You couldn't make it up (?)

This sounds too much like a Private Eye parody to be true. It seems that an 'alternative' carol service was held at St. James's Piccadilly on Wednesday evening, in support of the Palestinian cause and in protest at Israeli policies. The words of some traditional Christmas favourites were apparently adapted for the occasion, as in this example:

While shepherds watched their flocks by night

All seated on the ground

Some occupying soldiers came

And bulldozed all around

'Fear not,' said one, for mighty dread

Had seized their troubled mind

We will not do any harm

For we are good and kind

We're forced to confiscate your land

To build ourselves a fence

To keep our people safe from all

Your people's violence

Some fields will stay, although cut off

But access won't be banned

Yes, permits we will give to you

To visit your own land.

As I say, it's just the kind of nonsense you might find in a Dave Spart column or the Alternative Rocky Horror Service Book, so I'm wary about taking it too seriously. I couldn't find any mention of the service on the church's website, and there's a danger of being taken in by left-wing, secular versions of all those 'Post Office bans Christmas'  kind of stories. But I did wonder why there wasn't a verse about the shepherds being disturbed by a Katyusha rocket attack...

On the other hand, if the story has any truth, it's yet another example of the willingness of well-meaning but naive progressive-religious types to be taken in by pseudo-leftist posturing, and to adopt one-sided positions on the Israeli-Palestine question. Thankfully, not all Christians are amused.

(Via Red Maria, whose blog I discovered today by way of Shiraz Socialist)

Mumbai and the theology of death

What on earth can one say about the horrific events in Mumbai? Reading accounts of this latest massacre of the innocents, I was struck above all by the nihilism and sheer inhumanity of the terrorists. Never has the Al-Qaeda boast, 'You love life and we love death', seemed so fitting. While British and American passport-holders appear to have been targeted in at least one location, and the assault on a Jewish centre can hardly be accidental, it's the indiscriminate nature of the attack that stays in the mind. Indians and foreigners, Hindus and Muslims, Christians and Jews - all were regarded as legitimate targets by these coldhearted  fanatics.

At the Leopold Cafe, 'five men wielding AK-47 rifles charged in and opened fire without asking anyone to identify themselves. They lobbed hand grenades at the horrified onlookers'. At a busy railway terminus, 'gunmen shot up the reservation counter of the station, randomly sprayed passengers, believed to be entirely composed of Indian travellers and commuters, and fled.' In the lobby of the Taj Mahal Palace hotel, according to Conservative MEP Sajjad Karim who was there, 'a gunman appeared in front of us, carrying machine-gun type weapons. And he just started firing at us'.

At lunchtime today, I listened to an insensitive, boneheaded Radio 4 presenter asking the Indian ambassador whether, given that the Mumbai attackers were probably Islamists, his government should now start attending seriously to the grievances of its Muslim population, as Britain had to do after 7/7.  It's enough to make you weep.  In something he wrote after 9/11, but which I can't find right now, Christopher Hitchens recalled asking some Chilean exile friends whether they were tempted to launch a similar attack on America, after the CIA-backed overthrow of Allende. They were horrified at the thought. Genuine radicals, those whose radicalism arises from a love of humanity and rage at inequality and injustice, don't tend to see the mass murder of innocent people as a legitimate tactic. The murderers of Mumbai, like the Baader-Meinhof killers that I wrote about the other day, were not reacting to 'grievances', unless they were grievances imagined in their twisted theology of victimhood, but acting out the logical dictates of a nihilistic and death-loving ideology. 

The delusions of Father D'Escoto

Further evidence today of the tendency among some 'progressive' Christians to identify with the more extreme stances of the pseudo-left. Harry's Place reports that UN General Assembly President Miguel D'Escoto, a former Roman Catholic priest, Nicaraguan foreign minister and holder of the Lenin Prize, has described Israel as an apartheid state and called for a campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions. This is the same Miguel D'Escoto who rushed to embrace Ahmadinejad after his antisemitic speech to the Assembly back in September. And if you were a Christian priest with any awareness of the history of Catholic antisemitism, would you be so crass as to use the word 'crucify' to describe Israel's treatment of the Palestinians?

Baader-Meinhof, terrorism and antisemitism

The release from prison of Christian Klar, one of the leaders of the Baader-Meinhof gang, and the appearance of a new film about the German terrorist faction, have focused renewed attention on a dark chapter in the history of the European left. The New Centrist links to a timely article by Jeffrey Herf, 'The Age of Murder: Ideology and Terror in Germany', which is worth reading in full. Herf enables us to see the Red Army Faction not only in the context of the development of the '60s New Left, but also in the specific context of German political history, with its repeated themes of antisemitism and totalitarian violence.

It's ironic, to say the least, that far left sects such as Baader-Meinhof justified their use of revolutionary violence on the basis of the supposed fascist tendencies of capitalist postwar Europe, when (as Herf shows) their own ideology and actions exhibited many of the symptoms of fascist reaction, including a love of symbolic violence and an increasing tendency towards antisemitism, demonstrated in their alliance with Palestinian terror groups and their notorious treatment of Jewish passengers during the Entebbe hijacking.  Herf suggests that the antisemitism of the German far left, and particularly its caricature of Israelis as 'new Nazis' in their treatment of the Palestinians (sound familiar?), can be seen as part of the complex and tortuous process of expunging collective national guilt about the Holocaust.

