The problem with liberalism: what me and Obama have in common

When Malcolm X was 13 years old, he was sent to a detention home after getting expelled from school for bad behaviour. At that time, he had already been separated from his seven siblings while his mother was institutionalised, sent to the State Mental Hospital at Kalamazoo. Her health had steadily declined since Malcolm’s father was brutally killed by white supremacists five years earlier.

Malcolm Little, as he was then known, got on surprisingly well at the detention home. The white couple who ran it, Mr and Mrs Swerlin, liked Malcolm and treated him decently. They treated him well—but not quite as equals, he realised. He wasn’t about to change how they saw ‘niggers’.

“I remember one day when Mr Swerlin, nice as he was, came in from Lansing, where he had been through the Negro section, and said to Mrs Swerlin right in front of me, ‘I just can’t see how those niggers can be so happy and be so poor.’ He talked about how they lived in shacks, but had those big, shining cars out front.

“And Mrs Swerlin said, me standing right there, ‘Niggers are just that way…’ That scene always stayed with me.

“It was the same with the other white people, most of them local politicians, when they would come visiting the Swerlins. One of their favourite parlour topics was ‘niggers’. One of them was a close friend of the Swerlins. He would ask about me when he came, and they would call me in, and he would look me up and down, his expression approving, like he was examining a fine colt, or a pedigreed pup. I knew they must have told him how I acted and how I worked.”

Malcolm X was a ‘mascot’. The token ‘nigger’ of his class. He was liked and accepted by this white family because he behaved himself, he conformed. He set a shining example of what a young black boy in a racist America should be: non-aggressive, obedient, grateful. It was to his credit that he didn’t exhibit the delinquent qualities attributed to ‘niggers’ in general.

“What I am trying to say is that it just never dawned upon them that I could understand, that I wasn’t a pet, but a human being. They didn’t give me credit for having the same sensitivity, intellect, and understanding that they would have been ready and willing to recognize in a white boy in my position. But it has historically been the case with white people, in their regard for black people, that even though we might be with them, we weren’t considered of them. Even though they appeared to have opened the door, it was still closed. Thus they never did really see me.

“This is the sort of kindly condescension which I try to clarify today, to these integration-hungry Negroes, about their ‘liberal’ white friends, these so-called ‘good white people’ – most of them anyway. I don’t care how nice one is to you; the thing you must always remember is that almost never does he really see you as he sees himself, as he sees his own kind.”

Among his detractors, Malcolm X came to be seen as brilliant but reckless, even dangerous. Mainstream white America couldn’t forgive him for failing to denounce violence. They pointed to less threatening civil rights activists like Martin Luther King, and asked why he couldn’t be like them. But what Malcolm X does—that more compromising figures don’t do—is turn the critical lens on liberal America.

He pours scorn both on white liberals and on black Americans’ efforts to ingratiate themselves with them. Black pride, as he saw it, could not exist as long as black Americans were trying to advance themselves within a system that wasn’t made for them; one that was in fact created out of their exploitation. Malcolm X was important because he demanded something more than just “crumbs from the white man’s table.”

Even Barack Obama himself recognises it! In Dreams from my father, he singles out Malcolm X from all the other classic authors on the black condition, saying, “His repeated acts of self-creation spoke to me; the blunt poetry of his words, his unadorned insistence on respect, promised a new and uncompromising order, martial in its discipline, forged through sheer force of will.”

Obama surprised me. I know he’s awesome and everything, but he’s a politician, and politicians are never to be trusted. So yes, I was surprised to read the following passage in his book that not only speaks to the continuing problem of racism in America, but also spoke to other racisms in other places and times:

“I had begun to see a new map of the world, one that was frightening in its simplicity, suffocating in its implications. We were always playing on the white man’s court, Ray had told me, by the white man’s rules. If the principle, or the coach, or a teacher, or Kurt, wanted to spit in your face, he could, because he had power and you didn’t. If he decided not to, if he treated you like a man or came to your defense, it was because he knew that the words you spoke, the clothes you wore, the books you read, your ambitions and desires, were already his. Whatever he decided to do, it was his decision to make, not yours, and because of that fundamental power he held over you, because it preceded and would outlast his individual motives and inclinations, and distinction between good and bad whites held negligible meaning. In fact, you couldn’t even be sure that that everything you had assumed to be an expression of your black, unfettered self—the humor, the song, the behind-the-back pass—had been freely chosen by you. At best, these things were a refuge; at worst, a trap. Following this maddening logic, the only thing you could choose as your own was withdrawal into a smaller and smaller coil of rage, until being black meant only the knowledge of your own powerlessness, of your own defeat. And the final irony: Should you refuse this defeat and lash out at your captors, they would have a name for that, too, a name that could cage you just as good. Paranoid. Militant. Violent. Nigger.”

His words are strikingly reminiscent of Frantz Fanon’s articulation of what it means to be a racialised subject. For Fanon, born in the French colony of Martinique, the shock of reaching Europe and realising that ‘Liberté, égalité, fraternité’ didn’t apply to black people triggered an understanding of race and racism that remains incredibly influential.

It was not the crude racism of the day that so concerned Fanon. It was the promise of humanity, cruelly denied. It was being “overdetermined from without… fixed” by the inescapable blackness of his skin. Like Obama, Fanon discovers that his choices—rebellion, submission, anger, pride—are choices that have already been made for him, they have been presupposed. “And so,” he says, “it is not I who make a meaning for myself, but it is the meaning that was already there, pre-existing, waiting for me.”

This problem now confronts Europe’s Muslims. Observers will have noted a dramatic difference in tone between the first ‘Islam vs. the West’ crisis (the publication of Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses and subsequent fatwa issued against him by Ayatollah Khomeini) and the second (9/11). During the former, the Western media was full of overtly Islamophobic and frankly ignorant commentary denouncing Islam as backward and barbaric.

By contrast, in the days after 9/11, the leaders of the Western world bent over backwards to stress, in public speeches anyway, the essentially peaceful nature of the Muslim religion. They promoted a clear distinction between the peaceful Muslim majority worldwide and the excesses of a fanatical minority. Amongst Western populations there appeared to be a similar trend, with sales of the Qur’an and books on Islam soaring as people sought to inform themselves about the peaceful and tolerant ‘true’ Islam.

Now, I’m a peaceful Muslim, no doubt about it. But something began to happen as more and more people bought into this idea of a ‘true’ Islam corrupted by violent fanatics, something which I found alarming and uncomfortable. A binary took hold, and permeated the public consciousness, taking on the status of a self-evident truth. It was the difference between a Good Muslim and a Bad Muslim. The set of oppositions looks roughly like this:

secular --------------------- religious
liberal ---------------------- illiberal
democracy ----------------- authoritarianism
freedom -------------------- control
decency --------------------- corruption
education ------------------- indoctrination
progress --------------------- stasis/regression
universalist ----------------- parochial
Westernised/integrated --- traditional
religion as faith/culture --- religion as political
peace ------------------------- jihad
clean-shaven ---------------- bearded
rational ---------------------- irrational

Crucially, it’s not the far right who are responsible for this latest manifestation of racism. The BNP think all Muslims are terrorists; by now, everyone knows these guys are loopy. No, it’s precisely the liberal desire to see the best in Islam, the “disgustingly patronizing liberal respect for the Other’s spiritual depth” coming from “people eager to give Islam a chance, to get a feel for it, to experience it from the inside, and thus to redeem it,” as Žižek puts it, that is so dangerous.

