Oliver Kamm

What's Left is right

This post appears on The Guardian's "Comment is Free" site.

Nick Cohen's book What's Left? is not centrally about a pro-totalitarian and anti-American fringe. To those who have read the book, this ought to be a truism. One person who hasn't, the former Liberal MP Michael Meadowcroft, querulously maintained in a letter to The Observer that the anti-Americanism Cohen skewers is confined to a "tiny minority of those who seek alternative ways of achieving world peace from the appalling judgment that led to the invasion of Iraq".

Among respectful reviewers, Peter Oborne complains that Cohen's "thesis simply does not begin to apply to the decent and honourable left-wing men and women who opposed the war".

There are certainly memorable vignettes in the book about that part of the left that requires from its adherents self-abasement as well as the abnegation of critical faculties. Cohen has found the notorious pamphlet written by Eric Hobsbawm and Raymond Williams in support of Stalin's invasion of Finland. He gives a brief history of the Workers' Revolutionary Party under the leadership of the thuggish, bonehead rapist Gerry Healy. He recounts the libels perpetrated by an obscure far-left/libertarian sect against ITN journalists reporting honestly and accurately on the Bosnian war. But if you maintain that these are isolated cases confined to an ideological extreme, you miss Cohen's thesis.

In the last century, material betterment and the steady diminution of discrimination against blacks, women and homosexuals have advanced progressive goals. Much of the left has yet to come to terms with this achievement. At the extreme, some who were once thought of as being on the left have adopted the language and outlook of the right.

The alliance of Islamists and Leninists that makes up the Respect coalition is not a dalliance born of opportunism. It reflects an extraordinary process in which part of the left has ended up arguing for what by any objective standards are reactionary positions: promotion of religious obscurantism in place of secularism; segregation of the sexes at public events; abridgement of free speech in deference to the sensibilities of those who claim themselves victims of the phantasm of "Islamophobia"; and most pernicious, the resurrection in political debate of some highly traditional motifs of antisemitic conspiracy theory.

This is a bizarre ideological metamorphosis, all right; but it is rarely stated as such. And in a less bleakly comic - so more plausible - form, the assumptions of what counts as a progressive politics subtly shift.

Last week on this site Agnès Poirier eloquently recounted her reasons for pulling out of a conference, organised under the auspices of the London Mayor, on the theme of the "Clash of Civilisations". The conference was an obviously loaded and tendentious exposition of multiculturalism (though regrettably it wasn't quite as obvious in advance to me, so I accepted an invitation to speak at it).

Quite apart from the subject matter, it was unremarked upon, and to the organisers clearly unexceptionable, that segregated "prayer rooms" were among the facilities provided - under the patronage of a left-wing municipal politician. This is a type of politics that elevates the demands of group identities - or rather, lobbyists for them - over the notion of a common citizenship with equal rights under law. The blight of identity politics is now a commonplace feature of the left, well beyond the ranks of the supporters of George Galloway.

In foreign affairs, the principle of humanitarian intervention on behalf of captive peoples under despotism has been catastrophically compromised by the culpable failures of the Bush administration in the Iraq war. The near uniform response of liberals, however, has been to welcome the proposals of James Baker and Lee Hamilton's Iraq Study Group.

These can be summarised as aiming for a stable balance of power in the region through friendliness with Iraq's despotic neighbours. The failure of that sort of misnamed "realism" may be gauged from the fact that when Mr Baker pursued such a policy in government its embrace extended as far as Saddam Hussein himself.

The left, with few exceptions, seems not so much content as insouciant at the political damage sustained by an approach that in the 1990s rebuffed the genocidal aggression of Slobodan Milosevic, preserved Sierra Leone from the vicious rule of private armies, and overthrew theocratic barbarism in Afghanistan.

We on the left had, and retain, a responsibility to stand with those whose only plausible prospect of liberation is intervention by western democracies. That responsibility is not, and never has been, adequately discharged by the solipsistic insistence that the cause of regime change is "not in my name".

Liberal interventionism is not a "trick", as Edward Pearce - voluble campaigner against the reversal of Saddam's annexation of Kuwait in 1990-91 - writes. It was an ideological mainstay of British social democracy and American liberalism in the late 1940s, when President Truman declared that "totalitarian regimes imposed on free peoples, by direct or indirect aggression, undermine the foundations of international peace and hence the security of the United States".

Isolationists of both wings of politics have never understood this connection. Autocracies seek enemies, as their own justification for existence. A better left would accept that role, if not with a portentous sense of historical obligation then at least with relish.

