Religion and free speech: a couple of links

Two powerful articles on the threat to freedom of expression from political Islam:

Johann Hari on the shameful UN vote against 'defamation' of religion (I know it's only a non-binding resolution, but why isn't there some kind of campaign against this?)

and Christopher Hitchens , writing two decades after the Rushdie affair, on the West's self-imposed 'cultural fatwa'.

Iranian fist remains clenched

To the Muslim world, we seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect...we will extend a hand if you are unwilling to unclench your fist.

- Barack Obama, January 20th

Those who say they want to make change, this is the change they should make: they should apologise to the Iranian nation and try to make up for their dark background and the crimes they have committed against the Iranian nation.

- Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, January 28th

Maybe the Iranian president should take note of some other words in Obama's inaugural speech:

To those leaders around the globe who seek to sow conflict, or blame their society's ills on the West - know that your people will judge you on what you can build, not on what you destroy. To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history.

Women's rights in Iraq and anti-imperialist double-think

Interviewed in today's Guardian about her new book, Nadje Al-Ali bemoans the lamentable state of women's rights in post-liberation Iraq (which I discussed here and here). Although she describes herself as 'anti-imperialist and anti-war', Al-Ali has attracted opprobrium from the anti-war movement for daring to criticise the Iraqi 'resistance':

A significant proportion of Iraqi groups engaged in armed resistance against the occupation are also harassing, intimidating and even murdering ordinary Iraqis, particularly women and vulnerable groups. 

(In their craven indulgence of the fundamentalist militias, the 'anti-war' movement demonstrate that they were not, in fact, against the war: they just wanted the other side to win.) Even interviewer Sara Wajid can't escape the double-think of the stoppists. She writes: 'Her use of the slippery term "Islamists" at time seems interchangeable with "terrorist insurgents", and progressives are invariably tagged with the approving "secular" but never "Muslim". (Well, duh...)

But Al-Ali is caught in a mental double-bind of her own. She derides as 'imperialist feminists' those western women who criticise the misogynist culture of Muslim countries, apparently unable to make up her mind whether she really wants their solidarity (we've been here before), and disagrees with 'fundamentalist secular groups' who think the problem in Iraq is Islam (well it sure isn't an excess of secularism...). Finally, she lays the ultimate blame for the setback in women's rights on the US invasion and argues that Iraqi women cannot be liberated by military intervention. For anti-imperialists, the West is always the real culprit.

Failing to halt the rise of militant fundamentalism has certainly been one of the signal failures of the Iraq campaign, particularly in the south. But it was a failure that might have been avoided, given a different strategy and sufficient manpower, and it wasn't an inevitable consequence of toppling Saddam. At the same time, the end of the Ba'athist tyranny, however it came about (and it's hard to see how it would have happened without military intervention), was bound to let loose all kinds of dark political forces that had been repressed for decades. Moreover, surely the government of Iran (not mentioned in the Guardian piece) should be accorded at least some of the blame  for arming and funding the misogynist Shia militias?

Despite her entanglement in anti-imperialist rhetoric, western progressives should pay attention to Nadje Al-Ali's compelling account of women's experience in Iraq - and support organisations like this one. 

Remember

Human memory is a marvelous but fallacious instrument...The memories which lie within us are not carved in stone; not only do they tend to become erased as the years go by, but often they change, or even increase by incorporating extraneous features.

 - Primo Levi

Today is the 64th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau and Holocaust Memorial Day. 

Iranian regime tries to cover up its crimes

Imagine, if the Israelis decided to mass execute the Palestinian prisoners they hold, 5000 to 10000 prisoners over two months, then dumped their bodies in meat trucks and buried them somewhere unknown. What would be the international outcry?

That's more or less what the Islamic Republic of Iran did in 1988, according to Azarmehr, killing thousands of its political opponents in a wave of mass executions. Now the Iranian authorities want to demolish the mass burial site at Khavaran, apparently to stop relatives of the dead from commemorating their loved ones and to prevent the regime's crimes from being investigated.

There's more on the campaign to preserve the site here and here, and background information on the mass killings here.

Reclaiming Rabbie the radical

Sunday marks the 250th birthday of Robert Burns who, according to a new biography, was a staunch republican and admirer of the French Revolution. And one of Scotland's finest contemporary poets, Jackie Kay, claims that Burns was 'a sophisticated political thinker about representation, the origin and limits of political authority, and the need for liberty and equality', whose most famous poem, sung at the opening of the Scottish parliament in 1999, 'could just as easily have been sung on 20 January 2009 in Washington'.

My ties to Scotland are rather remote - my ancestors were Jacobite Aberdeenshire farmers who migrated to England in the early nineteenth century  - and I probably shan't be lured by the Scottish government's appeal to 'come home' this year. But I'm tempted to pour a glass of Glenmorangie on Sunday to toast, not the kitsch shortbread-and-tartan image of popular memory, but a great radical poet and son of the Enlightenment.

Reflections on The Speech

Looking back on the Big Speech, a couple of days after the event, I'd probably agree with Michael Tomasky's verdict that it was 'mildly underwhelming'. The new president may have calculated that celebratory oratory would be out of keeping with the seriousness of the times. Nevertheless, the thousands of people who had waited for hours in the cold deserved their moment of poetry and jubilation. However, Tomasky adds:

There were many times during the campaign when I, and other political junkies of my acquaintance, thought Obama was screwing something up. A week or a month later, we almost invariably saw that maybe he was right after all. So maybe he thought, let's put the poetry on the shelf. It's time now to get to work. He's got a lot of that ahead of him, so it's understandable I suppose if that, not rhetoric, is what is foremost in his mind.

As if to support Tomasky's point, Obama's words are still being avidly dissected all over media, and nuggets of poetry (I'm thinking particularly of the bits I quoted the other day, which formed the emotional heart of the speech) are beginning to emerge from the layers of prose. Norm obviously thought it was a good performance, and I recommend his line-by-line analysis.

For British republicans (in the lower-case sense), the echoes of Tom Paine in the speech (discussed by Ben MacIntyre here) were particularly welcome, reminding us once again that this great Englishman is a prophet more honoured abroad than in his own country. And at the risk of sounding unpatriotic - wasn't it great to hear the tune that we know as 'God Save The Queen' used to praise the 'sweet land of liberty', rather than an unelected monarch? Let freedom ring indeed...