Been a bit busy lately, with this and that, so I’m still catching up with what all the kewl blogger kidz are talking about. So that is why it took me until yesterday to read the Institute of Race Relations report, How are thinktanks shaping the political agenda on Muslims in Britain?
Its a good read, I suggest giving it a quick one over. It also adds some more information on Policy Exchange, and its influence over David Cameron on matters of race, immigration and Muslims in the UK.
In the past, liberals tended to support multicultural policies while conservatives saw multiculturalism as a threat to national cohesion and social order. Since 7/7, many liberals have joined with conservatives in thinking that multicultural tolerance has gone too far and that the failure to defend western values has fostered ‘Islamic extremism’ leading, ultimately, to the creation of British suicide bombers.
I’m always interested to know exactly which “Western values” commentators are referring to when they make statements such as above. It seems such a…well, content free phrase. There are many interpretations of Western values, and not all are in agreement with each other. For example, I would say that both Communism and Fascism were Western value systems, in that they were developed in Europe, according to the challenges of industrial and postindustrial society, and were underpinned by Western philosophical conceptions such as the Enlightenment, Romantic reactions to the former and a bevy of other social, political and historical factors. Clearly, I’m not enamoured with them, but if we are going to start talking about Western values, I would like a definition of those values before proceeding.
I suspect we are, of course, meant to believe we are talking about a rather narrow interpretation of liberal demcocracy, but given some of the views expressed by those who harp on most about our Western values, I really do wonder if that is the case. Furthermore, is there a reason for the emphasis on the Western aspect of those values? I personally like things like political pluralism, the freedom of speech and association, haebus corpus etc not because they are Western, but simply because they safeguard my freedom and self. Shit, I couldn’t give a fuck if Ghenghis Khan came up with the theories after ripping apart a small baby and eating its tender flesh. Their origins are of little interest except analysing how they rose to prominence instead of the other previously named theories and other ideas, such as Absolute Monarchy or Feudalism.
Anyway, the report goes on to talk about the criticism of the government’s close links with the MCB, which to be honest, are not entirely without merit. I don’t like the MCB, to tell the truth. It has done some good things, like promoting ties between Muslim communities and trade unions, or condemning terrorism. On the other hand…well, its a religious group. Its views on, say, women, or gays, are notably backward. All in all, though, I suspect the level of hysteria directed at it is unwarranted. The MCB is to big and cohesive a group to simply ignore, but equally, more tolerant factions of the British Muslim community deserve to have their voices heard, and we should not simply assume the MCB speaks with their approval, as I am sure it does not.
In January 2007, PX released a far more wide-ranging report on Muslims and multiculturalism, entitled Living Apart Together. Billed as an attempt to find ‘the reasons why there has been a significant rise in Islamic fundamentalism amongst the younger generation’, its answer was that multiculturalism and Britain’s failure to assert the superiority of its national values had encouraged young Muslims to feel victimised and adopt anti-western views.
OK. For a moment, let us assume these are true. We have the claims here: Britain has failed to assert the superiority of its national values, and secondly, the failure of this assertion has caused victimisation, and thirdly this leads to the adoption of “anti-Western views”.
Obviously the question then becomes this: why has no-one else adopted dangerous anti-Western views? I’m older than some of the terrorists our government has arrested, and have lived here nearly all my life. As have most of the people I know. If the government is not asserting these values, then presumably someone else must have done, to stop us from all turning into subversive Muslim terrorists . Its funny though, I don’t remember me or any of my friends getting lectured at length about the superiority of British values, and yet mysteriously we have all failed to join the jihad or kill anyone. (Of course, some wit will probably point out that since I am a self-declared Discordian my parents and teachers probably did not do a very good job at stopping me from becoming a subversive element)
Also, there are curious leaps of logic within the presentation. Failure to assert the superiority of our national values leads to victimisation? How, exactly? Surely victimisation would be made worse by spurious in-group/out-group distinctions, especially if such a program was aimed at Muslims in particular? Wouldn’t that just create the impression that Muslims are an inherently dangerous subsection of our society, who need to be civilized into our viewpoint or they will become dangerous?
