Blurring the line between criticism and bigotry fuels hatred of Muslims and Jews | Kenan Malik

2024/03/05 Leave a comment

Good balanced and nuanced commentary:

Where do we draw the line between criticism and bigotry? From the uproar over Lee Anderson’s remarks about the London mayor, Sadiq Khan, being “controlled” by Islamists to the condemnation of slogans used on pro-Palestinian demonstrations, it is a question at the heart of current debates about Muslims and Jews, Islam and Israel.

The distinction between criticism and bigotry should, in principle, be easy to mark. Discussions about ideas or social practices or public policy should be as unfettered as possible. But when disdain for ideas or policies or practices become transposed into prejudices about people, a red line is crossed. It’s crossed when castigation of Islamism leads to calls for an end to Muslim immigration. Or when denunciation of Israeli actions in Gaza turns into a protest outside a Jewish shop in London.

In practice, though, that line can appear blurry. Claims about “Islamophobia” or “antisemitism” are often wielded in ways designed specifically to erase the distinction between criticism and bigotry, either to suppress dissent or to promote hatred. Such muddying enables some to portray criticism of Islam or of Israel as illegitimate because it is “Islamophobic” or “antisemitic”. It also allows those promoting hatred of Muslims or Jews to dismiss condemnation of that hatred as stemming from a desire to avoid censure of Islam or Israel.

It is for this reason that I have long been a critic of the concept of “Islamophobia”; not because bigotry or discrimination against Muslims does not exist, but because the term conflates disapproval of ideas and disparagement of people, making it more difficult to challenge the latter. It is, in my view, more useful to frame such intolerance as “anti-Muslim prejudice” or “bigotry”. The issue, though, is not one of wording; what matters is less the term employed than the meaning attributed to it.

The concept of Islamophobia became popularised in the 1990s, partly through an influential report from the Runnymede Trust thinktank entitled “Islamophobia: A Challenge For Us All”. The report acknowledged the term as “not ideal” but thought it “a useful shorthand way of referring to dread or hatred of Islam – and, therefore, to fear or dislike of all or most Muslims”. Ironically, the “useful shorthand” itself exposes the problem, eliding hostility to beliefs (“dread or hatred of Islam”) with prejudice towards a people (“fear or dislike of all or most Muslims”).

In 2018, the all-party parliamentary group (APPG) on British Muslims defined Islamophobia as “a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness”, a clumsy formulation that has nevertheless been adopted by the major political parties apart from the Conservatives. The APPG report dismissed the “supposed right to criticise Islam” as “another subtle form of anti-Muslim racism”.

It argued, too, that “Islamophobia” refers to Muslims being targeted by non-Muslims. Yet, the charge of “Islamophobia” or “hatred” is often aimed by Muslims at other Muslims, from Salman Rushdie to Monica Ali, from Hanif Kureishi to Sooreh Hera, to make their arguments appear illegitimate. It is a means of “gatekeeping”, of certain people taking it on themselves to police a community and determine what can be said about it.

The elision of criticism and bigotry works the other way, too: to deflect challenges to hatred. Some commentators have responded to the pushback against Anderson’s conspiracy theories about Khan by claiming that labelling his comments “Islamophobic” is intended “to stop criticism of Islamic extremism”.

The actions of hardline Islamists can have horrifying consequences, from forcing a teacher into hiding to the murder of an MP. Too often, as with the recent parliamentary mess created by the speaker, Lindsay Hoyle, politicians and institutions accede to threats rather than confronting them. None of this should lead us to conclude, though, that challenging anti-Muslim bigotry is a distraction from confronting Islamism. Opposing the one without opposing the other weakens our ability to challenge either.

The historical roots and contemporary manifestations of anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim hatred are different. Nevertheless, the charge of “antisemitism” can similarly be deployed to marginalise dissent while also providing racists with an alibi for their racism.

Take the insistence that “anti-Zionism is antisemitism”. It is a claim that has become increasingly accepted in recent years by mainstream politicians and organisations, from the French National Assembly to the US House of Representatives.

Zionism is a set of ideas and social practices. Yet, many who insist that Islam, as a set of beliefs and practices, should be open to robust challenge refuse to countenance similar scrutiny of Zionism.

In 2016, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) formally adopted its “working definition of antisemitism”, a definition that has been embraced by many governments, universities and civil institutions. It has also become, in the despairing words of one of its own drafters, Kenneth Stern, “a blunt instrument to label anyone an antisemite”.

