Oliver Kamm

After Srebrenica denial: where next?

There is vigorous debate among reasonable people on the principle of humanitarian intervention and how it has been pursued since the end of the Cold War. But there should be consensus among participants in that debate that a particular type of objection to interventionism must be discounted. This is the notion that documented depravities practised by aggressive and autocratic regimes are mere propaganda constructs of Western media. I wrote recently about an example of this sort of thing: a sustained exercise, in the current issue of the American far-left Monthly Review, in denying the magnitude of Serb atrocities in Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s.

The authors of that piece are Ed Herman and David Peterson. Peterson is just a blogger; Herman is co-author with Noam Chomsky of a tendentious work called Manufacturing Consent, which purports to develop a "propaganda model" of Western media. Herman has persistently deployed similar "analysis" with regard to the Balkan wars (see this admirable dissection of his thesis by Martin Shaw of Sussex University), and does so yet again now with Peterson: "Media coverage of the Yugoslav wars ranks among the classic cases in which early demonization as well as an underlying strong political interest led quickly to closure, with a developing narrative of good and evil participants and a crescendo of propaganda steadily reinforcing the good-evil perspective."

(Western media coverage of Milosevic's wars was in fact generally more probing and critical than commentary by certain loud polemical critics of Nato's intervention. See, for example, an extraordinary case cited by Ian Black in The Guardian - a paper whose reporting of those wars was outstanding - where John Pilger apparently manufactured factoids out of thin air.)

But in the last few days, Herman has gone a step beyond (or perhaps, below) anything I've seen from him before. He has contributed a remarkable article entitled "Genocide Inflation is the Real Human Rights Threat: Yugoslavia and Rwanda" to the Chomskyite Z Magazine. I am long familiar with Herman's preposterous insistence that "the claims of 8,000 executed [at Srebrenica in 1995] have never been verified by forensic or credible witness evidence of anything like this scale of killing" (to which I unhesitatingly say "baloney"), and won't deal with the subject here. I'll pass over, too, his comparisons of Israel to Nazi Germany, his reference to "the power of Western Jewish elites and lobbying operations", and his assertion that "by featuring Jewish victimization these campaigns [against Holocaust denial] build support for Israel and hence contribute to the astonishing willingness of the West not only to allow massive human rights violations of Palestinians and Lebanese by the Israeli Defense Forces and Israeli settlers but to actively support these by punishing the victims". I'll direct your attention merely to what he says about Rwanda, a nation I had no idea he was interested in.

What happened in Rwanda in 1994 was not only genocide on any definition; it has some claim to being the definitive case of genocide in the years since that word was coined. The true number of Tutsi victims will never be known, but Gérard Prunier, in The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide, 1995, was able to draw inferences from census data and from estimates of survivors passing through refugee camps. He concluded (pp. 264-5) that around 930,000 Tutsis were living in Rwanda on 6 April 1994; and between 800,000 and 850,000 of them were killed in the following three months.

In scale and nature, the murderous Hutu campaign remains scarcely conceivable. But it happened. In the years afterwards, radical publishing houses produced furious and excellent books that condemned the West's failure to intervene. Consider the investigative journalist Linda Melvern, who in her book A People Betrayed: The Role of the West in Rwanda's Genocide, 2000, published by Zed Books, rightly said (p. 229):

The Rwandan genocide should be the defining scandal of the presidency of Bill Clinton. Rwanda had been an issue requiring leadership and responsibility.... But the administration took the easy option and failed to push the moral boundaries; there were no votes to be gained by advocating help for another collapsed African state. Africa was less important since the end of the Cold War. The recent example of Somalia has shown the risks of intervention.

In her more recent book Conspiracy to Murder: the Rwandan Genocide, 2004, published by Verso Books, Ms Melvern laments (p. 262): "In the UK, Rwanda has been virtually airbrushed from history in the writings and memoirs of key figures in the government which presided at the time, a government which prided itself on the promotion of human rights."

Well, Ed Herman has a rather different take. This is his version of progressive concern about a threatened and devastated African people:

To an amazing degree, the Western media and NGOs swallowed the propaganda line and lies on Rwanda that turned things upside down. They made the prime aggressors and genocidists, who were responsible for the dual assassination [of President Habyarimana and of President Ntariyamira of Burundi] of April 6, 1994 that precipitated the mass killing, into heroic defenders against the de facto victims. The dictator Paul Kagame, one of the great mass murderers of our time, was made into an honored savior deserving and receiving strong Western support. [The American writer] Philip Gourevitch and the New Yorker whipped up sympathy in the West by labeling the Tutsis the “Jews of Africa;” the label stuck, and it garnered even greater support for Western anti-“genocide” intervention. These big lies are now institutionalized and are part of the common (mis)understanding in the West.