I’m sure my point is clear though. If we take the above statements to be true, it doesn’t explain why there hasn’t been a corresponding rise in “anti-Western” sentiment, ideology and terrorism among non-Muslim sections of the population. If multiculturalism is a failure for Muslims, then why not for Hindus, or the Chinese population, or other “non-Western” ethnicities and religions (amusingly, the boundaries for such groups seem to be continually shifting. Samuel Huntingdon tried to draw up a map of culturally Western nations which originally failed to include Eastern Europe or Spain and Portugal. But now, for some reason, they are considered Western).
Anyway, moving on:
The report was released to the press to coincide with a speech by David Cameron attacking multiculturalism and Muslim ‘extremists’ who seek ‘special treatment’. A policy document published simultaneously by the Tories suggested that the MCB was dominated by such ‘separatism’. Munira Mirza, a co-author of the PX report, is now working as Boris Johnson’s director of arts.
I just wanted to highlight this to show the level of cooperation there is between the Tories and Policy Exchange. Nothing special, I know, but its nice to keep in mind.
Anthony Browne’s writings over the last six years exemplify this shift in emphasis from a general concern with ‘Third World immigration’ to a focus on Muslims in Britain. In August 2002, Browne wrote an article for The Times entitled ‘Britain is losing Britain’ in which he stated that ‘an unprecedented and sustained wave of immigration [is] utterly transforming the society in which we live against the wishes of the majority of the population, damaging quality of life and social cohesion, exacerbating the housing crisis and congestion’. He added that ‘in the past five years, while the white population grew by 1 per cent, the Bangladeshi community grew by 30 per cent, the black African population by 37 per cent and the Pakistani community by 13 per cent’; what he called ‘little Third World colonies’ had appeared in Britain.
I have dealt with Anthony Browne before and his curious links to American racists, which can be read here. But yes, his viewpoint has changed from his concern-trolling over immigration to, well, peddling in hysteria about a secret Muslim plot to take over Europe. Its quite worrying, really.
Following 7/7, Anthony Browne turned his attention to what he called Islamic ‘fascism’. Political correctness, he argued, had ‘allowed the creation of alienated Muslim ghettoes which produce young men who commit mass murder against their fellow citizens’.[7] Groups such as the Muslim Association of Britain, he said, are ‘like Hitler’ and Islamic ‘fascism’ has taken root in Britain because of the Left’s failure to break down Muslim separatism. The response to 7/7 must be a clamp down on arranged marriages, the deportation of imams who support the Muslim Brotherhood and possibly a French-style ban on the hijab in schools.
Yes, he went there. Godwin’s Law, all the way. Never mind silly things like definitions of fascism (Muslim terrorist groups actually have more in common with some strands of Anarchist violence, and Autonomism, than many ideologies of the political right, their religious views nonwithstanding), they just are. They are like Hitler, they are they are they are.
His proposed solution is even worse. A clamp down on arranged marriages, sure. In fact, I believe the British police have done some excellent work in that area in recent years and I applaud their efforts, though I’m not sure what it has to do with terrorism. As for deportation of Imams who support the Muslim Brotherhood…hello, thought-crime territory.
Look, the Muslim Brotherhood are scum. You wont find me defending them. But if we are going to start throwing people out on the basis of their religious and political beliefs…well, there is a proposition that not only runs counter to political pluralism and freedom of expression entirely (you know, some of those supposedly “Western” values we are meant to cherish) but it seriously opens a can of worms. Where does legitimate dissent from mainstream opinion stop being principled and start being dangerous? Or “ideologically deviant”? I used to make fun of people who claimed that the Soviet Union was as bad as Western Europe and the USA, but I’m starting to reevaluate my opinion. If we are only better when it comes to thoughtcrime because we have a wider band of acceptable ideological dissent, then that is not really a ringing endorsement, is it?
As for the hijab in school…don’t care. But are we going to target Sikhs as well, with their turbans? If not, why not? How about those who wear Christian jewellery? If Muslims were the only ones singled out for such treatment, then surely this would only make alienation worse, and increase the siege mentality some of the Muslim community have already started to take on.
