Monday, December 05, 2005
FAIR PORTRAYAL OF MUSLIMS IN BRITISH MEDIA
Well I suppose it had to happen some day. David t at Harry’s Place has the story. Whilst it may be the remaining liberal do-gooder instinct in me that are the main course for my occasional concern over the vilification of Muslims, I think right-wing hawks should bear in mind that this matters a lot. Think about some of the arguments raised against the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Very prominent amongst them was the idea that these military actions were going to inflame Muslims to the extent that hordes of terrorists, including within our own country, were to be unleashed on the world. That is nonsence of course. But it’s an argument that has a lot of traction for the simple reason that the only British Muslim voices that are giving space in the msm are those of extremist nutters like Abu Hamza, or the often mealy mouthed apologists from self-declared community representations. The latter may say no to terrorism, but, well, there’s always a but. A but that often implies that the terrorists actions may be sort of wrong, but that their arguments were basically right; just a bit misguided the chaps. If this image of seething Muslim masses that are incapable of operating their own independent critical faculties to reach individual moral decisions, were true (which it isn’t), I can see that the best course of action in fighting terror would indeed be to lie low and hope you don’t get noticed.
But if you agree that the best way to fight terror is by confronting and facing down the enemy, with all means necessary, then it is obviously necessary to counter the myth of the mad and wild Muslim hordes. For if people believe in this myth they will be unwilling to shoulder the burdens of fighting a war that in their minds would unwinnable and best avoided. Of course by not acting against terror cells you actually let them grow as we saw with bin Laden’s gang in the 1990s.
So, by believing the racist mythology that there’s a jihadi lurking behind every Muslim neighbour, you actually increase the chances that it will be so.
Well I suppose it had to happen some day. David t at Harry’s Place has the story. Whilst it may be the remaining liberal do-gooder instinct in me that are the main course for my occasional concern over the vilification of Muslims, I think right-wing hawks should bear in mind that this matters a lot. Think about some of the arguments raised against the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Very prominent amongst them was the idea that these military actions were going to inflame Muslims to the extent that hordes of terrorists, including within our own country, were to be unleashed on the world. That is nonsence of course. But it’s an argument that has a lot of traction for the simple reason that the only British Muslim voices that are giving space in the msm are those of extremist nutters like Abu Hamza, or the often mealy mouthed apologists from self-declared community representations. The latter may say no to terrorism, but, well, there’s always a but. A but that often implies that the terrorists actions may be sort of wrong, but that their arguments were basically right; just a bit misguided the chaps. If this image of seething Muslim masses that are incapable of operating their own independent critical faculties to reach individual moral decisions, were true (which it isn’t), I can see that the best course of action in fighting terror would indeed be to lie low and hope you don’t get noticed.
But if you agree that the best way to fight terror is by confronting and facing down the enemy, with all means necessary, then it is obviously necessary to counter the myth of the mad and wild Muslim hordes. For if people believe in this myth they will be unwilling to shoulder the burdens of fighting a war that in their minds would unwinnable and best avoided. Of course by not acting against terror cells you actually let them grow as we saw with bin Laden’s gang in the 1990s.
So, by believing the racist mythology that there’s a jihadi lurking behind every Muslim neighbour, you actually increase the chances that it will be so.
Labels: Islam, media, nation, religion, terrorism
Monday, July 11, 2005
WHY WE WERE ATTACKED
So, why would such a grouping decide to carry out attacks in Britain? In summary:
Islamic fundamentalism vs. Islam and the West: there is a civil war within Islam between an extremist minority and the mainstream; a lot of this is about Islam’s relationship to the West; striking at the West is an important function for the extremists to show they mean business, to drive a wedge between Islam and the West and to claim they are the winning side, while feeding the terrorists’ fantasy of a global jihad; as Britain is a Western country, Britain was always a potential target
Ambiguity: terrorists like to exploit ambiguities in a country’s political will, and Britain’s deep divisions over fighting terror and the Iraq war made Britain an attractive target.
