Oliver Kamm

Propagandists for barbarism

Blair and Livingstone have said the wrong thing about the Stockwell shooting, but - as you would expect - nothing can compare with the tawdry posturing of the Stop the War Coalition (proprietor: the Socialist Workers' Party). The SWP - sorry; I mean the StWC - has been holding a 'peace vigil' this evening outside Stockwell tube station. Its spokesman, John Rees, a member of the Politbureau of the SWP, manages to compound tragedy with blasphemy by declaring (emphasis added):

There can be no excuse for the police adopting a shoot to kill policy which guns down innocent people in cold blood. This is precisely the crime for which we hold the terrorists responsible.

If you wonder about that use of the word 'precisely', you'll get an insight into the peculiar philosophy of Rees and his fellow-campaigners by reading Nick Cohen's Observer column this week:

A warning arrives from the Stop the War Coalition. It wants to 'make it absolutely clear' that Germaine Lindsay, one of the suspects in the 7/7 murders in London, 'is entirely unconnected with Lindsey German, the convenor of the Stop the War Coalition. Any suggestion of any connection between these two individuals is both false and libellous.'

Of course, but how could such a terrible mistake be made? Last year, when decent members of the left were supporting the Iraqi democrats and trade unionists who were being blown to pieces by the bombers of the far right, Ms German prepared a statement which called for 'an end to the occupation [and] recognises once more the legitimacy of the struggle of Iraqis, by whatever means they find necessary, to secure such ends'. Although the 'peace' movement abhors the murder of civilians in London, it seems less queasy about the murder of civilians in Baghdad.

We're happy to make things clear.

Of all the feeble evasions I have ever heard from apologists for terrorism, the most synthetic was from the StWC when the monstrous remarks that Nick quotes came to light. The organisation protested that this explicit cheerleading for barbarism was not an official statement of policy - as if the sentiments it expressed were a minor error of impolitic drafting that anyone could have made. It was, in fact, entirely consistent with the thinking of the SWP/StWC. I have written before of the open letter written earlier this year by Alex Callinicos, Professor of Politics at York University and leading SWP ideologue, addressed to a comrade. Callinicos makes clear that he believes legitimate attacks on Iraqis encompass a very wide spectrum indeed (emphasis added):

I refuse to equate ‘the “Iraqi resistance” as a whole’ with the obscenities practised by Zarqawi. What about the other tactics that are being used – for example, road-side bombs that kill American soldiers and attacks on Iraqi recruits to the puppet regime’s army and police and on its officials, like the Governor of Baghdad, who was assassinated last week? If you condemn these in Iraq, then you must condemn similar methods that were used again and again in anti-colonial guerrilla struggles – from Ireland to Vietnam to Cyprus to Algeria to Zimbabwe. I presume that you do in fact regard these as ‘legitimate attacks’...

If you want an example of these attacks against 'legitimate targets', these 'Iraqi recruits to the puppet regime’s army and police and on its officials', consider this BBC report from a few weeks after Callinicos wrote:

At least 114 people have been killed by a massive car bomb in the worst single such incident since the US-led invasion nearly two years ago. At least 130 others were wounded in the blast in Hilla, 100km (60 miles) south of the capital, Baghdad. The car, reportedly driven by a suicide bomber, exploded near a queue of people applying for government jobs....

Footage showed pools of blood at the scene, with dozens of people helping to put body parts into blankets. Shoes and tattered clothes were piled up in a corner. "I was lined up near the medical centre, waiting for my turn for the medical exam in order to apply for work in the police," Abdullah Salih, 22, told the Associated Press.

"Suddenly I heard a very big explosion. I was thrown several metres away and I had burns in my legs and hands, then I was taken to the hospital," he said. Muhsin Hadi, 29, broke his leg in the blast. "I was lucky because I was the last person in line when the explosion took place," he told AP.

The director of the Hilla teaching hospital, Mohammed Dia, told the BBC the explosion was far worse than anything the town had experienced before. He said the number of dead was likely to rise, partly because some of the injured were in a serious condition, and partly because some of the victims had been blown to pieces.

The SWP/StWC has, let me remind you, been protesting this evening about the British police, who commit "precisely the crime for which we hold the terrorists responsible".

An unmitigated disaster

The shooting of a Brazilian national unconnected with the London bombings is an unmitigated disaster, obviously for his family and friends but also for the rest of us. Tim Hames in The Times has a perplexing monopoly, as opposed to his usual large share, of wisdom on the matter:

I am a hardliner on the War on Terror and remain a hawk on the invasion of Iraq and its aftermath. But if al-Qaeda has created an atmosphere in which an ordinary person can have five bullets pumped into him by the police, and society shrugs its shoulders, then the terrorists have already won a modest victory.

