The ego of Peter Tatchell

My most persisting memory of Peter Tatchell is from a counter-demonstration against the EDL, who at the height of their strength were trying to march past the East London Mosque. Tatchell's helpful contribution to this was to turn up with a placard denouncing 'far right Islamists'. I thought he was a twat.

Now, 'Islamist' is a worse than useless political description, but I no doubt agree with Tatchell that the people who I presume are his targets - fundamentalist, patriarchal, homophobes - need to be stopped. Politics, however, isn't simply about having the right ideas and saying the right thing. It's about doing this in a concrete political situations with due attention to context. In other words, it's about doing this as recognising that your fellow participants are human beings rather than robots. The importance of this is easy to forget if you are, say, a white man with ready access to the media.

If you're a member of a besieged community under immediate attack from fascists, on the other hand, you might wonder why on earth Tatchell felt the need to do something that might look like qualifying or nuancing his support for you. Perhaps you yourself have some ideas, on homosexuality say, that would fall within the remit of Tatchell's condemnation - plenty of people do (or all faiths and none). Or perhaps you have some sympathy for Islamist politics; given the slipperiness of the term it's easy enough. What might move you more towards Tatchell's type of politics would be a display of unconditional solidarity against the immediate threat, leading to conversations based on the relationship of trust this kind of solidarity can create. The intervention picture above would, if anything, push you in the other direction.

Fast forward to today. Jeremy Corbyn was giving a speech on violence against women. And then this happened:

Now, I think the left needs to be able to criticise Corbyn, and I think the cult of personality that some have for him actually undermines his leadership. I also think Corbyn has been naive on Syria - calling for 'diplomatic' responses, for instance (as though either Assad or Daesh would engage in meaningful diplomacy), and being insufficiently strong in his condemnation of Russian attacks in the region. This is the legacy of the dual influence of pacifism and Stalinism on the Labour left, and needs addressing. But once again, it's not simply a question of what one says, there remains the matters of how and where one one says it.

Questions might reasonably be asked about attacking Corbyn at such a vulnerable time, with his leadership under renewed attack in the wake of the Sleaford by-election result. Admittedly Green supporter Tatchell might not care too much about this: one way the heckling could have been reported is 'Politician heckled by member of rival party'. But above all else, whatever you have to say, is heckling a speech against violence against women the way to do it?

One thing the Corbyn leadership has undoubtedly been good at is giving prominence to issues that are forgotten by mainstream politics. Mental health is one example. Women's liberation is another. I don't know what he was saying about violence against women, since it hasn't been reported, nor whether I agree with it (or whether, for instance, his approach was carceral). But at least he was talking about the issue. Here was a politician for once talking about an issue that affects millions of lives worldwide. And it is being ignored because of Peter Tatchell.

A working hypothesis: what Peter Tatchell cares about is getting Peter Tatchell in the newspapers. And being a contrarian is a good way to do that. Hey, I'm even writing a blog about him.

Ten years ago

Ten years ago today I was at home. A plumber was doing some work on the boiler. As the horrible events of the morning unfolded I, like other Londoners, became aware of them gradually. Partial, confused information, began coming in. The plumber couldn't contact his wife, who was in central London; the mobile networks were down. The radio started reporting that something had happened: perhaps it was an electrical fire. The subsequent blasts made it clear that this wasn't the case. News of casualties came, then images - we were by this time glued to the television, fixated on pictures that had an uncanny quality. Here was the city we knew, loved, and worked in; so familiar, yet so utterly different.

The feeling was one of utter confusion; nobody knew what would happen next. The media reflected this : armed police had drawn their weapons outside the Downing Street gates, what was going on? Rumours and misinformation spread - someone had been shot at Canary Wharf, my neighbours falsely claimed. Finally, as thousands of commuters struggled to get home across a city whose public transport was shut down, the grim realisation of the extent of what had happened began to settle in. The skies were eerily quiet, all planes had been diverted; millions of Londoners were similarly stunned into silence. This was an attack that was felt.

