Tom Harris at the Telegraph is disgusted by the suspension of Louis Smith.

He starts with Roy Hattersley’s submission to Islamist outrage at Salman Rushdie in 1989.

Hattersley, whose constituency of Birmingham Sparkbrook included a large number of Muslims, has revealed that as a consequence of pressure put on him by local Muslim leaders, he proposed a “compromise”: Rushdie’s book should not be issued in paperback, as would normally be the case after the initial marketing of the hardback.

Of course, this was no compromise at all. The Shadow Home Secretary was advocating a surrender to the threat of terrorism. He advocated the compromising of free speech as a route to sating the blood thirst of the leader of a fascist state.

And they’re still doing it.

Nearly 30 years on, it would be nice to imagine that our political leaders considered freedom of speech more important than the personal hurt feelings of the followers of a particular faith. So where are the voices condemning the absurd suspension by British Gymnastics of athlete Louis Smith for his “mockery” of Islam?

There are some of us, but not many in the government.

Yet still our MPs seem pretty shy about discussing this issue or defending Smith’s right to offend. Many of them will, of course, like Hattersley before them, have to consider the electoral consequences of being seen to defend mockery of one particular religion (even if it means a defence of mockery of all religions). Have they no faith? Have they no confidence in their Muslim constituents to be able to take a sensible, moderate view of this little controversy? Isn’t it a little condescending towards all Muslims to assume that they will be so enraged by Smith’s behaviour that they will switch their votes away from any politician who dares defend his right to offend?

British Gymnastics has behaved deplorably, and our political leaders should say so. And Muslim leaders in the UK should say so too. They should celebrate the fact that we live in a country and society where we can offend each other without the threat of violence or official sanction.

Except, as British Gymnastics have now proved, we don’t. In 1989, Lord Hattersley advocated financial penalties on a writer for daring to write something that was offensive to some. Ten years earlier, Glasgow City Council penalised its own film-loving citizens by banning local cinemas from showing The Life of Brian.

By keeping their own counsel, political leaders give the green light to a bullying, blinkered officialdom that will continue to behave however it likes until someone at a national level calls it to heel.

From the SPLC to British Gymnastics…we’re told to respect Or Else.

Another bad thing. Pragna Patel of Southall Black Sisters writes:

Just had a horrible, bruising experience on BBC Asia Network whilst debating the problem of religious arbitration bodies, especially Sharia Councils, and their rulings on family and personal matters.

I was pitted against two Islamic ‘judges’ who call themselves ‘scholars’ who defended the existence of Sharia ‘Courts’: They argued that these bodies were set up for women and run on principles of compassion and justice. (Try telling that to the many Muslim women and women of other faiths who approach SBS on a daily basis with horrific stories of domestic violence and religious abuse of power; including those who contacted us today as a result of the debate on the Victoria Derbyshire Show!)

I was forced to walk out of the debate because it was clear that the two Islamist women (Khola Hasan and Amra Bone) from Birmingham and Leytonstone Sharia Councils were being allowed to dictate the terms of the debate with support from the facilitator who appeared completely out of her depth.

The facilitator invited me to respond to Khola Hasan’s view that Sharia Councils were set up for women and then cut me off as I tried to explain that Sharia Councils were set up to control women, not support them. I said that these bodies are in fact, part of an Islamist project and was about to cite evidence in support of this assertion but the facilitator jumped in and attempted to shut me up by saying that she did not want to get into a discussion about ‘ideology’ for which there was no proof! Instead, cutting me off in mid flow, she conveniently decided that she wanted to ‘hear from listeners’ as this was a ‘live radio talk show’.

It was a crude and ignorant response lacking in any insight into the seriousness of the situation that faces minority women whose rights are being discussed with reference to a patriarchal, theological framework rather than human rights.

I can imagine it all too easily. They’re terrified of that kind of thing, the BBC – and yet for some reason they’re not at all terrified of shutting up Pragna and what she was saying.

Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on Potok was not about to let facts change his mind.

A significant faction on the left hates them for upholding the values they have forgotten

How did a significant faction on the left become apologists for a far-right movement that they would be the first to condemn if it were dominated by white people? Some random thoughts on how this might have happened.

I suspect that most leftists have a notion that it is legitimate to criticize what other people think or do, but not what they are as individuals, which is fine to a certain point. But language is flexible. You can always invent a name for “The kind of person that thinks/does [insert ideas/behaviors]” and frame that as an “identity” or something you are as a person. And since “identities” are sacred, it follows that any criticism of said ideas/behaviors is a hate crime.