Even from this source, I've read nothing so vile and politically illiterate. The article was sent to me by one of my regular correspondents, a journalist with much experience of Africa, who notes two points in particular. First, the "evidence" for Herman's denial of genocide in Rwanda comes from a book by a Canadian, Robin Philpot. The surname has a resonance on this issue, for Philpot's brother, John, is a lawyer who represented some of those accused of genocide at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. (Robin Philpot also retails his theories on the far-left Counterpunch magazine.) Secondly, there is an extraordinary but perfectly casual defamation of Roméo Dallaire, the UN representative in Rwanda at the time (and now a Liberal member of the Canadian Senate), who Herman claims gave "active or tacit help" in the shooting down of the plane carrying Juvénal Habyarimana.

What can you say, and where do you start? There is very much to say, but scant purpose in saying it. This is a monstrous article by a man who sullies the good name of crank conspiracy theorists everywhere. It's ironic that even the absurd Robin Philpot, Herman's source, has lately been embarrassed by such nonsensical claims. Earlier this year, Philpot stood as a candidate for the Parti Québécois in Montreal, where his documented genocide denial became a campaign issue and caused much consternation to his party leader. Apparently Philpot did not so much the decent as the self-interested thing, and denied his earlier denial.

That Saudi visit

I meant to mention the state visit of King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. Having written before about UK-Saudi relations, I did a couple of television interviews yesterday on this.

The notion that nations have interests rather than friends, and that it would be imprudent to jettison our strategic goals for abstract principles, isn't entirely misguided. While I'm a supporter of liberal-democratic interventionism and highly sympathetic to the democratic globalism of Tony Blair, I would fault Blairite principles to the extent that they lack a sense of priorities.

Consider this example. There is no worse state in the world (now Saddam Hussein is gone) than North Korea. Nonetheless, countering North Korea's nuclear adventurism and support for terrorism is less urgent than countering Iran's, despite the fact that North Korea is a totalitarian state whereas Iran is not. (Iran is an oppressive state with an extremist regime, but it also has elements of a civil society that we should try to win to our side.) It was always a weakness of President Bush's 2002 identification of an "axis of evil" that it failed to distinguish between different types of oppressive regime. I don't doubt that the states Bush named were evil, and that there was complicity among them (if only in the sense implied by a trade in North Korean weaponry). But the genuinely threatening relationship is an axis of Islamist terrorism, of which Iran and its client Syria are constituents. Dealing with that threat must be the centrepiece - not the only part, but the most pressing one - of our security policies.

The irony of our treating the Saudi royal family (and I'm painfully aware that Tony Blair made this his practice too) is that it doesn't even serve our long-term strategic interests in countering Islamist terrorism. I wrote last year, in the context of the scandal of the forced closure of the Serious Fraud Office’s inquiry into corruption in a Saudi arms deal:

Saudi Arabia is not so much a state as a fiefdom. Single-family rule is a bizarre anachronism, but this ruling family largely owns the country as well as governing it. The family has stolen vast sums from the country’s wealth. The spending habits of the House of Saud is an inevitable source of popular discontent.

The Saudis therefore clearly encourage an aggressive Islamist ideology, Wahhabism, to divert political dissent into the mosque and then outward to the world. There could scarcely be a more effective way of incubating the forces of fanaticism that threaten us, and the Saudis too. Pressing for political reform in Saudi Arabia is urgent. Mr Blair is not pursuing that course, but instead is acquiescing in corruption for reasons of state. It is an unprincipled decision, but worse, it is a stupid one.

The awful precedent that comes back to me is the state visit in 1978 - when, likewise, a Labour government was in office - of President Nicolae Ceausescu of Romania, whom some people who ought to have known better imagined to be a force for reform and polycentrism in the Communist bloc. (The most shameless and stupid such character was a Labour MP called Stan Newens, who urged that Britain adopt an independent foreign policy and thereby draw closer to the model of Romania. Here, if you can credit it, is a more recent piece by Newens: a review of an "extremely important" and "erudite" book by Abdullah Ocalan, a man aptly described by Christopher Hitchens as a Kurdish Pol Pot.) When Ceausescu visited, he and his party looted most of the furnishings - pretty much anything that wasn't bolted down - where they stayed. I doubt that King Abdullah will do likewise, but in other respects his state visit is scarcely a more creditable reflection on this country and its government. Flexibility and supineness are diplomatic postures that ought to be scrupulously distinguished.

IAEA and France: whom to believe?

AP reported some emollient comments yesterday by Mohamed ElBaradei:

The head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog said Sunday he had no evidence Iran was working actively to build nuclear weapons and expressed concern that escalating rhetoric from the U.S. could bring disaster.

"We have information that there has been maybe some studies about possible weaponization,'' said Mohamed ElBaradei, who leads the International Atomic Energy Agency. "That's why we have said that we cannot give Iran a pass right now, because there is still a lot of question marks.''

