Sardanapale

Evolution, sophisticated Europeans like to think, is only controversial in backward parts of the US.

Would that it were so.

Watching Richard Dawkins’ latest series “The genius of Charles Darwin” - broadcast by Channel 4 recently - I realized that creationist myths exert undue influence on this side of the Atlantic as well.

Says Dawkins:

“This is multicultural Britain. And one of its fault lines runs straight through our children’s classrooms. How do we reconcile scientific truth with the deeply held convictions that bind religious communities?”

Dawkins finds out by visiting a high-school in London, and finds astonishing resistance to Darwinian ideas on the part of students. (Clip here)

He then takes them to a beach and look at fossils, and only then are some of the kids willing to accept that evolution might be a fact.

Later, in the high point of the series, he confronts the kids’ teachers to find out why they failed so abysmally to acquaint with basic scientific facts.

The answer is clear: the teachers are unprepared to challenge religious views that contradict science.

“We can’t get in to the business of knocking down kid’s religions and the religions of families,” one says.

Dawkins retort sounds banal - but it obviously bears repeating:

“There really is something special about scientific evidence.

Science works; planes fly. Magic carpets and broomsticks don’t.

Gravity isn’t a version of the truth; it is the truth. Anybody who doubts it is invited to jump out of a tenth floor window. Evolution too, is reality.”

Ayaan Hirsi Ali on CNN:

“I have sensed in this country that there is no place for ambiguity. The American constitution is clear.

Of course you can have your own religion and of course you can have your own neighborhoods and you can self-segregate as much as you wish.

But there are certain things you have to abide by, the most important of which is, you feed yourself.

You work, and you have the dignity of living on your own earnings.

There is also the clarity of law enforcement. Europe, because of all these notions of post-modernism, and multiculturalism and what have you, has decided to treat immigrants as if they were not completely mature citizens, as if they were children, appeasing and looking away when they commit crimes.

I haven’t seen the same thing here. I’m not saying this is a perfect system, but it just gives Muslims who are looking for clarity that clarity (…).

If freedom of expression is protected the way it is in the United States (…) then I think (improvements in the lot of Muslim women in Europe) can take a very short time.

I don’t know if it will take 10 years or 100 years, but that’s the condition – to express your ideas freely and to be able to associate with one another and plan to change.

All of this is not possible if every time one criticises Islam, one is labelled an Islamophobe, works are not published, intellectuals are ostracized, and that’s what going on in Europe at the moment.

It’s no longer the issues that you address but your person that is attacked, and the whole debate is brought too a standstill.

That, combined with the terrorists who threaten, intimidate and promise jihad, is what has made progress for Muslims living in Europe something harder to achieve than for Muslims living in America.”

Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s whole interview on Fareed Zakaria’s excellent weekly show is worth listening to.

Here are links to part one and two.

“The trial, which took place over the following weeks, was like a circus, although there was some difficulty getting the elephants into the courtroom. At last, the jury found Cloquet guilty, and he was sentenced to the guillotine. An appeal for clemency was turned down on a technicality when it was learned Cloquet’s lawyer had filed it while wearing a cardboard mustache.”

Woody Allen

The short story “The Condemned” by Woody Allen - a satire of French literature of the absurd - had always made me laugh.

I found the idea that judges could take silly accoutrements into account in their decisions deliciously surreal.

But then I read the story of a Moroccan woman whose husband and three sons are all French - but who fatefully filed her application for French nationality while wearing a burqa.

Guess what happened?

French judges turned her down, deeming “radical practice of religion incompatible with the essential values of the French community, notably the principle of sexual equality”.

The absurd is no longer a literary fashion in France, but it appears to have become a legal one. You can read more about the case here.

Yesterday David Davis, the shadow home secretary, took a step that is almost unheard of in British political history.

He resigned as a member of parliament – and as the second most senior conservative leader after David Cameron – and promised to run again for his seat on a platform of defending “British liberties”.

Davis took pissed off his party – which is a year or two away from being elected – to take a moral stand, a day after the House of Commons passed a law extending detentions for terror suspects.

Many find his move baffling or quixotic. But his stirring resignation speech is worth quoting:

“Up until yesterday, I took the view that what we did in the House of Commons representing our constituents was a noble endeavour because with centuries or forebears we defended the freedoms of the British people. Well we did up until yesterday.

