Losing My Irreligion

For around ten years, I have written articles and blog posts from an atheist perspective. I no longer consider myself to be an atheist, and the following is my attempt at explaining this change of position.

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My background is one of a family rooted in a mild and liberal Anglicanism. I wasn’t brought up in the kind of household where religion was ‘forced’ upon me. I didn’t ‘have’ to pray, and I wasn’t made to feel inherently depraved and sinful.

At age 14, I stopped attending church. Four years later, a quest for meaning of sorts began. Having watched a documentary on the racist ‘Christian Identity’ movement, I looked into some of its writings online. These texts were filled with biblical quotations used to ‘validate’ the CI theology and I picked up a Bible and started to check these texts in an attempt at looking at them in their proper context. I was instantly absolutely captivated by the Bible. I had never read the Bible properly before and, while I was of course familiar with a few of its passages and stories from church services, I was now seeing it in a completely different way. I found the book hugely exciting and in time I became an evangelical Christian. I was not ‘converted’ by anyone, but rather came to faith through my own reading of the Bible.

Through browsing in my local library, I became fascinated by religion and philosophy in general. I began a journey which involved lots and lots of reading, and sending off for numerous books and pamphlets from groups as diverse as hardline Christian fundamentalist sects, messianic Jews, Unitarians, Deists, Bahá’ís, Rosicrucians, ‘Sacred Name’ groups, John Todd Ferrier’s ‘Order of the Cross’, Theosophists, Gnostics, neo-Pagans, and so on. This collection of religious literature would later be joined by Catholic Truth Society books and a large collection of Islamic materials. I also started to read theological books, biblical studies, and historical Jesus studies. In time, my simplistic evangelicalism morphed into a less literalist and more thoughtful faith, and I decided to study Theology & Religious Studies at university.

Overall, I greatly enjoyed my degree. I loved all the reading, the class debates, and the exploring of ideas. In my final year, things started to go downhill somewhat, not academically, as I ended up with a First, but rather in terms of the direction my reading was going. I started to read a lot of so-called ‘radical theology’ and ‘postmodern theology’. Initially, I found these obscure, difficult texts, filled with a dazzling array of neologisms and technical terms, very engaging. Gradually, however, I began to see their inner emptiness. This was not religious material, it would not inspire action and it all too clearly was ‘academic’ in the worst possible sense. For an example of what I’m talking about, consider the following typical passage from the late Charles E. Winquist’s book Desiring Theology:

Theology belongs to the population of all discursive practices. It remains text production. There is no special privilege to its discursive formations that comes from outside of the text production. The theological exigencies inscribed within its texts are effects of the metonymical placing of extreme formulations throughout the texts. The efficacy of these formulations is in their pressure upon ordinary usage and reference. The pressure of figurations of ultimacy on the pragmatics of discourse is a transvaluation of the ordinary… Theological texts explicitly express their internal undecidability. In this sense, theological texts introduce an incommensurability into discursive practices that is an internal trace of the other.

Immersed as I was in this material, I felt increasingly dislocated from faith as a lived experience and more and more bogged down in a world of academic obscurantism. I no longer attended church, had little or no connection with any kind of religious belief or practice, and eventually became weary of not only academic theology but of all thinking of God. After my degree was over, I left theology behind and decided to further explore instead the critical and cultural theory the postmodern theologians were working with (or arguably misrepresenting). Sadly, in doing this, I inflicted upon myself the experience of reading piles of barely coherent, jargon-filled academic waffle, which I concluded fairly early on was devoid of any genuine meaning or purpose. I descended into a great period of depression and was overcome by a sense of emptiness, darkness, and meaninglessness. Unlike those who might be accused of using religion as a ‘crutch’ in such circumstances, I didn’t return to faith. In fact, in the period after I finished my MA, put academia behind me and got a proper job working with the elderly, I gained a new, wholly negative connection to religion and religious texts. As a result, I spent much of the past decade writing atheist articles which attempted to undermine the possibility of faith, the relevance of the Bible, the reality of God, and so on.

Looking back on it now, I can see a clear and deliberate pattern emerging, and a ‘tactic’ of sorts in use that I now consider to have been part of a subconscious effort to finally bury any connection I once had, or could ever have again, with belief. It seems to me now that, over my period of atheist writing, I was engaging in a systematic process of tearing down each aspect of faith one by one (the possibility of God, the relevance of Jesus, the relevance of the Bible, the value of faith, the possibility of a thinking faith, the possibility of engaging in theological thought and writing, the positive contributions of religion) in order that I could finally and ‘logically’ satisfy myself that the only rationally justifiable course of action was a wholesale repudiation of God and religion. Essentially, then, I would now argue that the attractiveness of atheism for me lay most clearly in the fact that, for me, embracing atheism offered a quick escape route from thinking too deeply. Weary as I was after four years of academic work, there was a strange sort of comfort to be found in arguing that all the big questions I had been looking at previously were ultimately meaningless and that there is consequently no need to investigate any further. On a certain level, there was a mirror here with the simplistic faith I first embraced in my late teens. The world is a simpler place and life is less challenging if you can satisfy yourself that you have all the answers and that the quest for meaning is complete. Both religious fundamentalism and atheism can provide that same certainty and a sense of being ‘at peace’ in a world in which truth is immediately self-evident and the need for debate is over, although I would now argue that any sense of being at peace in atheism was ultimately illusory and unsatisfactory.

With time away from writing and a period spent getting on with life itself, working hard, getting married, and making a home, certain interests and thoughts have come back to haunt me, although I feel they were always haunting me even in my time advocating atheism and attacking religion as wholly outdated, irrelevant, and so on. I have come to the realisation that, try as a might, I simply cannot shake the questions of meaning and the draw that faith continues to have on me. Am I really an atheist? Was I ever truly an atheist? The claim that atheists don’t really mean what they say or are deluding themselves is a smug and intellectually lazy way to answer atheism. There are many genuine atheists out there, but I’ve come to realise that I’m not one. I fear (on a certain level) that my atheism was always at heart a process of iconoclasm and a type of negative theology. As I say, for many, atheism is exactly what it appears to be, yet in my case I continued to channel my ongoing fascination with Christianity, my ‘obsession’ with the Bible (as one of my university lecturers called it), and my desire to engage with questions of belief and so on through a process of negation. I attacked the notion of God and offered strong critiques of biblical texts, yet in doing this I was able to maintain a connection, albeit a negative one, with those very things. For an atheist, I certainly filled a large amount of my time with talking about God and Jesus and reading the Bible. Now, again, there are atheists who do just that, and for entirely atheistic reasons, but I can simply no longer fool myself that this was all that I was up to.

On a certain level, I’m deeply frustrated. Many atheists or agnostics I have come across who are not intrinsically hostile to religion often say, “I wish I could believe in God, but I can’t.” I’m not one of those. I explicitly and definitely did not want to believe in God. Instead, I wanted to be rid of God, to purge myself of every last trace of what Nietzsche called the ‘theologian instinct’. Yet, somewhat to my surprise, I found that I have ultimately failed. I thought I had succeeded, but I was fooling myself. I continue to hear a knocking at the door, a knocking I have sought to silence, to deny exists, to muffle and drown out. I can no longer ignore that knocking, much as a part of me strongly wishes to do so. I am forced, for the first time in a decade, to confront the fact that I am not an atheist, but I am rather a believer in deep denial, or perhaps more accurately a believer who has been engaging in a heavily disguised kind of apophasis, and a believer whose attacks on the Bible are actually part of a quest not to destroy it, but rather to re-examine and re-think it. Frustration and disappointment are, of course, not all that I feel, otherwise I would be little more than a failed believer stuck in a state of melancholia. In reality, those frustrations and disappointments are nothing more than the result of a process of working through and rejecting the false comforts of a narrow and simplistic world view, and those feelings of frustration are even now giving way to a new sense of excitement and purpose, and new hope for the future.

Logging out and signing off

A while back I deleted my Facebook account. I simply couldn’t be bothered with it, just as I’ve never had any inclination to ‘tweet’. Over the last year, my interest in blogging and in reading blogs has likewise diminished greatly. At times I’ve gone for a month or more without reading blogs or getting round to writing anything. It’s not a case of falling into despair or anything like that. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. I’ve simply lost whatever it is that drives people to blog, mainly because I’m busily engaged in other things, largely in the ‘real world’ – and enjoying them. As a result, when it comes to blogging, I’m calling it a day.