Nick Cohen's book (disclosure: the author is a friend, and I appear in the acknowledgements) has an exotic cast of characters. But, reader, it is also about you.

Multiculturalism, right and left

There is an excellent piece by the political and cultural commentator Agnès Poirier on the Guardian's Comment is Free site on the dilemmas of multiculturalism. Agnès is referring specifically to the conference held by Ken Livingstone last weekend purporting to discuss the thesis of the "Clash of Civilisations". She says:

There is something rotten in Ken Livingstone's political agenda. His multiculturalism debate, which took place last Saturday in London, was so misconceived and biased that, unlike Inayat Bunglawala [of the Muslim Council of Britain, whom I debated at the same event - OK], I felt I had no other option than to pull out.

Her argument is spirited and her observations acute. Note in particular her conclusion:

Last thing, at the end of the programme, there was a mention of facilities "available during the day": a crèche (great, that's always handy), a "female prayer room" and "a male prayer room". The Catholics not segregating between men and women, I guess these rooms weren't made for them. The Orthodox Jews do segregate according to gender but there wouldn't be any since the conference was organised during Shabbat. So what? Were these prayer rooms only for devout Muslims? And is it Ken Livingstone's idea of multiculturalism, one that acknowledges and condones segregation? Perhaps, you now see the point of French republicanism: don't give in to any specific religious demands. And let everybody go down the café if they want a change of scenery.

As some comments beneath her article cite me as a counterexample of a speaker unsympathetic to Livingstone's political premises yet who turned up to argue the case at the conference, I should say that I entirely agree with Agnès Poirier's observations. I consider the event was not only misconceived but also illegitimate. It presented a tendentious misreading of an admittedly deeply flawed political thesis as a matter of municipal responsibility in a great cosmopolitan capital city. I still can't quite credit that it was only when I was physically on the platform of the session preposterously entitled "Democratic solutions for the Middle East" that I fully realised that the interests of the conference's organisers and many of its attendees were not with the development of civil society in that turbulent and predominantly autocratic region, let alone with how municipal government in London might contribute to that end, but with certain familiar preconceptions about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Another speaker at the conference, Martin Bright of the New Statesman, writing on his blog reaches similar conclusions to mine: "The conference was entirely misleading in its very conception: ostensibly all-embracing and generous, but, in fact, designed to set people against each other. I went home with a feeling of delayed shellshock."

One of the reasons I identify with the political Left in spite of everything is its traditional adherence to secularism and the notion of a common humanity that supersedes group identities. (I concede that I also count myself on the Left for the pragmatic but negative reason of not wishing to grant Mr Livingstone and those who think like him a proprietary claim to that label.) It is almost refreshing - or at least stabilising - in these circumstances to find that the traditional Right remains receptive to comparable or worse inflammatory nonsense on culture and religion. Take, for example, a demagogue called Dinesh D'Souza, a Fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University (where one of my political heroes, the pragmatist philosopher and social democrat Sidney Hook, held a similar position in the last decade of his long and distinguished life).

I have read two books by D'Souza, who is a prolific author. One is a hagiography of Ronald Reagan, which as a discussion of the often contradictory and idiosyncratic policies of Reagan as President is worthless. (As a point of comparison, read the important and original studies by John Sloan, The Reagan Effect: Economics and Presidential Leadership, 1999, and Beth Fischer, The Reagan Reversal: Foreign Policy and the End of the Cold War, 1997.) The other is a disgraceful work called The End of Racism, which comprises reams of assertions on the supposed pathologies of black Americans and a candid judgement that the Civil Rights Act ought never to have been passed.

D'Souza has just produced another book, called The Enemy At Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11. Seriously. No, I haven't read the book, and no, I won't be doing so. There's an interview with the author in the conservative National Review, which is quite enough for me. D'Souza's thesis might almost be entitled, in emulation of so much tosh published after 9/11 in newspapers that are closer - geographically and ideologically speaking - to home than is National Review, "Why do they hate us?" Here is D'Souza's considered judgement:

Why did the guys who did it, do it? Surely five years after 9/11, it’s reasonable to ask this question. And both the Right and the Left have been operating under illusions. The radical Muslims are against modernity and science and democracy. The radical Muslims are upset because of colonialism and the Crusades. It’s all nonsense. That’s not what the leading thinkers of radical Islam say. And Bin Laden’s own views are quite different. In his Letter to America, issued shortly after 9/11, he said that America is the fount of global atheism and it is imposing its morally depraved values on the world. So Muslims must rise up in defensive jihad against America because their religion and their values are under attack. This aspect of Bin Laden’s critique has been totally ignored, and it’s one that resonates with a lot of traditional Muslims and traditional people around the world. A second point is that unlike [the bonehead Baptist Rev. Jerry] Falwell I don’t think “America” is to blame. Muslims in Indonesia and Egypt and Pakistan don’t see “America,” they see the face of American popular culture that is projected by our television and movies and music. They see the dimension of America that in their view corrupts the innocence of children, and undermines the family, and promotes homosexuality as a normal way of life. In fact, this is the America of the cultural Left. What the Left considers “liberating,” much of the world considers a scandalous assault on modesty and decency.

So let's have a return to modesty and decency in deference to the feelings of those who might otherwise ally with movements that declare holy war on us. I could scarcely believe what I was reading. Expounded at book-length, D'Souza's argument is still apparently a farrago of nonsense, judging by Alan Wolfe's review in the New York Times:

At one point in “The Enemy at Home,” D’Souza appeals to “decent liberals and Democrats” to join him in rejecting the American left. Although he does not name me as one of them, I sense he is appealing to people like me because I write for The New Republic, a liberal magazine that distances itself from leftism. So let this “decent” liberal make perfectly clear how thoroughly indecent Dinesh D’Souza is. Like his hero Joe McCarthy, he has no sense of shame. He is a childish thinker and writer tackling subjects about which he knows little to make arguments that reek of political extremism. His book is a national disgrace, a sorry example of a publishing culture more concerned with the sensational than the sensible. People on the left, especially those who have been subjects of D’Souza’s previous books, will shrug their shoulders at his latest screed. I look forward to the reaction from decent conservatives and Republicans who will, if they have any sense of honor, distance themselves, quickly and cleanly, from the Rishwain research scholar at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

Unlike D'Souza, I take immense pride in the offence and provocation that my country, its culture and its godlessness cause those who value "modesty and decency". I celebrate our commitment to artistic self-expression, sexual equality, the separation of religious and civil authority, and what D'Souza terms the promotion of homosexuality as a normal way of life. To those "traditional Muslims and traditional people around the world" who find this offensive, I undertake to pay no attention whatever to the state of your injured sensibilities.

Conservatives' heroes

The Independent reports (emphasis added):

David Cameron may have reinvigorated the Conservatives and delivered a healthy string of opinion poll leads over Labour but his MPs still revere the woman who led them through the Tory glory days of the 1980s.

Although the party's youthful new leader has spent much of the past year distancing himself from the legacy of Thatcherism, the Iron Lady herself is still the most popular political hero for more than a quarter of Tory MPs, a survey of more than 150 MPs found.

Winston Churchill was the second most frequently mentioned hero among the Conservatives surveyed, with 45 per cent of the 56 Conservatives polled listing one of the two former prime ministers.

By contrast, the poll by Communicate Research found Mr Cameron was mentioned as a hero by only one Conservative MP - one Tory even listed Tony Blair as his political idol.

Did you seriously think there would be any others, Michael, and how inconspicuous did you expect to be?

Livingstone's follies

Last week the Bagehot column The Economist gave a balanced profile of Ken Livingstone. Bagehot commented:

Unusually for a city mayor, Mr Livingstone conducts his own foreign policy. This weekend he will host a conference entitled “A World Civilisation or a Clash of Civilisations”. It will ponder such issues as “counter-terrorism and torture”, “democratic solutions for the Middle East” (Mr Livingstone looks forward to seeing the Saudi royal family “swinging from lamp posts”) and whether there is such a thing as “progressive colonialism”.

To say Livingstone's approach to municipal administration is unusual is to understate it. Using public office for the promotion of his own foreign policy views would be an improper use of public revenues in any event, but Livingstone's particular interventions are a liability to political debate and community relations in London. I wrote a short piece for The Times about this a fortnight ago, referring to Livingstone's conference “A World Civilisation or a Clash of Civilisations”. The conference took place this weekend. The principal event was a debate in the morning between Livingstone and the American neoconservative Daniel Pipes. The seconders were respectively Salma Yaqoob of the Respect "Coalition" and Douglas Murray of the Social Affairs Unit. There is an account of that debate here, which from my recollection gives an accurate recitation of the arguments of each participant.

