Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's attempt to blow himself up on Northwest Airlines 253 over Detroit on Christmas Day has generated a stupendous amount of column inches and airtime in the US and British media. While the saturation-level coverage has focused on questions of "who," "what," "when," "where" and "how," it has categorically failed to ask the most important question of all - why? Those hoping that the new messiah of the United States would enlighten the ignorant masses were sorely disappointed when the Democratic president could only offer to "communicate clearly to Muslims around the world that ... the United States stands with those who seek justice and progress." Barack Obama then turned the floor over to his top counter-terrorism adviser John Brennan, who made the blindingly obvious and technically true statement that "al-Qaida is an organisation that is dedicated to murder and wanton slaughter of innocents." As with much of Obama's foreign policy, his inability or unwillingness to articulate why the US is the target of so much terrorism has more in common with his universally reviled predecessor than many of his supporters would like to admit. Of course Bush was always far more crass and simplistic than the smooth Harvard graduate. "America was targeted for attack because we're the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world," the then commander-in-chief told the US on September 11 2001. Just in case anyone is turning their noses up at "those stupid Americans," we shouldn't forget that immediately after the July 7 2005 terrorist attacks in London, the BBC reported then home secretary Charles Clarke as saying that "those responsible for such attacks simply wanted to destroy democracy."
In contrast Michael Scheuer, the man who headed the CIA unit monitoring Osama bin Laden in the 1990s, argues Islamic terrorist attacks on the US have nothing "to do with our freedom, liberty and democracy, but everything to do with US policies and actions in the Muslim world." So who should we believe? To begin to answer this question, it seems pertinent to look at the reasons those actually carrying out the terrorism give for their actions. Although it has since disappeared down the memory hole, in 2004 bin Laden himself directly addressed Bush's claim that al-Qaida is motivated by a hatred of US freedom and democracy. "Let him tell us why we did not strike Sweden," the al-Qaida figurehead quipped before stating: "We fought you because we are free and do not accept injustice. We want to restore freedom to our nation." What about Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind behind September 11 2001 and the man with the dubious honour of holding the world record for the number of times to undergo waterboarding - 183 times according to the US Justice Department. "By his own account KSM's [Khalid Sheikh Mohammed] animus toward the United States stemmed not from his experience there as a student, but rather from his violent disagreement with US foreign policy favouring Israel," noted the official 9/11 Commission report. Back to Britain. Last September, the International Herald Tribune reported that the jury at the trial of the 2006 plot to blow up 10 transatlantic airliners were shown martyrdom videos prepared by several of the plotters. "A common theme was that they planned to wreak revenge on Britain and the United States for their interference in Muslim countries, especially the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq," reported the newspaper.
No doubt some readers will be uncomfortable with taking mass-murdering terrorists at their word. But what about testimony from the US government itself? In 2004 the Pentagon-appointed US Defence Science Board explained: "Muslims do not 'hate our freedom,' but rather they hate our policies." The board elaborated: "The overwhelming majority voice their objections to what they see as one-sided support in favour of Israel and against Palestinian rights, and the longstanding, even increasing support for what Muslims collectively see as tyrannies, most notably Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Pakistan, and the Gulf states." As someone paralysed in a 2004 attack by Saudi extremists, one presumes BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner has thought a little bit about this topic. In 2005 he told the Commons foreign affairs committee that "al-Qaida could not give a stuff about what Americans do in America. What they object to is Western military adventures in their heartland, whether it be Afghanistan, Iraq, wherever." Robert A Pape, professor of political science at the University of Chicago and director of the Chicago Project on Suicide Terrorism, has written a whole book addressing this question. He concludes that "suicide terrorism is mainly a response to foreign occupation rather than the product of Islamic fundamentalism." Returning to the case of Abdulmutallab, a recent Associated Press story noted he was "not overtly extremist," however he "was open about his sympathies toward the Palestinians and his anger over Israel's actions in Gaza." In addition Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula released a video after the attempted attack stating that it was in revenge for two joint US-Yemeni air raids on December 17, supposedly targeting al-Qaida operatives. Yes that's right, the latest recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize personally ordered US air strikes in Yemen, killing 23 children and 17 women, according to local officials.
The enigmatic US novelist Thomas Pynchon once wrote: "If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers." So far the "wrong questions" asked by politicians and the mainstream media have led to the implementation of "the most significant changes to airport security since 2006," according to the Guardian. "Increased pat-down searches, more sniffer dogs in terminals and a step-up in hand luggage inspections" along with "the introduction of body scanners" has been the British government's knee-jerk response to Abdulmutallab's attempted attack. The problem is that these are technical answers to something that desperately requires a political solution. In fact, by ignoring the inconvenient question of "why," the chances are that we are actually making future terrorist attacks on the US and Britain more likely. This is not to suggest that British foreign policy should be decided by the actions of a small group of murderous Islamic extremists. Rather it should radically change because it is immoral, hypocritical and has directly caused hundreds of thousands of deaths, many of them in the Islamic world. Put simply, reversing US and British backing for Israel, withdrawing from Iraq and Afghanistan and ending our Machiavellian support for undemocratic Arab regimes is the right and moral thing to do. A welcome by-product of implementing these sane and humane policies would be a decrease in the hatred directed against the US and British in the Islamic world - and therefore a significantly reduced terrorist threat.
Showing posts with label extremism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label extremism. Show all posts
Saturday, 3 April 2010
Friday, 26 March 2010
Torture won't halt terrorism
There's a single word in a recent Foreign Commonwealth Office report that underlines a central myth used to justify torture. Responding to recent revelations that the British security services had colluded with shocking abuses, the Annual Report on Human Rights 2009 says: "We must work with intelligence and security agencies overseas. Some of them share our standards and laws while others do not. "But we cannot afford the luxury of only dealing with those that do. The intelligence we get from others saves British lives." I'm struck by the word "luxury." It implies that human rights are like shopping at Waitrose - all very nice in good times but in tough times, Tescos will do. I thought the point about "rights" was that they are inviolable - while evidence has been seeping out about torture for some years, the case of Binyam Mohamed has clarified exactly how the US government treated its detainees. Mohamed was arrested in Pakistan where he was tortured by the Pakistan Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and then taken by US agents to Morocco where he was tortured for 18 months by the Moroccan authorities and simultaneously interrogated by the CIA. Then it was on to US detention centres in Bagram and Kabul where he was tortured by various means - sleep deprivation, continuous and literally maddeningly loud music, hooding - and finally to Guantanamo.