The inconsistency bordering on callousness of Scotland Yard has been breathtaking.

Me too; yes, they have; and yes, it is.

Everyone can understand that policemen have to take an immediate decision on the threat to the public from a suspected terrorist, and there can be no serious principled objection to - and from me at least, strong support for - their being prepared to shoot if they believe the lives of the public are endangered. But it is baffling - genuinely so; I can't begin to see how this terrible mistaken identification could have been made - to trail a suspect and finally see no option but to shoot dead a man who we now know was harmless and must have been scared witless. There may in fact have been reasonable (if obviously mistaken) grounds for police suspicion of Mr Menezes, but at the moment it does not look that way. If the police tailed him from Tulse Hill, did they have any grounds for regarding his behaviour as potentially threatening, and if so why did they not apprehend him before he boarded a bus or a train? Did they hear him speak? If so, were their suspicions in any way allayed or were they heightened? Or were they unable to tell, so shot anyway? (I lived in Stockwell for 12 years, and it is rare to be on Stockwell Road for more than a few minutes without hearing Portuguese spoken; you would hope that the police know this distinctive character of the area.)

This all argues for an appalling and careless failure of intelligence that must be cleared up. Mistakes do happen, and sometimes for understandable reasons - but those reasons don't protect those who have failed. Israel has a policy of finding and killing terrorists who have murdered Israeli nationals, and again - in the absence of an effective supranational system of law enforcement - I have no principled objections to this, which strikes me as a policy of strengthening deterrence to future terrorist acts. But on one occasion when a terrible mistake was made - a Moroccan-born waiter was shot in Norway by Mossad agents, mistaking him for one of the terrorists from the Munich Olympics massacre in 1972 - the rule of law had to take its course. Norway tracked down the Israelis, put them on trial and imprisoned them. That was the right thing to do despite the justice of Israel's policy and the fact that the waiter's death was a terrible mistake. In the case of Mr Menezes, there will have to be resignations at the least, and at the top.

I'm surprised that Tony Blair's normal political instincts seem to have deserted him on this. It is of course true that the police would have been criticised for failing to act if the suspect had been a terrorist, and that anyone who knows the identities of the real bombers has a duty to tell the police. But these are truisms, and a man has been needlessly killed. Ken Livingstone, coincident with an absurd and offensive comparison of Likud, a democratic party, to Hamas, a terrorist organisation, has managed to hit the wrong note on a subject that genuinely is part of his remit, namely the security of Londoners. He is strictly right to say that Mr Menezes's killing "has added another victim to the toll of deaths for which the terrorists bear responsibility", in the sense that had the terrorists not killed then Mr Menezes would be alive today. But the form of his argument is is ominously reminiscent of the 'root cause' fallacy that blames the London bombings on our overthrowing Saddam Hussein. Leaving aside the question of whether this is true (as it is in the first case, and is not in the second), it is the wrong thing to say, when by definition - for an innocent man has been killed - a terrible failure of policing has happened and it is essential that the risks of its happening again be minimised.

"Have you left no sense of decency?"

A few days after the destruction of the Twin Towers, the New Statesman ran a notorious editorial in which it asked whether the bond traders murdered at the World Trade Center had been "as innocent and as undeserving of terror as Vietnamese or Iraqi peasants". Its answer: "Well, yes and no."

There are many things that could be said of this. Jonathan Freedland wrote some of them in his Guardian column. The timing stank; the tone was gross; the hypothesis the editorialist assumed was itself, in Freedland's delicate understatement, "shaky at best". I would put it slightly differently. A man who can write such a sentiment, and at such a time, merits the question directed to Senator Joseph McCarthy by his nemesis Joseph Welch: "You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?"

That editor (Peter Wilby) has gone. His replacement, John Kampfner, has distinguished himself by giving the cover story of this week's edition to John Pilger, illustrated with a picture of a rucksack and the title "Blair's bombs". Not al-Qaeda's bombs, mind: Blair's bombs.

Pilger is Pilger: a man who identifies in the Bush administration "the Third Reich of our times", and whose career as an investigative journalist has encompassed such triumphs as 'buying' a five-year old girl in Thailand to illustrate a documentary on child labour only to find he'd been duped by a hoaxer. The responsibility for a cover describing the bombs that killed 56 people in London a fortnight ago as "Blair's" lies not with Pilger but with his editor. As a friend and broadsheet political columnist observed to me this afternoon, that cover alone requires Kampfner's resignation.