Because what it says to Muslims—what it says to me—is that you can be a Muslim, no problem, but you’ve got to be our kind of Muslim. As a Muslim, the invitation to take up my fully human status is extended to me with conditions attached. Do I condemn violence? Check. Do I tolerate other faiths? Check. Do I believe in equality? Check. In other words, to be a Good Muslim I must be a liberal subject first and a Muslim second. Islam is reduced to a lifestyle choice.

And so I lament, with Fanon, that “it is not I who make a meaning for myself, but it is the meaning that was already there, pre-existing, waiting for me.” And like Obama, I know that to refuse my defeat, my powerlessness to define my own identity, desires and ambitions, is only to invite those alternative pre-defined identities. Militant. Violent. Extremist. Terrorist.

God and the Government

Last week the Malaysian Minister of Islamic Affairs warned the Malaysian Bar Council against conducting an online poll to determine whether lawyers and members of the public agree with the government’s ban preventing non-Muslim publications from using the word ‘Allah’.

The warning follows a dispute in January this year, when the Interior Ministry prohibited the Catholic Herald newspaper from printing its Malay language edition after it was found to contravene a 2007 ban on using the word ‘Allah’ to refer to the Christian god.

It later softened its position, allowing the word to be used as long as it is explicitly stated that the material is not for intended for Muslims. To prevent hapless Muslims becoming confused and accidentally converting to a different faith, the Herald was compelled to print ‘For Christianity’ on its cover.

It is worrying that the Malaysian government does not appear to be aware that the Arabic word ‘Allah’ predates Islam, that it is the only available translation for ‘god’ in the Malay language, and that the god worshipped by Christians is, in fact, the same god that Muslims worship.

More worrying, however, are the government’s continued efforts to politicise religion. In Malaysia’s highly racialised political system, religion was bound to get caught up in the whole thing to a certain extent, particularly given that ‘the Malay race’ is defined as unequivocally Muslim.

But recent years have seen a creeping conservatism gaining strength throughout Malaysia. When my mum was growing up in the sixties and seventies, hardly anyone wore the tudung (headscarf). Now it is commonplace, even among teenagers and twenty-somethings.

On a more sinister note, anger directed at the state of Israel is translating into a weird anti-Semitism expressed mainly by people who have never knowingly encountered a Jewish person in their lives. My own uncle, who almost certainly falls into that category, spent a good three or four days trying to get me to read that infamous forgery The Protocols of Zion. Malays routinely equate “Jew” and “Israeli”—an unsurprising conflation given that Malay Malaysians’ national identity is bound to static notions of race and religion, but one that makes me wince nonetheless.

In addition to this shift among the Muslim population, which may well be attributable to global political developments like the war on terror and the belief that Muslims are increasingly targets of victimisation, particularly in the Middle East, there appears to be a growing willingness by the Malaysian authorities to assert Muslim supremacy in the country and take an intolerant approach to the rights of non-Muslims.

In 2007 we heard about the Malaysian woman born to Muslim parents but raised as a Hindu, who asked to be officially registered as a Hindu. As a result she was detained for months in an ‘Islamic Rehabilitation Centre’, where she was forced to pray as a Muslim, wear a tudung and eat beef. In 2005, a Hindu Malaysian was buried in a Muslim cemetery under Muslim burial rites after a Sharia court ruled that he had converted to Islam just before his death, against the evidence of his friends and family. And now we have the government stipulating what non-Muslims are allowed to call the god they worship.

What's next?

White black people

You need to be careful about creating imagery of sub-Saharan African societies for British audiences. People tend to generalise about the region and often don’t understand the differences between different African cultures, and even different African countries. During my first year at university, I discovered that around half of my housemates were unaware that Africa is a continent, and not a country.

Lazy journalists and television appeals, for their part, routinely refer to Africa as if it were one homogenous society—poor, disease-ridden, unstable, corrupt and undeveloped—with little internal differentiation save for ‘warring tribes’ and rebel armies. Our ignorance is not only embarrassing; it perpetuates stereotypes that are dangerous for those they (mis)represent.

Photographers and filmmakers also have to be sensitive to the centuries of racist representations of Africans produced by Europe and the ‘developed’ world, of which Resident Evil 5 is just the latest manifestation. Treating black Africans as part of the backdrop for a storyline centred around a white, male, protagonist has a history going back at least as far as Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and undermines efforts to bring about social change based on an understanding of Africans as just as human as Europeans.

A series of photographs centred on Tanzanians suffering from albinism—the congenital condition of being born without the melanin pigment that protects our skin from the sun’s UV rays—therefore has a heavy burden of responsibility to bear. And, arresting as these images by Jackie Dewe Mathews undoubtedly are, I’m not sure they fully acknowledge this responsibility.
(http://www.jackiedewemathews.com/stories/zeru_zeru/zeru_zeru.html)

There are two main problems. Firstly, while it is the job of the images to tell the story, the captions do play their part in explaining certain information. Who are these people? Where are they? Why is this happening to them? If information is omitted, it can change the way we consume the story.

Explaining these images, the photographer barely mentions the context or the history behind them. She refers superficially to ‘ingrained prejudice’, giving us the impression that this prejudice is something inherent to Tanzanian society. She briefly mentions ‘the killings that have ravaged Tanzania’ as if they were a tornado or some other natural disaster. In fact, the images and their accompanying information provoke more questions than they answer—and not in a good way.

It is true that albinos are stigmatised throughout many parts of sub-Saharan Africa, often being shunned by their communities and relatives, having to drop out of school because of sight problems, and suffering discrimination when they seek employment. They also face a greatly increased risk of cancer and other health problems because their skin lacks the pigmentation that protects against sun damage.

However, Tanzania has become far more dangerous in recent years after Tanzanian witch doctors have increased trade in albino skin, bones, genitals and hair. These are supposed to possess magical powers and bestow luck upon others. This belief has created a demand for albino body parts, and at least 45 Tanzanian men, women and children suffering from albinism have been killed and mutilated since the beginning of 2008. According to Tanzanian police officials, the violence is worst in rural areas where people tend to be more superstitious. Fishermen reportedly weave albino hairs into their nets, hoping that they will catch more fish.

