I am somewhat aghast that Ayaan Hirsan Ali came to town and our old friend Pamela Bone failed to mention her in her column yesterday. Instead, local Eustonista Bone stuck to a Blairite standard - the wonders of liberal interventionism (soon to be rendered moot, no doubt, as Gordon Brown takes quite a different approach to foreign policy).
Still, the specture of Ali’s work is obviously never far from Bone’s horizon. Ali has been giving interviews in Australia:
“Islam was founded in an Arab desert culture,” she says. “The role that women had at that time in the 7th century was tribal in context. She was there only to reproduce. Women were viewed almost like camels, or perhaps, just as reproductive organs for the tribe.
Bone writes:
To many it is shockingly impolite to suggest that some countries - Western liberal democracies, for example - are better than countries that still operate under rules more appropriate to 7th-century century Arabia.
The biggest two arguments against liberal interventionism are that war is not necessarily a humanitarian intervention, and inevitably has dire consequences for many even if missions “succeed” and that the calls for humanitarian intervention to save people in the name of “universal values” (which are, as Bone concedes, actually Western) are invariably selective. Contrast for instance the current moves in regard to Darfur with the total indifference shown to the Congo where the UN has estimated four million civilian deaths. Writing in The Guardian, Roger Howard hits the nail on the head.
The key difference between the two situations lies in the racial and ethnic composition of the perceived victims and perpetrators. In Congo, black Africans are killing other black Africans in a way that is difficult for outsiders to identify with. The turmoil there can in that sense be regarded as a narrowly African affair.In Darfur the fighting is portrayed as a war between black Africans, rightly or wrongly regarded as the victims, and “Arabs”, widely regarded as the perpetrators of the killings. In practice these neat racial categories are highly indistinct, but it is through such a prism that the conflict is generally viewed.
As Howard argues, liberal interventionism is invariably a cover for self-interest and ideology. Not only are oil and the influence of the Chinese at play in Sudan, calls for intervention there also conveniently factor into narratives about the evils of Islam, alleged cultural deficiencies and “primitivism” of “Arabs” and that old staple, the GWOT.
Nor is it a coincidence that all the examples Bone uses to justify her proclamations about teh superiority of teh West relate to Islam. She’s been loud in her claims that “Western feminists” (herself excluded, of course) are indifferent to the suffering of women in Islamic societies. Her obsession with Islam has apparently blinded her to the suffering of women in The Congo.
There’s an obvious counter to the sort of simplistic rhetoric that we get from the Bones and Alis of this world:
I decided to skip to the end of Paul Berman’s monster essay and I see he winds up talking about Ayaan Hirsi Ali. She, of course, is every western secularist’s favorite Muslim precisely because she’s, well, not a Muslim. And, of course, from the point of view of western secularists it would be great if we could just partner up with secularists born in Muslim countries and together quash the menace of radical Islamist terrorism.
The trouble, of course, is that politics is the art of the possible, and history shows that it’s frequently not possible to do very much of anything with secularist politics. That’s why, for example, seeking arguments against Female Genital Mutilation in the Koran seems like an obviously smart move. In countries where large numbers of people believe FGM is required by Islam, arguments of the form “Islam requires FGM, FGM bad for women, therefore Islam should be abandoned” aren’t going to get off the ground. Arguments of the form “FGM is not required by Islam” or, even better, “FGM is condemned by Islam” are, pragmatically speaking, much more useful. But an argument like that is only going to be credible coming from a serious Muslim, probably one whose general beliefs are wildly too culturally conservative for my taste or that of any western feminist.
Samhita argues a similar case at Feministing:
I am sure part of the problem is that Muslim ideas and Western feminist ideas tend to run in opposition to one another. The feminist movement, as it is understood world-wide, is considered to be Western and white. It seems almost logical that local leaders would reject the terms of women’s rights if they are based on a Western model of “women’s liberation.”
However, the health risks of FGM are real and cannot be ignored internationally. But it is important to listen to these activists on their own terms.
FGM is an abhorrent practice, and I am very sorry that it was inflicted on Ali. But rather than preaching about allegedly universal values and some sort of right that “we” have to intervene and perhaps more importantly for the ideological obsessives, only to do so in such a way as will satisfy our own preconceptions, it might be worthwhile reflecting on the actual realities on the ground in countries where such practices occur and the methods activists are using to counter these cultural practices.
