Moderation in moderation
Guest post by Pink Prosecco
Nathan Lean is the author of The Islamophobia Industry: How the Right Manufactures Fear of Muslims (2012). His latest post, “Stop Saying ‘Moderate Muslims’. You’re Only Empowering Islamophobes” is characteristically frustrating, leaving the reader (or this one at least) uncertain whether he is (mostly) making sense or succumbing to a dangerous moral relativism.
After sketching events at a recent Heritage Foundation panel in which Brigitte Gabriel clashed with a young student, Saba Ahmed, Lean explains:
That prompted much hand-wringing, primarily on cable news, about the supposed silence of “moderate Muslims” in this supposed age of Islamist extremism. What no one on either side of the debate questioned, though, was the legitimacy of the phrase “moderate Muslims” itself.
Fair enough, I think. Most Muslims will tell you that their version of Islam is simply correct – not “moderate Islam’, just Islam. The Muslim whose views will probably strike most non-Muslims as “moderate’, because broadly compatible with secular and liberal norms, is unlikely to see herself as following a watered down version of the faith. Instead she will view both violent extremists and theocrats as wedded to a perverted and distorted form of Islam.
You could argue that “moderate Muslim’ has a subtext of “doesn’t take her religion seriously, thank goodness’. I believe that’s what Baroness Warsi was getting at in her rather incoherent 2011 speech on Islamophobia. (Obviously many “moderate Muslims’ will have no special problem with that label, but you can object to it and still be perfectly “moderate’.)
Nathan Lean then makes some points it seems easy to go along with. Brigitte Gabriel thinks no practising Muslim can be moderate, Sam Harris asserts that moderate Muslims are those that “express skepticism over the divine origins of the Quran and “surely realize that all [sacred] books are now candidates for flushing down the toilet”, and Pamela Geller thinks that today’s moderate is tomorrow’s mass murderer.
But just when I’m feeling perfectly well aligned with Lean against a bunch of bigots he says this:
To be fair, it’s not just the wackos. [M]any have used this phrase to describe Muslims who fit a certain preferred profile. Many Muslims themselves have bought into this dichotomy, if only to distance themselves from the so-called radicals and extremists to assure paranoid non-Muslims, in other words, “I’m not “that” kind of Muslim.”
Now, even the most irreproachably moderate Muslim might feel irritated at being constantly required to condemn things which have nothing whatsoever to do with him. But what on earth does Lean mean when he refers to “so-called radicals and extremists’? Does he mean terrorists and those who believe adulterers should be stoned to death? Lean’s failure to define his terms makes it impossible to know what he is actually arguing here.
This passage is very satirical, but I don’t mind admitting that I feel implicated in his sketch of the Buffalo wings customer.
How is it that we talk about Muslims much like we talk about Buffalo wings, their “potency” being measured not by some objective rubric but rather by our personal preferences? It’s the mild ones that we seem to search out: not so spicy in their religious practices that they burn us, yet not so bland that they dilute our religious diversity altogether.”
I feel no compunction in condemning those who think apostates and blasphemers should die. But I have no problem with Muslims who pray, fast, and choose to conform to their own understanding of sexual morality and modesty. (Later in the article Lean sets up a straw man, implying that that Muslims who observe Ramadan are viewed as “flirting with extremism’. This – unless you are some kind of counter-jihadist wingnut – is rubbish.)
Lean completely occludes non-violent extremism in his analysis, even though the views held by some entirely non-violent and law abiding Muslims are more extreme than those of the most lurid far right parties.
Even if a mere 1 percent of the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims is committed to violence, why is it that we haven’t seen 16 million violent attacks?
With rhetorical sleight of hand he darts back to those who set the bar unfairly high for “moderation’.
Proving one’s “moderation” is a trap, anyway. The only way to do it is to meet the criteria set forth by the person making the demand. For Gabriel and others, it’s by supporting Western foreign policies in the Middle East, cheering continued military aid to Israel, and even rejecting certain Islamic tenets. It’s why a figure like Zuhdi Jasser, a darling of the Republican Party and Peter King’s star witness in the “radicalization” hearings, is held up like a trophy while Saba Ahmed is mocked.
What does “rejecting certain Islamic tenets’ mean? There is little consensus about what Islam “is’ so I am completely at a loss as to whether Lean has in mind lashing blasphemers or believing there is no God but Allah. There’s an awful lot of middle ground between Zuhdi Jasser, who opposed the so-called Ground Zero mosque, and the terrorists who created Ground Zero in the first place. As Lean fails to acknowledge this, his post is ultimately meaningless.
