You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom (14 page)

In Paris, Pascal Bruckner, heir to the best traditions of the French Enlightenment, said that as well as living in fear, Ayaan Hirsi Ali has had ‘to endure the ridicule of the high-minded’. In the eyes of the ‘genteel professors’ she had ‘committed an unpardonable offence: she has taken democratic principles seriously’. For that they called her a ‘fundamentalist’, and could not see that ‘the difference between her and Muhammad Bouyeri is that she never advocated murder to further her ideas’.

For all the brilliance of the polemics in the pamphlet war over Hirsi Ali, no fair observer could doubt that Buruma and Garton Ash represented the dominant tendency in liberal opinion in the West. In Britain, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Lord Chief Justice supported the use of Sharia law in divorces and other family disputes – the Lord Chief Justice in a Jamaat-e-Islami-influenced mosque, appropriately. The women priests of the Church of England, so keen to have their equal right to be bishops asserted, and women lawyers at the Bar, who complained so vociferously about the law’s glass ceiling, did not accuse the archbishop and the judge of sexism. They left the fight to a group of ex-Muslim women, who pointed out that Sharia law already existed informally in Britain, and ‘women are often pressured by their families into going to these courts and adhering to unfair decisions. If they refuse to go they faced threats and intimidation, or at best being ostracised.’ Too many liberals ignored the protest, and showed they were prepared to endorse one law for women with white skins and another for women with brown skins.

With equal insincerity, the nominally left-of-centre and perennially two-faced Labour Party instructed the Foreign Office to appease Islamist sentiment at home and abroad. It embraced the Muslim Brotherhood and Jamaat-e-Islami, and declared that they were ‘reformist groups’ with a ‘moderate’ and ‘progressive’ ideology. Britain’s ‘progressives’, nitpickingly politically correct in all other matters, stayed silent as they did it.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali was not the only dissident they left behind.

The Scaremongers and the Scared

In 2009, I was standing with a group of young men and women whose courage made me want to hug them. They called themselves British Muslims for Secular Democracy, and they had come together to defend freedom of speech and demand the separation of Church and state. We were demonstrating in central London against Islam4UK, a front organisation for radical Islamists, whose fellow travellers were more than willing to turn violent, as the publishers of
The Jewel of Medina
had learned. ‘Laugh at those who Insult Islam’, read one of my companions’ placards. ‘Liberal democracy will rule the world’, read another. ‘Secularism is coming to Britain,’ their organisers said. ‘We are all free to worship or not to worship according to our own conscience.’

Well, I thought, I’ve waited a long time to see this. Behind us on the steps of Eros at Piccadilly Circus was a separate protest organised by beery football fans, draped in Union flags. Its members explained that they were from a new organisation called the English Defence League. They had had enough of Islamists wrecking the solemn ceremonies to mark the return of the bodies of British troops from Iraq and Afghanistan. They would fight back, they told me, but not as racists. I had been waiting a while for that, too. Liberal-left politicians could not deplore prejudice and then welcome Islamists into Whitehall without expecting a backlash. The Archbishop of Canterbury and the Lord Chief Justice could not call for Sharia law, and think that no one would notice. There was bound to be a reaction, and it was good to see that it appeared to be of an earthy and democratic kind. Or as the wife of an EDL member said to me, ‘I’m not walking three paces behind any fucking man.’

My illusions lasted less than an hour. I walked into a nearby bar with a young woman who was as British as anyone else in London that day. ‘You’re not welcome here,’ EDL members spat at a Muslim so integrated that she would walk into a pub with a casual acquaintance. ‘Fuck off back to Pakistan.’ I learned then that the English Defence League was not against Islamists, but against all Muslims. As I expected, the League soon became home to those far-rightists who hated Muslims more than they hated Jews.

A few weeks later, I addressed a meeting of students, and praised the secular Muslims for defending liberal values. A leftist in the audience was having none of it. He denounced British Muslims for Secular Democracy as the English Defence League’s allies and collaborators, citing as evidence the ‘joint demonstration’ at Piccadilly Circus. I told him there had been no joint demonstration, and I had seen with my own eyes the white racists abuse the secular Muslims. I was there, he was not; but it did not matter what I said. He and his comrades had already spread the required smear round the Net. To their minds, liberal Muslims were Uncle Toms. Authentic Muslims could only be bearded men with a Koran in one hand and a Kalashnikov in the other.

