Author: Ophelia Benson

So there’s a transcript of Panorama – very useful for those of us too far away to watch it.

Much food for thought. John Ware:

Extremism feeds off a conviction that Islam is a superior faith and culture which Christians and Jews in the West are conspiring to undermine. My journey through Muslim communities since the London bombings suggests their leaders have not acknowledged the extent to which these views are held in Britain.

He talks to Dr Taj Hargey, who runs a centre for what he calls ‘progressive inclusive Islam.’ Good luck, Dr Hargey, then.

Ad infinitum and ad nauseum, it’s there, it’s with us. We see it from the time you’re a child, you’re given this idea that those people they are Kaafir, they’re unbelievers. They are not equal to you, they are different to you. You are superior to them because you have the truth, they don’t have the truth. You will go to heaven, they will go to hell. So we have this from a very young age.

Ware asks Iqbal Sacranie if he would still expect the government of the day to put pressure on the publishers to withdraw it.

There is no law at the moment, sadly, that would enable me to pursue with a legal course of.. of seeking its withdrawal.

Ah yes, that is sad. Sacranie goes on:

We respect the freedom of expression but we expect freedom of expression to be exercised with responsibility.

Which means, we feel obliged to say we respect the freedom of expression but in reality we’re dead against it. Except for ourselves of course. To express our grievance when books like that get published.

As Rushdie said a couple of weeks ago, ‘If Sir Iqbal Sacranie is the best Blair can offer in the way of a good Muslim, we have a problem.’

I’m reading Chris Mooney’s new book The Republican War on Science. It’s pretty enthralling. Infuriating too, of course, but mostly enthralling. It’s so…so B&W. Consider this item from B&W’s ‘About’ page, the last in a list of what B&W was set up to oppose: ‘Those disciplines or schools of thought whose truth claims are prompted by the political, ideological and moral commitments of their adherents, and the general tendency to judge the veracity of claims about the world in terms of such commitments.’ Now consider this item from the book: ‘At a time when more political choices than ever before hinge upon the scientific and technical competence of our elected leaders, the disregard for scientific consensus and expertise – and the substitution of ideological allegiance for careful assessment – can have disastrous consequences.’

See what I mean? And that is – naturally enough – a central issue in the book. There are also closely related issues, such as the way protecting profits can (gosh, really? surely not! surely the market is never wrong!) conflict with the pursuit of truth.

Pharyngula has a comment on the book from last week.

Chris Mooney is trying to kill me.

It’s true. He sent me this book, The Republican War on Science, that he knew would send my blood pressure skyrocketing, give me apoplexy, and cause me to stroke out and die, gasping, clawing in futile spasms at the floor.

Don’t worry, be happy.

Good science needs to be independent of and unfiltered by desired outcomes; it aims to describe the world as it is, not how we wish it would be.

There’s that issue again – that pesky is-ought gap again. Chris’ book could have been called The Republicans Try to Throw a Bridge Across the Is-Ought Gap and Fall In, Pulling All of Us In After Them.

More on this subject later.

More discussion of multiculturalism:

Multiculturalism has encouraged the politicisation of identity in ethnic or religious terms…[T]he children of immigrants from the Indian subcontinent or the Middle East have little option but to adopt the label of Muslim, which is thrust upon them by British society as much as by their own parents. If young Muslim women have embraced the hijab as a badge of identity in a way their mothers never did, as a public political symbol, this is more a result of the demands of British multiculturalism than a spontaneous assertion of allegiance.

Thrust upon them by the British media as well as by British society. The default assumption seems to be that if you look as if you come from the Indian subcontinent and you’re not actually wearing a sari, then you’re a Muslim. Secularism and atheism are not on the menu.

The elevation of victimhood has a corrupting and infantilising effect: it encourages members of ethnic minorities to exaggerate and parade their sufferings as a means towards personal and communal advancement. The result is to unleash a sense of grievance that is unlikely to be assuaged by the meagre offerings of the state to the local mosque or temple…When in 1989 Islamic fundamentalists issued a fatwa against Salman Rushdie over his allegedly blasphemous book The Satanic Verses, the first instinct of the advocates of multiculturalism was to criticise Rushdie for his insensitivity towards the devout Muslims who took offence at his book…The potent forces unleashed by multiculturalism provide the context for the lurch towards narcissistic violence among second-generation immigrants in British society.

I feel a bit squirmy agreeing with all that. It has a depressing, blimpish, ‘pull your socks up’ ring to it. But – it seems to be true, that does seem to be what has happened, so it’s cognitively difficult not to agree. It’s really hard not to think that that ‘lurch towards narcissistic violence’ was indeed rooted in a worked-up sense of grievance that does indeed have a lot to do with the identity-massaging and victimhood-brandishing of multiculturalism.

In the past, second-generation immigrants often found new sources of identity through the trade unions, socialist and communist movements (which would have scarcely existed in Britain without Irish, Jewish and other immigrants). The disappearance of such sources of collective identification and aspiration is another factor that has encouraged the retreat of some young people into the mindset that culminated in the London bombings.

Yes. Nick Cohen talked about that on ‘Talking Politics’ the other day. Sources of collective aspiration other than religious or ethnic identities would be a good idea, it seems reasonable to think.