Bad history helps bad ideology and xenophobic extremism

Christopher de Bellaigue has a useful essay on the problems of the "clash of civilizations" theory that Islamophobes use to provide some ideological justification for their xenophobia and militarism and religious bigotry, Trump’s dangerous delusions about Islam Guardian 02/162017.

And he reminds us that once a group perceived as foreign and weak is targeted for hatred, for many people the hatred takes on a life of its own:

Even accounting for the new arrivals of recent years, Muslims amount to just 6% of Europe’s population, and 1% of that of the US. But proportionality of response is not considered a virtue among the new nationalists – and even if the Muslim immigration figures were to start to fall, and all fear of submergence under a Muslim tide was demonstrated to be empirically groundless, who’s to say the populists would allow the thrill of fear to abate?

What seems more likely is that today’s proponents of harsh anti-Muslim measures will find retroactive justification in any virulent reaction they excite, leading to even more and harsher measures against Muslims – much as the European powers whose interventions helped hasten the collapse of the Islamic Enlightenment at the start of the last century felt their actions were vindicated by the violence that followed.

For those whose primary concern is the perpetuation of cultural homogeneity, the pressing question is a simple one: what is to be done with the Muslims? The clashist version of history makes their antipathy to modernity indisputable; integration and assimilation are therefore impossible. This would seem to be the position of the 60% of Germans, for example, who have been found in surveys to agree with Frauke Petry’s AfD that Islam does not belong in their country.

Pankaj Mishra on shaky democracy

My last post cited one of the Big Think sort of columns that the Guardian sometimes has. This is another one, from Pankaj Mishra, Welcome to the age of anger 12/08/2016.

After the 2008 financial crisis, Paul Krugman started talking about how to get new ideas in economics you needed to read old books. He meant people like John Maynard Keynes and Charles Kindleberger.

Mishra's article suggests that something similar holds in sociology and political science. He's looking more toward the old books of Hannah Arendt, Albert Camus, Charles Darwin, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx (maybe), Robert Musil, Friedrich Nietzsche, Max Scheler, Alexis De Tocqueville and Max Weber. At the core of Mishra's argument is a well-founded criticism of the dominant neoliberal ideology, which has implications far beyond economic policy:

The past two decades of hectic globalisation have brought us closer than ever before to the liberal Enlightenment ideal of a universal commercial society of self-interested, rational and autonomous individuals – one that was originally advocated in the 18th century by such thinkers as Montesquieu, Voltaire, Adam Smith, and Kant. In the 19th century, it was still possible for Marx to sneer at Jeremy Bentham for assuming “the modern shopkeeper, especially the English shopkeeper, as the normal man”. In our own time, however, the ideology of neoliberalism – a market-centric hybrid of Enlightenment rationalism and 19th-century utilitarianism – has achieved near total domination in the economic and political realm alike.

The success of this universal creed can be attested by many innovations of recent decades that now look perfectly natural. The rational market is expected to ensure the supply of valuable products and services, while the task of governments is to ensure fair competition, which produces “winners” and “losers”. The broad intellectual revolution in which an all-knowing market judges failure and success has even more forcefully insisted on the rationality of the individual.

Issues of social justice and equality have receded along with conceptions of society or community – to be replaced by the freely choosing individual in the marketplace. According to the prevailing view today, the injustices entrenched by history or social circumstances cease to matter: the slumdog, too, can be a millionaire, and the individual’s failure to escape the underclass is self-evident proof of his poor choices.

But this abstract conception has no room for the emotional situation of real, flesh-and-blood people – and how they might act within concrete social and historical settings. [my emphasis]

Mishra conveys a good sense of the complexity of the long term effects of neoliberalism: "For nearly three decades, the religion of technology and GDP and the crude 19th-century calculus of self-interest have dominated politics and intellectual life. Today, the society of entrepreneurial individuals competing in the rational market reveals unplumbed depths of misery and despair; it spawns a nihilistic rebellion against order itself."

It's also important to make sure the resonance of broad generalizations doesn't distract us too much from empirical facts. In the 2016 American Presidential election, Hillary Clinton decisively defeated Donald Trump. She got a plurality rather than a majority. But it was a bigger plurality than Trump's. So it's still to early to declare that American's political culture has decisively embraced Trumpism.

But I don't think Mishra is taking such a simplistic approach. In another essay almost two years ago, he reminds his readers of the contrast between the propaganda image of "the West" that conservatives and many liberals and some people who identify as left use as a contrast to a hostile image of Islam and the Islamic world (After the Paris attacks: It’s time for a new Enlightenment) Guardian 01/20/2015:

You don’t have to be a Catholic, or a Marxist, to acknowledge that Europe is beset by serious problems: soaring unemployment, the unresolved crisis of the euro, rising anti-immigrant sentiment, and the stunning loss of a sense of possibility for young Europeans everywhere – events made intolerable for many by the invisible bondholders, exorbitantly bonused bankers, and the taint of venality that spreads across Europe’s oligarchic political class. “Right in front of our eyes,” the Polish thinker Adam Michnik laments in his new book The Trouble with History, “we can see the marching parade of corrupt hypocrites, thick-necked racketeers, and venal deputies.” “Today, in our world,” Michnik argues, “there exists no great idea of freedom, equality, and fraternity.”

