National Review Online
June 18, 2004, 10:18 a.m.
Living in a Bubble: The BBC’s very own Mideast foreign policy.
By Tom Gross
The BBC: Sheikh Abdur-Rahman al-Sudais, from Saudi Arabia, who opened London's biggest mosque last Friday, is a respected leader who works for "community cohesion" and "building communities."
Not mentioned on the BBC: Some of the views of Sheikh Abdur-Rahman al-Sudais. In his own words: In the name of Allah, the Jews must be "annihilated." They are "the scum of the human race, the rats of the world... the murderers of the prophets, and the offspring of apes and pigs."
The BBC's Charter and its Producers Guidelines state: "Due impartiality lies at the heart of the BBC. All programs and services should be open minded, fair and show a respect for truth... [BBC reports should] contain comprehensive, authoritative and impartial coverage of news and current affairs in the United Kingdom and throughout the world...."
The BBC makes many good programs when it comes to drama, comedy, sport, and science. But its enormous news division — by far the world's biggest — is another story. Using lavish public funding (courtesy of the British taxpayer) and an unprecedented worldwide news reach (its radio service alone, broadcasting in 43 languages, attracts over 150 million listeners daily), it is — in blatant breach of its own charter — virtually conducting its own anti-American and anti-Israeli foreign policy. Anyone who doesn't agree with its policies (Tony Blair, for example) finds himself at the mercy of BBC news coverage.
In January, criticisms made of the BBC in a report by an official commission set up by the U.K. government ("the Hutton enquiry") in regard to its Iraq-war coverage, were so scathing that both the chairman of the board of governors of the BBC and its director-general had little choice but to resign. Since then, the BBC has — for a while at least — been a little more adroit at disguising its prejudices. Instead much of its slant now lies in omission rather than in active distortion.
"B" MOVIE ACTOR
Last week, for example, almost every other news organization in the world (including those in the former Communist states) began their obituaries of Ronald Reagan by saying that many (including Mikhail Gorbachev) credit Reagan with helping to bring about the end of the Cold War. But the BBC online obituary ("World Edition," Sunday, June 6, 2004, titled "Reagan's mixed White House legacy," and running to almost 1,000 words — that's a full four pages if you print it out from the BBC website) didn't even mention the Cold War, let alone Reagan's calls to "tear down" the Berlin Wall.
Instead the BBC reminded us that Reagan was "a B movie actor," and stated that as president his "foreign policy was criticised for being in disarray." Accompanying photos were not of Reagan meeting Gorbachev, but of Oliver North, and of the invasion of Grenada ("a clumsy sham," according to the BBC text).
Even during his funeral last Friday, BBC World Service Radio began its bulletin by first referring to Reagan as a film actor before mentioning that he was president.
When I went to interview for a job at BBC news at the end of the 1980s, the BBC interviewers (comprising several senior news producers) literally scoffed at me when I suggested, in a mild way, that perhaps the BBC might devote a little more coverage to the eastern bloc.
But then the Cold War plays a very small part in the worldview of the BBC. They seldom showed signs of caring much about hundreds of millions of people living under Communist dictatorship then, and they are still very reluctant to acknowledge that it happened, let alone their own failings in reporting it.
I mention this because it helps explain the bubble they live in today with regard to the Middle East and Arab world. A bubble which has led them to seek to undermine, even delegitimize Israel, the region's sole democracy, while at the same time bending over backwards to excuse extremist Islamic clerics, and the worst of the Arab dictators.
The BBC doesn't seem to care that — as Jonathan Kay of Canada's National Post once put it — if Robert Mugabe walked into an Arab League summit he would be the most democratically legitimate leader in the room. The BBC's attitude appears to be that: Arabs don't deserve to have their human-rights situation mentioned. As far as their reporting is concerned, women, gays, and others don't deserve rights in Muslim countries.
PREACHING HATE FROM MECCA
Sheikh Abdur-Rahman al-Sudais (referred to in the introduction to this article, and whose surname has also been transliterated by MEMRI and others as Al-Sudayyis [1]) is not just any imam, and his hate-filled sermons are not just delivered in some peripheral setting. He is the preacher at the Grand Al-Haraam mosque — the most important mosque in Mecca, the very heart of Islam.
"Read history," implored al-Sudais to his massed ranks of followers in another of his sermons, on February 1, 2004, "and you will understand that the Jews of yesterday are the evil fathers of the Jews of today, who are evil offspring, infidels ... calf-worshippers, prophet-murderers, prophecy-deniers...the scum of the human race whom Allah cursed and turned into apes and pigs.... These are the Jews, a continuous lineage of meanness, cunning, obstinacy, tyranny, licentiousness, evil, and corruption...."
Al-Sudais has repeated these words, or close variations of them, at several other sermons in recent years. It is because of these and other calls for violence against Christians, Hindus, and Americans, that the Canadian government last month denied al-Sudais a visa to enter Canada.
But none of this seems to have penetrated the BBC bubble. In its reports last weekend on TV, radio, and online, on Sheikh al-Sudais's visit to Britain, in which he lead 15,000 worshippers at prayer at the opening of the enormous new six-story Islamic center in east London, the BBC mentioned none of this.
BBC Online for example, last Saturday, gave the impression that al-Sudais was nothing but a benign, kindly cleric promoting (to quote the BBC) "community cohesion" between Muslims and their neighbors.
