Wave a White Flag

Rachel Shabi and the Return of the Paul Fauristes

What, it should be govt policy to defeat 'Islamism'? Why? #bbcqt
— rachel shabi(@rachshabi) May 23, 2013

It's somewhat alarming that anyone should still be asking entry-level questions at this late date, let alone an experienced broadsheet journalist who specialises in Middle East commentary, but there it is. More alarming still, Shabi's perplexed tweet was sent during a discussion on BBC Question Time about the implications of Lee Rigby's horrifying murder the previous day, apparently at the hands of Islamist assassins.

On the afternoon of 22 May, Rigby, a 25 year old drummer in the 2nd Battalion of the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers, had been knocked down by a car in broad daylight, stabbed with knives and hacked with a meat cleaver. An attempt was then made to decapitate his corpse before it was dragged into the middle of the road and displayed for all to see. His alleged killers, whose hands were still wet with their victim's blood, then remained at the scene until they were finally shot and taken into custody by the police.

The day after the Question Time broadcast, Shabi trailed her own appearance on Sky News to discuss the Woolwich atrocity with a series of tweets, including this one:

Told Sky: if woman in #Woolwich brave enough to ask armed killer why he did it; we need to be brave enough to hear reply
— rachel shabi(@rachshabi) May 24, 2013

For reasons I'll come back to, I find Shabi's comparison to be fantastically ill-judged. But I happen to agree that we ought to listen to the alleged perpetrators in a crime of this kind. Not least because it will help to determine whether this is a simply a meaningless if spectacularly savage act of random violence, or whether there is an ideology underpinning it which means it qualifies as a political act. Because if it's the latter, a strategy needs to be formulated aimed at defeating such a toxic ideology and protecting society from the barbarous fanaticism of its adherents.

The brave woman to whom Shabi refers is Ingrid Loyau-Kennett, a passer-by who confronted one of the men and was allegedly informed that Rigby had been killed because, as a British soldier, he had killed Muslims. Further rambling testimony was delivered into the cameraphone of another bystander by his alleged co-conspirator:

… Sura at-Taubah — many, many ayat [Qur'anic verses] throughout the Qur'an that, we must fight them as they fight us, an eye for eye and a tooth for a tooth. We, I apologize that women had to witness this today, but in our lands, our women have to see the same. You people will never be safe. Remove your government, they don’t care about you.

Over at zenpundit.com, commentary on Sura at-Taubah or Sura 9 is cited as follows:

It should also be mentioned that this surah does not start with ‘Bismillah’ as do all other surahs in the Qur’an, because ‘Bismillah’ is an assurance of protection and mercy and as per report of Ali (RAA) this surah was revealed with a sword in its hand, and thus could not have the assurance of peace and mercy for the disbelievers.

The author also points out that Sura 9 contains the notorious so-called "verse of the sword" or Sura 9.5 which instructs the faithful to:

...fight and slay the Pagans wherever ye find them, and seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every stratagem (of war).

Relevant, I would have thought, all things considered. But Shabi seemed curiously reluctant to acknowledge any of the above during her Sky News interview. Instead, she strongly implied that the real victim of this attack was not a young father and his surviving family, but rather Britain's Muslim Community. Nor were the true aggressors the agents of a radical religio-political ideology as conventional wisdom supposed; if we look deeper, Shabi pressed, we will discover as she had that responsibility for the carnage in Woolwich actually lay with the foreign and domestic policies of Western democracies.

She didn't allow herself to be detained by condemnation of the bloodstained suspects even as they threatened her own life and safety and demanded the removal of her democratically-elected government. Presumably she felt that, as members of an embattled minority, they had enough on their plates. Indeed, Shabi had even gone so far as to publicly chastise others on the day of the Rigby murder for expressing condemnation of their own. She could do this because she had grasped something that others apparently had not: context.

What was of paramount importance, she explained, was that we do not use this incident to misrepresent Islam by conflating "terms such as Islam, Islamist, Islamism and terrorism so they all come to mean the same thing". This, she declared, as her sense of perspective deserted her, would be not only "nonsensical" but "offensive"and contribute to rising levels of anti-Muslim bigotry.

Shabi was then shown a picture of the victim and his young son and was invited to share in the revulsion that the anchor suggested was uniting others. But Shabi appeared unmoved. Instead she made some perfunctory remarks of the "yes, yes, of course but..." variety, before continuing:

I think we need to be really careful not to single out or make the Muslim community in Britain responsible or somehow accountable; put the onus on them and kind of "You sort it out" because, y'know, this is a collective problem and we need to have a collective shared approach. And one of the things we can do in this shared approach is actually to own up to the obvious correlation between British foreign policy and the violence that we've seen on our streets in the last few days. And British security officials have been for some time warning about the consequences of British foreign policy in the Middle East and the kind of repercussions it would have on British soil. And I think it's really important that we have this conversation openly and honestly because if we don't then that conversation will go elsewhere and it will be used as fuel by extremists.

"But," protested the anchor, "Is now the time to have this conversation? The government has made it very clear that nothing justifies an attack like this." Unfazed, Shabi replied:

Well, there's a very big difference between justification and understanding. There is of course no justification for any sort of act of terror, but, y'know, we do need to listen to the justifications. And if a woman in Woolwich is brave enough to stand and talk to an armed killer and ask him why he did it, then we need to be brave enough right now to listen to what his answer is.

The difference between "justification" and "understanding" is indeed big. Or can be. That is, until or unless one realises that the understanding Shabi urges in this case refers not to the murderous ideology the alleged criminals voluntarily espouse, but to their ostensible grievances. Grievances with which, as it so happens, Shabi has considerable sympathy.

I say "ostensible grievances", because Islamism's intellectual founding fathers Hassan al-Banna, Sayyid Qutb and Abul A'la Maududi made it quite clear that their aggressively politicised brand of Islam was not a liberation theology in any progressive sense, but a deeply reactionary, supremacist theocratic imperialism which sought to establish the unchallengeable global primacy of Islam and the subordination of men and, especially, women beneath the totalitarian authority of the Sharia. As Ghaffar Hussein of anti-extremism think-tank the Quilliam Foundation, reminded us back in 2008:

Grievances are viewed [by Islamists] as opportunities because they can be exploited and manipulated for the sake of furthering the cause. The grievance argument also gives Islamists the chance to cloud their political agenda in public and use it as something to hide behind when they feel the heat. Therefore, to suggest that grievances cause radicalisation plays into Islamist hands and allows them to present a more acceptable version of their position in public discourse.

I have no reason to suspect that Rachel Shabi has any genuine sympathy with totalitarian religious ideologies, or indeed extremism of any kind. And yet the arguments she advanced on Sky News with respect to the role of UK foreign policy in this terrible crime are barely distinguishable from those offered by Anjem Choudary when he had appeared on Newsnight the previous evening. The dissonance produced by the collision of her liberal beliefs with her ad hoc reactionary reasoning had entangled her arguments in an incoherent bind, forcing her to firstly claim there was no justification for Rigby's murder, before immediately claiming there were justifications plural, and that we ought to be listening to them with a view to reassessing our nation's foreign policy. How has an intelligent, liberal person like Shabi managed to talk herself into such a position? And why?

Pondering European hostility to Israel in his 2003 polemic Terror and Liberalism, the American liberal essayist Paul Berman made an interesting and, prima facie, counter-intuitive observation. He noticed that European outrage at the behaviour of Israel tended to rise and fall, not in accordance with the brutality or otherwise of occupation policy and the corresponding level of suffering experienced by Palestinians, but in correlation with incidences of Palestinian terrorism. He theorised the following explanation for this odd phenomenon:

[Palestinian] suicide bombings produced a philosophical crisis among everyone around the world who wanted to believe that a rational logic governs the world - a crisis for everyone whose fundamental beliefs would not be able to acknowledge the existence of pathological mass political movements. The protests against Israel, by putting the onus for suicide terror on Israeli shoulders, served a rather useful purpose from this point of view. The protests explained the unexplainable. [TaL, p. 143]

Six years later, the conservative American journalist Christopher Caldwell reappraised Berman's theory in his own polemic Reflections on the Revolution in Europe and found that he concurred. "Without quite realising what they were doing," Caldwell wrote, "Europeans tended to blame Israel for the terrorist violence committed against it":

Suicide bombing had to be about an unbearable injustice. If it was not, it was a mere homicidal death cult. For a continent scarred by the homicidal cults of the twentieth century that was an unbearable thought. Europeans became more interested in the causes of terror than in terrorism itself. The more Israelis the bombers killed and the more ruthlessly they did it, the more public opinion shifted against Israel....Berman's view sounded eccentric when he advanced it, but he has been vindicated. European hostility towards Israel has diminished since the building of a secure wall between Israel and the West Bank - which has not altered the justice or injustice of Israeli occupation, but which has dramatically reduced the level of suicide bombing. [RotRiE, p. 216]

I would add that it is not just the scars of totalitarianism which make Europeans recoil from the idea of irrationalist ideologies. The idea that such pathological ideas are embedded in the hearts and minds of the wretched of the earth capsizes the entire post-colonial narrative, the desperate defence of which has forced its apologists to take refuge behind increasingly ludicrous arguments from cultural relativism and moral equivalence. It is for this reason that they reserve a particularly vicious hatred for plain-spoken, clear-minded dissidents such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Mona Eltahawy and Maryam Namazie who expose their hypocrisy by testifying with passion and clarity to the moral turpitude of many of the so-called resistance movements lionised by the Anglo-American Left.