Relativist tossers willing to promote Hizb ut-Tahir’s misogyny
Following the publication of this pretentious filth at the Graun‘s Comment Is Free site, it’s a pleasure to republish the following article, from Joanne Payton’s excellent blog:
In Australia, there is an event called the Festival of Dangerous Ideas, with some high-calibre contributors, like Salman Rushdie and Steven Pinker. One of the speakers they invited was one Uthman Badar, of Hizb ut-Tahrir. The title of the speech was Honour Killings are Morally Justified.
Badar says he did not choose the topic himself, but accepted it upon the urgings of the board. The festival’s co-curator Simon Longstaff said he had nominated the topic for six years in a row, because the point of the festival is to push boundaries ”to the point where you become extremely uncomfortable”.
Yet again, misogyny, racism and violence against minoritised women is considered edgy, rather than banal and conservative.
What’s more edgy and dangerous and uncomfortable than suggesting the world is a better place because a Tunisian father burned his 13 year old daughter alive? What’s more edgy and dangerous than saying certain women and girls don’t deserve to live?
For Aya, it was ‘dangerous’ to walk home from school with one of her classmates, and no doubt somewhat more than ‘extremely uncomfortable’ to die of burns a few days later.
It is a wonder that Longstaff didn’t realise that other speakers had balked the topic for six years in a row not because it was “uncomfortable”, but because it was morally repugnant: hate-speech as clickbait, where the names and faces of the victims are erased for the sake of a headline.
Enter Uthman Badar, the only man vainglorious enough to make the attempt. There are, of course, many experts in ‘honour’-based violence, people who have dedicated their careers to exploring its dynamics, conducting research, developing protection measures, supporting victims. Badar is not one of them. According to his Academia.edu page, he’s an economist (although apparently, he is not actually a student of the university that he claims to attend).
Even Badar doesn’t seem to have wanted to defend the murders of girls and women and young men: his preamble suggests he’s not even going to try and justify ‘honour’ killing. Let’s look at what he was going to say:
“Overwhelmingly, those who condemn honour killing are based in the liberal democracies of the West.”
This is untrue:
Here are 300 Tunisians demonstrating against the murder of Aya.
We in the West know about ‘honour’ killings only because they were brought to our attention by local activists: it was Asma Jahangir‘s decision to exceed her brief as Special Rapporteur into Extrajudicial Executions that brought the subject up; it was Rana Husseini‘s activism against the laws of Jordan that told us how embedded such crimes were in their societies, and it was Fadime Sahindal‘s prediction of her own death that raised the topic as something which occurred in the West.
Perhaps it is true that many of those who commit honour killings may not be based in the liberal democracies of the West but that doesn’t mean that they are accepted within their societies. Of all the Muslim countries surveyed by Pew, only in two did more respondents approve than disapprove of ‘honour’ crimes. Overwhelmingly, the scholars and activists who work against ‘honour’-based violence are people working in their own countries and communities, both within and outside the ‘West’. To ignore this fact demonstrates a strangely Eurocentric world view.
Aya’s father is taken as an exemplar of Tunisia: Aya herself is erased, the 300 Tunisian protesters are erased, Tunisian women’s rights activists are erased, the fact that ‘honour’ killings are vanishingly rare in Tunisia is erased. And this is all done in order that Badar can synechodically present ‘honour’ killers as the true representatives of ‘Eastern’ culture. This smacks of orientalism in itself: the presentation of a diverse culture and people as homogeneously violent, and obsessed with ‘honour’, against reams of evidence to the contrary.
And so, the next sentence:
“The accuser and moral judge is the secular (white) Westerner and the accused is the oriental other: the powerful condemn the powerless.”
The person at the actual nadir of powerlessness, the victim, is totally absent from Badar’s analysis. The actual situation — where the accuser and moral judge is the enculturated (brown) Easterner and the accused is the feminine other: where the powerful not only condemn, but slaughter the powerless – is erased. The victim is erased, and the murderer is granted victimhood in her stead.
And on:
“By taking a particular cultural view of honour, some killings are condemned, while others are celebrated: in turn, the act becomes a symbol of everything which is wrong with the other culture.”
