JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSES TO AN EDITORIAL IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

Honorable John McCain?

Honorable because for once in his life he spoke against the utter stupidity of Republican zombies like Michele Bachmann, a woman who has made lunatic accusation after accusation in her career, and never before did the nasty little fly-boy speak up.

I don’t know just why McCain chose that moment to open his mouth, but it was certainly not a matter of honor. Likely his instincts told him there was political gain to be made, and he does have remarkably good political instincts.

If you want to inform yourself of just how dishonorable a man John McCain has been for most of his life, read this:

http://chuckmanwords.wordpress.com/2009/06/07/john-mccain-a-matter-of-character/
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“The Muslim ideology is a threat to the whole western world, because its stated aim is to subjugate it, and rid the world of democracy and human rights law and impose Sharia etc. Any sane person who practices Islam is either very dumb, or they are devious subversives. Islam is a poison for the mind, which brings much violence to the earth.”

And what of the ultra-Orthodox?

They have bizarre laws too.

And their women are held in utter inferiority and subservience.

They can’t even ride on a bus with men.

They cannot divorce their husbands no matter how abusive.

If there is a divorce, the man will be awarded the woman’s children.

While there are not great numbers of them, they certainly do their share of nasty damage.

Shooting unarmed Palestinians frequently.

Chopping done olive groves and fruit trees belonging to others.

Defacing and sometimes destroying the dwellings of others.

Stealing the land of others frequently.

All done while using unacceptable language calling their Palestinian neighbors things like vermin.

And what about the spitting on people on the streets or kicking those who happen to be different, as Arabs or Africans?

I guess that’s all okay?

 

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY COLIN FREEZE IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

“The silent threat of the lone-wolf terrorist”

An utterly stupid piece of writing.

We have always, always had “lone wolf” monsters.

How do you think legends like vampires and other monsters became so fixed in people’s minds?

And what do you think the likes of John Wayne Gacy and Charles Manson and Robert Picton and Clifford Olsen represent?

They are psychopathic serial and mass killers, one of nature’s many mistakes, from civilized society’s point of view, in its endless evolutionary experiments.

There may have been a time when such people served a purpose, as in wars in the times of walled cities.

So what purpose does it serve to call such people “terrorists”?

Or indeed to attribute any politics or ideology to their love of killing and torturing human beings?

Nothing, but it feeds the ignorant nightmarish fears being promoted by Islamophobics night and day.

This is “high class” garbage.

 

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY LAWRENCE DAVIDSON IN INTIFADA PALESTINE

An accurate assessment, but an unpopular one.

From the beginning I have explained and advocated the same view, the view of relatively powerless people taking violent action against great injustices.

But governments and the large mainline news media which invariably support them have filled the atmosphere with Islamophobic nonsense to such an extent that it is blindly accepted by many.

Being a humanist with loyalty to no religion, I have no special brief for Islam.

But I am a person who has little toleration for injustice, and American policies after WWII are nothing if not one long series of injustices.

A very wise woman once said, in answer to the question of what distinguishes a good, democratic society, that it was whether the people lived with a sense of justice.

I cannot agree more with that profound and simple observation.

But we see very little justice from the foreign policy of the United States. We see, quite to the contrary, the imposition, over and over again, of injustice, on an international scale being much as one would experience in an old society where deliberate injustice is maintained as the ordinary state of affairs.

Global affairs, if we are to support democratic values and humane dealings, must also feature justice. It is no less required.

But so many people recognize that that is not the situation, and they include not only people living in the artificial reality of the Middle East maintained by the United States but people in Europe and North America who find it difficult even to have good public discussions of the matter.

The United States through NATO and its tremendous financial and economic power is remarkably capable of keeping these issues off the public agenda.

Sometimes, as in Egypt, an eruption simply gets too big to suppress, and the U.S. takes great hypocritical noises about democracy and the people’s desires, but it never does this automatically, and at the same time it throws its support to inevitable change (really as a form of emergency measure and damage control) in a place like Egypt, it is bombing people and supporting repression of people with the same kind of demands for freedom in Yemen, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia.