The first session I spoke in was entitled "Enlightenment values and modern society". The other speakers were Simon Fletcher, who is Livingstone's chief of staff and, I believe, a member of the Socialist Alliance; Linda Bellos, the former leader of Lambeth Council and a lesbian activist; and Inayat Bunglawala, of the Muslim Council of Britain. This roughly is what I said.

By Enlightenment values we must first say which Enlightenment we refer to. I use the concept to include the rule of law, religious liberty and free expression. This is a rough approximation. The rule of law greatly antedates the Enlightenment, and has indeed at various times - as in the ancien regime - been opposed to it. Moreover, the version of Enlightenment values deriving from the French Revolution - contemptuous of tradition and of religion - is different from that of the Glorious Revolution and the American Declaration of Independence. The tradition of Locke and Montesquieu was aware of the destructive potential of untrammelled reason (a prophetic analysis of which may be found also in Edmund Burke's Vindication of Natural Society of 1757).

To my mind the decisive document of the Enlightenment is neither the Declaration of Independence nor the Déclaration des Droits de l'homme et du citoyen, but Thomas Jefferson's Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, which established that there be no religious test for public office. Religious adherence, or the absence of it, was a matter of personal conscience belonging to the private sphere. The corollary is that children of the Enlightenment are politically indifferent to those who are religiously observant, yet resistant to those who claim to know the will of God and wish to hasten it by legislation or by force.

I make no confident predictions of the resilience of Enlightenment values, largely because the Enlightenment itself is so recent and contingent a development. Its spread in the 17th and 18th centuries was to a large extent bound up with the fortunes of Protestantism. The Enlightenment's advocates in England, Scotland and America were rightly perceived to be the opponents of Papist superstition, but they were also (and much less widely recognised as) deriders of the notion of the inerrancy of Scripture. Unfortunately the attractions of religion and nationalism commonly press against the notions of a common humanity, and religious and political liberty.

Among the forces threatening Enlightenment values in modern society, some are more salient than others. The Roman Catholic Church, even since the Second Vatican Council, remains obdurate on issues of reproductive freedom and the rights of homosexuals - on which I am at one with the campaigner Linda Bellos. Yet the Vatican is not the monolithic influence often feared by secularists. The widespread lay response to Pope Paul VI's 1968 encylical Humanae Vitae, forbidding contraception including the pill, has been simply to ignore it - and quite right too. I am more concerned at the threat to Enlightenment values posed by one particular religious source - a theocratic one, proclaiming holy war against Jews, Christians and Western civilisation - and certain secular ones.

The theocratic one needs no further explanation, as we know its destructive power and ought to anticipate its destructive potential. Among the secular currents are those that proclaim loyalty to group identities as more important than common citizenship under law. This is the premise of the apparently benign notion that groups have the right to protection from aspects of the modern world that they find offensive, and a call on the compassion of others to that end. That is a terrible principle, and lethal to liberty. The retreat it implies is evident still more in a curious political convergence between the isolationist Right with elements of the multiculturalist Left. On this point I remarked on the embrace - literal in some cases - of parts of the Left with Islamist militancy, Hezbollah and other reactionary causes. I also recommended to the audience - and do now to my readers - Nick Cohen's new book, What's Left?, which discusses this conundrum at length. (You can read extracts from the book in yesterday's Observer.) Against such tendencies, I urged a countervailing militancy. I also commented on the singular fact that the Mayor of London had put on a conference, with an explicit reference to a celebrated book by the political scientist Samuel Huntington, while plainly not understanding the book's thesis. Huntington is an opponent of Western universalism, which he believes is a threat to peace.

It would be fair to say that the other panellists were sceptical of my comments. Linda Bellos shouted that we should engage with other people instead of condemning, while Inayat Bunglawala declared - in answer to a question from the floor - that there had been "no need for" the Tehran Holocaust denial conference even with the provocation of the Danish cartoons affair. I said, a little more forcefully than I'd intended, that this comment alone disqualified Mr Bunglawala from being taken seriously in matters of community relations. The objection to Holocaust denial is not that it is "offensive" - a quality about which a free society should be indifferent - but that it is false, and may be consistently advanced only by fraud.