His account shows that the US practised torture directly and sub-contracted some of it out to other governments. Mohamed's account, accepted as true by British and US judges, has confirmed accounts from other detainees. The Bush government never denied that it practised "torture-lite" but was much more uncomfortable with the actual details being made public. The British security services knew that Mohamed was being tortured. Their agents questioned him in Karachi after having been formally told about his treatment by the CIA. When Mohamed was being tortured and interrogated in Morocco some of the questions referred to information from the British security services and his answers were passed back to Britain. British security services didn't themselves cut Mohamed's genitals with a scalpel but they knew of the torture and threatened him if he didn't "co-operate." They were happy to be involved in the interrogation process. British citizens Salahuddin Amin and Zeeshan Siddiqui each describe being tortured by Pakistan's ISI and then questioned by MI5. Human Rights Watch quotes ISI agents as saying that in both cases MI5 knew that the men were being "processed in the traditional way" and were "grateful.".
The FCO justification is therefore a surprisingly honest statement of actual practice. British security services are prepared to turn a blind eye to torture. The problem for the government is that the law is unequivocal - torture is absolutely prohibited both under long-standing common law and the European Convention on Human Rights. The government is caught in a cleft stick, which is no doubt why it is refusing to publish its guidelines on torture. For most of us, the moral case against torture is sufficient. The deliberate infliction of pain on an individual is absolutely and indisputably wrong. When private individuals torture another human being, it's illegal and horrifying. But for proponents of torture, the legal and moral arguments are mere luxuries and they constantly fall back on the "ticking time bomb" argument in which human rights "liberals" are condemned for not condoning the ill-treatment of one person when it will - or might - save the lives of thousands. They see themselves as the pragmatic ones and the life-savers. The ticking time bomb scenario is staple fare all the time in film and TV programmes such as 24 and Spooks and you're likely to come across at least one during any night's viewing. We are all very familiar with the scenario and it's that familiarity through fiction that allows the torture proponents to get away with telling us that the scenario is real.
But in the real world, no-one can point to an actual ticking time bomb scenario because presumptions underlying it are false. The security services don't usually know that a terrorist attack is about to happen or who might know about it. They didn't know about September 11, despite the US having Zacarias Moussaoui in detention for immigration offences at the time. Moussaoui was subsequently convicted of being part of that conspiracy. But since the CIA didn't know September 11 2001 was about to happen it had no reason to interrogate someone detained for other reasons. International terrorism like most serious criminal activities depends on hardly any of the players knowing the full story, especially not the actual perpetrators. Who knows what most of the September 11 2001 hijackers knew in advance? Or what the London bombers knew before the morning of July 7? What we do know is that torture produces unreliable evidence. This seems obvious - people being tortured tell their torturers what they want to hear. So the detainee eagerly assents when asked if there's a bomb in London and the spooks go haring off on a wild-goose chase. In fact the bomb was always in Paris.
Evidence obtained under torture is so inherently unreliable that its substantive value is always nothing. How could anyone identify scraps of truth - if there are any - among the fiction invented to please the torturer? Torture proponents will argue that each of those presumptions simply requires better security work. But the point is that each presumption is so unrealistic that the overall scenario is utterly far-fetched. Which is why it has never happened. Were the scenario to be realistic, then surely it would have happened at least once. But I have never heard a torture proponent able to point to one instance. I appreciate that security services can't talk about terrorist attacks that they have prevented, but surely some example would have leaked out given the current debate? There is simply no example of torture preventing a ticking time bomb. And while nobody can point to one instance of lives being saved as a result of torture, what is clear is that the US and British government's war on terror has made us less safe.
Guantanamo, torture, uncritical support for Israel and the invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq are all reasons why some people come to believe that terrorist attacks can be justified. Renouncing torture is a pragmatic position as well as a legal and moral one; it makes us safer. Withdrawing from Afghanistan, providing reparations for Iraq and supporting the rights of the Palestinians would also help. Practising torture - and colluding with it - doesn't just fail to detect terrorism. It also helps to make terrorism more likely. It's of some comfort that MPs and peers obviously feel just as worried about the issue, since they consistently revisit the issue in committee, even though they appear to lack the courage to do anything more direct within the various Houses of Parliament. And it's quite proper that they should feel worried, since the provisions of the anti-terror legislation consitute the biggest erosion of civil liberties in living memory, with the possible exception of the Tory - and now new Labour as well - anti-union laws. It's an unfortunate fact of political life in bourgeois democratic Britain that, when it comes to restricting human and civil rights, the temporary and short term seem to metamorphose effortlessly into the long term and the long term into the permanent.
Parliament's joint committee on human rights clearly recognises this and has called for a review of all such laws passed since September 11 2001. The committee rightly questions whether ministers can legitimately still argue that a "public emergency threatening the life of the nation" remains. And it further says that the government's "narrow" definition of complicity in torture is "worrying." Too right it is. And so is detention without charge, continual abortive attempts to extent the period of such detention, trials without publicly displayed evidence, trials without juries, derogation from aspects of the European Convention on Human Rights and all the rest of the panoply of repression which has become the norm of government over the last decade. The committee says that it is pleased to see that ministers claim that a commitment to human rights "underpinned" counter-terrorism work, but it said "all too often" it was "squeezed out by the imperatives of national security and public safety." Perhaps someone ought to warn these MPs that "all too often" is hardly a sufficient evaluation. Maybe it ought to be a building worker, because at least he or she would be able to remind them that, if just one part of underpinning is "squeezed out," the wall is likely to collapse and, if one wall falls down, the whole house is likely to collapse with it. The civil and human rights that used to be taken for granted in Britain are under extreme threat. Those rights, fought for by working people over hundreds of years, are not negotiable.
It was always obvious that the phoney "war on terror" would raise these dangers. Indeed, there are conspiracy theorists around who say that it is so convenient for a repressive government to have such an excuse that it may have been among the reasons for promoting the phoney war in the first place. While not going that far, simply because we're not in the habit of making assertions unsupported by concrete evidence, it needs to be remembered that many of the vicious repressions of nazi Germany were justified on the basis of allegations that an invisible enemy was eating away at society. Socialists have always been aware of this danger, which is one reason that the defence of civil rights is so high on any progressive agenda. And it is time that we reminded the MPs and peers in the two Houses of Parliament that it is not sufficient to merely sit on the sidelines and comment wryly on the erosion of liberty in the country. Nor is it enough to warn the government that it might have gone a teeny weeny bit too far. If the case is made, and the human rights committee has made it adequately, then it's the task of MPs to get off their behinds and do something concrete about it. Otherwise the committee system ceases to be of any democratic value and merely acts as an escape valve to let MPs air legitimate grievances and feel that they have done their duty, without actually changing anything.
