RosieBell

The New Philistines

Review of The New Philistines: How Identity Politics Disfigures the Arts by Sohrab Ahmari

The Philistines identified by Matthew Arnold had a narrow and reductive view of the arts as only good if they upheld a particular morality. The 1890s and the aesthetic movement upturned them, the aesthetes were despised by the Social Realists in the 30s, who were taken on by the liberal creatives bursting out in the sixties, the New Leftists returned, along with the feminists, with shock and political art and now the identitarians have moved in. The identitarians are Ahmari's New Philistines, who judge, and sometimes make, art via their ideology, caring about the political point rather than craft or beauty. His contention that they dominate the culture is reinforced by how his frequent use of “beauty” and “truth” now seem antiquated as critical terms.

Ahmari has a reverential attitude towards high art, so Part I of his readable polemic, Intruders in the Temple, tells of how he was affronted by a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream at The Globe. Emma Rice was the director and it included a sound-and-light show, a gay male Helena and the love juices were date rape drugs. I share his pain as I too have ground my teeth at a goose-stepping Coriolanus, say (Coriolanus is not a Fascist, and it made no sense). Directors making stupid political points are as annoying as hectoring comedians.

However for every modish production of a Shakespeare play with a Hoxton-hipster Hermia there's a straightforward, well-acted piece in robes and furred gowns. In the RSC production of King Lear I saw the other night Anthony Sher was a mound of pelt. Although the director had rehearsed it during Brexit, and thought there were parallels with bad decision-making and a union falling apart he did not present Cordelia as Angela Merkel nor Goneril as Theresa May and left us to draw the modern parallels about power and powerlessness and the times being disturbed.

It shows a particular cultural strength that the educated Shakespearean audience sees interpretations as variations on a theme, because the plays are so well known, as Athenian play goers liked to see what a playwright would do with the myth of Orestes or Dionysus.

I can't get too holy about Shakespeare. He has his longueurs and a lot of his humour is lost with his language so the actors have to force out laughs with cod-fingering. Cuts can be enhancements. There are plenty of excellent productions including those broadcast at local cinemas by the RSC and the terrific Wars of the Roses series on the BBC a while back.

Ahmari does make a good thrust about shallow gimmickry in theatre productions:-

The bhangra and Bollywood numbers, and actors of south Asian heritage in two leading parts, suggested an Indian sensibility. Now a Midsummer with a well-developed south-Asian concept – juxtaposing or blending say, the rich mythology of the subcontinent with English folklore – might have worked well. Such a concept would have required a sincere, rigorous encounter with these sources. Yet identitarian art is rarely capable of such engagement. The texture and weight of genuine difference elude art of this kind, with its ironic posturing and tendency towards the flattening pastiche. Identitarian art rarely manages to raise marginalise and 'subaltern' voices. Doing so successfully requires really listening to such voices in all their rich complexity – whereas identiarian art usually searches for subaltern props with which to bash the 'dominant' culture. Opposing the 'oppressive' mainstream is more important than examining the peripheral as it really is.

Actually I do wonder that Emma Rice wasn't castigated for cultural appropriation by Indians, or someone purporting to speak for Indians. These fashions change so fast. Emma Rice however will not be around to do brash shows based on Shakespearean texts. She has had her marching orders because her use of neon lighting is against the spirit of The Globe. The Guardian thinks that is a bad idea, and The Spectator a good. So it goes in culture-land.

Ahmari finds a parallel with other ideological arts e.g Socialist realism but “Say what you will about the Soviet critics, at least they were erudite. Not so with today's identitarian critics, who care little for art history and aesthetics. What they are blessed with is lots of opinions about everything – all of which invariably revolve around race, gender and class, power and privilege.”

I've seen just such criticism of the gooey headed Corbynistas from dialectic trained old Trots about the Corbys' lack of hard analysis. Unlike Victorian evangelists and Marxists, the identitarians have no authoritative scripture to use as a measure for their particular world view – Foucault comes closest, but Ahmari does not find his identitarians actually quoting so much as osmosing, which he lays out in the second part of his polemic, The Illiberal Imagination. This follows discussions at Artforum. I found it a useful primer for such terms as “queer”, “performative”, “visibility” and “legibility” (something lots of people want to see and enjoy).

Liberal societies have increased “visibility” in the form of social and political rights, and liberal-minded writers were part of this process eg the authors of Uncle Tom's Cabin and Oliver Twist. And as far as visibility is concerned the marginalised have moved more towards the centre. The RSC's King Lear had a lot of black actors without making any identitarian big deal about it and that would not have happened a generation ago. And those who fulminate against political corrrectness, would once have grumbled about a black Edmund and Cordelia.

Ahmari has fun with the appalling jargon his Artforumites use and its view of art as “a place where we can treat the self as historical and social material”. This particular idea has permeated through to artists whose work he goes to see in the third chapter. Some have talent but, “their curiosity is limited by politics; identitarian politics takes away their freedom to explore great big questions in an uninhibited way; without pre-determined answers and concepts. Foucault, hardline feminism and queer theory wrap their art like a straitjacket. If their English grammar sounds broken, it is because their creative grammar is, too, and the source of the brokenness is the same.”

His tour of identitarian art – videos and installations – and dance – political twerking – is amusingly terrible. My own experience of such things – neon tubes of slogans repeating banalities and amateurish looking videos saying things that are neither new nor true – has sent me along the road to the museum of handsome and interesting artefacts. The audience for this work is the highly educated white liberals that it castigates, the ones who take city breaks in grand European cities who have preserved their past.

Of course fashions change. “The Great Wall of Vagina”, plaster-casting 500 women's sexual organs that Ahmari evokes may be deemed to be transphobic in a year or two, and Judy Chicago's Dinner Party, which used a vagina theme in ceramics, is beautiful as well as polemical. Ideological art does not mean ugliness of course- as demonstrated by the great mass of Christian and Islamic art.  So the ugliness may come from lack of craft as anything else. That may be the fault of the art schools, as well as the zeitgeist. Also, while the subsidised galleries and the grant receiving artists may be at work on such things the commercial artists will be turning out posters and cards of quite a different complexion for the mass market. Modern culture is definitely not all of a piece, nor stagnant.

Ahmari's last chapter is about the effects of this ideological art on our society. “Ideas that being with elite, avant-garde institutions invariably trickle down to popular culture, then go on to impact our daily lives.” and he instances criticisms of eg Downton Abbey (which deserves it – the servant class was not treated with anything like that consideration but caste superiority has to be prettied up for the modern audience). Downton Abbey may be castigated by someone in the Guardian but it will be made as long as it makes money and Julian Fellows is ready to turn out scripts.

He thinks identitarian politics is responsible for the rise of white-rage politics of Trump and UKIP.

Is it any wonder, then, that Americans and Europeans are increasingly embracing nationalist parties and illiberal movements?..