One healer in northern Tanzania denied that albino body parts form part of the witch doctor tradition in the area, saying, “Yes, I’ve heard of it. But that’s not real witchcraft. It’s the work of con men.” Indeed, it is now commonplace to hear albinos referred to as ‘deals’ because of how lucrative trading their body parts can be. Albinos in Tanzania say they are being hunted and fear for the safety of their families. Already more than 90 people, including four police officers, have been arrested on suspicion of murdering albinos.

The cause of this recent resurgence of superstition is unknown, but authorities have blamed everything from Nigerian films to rising food prices. The killings have even spread over the border into neighbouring Burundi, where at least 10 albinos have been killed and dismembered, their body parts then smuggled into Tanzania.

Government spokesman Salvator Rweyemamu has said that the killings of albinos perpetuate “perceptions of Africa that we’re trying to run away from,” pointing to the positive developments taking place in the country that the government is keen to promote.

Of course, I am not advocating that photographers seek to support government propaganda. But statements like this point to another story that is not being told: a story about uneven economic development and education; about the invention of superstition and the point at which it begins to legitimise acts of great violence. According to 49 year old Samuel Mluge, secretary-general of the grossly under-funded Tanzanian Albino Society, the recent killings are a relatively new development. While albinos in his country have long been targets of discrimination, he said, “we have never feared like we do today.”

There is another story to be told here: a story about the way people deal with physical abnormality, about how we deal with it in Britain and have dealt with it in the past, and how we consume imagery of people we find fascinating and a little frightening. This is the second problem. There isn’t anything intrinsically wrong with looking at pictures of Tanzanians with albinism. But you really need to be presented with the context. Often context is all that stands between insightful commentary and pure voyeurism, as this photo essay clearly shows.

I’d like to think that the photographer’s aim was noble; that she was concerned by the stigmatisation of those born with albinism and wanted to convey this to a wider audience. Indeed, this may well have been her motivation. But somehow, I don’t think it was.

We are drawn to the weird and grotesque; the persistence of freak shows is evidence of that. Fascination with disease, deformity and physical abnormality has a history, certainly, but it also has a psychology and a politics. To be able to gaze upon the image of a person deformed by a genetic condition excites the viewer, while conferring upon him or her the peculiar privileges of distance and detachment.

These photographs are beautiful: expertly composed and thoughtfully lit. But the incredible visual appeal of the photographs actually enhances the objectification of their subjects. Tanzanians suffering from albinism are placed under the spotlight, positioned before our curious eyes while we gawp at their condition, simultaneously enthralled and repelled by the pale pinkness of their skin, mottled with sun damage, set against the healthy brown skin of those around them.

We stare, horrified, at the tumours, scabs and sores erupting on their bodies, and without the self-conscious need to politely look away we would experience in a real-life encounter. We stare unapologetically at the strange beauty contained within these images, feeling pity and concern. We probably do not feel guilty.

The photographer’s brief was to cover a story based somewhere else—not in the UK, not in the homeland of the Royal Photographic Society and the Guardian newspaper sponsoring the endeavour—and it was supposed to be a story that suggested connections between British audiences and the wider world. The winning story certainly suggests a connection, but I’m not sure that it’s the kind of connection originally envisaged.

The connection making the greatest impression on me is the connection with our racist colonial heritage; the one where we treat difference as a spectacle and see Africans as objects. I don’t doubt for a moment that this entirely contradicts the stated aims of the photographer, but I want to challenge the idea that we should be forgiven for our ignorance.

To portray people in Africa—anywhere in Africa—you have to recognise the burden of responsibility that your images will bear. At best, a series of photographs like this will tell an incomplete story. At worst, they will reinforce a dangerous and outdated way of looking at the world, gratifying our most base instincts and objectifying the very people the photographer wished to defend.

Free Speech and freedom to abuse

Poor old Free Speech is on the ropes again, it would seem.


A couple of months ago Italian comedian Sabina Guzzanti made some hilarious quips about Italian premier Silvio Berlusconi, his equal opportunities minister (and former topless model) Mara Carfagna, and finally the Pope. Despite getting away with mocking the two politicians – Carfagna threatened to sue, but didn’t dare carry out the threat – the Pope has proved a little more prickly.

Before a large rally in Rome, she joked that in twenty years time teachers in Italy would be selected by the Vatican, before saying “but then, within twenty years the Pope will be where he ought to be — in Hell, tormented by great big poofter devils, and very active ones, not passive ones.”

This month she was almost charged with ‘contempt of the Pope’. Prosecutors wanted to invoke a 79-year old law originally introduced through a treaty between the papacy and fascist dictator Mussolini.

Dismissing the validity of the charge, Guzzanti said, “I believe that in a democracy there is no right not to be offended. I think that anyone ought to be free to say whatever he or she likes at any moment.

“If someone says things that are offensive, gratuitous and stupid, one has to assume that there will be others to demonstrate that what you said was offensive, gratuitous and stupid.”

There are two points I think we can draw from this story. Firstly, the way that the Free-Speech-In-Europe debate is usually framed, as a conflict between European civilisational values and Muslims, is flawed and – dare I say it? – more than a little racist. This Italian example demonstrates that stifling debate and criticism is a trait of certain aspects of Christian culture as well.

It is also a feature of secular democracies. Berlusconi’s own historically inaccurate assertion that Western civilisation is “superior” to Islamic cultures by virtue of its tolerant and democratic ethos is pretty laughable considering that he basically controls the country’s television broadcasting and silences critics by trying to sue them.

Secondly, the preposterousness of the attempt to prosecute a comedian for ridiculing the Pope can unfortunately lead to a rather overzealous reassertion of the right to free speech. Even Guzzanti falls into the trap: when asked by a journalist whether there should be any limitations on free speech in the context of Holocaust denial or the infamous Danish cartoons, she simply falls back on the free speech mantra.

This can be dangerous because it obscures the difference between poking fun at authority – religious or otherwise – and poking fun at minority communities. In Britain, we have the right to mock the Prime Minister, the Queen, or the Archbishop of Canterbury. We also have the right to mock Muslims, black people, or children with disabilities. So why does former feel ok, whilst the latter feels somehow wrong?

To take part in satirising, criticising and ridiculing someone else, you have to acknowledge that it makes a difference who you are, who the subject of your criticism is, and your respective roles in society. Directing your scorn at a person who has intentionally placed him or herself in the public eye, or who is a figure of authority and should therefore be held accountable to the people, is fine. Directing it at a member of a minority group – such as Muslims in Denmark or Jews in Europe – is less acceptable because these subjects are often already marginalised or discriminated against in some way by the state.

Guzzanti assumes that in a democracy, stupid and offensive comments are permissable because there will always be others there to counter them. This gives society a little too much credit in my opinion. When a well-known British author like Martin Amis makes racist remarks about British Muslims, there are plenty who will stand up and decry his comments. However, they may be less prominent voices, and are easily drowned out by stronger and louder popular discourses reinforcing the flawed association between violence, intolerance and Islam. These spokespeople present themselves as responding to a threat – but in reality they are little more than bullies.