His account shows that the US practised torture directly and sub-contracted some of it out to other governments. Mohamed's account, accepted as true by British and US judges, has confirmed accounts from other detainees. The Bush government never denied that it practised "torture-lite" but was much more uncomfortable with the actual details being made public. The British security services knew that Mohamed was being tortured. Their agents questioned him in Karachi after having been formally told about his treatment by the CIA. When Mohamed was being tortured and interrogated in Morocco some of the questions referred to information from the British security services and his answers were passed back to Britain. British security services didn't themselves cut Mohamed's genitals with a scalpel but they knew of the torture and threatened him if he didn't "co-operate." They were happy to be involved in the interrogation process. British citizens Salahuddin Amin and Zeeshan Siddiqui each describe being tortured by Pakistan's ISI and then questioned by MI5. Human Rights Watch quotes ISI agents as saying that in both cases MI5 knew that the men were being "processed in the traditional way" and were "grateful.".
The FCO justification is therefore a surprisingly honest statement of actual practice. British security services are prepared to turn a blind eye to torture. The problem for the government is that the law is unequivocal - torture is absolutely prohibited both under long-standing common law and the European Convention on Human Rights. The government is caught in a cleft stick, which is no doubt why it is refusing to publish its guidelines on torture. For most of us, the moral case against torture is sufficient. The deliberate infliction of pain on an individual is absolutely and indisputably wrong. When private individuals torture another human being, it's illegal and horrifying. But for proponents of torture, the legal and moral arguments are mere luxuries and they constantly fall back on the "ticking time bomb" argument in which human rights "liberals" are condemned for not condoning the ill-treatment of one person when it will - or might - save the lives of thousands. They see themselves as the pragmatic ones and the life-savers. The ticking time bomb scenario is staple fare all the time in film and TV programmes such as 24 and Spooks and you're likely to come across at least one during any night's viewing. We are all very familiar with the scenario and it's that familiarity through fiction that allows the torture proponents to get away with telling us that the scenario is real.
But in the real world, no-one can point to an actual ticking time bomb scenario because presumptions underlying it are false. The security services don't usually know that a terrorist attack is about to happen or who might know about it. They didn't know about September 11, despite the US having Zacarias Moussaoui in detention for immigration offences at the time. Moussaoui was subsequently convicted of being part of that conspiracy. But since the CIA didn't know September 11 2001 was about to happen it had no reason to interrogate someone detained for other reasons. International terrorism like most serious criminal activities depends on hardly any of the players knowing the full story, especially not the actual perpetrators. Who knows what most of the September 11 2001 hijackers knew in advance? Or what the London bombers knew before the morning of July 7? What we do know is that torture produces unreliable evidence. This seems obvious - people being tortured tell their torturers what they want to hear. So the detainee eagerly assents when asked if there's a bomb in London and the spooks go haring off on a wild-goose chase. In fact the bomb was always in Paris.
Evidence obtained under torture is so inherently unreliable that its substantive value is always nothing. How could anyone identify scraps of truth - if there are any - among the fiction invented to please the torturer? Torture proponents will argue that each of those presumptions simply requires better security work. But the point is that each presumption is so unrealistic that the overall scenario is utterly far-fetched. Which is why it has never happened. Were the scenario to be realistic, then surely it would have happened at least once. But I have never heard a torture proponent able to point to one instance. I appreciate that security services can't talk about terrorist attacks that they have prevented, but surely some example would have leaked out given the current debate? There is simply no example of torture preventing a ticking time bomb. And while nobody can point to one instance of lives being saved as a result of torture, what is clear is that the US and British government's war on terror has made us less safe.
Guantanamo, torture, uncritical support for Israel and the invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq are all reasons why some people come to believe that terrorist attacks can be justified. Renouncing torture is a pragmatic position as well as a legal and moral one; it makes us safer. Withdrawing from Afghanistan, providing reparations for Iraq and supporting the rights of the Palestinians would also help. Practising torture - and colluding with it - doesn't just fail to detect terrorism. It also helps to make terrorism more likely. It's of some comfort that MPs and peers obviously feel just as worried about the issue, since they consistently revisit the issue in committee, even though they appear to lack the courage to do anything more direct within the various Houses of Parliament. And it's quite proper that they should feel worried, since the provisions of the anti-terror legislation consitute the biggest erosion of civil liberties in living memory, with the possible exception of the Tory - and now new Labour as well - anti-union laws. It's an unfortunate fact of political life in bourgeois democratic Britain that, when it comes to restricting human and civil rights, the temporary and short term seem to metamorphose effortlessly into the long term and the long term into the permanent.
Parliament's joint committee on human rights clearly recognises this and has called for a review of all such laws passed since September 11 2001. The committee rightly questions whether ministers can legitimately still argue that a "public emergency threatening the life of the nation" remains. And it further says that the government's "narrow" definition of complicity in torture is "worrying." Too right it is. And so is detention without charge, continual abortive attempts to extent the period of such detention, trials without publicly displayed evidence, trials without juries, derogation from aspects of the European Convention on Human Rights and all the rest of the panoply of repression which has become the norm of government over the last decade. The committee says that it is pleased to see that ministers claim that a commitment to human rights "underpinned" counter-terrorism work, but it said "all too often" it was "squeezed out by the imperatives of national security and public safety." Perhaps someone ought to warn these MPs that "all too often" is hardly a sufficient evaluation. Maybe it ought to be a building worker, because at least he or she would be able to remind them that, if just one part of underpinning is "squeezed out," the wall is likely to collapse and, if one wall falls down, the whole house is likely to collapse with it. The civil and human rights that used to be taken for granted in Britain are under extreme threat. Those rights, fought for by working people over hundreds of years, are not negotiable.
It was always obvious that the phoney "war on terror" would raise these dangers. Indeed, there are conspiracy theorists around who say that it is so convenient for a repressive government to have such an excuse that it may have been among the reasons for promoting the phoney war in the first place. While not going that far, simply because we're not in the habit of making assertions unsupported by concrete evidence, it needs to be remembered that many of the vicious repressions of nazi Germany were justified on the basis of allegations that an invisible enemy was eating away at society. Socialists have always been aware of this danger, which is one reason that the defence of civil rights is so high on any progressive agenda. And it is time that we reminded the MPs and peers in the two Houses of Parliament that it is not sufficient to merely sit on the sidelines and comment wryly on the erosion of liberty in the country. Nor is it enough to warn the government that it might have gone a teeny weeny bit too far. If the case is made, and the human rights committee has made it adequately, then it's the task of MPs to get off their behinds and do something concrete about it. Otherwise the committee system ceases to be of any democratic value and merely acts as an escape valve to let MPs air legitimate grievances and feel that they have done their duty, without actually changing anything.
