Hey, New Zealand: couldn't you lend us Jacinda for a while?

It’s a tale of two accidental leaders…

Jacinda Ardern was never meant to be Prime Minister of New Zealand. Or at least not yet, not so early as to make her the youngest in a century and a half. She was serving as Deputy Leader of the New Zealand Labour Party when, just seven weeks ahead of the 2017 General Election, the then Leader, Andrew Little, stood down in the face of the dire poll standing of the party.

That’s not an issue for the British Labour Party under its present leadership. It trails a thoroughly discredited Tory government in the polls, at a point when it needs to be well ahead to stand any chance of winning the next election. But Corbynists shrug such matters off. There’ll be a surge, they say, as there was last time. They ignore the fact that the surge wasn’t enough to win and only produced a defeat less drastic than had been feared.

Funnily enough, Corbyn was an accidental leader too. He only stood for the leadership because no one else on the left was prepared to throw his name into the hat. He had no expectation of winning and, indeed, only made it onto the ballot because political opponents within Labour agreed to nominate him as a way of giving the left a chance to be in the game. They didn’t think he’d win either, and how they must be regretting it now.

As it happens, Ardern didn’t win the General Election. She came second with 46 parliamentary seats to the National (conservative) Party’s 56. But coalition negotiations allowed her to assemble a government and she took office. Since then, she’s impressed again and again, including in her personal behaviour: giving birth while in office in a way that charmed the nation.

At no time has she been more impressive than in response to the dire events that took place last Friday, 15 March. A new and far more dreadful Ides of March than those that marked the assassination of Julius Caesar. In Christchurch, a terrorist opened fire in two Mosques killing 50 worshippers and injuring many others.

Her statement to Parliament moved me to tears. She found an extraordinarily powerful way of expressing her total solidarity with the victims and their friends or relatives. It was a moving statement that said that these Muslim immigrants belonged to New Zealand and New Zealand belonged to them. It was a highly effective way of rejecting the views of anyone who might be inclined to nurse  xenophobic feelings towards the victims, a sense that it was tragic but nonetheless, they were somehow wrong to have come to New Zealand, that they were in some sense responsible for the attack on them.

She said:

We cannot know your grief, but we can walk with you at every stage. We can. And we will, surround you with aroha, manaakitanga and all that makes us, us. Our hearts are heavy but our spirit is strong.

Jacinda Ardern with the victims
Showing aroha, manaakitanga and ... leadership

She spoke of “us”, embracing all New Zealanders. And she underlined the message by using the Maori words for love and a much deeper sense of hospitality. The Prime Minister was saying categorically and clearly that the victims belonged in New Zealand and deserved its welcome.

Talking of the presumed perpetrator who, following her example, will not be named here, she said:

A 28-year-old man – an Australian citizen – has been charged with one count of murder. Other charges will follow. He will face the full force of the law in New Zealand. The families of the fallen will have justice.

He sought many things from his act of terror, but one was notoriety.

And that is why you will never hear me mention his name.

He is a terrorist. He is a criminal. He is an extremist.

But he will, when I speak, be nameless.

And to others I implore you: speak the names of those who were lost, rather than name of the man who took them.

He may have sought notoriety, but we in New Zealand will give him nothing. Not even his name.

I find it hard to read these words, courageous, outspoken, resolute, without feeling a pricking of tears in my eyes.

Compare them with what Jeremy Corbyn said when asked whether, in a second referendum, he might vote for Brexit:

It depends on what the choice is in front of us. If we’ve got a good deal in which we can have a dynamic relationship with Europe which is all the trading relationships and so on that might be a good way forward that unites the country.

“It depends”. A prevaricating, vacillating reply. And why does he make it? Because he thinks there is a Brexit deal that can unite the country. Which means he wants to pull in the xenophobes who voted to leave the EU out of a dislike of immigrants. Where Ardern tells xenophobes that New Zealand stands for different values, Corbyn tries to appease them.

He must know he can’t. Any deal that he would call ‘good’ would involve a softer Brexit that leave voters would regard as a betrayal. He’s making the same error so many others have made before him, not least David Cameron who called the Brexit referendum: he’s throwing raw meat to people who will only demand more, when they see that pushing their demands gives results.

Ardern stood firm and she’ll be admired for it. Corbyn yielded and he’ll be despised. Two accidental leaders, but only one is truly a leader, showing that accidents can turn out well on some occasions and pitifully badly on others.

How I wish we could borrow her for Britain, to lead Labour, and eventually the country. And send Corbyn back to his allotment to tend to his vegetables. He’d be much happier. As would Britain.

Alas, New Zealand wouldn’t let her go. But can we perhaps can find her like ourselves? At least she’s shown us what to look for.

Iftar, or enjoying a Muslim breakfast

Breakfast with friends has to be fun. And that’s true even when it’s in the evening. In fact, it’s better in the evening, if just for the novelty.

The occasion was an Iftar. That’s the ceremony of breaking the Ramadan fast – a rather special breakfast, in fact – at the end of daylight. Ramadan and its fasting is one of the five pillars of Sunni Islam.

Just for the record, another is the declaration of faith, so ‘Allahu Akbar’ isn’t some kind of terrorist slogan, as some might be led to believe by its handling in the Western media, but the key assertion of belief of Muslims everywhere (close to a quarter of the world’s population). It means God is greatest.

A further pillar that Britons ought to value particularly is the obligation to give alms. This is generally done quietly, without ostentation; there is a similar principle in Christianity, ‘do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing’. Unfortunately, the left hand of Muslim charity keeps things so quiet that it took the right hand of a parliamentary investigation to reveal just how much good it does.

A Muslim friend – and not just any friend but a Badminton partner, so someone pretty special – and her husband invited us to join an Iftar in one of our local parks. There’s a tradition that non-Muslims should be invited to at least one such occasion during Ramadan, and many Luton mosques had extended similar invitations.

The friend who invited us
With two non-Muslim guests (Danielle to the right)

The Ramadan fast lasts from sunrise to sunset. Since it’s based on a lunar calendar with four-week months, over the years the celebration falls at different seasons. It’s particularly tough when it happens in the summer. Right now, daylight lasts nineteen hours in Britain. A Muslim friend – this time special not because of badminton but because he’s a colleague – tells me that in Norway, where he lives, the day is currently 22 hours long. In the two remaining hours, it must be hard to fit in two meals. Our British friends just about pull it off, by eating at 9:15 at night and before 3:30 in the morning.