Let’s ignore this strange position where we are led to believe that some killings are celebrated, which seems to be an attempt at whataboutery and decontextualisation too vague for me to parse. On the other hand, his point that the discourse of ‘honour’ is used to demonise the ‘other’ culture is unavoidably true. However, there are many more people who are far better qualified to argue this than Badar. Aisha Gill and Avtar Brah have done this excellently, and are feminists to boot.
Katherine Pratt Ewing, to give another example, has written an entire book on the topic, and a speech by her on how ‘honour’ crimes are used to stigmatise minorities would be informative, and moreover, informed by research. That is not what Longstaff wanted though: it wouldn’t have have got him in the headlines.
‘Islamophobia’
After the cancellation of the speech due to public outcry, Badar produced a petulant statement which attributes the outcry to Islamaphobia, as did Longstaff: ‘Have not the ‘Islamophobes’ already won the day when a person dare not speak on controversial matters because he is Muslim?’, he tweeted, rather pompously.
Let’s consider this charge for a second. Almost all Muslim organisations take pains to distance themselves from ‘honour’ killings. Almost all serious scholars address the issues of culture with caution, and with due attention to the worrying levels of xenophobia in the West. Training materials in use by professionals to help them respond to ‘honour’-related violence in the family stress the importance of not making cultural assumptions.
Just as a thought experiment, consider this: if you really hated Muslims and Islam, what would be the best way of overturning all this good work done in balancing the rights to life and freedom of young people (many, but not all, of whom are Muslim) with respect for the culture of their families? How about promoting a speech called ‘Honour Killings are Morally Justified’, and getting a speaker whose only qualification is being a Muslim to present it? Would that work? I think it would.
H/T: KB Player
Of course Putin’s Russia is imperialist!
By Dale Street (first published by Workers Liberty)
Sam Williams has written 16,000 words to claim that Russia is not imperialist, even when its tanks are rolling through other nations.
He describes the old Stalinist states “the former socialist countries of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.” In those days there was “no true Soviet imperialism”, claims Williams, because “wealth was not accumulated in the form of capital, and therefore not in the form of finance capital — there was not a single kopeck of finance capital.” Any other view is down to “imperialist Western propaganda and its bought and paid-for historians.”
And Russia retains its non-imperialism even after it has unambiguously reverted to capitalism. “Has the military-feudal imperialism of pre-1917 Russia been restored?” asks Williams. No, it’s not feudal. (But it was not the feudal residues in Tsarist Russia which made Marxists of the time classify it as imperialist. It was its domination and exploitation of other nations).
“What about a modernised Russian imperialism based on the rule of monopoly capitalism and finance capital?” He rejects this argument as well: Russia is “very poor in finance capital. … (Therefore) today’s Russia is very far indeed from becoming an imperialist country.”
This is really just a re-run of Williams’s denial of Stalinist imperialism. There was no finance capital in Stalin’s USSR, and therefore no Stalinist imperialism. Today’s Russia is “very poor” in finance capital, and therefore there is no Russian imperialism.
However, Williams’s equation of “imperialist” with “rich in finance capital” obliges him to classify Taiwan, Ireland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Iceland and New Zealand as imperialist powers. Read the rest of this entry »
Birmingham NUT on ‘Trojan Horse’
Shiraz Socialist reproduces this resolution exactly as it was circulated by Birmingham NUT:
Resolution passed at Birmingham NUT Exec meeting 12 June
We recognise that the ‘Trojan Horse’ affair has been politically charged and that the Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove has made numerous attacks to further his agenda:
We strongly oppose all of these attacks. We say to Gove: ‘Hands Off Birmingham Schools’ . We welcome and support the ‘Hands Off Birmingham Schools’ campaign.
It is vital that the BANUT is CLEARLY seen to be opposing the Islamophobia that a large section of Birmingham’s citizens (and NUT members) are feeling. That includes making public statements that clearly reject the Islamophobic nature of the discourse. Within this context we believe that Ofsted reports have been politically charges and we reject the notion that they could possibly be fair and unbiased reporting of the schools.
However, while taking account of the government’s motivation we do not base our response on it., we make our own critical assessment of the evidence presented in the reports which includes:
a) The role of governors.
b) The role of school management.
c) Curriculum and equality issues.
To ignore or downplay these issues, insofar as the evidence is accurate, or to fail to put forward an effective strategy to deal with them, including within the Hands Off Our Schools campaign, would be to depart from NUT principles.