And even in Egypt, what do we see now? Basically a military junta taking immense amounts of time to change anything meaningful, hoping to let people’s energy and dreams dissipate. And it is the United States supporting the effort.

So much for the land of the free, a slogan that always has been more slogan than reality. Free people do not enslave others. Genuine democratic states do not do deals with dictators and just wink at gross injustice. But America is a land where all the vaunted assertions of the Constitution end right at the shoreline. The horrors of Guantanamo, 90 miles off shore, are just fine. And increasingly, with terrible invasions of privacy and police-state laws about “terror” even on shore America becomes a less democratic place daily.

Terror has become a word very similar to what the ghastly Joe Stalin meant when he spoke of “wreckers,” one of his signal words for new waves of state terror in the Soviet Union.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

The Palestinians are making plans for unprecedented violence to begin following their United Nations application for statehood?

Avigdor Lieberman is a sick extremist, almost certainly a man suffering from mental illness.

But his idiotic words, time and again, reveal for all the world to see the kind of thinking that genuinely motivates Israel’s government in its brutal behavior, and it sure isn’t the stuff of Netanyahu’s fantasyland speech before Congress.

Israel’s behavior just becomes more and more threatening and irrational as time goes on.

Right now, this small country keeps threatening war with Iran, as well as ceaselessly pushing the United States in that direction.

It has long supported an attack on Syria to overthrow that government.

It is threatening the border of Lebanon with regular incursions of fighter planes and troops, and it is threatening to seize offshore property of Lebanon.

High-ranking people in Israel have spoken of re-taking the Sinai so that the new Egypt cannot interfere with subsidized natural gas sales arranged by Mubarak with American support.

It is into its fourth year of an illegal and brutal blockade of Gaza.

It has alienated Turkey with its piracy and refusal to apologize for the murder of unarmed humanitarians.

Mr Lieberman himself is well known for – or should I say infamous for – his views on running Arabs out of Israel.

Israel continues to steal the property of Palestinians in the West Bank and in Jerusalem, only just recently having announced a development of 900 homes in East (Arab) Jerusalem, 900 homes on property stolen in broad daylight.

The world is reeling from the effects of Islamophobia, constantly promoted by Israel’s apologists, and America is bombing people in half a dozen West Asian and North African locations.

Meanwhile, the United States which cannot pay its bills continues to subsidize on a vast scale this small nation which is disturbing a good deal of the planet.

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“Their policy of always blaming Israel while giving the intolerant religion of killers for allah [sic]a pass as victims is why we are at a dead end.”

Always giving Muslims a pass?

Always blaming Israel?

This is precisely the kind of sick, distorted view that explains the situation we are in.

The mainline press in the West constantly gives Israel good press, excessively so.

Israel never felt, as it should have, the force of the world’s disapproval for its savageries in Gaza and Southern Lebanon and on the high seas.

As for Muslims getting a pass, it is impossible to understand how anyone not as delusional as Avigdor Lieberman could make that statement.

Our press is filled with columnists who constantly speak for Israel. The list is a long one, but we have the likes of Thomas Friedman, Charles Krauthammer, Jeff Jacoby, Margaret Wente, and many, many others giving us reading material which might well have been written by Israel’s Ministry of Truth.

And the world’s most important newspaper, The New York Times, has a highly biased view towards Israel in everything that it writes. As does Rupert Murdoch’s The Times of London.

American television networks never report one tough thing about Israel. The effective censorship is astounding.

For example, right now in Israel, demonstrations on a giant scale – hundreds of thousands out of a small population – have taken place day after day. These demonstrations are by Israelis who are sick of the way the economy and politics of Israel operate.

They are just as real and just as significant as what went on in Egypt, but you will not see them featured all over our newspapers and televisions as were all the “Arab Spring” demonstrations and revolts.