In fact, there are some regions where summer days are so long, with barely any night at all, that a special dispensation has been made for them: they keep the same hours as Mecca. It strikes me as only fair that a similar arrangement ought to apply everywhere. After all, when Ramadan falls in the winter, my friend in Norway would have to fast for only two hours of daylight, which makes it rather an empty gesture, doesn’t it? I mean, even I can go two hours without eating.

It seems that there may be increasing pressure among younger Muslims to adopt generally the notion that the fast period should always last as long as it does in Mecca. That would make sense to me and I wish my friends luck with pushing this reform through.

As for the event itself, it was charming. We sat on a blanket under an awning and waited for daylight to end.

“The last minutes are the worst,” our friend told us.

At 9:14, with the fast due to end at 9:15, her husband added that the very last minute was worse than any other.

Then came the longed-for moment, when the sun dipped below the horizon. We ate dates, the traditional start of the breakfast. Then we turned our attention to the chicken, bhajis and spiced rice, which was astonishingly good – astonishing because there must have been 200 or so people there and it’s rare, in my experience, that food prepared for that many people is good at all, but this was delicious.

It had to be eaten quickly since prayer – another of the pillars – started only a few minutes later. But, in any case, after nineteen hours of fasting, I doubt many people there minded getting on with the food.

While the prayers were going on, we chatted with some of the other non-Muslims or, indeed, the Muslims who’d stayed behind to look after the young children. Danielle joined in with that task, knocking a balloon backwards and forwards with two of the kids. She’s the perfect grandmother to any child who needs one, while she waits for some more of her own to come along.

Danielle as stand-in grandmother

All in all, it was a warm-hearted, pleasant, and enjoyable experience. It was encouraging to see the far more widespread and far more attractive side of Islam than the one we tend to get from the press. Above all, it was just great to be there.

The faith that moves mountains. But not apparently nations

The head of the Catholic Church visits a country which has a majority of Buddhists, representatives of a religion that is a byword for peacefulness and tolerance, but who are busily exterminating members of another of the world’s great faiths, Islam. The Pope carefully avoids naming the victims as Rohingya, because that might further inflame those gentle Buddhists and turn their attentions to Christians as well.

The Pope in Myanmar: don’t mention the Rohingya

Those Rohingya are members of a religion that believes that to save a single life is tantamount to saving the entire human race. And yet members of that religion, Islam – admittedly a tiny minority of it – seem to have convinced themselves that it is holy work to kill large numbers of people in its name.

The behaviour of that minority has inflamed many in the West into passionate Islamophobia. Some of those justify their hatred on the grounds that they are Christians, or belong at any rate to countries that are Christian in their roots. This is a curious notion, in many cases.

In Britain, for example, only around one in twenty people regularly attends a church service of any Christian denomination. But then, maybe they’re thinking of the underlying values rather than actual Church practice. Principles such as

Let him offer his cheek to one who would strike him

or

It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God

or

Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these

The first of those is a little hard to reconcile with Britain’s long love-affair with weapons, a little reduced these days but only because austerity is enforcing cuts even on the military.

The second is just as hard to reconcile with the other side of the austerity coin, which has been to enrich the wealthiest members of society still further, making it, I assume, harder than ever for them to get into the kingdom of heaven.

As for the third, that commitment to children is proclaimed by most Brits, but rather subverted by the discovery that the country has one of the worst rates of stillbirth in Western Europe. Why? Here are the words of Gill Walton, Chief Executive of the Royal College of Midwives:

We’ve got a real concern about staffing levels… we really need more staff and more capacity in order to safely care for mums and babies.

Austerity hammers children too, it seems. As we find in the recent reports that two-thirds of English children referred for mental healthcare remain untreated. And it’s not just children: refuges for women escaping domestic violence are being forced to close through lack of funding, hospital Emergency Departments are being increasingly staffed by unqualified doctors, and the hospitals themselves are, in greater numbers than ever before, facing bankruptcy without more finance.

It seems that our Christian values aren’t strong enough to insist on the support the vulnerable. Instead we prefer to elect and re-elect a government committed to serving the wealthiest by imposing these cuts on services that would otherwise protect the poor. Perhaps our supposed Christianity has nothing to do with the teachings of Christ, and merely provides a justification for our dislike of the other, the foreigner, the person from outside our community.

Faith without compassion. Whether in Myanmar, in ISIS or, sadly, in Britain.

The Muslims are coming, the Muslims are coming!

Donald Trump tweeted in response to the killings in Orlando, “Is President Obama going to finally mention the words radical Islamic terrorism? If he doesn’t he should immediately resign in disgrace!”

The killer may have been a Muslim by birth but, as his ex-wife has pointed out, he had never been a religious radical. What he was, on the other hand, was violent: if she was no longer his wife, it was because he beat her. What’s more, the FBI was concerned about him. None of that prevented him buying powerful weapons.

Trump has followed up his tweet with another: “What has happened in Orlando is just the beginning. Our leadership is weak and ineffective. I called and asked for the ban. Must be tough.”

Orlando: scene of the worst mass killing in the US
Trump repeats his call for a ban on Muslims entering the country

The ban he means wouldn’t be on the weapons that were supplied to an obviously unhinged person. No, it would be on his fellow Muslims. However, the killer in this case, Omar Mateen, happens to have been an American citizen. It’s not clear how Trump plans to ban such people from the US, unless he believes he can expel citizens from their own country. Most civilised peoples regard it as unacceptable to deny citizens their citizenship.

Not that there’s ever been much sign of the Donald being overly guided by concerns about civilisation.

He called the Orlando attack “just the beginning.” That is a widespread fear in Britain too. Resisting Islam seems to be a theme for some supporters of the movement to withdraw the country from the EU, the ‘Brexit’ campaign. This is seen as a way, in particular, of avoiding an influx of a million and a half Muslims into the country when Turkey becomes a member of the EU.