The second session I addressed was the one entitled "Democratic solutions for the Middle East". In my comments I gave a brief account of the progress - and generally decline - of liberalising tendencies through the region over the past two decades or so. I dispute the notion of Arab exceptionalism. There are quite as many autocratic developments in the states of the former Soviet Union, and in Asia, while movements in Arab politics in the 20th century often ran in close parallel with those in other regions. Pan-Arabism was allied to the Non-Aligned movement, and Baathism was closely modelled on European fascism. But I am not hopeful of either widespread political reform in the region - invoking a phrase of Fouad Ajami, I said there was possibly an autumn of the autocrats but no sign of a Prague spring - or the short-term prospects for a negotiated two-state territorial settlement in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The tenor of the discussion from the platform and particularly from the floor turned out, however, to be scarcely at all about the Middle East but rather about a particular country within the region, whose identity you will guess immediately and discussion about which took a predictable form. (I should add that one of my fellow panellists, Karma Nabulsi, a former PLO representative, is a weighty political and academic figure, whose arguments were cogent and demanded a careful hearing.) One other speaker at the conference told me that, having arranged child care for the day, he was in effect paying to be abused. I know what the comrade meant.

Foreign policy last week

Sorry again for the lack of posts in the past week. Here are some issues from last week.

I argued with the writer Ziauddin Sardar on Sky News about US-UK strategy for Iraq. The most significant feature of President Bush's proposals for increased troop deployments in Iraq seemed to me the implicit but clear repudiation of the Baker-Hamilton proposals. Instead of incremental disengagement allied to diplomatic openings with Iran and Syria, US strategy appears to be to reinforce existing troops and provide security for Iraqis in and around Baghdad. I welcome the rejection of the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group and condemn the criticisms of US strategy by the Shadow Foreign Secretary William Hague. Any lasting political resolution of the conflict in Iraq requires that the constitutional government of Iraq have as close as possible a monopoly of the means of violence. It is flatly untrue (though Sardar argued it) that US troops are a cause of violence. There is a great deal of evidence that they are trusted by Iraqis to provide impartial security against rival terrorist groups. A political solution depends on establishing security first, which in turn requires that US and UK forces inflict an unmistakable battlefield defeat on the forces of Baathism and theocratic fanaticism.

Tony Blair's speech on Friday arguing for an interventionist foreign policy was, in my view, excellent. The greatest threat from US policy towards the world is not an excess of intervention but that there is too little of it, too late. There are few issues in international affairs that would not benefit from greater US involvement. In a BBC interview I tried to give some background to the PM's views, in particular citing his Chicago speech of 1999. The belated international response to the aggression of Slobodan Milosevic was a warning of how indifference can encourage atavistic and genocidal forces. In that speech, the PM was already indicating, when George W. Bush was a presidential hopeful advocating traditional conservative realism, the need to confront Saddam Hussein. (Also see an excellent piece by John Rentoul in the Independent on Sunday.)

The Guardian ran a notably hagiographic article about the former CIA officer Philip Agee, who had "blow[n] the whistle on the dirty tactics of his CIA bosses in the 70s". Agee's was a briefly fashionable cause for civil libertarian opinion in 1976, when the Labour Home Secretary, Merlyn Rees, deported him on grounds of national security - entirely justifiably. You wouldn't know this from the Guardian profile, written by Duncan Campbell, but Agee was named in The Mitrokhin Archive, a collection of KGB documents smuggled to the West by the late Vasili Mitrokhin and published under the joint authorship of Mitrokhin and the historian Christopher Andrew in 1999. According to Andrew and Mitrokhin (p. 300):"Agee became in effect the CIA's first defector. In 1973 he approached the KGB residency in Mexico City and offered what the head of the FCD's Counter-Intelligence Directorate, Oleg Kalugin, called 'reams of information about CIA operations'. " Extraordinarily the suspicious KGB resident turned Agee away. According to Kalugin, Agee then went to the Cubans, who welcomed him and willingly shared Agee's information.

Henry Kissinger, George Shultz and others called for "the creation of 'a world without nuclear weapons'", reported the International Herald Tribune. Elder statesmen are prone to calls for worldwide nuclear abolition (the Canberra Commission report of 1996, chaired by Richard Butler, was an earlier exposition of the same theme), but it’s a terrible idea whether it comes from former Senator (and senior Democratic thinker on security) Sam Nunn or Bruce Kent of CND. Even if you disregard the practical difficulties of creating an obtrusive and effective system of verification that nuclear states have disarmed, you're faced with the brute improbability that a world nominally without nuclear weapons would be a safer world. In reality it would be a world in which nuclear weapons would be constantly about to be reinvented, and in which there would be an incentive for states that feared the deployment of clandestine nuclear devices by an adversary to launch a pre-emptive strike. In practice, a system of deterrence and collective security is likely to be far less risky. Worldwide nuclear disarmament requires the utopian prospect of the abolition of the nation state.

