Martin Amis is No Racist

In his G2 cover story on Monday, Ronan Bennett was wrong to condemn Martin Amis for his comments about Islam, argues Christopher Hitchens

Wednesday November 21, 2007
The Guardian

Ronan Bennett's clumsy tirade against Martin Amis in G2 on Monday will not have been a complete waste of space if it allows us to revisit the words "discriminate" or "discrimination". In a public quarrel that originated between two professors of English (Amis and Terry Eagleton) it ought not to be necessary to remind people that these terms are, at root, complimentary. To have a discriminating palate, for example, is to enjoy good taste. I have argued for years that the concept is absurd when applied to racists. "Discrimination" is something that they just can't manage. Indeed, it is the very thing of all things that they cannot, by definition, manage. A racist is a racist precisely because he can't distinguish between a Jew and another Jew, or an Asian or West Indian or Chechen. The "out" groups are all made up of generalised amalgams and there can be no exceptions.

Thus to accuse Martin Amis of being a racist is to say that he can't tell the difference between, say, one Irishman and another. Now, a moment's thought on the part of his worst enemy would reveal that accusation to be silly and vicious, and baseless on its face. I am not writing as Amis's worst enemy. In fact, I am writing as a friend who also took issue with what he said, in unscripted conversation with a Times reporter, a short while after the ghastly assault by Muslim fanatics on our public transport system. (By the way, yes, I do think that the word "fanatic" requires that prefix in this case.) I wrote my article last autumn and it was published in the Manhattan City Journal last January, so Mr Bennett need not congratulate himself so warmly on being the only one apart from Eagleton with the nerve to raise the issue.

I grouped what Amis had said with two other statements that had been made by people I know less well. Jack Straw, a humane old social democrat from way back and a stern foe of racism, had said that he preferred his female constituents to be unveiled when they came to see him. Sam Harris, a Jewish warrior against theocracy and bigotry of all stripes, had written that it was often fascists who made the most sense when talking about immigration to Europe. The last statement had truly shocked me in the way that the Amis and Straw remarks had not, and I was therefore writing about the way in which the battle over Islamism was making good people wonder aloud about saying or thinking unpleasant or ungenerous things.

This is exactly the bull that Amis was taking by the horns. You don't have to know him, or for that matter to be an expert on Jonathan Swift, to see that the harshness Amis was canvassing was not in the least a recommendation, but rather an experiment in the limits of permissible thought. As he once wrote in another connection: "What am I to do with thoughts like these?" In that celebrated essay, he was rehearsing the idea of killing his wife and children to spare them the horror of a nuclear groundburst. Critics as literal-minded as Eagleton and Bennett would no doubt detect, in this, a buried and lurid fantasy of murder and infanticide. (By the way, when it comes to Eagletonian literal-mindedness, I have no bitterness because I am, of this infinite resource, an unintended beneficiary. In the same essay that initially attacked Amis, Eagleton also slammed me for disappointing him and not, after all, becoming the George Orwell of my generation. I have instead, he snorts, become the Evelyn Waugh! How is one to come to grips with a man so crude in his sneers that his idea of an insult is to compare me to one of the greatest novelists of the past century?)

Failing entirely to "discriminate", Bennett places criticism of Islamism on all fours with anti-semitism, hostility to the Irish, and to other xenophobic moments in our past. And yes, of course, we remember those bombs that the Jewish refugees from Russian czarism placed in our streets. We remember how (before they became good old assimilated types) they ululated praise for suicide from their synagogues, demanded the segregation of the sexes, insisted on special prayer-rooms at work, exemptions from certain laws and on the censorship of newspapers that didn't "respect" Judaism. One would have to have a capacity for fantasy of something like that order to believe in the Ronan Bennett universe of modern persecution where "those who point to the illegality of Israeli occupation are anti-semites. Those who protest against the war in Iraq are al-Qaida sympathisers and moral relativists." In which known world is that happening?

On the other hand, the world where honour killings and forced marriages happen is real, and so is the world in which mosques are distributing cassettes and DVDs calling for the murder of Jews and Hindus. (So much for precious multiculturalism.) The world where one holy book is sovereign, and only to be understood as written in one exclusive tongue. The world where djinns and devils are real, and where women are unclean and homosexuals are unspeakable, where novelists can be sentenced to death and where bombs can be left to slaughter the sort of "slags" who might go clubbing in London. And the damage that those bombs were designed to inflict was ... indiscriminate.

This is not the only manner in which Bennett gives himself away. He refers to the "Muslim dead from Iraq to Afghanistan" and conscripts them for what he imagines is his side. How dare he? Has he even begun to tot up the number of Muslims murdered by the Taliban? Or the total slaughtered in Iraq since al-Qaida began its campaign to level the Shi'a mosques? Does he think that the forces of the Northern Alliance, or the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, who fight on "our" side against barbarism, are somehow inauthentic Muslims because they prefer Bush and Blair to Mullah Omar or Abu Musab al-Zarqawi? Something in his tone makes me suspect that this may well be his problem, just as I might have preferred him to mention that it was also the Provisional IRA, and not just the 1974 Prevention of Terrorism Act, that left "the Irish community in Britain feeling like a suspect nation".

Bennett may have the ghost of a point when he insists on a sharper distinction between Islam and "Islamism" but if he wants more discrimination here he must learn not to muddy the same waters himself. Does he think Muslims are a "race", or not, and if not, how can he trade down from the already vague and dubious word "Islamophobia" to the toxic accusation of "racism" itself?

I have criticised both Mark Steyn and Oriana Fallaci for writing too obsessively about demography when it comes to Muslim immigration. But whenever I criticise any reactionary religious practice, I am at once accused myself of "insulting a billion Muslims". And it's not hard to find Islamist websites that boast of a demographic conquest to come, for the votaries of the prophet. So, which is it to be? Who is supposed to dissociate what, and from whom? This is going to take all our cultural and political intelligence and, indeed, our "sensitivity". But I'm afraid the faithful will have to get used to the idea that I, too, can be "offended" and that I, too, have deep and unalterable convictions. And it is much worse than pointless, in the face of genuine worry about the spread of real bigotry and awful violence, to try to pin the accusation of prejudice on those who are honestly attempting to ventilate the question, and to clarify it.

Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and the author, most recently, of God is not Great: the Case Against Religion.

Amis launches scathing response to accusations of Islamophobia

The Independent

12th October 2007

Martin Amis defended himself yesterday against allegations of Islamophobia, insisting it was necessary to "build all the bridges we can" with moderate Muslims, who he said constituted the majority within the faith.

Outlining his views in a letter to The Independent columnist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, who on Monday wrote in an article that the author was "with the beasts" when it came to dealing with Islam, Amis denied the accusations, insisting the remarks from which she had drawn her conclusions had been "distorted" in an article written by his colleague Professor Terry Eagleton.

"It is a dull business, correcting Eagleton's distortions, but this is the work he is obliging me to do," wrote Amis in the letter, published below in full.

"The anti-Muslim measures he says I 'advocated' I merely adumbrated, not 'in an essay' ('he wrote', 'wrote Amis'– each of these is a little lie), but in a long interview with the press."

In the interview, Amis said: "The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order. What sort of suffering? Not let them travel. Deportation – further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they're from the Middle East or from Pakistan... Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children..."

The remarks, originally published in August 2006, resurfaced this month when Eagleton, professor of English literature at Manchester University, where Amis has recently accepted a position teaching creative writing, used the interview as the basis for an article attacking Amis's alleged argument as a means of "hounding and humiliating [Muslims] as a whole [so] they would return home and teach their children to be obedient to the White Man's law". Eagleton, one of Britain's leading Marxist academics, concluded: "There seems something mildly defective about his logic."

The academic's disdain for Amis and his ideas had an earlier airing in a new introduction to his book Ideology: An Introduction in which he described the writer's father, Kingsley, as a "racist, anti-Semitic boor, a drink-sodden, self-hating reviler of women, gays and liberals" – adding :"Amis fils has clearly learnt more from him than how to turn a shapely phrase."

Amis's decision yesterday to write to Alibhai-Brown follows her intervention in the bitter academic spat in her weekly column. Under the headline "Expel the Muslim fanatics who want conflict", Alibhai-Brown recalled sharing a drink with the writer at last year's Cheltenham Festival – when, she said, on the face of it they should have agreed on ways of tackling Islamic terrorism in the UK. "He has pitched himself against demonic Muslims and is at war with them too," she wrote.

However, Alibhai-Brown said, having read the remarks quoted in Eagleton's essay, farfrom occupying common ground on the issue, Amis was "with the beasts" when it came to dealing with Islam, with "the Muslim-baiters and haters, these days as likely to come from the Groucho and Garrick clubs as the nasty, secret venues used by neo-fascists." She said Amis was "another kind of threat to society".

THE LETTER...

Dear Yasmin,

Yes, I remember those drinks we had at the Cheltenham Festival last year – just the four of us, you and Mr Brown, me and Ms Fonseca. (You enjoyed a Ribena, as I recall, while I addressed myself to a powerful scotch.) That night you revealed, inter alia, that you were Shia; and, as far as I understand it, the Shia minority speaks for the more dreamy and poetic face of Islam, the more lax and capacious (tolerant, for example, of representations of the human form), the more spiritual (in the general sense of that word), as opposed to the Sunnis, whose approach is known to be stricter and more legalistic. Your Shia identity endeared you to me, and made me feel protective, because Islamism, in most of its manifestations, not only wants to kill me – it wants to kill you.

When you write that I am "with the beasts" on Islamic questions, it is because you've been listening, rather dreamily perhaps, to Professor Terry Eagleton. Now Eagleton, Yasmin, has a chair at Manchester University, where I have recently taken up an enjoyable post, and he is a man of a redundant but familiar type: an ideological relict, unable to get out of bed in the morning without the dual guidance of God and Karl Marx. More remarkably, he combines a cruising hostility with an almost neurotic indifference to truth; on the matter of checking his facts, he is, to be frank, an embarrassment to the academic profession. But his human need is simple enough: he wants attention to be paid to his self-righteousness – righteousness being his particular brand of vanity.