In these circumstances, the unspoken supposition that while everything else changes in the modern world, European norms should remain self-sufficient and unchangeable, deserving of unconditional submission from backward foreigners, makes you pause. As Tony Judt demonstrated in his magisterial Postwar, the notion of Europe as the embodiment of democracy, rationality, human rights, freedom of speech, gender equality was meant to suppress collective memories of brutal crimes in which almost all European states were complicit. They cannot be said to have reinvigorated the values of the Enlightenment in recent years, either. European nation-states, even those that did not participate in Anglo-American wars and occupations, facilitated extrajudicial execution, torture and rendition, which were originally sanctioned in the name of reason, freedom and democracy. Marine Le Pen has not got close to occupying the Élysée Palace by advocating pluralism and tolerance. Nicolas Sarkozy reportedly secured his tenancy there in 2007 with the help of a €50m donation from Libya’s Gaddafi (Sarkozy denies the charge); he then committed a French version of blasphemy by claiming that the roots of France were “essentially Christian”. [my emphasis]

Religion, secularism and the complications of the American tradition of religious freedom

In my recent post Mark Twain's white suit and Andrew Jackson 02/16/2016, I cited Tracy Fessenden's book Culture and Redemption: Religion, The Secular, and American Literature (2007).

Her book is a collection of essays divided into two sections. The four chapters in the first part are more thematically tied together with the idea that the development of the American notion of freedom of religion well into the 19th century largely took the form of the privileging of a non-sectarian Protestant Christian narrative. The second is a more diverse set of essays on literary topics, including the one that deals with Mark Twain's white suit.

I was especially intrigued by her elaboration of Puritan texts equating the "savage Indians" with "Catholicism." Puritan views lumped women with Indians as part of Nature, a condition above which white European Protestants had risen, though obviously white European Protestant women weren't put on quite so low a level as the other humans regarded as part of degraded, unregenerate Nature. Or at least true Protestants like themselves. Dissenters from their true way were quickly lumped in with the other wretched inferiors who were part of Nature: Indians, Catholics, women. The Puritan era is one of Fessenden's specialties. She is a co-editor of The Puritan Origins of American Sex: Religion, Sexuality, and National Identity in American Literature (2001).

But Protestantism was plagued from the start by its own schismatic tendencies. Fessenden in a footnote (p. 245) quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson from 1844: "[T]he Catholic religion respects masses of men and ages. ... The Catholic church is ethnical [sic], and in every way superior. It is in harmony with Nature, which loves the race and ruins the individual. The Protestant has his pew, which of course is only the first step to a church for every individual citizen - a church apiece." (my emphasis)

So in terms of the secular government's attitudes toward establishment and protection of the Christian religion, Papist and heathen Indians came in practice to be regarded as far more threatening to the True Faith than dissenting Protestant sects.

Fessenden writes about the great appeal of captive narratives, stories of whites who lived among the Indians. This is a fascinating shadow side of white-dominated American history, a reminder that some whites were forced into a relation with natives peoples in which they were regarded to treat them as humans like themselves. At least at some level, for some length of time. In some cases, such whites decided they preferred the company of the "savages" to that of the civilized whites.

The following passage gives a glimpse of Fassenden's nuanced treatment of the complexity of these trends and their evolution over time:

Bur if the view of Indians as deficient Christians - and of wayward Protestant Christians as Indians [in an earlier Puritan view] - made Indians the inverse of the Puritan ideal, it also permitted the Puritans' gradual recasting of Indians not as the image of the unregenerate Puritan interior but instead as the external periphery of an increasingly incommensurable otherness, against which different varieties of Protestant Christianity could then be subtly consolidated. After 1679, the civil and spiritual reforms of the Puritans were directed less toward individual regeneration than toward securing ministerial leadership and civil order among the new outlying towns and "unwalled villages" of the expanding white frontier. Because Puritans failed to credit Indians with a distinctive interiority, the Indian became a blank slate for Puritan projections of spiritual deficiency, first by being made into emblems of unregenerate Puritans, and then subtly and increasingly as tools of enemy Catholics. The "conversion" of lndians from weak Puritans to vigorous papists was facilitated by the literal removing or subduing of autonomous tribes from southern New England, which meant that the resistant Indians with whom Puritans came into contact after King Philip's War were those who had been "Romanized" in their association with French colonists to the north. "There is a Danger lest your Neighbors be made Captives," warned Cotton Mather in 1707; "If they become Captives, they fall into the hands of Papists. The Papists will use more than ordinary Pains to Debauch them." Indian captivity had earlier provided Mather the occasion to exhort his congregants to examine their spiritual fragility, their own incipient Indianness in the absence of full conversion. As Tara Fitzpatrick argues, however, the threat of captivity to "papists" now enabled Mather to emphasize less the vulnerability of the Puritan community than its theological strengths, its elevation of faith over works and the gracious workings of the Word over the meretricious agency of the sacraments [associated especially with the "Papists"]. (my emphasis in bold; p. 30)

She concludes that by the end of the eighteenth century, with the image of Indians as the Other, bolstered by and identified with the image of the Papist Other, "the Puritans' recasting of the otherness of Indians as a spiritual difference of kind rather than degree enabled the proliferating sects of white New England Protestants to remain united as solid and worthy heirs of the Reformation against the miscegenate corruption represented to [Increase] Mather as the 'half Indianized French ... half Frenchified Indians." (p. 31) The Puritans were particularly focused on the "Papist" threat because of the close proximity of Catholic French settlements.

Fassenden is careful to look at the periods she examines as what they are, events taking place in particular temporal and geographic contexts and is careful against generalizing those experiences beyond the evidence she cites. But she does argue that the broad trend in the United States well into the 19th century tended to regard "freedom of religion" in schools and public institutions as a nonsectarian support of Protestant religiosity. She doesn't stress the legal and Constitutional evolution in the United States. But it is important to remember that the freedom of religion enshrined in the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the federal Constitution was generally understood as applying only to the federal government, not to the states. It wasn't until the 14th Amendment extended the protections of the Bill of Rights fully to the states as well, that the pre-Civil War state-level approach to religious liberty was superseded by the protections of the federal Constitution.

