On extremism, jihadism and counter-jihadism


This post is prompted by David Cameron’s recent speech setting out a new agenda on addressing the threat of Islamist violent extremism, and also by the recent launch of a whole series of “counter-jihadi” initiatives on the British right, including the planning of a Mohammed cartoon exhibition in London in September. The latter has been the subject of a report by the anti-fascist group Hope Not Hate (HnH). My friend Sarah made some sympathetic criticisms of that report at Harry’s Place, for which she got some sharp criticism on Twitter. This whole topic is one which frequently inflames irrational passions and generates more heat than light. This post, therefore, is an attempt to set out a series of propositions on these issues as an attempt to cut through some of the hysteria.  I didn’t mean for it to get so long!

“Extremism” is not a helpful framing of the problem
Cameron frames his approach to Islamism in terms of the wider generic problem of “extremism”, noting that Islamism is just one of many forms of “extremism”, along with that of the far right. Cameron is right to note that other ideologies constitute a threat, and there are certain similarities between the Islamist far right and the British nationalist far right. However, the term “extremism” creates more confusion than it solves, especially when the border between extremism and terrorism is blurred, as it was in Cameron’s speech, and in fact can do damage.

The idea of “extremism” implicitly contrasts these ideologies to the “normal”, acceptable politics of the centre ground, of the mainstream status quo. The concept of “extremism” criminalises the desire for change. It stops us from looking carefully and critically at the ideologies caught in its remit – which closes down debate, imagination and criticism, and stops us from engaging “extremist” ideologies and challenging them politically. The concept of “extremism” can make minor, marginal ideologies seem more dangerous than they often are – and therefore can sometimes make them seem glamourous and exciting.

We know from history that the rubric of “extremism” is most often used against the left. In recent decades, for example, we have seen huge amount of resources put into the policing and surveillance of left-wing politics, with undercover police officers inserted into ecological, anti-fascist and anti-racist movements, sowing havoc and ruining lives. Anti-capitalist groups like Occupy are lumped together with al-Qaeda and the IRA in the category of “domestic extremism”. The language of the guidance on extremism given to universities effectively means that not just jihadism but also anarchism should be excluded from such institutions. We have seen the infiltration and disruption of the campaigns led by the families of victims of racist violence, such as Stephen Lawrence’s; collusion in the blacklisting of union activists; and acts of provocation to push non-violent activists into criminal activity.

Cameron is wrong to think that extremism in general is a conveyer belt to violent extremism and terror
Cameron claims that “many [terrorists] were first influenced by what some would call non-violent extremists”; Islamism, he says, “has often sucked people in from non-violence to violence”. This is true, as far is at goes, but it is also true that most followers of “non-violent” extremism do not get “sucked” to jihadist violence, just as most anti-immigrant racists and casual antisemites do not get “sucked” to violent fascism. Not making that clear is problematic.

The evidence-based blogger Anonymous Mugwump has collated all of the research showing very conclusively that there is no necessary or straightforward step from extremism to violent extremism, no single pathway from Islamism to terrorism; his case is pretty conclusive.

(Cameron’s mistaken emphasis on this connection is probably due to the emphasis on the government’s thinking of the thinktank Quilliam, who have long argued, with little evidential basis, that extremism in general leads to violent extremism in particular – although their position,  as Amjad Khan argues here, is more subtle than Cameron’s: non-violent extremism, they say, provides the “mood music” for terrorism.)

As Anonymous Mugwump notes, there may well be good reasons to oppose some forms of non-violent extremism – but its connection to terrorism is not one of them. The category of non-violent extremism is basically a form of “pre-crime” or thought crime; making it into a security issue is dangerous because it criminalises beliefs that are not in fact criminally dangerous; it is a licence for authoritarian over-policing, for policing without the consent of communities. As I will argue more fully below, while terrorism is a policing issue, non-violent Islamism is a political issue, which should be challenged politically, by all of us – citizens, communities – and not from above by the state.

Cameron is broadly right to highlight ideology over “root causes”
Image: Jake Goretski
It is a shibboleth of many liberals and leftists that terrorism can be explained through “root causes” such as Western imperialism and foreign policy, or the socio-economic disadvantage of Muslim communities.  (Leftists and liberals rarely look for “root causes” to explain fascism, UKIP support or voting Tory; fascists and xenophobes are usually dismissed as malevolent or stupid. Why is Islamism unique among far right ideologies in needing explanation through root causes?)

The late Norman Geras regularly exposed the folly of root causism and the blowback theory. Cameron echoes Norm in noting that 9/11 came before the Iraq war and that it is often the most rather than least advantaged who engage in terrorism, demonstrating that it is the ideology itself, not deprivation or foreign policy, that is the central explanatory factor. Anonymous Mugwump has summed up much of the literature refuting blowback theory too (hereherehereherehere and here), and Futile Democracy has made some similar points, pointing out how long before 2002 Islamism’s commitment to violence can be dated.