It is a dull business, correcting Eagleton's distortions, but this is the work he is obliging me to do. The anti-Muslim measures he says I "advocated" I merely adumbrated, not "in an essay" ("he wrote", "wrote Amis" – each of these is an untruth), but in a long interview with the press. It was a thought experiment, or a mood experiment, and the remarks were preceded by the following: "There's a definite urge – don't you have it? – to say... [etc, etc]." I felt that urge, for a day or two. My mood, I admit, was bleak – how I longed, Yasmin, for your soothing hand on my brow! It was, in its way, one of the bitterest moments, one of the moments of wormwood, in the strange tale that began five years earlier, in September 2001.

The press interview took place in the immediate aftermath of the foiled plot (August 2006) to obliterate 10 commercial jets with explosives put together in transit. Which would have resulted in the deaths of another 3,000 random Westerners, the majority of them women and children (these were summer flights across the North Atlantic). Human beings, born of women, caressed such thoughts in their minds.

There were two additional depressants. At least one of the alleged would-be mass murderers had taken the trouble to convert to Islam, suggesting that the exterminatory virus was about to mutate, like bird flu. And I'm sure you remember, Yasmin, that passengers on this route were suddenly forbidden to take books on the eight-hour flight – a resonant symbolic victory for the forces of ignorance, humourlessness, literalism, boredom and misery.

Anyway, the mood, the retaliatory "urge" soon evaporated, and I went back to feeling that we must, of course, build all the bridges we can between ourselves and the Muslim majority, which we know to be moderate. Moderate, and mute. The quietism is perhaps no mystery. In 15th-century Spain, not many people, I imagine, were proclaiming that the Inquisition had gone too far. The extremists, for now, have the monopoly of violence, intimidation, and self-righteousness. Meanwhile, I don't want to stripsearch you, Yasmin, or do anything else that would trouble or even momentarily surprise your dignity, or that of any other eirenic Muslim.

People like Eagleton are the nearest thing we have to the "iron mullahs": he is, in other words, a deluded flailer and stirrer. He recently did a similar job on my old mucker Sir Salman Rushdie; and the rigged-up spat ended with a helpless apology from Manchester. I don't know, or can't remember, how you felt about the knighthood. My father (also lazily and cornily defamed by Eagleton) said of his KBE: "It's not too little, but it is too late." An anachronistic award, perhaps – though one fully deserved by the author of the triumphant Shalimar the Clown. The "storm" that followed the announcement was unforeseen by everybody, including the Fourth Estate (which then hollered on about how "inevitable" it was). You see, time had advanced, in the West, since 1989. Time moves more slowly in Iran and Pakistan. As I don't need to tell you, Yasmin, there is something the matter with the Islamic clock.

You wrong your own intelligence when you write that atheism is another form of fanaticism. This notion is a philosophical non-starter. Adherence, however "moderate", to a holy book that recommends (for instance) the murder of apostates and the beating of women (on suspicion of disobedience) carries certain consequences. Whereas nothing follows from atheism. With atheism, there is no what-next.

I am off to Cheltenham tomorrow afternoon. And I hope to see you at the bar. With all best wishes to you and your husband,

Martin

Lawyers Sap Our Will to Combat Terrorism

Michael Burleigh
The Times
27th July 2007

Many jihadis seek to create a global caliphate, ruled by Sharia. At best, Christians, Hindus, and Jews would live in a state of submission tantamount to second-class citizenship. If they got above themselves, they would suffer the persecutions Islamists visited on the Coptic Christians of Egypt. The rule of Islamists has resulted in murderous chaos – 150,000 died in Algeria during the 1990s when madmen decided that most of the Muslim population were apostates. The Taleban anti-state so ruined Afghanistan that Americans joked that they had to bomb it forwards to the Stone Age. There are significant numbers of people living in Britain who wish to visit such chaos on us.

This is the backdrop to the debate about anti-terrorism legislation. As usual lawyers talk to lawyers, including those overrepresented in our political class. Overlooking that our greatest right is to life, civil libertarians are exercised about proposals to extend detention of suspects from 28 to 56 days.

Shami Chakrabarti, the barrister whom the BBC assiduously promotes as the voice of a presumed liberal consensus, will widen her Diana-like eyes in outrage, while Amnesty will mutter darkly about internment. Then we’ll hear from Gareth Peirce – the Provos’ and now the jihadis’ lawyer of choice – or her business rival Mudassur Arani, whose website advises Muslims how to deny cooperation with M15. Ms Arani was recently exercised by an attack on Dhiren Barot, the British al-Qaeda terrorist, by a fellow prison inmate. She wants jihadi prisoners all kept together, doubtless so that within ten minutes of such consolidation, she would be whining about a British Guantanamo, from where, say, Clive Stafford Smith, would soon relay lurid terrorist tales of torture to Channel 4 News.

Since activist lawyers routinely usurp a moral high ground vacated by a lazy liberalism, it seems almost vulgar to point out that at least one terrorist group – the Baader-Meinhof gang – was co-founded by a lawyer, Horst Mahler (nowadays a neo-Nazi), while Lynne Stewart, defence counsel to blind Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman, is serving a prison sentence for helping him to communicate from his prison cell with his Egyptian followers.

Now that Gordon Brown has rejected the proposal of Lord Carlile of Berriew, QC, to give judges the powers to extend periods of detention, on the understandable ground that senior judges sabotaged the system of control orders after freeing the Belmarsh detainees, perhaps his lordship could get the Law Society to focus on its own nest?

Some of Mr Brown’s proposals announced this week in the Commons make sense, although they are hopelessly overdue. The Tories have long argued for a dedicated border police, staffed with officers on serious salaries. Instead of which we are going to get an agency mainly staffed by low-grade Customs officers. Electronic passenger screening is being introduced after the US warned us that it may introduce visa requirements for Anglo-Pakistanis on the ground that you don’t stop Jaguars when a Toyota has been stolen. Belated steps are being taken to secure strategic sites, sports grounds and shopping malls, as well as, tardily again, to hook up our immigration computers with Europol’s databank of seven million lost or stolen passports.

Another proposal briefly floated was to turn a few circuit judges into European-style investigative magistrates. One can’t quite imagine these claret-faced old buffers in the role of Jean-Louis Brugière, a French judge whose pursuit of Islamists led to his being dubbed “the sheriff”, and not only because of the Magnum revolver he had under his jacket.

One of the puzzles of our time is why Britain scrupulously adheres to the Human Rights Act, when our allies and partners systematically flout the European Convention on Human Rights. Talk of human rights abuses invariably focuses on the US, with sneering TV documentaries about Guantanamo or CIA “extraordinary rendition”. But on much of the Continent they don’t allow civil liberty lawyers to turn terrorism into a risk-free activity.

When the Socialist Interior Minister of Spain organised a campaign of assassinating Eta terrorists across the border in France during the 1990s, he was following in the footsteps of French governments that had routinely killed FLN and OAS arms traders in the 1960s. Getting Spain’s message, France began deporting Eta suspects to places such as Papua New Guinea, and has since been repatriating radical Islamist clerics. The Germans, likewise, did not hesitate to deport a Turkish imam on grounds of national security, even though he had lived in Germany for 30 years. The former German Interior Minister, Otto Schily, once a lawyer for Baader-Meinhof defendants, cryptically remarked of the jihadis: “Those who love death can have it.”

While we agonise about 28 or 56 days custody, it is not uncommon for terrorist suspects in France to be held in preventive detention for four or five years before their case goes to court. The use of intelligence intercept evidence in courts is being debated here, but the Italian security services have long made transcripts of this material available, so revealing the lying cynicism with which, for example, Milan-based Arab jihadis regard European asylum laws. And then there is the internet, one of the key means of radicalising Muslims. Wolfgang Schäuble, the German Interior Minister, wheelchair-bound since a 1990 assassination attempt, has argued recently in favour of hacking into the computers of Islamist radicals. We can’t even manage to shut down jihadi websites or to prohibit subversive organisations, such as Hizb ut-Tahir, from operating on university campuses where the dons think they are dealing with the usual middle-class radicals.

If Mr Brown’s anti-terrorism measures seem ignorant of what our fellow Europeans practise routinely, they also reflect an outmoded habit of separating domestic and foreign policy. Why is foreign aid not contingent upon warning recipient states that they will forfeit it if clerics they subsidise preach hatred of the West? Why aren’t we helping Afghanistan or Pakistan to build secular alternatives to the Saudi-financed madrassas where children are brainwashed with cartoon Jew killers? If this is a neo-Cold War, why are we failing to help the four fifths of Muslims who are not from the Middle East to assert themselves against that demented region?

The predictable racket between rival lawyers does not even begin to address the serious questions involved if we don’t wish to live in that grim caliphate or to be murdered by hysterical fanatics.

Michael Burleigh’s most recent book is Sacred Causes: Religion and Politics from the European Dictators to al-Qaeda

Was Osama Right?

Islamists always believed the U.S. was weak. Recent political trends won't change their view.

By Bernard Lewis
Wednesday, May 16, 2007

During the Cold War, two things came to be known and generally recognized in the Middle East concerning the two rival superpowers. If you did anything to annoy the Russians, punishment would be swift and dire. If you said or did anything against the Americans, not only would there be no punishment; there might even be some possibility of reward, as the usual anxious procession of diplomats and politicians, journalists and scholars and miscellaneous others came with their usual pleading inquiries: "What have we done to offend you? What can we do to put it right?"

A few examples may suffice. During the troubles in Lebanon in the 1970s and '80s, there were many attacks on American installations and individuals--notably the attack on the Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983, followed by a prompt withdrawal, and a whole series of kidnappings of Americans, both official and private, as well as of Europeans. There was only one attack on Soviet citizens, when one diplomat was killed and several others kidnapped. The Soviet response through their local agents was swift, and directed against the family of the leader of the kidnappers. The kidnapped Russians were promptly released, and after that there were no attacks on Soviet citizens or installations throughout the period of the Lebanese troubles.

These different responses evoked different treatment. While American policies, institutions and individuals were subject to unremitting criticism and sometimes deadly attack, the Soviets were immune. Their retention of the vast, largely Muslim colonial empire accumulated by the czars in Asia passed unnoticed, as did their propaganda and sometimes action against Muslim beliefs and institutions.