"But have we seen Iran having the nuclear material that can readily be used into a weapon? No. Have we seen an active weaponization program? No.''

As so often on this subject, where hard information is scarce and prudent assumptions have to be made, these are answers to the wrong questions. The emerging problem with Iran is not whether it is actively building nuclear weapons but whether we can take the regime at its word that a civil nuclear programme will not be used for military purposes. The answer to that question dominates all other considerations, because if and when Iran has access to the full fuel cycle, then the technology to fabricate material for nuclear weapons is essentially all there. Because the regime is deceitful, supports terrorism and anticipates the extinction of a member state of the UN, that prospect is ominous. This is why united diplomatic pressure on Iran needs to be exercised now, before only military options remain. ElBaradei will make that task more difficult if he insists on interpreting his role as that of political leader rather than civil servant.

Note too that this analysis is based on the cautious assumption that ElBaradei's technical assessment is right. One important party does not share that assessment. Bloomberg reports today:

French Defense Minister Herve Morin contradicted the findings of the International Atomic Energy Agency and said his government has evidence Iran is trying to build a nuclear weapon, Agence France-Presse reported.

The UN agency has said there was no evidence Iran was developing an atomic bomb, AFP said.

Who is the more reliable source? The Nobel peace laureate or the hawkish right-wing French government? On a balance of probability, the answer is obvious. It has to be the French government. Think back 15 years, and consider this report from the New York Times, 20 January 1992:

International Atomic Energy Agency officials say the latest inspection mission to Iraq filled in major gaps in the agency's understanding of the Iraqi nuclear weapons program.

At a news conference Friday, the head of the agency's inspection team, Maurizio Zifferero, said the Iraqis had accounted for all the components and raw materials that the German Government said had been sold to Iraq by German companies and had subsequently been used in the program.

Iraq was using the supplies to build gas centrifuges, equipment that is employed to enrich uranium to make it usable as fuel in atomic bombs.

"Everything the Germans told us about has been seen in destroyed form," David Kyd, an agency spokesman, said after the news conference. "We now have to make an analysis and to work back from that to see whether the amounts tally."

The German Government's tip to the agency that German companies supplied raw materials and components to Iraq enabled investigators to identify parts of the centrifuge program, Mr. Zifferero said.

The IAEA under Hans Blix had failed comprehensively to grasp how far advanced had been Saddam Hussein's nuclear weapons programme. At the start of the Gulf War, Iraq had been two or three years away from producing enriched uranium. The IAEA belatedly found out after the reversal of Iraq's annexation of Kuwait, when the German government provided missing information about Saddam's centrifuge programme. We know that Iran acquired centrifuge designs in the mid-1990s, having bought them from the rogue Pakistani scientist A.Q. Khan, who in turn had stolen them from a European consortium.

I'm just saying.

Dealing with Iran

The Washington correspondent of The Sunday Times, Sarah Baxter, writes illuminatingly today on the urgency in the Bush administration's consideration of Iran. I've written in the past year or so about my concerns over Iranian policy. I had the curious experience yesterday of taking part in a debate about these issues on Press TV, which is the Iranian state-run English-language broadcaster. The programme - a weekly debate called Forum, whose chairman is the former BBC journalist Andrew Gilligan - was pre-recorded, and I believe it's shown on Tuesdays, though I don't know the time and it doesn't appear to be on the station's website. Here are my impressions of the outlet and the issue.

I'm usually minded to accept, if I can and within reason, an invitation to debate a highly charged issue before a hostile audience. The title of this debate was "Is Iran inviting attacks?" This seems to me in principle, and if framed in a more balanced way, an unexceptionable proposition even to those who do not share my inclination to Militant Blairism. But I began to wonder whether the debate was a useful exercise when Andrew Gilligan, whom I found an affable and fair moderator, suggested to one of my fellow panellists why some might find Iran a threatening power. To illustrate his question, Gilligan quoted one of the more chilling imprecations of President Ahmadinejad against the Zionist entity - a statement that promptly elicited vigorous applause from the audience.

We shall see. My main concern was to state on Iranian-run television that, so far as I'm aware, not a single serious analyst at any reputable university or NGO in Europe and North America believes Iran's nuclear programme is intended for purely non-military purposes. The other panellists were Jeremy Corbyn, Labour MP and a member of the steering committee of the Stop the War Coalition; and Abbas Edalat, founder of something called the Campaign Against Sanctions and Military Intervention in Iran. Corbyn is a known quantity (but quite a nice man in private). Edalat came to my attention last August when he wrote an article for The Guardian maintaining that the US was considering pre-emptive nuclear strikes against Iran. His prime suspect was not a statesman or politician, or even an American at all, but - seriously - me. And his sole evidence was an article by me that had nothing to do with Iran and did not mention that country. (My article, which The Guardian carried on the anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, argued that recent historical research confirms the traditionalist interpretation of President Truman's decision to use the A-bomb.) I assumed that Edalat must be either a mindreader of prowess, able to divine in an argument a "subtext" unknown even to its author; or a feeble hack propagandist unable to construct even a minimally rational case. Having now met him, I'm able to discount the more interesting explanation.