In theory, there should be no limits on Free Speech. In practice, however, the way we use it reveals a great deal about our own positions in society, and how we relate to those we subject to ridicule.

On being a transnational oversoul, or, an awkward half-soul

The following is an miniature chunk of dissertation (for the Sussex University course Landscape/Memory/Identity):

In the journal I had been keeping two summers ago whilst travelling in Malaysia, Thailand and Bali, I wrote, “Maybe I am half-not-English, half-not-Malay.” This nugget of angst reminded me of a poem I had quite uncharacteristically written, more recently, about my grandmother Mak Eng and her house in Sibu. In the poem I had supposed my sister and I to be “neither this nor that,” using the image of “other people’s bare brown feet” as a marker of those other people’s authenticity, a kind of obvious and embodied belonging which we were denied. Ranciére writes that the “process of identification is first of all a process of spatialization. The paradox of identity is that you must travel to disclose it… Spatialization presents by its own virtue the identity of the concept to its flesh”. I can’t really remember a time before I was able to observe the peculiar shift that took place as I moved between Hemel Hempstead, a new town just outside the M25 where I went to school, and Sibu, a town on the Rejang river in Sarawak where my mum was born. That movement effected a regular transformation in my sister and I: from feeling often very English in Malaysia to feeling quite foreign in England. I was born in Hemel, but when I am there people still ask me where I’m from. Here, I reply. Then they ask me awkwardly where I’m… you know… originally from. What’s my… erm… background? (Or, in other words, why is my skin brown?) When I’m in Sibu, people often refer to me as orang puteh (white person) and wonder what I’m doing with all these Malay people who are, in fact, my close family. Once, some children approached my sister and I and proceeded to inform us that I was “seventy per cent Melayu, thirty percent orang puteh” whilst my sister, whose skin and hair are a shade fairer than mine, was just “twenty percent Melayu, eighty per cent orang puteh.” They had exposed us; my sister promptly burst into tears.

*

The paradoxical position of belonging to multiple places and, consequently, to no single place entirely, tends to be associated with an uncomfortable privilege. Edward Said – whose autobiography, it should be noted, is entitled ‘Out of Place’ – has said that his various identities and the multiple ‘worlds’ to which he belongs have afforded him “an odd, not to say grotesque, double perspective”. It is this ambivalent position, paradoxically incorporating the privilege of distance with the affliction of never wholly belonging, to which Hollinshead refers in his discussion of diasporic identities. He characterises these as an uncertain, even schizophrenic way of being, somewhere between the richness of a “transnational oversoul” (a term he borrows from Wilson and Dissanayake) and an awkward, off-balance “half-soul”. His argument that such identities are “invariably protean” suggests both insecurity and an automatic worldliness not available to more stable, unambiguously territorial identities which tend to lend themselves to essentialised notions of land and belonging. Others have noted the potential in ‘diasporics’ for the realisation of radical political alternatives, advocating the deconstruction of the parochialism associated with nationalism and other politicisations of identity which bind it to particular territories. Comparisons may be drawn between the marginal space occupied by the diasporic, exiled or migrant, and the politically marginal and insecure “space of radical openness” associated with postmodern cultural politics. Would it be better, then, to resist that impulse towards an immediate and automatic localisation of identity? As Casey notes, ‘Where are you from?’ is the first thing we ask of a stranger. Instead, should we entertain that possibility of de-localisation contained in what Clifford calls the “intercultural identity question” of ‘where are you between?’

Students, be vigilant!!! …There are fundamentalists among us, and they are dangerous…

by Pia Muzaffar Dawson

this article was first published in The Pulse in 2007

Has anyone else noticed a creeping consensus taking root in our university? A certain sceptical chill in the air? Now, I know that there have been recent reports about campus staff at higher education institutions all over Britain being encouraged by the government to spy on Muslim and ‘Asian-looking’ (!!) students, but I’m advocating that we redirect our suspicions elsewhere. Muslims are too easy to spot; what’s more, they’ll readily admit their faith. No, what I’m talking about is a silent, far more sinister force that has steadily been gaining more and more adherents – but unlike many other cults they wear no visible indicators of their faith, and if you quiz them, chances are they’ll deny they believe anything at all. This stealthy self-denial has proved one of their most effective weapons against detection, and thus against contestation. Yet press them a little more, and you’ll reveal a wellspring of cultural supremacism and badly articulated racism. Yes indeed: these are the secular fundamentalists, and their propaganda is slowly seeping into our institutions, our media and our minds.

Right, what does that mean? Precisely this: despite what is currently propagated by our leaders, our media, our parents, our lecturers (both ‘rightwing’ and ‘liberal’ alike), the greatest cause of hatred and intolerance in fact derives from the secularist myth, and not from any dodgy interpretation of the Bible or Qur’an.

No, hang on, I must have got that wrong. Surely we’re living in an age of increasing threat from “Islamic fundamentalism”? Isn’t there a “clash of civilisations”? That’s right; our secular, modern existence is being jeopardised by people with outdated beliefs trying to drag us back into the Dark Ages! Women are attempting to cover up – god forbid! – their beautiful, liberated bodies. Irrational beliefs and redundant traditions just refuse to go away! What’s wrong with these people?? Don’t they know that we discarded the “God-delusion” decades ago? Aren’t they aware that we’re living in newer, better times, where you can live your life free from the oppressive dogmas of organised religions based on rigid interpretations of ancient texts??

Bollocks, I say. Contemporary Britain remains under the powerful spell of a centuries-old faith: the twin beliefs of rationalism and secularism. Contrary to popular opinion, we are not born atheists with a natural ability to rationally deduce the non-existence of God (or gods) from the assembled evidence until some silly superstitions come along to deceive and flummox us with their threats of eternal pain and promises of everlasting glory. No, we are born into a time and a place, and if that place is Britain and that time is now, the belief system that happens to pervade our social existence is the secularist myth. This myth is based on the notion that we no longer need to turn to religion to explain the fantastic complexity of the natural world; science privileges us with access to the Truth, and Truth need not be mediated by the priest, imam or rabbi. Neither do we need religion to provide us with hope of a better life, since life is better than ever before. We have fridges, for heavens sake!! We can fly to Spain for 99p! Religion has also ceased to be of spiritual use, since we can now fulfil our innermost desires to discern life’s meaning in a multitude of other ways. So we are not, in fact, living in a post-myth, post-religion, post-belief age at all; we have simply replaced the old myth with a new one. We’ve swapped faith in God for faith in ourselves, or in humankind, or music, poetry, surfing – whatever you want really. You get to decide.

