Shariah just around the corner! Burqas! Stoning!

Kate McMillan has the goods.

(The fact that every Muslim boy gets the Mohammed moniker might just have something to do with this new name game, but mentioning that would spoil the narrative.)

[Didn't I just use that photo? My bad. --Ed.]

Holocaust-denial defended

...at a prominent conservative blogsite.

First it was frequent commenter "john begley," claiming that Jews ran up the Holocaust numbers to get higher reparations out of the Germans. (Hardly a word against this obscene comment was recorded from the regulars at Jay's place. But the side-stepping and fancy dancing were something to behold.)

Now it's Gerry T. Neal's turn:

"Holocaust denial" is in many cases, a defense mechanism on the part of people of German background in response to post-WWII German bashing. It is a shield to protect Germans against anti-German racism far more often than it is a sword to attack the Jews. It is not good history but it is not the sin Dr. Dawg makes it out to be either.

Umm...OK. Confronted by real anti-Semitism, your first response is to defend it by claiming it's merely defensive in nature. Whatever, Gerry.

Taking a brief respite from continual Muslim-bashing, Jay's regulars are beginning to let us know what we knew already: anti-Semitism is, and always has been, a disease of the Right. And, for the record, that Right includes the social-conservative, religious agenda of the Islamists. Amazing that they haven't joined forces with the small army of homophobes and anti-choicers who infest the starboard side of the blogosphere. If the latter could only give up their xenophobia, they might help create an electoral bloc to be reckoned with.

By all means, keep fighting for free expression but against minarets and burqas, Jay. And go on denouncing criticism of Israel by progressives as "anti-Semitic" while the real thing gets a continual pass at your house. But, if I might gently suggest, the Whitman defence only works for poets.

Cut-and-paste polemics

Mark Steyn makes me nostalgic.

About a century ago I worked briefly for the Canadian Government Travel Bureau, long since gone the way of all flesh. The Bureau was established to promote tourism in Canada. I was employed in a junior capacity to help answer inquiry letters from would-be visitors.

It was there that I was introduced to the wonders of standard paragraphing. There is a finite number of queries that a would-be tourist can make, and potted responses were prepared for each one, and assigned a number.

Although some sparse textual connective tissue was required, all we had to do at our level was to identify by their numbers the paragraphs to be used in an official response which--and this dazzled us at the time--could be reproduced in what looked like a personal letter, actually signed by the Director of the Bureau, Dan Wallace. (This was, of course, well before the days of IT.)

Cutting edge, we were. Off went the memos: "123, 18, 26, 71" (PEI. Lobsters. Beaches. Cabins.) and out went the letters.

It now appears that the young fellow at the next desk might have been Mark Steyn. For he, too, it seems, has adopted the use of standard paragraphs to assist him in his prolific generation of polemics. (Readers may recall a minor Conservative plagiarism scandal in 2008, but this goes well beyond that. Yet, to be fair, can one really plagiarize oneself?)

One imagines Steyn with his own small army of minions now, who send up similar numerical memos: "1, 26, 44, 7." (Muslim threat. Minarets. Burqas. Birthrates.)

Of course he has not descended to the level of the American humorist Gelett Burgess, who, in "A Permutative System," created six mock-philosophical paragraphs that could be rearranged in any order. To give Steyn his due, he has considerably more paragraphs at his disposal. But one can't help wondering how he will deal with these awkward revelations. I find it hard to believe that a man of such amour propre would dismiss his own writing as "political boilerplate." The mean-minded among us, on the other hand, may hold no such reservations.




















[via Big City Lib]

Women's bodies as sites of struggle

Tarek Fatah jumped the shark quite some time ago, but his increasing crankiness is still news. This time it's his enthusiastic support for a demand by the organization he used to lead, the tiny Muslim Canadian Congress, that the Canadian state outlaw the wearing of niqab. Actually, it goes further: the MCC wants Parliament to "ban the wearing of masks, burkas and niqabs in public."

So much for Hallowe'en.

But here, in any case, are his own arguments, and there are lessons to be learned therefrom:

Defenders of the burka contend that the wearing of a face-mask by Muslim women is protected by our Charter’s right to religious freedom. But such arguments are premised on the myth that a face-mask for women is a necessary part of religiously prescribed Islamic attire.

There are two difficulties here. The first is obvious: whether the practice is "cultural" or "religious" (and I have trouble separating the latter from the former), the Charter does come into play. Section 2 covers freedom of expression as well as religious belief; Section 7, security of the person. Robust arguments based on either or both sections could be advanced on behalf of a woman's choice of clothing, and furthermore it is impossible to believe that a government edict banning certain apparel could be saved by Section 1.