The proper question seems to me not whether Iran is inviting attacks but whether Iran is threatening them. The answer, to any prudent observer of the Middle East, is surely yes, in which case the onus is on the UN Security Council and its member states to counter those threats.

Iran's proxies and client state give a consistent message. Hamas is launching rockets into Israel from the Gaza Strip. Hezbollah has rebuilt its weaponry with Iranian rockets shipped through Syria. Syria itself is plainly engaged in a murder campaign directed against non-compliant politicians in Lebanon. Iran's Revolutionary Guards are equipping and training Shi'ite groups in Iraq to attack US and Iraqi forces with improvised explosive devices. (I'm sure I do not need to remind my readers, as I did Jeremy Corbyn, that US troops are in Iraq under a UN mandate.) All of this activity is coincident with Iran's nuclear diplomacy, the purposes of which are implicit but not obscure, and are rightly described by President Sarkozy as "unacceptable". (I've found the technical details of Iran's nuclear programme particularly well expounded in a scrupulously balanced book by Shahram Chubin, Iran's Nuclear Ambitions, 2006, published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.)

Nobody - excepting, oddly enough, the recently defeated Socialist candidate for the French Presidency - disputes Iran's right to a civil nuclear power programme. A problem arises because Iran insists on access to the full fuel cycle, including uranium enrichment and plutonium reprocessing. A capability of this order would be very hard to distinguish from one designed to develop a nuclear bomb. The regime has consistently lied about its activities, which include the illicit production of a small amount of fissionable material. Its nuclear developments to date also suggest a military programme. Enrichment facilities at Natanz and a heavy water plant at Arak - before a single reactor has come into service - make little sense in the context of a civil nuclear programme. Other countries with reactors don't seek enrichment capabilties. Sweden has ten reactors; it simply buys fuel on the open market, which is cheaper. Moreover, there are no circumstances, even with a full fuel cycle and even assuming that energy self-sufficiency were a sensible aim, in which Iran would be able to avoid the need to import uranium. It hasn't got enough of the stuff.

President Ahmadinejad's insistence that Iran is being discriminated against isn't strictly true either. Some pro-Western countries do have access to a full fuel cycle, but not all - South Korea, which isn't allowed to possess reprocessed plutonium, is a case in point. Those countries that do have access to a full fuel cycle (such as Japan) are, moreover, not those characterised by a history of lying on the subject.

Iran's President is a messianic crank belonging to an end-of-times cult (at the Jamkaran mosque near Qum). He is a racist who denies the historicity of the Holocaust and cheerfully anticipates the extinction of the Jewish state. The revolutionary regime supports terrorist groups financially and with materiel. It spurned attempts of the EU-3 to negotiate over a nuclear programme, despite the fact that even the Bush administration was prepared to accept a compromise proposal from Russia that Iran could have access to the full cycle provided that enrichment took place in Russia rather than Iran. When in September 2005 the IAEA belatedly recognised that Iran was in breach of its responsibilities under the Non-Proliferation Treaty, Iran kept on being obstructive such that the matter was referred to the UN Security Council six months later (a move that - astonishingly for an organisation nominally opposed to nuclear weapons - was "regretted" by CND).

This is a threat, deriving from the character of the Iranian regime. The question whether military action against Iran is justified has a context, namely this appalling history of duplicity and threat. What we do about it ought to be a matter of consensus on the UNSC but isn't, owing principally to the obstructionism of President Putin. It ought also to be a matter of consensus among those of us who supported military intervention in Iraq and those such as Bernard Kouchner who stood for "Ni la guerre ni Saddam".

Admittedly, the odds on a military strike on Iran's nuclear programme have probably shortened lately owing to what appears to have been - judging by newspaper accounts, as there is no official confirmation from any source - a successful Israeli strike against a Syrian nuclear facility last month. What was most interesting about Israel's action was indeed the lack of diplomatic condemnation, excepting only the predictable parties of Syria, Libya, Russia, Turkey (which Israeli pilots presumably overflew with the knowledge of the country's military but not government) and North Korea (presumably the origin of Syria's facility). It is in nobody's interests that Iran become a nuclear-armed power, and countries within range of Iran's missiles (Turkey and India) have reportedly made inquiries to Israeli sources about that country's ballistic missile defences. In short, it's obvious there's a problem, and it's obvious the problem is widely recognised.

