Potok was not about to let facts change his mind
Nick Cohen on the SPLC’s fatwa.
Nick is no fan of UK libel laws, and has put in a lot of time campaigning against them. But yesterday he advised Maajid to sue, and gave him the names of some lawyers.
The attack he is facing is so grotesque, ferocious remedies seem the only response.
Nawaz’s enemy is not the usual user of the libel law: a Putin frontman or multinational. It is an organisation that ought to share Nawaz’s values, but because of the crisis in left-wing values does the dirty work of the misogynists, the racists, the homophobes, the censors, and the murderers it was founded to oppose. It does it with a straight face because, as I am sure you will have guessed, the fascism in question is not white but Islamic. And once that subject is raised all notions of universal human rights, and indeed basic moral and intellectual decency, are drowned in a sea of bad faith.
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Quilliam and Nawaz support women’s rights and gay rights. They believe that there is no respectable reason why men and women with brown skins should not enjoy the same rights as men and women with white skins. They think they should try to stop young Muslims joining Islamic State, not just for the sake of the Yazidis they will take into sex slavery, or the civilians they will tyrannise and kill, but for the sake of the young Muslims themselves.
A significant faction on the left hates them for upholding the values they have forgotten, and will use any smear to denigrate them. As my secularist friend Faisal Saeed Al Mutar observed, when he, Nawaz and hundreds of others step forward and try to liberalise Muslim communities from within, they are attacked, ‘for being not Muslim enough, not Arab enough, not Pakistani enough, not filled with enough revenge and enough hatred’.
It’s all about Different Standards for Different Communities.
I have no doubt, for instance, that Alabama’s Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) would be appalled if white supremacists hacked to death writers on the New York Times for challenging racial prejudice, as Islamists hack Bangladeshi liberal writers to death for challenging theocratic prejudice.
It’s still not clear to me whether the people at the SPLC are too thick to see that, or too cynical to act on it.
Of course they could not leave alone Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who became an atheist and denounced the faith of her childhood, and is hated by a section of the white left for doing what they do all the time. That Hirsi Ali needs bodyguards to protect her from Islamist assassins in no way restrained our Alabama witch finders.
But the name that has jumped out at everyone is the Muslim reformer Maajid Nawaz. The text underneath oozes malice. The SPLC tries to make out that Nawaz’s stag night makes him an extremist. It misrepresents the work of his Quilliam Foundation so thoroughly I no longer recognised the organisation I knew. All these tricks and non-sequiturs, just so it can turn a liberal Muslim anti-extremist, into a reactionary ‘anti-Muslim extremist’.
And why why why would they want to do that? Why do they not want to join forces with him instead of telling evil lies about him?
Then Nick’s reportorial background knowledge comes into play:
I asked the SPLC’s Mark Potok, ‘one of the country’s leading experts on the world of extremism,’ according to its website, if he was Muslim himself. ‘No.’ Was he happy, then, branding a liberal Muslim ‘an anti-Muslim extremist?’ Well, Potok said, the head of Scotland Yard’s Muslim Contact Unit had accused Nawaz of ‘demonising a whole range of groups that have made valuable contributions to counter-terrorism,’ and that was good enough for him.
I tried to explain that the then head of the Muslim Contact Unit was Bob Lambert, one of the most notorious agent provocateurs British policing has produced. He stole the identity of a dead boy and infiltrated left groups. Pretending to be one of them, he got an activist pregnant then vanished from his partner and child’s lives. He had a shadowy part in the ‘McLibel’ case, which led to two environmental activists being persecuted for years in the courts, and is under investigation for allegedly smearing the campaign for justice for the murdered black teenager Stephen Lawrence. There are reasonable grounds for suspecting that, when Lambert attacked Nawaz, he was trying to ingratiate himself with Islamists as he had tried to ingratiate himself with leftists.
I didn’t know all that. That’s highly relevant information. Couldn’t the SPLC have done a little due diligence before maligning Maajid?
Did Mark Potok, ‘one of the country’s leading experts on the world of extremism’ if you please, know he was relying on the word of a stool pigeon? ‘I don’t know the details.’ Would the Southern Poverty Law Center, which is after all meant to defend the Stephen Lawrences of the world, reconsider its condemnation of Nawaz? With the braggart self-confidence of a liberal Donald Trump, Potok was not about to let facts change his mind. ‘No,’ he replied. Did Potok think he was putting Nawaz’s life in danger. ‘No.’
Oh god. That is infuriating. It is exactly like Trump, and it’s infuriating.
Sue the bastards.
And, of course, even if Nawaz was anti-Islam, he has a right to be that. Just as I have a right to be anti-Catholic. I don’t have a right to create situations that target Catholics, but I have a right to hate the church. People may not like Ayan Hirsi Ali, or the positions she takes, but she doesn’t belong on that list, either. The mere act of speaking against a religion, even if the ultimate goal is getting rid of religion entirely, is perfectly protected…and in my mind, a noble act. The act of calling for extermination of individuals, or targeting individuals for hate, is not.
How did a significant faction on the left become apologists for a far-right movement that they would be the first to condemn if it were dominated by white people? Some random thoughts on how this might have happened.