There is no requirement in Islam for Muslim women to cover their face. Rather, the practice reflects a mode of male control over women. Its association with Islam originates in Saudi Arabia, which seeks to export the practice of veiling — along with other elements of its extremist Wahhabist brand of Islam.

I might be tempted to agree with this observation, if not the conclusion that Fatah draws from it. But there is a difficulty, a classic one that can be found in the current debates over decriminalizing prostitution: do women have agency? Or are they merely soft wax upon which men impose their will?

A strong case can be made, for example, that the attire of many women in North America--miniskirts, high heels and so on--presupposes a male audience, real or hypothetical, and is imposed by the patriarchy. But try telling that to the women themselves!

The ever-earlier sexualization of girl-children, meanwhile, is raising alarm across the political spectrum. Is this imposed? It's hard to argue the contrary, even if the imposition is a complex one, involving peer pressure, advertising, the community, male-biased cultural values and so on. So when does imposition give way to free choice?

My mother’s generation threw off their burqas when Muslim countries gained their independence after the Second World War.

Again, a free choice from the sound of it.

Here in Canada, the debate about the niqab controversy surfaced recently in Toronto, when a judge ordered a Muslim woman to take off her niqab when she testified in a case of sexual assault. The woman invoked Islam as the reason why she wanted to give testimony while wearing a face-mask. She told the judge: “It’s a respect issue, one of modesty,” before adding that it was a matter of Islamic “honour.” (The judge denied her request.)

Elsewhere, a person wearing a burka and masquerading as a Muslim woman robbed a ScotiaBank branch in Mississauga and is still being hunted by police. Interestingly, none of the national newspapers covered the burka-bandit bank holdup, scared it seems that reporting the incident would attract accusations of racism and Islamophobia.

As is the case with all clothing, there are complex social interactions at play here: I have to remove my boots and hat when I go through airport security, for example, but this is hardly an argument for banning either. The bank-robbing example is already covered in the Criminal Code (Section 351[2]), and again is hardly an argument for abolition.

Some apologists of Islamism in academia and feminist groups bend the truth to make it sound as if their defence of the burka is a defence of tolerant Western values. What do these people have to say about laws against polygamy and slavery, both sanctioned in some parts of the Islamic world, but outlawed in Canada?

This is a strawwoman argument. There is no "defence of the burka" per se being advanced during the current debate (sparked by a recent ban on niqab at Cairo University), other than from the burka-wearers themselves. Rather, the question of choice is salient. I'll return to this point.

Other opponents of a ban on face-masks compare the burka to a bra. Wahida Valiante, chair of the Canadian Islamic Congress, said, “Women can take their bra off and we don’t have any laws against that. So in that context a woman can choose to cover their face in this country.” It was lost on Ms. Valiante that the burka conceals a person’s identity while a bra is female undergarment.

This is disingenuous. Once again, it's the matter of choice that is paramount, not how it is exercised.

The Canada I came to with my wife and daughters should not be a haven for a medieval, misogynist doctrine that traps women under the guise of liberalism and choice.

It is sad that while the rest of the world moves toward the goal of gender equality, right here in Europe and North America, under our very noses, Islamists are pushing back the clock, convincing educated Muslim women they are mere corrupting sexual objects and a source of sin.

There can be little doubt that some of that is in the mix. But what I find odd and offensive is that these "educated Muslim women" are so condescendingly described by Fatah. Poor brainwashed souls that they are, only the liberating force of government legislation can free them from their misconceptions.

Summing up Fatah's arguments, then, if some women in Canada want to walk around in niqab, they are in fact oppressed by a mediaeval, non-religious, misogynist custom, and must be rescued from themselves.

Hard-line feminists have said much the same thing in the past about miniskirts, heels and fishnets, although I don't recall their demanding government legislation to enforce an alternative norm. Once again, they had a point, but it wasn't the whole story. Social interaction, indeed the very construction of the "self," is complex, volatile, always in flux, with numerous contending forces at play.

When Gayatri Spivak concluded that the subaltern has no voice because even voice has been appropriated beforehand by the oppressor, and "liberation" merely reinscribes that voice in new ways, it is hard to see where this leads concretely but to a denial of agency on the part of the oppressed. However well-theorized, her position offers no way out.

It is more constructive, I think, while recognizing the persistent fallacy of an atomized human "individual," self-constructed, essentialized, pre-social, that we allow for the possibility of positive social change. If we create each other through social interaction, can we not also mutually create a society, if we choose, without subalterns and oppressors?

