Showing posts with label radical. Show all posts
Showing posts with label radical. Show all posts
Monday, 27 May 2024
Friday, 22 September 2023
Thursday, 30 June 2022
Sunday, 16 May 2021
Islamophobia And Secularism
Nadeem F Paracha in The Dawn
Prime Minister Imran Khan frequently uses the term ‘Islamophobia’ while commenting on the relationship between European governments and their Muslim citizens. Khan has often been accused of lamenting the treatment meted out to Muslims in Europe, but remaining conspicuously silent about cases of religious discrimination in his own country.
Then there is also the case of Khan not uttering a single word about the Chinese government’s apparently atrocious treatment of the Muslim population of China’s Xinjiang province.
Certain laws in European countries are sweepingly described as being ‘Islamophobic’ by Khan. When European governments retaliate by accusing Pakistan of constitutionally encouraging acts of bigotry against non-Muslim groups, the PM bemoans that Europeans do not understand the complexities of Pakistan’s ‘Islamic’ laws.
Yet, despite the PM repeatedly claiming to know the West like no other Pakistani does, he seems to have no clue about the complexities of European secularism.
Take France for instance. French secularism, called ‘Laïcité’ is somewhat different than the secularism of various other European countries and the US. According to the contemporary scholar of Western secularism, Charles Taylor, French secularism is required to play a more aggressive role.
In his book, A Secular Age, Taylor demonstrates that even though the source of Western secularism was common — i.e. the emergence of ‘modernity’ and its political, economic and social manifestations — secularism evolved in Europe and the US in varying degrees and of different types.
Secularism in the US remains largely impersonal towards religion. But in France and in some other European countries, it encourages the state/government to proactively discourage even certain cultural dimensions of faith in the public sphere which, it believes, have the potential of mutating into becoming political expressions.
Nevertheless, to almost all prominent philosophers of Western democracy across the 19th and 20th centuries, the idea of providing freedom to practise religion is inherent in secularism, as long as this freedom is not used for any political purposes.
According to the American sociologist Jacques Berlinerblau in A Call to Arms for Religious Freedom, six types of secularism have evolved. The American researcher Barry Kosmin divides secularism into two categories: ‘soft’ and ‘hard’. Most of Berlinerblau’s types fall in the ‘soft’ category. The hard one is ‘State Sponsored Atheism’ which looks to completely eliminate religion. This type was practised in various former communist countries and is presently exercised in China and North Korea. One can thus place Laïcité between Kosmin’s soft and hard secular types.
The existence of what is called ‘Islamophobia’ in secular Europe and the US has increasingly drawn criticism from various quarters. According to the French author Jean-Loïc Le Quellec, the term is derived from the French word ‘islamophobie’ that was first used in 1910 to describe prejudice against Muslims.
L.P. Sheridan writes in the March 2006 issue of the Journal of Interpersonal Violence that the term did not become widely used till 1991. According to Roland Imhoff and Julia Recker in the Journal of Political Psychology, a wariness had already been building in the West towards Muslims because of the aggressively anti-West ‘Islamic’ Revolution in Iran in 1979, and the violent backlash in some Muslim countries against the publication of the novel Satanic Verses by the British author Salman Rushdie in 1988.
Islamophobia is one of the many expressions of racism towards ‘the other’. Racisms of varying nature have for long been present in Europe and the US. Therefore Imhoff and Recker see Islamophibia as “new wine in an old bottle.” It is a relatively new term, but one that has also been criticised.
Discrimination against race, faith, ethnicity, caste, etc., is present in almost all countries. But its existence gets magnified when it is present in countries that describe themselves as liberal democracies.
Whereas Islamophobia is often understood as a phobia against Islam, there are also those who find this definition problematic. To the term’s most vehement critics, not only has it overshadowed other aspects of racism, of which there are many, it is also mostly used by ‘radical Muslims’ to curb open debate.
In a study, the University of Northampton’s Paul Jackson writes that the term should be replaced with ‘Muslimphobia’ because the racism in this context is aimed at a people and not towards the faith, as such. However, he does add that the faith too should be open for academic debate.
In an essay for the 2016 anthology The Search for Europe, Bichara Khader writes that racism against non-white migrants in Europe intensified in the 1970s because of a severe economic crisis. Khader writes that this racism was not pitched against one’s faith.
According to Khader, whereas this meant that South Asian, Arab, African and Caribbean migrants were treated as an unwanted whole based on the colour of their skin, from the 1980s onwards, the Muslims among these migrants began to prominently assert their distinctiveness. As the presence of veiled women and mosques grew, this is when the ‘migration problem’ began to be seen as a ‘Muslim problem’.
The Muslim diaspora in the West began to increasingly consolidate itself as a separate whole. Mainly through dress, Muslim migrants began to shed the identity of their original countries, creating a sort of universality of Muslimness.
But this also separated them from the non-Muslim migrant communities, who were facing racial discrimination as well. Interestingly, this imagined universality of Muslimness was also exported back to the mother countries of Muslim migrants.