But it would be a great mistake to allow the Islamist/Leninist alliance that now speaks for CND as well as the Stop the War Coalition to define this issue as one of potential Western military action. I noted in my debate yesterday that the usual suspects maintain - as if Iran had done nothing wrong and were acting reasonably - that observations of the type I'd deployed and have written here increase the pressure for war. The opposite is true. Avoiding military action against Iran requires that - as did not happen with Saddam Hussein's barbarous regime - the UN and its principal member states seriously pressure Iran to abide by its international obligations as a signatory of the NPT. It's admittedly difficult to see that happening with the current stance of Russia and China, but I'm hopeful that the prospects are better than they were with Iraq.

Iran is an extremist and theocratic polity but not a totalitarian state. It has a civil society to an extent that was not known in Baathist Iraq (and that plainly can't exist in the nightmare-state of North Korea). That civil society contains, according to anecdotal evidence from journalists and academics, much latent sympathy to the US. The very fact that we know far more about Iran's nuclear programme - where it is on the map, to state the matter minimally - than we did about Saddam's WMD is testament that there is a flow of information of some kind. It's a shame, for many reasons, that Tony Blair is no longer in office, as his diplomatic and expository gifts, allied to his understanding of the threat of Islamist extremism, would have conveyed the right message in the right way. Let us hope that Iran's leadership gets the message even without him.

"A dumping ground for hypochondriacs"

Back to the issue of homeopathic "medicine": Nick is on form in his Observer column today. I particularly liked his description, which is the title of this post, of how GPs use homeopaths. I wouldn't normally recommend you glance at the bizarre intellectual underworld of the comments threads provided by "Comment is Free"; note, however, that advocates of crank "medicine" behave like the advocates of the "dianetics" invented by the Scientologists. If you're a journalist with a sceptical message, you'll generate an anguished and immediate response.

The scandal of homeopathy is its appropriation of public funds for purposes that are at best useless, but more widely the recognition that this pseudoscience enjoys in public policy. Homeopathy is not a science, like medicine, but a faith. A democratic society takes no view on origins, eschatology and immortality, and is indifferent to what its citizens believe on these matters. (As private citizens, by contrast, we're fully entitled to have views on what others believe, and must be free to express our ridicule for religious dogma without any social restraint let alone legal sanction.) By making provision within the NHS for homeopathic institutions (I decline to refer to them as hospitals) and bogus treatments the state accords a privileged status to a particular faith. That's iniquitous as well as feeble minded.

Ex-Muslims

There is an excellent article by Johann Hari in today's Independent and reproduced on his website (which I reached via Harry's Place). Johann is expounding the work of a group that demands our attention: "All over Europe, there are Muslims who are exercising their right in a free society to change their religion, or to become atheists. And they are regularly being threatened, beaten, and burned-out, while the police largely stand by, inert."

The bravery of these ex-Muslims is remarkable, and I pay tribute to them. One of them, whom Johann interviews, is an Iranian dissident, Mina Ahadi, who was awarded the title "Secularist of the Year" by the National Secular Society at the weekend. (Both Johann and I were on the shortlist for this prize as well. I cannot speak for him, but I am plainly not secularist of this or any other year; unlike the winner, I am required to show no personal courage in expressing my irreligious convictions.) It's still more extraordinary how scant, or at least how quiet, is the support for their cause among progressive organisations. Johann nicely expounds their importance:

Women like Mina expose a hole in the stale logic of multiculturalism. She shows that secularism is not a ‘Western’ value: she thought of it all by herself, in a rural village in Iran. Yet the attitudes that lead to the persecution of apostates are widespread even within British Islam, because we patronisingly assume it is ‘their culture’ and do not challenge it. Some 36 percent of British Muslims between the ages of 18 and 24 think apostates should be murdered. The younger British Muslims are, the more they believe it – a bad sign for the future, unless we start arguing back. This isn’t just kids sounding off. Some act on it: a Despatches documentary earlier this year, ‘Unholy War’, found dozens of cases of apostates having their cars blown up, their kids threatened and even being beaten and left for dead, on British streets.

Of course, the ex-Muslims have flaws too. Sometimes they can imply there is only one true reading of the Koran – the vicious Bin Ladenist one. In fact, it is a basic atheist truth that superstition is elastic: the ‘holy’ text can mean anything the believers want it to mean, precisely because there is no divine essence to it, only the contradictory ramblings of human beings. If moderate Muslims find a way to relativize away the most abhorrent parts of their holy text, as many Christians have been forced to in a secular environment, then we should cautiously welcome them, while still encouraging them to make the full journey into atheism.

I very much agree with all this, excepting only the final clause. The claims of religion are to my mind incredible and its explanations - for the universe, the natural world, or morality - redundant. But religion, being a durable human construct, is inescapably part of public life. Our aim as secularists should be the separation of religious and civil authority; beyond that, I'm indifferent to what my fellow citizens believe about first and last things. I just require the faithful to leave me alone. It's because ex-Muslims are generally not left alone that they merit our admiration and support.