Tony Blair's legacy

Tony Blair defends his foreign policies in a speech in Plymouth today. The BBC reports:

Tony Blair has said his foreign policy is "controversial" but his approach of military intervention must continue after he has stepped down. In a major speech, he said the "war on terror" may last a generation but to retreat would be a "catastrophe". And Britain must be ready to fight wars as well as keep the peace.

I will be on BBC News 24 at 9.00pm this evening to explain the background to the PM's thinking on foreign policy, and say what I thought of the speech.

Apologies

Sorry for the absence of posts this week, owing to work. I hope things will be back to normal in a few days, and I'll try to catch up on the main stories of this week.

I'm on Sky News at 9.00pm this evening to debate US-UK policy for Iraq.

Caliban's return

The Observer carries an article by one Jonah Albert, who asks rhetorically: "Where are the black visitors in my gallery?" His gallery is, it turns out, our gallery: the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square, where Mr Albert is a curatorial fellow. He writes:

The Inspire scheme, which I am part of, was initiated by the Arts Council two years ago in an attempt to get more black and Asian people into curatorial positions in London and help rectify the imbalance. Let's face it; there are very few from black or ethnic minority backgrounds - they account for less than 5 per cent of full-time curatorial staff....

An obvious culprit hides in the nature of the National Gallery's collection: Western European painting from 1200 to the turn of 19th century was the remit it was given when it was established in the early 19th century. Other institutions would collect and display Eastern and African Art; the National Gallery was set up to focus on old master paintings.

To the minds of those who choose not to engage with the place, it's little more than the work of some dead men - well, mainly dead white men.

I greatly desire a full integration of black and Asian British into all fields of national life. It is a pity that on the evidence of this article there is one black British man too many in the field of arts administration, namely Mr Albert, who should immediately be relieved of his responsibilities on the grounds that he has no idea what the arts are for. His incomprehension is merely compounded by this truism:

You don't need a black face in a painting for it to hold stories relevant to black people. The paintings in the National Gallery deal with major life themes: love, loss, death, jealousy, betrayal, war, peace, power and many more ideas, all of which are just as relevant to black people as anyone else.

The pedagogic power of art lies not in its being "relevant" - though it is obviously, and trivially, true that the subjects cited by Mr Albert are of universal rather than parochial significance - but in its broadening our experience and appreciation of enduring human concerns. Race and racism are important themes in human history, and some great artists and writers have illuminated them. (All my readers will know Othello. Many may not know a magnificent play by the writer of the German Enlightenment Gotthold Ephraim Lessing called Nathan der Weise, or Nathan the Wise. It is, in European literature, one of the great attacks on racism.) But they remain nonetheless a partial way of approaching art.

Albert cites "the buried story" behind portraits in the National Gallery - the history of slavery and colonial plantations. The history is important in itself, but to invoke it as the reason for being interested in paintings is to diminish the content of art. It may be interesting background, and the paintings themselves may tell us something about that history; but to reduce your artistic appreciation to one issue is merely an indication that Albert isn't interested in art to start with.

Albert states: "If that history is not enough to entice minorities into our museums, there are all the other issues which affect attendance - class, education, the immigrant mentality, employment status." All the other issues? How can you be a curatorial fellow of one of the greatest art galleries in the world and say nothing about the enjoyment and elevation that art provides? How can you have any role connected with arts administration and not regard the love of art as a sufficient - or even a possible - reason for looking at paintings? In my view, you can't or at least shouldn't. If Jonah Albert is representative of the Arts Council's "Inspire" scheme, then the Council should put a stop to it with alacrity. (You can read more about the programme in this article from Time Out.) In any event, Mr Albert's article is more than reason enough for the Council and the National Gallery to dispense with his services.

Incitement to crime

The BBC reports:

A British Muslim has been found guilty of soliciting murder during a London rally against cartoons satirising the Prophet Muhammad. Umran Javed 27, of Birmingham, was also convicted of stirring up racial hatred by a jury at the Old Bailey.

Javed told a crowd of hundreds at the February 2006 protest: "Bomb, bomb Denmark, bomb, bomb USA."

He had claimed the chants against the two countries were "just slogans" and that he regretted saying them.

Remanding him in custody, Judge Brian Barker said he would not pass sentence until several other trials relating to the protest had concluded - expected to be in April. The maximum penalty for soliciting murder is life in prison.

