The discussions are
not being had constantly, because the top-down multicultural project polarises the debate into racists and non-racists. As has happened here. And so discussion becomes about whether what’s been said is racist.
Leave CH aside for now. Decent people like Maryam Namazi – a socialist feminist ex-Muslim – are being lumped along with the far right. She is called racist, she is called Islamophobic, she is vilified, and her points are discounted. People who probably haven’t even heard her speak start from the assumption that she is pro-racist.
Read her Twitter time line. She makes perfectly easy to understand statements which liberal leftists take completely the wrong way, because of the preconceptions they start with, because of the three decades of conditioning that these questions aren’t allowed. The only people who question multiculturalism, the mindset goes, are the far right, so therefore anyone who questions it is far right. I’ve had it myself, and it’s like wading through treacle trying to get people to see what ought to be a straightforward point. What would have been a widely held view on the left had moral relativism not warped the terms of reference.
And that’s what’s happening with this CH piece: it isn’t satire. It’s straight forward commentary. But it is being taken the wrong way by people determined to see racism. Yes, there are a couple of points I disagree with. I’ve discussed them. But just because I disagree with someone doesn’t make them a racist. I agree with the main theme of what is being said by this piece. And just because there are minor things I don’t agree with doesn’t mean I think they shouldn’t be said.
The continual attempts to misinterpret, mislabel, wilfully misunderstand, and generally smear Charlie Hebdo lead me to one conclusion: the people on the so-called left doing the smearing don’t want the murders to have been caused by anything other than what they’ve decided they were caused by. They want Charlie Hebdo to have brought those murders on themselves. They want those murders to be part of a blow against imperialism. Because to see them as anything else means they have to rethink the explanations they have for everything. So Charlie Hebdo are racists.
Except they aren’t.
I was just looking for my copy of Kenan Malik’s Fatwa to Jihad, because there was a passage I wanted to quote. It appears I’ve lent it to someone. It was something like this, though:
“Multiculturalism has helped foster a more tribal nation and, within Muslim communities, has undermined progressive trends while strengthening the hand of conservative religious leaders. While it did not create militant Islam, it helped create for it a space within British Muslim communities that had not existed before.”
And that’s what this CH piece is talking about, though from a French perspective. This is not about “an entire group of people being evil” as you have read it, it’s about a culture that has had the unintended consequence of boosting the wrong attitudes and the wrong people. Because we don’t want to upset that decent, courageous, dignified woman in the veil by discussing our misgivings about the patriarchy and misogyny, we don’t. We say “She is an admirable woman. She is courageous and dignified, devoted to her family and her children. Why bother her? She harms no one”, and decide that it’s none of our business. We don’t want to give her offence. We don’t really want to give
anyone offence. We certainly don’t want to be mistaken for a far right racist. So we keep our misgivings to ourselves. But by doing that we strengthen the hand of conservative religious leaders. And we contribute to the debate being polarised. We are all to blame. That’s how we ended up here.