Similarly, Charles Moore, the current chairman of PX and a former editor of the Telegraph and the Spectator, gave a speech in March 2008 outlining a ‘possible conservative approach to the question of Islam in Britain’. The government, he argued, should maintain a list of Muslim organisations which, while not actually inciting violence, ‘nevertheless advocate such anti-social attitudes that they should not receive public money or official recognition’ – in this category would fall any groups with links to the Muslim Brotherhood or the Jamaati-e-Islami, as well as individuals, such as Tariq Ramadan, the Swiss philosopher and fellow of St Antony’s College, Oxford.
So like I said…the difference between us and the Soviet Union is our acceptable range of “legitimate” political and religious opinions is somewhat larger. Naturally, the government has the right to withhold money from groups who do not meet their requirements, but official recognition? If people have joined a group in sufficiently large numbers to give it political clout, then that is all the recognition they need. If the government is going to start ignoring the concerns of people simply because of their religion, then it is not really much of a government, is it?
Finally, there is Michael Gove, a founding chairman of PX and one of the young Conservative MPs who make up David Cameron’s shadow cabinet. In his 2006 book Celsius 7/7, Gove defines ‘Islamism’ as an ideology that is similar to fascism and includes Tariq Ramadan as a follower. He states that in the war against ‘Islamism’, it will be necessary for Britain to carry out assassinations of terrorist suspects, in order to send ‘a vital signal of resolution’. More generally, a ‘temporary curtailment of liberties’ will be needed to prevent Islamism from destroying western civilisation.
Gove is a nutcase, and I have long thought so. Love the extra-judicial murder and suspension of civil liberties, naturally “for the duration of the emergency”, thats a nice touch. However, the problem is not that Gove is a nutcase, the problem is:
Fellow Tories regard Gove as a leading expert on Muslims in Britain.
In other words, his words hold weight. Be worried, be very worried.
What Browne’s, Moore’s and Gove’s comments illustrate is the attempt to justify illberal policies in the name of defending ‘liberal’ western values against an alien ‘totalitarian’ threat. This is the paradoxical project that is now the major theme of centre-Right thinking on multiculturalism and the ‘war on terror’. Indeed, the debate on multiculturalism has become a part of what many regard as a new ‘cultural’ cold war to promote a ‘moderate’ (i.e. pro-western) Islam across the globe – and particularly in Europe.
This is an interesting point as well. The empahsis on Cold War rhetoric, and indeed totalitarianism, are hallmarks of what I would consider a very Neoconservative analysis of politics. For example, we could consider Jeane Kirkpatrick, whose seminal work was “Dictatorships and Double Standards”. Timothy Garton Ash explains the link:
I’m waiting for someone to pen a new version of the late Jeane Kirkpatrick’s famous article of 1979, “Dictatorships and double standards”, in which she argued that friendly, anti-Soviet, rightwing autocracies should be treated differently from pro-Soviet, leftwing totalitarian regimes. Double standards? Yes, please. Today, a friendly autocracy will be defined partly by its positioning in the struggle with jihadist terrorism and partly by its readiness to sell its energy and natural resources to the west.
TGA is on the money with the highlighted distinction. According to Kirkpatrick, an authoritarian government is quite different to a totalitarian one. Totalitarian governments can, apparently, not transform to democratic ones, whereas merely authoritarian ones can.
Therefore, if the choice is authoritarianism or death at the hands of an existensial threat, authoritarianism is the better choice because, in theory, we can return to democratic rule later. Of course, it doesn’t work like that, and Kirkpatrick was hilariously wrong in her understanding of the Soviet Union, but the logic is still there. It is not only inherent in our foreign policy, such as how we sucked up to Uzbekistan but will not deal with Iran, but the logic also applies internally. To us.
This is a model that has been endorsed by Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who has spoken of a new cold war against ‘Muslim extremism’, fought through the ‘soft power’ of cultural influence.[11] The role of thinktanks would then not only be to supply political parties with policy suggestions but also to popularise the idea of ‘Islamism’ as an existential threat to the West that requires a hardline, Cold War-style response.