The fact that I’m not an ‘activist’ type, nor involved in party politics, always made me something of an outsider within the political blogging world. I started blogging for one specific reason – to offer a small attempt at countering some of the BNP propaganda that for a while seemed to be helping that party to mainstream itself and to cover up its true ideology. This led to me becoming a blogger at Harry’s Place and to producing two reports on the far-right. I then diversified my blogging interests to include posting on anti-Western and anti-democratic ideologies such as those found amongst Islamists and their far-left fellow travellers. And at the same time, I also tried to put the significance and power of those groups into perspective and to counter the paranoia about ‘Islamisation’ that feeds into anti-Muslim bigotry. As far as that goes, I’m happy to have done my bit and have enjoyed the numerous writing-related friendships I’ve made along the way. However, I’ve really reached the end of the line on these topics. There are plenty of people doing excellent work in those areas, and I don’t feel in any way that I need to be writing any more.

Since I passed 30, bought a house in suburbia, and got married, I’ve very much made my peace with the mainstream, and unashamedly so. I enjoy gardening, photography, going for walks, reading up on local history, and have even started getting into cookery. It may seem like a shallow ‘white picket fence’ existence to some, especially those filled with rage and righteous indignation about all manner of issues, but I’m happy. Indeed, very happy.

I wish all of you well and want to thank the HP team for giving me the opportunity to be a part of what they do. I admire the work carried out by HP, but it’s no longer for me. In all honesty, if I never hear about the PSC, Gilad Atzmon, Andy Newman and ‘Socialist Unity’, the bitter cranks of groups like the SWP (and so on) again it won’t be soon enough. The same applies for reading the bizarre rants of obsessive commenters and internet oddballs who would no doubt benefit from getting out in the fresh air a bit more often.

So, to the many decent people I’ve encountered over the last few years of blogging, thank you. To the angry mouth-foamers and comment section obsessives, I hope life gets better for you and you can find a way to see through the darkness you perceive around you to the many wonderful things life has to offer. The world isn’t going to hell, any more than it was in each generation that people have proclaimed that it’s going to hell. On this, if little else, I find myself in agreement with the author of a well-known book of the ancient world.

Best wishes and farewell,

Edmund Standing

On dishonest quote mining and false accusations of bigotry

It’s been brought to my attention that I’m being attacked by a couple of far-left blogs. One of these blogs seems to be run by a George Galloway fanclub, while the other is run by a member of a historical reenactment society called the SWP, whose members like to pretend they’re taking part in a Communist revolution. About the only modern idea they seem to embrace is recycling – in their case, recycling the ideas of Trotsky. I won’t bother wasting time replying to their facile ‘arguments’ at any great length as I’ve already done so before. Should you wish, you can read those responses here and here.

There is one thing that is worth pointing out about attacks such as these, as there have been quite a few of a similar nature that make use of a few quotes from a four part study of the Qur’an I wrote for the rationalist website Butterflies & Wheels. The Gallowayite site states:

Standing’s views on Islam are just as forthright. He describes the Qur’an in the following terms: “I hope to demonstrate to the reader quite what a divisive, primitive, and insulting book it actually is “; and he condemns ” the hateful attitude it takes towards those who do not accept Islam”, and demands: “how can texts like those I have just cited do anything but instill a negative or contemptuous attitude towards non-Muslims?

As the link leading up to the quotes is dead, I can only assume this section was copied and pasted from some other website. The article in question can now be found here.

‘Critiques’ such as these engage in quote mining that seems so blatant that it is hard to see it as being accidental. Let’s take the first quote, for example, which is almost certainly deliberately taken out of context to create the impression that I’m trying somehow to attack Muslims. Here is the full quote, with the missing text in bold:

In this article, I shall look at exactly what the Qur’an says, and I hope to demonstrate to the reader quite what a divisive, primitive, and insulting book it actually is; not to provoke hostility towards Muslims, nor to be deliberately and gratuituously offensive, but for the important reasons outlined above.

They never quote the reasons I gave either, which is unsurprising. I wrote:

It seems to me vitally important in a time in which this book [the Qur'an] and this religion [Islam] are proclaimed so widely and so loudly to be the Truth and to be beyond criticism that those of us who value the fruits of the Enlightenment – rational, secular thought and discourse, freed from the often horrific superstitions of ignorant men of the past – should endevour to both examine and critically evaluate Islam and its much vaunted ‘holy book’.

The Enlightenment and the huge social changes it ushered in are precious gifts that it is our duty to protect against the forces of resurgent irrationalism in the world today. The values and achievements of the Enlightenment are things which should be open to all, regardless of skin colour or ethnicity: in short, they are not simply a luxury for white Western elites. In seeking to ‘understand’ Islam and in offering an unthinking and servile ‘respect’ for the Qur’an, many feel they are championing the cause of minorities and protecting them from bigotry and Western ‘cultural imperialism’. This is utter condescending nonsense. There is no reason why brown skinned people should be left in the chains of superstition and there is no reason why the things many of them hold dear should be beyond rational criticism. Beliefs have consequences, and in the case of this particular religion one of those consequences is that many of its followers feel duty-bound to attempt to roll back the Enlightenment and to ‘Islamify’ the West. This is an unpopular statement to make, considered in the minds of many self-proclaimed liberals and progressives to border on ‘bigotry’ or to actually constitute a form of ‘racism’. But bigotry and racism are enemies of Enlightenment rationalism – they belong to precisely the same realm of irrational, petty, provincial thinking that produced competing religions, all proclaiming to be bearers of the Truth without a shread of real evidence, and all quite unsatisfactory if we are to be serious about developing further together as a global community in the years to come.

Hardly the statements of someone seeking to launch ‘bilious attacks on Muslims’, as the SWP blogger claims.

Then there are the following quotes: ‘the hateful attitude it takes towards those who do not accept Islam’ and ‘how can texts like those I have just cited do anything but instill a negative or contemptuous attitude towards non-Muslims?’

That quote is again given no context. It actually appears at the end of a list of quotes from the Qur’an about those who refuse to accept Islam. Quotes such as:

Have you not seen those who dispute with respect to the communications of Allah: how are they turned away? Those who reject the Book and that with which We have sent Our Apostle; but they shall soon come to know, when the fetters and the chains shall be on their necks; they shall be dragged into boiling water, then in the fire shall they be burned (Qur’an 40.69-72).

And:

Has not there come to you the news of the overwhelming calamity? (Some) faces on that day shall be downcast, laboring, toiling, entering into burning fire, made to drink from a boiling spring. They shall have no food but of thorns, which will neither fatten nor avail against hunger (Qur’an 88.1-7).

And my conclusion reads in full:

These are clearly not the writings of a rational mind. Deranged by religious delusions, the author or authors of these passages would no doubt be considered mentally ill or psychologically unbalanced were this ‘holy’ book to be written today. Yet, as a religious text, the Qur’an is all too often given a special exemption from normal criticism, and we are told that we must show it ‘respect’, despite the hateful attitude it takes towards those who do not accept Islam. Around the world, children are taught to revere the Qur’an as the very words of the creator of the universe, as a perfect book with a timeless message, yet how can texts like those I have just cited do anything but instill a negative or contemptuous attitude towards non-Muslims? And why would anyone in their right mind claim that this book should be held up as the most important book ever written, or even as a great work of literature?

Later, in part four of the same article, I wrote:

We need to stop cowering in fear of being accused of ‘bigotry’ or ‘Islamophobia’, or ‘racism’, or any of the other labels that are all too often attached to those who dare to critically examine Islam, and we also need to be firm in our rejection of far-right political parties and organisations that are attempting to make problems related to Islam ‘their issue’ and who are seeking to slide a racist agenda in under the guise of ‘defending the West’. As a committed anti-racist I will not be told by genuine bigots that they ’speak for me’, because they most certainly do not.

In this article I wrote that ‘anti-Muslim bigotry is undoubtedly a problem that needs to be confronted’, ‘anti-Muslim bigotry is often appalling and must be opposed’, and that we must ‘promote the values of the Enlightenment, oppose racism, and seek to stand up against genuine anti-Muslim bigotry’.

The fact is, when it comes to my positions on criticism of Islam and Islamism and opposition to anti-Muslim bigotry, I have been consistent and crystal clear. I can only assume that those who level pathetic accusations of ‘Islamophobia’ against me have either not read my articles in full, have the reading comprehension skills of a primary school child, or are deliberately and maliciously quoting me out of context in order to present me as someone who promotes bigotry towards Muslims.

I think the latter is most likely, and this says a lot about the intellectual honesty and credibility of the writers in question.

