Shot by both sides

The statement which Peter Tatchell posted yesterday, about his participation as a visibly gay man in last Saturday's anti-EDL demonstration, is so good, and says so many things that have needed saying, that I'm reproducing it in full below. I’m a supporter of ‘Hope not hate’, but my response to their regular calls for action to halt EDL marches through areas like Tower Hamlets is often one of ‘Yes, but…’ Yes, by all means protest the hateful behaviour of racist thugs, but at the same time, please be equally firm in your condemnation of the fundamentalist militants who pose just as much of a threat to the people of these areas. The lack of such condemnation by anti-racists, and even worse, the explicit or implicit support given to Islamists by some on the left, is surely one of the factors driving some people away from conventional politics and into the arms of the extreme right.

One of the most disappointing, if predictable, aspects of Tatchell's account is the hostile reaction to his 'Gays and Muslims unite!' placard from supposedly left-wing marchers, who responded with 'dirty looks' and even accusations of 'racism' and 'fascism' - against Peter Tatchell, of all people. But it was high time that somebody of stature on the left spoke out about the climate of intolerance, not only of homosexuality but also of freedom of expression and lifestyle, being spread by religious fundamentalists in some parts of East London.

I salute Tatchell's characteristic bravery in taking his principled arguments into the metaphorical lion's den, at the risk of being, in Howard Devoto's immortal words, shot by both sides (see footnote). I'm glad he was able to win over some initially hostile and homophobic Muslims, but I do query his attempt to preach the virtues of 'true' Islam to believers. Peter may be right that ‘love and compassion' are core Islamic values and that's there's nothing in the Quran that sanctions discrimination against gay people. However, (1) attempts to legislate on what's 'core' in someone else's religion are always doomed, (2) there are a lot of other things in the Quran, as in the scriptures of other faiths, that do encourage intolerance, if people want to find them, (3) surely what matters is not holy writ but ‘facts on the ground’ – e.g. the fact that there’s not a majority-Muslim country where it’s safe to be openly gay, and (4) it's for Muslims themselves to decide, and to demonstrate by their actions, whether the 'core' of their faith is going to be tolerance or intolerance, compassion or repression.

Statement by Peter Tatchell, Director of the human rights campaign group, the Peter Tatchell Foundation: 

Like many other people, I went to last Saturday's protest in East London first and foremost to oppose the far right English Defence League and to defend the Muslim community against EDL thuggery.

But I also wanted to stand in solidarity with Muslims who oppose far right Islamists. These fundamentalists threaten and intimidate the Muslim community; especially fellow Muslims who don't conform to their harsh, intolerant interpretation of Islam. To varying degrees, both the Islamists and the EDL menace Muslim people.

In addition, I wanted to be visible as a gay man, to demonstrate that East London is not and never will be a "Gay-Free Zone" and to show that most lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people are not anti-Muslim; that there are LGBTs who want to work in solidarity with Muslim people to oppose all prejudice, discrimination and violence.

To these ends, my human rights campaign colleague Ashley McAlister and I joined the anti-EDL protest, carrying double-sided placards which read on one side: "Stop EDL & far right Islamists. No to ALL hate" and on the other side: "Gays & Muslims UNITE! Stop the EDL".  

We got dirty looks from a small number of left-wing and LGBT anti-EDL protesters, some of whom said explicitly that our placards were "insensitive...provocative...inappropriate...divisive"  and that I am "racist...fascist...anti-Muslim."

There was also hostility from a minority of Muslims who were part of the anti-EDL demonstration, including attempts to snatch and rip my placard. These fanatics mostly objected to the slogan: "Gays & Muslims UNITE! Stop the EDL". I was surrounded several times throughout the day by angry Muslim youths who ordered me: "You must remove this placard...You can't walk here with these words...We don't allow gays in this area...Gays are not permitted here...We don't have gays in Tower Hamlets."

When I suggested that LGBT Muslims must also be defended against the EDL, I was told: "Gays can't be Muslims...We will never accept them (LGBT Muslims)...They can't come around here...We won't allow it."