Ok, all fine so far, so we’ve moved on from God, so we now believe in other things – where exactly is the harm in that? …This is where the ‘fundamental’ part of secular fundamentalism comes in. Because there’s nothing wrong with being an atheist, nor with believing in the division of church and state, nor with deriving your ethical values from experience and love rather than the Ten Commandments. I myself am a thoroughly secularised Muslim atheist; I see no contradiction there at all. The dodgy bit is when people start asserting that atheism and secular values are somehow… well, a bit more advanced than the old-fashioned religious ones. Though you may not always hear this view expressed in quite those terms, it is nevertheless implicit in more aspects of our daily lives than I, for one, am comfortable with.

For example: part of the myth of rational secularism involves the assertion that being secular is qualitatively different to being religious – that the denial of God permits a certain objectivity, a scientific impartiality not attainable for those who profess to believe in the invisible and unknowable. Hence our mainstream schools and universities are secular institutions, and religious affiliations are treated as special interests. Here at Sussex, as with many if not most other British universities, you can study International Relations, Cultural Studies, Sociology, Media, Politics, Anthropology, Philosophy, all the Sciences – but you can’t study religion. This systematic and institutionalised bias in favour of the secularist myth inculcates the identification of civilised modernity with secularism, reinforcing the linear conception of progressive human history with ‘us’ at the top, and believers a few rungs further down. This is a subtle kind of racism, of cultural arrogance, since it basically adheres to the view that our belief system is superior to all others, placing us in a unique position to observe and comment on everyone else.

In the media as well as in the university, the distinction between ‘liberal’ and ‘rightwing’ is utterly meaningless with regard to the elevation of secularism to a higher moral plane. Even the Independent, which is hardly seen as a bastion of xenophobia and inter-cultural suspicion, recently published an interview with some “smart, articulate, beautifully dressed… brilliant, thoughtful… modern” Muslim women who, according to the writer, are far more representative of the wider “moderate, rational” Muslim community ignored by much of the media. These women all balked at the idea of wearing the veil, comparing it with “attracting attention in the wrong way, like a child." One woman said she finds it “bizarre that a woman who is educated or has a PhD finds it normal to be covered." OH MY GOD!! This article, though superficially a coherent and well-intentioned appeal to non-Muslims to recognise the happy face of Islam we don’t hear about too often, is in fact an appeal to our most basic prejudices – it’s saying: “Yes, there are a lot of basically backward traditions still in force in our society, but if you give these poor Muslims a decent education and teach them how to be rational like us, you’ll soon rid them of their silly attention-seeking habits. Look at these women here! You can’t even tell they’re Muslims, they’re so civilised and articulate!” But here’s a fun fact: you can wear a veil and be an intelligent, modern woman; the two things are not mutually exclusive as this writer would have us believe.

And this subtle prejudice is not only propagated in the media and promoted by the very structures of our education system; the secular fundamentalists are actively recruiting devotees on our very campus too. Just last year our university hosted a debate about the relative merits of religion and secularism at which the journalist Polly Toynbee (winner of the Islamic Human Rights Commission’s "Most Islamophobic media personality" award, 2004) propounded various provocative opinions which refused to engage in a meaningful debate with the other speaker, the Anglican Priest and Quaker Chaplain Paul Oestreicher, and basically amounted to a reinforcement of the mistaken belief that religion’s rightful place is in the past and secularism is synonymous with modernity and civilisation. (The fact that the whole debate took place in the Meeting House, which is both the university chaplaincy and the only place on campus providing the valuable service of coffee and tea for less than 50p – if that’s not contributing to our social wellbeing, I don’t know what is! – was probably lost on Toynbee) Once again, this view can only be described as cultural supremacism. If a fundamentalist is someone who cannot see or comprehend the alternative perspective, and expects to be able to subject all others to their own specific ideology, then ideologues like Toynbee are precisely that: the fundamentalist equivalents to the religious extremists they so despise.

Anyway, try not to get too alarmed by the frenzy of fear over ‘religious extremism’; instead be wary of the other fundamentalists in our midst. Secular superiority is a belief system like any other, and where an ideology claims objectivity there is all the more reason to treat it with suspicion.

Education/Islamophobia

by Pia Muzaffar

this article was first published in The Badger 28/01/08, volume 18 issue 3

Many Muslims in Britain increasingly consider us an Islamophobic society – and our universities are by no means an exception.

Sussex Anthropology lecturer Filippo Osella was the first of three invited speakers to talk on Islamophobia to a crowded lecture theatre last week here at Sussex. Unlike recent outbursts demanding, as Martin Amis controversially did, that it is the Muslim community itself that needs to “get its house in order”, Osella redirected attention towards non-Muslim Britain.

He argued that although the current wave of Islamophobia is clearly unique in many ways, there is nevertheless a continuity in the way that the West has historically defined itself in opposition to its Islamic antithesis. Western civilisation projects onto a monolithic ‘Islam’ everything that it is not. Presently, this means that any form of political Islam is demonised as total anathema to secular society.

In this way, Osella pointed out, it is the secularists who get to define ‘proper’ spirituality. They define who is a ‘good Muslim’ (tolerant, apolitical, non-interfering), and who is a ‘bad Muslim’ (fundamentalist, traditional, political).

And this has crept into our educational institutions. It was only in 2006 that it was revealed that lecturers in Britain have been encouraged to spy on Muslim students. According to Osella, they are also being encouraged to run courses espousing a more ‘moderate’ Islam – ‘moderate’ being defined by the liberal establishment.

Academics have also been asked to conduct research on radicalism in specific Muslim communities which would involve supplying actual names and places to intelligence gathering agencies. And at Sussex, there was even talk of introducing an International Security programme. Though he was assured that such a study programme was in no way Islamophobic, upon enquiring as to what it might entail, Osella was told that a combination “with Middle Eastern Studies and Arabic” might be one possibility.

Such proposals are particularly resonant this week, after the Higher Education Minister Bill Rammell was reported on Tuesday as saying that there exists a “serious” threat of extremism on university campuses, with the younger generation being particularly “vulnerable” to radicalisation.

These claims have been tempered, however, by student groups and unions. A Federation of Student Islamic Societies (FOSIS) spokesman pointed out that “no evidence” exists to suggests that students should become targets of suspicion. NUS President Gemma Tumelty, and the General Secretary of the University and College Union, Sally Hunt, both expressed concern that this government guidance could foster an atmosphere of mistrust between teaching staff and students.

One BSMS student present at the discussion on Islamophobia described how he, along with other Muslim students, had been singled out and warned against taking home any of the routinely used chemicals which could be used to manufacture explosives. He explained that they had been required to fill out reports detailing their use of such chemicals, and that their course coordinator had been visited and interviewed by two Special Branch intelligence officers.

Another student in attendance alleged that Sussex is one of the universities to have recently signed up to a government pilot scheme allowing certain students – particularly members of the Islamic Students Society – to be monitored for suspicious activities.

