posted 6 years ago
Well, I can't be bothered listening to some Youtube diatribe from the likes of TR. There is enough right-wing propaganda in our media these days thanks to UKIP, never mind the EDL and its ilk. Freedom of speech does not require me to listen to this stuff.
I have no time for fundamentalism of any kind - Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu etc - and I agree with Campbell that the problem is not with massive populations or entire religions, but with a small minority of violent extremists. So I have to disagree with Bert's broadbrush condemnation of Islam, which I think misses both the historical context of much of today's Islamist violence and also at least some acknowledgement that our own history is hardly spotless.
Modern Islamism seems to be largely a product of the failure of secular nationalism and liberation movements following the collapse of the Western and Ottoman empires. Western powers preached freedom to Muslims recently liberated from Turkish rule, but systematically undermined efforts to achieve genuine independence from Western interference, from Egypt through Palestine to Iraq and beyond. After WWII, this contrast between words and deeds became even starker, with the creation of Israel (which many people in the region saw as a Western Jewish colony planted in their midst - as one West Bank Palestinian ruefully asked me, "If the West wanted to help the Jews after the Holocaust, why not give them Bavaria?") and with the polarisation between Western and Soviet proxies in the region. For example, the reason we have problems with Iran today is because we undermined their democratically elected government back in the 1950s and imposed the Shah on them, ultimately resulting in the religiously inspired revolution against the Shah. In Syria and Iraq, we are dealing with the consequences of half a century of Western and Soviet interference.
And our choice of friends in the region doesn't help. A couple of weeks ago, we saw Western leaders declaring "Je suis Charlie" after the events in Paris, while the same week their Saudi friends were inflicting a barbaric medieval punishment on a dissident. This week, our leaders are all mourning the Saudi head of a dynasty of head-lopping autocrats who have in many cases been actively sponsoring extreme Islamist groups around the world, sometimes with our connivance (Afghanistan) and sometimes without (Pakistan). We blame Palestinians - under a brutal and racist occupation - for electing Hamas in Gaza, but we cosy up to the Saudi leadership and other dictators without a qualm of conscience. We may not be aware of this gulf between our words and deeds, but people in the affected regions are all too aware of it. And when you've had your nose rubbed in this kind of hypocrisy for long enough, it is at least understandable that you might reach for more extreme ideologies - even those based on pseudo-medieval fantasies of a mythical Caliphate - in response. This stuff doesn't come out of nowhere - we reap what we sow in many cases.
What is particularly terrifying today is that this desperate cynicism and growing rejection of democracy has reached a critical mass, where even countries that were relatively free of Islamism - like Nigeria - are now seeing the growth of Islamist thugs like Boko Haram. Again, it would probably be worth looking at where the money comes from for weapons and extremist madrasas, because I suspect many such trails would lead back to Saudi Arabia, as they do from Pakistan. Of course, I hope we would agree that when somebody picks up a gun or sets off a bomb, they are responsible for their own actions, but we should also recognise that our own governments bear at least some responsibility for creating the conditions that allow such extremism to grow. Perhaps the problem with Islamic extremism is that, unlike most secular nationalist movements we have suppressed in the past, Islam is a global religion with global networks that can be exploited by violent extremists. Just like our own networks of power that we have used to maintain our position in the past.
And when it comes to criticism of specific aspects of Muslim societies, we should remember that it wasn't always this way. For most of the last millennium, the safest place to be a Jew was probably under Muslim rule, where the other "people of the Book" were relatively free to practice their own religions in peace. It wasn't the Arabs who killed 6 million Jews within living memory, and slavery is still a recent cultural memory in the USA and Caribbean. Sadly, anti-semitism, intolerance, homophobia and attacks on secularism are familiar features of even mainstream dialogue in many Western countries e.g. Fox News broadcast inflammatory lies about a major British city only last week. And just try electing an atheist president in the USA and see how far you get.
Meanwhile, the position of women in Muslim countries varies widely, but ironically it was generally better under our secular "enemies" (Iraq, Syria, communist Afghanistan) than under our devout friends (Saudi, the Gulf states). It's true that most of these societies are not places where we as Westerners would want to live, and I agree with Bert that we should actively promote greater democracy and freedom, especially for women. But that's not what our governments are doing, is it?
Personally, I think we should be far more robust in our defence of the liberties we claim to uphold, whether on the streets of Paris or London, or indeed in our dealings with the oppressive regimes we have favoured with such catastrophic results in the past. And that includes our allies - whether it's Saudi Arabia, Pakistan or even Israel/Palestine. People in these troubled regions are not idiots, and they can see our hypocrisy even if we cannot.
No more Blub for me, thank you, Vicar.
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