In any case, it may seem to bear out Spivak's hypothesis when we see, for example, strong feminists deliberately dressing in sexy outfits, but I see this as neither an incapacity to avoid replicating oppression, nor as an ideological contradiction. It's an exercise of will and power, whatever cultural vocabulary is involved.

To be sure we can argue about a patriarchal etiology of fashion, but that's really rather pointless and abstract. We know that such forms of expression sometimes appear to be imposed, sometimes are claimed by women as their own, and sometimes both at once. And we also know--or should know--that such apparel is never simply a matter of coercion, however we refine and redefine the latter concept.

I am wary of ideological prescriptions, because life cannot be reduced to a series of verbal commandments. But the irony of Fatah's approach is that it exactly mirrors, in fact reinscribes, the very form of prescription that he claims to oppose. On a woman's body, he simply proposes to replace one form of oppression with another, enforcing it, moreover, by state sanction.

Why not let the women decide for themselves, whatever we mean by that? (I once saw a young Muslim woman in a shopping mall, with a hijab and thigh-high boots--the body as a site of struggle indeed.) In the liberal society that Fatah pretends to support, this would go without saying.

But, without going into detail, this society, for women, is a minefield of coercive forces, as the continuing struggle over abortion indicates all too well. If the bodies of women are complex sites where various forces collide and contend, then women-as-subjects should be recognized as actively involved in this clash as well, and, if we mean what we say about gender equality, as privileged actors.

If women should not be reduced to sex objects, neither should they be reduced to political or social ones. But in taking the position he does, Fatah, with considerably less honesty than the anti-abortion (read: anti-feminist) movement, objectifies the women he claims he wants to liberate. By so doing offers them, not freedom, but the same old father-knows-best gender oppression--in fact, Wahhabism in reverse.

Counter-dissent: the case of Tarek Fatah

I thought this article was satire, at first, that had duped the perennially unwary.

I was wrong. Tarek Fatah is dead serious. Any satire is utterly unintentional.

Little Mosque on the Prairie, a tiresomely twee CBC sit-com effort, is nothing less, he says, than a vehicle for terrorism. But then, the indefatigable Fatah turns out to have had this bee in his bonnet for a while:

In early 2007, as the CBC was promoting Little Mosque on the Prairie with great fanfare, I expressed my misgivings about the project. Writing in a Toronto newspaper, I suggested the CBC sitcom reflected "an Islamist agenda" that was using comedy to lull mainstream Canadians into believing all-is-well in Canada's Muslim communities, despite evidence of a rise in extremism among Muslim youth. For example, Little Mosque made no reference to "the hijacking of...Islam by politicized clerics affiliated with Saudi Arabia or Iran."

The latter, I think, would have required one heck of a laugh track to keep the program's sit-com status intact. The suggestion reminds me of the scene in Natural Born Killers when Mallory's abuse by her father is presented in just this fashion. But we weren't meant to be amused by it. In Fatah's hands, I suspect, Little Mosque on the Prairie would include stonings and amputations, bomb-making and AK-47s, genital mutilation and burqas, and it wouldn't be funny either.

But of course Fatah doesn't want us to laugh. He has no patience with the comedic possibilities of cultural encounter. For him it's all documentary, all the time, and if we're laughing it's because we aren't paying attention. Worse, we're being lulled and duped. Because we all should know that Canadian Muslims--with the exception, of course, of Tarek Fatah himself (his involvement with the tiny Muslim Canadian Congress ended in 2006 after the latter split into two even smaller groupuscules) and Alia Hogben's Canadian Council of Muslim Women--are all terrorists or terrorist sympathizers or terrorist enablers or just plain folks terrorized into silence.

Now let me note up front, because one has to these days, that I have far more in common with Fatah than I do with the religious nutbars who ran weekly fun-for-the-whole-family Execution Nights down at the soccer stadium in Kabul, banned kite-flying, made it a crime to educate girls, and sent men to jail for trimming their beards. The Muslim Canadian Congress, and I presume Fatah as well, support a "progressive, liberal, pluralistic, democratic, and secular society where everyone has the freedom of religion." Leave out the word "liberal" and I'm there.

But Fatah insists on pretending that he's a brave voice crying in the wilderness. He paints much the same picture of Canadian Islamic communities that screechy xenophobes like Kathy Shaidle and the hérouxvillistes do. This gets him excellent media coverage and a lot of political face-time. Yet to hold everyone's attention, he needs to make wilder and wilder assertions. Ramping up paranoia from the perceived vantage-point of an apostate, or, at least, a maverick, Fatah now claims that the cast of Little Mosque on the Prairie, by virtue of collecting donations for a food-bank in concert with two more somewhat more official Muslim organizations than the one he left, is engaged in subversion.