This Sunday is the anniversary of Magna Carta, the document that guarantees that most fundamental of British freedoms - Habeas Corpus, the right not to be imprisoned by the state without charge or reason.

Yesterday this house decided to allow the state to lock up potentially innocent British citizens for up to six weeks without charge…

Now the counter terrorism bill will in all probability be rejected by the House of Lords very firmly. After all, what should they be there for if not to defend Magna Carta…

But in truth, 42 days is just one - perhaps the most salient example - of the insidious, surreptitious and relentless erosion of fundamental British freedoms.

And we will have shortly, the most intrusive identity card system in the world, a CCTV camera for every 14 citizens, a DNA database bigger than any dictatorship has, with thousands of innocent children and a million innocent citizens on it.

We have witnessed an assault on jury trials - that bulwark against bad law and its arbitrary use by the state….

The state has security powers to clamp down on peaceful protest and so-called hate laws that stifle legitimate debate - while those who incite violence get off Scot-free.

This cannot go on, it must be stopped.

And for that reason, I feel that today it’s incumbent on me to take a stand.

I will be resigning my membership of the House and I intend to force a by-election in Haltemprice and Howden….

I will argue this by-election, against the slow strangulation of fundamental British freedoms by this government. “

A recent article by John Gray in the Guardian attacks Richard Dawkins and other authors of recent books religion.

Between a (born-again) anti-market philosopher and a great scientific, my choice is clear.

So I was surprised to find myself agreeing with Gray.

His main idea is that, 9/11 notwithstanding, religion is not a force for evil in the modern world.

In the past century, the worst crimes against humanity have been committed by godless tyrants.

According to Gray, Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Martin Amis, Philip Pullman, Daniel Dennett and other foes of religion are fighting the wrong battle – often reproducing the fanaticism of their foes.

In his book The God Delusion, Dawkins tries to refute this objection:

“What matters is not whether Hitler and Stalin were atheists, but whether atheism systematically influences people to do bad things. There is not the smallest evidence that it does.”

Dawkins, of course, is right to say that atheist does not lead to crime (as a heathen myself, I can only agree). But he is wrong to say that religion does.

He neglects the fact that opposition to religious freedom has characterized totalitarian movements since France’s Jacobin revolutionaries.

Opposition to church independence is not confined to totalitarianism.

It was a feature of the absolutist mindset that arose in 16th century England and 17th France.

In both cases, power-hungry monarchs sought to bring the clergy and dissident churches to heel.

The battle against bolshy priests was a also a fixture of 20th century tyrannies, as illustrated in Graham Greene’s masterpiece The Power and the Glory, about Mexico in the 1920s.

In fact, it is a basic tenet of all faiths that there is a higher law than the rule of the prince.

It is no accident that some of the most eloquent defenders of liberty have been devout men, such as Chateaubriand, Martin Luther King, Solzhenitsyn, and Desmond Tutu.

And the Catholic Church, unlike earthly powers, never made its peace with the Soviet empire, and elected at its head an anti-Communist committed to rollback before the US did.

You might object that although Christianity may now be compatible with liberal values, but the same is not true of Islam, which does not recognize the distinction between the private and public spheres.

This is debatable - I do mean “false”, but a point of debate. Experts are arguing whether Islam is inherently inimical to liberal values.

The Koran is a hodgepodge of baffling and contradictory precepts (like the Bible) where you can find quotes in support in support of pretty much anything.

As far as I’m concerned, I’ve met too many good people who call themselves Muslims to indict a whole faith with the crimes of a fanatical minority.

I agree with Gray: there are much worse things in the world than religion.

Dawkins is wasting his considerable intellectual and argumentative powers on a mild quirk of the human psyche.

Gray’s article is here.

Dawkins is always worth reading.

Britain is consumed by the controversy triggered by the Archbishop of Canterbury’s pronouncement that the adoption of some aspects of Sharia law was “unavoidable”.

Rowan Williams said that many UK citizens did not relate to the British legal system, and that adopting parts of Islamic law would help maintain “social cohesion”.

For example, Muslims could choose to have marital disputes or financial matters dealt with in a Sharia courts, which should be part of “plural jurisdiction” in Britain.