So, Cameron is broadly right here. He is too quick, though, to eliminate the possibility that Western policy has any role in driving terror: surely it is possible that Western intervention can trigger terrorist vengeance even it does not cause it, or that narratives which highlight Western intervention might be used by jihadists to recruit converts? (An analogy would be Israel’s actions and antisemitic incidents, or Islamist terrorism and anti-Muslim hate crime: the former trigger the latter but are not the cause, because for the trigger to work there needs to already be an ideological matrix which blames Israel’s actions on all Jews, terrorist actions on all Muslims – or Western intervention on all Westerners.)

Cameron points to some of the right reasons Islamist ideologies are attractive
Focusing on the ideology not the “root causes” does not absolve us from trying to understand why the ideology appeals. Cameron’s explanation of the appeal is incoherent, but hits some of the right notes. The lust for adventure, the desire for identity, a sense of injustice, compassion for suffering members of the ummah and the pleasure of moral certainty are certainly part of the appeal.

And Cameron gestures towards these.  Jihadism, he says, “can offer [young people] a sense of belonging that they can lack here at home” – while “racism, discrimination or sickening Islamophobia” lead them to believe there is no place for them in Britain. (Left-wing critics of Cameron, such as Nafeez Ahmed, seem to have completely missed this large section of the speech.)

Cameron is right to downplay grievances but wrong to dismiss them altogether
As I already noted, Cameron is wrong to refuse the possibility that there’s some connection between foreign policy or socio-economic context and terrorism. The right way to frame this, in my view, is through the category of perceived grievance. Perceived grievance clearly contributes to the appeal of radical responses.

Perceived grievances sometimes have no basis in truth (there is no Western war on Muslims; Jews and Zionists do not control Britain). Some grievances involve a mix of fact and fantasy (the Iraq war has some questionable motives as well as some good ones, and lots of people died because of it). Other grievances a firm basis in truth (Islamophobia is pandemic in modern Europe; Muslims do experience some discrimination in the labour market; Assad is slaughtering Sunni Muslims). 

In this sense, the Islamist appeal to British Muslims mirrors the appeal of UKIP or the far right to some other British people. Immigration and terrorism does not cause or “provoke” xenophobia and anti-Muslim bigotry, but the mixture of real and imagined grievances accumulating around migration and Islam contributes to the appeal. If we recognise the role of grievance in driving Islamism (as the left does), we also need to recognise (as the left refuses to do) its role in driving right-wing ideology too.

Cameron is right to emphasise antisemitism and conspiricism in the Islamist mix
Image: The New Centrist
Cameron put a surprising amount of emphasis in his speech on antisemitism and conspiracy theories. I think he was right to do so, for two reasons. First, because conspirationism and antisemitic memes are behind the false narratives in many of the perceived grievances promoted by Islamist ideology. And second because antisemitism, or more specifically the shift in gear from casual everyday antisemitism to an ideologically committed antisemitic worldview, typically marks the shift from softer sympathy with Islamism to the kinds of Islamist ideology most likely to generate terrorism.

(We can see something similar on the far right, both with antisemitism, which remains the esoteric core of fascist ideology even as anti-Muslim bigotry becomes a more prominent part of the public appeal, and with Islamophobia as new far right groups move beyond soft anti-Muslim bigotry to a full scale, paranoid conspiricist and civilisationist anti-Islamic ideological worldview.)

Cameron is wrong to think that failed integration is a driver of extremism
The Islamist appeal to forms of everyday antisemitism that are wired into British society at large is a good example of how “failed integration” is the wrong frame for understanding extremism. Many of the ingredients of Islamism – e.g. anti-Americanism, misogyny, homophobia – are not unique to Islamism but float around in mainstream society. The humanitarian impulse that says we must do something about the suffering of the children of Gaza or Syria is not profoundly un-British either.

And so it is not surprising that recruits to jihad are not the least “integrated” of British Muslims, but often the most integrated – including converts. They are English-speaking, British-educated, often high achieving, often from comfortable socio-economic backgrounds, on the surface indistinguishable from their non-jihadi peers.

Very few come from the tiny handful of places in Britain that could be thought of as de facto segregated communities; there are no all-Muslim ghettos in Portsmouth, Southampton, Brighton, Cardiff or Lewisham, to name some of the places where jihadist cells have operated. (I have made that argument before, here.)

Young people who turn to radical Wahhabi or Salafi faith or to political Islam are often doing so in rebellion against their parents’ or grandparents’ conservative Sufi or Barelvi practices. They go to English-speaking mosques to get out of Urdu-speaking mosques. They prefer the multi-ethnic solidarity of jihad to the restrictive ties of ethnic community.