That is absolutely voluntary censorship on Israel’s behalf.

And we have America’s huge Christian fundamentalist community constantly supporting every wrongful act of Israel with words and political pressure and money, even if they do so for their own weird mystical reasons.

Yet Israel’s apologists, like the writer of this comment, can make absolutely outlandish claims, and generally they are not called on them.

You don’t get solutions to ugly problems by not even admitting the truth, by pretending on fantasy concepts.

I am reminded of the United States’ decade of mass murder in Vietnam, and there always being “a light at the end of the tunnel.”

This writer and Avigdor Lieberman remind me of the old fairy tale of the Emperor’s New Clothes in which the Emperor paraded naked in the streets but no one dared call it to his attention.

That is precisely the situation of Israel, pretending to talk about peace, pretending to being a normal state, while constantly assassinating, attacking, torturing, and stealing the property of others.

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“The core cause of the Arab Israeli conflict, local and regional, has nothing to do with “Jerusalem”, “settlements”, “borders”, “refugees”, “security” or “water”….”

There are none so blind as those who will not see.

 

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

YET FURTHER POSTED RESPONSES TO COMMENTS ON DOUG SAUNDERS’ COLUMN IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

“It is clear that western societies have sublimated their culture to accomodate [sic] new ones. Christmas trees and prayer rooms in schools, for example. And it is a powerful argument…”

The writer misses the point.

We are in a new era of massive global migration, but there is nothing new about migration over time changing the norms and practices of a society. It’s just happening more quickly now, just as everything else is happening more quickly with ever-speeding technological (and that driving economic) change.

Take just one example, Britain. We could equally well choose just about any other old European country, but Britain is very familiar.

In the era BCE, Britain was populated by Celtic and other tribes.

Starting with the Emperor Julius Caesar’s expeditions in 55 BCE and extending beyond Emperor Claudius’s invasion of 43 CE, Britain began centuries of becoming a Romanized society.

After the fifth century CE, the Anglo-Saxon tribes – Germanic people began to conquer. Britain became an Anglo-Saxon country then for hundreds of years.

In 1066, as we all learned in school, the Normans conquered Britain, and it became a Norman society for centuries.

There were many other changes of varying importance over the centuries in Britain, but these big steps in each case meant an entirely new culture and language and political norms and even religion being established.

People have gone from speaking Celtic languages to Latin to German to French, and they now speak the true hybrid, English.

The nation state as we know it is a relatively new thing, mainly a product of the 19th century. Most of human history has not even known nation states, but empires and kingdoms which viewed any new people or territory as a fair gain.

Already in many respects, the 19th century concept of nation state is fraying at the edges. Europe once defined its modern states by language and culture, but already we see them becoming migrant states, the kind of states we have always had in the New World.

This is an unavoidable consequence of a globalized world with relatively cheap transportation and communication and huge movements of goods and services around the planet.

Taking a view anything like the writer of this comment, despite the reasonable tone of most of his remarks, is to enter into a debate defined by the Anders Breveiks of this world.

The only response that makes any sense in the Norwegian response, not the response of the United States or that garrison state Israel, which is fighting a pointless and losing battle with the forces of modern society.

Breveik is a kind of modern murderous Luddite – the people who used to smash machines in the Industrial Revolution in order to keep things as they were – only he smashed people hoping to keep things as they were.

Whether violent or not, these are futile, doomed-to-lose battles.

The future we already have glimmers of: A world of multi-cultural states amongst which a great deal of human migration occurs (just as goods and services move now), and it will require more international governance and treaties, all of which will slowly erode the nation state as we’ve known it.

There is no alternative, unless you want to build fortress states and give up the economic potential of globalism, but even if you do that, you will have to surrender in the end because the forces at work are real and simply overwhelming.

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“Therefore, the fiction that they are Muslim therefore they breed is plain WRONG!”