Shabi believes herself to be a far more honest and courageous speaker of truth to power than any of the above, and it is her nobility and bravery we are enjoined to emulate. It is she who possesses the necessary perspicacity, the developed appreciation of nuance and the empathy for the plight of the dispossessed which she implies is lacking in her chauvinist opponents. But when one strips away the rhetoric, what her arguments actually recommend is the antithesis of courage; it is appeasement. Objectively, Shabi wishes to give anyone with the inclination to use violence to intimidate the West's electorates and their governments the final say when it comes to policymaking.

Berman had some interesting things to say on the subject of appeasement as well, finding a useful parallel between the contemporary anti-war left's refusal to correctly identify pathological Islamic fascism and the corresponding unwillingness of the French Socialists' Paul Faure faction to understand the true character of National Socialism as the Nazi threat gathered.

The Paul Fauristes, Berman reminds us, were no fans of Hitler. They were, after all, at opposite ends of the political spectrum; as far apart one might think as Rachel Shabi and Anjem Choudary. Nevertheless, at the same time they were terrified by the prospect of further European conflict. They concluded, like contemporary Europeans, that they were not prepared to accept the notion that Nazism was a cult of mayhem, and that a rationalisation of Nazi rhetoric and policy - any rationalisation - would have to be constructed to explain what was happening to Europe. And so in Berman's words, the Paul Fauristes "grew thoughtful".

After all, they wondered, was it not unfair and morally reductive to demonise the Nazi party in monochromatic terms? Hadn't Germany been badly treated at Versailles? Weren't the German people suffering? Wasn't it important to locate common ground? Wasn't conciliation a price worth paying to avoid another continent-wide bloodbath? And although this hysterical stuff about the Jews was rather distasteful, was there not a difference between the legitimate criticism of the ways in which some - or even most - Jews behaved and outright anti-Semitism? Weren't some of those who favoured a confrontation with Germany Jewish? And as wealthy financiers, did some of them not stand to benefit from such a conflict? And on and on and on. And yet:

The anti-war Socialists of France did not think they were being cowardly or unprincipled in making those arguments. On the contrary, they took pride in their anti-war instincts. They regarded themselves as exceptionally brave and honest. They felt that courage and radicalism allowed them to peer beneath the surface of events and identify the deeper factors at work in international relations - the truest danger facing France. This danger did not come from Hitler and the Nazis, not principally. The truest danger came from warmongers and arms manufacturers of France itself, as well as from the other great powers. [p. 125]

Mutatis mutandis, when Shabi used the word "lunacy" in connection with Woolwich two days later, it was not to describe those who had pitilessly butchered an innocent man in a crowded London street; she used it instead to describe the opinions of The Observer's Nick Cohen, who had written a hawkish article on the subject to which she took exception.

There is of course no question that the two individuals suspected of Lee Rigby's revolting murder present anything like the threat to Western democracies presented by Nazi Germany. The fact that Salafi Jihadis are reduced to the kind of squalid crime committed in Woolwich is, I suspect, an indication of the parlous state of disrepair into which the campaign for global jihad has latterly fallen. But as the controversies over the Danish cartoons and the Innocence of Muslims showed, it can still be mobilised to inspire fear and cowardice in those, like Shabi, predisposed to submit to its illiberal demands.

Other countries are not so fortunate. As the Middle East and North Africa see their secular despots fall to popular revolutions, Sunni Islamism is rising in its place. Pakistan and Afghanistan are in danger of being torn to pieces by jihadi violence. Nigeria, Somalia, Iraq and other countries across MENA are trying to cope with Islamist insurgencies of varying kinds. It is looking increasingly probable that when the dust finally settles on the Syrian catastrophe, that country will find itself governed by Islamists. And in Iran, a deeply anti-Semitic and oppressive Shia theocracy is defiantly pressing ahead with nuclear enrichment. Even Turkey, previously staunchly secular, is moving in an increasingly conservative direction under Erdoğan's AKP.

So what of the Shia, Ahmadis, Copts, atheists and secularists, and the gays and women who are finding themselves increasingly threatened by theocratic reaction in the Middle East and beyond? What scars have they inflicted upon their Salafist oppressors that explains away their persecution? If the Jews have brought Islamist hatred upon their own heads through the occupation of Palestinian land, then what have, say, Muslim women in Gaza and Iran done to deserve their subordination?

Alas, the ideological pacifism of the Paul Fauristes, so deeply embedded inside the heads and hearts of today's isolationist Anglo-American liberal Left, provides no intelligible answer. Instead, perversely fortified by the gory horrors religious fanaticism and violence have visited upon the peoples of Iraq and Afghanistan in the wake of their botched liberations, the pacifists declare themselves vindicated. And their demands for appeasement only escalate with every bookstore firebombed, every embassy torched, every innocent victim of fascistic terror and every blood-curdling threat uttered. "Enough!" they cry. "Let them have what they want!"

Liberals like Rachel Shabi and the new Paul Fauristes are able to advocate surrender to fascism because  they refuse to recognise it for what it is. Instead they re-describe it as justice and simply screen out any evidence to the contrary. Having once been unwilling to identify and confront unreconstructed medieval savagery, they are now apparently incapable of doing so, even when it is staring them in the face.

*   *   *

PS: As I was putting the finishing touches to the above post, The Guardian published an article by Rachel Shabi in which she attempted to elaborate on the points she made in her Sky interview. I believe   her piece, a laundry list of bitter recriminations about Western foreign policy and deeply disempowering arguments from Muslim victimhood, bears out what I have argued above. I will make just one additional point in response: I find it faintly amusing when journalists such as Glenn Greenwald and Shabi use their platforms at a broadsheet paper to argue that their views are being stifled and silenced. This is simply further evidence of the narcissism that paradoxically undergirds their self-hatred. What they mean to say is that their advice is not allowed to inform policymaking. The most plausible reason for this is that their arguments rest on the catastrophic error of judgement I've described above and it is an error that those entrusted with our safety, thankfully, feel disinclined to adopt.

PPS: It's worth noticing that in neither her Sky interview, nor her Op-Ed piece does Shabi attempt to present any evidence for the causal link between Western policy and Islamist terror she alleges, and on which the entire 'blowback' argument depends. It is instead the result of an intuition that insists such a link is self-evident. Even if it did exist, I still don't believe it would justify the kind of capitulation Shabi demands. But as it so happens, there is some fairly persuasive evidence to the contrary. On that score, this closely argued and well-supported post over at the Anonymous Mugwump blog makes for thought-provoking reading.

Drooling Self-Love & Dime-Store Third Worldism

The Rage, Relativism & Racism of Glenn Greenwald

"Then the idiot who praises, with enthusiastic tone,

All centuries but this, and every country but his own..."
- W. S. Gilbert adds to his shitlist

Glenn Greenwald

For a commentator who gets as exercised about the killing of innocent Muslims as Glenn Greenwald does, he has had precious little to say about the ongoing catastrophe in Syria. That is, until Monday 6 May.

After more than two years of an increasingly vicious civil war that has so far claimed the lives of an estimated 80,000 Syrians, events took a particularly ugly turn last week. On Saturday 4, news began to filter out of sectarian massacres committed by regime loyalists over the previous two days in the coastal city of Banias and the neighbouring village of al-Bayda. Graphic pictures depicting the piled corpses of men, women and small children were greeted with a wave of revulsion amid unconfirmed estimates that between 60 and 100 people had been murdered at both sites. Meanwhile, reports and allegations that the regime had begun using sarin and other unspecified chemical agents against rebel forces and civilians continued to emerge, intensifying the debate about whether or not Obama's "red line" had been crossed and what on earth to do about it if it had.

Then on Sunday March 5, Israel apparently rocketed government positions inside Syria, seemingly with impunity and from Lebanese airspace. Although Israel has not taken public responsibility for the attack, it was widely reported that the targeted strikes were aimed at the destruction of shipments of Fateh-110 rockets being held in and around Damascus, en route from Iran to Lebanese Shi'ite terror group Hezbollah. Dozens of soldiers loyal to Assad's brutal Ba'athist dictatorship were killed in the process.

After more than two years of silence on the subject Greenwald evidently decided that a red line of his own had been crossed and that enough was enough. So he drew himself up, approached his podium at The Guardian and declared:

Few things are more ludicrous than the attempt by advocates of US and Israeli militarism to pretend that they're applying anything remotely resembling "principles". Their only cognizable "principle" is rank tribalism: My Side is superior, and therefore we are entitled to do things that Our Enemies are not.