"The centre was opened as Friday prayers took place, led by one of Islam's most renowned Imams, and celebrations will continue throughout the weekend," said the BBC. "Worshippers had come to hear Sheikh Abdur-Rahman al-Sudais, Imam of the Ka'ba, Islam's holiest mosque in Mecca, Saudi Arabia.... With many unable to enter the new centre, some worshippers took to praying on a street behind the mosque using prayer mats and even newspapers." We are told that the center "will bolster London's reputation as a vibrant and diverse international city" and has a "spirit of modesty."
At the side of the BBC website, a video clip was flagged with the caption: "The BBC's Mark Easton: 'Events like today offer grounds for optimism.'"
It would be hard to imagine the BBC completely omitting diatribes such as al-Sudais's had they been made by a Christian leader — or had a prominent Israeli rabbi said anything similar about Muslims.
IS SOMETHING HAPPENING IN SUDAN?
The BBC efforts not to "offend" Arabs extremists even extend to their reports on ethnic cleansing and genocide. On both the occasions in the last week when I heard BBC World Service Radio refer to the ongoing genocide and ethnic cleansing in Sudan, the BBC took scrupulous care to avoid saying who the perpetrators were (they are Arab militias) and who the victims are (hundreds of thousands of Black Sudanese Africans — Muslims, Christians, and Animists). The BBC didn't make any mention whatever of the long history of mass slavery in Sudan, carried out by Arabs with non-Arabs as their victims; nor of the scorched-earth policies, and systematic rape being carried out there by Arabs.
Yet in one of these very same news bulletins, the BBC mentioned that "settlers" in Gaza were "Jewish" and the land they were settling is "Palestinian." I don't think I have ever heard the BBC refer to settlers in Gaza without mentioning their ethnicity or religion — which is, of course, relevant to the story (though many would dispute the historical and legal accuracy of referring to the territory as Palestinian). But the BBC doesn't appear to think ethnicity is relevant when it comes to real killing or ethnic-based cleansing.
That is apart from situations elsewhere, in which non-Arabs are perpetrators. In one of the very same bulletins in which the BBC failed to mention the ethnic make-up of perpetrator and victim in Sudan, it made sure to let us know that "Bosnian Serbs have admitted for the first time their role in the massacre of Bosnian Moslems a decade ago."
In another report last week, a BBC correspondent casually referred to "a fanatical rebel group" in Uganda. This contrasts with the term "Palestinian resistance group" that BBC reporters often use to describe Hamas, a group the BBC clearly doesn't find fanatical at all.
SO HAMAS ARE NOT GUILTY?
But then Hamas (along with Yasser Arafat, one of the most vicious murderers of Jews since Hitler) appear to enjoy a certain degree of sympathy at the BBC, which throughout the past four years of Israeli-Palestinian violence has constantly tried to obscure the true nature of the group by using misleading language.
There are innumerable examples of this; they occur almost daily. "Over the years, Hamas has been blamed for scores of suicide attacks on Israel," says the BBC, thereby trying to suggest to listeners and viewers that Hamas has perhaps been wrongly accused of such attacks (even though Hamas itself has proudly and repeatedly claimed responsibility for them in mass celebratory rallies in Gaza, Jenin, and elsewhere.)
Two Palestinian gunmen opened fire indiscriminately in the heart of the northern Israeli town of Afula, killing two young Israeli civilians and wounding over 50 others. They themselves were then shot dead by Israeli policemen. The headline on the BBC website read: "Four Die in Israel Shooting Rampage," suggesting that four innocent people had died, possibly at the hands of the Israelis.
Again, when suicide bombers killed 26 Israeli civilians in attacks on Jerusalem and Haifa, the word "terror" was used by the BBC only when describing Israel's retaliatory (and largely non-lethal) attacks on Palestinian military targets. (By contrast, the BBC didn't hesitate to use the word "terrorism" last week, when one of its own correspondents, Frank Gardner, was shot and badly wounded by an al Qaeda gunman in Saudi Arabia.)
Some of the foreign BBC staff are quite open about their sympathies for Hamas. The senior BBC Arabic Service correspondent in the Gaza Strip, Fayad Abu Shamala, told a Hamas rally on May 6, 2001, (attended by the then Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin) that journalists and media organizations in Gaza, including the BBC, are "waging the campaign [of resistance/terror against Israel] shoulder-to-shoulder together with the Palestinian people."
The best the BBC could do in response to requests from Israel that they distance themselves from these remarks at the time, was to issue a statement saying, "Fayad's remarks were made in a private capacity. His reports have always matched the best standards of balance required by the BBC."
Indeed, today, three years later, the BBC is continuing to use Abu Shamala as much as ever. He was, for example, one of the BBC reporters in Gaza last month, who contributed to the BBC's highly slanted reporting (on both the BBC English and Arabic services) of Israel's operation to root out Hamas bomb-makers in Rafah in the southern Gaza.
A MINUTE'S SILENCE FOR SHEIKH YASSIN
Back in London, BBC staff are careful to promote sympathy for Hamas and other Palestinian terror groups in more subtle ways. Jenny Tonge, a Liberal Democrat member of the British parliament, declared in January that she would consider becoming a suicide bomber if she were Palestinian (and subsequently led a minute's silence in March — in the House of Commons no less — for the deceased Hamas leader Sheikh Yassin, who issued orders for dozens of suicide attacks against Israeli civilians). Since then, Tonge's invitations to appear on BBC have noticeably increased.
She was sacked by the Liberal Democrat party leader as parliamentary spokesman for children's issues for these remarks, but this hasn't bothered the BBC, who now invite her on both radio and TV to discuss the Middle East.
