Author: Ophelia Benson

Words fail me. Human garbage. Rock bottom.

Suspected Taliban militants have beheaded a headteacher in central Afghanistan, the latest in a string of gruesome attacks on teachers working in schools where girls are taught. Armed men burst into the home of Malim Abdul Habib in Qalat, the capital of restive Zabul province, on Tuesday night. They dragged him into a courtyard and forced his family to watch as they cut off his head, said Ali Khel, a local government spokesman…Hundreds of students attended his funeral yesterday. “Only the Taliban are against our girls being educated,” Mr Khel said.

Well there – that’s why they’re human garbage. They dedicate their lives to preventing girls from getting an education – what a noble goal! What a splendid way for grown men to spend their time – zipping around the countryside with guns murdering teachers who have the gall to teach girls – and making the family watch is a pretty touch, too.

The Taliban insurgency has taken a brutal twist in the past year with militants avoiding shoot-outs with American troops – which they usually lose – in favour of targeted assassinations of teachers, aid workers and pro-government clerics. Last month gunmen pulled a teacher in Helmand province from his classroom and shot him at the school gate after he ignored orders to stop teaching girls. The violent tactics, which are concentrated in the southern provinces where a British-led Nato force is due to assume control next spring, appear to be working. Nabi Khushal, the director of education in Zabul, told the Associated Press that 100 of the province’s 170 registered schools had been closed over the past two years, mostly in remote areas, due to deteriorating security. Only 8% of the pupils are girls, he said.

100 out of 170. Well how nice. One of the poorest countries on earth, and the schools are closing because men who hate all females are killing people. Spiffy. It’s enough to make you sick.

Aha. Natalie Angier and I are on the same page, so to speak.

Among the more irritating consequences of our flagrantly religious society is the special dispensation that mainstream religions receive. We all may talk about religion as a powerful social force, but unlike other similarly powerful institutions, religion is not to be questioned, criticized or mocked. When the singer-songwriter Sinéad O’Connor ripped apart a photograph of John Paul II to protest what she saw as his overweening power, even the most secular humanists were outraged by her idolatry, and her career has never really recovered.

Not this cookie – I wasn’t outraged. (Well, I wasn’t aware of it at the time, but if I had been, I would have cheered.) John Paul 2 had way too much power and used it to do appalling things.

“Society bends over backward to be accommodating to religious sensibilities but not to other kinds of sensibilities,” says Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist and outspoken atheist. “If I say something offensive to religious people, I’ll be universally censured, including by many atheists. But if I say something insulting about Democrats or Republicans or the Green Party, one is allowed to get away with that. Hiding behind the smoke screen of untouchability is something religions have been allowed to get away with for too long.”

Exactly. Me, Angier, and Dawkins – a small club, but a good one. Yes okay you can be in it too.

Good old Iqbal Sacranie. One can see why the BBC and similar are always so eager to ask the MCB for its opinion on matters to do with ‘the Muslim community’.

Sir Iqbal said of civil partnerships: “This is harmful. It does not augur well in building the very foundations of society – stability, family relationships. And it is something we would certainly not, in any form, encourage the community to be involved in.”

Why? Why doesn’t it?

He said he was guided by the teachings of the Muslim faith, adding that other religions such as Christianity and Judaism held the same stance.

Yes, they do. A cardinal was saying so just the other day. So what? Why should anyone care? Why is that supposed to be a reason? We don’t want religious pseudo-reasons for public policy, we want real reasons, based on actual arguments. But we don’t get them – not from people who think their ‘faith’ is reason enough. That’s because they don’t have any. All they ever manage to come up with is meaningless hand-waving about the family.

Cardinal Keith O’Brien criticised Westminster over civil partnerships and the Scottish Executive over changes to the laws on uncontested divorce…He argued that alternative lifestyles were “undermining values which for generations have been treasured”. The cardinal claimed that the family remained “the basic social unit” to be recognised, protected and promoted as the most vital building block of society. He told his congregation: “When our lawmakers condone and endorse trends in society which are ultimately ruinous of family life we are entitled to question their motivation and condemn their behaviour.”

But why are civil partnerships ultimately ruinous of family life? Why do they not ‘augur well in building the very foundations of society – stability, family relationships’? Why? Because – what – married straight people will look around them and see (how?) that some gay people have civil partnerships, and – what? Be filled with despair and rage and bitterness and a sense of futility, and wonder why they ever bothered, and turn their children over to an orphanage or out onto the streets, and run off to Tahiti and Hoboken respectively, there to become layabouts and pickpockets? Or what? Straight people will contemplate the existence of civil partnerships and decide not to get married themselves because, I mean, after all, it’s obvious – ? Or what? What is the problem? Why does civil partnerships for gay people have any effect on marriage or ‘the family’ whatsoever? Hey – suppose somebody informed us all that, contrary to previous scientific opinion, ostriches and geckoes have formal, legal marriage, just like human marriage, right down to the new dishes and the arguments over who has to wash them. Would that make humans stop getting married and become pirates instead?