For Stern, director of the Bard Center for the Study of Hate, the IHRA definition was never meant to be a “hate speech code” but developed rather to help monitor antisemitism. It has, however, become a means by which supporters of Israel now “go after pro-Palestinian speech”. “As a Zionist, I don’t agree with some of the speech,” Stern notes, but such speech “should be answered, not suppressed”.

This is particularly so because “there is a deep internal Jewish conflict about … attitude[s] toward Israel”. “For many Jews,” Stern points out, “Zionism, and what it means for Palestinians, is irreconcilable with what Judaism says about treating the stranger or repairing the world.” Again, blurring the line between criticism and bigotry facilitates gatekeeping, in this case by making dissenting Jewish voices seem illegitimate.

The drive to suppress criticism of Israel and support for Palestinians has been aided by some on the left lacing their anti-Zionism with antisemitic tropes. And, mirroring the tactics of anti-Muslim bigots, too many dismiss criticism of their antisemitism as a kind of Zionist shield against scrutiny.

Anti-Zionism is not necessarily antisemitic; but it can be, and too often is. The answer is not to label all expressions of anti-Zionism as antisemitic but to call out the latter, while acknowledging the legitimacy of the former.

In the polarised debate about antisemitism and anti-Muslim bigotry, too many who rightly condemn antisemitism are less robust in challenging bigotry against Muslims. And too many of those who excoriate anti-Muslim bigotry turn a blind eye to the hatred of Jews. In both cases, blurring the line between criticism of ideas and bigotry against people narrows debate and nurtures hatred.

Kenan Malik is an Observer columnist

Source: Blurring the line between criticism and bigotry fuels hatred of Muslims and Jews | Kenan Malik

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Malik: Suella Braverman’s bigoted attack on multiculturalism shouldn’t blind us to its problems

2023/10/03 Leave a comment

Valid reflections on the risks of deeper multiculturalism approaches rather than civic integration variants:

Has multiculturalism failed?” It is a debate that raged a decade ago but had seemed to have faded into the political background in recent years. Until, that is, the home secretary, Suella Braverman, attempted to light the fires again, in a speech she gave last week to the American Enterprise Institute in Washington DC. Multiculturalism, she argued, “has failed because it allowed people to come to our society and live parallel lives in it”.

Her real audience, as many commentators observed, were not the people sitting in the room but the Conservative party back home. Braverman did not engage seriously with any of the issues she raised, from asylum to multiculturalism, but sought rather to position herself as the right’s flagbearer in any upcoming Tory leadership battle.

Nevertheless, Braverman’s speech, and the debate it unleashed, provides an opportunity to think again about multiculturalism. Part of the difficulty in making sense of this debate is that the term is used in two distinct ways: a description both of the lived experience of diversity and of the policies necessary to manage such a society.

The experience of living in a society that is less homogenous and insular, more open and cosmopolitan, is something to welcome and cherish. As a political process, however, multiculturalism means something very different: a set of policies and practices, the aim of which is to manage diversity by putting people into ethnic and cultural boxes, and using those boxes to define people’s needs and obligations.

The conflation of lived experience and political policy has proved highly invidious. It has allowed many on the right – and not just on the right – to blame mass immigration for the failures of social policy and to turn minorities into the problem. It has also led many liberals and radicals to become more detached from classical notions of liberty, such as free speech, in the name of defending diversity.

All these issues, from immigration to free speech, are central to contemporary politics, but the context has changed as the old debates about multiculturalism have shifted. Partly, this is because multiculturalism, in both its meanings, is more embedded in our social fabric.

Source: Suella Braverman’s bigoted attack on multiculturalism shouldn’t blind us to its problems – The Guardian

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Malik: France has been laissez-faire on race, the US proactive. Clearly, neither of them has it right

2023/07/10 Leave a comment

Another call for greater analysis by class, but one that does not ignore identity and race:

Should public policy be “race conscious” or “colour blind”? Should it target the specific inequalities faced by minority groups or treat all citizens equally without any reference to individuals’ racial and cultural backgrounds?

The contrast between these two approaches has often been seen as that between Anglo-Saxon multiculturalism and French assimilationism, the one “based on the right of ethnic minorities, of communities”, the other “based on individual rights”, as Marceau Long, then the president of France’s Haut Conseil à L’Intégration, put it in 1991, adding that the Anglo-Saxon approach, unlike that of the French, was that of “another way of imprisoning people within ghettos”.