Of course, the notion is garbage.

Promoting that nonsense is just one more aspect of the Islamophobia being vigorously promoted by special interests.

Any decent economist or demographer can refute the nonsense.

Demographic Transition, the phenomenon of falling birth rates in response to falling death rates, is an established fact.

The death rates fall through the growing prosperity of economic development and all that that entails. Then people automatically have fewer babies since almost all will survive.

The theory explains why countries like Canada or France or Britain cannot replace their own population. Migration is essential unless you want economic decline.

And Israel, too, a western implant with western concepts, cannot replace its population, and it is surrounded by poor nations with high birth rates.

Which only goes to prove how much more intelligent would have been a policy of assisting your neighbors instead of attacking them and spending unholy amounts on the military.

The United States, too, acts quite stupidly in this regard. It should have been dropping dollars on places like Afghanistan or Iraq instead of bombs.

 

 

 

 

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

FURTHER POSTED RESPONSES TO COMMENTS ON DOUG SAUNDERS’ COLUMN IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

 

“We have already made huge compromises to accommodate ancient practices [of Muslims]”

Oh please, such ignorance.

How about our allowances for ultra-orthodox Jews’ nasty treatment of women’s rights? Such women cannot divorce their husbands for fear of losing their children in a male-dominated, backward kangaroo court of rabbis. And our law permits this.

How about our allowances for the pathetic state of many traditional Mennonite women? in their ugly baggy black dresses with doilies on their heads?

How about our allowances for Catholic priests who’ve raped and abused children by the thousand? They should all have been arrested and tried to face hard time in prison.

All the special ranting about Islam is just Islamophobioa – in other words, pure unbalanced prejudice.

And much of it serves the interests of Israel – by stoking up unreasonable hatred of Muslims – and helps Israel to continue its terrible abuse of millions of souls.

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“Wake up Canada. Wake up and smell the coffee. No we must not do what happened in Norway. Nip this in the bud right now in the right way. ”

Sounds like a fire-breathing fundamentalist tent-preacher out scaring the flock into leaving big bucks in the offering plate.

This writer sounds as sick as Breveik.

Breveik was directly influenced by the very Islam-hate this person is preaching.

The writer not only displays ignorance and hatred but misses the facts of the Breveik case completely.

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“No, not nearly all, or even a majority – but enough to worry about – much as Iran ended up as a theocracy though previously under the Shah its citizens were moderate and highly secularised”

Yes, and the Shah’s SAVAK secret police pulled out people’s finger nails by the thousands in their torture chambers.

I guess that doesn’t count for much in your set of concerns, just so many apologists for Israel were too happy to see Mubarak go on with his 30-year tyranny and secret police.

And what about the ultra-orthodox control of so many of Israel’s laws and policies, even to the great discomfort of many secular Jews?

And what about the very notion of a “Jewish state”?

No different in many respects to Iran.

Of course there’s a pretense of democracy, but you cannot have a “Jews-only” democracy, except if you have a very bad sense of humor.

And, regardless of the form of government, when a vicious-minded majority suppresses the rights of a minority, you have genuine democratic values entirely missing.

Majorities in ostensibly democratic states can easily suppress a minority, and they have done so many times. South Africa was a democracy, if you were white. The American Confederacy was a democracy, if you were white.

To protect against that very situation, Canada has a Charter of Rights and America has a Bill of Rights.

But Israel can never produce such a document because its basic assumptions are inimical to the concept.

 

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY DOUG SAUNDERS IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

Dangerous fictions?

Which of the hundreds which humans adhere to should we busy ourselves with exposing?

We are chimpanzees with big brains, the big brains only making us more dangerous than our murderous ancestors.

Just as one example, we are inundated with dangerous fictions about the Middle East, and these are fictions which helped motivate Mr Breveik.

Israel murders 400 children in Gaza, but that’s hardly worth commenting upon.

