Farewell to Terry and Stan

Two final comments on Eaglefish. First an exasperated Ophelia :

It is so hard not to wish both of them suddenly transported to a place bereft of progress, liberalism and enlightenment - the Swat valley would be just the ticket - and see how they like it.

That's not a nice thing to say, it's even a bit schoolyardy, but I am so sick of smug prosperous safe comfortable pale men urinating all over progress, liberalism and enlightenment while desperate threatened terrified women would weep scalding tears of joy and deliverance to get just a taste of some. I am so sick of safe prosperous men who are never, ever going to be grabbed on the street and whipped, or shot in the back, or locked up in their houses, or married off to some abusive bully, going on and on and on and on about how much they hate progress, liberalism and enlightenment.

And along similar lines, Max puts words into Eagleton's mouth (but they're a pretty accurate summary of his position):

Well, I've finally come to realise that the revolutionary socialism to which I've dedicated my entire adult life is a total dead end. But I still need an anti-Western movement to support, and all that's left is religious fundamentalism. Okay, theocratic movements and governments tend to consist of sadists and killers, but what the f***, it's not like I have to live in any of the countries where they are in power.

Israel: real and imaginary

Via Mick, a powerful piece by Greg Sheridan on the differences between the Israel he knows, and the Israel that dominates the Islamic - and increasingly the Western leftist - imagination. It's the kind of article you can't help quoting big chunks from, so here goes:

I have my very own Israel problem and it is this: the Israel I know, which I have visited for weeks at a time, which I experience through its literature and media and the Israeli citizens I have met, bears no relation to the Israel I see in most of the Western media. That Israel seems almost to dominate Western intellectual life. It is commonly held that Israel lies at the heart of the widespread Muslim hostility to the West and much of the ideological conflict in the Middle East. But Israel must surely also lie at the heart of the West itself; it is so often the centrepoint of raging ideological debate, shrill mutual denunciation, ferocious polemic, emotional demonstrations, university activism and academic boycotts.

That Israel of the Western mind (and indeed of the Arab mind) is a hateful place: right-wing, militaristic, authoritarian, racist, ultra-religious, neo-colonial, narrow-minded, undemocratic, indifferent to world opinion, indifferent especially to Palestinian suffering.

Yet the Israel I know is mostly secular, raucously, almost wildly democratic, has a vibrant left wing, having founded in the kibbutz movement one of the only successful experiments in socialism in human history. It is intellectually disputatious; any two Israelis will have three opinions and be happy to argue them to a lamp post. It is multi-ethnic, there is a great stress on human solidarity, there is due process. And I've never heard an Israeli speak casually about the value of Palestinian life. I've heard Israelis voice a desire to neutralise Hezbollah or remove Hamas from leadership in Gaza, but I've never in any context heard an Israeli express the view that the value of a human life is determined by race.

The Israel I know is a Western democracy, often under siege, often making mistakes, sometimes moral mistakes. But I also see its institutions, its courts, its free press and vigorous academics challenging those mistakes and trying to correct them, sometimes exaggerating them in the process. I see a society striving for the good, sometimes doing the wrong thing, certainly not beyond criticism, but overall behaving as well as any comparably sized Western society would or could in all the circumstances.

Sheridan challenges the view that Israel's treatment of the Palestinians is the root cause of all the ills of the Middle East (an old argument trotted out again the other day by Jonathan Steele in the Guardian):

As a matter of mere logic, the presence of 5.5 million Jews in Israel cannot be responsible for the economic and political development of hundreds of millions of Arabs. But the Arab mind is presented with a disagreeable conundrum. The Arab world possesses, in its view, the one true religion, the greatest culture and much of the world's oil, yet its societies are impoverished and dysfunctional. How can this be explained? In societies that do not allow searching criticism of ruling regimes, the answer has to come in the form of anti-Arab conspiracies, centred on the West generally, but more specifically on the US, Israel and the Jews. 

This Arab anti-Semitism, popular and official, is incidentally a huge obstacle to peace. If Israel is not just a nation like any other but the most visible and offensive manifestation of a giant Western and Jewish conspiracy against Islam and the Arabs, then making peace with it is not honourable but despicable. 

What is perplexing is the emerging strategic alliance between the Western Left and Islamist anger. This is evident especially in Western demonstrations where left-wing protesters carry banners saying things such as "We are Hamas". 

