many other kinds of inmate, they will return to their Muslim ghettoes even tougher and more Islamic than they were before they were convicted. No doubt too they will have gained a lot of ‘Respek’ from the younger Muslims in their 'hoods.

My sceptical account of Muslim-extremist imprisonment is backed up by some evidence. For example, a Muslim Londoner, who was 17 years old when he was jailed for after admitting attending a place used for terrorist training, has said that the Muslim chaplains, or imams, utterly failed to challenge his extreme Islamic beliefs. He even said that prison didn’t change his views at all. He went on to say that imprisonment made him stronger as an (extremist) Muslim. He had become a kind of small-time martyr for the cause of Islam. How else would anyone expect a young Muslim to view his imprisonment by the infidel state?

In any case, all this ‘de-radicalising’ seems to have been a bit of a gimmick anyway. It certainly isn’t widespread or thorough in the prison service. For example, one former inmate, Shah Jalal Hussain, told BBC Radio 4 that they

‘didn’t try to de-radicalise me. There wasn’t much at all to be honest. There was a prison imam but he only came on a Friday to lead prayers.’

Perhaps he wasn’t radical enough to be de-radicalised. Or perhaps he was too radical to be properly de-radicalised. Would any form of de-radicalisation work anyway? It would depend on how much de-radicalising is actually carried out and on which particular Muslim is being de-radicalised.

In the end, then, the prison imams who work in our prisons won’t achieve much; if anything. Who knows, perhaps some of these imams sympathise - or even agree - with these militant Muslim prisoners. After all, New Labour has often used Muslim extremists to deal with, well, Muslim extremists. Thus one set of Muslim extremists has often ended up taking the place of another set of Muslim extremists. Who is to say that these prison imams or chaplains really are doing what they say they are doing?

Bunglawalah, the Islamist, Against Ed Husain, the ‘Neo-Con Poster Boy’

2010-04-14T10:46:00.001-07:00

(Ed Husain)

(Inayat Bunglawala)

Contents:
i) Introduction
ii) Who are the Islamists?
iii) The Islamists Against the Neo-Cons
iv) Most Muslims are For the Islamists
v) Bunglawala on Wahhabism
vi) Conclusion: Keep Silent About the Islamists!

Introduction

The following is a commentary on Inayat Bunglawala’s extremely critical review of Ed Husain’s popular book, The Islamist. Bunglawala is currently the main media spokesman for the Muslim Council of Britain.

Ed Husain helps run the Quilliam Foundation (which was set up - and then funded - by the Government to help ‘counteract Islamic extremism’) with the Swiss academic, Tariq Ramadan.

My reading of Bunglawala’s review of The Islamist led me to conclude that Bunglawala is not very keen on ‘counteracting Islamic extremism’, especially if it is fellow Muslims (or ‘Muslims’) who are doing the counteracting. Perhaps he sees them as traitors. He does indeed accuse Ed Husain of ‘washing his dirty linen in public’.

Who are the Islamists?

Bunglawala (ironically) notes Husain’s position on Islamism thus:

‘political Islam’ = ‘extremism’ = ‘Islamists’

Thus Bunglawala, on the other hand, believes that

Political Islam is not extreme. Therefore Islamists are not extreme.

Why else would he (ironically) note Husain’s position on Islamism if he didn’t believe the opposite? However, even though in one breath he appears to defend Islamism, he then goes on to question Husain’s inclusion of Hizb ut-Tahrir, the Islamic Forum Europe, the Muslim Association of Britain, and Bunglawala’s own Muslim Council of Britain, as examples of Islamist organisations. Thus, to Inayat, none of these groups are either Islamist or extreme. This is strange.

Bunglawala goes on to say that Hizb ut-Tahrir has changed. Honest. They’ve really changed. That’s funny. It was only yesterday that they carried out acts of violence against the Islamophile tyrant-lover, George Galloway. They threatened to hang him in the gallows for pretending to be a new prophet – ‘a false prophet’. Now if this is Hizb ut-Tahrir’s new-found moderation, I would hate to know what they used to be like. Perhaps back then they would have crucified Galloway instead.

Bunglawala then defends Hizb ut-Tahrir some more. Again, he disagrees with Husain’s analysis. So what does Bunglawala disagree with? That

‘HT as being not actual terrorists themselves, then at the very least they are a conveyor belt for graduation to terrorist activities.’

The funny thing is that Bunglawala doesn’t say why this analysis is wrong. All he can do is tar Husain with the brush that is Daniel Pipes. That is, Bunglawala thinks that Husain is wrong quite simply because he ‘appears here to have adopted the Daniel Pipes theory of HT’. My guess is that Husain didn’t need to adopt, borrow or plagiarise Daniel Pipes’ theory at all. After all, Husain spent quite some time with HT. If that was indeed the case, then he wouldn’t have needed Daniel Pipes or anyone else to infect his thinking about the Hizb ut-Tahrir. He knows what he needs to know about this lovely group. And what he knows he doesn’t like. What Bunglawala knows about the Hizb, on the other hand, Bunglawala does appear to like. Each to his own.

It is no surprise, then, that Bunglawala thinks that it was a good thing that ‘New Labour fail[ed] to carry out their threat to ban HT’. Of course Bunglawala was against the ban because he believes, very strongly, in the freedom of speech… for extreme Muslim groups, but not for Danish cartoonists, Anglo-Indian novelists and Dutch politicians.

What about the Islamic Forum Europe? The following occurred not yesterday (as with the Galloway/HT tête-à-tête), but only the other week. This organisation was found to be trying to intimidate voters and influence various MPs and councillors. It was also accused of entry-ism in various non-Muslim organisations. So Bunglawala thinks that the Islamic Forum Europe is moderate and not Islamist?

Now what about the ‘non-Islamist’ Muslim Association of Britain? Non-Islamist? Really? The MAB is a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. Hamas is also a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. Azzam Tamimi is the main spokesman for the MAB. He has also held many talks with Hamas and has frequently defended both suicide bombings and terrorism generally. If the MAB is not Islamist to Bunglawala, then who the hell is?

Now what about Bunglawala's very own Muslim Council of Britain? That too is a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. It too defends terrorists and suicide bombers. However, it has a slightly more media-friendly image that the MAB.

The Islamists Versus the Neo-Cons: Guilt by Association

The logic is simple for Islamists like Bunglawala (as well as far leftists). If one does not subscribe to the Islamist (or far leftist) position on X, then one is, by definition, a ‘neo-con’ or a ‘neo-liberal’. Thus we have a simple binary opposition:

Islamism (or far leftism) ↔ neo-conservatism

Take the example of Ed Husain in this respect. Because Husain did not have the same position on Saddam Hussein and the Iraq War as Inayat and the far left did, then Husain simply must have ‘embraced the neo-con narrative’. Bunglawala is saying that

you are either for us, or you are a neo-con.

The thought of other possibilities, neither Islamist nor neo-con, simply don’t enter Bunglawala’s mind. Hussain is a neo-con, to Bunglawala, simply because he had a negative and critical view of Saddam Hussain and thus was in favour of the invasion of Iraq.

Thus Husain’s position on Saddam Hussein and the war was not wrong because it was, well, wrong. It was wrong because it was the same as the ‘neo-con narrative’ on Saddam Hussein and the war. This is a case of guilt by association if ever I saw one.

And just as Bunglawala dismisses Husain’s position because it is allegedly the same as Daniel Pipes’, so the Islamophile par excellence, Madeline Bunting (also quoted by Inayat), rejects Husain because his points and opinions have been taken up by people with a ‘rightwing and anti-Islamic sentiment’. Is this another case of guilt by association? Can Husain be held responsible for the many and varied people who will read and perhaps then quote his book? Perhaps a few serial killers will also read and then quote his book. Who knows? Unless Bunting is really claiming that Husain is actually encouraging ‘right-wingers’ to ‘feast on his testimony’. Should Husain therefore hide the truth because the truth may get into the wrong hands? Who will then decide whose the right and wrong hands are? Will it be Madeline Bunting or will it be Inayat himself?

Most Muslims are For the Islamists

Bunglawala makes a confession. (Or is it actually a slip of the tongue?) I’ll explain.

Muslim ‘moderates’ are always telling us that ‘not all Muslims are Islamists or extremists’. Indeed Bunglawala himself has often said this. However, he also says that Ed Husain

‘tries hard in the book to portray himself, and not the dreaded “Islamists”, as being in tune with the majority of Muslim
opinion in the UK.’

Clearly Bunglawala thinks that Husain is wrong about this. Thus Bunglawala must believe that

The Islamists, and not ‘moderates’ like Ed Husain, are really the ones who are in tune with the majority of Muslim opinion in the UK.

This is just what many non-Muslim sceptics have always thought. Thanks, Bunglawala, for confirming our suspicion about the so-called ‘moderate majority’ of Muslims. It’s nice to hear it from the horse’s mouth. In addition, if Bunglawala used the phrase ‘the dreaded Islamists’ to take the piss out of Husain, one can only conclude that Inayat does not think the Islamists should be feared. Again, this is just what we sceptics always thought the ever-so slippery Bunglawala really believed.

And just as Bunglawala has just said that ‘the majority of Muslim opinion in the UK’ will prefer the ‘dreaded Islamists’ to the equally dreaded Ed Husain, so he then puts the ‘Muslim majority’ further in the shit, in my view, by saying that Husain’s moderate book about Islamist extremism ‘will not find much favour among many British Muslims’. Why is that, Inayat? Won’t they like his moderate position on Islam? Or perhaps they won’t like his exposé of extreme Islamism because they are actually fairly sympathetic to Islamism themselves. That must be the only conclusion to draw from Bunglawala’s words and his many criticisms of Ed Husain. Not only will it not appeal to the ‘Muslim majority opinion’ of pro-Islamists, it will appeal to ‘the warmongering sections of the present government’. What the hell did Bunglawala mean by ‘the warmongering sections of the present government’? And even if such a thing existed, what direct relevance did they have to Ed Husain’s book about Islamism and the Islamists? Bunglawala simply does not say. Like his arch-Taqiyya rival, Tariq ‘two faces’ Ramadan (another Muslim who is too moderate for Bunglawala), Bunglawala hints at things quite a lot, but rarely states anything in full.

Bunglawalah on Wahhabism

Forget Bunglawala’s defence of Hizb ut-Tahrir, what about his support for Wahhabism? He is annoyed by the fact that many people use the word ‘Wahhabis’ as a ‘derogatory term’. He must either believe that it is not a derogatory term or that it is misused. In any case, if there is one thing which can prove to non-Muslims whether or not a Muslim is truly moderate, it is his or her position on Wahhabite Islam. And it seems that Bunglawala has positive feelings towards Wahhabism in this review. Not only that, I have also heard him eloquently defend the Saudi Wahhabite regime on YouTube. These disclosures, more than anything else about Bunglawala, show us where he is really coming from. We must always keep an eye on a Muslim who is at one and at peace with ‘the path of the salaf’.

Bunglawala even goes so far as to defend Wahhabism in strictly theological terms. He thinks that it is a good thing that Wahhabites are ‘careful to ensure that [their love for the Prophet] enhances and does not in any way detract from the sole worship due to the One God’.

In addition, does Bunglawala think that that Husain’s statement that the ‘Wahhabis are a deeply literalist sect’ is false? He certainly seems to be at odds with it.

Conclusion: Keep Silent About the Islamists!

It is clear that Bunglawala thinks that Ed Husain should never have written or published his book. He probably would have liked to have had it banned. But not so quick! Bunglawala knows that he must watch his words - just in case anyone comes to the outlandish conclusion that he too is, well, an extreme Islamist in Government-friendly sheep’s (i.e., MCB’s) clothing. What does he say instead of ‘ban it’? He says that Ed Husain shouldn’t have ‘washed [his] dirty linen in public’. So the doings and sayings of Hizb ut-Tahrir, and other Islamic extremists, are dirty linen to Bunglawala? That is, they are Muslim - or Islamic - dirty linen that should be kept between Muslims and not exposed to the ‘dreaded’ kafir.

Plastic Mosques in the North Yorks Moors

2010-04-14T10:41:00.000-07:00

Just the other day a rumour was doing the rounds, within Muslim circles, that the British army was shooting at replica mosques during its practice sessions. Or at least this is what was reported to a Muslim group in Bradford. The group swiftly complained that ‘the features on Bellerby firing range at Catterick Garrison in North Yorkshire’ looked like mosques and should be dismantled immediately.

How the hell did this snippet of misinformation travel all the way down to the Islamic Republic of Bradford?

In any case, this should give the Islamists of Bradford and beyond more fuel for the jihad. That is, Muslims simply can’t survive without the latest ‘offence’ or ‘insult’ against Islam. It’s called victimhood. It is ever-present and ubiquitous. It is what unites most Muslims (along with anti-Semitism). More than that, defence against insult or offence is the best form of attack for many Muslims. When Muslims are insulted or offended, very soon after there are riots, killings and bombings. Not only that, governments tend to bend over backwards, legally and in other ways, to guarantee to their Muslim voters that such things will never happen again. Think here about the widespread bits of legislation which were brought into being after the Bradford Muslim riots. And the Muslim Council of Britain was formed by the Government and Islamists largely in response to the Satanic Verses riots and other overreactions to ‘insult and ‘offence’.

Are these offended or insulted Muslims psychotic or something? No? Then why are they so easily offended and insulted? Why are they always so angry? It is because Islam is an eggshell? An eggshell religion needs to be protected in every which way. Protected by jihad or by government legislation against ‘hate speech’.

Islam has lasted for so long because of these overreactions to all and every criticism – or ‘offence’ or ‘insult’. Criticism of Islam was never allowed within the Islamic world. That’s why it survived. Death for ‘apostasy’ also helped it survive and spread. Even train spotting would survive and prosper if all criticism - or ‘insults’ - were declared illegal. Train spotting would also survive if becoming an ex-train spotter resulted in one’s head being chopped off.

And why shouldn’t the army replicate mosques? These are the places in which many Taliban hide. They also sometimes use mosques as bases for military action and bombings. In fact the Taliban does the same as Hamas. In Hamas’s case, it too hides in - and fires from - mosques, as well as from schools and other civilian areas. And judging by what the Turkish PM said recently, it is no surprise that mosques are used for such things. Indeed we already know that many, many mosques encourage jihad. The PM of Turkey recently said that ‘mosques are our weapons’. Perhaps he meant this literally as well as metaphorically.

In any case, if the British army wants to replicate the reality of Afghanistan it should also have women walking around with horribly disfigured faces - the victims of acid attacks for not wearing the burka or for looking at ‘non-Islamic books’ (most Afghan women can’t read). Actually, such scares will usually be covered by the burka.

The reality is that Muslims do far worse than replicate churches. Forget about replica mosques, Muslims in Afghanistan and Iraq blow mosques up. They blow Sunni mosques up if they are Shia. And they blow Shia mosques up if they are Sunni. So let’s get things in perspective here. Let’s us hear just one example of British Muslim anger at Muslim-on-Muslim mosque bombings or Taliban acid throwing instead. But of course we won’t. Muslim-on-infidel violence is OK. Even Muslim-on-Muslim violence is OK. However, infidel-on-Muslim violence is most certainly not OK. Isn’t Islamic logic painfully simple?

George Galloway Defends Britain's Islamic Republic

2010-04-14T10:39:00.001-07:00

If there are over two million Muslims in the UK, and it is the duty of all Muslims to protect their faith from ‘insult’ and ‘offence’, then it is not a surprise that more than 1,000 viewers complained about the Channel 4 documentary on ‘Britain’s Islamic Republic’. In fact I am surprised there haven’t been more complaints than that. Of course many Muslims will have complained without having actually seen the documentary. After all, this is exactly what happened about the Satanic Verses and the Danish Cartoons. Most of the rioters and killers hadn’t actually read the Satanic Verses or seen the cartoons of Mohammed. Not only that, many Muslims would have still complained even if the documentary were completely truthful and factual. None of this matters when it comes to defending Islam - which is an absolute imperative for all Muslims. Galloway, the honorary Muslim and Arabophile, admitted he hadn’t seen the programme. That didn’t stop him from saying that it was ‘a dirty little programme’.

Is there a single non-Muslim and non-Trot who has even a second’s worth of time for this despicable little exhibitionist tyrant-lover? No one else outside his IslamoTrot tiny circle of friends takes him seriously anymore (if they ever did). He is an utter buffoon and an unashamed exhibitionist. He will say anything and do anything to get himself on TV. That’s why he pretends to believe in so many outrageous and absurd things – all before breakfast. It is only the absurd and the extreme which will guarantee him a slot on TV and keep his tacky little Respect career afloat. Aren’t his supporters not even a tiny bit embarrassed by this master-fool? Unless all of his supporters are deranged IslamoTrots. And nothing is too foolish and absurd for them. They thrive off such things.

So it is not a surprise that a tyrant-lover like Galloway is trying his very best to stop, completely, all and any criticism of Islam and Muslims. If the Islamists see him doing such things, he will be rewarded, both financially and politically. And he has always made a fast buck out of supporting killers and lunatics, hasn’t he?

Barack Obama: 'There is no such thing as Islamic terrorism'

2010-04-14T10:36:00.001-07:00

Islam and terrorism are not linked. That’s official. Islamism or militant Islam and terrorism are not linked either. There is absolutely no connection whatsoever between Islam, in any of its forms, and terrorism. The only thing that is linked to terrorism are various ‘death cults’ or ‘sects’. This is the truth according to Barack Obama. This man has ordered a revision of America’s National Security Strategy so as to erase all possible connections between Islam and terrorism. Between Islam and anything violent.

This is thought control. It all about words, not realities or actions.

Specifically, the phrases ‘Islami radicalism’ will be erased from American governmental discourse. And if the words no longer exist, then the realities don’t exist either. At least not according to the post-modern logic of the American state.

Apparently it was George W. Bush who got it all wrong. He made the illogical and Islamophobic conclusion that Islam and terrorism are indeed intertwined. Actually not quite that. He rightly concluded that ‘militant Islam’ and terrorism are intertwined. More specifically, a Bush-era document described the war against terrorists as

“the struggle against militant Islamic radicalism … the great ideological conflict of the early years of the 21st century.”

After all, didn’t he also think pure and good Islam was a pretty decent thing?

Then the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) got in on the act. And when it does so, which is quite often, it usually gets what it wants from the US Government.

Clearly such a disuniting of Islam and terrorism pleased CAIR very much. It said that it would

‘welcome this change in language as another step toward respectful and effective outreach to Muslims at home and abroad’.

Well I never! Muslims being jubilant over the effective denial of any Islam-terrorism connection? You wouldn’t expect anything else. Now Muslims can carry out their jihadist acts without anyone seeing the deep connections between Islam and violence. Or at least they won’t be able to use the phrase ‘Islamic terrorism’ or ‘Islamist terrorism’ if they work for the US Government. Who knows, perhaps Islamic terrorism will magically disappear if such a thing is never spoken of, or even thought about, in those words.

CAIR thinks that phrases like ‘Islamic terrorism’ are ‘loaded’. That is, it is wrong and quite simply Islamophobic to use phrases like ‘Islamist terrorism’. Let’s not mess about here. It is wrong and Islamophobic to even think that there is even a slight hint of a connection between Islam and terrorism or violence generally.

Yet Islamic terrorism and violence exists. It exists on a massive and everyday scale. So what does CAIR, and therefore Barack Obama, want to do about this very inconvenient and logical connection between Islam and violence? They want to change the words we use to describe Islamic terrorism by keeping the ‘terrorism’ part and erasing the ‘Islamist’. Surely that will change reality too, not just the words we use and the thoughts we think. Or so CAIR and the US Government think.

Specifically, they want to keep the ‘Words that Work’ and get rid of the ‘Words that don’t’. That is how the US National Counter-Terrorism Centre put it. “'Islamist terrorism’” does ‘not work’. "'Death-cult terrorism”’ or ‘”evil terrorism”’, yes, ‘does work’. Why is that? Well, it can in no way stop Islamist terrorism. It may make the lives of American Muslims a whole lot easier. The ‘moderate’ Muslims will not feel the need to defend their religion any more. The terrorists will find it a whole lot easier to do what they do if Government infidels are not allowed to look towards Islam, and the teachers and teachings of Islam, to help them fight Islamist terrorism.

Not even al-Qaeda can now be called ‘Islamic’ or ‘Muslim’. It will come as a surprise to Osama bin Laden that he is not a Muslim and that he does not control an Islamic terrorist network. Indeed this is a surprise to me, as it will be to the millions of non-Muslims who do see a strong connection between Islam and violence.

More specifically, CAIR and the US Government are claiming that these naughty and Islamophobic phrases ‘unintentionally legitimise’ terrorist groups. That is, by seeing these organisations as Islamic, or as aspects of Islam (even small aspects), is to make them seem more acceptable and, well, Islamic than they really are.

But what if there is a connection between Islam, or only parts thereof, and violence? What if Osama bin Laden is a Muslim. Full stop? What if he is a good Muslim who is actually truer to his religion than many other Muslims, including CAIR and the ‘moderates’. That’s if CAIR and the Muslim moderates are genuinely against Islamic terrorism or terrorism in the name of Islam. Alternatively, CAIR’s suggestions may have been offered to make life not only easier for moderate Muslims, but for the Islamic terrorists themselves. If the terrorists and their acts cannot be spoken of as what they truly are, then they case to exist qua Islamic terrorists. And if Islamic terrorism ceases to exist qua Islamic terrorism, then the terrorists will be far harder to defeat. Islamic terror will thus get worse, not better.

All this is no surprise if one bears in mind Obama’s speech at Cairo University in Egypt in June 2009. In that speech he told Egyptian Muslims that the US did not fear or hate the Muslim world. And to prove this he promised to bend over backwards - as far as is humanly possible. He promised to rewrite the English language and thus retune the infidels’ thoughts about Islam and terrorism. Could any Muslim ask for more?

Let’s take the ‘Guide for Counter-Terrorism Communication’ in more detail. This document seeks to ‘avoid labelling everything “'Muslim'". Thus the US Government can longer label anything ‘Muslim’. Or at least not acts of terrorism and other acts of jihadist violence. This is because Obama wants to get rid of the mindset which believes that it is the case today of 'the US vs Islam’. What if it is largely a case of Islam versus the US and the rest of the non-Muslim world? What if it is the case that millions upon millions of Muslims believe in jihad, even if they don’t carry it out themselves? Not all Muslim believers in jihad and terrorism are actually active in either jihad or terrorism. Not every Nazi loaded the cattle trucks with Jews, fought on the Russian front or joined the Gestapo. Still they supported these things, either directly or indirectly.

This is a chicken-or-egg scenario. The aforesaid document says that when we use the naughty words which connect Islam with terrorism this will result in ‘a large percentage of the world’s population’ becoming the victims of policy and hurtful words. This in turn will result in our ‘unintentionally alienating them’. That ‘is not a judicious move’.

What if it is actually the other way around? That is:

i) National legislation and government actions alienate Muslims because it is Muslims, and their religion, who and which are largely responsible for most contemporary acts of terrorism.

Barack has got this the wrong way around. He thinks that

ii) National legislations and government actions, up until now, have alienated Muslims and have thus contributed to the rise of terrorism and Muslim violence generally.

Why would the US Government have focused upon - and thus alienated - Muslims if it had not made the obvious connections between Islam/Muslims and terrorism? Of course there is a Leftist and an Islamist alternative to this. The US Government focused upon, and thus alienated, Muslims quite simply because of its ‘Islamophobia’ and/or its ‘racism’. But again we can ask: Where did that ‘Islamophobia’ came from? It came from Islamist terrorism. It did not create Islamist terrorism. Most people don’t fear that which is not dangerous. The possibility of Islamic terrorism is ever-present. Thus we have the fear of Muslims and Islam. We have Islamophobia.

The US will never understand Al Qaeda and Islamic violence if it really believes it own Muslim-friendly rhetoric. It will be forever barking up the wrong tree. Barack makes the absurd and dangerous conclusion, or at least US officials do, that Al-Qaeda ‘exploits religious sentiments and tries to use religion to justify its actions’. This is similar to the mistakes governments made about the ‘ridiculous’ Hitler and his ‘silly brown shirts’. It is also parallel to the grave mistakes UK ministers and officials made about a whole host of potential terrorists and Islamists. Civil servants and officials in the UK once saw these people as simple 'buffoons' and 'clowns' and thus concluded that they were no real threat to Britain. Some civil servants still think this way. Thus the ‘misfits’ and ‘clowns’ were quite simply ignored. As long as they didn’t plant their bombs in England, all was fine. And then came 9/11. Madrid. Bali. And then London.

Barack, instead of seeing Al Qaeda as being made up of clowns or buffoons, sees it as being made of ‘criminals’ instead. How does that work? Is it being suggested that Al-Qaeda is making money from their operations and propaganda? If not, what other kinds of criminality is being hinted at here? One cannot say ‘the exportation of heroin’ because the funds gained from this are invested into the jihad against the West. Thus we are back to where we started – Islamic jihad and Islamic violence generally.

What about just calling Al Qaeda ‘terrorists’. Full stop? But terrorists must terrorise for reasons, principles or beliefs. No one is just a terrorist simpliciter. Thus, as with the 'criminals' earlier, we are back to the starting point again. Al Qaeda members aren’t terrorists simply because they are terrorists. They are terrorists in the name of Allah and Islam. Even if we, and indeed Muslims, think that terror in the name of Allah and Islam is wrong or a misinterpretation of that religion, it is still the case that Al Qaeda does not think it is theologically or Islamically wrong in doing what it does. Why pretend that they are not Muslims just because we think they are theologically in the wrong or that such an acceptance of their politico-theology would work against moderate Muslims at home? Al Qaeda is made up of Muslims and commit acts of Islamic terrorism no matter what we think of their theology, etc. So even if we accept that there exists a non-violent Islam, this need not mean that we are given a good reason to claim that Al Qaeda members ‘are not really Muslims’ and that what they do ‘is not really Islamic’.

As it is, million of people do believe that there is such a thing as Islamic violence and that Al Qaeda is not really distorting Islam at all. No word games from Barack Obama and others will change this.

Bunglawala, the Islamist, Against Ed Husain, the ‘Neo-Con Poster Boy’

2010-03-28T04:15:00.000-07:00

(Ed Husain)

(Inayat Bunglawala)

Islamic Totalism and Literalism

2010-03-24T03:59:00.000-07:00

Apart from Koranic literalism, there is the all-encompassing nature of Islam that is to some extent separate from its literalism. Islam informs all life. At least if one is a good Muslim (unlike tribal or nominal Muslim), Islam must inform every aspect of one’s life. That means everything. We are talking about the private as well as the public. We are taking about law and politics as well as community and culture. As one commentator put it (to paraphrase): ‘Islam follows you into the bathroom; and then into the bedroom.’ It is also important to realise that this is not an outsider’s or a non-Muslim’s view of Islam. What has just been said, every Muslim would, and should, agree to. Indeed many Muslims often say that Islam is a ‘total religion’ themselves. It is precisely this totalism that Muslims think distinguishes Islam from so many, or all, other religions.

Koranic literalism is partly responsible for this because there are, after all, roughly 80,000 words in the Koran to take literally. Thus it is hardly surprising that Islam pervades every aspect of life, especially if we also consider that hadiths, Islamic jurisprudence, etc. which have been piled on top of the originating Koran. Let’s not mess about here. Many Muslims, not just members of Hizb ut-Tahrir, Islam4UK, the Muslim Brotherhood, etc., laugh about how weak, undemanding and impotent Christianity is today. And if they think that of Christianity generally, what would they think about the special case of a Church of England which has effectively ‘erased God from the equation’ and who’s only true faith is Inter-Faith?

Now we must say that it is Koranic literalism, along with Islamic totalism, that makes the ‘extremist’ Muslims the extremists that they are. To put it simply. The Islamists, fundamentalists and the militants have got it right and the moderates, or modernisers, have got it wrong. Or at least it is more likely to be the case that the former have got it right, even if not in every respect. If someone is a nominal Muslim, or a tribal Muslim, it is not surprising that they have got much of Islam wrong – perhaps all of it. If they weren’t only tribal or nominal Muslims, then moderate Muslims would become Islamists or militants over night. It is precisely because of the rejection of Koranic literalism and totalism that the Anila Baigs of this world are nice or moderate. They are nice or moderate precisely because they aren’t Koranic literalists; or because they do not accept the totality of Islam (or Islam’s totalist demands). What’s more, I would bet that the Muslim nice-ies or moderates know that they would not stand a chance, theologically, against the average Islamist or militant. And because of this, you can bet that there must be very few, if any at all, face to face debates (on the true nature of Islam) between moderates and Islamists. Any debates which do occur will almost always be ones which moderate Muslims want the non-Muslim world to see (so it knows that there is a debate going on between fundamentalists and moderate Muslims). Outside the TV studio or the public forum, I would guess that there are very few genuine debates between the Islamists and the moderates. If there are, the Islamists will almost invariably win such debates. It is probably also the case that most moderate Muslims know this too. There is simply not enough material, argumentation and analysis to help moderate Muslims outwit the Islamists. There is not enough material to defend the moderate Islam cause. Quite simply, there couldn’t be that much moderate material to use or work upon. Most examples of Islamic or Muslim moderation which I have seen have been very poor in terms of the defences of moderate Islam. The examples of Ed Hussein and Ziauddin Sardar clearly show this. They are very good on the history of moderate Islam and on the Islamists they have experienced in their lives. But when it comes to clear analytic arguments in favour of moderate Islam, they are on very thin ground. In any case, in most of these example there is very little argument for moderate Islam in the first place. It is not even the case that the arguments don’t work. Most of the stuff in Sardar and Hussein, again, is mere anecdote or small examples from history which show that Islamic moderation sometimes won the day in some parts of the Islamic world. In any case, doesn’t it just prove how bad the moderate-Islam case is when moderate Muslims have to go all the way back to the 14th century (or earlier) in order to show non-Muslims that Islam is moderate (as is also is the case with ‘Islamic science’). This would be like relying exclusively on Roger Bacon or Aquinas to prove how scientific the West is or how moderate Christianity is. Even the golden examples of the ‘Islamic golden age’ were often persecuted, killed, imprisoned, or their books were burned. This is true if all the greats, including Avicenna, Averroes, Ibn Sina and Al-Farabi. So it is odd that Tariq Ramadan, for example, should think he has scored a point against anti-Islamists by bringing in the case of Averroes, a he does (‘Have you even heard of Averroes?’ he asked one non-Muslim critic.) The thing that is worth mentioning, and Ramadan should have also added, is that Averroes, and many other great ‘Muslim philosophers’, did not have a big effect on Islamic civilisation after the 14th century or so. They were basically forgotten. They are known to us because they were made known to the West and often by non-Muslims. So just as Muslims tell us, truthfully, that Muslims, or ‘Islamic civilisation’, passed on to Europe the great scientific and philosophical works of the Greeks and Romans, so Western non-Muslims passed on Averroes and Co. to Europeans.

Respect Watch (1) Salma Yaqoob on the War in Afghanistan

2010-03-20T08:58:00.000-07:00

Contents:
i) Introduction: Good and Bad Wars
ii) Afghanistan: Another ‘Occupation’?
iii) Al Qaeda is Not a Threat!
iv) The Muslim and the Non-Muslim Dead
v) Respect’s Very Own Utopia

Introduction: Good and Bad Wars

The undertext of what Respect and Salma Yaqoob say is that they are against all wars. Well, not all wars. They frequently tell us that Hamas and Hezbolloah are ‘freedom fighters’ and ‘liberation movements’ who are fighting a war against ‘Zionist oppression’ and ‘Zionist imperialism’. Thus Respect is for the war against Israel. It doesn’t speak out that much about any of the other wars and conflicts which are occurring in the world today either. That is because it is only against the wars fought by the US, the UK and perhaps also European countries. More specifically, it is against wars fought by ‘capitalists’ or ‘imperialist powers’. Again, this means that there is not much criticism of the wars in Darfur/southern Sundan, Somalia and other African countries. No. These are not ‘capitalist wars’ or ‘imperialist wars’. They are often wars fought be Muslims – sometimes against fellow Muslims. That is why the Yaqoobins keep shut about them. And any wars that China, Cuba, Veneuazala and even North Korea engage in would never have an ‘anti-war colition’ formed against them. So Respect is far from being the pacifist party it hints at being (but, of course, would never state).

Afghanistan: Another 'Occupation'?

Yaqoob talks about ‘the occupation’ of Afghanistan by Western troops. She deliberately uses that term to bring the One and Only Occupation – ‘the Occupation’… of the West Bank and Gaza by Israel - to people’s minds. She is not, of course, talking about the occupation of Tibet by China; the occupation of Kurdistan by Muslim Turkey, Muslim Iran and Muslim Iraq; the occupation of southern Sudan by the jihadist Janjaweed. She is not even talking about the many non-Afghanistani jihadists, mainly Arabs, who have occupied Afghanistan since the 1980s and after. No. She is only talking about white or kafir occupiers. The ‘imperialists’, or ‘colonialists’, or ‘Zionists’. All the ‘ists you read about in leftist student publications (except for jihad-ists).

What has the British Government got to gain from its involvement in Afghanistan? If we are not there to help the Afghans and destroy terrorist bases, then why are we there, Yaqoob? Of course she may well know. But she doesn’t have the decency to tell us. Not in this article or any others. I mean it may be all ‘about oil’ or ‘realpolitik with Pakistan’. So why doesn’t Yaqoob say that? (Perhaps she does say that to her close friends or on some obscure Trot or Islamist site.) She didn’t tell the audience on Question Time ‘what the Government really has to gain’ from Afghanistan. No. Either she hasn’t thought about this or she knows that such outright honesty and cynicism about the war would cause her political suicide, at least in mainstream politics. Thus she wouldn’t be photographed any more. She wouldn’t want that. In that respect, she is very much like her good friend, the exhibitionistic tyrant-lover, George Galloway.