The Taliban and Revolutionary Victory

A quick reminder as to why posts like Gene’s on the plight of Afghan women are unlikely to give the ‘anti-war’ Trots any sleepless nights. You see, ultimately, supporting the Taliban will lead to Socialism. An article by Jonathan Neale in the SWP’s pseudo-intellectual journal International Socialism explains how.

While he acknowledges that the so-called ‘resistance’ in Afghanistan is led by ‘the right wing Taliban’ (I wasn’t aware they advocate free markets and individual liberty, but anyway), Neale nonetheless hopes for ‘a victory for the resistance’ – after all, ‘[t]he Taliban have walked the walk and earned their place at the table’. Towards the end of the article, Neale’s delusions are fully expounded. According to this SWP ideologue, supporting the Taliban will somehow bring about a victory for Socialism:

For too long most of the left in Pakistan has identified the jihadis and the Taliban as the main enemy. There is likely to be a moment of rebellion against the Americans in Pakistan in the next few months or years. When that comes, if the left is strong and passionate and enraged on the streets, that could change politics in Afghanistan too.

In other words, then, Neale is fully aware of the fact that the Afghan ‘resistance’ is led by theocratic maniacs who kill British troops, throw acid in the faces of girls who try to go to school, and train children to become suicide bombers, but sees that as a trifling matter compared to his fantasy that somehow their hatred for the West will ultimately lead to the establishment of a Socialist utopia.

The same bizarre ‘reasoning’ of course underlies the far-left’s approach to various Islamist groups in the UK. You see, according to John Molyneux of the SWP, also writing in International Socialism, given enough time, Islamist radicals will come to see that what they actually want is Socialism, not the Islamism they currently espouse:

The vast mass of workers will be liberated from their religious illusions not by arguments, pamphlets or books, but by participation in the revolutionary struggle, and beyond, in the building of socialism. In such a situation it is incumbent on the party to ensure that religious differences, or differences between the religious and the non-religious, do not obstruct the unity of working class struggle. Moreover, insofar as the party becomes a truly mass party, leading the class in its workplaces and communities, it will inevitably find in its ranks a layer of workers who remain religious or semi-religious. To reject such workers because of their religious illusions would be sectarian and non-materialist. It would be to share the religious/idealist mistake of regarding religion as the most important element in consciousness and consciousness as more important than practice. At the same time, the party must not become a religious party, or party whose policy, strategy or tactics are shaped by religious considerations. Revolutionary victory requires that the party should be guided by the theory that expresses the collective interests and struggle of the working class, namely Marxism. Therefore the party must ensure that on this matter it educates and influences its religious members rather than vice versa.

For the SWP and their ilk, the fact that they find themselves standing shoulder to shoulder with theocrats who oppose almost everything they stand for is of no importance. What matters  is that these Islamists are fellow ‘workers’ who are, whether they realise it or not, participating in a ‘revolutionary struggle’. Such participation will supposedly lead the Islamists to be ‘liberated from their religious illusions’ and ultimately result in a ‘revolutionary victory’.

So, don’t expect them to be moved by the plight of women like Aisha. What’s a missing nose here or a burnt off face there when the day of Socialist victory draws ever nearer?

Further Reading for White Liberals

Nirpal Singh Dhaliwal, ‘How wet white liberals became the ultimate black joke‘:

Groovy white liberals can pose serious problems to ethnic minorities in this country. They contributed to some of the most enjoyable and least productive moments of my childhood. I went to an all-boys comprehensive school in Ealing; the pupils were overwhelmingly black and Asian. Some, like me, were the children of Indian immigrants, others, refugees from Somalia, Iran, Armenia . . .

We’d often get a fresh-faced, idealistic teacher who had no doubt read Marx and Malcolm X and done an elective in post-colonial theory at polytechnic. We ate those suckers alive.

Desperate to empathise with our persecution, they were knocked dead by our indifference and rampant misbehaviour. At the first sniff of guilt-ridden middle-class weakness, the feral instincts of teenage boys were unleashed and the class descended into anarchy. They thought we’d been crazed by oppression, so didn’t want to come down too hard on us. They wanted to understand instead. When it did get too much for them and they threatened to march one of us to the headmaster’s office, our immediate protest would be: “You’re a racist!”

[...]

A stalwart gang of diehard traditionalists prevented us from leaving school illiterate. Chief among them was Mr Garrett, my form tutor. He was an imposing behemoth of a man, who couldn’t have cared less about our ethnicity and historical subjugation. He had high expectations of how we should behave and apply ourselves, and flew into thunderous, terrifying rages whenever we failed to meet them.

He was the kind of guy who’d never get a job in education today. For some kids he was the most solid male presence they had in their lives. Whenever I bump into former classmates in my old neighbourhood, he’s the teacher we remember most fondly, wondering how he’s doing now. He didn’t always have our affection, but he commanded our respect. He saw enough innate worth in us to set us standards and be bitterly disappointed when we fell short.

Things are very different today. I have a friend who teaches, and he says it’s normal for teachers not to reprimand badly behaved black kids because “they suffer enough oppression as it is”. The soft bigotry of wet liberals is as insidious as the racism of white supremacists. Lowering the bar for children because you consider them oppressed has the same effect as expecting little of them because you think them inferior.

Lloyd Marcus, Open letter to white liberals from a black American:

Thank you very, very much. You see us poor helpless inferior blacks, oh forgive me, I must be politically correct, “African Americans,” and you want to help us using your superior intellect. After all, we could not possibly succeed in this racist, homophobic and greedy country without your assistance.

[...]

Oh, and thanks for encouraging schools to accept black kids speaking Ebonics rather than English. It would be racist to expect us simple minded colored folks to learn to speak English correctly. And besides, we don’t want our black kids sounding too white. Authentic blacks must sound like the hood, love rap and Kentucky Fried. I would never trust any black that eats “sushi”; which is probably what those traitors, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas eat. If Justice Thomas would have answered his phone with a “What up!” and a heartfelt “A-muri-ka sucks,” the NAACP would have championed him as a true brother faithful to his blackness. Sadly, Rice and “Uncle Thomas” as we call him, chose the character, education and hard work route to success. How disgusting!

And a quick personal anecdote: I was recently talking to a friend of mine who refers to herself not as mixed-race, ‘biracial’, or ‘dual heritage’, but rather as half-caste (‘always have been half-caste, and always will be’). Her boss is a white liberal who, upon hearing my friend use the term ‘half-caste’ got rather upset and told her off, informing her that she was using racist language and it was unacceptable for a mixed-race person to use the term ‘half-caste’, even when describing herself. You see, my poor little friend (being a shade darker an’ all) doesn’t understand racism like white liberals do. Thank goodness her boss was around to ‘explain’ things to her…

White Liberals and Politically Correct Racism

The white liberal is an unhealthy type of creature that you will undoubtedly have encountered, if not in real life, certainly via the media. By ‘liberal’, I do not mean simply someone who has a generally liberal outlook, in the sense of a ‘live and let live’ philosophy, nor do I mean liberals in the sense of the classical liberals of the conservative tradition. By ‘white liberal’, I mean a white Western individual who is likely to come from a middle class background and have a university education, considers him or herself to be both ‘left-wing’ and socially ‘liberal’, and almost certainly reads The Guardian or The Independent. White liberals espouse an artificial and pretentious form of ‘egalitarianism’, a patronising and hypocritical approach to ethnic minorities and non-Western cultures, and – in a re-hash of the notion of the ‘white man’s burden’ – devote themselves to a delusional Messianism in which they seek to ‘save the world’ through protesting against war (in real terms, protesting against non-white people having a chance at freedom and democracy), Israel (the one truly liberal society in the Middle East), globalisation (thereby opposing the one great vehicle by which poorer nations can develop), and so on, while making themselves feel and look ‘good’ by flaunting their pious support for campaigns to end poverty in the Third World (which will do no such thing, as Dambisa Moyo, Stephen Pollard, Marian L. Tupy, and others rightly point out ), and boasting about how ‘progressive’ they are by showing ‘solidarity’ with genocidal Islamists in Gaza.