And, contra Ali:
“Islam is a totalitarian doctrine that puts women in a position that no other totalitarian doctrine, not even Communism, not even Nazism, did,” says Ali. “In Islam, women come off the worst.”
Women in Algeria have been entering the workplace and into legal and governmental institutions, without giving up religious beliefs, as reported at some length in the New York Times.
In this tradition-bound nation scarred by a brutal Islamist-led civil war that killed more than 100,000, a quiet revolution is under way: women are emerging as an economic and political force unheard of in the rest of the Arab world.
Women make up 70 percent of Algeria’s lawyers and 60 percent of its judges. Women dominate medicine. Increasingly, women contribute more to household income than men. Sixty percent of university students are women, university researchers say.
In a region where women have a decidedly low public profile, Algerian women are visible everywhere. They are starting to drive buses and taxicabs. They pump gas and wait on tables.
Although men still hold all of the formal levers of power and women still make up only 20 percent of the work force, that is more than twice their share a generation ago, and they seem to be taking over the machinery of state as well.
That scarcely suggests that liberal secularism is a necessary precondition for women’s path to equality nor that Algerian women are being trodden under the thumb of some archaic 7th century culture.
I think that people, in Australia at least, are increasingly seeing the rhetoric about the War on Terror as reflecting a very large helping of self-interest, and the madness in Iraq is exposing much of the violence for what it is - a series of internecine struggles within Islamism and Arab and Persian cultures rather than some sort of existential threat to “the West”. It should be long past time that we take the blinkers off and start asking exactly who and what aims the rhetoric employed by the Alis and Bones of the world serve.
Update: I have written a response to the debate this post started here.
Pointless nitpick: Matthew Yglesias
Other than that… I really am sick of Ayaan Hirsi Ali getting mentioned by people who would’ve locked her up in camps had she come here via boat, instead of the Netherlands.
Oopsy!
Fixed, thanks, Leinad, and you’re dead right about Ali’s Antipodean defenders. She was also (gasp) still a Muslim when she went to the Netherlands.
Great post, Kim. I was working my dander up to posting about Ali, but now I don’t have to!
Like you, I have a great deal of personal sympathy for her experiences. I don’t agree that demonising her ex-coreligionists is the most ethical or the most pragmatic response to undertake in the aim of ensuring that it doesn’t happen to other little girls anymore.
Agreed, tigtog (and thanks!) - I think the Algerian example demonstrates how her view on Islam is too much coloured by her own experience and culture (remembering that there are Islamic or Islamic influenced cultures rather than a singular Islamic culture). I also think that what she has to say about modernity and secularism is fairly lightweight. That’s not to diminish her passion and her lived experience - but I think in some ways she’s backed herself into a corner with her politics.
She is muslim & speaking sense in public, quite a rarity.
Some satisfaction in watching those who are a handbrake on society moan about how she gets an audience from those who lead with common sense, heh heh heh heh!
Monolithic Islam, n. : crazy, politically and theologically impossible supergroup existing solely in the imaginations of Islamic extremists and select Western commentators/policymakers .
Except she isn’t, and it isn’t. SATP and the facts, together in public?
Quite a rarity…
True as far as it goes.
But it is also necessary to note that women’s path to equality will always be blocked at some point before its destination by patriarchal cosomology, patriarchal theology, patriarchal ethical schemas, and patriarchal religious institutions.
BTW, Kim I think your nailing of Bone’s sanctimonious special pleading is right on target.
Oppressed African woman who experienced genital mutilation, the suicide of her sister, who fled an arranged marriage, who wrote a play about her experiences which then saw its director murdered, who now has to be escorted 24/7 by bodyguards, and who now dedicates her life (whilst putting it on the line) to provide inspiration for millions of similarly oppressed woman around the world.
And the Left is equivocal in its support for her.
Shame on you.
Here Here pommygranate
We are equivocal about someone who, however understandable her personal motivation may be, is effectively acting as a mouthpiece for the Islamophobic whitewash of two grubby imperialist wars. One (in Afghanistan) has led to the replacement of a bunch of misogynist Islamicists with another bunch of mysogynist Islamicists with a predilection for rape. The other has led to the deaths of countless thousands of Iraqi women and the immiseration of millions of others. It also, incidentally, involved the removal of a regime that, for all its faults, was actually secularist.