Al-Qaeda is Not a Threat!

Yaqoob does say, however, that this war is ‘based on lies’. But yet again she doesn’t have the decency to tell us what these lies actually are. So let us rely here on Dr. Mohammed Naseem of the Central Mosque of Birmingham, who is a friend of Yaqoob’s. (She is also a media representative/spokeswoman for Birmingham Central Mosque.) One Government ‘lie’ which Naseem mentions is that al Qaeda ‘is a threat’. Why does Naseem think al Qaeda is not a threat? He gives two mind-numbing reasons:

1) Firstly, Naseem tells us that Osama bin Laden, in his isolated cave in Afghanistan, will have no electricity. Therefore he could not, even if he wanted to, control a global terrorist network. Naseem says that without electricity bin Laden will not be ‘able to control a world wide organisation’. People must be ‘extremely naïve’ to believe ‘that Al-Qaeda is a threat to the world’.
2) Secondly, al-Qaeda is also not the threat that it is presented to be (by the platonic Media - with a capital ‘M’) because it has ‘never approached’ Naseem himself or any other Muslim he knows.

I can therefore conclude that one of the Government’s ‘lies’ which Yaqoob mentions, but does not - and could not - state, is that Al-Qaeda is a threat.

What would ‘make us safe’ then, Yaqoob? She tells us that the Government is lying about the situation in Afghanistan. She does not tell us what those lies are. She says the war in Afghanistan ‘will not make us safe’. She does not tell us what would make us safe. In these empty statements Yaqoob is displaying something that strongly characterises IslamoTrots and Trots nowadays. And that is that they are against everything but not strongly for anything. They have no grown-up policies of their own. Thus all the IslamoTrots can do is criticise not only the Government, but everything that isn’t leftist or Islamist enough for them.

The Muslim and the Non-Muslim Dead

Yaqoob says that ‘with the parades in Wootton Bassett we congratulate ourselves that we’re so civilised that no loss goes unmourned’. Well, talk about a critical and sarcastic statement! Talk about a cynical statement. What, exactly, is she saying here? She is calling the British people hypocrites. That is, we are ‘so civilised that no loss goes unmourned’. And yet ‘if you’re Afghan, no one even counts your death’. This accusation of hypocrisy isn’t aimed at the British Government; which is something Yaqoob would probably claim. It was ordinary British people who attended the ‘parades in Wootton Bassett’, not the Government.

Yaqoob doesn’t genuinely mourn Afghan deaths either. She uses Afghan deaths as political capital. She makes use, politically, of Afghan deaths.

And have you ever noticed that it is only the Muslim dead she cries about? Actually, not even the Muslim dead who have been the victims of other Muslims (as in Iraq). No. Only the Muslim dead who have been victims of Western or Israeli military forces. These facts alone show us that her tears for the dead only flow for selected peoples – Muslims killed by non-Muslims (as in Afghanistan and Palestine); not even Muslims killed by Muslims. In any case, when Muslims kill Muslims the IslamoTrots always blame the West for this too. So even when Muslims kill Muslims the Islamists and Islamo-Trots actually believe that it is non-Muslims who are ultimately responsible for Muslim-on-Muslim conflict and death. The little children who are the Arabs and the Muslims of the world get off scot-free because the white middle-class IslamoTrots, who live in the West, think that non-European and Arab Muslims are too childlike, morally and politically, to be blamed for anything. Thus we Westerners, to IslamoTrot minds, are the bad parents of every piece of shit that happens in the Arab and the Muslim world. Isn’t this what Edward Said taught the students and leftists of American and Europe? Of course all this is racist and relativist. It cannot even be dignified by the term ‘inverted racism’.

Respect’s Very Own Utopia

Yaqoob is very keen on absolute statements such as ‘there’s absolutely no acknowledgement of Afghan people’s suffering’ or that the war in Afghanistan is ‘based on lies’. All IslamoTrots speak in this Dave Spart kind-a-way. Everything has to be extreme. Their words have to be absolute. Their opposition to ‘the Government’, ‘the Press’, ‘the Zionists’, ‘the Islamophobes’, ‘the racists’, has to be absolute. Only absolute statements fire up absolutists like the IslamoTrots her support Respect. No shades of grey are ever allowed. No complications.

Yaqoob gives the impression that

i) Respect is against all wars.
ii) That she wouldn’t be like any other parliamentary politician if she had real power.
iii) That Respect is different from all established parties.
iv) That Respect would invest like no other party.
v) That Respect would tell the truth like no other party.
vi) That Respect would serve ‘the people’ like no other party.
vi) That Respect would spend on health and education like no other party has ever done.

Thus Respect makes the sort of promises that the German Nazi Party or the Russian Bolshevik Party made. That tacit promise of a Utopia that is never spoken of as ‘a Utopia’. (Marxists and Trots think that only ‘Utopians’ speak of Utopia.) The promise of Utopia is always there but it is hidden. It is implied. It is never spelled out because any honest and truthful spelling out would show Respect to be yet another party which lies and distorts. Thus it would be seen as the extreme IslamoTrot party that it really is.

Another couple of absolutist statements. She says that Afghan deaths are ‘not on anybody’s radar’. On no one’s radar? Well, for a start, they are on Yaqoob’s own radar. They are also of the radars of many Muslims. They are on the radar of Respect. On the radar of the Stop the War Coalition. On the Guardian’s radar. The New Statesman’s. And on the radars of numerous British academics. Etc.

Yaqoob should also retune her TV because I have heard lots of accounts of non-military Afghan deaths. On the BBC. On the Channel Four News. On the ITV. In the Guardian. In the Independent. In the New Statesman. Of course what Yaqoob really means is that her issues and her ideological positions are not broadcast enough. But that’s what every politician cries! And we know that the IslamoTrots would love to control the airwaves and the entirety of the press. They are such democrats at heart.

What Yaqoob really means by ‘Afghan deaths are not on the radar’ is that they are not on the radar of all those she thinks of as being right wing, or ‘neo-liberal’, and so on. Even in these cases I would wager that there are lots of right wingers or whatevers who know full well about the civilian deaths in Afghanistan.

In addition, what Yaqoob also means is that the complete pulling out of Afghanistan is not on everybody’s radar. Not every person has radar that is ideologically identical to Respect’s own. In any case, there are certain conflicts which are not on Yaqoob’s radar either. Is the plight of the southern Sudanese Christians and animists on Respect’s radar? What about the persecution of Copts in Egypt and of Christians in Pakistan, are they on Yaqoob or Respect’s radar?

There are many other Yaqoobin absolute statements. Take her claim that with British MPs there is ‘absolutely no acknowledgement of Afghan people’s suffering’. Well, this is quite simply untrue. That doesn’t matter to her because only the complete rejection of all British politicians, and even the supporters of the British political parties, can justify such Yaqoobin absolutes. These absolute statements are what are required by the absolutist and extremist political party - Respect. Yaqoob has to sell her supporters absolute and extreme facts about all governments and parties because an extremist and absolutist party such as Respect requires such absolute and extreme statements.

*) Salma Yaqoob, Birmingham Respect, ‘The real debate we should have about Afghanistan’, January 5th, 2010, http://birminghamrespect.wordpress.com/category/articles/

Mosque Watch (1): Dr. Mohammad Naseem at Birmingham Central Mosque

2010-03-16T04:38:00.000-07:00

*) From ‘The Legacy of September 11th’, by Dr. Mohammad Naseem, the Dawn, Issue No. 167 (the Newsletter of Birmingham Central Mosque) - http://www.centralmosque.org.uk/PDF-downloads/200409-The%20Legacy%20of%20September%2011th.pdf

Contents:
i) Introduction

ii) Muslims are Not Sorry For 9/11

iii) So Who Did Done It?

iv) Engagement With Muslims?

Introduction

Dr. Mohammad Naseem is quite a well known Muslim in England. He is the chairman of Birmingham Central Mosque and the home affairs spokesman for the Islamic Party of Britain. (Dr. Naseem’s being a member of an ‘Islamic' political party tells you all you need to know about him.) In addition, Naseem stood as a candidate for Respect in 2005 and since that time has been actively involved in the Stop the War Coalition.

Naseem once said that Tony Blair was ‘like Hitler’ and that the British state was a ‘police state’. Tony Blair was like Hitler because he took measures to find Islamic terrorists and stop Islamic terrorism. The British state was a ‘police state’ because it took measures to find Islamic terrorists and stop Islamic terrorism. More recently, and closer to home, Naseem encouraged young Muslim yobs to ‘vent their feelings’ at an English Defence League demonstration in Birmingham last year.

Muslims are Not Sorry For 9/11

It is strange that a piece entitled ‘The Legacy of September 11th’ should include not a single word of Muslim culpability. Neither does it contain a single word which even attempts to distance 'moderate' Muslims from the 9/11 terrorists. Well, it would be hard to distance yourself from the Muslim terrorists who didn’t, in fact, carry out 9/11. There is simply no need for Muslims, or Dr. Naseem himself, to say sorry or express regret. Muslims simply didn’t do it. Full stop. There is no need for any distancing, or any sorrow, or any regret. Instead it is the American state, or Europe, or Israel, which should be sorry. It, or they, did it.

Now we know that it was the Americans that did it, or Europe, or Israel, it should be no surprise to read Dr. Naseem expressing his shock about just ‘how far people with power would go to achieve their desired goal’. That goal was the creation of the ‘perception of an external threat’ in order to unite the US or Europe… Or to get the oil and gas from the former Soviet Union… Or to create a Greater Israel which would be controlled and run by the ‘Christian extremists’ who have ‘dreamt of Christ’s return after the establishment of an extended Israel’.

It is strange that a Muslim extremist like Dr. Naseem should deride ‘Christian extremists’ in this piece. You would think that Naseem would admire the extreme beliefs and actions of the American evangelicals. (I presume that it is the evangelicals that he is referring to.) Shouldn’t Naseem admire Christians who take their religion and their holy books seriously? Shouldn’t he admire those Christians who are prepared to fight to the death for Christianity and its political and geographical expansion? Except, of course, these are the wrong extremes. These are the wrong holy books. Naseem is talking about the wrong religion. Thus, since we are not talking about Islamic extremism; then of course Naseem is against every example of non-Islamic extremism. Islamic extremism; yes: Christian extremism; no.

So Who Did Done It?

According to Naseem, it wasn’t Muslim terrorists who carried out 9/11. (Naseem’s article is on 9/11, but I may as well tell you here and now that Naseem didn’t think that Muslims were responsible for the London bombings of 2005 either.) Firstly, Naseem claims that it was the American state that carried out the terrorist attacks. Naseem does not say that this is a fact. However, the whole purpose of this little piece is to say that it was the Americans themselves, or the Europeans, or the Israelis, and not Muslims, who were responsible for 9/11.

Why did the American state commit this atrocity on its own people? Naseem says that it was because it wanted to create ‘the perception of an external threat’. And what better way to do this than ‘through a terrorist outrage’ committed by Muslims? He cites various sources as proof, or evidence, that this was so.

Firstly Naseem states that this ‘external threat’ was primarily needed for ‘political union’. However, the first two passages he quotes are from Europe. One is from the European Commission of 1996 and the other is from Romano Prodi.

After citing these two passages, which are supposed to display the desire for ‘political union’ (within Europe, not America), Naseem then cites a passage which says, or hints at, that 9/11 was all about the gas and oil in the former Soviet Union. That is a sudden and somewhat unrelated shift of potential suspects if ever there was one.

Naseem then changes his mind yet again. This time he offers a kind of theological and historical reason for America’s act of self-terrorism. Naseem now hints at the possibility that America wants to create an ‘extended Israel’. All this is very vague. But his use of the words ‘cross Atlantic…. desire for control’ suggests that Naseem also thinks that Europe is in on this attempt to create a ‘greater Israel’. Thus Europe were also involved in 9/11.

Of course Dr. Naseem can’t be too explicit about all these things because he doesn’t want the media to get a hold of his mad conspiracy theories (there is more than one in his article). That doesn’t matter. His fellow Muslims, at Birmingham Central Mosque and elsewhere, will know exactly what he is really talking about. But to state these accusations explicitly would be an act of political suicide. It would go down very badly in terms of negative publicity, something which Dr. Naseem has already had his fair share of. That’s why this piece is so vague. He is being very careful not to be too explicit and too, well, Islamic. In other words, he is using the Lesser Taqiyya rather than the Greater Taqiyya. That is, Naseem hints and implies that his conspiracy theories are factual, rather than states that they are. There are no outright lies. These are sweet words of dissimulation.

If the Americans did it, or the Europeans, or the Israelis, this means that Muslims did not do it. Again, he uses hint and innuendo rather than statement to put his conspiracy theories across. He doesn’t out rightly say that the Muslims who flew the aeroplanes did not fly the planes on their own, instead he asks his Muslim readers to think about the feasibility of ‘a few unknowns who after 14 hours of flight training became so skilful that they could accomplish an aerial feat of such precision’. Naseem implied answer to this is simple. These Muslims couldn’t have done it, considering this dearth of expertise.

If these Muslims didn’t do it (or didn’t do it on their own), then why does Naseem then go on to hint (again) at the fact that these very same Muslims, the ones who didn’t do it, couldn’t have been controlled by al-Qaeda or Bin Laden anyway – even if they did do it. This is Naseem’s position now:

Those Muslim men didn’t do it. But if they did, they couldn’t have been controlled by al-Qaeda and bin Laden.

This is a little like another popular Muslim riposte:

Muslims didn’t commit 9/11. But if they did, then America had it coming and deserved it.

It is also like an older Muslim favourite, this time about the Jews:

Hitler didn’t kill six million Jews. But if he did, then the Jews deserved it.

Naseem tells us why bin Laden couldn’t have planned and then controlled the 9/11 attacks.

Bin Laden lives most of the time in a cave in Afghanistan. At least that’s what most of us believe. It is what Naseem believes as well. However, the difference is that most people (or most non-Muslims) think that bin Laden could control at least some global acts of terrorism from his cave. Naseem, on the contrary, thinks that this would be impossible. He says that the main problem for bin Laden will be his lack of electricity. Without electricity bin Laden would not be ‘able to control a world wide organisation’. (What about generators and other such things?)

So to recap. Dr. Naseem believes that Muslims did not carry out the 9/11 attacks. America, or Europe, or Israel, did. He then argues that even if these Muslims did do it (on their own), they couldn’t have been working for bin Laden because he has no electricity.

From this lack-of-electricity scenario, it is but a small step to state, or hint (again), that one must be ‘extremely naïve’ to believe ‘that Al-Qaeda is a threat to the world’. Apart from bin Laden’s lack of electricity, Naseem also believes that Al-Qaeda can’t be the threat infidels claim it to be because this group has ‘never approached’ Naseem himself or any other Muslim he knows. Not only that, Naseem and other Muslims had ‘never heard of ’ Al-Qaeda before 9/11.

Engagement With the Muslim Community?

There is a lot of talk, from Naseem and other Muslim leaders, about the need for the Government to fully engage with Muslims and Islamic organisations. This is strange. What kind of engagement could there be between Muslims and a Government which Naseem himself says ‘is not concerned with morality or principles’. That is not a reference to a particular political party, or to a particular Governmental institution, or to a particular policy. This is what Naseem thinks of the whole British state – from head to toe. Why would Muslims, or Naseem himself, what to engage or debate with a ‘political establishment [which] is not concerned with morality and principles’? Wouldn’t Naseem and other Muslims be contaminated by our immoral and unprincipled Government and state? (Remember here that Dr. Naseem is an actvist within the Islamic Party of Britain.)

Naseem thinks the British state is immoral and unprincipled because it is an infidel state and government. By Muslim definition, the Government simply must be unprincipled and immoral because it is without Islamic principles and without Islamic morality. It is the infidel status of the Government that really gets to Naseem. Thus, quite frankly, it must be the case that Dr. Naseem could never genuinely deal with any non-Muslim individual or institution, from the local council to the media. But he often does!

Muslim Non-Action ≠ Muslim Moderation

2010-03-15T03:45:00.000-07:00

Contents:
i) Active and Inactive Muslims
ii) Muslim Non-Action ≠ Muslim Moderation

Active and Inactive Muslims

What is the main reason for a Muslim, as a Muslim, or as someone who follows Islamic teachings and the Koran, being more fundamentalist than another person, whether a Christian or an atheist? It is this. Even a moderate Muslim, or a nice or moderate person who just happens also to be a Muslim, must believe that the Koran is the literal, everlasting and irrefutable word of the one and only true god, Allah. Think about that for a moment. Every single chapter, or paragraph, or sentence, or word, is the literal, everlasting and un-falsifiable word of the one true god, Allah. Even if a mountain can be made out of Koranic contexts, interpretations and translations, Koranic literalism is still an incredible thing. It is incredible thing that each and every single Muslim must believe absolutely. To not believe this is to not to be a Muslim. Simple as that. Even taking into account Koranic translations, contexts and interpretations, that Koranic literalism must be taken literally.

Now how can anyone who believes this be truly moderate? Perhaps a Muslim can be truly moderate to the extent that he or she does not take the command of Koranic literalism literally. Then she wouldn’t be a true Muslim. Perhaps instead she is moderate because she is only a nominal Muslim – just a Muslim in name or by tribe. That would be to say nothing about Islamic literalism, Islam and the Koran. It would be a judgment on a single person who just happens to be a Muslim –or who happens to be called a ‘Muslim’ (or be a Muslim only by tribe).

One way in which non-Muslims may distinguish moderate from immoderate Muslims is in terms of action. The moderate Muslim does not do anything which is too Islamic or too immoderate. The fundamentalist or Islamist does do things which are too Islamic and too immoderate. However, both the moderate and the fundamentalist believe exactly the same things about Islam, the Prophet and the Koran. The only difference is the extent of which they act on their faith. The fundamentalist acts on his faith in many immoderate ways. The moderate only goes to the mosque every now and again and spends the rest of his time at work or with his family. Again, both the moderate and the fundamentalist believe exactly the same things about Islam, the Koran and the Prophet. One frequently acts on his faith. The other rarely does so. Thus the moderate is moderate simply because he doesn’t act on his faith that much or he doesn’t act out his faith, as it were. That’s partly because at least some Muslims must spend nearly all of their time, say, driving taxis or teaching and the rest of the time with their families. Such Muslims do not have the time to act on their faith, never mind act immoderately or extremely.

Alternatively, a Muslim may be a fanatic qua his faith, but nice or moderate as a family man or as a pool partner. Osama bin Laden may be a nice man to have dinner with. (Indeed the Arabophile and Islamophile, Robert Fisk, once remarked on how gentle Osama bin Laden’s handshake was.)

Muslim Non-Action is Not Moderation

There is another way we can say that the differences between moderate Muslims and Islamists are often very superficial. For example, the extreme non-action, as it were, of the Muslim moderates is as bad as the actions of Muslim extremists. For example, not a single moderate Muslim, or moderate Muslim group, spoke out against the fatwa against Salman Rushdie. Indeed this was the time when moderate Muslims discovered fundamentalist or Islamist Islam. For a short time, even moderate Muslims became extremist Muslims.

Again, how many demos have we seen by Muslims against suicide bombings? Against terrorist attacks? Or against general Muslim intolerance? Individual Muslims might have spoken out. Perhaps that was something many of them felt that they had to do to hoodwink non-Muslims or to guarantee the continued expansion of Islam. It was precisely because they were individuals, speaking out against fatwas or terrorism, which meant that they could not find enough Muslims to fill a demonstration or sign a petition against Islamic extremism or terrorism. Neither do most Muslims, as individuals rather than Muslim leaders or spokesmen, need to sell themselves to the press or to non-Muslims. Thus they don’t feel the need to demonstrate against Islamic extremism, or terrorism, because they will not loose their jobs for not doing so, or they don’t need to convince non-Muslim newspapers and individuals of their moderation. That is not their job, as individual Muslims with no official Islamic station. Indeed the moderates who do not demonstrate or sign petitions may not be against the terrorists or the Islamists in the first place!

This leads us back to the earlier point that those Muslims who do not demonstrate or speak out may be moderate only in the sense of their Islamic non-action. Their only point of difference with the Islamists is in the domain of action. The moderates may not preach, bomb, or bring about a ‘spontaneous’ Intifada, but they often share the same theological and political beliefs as the Muslims who do. The moderates are moderate simply because they don’t act. They don’t do Islamic things; certainly they do not plant bombs or speak out against various examples of ‘corrupt infidel behaviour’. In terms of belief and theology, many moderates may be the same as the militants. It is just the case that their Islamic literalism, or militancy (say, vis-à-vis Palestine), does not cause them to act on the Islamic issues of the day. They are either too busy or they are only tribal (or nominal) Muslims.

Nice or Moderate Muslims ≠ Nice or Moderate Islam

2010-03-14T10:05:00.000-07:00

Can there be moderate Muslims when their faith, Islam, is immoderate? Can you have moderate Muslims when Islam itself is fundamentalist? Were there moderate Nazis or moderate Stalinists? Absolutely not. There were, of course, many people who were called Nazis and Stalinists who were moderate. They were moderate people who just happened to be Nazis or Stalinists. As/qua Nazis or Stalinists, they could not be moderate. They could escape this by being nominal Nazis or Stalinists only. Alternatively, perhaps they were only 34% Nazis or Stalinists, if such a thing can be quantified at all. If they were 100% Nazis or Stalinists, then there would have been no possibility of calling them ‘moderate’. Even in this case, perhaps they were moderate when they got home to their families, etc. This would not have been Nazi or Stalinist moderation. It would have been an example of someone who just happened to be a Nazi or Stalinist being moderate.

The same is true of Muslims and Islam. As Muslims it is the case that Muslims cannot be moderate. Muslims can escape this by being nominal Muslims. Alternatively, perhaps they are only 34% Muslim, if such a thing can be quantified at all. If they were 100% Muslim, or 100% Islamic, then there would be no possibility of their being moderate. Even in this case perhaps they are moderate when they get home from the mosque, or meeting, or riot, or conflict, and attend to their families and friends. This would not be Muslim or Islamic moderation. It would be an example of someone who just happened to be a Muslim being moderate.

So when the Sun's Anila Baig, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, the Muslim characters in EastEnders, etc. are nice or moderate, this is not necessarily a case of their being nice and moderate qua their being Muslim. Of course they are Muslims and they are nice or moderate. But it is not Islam or the Koran itself that is making them moderate or nice. These people are nice or moderate anyway. Even if a nice or moderate Muslim can cite passages in the Koran, etc. that he or she says have made him or her nice or moderate, this says more about him or her than it does about the passages in the Koran. Thus there may not be a single nice or moderate passage in the Koran. Any niceness or moderation that is extracted from the Koran, by these nice or moderate Muslims, is just a case of a nice or moderate person interpreting the Koran nicely or moderately. In any case, can a few nice or moderate passages in the Koran really sustain a lifetime’s worth of niceness or moderation? Surely nice or moderate Muslims need more than a handful of Koranic passages to sustain themselves in their niceness or moderation.

Niceness Again

Many of the Muslims who are genuinely against militancy and terrorism are not so because of their Islamic beliefs but because they are naturally nice or moderate Muslims. That niceness or moderation is a point for them as individuals who happen to be Muslim, not for them as followers of Islam or the Koran.

This is like the ‘Islamic science’ case. During the early Middle Ages there were indeed many great scientists in Islamic countries. But that was all in spite - not because - of Islam or the Koran. They were scientists who just happened to be Muslims as well, just as in our example of nice and moderate Muslims that they are moderate or nice Muslims in spite of Islam, not because of it. Their niceness or intrinsic moderation tells us about them as individuals, and little or nothing about Islam or the Koran itself.

What we say about ‘Islamic science’, or nice or moderate Muslims, can be taken to its conclusion. Say that a person is a Quaker. Does he fix the cooker qua Quaker or does he fit the cooker qua someone who just happens to be a Quaker? The same is true of Muslim scientists and nice or moderate Muslims. We are learning about individual Muslim scientists not about Islam or the Koran. We are also learning about Muslims who happen to be nice or moderate. We are learning little, or nothing, about Islam or the Koran. Why should science, or the states of being nice or moderate, be singled out as the concrete instantiations, as it were, of Islam or the Koran? What is true of a Muslim cooker fixer is also true of nice or moderate Muslims. Fixing cookers, being nice or moderate, and science, have nothing to do with Islam or the Koran. What they are to do with is individual scientists who happen to be Muslim or nice or moderate persons who happen to be Muslims.

So just as it is the case that cooker fixing, or even camel training, have nothing to do with Islam or the Koran, so we can say that science, when practised by a Muslim, has nothing to do with Islam or the Koran. Even the oft-quoted passage in the Koran about ‘searching out knowledge as far as China’ does not lead directly, or even indirectly, to science and knowledge. Not only that, they are exclusively about religious knowledge anyway. It would be silly to say that there is even a smidgen or genuine science or even philosophy in the Koran. It may also be the case that the psychological traits of niceness or moderation can be extracted from the Koran or Islam. Even if there were a couple of passages that do order moderation, it may well be the case that nice or moderate Muslims don’t get their moderation from the Koran itself but from their own genetic or psychological niceness or moderation. Thus a nice or moderate Muslim may simply interpret a passage which many other Muslims see as X, but he or she may see it as Y. Her interpretations and readings of the nice or moderate passages in the Koran come from her, not from the Koran. Even if there are the odd few passages of niceness or moderation, or the encouraging of niceness or moderation in this case, there simply cannot be enough to sustain an individual Muslim’s niceness or moderation. Above all, the few passages of niceness or moderation are not argumentative anyway. They could not sustain moderation or niceness on their own because they are so intellectually light and too few and far between.

Why Many Muslims Decide to be Moderate

2010-03-10T04:19:00.000-08:00

Contents:
i) Muslim Groups and Individuals Within a Non-Muslim State
ii) Islamic/Muslim States Within a Non-Muslim World

Muslim Groups and Individuals within a Non-Muslim State

Much is made of how ‘moderate’ Muslims are in the UK and how many moderate Muslims there are. Muslims constitute a minority in the UK. The population of the UK is around 60 million, about two million of whom are Muslims. Thus, would it make much sense for Muslims or Muslim groups to be radical, or militant, or overly vocal? As a minority, Muslims are well aware of the fact that they cannot demand too much or, indeed, be too Islamic. Overt Islamism or radicalism would quite simply backfire in a country in which Muslims are clearly a minority.

We must ask ourselves what would Muslims need to do to be immoderate, radical or militant? Of course Muslims can’t introduce sharia law off their own backs. On the whole, they cannot pull their children out of non-Muslim schools. They cannot vocally support terrorism. They cannot admit to accepting jihad. And so on. To do so would be out rightly self-destructive because few of these demands would be met at this moment of time. (But in a few years?) Thus, Muslims have no choice but to be moderate. Not because they believe in Islamic moderation, but because militancy, Islamism and fundamentalism would backfire.

Similarly, Muslims would find it very hard to get away with systemic kinds of Islamic of Muslim intolerance, both legally and in terms of non-Muslim opinion. Thus if Islamic militancy or intolerance will definitely backfire, what would be the point of displaying such things? Muslims as individuals may be militant and intolerant because, as individuals committing individual acts, they can get away with it. The same is true of fringe groups like Islam4UK and Hizb ut-Tahrir. These group do not want to be mainstream. What about the mainstream groups like Muslim Association of Britain and Muslim Council of Britain? Why would they self-destructively become too demanding, too militant or, indeed, too Islamic? This would ruin things for them. This would put a halt to their long-term plans for the slow but sure Islamification of the UK.

The same with Muslims as a whole, either as communities or as the sum of Muslim communities. They too know that complete Islamification would be impossible at this point of time. They know that excessive militancy would backfire. So why not wait instead? Why not increase Muslim demographic power and then start being more demanding and militant? Again, to do so now would simply backfire.

Even in the case of Islamic zealots, there is only a limited amount a Muslim, or a Muslim group, can do in a non-Muslim society. That is why terrorism is so often used. There is nothing to stop a Muslim from becoming a suicide bomber or a terrorist. That is, he need not accommodate himself to British law and custom because from the beginning he is evidently outside that system. But for Muslims as a whole, as well as Muslim groups, they must work within British law and custom. So by definition their militancy and Islamism will be curtailed. Curtailed not through Muslim choice, but from facing the fact that Muslims live within non-Muslim states with their non-Muslim laws and customs.

In the end, then, it is not the case of Muslims and Muslim groups being moderate, as some of them indeed are, but it is more the case that they must be moderate. They must curtail their demands and their Islamic militancy. If they do not, the Muslims know that the cause that is the Islamification of Britain will take one or more steps back. Why would Muslims or Muslim groups want Islam to take one or more steps back? Thus they play the game. They say the right things and make the right gestures. Sometimes, of course, Muslims or Muslim groups are not that careful. They overstep the mark. They are too Islamic or too demanding. This is to be expected because the boundaries need to be continuously tested. Some Muslims will even be sacrificed by their fellow Muslims on the alter of the slow, but sure, Islamification of the United Kingdom.

Thus Muslim moderation is actually a sign of Muslim weakness vis-à-vis the larger non-Muslim secular state or society. Numerical and political weakness is far from being the same as religious moderation or tolerance. Even a Muslim zealot will bide his time because he knows that any act of zealousness would evidently be self-destructive. And even a Muslim terrorist waits and prepares rather than selects the first target that enters his vision. Muslim periods of quiescence, or relative quiescence, and not, therefore, periods of Muslim or Islamic moderation.

Islamic/Muslim States within a Non-Muslim World

Now it will be interesting to apply the same arguments to the larger scale. Instead of talking about the relative weakness of Muslims or Muslim groups vis-a-vis British society, let us think instead about the relative weakness of Muslim or Islamic states vis-a-vis the world. Here again we can say that if all Muslims states were stronger, or even if just one were stronger, than the US or the West, what would happen? Think of Iran with nuclear weapons. Think of Saudi Arabia with a vastly increased military? Think indeed of the possible massively increased power of Hezbollah and Hamas relative to Israel. I can quite confidently say that in one, or indeed in many, of these cases we would now be experiencing massive conflict and even Armageddon. Just think of how many Muslim purists or fanatics wouldn’t think twice about using nuclear weapons against Israel. But Israel would only be the beginning. After Israel it would be the United States. Then Britain. And then Europe as a whole.

Now let’s move back to the small scale and imagine British Muslims or Islamic groups having much-increased power, both demographically and politically. Even with twice as much power, if such things can be quantified at all, this country would be radically transformed. So much so that it would be largely unrecognisable. It would be well on the way to being an Islamic state, which is something virtually every Muslim group wants and which very many individual Muslims also desire. Muslims have not got such power or numbers today. That is why Muslim groups are relatively quiet and relatively undemanding. Given time, and a large increase in Muslim populations and power, things will be radically changed. No culture and no state in history has experienced long periods of stasis. And this is not going to suddenly change in the case of Great Britain and Europe as a whole; which is not to say that this change will necessarily be Islamic change. Whether it is or not, is up to us. It is up to the non-Muslim citizens of Britain and Europe as a whole. Our destiny lies in our own hands. No one is forcing us to give way to Islam and Islamification. If sharia law and the rest becomes a reality, it is us, Britain’s non-Muslims, who will have allowed this to happen. Muslims, after all, are only being true to their religion.

*) The Muslim population of the UK is rising 10 times faster than the non-Muslim population:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article5621482.ece

Chris Harman's Marxist Determinism Applied to Islam (4)

2010-03-09T07:52:00.001-08:00

English Defence League Counter-Leaflet (for Bolton)

2010-03-08T03:48:00.000-08:00

DEMONSTRATION
Sat 20 March
Bolton

For details go to http://www.englishdefenceleague.org/

Unite Against Fascism (UAF) – a group of Trotskyist, Islamist and communist thugs, as well as violent revolutionaries and Islamic radicals - with very close links to the Socialist Workers Party (which supports the terrorist groups Hezbollah and Hamas) – will be holding a counter-demonstration against the English Defence League on the 20th March in Bolton to whip up race hatred against the white working class, class hatred, and Islamist violence against non-Muslims.

These thugs spread fear and terror when they have rampaged through Birmingham and Harrow recently. They used baseball bats, bricks and attacked shoppers and non-Muslims in the streets of both Birmingham and Harrow.

When some locals tried to stop them they were called ‘Islamophobes’, ‘racists’ and ‘fascists’ and then they were attacked.

Don’t believe UAF/SWP’s lies when it claims to be a ‘peaceful group’ opposed to ‘Islamophobic extremism’.

It is nothing of the sort. UAF/SWP is a group of violent Trotskyists and Islamist bigots that wants to intimidate and attack all non-Muslims (black, brown and white) and non-revolutionaries (as well as Jews).

They should not be allowed to counter-demonstrate in Bolton.

Join the EDL’s protests to show these Islamists and revolutionary Trotskyists that they are not welcome here.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

UAF's own leaflet:

http://www.uaf.org.uk/resources/1003bolton_leaflet.pdf

Chris Harman: The Socialist Workers Party (SWP) Must Support Muslims Every Time (3)

2010-03-07T07:31:00.000-08:00

(... is for mugs.)

*) Chris Harman, ‘The Prophet and the Proletariat’, 1999, updated in 2002, from the website Reds, http://www.marxists.de/religion/harman/pt03.htm

Introduction
[This introduction is largely a repetition of the one used in the first part one of my essay on Chris Harman.]

The following essay is part three of a response to - and critique of- Chris Harman’s influential essay, ‘The Prophet and the Proletariat’ (1999/updated in 2002).

Harman's own essay can be seen as both a defence - and the beginnings - of the contemporary situation of strong Marxist-Islamist collaboration, both intellectually speaking and in terms of political activism.