There is also the problem of overcompensation. It is certainly true that hardcore racists and bigots often disguise their hatred as a fake concern for the treatment of women in Muslim societies etc. (The obvious example being atheists who opportunistically exploit the suffering of Dear Muslima to attack Muslims while spending every free moment harassing women online), and every leftist knows it. In the absence of telepathic power there is no method for identifying all the fakers without implicating lots of sincere people in the process. If you have determined that racism is infinitely bad, it seems to follow that no consequence of accusing others of racism – whether they are in fact guilty or not – could possibly be worse than failing to call out even a single real racist.

Then there’s the well-known phenomenon of attacking others to prove one’s own righteousness: “Don’t you see how viciously I call out even just alleged racists? So how can I possibly be one of them?” One of the main things I took away from Jung Chang’s biography of chairman Mao was that the endless purges and show trials were not actually meant to smoke out any real dissidents. At least that wasn’t their main function. The real purpose was to convey the following message: “Some percentage of the population will be made to pay during the next purge whether they are in fact guilty or not. Make sure it’s not you!” And of course the way to make sure it wasn’t you was to make sure it was somebody else. So basically people were forced to compete to inform on others in order to stay clear themselves. Hardly anything can be more toxic than a culture in which insufficient eagerness to accuse others of thoughtcrime is all it takes to be accused oneself.

Last but not least, it seems to me, there have always been a tension on the left between two, not necessarily contradictory, but certainly very different perspectives, or mindsets, or modes of thought:

On the one hand there’s a perspective that says “We’re all the same on the inside”. I.e. there might be some individual differences, but differences between groups are just superficial and irrelevant like skin color or the shape of a person’s genitals. To the extent that there appears to be some real differences in the distribution of interests or talents, it’s basically a self-fulfilling prophecy, i.e. people turn out differently because we already think and act as if there were such differences, and treat people accordingly. Hence people end up different because of how they’re treated, not because of how they’re born. Bottom line, because people all function in pretty much the same way, there is no justification for treating them differently. Hence “equality” ultimately means rendering our various group identities irrelevant with respect to how people are treated.

On the other hand there’s a strand of thought that says it’s ok to be different, hence the emphasis on tolerance and the celebration of diversity. According to this perspective, people really are different, and there is nothing wrong with that. Insisting that we must all be the same “on the inside” is in itself a form of bigotry.

My personal view is that both perspectives have some validity (obviously, both can’t apply equally well in every particular case, but reality is complicated, and different principles may apply under different circumstances). For example: Are certain jobs considered “women’s work” because they’re seen as low-status (the first perspective), or are they considered low-status because they’re seen as “women’s work” (the second perspective)? I suspect the answer is some mixture of both.

I also think both modes of thought can be potentially problematic if applied simplistically, or dogmatically, or without regard for the specifics (in short, without thinking), especially if one fails to distinguish between innate and cultural differences.

The first perspective, if misapplied, can lead to a dogmatic inability/unwillingness to even consider the possibility that extremists like the IS actually mean what they say. After all, if we’re all the same on the inside, we must all be motivated by the same kinds of goals and values, hence all this talk of obeying the will of Allah etc. can only be an “excuse”.

The second perspective, if applied uncritically, leads to tolerance of intolerance, the abandonment of universal standards and a return to different rules for different groups of people. “Equality” is redefined as everybody having the same right to be treated according to the rules appropriate to their particular group identity (trans activism being the obvious example). There is also the idea that whatever your ancestors happened to believe/practice is automatically “right” for you. And this is where I think a label like “The regressive left” is indeed justified. All leftists agree that westerners should work to change their culture from within, but regressive leftists have somehow convinced themselves that nobody outside the West could possibly want to live differently than their ancestors for reasons other than internalized Western bigotry against “their own” culture. The idea that non-western women, homosexuals, secularists etc. might want the same changes we have made (imperfectly, but still) in the West for exactly the same reasons we did, simply doesn’t compute.

“Difference” is a word like “change”. Some changes are for the better while others are for the worse, and yet others don’t matter at all. This is why my head explodes when people talk about supporting Trump because he represents “change” as if “change” were synonymous with “improvement”. It is, certainly, true that Trump represents “change”, more specifically change for the worse. I just don’t see why that’s a reason to vote for him. The same goes for “difference”. Differences between languages, artistic styles, food traditions, ways of dressing (at least as long as there is no coercion involved) etc. may all be created pretty much equal. Differences in ways of treating women and homosexuals, not so much. Specifics matter.