I very much welcome this judgement, and I can anticipate with a reasonable degree of confidence that we shall hear somewhere an objection that is intended to show up the hypocrisy of us near-absolutists on free speech. It will be something along these lines. While Umran Javed's remarks may have offended many, was he not exercising a right to free speech that liberals should defend? After all, we liberals strongly defended the publication of the Danish cartoons, which deeply offended many millions of Muslims and not merely - as in Javed's case - a few passers-by. Does this judgement not show the hypocrisy of Western liberalism, and the Islamophobic character of British justice?

No. Or to put it another way: pah. I do and did defend the publication of the Danish cartoons, and I condemn the decision of British newspapers not to publish them. I wrote at the time:

The cartoons are indifferent, crude and unfunny, and ought not to have found editorial space when submitted. Now that they have caused widespread offence, it is imperative that they be widely published and circulated. The defence of a free society is the defence of its procedures, not its output.

Umran Javed has been found guilty not of being "offensive" but of incitement to crime. On that point, I insist that a liberal society needs to be intolerant. It depends on context. Inciting an Islamist rally outside the embassy of a country whose embassies elsewhere have already been violated was an act of demagoguery that might easily have procured murderous consequences. I wrote a post, in another context, with a view applicable to this issue:

The legitimation of political violence is not just a matter of opinion; those who hear it should be clear on what it represents; those who indulge in it should be aware of the costs of free speech. If the government is seriously going to press for expansive legislation cracking down on incitement to terrorism, then it should strive manfully to resist the temptation to be cautious.

The British criminal justice system, I am pleased to see, has some spine to it. I hope Javed receives a stiff exemplary sentence beyond his greatest fears.

Chomsky on Palestine & Israel

Noam Chomsky commented last week on the Iraq Survey Group report; you can find his interview here. This passage, in which Chomsky gives his view on the report's recommendations concerning the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, particularly caught my eye:

Interviewer: The report points at the connectedness of the Iraq crisis with the Arab-Israeli conflict, recommending a more spirited US role regarding the latter. What are the chances that this will happen?

Chomsky: The Report refers to Bush's "commitment to a two-state solution," failing to mention that Bush rejects this long-standing international consensus even more strongly than his predecessors, who, with only occasional departures, have blocked it (with Israel) for 30 years. In Bush's version, Israel will annex valuable lands and major resources (particularly water), leaving the remnants dismembered by infrastructure project and other modalities, and imprisoned as Israel takes over the Jordan valley.

The Report calls for direct talks for Palestinians who "accept Israel's right to exist" (an absurd demand) but does not restrict Israelis to those who accept the right of a Palestinian state to exist, which would, for example, exclude Israel's Prime Minister Olmert, who received a rousing ovation in Congress when he declared that Israel's historic right to the land from Jordan to the sea is beyond question.

The proposals offer little hope for a reversal of long-standing US-Israeli rejectionism, which in fact reached its peak with Baker's endorsement of the Shamir-Peres rejection of any "additional" Palestinian state in 1989 (Jordan by implication being a Palestinian state), in response to the formal endorsement by the PLO of the international consensus.

Chomsky's depiction of the Bush administration's approach to a Palestinian state is pure rhetoric. It involves attributing to the President underlying assumptions that are not present in declared policy. It is a fact that Bush is the first President to support an independent Palestinian state. (The Reagan administration, in December 1988, initiated dialogue between the US and the PLO after Yassir Arafat declared acceptance of Israel's right to exist, but that didn't involve acceptance of a Palestinian state.) Moreover, the "version" of a settlement envisaged in the Roadmap to a Permanent Two-State Solution to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, which remains the administration's policy despite the obvious failure of its timetable, says nothing of the conditions that Chomsky asserts as Bush's view. The Roadmap instead envisages in its second phase an independent state with unspecified provisional borders, and its third and final stage a permanent status agreement in which borders will be settled.

Doubtless Chomsky believes declaratory policy is a mere feint for the real aims of the Western powers, but that is the policy nonetheless; there isn't anything else. The only apparent development is that the proposals of the Roadmap remain policy while the timetable has been extended. Reportedly, the administration is now considering a plan to declare an independent Palestinian state with provisional borders by the end of this year. To render the adminstration's policy as Chomsky does is unfalsifiable psychological speculation, which is the quality that renders his writings valueless as diplomatic history.