Thirty years on, we can see the issues as more complex and less given to simple binary oppositions. Two recent high-profile events illustrate this complexity: the debates around the US supreme court’s decision to strike down affirmative action and those around the riots that ripped through France after the police killing of teenager Nahel Merzouk.

While affirmative action improved prospects for middle-class black people, it left untouched those of the working-class

The supreme court’s verdict that Harvard’s race-based admission policy was illegal has led many to fear that the progress of African Americans in higher education will now stall. Yet, as the African American writer Bertrand Cooper observed even before the decision: “The reality is that for the Black poor, a world without affirmative action is just the world as it is – no different than before.”

Why? Because while affirmative action has improved prospects for middle-class black people, it has left untouched the lives of working-class African Americans. By 2020, the percentage of African Americans admitted to Harvard stood at almost 16% – higher than the proportion of black people within the US population. Black students in Harvard are, though, anything but representative of the African American community.

In most discussions about race, black Americans are regarded as constituting a singular community. However, black America has been, for most of the past half-century, the most unequal racial or ethnic group in the nation. White Americans in the top income quintile possess 21.3 times the wealth of white people in the lowest income quintile. For black people, that figure stands at a staggering 1,382. The poorest black people earn just 1.5% of the median black income.

This disparity shapes everything from education to incarceration. More than 70% of Harvard students come from the wealthiest 20% of families; 3% come from the poorest 20%. There were almost as many students from the wealthiest 1% as from the poorest 60%.

The greatest lack of diversity in America’s elite universities, in other words, is not racial but class-based. It is, though, one that deeply affects black Americans, because that same pattern of elite recruitment applies to African Americans as it does to the population as a whole. Affirmative action is action largely for the black elite.

This is not a new argument. In his seminal 1978 work, The Declining Significance of Race, the sociologist William Julius Wilson noted the changing contours of race and class and the development of a “deepening economic schism” within African American communities, “with the black poor falling further and further behind higher-income blacks”.

The title of Wilson’s book may seem ironic, given the centrality of race in public debate today. In material terms, Wilson’s thesis has proved largely accurate. Politically, though, there has been an increasing fixation with racial identities. This mismatch between material developments and political perceptions has ill-served the majority of African Americans.

It is not that racism does not continue to play an immense role in the lives of black people. It is rather that, as Cooper has observed: “Ignoring class divisions in Black America over the last 40 years has allowed the benefits of racial progress to be concentrated upon the Black middle and upper classes while the Black poor have largely been excluded.”

Many critics of race-conscious policies argue instead for the pursuit of “colour blind” policies that take no account of an individual’s race or culture. Perhaps the nation that most embodies such an approach is France. It is also the one that most reveals the problems with it.

‘Universalism’ has become a weapon with which to point out the ‘difference’ of particular peoples

French policy is rooted in its republican tradition and universalist principles, and a refusal to recognise racial distinctions in policymaking. The universalist belief that one should treat everyone as citizens, rather than as bearers of specific racial or cultural histories, is a valuable principle.

In practice, however, French policy has entailed being blind to racism in the name of being “colour blind”, and of using the demand for “assimilation” as a means of marking out certain groups – Jews in the past, Muslims and those of North African origin today – as not truly belonging to the nation. “Universalism” has become a weapon with which to point out the “difference” of particular peoples and to justify their marginalisation. France, as much as America, too often treats its citizens not as individuals but as members of racial or ethnic communities.

The French state not only refuses to recognise racial distinctions but also bans the collection of race-based data, making it far more difficult to evaluate the extent of racial discrimination, while providing a free pass to deny that such discrimination exists. A host of academic studies, attitudinal surveys and the use of categories, such as parent’s country of origin, that can act as surrogates for race and ethnicity, have exposed the degree to which France’s race-blind ideals are freighted with race-based assumptions, from racial profiling in policing to racial discrimination in employment.

And then there is the brutality of police violence, Nahel’s killing is but the latest example. Police perceptions of minority communities can be gauged by an extraordinary statement put out by two of France’s police unions during the riots, claiming that the police were “at war” with the “savage hordes” and warning that “tomorrow we will be in resistance” to the government.

In France, the refusal to recognise the social reality of racism in the name of “universalism” has helped create the very “ghettos” for which French politicians used to deride the Anglo-Saxon approach. In America, the preoccupation with policymaking by racial categories has neglected the very communities those policies are supposed to have benefited, by ignoring the many other features, such as class, that shape black lives, while also creating new social frictions – witness the tensions between African Americans and Asian Americans. What needs to be forged, beyond these two approaches, is a universalist perspective that embraces equal treatment but does not deny the reality of racial inequality

Source: France has been laissez-faire on race, the US proactive. Clearly, neither of them has it right

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An art treasure long cherished by Muslims is deemed offensive. But to whom?

