Victimisers as Victims

Mehdi Hasan and the "New Jews"

The Jewish Museum in Brussels, Begium, where four people,
including an Israeli couple, were murdered on 24 May.

On the 29th of May, Mehdi Hasan published another piece about Islamophobia at the Huffington Post. It came in the wake of alarming gains made by far-right parties in the European elections. As acknowledged by its author, it also came in the wake of a shooting at a Jewish Museum in Brussels in which an Israeli couple and a Belgian woman were shot dead. A fourth victim, critically injured during the shooting, succumbed to his injuries as I was drafting this post.

The only suspect in the shooting, an Islamist jihadi and French national named Mehdi Nemmouche, was not identified and arrested until the day after the publication of Hasan's article. However, similarities to the shooting carried out by Mohammed Merah at a Jewish school in Toulouse in 2012 were already apparent, as was the attack's probable anti-Semitic intent.

Nevertheless, Mehdi Hasan thought that now would be good time to say this:

In some respects, Muslims are the new Jews of Europe. The vile shooting at the Jewish Museum in Brussels on 24 May, in which three people were killed, might make this statement sound odd. Anti-Jewish attacks are indeed on the rise in Europe, which is deplorable and depressing, but thankfully anti-Semitism is now taboo in mainstream political discourse in a way in which Islamophobia isn't. These days, most anti-Semitic attacks are carried out by second-generation Arabs and are linked to anger over Israeli policies.

For whatever it's worth, I do not believe that Mehdi Hasan is himself an Islamist. By which I mean that I have seen no evidence that he wishes his own freedom to be subject to the demands of State-imposed Islamic Law of any kind. That said, he displays a disturbing readiness to endorse Islamist arguments and talking points, the chief function of which is to re-describe the victimisers as victims.

Hasan's reference to the "Jews of Europe" is historically imprecise, but the phrase most immediately evokes the Nuremberg Laws, concentration camps, and gas chambers. In light of Nemmouche's arrest, and the revelation that he is probably a member of the al Qaeda splinter group ISIS, this sounds not merely "odd", but deranged. The qualifier offered by Hasan - that Muslims only resemble the Jews of Europe "in some respects" - is being asked to do more work than history or common sense will allow. The respects in which Muslims living in European democracies today are plainly not like the Jews of pre-war Germany so vastly outweigh the similarities that they invalidate the comparison.

But the real function of this risible meme is not to draw a historically literate comparison but rather to circulate the idea that Muslims have now replaced Jews at the top of a perceived hierarchy of suffering. For if Muslims are the "new Jews", then the Jews' own claim to this perversely coveted title must have, by definition, expired. To use the words "but thankfully anti-Semitism", a mere five days after an anti-Semitic multiple murder, strikes me as unwise. To do so as the basis from which to argue that Muslims have a superior claim to victimhood strikes me as political, a feeling confirmed by Hasan's next observation that attacks on Jews no longer come from the nationalist far-right but from "second generation Arabs and are linked to anger over Israeli policies".

I'm afraid I'm unable to see why being targeted by the Islamist assassins of al Qaeda is an improvement on being targeted by the nationalist far-right. And what exactly is the nature of this mysterious "link" by which Hasan connects the continuing occupation of the West Bank to the murder of two Israeli tourists in Belgium, who - for all Hasan knows - may have hated the Netanyahu government?

In their co-authored book, Myths, Illusions and Peace, the former Middle East negotiator and analyst Dennis Ross and the journalist David Makovsky describe this kind of "linkage" argument as "the mother of all myths" about the Middle East. Having examined the ways in which Arab governments have instrumentalised the conflict in Palestine as a means of pursuing their own political and geopolitical agendas, Makovsky and Ross turn to the matter of terrorism:

[The linkage idea] has also been used as an explanation for terrorism. By anchoring political violence to grievance, terrorist perpetrators sought not only to justify their actions, but to neutralise those who would oppose them.

The authors remind us that, in his earliest fatwas, Osama bin Laden displayed scant interest in the Palestinian conflict. He was instead preoccupied with forcing the removal of "crusader" (ie: American) soldiers from sacred Saudi Arabian soil, with toppling the illegitimate Saudi monarchy, and with re-establishing the Holy Islamic Caliphate under a particularly austere and cruel reading of Sharia Law. But...