The United Nations’ raporteur for Palestine, Richard Falk, distinguished academic and an American Jew, recently reported that Israel’s forces in their various attacks and punishments and raids have killed 1,335 Palestinian children since the year 2000.

I don’t see you or other columnists getting worked up over that.

And the United States started an illegal war in Iraq – mainly to wipe off the board Israel’s number-one enemy – which ended with the deaths of the best part of a million people, countless cripples, and an entire society set back for a generation.

Indeed, the killing the United States has been doing in recent years makes Mr Breveik look like a piker when it comes to murder.

How about all the crazy religious beliefs and values which motivate so much of the world into terrible injustice? Bride burning in India? Treatment of young widows in India? Selling girls to old rich men in India and Thailand and other places? The fairly routine murder of prostitutes in Mexico? The ghastly ritual murders in parts of Africa? Africa’s brutal female mutilations, 3 million a year? Africa’s common practice of men raping young girls in villages? The Catholic Church’s countless thousands of abused children in all the corners of the world?

One of the dangerous fictions at the Globe is that Doug Saunders thinks before he writes.

The other is that he has anything worth saying.

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I just love one particularly obtuse comment starting with “Let’s be honest.” I love it because after those words everything said is prejudiced, ignorant, and unbalanced.

“There is an inherent incompatibility between the Western culture and the teaching of Islam (Think “slut-walk” or “gay-pride”) “Freedom” and human rights in the West are inimical to Islam.”

Things like “slut walk” are no more acceptable to the Ultra-orthodox Jews who largely determine Israel’s policies and laws.

Only a few years back in Israel, a group of women, known prostitutes, were mysteriously burned alive when their house, near an orthodox neighborhood, was burned down.

It is quite typical for Ultra-orthodox men to drive “loose women” off their streets with violence and vituperation.

And are you trying to tell me that “slut walk” would be acceptable to the millions of American Christian fundamentalists who support Israel and help distort American policies to its benefit? Or gay rights?

Try “slut walk” in strongly Catholic parts of South America? There would be some new murders of women.

Your comments are nothing but unthinking ignorance with no perspective, the same kind of prejudice which clearly motivated Breveik.

You are promoting Islamophobia.

Simply appalling.

You are the perfect example of why Doug Saunders’ column is nonsense.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

FURTHER POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN BY NAZEEN SHEIKH IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

“Freedom of speech does not include freedom to oppress others.”

That is so obvious a truth it need not be stated. It is the ethical equivalent of announcing that the earth revolves around the sun.

Its author here only uses it as a lead-in, a way to gain the first favorable nod of the reader’s head, to the bits of prejudice he wants to plant.

That is the well-established method of propagandists and prejudiced people everywhere.

Our laws, as are those of France, are sufficient to deal with all instances where true oppression might be involved. A woman claiming oppression would be supported by all agencies of the state.

Like so many other religious groups, conservative Muslims in Third World countries sustain ancient practices which we view as foolish.

Almost any aspect of the practices of African Animists is repulsive by our lights. Not just silly stuff like witch doctors, but common practices like female genital mutilation – an African, not a Muslim, practice – or the common practice of older men in villages raping young girls. How about the hunting down and killing and magical use of dismembered body parts of people unfortunate enough to be born albinos?

In backwater India, a poor family will sell a good-looking daughter, at 12 years old, to a rich old man who pays them a “dowry.” When the old man dies in not many years, the poor girl will likely inherit nothing, and she will be consigned to terrible abusive practices towards widows. She must never marry again, she must wear only certain clothes, she must eat only certain foods, and she must not socialize in any normal way. She is consigned to living death at perhaps 18 or 20.

Or how about the young girls sold to certain temples to “serve” there? They become institutionalized prostitutes at very young ages, and they are subject to the ravages of venereal diseases from all the old men who use them.

I could go on and on.