One of these organizations is the Canadian chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Fatah doesn't talk about the Canadian chapter, though: instead, he goes on and on about wealthy donors from Arab countries who have provided money to CAIR in the US, and notes that some of the parent organization's associations have been less than savoury.

The other group is the Muslim Association of Canada, which, as he notes in his pearl-clutching manner, is made up of supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood, which admittedly has had a chequered past--to put it mildly. But the MAC's own stated goal is "[t]o establish an Islamic presence in Canada, that is balanced, constructive and integrated though distinct, within the social fabric and culture of Canada." It's hard to argue with that. And anyway, in the case at hand, MAC just wants to collect for a foodbank.

Fatah's conclusion is a keeper:

MAC and other Islamists can fly under the radar and even manage to appropriate the CBC name and logo in their plans.

The question all Canadians should be asking is this: What good is it to send our troops to fight the Taliban in Afghanistan when our own public broadcaster is tricked into according respectability to Islamist organizations that share the same doctrine of Jihad?

I hope Hubert Lacroix, the new head of the CBC will recognize that the good name of the public broadcaster is tarnished as a result of partnering with CAIR and MAC. Lacroix should ensure such a hijacking of the CBC is prevented in the future. The world is witnessing a world-wide struggle that is pitting ordinary Muslims against well-funded Islamists. The least the CBC can do is not side with those who wish to implement the Muslim Brotherhood agenda on Canada.

"[H]ijacking of the CBC?" This is simply neo-McCarthyist raving. We're talking about a food drive, not flying planes into the Peace Tower. Even members of fundamentalist groups like MAC lift their dripping fangs from the corpses of innocents from time to time to share meals, give to charity and engage in the routines of family life and citizenship. And when pressed, they tend to sound like boring old run-of-the-mill social conservatives: they're opposed to abortion and feminism and same-sex marriages. Under other circumstances, there is a vast potential here for political alliances of quite a different sort than the one that allegedly exists.

But Fatah's hyperbole goes with the role that he has thrust upon himself. And the media lap it up. Why?

We might in fact ask the same question about other counter-dissidents--that is, members of groups where political dissent has arisen, who reject the dissidents and embrace the Establishment. Anti-feminist women are media darlings, for example. There was Phyllis Schlafly, who traveled up and down the USA to argue that women should stay at home, and who eventually helped to kill the Equal Rights Amendment. There's the light and lively Camille Paglia, always good for a sound bite, and of course Ann Coulter.

Once we see this sort of thing for what it is, of course, the question really answers itself. There is nothing quite so rare and valuable to the corporate media than a counter-dissident, who carries the authority of his or her background in the very act of breaking with dissidents, and can be counted upon to say things about the dissidents in question that others cannot.

It is not my intention, of course, to portray Canadian Muslims as a single community, with a dissensus group at its core. But they are too often portrayed as such, a threatening collective Other in our midst whose ways are not "ours," posing an actual threat to what we take to be the Canadian way of life. That portrait, that series of stereotypes that the good burghers of Hérouxville so bravely confronted, is always with us these days. 9/11. Our troops in Afghanistan. The appalling Khadr family. And Fatah is making good use of it all.

Islamism, in fact, is the new Communism, not in the ideological sense--only a political illiterate could make such a claim--but in the sense of a Peril, an evil loosed upon us that good citizens must root out. Hijab-wearing soccer players! Eeek! Tented women wanting to vote! Democracy is at stake! May as well search the mosques for pods while we're at it. And be sure to look under our beds.

The far-right ignorantsia is historically prone to this kind of xenophobic feeding frenzy. But to see self-professed liberals pouring oil on the flames by adding their own wild talk to the chorus is alarming. The allure of fame appears to trump civil sobriety and good judgement. In the current maelstrom of uninformed confrontation, one can be sought after by the media simply by trumpeting one's own apostasy, and rather too easily become transformed from a spokesperson to a performer.

The problem is, however, that there is inevitably a shelf-life for this particular performance. Being opposed to fundamentalist Islam, after all, is hardly new or even interesting in itself. The latter is not a moving target like progressive feminism, but an ossified, cruel, narrow, intolerant and profoundly conservative ideology. The whole point about it is that it doesn't change. So anti-Islamist rhetoric quickly gets boring and repetitive.