. . . after 9/11, bin Laden discovered the utility of the Palestinian issue. Suddenly, he began more openly trying to tie his actions to the cause of the Palestinians. In one videotaped message after 9/11, he declared, "Neither America nor the people who live in it will dream of security before we live it in Palestine."

As Ross and Makovsky point out, if this ex post facto rationale for the premeditated murder of almost 3000 people is to be believed, it must be reconciled with the knowledge that the 9/11 atrocity was being planned as talks to resolve the conflict in the Middle East were ongoing. Besides which, al Qaeda's broader revolutionary agenda includes a non-negotiable rejection of a Jewish State on Muslim land in any form. It defies plausibility that, had a conflict-ending agreement been signed at Camp David in July 2000, the mission would have been called off. Nonetheless, the idea persists that the conflict in Palestine is responsible, at least in part, for Islamist terror directed at diaspora Jews.

It remains to be seen whether or not Mehdi Nemmouche, the alleged Brussels assassin, decides to invoke the suffering of Palestine in his own defence. But during the siege following the shootings in Toulouse and Montauban in 2012, the assailant Muhamad Merah, also a self-described member of al Qaeda, let it be known that he had shot 3 Jewish children and a rabbi dead in order to avenge "Palestinian children".

The French Party of the Indigenous of the Republic [PIR] (about which I have written previously) responded by releasing a statement, which read in part:

We also feel anger and bitterness at the act of a young man claiming to support the cause of Palestinians and Afghanis. His act distorts the goals of these just causes, muddies the message and reinforces the side he claims to oppose . . . However, it would be wrong to believe that Mohamed Merah’s vengeful fantasies came out of nowhere. The terrible violence that he displayed this week was fed for years by the cold reason of the murderous wars being led by major powers in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere with the support of the Israeli state. How could we not predict that all this would lead one day to violent actions in which Jewish French people, constantly linked by French propaganda to Zionism, would be the target? . . . How could the possibility of the growing Islamophobia expressed ad nauseam, and becoming a major electoral refrain this year, moving some members of violent sects to action be ignored? Such a political-ideological context could not be ignored.

Mehdi Hasan would, I think, struggle to disagree with any part of this sophistical attempt to reclothe a murderer of Jewish children in the rags of political martyrdom. After all, the same two mitigating elements deployed by Hasan post-Brussels are present and correct here: injustice in Palestine and Islamophobia at home.

Unexamined "root cause" arguments for Islamic terror are highly expedient to Islamists who target civilians - they provide a comprehensible explanation for apparently arbitrary acts of savagery; they help disguise Islamism's supremacist agenda beneath a counter-narrative in which Islamists cast themselves as history's most abject victims; and they shift the focus - and ideally the blame - from the assassins themselves onto the policies to which they object.

And they are, of course, also highly convenient to mainstream commentators like Mehdi Hasan, and the broadsheet Left's perverse Noam Chomsky tendency, since they add ballast to their own anti-war arguments. But what makes "root causism" dangerous is that it encourages the idea that democracies are to blame for the political violence committed against their citizens, and that foreign and domestic policy must therefore be altered to meet terrorist demands. This is what's also known as appeasement.

Mehdi Hasan's defenders will object most strenuously (they always do) that he has spoken out about what he called the "dirty little secret" of Muslim anti-Semitism, and that he received considerable abuse from his co-religionists in general, and Islamists in particular, for his trouble.

Indeed he has, and indeed he did. And returning to his 2012 article on the subject today, it should be noted that some of the language he used to describe the problem remains striking and emphatic:

It is sheer hypocrisy for Muslims to complain of Islamophobia in every nook and cranny of British public life, to denounce the newspapers for running Muslim-baiting headlines, and yet ignore the rampant anti-Semitism in our own backyard.