As she does note, "Just prior to the Revolution, religious establishment was the rule in nine of the thirteen colonies. Soon after, New York's state constitution of 1777 abolished establishment, South Carolina's in 1778 for the first time require it, and other states proceeded unevenly to codify their relationship to established churches."

Her third chapter looks at local rounds in the "Bible wars," in the nineteenth century over religious education in public schools. The influx of Irish Catholic immigrants into northern cities added nativist and ethnic elements to Protestant anti-Catholicism. Use of the King James Bible in public school education became a flashpoint with Catholics:

In Massachusetts, whose 1780 Constitution had stipulated that "public protestant teachers" would be supported to foster the "piety, education, and morality" on which civil government must "essentially depend," an 1827 law gave school committees power over textbooks "provided also that said committee shall never direct any school books to be purchased or used in any of the schools under their superintendence, which are calculated to favor any particular religious sect or tenet. " Sectarian objections that the public schools made no provision for specifically religious teachings were answered by interdenominational Protestant assurances that the content of instruction would be broadly Christian. At the center of the curriculum was the King James Bible. As the educational reformer Horace Mann insisted, the public school "welcomes the Bible, and therefore welcomes all the doctrines which the Bible really contains .... [I]t listens to these doctrines so reverently, that ... it will not suffer any rash mortal to thrust in his interpolations of their meanings, or overlay the text with any of the 'many inventions' which the heart of man has sought out" - a policy that rendered the annotated Douay Bible used by Catholics unacceptable, even as it enshrined the edition (the King James Bible) whose dedication referred to the pope as the "man of Sinne„ and whose preface refuted the legitimacy of the Catholic Church. As head of the Massachusetts School Committee, Mann vetoed as inappropriately sectarian a book then in wide use, The Child at Home, which was staunchly Calvinist in matters of sin and final judgment, but he made the Bible into the principle of tolerance itself: "In every course of studies, all the practical and preceptive parts of the Gospel should ... [be] sacredly included .... In no school should the Bible ... [be] opened to reveal the sword of ... polemic, but to unloose the dove of peace." [my emphasis in bold; pp. 66-7

The real-life conflicts between Catholics and Protestants in the US cannot be cleanly separated into religious, ethnic/cultural and political elements. But there was a political element. And whatever their various motivations, American Protestants were not wrong when they viewed the Catholic Church as largely an opponent of free, republican institutions Fessenden writes about the aftermath of the failed democratic revolutions of 1848 in Europe:

[I]n 1853 [in Cincinnati], violence was again narrowly averted when the visiting Archbishop Gaetano Bedini of Rome was burned in effigy by a crnwd of two thousand Protestant marchers, who advertised on placards their intention to burn the residence of Archbishop Purcell, where Bedini was staying. As Peter D'Agostino observes, Bedini's American visit "crystallized Catholic loyalty to the symbols of papal Rome" in the wake of Pius IX's triumphant return from exile after the fall of the independent Roman Republic in April 1849. Before coming to America, Bedini had been assigned by the Vatican to oversee the defeat of the liberal rebellion in Spain, an involvement that earned him the nickname of the "Bloody Butcher of Bologna" among the rebellion's supporters at home. While Catholic immigrants saw in the pope's hurniliation and exile a mirror of their own experiences of alienation in an often hostile new land, American Protestants (among them Margaret Fuller, William Lloyd Garrison, and Horace Greeley) vigorously hailed the rebellion that would have secularized the Papal States and destroyed the Vatican's temporal power. ("So deeply rooted in every American heart is the love of liberty," declared the American consul Nicholas Brown in Rome, that Americans would "at once hail with joy the independence of the Roman Republic." ) As a symbol of the Roman Republic's defeat, Bedini's visit to Cincinnati revitalized Catholics' spiritual allegiance to the "Eternal City" and gave urgency to the Protestant project of portraying as dangerously un-American those whose more deeply imagined community lay beyond national and temporal borders. [my emphasis; p. 75]

She defined the outlines of the Protestant-Catholic conflict in the mid-19th century this way in "The Other Woman's Sphere," her own essay in The Puritan Origins of America Sex:

The arrival of more than three million Catholic immigrants in the middle decades of the nineteenth century reconfigured urban spaces and magnified existing tensions among races, classes, and regions. Skilied craftspeople viewed the immigrants as fodder for industrialists, while factory owners saw them as shiftless and unprofitable. Immigrants threatened industrial and domestic laborers by accepting even the lowest-paying jobs, which until then only free black men and women had been called on to fill. To slave owners, Catholic immigrants were instinctive abolitionists who were unwilling to compete with slave labor; Protestant abolitionists who saw Catholicism as inherently despotic, meanwhile, considered them natural allies of the slave power. Tue seemingly monolithic structure of Catholicism cast the splintering of Protestant congregations and the arrival of new religious bodies into relief, while Catholicism's celibate vocations appeared to threaten both the family and the workplace as bulwarks of Protestant power. [my emphasis, p. 171]

Giovanni Maris Mastai-Ferretti served from 1846-1878 as Pope Pius IX. When the College of Cardinals selected him as Pope, "Liberal Europe applauded his election." (Richard McBrien, Lives of the Popes, 1997) But the shock of the revolutions of 1848 and that in Italy in particular shocked the previously liberal-minded Pope into becoming "one of "the more reactionary popes of history," as McBrien writes. Hans Küng writes in Das Christentum (1995) that after French and Austrian troops restored Pius IX in the Vatican, he became "an unreconstructed opponent of all free ('liberal') political, intellectual and theological currents." Küng claims that Pius' thinking "was not clouded by intellectual doubt" but instead was "marked by psychopathic features." (my translation) McBrien lists some of his later dubious accomplishments: "He called the First Vatican Council (1869-70), which defined papal primacy and papal infallibility; he defined the Immaculate Conception of Mary; and he published the 'Syllabus of Errors,' which condemned the major developments of the modern world."