Cameron is right to care about issues such as FGM and forced marriage, but wrong to link to Islamism
“Failed integration”, where it exists, might be a problem, then, but it is not the problem of jihad. Practices such as forced marriage and female genital mutilation are problems which need to be fought vigorously, but they are problems that flourish in completely different contexts than those in which jihadi ideology flourishes. FGM and forced marriage are issues of patriarchy and cultural –conservatism driven by elders in particular micro-communities, exactly the cultural conservatism jihadi youth seek to escape.

By associating these kinds of practices (which are cultural and not religious, and found among some Muslim ethnic groups and not others) with jihad, Cameron is helping to sustain a false idea of a generic “Muslim” problem, rather than thinking seriously about how to combat jihadi ideology. (And in doing so,  of course, sustains the perceived grievance of a “war on Muslims” that jihadist promote to broaden their appeal.)

Islamism and the far right are both dangers, but are not equivalents
Image: TNC
The narrative of generic “extremism”, including both the far right and jihadis, at war with our British mainstream sometimes shades in to thinking of these different “extremisms” as equivalent to each other. (For instance, the HnH report describes the counter-jihadists as “as dangerous as the Islamists they claim to dislike” (p.2).) There are some ways in which the far right and Islamism do mirror or feed off each other. This is most obvious with the relationship between the EDL (and its offshoots) and Anjem Chaudhary’s outfit, locked in a childish cycle of media-amplified face-offs. But we shouldn’t be too quick to equate the two sides.

Like Islamism, the far right is a very heterogeneous formation. At its softer end, it blurs with a kind of xenophobic authoritarian populism which is actually quite mainstream in our political culture. At its far end, the kind of hardcore Nazism of a Joshua Bonehill is extremely marginal in its threat or appeal.

Instances of actual violence and terrorism have come from various points on this spectrum, as I discussed here. The new CST report on antisemitic incidents in 2015 shows that suggests that the far right remain much more prominent as known perpetrators than Islamism (122 incidents involved far right discourse; 16 involved Islamist discourse). And, to use Quilliam’s language, figures like Stephen Yaxley-Lennon provide the “mood music” for the disturbing (and growing) number of anti-Muslim attacks on Britain’s streets. So, the far right is a threat.

But is it equivalent to the Islamist threat, as Hope not Hate and others suggest? I don’t think so, for two reasons. First, the British far right recruits from a fairly large population of angry white males – but only manages to recruit a tiny proportion of them. The toxicity of the fascist brand in this constituency keeps it marginal (for now). Islamism, in contrast, has a much smaller pool to recruit from, but its appeal seems to be more successful in that constituency. For example, you’re unlikely to join a student Islamic society without coming into contact with hardcore jihadist views, whereas the British nationalist far right is actually quite hard to join.

Second, I think that only at the most extreme end of the spectrum does violence become a central part of far right ideology – whereas the message of military jihad is central not just to the most extreme jihadists. As Amjad Khan recently wrote, allegedly “non-violent extremists” such as Hisb-ut-Tahrir do believe in a caliphate and a war of offensive jihad, and justify terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians. The centrality of jihad to a broad spectrum of Islamists is the danger of terrorism follows more often (even if not automatically) from the prevalence of Islamism than from the prevalence of the far right. Hence all but the most hardcore on the far right disavow the likes of Breivik and Dylann Roof, while quite broad a broad swathe of Islamist opinion apologise for, defend or even applaud their Breiviks and Roofs (to give just two examples, Cage describe jihadists as victims of the British state, while Cage’s director Moazzam Begg has recently argued that as a counterweight to ISIS we should back al-Nusra, al-Qaeda’s franchise in Syria!).

The counter-jihadi movement is toxic and dangerous
This brings us to the counter-jihad movement, that part of the far right whose central narrative is threat posed to Western civilisation by Islam, as described in the new HnH report. The counter-jihad movement is not homogeneous, but some of its themes are: a refusal to distinguish between Muslims and people, Islam as a faith and Islamism as a politics; an obsession with demographics and immigration which echo older right-wing themes; a  civilisationist discourse, which frames more or less everything in terms of the epic clash of a decadent Western civilisation against ascendant Islam; its paranoid, conspiracist worldview in which Islam is not seen in religious or cultural terms but as a vast co-ordinated secret plot; and a superficial claim to defend liberal values such as women’s or gay rights or free speech, which typically doesn’t translate into caring about violations of these values that come from any source other than Islam.

The counter-jihad movement is toxic and dangerous because it picks up on real and imagined grievances about Islam and immigration circulating in mainstream culture and translates them into a fully-formed ideological narrative, which gives it more reach than the discredited race theories traditional fascists still cleave to. It is toxic and dangerous because it sees bloody conflict between the West and Islam as both inevitable and good, thus licensing both petty and serious hate crimes against Muslims on the streets and even of terrorist activities such as those of Zack Davies, Pavlo Lapshyn or Ryan McGee.