But it is also to be observed in the general silence of the Western Left on human rights abuses throughout the Arab world and in Iran. One of the most arresting sights in Israel is the magnificent Bahai headquarters in Haifa. The Bahais have an equally beautiful temple in New Delhi. The Bahais fled to Israel and India, two states where minority religions are not subject to official persecution, because of the murderous repression they suffer in Iran. Yet the Western Left is infinitely more active about Israeli human rights abuses, real or alleged, than Iranian human rights abuses. Similarly, the more left-wing the Western feminist, the less will be said about the routine abuse of women's rights in much of the Arab world.

Sheridan's final paragraph is particularly shrewd:

Both the intense hatred and in other circles the affection that Israel inspires have little to do with the actions any Israeli government could reasonably take. It is rather Israel's multiple identities, going to the heart of Western history and contemporary Arab politics, the hostility among intellectuals to Western society, the inheritance of anti-Semitism and the search for scapegoats for the Arab world's troubled encounter with modernity, that ensure that the Israel of the mind will remain at the forefront of international concerns.

He might have added that a 'troubled encounter with modernity' is also a trait shared by many western intellectuals.

Smith, Savage and free speech

What to make of Jacqui Smith's little list of people who have been barred from entering Britain, which in addition to assorted terrorists and sponsors of terror, includes American talk-show host Michael Savage?

A few points to make:

Firstly, Savage does appear to be a particularly extreme right-wing nut-job with repulsive views on immigration, homosexuality, etc.

He also seems pretty mixed-up - a West Coast Jewish herbalist and homeopath (real name Michael Alan Weiner) who in recent years has metamorphosed into a mouthpiece of the guns 'n' Jesus wing of the Republican party.

However, unlike most of the other people on Smith's list, I'm not sure Savage has physically attacked anyone, or funded anyone else to do so.

Then again, I don't think Savage has actually applied to come to Britain, which means that Smith's list is a pre-emptive one, indicating the people the government would be likely to refuse entry to, if they applied. In which case, why only 16, and why this 16? Couldn't they think of any more terrorists or tyrants to include? And this raises the question of why exactly someone like Savage has been singled out from a world stuffed full of nasty and vicious characters...

On which point: Smith's explanation of why Savage has been subject to pre-emptive exclusion is mealy-mouthed but revealing:

This is someone who has fallen into the category of fomenting hatred, of such extreme views and expressing them in such a way that it is actually likely to cause inter-community tension or even violence if that person were allowed into the country.

A similar argument about the threat of 'inter-community tension' and 'violence' was used to justify the recent ban on Geert Wilders. In that case, it was obvious that the 'threat' came not from Wilders himself but from Islamic extremists in Britain who promised to create merry hell if the Dutch MP were to set foot in the country. And in the case of Savage, it would seem that it's his views on Islam that have got the British government all hot under the collar. 

Other religions are clearly missing a trick here. If I were a Scientologist (say) and I wanted to make sure that critics of my peculiar sect weren't given a platform in Britain, all I'd need to do is threaten a bit of 'inter-community tension', and hey presto, they would make it on to Jacqui Smith's hit list. Even better, it would look like my enemies were the extremists and fomenters of violence, not me.

Does it need saying that angry and easily-offended believers shouldn't be given this kind of implicit veto over who gets to visit Britain? You get the impression that the government just doesn't want the bother of dealing with the ruckus that would be stirred up by 'community leaders' if a vocal critic of Islam were to dare to approach these shores - or maybe they just don't want to risk losing the Muslim vote?

Perhaps the worst consequence of this latest illustration of Jacqui Smith's and the Brown government's casual attitude to free speech, is that it gives ammunition to those hysterical right-wing commentators (including Savage's supporters in the conspiracy-theorist blogosphere, as well as our own home-grown examples) who claim that Britain is turning into some kind of politically-correct totalitarian state.

The government should make crystal clear its grounds for deciding whether individuals are excluded from Britain: I believe the main criterion should be evidence of committing or supporting violence, rather than expressing particular beliefs or attitudes, however extreme. In addition, each exclusion order should be subject to the due process of law, and able to be challenged in the courts, rather than being the whim of a government minister.

Fishy rhetoric

One of the pleasures of reading the New York Times is that it's relatively free of the anti-modern, anti-western pseudo-leftism that currently infects its British liberal counterpart, the Guardian. You'll search long and hard in the pages of the Times to find the equivalents of Madeleine Bunting, Seumas Milne, Jonathan Steele, John Gray, et al.