Greenwald, it transpired to the surprise of no-one, was not particularly interested in the horrors of the Syrian civil war - neither the butchery unleashed by Assad's regime in Banias and al-Bayda nor the appalling human rights crisis afflicting much of the country warranted so much as a murmur.

What irks him is that those seeking to defend or justify Israel's very brief and limited involvement in the conflict should presume to offer a moral justification for her behaviour when, so far as Greenwald can tell, their reasoning is nothing more honourable than a naked and single-minded chauvinism rooted in an unjustifiable Western exceptionalism.

In support of this contention, Greenwald defies those he calls "Israeli defenders" to defend equivalent (theoretical) actions taken by Iran or Syria on the same grounds of self-interest, or to condemn Israel's nuclear arsenal with the same vehemence reserved for Iran's ambitions. Stretching the already elastic logic of this argument to its limit, he even implies that those who defend Israel while denouncing Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan (the victims of whom Greenwald describes as "incidental") are guilty of double-standards.

The use of this kind of shabby relativist equivalence to denigrate Western democracies and excuse the actions of terrorists and dictators is par for the course on certain sections of the self-proclaimed anti-Imperialist Left. But, oddly, Greenwald is indignant that anyone should presume to characterise his views in this way. "The ultimate irony," he complains...

...is that those [like Greenwald] who advocate for the universal application of principles to all nations are usually tarred with the trite accusatory slogan of "moral relativism". But the real moral relativists are those who believe that the morality of an act is determined not by its content but by the identity of those who commit them: namely, whether it's themselves or someone else doing it....[thus] Israel and the US (and its dictatorial allies in Riyadh and Doha) have the absolute right to bomb other countries or arm rebels in those countries if they perceive doing so is necessary to stop a threat but Iran and Syria (and other countries disobedient to US dictates) do not. This whole debate would be much more tolerable if it were at least honestly acknowledged that what is driving the discussion are tribalistic notions of entitlement and nothing more noble.

Hmm. It seems to me that the only reason Greenwald is perplexed by accusations of relativism is that he doesn't understand what the term means. Moral relativism holds that there is no objective means of deciding right and wrong so, since countries and their respective cultures cannot be judged by any meaningfully objective standard, they must simply be understood as different, rather than comparatively better or worse.

Pursuing this logic, then, a culture which tortures and imprisons dissidents is no worse than one which protects free assembly and expression; a culture which publicly hangs homosexuals from cranes is no worse than one which enshrines their equality and rights as individuals in law; a culture which confines women to the home and denies them the vote is no worse than one in which they run companies and head governments. Lest this sounds like a caricature, it ought to be remembered that Michel Foucault eulogised the Iranian revolution on the grounds that the Ayatollah Khomeini's nascent theocracy was simply a different (and in many ways superior) "regime of truth".

Greenwald's steadfast refusal to arrange countries into a moral hierarchy explicitly endorses the complete suspension of moral judgement required by the above. As does his conclusion that there can be no reason for assigning cultural superiority to free societies, nor justifying acts of violence committed in their defence, besides an "adolescent, self-praising, tribalistic license" on the part of those fortunate enough to live in them. To Greenwald, it seems, arguments about cultural superiority are no better than a debate between competing, morally-indistinguishable subjectivities, each as valid or invalid as the next.

It is this thinking that allows Greenwald to endorse Mehdi Hasan's assertion of a direct equivalence between a theocracy aiding a genocidal dictator by shelling rebels to further its own interests, with the actions of a democracy safeguarding its security and the lives of its citizens from Hezbollah rockets:

@mehdirhasan oh dear Mehdi, back to your relativist worst this morning, eh? I'd hoped you were past this, been enjoying your stuff recently.
— Shiraz Maher (@ShirazMaher) May 5, 2013

Shiraz Maher is correct to identify this as tawdry relativism. Greenwald, on the other hand, misdescribes Hasan's position (and by extension, his own) as universalist because it seems he doesn't understand what that term means either.

The universal application of moral and ethical principles requires the organisation of cultures into a moral hierarchy, according to the degree to which objectively good precepts and values are upheld. These might include a commitment to rationalist (and therefore secular) government; the protection of individual human rights, irrespective of race, gender or sexuality; the defence of free expression and free assembly and a free press; the independence of judicial process and so on.

Those of us who recognise the universal importance and desirability of the above, have little difficulty in ascribing inferiority to a culture that is - conversely - obscurantist, theocratic, misogynistic, racist and oppressive, such as that of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The recognition of this fact is the most elementary form of solidarity one can show to its embattled populace, enslaved by a tyrannical regime and its religious codes, who yearn for modernity.

However, it must be noted that, elsewhere, Greenwald has written passionately and extensively in defence of free speech. This is odd given the above, since it suggests an acknowledgement on his part that (a) freedom of expression has an axiomatic, objective moral worth and that (b) consequently, a society in which expression is restricted is inferior to one in which it is comparably free.

Greenwald has also criticised the US detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba on the grounds that they deny those held there the protection of the rule of law and due process. But if these are markers by which it is possible to judge the American administration's commitment to human rights, why are they not also suitable markers by which to judge that of the Iranian or Syrian regimes, whose behaviour by these standards is demonstrably much worse? And if these markers are deemed legitimate points of universalist comparison by Greenwald, then why not others such as the emancipation of women, and the protection of LGBTQ rights? And why the reluctance to judge, and where necessary indict, cultures accordingly?

One will search Greenwald's writing for coherence in vain because, although he espouses moral relativism when it suits his agenda, as we've just seen, he'll vehemently disown it with his very next breath. His is not a thoughtful, principled commitment to a philosophy he's prepared to defend or apply consistently. Rather, his geopolitical outlook might be best described as a half-understood kind of dime-store Third Worldism; a gruesome combination of a thoroughgoing Western masochism with an ostensible compassion for the wretched of the earth that masks the same racist condescension and contempt typified by the worst kind of colonialist paternalism.

Thus, the planet is divided between the sentimentalised poor of the Global South and the brutal, arrogant power of the modern West. The former struggle valiantly beneath the jackboot of the latter's economic and military hegemony, yet are ennobled by a humble commitment to primitive - and often deeply regressive - traditions, and confinement within a pitiable victimhood. Any resistance to the hegemonic power of the West or rejection of modernity is therefore held to be, by its very nature, progressive and laudable, irrespective of how barbarous the groups/individuals/regimes in question, or how retrogressive their aims. As Greenwald's firm opposition to the French intervention in Mali and his unbending defence of the Iranian theocracy's right to apocalyptic weaponry demonstrate, there seems to be no third world regime or militia repellent or cruel enough that he would deny them his solidarity should they come into conflict with the West's democracies.

Greenwald can only withhold judgement of Iran's dismal human rights record or Syria's campaign of sectarian slaughter by affirming that Persians and Arabs are simply not culturally suited to the liberties and protections derived from Enlightenment thought to which Westerners rightly feel they are entitled. Instead, they must be perceived as childlike, simple and sometimes savage peoples whose cultural proclivities demonstrate a preference for subjugation, violence, injustice and fear over liberty and peace, and who are incapable of understanding egalitarian concepts of human rights due to their uniquely 'Western' character.

Greenwald is of course free to believe this if he wishes, but I can hardly think of a more reactionary or racist point of view. And this manichean thinking is only made possible by the application of an indefensible double-standard, one which demands that the actions of the West be judged according to a quasi-Biblical moral absolutism, whilst the actions of those in Third World, no matter how egregious, are afforded a relativist justification, and indulgently excused in the name of 'resistance':

@rprez2012 Only drooling, self-loving jingoists deny a causal relationship between U.S. actions in the Muslim world and 9/11.
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) Sept 09, 2010

In the end, for all his righteous fulminating about injustice, what animates Greenwald is not a sincere and fair-minded commitment to universalist principles and norms, but simply a myopic and visceral hatred of the West, America and - especially - Israel. This is self-criticism, unfettered by perspective or coherent moral philosophy, and thereby transformed into a disabling self-loathing, manifested in unseemly displays of narcissistic self-flagellation.

With Israel, as with the West in general, no concession will ever be enough; no achievement will ever be deemed praiseworthy; no atonement, no matter how abject, will be sufficient. And if Israel should fall to her enemies, Greenwald would doubtless affect a tone of gravest sorrow and announce that, alas, once again, the Jews had brought it on themselves, just as America had done when she was assaulted by theocratic fascists on 9/11. But on that count, for the time being - at least as long as Israel possesses nuclear weapons with which to safeguard her security and survival, and the anti-Semitic theocracy in Iran does not - Greenwald's spiteful schadenfreude will have to wait.

