normblog

Justifying the murder of children

Exactly one hundred years ago, Russian opponents of the Tsarist regime aborted their assassination attempt on the life of Grand Duke Sergei Aleksandrovich because of the presence of his wife and children... [S]uch acts of restraint in the world's modern trouble-spots seem hard to imagine.

Dr Rory Miller and Dr Martin Navias, both of King's College London, consider some of the reasons for the change, not in the sense of 'root causes', but in the sense of justifying beliefs:

[T]actics and strategy aside, such brutal acts are justified by the perpetrators on ideological grounds because they are part of what is perceived to be a moral struggle. As Antar Soubari, a senior member of Algeria's Armed Islamic Group (GIA), put it: "I am innocent of those killed because they are associated with those who had to be fought."

In recent times, this sort of argument has found explicit backing among a growing number of Islamist thinkers.

They have argued that the prophet Mohammed's prohibition on killing children does not apply if the children being targeted "knowingly" participated in combat, or aided the enemy war effort, or even if they only acted to "encourage" the enemy.

Likewise, extremist clerics have increasingly argued that it is not prohibited to kill children in suicide bombings if the attacker has no premeditated intention to kill them.

When taken together, these two impossibly vague formulations have legitimised all foul deeds against children caught up in the struggles against Israel and the secular and pro-western Muslim governments of the Middle East.

But there is a third ideological argument that flows from an extreme interpretation of the Islamic principle of retaliation, and which also provides the basis for targeting children in the non-Muslim world.

The classic expression of this worldview is to be found in the pronouncements of Suleiman Abu Ghait, an al-Qaeda spokesman and close associate of Osama bin Laden.

He has argued that the evils perpetrated by the West, in particular the US, against Muslims of all ages throughout the Islamic world - in Iraq, Palestine, Somalia and elsewhere - not only justified the 9/11 attacks but provided Muslims with both the right and duty to kill a further four million Americans, including one million American children.

'I am innocent... because they are associated with...' - that pretty much sums it up. (Thanks: DC.)

In praise of complexity

The consistently awful Madeleine Bunting is at it again. What she's at again is how fear is making us too deeply dependent on politicians. Me, I'm just deeply dependent on thinking about what Ms Bunting writes, whenever I read it. A sample:

This reflects the second way fear shapes political life: the desire for uncompromising clarity. When people are fearful, they want to know who's on their side and who's not - everyone has to be assigned as goodies or baddies, good or evil. Anyone who introduces complexity or context blurs that clarity and must be bullied into silence. So there is now a growing constituency that no longer distinguishes between the analysis and the justification of an atrocity. The result is a willed ignorance - people don't want to understand. There's a blanket rejection of how understanding is the crucial underpinning for effective policy. They want only a politics of symbolism to meet their emotional responses of fear and anger.

There's virtually nothing here that isn't open to objection as an oversimplification of the very kind Bunting affects to lament in aligning herself, as she imagines, with complexity. No, not everyone belongs unambiguously to 'goodies or baddies', but some do. And some people are definitely not on the 'side', for example, of ordinary citizens going about their business in the hope of concluding it without being blown apart. These ordinary citizens might, also, have a legitimate concern about this without being accused, just for having it, of yearning after 'uncompromising clarity'. Then there's the bullied-into-silence cry of Bunting and certain other members of her tendency, a cry become standard in recent times, but puzzlingly so since no one has bullied them into silence, they in fact haven't been silent but rather noisy, and they constitute a large chunk of contemporary progressive opinion, such as it is. Finally, I'd say that the 'constituency that no longer distinguishes between the analysis and the justification of an atrocity' is small, and Bunting ought to show, with clear examples, who belongs to it; for it is certainly possible to show, with clear examples, cases of what purports to be merely the understanding of atrocity but which strays towards making excuses, or actually does make excuses, for it. This being so, Bunting is probably just failing to grasp the complexity of the criticism being directed at the excuse-makers.

The closed door in Darfur

Here's a report from 60 Minutes on Darfur:

(CBS) The United Nations has called it the greatest crisis in the world. The United States calls it genocide.

It's happening in the African nation of Sudan, and 60 Minutes went to see for ourselves. What we saw and what you will see again tonight is evidence of a government-backed campaign to wipe out a race.