The practices of Ultra-orthodox Jews are as ugly as anything at the extremes of Islam – yet note that we tolerate them in our society. We actually allow Ultra-orthodox rabbis to give a woman’s children to her husband upon divorce, and she has no recourse unless she wants to leave her faith entirely. Such people in fact live under a Jewish form of Sharia Law right here in our society, something we would not tolerate for Muslims. And they wear clothes as impossible and ridiculous as any fundamentalist Muslim in the Third World.

And just so our conservative Mennonites – many of their practices are not quaint and charming, they are brutal and outdated, yet we tolerate them.

Going on and on about the small number – and it is a very small number – of traditional Muslim women who wear the niqab is absurd. They hurt no one. They are free at any future date to give it up.

But telling them through force of law that they cannot wear the niqab is simply the tactics of a police state.

Sarkozy has a shameful record concerning minorities, including his nasty deportation of gypsies, something reminding one of the early days of the Third Reich when Hitler focused on deportation and abuse, murder coming later.

No one who loves a free society will embrace Sarkozy.
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@David_C3:

You assume this is “enforced.”

You have no factual basis for saying so, but I suspect prejudice.

Lots of religious or culturally conservative people do things I think are silly or even offensive, but if they mind their own business, they have every right to carry on.

Should Ultra-orthodox Jews be required to shave and remove their big hats? In effect, the men’s faces are virtually hidden.

Should Ultra-orthodox Jewish women have equal rights in marriage and with their children, something they do not have unless they leave their religion?

The world is full of foolishness, and worse.

A few women wearing the niqab is hardly an issue worth writing about. But forbidding their right is very much worth writing about.
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There is a lot of confusion about the various female Muslim garments.

In general, for readers:

The niqab is a sheer veil worn over the lower face. It was not that long ago regarded in the West as attractive and mysterious, but not now in the insanity of the war-on-terror world, we read nonsense accusations. The niqab is not typical in the Muslim world and few migrants wear it.

The hijab is a headscarf, not much different to a babushka. Anyone criticizing this is being ridiculous, considering how many others cover their heads, including Mennonite women, many Jewish men, and senior Catholic Priests. It wasn’t many decades ago that Western women routinely wore hats and very often veils.

The burqa is a head-to-toe sack with a meshed face slot. The burqa is almost exclusively used in truly backwater places like rural Afghanistan. Only a tiny percent of Muslim women use this.

The chador is a robe worn over the head which goes to the feet. It may be worn with or without the niqab. The chador is associated with Iran.

If you look at films from Egypt or Syria or other places, you will see an immense variety of women’s dress, from purely Western to chadors.
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The naiveté of people writing about why some Muslim women use these various modes of dress would be funny were the consequences not so deadly serious.

I recall nuns decades back, dressed in their immense, flowing head-to-foot habits, many of them with huge uncomfortable starchy head gear, who were such strong individuals they might take your breath away.

I am sure, there are Muslim women, wearing the chador and or the niqab who are exactly the same way.

How very foolish it is to assume they are all just beaten beasts, but that kind of cheap assumption comes with the blindness of prejudice.

We are in the midst of a great conflagration of anti-Muslim prejudice. It is a fire constantly stoked by those with an interest in demeaning and demonizing Muslims.

Again,

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_NtgXlrcvXZA/S9dSOIkOI_I/AAAAAAAAk0Q/6hXzcWFiT94/s1600/HIJAB+-+WHY+I+LAUGH+AT+LUNACY+OVER+THE+HIJA

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE FROM A COLUMN BY NAZEEN SHEIKH IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

This is simply blather from Nazneen Sheikh, rather dangerous blather, demonstrating not understanding but attitude.

It is well known that neither the niqab nor the burqa are requirements for the world’s billion or so Muslims.

But they are nevertheless deeply traditional parts of some primitive cultures, and indeed primitive cultures everywhere have backward and superstitious customs. That is precisely what it means to be backward.

Societies leave their backward customs behind when they enjoy healthy economic growth. They don’t bind women’s feet anymore in China or Japan.