Most remarkable of all was the response of the Arab and other Muslim countries to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979. Washington's handling of the Tehran hostage crisis assured the Soviets that they had nothing to fear from the U.S. They already knew that they need not worry about the Arab and other Muslim governments. The Soviets already ruled--or misruled--half a dozen Muslim countries in Asia, without arousing any opposition or criticism. Initially, their decision and action to invade and conquer Afghanistan and install a puppet regime in Kabul went almost unresisted. After weeks of debate, the U.N. General Assembly finally was persuaded to pass a resolution "strongly deploring the recent armed intervention in Afghanistan." The words "condemn" and "aggression" were not used, and the source of the "intervention" was not named. Even this anodyne resolution was too much for some of the Arab states. South Yemen voted no; Algeria and Syria abstained; Libya was absent; the nonvoting PLO observer to the Assembly even made a speech defending the Soviets.

One might have expected that the recently established Organization of the Islamic Conference would take a tougher line. It did not. After a month of negotiation and manipulation, the organization finally held a meeting in Pakistan to discuss the Afghan question. Two of the Arab states, South Yemen and Syria, boycotted the meeting. The representative of the PLO, a full member of this organization, was present, but abstained from voting on a resolution critical of the Soviet action; the Libyan delegate went further, and used this occasion to denounce the U.S.

The Muslim willingness to submit to Soviet authority, though widespread, was not unanimous. The Afghan people, who had successfully defied the British Empire in its prime, found a way to resist the Soviet invaders. An organization known as the Taliban (literally, "the students") began to organize resistance and even guerilla warfare against the Soviet occupiers and their puppets. For this, they were able to attract some support from the Muslim world--some grants of money, and growing numbers of volunteers to fight in the Holy War against the infidel conqueror. Notable among these was a group led by a Saudi of Yemeni origin called Osama bin Laden.

To accomplish their purpose, they did not disdain to turn to the U.S. for help, which they got. In the Muslim perception there has been, since the time of the Prophet, an ongoing struggle between the two world religions, Christendom and Islam, for the privilege and opportunity to bring salvation to the rest of humankind, removing whatever obstacles there might be in their path. For a long time, the main enemy was seen, with some plausibility, as being the West, and some Muslims were, naturally enough, willing to accept what help they could get against that enemy. This explains the widespread support in the Arab countries and in some other places first for the Third Reich and, after its collapse, for the Soviet Union. These were the main enemies of the West, and therefore natural allies.

Now the situation had changed. The more immediate, more dangerous enemy was the Soviet Union, already ruling a number of Muslim countries, and daily increasing its influence and presence in others. It was therefore natural to seek and accept American help. As Osama bin Laden explained, in this final phase of the millennial struggle, the world of the unbelievers was divided between two superpowers. The first task was to deal with the more deadly and more dangerous of the two, the Soviet Union. After that, dealing with the pampered and degenerate Americans would be easy.

We in the Western world see the defeat and collapse of the Soviet Union as a Western, more specifically an American, victory in the Cold War. For Osama bin Laden and his followers, it was a Muslim victory in a jihad, and, given the circumstances, this perception does not lack plausibility.

From the writings and the speeches of Osama bin Laden and his colleagues, it is clear that they expected this second task, dealing with America, would be comparatively simple and easy. This perception was certainly encouraged and so it seemed, confirmed by the American response to a whole series of attacks--on the World Trade Center in New York and on U.S. troops in Mogadishu in 1993, on the U.S. military office in Riyadh in 1995, on the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, on the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000--all of which evoked only angry words, sometimes accompanied by the dispatch of expensive missiles to remote and uninhabited places.

Stage One of the jihad was to drive the infidels from the lands of Islam; Stage Two--to bring the war into the enemy camp, and the attacks of 9/11 were clearly intended to be the opening salvo of this stage. The response to 9/11, so completely out of accord with previous American practice, came as a shock, and it is noteworthy that there has been no successful attack on American soil since then. The U.S. actions in Afghanistan and in Iraq indicated that there had been a major change in the U.S., and that some revision of their assessment, and of the policies based on that assessment, was necessary.

More recent developments, and notably the public discourse inside the U.S., are persuading increasing numbers of Islamist radicals that their first assessment was correct after all, and that they need only to press a little harder to achieve final victory. It is not yet clear whether they are right or wrong in this view. If they are right, the consequences--both for Islam and for America--will be deep, wide and lasting.

Mr. Lewis, professor emeritus at Princeton, is the author, most recently, of "From Babel to Dragomans: Interpreting the Middle East" (Oxford University Press, 2004).

IS THE FRENCH ELECTION A BELATED ACKNOWLEDGMENT OF REALITY?

Shortest of Honeymoons
By Mark Steyn
The New York Sun
May 7, 2007


Is the French election a belated acknowledgment of reality or the latest attempt to dodge it? In other words, is it Britain voting for Mrs. Thatcher in 1979 and America for Ronald Reagan the following year? That’s to say, the electorate understands the status quo is exhausted and unsustainable and that unless catastrophe is to be avoided radical course correction is required. Or is it Germany voting tepidly and tentatively to give Angela Merkel the narrowest of victories in 2005? In other words, the electorate was irritated with the incumbents but recoiled from any meaningful change, with the result that Frau Merkel found herself presiding over a nominally fresh government with no agenda and no mandate for reform.

I’d bet on the latter. Just as Frau Merkel proved not to be Germany’s Thatcher, I would be surprised if Nicolas Sarkozy turned out to be France’s Reagan. Not because he doesn’t have Reaganite tendencies but because the French electorate, like the Germans, aren’t there yet. M Sarkozy did well in the first round because he co-opted many of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s concerns. I don’t mean the fascism and the anti-Semitism and the oven jokes. It’s a tribute to the shriveling of the French political sphere that, by the time of the last presidential election in 2002, an antiquated perennial loser was able to catapult himself into second place. But, in an advanced technocratic state, where almost any issue worth talking about has been ruled beyond the scope of partisan politics, you might as well throw away terms like “left” and “right.” The previous presidential election was meant to be a contest between the supposedly conservative Jacques Chirac and his supposedly socialist Prime Minister, Lionel Jospin. In practice, this boiled down to a candidate who’s left of right of left of center, and a candidate who’s right of left of right of left of center. Chirac and Jospin ran on identical platforms: they were both in favor of high taxes, high unemployment and high crime. Faced with a choice between Tweedleleft and Tweedleright, you couldn’t blame French voters for choosing to make it a real race by voting for the one guy running on an openly stated, clearly defined manifesto. In 2002, the political class considered most of M Le Pen’s preoccupations – immigration, crime, unemployment – beneath discussion.

This time round, Mr. Sarkozy didn’t make that mistake. The discontented citizenry often complain about the lack of croissance – that’s not a basket of crescent-shaped buttery breakfast pastries invented to mark Christendom’s victory over Islam at the gates of Vienna in 1693, but the French word for “growth.” The Fifth Republic has entirely missed out on the Reagan-Thatcher booms of the last quarter-century: its over-protected and over-regulated economy has led to permanently high unemployment and a lack of entrepreneurial energy, not to mention various social tensions from the blazing Citroens and Renaults lighting up the sky every night to entire suburbs that have effectively seceded from France to join the new Caliphate. It’s a measure of the torpor of French politics that M Chirac regarded a presidential election against an elderly fascist as little more than a mildly embarrassing social faux pas rather than a profound indictment of a failing system So he spent his second term as he did the first, governing as an elegant narcissistic complacent hack.

When you mention “the French riots,” most people assume you’re talking about the excitable chaps rampaging around in 2005. But it was another set of riots six months later that symbolizes the trap in which the political class is caught. The fall 2005 rioters were “youths” (ie Muslims from the suburbs), supposedly alienated by lack of economic opportunity. The spring 2006 rioters were “youths” (ie pampered deadbeats from the Sorbonne), protesting a new law that would enable employers to terminate the contracts of employees under the age of 26 in their first jobs, after two years.

To which the response of most Americans is: you mean, you can’t right now? No, you can’t. If you hire a 20-year-old and take a dislike to his work three months in, tough: chances are you’re stuck with him till mid-century. In France’s immobilized economy, it’s all but impossible to get fired. Which is why it’s all but impossible to get hired. Especially if you belong to that first category of “youths” from the Muslim ghettos, where unemployment is around 40 to 50 per cent. The second group of “youths” – the Sorbonne set – protesting the proposed new, more flexible labor law ought to be able to understand that it’s both necessary to the nation and, indeed, in their own self-interest: they are after all their nation’s elite. Yet they’re like lemmings striking over the right to a steeper cliff – and, naturally, the political class caved in to them.

When most of us on this side of the Atlantic think of “welfare queens,” our mind’s eye conjures some teenage crack whore with three kids by different men in a housing project. But France illustrates how absolute welfare corrupts absolutely. These Sorbonne welfare queens are Marie Antoinettes: unemployment rates for immigrants? Let ’em eat cake, as long as our pampered existence is undisturbed.

Not all French youth is so self-deluded. I notice, for example, every time I’m across the pond in my corner of South Kensington that one hears more and more French spoken on the street. There are somewhere between 400 and 500,000 French citizens living in Britain’s capital. London is now the seventh biggest French-speaking city in the world. These are young talented dynamic people who like the same things about France the British and American tourists do – the vin, the cuisine, the couture, the Provencal farmhouses and the Cote d’Azur’s topless beaches – but have concluded that it is no longer a society in which you can fulfill your economic potential. They would presumably be Sarkozy supporters, but, like many who feel the odds are stacked against them, they chose in the end to bail out.

As for those who remain, they’re sick of crime and unemployment and on the whole could do with rather fewer Muslims on the streets, but they’re not yet willing to give up on the economic protectionism and lavish social programs that lead, inexorably, to the crime and unemployment and a general economic and demographic decline leaving the nation dependent on mass immigration and accelerating Islamization.

In my recent book, whose title escapes me, I cite one of those small anecdotes that seems almost too perfect a distillation of Continental politics. It was a news item from 2005: A fellow in Marseilles was charged with fraud because he lived with the dead body of his mother for five years in order to continue receiving her pension of 700 euros a month.

She was 94 when she croaked, so she’d presumably been enjoying the old government check for a good three decades or so, but her son figured he might as well keep the money rolling in until her second century and, with her corpse tucked away under a pile of rubbish in the living room, the female telephone voice he put on for the benefit of the social services office was apparently convincing enough. As the Reuters headline put it: “Frenchman Lived With Dead Mother To Keep Pension.”