Iraq:British forces are preventing an Islamic fundamentalist dictatorship coming into place
Afghanistan: British forces removed and are preventing the resurgence of an Islamic fundamentalist dictatorship
lack of secondary deterrence: Sorry to say something like this when obviously so many people in Madrid feel sympathetic to us Londoners, but the decision of the Zapatero government to withdraw Spanish troops form Iraq overhastily, certainly gave the jihadists a victory and encouraged them that their methods were successful.
G8: as for the timing, publicity basically, all the world’s tv cameras were centred on the UK anyway
Whatever the precise combination of factors, it was unjustifiable.
Full stop.
So, why would such a grouping decide to carry out attacks in Britain? In summary:
Islamic fundamentalism vs. Islam and the West: there is a civil war within Islam between an extremist minority and the mainstream; a lot of this is about Islam’s relationship to the West; striking at the West is an important function for the extremists to show they mean business, to drive a wedge between Islam and the West and to claim they are the winning side, while feeding the terrorists’ fantasy of a global jihad; as Britain is a Western country, Britain was always a potential target
Ambiguity: terrorists like to exploit ambiguities in a country’s political will, and Britain’s deep divisions over fighting terror and the Iraq war made Britain an attractive target.
Iraq:British forces are preventing an Islamic fundamentalist dictatorship coming into place
Afghanistan: British forces removed and are preventing the resurgence of an Islamic fundamentalist dictatorship
lack of secondary deterrence: Sorry to say something like this when obviously so many people in Madrid feel sympathetic to us Londoners, but the decision of the Zapatero government to withdraw Spanish troops form Iraq overhastily, certainly gave the jihadists a victory and encouraged them that their methods were successful.
G8: as for the timing, publicity basically, all the world’s tv cameras were centred on the UK anyway
Whatever the precise combination of factors, it was unjustifiable.
Full stop.
Labels: Iraq, Islam, terrorism
Monday, January 17, 2005
YES, TELEVISION IS RUBBISH
Well, so I went away for a couple of days and “forgot” to take enough work with me, so I had plentiful time to watch the box. It was a fairly sobering experience I can tell you. Here are two samples of what caught my ire:
-Newsnight Review: One of the topic’s was an exhibition of pre-Ottoman Turkish culture. For sure it looked interesting and beautiful and all, but that’s not really the point though. They all just sat around fawning at how great and fanstastic and everything it all was and saying how the “American neocon Christian right” and assorted other baddies should look at this and be ashamed and change course (presumeably because Ossama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein present the continuation of the greatest traditions of Islamic-Turkish civilization; or what?). Anyways, the point I’d have to make about this is that there was a consensus on the whole issue by all the pannelists. I mean what is the point of having a “debate” in which everyone agrees on everything? Ok, so in the age of political correctness I didn’t really expect anyone to say “Yes, the Turks incorporated all the best of the Christian cultures they found in the lands they had newly conquered and then they expelled and exterminated those Christians”; or perhaps more mildly “This show is purely being put on for political reasons to boost Turkey’s drive to enter the European Union by getting it some positive cultural press”.
In sum a pointless programme really.
-Ultimate Force: What on earth was this? Now look, I like a good Army action flick as much as the next guy, but somehow it just got everything wrong: the acting, the politics, the fighting. Actually coming to think of it, that’s a little unfair. All of these aspects were right, but just not quite wholesome yet. It’s like somebody handed in the script and said, “oh, something roughly like this, but I need mor time to finish it”, and the producers said, “Nah, it’ll be fine. Nobody cares to have a good quality British army action series”. Well I would. Disappointing, though like all the above programmes I’ll probably be mindless enough to watch it again at the next opportunity (that being next week).
Well that’s enough moaning for now.
On the plus side . . .
I finally got round to watching the videotaped first part of the BBC2 series on Auschwitz, which I can can so far only recommend; well put together and the dramatisations are sensible instead of their normal habit of distracting from the issue and looking silly at the same time. I’m looking forward to seeing how the series will go from here.