Most commentators were appalled.

One of the most vocal and articulate critics was the British writer Christopher Hitchens, who wrote in Slate.com:

“Picture the life of a young Urdu-speaking woman brought to Yorkshire from Pakistan to marry a man—quite possibly a close cousin—whom she has never met. He takes her dowry, beats her, and abuses the children he forces her to bear.

She is not allowed to leave the house unless in the company of a male relative and unless she is submissively covered from head to toe. Suppose that she is able to contact one of the few support groups that now exist for the many women in Britain who share her plight.

What she ought to be able to say is, “I need the police, and I need the law to be enforced.” But what she will often be told is, “Your problem is better handled within the community.” And those words, almost a death sentence, have now been endorsed and underwritten—and even advocated—by the country’s official spiritual authority.

You might argue that I am describing an extreme case (though, alas, now not an uncommon one), but it is the principle of equality before the law that really counts.”

I don’t share Hitchens’s concerns. It seems to me that he confuses two things: criminal and civil law.

Any viable system of criminal law must indeed entail a monopoly. All citizens of a country should enjoy equal protection under a single norm.

The full force of the law must bear on any man who behaves like the bastard in the not-so-hypothetical case Hitchens mentions.

A woman who came to the police with those complaints should secure a prosecution: the guy is clearly committing a number of crimes (assault, child abuse and sequestration).

But what Williams is talking about is civil law - disputes between individuals (or individuals and companies) - and there a plurality of jurisdictions is desirable.

People should be allowed to choose their arbiter - as long as that choice is freely accepted by all parties.

Britain itself has a history of plurality in civil jurisdictions. Until the 19th century, England and Wales had a system “chancery courts” (which was famously denounced by Dickens) alongside other common law tribunals.

Now the chancery courts have gone, but parallel systems of dispute settlement remain, from chartered arbitrators to religious community courts for Jews – which are all recognized in law.

Even Muslims, in matters of divorce, can already go before Islamic Sharia Council.

It sure beats me why any woman would take her divorce case to a bearded man working out of a prefab cabin in a dodgy part of London, as opposed to say Heather Mill’s lawyer.

But as long as it’s her choice, I don’t have a problem with it.

As I write highly altruistic souls, somewhere not too far from here, are plotting to kill me - along with every non-Muslim in Britain.

What could lead otherwise well adjusted young men (the latest plot was the work of doctors) to regard mass murder as the fulfilment of a heroic destiny?

I thought everything had been said on British Jihadis - but I found Shiv Malik’s article “My brother the bomber” in Prospect Magazine illuminating.

Malik spent several months in a mainly Pakistani suburb of Leeds to research a film on the July 2005 bombers. After first hitting a wall of silence, he got to know the brother of Mohammad Sidique Khan, the ringleader, and pieced together the stages of his radicalization.

Malik’s startling conclusion is that jihadism in Britain is driven by a conflict between older immigrants and their children. Khan, like many second-generation Pakistanis, resented the strictures of the tribal system his parents had reproduced in Britain.

He detested traditional, Urdu-speaking preachers, and finally broke with his family after rejecting the marriage within the clan they sought to impose on him.

Writes Malik:

“Among those who study British race relations, there’s an informal theory that states that 30 years after the establishment of any sizeable ethnic minority community, there will be riots. After Jewish migration into Britain in the 1900s, there were riots in the Jewish communities of east London during the 1930s.

After the 1950s migration from the Caribbean, there were riots in 1981 in the Afro-Caribbean areas of Toxteth, Chapeltown and Brixton. And after the 1970s Pakistani immigration into northern England, in the summer of 2001, like clockwork, serious unrest kicked off in Oldham, then spread to Leeds, Burnley and Bradford.

One explanation is that it takes about 30 years for a sizeable second generation to establish itself and then become frustrated with its status, both within its own community and the wider society.

This frustration arises in part from a question of identity. Whose culture and values do you affiliate with? Those of your parents or of your friends? Those of your community or of your country?…

Khan may have felt indignant about western foreign policy, as many anti-war campaigners do, but that wasn’t the reason he led a cell of young men to kill themselves and 52 London commuters.