Hard to argue against. Brown has softened the rhetoric from the Blair days, it is true, but the only real difference between Labour and the Conseratives on this is currently how much empahsis they place on soft power, and how much they place on the hardline response. Brown and Labour tend towards soft power, whereas the Tories tend towards a far more vigourous and “in your face” response. And the role of think tanks in supplying the narrative cannot be ignored, either. Terrorism is a threat, but I would argue that Islamism is probably not a threat, and almost certainly not an existential one at that. I have a lot of issues with the theories of “new terrorism” in general though, so I will save that for another day. Suffice to say, the main worry is anyone getting their hands on WMDs, or manufacturing and deploying them, and this wont be dealt with by futile attacks on “Islamism” – especially when Apocalyptic New Age cults and Neo-Nazi organizations also seek to acquire them. That they frame the threat with such a small focus, but hype the potential of such a threat, suggests a very political motive.
As Dean Godson, a research director at PX who has strong links to well-known Washington neoconservatives, wrote in 2006: ‘During the Cold War, organisations such as the Information Research Department of the Foreign Office would assert the superiority of the West over its totalitarian rivals. And magazines such as Encounter did hand-to-hand combat with Soviet fellow travellers. For any kind of truly moderate Islam to flourish, we need first to recapture our own self-confidence.’
[…]
But Godson’s suggestion has been taken up with the launch of Standpoint magazine, published by another thinktank, the Social Affairs Unit (SAU). Its editor Daniel Johnson explicitly sees Standpoint as a 21st-century version of Encounter, except with Islamism replacing communism as the threat to western civilisation.[13] By uniting around the formula of the ‘defence of the liberal West against the Islamists’, the magazine has been able to incorporate pro-Iraq war ‘liberal’ writers, such as Nick Cohen and Julie Burchill, with neoconservatives. Michael Gove serves on the magazine’s advisory board, as does Gertrude Himmelfarb (one of Gordon Brown’s favourite historians and wife and mother of the leading US neoconservatives Irving and William Kristol).
No surprises there, really. The Neoconservatives loved the Cold War, and have long wanted to replicate its mythology, as a titantic struggle between good and evil, where the fate of the world rested in the hands of the West. It would make sense that they would try and replicate the strategies they think helped win the war (that they did not is, of course, entirely irrelevant to their purpose). I’ll try to ignore Nick Cohen and Julie Burchill, two of our biggest journalistic whores, are still considered liberal.
In Standpoint’s first issue in June 2008, the historian Michael Burleigh praised Cameron’s approach to the ‘war on terror’, suggesting that, once in government, he would end Britain’s excessive multicultural tolerance and adopt a tougher counter-terrorist stance. Cameron, he says, has understood that ‘jihadism’ threatens the very existence of the West and that the way to fight it is through the dismantling of ‘state multiculturalism’, the banning of extremist groups such as Hizb ut-Tahrir, the deportation of ‘foreign agitators’ and withdrawal from European human rights commitments
Hurrah, we shall show how we cherish Western values by undermining and removing them!
Like PX, the SAU has also published a series of reports on ‘Islamic extremism’. Its 2005 study of ‘terrorist and extremist activity on British campuses’ by Anthony Glees, entitled When Students Turn to Terror, was widely seen as exaggerated and flawed yet had a significant impact in fostering an atmosphere of suspicion in further and higher education.[16] The report argued the need for greater monitoring and surveillance of students by police and security forces.
I remember one of my International Relations professors talking to me about this. He was not impressed. As he bluntly put it, his job was to teach, not to act as a snitch for the intelligence services. Monitoring students for ideological divergence also, again, reminds me of the Soviet Union. It also seems totalitarian, in the sense that the apparatus of the state is permeating every aspect of one’s life, not merely authoritarian and incredibly wrong.
The focus on campuses was repeated in a 2008 report by the Centre for Social Cohesion (CSC). Islam on Campus by John Thorne and Hannah Stuart claimed that involvement in university Islamic Societies tends to encourage extremism.[18] In response, Wes Streeting, president of the National Union of Students, argued that the survey on which the report was based asked Muslim students ‘vague and misleading questions, and their answers were then misinterpreted’.
I believe Anton also ripped this apart over at Enemies of Reason, though I cannot currently find the link.