My response was to engage with these Muslims hotheads and argue against them. The discussions got very heated; at times even menacing and scary. There were moments when I thought I was going to be physically attacked. Thankfully, this did not happen, probably because there were police nearby and, more significantly, because several Muslims intervened to defend my right to be there and to express my viewpoint. Some Muslims even thanked me for joining the anti-EDL protest.

In the course of the arguments, I diffused the hostility of quite a few Muslim critics. I suggested that love and compassion were core Islamic values and that even if Muslims personally disapproved of homosexuality there is nothing in the Qu'ran that sanctions hatred or discrimination against LGBT people. Several eventually agreed that homophobia was wrong. Some shook my hand and parted with a more 'live and let live' attitude - a big improvement on their initial response.

This change in attitude as a result of Ashley and I being willing to engage in dialogue was really positive and inspiring. It shows how important and effective such an engagement can be. We need more of it.

Interestingly, there was very little overt, identifiable Muslim hostility to our placard slogan:

"Stop EDL & far right Islamists. No to ALL hate." There were a few nasty, aggressive looks but that's all. Indeed, several Muslims indicated that they also oppose the Islamist far right.  They realise that extremist groups like Islam4UK and Hizb ut-Tahrir, which want to establish a religious dictatorship, threaten the human rights of mainstream Muslims. These fundamentalists have a similar bigoted agenda to the EDL and BNP.

Our experience on Saturday is further evidence that we need an East End Gay Pride that goes through the heart of the Muslim community in E1, to engage with the Muslim communities and build mutual understanding.

Interestingly, there were lots of LGBT protesters against the EDL. But I never saw a single one with a gay badge, placard, t-shirt or rainbow flag. It was as if they'd all gone back in the closet. Why? Normally, on other demos, they always proclaim their LGBT identity. How strange. Ashley McAlister and I were the only visibly gay protesters in the entire anti-EDL demonstration.

The people who called for the anti-EDL protest to be called off were mistaken. In the absence of a visible counter-protest, the EDL would have been able to rally unchallenged and claim a victory. It would have sent the wrong signal if the EDL had been permitted to claim any part of East London as its own.

Saturday's peaceful protest against the EDL was important because it showed that most of our communities are united in solidarity and that we will not be divided by the hate-mongering of the far right.

What too many anti-fascists refuse to acknowledge is that Islamist fundamentalism mirrors the right-wing ideology of the EDL (and the BNP). In fact, the Islamist goals are much more dangerous. They want to establish a theocratic tyranny, ban trade unions and political parties and deny women equal human rights. They endorse hatred and violence against Jewish, Hindu and LGBT people. Muslims who don't follow their particular brand of Islam would face severe persecution in their Islamist state. These fanatical sects condone terrorism and the suicide bombing of innocent civilians. Not even the BNP and EDL are this extreme.

The failure of many people on the Left to speak out against Islamist fundamentalism is de facto collusion with extremism and a betrayal of the Muslim majority. It also creates a political vacuum, which the EDL is seeking to exploit and manipulate.

Some anti-fascists argue that we should not condemn the Islamists because this will fuel anti-Muslim sentiment. Wrong. Protesting against the fundamentalists and defending mainstream Muslims is actually the most effective way to undermine Islamophobia. 

In the absence of a left-wing critique of the Islamist far right, the EDL is able to pose as the sole critic of Islamist extremism and to mount indiscriminate attacks on the whole Muslim community.

This silence and inaction by many on the left is objectively (albeit unintentionally) colluding with both fundamentalist fanaticism and anti-Muslim prejudice.  

To be credible and effective, opponents of the EDL need to be consistent by also taking a stand against right-wing Islamists. Only this way can we offer a principled alternative to the EDL that isolates and targets the extremists without demonising the whole Muslim population.

Footnote


For those who are too young to understand the Devoto reference:

In memoriam

Polish composer Henryk Gorecki has died, aged 76. His most popular work, the Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, was inspired by the graffiti carved on the wall of a Gestapo prison by an 18 year old girl: 'Mamma do not cry. Immaculate Queen of Heaven support me always'.

