Fighting intolerance without prejudice

At first glance, the title of this blogpost seems redundant, since prejudice and intolerance are usually treated like synonyms. However, dozens of different reactions I have been reading about, to all the horrific events that keep cropping up in the news these days, are making it obvious to me once again just how difficult it is for most people to make any sense out of the current wave of prejudice and intolerance that seems to be taking over the entire world.

One of those events was Donald Trump’s much maligned decision on January 27 to “temporarily” ban entry to the USA for anyone born in a group of seven Muslim-majority countries designated as being “hotbeds of terrorism”, ostensibly in order to protect the US population from any potential terrorist immigration. Another such event was the odious massacre of six Muslim worshippers, and the wounding of several others, in a Quebec City mosque on January 29, by a lone-wolf, extreme right-wing Québécois youth. Two events that the White House tried to link together by claiming that the anti-Muslim terrorist attack in Quebec somehow justified Trump’s partial immigration ban!

Whereas the real link between those two events is that the vast majority of the Muslims living in the Western world, as well as those living in the Asian and African countries involved in the ban, are not terrorists at all, any more than are the vast majority of non-Muslims living in those same regions. Most of the world’s Muslims do not even belong to one or another of the ultra-conservative branches of Islam, although opinions differ as to how many Muslims may passively support jihadism in any of its forms. However, the US ban certainly encourages not only non-Muslim intolerance of non-violent Muslims, but also seems to justify Muslim intolerance of the non-Muslim world in general. As well as encouraging many more xenophobic extremists, both Muslim and non-Muslim, to consider joining the already long list of perpetrators who act out their irrational fears over and over again, by killing a whole lot more people than have so far been killed by their predecessors.

Which means that the Trump administration is not fighting against terrorism at all. As pointed out recently by James Woolsey, a former CIA director, the Trump ban is instead helping to transform the current “civil war” inside the Muslim world, between extremists and anti-extremists, into a Samuel Huntington-style war between competing civilizations. Something that an ex-CIA director would certainly know a lot about, having been, if not personally, at least institutionally involved in using ultra-right-wing Muslim movements to help the USA fight against the influence of communism, and of nationalism, inside the Muslim world.

Which means that the intolerance of the current US government toward all Muslims is just part of the ongoing neofascist disease currently affecting the entire world. In every country, this epidemic starts out by abandonment of the official condemnations of intolerance that most governments used to hand out in the past, and instead promotes the acceptance of racism, sexism and all the other kinds of ultra-right-wing hate mongering, as the “voice of the people”. Once initiated, this neofascist tendency rapidly gathers intensity, becoming more and more violently reactionary with each passing day. As has already taken place in many other parts of the world, the Trump administration in the USA has now become an important part of what is currently the world’s most important problem.

Nevertheless, those who quite rightly denounce the US government for its intolerant and prejudiced attitude toward the Muslim world should not be going over to the other extreme, by trying to justify violent Muslim reactions to that intolerance. Unfortunately, many people who constantly inveigle against Islamophobia, particularly in the Western group of countries, often make the horrendous mistake of believing that it is the Western empires oppression of the Muslims that is the underlying cause of Islamic terrorism. Although the British, French and American empires all fanned the flames of jihadism in recent decades, the use of considerable amounts of violence to help “convert” subject populations to their will has been part and parcel of Islamic imperialism since the beginning. Imperialism, after all, was not invented in the West, but has in fact existed in most parts of the world, ever since the first Mesopotamian city-states started falling under the control of neighbouring empires over five thousand years ago.

Outside intelligence forces cannot create such an atavistic movement out of nothing, but always have to build upon tendencies already existing in any targeted population. As in every other part of the world that has been seriously affected by Western colonialism and neocolonialism, the Muslim world has been heavily corrupted toward ultra-conservative thinking and sectarian violence by the efforts of non-Muslim, “outside agitators”. But those efforts could never have succeeded without considerable, internal support from homegrown extremists, particularly those belonging to the Salafist and Wahhabist movements, often based in countries like Saudi Arabia. Once again, however, under Donald Trump as well as under his predecessors, the US government has decided for opportunist reasons not to include such countries in its list of “hotbeds of terrorism”.

In reality, jihadi violence, which is often practised in Shiite countries as well as in Sunni ones, is every bit as reprehensible as Western military violence, especially when it is perpetrated against largely civilian targets. Killing large numbers of innocent people as part of some imperial design is as morally reprehensible if its goal is to revive the expansionist Islamic caliphates of days gone by, than if its goal is to preserve Western neocolonial control of both human and natural resources, overseas. Both official government terrorism and unofficial Islamic terrorism are just two sides of the same coin.