Take the example of how, in Pakistan, some recent textbooks have visually depicted the dress choices of Pakistani women. They are almost exactly how some second and third generation Muslim women in the West imagine a woman should dress like.
But there was criticism within Pakistan of this depiction. The critics maintain that the present government was trying to engineer a cultural type of how women ought to dress in a country where — unlike in some other Muslim countries — veiling is neither mandatory nor banned. This has only further highlighted the fact that identity politics in this context in Pakistan is being influenced by the identity politics being flexed by certain Muslim groups in the West.
Either way, because of the fact that it is a recent phenomenon, identity politics of this nature is not organic as such, and will continue to cause problems for Muslims within and away.
Prime Minister Imran Khan frequently uses the term ‘Islamophobia’ while commenting on the relationship between European governments and their Muslim citizens. Khan has often been accused of lamenting the treatment meted out to Muslims in Europe, but remaining conspicuously silent about cases of religious discrimination in his own country.
Then there is also the case of Khan not uttering a single word about the Chinese government’s apparently atrocious treatment of the Muslim population of China’s Xinjiang province.
Certain laws in European countries are sweepingly described as being ‘Islamophobic’ by Khan. When European governments retaliate by accusing Pakistan of constitutionally encouraging acts of bigotry against non-Muslim groups, the PM bemoans that Europeans do not understand the complexities of Pakistan’s ‘Islamic’ laws.
Yet, despite the PM repeatedly claiming to know the West like no other Pakistani does, he seems to have no clue about the complexities of European secularism.
Take France for instance. French secularism, called ‘Laïcité’ is somewhat different than the secularism of various other European countries and the US. According to the contemporary scholar of Western secularism, Charles Taylor, French secularism is required to play a more aggressive role.
In his book, A Secular Age, Taylor demonstrates that even though the source of Western secularism was common — i.e. the emergence of ‘modernity’ and its political, economic and social manifestations — secularism evolved in Europe and the US in varying degrees and of different types.
Secularism in the US remains largely impersonal towards religion. But in France and in some other European countries, it encourages the state/government to proactively discourage even certain cultural dimensions of faith in the public sphere which, it believes, have the potential of mutating into becoming political expressions.
Nevertheless, to almost all prominent philosophers of Western democracy across the 19th and 20th centuries, the idea of providing freedom to practise religion is inherent in secularism, as long as this freedom is not used for any political purposes.
According to the American sociologist Jacques Berlinerblau in A Call to Arms for Religious Freedom, six types of secularism have evolved. The American researcher Barry Kosmin divides secularism into two categories: ‘soft’ and ‘hard’. Most of Berlinerblau’s types fall in the ‘soft’ category. The hard one is ‘State Sponsored Atheism’ which looks to completely eliminate religion. This type was practised in various former communist countries and is presently exercised in China and North Korea. One can thus place Laïcité between Kosmin’s soft and hard secular types.
The existence of what is called ‘Islamophobia’ in secular Europe and the US has increasingly drawn criticism from various quarters. According to the French author Jean-Loïc Le Quellec, the term is derived from the French word ‘islamophobie’ that was first used in 1910 to describe prejudice against Muslims.
L.P. Sheridan writes in the March 2006 issue of the Journal of Interpersonal Violence that the term did not become widely used till 1991. According to Roland Imhoff and Julia Recker in the Journal of Political Psychology, a wariness had already been building in the West towards Muslims because of the aggressively anti-West ‘Islamic’ Revolution in Iran in 1979, and the violent backlash in some Muslim countries against the publication of the novel Satanic Verses by the British author Salman Rushdie in 1988.
Islamophobia is one of the many expressions of racism towards ‘the other’. Racisms of varying nature have for long been present in Europe and the US. Therefore Imhoff and Recker see Islamophibia as “new wine in an old bottle.” It is a relatively new term, but one that has also been criticised.
Discrimination against race, faith, ethnicity, caste, etc., is present in almost all countries. But its existence gets magnified when it is present in countries that describe themselves as liberal democracies.
Whereas Islamophobia is often understood as a phobia against Islam, there are also those who find this definition problematic. To the term’s most vehement critics, not only has it overshadowed other aspects of racism, of which there are many, it is also mostly used by ‘radical Muslims’ to curb open debate.
In a study, the University of Northampton’s Paul Jackson writes that the term should be replaced with ‘Muslimphobia’ because the racism in this context is aimed at a people and not towards the faith, as such. However, he does add that the faith too should be open for academic debate.
In an essay for the 2016 anthology The Search for Europe, Bichara Khader writes that racism against non-white migrants in Europe intensified in the 1970s because of a severe economic crisis. Khader writes that this racism was not pitched against one’s faith.
According to Khader, whereas this meant that South Asian, Arab, African and Caribbean migrants were treated as an unwanted whole based on the colour of their skin, from the 1980s onwards, the Muslims among these migrants began to prominently assert their distinctiveness. As the presence of veiled women and mosques grew, this is when the ‘migration problem’ began to be seen as a ‘Muslim problem’.