Finally, the counter-jihad movement has strong links with actual fascism, links embodied by Paul Weston and his British Freedom Party/Liberty GB party, by the English Defence League, and by Britain First, all of which involved in the planning of the Mohammed cartoon exhibition in September.

The counter-jihadi movement has exactly the wrong strategy for contesting Islamism
Unlike classical fascism, counter-jihadism’s narrative does contain some elements of the truth. As noted above, Islamism is a clear and present danger, as are illiberal practices (such as FGM and forced marriage) that exist in some Muslim populations. But if we’re serious about combating these things, counter-jihadism takes exactly the wrong approach to doing so.

Using Crusader imagery, flying the George cross, publishing cartoons of the Prophet fucking goats, getting tanked up on Stella and Charlie to march through Asian neighbourhoods, muttering about the eclipse of the white race, demanding bans on halal food – the strategies the counter-jihad movement uses are far more likely to inflame and entrench Islamist support and to confirm the grievances Islamists use to recruit.

As I argued above, jihadi terrorism (like far right terrorism) is a security issue which should be policed as sharply as necessary. But non-terrorist Islamism (like fascism in general) is a political problem that should be combated politically. Combating Islamism means clearly articulating the values it abhors: intellectual doubt, religious tolerance (including the right to heresy and apostasy and the right not to believe), secular public space, sexual freedom, the rights of women and non-heterosexual people, free expression (including the right to laugh and to offend).

But just as UKIP supporters will never be won over by merely celebrating multiculturalism, winning potential Islamists to these values requires more than treating them as catchphrases. Instead, we need to work out how to articulate them in credible and imaginative ways; we need to show we are prepared for dialogue not just to lecture; we need to show willingness to take seriously the grievances that Islamism latches on to. And, crucially, we need to find credible, trusted voices to articulate them.

Cameron is right that some Muslim voices are drowning out others
The issue of credible, trusted voices is vital. Cameron is right that some of the least welcome voices are too loud in the Muslim public sphere. Malignant and unrepresentative “community leaders” are given too much airplay both amongst Muslims and in communicating to the wider world.

It would be great instead if, both in Muslim communities and in mainstream media, we could hear more varied Muslim voices, young Muslim voices, reforming Muslim voices, feminist Muslim voices. Fortunately, there are more now than there were a decade ago. Unfortunately, though, the Muslim voices nurtured by the state tend to lack credibility on the Muslim street – by being selected and patronised by the establishment undermines their credibility. Unless radical and reforming representatives actually come from below, then conservative and “extremist” voices will continue to be heard the loudest.

The free speech principle has been hijacked by the anti-Muslim right…
Free speech has been one of the themes the counter-jihadi movement has used extensively. Now, it is true that free speech is increasingly fragile, that Islamism – and especially Islamist terrorism, such as that against Charlie Hebdo in Paris – constitutes one of the gravest of dangers to free speech.

But Islamism is one among many threats – as a quick glance at Spiked or Index on Censorship would tell you. Yet the likes of Anne-Marie Waters, Douglas Murray or Charlie Klendjian – let alone the likes of Paul Weston, Jim Dowson or Pamela Geller – rarely if ever speak out about threats to free speech from any other source. This shows that their claim to be advocates of free speech is hollow and cynical, a cover for anti-Muslim racism.

It is commonly said that if you care about free speech you should care about the free speech of those you oppose the most. Perhaps my dislike of the far right should not stop me from defending their right to speak out. Maybe – that does not mean I should approve their actions when they go out of their way to provide a platform for racism or when their primary intention is causing offence.

I don’t know if Hope not Hate is right in claiming that Waters and the other organisers of the Mohammed cartoons exhibition are doing it to provoke a civil war. But it certainly is a provocative thing to do, likely to lead to unrest, and unlikely to have any positive impact in politically challenging Islamism.

We should treat a Mohammed cartoon exhibition the way we would treat the Iranian state’s Holocaust cartoon contest: it is not a matter of free speech, but a case of provocation, incitement and racism.

…but it doesn’t mean we should embrace illiberal strategies
Although I see the toon exhibition as malignant and dangerous, I do not agree with Hope not Hate’s main policy recommendations in response to it: ban the exhibition and institute better state surveillance of counter-jihadis. These kinds of strategies are ill-advised for two reasons. First, they are ineffective in an age when images circulate on social media whether the exhibition is banned or not – and indeed will be used by the counter-jihadis to sell their victimhood narrative, the perceived grievance they use to recruit. Second, bans and policing are authoritarian solutions, which empower the state. Instead, we should empower communities and citizens by promoting an adult conversation about the issues, and by promoting alternative, democratic values.