2023/01/09 Leave a comment

Abject surrender to extremists and a further closing of minds:

It is a beautiful painting found in a 14th-century Persian manuscript, the “Compendium of Chronicles”, a history of Islam. It shows the Prophet Muhammad receiving his first Quranic revelations from the angel Gabriel. Christine Gruber, professor of Islamic art at Michigan University, describes it as “a masterpiece of Persian manuscript painting”.

Last October, an instructor at Hamline University, Minnesota, displayed the painting during an online class on Islamic art. The instructor (who has not been named) had warned of what she was about to do in case anyone found the image offensive and did not wish to view it. No matter, a student complained to the university authorities.

David Everett, Hamline’s associate vice-president of inclusive excellence, condemned the classroom exercise as “undeniably inconsiderate, disrespectful and Islamophobic”. A letter written by Mark Berkson, chair of the department of religion, defending the instructor and providing historical and religious context for her actions, was published on the website of The Oracle, the university’s student newspaper, and then taken down because it “caused harm”. The instructor was “released” from further teaching duties.

It is a depressing but all too familiar story. From The Satanic Verses to the Danish cartoons to Charlie Hebdo, the last decades have spawned a succession of often murderous controversies over depictions of Islam deemed blasphemous or racist.

What is striking about the Hamline incident, though, is that the image at the heart of the row cannot even in the most elastic of definitions be described as Islamophobic. It is an artistic treasure that exalts Islam and has long been cherished by Muslims.

Yet, to show it is now condemned as Islamophobic because… a student says so. Even to question that claim is to cause “harm”. As Berkson asked in another (unpublished) letter he sent to The Oracle, after his first had been removed: “Are you saying that disagreement with an argument is a form of ‘harm’?”

That is precisely what the university is saying. “Respect for the observant Muslim students in that classroom should have superseded academic freedom,” wrote Fayneese Miller, the university’s president, and Everett in a letter to staff and students. In what way was showing the painting “disrespecting” Muslims? Those who did not wish to view it did not have to. But others, including Muslims who desired to view the image, had every right to engage with a discussion of Islamic history.

Universities should defend all students’ right to practise their faith. They should not allow that faith to dictate the curriculum. That is to introduce blasphemy taboos into the classroom.

Hamline has effectively declared whole areas of Islamic history beyond scholarly purview because they may cause offence. And not just Islamic history. As Audrey Truschke, associate professor of South Asian history at Rutgers University, observed, Hamline’s action “endangers… professors who show things in class, from premodern Islamic art to Hindu images with swastikas to Piss Christ”.

One can only wonder that the university bureaucrats who declared representations of Muhammad to be proscribed by Islam did not ask themselves why, if this was true, there were figurative Islamic paintings to show the class in the first place? There has developed a historical amnesia about the many Islamic traditions, especially Persian, Turkish and Indian, which have celebrated portrayals of Muhammad; portrayals found in manuscripts, paintings, postcards, even in mosques.

While there have always been debates on this issue within Islam, the strict prohibition on picturing Muhammad is primarily Sunni and relatively recent. The growth of Wahhabism, a fundamentalist strand of Islam that developed in the 18th century and came eventually to be the ideological cement of modern Saudi Arabia, has been particularly important. Saudi petrodollars have allowed the fanatically austere character of Wahhabism to find greater global purchase.

Even so, Gruber observes, as late as 2000, a senior Saudi-based legal scholar recognised certain portrayals of Muhammad as both “permissible and laudable”. Only in the wake of 9/11, and the emergence of more fundamentalist forms of Islam, did the absolute prohibition of images of Muhammad become more widely accepted.

The actions of Hamline University are a threat not just to academic freedom but to religious freedom, too. They implicitly disavow the variety of traditions that constitute Islam and condemn those traditions as in some sense so bigoted that they cannot be shown in a class on Islamic art history. University bureaucrats are, as non-Muslims, taking part in a theological debate within Islam and siding with the extremists.

That is why, the historian Amna Khalid observes, it is as a Muslim she is most offended by Hamline’s actions that have “flattened the rich history and diversity of Islamic thought” and “privileged a most extreme and conservative Muslim point of view”. In an age in which there are demands for the syllabus to be “decolonised”, she adds, “Hamline’s position is a kind of arch-imperialism, reinforcing a monolithic image of Muslims propounded by the cult of authentic Islam”.