Think of France as that flat in Marseilles, and its economy as the dead mother, and the country’s many state benefits as monsieur’s deceased mom’s benefits. To the outside observer, the French give the impression they can live with the stench of death as long as the government benefits keep coming. If that’s the case, the new president will have the shortest of honeymoons.

The Trouble With Islam: Western Liberals

Sadly, mainstream Muslim teaching accepts and promotes violence.

By Tawfik Hamid
The Wall Street Journal
Tuesday, April 3, 2007

Not many years ago the brilliant Orientalist, Bernard Lewis, published a short history of the Islamic world's decline, entitled "What Went Wrong?" Astonishingly, there was, among many Western "progressives," a vocal dislike for the title. It is a false premise, these critics protested. They ignored Mr. Lewis's implicit statement that things have been, or could be, right.

But indeed, there is much that is clearly wrong with the Islamic world. Women are stoned to death and undergo clitorectomies. Gays hang from the gallows under the approving eyes of the proponents of Shariah, the legal code of Islam. Sunni and Shia massacre each other daily in Iraq. Palestinian mothers teach 3-year-old boys and girls the ideal of martyrdom. One would expect the orthodox Islamic establishment to evade or dismiss these complaints, but less happily, the non-Muslim priests of enlightenment in the West have come, actively and passively, to the Islamists' defense.

These "progressives" frequently cite the need to examine "root causes." In this they are correct: Terrorism is only the manifestation of a disease and not the disease itself. But the root-causes are quite different from what they think. As a former member of Jemaah Islamiya, a group led by al Qaeda's second in command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, I know firsthand that the inhumane teaching in Islamist ideology can transform a young, benevolent mind into that of a terrorist. Without confronting the ideological roots of radical Islam it will be impossible to combat it. While there are many ideological "rootlets" of Islamism, the main tap root has a name--Salafism, or Salafi Islam, a violent, ultra-conservative version of the religion.

It is vital to grasp that traditional and even mainstream Islamic teaching accepts and promotes violence. Shariah, for example, allows apostates to be killed, permits beating women to discipline them, seeks to subjugate non-Muslims to Islam as dhimmis and justifies declaring war to do so. It exhorts good Muslims to exterminate the Jews before the "end of days." The near deafening silence of the Muslim majority against these barbaric practices is evidence enough that there is something fundamentally wrong.

The grave predicament we face in the Islamic world is the virtual lack of approved, theologically rigorous interpretations of Islam that clearly challenge the abusive aspects of Shariah. Unlike Salafism, more liberal branches of Islam, such as Sufism, typically do not provide the essential theological base to nullify the cruel proclamations of their Salafist counterparts. And so, for more than 20 years I have been developing and working to establish a theologically-rigorous Islam that teaches peace.

Yet it is ironic and discouraging that many non-Muslim, Western intellectuals--who unceasingly claim to support human rights--have become obstacles to reforming Islam. Political correctness among Westerners obstructs unambiguous criticism of Shariah's inhumanity. They find socioeconomic or political excuses for Islamist terrorism such as poverty, colonialism, discrimination or the existence of Israel. What incentive is there for Muslims to demand reform when Western "progressives" pave the way for Islamist barbarity? Indeed, if the problem is not one of religious beliefs, it leaves one to wonder why Christians who live among Muslims under identical circumstances refrain from contributing to wide-scale, systematic campaigns of terror.

Politicians and scholars in the West have taken up the chant that Islamic extremism is caused by the Arab-Israeli conflict. This analysis cannot convince any rational person that the Islamist murder of over 150,000 innocent people in Algeria--which happened in the last few decades--or their slaying of hundreds of Buddhists in Thailand, or the brutal violence between Sunni and Shia in Iraq could have anything to do with the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Western feminists duly fight in their home countries for equal pay and opportunity, but seemingly ignore, under a façade of cultural relativism, that large numbers of women in the Islamic world live under threat of beating, execution and genital mutilation, or cannot vote, drive cars and dress as they please.

The tendency of many Westerners to restrict themselves to self-criticism further obstructs reformation in Islam. Americans demonstrate against the war in Iraq, yet decline to demonstrate against the terrorists who kidnap innocent people and behead them. Similarly, after the Madrid train bombings, millions of Spanish citizens demonstrated against their separatist organization, ETA. But once the demonstrators realized that Muslims were behind the terror attacks they suspended the demonstrations. This example sent a message to radical Islamists to continue their violent methods.

Western appeasement of their Muslim communities has exacerbated the problem. During the four-month period after the publication of the Muhammad cartoons in a Danish magazine, there were comparatively few violent demonstrations by Muslims. Within a few days of the Danish magazine's formal apology, riots erupted throughout the world. The apology had been perceived by Islamists as weakness and concession.

Worst of all, perhaps, is the anti-Americanism among many Westerners. It is a resentment so strong, so deep-seated, so rooted in personal identity, that it has led many, consciously or unconsciously, to morally support America's enemies.

Progressives need to realize that radical Islam is based on an antiliberal system. They need to awaken to the inhumane policies and practices of Islamists around the world. They need to realize that Islamism spells the death of liberal values. And they must not take for granted the respect for human rights and dignity that we experience in America, and indeed, the West, today.

Well-meaning interfaith dialogues with Muslims have largely been fruitless. Participants must demand--but so far haven't--that Muslim organizations and scholars specifically and unambiguously denounce violent Salafi components in their mosques and in the media. Muslims who do not vocally oppose brutal Shariah decrees should not be considered "moderates."

All of this makes the efforts of Muslim reformers more difficult. When Westerners make politically-correct excuses for Islamism, it actually endangers the lives of reformers and in many cases has the effect of suppressing their voices.

Tolerance does not mean toleration of atrocities under the umbrella of relativism. It is time for all of us in the free world to face the reality of Salafi Islam or the reality of radical Islam will continue to face us.

Dr. Hamid, a onetime member of Jemaah Islamiya, an Islamist terrorist group, is a medical doctor and Muslim reformer living in the West.

The Agony of a 21st Century Muslim

"Islam is a religion that devours all that is most humane and open-minded." How has this happened? Ziauddin Sardar on the delusion and intolerance of his fellow believers. Ziauddin Sardar New Statesman Monday 17th February 2003

Islam Explained. Tahar Ben Jelloun, translated by Franklin Philip The New Press, 120pp, £9.95.

The Prophet Muhammad: a biography. Barnaby Rogerson Little, Brown, 240pp, £14.99

Believing Women in Islam: unreading patriarchal interpretations of the Koran. Asma Barlas University of Texas Press, 272pp, £16.95 pbk

It is not easy to be a Muslim. Believers like me live on the edge, constantly having to justify our very existence. As the French Moroccan novelist Tahar Ben Jelloun discovered, the situation became infinitely worse after the events of 11 September 2001. Having watched the spectacle unfold on television, his daughter declared that she did not want to be a Muslim: "Muslims are bad; they killed a lot of people." The loving father explained that the attacks on America were the work of "fanatics" and "crazy people". They did not represent Islam.

But what is Islam, the children ask. So Ben Jelloun here sets out to explain Islam to his children. "Once upon a time, very, very long ago," he begins, "a little boy was born in Mecca." He traces the life of the Prophet Muhammad, describing the tenets of Islam in a simple, graceful style. Adults often assume that children are incapable of grasping the complexity of life, an assumption that has led Ben Jelloun to keep things simple. In doing so, he evades the biggest problem of all, which is the self-delusion that we Muslims have turned into a fine art, the reality that much of the agony of being a Muslim in the 21st century is self-inflicted. Ben Jelloun's simplistic but compassionate interpretation of Islam is far removed from the Islam of the Taliban or the Revolutionary Guards in Iran. It is the Islam conventionally invoked by the liberal defenders of the faith, who believe that, as Muslims, it is their duty to present a more humane, tolerant Islam.

In truth, while humane representations of Islam ease our conscience, they do little to address the problems within Islam itself. The problem with all varieties of Islam as it is practised today, not as it is envisaged by liberals, is that it has lost its humanity. Our religion has become a monster that devours all that is most humane and open-minded. Instead of retreating to an imagined liberal utopia, we Muslims need to ask some tough questions about our faith. What, for example, makes so many pious Muslims such nasty and intolerant individuals? Why is it that every time a country enforces the shariah, the so-called Islamic law, it retreats into medieval barbarity? Why do Muslims still insist on treating women as though they were an inferior race, sent to earth only to deprave and spread corruption? Not surprisingly, Ben Jelloun's children do not ask such questions. And the answers will not bring much comfort for any kind of Muslim, child or adult, liberal or otherwise.

It is easy to dismiss the followers of all the non-liberal verities of Islam as fanatics and fundamentalists. It is much harder and much more painful to see them as a natural product of what contemporary Islam has become. Their paranoia is located within Islam. All Muslims, no matter how liberal they perceive themselves to be, are in danger of becoming infected. For, at the very heart of Islam, there are four category mistakes of catastrophic proportions. (By which I mean, Muslims have elevated what is clearly human to the category of the divine.) These have transformed Islam into an authoritarian creed.

Ben Jelloun alludes to the first without realising what he is saying. "The Muslims owe their Prophet Muhammad, God's messenger, their worship and love," he tells the little girl. In this unconscious slip, Ben Jelloun reveals how Muslims perceive the Prophet. He equates the Prophet with God, for in Islam only God can be worshipped. The Koran insists, and the Prophet himself emphasised, that Muhammad was only a man. What made him human was that he could make mistakes and he was a product of his own time. But in reality, Muslims have fetishised the Prophet so much that all his human qualities have evaporated; his time and context have been transformed into eternal time.

The measure of piety for Muslims is thus how closely one imitates the Prophet's physical appearance: his beard, his clothes, the way he walked and brushed his teeth. Even the way the Prophet came to be described, his human qualities, his character, his struggles to shape a humane and just society in his particular epoch, was underplayed at the expense of superhuman attributes, such as his victories in battles against tremendous odds.