Those who advance the contemptible argument that Israel's treatment of the Palestinians demonstrates that Jews have 'learned nothing' from Auschwitz contrive to ignore the evidence before their eyes. It is surely because of this experience more than any other that Israel was established as a secular parliamentary democracy in which minority rights and free expression remain protected to this day. This despite being surrounded by peoples and regimes hostile to her very existence since inception, not one of which comes close to affording its citizens the freedoms Israel does.

Which is not to say I agree with everything Israel or America or any other democracy does. Rather that as an emancipatory model, free and democratic societies possess a worth above the immediate benefits they bestow on their own citizens and beyond the reach of the crimes they commit. The space provided for dissent and disputation allows for self-criticism and evolution; political accountability and an independent judiciary provide oversight, punishment and redress. The separation of religion and the State ensure policy will be decided on the basis of reason and argument rather than the enforcing of religious dogma. It is this framework that has allowed the West's democracies to evolve and grow in ways that closed societies cannot, thereby facilitating progress.

The regimes in Iran and Syria may make no such claim in defence of their survival. On the contrary, their very existence ought to be an offence to anyone who cares about individual liberty, as Glenn Greenwald claims to do. And it is for this reason that self-interested actions taken by these regimes to further their interests are not remotely morally equivalent to those taken by democracies to protect their people. That is, unless, like Glenn Greenwald, you happen to be a moral relativist.

Slurs, Segregation & Decent Liberals

Richard Dawkins, Tell MAMA UK and 'Islamophobia'

Decent, nice, liberal people must stop being so terrified of being thought “Islamophobic” and stand up for decent, nice, liberal values.

— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) March 10, 2013

Anyone wondering whether or not Professor Dawkins has a point need look no further than the lengthy and somewhat bizarre response to the above tweet posted by the organisation Tell MAMA UK.
 
The 'MAMA' in Tell MAMA stands for 'Measuring Anti-Muslim Attacks' and the organisation was established, in its own words, to "provide a means for such incidents to be reported, recorded and analysed, working to ensure this data is accurate and reliable and the victims and witnesses affected receive support."

Someone at Tell MAMA evidently decided that Dawkins's innocuous tweet masked an agenda sinister enough to qualify and so devoted 2000 words to exposing it. This intention is made clear from the title of the article: "Decent, nice, liberal people – dispelling some myths about anti-Muslim hate and those who share it". Their post returns repeatedly to Dawkins's phrase, invariably enclosing it in inverted commas (the better to emphasise its spuriousness), as the author delivers a stern warning about the dangers of using such an apparently disingenuous term in the context of the debate about anti-Muslim hatred and 'Islamophobia'.

Dawkins can be controversial and divisive but he is usually a very straightforward and plain-spoken man. Far from being a dissembler, it is Dawkins's penchant for bluntness that tends to take people aback and get him into trouble. With that in mind, it's worth quickly rehearsing the context of his tweet.

On 9 March 2013, an Islamist organisation with euphemistic title 'Islamic Education and Research Academy' (iERA) booked a room at University College London for a debate between Canadian-American physicist Lawrence Krauss and former Hizb ut-Tahrir member Hamza Tzortzis.

Upon arrival, Krauss discovered that the auditorium had been segregated by gender, despite securing an assurance in advance that seating arrangements would be free and egalitarian in line with UCL's normal equality and diversity policies. Men and women attending the debate were instructed to queue separately and enter the auditorium via separate doors. Inside, three seating sections were provided - one for men, one for "couples" (since redescribed by iERA as "mixed", which is not the same) and one for women. Women were asked - in accordance with the subordinate position required of them by the Qur'an - to sit at the back. Those refusing to comply were accused of trouble-making and ejected. A fuller account of the incident can be found here.

Dawkins responded to this news with a blog post, which concluded with the following:

It is unclear whether the UCL authorities were aware that sexual apartheid was being practised in one of their lecture rooms, but we may hope that a full inquiry will be launched. University College, London is celebrated as an early haven of enlightened free thinking, the first university college in England to have a secular foundation, and the first to admit men and women on equal terms. Heads should roll. Isn’t it really about time we decent, nice, liberal people stopped being so pusillanimously terrified of being thought “Islamophobic” and stood up for decent, nice, liberal values?

Not that you would know any of this from the response to Dawkins posted by Tell MAMA.

It contains no mention of the incident at UCL whatsoever.

Instead, their article opens with a list of incidents of alleged anti-Muslim bigotry that Tell MAMA have catalogued in their first annual report, before casually observing:

That same morning, prominent atheist writer Richard Dawkins – pursuing a theme on Islam that seems to have occupied his mind of late – stated that: ‘Decent, nice, liberal people must stop being so terrified of being thought “Islamophobic” and stand up for decent, nice, liberal values’.

"Pursuing a theme that seems to have occupied his mind of late" is characteristic of the innuendo that follows, and is designed to create an impression of Dawkins as an obsessive crank. His words are not presented as a response to Islamist attempts to enforce gender apartheid in neutral public space, nor is there any mention of the blog post from which they come. Rather they are linked to the release of Tell MAMA's own report - a coincidence of timing the author found significant enough to point out, but not to explain.

Dawkins is not alone in making these sorts of claims, and many in the ‘New Atheist’ movement and beyond subscribe to similar conflicts between a decent, Western, liberalism and the Islamic ‘other’.

This strongly implies Dawkins and others are using the language of liberalism to mask a racist agenda. It's false. Dawkins's quarrel is with tenets and injunctions of Islam not with its adherents, whom he presumably judges on their views and behaviour, as he would any other individual. Given that it is an organisation whose entire raison d'être is correctly identifying genuine anti-Muslim bigotry and prejudice, Tell MAMA's inability to make this elementary distinction is troubling to say the least. There are in fact a lot of moderate, secular and reformist Muslims who revile fundamentalist organisations like iERA with the same vehemence as Dawkins. And why not? Is it not natural that liberals, no matter what their religious affiliation, should recoil from illiberalism? But so preoccupied is the post's author by the identity politics angle, s/he is apparently unable to appreciate that opposition to Islamism can be the product of anything other than racism.

It is presumably with this rationale in mind that they then provide a list of some of the more offensive reports of online bigotry "since that was where Dawkins’s comment was raised".

[W]hen we look at the sorts of sentiments, statements, and harassment being reported in to Tell MAMA as incidences of ‘Islamophobia’ or ‘anti-Muslim prejudice’, we can see that these are far from the actions of ‘decent, nice, liberal people’. 

The first example of which is:

Fucking bastards time we killed 2 or 3 of the cunts kids just to let them feel the pain burn the koran

Further comparably unpleasant examples follow. "The combination of rape culture, anti-Muslim prejudice, and ‘banter’" we are informed, "combines to form a toxic online environment that is very far removed from the ‘decent, nice, liberal values’ that many prominent critics of Islam espouse."

Well that may be, but we have to get through another three faintly intimidating paragraphs detailing Tell MAMA's monitoring and reporting procedures before we discover what relevance any of this has to Dawkins, who has never said nor written anything remotely comparable to the example quoted above. I find it necessary to quote Tell MAMA's tortuous explanation in full:

Naturally, Dawkins, his supporters, and the broader movement of self-identified ‘liberal, nice, decent people’ may yet defend themselves as critics of Islam who do not adopt the violent extremist attitudes of EDL members. Many of them may well be decent people though it is important that they realise that their actions may feed into the rhetoric of hate organisations like the EDL. Sometimes, the language and comments used may well be perceived by Muslims as being identical to groups like the EDL and whilst they are coming from different places, the impact and perceptions on Muslim individuals may be the same – whether from the liberal or political left or whether from the Far Right. Any form of speech that lumps groups of individuals together and abuses them collectively is unacceptable in a tolerant, diverse, and equal society. Furthermore, these ‘decent, nice and liberal people’ need to understand that some in society attack Islam to undermine and dehumanise Muslims. Some genuinely believe that by attacking Islam, they are having no impact on the perception of Muslims by others.  It is therefore not a simple issue and saying that hating and attacking Islam does not impact or affect Muslims in our communities is naive. Whilst we defend their right to speak, we also raise the fact that their comments and actions may have impacts which can be perceived as hate speech, as well as direct impacts on community tensions. In the end such community tensions can and do impact on the lives of decent, law-abiding Muslims going about their everyday business.

If this is not an attempt to shame progressive critics of the Islamic Far Right into silence, I don't know what is. And in response to condemnation of segregation, no less! Tell MAMA's pro forma claim to defend the right of Dawkins et al to speak is to be predicted; they would be unable to defend their own pretentions to liberalism otherwise. But what they want instead is for critics of Islam to censor themselves. Yet, not two paragraphs previously, the article's author had the audacity to make the following declaration in bold type:

[I]t’s unhelpful at best, and disingenuous at worst, to consider Tell MAMA an organisation obsessed with restricting free speech and terrorising prominent public figures into silence whenever they dare criticise Islam.

Unfortunately, a bold typeface only adds emphasis - it says nothing about a statement's good faith, and the arguments Tell MAMA offer speak against them. So poorly conceived, badly wrought and incoherent is their case against Dawkins that they end up making his point for him. The article is self-refuting.