Homeopaths and legal threats

One of the best features of The Guardian is its ruthlessness with the advocates of pseudoscience. Much credit goes in particular to Ben Goldacre, who writes the paper's weekly "Bad Science" column and whose website (which I shall add to my links) goes under the same name. Being a doctor, he is sensitive to the abuse of the terminology of medicine by the practitioners of complementary (i.e. unscientific) treatments and other mumbo-jumbo. Earlier this year I linked to an outstanding piece he wrote about a lady who styles herself Dr Gillian McKeith. If you didn't read it at the time, do so now; it will enrich and entertain. It notes, among other things, that Ms McKeith "goes after people, and nastily" - which is to say, she is of litigious inclination, even with regard to humble bloggers.

Libel law and free speech on the Web is a subject of interest to me, for reasons I've expounded several times and will be returning to frequently. English libel law as it stands is unreasonably restrictive with regard to comment on the Web. It encourages, as rational behaviour, the removal of material by the hosts of a website regardless of the merits of a complaint. Ben has drawn my attention to a recent example that he has republished on his website:

Let’s imagine that we live in an exotic parallel universe where I am able to use an amusing but trivial news event to illustrate a wider cultural and intellectual issue. Dr Andy Lewis runs a website called Quackometer: he criticised the Society of Homeopaths (Europe ’s largest professional organisation of homeopaths) in no uncertain terms.

In his opinion, and he amassed some examples: they do not enforce their own “Code of Practice” (you’re not even allowed to imply you can cure a named disease!) it is a figleaf; and they fail to censure their members over dangerous claims. His chosen example was the Newsnight malaria sting which you might remember: an undercover investigator went to see some homeopaths, and was given homeopathic pills to protect against this fatal disease, by quacks who denigrated medical options and failed to give basic “holistic” advice on things like bite protection. I agree with Dr Lewis: in my opinion their approach was cavalier and dangerous.

Did the SoH engage with these criticisms? Reflect on them? Challenge and rebut them? No. They sent a threatening legal letter. Did this threatening legal letter say what was wrong with Dr Lewis’s post? No. It wasn’t even sent to him, it was sent to his hosting company Netcetera, demanding they take his page down. He contacted the SoH, very politely (I mean incredibly politely, read it here), to ask them what the problems were with his comments. No response.

Instead their lawyers sent another angry letter to his hosting company, who of course cannot investigate this in full, are strictly speaking liable, and so – good call - the page was taken down. Corporate conspiracy silences the little man: except of course his piece has now been replicated a hundred times across the internet by an army of smirking bloggers.

Well, good for Dr Lewis and the smirking bloggers. But two disturbing issues are highlighted by this episode. First, it confirms my observation that host companies for websites have little option but to take down material as soon as they receive a complaint about supposed libel. (Like Ben, I have no criticism to make of Netcetera in this case. It is deplorable that the company is in this position, but it is not a quandry of Netcetera's making.) This is a serious check on the free flow of ideas and information. Secondly, what sort of "science" is homeopathy that it relies on legal threats sooner than engage with medically qualified criticism? It is, of course, this sort of "science".

Cranks: that strain again

One of the most purely enjoyable books on my shelves is a volume by the late Samuel Schoenbaum called Shakespeare's Lives (revised edition, 1993). It's a study of how writers in different ages have reshaped Shakespeare to accord with their own preconceptions.

Some of these writers have been great literary figures in their own right (Johnson, Keats and Joyce). Some have been serious biographers and literary scholars (Sidney Lee and Leslie Hotson). Some have been hoaxers (William Henry Ireland and John Payne Collier). Some have been outright cranks (those who maintain the peculiarly Victorian notion, born of snobbery, that the actor from Stratford could not have possessed the literary and educational attainment to be the true author of plays, which must therefore have been written by a nobleman).

I was reminded of this last and vast category by a story in The Times today:

A portrait of Shakespeare that has been in the collection of the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon since 1892 has secretly been replaced by a 19th-century fake during the past decade, a German scholar claims.

Hildegard Hammerschmidt-Hummel said that the famous portrait, The Flower, was not the original that she examined between 1995 and 2005 and which was among the very few reliable likenesses of the playwright.

Professor Hammerschmidt-Hummel said yesterday that the original had been substituted by a copy. In 2005 it was sent to the laboratories of the National Portrait Gallery and dismissed as a 19th century forgery after it was found to contain chrome yellow, a colour that was commercially available only from 1814 onwards.

“Where is the priceless 400-year-old original Flower portrait?” asked the professor, who lectures in English literature at the University of Mainz.