Upon publication, Hasan's courage in addressing this taboo topic was applauded by many unaccustomed to agreeing with him (including me). However, what's odd about the piece on reflection is the absence of analysis. Having publicly identified the problem and listed a handful of anecdotal examples, Hasan neglects to explore it:

The truth is that the virus of anti-Semitism has infected members of the British Muslim community, both young and old. No, the ongoing Israel-Palestine conflict hasn’t helped matters. But this goes beyond the Middle East. How else to explain why British Pakistanis are so often the most ardent advocates of anti-Semitic conspiracies, even though there are so few Jews living in Pakistan?

It is interesting to note that in 2014 Hasan argues that European anti-Semitism is largely the product of "Arab anger at Israeli policies". But in his piece about Muslim anti-Semitism a year earlier he had argued that the Middle East was a subordinate factor - something that "hasn't helped" but which does not, by itself, explain the conspiratorial Jew hatred which he tells us is "rampant" in Muslim communities. He was closer to the truth the first time around. But as for "how else" to account for this poisonous phenomenon, no answer if forthcoming. Having opened his inquiry, Hasan abruptly abandons it when its conclusions threaten to become toxic.

One of the difficulties faced by Hasan and the 'anti-Imperialist' Left in combatting Islamist propagandising on terrorism and Israel is that their anti-Westernism and anti-Zionism predispose them to agree with most of it. And, having become comfortable endorsing Islamist narratives regarding foreign policy and the Middle East, they find themselves more at ease defending their new allies in the increasingly bitter disputes over multiculturalism, and what has become known as "non-violent extremism".

Hasan's lamentable response to the row between the Home Office and the Department of Education suggests it is enough to discredit the 'conveyor belt' theory of radicalisation in order to discredit the government's focus on non-violent extremism. Surely, it ought to go without saying that those who advocate the murder of apostates, gays, and Jews, the subjection of women and non-Muslims, and the restoration of medieval hudud punishments present a threat to the welfare of others, irrespective of whether or not they have foresworn terrorism as a means of achieving these regressive goals.

But when Islamist organisations seeking to impose their beliefs on secular space and discourse meet with resistance from liberals and secularists of all kinds, it is by the Islamists' side that Mehdi Hasan tends to stand in solidarity:

Social media has emboldened an army of online Islamophobes; in the real world, mosques have been firebombed and politicians line up to condemn Muslim terrorism/clothing/meat/ seating arrangements.

Hasan's juxtaposition of arson committed by criminals with the condemnation of Islamist terrorism by elected politicians is simply bizarre. Would he prefer it if Muslim terrorism were not condemned? Or would he just like to see it tempered by a bit more Western penitence and moral equivocation? And does he really believe that attempts to introduce gender apartheid and discriminatory dress codes into free societies are of no consequence or concern - matters to be euphemised as false quarrels over "clothing" and "seating arrangements"?

It seems to me that there's a struggle going on within Islam to which Hasan has been paying insufficient attention. It is one in which embattled reformers could use his solidarity and support. For such people, the spread of religious veiling and gender apartheid are neither benign nor desirable phenomena, but sinister developments to be resisted in the name of secularism, female autonomy and gender equality.

But those Muslims mobilising against Islamism tend not to benefit from Hasan's sympathy. Time after time, most recently during the row over the Jesus and Mo cartoon fiasco, when multicultural controversy erupts, he has reflexively lined up with the reactionary tendency, recycled their mitigating excuses, and rehearsed their diversionary arguments from victimhood.

Perhaps the most galling of these offered in his Huffington Post piece, and one characteristic of the bad faith that informs Hasan's writing on these matters, is his closing invocation of the massacre of over 8000 Muslims at Srebrenica in 1995. Hasan wonders aloud if his fears regarding the current climate of Islamophobia are the result of paranoia, before answering his own question as follows:

If only. Next year is the 20th anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre. Eight thousand Bosnian Muslim men and boys were lined up and shot in the heart of Europe. It was the worst genocide on the continent since the Second World War and was made possible by a far-right campaign of demonisation and dehumanisation. I wish I could believe the mantra of "never again". But these European election results fill me with dread. 

If the Srebrenica genocide typified the Muslim experience in Western Europe, then Hasan's fears would be irrefutable. But it doesn't. On the contrary, not only did NATO (eventually) intervene to halt Serbian-backed VRS atrocities, it deployed 60,000 troops to implement the Dayton Accords, provide humanitarian aid and begin reconstruction. Four years later NATO intervened in the Balkans again, this time to protect the Muslim population of Kosovo and, following the subsequent downfall of the Milosovic regime, it extradited Serbia's former leadership and brought it before the ICTY in the Hague to face charges of crimes against humanity.