White liberals, despite viewing themselves as intelligent and open-minded, are actually some of the most illiberal and narrow-minded people in society today. Their reactions to the idea that anyone might think differently to them range from gut-wrenching despair to pure hatred of the kind seen in the most fanatical of ‘true believers’. White liberals are, by and large, incapable of serious adult debate (preferring innuendo and accusations of bigotry), or of dealing with the fact that not everyone will agree with them (despite their supposed love of pluralism and a multiplicity of different ‘voices’), and tend to see any view which deviates from their cultic leftist script as a form of irredeemable moral evil. White liberals do not base their world-view on rational analysis and sensible argument, but instead on an almost religious faith that they possess the ‘truth’, and just as we see in so many fundamentalist religious cults and sects, the devotees of the white liberal faith burn with hatred for the ‘sin’ that surrounds them, and indeed, all too often for the ‘sinners’ themselves. White liberals, who are the intellectual equivalent of stroppy, rebellious teenagers, have sought to subvert and undermine Western civilisation, and some offer support for authoritarian and even terrorist movements as part of their attack on ‘racism’ and ‘colonialism’.

White liberals approach issues of race and racism from an essentially irrational, moralistic standpoint. White liberals do not simply judge racism to be based on bad thinking and criticise it for its illogical collectivism. Instead, white liberals make the issue of racism, as with other issues, all about them. White liberals have colonised the discourse of racism and anti-racism because it offers them an opportunity to boast of the superiority of their virtue and to demonstrate their purity and holiness through ostentatious and vacuous public displays of self-flagellation. Just as early Christianity imbued adherents with a deep sense of guilt and sinfulness, so the white liberal finds in reflecting on the history of white racism the opportunity to both revel in the guilt of the sinner and to make atonement through ‘anti-racist’ initiatives, thereby offering them the opportunity to further present themselves as a holy elite tasked with saving the world. And just as at various points in the history of Christianity an overarching sense of guilt derived from an intense awareness of, and obsession with, the supposedly inherent sinfulness of human beings and of the ‘world’ led ‘holy’ men and women to conclude that the path to holiness is found in the hatred of self, world, and the human condition, white liberals indulge in a form of self-hatred which is designed to project the image of penitence and sanctity, while actually being transparently pretentious, self-aggrandising, and destructive.

Ideological white racists are collectivists who adopt the irrational position that white people form some kind of world-wide ‘brotherhood’ with a unified history and culture. The huge variations in the historical and cultural experiences and manifestations of the various majority white nations is seen to be of little importance in the bigger picture. Ideological white racists are frequently people who have made little or no personal contribution to the development and advancement of Western civilisation. You won’t find many ground-breaking inventors and innovators, great scientists, artists, composers, and so on in the ranks of the modern white supremacist movement, but you will find many bitter and insecure individuals who make themselves feel important by piggy-backing on the achievements of others. When white racist activists and ideologues talk of ‘white unity’ and ‘white pride’, they almost always claim to be ‘proud’ of the ‘superior’ achievements of white people throughout history. Ideological white racists will point to great men and women of the past and present who happen to share their skin colour and state how great the ‘white race’ is. So, you will find the absurd phenomenon of drug dealing, dole scrounging morons who somehow feel Shakespeare and Mozart can be claimed by them as great men of ‘their race’. Clearly, stating yourself ‘proud’ of things that you have not made or done just because they were made or done by people who look or looked similar to you has no rational basis.

On this point, white liberals will agree. However, at the same time, white liberals advocate an inverse form of the same collectivist nonsense by proposing that whites should feel collective guilt for the negative actions of white people of the past. It’s clearly stupid for a skinhead thug to claim to feel ‘proud’ of the works of Beethoven, yet it is also equally stupid for a white liberal to claim to feel ‘guilty’ for the actions of white slave traders or marauding white colonialists. But the white liberal simply will not accept this. White liberals hold an almost universally negative view of the history of Western civilisation and claim that modern Western whites should apologise and make amends for the actions of whites of previous generations and even previous centuries. If a Mayor of London made a public speech tearfully extolling the superior virtues of white people who happened to live in London in the past most people would be shocked by this act of collectivist posturing and irrational bigotry. However, when the tables are turned and a Mayor of London makes a tearful ‘apology’ for long dead Londoners’ involvement in the slave trade, this is seen by white liberals to be a moral and righteous act.

Here’s how The Guardian reported a 2007 case of exactly this collectivist irrationality:

Ken Livingstone yesterday marked the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade with an emotional and tearful ceremonial apology on behalf of the capital city and its institutions. The London mayor wept as he told a commemorative service of the cruelties inflicted on the millions transported from Africa and the legacy that confronts them today.

Before an audience of politicians, writers and dignitaries, he twice paused during his address. As he voiced the apology, the US civil rights leader the Rev Jesse Jackson walked over and placed his arm around the mayor. Mr Livingstone completed the long awaited statement, dabbing tears from his eyes, his voice shaky.

Ken Livingstone – known as ‘Red Ken’ for the far-left views he espoused for many years of his political career – took it upon himself to express collective guilt on behalf of an entire city in his role as Mayor of London. In doing so, he acted as the archetypal masochistic white liberal idiot.

As is so often the case with white liberals, Livingstone’s pathological sense of white guilt has also affected his ability to think rationally about people who happen to have a darker shade of skin than him. For white liberals like Red Ken, criticism of any non-white person is suspected to be a cover for ‘racism’, ‘imperialism’, and so on. Consequently, when Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi – an Islamist ‘scholar’ who advocates the death penalty for gay people, the beating of wives by their husbands, and calls Hamas terrorists ‘martyrs’ – came to London in 2004, Livingstone, acting in his official capacity of Mayor of London, publicly welcomed him and went so far as to embrace him before the cameras of the media.

Rational criticism of this disgusting act of grovelling to a retrograde theocratic ideologue had no effect on Livingstone. Taking white liberal idiocy to its logical conclusion, he went so far as issuing yet another of his vacuous apologies, stating that ‘On behalf of the people of London, I would like to apologise to the Sheikh for the outburst of xenophobia in sections of the media’. Livingstone’s decision to ignore Al-Qaradawi’s reactionary views was typical of the kind of double standard adopted by many white liberals. Livingstone seems to be one of the white liberal drones who thinks that while white people have been – and continue to be – somehow collectively responsible for an endless list of crimes and transgressions, the same cannot possibly be said for someone of another ethnicity. If a white leader advocated the same things as Al-Qaradawi, white liberals like Livingstone would be up in arms, denouncing the evils of homophobia, sexism, and any other ‘ism’ that could be thrown at them, and would probably go on to issue tearful apologies and dredge up issues like slavery.

Speaking of the similar attitudes of white liberals in Canada, liberal Muslim author Tarek Fatah nailed it when he told the Canadian Jewish News:

there is a tremendous amount of white guilt. The intelligentsia in this country in a selfish way tries to assuage this guilt. It caters to the most idiosyncratic behaviour of the immigrant and practices the racism of lower expectations. It sets standards of behaviour for our community, but when dealing with immigrants and especially the Muslim community, it does not expect them to live by the same standards.

Meanwhile, the Syrian-born Muslim scholar Bassam Tibi has told Germany’s Der Spiegel magazine that ‘Europeans have stopped defending the values of their civilization’ because ‘they confuse tolerance with relativism’. White guilt is an irrational, intellectually and culturally crippling pathology, yet white liberals who embrace this nonsense have a huge influence in almost all the powerful and influential sectors of our society.

For white liberals, the fear of being accused of racism is a matter of constant concern. The idea that someone might be a racist has taken second place only to the idea that someone might be a paedophile. Racism continues to be a highly contentious issue, and one in which white liberals take a particularly keen interest. However, as with everything else, most white liberals get this issue completely wrong and in doing so greatly hinder the development of an intellectually honest and rational society, and a society in which racial collectivism and prejudice is eradicated.

A good working definition of racism would be that it is the belief that one or more ethnic groups are inherently, biologically inferior to another. Racists work on the deterministic assumption that people can be collectively viewed as a single group based on ethnic ancestry alone and that membership of this group connotes certain fixed, unchanging, and unchangeable factors, such as intelligence, character, and aspirations. Racists are race essentialists – they do not see individuals but rather view ethnic groups as monolithic groups whose cultures, traditions, religions, and so on in some sense spring from their genetic make-up. While I’m far from an Ayn Rand acolyte, her analysis of racism in The Virtue of Selfishness is spot-on:

Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism. It is the notion of ascribing moral, social or political significance to a man’s genetic lineage — the notion that a man’s intellectual and characterological traits are produced and transmitted by his internal body chemistry. Which means, in practice, that a man is to be judged, not by his own character and actions, but by the characters and actions of a collective of ancestors.