And btw, no-one’s providing the women of Afghanistan or Iraq with bodyguards.
effectively acting as a mouthpiece for the Islamophobic whitewash of two grubby imperialist wars
Is she?
Or is that your agenda?
No shame felt. Indeed those that should feel shame are those that use Ayaan Hirsan Ali to validate their Isalmophobia and provide a cover for their real lack of concern for the plight of women in many countries.
Which you would have understood if you read Kim’s post and not headed down the path of faux indignation.
Well said, Robert. Pommygranate: much of what Ali says is powerful and inspirational and a valid indictment of those responsible for her suffering. Kudos to her for the power of her voice.
But, taking the pragmatic view, as an apostate she is not going to be listened to by most of her former co-religionists, so that much of the sense of what she says will be rejected out of hand as Westernised propaganda (and frankly, a lot of what she says alongside her strong points is not actually sense).
The people who are listening to her are the people whose answer to her experience seems to be invasion and conquest. But if invasion and conquest in Afghanistan and Iraq have not actually improved the lives of women there, as examples above show, what actual success is Ali having in reaching her goal?
When Algerian women are successfully changing their society within Islam and without having to embrace secularisation, when Algerian women’s lives are actually being measurably improved, doesn’t that say something about which approach is actually more successful in ensuring that experiences like Ali’s are less likely to happen to other women?
What Robert and Shaun and tigtog said.
Yes, indeed. And in America too. But what practical suggestions have Ali’s supporters like Bone ever made to prevent FGM other than to denounce Islam really loudly? I reiterate what I said in the post and previous comments.
When Algerian women are successfully changing their society within Islam and without having to embrace secularisation,
But Tigtog, her whole point is that women’s lot will only be improved by secularisation. She makes the point repeatedly that hardline Islamic regimes (not all Muslim countries for sure) that impose Sharia Law on their people, by definition oppress women.
Under Sharia Law rape is only legal if you can produce four male witnesses, husbands are permitted four wives, women must cover up, women can only seek divorce if the husband permits it whilst men have the right of unilateral divorce, the penalty for adultery is stoning, women are not permitted to work or be educated and husbands are permitted to hit their wives for ‘disobedience’.
Thanks to courageous women such as Ayaan, we are becoming aware of these misogynous practices.
It seems incredible to me, as Robert knows, that the Left, the traditional champion of women’s rights, is not 100% behind her.
Shame on us for only having equivocal support? I though you were some kind of libertarian, pommygranate — why are you talking like a Stalinist partyliner?
Agree with her or not the fact that she is guarded 24/7 is frightening
Feminists, despite what Bone and even Ali would have you believe, were very much aware of these misogynistic practises before 9/11 and were working with Muslim feminists to help them change the laws and the culture to eradicate the worst abuses and work for female sovereignty and financial equity. There were many successes before the War on Terror began, and there continue to be many successes from such grassroots feminist activism in promoting women’s rights since the War on Terror started, just not in Iraq or Afghanistan.
And since to hear some talk, the whole point of the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan was to liberate women, isn’t that a damning indictment?
Leinad
We libertarians try to persuade not to mandate.
“If God had been a libertarian, Moses would have produced the Ten Suggestions”
Malcolm Bradbury
But secularisation must occur by degrees to be a success. If you start by saying “you must renounce Islam and live in the real world, sexist pigs and downtrodden victims!” there’ll be a backlash.
For Muslims living in Western nations it might be different - where they have a bettter chance of making a clean break - but in the ME it’s just going to get folks hurt.
Kim doesnt have to defend herself and her argument,Sharia Law maybe in the hands of men as enforcers generally,and powerful men know wherever they are faced with that as awesome power alone,on matters God if that is their way ,human reason subservient as it may well be,cannot be submissive to that power if a rage against it exists.Powerful men as good Islamic folk will take the pain themselves as being powerless to God and for the sake of God where the longer term interest cannot be met alone in the understandings of the Koran or humanity. The practice will stop,because to be a Muslim seems to be pain bearing,powerful men cannot do other than that. Because they are men, not God I would of thought.The male cleric are servants of God or Allah ,they cannot be servants to the understandings of the Koran alone,their pain is therefore obvious,males as humans carry their pain in a undignified way often..to be in pain,may not mean to fail, but not be able to finally as on earth, meet all written Koranic matters that appear instructional..but..perhaps,are more than that,… to face the power of the Creator.That is the Clerics real problem as one of the faithful,instructional matters are which have to be borne by the faithful,reasoning can only suggest where a practice hurts the chances for both women as child bearers and sinners who could be worthy again,the Cleric is in a diabolical bind with their faith..if the outcome of that, as we see in countries like ours werent so terrible for women,we would sympathise with the Clerics.Their mortality is always tested by the non human Will… by faith.