First, a minor point: the author of this article is mistaken in believing that the title of the portrait is The Flower. The reason the picture is known as the Flower portrait of Shakespeare is that it was formerly owned by a Mrs Charles Flower, who donated it to the Shakespeare Memorial Gallery in Stratford - not that it was a picture of a flower. More important, do not be impressed with any conspiracy theories that make too much of the provenance of the portrait. While some scholars have been impressed with the possibility that it is a depiction of Shakespeare from life, it is in reality a picture painted from the famous Droeshout engraving of Shakespeare, which adorns the frontispiece of the 1623 First Folio of Shakespeare's plays. As Schoenbaum states (p. 334): "It improves upon the engraving, correcting the lighting and reducing exaggerations: surely Droeshout would not have deliberately introduced infelicities into his copy."

But note in particular Professor Hammerschmidt-Hummel's immediate resort to insinuations of malpractice sooner than examine her preconceptions about the painting. There are simpler and more prosaic explanations, as the article makes clear:

Both the RSC and the portrait gallery rejected the claims. A spokes-woman for the RSC said that the only time the painting had not been on display under CCTV coverage in the RSC Collection Gallery was when it was in a secure store room. Dr Tarnya Cooper, the portrait gallery’s 16th century curator, said: “The idea that this picture has been substituted for a different portrait between 1996 and 2005 is plainly nonsensical . . . Any perceived differences between photographs are likely to be caused by differences in lighting conditions.”

Stanley Wells, Britain’s foremost Shakespeare scholar, condemned Professor Hammerschmidt-Hummel’s claims as “disgraceful”. He claimed that she was trying to counter the evidence against the painting’s authenticity, following the NPG’s research, and added that many books written on Shakespeare contained “lunatic theories”. He said of Professor Ham-merschmidt-Hummel: “She knows her way round the archives, but she barks continually up the wrong tree. At least she’s not saying Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare.”

Chaucer Press will be publishing Professor Hammerschmidt-Hummel’s findings in The Life and Times of William Shakespeare on November 5.

No doubt; and the publisher will be glad of the publicity generated by the extravagant claims that its author has made. All credit goes to Professor Wells for calling a crank when he sees one; the field of Shakespeare studies is full of them.

Incidentally, I'm a little concerned by this remark underneath the article, surveying other fantastic claims about Shakespeare: "Academics have argued for centuries over the authorship of Shakespeare’s works; the philosopher Francis Bacon, the nobleman Edward de Vere and the playwright Christopher Marlowe are among suggested candidates."

This is true only in a literal and thereby misleading sense. There have been numerous proponents in the last 150 years of the crank belief that Francis Bacon or Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, or numerous others might have been the true author of Shakespeare. Some of these conspiracy theorists have been academics - but almost none has been a scholar in a relevant field of inquiry. There have been chemists, lawyers (particularly lawyers, for some reason), classicists and many other types. But the number of scholars of Elizabethan and Jacobean literature seriously entertaining these notions is, to my knowledge, fewer than half a dozen. There is no more genuine academic debate on the authorship of Shakespeare than there is genuine academic debate among biologists about the fact of evolution.

There is a reason for this unanimity. If you're steeped in the literature and social history of the period, you will not be susceptible to the notion that the author of the plays possessed an unusual knowledge of classical literature, or royal protocol, or Italy, or soldiering, or the law. You will be familiar with the interest in these and other subjects shown by the principal authors of that period, and know how much that is esoteric to us was a standard part of a grammar school education such as Shakespeare probably received.

The Shakespeare authorship craze may seem a benign if bizarre fantasy. I take the view that conspiracy theories are essentially similar and pernicious, because they disregard the disciplines of historical inquiry. The literary scholar Jonathan Bate (author of one of the best popular books about Shakespeare of recent years, The Genius of Shakespeare, 1997) has stated well why the question - or rather non-question - of Shakespearean authorship matters: "Partly it's to do with honouring truth, honouring fact. And, you know, without being melodramatic about it, you deny the reality of Shakespeare one moment, you can deny the reality of the Holocaust the next."

"A standard bearer of peace and stability"

Last July The Guardian reported on the launch of Press TV, Iran's state-run English-language news channel:

At the launch of Press TV, at the headquarters of state broadcaster IRIB, president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said its goal was to counter "propaganda" peddled by western channels. "Knowing the truth is the right of all human beings but the media today is the number one means used by the authorities to keep control," he said. "We scarcely know a media that does its duty correctly. Our media should be a standard bearer of peace and stability. "

I shall be taking part in a debate on Press TV's Forum show, presented by Andrew Gilligan, on Saturday afternoon. I think it's prerecorded, so I will find out when it will be shown; I believe the programme is broadcast online. The title of the debate is: "Is Iran inviting attacks?"

Not to give my debating line away, but I think this is the wrong question. It would be more appropriate to ask "Is Iran threatening attacks?", to which the prudent answer appears to me to be yes.