This video, which superimposes images of those murdered by the Nazis, seems appropriate on this day of Remembrance. I'm posting it in honour of all victims of fascism, and of all those who fought and died to defeat it.

Three quick links

Dashing hither and thither this week, so I only have time to recommend posts from elsewhere:

The Plump writes about the dangers of creating a false equivalence between Nazism and Communism, and on the other hand his problems with the notion of a ‘post left’, as if antisemitism and totalitarianism among progressives were recent phenomena and ‘the left was pure and innocent before the Stop the War Coalition came along.’

Mick responds to the collective madness surrounding Chilcot and the 'outpouring of hatred' against Tony Blair, including George Monbiot's absurd call for the ex-PM's arrest for 'mass murder', and challenges 'the assumption that had we not got rid of Saddam everything would somehow have turned out just fine: the internal divisions within Iraqi society would have healed themselves by magic and Saddam himself would have turned to Sufi mysticism'.

Finally, Minnie marks Holocaust Memorial Day with a poem by Primo Levi.

Barking mad

I've been doing quite a bit of research into my family's history recently, focusing on my mother's agricultural ancestors in what were then the fields and farms of rural Barking, and my father's forebears in Mile End and Whitechapel. So it pained me this week to read that both of these areas may soon boast (?) extremist demagogues as their political representatives - if Nick Griffin is successful in being elected as MP for Barking and Dagenham, and George Galloway achieves his apparent ambition to become mayor of Tower Hamlets.

I suppose having a fascist as your MP is marginally worse than having a supporter of clerical fascists and tyrants as your mayor, but if either came to pass, it would be a sad day for these boroughs, with their proud history of working-class activism and standing up to fascism.

The pathology of Chavismo

Via Mick: a fascinating and deeply troubling analysis of state-sponsored anti-semitism in Venezuela:

Over the past four years, Venezuela has witnessed alarming signs of state-directed anti-Semitism, including a 2005 Christmas declaration by President Hugo Chávez himself: “The World has enough for everybody, but some minorities, the descendants of the same people that crucified Christ, and of those that expelled Bolívar from here and in their own way crucified him. . . . have taken control of the riches of the world.”

The article also highlights other pathological features of Chavez' authoritarian ideology, including rabid homophobia and a habit of characterising opponents of the regime, as 'escuálidos' or 'squalids', 'a Spanish term that connotes not only dirtiness and abjection, but also flimsiness, wimpiness, and scrawniness.' Moreover: 'What Chavista opponents—be they escuálidos, patos, or Gringo-Zionist-Imperialists—have in common is shit. Chávez routinely calls his opponents “plastas” (“lumps of shit”).' Freud would have a field day.

The authors of the Boston Review article, Claudio Lomnitz and Rafael Sánchez, point to another aspect of Chavez' rule that is distinctly reminiscent of totalitarian regimes:

Instead of political parties, representative institutions, and, above all, ideologies, Chavismo manifests as a physical relationship between the people and Chávez, with, as Chávez himself describes, love as the potent glue connecting them.Thus during the recent campaign for the referendum to abolish presidential term limits, the widespread slogan,“Amor con amor se paga” (“love must with love be repaid”), which captures the notion that Chávez’s love for the people comes with a corresponding obligation.

As Lomnitz and Sánchez explain: 'The problem with substituting rights with a language of love is that dissent suggests lack of love, or ingratitude, or a sign of allegiance to a foreign enemy: capitalism, the “Euro-Gringo imperialism,” or even, for Chávez, Zionist-Fascist-Euro-Gringo Imperialism.'

We've been here before, I think. As the authors of the article conclude: 'When a regime relies on populism, military uniforms, homophobia, and anti-Semitism, it is time to worry.'

Balancing beatitude

Some time ago I wrote about the Vatican's controversial decision to beatify hundreds of priests, monks and nuns killed by left-wing militias during the Spanish Civil War, noting that it was a pity they overlooked the clergy executed by Franco, including those accused of being Basque nationalist sympathisers.

