Islamophobia

Howard Jacobson’s pathological need to be persecuted

"Literature", Islamophobia, Israel/Palestine
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There’s a disease that strikes English novelists of a certain age and fame, that makes them think whatever small talent they have at creating Times reviewed stories means they have an unique insight into human nature and the political realities of 21st century Britain. This usually manifest in rightwing babble about the problems of the day, as exclusively revealed to whichever newspaper with spare column inches to fill, as well as through novels that suddenly tackle big political issues in the way literary writers normally reserve for dabbling in science fiction: naively and ploddingly reinventing cliches better writers had long since abandoned and being proud of it. Martin Amis and Ian McEwan are the best examples of this disease, but Howard Jacobson seems determined to join them.

Jacobson is “best known for writing comic novels that often revolve around the dilemmas of British Jewish characters” as Wikipedia puts it. Not one to hide his Jewishness under a bushell and keen to let you know how his background makes him uniquely able to provide insights into the Israel/Palestinian conflict, he has been making a nuisance of himself for years in opinion pieces. As with Amis and McEwan, his politics also infected his fiction, metastasising in The Finkler Question, made unreadable by his politics.

So it comes as no surprise that when he saw the images of Asian shopkeepers defending their communities against the riots in London two weeks ago he saw something quite different from the rest of us:

The good thing that came out of the riots was a renewed sense of community. “How does one put this without sounding gross … it was terrific to see the Asian communities on telly and not to have to think about terrorism, and not to have to think about the thing I’m always thinking about… do they want to kill Jews?”

A remark on par with Amis’ similar ones on wanting to make Muslims suffer for 9/11. But there seems to be more going on with Jacobson, he seems convinced that pogroms could break out in London any minute and that like any good Jew he needs to be prepared. It’s not a mindset that’s not unique to him; I’ve stopped being surprised at the number of middleclass Jewish people living in England or America, never having suffered any discrimination in their lifetimes, convinced that it’s only a matter of time before the killings start again. If the most important event in your history is the Holocaust, it’s not surprising some people get a bit paranoid.

With Jacobson however it almost seems as if he would welcome persecution, that he feels agrieved that there are no pogroms in England and the number of real anti-semitic incidents (as opposed to people being accused of anti-semitism because they disagree with Israeli policies) is low and has remained low for decades. Hence remarks like the above, as to him it’s inconcievable that Asian people would not want to oppress him. Call it victim envy.

The military wing of melanie phillips

Islamophobia, War on Terror, wingnuts
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The guys at Blood and Treasure are discussing the Norway Attacks and how the ideology behind it sounds so familiar. Ken MacLeod sums up:

Familiar indeed. ‘Cultural Marxism’, the Frankfurt School, feminism and political correctness as the root of the problem, the EU apparat as its enforcer, Muslim immigration and terrorism as its consequence or indeed as its weapon … now where have we heard these ideas before?

An ideology for justifying violence against racial minorities, the Left and the labour movement has been developing in plain sight, rather than in the underworld of NSDAP re-enactors. And it overlaps mainstream right-wing thinking.

There have warnings that this sort of atrocity would happen sooner or later in Europe. It’s not just the rhetoric that came along in the wake of the The War Against Terror, but also a slew of incidents in which rightwing extremists were caught with enough explosives to kill a small town, or massing guns, or with chemical warfare equipment, largely going unreported in the media. Remember the ex-BNP members and their weapons cache that nobody wanted to call terrorists? In the last decade there has been a climate in which Islamophobia and fear of “Eurabia”, the susposed clash of civilisations have become mainstream, in that these are no longer extreme opinions to hold, but arguments that can be seriously debated by serious mainstream commentators. In that climate, when day in day out you have certain politicians (Wilders not being the last example to come to mind and loonies in the media foaming at the mouth about the life and death struggle “Islam” and “the west” are locked into, it should not come as a surprise one of the internet hard men ranting about striking a blow for civilisation actually did.

Recipe for disaster

Dutch politics, economic crisis, Geertje Wilders, Islamophobia
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wilders picking his nose

Everyone involved with politics understands the current dynamic. It’s not hard to grasp. You take very tough economic times, add them to a heavy dose of political opportunism, and multiply both by the aggravating factor of a nihilistic commercial media, and what you get is ethnic scapegoating on a massive scale.