The Muslim diaspora in the West began to increasingly consolidate itself as a separate whole. Mainly through dress, Muslim migrants began to shed the identity of their original countries, creating a sort of universality of Muslimness.
But this also separated them from the non-Muslim migrant communities, who were facing racial discrimination as well. Interestingly, this imagined universality of Muslimness was also exported back to the mother countries of Muslim migrants.
Take the example of how, in Pakistan, some recent textbooks have visually depicted the dress choices of Pakistani women. They are almost exactly how some second and third generation Muslim women in the West imagine a woman should dress like.
But there was criticism within Pakistan of this depiction. The critics maintain that the present government was trying to engineer a cultural type of how women ought to dress in a country where — unlike in some other Muslim countries — veiling is neither mandatory nor banned. This has only further highlighted the fact that identity politics in this context in Pakistan is being influenced by the identity politics being flexed by certain Muslim groups in the West.
Either way, because of the fact that it is a recent phenomenon, identity politics of this nature is not organic as such, and will continue to cause problems for Muslims within and away.
Sunday, 25 April 2021
Friday, 19 January 2018
This is not a Corbynite coup, it’s a mandate for his radical agenda
Gary Younge in The Guardian
Kings were put to death long before 21 January 1793,” wrote Albert Camus, referring to Louis XVI’s execution after the French revolution. “But regicides of earlier times and their followers were interested in attacking the person, not the principle, of the king. They wanted another king, and that was all.”
One of the biggest mistakes the critics of Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader, made from the outset – and there are many to choose from – was that his victory was about him. They refer to “Corbynites” and “Corbynistas” as though there were some undying and uncritical devotion to a man and his singular philosophy, rather than broad support for an agenda and a trajectory. If they could get rid of the king, went the logic, they would reinherit the kingdom. With a new leader normal service could resume. Labour could resuscitate its programme of milquetoast managerialism, whereby it was indifferent to its members, ambivalent about austerity at home, and hawkish about wars abroad.
This week’s resounding victory of a slate of leftwing candidates to Labour’s national executive committee, the party’s ruling body, has put that assumption to rest for the moment. There is now a reliable majority on the NEC who back both democratising the party, to give members more control, and pursuing policies against austerity and war and for wealth redistribution.
Corbyn has been accused of tightening his grip on the party so that he may purge critics and promote cronies. The logic is perverse
That this should have happened in the week of Carillion’s collapse has a certain symmetry. Carillion took billions in public funds for public projects, paid its executives and shareholders handsomely, and has now left taxpayers to pick up the pieces in a system of private finance initiatives introduced by Conservatives but championed and vastly expanded by New Labour.
It was anger at this kind of rank unfairness, the inequalities it both illustrated and imposed after the economic crash, that explains not just Corbyn’s victory but the rise of the hard left across Europe and in the US.
The contradictions inherent in Corbyn’s rise are finally ironing themselves out. In 2015 he won not the leadership but the title of leader. Unlike Podemos in Spain or Syriza in Greece, his ascent was not the product of a movement that could sustain his challenge from the margins; instead he emerged from a wider, inchoate sense of frustration and alienation that propelled him to the top within the mainstream. Without the consent of MPs he lacked the authority that would endow that title with power and meaning in parliament. Outside parliament he lacked the kind of organised support that could buttress his position against this hostility. This left him embattled, isolated and, to some extent, ineffective, since his primary task was not to exercise leadership but to cling on to it.
'I'm JC': Jeremy Corbyn on ageing, infighting and his Tory 'friends'
Last year’s general election changed all that. Labour’s gains, with its highest vote-share since 2001 leaving the Tories without a majority, proved that there was a broad electoral constituency for his redistributive, anti-austerity agenda. In so doing it showed that the membership was far more in touch with the needs and aspirations of the electorate than the parliamentarians.
Now, with the shadow cabinet no longer in open revolt, the parliamentary party quiescent, if not onside, and the party machine no longer obstructive, at almost every tier the party has either come around or made its peace with him. Meanwhile, outside parliament, Momentum – the leftwing caucus within the party that supports Corbyn’s agenda – has become more organised and less fractious, providing a more coherent plank of support beyond Westminster. Finally, Corbyn can do what he was elected to do – lead on the agenda he has laid out.
Leftwing control of the NEC was one of the last pieces to fall into place. Since the three candidates who won this week were backed by Momentum, and one – Jon Lansman – is its founder, this latest shift will inevitably provoke some bedwetting.
Those who have got everything wrong about Labour over the past two years will, of course, get this wrong too. We must once again brace ourselves for rhetorical hyperbole. Corbyn has been accused of tightening his grip on the party so that he may purge critics and promote cronies. The logic is perverse. The Stalinists, in the minds of his most feverish critics, are the ones who keep winning internal elections hands down; the democrats are those who launched a coup against the popular choice.