See also:
Far right violence from Charleston to Mold Tesco; Has Tommy Robinson changed?; Anders Breivik, Counter-jihad and right-wing terror; The EDL and global counter-jihad; The lessons of the Lucozade plane plot; Anne Marie Waters in Lewisham East; Liberty GB in Lewisham West.

Comments

Brilliant article. I agree with nearly everything you wrote. Particularly liked your analysis of how the Islamists and the so called "counter-jihadi" movement use "greievances" to create an ideological narrative.

However I think it is a little unfair to put Douglas Murray in the same league as Paul Weston and EDL. I know Murray is on the right and he speaks alot on Islamism and Islam and he's critical of mass immigration(which I disagree with btw) but that doesn't neccessarily mean he's an anti muslim bigot, he may say some things which are wrong like saying that Islamist terrorism is the reason why there is anti muslim sentiment in the west.

Maybe I'm wrong but from what I read of him I seriously don't get the impression that Murray is a bigot even though I don't agree with everything he says. At worst he's in the grey area.

Other than that I agree with everything you said.
Sarah AB said…
Thanks for this very interesting post Bob. The relationship between ‘violent extremism’/terrorism and ‘non-violent extremism’ seems extrenekt complicated, particularly WRT causation. ‘Extremism’ and ‘radicalisation’ are perhaps not always the most helpful words, partly because (as you point out) they can include such a wide range of views.
It’s important to distinguish carefully between the goals of various ‘extremists’ and the methods used by some to achieve these. Whereas the goals of e.g. animal rights activists are not violent, sometimes their methods are. However in the case of at least some Islamists, the goal is a society which legitimises violence, including death, against people who haven’t, within a Western/secular context, even committed a crime.
There are Muslims who are completely sincere in their condemnation of ISIS yet who in theory support a state in which huddud punishments are meted out. Thus in the case of Islamist ideology the gap between violent and non-violent extremism seems narrower than between those who simply want to see a united Ireland and the IRA, or (to cite a more ‘extreme’ philosophy), between those who want to see an overthrow of capitalism and those who turn to violence to try to achieve this. So I agree that it’s a political ideology, to be dealt with politically - but it is a particularly evil one, just as it would be evil to want Muslims to be killed ‘in an ideal state’. I think your example of FOSIS is very important, i.e. the way in which the most extreme ideas are made to seem mainstream in certain Muslim circles, and sometimes blanked out or glossed over by non-Muslims who would be highly sensitive to much milder manifestations of extreme views from the white far right.
Completely agree with your point about counter-jihadism’s narrative having some elements of truth, and this makes it more dangerous – and it’s dangerous to ignore this fact.
One problem with the kind of Muslim voices you would welcome is that even when they come ‘from below’ they are often met with hostility and abuse from more extreme Muslim voices.
I find it really difficult to find the right terms to talk about the Mohammed exhibition. You say it ‘is not a matter of free speech’, but it is a response to attempts to shut down free speech and Hope not Hate want it to be banned. But it’s thoroughly tainted by anti-Muslim bigotry so certainly isn’t just about free speech. (A clear contrast would be the free expression rally Maryam Namazie held a few years back, or people insisting that pictures of Mohammed be shown on TV where relevant to the story).
Unknown said…
I'd like to echo the sentiments of the commentator above. I agree with the vast bulk of this article, which fleshes out some of the points made in Cameron's speech, adds some of the missing nuance and makes some legitimate corrections, mostly in terms of where the emphasis should have lay. However, I'd also like to defend Douglas Murray, who I think it takes work to construe as a bigot from what he actually writes / says without taking excessive licence to "read between the lines". He is very clear in his focus on Islam as an ideology, rather than Muslims as people, and reliably makes the distinction between Islam as a loose collection of ideas and Islamism as a tighter and more dangerous ideology whenever it's relevant to his commentary.

I certainly take issue with the argument you advanced for how we can know that Murray is motivated by anti-muslim racism (a notion that hardly makes sense, incidentally, given that Islam is not a race). You said:

"Yet the likes of Anne-Marie Waters, Douglas Murray or Charlie Klendjian – let alone the likes of Paul Weston, Jim Dowson or Pamela Geller – rarely if ever speak out about threats to free speech from any other source. This shows that their claim to be advocates of free speech is hollow and cynical, a cover for anti-Muslim racism."