By that time, it was hard to know whether left or right was more culpable of inciting violence. With a neat symmetry, campaigners against white neo-fascism wrote to the right-wing
Daily Star
in 2010 to complain that the paper exaggerated ‘the importance of tiny Muslim extremist groups’, and risked creating ‘a dangerous backlash among non-Muslims which in turn will feed groups such as the EDL and the British National Party’. Within weeks, liberal Muslims at the Quilliam Foundation complained to the leftish executives of Channel 4 that they took speakers from Islamist groups and supporters of the Iranian theocratic regime to ‘represent mainstream Muslim opinion’, and reinforced ‘negative stereotypes of Islam to non-Muslims’ by doing so. Right-wing newspapers pretended extremists were immigrants’ authentic representatives because they wanted to whip up the fear of the other. The liberal media gave platforms to reactionary and paranoid men because they wanted to revel in the exoticism of the other. The motives were different, but the effect was the same.

In Holland, the Islamophobic Party for Freedom overtook the Christian Democrats to become the largest conservative force in the country. The French National Front enjoyed a resurgence of support, while the Sarkozy government banned women from wearing the burqa – a direct assault on freedom of choice and freedom of religion. American conservatives believed that Muslim immigration was turning Europe into ‘Eurabia’, as the example mentioned earlier from Christopher Caldwell’s writing shows. Immigrants, the theory ran, had huge families and an uncompromising religion. Godless, pacifist Europeans, their will sapped by secularism and relativism, their numbers diminished by their hedonistic determination to have sex without having babies, lacked the moral certainty to fight militant Islam and the birth rate to outbreed it. They were losing the battle of ideas and the battle in the maternity wards. Muslims would make up 30, 40 or 50 per cent of the population of Europe by 2050, according to which alarmist forecast you read. It would become an anti-American, anti-Semitic, anti-Western continent, too frightened of its new inhabitants to stand up for democratic values.

These figures were nonsense. Even when they were not outright inventions, they included the assumption that current immigrant birth rates would remain high, when statistics suggested they were falling. The premise behind conservatives’ fears was equally dubious. European Muslims did not form a cohesive bloc capable of collective action in favour of the causes of Islamist militants. The best reason for rejecting the paranoia of the right, however, was that it did not look at the victims of violence.

Extremists of all persuasions committed atrocities. Islamists murdered 191 civilians in Madrid in March 2004 and fifty-two in London in July 2005. The neo-fascist Anders Breivik murdered seventy-seven in Norway in July 2011. Both the religious far right and the white far right were convinced that they were fighting diabolic conspiracies. The London bomber Mohammad Sidique Khan justified random murder by invoking a Western plot to destroy Islam. ‘Your democratically elected governments continuously perpetuate atrocities against my people all over the world,’ he said in a videotape released after he killed himself and murdered six others on the London Underground’s Circle Line. ‘And your support of them makes you directly responsible, just as I am directly responsible for protecting and avenging my Muslim brothers and sisters.’ Breivik cut and pasted a manifesto from anti-Muslim blogs, and justified his massacre by saying that leftish multi-cultural elites were plotting to destroy Europe’s old nations and create ‘Eurabia’ by flooding the continent with immigrants. His charge was not that European establishments were naïve or cowardly in their treatment of religious extremism – which they were on many occasions – but that a quasi-Marxist hatred of traditional Christian culture pushed them into collaboration with an alien enemy.