Now it seems the Church has gone some way towards correcting the imbalance, by holding a ceremony tomorrow to honour the Basque martyrs. It's a shame, though, that this is an initiative of the local Basque bishops, and doesn't have official Vatican backing. Still, as Splintered Sunrise says, its nice to see the Church doing the right thing, and gratifying that the move will 'greatly annoy ... the Franco nostalgics'.

(Via Poumista)

'This was exactly a massacre'

There are unconfirmed reports of massive violence today by Iranian security forces against demonstrators in Baharestan Square in Tehran.

Here's Azarmehr:

Despite all the security measures and the confusion on whether Moussavi has called for the people to gather outside the Islamic Assembly in Baharestan Sq or not, people have started to converge towards the square. Many are wearing black arm bands and holding pictures of Neda.

One girl has been shot already and not known whether she is alive or dead.

It gets much, much worse. CNN has a terrifying eye-witness account here (can't seem to embed the video at the moment). An extract from the transcript (via):

I was going towards Baharestan with my friend. This was everyone, not just supporters of one candidate or another. All of my friends, they were going to Baharestan to express our opposition to these killings and demanding freedom. The black-clad police stopped everyone. They emptied the buses that were taking people there and let the private cars go on. We went on until Ferdowsi then all of a sudden some 500 people with clubs came out of [undecipherable] mosque and they started beating everyone. They tried to beat everyone on [undecipherable] bridge and throwing them off of the bridge. And everyone also on the sidewalks. They beat a woman so savagely that she was drenched in blood and her husband, he fainted. They were beating people like hell. It was a massacre. They were trying to beat people so they would die. they were cursing and saying very bad words to everyone. This was exactly a massacre... 

Update

More evidence here (warning: extremely graphic images), including confirmation of reports that militia are using axes against male demonstrators and beating women with metal pipes.

Update 2

Finally managed to embed the video with the eyewitness account:

Iran: theocracy, misogyny and sexual repression

There's a great post by Nora Mulready over at Harry's Place, about the nastiness of the Iranian regime, and the lengths to which some sections of the left will go to avoid criticising it:

Over the last three years I have had hundreds of conversations with people about life in Iran. I have long believed Iran’s to be a deeply repressed society in which freedom is curtailed in the name of religion and by an assortment of ‘holy men.’ I was initially bemused when talking to people about this, good people with solid left wing principles, and having my criticisms dismissed as those of a ‘cultural imperialist,’ ‘a neo-con,’ ‘an islamaphobe,’ to name a few terms thrown my way. As time went on and I realised that these weren’t, sadly, the views of the odd person here and there on the left, but those of the left’s mainstream, I moved from bemused to shocked, to saddened and then to angry.

Looking at a society where it is codified into law that a women is worth half a man, where the morality police prowl the streets arresting men and women for such ‘unIslamic’ behaviour as holding hands, where stoning is still an allowed punishment for adultery, where children can be hanged, where being gay is a crime, I found the stance of my so called comrades on the left to be unforgivable. I also found it ridiculous. I honestly could not believe that anyone could look at this society and say that people had chosen to live like this – but it became clear that is exactly what they believed. And worse than that, despite the desperate cries for freedom we are seeing now, some of them still do.

I think Nora's absolutely right to use the word 'repressed' to describe Iranian society, and to highlight its oppression of women and obsession with sexual behaviour. Since writing this post on Saturday, I've been unable to get the picture of Neda, shot to death by the religious militia, out of my head, nor to forget the claim of an eyewitness that her murder, as she stood watching a demonstration, was cold, calculating and deliberate. Putting it together with the clips I posted here and here of security forces and government supporters beating up unarmed female demonstrators, not to mention Iran's notorious record of legalised violence towards women, and you can't help wondering about the pathological roots of this institutionalised hatred of women. 

Could it be that 'repressed', in a specific, clinical sense, is exactly the word to describe the 'holy men' who rule Iran? And does their vicious misogyny stem from the puritanical repression of sexuality that is part and parcel of their twisted religious outlook?  Christopher Hitchens has a great quote from a young Iranian:

I went to the last major Ahmadinejad rally and got the whiff of what I imagine fascism to have been all about. Lots of splotchy boys who can't get a date are given guns and told they're special.