Wednesday, 24 February 2010
Is the internet harbouring a thriving Nazi community?
On most days, the man once labeled a "near genius" in a Time magazine article spends the bulk of his time in an office of the Mandeville, La., home of infamous white supremacist David Duke. There, Jamie Kelso whips across Duke's hardwood floors on a wheeled office chair as he attends to his work: monitoring the burgeoning community of the racist Stormfront Web site on one of six different computers. To the thousands of white supremacists who regularly visit Stormfront and its forum, Kelso is best known by his e-moniker, "Charles A Lindbergh." He signs off all his posts with a quote from Lindbergh, a well-known racist and anti-Semite: "We can have peace and security only as long as we band together to preserve that most priceless possession, our inheritance of European blood." "I admire the aviator so much, " Kelso says.
The aviator, were he still alive, might well admire Kelso. As Stormfront celebrates its 10th birthday — the first major hate site on the Internet, it was created by former Alabama Klan leader Don Black in 1995 — Kelso has much to be proud of.
In the three years he's been a senior moderator of the site, it has grown from fewer than 10,000 registered users to, as of mid-June, an astounding 52,566. And while many thousands of that ever-growing total probably haven't visited in years, independent Web monitors recently ranked Stormfront the 338th largest electronic forum on the Internet, putting it easily into the top 1% of all sites on the World Wide Web. It began with Don Black. Going back to high school, Black had always been one of the more enthusiastic proponents of white power. One of his first forays into the organized movement was in the 1970s, when he volunteered for the late white supremacist J.B. Stoner's unsuccessful run for governor of Georgia. That was until Stoner's campaign manager, Jerry Ray, the brother of Martin Luther King Jr. assassin James Earl Ray, shot him in the chest. The shooting apparently stemmed from accusations that Black had broken into Stoner's office to steal a mailing list for the National Socialist White People's Party.
After recovering, Black went on to join the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, the group headed by Duke in the 1970s. Working on Duke's unsuccessful campaign for Louisiana state senate, Black won Duke's trust, moving up to become his mentor's right-hand man. When Duke left the group amid allegations that he'd tried to sell its membership list to another Klan group for $35,000, Black took over. But Black quickly got into trouble himself. In 1981, he and nine other white supremacists were arrested as they prepared to board a yacht with which they intended to invade the tiny Caribbean island of Dominica, oust its black-run government, and transform it into a "white state." Black's resulting three-year prison sentence was time well spent. He took classes in computer programming that would provide the basis for his future. Not long after his release, Black launched an abysmally unsuccessful campaign for a U.S. Senate seat from Alabama. He wound up marrying Duke's ex-wife, Chloe, and moving to West Palm Beach, Fla. Once there, he began dabbling with his computer, eventually setting up a dial-up bulletin board service for the radical right. By March 1995, that service evolved into Stormfront, the Net's best-known hate site.
Black saw clearly that with this new technology, white supremacists might finally bypass the mainstream media and political apparatus, getting their message out to people who otherwise would never hear it — people who now could listen in the privacy of their own homes without fear of embarrassment or reproach. "The potential of the Net for organizations and movements such as ours is enormous," Black told the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1996. "We're reaching tens of thousands of people who never before had access to our point of view." Being the first of its kind helped Stormfront win enormous publicity. Black and his site were written up in newspapers around the country and the world, and he frequently appeared on major network news shows like abc's "Nightline," where, clad in suit and tie, he talked politely about allowing people access to information not filtered by the "media monopoly." Though he undoubtedly turned off many viewers, each major TV appearance led to a spike in visitors to Stormfront.
Like a morning roll call, the posts pour in each day. Below the Stormfront motto, "White Pride World Wide," links to news stories with a racial angle light up the page, complete with headlines home-crafted by the members. "Mestizo Rapes White Woman in Elevator," shouts one. "Negro Man Stabs Elderly Woman, Shoots Detective, Negroes Screaming 'Police Brutality,'" another breathlessly reports. And the list goes on.
But one thing you won't normally find on Stormfront are racial slurs. In fact, new members are explicitly warned not to use such language, and also not to post violent threats or anything describing illegal activity. Black clearly has modeled his site on some of the tactics used by Duke, who famously urged his Klan followers to "get out of the cow pasture and into hotel meeting rooms." As Black once told a reporter, "We don't use the 'nigger, nigger' type of approaches." When New Jersey neo-Nazi Hal Turner began posting incendiary comments this March about a federal judge whose family was murdered, he was rapidly excommunicated. "They are so afraid of rocking the ZOG [Zionist Occupation Government] boat that they scurry around behind the scenes censoring posts of folks who are strong enough to speak the plain truth," Turner fumed later.
It's not that Stormfront is about moderation — hardly. The talk is all about the evils of African Americans, homosexuals, non-white immigrants, and, above all, Jews, who are blamed for most of what's wrong in the world. As pointed out by Cass Sunstein, the University of Chicago law professor who wrote the 2001 book republic.com, "Extremists and hate-filled sites tend to attract likeminded people who, if isolated, could come to their senses." Likeminded people talking to one another, Sunstein says, "tend to become more extremist." But it's all done with a tone of simmering civility. "One of the things that Don Black does very well is he doesn't fit the stereotype of an angry man," Kelso proudly told the Intelligence Report in a lengthy interview recently. "Don is the most under-recognized giant in the whole white nationalist movement." Kelso, who was featured in a 1960s Time article about teenagers in the Los Angeles suburbs, personifies the approach. Animated and cordial, he happily offers to set up a Stormfront account for an Intelligence Report writer. He exudes a kind of grandfatherly charm — the same charm that he exhibits in some of his postings, and in his tireless welcoming of new members to the Stormfront community. It is, Kelso says, "a positive spiritual approach."
Black and Kelso have created something more than just another hate site that draws people for a few months, then fades for lack of interest. Using everything from good manners to "white scholarships" to such catchy gimmicks as highlighting its members' birthdays, these two men have built something that very few people on the entire Internet have — a genuine and very large cyber-community. That they did it at a time when major neo-Nazi groups are on the decline is merely icing. "Without a doubt," Bob DeMarais, a former staff member of the neo-Nazi National Alliance (see related story), wrote recently, "Stormfront is the most powerful active influence in the White Nationalist movement." Want to find the latest headlines on black-on-white crime? Go to Stormfront. New developments in the National Alliance's leadership woes? Go to Stormfront. Details of yet another nefarious Jewish conspiracy? Go to Stormfront. Stormfront's recent growth spurt is only the beginning, Kelso says. He and Black share a larger goal, one that their friend Duke also tried with a fair measure of success — establishing real legitimacy in the realm of public opinion.