That was the thing about 7th July 2005. Its initial impact was to unify. Against those sections of the left who cannot see an outbreak of the collective with any popular purchase without sniffing reaction in the wings, this was something to celebrate, the human determination breaking through an otherwise relentless darkness. The shared grief, the shared efforts of emergency and tube workers (will we remember the latter when they are demonised for striking tomorrow?), the collective  resolve of those struggling to walk home in their office shoes. It was a spirit captured by Ken Livingstone's response, surely his finest moment. Our response, he said, must be unified. This was an assault on working class people, of all faiths. We must not allow ourselves to be divided. In terms that stand as a marker of the extent to which attitudes to migration hardened in the subsequent decade, he ended:

In the days that follow look at our airports, look at our sea ports and look at our railway stations and, even after your cowardly attack, you will see that people from the rest of Britain, people from around the world will arrive in London to become Londoners and to fulfil their dreams and achieve their potential.

 They choose to come to London, as so many have come before because they come to be free, they come to live the life they choose, they come to be able to be themselves. They flee you because you tell them how they should live. They don't want that and nothing you do, however many of us you kill, will stop that flight to our city where freedom is strong and where people can live in harmony with one another. Whatever you do, however many you kill, you will fail.

What followed, on the part of central government and security agencies, was the systematic negation of the attitude proposed by Livingstone. One person fitting Livingstone's description of someone coming to London to live their life was Jean Charles de Menezes,  who should be counted the 53rd victim of 7/7 - murdered by police in a moment of paranoid frenzy. The New Labour government rolled out successive pieces of anti-terror legislation at a dizzying pace - only being prevented by a parliamentary vote from implementing 90 days detention without trial. MI5 recruited as never before; its staff has doubled since 2005. London's Muslim communities were criminalised and surveilled.

London became a city increasingly dominated, and policed, by fear. We have become used to armed police, as we before became used to the street homeless. The years since 2005 have seen the city change in other ways. Gentrification has accelerated: the multicultural diversity and the capacity of ordinary people to live and work in this city which were both integral to the city's initial resolution in 2005 have suffered at the hands of the housing market. We are, these days, a superficially hip city whose well-groomed exterior hides a fear all too willing to lash out if provoked. We have lost so much, and those who have lost most are given least opportunity to tell their stories.

The Irish referendum and 'undue spiritual influence'

In April a judge ruled that 'undue spiritual influence' was exerted by imams in Tower Hamlets in supporting then mayor Lutfur Rahman. The legislation in which this concept appears has its origins in British rule in Ireland and concern about the influence of Catholic clergy. In the latter case racism was absolutely central to the rationale of the law. Many of us feel that it was not absent in Tower Hamlets.

In the years subsequent to independence there has certainly been no shortage of attempts by clergy in southern Ireland to exert influence politically. Past referenda over divorce and abortion have in the past been occasions for church-led campaigns opposing change.

The run-up to last Friday's referendum on same-sex marriage was subtly different. The institutional role of the Church in Ireland having taken a battering over the abuse scandal, the leading role in the 'No' campaign fell to groups of conservative lay Catholics. The extent of the change here has been exaggerated (as here, for example). In a very helpful article on the Irish Church, Jon Anderson notes the high level of lay leadership of 1980s campaigns over divorce and abortion. Either way, it was hardly unclear what the hierarchy thought about same-sex marriage. Each diocesan bishop wrote a pastoral letter, read out in churches, urging a No vote. Some priests added their own thoughts; in at least one case this led to congregants walking out of Mass.

Voters in large numbers ignored the pleas from the pulpit. 62% of those voting voted 'Yes'. In some urban areas this percentage was in the seventies and eighties, with only one consituency voting against. It's fair to say, then, that the bishops did not have decisive influence. An easy inference, and one made by pretty much every British broadsheet commentator (and not a few Irish ones), is that this is evidence of an accelerating process of secularisation.