At the heart of this tragedy is a conflict between the first and subsequent generations of British Pakistanis - with many young people using Islamism as a kind of liberation theology to assert their right to choose how to live. It is a conflict between tradition and individuality, culture and religion, tribalism and universalism, passivity and action.

When it is stated like this, the problem of Islamic extremism looks depressingly intractable. The government’s first reaction following 7/7 was to consult with a wide range of Muslim opinion, including the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) and similar bodies.

The government now argues that the MCB and some of its affiliates are as much part of the problem as of the solution, and the new initiatives to tackle radicalism stress the promotion of British values at a grassroots level and working more closely with the few liberal modernizers in Britain’s Muslim community.

But maybe all that we can do now is remain vigilant and wait for the tide in the battle for Islam’s soul to turn in the west’s favor.”

Not convinced? Read the whole piece and get back to me. I’ll be around for a while yet. Despite those lurking murderers, the laws of probability are on my side.

Paul Berman’s article in the New Republic “Who’s Afraid of Tariq Ramadan?” makes dazzling, if lengthy, reading.

It’s the latest – and to my mind the best-aimed salvo – in a debate that agitated much of the trans-Atlantic intelligentsia in the early months of the year.

A few words about that controversy first.

The first shot was fired by the French philosopher Pascal Bruckner who called Dutch writer Ian Buruma and British academic Timothy Garton Ash “enemies of freedom”.

Their chief crime, as Bruckner saw it, was their support for “multiculturalism”, i.e. the notion that all cultures deserve equal recognition.

The “mystique of respect for others” is a very dangerous thing when applied to repressive groups, and Buruma and Garton Ash stood accused of sanctioning “the oppression of the individual”.

How so? They had criticised the Dutch writer Ayaan Hirsi Ai, a fierce critic of Islam, and had warned against a hard-line stance towards Islamists.

To Bruckner, this “tolerance harbours contempt” for victims of fanaticism. Multiculturalism, he wrote, was the “racism of the anti-racists”.

Buruma and Garton Ash were not willing to stick up for liberal democracy, just like the useful idiots who lent their supports to the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century.

Bruckner wrote:

“It is astonishing that 62 years after the fall of the Third Reich and 16 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, an important segment Europe’s intelligentsia is engaged in slandering the friends of democracy.

They maintain it is best to cede and retreat, and pay mere lip-service to the ideals of the Enlightenment.”

Buruma and Garton Ash rejected the charge – fairly convincingly I thought – pointing out that they had a track record of opposing anti-Western sentiment.

“Liberal democracy must be defended against violent extremism,” wrote Buruma.

He added that revolutionary Islamism was “indeed a threat to our free society.”

Both Buruma and Garton Ash insisted that they were just as outraged by terrorism as anyone – they just argued that targeting a whole religion for opprobrium was not the right way to tackle Islamic violence.

Others joined the fray.

The Bruckner lot branded their opponents as fellow travellers of a new form of totalitarianism; Buruma called his attackers “Enlightenment fundamentalists”.

Berman’s piece is the most considered contribution to the debate, and it weighs heavily on the side of Bruckner.

Although his main target is Tariq Ramadan, Buruma is faulted for going easy on the Swiss Islamist in a profile written for the New York Times Magazine last year.

Writes Berman:

“All in all, Buruma judged that, despite the controversies and accusations, Ramadan the philosopher offers, in Buruma’s words, “a reasoned but traditionalist approach to Islam” based on “values that are as universal as those of the European Enlightenment.”

He judged that Ramadan’s values, although “neither secular, nor always liberal,” offer “an alternative to violence, which is, in the end, reason enough to engage with him, critically, but without fear.”

This was not quite a ringing endorsement. Still, it was an endorsement.

It conveyed the unmistakable implication that Ramadan, the worthy interlocutor, stands for more than himself, which is why engaging him might be useful - in order to discover the human and philosophical principles that Western and Muslim hearts and minds might share in common, and to bridge the divisions, and at last to achieve, between the West and Islam, a cultural peace.”

For Berman, Ramadan glosses over the deep links between the Muslim Brotherhood, founded by his grandfather, and the ideologue of modern jihad Sayyid Qutb.

