Islamism, Free Speech and the Great Power Game

'In Britain...a majority of Muslims have, one way or another, clearly accepted the basic rules of peaceful coexistence in a liberal pluralist society. They no longer say, as a British Muslim called Iqbal Sacranie did in 1989, while some of his co-religionists were burning copies of The Satanic Verses, that death might be "a bit too easy" for Rushdie'.We still don't know who'll win the global battle for free speech , Timothy Garton Ash, The Guardian, May 9 2014

Certainly the basic rules of free speech have been mostly accepted. Yet it's not clear whether 'preaceful coexistence' is one accepted by militant Islamists without imposing certain terms and using the threat of terror as a means to try and change Britain and its foreign policy.

They may well not say such things as Sacranie did in the heat of the moment in 1989. Instead Islamists have learnt public relations and how to craftily deploy language to insinuate the idea of a 'community under siege'. That was quite evident during the Birmingham Islamist 'school takeover plot'.

They include former psychotherapists such as the sinister Salma Yaqoob. Media savvy and manipulate, she was able to spin the reaction to allegations of an Islamist takeover as part of a "narrative" to demonise Muslims who are 'in denial' and complicit if they "challenge" it.

Unless the Ofsted Report is part of a choreographed state plot, then it has to be accepted that Islamists did put into practice institutional discrimination against non-Muslim pupils. Even so, the point is that Yaqoob is trying to exploit these events for propaganda purposes.

The insinuation is always that Muslims are facing persecution, harrassment and discrimination in Britain so as to whip up sectarian militancy. As Yaqoob puts it 'Muslims feel under siege, while being accused of besieging an unwitting and overly tolerant majority who in turn will be fearful and mistrustful'.

Since 2001, free speech has been lauded by Islamists because it was no longer beneficial to call for a novelists or writer to be killed publicly. It was better to use the undoubted overreaction to the 9/11 attacks to put forth the idea of the myth of the umma as under armed threat across the globe.

In Britain throughout the 2000s a form of shadow boxing has since gone on between British governments wanting to ramp up the threat of terror as a pretext to intervene militarily in 'the Muslim world' and domestic Islamists who portray that as global war of terror against the umma.

That was seen in the Birmingham School 'plot' where Michael Gove deliberately blew out of all proportion the attempts to Islamise schools by sending in counter terrorism officials. Such shoddy attempts to exploit the fear of Islamism are designed to win votes and look 'tough'.

In Britain, free speech is not so much on the wane. The reason there are few people willing to satirise Islam or Mohammed is partly because it is simply so much easier to stick to the routine targets such as Christianity and due to the mendacious use of the word 'Islamophobia' to mean a form of 'racism'.

If anything free speech has become superfluous in an age of image and spin, one where Britons living in a bored and atomised consumer society have their politics and view fed to them by mass media machines, oily spin and ideologues trying to 'frame debates' through their use of politically correct language.

The Mob Celebration on Bin Laden's Death: Tribalism not Patriotism.

The jubilation in the USA that greeted Bin Laden's killing was vulgar and unseemly. But certain journalists have tried to use it to discern some systemic malaise connected to the idea of being loyal to a nation. Gary Younge makes some good points and states today, (Osama bin Laden's death: The US patriot reflex, The Guardian 3 May 2011 ),

The national unity that Barack Obama has sought to harness following the announcement is indeed eerily familiar. Albeit in joy rather than sorrow, it's the same kind of unity that followed 9/11. It is also the same kind of unity that rallies around flags, dismisses dissent and disdains reflection.

But he writes,

The patriotic impulse in American society is intense and pervasive. The kind of national fervour reserved elsewhere for occasional events like royal weddings, World Cup victories or major tragedies is a dormant reflex waiting for a trigger.

The mob reaction in reaction to Bin Laden's assassination is more akin to "tribalism" or nationalism which is different to patriotism which has often led to an impassioned and sceptical questioning of power, not only of government but of those whom Orwell called "transferred nationalism".

The fact that the neoconservatives used terms such as "Patriot Act" to impose measures that curtailed civil liberties in the USA should not detract from the fact that the word "patriotism", as in "patriot missile" is an Orwellian misappropriation of the word. In the same way that Soviet communist regimes were termed "people's republics".