The second speaker, Assed Baig from the NUS Black Students Campaign, believed that such tactics would prove counterproductive. Turning the glare of the spotlight onto the Muslim community, he said, would not encourage integration. Instead it would create a feeling of victimisation. Drawing on the ‘good’ Muslim/ ‘bad’ Muslim polarisation, he also argued that the distinction currently rests on whether an individual agrees with the government line. “If I disagree with foreign policy, does that make me an extremist?”

This sense of victimisation was the subject elaborated upon by the third speaker, Seyfeddin Kara from the Islamic Human Rights Commission. He presented a recent study conducted by the IHRC on Muslim perceptions of media reporting in Britain. In addition to the fact that a significant majority of respondents believed much media to be Islamophobic or racist, the study also revealed that the more educated the respondent, the greater their perception of anti-Islamic discrimination.

This paralled Osella’s suggestion that the more sinister form of Islamophobia does not come from the typical ‘lay’ racism associated with tabloid hate-mongering, but rather from the liberal establishment. In these ‘higher’ circles, including academia, a consensus has appeared which unites both Left and Right in its assumptions about the conflict between Islam and modern, secular society.

It is undeniably paradoxical that institutions of higher learning, founded upon ideals of freedom of thought and expression, may be entering into suspect contracts with the government that would curtail these freedoms.

Critically evaluate Frantz Fanon’s contribution to our understanding of contemporary oppression, and to the politics of dissent and resistance

this essay was written in 2008 for Life, Power, Resistance: Critical Perspectives on a Post-Westphalian Era, an International Relations course at Sussex University

I

Interpretations of Fanon’s writings are multifarious and frequently misleading. He has been variously cast as a violent revolutionary, a critical psychologist and a repressed homophobe, among other things, none of which can be addressed in the scope of this study. Rather, I take as central Fanon’s insight into the racialisation of oppression, briefly outlining what is meant by this concept before locating it within the colonial moment, in order to draw it into a broader discussion of the failings of European humanism. I argue for its continued relevance both in terms of its explanation of the utility of ‘othering’, and because of the parallel we can draw between the dehumanising humanism that Fanon attacks, and the logic of sovereignty that constitutes ‘Westphalian’ norms. I then go on to consider possible alternatives to accepting this racialised and universalised objectification, echoing Fanon’s suspicion of strategic cultural essentialisms and pointing instead to his advocacy of openness towards the other as a meaningful politics of resistance.

II

For Fanon, oppression means something more complex than the subjection to violence or the constraining of agency. Oppression is to be denied one’s own humanity: “A feeling of inferiority? No, a feeling of nonexistence” (1986:139). It is to negate the claim to be a ‘Man’. In other words, though he tries to master his own humanity, a humanity which has both been promised to him and which he senses in the immensity and depth of his soul (1986:140), he finds instead: 

I was responsible at the same time for my body, for my race, for my ancestors… I discovered my blackness, my ethnic characteristics; and I was battered down by tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetichism, racial defects, slave-ships, and above all else, above all: “Sho’ good eatin’.” (1986:112)

This resonates with Said’s analysis (1978) of the discursive construction of the Orient, itself clearly influenced by Fanon’s account of how the European “had woven me out of a thousand details, anecdotes, stories” (1986:111). Fanon’s innovation was to show how this denial is racialised; how it is inscribed on the body. A process of self-composition becomes a construction of the black man according to “a racial epidermal schema,” a “uniform” from which he can never escape (1986:112, 114). The negative stereotypes attached to this epidermis may change, but ‘the fact of blackness’ remains. Fanon will continue to be “overdetermined from without… I am fixed” (1986:116).

Fanon’s work has been tremendously influential for later ‘neo-colonialism’ and Dependency Theory critiques, articulating the injustice of colonial rule and the hypocrisy of “native intellectuals” and post-independence leaders, whilst inspiring a revolutionary fervour in many Third World readers. His last book is a “bible of the decolonisation movement” (Stuart Hall, cited in Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask, 1996). Of greater significance for this paper, however, is his characterisation of the colonial world as “a world cut in two”, as “a Manichaean world” (1990:29, 31). Again echoed by Said, Fanon describes how the native other is defined as lack, as being what we are not.

The native is declared insensible to ethics; he represents not only the absence of values, but also the negation of values. He is, let us dare to admit, the enemy of values, and in this sense he is the absolute evil. He is the corrosive element, destroying all that comes near him; he is the deforming element, disfiguring all that has to do with beauty or morality; he is the depository of maleficent powers… (1990:32)

This, argues Fanon, is central to the psychology of colonial rule that is internalised by the native. Disrupting this “mentally debilitating” ideology (Gibson 1999:109) is crucial for attaining real independence, hence Fanon’s scathing attacks on new leaders of the new nations, the “spoilt children of yesterday’s colonialism and of today’s national governments” who failed to mount a “real struggle for freedom” to effect the transfer of power (1990:37, 36).

It might be said that Fanon’s highly incisive critique of colonialism has now been rendered somewhat less potent within contemporary contexts. We no longer conceptualise oppression as a struggle between settler and native, and we may be apt to dismiss Fanon’s revolutionary zeal as a mere ‘apostle of violence’, as commentators frequently do (Pithouse 2003:2). However, this colonial Manichaean split has its present manifestations; a discriminatory denial of humanity once again taking a specifically racialised form. Taking just one example, representations of ‘Africa’ portray it as a place of famine, war, disease, genocide and hunger; these appear to be “‘native’ African products” (Taylor 1998:136). We have seen, consumed, and discarded countless black faces in the news, in Oxfam pamphlets, and in advertisements promising that you can ‘make a difference’ for just £2 per month. The accumulation of images of Africa construct a seemingly inconsequential realm of otherness, a reflection of the state of nature Europe is deemed to have long since transcended.

Those hordes of vital statistics, those hysterical masses, those faces bereft of all humanity, those distended bodies which are like nothing on earth, that mob without beginning or end, those children who seem to belong to nobody, that laziness stretched out in the sun, that vegetative rhythm of life – all this forms part of the colonial vocabulary. (Fanon 1990:33; emphasis added)

Of course, this vocabulary serves its purpose. It permits us to remain undisturbed by ongoing structural violence suffered by vast numbers of the world’s population; it enables us to celebrate military interventions, to keep silent at the erosion of civil liberties, to penetrate weak economies with our capital. This much should be clear. What Fanon’s analysis highlights, in fact, is the more contentious observation that this violent dehumanisation is not made up of piecemeal aberrations and individualised acts, but rather is constitutive of European humanism.

III

This is explicit during, though not limited to, the colonial period. The discrepancy between Western discourses on “human dignity”, and the “Europe where they are never done talking of Man, yet murder men everywhere they find them, at the corner of every one of their own streets, in all the corners of the globe” (1990:34, 251), is a discrepancy observable today – the most obvious example being calls for ‘democratisation’ and ‘freedom’ whilst deposing recalcitrant leaders or invading uncooperative states. Fanon exhibits a frustration that Europe continues to be held up as the exemplar, as “a paradise close at hand” (1990:41), when all he sees is the most terrible violence. The oppressed subject finds himself in a catch-22: invited to join the ranks of universally equal men whilst simultaneously discovering he has been rendered immobile by that same universality. It is the settler who “makes history and is conscious of making it” (1990:40); his is the plot whereby the native is constructed as the background.