In one case, in February, BBC Radio 4's Flagship morning news program Today actually sent her off to "Palestine" (at the BBC's expense), after which they broadcast her "diary," in which she further defamed Israel and reiterated her sympathy for suicide bombing. She has also repeated her support for suicide bombers on air on the BBC on other occasions.
Similarly, there is the case of Oxford University literature lecturer Tom Paulin — who among other things has compared Jewish settlers to Nazis, has said they should be "shot dead," compared the Israeli army to Hitler's SS, and said he could "understand how suicide bombers feel." He continues to be invited as a regular guest commentator by the BBC; indeed, he is one of the two or three most frequent contributors to their most widely screened program on the arts.
DON'T MENTION LIMB AMPTUTATION
Those who dare criticize Arab extremism are dealt with somewhat differently by the BBC. For example, Robert Kilroy-Silk — who does not appear on BBC news but hosted a daytime chat show — was immediately taken off air after he wrote in a non-BBC newspaper article in January that Arabs were "suicide bombers, limb amputators, women repressors." He swiftly apologized and the newspaper in question acknowledged that he had written "Arab governments" and this was inadvertently changed to "Arabs" as a result of an editing error. But Kilroy-Silk was rapidly sacked by the BBC nevertheless.
However, Kilroy-Silk's remarks — as many Arab moderates who welcomed them, such as the Egyptian human-rights campaigner Ibrahim Nawar, have pointed out — were not wholly inaccurate. Limb amputation and repression of women are enshrined in Saudi law, and suicide bombing of Israelis and Americans strongly encouraged by some in government circles. Paulin's comments, on the other hand, were both blatantly biased and incendiary.
Kilroy-Silk — whose article appeared just a few days before Tonge's suicide-bomb remarks — apologized. He said he "greatly regretted the offence caused" by his remarks. But this wasn't enough to satisfy the BBC. Paulin and Tonge have offered no such apology; but then the BBC gave no indication they would expect one.
When Harvard University later withdrew an invitation for Paulin to lecture, the BBC seemed to think it was all a bit of a joke. BBC news online commented: "[Paulin's] knockabout style has ruffled feathers in the US, where the Jewish question is notoriously sensitive."
"THE STUFF OF LEGENDS"
The BBC rarely misses an opportunity to denigrate Israel or its prime minister. One program even staged a mock "war crimes" trial for Ariel Sharon. (The BBC verdict — that Sharon has a case to answer — was never in doubt.) Yasser Arafat, though, receives a very different treatment. One particularly cosmetic exercise was a 30-minute BBC profile of Arafat which described him as a "hero," and "an icon," and spoke of him as having "performer's flare," "charisma and style," "personal courage," and being "the stuff of legends." Adjectives applied to him included "clever," "respectable," and "triumphant." He was also inaccurately referred to as "President." [2]
This was broadcast on July 5, 2002 — just two weeks after President Bush had called for a change in Palestinian leadership following revelations about Arafat's links with suicide-terror attacks. But then the BBC knew that they would get this kind of approach when they asked the notoriously anti-Israeli journalist, Suzanne Goldenberg (formerly Jerusalem correspondent for the London Guardian, now the Guardian's Washington correspondent) to make the program.
A particularly blatant example of bias, perhaps, but not an isolated one. The BBC rarely mention Arafat's dictatorial rule, his endemic corruption, or the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade — the terror group he set up after launching the current Intifada, a group which, in recent months, has outstripped Hamas in the number of terror attacks perpetrated against Israeli civilians. As for Hamas, Sheikh Yassin was recently described by one of BBC radio's Gaza correspondents, Zubeida Malik, as "polite, charming and witty, a deeply religious man."
DID SOMEONE SAY DOUBLE STANDARDS?
The BBC's double standards are clear to almost everyone except, it seems, the BBC itself and its sympathizers in the press. A BBC spokeswoman for example, told the Guardian (May 23, 2002) after the BBC was accused by British Jews of being a prime force in inciting renewed anti-Semitism in the U.K., that "The BBC's reporting about the Middle East is scrupulously fair, accurate and balanced."
The official BBC line has not changed since then, even after the scathing criticism of the Hutton report. Such are the level of arrogance and the spirit of denial that permeate the BBC newsroom. Indeed, recent denials of political bias have been stronger than ever. Of course, the BBC would be in danger of losing its enormous public funding if they were admitted.
For a short while after the Hutton report was published in January, BBC staff were a little more careful in their attacks on Israel. But recently they have returned to old ways, with at least four anti-Israeli TV documentaries airing in recent weeks. That makes a total of 20 major documentaries the BBC has made on Israel since 2001 (all but one attacking Israel.) That is three times more than the number of documentaries the BBC has made on any other single country, with the exception of Britain.
Meanwhile, to my knowledge, the BBC has made no documentaries about human-rights abuses in the Arab world; or about Palestinian schoolbooks; or about the Palestinian Authority's incitement of the Palestinian population; or about the Palestinian Authority's funding of terrorism allegedly with the use of European Union aid funds.
The problem is not that every individual correspondent is biased. Whereas some, such as Orla Guerin, make almost no attempt at balance, others, such as James Reynolds in Jerusalem, do make a genuine effort to be fair. The problem is that the culture that permeates the BBC, a habit of thought that has become engrained throughout the network, allows only one worldview, in which the U.S. and Israel are vilified well beyond any reasoned or justified criticism of anything these states have actually done.