The new concern with Britishness is a way of responding to right-wing attacks on multiculturalism that favours a ‘third way’ on identity, rooting national belonging in liberal values. These have been the approaches adopted by the Institute of Public Policy Research (IPPR), the Smith Institute and the Fabian Society.[21] In effect, this has meant that the right-wing thinktanks’ definition of a ‘crisis of multiculturalism’ has not been challenged and the Left has differed only in the sorts of solutions it proposes. While IPPR, in particular, has over the last few years published reports that question the perception of an ‘immigration crisis’, it has not done the same to challenge the idea of a ‘multiculturalism crisis’ or a ‘Muslim problem’
Precisely. The field has been ceded to these think tanks, so they will dominate the narratives that then get reported and spread via the media. The response has been, in short, absolute crap.
The only major thinktank that has attempted an alternative approach to notions of Muslim extremism is Demos. Its research has sought to challenge the conflation of Islamism, Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism. In July 2008, as part of this research project, Demos decided to host a session at the Islam Expo in London Olympia on the subject of ‘The Islamist Threat: myth or reality?’.[22] But Demos’ involvement drew a storm of protest as critics such as Martin Bright branded the event ‘Hamas at Olympia’.[23] Nick Cohen accused Demos of ‘appeasement’ and ‘collaborating’ with a fascist enemy.[24] Demos’ then director Catherine Fieschi resigned on the following Monday.
And alternative interpretations get smeared and shouted down in the press. Also, just a minr point but seriously, shouldn’t Nick Cohen just come out and say “I’m a Neoconservative now. My only redeeming feature is that I still hate the BNP, despite resembling them more and more every time I publish an article”? Also, he should really try and learn the definition of the word “collaboration”. Because it does not mean what he thinks it means. Because the rightwing think tanks have been allowed to frame the debate well, and the mindless idiots in the press have gone along with it, its going to be very hard to frame the discussion in another way, especially if such think tanks allow themselves to be intimidated by such hacks, instead of calling them out and challenging them.
A number of questions can be raised about the methodologies of the reports that PX, the SAU and the CSC have produced on Muslims in Britain. But the deeper issue is their disproportionality and selectivity, which – in the absence of an alternative perspective from other thinktanks – end up reinforcing a systematic and unchallenged conflation of extremism and the wider British Muslim presence. The publication of these reports is often followed by incendiary newspaper headlines on the ‘Islamic threat’. As Ronan Bennett has written: ‘Hardly a day goes by when they [British Muslims] are not lectured and scolded by writers claiming to be the champions of true liberalism.’
Absolutely. They help contribute to the problem they supposedly want to solve. And I’m not so certain some of them do want it solved. I’ll quote HTML Mencken here, as he says it so much better:
War stalls domestic progress. Republicans are well aware that the majority of the American populace favors liberal reforms — that, in short, it favors an expansion of the welfare state. To stop such a decent thing from happening, wingnuts have created a Perpetual Warfare state that inculcates fear in the masses, militarizes American society, empties the treasury, curtails or outright destroys civil liberties.
Consider that, in the 80s when Republicans ran up incredible deficits (knowing that succeeding Democratic administrations would have to sacrifice liberal programs so as to afford cleaning up the mess), it was done with tax cuts and a cold war with a monolithic enemy. By wingnut logic, then, what would do an even better job of staving off social democracy? and of getting back power and retaining it? The answer, of course, is tax cuts and a hot war with a monolithic enemy. Which is exactly what we got.
I know there are probably some comrades who would prefer to believe that wingnuts are basically inscrutable, merely observing and noting that war provides, through some inexplicable and opaque process, a rush of endorphins to such addicted geopolitical maniacs — and leaving it at that; better than admitting there is also a perverse logic in wingnut madness. But there it is. Even serial killers have to make a living. Scaring people gives wingnuts power; once power’s had, war keeps it in their grasp and even tightens their hold on it. And it’s not like a variety of people haven’t stumbled on the same truth.
For instance, here’s Christopher Hitchens intuiting the same truth, just to completely pervert and dismiss it with characteristic mendacity:
Christopher Hitchens: I think this is more than just instinct on my part, the reaction of a lot of Democrats and liberals to the September 11th events was obviously in common with everyone else, revulsion, disgust, hatred, and so forth. But when they consider politically I think a lot of them couldn’t say this, but they thought that’s the end of our agenda for a little while. We’re not going to be talking very much about welfare and gay marriage. We’re going to be living in law and order times. Now the instinct is to think well, that must favor the right wing. Surely, that creates a climate for the conservatives–law and order and warfare and mobilization and so forth.