And Buruma took Ramadan at face value: he pulled his punches when he knew better:

“Ramadan offered his misleading explanation that Qutb and Grandfather al-Banna never knew each other, and Buruma left it at that. Salafi reformism?

Buruma failed to notice Qutb’s prominence among its intellectual leaders. Anti-Semitism? Ramadan is “one of the few Muslim intellectuals to speak out.”

And why one of the few?

It was as if, without realizing what had happened, Buruma had quietly come to accept Ramadan’s overall thesis, and had begun to look upon Ramadan as the voice of the masses, and the masses as a population hopelessly steeped in the vapors of authenticity; and had come also to look upon the liberal intellectuals from Muslim backgrounds as insignificant because, in their liberalism, they are demonstrably inauthentic.

Ramadan ended up being “one of the few Muslim intellectuals” because the other Muslim intellectuals, being liberals, did not count.

Or worse, the other Muslim intellectuals, being liberals, sometimes stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the non-Muslim liberals, whom Buruma had decided to dismiss as neocons.

This is a pretty big development, if you stop to think about it, and one that might explain the oddly ingenuous press that Ramadan has been receiving.

For if people like Ramadan and the other Islamists do speak for the oppressed and the downtrodden, and if Ramadan is a pretty good guy compared with most of his fellow salafi reformists, then shouldn’t we make every effort to view Ramadan in the best of lights?”

But according to Berman, this is a sham. It is true that Ramadan disapproves of terrorism - but

“there is a cost in having it both ways, in noisily affirming his place within the salafi reformist tradition while pretending that terrorist components of the movement belong only to a distant offshoot; or in affirming his own disapproval of violent action while exalting his grandfather’s memory…

The cost is a little smudge of ambiguity in Ramadan’s own position….

But what is his final message with regard to violence? It is a double message.

The first message condemns terrorism. The second message lavishes praise on the theoreticians of terrorism.”

Berman also takes Buruma to task over his argument that people like Ramadan, who refuse to tackle Islamism head on and have credibility with ordinary Muslims, are in a better position in influence them than Hirsi Ali.

“This ought to be a familiar argument - it was more or less the argument that Sartre invoked in order to explain why he refused to condemn the USSR.

Sartre invited his audiences to think of the industrial suburb of Paris called Billancourt, where the ignorant workers believed in communism and the Soviet future–and he did not want to demoralize the downtrodden, to désespérer Billancourt.

And so Sartre bit his tongue; if the workers were going to learn the truth about the Soviets, it was not going to be from him. And Ramadan is right not to désespérer Brick Lane (a Bangladeshi area of London) by offering a simple straight-out condemnation of violence against women.”

In conclusion, Berman contrasts the present restraint to the unanimous outcry among intellectuals that followed the fatwa against Salman Rushdie in 1989.

“During the Rushdie affair, courage was saluted. Today it is likened to fascism.

How did this happen?

The equanimity on the part of some well-known intellectuals and journalists in the face of Islamist death threats so numerous as to constitute a campaign; the equanimity in regard to stoning women to death; the journalistic inability even to acknowledge that women’s rights have been at stake in the debates over Islamism… ; the inability to acknowledge how large has been the role of a revived anti-Semitism; the striking number of errors of understanding and even of fact that have entered into the journalistic presentations of Tariq Ramadan and his ideas… - what can possibly account for this string of bumbles, timidities, gaffes, omissions, miscomprehensions, and slanders?

Two developments account for it. The first development is the unimaginable rise of Islamism since the time of the Rushdie fatwa. The second is terrorism.”

I am not buying all of Berman’s arguments, and have some sympathy with Buruma’s, but this article makes fascinating reading.

I am struck by the power and clarity of Berman’s arguments, but I don’t buy every single one of them.

I find him sometimes harsh on Buruma and Garton Ash, who after all belong to the same intellectual family as him, the anti-Marxist left.

The fact that both sides have valid points makes the confrontation all the more interesting.

It raises crucial questions for which there are no easy answers: who are the West’s enemies: Jihadis? Islamists? Muslims?

Can a culture be totalitarian? After all, the totalitarian monstrosities of the 20th centuries did not rest on ancient cultures but on their destructions, and on the banishment of history.

Is the notion of Islamofascism a valid one? Is there such a thing as an “enlightenment fundamentalist”?