Stormfront — along with the many lesser radical forums on the Internet — has always done better than the much more numerous hate Web pages. Whereas typical hate sites function as one-way transfers of information — rather like a brochure posted in a grocery store that can be read but cannot be responded to — Stormfront has always been organized as a message board. Members can post opinions, listen to others respond, then post more feedback for all to read. The potential for dialogues to develop was built in — and, therefore, so was the potential to develop a genuine white supremacist cyber-community. "The great power of the Internet is it allows people who don't know each other ... to connect with people with shared interests," says Howard Rheingold, an Internet theorist and author. "The shared interests might be that 'I have a kid with leukemia.' Or, 'I'm a Nazi.' It gives marginalized people more power." Black and Kelso, both men who could put up a relatively clean-cut and civilized front, saw eye to eye on the possibilities. So when Jamie Kelso joined Stormfront about three years ago, he successfully began pushing for leading movement writers — men like Sam Dickson, a leader of the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens, and Willis Carto, publisher of the Holocaust-denying journal The Barnes Review — to start posting. That was just part of an effort to make the site more inclusive. Although the forum has recently censored some posts critical of the National Alliance — a major neo-Nazi group undergoing an internal civil war — it generally has tried to maintain a relatively non-sectarian stance, making people from different sectors of the radical right feel welcome to join in. As Black once told a reporter for Newhouse News Service, "Anyone can work to promote our ideas without being a member of any organization. I used to be annoyed by people who didn't join my organization, but I see the advantage now."
Black and Kelso take care to avoid appearing dictatorial. One result is that the forum, within the bounds of the radical right, feels very democratic — a gathering of people with similar interests in what increasingly looks like a community. Every member gets to choose a graphic to accompany their postings. Little smiley faces and other signs abound. It's not unusual to spot two members using an animation where the faces toast with mugs of beer. There is a list of birthdays of members on the main page. Birthday greetings are frequently exchanged, along with notes of consolation or encouragement. There are essay contests and $2,000 scholarships for white kids. And, to encourage the shy, Kelso frequently starts innocuous threads to get people to start joining in the conversation. "Where is Your Home?" Kelso asks at the head of one. Or, atop another, "What inspired your screen name?"
The results have been fairly spectacular. In January 2002, Stormfront had a mere 5,000 members. A year later, membership reached 11,000; and a year after that, in early 2004, it had 23,000. By January 2005, membership hit about 42,000, and it finally topped 52,000 this June. In the last year, a Kelso analysis showed, the site has been gaining an average of almost 500 new members every week. That doesn't include the large numbers of those who simply read Stormfront postings without joining up (becoming a member allows one to post messages and also to view personal information posted by other members). All together, total traffic to the site gave it an Alexa Web monitor ranking this June of the 8,682nd most visited site on the Internet — a rank well above that of most civil rights sites. Bob DeMarais, for one, sees Kelso as integral to Stormfront's success. "Jamie Kelso did much of the marketing and promotion responsible for Stormfront's recent growth spurt," DeMarais wrote recently. "Kelso has a knack for making new people feel welcome and getting them to start posting."
With Stormfront growing every day, a larger question has developed: What does it mean for the movement? The site is very unlike a traditional hate group. There is no formal hierarchy, even though Black and Kelso run the site, and no charismatic leader issues orders. That's one reason that Devin Burghart, who analyzes hate groups for the Center for New Community in Chicago, doesn't think that Stormfront has the potential to be much more than a sounding board for angry racists. He also points out that for every white supremacist kept busy posting messages on his or her computer screen, there is one less person available to be out in the neighborhoods organizing.
Other experts see some organizing possibilities. "While you can certainly build a community online, it [only] thrives with face-to-face interaction," said John Palfrey, executive director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. "Starting with the Internet, however, might not be a terrible idea."
That's what Joe Trippi did. As the first manager of the presidential campaign of Howard Dean, he raised immense sums and also got people out of their homes and into the campaign — all via the Internet. "What you've got to do, is you have to have two-way communication," Trippi explained in an interview. "It's the bond, to be able to talk to each other about you, that is important." David Weinberger, who served as senior Internet advisor under Trippi and is now a fellow at the Berkman Center, agreed. "The left and the right can do the same thing," he told the Intelligence Report. "The Net can do the same thing for racists as it did for the Dean campaign. Treating your readers not as readers but as participants is a really good way of creating community and getting supporters." There are already some signs that Stormfront's cyber-community may be developing, at least in some places, into physical community. Earlier this year, a group of members got together in San Diego for the first time. "We just talked about whatever came to mind for three and a half hours or so," one wrote afterward. "We all want to start doing this on a regular basis in order to foster camaraderie and group cohesion. ... We wish to have larger and larger numbers of people coming out with each successive get-together." The event, another wrote back, "is only the beginning for bigger and better things to come. Eventually, there will be political organization and activity." All this is music to Jamie Kelso.
"You always want to paint your opponents in the worst possible light," Kelso said of antiracist activists and other Stormfront detractors. "That becomes hard to do when an organization reaches large numbers. It's not plausible to say hundreds of thousands of people are nuts. We're striving to be seen as our own kind of mainstream, and that we're not kooky." The recent successes of Stormfront have been, as Trippi would say, "viral." More than 70 people a day are joining the forum, and although some are mere tourists or even antiracist researchers, huge numbers are potential true believers. If Black and Kelso continue to succeed — if Stormfront members increasingly come out from behind their computer monitors and get into the streets — it could turn out that the forum becomes one of the real pillars of American radicalism. Kelso, always the optimist, predicts reaching a membership of 500,000 by 2010. That is probably unrealistic. But the possibility has veterans of the Internet and the world of real competitive politics worried. "I'd hate to think," Trippi says, "what Hitler could've done with the Internet."
The aviator, were he still alive, might well admire Kelso. As Stormfront celebrates its 10th birthday — the first major hate site on the Internet, it was created by former Alabama Klan leader Don Black in 1995 — Kelso has much to be proud of.
In the three years he's been a senior moderator of the site, it has grown from fewer than 10,000 registered users to, as of mid-June, an astounding 52,566. And while many thousands of that ever-growing total probably haven't visited in years, independent Web monitors recently ranked Stormfront the 338th largest electronic forum on the Internet, putting it easily into the top 1% of all sites on the World Wide Web. It began with Don Black. Going back to high school, Black had always been one of the more enthusiastic proponents of white power. One of his first forays into the organized movement was in the 1970s, when he volunteered for the late white supremacist J.B. Stoner's unsuccessful run for governor of Georgia. That was until Stoner's campaign manager, Jerry Ray, the brother of Martin Luther King Jr. assassin James Earl Ray, shot him in the chest. The shooting apparently stemmed from accusations that Black had broken into Stoner's office to steal a mailing list for the National Socialist White People's Party.
