RUTHFULLY YOURS

“Since 2013, Bangladesh has experienced a series of violent attacks by extremists. The victims have included besides atheists, secular bloggers, liberals and foreigners — many Buddhists, Christians and Hindus as well as Ahmadis and Shia Muslims.” — Minority Rights Group International.

“A new school of Islam from Saudi Arabia is transforming South Asia’s religious landscape. Wahhabism, a fundamental Sunni school of Islam originating in Saudi Arabia, entered South Asia in the late 1970s. With public and private Saudi funding, Wahhabism has steadily gained influence among Muslim communities throughout the region. As a result, the nature of South Asian Islam has significantly changed in the last three decades. The result has been an increase in Islamist violence in Pakistan, Indian Kashmir, and Bangladesh.” — Georgetown Security Studies Review, 2014.

Minority communities across Bangladesh are once again facing violence and persecution by the Sunni Muslim majority. In the last month or so, dozens of Hindu temples have been vandalized and hundreds of houses burned down by Muslims in different districts across the nation.

In one incident alone, a group of Muslims carried out attacks that left more than 100 injured and several hundred victims homeless. Hindus, at 9% of the total population the largest religious minority in Bangladesh, were targeted in the attack on October 30, about 120 km from the capital city, Dhaka. Muslims, led by two Islamic organizations — the Tawheedi Janata (“Faithful People”) and Ahle Sunnat-Wal-Jamaat –vandalized more than 15 temples and 200 houses belonging to Hindus. Violence continued a few days later, when, on November 5, extremists repeated similar attacks in the same area despite police “vigilance.”

A day before the attacks began, a rumor circulated that a 27-year-old Hindu man named Rasraj Das edited a photograph superimposing the Hindu God Shiva onto an image of the Kaaba (the holiest site in Islam) and posted it on his Facebook page. Within hours of the post, he was caught by local Muslims and handed over to the police. Prior to his arrest, Das pleaded his innocence on his Facebook page, saying:

“At first I am apologizing to Muslim brothers because someone has posted a photograph from my facebook account without my knowledge. When I came to know yesterday night (October 28), I deleted it immediately. Here we live side by side as Hindu-Muslim brothers, I have no such mentality and of course I don’t have such imprudent courage.”

Yet the uproar of the Muslim community was not appeased, and on October 30, shortly after the early morning prayer, religious Muslims, in the name of “hurting Muslims’ feelings,” called on fellow Muslims, using loudspeakers from the neighboring mosques, to come out to retaliate. According to some witnesses, the local administration and police had a nonchalant attitude and did not intervene to protect the minority community.

The United Church of Christ (UCC) published a guide to Israel-Palestine affairs in August and again in September 2016. Entitled, “Promoting a Just Peace in Palestine-Israel”, this toxic document is a desperately one-sided, inaccurate, and counter-factual exercise in futile politics. It most certainly does not favour justice or peace in the Holy Land, as its contents show on every page.

The naïvety of the UCC is particularly striking in its choice to take at face value the Palestinian statement that if Israel ended its occupation peace would follow as day follows night. When, after 1949, Gaza was occupied by Egypt and the West Bank by Jordan, no one protested, no one attacked Egyptians or Jordanians. In other words, Israel occupied only itself. But Palestinian terrorism against Israelis continued up to 1967, right through the period of Israeli non-occupation. There were no “settlements” then. Rather, the Palestinians have always regarded all of Israel as one big “settlement.” Just look at any Palestinian maps; they cover both the entirety of Israel and the Palestinian territories.

Unfortunately, the Palestinians have a history of regarding every retreat by Israel as a triumph of aggression over diplomacy, as if to say: We shoot at Israelis and they leave; so let’s keep doing it.

In its introduction, the UCC, knowing full well that Israel has not occupied Gaza since 2005, still speaks of “the Israeli military occupation of the Occupied Palestinian Territories: the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza.”

The UCC Guide states flatly that “Israeli settlements in the West Bank are identified as illegal by the international community” — even though international law says exactly the opposite. The West Bank and Gaza were both occupied as a result of a defensive war against Egypt and Jordan in 1967, in which the Israelis were victorious. It is never illegal to occupy territory obtained in defensive military action.

The Palestinians not only reject all offers of peace on that basis but go much farther and call every day for the abolition of Israel and the creation of a Palestinian state covering Gaza, Israel, and the West Bank.

The UCC Guide states that “Israel has built hundreds of permanent and mobile military checkpoints throughout the West Bank.” This, again, is pure fantasy. In 2015, there were no more than fifteen checkpoints across the West Bank. These checkpoints are not there to target innocent Palestinians. They are there to restrain terrorists from setting out to kill innocent Israelis. The only people to criticize the checkpoints across Northern Ireland during the many years of terrorism there were supporters of the Provisional IRA, who apparently did not like being obstructed from killing people.