Racism claims that the content of a man’s mind (not his cognitive apparatus, but its content) is inherited; that a man’s convictions, values and character are determined before he is born, by physical factors beyond his control. This is the caveman’s version of the doctrine of innate ideas — or of inherited knowledge — which has been thoroughly refuted by philosophy and science. Racism is a doctrine of, by and for brutes. It is a barnyard or stock-farm version of collectivism, appropriate to a mentality that differentiates between various breeds of animals, but not between animals and men.

Like every form of determinism, racism invalidates the specific attribute which distinguishes man from all other living species: his rational faculty. Racism negates two aspects of man’s life: reason and choice, or mind and morality, replacing them with chemical predestination.

When it comes to racism, a sensible approach would be to say that as the central assumptions which underpin it are false, racism is irrational and consequently a belief system that is of no value and is positively harmful. Many white people are hard-working and make a positive contribution to society; however, many do not. The same applies across all ethnic groups. A sensible approach to the issue of race is to judge individuals on their personal merits, not on the colour of their skin or their country of ethnic ancestry. The white racist would prefer to live next to a white dole scrounger than a hard-working Asian. This fact illustrates the fundamental irrationality of racism, and the indiscriminate collectivism upon which it is based. Racists are often seen as people who ‘discriminate’. In reality, they show themselves to be fundamentally incapable of discrimination, given the fact they see only undifferentiated masses termed ‘races’, instead of vastly differing individuals.

White liberals take a very different approach to the issue of racism than the one outlined above. White liberals do not predominantly base their positions on reason, but rather on emotions, moralism, and an almost religious devotion to concepts such as egalitarianism and ‘human rights’ (although their support for human rights varies according to whose rights are at stake). As moralists, white liberals see racism as evil and essentially ‘sinful’, and for them racism violates the holy precepts of ‘rights’ and ‘humanity’. White liberals are incapable of logically and adequately addressing issues of race and racism, because their moralism is not rationally founded.

In the Hebrew Bible, we find the idea of generational curses, in which God punishes the descendants of transgressors. For example, in Exodus 20:5, God is said to have stated: ‘I the Lord your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and the fourth generation’. White liberals approach racism from a similar perspective. As we have seen, white liberals feel an almost pathological sense of guilt over the white racism of the past and this is central to their overwhelmingly negative assessment of the West and its history.

This combination of moralism and guilt has resulted in white liberals going from one extreme to the other. In attempting to avoid the mistakes of the past and to somehow atone for the sins of their forefathers, white liberals have adopted a position towards ethnic minorities and non-Western cultures in which they feel that it is not morally permissible for white people to criticise any non-white groups, belief systems, cultural phenomena, and so on. Consequently, white liberals are – for example – wholly opposed to asserting the superior values of Western modernity over the comparative backwardness of the so-called Islamic world, and indeed devote much of their time to promoting the idea that the West is in fact grossly deficient and shot through with ‘racism’.

Multiculturalism is the inevitable result of this white liberal outlook. Unable to assert the particular value of Western civilisation and the developments of modernity, white liberals have encouraged multiculturalism because a large part of their flawed ‘anti-racist’ strategy is the promotion of cultural relativism. Cultural relativism is the irrational position that no culture – or aspect of cultural belief or practice – can in any sense be stated to be better than another, and it is an important aspect of the pseudo-religion of ‘equality’. The simplistic idea underpinning cultural relativism is the view that if all cultures are seen as equal, then all races will be seen to be equal, and never again can whites assert racial superiority over non-whites. However, the white liberal approach to racism is wrong on two fundamental levels: firstly, it is irrational, and secondly, it is actually based on racist ideas.

The white liberal notion that ‘discrimination’ is an intrinsic evil involves an abuse of the concept of discrimination and the application of a moral principle that makes no sense, and is not even consistently followed by white liberals. Despite the fact the word is now so loaded it automatically conjures up images of bigotry and injustice, discrimination is a perfectly normal and legitimate concept. To discriminate is simply to choose one option from a series of options. The fact that railway companies no longer build steam locomotives is the result of superior advances in rail technology. When building new trains, rail companies could choose to build a new fleet of steam locomotives. Of course, they do not do this as to do so would be a step backwards and would be commercially harmful. In choosing to build trains using the latest technology, rail companies are using a process of discrimination. Go and see the managers of a rail company and try telling them that all trains are ‘equal’ and that they should not ‘discriminate’ against steam locomotives, but should rather use equal numbers of steam and electric locomotives. They would probably laugh in your face and call you an idiot. And they would be right. Even white liberals would find the notion of railway locomotive ‘equality’ completely absurd and irrational. However, when it comes to looking at beliefs, cultural practices, ways of ordering society, and so on, white liberals suddenly adopt the same irrational argument as used in my train example. All cultures are ‘equal’, they assert. To think otherwise is immoral and bigoted and shows that you are a ‘racist’.

In reality, white liberals do not really consider all cultures to be equal. They may say they do, but even white liberals are not actually that stupid. White liberals to do not want to live in a society ruled on theocratic lines; they don’t want to be enslaved to following ancient writings of ignorant men; they don’t want their daughters to be genitally mutilated; they don’t want to be forced into arranged marriages; they don’t believe men should be in a position of ‘authority’ over women; they don’t accept sexism, misogyny, and anti-gay prejudice; they don’t think the answer to criminality is to enact barbaric laws involving public whippings, amputation, stoning, and beheading; they don’t think people should be executed for ‘crimes’ such as homosexuality and ‘sorcery’. The West was once based around all these principles, however, a slow development away from rule by religious authority and unelected leaders, and a society ordered along brutal feudal lines and permeated with superstition, took place in the West over a number of centuries, and was particularly accelerated thanks to the Enlightenment. The often hysterical reaction to Christian fundamentalists exhibited by white liberals, and their support for the notion that harshly criticising and even ridiculing Christianity is admirable and ‘progressive’, shows where they stand when it comes to traditional Western religion and religious authority. Because of its long history in the West, white liberals tend to perceive Christianity as somehow a ‘white’ religion (despite the majority of practising Christians in the world today being non-white and non-European), and as a result are more than happy to see it dissected, neutered, and pilloried. Naturally, white liberals do not consider criticism of Christianity and theocratic Christian groups to be a form of ‘anti-white racism’, and they are right, as it isn’t, and has nothing to do with race.

Given white liberals are very clear about the way in which they wish to live, and the rights they consider essential – free speech and expression, freedom from sexism, freedom from homophobia, democratic rights, individual rights, freedom from religious authority, freedom from State oppression, and so on – you might expect them to take the position that every citizen in the West (and indeed the whole world) should share a respect for, and enjoy the benefits of, these freedoms. However, because of white liberals’ bizarre misunderstanding of what racism is, they suddenly throw out any universal commitment to such values when they find that non-white societies and ethnic minority groups in majority-white societies do not respect these freedoms. The clearest example of this bizarre and hypocritical attitude is currently found in the way white liberals approach Islam and Muslims. According to the white liberal anti-racist creed, to criticise Islam, to state that Muslims living in the West should abide by the social mores of the West, and even to criticise political Islam (Islamism) is an act of ‘racism’. How can this be perceived to be racism? According to white liberals, criticism of Islam is ‘racist’ because the majority of Muslims in the world – and in the West – are non-white, and Islam is a religion that emerged in a non-white land (the Arabian peninsula). For the white liberal, criticism of Islam, because it is a predominantly non-white belief system, must by definition in fact be based on racist contempt for non-white people, because Islam is ‘their culture’ and to criticise ‘their culture’ is to criticise ‘them’. White liberals, haunted by memories of slavery, colonialism, and white supremacist ideologies of the past, have concluded that cultures and races are integrally intertwined. Islam, they believe, is a non-white and ethnic minority belief system, which is therefore an extension of the non-white and ethnic minority communities that adhere to it. In the light of the white colonialism and racism of the past, white liberals claim, white people have no right to pass judgement on other cultures, and to do so is to engage in a racist ‘cultural imperialism’.