After recovering, Black went on to join the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, the group headed by Duke in the 1970s. Working on Duke's unsuccessful campaign for Louisiana state senate, Black won Duke's trust, moving up to become his mentor's right-hand man. When Duke left the group amid allegations that he'd tried to sell its membership list to another Klan group for $35,000, Black took over. But Black quickly got into trouble himself. In 1981, he and nine other white supremacists were arrested as they prepared to board a yacht with which they intended to invade the tiny Caribbean island of Dominica, oust its black-run government, and transform it into a "white state." Black's resulting three-year prison sentence was time well spent. He took classes in computer programming that would provide the basis for his future. Not long after his release, Black launched an abysmally unsuccessful campaign for a U.S. Senate seat from Alabama. He wound up marrying Duke's ex-wife, Chloe, and moving to West Palm Beach, Fla. Once there, he began dabbling with his computer, eventually setting up a dial-up bulletin board service for the radical right. By March 1995, that service evolved into Stormfront, the Net's best-known hate site.
Black saw clearly that with this new technology, white supremacists might finally bypass the mainstream media and political apparatus, getting their message out to people who otherwise would never hear it — people who now could listen in the privacy of their own homes without fear of embarrassment or reproach. "The potential of the Net for organizations and movements such as ours is enormous," Black told the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1996. "We're reaching tens of thousands of people who never before had access to our point of view." Being the first of its kind helped Stormfront win enormous publicity. Black and his site were written up in newspapers around the country and the world, and he frequently appeared on major network news shows like abc's "Nightline," where, clad in suit and tie, he talked politely about allowing people access to information not filtered by the "media monopoly." Though he undoubtedly turned off many viewers, each major TV appearance led to a spike in visitors to Stormfront.
Like a morning roll call, the posts pour in each day. Below the Stormfront motto, "White Pride World Wide," links to news stories with a racial angle light up the page, complete with headlines home-crafted by the members. "Mestizo Rapes White Woman in Elevator," shouts one. "Negro Man Stabs Elderly Woman, Shoots Detective, Negroes Screaming 'Police Brutality,'" another breathlessly reports. And the list goes on.
But one thing you won't normally find on Stormfront are racial slurs. In fact, new members are explicitly warned not to use such language, and also not to post violent threats or anything describing illegal activity. Black clearly has modeled his site on some of the tactics used by Duke, who famously urged his Klan followers to "get out of the cow pasture and into hotel meeting rooms." As Black once told a reporter, "We don't use the 'nigger, nigger' type of approaches." When New Jersey neo-Nazi Hal Turner began posting incendiary comments this March about a federal judge whose family was murdered, he was rapidly excommunicated. "They are so afraid of rocking the ZOG [Zionist Occupation Government] boat that they scurry around behind the scenes censoring posts of folks who are strong enough to speak the plain truth," Turner fumed later.
It's not that Stormfront is about moderation — hardly. The talk is all about the evils of African Americans, homosexuals, non-white immigrants, and, above all, Jews, who are blamed for most of what's wrong in the world. As pointed out by Cass Sunstein, the University of Chicago law professor who wrote the 2001 book republic.com, "Extremists and hate-filled sites tend to attract likeminded people who, if isolated, could come to their senses." Likeminded people talking to one another, Sunstein says, "tend to become more extremist." But it's all done with a tone of simmering civility. "One of the things that Don Black does very well is he doesn't fit the stereotype of an angry man," Kelso proudly told the Intelligence Report in a lengthy interview recently. "Don is the most under-recognized giant in the whole white nationalist movement." Kelso, who was featured in a 1960s Time article about teenagers in the Los Angeles suburbs, personifies the approach. Animated and cordial, he happily offers to set up a Stormfront account for an Intelligence Report writer. He exudes a kind of grandfatherly charm — the same charm that he exhibits in some of his postings, and in his tireless welcoming of new members to the Stormfront community. It is, Kelso says, "a positive spiritual approach."
Black and Kelso have created something more than just another hate site that draws people for a few months, then fades for lack of interest. Using everything from good manners to "white scholarships" to such catchy gimmicks as highlighting its members' birthdays, these two men have built something that very few people on the entire Internet have — a genuine and very large cyber-community. That they did it at a time when major neo-Nazi groups are on the decline is merely icing. "Without a doubt," Bob DeMarais, a former staff member of the neo-Nazi National Alliance (see related story), wrote recently, "Stormfront is the most powerful active influence in the White Nationalist movement." Want to find the latest headlines on black-on-white crime? Go to Stormfront. New developments in the National Alliance's leadership woes? Go to Stormfront. Details of yet another nefarious Jewish conspiracy? Go to Stormfront. Stormfront's recent growth spurt is only the beginning, Kelso says. He and Black share a larger goal, one that their friend Duke also tried with a fair measure of success — establishing real legitimacy in the realm of public opinion.
Stormfront — along with the many lesser radical forums on the Internet — has always done better than the much more numerous hate Web pages. Whereas typical hate sites function as one-way transfers of information — rather like a brochure posted in a grocery store that can be read but cannot be responded to — Stormfront has always been organized as a message board. Members can post opinions, listen to others respond, then post more feedback for all to read. The potential for dialogues to develop was built in — and, therefore, so was the potential to develop a genuine white supremacist cyber-community. "The great power of the Internet is it allows people who don't know each other ... to connect with people with shared interests," says Howard Rheingold, an Internet theorist and author. "The shared interests might be that 'I have a kid with leukemia.' Or, 'I'm a Nazi.' It gives marginalized people more power." Black and Kelso, both men who could put up a relatively clean-cut and civilized front, saw eye to eye on the possibilities. So when Jamie Kelso joined Stormfront about three years ago, he successfully began pushing for leading movement writers — men like Sam Dickson, a leader of the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens, and Willis Carto, publisher of the Holocaust-denying journal The Barnes Review — to start posting. That was just part of an effort to make the site more inclusive. Although the forum has recently censored some posts critical of the National Alliance — a major neo-Nazi group undergoing an internal civil war — it generally has tried to maintain a relatively non-sectarian stance, making people from different sectors of the radical right feel welcome to join in. As Black once told a reporter for Newhouse News Service, "Anyone can work to promote our ideas without being a member of any organization. I used to be annoyed by people who didn't join my organization, but I see the advantage now."