Harman’s basic point is that Islam, or at least Islamism, is more revolutionary or radical than Christianity and the other monotheistic religions. He is not, of course, completely sympathetic to Islam or Islamism. That doesn’t matter. Because of the Marxist analysis of religion, which Harman fully endorses, Islam, and all religions, are seen as merely the epiphenomena (or ‘superstructure’) of the much more important socio-economic material conditions. Thus it is those basic socio-economic conditions which must be changed; through revolution. So it makes little sense to (contemporary) Marxists to criticise Islam when it is seen as merely the causal outcome of given material socio-economic conditions. More specifically in the case of Islam or Islamism, such conditions as class, class conflict and, more importantly, Western, US, or European imperialism.

Chris Harman himself was the prime intellectual of the Socialist Workers Party after the death of its founder, Tony Cliff. He was also a member of the SWP’s Central Committee. He died in November last year (2009), in Cairo.

One

Harman makes two fundamental points about the Islamists:

i) Marxists must not ‘write them off as fascists, with whom we have nothing in common’.
ii) Marxists must not ‘see them as “progressive” who must not be criticised’.

It can be said that the Old Left, on the whole, did ‘write [Islamists] off as fascists’. Some Leftists still do. Today, however, many Marxists, especially Harman’s very own Socialist Workers Party, do indeed ‘see them as “progressives”’. Harman wisely sees the obvious problem with these two diametrically opposed positions on Islamism and Islamists.

On the one hand, if Marxists do ‘write [Islamists and Muslims]off as fascists’, then clearly they cannot also ‘be tapped for progressive purposes’. That is, they cannot be used by Marxists or by the SWP. In addition, if utterly dismissed then there will be no opportunity for Marxists ‘to argue strongly with them, to challenge them’ and thus to ‘seize opportunities to draw individual Islamists into genuinely radical forms of struggle’. Thus they cannot be made into Marxists or members of the SWP.

On the other hand, if Marxists or SWP-ers see them as ‘progressives’, then Marxists rule themselves out of a job. If Islamists are indeed genuine progressives, then Marxists have nothing really to teach them. In other words, the Islamists (may) have no further to go in their progressiveness, as it were. Again, Marxists would deny themselves the opportunity of making the Islamists into members of the SWP if they think that the Islamists are already true progressives.

It seems, then, that Marxists are in some kind of a bind. If they see Islamists as simple fascists, then there will be no collaborations with them or any kind of support for them. If they are fascists, they must be fought against instead. Thus SWP-ers deny themselves potential revolution-fodder which they could otherwise ‘tap into’.

But if they are progressives, then the SWP has nothing more to teach them. What justification would a Marxist have for converting an Islamist to Marxism if that Islamist is already a progressive - or already seen as a progressive - by Marxists? What is the solution? Harman says:

‘With the Islamists sometimes. With the state never.’

This may also lead to another SWP diktat, once used about the IRA. Thus:

‘Complete but critical support.’

One can immediately say that if the support for Islamists (or the IRA) is ‘complete’, then what’s the point of it also being ‘critical’? What is the point of criticism if at the end of the day one’s support of Islamism is complete? In other words, no matter what the Islamists do, no matter how much the SWP criticises them, the SWP will still support them because that support must be ‘complete’. In concrete terms, this means that an SWP-er may well criticise a Islamist for his sexism, his adventurism, his anti-Semitism, etc., but at the end of the day he will still support the Islamist because, after all, he is still ‘fighting the state’. And anyone – anyone – who fights the state is a friend of the Marxist or the SWP! In Harman’s own words, even if the Islamist’s own ‘oppressions’ of ‘minorities, women and gays’ are fully criticised, the SWP-er will still support him ‘against the state’. Again, the criticism will prove to be pretty pointless if in the end the support is complete or total.

However, Harman himself actually says ‘with the Islamists sometimes’, not every time. Despite that, I think that the SWP today is with the Islamists at all times. Not only that, there is precious little, or no, criticism of Islamists or even Muslims from the SWP. This goes against what Harman says in this essay at least. Harman only died a few months ago, so either he changed his mind on this or he didn’t have his way on this issue with the SWP as a whole. Alternatively, perhaps he stuck by his position, but he wasn’t followed by the rest of the SWP (or, I should say, by the Central Committee). For example, what would he think of non-Muslim SWP female members wearing the hijab when jointly involved with Muslim men in political activity? What would he have thought about the separate seating arrangements for men and women at some SWP and anti-war events? My guess would be that he would supported these things. Or, at the least, he would not have kicked up a stink about them. After all, it is a Trotskyist we are talking about here. And we all know that they do anything, or say anything, which furthers the revolution or helps to radicalise minorities. Thus if wearing hijab or allowing separate seating arrangements helps radicalise, or helps contribute to the Revolution, then so be it. These things must be supported, even if they leave a bitter taste in the mouth.

Thus we must conclude that the SWP today (Harman wrote this essay some years back) is fairly happy that Islamists ‘scapegoat… ethnic and religious minorities, women and gays’, as long as they are otherwise ‘against the State’.

On the other hand, if the Islamists are seen as ‘progressives’, as Harman warns, contemporary SWP-ers, whether they know it or not, are supporting groups or individuals ‘at the expense of the left’ (both at home and ‘in much of the Middle East’). More than that, it seems that the contemporary unequivocal support of Muslims and Islamists from the SWP looks very much like Harman’s case of the ‘abandonment [of] the goal of independent socialist politics, based on workers in struggle’. In addition, SWP-ers today are forgoing the opportunity of making Islamists ‘question their allegiance to its ideas and organisations’ (4). Either all that, or I have Harman’s position wrong in a big way.

Two

Harman’s position on supporting Islamists, as well as the SWP’s similar stance today, is very simple. It is this:

If one does not support Islamists, or Muslims generally, one must be supporting the state instead.

That is because the state is against Muslims and Islamists. Full stop. This is something that Harman simply takes for granted in this essay. Why not this? –

A position against both Muslims/Islamists and the state.

Harman is specific about his support for Muslims and Islamists and the reasons why Leftists (and others) may be against them. He gives the example of ‘secular values’. Leftists may be in favour of secular values. Muslims and Islamists, almost by definition, are not. Thus it may follow, or does follow, that such Leftists must therefore be against Muslims and Islamists because they are against secular values. Harman says that Leftists must not take this position against Islamists and Muslims because if they do, they are siding with the State. And one must always be ‘against the state’ if one is a Marxist revolutionary: ‘With the Islamists sometimes, with the state never.’

Harman’s defence of Islamism and the Islamists is even deeper than that. Harman does not want the Islamists to be against the Leftists, just as he doesn’t want Leftists to be against the Islamists. Thus if Leftists attack Islamists, or even simply champion secular values, then that will

‘merely make it easier for the Islamists to portray the left as part of an “infidel”, “secularist” conspiracy of the “oppressors” against the most impoverished sections of society.’

Thus the very defence of secular values is taken by Harman to be some kind of attack on Muslims – ‘the most impoverished section of society’. Or does he mean that Leftists must not speak about secular values in front of potential Islamist or Muslim comrades or collaborators? However, you either support secular values or you do not, regardless of how others (in this case, Islamists) interpret or see your position. Surely one cannot deny one’s belief in secular values simply because it will alienate one’s potential Muslim comrades or collaborators. Again, is this just a case of Trotskyists keeping quiet when Muslims are around? Or was Harman himself against secular values? Perhaps secular values are also ‘bourgeois inventions’. If you do not support secular values, mustn’t you support religious or theocratic values instead? Surely Harman did not. Unless Harman believes that this is not a simple choice between binary opposites – secular values versus theocratic/religious values. It may well be the case that if secular values are seen as bourgeois or capitalistic by Harman, then there may well be other options. What about Marxist values? Or even a valueless system or ideology? After all, Marx himself said that moral philosophy, or morality/ethics itself, is a bourgeois/capitalist ‘invention’. He certainly believed such things to be class-based and class-determined. How could a Marxist not think that?

Harman himself gives examples of Leftists supporting the state against Muslims or Islamists. The Left in Algerian and Egypt ‘praised regimes that were… [seen by them] as “progressive”’. Presumably, although it is not made clear by Harman, this praise was in response to the Algerian and Egyptian regimes attempts to secularise the state. However, the Left should never have done such a thing. They should be against ‘the state at all times’, even when it is secularising itself. According to Harman, this secularising behaviour of Egypt and Algeria did ‘nothing for the mass of people’. Not only that, it ‘enabled the Islamists to grow’. So be careful about who or what you support. This is a position of complete rejection of the state. Even if the state is offering the working people higher wages and shorter hours, Marxists like Harman must still be against the state. If the State does anything against Islamism or Muslim militancy they should never be supported. Such is the absolutist position of the SWP and Harman. This helps explain some of the nasty causes, groups and individuals they have supported over the years - from the introduction of halal meat, the support Muslim bigots, the support of (Muslim) single-sex schools, etc. You must never support the state even if it is against ritual slaughter. Contrawise, one must always support minorities or oppressed groups, no matter what they believe or what they do.

One wonders, then, about the nature of this far-leftist support of Islamists and Muslims generally. Specifically when one notes that Harman says that socialists must ‘combine complete political independence from all forms of Islamism’. What form would this independence actually take (especially bearing in mind the care and attention Leftists must show when dealing with Islamists and Muslims)? For example, surely if Marxists stressed and even argued for atheism, and other positions at odds with Islam, this would be bound to alienate Muslims from Leftists. This is something that Harman himself seems to argue. Again, what kind of independence is Harman talking about? Is it a silent independence? An independence which does not speak its name – at least not in front of Islamists or Muslims generally?

Perhaps Marxists should catch the Islamists when they are off guard rather than pontificate about Marxism in front of them. Harman seems to hint at this ambivalent and difficult independence. For example, despite Marxists keeping quiet about their beliefs in front of Islamists and Muslims, it is still the case that they should show a

‘willingness to seize opportunities to draw individual Islamists into genuinely radical forms of struggle alongside them’.

This must be a case of the SWP-ers keeping an eye out for Islamists or Muslims having doubts about Islam and then jumping in for the kill. But Marxists should only do so when a genuine opportunity to draw individual Islamists into the fold shows itself. All this is very ambivalent and almost cynical on Harman’s part. Indeed it sounds like classic Trotskyism – the doing and saying of anything to further the cause of Trotskyism or Revolution. In this case it means collaborating with Islamists but at the same time being observant of the ‘opportunities to draw individual Islamists’ towards the truth path of Trotskyism or Marxism. This is also pure realpolitik.

Three

Despite all that, Harman also says that he is not in favour of making Islamists ‘allies’ of the far left. This is not because they are reactionary, or just plain mistaken, but because they are the far left’s competition. Pure and simple. They are competing with the revolutionary socialists to ‘influence the working classes’. As a revolutionary socialist, this competition cannot be accepted. Thus Harman concludes that the ‘Islamists are not our allies’. If the revolutionary socialists were to make the Islamists their ‘allies’, then they would effectively give up some or all of their political power – or potential political power. It seems, then, that this has little or nothing to do with the fact that Islamists are reactionary, fundamentalist or even radical. They are the revolutionary socialists’ competitors. And that’s that.

Although, of course, this lack of full support for the Islamists has to be given an ideological veneer which will cover the simple fact of rejecting the competition qua competition. Thus Islamists are ‘utopians’ who sometimes indulge in ‘adventurist’ political actions. Marxists, or revolutionary socialists, are not utopians or adventurists; though it is hard to tell why from Harman's 'The Prophet and the Proleteriat'.

Martin Smith (UAF): 'The BNP and the EDL'

2010-03-04T10:19:00.000-08:00

Martin Smith, ‘The BNP and the EDL’, Socialist Review, March 2010,
http://www.socialistreview.org.uk/article.php?articlenumber=11183

Contents:
i) What's wrong with football fans, Mr Smith?
ii) Martin Smith’s Account of the Stoke Demo
iii) The Far Left Loves the Far Right Really
iv) Racism?
v) Martin ‘Runs With Muslims’ Smith the Street Fighter
vi) Gramsci and Mr Smith
vii) Revolution?

What’s wrong with football fans, Mr Smith?

Citizen Smith doesn’t seem to like football supporters. They are too British for him. Too patriotic. Worst of all, they haven’t read Trotsky or even Lenin. Bastards! Martin Smith seems to find it hard to make a distinction between ‘football hooligans’ and ‘football fans’. Does Citizen Smith know that one out of every two British males is a football fan? Fancy being against so many people. Then again, this is Citizen Smith and the UAF/SWP we are talking about. If you’re not brown, or a student, or a Muslim, then they don’t have much time for you. The vast majority of British people just aren’t Marxist or Islamist enough for Citizen Smith. All we can do is laugh when Smith says, conspiratorially, that so-and-so ‘had already begun to build alliances with football supporters’. Shock horror! What next, alliances with, uh, working class white people? Never!

I love Smith's little excursion into Marxist ‘class analysis’. Smith thinks that the media portrays EDL as ‘working class yobs’. He thinks that the media is wrong. Apparently, ‘many [EDL] come from “petty bourgeois” professions – the classic base of fascism’. Well, I never! I didn’t know that I was ‘petty bourgeois’ and the EDL members I have talked to are petty bourgeois. Doesn’t it show what a sad little train spotter Smith really is when he resurrects terms like ‘petty bourgeois’ from the dustbin of Communist and Trotskyist history. Anyone who uses these quaint little pseudo-technical terms must be a complete arse. These words are dead today. In any case, the SWP/UAF Alliance is full of middle class people. Alex Callinicos, of the Central Committee (yes, Central Committee) and a few others, are upper middle class. Actually, Callinicos is from an aristocratic background. But they are not ‘bourgeois’! Why is that? Because they are Marxists. A Marxist may be middle class, but he can’t be bourgeois. In fact no Marxist can be bourgeois, no matter how rich he is. How neat. And how tidy.

Yes, I too talk about class. Specifically the middle class and professional/student basis of the UAF/SWP Alliance. That is not because I’m against the middle class. I’m not. What I am against is middle class people who pretend they are not middle class. Or middle class people who speak out against what they call ‘the middle class’. As well as those Marxists middle-class SWP-ers who class right-wing middle class people as ‘bourgeois’ or ‘petty bourgeois’. It’s not the middle class I’m against. It’s middle class far-leftist hypocrites.

You see the EDL can’t win. If it were full of working class members it would be accused of being full of ‘yobs’. Now Smith is saying it is full of, or run by, the ‘petty bourgeois’. In any case, this petty-bourgeois fixation is simply a result of Smith and co. reading too many books about the rise of fascism in Nazi Germany and Italy in the 1920s and 30s. He is trying very hard indeed to fit the EDL and its actions into his own potted history of fascism – the things he has read about again and again in the vast and boring corpus of Marxist history and theory. But the cap doesn’t fit, Smith. This is Britain in the year 2010. It’s not Germany or Italy in the 1920s or 30s. The situations are completely different. The British have always despised Nazis and Trots equally. Extremism doesn’t sit that well in England, unlike in Europe. That’s why far right and Trot groups still do better on the Continent. That’s why the British hate the SWP and the far right.

In any case, what point is Smith actually making by stressing the ‘petty bourgeois’ fan base of the EDL? Is it really the simple point that historically the petty bourgeois were the backbone of the Nazi Party? Is that what he is getting at? Eddie Hitler was also an artist and a vegetarian. Perhaps some sociologist should do a study of the EDL and see how many artists or vegetarians there are.

Martin Smith become even more pathetic than, well, Martin Smith when, in hushed tones, he tells us that the ‘leading figures behind the Luton protest [were] a self-employed carpenter and another runs his own internet company’. Really! Now I’m definitely not going to vote for the EDL. I mean, carpenters – they’re all Nazis, especially Jesus! What the EDL should be full of, instead, are lecturers from the London School of Economics or from the Embrace Diversity Department at Staines University. Oh, and one STIOE member is an 'American student'! Which bit of that description don’t you like, Citizen Smith? It can’t be the ‘student’ part (the SWP is entirely made up of students, except for its ex-student leaders). So it must be the ‘American’ part.

Smith’s Account of the Stoke Demo

Citizen Smith is not very keen on either facts or the truth. Not if the facts and the truth get in the way of a good story or, more importantly, in the way of the Revolution or the leftist radicalisation of young British Muslims. He claims that the EDL, after the Stoke demo of 23rd January, ‘directed their anger on the Asian community, smashing up shops and attacking Asian people’. Everything is right about that account except for the facts. Firstly, within half an hour of the demo ending the city centre streets were more or less clear of EDL demonstrators. Secondly, which ‘Asian community’ is he talking about? There is no Asian community near the city centre of Stoke so how could EDL members ‘smash’ their shops? Finally, not a single riot van was overturned, unless it was overturned only in Smith’s head. I also doubt that a single Asian was ‘attacked’. I saw very few Asians in the city centre that day. I saw lots of black people. Some of them joined the EDL demo, I’m sorry to say, Mr Smith. And why not? The EDL has more in common with the average black person that the middle-class Trots who run the SWP/UAF Alliance.

What exactly does Smith mean by ‘anti-Muslim riot’ when there were no Muslims there to riot against? Or does this just sound good on paper? Perhaps it will give a few middle-class Trot/SWP students a sense of excitement and their first taste of a scrap.

The Far Left Loves the Far Right Really

If Smith uses the words ‘racist’, ‘thugs’, ‘Nazis’ enough times, he thinks he will be able to persuade all and sundry that the EDL really is full of racists, thugs and Nazis. Repeat a lie enough times and many people will believe it. I think some Nazi once said that. And Smith is himself a red fascist; so he should know… Oh, I forget. Socialist Worker recently argued that it was a big mistake to conflate the far right with the far left. Well, the SWP would say that, wouldn’t it? After all, it is far left. Not only that, but it justifies and defines itself almost exclusively by its opposition to the far right. What a nice little club the far right and far left belong to. They love each other really. They certainly need each other.

Racism?

Smith mentions the ‘terrifying rise in anti-Muslim racism since 9/11’. Apart from the fact that there has been no ‘terrifying’ rise in anti-Muslim attacks, what about the real rise in anti-Semitic attacks in Britain and Europe? You won’t hear much about that from Smith and his friends because many of them are anti-Semites. Oh, no, they are ‘anti-Zionists’. Their monomania and neurotic obsession with Israel has nothing whatsoever to do with the one thousand five hundred years of European anti-Semitism. It is a complete coincidence that Trots go to bed at night thinking about Israeli ‘crimes’ and the sad, sad Palestinians. They don’t worry that much about the plight of the southern Sudanese black Christians or animists, or the Kurds. No. It the behaviour of the Jews in Israel that really gets to them. After all, Israel is the ‘front line of America’.

Anyway. ‘Anti-Muslim racism’? What does that mean? That’s like, ‘anti-Tory homophobia’. It doesn’t even make sense. After all, people like Smith himself keep on telling us that Muslims don’t constitute a single race. That doesn’t matter to a Trot. As long as the phrase ‘ant-Muslim racism’ helps him recruit a few young naïve Muslims and a few naïve middle class students. He doesn’t really care how he recruits them. If lies, distortions, alliances with reactionaries (Muslims), etc. work, they he’ll do it. He will do anything to further the Revolution and increase militancy amongst young Muslims and non-Muslim students. Anything.

Martin ‘Runs With Muslims’ Smith the Street Fighter

Smith cleverly tells us about the ‘electoral and a street fighting wing’ of fascist organisations. Does that include red fascist organisations like the SWP and UAF? They certainly have a ‘street fighting wing’ and a nice wing (the good cops) which dupes members of the leading parties into joining the UAF.

The SWP can’t be electoral because it is against parliamentary democracy. However, that didn’t stop Smith from accusing the BNP of not believing in democracy and the vote. But that’s for far- right reasons, which are bad, not far-left reasons, which are good. Indeed Martin Smith himself is a street fighter. He is called ‘Martin “runs with Muslims” Smith’. There are photos of him running with Muslims, attacking two Birmingham shoppers, teasing a police dog, and haranguing a Birmingham shop keeper. He was also arrested for street fighting outside the BBC. In addition, he was reported to West Midland Police for attacking shoppers in Birmingham. So Smith is in favour of far-left street fighting, but against far-right street fighting. This is something everyone knows already.

Gramsci and Mr Smith

Smith mentions his hero, the ‘socialist’ Antonia Gramsci. Gramsci’s main thesis was simple. He knew that the revolution would not happen, at least not in the immediate future. So what to do? Gramsci suggested taking over, infiltrating and being entryists in important institutions, from the universities and colleges, to the media and even the church and police. The tactic was, basically, to take over these institutions and groups and make them ideologically communist or Trotskyist in nature. It has worked in the UK. The far left has ‘won the culture war, but lost the economic war’. But instead of out-and-out Trotskyism, which the British would never swallow, what we have instead is the Politically Correct Cultural Revolution. This is a nicer form of far leftism.

Martin Smith is the National Secretary of the Socialist Workers Party. He has heeded Gramsci’s words and he and the SWP have formed UAF. Smith also runs the Love Music Hate Racism (LMHR) show. He is certainly doing his bit for Gramsci and the Revolution. Martin ‘runs with Muslims’ Smith has even created his own version of Mussolini’s squadre d’azione. You can see him in action in a few photos and videos. I think his boot boys are called ‘Red and Green Action’. The ‘red’ stands for ‘red fascism’ (Trotskyism) and the ‘green’ stand for ‘Islamofascism’. I bet Smith’s red ‘sword’ is nine inches long when folded in half!

Revolution?

Smith indulges in some classic Trotskyite scare-mongering. In one breath he tells us that ‘the BNP gained 17 percent’ of the vote in Barking in 2005. That’s only 17% in one constituency. From this meagre evidence he then tells us in the next breath that ‘the Nazis are making serious breakthroughs at the ballot box’. Apart from 17% not really being a ‘breakthrough’, this vote involved a lot of protest votes from the electorate. And why is that? Because people like Smith and the middle class professionals who run the UAF/SWP Alliance, and the universities and much of the media, gave up on the white working class years ago. Smith and his mates now ‘run with Muslims’. They embrace other kinds of diversity – any kind of diversity, as long as it is not the white working class. For example, Martin writes that EDL members ‘talked about the fear of losing their jobs or businesses’. He doesn’t show any compassion for their plight or even an analysis of why things are the way they are. The only thing that he concludes from this is that such people become attracted to ‘typical… fascist/ultra right wing nationalist movements’. This just shows us why some people are doing precisely that, Mr Smith. Because you don’t give a shit about anyone except middle class students and Muslims. That is, anyone who will be fodder for the Trot Revolution, which the working class refuse to be. And that’s why the SWP gave up on the working class. It just wasn’t into the Revolution. Never mind. Let’s try the Muslims and Islamists instead.

Chris Harman's History of Islam (2)

2010-03-03T02:51:00.000-08:00

*) Chris Harman, ‘The Prophet and the Proletariat’, 1999, updated in 2002, from the website Reds, http://www.marxists.de/religion/harman/pt03.htm

Contents:
i) Introduction
ii) Religion Generally
iii) Now Islam

Introduction
[This introduction is largely a repetition of the one used in the first part one of my essay on Chris Harman.]

The following essay is part two of a response to - and critique of- Chris Harman’s influential essay, ‘The Prophet and the Proletariat’ (1999/updated in 2002).

Harman's own essay can be seen as both a defence - and the beginnings - of the contemporary situation of strong Marxist-Islamist collaboration, both intellectually speaking and in terms of political activism.

Harman’s basic point is that Islam, or at least Islamism, is more revolutionary or radical than Christianity and the other monotheistic religions. He is not, of course, completely sympathetic to Islam or Islamism. That doesn’t matter. Because of the Marxist analysis of religion, which Harman fully endorses, Islam, and all religions, are seen as merely the epiphenomena (or ‘superstructure’) of the much more important socio-economic material conditions. Thus it is those basic socio-economic conditions which must be changed; through revolution. So it makes little sense to (contemporary) Marxists to criticise Islam when it is seen as merely the causal outcome of given material socio-economic conditions. More specifically in the case of Islam or Islamism, such conditions as class, class conflict and, more importantly, Western, US, or European imperialism.

Chris Harman himself was the prime intellectual of the Socialist Workers Party after the death of its founder, Tony Cliff. He was also a member of the SWP’s Central Committee. He died in November last year (2009), in Cairo.

Religion Generally

Harman offers his own little bit of history - or his ‘Marxist analysis’ of the history of Islam and the Catholic Church. Firstly he deals with the Catholic Church and then with Islam.

He makes his basic Marxist historical point by stressing the fact that that the Catholic Church ‘adapted itself’ to various socio-economic and political realities and changes. This is the basic evidence that the Catholic Church responds to History (with a capital ‘H’), rather than shapes it. Even more bluntly, the Catholic Church (or Catholicism) was an effect, not actually a cause. It was the effect of various socio-economic material conditions. It didn’t bring these socio-economic conditions about. Thus the arrow only points in one direction. Thus:

i) socio-economic material conditions/realties → the Catholic Church (its dogmas, institutions, people, etc.)

To stress, it is not a case of this:

ii) the Catholic Church → socio-economic material conditions/realities

Firstly, Harman said that the Catholic Church ‘adapted itself to feudal society’, even though it had ‘originated in the late ancient world’. Then it adapted itself to the ‘capitalist society which [had] replaced feudalism’. Each time the Catholic Church adapted itself and had to ‘change much of the content of its own teaching in the process’.

The other way of putting the material-conditions-caused-the-Catholic-Church causal sequence, is to state it as a simple temporal sequence:

i) Firstly, there were given socio-economic material conditions/realities (feudalism or capitalism).

ii) Then there was the Catholic Church.

This is a materialist and a deterministic Marxist thesis.

i) Just as Marxists strongly deny genetic determinism because it over-stresses the impact of genes (or only stresses genes) when it comes to the formation of character and other aspects of human psychology,
ii) so Marxists strongly stress (or only stress) the material conditions/realities when it comes to formation of both society and human psychology/mind.

Marxists are against genetic determinism but in favour of socio-economic determinism. In both cases, human agency is effectively denied. Except, in the Marxist case, the socio-economic material realities, which would otherwise determine psychology and society, are diverted or trumped by Marxist persons because they are effectively the only ones who are fully aware of that very same socio-economic determinism. This knowledge, or cognisance, of the material conditions/realities, effectively subverts what would otherwise be a complete determinism.

It is of course the case that non-Marxists, and Catholics, will not deny that there are socio-economic forces in history which shape society and psychology. How could they? No one would deny such things. The thing is, though, that Marxists see the causal arrow as working only in one direction. Thus:

i) socio-economic material conditions → society, psychology/mind, ideology, etc.

The arrow, to the Marxist, never works in the other direction. Thus:

ii) society, psychology/mind, ideology → socio-economic material conditions

But that’s not quite right, as I have already said. The arrow in i) is always the case except in the particular examples of Marxist persons. They break free from this causally determinist arrow through their simple cognisance - or knowledge - of that same arrow’s very existence. Being thus aware of the causal arrow from socio-economic material conditions to mind, effectively gives Marxist persons the means to escape from that causal arrow.

There is a simple schematic alternative to the Marxist causal arrow, and also to the inversion of that arrow (from right to left, as it were). Why can’t we have this? –

ideology, psychology, mind, etc. ↔ socio-economic material conditions

That is, mind can affect the socio-economic conditions as well as being an effect of those very same material conditions. That is how most people, I think, would see these things. But that would complexify things too much for Marxist. It would deny him the political and ideological tool of stating that all ideology, religion, philosophy – all mentality and mind - is simply the effect of socio-economic conditions. That is, of class, class position, etc. Without this absolutism Marxists would have nothing. It is the essence of Marxism. Even to accept a two-headed arrow would complexify things too much because it would free non-Marxists from being the passive victims of socio-economic conditions or, more basically, of their class.

The other thing that would be denied to the Marxist (if they accepted the double-headed arrow, or the inverted arrow) is that there would no longer be such a thing as ‘false consciousness’. They would no longer have an explanation for why people believe and uphold things which actually go against their true interests. Thus capitalism, and everything that emanates from it, would be rejected and revolted against if only the working class, Muslims, etc. knew their true exploited nature. Instead, those who are most oppressed by capitalism are sometimes – or most times – the ones who support it (sometimes more than those who aren’t that oppressed by it). This is ‘false consciousness’. That means that the working class become the supporters of capitalism (e.g., by becoming New Labourites or Conservatives) instead of Marxist revolutionaries. They do this because the socio-economic material conditions/realities, the class realities, causally determine what it is they believe – without their knowing it. They could only know that this is indeed the case by adopting a Marxist analysis of their political and economic position, as well as the corresponding Marxist ideologies which go with it.

Now Islam

Bearing all that in mind, Harman then goes on to say more or less the same things he has said about the Catholic Church about Islam. In fact it is exactly the same analysis, with different name-fillers. This time it is Islam, not the Catholic Church, which has

‘been able to survive in such different societies because it has been able to adopt to differing class interests.’

Instead of Catholic feudalism, we are now told that Islam

‘obtained the finance to build its mosques and employ its preachers in turn from the traders of Arabia, the bureaucrats, landowners and merchants of the great empires, and the industrialists of modern capitalism.’

It can immediately be seen that the one thing that the Catholic Church and Islam share, on Harman’s historical account, is capitalism. Capitalism is the ‘last stage’ in both historical accounts. Indeed this must be the case if Harman’s overall Marxist analysis, and indeed his Marxist solutions, are to make any sense. It is capitalism that is to be 'fought against' in both cases. But there is one difference between the potted history of the Catholic Church and the potted history of Islam. The account of Islam finishes off with a burst of Marxist positivity that is not even hinted at in the account of the Catholic Church. Thus even though we have had ‘modern capitalism’ in Islam, it has also been the case that Islam has

‘at the same time gained the allegiance of the mass of people by putting across a message offering consolation to the poor and oppressed.’

Does that mean that Harman believed that the Catholic Church didn’t ‘gain the allegiance of the mass of people by putting across a message offering consolation to the poor and oppressed’? It seems so. That would be a very difficult position to defend, historically. Perhaps the history of the Catholic Church really was two thousand years of un-adulterated oppression. Full stop. That would partly explain the double standards and the support Marxists show for Islam and Muslims which they show for no other religion.

However, Harman’s account of Islam cannot of course be completely positive. After all, Islam is not Marxism and Muslims are not Marxists. Not even Islamists are Marxists. Obviously. So on the one hand, Islam

i) ‘promised a degree of protection to the oppressed’.

but on the other hand, it

ii) ‘provided the exploiting classes with protection against any revolutionary overthrow’.

Thus Islam was OK – but only up to a point. That point was that it stopped at the ‘revolutionary overthrow’ of the ‘exploiting classes’. (If only these Muslims had read Marx or Chris Harman, perhaps then they would have gone all the way. All the way to that glorious ‘revolutionary overthrow’ of the ‘exploiting classes’.)

Indeed the ‘exploiting class’ pre-empted their own overthrow, as Marxists usually put it, by cynically damping down the revolutionary zeal of poor Muslims. For example, Harman says Islam

‘stresses that the rich have to pay a 2.5 percent Islamic tax (the zakat) for the relief of the poor’.

(Actually, as far as I know, this 2.5% tax applied to all adult Muslims in work, not just the rich. Thus the rich would pay proportionally less tax than those less well off. This, in itself, should make Marxists like Harman a little suspicious.)

Chris Harman: 'The Prophet and the Proletariat'

2010-03-02T10:42:00.000-08:00

*) Chris Harman, ‘The Prophet and the Proletariat’, 1999, updated in 2002, from the website Reds, http://www.marxists.de/religion/harman/pt03.htm

Contents:
i) Introduction
ii) Religion and Historical Forces
iii) Islamic Revolutionaries against Islamic Fundamentalists
iv) Islamist Revolutionaries: Iran, 1979
v) Revolutionary Islamic Revivalism

Introduction

The following essay is a response to - and critique of- Chris Harman’s influential essay, ‘The Prophet and the Proletariat’ (1999/updated in 2002).

Harman's own essay can be seen as both a defence - and the beginnings - of the contemporary situation of strong Marxist-Islamist collaboration, both intellectually speaking and in terms of political activism.

Harman’s basic point is that Islam, or at least Islamism, is more revolutionary or radical than Christianity and the other monotheistic religions. He is not, of course, completely sympathetic to Islam or Islamism. That doesn’t matter. Because of the Marxist analysis of religion, which Harman fully endorses, Islam, and all religions, are seen as merely the epiphenomena (or ‘superstructure’) of the much more important socio-economic material conditions. Thus it is those basic socio-economic conditions which must be changed; through revolution. So it makes little sense to (contemporary) Marxists to criticise Islam when it is seen as merely the causal outcome of given material socio-economic conditions. More specifically in the case of Islam or Islamism, such conditions as class, class conflict and, more importantly, Western, US, or European imperialism.

Chris Harman himself was the prime intellectual of the Socialist Workers Party after the death of its founder, Tony Cliff. He was also a member of the SWP’s Central Committee. He died in November last year (2009), in Cairo.

Historical Forces and Religion

Harman says that ‘[r]eligious people see [religion] as a historical force in its own right’. Harman and Marxists generally do not see religion as ‘a historical force’. At least not an historical force ‘in its own right’. ‘Material conditions’ are the real ‘historical forces’. We shall get to that later.

Not even ‘bourgeois anti-clerics and free thinkers’ escape Harman’s general condescension towards all who are not (true) Marxists (1). They too see religion as a ‘historical force in its own right’. The only difference being is that they are against religion. They are against religion; but for the wrong reasons. They do not truly understand religion, as Harman and other Marxists do. Basically, the main crime of the bourgeois anti-clerics and free thinkers is that they are not Marxists. They do not having Harman’s take on things. Thus they simply must be mistaken, as every non-Marxist is also mistaken about, well, almost everything.