There are at least 180,000 dead and more than 2 million on the run.
.....
"The Janjaweed are like a grotesque mixture of the mafia and the Ku Klux Klan," says [John] Prendergast [of International Crisis Group]. "These guys have a racist ideology that sees the Arab population as the supreme population that would like to see the subjugation of non-Arab peoples. They're criminal racketeers that have been supported very directly by the government to wage the war against the people of Darfur."

Survivors say the attacks usually start at dawn, with bombs falling from planes of the Sudanese Air Force.

"And then here come the Janjaweed on camel or on horseback," Prendergast says. "They come rolling into the town, shooting and torching the village, often bringing women to the side and raping women indiscriminately. And in order to ensure that the destruction is complete, the government either sends ground forces to oversee the operation, or the attack helicopters, which often are the most deadly things."
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What is the evidence that this is ethnic cleansing, or genocide?

"When the Janjaweed come in, and there is interaction between the Janjaweed and the local people, the Janjaweed are shouting ethnic slogans. They are saying, 'You blacks, you Zurga,' sort of like an equivalent of 'nigger.' 'Get out. You're slaves. You're hyena. Never come back,'" says [Samantha] Power. "When rape is committed, often the same epithets are issued. 'You're gonna give birth to a light-skinned child now.' They see their task, those who are racially motivated, as one of purification."

The rest contains much direct eyewitness testimony. From Saul Bellow:

I know now that humankind marks certain people for death. Against them there shuts a door.

(Thanks: Dave F.)

Whitechapel Library

The library, now so battered that flakes of paint and plaster regularly fall on the readers, opened its doors in London's East End, on May 6 1892. Immediately people poured in from the poor streets whose cheap, shabby houses had been the homes of refugees and revolutionaries for centuries.

It quickly built up one of the biggest collections in any library of Jewish books - overtaken, in 1971, by loans of books in Bengali.

By the end of 1892 it had over 2,500 registered members, whose professions, carefully logged in a neat Victorian ledger, began with "actors and comedians" and ran to "ladies, no occupation given" by way of diamond cutters, lard refiners, feather merchants and curlers, and three journalists. The area, whose skyline is now dominated by the new domes of mosques, remained overwhelmingly Jewish for much of the 20th century.

Jacob Bronowski, scientist and historian, learned his English there, and went on to become internationally famous for his television series The Ascent of Man.

On the closure of Whitechapel Library, 'the university of the ghetto'. See also the appeal here for people interested in being interviewed about the Library and its users. (Thanks: AL.)

How (not) to respond to incitement to murder

In yesterday's Sunday Times David Goodhart makes an argument against extending certain basic rights to foreign jihadists who actively foment harm against the citizens of this country. I sympathize with the impulse behind his argument - to close down, as far as possible, the opportunities for soliciting the murder of innocent people. But the particularities of the view he puts forward seem to me wrong. Goodhart writes:

[T]he HRA [Human Rights Act] requires public authorities to respect equally the human rights of all individuals in Britain, whether British citizens, those temporarily here or even those illegally here.

In today's conditions of global migration and cross-national terrorism this requirement to give non-citizens many of the legal protections of citizens is hard to justify, especially in a country as open as Britain (with its 90m arrivals a year). Furthermore, it seems to be connected to a wider fallacy about the origin and nature of rights.

People are not born with rights and many of the world's 6.4 billion people have few or none. Rights are a social construct, a product of history, ideas and of states that are neither too weak nor too strong. Most people in this country have rights because they belong to the political and national community called the United Kingdom, with its infrastructure of laws and institutions.

We would all like the rights enjoyed by people in developed countries extended to the rest of the world. And the West sometimes tries to project its idea of rights through force or through extending the reach of its laws. For example, article 3 of the European convention on human rights states that nobody shall be subject to torture or degrading treatment. Judges have interpreted this in such a way as to stop states that are party to the convention from deporting people to countries where they may be subject to such treatment.

Most of the time extending protection and sustenance to the non-citizens who come within our jurisdiction is uncontroversial, whether it was Soviet dissidents in the 1970s or most of today's legitimate asylum seekers. But should we really have no discretion about extending our protection to jihadists who hate us and may attempt to harm us or to people who have been involved in human rights abuses? Ultimately, in a democracy, rights can only be sustained if a critical mass of the population accepts the corresponding obligations. We should extend our rights to outsiders because of our sympathy with them. But we should be free - through our political representatives - not to extend those rights, especially when doing so may conflict with the wellbeing of British citizens.