Perhaps the most damaging aspect of Hamline’s action is the use of the language of diversity to eviscerate the very meaning of diversity. This is an issue not confined to Hamline. Too many people today demand that we respect the diversity of society, but fail to see the diversity of minority communities in those societies. As a result, progressive voices often get dismissed as not being authentic, while the most conservative figures become celebrated as the true embodiment of their communities.

Here, liberal “anti-racism” meets rightwing anti-Muslim bigotry. For bigots, all Muslims are reactionary and their values incompatible with those of liberal societies. For too many liberals, opposing bigotry means accepting reactionary ideas as authentically Muslim; that to be Muslim is to find the Danish cartoons offensive and the depiction of Muhammed “harmful”. Both bigots and liberals erase the richness and variety of Muslim communities.

The Hamline controversy shows how the concepts of diversity and tolerance have become turned on their head. Diversity used to mean the creation of a space for dissent and disagreement and tolerance the willingness to live with things that one might find offensive or distasteful. Now, diversity too often describes a space in which dissent and disagreement have to be expunged in the name of “respect” and tolerance requires one to refrain from saying or doing things that might be deemed offensive. It is time we re-grasped both diversity and tolerance in their original sense.

Kenan Malik is an Observer columnist. His book, Not So Black and White, is published by Hurst (£20).

Source: An art treasure long cherished by Muslims is deemed offensive. But to whom?

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Malik: To live in a diverse society means to live with debate. Bring it on

2021/03/30 Leave a comment

To my mind, it is more how one engages in discussion and debate, not in the raising of uncomfortable issues:

No one has a right not to be offended. All of us have a duty to challenge bigotry. These two claims are not just compatible, they are often interconnected. Today, though, many view these as conflicting perspectives. To give offence to other cultures or faiths, they argue, is to foment racism; to challenge racism, one should refrain from giving offence.

It’s a belief at the heart of the controversy engulfing Batley grammar school. The facts are still unclear. A teacher apparently showed an image of the Prophet Muhammad in a religious education class. Some parents have demanded the teacher be sacked, holding protests outside the school. The school has apologised and suspended the teacher involved. At the heart of the affair, the former Tory cabinet minister Sayeeda Warsi insists, is the issue of “child safeguarding”, of protecting children from racist bullying.

It is inevitable in plural societies that we offend the sensibilities of others. Where different beliefs are deeply held, disagreement is unavoidable. Almost by definition, that’s what it means to live in a plural society. If we cherish diversity, we should establish ways of having such debates and conversations in a civil manner, not try to suppress them. A structured discussion in a classroom, properly done, seems an ideal approach.

It is inevitable, too, that in pursuing social change, we often offend deeply held sensibilities. Many groups struggling for justice and equality – women, gays, non-believers – within religious communities cannot but be blasphemous. In this context, to accept that certain things cannot be said is to accept that certain forms of power cannot be challenged. Fighting for social justice, in other words, often requires us to offend others. The boundaries of speech are different in a classroom than in the world outside. Here, a teacher is dealing with minors, building a relationship of trust with them, encouraging them to think, and to think about issues that they may not have thought about or may not have wanted to think about.

Source: To live in a diverse society means to live with debate. Bring it on

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The spirit of eugenics is still with us, as immigrants know to their cost

2019/10/07 Leave a comment

Useful reminder of relatively recent history and its contemporary echoes:

Birth control. Intelligence tests. Town planning. Immigration controls. It’s striking how much of contemporary life has been shaped, at least in part, by the eugenics movement, as Eugenics: Science’s Greatest Scandal, a two-part BBC documentary by science writer Angela Saini and disability campaigner Adam Pearson, which began last week, usefully reminds us.

Source: The spirit of eugenics is still with us, as immigrants know to their cost

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Kenan Malik: Antisemites use the language of anti-Zionism. The two are distinct

2019/02/25 Leave a comment

Important to note the distinctions and consequent implications:

Anti-Zionism is antisemitism. So claimed France’s President Emmanuel Macron in a speech last week in which he promised to change policing regulations to criminalise anti-Zionism.

The condemnation of anti-Zionism as antisemitism has a long history, but in recent years has become increasingly accepted by mainstream politicians and organisations. This shift in perspective has taken place against the background of rising antisemitism, from physical attacks to racist tweets, fuelled by both the resurgence of the far-right and the growth of antisemitism on the left. Particularly in sections of the left, anti-Zionism has more and more appropriated, often unrecognised, antisemitic tropes.