As Hitchens comments: 'It's hard to better this [...] as an evocation of the rancid sexual repression that lies at the nasty core of the "Islamic republic"'.

Theocracy, sexual repression and violence towards women often seem to go hand in hand. Think of Cromwell's Puritans and their vicious campaign of 'witch' burning, or Franco's fondness for summarily hanging female Republican prisoners. This may sound like another puff for Ophelia's new book, but can anyone name me a political system, in which religious institutions have a major role, that does not oppress women? And can anyone doubt that there's a close link between theocratic sexism and the sexual repression that infects fundamentalist religiosity?

'Please let the world know'

Gene has the story behind yesterday's video of a young woman murdered by the Iranian religious police. This appears to be an eye-witness account:

At 19:05 June 20th

Place: Karekar Ave., at the corner crossing Khosravi St. and Salehi st.

A young woman who was standing aside with her father watching the protests was shot by a basij member hiding on the rooftop of a civilian house. He had clear shot at the girl and could not miss her. However, he aimed straight her heart. I am a doctor, so I rushed to try to save her. But the impact of the gunshot was so fierce that the bullet had blasted inside the victim’s chest, and she died in less than 2 minutes.

The protests were going on about 1 kilometers away in the main street and some of the protesting crowd were running from tear gass used among them, towards Salehi St.

The film is shot by my friend who was standing beside me.

Please let the world know.

Iranian riot police beat up women demonstrators

Via Nico Pitney: more evidence of the misogyny of the Iranian regime. Riot police beat up defenceless women protestors in Shiraz today. As Nico says:

What is so shocking about many of these videos is that the armed police are willing to attack completely defenseless bystanders. This video, apparently from the university in Shiraz, shows police not in any immediate danger walking up to veiled women who are leaning against a fence and raising their batons above their heads, threatening them, and then occassionally striking them. It is pure brutality.

Murdered by the religious police

Extremely disturbing footage of the shooting of a young woman demonstrator by the Basij in Tehran today. Apologies for the graphic nature of the video, but the world needs to see the reality of this vile regime. Andrew's right: this is just what fascism looks like:

Hope Not Hate

Think this is the most constructive way to oppose fascism? Think again. Then go to this website and, at the very least, sign the petition. 

At last, an honourable use for the slogan, 'Not in my name'.

Fighting fascism, then and now

The government of Spain has decided to honour surviving British and Irish veterans of the International Brigade by granting them Spanish citizenship. Questioned on the Today programme this morning about why he left his home in the East End of London to fight for a country of which he knew little, 94 year old Sam Lesser recalled the fear of fascism spreading through Europe at the time. But, he added, we didn't have to leave home to find out about fascism: we had experienced it here, on our own streets.

Seventy years later, fascism is once again stalking the streets of Britain, not to mention its town halls and the corridors of the European Parliament. According to the Guardian report, Sam Lesser is 'still angry that the British government did nothing to help the Spaniards'. Not only that, he's 'furious...that the fascist, xenophobic propaganda he had to endure as a  young man is again being preached by 'Sir Oswald Mosley's heirs and successors'.

Let's hope that the current generation is as courageous in confronting the menace of the BNP as Lesser and his generation were in standing up to Franco, Hitler and Mussolini.

Footnote

This is the first of my posts to be cross-posted at Common Endeavour, a new broadly Labour-supporting site that I heartily recommend.

Postal veto?

Following on from my last post: it looks as though my experience of receiving a BNP leaflet this week was just bad luck. If I lived in parts of north-west England, I wouldn't have to put up with the far-right party's rancid propaganda, or indeed any election literature at all, dropping on to my doormat.

Apparently some postal workers at a delivery depot in Macclesfield have refused to handle BNP bumf, and have accused Royal Mail of breaking a 'conscience clause' which allows staff to refuse to deliver material they find offensive. The depot manager has told workers that if they won't handle BNP leaflets, they won't be allowed to deliver any election literature at all, thus depriving them of the extra money they receive for doing so.

Leave to one side the issue of whether Royal Mail went back on an agreement with the union, or whether it should have made such a dubious undertaking in the first place. And let's acknowledge how awful it must be for postal workers to handle BNP literature, and in doing so feel they are somehow advancing the electoral fortunes of a bunch of racists... 