I suspect that most leftists have a notion that it is legitimate to criticize what other people think or do, but not what they are as individuals, which is fine to a certain point. But language is flexible. You can always invent a name for “The kind of person that thinks/does [insert ideas/behaviors]” and frame that as an “identity” or something you are as a person. And since “identities” are sacred, it follows that any criticism of said ideas/behaviors is a hate crime.
There is also the problem of overcompensation. It is certainly true that hardcore racists and bigots often disguise their hatred as a fake concern for the treatment of women in Muslim societies etc. (The obvious example being atheists who opportunistically exploit the suffering of Dear Muslima to attack Muslims while spending every free moment harassing women online), and every leftist knows it. In the absence of telepathic power there is no method for identifying all the fakers without implicating lots of sincere people in the process. If you have determined that racism is infinitely bad, it seems to follow that no consequence of accusing others of racism – whether they are in fact guilty or not – could possibly be worse than failing to call out even a single real racist.
Then there’s the well-known phenomenon of attacking others to prove one’s own righteousness: “Don’t you see how viciously I call out even just alleged racists? So how can I possibly be one of them?” One of the main things I took away from Jung Chang’s biography of chairman Mao was that the endless purges and show trials were not actually meant to smoke out any real dissidents. At least that wasn’t their main function. The real purpose was to convey the following message: “Some percentage of the population will be made to pay during the next purge whether they are in fact guilty or not. Make sure it’s not you!” And of course the way to make sure it wasn’t you was to make sure it was somebody else. So basically people were forced to compete to inform on others in order to stay clear themselves. Hardly anything can be more toxic than a culture in which insufficient eagerness to accuse others of thoughtcrime is all it takes to be accused oneself.
Last but not least, It seems to me, there have always been a tension on the left between two, not necessarily contradictory, but certainly very different perspectives, or mindsets, or modes of thought:
On the one hand there’s a perspective that says “We’re all the same on the inside”. I.e. there might be some individual differences, but differences between groups are just superficial and irrelevant like skin color or the shape of a person’s genitals. To the extent that there appears to be some real differences in the distribution of interests or talents, it’s basically a self-fulfilling prophecy, i.e. people turn out differently because we already think and act as if there were such differences, and treat people accordingly. Hence people end up different because of how they’re treated, not because of how they’re born. Bottom line, because people all function in pretty much the same way, there is no justification for treating them differently. Hence “equality” ultimately means rendering our various group identities irrelevant with respect to how people are treated.
On the other hand there’s a strand of thought that says it’s ok to be different, hence the emphasis on tolerance and the celebration of diversity. According to this perspective, people really are different, and there is nothing wrong with that. Insisting that we must all be the same “on the inside” is in itself a form of bigotry.
My personal view is that both perspectives have some validity (obviously, both can’t apply equally well in every particular case, but reality is complicated, and different principles may apply under different circumstances). For example: Are certain jobs considered “women’s work” because they’re seen as low-status (the first perspective), or are they considered low-status because they’re seen as “women’s work” (the second perspective)? I suspect the answer is some mixture of both.
I also think both modes of thought can be potentially problematic if applied simplistically, or dogmatically, or without regard for the specifics (in short, without thinking), especially if one fails to distinguish between innate and cultural differences.
The first perspective, if misapplied, can lead to a dogmatic inability/unwillingness to even consider the possibility that extremists like the IS actually mean what they say. After all, if we’re all the same on the inside, we must all be motivated by the same kinds of goals and values, hence all this talk of obeying the will of Allah etc. can only be an “excuse”.
The second perspective, if applied uncritically, leads to tolerance of intolerance, the abandonment of universal standards and a return to different rules for different groups of people. “Equality” is redefined as everybody having the same right to be treated according to the rules appropriate to their particular group identity (trans activism being the obvious example). There is also the idea that whatever your ancestors happened to believe/practice is automatically “right” for you. And this is where I think a label like “The regressive left” is indeed justified. All leftists agree that westerners should work to change their culture from within, but regressive leftists have somehow convinced themselves that nobody outside the West could possibly want to live differently than their ancestors for reasons other than internalized Western bigotry against “their own” culture. The idea that non-western women, homosexuals, secularists etc. might want the same changes we have made (imperfectly, but still) in the West for exactly the same reasons we did, simply doesn’t compute.
“Difference” is a word like “change”. Some changes are for the better while others are for the worse, and yet others don’t matter at all. This is why my head explodes when people talk about supporting Trump because he represents “change” as if “change” was synonymous with “improvement”. It is, certainly true that Trump represents “change”, more specifically change for the worse. I just don’t see why that’s a reason to vote for him. The same goes for “difference”. Differences between languages, artistic styles, food traditions, ways of dressing (at least as long as there is no coercion involved) etc. may all be created pretty much equal. Differences in ways of treating women and homosexuals, not so much. Specifics matter.
Finally, I think leftists are right to be concerned that “universal standards” in practice means holding up Western culture as the norm to which everyone else needs to conform. I therefore hasten to say that that’s not what I’m advocating. We should aim higher than replacing the burqa with Western porn culture.
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