Well, so I went away for a couple of days and “forgot” to take enough work with me, so I had plentiful time to watch the box. It was a fairly sobering experience I can tell you. Here are two samples of what caught my ire:
-Newsnight Review: One of the topic’s was an exhibition of pre-Ottoman Turkish culture. For sure it looked interesting and beautiful and all, but that’s not really the point though. They all just sat around fawning at how great and fanstastic and everything it all was and saying how the “American neocon Christian right” and assorted other baddies should look at this and be ashamed and change course (presumeably because Ossama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein present the continuation of the greatest traditions of Islamic-Turkish civilization; or what?). Anyways, the point I’d have to make about this is that there was a consensus on the whole issue by all the pannelists. I mean what is the point of having a “debate” in which everyone agrees on everything? Ok, so in the age of political correctness I didn’t really expect anyone to say “Yes, the Turks incorporated all the best of the Christian cultures they found in the lands they had newly conquered and then they expelled and exterminated those Christians”; or perhaps more mildly “This show is purely being put on for political reasons to boost Turkey’s drive to enter the European Union by getting it some positive cultural press”.
In sum a pointless programme really.
-Ultimate Force: What on earth was this? Now look, I like a good Army action flick as much as the next guy, but somehow it just got everything wrong: the acting, the politics, the fighting. Actually coming to think of it, that’s a little unfair. All of these aspects were right, but just not quite wholesome yet. It’s like somebody handed in the script and said, “oh, something roughly like this, but I need mor time to finish it”, and the producers said, “Nah, it’ll be fine. Nobody cares to have a good quality British army action series”. Well I would. Disappointing, though like all the above programmes I’ll probably be mindless enough to watch it again at the next opportunity (that being next week).
Well that’s enough moaning for now.
On the plus side . . .
I finally got round to watching the videotaped first part of the BBC2 series on Auschwitz, which I can can so far only recommend; well put together and the dramatisations are sensible instead of their normal habit of distracting from the issue and looking silly at the same time. I’m looking forward to seeing how the series will go from here.
Labels: history, Islam, media, terrorism, Turkey
Sunday, January 09, 2005
GOOD LUCK PALESTINE
Today the Palestinians are holding leadership elections. Hopefully this will give them a chance to put the negative legacy of the Arafat years behind them.
I want to focus on only one aspect that is very important for an Israeli-Palestinian peace: anti-Israel rejectionism. While it’s understandable under the conditions that many Palestinians harbour animus against Israel, there is no reason why these resentments should be supported and strengthened by politicians, both Palestinian and foreign. This is deeply destructive and makes the route to peace unnecessarily harder than it would be already.
Above all -and this counts mainly for many Western observers- it rests on a non-sense, namely that all would be well in the region if it weren’t for Israel. In the current edition of Foreign Policy this notion is debunked by Josef Joffe:
Today the Palestinians are holding leadership elections. Hopefully this will give them a chance to put the negative legacy of the Arafat years behind them.
I want to focus on only one aspect that is very important for an Israeli-Palestinian peace: anti-Israel rejectionism. While it’s understandable under the conditions that many Palestinians harbour animus against Israel, there is no reason why these resentments should be supported and strengthened by politicians, both Palestinian and foreign. This is deeply destructive and makes the route to peace unnecessarily harder than it would be already.
Above all -and this counts mainly for many Western observers- it rests on a non-sense, namely that all would be well in the region if it weren’t for Israel. In the current edition of Foreign Policy this notion is debunked by Josef Joffe:
It won’t do to lay the democracy and development deficits of the Arab world on the doorstep of the Jewish state. Israel is a pretext, not a cause, and therefore its dispatch will not heal the self-inflicted wounds of the Arab-Islamic world. Nor will the mild version of “statocide,” a binational state, do the trick—not in view of the “civilization of clashes” (to borrow a term from British historian Niall Ferguson) that is the hallmark of Arab political culture. The mortal struggle between Israelis and Palestinians would simply shift from the outside to the inside.
Accepting this is one first step the Palestinians will have to take in building a new politics, a politics that will make co-existence with Israel easier or in fact possible at all.