And shame on you Pommygranate for betraying one of the great principles of libertarianism.
Your rants can be interpreted only as an attempt to justify interventionist violence, as if sovereign human beings will be compelled to change their mental outlook on important spiritual issues with an extravagant dose of military violence and with an insulting denunciation of the principles and precepts of an embedded and embattled culture. Your insensitivity simply emboldens and legitimises the fanatics who interpret ignorant generalisations such as yours as a conspiracy against Islam in general.
The Pommygranates of this world are among the most effective recruiting sergeants for jihad.
I share Pommygranate’s hope for a secular world. But I observe that Pommygranate’s means to achieve that ambition are futile and contrary to a libertarian understanding of human motivations and human autonomy.
Katz
Your rants can be interpreted only as an attempt to justify interventionist violence
Who said anything about interventionist violence?
And anyway, you show a lack of understanding of libertarianism. Not all libertarians are isolationist.
War is an ugly thing but not the ugliest of things; the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feelings which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.
John Staurt Mill, On Liberty
The same might be said of a man who has nothing for which he is willing to argue, nothing which is more important to him than his own feelings of superiority: he’s a miserable creature with no chance of looking intelligent except by quoting the ideas - well, you get my drift.
It’s one thing to be willing to fight in defence of one’s own notion of freedom - it’s something else entirely to demand that others conform to that notion and impose it at the point of a gun. The latter demands some pretty serious justification.
Pommygranate:
1. You answered your own question, and to your detriment.
2. Isolationism does not equal pacificism. I am neither isolationist nor pacifist. Nor am I a coward. A true libertarian has a better sense of the potentiality for beneficial outcomes of military violence than you do. For you, Pommygranate, appear to be somewhat besotted by the grim glamour of martial exploits.
In other words, you mistake shock and awe as a process for shock and awe as a result.
Grow up Pommygranate.
Katz
Try and debate without resorting to personal attacks. Not only is it common decency but it’s usually a good indicator that you have run out of arguments. Bye.
9.52am:
2.44pm:
Pommygranate bails.
(BTW, nice one, FDG. No one left here except us sensible folk, it seems.)
What’s the connection between Ayaan Hirsi Ali and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? Theo Van Gogh was assassinated in 2004, and Ali’s fame was subsequent to that — well after both events were well under way.
The common Islamophobia which runs like a red thread through much of her work and the way it is put to use and justifications for “humanitarian intervention” and war, Rob - as tigtog said.
Dunno that you could really call ‘Submission’ Islamophobic. Heretical to an Islamist, no doubt, but then so was ‘The Satanic Verses’. Besides, has anyone used Ali’s work to justify the invasions of Iraq or Afghanistan, or any prospective intervention in the Sudan?
Rob, you’re being overly literal minded here. It’s used as part of an attempt to form a climate of opinion which paints Islam as being dominated by a “barbaric” “7th century Arabian culture” which, as you can see from reading Bone’s piece, contributes to a justification for intervention in the Sudan, and the rest of the nonsense about the liberation of Iraq and Afghanistan being in the interests of gender equity - which has now become a “core Australian value” according to Ministers because it enables people to stigmatise Islamic citizens and immigrants.
But Bone specifically singles out Turkey as an example of how Islam and (the universalist values of) democracy are compatible. She could have mentioned Indonesia, of course, as another example. Both are Islamic, both have extremists, but both (latterly, in the case of Indonesia) are firmly democratic.
I must say I see nothing to object to in her article.
Kim
I am afraid your post is a classic statement of why it is The Left that is associated with modern-day anti-Semitism more than The Right.
The tragedy is I am not even sure you will appreciate this even after I have told you.
Oh and let me save you the typing.
Kim: “Being anti-Zionist is not anti-Semitic.”
Which society (since evidently it’s not Turkey) is that precisely?
Kim
I have been saying this since my very first post on LP. However, 90% of my posts which situate Islamic imperialism at the centre of Middle East contretemps are not published. I suppose now that I have finally convinced YOU, my views will not be considered “Islamophobic?”