Fessenden in Culture and Redemption sensibly does not attempt to draw direct lines between the history she recounts of the limits of earlier American conception of freedom of religion as the tolerance and public support of nonsectarian Protestantism, and the present-day disputes over freedom of religion and religious establishment in the United States.

But her account does give us some insight into the religious and rhetorical traditions on which today's Christian Dominionists draw in trying to define freedom of religion as freedom for Christians to use state institutions to impose their religion - most often a version of fundamentalist Protestant Christianity - on everyone else. And as the right to discriminate in public businesses and accommodations against people using Christianity as the justification. She notes, "Janet Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini suggest that the Christian right develops its political and cultural power 'both by
drawing on its connection to the Christian aspect (itself supported by mainline Protestantism) of hegemonic Christian secularism and by claiming to be oppressed by the same secularism.'"(p. 214) She also suggests, tentatively and in parentheses, "Secularists, meanwhile, might be said to draw on the secular aspect of hegemonic Christian secularism while claiming to be oppressed by its Christian aspect."

In a concluding chapter written after the Presidential election of 2004, Fessenden describes her book as "calling even the progressive elements of a secularized Protestant culture to account" and as putting "hard questions to cherished liberal narratives about, for example, the separation of church and state, the value of literacy, or the privatization of religious faith." But she also expressed concern that in the post-9/11 "war on terror" and its Islamophobic baggage, "the hegemonic power of appeals to a Protestant consensus in American public life remains, it would seem, as strong than ever: what William Hutchison identifies as the nineteenth-century dynamic of '[religious] pluralism as selective tolerance' ..."

What she means about troubling "liberal narratives" on the topic is that she objects to any easy explanation of the history of religious tolerance in America doesn't reflect historical realities, especially when our foreign policy or our occasional exercise in nation-building tires to apply simplistic models based on an idealized version of the American experience:

[T]he model we seek to export in the name of American values, one that attempts to ensure religious freedom and eradicate conflict by confining religion to a privatized sphere, does not even describe the dynamics of our own history. Worse still, it hides the violence and coercion that have attended the formation of American democratic space in the guise of the neutrality and universality of the secular. Academics tend to dismiss challenges to this narrative as the retrogressive voices of religionists who clamor for an ever greater share of public power. And not without evidence. Even so, however, our own embrace of a simplified narrative of secularization-as-progress is in part what allows this template to operate as the norm for bringing American values to a benighted world. [my emphasis]

And she makes this important observation about the endless scolding of the religion of Islam generally for allegedly never having had its own Reformation:

[I]n the post-September 11 calls from politicians and pundits for a "Reformation" in Islam, an Islam that would conform to Western expectations of acceptable religion: should we be surprised if such appeals are no longer made by the side of a moderate Muslim leader produced for the occasion, and all forms of Islam are now suspect for not looking enough like post-Reformation Christianity? [emphasis in original]

And she notes how this not-Protestant-enough criticism of Islam is used by advocates of war against Islamic countries as propaganda:

In the same way that a familiar liberal narrative of Islam - "the Reformation of Islam will arrive as an inevitable byproduct of modernization" - is made to yield up to its more violent and triumphalist counterpart - "Islam will ever remain incompatible with the West's secularized Protestant values" - so also do two versions of U.S. imperialism become mutually supporting and difficult to untangle. In the first, a liberal interventionist narrative sees the United States as uniquely able to redress, even if reluctantly, the failure of backward states and cultures to enter fully into modernity. The United States acts in its own interests and in the interests of those oppressed by the failed states in which they reside, this story runs, when it uses whatever means necessary to bring the blessings of religious liberty, economic freedom, and representative government to those parts of the world that would otherwise remain breeding grounds for violence, human rights abuses, and terrorism. This narrative's calming appeal to freedom, democracy, and their inevitable sway migrates also to its more hawkish counterpart, which urges perpetual aggressions against all those who oppose our universal values and who "hate" the freedoms we hold so dear - witness the hypocrisy of our guarantee of "religious freedoms" to those Muslims violently detained at Guantänamo Bay, without due process and apparently indefinitely.

In an observation that sheds some light on the incongruous ecumenical alliance in Islamophobia between Christian fundamentalists and some self-professed atheists:

However starkly continuing dispatches from the "culture wars" may portray an America divided into a conservative Christian faction hostile to the secular and a dogmatic secularism at odds with religion, it must be noted that the category of the West readily accommodates both of these polarized alternatives when the paradigm shifts from the culture wars between Christians and secularists to the "clash of civilizations" between the West and the rest. ... According to either version of this story, the formation of democratic societies requires that "irrational" religious behavior be banished to the private sphere, on the Protestant model, as a way of containing otherwise intractable and potentially violent conflict between contending worldviews. This is the model to which warnings of a "clash of civilizations" continue to appeal, even if secularists looking out from the Westsee theocratic assaults on modernity where religionists see godless assaults on the cherished values of Western civilization. lt is also the model that Western projects of nation building have traditionally sought to install around the globe. [my emphasis]

The "Charlie Hebdo" magazine and its political role in Muslim immigrant integration

I've been saying on the Charlie Hebdo attacks that people need to be able to walk and talk on this issue at the same time.

Paul Pillar makes a useful contribution to doing so in Five Things Wrong with the Reaction to the Paris Attacks The National Interest 01/13/2015.

The first of his list of five is "Scale of the attacks vs. scale of the reaction." I'm not so worried about the fact that the Charlie Hebdo killings provoked a response that may seem to be proportionately different than that after similar incidents. There are no perfect cases, and no perfectly identical ones.