Having been told for decades that the promise of universal rights is a lie, that group identity is all that there is to public life, that the Western canon is the preserve of Privileged Dead White Men, and that identitarian warfare is permanent, many in the West have taken up their own form of identity politics. .. When culture only rewards the assertion of group identity (black, female, queer etc.), the silent majority will want its slice of the identitarian pie. They can do identity politics, too; it's called white nationalism. ..

Surely identitarianism is a muted annoyance compared to eg mass migration, demographic changes, a globalised economy and the sense of the world is becoming a more dangerous place. But the cause and effect of culture and politics is a large subject. In crude terms, far more read The Sun and the Daily Mail than get annoyed by The Guardian.

“To repair our politics, we could do worse than to start by expecting better from our arts and culture.”- is Ahmari's final call, and that really is the chicken-and-the-egg. I would expect a generational shift for talent and brains will break out of a strait-jacket and they're at work somewhere on a hub near you. Our society does have teeth and a stomach and it's a wonder what it can digest.

After reading Ahmari I re-read Robert Hughes' Culture of Complaint, which has a similar theme, and is richer and funnier from someone wholly engaged with the art world. It was published in 1992 and how little has moved on from then. What Hughes calls political correctness, we now call identity politics but they are essentially the same thing, constant language policing, a favourite target for conservative satirists.

Satire loves to fasten on manners and modes, which is what PC [political correctness] talk is, political etiquette, not politics itself. When the waters of PC recede – as they presently will, leaving the predictable scum of dead words on the social beach – it will be, in part, because young people get turned off by all the carping about verbal proprieties on campus. The radical impulses of youth are generous, romantic and instinctive and are easily chilled by an atmosphere of prim, obsessive correction. The real problem with PC isn't 'post-Marxism”, but post-Puritanism.

Generous, romantic and instinctive I'd like to believe but what is reported from the universities is an equal impulse for correction, censoriousness and righteousness. And against the post-Puritanism is the post-Restoration of the alt right and Milo Yiannopoulos.

So though not as apocalyptic as Ahmari, I do share some of his concerns. It is a chronic condition for liberalism to be in danger as it is an unnatural state for a tribal species and it has plenty of enemies, whether the new Red Guards of identitarianism,, the Islamic Fascists and their idiot enablers, the Guardian Cultural Sensitives, the Lock-em-Up Tabloids, and a whiff of blasphemy laws from the government.

“It's a free country,” we would say self-righteously at my primary school during disagreements. That sentence had a long political and cultural history behind it. Do they still say it now?

The Revolutionary Guard do Facebook, Not Twitter

I caught this on the World Service programme BBC Trending. It starts at 9:35 

Ayatollah Tanasoli, is an Iranian, whose pseudonym translates as “Genitals” or “Penis”. He writes in Farsi but here's one of his tweets:- 

invenTION OF iSLAMIC tWITTER ayatollah TaNasoli will tweit in England now womane dont come

From the interview:-

India (presenter): ...the man behind the page started this Facebook less than two years ago and he's got 20,000 likes. He's also got about 7,000 followers on Twitter. That might not seem that big, … but it is for an Iranian account and lots of the followers are from Iran. It is a country where many people are afraid of aligning themselves perhaps with satire and criticism. …

He pokes fun at their teachings, the sermons, their fatwahs. Here's a flavour of some of the tweets:-

Islam values women's rights, especially those women who give birth to male children.

We condemn any sort of violence, but the violence we commit ourselves

If they had Islamic democracy in France as we do, those cartoonists would not be assassinated like that, but they would be hanged 10 years earlier.

In our governing system, the more illiterate you are, the more progress you make.

India interviews Ayatollah T, using an actor's voice so he won't be identified:-

AT: It is mandatory for Iranian boys to go to military service after they graduate from high school or college and basically you don't have any training, they just want to keep you there but they don't know how to fill your time so they bring in all these mullahs to talk to you. They just gather you in these mosques and soldiers just sit there for a couple of hours or so. The stuff they say about the West, the internet, satellites and all this is so absurd and crazy that it makes you laugh. It is really easy to make fun of so that;'s what I did during my breaks in the army. I created this character. People would come to me, and they'd say, give us a sermon, give us a speech, and that mullah became very popular.

…

[G]rowing up in Iran and going to a school... they brainwash you at a very early age not to make fun of the government or religion and you grow up and you reach a point where you realise why am I listening to this. For Iranian young people the only place we can express ourselves is on line and even that is dangerous. There is no free newspaper, there are no gatherings.

India:- Are you in Iran?

AT: I don't want to answer that.

India: Your followers, are they in Iran?

AT: Some of them are, and some of them are not. Let me give you what has happened in the past two years in social media. At the beginning, it was very good when people trusted each other and they found friends through Twitter, it was like a gang, but eventually the government managed to infiltrate the groups and when they started arresting users on Facebook and Twitter that's when it became very dangerous and I decided to create a character.

India: On your feed you are mocking religious leaders and you are against the government. Are you not worried about yourself?

AP: But I am worried. Everybody is worried.

India: And do you not worry that some of your tweets are going to upset other Muslims?

AP: That's my intention. I want them to be upset. I want them to think. The first thing that people in the Middle East and Iran should understand is that nothing is offensive, nothing is sacred, nothing is supernatural, and when they understand that then I think a lot of problems will be solved.

India: What sort of response do you get to your tweets?

AT: I don't want to brag but I get a lot. On Facebook every day I get more than five or six emails and they all say we love what you're doing. I realise that a lot of people are thinking like me, and they think okay, he said what we wanted to say.

India: Have you received any negative reaction or any threats?

AT: Oh yes, especially on Facebook because the Sepah, the Revolutionary Guard right now they're on Facebook and not so much on Twitter. I get a lot of emails, contact. They just want to make you scared. They say, we know where you are, and your mother is a whore and your sister is a whore and we will find you and we will rape them and we will kill you but I know they are lying. And they think that that way I will stop and I won't tweet any more but that doesn't work for me.

India: Do you think they are from the government?

AT: Most of them are because I go back and I check their profiles and I know about a fake very fast.

India: Do you think what you are doing is jeopardising other people who have a voice on line? [The “provocative” and “responsible” gambit.]

AT: No. I think what they do is jeopardising what I do. After I started this other people created similar characters and some of them tried to contact me saying, Oh let's start a hashtag or create a campaign, and I said to them, don't contact me because it's dangerous. Wherever you are, good luck and keep doing this. Trust no-one.

…

India: Here he's talking about a Facebook user called Soheil Arabi.  He's currently in the notorious Evin prison in Tehran where he's been for the last year. His posts were quite political. They were criticising the Islamic revolution for example. But he has now been charged with insulting the Prophet Mohammad, which carries the death penalty. So I asked the man behind the Ayatollah Tanasoli account what he thought about what's happened.