Which is not to say it is ineffective. It was uncritically retweeted a number of times, including by media figures who themselves have large twitter followings. Many on the liberal Left accept Tell MAMA's premises and conclusions without question. Which is the reason a nice, decent, liberal columist like The Guardian's Jonathan Freedland might find himself writing nonsensical sentences like this one:

[Bigots] can be confusing, because they often dress up in progressive, Guardian-friendly garb – slamming Islam as oppressive of gay and women's rights, for example – but the thick layer of bigotry is visible all the same. Call it progressives' prejudice.

For Freedland and others like him, condemnation of Christian or secular (and, presumably, Jewish) homophobia remains, not only permissible, but something akin to a progressive duty. But condemnation of Islamic homophobia is prima facie evidence of intolerance and bigotry, if not outright racism. 

Freedland (whose sincerity I can find no reason to doubt) seems to have bought into this stuff wholesale. But other liberals, presented with a false choice between condemning Islamic bigotry and racism are left either stunned into bewildered agnosticism or intimidated into silence despite reservations, concluding that dissonance is preferable to having to defend themselves from relativist accusations of intolerance. Sure enough, those who do speak up against the Islamic Far Right risk accusations of 'neo-Colonialism' and 'Cultural Imperialism' (if they are white) and 'inauthenticity' and 'careerism' if they are not.

Needless to say, this kind of thinking has been seized upon and enthusiastically promoted by Islamists who - unlike the Christian Far Right - find themselves afforded the space to bodyguard their regressive views with a demand for respect of cultural difference. A vital instrument in this pursuit is the slippery term 'Islamophobia' to which Dawkins refered, the ambiguity of which precludes a clear distinction between the criticism of religious tenets and practices on the one hand and the indiscriminate stigmatisation of adherents on the other.

In July of last year, a post appeared at Conservative Home entitled Islamophobia – a trap for unwary Muslims written by Vice Chairman of the Conservative Muslim Forum, Mohammed Amin (blogging in a personal capacity). In it, he argued:

[T]he most widely accepted definition [of Islamophobia] is from the Runnymede Trust’s Commission on British Muslims and Islamophobia which published a report in 1997 called “Islamophobia: A Challenge for Us All.”

Explaining the word Islamophobia, page one of the report says “The word is not ideal, but is recognisably similar to ‘xenophobia’ and ‘europhobia’, and is a useful shorthand way of referring to dread or hatred of Islam – and, therefore, to fear or dislike of all or most Muslims.”

It is worth reading the full report, but even the short quotation above shows two distinct issues being conflated:

• One’s belief about an abstract noun, Islam.
• One’s attitude to real people, Muslims.

This conflation is of course nonsense.

It is indeed, and Amin does a pretty succinct, if not comprehensive, job of explaining just why. I encourage those interested to read his article in full, but - in short - he concludes:

I do not want other people to slag off Islam, any more than I want to see them slagging off Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism or any other religion. However, if they wish to do so, they have every right in a free society to be as trenchant as they wish about Islam. What people are not free to do is deny me the rights [listed at the top of the article]. That distinction needs to be understood by every Muslim (and indeed non-Muslim) citizen.

It would help if we stopped using term Islamophobia. “Anti-Muslim violence” and “anti-Muslim hatred” are much clearer, and focus the issue properly on the rights of individual citizens.

An irony: Mohammed Amin is a patron of Tell MAMA UK.

A further (even better) irony: the article he penned for Conservative Home was reported to Tell MAMA on twitter:

@tellmamauk @sheryl2311 apparently islamophobia doesnt exist. But antisemitism does ofcourse. twitter.com/Bluangel786/st…
— Nikku (@Bluangel786) February 23, 2013

Reposting his article on his own website, Amin drily remarked "There were a large number of comments from ConservativeHome readers which you can read them at the foot of my original piece on ConservativeHome. The comments demonstrate the extent of the communications exercise that is needed by the British Muslim community."

In the light of the above, I'd say that's an understatement. But it is not just the British Muslim community who are in need of a communications exercise. The decent, nice, liberal people to whom Dawkins's offending tweet was addressed need one too.

At the top of their post, the author of Tell MAMA's article states:

Generally, people don’t want to align themselves with indecent, mean, and oppressive people.

The irony of this statement is entirely at Tell MAMA's expense. Because by occluding any mention of iERA's bigotry and choosing instead to attack Richard Dawkins's appalled reaction to it, this is precisely what Tell MAMA have done.

Blinkered Vision

The Burqa and the Civil Libertarian Left

NOTE: The following essay deals with face-covering - ie: the burqa and the niqab (see below). For the sake of simplicity, use of either term here can be taken to mean both.

BURQA: Covers the entire body and hides the eyes behind a grill.
HIJAB (headscarf): Covers the hair and neck, but not the face.
NIQAB (face veil): Covers the whole head except the eyes. 

*     *     *

The Muslim veil, the different sorts of masks and beaks and burkas, are all gradations of mental slavery. You must ask permission to leave the house, and when you do go out you must always hide yourself behind thick drapery. Ashamed of your body, suppressing your desires -- what small space in your life can you call your own? The veil deliberately marks women as private and restricted property, nonpersons. The veil sets women apart from men and apart from the world; it restrains them, confines them, grooms them for docility. A mind can be cramped just as a body may be, and a Muslim veil blinkers both your vision and your destiny. It is the mark of a kind of apartheid, not the domination of a race but of a sex.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

These stark reflections on a life behind the veil in Ayaan Hirsi Ali's memoir-cum-polemic Nomad were occasioned, not by a trip to Saudi Arabia or Iran, but by a drive down Whitechapel Road where Britain's largest Muslim community live in the shadow of the notorious East London Mosque. Veiling, and the oppression of women that the practice in its most extreme forms unavoidably entails, is becoming increasingly common amongst Muslim women living in free societies, despite the fact that the progressive struggle for women's rights in such societies has resulted in laws designed to promote and safeguard gender equality.

For the relativist Left this is cause not for outrage but for celebration. They argue that the growing prevalence of veiling, including face- and full body-covering, is evidence not of oppression, but of our society's broad-mindedness and cultural diversity. Since Western laws and culture make no such demand on women, adoption of regressive dress codes can only be a matter of free and individual choice. To circumscribe or even criticise such a choice is not only illiberal, but evidence of cultural imperialism, bigotry, 'Islamophobia' and intolerance. When the French lower house passed its ban on face-covering in 2010, The Guardian's Madeleine Bunting voiced her disgust:

It is not difficult to see the racism which permeates this debate. It is about assertion of identity – under the soubriquet of protecting "our way of life" – and crucial to that is forcing a choice: do you subscribe or don't you? Sign up or get out. But such choices are notoriously slippery. Who gets to decide what our way of life is exactly?

One of the most trenchant critics of this kind of incoherent, woolly thinking has been the progressive writer and journalist Nick Cohen. Some of his most powerful writing has been devoted to attacks on the pieties of multiculturalism and its apologists, who would tolerate intolerance in the narcissistic belief that what mattered most was the ostentatious display of their own open-mindedness. In a particularly scathing article for Standpoint on the subject of liberal attitudes to religious misogyny, he wrote:

People on the receiving end of repression notice the air of moral superiority as soon as Western liberals refuse them their support out of "respect" for the culture which intimidates them. Liberal relativists are in this respect the true successors of their imperialist ancestors. Where once Westerners denied rights to lesser breeds without the law who were racially unsuited to enjoy liberty, now they deny them to diverse breeds without the culture who are unsuited by accidents of history and geography to exercise the freedoms white Westerners take for granted or handle the complex arguments white Westerners take in their stride.

In other words, if the debate over, say, minority women's rights is being permeated by racism, it is the racism of impoverished expectations produced by the cultural relativism of people like Bunting (who, contrary to her declaration, finds this very difficult to see indeed). Cohen argues that these "weird twists in liberal opinion" are the product of fear. Fear, in part, of "provoking accusations of racial or religious prejudice".

The Burqa and the Question of Religious Freedom 

But the peculiar quarrel over whether or not to ban the burqa has produced some weird twists of its own. In the middle of a discussion about the reactions of the political left and right to the spread of political Islam in Europe in his blistering free speech polemic You Can't Read This Book, Cohen suddenly writes the following:

[T]he Sarkozy government banned women from wearing the burqa - a direct assault on freedom of choice and freedom of religion.

I have to confess I was slightly stunned by this declaration. Even allowing for his hostility to State interference in matters of individual freedom, it is not a conclusion I would have expected Cohen to arrive at without difficulty. Not least because in the Standpoint article excerpted above, he had also written this:

For all the qualifications, the stubborn fact remains that mainstream opinion does not consider the oppression of women a pressing concern when it is done in the name of culture or religion, particularly in the name of once-subordinate cultures and religions. The misogyny they generate does not move hearts or stir passions.