Harman is saying is that the bourgeois anti-clerics and free thinkers were fighting religion, but for the wrong reasons and in the wrong way. But traditionally, Marxists too, from Marx to Lenin and after, fought against religion and religious institutions. However, something changed in Marxists circles. It changed with the increase in size of the Muslim populations of Europe and with the corresponding rise in Islamism in Europe and throughout the world. No longer was it hip to be anti-religious or anti-clerical (as Harman puts it). Instead the Marxists began to embrace the Otherness that is Islam. Not altruistically, as it were, but because Marxist analysis says that it was OK to do so. Indeed Muslims could now be seen as ‘revolutionary’ and ‘radical’, even if only in their own not-quite-right way. (Marxists do not seem to have applied this embracing of Islam to any other religion. Certainly not to ‘white’ Christianity or even, say, ‘yellow’ Zen Buddhism.)

The idea is this. Because religion, or Islam, is only the blind result and consequence of material conditions, which include classes, class conflict, imperialism, exploitation, colonialism, etc., then it does not make much sense for Marxists to be too critical of religion, the religious or even of religious institutions. What Marxists must do is criticise the material conditions themselves, or the political forces which speak for, uphold or reflect them. This basically means that religions, religious people and religious institutions had no choice but to appear or exist as they are because these very same material conditions brought them into existence. Thus criticising Islam, or Muslims or Islamic institutions, is getting cause and effect the wrong way around. That is, holding the effect responsible for the cause, rather than the cause responsible for the effect.

Islamist Revolutionaries versus Islamic Fundamentalists

What Harman really wants to get across is that Islam, not just Islamism, can indeed be revolutionary (of a kind). Islam is not always what he calls ‘reactionary’. It is this that has had an appeal to Marxists like Harman and many others, at least since the 1970s and certainly more recently (since the early 1990s).

However, he does pick out the ‘Islamists’ from the general pack of Muslims. Not all Muslims are revolutionary. However, Harman still thinks that ‘Islamic fundamentalism’ is better than ‘Christian fundamentalism’. Is that because Harman was brought up in a Christian society and because Christians are often white; whereas he wasn’t brought up in an Islamic society and Muslims are often brown? No. The reason is deeper than that and, of course, political. Actually it’s not deep at all. This distinction between Islamic and Christian fundamentalism is made in Harman’s essay primarily because the latter ‘is the bastion of the right wing of the Republican Party in the US’. The whole of Christianity, and indeed Christian revolutionary history, is summed up by a reference to the American Republican Party.

The Muslims, or the Islamists, on the other hand, ‘appeal to radical currents produced as society is transformed by capitalism’. Islamists are radical. That’s always been in good thing to be in Marxist circles. Let’s not mess about here. Who, exactly, is Harman referring to here? These ‘radicals’:

i) ‘Figures like Khomeini…’
ii) ‘the heads of the rival Mujahedin groups in Afghanistan’.
iii) ‘the leaders of the Algerian FIS’.

What a bunch of murderous bastards Harman has chosen! They are all, individually and collectively, responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths. Yet that doesn’t matter to Harman. They are excused of mass murder because they are ‘radical’ and ‘revolutionary’. You are allowed to kill en masse if you do so for radical or revolutionary reasons or if it is a response to the ‘transformations [of] capitalism’. If you kill for other reasons, in war, for trade, or for other ‘right wing’ reasons, you are a ‘cold killer’ or a ‘capitalist criminal’. Such is the calculus of death according to Marxists like Harman.

Although Harman makes his main distinction between Christian fundamentalism and Islamic fundamentalism, Islam does not quite have it all its own way. Harman does make a distinction between ‘traditionalist Islam’ and ‘Islamism’. And the equation is:

traditionalist Islam bad/Islamism good

In the Marxist manner, Harman sums up this distinction in typically socio-economic and political terms. Thus:

Traditionalist Islam: ‘is an ideology which seeks to perpetuate a social order which is being undermined by the development of capitalism…’

Islamism: ‘is an ideology which… seeks to transform society, not to conserve it in the old way.’

Yes, it sounds like he is describing Marxism when he describes Islamism. That’s why Harman and other Marxists are friendly towards Islamism and Islamists. It does not matter if Islamists ‘transform society’ is an Islamic-kinda-way, as long as they transform society. That’s enough. That’s what the Cambodian Khmer Rouge, the Chinese Maoists, the Russian Bolsheviks, did. That’s why Chomsky and many other far-leftists have praised these genocidal regimes. They may have got things wrong. They may not have been Trotskyist enough. But at least they ‘transformed society’. At least they transformed or destroyed capitalism. That’s what really matters. Not the death-count at the end of the revolution. Not the mass of suffering involved in the vast enterprise of revolution or transforming society. Only the transformation of society. Only the transformation of capitalism into something else – anything else!

In addition to all this, Islamism is not ‘fundamentalist’ either. Why is that? Harman quotes Abrahamian, who writes that

‘The label “fundamentalism” implies religious inflexibility, intellectual purity, political traditionalism, even social conservatism and the centrality of scriptural-doctrinal principles. “Fundamentalism” implies rejection of the modern world.’

No. That is a Marxist distinction between fundamentalism and other forms of Islam. Most people, of both left and right, see fundamentalism as a relationship to the Koran, the hadiths, etc. and the life of the Prophet. It is a kind of literalism towards the Koran and other canonical Islamic texts. What Harman, or Abrahamian, offers us is a specifically Marxist take on the distinction between Islamic fundamentalism and Islamism. Thus he sees it exclusively in terms of things like ‘social conservatism’ and the ‘rejection of the modern world’. But Islamists are also victims of ‘religious inflexibility [and] intellectual purity’. In fact this goes alongside its sometimes ‘revolutionary’ or ‘radical’ intent. Islamists also accept the ‘centrality of scriptural-doctrinal principles’. It’s just that they see these things differently to ‘traditional’ Muslims. Islamists are as fundamentalist as any Muslim, even if they square their fundamentalism with radicalism and revolutionary intent.

Harman is actually saying that Qutb, Maududi, Hamas, Hezbollah, and even Osama bin Laden are religiously flexible, intellectually impure and the rejecters of ‘scriptural-doctrinal principles’ - which are the inversions/contradictories of the terms Harman used for the fundamentalists. All these people are still fundamentalists. They are all Islamic literalists. And there is nothing more fundamentalist than Islamic or Koranic literalism.

This is the kind of mistake Islamophiles, and even young British Muslims, make. That is, when Islamists criticise oppressive Arab or Islamic states, they are not doing so because they are not revolutionary enough, or radical enough, or because they are not democratic enough. They are criticising them because they are not Islamic enough. They are not literalist enough. They do not have enough sharia law in their countries. Freedom, democracy and a lack of oppression are all besides the point to the Islamists. In fact, they are earthly or secular ideals and doctrines. It seems that Harman and the far leftists are making the same mistake. They think that European Islamists are radical and revolutionary in their kind of way. They are not. The Arab states, Saudi Arabia, etc. are not Islamic enough. Forget democracy and freedom. Thus Marxists see the Islamists as ‘fellow fighters’ against Arab dictatorships and that they are also ‘anti-capitalists’. However, despite that huge qualification and amendment of Islamist radicality or revolutionary intent, Marxists like Harman would still support the Islamists because, as I said earlier, they want to ‘transform society’ – transform capitalism and the ‘international capitalist system’. That is enough for the far left, regardless of the consequences as well as the Islamic/religious reality and principles which really drive the Islamists.

Islamists Revolutionaries: Iran, 1979

Harman then offers more defences 0f - or apologies for - Islamism. Specifically in the case of the ‘Iranian revolution’ of 1979.

Harman saw that revolution as a challenge to ‘imperialism’s political domination’ . Except that that is not quite right. Islam never challenges imperialism simpliciter. It challenges infidel imperialism and sometimes, say, Sunni or Shia imperialism (depending on which religious club is supported). Thus Harman seems to forget that Islam had its own imperialist empire for nearly one and a half thousand years (which spread from Arabia, to Africa, to India and the Far East). Was it a capitalist empire? Sort of. But we shouldn’t really care that much. It was an imperialist empire regardless of its attitude to a capitalism which first emerged in Europe in the 16th/17th centuries. None of this really matters to Harman and other far leftists because as long as Islam/Islamism is a threat to Western or American imperialism, that’s all that matters. Thus the communist imperialisms of the 20th century, for example, of the Chinese and the Russians, were not heavily criticised - or criticised at all - by most Marxists. That was the right sort of imperialism. They were non-capitalist imperialisms and imperialisms of ‘liberation’.

Harman gives some rather pathetic examples of Iran’s anti-imperialist actions or gestures. He writes that ‘the Iranian Islamists did close down the biggest US “listening” station in Asia and seize control of the US embassy’. Yes, they also jailed and killed loads of leftists and union leaders. That doesn’t matter to Harman because they weren’t Western or American leftists and union leaders. They could not have been genuine leftists. That is why the British far left were so hypercritical and obnoxious in their lack of support for the leftists and union leaders in Iraq who acted and spoke out against Saddam Hussein. Galloway even suggested that they were Uncle Toms. And, of course, the Palestinians, as well as Arafat, supported Saddam in the war and before the war. Indeed many Palestinians and European/US leftists tried to encourage Saddam Hussein to ‘liberate’ Palestine. That is, to go to war with Israel. All this shows us again and again that far leftists will support any nasty regime and any dictator if such regimes and leaders are against ‘Western/American imperialism’. Their standards of right and wrong really are that simple.

Harman’s support for Iran’s theocratic regime (as well as Edward Said’s – see my ‘Edward Said on Islam as Politics’) should not come as a surprise to anyone who knows even a little about the mindset of the far left or Trotskyists. It should not as a surprise either that Harman also supports Hezbollah and Hamas. And for the very same reasons. That is, no matter how violent and fascistic these Islamist groups are, none of that matters because they are ‘fighting imperialism’ – in this case, ‘American-backed Israeli imperialism’. Harman says that

‘Hezbollah in southern Lebanon and Hamas in the West bank and Gaza have played a key role in the armed struggle against Israel.’ (4)

They have also ‘played a key role in the armed struggle against’ Israeli civilians. That is, against women and children on buses, in schools, out shopping, etc. This is because Hamas and Hezbollah do not recognise the civilian status of any Israeli (or Jew), partly because they could become part of the Israeli military but mainly because ‘a Jew is a Jew’. So now we have another example of Harman and the Trots supporting anything – this time they support the pure anti-Semitism of Hamas and Hezbollah. But, don’t forget, Harman and the Marxists see Islamic anti-Semitism as a mere epiphenomenon of the material conditions, of class conflict, the economic order, the imperialism, etc., underneath. Thus it does not matter to Harman that Hamas is anti-Semitic, reactionary, sexist, etc. because all these traits are the epiphenomena of the more important socio-economic conditions underneath or below. However, Harman does mind the anti-Semitic, reactionary, sexist, etc traits of, say, American evangelists because, as he says in this essay, they are an arm of the American Republican Party. (What about the Methodists? The Quakers? The Anglicans, etc? Well, for a start, they are all white and all European in nature and heritage. Thus they must be ‘tools of the capitalist state’.)

Harman even has the audacity to praise the Algerian FIS, which was responsible for over a hundred thousand deaths! That doesn’t matter to Harman. Why? Because

‘the Algerian FIS did organise huge demonstrations against the US was against Iraq’.

Harman displays two despicable positions here. 1) The support for the murderous Islamic FIS. 2) Support for the FIS demonstrations which were themselves in support of Saddam Hussein and against the US. Is there any group that Harman would not have supported, no mater how vile, if that group had ‘fought against American imperialism’?

Harman’s Marxist logic is simple, though he and other Marxists think that it is sophisticated. For example, Harman weighs together two different issues:

i) The ‘fight against the unveiling of women’ (in this case, in Algeria).
ii) The ‘fight against the Western oil companies’ (again, in Algeria).

Now, Harman would not ordinarily have supported the forced veiling of women in Algeria or anywhere else. However! Many of the people who fought against the unveiling of women in Algerian also fought against the Western oil companies in their country. Oil companies are part of the important socio-economic reality. The veiling of women is an unimportant epiphenomenon of such things as the socio-economic reality which, in this case, includes Western oil companies. According to Harman, it is more important to support the Islamists, who are fighting against these Western oil companies, than it is to support the women who do not want to be forced to wear the veil. Thus Harman does not support the Algerian women’s fight against the hijab because it will work against the more important fight against Western oil companies or Western imperialism generally.

Harman even has the cheek to fully quote a spokesman for the Islamist FIS and the reasons why they did not oppress women:

‘It is not violence to demand that woman stays at home, in an atmosphere of chastity, reserve and humility and that she only goes out in cases of necessity defined by the legislator.’

Again, Harman would not personally have liked the idea of women being forced to ‘stay at home in an atmosphere of chastity, reserve and humility’. However, the individual, Ali Belhadj, and the Islamist group, the FIS, which supports such oppression and discrimination, were also leading the ‘fight against Western oil companies’. Thus we must forget about the plight of women in Algeria and other Muslim countries and fully support the Islamists in their fight against ‘Western imperialism’. Why? Because the oppression of women, that is, forcing them to stay at home, wear the veil, etc., are but mere epiphenomena (or examples of ‘superstructure’) above the more important socio-economic and political conditions – such as, in this case, the Western oil companies and the general reality of Western imperialism. By the same token, then, Harman and other Trots would also support cliterodectomy, the stoning of adulterers and women, amputation for stealing and even throwing acid into the faces of Muslims women who do not wear the veil. Indeed many Trots have supported or rationalised such things. Why? Because, again, all these abominations are but mere epiphenomena above the more important socio-economic and political realities (i.e., the Marxist ‘substructure’).

Harman goes on to say more about this Ali Belhadj of the Algerian Islamist group, the FIS, and his political actions. Remember this is the man who believes that Muslim women should be forced to stay at home, wear the veil, etc. All that doesn’t matter because Ali Belhadj also believes in things which sound suspiciously Marxist or even SWPish as well. Thus Harman talks about Ali Belhadj in this way:

‘Thus in Algerian in the late 1980s, Belhadj, made himself the voice of all those with nothing to lose… Every Friday Belhadj made war against the entire world, Jews and Christians, Zionists, communists and secularists, liberals and agnostics, governments of the East and the West, Arab or Muslim heads of state, Westernised party leaders and intellectuals…’

Harman broadly agrees with a lot of that. He thinks that Belhadj has chosen most of his enemies wisely. However, he has also made the mistake of not being a Marxist like Harman. That means he didn’t, or couldn’t, see the full reality of what it is he is talking about. He didn’t see the ‘substructure’. All he saw was the epiphenomena or the ‘superstructure’. Harman concludes:

‘Yet beneath this confusion of ideas [of Belhadj’s] there were real class interests at work.’

Thus Belhadj could only see the trees (epiphenomena), not the whole wood (‘substructure’). In other words, seeing the trees was half way there. Belhadj had gone some of the way towards being a true Marxist like Harman. Thus Belhadj’s actions and beliefs were also half way to being truly Marxist. And that’s why Harman and other Trots support nasty Islamist reactionaries like this and their nasty political actions.

Revolutionary Islamic Revivalism

Harman also makes a distinction between Islamic ‘traditionalists’ and Islamic ‘revivalists’, just as he made a distinction between ‘Islamists’ and the ‘traditionalists’. In this case, it is not the Islamists who are revolutionary, it is the ‘Islamic revivalists’. Or at least they are partially revolutionary (i.e., ‘partial’ because not Marxist).

‘Islamic revivalism’ certainly sounds traditionalist. However, it is not committed to any tradition, it is committed to a specific tradition that has long since died. That is what distinguishes it from basic Islamic traditionalism, which likes to sustain and bring back traditions which have only just disappeared or which may disappear if things are not changed. That specific period which the Islamic revivalists want to resurrect is a ‘return to the practices of the prophet’s time’. More specifically, the time and ‘spirit of Islam as expressed by the first four Caliphs (or, for Shiites, by Ali)’.

Apart from this specific and relatively short-lived tradition within Islam, all the other traditions, both in the immediate past and all the way back to the period immediately after the first four Caliphs, are bogus. They were not ‘truly Islamic’. They were not faithful to Mohammed, the Koran and the four Caliphs. The revivalists believed that that all these other traditions had ‘corrupted’ the ‘original Islamic values’ because they had dirtied their hands with ‘worldly pursuits of the great medieval empires’. It was not empire-building in itself, or imperialism in itself, which was corrupt, but the wrong kind of imperialism and empire-building. That is the case because Islamic imperialism and empire-building began with the Prophet himself and was well under way immediately after his death. I mentioned earlier that Marxists believed that there can be good empires and good imperialisms, or at least better ones than the US, British and other Western empires. Harman is hinting at this position again in his account of Islamic history. Harman pinpoints when the Islamic empire, or when Islamic imperialism, went wrong. It went wrong after the

‘material conquest and cultural transformation of Asia and North Africa by capitalist Europe’.

Yes, everything was more or less fine and dandy until capitalism and the West got its hands on Islamic states and empires. The Islamic revivalists too, according to Harman, attempted to subvert all these examples of Western-imperialism-against-Islamic-imperialism and go back to the halcyon days before Western and capitalist influence. The revivalists also wanted to go back further than that. As I said, they wanted to go back to the period of the first four Caliphs. So, unlike Harman, the revivalists couldn’t have blamed Western imperialism and capitalism for everything because the death of the last (the 4th) Caliph pre-dates the rise of capitalism in Europe. Indeed, according to Harman’s Khomeini quote, the latter believed that Islam became corrupted immediately after the death of Mohammed, which was roughly 750 years before the rise of European capitalism and certainly long before European imperialism and colonialism.

Note:
(1) What does Harman mean by ‘bourgeois’, as in ‘bourgeois anti-clerics and free thinkers’? This means that although most leaders of the Socialist Workers Party, including Harman himself (even if he had ‘a working class background’) are thoroughly middle class and are all professionals of some kind (mainly lecturers, professors, teachers, etc.), they are still not bourgeois. They cannot be bourgeois because they are Marxists. However, middle class people who aren’t Marxists, are also bourgeois. Harman and other Marxists class some people who are unemployed, or quite poor compared to most Marxists, as ‘bourgeois’. However, SWP leaders and its supporters who are quite rich, whether they are lecturers, professors, etc., are not bourgeois because they are Marxists. Very neat. And very tidy.

Salma Yaqoob: 'They say all Muslims are terrorists'

2010-02-27T04:48:00.000-08:00

A response to:
Salma Yaqoob, ‘They say all Muslims are terrorists’, Socialist Worker Online,
http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/art.php?id=569

Yaqoob inciting a riot in Birmingham (at 40 seconds). After her

speech, the Muslims and red fascists rioted in Birmingham:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/west_midlands/8191833.stm

Contents:
i) ‘Hype’ About Terrorism?
ii) Demonisation?
iii) The Vanguard and the Neo…whatevers
iv) The Hijab
v) Which Oppressed People?

‘Hype’ about Terrorism?

When Yaqoob says that there is ‘hype around terror alerts’, what exactly does she mean? I get the feeling that the very fact that the press, or that abstract platonic entity, ‘the Media’ (which far leftists always rant on about), reports them at all is ‘Islamophobia’ enough for her. 9/11, Madrid, Bali (which occurred almost while she was writing this), etc. were quite big things, Ms Yaqoob. That’s why people are interested and concerned about these issues. And let’s not forget the many foiled and averted terror attacks that have not been successful. Just as is the case in Israel – where Israeli deaths would far outnumber Palestinian deaths if every Hamas and Hezbollah rocket and bomb had found its target.

So what kind of ‘hype’ are we talking about? The far-leftist hype about the Palestinians or Guantanamo Bay? That is true hype!

Demonisation?

Muslims are very rarely ‘demonised’. This is just a buzz word Trots and IslamoTrots fixate upon. They copy it from other Trots and IslamoTrots. That’s why they all sound like wind-up versions of each other. Such is the case with the other buzz words like ‘bigot’, ‘racist bigot’, ‘Israeli crimes’ and so on.

In any case, Yaqoob practises her own brand of demonisation. Everyone who disagrees with her infantile IslamoTrotskyism is classed as ‘the enemy’. She uses this term about everybody who is not in tiny IslamoTrot club. She uses that word four times in this very article. And we all know what should be done with ‘enemies’ – they should be shot.

Before the London bombings (2005), Muslims were virtually never demonised. Asians qua Asians, or brown people qua brown people, were indeed the victims of racism. But very few people suffered because they were Muslim. This might have changed a bit in recent years. And perhaps it is a good thing that people now can make a distinction between Muslim and other Asians. Even the media does not ‘demonise’ Muslims qua Muslims. They demonise Choudary, Hizb ut-Tahrir and other loonies. Does Yaqoob think that not even these Muslims should be demonised? The public are against you, Ms Yaqoob. Especially the ‘working people’ that you claim - or pretend - to represent.

Again, Trots, Islamists and IslamoTrots are the masters of demonisation. They demonise everyone who is not far leftist, Islamist or Muslim. They began by demonising the BNP. Then they demonised the EDL. If the climate is right, then they will get on to the right wing of the Tory Party. Then the centre of the Conservative Party. Then all of the Tory Party. Then it’ll be on to New Labour. And the worst cases of IslamoTrot demonisation are when they demonise other competing far-left groups, whom they despise more than they despise the ‘neo-cons’ and ‘Zionists’. This is a big fat bag of demonisations. So don’t talk to us about 'Muslims being demonised', when the far left demonises just about everyone, not just a single group.

And Yaqoob has the nerve to talk about the Nazi ‘demonisation of the Jews’. What nauseating audacity! Are there any groups in the world that are more responsible for the recent rise in anti-Semitism (Judeophobia), which is far worse than ‘Islamophobia’, than the Islamist and IslamoTrot groups which Yaqoob supports? Most of her Islamist friends will be Holocaust deniers. Some of her far leftist friends are also Holocaust deniers. After all, Chomsky says that Holocaust denial is not anti-Semitic.

Not only all that, but think about what all that propaganda about Israel, ‘the Occupation’, ‘Nakba’, and all the other shit has done to increase anti-Semitism in recent years. The rise in anti-Semitic attacks in the UK and Europe as a whole occurred while Yaqoob was out on the Birmingham streets marching and shouting about ‘Israeli crimes against the Palestinians’. That constant demonisation of the Israelis – the Jews – has had it desired effect and it has tapped into the already-existing and fanatical anti-Semitism that has been part of Islam for over one thousand years – ever since the Jews stuck their fingers up to the Prophet Mohammed and said that they would never follow him and his new religion.

There is very little genuine ‘Islamophobia’ either. Tariq Ramadan coined that term as a useful blunt instrument to knock all critics of Islam, the Koran and Muslims. And my God it has been useful and very effective. Even different far left groups accuse each other of being ‘Islamophobic’. Thus we had the Respect Party accusing the SWP of being ‘Islamophobic’. We had groups within the SWP accusing each other of being ‘Islamophobic’. We had Ger Francis accusing everyone in the world apart from himself of being ‘Islamophobic’. Thus the word has lost all of its efficacy because no one takes such accusations seriously anymore.

The Vanguard and the Neo…whatevers

How can Yaqoob speak for British ‘working people’, as she often does? She is far from being working class. Though she does work. So I suppose she is working class. By the same token, Richard Branson or the ‘neo-cons’ work, so they are working class as well.

As always with the far left, Yaqoob is a middle class former student professional who speaks for 'working people'. Leftists have a word for this. She sees herself as part of the ‘vanguard’ of the working class. The vanguard is always full of middle-class professionals who have had a university education. That’s precisely why they see themselves as vanguard material. They don’t think that the working class is clever enough to be its own vanguard. Thus IslamoTrots like Yaqoob have to indoctrinate and then ‘lead’ the working class. But no one really listens to her or to the other members of the vanguard. That why the far left now only appeals to young Muslims, students and middle-class professionals. It a neat little club full of condescending bastards.

In any case, who are these ‘neo-liberals’? Only far leftists use that term. That’s how you know that Yaqoob is only talking to other far leftists, IslamoTrots and students because only they use this term. Welcome to their tiny vanguard club, in which the words ‘neo-liberal’, ‘neo-con’, ‘neo-Zionist’, ‘Neopolitan’ and ‘Neomi Campbell’ are on everyone’s lips. Be sure to drop these words into every conversation otherwise you will never be accepted into this Vanguard of the Working Class...sorry, of Muslims.

Yaqoob also says that the ‘neo-liberals’ are ‘attacking our basic rights in every area of life, from birth to death’. Very dramatic! What rights have Trots, IslamoTrots and other far leftists ever won for us? Leftist and Islamic regimes stamp on rights. What rights would the Islamists give us? The right to submit to Allah and his earthly representatives? So don’t talk to us about rights when you and your kind would be the first to trample on them. As I said, you started on the BNP first. Then you moved on to the EDL. Then to the ‘neo-cons’ and the ‘neo-liberals’ (whoever they are).Then on to plain conservatives. Then on to the New Labourites. And then on and on and on until there’s no one left but the Vanguard of the Working Class and a few Muslims.

The Hijab

Yaqoob tries to sound fair and moderate by saying that

‘it is wrong to enforce the wearing of veils in Iran, Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan, [but]similarly it is wrong to enforce the removal of the veil in France.'

So both are cases of enforcement? Cliterodectomy is also enforced in northern Africa. Is it also wrong to enforce a ban on cliterodectomy in France or elsewhere? Some Muslim men have fifty wives or more in Muslim countries. Is it also wrong to enforce laws against such examples of polygamy? Freedom to wear the veil. Freedom to practice polygamy and cliterodectomy. What’s the difference? So Yaqoob’s neat little piece of symmetry doesn’t really work, does it.

What is the veil or hijab anyway? Is it really all about female ‘modesty’? Sometimes; maybe. But it’s more often than not all about very immodest female Islamists sticking two fingers up at infidel society and all the vices they think it stands for. The wearing of the veil and burkha is a political act, not an act of ‘modesty’. It is a visible display of Islamism. It is a cheer for the Islamist cause. And sometimes it is even a display of support for Islamoterrorists.

Which Oppressed?

Yaqoob says that ‘[w]e must stand with those who are oppressed’. Yes! You’re right:

i) Let’s stand with the oppressed women who are the victims of the Taliban’s psychotic attitudes towards women and sex.
ii) Let’s stand with the oppressed students of Iran who are standing up to that ‘revolutionary’ Islamic and totalitarian regime.
iii) Let’s stand by the oppressed Kurds who are standing against the imperialist desires of Muslim Turkey, Muslim Syria, Muslim Iran and Muslim Iraq.
iv) Let’s stand with the oppressed Copts in Egypt and the Christians of Pakistan who are the victims of Muslim bigotry.
v) Lets stand with the oppressed black Christians and animists in southern Sudan who are the victims of the Islamist janjaweed and who have seen hundreds of thousands of their folk murdered – infinitely more than the number of Palestinians killed by the Israelis.
vi) Let’s stand with the southern Thai Buddhists who are the victims of the Thai Islamist killers. And so on and so on.

No. Never a peep from Yaqoob’s lips about these oppressed peoples. They are the wrong kind of oppressed peoples. And why is that? Because they are oppressed by Muslims, not by the UK, or the US, or by ‘neo-cons’, or by ‘neo-liberals’. Yaqoob’s palpable hypocrisy is staggering and nauseating. We don’t hear much about the oppressed of China, Cuba, Venezuela, etc. either. I wonder why that is?

Adrian Goldberg Defends Red-Fascist Unite Against Fascism (UAF)

2010-02-25T11:06:00.000-08:00

[Above: Top Bloke, Adrian 'I Hate Israel Too' Goldberg. He's not

related to Chomsky or Finklestein.]

[Martin Smith (left, in the glasses),

spokesman for UAF and one of its

leaders... oh, yes, and also the

National Secretary of the

Socialist Workers Party.]

Letter to the Birmingham Mail, 7.1.2010 -

Yes, Adrian Goldberg [of the Birmingham Mail] is correct. Both EDL demos in Birmingham ended in violence. But what he fails to mention is that Unite Against Fascism and its many Asian thugs were largely responsible for that violence. Is this bias because Mr Goldberg supports Unite Against Fascism, as well Birmingham United, which is a similar far-left-run group (which is not to say all its supporters are Trots)?

He also talks about ‘ducking flying bottles’. What about the Asian bigots with baseball bats and the UAF thugs (like one of its leaders, Martin Smith) running riot through the streets of Birmingham? Martin Smith was actually arrested for violence in London at a similar demo. He was also reported to West Midlands Police for a physical attack on Birmingham shoppers. This is no surprise. Martin Smith is a revolutionary socialist. A Trot. A Trot who seems to be supported by our very own Adrian Goldberg. Many would say that the trouble in Birmingham ‘was precisely the outcome the UAF was hoping for’. But, strangely enough, Goldberg says this only about the EDL. The bias and hypocrisy of Goldberg is staggering.

It is a neat little trick of Goldberg to lump the EDL together with Choudary’s lot as both being 'extremists'. He fails to mention that the EDL is against extremists like Choudary, unlike the UAF, which is run by the Socialist Workers Party which champions Islamists, and even terrorists, as victims of ‘Western capitalism’. The SWP/UAF is far more extreme and political than the EDL because the latter is a single-issue group fighting against Islamic extremism. The UAF/SWP is utterly political, from head to toe, and most of its activists are revolutionary socialists and supporters of Hamas and Hizbollah. So why the hell does Goldberg aim all his fire at the EDL?

There is another big difference between the EDL and Islam4UK. The latter explicitly endorses and encourages violence in various and many forms. The EDL is a non-violent organisation, even if violence has occurred at its demos. The UAF/SWP also believes in violence. Not just against the EDL, but against the ‘capitalist system’ and against ‘Western imperialism’. Goldberg should make a little more effort to find out who he is mixing with - unless he already knows who he is mixing with!

As for ‘dividing our community’. That is an empty cliché that UAF and Salma Yaqoob trot out without even thinking. The UAF/SWP loves divided societies because such divisions give them the raw recruits from the Muslim and other communities which they need. The UAF/SWP thrives on trouble. Everybody accepts that about the SWP, and the SWP created and runs the UAF. In any case, we haven’t always got a united community anyway, no matter how many times Goldberg says we have. We have a rift between the black community and the Muslim community. In a sense, what we have are a bi-cultural societies in many cities and towns. In Bradford it is a case of the Muslim community and all the rest. Birmingham is not quite there yet. But remember what happened in the Lozells district between the black community and the Muslim community.

So I think that readers should be a little bit more sceptical about Goldberg’s bloke-next-door image and ask him what he really thinks about these important political issues.

Tariq Ramadan's Defence of Relativism and Diversity

2010-02-25T02:58:00.000-08:00

Contents:
i) Tariq Ramadan Goes All Relativist
ii) Tariq Ramadan Embraces Only Certain Examples of Diversity

Ramadan Goes Relativist and Embraces Certain Cases of Diversity

Ramadan states his own version of relativism. He has drunk deep of post-modern theory, post-structuralist philosophy and whatnot, just as Anjem Choudary of Islam4UK and Hizb ut-Tahrir use the languages of human rights, international law and even political correctness.

Ramadan’s idea is that what is seen as moderate (as in ‘moderate Muslim/Islam’) is a relative matter. We can only decide what is moderate by taking into consideration ‘our histories, cultures and reference points’(2010). The point is that these things ‘are not identical’ from culture to culture. No. All we can do to discover what is taken as moderate in a particular culture and then study it ‘from within each system of reference’. In consequence, ‘[i]t cannot be imposed from outside’ (2010). Thus stoning cannot be either immoderate or moderate within some cultural and historical void, as it were. The same must be true of so much more. That will include crucifixion, Jew hating and killing, incest, mass sacrifice and whatnot. We must study mass sacrifice or Jew killing according to a ‘system of reference’. We must study the cultures, histories and reference points who those who carry out sacrifices or kill Jews. Only then will we know the truth – if only the truth for that ‘system of reference’.

Even if Ramadan’s relativist thesis is correct, it still shouldn’t or couldn’t be according to his own religion – Islam. As everyone knows, Islam deals with absolute and eternal truths. The Koran is the literal word of Allah – true for all times and places. Thus, how does Ramadan’s relativism fit into his Islamic scheme? It doesn’t! He has been partly, or largely, educated in universities and institutions in Europe and elsewhere in which many people espouse and defend various theories of relativism, from post-modern relativism to Thomas Kuhn’s relativism of science. Ramadan has quickly realised that he can use European and American relativist theses and trends in order to defend Islam and Muslims within European culture. Thus he uses relativist arguments in order to defend and further a religion, Islam, of absolute and eternal truths, just as Anjem Choudary uses parliamentary democracy, PC vocab and international law to protect himself and Islam generally. Very clever. Very deceitful. Very much like the Trojan Horse of Greek myth.

Respecting and Embracing Diversity?

And that is why we should ‘respect’ and ‘embrace diversity’. That is why we should respect and embrace Islam and Muslims.

Is it taken as a given that all examples of ‘diversity’ should be respected? This is simply not the case. The buzz word ‘diversity’ just becomes a trite and fluffy term which is used by select groups and politicians to get what they want from the rest of society. No one respects all diversity. For a start, Ramadan and his fellow Muslims certainly do not respect all examples of diversity. Do they respect the English Defence League or the Witches’ Coven of Hull? Do they truly and genuinely respect Hindus and, yes, Christians? What about militant atheists or just plain ‘liberal’ atheists? It can easily be seen that ‘diversity’ is just a leftist or liberal-leftist piece of jargon which is sometimes used to defend the indefensible and which, in the end, is very selective when it comes to specifying particular politically-correct examples of diversity – all at the expense of politically-incorrect cases. When Ramadan says the religious ‘symbols represent human life in all its diversity’ (2009), and that therefore they must be ‘respected’, most of us simply ignore such vague statements and the buzz word that is ‘diversity’. You can imagine council ‘training courses’ in Birmingham in which helpless and hapless people are fed the propaganda of diversity and forced to use that actual word at least five times each day.

