Two Observers
Ian McEwan, July 19.
Inevitably, we’re going to start seeing around the preposterous political correctness that allows us to have radical clerics preaching in mosques and recruiting young people. We have been caught too much by a sense that we can just regard these clerics as being like English eccentrics at Hyde Park Corner.
So being ‘devout’ isn’t enough then? Huh.
I don’t buy the arguments in the Iraq war. What keeps getting forgotten here is that the people committing massacres in Iraq right now belong to al-Qaida…But the massacres in Iraq now are being conducted by al-Qaida against Muslims. I also think it’s extraordinary the way in which we get morally selective in our outrages. When there was a rumor that someone at Guantanamo Bay had flushed a Koran down the lavatory, the pages in The Guardian almost caught fire with outrage, but only months before the Taliban had set fire to a mosque and destroyed 300 ancient Korans.
I didn’t know that – remind me to look into it. But the selectiveness of the moral outrage – oh yeah. Big time. All the guff about rage and alienation and disaffection – no, not offered as pure disinterested explanation, as one might offer overexposure to the midday sun to explain a sunburn – which never, ever gets rolled out for the BNP or Timothy McVeigh or murderers of doctors who do abortions – that guff. Why is that? I don’t know, but I hope people get over it soon.
Polly Toynbee, July 22.
The death cult strikes again, unstoppable in its deranged religious mania. This time no deaths but a savage reminder of the unknown waves of demented killers lining up to murder in the name of God…In the growing fear and anger at what more may be to come, apologists or explainers for these young men can expect short shrift. This is not about poverty, deprivation or cultural dislocation of second-generation immigrants. There is plenty of that and it is passive. Iraq is the immediate trigger, but this is about religious delusion.
Partly – I think. Religious delusion joined to testosterone-syndrome joined to a fascist love of violence for its own sake joined to thrill-seeking. But r.d. sure does its bit.
Enlightenment values are in peril not because these mad beliefs are really growing but because too many rational people seek to appease and understand unreason…Meanwhile the far left, forever thrilled by the whiff of cordite, has bizarrely decided to fellow-travel with primitive Islamic extremism as the best available anti-Americanism around. (Never mind their new friends’ views on women, gays and democracy.)
Exactly – except for the far left bit. I refuse to consider anyone who hugs talibanism as any kind of left at all. If that’s far left it’s so ‘far’ that it’s gone all the way around to the other side.
Bombs do change things, maybe not in the extremists’ favour. A great shift in attitude seems to have swept through many Muslim groups who signed the full-page newspaper statement yesterday headed “Not in Our Name”. Many were equivocators on the fatwa that had Salman Rushdie locked away for years.
And as ‘The World Tonight’ pointed out on Tuesday (I think it was Tuesday), if people who rush off to interview ‘the Muslim community’ would stop talking exclusively to men, that might help too. The Muslim women that reporter talked to had nothing but contempt and anger for the whole sorry mess.
“What keeps getting forgotten here is that the people committing massacres in Iraq right now belong to al-Qaida”
I thought the most recent view was that most of the insurgents were home-grown.
Roughly contemporaneously with the London bombings, a suicide-bomber blew himself up next to a gasoline tanker truck in a mid-sized Iraqi city. The initial death toll was reported as 56 and later I saw a report that the truck had been stolen 2 days before, but I’ve seen no revised casuality figure. (It must have been much higher- 100,000 gallons of gasoline in a crowded city center?) The attack was claimed by “Al Qaida in Iraq”, but seemed to make no sense, as the city was of mixed Sunni/Shiite population. What possible “strategic” point could there be to such wantonly horrific slaughter? There’s no redemptive moral here, just this reflection: terrorism, whatever it’s source or provenance, its agency or mode of organization, whatever “strategic” motives might be imputed to it by way of disruption, is always “designed” to re-enforce battle-lines, to promote fundamentalism all round. That’s why knee-jerk reactions to it, even ones of outrage, are slightly beside the point. (It’s not exactly that the outrage is itself not legitimate, but is there an economics of atrocity?) The terrorists “win” precisely by disrupting any efforts at balanced and rational thinking and activity. The nihilism of the thing is want to produce disavowals that are, at least potentially, just as nihilistic.
My own feeling (currently) on the real evil that underlies all this and much else that is wrong with the world: credulity and the tolerance thereof.
I really do think we need to be tolerant when it comes to beliefs; where we go wrong is in confusing this with being tolerant of credulity. By tolerating a refusal or inability to think critically and accept presented ‘facts’ at face value we set up a situation where people become vulnerable to damaging beliefs.
I am convinced that those who fall for religious (or political) extremism are victims, in the main, of credulity; such people carry out murders, bombings and so on in the sincere and genuine belief that they are (say) defending or avenging the victims of persecution and yadayadayada. Why do they believe this? How can somone who has grown up in the relative luxury and freedom from oppression of Britain, for example, really come to believe that they or their co-believers are victims? They believe what they are told by people whose word they take on trust – and oh, boy are they told a lot of bullshit!
We see the same thing again and again across the religious and poolitical spectra: whether it’s the belief that AIDS was developed to wipe out gays/blacks, belief in creationism, belief in the evilness of GM crops, belief that vaccines cause autism, or whatever, the key problem is credulity…
Just a though.
“I thought the most recent view was that most of the insurgents were home-grown.”
AQ seems to be an equal oppotunities recruiter and happy to take on middleclass engineers from any country.
“AQ seems to be an equal oppotunities recruiter and happy to take on middleclass engineers from any country.”
True enough, but the Iraq situation is a proper insurgency, seemingly driven, at least in part, by ancient ethnic/religious divisions and general tribal lawlessness, and as such is different to Al Qaeda terrorist operations abroad.