We therefore resolve:
i) to seek and evaluate further evidence from our members in the schools and from other sources in the community;
ii) where poor practice exists, to work with staff in these schools to adopt better policies such as those agreed with the local authority.
iii) where point (ii) is insufficient to deal with the problem, to support intervention by the local authority.
iv) to raise and seek support for these concerns and actions within the Hands Off Our Schools campaign.
4. We reject Gove’s solution, which is to force Saltley to become a sponsored academy and to transfer the four academies to be run by new sponsors.
We therefore state that it should be the role of the LA, not Gove or Ofsted, to deal with any issues at the schools in question or elsewhere in Birmingham.
7. BANUT needs to act collectively with its members and others such as Birmingham Trades Council, and should, amongst other actions:
a) send a questionnaire to members in all the affected schools.
b) convene a meeting/meetings with members in all the affected schools.
c) consider holding a Special General Meeting.
d) encourage twinning arrangements between schools.
e) Support meetings in localities.
f) Hold a public meeting.
g) Support any action against racism that arises in reaction to this matter.
h) Encourage parents to participate with our ‘Stand Up For Education’ campaign.
The Graun at its best … and worst
Regulars will know that although I take the Graun every day, its editorial line and a lot of its columnists infuriate me. So credit where its due: the paper’s role in exposing the News of the World phone-hacking scandal in the first place, and its dogged pursuit of the truth over five long years has been superb. The Graun is largely responsible for the criminal Coulson being brought to justice – something that would never have happened if matters had been left up to the Metropolitan Police (who now have serious questions to answer about their own cosy relationship with News International).
The star of the Graun‘s team on this story has been, since he first broke it in 2009, the relentless Nick Davies, who this week crowned his achievements with a magisterial and surely definitive account of the trial itself, closing with this quietly devastating conclusion, the full meaning of which is unmistakable when read in context:
It seems to have become forgotten, conveniently by some, that before the Old Bailey trial two former newsdesk executives, Greg Miskiw and James Weatherup, pleaded guilty, as did the phone-hacker Glenn Mulcaire and a former reporter, Dan Evans, who confessed to hacking Sienna Miller’s messages on Daniel Craig’s phone.
Neville Thurlbeck, the News of the World’s former chief reporter and news editor, pleaded guilty after the police found the tapes he had of Blunkett’s messages in a News International safe.
In the trial, Coulson was convicted of conspiring to hack phones while he was editor of the News of the World. The jury was discharged after failing to reach unanimous verdicts on two further charges of conspiring to commit misconduct in a public office faced by Coulson and Goodman.
But Brooks was found not guilty of four charges including conspiring to hack phones when she was editor of the News of the World and making corrupt payments to public officials when she was editor of the Sun. She was also cleared of two charges that she conspired with her former secretary and her husband to conceal evidence from police investigating phone hacking in 2011.
The jury at the Old Bailey returned true verdicts according to the evidence. They were not asked to do more.
Superb stuff, and I only wish I could leave it at that. But yet another example of the Graun at its stupid, relativist worst has been drawn to my attention by Comrade Coatesy: a vile piece defending a vile man and a vile organisation, the writing all the more objectionable because of its post-modern pretentiousness. At least it didn’t appear in the print edition, but was evidently considered suitable for publication at the cess-pit that is Comment Is Free.
“Reyaad, I’m dying for you”
This is so desperately sad that I thought twice about publishing it. But it’s important to be aware of the immediate human consequences of young men being seduced by a fascist ideology – especially as some idiots seem to wilfully misunderstand what’s going on.
From the Daily Telegraph:
By Tom Whitehead
Young British jihadist Reyaad Khan was told he was “killing his parents” and had turned them against Islam, the Daily Telegraph can disclose.
His uncle texted the fanatic pleading with him to come home because he was tearing his family apart.
The stark message also warned Khan that his father would “pray he went to hell” if he did not come home.
The desperate attempts to get Khan back emerged as his mother Rukia made an emotional plea to her son to come home.
She also pleaded directly to terror group Isis to send her son back to her before she “died”.
Khan’s family said they were in shock when they discovered he had gone to Syria and believe he has been “brainwashed” by extremists, either over the internet or in Cardiff
He disappeared in November after telling his family he was going to Birmingham for talks.
He phoned his uncle, who asked not to be named, to reveal he was actually in Syria and asked him to “tell his mother”.
The uncle then embarked on a series of text message exchanges trying to persuade his nephew to return.
In one, he wrote: “I must let you know that you are killing your parents with worry and stress to the level that they hate Islam.
“Blame Islam for their son.”