The magazine's switchboard number is +44 (0)20 7730 3444.

CND: wrong again

In the absence of much information about this afternoon's terrorist attacks in London, I'll do what most appeals to me: abusing the peace movement. Kate Hudson, the chairman of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, has this letter in The Guardian today:

The myth that the US had to drop nuclear weapons on Japan to end the second world war and thus save lives is still prevalent. Winston Churchill later asserted: "It would be a mistake to suppose that the fate of Japan was settled by the atomic bomb. Her defeat was certain before the bomb fell." The US had two main goals. One was to dominate the Far East after the war. The other was to gain advantage over the Soviet Union in the post-war settlement. This was a criminal act and a massive human catastrophe which must never be forgotten - and never repeated.

The Churchill quotation is a peculiarly offensive touch. By taking it out of context, Mrs Hudson illegitimately runs together the notions of certain Japanese defeat and imminent Japanese surrender. These were not at all the same thing in the context of the war, and in the planning of the allied war leaders.

The quotation is staple of peace movement propaganda, and we can reasonably infer that Kate Hudson has picked it up from a secondary source rather than from Churchill’s own writings. It comes from his history The Second World War, Volume 6: Triumph and Tragedy (1953), p. 559. The full quotation reads:

It would be a mistake to suppose that the fate of Japan was settled by the atomic bomb. Her defeat was certain before the bomb fell, and was brought about by overwhelming maritime power. This alone had made it possible to seize ocean bases from which to launch the final attack and force her metropolitan Army to capitulate without striking a blow.

The entire passage is about the importance of sea power in wartime. It is intended to establish Churchill’s point that control of the sea is essential for an island nation; he concludes:

We, an island Power, equally dependent on the sea, can read the lesson and understand our own fate had we failed to master the U-boats.

None of this is relevant to the question of whether the atomic bomb was necessary to force Japanese surrender. On this point, Churchill has already stated his judgement earlier in the same chapter (p. 552) when describing his response to the news of a successful American bomb test:

Up to this moment we had shaped our ideas towards an assault upon the homeland of Japan by terrific air bombing and by the invasion of very large armies. We had contemplated the desperate resistance of the Japanese fighting to the death with Samurai devotion, not only in pitched battles, but in every cave and dug-out. I had in my mind the spectacle of Okinawa island, where many thousands of Japanese, rather than surrender, had drawn up in line and destroyed themselves by hand-grenades after their leaders had solemnly performed the rite of hara-kiri. To quell the Japanese resistance man by man and conquer the country yard by yard might well require the loss of a million American lives and half that number of British – or more if we could get them there: for we were resolved to share the agony. Now all this nightmare picture had vanished.

It is dishonest of CND to cite Churchill without putting his remarks in the context of this passage. The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not a gratuitous act perpetrated against a defeated nation. Churchill believed that the atomic bomb would avoid combined American and British combat deaths of well into seven figures. We know for a fact, from recent historical research, that that was not an ex post rationalisation by Churchill writing some years after the event. It was the working assumption of the US administration for many months previously. D. M. Giangreco, of the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College analysed the contemporary documentation and published his findings in an important article, "Casualty Projections for the US Invasions of Japan, 1945-1946: Planning and Policy Implications", in the Journal of Military History in July 1997. He concluded (emphasis added):

What can be stated as fact, is that the estimate that American casualties could surpass the million mark was set in the summer of 1944 and was never changed. In the spring of 1945 various planners and senior officers quibbled over the estimate, or facets of it relating to specific operations, but the statistical possibility of a million casualties, combined with the experience of combat attrition of line infantry units in both Europe and the Pacific, had already prompted the Army and War Department manpower policy for 1945, and thus, the pace for the big jump in Selective Service inductions and expansion of the training base in the U.S. even as the war in Europe was winding down. Japan had lost its navy, and its cities were being essentially destroyed by U.S. airpower, but this was largely irrelevant to their ability to inflict casualties on American forces with the aim of forcing the U.S. into a negotiated peace.