This is an odd notion, given that there seems no prospect whatever of Turkey acceding to membership any time in the foreseeable future. Even fifteen years ago, when the country was apparently moving towards greater democracy, and firmly committed to secularism, the chances of overcoming opposition to Turkish entry were slim. Today, with the nation slipping towards theocratic autocracy under President Erdogan, membership has become even less likely. The need to resist a putative Turkish invasion nonetheless remains a concern of certain of the most vociferous proponents of Britain leaving the EU. An odd state of affairs since the easiest way of preventing Turkey acceding is to veto it – which means remaining a member ourselves.

When veteran British broadcaster Michael Parkinson interviewed Muhammad Ali in 1971, he asked about Ali’s realisation in childhood that he was being treated as a second-class citizen.

“Second class?” Ali exclaimed. “Oh no. Sixteenth class. They used to always say I was a second class citizen. […] 

“Oh man, if we were second class citizens we’d be driving old Cadillacs and living good. If we were first class we’d be driving a Rolls Royce.”

That exchange came to mind while I was listening to Brexiters explaining how we had to leave the EU to keep Muslims, and in particular Turks, out of Britain. Muslims, I was told, are taking over. That, it seems, is Islam’s aim: to dominate the world and impose its will on all peoples. It’s already happening in Britain, I was assured.

This is curious. Muslims account for about 4.5% of the total population of the UK. Even if the 1.5 million turned up from Turkey, which they won’t, they’d still only represent 7%. In my experience, most Muslims in Britain fall into Ali’s category: some are wealthy but the majority are poor and under-privileged. As to the imposition of their ways, even in Luton where I live, with its 15% Muslim population, Islamic customs are strictly limited to the Muslim community. After all, when you’re sixteenth-rate citizens, what chance is there of imposing your way of life?

In any case, we’ve faced religious movements that tried to inflict their outlook on Britain before. For centuries, Christianity tried to dictate every aspect of behaviour. Not just Christianity, as it happens, but whichever particular sect of Christianity happened to be in power at the time. Failure to attend Church was grounds for suspicion. Non-adherence to the dominant faith was a disqualification from public office. The sect in power was not above burning its adversaries to death – and was allowed to get away with it.

We saw those ghastly people off. We’ve obliged our Christian communities to legislate only for themselves. We’ve freed our institutions of religious dominance.

If we could see off the powerful force of Christianity, why should we fear the triumph of the much smaller, poorer and sixteenth-class Muslim community? Surely with perhaps nineteen out of every twenty people and most of the wealth, the non-Muslims can look after themselves.

A phobia’s a morbid fear. Islamophobia’s no exception. Morbidity doesn’t tend to conduce to rational thought, which makes it a less than ideal basis for deciding Britain’s relationship with the EU. 

Nor is it the best reaction to the Orlando killings.

Faith can move mountains – or hearts. Or it can kill shopkeepers...

I’ve met many people who are improved by their religious faith. Somehow, the teachings of their beliefs improve their naturally good qualities.

Sadly, however, the exact opposite can also apply. There are many for whom belief, and in particular the belief that all their basest instincts are endorsed by a supreme power, only emphasises their worst characteristics. Indeed, they treat it as authorisation to act on them.

Asad Shah, who was murdered on Good Friday, was a Glasgow shopkeeper viewed with great affection by the community he served. He regarded himself as a Muslim but liked to keep lines of communication open to other faiths – not long before he died he used Facebook to post the message “Good Friday and a very Happy Easter, especially to my beloved Christian nation.”

A community grieving for Asad Shah's death
Their slogan? “This is not who we are”

He also liked to distribute personalised Christmas cards to his customers. That reminded me of my Jewish grandmother who used to exchange Christmas cards, each and every year, with her neighbour, for decades. The fact that one of them was Jewish changed absolutely nothing in a small gesture that was intended to communicate goodwill and bring a little happiness. To both of them.

The general form in murder cases is for the presumed perpetrator to deny everything, plead not guilty and struggle to get off the hook. In this case, however, the defendant, Tanveer Ahmed, has taken the unusual step of issuing a statement, in his own words, through his lawyer:

This all happened for one reason and no other issues and no other intentions.

Asad Shah disrespected the messenger of Islam the Prophet Muhammad peace be upon him. Mr Shah claimed to be a Prophet.

When 1,400 years ago the Prophet of Islam Muhammad peace be upon him has clearly said that “I am the final messenger of Allah there is no more prophets or messengers from God Allah after me.

“I am leaving you the final Quran. There is no changes. It is the final book of Allah and this is the final completion of Islam.”

Just to make a trivial point in passing, this communication makes me hope he isn’t the product of a British school system. Because if he is, it’s no testimonial to his teachers’ ability to teach him English.

The chilling part is the reference to Shah disrespecting the Prophet Muhammad. No wonder he had to die. Ahmed at the end of his statement tells us, “If I had not done this others would and there would have been more killing and violence in the world,” which is a glorious notion: he killed a man, by stabbing and beating him, in order to reduce the killing and violence in the world. That has all the rationality of NATO powers going to war to preserve international peace.

Mr Ahmed’s hatred was directed at the man who disrespected Islam, while claiming to be a Muslim. We hate no one as much as a traitor, do we? The man who turned his coat is far worse than the man who was always an open, avowed enemy.

To make things still graver, Shah belonged to a sect, the Ahmadiyya, whose members are not even allowed to refer to themselves as Muslims under the law of Pakistan. A man who persisted in calling himself a Muslim, though he belonged to a group deemed beyond the Pale by one of the world’s great Muslim Nations? No wonder he had to die. 

Especially if he disrespected Muhammad.

Treason, when it occurs in a religious context, has its own term: apostasy. And religious authorities who, down the ages, have never been reluctant to resort to fairly hideous forms of punishment, reserve the worst for the apostate. Catholics and Protestants burned each other with particular glee precisely because each side saw the other as traitors from inside the same Church, who had turned against it. Why, there was plenty of persecution even of Protestants by other Protestants.

Similarly, Stalin, despite having taken supreme power in what was then the Soviet Union, couldn’t rest until Trotsky had been murdered. Trotsky, reduced to a rootless exile, travelling from country to country until he found some kind of asylum in Mexico, thousands of miles from Russia and Stalin. Yet even there, Stalin could not bear to let him live, and sent in Ramón Mercader to see him off with an ice axe.