Of course this is a message that all outsiders must also keep at the forefront of thinking about the problems, in order to have realistic expectations about what can be achieved in a wider geopolitical context by an Israeli-Palestinian peace. (Sadly probably not all too much, as Amir Taheri noted quite recently.)
My hope is however that this will at least give the Palestinians a step forward, they certainly need some peace and have suffered enough in the past years and that will be good in itself.
PS: If your German’s up to scratch there’s an article in the Zeit, the German weekly Joffe edits, on the upcoming Palestinian elections that makes for fairly upbeat reading. I hope the author’s right that this could bring about a turning about for the Palestinians.
Of course this is a message that all outsiders must also keep at the forefront of thinking about the problems, in order to have realistic expectations about what can be achieved in a wider geopolitical context by an Israeli-Palestinian peace. (Sadly probably not all too much, as Amir Taheri noted quite recently.)
My hope is however that this will at least give the Palestinians a step forward, they certainly need some peace and have suffered enough in the past years and that will be good in itself.
PS: If your German’s up to scratch there’s an article in the Zeit, the German weekly Joffe edits, on the upcoming Palestinian elections that makes for fairly upbeat reading. I hope the author’s right that this could bring about a turning about for the Palestinians.
PPS: Just reread above post. Apologies for the muddledness of it, I'm not entirely sure what I was trying to say myself anymore.
Labels: Islam, Israel, terrorism
Thursday, August 19, 2004
WAR BLOGS AND ISLAMOPHOBIA
Thanks to the national anthem for the link and the link to this post on Islamophobia in pro-war blogland. I'd just recommend reading the whole thing because it's hard to excerpt it. But I think this is something worth having a closer look at:
Thanks to the national anthem for the link and the link to this post on Islamophobia in pro-war blogland. I'd just recommend reading the whole thing because it's hard to excerpt it. But I think this is something worth having a closer look at:
I've long, as a Jew, found a highly useful test for distinguishing legitimate commentary from hate; I take the noun of the statement in question, switch it to "Jew," or the adjective to "Jewish," and see how I think it stands up.
One can also switch out, say, one religious figure for another who did things, in a different religious tradition, we now would call horrible and despicable. Enjoy the game! "If the bastard wasn't a Jew they would have said so." "I'd just be satisfied with covering those Jews with pork chops and putting them in a pit full of rottweillers."
Feel free to use "Christian, " or "atheist," or "Hindu," or whatever works best for yourself.
The good thing about this method is that we in the West are more used to recognizing and condemning anti-Semitism for sad historical reasons. Anti-Islamic and Anti-Muslim prejudice is however something we haven' t quite got a grip on yet, I feel.
However I would alter this recommendation slightly. When discussing Islam the religion, don't replace it with Judaism. Judaism is a religion closely linked with Jewish ethnicity and thus is not easily comparable with a universal religion like Islam. For me personally, I find it more effective to replace Islam with Christianity, and then imagine that Christianity is a minority religion. On the other hand the Jewish comparison works quite well when you look at bigoted remarks about Muslims as people. Try out some of the examples Gary Farber quotes and I think you'll see what I mean.
Just to be entirely clear, there is nothing wrong with criticising Islam the religion. It is not something for me as I prefer to sweep in front of my own door, but there is no reason to be opposed completely. As for hating Islam, that is slightly different and depends strongly on the context. If, like with Polly Toynbee, that hatred is combined with an equal hatred of all religion I would simply think it's a wrong way to look at religion per se which plays an important role in human existence and can't just be wished away. But if the only religion being subjected to hatred were Islam I would certainly feel that somebody is fishing around in murkier waters.
However I would alter this recommendation slightly. When discussing Islam the religion, don't replace it with Judaism. Judaism is a religion closely linked with Jewish ethnicity and thus is not easily comparable with a universal religion like Islam. For me personally, I find it more effective to replace Islam with Christianity, and then imagine that Christianity is a minority religion. On the other hand the Jewish comparison works quite well when you look at bigoted remarks about Muslims as people. Try out some of the examples Gary Farber quotes and I think you'll see what I mean.