We also know, from recent Japanese research, that US forebodings were well-grounded. Sadao Asada, in a study entitled "The Shock of the Atomic Bomb and Japan's Decision to Surrender - A Reconsideration", in Pacific Historical Review, November 1998, assessed newly-released documents about the surrender. He demonstrated that the dropping of the atomic bomb was crucial in giving leverage to those within the Japanese government who wished to sue for peace. Indeed both atomic bombs were necessary: Nagasaki demonstrated that the bombing of Hiroshima was not an isolated capability, and that America would be able to destroy Japanese society should the war continue. Only after Nagasaki were the bellicose forces within the Japanese government – the War Minister, Korechika Anami, and the Navy Chief of Staff, Soemu Toyoda – overruled and the Potsdam surrender terms accepted.

The notion that the atomic bombs were dropped for cynical reasons of US realpolitik is ahistorical. These undeniably terrible acts of warfare were undertaken for the humanitarian reason of avoiding the certainty of far greater casualties on all sides. Kate Hudson is right to describe them as a massive human catastrophe; she is grossly mistaken on every other point, particularly her casual invocation of the word "crime". If you want an indication of why I am disturbed by this, see the ease with which other peace-movement polemicists level the charge of criminality against Churchill, using the same out-of-context quotation, and where they end up.

You would expect the far-Left webzine Counterpunch (publisher of the antisemitic activist Gilad Atzmon) to be in on this. Its contributor here ("a member of the Delhi Science Forum, an anti-nuclear weapons group") clearly hasn't gone back to the primary sources either, because he gives a false page reference to the Churchill quotation, which he misconstrues as the words of “a willing accomplice to the crime, [who] has nevertheless made a frank admission". But even Counterpunch is a model of propriety compared with this case. The author ("chairperson, Nuclear Weapons Free Zone Commission", which apparently resides - where else? - in California) at least cites the single secondary source from which all but one of the numerous quotations in his article are drawn. And then he gives a set of four web links. Two of those links don’t work, and I am thus unable to assess their content. One is a book review from the web site of Lord Garden, Liberal Democrat defence spokesman, who is obviously an entirely reputable source. The remaining one (it's the first on the list) is a review of the same book (the one from which the author's quotations are filched), extracted from The Nation magazine - and posted on a notorious Holocaust-denial site. (The site is that of an organisation called CODOH, which stands for - forgive the blasphemy; I am merely reporting it - the 'Committee for Open Debate of the Holocaust'.)

I think it likely that the author and activist who has assembled those links is a naïf rather than a knave, but that scarcely alters my charge against this type of peace-movement propaganda. The movement’s denunciations of Churchill and Truman are not "revisionist history"; they read like history as it might have been written if the wrong side had won the war. I grant that the author of The Nation piece will have had no control over the use to which his words were put by a pro-Nazi organisation, but there is no excuse for a peace activist wishing to cite that material to do it by linking to such a site. That peace activists can’t tell genuine historical iconoclasm from an organised campaign of lies in the service of bigotry is disturbing indeed, and a phenomenon I shall be watching for.

"Our leader, Abdullah Ocalan"

One of the most moving sights in British politics in recent months was the appearance at the Labour Party Conference last year of an Iraqi Kurdish refugee, Shanaz Rashid. As The Times reported:

Shanaz Rashid, a member of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, pleaded for Iraq not to be deserted in its hour of need and said that she did not understand criticism of Tony Blair for toppling Saddam Hussein... Ms Rashid spent 30 years in exile in Surrey and her husband is a minister in the Iraqi interim Government. She told delegates: “Please, please do not desert us in our hour of need. Do not let the men of violence use terror to deny the Iraqi people their freedom.”

Close to tears, Ms Rashid said that her friends and relatives had died under Saddam’s rule and she had kissed the ground with joy on arriving back in Baghdad after the war. “Some of you may feel you can attack your leader over Iraq, but it is Mr Blair who has stood up to Saddam and freed my people,” she said.

“Yes, there have been difficulties. Yes, there have been mistakes, perhaps many mistakes. No, you did not find weapons of mass destruction. But for the great majority of Iraqis WMD was never the issue. We do not understand the criticism of your Prime Minister. All we wanted was to be free.”

She added: “I appeal to you all . . . to help us to build a new democratic federal Iraq that would respect the lives of human beings.”

It should be acknowledged that not everyone was as impressed with Mrs Rashid's testimony as the Labour delegates were. Here is what Socialist Worker had to say:

SHANAZ RASHID was another Iraqi trotted out by Labour’s leadership to swing the conference vote. Rashid won a standing ovation when she said, “For the great majority of Iraqis, WMD was never the issue. “We don’t understand the criticism of your prime minister. All we wanted was to be free.” Shanaz Rashid is not an “ordinary Iraqi”. She is a high-ranking member of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), which has close links with the US and supported the invasion of Iraq. She has attended the Socialist International, which includes the Labour Party, congress several times for the PUK.