How much one ought to believe this turns a lot on what is meant by 'secularisation'.  Certainly the institutional power of the Catholic Church in the southern state is much declined. No longer can fearful unionists in the north (where, incidentally, same-sex marriage remains illegal) claim with any plausibility that the Republic is a confessional state. Yet the rejection of a certain political role for the Church co-exists with a substantial ongoing commitment to Catholicism on the part of much of the population. 84.16% of the population declared themselves Catholic in the 2011 census; the figure being well over 50% even in many urban areas. In 2013 Mass attendance was 34%. The use of the word 'secular' to describe this population should proceed with caution.

It is undoubtedly true that modern capitalist societies place great pressure on traditional understandings of religious belonging and ecclesiastical authority. (For some thoughts on why this might be, see a forthcoming book!) Attendance figures at religious services decline, and the ethical views of religious believers, particularly on sexual ethics, move closer to those of their atheist and agnostic contemporaries. For confirmation from the UK of this, see Linda Woodhead's useful research. Yet all of this is compatible with an ongoing attachment to a religious tradition, as the Irish case shows.

Many Irish Catholics voted 'yes', and it would be utterly wrong to write them off as duplicitous, confused, or insufficiently modernised, clinging to their religious belonging whilst rejecting it in practice - a judgement shared, interestingly, by liberal commentators and religious conservatives alike. Some voters cited their Catholicism whilst advocating a 'yes' vote, attracting the ire of conservative groups. For a genuinely moving case, look at this video by an elderly Catholic couple.

Tokenistic religious belonging is one possible way of negotiating religious identity in modern society, but it is not the only one. People are capable of relating their faith to the experience of life in modern society in sophisticated ways, exercising levels of political autonomy and modifying their ideas, even whilst remaining firmly within traditions. Last week's result demonstrates this.

And, to return to where we began, if this is true of Irish Catholics, might it be true of London Muslims also? The Bengali Muslim community are certainly not, in the succinct patrician phrase of Richard Mawrey QC, an "agnostic metropolitan elite". But then neither are the population of the Republic of Ireland.

Total Eclipse of the Arse

So there was a total eclipse this morning. I wonder, I found myself thinking, what Richard Dawkins thinks about this. As luck would have it, he took to Twitter to tell us:

Solar eclipse visible in Medina, Jan 632. If only the true nature of eclipses had been Koranically 'revealed', that would be impressive!
— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) March 20, 2015

My immediate thought was that this exhibits the philistinism of the man. Well, my first thought was in fact, "you utter wanker". But the philistinism one was definitely near the top of the list. The point is that the mirror-image fundamentalism with which Dawkins approaches religious texts betrays an incomprehension that people might use language to do anything other than communicate facts, or at least purported facts, about the physical world. There's nothing peculiarly religious to this line of criticism. For much the same reason you wouldn't want to read a critical essay on Middlemarch by Dawkins, and wouldn't bother to turn up to a rap-battle at which he was a contestant. In fact, when you think about the range of human endeavours that must for him be as baffling as the Quaranic text, the title of his autobiography An Appetite for Wonder seems about as apt as that of Mel C's little known memoir An Appetite for Twelve-Tone Serialism.

The purpose of this blog is to talk about left-wing politics, rather than to slag off Richard Dawkins, laudible though that activity always is. There is, I think, a political question along the lines of: what is it about our contemporary society that produces public intellectuals like Dawkins and how do we get rid of it as quickly as possible? But the real action is elsewhere.

Because what's really wrong with Dawkins' tweet is the Islamophobia. Because be in no doubt that is what's going on here. The irrational other, Islam, bays for blood at the gates of Western civilisation, whose only hope is that the beast be tamed by Reason, as dispensed by the likes of Dawkins. So far, so much a standard orientalist trope (I am so tempted to use the word 'meme' here, but I'd feel dirty). But this irrational dark-skinned other is a particularly dangerous one. For Islam, by Dawkins own admission, is a uniquely dangerous inhabitant of the religious zoo. So much so, that he has even flirted with the idea of supporting Christian missionaries in Africa to stem the tide of Islamicisation he, like his sound-alikes at the EDL, sees everywhere. He presumably thinks Islam is the most evil religion in the world, since he declared Catholic Christianity to be only the second most evil a few years back. I myself am devastated by this under-par performance by the home team, and am certainly hoping we can get our hands on Anjem Choudary before this season's transfer window closes. 