On December 9, Geert Wilders was found guilty by a Dutch court of “incitement to anti-minority discrimination.” His crime was asking a crowd in The Hague in 2014, “Do you want more or fewer Moroccans in this city and in the Netherlands?” “Fewer, fewer!” came the reply, to which he responded: “I’ll take care of that!” That was enough to get Wilders arrested and put on trial nine months ago, and convicted last Friday.

Wilders called the verdict “madness” and promised to fight back, but other Europeans accused of deviant thoughts are not as sanguine. In late 2015, Christoph Biro, editor-in-chief of Austria’s top-circulation daily, the Kronen Zeitung, was charged with “hate speech” for writing that “young men, testosterone-fueled Syrians, carry out extremely aggressive sexual attacks.” Only weeks later, the New Year’s Eve orgy of rape and sexual assaults by Muslim immigrants in Germany and elsewhere in Europe provided ample empirical evidence of Biro’s assertions. He nevertheless had to take a month-long leave of absence, and was subsequently pressurized into confessing, Moscow-1936-style, that he had “lost a sense of proportion.” That will not save him from standing trial in Graz next year.

The writing on Europe’s wall was clear a decade ago, when the late Oriana Fallaci—for decades Italy’s best-known journalist—was indicted in the Italian city of Bergamo for “hate crimes” and “defaming Islam.” Fallaci, a self-described “Christian atheist” and a leftist, in the aftermath of 9/11 had become an outspoken foe of Europe’s Islamization. Her 2002 book The Rage and the Pridecaused a sensation. It is not just the Western culture and way of life that the jihadist hates, she wrote. Blinded as they are by cultural myopia, the Westerners should understand that a war of religion was in progress, a war that the enemy calls Jihad, which seeks the disappearance of our freedom and our civilization. It wants to annihilate, she wrote,

. . . our way of living and dying, our way of praying or not praying, our way of eating and drinking and dressing and entertaining and informing ourselves. You don’t understand or don’t want to understand that if we don’t oppose them, if we don’t defend ourselves, if we don’t fight, the Jihad will win . . . And with that it will destroy our culture, our art, our science, our morals, our values, our pleasures.

The most heartening poll of the post-Brexit era was published by YouGov last week. It shows that 68 per cent of people want Britain to crack on with Brexit. That’s a pretty clear majority in favour of enacting the June referendum result. Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of Leave voters who responded to the poll said we should get on with leaving the EU, but strikingly so did around half of Remain respondents. That is, a great swathe of the people who on 23 June expressed a desire to stay with Brussels recognise that there’s something more important than their political preferences: democracy; the right of a majority within a nation to shape that nation’s political destin

There are many positive things about this poll. There’s its suggestion that, outside of the anti-Brexit bubble of the political class, business world and liberal media, a great chunk of people still understand that democracy is important. There’s its wiseness to the anti-democratic swindle of a second referendum: 59% said the call for a second referendum is ‘illegitimate’. There’s its scepticism about the insistence that parliament must get to pore over Brexit: 47 per cent to 36 per cent think the government should probably enact Brexit now.

But perhaps the most positive thing in the poll is what it tells us about that new political tribe ‘the 48%’, which presents itself as the voice of the 16.1million people who voted Remain. It tells us this tribe doesn’t really exist. That it’s a cynical fabrication of a small elite that merely uses the 16.1million as a cover to pursue its own self-interested agenda.

‘The 48%’ fancies itself as an edgy, rebellious movement. ‘We’re the insurgents now’, says Tony Blair. Blair, who has openly discussed the possibility of stopping Brexit, poses as the spokesman for a revolution when he says there should be ‘a new movement born from the 48%’ and it must ‘mobilise and organise’.

On social media, journalists and campaigners plaster their photos with stickers saying ‘I am the 48%’. There’s now a ‘newspaper of the 48%’, The New European, a superbly snooty affair whose first issue was adorned with a photo of two slovenly Leave voters plonked on a couch as their pet dog wonders why ‘these idiots’ voted against the EU (dogs being cleverer than plebs).

Who will speak for the 48%?’, cries The Economist. That bible of the business elite says ‘the 48%’ are actually probably ‘a majority of the British population’ — not all Remainers turned out to vote, or something — and these millions of ‘big-city dwellers, Millennials, globe-trotters, university students… [and] perfectly Middle-England types’ need to have their concerns about leaving the EU heeded, perhaps even as a means of softening Brexit. Keir Starmer, Labour’s anti-Brexit shadow Brexit secretary — like having someone who hates education in charge of education — says ‘the 48% feel they’re being written out of their own history’.

