For anyone who has hoped and believed, as I have, that the British way of integrating Muslim citizens is more promising than the French one, the last year has been discouraging writes Tim Garton-Ash.
Not just "discouraging", shurly, given that in 2004 article Who was to blame? Tim graphically laid waste to the French capital in an imaginary nuclear attack perpetrated by a pair of sisters narked that they couldn't wear their hijab in class.
Who knows, by 2009 when Tim set his nightmare vision, things may have changed. By which time he will have no doubt performed yet another graceful back-flip.
Meanwhile: whatever the mix of causes for this alienation, we need to escape from seeing British Muslims only through the prism of two currently prevailing paradigms: the terrorism paradigm and the backwardness paradigm...
The idea that these young British Muslims might actually be putting their fingers on some things that are wrong with our modern, progressive, liberal, secular society; the idea that rational persons might freely choose to live in a different, outwardly more restricted way; these hardly feature in everyday progressive discourse. But they should.
So, while accepting that the more "muscular" attitude of the French may have garnered results (81% of British Muslims polled said they were Muslim first and a citizen of their country only second, compared to 46% of French Muslims) he then continues head-long over the same old precipice.
But who is to blame for our current difficulties? Well I'd suggest Tim and the policy-makers his views reflect could bear some of the responsibility - conjuring up imaginary horrors, their relativist fantasies have helped create real demons.
And in that same real world the French are beginning their vacances while we, grounded, turn upon ourselves.
Thursday, August 10, 2006
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3 comments:
I like the faux-dialectic of 'conjuring up imaginary horrors, their relativist fantasies have helped create real demons' but one could ask which imaginary horror of Tim's conjuring persuaded the brothers in the Midlands to atomise themselves on our tubes.
I bet they don't even read the Guardian... but if they do your argument appears to be that its supposedly anti-progressive vision has whipped them into a murderous and self destructive frenzy.
Well blow me, better muzzle the press then.
Simply echoing rhetoric that sounds good is no substitute for thinking about social, sub-cultural or psychological process.
I'm not coming over all Garton-Ash here, as I'm not much of a Guardian reader and I tend to think that what we are dealing with here IS about a mixture of forms of extremist ideology AND backwardness / alternativeness (perhaps more the latter) and to some extent isolation - but like all terrrorism its a minority pre-occupation - a rare and unusual response to common circumstances.
That said Ash' article/s do in fact make some valid points, including some of those. What I find remarkable is that you can find his musings so apparently controversial and in effect accuse him of responsibility for terrorism.
I know blogging is a 'screechy' medium, but get over it. The tendency to blame the liberal media (or worse still some notional value-setting liberal elite which does not in fact exist)for terrorism while applauding murderous war, international under-development and vast inequality, not to mention the domestic erosion of civil liberties, is one of the more unattractive memes of the net.
Except its not really either a meme, or a net thing. Its just the usual old guff of the retro-downbeats who feel more comfortable swallowing recieved fear and loathing of the 'other' than wrestling joyously with social complexity and change.
Thus we have the intellectual laziness of concepts like terrorism itself and the ridiculous War on Terror - a phrase so ironically suicidal as to approach the notion of the world's smallest joke while simultaneously operating as the world's worst!
We conflate '7/7' and Iraq as if shooting up Najaf will make the next bunch of murderous midlanders think twice.
Because of course we don't think about quite what terror means and how VERY different that meaning is from the situation in a failed and occupied non-state like former Iraq. Which is what makes the War on Terror rhetoric both so banal and so great a victory for the terrorists.
Are we really to try and imagine ourselves as scared as those we are 'protecting' so poorly in Iraq, or allowing to be bombed in southern Lebanon?
Further, identity at a national level is so missing the point - its Tebbit's cricket test with a bald head and a Scottish accent - ask them what they feel about pluralist democracy and individual expression set against notions of social conformity in a context changing distributions of social goods (I'm only kind of joking - but my point is that the answers to these questions tell us little about anything except current degrees of isolation as Garton-Ash implies).
Also compare poll dates and environments - you can't pat 'Jacques' on the head for his tough secular line on the hijab while condemning him as an arab-loving enemy of Israel in the next breath.
What is so insidious about the Londonstan rhetoric of the new internationalist right is that the rhetoricians choose London precisely beacuse here there is a battle with an alternative pluralist vision. That is a risk as much for the islamist as for Melanie Phillips and George Bush - both need a divided world devoid of understanding to flourish.
Up North the brothers get the kicking without the coffee shops. Down here they get they get the mullahs and moccas - which is worse?
We must be very careful not to blame the sins of the extremists on the liberals - saying to a fascist sympathiser 'well if you really want to see a jackboot just put your face down there like a good boy and while you're at it can you bring a few of your friends around so that I can give them a precautionary kickin too' should never, so as to speak, be our resort of First Choice.
Nor should it ever make more sense to use the rhetoric of battle before the dialectic of understanding - making that mistake is not a sign of civilization.
Attempts to understand and educate are not responsible for terrorism and the idea that just because crap northern local authorities think multi-culturalism is best expressed by educational and social apartheid that therefore those of us living in the more integrated south should raze the mosques and make everyone play cricket (or indeed boules) is bizarre (and indeed balls).
Um... where to begin?
1. I wasn't blaming anything on Tim's 2004 prediction of damnation, I just thought it was ironic that the kind of terror he had so smugly predicted for the French was now being played out here, and he had belatedly woke up to the fact that, um, something might be amiss.
2. Instead of accepting that, heavens, the French approach may have benefits, instead he prescribes "more of the same", so to speak, which is clearly serving our society so well.
3. I don't think anyone is talking about "razing" anything, except you?
4. And when have I "applauded murderous war, international under-development and vast inequality, not to mention the domestic erosion of civil liberties"?
Of course these are easy dragons to slay. But not of my making.
My point was that you could, possibly inadvertently, be seen to be lining up as part of the AL-Guardian agenda so beloved of the short-trousered neo-con pub bores over at Harry's Sauce
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