We know that beheading prisoners is uncivilized. We know that lashing rape victims is cruelly wrong, and hanging gay teeenagers is barbaric. It's not hard for a Canadian, Muslim or non-Muslim, to make these and similar points with dignity and sincerity, and establish common cause with the majority, but for some the media limelight can prove intoxicating.

I believe that it has become just that for Tarek Fatah. The media haven't turned on him yet, but they will have to at some point to preserve their own credibility. Calling Little Mosque on the Prairie an Islamist plot is in exactly the same league as Phyllis Chesler's taxi-driver fifth column. What can we expect next--fluoridated water alerts?

Don't laugh.

The pitchfork strategy

If the Right excels at anything, it's demonology. The Good Guys have never fought people: they fight images, images of pure evil that erupt into history out of nowhere. It is an article of faith, in fact, that these malign forces have no causes: they are simply there, hating our freedoms and our Way of Life--and they all look alike.

Witness the crude racialist cartoons of the Other, visual and verbal, whenever the Good Guys go to war; or the religified discourse, hellfire and all, that sprang up around the same-sex marriage issue; or the deliberate confusion of mild social reformers with Stalinists; or the ludicrous attempts at present to link "the Left" with a mediaeval, misogynist, homophobic, ossified, punitive form of Islam for whom bin Laden appears to be the current spokesman.

For quite a while, I thought the latter was merely the kind of verbal flim-flam one uses in cheap debate: an audacious and sweeping ad hominem, meant to silence opponents before they ever open their mouths. Or to knock them wildly off-course when they do: "No, I don't approve of execution by paper-shredder! No, I think that amputations for theft are an atrocity! And stoning women! And flying planes into buildings! But I thought we were here to discuss pay equity." "Sorry, time's up." That kind of thing. We've seen it before, although the rhetorical density from the Right seems to be increasing exponentially. But there's strategy here, too, if poorly-articulated.

The Right, and this needs to be said up front, is still in the driver’s seat, globally speaking, even if neo-liberal "benefits" to the Third World have by now been debunked, short-term pain has given way to long-term pain, deregulation has actually killed people, and the Invisible Hand is around too many throats to ignore any longer. Even the World Bank has its apostates now. The Right is still in power, but it's looking around wildly to shore itself up, now that its gospel of privatization and globalization is wearing a little thin.

What to do? People are starting to ask tough questions, as Zamyatin did of Lenin: "OK, I've seen the broken eggs. Now, where's that omelet of yours?" So the US administration does what it always does when it's in a jam--waves the flag and starts a war. Or two. Find the demons, wipe 'em out. Call on all the old values. Patriotism. Bigotry. Get a bunch of working people with no future into the forces to go and fight your battles for you. Commiserate with the parents. Nail down the reconstruction contracts.

But that's only half the job. Order on the home front is essential too, to keep the opposition in line once friendly voting machines have done their part. Remember, those demons are tricky. Positively supernatural. They're everywhere, not just Over There. They could be your next-door neighbour. Hell, they could be you. Their agenda is clear: Same-sex marriage. Hanging gay teenagers. Amputation. Rehabilitation. A woman's right to choose abortion. Stoning. Women's equality. Burqas. Abolishing capital punishment. Mass-murder. Peace. War. They're a sneaky bunch, and we have to be ever-vigilant.

Never mind, you can always tell the home-grown demons. They're easy to spot. There's a simple test: they're always supporters or members of a political party conservatives don’t like. They like to congregate. In the States, they're Democrats. In Canada, they're Liberals, or NDP, or Green. (To quote one of the blowflies over at Small Dead Animals, "Gulags and mild social reform are one and the same." I didn't make that up.)

The head demon has taken an Arabic name, for now. Nobody, not all the President's technology and all of his men, can seem to locate him. They can't even find his recording studio, but you know what demons are like. Meanwhile the Left--you know, the people who don't like Bush, or Stephen Harper--are hauling out the pitchforks. We hate our freedoms. We practise stoning in our spare time, waiting for The Day. Our values are the same as his. Think I'm kidding? The frantic and increasingly mad David Horowitz even wrote a book about it.

But there's strategy here, as I said. It's not a conspiracy, just a case of small minds thinking alike, and fools seldom differing. The technique to achieve it is the well-known Big Lie: just keep repeating that "the Left" is in bed with the beheaders and stoners and bombers, and people will start to question why we oppose the war in Iraq. Why we support public transit. Why we like medicare. Why we think the world is getting warmer. Why we're in favour of more social housing. Why we find Stephen Harper scary. Why we oppose tax cuts.

O tempora, o mores! Pass the horn-polish, Comrade Omar--it’s getting warm in here.