AT: This is a tragedy. This is so against everything that humanity stands for. We have to defend freedom of speech. And then the nuclear thing and all other stuff will follow. If you forget about this basic thing, you are going against the direction of history and I cry sometimes at night thinking about it. I'm sorry. I don't know. People don't understand how tragic this is.

India: You must feel quite powerless to do anything because you write and publish on social media too.

AT: Well, it's like other people are laughing at my jokes, but when you are not allowed to tell people who you are, you are in a solitary prison with no windows out and you are screaming. And you are happy because you are so loud but nobody can hear you and it doesn't change anything.

India: Do you think you will see a day when you can reveal your identity?

AT: I truly hope so. It's just the fact that we do all this and we are forced to be hidden from the government. It makes you feel that you are different from the rest of the world, like you're not part of the world. And yet I hope some day people can be who they are, Be who they want to be and say what they want to say.

(I suppose that would seem very naive – sorry unnuanced – to a certain kind of Westerner. Will Self, one of our most prominent intellectuals, drawls that free speech is like a sexual fetish. I don't know if anyone made such a howl of longing for sado-masochism and cross-dressing as this man does for liberty.)

I transcribed this piece thinking it was one small thing I could do.

Punching up, punching down

Re Charlie Hebdo:-

“The point of satire is to attack the powerful, to expose their hypocrisy and absurdity, and of course to be funny. If satire is directed downwards it is not satire, it’s bullying.

So doubly wrong there Tim Sanders at the Socialist Review. (H/T Tendance Coatesy - do read his whole piece)

Two elementary objections:-

1. Mohammad and Islam are very powerful - to a gruesome degree in some places; 
2. It's not the point of satire to attack the powerful. The point of satire is to ridicule absurdities. It's not just the powerful that are absurd.

Tim Sanders belongs to some left wing groupuscule. I suppose he'd admit that left wing groupuscules are (sadly) not powerful. They had the piss gloriously taken out of them in The Life of Brian with the The People's Front of Judaea vs the Judaean People's Front.

Here's a video clip to refute his argument:-

 

1. It's funny – one of the funniest scenes in one of the funniest films
2. It attacks the powerless – who happen to be absurd in this instance. In fact their powerlessness is part of their being ridiculous.

However word seems to be getting about that satire MUST attack the powerful otherwise it isn't really satire - punching up against punching down. Will Self said something incoherent about this on Channel 4 (both he and Martin Rowson are purgative – see them fisked here.)

“You always have to ask with something that purports to be satire, who is it attacking? Are they people in a position of power? And if it’s attacking people in a position of power, is it giving comfort to people who are powerless and who are assaulted in some sense by those powerful people? This is not the dynamic with Islamist terrorists, they are not in power in our society, and it is not comforting the people who look at these cartoons whether in Charlie Hebdo or in newspapers here, they don’t feel better about themselves or about life to see Islamist terrorists mocked or the beliefs of Muslims in general mocked - why does it make anybody feel better?”

Islamists do have power within our society. In that interview the cartoonist Rowson said he wouldn't draw Mohammad in case staff at newspapers got killed, i.e. he obeys the assassins' veto.  Pissing off Islamists and their followers seems as morally imperative as pissing off David Cameron and his – except that David Cameron won't execute you out of hand.

When Rageboy was in one of his fits about a crappy film - those fits which would be funny if they weren't sinister, it made me feel better to knock this cartoon up.  Caption:- Film Critics Revolt

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Self teaches contemporary thought at Brunel University but his notions of satire seemed to have stopped at Spitting Image. One thing to notice about modern culture, as I thought last night when watching Charlie Brooker's Screen Wipes, which twists the tail of the ordinary glazed-eyed citizen as well as world leaders, is how it is flooded with satire, with piss-taking, with smart-arsery, with Reddit, and Cracked and Weird Al Yankovic. It's the modern idiom. Selfie, with his natural tone of sneering contempt and his ultra-punnable surname, is evidently the fish who doesn't know it's water he's swimming in as he hasn't noticed that early twenty first culture in the anglophone world is satirical to the point of misanthropy, which makes our politicians despised to an unhealthy degree, because, they, poor buggers, have to talk in the language of hope and belief, and it's as if they're speaking Victorian Uplift, while we their voters speak Modern Cynic.

However Self may have been doing a piece of satire of his own – perhaps a subtle reference to the English academic in David Lodge's Changing Places (a satire against the not very powerful) who boasts he's never read Hamlet.

Satire can be cruel, or it can be gentle. Goodness Gracious Me was rather gentle about its crass whites, its social climbers the Coopers and the bloke who says Indian about every invention (who should be resurrected as a Muslim saying, “It's in the Qu'ran” about genetics, embryology and thermodynamics.)

Jonathan Swift punched up at politicians in Lilliput and Brobdignag, and scientists in Laputa, but come the fourth voyage he was punching downwards at grovelling humankind. The Simpsons punches down at America's blue-collar class. Shameless punched down at the British underclass. The Royle Family punched down at the British working class and Rab C Nesbit punched down at the Scottish schemey.

Mo Dawah, one of the best things on Twitter, aims his darts at the target of the “community leader” - who has a helluva lot more power than their victims though less power than the Government.

We must not be afraid to address the problems within our community, by introspecting fearlessly on how it is everyone else's fault.

We have to fight the hegemony of hetero-normative racist patriarchy that tries to blame the perpetrators who are victims too #Rotherham (Now that one is savage.)

Sick of double standards of liberal fascists imposing freedom to say what I want on me, whilst denying my right to impose censorship on them

Meanwhile the Charlie Hebdo disapprovers reach for their Holocaust. What would you think if we made cartoons about Jews in gas chambers hey? Hey?

Well I'd think you were a shit of course, but I already thought that about you.

However, let's treat this seriously for a second or two and spell out the difference between making fun of a religion with its sacred objects and a staggering, culture-breaking historic event that still has living witnesses. Here are a couple of cartoons featuring women – one semi-mythical (though admirable on the whole).

The Virgin Mary/Our Lady

A rape victim

I'm sure you Holocaust cartooners can find something absurd and ridiculous about her plight and will knock up a nifty speech bubble. As for me I never want to google “rape victim” images again.

Actually if I was Charlie Hebdo I'd do a caption like “Her skirt must have been too short” which, to explain to those who are slow on the uptake, would be a satire against rape-victim-blamers. But I haven't got the heart or stomach.

My satire is constrained by my own boundaries and that of the shared culture, where we judge what is outside of enough. We can estimate satire as good or bad in all sorts of ways, but not that it only should attack the powerful. Cartoonists laying into a religion shouldn't have to think again, except for the prudential reasons that now are forcing us to mind our manners or else.

Bunkering up with Julian Assange

Andrew O'Hagan tells a fascinating story of what it was like to ghost write Julian Assange's autobiography.  He did this under contract with Canongate Books, a hip publisher based in Edinburgh.