Younge conflates nationalism with patriotism due to the adherence to the ideology of anti-colonial discourse that derives from the 1960s Leninist radicals and those such as Franz Fanon. Nationalism is only good if it is yoked to victim nations or to hyper identities such as militant Islamism.

It is quite possible to be simultaneously against US global policy, even "neo-imperialism", without being scathing about the ordinary ties and loyalty to a country and being against those who write drivel about "the Iraqi resistance" or support Islamo-Bolshevik movements such as Respect.

Such movements fall under the rubric of what Orwell called "transferred nationalism" and are conditioned by the same power hunger, fanaticism and hatreds that are fomented by bad governments that those who care for their own countries seek to bring an end to. Nationalism is not the same as patriotism. To conflate them is disingenuous.

A Rationalisation of Bin Laden's Terrorism.

Let that be it. The killing of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan is a fork in the road of world politics.

One way lies a fundamental rethink of US and British policy towards the Arab and Muslim worlds, a chance to drain the swamp that bred 9/11.

That way is the end of the "war on terror" launched in the aftermath of Bin Laden's atrocious crimes of September 2011. His act of violence became first the cause and rapidly the pretext for many more such acts, vastly more costly in terms of lives lost.

Andrew Murray, ( Bin Laden's death is a fork in the road The Guardian, 2 May 2011 )

Murray, chairman of the "Stop the War Coalition" in Britain has used the killing of Bin Laden to trot out the usual line that Al Qaeda terrorism is merely a reflex action to US and British foreign policy. Despite the fact Al Qaeda fighters have been active in places outside the Arab and Muslim World such as Indonesia and Chechnya.

There is no need to take the propaganda claims of the Bush administration and the "war on terror" at face value, for if 9/11 was a pretext to go in to Afghanistan and, partly, into Iraq, Al Qaeda's commitment to terrorism and the USA/UK's quest for energy security pre dates both what are essentially resource wars.

The same is true of Russia's role in the war against Chechen insurgents with connections to Al Qaeda. In fact, the assassination of 'Moganned', Al Qaeda's main Saudi born militant in Chechnya occurred recently on April 22nd 2011 and who had entered the Northern Caucasus since 1999 and by 2005 emerged as the handler of foreign funds for the jihad.

Hence Andrew Murray's crude "either-or" interpretation of the relationship between "the West" and "the Muslim World" is an inversion of the clash of civilisations idea: that Al Qaeda is simply the most extreme and violent form of reaction against Western Imperialism in Arab and Muslim lands.

This crude Leninist propaganda line denies the agency of Arab peoples themselves unless they fit into the notion that they are anti-Western as opposed to against the autocrats that dominate them e.g decayed secular dictatorship of Egypt was created by military power under those such as Colonel Nasser.

The absurdity is that one of the greatest admirers of Nasser is none other than George Galloway, an erstwhile ally of Murray in the myriad of groupuscules that try to hi-jack anti-war sentiment amongst British people into support for fanatical ideological agendas-including that of Respect.

Galloway's hero in Nasser executed Sayyid Qutb, the intellectual progenitor of modern militant Islamism in 1966, one reason the alliance between the hard left and the MAB, influenced very much by Qutb, is based only on hatred of the West as opposed to a principled criticism of Western foreign policy.

Al Qaeda has its own history and agenda: it's original raison d'etre under Bin Laden was less to do with Western foreign policy as such but with antagonism to the corruption of the Saudi regime and not being permitted to fight in the First Gulf War of 1991 against Saddam Hussein and which was blamed later on the US and it's 'occupation' of the Holy Land.

Murray is active in campaigning against the governments cuts: but the British economy and hence living standards would collapse without a steady and secure supply of oil from Saudi Arabia, one reason why the British government simply cannot give decisive public backing to democracy activists in Bahrain.

Obviously, as Malise Ruthven wrote in A Fury for God on 9/11 the long term interests of the Western powers are in having stable democratic regimes across the Middle East. The Arab Uprisings at least provide an opportunity that this could be brought about.