But I've become particularly interested in the "perfect case" problem recently. Protests over racial injustices in the US have often centered around dramatic incidents that, for whatever reason, resonated among a larger population than those immediately affected. George Zimmerman's killing of Trayvon Martin, for instance, which the Florida justice system found legal. Darryl Wilson's murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson, in which the Democratic prosecutor with the connivance of the Democratic Governor acted as the killer cop's defense attorney, effectively spiking the possibility of Wilson being prosecuted. New York cops choking for Eric Garner to death on video for the minor crime of selling individual black market cigarettes, which the New York justice system also found to be legal.

Criminal cases like those are never "perfect cases," in the sense that the accused can usually plead some mitigating circumstance of some kind, unlikely as some of them may be.

I would say, though, that anyone who sees the Eric Garner murder as a murky case not worthy anyone protesting over, in my jaded view there is probably no murder of a black man by a white police officer that they would ever question or criticize.

Pillar makes an observation in the Charlie Hebdo case that adds some important perspective on all the other imperfect cases over which public protest is aroused:

But much of what we have been seeing over the past week is an example of how public and political attention to something, regardless of what that something is, tends to feed on itself. Once a certain level of salience is reached and enough people are talking and writing about a subject or an event, then for that very reason other people start talking and writing about it too. As the attention snowballs, political leaders feel obligated to weigh in and to appear responsive, regardless of their private assessment of whatever started the crescendo of public attention. Thus in the current instance even the White House feels obligated to answer for the president or vice president of the United States not having flown off to join a crowd in Paris. [my emphasis]

In the case of the thoroughly odious George Zimmerman, I couldn't assert with complete confidence that his killing of Trayvon was illegal, given the kind of NRA-approved Stand Your Ground/Kill At Will statue in effect in Florida.

But I also find myself in the Zimmerman case thinking that Charlie Pearson turned out to be wrong in judging, "Nothing good has come of this whole situation. Nothing." (What Zimmerman Can Do Now Esquire Politics Blog 07/14/2013) The protests over the seeming inaction of the police in that case were legitimate. That is not changed by the fact that protesters in some case got some detail of their accounts wrong. That's what trials are for, which is what the protesters were demanding. The basic facts were hard for any honest person to dispute. The armed Zimmerman was stalking the unarmed Trayvon Martin for no good reason. Trayvon, alarmed for very good reason, confronted the armed white guy. The unarmed black kid wound up dead. His white killer got away with it and is free to continue in his highly dubious ways. (See Kelli Kennedy, George Zimmerman Arrested On Aggravated Assault Charge AP/Huffington Post 01/10/2015)

But it did raise the consciousness (if I can borrow that New Agey phrase - awareness, if you prefer) of many Americans, particularly white Americans, about the kind racial discrimination that is pervasive in the American justice system. And Pillar there gives a good, brief description of how this works.

As a technical description of a social and media process, it reminds us that it can be used to hype a false and misleading narrative just as it can a legitimate one. But on the hopeful side, it's a reminder that we don't need a "perfect case" to use as a way of calling attention to a real, widespread problem like police brutality. Only enough legitimate cases to make it a live issue on a broader scale.

Pillar also raises the nature and quality of the satire that Charlie Hebdo has been practicing for years:

The exerciser of free speech in question in Paris was a satirical magazine that seems to specialize in cartoons that are bound to offend a lot of people. It is fair to say that in the centuries of struggles for civil liberties, this is probably not one of the nobler vehicles for the cause. We are not talking Thomas Paine here. What is that “je suis Charlie” stuff supposed to mean? That we are all dedicated to putting down religious prophets? With most rights also go responsibilities, and prudence in the exercise of those rights, with an honest effort to bear in mind the consequences of what one does or says. Responsible, prudent exercise of a right does nothing to diminish or compromise that right. [my emphasis]

I didn't plaster any of my own “je suis Charlie” placards on Facebook or Twitter. But I understood it to mean primarily a statement of solidarity with the victims of violence against the free press.

But I also didn't rush to plaster “je suis Charlie” labels on myself online because I was unfamiliar with the actual content of the piece. I'm also in solidarity with the right of nasty, xenophobic protesters in the far-right "Pegida" movement in Germany. But I ain't posting any "Ich bin Pegida" signs for myself. Because I'm very much not in solidarity with their message of hate. And I wouldn't want anyone assuming that I was.

Pillar also points out that a new wave of often ill-informed criticism of Islam in general has been a result of the attack on the "je suis Charlie" campaign:

The Paris events have rekindled an old debate about whether the seeds of violent Islamist extremism can be found in the content of Islam itself. That debate had a surge a couple of decades ago when Samuel Huntington was writing about a clash of civilizations and about how Islam has “bloody borders.” The debate gets a renewed surge whenever, say, Congressman Peter King says something on the subject or events such as those in Paris transpire. The debate will never be resolved.

The debate as commonly framed is not very useful because even if those who argue that the content of Islam explains the motivations of those who commit violent acts in its name were right—and they are more wrong than right—that would not take us very far toward any implied policy recommendations. [my emphasis]

Max Blumenthal and Chris Hayes both linked on Twitter to this 2013 critique by a former Charlie Hebdo staffer of the thematic content of the magazine's satire: Olivier Cyran, “Charlie Hebdo”, not racist? If you say so ... 12/05/2013; translated by Daphne Lawless; original from Article11:

Doubtless I would not have had the patience or the stoutness of heart to follow, week after week, the distressing transformation which took over your team after the events of September 11, 2001. I was no longer part of Charlie Hebdo when the suicide planes made their impact on your editorial line, but the Islamophobic neurosis which bit by bit took over your pages from that day on affected me personally, as it ruined the memory of the good moments I spent on the magazine during the 1990s. The devastating laughter of “Charlie” which I had loved to hear now sounded in my ears like the laugh of a happy idiot getting his cock out at the checkout counter, or of a pig rolling in its own shit. And yet, I never called your magazine racist. But since today you are proclaiming, high and loud, your stainless and irreproachable anti-racism, maybe it’s now the right moment to seriously consider the question. ...