I haven't seen The Baader Meinhof Complex but, if the reviews are to be believed, it conveys a rather heavy-handed message about the need to understand the underlying causes of terror, and draws predictable parallels with contemporary responses to Islamist terrorism. However, Herf's article is a reminder that the terrorists of the Red Army Faction and the perpetrators of 9/11 and 7/7 were similar, not in their experience of injustice and an idealistic desire to liberate oppressed humanity, but in their shared background as educated, middle-class ideologues, driven by an inflexible dogmatism and without a scintilla of human feeling towards those they were 'liberating', many of whom were among their victims.

One of the most poignant features of Herf's piece is his detailed listing of the innocent victims of Baader-Meinhof violence, something he argues has been missing from many accounts of the events, with their tendency to glamorise the perpetrators. This quotation from Gabriele von Lutzau, a stewardess on the hijacked Lufthansa flight to Mogadishu, when asked if she wished to meet one of her former captors in order to discuss her motives, can stand as a riposte to all those who urge us to try to 'understand' terrorism:

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.'

Rhetoric vs. reality in Venezuela

It appears that Hugo Chavez might not be as wildly popular as we had been led to believe. According to a New York Times report from Caracas:

From the hardened slums of this city to some of Venezuela's most popular and economically important states, many of President Hugo Chavez's supporters deserted him in regional elections, showing it is possible to challenge him in areas where he was once thought invincible.

And this wasn't a revolt of the privileged. Chavez did badly in some of the poor urban areas that might have been expected to support him:

In Petare, a sprawling area of slums on the eastern fringe of Caracas, long lines at polling stations snaked into alleyways on Sunday as voters delivered the area, part of a municipality long considered a Chavez bulwark, to Carlos Ocariz, a mild-mannered 37-year-old engineer.

'We punctured the myth that only Chavez can be a champion of the poor', said Eduardo Ramirez, 61, a political activist in Petare who campaigned for Mr. Ocariz.

'Chavez's rhetoric is one thing,' he said, 'but the reality is another when he  does nothing to stop the bloodshed on our doorstep.'

Among the losers in the elections was Mario Silva, the host of a programme on state television 

that regularly attacks Chavez's opponents. It was Silva who was in the news recently for his habit of broadcasting the cellphone conversations of opposition politicians.

The Venezuelan leader's reaction to the results should give pause for thought to those, like Tariq Ali, who have faith in Chavez's 'commitment to a democratically embedded social process'. Appearing on state television on Monday night, Chavez warned the opposition: 'Don't think you control Petare'. And with Silva trailing in the polls in Carobobo state, the president threatened to mobilise tanks in the area in the event of his ally's defeat.

Previous posts on Chavez and his apologists here , here , here , here , here and here.

Update

As if threatening to use tanks against those who refuse to vote for you wasn't evidence enough of illiberal tendencies: Mick reports that Venezuela was one of only two non-Islamic countries (the other was that shining beacon of democracy, Belarus) to vote for a new UN anti-free-speech resolution outlawing the 'defamation' of religion.

Blogroll update

Restored to the blogroll: Terry Glavin (removed some time back due to prolonged silence), if only for his impressive reporting from Afghanistan, and for photos like this which speak volumes:

Michael Tomasky on the US Left

I've been reading Michael Tomasky's Left for Dead: the life, death and possible resurrection of progressive politics in America. Writing way back in 1996, Tomasky often comes across like an American version of Nick Cohen avant la lettre. Although the book was published pre-Bush, pre-9/11, and pre-Obama, it still has insightful things to say about the wrong turnings taken by the US left, which turn out to be remarkably similar to some of the wrong turnings taken by the British and European left. 

I particularly liked the chapter on identity politics, entitled 'E Unum Pluribus' (OK, so the Latin grammar is wrong when you reverse it like this, but never mind), and the book's main plea, as I read it, is for a return to a progressive universalism based on Enlightenment values. It remains to be seen whether the Obama victory represents the kind of political realignment and revival of liberal-left values that Tomasky was hoping for all those years ago.

In the meantime, I'm hoping that Tomasky will be among those tempted to write up his coverage of the recent presidential electon in book form. There's already a slew of hot-off-the-press volumes available at Amazon, but most of them are by hack writers you've never heard of. The only 'proper' journalist who's so far owned up to writing a book on the campaign is MSNBC's Chuck Todd (for British readers: he's like an American version of Peter Snow, but with a real understanding of politics, and without the histrionics), and a documentary film that has followed the Obama campaign for the last two years is due out in the spring. On the basis of his classic account of Hillary Clinton's run for Senate, which I wrote about in this post, if Tomasky were to decide to pitch in and publish something about the presidential race, it would definitely be the one to read. How about it, Michael?

More on Tomasky here and here.