The notion that criticism of a culture, cultural practice, or ideology is a form of racism is, ironically enough, actually predicated on a racist outlook. When white liberals cry ‘cultural racism’, they are merely engaging in a politically correct form of a racist idea which originally formed the basis of many theories of white supremacy. Early Western proponents of notions of the inferiority of non-white people, racial hierarchies, and so on, initially based their beliefs on assumptions derived from anthropology, before going on to create full-blown pseudo-scientific racial theories that drew on such bogus ‘scientific’ methods as craniology and phrenology. These anthropological racists came into contact with various non-white peoples through exploration and colonialism. Upon finding that many non-European peoples were living in societies bereft of the technological and philosophical advances found in the West, white supremacists concluded that the reason these peoples lived in primitive conditions which lacked any evidence of modernity was not that they – for various geographical and sociological reasons – had yet to go through the radical changes from living in pre-modern societies to living in modern technological and industrialised nations that had recently occurred in the West, but rather was a result of an inherent intellectual and sociological deficiency in their ‘race’ that derived from their genetic make-up. According to the Western theorists of white supremacy, the cultures of non-white peoples were external manifestations of an innate racial essence, and it was quite impossible to hope that these peoples would ever advance from the state in which they were found, because they were biologically incapable of ever advancing or developing. Such thinking provided an ‘intellectual’ justification for slavery, for example, in that it adjudged black people to be a lesser form of being, lacking intellectual potential and aspirations, and consequently a being whose ‘natural’ role was to live in subservience to white people. When white liberals claim that criticism of Islam or Islamic politics – so-called ‘Islamophobia’ – is a form of racism, they are making exactly the same connection between culture and race. In this white liberal form of racism – the racism of lower expectations – it is seen to be bigoted to suggest that non-white people should leave behind the very same primitive ideas that once held sway in the West (fanatical devotion to religion, intolerance of critical thinking and other beliefs, persecution of gay people, and so on). Yet the true bigot here is the white liberal, who assumes that cultural ideas that have developed in non-white societies are somehow integrally intertwined with, and innately derived from, the racial groups in those societies. The racism of lower expectations views non-white people as inferior to white Westerners, but masks this racist assumption in politically correct language about ‘diversity’ and ‘respect’ for cultures.

If white liberals really believed that all cultures are ‘equal’, you would expect to see them spreading out across the world, queuing up to gain entry to countries such as Iran or Saudi Arabia. In fact, most white liberals certainly do not hike off around the world, seeking to make their homes in Islamic States. The major traffic between Islamic States and the West comes in the form of a steady flow of immigrants trying to gain entry to the West because they know they will have a better life here. Societies that attempt to organise themselves using Islam as their foundational philosophical basis are demonstrably vastly inferior to the West. One need only glance at the human rights records of Islamic States such as Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Iran to see that this is the case. None of these States has a properly functioning democracy or the freedoms we take for granted in the West such as freedom of speech and expression, freedom of belief and religious adherence, freedom of association, gender equality, and freedom of choice in personal and sexual relationships. The legal systems in these States are barbaric, prejudiced, and corrupt. Law enforcement does not adhere to any proper system of due process. Saudi Arabia is ruled with an iron fist and is marked by institutional superstition, as seen, for example, in its execution of people accused of ‘witchcraft’ and ‘sorcery’. Yemen fiercely clamps down both on individual freedom and the rights of political groups. Arbitrary house searches and arrests are common, and capital ‘crimes’ include homosexuality. Child marriage, meanwhile, is promoted by Yemeni clerics, who cite Muhammad’s marriage of a child as the authoritative precedent for this practice. Iran is governed by a Holocaust-denying Islamist lunatic who incites hatred of the West and grants police the right to detain individuals for such bogus ‘crimes’ as ‘Satanism’ or having the wrong hairstyle. Iran also executes gay men, including teenagers.

To state that life in Western democracies is demonstrably better than life in Islamic States should hardly be controversial, yet many white liberals cannot bring themselves to acknowledge what they must logically believe to be the case, because to do so would be to ‘discriminate’ and to engage in ‘cultural imperialism’, ‘Islamophobia’, and ‘racism’. Yet who is the racist here? – The honest individual who notes that modern Western civilisation is superior to that of Islamic States, or the white liberal who enjoys the freedoms of the West but claims that we cannot ‘impose’ our ‘Eurocentric’ perspective on others, because to do so would be to claim that peoples and races living in Islamic States are themselves inferior? The subtext is rather clear in the white liberal’s cultural relativism: Islamic States are the way they are because they are the creation of non-white peoples, and therefore to criticise political Islam is to pass judgement on the ethnic groups in those States. A sensible person who is not clouded by racial prejudice should be able to see that Islam and Islamic States have nothing to do with race, and everything to do with culture. Culture does not derive from race, and therefore to criticise a culture cannot be seen as a racial criticism (unless that criticism is articulated in the language of genuine ideological racism). To assume that it can be seen as that is actually to endorse the view that culture does derive from race and that therefore the backward, superstitious, and authoritarian nature of Islamic societies is actually the result of non-white peoples being inherently backward and superstitious.

The same issue applies to white liberals’ approach to Islamists living in the West. When Islam, Islamism, and Islamists are criticised, many white liberals work themselves into a frenzy, frothing at the mouth about supposed ‘Islamophobia’ and ‘racism’. In doing so, white liberals seem to be seriously proposing that non-white immigrants and children of immigrants are inherently predisposed towards theocratic and illiberal outlooks. White liberals practice the racism of lower expectations in their dealings with immigrant communities. When Islamic groups are shown to be sexist, homophobic, anti-Semitic, anti-freedom, and anti-Western, white liberals do not oppose them – instead they support the bigotry and backwardness of Islamic extremists in immigrant communities by announcing that such prejudices and anti-freedom views and ideologies are ‘their’ culture and are no better or worse than the predominant culture in the West. The fact that white liberals are being racist in doing this is easily illustrated by the fact that when white racist parties and organisations promote anti-democratic views and hatred for minorities such as gay people, white liberals immediately condemn them. When the Christian Right comes out with views that are backward, superstitious, and opposed to personal freedom, white liberals start ranting about theocracy and ‘fascism’. White liberals are happy to attack bigotry, irrationalism, and extremism when it comes with a white face – they don’t claim that ‘far-right’ homophobia and anti-Semitism is somehow ‘different but equal’ to white liberal views, nor do they start making excuses about ‘understandable grievances’ when white supremacists rave about Jewish conspiracies or Christian extremists bomb abortion clinics. If virulent criticism of white racist ideologies and religiously conservative Christianity is not seen by white liberals to constitute a form of ‘anti-white racism’, then why on earth should criticism of political Islam be seen as a form of ‘racism’? The only way in which opposing political Islam can be spun as a form of ‘racism’ is to claim that Islam constitutes an expression of a racial ‘essence’, as opposed to being one cultural form among many. To claim that criticism of Islam is ‘racist’ is to claim that Islam is derived from biology. This is nonsense. It is the same as the white supremacist claim that Western civilisation is great because the ethnicity of its progenitors is great. When white liberals claim criticism of Islam or any other non-white belief or culture is racist they show themselves to be racist to the core. White liberals have a condescending approach to non-white people because in actual fact they do not view them as equals at all. White liberals are the true racists, and their ‘tolerance’, relativism, and obsession with calling other people racists is in fact an attempt at covering up this very fact.

Sultana ‘Inspired by Muhammad’ Tafadar and the IHRC

‘I believe in women’s rights. So did Muhammad’. So says ‘Sultana Tafadar, Barrister’ at the ‘Inspired by Muhammad’ campaign website (see my previous article on the claims made by the campaign here).

Curious to find out more about Ms Tafadar, I did a bit of looking around the web. Tafadar, it turns out, wrote a report for the Islamic Human Rights Commission in 2002 entitled ‘The Hidden Victims of September 11: Prisoners of UK Law’ (PDF) and spoke at an IHRC seminar on ’9/11 – The Hidden Victims’. In 2003, Tafadar again appeared at an IHRC event, this time speaking on ‘The Legal Case against Ariel Sharon’.

Anyone who might be wondering how the IHRC defines ‘human rights’ would do well to consult this excellent post at Harry’s Place. A sample:

It is a Khomeinist group that campaigns for Islamists in legal trouble, including convicted terrorists, such as Omar Abdel Rahman, the “blind sheikh”.

He was the spiritual leader of the bombers of the World Trade Center in 1993. According to terrorism investigator Evan Kohlmann, in his sermons he derided Americans as “descendants of apes and pigs who have been feeding from the dining tables of the Zionists, Communists, and colonialists” and called on Muslims to attack the West: “cut the transportation of their countries, tear it apart, destroy their economy, burn their companies, eliminate their interests, sink their ships, shoot down their planes, kill them on the sea, air, or land”.

He was convicted of seditious conspiracy in 1995 and sentenced to life in prison. So what does the IHRC do, to this day? It calls (pdf) for his release and asks Muslims to pray for him.

What about Abu Hamza? When he was convicted, IHRC chairman Massoud Shadjareh was not best pleased:

‘This is creating an environment that can only further alienate the Muslim community’.
The IHRC is certainly “alienated”. It refuses to deal with the police, who – shock! horror! – have turned to Israel for insight on dealing with suicide bombers. One policeman even dared to be rude about Hitler fan Yusuf al Qaradawi! The cheek.