If so, LP will have a first-mover advantage among blogs published by the Luvvie Left. There are, to be sure, some quite hard-core Leftists around who have always been on to the reality. Rare as hens-teeth mind.
What are you on about, John? I’ve got no idea what anti-Semitism has to do with this post.
Mark - primarily Iran, I would have thought, and by extension other theocracies in which the same is true. Are you disagreeing with her?
Mark
I have a billion deadlines au momente, as i hope you can understand. So, rather than bash something out that reflects my frazzled brain which is currently jumping from Aeschylus to Justinian, to neuroimmunology to Fourier Series, I shall post a clear explanation on the morrow. However, as my post said, your not having an idea what anti-Semitism has to do with the article is no surprise.
Bone:
1. Bone is correct about ordinary Muslims being the best bulwark against extremist Islamism. But she does not seem to understand that her heroes Blair and Bush (and doubtless Howard) have been instrumental in making life intolerable for educated, liberal Muslims throughout the Middle East. Hasn’t Bone been keeping up with news from Iraq? At least 2 million refugees have fleed that tragic country since the advent of “Shock and Awe”. A high percentage of them are those self-same educated, liberal Muslims.
What have the Infamous GWOT Trio done for them? They have destroyed their lives.
2. Bone insists on mistaking correct prediction for approbation. We lefties plead with Bush, “Don’t go, you’ll make it worse!” And guess what, we were correct.
I cannot understand why Bone is unable to comprehend that rather basic point.
3. The million Turks know that if the whole of Turkey were to vote for president, Turkey would have an Islamist president. (Ironically, and predictably for many who aren’t besotted by fantasy, the US presided over a democratic process in Iraq that produced an Islamist hegemony.)
Rob, and Bone seem unable to grasp that Islamism is a product of illiberal democracy.
And Islamism is on the march, thanks in no small part to the cack-handedness of the Infamous GWOT Trio — Bush, Blair and Howard, and their claqueurs of the ilk of Bone.
I don’t know in what sense you mean, Rob, since as Katz has suggested, what she has written is emotive and disconnected rather than logical and argumentative. Very clearly the large number of people in Iran who would like to challenge the boundaries set by the regime derive no benefit from the sorts of concern troll analyses she writes (which either deliberately or through lack of rigour skip from example to example to paint a picture of monolithic Islam) nor do they benefit from the current posture of American foreign policy (which in the case of Iran has bugger all to do with either humanitarianism - the ostensible topic of her badly thought out piece - or “Western values” unless those values are reduced to the assertion of power or strategic realism, neither of which she has in mind, I think).
I’m sorry, Mark, I was quite unclear.
I meant do you agree or disagree with this statement:
Of course I agree with that statement, Rob, but that’s hardly the point.
Why then the exoriation of Bone? I’m baffled. (I often am.) I rather thought that was the central point of the whole article.
For two reasons, Rob, and it is quite clear from the post:
1. She elides a whole range of practices as in some way characteristic of Islam and suggests that Western secularism is the only answer.
2. She makes a tendentious attempt to justify war in the name of “humanitarian interventionism” and does so very selectively - it appears that the outrages to human rights she deplores only ever occur in Islamic countries.
No Rob, the central point of Bone’s article is that Bush, Blair and Howard have contributed to making that vision of civil society possible. (Bone’s corollary is that Lefties have conspired to prevent the realisation of that vision.)
Now this is the bit that you must undersand Rob:
Bone’s critics here have definitvely refuted Bone’s fantasy about hthe Infamous GWOT Trio.
Her argument is bankrupt.
Rob
The excoriation of Bone is an irruption of left-wing anti-Semitism, provoked by the appearance on Australian soil of the otherwise shunned “Other” of the western bourgeois-left feminist: Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
Said western bourgeois-left feminists do not have room for Hanan Ashrawi AND their “Other.”
One can only imagine the pro-Palestinian paroxysms that attended Ashrawi’s visit a couple of years ago, among these same western bourgeois-left feminists. A sane human being would have expected similar reactions to Ali.
The hypocrisy so often crosses over from chutzpah to contemptible
No, I don’t see that at all, Katz and Mark.
Commenting on Blair’s foreign policy, she says:
That looks like honest commentary to me - and the context is Blair and his “interventionism”, not the rightness or wrongness of intervention in Iraq or Afghanistan. (Though it seems unarguable to me but what the interventions in the Balkans (was not the intervention there to save the Muslims?)and Sierra Leone were both justified and just.)