And it did all this over the objections of people like Hasan, whose absolute opposition to the use of Western power requires him to watch the slaughter of even his co-religionists - whether in the Balkans or the Levant - with equanimity. As he remarked in an unpardonably sanctimonious article at the height of the Ukraine crisis:

It is “illegal and illegitimate” for Russia to try to detach Crimea from Ukraine by means of a dodgy referendum, Hague says. Indeed, it is. But was it any less illegal or illegitimate for the west to detach Kosovo from Serbia in 1999 with a 78-day Nato bombing campaign?

A very silly analogy indeed. But notice that once again the victimiser, in this case Serbian nationalism, is recast as victim in the service of anti-Western polemic. Hasan damns the West for its complicity in the mass-murder of over 8000 Muslims on European soil, and then damns it again for preventing a possible re-run of this atrocity in another part of the Balkans just four years later. (Needless to say, he also compares Putin's annexation of Crimea to Israel's occupation of the West Bank, another analogy that could do with further thought.)

Hasan's bitter denunciations of the country in which he lives and for which he affects to feel such pride ("My seven-year-old daughter is counting down the days until she can watch England play in the World Cup" he offers), betray a childish and self-pitying ingratitude.

Contemporary Britain, for all its faults and imperfections, has been good to Mehdi Hasan. It has offered him the opportunity of a world-class education (he's an Oxford graduate) and a successful career as an influential journalist, broadcaster and opinion-former, and it has affording him complete freedom of conscience as a Shia Muslim to believe, profess and worship, something he would not be afforded in many Muslim majority countries. Not only that, but in spite of his constant bleating about 'Islamophobia', polite society has been exceedingly forgiving of his own bigotry, freely expressed when he thought no-one who would mind was listening.

If it is true, as Saif Rahman reported on a recent blogpost, that Hasan has recently been on a trip to America financed by the Islamist front organisation CAIR, then it may be that the "joke" he reports telling his American wife about fleeing Europe's terrifying racism for the States is in fact a signal of his intention to do just that. I'm speculating, of course, but an intelligent and eloquent dissembler like Hasan would prove extremely valuable to CAIR. And I have no doubt they have highly agreeable things to say on the subjects of Israel, American foreign policy, and the desirability of using the term 'Islamophobia' as promiscuously as possible. Were CAIR to offer Hasan a position, and were he to accept, then my assumption at the top of this post that he is not an Islamist would start to look very unsafe indeed.

But there exists another possibility, although I'm dubious about how much faith or patience it deserves. This is that Mehdi Hasan starts to appreciate the scale of the danger posed by Islamism: a homophobic, misogynistic, anti-Semitic, chauvinistic, misanthropic, conspiratorial, millenarian, expansionist and totalitarian ideology, of which there is no known 'moderate' strain. What separates al Qaeda's Ayman al-Zawahiri from an ostensible democrat like Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, or an imam like Yusuf al Qaradawi from an apparently urbane academic like Tariq Ramadan, is not a matter of substance but one of mere strategy. The oppression of millions across the Muslim world already subject to Islamism's punishing rule and pitiless violence cannot simply be waved away with a reference to Palestine or Iraq.

It is not just Islamism that benefits from the excuse-making of people like Mehdi Hasan; when centrists and Leftists fail to confront the threat Islamists present, the xenophobic right and far-right are only too happy to step into the breach. The surge in support for nationalist parties in the European elections, eager to capitalise on fear of and hostility to Islamist designs, is extremely concerning. Reactionary and provincial nationalists are no kind of solution to anything. Armed with their own demagogic and self-pitying grievance agenda, they pose a threat, not just to Muslims, but to everyone.

The answer is not to appease Islamist grassroots activism and violence, or to seek refuge in tribal apologetics or to proceed on the suicidal assumption that the enemy of one's enemy is one's friend. It is to organise against, expose, and marginalise all intolerant, identitarian and totalitarian politics, irrespective of whether its provenance is Islamic or European.