Scarcely had I walked out, wearied by the dictatorial behaviour and corrupt promotion practices of the employer, than the Twin Towers fell and Caroline Fourest arrived in your editorial team. This double catastrophe set off a process of ideological reformatting which would drive off your former readers and attract new ones - a cleaner readership, more interested in a light-hearted version of the “war on terror” than the soft anarchy of [cartoonist] Gébé. Little by little, the wholesale denunciation of “beards”, veiled women and their imaginary accomplices became a central axis of your journalistic and satirical production. “Investigations” began to appear which accepted the wildest rumours as fact, like the so-called infiltration of the League of Human Rights (LDH) or European Social Forum (FSE) by a horde of bloodthirsty Salafists. The new impulse underway required the magazine to renounce the unruly attitude which had been its backbone up to then, and to form alliances with the most corrupt figures of the intellectual jet-set, such as Bernard-Henri Lévy or Antoine Sfeir, cosignatories in Charlie Hebdo of a grotesque “Manifesto of the Twelve against the New Islamic Totalitarianism”[3]. Whoever could not see themselves in a worldview which opposed the civilized (Europeans) to obscurantists (Muslims) saw themselves quickly slapped with the label of “useful idiots” or “Islamo-leftists”. (my emphasis in bold; italics in English text quoted)

Okay, the fact that professional twit and self-righteous warmonger Bernard-Henri Lévy like the content of the paper is a bad sign in itself. As Cyran also explains, the magazine very publicly welcomed Lévy's support. Two strikes.

As the late great Molly Ivins noted nearly 20 years ago in a takedown of Rush Limbaugh (Lyin' Bully Mother Jones May/June 1995):

I object because he consistently targets dead people, little girls, and the homeless — none of whom are in a particularly good position to answer back. Satire is a weapon, and it can be quite cruel. It has historically been the weapon of powerless people aimed at the powerful. When you use satire against powerless people, as Limbaugh does, it is not only cruel, it's profoundly vulgar. It is like kicking a cripple. [my emphasis]

And while France has been at war recently in Islamic countries and Muslims are certainly powerful in countries from Indonesia to Morocco.

But French Muslims themselves are not a powerful group in French society. As Cyran notes:

The obsessive pounding on Muslims to which your weekly has devoted itself for more than a decade has had very real effects. It has powerfully contributed to popularising, among “left-wing” opinion, the idea that Islam is a major “problem” in French society. That belittling Muslims is no longer the sole privilege of the extreme right, but a “right to offend” which is sanctified by secularism, the Republic, by “co-existence”. And even - let’s not be stingy with the alibis! - by the rights of women. It’s widely believed today that the exclusion of a veiled girl is a sign, not of stupid discrimination, but of solid, respectable feminism, which consists of pestering those whom one claims to be liberating. Draped in these noble intentions that flatter their ignorance and exempt them from any scruples, we see people with whom we were close, and whom we believed mentally healthy, abruptly start to cut loose with a stream of racist idiocies. ... But it’s rare that Charlie Hebdo is not cited to support the golden rule authorising us to spew all over Muslims. And, since your disciples have learned their lessons well, they never fail to exclaim when they’re caught red-handed: “But it is our right to mock religions! Don’t confuse legitimate criticism of Islam with anti-Arab racism!”

Juan Cole writes (Yes, they’re Condemning the Paris Attacks: The Muslims’ War on Terror Informed Comment 01/09/2015):

I have no knowledge of the background of the suspect brothers [in the Charlie Hebdo killings], their parents may even have been `Frence collaborators’ in Algeria (50,000 of whom were butchered by the victorious FLN after the war), they cannot have direct knowedge  [sic]of that war. But they come from a subculture of French society that has been spat upon and marginalized by a large minority of main-stream France ever since. [my emphasis in bold]

Stéphanie Giry in a 2006 article described the state of Muslim immigrant integration in France and Its Muslims Foreign Affairs (Sept/Oct 2006).

Cenk Uygur on militant atheism and Islamophobia

There has been some attention lately in the progressive media to the Islamophobia promoted by outspoken atheists like Bill Maher and Sam Harris.

Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks has a half-hour interview here with Muslim religious scholar Reza Aslan on the topic, Reza Aslan - Bigotry, Fundamentalism and Neo-Atheism in the Media 10/13/2014:

Digby in QOTD: Reza Aslan Hullabaloo 10/14/2014 links to an interview by Jesse Singal with Aslan, Reza Aslan on What the New Atheists Get Wrong About Islam New York Magazine 10/14/2014. Aslan says there:

This is going to sound odd to say, but probably nothing, because when you are dealing with that kind of level of certainty, whether you are talking about a religious fundamentalist, or an atheist fundamentalist, which is precisely what someone like Sam Harris is, it’s really a waste of time to try to argue either data points or logical reasoning, because they have already made up their mind and it becomes kind of useless to have that kind of conversation.

Digby is somewhat surprised by the Islamophobia coming from atheists.

I'm tempted to attribute the Harris/Maher kind of Islamophobia to the kind of testosterone poisoning that women have sometimes encountered in the "skeptical" movement that debunks pseudo-science and attracts science-minded atheists. Skeptic star Michael Sherman, the Founding Director of Skeptic magazine and a longtime monthly columnist for Scientific American, has been accused of being a nasty twit (and worse!) in his behavior toward women. He also has a fondness for Friedrich Hayek/Ayn Rand type "Utopian-free-market economics (which isn't exactly reality-based).