As for Tafadar, in 2002 she considered ‘Sheikh Faisal’ one of the ‘Hidden Victims of September 11′, writing:

Sheikh Faisal was arrested on February 18, 2002.  He faces a sentence of up to life imprisonment if found guilty of the charge ‘soliciting to murder’ under section  four of the Offences Against the Person Act 1891 on the basis that on or before February 18 this year he ‘encouraged others to murder persons unknown’.

He was initially refused bail and was held in custody, but was later released on  bail on 21 August 2002 after the prosecution failed to hand over evidence they intended to use to his lawyer. He is currently awaiting trial.

In 2003, Abdullah al-Faisal (AKA Trevor William Forrest, AKA ‘Sheikh Faisal’) was found guilty of three charges of soliciting murder by an Old Bailey jury:

The jury found el-Faisal incited young, impressionable Muslims to kill non-believers, Americans, Hindus and Jews.

El-Faisal argued his words were taken from the Koran, the Muslim holy book, and had been misrepresented.

One tape, Jihad, contained the words: “So you go to India and if you see a Hindu walking down the road you are allowed to kill him and take his money, is that clear?”

He also said it is permissible to use chemical weapons to kill unbelievers.

In a tape called Rules of Jihad – thought to have been made before the 11 September 2001 attacks on the United States – el-Faisal told his audience: “You have to learn how to shoot. You have to learn how to fly planes, drive tanks and you have to learn how to load your guns and to use missiles.”

He said: “You are only allowed to use nuclear weapons in that country which is 100% unbelievers.”

On a tape entitled Declaration of War, which had a picture of Osama Bin Laden on the cover and is thought to have been made in 2000, el-Faisal translates one of his speeches calling for a holy war against Americans and Jews to “drive them out of the Holy Land”.

The tape called Them Versus Us says: “There are two religions in the world today – the right one and the wrong one. Islam versus the rest of the world.”

It was also disclosed that controversial cleric Abu Hamza was due to be called as a witness in the case.

Another ‘serious concern’ expressed by Tafadar was ‘political interference in the judiciary’. Commenting on the case of Suleyman Zain ul Abidin – a friend of hate preacher Abu Hamza (as Comrade/Sister Yvonne Ridley acknowledges in this piece at the IHRC site on supposed CIA ‘hit squads’ in London) – Tafadar was particularly worried by the fact that ‘[t]he campaign against Zain ul Abidin was spearheaded by pro-Zionist Andrew Dismore’.

As is so often the case with such characters, Tafadar also has links to the far-left, having conducted an interview for ‘Socialist Lawyer‘, magazine of the Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers. The Society’s website, unsurprisingly, offers links to, amongst others, the Communist ‘Morning Star’ newspaper, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, and the Stop the War Coalition.

I think it’s a shame the ‘Inspired by Muhammad’ campaign’s biography of Tafadar was so sparse. Hopefully this post has done something to redress this injustice.

The Derrick Bird case and the fallacious arguments of the gun control lobby

The Derrick Bird case has predictably brought Britain’s gun control maniacs back into the limelight and has also led to the usual leftist musings on the nature of modern society and how maybe it is to blame for his actions. The always excellent Heresy Corner has cut through much of this nonsense and also makes this very interesting observation:

We shall probably never know what went on in Derrick Bird’s head. There is one incident that stands out, however. In 2007, Bird was assaulted by a fare-dodger who knocked him unconscious and broke his teeth. The assailant was convicted of actual bodily harm, but the attack was said to have left Bird “nervous and anxious” and unwilling to work nights. Nothing out of the ordinary there, but it does raise the possibility that he sustained brain damage. Head injury not infrequently leads to personality change, and in some cases the full effect does not emerge for some years. Damage to the frontal lobes can be particularly dangerous, since that area of the brain controls inhibitions and social relationships. If Bird was brain-damaged, then he may indeed have been a ticking time-bomb – but for purely physical reasons, not because of the deeply-buried and hitherto undetectable traumas of a life that perturbs only with hindsight. That’s just a speculation, of course, but it strikes me as more plausible than anything offered by the psychologists.

This is indeed far more plausible. The link between head injury and apparently motiveless murder is well established. Many infamous serial killers are known to have suffered head trauma, including Leonard Lake, David Berkowitz, Kenneth Bianchi, John Wayne Gacy, and Carl Panzram, as noted by this interesting Crime Library article, which explains:

The temporal lobe is highly susceptible to injury, located where the skull bone is thinnest. Blunt injuries, including falling on a hard surface, can easily damage this section of the brain, creating lesions, which cause forms of amnesia and epileptic seizures. Damage to the temporal lobe can result in hair-trigger violent reactions and increased aggressive responses. As a child, Ken Bianchi fell off of a jungle gym, and landed on the back of his head. He soon began to have epileptic seizures.

Researcher Dominique LaPierre believes that the “prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain involved in long-term planning and judgment, does not function properly in psychopathic subjects.” Paleopsychologists also believe that there is some sort of malfunction in the brain of serial killers, that somehow their primitive brain overrides the “higher” brain: reason and compassion take a backseat to lust, aggression, and appetite. A study by Pavlos Hatzitaskos and colleagues reports that a large portion of death-row inmates have had severe head injuries, and that approximately 70% of brain-injured patients develop aggressive tendencies.

But surely, it might be argued, if guns were less readily available (not that they are readily available in gun control mad Britain), the Derrick Bird case may never have happened?

This is a spectacularly poor argument.

Firstly, it ignores the fact that, as Heresy Corner points out, in Switzerland, every household does indeed have a gun, and the last such mass-shooting there was in 2001.

Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, it ignores the fact that where guns are not readily available, other weapons are used instead. Remember, a kitchen knife easily becomes a weapon in the wrong hands. A string of recent spree killings in China illustrate the fallacious nature of the ‘no guns, no killings’ argument, given the killers used knifes, cleavers, and hammers, none of which – presumably – the gun control lobby would like to ban.

Thirdly, statistical evidence from the United States completely undermines the notion that gun control leads to a reduction in violent crime:

In 1976, Washington, D.C., instituted one of the strictest gun-control laws in the country. The murder rate since that time has risen 134 percent (77.8 per 100,000 population) while the overall rate for the country has declined 2 percent. Washington, D.C., politicians find it easy to blame Virginia’s less-stringent gun laws for the D.C. murder rate. Yet Virginia Beach, Virginia’s largest city with almost 400,000 residents, has had one of the lowest rates of murder in the country — 4.1 per 100,000.

In New York City, long known for strict regulation of all types of weapons, only 19 percent of the 390 homicides in 1960 involved pistols. By 1972, this proportion had jumped to 49 percent of 1,691. In 1973, according to the New York Times, there were only 28,000 lawfully possessed handguns in the nation’s largest city, but police estimated that there were as many as 1.3 million illegal handguns there.

In 1986, Maryland banned small, affordable handguns called Saturday night specials. Within two years, Maryland’s murder rate increased by 20 percent, surpassing the national murder rate by 33 percent. Then Maryland passed a one-gun-a-month law. Yet between 1997 and 1998, 600 firearms recovered from crime scenes were traced to Maryland gun stores. Virginia, one of only two other states with a similar law, ranked third as a source of guns used by criminals in other states.

On the other hand, New Hampshire has almost no gun control and its cities are rated among the safest in the country. Across the border in Massachusetts, which has very stringent gun-control laws, cities of comparable size have two to three times as much crime as New Hampshire.

Vermont has the least restrictive gun-control law. It recognizes the right of any Vermonter who has not otherwise been prohibited from owning a firearm to carry concealed weapons without a permit or license. Yet Vermont has one of the lowest crime rates in America, ranking 49 out of 50 in all crimes and 47th in murders.

States which have passed concealed-carry laws have seen their murder rate fall by 8.5 percent, rapes by 5 percent, aggravated assaults by 7 percent and robbery by 3 percent.

Gun control arguments are – for the most part – based not on a rational analysis of the phenomena of gun ownership and violence involving guns, but rather on a knee-jerk fear of guns and an apparent belief that the actions of a tiny minority of citizens should be used as the benchmark for decisions about the rights of the majority.

If we were to apply the same type of ‘argument’ used by gun control advocates to other issues, here is what we might conclude:

1. Cars: Every year thousands of people are killed or injured in road accidents. This strongly suggests, therefore, that cars are too dangerous to be in the hands of the average citizen. If we banned cars, there would be no more road deaths.

