Calling the “occupation” (a term that incidentally I don’t agree with) of Jerusalem and Baghdad as “the rape of your beautiful daughters” would be pretty inflammatory in the West, but it would not mean that same thing to an Arab audience. Remember, this is in a culture where a raped daughter is not uncommonly killed by her father. Now, that particular reaction would be pretty unthinkable in our culture, and some might call it irrational, but rather it reflects a culture where the rape (or indeed adultery) of a daughter destroys the honour of her entire patrilineal family, and this honour can only be restored by blood.

George, of course, knows this, and his speech seems to me to be a direct, if coded, call for violence.

It is another peculiarity of Arab culture that this type of retaliatory violence, outside of certain semi-formal contests such as tribal raiding, can be pretty excessive and is directed against all members of the offending “tribe”. This is of course the reason that some feel that the random murder of British civilians is a justified response to British policies in Iraq when by our standards it is no such thing as we think in terms of personal responsibility.

George, knowing his audience, is deliberately calling for more of the same – terrorist violence against British civilians.

In the twisted logic of the day, George actually benefits politically from each such attack, as long as people are induced to blame Tony Blair for them. I think this context is needed to inform the debate.

Well, dsquared, a large proportion of the population of all regions are more or less incapable of serious reflection – the last election result clearly showed that that applies in spades to the US. So clearly let’s just stop anyone anywhere stirring up the great unwashed shall we? Or is that not quite what you had in mind?

Look, Galloway is an irresponsible powerseeker who I hope is never part of any government anywhere. But he pales against some irresponsible powerseekers who are in government in places that matter, and who are literally war criminals. And as it happens he has in fact pointed this latter out to some of those incapable of serious reflection. Why then don’t you direct your fire onto the more dangerous enemy?

Perhaps the reason why people are not spending all their time criticising Islam is that a) Muslim’s are a minority inside British society which is in the process of being criminalised and that b) the idea that this is a problem of a clash of civilizations rather then a political problem is the main plank of the pro-war movement.

I do not really understand what you mean by Christianity being ‘marginalised’. Perhaps you mean that less people go to church (at least in Britain, in the US things may be different). This is presumably because the church is seen as less relevent to them. If religion is seen as still relevent by other people then the reasons are not to do with the religion but the society in which they live (including in the case of British Muslims, this one). The relevent texts on this by Marx are too well known to require comment.

In any case championing secularism as a response to the war on terror assumes that the problems we face are due to an absence of secularism. If we do not believe this (and many of us in the anti-war movement do not believe this) why would we decide to respond to the war by suddenly launching a big campaign about the religious beliefs of muslims?

What about direct advocacy for a war based on deliberately misleading (if not deliberately mendacious) claims about the threat posed by WMDs? I’m worried about your use of “certainly” and “despicable” and about what tests you’d apply to determine who should be silenced and who should be allowed to speak. If you look at the blood libel, it was peddled by Christians who were certain that they were right and that their “despicable” opponents should be silenced. If Jews had tried to defend themselves and argue against the libel or against Christianity in general, they would have been prevented. IOW, the problem was power and too little speech, not too much. The problem with the Iraq war was calculated censorship of intelligence by the powerful, not Galloway’s grandstanding, and that censorship is no doubt continuing.

Hmmm. Wheeling out the metaphors. What about similes? Or really dangerous stuff like synecdoche and zeugma? I really cannot see how a speech can “force” anyone into anything, and even the apologist for censorship who wrote the above seems to accept that, or he wouldn’t have said “trying to force”. Purely on grounds of self-interest it would be very unwise to silence people like Galloway, because that WOULD be crossing a line and if he’s silenced today, it will be you silenced tomorrow.

This subject of rationality still fascinates me. The idea that there is a fight between rationality and irrationality for instance. In this case which position represents ‘rationality’ (inside the Middle East itself, unless of course they’re all completely deranged). The other idea linked to this raises tough questions about what is called ‘terrorism’. On the ‘irrationality’ analyses there is an equivilance between the ‘irrationality’ of the man who just murdered a number of people on a bus influenced by the ka’hanist ideology, and the irrationality of a man who blows up a bus influenced by the ideology of Hamas. Its a two tribes kind of thing with, thankfully, there being less irrationality on one side then the other.