The same goes for Ramadan’s ‘respect the sensitivities of others’. All others? Even Nazis? Even members of the British National Party? Should I respect the ‘sensitivities’ of those who are sensitive about all their beliefs and attitudes? What if some Muslims are too sensitive about too much, which is often the case? What if Muslims are sensitive to any criticism whatsoever of Islam, the Koran or Mohammed? Should we just shut up and leave Islam untouched by criticism? Would that be a good thing to Ramadan? Are Ramadan and his fellow Muslims sensitive to the beliefs and desires of ‘Zionists’ and the beliefs and desires of Jews and Israelis? Or does sensitive just mean this? –

Be sensitive to Muslims, or when talking about Islam, the Koran and Mohamed. Respect Muslims, Islam, Mohammad and the Koran.

This is the respect and the sensitivity which Ramadan is really talking about. Indeed when anyone talks about ‘diversity’ and ‘respect’ they have particular communities in mind. They do not respect all diversity – far from it!

Ramadan also ‘encourages discretion and good taste’ (2009). A while ago Ramadan tried to ban a performance of a play by Voltaire in which Mohammed was criticised. However, he claimed that it was not really a ban at all. What he wanted from the authorities and the people who put the play on was simply ‘discretion and good taste’. That didn’t matter. It still meant that Ramadan wanted to ban the performance of the play. Why didn’t he respect the playwright and the audience? Why wasn’t he sensitive to the wishes and desires of those who wanted to see the play? Again, that would have been the wrong kind of diversity and the wrong kind of respect.

Perhaps that play would have encouraged ‘hate-speech’ against Muslims or even against Mohammed himself. Ramadan thinks that freedom of thought is all fine and dandy. But what if in

‘the guise of defending freedom of thought, some intellectuals, journalists and politicians are actually legitimising the racialist hate-speech?’ (2009).

Is every - or any - criticism of Islam, Muslims, the Koran or Muhammad an example of hate-speech or an ‘encouragement of hate’? Ramadan certainly thought so about that play by Voltaire. Presently he thinks the same about Gert Wilder’s Fitna. What about the Satanic Verses or the Danish cartoons of Mohammed? Were they examples of hate-speech too? What about saying that ‘sharia law is full of abominations’. Hate-speech? ‘Polygamy is deeply prejudiced against women.’ Hate-speech? ‘Mohamed was a killer and a warrior.’ Hate-speech?

Now put the boot on the other foot. Is the ‘Hamas charter’ full of hate-speech? What about parts of the Koran itself? The Koran is full of hate-speech towards Jews, Christians, infidels and all sorts of other groups and peoples.

As with the words or concepts ‘diversity’ and ‘respect’, Ramadan again selectively chooses who is guilty of propagating hate-speech. As before, all we are really left with is:

Any or every criticism of Islam, Muslims, the Koran or Mohammed is an example of hate-speech.

References:
Tariq Ramadan, ‘Good Muslims, Bad Muslims’, 2010, Tariq Ramadan: Official Website, http://www.tariqramadan.com/spip.php?article11022
Tariq Ramadan, ‘Let’s not be afraid of religious symbols’, 2009, Tariq Ramadan: Official Website, http://www.tariqramadan.com/spip.php?article10965

Tariq Ramadan Cherry Picks From the Koran

2010-02-24T08:11:00.000-08:00

Contents:
i) Introduction
ii) Interpretation versus Context: Interpretation versus Translation
iii) Islamic Definitional Truths

Introduction

It is quite remarkable how some Muslims and Muslim scholars use the most incredibly bland and vacuous passages from the Koran in order to justify, and sometimes explain, contemporary problems and issues. Ramadan is a master of picking out what he sees to be the appropriate and relevant passage in the Koran. Take the case of religious moderation. Apparently the Koran and Mohammed himself endorse it. Or that seems to be the case to Ramadan. He thinks that this is the case because of two very short, very bland and very empty phrases. Firstly, he cites the Koran thus:

‘God desires ease for you, and desires not hardship.’ (2010)

Really! Is that all there is to go on? Is Islamic moderation based on something so insubstantial? Even if there are other Koranic backups for this, one can bet that they too will be as bland as this one. And yes they are. Apparently, ‘Muhammad confirms’ that last empty passage with this empty passage:

‘Make things easy, do not make them difficult.’ (2010)

Profound or what! What! It sounds like the sort of thing you would hear from a stoned-out hippy. It is completely shallow. Why on earth did Ramadan feel the need to quote these ridiculous passages?

This sort of thing happens all the time when Muslims discuss their religion with non-Muslims, and sometimes even when Muslims discuss their religion with other Muslims. It is not only a case of these passages being bland and empty, but that they are used to defend and justify all manner of things. The two passages above, when taken on their own, do not even mention religious moderation, only moderation, yet Ramadam used them to do exactly that. If we give Ramadan the benefit of the doubt and say that when ‘taken in context’, which is something Ramadan is always keen for us to do (well, if only when talking about the negative-sounding Koranic passages, not the positive ones), we can say that perhaps there is more meat elsewhere in the Koran with regards to Islamic moderation. If this is not the case, Ramadam is just effectively playing games with passages from the Koran. For example, I will randomly pick a passage from the Koran. This one:

‘The Romans have been defeated.’

I can now argue that this is a commandment to Muslims to defeat all non-Muslims because the Romans were non-Muslims, and they were ‘defeated’.

The point is that if such insubstantial, empty and sometimes vague passages can be used from the Koran, anything on earth can be justified. Indeed that is exactly what happens with trigger-happy Koran-quoters. At least some religious passages from other holy books are self-sufficient, as when Dot Cotton on the BBC’s EastEnders quotes from the Old Testament. Such passages are often pretty unequivocal and if they aren’t, then they are often literary or poetic in nature instead.

Can it be that from these two passages alone that ‘Islamic scholars’ have been led to state that Muslims are ‘the community of moderation’, as Ramadan claims? That would not surprise any non-Muslim. It is often the case that certain oft-used passages from the Koran are used to defend various positions and practices in contemporary society. Some of these justifying passages are as short as a single sentence and do not have any backup anywhere else in the Koran. That is why very many Muslims quote this old-chestnut:

‘If one kills a man, it is as if one has killed the whole world.’

Why just that one? (Which, in any case, always has the middle clause, ‘except for villainy in the land’, surgically removed from it.) It is because there are no other pacifist-sounding passages in the Koran. Thus this well-known single sentence is all we, or Muslims, have to go on when it comes to Islamic ‘commandments’ against killing or murder. Why is that religious books are only required to state their case, whereas everyone else is expected to argue their case? This peaceful or pacifist passage is not even elaborated up. The same goes for:

‘There is no compulsion in religion.’

That’s it. There is no more. That's all we, or all Muslims, are expected to go on. How can it be anywhere near self-sufficient when there are so many, or more, passages like this one? -

‘Fight for Allah until Islam reigns supreme.’

If there are no arguments for either these Koranic negatives and positives, then we will have to simply count the ratio of positives to negatives. In which case, the negatives (say, on ‘fighting’ or jihad) certainly far outnumber passages like, ‘There is no compulsion in religion’. That is why Muslim ‘moderates’ can never really win when it comes to having debates with Islamists or fundamentalists.

Interpretation versus Context: Interpretation versus Translation

Ramadan says that it would be

‘possible to quote here tens of passages from the Bhagavad Gita, the Torah, the Gospels and the Epistles that are violent without reaching the conclusion that Hinduism, Judaism or Christianity are violent per se’ (2007).

But there is a massive difference. The Koran is the literal word of Allah. It is Allah who is speaking to Mohammed - and therefore to man. This is not the case with the Gospels and the Epistles. As far I know, it is not true of the Torah and the Bhagavad Gita either. God may speak in these holy books, and his words have been written down, but they are not the direct and literal word of God from start to finish, as is the case with the Koran.

There are also ‘violent’ passages in these holy books. However, there is a big difference between chronicling violent events, such as wars and conflicts, and actually encouraging war - or ‘fighting’ as it is often called in the Koran. Violence is actually encouraged and propagated by Allah in the Koran. It is also chronicled; but not only chronicled.

The ratio of violent-to-non-violent passages is very high in favour of violence in the Koran. Almost on every page there is a reference to ‘fighting’, jihad, infidels burning in hell, Allah’s rage and so on. It can be found again and again and again. Most of the ‘violent’ passages in the other holy books, especially the New Testament, but even the Old Testament as well, are simply chronicles or accounts of violent events such as wars and other conflicts. More specifically, there is no direct and literal ‘ethic’ of war and conquest in the New Testament, as there is in the Koran. Islamic expansionism/imperialism is part of the message of the Koran, not just part of the narrative. The same is true of the negative treatment of infidels, death in hell, and so on.

Thus it would not make much sense to conclude that the New Testament is ‘violent per se’, as it does with the Koran. Again, aggression or violence is part of the message of the Koran, not just an aspect of the narrative.

Now welcome to that Muslim and Ramadanian old chestnut – ‘interpretation’. Apparently it’s all ‘a question of interpretation’ (2007). That is odd. Very odd. Let’s quote the passage in the Koran that Ramadan is talking about here:

‘The woman and the man guilty of adultery or fornication, flog each of them with 100 stripes: Let no compassion move you in their case, in a manner prescribed by Allah, if you believe in Allah and the Last Day.’ – Koran, 24:2

That is very straightforward. Perhaps if Ramadan had said

It is all a question of translation.

That would be understandable. I can imagine that there might well have been problems with translating this Koranic passage. For example, perhaps ‘adultery’ and ‘fornication’ are incorrect translations of the original Arabic. Perhaps ‘flog’ should really be ‘slap’ or something like that. Perhaps when the Arab sentence or passage is taken as a whole this creates difficulties for acceptable translations. No. Ramadan is talking about interpretation here, not translation. Thus we must conclude that he is fairly happy with the English translation, but not with the interpretation. But hang on a minute! Which interpretation is he talking about? He is only referring here to Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s use of this passage from the Koran. However, there is no mention in this essay of Ali’s interpretation of this Koranic passage. All she has done is quote it.

Since we have (more or less) accepted the translation. What of interpretation? In what way can we interpret that passage from the Koran? In what sense can we do so? It is hard to even guess at a way of interpreting it, even in theory. How can one interpret ‘Let no compassion move you’? How can one interpret ‘flog each of them with 100 stripes’? How can we interpret the ‘women and the man are guilty of adultery or fornication’? We can put these words in various contexts, but that is not interpretation. For example, we can say that flogging people is what happened in Mohammed’s day. So let’s put it in the context of the Arabic concepts of punishment in Mohamed’s day. We can put it in the context of Arabic tribes having a very strict view of adultery in Mohammed’s day. These are contexts. They are not interpretations of the Koranic passage. Even if we put the passage in the context of the contemporary world, that is still not an interpretation of the passage.

However, this is meant to be the literal word of Allah. Thus Muslims must take it literally. Since the very clear words can’t be interpreted, then what about the context? No. Allah must know, and must have known, exactly what he meant by the words ‘flog’, ‘100 stripes’, ‘adultery’ and so on. We still use these words in the same way today. We still understand the passage in the same way. All we have left is to put it in a context. Say, the context of the contemporary world or the context of Ramadan selling the Koran to non-Muslims. But every such contextualisation will change the meaning and intent of the original Koranic passage. And if that is the case, then it is going against the word of Allah and the demand for Koranic literalism which came from Allah and/or Mohammed. The fundamentalists and the Islamists are correct. Ramadan is dealing in obfuscation and dissimulation. He is practising taqiyya on the words of the Koran itself.

Ramadan says that Ali, by citing such a passage, has effectively ‘condemn[ed] in such a way a religion’ (2007). More than that, she has condemned Islam ‘by its very essence’. She has. She has the right to do so if she can back her arguments up. Does she have good political, moral, sociological reasons to do so. She has. Ramadan can’t just sulk about this. He seems to be saying that even if this passage is abominable, or even if one sees the whole of Islam as an abomination, one should still keep quiet because otherwise one rocks the boat. One makes things worse. Or, as Ramadan puts it, it is ‘counterproductive’. It ‘does not help the inner dynamic of reforms’. Again, Ramadan is telling Ali, and others, to keep quiet. To be dishonest. Even to lie about the Koran and Islam. Such cases of dissimulation or outright lies which are positive to the Koran, even from those who are anti-Islam, will help ‘the inner dynamic of reforms’. Such lies, dissimilitude and taqiyya will be productive, not ‘counterproductive’. Who will this taqiyya help? Muslims? Tariq Ramadan himself? Yes, that’s correct. But so what. We need the truth to come out about Islam and, in this case, the Koran. Non-Muslims, and a few Muslims, are sick of being the victims of taqiyya. More than that, non-Muslims are sick and inpatient with the lack of ‘dynamic’ when it comes to Islamic reform. They are sick of Ramadan’s constant taqiyya and his trying any game, any manoeuvre, any ploy, to further the cause of Islam and the Muslim Brotherhood in Europe.

Yes, Ayaan Ali is right. The ‘message is clear’. Islam is

‘an archaic religion, the Koran is a violent text and the only way to reform Islam is simply to “de-Islamize” the Muslims’. (2007)

Not only is all that true, but Ramadan is suggesting that even if Ali and other non-Muslims thinks it is true, then they should still keep quiet about it. Who knows, perhaps some or many Muslims know it is true as well, but keep quiet about it. Perhaps Ramadan himself knows it is true but he obviously keeps quiet about it.

It is odd, then, that Ramadan asks his audience about

‘[w]hat kind of message does [Ali] exactly want to convey by quoting a verse referring to corporal punishment?’ (2007)

Isn’t that obvious? It is so obvious that Ramadan answers his own question correctly. Ali is arguing that ‘Islam, per se, is advocating violence’. Why is Ramadan seemingly surprised by this? Why is he surprised by this negative reaction to such a negative passage in the Koran? Indeed why is he surprised that many people see the Koran as a whole as negative? Unless what he is actually surprised by is Ali and other non-Muslims wanting to rock the boat. Many do want to be ‘counterproductive’, in Ramadan’s eyes. Many do want to shake the lack of an ‘inner dynamic of reforms’ within Muslim communities generally. Many people do want to tell the truth about Islam and the Koran. Get used to it, Tariq, it’s not going to go away. Not unless Ramadan, the Muslim Brotherhood, Muslims generally, end up getting it all their own way.

Islamic Definitional Truths

Ramadan, in one essay, goes through a list of many of the bad things which are ‘done in the name of Islam’ (as a response to Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s comments). They are not really Islamic actions or based on Islam. Of course not. More precisely,

‘[t]hese actions are not done in the name of one of the accepted interpretations of Islam.’ (2007)

Come on Tariq. You’re supposed to be an ‘intellectual’. Which ‘accepted interpretations of Islam’ are you talking about? ‘Accepted’ by whom? By you and the Muslims who agree with you? At least give us a clue as to what you mean by ‘accepted interpretations’ and as to what these interpretations actually are.

Does Ramadan really think that a non-Muslim, or even a Muslim, will simply say: Oh! Those accepted interpretations. I see. In any case, Ramadan keeps on telling us that interpretation is a vague and difficult sport. That’s when he is talking about the negative passages in the Koran. However, he is all too keen to recite the positive passages in the Koran without warning and without interpretation, as he does in this very essay. In fact he does so on this very issue and in this very space. On the issue of these wrong or bad ‘actions’ in Islamic countries, he offers us this startlingly profound sentence from Mohammed:

‘What is built on [a] wrong foundation is wrong.’ (2007)

Well, that’s that sorted then!

He then goes on to defend his case by issuing some kind of cross between a Muslim truism and a definitional truth. He says that ‘these actions are plainly unjust, [because] they are purely anti-Islamic (2007).’ That is:

If X is unjust, it can’t be Islamic. It must therefore be anti-Islamic.

Thus nothing Islamic can ever be unjust. By definition! Of course it depends on what Muslims see as just and unjust. If stoning is a part of Islam, then, by definition, it must be just. This is similar to this often heard phrase:

Terrorism is not allowed in Islam. However, jihad is allowed in Islam.

Any act of Islamic terrorism will be called ‘jihad’ by Muslims, not ‘terrorism’. Thus there is no Islamic terrorism. By definition.

I think that using the words ‘just’ and ‘unjust’ won’t get us very far when it comes to discussing Islam. The same goes for many of the other buzz words which Ramadan bats about. Every word which we use, he uses in his own Islamic or even Ramadanian way. Words such as ‘freedom’, ‘democracy’, ‘truth’, ‘justice’, ‘diversity’, etc. will all have their specific Islamic or Ramadanian meaning. So much of the time, if one is a non-Muslim, one will be talking at cross purposes when one debates with Ramadan or with Muslims generally.

References:
Tariq Ramadan, ‘A response to Ayaan Hirsi Ali’, 2007, Tariq Ramadan: Official Website, http://www.tariqramadan.com/spip.php?article1305
Tariq Ramadan, ‘Good Muslim, Bad Muslim’, 2010, Tariq Ramadan: Official Website, http://www.tariqramadan.com/spip.php?article11022

Tariq Ramadan: 'Islamic Principles' Alongside 'European Tastes and Styles'

2010-02-23T07:28:00.000-08:00

Contents:
i) What European Muslims Want
ii) 'Islamic Principles' Can Live Alongside ‘European Tastes and Styles’

What European Muslims Want

Ramadan offers the West, or offers ‘us’, a big wish-list on behalf of his fellow Muslims. Actually, it is more of a want-list than a wish-list. He states that European Muslims must claim

‘the right to determine for themselves the parameters of their identity, the nature and extent of their religious practices, and their spiritual and moral convictions.’ (2010)

Now that’s a big want-list. It is a very demanding want-list. This is what Muslims want again:

i) The ‘right to determine for themselves the parameters of their identity’.
ii) The ‘nature and extent of their religious practices’.
iii) And ‘the nature and extent’ of their ‘spiritual and moral convictions’.

Apart the jargon-infestation, what does he mean by i) above? It is very slippery, so any translation will be inexact too. Then again, this is the slippery Ramadan we are talking about.

Do you and I ‘determine for [ourselves] the parameters of [our] identity’? I don’t know because I still don’t know what the hell it means.

What about ii) above? The demand is, well, very demanding and very wide-ranging. Ramadam is demanding that every Muslim should be allowed to ‘determine the nature and extent of their religious practices’. Full stop! There are no limitations or ‘buts’ in the vicinity. What is an example of Islamic ‘practice’? Surely the best example is sharia law, which is at the heart of Islam. Thus Ramadan is demanding that all Muslims should be able to ‘determine for themselves’ the ‘nature and extent’ of the sharia law they shall impose on to themselves. Thus, if Muslims want to punish adulterers by stoning them, then they must be allowed to ‘determine’ that particular ‘religious practice’. What about polygamy and stopping wives/women from working? The list of religious or Islamic demands will of course be very long. Ramadan thinks that Muslims should have ‘the right to determine for themselves’ these aspects of ‘religious practice’, which may or may not, though they probably will, include sharia law in some shape or form.

No minority religious group has ever had the complete freedom that Ramadam demands for Muslims. Not even Dead White Christian Males had a carte blanche freedom to ‘determine for themselves the parameters of their identity’ (if I have Ramadam right on that phrase).

Ramadam has it right. The corollary of these demands is the corresponding rejections of so much that is European or ‘Western’. To want so much is also to reject so much. Or, as Ramadan puts it, all this is

‘from this perspective, criticism and rejection of the west are linked only to a refusal to accept political, economic or cultural domination’.

So it’s not much that Muslims want. It’s not that much that they reject. They only reject Western ‘political, economic or cultural domination’. Is that all! Isn’t that just about everything? The ‘political, economic or cultural’ bit is a big slice of the Western pie. Ramadam is explicitly stating (for once) that Muslims should be allowed to reject, or ‘criticise’ as he puts it, ‘political, economic and cultural domination’. Which leaves them with what, exactly? An Islamic society? An Islamic state? Or just an Islamic ghetto or district within an otherwise non-Muslim state?

What does Ramadan mean by ‘domination’ anyway? Am I dominated by parliamentary democracy? Not really. Ramadan thinks that some, or all, Muslims are. Am I dominated by a (fairly) free press or by EastEnders? No. Ramadan think that many, or all, Muslims are (i.e. ‘cultural domination’). Am I dominated by the Christian religion or by Christian institutions? Not really. Not anymore. Ramadan seems to think that many, or all, Muslims are.

Again, what will Muslims do, and what will Muslims have left, when they have successfully ‘rejected’ their ‘political, economic or cultural domination’? An Islamic society? Sharia law? Or just an Islamic ghetto?

'Islamic Principles' Can Live Alongside 'Western Tastes and Styles'

Ramadan also says something which sounds pretty innocent on first reading but which can be seen as deeply revealing. He suggests that ‘European Muslims’ become ‘[a]ctive citizens’ and that they should do so by

‘respecting Islamic principles while adopting European tastes and styles’ (2004).

There is a sharp binary division here. It tells us a lot about what Ramadan and other Muslims think that their fellow Muslims should do, and the way they should think, within European society. That division is this:

European tastes and styles/ Islamic principles

This little division is very illuminating and it explains a lot about Muslim behaviour and attitudes in Europe. Firstly, ‘Islamic principles’ sounds very grand and important; whereas ‘European tastes and styles’ sounds trivial. Why not

European principles/Islamic tastes and styles

instead? Is that all there is - or should be - to Muslim ‘citizenship’ in Europe – the ‘adoption’ of ‘European tastes and styles’? Adopting only European tastes and styles will in no way solve the many problems of Muslim/non-Muslim relations in Europe. Indeed it will help propagate them. Why can’t Muslims also adopt European ‘principles’, as well as, or instead of, European ‘tastes and styles’? What is right about tastes and styles but seemingly wrong about European principles? This sounds as if Ramadan is encouraging the adoption of European tastes and styles so as to make it easier for Muslims to adopt Islamic instead of European principles.

Why has Ramadan made this illuminating division? Indeed this is a division which Muslims in Europe have already adopted. Take young Pakistani Muslims in places like Bradford, Bolton and Birmingham. Many of them have indeed adopted European and American styles and tastes. They have also said a big ‘no!’ to European principles. Thus they listen to gangsta rap, wear trendy clothes, borrow New York lingo and bling, eat at MacDonald’s, etc. And all the time they reject Western politics, western values, and even go so far as supporting Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran in their disputes and conflicts with the UK. They are not committed to European democratic principles or the values of, say, equal opportunities for women. Yet all along - even in the gansta gear, etc.- they are still committed to Islamic principles and values such as Islamic finance, family ‘honour’, tribal loyalties, and so on. The same is true of the Muslims of the older generations as well as middle-class Muslims. The latter also adopt western tastes and styles but often also reject European principles. For example, they retain a belief in arranged marriages and the same time as holding down professional jobs. They may watch EastEnders at the same time as supporting Iran against the West or adopting or wanting aspects of sharia law which go against European law.

It can be said that the simple adoption of tastes and styles rather than principles will do nothing for what Ramadan and others call ‘community cohesion’ and ‘pluralism’ because such an adoption is rather superficial and transitory in nature and does not lay down any genuine roots with which to establish a truly European identity and loyalty. Such styles and tastes will be dropped in an instant when there come such times when loyalty to Islam trumps loyalty to European civilisation or democracy. As I said, loving EastEnders or even going clubbing does not amount to much and can be quickly dropped if Islamic principles and values are strengthened and more strongly enforced within Muslim communities. It may even be the case that a love for EastEnders is maintained at the very same time as Muslim communities become more Islamic and thus more distant from all other communities (not just ‘white Christian’ communities).

However, Ramadan does later mention certain ‘common values’ which can be shared between Muslims and non-Muslims. He says that we

‘should promote common vales of equality, justice and respect in the name of a shared “ethic of citizenship”’ (2004).

That’s fair enough. In fact, it’s fair enough because in the end it is a pretty vague and nebulous statement. Almost everyone will agree with and accept the ‘values of equality, justice and respect’. Who is against equality, justice and respect? Certainly in the case of justice and respect. This uniformity will certainly be the case when definitions and examples of justice, equality and respect are not given. Everyone will agree until specifics are cited. Thus it can be said that of course Ramadan and other Muslims are in favour of equality, justice and respect. For example

i) Muslims believe that they should be treated equally and that this equality should be recognised in society and law.
ii) Muslims should be treated justly and have recourse to systems of justice.
iii) Muslims must be treated with respect and their values and religion handled respectfully.

Thus talk of equality, justice and respect are just noises until they are fleshed out. More than that, people who make these noises are often not talking about general or common values at all, but values that are specifically applicable to a single community which will benefit from them. It is the same with nebulous words like ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’. People tell you that they are in favour of freedom or democracy and you think to yourself that this is a good thing. Then you find out exactly what they mean by ‘freedom’ or ‘democracy’ and soon discover that they mean something different by these words. For example, what about the freedom to submit oneself to an ayatollah’s totalitarian rule? What about a democracy in which only the clerics or the ulema have the vote or only they collectively establish law? Indeed what if a Muslim community excludes women from all democratic procedures? The same is the case for Ramadan’s ‘equality, justice and respect’. Ramadan could mean that only Muslim men are equal to other Muslim men. Perhaps in Islamic society only men have full recourse to systems of justice. Or say that many Muslims believe that justice only occurs when, say, a thief has his hands chopped off, as in sharia law. Finally, perhaps many Muslims believe that only Muslims deserve respect. Or that only the pious or religious are worthy of respect. Thus everyone or anyone can talk about ‘freedom’ or ‘democracy’, just as they can talk about Ramadan’s ‘equality, justice and respect’.

References:
Tariq Ramadan, ‘Good Muslims, Bad Muslims’, 2010, Tariq Ramadan: Official Website, http://www.tariqramadan.com/spip.php?article11022
Tariq Ramadan, ‘Islam in Europe’, 2004, Tariq Ramadan: Official Website, http://www.tariqramadan.com/spip.php?article73

Tariq Ramadan on Extreme/Moderate and Good/Bad Muslims

2010-02-22T03:09:00.000-08:00

Contents:
i) Ramadan on Islamic Extremism
ii) Moderate Muslims are Like Us?
iii) Orientalism: Good and Bad Muslims

Ramadan on Islamic Extremism

There is something very fishy about something Ramadan says. It can be translated thus:

Once we have the compulsory condemnations out of the way, which I’m afraid is something we ‘moderate’ Muslims have to do, then we can rationalise or justify what the ‘violent extremist groups’ have done.

And what they have done, according to Ramadan, is both a response to political situations and a political act. Or, as Ramadam puts it, ‘we must move forward and place their political positions in context’. What if the actions of Islamic terrorists or ‘extremists’ are religious as well as political? Indeed what if they are solely religious? Commentators like Ramadan in one breath stress the importance of Islam in every ‘Muslim struggle’ against ‘oppression’ or against many other things. Yet when that religious struggle expresses itself in terrorism, or other violent and extreme acts, he feels a strong desire to explain them solely in terms of political realities and political rationalisations. Suddenly Islam becomes less important when the actions discussed are extreme or violent. The thing is, Ramadan would not get away with doing anything else other than ‘condemn’ what he calls ‘violent extremist groups’ if he wants to further the cause of Islam, or, more specifically, the cause of the Muslim Brotherhood, in Europe and beyond. That is why I can’t understand why terrorists and fundamentalists criticise Ramadan for being a kind of Muslim Uncle Tom when they should be praising him. Ramadam is going to do far more for the Islamic cause that all these terrorists and Islamists put together. Ramadan knows this. I am surprised that hard-core Islamists don’t know it too. Perhaps they do know it and their criticisms are taken as actually advancing Ramadan’s Islamification-of-Europe cause. After all, the more he is criticised by the extremists, the easier it is for him to sell himself as a ‘moderate’ or, in fact, as ‘the true voice of Islam’ (whatever that means).

Moderate Muslims are Like Us?

Ramadam says that there are

‘those in the west today who are keen to define moderate Muslims as those who are invisible, or look just like us, who support us, or even as those who have accepted the terms of their subjection.’ (2010)

Thus, Ramadam must be defending, implicitly of course (he says a lot implicitly rather than explicitly) those Muslims

who are very visible, who don’t look like us, who don’t support us, or even those who have rejected the terms of 'their subjection'.

If think this is a fair version or translation of what it is that Ramadam actually meant. I wouldn’t have been that sure about it, however, if it weren’t for those two words at the very end – ‘their subjection’. Thus it is absolutely clear that Ramadam believes that ‘those moderate Muslims as those who are invisible, or look just like us, who support us’ are suffering ‘subjection’ at the hands of ‘the West’. There is no other way to read what he has written. The fact that he didn’t offer my version is of no consequence. The fact that these positions are tacitly hidden underneath what he does say is of no consequence. The fact is that on so many issues and on so many occasions Ramadan knows, as we know, that he can’t be explicit and open about what it is he really believes if he wants to retain his image as a 'moderate reformer of European Islam'.

In addition, what would it mean for Muslims to be visible, in Ramadan’s terms? Is that in-your-face visibility, or just plain visibility? Is he talking about the burkha or just the hijab? Is he talking about louder chants from more and more mosques in more and more places? Is he talking about Muslims getting down to pray in the middle of Oxford Street or in Manchester city centre? Is he talking about Sunni or Shia rituals taking place in the streets of Cambridge or Bradford? I don’t know because he doesn’t say. Of course he doesn’t say. This is Tariq Ramadan we’re talking about here.

In any case, what is intrinsically wrong with Muslims who ‘support us’? It depends, I suppose, on what is meant by ‘us’ here. He doesn’t include Muslims from European as ‘us’ because he has already artfully separated all Muslims from the ‘us’ by nature of his very comments. Does he mean the ‘support’ of the British or French nation in wars or in conflicts? What’s so bad about that? What is this something which Ramadam seems not to expect from his fellow Muslims? What about ‘supporting us’ in out attitudes to wife beating, or animal cruelty? What’s wrong with expecting Muslims to be ‘just like us’ in these areas? Or being ‘just like us’ in our support for parliamentary democracy and so on? It seems that Ramadam is trying to separate Muslims from the rest of ‘us’ at the very same time that he says (in public) he is trying to bring Muslims and non-Muslims together. But this is Tariq Ramadam we are talking about! So any position, even a contradictory one, is possible.

The other point is that Ramadan thinks that Muslims who ‘are just like us’ must be ‘subjugated’. That is, forced to be ‘like us’. And if Muslims weren’t forced, or subjected, to be just like us, then they would be quite unlike us. Again, at the very same time that Ramadam attempts to bring Muslims and non-Muslims together he also tries to split them apart. But this is Tariq Ramadan we are talking about! I would also like to know what a Muslim in Europe or the UK does when he is not suffering from European ‘subjection’. Does he, say, become an Islamist, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, or even join Hizb ut-Tahrir? What about becoming a terrorist or a ‘freedom fighter’ in Palestine, Iraq or Afghanistan?

Orientalism: Good and Bad Muslims

One can easily see that Ramadan has accepted Edward Said’s position on how ‘the West’ sees Islam (although there are many other writers who basically share Said’s standpoint on these matters). Even down to accepting the Saidian nomenclature of ‘Orientalist’ and ‘the Other’, one can see the influence of Said and other concomitant writers of the ‘post-colonialist school’ (or the ‘antithetical school’). And just like Said, Ramadan has nothing to say about the many writers of ‘the colonialist period’ who rather than classify Muslims in the ‘binary’ manner of ‘good and bad’, as Ramadan suggests, actually went the opposite way and saw all things Muslim, or all things Arabic, in a positive and romantic light. This might well have been an example of what some people now call ‘inverted racism’. That is, rather than see Muslims is an exclusively bad light, these writers saw them in an exclusively good light. These romanticisers of Islam are worth mentioning because today we can see the same phenomenon. Only now the romanticisation of all things Muslim, as well as all things brown and 'oppressed', is a more widespread phenomenon, especially in Leftist and liberal circles.

Clearly, Ramadam does not mention this phenomenon either as it was in the colonialist period, or as it is today. Instead he argues that

‘”Good” Muslims were those who either collaborated with the colonial enterprise or accepted the values and customs of the dominant power. The rest, the “bad” Muslims, those who “resisted” religiously, culturally or politically, were systematically denigrated, dismissed as the “other” and repressed as a “danger”.’ (2010)

Although Ramadan’s binary distinction of ‘good and bad Muslims’ is neat and tidy, he completely ignores such facts that the British colonialists (or the British Empire), as well as other colonial powers, systematically allowed much cultural and religious autonomy when it came to the lives of the colonised peoples. This was especially true in India and with Indian Muslims and Hindus. Of course there wasn’t a blanket and unequivocal policy of tolerance vis-à-vis culture and religion, and it has been said that such tolerance as there was, was simply a means to rule - or ‘divide and rule’ - the subject nation. However, ‘the other’, in his otherness, was not completely suppressed or oppressed. Why else are there still thousands of Hindu temples and Muslim holy places on Indian territory today? Interestingly enough, the Islamic empire that preceded the British Empire had the same policy of cultural tolerance during certain parts of its tenure, though the imperialist Muslims were not quite as understanding when it came to religious toleration. It is even the case that many imperial powers have displayed a similar cultural and religious tolerance, from the Greeks to the Romans and even to the French. Though, again, there were periods and examples of extreme intolerance and brutality which can be seen when we survey the whole history of imperial power and foreign conquest.