All this is undeniably true. Yet, it remains important to resist the equation of anti-Zionism and antisemitism.

Critics of anti-Zionism observe that Zionism simply expresses the right of Jewish people to self-determination. Just as other peoples, from Armenians to Zimbabweans, have the right to self-determination, so do Jews. To deny that is antisemitic because it is to deny Jews the rights accorded to others. However, the issue is more complex. When Scots voted in their independence referendum in 2016, all residents of Scotland who were over 16, and were British, EU or Commonwealth citizens, had the right to vote. The right to self-determination did not extend to all those of Scottish ancestry living outside Scotland.

The Zionist notion of “self-determination”, on the other hand, embodies the idea that Jews anywhere in the world “self-determine” and that such self-determination relates to a state in which the vast majority of Jews do not and will not live.

Zionism is a form of ethnic, as opposed to civic, nationalism. The distinction between the two is fiercely contested, and often blurred. Many modern states fuse elements of both in nationality and immigration laws. Nevertheless, the distinction between civic and ethnic nationalism is important because they embody contrasting conceptions of national belonging, citizenship, equality and rights.

Israel itself combines aspects of civic and ethnic nationalism. As the late historian Tony Judt put it in an essay for the New York Review of Books, Israel is both a democracy in which non-Jews can be citizens and “a state in which Jews and the Jewish religion have exclusive privileges from which non-Jewish citizens are forever excluded” and from which Palestinians grievously suffer. Judt faced great opprobrium for that essay, with many reviling him as “antisemitic” or a “self-hating Jew”.

To oppose Zionism but not other forms of ethnic nationalism would indeed be antisemitic. But to oppose Zionism because one opposes ethnic nationalism is a legitimate view.

Judt, who in early life was a Zionist, came eventually to accept that the only lasting solution would be a single, secular state in which both Jews and Palestinians were treated equally. For anti-Zionists like Judt, “self-determination” in that piece of contested land that is Israel/Palestine should adhere to principles of civic, not ethnic, nationalism; that is, be the self-determination of the people, and only the people, who live there, whether Jews or Palestinians.

This kind of anti-Zionism is very different from that which calls for the “destruction of the state of Israel”, usually (a not very veiled) code for the destruction of Jews. The latter is a form of anti-Zionism that refuses to acknowledge the presence of more than 6 million Jews in Israel/Palestine, whose rights, needs and aspirations are as central as those of Palestinians to any discussion of the region’s future.

There are, in other words, many forms of anti-Zionism, some progressive, some antisemitic. What has shifted is that leftwing ideas of anti-Zionism have become increasingly colonised by antisemitic forms. The reasons are complex, ranging from evolving notions of “anti-imperialism” to the mainstreaming of conspiracy theories.

One key development that has helped foster the shift is the growth of the politics of identity and of the tendency to see “good” and “bad” in terms of the group to which someone belongs and the privileges that they are supposed to possess.

Identity politics has led many to target Jews for being Jews, especially as they are seen as belonging to a group with many privileges to check, and to hold all Jews responsible for the actions of the state of Israel. Many who support the Palestinian cause, including many within the Labour party, seem genuinely unable to distinguish between criticising Israel and sowing hatred against a people.

The elision of anti-Zionism and antisemitism is a feature, then, of both sides of the debate. On the one side, it helps to legitimise antisemitism, on the other to close down debates about Israel and to criminalise genuine struggles for Palestinian rights. We should reject both.

Source: Antisemites use the language of anti-Zionism. The two are distinct

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Myths about shared culture have no place in the citizenship debate: Kenan Malik

2018/11/05 Leave a comment

Interesting and valid reflections that culture has never. been as monolithic as some immigration critics, looking back with nostalgia, imagine:

What links Mike Leigh’s new film, Peterloo, to Donald Trump’s threat to deprive children born to undocumented migrants of the right to US citizenship? It might seem an odd question, best left to Only Connect fans. But answering it helps give an insight into some of the ways we think about immigration and citizenship.

Trump wants to restrict the scope of the 14th amendment, which guarantees citizenship to anyone born on US soil. It’s the latest move in a long history of attacks on “birthright citizenship”, a history defined by a desire to create fears about an “alien” presence and to cast some Americans as not truly belonging to the nation.

There is more to the debate, however, than fearmongering. It speaks to wider questions about the nature of citizenship and of national belonging. It has resonance on this side of the Atlantic too.