Yet his indictment of a ban on the burqa is as definite and unequivocal as it is pithy. The emphatic terseness with which the case is stated and concluded gives the clear impression that the question is a straightforward one undeserving of lengthy consideration. Two pages later, he writes:

Liberal societies treated the Islamist wave with a disastrous mixture of authoritarianism and appeasement. On the one hand, they passed terror laws that conflicted with basic liberties, banned burqas and imposed new immigration controls....

...and, with that, the ban is bundled up with two other highly contentious issues, stamped "right-wing authoritarianism" and simply thrown away. The burqa is not, as I recall, mentioned again. To be fair, it is not central to the thesis of Cohen's book, which is an impassioned monograph about censorship in the internet age. But, having introduced the subject, his casual dismissal of it and his partial defence of the burqa on the grounds of religious freedom took me aback.

To take Cohen's two main objections in reverse order, it is highly dubious whether a burqa ban constitutes an infringement on religious freedom at all, still less a direct assault. Admittedly, the pitiless subjugation of women by Wahhabist doctrine is invariably justified by a medieval theology that demands submission of people to God, and of women to men. But it is in fact a cultural practice from the Byzantine and Persian Empires pre-dating Islam, designed specifically as a mark of ownership at a time when women were considered the private property of men. There is no explicit scriptural justification to be found in either the Qur'an or the Sunna, either for enforcing or 'recommending' the covering of the female face. Nor, for those who care about this sort of thing, is there any agreement on the subject amongst contemporary Islamic scholarship.

But even if there were such a scriptural justification, and even if it were the only verse clear and unequivocal enough for everyone to agree on its meaning and applicability, it should make no difference to the question of its legality in a secular society. Freedom of religious belief and opinion ought to be inviolable - no-one should be persecuted for their theological or metaphysical views, no matter how absurd. But the parameters of what constitutes legal or legitimate freedom of religious practice must be determined on a uniform basis by secular human (and, where applicable, animal) rights law.

Laws already exist proscribing cultural and religious practices such as genital mutilation/cutting of the unconsenting female young, irrespective of how fervently the parents may believe it to be necessary. And polygamy remains illegal, irrespective of its supposed justification or whether or not the adults involved have freely consented. Such restrictions are designed to uphold equality and universal human rights, and Cohen has not to my knowledge described either as a threat to religious freedom. On the contrary, he has expressed his outrage (which I share) that enforcement of the law banning FGM is so lamentably lax, and he has been justifiably caustic in his condemnation of the soft racism lurking behind this failure.

The confinement of the niqab to women - and only women - in austere Salafist sects is persuasive evidence, not of free and independent choice, but of conformity to the untestable demands of misogynistic - and invariably male - religious and cultural authorities. It is on the recommendation of such authorities that Muslim women are persuaded that such an oppressive degree of 'modesty' is required of them by her faith. And it on the advice of such authorities that any suitably pious husband deserving of her 'purity' will grow to expect this requirement of her, in perpetuity.

Given the superstitious hold mosques, churches and synagogues have on their followers and the uniquely coercive power it affords their authority, it must be permissible for the State to limit the sacrifices they require of their adherents, so as to protect the vulnerable from abusive clerical indoctrination. If religious doctrine can persuade adherents to blow themselves to pieces on the London transit system in the hope of finding paradise, then it follows that others are also vulnerable to the idea that passively accepting a life of subjugation and misery will reward them in death. As Saudiwoman reported on her blog:

The number of times I have heard Saudi women here, who are conditioned to believe that covering is an unquestionable issue, sigh as they watch uncovered women on TV and say لهم الدنبا ولنا الأخرة (they get the world and we get the afterlife). These are the women “choosing” to cover, brainwashed into living to die.

The Multicultural Disaster and the Matter of Choice 

The question of whether a ban on the burqa is an unacceptable restriction of individual choice is a more complicated one. For some Muslims, individual choice is already hugely circumscribed by the illiberal cultural and religious demands I've just described. These restrictions on individual liberty are exacerbated by the unintended consequences of multiculturalism.

The British multicultural model was not designed. Rather, it evolved as an ad hoc policy response by local authorities to a knot of unforeseen problems produced by mass migration. The policy was expedient, but its demand that all communities be respectful of one another's cultural peculiarities was - theoretically at least - also well-intentioned.

But by homogenising groups and elevating respect for cultural difference over individual rights, multiculturalism has inadvertently imprisoned many Muslim migrants and their children inside precisely the same regressive value-systems they came to the West to escape - powerfully coercive cultural and religious traditions of honour and shame, the burden of which falls most heavily and disproportionately upon women. For Muslims in this situation, dress codes are not remotely a matter of free choice, but of conditioning and enforcement by families, communities and religious leaders. As Ayaan Hirsi Ali and countless others have discovered, rebellion against kin, clan and culture can exact an intolerable cost, from ostracism and beatings to murder.

The complication is that not everyone who adopts the niqab is a hostage to culture. Increasingly, educated young Muslim women are covering in defiance of their parents' secularism and religious liberalism. If this is an act of masochistic self-abnegation, then it is one undertaken freely.

The reasons why anyone would choose to do such a thing are complex, but a large part of the catalyst for this somewhat sinister phenomenon can be located in a second, no less disastrous, consequence of state-sponsored multiculturalism: that it unintentionally cleared political space for the rise of the Islamic far-right.

In his brilliant 2010 polemic, From Fatwa to Jihad, writer and broadcaster Kenan Malik observes that during the 1970s, young irreligious Asians had aligned themselves with the anti-racist Asian Youth Movements and secular, class-based organisations such as the SWP. But in the 1980s, in response to short-termist policy initiatives designed to diffuse racial tensions, they suddenly found themselves expected and incentivised to organise and self-identify as Muslims. With nimble opportunism, radical Islamist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood, Jamaat-e-Islami and Hizb ut-Tahrir stepped into the breach and provided a political framework within which to forge a new identity and sense of belonging.

Like Wahhabists, Islamists are Salafi (or fundamentalist) Muslims, who ostensibly advocate a return to the example set by the Prophet Muhammad and his earliest followers. But while Wahhabism represents an austere, literalist interpretation of Islamic faith and culture, Islamism represents its aggressively politicised variant, animated by contemporary goals and grievances. While Wahhabism demands separation and withdrawal from Western society, Islamism demands confrontation and overthrow. To describe Islamism as a far-right ideology is to flirt with euphemism. It is more correctly described as fascistic - totalitarian, supremacist, imperialist, sectarian, misogynistic, gay-hating and pathologically anti-Semitic. In short, it has no redeeming features. At all.

(It is, by the way, a rather marvellous irony that, while Islamist mosques, communities, parties, bookshops and think-tanks are almost exclusively funded by Saudi Arabian petrodollars, much of that money is spent preaching hatred of the equally loathsome Saudi regime for its alliance with America.)

But Islamism has been extremely adept at exploiting liberal freedoms and areas of cultural sensitivity as a means of furthering its agenda. In his short, riveting memoir The Islamist, former Hizb ut-Tahrir activist Ed Husain offers an object example of this process. As a boy, he rejected the secular, spiritual Islam of his parents and fell, almost without realising it, into the arms of the far-right. The Islamists he encountered were not pious men fired by religious fervour, but angry, confused men and women in search of identity. Most of them, he reports, had little or no knowledge of the Qur'an. Others openly took drugs and used pornography (activities to which I have no objection, incidentally, but which are rather at odds with adherents' professed asceticism and piety), and energies were channeled not into theology and scriptural exegeses, but into single-minded grievance-mongering and a fanatical hatred of the West and all its works.

In this environment, Muslim women and converts radicalised by Islamism's ruthlessly efficient recruiting drives on university campuses began to adopt increasingly strict dress codes as a sign, not of religious observance, but of political defiance and cultural hostility. Commenting on his observations of the corresponding spread of face-covering in Canada, Tarek Fatah, author and founder of the Canadian Muslim Congress, flatly told the Calgary Herald that:

The burqa and the niqab is the political uniform of the regiments of the Muslim Brotherhood, which is a fascist, supremacist organization. You can’t wear a swastika today and not be a Nazi, and the niqab is the swastika of the Muslim Brotherhood. Every woman who wears a burka by choice in the West is a supporter of Islamic fascism, believes in jihad and desires the implementation of sharia law and the destruction of Western civilization. There is not one of these women who will say that they are against sharia and they’re against jihad. So, we’re dealing with a dress code of a fascist organization that has in its gun-sights, the West.

Whenever the subject of the burqa ban is brought up, it is Islamists who are the burqa's noisiest defenders and whose outraged cries of persecution and 'Islamophobia' seem to catch the ear of the relativist Left, postmodern Western feminists and civil libertarians. Islamist niqabis announce that the burqa is not a symbol of their oppression, but a symbol of their empowerment and of a kind of 'feminism' that empties the term of all coherent meaning. They vow to disobey laws proscribing it, and if they are arrested for doing so, they present themselves as martyrs to a liberalism they unapologetically despise and are sworn to overthrow. For good measure, and unencumbered by a sense of irony or humour, they then righteously denounce the West for its racism and intolerance. In the hands of Islamists, face-covering is a crude instrument of cultural warfare to which Muslim women are so much cannon-fodder.