Does ‘the 48%’ really feel this? All 16.1million? Of course not. There is no movement of the 48 per cent. There’s no mass desire to thwart Brexit. As that YouGov poll shows, a nice majority thinks democracy should take its course. The vast majority of both Leavers and Remainers, having made their political views plain on 23 June, are now getting on with life again. One side has not launched an insurgency against the other, except in Blair’s febrile imagination. ‘The 48%’ is an utter invention, a front for tiny but influential cliques that want to appear at least semi-democratic as they seek to thwart Brexit. Let’s call them by their real name: the 0.48%. Actually, that might be too generous. Perhaps the 0.048%.

The brilliant democratic cry of the Levellers remains unanswered

It is arguable that democracy as we know it, the modern, much fought-for ideal that a people should be sovereign over itself, was born in a pokey church in Putney in south-west London. There, in St Mary’s, by the Thames, members of the New Model Army that fought on the side of parliament against the king in the English Civil War met in 1647. They spent 15 days, from 28 October to 11 November, discussing the constitutional set-up of a new, freer Britain, the fate of the king, and the idea, put forward by more radical attendees, that there should be manhood suffrage — that is, one man, one vote; a parliament elected by all men, including poor men. For two weeks the church fizzed with ideas and proposals that would reverberate not only across Britain, but around the world, inspiring American revolutionaries, French revolutionaries and others to depose of rotten regimes and stagger towards democracy. The church is still there, and emblazoned on its wall is perhaps the key cry of the more radical elements who gathered in it 350 years ago: ‘The poorest hee that is in England hath a life to live as the greatest hee.’

‘The poorest hee hath a life to live as the greatest hee.’ It was a plea for the franchise for all men, regardless of station or wealth or even intellect. The words were uttered by Thomas Rainsborough, an MP for Droitwich in Worcestershire and a leading spokesman for a group called the Levellers in these Putney Debates, as history has recorded them. Rainsborough continued: ‘I think it clear, that every Man that is to live under a Government ought first by his own Consent to put himself under that Government; and I do think that the poorest man in England is not at all bound in a strict sense to that Government that he hath not had a voice to put Himself under.’ It was a searingly radical idea then, and arguably remains radical now: that even the poorest, least well-educated person should not be ruled by any institution whose existence he has not in some way consented to. It was the expression of a new idea — or rather of an old idea stretching back to Athens, but lost for millennia, in a new form. And it’s no exaggeration to say, as one historian does, that this proposal in a church to enfranchise ‘the poorest hee’ became ‘the spark that was to light the fire which eventually razed centuries of tyranny, monarchy, feudalism and oligarchy’, not only in England, but beyond (1). Around the world, ‘the poorest hee’ forced himself into public life, rudely intruded on history, remade the political world.

The Levellers were not an especially coherent group on the parliamentarian side in the Civil War. They were also not the most radical body in this most brilliant and tumultuous of periods in English history. The Diggers, for example, a collection of Protestant radicals who called themselves True Levellers, went further in terms of agitating for a wholly open politics and even economic equality. But the Levellers’ case for democracy, and for the thing that is essential to democracy, freedom of the press, stands as the most articulate and long-lasting cry of the Civil War. It’s also an unanswered cry. It helped to raze tyrannies, and moved millions, yes, but it remains unfulfilled. The Levellers’ proposals, or questions, on how the sovereignty of the people should be embodied and exercised, and why all ‘hees’, not just the ‘greatest hee’, should get to steer the fate of the nation, and why press freedom must be unfettered and unpunished if we are genuinely to have an open, democratic politics, remain unsettled, remain unresolved. Indeed, events of 2016, in particular the rash, unforgiving reaction of the elites to Brexit and the ill-educated ‘hees’ who voted for it, show that the ideas pushed by the Levellers in that church 350 years ago are still controversial; they’re the unfinished business of history brimming under the terra firma of our polite politics; they’re yet to be won.

The ideas pushed by the Levellers in that church 350 years ago are still controversial; they’re the unfinished business of history brimming under the terra firma of our polite politics

The English Civil War was in fact three wars, which took place between 1642 and 1651. They were wars over the manner of government in England, pitting parliamentarians, or Roundheads, against royalists, or Cavaliers. Their impact was extraordinary. There was the execution of Charles I in 1649. There was the complete replacement of the monarchy with a Commonwealth of England from 1649 to 1653, and then a Protectorate from 1653 to 1659, through which Oliver Cromwell, the key commander of the parliamentarian forces, and later his son became Lord Protector — effectively dictator — of England, Scotland and Ireland. In 1660, the monarchy was restored, with Charles II put on the throne; but his successor, James II, was then deposed in 1688 by the specially arranged coup of an invasion of England by the Protestant William of Orange from the Netherlands, who ruled under terms set by parliament. These terms imposed dramatic limits on royal power. And so, following years of conflict and monarchical rearrangement, was the supremacy of parliament established.