He told him that his father had said “If you do not come back he prays for you to go to hell.
“Your dad curses you in a way you would not believe and hates the mosques.”
But Khan simply replied: “I’m fine. No reception, I cannot speak.”
The uncle told the Telegraph: “I was shocked and told him he should be here. I said to come back home now. I said ‘come home, you will kill your mother’.”
The uncle said he could not tell Khan’s mother at first “because she would have collapsed”.
She was devastated by the news and was “acting mad and screaming”, he said. “She was blaming everyone.”
In her own tearful appeal, Mrs Khan said: “Reyaad, please come back home. I’m dying for you. You’re my only son. Please come back Reyaad.”
She also begged Isis: “Please send my son back home. He is my one and only son. I and my family need him back. Please just send my son back to me before I die and it is going to be too late for Reyaad, he’s going to regret it for the rest of his life.
“Please send my son back to me and his family. We all need him.”
She told Sky News: “He is honest, always caring for his family, he always wanted to be there for them. He was one of the best boys a mother could ever have or want.
“I think they are brainwashed into thinking they are going to help people. I don’t know who it is but there is someone behind them keeping these young, innocent boys, brainwashing them into thinking they are going to help people. There is someone behind them, I don’t know who.”
The mother said the actions of her 20-year-old son had hugely impacted on her family.
“It is absolutely devastating. It has turned our lives upside down. I can’t sleep or eat, I am very ill,” she said.
Why the f*** is Labour backing Cameron’s EU posturing?
Polish foreign minister Radoslaw Sikorski sums up Cameron’s attempts to undo European integration:
“It’s either a very badly thought-through move or, not for the first time, a kind of incompetence in European affairs. Remember? He fucked up the fiscal pact. He fucked it up – simple as that. He is not interested. He does not get it. He believes in stupid propaganda. He stupidly tries to play the system …
“His whole strategy of feeding [the Eurosceptics] scraps to satisfy them is, just as I predicted, turning against him; he should have said fuck off … But he ceded the field to them that are now embarrassing him.”
Sikorski is, believe it or not, considered a political ally of Cameron’s and (like the Tories’ bête noir, Jean-Claude Junker) a thoroughgoing reactionary. But, of course, that’s not the reason for the rift between Cameron and the Euro-Tories of the centre-right EPP. They agree on most aspects of economic policy.
Nor is it – despite Tory demagogy – anything to do with the elitism, bureaucratism and lack of democracy of EU institutions.
In fact David Cameron’s attempt to veto the appointment of Jean-Claude Juncker to head the European Commission is no stance against elitism, nor an attempt to make EU institutions more democratic. Within the highly-limited standards of EU democracy it is the exact opposite.
Juncker is the preferred candidate of the conservative political bloc which won the largest chunk of popular votes in May’s European election. But Cameron isn’t bothered by the tally of the popular vote. He prefers bureaucratic manoeuvring and nationalistic special pleading. Cameron, with an eye on his UKIP rivals, wants to be seen to be “fighting for Britain”. No matter that there is no great difference on economic policies between Juncker and the British Tory party.
It would be a whole lot better if the political semi-union of Europe, which Cameron choses out of political expediency to object to, were more democratic, more transparent and were not tied to a drive to make workers pay for the crisis.
But it is still a big step forward for working-class people around Europe that barriers between nations have been drastically reduced.
At a time when migrants are being scapegoated we need those barriers to stay down.
The semi-dissolution of the barriers has made it easier to fight the class struggle across Europe. If the labour movement leaders of Europe had any imagination they could run powerful Europe-wide campaigns. For instance they could organise a Europe-wide struggle for a decent Living Wage, one which would could generalise much needed solidarity to existing struggles of low-paid workers.
Unfortunately there are a few on the left in Europe (but notably not the Greek radical-left party Syriza) who oppose the existence of the political union of the EU: in the UK it is the No2EU campaign. The logic of their campaign is to advocate the resurrection of national barriers. In this way they add to the increasing toxic nationalism of UKIP and Cameron. But No2EU are, in the main, a bunch of brain-dead Stalinists whose fanatical little-Englandism stems from a visceral hatred of Germany and a bizarre, anachronistic perception of the EU as a threat to the USSR (by means of a time-warp, presumably). The derisory number of votes they picked up in the last Euro-elections means we don’t have to take them seriously – though RMT members may well be wondering what the hell their leadership was doing throwing away the union’s money on this reactionary irrelevance.