Black and Kelso take care to avoid appearing dictatorial. One result is that the forum, within the bounds of the radical right, feels very democratic — a gathering of people with similar interests in what increasingly looks like a community. Every member gets to choose a graphic to accompany their postings. Little smiley faces and other signs abound. It's not unusual to spot two members using an animation where the faces toast with mugs of beer. There is a list of birthdays of members on the main page. Birthday greetings are frequently exchanged, along with notes of consolation or encouragement. There are essay contests and $2,000 scholarships for white kids. And, to encourage the shy, Kelso frequently starts innocuous threads to get people to start joining in the conversation. "Where is Your Home?" Kelso asks at the head of one. Or, atop another, "What inspired your screen name?"
The results have been fairly spectacular. In January 2002, Stormfront had a mere 5,000 members. A year later, membership reached 11,000; and a year after that, in early 2004, it had 23,000. By January 2005, membership hit about 42,000, and it finally topped 52,000 this June. In the last year, a Kelso analysis showed, the site has been gaining an average of almost 500 new members every week. That doesn't include the large numbers of those who simply read Stormfront postings without joining up (becoming a member allows one to post messages and also to view personal information posted by other members). All together, total traffic to the site gave it an Alexa Web monitor ranking this June of the 8,682nd most visited site on the Internet — a rank well above that of most civil rights sites. Bob DeMarais, for one, sees Kelso as integral to Stormfront's success. "Jamie Kelso did much of the marketing and promotion responsible for Stormfront's recent growth spurt," DeMarais wrote recently. "Kelso has a knack for making new people feel welcome and getting them to start posting."
With Stormfront growing every day, a larger question has developed: What does it mean for the movement? The site is very unlike a traditional hate group. There is no formal hierarchy, even though Black and Kelso run the site, and no charismatic leader issues orders. That's one reason that Devin Burghart, who analyzes hate groups for the Center for New Community in Chicago, doesn't think that Stormfront has the potential to be much more than a sounding board for angry racists. He also points out that for every white supremacist kept busy posting messages on his or her computer screen, there is one less person available to be out in the neighborhoods organizing.
Other experts see some organizing possibilities. "While you can certainly build a community online, it [only] thrives with face-to-face interaction," said John Palfrey, executive director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. "Starting with the Internet, however, might not be a terrible idea."
That's what Joe Trippi did. As the first manager of the presidential campaign of Howard Dean, he raised immense sums and also got people out of their homes and into the campaign — all via the Internet. "What you've got to do, is you have to have two-way communication," Trippi explained in an interview. "It's the bond, to be able to talk to each other about you, that is important." David Weinberger, who served as senior Internet advisor under Trippi and is now a fellow at the Berkman Center, agreed. "The left and the right can do the same thing," he told the Intelligence Report. "The Net can do the same thing for racists as it did for the Dean campaign. Treating your readers not as readers but as participants is a really good way of creating community and getting supporters." There are already some signs that Stormfront's cyber-community may be developing, at least in some places, into physical community. Earlier this year, a group of members got together in San Diego for the first time. "We just talked about whatever came to mind for three and a half hours or so," one wrote afterward. "We all want to start doing this on a regular basis in order to foster camaraderie and group cohesion. ... We wish to have larger and larger numbers of people coming out with each successive get-together." The event, another wrote back, "is only the beginning for bigger and better things to come. Eventually, there will be political organization and activity." All this is music to Jamie Kelso.
"You always want to paint your opponents in the worst possible light," Kelso said of antiracist activists and other Stormfront detractors. "That becomes hard to do when an organization reaches large numbers. It's not plausible to say hundreds of thousands of people are nuts. We're striving to be seen as our own kind of mainstream, and that we're not kooky." The recent successes of Stormfront have been, as Trippi would say, "viral." More than 70 people a day are joining the forum, and although some are mere tourists or even antiracist researchers, huge numbers are potential true believers. If Black and Kelso continue to succeed — if Stormfront members increasingly come out from behind their computer monitors and get into the streets — it could turn out that the forum becomes one of the real pillars of American radicalism. Kelso, always the optimist, predicts reaching a membership of 500,000 by 2010. That is probably unrealistic. But the possibility has veterans of the Internet and the world of real competitive politics worried. "I'd hate to think," Trippi says, "what Hitler could've done with the Internet."
Tuesday, 5 January 2010
Bring on the militant atheists!
As every middlebrow with a newspaper column or Radio 4 slot to fill agrees, a vulgar "new atheism" is sweeping Britain. The readers of Richard Dawkins, Philip Pullman and Christopher Hitchens are, they tell us, crass because they do not appreciate the mystery of religion, the consolations of ritual and all the rest of it, and also dangerous because they are as fundamentalist in their criticisms of religion as the religious fanatics they criticise. I could waste your time by pointing out that "new atheists" are not so different from old atheists – we still don't believe in God, for instance – and add that the charge of moral equivalence would be easier to substantiate if atheists planted bombs on the underground. But space is short and the depressing truth about "new atheists" no one dwells on is that if they exist outside the imaginations of religious writers, they are never there when you need them. For if we had a vibrant atheist or secularist movement in Britain, it would now be tearing into this government for once again trying to ride the Islamist tiger. In November, John Denham, the communities secretary, announced: "Anyone wanting to build a more progressive society would ignore the powerful role of faith at their peril. We should continually seek ways of encouraging and enhancing the contribution faith communities make on the central issues of our time."
As the week wore on, it became clear what type of "faith communities" Labour wanted to put at the centre of its "progressive society". Denham is forcing out of his department Azhar Ali, an adviser from the heart of the Labour movement (he was once the Labour leader of Pendle council). Ali's crime was that he opposed Islamism while advising Tony Blair, Ruth Kelly and Hazel Blears. After Daud Abdullah, the deputy general secretary of the Muslim Council of Britain, signed a declaration advocating attacks on the Royal Navy if Gordon Brown sent ships to impose an arms blockade on Gaza, Ali told his comrades to cut all links. He might have said that a centre-left party should never have had links with the MCB in the first place. It contains supporters of the Arab Muslim Brotherhood and the south Asian Jamaat-e-Islami. Arab liberals know the Brotherhood to be the enemy of every enlightened value they hold, while their Bangladeshi equivalents regard Jamaat in the same way most decent citizens regard the BNP, only worse because Jamaat murderers collaborated in the Pakistani army's crimes during the Bangladeshi war of independence.