There goes liberty

Steven Rose writes on The Guardian's "Comment is Free" site about the controversy concerning the Nobel laureate James Watson's reported views on race:

Responses to my comments on the cancellation of James Watson's lecture tour fell, predictably, into two categories. On the one hand there were those (like Sue Blackmore, self-confessedly ignorant of the scientific issues) who argued that Watson had the right to speak his mind whether he was correct or not - that is, for absolute freedom of speech however unpleasant, malicious, hate-filled or untrue the content. If you believe this, there is nothing I can say that will convince you and you are free to end up as a victim or hero of British libel laws or hate speech legislation. That is, I think human rights trump free speech rights, and you don't, irrespective of the fact that your freedom of speech, for instance to abuse and encourage prejudice or violence against gays, ethnic minorities or feminists may damage the human rights of gays, ethnic minorities or feminists.

I find unexceptionable Rose's insistence that "heritability of group differences ought to be as irrelevant to today's biology as phlogiston theory is to chemistry or 'intelligent design' to evolution". I have no more training in chemistry and biology than the psychologist Sue Blackmore has. It doesn't take specialist knowledge, though, but merely a respect for scientific reasoning to understand the difference between, say, evolutionary biology, which proceeds by evidence, and "intelligent design", which is dogma. The first of those fields is science; the second is pseudoscience.

But that is a different issue from the political premises that Rose advances in the paragraph I've quoted. The notion that "human rights trump free speech rights" is chilling. The best case I can make for it is the proposition that free speech, while desirable, needs in a civilised society to be balanced against other values. Even then, it's a pernicious argument. In the form that Rose adopts, it's also peculiarly dishonest.

Consider the work that the conjunction "or" is doing in Rose's argument. Libel and hate speech are not the same thing; nor are they the same type of thing. Few would argue that an individual complainant should have no recourse to law to correct errors of fact that, if left uncorrected, would lower the public's estimation of him. Some do make that argument. I don't, even - indeed, particularly - in the case of minor figures. (The corollary, of course, is that minor figures have no more right than anyone else to abuse the legal process in the hope of suppressing accurate but damaging information. I have pleasing and unexacting experience of thwarting such activity.)

Hate speech is an expression of prejudice and bigotry about a group or its members based on common characteristics. Why does an expression of bigotry - as opposed to a specific defamatory accusation against a person, or a direct act of discrimination on morally irrelevant grounds such as race or sex - transgress human rights? Likewise, the phrase "encouraging prejudice or violence" conjoins different things. Encouraging violence is incitement to crime, and is already dealt with by criminal law. Why does encouraging prejudice violate someone's human rights?

The answers to these questions must be obvious to Rose, or he wouldn't have left them unstated. But they are not obvious. I am - to state something that ought to be completely obvious - opposed to Holocaust denial, racism and anti-homosexual prejudice. (Religious "hatred", being about beliefs rather than characteristics, is a different matter. I can at least say that, while I disrespect all organised religions, I oppose all religious tests for civic participation and public office. I should add that my disrespect for all religions is not equal; my greatest aversion is reserved for those faiths that stress the claims of revelation over reason. I am more hostile to Islamism than I am to Unitarianism.) It is a task of government to outlaw discrimination on morally irrelevant grounds, owing to our common citizenship. I do not, however, regard it as any legitimate part of public policy to eradicate bigotry. Let me direct you to an American (and, as it happens, Jewish and gay) writer I've cited several times on the issue of speech, Jonathan Rauch. In an article in Harper's some years ago, Rauch wrote:

Equating "verbal violence" with physical violence is a treacherous, mischievous business. Not long ago a writer was charged with viciously and gratuitously wounding the feelings and dignity of millions of people. He was charged, in effect, with exhibiting flagrant prejudice against Muslims and outrageously slandering their beliefs. "What is freedom of expression?" mused Salman Rushdie a year after the ayatollahs sentenced him to death and put a price on his head. "Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist." I can think of nothing sadder than that minority activists, in their haste to make the world better, should be the ones to forget the lesson of Rushdie's plight: for minorities, pluralism, not purism, is the answer. The campaigns to eradicate prejudice--all of them, the speech codes and workplace restrictions and mandatory therapy for accused bigots and all the rest--should stop, now. The whole objective of eradicating prejudice, as opposed to correcting and criticizing it, should be repudiated as a fool's errand.

Steven Rose's politics are far from mine (we have taken part - I as a witness, and he as a cross-examiner - on Radio 4's Moral Maze). But New Labour, of which I'm a sympathetic observer and whose recently retired leader I greatly admire, has its own version of Rose's principle. This is the presumption that we are parts of our various communities, and that those groups are entitled to respect for their collective identities and beliefs. I deplore this notion, and greatly regret the activities of New Labour in promoting it.