I think this goes considerably too far. While in conjunction with other information about an individual it may be reasonable to see an exclusive focus on the threat to free-speech presented by Islamism (or even Islam) as indicative of anti-Muslim animus or bigotry, it certainly doesn't "show" this on its *own*. The truth is, Murray doesn't define himself principally as a defender of free speech, unlike someone like Nick Cohen, for instance. Murray is a critic of Islam and Islamism in particular, as am I, and in both our cases the threat to free speech presented by certain ideas common to these related ideologies - the notion of blasphemy, for instance - are especially salient to us as one of the many threats posed by the overall package of Islamism and Islamic conservatism that should be addressed. While I would consider myself an ardent free-speech advocate, which is why I share your concerns about the term "extremism" and much of the government's authoritarian strategy for tackling it, when this principle is refracted through my special interest in Islam and Islamism as sources of illiberalism more generally, my concern for preserving free-speech manifests as a (non-exclusive) focus on Islamic threats. I agree that if someone who advertised themselves primarily as a free-speech defender only ever drew attention to Islamic sources of threat to this ideal, this would suggest a motivational dimension to their critical energies not explicated. However, even in this case the motivation isn't *necessarily* "anti-Muslim racism", even if we have reason to think that it likely is. I think that this particular argument of yours strays dangerously close to the whataboutry fallacy, and I think it unfairly convicts commentators like Douglas Murray as bigots by going significantly beyond the evidence.

Other than this and a few other very minor points of contention, I think that your article is a valuable addition to the ongoing debate over how Islamism should, but especially *shouldn't*, be tackled.
Waterloo Sunset said…
Interesting post Bob. Some thoughts. (This will probably get long as well!)

The other issue with the "extremism" argument is that it's contextual and shifts over time. Much like the "centre ground". It would include the Suffragettes for sure. And Turkey are currently attacking Kurds in the name of anti-extremism.

It's not really relevant either. "Extremism" tells us nothing about the merits of otherwise of an ideology. Arguments are either right or wrong, regardless of whether they're part of the political mainstream. Anti-extremism is a morally relativist argument, often used by those who would otherwise condemn moral relativism.

Besides, someone can be an extremist in the sense of being outside the centre ground and not be an issue at all. I may not agree with the Libertarian Alliance, but I don't think we need to be kicking their doors down any time soon.

Obviously, HnH would disagree with much of that. They very much buy into the anti-extremism narrative. Even moreso some of the people in their periphery like Matthew Goodwin. That's been the case since their formation and isn't really that surprising.

What I find more interesting is the CST's strong welcome of the Cameron speech. I think it's them discarding the last remnants of the 43/62 tradition, aside from as a historical curiosity. That's reflective of wider trends in Jewish community organisations though. Back in the 90s, I was pretty friendly with the UJS. Certainly my impression was that you had a small number of their activists who were active in militant anti-fascism. But that the majority of the group were at least passively supportive of militant antifascism and respected the work AFA did. These days, the UJS talk about the BNP's right to free speech. I'm pretty sure they wouldn't give me the time of day now. And I used to address their meetings on occasion.

The non-violent-extremism-as-conveyor-belt argument is way too strong. But I do think that it can provide increased exposure to other tactics and ideologies. It also can make the recipient more likely to listen to them. In their heyday, I don't think everyone voting for the BNP was an anti-Semite. But if they got involved in the party, they almost certainly would become one.

(Leftists and liberals rarely look for “root causes” to explain fascism, UKIP support or voting Tory;

You already know this, but for other readers. That's a far comment on much of the liberal left. But it is categorically not the case with the AFA milieu.

It is a similar issue though. "Root cause" explanations don't mitigate ideological influence nor are they an excuse for it. But they do go some way to explaining why those arguments may get a hearing in the first place. Poverty doesn't excuse racist voters in Oldham. But it's one of the reasons they were prepared to take up racism.
Waterloo Sunset said…
On root causes though, I think Afghanistan in the cold war period is actually a bigger issue than Iraq. I have trouble understanding the argument that providing logistical support to Islamists doesn't have anything to do with them gaining in strength.

I don't think counter-jihadism is just about being anti Islamism, or even anti Muslim. A lot of it ties into US culture war stuff as well. And their relationship with the Islamists is as much symbiotic as it is oppositional. That's certainly the case with the EDL and Choudry's mob. (I think I've talked before about how I'm quite suspicious of the reasons why Choudry is seemingly immune to prosecution. And the idea that Bob Lambert has left his former role behind).

When talking about Anne Marie Davis, it is the case that some "decents" are into that association up to their necks. Nick Cohen's hands aren't clean on that one, but he has backpeddled at least. (Not enough. Especially for someone that wrote a book criticising other people's dodgy connections). Howard Fuller is heavily implicated. He even called for her to leave UKIP and rejoin the Labour Party. So next time he does his "far left and far right are identical" thing, it's worth remembering he'd be fine with them if they actually were far right. As long as they don't like Muslims.