[…]
I know people dislike the “we’re doomed” sentiments that typically conclude my posts on these matters. Okay, so here’s something a little different: if you accept my thesis that the war in Iraq specifically and the PNAC mentality in general are not only morally obscene in their own right, but also by design the primary political obstacles to American social democracy, you’ll understand why I think it’s obvious that all other issues are subordinate. Gay marriage? Immigration? Health care? These are necessary causes, but to expect to do anything truly progressive about them is to put the cart before the horse. First, the war must be stopped and the war-mongering tendencies of our rulers thoroughly repudiated — by which I mean in practical terms that it does no good to “lessen our footprint” in Iraq if we’re still going to occupy it and then bomb Iran for good measure. So the only thing to do is to reject any Democratic candidate who supports anything less than a total withdrawal from Iraq. One thing I can promise you is that the wingnuts will make sure their nominee for President will be the most war-mongering, stay-the-course maniac possible (which is why they hate Ron Paul and love Rudy despite his social liberalism); in my view, then, a progressive’s duty is to make god-damned sure that our nominee is anti-war. (And in my case, as much as I love John Edwards, he’s not making the grade right now; but the otherwise unsavory Bill Richardson, whose Chamber of Commerce Democrat schtick I detest, is — and he’d get my vote today because of it.)
While our own members of the right are not agitating for a foreign war, they are agitiating for an internal war – of sorts. And they do so enjoy the Cold War rhetoric. The sort of “war” they demand would indeed distract many from the realization that essentially many aspects of our social democracy are under threat, or have been reversed thanks to aspects of neoliberal globalization, and that instead of demanding a government that is looking to create a fairer and better British society, that they demand one which protects them, and plays into the hands of people who make a living and base much of their political influence on fear-mongering and exaggeration of threats. Naturally, the differences in the UK, of a more institutionally established social democracy, of a greater Muslim population etc mean there are bound to be differences in the processes and presentation of such methods, but I believe the underlying logic is still present.
Cameron says he wants a social revolution as deep as the economic as the economic revolution that was initiated by Thatcher. This will involve “dealing with the issues of family breakdown, welfare dependency, failing schools, crime and the problems that we see in too many of our communities.” One is forced to wonder, however, exactly how he intends to do this, given the above statements. Would it perhaps involve the public sector receding, with the private sector taking over much of the control on these issues? I can’t see that being very popular, if it is obvious, but I can see them being sold on the quiet, while the tabloids are screaming about the Mighty Islamic Horde.
But what else might this large scale social engineering entail? I cannot help but be reminded of a comment by David Frum:
The great, overwhelming fact of a capitalist economy is risk. Everyone is at constant risk of the loss of his job, or of the destruction of his business by a competitor, or of the crash of his investment portfolio. Risk makes people circumspect. It disciplines them and teaches them self-control. Without a safety net, people won’t try to vault across the big top.
But I may be barking up entirely the wrong tree here. At this stage, it is too early to engage in anything except rather futile guessing games, so I shall move on.
Yet, in the next general election campaign, the Conservatives are likely to take a tougher approach to multiculturalism and Muslim organisations – as they did in the London mayoral elections. The interpretation of ‘Islamic extremism’ that has been fostered by PX, the SAU and the CSC is likely to feed into this process.
And there is the real concern. These think tanks have an extraordinary amount of influence over what is essentially the government-in-waiting. And that does not bode well at all. Anthony Browne, the one time Director of Policy Exchange, was enamoured with the influence of American think tanks, such as the AEI or Heritage Foundation, over the Republican Party, and bemoaned a British version of this. However, it looks like he has got his wish.
It is of course true that some interpretations of multiculturalism have been counter-productive and that Muslim political leaders need to be held to account by the communities they represent. But that is a far cry from the political agenda implied by these writers. Certainly, their writings can be seen as contributing to an ideological atmosphere in which attacks on multiculturalism and demands to restrict civil liberties, suppress democratic Muslim voices and downplay the legitimate issues that fuel Muslim anger at western states all become increasingly acceptable and part of a common political agenda across the party divide.
And that is the other thing that worries me.
h/t to Lenin’s Tomb for the link
Anton also has a mercifully shorter review of this document over at Enemies of Reason as well.
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