Thus it is not the physical violence done to the native that results in his dehumanisation, nor is it merely the creation of an ideology that can legitimate such violence. For Fanon, it is the assumption of universality which necessitates the subsumption of the colonised subject into a pre-given understanding of humanity, with a pre-defined telos. As such, it may well be the liberal – perhaps even “colour-blind” or “anti-racist” – perspective which actually replicates this racist objectification, as argued by Schmitt (1996) and Lentin (2003). Like overt racism it simply stops at the racialised epidermis, declaring a “disavowal of difference… [a] political raciology, which constantly reinvokes the body while disavowing its primacy” (Ali 2005:166-167; emphasis added). Fanon laments this disavowal which is once again rooted in the invariability of his aspect: “When people like me, they tell me it is in spite of my color. When they dislike me, they point out that it is not because of my colour. Either way, I am locked into the infernal circle” (1986:116). This refusal to engage with the other may be termed “the prejudice of equality”, stripping the other of his otherness (Rasch 2003:140), or what Schmitt calls ‘objectification’ – “a carefully orchestrated and systematic refusal of genuinely human relationships” (1996:36).

We can draw a parallel between this dehumanising humanity and the Westphalian logic of sovereignty. This too paradoxically combines universal equality with particularism, resulting in a system of containment which exercises the externalisation and repression of the Other in the name of “sameness” (Blaney & Inayatullah 2000:32). As Walker (1993) identifies, orthodox international relations theory actively constitutes this “inside/outside” or self/other demarcation insofar as it continues to insist on the primacy of state sovereignty. Sovereignty, like objectification, seems to say: “I am “my own man” and you are yours. We are separate. We do not share with each other; at best we do things alongside each other” (Schmitt 1996:44). And yet, significantly, this recognition rests upon a refusal to entertain challenges to the basic principle of liberal pluralism, namely “an overriding monism, the monism of humanity” (Rasch 2003:136). It denies “the existence of a human substance truly other” (Todorov 1984:42-3), a denial that there can be an Other both equal and different. Western humanism is inseparable from its simultaneous constitution of the inhuman – which takes the form of any such challenge – and therefore from the project of the ‘civilising mission’; the project of “correcting” those who fail to fulfil their human potential (Rasch 2003:137-138). Furthermore, this once again takes on a racialised character, being grounded in the inclusion of the New World as a bestial state-of-nature against which Europe could achieve a ‘bracketing of war’ (Schmitt 2003:142). The European pluriverse relied on externalising the hierarchical relation to extra-European territory (Rasch 2003:127).

IV

What alternatives to this totalising, racialising metaphysics might be offered by Fanon’s work? One immediate counter to a dominating universalism is the reassertion of particularism, exemplified in the contemporary context by arguments for cultural relativism. These seem to challenge dominant actors to live up to the ideal of mutual recognition by refraining from imposing ‘Western’ norms on noncompliant societies. However, this strategy may result in an essentialised authenticity, reducing contestation to an identity politics whose only possible tactic is to demand “recognition” (Lentin 2006). Fanon’s initial seduction by Cesaire’s negritude – “From the opposite end of the white world a magical Negro culture was hailing me. Negro sculpture! I began to flush with pride. Was this our salvation?” (1986:123) – like contemporary identity politics, ultimately fails to address or indeed challenge the way in which the politicised ‘identity’ in question is itself called into being by a dominant conception of humanity. It reinforces the egocentrism of the European, allowing him to say “We will turn to you as to the childhood of the world… In a way, you reconcile us with ourselves” (Fanon 1986:132).

It also permits the voice of the oppressor to seize upon this strategic essentialism and sublimate it within another teleology, hijacking the self-representation of the oppressed. Fanon accuses Sartre of doing precisely this in his Black Orpheus (1948), denying Fanon the ability to define his own end: “And so it is not I who make a meaning for myself, but it is the meaning that was already there, pre-existing, waiting for me” (1986:134). A similar utilisation can be identified in the advocacy of many contemporary NGOs ‘on behalf’ of the marginalised groups they seek to represent. For example, activists and academics among the Karen hill tribes in Thailand have inadvertently produced what Walker (2001) labels “the Karen Consensus”, trapping the Karen in a fixed primordial identity (sustainable, egalitarian, non-commercial) in order to demand certain rights from the state – to the detriment of those Karen who wish to make other sorts of claims (for government schooling, televisions, trade).

It is this tendency which provokes Fanon to refuse outright any sort of transcendent ideal, to articulate instead a humanism based upon immanent power (Pithouse 2003:10-11).

In opposition to historical becoming, there had always been the unforeseeable… The dialectic that brings necessity into the foundation of my freedom drives me out of myself… I am not a potentiality of something, I am wholly what I am. I do not have to look for the universal. No probability has any place inside me. My Negro consciousness does not hold itself out as a lack. It is. It is its own follower. (Fanon 1986:135)

Moulard-Leonard recasts Fanon within a Deleuzian non-dialectical becoming premised on the concept of “Difference-in-itself” and hence the possibility of “radically creative self-alteration” (2005:242-243). It is a transformation which does not necessitate a given end to the process of becoming.

Despite this, however, it is possible to discern in Fanon’s new humanism a latent telos framed by residual assumptions of European humanism, specifically the notions of history-making, progress and self-determination. He declares that to be human is to “introduc[e] invention into existence. In the world through which I travel, I am endlessly creating myself” (1990:229); that “no attempt must be made to encase a man, for it is his destiny to be set free” (1990:230). Yet we must historicise the idea that history-making is emancipatory, active, and self-consciously dynamic. Once again, the European encounter with the New World constitutes a formative moment, necessitating a progressivist hierarchy of human societies in which some are more advanced than others, a “dual modality of historical time… events as at once contemporaneous and noncontemporaneous” (Koselleck 1988:249). Furthermore, in the 18th century, Christian linear salvational teleology came together with secular rational prediction to produce the peculiarly modern concept of progress (1988:17); and the Calvinist emphasis on “good works” contributed to the idea that man makes his own history (Weber 1930:xiii). Such Eurocentric values clearly run right through many postcolonial and subalternist efforts which couple ‘agency’ and ‘subjectivity’ in the essentialist-liberal-humanist tradition (O’Hanlon 1988). There may not be space in this humanism for even more radically different conceptions of history-making.