O'Hagan has got hold of a character who could be one of fiction's great monsters with a toddler's grasp of other people's motives and rights.  Assange holed up talking without interruption for 3 hours at a time is strongly reminiscent of Hitler in his table talk and his lashings out at everyone as he sits in one of his bunkers (Ellingham Hall, the Ecuadorian Embassy) has been portrayed in Downfall.  He has real enemies and he has imaginary ones as well.  The many people who fall out with him do so because of envy or malice.

His paranoia has its comic side:-

He appeared to like the notion that he was being pursued and the tendency was only complicated by the fact that there were real pursuers. But the pursuit was never as grave as he wanted it to be. He stuck to his Cold War tropes, where one didn’t deliver a package, but made a ‘drop off’. One day, we were due to meet some of the WikiLeaks staff at a farmhouse out towards Lowestoft. We went in my car. Julian was especially edgy that afternoon, feeling perhaps that the walls were closing in, as we bumped down one of those flat roads covered in muck left by tractors’ tyres. ‘Quick, quick,’ he said, ‘go left. We’re being followed!’ I looked in the rear-view mirror and could see a white Mondeo with a wire sticking out the back.

‘Don’t be daft, Julian,’ I said. ‘That’s a taxi.’

‘No. Listen to me. It’s surveillance. We’re being followed. Quickly go left.’ Just by comical chance, as I was rocking a Sweeney-style handbrake turn, the car behind us suddenly stopped at a farmhouse gate and a little boy jumped out and ran up the path. I looked at the clock as we rolled off in a cloud of dust. It said 3.48.

‘That was a kid being delivered home from school,’ I said. ‘You’re mental.’

There are some good moments with Assange, the expert hacker and courageous activist:-

At the time of the Egyptian uprising, Mubarak tried to close down the country’s mobile phone network, a service that came through Canada. Julian and his gang hacked into Nortel and fought against Mubarak’s official hackers to reverse the process. The revolution continued and Julian was satisfied, sitting back in our remote kitchen eating chocolates.

That is why I didn’t walk out. The story was just too large. What Julian lacked in efficiency or professionalism he made up for in courage. What he lacked in carefulness he made up for in impact.

But on the whole the Wikileaks endeavour suffered from that symptom of the internet age, the short attention span, the hook, the click-bait and the Twitter storm of petty feuds:-

He’s not a details guy. None of them is. What they love is the big picture and the general fight. They love the noise and the glamour, the history, the spectacle, but not the fine print. That is why they released so many cables so quickly: for impact. And there’s a good argument to support that. But, even today, three years later, the cables have never had the dedicated attention they deserve. They made a splash and then were left languishing. I always hoped someone would do a serious editing job, ordering them country by country, contextualising each one, providing a proper introduction, detailing each injustice and each breach, but Julian wanted the next splash and, even more, he wanted to scrap with each critic he found on the internet. As for the book, he kept putting it off.

Assange makes a virtue of scientific journalism, where readers take the raw data and process it for themselves.  But of course we can't do that any more than we can make our laptops from oil, metals and silicon.  We need context and background information to gauge whether a piece of information is significant or trivial.

I thought, if Julian was serious and strategic, that WikiLeaks should not only bale stuff out onto the web, but should then facilitate the editing and presenting of that work in a way that was of permanent historical value. Perry Anderson of Verso Books had the same thought, and I put it to Julian that the WikiLeaks Map of the World should be a series which provided for a proper academic study of what the biggest security leaks in history had revealed, with expert commentary, notes, essays and introductions. It would provide the organisation with a lasting, grown-up legacy, a powerful, orderly continuation of its initial work.

Julian came to lunch at my flat in Belsize Park. Tariq Ali came and so did Mary-Kay Wilmers, the editor of the London Review, as well as an American editor for Verso called Tom Mertes. Anderson’s idea was that Verso would publish a series of books, or one book in which each chapter showed how the US cables released by WikiLeaks had changed the political position of a particular country. A writer who knew, say, Italy, would introduce the chapter and the same would be done for every country and it would be very meticulous and well-made. Julian gave a big speech at the beginning, the middle and the end. He clearly liked Tariq but had no sense of him as someone who knew a lot more about the world than he did. Although the idea for the book had come from Verso, Julian preferred to give a lecture about how most academics were corrupted by their institutions.

.... . Anyone else would have jumped at the chance of the Verso project but as Julian drove off in a taxi I knew he would never call Tariq about this or lay any of the groundwork they’d agreed. Julian was already more concerned about claiming the idea for himself, an idea that he would never see to fruition. The meeting had called for responsible action, when what Julian loved was irresponsible reaction.

Everyone has one rule for themselves and another for  the rest of the world but Assange takes this to the nth degree:-

Julian was getting a lot of flak in the press for making Wiki-employees sign contracts threatening them with a £12 million lawsuit if they disclosed anything about the organisation. It was clear he didn’t see the problem. He has a notion that WikiLeaks floats above other organisations and their rules. He can’t understand why any public body should keep a secret but insists that his own organisation enforce its secrecy with lawsuits. Every time he mentioned legal action against the Guardian or the New York Times, and he did this a lot, I would roll my eyes, but he didn’t see the contradiction. He was increasingly lodged in a jungle of his own making and I told Jamie it was like trying to write a book with Mr Kurtz.

He was in a state of panic at all times that things might get out. But he manages people so poorly, and is such a slave to what he’s not good at, that he forgets he might be making bombs set to explode in his own face. I am sure this is what happens in many of his scrapes: he runs on a high-octane belief in his own rectitude and wisdom, only to find later that other people had their own views – of what is sound journalism or agreeable sex – and the idea that he might be complicit in his own mess baffles him.

He has the common tendency to fight far more bitterly with those who share his world view than those who outright reject it:-

the Guardian was an enemy because he’d ‘given’ them something and they hadn’t toed the line, whereas the Daily Mail was almost respected for finding him entirely abominable. The Guardian tried to soothe him – its editor, Alan Rusbridger, showed concern for his position, as did the then deputy, Ian Katz, and others – but he talked about its journalists in savage terms. The Guardian felt strongly that the secret material ought to be redacted to protect informants or bystanders named in it, and Julian was inconsistent about that. I never believed he wanted to endanger such people, but he chose to interpret the Guardian’s concern as ‘cowardice’.

He's full of repugnant sexism and anti-Semitsm:-

They certainly had transcripts of our interviews, sittings in which he’d uttered, late at night, many casual libels, many sexist or anti-Semitic remarks, and where he spoke freely about every aspect of his life.

As well as wasting time to a heart-breaking degree, those who engage with Assange find themselves out of goodwill and out of pocket. Canongate tried to salvage the autobiography and published what they could.

Canongate Books, the Edinburgh-based publisher, has blamed Wikileaks founder Julian Assange's "failure to deliver" the book he was contracted to produce for plunging into operating loss.