There are many different political groups organising among the Kurds. Shanaz Rashid is associated with a pro-US faction. One of her relatives is married to the Iraqi deputy prime minister. Her husband, Latif Rashid, is a minister in the Iraqi government. Kurdish activist Sait Akgul told Socialist Worker, “Her appearance at the Labour Party conference is another example of Blair’s double standards. No Kurds were allowed to go to the Labour Party conference to plead the case of our leader Abdullah Ocalan, who was captured by Turkey, or for our political prisoners. Why is this woman a hero and the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) group, which has millions of supporters, described as ‘terrorist’?”

I commented at the time on this development, and have reason for recalling it now. The Socialist Workers' Party has favoured a number of reactionary causes in recent years, but this one takes the proverbial biscuit (or perhaps fruitcake). Abdullah Ocalan is not a Mandela figure; he is, as Christopher Hitchens (one of the few Western journalists to have interviewed Ocalan at length) has described him, the Pol Pot of Kurdish politics. He has a distinctive malevolence in the field of terrorism, as noted by Walter Laqueur in No End to War (2003, p. 91). Between 1994 and 1998 the PKK carried out 16 suicide-bombings. Most of the suicide-bombers (eleven in all) were young female members of the PKK with minimal political and paramilitary experience; and all but one of these were not volunteers. They had been personally selected by Ocalan to sacrifice themselves for the cause.

To the question posed by Socialist Worker's Kurdish interlocutor - "Why is ... the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) group, which has millions of supporters, described as ‘terrorist’?" (note carefully the scare quotes) - there is, I am sorry to say, a probable and topical answer. The BBC reported on Sunday:

Turkish authorities believe Kurdish PKK separatists planted Saturday's bomb on a tourist bus, said the UK ambassador. "They are virtually certain this is the PKK," Sir Peter Westmacott said.

The five people killed were Helen Bennett, of Co Durham, and Tara Whelan, 17, of Co Waterford, Ireland, and three Turkish nationals.

The PKK's responsibility for this weekend's attack remains at this stage a reported attribution, not a certainty, but it would fit with the group's record of what Human Rights Watch has called its "crimes against humanity":

[B]etween 1992 and 1995, the height of the conflict [with the Turkish authorities], Ocalan's PKK is believed to have been responsible for at least 768 extrajudicial executions, mostly of civil servants and teachers, political opponents, off-duty police officers and soldiers, and those deemed by the PKK to be "state supporters." In addition, the PKK committed numerous large-scale massacres of civilians, usually against villagers or villages that were believed to be connected with the state civil defense "village guard system." In twenty-five such massacres committed between 1992 and 1995, 360 people were killed, including thirty-nine women and seventy-six children. These actions were not committed by rogue units or commanders, but were PKK official policy.

The Socialist Workers' Party is the controlling organisation behind the Stop the War Coalition, which held a rally a couple of days ago in Russell Square purportedly "In solidarity with the families of the dead and injured". Perhaps it will also contact the families of Helen Bennett of County Durham and Tara Whelan of County Waterford to give a decent apology for misrepresenting a brutal cause.

Same old Roy, same old tosh

This comment appears in The Times today.

THE LAST harrumph sounds; the Long Sulk is ended. No longer does the portly elder statesman inveigh at the ruinous influence of his party leader. This week Lord Hattersley declared of his ideological nemesis: “It would be stupid . . . not to acknowledge that the Prime Minister has just completed the two most impressive weeks of his political career.”

So it would. Tony Blair’s diligence over the Olympics, his chairmanship of the G8 and his composure in responding to terrorism have been the stuff of leadership. Yet Lord Hattersley remains unreconciled. He insists that “the Britain that Blair wants to build has very little in common with the social democratic vision of a good society”, and believes it “self-evident that the Labour Party should be led by someone who is Labour”.

His thesis is not self-evident at all. It is an artifice for appropriating the word “Labour” for an impossibly narrow constituency: those who share Lord Hattersley’s conviction that nothing has refuted the old Croslandite programme of public spending and egalitarian redistribution. If anything is self-evident, it is that Labour should be led by someone who recognises the failures of the governments in which Hattersley served and who is resolved not to repeat the experience.

Under the last old Labour government, public spending peaked at almost 50 per cent of GDP, and marginal tax rates rose to levels that damaged incentives. Trade unions held economic power while being essentially answerable to no one. Jim Callaghan acknowledged that the option of boosting spending to stimulate employment no longer existed, and had “only worked by injecting a bigger dose of inflation into the system”.