Jeremy Corbyn speaks to NHS staff at Park South community centre in Swindon. Photograph: Andrew Matthews/PA
The obsession, among parliamentarians and their courtiers, is that this latest development will lead to a wave of deselections (or purges) in which MPs hostile to this new orientation will be forced out. There is some irony in the notion that those who tried to depose an elected leader with a huge mandate might bristle at the prospect of being removed by an election.
For now, that fear seems unfounded. While Momentum certainly believes MPs should be more accountable to their local parties, there is little evidence that this is a strategic priority (which doesn’t mean some local chapters might not pursue it). Corbyn’s team is not keen either, believing the pain rarely justifies the gain.
This is a relief. Another election could be upon us at any moment. The party does not need more trauma. Moreover, the gains are likely to be minimal. Corbyn is not king; his word is not law. The moment has tipped in his favour, not swung to him completely. And while the party may have made its peace with him, Momentum still sits outside its comfort zone. According to the website Labourlist, of the 24 key marginals to be contested so far, Momentum candidates have won in just five, while a further six have gone to candidates from the “wider Labour left”. The rest have been taken by “trade unionists, longstanding local campaigners and former [candidates]”.
Momentum’s focus is instead on funding organisers to transform the party into a social movement by connecting it with local campaigns – be they over caretakers’ pay, or cuts to schools and hospitals. For those whose understanding of politics and power is limited to elections and parliament, this will seem at best a waste of time. But anything that engages members, be they new or longstanding, in activities that make Labour more dynamic and receptive to the outside world should be welcomed.
This would fulfil one of three central challenges for Momentum in the foreseeable future. The second is to deploy all its resources – digital, human, organisational – to help Labour win at the next election. The third is to establish some independence from the Labour leadership, so that it can continue to advocate for a left agenda, should the party come to power. However confused the left might be about where power resides, the right understands that a range of vested interests, from big business to hot money, can force parliament’s hand and thwart the popular will.
Like most radical governments, Labour will have to negotiate between the powers that be and the forces that made them possible. Corbyn is not king. It was pressure from below that made him possible. It will be pressure from below that keeps him viable.
Kings were put to death long before 21 January 1793,” wrote Albert Camus, referring to Louis XVI’s execution after the French revolution. “But regicides of earlier times and their followers were interested in attacking the person, not the principle, of the king. They wanted another king, and that was all.”
One of the biggest mistakes the critics of Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader, made from the outset – and there are many to choose from – was that his victory was about him. They refer to “Corbynites” and “Corbynistas” as though there were some undying and uncritical devotion to a man and his singular philosophy, rather than broad support for an agenda and a trajectory. If they could get rid of the king, went the logic, they would reinherit the kingdom. With a new leader normal service could resume. Labour could resuscitate its programme of milquetoast managerialism, whereby it was indifferent to its members, ambivalent about austerity at home, and hawkish about wars abroad.
This week’s resounding victory of a slate of leftwing candidates to Labour’s national executive committee, the party’s ruling body, has put that assumption to rest for the moment. There is now a reliable majority on the NEC who back both democratising the party, to give members more control, and pursuing policies against austerity and war and for wealth redistribution.
Corbyn has been accused of tightening his grip on the party so that he may purge critics and promote cronies. The logic is perverse
That this should have happened in the week of Carillion’s collapse has a certain symmetry. Carillion took billions in public funds for public projects, paid its executives and shareholders handsomely, and has now left taxpayers to pick up the pieces in a system of private finance initiatives introduced by Conservatives but championed and vastly expanded by New Labour.
It was anger at this kind of rank unfairness, the inequalities it both illustrated and imposed after the economic crash, that explains not just Corbyn’s victory but the rise of the hard left across Europe and in the US.
The contradictions inherent in Corbyn’s rise are finally ironing themselves out. In 2015 he won not the leadership but the title of leader. Unlike Podemos in Spain or Syriza in Greece, his ascent was not the product of a movement that could sustain his challenge from the margins; instead he emerged from a wider, inchoate sense of frustration and alienation that propelled him to the top within the mainstream. Without the consent of MPs he lacked the authority that would endow that title with power and meaning in parliament. Outside parliament he lacked the kind of organised support that could buttress his position against this hostility. This left him embattled, isolated and, to some extent, ineffective, since his primary task was not to exercise leadership but to cling on to it.
'I'm JC': Jeremy Corbyn on ageing, infighting and his Tory 'friends'
Last year’s general election changed all that. Labour’s gains, with its highest vote-share since 2001 leaving the Tories without a majority, proved that there was a broad electoral constituency for his redistributive, anti-austerity agenda. In so doing it showed that the membership was far more in touch with the needs and aspirations of the electorate than the parliamentarians.
Now, with the shadow cabinet no longer in open revolt, the parliamentary party quiescent, if not onside, and the party machine no longer obstructive, at almost every tier the party has either come around or made its peace with him. Meanwhile, outside parliament, Momentum – the leftwing caucus within the party that supports Corbyn’s agenda – has become more organised and less fractious, providing a more coherent plank of support beyond Westminster. Finally, Corbyn can do what he was elected to do – lead on the agenda he has laid out.