V

This may be reconciled, however, by the fluidity of Fanon’s approach and his radical commitment to destabilising all fixed identities, and the fluidity of his approach to dialogic communication. He states clearly on the first page of his first book, “I do not come with timeless truths” (1986:9). Thus, rather than seeking to positively define The New Humanity, Fanon’s work permits a new humanity to arise out of every moment where there is a “genuine transcendence of the divisions and hierarchies that push us into unequal spaces and trap us in limited, reductive identities” (Pithouse 2003:18). Although he has often been mistaken for an uncritical advocate of violent revolution, as noted above, and certainly comes across as dismissive of the more incremental social changes or post-colonial (neo-colonial) structures that have characterised many ex-colonies, it would be unfair to characterise Fanon’s revolutionary zeal within a simplistic dichotomy between the evil coloniser and the struggling colonised, in which the principle objective is to destroy (and replace) colonial authority. His method of resisting colonial Manichaeanism is precisely to advocate an openness to the other – an openness echoed by Blaney and Inayatullah in their call for a “critical dialogue” (2004:219), or by a Levinasian “ethics of alterity” (Campbell 1994:477).

Why not the quite simple attempt to touch the other, to feel the other, to explain the other to myself? Was my freedom not given to me then in order to build the world of the You? At the conclusion of this study, I want the world to recognize, with me, the open door of every consciousness. (Fanon 1986:231-232). 

Bibliography
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Blaney, D. L. and Inayatullah, N. 2004. International Relations and the Problem of Difference (London: Routledge)

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1996. Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask [film], directed by I. Julien

the day we met many Israelis…

this post was written for brightonpalestine.org during the April 2007 delegation to Palestine

The other day, having spent pretty much all our time in Palestine with Palestinians, we experienced “the other side” for the first time. It was a day of random conversations with random Jewish Israelis, and we somehow managed, quite by accident, to speak with a very diverse range of people with very different takes on the situation here.

First we went to the Dead Sea. The journey from our hostel to Jerusalem’s central bus station made us distinctly uneasy, since we were quite unused to the massive presence of soldiers - most of whom are younger than we are - among Israel’s civilian population. They milled around us, clutching their guns. Israeli society appears quite normalised to the latent threat of violence: all, of course, in the name of “security”…

So, at Ein Gedi [on the Dead Sea], after covering ourselves in black mud and floating for a while, we were drying off on a rock when a young lifeguard came to chat to us. I think he probably wishes he hadn’t. With the inevitable “Where are you from” and “What have you been doing in Israel” questions, we revealed that we had been spending time in the West Bank. He in turn revealed that he had been to the West Bank too - whilst serving in the army. We found him to be a very confused man. At first, he insisted that “the Palestinians are a wonderful people, very nice - really! I’m not being sarcastic! - they are very nice people”, and, since he was clearly making an effort to be nice himself, we were cordial back - asking him about his time in the army, what he thought of it, how he felt about some of the things he had to do, etc.. In fact, I was very interested to speak to an ex-soldier, and I told him so. We were very careful to be non-provocative and non-biased in the way we asked him questions.

The things he was saying, however, began to conflict with our own direct experiences over the last two weeks. For example, he told us that Palestinian schools teach children to hate and to kill Jews - there’s the propaganda working - and that maybe they should concentrate on teaching the skills they need to feed their families. So we told him how that was completely untrue (I mean, it seems obvious, but there you go), and we described the problems the Occupation has created for basic education in areas of the West Bank like al-Jifflik and Fasayil. We also tried to challenge (gently, since we wanted to keep the discussion on vaguely pleasant terms) his ridiculous stereotypes of Palestinians as terrorists-in-the-making, telling him how everywhere we went people did not speak a language of violence; but rather one of justice and peace.

As rational argument failed, however, he descended into blatant racism - he got really angry, shouting at us how we didn’t understand and how Palestinians should [and this is a direct quote] “stop teaching their kids to kill Jews and stop looking out for their own stinking asses”, and that maybe this would improve their situations. He said a lot of other stuff too, but it’s not necessary to reproduce it all here. The point is: underneath all his trying to say what he thought we wanted to hear, and indeed what he understood to be acceptable, lay an irrational but deeply rooted conception of Israeli society as eternal and vigilant victim and of Palestinian people as eternal aggressor and inferior - a conception of self and other based on [and constructed by] fear. All his direct experience of Palestinians came after he had become accustomed to dealing with them as an Enforcer of Occupation. 

Saddest of all, I did not think his views were untypical in Israeli society, or even the most extreme. For example, last week I was eavesdropping on what I think were an American-Israeli settler family, walking along the wall of Jerusalem’s Old City from the more Jewish area to the Muslim quarter. As we walked, looking down through some railings at the Palestinian stalls and shoppers below, the kid [he looked about 8 or 9] was going on and on to his dad about all the violent ways they could attack Arabs from this vantage point, about pouring boiling water on them down through the railings [which has actually been used as a tactic in places like Hebron], and about [again, a direct quote] “kicking them all out - it’s our land now!!” That a child was saying this was quite unbelievable, for me.

The next encounter with an Israeli that day was far less depressing. In a taxi back in Jerusalem, we were speaking Arabic [badly] to our taxi driver, as we would usually do, when we realised we’d misunderstood him - we thought he said he was half-Jewish, half-Palestinian, but in fact he was completely Jewish. However, he had a lot to say about the “Jewish democratic state”. Pointing vigourously at Orthodox Jews walking past, he insisted “They hate peace! They HATE peace!!” He was obviously upset by the fact that the Israeli state claims to act to protect and serve the Jewish people, but in fact fails to represent the diversity of opinion and belief with the population, seeming instead to represent the most powerful, the most violent, and the most fundamentalist.

Even more diverse were the Israeli activists we met later that evening, who looked like they would not have been out of place at Sussex or in the Cowley Club. They represented the tiny proportion of Jewish Israeli citizens who were not only critical of their state, but also acting to protest against it. One guy we met, who was still serving in the army, spoke to us about the “evils” he had to do, and how all those checks and raids on Palestinians in the West Bank had very little to do with security and were in fact designed to annoy and intimidate the Palestinian population. He had given his testimony to an organisation called Breaking The Silence, who are concerned with revealing the truth of the Occupation from ordinary soldiers’ perspectives.

Another girl we met made a really interesting point about the role of internationals and the role of Israelis. She said [and I am inclined to agree] that she found it incredibly patronising when activists come from overseas and treat Israel and Israelis as one homogenous lump, lecturing them on the evils of Occupation (she was referring to one speaker in particular, but I think the problem is fairly widespread). As an activist engaged in criticism and resistance, I think she felt mis- or under-represented. It’s vital that we recognise these sectors of Israeli society and seek relationships and solidarity with them too - for change to happen, it is not enough to focus on pressuring governments and corporations, nor is it sufficient to seek lasting friendships with Palestinians only. In order to undermine a state which claims to represent the interests of a particular group, it is necessary to recognise and make explicit voices of dissent within that group.

And that’s my massive ramble about Israelis!!

Sussex-Palestine zine 2007

This zine was published following the April 2007 delegation of Sussex students to the occupied West Bank.