All biographies of the Prophet, from the earliest, written by Ibn Ishaq in the early eighth century, to those produced today, follow a standard formula. The story is told chronologically. We move from one battle to the next until we reach the conquest of Mecca and the death of the Prophet himself. But this is absurd; the battles of the Prophet occupied less than a month of the 63 years of his life on earth. The two most celebrated confrontations, the Battles of Badr (624) and Uhud (625), were over within a day. The other main conflict, the Battle of Trenches, never took place. And apart from one minor skirmish, no one fought during the conquest of Mecca. The Prophet simply entered the city with a large army, declared a general amnesty and forgave all his bitter enemies. Yet the standard biographies of the Prophet contain little other than fighting and conflict.

This is largely why Muslims cannot relate to the Prophet as a man struggling to do the right thing in exceptionally difficult circumstances. Instead, they relate to an abstract construction; they aim to imitate an impossible person devoid of all human attributes and virtues. In the words of the celebrated Muslim philosopher and poet Mohammad Iqbal, they want to be "superman", or a Momin, the technical term for the perfect Muslim. The quest for this status, the absolute imitation of the Prophet in every eighth-century detail, then becomes a pathological end in itself. And all forms of violence and oppression are justified to achieve the end in the name of the Prophet.

The genius of the Prophet, as Barnaby Rogerson notes, was "to transform his own religious experience, which was by its very nature highly individual, and create from it something of relevance to a whole society". It is the relevance of the Prophet's example, the spirit, the ethics, the morality that shaped his outlook and behaviour that Muslims have discarded in favour of fetishising his personality and his times.

Rogerson aims to capture the spiritual and moral framework that guided the actions of the Prophet. It is an indication of the importance of his book that the Battles of Badr and Uhud are hardly mentioned. Rogerson concentrates on the Prophet's character, and the texture of the period in which he lived. We can almost smell and feel the Arabia of the seventh century. The end product is more than enchanting: it is a closer representation of what Muslims really should be emulating.

The second category mistake concerns the shariah. Ben Jelloun tells his children that the shariah is not obligatory. The liberals can ignore it. But Asma Barlas has no such illusions. Women living in "Islamic states" do not have such luxuries. Most Muslims consider the shariah to be divine. Yet as Barlas shows, in reality there is hardly anything in the shariah that is based on the Koran and hence can be taken as divine. The Koran has remarkably few rules and regulations. Most of the Holy Book is devoted to elaborating the attributes of God and the virtues of reason. So where does the shariah come from?

The bulk of the shariah consists of the legal opinion of classical jurists. It was formulated in the Abbasid period, when Muslim history was in its expansionist phase. It incorporates the logic of Muslim imperialism of the eighth and ninth centuries. Hence the black-and-white division of the world into "the abode of Islam" and "the abode of war", the ruling on apostasy which, contrary to the unequivocal declaration of the Koran that "there is no compulsion in religion", equates apostasy with treason against the state. Or the dictate that says non-Muslims should be humiliated and cannot give evidence in a Muslim court.

It was largely men who formulated the shariah, says Barlas - good men, but firmly rooted in their time. It is not surprising that they were misogynistic. The shariah treats women and men unequally, particularly when it comes to criminal justice. By treating the testimony of women with what Barlas calls the "two-for-one formula", the shariah promotes the view, contrary to everything that the Koran teaches, that a woman is only half a man. Being a product of male perceptions, the shariah cannot distinguish between adultery, fornication and rape. As a result, victims of rape and sexual abuse can find themselves charged with a crime and sentenced to being stoned to death, an aberrant law, because the Koran does not sanction stoning to death for any crime whatsoever. Even though the Koran gives women's testimonies privilege over men's in the case of sexual offences, the shariah chooses to ignore them.

What this means in reality is that when Muslim countries apply or impose the shariah, the demand of Muslims from Algeria through Pakistan to Nigeria, the contradictions that were inherent in the formulation and evolution of this jurisprudence come to the fore. The shariah's obsession with extreme punishment generates extreme societies. That is why, wherever the shariah is imposed, Muslim societies acquire a medieval feel. We can see that in Saudi Arabia, the Sudan and the Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. But this is what even the moderate elements of the Islamic movement want. The alliance of Islamic parties that took over Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province recently may describe itself as "modernist", but it is still ready to lock up women, flog thieves and stone adulterers in the name of divine justice.

The reason Muslims are so reluctant to reform the shariah, Barlas tells us in her brave and penetrating book, is that it underwrites male privilege. But it does something more: it keeps the interpretation of Islam firmly in the hands of a select group of bearded obscurantists. The Koran declares unequivocally that no one has any special privilege of interpretation. As a book of guidance, it is open to all. But Muslims have created a whole elite class of individuals who are the only ones with the right to interpret the Koran. In Shia Iran, they go under the obnoxious rubric of "clergy"; in the other, Sunni Muslim communities, they use the term "ulama", or religious scholars. The repulsive notion that only the ulama and the clergy can interpret the Koran is the third category mistake.

The individual Muslim is thus denied agency. If the shariah is a given, and only a select few can reinterpret the Koran, then most believers have nothing to do except follow what we are told. Believers thus become passive receivers rather than active seekers of truth: that is why they can tolerate such injustice and inhumanity while imagining they are carving some piece of paradise for themselves. Even the liberals have to defer to the superior knowledge of the guardians of the faith for explanation of this or that verse of the Koran. The pressing ethical questions of contemporary science on issues such as human cloning and genetic engineering can be addressed only by the ulama, who, by and large, know nothing of science or contemporary society. Oppressed women have to turn to their religious oppressors for justice. The authoritarianism that has become so intrinsic to Islam is reflected in Muslim societies themselves. How can Muslims introduce democracy to their societies when there is no democracy within their religion?

And so, to the final category mistake. Everything about Islam, we Muslims believe, is eternal. Everything that the Prophet did is eternal. The shariah is eternal. The right of the ulama to reinterpret the Koran is eternal. Indeed, Islam itself is eternal. Thus, all human problems have been solved for all time. The most common slogan among Muslims of all varieties, in every part of the world, is that "Islam has all the answers". This from a people who have forgotten how to ask questions!

What remains constant in Islam is the text of the Koran itself, its concepts providing the ethical anchor for ever-changing interpretations. Everything else is subject to change, including the reinterpretations of the Koran and life of the Prophet Muhammad. As far as the shariah is concerned, it neither works as law nor contains much that any sensible person can recognise as ethics. If the original formulators of the shariah were to visit the 21st century, they would be appalled at the injustices their opinions are propagating.

Islam cannot survive as a static faith, buried in history. It was always meant to be a dynamic world-view, adjusting to change. In reality, the shariah is nothing more than a set of principles, a framework of values that provide Muslim societies with guidance. But these sets of principles and values are not givens; they are vigorously derived from within changing contexts. As such, the shariah is a problem-solving methodology rather than law. It requires individual believers and societies to exert themselves and to reinterpret the Koran and the life of the Prophet Muhammad.

If Ben Jelloun was really interested in explaining Islam to his children, he would have addressed the problems intrinsic to how Muslims perceive their faith. For it is his children, and mine, who will inherit the inhumanity of so much that goes under the rubric of Islam today.

Islam, Postmodernism and Other Futures: a Ziauddin Sardar Reader, edited by Sohail Inayatullah and Gail Boxwell, will be published on 15 March (Pluto Press, £14.99)

PJ O'Rourke interviewed by Clive James

Rare TV interview with PJ O'Rourke shortly after 9/11 attacks.

P.J. O' Rourke has been happily disagreeing with Clive James's wishy-washy liberalism for years. This meeting between the Kid from Kogarah and the Republican Party Reptile was scheduled well before the events of September 11th 2001, but soon afterwards P.J. flew the Atlantic to keep the date, and even in sombre circumstances the wit shines through the seriousness, just as the seriousness has always shone through the wit.

There is a sound fault on this interview. The fault is due to a glitch in coding and loading, not to a blunder in the original production. The fault will take time to fix, but we are working on it. Meanwhile, those with keen ears should still be able to enjoy the discussion.

Clive James: On Anti-Semitism

The University of the Holocaust: On Anti-Semitism Now

Clive James

For the Israelis, anti-Semitism is merely a nightmare. For the Palestinians, it's a catastrophe. If you believe, as I do, that the Palestinians' cause is just, nothing could be more depressing than to hear them spout the very stuff that guarantees they will never get an even break. The mad idea that the Jews have no right to exist is a potent intensifier of the almost equally mad idea that the State of Israel can somehow be eliminated. I say "almost" because a friend of mine in Australia recently presented me with a plausible case that the Middle East would probably be a more peaceful area if the State of Israel had never been founded. Like her argument that the Aborigines would have been a lot happier if the Europeans had never shown up, this contention was hard to rebut, except by rudely pointing out that we were both sitting in an Italian restaurant in Melbourne, history having happened.

But history might have happened otherwise, although in the case of the Jewish presence in Palestine you would have to go back beyond the 1850s (when the Jews were already a majority in Jerusalem) to somewhere near the beginning of the Old Testament, and equip the Canaanites with grenade launchers. To the perfect madness of the first idea, however — the idea that the Jews are candidates for extermination — no concessions are possible. Anti-Semitism is so obviously insane that no refutation of it should be necessary, and indeed after the Holocaust the feeling was widespread throughout the world that the whole demented notion had at last become an historical back number, like phlogiston or the belief that mirrors could leak lightning. Throughout the world: but not, alas, throughout the Arab world.