Loyalty tests are a shite idea. See: nazi ‘Nuremburg Laws’.
Also a bad idea is inhibiting free speech in the name of anti-terrorism.
Making the state secular, on the other hand, is a good idea.
Oh, and Toynbee’s wrong about ‘the far left’. Should have said _some_ of the far left. Quite a few of us haven’t got into bed with Islamists, or with Tony B. It’s a workers of the world thing.
I gather our mighty UKanian leader, St.Tony of Sedgefield, has suggested training more Imams in the UK so that young British Muslims can learn a more western friendly interpretation of the Qur’an, a sort of Islam-lite. Right on Tony. More Imams and more faith schools, so that they can really appreciate the worth of an old book chronicling the ravings of a despot. We wouldn’t want to encourage godless atheism, science or critical thought would we?
ChrisM
“AQ seems to be an equal opportunities recruiter and happy to take on middleclass engineers from any country. ” Quite so, and it would appear that the death-in-service package is unbeatable .
PM
“…but the Iraq situation is a proper insurgency, seemingly driven, at least in part, by ancient ethnic/religious divisions and general tribal lawlessness, and as such is different to Al Qaeda terrorist operations abroad”
No. Check Algeria since 1993. First class AQ recruitment pool and practice ground.
Mike S
“Right on Tony. More Imams and more faith schools, so that they can really appreciate the worth of an old book chronicling the ravings of a despot. We wouldn’t want to encourage godless atheism, science or critical thought would we?”
Just grabbing at straws here, but how about… recruit a bunch of 3+4 generation UK Pakistanis and Bangladeshis, Somalis with quality minds into the Civil Service, Whitehall, MI5 + 6, etc; take them from the vast mainstream of these sub-groups who like secular Britain and it’s democracy, while nevertheless keeping their faith… give ’em a taste of the Establishment sweet-life… that’s where they need to be going on this. (For – flimsy-ish – evidence that this may work, just look at the useless post-grad job search success rate for that demograph. A downside too: not positive discrimination though, cos that clearly sucks)… but give the bright ones an in, and I reckon they’ll grab it with both hands and sort out their loyalties in a trice; also they’ll have stabilising influence and kudos in their home circle of friends/family/neighbours – OK, perhaps a bit wishy washy, but it’s a lot better than if we try and spy on the other f@ckers, restrict their mobility or mess with their rituals.
To anyone interested in answering: How does Iraq figure into the events of the last couple weeks? Greatly? Not at all? Something in between? Exactly how or why?
Should the US and UK get out of Iraq immmediately? Set a time table for a later withdrawal? Would this have any effect on the attacks on western nations…at least the ones who are in Iraq right now?
Is it possible to have diplomatic relations with the current Arab Muslim leadership worldwide and not be targeted by groups like Al Qaeda?
How do we conduct daily business (oil) without attracting the wrath of extremists? If we can’t can we kill them all?
Nick S: “No. Check Algeria since 1993. First class AQ recruitment pool and practice ground.”
I’m not sure what you’re trying to say here. While Algeria may have served as a good recruiting ground, Al Qaeda certainly didn’t initiate the civil war. Same thing with Iraq, while Al Qaeda may benefit from the situation, it is not the prime mover.
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How does Iraq figure into the events of the last couple weeks?
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Juan Cole, the noted Iraq pundit and Bushophobe, has a piece on this today. Iraq isn’t mentioned, Kashmir is.
Problem with being the UK I guess. There are about 3 countries worldwide that don’t have some kind of more or less legitimate bitch to make about UK policy at one time or other.
Collectively, I think we really want to try and persuade the world that blowing us up isn’t the solution to their problems.
soru
Surely the selectiveness of the moral outrage is more parochialism than outright hypocrisy. The US, being part of the West, is one of “us”, and we like to think we are above flushing copies of the Koran down the toilet – how crude. but the Taliban burning down a mosque – well, it’s muslims doing it to other muslims, it’s not our concern, not much we can do about it is there. Not saying that this is a good thing, but it’s just natural human behaviour. Same reason why hundreds of people dying in a train crash in Pakistan rates lower in the news than a school shooting in the US which rates lower than the deaths of a carload of local teenagers.
Put another way, it’s not the fact that the Koran was dissed that was the problem; it’s who was doing it – and shouldn’t we expect a liberal democracy (even the armed forces thereof) to behave better than a bunch of violent religious zealots?
Sure, it’s prescriptive, not descriptive. “Ought to be”, not “is”. It’s the gap between expectation and reality that causes the outrage – no matter if that gap can never actually be reduced to zero, it still offends. One has lower expectations of the Taliban to begin with, however.
Sure, George. (Well I don’t remember the film of the woman, but I take your word for it.) I said ‘might’ help. It’s not that I’m sure it would, but it might. But it does make me tired that it’s so mostly men who get trundled out. What is that – ‘respect’ for a ‘different culture’ in which women don’t matter?
I am always surprised at the numbers of European Muslim women who, when interviewed, say that they started wearing the hijab after 9:11.
That’s right: it took a terrorist atrocity to make them aware of their Islamic identity… and indeed, to be proud of it.
The Islamic dissidents – Ayaan Hiris Ali, Irshad Manji – are brave and powerful but there also appears to be a strong Al-Q groupie factor.
Yes. The 7/7 bombs going off at 8:50 – that’s a big groupie factor right there. A ‘tribute’ – an ‘homage’. Urrggh.
Late coming back to you on this, Olivia. I’m with you there of course, it’s just the old canard of all blokes nasty (rapists, bastards etc etc), all women nice (so innocent, so well meaning etc etc)… I just don’t think it quite works like that, not even in religion. But that’s a long long long long discussion and I am already making myself yawn.