Accounts, which have just become available from Companies House, reveal Canongate tumbled to an operating loss of £368,467 in 2011, from a profit of £1.08 million at this level in 2010. Canongate acknowledged this was its worst performance "in many years".

For Andrew O'Hagan it hasn't all been a minus.  He came out with a great story to tell, and that's enough pay off for any writer.

(H/T - HJ) 

The Dieudonnic Plague

David Rich has a very good, and very depressing article on Dieudonne and his kind:-

“Making common cause” between Holocaust deniers, neo-fascists, the pro-Palestinian left, and the revolutionary Islamists of Iran is precisely what Dieudonné has spent the past decade trying to achieve. Originally from the political left, he has moved via anti-Israel rhetoric and the fascist Front National (FN) to the establishment of his own Parti Anti Sioniste (PAS, or Anti-Zionist Party). Alongside him in the PAS is essayist and filmmaker Alain Soral, who underwent a similar journey from the Marxist left to the FN before finding a political home with Dieudonné.

There are not many political movements that can embrace the neo-fascist right, the anti-capitalist left, and Iranian revolutionary Islamism. Dieudonné is close to FN leaders—Jean Marie Le Pen is godfather to one of his children—while also attracting fans who consider themselves to be left-wing radicals. He was a guest in Tehran of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and received Iranian funding for a film project. Historically, movements that successfully pulled off this kind of balancing act have tended to rely on anti-Semitism as their glue, expressed through the lingua franca of conspiracist anti-Zionism, and PAS is no different.

Strikingly, for a party that calls itself anti-Zionist, PAS’s political program makes no direct mention of Israel or Palestine. This is parochial, patriotic anti-Zionism, in which Zionism is portrayed primarily as a subversive, corrupting presence in French society.

Radio 4's The Report had the journalist Helen Grady interviewing Dieudonne's friends and followers.  Sometimes they said "Zionist" where they obviously meant "Jewish" and sometimes they said, "I'm not antisemitic but Jews run everything".  Also, Dieudonne gave them the thrill of saying, or just hinting at, the forbidden. - not just "you don't say that" but "you can't say that" because it's illegal in a state with laws against Holocaust denial. This was interpreted as special treatment for Jews while other minorities are fair game.

I was sorry the reporter didn't ask them to explain who these Zionists are and what are these utterances that are so dammed by the laws - not that I agree with Holocaust denial laws or anti free speech and expression laws in general. In fact I would like to know how much these laws exacerbate the sense of resentment that is one of the emotional bases of Fascism. Certainly breaking them, or hinting that you were, gave the audience a lovely outsider frisson.

Anti-Zionist and Anti-Establishment

Some of these gagged folk came from immigrant communities - their parents from North Africa say - and they had good words to say of the Front National - at least they're honest when the rest are hypocrites.

It was your worst gibbering blog thread taking flesh, with hideous whiffs of the 1930s, in all their bizarre irrationality.

Rich concludes with a warning for those who think It Can't Happen Here:-

. .it would be complacent to assume that Dieudonné’s anti-establishment appeal, expressed through angry, transgressive satire and political stunts, could not find a British audience. The personal followings of Nigel Farage MEP and George Galloway MP demonstrate the appetite in the UK for charismatic, populist anti-politics. .. A Francophone comic with a taste for the surreal is likely to have trouble finding a mass audience in Britain; but his populist anti-politics, carrying a coded anti-Semitism and transmitted via social media, may have better luck in finding an audience..

The anti-establishment comedian who thinks all political institutions are a waste of time is Russell Brand, but to do him justice, he is nothing like as malevolent as Dieudonne, and I can't see him doing Holocaust jokes or chumming up with David Irving.  I can't see him getting in bed with UKIP either, which is the closest thing here to the Front National. However I'm not very up with popular culture, and there may be obvious candidates for the Dieudonne role that I've missed.

Respect was a party that pulled in some of the political groups that are attracted to Dieudonne:- the pro-Palestinian Left and Islamists, and no doubt Holocaust deniers would pop up in such a crowd. Gilad Atzmon would be the obvious entertainer, but he's not a man of any great charisma or the popular touch. However, it's hard to think of the neo-Fascist right finding a home there, and Respect is now mostly a fantasy in Galloway's head.

Unseating the Segregationists

Well, can you believe it?. An illiberal piece of policy is advanced by a powerful body, against it comes a petition, a demonstration, media shouting and then the policy is withdrawn. Amazing.

To recap,  Universities UK, (UUK) (formerly The Committee of Vice-Chancellors and Principals of the Universities of the United Kingdom)  put out guidelines that allowed speakers at meetings in universities to insist women and men be segregated for "genuinely religious" reasons. Student Rights picked this up.  The bloggers you'd expect - Maryam Nazie,  Ophelia Benson,  James Bloodworth produced angry posts. The mainstream media moved in - Nick Cohen in the Spectator, and Yasmin Alibai-Brown, finely furious, in The Independent.  

Imagine the scenario:-

Sheikh Shifty is invited by some ISOC group to speak about Freedom and Justice at the University of Excellence.  Sheikh Shifty will only speak if the women sit separate from the men.  
 
Obvious answer - tell the misogynist theocrat to take a hike, in these words,

"I am sorry to inform you that it is against the principles of the University to allow meetings to occur with gender segregation."

But not in the UUK's horrible management speak:- .

if imposing an unsegregated seating area in addition to the segregated areas contravenes the genuinely-held religious beliefs of the group hosting the event, or those of the speaker, the institution should be mindful to ensure that the freedom of speech of the religious group or speaker is not curtailed unlawfully

There was a petition and a small demonstration which Channel 4 covered at length.

Then the BBC began to thunder. The Today programme (1:35) on 11th December had a long piece which started with the reporter regretting his old LSE, the one in the 1980s where students were raucous but not so ready to be offended, or offended on the behalf of putative others.  
 
The next day the BBC got Nicola Dandridge, the Chief Executive of UUK, into the Today (2:10) studio. Regular Today listeners recognised the tones with which Justin Webb interrogated her. It's the one which they use on a duplicitous politician who has no moral leg to stand on -  who has, say, been fiddling her expenses.  It's the voice of outraged decency against a moral moron and it was music to my ears, an angry liberal telling off a squirming piece of inconsistency and illogic. (For a biting take down of Dandridge's muddled defence, I would strongly recommend this.)

"If this is all that Dandridge means – that people have the right to sit where the hell they want and some will sit cliquishly by gender or other groupings, there is no role for Universities and no reason why the situation should ever be addressed in policy.

Worse, “If women want to sit where the hell the want”? IF? What is this world in which you live where women routinely have no desires and sit where they are told without a single thought disrupting the gentle currents of air between their ears?

All women always sit where they want unless coerced or forced. The fact that you can’t acknowledge this openly, that women naturally have desires and preferences, that we make conscious choices here-there-and-everywhere, speaks to a profound sexism whose paucity of respect for a woman’s mind truly challenges the ability of words to express. I can only repeat your own phrase:

    If women want to sit where the hell they want

and goggle at your idea that you will only impose segregation in times and places where women have no preferences.

