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.

A young girl measures human progress

A picture in today’s Guardian caught my attention. 

From the Guardian of 11 August

I wondered what different people might see in it. I imagine most of us would see a young girl. A child.

If we looked a little closer, we might think she was sleeping peacefully, although the setting – adults and other children sitting behind her, wide awake, and frightened – might suggest that she was actually sleeping in exahustion. I still hope that most of us, if we were present, would want to do nothing worse to her than lower our voices so she could keep on sleeping.

If we then read the article, we would discover that a large group of men in Iraq, where she comes from, would have wanted to do far more than that. They would have seen in her a target, a Satan-worshipper, and they would have been driven by a holy zeal to do God’s work, into killing her or forcibly converting her to Sunni Islam. After conversion, she would have been reduced to slavery.

I don’t think there’s much to rule out in the list of things that could be done to a young girl who’s made a slave by the Islamic State.

All that because she’s a Yazidi. That indeed is why she is where she is in the photo, and exhausted. She’s just completed a draining trek to safety in Kurdistan, from a home invaded by the IS militants.

The safety’s only relative, because it depends on the ability of the Kurdish Peshmerga to hold IS at bay. Equally, though she’s lucky to have escaped – many thousands of others have not – that luck is also relative: she is now entering onto the misery of life as a refugee, dependent on charity, with neither a home nor a living to support her.

So we should amend our view of the photo again. An exhausted, unfortunate young girl, we might say.

If she were from Gaza and not Iraq, she might not now be the deliberate target of a terrorist movement, but she would be in serious danger nonetheless, as a potential victim of collateral damage by the Israeli Defence Forces, one of the world’s most powerful armies. She would be at risk because Israel has decided that, in its self-defence, it has every right to deploy hugely destructive firepower in densely populated areas. Anyone it kills as a result it views a regrettable but entirely legitimate casualty.

So again, let’s review our judgement. An exhausted, unfortunate young girl who doesn’t really matter much, even to people who claim to respect democracy and human rights.

Which adds up to a measure of just how far humanity has progressed down the tens of millennia. We live in a world in which many people feel that it is perfectly justified to snuff out the life of that little girl, or to cause her unbearable suffering. Some will act that way because they believe it is the will of God. Others out of indifference to her fate. Yet others to gratify some deeply deformed appetite.

Humanity will have reached a state we can call civilised the day we can look at such a sleeping young girl, and the only thing any of us would want to do to her, is cover her with a blanket.

What genocide really feels like, by a prospective victim

Yesterday I wrote about what genocide really means, when the word isn’t being thrown around as a simple term of abuse to hurl at anyone using brutal and excessive force to achieve military ends.

Today my blood ran cold as I heard a man facing the prospect of real genocide being perpetrated against his people, and specifically himself. He was facing that fate not at some indefinite date in the future, but within a few hours. If you’re reading this in the evening of 8 August, there’s every likelihood that the speaker is dead, killed by foes so pitiless that he would rather have the international community bomb him than die at their hands.

If he’s killed, it will not be for anything he’s done, but for what he is: a member of the Yazidi faith in Northern Iraq. 

This is my transcript of what he told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme this morning. I give it without comment: I feel it provides commentary enough in itself.

Yazidis on Mount Sinjar
Awaiting death by thirst, or by Isis

Currently our situation is very catastrophic. We don’t have any food, we don’t have any water. In the last couple of days, I’ve seen 22 children who died because of the lack of food and water, and I’ve seen  also four or five women and men who died because of the lack of supplies. We’re currently on the mountain surrounded on four different sides, and right now, while we’re speaking, there are clashes between Isis and a couple of our people. I would also like to add that maybe you will not be able to contact me again, because I will be already killed.

The clashes now are very, very close to where I stand. Now there are clashes among the final line of resistance. There is a small checkpoint inside the mountain. If Isis defeat the defending forces there and advance by night, they will kill every one of us and all this ethnicity will be wiped out

It’s a matter of hours whether they manage to capture this last checkpoint by nightfall. They will kill all of us and we don’t think we have enough time.

We already fled because they killed more than 1000 people around the area and they captured also more than 200 women and girls.

Send us urgent help and urgent rescue because we are facing our certain death. If the international community can’t help us and send us urgent rescue, I want them to bomb us and wipe us out, because we would rather that than be captured or killed by Isis. They will have to live with the guilt they have. Because our time now has reached almost the end.

Gaza: you think that’s genocide? You ain’t seen nothing yet...