Bone acknowledges specifically that the Iraqi adventure has been disastrous.
What’s all the stuff about “Western values” doing in the column, then, Rob? Surely readers are meant to infer some connection between the assertions that these values are better than those “more appropriate to 7th-century century Arabia” as she puts it and the stuff on war? Either it has some point - which is to say that what she sees as oppressive values justify “humanitarian interventionism” - or the whole thing is just a confused rant.
John, once again, I have no idea why or how criticism of Ali’s views could constitute “anti-Semitism”? That’s just bizarre.
But she doesn’t acknowledge that the Left was correct all along about Iraq.
And why is that? Because she refuses to acknowledge that the Left’s understanding of social and cultural processes in the Middle East is superior to the interventionists’ ideologically-driven programs.
And what doesn’t whe acknowledge that? Because it would necessarily entail an utter refutation of her entire program of intervention.
Bone cannot acknowledge the source of her mistaken appreciation of the world.
Bone cannot acknowledge her intellectual bankruptcy.
Can you point me to where Bone mentions “Western values”, Mark?
John — thanks, I think I get your point about anti-Semitism.
Katz — there were strong voices from the right who opposed the invasion of Iraq from the get-go. Owen Harries, for one. In any case, the point is immaterial to the article in question.
Also, if you understand John’s point, perhaps you could elucidate it?
Yes, of course I saw those references, Mark, but there’s no mention of “western values“.
The first reference is hardly triumphalist. The second relates to comparative systems of governments. The third is in favour of the universality of the rights and freedoms enjoyed by western democracies.
Nothing to argue with there, AFAICS.
Nonsense.
Bone’s whole article is about what the west should do and think about Islam, especially in the context of the Middle East.
Her point is that Bush and Blair’s intentions are superior to the Left’s.
Your reference to Harries is utterly irrelevant. Bone vents her spleen on the Left, not on Harries and the realist Right.
I’m beginning to understand why you find Greensleeves comprehensible.
Rob, obviously she’s trying very hard not to identify “shared universal values” with “Western values” but since apparently they’re not shared and Western humanitarian interventionism exists to impose them, she doesn’t really succeed.
Particularly in the third passage I’ve quoted where “our” can only refer back to these putatively universal values.
Katz, you’re simply constructing a whole argument of your own and then projecting it onto Bone.
This is just silly. It was you who introduced the idea (nor present in Bone’s article but interpolated by you) that “But she doesn’t acknowledge that the Left was correct all along about Iraq.”
Why should she? That’s not what the article is about. You’re just re-writing the article to suit your own purposes.
Mark
Are you seriously suggesting that you would NOT agree with Bone on western values vs. seventh century Arabia?
And are you seriously trying to tell us that you do not realize that the utopia sought by Sunnia Arab Islamists IS the world of the first four “good” caliphs?
Rob, who are the “so-called liberal commentators” and “culturalists” the column is designed to criticise then?
I do sympathise, though. It’s a most incoherent article.
So, Mark, do you think that people in the Sudan, Syria, Uganda, Nigeria, Sierra Leone and all the rest do not believe in or aspire to nor have an entitlement to the rights and freedoms enjoyed in the western democracies?
Rob, many don’t aspire to “rights and freedoms” in exactly the same sense, no. Some do. As suggested in the post, there are other ways of achieving progressive goals than an importation of (anyway very imperfect) Western political systems… Let me point out, pre-emptively, that I’m not being a “culturalist” here but recognising that cultures vary. It’s idiotic to think that they don’t, and the claim that Iraq was justified and would work out because (all) Iraqis wanted “rights and freedoms” demonstrates why.
I’ve already answered the question, John.
Bone never said that.
She said:
She also said:
Yes; that’s what the UN charter is all about.
Oh Rob, what an inattentive reader you are:
Bone
I count six references to the despised Left.
The payload of Bone’s fantasia is in the final paragraph. It is a diatribe against TEH LEFT.
Don’t be daft, Katz. Try to remember she wrote the article, not you. The article is inspired by, about, and reflective of the issues surrounding the Iranian police’s rounding up of women wearing “non-or-insufficiently-Islamic” clothing.
Give some thought to what that police action and the left’s putative complaisance in the face of it actually means.
Putative is the word, Rob.