Finally, I think leftists are right to be concerned that “universal standards” in practice means holding up Western culture as the norm to which everyone else needs to conform. I therefore hasten to say that that’s not what I’m advocating. We should aim higher than replacing the burqa with Western porn culture.

Headline:

Bono Becomes The First Man To Make Glamour’s Women Of The Year List

Because…there just aren’t enough women good enough to win it?

Glamour’s annual Women of the Year list always takes in a lot of territory, from noteworthy fashionistas and sports heroes to social justice activists and business leaders.

Enter Bono: The first Man of the Year among the magazine’s Women of the Year, all to be honored at a Nov. 14 ceremony in Los Angeles.

“We’ve talked for years about whether to honor a man at Women of the Year and we’ve always kind of put the kabash on it. You know, men get a lot of awards and aren’t exactly hurting in the celebration and honors department,” said Cindi Leive, Glamour’s editor-in-chief.

“But it started to seem that that might be an outdated way of looking at things, and there are so many men who really are doing wonderful things for women these days. Some men get it and Bono is one of those guys,” Leive said in a recent interview.

And speaking of non-violent Isamism, and the clueless non-Muslims who enforce it on the rest of us – the Guardian reports that the British gymnast Louis Smith has been suspended from British Gymnastics for two months for making jokes about Islam.

Louis Smith has been banned for two months after a video emerged in which he and fellow gymnast Luke Carson were appeared to mock Islam.

Smith, who won a silver medal for Great Britain on the pommel horse in Rio, was filmed with Carson shouting “Allahu Akbar” and mimicking a praying pose. Carson has been given a reprimand by British Gymnastics which will stay on his record for two years.

Did this happen at a public event where he was representing British Gymnastics? If so I could maybe see why they would ask him not to do that again.

But no, it didn’t – it happened at a friend’s wedding. Wouldn’t you think that would be absolutely none of British Gymnastic’s business? Wouldn’t you wonder why that video “emerged” at all?

Smith apologised for the incident, which took place at a friend’s wedding. “I am deeply sorry,” he wrote in a message on Twitter. “I am not defending myself, what I did was wrong. I want to say sorry for the deep offense I have caused and to my family who have also been affected by my thoughtless actions.

“I recognised the severity of my mistake and hope it can be used as an example of how important it is to respect others at all times. I have learnt a valuable life lesson and I wholeheartedly apologise.”

I think it’s much more an example of how important it is not to trust anyone at a party because maybe they will film you and then send the film to the media if you do anything the media might pretend to be shocked by.

I was pretty sure I’d heard of Bob Lambert before reading Nick Cohen’s piece on the SPLC’s attack on Maajid Nawaz and Ayaan Hirsi Ali. I was pretty sure I remembered a co-authored piece at Comment is Free making some kind of claim that Islamists Are Our Friends, and that I’d blogged about it. I was not wrong.

It was April 2009. The ridiculous title is The demonisation of British Islamism. It’s shockingly stupid and perverse – or, as Nick suggests, it’s part of Lambert’s undercover disguise.

In recent weeks an unnecessary schism has been created between government and British Islamists.

First, government failure to condemn Israel in the aftermath of Operation Cast Lead exposed a bias towards Israel and an ambivalence towards the value of Palestinian lives that angered British Islamists. Next, the government’s new counter-terrorism strategy (“Contest Two“) served to amplify pre-existing British Islamist concerns at being treated as “fifth columnists”. Then, along came Hazel Blears with an ill-judged assault on Daud Abdullah and the Muslim Council of Britain. Taken together these incidents reinforce concerns that British Islamists are uniquely held out for political attack, and illustrate the power of key anti-Islamist lobbying groups. The result is a feeling that the government holds Islamists to a different political standard based on a Bush-ite principle of “either you are with us or against us”, where the “us” is clearly not Muslim.

If you replaced “Islamists” with “Muslims” and then talked about different people and groups, you could see their point. But they talked about Islamists, not Muslims.

According to the Oxford Dictionary of Islam, “Islamist” describes an Islamic political or social activist.

That’s a ludicrously incomplete definition, and you would expect a cop to know that.

Over the last year we have been interviewing Islamists in Britain. While all of them fit this dictionary definition, none match the negative caricatures provided by UK thinktanks such as the Quilliam Foundation and Policy Exchange. Ironically enough, all of our interviewees do appear to resemble Britain’s first Islamist, Abdullah Quilliam (1856-1932) who was himself critical of imperial British foreign policy in the Middle East in much the same way that his modern day descendents are critical of the Blair and Brown governments’ policies in the same region. In Quilliam’s day, however, it was difficult for British Muslims to be politically engaged.