Ruthven also sensibly argued that Islamist solidarity always works negatively: the interests of Arab nations and the political groups within them from Bahrain to Libya and Saudi Arabia to Palestine and Lebanon are diverse and to yoke them all as "anti-Western" is to accept precisely the narrative of Al Qaeda.

This narrative accepts the concept of an Islamic hyper identity in which "the Muslim World" and the ummah is largely united in opposing Western "crusades", a term used repeatedly by neurotic and self promoting radical journalists such as John Pilger who want to motivate Muslim youths as new force for militant challenge to Western power from within.

The rationalisation of terrorism that has continually been offered since 9/11, whether by Pilger, Milne or Galloway, has acted as a ruse to ramp up militancy against the system in Britain as a substitute for the decline of the forward march of the labour movement which has petered out and fragmented.

It is true that it is both vital and justified to criticise the foreign policy and the dangerous over dependence upon the oil that fuels Western high octane car and supermarket societies and that leads to contradictory and botched entanglement and meddling in the Middle East.

But equally so, it is necessary to understand that Al Qaeda was not caused wholly by "the West" but as a spin off from the dysfunctional Saudi regime's investment in the Arab Afghan campaigns against the Soviet Union and an ideology that has an existence in its own right, one rejected in the recent Arab Uprisings.

Lifestyle Conversions to Islam and the Attraction of the Political Exotic.

Andrew Brown writes on Lauren Booth's conversion to Islam that,

There is quite a lot that could be said about anyone who converts to Islam in Iran under the impression that it is less inhumane than New Labour, but as a piece of theatre, Lauren Booth's conversion could hardly be beaten.

Conversion....is also always a political and social act, a statement about where you fit into the world. To convert is to announce your allegiance to a new tribe, or a new idea of humanity.

Lauren Booth is not "nutty" but neither is this act of conversion much to do with religion but as more of a lifestyle option. As Booth put it in A Daily Mail interview, after she spoke of her "holy experience” whilst visiting the Fatima al-Masumeh shrine in the city of Qom, something that hit her like a “shot of spiritual morphine”,

‘Now I don’t eat pork and I read the Koran every day. I’m on page 60. I also haven’t had a drink in 45 days, the longest period in 25 years,' she said.

'The strange thing is that since I decided to convert I haven’t wanted to touch alcohol, and I was someone who craved a glass of wine or two at the end of a day.’

The move is partly political and more based on a rejection of what she does not like as opposed to what she does.

Booth converted as part of the usual pathetic quest for some form of identity which Islam obviously offers in a bleak, atomised and deracinated Britain that depends for its consumer lifestyle, it is thought, on the subjugation of Muslims. Its a spiritual quest perverted into self indulgent identity politics.

By conflating all Islamist causes into one global form of revolutionary and emancipatory kitsch, the attraction of middle class women like Booth to Islam is really more to do to with a fetish for the political exotic, the sort that pulled in women to extol Cuba and handsome guerillas as Che Guevara in the 1960s.

Booth was given a Palestinian diplomatic status by Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in 2008 claims that she now covers her head with a hijab when she leaves the house and prays five times daily. Booth did not exclude the possibility of wearing a burka, even though its not part of Islam itself.

Booth was already a member of the "political religion" that is the Islamo-Trotskyist hybrid Respect, but with the split with the SWP, Booth has moved more to the more ostensibly Islamist wing as did that other halfwit Yvonne Ridley after being captured by the Taliban back in 2001.

The conversion is due to the usual mixture of careerist motives ( she works as does Galloway for Iran's state network Press TV ) and as an act of repudiating her civilisation and culture more than through any real acceptance of Islam. It makes for good propaganda for Iran, which is what Press TV is about.

Both Ridley and Booth work for Press TV and are prominent in RESPECT. This is the party that Ridley claimed was “Zionist-free” in 2006 and who described Israel as “that disgusting little watchdog of America that is festering in the Middle East”. She could have said satellite or client without using this lurid language.

Ridley opined “If there was any Zionists in the Respect Party they would be hunted down and kicked out. We have no time for Zionists”.

There is no reason why both US foreign policy and Israel's actions cannot be condemned whilst at the same time condemning the inhumanity of the repressive aspects of Iran's regime. The reason Booth and Ridley do not is due to the mental vice defined by Orwell as "transferred nationalism".