The Daily Condemnation
Have you condemned attacks on British Troops yet today? Better get it done soon, maybe round the water cooler or during lunch. You don’t want to be seen as an extremist now do you? This would be funny if it wasn’t so pernicious. The new government guidelines for defining extremists are reported to include the following:
People are extremists if:
• They advocate a caliphate, a pan-Islamic state encompassing many countries.
• They promote Sharia law.
• They believe in jihad, or armed resistance, anywhere in the world. This would include armed resistance by Palestinians against the Israeli military.
• They argue that Islam bans homosexuality and that it is a sin against Allah.
• They fail to condemn the killing of British soldiers in Iraq or Afghanistan
This is breathtakingly stupid. It involves the co-option of both the words Sharia and jihad to mean something utterly different from the understanding of most Muslims (when the local Muslim scholar who I work with in anti-war campaigns signs off emails with references to jihad, he does not mean ‘armed resistance’, unless I’ve gravely misunderstood what we are planning). It seems to place demands on Islam that it does not place on any other religion – Or are we suggesting there’s a direct continuum between Christian homophobes and terrorism too? It operates an extremely elastic definition of extremism, which feeds into the idea that all Muslims are some sort of fifth column.
To see these distortions at work it’s worth looking at this piece of scaremongering rubbish (apologies to our thousands of readers outside the UK). Notice the way in which scenes of the riots at the end of the Gaza protests are elided with meetings of Al-Mujaharoun– Young, angry about Gaza and being penned in by overzealous cops outside the Israeli embassy? Why that must be because you hate Western values. There’s a particular cringing scene where a Muslim guy explains to the film maker that he doesn’t like him, with a slight raised voice and animated gestures. This is apparently evidence that this place is a factory of hate. Finally, notice the bizarre use of shots of big public screens in Liverpool and Manchester, because, don’t you see, they are IN OUR CITIES! All of this is added together to create a picture that holding certain positions on sexuality and the middle east must mean holding a set of other beliefs, and will lead to terrorist attacks and hate crimes.
These proposals smack of a quite amazing ignorance, and in practice would have to operate in one of two ways. Either everyone who fails to condemn attacks on British troops or advocates armed resistance would become an extremist. This would, of course, include people like me and most of the far left. It would also include many academics and moral philosophers, for whom the legitimacy of occupation, war and resistance are serious debates, for example the really-very-moderate Ted Honderich’s position on Palestine (don’t forget, it’s failure to condemn, not support that is the issue). It would include huge sections of the Irish community (for reasons Salman alludes to below). Finally, it would include most of the political establishment, who are more than ready to support armed resistance when it suits.
The other option is to apply these standards only to Muslims and their associated organisations. I shouldn’t have to tell people how objectionable both these options are.