Happily, in today’s pluralistic Britain, Islamists are able to work in partnership with mainstream (though by no means centrist) politicians like Tony Benn, Ken Livingstone and Jeremy Corbyn to present their concerns about UK foreign policy to a wider public. While British Islamists are as diverse as British socialists, the interviews do reveal important unifying characteristics, most notably a devotion to social justice and a concern for community needs over individual or corporate ambitions. British Islamists are typified by a sense of moral obligation to confront injustice, and they strive, in their own ways, to try to make the world a better place. These are messages which have more power than ever in modern Britain.

Oh dear god. Is that the spy talking, or the useful idiot?

My post at the time is as enraged as you’d expect.

Here again is what Nick said about the SPLC and Bob Lambert and Quilliam:

I asked the SPLC’s Mark Potok, ‘one of the country’s leading experts on the world of extremism,’ according to its website,  if he was Muslim himself. ‘No.’ Was he happy, then, branding a liberal Muslim ‘an anti-Muslim extremist?’ Well, Potok said, the head of Scotland Yard’s Muslim Contact Unit had accused Nawaz of  ‘demonising a whole range of groups that have made valuable contributions to counter-terrorism,’ and that was good enough for him.

I tried to explain that the then head of the Muslim Contact Unit was Bob Lambert, one of the most notorious agent provocateurs British policing has produced. He stole the identity of a dead boy and infiltrated left groups. Pretending to be one of them, he got an activist pregnant then vanished from his partner and child’s lives. He had a shadowy part in the ‘McLibel’ case, which led to two environmental activists being persecuted for years in the courts, and is under investigation for allegedly smearing the campaign for justice for the murdered black teenager Stephen Lawrence. There are reasonable grounds for suspecting that, when Lambert attacked Nawaz, he was trying to ingratiate himself with Islamists as he had tried to ingratiate himself with leftists.

If the suspicion is true then Lambert also did his bit to influence public opinion to see Islamists as social justice activists, which is surely a step too far for the police.

It’s all grotesque.

The BBC returns to the subject of Malawian “hyenas” – men who are paid to “initiate” young girls into sex.

In July the BBC wrote about a Malawian man paid to have sex with young girls from his village, as part of a sexual initiation ritual. Later a Malawian woman, Natasha Annie Tonthola, contacted the BBC to explain how her experience of the ritual helped inspire her to campaign for the protection of women and girls. This is her story.

I’m the oldest of five children and I grew up in a village in the central district of Malawi, near the capital, Lilongwe, and I was 13 years old when the initiation ceremony happened.

My father was from a village near Mulanje, in the south of the country, and I was sent there for the ceremony after my first period. You don’t have a choice – it happens to every girl in the village.

They were told they would learn about womanhood. She was excited about it. No one told them it involved sex. They were told a man called a “hyena” was coming to visit them, but not that he would be putting his penis in them.

We each had a piece of cloth and we were told to put it on the floor. We were told that it was time to show that we knew how to treat a man, that we knew what to do for our future husbands. Then we were blindfolded.

You’re not supposed to show you’re scared, you’re not supposed to show you don’t know what’s happening to you.

The man comes, and he tells you to lie down, you open your legs and he does what he does. We weren’t allowed to know who the man was – only the elders know.

That’s an interesting touch. I guess it’s to teach them that it doesn’t matter who he is? Because they don’t get to choose who he is at any time? They just have to take it?

We were young girls, so we were tense, and this man would push our legs open. I found it painful. When he finished, I was relieved. The female elder came in and said, “Congratulations, you have finished the initiation ceremony, and you are a woman now.”

Many girls think this is normal because we are in a way brainwashed, we think it is OK because it is tradition.

But the hyena didn’t wear a condom, and some of the girls got pregnant. If the hyena has an STD, well…

Tonthola had a rough life and an abusive marriage, and she became an organizer.

My community organisation continued to educate people but it was hard, particularly when we were challenging traditions such as the use of hyenas and wife inheritance.

In some communities they told us: “Just because you are educated, doesn’t mean that you should tell us what to do. These traditions and customs have existed for time immemorial, and we’ve practised them for ages without any harm.”

But some elders and religious leaders listened, and some have stopped the practice in their villages.

In my community work I soon learned more about the barriers for girls in school. If families are going through a financial rough patch, they’re more likely to pay fees for boys rather than for girls. If girls drop out of school, the family is eager to marry them off rather than have them sit around the house all day. And many girls miss class because they can’t afford sanitary towels.