Rand herself was also very much an atheist, to the embarrassment of her fans like Paul Ryan. But that didn't stop her from being on the bandwagon of Cold War opposition to Communism, which was routinely and prominently condemned for its "godlessness" - which Rand presumably shared.

I can't help but think that some of the atheist Islamophobia is based on ideological affinity. If you're an atheist who loves the Republicans for being free-market, damning Islam is a way to identify with them on something religious without claiming to be Christian. There's also some ideological piggy-backing on the politics: Christians are likely to dismiss atheist arguments directed against the *Christian* God. But if you show religion is evil by criticizing the barbarian Moon God Allah and his fanatical brainwashed polygamous beheading followers, you might get a hearing among conservative Christians.

Juan Cole writes about Maher and Harris in Ben Affleck on Bill Maher’s Muslim Problem Informed Comment 10/07/2014:

Maher’s and Harris’s charges against Muslims in general are ridiculous. Neither one has ever lived in a Muslim-majority society or knows the languages or cultures. They just retail invidious calumnies second-hand. Almost anything polemicists like Sam Harris say of Muslims can be said of others; i.e. they are just describing the human condition, unfortunate as it often is. In the 1990s an ABC poll showed that 10% of Americans sympathized with far right wing white supremacist groups like the Michigan Militia. My recollection is that polling showed that a significant proportion of Chinese sympathized with the 9/11 attacks and to this day only a third think al-Qaeda committed them (i.e. it wasn’t viewed as a fundamentalist act but as an anti-imperialist one [this point of view is execrable; I'm just reporting it]). Note that in this last instance, the attitudes have nothing to do with religion but rather with nationalism/ imperialism, a binary pair that explains the world much better than religion/atheism. The same statistics, if glibly given by Maher or Harris for Muslims, would damn the latter and their tradition; but what about the Chinese? Is Communist-Capitalism or the Confucianist heritage to blame here?

Progressives and Islamophia

When rightwing Republicans created a controversy over the Park 51 community center in New York - the Ground Zero Mosque as the FOXists preferred to call it - it was clear that Islamophia had worked its way higher in the Republicans' arsenal of ways to induce mass fear and hatred. So I've been paying more attention to it since then.

As several news organizations have been reporting lately, such controversies are occurring in Europe, as well. On a recent visit to Austria, my wife and I were both struck by the number of people we heard repeating the most dubious claims about Muslims in Austria. We were especially disturbed at speaking to an attorney that we've known for years, who insisted on telling us about the impending takeover of Austria by Muslims and the imposition of sharia law (Islamic religious law).

The essential argument was no different from that we hear from American Islamophobes. He claimed that German courts were making rulings based on sharia. He pretended not to notice when I told him that I found that impossible to believe because German like (as in all EU countries) is secular. When I asked him for an example of a case in which this occurred, he couldn't cite anything, not a name, not a place, not a date. (And this guy is an attorney!) Nor did he seem to know anything at all about sharia other than that it was Muslim and scary and evil.

He claimed that second and generation Turks in Austria (Turks are the largest Islamic minority in Austria) harbored secret plans to overthrow the existing constitution and impose sharia. But he couldn't name any actual Turks or Turkish groups in Austria advocating such a thing. Nor could he name a single member of Parliament proposing replacing the Austrian secular law with sharia. If not one single member of Parliament is favoring such an idea, it's pretty obvious a threat so distant as to be downright delusional. If they had an Austrian version of FOX News, I'm sure it would find some Muslim kook living in Austria who advocates all sorts of hair-raising things.

He didn't seem to know that Turkey itself doesn't operate under sharia, in fact has been under strict secular law since Attaturk's rule in the 1920s. I can tell the difference in a conversation like this between someone who's prejudiced, someone who's well-meaning but poorly informed, and outright fanatics. This guy was clearly operating on fanaticism. And when you try to engage a fanatic on what he's actually saying, you get some strange conversation. He told a story about some lawyer he knows who left Iran after the 1979 Revolution who told him about how the Muslim theocrats imposed their rule, something that's hardly a secret one needs to learn by whispers from an Iranian acquaintance. And he said, "They want to do the same thing here." I asked him, "Are you saying that Persians are trying to take over Austria?" "No!" he said, "The Muslims!"

One of the things that's somewhat problematic for liberals/progressives to deal with when faced with Islamophobia. On the one hand, it's bigotry that rightwingers are using to promote fear and hatred, and to validate notions like waging an illegal, aggressive war against Iran. It's pretty clear in the actual American political context, where many Republicans are now convinced - speaking of fanaticism - that President Obama is a Kenyan Muslim revolutionary, in that context anti-Muslim hate-mongering is also a surrogate for good old all-American white racism, too. So it's not something that Democrats (of the capital-D or small-d variety) can ignore.

But, of course, there are real criticisms that Westerners have about some social practices in Muslim countries and communities that come in conflict with Western moral assumption and sometimes the law. Many of those have to do with women's rights and women's status. In public appearance, conservative Republican Christianists, many of whom also hold some troubling ideas and attitudes on women's rights, like to forefront the alleged evils of the "sharia" bogeyman in their anti-Muslim hate propaganda. That was a prominent feature of the impressive report Christiane Amanpour made this past weekend on ABC's This Week, 10/03/2010, in which the anti-Muslim polemicists made just that charge.

But there are legitimate criticisms to be made of real existing Islamic practices on that score, all of which are being made by Muslims themselves.