Hiring practices reinforce this. Recently, Ibrahim Helal, editor in chief of the much-criticized al Jazeera TV network was hired by the BBC World Service Trust. The job the BBC wanted him for? To advise on balance in Middle East coverage, and head "media training projects," i.e. to train BBC (and perhaps other journalists) into "understanding the Middle East better."
OCCUPIED WEST BANK OF THE SAHARA?
This culture makes it all but impossible for anyone who thinks differently to gain or hold a job at BBC news. Who at the BBC can name the leader of the Polisario Front, fighting for independence against a 25-year Arab occupation of the Western Sahara (a territory bigger than Britain)? Who at the BBC has done a report about all the Arab settlers that the Moroccan government has been bussing into the area to take the land of the indigenous Saharawi people, since Morocco annexed it 25 years ago?
This article has been limited to BBC news programming. But even elsewhere there is anti-Israel (and some would argue anti-Jewish sentiment). Each summer, for example, BBC Radio 3, a station largely devoted to classical music, carries a broadcast of "The Proms." The Proms are a British institution, a jovial annual event at the end of the British summer during which classical favorites and (on the Proms' final night) tunes such as "Rule Britannia" and "Land of Hope and Glory" are sung by the audience with great fanfare and light-hearted flag-waving at the Royal Albert Hall in London. Yet on the evenings of August 13 and August 20, 2002, the BBC Radio 3 producers decided to fill the time during the interval in their live broadcast (there are no commercials on the BBC) with a recitation of poems that compared Israeli actions to those of the Nazis and asked Holocaust survivors why they had "not learnt their lesson."
A GLOBAL PROBLEM
The BBC's Middle East problem is not just a British problem but also an international one. The BBC pours forth its worldview not just in English, but in almost every language of the Middle East: Pashto, Persian, Arabic, Turkish. Needless to say it declines to broadcast in Hebrew, even though it does broadcast in the languages of other small nations: Slovene and Slovak, Macedonian and Albanian, Azeri and Uzbek, Kazakh and Kyrgyz, and so on. (It doesn't broadcast in Kurdish either; but then the BBC doesn't typically concern itself with the rights and aspirations of persecuted Kurds in Muslim-majority states like Syria and Iran. We didn't hear much on the BBC, for example, when dozens of Syrian Kurds were killed and injured by President Assad's regime two months ago.)
Throughout the world the BBC enjoys exceptional influence. An article last month in the liberal Israeli daily Haaretz, for example, quotes a leading Lithuanian campaigner against anti-Semitism as saying that inflammatory and biased international BBC news coverage against Israel was helping to revive anti-Semitism in Lithuania against those few Jews remaining who were not murdered in the Holocaust.
The English-language version of the BBC seems to be just the tip of the iceberg. My friend Kamran al-Karadaghi, an urbane, moderate, and thoughtful Iraqi, who was for a decade the political editor of the Arabic-language newspaper al-Hayat in London, and who until last week served as head of Radio Free Iraq, tells me that the BBC Arabic-language service is not just far worse than the English-language BBC. It is "even worse," he says, than al Jazeera, in the vitriol it pours out against America and Israel.
Footnotes
[1] For more on these and other quotes, see here and Steven Stalinsky's "Kingdom Comes to North America" (after which the Canadian government rescinded al-Sudais' visa request).
[2] For many other examples contrasting BBC coverage of Sharon and Arafat, see the well-compiled reports by London lawyer Trevor Asserson at www.bbcwatch.com.
— Tom Gross is a former Middle East correspondent for the London Sunday Telegraph and the New York Daily News. Among his previous pieces for NRO are "All The News That's Fit to Print? The New York Times and Israel" and "Jeningrad. What the British media said."
In February 2005 the Australian journalist Pamela Bone, already close to her death from cancer, published an article in the Melbourne Age entitled “Where are the Western Feminists?” Some of us would still like to know.
The immediate spur to Pamela Bone’s article had been the piercing silence from Western feminists on the subject of Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s condemnation of how women were being treated in the culture of Islam. In asking her question, Pamela Bone already knew why the Western feminists were saying so little. They were saying little not just about Islam, but about Hinduism or any other culture which, when the behaviour of its more extreme groups towards women attracts criticism, bridles as if it is being attacked as a whole. Of all the liberal democracies, Australia is the one where the idea is most firmly entrenched among the local intelligentsia that the culture of the West is the only criminal, all other cultures being victims no matter what atrocities they might condone even within their own families.
Perhaps the most successful example of how a western liberal democracy can absorb migrant diasporas into its social texture, Australia would have reason to vaunt itself as a multicultural society if the supposedly universal unhappiness of the Aboriginals did not, in the eyes of its guilty intelligentsia, make the claim seem empty. But in Australia multiculturalism is not only a social aim, largely attained. It is also an ideology, in which form, to borrow Pascal Bruckner’s useful phrase, it becomes the racism of the anti-racists. Australian multiculturalist ideologues will call anyone a racist who dares to suggest that another culture than the one in which they flourish might have aspects more repellent than their own. And it was just such accusations that Pamela Bone heard ringing in her ears when she made her exit.
The essay you are reading now has its own history, which will probably be part of its subject, because I have nothing original to say on the matter. Indeed that was why I could never seem to get the thing written. That there were countries in the world where the culture visited hellish violence on women even when their governments professed a measure of equality, and that these governments were unlikely to temper the psychopathic inclinations of the culture unless there was a measure of democracy sufficient to separate the state from theocratic pressure: these conclusions seemed obvious. The only mystery was why so few female intellectuals seemed willing to reach them.