What still goes on in the backward corners of India, South America, Thailand, Africa, and other places is appalling. Countless savageries are committed daily against women from accepted rape and selling children into prostitution to bride-burning and “honor killing.”

Considering the vast scope of horrors against women in this world, I think it slightly ridiculous to be riveted on the situation of several hundred immigrant women in France who wear the niqab, and that is the order of magnitude we are concerned with here because the overwhelming majority of Muslim women in France have never worn the niqab.

As anyone who studies the ways of people without a political agenda knows perfectly well, you cannot change backward customs quickly.

Indeed, if you try, you do so with tyrant behavior as bad or worse than the custom itself, and often run the risk of bad reactions from those charged with special and unfair laws.

It sometimes takes a couple of generations in a new land for strongly-entrenched customs to fade, as we can easily observe in other groups who live in Canada.

Indeed, some seem never to change, and one may ask justly, why should they if that is their choice? They live quiet lives, just as the Muslims with their niqabs.

Hasidic Jewish men still wear full face beards and large dark hats.

Traditional Mennonite women wear ugly long formless dresses with ugly caps on their heads and they drive in silly box carriages pulled by horses.

Both those groups are stuck somewhere in the 19th century. They both also do not truly integrate into the greater society, keeping in their own close-knit communities.

And so long as they do no one any harm and obey our laws, who cares?

Telling people what they must or must not wear is in the same spirit of human rights as telling people what they should say.

Sarkozy is only responding to the increased popularity of the National Front, effectively setting himself a race with the society’s least decent political party.

Hardly admirable, but we should know from many of Sarkozy’s other deeds and words that he is an unpleasant man altogether, from his treatment of gypsies to his calling people scum.

Yet, the thoughtless writer of this piece sets him up as someone to be emulated.

I suspect Ms Sheikh to be one of those people who are ashamed of their more backward cousins, but that is no excuse to advocate corrupting the laws of civil society.

I suspect, too, this is one of her ways of responding to the irrational pressure created by the “war on terror” with its daily freely-communicated ignorant prejudices against Muslims in our society. It is a way of responding – jumping on the simpler and more backward members of her community – that is aimed at gaining approval from the ugly noisy mob, when it is the mob that is the problem.

How quickly our perceptions vary under such conditions. Not that long ago, the niqab was viewed as alluring and mysteriously beautiful, highlighting the eyes as it does. We saw that in countless movies and television shows and read it in many books. Suddenly, it is evil and must be expunged.

Ridiculous, unthinking, and unenlightened.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN BY GIDEON RACHMAN IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES

This kind of legislation is just one more chilling aspect of the Islamophobia which has descended on Western society like a poisonous cloud of volcanic ash.

It really would be nice to get a break from all this mindless, anti-Muslim hysteria.

What do I care what my neighbor wears so long as he or she is a peaceful member of society?

My experience with Muslims is simply one a sweet-tempered people who pretty much mind their own business.

I wish their critics displayed half their excellent qualities.

A few decades back, in films, the niqab was viewed by our public as alluring and fascinating. There are many scenes exhibiting these aspects in old films and serials, scenes made to appeal to our sensibilities.

Now, it has completely turned around with people attributing the most outlandish motives. It’s just the backwash from America’s insane war on terror, fed by Bush’s lame stuff about women’s rights when what he was about was killing.

Women wearing the niqab or the burka – both not really common in the Islamic world – were admitted as immigrants to France with their garments and customs. What right does anyone have to say high-handedly, after they have moved their lives there, they must do away with it?

This is the attitude of the intolerant and those who do not understand what they are talking about, using flimsy excuses like women’s rights. A woman’s rights include wearing what she wishes, does it not?

The reasons for these garments among a minority of Muslims are complex – social, historical, and not just religious, but for devout wearers religion is very important, more so than secular critics can understand.

Almost all immigrants eventually give up their native dress. It is up to them to decide on that, not shrill accusers in a newspaper column.