Much more serious – and worrying – is the present stance of the Labour Party. That pompous prat of a shadow foreign secretary, Douglas Alexander, has instructed Labour MEPs not to support Junker. If that was because Junker is an anti-working class, pro-austerity right-winger, then we’d agree. But no; the wretched Alexander has made it clear that the Labour leadership supports Cameron’s quest for a less “federalist” (ie: more right-wing) candidate: “There can be no excuses. David Cameron has a clear mandate from political parties here in the UK – including Labour – to build consensus across Europe for an alternative candidate for president of the commission.”
What a disgrace! Or, as Mr Sikorski might say, what an incompetent, badly thought-through, fucking fuck-up.
Solidarity with imprisoned Al Jazeera journalists
We must all register our protests, as best we can. Staff at Channel 4 (including Jon Snow, below) made their feelings known this evening:
Excerpted from Press Gazette:
National Union of Journalists’ general secretary Michelle Stanistreet described the sentences as “outrageous” and called for the British Government to condemn the verdicts.”The NUJ condemns in the strongest terms these sentences meted on journalists who were merely doing their job,” she said. “This is an outrageous decision and travesty of justice made by a kangaroo court.”Al Jazeera has rejected the charges against its journalists and maintains their innocence. This is a brutal regime which is attacking and arresting many journalists to attempt to silence them and prevent them from reporting events.
“The British Government must immediately signal its opposition to this verdict and do all it can to have the sentences overturned. The NUJ is calling on all media organisations to register their protest in support of colleagues at Al Jazeera and all the Egyptian journalists who have been attacked and arrested by their country’s authorities.
“Governments must not be allowed to deny journalists, wherever they are, the right to be able to report independently and in safety. The freedom of journalists is an integral part of any democratic process.”
Free speech campaign group Index on Censorship said the verdicts sent a message that journalists “simply doing their job” was considered a crime in Egypt.
Chief executive Jodie Ginsberg condemned the verdicts as “disgraceful” adding: “We call on the international community to join us in condemning this verdict and ask governments to apply political and financial pressure on a country that is rapidly unwinding recently won freedoms, including freedom of the press.
“The government of newly elected president Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi must build on the country’s democratic aspirations and halt curbs on the media and the silencing of voices of dissent.”
Ginsberg said at least 14 journalists remained in detention in Egypt and some 200 members of the press were in jails around the world, and that concerns are growing over the safety of media representatives across the globe.
“Index is deeply concerned at the growing number of imprisoned journalists in Egypt and around the world,” she said. “We reiterate our support to journalists to report freely and safely and call on Egyptian authorities to drop charges against journalists and ensure they are set free from jail.
“And we ask governments to maintain pressure on Egypt to ensure freedom of expression and other fundamental human rights are protected. Index joined the global #FreeAJStaff campaign along with other human rights, press freedom groups and journalists.”
The hashtags #journalismisnotacrime and #FreeAJStaff were trending on Twitter this morning after the verdicts came through.
Anonymity or not
Guest post from Pink Prosecco
Most people probably hesitate before commenting on contested rape allegations, We don’t wish to belittle the victim of an alleged crime, but are equally unwilling to jump to conclusions about someone who may have been quite unjustly accused. Whatever one thinks of the suggestion that those charged with rape should be granted anonymity, it is certainly easy to sympathise with Ben Sullivans carefully worded thoughts on the issue, given his recent experiences.
Mr Sullivan said: “I’m not as extreme as some who don’t think you should have your anonymity revealed until you’ve been convicted, or… after a charge. ‘What I don’t agree with, though, is that everyone’s identity is automatically revealed the minute they are arrested.” He added that he was “completely aware that it can be extremely helpful to police investigations” and “would never say that everyone’s identity in the circumstances should be kept secret”. “However, these are obviously incredibly poisonous allegations. They are incredibly difficult to deal with.”
Milo Yiannopoulos expresses his views in a less restrained manner. After asserting that it is quite common to regret a drunken sexual encounter, he continues: “Some people, however, decide to exact revenge on their sexual partners, sometimes in retaliation for their own poor choices, sometimes for a variety of other, peculiar psychological reasons. It’s what I call slut’s remorse, and it’s the reason we need to keep the names of rape suspects a secret until they are charged. For too long, men have been a silent class of victim in rape cases, unable to protect themselves from the consequences of victimless drunken fumbling and, yes, from vindictive bitches, whether male or female, lashing out in frustration about their own self-loathing.”
