Greens Engage

On OpenDemocracy.

Further to the crisis of confidence in Human Rights Watch of last week, the release of convicted Lockerbie bomber, and the stunningly unfounded allegations of organ theft by Israelis, three scenarios and a two theories from S.O.Muffin.

In the comments to that piece, Eve Garrard reminds readers not to underestimate the importance of vanity on human affairs, and to think about the implications of publicly pillorying our policy makers for making mistakes.

David Runciman, author of a fairly recent book Political Hypocrisy: the Mask of Power from Hobbes to Orwell, and Beyond, also cautions against this, arguing that merciless pillorying promotes hypocrisy:

“Runciman argues that we should accept hypocrisy as a fact of politics, but without resigning ourselves to it, let alone cynically embracing it. We should stop trying to eliminate every form of hypocrisy, and we should stop vainly searching for ideally authentic politicians. Instead, we should try to distinguish between harmless and harmful hypocrisies and should worry only about its most damaging varieties.”

On Engage, David Hirsh flags up J-Street’s whole-hearted endorsement of Caryl Churchill’s play ‘Seven Jewish Children‘. The J-Street statement included:

“The decision to feature Seven Jewish Children at Theater J should be judged not on the basis of the play’s content but, rather, on its value in sparking a difficult but necessary conversation within our community. To preclude even the possibility of such a discussion does a disservice not only to public discourse, but also to the very values of rigorous intellectual engagement and civil debate on which our community prides itself.”

“Necessary conversation”. Debate. Discussion. Ends in themselves. De facto positives.

I don’t think so. I think debate is often fetishised to its own detriment and to the detriment of values we should uphold as uncontroversial.

This weekend I watched Al Gore’s ‘An Inconvenient Truth‘, a film about climate change and humankind’s collective responsibility to reduce our emissions in order to safeguard our future in general, and most immediately the future of the people of low-lying countries such as Bangladesh.

It seems obvious to me that each of us has a personal responsibility for the environment and should attempt to act accordingly. I have been able to arrange my life to hardly ever fly or drive, not to eat animal, buy to last, buy sustainably, conserve energy and materials, create habitats, and other measures. Other people will take different measures in different proportions. I could do more – the obstacles are to do with lack of support rather than lack of conviction.

But one of the most interesting parts of ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ for me was the discussion about manufactured controversy. Of a large sample of 10% of all peer-reviewed research papers on climate change published during the decade up till 2006 (n=928), there was 75% explicit consensus that climate change was anthropogenic – caused by human activity – and none of the remaining 25% disagreed with this consensus position. (A summary of this study is available in Science Magazine.)

The media’s failure to reflect this may well go down in history as the single largest reason why campaigners who are attempting to get us to value professional journalists in a digital age will be met with sad head-shaking. Gore says that 53% of media reports on climate change gave the impression that the the theory of anthropogenic climate change was controversial.

The most generous explanation (and I’ll ignore the others) for this is that the professional media is permeated with the imperative to provide journalistic balance and that this balance is often interpreted as countering strong voices with opposing points of view. In the case of climate change the result is informational bias.

In J-Street’s case, the imperative is something different. This position on Caryl Churchill is a manifestation of an aspect of J-Street that makes me uncomfortable. It’s not the entirety of J-Street – it’s the part which tries to fend off antisemitism with appeasement. “They say there’s a Jewish lobby? Well, we’ll show them a second Jewish lobby which speaks against the one they hate. We’ll be seen to criticise Israel. We’ll be recognised as US patriots. And then they’ll leave us alone”. The pathos is acute.

The result is that Caryl Churchill’s play which casts Jewish parents as the perpetuators of war and mental infirmity is touted as the occasion for a “difficult but necessary conversation”. To me and others it just looks racist.

And being racist, what is there to debate?