He contrived the murder in August 1940, the same month in which he signed the Nazi-Soviet pact. Stalin could shake the hand of Hitler, but couldn’t bear the thought that he was sharing the world with his old comrade from the St Petersburg barricades of 1917.

Just like Tanveer Ahmed, who couldn’t bear the idea that Asad Shah was drawing breath at the same time as he was.

Most of us take limited action against those we feel have betrayed us. A friendship ends. A professional relationship dies. Maybe a marriage leads to divorce. Generally, we stop short of violence. A long way short.

But when there’s a belief at stake? If what you’re doing is the will of God? Or, as in Stalin’s case – and Hitler’s – obeying the dictates of history? Why, what possible limits should you put on a righteous anger in the name of an unlimited cause?

As assuredly as Mercader wielded his ice axe, or the two sides of the Reformation wielded their bonfires, Tanveer Ahmed wielded his knife in the name of something they all saw as greater than themselves. Most often, against victims as hapless as Asad Shah. 

No wonder he had to die.

I know many people who have been helped to lead blameless, even praiseworthy lives by their beliefs. Unfortunately, however, belief can also have the opposite effect. Instead of intensifying the better instincts of man it can justify the worst – and sadly Asad Shah and his community have paid the price.

US Independence Day Thoughts

Happy Independence Day to my US friends.

Today’s a good time to think a moment about the main architect of the document whose signing you’re celebrating, the Declaration on Independence.

Fourth of July: a time for celebration in the US,
Perhaps also for reflection everywhere...

At a time when rising racial tensions are belying the hope raised by the Civil Rights movement and the reforms that followed, it’s worth recalling one of the principal denunciations it hurls at the British King, George III:

He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian King of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where Men should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce.

Don’t worry, if you know the Declaration well and don’t recognise these words, it’s not your memory letting you down. They appeared in Thomas Jefferson’s draft, but were excised from the final version. He explained later that they were removed to satisfy slave-owners in Georgia and South Carolina, and slave-traders from the Northern States.

Besides, although this passage denounces the transatlantic slave trade, it stops short of condemning slavery itself. Jefferson was a slaveholder till his death. The only slaves he ever freed were Sally Hemings, with whom he had a near forty-year affair, and the children he fathered with her.

However, he undoubtedly disliked slavery. That shouldn’t be taken as implying, though, that he was a champion of the kind of integration the US still needs so badly:

Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate, than that these people [African Americans] are to be free; nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government. Nature, habit, opinion have drawn indelible lines of distinction between them.

Gary Younge is an outstanding (Black) British journalist with The Guardian. He and his (Black – or perhaps I should say African) American wife and their children are about to leave the US for Britain after twelve years. In an excellent valedictory piece, he mentions the hopes for progress on racial issues many expressed over the election of Barack Obama. He didn’t believe much would improve:

…one person cannot undo centuries of discrimination, no matter how much nominal power they have… He was the most progressive candidate viable for the presidency, which says a great deal, given the alternatives, but means very little, given what would be needed to significantly shift the dial on such issues as race and inequality.

Centuries of discrimination indeed. And we can see it deeply embedded in the writings of even so liberal a figure as Thomas Jefferson.

Still, none of us is free of the assumptions of our times. Jefferson is remarkable for his ability to adopt thoughts that were revolutionary for his epoch. Some of them have become part of the fabric of societies that aspire to democracy, sometimes to the point of being so familiar we run the danger of forgetting them altogether. It’s salutary to remind ourselves of what some of them were.

Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence
Contradictory as we all are, but he got a lot right
as well as a few things badly wrong

For instance, in his first inaugural address, he called on his fellow citizens to bear in mind:

…that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression.

What of his political opponents, those in particular who might oppose the very existence of the Union or its republican basis?

…let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.

A couple of years earlier, Jefferson wrote to a political ally:

I am for freedom of religion, and against all manoeuvres to bring about a legal ascendancy of one sect over another: for freedom of the press, and against all violations of the Constitution to silence by force and not by reason the complaints or criticisms, just or unjust, of our citizens against the conduct of their agents. And I am for encouraging the progress of science in all its branches; and not for the raising a hue and cry against he sacred name of philosophy…

Well worth reflecting on these thoughts. Especially at a time when many are calling for restrictions of liberties in the US for the sake of religious faith (such as the refusal to perform legal gay marriages), while others are resisting the progress of science (for example by denying climate change).

More important still, on both sides of the Atlantic, is the principle that the majority is not entitled to trample on the beliefs and behaviours of a minority, simply because we dislike them. We don’t like the burqa? That doesn’t give us the right to ban it.

Worst of all, we keep forgetting that it’s essential in a democracy that “error of opinion may be tolerated.” Today the talk is all of resisting radicalisation, principally among young Muslims. But the holding of radical views isn’t and should never be illegal – that’s a net that would have caught Jefferson himself. To believe that ISIS is right and deserves support may be a view so misguided as to be imbecilic, but we have no right to forbid it.

Pick up a gun for ISIS, or conspire to give it material support, or even incite others to do so, and you have broken the law and can and should expect action against you. But espouse the opinion? That must be legitimate.

Ah, well. July 4th is not a day for too much heavy thinking. I’ll stop there.

Enjoy the fireworks!

A Jordanian pilot burned to death: who are the victims of Islamic extremism?

The organisation variously known as ISIS, ISIL, Daesh or “that ghastly lot terrorising Iraq and Syria”, has apparently burned to death the Jordanian pilot it captured after his plane crashed on a bombing raid against their positions. To make sure the execution was as unpleasant as it could be, it seems the pilot was placed in a metal cage before being drowned in flames.

Muadh al-Kasasbeh with the captors who later
murdered him with all the cruelty they could muster

Now, I don’t claim to be an expert on the Koran, but I suspect that it nowhere recommends burning prisoners of war alive. Equally, I’m pretty certain the vast majority of Muslims around the world would be as doubtful as I am that this is principle of Islamic belief. Some Muslims might argue that beheading people, as Daesh has also done, is legitimate since that fine ally of the Democracies, Saudi Arabia, likes to indulge in the practice, but not even that enlightened nation goes so far as to recommend burning.

It is all the more likely that a great many adherents of Islam will be sickened by what has happened, since the victim was as Muslim as his torturers claim to be.