Why this should have been so is hard to unscramble at this distance, but briefly, and without too much distortion, it can be said that the Arab nations never studied at the University of the Holocaust. Their interests lay, not in Europe, but in the area containing the nagging presence which was already threatening to become a Jewish state. The Arab nations on the whole concurred with the British mandate's lethal reluctance to admit Jewish refugees into Palestine, and several of the Arab leaders saw nothing wrong with Hitler's determination that as many potential colonists as possible should be dealt with at source. One of the leaders, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, spent time in Berlin urging Hitler to get on with it. We should hasten to remember that another of the leaders, King Abdullah of Tansjordan — grandfather of the future King Hussein — was always a model of far-sighted tolerance, and quite saw the possibility of fruitful coexistence with the infidel incursion. But we should also remember that Abdullah paid for his liberalism with his life, in an early version of the price exacted from Anwar Sadat for even entertaining the idea of peace. It was the choleric Grand Mufti who set the tone. He had been reading the same Koran as Abdullah, but had reached different conclusions. Our own best conclusion should be that the Koran was not the book to blame. There were other books, borrowed from abroad, and one of them was that putrid old Tsarist forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Remember the name, because it goes on cropping up throughout the bloody history of the area. (In Egypt, supposedly the most enlightened of the Arab nations, the state television system recently dramatised it as a TV serial.) The historian Golo Mann, once said that Nazi-style anti-Semitism was a crime encouraged by bad literature, and literature doesn't get any more bad than The Protocols. But before we get to the written word, we should look at more substantive phenomena that might account for intransigence among Israel's enemies. There are plenty to consider. A year before he declared the Israeli state, David Ben Gurion was ready to accept a partition of Palestine: even though his resulting portion would be tiny, at least it would be independent. But when he realised that the Arab states would not recognize a Jewish state even if it were the size of a tennis court, he was ready for what was bound to happen when he made his unilateral announcement. The State of Israel was declared, and the Arab nations immediately combined to attack it.

One of the consequences was the flight of the Palestinians. In fairness to them, we should not mince words: the flight was an expulsion. The instrument of expulsion was terror. The nascent Israeli state already had an unfortunate heritage of terror, much of it due to the initiatives of Menachem Begin, a University of the Holocaust alumnus armed with the inflexible conviction that the only answer to the threat of overwhelming violence was to get your retaliation in first. When the tiny new state was attacked from all sides, his brainchild, the Irgun, teamed up with the Stern Gang to massacre almost 300 Arabs at Deir Yassin, and the exodus of the Palestinians understandably ensued. Though their disappearance suited Ben Gurion's purposes — already embattled on half a dozen external fronts, he would probably have lost the war if he had been forced to fight on an internal front as well — the Jews were suitably sorry at the time. But the Palestinians were sorry forever. We should not forget their grief.

The Arab nations, alas, forgot it immediately. With the honourable exception of Jordan, every one of them turned the Palestinians away, and not even Jordan has ever given them much beyond citizenship. There is enough oil money in the Arab nations to give every refugee a hotel suite with 24-hour room service. Instead, far too many of them have been obliged to remain in camps that are really display cases, so that they can testify with their desperation to Jewish inhumanity. The inhumanity was thought to be endemic in the Jewish race. Arab theorists believed that there was scientific literature to lend this contention weight. The Jewish leaders had already been startled to discover, as early as 1949, that The Protocols had been officially translated and printed in the Arab nations. With the rise to power of Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser, the bad literature became a driving force. As Amos Elon reveals in his invaluable book A Blood-Dimmed Tide, Nasser discovered in The Protocols a proof "beyond all doubt that 300 Zionists, each knowing the others, control the fate of the European continent and elect their successors from among themselves." He didn't say how successfully they had controlled the fate of the European continent when Adolf Eichmann was in charge of the train timetables, but what he did say is recorded in the official collection of Nasser's Speeches and Press Interviews. If Nasser was not precisely a madman, he was certainly no model of detached judgment when he sucked Hussein of Jordan into the 1967 war, thereby laying the West Bank open for occupation and the Palestinians to the second stage of their suffering.

The suffering might have been worse. If Israel, between 1967 and 1973, was fatally slow to realise that the Palestinians had fair nationalist aspirations, one of the reasons was that they seemed to be doing fairly well. Arabs in the Occupied Territories, as Arabs have always done within Israel itself, prospered economically to an extent that might have made the leaders of the Arab nations wonder why their own poor were quite so destitute. Luckily the anomaly could be put down to the continuing efficacy of the infinitely subtle international Zionist plot. Israel came so near to losing the 1973 war that Golda Meir and Moshe Dayan both had to resign in apology. It was the end of the old Labour Alignment's preponderance in government. Begin was at last allowed into the Knesset from which he had previously been excluded as if infected — which indeed he was — and the inexorable rise of the hardliners began. But even then, the settlement movement might have been slower to start if a bunch of PLO "moderates" had not attacked a defenceless school containing nobody except 22 Jewish religious students and murdered them all.

It was a crime encouraged by bad literature. The crime has gone on until this day, and it will continue to be a crime even if the Jews prepare a counter-crime of their own. Some would say they already have. On one occasion, a single Jew walked into a mosque and killed thirty helpless Arabs before his weapons could be disentangled from his ultra-orthodox beard. But no Israeli government, however keen on reprisals against terror, has yet proclaimed the desirability of killing any Arab it can reach. Hezbollah and Hamas both proclaim the desirability of killing any Jew, and there is nothing novel in the proclamation. For a quarter of a century before 1988, when Yasser Arafat finally recognized the state of Israel, it was the founding objective of the PLO to "liquidate" it. Losing people at a crippling rate for a country with such a small population, the Israelis had no reason to doubt that the word "liquidate" was meant in the Stalinist sense. In the last five years of suicidal attacks, Israel has lost almost half the number of people that died in the World Trade Centre. To inflict proportionate damage, Al Qa'eda would have had to burn down Brooklyn. Nearly all of the dead Jews were non-combatants going about their everyday lives, and no doubt that was what made them targets. Any Jew, anywhere. Hezbollah has killed Jews in that well-known centre of the world Zionist conspiracy, Buenos Aires. Where next? Reykjavik?

A week ago, shortly after Hamas' spiritual leader Sheik Ahmed Yassin finally met his rocket, some of our media representatives were impressed when one of his supporters promised that the Gates of Hell would now be open. For the Jews, those same gates have been open for a long time. People who hold the understandable belief that Jewish reprisals will create more Arab terror should be equally prepared to consider whether more Arab terror might not produce an effect on the Jewish side that we have not previously had to contemplate because they have so far been able to keep their own maniacs chained up. Out on the extreme, far beyond Ariel Sharon and even beyond Benjamin Netenyahu, there are ultras who would like to see every Arab dead. Yitzhak Rabin, the lost hero of Israel, was murdered by the Jewish equivalent of the Arab fanatic who killed Sadat, the lost hero of Egypt. Rabin always believed that the loudly racist Gush Emunim settlers on the West Bank were a threat to democracy. Sharon couldn't see it. By now he can, and those who loathe his ruthlessness might come to bless it when the time arrives for Jews to shoot Jews — as well it might, on the inevitable day when the last settlers are ordered out of the Occupied Territories. It wouldn't be the first time Jews had shot Jews. In 1948, when Ben Gurion ordered the Irgun to disarm, their response was to run a fresh supply of guns into Tel Aviv. Ben Gurion ordered that the ship should be attacked. Twenty of the Irgun were killed, and Begin ended up swimming in the harbour. Some optimists believed he had learned his lesson.

The University of the Holocaust had as many dumb graduates as clever ones. Nazi anti-Semitism was so awful in its irrationality that any contrary force is likely to be irrational as well. The only rational contrary force is called democracy, which conquers extremism by containing it. In answer to those who think Mel Gibson, lonely creator of The Passion of the Christ, might be Hitler reborn with a more photogenic hairstyle, it should be said that if he had wanted to produce a truly anti-Semitic film, he would have had the Jews on screen whispering in Hebrew about setting up a world conspiracy with money swindled from the Romans. Authentic Jew-baiters don't equivocate. In its classic form, anti-Semitism did indeed emerge as a by-product of Christianity. None of the abuse recently heaped on world Jewry by the ex-Prime Minister of Malaysia and the top Imam of Australia was not first heaped by Martin Luther. But Christianity finally got over it, mainly because the democratic states deprived Christianity of political power. In a democratic state, the passion of the Mel, whatever it might happen to be, must be tempered for rational ears if it is to open big on the first weekend.

The Mel's passion aside, however, we really do have fanatics of our own, preaching versions of The Protocols that differ from it only by substituting America as the source of all the world's evil — including, of course, the depredations of the Israeli state, which generate such universal anger that a bunch of young head-cases in Bali are moved to blow up a night club. In reality, they blew up the night club because they didn't like the way young Australians dance. I don't much like it either, but I don't think blowing their legs off is an appropriate cure. My opinion, which I assume most of the readers of this newspaper share, was not transmitted to me by a sacred text, although I suppose the teachings of Jesus were in on the start of it. In the world of today, any reasonable and widely shared opinion is the result of a long and complicated history of enlightenment culminating in liberal institutions, which we should be proud of and teach our children to revere, instead of favouring the fantastic theory that a regard for civilized values somehow exacerbates a conspiracy against the wretched of the earth.

It shouldn't need pointing out that the Bali bombers knew no more about the history of the Middle East than I know about quantum mechanics. But it does need pointing out, because so many Western intellectuals are incapable of reasoning their way to any conclusion that does not suit their prejudices. There are limits, however, to what they can say unopposed, and very definite limits to what they can do without legal sanction. With Islamic fanaticism as we now face it, no such restrictions apply. This is bad news for Islam in general, and for the Palestinians it is beyond bad news. There are many Palestinians who know this to be true. In the week after Sheik Ahmed Yassin's death, the Palestinian Authority issued an appeal for passive resistance that amounted to a repudiation of the suicide bombing. The question remains, however, of how much authority the Palestinian Authority exercises over the fanatics. Our own absolutist half-wits need to realise two things. Al Qa'eda would go an attacking the democracies even if the Palestinians achieved justice tomorrow. And the Palestinians will never achieve justice if they go on attacking Israel. Both crimes are abetted by bad literature, and to produce bad literature of our own adds fuel to the fire. To that extent, the seductive idea that we are all guilty is exactly right. (Sunday Times, March 28, 2004)

Is Nick Cohen right about the left? His critics reply

Sunday January 28, 2007

Peter Oborne and others Review Nick Cohen What's Left: How Liberals Lost Their Way

Published 5 February 2007 by Fourth Estate at £12.99.

Nick Cohen attacks many enemies in this book, and he believes they are very bad indeed. They include: Amnesty International, Harold Pinter, Noam Chomsky, the Comment pages of the Guardian, the London Review of Books, Robert Fisk, George Galloway, the Socialist Workers Party, Edward Said, the anti-war coalition and (for reasons I could not fathom) Virginia Woolf.