But it took Labour many years to come to terms with the realisation that governments as well as markets fail, the need to subject the trade unions to the rule of law, and the limits of discretionary fiscal policy.

In that time Labour might have argued that deregulation and defeating union militancy had been necessary, but that the concept of public service had been overlooked; that the market is the only reasonably efficient economic producer, but that it depends for its legitimacy on the State easing the social consequences of economic change. The last thing it needed was a tested and failed programme for big government. The last thing it needs now is the advice of Lord Hattersley.

Castration of language

Fine piece by Nick Cohen in The Observer on the BBC's "castrated language which has been emptied of precise meaning". I don't usually link without comment, but I entirely agree with him and he says it better than I have done:

[T]he BBC guidelines do not authorise staff to say that 'the enemies of all mankind' have massacred commuters in London or children in Baghdad. Instead, the censors instruct: 'We should use words which specifically describe the perpetrator, such as "bomber", "attacker", "gunman", "kidnapper", "insurgent" and "militant". Our responsibility is to remain objective and report in ways that enable our audience to make their own assessment about who is doing what to whom.'

But with the exception of 'kidnapper', none of the BBC's words is specific or objective. 'Bomber', 'attacker' and 'gunman' allow no distinction between fighters who assault military targets and fighters who assault civilian targets. The leaders of the rail unions are 'militants' in the sense they will call out their members in the private rail companies whenever they can. They don't put bombs on trains. At the BBC and elsewhere, the pressure of events has pushed neutrality into euphemism and euphemism to the edge of outright falsehood.

Incidentally, I've received a lot of emails in the past few days rejecting my view that the problem with the BBC is not that it is biased. I'll run one or two this week (though keeping my correspondents' anonymity, as is my practice with all but the rudest) before leaving the subject for the time being.

"Unite Against Terror"

Let me draw your attention to a campaign called Unite Against Terror. Having signed its founding declaration, I was invited to send a short statement on why I supported it, and this is what I wrote:

Many years ago, Conor Cruise O’Brien identified an attitude he termed "unilateral liberalism". This is a stance acutely sensitive to threats to liberty arising from actions by democratic states, but curiously phlegmatic about threats to liberty from the enemies of those states.

O’Brien was alluding to attitudes to terrorism in Northern Ireland in the 1970s. But many of us on the Left can recognise a similar tendency, and worse, in the response of progressives to the atrocities of 9/11 and other acts of suicide-terrorism against established and emerging democracies. The terrorists give allegiance to a totalitarianism both with recognisable twentieth-century forebears and with a still more atavistic – literally mediaeval – character. They oppose the US and its allies not for our sins of commission and omission, but for what we exemplify: liberal political rights, pluralism, religious liberty, scientific inquiry and women’s emancipation. Their contempt for human life and disregard for the principle of non-combatant immunity stem not from despair and anger, but from nihilism.

"Unite Against Terror" expresses a tougher-minded liberalism on this central political issue of the early-21st century. More than that, it is a call for simple human decency and an insistence that human rights are indivisible.

Atzmon and his shadow

I quoted a couple of days ago remarks by the jazz musician Gilad Atzmon at the Socialist Workers’ Party’s ‘Marxism 2005’ jamboree last weekend. They’re so bizarre I’m not certain I could even summarise them: they are a bald statement of extreme political reaction. Atzmon is outraged at the notion that we have any business so much as favouring – let alone doing anything to accomplish - the overthrow of tyranny and the establishment of democracy overseas:

If Tony Blair isn’t a white supremacist how dare he is suggesting that Democracy is the right way forward for the Muslim world. How come he knows better than the Muslims what is good for them? When you come to determine other people’s lives you must believe that you know better. You must assume that you are better.

At least Atzmon had found the right audience. As I’ve pointed out before, the SWP explicitly favoured military victory for fascism in the Iraq War (evidently “daring to suggest” that democracy was not the right course for the Muslim world).

But the main contentious characteristic of Atzmon’s political agitation is, of course, his antisemitism. Since his speech at the SWP event, he has put on his web site a response to his critics entitled 1001 Lies about Gilad Atzmon - a witless title given that they aren't lies and there aren't 1001 of them. Still more predictably foolishly, they confirm precisely what it is he wishes to refute. He dismisses for example the “lie” that he is a “proponent of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion” with this response:

In fact it is the other way around. I argue that the Protocols are completely irrelevant. Zionist lobbies all over the world are manifestly engaged in global politics and international murderous tactics.