Reference:
Tariq Ramadan, 2010, ‘Good Muslims, Bad Muslims’, Tariq Ramadan: Official Website, http://www.tariqramadan.com/spip.php?article11022

Tariq Ramadan: Non-Muslims Must Be Taught About Islam

2010-02-21T04:36:00.000-08:00

Contents:
i) Non-Muslims Must Be Taught About Islam
ii) Education in Diversity and Otherness

Non-Muslims Must Be Taught About Islam

Ramadan asks all non-Muslim Europeans two direct and simple questions:

i) ‘Are you prepared to study the history of a civilisation that is present in your lives and which forms part of your pluralistic society?’ (2004)
ii) ‘Do you sincerely believe that Muslims – with their spirituality, ethics and creativity – have a positive contribution to make?’

The problem with these questions is that Ramadan seems to know, or think he knows, that the answers to these questions will be positive. The first question also begs the question in certain ways. It assumes that Islam or Muslims are ‘present in [all our] lives’ and that they ‘form part of [our] pluralistic society’. Not every European, or every Brit, comes into daily contact with Muslims and Islamic society. Indeed the majority of Europeans and Brits don’t come into daily contact with Muslims or anything Islamic. Even in cities with high Muslim populations, such as Bradford and Birmingham, a non-Muslim may still never come across Muslims or their culture on a daily basis. Thus from the start Ramadan is expecting a lot of accommodation from all non-Muslims. Of course he will not see it as accommodation but just as, well, ‘pluralism’, ‘tolerance’, etc.

Ramadan also assumes that even the people who do come across Muslims and Islamic culture will want to study Islamic civilisation. What if they have negative attitudes towards Islam and Islamic civilisation, for whatever reasons? How can they have negative attitudes if they know nothing about Islam or Muslims? Well, they may know enough. Not only that, but those non-Muslims who do know something about Islam may still have a negative attitude to it or to the Islamic behaviour, as it were, of the Muslims they have known.

The other thing to tell Ramadan, and indeed many Muslims, is that we are supposed to live in a multi-cultural society, not a bi-cultural one. That is, Muslims are not the only minority in these isles or in Europe as a whole. Does he also expect non-Muslims to ‘study the history of a civilisation’ like Hinduism, or Judaism, or Rastafarianism, etc? Is there enough time in the day for all non-Muslims to do this? Or does it not really matter as to depth of that study, as long as non-Muslims form a positive, not a negative, view of Islam and Muslims? Thus non-Muslims may be persuaded by councils, governments and people like Tariq Ramadan to see Islam only in a positive light even though their studies of Islam have been shallow and inconsequential. Again, as long as the result is positive towards Islam. That’s all that really matters. In that case, the changeover from a negative to a positive view of Islam will be more political or sociological in nature than it will be educational. This is really all that Ramadan wants –not any meaty immersion into Islamic civilisation or religion. I say this because there are many, many Muslims in the UK who know next-to-nothing about Islamic civilisation or even Islam itself. However, they obviously have a positive view of Islam. Ramadan isn’t as concerned about shallow positivity towards Islam as he is about both shallow and deep negativity towards it.

The answer to Ramadan’s other question, ii) above, may similarly be negative. Again, the possibility of negative replies seems not to have crossed Ramadan’s mind. All you need to do is teach non-Muslims about ‘real’ or ‘genuine’ Islam, then they can’t fail but to be anything but positive. But what if the answer to

‘Do you sincerely believe that Muslims have a positive contribution to make?’

is ‘no’? What if the answer is ‘no’ even though it is false that Muslims can’t make a positive contribution? The other thing to bear in mind is that the question is equivocal. Does Ramadan really mean this? –

i) Do you sincerely believe that Muslims, qua Muslims, or qua their Islamic behaviour, attitudes, actions, etc., have a positive contribution to make?

Or:

ii) Do you sincerely believe that people who just happen to be Muslims have a positive contribution to make?

The later question can easily be answered. Of course Muslims, when taken as people who just happen to be Muslims, will have positive contributions to make and already have made contributions to largely non-Muslim societies. In this respect a Muslim’s religion is as irrelevant as the contribution a man’s skill at football will be to his driving a lorry. Thus a Muslim’s being a Muslim will not be relevant to his or her studying or becoming a councillor in Manchester.

On the other hand, if it is i) above we have in mind, then the response may well be negative. That is because that contribution must take into account than man or woman’s Islamic behaviour and his or her beliefs. Thus a conservative or fundamentalist Muslim would not be a good candidate for a job at a rape crisis centre because he either thinks that rape doesn’t exist or that the woman herself is often responsible for the rape. Apart from these facts, he may well be imminently suitable for this job (although that is unlikely). Similarly, if the British army were aware that an army applicant has previously spread propaganda against the wars or conflicts his country is involved in, then his Islamic beliefs and past behaviour will be very relevant. If the Muslim is a man of ‘Queen and country’, though still a Muslim, then his being Muslim should not effect his becoming a soldier of some kind.

Thus i) and ii) become very different questions which will get two different answers, even from the same Muslim.

More specifically, it may well be the case that a Muslim’s ‘ethics’, as Ramadan puts it, may make the answer to question i) above negative, in least in respect to the specifics of Islam and the specifics of what is required from him qua Muslim. This effectively makes Ramadan’s question i) vacuous or meaningless if all it seems to be referring to is a nominal Muslim, as it were. It may refer to people who just happen to be Muslims (just as they just happen to be gay or just happen to be good cycle riders). So i) needs to be fleshed out into a question like number ii). Then the problem with ii) is that it may well engender a negative response from a non-Muslim, whereas it would be very difficult for a non-Muslim to react negatively to question i). (Unless it is a racist response in that he believes that nothing positive can come from people with brown skins or from Asians.) In theory, and even in practice, there may well be many reasons for a non-Muslim to think negatively about a Muslim’s ‘spirituality [and] ethics’ and even his ‘creativity’. In theory, why shouldn’t or couldn’t that be a possibility? If someone were to judge a culture of head hunting, incest, mass sacrifice, etc., then he may well think that it has no ‘possible contribution to make’. What about a culture that wants to have sharia law, or which believes in jihad, or which allows polygamy, etc? Has that culture got a ‘positive contribution to make’ to European society? Many Europeans would say that it hasn’t. Ramadan does not even seem to consider negative responses to this question of his. That is a big problem because Ramadam believes, or claims he believes, that all non-Muslims will answer in the positive. He must also assume that the more a non-Muslim knows about Islam and Muslims, the more positive towards Islam and Muslims his attitude will become. That is not definitionally the case. For example, we may know a hell of a lot about Satanism. That doesn’t automatically mean that the more we find out about Satanism the more positive we will become towards it. In fact, I would say that many non-Muslim critics of Islam know more about Islam than most of the Islamophiles – the ones who only see the good in Islam. This is especially the case if their positivity towards Islam is the result of leftist dogma, fluffy liberalism or even basic naiveté.

Education in Diversity and Otherness

Again, Ramadan simply assumes that if a non-Muslim learns - or is taught - more about Islam, then he is bound to become more positive towards it. He says that all non-Muslims

i) ‘must acquire a better understanding of the other’s philosophical and cultural orientations’ (2009).

Let’s translate that:

ii) All non-Muslims must acquire a better understanding of Muslims’ philosophical and cultural orientations.

And when every non-Muslim has acquired a ‘better understanding of Islam ‘ and the ‘philosophical and cultural orientations’ of Muslims, Ramadan simply assumes that this is bound to lead to all non-Muslims ‘seeing the [the Muslim]world as a source of richness, and not as a threat’. Is that a definitional truth on Ramadan’s part? What if non-Muslims, through education not in spite of it, begin to see Islam as ‘a source’ of violence, sexism, aggression, expansionism, imperialism, intolerance, bigotry and thus consequently see it as a ‘threat’, rather than ‘not as a threat’?. Unless, of course, Muslims like Ramadan will be, or are, in charge, directly or indirectly, of that education into Islam. Thus we will then be spoon-fed only the positive aspects and parts of Islam. Or perhaps non-Muslims will be, or are, educated by the Diversity Police of the local council. Then one can guarantee that Islam will be viewed through rose-tinted spectacles.

Surely Ramadan has to do more than simply assume that education by definition will lead every non-Muslim to Embrace the Diversity that is Islam.

All this is a must for Ramadan. We ‘must’ be educated into Islam (or even be given an Islamic education?). In addition, there is another ‘must’ from Ramadan. He says that our

i) ‘pluralist society must provide its citizens with the tools old to understand religions, their symbols and their practices’ (2009).

Ramadan hasn’t spent much time defending Judaism, Hinduism, etc. In fact, I don’t think that he has spent any time (in public or in print) doing so. Therefore let’s rewrite that passage above thus:

ii) Pluralist society must provide its non-Muslim citizens with the tools to understand Islam, Islam’s symbols and Islam’s practices.

I don’t like Ramadan’s musts. It is a case of this:

We must do X, Y and Z. If we don’t, then we can expect A, B and C from Muslims and Islamic groups.

Is that what he is getting at? Is this must simply: We must see Islam positively? We must see the Koran and Mohammed positively? What happens if many non-Muslims don’t see Islam positively? Has Ramadan got a backup plan for such a possibility?

Not only all that, but Ramadan also says that Islamic ‘signs’ must be ‘made an integral part of the educational curriculum’. There may well be, then, an element of compulsion, or force, involved in our acquiring a positive view of Islam, at least when we are at school or in the workplace. We may be compelled, or, at the least, strongly encouraged, to learn about Islam. Will we also be compelled, or educated, to see Islam in an exclusively positive light? After all, isn’t that how both religious education and religious instruction have been and how they are today? How will that increased knowledge of Islam, which Mr Ramadan clearly wants, actually come about? Will it be based on the model of the Soviet Union’s Marxist Schools or perhaps there will be weaker versions of Islamic madrasses. I say ‘weaker’ because not even Ramadan and his Muslim friends would be stupid enough to push the kafir too far or too quickly.

References:
Tariq Ramadan, ‘Islam in Europe’, 2004, Tariq Ramadan: Official Website, http://www.tariqramadan.com/spip.php?article73
Tariq Ramadan, ‘Let’s not be afraid of religious symbols’, 2009, Tariq Ramadan: Official Website, http://www.tariqramadan.com/spip.php?article10965

Edward Said on Islam and Israel

2010-02-18T03:25:00.000-08:00

---------------------------------------------

Contents:

i) Edward Said on Those Who Dare to Slag off Islam

ii) Ed Said on the State of Israel

----------------------------------------------

Edward Said on Those Who Dare to Slag Off Islam

Despite everything Edward Said has written about the Jews and Judaism, and in spite of all the things Hezbollah, Hamas, the far left in the UK and Europe, American academia, the media generally, etc. have said about Jews and Judaism, Said still has the audacity to say that ‘it is still possible to say things about Islam that are simply unacceptable for Judaism’ (148). Yes, you read it correctly. Said actually believed that. What planet did he live on? His proposition is literally the exact opposite of the truth. When you criticise Islam, the Koran or Mohamed, the whole world seems to tumble down upon you. Or, more specifically, people are killed, assassinated, riots ensue, places are bombed, etc. Worse that that, academics like Said himself come to defence of Islam, the Koran or Mohammed. And they do so without question. Not only that, but the state and councils get in on the act. They talk about ‘hate speech’, ‘Islamophobia’ and pass laws to stop people criticising Islam, the Koran or Mohammed. How many bombs go off when someone criticises Judaism or the Jews? How many riots are there? Does the ‘offence’ to the Jews get fiercely debated in the UN or anywhere else for that matter? No! No - to all these questions. In fact far from it being the case that criticism of Judaism or the Jews is ‘unacceptable’, it is in fact de rigour in left wing and academic circles. You are often ostracised if you don’t criticise the Jews…. sorry, the Israelis and their religion of ‘the chosen people’ and their God as a ‘real estate agent’. On the other hand, Islam is treated as if it’s the greatest and fluffiest religion going by people who twenty years earlier had not given it a moment’s thought.

Said was a trendy post-Marxist, neo-Marxist, post-structuralist or whatever academic. So what really got his goat, obscurely enough, was that other academics had the audacity to write on

‘Islamic history and society… blithely [ignorant of] every major advance in interpretative theory since Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud’. (148)

So that’s what I and many others are doing wrong. We are not studying Islam correctly. In order to study Islam correctly we must read Nietzsche, Marx, Freud and the numerous post-Nietzscheans, post-Marxists and post-Freudians. No wonder I was getting it all wrong. God knows what academics did before Marx. God knows what academics have been doing without Marx, Freud and the post-Marxists and post-Freudians. At least now Said has told us through which prism he sees the Islamic world – the Marxist or post-Marxist prism (no doubt, with little other bits and bobs thrown in for padding).

Ed Said on the State of Israel

Said seems to dispute that Israel is ‘the Middle East’s only democracy’. Either that or it has ‘been used as a foil for Islam’ (4). If he does dispute it, then he is wrong. If he doesn’t dispute it, then a state’s being ‘the only democracy in the Middle East’ is a very good reason to use it as a ‘foil against Islam’ or even a foil against Islamic or Muslim states. Democracy is a very good thing to have when you are surrounded by Muslim countries and are the endless victim of countless Hamas, Fatah and Hezbollah attacks and suicide bombs. Unless, as I have said, Said says ‘the only democracy in the Middle East’ ironically - because it is not a true democracy. Is that because Said believed that the Arabs in Israel aren’t full citizens or was it something else to do with Israel’s Arab population? Or was it because if Israel’s democracy is a capitalist liberal democracy, then it is not a true democracy? If that is the case it must be because Said’s position is some kind of far-leftist or even Islamist position (or IslamoTrot position!) which views capitalist liberal democracies as not real democracies. They are examples of, say, ‘class power’, ‘hegemony’, or something like that. I think that it was very likely that Said did mean it (mainly) in the second sense, and not because of Israel’s treatment of Arabs. However, the treatment of Israeli Arabs and its democracy tie in together in Said’s account. In that case, Israel’s treatment of Israeli Arabs will no doubt be a consequence of capitalist, liberal democracy. Then again, the Arabs do have the vote, they can sit in the Knesset, etc. The treatment of Israeli Arabs cannot in and of itself make Israel a bogus democracy. In that case, even if Arabs have the vote, can sit in the Knesset, etc. that would still not make Israel’s democracy a real or genuine democracy. And Said, being a Marxist of sorts, or a post-Marxist of sorts, is almost bound to take this position.

Thus Said might well have preferred various Arab states to the Israeli state. After all, many far-leftists once preferred communist Russia to the US or UK. Why can’t Said have preferred Egyptian or even Pakistani democracy to Israel’s democracy? In fact one likely candidate for a better regime, and even a better democracy (though not a parliamentary democracy) for Said was Iran in the early days of the revolutionary regime (perhaps also later). Perhaps he preferred Iran’s system to Israel’s when writing this (in 1982 and 1996). Chomsky, for example, thinks that the US is a ‘Nazi state’ which needs to be ‘denazified’. It will not be surprising, then, that Said too thought that Israel was a Nazi state which needs denazifying. In fact he did. He saw Israel as being in many ways fascistic or Nazi in nature (as do virtually all far leftists today).

Which system or state did Said actually prefer? Come to think of it, I can ask the same question of Chomsky. Since Chomsky rejected the UK, US and European systems of democracy, which did he prefer, if not completely endorse? Well, he praised Maoist China, the Soviet Union, Cuba and even Pol Pot’s Cambodia.

Which states floated Said’s boat or did he see as at least being superior to Israel – even if he was not completely happy with any non-Israeli regime? He wasn’t completely happy with Arab Muslim states. That was nothing to do with their democracies or a lack thereof, but because, like all the Islamists and terrorists today, he thought that most Arab regimes were American stooges and deeply corrupt. That is, they were not Islamic enough. That has nothing to do with democracy as we know it. It was because these states were far too secular and hadn’t implemented sharia law across the board. But surely a purportedly non-religious ‘post-Marxist’ could not have thought that! Yes he could! Just as Chomsky preferred Maoist China and even Cambodia to the system of the US, then it is very likely that Said preferred, say, Iran or Pakistan to Israel or even to the USA! As I said, Chomsky still believed this even though he modestly admitted that Mao’s China, etc. were not perfect. Said also admitted to the failings of Muslim Arab states. Yet he still preferred them, maybe all of them, to Israel. Did he prefer them to the US and the UK states too? If that was the case, it was quite an incredible thing to believe. That Iran or even Pakistan is superior, even if not perfect, to Israel? It is also incredible thing that Chomsky preferred Cuba and Maoist China to the US and, of course, to Israel. Such extreme positions do indeed exist. There were many far-leftists who once supported the Soviet Union, Maoist China and even North Korea. The Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party recently stated that it would support Iran in a nuclear war with the West. Thus Said preferring the Iranian or Egyptian system to that of Israel is quite possible. How could a purportedly non-religious person even cope, let alone defend it or see as superior to Israel and the West, a totalitarian Islamic state?

These are the possibilities or realities we have to understand if we are to make sense of Said’s position on Israel and his position on ‘Western capitalist states’. This must be an important component of any explanation of Said’s attitude to Israel vis-à-vis Iran, Palestine and possibly all Arab and/or Muslim state. Said could of course have rejected every system or state on the planet and thus his expectation that Israel should be perfect would have made at least some sense. He didn’t out rightly reject all states, even if he did criticise all of them. He preferred and supported particular Islamic or Arabic regimes against the US and the West. Trotskyist groups also argue than no state is ‘a true socialist or communist state’. But they too take sides in wars or non-violent ideological confrontations, as I just said in the case of the SWP supporting Iran against the West (which is just a bad as Bradford Pakistani Muslims preferring Pakistan or Afghanistan to the UK’s system and setup). Said too took sides. He obviously took the sides of the Arab nations against the West. He even supported Saddam Hussein in the Second Gulf War and probably the Iraqi regimes attempts to nuke Israel in the 1990s.

Reference

Edward Said, Covering Islam, 1982/97, Vintage Books, London

Edward Said on Islam as Politics

2010-02-15T10:52:00.000-08:00

Contents:

i) Introduction

ii) Said on Hezbollah Not Being Anti-Semitic

iii) Said on Hezbollah Being Political, Not Religious

iv) Said on Hezbollah as Resistance Fighters

v) Said on Israel as a Religious State

Introduction

My position in this essay is that Edward Said applies a basically Marxist analysis to the cases of Hamas, Hezbollah and Palestine generally. Indeed he applies Marxist tools to Islam as a whole. Some commentators may say that Said was more of a post-Marxist, or a neo-Marxist, than a plain Marxist of any of the old schools. Yet others would argue that he was not a Marxist of any kind. They may say that he owes more to post-structuralism, structuralism, post-modernism, literary theory, etc. than he does to ‘old-fashioned’ Marxism. I am not sure what Said himself would have thought about these classifications. However, to my mind, in this book at least, he is indeed a Marxist – even an old-fashioned Marxist.

As I have said, Said offers us a Marxist analysis of Hezbollah, Hamas, and Islam generally, in which he sees these groups and the religion itself as (mere) ‘superstructure’ or epiphenomena above ‘material conditions’ such as ‘class’, ‘class conflict’, ‘imperialism’ and other such socio-economic and political phenomena.

However, despite that general and overarching Marxist analysis in which religion, Islam qua Islam, is downplayed, he does the exact opposite when talking about the state of Israel and Israelis generally. That is, he emphasises the religious nature of Israel and its leaders rather than downplays it. Thus all of a sudden Said’s Marxist lenses seem to be taken off when thinking about or discussing Israel. More than that, one gets a very strong sense that he is indeed favourable to Islam, qua Islam, and distinctly unfavourable to Judaism, qua its ostensible implementation in the state and nation of Israel. This appears to be a blatant contradiction at best. At worst, it seems like straightforward bias, if not downright prejudice.

Edward Said on Hezbollah Not Being Anti-Semitic

One of the most amazing and frankly astounding assertions of Said is that Islam and even more specifically, Hezbollah and Hamas, are not anti-Semitic. He doesn’t say it those words. He does say that their anti-Semitism is ‘putative’ (page 77). We all know what ‘putative’ means. It means that we simply presume, suppose, allege, etc. that these groups are anti-Semitic. However, if we bear in mind Said’s Marxist, or post-Marxist, or neo-Marxist, position, then Hezbollah, Hamas, etc. being non-anti-Semitic would (sort of) follow. That is because Islamic anti-Semitism is primarily based on the religion itself (with a bit of pre-20th and Nazi racism thrown in for good measure). Said has already classed religion as a superstructure or epiphenomenon above the ‘civil, political and human’ material conditions underneath. Indeed he often reduces religion to ‘class’, ‘class conflict’ and even ‘imperialism’ in other parts of his writing.

Of course the belief that Hamas, Hezbollah, and other Islamists are anti-Semites is part of the ‘Israeli official line’ (pg., 78). No it’s not! Hamas and Hezbollah are anti-Semitic according to Hamas and Hezbollah! Did Said, again, ever actually read any of their literature or did he see that too as a mere epiphenomenon above the more important ‘material and political conditions’? Not only is anti-Semitism part of these movements, it can easily be argued that it is the most important part! And getting the Jews out of the Islamic waqf has been vitally important part of Islam since the Prophet Mohammed made it vitally important over one thousand five hundred years ago.

Said again gives what can only be a Marxist - OK, a post-Marxist - account of Hezbollah. That is, he condemns the ‘United States press’ for ‘pressing Hezbollah’s religion’ and thus making sure its religion is ‘emphasised’ (x1iv). No. It is Hizbollah that stresses its own religion, not the US media or anyone else. Even if Hizbollah didn’t openly stress its religion, as it does, Said could have easily read its literature or listened to its spokesmen. Then he would have seen that Hezbollah itself ‘stresses, and ‘emphasises’ its religious basis. Of course Said must have read Hezbollah’s literature. That doesn’t matter. As a Marxist or post-Marxist he would have seen the religious stuff a mere superstructure or the epiphenomena above the underlying material and thus socio-economic and political substructure. That would mean, as it does in Marxism generally, that no matter how much Hizbollah rants and raves about Islam and the Jews, it is still all just the mere superstructure or epiphenomena above the far more important political and social things ‘underneath’. It is because of this traditional Marxist slant on religion (plus other examples of superstructure) that Said is almost bound to see Hizbollah as ‘basically a guerrilla group fighting an illegal occupation in their country’ (x1iii). Of course Hizbollah may be

i) a religious group and a guerrilla army (or a guerrilla army and a religious group).
ii) or it can be just or only a religious group.

Said opts for the option that

iii) Hizbollah is only a political group.

Most people would say that

iv) Hizbollah is both a religious group and a political group; though not necessarily a ‘guerrilla group’.

Said hints again at what he sees as the fact that Palestinian or Lebanese ‘resistance’ is not religious – at least not ‘primarily’ religious. For example, he mentions Walzer by saying that

‘when Palestinians resist Israeli colonialism it is Walzer’s firm assertion that such resistance is religious, not political or civil or human’ (41).

There are a couple of responses to this:

i) Palestinian resistance can be religious and ‘political or civil or human’.
ii) Palestinian resistance is religious. But that religiousness expresses itself in ‘political or civil or human terms’.

As we are always told by Muslims, Islam is a ‘political and civil religion’. Thus proposition ii) makes a lot of sense within that particular position.

It is also debatable whether or not Israel actually has a ‘colonialist’ position. That is, can’t a state have a position of land ownership and control without it thereby also being colonialist? Even if we accept ‘the Nakba’, it is still the case that the Israelis did not exploit Palestinian labour. And even the land was not exploitable when the Palestinians lived on it. It was the Jews who made it exploitable when they cultivated it, drained it and so on. Even Palestinian Arabs came to benefit from what the Israelis did to the land.

Not only does Said see the Israeli state as colonialist it, he sees it as being only colonialist. That is why he writes that the Israeli regime has a ‘thin colonialist façade of liberalism, secularism, socialism, or democracy’ (41). This creates a strange Saidian inversion. Thus:

i) When Jews, or Israelis, say that they are ‘secularists, socialists, or democrats’, they are basically lying. They are, instead, primarily ‘religious’.
ii) When the Palestinians, Palestinian groups, say that they are ‘religious’, Said thinks that they are in fact ‘political or civil or human’. (Did said think that they were lying too? Or was religion simply a Palestinian (Marxist) superstructure or epiphenomenon?)

Thus this is a complete inversion of what he takes other people as seeing as the truth.

Edward Said on Hezbollah Being Political, Not Religious

I find it very strange that Said should say of writer called Judith Miller that for her ‘Mohammed is the begetter of an anti-Jewish religion’ (xxxviii). Elsewhere he also talks about her writing about ‘Mohammed’s depredations against the Jews’ (xxxix). Yes. And Said’s point is? Surely Said can’t be saying that Islam is not an anti-Jewish religion. Mohammed was certainly anti-Jewish, and for many religious, social and political reasons. Islam throughout its history has shown itself to be repeatedly anti-Jewish. Today, Said’s Hamas, Hezbollah, the Palestinians generally as well as Iran, are all ‘anti-Jewish’. It is strange, then, that Said does not feel the need to argue the point that Islam and Mohammed were and are not anti-Jewish. Said often does that. He points out the West’s negative attitudes towards Islam, and displays the content and varieties of that negativity, but he rarely, if ever, attempts to argue the case for Islam not being the negative things it is painted to be. It is as if it is enough for Said to merely point out and then criticise the many examples of Western criticism of Islam and that is enough. Thus it is wrong in itself, as it were, to criticise Islam so much and so uniformly. It does not seem to matter to Said that many of the criticisms of Islam may be true, accurate or justified. The very fact of Western criticism shows us how biased we all are towards Islam and that is enough to prove to Said that there is something fundamentally wrong somewhere. He simply fails to even countenance the possibility that at least some ‘Western’ criticisms may be true, correct or justified. The very fact of criticising another culture or another religion is itself ideologically suspect. That is partly why Said, and people like Said (especially Leftists), seem to accept and even defend all sorts of Islamic wrongs, from forced marriage, to cliterodectamy, to suicide bombing. That is, it is simply forbidden for Westerners, or Christians, or the West, to castigate or criticise another culture, and that includes Islam, no matter how bad or objectionable the things are that are being criticised. The ‘oppressed’, whether Muslims or Africans, can never be criticised by the West simply because they are the oppressed. Or, I should say, because they are compartmentalised as ‘the oppressed’ by Leftists and others. That is why, for example, many Leftists do not think that Muslims and other oppressed groups can be racist. The official line is that oppressed or exploited peoples cannot be racist. Only the powerful can be racist. Only the West is racist. To slag off Islam, or any oppressed group, is effectively to become part of the oppressor West. It is to be an oppressor – no matter what or whom one is criticising, from jihad to wearing the burka to Osama bin Laden. That is why Said simply objects to every criticism of Islam, Muslims or Islamic states. At the same time, he does not try to defend, or justify, what it is that is being criticised. The very criticism of Islam is wrong, regardless of the truth, correctness, or justification of those criticisms.

Thus, until there is a radical shift of power from the West to the Muslim world, Said argued, or should have argued had he been more explicit about it, then no criticism of Islam is acceptable or even allowed from a Leftist position. This will explain the unthinkable examples of Leftist quiescence and even support or defence when it comes to all manner of outrages committed in the Muslim world or by individual Muslims. In addition, in domestic terms, that is why Western countries have so easily allowed things such as halal meat, Muslim schools, sharia law, criminal activity, polygamy, ‘hate speech’, forced and arranged marriages, and so on from Muslim communities or from individual Muslims.

Said on Hezbollah as Resistance Fighters Not Terrorists

Said has a sick and conspiratorial mind when it comes to the Jews or Israelis.

Why do we in the West use the word ‘terrorism’ when talking about Hamas, Hezbollah, the ‘insurgents’ in Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan, and even al-Qaeda? Because Israel has told us to. Well, not quite. Said writes that our

‘loose application of the word “terrorism” to “Islam”, and the attitude that elevates Israelis views of Islam’s “dangers” to the level of United States policy’ (xxix).

Did the Israelis tell those animists and Christians in southern Sudan, who have been killed and exterminated, to class the Janjaweed as ‘terrorists’? Do they all read the Israel Times or the New York Times? Did we need to be told by the Israelis, or anyone else for that matter, that those responsible for 9/11 were terrorists? Except, of course, for the fact that some far leftists and many Muslims, think the Jews or Israelis were really responsible for that outrage as well! When you have a psychotic mind, you really can’t escape from the Jews or the ‘Israel Lobby’.

What does Said’s phrase the ‘loose application of the word “terrorism” to “Islam”’ actually mean? How does that work? I don’t think it even makes sense as a statement. It sounds like yet another ideologically-loaded soundbite on Said’s part. He has got himself in a froth and forgotten to actually make sense here.

The Jewish Lobby, as well as the Jewish conspiracy in more general terms, is seen by Said as even bigger and more all-encompassing than some of the Islamists in the Muslim Brotherhood or Hizb ut-Tahrir do. Let’s give it in full. All of us, that is you and I, belong to what Said calls pax Americana-Israelica (xxxv), which also rules the Middle East. At least he had the wisdom to include America. So the Jews need at least a little help? Except for the fact that the Israeli or Jewish Lobby also runs America! Brilliant! The true World Government encapsulated by a bit of pseudo-Latin from Said.

Said gives an example of the ‘Israeli view’ in the guise of the Times. He says that the Times is not interested the ‘facts’. Why is that? Because it did not support Hezbollah, or its position, in Lebanon (1996)? This is the story of Israel’s air strikes in ? against terrorist targets in Lebanon. According to Said, Hezbollah is not a terrorist group at all; it is made up of what he calls ‘guerrillas’. The Times got that wrong for a start. Fancy mistaking guerrillas for terrorists. The Times thinks what it thinks simply because Israel ‘wishes it to be known that that country’s terrorists are militant Muslims rather than Guerrillas resisting occupation’ (x1iv). It’s not a case of the Times thinking that Hezbollah is a terrorist group. It’s more a case of Israel telling the Times what to think about a bunch of ‘guerrillas’. (What about ‘freedom fighters’?) If Said believes that the Times can’t think for itself when it comes to any foreign country that would be, if not fine, then it would be consistent. That’s not the case, though, because we are talking here about Israel. We all know how powerful and deceitful the Jews are. Don’t we? Said even suggests that the Times wants its readers to think that it’s ‘the mad Muslims are at it again, killing Jews as usual’ (x1iv). Well, they have killed a lot of Jews. In fact they have killed a lot of Jews for being Jews. Indeed they have killed non-Israeli Jews in various parts of the world, most spectacularly in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Did Said never read Hezbollah literature or listen to its religious leaders when they talked about the Jews ruling the world, their being ‘apes and pigs’ and that they were going to kill every last Jew on earth? Actually, Said did read such things from Hezbollah. After all he too believes in the Israel Lobby and the Jewish Conspiracy as well as the supreme power and malevolence of the Jews.

The truth, according to Said, is this. Hezbollah exists (partly?) because of the fact that Israel ‘displaced 200,000 residents of South Lebanon, having already bombed the area from the air, land, and sea’ (x1v). The thing is that there’s an easy answer to this. The Israelis ‘displaced 200,000 residents of South Lebanon’ etc. because Hezbollah, and other Islamic groups, had already bombed northern Israel for years before that. Now, of course, all a Saidian needs to say is that Hezbollah ‘bombed northern Israel’ because … Yes, fill in the dots yourself, because I’m not sure if this game of mono-causality actually gets us anywhere in the end.

Said’s original source of truth, on this occasion, was Robert Fisk; the guy who basically takes the same ideological positions on Israel as Said himself. After all, Said would have in all modesty admitted that he was not himself a journalist or reporter. So let’s get things straight. Fisk ‘concentrated on what in fact happened’ (x1v). In other words, he didn’t tell us ‘what Israeli or United States officials wanted the world to believe was happening’ (x1v). What was happening was that Lebanese ‘guerrillas [were] resisting occupation’ (x1v).

Not only did Said deny that Hezbollah is a terrorist group, he also seemed to deny that that it is a ‘militant Shi’a group backed by Iran’ (x1vii). Actually; fair dues. He doesn’t really deny this. He says that Hezbollah is not ‘primarily’ a militant Shia’ group backed by Iran. It is Israel and the West, apparently, who think that. What is Hezbollah, then, ‘primarily’? Said does not explicitly say. I must assume that he thinks that Hezbollah is primarily a guerrilla group or a ‘resistance movement’ because that’s what he repeatedly calls them elsewhere. (Unless Hezbollah is primarily made up of social workers or something like that.)

Let’s get back to Israel brainwashing the US; and then the US brainwashing the rest of the West. Why does Israel and the US, or why do we, believe that Hezbollah is a terrorist group? Well we certainly don’t believe that Hezbollah is a terrorist group because it is a terrorist group. We don’t believe that Hezbollah is a terrorist group because it is fanatically anti-Semitic and that it frequently bombs civilians because it doesn’t actually see any Israeli civilian as a civilian. No. We believe that Hezbollah is a terrorist group because its ‘resistance is [thereby] dehumanised and rendered illegitimate’ (x1vii). Aren’t child-killers and fanatical anti-Semites inhuman and illegitimate? A lot of being people, brainwashed people in Said’s eyes, would think that they are. Even if Israel did occupy southern Lebanon ‘illegitimately’, would that miraculously make child killing and fanatical anti-Semitism humane and legitimate?

Said’s logic is simple and massively mistaken. He suggests that we should not see Hezbollah, Hamas and even al-Qaeda (?)in terms of Islam, or their being Muslims, at all. It is, it seems, the wrong way of looking at these movements. He gives us an equivalence which is closer to home (or so he thinks). He writes:

‘Of course no one has equated the Jonestown massacre or the destructive horror of the Oklahoma bombing or the devastation of Indochina with Christianity…’ (9)

Said must think that we, or the West, should believe the following:

Of course no one has (or should!) equated 9/11 or the London bombing or Hezbollah/Hamas suicide bombs with Islam.