Even though it can certainly be shown that US military forces, and their other Western and non-Western allies, including Israel and Turkey, have killed a significantly larger number of innocent Muslims than the jihadi terrorists have so far killed of innocent non-Muslim populations, the qualitative reality of civilian massacre far outweighs the quantitative difference in the number of corpses, at least from a moral standpoint. Especially when we realize that most of the non-combatant victims of jihadi terror were also non-extremist Muslims, or at least “not sufficiently extremist” Muslims.

Certainly, Islamophobia in non-Muslim countries has to be condemned for what it is, an irrational fear of all Muslims, the terrorist minority as well as the non-terrorist majority. But the fight against Islamophobia in the world’s non-Muslim countries cannot include creating apologies for violent jihadism. Every time someone denounces Islamophobia, that person should also denounce Islamism, defined as the use of the Muslim religion as a political weapon against rival empires. By the same token, everyone denouncing Islamic terrorism should also denounce Islamophobia, in the same breath. Both of those ideologies form part of the same, ultra-right-wing, reactionary, atavistic tendencies currently infecting world politics.

Right-wing organizations in the West, such as the Conservative Party of Canada, also quite cleverly use very real examples of “barbarian cultural practices” in many Muslim-majority countries as part of their Islamophobic propaganda. Ultra-right-wing organizations such as the National Front in France are also quite clever in their use of “republican” principles such as laicity (government-sponsored secularism) in order to fan the flames of popular Islamophobia. But the fact that these Western political organizations are quite good at what they do should not blind honest opponents of Islamophobia to the reality of the Islamic terrorists oppression of their own Muslim populations.

Barbarian cultural practices do indeed exist in every country, but they are in fact concentrated in various Third World countries, including many different Muslim-majority countries in Africa and Asia, such as Somalia and Afghanistan. But they also concentrated in places like Hindu-dominated India, whose huge population, including a significant Muslim minority, makes it the largest country in the world affected by that kind of intense oppression. These practices include such abominations as honour killings, female excision, forced marriages of pre-pubescent girls, prostitution slavery rings, wife beatings, polygamy and so on, targeting millions of people, mostly among the female portions of those populations. Other barbarian practices, however, such as punishing apostasy by using the death penalty, as well as jailing and whipping dissidents, have mostly been used against men.

The fact that all those practices have been so effectively and opportunistically used in many different Western electoral campaigns does not mean that opponents of Islamophobia should be allowed to get away with downplaying those forms of oppression, just because they take place more often in some parts of the world than in others. While it is true that all religions condone female oppression, the parts of the world least affected by modern forms of enlightenment are also the ones most affected by popular versions of misogyny. This also includes many Christian populations, mostly in Africa and Latin America, who often hate feminism, and sexual “deviances” like homosexuality, as much as do ultra-conservative Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs and other religious extremists. Denying reality all over the world, including the Third World, does not get us anywhere. Which does not mean that such practices do not also exist, often to a considerable extent, in many other countries not usually classified as part of the Third World, such as the Russian Federation, or even in the not-so-enlightened Western countries.

The most often overlooked fact in this debate is that religious ideologies, like political ideologies, are always inherently biased in dozens of different ways. All ideologies, by definition, are necessarily intolerant and prejudiced, since they all have to lead people away from the truth, just to continue functioning as rival ideologies. It is impossible for any religion to avoid blowing its own horn, and still remain a distinct religion. When some religious people, “moderate”, non-fundamentalist believers, support tolerance, they are not doing so in most cases for religious reasons, but because those people have partially adopted more modern attitudes toward society, that originated in such non-religious sources as the philosophers of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. In other words, many people nowadays combine both religious, and secular, influences on their thinking. More or less in the way that the Republican Party in the USA combines such quite contradictory ideologies as ethnic imperialism, Christian fundamentalism and laissez-faire libertarianism in its own peculiar, ideological pedigree.

Holy books from most of the world’s religions, such as the Bible and the Koran, are chock full of horrific passages promoting full-scale ideological warfare against rival beliefs. They are incredibly intolerant of, and prejudiced against, their designated enemies, promoting ideological violence much more often than they promote peaceful attitudes and cultivated debate between rival sets of ideas. It is no wonder that fundamentalists nowadays who adopt a literal interpretation of the messages contained in such books often end up promoting terrorism.