Matt Taibbi is talking about the teabaggers, but he could just have well been talking about Wilders. He started out as somewhat of a Fortuyn clone, but trading in much of Fortuyn’s anti-establishment vibe for more straightforward anti-Islam rhetoric, first within the VVD, then with his own party. Since the economic crisis reached the Netherlands however, he has not just talked about the dangers of Islamic terrorism and the Islamisation of the country, but also about the economic cost of non-western immigration to the Netherlands. So e.g. he takes a populist stance against raising retirement ages, but ties it to cutting down foreign aid.

The scary thing is that this shift in emphasis might just have been the key to his succes. Two elections ago, the first in which his party participated, he got only the same number of seats as had been shared between him and the remnants of Fortuyn’s old party (nine). This election he got twentyfour seats, making his party the third largest. And despite continuing conflict within the CDA, it seems likely the next government will have PVV support, if not participation, leaving Wilder in a position where he does not need to compromise yet can demand concessions for his support. So we would have the nice explosive mixture of a rightwing government wanting to push through huge cuts supported by an xenophobic party eager to start the scapegoating in earnest….

Thilo Sarrazin: Islamophobia is okay, but mention Jews just once…

Islamophobia, Numpties
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A rightwing blowhard spouting racist nonsense, even when he is a high ranking official at the German Central Bank, does not become an international scandal, but Thilo Sarrazin made one big mistake. He targeted the wrong ethnical group:

Over the weekend, Sarrazin went even further. In an interview with Welt am Sonntag, Sarrazin waded into the fraught field of genetics, saying “all Jews share a certain gene, all Basques have certain genes that make them different from other people.”

The comment came as he was discussing the identities of different European cultures, but the reference to a Jewish gene has unleashed yet another storm of critique. Such references have been largely taboo in Germany since World War II.

When asked by the interviewer if perhaps he meant to talk of “races” rather than “cultures,” Sarrazin responded “I am not a racist.”

Had he only kept his racism to the usual Islamophobia, it wouldn’t have mattered, but talking about a “Jewish gene” when you’re a German banker? That’s asking for trouble. As The online archive at Der Spiegel shows Sarrazin has been Islamophobic for a long time without it harming his career much. He might have faced censure by his own party (the social democratic SPD!) and criticism from the usual quarters, but his job was safe and he has been described as a “provocateur” and “blunt talking” rather than “racist bastard” in respectable newspapers. One little mention of the “Jewish gene” has changed all that….

Geert Wilders is smarter; not only a “critic of Islam” but also a “friend of Israel” (and you do wonder how much of his Islamophobia is caused by this friendship and imbibing the Israeli views of it, or vice versa). He has kept his racism confided to acceptable targets and as a result is taken seriously as a coalition partner in the next Dutch government. That’s the bad news. The good news is that one of its intended coalition partners, the Christian Democrat CDA has gotten cold feet at the last moment, as many of its members do not feel comfortable with Wilders. As well they should: rightwing or leftwing, no non-racist politician should want anything to do with somebody who wants to use a specific ethnic group of citizens (and in the vocabulary of Wilders’ followers, if not always with Wilders himself, the word “Islam” is interchangable with “Moroccan”) as the scapegoat for all of our country’s problems.

QotD: David Mitchell on burqa bans

Islamophobia
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David Mitchell comments on debates about banning the burqa, which he says would be the only way he would ever wear one and gets to the nub of things quickly:

There’s altogether too much harping on respect and banning these days. If you can’t respect something, you should ban it. If it’s not banned, you should respect it. Bullshit. There is a huge gulf of toleration between respect and banning. In a free society, people should be allowed to do what they want wherever possible. The loss of liberty incurred by any alternative principle is too high a price to pay to stop people making dicks of themselves. But, if people are using their freedoms to make dicks of themselves, other people should be able to say so.

(David Mitchell is on twitter as realdmitchell; if the other famous David Mitchell shows up, will he be realdmitchelltoo? And who is to say any other dmitchells aren’t real either, just because they don’t get to be on telly? Burning issues of the day that clearly need answers, unlike the “debate” on whether or not to ban a piece of clothing.)