Pamela Bone was still very much alive when I began making sketches for this essay back in the first year of the decade, before the successful attack on the World Trade Center. Her cancer had already been diagnosed but she was fighting it hard and had definitely not stopped writing. Indeed she was producing some of her most adventurous things. She had made the inherent conflict between feminism and multiculturalism one of her subjects.
To do so took bravery, especially in Australia, where the multiculturalist ideology – as opposed, often directly opposed, to the reasonable approval of multiculturalism as a desirable form of social organization -- is not just a consensus, as I have said, but often thought to be fundamental to a liberal position, and therefore not to be questioned. The distinguished writer Helen Garner had been similarly daring when she raised the possibility that the occasional woman might be evil enough to falsely accuse a man of sexual harassment – a conjecture on Garner’s part which drew the wrath of all those legions of Australian female pundits who seemed honestly to believe either (a) that if the occasional innocent man should get locked up it would be a small price to pay for the sure punishment of those men who were guilty, or (b) all men were guilty. Like Helen Garner, if on a less celebrated scale, Pamela Bone was a fine enough writer to make the onlooker toy with the possibility that these matters vital to women were being debated among them.
But the onlooker needed to overlook the fact that such independent voices were few, whether in Australia or anywhere else. And as the decade wore on, the number did not notably increase, especially in the matter of the treatment of women within the culture of Islam, and especially in the matter of honour crimes. My own impression, drawn over the course of these past ten years or so, is that the amount of protest about honour crimes from Western female thinkers has diminished as the news about honour crimes has proliferated, and has steadily shrunk towards nothing even as news about honour crimes among immigrant populations in the Western countries has become more conspicuous.
In Britain especially, the worse it gets, the fewer objections we hear from writers in the serious newspapers. (In the unserious ones, the stories run all the time, as a kind of snuff video on a loop: but the purpose there is to play on fears about immigration in general, and not to highlight a failing in the law.) A serious British journalist such as Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, who promotes the difficult double programme of wanting Islam respected and honour crimes condemned, would not have to be quite so brave if she had more-back-up. But the feminists do not want to know, or, if they know, prefer to do nothing. This was certainly a conclusion I didn’t want to draw, because I never wanted to publish this essay, or even to make much more than a start on writing it. I wanted women to do the job. After seventy years of hard training I had finally accepted that it was not a woman’s job to wash my socks, but I still thought that if there were thousands of madmen all over the world ready to murder or mutilate their own daughters for imaginary crimes, then it was a woman’s job to object in the first instance, always provided that she was free to do so. On the whole, however, it hasn’t happened.
Some people keep a file of outrageous things they read in the newspapers, and sometimes those same people are eventually found dead among their heaps of clippings, having understandably decided that life is not worth going on with. Keen to avoid the same fate, I make a point of throwing almost everything away. But there is a paragraph I saw in 2001, before the twin towers were brought down, that I have never been able to get rid of. When I clipped it out in the first place, I knew it would be harder to lose than a bad dream. I would use the clipping as a marker in a work-book, and then deliberately lose the work-book in my inland sea of papers; but I always knew where the clipping was. I knew that it would go on sending out its beeping signal until I had summoned up the courage to write something about it. Perhaps the time has come. Anyway, here is the clipping, reduced to the form of a single quotation, with a credit for the speaker.
All women killed in cases of honour are prostitutes. I believe prostitutes deserve to die.
--- Abdul Karim Dughmi, former Minister of Justice in Jordan, quoted in the Sunday Times Magazine, July 8th, 2001.
The “former Minister of Justice” no longer held his post, but he was still prominent enough in public life to have his opinion quoted. A key part of his belief system, it emerged, centred on the principle that if a girl is raped, her father is honour-bound to kill her. At the time, as clueless as anyone else in the West, I was not yet fully familiar with the idea of taking revenge on the victim. Later on, when it finally emerged that a feature of the conflict in the Balkans during the 1990s was the reluctance of Muslim girls who had been raped to tell their own families, I woke up. But even while still asleep I was impressed by what this man had said, mainly because of the eminence of the post he had held, and in which country. The fact that this principle could be enunciated at all by any man not clinically insane attained a special piquancy in the context of Jordan, then as now held to be a centre of enlightenment within the Arab world. Stung to attention, I started to keep an eye on the news coming out of Jordan.
I should say straight away, when it comes to Jordan, that there was, and still is, reason for hope. Obviously Queen Rania has never believed any of this lethal nonsense, and she has often verbally condemned it as an anachronism. Even saying that much couldn’t have been easy, but she has contrived to back her words with action, and it was partly due to her influence that the notorious Article 340 of the Jordanian criminal code was at last modified so that men who murder women on a point of honour no longer automatically walk free straight away. But they still walk free soon enough to make you wonder if an enlightened ruling elite, and even a reformed justice system, really has much chance against the ingrained prejudices of the culture. We know that the present monarch, Abdullah II, and his elegant wife have done what they can for the liberal reform of the Jordanian system of justice. But we also know that they would be receiving less praise for their bravery and originality if the Jordanian system of justice had been less recalcitrant. Or, to cut the irony before it starts softening the enormity, it is a fair bet that the culture, in Jordan, goes on treating women like dirt.