Good point on integration. Traditional conservative Muslims are not the demographic most at risk of taking up Islamism. I heartily recommend Keenan Malik's From Fatwa to Jihad for those who want an overview of the subject.
Tir Tairngire said…
Bob can you find your own way to Pseuds Corner or do you need a sat nav ?
Lancastrian1 said…
You give the appearance of trying to be even handed but then you say you don't see why people should be given a platform to promote racism etc. However your definition of what constitutes racism and other 'isms' may well differ from what many other people think. In general, IMO there should be few limits apart from direct incitement to violence on free speech.

Your main objective is to attack the counter jihad movement yet you ignore the fact that Islamic ideology is one of the biggest threats to free speech across the planet. The nine people sentenced to death for blasphemy in Kano, Nigeria recently is one such example as is Mahmoud Muhammad Taha; he was executed, in 1985, for sedition and apostasy, after protesting the imposition of Sharia in Sudan

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/09/11/the-moderate-martyr

Nor is it just those killed by regimes, many bloggers who are critical of Islam have been killed, e.g.:
http://edition.cnn.com/2015/05/12/asia/bangladesh-blogger-killed/
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-19632673

Islam does not allow free speech, that is in its DNA and can be seen in this ruling from the ECHR:

Noting that the Welfare Party had pledged to set up a regime based on sharia law, the Court found that sharia was incompatible with the fundamental principles of democracy as set forth in the Convention. It considered that “sharia, which faithfully reflects the dogmas and divine rules laid down by religion, is stable and invariable. Principles such as pluralism in the political sphere or the constant evolution of public freedoms have no place in it”. According to the Court, it was difficult to declare one’s respect for democracy and human rights while at the same time supporting a regime based on sharia, which clearly diverged from Convention values, particularly with regard to its criminal law and criminal procedure, its rules on the legal status of women and the way it intervened in all spheres of private and public life in accordance with religious precepts.

You are correct that many people in the counter-jihad arena concentrate mostly on Islam suppressing free speech but that is not a sign of prejudice, rather it is the Pareto 80:20 rule in action. Effective action means concentrate on the biggest threat by far because that is the only one that carries a serious threat of death to enforce it. On top of that governments are using the Islamic threat as a way of clamping down on the freedoms of us all and you unwittingly assist them in that objective. If governments felt empowered or pressured to be able to name Islam, sharia and jihad as the explicit targets of their draconian proposals to restrict freedom of speech then they would be targeting the right area where death threats and killings regularly occur whilst leaving the rest of us alone. The fact that many voices such as yours would scream discrimination, racism etc. is actually assisting governments in curbing the rights of all of us to the long term detriment of us all.
Lancastrian1 said…
"Cameron is wrong to think that extremism in general is a conveyer belt to violent extremism and terror"

There I believe you are completely wrong. All jihadi groups are fighting to impose sharia law, a central tenet of Islam so even if the people who believe in sharia law aren't directly going to fight they are often carrying out soft jihad and supporting the climate in which extremism can flourish. I think these articles from 2010 outline the point clearly:

http://conservativehome.blogs.com/platform/2010/11/stopping-the-spread-of-sharia-is-central-to-countering-radicalisation-part-1.html
http://conservativehome.blogs.com/platform/2010/11/sharia-is-the-touchstone-for-recognising-and-combatting-radical-islam-part-2.html
http://conservativehome.blogs.com/platform/2010/11/the-new-government-needs-to-take-urgent-steps-to-counter-sharia-based-radicalisation-part-3.html
http://conservativehome.blogs.com/platform/2013/01/in-2012-sharia-enforcement-continued-to-spread-around-the-world.html
http://conservativehome.blogs.com/platform/2012/01/suffering-of-the-innocents-in-the-islamic-world-the-spread-of-sharia-enforcement-in-2011.html
bob said…
1. On the Douglas Murray issue.
Interesting a few of you have taken exception to what I said about Douglas Murray, but not Anne-Marie Waters or Charlie Klendjian. I don't know much about Klendjian and so don't know if I was unfair to put him in my list. I've edited what I said to replace "shows that" with "suggests that" as commentors are right that not speaking out on other types of free speech issues alone does not show racism. It's true that these people badge themselves as anti-Islamism activists mainly rather than as free speech activists, so perhaps it's wrong to expect them to be consistent when they raise the free speech klaxon. (They also badge themselves as secularists first and foremost, but rarely talk about dangers to secularism from other religions, and don't seem to have a problem lining up with Christian far right activists such as Britain First's Jim Dowson.)