A few - those with the strength of character to repudiate Islamist values as Ed Husain eventually did - may leave without fearing for their lives as those ensnared in monocultural ghettos often must. But Islamist sects, like all cults, maintain their control by fostering dependence through indoctrination and by isolating their adherents from an outside world they demonise. For those women unable to extricate themselves, a glimpse of the grotesque subordination awaiting them once the frisson of youthful rebellion wears off can be found in novelist Hanif Kureishi's account of a visit to the home of Farid Kassim, a co-founder of Hizb ut-Tahrir's UK chapter:

Four women brought in the food. They came into the room backwards, bent over, so we could not see their faces. I have never seen that anywhere else.

The decision to adopt the niqab is not so much a matter of exercising free choice as renouncing it. Just as when an electorate votes for an Islamist government, it is almost certainly the last vote they will ever cast, so a woman adopting a burqa is asked to forswear choice and to exchange a life of independence for one of servility. Inevitably Islamist women find they have become apologists for their own oppression and, disgracefully, for the oppression of other Muslim women denied their freedom to choose.

So the question of choice presents a problem for liberal universalists: does the right to freely adopt the burqa in the first instance trump the need to protect and emancipate - if necessary by recourse to State intervention - those compelled to wear it?

Kenan Malik had a stab at addressing this question when he argued against a State ban on the burqa in the New Humanist. Like Cohen, Malik is no relativist. From Fatwa to Jihad is a lucid and thoughtful examination of the West's response to Islamic fundamentalism in the wake of the Satanic Verses affair. But it is also a sturdy defence of Enlightenment universalism from the pincer threat of Western relativism and reactionary Islamism. Malik shares Nick Cohen's dismay at the concessions made by open societies to theocratic fascism in the name of fear and sensitivity. But, unlike Cohen, Malik stutters when it comes to the burqa.

[I]s a ban not necessary to protect women from being forced to wear the burqa? In countries such as Saudi Arabia or Yemen women have little choice but to cover up their face. That in itself is a good reason for liberal societies not to impose coercive dress codes. In democratic countries, the law already protects citizens from being harmed or coerced by others. It should go no further, especially as evidence suggests that in Europe most women wear the burqa of their own volition.

This pretzel of an argument is completely foreign to the clear-minded reasoning of his book, and in its convoluted logic I detect dissonance. He asks what is to be done about those coerced in free societies. He then shifts the argument to the treatment of women in Gulf theocracies, before returning - not to those forced to wear the burqa whose fate is supposed to be under discussion - but to those he fears may be asked by the State to remove it.

The additional argument that laws already exist in democracies to protect citizens from coercion sidesteps precisely what is at issue: that some Muslim women are being coerced in spite of these laws and in spite of others supposed to guarantee gender equality. Who speaks for them?

Contrast Malik's reasoning to that of American feminist and anti-theist Ophelia Benson, who back in July 2009, told the New Statesman:

One reason I don't flat-out oppose [a ban] is because community pressure can force other women and girls to wear the hijab or the burqa, and from that point of view a ban is like any other law that creates a level playing field. If no one can wear the burqa on the street, then no one will be forced to wear it on the street. This is hard on women and girls who want to wear it but good for women and girls who don't want to. If I have to choose which should be helped, I choose the latter.

Malik's position, conversely, requires him to choose the former and abandon the latter. There is no need to divert the discussion into the Arabian peninsular when debating the human rights of women in European democracies. But having done so, the equivalence he asserts is a false one. A theocratic state imposing a uniform and dehumanising dress code on half of its population in the name of gender segregation and female subjugation is not comparable to a democratic state which proscribes a single item of clothing in the name of gender equality and female emancipation. To suggest that it is paddles into the very relativist swamp Malik's reasoning is intended to avoid.

In fact, his parallel invites a different question: if we deplore the oppression of women by political and religious sects in the Gulf, why should we tolerate the same oppression by those same sects in the democratic West? What does freedom gain exactly by allowing the flourishing of Saudi Arabian and Yemeni microcosms in Amsterdam, Paris and London? 

Infringements upon individual choice in free societies, although thankfully exceptions rather than the rule, are not unheard of, provided a persuasive utilitarian justification can be offered. The ban on the freedom to undress completely is an infringement upon personal liberty but has not resulted in a slippery slope towards State-sponsored sartorial fascism. Nor is it generally regarded as coercive, even though the freedom to be naked in public has been massively curtailed for a minority who like that kind of thing. If an exception can be made at one extreme, then there can be no 'on principle' objection at the other extreme where a mode of dress obliterates the identity of its wearer entirely.

Liberalism and Fascism 

One of the most imposing and eloquent liberal opponents of a ban on the burqa I have come across is academic and blogger Norman Geras, one of the co-architects of the Euston Manifesto. He has written considerably more on the subject than either Malik or Cohen and has adopted a particularly inflexible line on the issue. When a Muslim student in Quebec was faced with exclusion from classes for refusing to reveal her face in accordance with a new provincial law, Geras described the ultimatum as "an act of rank, crass illiberalism".

As far as I know, Geras has not made a standalone case of his own. However, he has been assiduous in quietly patrolling the subject, posting carefully reasoned objections of varying lengths to pro-ban arguments offered by Christopher Hitchens, Oliver Kamm, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown and Mona Eltahawy, who found herself accused of 'Burqa Leninism'. (Given that it was the French ban she was defending, 'Burqa Jacobinism' might have been more apposite.)

He even took issue with blog posts by A. Jay Adler and Alice Thomson, both of whom share his overall view that a State ban on face-covering is undesirable. 

Geras's approach to the subject is coolly rational almost to the point of frigidity, and painstaking in its attention to semantic detail. His objection to Thompson, for instance, is entirely concerned with the question of whether or not she is justified in describing facial expressions as being "crucial" to personal interaction rather than simply "very important" (conclusion: she is not).

Which is not to trivialise or gainsay the importance of this approach. Clarity of language and calm rationality are essential to the constructive discussion of ideas, particularly in a debate as emotive as this one. However, reading his blogs on the subject, I couldn't shake the suspicion that the micro-management of his own position's defences betrayed a disabling myopia.

This suspicion appears to be confirmed by an astonishing remark Geras makes in response to Christopher Hitchens. In his piece for Slate in support of the French ban, Hitchens had written:

Let me ask a simple question to the pseudoliberals who take a soft line on the veil and the burqa. What about the Ku Klux Klan? Notorious for its hooded style and its reactionary history, this gang is and always was dedicated to upholding Protestant and Anglo-Saxon purity. I do not deny the right of the KKK to take this faith-based view, which is protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. I might even go so far as to say that, at a rally protected by police, they could lawfully hide their nasty faces. But I am not going to have a hooded man or woman teach my children, or push their way into the bank ahead of me, or drive my taxi or bus, and there will never be a law that says I have to. 

To which Geras responded:

'What about the Ku Klux Klan?' Christopher asks. What about them? Why are they relevant? OK, they also cover their faces. But, leaving aside the issue of how that should be dealt with in terms of the permissibility or otherwise of public displays, why aren't the differences between the Ku Klux Klan's reasons for covering their faces and the reasons of Muslim women more important than the similarities? In one case, we're talking about a type of political uniform and its use in the spreading of hatred, and in the other case... we aren't.

Hitchens's analogy between Christian neo-Nazism and Islamofascism is drawn with unpardonable sloppiness, but its intention is not obscure. That Geras misses it, or simply disregards it as so much paranoid hysteria, is indicative of the degree to which he is prepared to accept Islamism's preferred narrative - that the debate over the burqa ban is a straightforward quarrel between the State and the freedom-loving individual. It is in fact a quarrel between the secular State and an Islamist ideology that seeks to usurp its authority, and to do so using the mechanisms of free societies and the language of liberty and choice to advance an agenda intended to dominate and enslave.

In Islamism's rejection of integration in favour of belligerent separatism, the burqa is not just a tool and symbol of subjugation and control; it is a crude instrument of gender apartheid and one aspect of a deliberate campaign to create sex-segregated societies within our own, also evidenced by the demand for parallel Sharia jurisdiction and Muslim Arbitration Tribunals; the increase in faith schools; the demand for separate hospitals and beaches and so on. And I do not believe that an Islamist challenged in a moment of candour would disagree.

If there is an assault on individual liberty going on here, it comes from Islamist ideology, and from those who preach and practice it. It is an assault against which the burqa ban is intended as a defence. An assault, first and foremost, on Muslim women; then on Muslims; then on Western society as a whole, the tolerance and pluralism of which Islamism sets out first to exploit, then to disfigure and destroy. Speaking on Canada's Sun News Network, Tarek Fatah could barely contain his exasperation:

[The burqa] is a symbol of Islamofascism which is showing its middle finger to Western society saying: "We are going to use your laws to humiliate you and we don't give a damn as to what you feel about it!"