The politicians  -  Chuka Umunna , Jack Straw, Michael Gove, David Cameron spoke out.  Under the threads of their statements in the Guardian commenters were saying, Bugger me, the horrible Tory creeps are right this time. I'd normally be spitting that politicians were interfering in University affairs - they really shouldn't, you know - but I'm cheering them. If the representative body of the Vice Chancellors and Principals are so bloody clueless, and the NUS are so supine, they need to be kicked.

I think a lot of the response has been visceral. The suffragettes weren't force fed for this, the women who fought a grinding battle to get entry into English universities shouldn't be pissed  on   

So now the UUK has withdrawn gender segreation from its guidelines. It looks like the forces of light have won for once. 

Congratulations to those who attended protests and wrote copiously.  If only every campaign could be so successful.  But what a ridiculous waste of everyone's time and anger-fuelled action.

Flesh is Grass has a sane, thoughtful piece:-

Women always miss out when public spaces are segregated by leaders and organisers – even if voluntary, it’s a small change in culture, in the general view of what is acceptable. Authoritarians always use the values of open, pluralist societies against those societies themselves, and weaken them incrementally. Let’s stop this.

She also pointed out that feminists like Caroline Lucas, MP, Green Party and Natalie Bennett, Leader, Green Party did not speak out. I read that Caroline Lucas had said it wasn't a priority. Also there hasn't been a peep out of that clutch of feminist writers in The Staggers.   Polly Toynbee,  one of the old-guard Guardian, undid the miserable expectations we now have of her paper, by sticking to her old feminism and atheism.  At least they didn't publish any of their usual apologetics on these matters. The Observer has an editorial  and a good piece by Catherine Bennett.

On the other side:-

Well, one is an article which looks like parody in the Huff Po by Camilla Khan, the Head of Communications,(!) Federation of Student Islamic Societies, who tries to wrap this up in a mixture of post-modernism and spirituality.  She has managed to use every con-trick word - those words that irritate like berry bugs in a bra cup - "discourse", "empower", "nuanced"  and "diversity, "

Firstly, the term segregation itself is highly problematic and acts to conflate the reality further. As Saussure theorised on syntagmatic relations, ‘within speech, words are subject to a kind of relation that is independent of the first and based on their linkage,’ and segregation connotes various forms of separation and oppression.

The problem is calling segregation, segregation.  If you called it something else it would be fine. Telling Molly when she walks into a room that she can't sit here because she's a woman, isn't segregation, just nuanced diverse empowerment.

Tendance Coatesey has a bit of fun with Khan's linguistic studies - Saussure is old hat, I understand - but she really should read a bit of Orwell, and note that calling mass murder "liqudation of anti-social elements" doesn't stop it being mass murder.  But whoever has influenced her writing style, it wasn't Orwell.

Her other con-trick is that very old anti-feminist ploy, that women taking a different (and different will mean inferior) place is a path to spirituality.  So the anti-suffragists said that women agitating to take part in public life spoiled their purifying influence and their moral specialness.  They were meant for a higher destiny.

As with life, Islam acknowledges that we form different groups who occupy various intellectual and social spaces. Diversity is celebrated with spirituality at the forefront, forming a broad frame of reference which is not always easily comprehensible to those outside of it.

No, I can't comprehend how her spirituality is so much compromised when she takes a bus, goes to the cinema or sits in her cultural studies class. What about the diversity of those women who don't want to be herded with other women, and men also.  Is that celebrated? (Add "celebrate" with abstract nouns to my list of berry bug words).  I think the "diversity" is a pretty damned narrow one. 

Second is Shohana Khan. Khan is a member of Hitz ut-Tahrir, the fighters for a Caliphate where apostates will be killed.   

Her argument boils down to:- Men and women must be separated because otherwise they will get sex on the brain and not be able to do something.

Rather the concept of separating men and women in public spaces in Islam, is part of a wider objective. Islam has a societal view that the intimate relationship between a man and a woman is for the committed private sphere of marriage, and should not be allowed to spill outside of this sphere. This is because in society, men and women need to cooperate to achieve things in society whether in the work place, in education, in interactions across the public space. Islam firmly believes if the sexual instinct is let loose in this public sphere, it can taint and complicate these relationships. Therefore Islam promotes ideas such as honouring women which are upheld in society, but alongside such ideas specific rules and laws are implemented to help maintain the atmosphere of healthy interaction between the sexes.

And if the woman breaks these rules, eg by not covering her head she's fair game is she?  

I think it has been observed that public school boys for instance, especially in times past, had a highly unhealthy attitude towards women because they weren't used to them as normal human beings.  So you're talking garbage - and rather prurient garbage at that.  Islamists are as sex obsessed as Hugh Hefner.

Now I won't say I haven't been at a public meeting and thought a chap in the audience was rather a dish. In fact, political meetings at universities is where many of us met our soulmates - that person who was highly vocal about the need to oppose nuclear proliferation and had lovely grey eyes.  The partnerships of couples who fell in love with the shared ideals and the person can be highly productive. The Pankhursts were one such couple.  Jennie Lee and Nye Bevan were another.  So I can't deny there is a sexual element at public meetings, as there is in the offices where we work.

But that it should dominate someone's mind so much that it screws up their ability to act! What's wrong with them?  Knowing how to behave in public is part of growing up, as is concentrating on the matter at hand. The only people offering distractions who should be segregated are those twerps with buzzing mobile phones.

So a victory this time round.  End with Any Questions  (:38).  Shami Chakrabati took what has been a common attitude - why on earth are we even talking about this?

Johnathan Dimbleby: Is there justification for segregation in an educational setting?

Amjad Bashir  (small business spokesman for UKIP, Pakistani immigrant, from Bradford): No.  The answer is no. Absolutely not. . .  All through my life, and my children, my grand children are all mixing, all sexes, whether it's primary schools, whether it's secondary schools. whether it's universities. There is no room. This is England This is the twenty first century.  It's not Saudi Arabia, where women are not allowed to drive, It's not Saudi Arabia, where they are not allowed to have bank accounts. This is England. We should allow our youngsters to mix and decide their own future. This is the twenty first century. I am against this segregation.

Mehdi Hasan, rejected Mail columnist

This Daily Mail on Milliband business has certainly brought people together.  From Tariq Ali  to David Cameron they all agree that the Daily Mail was obnoxious, hateful, wrong, and every other derogatory adjective in its attack on Ed Milliband's father. 

Mehdi Hasan's diatribe against the Daily Mail on Question Time has gone viral.