That isn’t actually surprising. Amid all the fear that some new terrorist outrage causes us in the West – and the attack on Charlie Hebdo must have put ice in the blood of most of us – we have a tendency to forget that most terrorist violence, including most Islamic terrorist violence, has Muslims as its victims.

In exactly the same way, when the press was bleating about thuggish young men, many of them black, terrorising poor little old women and stealing their inadequate pensions, it failed to point out that the vast majority of victims of muggings were young men, most of them black. When people lash out in anger and bitterness, justified or not, the victim is likely to be someone standing nearby, who is probably very like them.

So who are the victims of terrorism generally?

According to the Global Terrorism Database, an organisation that really exists, in the US, 50% of all terrorist attacks around the world take place in Afghanistan and Pakistan alone. That’s a piece of information we ought to keep clearly in mind when we evaluate the success of the NATO intervention in Afghanistan.

Overall, where that database has been able to ascertain the faith of the victims, it finds that between 82% and 97% of all victims of terrorism are Muslim.

Over the ten year period after 2004, the US suffered 131 terrorist attacks, of which fewer than 20 were lethal. The UK did less well, principally because of continued unrest in Northern Ireland: over the same period it had 400 attacks, of which most were non-lethal.

Iraq had 12,000. Of those attacks, 8000 were lethal. Again, a useful piece of information when we think about Western intervention in a Muslim country.

Overall, though, the real message is this: the outcry against “Muslims” that goes up when a small number of Islamic fundamentalists carries out an attack, needs to be balanced by a cry of sympathy for the Muslims who make up the vast majority of their victims.

One of the most recent of whom was Lieutenant Muadh al-Kasasbeh. A Muslim burned to death by the self-proclaimed Muslims of Daesh. In what has to be the most shameful terrorist outrage for quite some time.

Islamic State: history repeating itself? Without redeeming features?

Explaining increased British involvement in action to stop the Islamic State in Iraq, David Cameron points out that the alternative was to allow the emergence of a “terrorist state on the shores of the Mediterranean and bordering a Nato member.”

The Nato member in question is Turkey. And, curiously, seeing that region threatened by a militant Islamic movement is a repetition of history – though, as often happens when history repeats itself, the second time round is even more painful than the first.

When the prophet Mohammed died in 632, he left the Arabian peninsula united as it had never been before. His successors discovered an energy and a military drive that would astonish and, generally, overwhelm their neighbours. To their North, two great Empires had been battling with each other for centuries: the Byzantines, successors of Rome, and the Persians. Within a generation, the Persian Empire had been completely overrun by Islamic forces and the Byzantines had lost huge territories, principally in the regions that now make up Iraq, Syria, Lebanon – and Turkey.

See the repetition?

Their sudden irruption on the scene wasn’t the only remarkable aspect of the Muslim conquerors. Their behaviour after victory gave them some unusual redeeming features. Instead of massacring their defeated foes, or even crushing them, they usually recruited them. So, for example, when they’d stretched their Empire along the whole of the North African seaboard, they decided it might be worth crossing the straits into Southern Spain and trying their luck in Europe. Tariq ibn Ziyad, who led their first landing on the rock off the Spanish coast which bears his name, Tariq’s mountain, Jebel Tariq, now Gibraltar, was in all likelihood a Berber, rather than an Arab, and the son of a former prisoner of war.

Once in Spain, the Arabs made allies of the Jews, long oppressed by the Visigothic Christian rulers. Jews held the captured cities on behalf of the Muslim armies, which could therefore move on to capture some more. The tradition of coexistence with other communities inspired one of the world’s great cultural centres in Cordoba. Muslims ran the show, but Jews – who were allowed to settle in pride of place right next to the Mosque – and Christians were tolerated and allowed to debate with Muslim scholars in one of the richest periods of intellectual development in Europe.

When Saint Thomas Aquinas wrote the works that would transform Christian thinking and underpin the Renaissance, he drew heavily on the thought of the Greek pagan Aristotle, as interpreted by a Muslim scholar from Cordoba, Averroes (Ibn Rushd).

That was then. Today a new Islamic military force is threatening the borders of what were once the Persian and Byzantine Empires. Given the opportunity, it would no doubt be more than happy to take the whole Mediterranean littoral and even threaten southern Spain. However, based on their track record so far, you can be pretty certain that they wouldn’t want to found a community in Cordoba that would win an international reputation for the free exchange of ideas.

Islamic State: attempting to reproduce the Muslim conquests
but without any of the redeeming features

On the contrary, it has proved to be a life-threatening condition to be non-Muslim, or even simply the wrong kind of Muslim, in the presence of the Islamic State. 1500 Shia prisoners of war were executed in a single day; Christians or Yazidis have been murdered, enslaved or driven from their homes in huge numbers.

The militants of Islamic State are trying to reproduce the great conquests of Islam in its early days. But as I said before, the second time round tends to be less admirable, less glorious than the first.

In Islamic State’s case, a lot less admirable and a lot less glorious.

No bad thing if we can help stem their attempt to repeat history.

It was something I said. And what UKIP wouldn't say.

The other day, I shamelessly stole a picture from a friend on Facebook and posted it on Twitter. It shows soldiers from the British Indian Army with the caption that “over a million Muslims fought for the British Army in WW2”.

I did sharpen up the message a little by adding my own take on it, “An inconvenient truth for UKIP and other xenophobes.”

Not everyone appreciated the sentiment...

The reaction was spectacular. It was retweeted over a hundred times. And several UKIP followers responded, apparently less than charmed. It’s instructive to see what they said and, perhaps even more interestingly, what they didn’t say.

By way of background, I should point out that, though some of UKIP’s messages are pretty tough (e.g. “26 million people in Europe are looking for work. And whose jobs are they after?”, which ignores the fact that nearly 10% of those people are Brits), its followers are sensitive souls. Call them racist, for instance, as I may carelessly have done in the past, and they get terribly upset. 

“Name-calling!” they proclaim. “Try to debate the issues.”

Well, it’s always good to re-examine one’s own positions. Had I perhaps been too harsh? I thought about what I really knew about UKIP. For instance, that its leader Nigel Farage had described his discomfort on being in a train carriage in which everyone around him was talking a language other than English. Or the discomfort he reckoned most people would feel at knowing that they had Romanian neighbours.