I won't dwell here on the non-sequitur that because rights are a social construct, people are not born with them. There's a sense in which all concepts are social constructs, but that doesn't necessarily mean - though it sometimes does mean - that what the concepts refer to are merely a matter of convention, of moral and cultural context, or what have you. It is true that some of the rights a person enjoys are a consequence of belonging to a particular community (your right to a British passport), or are relative to a given status she enjoys (as an old age pensioner), or the result of his past actions (as the party to a contract of sale). But there are other rights which a person possesses simply in virtue of being a human being. This is why we call them basic human rights. The right against being tortured is one of them. Even the most repugnant of individuals and those guilty of grave crimes, equally those merely suspected of some crime, share with everyone else the right not to be tortured. So the policy of not returning people to countries in which they face the danger of being subjected to torture ought to be upheld and defended.

This does not mean, however, that anyone in this category must remain free to encourage lethal violence against others. If the law doesn't already contain means - effective means - of putting a stop to that, then it needs to be changed. A liberal society is not obliged to countenance incitement to murder, all soft-headed pleas about the potentially alienating effects of such protective legislation notwithstanding.

Hurricane Katrina

Hurricane Katrina has been downgraded from category five to category four as New Orleans is braced for its arrival. Thousands have left the city; those unable to are taking shelter. See the picture here. Some comments from the area:

Our house is about 2 blocks from the levee that guards us from Lake Pontchartrain so we evacuated on Saturday to try and stay ahead of the heavy traffic. After making it around the contraflow we managed to go west to Houston to stay at a friend's flat. Our 12 day old son took the 11 hour drive pretty good so we are happy about that. At this point, we are just hoping that our home will still be standing when we eventually return. Most of our family has evacuated but a few are staying behind on the northshore of the lake to watch over their homes. We hope that we will get to return to our home soon.
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I'm an exchange student from Keele in England on exchange to Loyola University New Orleans. I've only been here a week but have had to evacuate to further west in Louisiana near Lafayette, with my friends from uni! At the moment we don't know what's gonna happen and how bad it's gonna get!
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If you are foolish enough to try and ride this storm out, please consider the 20-30 foot expected storm swell and the fact that it will coincide with high tide. Pick a place to shelter that is high enough that you won't drown, and strong enough that it won't collapse.

Awaiting disaster:

Tampa - Hurricane Katrina churned toward the northern Gulf coast Sunday night as one of the most powerful storms in 150 years, maintaining a course that experts said might obliterate New Orleans after it makes landfall about sunrise today.

Katrina could be the brutish nightmare that low-lying New Orleans has long feared - a Category 5 hurricane making a direct hit with winds greater than 155 mph, pushing a wall of water nearly three stories high over the levees that ring the city.
.....
"We are facing a storm that most of us have long feared,'' New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin said in ordering the mandatory evacuation for his city of 485,000 people, surrounded by suburbs of a million more. "The storm surge will most likely topple our levee system.''

See also here:

On September 8, 1900, a hurricane struck Galveston. Winds estimated at 140 mph swept over the island, leaving devastation in their wake. After the storm surge of 15.7 feet subsided, Galvestonians left their shelters to find 6,000 of the city's 37,000 residents dead and more than 3,600 buildings totally destroyed.

The 1900 Storm is still considered to be the deadliest natural disaster in U.S. history.

And here and here. For US hurricanes, scroll down here.

Grapple in the Apple

That's on September 14 'in the Mason Hall at the Baruch College performing arts centre in the Gramercy Park area of Manhattan'. An item on the upcoming debate between Christopher Hitchens and George Galloway.

Not jumping ship

Futher to the Christopher Hitchens article featured immediately below, this is from a piece in today's Sunday Times by Tony Allen-Mills:

[A]ll is not lost for Bush, who still benefits from a broad political consensus that America cannot afford to cut and run. Polls show that only 13% of Americans want troops out immediately; the president is also benefiting from his critics' inability to produce a coherent alternative.

Despite rumblings of discontent in the Republican party, no serious revolt is expected.