You will note that he does not say, of that notorious Czarist forgery (on whose history and place in pre-war antisemitic propaganda see Norman Cohn’s standard and evocatively-titled history Warrant for Genocide), that it is a malevolent pack of lies of catastrophic influence. He believes merely that the matter is “irrelevant”. Here is what he has said about the matter in an earlier article (On Antisemitism, 20 December 2003):

[W]e must begin to take the accusation that the Jewish people are trying to control the world very seriously. It is beyond doubt that Zionists, the most radical, racist and nationalistic Jews around, have already managed to turn America into an Israeli mission force. The world's number one super power is there to support the Jewish state's wealth and security matters. The one-sided pro-Zionist take on the Israeli¬ Palestinian conflict, the American veto against every 'anti-Israeli' UN resolution, the war against Iraq and now the militant intentions against Syria, all prove beyond doubt that it is Zionist interests that America is serving. American Jewry makes any debate on whether the 'Protocols of the elder of Zion' are an authentic document or rather a forgery irrelevant. American Jews do try to control the world, by proxy. So far they are doing pretty well for themselves at least.

So he believes that any debate (debate! As if serious historians disagreed on the matter!) over the Protocols’ authenticity is beside the point because they do, in fact accurately describe the state of modern American politics. With that, never mind the rest of his record, we can safely say “case closed”. The man is a purveyor of hoary and pernicious accusations of covert and malign Jewish influence. He is an antisemite.

So how did the audience of Marxism 2005 respond to a man who counts among his associates the Swedish neo-Nazi “Israel Shamir” and propounds a conspiracy theory that has a direct continuity with Nazi propaganda? Well, according to a sympathiser who was there (and as posted to the authors of Harry’s Place by Atzmon’s amanuensis, one Mary Rizzo):

The audience was in agreement with Mr Atzmon, demonstrating this with a round of applause. Mr Atzmon acknowledged the audience's applause and continued speaking… Mr Atzmon wrapped up his talk to be greeted with riotous clapping and cheering. He had touched us all that night.

Quite.

It is disturbing that on some sections of the ostensible Left (in fact the extreme reactionary and xenophobic Right) the language of classic antisemitism is now not only tolerated but also popular. I have written of other instances and have every apprehension that it is a subject I shall return to. That is not the reason for the remaining observation in this post, which needs to be made in any case. But the cases are symmetrical.

I am a supporter of Israel and a longstanding sympathiser with the ideas of Labour Zionism. When I started this blog a couple of years ago a friend signed me up as a contributor to a large pro-Israel site with many contributors, which invited me on her recommendation to cross-post any relevant material I might write. I have never done that, because the site declared shortly afterwards a collective policy of campaigning against the Bush administration’s Road Map, and I did not feel that was a stance I wished to align myself with. I also thought it was a needlessly sectarian position for a broad pro-Israel cause to adopt, especially given that the principles of a negotiated territorial settlement between Israel and a future pacific Palestinian state command strong support among Israelis.

But that was still within the bounds of acceptable political debate, of which there is a great deal – not all of it especially genteel – within Israel. I noticed very recently that another broad pro-Israel campaigning site, called Think-Israel (which I don’t recall ever having subscribed to but which I receive regular notification of), has gone a substantial stage further.

The magazine reproduces articles, with permission of the authors, from the English-language press and other sources. The May-June issue of this online magazine is here. If you scroll down, you see that it reproduces an article from the early 1980s by one Rabbi Meir Kahane, denouncing the removal of Jewish settlements from Sinai under the terms of the Camp David Agreement with Egypt. The analogy the site wishes to draw is with the opposition of settlers in Gaza to the current Prime Minister’s disengagement plan.

Kahane has been dead (from an assassin’s bullet) for some years, but he was a disruptive and disturbing feature of Israeli politics in the 1980s. As the Anti-Defamation League describes him:

Kahane consistently preached a radical form of Jewish nationalism which reflected racism, violence and political extremism.

Kahane’s views were and are held by a minuscule minority of the Israeli electorate, and his Kach movement comprised mainly aggressive young members of his entourage from Brooklyn. The Israeli political establishment was so horrified at his views and malign influence that the Kach movement was banned from standing in elections in 1988.

So what is an established pro-Israel magazine on the Internet doing reproducing the material of a racist bigot? I put the question to its editor, Bernice Lipkin, who suggested I was being unfair to Kahane in describing him in that way and that his article was “very appropriate”. On that point, there is little further to discuss.