Racism? Perhaps that’s an overstatement. But clearly if he’s that uncomfortable, he must suffer from a certain aversion towards foreigners (despite being married to a German). Now aversion to foreigners is called xeonophobia. It seemed to me that to say that UKIP was xenophobic would therefore be non-contentious, a simple description, not an insult.

It seems I was wrong.

The most moderate opposition I received was over a detail of the photograph: the uniforms of the soldiers, or more precisely their headgear. One response was:

“I think you will find that these soldiers who fought for Britain were Sikhs.”

As far as I was concerned, that matter was closed by the tweet:

“They are not Sikh turbans, as a Sikh I can unequivocally tell you that.”

And another, from someone called Waqar Latif:

“Turbans were part of the uniform for the Indian troops. Muslim and Hindus also wore them. My granddad did.”

Which created a response demonstrating that UKIP isn’t backward in handing out what it doesn’t like to receive:

“I think you, Latif, are a racist in search of conflict.”

Tony Byrne decided that I was being deliberately deceptive:

“You misled or are misled and misleading. Try using the truth in tweets.”

When I defended myself, he made clear what he understood as rational debate:

“I don’t care David, you are trying to create a straw-man argument to hide your deception.”

There were attempts to debate the substance of the matter:

“1 million Indians were NOT all muslim, and most remained in India to defend India from Japan and it was called the INDIAN IMPERIAL ARMY, they were not in British regiments from this country.”

This is an interesting view of history, in which Britain’s army in India is seen as protecting Indian rather than British interests. Incidentally, the total number of Indians in British uniform in World War 2 reached 2.5 million, not just one million, and many of them fought in Europe.

The complaint re-emerged that UKIP supporters are unfairly dismissed by their opponents:

“You are very wrong to suggest that #UKIP supporters are ignorant.”

Greg Cook took the debate on to the much more elevated level it deserves:

“As a @UKLabour member, your opinion is irrelevant. You are a traitor.”
“Martie Caine UKIP”  gently noted: 

“It’s a waste of time trying to explain the difference between immigration and open borders to any #Labour fool.” 

He matched his deeds to his words and didn’t bother to explain it. 

And to wrap up the matter, he produced the killer argument:

“... I think anyone voting Lab now is a fool.”

Ah, well. As long as they don’t suggest we may be ignorant. 

This was all highly entertaining, but I was much more interested by what the UKIP supporters didn’t say. At one point, I asked:

“What is the UKIP policy on education? or the health service? on the bedroom tax?”

I wasn’t alone in pushing for this kind of information. “Averyenglishgypsy” asked a string of such questions, including:

“What will replace the human rights legislation? Who decides what children are taught? Where are the policies regarding pension issue? Any plans to help small business? No action on sustainability? No consultation regarding fracking?”

Nobody answered. No UKIP supporter is able to provide any indication of what their party’s policy is on any matter other than the EU and immigration.

Now, I understand that reticence. UKIP knows that its supporters are a disparate band, held together by what I still maintain is nothing more sophisticated than xenophobia. If it actually picked a policy on the matters we raised, some group or other of their supporters would be put off. Much better to say nothing and let everyone project their own particular likes or dislikes on the party.

What that means is that we have no idea what they want to see done on any substantive matter that affects our lives, including those of their supporters. That led me to comment:

“Sadly, there are voters prepared to back a party (specifically UKIP) that commits to nothing.”

And I still find that sad today.

A Muslim nation that offers an object lesson in tolerance

Warmth. That’s what I remember most from the week we spent in Tunisia the week before last.

Not just the physical kind, though there was that too: in the mid-twenties Celsius. It’s the perfect level, comfortably warm without being unbearably hot.

But the main thing was the human warmth. An awareness that others too had rights. A willingness to treat them as you’d want to be treated yourself.

The Tunis Souk.
Lively, bustling, diverse. Fun

There was an expectation that we would bargain over any price, so starting offers were always high. Once an agreement had been reached, however, that was the price. Neither side would change it. And what was to be delivered, would be delivered. Cars we ordered turned up on time (actually, ahead of time we generally found), and the price on a bill presented for payment was the price agreed.

But even that reassuring honesty wasn’t what mattered.

No, what really mattered was the tolerance, the willingness to live and let live. Tunisia is undoubtedly a Muslim country, and most restaurants and cafes we visited served no alcohol. However, it isn’t an Islamic nation, so there were plenty that did sell alcohol, and they served it to Tunisians as well as tourists.

What I found interesting is that those places had their conventions. I’ve cut down recently on the amount I drink (not just doctor’s orders, though I’ve had those too – well, actually, nurse’s orders: I’ve never yet managed to see a doctor at the Practice where I’m registered, instead always being palmed off on a nurse but, hey, they’ve been great so why should I complain?)

One evening I decided to stick to water with the dinner. After the meal, the restaurant offered us a liqueur on the house – but the waiter brought four to the five of us. Clearly the restaurant was used to mixed groups of guests, some of whom were drinking and others not, and tactfully offered no drink to those who weren’t.

I was impressed by the delicacy of the gesture.

Later on, the manager did still better, having one of the staff drive us back to our hotel through a torrential downpour. I’ve never known a restaurant anywhere else offer that kind of service.

As it happens, it was a bit like the courtesy drinks. There was only space for four, so I walked. I’m not sure whether that was related to not drinking alcohol – the one who was drinking only water might as well be the one who got wet, perhaps? 

My overall impression of the country was one of charm, generosity and above all a willingness to admit that there are many ways to live a life, and no-one needs to tell others what’s wrong with theirs.

Sadly, there are elections later this year, and many fear that the Islamists will make gains. I know the difference between Muslims and Islamists, and I’d much rather see the former continuing to live as they do than the latter taking their place. Insha’Allah, the present happy arrangement may continue.

If it does, well, Tunisia will have a lesson or two to teach other countries, not least the democracies of the West. A lesson in basic liberalism. And its most important component: tolerance.

Persecuting the Irish: icon of our times

Noble, that’s the word for the Colegio de los Irlandeses, now part of the prestigious university of Alcalà de Henares near Madrid. 

Quiet, understated but self-assured, it is a fitting tribute to the offer of Spain to the persecuted Catholics of Ireland, to a refuge where they could safely study within the tenets of their faith.