So, I’m sorry, what’s all the stuff in there about Blair and Bush and “humanitarian interventionism” got to do with the actions of the Iranian police? Is she suggesting Iran as a target of humanitarian interventionism in the name of “shared universal values”?
Re-read the article, maybe. It doesn’t seem to be too hard to work out. It’s an intelligent, well-thought out piece.
I mean, have a look at what you guys have been doing on this thread. You’ve picked up bits of what Bone didn’t say in the first place, dragged them off to some place in the conspiracy jungle a couple of hundred miles off at the side, extrapolated some conclusions of your own which you attributed to her, and triumphantly denounced her as a war-mongering fascist (except of course you didn’t say that but I, reconstructing your discourse, understand your meaning as perfectly as you understand Bone’s — not).
And of course Ayaan Hirsi Ali must be twice as bad, just because Bone approves of her.
Hyperbole, yes, yes — but not by that that much.
Rob, since Katz and I (and Kim in the post) are pretty clear about what she was saying in the piece and since your contribution has been to deny that she says what we think she says, perhaps the onus lies on you to specify what you think her argument is.
You’ve been playing a sort of guerilla scattershot approach with comments rather than engaging with either the post or clearly arguing against everyone else’s interpretation of Bone’s meaning.
The arguments made about how Ali proposes to respond to FGM compared to the responses of women in countries where it is practiced and the contention that the imposition of Western secular values is not the only way to bring about progressive change in gender relations are also set out in the post and the initial comments, but not addressed by you.
It comes down to a simple opposition, as it has done for centuries. Freedom versus oppression. I reckon the Larva Prodders are on one side, and decent human beings like Bone and the Eustonistas you love to sneer at are on the other.
As Pommy said a while back, it’s amazing you guys aren’t on Ali’s side. But then you probably wouldn’t have been on Voltaire’s, or Sakharov’s.
Oh I do like a good laugh before tea-time!
With some difficulty I’ll avoid responding to some of the utterly ridiculous things said above.
The crucial point for me is concern that the Left may find itself reacting to stupid arguments such as Bones’ by adopting a sort of caricature of the position she projects onto us.
Darfur demands a Western response. I don’t know exactly what form that response should take, and I can’t imagine it would involve an Iraq style invasion. But I’m worried when people say “well Congo is worse so any call for intervention in Darfur is just driven by Islamophobia”.
The thing Bone never seem to acknowledge is that the strongest voices for Darfur have generally been people who opposed the Iraq invasion (eg Clooney). The danger is that the Left may start to believe her and we end up opposing, or just not supporting, action there. And this time we probably have a lot more influence than we did in the lead up to the Iraq invasion.
So we’re on the side of oppression? Whatever, Rob. It must be comforting for you and the Eustonistas never to have a doubt that you’re on the right side of history and able to see things in their correct black and white colours.
I think you’ve let the cat out of the bag, there, personally. All this posturing by Bone and her epigones is about making political points within the West (maybe that’s the Antipodean incarnation of her/Blair’s “clash within civilisations”). Whatever, for instance, can you mean by this comment?
Either it’s meaningless concern trolling - I don’t believe for a second you advocate military intervention in Syria or Uganda for instance - or it’s a disingenuous attempt to claim some sort of high moral ground by dismissing those who see complexity rather than a “simple opposition” as firstly “culturalists” then some sort of enemy within.
That’s why the rhetoric of Bone and her ilk is so hypocritical. The assumed tone of self-righteousness disguises the actual political pettiness.
I don’t think the post argues against intervention in Darfur. I don’t myself. But it’s wise to understand what has led to the situation there, rather than accept the distortions involved in seeing it as part of some sort of Islam vs. the others stoush.
Thanks Mark. Rereading it I think I took “The biggest two arguments against liberal interventionism…” as meaning “The biggest arguments against intervention…” If Kims attacking the brand of thinking known as “liberal interventionism” I’m with her. If she’s opposing western liberals intervening, at least via government agency (I can’t imagine she’s opposed to NGO involvement) then I have a big problem.
feral sparrowhawk, I may have been taking it for granted that readers were aware of my previous comments supporting intervention in Darfur.
On Katz and Mark v. Rob, I think Rob is displaying that un-Euston “value” of romanticism and emotion which is his preferred mode of political rhetoric and thought rather than the reason which is usually proclaimed to be central - Enlightenment values and all that…
Still a bit of Hegelianism rather than Ka