 

I'm no great fan of Mehdi Hasan and have wondered why such an ultra-religious bloke got the Senior Editor (Politics) gig at the New Statesman, but I was applauding this:-

Let's have the debate about who hates Britain more, it isn't a dead Jewish refugee from Belgium who served in the Royal Navy, it's the immigrant-bashing, woman-hating, muslim-smearing, NHS-undermining, gay-baiting Daily Mail.

Good for him.

The Daily Mail has fought back very dirty.  It has now leaked a letter from Mehdi Hasan to the editor of the Daily Mail requesting a column, and presenting himself as being in tune with the Mail's ethos:-

• that the "Mail had a vitally important part to play in national debate" [I suppose all forms of bigotry should appear in national debate - it's only fair]:

• that he admires Paul Dacre's relentless focus on the need for morality and integrity in public life;

• that he was more in tune with the Mail than the left on "social and moral issues";

• that he will make the left wing case against abortions;

• that he admires the Mail's social conservatism on marriage, the family, abortion and teenage pregnancy;

It's no surprise that a religious fellow like Hasan should be socially conservative.  It's easy enough to imagine a socially conservative Catholic with leftish views on economics and foreign policy.   Hasan didn't say that he'd write about cellulite, women getting fat and dodgy foreigners, and if hired, might have given the Mail's readership a more positive spin on immigration.  But what the hell was he doing at the New Statesman?

(Yuk,  this link is to the repulsive Guy Fawkes, but Mehdi  praises "outspoken defence of faith, and Christian culture, in the face of attacks from militant atheists and secularists." 

Militant - for atheists like Richard Dawkins - means outspoken and rude.

Militant - for theocrats - means mowing down children in a shopping centre.

Secrets and Lies

Front Row had an interesting interview last night with Alex Gibney who has directed the film We Steal Secrets: the Story of Wikileaks which will be released in the UK soon.

The link is here 1:36 on. Transcription of most of it below.

Interviewer:  The computer analyst Edward Snowden turned whistleblower  is believed to be holed up in the transit holding area in Moscow airport  evading espionage charges in the USA The unfolding story coincides with the release of the film We Steal Secrets, the new documentary from Oscar winning director Alex Gibney. His previous films include The Smartest Guys in the Room, which told the story of the collapse of the Enron corporation, Taxi to the Dark Side, which exposed torture by the US military and Silence in the House of God which about abuse within the Catholic Church. For his latest project Gibney set out to make a film which focussed not on the villains but someone he initially regarded as a hero, Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, the organisation which is currently aiding Edward Snowden. With Assange himself currently hiding out in the Ecuadorian embassy, the film includes interviews with hackers, activists and even the former director of the CIA and National Security Agency, Michael Hayden. . .  When I met director Alex Gibney I suggested that having made films about the abuses of power, he regarded Wikileaks founder Julian Assange as a kindred spirit when he set out to make the film.

Gibney: Yes, that's very much the case.  I think I was very impressed by the role that Julian's organisation Wikileaks.- and it's really Julian and a few other people. As somebody said in the film, I asked, is this Apple or IBM?  They said no, it's a tiny gas station with a few very bright attendants.  That probably sums it up pretty well. But yeah, I was very sympathetic because what Julian was all about was exposing corruption,  exposing official lies,.

Interviewer: Stamping on the bastards, he says, doesn't he?

Gibney: Crushing bastards. . . and Julian makes a joke about it. Somebody says, "Is that all it is about for you, crushing bastards?"  And he says, ""Well it depends on the bastards."  That's funny, but if you think about it really, the verb "Crushing", if you take it seriously, is not such a pretty verb. And that sounds more like a powerful nation state than an idealistic person trying to make a difference by speaking truth to power.

Interviewer: Because it feels like he's an heroic figure for the first half hour or so. And then we hear this phrase, he wants to crush the bastards. he wants to crush the bastards, and it sends a warning signal out there.  After that the narrative changes totally. What changed your perception of Julian Assange? Because in the end he is not a sympathetic character at all.

Gibney: I think in the end the mission of Wikileaks remains deeply sympathetic to me but he is a character I think who leaves his own mission behind, and that becomes deeply unsympathetic.. The aspect of the story that I didn't really understand going in, in fact I assumed it was something different was the Swedish episode, the sex scandal that somehow between the Iraq war logs and the Afgham war logs suddenly Julian Assange is accused of rape in Sweden. and I thought from afar that this must be - the timing was too suspicious, it must be some kind of conspiracy. Well I dug deep into this and I've concluded that it was a personal matter. Why deal with a personal matter in this case then?  The reason is that Julian Assange, very intentionally and very cleverly, tried to make a personal matter part of the transparency agenda, to sort of say "no no no this is not a personal matter," and all the people at Wikileaks were saying "You've got to go and deal with this yourself. Deal with it as a personal matter and leave Wikileaks out of it."  He said, "Absolutely not.  What we're going to do, is part of Wikileaks." That's the moment where he lost me, and it seems to me that Julian's great fatal flaw is his unwillingness to be held to account. I think in some fundamental way maybe none of us really like to be held to account but he has a paranoia about being held to account, and so the idea that he would even be slapped on the hand for failing to take an HIV test struck him as so abhorrent that he concocted this huge conspiracy which then embroiled all his followers in the idea that the government of Sweden had become opposed to the transparency agenda.  That was a lie in my view and that turned me against what Julian Assange was doing.

There's a great phrase in the film spoken by James Ball who worked for Wikileaks for a while and now works for the Guardian.

Interviewer: He looks about ten, actually, when he starts working for Julian Assange. He becomes the spokesman for Wikileaks.

Gibney; He becomes the spokesman. He's on TV everywhere. It's a great symbol for the organisation. Maybe a better symbol in a way than Assange because he looks so young and he looks so innocent. but there's a phrase that he comes up with in the film - "Noble cause corruption". It's actually a phrase used by police departments who describe cops who plant joints on people , bad guys, who they can't get any other way, the idea being that if you are a good guy, it's okay for you to do bad things. .

Interviewer: To bend the truth.

Gibney: Well it's a higher purpose to be served. And I think that was Julian's view. So instead of speaking truth to power, Julian began to speak lies to power.

Interviewer: You make great play with this and the idea that as a young hacker he went under the pseudonym "Mendax", part of a quote from Horace I think "splendide mendax" meaning "noble liar" and playing with that idea that it is okay to lie. So you're saying that he is a liar?

Gibney: Yes. In a fundamental way I think Julian believes that it's okay for him to lie so long as it is in the service of a higher truth and I think that's a contradiction that is fundamentally untenable. .

Interviewer: You say you did your own investigations and you think there was absolutely no suggestion  whatsoever to say that that was a set up as his supporters were suggesting that it was a honey trap.

Gibney: I can find no evidence that that episode in Sweden was any kind of honey trap.

Interviewer: So this is a film about the internet, it's about governments, about power, corruption, lies and war but at the heart of the story are two characters, Julian Assange and the far more tragic figure of Private Bradley Manning who is still in prison after dumping the data and he is a very conflicted character and you reveal that he is deeply uncomfortable with his own sexuality, uncomfortable with his role within the army and appalled by some of the things that he has seen.  Now of course you don't get to interview him but we get a very intimate portrait of him through his email.