Leftwing control of the NEC was one of the last pieces to fall into place. Since the three candidates who won this week were backed by Momentum, and one – Jon Lansman – is its founder, this latest shift will inevitably provoke some bedwetting.
Those who have got everything wrong about Labour over the past two years will, of course, get this wrong too. We must once again brace ourselves for rhetorical hyperbole. Corbyn has been accused of tightening his grip on the party so that he may purge critics and promote cronies. The logic is perverse. The Stalinists, in the minds of his most feverish critics, are the ones who keep winning internal elections hands down; the democrats are those who launched a coup against the popular choice.
Jeremy Corbyn speaks to NHS staff at Park South community centre in Swindon. Photograph: Andrew Matthews/PA
The obsession, among parliamentarians and their courtiers, is that this latest development will lead to a wave of deselections (or purges) in which MPs hostile to this new orientation will be forced out. There is some irony in the notion that those who tried to depose an elected leader with a huge mandate might bristle at the prospect of being removed by an election.
For now, that fear seems unfounded. While Momentum certainly believes MPs should be more accountable to their local parties, there is little evidence that this is a strategic priority (which doesn’t mean some local chapters might not pursue it). Corbyn’s team is not keen either, believing the pain rarely justifies the gain.
This is a relief. Another election could be upon us at any moment. The party does not need more trauma. Moreover, the gains are likely to be minimal. Corbyn is not king; his word is not law. The moment has tipped in his favour, not swung to him completely. And while the party may have made its peace with him, Momentum still sits outside its comfort zone. According to the website Labourlist, of the 24 key marginals to be contested so far, Momentum candidates have won in just five, while a further six have gone to candidates from the “wider Labour left”. The rest have been taken by “trade unionists, longstanding local campaigners and former [candidates]”.
Momentum’s focus is instead on funding organisers to transform the party into a social movement by connecting it with local campaigns – be they over caretakers’ pay, or cuts to schools and hospitals. For those whose understanding of politics and power is limited to elections and parliament, this will seem at best a waste of time. But anything that engages members, be they new or longstanding, in activities that make Labour more dynamic and receptive to the outside world should be welcomed.
This would fulfil one of three central challenges for Momentum in the foreseeable future. The second is to deploy all its resources – digital, human, organisational – to help Labour win at the next election. The third is to establish some independence from the Labour leadership, so that it can continue to advocate for a left agenda, should the party come to power. However confused the left might be about where power resides, the right understands that a range of vested interests, from big business to hot money, can force parliament’s hand and thwart the popular will.
Like most radical governments, Labour will have to negotiate between the powers that be and the forces that made them possible. Corbyn is not king. It was pressure from below that made him possible. It will be pressure from below that keeps him viable.
Monday, 21 August 2017
Extremism is surging. To beat it, we need young hearts and minds
Scott Atran in The Guardian
The last of the shellshocked were being evacuated as I headed back toward Las Ramblas, Barcelona’s famed tourist-filled walkway where another disgruntled “soldier of Islamic State” had ploughed a van into the crowd, killing at least 13 and injuring more than 120 from 34 nations. Minutes before the attack I had dropped my wife’s niece near where the rampage began. It was deja vu and dread again, as with the Paris massacre at the Bataclan theatre in 2015, next door to where my daughter lived.
At a seafront promenade south of Barcelona, a car of five knife-wielding kamikaze mowed down a woman before police killed them all. One teenage attacker had posted on the web two years before that “on my first day as king of the world” he would “kill the unbelievers and leave only Muslims who follow their religion”.
Mariano Rajoy, the president of Spain, declared that “our values and way of life will triumph” – just as Theresa May had proclaimed “our values will prevail” in March when yet another petty criminal “born again” into radical Islam drove his vehicle across Westminster Bridge to kill and wound pedestrians.
In Charlottesville the week before, the white supremacist attacker who killed civil rights activist Heather Heyer mimicked Isis-inspired killings using vehicles. “This was something that was growing in him,” the alleged attacker’s former history teacher told a newspaper. “He had this fascination with nazism [and] white supremacist views … I admit I failed. But this is definitely a teachable moment and something we need to be vigilant about, because this stuff is tearing up our country.”
The values of liberal and open democracy increasingly appear to be losing ground around the world to those of narrow, xenophobic ethno-nationalisms and radical Islam. This is not a “clash of civilisations”, but a collapse of communities, for ethno-nationalist violent extremism and transnational jihadi terrorism represent not the resurgence of traditional cultures, but their unravelling.
This is the dark side of globalisation. The western nation-state and relatively open markets that dominate the global political and economic order have largely supplanted age-old forms of governance and social life. People across the planet have been transformed into competitive players seeking fulfilment through material accumulation and its symbols. But the forced participation and gamble in the rush of market-driven change often fails, especially among communities that have had little time to adapt. When it does, redemptive violence is prone to erupt.