Chomsky does the same thing with his castigation of James Baker as Secretary of State. It is true that Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir's Peace Plan of May 1989 explicitly "oppose[d] the establishment of an additional Palestinian state in the Gaza district and in the area between Israel and Jordan". The phrase "additional Palestinian state" also, as Chomsky says, implied "additional to Jordan". It was a popular slogan of the Likud Party at the time that "Jordan is Palestine", and that view was both historically unwarranted and politically destructive. But James Baker did not "endorse" it; in his own Five-Point Plan of December 1989, this was the fourth point (emphasis added):

The United States understands that the Government of Israel will come to the dialogue on the basis of the Israeli Government's Initiative. The United States further understands that Palestinians will come to the dialogue prepared to discuss elections and the negotiating process in accordance with Israel's initiative. The United States understands, therefore, that Palestinians would be free to raise issues that relate to their opinions on how to make elections and the negotiating process succeed.

So what Chomsky presents as an endorsement of Israel's negotiating position was in fact merely an acknowledgement of what Israel's negotiating position was, coupled with a wish that negotiations with the Palestinians proceed. Baker's plan explicitly stated that those negotiations would include issues that the Palestinians regarded as essential to successful negotiations. Chomsky's account of US policy is a blatant distortion.

Finally, Chomsky regards it as an "absurd demand" to require that Palestinian interlocutors recognise Israel's right to exist. He cites by analogy "Israel's Prime Minister Olmert, who received a rousing ovation in Congress when he declared that Israel's historic right to the land from Jordan to the sea is beyond question".

Here is what Olmert said to Congress in May of last year, as transcribed in the Washington Post. It is the passage Chomsky is referring to:

For thousands of years, we Jews have been nourished and sustained by a yearning for our historic land. I, like many others, was raised with a deep conviction that the day would never come when we would have to relinquish parts of the land of our forefathers. I believed and to this day still believe in our people's eternal and historic right to this entire land.

(APPLAUSE)

And here is the passage from Olmert's speech that follows immediately:

But I also believe that dreams alone will not quiet the guns that have fired unceasingly for nearly 100 years. Dreams alone will not enable us to preserve a secure democratic Jewish state.

Jews all around the world read in this week's Torah portion, "And you will dwell in your land safely, and I will give you peace in the land, and there shall be no cause for fear, neither shall the sword cross through the promised land."

Painfully, we, the people of Israel, have learned to change our perspective.

We have to compromise in the name of peace, to give up parts of our promised land in which every hill and every valley is saturated with Jewish history and in which our heroes are buried.

We have to relinquish part of our dream to leave room for the dream of others so that all of us can enjoy a better future.

(APPLAUSE)

It makes a difference. Chomsky has taken a passage out of context in order to fabricate his conclusion. In context, Olmert is clearly stating that Israel's historic claims are superseded by the need for compromise so that the dreams of others may be realised. He does so, moreover, after a passage in which he states:

[T]he Palestinians will forever be our neighbors. They are an inseparable part of this land, as are we. Israel has not desired to rule over them, nor to oppress them. They, too, have a right for freedom and national aspirations.

I mention this because it is the context in which Olmert's listeners applauded his belief in Israel's historic national claims. Olmert had already stated that the Palestinians have a right to freedom and legitimate national claims of their own. His later assertion of his own tradition was a counterpart, or balance. That balancing of national claims, and not any supposed assertion (made up out of whole cloth by Chomsky) of territorial aggrandisement, was the reason Olmert's Congressional audience applauded that statement.

I frequently receive emails from inquirers who assert how much they admire and have been influenced by Professor Chomsky's political writings. I usually reply that Chomsky can be highly convincing in the absence of background material or exposure to reputable historical sources and scholarship. The appearance of a logical argument constructed from a range of sources, and with copious footnotes, gives an impression of mastery of the relevant material. But an impression is all it is. Once you look below the surface, and consider Chomsky's work alongside the writings of historians and other specialists in the fields he writes about, you gain a different impression.

Whatever your view, or mine, of the historical rights and wrongs in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it should be possible at least to give an accurate account of the historical positions of the parties within that dispute, and of successive US administrations. But Chomsky's account of only a week or so ago is transparently a series of fabrications. It exemplifies his status as a writer on politics and international history. Not everything Chomsky says is wrong, but the manner in which he weaves his historical account involves the suppression of relevant material, the excision of context, and sometimes invention to force a prespecified conclusion. In short, nothing Chomsky says in his political writings can be taken on trust. Whether by design or incompetence, his handling of source material is a standing affront to the notion of disinterested inquiry.