Gisha is an Israeli campaign for freedom of movement in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. They commissioned Yoni Goodman, director of animation for the critically acclaimed 2008 feature-length animation Waltz With Bashir, to create this short one about Gaza. And below that is another short subtitled film in which Goodman and Gisha’s executive director discuss what they hoped to communicate. The message is simple – end the blockade of Gaza for the sake of Gazans. There are also some intriguing bits – note that almost all the hands which block the boy are nationality non-specific, contrasting sharply with the two that are Egyptian and Israeli. And for the boy, it doesn’t make a difference where the rocket fire is coming from – we could guess Israel, and also Hamas and Islamic Jihad – all potentially lethal. And what do you make of the blue bird?

“Belief in conspiracy theories is rife. But what are they and why have they become so popular?”

Did anybody catch this back in 2007 – Channel 4 documentary ‘Conspiracy – Who Really Runs the World?’ I missed it but it’s on Google Video and on the Channel 4 site.

9/11 comes about 18 minutes in. David Icke – former Green Party spokesman, later expelled – is interviewed expounding at length on how the entire global population might be “programmed”.

At 34:19 two psychologists carry out an experiment to predict the likelihood that 30 students will believe in conspiracy theories in the absence of evidence. First they test the pyschological factors of trust, disaffection with society and quickness to make false assumptions based on partial evidence. The hypothesis is that high scores on these factors predict likelihood of believing conspiracy theories. Then they run an invented conspiracy theory past the people with the 6 highest and 6 lowest scores. The experiment confirms the hypothesis.

Chris French, one of the psychologists, takes the findings to David Icke on a beach at around 40:30. David Icke becomes cross (“gets up my nose … song-sheet science”).

Chris French (my emphases):

“OK, conspiracies take place. But it’s the nature of the conspiracies and when there is kind of overwhelming evidence against a particular conspiracy but people still cling tenaciously to it… That then moves into the realm – as far as I’m concerned – of probably trying to look at the psychology behind it.”

And a little later, as the camera operator backs away from the argument:

“I think there is a problem with the belief system in that it’s non-falsifiable – nothing could happen that could falsify it.”

As Nafeez Ahmed, author of ‘The War on Truth’ comments (around 44:25), conspiracy beliefs are born of a desire, in a state of uncertainly, for a solid way of looking at the world, but are almost religious in nature.

At 45:00, Patrick Lehman (the other psychologist involved in the experiment above):

“… and they can’t be shaken out of their beliefs. They are a bit like religious fundamentalists in the sense that their pursuing a certain dogma, they’re pursuing a certain line of attack, and I think being a conspiracy theorist is fundamental to who they are. They’re critical of government – they see government or big business as conspiring against individual freedoms or they see certain institutions as conspiring against them or against other people, so it’s a particular mindset and if you’re in that mindset, if you think “I am a conspiracy theorist” then you’re going to go out and look for conspiracy theories”.

The other day over lunch with David Hirsh I brought up a recent debate about the relationship between ‘Islamophobia’ and ‘anti-Muslim bigotry’. I asked what seemed to me an important question “Is it inevitable that to be Islamophobic is to be bigoted against Muslims?”  Hopefully you get the thrust of my question. In the same vein I could have asked whether it is inevitably antisemitic to be Judeophobic. The question was about whether it is bigoted to fear a given religion.

To which David replied “Yes, because all religions can be filled with different content”.

This unfixed nature of religion is evident in the enormous diversity of religious denominations, not only in the here-and-now but also over time. Islamophobia is a reaction to what Islamophobes insist is the correct reading of a holy text; they are irrational, singular – and therefore false – views of a religion. The irony of Islamophobes and anti-Muslim bigots is that they feel the same way about Islam as the extremists they fear.

But this won’t convince anybody who has a fear, let alone a phobia. I know such a person – he joined the BNP’s  embryonic coalition of different nationalists against Muslims. He considers me naive and, moreover, badly wrong. You have to know your onions to argue with people like him.