But there is one exception: his name is Stanley Fish, and he writes a regular blog on the NYT website. You can find out more about Fish and his po-mo take on subjects such as free speech here. (I love Camille Paglia's characterisation of him as a 'totalitarian Tinkerbell'.) Last year, he wrote a piece arguing that Random House's decision not to publish Sherry Jones' novel about Muhammed's child bride was not censorship, at the same time sneering at Salman Rushdie as a 'self-appointed poster boy for the First Amendment'. (Incidentally, don't these anti-liberal leftists just hate it when non-whites refuse to follow their script and instead stand up for 'western' values? Remember Seumas Milne excoriating Ed Husain as a 'neocon pin-up boy', and Jonathan Pilger dismissing Barack Obama as a 'glossy Uncle Tom'. Gosh, if you didn't know better, you might be inclined to detect a note of neo-colonial elitism, or even - whisper it if you dare - racism in these remarks.)

The other day Fish devoted his column to a spirited defence of that other master of rhetorical evasion, Terry Eagleton. Ironic, given that the latter once described Fish's 'discreditable epistemology' as 'sinister'. But in the new war against Enlightenment liberalism, pro-faith universalists and post-modern cultural relativists find themselves on the same side: a fact that Fish acknowledges, without noting the irony, in this article. 

Fish's piece is virtually a precis, laced with generous quotes, of the first chapter of Eagleton's latest book. Both Eagleton's original argument, and Fish's uncritical commentary on it, repeat many of the points made in the former's Guardian article last week. There's the same defence of religion, not because it might be true, but because of its social value, and the same sneering at 'liberal dogmatists, doctrinaire flag-wavers for Progress, and Islamophobic intellectuals', while once again declining to engage with their criticisms. 

Have you noticed that the new breed of anti-secularists always have to add a damning qualifier to the characterisation of their opponents? In their looking-glass world, atheists are always 'militant', secularists 'aggressive', liberals 'dogmatic' or 'muscular', and believers in progress 'doctrinaire' or 'fundamentalist'.  I find this strategy, like the habit of condemning any criticism of a certain religion as 'Islamophobic', profoundly anti-intellectual and unworthy of those, like Eagleton and Fish, who claim to be scholars and academics.

Reading the article, you can understand why Martha Nussbaum described Fish's writing as 'sophistry' and 'rhetorical manipulation'. He and his former antagonist Eagleton have much in common.

Update

Via B&W: Read P Z Myers' hilariously insightful account of being stuck on a plane for 8 hours with nothing to read but the Eagleton book fawningly reviewed by Fish. Plus Crooked Timber and Jason Rosenhouse on Fish. (And thanks to B&W for linking to this post.)

Further update

Russell Blackford (just added to my blogroll) has an epiphany and conjures up an Eaglefish at war with 'Ditchkins'.

No mercy in Ahmadinejad's Iran

In the name of Allah the merciful....?

The Islamic Republic of Iran has executed talented 22-year-old artist Delara Darabi, for a crime she was convicted of when still a child and which she probably didn't commit. There was no warning, and her family and friends were not told. The reports of her execution make almost unbearable reading. What a vicious, mean-spirited, misogynist regime: the sooner it goes and the Iranian people are free of these medieval thugs the better.

You can read here about the campaign to stop child executions in Iran, and here's a video about Delara:

Tuesday miscellany

A few random bits and pieces:

Via Andrew Sullivan, here's Daniel Florien on his disillusionment with Buddhism (echoing some of the things I wrote here and here).

Mick and Bob with contrasting views of Pete Seeger.

Kira Cochrane on the women of Mad Men. She's right: they've dominated the second series and leavened the stodgy, predictable misogyny of Don Draper et al. The last few episodes have been worth watching for January Jones' performance alone.

Finally, Martin M. with some versions of American Civil War and Liberty songs - from Marian Anderson to the Muppets. And that's all the excuse I need to feature this spine-tingling version of The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down, from The Last Waltz:

Faith, evolution and secularism: a couple of links

Never let it be said that you only read negative stuff about religion on this blog. Here's a couple of links to thoughtful pieces written from a believing perspective:

On yesterday's Today programme, John Humphrys interviewed an American scientist, apparently a good friend of Richard Dawkins, who argued against the teaching of 'intelligent design', which he saw as little more than creationism with new window-dressing. The surprise of the interview was when the scientist revealed himself to be a practising Roman Catholic. You can read Professor Kenneth Miller's thought-provoking explanation of why an understanding of evolution deepens rather than threatens his Christian faith here.

And here's Red Maria, also writing from a Catholic perspective, on why Cardinal Cormac Murphy O'Connor should refuse the offer of a seat in the House of Lords when he retires as Archbishop of Westminster. As I've always argued, religious faith and secularism (rightly understood) are not incompatible: indeed, a clear separation of church and state is ultimately in the interests of believers.