I have no definitive answers to these questions.

If you want to form an opinion for your self most of the debate can be found on this site.

The first video of BBC Gaza correspondent Alan Johnston since his abduction in March is a testament to the totalitarian idiocy of his captors.

The group - the “Army of Islam” - apparently believes that a list of supposed Western crimes reeled off by a gaunt hostage can help raise awareness of the plight of Muslims in Gaza and elsewhere.

But of course, the main crime highlighted in the video is that perpetrated against Johnston.

And a direct consequence will be to further discourage Western journalists from travelling to Gaza to raise awareness of the plight of Muslims.

That is the idiotic bit. The totalitarian bit relates to the ideology and methods of the jihadists.

Testimony extracted at gunpoint and put on display for the enlightenment of the masses is a technique perfected by communism, both in its Soviet and Chinese versions.

The glorification of death and martyrdom is also a totalitarian trope. “There are thousands of our young people who look forward to death like the Americans look forward to living,” another al-Qaeda video exulted after the 9/11 attacks.

The thrill associated with dying and killing was first expressed was the Spanish fascists who shouted: “Viva la muerte.”

And radical Muslims share the common objective of the Nazis and the Communists: the destruction of Western democracy.

Like them, they show particular hatred towards the Anglo-Saxons. The text read Johnston was made to read includes this tirade

“From history, the British worked to bring about the state of Israel, which is the cause of all the suffering of the Palestinian people, and we, the British, are completely to blame, along with the Americans, for the situation in Iraq.”

Which is I find the word “Islamofascism” (coined by Paul Berman) appropriate: Jihadists seek to establish a caliphate through force, and are supported in this endeavor by dictatorships, notably a nuclear Iran.

The phrase “World War IV” – used again by Norman Podhoretz in a recent article – is also justified.

Some balk at this characterization. But since there is an “Army” (of Islam), there must be a war.

And the fight is being taken to the four corners of the world. Gaza is just one of the current hotspots: there are potential fronts on all continents.

The conflict is indeed global. The jihadists dream of doing to all of mankind what they are doing to Alan Johnston.

The French like to think that “communitarianism” is rampant in the United States – i.e. that ethnic and religious groups live apart from each other.

This is pure fantasy: anyone who has spent five minutes in the US knows that economic and public life there brings together a multitude of groups.

The belief in a ghettoized American society is mostly a comfort blanket that helps the French forget about the problems with integration in their own country – notably that of Muslims.

Enough said. But there is abroad an opposite idea that is worth examining: that unlike an old world threatened by a “Eurabian” fifth column, the US is a model of integration for Muslims.

The Pew Research Center has just published a survey of US Muslim opinion that sheds light on this issue.

At first sight, it suggests that Muslim Americans are remarkably well integrated.

They share the American work ethic: 71% agree that working hard brings success.

Economically, Muslims tend to do just as well as their fellow Americans, and they are just as contented with the state of US.

The Pew Center sums up its main point in the title: “Muslim Americans: Middle Class and Mostly Mainstream.”

I find this heartening, and wish I could the same of French Muslims – who are by and large not responsible for their own marginalization.

But on closer inspection, the study makes sobering reading.

The Pew Center helpfully breaks down the results between foreign-born Muslims and those born in the US.

The former outnumber the latter by two-to-one. This means that the survey is dominated by the views of people who know what life is like elsewhere.

Predictably, these people are well inclined towards the adoptive country they have chosen.

But if you look at the views of US-born Muslims, you find high levels of disenchantment.

A full 77% say they are dissatisfied with US society - against 45% of foreign-born Muslims and 61% for the US population in general.

More US-born Muslims say they want to remain distinct than say they need to adopt American customs (foreign-born Muslims say the reverse by an overwhelming margin.)

Furthermore, 7% of younger Muslims have a favorable opinion of al-Qaeda.

Let me repeat: I am convinced that the US – a country founded by immigrants – has done a much better job of integrating Muslims (and others) than old Europe has.

But the outlook is far from rosy: most US Muslims may be “mainly mainstream” now, but for how long?

Already many, regardless of their age or country of origin, hold pretty weird ideas.

As the survey shows, only 40% believe that Arabs carried out the 9/11 attacks.