However, their demand to be let off delivering material they find 'offensive' raises serious problems. Who gets to define what's offensive? It's in the nature of being offended that it's a thoroughly subjective business. What if I'm a Conservative postal worker who finds the ideas of the far left offensive: can I plead the right not to deliver SWP or Respect leaflets?

And what if, the precedent having been set, other groups decide to take advantage of this kind of 'conscience clause'? Could a Muslim postman refuse to deliver advertising material from Oddbins, or an evangelical Christian postwoman be let off handling leaflets advertising 'Jerry Springer: the Opera'?

A woman in Hazel Grove, Cheshire, who was handed a BNP leaflet by her postman, was outraged: 'It was full of inflammatory statements relating to Muslims and asylum seekers. It annoyed me greatly, but how will people from black and ethnic minority groups feel about having this stuff pushed through their letter box?'

I sympathise: it's how I felt when I found the BNP leaflet in our mail yesterday. But if you genuinely believe a party's election literature is an incitement to racial hatred, then the answer isn't to let postal workers make arbitrary decisions about whether it should be delivered. The answer is to refer the matter to the police. Any other course of action threatens the democratic electoral process, and ultimately freedom of speech. I don't like having to receive BNP propaganda, but neither do I want the postman to have a veto over what comes through my letter-box.

Bin the BNP

Yesterday, for the first time ever in this leafy corner of eastern England, we received an election flyer from the BNP. It was in a bundle of junk mail and I didn't notice it until I cleared the kitchen table this morning. Naturally, it went straight in the bin: I felt as though the house had been soiled by its overnight presence.

I was going to retrieve the leaflet so I could dissect its rabid propaganda in this post, but it's now lost beneath the tissues and food wrappers, which is probably where it belongs. I remember something about 'British jobs for British workers', and a photo of a smiling (white) family (I hope they gave their permission).

The general opinion seems to be that the BNP will do well in the forthcoming European elections. I hope the general opinion is wrong, but I fear it's not. The party seems to have become a repository for white working-class disillusionment with New Labour, and for a general alienation from mainstream politics. What went wrong? 

Some of the erosion of working-class support for Labour was probably inevitable, given the decline of manufacturing industry, bourgeoisification, etc. But the steep decline in the working-class Labour vote in the last 10 years must also owe something to New Labour's cavalier attitude to its historical base, its re-styling as a party of Daily Mail-reading 'middle Britain', and its reckless disregard of the members who delivered its landslide victory (Barack Obama: take note). The number of communities that regard themselves as 'naturally' Labour is now perilously few, and the days when people saw the party as 'on the side of working people' have almost gone. Mix into the cocktail some concocted grievances about 'preferential treatment' in housing and jobs being given to 'newcomers', and a gap opens up for other parties to lay claim to being the voice of the white working-class. And into that gap the noxious BNP have quite cunningly and unscrupulously stepped, toning down the overt racism and fascist leanings, and playing up the grievance politics.

I had the dubious privilege of being at university with BNP leader Nick Griffin: we were at the same college, though he was a couple of years below me. (I ask you: how can someone study history at one of our top universities and remain a fascist?) In those days he was a luminary of the Young National Front, and I'm pleased to say that, even at our fairly conservative college (you were a dangerous radical if you voted against increased funds for the boat club) he was regarded as beyond the pale and given the cold shoulder by most of his fellow-students. But that was then: now he presents himself as a mainstream politician who would like to hobnob with the Queen at Buckingham Palace garden parties, and the BNP is winning seats in local councils all over the place. 

How can decent, democratic political parties reverse the BNP tide? I like the approach of this video  , from the 'Nothing British about the BNP' campaign, which calls the party's bluff on its supposed 'patriotism' (actually, a mean-spirited, xenophobic white nationalism), and advances an alternative, inclusive definition of Britishness. I think that's also what Edmund Standing is getting at in his new blog, which is even-handedly dismissive of the BNP and of Islamic and far-left extremists (though I'd be careful about the pillorying of Marxist academics, Edmund: although I have my own beef with elements of the academic left, your little list had just the faintest whiff of McCarthyism about it).