That brief moment of principled politics is over. There's talk of the government giving the MCB's Sir Iqbal "death perhaps is a bit too easy for Salman Rushdie" Sacranie a peerage. Meanwhile, ministers are about to cut financial support for Sufi Muslims who, like the majority of Britain's Muslims, Sunni or Shia, are not represented by the MCB. The fix is in and Islamists are all over Whitehall again. Denham is entertaining Inayat Bunglawala of the MCB, who gave a taste of the "progressive" policies Labour is encouraging when he wrote an article defending Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, and a preacher who recommends wife-beating, genital mutilation of girls and the murder of apostates and homosexuals. Earlier this year, the sheikh said of Adolf Hitler's massacre's of the Jews: "This was divine punishment for them. Allah willing, the next time will be at the hand of the believers." Astute outsiders look at people who were on the 20th-century left and notice that they have gone from calling themselves "socialists" to "social democrats" to "third wayers" to "progressives" in rapid succession. They might have wondered what the new "progressive" label means. Now they know.
Over at the Department for Children, Schools and Families, Ed Balls is as keen on appeasing the churches as Denham is on appeasing radical Islam. Last week, the National Secular Society (of which I am a patron) described how Labour allowed faith schools to reject applications from non-religious teachers solely on the grounds that they doubted the presence of supernatural beings or worshipped the wrong supernatural being. The rebuttal Balls's department issued was so vituperative and inaccurate that civil servants had to take the virtually unheard-of step of withdrawing it and thus tacitly acknowledge the truth of the secularists' claim that the only people New Labour allowed employers to discriminate against were atheists and sceptics. You don't need to be a political tactician to understand Labour's dog-whistle politics. Balls is playing both sides by alleging that the Tories would bring creationism to the classroom while doing nothing to restrict religious control of schools. At the Department for Communities, real power does not rest with the ineffective John Denham, but Shahid Malik, his deputy, who perhaps hopes that appeasing Jamaat and the Brotherhood will help him keep the core vote in his Dewsbury seat and enable a few other desperate Labour MPs to survive a potential Tory landslide as well.
No minister, though, imagines that they will pay a political price as hundreds of thousands of "new atheists" walk away in disgust. Which is not to say that a price will not be paid, just that it will come in a coinage nobody should want to accept. Communalist politics do not always generate a liberal backlash; more often, communalism merely produces heightened communal tension. Sufis are now promising to tell Dewsbury Muslims not to vote for Malik, which is no more than he deserves. More seriously, a revival of the left's affair with Islamism can only help the BNP by convincing the white working class that their rulers hypocritically denounce racial conspiracy theories, misogyny and homophobia when they come from the followers of Nick Griffin, but not when they come from the friends of Yusuf al-Qaradawi. It is a dismal way to imagine Britain's longest period of left-wing rule ending, but perhaps it will take the BNP winning a parliamentary contest or so splitting the Labour vote that the Tories come through the middle in "safe" seats for the party to realise you cannot be a fairweather anti-fascist or part-time leftist without your "progressive society" turning to dust.
As the week wore on, it became clear what type of "faith communities" Labour wanted to put at the centre of its "progressive society". Denham is forcing out of his department Azhar Ali, an adviser from the heart of the Labour movement (he was once the Labour leader of Pendle council). Ali's crime was that he opposed Islamism while advising Tony Blair, Ruth Kelly and Hazel Blears. After Daud Abdullah, the deputy general secretary of the Muslim Council of Britain, signed a declaration advocating attacks on the Royal Navy if Gordon Brown sent ships to impose an arms blockade on Gaza, Ali told his comrades to cut all links. He might have said that a centre-left party should never have had links with the MCB in the first place. It contains supporters of the Arab Muslim Brotherhood and the south Asian Jamaat-e-Islami. Arab liberals know the Brotherhood to be the enemy of every enlightened value they hold, while their Bangladeshi equivalents regard Jamaat in the same way most decent citizens regard the BNP, only worse because Jamaat murderers collaborated in the Pakistani army's crimes during the Bangladeshi war of independence.
That brief moment of principled politics is over. There's talk of the government giving the MCB's Sir Iqbal "death perhaps is a bit too easy for Salman Rushdie" Sacranie a peerage. Meanwhile, ministers are about to cut financial support for Sufi Muslims who, like the majority of Britain's Muslims, Sunni or Shia, are not represented by the MCB. The fix is in and Islamists are all over Whitehall again. Denham is entertaining Inayat Bunglawala of the MCB, who gave a taste of the "progressive" policies Labour is encouraging when he wrote an article defending Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, and a preacher who recommends wife-beating, genital mutilation of girls and the murder of apostates and homosexuals. Earlier this year, the sheikh said of Adolf Hitler's massacre's of the Jews: "This was divine punishment for them. Allah willing, the next time will be at the hand of the believers." Astute outsiders look at people who were on the 20th-century left and notice that they have gone from calling themselves "socialists" to "social democrats" to "third wayers" to "progressives" in rapid succession. They might have wondered what the new "progressive" label means. Now they know.
Over at the Department for Children, Schools and Families, Ed Balls is as keen on appeasing the churches as Denham is on appeasing radical Islam. Last week, the National Secular Society (of which I am a patron) described how Labour allowed faith schools to reject applications from non-religious teachers solely on the grounds that they doubted the presence of supernatural beings or worshipped the wrong supernatural being. The rebuttal Balls's department issued was so vituperative and inaccurate that civil servants had to take the virtually unheard-of step of withdrawing it and thus tacitly acknowledge the truth of the secularists' claim that the only people New Labour allowed employers to discriminate against were atheists and sceptics. You don't need to be a political tactician to understand Labour's dog-whistle politics. Balls is playing both sides by alleging that the Tories would bring creationism to the classroom while doing nothing to restrict religious control of schools. At the Department for Communities, real power does not rest with the ineffective John Denham, but Shahid Malik, his deputy, who perhaps hopes that appeasing Jamaat and the Brotherhood will help him keep the core vote in his Dewsbury seat and enable a few other desperate Labour MPs to survive a potential Tory landslide as well.
No minister, though, imagines that they will pay a political price as hundreds of thousands of "new atheists" walk away in disgust. Which is not to say that a price will not be paid, just that it will come in a coinage nobody should want to accept. Communalist politics do not always generate a liberal backlash; more often, communalism merely produces heightened communal tension. Sufis are now promising to tell Dewsbury Muslims not to vote for Malik, which is no more than he deserves. More seriously, a revival of the left's affair with Islamism can only help the BNP by convincing the white working class that their rulers hypocritically denounce racial conspiracy theories, misogyny and homophobia when they come from the followers of Nick Griffin, but not when they come from the friends of Yusuf al-Qaradawi. It is a dismal way to imagine Britain's longest period of left-wing rule ending, but perhaps it will take the BNP winning a parliamentary contest or so splitting the Labour vote that the Tories come through the middle in "safe" seats for the party to realise you cannot be a fairweather anti-fascist or part-time leftist without your "progressive society" turning to dust.
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