That is what he is getting at. Yes; it is incredible! He wants us to believe that these outrages were more to do with ‘resistance’, ‘national liberation’, ‘oppression’ or whatnot than about Islam.
But his list is disingenuous because both the Jonestown massacre and the Oklahoma bombing did have religious aspects. However, to say that the ‘devastation of Indochina’ was a kind of Christian crusade is ridiculous. Yes, a capitalist crusade or an imperialist crusade or a crusade against communism. I can just about accept that. But a Christian crusade, or Christianity being at the heart of the Indochina wars, is plain silly. Yes, most of the soldiers were Christians and most of the leaders of the US army were Christian. That still wouldn’t have made it a Christian crusade. The other thing is that Timothy Mcveigh was a loner. Hamas, Hezbollah, etc. aren’t loners. Said himself sees them as resistance movements for Palestine and Lebanon respectively. Thus the comparison with Mcveigh just doesn’t work. Did Mcveigh’s family support him? No. Did his (Christian) community support him? No. Is there much of a rational for his actions in Christian literature, etc. Well, possibly. But not unequivocally and absolutely, as is really the case for the Islam of Hamas or Hezbollah. Even in the case of the Jonestown massacre. There might have been a community of sorts. But it was a community that was at odds with the communities around it. That is not the case with Hezbollah and Hamas. They have strong support in Lebanon and Palestine respectively. So Said’s comparisons are little more than examples of Islamist or far leftist tabloid journalism.

Edward Said on Israel as a Religious State

The Jewish Conspiracy, or I should say, the Israel Lobby, is a simple fact. Of course it is a fact because there is indeed an Israel Lobby, as there is a gay lobby, an arms company lobby and probably even a poker players lobby. But Said is not talking about the weaklings of the lobby circus. He is talking about that ‘the role of Israel in mediating Western and particularly America views of the Islamic world sense World War II’ (34). Thus the US itself is not mediating how we should see the Islamic world. Not even the West is. It is Israel, or perhaps the Israel Lobby, that is doing that. On that strength, in a sense Israel is actually more powerful, if only ideologically, than the West and the US – at least when it comes to the Middle East and Palestine/Israel particularly. Said then shows us how the Israel Lobby makes us forget about Israel. It makes us forget ‘Israel’s religious fanaticism’ (34). This must be in contrast to Hezbollah’s, or Iran’s, ‘religious fanaticism’, which we don’t ignore. There are indeed Jewish fanatics in Israel. They are minuscule in number and hardly any Israelis support them. Many Israelis are secularists in that they believe that there should be a big gap between synagogue and state. However, these minority religious groups do have quite some power because of Israel’s proportional representation system. This allows parties and groups with only 2.0% votes and over a say in Israel’s parliament. On top of that, as with all PR systems, these groups have a power beyond their size because non-religious groups often have to form alliances with them in order to achieve political victories, or gain more votes, etc. These facts can be part of an argument against PR but not one against Israel’s religious fanaticism as a whole or its hold over Israeli society and government.

Yes, and it also true that that these religious nuts are largely responsible for the settlements in Gaza, the West Bank and elsewhere. Yet even here it is also the case that many other settlers are not fundamentalist Jews but are also secular in outlook. They have built settlements not for religious reasons but to improve their standard of living. Even Said acknowledges that it ‘is a convenient fact that it was “secular” labour governments that first instituted illegal settlements on the West Bank’ (34). Isn’t it also an ‘inconvenient fact’, for Said himself, in that just a few sentences before he was trying to make the point that Israel, or its Government, is as religious as Hamas, Hezbollah or even certain Muslim-majority states? The ‘secular’ nature of the Israeli government’s instituting settlements in the West works against Said’s general argument. Unless Said is saying that we should more or less ignore the religious nature of Israel in the way we should more or less ignore the religious nature of Hamas and Hezbollah (even of Muslim states), as he does. Ignoring the Islamic nature of Hezbollah and Hamas would be like ignoring the Catholic beliefs of the Pope as a justification or explanation for his actions. In any case, Said, both in this book and elsewhere, has certainly not ignored the religious nature, or natures, of the Israeli state. So what he wants us to do with Hezbollah, Hamas, etc., he does not want us to in the case of Israel and its leaders.

Despite the fact that Said seems to defend Islam, or the legitimacy of Islam within the global Marxist context of Islam-versus-the-capitalist/colonialist-West, and even defend Islam’s autonomy despite his otherwise materialist analysis, Said doesn’t stop himself from making quite a few critical and ironic comments about the general religiosity or religious nature of the state of Israel. Clearly, despite his professed secularism and materialism (or plain non-religiosity), he does indeed prefer Islam to Judaism. For example, he says of ‘Begin’s Israel’ that it was

‘a regime fully willing to mandate its actions by religious authority and by a very backward-looking theological doctrine’ (31).

This comment comes immediately after speaking about Iran and how it is seen as ‘atavistic’ and ‘mediaeval’ by ‘the West’. Said thinks it is not. It is Israel that is atavistic and mediaeval. Iran is, if anything, ‘revolutionary’. This is something Said frequently says; sometimes explicitly and sometimes implicitly. The Far Left has always had a rosy view of post-1979 ‘revolutionary Iran’ precisely because of its purportedly revolutionary and liberatory potential. Foucault admired the early stages of this regime. The Far Left often defends it. The Socialist Workers Party even today would support Iran in a nuclear war with the West. And so on. Thus Said was not alone in his penchant for revolutionary Shia Iran.

Perhaps all this is partly why there are lots of crosscurrents and similarities between the Far Left and Islam – specifically Iran’s Islam. There are other similarities as well. Ironically, Said himself quotes a writer who offers some of these very similarities between Far Leftism and Islam. That writer is Daniel Pipes. He writes that ‘radical Islam’ is

‘closer in spirit to other such movements (communism, fascism) than to traditional religion… While fundamentalist Islam differs in its details from other utopian ideologies, it closely resembles them in scope and ambition. Like communism and fascism, it offers a vanguard ideology; a complete program to improve man and to create a new society; complete control over society; and cadres ready, and even eager, to spill blood.’ (xviii)

However, it appears that Said does not altogether, or at all, appreciate Daniel Pipe’s comparisons. No doubt that was partly because it was a ‘perfervid anti-Muslim’ who was offering them. Perhaps if a Muslim had written the above, with a few changes of rhetoric and content, Said would have concurred with it. After all, Pipe’s description and analysis does sound very much like the Iran of the immediate revolutionary and post-revolutionary period, which was precisely the time in which Said, Foucault and many other Leftists saw many things they admired in Iran. Perhaps it was Pipe inclusion of the triad

Islam- fascism – communism

that Said did not like. That is, comparing radical Islam with communism is OK. But comparing it with fascism as well; that’s not OK. (Said may not even have liked the comparison of fascism and communism, but that is a different story.)

We have just talked about the Islam-fascism-communism triad. Now Said also includes a duo:

Adolph Hitler – Ayatollah Khomeini

Again, this is a quote from another writer. This time from George Carpozi. We can now be sure that Said has used this quote to show us how silly it is. But is it? –

‘Like Adolph Hitler in another time, Ayatollah Khomeini is a tyrant, a hater, a baiter, a threat to world order and peace. The principle difference between the author of Mein Kampf and the compiler of the vapid Islamic Government is that one was an atheist while the other pretends to be a man of God.’ (44)

Here, as on many other occasions, Said simply takes it for grated that his reader will agree with him by seeing the above comparison as over the top or whatever. Again, this is because he does not attempt to refute it or even display its hyperbolic nature. What if it is largely correct in its analysis? I say ‘largely correct’ because I am not completely happy with this passage myself. I am not happy with the psychological or ad hominem phrase that the Ayatollah Khomeini ‘pretends to be a man of God’. I am absolutely sure that he did not pretend anything of the sort. I am absolutely sure that Khomeini did see himself to ‘be a man of God’. Indeed, to me, that was precisely the problem.

In the end though, don’t radical Islam, communism and fascism have more similarities, if this is quantifiable even in principle, than they have dissimilarities?

Reference:

- Edward W. Said, Covering Islam, 1981/97, Vintage Books, London.

The Koran's Sura 2, 'The Cow'

2010-02-10T10:58:00.000-08:00

Contents:
i) General Introduction

ii) Intro. to Surah 2, 'the Cow'

iii) Jihad or Fighting?

iv) The Jews

v) Women: Divorce and Mentruation

vi) Almsgiving and Usury

--------------------------------

General Introduction
[This 'General Introduction' is more or less the same as my introduction to my commentary and criticism of Sura 4 - 'the Women'.]

This piece is written by someone who has not studied the Koran ‘in depth’ for twenty or more years. It is written by someone who does not ‘understand the nuances of the original Arabic’. It is also written by someone who has not consulted Koranic scholars in order to be given a ‘proper’ and positive take on the Koran. I take all such obfuscations and rejoinders as good examples of Islamic Taqiyya – that is, as deceits, deceptions or lies used in order to protect - or further the cause of - Islam.

Muslims and Islamophiles may also accuse me of cherry picking only negative passages from the 2nd sura. That may be partly true. However, we have millions upon millions of Muslims in the world who seem to cherry pick only the positive parts of the Koran. Why add to this huge industry? Actually, that is not completely the case. It depends which Muslims we talk to. The ‘extremists’ and Islamists thoroughly accept what I see, but they don’t, as the negative parts of the Koran. And even the ‘moderates’, or those who want to engage with non-Muslims, often only cherry pick the positive parts of the Koran in order to create a false impression of Islam and the Koran. In any case, I genuinely found it hard to pick out any positive passages from this sura. And those passages which are positive in the Koran are often rather bland and are similar to many things which have been written and believed by many people who were not Muslims.

Finally, why should any non-Muslim bow down, as it were, to a Muslim scholar who has been ‘studying’ the Koran for twenty or more years? (Or why should I feel a strong need to immerse myself in, say, Ziauddin Sardar?) This scholar, and many others, may not have a single logical, analytical, critical, philosophical or even historical bone in his body. Thus why should a non-Muslim - or even a Muslim - expect or even require an acute or profound reading of the Koran from such a man? Martin Amis, for example, commented on the fact the one of the founders of contemporary Islamism, Sayyid Qutb, had memorised the Koran by the age of ten. Amis wrote:

‘Qutb… spent his childhood memorising the Koran, and on his own initiative. Now given that, it seems idle to expect much sense from him.’ (61)

Introduction to Surah 2, ‘The Cow’

This surah includes all the usual suspects one usually finds in the Koran and indeed in Islam as a whole – viz., jihad, the Jews and women. This particular surah is strong on the Jews. In basic terms, it gives the theological and historical reasons for the Islamic hatred of the Jews, despite their being seen by Muslims as ‘the People of the Book’. The Jews’ being the People of the Book amounts to very little that is positive to Muslims, as one will see in this essay.

An interesting and very relevant distinction, or lack of one, is then made between fighting and jihad. My argument is that it is indeed the case that the word ‘jihad’ is not often found in the Koran – but ‘fighting’ is! In other words, the concept of [jihad] is found, even if the word ‘jihad’ is not. In any case, there is no real distinction that is made in this surah between fighting and jihad any way. Thus the concentration on the word ‘jihad’ by Muslim apologists or scholars is at the best duplicitous, and at worst, a good example of Islamic Taqiyya.

The role of women is then discussed. Particularly the Koranic position on divorce. It will be seen how remarkably easy divorce is in Islam, or at least is in the Koran and in traditional Muslim societies. It is also remarkably man-friendly.

Finally we will find the strong Islamic distinction which is made between usury and trading. This too has theological components and implications. And one would not be far off the mark if one immediately sees a direct connection to the Koranic or Islamic position on the Jews here as well.

Jihad or Fighting?

In Surah 2, as in every other surah, there are many references to jihad. Not to ‘internal struggle’ – to violent or aggressive jihad. No Muslim, at least no Muslim male of fighting age (although al-Qaeda Hamas and Hezbollah have used women recently) can be spared from the duty of Jihad. Jihad is not peripheral to Islam. It is at its very heart. Only such a statement can explain what follows:

‘Fighting is obligatory for you [all Muslims], much as you dislike it. But you may hate a thing although it is good for you, and love a thing although it is bad for you. Allah knows, but you know not.’ – 2:216

Many Muslims have made much of the fact that there are no references to ‘jihad’ in the Koran. What they really mean, despite the nauseating use of Islamic Taqiyya, is that the word itself, 'jihad', is not used in the Koran.(This itself only depends on translation.) The concept [jihad] is in the Koran. The word ‘jihad’ is not. What a scandalous piece of deceit that is. According to these ‘scholars’:

fighting ≠ jihad

or

jihad ≠ fighting

More precisely:

‘Fighting is obligatory for you.’ ≠ ‘Jihad is obligatory for you.’

(This is similar to arguing that the BNP is not racist because it never uses the word ‘nigger’ or any other explicitly racist term for black people.)

Fighting is mentioned in the Koran, but not jihad. OK then. So fighting is at the heart of the Koran, not jihad. What’s the difference? Is there a difference? Perhaps I need to ask an Islamic scholar. Which one? There are millions of them; all of whom say different things!

Defensive Aggression

Much is also made of the fact that the Koran only allows defensive war or force. They quote the often-used line:

‘Allah does not love aggressors.’

The problem is that anything can be deemed as aggression. Anything can be seen as defensive. And just about everything is seen as being aggressive towards Islam in the Koran; just as it is by today’s Muslims. Thus Muslims never have a shortage of things to be defensively aggressive about. There has never been a shortage of ‘defensive’ wars in Islamic history either. Don’t forget that

i) The Satanic Verses were an ‘attack on Islam’.
ii) The Danish cartoons were ‘an attack on Mohammed’.
iii) The banning of the veil in France is an ‘attack on Islam and Muslim women’.
iv) Not allowing Sharia law in Bradford is an attack on Muslims. Ad infinitum!

A theme which can be seen throughout the Koran is the ‘aggressive’ act of other religions forcing Muslims ‘to renounce [their] faith’. What does that mean? -

i) Saying one’s Christian or Hindu prayers in front of a Muslim can be deemed as an attempt by ‘infidels’ to get Muslims ‘to renounce [their] faith’.
ii) Building churches in Saudi Arabia is actually seen as an attempt by Christians to get Muslims to ‘renounce their faith’.
iii) Anything at odds with Islam could and has been seen by Muslims as an attempt by non-Muslims to try and get them to renounce their faith. Ad infinitum!

Thus these so-called ‘attacks’ on Muslims end up being the best form of attack for Muslims, as it were. This is an example of this defensive or paranoid Muslim mentality from the Koran:

‘They [the Jews, Christians, etc.] will not cease to fight against you until they force you to renounce your faith – if they are able.’ – 2:216

The obvious result of all this is that all non-Muslims, or all non-Muslim objects and symbols, are seen as a direct threat to both Islam and to Muslims. Indeed all these things are seen as tacit or explicit acts of aggression towards Islam or Muslims. Allah ‘does not like aggressors’. Thus that almost pacifist-like phrase, which is meant to show us that Muslims or Islam is not aggressive or violent, is actually a warning to all non-Muslims that they should never mess with Muslims. It is not actually aimed at Muslims at all. It is aimed at the infidel. Not only that, but it gives Muslims an excuse or justification for defensive attacks on non-Muslims. Thus defence, or defensive attack, is virtually indistinguishable from plain or outright Muslim expansionist attack. And one of the very few passages against ‘aggressors’ or aggression turns out not to be what it seems. It is, in fact, aimed at us – not at Muslims! What else would one expect from a warrior-prophet?

In this part of this surah, it is ‘idolatry’ which is seen as, well, aggressive, or an act of aggression, towards Muslims. The very existence of idolatry, Jewish, Christian or whatever, is seen as aggressive or expansionist in or by the Koran. And because it is an act of aggression, Muslims can ‘fight’ against it. That is, jihad against idolatry is accepted and encouraged. In fact in Islam and the Koran idolatry is seen as being worse than the killing which will occur in a ‘defensive’ attack against it. Thus:

‘Idolatry is more grievous than bloodshed.’ – 2:216

From then on, in this surah, there are various references to ‘fighting’ (not ‘jihad’!). For example, Muslims are enjoined to ‘[F]ight for the cause of Allah’ (2:242).

Muslims, in the Koran and today, don’t want to be the ‘victims’ of what they see as the aggression of other religions. That’s what they don’t want. What do they want? This:

‘… [Allah]. Give us victory over the unbelievers.’ – 2:286

The best way to stop infidel aggression, however that aggression is seen, is to gain a ‘victory over the unbelievers’. Thus when every unbeliever is dead or converted (or ‘reverted’), there will indeed be peace. But even that is only brought about after everyone’s complete submission to Allah.

Again, we have another Koranic reference to not attacking the ‘aggressor’ first. (If the ‘aggressor’ does not attack first, he can’t be the aggressor.) Here again it is others who are seen, in the Koran, as fighting against Muslims. It is not a case of Muslims attacking others. If we remember how wide ‘attack’ can be read by Muslims or in Islam, then the following passage should seem very problematic and in no way a direct or indirect reference to some kind of Islamic semi-pacifism, as it were:

‘Fight for the sake of Allah those that fight against you, but do not attack then first. God does not love the aggressors.’ – 2:189

What is meant by ‘fight’ and ‘aggressors’ here? Today Muslims see anything or everything as aggression against Muslims, Islam or Mohammed. If they do that today, and often in non-Muslim countries, imagine how things were in the Prophet’s time. In fact, in the very next paragraph we are given a hint, or even a statement, as to what kind of aggression we are talking about here. We are talking about infidel or unbeliever ‘idolatry’! Idolatry itself is seen as aggression by Mohammed and his fellow Muslims, as it is today. The Koran says:

‘Idolatry is more grievous than bloodshed.’ – 2:189

That is just a few lines after the Koran talked about infidel aggression towards Mohammed and his fellow Muslims. Thus we must conclude that infidel idolatry or idols are seen as aggression or aggressive. It is probable that this particular reference is to pagan Arab idols and idolatry. It could just as easily refer to Christians and churches or Jews and synagogues.

The very next few sentences make one think that the Islamic or Muslim view of aggression is very strange. Or should I say that the Islamic view of self-defence is very strange. Do the following words sounds like a call to self-defence or the cry of those who are suffering from infidel aggression? –

‘Fight against them until idolatry is no more and Allah’s religion reigns supreme.’ – 2:189

There is another reference to aggression, or violence, in this surah which is not directly connected with jihad or fighting. It is a statement which seems to be taken directly from the Old Testament business of ‘an eye for an eye’. It also contains a reference to slaves and the legitimisation of slavery. It goes:

‘Believers, retaliation is decreed for you in bloodshed: a free man for a free man, a slave for a slave, and a female for a female.’ – 2:178

Having said that, this can also be seen as a reference to jihad, or, should I say, to Islamic defensive-attack or defensive aggression, which I have covered. That is, the reference to ‘retaliation’. Thus Muslims can retaliate not for direct physical attacks or force against them, but for the example of the ‘idolatry’ already mentioned. Thus if anyone builds a church, temple or synagogue, or prays out loud, then Muslims can ‘retaliate’ against the infidel or unbeliever because such things are, after all, seen as being attacks by Muslims, the Koran, or Mohammed.

Despite all that, even though Allah or the Koran most definitely encourages jihad, or defensive aggression, death itself does not actually exist for the martyr or jihadist. Those that die in battle against the infidel, or when they have exploded their suicide bomb, are not dead:

‘And call not those who are slain in the way of Allah “dead”. Nay, they are living, only you perceive not.’ - 154

It is no wonder, then, that the mothers of suicide bombers or jihadists encourage their sons to become killers-for-Islam and even celebrate upon hearing of their sons’ deaths ‘in the way of Allah’.

The Jews

There is a lot of ranting and raving in Surah 2 about how bad the Jews are. There is a lot of ranting and raving about the Jews throughout the Koran. This Surah is particularly strong on Jew-bashing. Their main sin is rejecting ‘the Prophets’ with an‘s’ and rejecting the Prophet without an ‘s’ (i.e., Mohammed).

For example, we have this:

‘… you [the Jews or ‘Israelites’] broke your covenant [with Allah] except a few, and gave no heed.’ – 2:80

This is what Allah asked of the Jews, and, thus, what they ‘broke’:

‘When I made a convenant with the Israelites I said: “Serve none but God. Show kindness to your parents, to your kinsfolk, to the orphans, and to the destitute. Exhort men to righteousness. Attend to your prayers and render the alms levy.”’ – 2:80

Thus we must conclude, if only from these words, that that the Jews not only broke their convenant with Allah, but they did not show kindness to their parents, to their kinsfolk, to their orphans, or to the destitute. They did not ‘exhort’ men to do good either. Or help the poor or say their prayers. The Jews were a pretty bad lot, if this propaganda is to be believed. Perhaps they are still a bad lot. Perhaps this is Hamas’s or Hezbollah’s favourite surah in the Koran.

Another thing the Jews were guilty of was believing one part of the Scripture and denying the other. Or, as Mohammed puts it:

‘Can you believe in one part of the Scriptures and deny another?’ – 2:85

What Mohammed means here is that the Jews were denying the Koran. And the Koran is what Mohammed spoke. Thus they were denying the words of Mohammed. This is not surprising considering the fact that the Judaic religion pre-dated Mohammed by over a thousand years. He must have seemed to most of them as little more than a puffed-up impostor. No wonder Mohammed grew to hate the Jews. What a slap in the face he received from them! How dare you not believe my words!

There is even a reference to the Jews killing Jesus. It says:

‘Why did you kill the prophets of God, if you are true believers?’

(Wasn’t it the Romans who killed Jesus? I know there is a little dispute about this.)

However, that very denial of Scriptures or ‘revelations’ (that is, the Koran or Mohammed’s words) is clearly and unequivocally criticised thus:

‘We sent down to you [the Jews] clear revelations: none will deny them except the evil-doers.’ – 2: 98

The Jews denied the truth of Mohammed’s words, thus they were, and are, ‘evil-doers’ – the Jews were and are evil.

Another way of putting all this is to say that the Jews were Allah’s ‘chosen ones’, but that they then rejected Him, his prophets and scriptures. Thus they are bad people. So it is very strange that when the criticisms of Israel are discussed, or Islamic anti-Semitism, etc., Muslim often say: But Jews are the People of the Book. Next time a Muslim says that, ask him or her to tell you exactly what the Koran says about the Jews. Yes, they are ‘the People of the Book’. But they are the people of the Book who rejected Allah, the prophets and their scriptures. There is nothing positive in the Koran about the Jews, other than their classification, ‘the People of the Book’; as well as the simple fact that they were ‘chosen’ by Allah himself.

This is supposed to be Allah himself speaking to the Jews:

‘O Children of Israel! Remember My favour with which I favoured you, and fulfil your (part of the covenant, I shall fulfil My (part of the) convent, and fear Me.’ - 40

The Jews are the People of the Book essentially because they ‘already possess’ a part of Scripture. The Koran, of course, is the next part. Thus:

‘And believe in that which I reveal, confirming that which you possess already (of the Scripture), and be not first to disbelieve it, and part not with My revelations for a trifling price, and keep your duty to Me.’ – 41

Thus what the Jews already had, plus the Koran, constituted a single ‘Scripture’. And that is why the word ‘Scripture’ has a capital ‘S’.

Up until the time of Mohammed, or the Koran, Allah had actually ‘favoured’ the Jews or the Israelites. Thus we have a few references to what can now be found in the Old Testament. Allah essentially tells the Jews about how he ‘delivered [them] from Pharaoh’s people’ (49). Allah also refers to a time when the Jews were bad. For example, when they ‘wronged’ Moses (thus Allah) and instead chose to ‘worship a calf’ (54). But all this is small fry compared to when the Jews rejected Mohammed and his Koran. That was abominable! This is how the Koran itself puts it:

‘[T]hey [the Jews] disbelieved in Allah’s revelations and slew the prophets wrongfully. That was for their disobedience and transgression.’ (61)

This is a reference to what the Jews ‘disbelieved’ before the coming of Mohammed and the Koran. (I.e., a reference to Christ, amongst other things.) As I have already said, Muslims see the Koran and the earlier works of the non-Muslim prophets as all being a part of a single entity – the Scripture. Thus when the Jews believed the earlier parts, but rejected the Koran, that was ‘unlawful’ (85):

‘Do you believe in part of the Scripture and disbelieve in part of it?’ [That ‘part’ being the Koran and perhaps also Christian scripture.] - 85

Because of this Jewish act of ‘obstinacy’, Allah decided to punish the Jews and other ‘unbelievers’ by hardening their hearts. Allah says that after their rejection of Mohammed and the Koran Jewish ‘hearts were hardened and became as rocks, or worse than rocks, for hardness’ (12). Thus we now have one explanation for the long-running belief that the Jews are inhuman and unmoved by the suffering of all non-Jews. The terms ‘hardhearted’ or ‘stonehearted’ may in part come direct from the Koran!

Allah also punished the Jews by making them ‘greedy for life’, not for death (thus Paradise)! This can be explained by statement from Hamas. A spokesman for the terrorist group said that ‘they would defeat the Jews because the Jews love life more than death, whereas we love death alone’. This is how that message is expressed in the Koran:

‘And you will find them greediest of mankind for life and (greedier) than the idolaters.’ – 96

Women: Menstruation and Divorce

As many people know, divorce is very easy in Islam. Or, at the least, it is according to the Koran and in traditional Muslim societies. If I wanted to divorce or ‘renounce’ my wife, all I would need to do is give her – or construct - an ‘oath’. The only handicap there, however, is that I would need to wait four months before the renunciation or divorce was complete or finalised. Here is the passage:

‘Those that renounce their wives on oath must wait four months.’

As I have just said, the divorce is only complete or final four months after the initial ‘oath’. This means that the Muslim man can change his mind within that period. That is, he can decide not to divorce his wife:

‘If [men or husbands] change their minds, Allah is forgiving and merciful; but if they decide to divorce them [their wives], know that Allah hears all and knows all.’ – 2:222

What about Muslim women or wives? After they have been divorced by their husbands

‘[d]ivorced women must wait, keeping themselves from men, three menstrual courses.’ – 2:228

Thus, when women are divorced, or ‘renounced’, by their husbands, they must wait three months or more before they can remarry. The only extra bit of detail we get here is that when the husband divorces his wife, she must not, at that time, hide the fact that she is pregnant from him because the pregnancy would clearly influence the man’s decision as to the divorce. Or as the Koran puts it:

‘It is unlawful of them [wives or women], if they believe in Allah and the Last Day, to hide what Allah has created in their wombs: in which case their husbands would do well to take them back, should they desire reconciliation.’ – 2:228

Whereas it is ‘unlawful’ for a wife or a woman to hide her pregnancy from her husband (after the oath of divorce), it is only the case that the husband ‘would do well’ to desist from the divorce when he finds out that his wife is pregnant. Thus Mohammed, or Allah, only suggests that a husband should stay with his wife (not divorce her) when and if he find out that she is pregnant. On the other hand, it is ‘unlawful’ for the wife to hide her pregnancy from her husband after he has divorced her (bearing in mind that the divorce is only complete or finalised after four months).

Can women divorce their husbands as well? It is hard to say. Or, I should say, it is hard to say if one is only relying on this surah for an answer to that question. That is, the next paragraph or passage is a little ambivalent as to a woman’s right to divorce her husband. It says:

‘Women shall with justice have rights similar to those exercised against them, although men have a status above women.’ – 2:228

The first clause

‘Women shall with justice have rights similar to those exercised against them…’

seems to suggest that women can divorce their husbands as well. After all, it has been the divorce by a husband that has been ‘exercised against them’. However, the next clause

‘although men have a status above women.’

seems to negate this right. The thing is that it is hard to decide – if only from this surah alone - whether women have the right to divorce their husbands as well. Of course, this issue may well be settled elsewhere in the Koran (or outside the Koran!). Despite this problem, it is unequivocally the case, as it is everywhere else in the Koran, that in Islam ‘men have a status above women’. That statement alone, as well as the fact that there is no mention in this surah about women being able to divorce their husbands, suggests that women cannot divorce their husbands.

Menstruation

Many Muslims have some odd obsessions about cleanliness, most of which date back to Koran. In this surah’s case, it is women who are dirty or unclean. Or at least they are during their menstrual period. The warning is simple. Men and husbands must keep away from ‘their’ women when they are having their periods. Not only is a period seen as unclean, it is also seen as an ‘indisposition’ or even an ‘illness’ (in certain translations). The relevant passage in this surah goes:

‘It is an indisposition. Keep aloof from women during their menstrual periods and do not approach them until they are clean again; when they are clean, have intercourse with them whence Allah enjoined you.’ – 2:222

One wonder if the ‘intercourse’ mentioned above is ‘sexual intercourse’ or ‘social intercourse’. However, in the very next sentence it says that ‘[w]omen are your fields: go, then, into your fields whence you please’ (2:222). Thus it is my guess that the intercourse being referred to here is sexual intercourse. After all, one seeds fields, as one does women.

Almsgiving and Usury

Yes, there are indeed references to helping the poor in the Koran and indeed in this specific surah. The problem is that there are only a few statements to go on. Nothing is elaborated upon. Nothing is argued for. Not many examples are given. Nothing much, in fact, is actually said about helping the poor and other such positives. These statements could have been said by anyone and in any book. They do not even sound like great literature in my translations. For instance, there are only about four sentences on giving ‘alms’ to the poor and all the rest is either repetition or evocations of Allah’s greatness - again and again and again. For example:

‘To be charitable in public is good, but to give alms to the poor in private is better and will atone for some of your sins.’ – 2:267

That’s it! There are other references a little later; but nothing about almsgiving is added to. The only additions are about Allah’s attitude to almsgiving, not to almsgiving itself. No wonder Islam requires the hadiths, the sunnah, Islamic jurisprudence and the rest! Yet, in essence, it’s all supposed to be here – in the Koran!

Not only that, but Islamic almsgiving can hardly be said to be altruistic in nature. Take the very same two or three paragraphs. For example:

‘… whatever alms you give shall be paid back to you in full: you shall not be wronged.’ – 2:272

In other words, the more you give the more you will get back at payback time in Paradise. Thus you are essentially being paid, or rewarded, for doing good. You are not encouraged to do good for the sake of doing good or because you want to help the poor.

In addition, if you give alms, you

‘will atone for some of your sins.’ – 2:267

Instead of going to confession after you have killed someone, you can instead give a couple of quid to the poor and thus be atoned for your sin. Brilliant! How much do I need to give to the poor to atone for my killing a hundred people in cold blood? Twenty pounds? The oil-rich Wahhabi Saudis must be guaranteed a place in Paradise if all this is anything to go on.

And again:

‘Whatever alms you give shall rebound to your own advantage…’ – 2:272

The only requirement here is that you do it ‘for the love of Allah’, not for the love of the poor or the love of anyone else for that matter. And if Allah is going to save you a place in Paradise for your almsgiving, or ‘pay back to you in full’, then it is little surprise that the onus is on loving Allah and not on loving the poor or on loving anyone else.

Tied in with these ‘positive’ remarks about almsgiving are some rather negative ones about usury. Usury is seen very differently in these very same passages. Arabs Muslims loved trading. They still do. Thus it seems that in this surah, and historically, there was a need to distinguish trading from usury. Trading good: usury bad. Actually, the Koran claims that it is the usurers themselves who say that ‘usurer is the same as trading’, or even that it is a form of trading. The Koran thinks differently:

‘Those that live on usury shall rise up before Allah like men whom Satan has demented by his touch; for they claim that trading is no different from usury. But Allah has permitted trading and made usury unlawful.’ – 2:275

As I said about the passages on almsgiving, there is little to go on here. Once these statements on usury are made, that’s just about it. There are no reasons given for the choice of trading rather than usury. There is no explanation and no argument. Perhaps I am expecting too much from a holy book. However, there are historical and political reasons for this choice (amounting to the Jewish tribes (usury) being at odds with the Muslim tribes (trading)). I know of some reasons why usury is a bad thing. I know of other reasons why it is a good thing. But since I’m sticking to the actual text, to this surah, I will not add anything to this.

Notes:

i) Parts of Naseem Dawood’s translation are disputed, as is every translation of the Koran. Particularly, the sentence: ‘Idolatry is more grievous than killing’. Certain Muslim commentators say that it should be: ‘Heresy is more grievous than killing.’ That translational point does not make a profound, or even a small, difference to my overall reading of this surah. Indeed these words can be mutually substituted without effecting anything in my general reading.
ii) The Koranic references ending with a number which includes a colon are from Naseen Dawood’s translation. The quoted passages from the Koran with only numbers are from Muhammad Pickthall’s translation.

References:

i) The Koran, translated by Naseem Dawood 1956/1995 (with revisions), Penguin Classics.
ii) The Meaning of the Glorious Qur’an: An Explanatory Translation, translation by Muhammad Pickthall, 2004/5, Islamic Dawah Centre International.