Islam, this non-too-subtle line of thought goes, equals irrationality, equals violence. For the slow learners amongst us, Dawkins spelled it out post-9/11:

It [9/11] came from religion. Religion is also, of course, the underlying source of the divisiveness in the Middle East which motivated the use of this deadly weapon in the first place. But that is another story and not my concern here. My concern here is with the weapon itself. To fill a world with religion, or religions of the Abrahamic kind, is like littering the streets with loaded guns. Do not be surprised if they are used.

All of which conveniently lets imperialism, capitalism, and good old-fashioned racism off the hook. In any case the piece is disingenuous: by "religion of the Abrahamic kind", he means first and foremost Islam, as he makes perfectly clear elsewhere, and as his fellow New Atheist Sam Harris emphasises like a racist on speed. The political cash value of this is twofold. First, a bevy of impressionable followers are left with an utterly inadequate understanding of the contours of power in the world. Marx's plea to turn the criticism of heaven into the criticism of earth certainly wouldn't be out of place here. Second, Dawkins, Harris, et. al. (whatever their intentions) provide a secular variant of the clash of civilisations narrative that, in its Pentagon version, is normally littered with evangelical Christian theology. They supply a legitimatory weapon to the occidental warriors in far off lands. It's almost as though, well, they were littering the streets with loaded guns.

Two really unhelpful political terms

...are:

1. Islamism. This is supposed to refer to the view that Islamic faith should impact on one's political views. Guess what? A lot of Muslims think that - and quite frankly, good for them: the idea that one should (or even can) separate one's politics from one's substantial ethical commitments being a liberal prejudice we'd all be better off without. Amongst the Muslims signed up to this view are socialists and feminists, think Salma Yaqoob, any number of tedious and unremarkable parliamentarians the world over, oh, and ISIS. I wonder who out of that list you think of when you hear the word 'Islamist'. Oh, and 'Islamist' sounds quite a lot like 'Islam'. You see where this is going? Compare the hardly-ever-used term 'political Christianity'. This would encompass Tony Benn, Tony Blair, Ian Paisley, the Ku-Klux Klan, German Christian Democrats, Chinese underground Catholics, some of the Palestinian resistance, a good proportion of Tea Party members, liberationist fighters in Latin America.... Do you find it a particularly helpful political category? Well, then.
2. Extremism. This is the current term for Bad Things on the part of UK (and wider) state agencies and media. Thus ISIS are, when they are not being Islamists, extremists. Sometimes they are Islamist extremists; more worryingly they are often Islamic extremists, of which more post haste. The thought presumably is that were ISIS moderate theocratic murderers, that would be all well and good. Why must people always take things too far? Related to the extremism trope is the perennial creed of the English bourgeoisie, that the truth always lies midway between two extremes. Faced with two proposed answers to the question "What is twice eleven?", twenty two and three thousand, a certain type of calculating pragmatist would split the difference somewhere in the mid thousands. Anyway, extremism, to the extent that the word means anything at all, is surely a good idea. We should react in an extreme way to a world in which millions starve needlessly. Also notice the danger of modifying "Islam" with "extreme" to describe ISIS - as one recently blocked Facebook 'friend' put it, "If Islam really is a religion of peace, why aren't their extremists really peaceful?". The KKK are never "extreme Christians". Once "extremists" have been established as people who blow up shopping centres and behead soldiers on the street, however, animal rights protestors, peaceniks and other similar enemies of civilisation become "domestic extremists".

Anyway, thanks for letting me get that rant off my chest. I've been on holiday.

"God said to Abraham, kill me a son"

The Guardian is running this advert tomorrow:

The 'human shield' slander against Palestine has been dispatched elsewhere. The echoes of the historic anti-Semitic blood libel in the 'child sacrifice' claim have been noted. Let me, then, draw your attention to some lines from the advert:

More than three thousand years ago, Abraham had two children. One son had been sent into the wilderness and was in danger of dying. God saved him with water from a spring.