What might be helpful would be to look at Gabriele Maranci’s new book – Understanding Muslim Identity, Rethinking Fundamentalism, the introduction and index to which are freely available. His is a distinctly anthropological exploration of social identity and emotional fundamentalism:

“By rejecting culturalist and essentialist reductionist approaches to it, I have suggested that we need to understand ‘fundamentalism’ not as a ‘thing’ (i.e. cultural object) but as a ‘process’, and start from the individual before looking at the group. Of course, it is only the reader whom can decide whether a book may be interesting or not, but I am sure that Understanding Muslim Identity Rethinking Fundamentalism provides something new to the scholarly debate on radicalism and religious violence. Indeed, although I focus on Muslims, the argument presented in this book is not limited to them, and the theory on which it is based may be tested on other forms of ‘emotional religions’ or even ‘emotional secularism’.”

This strikes me as a good approach to arguing with people who subscribe to the ‘clash of civilisations’ theory.

According to student harassment advisor and Green Andrew Collingwood, who played with allegations of antisemitism as part of his political campaigning about Palestine.

He can’t have noticed that most campus antisemitism today emanates from anti-Zionists and their Palestine solidarity campaigns. Campaigning on behalf of Palestinians doesn’t have to be like that, but in Britain it often is.

In common with many people who are accused of racism, Andrew Collingwood is deeply upset and offended that he’s been called racist, and views it as an attempt to smear him on account of his Palestine Solidarity Campaign work.

But even some members of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign think that the PSC is too comfortable an environment for antisemitism – it has been for years. The cartoon wasn’t out of the ordinary.

One student in the comments:

“If something racist were to happen to me on campus, I honestly feel there would be no one I could go to.”

Many others want the people with concerns to get over it. But if you’re going to ask people who feel themselves subject to racism to get over it, you may as well write off the racism part of the harassment advisory service.

Nobody has to turn a blind eye to this, do they.

Update: And nobody should turn a blind eye to hate mail received by Andrew Collingwood. Sending hate mail is deplorable, futile, self-indulgent, and often extremely frightening for the recipient. Andrew Collingwood does not deserve hate mail. He deserves to be argued with, straight. Send hate mail and not only have you lost the argument but you’ve given up on persuading somebody.

It would be good to do something fresh on Wilders, but no time so here is something I wrote last year.

Yeah – like Bob, I think that rights – such as the right to free expression – need to be considered in their concrete context. And like Brett and David T, I think the government needs to base its decision on the generally applicable standard of combatting hatred. And this should be in such a way that it poses no obstacle to people who are merely political opponents – it should pose no obstacle socialists, for example, as feared by David Semple. In other words – I would prefer to have to scrutinise my government, than fight off yet another hater.

I think that fighting with haters can hone our societal ability to deal with haters. But for the people on the receiving end of the hatred, dealing with haters is far from recreational.

Besides, I think we have enough to be going along with with our homegrown demagogues.

Everybody decent is disgusted with Avigdor Lieberman.

Avigdor Lieberman heads up the Israeli deeply nationalist party Yisrael Beitenu (‘Our Home’). It was Avigdor Lieberman who pushed for two of the Arab Israeli parties to be banned from the imminent elections – a ban which was briskly overturned by the Israeli Supreme Court yesterday. Avigdor Lieberman intends to shunt his Citizenship Bill into Israeli law to address the “disloyalty” of Israel’s Arab citizens. He’s interested in population swaps. He voted against pulling out of Gaza in 2005 (and has been making capital out of Hamas rockets ever since). He blamed the Mercav Harev bombings on “incitement” by Arab Israeli MKs. Nevertheless, in 2006 he accepted a responsibility for strategic affairs in the Kadima coalition, obliging Labour MK Ophir Paz-Pines to resign from the cabinet retorting that Lieberman himself was a strategic threat. Israeli politics is bizarre like that.