The quest for elimination of uncertainty, coupled with what social psychologist Arie Kruglanski deems “the search for significance”, are the personal sentiments most readily elicited in my research team’s interviews with violent jihadists and militant supporters of populist ethno-nationalist movements. In Hungary, we find strong support for the government’s call for restoring the “national cohesion” lost with the fall of Miklós Hothy’s fascist regime in the second world war. In Iraq, we find nearly all young people coming out from under Isis rule in Mosul initially welcomed the stability and security it offered, despite its brutality, amid the chaos following the US invasion.
In the world of liberal democracy and human rights, violence – especially extreme forms of mass bloodshed – is generally considered pathological or an evil expression of human nature. But across most history and cultures, violence against other groups is claimed by the perpetrators to be a sublime matter of moral virtue. For without a claim to virtue it is difficult, if not inconceivable, to kill large numbers of people innocent of direct harm to others.
Ever since the second world war, revolutionaries and insurgents willing to sacrifice themselves for causes and groups have prevailed with considerably less firepower and manpower than the state armies and police forces they oppose. Meanwhile, according to the World Values Survey, the majority of Europeans don’t believe democracy is “absolutely important” for them; and in France and Spain we find little evidence of willingness to sacrifice much of anything for democracy – in contrast to the willingness to fight and die among supporters of militant jihad.
How can we resist, compete with, and overcome these strengthening countercultural pressures in the present age? Perhaps, for some, a re-enchantment and communitarian rerooting of our own values of representative government and cultural tolerance provides an answer. Preserving what is left of the planet’s fauna and flora and avoiding environmental catastrophes may offer a new course for others. Or the coming generation, if allowed, may offer whole new ways of understanding.
Young people are viewed mostly as a youth bulge and a problem to be pummelled rather than as a youth boom
Yet no countervailing message will spread in a social vacuum, in the abstract space of ideology or counter-narrative alone. The means of engagement are critical, requiring close knowledge of communities at risk. Most often, people join radical groups through pre-existing social networks. This clustering suggests that much recruitment does not take place primarily via direct appeals or following individual exposure to social media (which would entail a more dispersed recruitment pattern). Rather, recruiting often involves enlisting clusters of family, friends and fellow travellers from specific locales (neighbourhoods, universities, prisons).
Our research into the history of Isis-inspired attacks in western Europe clearly indicates that initial attempts by those directly commissioned by Islamic State, and without involvement from locally pre-existing social networks, mostly failed; however, as that involvement broadened and deepened, attacks became progressively more lethal. In our research, we find loose but wide-ranging connections between jihadist circles in Barcelona and much of western Europe, the Maghreb, the Levant and beyond that stretch back even before the attacks of 9/11.
The necessary focus of engagement must be youth, who form the bulk of today’s radical recruits and tomorrow’s most vulnerable populations. Volunteers for al-Qaida, Isis and many extreme nationalist groups are often young people in transitional stages in their lives – immigrants, students, people between jobs and before finding their life partners. Having left their homes and parents, they seek new families of friends and fellow travellers to find purpose and significance.
We need a strategy to redirect radicalised youth by engaging with their passions, rather than ignoring or fearing them, or satisfying ourselves by calling on others to moderate or simply denounce them. Of course there are limits to tolerance, and dangers of worse violence in appeasement of the intolerable. Our partisan divisions include real differences in values that politicians and pundits hype and ply into existential threats. But there are still vast common grounds in a world where all but the too-far-gone can live life with more than a minimum of liberty and happiness, if given half a chance. It is for this chance that some of our forebears fought revolutions, civil wars and world wars.
The last of the shellshocked were being evacuated as I headed back toward Las Ramblas, Barcelona’s famed tourist-filled walkway where another disgruntled “soldier of Islamic State” had ploughed a van into the crowd, killing at least 13 and injuring more than 120 from 34 nations. Minutes before the attack I had dropped my wife’s niece near where the rampage began. It was deja vu and dread again, as with the Paris massacre at the Bataclan theatre in 2015, next door to where my daughter lived.
At a seafront promenade south of Barcelona, a car of five knife-wielding kamikaze mowed down a woman before police killed them all. One teenage attacker had posted on the web two years before that “on my first day as king of the world” he would “kill the unbelievers and leave only Muslims who follow their religion”.
Mariano Rajoy, the president of Spain, declared that “our values and way of life will triumph” – just as Theresa May had proclaimed “our values will prevail” in March when yet another petty criminal “born again” into radical Islam drove his vehicle across Westminster Bridge to kill and wound pedestrians.
In Charlottesville the week before, the white supremacist attacker who killed civil rights activist Heather Heyer mimicked Isis-inspired killings using vehicles. “This was something that was growing in him,” the alleged attacker’s former history teacher told a newspaper. “He had this fascination with nazism [and] white supremacist views … I admit I failed. But this is definitely a teachable moment and something we need to be vigilant about, because this stuff is tearing up our country.”