It should also not be forgotten that most of the intellectual discoveries and contributions to scientific understanding that were accomplished during the reigns of the nominally Christian and Muslim empires of the past, that helped to make them great, were not made by fundamentalist, religious believers, but by thinkers influenced by such secular traditions as rationalist philosophy. The incorporation of Platonic and Aristotelian influences into nominally Christian (the Logos incorporated into the Trinity), and nominally Muslim (the Mutazilist school of Islam), intellectual life predated the eventual liberation of modern scientific thought from reactionary religious prejudices.

The same type of observation also applies to the use of “Western values”, usually referred to in the media as values “belonging” to some particular Western country, to camouflage incendiary attitudes toward Muslim populations living in the West. Since most Muslims, not just the extreme right-wing ones, still harbour more conservative attitudes toward such things as women’s liberation than do most mainstream Christians, they become an easy target for racism, being treated as an inferior “race” instead of as a competing, universal religion. Such recent events as the mass demonstrations in Egypt, against the dictatorship’s attempt to eliminate the traditional Muslim prejudice against women petitioning for divorce (easy for men, very difficult for women), are constantly buttressing Western Islamophobia and disdain for Islam in general. Wherever it is practised, the sharia law, governing social relations within the umma, is also an excellent example of the way that conservative Islam tends to treat women as if they were children. More or less in the same way that they were treated in most Christian countries fifty or a hundred years ago.

This debate also invariably centres around many Muslim women’s tendency to drape themselves in various kinds of cover-up clothing, ostensibly in order to hide their bodies from improper male leering. These wardrobe decisions are most often adopted as a form of identity politics, interpreted as either a cultural or a religious symbol of female purity. The problem is that these more or less exaggerated attempts at modesty are also forms of female oppression, either imposed by male members of the family, or by the Muslim community (umma) in general. Quite often, they also come about as the result of self-imposed, female masochism, that hides individual, ideological identification with the surrounding community even more than it hides women’s faces, or entire bodies.

The extremely oppressive “barbarian” practices mentioned above, the general Muslim tendency to oppose women’s liberation, and the more symbolic “wardrobe malfunctions” among radicalized Muslim women, are often misinterpreted by conservative and ultra-conservative political formations in Western countries as “proof” that all Muslims are extremists, tending towards terrorism. In places such as France and Quebec, possessing relatively strong secular  movements, the republican desire to truly separate Church and State (religion and government) has led such countries to legislate, or try to legislate, against religious control of public institutions, in a democratic effort to separate private belief from public policy. Unfortunately, the intervention of right-wing and extreme right-wing parties and movements into that debate has convinced many left-liberal zealots opposed to Islamophobia, that public secularism, also known as laicity, is only being used to get large numbers of uninformed people to hate Muslims more than they ever had before.

In reality, however, laicity is just part of the general thrust of the Enlightenment thinkers to free human societies from the arcane, atavistic attitudes of religious prejudice and intolerance. Ultra-right-wing deformation of the desire to separate Church and State for democratic reasons, has resulted in the extremely reactionary use of feigned secularism to promote Islamophobia instead, exactly the opposite of laicity’s original intent of controlling conservative Catholicism’s influence on government. In France, the National Front has turned secularism on its head, transforming it into a weapon for promoting fascism, more or less in the same way that the Nazis (“national socialists”) helped turn socialism into a bad word during the 1930s.

The massive recent influx of millions of North African and West Asian (“Middle Eastern”) refugees into Europe, most of them Muslim, means that in today’s world, it is mostly Western audiences that are constantly being admonished to reject prejudice and intolerance toward immigrant populations, rather than “Eastern” populations. Given the horrendously negative treatment of minority religious populations in most of the world’s Muslim-majority countries (not only Christians and Yazidis in the Middle East, but also Hindus and Buddhists in Indonesia), it is hard to believe that if the flow of refugees were reversed, the Muslim populations would be any kinder to the incoming Christians than the other way around. In fact, as far as I can tell, every majority religion in the world right now has a generally intolerant and prejudiced attitude toward religious minorities. Treating such minorities as if they were inferior “races” seems to have become a universal tendency among human populations.

But that sort of tendency has to be turned around completely if there is to be any future for humanity as a whole. Now that capitalist neoliberalism has globalized the entire world into one giant economy, it is not only the enormous, unprecedented income gap between the social classes that has to be overcome. At some point, the huge cultural differences between rival populations that have been building up ever since human beings started settling the entire planet thousands of years ago, cannot be allowed to drive us all increasingly closer to an Armageddon of total war between rival, neofascist empires. All the ultra-right-wing movements now dominating world politics, Islamophobia as well as Islamism, and all the other kinds of racism and racialization of religion that currently exist, have to be swept aside. Globalization has to be humanized rather than continuing to be used, as it is now, as a weapon of imperialism, oppression of women, and the crushing of “inferior” social classes.