Obviously anyone who deliberately and maliciously makes a false accusation of rape is perverting the cause of justice and should be punished severely. But rape is an under-reported crime and it is not generally thought (although clearly it is impossible to be decisive about the figures) that false allegations are common. Consent is a complex area. It seems possible that there are cases where it would be inappropriate to charge, or convict, but where the accuser still does not fit the “vindictive bitch” image sketched by Yiannoupoulos. For people trying to negotiate these uncertainties the principle of “enthusiastic consent” may be a helpful one, and one which emphasises positive enjoyment, rather than just sternly warning “no means no” (though obviously it does).
But young men may find these guidelines confusing too, as Robyn Urback outlines here. ” And so, the suggestion that ‘yes’ might actually mean ‘no’ or at the very least, isn’t a complete ‘yes’ further complicates any attempt to really evaluate what’s going on. There’s no question that a ‘yes’ uttered under in response to a threat or under some other form of duress does not constitute consent. Nor does an intoxicated ‘yes,’ since an individual loses the capacity to consent when under the influence of alcohol and drugs. But the Forum on Consent takes the consent conundrum to an entirely new level by suggesting that a meek ‘yes,’ or a nonchalant ‘yes” or a ‘yes’ without emphatic body language does not constitute consent. According to the panel ‘It must be loud and clear.’
It’s a pity that those sympathising with men who have been wrongly accused, or young men experiencing confusion over consent, should so often express themselves in a way which is sneering and sexist. Here’s Peter Lloyd writing in the Telegraph: “This is precisely why a court of law armed with all the evidence, not a casual observer saddled with girl power grudges, should convict a defendant in a safe and fair way.” However it does seem as though a letter (no longer available by the way) calling on Sullivan to resign from the Oxford Union, and signed by many prominent media figures, was worded in a tendentious way, and may even have been in contempt of court. Lloyd’s reference to “girl power grudges” may irk, but he is correct in saying that these matters need to be sorted out in the courts.
Workers Liberty on the collapse in Iraq
Picture appearing to show ISIS militants loading captives into a truck.
The following article, by Martin Thomas of Workers Liberty, carries weight because it is largely based upon interviews with representatives of the Worker-communist Party of Iraq and the Worker-communist Party of Kurdistan. It first appeared in the AWL’s paper Solidarity:
On Wednesday 11 June, the Al-Qaeda-oriented Sunni Islamist group ISIS seized control of Iraq’s second-biggest city, Mosul.
It has taken several other cities in the Sunni-majority north and west. Before 11 June it already had control of Fallujah and much of Ramadi, and of significant areas in Syria.
Nadia Mahmood of the Worker-communist Party of Iraq told Solidarity:
“What’s going on now with ISIS is a new phase of the sectarian violence which reached its peak in 2006-7 with the bombings in Samarra”.
That simmering sectarian civil war died down in 2007-8 and after. But, said Nadia: “After the Arab Spring [in 2011], the Sunni [minority in Arab Iraq] became more assertive.
“In 2013, [Iraq’s Shia-Islamist prime minister] Maliki ended the [peaceful, and not sharply Islamist] protest camps outside the roads to Fallujah and ignored their demands.
“Now in 2014, after the election two months ago, Maliki wants to stay in power and has marginalised even the other Shia parties.
“Because of the sectarian nature of the government, this sort of violence will happen again and again. Socialists need to call for a secular state.
“The left and the labour movement in Iraq are not powerful right now, so first of all we need a secular state without religious identity which will give us ground to build. The target now is to end the sectarian nature of the state”.
Some of the roots of this collapse of the Iraqi state lie in what the USA did after invading in 2003. It disbanded much of the Iraqi state machine, including low-ranking people, and promoted “de-Baathification”.
At first the USA hoped that pro-US and relatively secular people like Ahmed Chalabi and Iyad Allawi would create a pro-US Iraqi government. But those neo-liberals turned out to be good at schmoozing US officials while in exile, hopeless at winning support from Iraqis in Iraq.
Amid the chaos and rancour which followed the invasion and the destruction of everyday governance, the mosques and the Islamist factions won hegemony.
The US adapted and worked with people like Maliki. As Aso Kamal of the Worker-communist Party of Kurdistan told Solidarity: “The Americans made a political system that depended on balancing three ethnic and sectarian identities.