Those shrill demands are the way Americans behave. It’s one of their most unpleasant qualities. Live and let live so long as people are not being hurt.

We have women being beaten in their homes by the thousands in all Western countries. We have a world packed with abusive practices towards women – bride burning and horrid shunning of widows in India to female genital mutilation (not a Muslim custom but an African one with 3 million victims a year) to the widespread acceptance of fathers and other elders raping young girls in Africa, and people focus on this insignificant phenomenon?

It wasn’t many decades ago that fashionable women in Britain and the United States wore veils with hats. Would anyone with manners have asked a woman then to remove her veil? Indeed a vestige of this practice remains in our wedding ceremonies with the bride wearing a veil only her husband lifts.

No wonder the Muslim world feels under assault from the West. We bomb their countries. We keep men in secret prisons. We say forms of torture are okay. And we interfere with their religious and cultural practices here. Can anyone blame them for feeling angry?

TWO POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN IN THE GUARDIAN BY OLIVER KAMM

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

Safer for whom, Oliver Kamm?

For the more than 600,000 murdered by Bush in Iraq?

For the tens of thousands murdered in Afghanistan, including the 3,000 prisoners who were driven out to the desert in vans to be suffocated?

For the thousands of prisoners of the CIA’s International Torture Gulag?

For the abused and tortured of Abu Ghraib?

For the abused and tortured of Guantanamo?

For the millions of lives shattered in Iraq, a place that once was on the cusp of modernity and prosperity?

This has to be the most breathtakingly dumb piece of writing I’ve seen in years
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Apart from my question of safer for whom, citing the piles of Bush victims, the world is not a safer place for many other reasons, Oliver Kamm.

First, suppression of human rights all over the Western world is no light thing. There is nothing ‘safe’ about living in a police state or a quasi-police state the U.S. has become under Bush. The Bill of Rights has virtually been suspended.

Second, people of Arabic origin or of Muslim beliefs are now routinely abused and insulted in many Western countries, especially in the United States.

Third, a wave of hatred and injustice is rippling through the Muslim world. That isn’t just going to go away. Bush’s approach has been the approach of Israel, which today remains a garrison state with no peace and defended by walls and brutality, a long-term untenable position, besides being a shining example of ethically-hollow behavior.

Fourth, Bush’s oppression and killing abroad have been closely paralleled by an almost unprecedented grant of license to Israel to behave as brutally and ruthlessly as it wishes towards Palestinians and other neighbors.

A genuinely horrible situation has grown up, and no open-minded person can possibly look at Israel’s wretched behavior in Gaza and in Lebanon and towards Syria without some revulsion. Nothing, absolutely nothing, Apartheid South Africa did has not been repeated by Israel towards its neighbors, and, of course, that includes infamous mass killings of poor blacks by South African troops and mass imprisonments with no rights or justice.

Fifth, Bush has also set aside the Geneva Conventions and other important international treaties, including that safeguarding the rights of child soldiers. No meaningful sense of safety comes from this arrogance.

He has practiced new bizarre doctrines, giving the example to other states to do the same in future, as, for example, pre-emptive strikes on suspects and high-tech assassinations. These provide another measure of the ‘Israelization’ of American policy. Imagine a world in which every state claims this philosophy?

What has happened overall in the world under Bush is a series of steps away from democratic principles. Even if America had the most vigorous and fair democracy, something that is demonstrably not the case, when its leaders decide the fates of so many others, its tiny group of electors (maybe 1% or less of the world’s people, taking into account many Americans do not even vote) effectively acts like an aristocracy vis-à-vis the rest of the world.

You cannot claim democratic values and behave this way. After all, the Communist Party of China rules more than a billion people with almost the same percentage of representation.

The United States and Israel have given democracy a bad name in much of the emerging world. After all, in the special limited sense they claim to be democratic, so was Apartheid South Africa or the American Confederacy or the Britain of George III.