Tolerance, Silence and Appeasement

In The Flight of the Intellectuals, his 2010 book about the Western Left's respective treatment of Islamist 'scholar' Tariq Ramadan and Somali apostate Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the American liberal essayist Paul Berman catalogues the 2007 controversy over Dutch liberal Ian Buruma's book Murder in Amsterdam.

The row was ignited by an essay by French philosopher Pascal Bruckner, in which he accused Ian Buruma of using cultural relativism to excuse fundamentalism and shamefully denounce a courageous dissident. In a testy response, Buruma denied the charge of relativism and countered that his arguments were the stuff of classical liberalism and tolerance:

Should we only side with rebels whose views and practices we like? Or does living in a free society also imply that people should be able to choose the way they look, or speak, or worship, even if we don't like it, as long as they don't harm others? A free-spirited citizen does not tolerate different customs or cultures because he thinks they are wonderful, but because he believes in freedom.

Buruma continued:

[Pascal] Bruckner mentions the opening of an Islamic hospital in Rotterdam and reserved beaches for Muslim women in Italy. I fail to see why this is so much more terrible than opening kosher restaurants, Catholic hospitals, or reserved beaches for nudists, but to Bruckner these concessions are akin to segregation in the southern states of America, and even Apartheid in South Africa.

Turkish-German feminist and Muslim reformer Necla Kelek, who had been watching this debate from the sidelines, then entered the fray with a furious contribution of her own. She began by pointing out that Buruma's denial that he is a cultural relativist did not in fact preclude him from being one. She went on to say:

I can tell you, Mr. Buruma, why Italian beaches reserved for Muslim women are "so much more terrible." Unlike kosher dining or a case of the flu requiring hospitalisation, the beach is a Muslim attempt to bring about change. Whether it is headscarves or gender-specific separation of public space, political Islam is trying to establish apartheid of the sexes in free European societies. A Muslim hospital is fundamentally different from a Catholic hospital. In a Muslim hospital, patients are separated according to gender. Men may be treated only by men, women only by women. Muslim female nurses, for example, may not wash male patients, they may not even touch them.

I am not privy to the thoughts of Norman Geras on the Murder in Amsterdam controversy. For all I know, he may agree with Ian Buruma and argue that resistance to segregated hospitals and beaches is also evidence of rank intolerance and illiberalism, with the proviso that no-one be compelled to visit them. I can find no reason in his arguments concerning face covering to suspect otherwise.

Kenan Malik may be more sceptical. In From Fatwa to Jihad, he mentions Buruma's Murder in Amsterdam only in passing, but he does so to illustrate the collapse of confidence amongst relativist liberals in the superiority of Enlightenment universalism. And many of Bruckner's arguments about the malign effects multiculturalism has had on individual freedom are echoed in Malik's writing. Furthermore, it is possible to detect clear parallels between Pascal Bruckner's outrage at the treatment of Ayaan Hirsi Ali by Ian Buruma, and Malik's disquiet at the treatment of Monica Ali by Germaine Greer. Still, his equivocations over the burqa could equally extend to the areas Bruckner raises.

But in You Can't Read This Book, Nick Cohen deals with the Murder in Amsterdam controversy directly, and he is explicit in declaring his sympathy for Pascal Bruckner's position - not just in the narrow matter of whether or not to show solidarity with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, but in his opposition to the racism that Bruckner and Kelek detect beneath Ian Buruma's professed defence of individual liberty. Cohen (correctly) describes Pascal Bruckner as "heir to the best traditions of the French Enlightenment" and sub-heads his section on the row "The Racism of the Anti-Racists", directly quoting the title of Pascal Bruckner's essay.

And yet, in a brief paragraph on the subject at The Spectator's blog, Cohen's reasoning becomes almost indistinguishable from Ian Buruma's:

[The unnamed author of a blog at Time magazine] deplores France’s ban on the burqa and says it reflects "very real Islamophobic attitudes spreading throughout society". I am not position to judge that, but am sure he is right to say that the state should not tell citizens how to dress. Many people find the burqa "obnoxious and offensive" – myself included. But in a free society all we can do is argue against the misogynists, who promote male ownership of women’s bodies.

Has the thinking of civil libertarians like Cohen, Malik and Geras become infected with the termites that have hollowed out so much of the rest of the Left? I doubt it. Rather, their response to the unique problem posed by the burqa seems to rest on a miscalculation - a wish to split the difference between the cultural relativists and the universalist abolitionists and forge a 'third way'; a compromise that opposes State interference in the lives of individuals, but without suspending moral judgment. The position is untenable.

The closest Geras gets to condemning the burqa is a line in his reply to Mona Eltahawy in which he politely allows that he has "no quarrel with the claim that [Salafi] ideology diminishes women and the interests of women". Reading his blogs I discern a reluctance to ackowledge that the burqa causes anyone any suffering at all, and that what is really at issue for abolitionists is the offence it gives to their Western sensibilities.

Malik opens his piece by stating: "The burqa should have no place in a 21st-century society, either as a piece of clothing or as a symbol of the status of women" but by the conclusion, he has retreated behind the familiar (and, I have to say, somewhat shabby) euphemism that the niqab is simply "a piece of cloth worn by a few hundred women"; a matter, in other words, of scant importance. 

In Cohen's 3500 word piece for Standpoint about religious misogyny, the burqa merits only a glancing reference. The only other instances I can find in which he discusses it are mentioned above.

Moral judgment ends up, if not suspended entirely, then reduced to throat-clearing. But the civil libertarian silence is not the result of the cowardice, fear, political correctness and latent racism that Bruckner, Kelek and Berman identify in Ian Buruma's thinking. Instead, it strikes me as a straightforward conflict of interests. It is, after all, difficult to criticise the burqa too vehemently without fortifying the case for the State ban. But the upshot is that, on an issue central to minority women's rights and the war of ideas occasioned by the challenge of Islamic fascism, three of our most brilliant progressive writers and thinkers have rendered themselves almost mute.

*     *     * 

There is a noble exception to this rule. This brings me back to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, with whose passionate and unequivocal condemnation of Islamic dress codes I chose to open this essay. As it happens, Hirsi Ali also opposes a ban on face-covering, but for reasons unconnected to arguments from individual freedom or cultural indulgence. Hirsi Ali believes that State intervention is impractical, counter-productive and, like the related quarrel over minarets, a superficial distraction from the urgent debate in which societies need to engage about what she terms (after Huntington) "the clash of civilisations".

I agree such a debate is long overdue. I disagree that a State ban on the burqa need be a diversion or that the question should come down to a matter of either/or. The abolition of the burqa by one means or another is a necessary precondition to winning the fight against theocratic and cultural misogyny, but it is by no means a sufficient one. Were the burqa to be proscribed by law, the backward values and attitudes that demand and bodyguard it, on the Islamic far-right and relativist Left respectively, will remain and the universalist counter-assault on these values and attitudes will need to continue. But we cannot wait until that argument is won before admitting that a free society should never have tolerated the totalitarianism, misogyny and intolerance the burqa represents.

I believe that Nick Cohen was absolutely right when he declared that politicians have responded to the Islamist challenge with a mixture of authoritarianism and appeasement. But I think he miscategorises French and Belgian reactions to the effrontery of the burqa. As Pascal Bruckner put it:

Many people scoffed at French authoritarianism when parliament voted to forbid women and young girls from wearing headscarves in school and in government offices...Yet now political leaders in Great Britain, the Netherlands and Germany, shocked by the spread of hijab and burqa, are considering passing laws against them. The facts speak against the appeasers, who enjoin Europe to fit in with Islam rather than vice versa. For the more we give in to the radicalism of the bearded, the more they will harden their tone. Appeasement politics only increase their appetite.

* * *

UPDATE: Norman Geras has responded to this essay and to the criticisms of his position within it at normblog here.

UPDATE/CORRECTION: In the short section dealing with Kenan Malik's post for the New Humanist, I originally quoted Malik as follows: "[I]s a ban not necessary to protect women from being forced to wear the burqa? In countries such as Saudi Arabia or Yemen women have little choice but to cover up their face. That in itself is a good reason for liberal societies not to impose coercive dress codes". I then commented: "Notice that Malik can’t – or won’t – provide his own question with a straight answer." Malik rightly objected that I had cut his quote short and misrepresented his view. He pointed out that in the very next line he had written: "In democratic countries, the law already protects citizens from being harmed or coerced by others. It should go no further..."

I had taken the two different parts of this paragraph to be two separate arguments, and only addressed the first. However, re-reading it, it is obvious that both points are part of the same argument. Malik still begs the question, in my view, and my argument in reply remains the same (although re-worded). However, my omission of the second part of his quote was careless and needlessly misleading. The post has now been amended to include the full quotation. My apologies to Kenan Malik for the error.