Michelle Goldberg, whose excellent Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism (2006) is one of the best journalistic treatments of the Christian Right in recent years, addresses this dilemma of American progressives confronting Islamophobia in The Un-Reluctant Fundamentalist Democracy Journal Fall 2010. It is a review of the book Nomad: From Islam to America: A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations (2010) by Ayaan Hirsi Ali,former member of the Dutch Parliament who now lives in the United States and works for the conservative thinktank, the American Enterprise Insitute (AEI), which is also known as Neocon Central.

For the right-wing think tank, landing such a brilliant, cosmopolitan heroine was a coup. The American right often alleges that liberals, full of mushy-headed cultural relativism, can’t even bestir themselves to defend their own values against reactionary Islam. The liberal intellectual establishment’s rejection of Hirsi Ali appeared, at least on the surface, to bear this out.

That’s certainly what Paul Berman argues in his new book, The Flight of the Intellectuals. "A more classic example of a persecuted dissident intellectual does not exist," he writes of Hirsi Ali, asserting that the left’s failure to rally around her is evidence of deep intellectual corruption. Pointing to her liberal critics, particularly the writers Ian Buruma and Timothy Garton Ash, he says, "The campaign in the intellectual press against Hirsi Ali seems to me unprecedented–at least since the days when lonely dissident refugees from Stalin’s Soviet Union used to find themselves slandered in the Western pro-communist press."

Here's how Michelle addresses that charge:

But there is a problem with this perspective. Hirsi Ali is, in many ways, immensely admirable. But she can also be reactionary, glib, and sloppy, and judging by Nomad–a painfully disappointing book–these tendencies have gotten worse since she joined AEI. Nomad brims with attacks on unrecognizable straw feminists, bizarre statements about the United States, and, strangest of all, a tendency to romanticize religions outside of Islam. Hirsi Ali remains, she says, an atheist, but she’s developed an odd admiration for the Catholic Church, which, she suggests, should try to civilize Muslims through conversion. There is in Nomad a new concern for private property and a shout-out to gun rights. She ladles praise on her AEI colleague Charles Murray, author, most famously, of The Bell Curve, which purported to demonstrate the intellectual inferiority of black people.

Hirsi Ali attacks Islam in the name of liberalism, but she’s more than willing to jettison her liberalism for the sake of her anti-Islamism. Perhaps if she had found a home on the left, Hirsi Ali’s thinking would have developed in a different direction. One could blame liberals or feminists or mainstream intellectuals for letting her down, for driving her into the arms of the neoconservatives. But to do so is to condescend to a woman who has always taken responsibility for forging her own path. [my emphasis]

No one is constrained to think in simple-minded terms. Progressives can sympathize with the situation of a woman like Hersi Ali who fled her country after death threats from Islamic extremists but recognize it if she, as Michelle puts it, is "reactionary, glib, and sloppy" or "shows contempt for fundamental American values of freedom of speech and freedom of religion". Her claims have to be judged on their merits. She may reject Islam. But it sounds as though her attitudes about the so-called traditional family and her hostility to feminism are very similar to those of the Christian Right.

On Hirsi Ali's criticisms of Western feminism, Michelle writes:

To be blunt, Hirsi Ali has no idea what she’s talking about. Western feminists have consistently stood up for women’s rights in developing countries–including Muslim countries–inspiring endless polemics by both Christian and Muslim conservatives blasting “feminist colonialism.” Long before September 11, the Feminist Majority Foundation was a lonely American voice against the Taliban’s sexual apartheid, and today, the New York-based feminist group Women for Afghan Women runs domestic violence shelters in Afghanistan. The American feminist movement lobbies, fiercely and consistently, for family planning programs in poor countries, including Muslim countries. American feminists–including Muslim feminists–have set up domestic violence shelters that serve women trapped in violent homes in insular religious communities. American feminists have also played a crucial role in the global campaign against female genital mutilation, both by getting the U.S. government to exert its influence on countries reliant on American aid, and by supporting women working in Africa to end the practice.

In other words, liberals and anyone else concerned to counter crass hate-mongering against Muslims can reject falsehoods and demagoguery without becoming apologists for every aspect of every Muslim culture. Nor does it means soft-pedaling legitimate criticism of Muslim practices or Islamic religious beliefs. Nobody is compelled to be willfully stupid about the issues involved, in other words. And no one should be under any illusion that Republican Islamophobia is anything but poisonous to democracy.

As far as the Christian religion, promoting mindless hate is also inconsistent with honest Christian values. Christian leaders like Franklin Graham shouldn't be surprised or whine about feeling rejected if the value of their Christian teachings are judged in part by their deliberate and dishonest promotion of hatred.

Michelle reminds of something else that we should keep in mind when we hear Republican Christianists criticising real or imagined discrimination against women by Muslims:

American conservatives, meanwhile, have consistently attacked programs that help to liberate women in the developing world. They’ve slashed funding for reproductive health clinics abroad, and have put pressure on foreign governments to maintain restrictive anti-abortion laws. They’ve fought efforts to expand women’s rights in international law, helping to ensure that the United States remains one of the few countries that have refused to ratify the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women–putting it in the company of Iran, Sudan, and Somalia. In 2007, the evangelical activist Janice Crouse, a Bush delegate to a 2002 United Nations summit on children, attacked the Convention in explicitly relativist terms: "It is like the old colonialism. . . . [H]ere you have the UN taking up the same kinds of principles and saying to countries you have to do things my way. You have to do things in the way of Western nations."

Indeed, when it comes to women’s rights, American conservatives often ally themselves with the very governments Hirsi Ali decries. As Colum Lynch reported in The Washington Post in 2002, "Conservative U.S. Christian organizations have joined forces with Islamic governments to halt the expansion of sexual and political protections and rights for gays, women and children at United Nations conferences." He quoted a U.S. official saying, "We have tried to point out there are some areas of agreement between [us] and a lot of Islamic countries on these social issues."

Tags: islam, islamic law, islamophobia