Upon investigation this proves to be the case. In Jordan, to expiate the shame brought upon a family by loss of honour, a woman is murdered every two weeks. Not only the crime of having been raped brings loss of honour. A rumour can bring loss of honour. Apparently there is little to encourage fathers in these cases to the consideration that there might be loss of honour involved in murdering their helpless daughters. The King and Queen have tried: they have spoken out for reform. The lawyer Asma Kadaar and a journalist on The Jordan Times have bravely devoted a good part of their working lives to the cause of sanity – particularly bravely because they are both female, and thus potentially subject to the self-righteous vengefulness of any mentally challenged male with honour on his mind. These advocates of elementary justice are people of influence, but they count for little against the collective dementia of the culture.
One says “the culture” because one is not allowed to say “the state”. The state, we are assured, isn’t really like that. Theoretically, in Jordan, a father must go to gaol for killing his daughter. And so he does, but he is out again soon enough to be in good shape for a hero’s welcome. In response to the influential liberal voices, the Jordanian system of justice is currently, in August 2009, tying itself in yet another series of knots as it strives to assure the world that the courts will not admit a plea about “honour” when it comes to murder committed “in a fit of fury caused by an unlawful act on the part of the victim”, and that a convicted murderer in such a case, instead of being let out after three months – six months in severe cases -- might have to serve the full term of two years. (A 29-year old man who stabbed his raped sister twelve times was sentenced to fifteen years but has just had his sentence halved. Will anyone be stunned when the sentence is halved again?) It seems to occur to nobody, not even the concerned royal family, that the sentencing policy is laughably unjust even when it is strictly applied. What a threat: if you murder your daughter because you think she has been raped you might very well go to gaol for months on end.
We are told that when it comes to a case of honour, Jordan is one of the more progressive Islamic communities. In Jordan, only one quarter of all homicides are cases of honour. In the Palestinian sectors of the West Bank and in Gaza, the proportion is two thirds. In Pakistan about a thousand women get killed every year, and a startling, if lesser, incidence of ritual murder is true wherever Pakistanis live in the outside world. When a girl in a British Pakistani community is set on fire by her brothers, or has her face ruined with acid by a rejected candidate for the role of husband, we hear about it in the newspapers, although seldom for long; but in Pakistan such incidents aren’t news at all. They happen three times a day. They are part of the culture. It was news in Britain when, on July 14, 2006, in London, a gifted Pakistani girl (her name was Sumari) was slain by her father, brother and cousin. It needed all of them to do it, because apparently she had to be stabbed eighteen times. Her crime had been to disobey them, and she died of the proof that they had been well worth disobeying. Taking it on the lam, the father – who, while thicker than any brick, had at least been smart enough to spot the lack of congruity between British law and his own beliefs – holed up in his land of origin, Pakistan, thus providing yet another statistic in one half of the two way traffic whereby potential victims, if they are lucky, hide out in the West, whereas perpetrators flee the West to hide out in the East. That two-way traffic should surely be enough by itself to define the nature of the horrible cultural interchange, which is mainly a matter of our culture failing to provide sufficient protection against the consequences of theirs.
I long ago lost count, just as I lost the clippings, of those occasions in which a local British police force could do no more than “warn” a woman whose life was in danger from the men around her. In late July 2009 the newspapers were featuring –but for not more than the usual few days – stories of a case in which a woman had been “warned” after the men around her poured acid down the throat of the man she had been seeing. The man ended up in hospital with his tongue destroyed, but it appears that the tongues of the police had been destroyed too, because a “warning” was the only help they could give, apparently for fear that the local immigrant community might take offence. There is seldom, apparently, much chance of “warning” the men in such cases that if they publicly avow violent intentions towards a woman they will be hauled up, and there is never any chance at all that such men will be expelled from the country. No Minister of Community Cohesion has yet said that all communities would have a better chance of cohering with each other if those communities whose beliefs about honour were contrary to the law of the land could change them.
By this time the words “community” and “culture” are starting to sound like what they are: weasel words for institutionalised sadism, which the naïve onlooker is likely to suspect might have something to do with the religion, whether it be Hindu, Sikh or Islamic. But at the mere mention of Islam, cue the experts: apparently these cases of honour have no justification in Sharia, and therefore honour crimes have nothing to do with the religion. In Sharia, four witnesses have to catch a pair of illicit lovers in flagrante before they can both be killed. We are supposed to be reassured by these rigorous requirements of sufficient evidence, and are thought to be niggling if we question the assumption that the death penalty is mandatory if the case is proved. The requirement that the culprits should be killed goes unexamined. No doubt, if it were examined, the community would be placed in danger, and the culture begin to fray. But surely, if moderate Islam is to hold its own against its extremist wings, then fraying, in that one respect at least, is exactly what the culture needs to do. There are more than a billion Muslims who are not engaged in jihad against the west, and not likely to be. We should try to remember just how few people are trying to kill us, even when they feel sorely provoked. But if the non-fanatical majority can’t find a voice to condemn the few among their fellows who see nothing wrong with killing their own women for imaginary crimes, then they either condone that attitude or are afraid of those who hold it: either way, not a very encouraging start towards the more liberal Muslim future that we have been promised.
If Jordan is progressive, you can imagine what things must be like elsewhere: except that you can’t imagine. Interviewed in our press, a Tunisian woman who dares to write about what is going on in her homeland clearly credits herself with the life expectancy of a snowflake on a hot stove. No wonder she is a lone voice. From Afghanistan, when the Taliban ruled, the reports were awful beyond belief. But we did better if we believed them, because it turned out that some of the Northern Alliance forces that replaced the Taliban were united only in their conviction that the Taliban were soft on women. Later on the Taliban came back to prominence and in the areas under their control things were re-established on the same plane of dementia as was the rule until just yesterday in Pakistan’s Swat Valley, where it was considered a mercy if, when a girl’s school was burned to the ground, the girls were not still inside it. At the time of writing, the Pakistani army has cleared the Taliban out of the Swat Valley, to the point where the streets where they used to dump the bodies of the punished are now full again of living people. But when the BBC interviews boy “fighters” who have been rescued from the Taliban’s suicide schools, the hoys have to be fully masked for their “protection.” It doesn’t sound as if the madmen have gone very far away, and judging by the fact that the BBC correspondent has only her face showing, the local men who theoretically aren’t insane might not be as sane as all that.