It’s interesting to see people throw the word “genocide” around when talking (or ranting) about the 2000 deaths at Israeli hands in Gaza. Indefensible, unjustifiable and quite probably criminal deaths. 2000 of them.

Let’s be absolutely clear.

Genocide is the deliberate extermination of a people. In other words, it’s the resolution of ethnic conflict by one people physically wiping out the other. Usually it’s accompanied by ethnic cleansing, where you can avoid being killed if you go away, abandoning everything you and possibly several generations before you have worked for, and settle for scraping a subsistence living in some miserable refugee camp somewhere.

Precisely that is happening right now, but not in Gaza. 130,000 members of the Yazidi sect have fled their main city of Sinjar in North West Iraq. 40,000 of them are now sitting on a mountain outside the city contemplating the unappealing alternatives of coming down and being murdered by Isis, or staying there and dying of thirst.

The Middle East's latest charmers: Isis at work in Iraq,
the nation where Bush accomplished his mission

Those who remain in the city have the third option of converting to Sunni Islam. That would certainly convince me. But then I prefer living on my knees to dying on my feet, on the basis that dying on your feet leaves you permanently on your back, whereas there is a chance of getting off your knees and back on your feet if you stay alive.

Even the figures of 130,000 and 40,000, shocking through they are, are on the smaller end of the scale of genocides. In Rwanda, for instance, estimates of deaths vary between 500,000 and a million. But Isis are just getting started. They showed their mettle by killing 1500 civilians in a single day (by comparison, it took the Israelis weeks to kill their 2200), and they have plenty of enemies other than the Yazidi: Shias (fellow Muslims), Christians, basically anyone who gets in their way.

Now it’s beyond a doubt that Israel has the capacity to be as genocidally effective as Isis. But if they had been in Gaza, there would have been hugely more deaths than there were. Whatever accusation we can make against the Israeli incursion, and we can accuse it of a great deal, charging it with genocide simply means ignoring what a genocide really is and what actually happened.

The UN has rightly said that the Israeli Defence Forces may have committed war crimes. It is, as I understand it, a crime to behave recklessly so that, even if an armed force is fighting legitimate military enemies, if it kills civilians through simple failure to take sufficient care, it has committed a war crime. That means no one needs to prove that they were deliberately targeting civilians: the mere fact that they didn’t take reasonable measures to protect them is enough.

It makes sense to investigate Israel on those charges. In the meantime, it would be a good move to suspend all arms exports to Israel. That might, indeed, force them to the table and oblige them to take a less violent line with their adversaries.

Nothing could be more necessary. That was brought home to me by an interview that John Alderdice, previously of the Alliance Party in Northern Ireland, gave to the BBC Today programme. With his experience of facilitating negotiations involving Protestant paramilitaries and the IRA in Ulster, he has no qualms about negotiating with terrorists. Indeed, he believes such negotiations are vital. He has personally held discussions, relatively recently, with Khaled Meshaal, the leader of Hamas. Here’s what Alderdice said:

I understand the perspective that Israelis have. I would also of course say, “well there’s not much evidence that the Israeli Government’s way of working has actually helped.” And from a very early stage, one of the things that was part of the discussion, was that Hamas was saying, “look we’re prepared to engage, we’re prepared to engage in a kind of Western democratic style of things, and free and fair elections and forming governments, and even coalitions, and all of these kinds of things. If however this becomes impossible, we will not change our commitment to that, but we can let you know that there are people in our wider community who in any case want to burn the system not work the system.” So in the same kind of way as not engaging with Fatah for many years led to the rise of Hamas, trying to destroy Hamas will simply create something else.

Chilling words. And a salutary warning to us all. Israel’s decades-long attempt to crush Fatah led to the emergence of the far more vicious and dangerous Hamas. Now their long battle against Hamas may lead to something far worse still.

What might that far worse thing be?

Alderdice was in no doubt:

…and we’re seeing it developing: with Isis.

The fruits of Israel’s action is to generate the most violent and terrifying terrorist organisation the Middle East has yet seen. Israel’s action and that of the Western Powers in invading Iraq. And in time, it will be targeting the West as well as Israel.

Anyone who thinks what we’ve seen in Gaza over the last few weeks was genocide needs to think again. Because it’s going to fade into insignificance compared to what we may see in the months ahead. And let’s remember that it’s been brought into existence by Israel’s recklessness and our support for it.

That’s the biggest danger. Our task is to understand it, so that we can do something about it. And misusing terms like genocide to make them simple insults only muddies the waters.