With the exception of Virginia Woolf, the above are accused of a grand, historic betrayal of the values of the left. Cohen insists they have surrendered to fascism. He holds that this betrayal is more profound and historically significant than the one committed by the left-wing intellectuals (among them Eric Hobsbawn and Raymond Williams) who apologised for the Nazi-Soviet pact in 1939.

The book veers off in a number of unexpected directions, at one point pausing to analyse Pride and Prejudice as a literary antecedent to Bridget Jones's Diary. But its thesis is nevertheless easy to state. The British left used to have a set of common values. Even when it was most catastrophically wrong - apologising for Stalin's death camps, or ignoring the horror of Mao - it meant well.

According to Cohen, this claim is now invalid. The collapse of socialism in the Eighties and the rise of what he calls Islamic fascism have changed everything. Cohen asserts that the left's hatred of America means it is no longer able to tell the difference between right and wrong. It suffers from the syndrome identified by Bertrand Russell 80 years ago, a belief in the superior virtue of the oppressed. This dogma has led left-wing writers and activists to make fellow cause with bigots, murderers, terrorists, gay-bashers, women-haters and the most dangerous kind of anti-semite.

Cohen skilfully shows how the left perversely sets its moral compass by the United States. When America refused to invade Iraq in 1991, it faced charges of collusion with a totalitarian regime. When it did go in some 12 years later, it was accused of taking part in an imperial adventure. For the left, whatever America does is by definition evil. Cohen is at his best as a painstakingly forensic reporter and he marshals his evidence with flair and rigour. Chomsky's erratic public career, including a brief spell as apologist for Pol Pot, gets the treatment it probably deserves. The section on how the Socialist Workers Party (a marginal organisation taken with perplexing seriousness by Cohen) evolved from a half-baked Marxist sub-group into a repository for Muslim grievance is very nicely done.

He is at his very best when he exposes the dishonesty of the liberal press. Here he is on the Independent's report of the murder of the American green party activist Marla Ruzicka by an Islamic suicide bomber in Baghdad in April 2005: 'The piece was headlined, "The senseless death of the woman who fought George Bush", which read as if her murder wasn't a premeditated act by a religious fanatic from the ultra-right but George Bush's fault. Her legacy "should put many politicians in America, and in our own country, to shame," the Independent continued, while carefully - and shamefully - avoiding criticism of her killer.'

This is admirable. Cohen's book has made me look with greater respect at the motives behind those who led the journey to war in Iraq in 2003, and view many of the anti-war campaigners with a new scepticism. There are, however, certain important methodological flaws that cast doubt on his central thesis.

Cohen grabs key Western concepts and applies them very loosely in a Middle-Eastern context, where they have a problematic application. For him Saddam Hussein's Baath Party is 'fascist' and so are the Islamic movements that it suppressed. There is no doubt that the word 'fascist' adds power and apparent clarity to Cohen's polemic, and it is of course the case that Saddam borrowed some of the most loathsome Nazi ideas. But the use of such a specific and emotive Western term to describe a variety of complex and distinct phenomena hinders rather than enables genuine understanding.

Cohen erects paper tigers. It is easy to turn over the SWP. The key failing of the book is that nowhere does Cohen seriously engage with the mainstream, anti-war left. Cohen's thesis simply does not begin to apply to the decent and honourable left-wing men and women who opposed the war: Robin Cook, Menzies Campbell, Chris Smith, Frank Dobson, Clare Short, Alan Simpson, Bob Marshall-Andrews, and so many others. These people are not rancid homophobes or anti-semites, reflex America bashers or secret supporters of al-Qaeda. They were perfectly clear-sighted about the horror of Saddam, and nevertheless found it natural as social democrats to oppose the war.

Then Cohen asks: 'Why is Palestine a cause for the liberal left but not China, Sudan, Zimbabwe, Congo or North Korea?' But precisely the same question must be levelled at Cohen's new-found neo-conservative friends, and with far greater force. Tony Blair, for example, has failed to lift a finger for Zimbabwe, been impotent on Darfur and sucked up to China, a serial failure of principle that raises the deadly question: why the obsession with Iraq?

This book is much more than a mere denunciation of old left-wing friends and colleagues. It is also a moving account of a long personal journey, carried off with wit, verve, considerable literary skill and human compassion. Its heroes include the Iraqi resistance to Saddam, Martin Amis, George W Bush, Paul Wolfowitz and Nick Cohen's long-suffering mother. Among its many other qualities it will come to be seen as a very powerful defence of Tony Blair's premiership: surely more intelligent, accomplished and eloquent than the Prime Minister really deserves.

Peter Oborne is political columnist for the Daily Mail

Beatrix Campbell
Writer and Journalist

Nick Cohen's mother and her shopping strategies guide us to his location on the left. It is a charming introduction - ethical consumption by his communist parents infused his childhood. I recognised the tone. Mine were communists and we were blessed by the belief that politics and active citizenship mattered. In our house, domestic and generational tumult roared over the terrain of Russia. My father, in raging exasperation, would shout, 'The trouble with you is you're a ... a ... social democrat!'

That's what What's Left? brought to mind: the use of abuse as argument. It is written with something of those bad manners: intemperate, petulant, abusive. It is a painful text, simultaneously victimised and grandiose; it is personal without self-awareness, polemical without coherence.

It starts from Cohen's support for the Bush-Blair new imperialism and all the trouble that caused. Cohen's book isn't interested in why he and a few influential political commentators hailing from the left landed up isolated from the majority progressive resistance to the invasion of Iraq. Instead of asking why his coterie was estranged from the rest of the left, he rants, he explodes, he hyperventilates.

The text begins with Iraq and then callously evades the sponsorship of militarism, sectarianism and sexism and corruption no one knows how to fix. It ends with Israel instead. Yes, he admits, Palestine suffers racism and collective punishment. Yes, that's worth fighting. 'Yes, until you ask the question I've delayed asking: what is anti-semitism?' What is this conditional 'until'? What makes ending collective punishment and the occupation of Palestine so unthinkable?

After the end of the Cold War, he says, the left embraced fascist fundamentalism as its expression of anti-Westernism. Cohen responds to the anti-semitism swirling around Islamic fundamentalism with an alarming hypothesis: after the Cold War 'radical intellectuals fled from universal values' into cultural relativism; gay, black and feminist cultures became separatist, they 'couldn't be criticised' and nor 'by extension could any other culture, even if it was the culture of fascism, religious tyranny, wife-burning or suicide bombing'. Ergo, the liberal left has become fascist.

Do you recognise yourself here, dear reader? We're used to this sort of stuff, of course: Melanie Phillips has been a prolific exponent of apostasy. It's mad.

[Pause for breath ... as Melanie Phillips replies to the extrodinary and revealing charge of 'apostasy'. Terra Incognita]

Vignettes of the New Barbarism
2 February, 2007

In the unintentionally hilarious and all-too revealing critiques in the Observer of Nick Cohen’s new book, What’s Left, Beatrix Campbell suddenly comes out with this: 'We’re used to this sort of stuff, of course: Melanie Phillips has been a prolific exponent of apostasy. It’s mad'.

Apostasy, eh? Yes, that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it. The language gives it away. It’s not the particular views that I happen to expound, or that the latest thought-criminal Nick Cohen now expounds, which enrage the left. It’s being an ‘exponent of apostasy’. Not an exponent of a political position, or an attitude of mind, or a view about a specific issue. Apostasy. The renunciation of a religious doctrine. It’s the fact that we have dared to deny the authority of an ideology which serves as a secular religion and which therefore cannot be challenged without our being excommunicated and ritually burned. Our crime is simply to think for ourselves, to be therefore apostates, to have left the faith, to declare it to be untrue, and not to have ‘recanted’. It is the language of religious hysterics; it is the language of the Inquisition; it is the language of Islam; it is the language also of Stalinism, which similarly declared that those who stood up against the tyranny were ‘mad’ and locked them away. And now it is the language of the British ‘progressive’ intelligentsia.

[Back to replies ... ]

Isabel Hilton
Editor of opendemocracy.net

Immanuel Kant, in his treatise on perpetual peace, argued that any leader of peace, who would embody in his person the responsibility for international administration and enforcement of justice, would quickly become a despot.

That is why he advocated that the role should be undertaken collectively and only with the consent of the peoples. Nick Cohen's book is detailed and passionately argued. It is also more than merely a rehearsal of the argument about the Iraq war, but that, nevertheless, lies at its heart: those who opposed the war, he says, were in de facto support of fascism. As one of them, I disagree.

Let's assume for a moment that the desire to overthrow Saddam Hussein derived from the good and disinterested intention to bring democracy to the Middle East. Let's stretch our credulity further to say that, in the pursuit of a good cause, the manipulation, deviousness and lies employed to launch the war were justified and that the abuses of justice and liberty that followed were necessary. The question remains: was war the best approach? Any who knew the region, and many who didn't, understood that this was a criminally dangerous gamble that risked setting in train events that could cost untold lives, all for an uncertain result that might well be worse.

Those who opposed it did so for many reasons - perhaps some of them unworthy. But to reduce this opposition to an acquiescence to fascism is itself unworthy. The idea that lethal force is a tool to refashion the world into something better is an illusion most easily maintained by men and women who have never been to war or sent their children, never lived it or had to flee the consequences - and who appear unable truly to reckon the cost in the sufferings of others or understand the long aftermath. It is something to undertake only when there is truly no alternative. Those misgivings have been amply vindicated.

Sunder Katwala
General secretary of the Fabian Society

Nick Cohen accurately skewers some of his main targets on the left, especially the Socialist Workers Party's use of the anti-war movement. The left should not let valid criticisms of the botched Iraq war slip into a 'my enemy's enemy' approach.

But what Cohen calls 'the left' is a leftist fringe. It has never achieved much. There is another left - the constructive democratic liberal left - which has many achievements. You owe to it your weekend, the NHS and the minimum wage. Cohen thinks this is all over - there are no causes left, except perhaps the environment. 'I doubt if anyone can tell you what a society significantly more left-wing than ours would look like,' he writes.

He is wrong. It would be a more equal society, where our opportunities in life were not so strongly determined by who our parents are and where we commit to sustain our environment for future generations. There are many great causes left - at home and abroad. Why doesn't Nick Cohen join those campaigns?