2. Kitchen knives: According to police statistics, kitchen knives are the most commonly used weapon in instances of knife crime. Given a minority of citizens apparently cannot use kitchen knives responsibly, the country would be far safer if we banned all kitchen knives.

3. Prescription drugs: According to this 2005 article in The Times, around 1,200 people in Britain die each year from taking prescription drugs which have an adverse reaction on the patient. Clearly, we cannot have citizens using drugs that may lead to death, therefore we’d be better off banning prescription drugs.

4. Domestic violence: According to statistical data, 54% of UK rapes are committed by a woman’s current or former partner, 48% of women murdered in the UK are killed by their partner, ex-partner, or lover, and 85% of UK domestic violence cases involve male on female violence. Given these statistics, it should be clear that in order for women to be truly safe, they should never live with, or have a relationship with, a man. If women are to be safe in our society we should ban heterosexual relationships.

All of the hypothetical ‘arguments’ above are clearly absurd. They take extreme examples of minority abuse of things which are not intrinsically bad and then propose legislation for all based on the deviant behaviour of the few. Exactly the same point applies to guns.

Legally owned firearms in this country are used for two main purposes; sport, and protecting animals and crops in rural areas. Unlike in many other countries, we, average citizens, do not have the right to own a firearm for the legitimate purpose of protection from violence.

The idea that we need tougher gun control laws as a result of statistical anomalies such as Derrick Bird is irrational and absurd. Unlike Bird, the vast majority of legal gun owners in Britain will never use their firearms to commit a criminal act. The gun crime we hear so much about in the media is carried out by criminals and criminal gangs, not by responsible gun owners, and the majority of guns used by criminals are not legally registered (for obvious reasons). Gun control advocates inhabit a fantasy world in which if potentially dangerous things are removed from society, then we will all be safer. As we have seen, the evidence does not bear this out, and a logical application of the basic ‘argument’ of the gun control lobby to many other potentially dangerous items would lead to a society in which most of us could hardly own or use anything, for fear that it might be misused by a minority.

Racism: The lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism

On the issue of racism, Ayn Rand was spot on.

From her The Virtue of Selfishness:

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Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism. It is the notion of ascribing moral, social or political significance to a man’s genetic lineage—the notion that a man’s intellectual and characterological traits are produced and transmitted by his internal body chemistry. Which means, in practice, that a man is to be judged, not by his own character and actions, but by the characters and actions of a collective of ancestors.

Racism claims that the content of a man’s mind (not his cognitive apparatus, but its content) is inherited; that a man’s convictions, values and character are determined before he is born, by physical factors beyond his control. This is the caveman’s version of the doctrine of innate ideas—or of inherited knowledge—which has been thoroughly refuted by philosophy and science. Racism is a doctrine of, by and for brutes. It is a barnyard or stock-farm version of collectivism, appropriate to a mentality that differentiates between various breeds of animals, but not between animals and men.

Like every form of determinism, racism invalidates the specific attribute which distinguishes man from all other living species: his rational faculty. Racism negates two aspects of man’s life: reason and choice, or mind and morality, replacing them with chemical predestination.

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Operation Black Vote and the curse of racial collectivism

As the countdown to the UK’s 2010 General Election nears its end, an organisation called ‘Operation Black Vote‘ is back in the news. Sky News reports:

The black vote could sway the result in up to 113 marginal seats across the country, according to campaigners.

Operation Black Vote is aimed at getting more people from black and ethnic minorities to vote and the man behind the campaign believes the coming week could be “historic”.

“Never before have black voters had this kind of power,” Simon Woolley told Sky News Online.

“The race is so tight that we could hold the keys to Downing Street. But people need to get out and vote.”

Operation Black Vote (OBV) is bankrolled by the British taxpayer, despite the fact that it is an organisation solely targeted at, and purporting to represent, Britain’s black and ethnic minority ‘communities’.

The British National Party (BNP), an organisation with a neo-Nazi history, has been roundly condemned by all mainstream political parties for its race-based ideology. The BNP claims to represent the white people of Britain and has only recently agreed to admit non-white members following a threat of legal action. The BNP is seen as beyond the pale (quite rightly) because it is an organisation that seeks to promote division along racial lines and to gain special treatment for white people.

According to the BNP, there is the need for an organisation that represents white voters, because, it is claimed, white people are a ‘community’ with specific needs and special interests which are not adequately addressed by the major political parties. The BNP in particular seeks to appeal to the ‘white working class community’, which is presented as an essentially homogeneous group with collective interests. This kind of thinking, based as it is on dividing society along artificially constructed racial lines, is seen by most British people to be discriminatory and irrelevant (although the BNP’s support base has grown significantly in recent years).

The BNP seeks to promote the notion that ‘white voters’ should mobilise around the idea of promoting and preserving themselves as part of a ‘community’. Operation Black Vote promotes the idea that black Britons should see themselves in racial terms and as some sort of ‘community’. The BNP receives widespread condemnation, while OBV receives Government funding. OBV and other black advocacy organisations are regularly cited by the BNP as evidence that ethnic minority groups receive preferential treatment and that the only group of people who are not allowed to assert a group identity are white people. I think, to a degree, they have a point. That is not to say I view the BNP’s ideology and policies as valid – quite the opposite – but that there is blatant hypocrisy when it comes to which kind of identity politics are seen as a good thing, and which are seen as bad and unacceptable.

The problem with both OBV and the BNP is that they operate on the basis of a racially oriented collectivist ideology. For both organisations, the colour of one’s skin is seen to have a central significance to one’s ‘identity’ and to be of paramount importance when deciding how to vote. OBV purports to be aiming to end racial discrimination and racist thinking, yet its central principles actually affirm the ideas that underpin white racism.

According to Operation Black Vote, there are not only British concerns, there are also ‘black’ concerns. Despite the fact there are black Marxists and there are black free market libertarians, according to OBV these huge differences in political outlook are ultimately of less significance than skin colour.

Many black and other ethnic minority British citizens live in areas of social deprivation, but so do many white working class people. OBV promotes the idea that the best way for black and ethnic minority Britons to become successful is to view themselves as a ‘community’ or ‘communities’ with interests that are specific to them, and to campaign and vote on that basis. But the fact of the matter is that there are many very poor white people in Britain. Struggling to pay bills is not a ‘black’ problem, any more than it is a ‘white’ problem, yet OBV encourages black and ethnic minority Britons to indulge in a victim mentality in which notions such as ‘institutional racism’ are seen to be the root cause of poverty in ethnic minority communities. White working class people are also starting to indulge in exactly the same victim mentality, and now the BNP – which once had absolutely no serious electoral chances – finds itself in the position of having two Members of the European Parliament, a large number of councillors, and may even gain a Member of Parliament in the coming General Election.

Collectivism and identity politics are a curse, not a blessing, even if they do come wrapped in the politically correct garb of encouraging ‘black’ participation in the political process.  Operation Black Vote encourages black Britons to see themselves first and foremost as ‘black’, as opposed to seeing themselves simply as British. OBV encourages black people not to see themselves as individuals who are solely responsible for their success or failure, but instead as members of a collective oppressed group. Does such an ideology actually constitute a vehicle for the advancement of black and ethnic minority Britons, or does it condemn black and ethnic minority Britons to forever presenting themselves as, and being seen as, some kind of ‘Other’ within the body politic? Arguably, the second of these two options is the more accurate outcome.

The best antidote to racism and other forms of discriminatory collectivist ideologies is individualism. Individualism views people as being simply people. Individualism eschews the notion that one should view other people as being part of one or other ‘groups’ or ‘communities’, but rather encourages us to come to conclusions about each person we encounter based on their personal qualities, their outlook, their behaviour, their achievements, and their aspirations. When an individualist views political candidates, he or she looks at the merits of that candidate based on their past record of political activity and how well they have represented the needs of their constituents, yet Operation Black Vote encourages voters to look at skin colour, instructing visitors to its website to ‘spot the black MP‘. The BNP also encourages voters to look at skin colour; for example, a BNP supporting video filmed in a London borough which has a large number of ethnic minority residents asks viewers to ‘spot the white man‘.

Far from overcoming racism, Operation Black Vote legitimises racial identity politics and collectivist views on ethnicity. It’s high time to put an end to this primitive way of viewing ourselves and our fellow citizens. OBV and the BNP are two sides of the same outdated coin. Individualism, not collectivism, is the answer to overcoming racism.