Tariq Ramadan (a satire in the Wiki style)

2010-02-09T04:58:00.000-08:00

Contents

i) Introduction

ii) Life

iii) Ramadanadingdong's Philosophy

iv) Against Ramadan

v) Some More Ramadan Denials

Introduction

Tariq Ramadan (known to his friends) was born on the 26th of August 1962, in Geneva, Switzerland. He is a Swiz academic, Islamist scholar (i.e. he reads books on Islam) and the Grandmaster Flash of Islamic Taqiyya. He is the Right Said Ed Said Professor of Islamist Studies in the Faculty of Positive Orientalism and Otherness at Oxbridge University. He advocates the study and re-interpretation of all the Islamic texts about jihad, crucifixion, stoning women, etc.; but says that ‘the texts about love, justice and peace should stay as they are’. He emphasizes the not-not-heterosexual nature of Western Muslims and the fact, for example, that many Muslims are Buddhists and Mormons. He emphasizes the necessity of their contribution to the downfall of Western society – ‘that contribution’, he says, ‘is to make it more Islamic in nature and more enabling to the doctrines of my father, grandfather and the Muslim Brotherhood generally’.

The British Prospect magazine placed him eighth in a list of the world’s top 100 contemporary intellectuals in 2008, just one place behind Osama bin Laden and just one place in front of Ronnie Corbett.

Life

Ramadan (also known as ‘Ramadanadingdong’) is the son of Said Ramadan (now on EastEnders) and the grandson of Hassan Havva-Banana, who in 1928 founded the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. (This was a group which advocated the Universal Caliphate and cream teas for all.) His father was a prominent radical figure in the Muslim Brotherhood and was exiled by Nasser the Nazi, to Islington and then Bradford, for bombing things and killing people. Said Ramadan was also Sayyid Qutb’s gay lover and pinball partner. Qutb was implicated in a gunpowder plot against the Egyptian Government for which he was hanged by the left testicle.

Tariq Ramadan graduated a year earlier than him and studied philosophy, cake making and social sciences at the University of Staines. He studied Philosophy and Islamic Semiotics at Masters level, and Geordie and Islamic Intertextuality for his City and Guilds. He wrote his PhD dissertation on Friedrich Nietzsche, entitled ‘Why Nietzsche Respected the War-like and Aggressive Religion of Islam’. He also studied Arabic, cake making and Islam at the Al Azhar Islamic University of Islington, London.

In September 2005 he was invited to join a ‘Politically Correct Flask Force’ by the Government of the United Kingdom and Emirates. In 2007 Tariq Ramadan successfully applied for a part-time job (‘cash in hand’) in Islamic Propaganda at the University of Sparkbrook, but then declined to take up the position, citing professional reasons such as ‘they didn’t offer enough cash’. He has also been guest professor of Identity, Diversity and Otherness at Erasmus Tec. Rotterdam. More recently, Tariq Ramadan has been hosting debates on the Islam & Life & Sacred Explosions programme on Rock TV. The Erasmus University and city council of Rotterdam, because of his appearance on Classic Gold, fired him from his University position and barred him from any advisory role because he suggested that ‘the Jews would make a good eco-friendly fuel source’ and that ‘adulterers should be killed and then stoned, but only after a three-minute moratorium which would conclude that adulterers should be killed and then stoned’. Tariq Ramadan said he was sacked for speaking Allah’s truth and that the authorities were ‘only being critical of Tariq Ramadan’.

Tariq Ramadanadingdong established the Movement of Swissrole Muslims. He has taken part in interfaith seminars whose principle aim is to ‘convince other religions how lovely and fluffy Islam is’. And he sat on someone’s face at the commission of ‘Islam and Cottage Cheese’. He is widely interviewed by Islamophiles and has produced about 100 live dub tapes which sell tens of thousands of copies each year in Barnsley alone. He is an advisor to the EU on religious issues to do with ‘Islamic enablement’ and ‘spending lots of public money’.

Ramadan is married to a gorgeous Muslim bird called Aisha, and has three Muslim sons and one Muslim daughter, called Muhammad, Muhammad, Mohamed and Aisha, respectfully.

Ramadanadingdong’s Philosophy

Ramadan works primarily on Islamic theology, cake making and the position of Muslims in within Muslim-majority cities like Bradford. In general he believes in the need ‘to continue to reinterpret the bad bits of the Qur'an in order to correctly understand the good bits of Islamic philosophy’.

He argues that ‘one shouldn’t read to much into the fact that the Koran can only be properly read in Arabic, and that Allah specifically choose Arabic and the Arabic people as upholders and propagators of Islam, or that all Muslims must adopt an Arabic name’. These ‘are all extremely important but peripheral elements of Islam and the Koran’.

He claims that there is no conflict between being both a Muslim and being an Islamic person; a Muslim ‘must accept the laws of his country even if he despises them, except in very many specific circumstances’. At the same time, he also strongly believes that

‘all Muslims should give higher authority to the Mr Mohammed’s Qur'an, Peace Be Beneath Him, than to kafir law.’

He believes that Western Muslims must create a ‘Western Islam’ (i.e., for Muslims in the West) just as there is a separate ‘Asian Islam’, an ‘African Islam’ and an ‘Islington Islam’, which take into account Differences and Othernesses. By this he means that European Muslims must re-examine the fundamental texts of Islam (primarily the Corb’ett) and ‘interpret them in light of their own Islamic background, influenced by infidel and Zionist society’.

He rejects a binary division of the world into dar al-Islam (the Abode of Islam) and dar al-harb (the Abode of War), on the grounds that such a division is not mentioned in the Guardian and the New Statesman. That means that only the actual words themselves, ‘Abode of War’ and the ‘Abode of Islam, or dar al-Islam and dar al-harb, are not to be found there, but the concepts [the abode of war] and [the abode of Islam], to be sure, are to be found in that book. He prefers a tripartite division of the world into

i) the abode of war
ii) the abode of Islam
iii) dar al-Taqiyya’ (or ‘the abode of dissimulation’).

He has been also known to cite favourably the Dar al-Da'wa (Abode of Proselytizing), as well as ‘the Abode of Taqiyyi’ (i.e., of ‘the Abode of Dissimulation’).

He emphasizes a Muslim's responsibility to his Muslim community, whether it is Islamic or Muslim. He criticizes the 'us vs. them' mentality and says that it should really be ‘them vs. us’ instead. He also advocates having ‘Muslim scholars in the West who are versed in Western vices’, and not relying on ‘the holy and true religious studies that come only from the Islamic world’. He wants more Islamic philosophy written in the pages of the Daily Mail, instead of just the usual pages of the Guardian and New Statesmen. He thinks that European Muslims' reliance on an ‘Arabic’ Islam leaves them feeling inadequate, impure and terribly un-Arabic, which is one of the main causes of alienation from Arabic culture.

He believes that ‘most Muslims in the West are quietly and successfully integrating into society, except for the very many who aren’t’. The main problems for the community come from those who are ignorant of Western society and those ‘infidels who are ignorant of how damn great Islam really is’.

Ramadanadingdong also worries about negative, but not the positive, perceptions of Islam. He says the Muslim community has been bad at representing itself as nice and fluffy, and that this has allowed westerners to confuse Islam with the Koran and Prof. Mohammed’s war-like behaviour. For example, he believes that many notionally Islamic countries have governments which ‘betray the principles of Islam by not allowing full jihad, stoning, capital punishment and the killing of gays’.

He believes that the Muslim leadership in Europe is partially responsible for the sometimes shaky relations between Muslims and Muslim intellectuals such as himself. He believes that they have been overly defensive, and have not ‘properly explained the good bits of Islam or successfully hidden the bad bits’, nor have they ‘engaged sufficiently with non-Muslim scum’.

Politically, Ramadan was opposed to ‘the 2003 War of Extermination in Iraq’ because ‘Iraq is a Muslim country and the invaders were infidels’. He was also once on dinner-party terms with Saddam Hussein (who, apparently, had a penchant for Chardonnay) and George Galloway (who, apparently, has a penchant for being on the TV and sucking Arab cock).

Against Ramadan

In a French beauty contest in 2003 with Nicolas Sarkozy, Sarkozy accused Ramadanadingdong of defending the stoning of adulterers, a punishment stipulated in the section of the Islamic penal code known as ‘the Stoning of Adulterers’. Ramadan replied philosophically by saying that Sarkozy ‘is wrong, and I am right’. He said that he opposed stoning and that he favored ‘a moratorium’ on such practices but refused to condemn the law outright. Many people, including Sarkozy, were pissed off. Ramadan later defended his position arguing that, because it involved religious texts, the law ‘would have to be properly understood and contextualised within given contextualised parameters of contextualised discourse and semiotic interpretation, all of which should be in line with the Second ibn al-Corb’ett School of Jurisprudence and Stuff qua qua qua as well as key texts from the contextualised qua qua qua liberating oeuvre of post-structuralist Othericity’. He then went on to say that ‘he is prepared to accept the contextualised stoning of women’. And that this ‘stoning within certain contexts would be, if anything, quite pleasurable’. Thus a moratorium, Ramadan argued, could open the way for further debate about whether or not ‘only small stones or even bricks should be used against whores’. Tariq Ramadan has enraged further debates on the issue, notably, in 2008, at the Cambridge Onion and on Look North, with Sir Harry Secombe, Germaine Greer and That Lot.

Ramadan wrote an article entitled, Mort aux Juifs!, which French newspapers Le Monde and Le Figaro refused to publish because ‘it was too honest’. Oumma.com did eventually publish it. In the article he criticizes a number of French Jewish intellectuals and figures such as Bob Dylan, Bobby Davro, and Leonard Cohen, for abandoning Muslim human rights and giving special status to the defence of Zion. He also criticized Paul Wolfowitz, whom he called a ‘Zionist fuckhead who doesn’t really want to nuke Israel’. Ramadan was accused, in return, of anti-Semitism and having used inflammatory language. However, by accusing Jewish and a non Jewish philosopher whose name merely sounded Jewish (the philosopher Fred Smith), he opened himself to the charge of ‘not being too keen on Jews’.

Some academics have greeted his works with stout erections, detecting liberalising and rationing tendencies. Paul Donnelly at Salon.com asked rhetorically:

‘Tariq Ramadan: The Muslim Martin Luther, the Muslim Luther Vandross, or the Muslim Martin Boormann?’

Many others however have charged Ramadan with saying different things to different audiences; one thing to radical Muslims or young Muslims, and another to gullible Western journalists and fawning academics, with advocating an agenda that places religious standards above earthly law. He agrees. He says:

‘I say different things to my milkman, things I wouldn’t say to an expensive prostitute or to my wife, for example.’

In a book published by an American conservative publisher Encounter Books, Caroline Fourest analysed Tariq Ramadan's 1500 books, 1,500 pages of interviews, and approximately 100 recordings (some ‘live at Wembley’), and concludes ‘Ramadan is a war leader and Ludo champion’, and the ‘political heir of his grandfather, Havva-Banana', stating that his discourse is, ‘often just a repetition of the discourse that the Banana had at the beginning of the 20th century in Egypt’, and that he ‘presents [Havva-Banana] as a model to be followed’. She argues that

‘Tariq Ramadan is slippery when wet. He says one thing to his faithful Muslim followers and something else entirely to the Guardian. His choice of words, the formulations he uses – even his tone of voice and his trousers – vary, chameleon-like, according to his audience.’

Christopher Caldwell, editor at the neoconservative, neoliberal and Neapolitan opinion magazine The Weekly Standard, describes Ramadan as being ‘the very embodiment of double language’, which Caldwell defines as, ‘not saying two different things to two different audiences’, but, rather, as ‘preaching a consistent message that will be understood in different ways by two different audiences’. According to Caldwell,

‘When Ramadan speaks of “resistance”, and calls on Muslims everywhere to wage it. Europeans and various simpletons ... have chosen to believe that... he really means 'reform' or ‘the power of love’. He does not. He means jihad.’

Some More Ramadan Denials

Ramadan vehemently denies direct contacts with terrorists or other Islamic fundamentalists and says that he ‘has never met anyone like that down a back street’. He says that the charges of anti-Semitism have been spread by ‘Jewish scum’. As for ‘double talk’, he attributed the charges to ‘misinterpretations of misinterpretations and unfamiliarity with his writings as well as with the 13th century Baghdadi Mu’tazilite School of Islamic jurisprudence’. He stated:

‘I have often been accused of this 'double entendres’, and to those who say it, I say - bring your lawyers. I am quite not-not-clear in what I say. The problem is that many people don't want to agree with me, particularly in the Zionist media. Most of the stories about me are completely not-not-true and Zionist distortions: journalists simply repeat Zionist propaganda from the Intranet without any corroboration, and it just confirms what they want to believe. Words are used out of the context of portraying me positively. There is double-talk, yes, but there is also double-hearing. That is what I want to challenge.’

In answer to criticism of his response to September 11th, Ramadan replied that two days after the attacks he had published an open letter (not a private one), exhorting Muslims to publicly condemn (not privately condemn) the Zionist attacks and the Zionist attackers, and not to ‘hide behind conspiracy theories about Muslims being responsible’, and that less than two weeks after the attacks he had stated that

‘The probability of Ariel Sharon’s guilt is large, but some questions remain unanswered ... But whoever they are, Ariel Sharon or others, it is necessary to find them and that they be judged.’

Why Many, or Most, Anti-Zionists are Anti-Semites

2010-02-06T08:38:00.000-08:00

‘When people criticise Zionists, they mean Jews. You’re talking anti-Semitism.’ – Martin Luther King

‘They should be shot dead. I think they [Israelis] are Nazis, racists. I feel nothing but hatred for them.’ – Tom Paulin

‘The foremost moral bigmouth today - unexcelled even among his own ilk, the anti-Semites.’ - Nietzsche

Contents:

i) Introduction

ii) Moral Rectitude and the Ancient Jews

iii) Anti-Semitic Mentalists

iv) The Obsession With the Palestinians

v) Good Israel: Bad Israel

vi) New and Chic Anti-Semitism From the Far Left

Introduction

The following is a good question to ask about anti-Zionists and those loudly against Israel:

Do anti-Zionists begin by hating Jews and end up hating Israel and Zionists? Or do they begin by hating Israel and Zionists and end up hating Jews?

My hunch is that the former is the case in many – if not most – cases of anti-Zionism. This is unequivocally the case for Islamists and the Far Right; but it is not so straightforwardly the case for Far Leftists.

There is more to be said about this initial question. In 2006, a study of public opinion, by researchers from Yale University, showed that in ten European countries ‘anti-Israel sentiment consistently predicts the probability that an individual is anti-Semitic’ (1). The problem is that this statistic brings us back to our initial question once again. On the face of it, this is not a question of causation but one of correlation. That is, anti-Israeli sentiment tends to come along with anti-Semitic sentiment. But in these cases, does the anti-Israel sentiment cause the anti-Semitic sentiment or does the anti-Semitic sentiment cause the anti-Israel sentiment? They could occur concurrently of course. That is, the split second a person becomes anti-Israel he also becomes anti-Semitic. Or the split second he becomes anti-Semitic he also becomes anti-Israel. This is highly unlikely. What is likely is that anti-Semitism somehow brings about an anti-Israel or anti-Zionist position. What tells me that? The reality and history of the virulent and incredibly widespread anti-Semitism which predated both Zionism and the creation of the state of Israel by well over a thousand years! That alone gives you a very strong reason to be highly suspicious of such much of what passes for anti-Zionism or anti-Israelism.

The following is list of five points which may make it the case that a position, or a person, can be deemed to be anti-Semitic, rather than just anti-Zionist:

i) Do they deny the Jewish people their right to self-determination (e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour).
ii) Do they apply double standards by requiring of it a behaviour not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.
iii) Do they use the symbols and images associated with classic anti-Semitism (e.g., claims of Jews killing Jesus or blood libel) to characterise Israel or Israelis?
iv) Do they draw comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis?
v) Do they hold Jews collectively responsible for actions of the State of Israel? (2)

One can only work onwards from here.

Moral Rectitude and the Ancient Jews

It is understandable why so many Jews, qua Jews, expect such incredibly high standards from the Israeli state and from their fellow Jews within that state. When they have their biblical hats on, so to speak, perhaps they think to themselves that Israel was once a nation of prophets, kings, priests and epic religious leaders. Thus, they want the Israeli state, or its leaders and policies, to somehow never betray that glorious past and that sense of moral righteousness which one can find in the various Jewish holy books.

And when the Israeli state, or its leaders, do not behave like ancient prophets, kings or priests, then many Jews take in upon themselves to castigate their own leaders for not, well, being Jewish enough.

That explains the attitudes of many Jews – and even of many anti-Zionist Jews. So what about non-Jewish anti-Zionists?

It is conceivable that many non-Jewish anti-Zionists and critics of Israel have simply plugged into this biblical sense of absolute and stern right and wrong. Thus they too expect perfection from the Jews and the Israeli state. After all, most non-Jewish anti-Zionists were brought up in a Christian culture, with a Christian history, which was itself built on the Jews, their traditions and their holy books. Indeed many evangelical Christians in the United States are pretty explicit about their attitude towards Israel and the Jews and freely admit that their essential position is theological or even theo-historical.

If all that is indeed the case, then the fierce anti-Zionism or anti-Israelism we often see could quite possibly be a result of non-Jews (and Jews) having too high a view of the Jews and how they should behave.

So it is no wonder that many non-Israeli Jews, and not just anti-Zionists, take it upon themselves to keep other Jews in line. Specifically, to keep the Israeli state in line. Again, they basically expect all political or powerful Jews to be priest-like or even prophet-like in their behaviour. These stern moral critics may even see themselves as doing God or Yahweh’s job. That of keeping a moral eye on the behaviour of the Jews here on earth. But by doing so, these self-critical Jews take on board the unreasonable and often extreme views of the Far Left, the Islamists and even the Far Right because it is they who do Jew-criticism better than anyone else. They feel obliged to give the sick and paranoid ramblings of the Far Left and the Islamist a fair hearing. More than that, they borrow their paranoid theories and aim them at Israel and the Jews. Thus it is effectively often the case that the Far Left and the Islamists get these very critical Jews to do their dirty work for them. And, of course, they then say: How can these Jews be anti-Semitic? That is surely the cream on the Far Leftist/Islamist anti-Semitic cake.

It is a direct result of these kinds of thinking that noisy anti-Zionists will not lay off Israel in any way unless Israel becomes a perfect state. A state that is unbelievably tolerant and more multi-racial than any other country on the planet. Or until it becmes like a state with a democracy which resembles one that exists nowhere on earth. If Israel does not match up to this impossible list, then, quite simply, it has no right to exist. If Israel is not heaven on earth, a super-democracy, or a Trotskyist state (or whatever it is the far leftists want from it), then the death of Israel it must be.

Anti-Semitic Mentalists

When the Far Left and others claim the following two incredible things

i) That Israel is the world’s only ‘pariah state’.
ii) That Israel is the ‘root cause’ of all the world’s terrorism and war.

why don’t they go the whole way by adding a third statement to this almost-classic set of anti-Semitic clichés? Why don’t they add this? –

iii) That the Jews are a cosmic and evil tribe which has the supernatural power to bring chaos and disorder to the whole universe.

What is the psychological appeal of anti-Semitism or the belief that the Jews are behind all the bad things in life? Well, it certainly simplifies the world. And there is a definite human propensity to prefer the simple to the complex. There is also the human propensity to hate and despise and thus the concomitant need to find things to hate and despise. And then there is the requirement to rationalise and justify that hate.

Middle-class Far Leftists don’t usually like being football hooligans or behaving like the yobs of the Far Right (with their honest anti-Semitism and hooliganism). But they too like aggression and violence. So Far Leftist anti-Zionists feel the need to justify or intellectualise their aggressive anti-Semitism. Thus they tuck into the complete works of Chomsky every evening and sometimes even indulge in a bit of Norman Finklestein when they are feeling particularly hateful or vindictive towards the Jews. (And they are Jews. So they can’t be anti-Semitic.) Wasn’t Mein Kampf a massive intellectualisation of anti-Semitism as well? That hooligan and anti-Semite Stalin, didn’t he too refine his anti-Semitism a little? He didn’t talk that often about the big noses of Jews.

I put the Far Leftist, Far Rightist and Islamist anti-Semites in the Dan Brown category. That level of paranoia and neurosis one finds in the Da Vinci Code and also in the X-Files of the 1990s. In fact, the Islamists kill two birds with one stone. Dan Brown links together a Freemason and Catholic conspiracy, but the Islamists trump this by saying that they too, or at least the Freemasons, were created and controlled by the fiendish Jews.

What we have here is that primeval or primitive desire to explain everything in the world with as few variables and complications as possible. That can be done by believing in various or many secret conspiracies as well as various or many dastardly plots. Such simplifications of the inherent complexity of the world balms and soothes the troubled extremist mind. He or she can then sleep easily or, alternatively, let rip violently but without any embarrassment or guilt.

Let’s give you an Islamist taste of this very peculiar phenomenon. Take the case of Said Ramadan. He is the father of the moderate - and sometimes very moderate - Tariq Ramadam, the moderate neo-Islamist. Tariq Ramadan’s father, who was a high flyer in the Muslim Brotherhood, wrote this in 1964:

‘Jewish plot… It is no accident that the state of Israel was created. We are convinced that in reality it is the incarnation of hellish thinking, a mixture born of the meeting between greedy Zionism… such as took the form in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the spirit of the Crusades, inspired by jealousy and hate against Islam.’ (3)

(Some people may think that I have gratuitously stained Tariq Ramadan’s reputation for abundant moderation by associating him with, of all people, his father. Oh, yes, Tariq is a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, just like his daddy.)

But that was 1964! So what about 2007 and the case of Dr Lee Marsden of the University of East Anglia? In the Guardian (in September of that year), which is not known for its anti-Zionism, he wrote an article about ‘the Israel lobby’. This clear-thinking academic believes that the Jews – perhaps more or less all of them- are working fulltime to stop all discussion of the Middle East other than to repeat the directives and edicts of the Israeli Government. This is strange when one considers the fact that the Guardian, again, runs an anti-Zionist or anti-Israeli story almost every day and that the plight of the ‘oppressed Palestinians’ is the main topic of everyday political conversation from Birmingham University’s Department of English to Islington’s sushi bars.

Let us get back to hard-core lunacy. Not only do many Islamists and Far Leftists think that the Jews run various or many secret lobbies, international institutions, etc., but they also believe that the Jews were responsible for 9/11. Actually, what they believe, precisely, is that the Jews warned their fellow Jews not to go to work at the Twin Towers that day. It is claimed that no Jew reported for work on 9/11. Thus this must have been a neocon-neoliberal-neoJewish conspiracy to blacken the names of otherwise good Muslims like Osama bin Laden. I mentioned hard-core lunacy at the beginning of this chapter. The terrible thing is that very many British Muslims, from doctors to businessmen to accountants to crack-sellers and pimps in Bradford, believe this conspiracy theory with all their hearts.

However, instead of claiming that the Jews actually carried out 9/11, or at the least that they were partly responsible for it, why not try another anti-Semitic trope? Try the Jews being responsible for 9/11, even though they didn’t actually fly the planes or even plan it. Professor Ted Honderich, of London’s University College, believes this. He is an analytic philosopher who tends to be remarkably less than analytic, more like mad, when talking about politics. Actually, when talking specifically about the state of Israel, neo-cons and even old-cons. He said:

‘With respect to 9/11, its prime necessary connection is neo-Zionism. Not the establishment of Israel but the expansion of Israel into the last fifth of historic Palestine and I stick to that absolutely.’ (4)

The Obsession with the Palestinians

Is it just me, or do other people also think that there is something very strange about the obsession with Israel and the plight of the Palestinians? It may, I think, have something to do with anti-Semitism. It is something which can certainly be explained by anti-Semitism. In fact, it is something which can only be explained by anti-Semitism. I don’t need a pro-Israeli or a Judeophile to agree with me on this. Take the anti-Israel academic Beshara Doumani and the anti-Israel publication, Journal of Palestine Studies. Now read Doumani’s very honest and illuminating words in that publication:

‘For a variety of reasons, the world had paid more attention to this conflict than to any other in modern history. This attention can turn the weaknesses of Palestinians into sources of strength.’ (5)

Indeed the ‘world has paid [less] attention’ to far worse ‘conflicts’ than the conflict in Israel and Palestine ‘in modern history’ – even in very recent history. Take what has happened in the Congo. In the Sudan and Darfur. In Chechnya. In Thailand and Pakistan. Even Tibet has had far less coverage than Gaza. And, yes, I agree, this ‘attention’ has proved to be a godsend to the Palestinians. Terrorism and suicide bombs have also gained the attention of ‘the world’. Indeed it can even be argued that the Palestinian use of terrorism has been a tactic to gain the world’s attention, rather than it being a simple ‘cry of desperation’, etc. And yes, it has certainly worked. Bravo Hamas. Bravo the PLO. Bravo Hezbollah.

Good Israel: Bad Israel

It is amazing to think that many New Leftists, before the 1967 war, believed that the Israeli state to be the only democracy in the Middle East. (It still is.) They saw the Jews of Israel as a persecuted and over-criticised group. (They still are.) But when the Arabs states attacked Israel in 1967, all that changed – literally over night. Frances Raday, a Far Leftist feminist activist at the time, wrote:

‘In six days the tune changed. Israel was an outpost of American imperialisms and as long as Israel continued to exist, the Arabs would never be able to fulfil their economic, political and cultural potential’.’” (6)

That most definitely suggests that before the Arab attack on Israel, or on the Jews, the Jews were seen as a minority by the Far Left. That suddenly changed. Why? Was it because a more politically-hip group had come to blows with the once ‘Jewish minority’? The new minority was made up of brown people. Not only that, they were Muslim and Arabic brown people. In the Far Left’s crude calculus or politically-correct right and wrong, this trumped the Jews’ minority and oppressed status. That is because the Jews, from then on, were seen as ‘white’. And from then on Israel was also seen as the vanguard of American imperialism and thus it became a fashionable leftist’s enemy. Six days is a long time in politics!

Now take the particular case of boycotts of Israel and Israeli goods.

Isn’t strange how important boycotts have become to the anti-Zionist or anti-Israel campaign? They are primarily, so they say, campaigning against what they call ‘the Occupation’. Note the definite article and the platonic capital ‘O’. It’s not an occupation. It is the Occupation. That is, it is not the occupation (with a small ‘o’) of Tibet by China. It is not the occupation of Kurdistan by Iraq, Turkey and Syria. It is not even the occupation of Chechnya by Russia. It is the Occupation (with a large ‘O’) of the West Bank and Gaza by Israel.

I will concede that some liberal-leftists do sometimes mention Tibet and Chechnya. However, the Far Left rarely, if ever, mentions Tibet because China is communist, or at least it used to be communist. The Far Left does not mention Kurdistan because it is occupied by other brown people. Not only that, it is occupied by other Muslims. And they don’t mention Chechnya because it is occupied by former communists, by Slavs and, who knows, by some brown people.

To give another example of this strange and neurotic obsession with the crimes of the Jews… sorry, the Zionists and the state of Israel, think about those other occupiers which are even closer to home than the occupiers of Tibet, Kurdistan, etc. Take the occupiers, or ex-occupiers, Jordan and Egypt. These two countries, between 1948 and 1967, occupied Gaza and the West Bank. No one talked about ‘the Occupation’ with a capital ‘O’ then. No. The Occupation began, all of a sudden, in 1967, when the Jews… sorry, the Israelis Occupied the West Bank and Gaza after defeating and pushing back the Arab aggressors. Why didn’t Egypt and Jordan create a Palestinian state then? Why did they help create and sustain the Palestinian refugee camps? Why? Why did Jordan go to war with the PLO around this time? Why do the Arab states seem to need the Palestinian refugees? They needed them to help the Arab and Islamic cause as well as the cause that is Israel’s annihilation. So, again. Why slag off Israel when Egypt and Jordon failed to create a Palestinian state with its capital in West Jerusalem? Similarly, think of all that cash swilling away in the coffers of all those Arab and Muslim states. Why didn’t Saudi Arabia and the other Arab states use some of it to help create a better life for all those suffering Palestinians instead building madrasses or mosques in Leicester and Toronto? Is it because the Arab and Muslim states need the Palestinians? Is it because they need the Palestinians to suffer? To suffer for the cause of Israel’s obliteration and the furtherance of Arabic Islam?

(By the way, the Jews don’t only occupy, or Occupy, the West Bank and Gaza, they also occupy the United States. That is, according to an American Nazi pamphlet, which talks about the ‘Zionist Occupation Government’ (or ‘ZOG’).)

Now one final example. We hear a lot about ‘the right of return’ for the Palestinian refugees who ‘fled’ from the ‘marauding Jews’ who raped everyone, even the goats, in 1947/8. Do the Jews also have a right of return to, say, Jordan or Iraq; places in which they had lived for hundreds sometimes for over a thousand years before they were kicked out by the Muslim Arabs? Well, they certainly can’t ‘return’ to Jordan because no Jew can be a citizen there. And if Muslims are very busy killing other Muslims in Iraq, why the hell would Jews want to return to that country? (However, for suicidal Jews it would be a good idea to return to the Arab countries they once lived in.)

New, Chic and Sexy Anti-Semitism From the Far Left

I personally experienced Kristallnacht-like anti-Semitism at the University of Birmingham during a protest about Gaza in Dec/Jan 2008/9. On a march at that time, probably organised by the SWP or Hizb-ut-Tahrir (under its latest pseudonym), I saw a huge effigy of a massive-nosed Jew eating a darling little Palestinian child. Straight out of Der Stürmer it was. (Or straight from Palestinian daytime TV.) I thought to myself: What the *uck has this got to do with anti-Zionism and the Israeli Government? It was pure, unadulterated racism. But not against brown or black people. That’s a ‘no-no’. Against the ‘white’ Jewish race. That a ‘yes-yes’. (See my post on Birmingham University’s Gaza march. Click here.)

What do you expect from SWP and Islamist students? (Students usually leave the SWP three minutes after graduating anyway.) Fair enough. What do we expect from the Independent newspaper? In 2003 it published a cartoon version of what I saw in 3-d in Birmingham. It was Ariel Sharon eating a darling little Palestinian baby and wearing a fig leaf saying ‘Vote Likud’. Would you expect this from the Independent? I’m not sure. I would, however, expect it from the New Statesman; after all they employ a man, Mehdi Hasan, who referred to all ‘infidels’ as ‘cattle’. Anyway. In 2002 it featured on its front page the Union Jack smothered by the Star of David. (I didn’t realise, till then, that the News Statesman was such a big fan of the Union Jack.) And what was the witty headline? ‘A Kosher Conspiracy?’ I don’t know why they used a question mark at the end. Once you read the article, you will soon realise that the article should have be entitled: ‘A Kosher Conspiracy!’

Let us see some more from the proudly anti-Zionist New Statesman. Let’s here some gross exaggerations and hyperbolic crap from John Pilger. He wrote that the

‘Zionist state remains the cause of more regional grievance and sheer terror than all the Muslim states combined… the equivalent of Madrid’s horror week after week, month after month, in occupied Palestine… Moreover, the Israeli army, a terrorist organisation by any reasonable measure… The ‘neo-conservatives’ who run the Bush regime all have close ties with the Likud government in Tel Aviv and the Zionist lobby groups in Washington.’ (7)

Really! Mad Pilger really must carry on with the anti-psychotic medication. This stuff wouldn’t even be published in a far-leftist student mag. Could Israel really be that bad - even in theory? So Israel is worse than Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Egypt, Indonesia, Pakistan, the Sudan, etc. ‘combined’? This pathetic and foaming diatribe hardly deserves a response. Pilger did, nonetheless, go on to state that ‘middle-class Jewish homes in Britain’ are ‘virulent’ and ‘destructive Zionists’ in league with the Israeli state. ‘Jewish homes’; not ‘Zionist homes’? All ‘middle-class Jewish homes in Britain’; not ‘some middle-class Jewish homes in Britain’? Didn’t this man ever go to university?

It is not surprising, then, that the British National Party once advised its members to read the Guardian in order to secure information about ‘Zionist cabals’ and other such exotica.

Is all this Far Leftist anti-Semitism beginning to sound like, well, Far Rightist or Nazi anti-Semitism? That’s not surprising. They have more in common than many, but not the anarchists, think. So it is no surprise that many Far Leftist anti-Zionists become Islamist anti-Semites. Take the rather obvious case Abdul-Aziz ibn Myatt. That's a very good Arabic/Muslim name. Only the case is that he wasn’t born with that name. He was born ‘David Myatt’. He wasn’t born a Muslim either. He became a Muslim. In fact he became an Islamist after having spent some years as a neo-Nazi. He even founded the British National Socialist Movement. Under which name, then, did he write that [ …]

‘is the only force that is capable of fighting and destroying the dishonour, the arrogance, the materialism of the West… For the West, nothing is sacred, except perhaps Zionists, Zionism, the hoax of the so-called Holocaust, and the idols of the West and its lackeys worship, or pretend to worship, such as democracy.’ (8)

Did Abdul-Aziz ibn write that or David Myatt? What word/s fill in the three dots before the quote: is it ‘Islam’ or ‘National Socialism’? Indeed, does it matter or does it really make a difference?

References:

1) Edward H. Kaplan and Charles A. Small, ‘Anti-Israel Sentiment Predicts Anti-Semitism In Europe’, Journal of Conflict Resolution, vol. 50, no. 4 (August 2006). The quotation is from the Abstract.
2) This list is based on one to be found in Robin Shepherd’s A State Beyond the Pale, 2009, pg. 97.
3) Quoted in Denis MacShane’s Globalising Hatred: the New Anti-Semitism, 2008, pg. 151.
4) Ted Honderich, from a conversation with Nick Cohen, quoted in Cohen’s Waiting For the Etonians, 2009, pg. 180.
5) Beshara Doumani, ‘Palestine versus the Palestinians? The Iron Laws and Ironies of a People Denied’, Journal of Palestine Studies 26, no. 4 (Summer 2007): 62.
6) Quoted in The New Anti-Semitism, by Phyllis Chesler, 2005.
7) John Pilger, the New Statesman, vol. 17,, no. 799 (22 March, 2004).
8) Quoted in America Alone, by Mark Steyn, 2006, pg. 92.