On Murray specifically: I won't got into details about why I mention Murray, because there's so much out there on the web, not just lefties like me, Mehdi Hasan and In The Soup, but also ConservativeHome's Paul Goodman, David Aaronovitch, former Centre for Social Cohesion associate James Brandon, former Henry Jackson Society associate Marko Hoare, Zelo Street. Here are the core points: Murray doesn't distinguish Muslims from Islam or Islam from Islamism; he has called for conditions across the board to be made harder for Muslims in Europe; he talks about demographic time-bombs (the language of pseudo-scientific racism); he has expressed sympathy for the English Defence League, whose own founder left it because it was too racist. (I know he has also criticised the EDL, but pretty half-heartedly.) So, whether or not he is "a racist", whatever that is, he's certainly promoted racist positions.
bob said…
Re Waterloo Sunset:

2. The CST and militant anti-fascism

What I find more interesting is the CST's strong welcome of the Cameron speech. I think it's them discarding the last remnants of the 43/62 tradition, aside from as a historical curiosity. That's reflective of wider trends in Jewish community organisations though. Back in the 90s, I was pretty friendly with the UJS. Certainly my impression was that you had a small number of their activists who were active in militant anti-fascism. But that the majority of the group were at least passively supportive of militant antifascism and respected the work AFA did.

I don't think there's any final or sudden break in CST welcoming Cameron's speech. CST has always worked closely with the state, and has always striven to be non-partisan and to encourage politicians of either party when they take a strong stance against antisemitism. David Cameron spoke at a CST dinner as far back as 2008. From a CST perspective, the encouraging thing about the speech was highlighting antisemitism, an often neglected dimension of this area (because antisemitism is usually associated with the far right rather than Islamism). In this sense, CST has never really been in the tradition of the 43 Group

On the other hand, their nice appreciation of Morris Beckman when he passed away shows that they continue to have some affiliation to the tradition, even if attenuated. For those in the Jewish community who take antisemitism and anti-fascism seriously, militant anti-fascists such as the 43 Group or the Ghetto partisans will always remain an inspiration.

The bigger communal changes include the deepening sense that Islamism (and perhaps anti-Zionism) now constitutes a bigger threat to Jews in Britain than the far right, and the deepening conservatism of the community as a whole (although I don't think this is as pronounced as some commentators think), so if there is a change in the CST (and UJS) then it is likely to reflect these bigger shifts.
bob said…
3. Root causes

It's true that a serious left-wing (especially Marxist-inflected) take on the far right - and on Islamism - should genuinely look at the "root causes" of these (as AFA absolutely did with the rise of the BNP in the 1990s. As I wrote on the blog once, the problem with the standard "root causes" approach to terrorism is not its materialist aspiration to understand, but the "arrested materialism", or partialness of the attempt to understand. We do need a genuine materialist analysis of both fascism (as it mutates) and of Islamism.

As for the global "root causes" and Afghanistan in the Cold War: yes, the West must take some responsibility for building up and arming the Mujahideen, as Israel must take some responsibility for building up Hamas and its predecessors as a counterweight to Fatah. But these are now a long way in the past. Nafeez Ahmed claims that pretty much all Islamist terrorism, from al-Qaeda to ISIS via Bosnia, is the result of some long-standing unbroken homogeneous deliberate Western policy, but it seems very clear to me that looking at the current actual threats - ISIS and al-Nusra in Syria and Iraq, al-Qaeda affiliates from West Africa to SE Asia, Boko Haram etc - that the role played by the West in the causal chain leading to the current situation is relatively minor compared to all the other links in the chain.
bob said…
4. Re Lancastrian1

I don't make any attempt to appear "even handed". My whole argument in this post (maybe it's too wordy to get this across) is that we need to look at every treat - from Islamists, from the far right, from the most "extreme" and from the less "extreme" - on its own terms and not reduce them all to the same thing or treat them as equivalent. I spent some time arguing that "Islamism and the far right are both dangers, but are not equivalents", giving a couple of reasons why Islamism might be seen as a graver danger than the far right at the moment.

You seem like a good example of someone unable to distinguish between Islam and Islamism. The problem is not "Islamic ideology" because there is no such thing, any more than there is such a thing as "Christian ideology" or "Jewish ideology". Islam, like Christianity, is perfectly compatible with a huge range of ideologies, some totalitarian and intolerant of free speech, others not.
Lancastrian1 said…
Bob, my initial comment was a fairly hurried affair. I have written a more substantial response here as there are several points that are key to this debate..

https://lancastrian1.wordpress.com/2015/08/04/islam-islamism-and-jihad-a-response-to-bob/

I disagree that there is no such thing as Islamic ideology and as for the difference between Islam and Islamism, perhaps you could explain what you think the differences are and where Islamism gets its ideas and doctrines if not from Islamic ideology?

I should perhaps have said Islamic political ideology which is embodied in Sharia law but has its roots in Islamic texts. See the reference to Tariq Ramadan in my post saying that "most [Islamic] scholars agree" that hudud punishments are based on textual references.
paulocanning said…
I agree with this but the sole comment I would make is to your back up your point on the need for political not criminal responses. Russia has laws against 'extremism' but they are politically applied. They are surrounded my much of the same rhetoric too.

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