Senator John McCain of Arizona, a likely presidential candidate, agreed last week that there was "nervousness" in the Republican ranks but added: "I do not see any significant erosion or inclination to jump ship." In Iraq, he said, "we can't afford to lose".

Andrew Sullivan also assesses the current prospects:

In reality, of course, what matters is what will remain on the ground in Mesopotamia in the next few years. Will what emerges be preferable to a sanctions-wrecked Iraq still run by Saddam or on the brink of being handed over to his psychopathic sons? Will it be more democratic than any other Muslim country in the Middle East?

As long as the answer to both those questions is a plausible yes, the Bush administration will be able to claim success of a sort. Not the democratic revolution some of us once hoped for. But not quite the nightmare so constantly predicted by others, either.

Those of us who have long backed this war, despite its manifold errors, may well be chastened. But we haven't given up yet.

Making the case

A fine piece by Christopher Hitchens in the Weekly Standard:

I have a ready answer to those who accuse me of being an agent and tool of the Bush-Cheney administration (which is the nicest thing that my enemies can find to say). Attempting a little levity, I respond that I could stay at home if the authorities could bother to make their own case, but that I meanwhile am a prisoner of what I actually do know about the permanent hell, and the permanent threat, of the Saddam regime.
.....
The peaceniks love to ask: When and where will it all end? The answer is easy: It will end with the surrender or defeat of one of the contending parties. Should I add that I am certain which party that ought to be? Defeat is just about imaginable, though the mathematics and the algebra tell heavily against the holy warriors. Surrender to such a foe, after only four years of combat, is not even worthy of consideration.
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If the great effort to remake Iraq as a demilitarized federal and secular democracy should fail or be defeated, I shall lose sleep for the rest of my life in reproaching myself for doing too little. But at least I shall have the comfort of not having offered, so far as I can recall, any word or deed that contributed to a defeat.

(Hat tip: TM.)

Compromising essential values

Progress is 'an organisation of Labour party members which aims to promote a radical and progressive politics for the 21st century'. From an unsigned opinion piece on the site:

There was nothing particularly surprising about the reactions of some on the liberal left to Tony Blair's post-7/7 denunciation of the 'evil ideology' of Islamic fundamentalism. To paraphrase one of the prime minister's less illustrious predecessors, they would prefer Mr Blair to condemn a little less and understand a little more.

This reaction, however, reveals a fundamental misunderstanding not only of the nature of the threat which Britain faces but also a willingness to compromise the essential values for which the left supposedly stands.
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The reason why some on the left have failed to correctly identify the true character of Islamic fundamentalism is, of course, not difficult to discern. For them, opposition to the foreign policies of the United States and western governments is all-consuming - and there are few in the world who are more hostile to them than radical Islamism. But the principle of 'my enemy's enemy' - aside, in our view, from being frequently misguided about the west's foreign policies - has driven some on the left to excuse and consort with individuals, organisations and an ideology which has nothing at all to do with those principles - equality, liberty and tolerance - which animate progressive thinking.

We need to be clear that Islamic fundamentalism is not a movement seeking to right perceived injustices in the developing world with which those who hold to liberal democratic values can seek compromise or understanding.
.....
That the Stop the War Coalition should have allowed the Muslim Association of Britain to be a partner organisation is disgraceful, given the MAB's support for sharia law (with its disregard for women's and gay rights), its belief that Muslims who renounce their faith should be put to death, and its calls for the state of Israel to be abolished.

While we do not expect much better from the Stop the War Coalition, given its domination by the Socialist Workers party, others should know better. Ken Livingstone's credibility as a spokesman for the rights of minorities and women, and his condemnation of terrorism in London, are severely undermined for so long as he continues to defend his decision last year to invite the radical Islamic cleric, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, to speak at a Greater London Authority event. On his website, al-Qaradawi advocates the killing of 'perverted' homosexuals, defends husbands who beat.. their wives and questions the innocence of rape victims. Al-Qaradawi is, furthermore, an out-and-out antisemite: defending not only the murder of Israeli civilians in suicide bombings but also looking forward to the day of judgement when 'Muslims will fight the Jews and kill them'. Would the mayor be happy to host an American white supremacist who advocated the murder of African Americans?

(Thanks: RB.)