John Lloyd
Financial Times

It is an essay of wide reference and great brilliance, which flays every kind of foot-shuffling excuse for not facing up to the nature of the regime which that most evil (and now, mercifully, dead) tyrant, Saddam Hussein, inflicted on his country and planned for his region. Cohen surveys a gamut of left-liberal Western opinion that, in part under the pressure of the Iraqi war, has forgotten its best traditions and instead lapsed into its worst, that regards nothing as more important than the failures of its own societies, and that lacks the imagination or the will to comprehend the agonies of those living under tyranny.'

Michale Gove
The Spectator

'Nick Cohen scrupulously anatomises the way in which anti-Americanism, and the doctrine that my enemy's enemy is my friend, has driven people whose political inspiration was a belief in progress to make excuses for forces that are trying to use murder to propel us back into the Dark Ages.'

Christopher Hitchens
The Sunday Times

'An exemplary piece of political satire, in which the generally amusing and ironic tone should not lull you into ignoring the deadly seriousness of the argument. It is not necessary to have a personal stake in a discussion like this, but it does help. Cohen started out trying to defend the honour of the left and attempting to appeal to its better traditions. He swiftly found that this made him the target of the most hysterical slander, from people whose hatred of liberal democracy has a long and sordid ancestry. He then lowered his head, clenched his teeth, steered into the storm and embarked on the toughest struggle an old leftist can ever undertake: a confrontation with former comrades who suspect him of "selling out"... Cohen's is an admirable example of self-criticism and self-examination, using intellectual honesty as a means of illuminating a much wider canvas.

How the Left Went Wrong

How the Left Went Wrong
Nick Cohen
Published 05 February 2007

In early 2003, the largest co-ordinated protests in history took place against the Iraq war. This, argues Nick Cohen, was a failure of solidarity with the Iraqi people.

No one who looked at the liberal left from the outside could pretend that it provided anything other than token opposition to the "insurgents" from the Ba'ath Party and al-Qaeda. The British Liberal Democrats, the Continental social-democratic parties, the African National Congress and virtually every leftish newspaper and journal on the planet were unable to accept that the struggles of Arabs and Kurds had anything to do with them. Mainstream Muslim organisations were as indifferent to the murder of Muslims by Muslims in Iraq as they were to those in Darfur. For most world opinion, Tony Blair's hopes of "giving people oppressed, almost enslaved, the prospect of democracy and liberty" counted for nothing. The worst of the lot were the organisers of the UK anti-war demonstrations who turned out to be not so much against war, but on the wrong side.

Their leader, George Galloway, was a bombastic Scottish Labour MP who combined blood-curdling rhetoric with a whining sentimentality, like many a thug before him. In the Nineties, his political career appeared to be dead. Contrary to popular prejudice, successful politicians don't always love the sound of their own voice. The ones who get on learn to hold their tongue and speak for a purpose. Galloway was too fond of grandstanding to make it in the best of times for the left. When new Labour took charge, many Scottish bruisers from the old left found preferment under Blair, who, like all prime ministers, needed his enforcers. But Galloway missed the boat, and perhaps never wanted to board it. He seemed an irrelevant backbencher who could hope only for the occasional appearance on talk radio, but he proved that a minor politician from democratic Britain could build an alternative career in Arab dictatorships. Their state-controlled media quoted approved foreigners at length, giving Galloway the attention he could not get at home. The unending tyranny of totalitarian Iraq and the ephemeral glitz of Celebrity Big Brother seem as far apart as it is possible to be. But the anti-war movement should not have been surprised that Galloway ended up as an exhibit on a TV freak show. The celebrity and the totalitarian share a desire to have their face in every newspaper and on every television screen. Both are what the playwright Heathcote Williams called "psychic imperialists", who want to colonise the minds of millions.

In 1994, long before he crawled around the Big Brother house, Galloway made his first steps towards stardom when Iraqi TV showed him bending the knee before Saddam Hussein. He gave the most emphatic demonstration of the switch on the left when he flew to Baghdad in the aftermath of the first war against Saddam and declared: "I thought the president would appreciate to know that even today, three years after the war, I still meet families who are calling their newborn sons Saddam . . . Sir, I salute your courage, your strength, your indefatigability. And I want you to know that we are with you until victory, until victory, until Jerusalem." If you listened to what Galloway said, you noticed a difference from what had gone before. With the brief exception of the two years of the Hitler-Stalin pact, 20th-century fellow-travellers had to choose between communism and fascism, but in the 21st century you could refuse to be "judgemental" about any system as long as it was anti-democratic.

Galloway saluted the fascistic perpetrator of racial extermination campaigns, but he was just as keen on communism. He lamented "the disappearance of the Soviet Union", and said it was "the biggest catastrophe of my life". When asked about his admiration for Fidel Castro, the dictator of Cuba, he said, "I don't believe that Fidel Castro is a dictator." When Saddam was gone, Galloway went to Ba'athist Syria, even though it was the sworn enemy of Ba'athist Iraq, and applauded it as "the last castle of the Arab dignity and the Arab rights". Saddam had launched an unprovoked war against Iran, but when Hezbollah, Iran's terrorist proxy in Lebanon, began a war with Israel, a finger-jabbing Galloway bellowed to a rally in London, "Hezbollah has never been a terrorist organisation. I am here to glorify the Lebanese resistance." Stalinism, Castroism, Islamism, Ba'athism, the old distinctions no longer held. Anyism would do as an alternative to democracy.

Such was the leader of the Stop the War Coalition, a man offered columns by the Guardian, the parish magazine of the "liberal" English middle class, and buttered up with oily profiles in the New York Times, the parish magazine of the "liberal" American middle class. A respectable movement of the right or the left would have refused to have anything to do with him, but the fever George W Bush provoked and the waning power of liberal principles meant that not one heckler raised a voice in protest when he addressed the London marchers who were so eager to chant "Not in my name".

A theme of this book is that ideas on the fringe are worth examining. Not only do the thoughts of apparently inconsequential figures - Michel Aflaq, Karl Marx, Friedrich Hayek, Sayyid Qutb - take off, but the extreme parties magnify trends in wider society. The Socialist Workers Party, Galloway's backer and the real force behind the Stop the War Coalition, distinguished itself by taking the opportunism and control-freakery of conventional politics and pushing them further than any democratic party would dare, when it ordered its pliant members into an alliance with the Islamic right in which not one of the old taboos held.

Take fascist conspiracy theory. Globalise Resistance, an anti-capitalist group dominated by the SWP, first proposed a global day of protest against the war at the "Cairo Conference" of anti-war activists. The delegates sounded as if tsarist Russia and Nazi Germany had inspired them when they declared that the 2003 war against Iraq was the result of a "Zionist plan, which targets the establishment of the greater State of Israel from the Nile to the Euphrates".

Making friends with your enemy's enemy is a familiar tactic, but it is not as uncomplicated as it seems. More often than not, you have to betray your old friends when you conclude your pact. The organisers of the anti-war demonstrations and their friends treated Iraqi left-wingers like criminals because they refused to take up arms against the Americans as the script of the rich world's left said they must.

Instead of supporting the far right, the uppity natives said they wanted to escape from al-Qaeda and the Ba'ath and to participate in free elections. Iraqi trade unionists in particular were met with the most implacable hatred. At the 2004 European Social Forum speaker after speaker supported the "resistance". No one booed when one said that those who questioned the motives of the suicide bombers who were murdering daily (mainly Muslim) civilians were guilty of "anti-Islamic racism". They dismissed the leaders of the Iraqi left as "quislings", even when they were men such as Hadi Saleh. The left would once have hailed him a hero for risking his life for the welfare of humanity. Saleh was a printer and trade union organiser whom the Ba'athists arrested as soon as they came to power in 1968. He sat on death row for five years. They let him go, and he fled to Sweden with his wife. Like many in the Iraqi Communist Party, he lost his faith in Moscow after it cut deals with Saddam and started a long journey towards constitutional politics. He had to live with a constant fear of assassination. Saleh opposed the war of 2003, but returned home after it was over. From next to nothing he and his comrades built a mass movement in the face of the indifference or hostility of the Americans, who were so lost in conservative dogma they didn't grasp that free societies and free trade unions go together. They came for him, of course. The professional nature of the torture wounds on his body suggested that "they" were Ba'athist secret policemen rather than Bin Ladenists. When he was dead, they took his union records to give them the names of more people to kill.

I've never felt as ashamed of my trade of liberal journalism as I did at the time of his murder. The BBC boasts that it questions without fear or favour. But when you hire upper-middle-class arts graduates, pay them well and allow them to work, eat and sleep together in west London, there's bound to be a "Collective Group Think". In Iraq's case, it did not come out in the hard questions they asked the other side, but in the soft questions they asked their own side. For years, the BBC's attack-dog presenters couldn't manage to give one opponent of the war a tough interview. Not even Galloway. My colleagues were rich men and women by British standards, let alone world standards. They kept silent so they could maintain the illusion that the family of the "left" was flawless. No one would have tortured them if they had spoken out. No one would have beaten their genitals, broken their bones, strangled them with an electric flex and then stolen their address book so that they could do the same to their friends. The worst they would have got were contemptuous looks at dinner parties, badges of honour at the time.

When I asked my colleagues why the fact that an anti-war movement being led by apologists for Saddam was not a story, when a Countryside Alliance led by neo-Nazis would have been, they said, "Well, the people who went on their demonstrations didn't agree with Galloway and the SWP. They followed Robin Cook, Jacques Chirac, Gerhard Schröder and the Liberal Democrats." This was true up to a point. "And anyway," they continued, "it didn't matter" - an answer which showed how little they understood the world around them.

The convergence of far-left and far-right ideas is not the only reason for taking a good look at the organisers of the anti-war marches. Because they said they were on the left, they had to face an argument that was to confront men and women with status, in the BBC, liberal media, NGOs, Liberal Democrats and the centre-left governments of Europe, South America and South Africa. All right, it ran, you say the war against Iraq was illegal, and you wish it had never happened; you're appalled by the casualties and sickened by Bush. That's fine, and you have a point, but now that far-right psychopaths are ravaging the country, are you going to stand up for your social-democratic principles and support the victims or does anything go for you, too?

"What's Left? How liberals lost their way" is published by Fourth Estate (£12.99). Next week,