I have published just a couple of pieces in the UK press about Israel (here and here). They express sympathy for Israel’s security dilemma, opposition to the campaiging groups that offer ideological apologetics for terrorism, and support for the general position of the present government: cracking down on terrorist groups, withdrawing from Gaza, and aiming for a negotiated settlement with the creation of a Palestinian state. I expect I shall write more from that standpoint. I have forbidden Dr Lipkin from reproducing anything further I may write on this subject at any time. She is one friend Israel could do without.

Dealing with nihilism

Anatole Kaletsky in The Times today makes an excellent point with an apt analogy:

It certainly did not occur to anyone after the Oklahoma bombing to apologise for the racial desegregation which had provoked the American neo-Nazis and their ideological antecedents, the Ku Klux Klan. Nobody suggested abolishing affirmative action or banning Jews from public office on the grounds that racial mixing and the prominence of Jews was angering white supremacists and acting as “a recruiting sergeant” for more neo-Nazi terrorists who might copy McVeigh.

Should the political sensitivities and religious aspirations of jihadist killers be treated with any greater respect? The answer is clearly, no.

But if a studied, contemptuous indifference is the right response to the personal motivations of Britain’s home-grown jihadists, this does not mean that public policy should do nothing in the face of their psychopathic acts. The obvious responses are the same as they were after Oklahoma — more security and surveillance and better infiltration of domestic extremist groups, which should be easier than the infiltration of foreign jihadist movements. Above all there must be a rock-solid commitment to give no quarter to any of the terrorists’ alleged grievances or ideological demands.

Morally, today’s Muslim extremists must be put exactly on a par with neo-Nazis. Their violence and hatred may be motivated by deep philosophical convictions and a genuine sense of grievance, but the same was true of Hitler. Thus the soul-searching and debate that Britain — and the rest of the modern world — must undertake about the religious sensitivities of Muslim extremists is not about how to accommodate them but how to isolate them completely from the mainstream of Muslim thinking, which is compatible with peaceful coexistence alongside other cultures in the modern world. To do this jihadism must be recognised explicitly as exactly equivalent to the neo-Nazi movement, even if it manifests itself as sincere religious belief.

Morally, Kaletsky is certainly right. Politically, I think he understates the threat by stressing the "banal backgrounds" of the suicide bombers from Leeds. Modern neo-Nazism is a minuscule and geographically-limited cause (though responsible, as in the case of Timothy McVeigh, of isolated acts of extreme violence). But in the early 1920s the National Socialist German Workers' Party was also a small group of malcontents and political chancers. By, among other factors, gross political miscalulation by a conservative movement that only after the war came to embrace liberal politics and abjure nationalism, Nazism came to be a mass force within a decade. For Islamist terrorists to be able to kill victims in the hundreds of thousands would, moreover, require no comparable mass movement and paramilitary force. As the historian Walter Laqueur states in the book I cited earlier this week, No End to War (2003, pp. 226-7):

It is only a question of time until radiological, chemical or biological weapons will be used more or less systematically by terrorist groups; the first steps in this direction have been made.... The fact that great technical difficulties exist, that many of these operations may abort, should not blind one to the fact that with every year that passes, access becomes easier and the opportunities to use these weapons greater.

Isolating Islamist fanaticism at home is essential, and requires among other things a determined intolerance of any anti-Muslim thuggery or prejudice that last week's bombings may spark. The defeat of a grotesque xenophobic campaign of the British National Party in a council by-election this week will be a small but immediate and important victory. But the home campaign is not enough. We also need to interdict the most obvious route by which terrorists might acquire a rudimentary chemical or biological capability in the future. The most obvious candidate of all would be a tyranny of sadistic brutality and a record of launching aggressive wars, sponsoring terrorism, and even using chemical weapons. That - and not the Bush administration's speculative and unconvincing claims of direct links between Saddam and al-Qaeda - was the link between 9/11 and the Iraq War.

The Stop the War Coalition (a front organisation for the Socialist Workers' Party) declared last week in its statement on the London bombings:

It is clearer than ever that the "war on terror" in which Britain has been so heavily involved has not, in fact, made the world safer from terrorism.

The Schadenfreude is indecent, but the confident historical assertion is still less justified. We cannot know at this point whether overthrowing the Taliban and Saddam Hussein has made the world safer from terrorism. But arguing that it has not requires believing that removing from the scene the main state sponsors of terrorism is, on balance, the course that the terrorists themselves would have preferred. Let us run the risk of pleasing them even further.