Colegio de los Irlandeses, Alcalà de Henares

Makes you wonder what the ancestors of today’s Brits were up to, oppressing Irish Catholics. What good did it do them? Today Ireland is still Catholic and, what’s more, it’s independent of Britain. All that pain and suffering Britain imposed, and it gave neither nation anything benefit at all. You’d think we might learn.

The truth, of course, is that some people did very well out of the arrangement. A tiny number of people, but they were powerful. The holders of great fortunes in Ireland, particularly in the form of land, were doing just fine and saw no reason to loosen the reins. On the contrary, they felt they were absolutely entitled to see the army doing whatever it took to put down anyone uppity enough to question their right to enjoy what they, and their ancestors, had always enjoyed.

Meanwhile, in Spain the founding of the College had nothing to with preserving liberty from persecution. Far from it. Spain itself was more than happy to do its full share of persecution. Protestants: burn them. Moors, Jews: drive them out. And if they don’t go: burn them. Just like the Mayflower pilgrims, Spanish Catholics weren’t out to obtain religious freedom, just the freedom of their own religion to persecute anyone who belonged to a different one.

And in just the same way, a handful of people did very well out of the arrangement: the owners of the great fortunes, in Spain, Latin America or anywhere else controlled by force of Spanish arms, were convinced that this was right and proper and the preservation of their way of life was a divinely ordained duty.

That’s what makes the College in Alcalà so eloquent a monument. So eloquent today, I mean.

When a couple of crazed, misfit Muslims, who can’t distinguish between an act of political courage and a simple piece of barbarism, hack to pieces a British soldier in Woolwich they are perpetuating the attitudes that drove Britain to impose its will by force on the Irish. Or Spanish Catholics to force the conversion of Spanish Jews. Or Pakistani Sunnis to murder Pakistani Shiites. Or orthodox Jews to deny the right of Jewish women to pray like their male counterparts at the Wailing Wall.

What they are perpetuating is the mindset of anyone who is so sure of being right that it justifies inflicting suffering or even death on those who disagree.

That goes just as much for those, in the English Defence League and outside, who’ve reacted to the Woolwich murders with violence against Muslims and their institutions. Less obviously, it also applies to organisations that don’t themselves promote violence, like the United Kingdom Independence Party. They may not actively condone persecution, but by their attacks on immigration, they sustain the belief that a nation is better for being homogeneous.

Homogeneity was what all those persecuting powers, driving out Muslims, Jews, Catholics or Protestants were trying to do, too. Looking back on their attempts in the past, as I did when I saw the Colegio de los Irlandeses, I had to ask myself ‘why did they bother?’

Though, seeing how many people seem to be rallying to the banner of intolerance again today, perhaps the question ought to be, ‘why do they still bother now?’

Terror and the words we speak

Often the responses to a terror attack is even more notable than the attack itself. As are the words in which they are expressed.

‘I spoke to him for more than five minutes,’ said a woman who approached one of the killers in yesterday’s fatal, meat-cleaver attack on a soldier in Woolwich, South London. ‘I asked him why he had done what he had done.’

Quietly confronting an armed killer

The man she was talking to was still carrying the cleaver and he was bespattered with his victim’s blood. Despite that she showed exemplary courage, as well as calm good sense in asking the one question which really matters and to which we shall never get an adequate answer.

The Prime Minister has also spoken out, repeatedly, and each time has reiterated how ‘shocking’ he finds the event. Well, I think most of us agree. But does it need to be said so often? The aim of terrorists is to terrorise us. Perhaps fewer references to being shocked might give them less of a sense of success.

Much more appealing were the words of a Sikh from the neighbourhood interviewed on the radio this morning. He had been upset by the reaction of the extreme right English Defence League, who within hours were calling demonstrations to demand the return of their streets to them: the attackers were Muslims and therefore from a culture the EDL perceives as alien and to be driven out. The Sikh underlined the fact that though he was Indian, he wasn’t Muslim, and he’d been brought up on those streets – they were his just as much as they were the EDL’s.

What other words did the EDL come up with? Its leader proclaimed ‘They’re chopping our soldiers’ heads off. This is Islam. That’s what we’ve seen today.’

As it happens, no-one had his head chopped off, though apparently the attackers did try to decapitate their victim. But that was one victim. Notice how one soldier has become ‘soldiers’? So a one-off gruesome event is converted, by simple pluralisation, into part of a series of attacks. And then instead of being attributed to two profoundly misled Muslims, it’s attributed to the whole of Islam, even though community leaders up and down the country have denounced the atrocity. That, sadly, did not stop a couple of Mosques being attacked.

The men suspected of killing the soldier have been caught. They seem certain to be convicted of a vile murder and will doubtless spend most or even all of the rest of their lives in gaol. Let’s take that as the right way of dealing with the attack. Let’s not use that crime to fuel an Islamophobic campaign, whose target is one of our most law-abiding communities. Let’s not use it to stoke up the fires of anti-immigrant hatred that are already generating far more than enough heat.

After all, let’s go back to the lady who spoke so calmly to the attackers. Many in Woolwich reacted well to the murder, confronting the men calmly and with courage, and they have been saluted for it. But her case is particularly intriguing.

Her name was Ingrid Loyau-Kennet. The papers took delight in describing her as a ‘British Mum’, but I think the Britishness comes with the ‘Kennet’ part of her name. She explained in a radio interview this morning that she'd been travelling home from France when she made her stop in Woolwich, and both the accent in which she told us the story and the ‘Loyau’ in her name suggest that her roots are French.

That cool courage, in other words, was displayed by one of those immigrants so frequently denounced by the likes of the United Kingdom Independence Party and the English Defence League. And the French have automatic right of residence here thanks to that maligned organisation, the European Union. That’s the union UKIP and the EDL, and many in the Conservative Party, would like us to leave.

She, unlike the Prime Minister or the far right, found the behaviour and the words that were right when confronted with yesterday's horror. For my part, I’d be delighted if we could get a few more Loyau-Kennets here, from France, from Germany, from Poland, from Bulgaria. And I’d be more than happy to send a few EDL and UKIP leaders back the other way in exchange.

But that would be terribly unfair to the countries that had to accept them.

Consolation of Faith

Religious belief is a source of great consolation. Particularly in today’s complex world with all its miseries. Or so I’m told.