The values of liberal and open democracy increasingly appear to be losing ground around the world to those of narrow, xenophobic ethno-nationalisms and radical Islam. This is not a “clash of civilisations”, but a collapse of communities, for ethno-nationalist violent extremism and transnational jihadi terrorism represent not the resurgence of traditional cultures, but their unravelling.
This is the dark side of globalisation. The western nation-state and relatively open markets that dominate the global political and economic order have largely supplanted age-old forms of governance and social life. People across the planet have been transformed into competitive players seeking fulfilment through material accumulation and its symbols. But the forced participation and gamble in the rush of market-driven change often fails, especially among communities that have had little time to adapt. When it does, redemptive violence is prone to erupt.
The quest for elimination of uncertainty, coupled with what social psychologist Arie Kruglanski deems “the search for significance”, are the personal sentiments most readily elicited in my research team’s interviews with violent jihadists and militant supporters of populist ethno-nationalist movements. In Hungary, we find strong support for the government’s call for restoring the “national cohesion” lost with the fall of Miklós Hothy’s fascist regime in the second world war. In Iraq, we find nearly all young people coming out from under Isis rule in Mosul initially welcomed the stability and security it offered, despite its brutality, amid the chaos following the US invasion.
In the world of liberal democracy and human rights, violence – especially extreme forms of mass bloodshed – is generally considered pathological or an evil expression of human nature. But across most history and cultures, violence against other groups is claimed by the perpetrators to be a sublime matter of moral virtue. For without a claim to virtue it is difficult, if not inconceivable, to kill large numbers of people innocent of direct harm to others.
Ever since the second world war, revolutionaries and insurgents willing to sacrifice themselves for causes and groups have prevailed with considerably less firepower and manpower than the state armies and police forces they oppose. Meanwhile, according to the World Values Survey, the majority of Europeans don’t believe democracy is “absolutely important” for them; and in France and Spain we find little evidence of willingness to sacrifice much of anything for democracy – in contrast to the willingness to fight and die among supporters of militant jihad.
How can we resist, compete with, and overcome these strengthening countercultural pressures in the present age? Perhaps, for some, a re-enchantment and communitarian rerooting of our own values of representative government and cultural tolerance provides an answer. Preserving what is left of the planet’s fauna and flora and avoiding environmental catastrophes may offer a new course for others. Or the coming generation, if allowed, may offer whole new ways of understanding.
Young people are viewed mostly as a youth bulge and a problem to be pummelled rather than as a youth boom
Yet no countervailing message will spread in a social vacuum, in the abstract space of ideology or counter-narrative alone. The means of engagement are critical, requiring close knowledge of communities at risk. Most often, people join radical groups through pre-existing social networks. This clustering suggests that much recruitment does not take place primarily via direct appeals or following individual exposure to social media (which would entail a more dispersed recruitment pattern). Rather, recruiting often involves enlisting clusters of family, friends and fellow travellers from specific locales (neighbourhoods, universities, prisons).
Our research into the history of Isis-inspired attacks in western Europe clearly indicates that initial attempts by those directly commissioned by Islamic State, and without involvement from locally pre-existing social networks, mostly failed; however, as that involvement broadened and deepened, attacks became progressively more lethal. In our research, we find loose but wide-ranging connections between jihadist circles in Barcelona and much of western Europe, the Maghreb, the Levant and beyond that stretch back even before the attacks of 9/11.
The necessary focus of engagement must be youth, who form the bulk of today’s radical recruits and tomorrow’s most vulnerable populations. Volunteers for al-Qaida, Isis and many extreme nationalist groups are often young people in transitional stages in their lives – immigrants, students, people between jobs and before finding their life partners. Having left their homes and parents, they seek new families of friends and fellow travellers to find purpose and significance.
We need a strategy to redirect radicalised youth by engaging with their passions, rather than ignoring or fearing them, or satisfying ourselves by calling on others to moderate or simply denounce them. Of course there are limits to tolerance, and dangers of worse violence in appeasement of the intolerable. Our partisan divisions include real differences in values that politicians and pundits hype and ply into existential threats. But there are still vast common grounds in a world where all but the too-far-gone can live life with more than a minimum of liberty and happiness, if given half a chance. It is for this chance that some of our forebears fought revolutions, civil wars and world wars.
Saturday, 16 November 2013
Why even atheists should be praying for Pope Francis
Francis could replace Obama as the pin-up on every liberal and leftist wall. He is now the world's clearest voice for change
'On Thursday, Pope Francis visited the Italian president, arriving in a blue Ford Focus, with not a blaring siren to be heard.' Photograph: Gregorio Borgia/AP
That Obama poster on the wall, promising hope and change, is looking a little faded now. The disappointments, whether over drone warfare or a botched rollout of healthcare reform, have left the world's liberals and progressives searching for a new pin-up to take the US president's place. As it happens, there's an obvious candidate: the head of an organisation those same liberals and progressives have long regarded as sexist, homophobic and, thanks to a series of child abuse scandals, chillingly cruel. The obvious new hero of the left is the pope.