We had also better believe that where men alone decide what women’s rights are, the results are rarely good. Western liberal democracy, or a reasonable imitation of Western liberal democracy when it comes to the rule of law, is still the only kind of society we know about where women are not at the mercy of systematic injustice –that is, of justice conceived of and maintained as a weapon of terror. Where women are concerned, countries like Japan have climbed out of their dark histories to the exact extent that they have become Western-style liberal democracies, and no further. The same is true for the “Tiger” economies: the condition of women might have been ameliorated only because it has been thought expedient to subject theocratic pressures to the rule of law, but it doesn’t matter why the law is there, as long as it is there. The rule of law does not guarantee justice, but there is no justice without it. It has been one of the sour amusements provided by our feminist movement in its modern phase to watch its proponents trying to blink this fact.
At one point our feminists, getting frustrated as the pace slowed down in the home stretch to utopia, started telling us that other cultures (cultures practising clitoridectomy, for example) were more “authentic” in the respect of female sexual identity. A woman in Somalia, we were told, at least knows she is a woman. At one point my friend Germaine Greer could be heard propounding this view, but she has a good heart, and perhaps found reason to dial back on her fervour after Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who has actually suffered a clitoridectomy in Somalia, pointed out that the practice, far from being a sign of authenticity, was a mechanism of repression. How Germaine Greer could ever, even momentarily, have thought anything different is a matter for study in a field that needs to be explored: the way Western intellectuals lose sight of elementary liberalism in the heat-haze of their own rhetoric.
In a free society, radical dissatisfaction is usually a condition of mind before it is a response to circumstances, so it has to go somewhere. As atomisation continues in the liberal democracies, the number of candidates for an irresponsible semi-intelligentsia continues to increase. They come from either wing, but are always more vociferous on the left, because capitalism provides the more blatant source of provocation. One can hardly blame them for that. What is striking is their capacity, once they run out of injustices in liberal democracy that they can blame on capitalism, to look for injustices in the rest of the world that they can blame on liberal democracy. In sub-Saharan Africa, especially, criminal states are regarded as victim states even when their sole concern is the victimisation of their own people. By now Bob Geldof seems ready to admit the possibility that he and President Mengistu of Ethiopia were in a symmetrical relationship. But Geldof is a long way ahead of most of his admirers. Food aid enthusiasts are still reluctant to believe that most of the money raised for Ethiopia was wasted.
But it was worse than wasted. It fuelled the engine of injustice, and the result of injustice, in Ethiopia and in any other African country that melts down, is invariably a situation in which the lot of women, already bad, gets worse. In those failed states where Islam is a factor, the sufferings of women seem to be even worse than in the others, but in the others it is bad enough to suggest that what we are talking about goes far beyond religion. An African state where men rule the roost is usually on its way to chaos, and the inevitable inference is that a fair shake for women is the only hope for a decent future. It is some encouragement to find that Barack Obama, whose influence is bound to count in Africa for the foreseeable future, seems to think the same. His excellent first book Dreams from My Father is ruled by the spirit of his mother, not his father. She is the responsible one. And as the Australian Aboriginal political thinker Noel Pearson has insisted, the right to responsibility is crucial. (Pearson, who argues that welfare for Aboriginals should be accompanied by a strict application of the law against abusive Aboriginal men, will no doubt become an object for execration among Australian intellectuals once they have finished collating the evidence that he is a CIA sleeper who was planted in Cooktown by a low-flying C-130 after he completed his training at Langley, Virginia.)
The other crucial requirement, surely, is for the pampered intelligentsia of the West to give up finally and forever on any notion that the Third World –for all its deprivations and perhaps because of them – is some kind of Eden in which countervailing values against the excesses of the West may be found. What may be found is more often a heap of dead bodies. Most of those get blamed on the West, too, but when half of the population of Rwanda sets out to murder the other half, with no recourse to Western technology except the metal to make machetes, the explanation starts looking thin. And always it is mandatory for the women to be raped as well as being chopped up, the only question in the minds of the men being about what order in which to do these things. No doubt the same sort of dialogue was going on somewhere in the mind of Fred West, but at least he found it advisable to hide the corpses.
It should be obvious that in Africa there is little hope without education and that any educational reform should emphasise the educating of women. We can’t be sure that the rise of women to political prominence, there or anywhere, will guarantee the beneficial modification of a monolithic state – Madame Mao, after all, was a product of the Chinese educational system – but we can be sure that any monolithic state which resists the very idea of educating women has no intention of liberalising itself. This principle holds true all the way up to – or down to, if you like – the level of Saudi Arabia, which even the West’s most ardently anti-Western feminists are ready to concede is an organized insult to their gender. (They would probably be less ready to concede this if Saudi Arabia were a declared enemy of the United States, but that’s by the way.) Where women are concerned – and where women are concerned we are all concerned, or should be --Saudi Arabia is such a horror show that it would constitute all on its own sufficient reason for the West to wean itself off oil, if only to deprive those untold thousands of idle princes and useless Koranic scholars of their endless supply of free money, large amounts of which are used in an export drive to flood the world with extremist doctrine on the intellectual level of the Sexcetera channel but with the virulence of botulism.