The United States, according to Trump, is the only nation “stupid” enough to permit birthright citizenship. In fact, virtually every country in the Americas does so. But not one in Europe. Yet this is not a New World/Old World divide. The roots of both birthright citizenship and opposition to it lie in Europe.

Two broad approaches to citizenship are formally labelled jus soli and jus sanguinis. Jus soli (right of the soil) is the right to citizenship of anyone born in a country. Jus sanguinis (right of blood) defines citizenship as an inheritance through one or both parents, who themselves need be citizens. What Americans call birthright citizenship is jus soli (though both forms of citizenship can be a birthright, automatically conferred at birth).

The distinction between the two has traditionally been seen as that between French and German conceptions of citizenship. The French republican tradition views citizenship from a universalist perspective, without regard for ethnicity or culture. German nationalism draws upon Romantic ideas of the Volk, rooted in a specific history, culture and race.

The reality is more complicated. For a start, the US concept of birthright citizenship derives not from French republicanism but from English common law. More importantly, jus soli and jus sanguinis have long been intertwined in policy. France introduced in the 19th century a “blood” element to citizenship: only those born in France with a French parent are automatically granted citizenship at birth.

In Britain, the 1981 Nationality Act restricted automatic citizenship at birth to those at least one of whose parents was British or had permanent residency rights.

In both countries, wariness about jus soli was driven by the sense that certain groups were incompatible with the nation. In the 19th century, Jews were cast as the unassimilable “other”. More recently, North Africans or West Indians were given that role. Today, it’s often Muslims.

Today, too, such fears have been recast in the debate about populism and social fragmentation. The philosopher Michael Walzer, influential in communitarian and postliberal circles, argues that in the past there existed an organic relationship between the political community and the cultural community. This allowed for “language, history and culture [to] come together… to produce a collective consciousness” and “a world of common meanings”.

Immigration has served to disrupt this, making societies seem more fragmented. For nations to flourish, Walzer insists, they must regulate immigration and citizenship so as to protect their historical and cultural integrity.

The lesson that some, such as the academic Eric Kaufmann, draw from this is the need to employ racial and cultural criteria in selecting immigrants. There is nothing racist, Kaufmann insists, in an immigration policy that seeks to maintain the “white share of the population”. It is a pragmatic response to assuage social anxiety and protect cultural integrity. Fear of populism and the triumph of identity politics have transformed what we imagine is racist.

Enter Peterloo. Leigh’s austere, harrowing portrayal of working-class struggles for democracy does not touch upon the question of immigration. In exposing the fractures of 19th-century Britain, however, it exposes, too, the myth that, until disrupted by immigration, nations existed as organic political and cultural communities defined by a “collective consciousness”. Societies have always ruptured along class, religious, cultural and ideological lines. From the English Civil War to the anti-slavery struggles to the suffragettes to the miners’ strike British history is one of contestation. As is that of all countries. Obsession with immigration has made us blind to that history.

On neither side of the Atlantic will it help in thinking about charged issues around immigration and citizenship to cling to historical myths or be blinkered to the consequences of our answers.

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/nov/04/myths-cultural-integrity-no-place-immigration-debate

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The New Voice of Indigenous Australia: Malik – The New York Times

2017/09/13 Leave a comment

Interesting reflections on the Australian Indigenous peoples debate and parallels with the Canadian one (not explored by Malik):

The debate about Indigenous peoples seems — at least to me, an outsider — to take place on only two registers: on one hand, silence; on the other, a romanticization of Indigenous life.

It may seem odd to speak of silence in a nation where the issue of Indigenous rights is so prominent in public life. But silence can come in many forms. The affirmation of Indigenous ownership at public events has become little more than a ritual incantation that allows white Australians to assuage guilt without taking the action necessary to challenge racist marginalization.

Equally troubling is the romanticization. It has become the accepted truth that Indigenous peoples have a culture stretching back 65,000 years. Humans have been on the continent for that long, but no culture extends over such a time span. Today’s Indigenous Australians no more have the same relationship to the spiritual tradition of Dreamtime stories as did those first inhabitants than modern Greeks relate to “The Iliad” in the way their ancient forebears did.

The idea of an unbroken, unchanged culture has a flip side that has always animated racists. It was once used to portray Indigenous Australians, and other nonwhite races, as primitive and incapable of development. Likewise with another common claim: that Indigenous people have a special attachment to the land and a unique form of ecological wisdom. This, too, draws on an old racist trope, a reworking of the “noble savage” myth. The fact that in contemporary debates such ideas are deployed in support, rather than denial, of Indigenous rights does not make them more palatable.