Gibney: On-line chats. On line chats with a man named Adrian Lamo, a Grade A hacker, who befriended Manning on line. And this is a really poignant episode because the other thing I thought this movie was about at the beginning was a leaking machine. This new device Wikileaks had, an electronic drop box that allows people to leak anonymously that neither the publisher nor the leaker know each other in any fundamental way and that they can therefore protect their anonymity. But Bradley Manning was in emotional distress. I think he leaked for political reasons akin to that of a whistle blower but he had a desperate need to tell somebody about what he had done. We never got to interview Bradley Manning but in a way I think for the film it is more interesting to see and reveal him through these chats.  Why? Because increasingly that's how we're all communicating. Girls and boys hook up and break up y'know via chats. We communicate the most intimate information over the internet on Facebook even though we know that everyone is spying on us.

Interviewer: You set out to make a film about the system but in the end you 'remaking a film about people who are struggling. There's a sense of human frailty and desperation really at the heart of all of these characters, Bradley Manning, Adrian Lamo who we see crying at the end. He's very conflicted about how having in effect turned Bradley Manning in. And there's a sense of desperation in the Julian Assange character even though he projects himself almost as a messianic character.  He refused to talk to you, Assange. He was asking for a million dollars for an interview?

Gibney: He said that the market rate for an interview with him was over a million dollars, but there's no doubt he was asking for money.  I said, "I don't pay for interviews." I don't., and he said, "Well, if you don't pay for interviews, how about this then instead," sort of like a scene out of Ed Wood. Why don't you spy on all the other interview subjects and report back to me." [Laughs] I found that actually a far more staggering suggestion from someone who is supposed to be so much about source protection that he wanted me to spy on the other people and give him intel  So there's Julian now acting not as a transparency activist but a spy and  I was supposed to spy on behalf of Julian.

Interviewer: And the great irony is that you have a real spy there.  You have the former director of the CIA, and NSA, Michael Hayden, who gives the title of the film, We Steal Secrets. He's proud of this. He says, "That's what we do. There are secrets out there, this is our job, we steal secrets". I mean the irony is, he is the spy who is apparently being more upfront and honest than the man who is supposedly revealing the corruption and the lies.

Gibney: That is correct.  And I titled the film We Steal Secrets because it sets this whole story in context. If governments are freely admitting, we steal secrets, and now you see it in the Snowden case, this is not so simple as to say, "Oh My God, Bradley Manning has leaked these secrets. Isn't it terrible. He's a traitor." The key is to find the moral high ground and that's not so easy to do.

Tom Holland: caught out and stumped

This is also posted at Harry's Place.

Tom Holland's documentary, Islam: the Untold Story caused controversy and Channel 4 cancelled a repeat screening because of "threats".

 As the Council for Ex-Muslims said:- 

The threats and concerted attempt to stigmatise the documentary and its producers by attacking its credibility and even legitimacy as a field of inquiry is nothing less than an attempt to impose a blasphemy taboo by stealth and coercion against programming that scrutinises Islam.

John Crace in the Guardian, the last publication to speak evil of Islam, commented on Tom Holland's deference to the religion:-

"Can a non-Muslim hope to understand the origins of the Muslim world?" asked historian Tom Holland. "No," was the emphatic one-word response of Dr Seyyed Hossein Nasr, professor of Islamic studies at George Washington University. .
 
For decades – centuries even – scholars have felt free to contest the accuracy of other religious texts. Not least the Bible; what's true, what's parable and what's just wishful thinking has all been up for grabs without any serious damage being done to Christian beliefs. Not so with Islam, around which non-Islamic scholars tread with extreme caution. I'm all for cultural and religious sensitivity, but the degree to which Holland tiptoed around the subject and apologised for his findings went way beyond what was required. Or would have been on offer for any other religion. It was almost as if he was looking over his shoulder, half expecting a fatwa at any minute.
 
None should be forthcoming, as towards the end of the programme Holland returned to Dr Nasr for reassurance that he hadn't caused any lasting offence. Which he more or less got, as Nasr told him that what he had discovered was "quite interesting, so long as you don't try to impose your view on the Muslim world", as that would be tantamount to "western imperialism". Holland crept out of Nasr's office more or less insisting that the last thing he wanted was for any Muslim to take him seriously, so no harm was done. The gap between western liberalism and Islamic liberalism suddenly looked frighteningly large.

I don't know if a fatwa has been delivered on Tom Holland, but he has now evidently been stamped "Handle with Care. Contents controversial".  Not controversial in an edgy, "may up the click bait/ratings" way of Russell Brand, but "may cause offence somewhere or other and we'd better be careful".
 
According to the excellent site Heresy Corner, Tom Holland was to appear on TalkSPORT and speak about cricket, one of his passions.  That sounds as harmless as you can get.  But no, at the last minute he was cancelled. without being told why. (Read the whole piece.)
 

"I think they Googled me and got into a state, worrying I might be a security risk," he speculates.   "It's utterly weird.  Beyond weird.  Comic.  I think they think they're being PC, when actually they're being the precise opposite."
 
Quite. If the station was acting pre-emptively to head off presumed Muslim anger, they must have a very low opinion of Muslims.  Nor does this kind of hypersensitivity do anything to further social harmony or good community relations.  It is in fact a form of Islamophobia: irrational fear of Islam in its most basic and literal sense.
 
As far as I can tell, there were no threats, or even complaints, in the run-up to Tom Holland's planned cricket-themed appearance on TalkSPORT.  But perhaps they feared a boycott, or imagined that Anjem Choudhary and his mates would picket their studios.  ("Behead Infidels who talk about Cricket!")  Or was the threat something more oblique -- maybe they envisaged EDL supporters phoning in to congratulate Holland, not on his celebrated Six, but on his "brave" stand against Islam."
 

So there we are.  My indifference to cricket overwhelms me and I wouldn't even be able to find the frequency for TalkSPORT but now I've heard of this incident and I'm furious. It's evidently some knucklehead in the station making a kind of ridiculous Health and Safety decision, of the sort which bans using cheese wheels at the Double Gloucester cheese rolling festival - only with more serious consequences for community relations.  Tom Holland's book The Shadow of the Sword is a vivid read, which peoples a tract of history which was bare to me.  It seems he's an accomplished cricketer and Heresy Corner says he's one of the nicest blokes on Twitter.  This kind of misplaced  sensitivity just pisses everyone off, including Muslims who don't want to constantly appear like grenades minus pins.  The only people who will be happy are the EDL, who can roll their eyes, with "see what we mean?" expressions and jihadists, who will no doubt regarde this as another tiny victory in their war for undiluted "respect". 

Party Hard for Pussy Riot