I don’t buy this really. The guy who shoots people in a bus already has a state of which he has full citizenship and if he chose to could live a life with all the benifits anyone living in a capitalist democracy can expect. The guy carrying out a suicide bombing has no state and suffers resulting diminishment of life whatever choices he makes. There is no equivilance in terms of irrationality here.

Speaking of ‘irrationality’ is always and everywhere a way of removing reasons from the scene.

You mean the 1980s? Because in the 1980s where I was, quite a few people weren’t thrilled with Pan-Africanism.

Cheers.

By the way, the UK is clearly not a broken country in the relevant sense, there is no great community of British Muslims who are open to any passing fascist (or at least, no larger than the ordinary community of twisted individuals who exist at all times in all places who are twisted for reasons unrelated to the world) so over here we can afford to set the bar a lot higher and Mr Blair’s current proposed toytown authoritarianism is a god-damned disgrace. (I’ve written more about this in comments here)

I also have always thought that there is a close connection between belief in conspiracy theories and something being wrong with the world as well as the believer.

Arendt in her account of anti-semitism in Origins of Totalitarianism provides the best account of the way a twisted world can provide twisted evidence for bigotry (the evidence piling up, and up, and up).

A little more on the twisted nature of the world and a little less on the allegedly pathological subjective state of most of the population in the Middle East would perhaps be a little more helpful (especially as this seems to be backed up by little more then cliches).

No but it sometimes happens. Not everyone who is bitten by a tsetse fly gets ill, but that’s how sleeping sickness spreads.

What is your justification for assuming that they will act irrationally where other populations before them, facing similar situations, acted rationally?

It’s my subjective assessment of those bits of contemporary culture in the Islamic (not just the Arabic) world that I pick up (which might obviously be a biased sample, but it’s the only sample I have). In terms of believing things which are wildly at variance with the evidence, the Muslim world is way out in front of the Russians, Irish, etc. I don’t believe that there is any causal chain from conspiracy theories to fascism, but susceptibility to conspiracy theory is, IMO, prima facie evidence of a certain mental state which is receptive to fascism. This mental state exists all over the world (I for one would be very scared if a credible fascist movement ever got going among American blacks) but there’s a tipping point kind of effect; at some point, the paranoid style (I think that what I’m talking about is quite probably something similar to what Hofstadter was talking about) takes over. You can see this in the McCarthy era in the USA, where fascism happened to take a nonviolent form, but the psychological content of the state of that time was the same sort of thing you can see in the Middle East right now.

“Cheap shot, soru. John G made a very obvious point—we’re not supposed to think that terrorism is motivated in any way by Western violence and injustice. Rather, we’re supposed to think it’s entirely the fault of their own culture. Rational people would probably take both into account.”

Culture is a somewhat protean term and I would suggest that the idea that Islamic culture (or Arab) plays a part in the generation of the political tensions which produce political violence is as true and as false as the belief that Catholicism produces dictatorships.

In my view the proposition that Catholicism produces dictatorships is not a proposition which can be true or false. Its a bit like the King of France is bald. I would make the bold claim that political tensions which produce political violence in the middle east are not the result of cultural problems. Cultural problems are the result of political tensions and its those that we should look to.

An amazing feature of the current discourse is the way ‘clash of civilization’ rhetoric has infected every level of discussion, to the extent that people now seriously believe that the Middle East is undemocratic because of religion. Gone are all those studies of the social basis of preatorian regimes in post-colonial countries (ie the sociology of the military combined with the sociology of the facade democracies they overthrew), gone is a recognition of the way in which the cold war meant that the resulting military modernising regimes found themselves encircled and responded with further militarization, and the way in which this project failed, producing the discontent and cultural wounds now being treated with various forms of Islamism.

All of this was a common part of the discourse of not just the left but of much social science until relatively recently. The same is true of discussion of issues about alienation in British society. The idea that people wanting to seperate themselves off from the mainstream and follow obscurantist social practices is a problem which leads to suicide bombing is an equally entirely novel idea (or indeed that such desires should be the focus of social policy). I think at times of crisis there is a yearning for new frameworks which is understandable. But we should at least be a little reflective about them.