Let’s leave to one side the nagging doubt that makes me doubt that, even if it were true that faith was comforting, that wouldn’t necessarily make it true. I remember walking away from a funeral and being told by the deceased woman’s brother that he ‘couldn’t believe that she wasn’t still with us.’ Sadly, I felt that told me a lot more about him than it did about her.

Instead let's concentrate on just how much consolation faith really brings.

After all, for months now we’ve had constant debate about the rights of gay people to be treated equally in our Western democracies. Gay marriage ignited terrible animosities in Britain and worse ones still in France; in the US, it continues to excite controversy. I’m not sure that a belief system that labels gays as cursed brings much consolation even to its adherents, let alone to the gays themselves.

But all the vitriol over gay marriage is as nothing compared to two stories that featured on the news today.

With elections coming up in Pakistan, the BBC this morning chose to remind us of what happened in Quetta at the beginning of this year. A suicide bomber walked into a snooker hall and detonated his bomb, killing eight of the Hazara community living in the city. People ran to the site, volunteers as well as the emergency services. That was the moment the attackers set off a second bomb, attached to an ambulance. In all, 120 were killed.

Hazara Shia burying their dead

Why? Follow this carefully. Not many of us in the West know much about the distinction between Sunni and Shia Islam. To most people, Sunnis and Shiites are all justMuslims with some differences in detail of belief. But not, it seems, to certain Pakistani Sunnis. A legal party is running in the elections on a platform that wants Shiism designated non-Muslim. They don’t want the Shiites driven out of Pakistan, far less killed, so a candidate explained to the BBC, they just want them officially declared outside the faith.

It was that party’s armed wing that carried out the Quetta attacks.

What is the religion of the Hazara community? You guessed it. Overwhelmingly Shia. And short of consolation right now, I imagine.

This afternoon, the BBC turned its attention to the fighting now escalating in Burma. That nation seemed at last to be taking important steps towards a better way of life, with the release of Aung San Suu Kyi and a general relaxation of military control. But now sectarian fighting is raising ugly new concerns.

On Tuesday, a trivial accident occurred on a street in the town of Oakkan: a young woman on a bike collided with a monk. Infuriating, I’m sure, the kind of thing most of us might expect to react to with some well chosen expletives.

I remember the ghastly bike riders I came across in Amsterdam. Step into a cycle lane, and they bear down on you, bell ringing and insults turning the air blue around you. At least, I assume what I heard was insults, but Dutch is a bit like that, isn’t it? It can make anything sound like an expletive. Perhaps the cyclists were mouthing endearments, but on balance I doubt it.

Still, I didn’t feel inclined to respond to their behaviour by killing anyone or burning down their houses. But the cyclist in Tuesday’s incident in Burma was Muslim, so Buddhist monks went on the rampage, attacking mosques, burning down houses, killing one person and injuring nine.

Muslim houses burning after Buddhist violence in Burma

Read that sentence again. That’s Buddhist monks. If any religion is committed to peace and non-violence, surely it’s Buddhism. But in Burma monks are going out in gangs to terrorise Muslims. Leaving them presumably as disconsolate as the Shias in Quetta.

Remind me again. Religious faith is a source of consolation to us all. 

Have I got that right?

Farewell to the Golden Horn. For now.

We caught the plane home from Istanbul at what proclaimed itself ‘the best airport in the world’. I suppose false modesty is a character flaw and at least this was certainly free of any trace of it. 

Tourist patrol in Istanbul: policing with a smile
if you're not an unlicensed street trader

It reminded me of the time I was using Liverpool airport regularly. It was the run up to the city becoming European Capital of Culture. Signs inside the passenger terminal proudly informed us that we were in the ‘official airport’ of that capital. All I could wonder is how many other airports had competed for the title. Had Glasgow perhaps been pipped at the post, Birmingham mounted a plucky but ultimately forlorn challenge?

Fortunately, however great its airports, Istanbul has a lot more going for it than that. There are the seven hills: seven naturally since this was the location of new Rome and it had to have the same number of hills as the original, even though it’s not that clear what exactly counts as a hill. There three different seaways, including the Golden Horn which snakes right into the heart of the city. And there are magnificent buildings recalling the past grandeur Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman grandeur as well as illustrating the dynamism of one of Europe’s great modern capitals.

What made the trip most pleasant,though, were the people. Everywhere we went we found friendliness, courtesy and good cheer. Even when they jostle you on the trams, they apologise so fulsomely and with such a winning smile that it’s hard to bear a grudge.

That kindness was so widespread that we were a little surprised when a policeman on one of those three-wheeled stand-up scooters went straight past us as we were trying to ask for directions. But then, as soon as he’d achieved his objective of driving away a bottled water salesman, he came straight back to where we were standing.

‘You had a question?’ he asked with the ubiquitous disarming smile.

Not only did he answer our question, but he took us to the door of the place we were looking for, and as soon as he realised Danielle was French, he expressed all his joy over the departure of Sarkozy, which only endeared him all the more to us.

Overall, it feels a Liberal city. Take the example of women’s dress: there are women wearing the full black costume and face veil, but probably no higher a proportion than we meet back in Luton. A much larger number wear a headscarf and cover up so extensively that the heat must be uncomfortable. But the largest number dress like any other women in Europe.

Islamic observance was, however, the one area that feels upsetting. A friend from the city told us how he’d seen the number of women in full Islamic dress grow over the last fifteen years. In itself, that’s not a problem. Where it becomes one is when the strict believers decide that they’re on to such a good thing, they ought to impose it on others. We’re seeing that in Western Europe too, in the slighter wackier fringe sects of Christianity, such as the upper echelons of the Catholic Church in Scotland.

With an Islamist government in power, however moderate, there has to be concern over wether Turkey can retain its vibrancy by preserving its liberalism and tolerance of diversity.

On our final day the city came up with another glimpse of its warm heart. As we were waiting in the hotel lobby to leave for the world’s best airport, a basil plant was delivered to reception.

‘What was that about?’ we asked.

‘The City distributes them to every single household, to help celebrate the Spring.’

A small gesture of generosity by the public authorities, without utilitarian value, only because it can spread a little goodwill.

Now that’s something that wouldn’t go down amiss in our own societies either, would it?