“Iraq had been a modern society, with sectarian divisions not so deep. These events are the product of the new system America brought to Iraq. Especially with other powers like Turkey and Iran intervening, seeking their allies within the Iraqi system, it has been a disaster”. Now Saudi Arabia has seized on the current crisis to call for the fall of Maliki and his replacement by “a government of national consensus”.
Nadia Mahmood explained: “I think some of the Ba’thists saw the de-Ba’thification policy as targeting Sunnis more than Ba’thists. In fact there were Shia Ba’thists who held powerful positions in the state, and they were protected because they were Shia.
“So the Sunni Ba’athists went to the Sunni side and the Islamist side, not the Ba’thist side. They held to their religious identity”.
According to Aso Kamal, Maliki’s government is seen as a Shia government, and that rallies groups like ISIS and ex-Ba’thists against it.
For us in Workers’ Liberty, the horrible events confirm the arguments we made during the previous simmering sectarian civil war in Iraq (especially 2006-7) for slogans of support for the Iraqi labour movement and democracy against both the US forces and the sectarian militias, not the negative slogan “troops out”. The two-word recipe “troops out” then certainly entailed a sectarian collapse like this one, only worse. Now it is happening, even those who previously most ardently insisted that anti-Americanism must be the first step, and everything else could be be sorted out later, dare not hail the ISIS advance and the Shia counter-mobilisation as “liberation” or “anti-imperialism”.
Of course, rejecting the slogan “troops out” did not mean supporting the US, any more than being dismayed at the ISIS advance means endorsing Maliki.
The sudden collapse of the Iraqi army as the relatively small ISIS force advanced shows how corrupt and discredited the state has become.
Nadia Mahmood explained: “Soldiers from Mosul were saying that even when ISIS were still far away from the city, the leaders of the army took off their military clothes and left the soldiers. The Mayor of Mosul told the soldiers to leave. Some of the soldiers are saying that there was a deal”.
The knock-on effect of the ISIS victories is a sharpening on the other side of Shia sectarianism. As Nadia Mahmood says: “Now the Shia political parties are becoming closer to each other and calling for resistance. There is a sectarian agenda against the Sunni”. Aso Kamal adds: “Sistani and Maliki are also calling for a holy war. This is taking Iraq back centuries. It could become like Somalia. That will destroy the working class. It is a very dark scenario”.
Workers’ Liberty believes that defence of the labour movement in Iraq, which will be crushed wherever ISIS rules and in grave danger where the Shia Islamists are mobilising, should be a main slogan now, alongside the call for a secular state.
“ISIS”, says Aso Kamal, “have announced what they are going to do. Women must stay at home. Nothing must be taught in schools outside the Quran. There will be no freedom of speech. They are like the Taliban”.
“I’m not sure how ISIS came to Iraq”, says Nadia Mahmood, “and whether they are popular even amongst Sunnis. Maybe they are allied with the Ba’thists. But are there more Sunnis supporting them? Many Sunnis seem very scared and oppose ISIS.
“It is horrible what is going on”. But, now they have power and access to big arsenals, “ISIS may keep hold of the Sunni cities, such as Mosul and Tikrit, for some time. It’s obviously not the same for Baghdad.
“Bringing in Iranian groups to fight ISIS will only encourage sectarian discourse and maybe accelerate Shia-Sunni polarisation. Already Maliki is accused by ISIS, and by the Ba’thists, of being an Iranian agent. Whether Iranian intervention calms the situation or it worsens it is unclear.
“Many people in Iraq would prefer the United States to attack ISIS. They have come all the way from Mosul to 60km outside Baghdad, killing in their wake. I don’t know if they stay longer how many crimes they will commit, how many tragedies are going to happen. People in Baghdad feel very scared now”.
That doesn’t mean endorsing US bombing. The US’s 12 years of bombing in Afghanistan have not installed a secular state, but rebuilt a base for the once-discredited Taliban.
As Aso Kamal explains: “The Americans have a common front against ISIS now. But the Americans are playing with both sides. They do whatever they think will stabilise the region and the markets, and ignore the future of the people. In reality, they are supporting reactionary forces in Iraq.
“The effect of the developing sectarian war will be to inflame nationalism in Kurdistan. Already the KDP and the PUK [the main parties] are asking people to support them in order to keep the territory which Kurdish forces have conquered”.
For the Worker-communist Party of Kurdistan, “the main issue is to keep Kurdistan separate from this war. We say there should be a referendum and independence for [Iraqi] Kurdistan”.
Shiraz Socialist 