To try to solve this problem, one of the main things my organisation is doing is distributing eco-friendly reusable washable sanitary pads and pants. They come as part of a kit including pants with clips so that they stay in place and a waterproof bag, in case girls need to change them in school. They are biodegradable, but cost effective and durable – they last for five years. I’ve also expanded into nappies. I hope these will encourage much less waste to go into landfill.

In 2011 I realised I needed to establish a formal organisation, and that was the start of Mama Africa Foundation Trust. We have distributed so many sanitary towels that I have lost count. I call this initiative Project Dignity.

The female body is a handicap in so many ways. Natasha Annie Tonthola is a hero.

H/t Seth

Ken Silverstein wrote a piece in Harper’s in 2000, The Church of Morris Dees. A site with a dubious name posted a copy.

Cofounded in 1971 by civil rights lawyer cum direct-marketing millionaire Morris Dees, a leading critic of “hate groups” and a man so beatific that he was the subject of a made-for-TV movie, the SPLC spent much of its early years defending prisoners who faced the death penalty and suing to desegregate all-white institutions like Alabama’s highway patrol. That was then.

Today, the SPLC spends most of its time–and money–on a relentless fund-raising campaign, peddling memberships in the church of tolerance with all the zeal of a circuit rider passing the collection plate. “He’s the Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker of the civil rights movement,” renowned anti- death-penalty lawyer Millard Farmer says of Dees, his former associate, “though I don!t mean to malign Jim and Tammy Faye.” The Center earned $44 million last year alone–$27 million from fund-raising and $17 million from stocks and other investments–but spent only $13 million on civil rights programs, making it one of the most profitable charities in the country.

Um. They raised $27 million from fund-raising and kept $14 million of it?

Morris Dees doesn’t need your financial support. The SPLC is already the wealthiest civil rights group in America, though this letter quite naturally omits that fact. Other solicitations have been more flagrantly misleading. One pitch, sent out in 1995-when the Center had more than $60 million in reserves-informed would-be donors that the “strain on our current operating budget is the greatest in our 25-year history.” Back in 1978, when the Center had less than $10 million, Dees promised that his organization would quit fund-raising and live off interest as soon as its endowment hit $55 million. But as it approached that figure, the SPLC upped the bar to $100 million, a sum that, one 1989 newsletter promised, would allow the Center “to cease the costly and often unreliable task of fund raising. ” Today, the SPLC’s treasury bulges with $120 million, and it spends twice as much on fund-raising-$5.76 million last year-as it does on legal services for victims of civil rights abuses. The American Institute of Philanthropy gives the Center one of the worst ratings of any group it monitors, estimating that the SPLC could operate for 4.6 years without making another tax-exempt nickel from its investments or raising another tax-deductible cent from well-meaning “people like you.”

And, he says, they choose their targets to appeal to donors rather than to address the most urgent problems.

What the Center’s other work for justice does not include is anything that might be considered controversial by donors. According to Millard Farmer, the Center largely stopped taking death-penalty cases for fear that too visible an opposition to capital punishment would scare off potential contributors. In 1986, the Center’s entire legal staff quit in protest of Dees’s refusal to address issues-such as homelessness, voter registration, and affirmative action-that they considered far more pertinent to poor minorities, if far less marketable to affluent benefactors, than fighting the KKK. Another lawyer, Gloria Browne, who resigned a few years later, told reporters that the Center’s programs were calculated to cash in on “black pain and white guilt.” Asked in 1994 if the SPLC itself, whose leadership consists almost entirely of white men, was in need of an affirmative action policy, Dees replied that “probably the most discriminated people in America today are white men when it comes to jobs.”

Hmm.

A National Journal survey of salaries paid to the top officers of advocacy groups shows that Dees earned more in 1998 than nearly all of the seventy-eight listed, tens of thousands more than the heads of such groups as the ACLU, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and the Children’s Defense Fund. The more money the SPLC receives, the less that goes to other civil rights organizations, many of which, including the NAACP, have struggled to stay out of bankruptcy. Dees’s compensation alone amounts to one quarter the annual budget of the Atlanta-based Southern Center for Human Rights, which handles several dozen death-penalty cases a year. “You are a fraud and a conman,” the Southern Center’s director, Stephen Bright, wrote in a 1996 letter to Dees, and proceeded to list his many reasons for thinking so, which included “your failure to respond to the most desperate needs of the poor and powerless despite your millions upon millions, your fund-raising techniques, the fact that you spend so much, accomplish so little, and promote yourself so shamelessly.” Soon the SPLC will move into a new six-story headquarters in downtown Montgomery, just across the street from its current headquarters, a building known locally as the Poverty Palace.

So there’s that.