When I raised these issues with Australian academics and activists, many suggested that as someone with a European perspective, I did not grasp the nuances of the Australian debate. That may be true. But many of the issues are global, not local. From America to South Africa, from India to France, questions about the legacies of colonialism, the authenticity of cultural traditions and the meaning of democracy in pluralist societies dominate public debate.

It was fascinating to read an essay by the Indigenous activist Noel Pearson, one of the guiding lights of the Uluru Statement, in which he references the work of Edmund Burke and Johann Herder to buttress his arguments: two 18th-century European philosophers, the first a founder of modern conservatism, the second of the Romantic view of culture. Both are figures whose ideas are central to European debates about multiculturalism, tradition and recognition — common threads that run through the discussions in different continents.

I was struck, also, by the fact that the Uluru delegates had not been elected by their communities but invited by the organizers. In Europe, the demand for recognition for minority communities has often helped empower community leaders at the expense of the communities themselves. It would be a tragedy if this were to happen in Australia, too.

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In Defense of Cultural Appropriation: Malik – The New York Times

2017/06/15 2 Comments

Good piece by Kenan Malik, particularly this point:

“The accusation of cultural appropriation is a secular version of the charge of blasphemy. It’s the insistence that certain beliefs and images are so important to particular cultures that they may not appropriated by others.”:

Critics of cultural appropriation insist that they are opposed not to cultural engagement, but to racism. They want to protect marginalized cultures and ensure that such cultures speak for themselves, not simply be seen through the eyes of more privileged groups.

Certainly, cultural engagement does not take place on a level playing field. Racism and inequality shape the ways in which people imagine others. Yet it is difficult to see how creating gated cultures helps promote social justice.

There are few figures more important to the development of rock ’n’ roll than Chuck Berry (who died in March). In the 1950s, white radio stations refused to play his songs, categorizing them as “race music.” Then came Elvis Presley. A white boy playing the same tunes was cool. Elvis was feted, Mr. Berry and other black pioneers largely ignored. Racism defined who became the cultural icon.

But imagine that Elvis had been prevented from appropriating so-called black music. Would that have challenged racism, or eradicated Jim Crow laws? Clearly not. It took a social struggle — the civil rights movement — to bring about change. That struggle was built not on cultural separation, but on the demand for equal rights and universal values.

Campaigns against cultural appropriation reveal the changing meaning of what it is to challenge racism. Once, it was a demand for equal treatment for all. Now it calls for cultures to be walled off and boundaries to be policed.

But who does the policing? Every society has its gatekeepers, whose role is to protect certain institutions, maintain the privileges of particular groups and cordon off some beliefs from challenge. Such gatekeepers protect not the marginalized but the powerful. Racism itself is a form of gatekeeping, a means of denying racialized groups equal rights, access and opportunities.

In minority communities, the gatekeepers are usually self-appointed guardians whose power rests on their ability to define what is acceptable and what is beyond the bounds. They appropriate for themselves the authority to license certain forms of cultural engagement, and in doing so, entrench their power.

The most potent form of gatekeeping is religion. When certain beliefs are deemed sacred, they are put beyond questioning. To challenge such beliefs is to commit blasphemy.

The accusation of cultural appropriation is a secular version of the charge of blasphemy. It’s the insistence that certain beliefs and images are so important to particular cultures that they may not appropriated by others. This is most clearly seen in the debate about Ms. Schutz’s painting “Open Casket.”

In 1955, Emmett Till’s mother urged the publication of photographs of her son’s mutilated body as it lay in its coffin. Till’s murder, and the photographs, played a major role in shaping the civil rights movement and have acquired an almost sacred quality. It was from those photos that Ms. Schutz began her painting.

To suggest that she, as a white painter, should not depict images of black suffering is as troubling as the demand by some Muslims that Salman Rushdie’s novel “The Satanic Verses” should be censored because of supposed blasphemies in its depiction of Islam. In fact, it’s more troubling because, as the critic Adam Shatz has observed, the campaign against Ms. Schutz’s work contains an “implicit disavowal that acts of radical sympathy, and imaginative identification, are possible across racial lines.”

Seventy years ago, racist radio stations refused to play “race music” for a white audience. Today, antiracist activists insist that white painters should not portray black subjects. To appropriate a phrase from a culture not my own: Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

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