The other son was bound, his throat about to be cut by his own father. But God stayed the knife.

Both sons – Ishmael and Isaac – received promises that they would father great nations.

With these narratives, monotheism and western civilization begin. And the Canaanite practices of child sacrifice to Moloch are forever left behind by the descendants of Abraham.

Except they are not.

You may be unfamiliar with the Abraham story. Here's an interesting thing - on the Jewish and Christian version of the story, the one you'd find in the book of Genesis, the son who is not nearly sacrificed is Ishmael. So, if you like, the rejection of child sacrifice begins with the other son - Isaac, who is the father of Jacob (also known as Israel), and a foundational figure in the history of Judaism. Ishmael becomes associated with ethnic arabs and is an important figure in Islam (for whose characteristic traditions  Ishmael, rather than Isaac, is the son who escapes the knife).

Let me spell out the message here. One son - because these sons really stand for entire ethno-religious groups - has stopped killing its children. Over to you, the other son.

Or to put it more briefly: those Muslims, they kill their children.

This, apparently, is the kind of stuff that liberals think they should use their newspapers to disseminate.

Iraqi Christians

As if the past few days didn't contain their fair share of human misery, the accounts coming out of Iraq about the treatment of Christians at the hands of ISIS are harrowing in the extreme. I urge you to read Tim Stanley's account here, lightly inflected though it may be with problematic politics.

One paragraph mid-way through the piece merits attention here:

Yet, having been so intimately involved in the collapse of Iraq, the West is now bizarrely silent about events in Mosul. The streets of London fill with thousands marching against Israel’s military operation in Gaza; the West rails mightily against the Russian separatists in Ukraine. But of Iraq there is nothing. Why?

Unlike Stanley I don't think there is any such thing as 'the West' which has raged against Israel and the Moscow-aligned separatists. On the contrary, the rulers of some Western countries have focused on the latter, some (but not all by any distance) of the ruled on the former. Nevertheless, there is a fair question to be asked of the Left. What have we to say about the persecution of Christians by groups like ISIS? More pointedly, the question could be rephrased: why the silence?

Now, I think the silence has been well-motivated. Any case of Christians suffering at the hands of Muslims is, in the current climate, ripe for appropriation by the Islamophobic Right in the cause of a warmed-over clash-of-civilisations narrative. This whole area is made difficult by the fact that plenty of concern for persecuted Christians, and not a few agencies devoted to their relief, are tainted with this politics. The Barnabas Fund is an example of one British group this blogger would not touch with a bargepole.

It is tempting to think, therefore, that political discourse in this area is polluted beyond the possibility of emancipatory use. This is a temptation, however, and one to which we shouldn't succumb - it is an admission of intellectual defeat, and much more importantly a cowardly abandonment of innocent victims. Another reason for silence is more sophisticated: we make noise about Gaza because, as citizens of imperialist States closely aligned to Israel, our own ruling class is directly complicit in the attrocities there in a way they are not in ISIS. This strategy is compatible with the recognition of an indirect complicity in the actions of ISIS, which were - after all - a foreseeable probable outcome of the war in Iraq.

On this second point: the differing political relations between Western ruling classes and Israel, on the one hand, and ISIS on the other, constitute good reasons to treat the two cases differently. They are no reason to ignore the plight of Iraqi Christians altogether. There are things we can say about their situation. We can, for example, make the connection between ISIS and the Iraq war explicit (there are more intriguing questions to be asked about Western support for ISIS' antecedents as well). We can actually condemn ISIS - it is amazing how this is a somewhat controversial position in some radical quarters. If there are ways of expressing solidarity with the victims of religious oppression and violence in Iraq, we should make use of them (and this is something I need to explore). The time will come, I fear,  when we are supporting some of these people against the UK asylum and immigration system. Perhaps the biggest debt we owe, though, to suffering humanity is not to forget it. Thus far, we have failed.