The old school noose
Nick Cohen takes a look at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office…
The FCO was not and is not standing up to the totalitarian ideas of the Islamist extreme Right, as it stood up to the totalitarianism of the socialist extreme Left in the second half of the 20th century. On the contrary, the establishment has appeased political Islamism abroad and interfered in the domestic affairs of its own country by mounting a covert operation to aid and abet it at home.
Well…perhaps they had some good reason?
The achievement of political Islam in Britain has been to suborn the liberal Left and cut off the most promising escape route for dissidents in the process. An abused woman, a young man fighting religious authoritarianism, an Iranian exile seeking to gain support for the campaign against the Archbishop of Canterbury’s and Lord Chief Justice’s endorsement of Sharia law or a British Bangladeshi trying to bring the Islamist criminals who massacred civilians in the war of independence to justice, would once have looked left for succour. If they do so now, they will find that progressives take their cue from the Muslim Brotherhood and Jamaat-e-Islami, rather than the best of the liberal Left’s traditions, and dismiss Muslims who fight for values they profess to hold as being at best irrelevances and at worst stool-pigeons for imperialism.
Ah. Well…perhaps it’s just a small enclave of loonies?
Do not make the mistake of believing that such attitudes are confined to the FCO. Only recently, the supposedly left-wing Institute for Public Policy Research was trumpeting “non-violent” Islamism as “the best organised and most popular opposition to existing authoritarian regimes in the Middle East”.
Ah. Oh dear. Well…I’m told the climate is nice in Antarctica.
OB: The climate is fantastic in Antarctica; just ask any penguin.
Everything is relative you know.
;-)
It is exactly that here in Australia too.
Thank God for Nick Cohen.
Yes, a bit of dynamite journalism from Nick Cohen. The sad reality is the number of British frogs who are slowly being boiled alive. Will they jump out of the pot in time?
Too many on the Left, as Cohen shows elsewhere, have dismissed liberalism the way Lenin and the Bolsheviks did, and with much the same rationale.
Norman Geras has an interesting Oct 29 piece related to the same broad issue. “…Being a critic of liberal democracy only carries any moral weight if you speak for a form of democracy that is superior to it…”
And by its very nature, no authoritarianism can be superior to it. Islamism is the Nazism of our time.
http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2009/10/the-democratic-theory-of-pure-assertion.html
Could anyone clarify who Nick is talking about when he refers to “the British Left”? Incidentally I think the suggestion that people voted for the National Front because they read articles by Nick Cohen is probably wide of the mark.
Does the National Front stand for elections? Or does Greg T mean the British National Party?
If he means the British National Party the question why people vote for them is always being asked. My answer is that the voters are racists or fools or both.
I’m not sure how the IPPR is “supposedly left-wing” – it’s a New Labour pet think-tank of the kind that produces reasoned, balanced studies that invariably and entirely coincidentally lead to recommendations yhat exactly align with the government policy direction of the day.