Countries in receipt of free money are under no compulsion to develop a real economy, and are thus less likely than ever to see even the material benefits, let alone the moral ones, of setting women free.
Similarly, to return to my main theme, it should be permissible to say that if Islamic leaders really believe that the Koran is a book of justice, they should enforce its spirit. It took Western civilization almost two millennia to do a decent job of enforcing the spirit of the New Testament, and part of the job consisted of imposing a separation between church and state, which couldn’t be done until the book was subjected to critical scrutiny, so that it could be taken as a source of benevolent metaphor rather than a set of inflexible precepts. In this regard, the enforced halt, in the 19th Century, to any critical scrutiny of the Islamic sacred writings had such deleterious effects that they were regretted even by Edward Said. But even in less enlightened times, the New Testament had one salient virtue: the merciful teachings of Jesus Christ. In Italy, perpetrators of crimes of passion were still being given a free pass well into my own day, but finally even the Catholic Church felt obliged to remind the legal system that the Son of God might have taken a dim view. It would be a blessing for Islam if its book featured a leading character imbued with the belief that when a woman is taken in adultery the best idea is not to throw stones at her unless you are certain of being without sin yourself. Jesus never said that if four of you catch her in the act, you can stone her to death.
But at least the Islamic holy writings say that Allah is merciful. Some kind of Islamic protestant reform might start from that assurance. In the case of Christianity, protestant reform started with pointing out what was actually written in the book, instead of concocted by a priesthood. Islamic protestants might have less to go on, and it could be that Ayaan Hirsi Ali is correct in wanting the whole religious edifice pulled down. But if we think that a reformation, rather than a dissolution, is more desirable, or at least more likely, then surely a movement that puts the emphasis back on the less fanatical interpretation of the texts that prevailed before the Wahabist aberration is one to be encouraged. Islamic protestants, however, seem more likely to come from among women than among men. Recent initiatives from putatively liberal thinkers among Islamic men have not been very convincing. Paul Berman has dealt in detail with the thought processes of Tariq Ramadan but really Nicholas Sarkozy had already done the necessary when, before he was President of France, he asked Ramadan on television whether he condemned the stoning of women, and Ramadan said that he could have no opinion until the imams had discussed the matter first. And Ali A. Allawi’s recent assurances that the Islamic civilization of the future will be ruled with the aid of a modernised Sharia sounded a lot less promising than his fond reminiscences of what the secular movement in some of the Arab countries used to be like when he was young enough to enjoy it.
A modernised Sharia? Even the Archbishop of Canterbury would have smelt a rat there. Instances of these nice noises from Islamic male thinkers could be multiplied, but even at their best they sound hollow beside those cries of protest arising from women where protesting is momentarily permitted without penalty, as it was when the admirable Wafa Sultan confronted a studio full of imams on Al Jazeera Television and told them where they could put their parade of clerical authority. But Wafa Sultan was safe in America when she said her piece, although the assembled male clerics would undoubtedly have thrown stones at her satellite image if there had been any stones available. It’s the cries of protest when protesting is not permitted, however, that really tell you what you need to know. The cries tend to be brief, and in the case of the girl we now all know as Neda Iran, we might not have heard the cry at all if she had not been so beautiful. The cult of glamour worked, for once, in the cause of justice. It was a crumb of comfort to offset against the depressing extent to which the cult of glamour has failed to work in the cause of Aung San Suu Kyi. She is beautiful too, and she is still alive: but she is wasting away.
What is to be done about this world-wide victimisation of women? What else but to condemn it? To do so, it would be a help to uncouple the question from all the other questions that look more pressing but are much more equivocal. Let me end where I started, in Australia, where Pamela Bone asked “Where are the Western feminists?” when she already knew the answer. They were hiding, under the guise of concerning themselves with those pressing questions. In Australia, which is in so many ways the ideal Western liberal democracy, and all the more instructive for being so, it is hard to find more than a handful of pundits, academics, journalists and broadcasters who do not hold the West responsible for world poverty, Israeli imperialism, genocide in Iraq, and the imminent heat death of what they insist on calling the Planet. On each point, they might well be less silly than they sound. They can make a case for their views. The feminists among them are especially eloquent in the condemnation of Western evils. But Pamela Bone wanted the feminists to speak out clearly about a simpler topic, which can be exemplified by a sign on the wall of a temple in Bali. NO MENSTRUATION WOMEN ALLOW. And the fact that there are men in charge of synagogues who feel the same is not really an answer, because except for the occasional ultra-orthodox head-case no man who runs a synagogue wants to burn the women inside it.
But there are men all over the world who really do want to kill women on a point of honour. What kind of honour is that? When are these dreadful men, and all who encourage and “understand” them, to be condemned as the homicidal maniacs they are? It could be said that there is not much point in condemning what we can’t change, but in our own countries, where it could be changed if the will existed, condemnation would surely be a useful first step, and it might help some of the countries of origin to at least see the point. Jordan, which is sensitive enough to Western opinion for its Queen to see the advantage of regular appearances in Hello magazine, has recently announced a shelter system for women running away from danger. While the women are in the shelter, the men in their families are given counselling. I suppose that’s a start, although some of the women might be wise not to take it on trust when they are told the danger is over. Daddy says it’s all right to come home now.
-- Standpoint, September 2009
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