Everybody who likes to posture as someone who really cares about Palestinian Israelis enjoys ostentatiously displaying how much they despise the views of Avigdor Lieberman – and then too often making him out to be the archetypal Zionist. It’s pretty uncomplicated in fact – the man really is a strategic threat to Israelis and Palestinians alike. And even if being irreconcilably anti-Arab weren’t a strategic threat, being irreconcilably anti-Arab is enough to make you want him to fail. That he became so senior (he resigned in 2008) is a sign of the times and a signal of danger. Lieberman has a very well thought-out plan for the future. It’s not Kach (a party Israel banned because it was in favour of ethnic cleansing), but it involves treating Arab Israelis as a strategic threat.

To tamper with the words and meaning of Hadash (Israeli communists) chair MK Mohammed Barakeh, Avigdor Lieberman is a boycotter’s wet dream. He is their pin-up. He is exactly what boycotters want us to believe that the Israeli government is like. He fits with the whole pantomime narrative about Israel that boycotters force on us. He’s more like George Galloway than anything.

You can imagine what politicians like Lieberman can do with boycotts of Israel. This is a person who calls home-grown boycotts of the occupation a form of incitement to international victimisation of Israel, and blames the Israeli left. He has always blamed the left for  “offering solutions to a problem they never understood”. In view of the quality of the recent protests about Gaza, he is looking like a savant these days, which is a crying shame.

“I have no claims against the Arabs, nor against the world. I do have a complaint against the leftists. All of our troubles, all of our problems, all of our victims are because of those people.”

He raises politics as a Jewish identity issue. Just as Jewish boycotters call themselves the only good Jews, he insists that good Jews support the settlements.

Richard Silverstein doesn’t seem to perceive any connection between Lieberman calling Jews who try to selectively boycott musicians “kapos” (an incendiary reference to co-opted Jews who policed the Nazi concentration camps in return for higher living standards) and the weak state of the Israeli left.

Newman and Pogrund worried in 2005, before Lieberman got lucky as Deputy Prime Minister, about the boycott strengthening the Israeli right:

“The boycott attempts from abroad only serve to strengthen the voices of the Israeli right, and their simplistic arguments that the British academic community is collectively anti-semitic and – in the words of one senior Israeli professor on the eve of Holocaust day this month – is guilty of repeating what the Nazi-era Germans did to Jewish academics. This knee-jerk, somewhat hysterical, reaction goes down well with the Israeli Jewish public, large sections of whom remain convinced that they stand alone against a hostile world that wishes for nothing more than the extinction of the Jewish state.”

If I can talk in crude political terms (this kind of befits me – but you live and learn) the Israeli right, like the Palestinian right, are standing solidly in the way of the  Palestinian state which most Israelis want.

The Israeli left, the progressives – who for obvious reasons of wishing to broaden their support base in Israel aren’t calling for boycott – are the Palestinians’ best allies.  Both the Israeli and Palestinian progressives need international support against their rejectionists. When they come together, they get further every time. Camp David, Oslo, Geneva Accords, Taba. They know what peace looks like. Anything we do here in support of Palestinians and Arab Israelis should not undermine the progressives. But the boycott campaign does undermine them. Boycott is the wrong tool for the job because it seems continuous with older hateful boycotts against Jews, and is amenable to being used by the Israeli right to reassert a polarisation between Israelis and Palestinians, and has been overrun by negationists (including British anti-Zionists, although they have little influence), because negation has been the logic and lifeblood of the boycott campaign – if only boycotters would realise its logic. The Israeli right are already deriving sustenance from Ahmedinejad, Haniyeh and Nasrallah. Why would we give the negationists any more? Why would we set Israel – and particularly the Israeli left – up to fail?

On the other hand, if you want to assist Avigdor Lieberman and the nationalists on opposing sides, then go ahead with the boycott campaign. You may end up proving yourself correct, and then won’t you feel on top of the world? Which is what boycotting Israel is all about – right?

Not in the UK, in Canada:

“Green party Leader Elizabeth May has removed one of the party’s candidates after he made what the party viewed as anti-Semitic comments in an online forum.”

Read more here