Just to be entirely clear, there is nothing wrong with criticising Islam the religion. It is not something for me as I prefer to sweep in front of my own door, but there is no reason to be opposed completely. As for hating Islam, that is slightly different and depends strongly on the context. If, like with Polly Toynbee, that hatred is combined with an equal hatred of all religion I would simply think it's a wrong way to look at religion per se which plays an important role in human existence and can't just be wished away. But if the only religion being subjected to hatred were Islam I would certainly feel that somebody is fishing around in murkier waters.
And this is where it comes to the question of being bigoted towards Muslims, as opposed to be being bigoted towards Islam. I know, many will think I'm trying to split hair atoms here, but I think there is a difference and that that difference is quite significant too. Hating Islam is at its worst just irritating and I wouldn't use the term Islamophobia to describe such an attitude that I would go talking of Christophobia, Hinduphobia etc. Islamophobia is a term I would use to describe a hatred of people who are Muslim. This hatred is then accompanied by a whole plethora of conspiracy theories and fear mongering. It breeds an image of Muslim people as incorrigibly evil and tries to eliminate their human individuality. If you find something and you're confused whether you think it fits this bill, just replace Muslim with Jew/Jewish and then see what effect it has and try to compare it to the kind of things the Nazis said about Jews. That is what I would understand as Islamophobic. And that is a dangerous bigotry that we must recognize and condemn as the evil it is.
Update: Had to make a highly embarrasing correction (see comments below).
Labels: Islam, nation, terrorism
Friday, August 13, 2004
An Anglican bishop wants to ban the hymn I Vow To Thee My Country - because it echoes Hitler's Germany and is "heretical".
For some reason my irritation hasn't subsided yet. I vow to Thee my Country is one of my favourite hymns, both musically and lyrically, so I suppose I can't really give it a rest. Laban Tall and "Tom Paine" have dealt with some of the key stupidities and so I urge you to give their posts a look too.
But the thing that I want to moan about now is the man's choice. His choice to become a part of the Church, when he quite obviously deeply disapproves of some key elements of it. Why did he join the Church in the first place? I mean, come on, it's even called the Church of England. It is the official Church of the British State and its head is also the embodiment of the State. To suddenly discover, after several decades of serving your way upwards to the position of bishop, that this institution had patriotic elements in it is rather unconvincing now, isn't it. He knew what he committing himself to. If that is not the kind of Christianity he wanted, he was and is entirely free to change his denomination or set up his own church. But there is no reason why he should now be allowed to start changing the C of E just like that. As I've pointed out over at Silent Running, the problem is the gulf between the leaders and the people of the C of E.
No doubt the number of people turning their backs on the C of E in alienation will only be increased by such behaviour of the Church's leadership. But I'm am not one of those who is for turning my back, at Silent Running, Gray Monk, articulates why I don't abandon the Church:
To those who want to see the C of E recover its sanity I say this - please join the congregations, please challenge the vicars, but do so from within the fold. Outside it you are not heard by those hiding inside. Inside you can do some good.
Just so.
Not all the commentary at Silent Running on the issue is quite such worthwhile, however. Opines an Andrew Ian Dodge:
Not all the commentary at Silent Running on the issue is quite such worthwhile, however. Opines an Andrew Ian Dodge:
The CoE has surrendered to Islam. They are more concerned about not upsetting Islamists than they are taking care of their own flock.
What?! The C of E's self-destruction has nothing to do with Islam. To insinuate otherwise looks more like an attempt to sneak some mindless Islamophobia through the back door and that is the last thing we need. This Dodge's comment is in fact a syndrome of something else. In a way, as I've argued before, the decline of sensible religion and confidence in our nation is one of the main causes for Islamophobia. While Bishop Lowe's leftist shenanigans can only further add to this, anti-Islamic prejudice would make any alternative to the currently dominant views in the C of E unpalatable.
A wholly disappointing and alienating affair.
A wholly disappointing and alienating affair.
Labels: Church, Islam, nation, religion