I know the video has been aired a lot on other blogs, but the more people who see it the better: 

Lessons in terror

'Now children, for today's lesson on the Holocaust, I'd like you to put yourself in the position of a Nazi concentration camp guard and imagine his feelings as he sets off for another day's work in the gas chambers...'

Unthinkable? In the worst possible taste? I made it up, of course: but it's not much different from this, reported in today's Guardian:

Pupils are being asked to put themselves inside the minds of the 7/7 bombers to understand the motives of terrorists.

A government-endorsed teaching pack suggests the secondary schools ask pupils to do a presentation on the 7 July London terror attacks from the bombers' perspective.

The teaching pack, put together by the borough of Calderdale in West Yorkshire and displayed on the website of the Department for Children, Schools and Families, has now been withdrawn, thankfully. But what were they thinking?

Of course schools should encourage students to examine why historical events occur, but this exercise assumes that the 7/7 terrorists had motives that are susceptible to rational analysis. It seems designed to lead to the conclusion that there were 'understandable' reasons - whether poverty, discrimination or British foreign policy - behind their actions. It makes no allowance for the influence of irrational elements, such as fanatical devotion to a fundamentalist faith, or personal pathology, which will be outside the knowledge and understanding of most pupils.

The best response to being asked to 'understand' the feelings of fascists and terrorists remains that of air stewardess Gabriele von Lutzau (whom I quoted here), when asked if she would like to meet one of her former Baader-Meinhof captors:

I'm not interested in the background, in her history or in understanding her. This woman acted without a single moment of humanity. Her attitude was 'we are better than you. We're going the righteous way against Western imperialism.' Her distorted view of reality is not one I ever want to face again.

A forgotten hero?

A belated link to a Holocaust Memorial Day tribute , over at Cafe Turco, to Aristides de Sousa Mendes, the Portuguese consul in Bordeaux, who in 1940 saved the lives of more than 10,000 Jews fleeing the Nazis, by arranging their safe passage to his home country, at great personal cost. I hadn't heard of Mendes before, and I would think his story is little known in the English-speaking world. Sarah's post includes a clip from a dramatisation of the Mendes story, which lifts the spirits, as well as being a salutary reminder, especially in these days of renascent antisemitism. 

I seem to remember reading in a Paul Auster story that Portugal was something of a safe haven for Jews escaping Nazi persecution, but this doesn't quite compute with my mental image of Salazar's regime. Perhaps someone who knows more about these things can enlighten me.

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. 

Signs of a new left fascism?

Not much time for blogging this week, but I've tried to keep up with what others are writing, particularly on the fallout from events in Gaza. The situation is increasingly depressing, principally because of the loss of so much innocent life, but also because of its wider impact, including a hardening of Arab support for Hamas, an increase in antisemitic vitriol and violence (regularly catalogued over at Harry's Place), and deepening hostility to Israel on the political left.

It's not that Israel is somehow 'responsible' for these developments or that its recent actions have unilaterally 'caused' them: after all, there was plenty of Arab antisemitism, Muslim victim-psychology and left-wing anti-Israel feeling around before all of this happened. But there's little doubt that, whatever its moral justification, the military campaign in Gaza has probably made the emergence of a viable two-state solution, with a secure Israel living alongside a peaceable Palestine, less rather than more likely, as well as dampening hopes that the forces of liberal, secular democracy would win out against clerical obscurantism and jihadist militancy in the Arab world (not to mention among the western left).

As other bloggers have documented in detail, many of the protests in the West against Israel's actions have been notably soft on Hamas and have often provided a platform for antisemites and clerical fascists. Anti-Zionist outrage has too often slipped into virulent antisemitism, making it no exaggeration to speak, as Johnny does in this post, of the re-emergence of a kind of left-wing fascism. Along similar lines, see this post over at The New Centrist, which links to an article by Ernest Sternberg on the 'revivified corpse' of left fascism.

The work of anti-totalitarian leftists is certainly going to be harder, but arguably even more urgent, after recent events.