Sacranie does make an effort, to cobble together some sort of argument other than ‘because God,’ but he doesn’t do much of a job of it.

Asked if he believed homosexuality was harmful to society, he said: “Certainly it is a practice that in terms of health, in terms of the moral issues that comes along in a society – it is. It is not acceptable.”

The moral issues that comes along in a society. Right. Which ones? Why is it not acceptable? Other than hand-waving?

Not to mention, of course, to revert to the cardinal for a moment, the redolent irony of celibate priests fussing about the family. If you’re in such a sweat about the family, you prosing chump, why don’t you go have one? And if you don’t want to have one, why are you nagging everyone else about the family ‘as the most vital building block of society’? What do you mean by it?

Creeping theocracy, that’s what it is.

No, it’s not particularly astonishing that Deborah Lipstadt doesn’t think Iriving should go to prison. Yes she has every reason to find him extremely irritating, but that doesn’t straightforwardly necessarily translate to thinking he ought to be locked up – and it’s a bit stupid to think or pretend to think it does. Don’t we all find countless throngs of people extremely irritating without thinking (except for the odd passing whim) that they ought to be locked up? I know I do.

Lipstadt has spent years exposing the arguments of Nazi sympathisers. She warns historians must “remain ever vigilant” against those who say the Holocaust was a hoax, “so that the precious tools of our trade and our society – truth and reason – can prevail”. The showdown came in January 2000 when she stood accused of libel for describing Irving in a book as “one of the most dangerous spokespersons for Holocaust denial”; he accused her of “vandalising” his legitimacy as an historian. The 32-day trial became a legal debate on the history of the Nazis – and the nature of truth itself.

Which is why truth matters. You can’t sort these disagreements out without figuring out – to the best of everyone’s ability – what the truth is. If truth and reason don’t prevail, you just get competing force. Whoever has the biggest fist wins.

Mr Justice Gray witheringly described Irving as anti-Semitic, racist and a Holocaust denier who had “deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence”.

Why does that ring a bell? Oh yes, Judge Jones – he said the Dover school board played silly games with the evidence too.

However, in the case of the Holocaust, Lipstadt says she recognises a case for laws in the lands that formed the heart of the Third Reich. “Germany and Austria are not so far past the Third Reich. So I can understand that the swastika symbol, Mein Kampf, Holocaust denial, being a neo-Nazi and all the rest have a certain potency there that they would not have in the United States,” she says…Lipstadt says the reason she is generally opposed to outlawing Holocaust denial is not because she fails to recognise how deeply offensive it is but because such laws tend to turn cranks into martyrs.

There’s that confusion again – in Brendan O’Neill, not in Lipstadt. The point is not, or not just, that Holocaust denial is offensive or even deeply offensive but that it is – possibly – dangerous. I think that’s why Lipstadt used the word ‘potency’. Being a neo-Nazi has a certain potency in Austria, surely, because it is seen as at least threatening as well as offensive. At least threatening, and possibly actually dangerous. Get the labels right.

Well, there’s one good thing. Maybe, maybe, maybe, now at last the news media will start calling bribery ‘bribery’ instead of ‘fundraising’ and ‘campaign contributions’. That would help. I don’t know, maybe the Beeb is different, maybe they’ve been calling it bribery at least some of the time all along, but US news media sure haven’t. It’s been driving me stark staring mad for years, hearing NPR reporters blithely referring to fundraising when what they’re talking about is simply solicitation of bribes, and campaign contributions when what they’re talking about is simply monetary payments to powerful elected officials in the expectation of favours in return. The whole incredible shocking disgusting deeply corrupt mess has been treated as normal and routine and therefore okay by our supposedly adversarial, liberal, suspicious, investigative, activist news media. Why? Why? Why? I seriously don’t understand it, and never have.

Surely it must look grotesque from the other side of the pond. We not only elect ignorant buffoons, we elect them by means of endemic bribery! They can’t even get elected without bribery. Everybody knows the equation – we hear it all the time – tv ads are expensive, you can’t get elected without tv ads, so obviously the only possibility for an aspirant to elective office is to demand large sums of money from people who have large sums of money. Gee, what a great system. It means we end up with corporate lobbyists actually writing legislation. [bangs head on desk]

But maybe the Abramoff thing will finally make it so obvious what a cesspool it all is that – oh, who am I trying to kid. No it won’t.

And people wonder why some of us saw some point to Nader. Which is exactly my point. Endemic corruption has become so normalized and routinized that putative liberals and leftists don’t even think it’s a reason not to vote for someone.