Although the two sides seemed to be diametrically opposed, when they went for specific targets, rather than bombing random collections of civilians, they showed that what united them was more important than what divided them. Breivik’s victims were not militant Islamists: most of them were young members of the Norwegian Labour Party. To his mind they were ‘traitors’ to their race and culture. Similarly, those Islamists marked for suffering were not far-rightists who dreamed of an all-white Europe, or conservatives who bewailed the decline of the Christian West. The leaders of most European far-right parties could operate without fearing a bullet in the head. It never occurred to Tea Party Republicans, who wittered about a demographic explosion producing a jihadist Europe, that jihadis might retaliate by gunning them down. With the exception of Geert Wilders of the Dutch Party of Freedom, who was the target of threats and one assassination attempt, the scaremongers knew no fear.

Unlike panic-stricken conservatives, Islamists did not regard European Muslims as a bloc which was theirs to command. They understood that there was no unified Islam, that most immigrants were just trying to make a living, and many were experimenting with new ideas and freedoms. The first aim of religious violence is to stop experiment by the faithful and to enforce taboos. Naturally, the first targets of Islamists in Europe were liberal Muslims and ex-Muslims, who like Salman Rushdie were ‘traitors’ to their religion. Potential victims ought to have been able to count on the steady support of a European mainstream that opposed Islamism and neo-fascism in equal measure, and recognised that both drew on a common totalitarian impulse. But as the example of Ayaan Hirsi Ali showed, principled anti-fascism was hard to find.

Liberal societies treated the Islamist wave with a disastrous mixture of authoritarianism and appeasement. On the one hand, they passed anti-terrorist laws that conflicted with basic liberties, banned burqas and imposed new immigration controls, which were controls on Muslim immigration when you stripped away all the humbug around them. On the other, they complemented their anti-terror strategy with a policy of ‘engaging’ with Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood variety, who were extreme but not violent. They hoped that by co-opting religious zealots, they could reduce the pool of potential terrorists. If we concede ground and don’t challenge them too rigorously, they thought, perhaps they won’t turn malevolent. The consequence of their double standards was that they had to attack Hirsi Ali and those like her who were not afraid to point out their hypocrisy or ignore the suffering of immigrant women ‘engagement with Islamists’ brought.

Naser Khader, the Danish Muslim politician whose defence of free speech during the cartoon crisis provoked one radical imam to discuss the possibility of him being blown up – as a ‘jest’, you will remember – viewed the manoeuvres of mainstream opinion with abhorrence. ‘They take a minority in a minority to represent everyone,’ he told me. ‘When the minority in the minority demands the right to oppress the majority within the minority, they give it to them.’ Khader has had to live with threats from extremists of all kinds. The intimidation from white racists bothered him less than the threats from Islamists from the religious far right. The police ought to know the identities of activists in local white extremist movements, he reasoned, and be able to monitor them. But radical Islam had a global network – a Comintern of the faithful – that stretched far beyond the jurisdiction of the Danish state. Just before I spoke to Khader, he had suggested in a television debate that schools should spare Muslim children the Ramadan fast because teachers had told him that hungry pupils were tired and listless during lessons. Someone in Denmark heard him, and passed details of his offence to the Middle East. A threatening message ordering him to mend his ways or suffer the consequences arrived from Jordan. Maybe nothing would come of it, maybe it would, but the Danish police could not investigate a threat from extremists living almost two thousand miles away.

Maryam Namazie, who fled with her family to Britain to avoid the persecutions of the Iranian theocracy, responded to the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Lord Chief Justice by organising campaigns against Sharia. ‘To safeguard the rights and freedoms of all those living in Britain, there must be one secular law for all and no religious courts,’ she said. As with Hirsi Ali and Khader, religious extremists threatened her as soon as she spoke out. She received a message warning, ‘You are going to be decapitated.’ If the American government or the British state had menaced her, she would have been a heroine. The press and the broadcasters would have defended and succoured her, and given encouragement to all who wanted to defy authority. As it was, she remained a virtually unknown figure.

On occasion, liberal society stirred itself. The self-taught Moroccan-Dutch artist Rachid Ben Ali responded to the murder of Theo van Gogh by producing pictures of ‘hate imams’ spewing bombs and excrement. As if to prove his point, death threats followed. Ali, like so many others, confessed to being frightened, but said that he remained determined to use his art to show that people of Muslim origins can be ‘absolutely free in their thinking’. His gallery stood by him, and paid for his security guards.