Only installed in March, Pope Francis has already become a phenomenon. His is the most talked-about name on the internet in 2013, ranking ahead of "Obamacare" and "NSA". In fourth place comes Francis's Twitter handle, @Pontifex. In Italy, Francesco has fast become the most popular name for new baby boys. Rome reports a surge in tourist numbers, while church attendance is said to be up – both trends attributed to "the Francis effect".
His popularity is not hard to fathom. The stories of his personal modesty have become the stuff of instant legend. He carries his own suitcase. He refused the grandeur of the papal palace, preferring to live in a simple hostel. When presented with the traditional red shoes of the pontiff, he declined; instead he telephoned his 81-year-old cobbler in Buenos Aires and asked him to repair his old ones. On Thursday, Francis visited the Italian president – arriving in a blue Ford Focus, with not a blaring siren to be heard.
Some will dismiss these acts as mere gestures, even publicity stunts. But they convey a powerful message, one of almost elemental egalitarianism. He is in the business of scraping away the trappings, the edifice of Vatican wealth accreted over centuries, and returning the church to its core purpose, one Jesus himself might have recognised. He says he wants to preside over "a poor church, for the poor". It's not the institution that counts, it's the mission.
All this would warm the heart of even the most fervent atheist, except Francis has gone much further. It seems he wants to do more than simply stroke the brow of the weak. He is taking on the system that has made them weak and keeps them that way.
"My thoughts turn to all who are unemployed, often as a result of a self-centred mindset bent on profit at any cost," he tweeted in May. A day earlier he denounced as "slave labour" the conditions endured by Bangladeshi workers killed in a building collapse. In September he said that God wanted men and women to be at the heart of the world and yet we live in a global economic order that worships "an idol called money".
There is no denying the radicalism of this message, a frontal and sustained attack on what he calls "unbridled capitalism", with its "throwaway" attitude to everything from unwanted food to unwanted old people. His enemies have certainly not missed it. If a man is to be judged by his opponents, note that this week Sarah Palin denounced him as "kind of liberal" while the free-market Institute of Economic Affairs has lamented that this pope lacks the "sophisticated" approach to such matters of his predecessors. Meanwhile, an Italian prosecutor has warned that Francis's campaign against corruption could put him in the crosshairs of that country's second most powerful institution: the mafia.
As if this weren't enough to have Francis's 76-year-old face on the walls of the world's student bedrooms, he also seems set to lead a church campaign on the environment. He was photographed this week with anti-fracking activists, while his biographer, Paul Vallely, has revealed that the pope has made contact with Leonardo Boff, an eco-theologian previously shunned by Rome and sentenced to "obsequious silence" by the office formerly known as the "Inquisition". An encyclical on care for the planet is said to be on the way.
Many on the left will say that's all very welcome, but meaningless until the pope puts his own house in order. But here, too, the signs are encouraging. Or, more accurately, stunning. Recently, Francis told an interviewer the church had become "obsessed" with abortion, gay marriage and contraception. He no longer wanted the Catholic hierarchy to be preoccupied with "small-minded rules". Talking to reporters on a flight – an occurrence remarkable in itself – he said: "If a person is gay and seeks God and has good will, who am I to judge?" His latest move is to send the world's Catholics a questionnaire, seeking their attitude to those vexed questions of modern life. It's bound to reveal a flock whose practices are, shall we say, at variance with Catholic teaching. In politics, you'd say Francis was preparing the ground for reform.
Witness his reaction to a letter – sent to "His Holiness Francis, Vatican City" – from a single woman, pregnant by a married man who had since abandoned her. To her astonishment, the pope telephoned her directly and told her that if, as she feared, priests refused to baptise her baby, he would perform the ceremony himself. (Telephoning individuals who write to him is a Francis habit.) Now contrast that with the past Catholic approach to such "fallen women", dramatised so powerfully in the current film Philomena. He is replacing brutality with empathy.
Of course, he is not perfect. His record in Argentina during the era of dictatorship and "dirty war" is far from clean. "He started off as a strict authoritarian, reactionary figure," says Vallely. But, aged 50, Francis underwent a spiritual crisis from which, says his biographer, he emerged utterly transformed. He ditched the trappings of high church office, went into the slums and got his hands dirty.
Now inside the Vatican, he faces a different challenge – to face down the conservatives of the curia and lock in his reforms, so that they cannot be undone once he's gone. Given the guile of those courtiers, that's quite a task: he'll need all the support he can get.
Some will say the world's leftists and liberals shouldn't hanker for a pin-up, that the urge is infantile and bound to end in disappointment. But the need is human and hardly confined to the left: think of the Reagan and Thatcher posters that still adorn the metaphorical walls of conservatives, three decades on. The pope may have no army, no battalions or divisions, but he has a pulpit – and right now he is using it to be the world's loudest and clearest voice against the status quo. You don't have to be a believer to believe in that.
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