The beginning

From James Forsyth in The Spectator.

Today is the 18th anniversary of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini declaring a Fatwa on Salman Rushdie for writing the Satanic Verses. It was a wake up call to the coming challenge to the freedoms of a liberal society but one that we failed to heed.

The Rushdie affair demonstrated the spinelessness of the British political class in the face of Islamic extremism. The Crown Prosecution Service refused to prosecute those who openly called for Rushdie’s death. The Islamist Kalim Siddiqui amazingly got away with telling a public meeting, “I would like every Muslim to raise his hand in agreement with the death sentence on Salman Rushdie. Let the world see that every Muslim agrees that this man should be put away.”

Both Labour and Tory politicians embarrassed themselves and failed to grasp how essential it was to protect the right to free expression. The Labour deputy leader called for the paperback edition not to be published and some backbench Tories whinged about how much Rushdie’s protection cost. Indeed, Rushdie ended up being pressured into contributing to his own security costs. All in all, a shameful episode.

The first of many to come, all with the same message, "Try it on. We'll just fold and probably apologise as well".

Activist poker

Maclean’s magazine in Canada is being sued by the Canadian Islamic Congress (CIC) over an excerpt from Mark Steyn' America Alone. According to the CIC,

the article is "flagrantly Islamophobic" and implies Muslims are involved in a global conspiracy to take over Western societies.

I have read the book. The point of most of it is that there's no need for conspiracies; demographics will do the job. I do recall Steyn claiming that both the childless Europeans and the childful Muslims were bringing about a crisis, but not that they were 'conspiring' to do so. It takes true conspiracy theorists to see one there.

Anyway, there's this interesting paragraph in Stanley Kurtz' post at The Corner.

Maclean’s published a total of 27 letters over two issues in response to Steyn’s piece–more responses than any Maclean’s cover story received over the past year. Yet when the law students demanded a longer response, Maclean’s was willing to consider it. The students then insisted that Maclean’s run a five-page article, written by an author of their choice, with no editing by the magazine. They also demanded that the reply to Steyn be a cover story, with art controlled by them, rather than the magazine. At this point, Editor-in-Chief Kenneth Whyte showed them the door, saying he would rather let Maclean’s go bankrupt than permit someone outside of operations dictate the magazine’s content.

What is striking there is the excalation. At every positive response, demand more. When they say 'no', accuse them of racism or some such. And even if the case fails, how many more will be frightened into silence?

[Thanks, Ninme]

Barbarians inside the gates

Nouri of the moor next door mourns the murder by insurgents of Khalil al-Zahawi, one of the world's great calligraphers of Classical Arabic.

While there are despicable habits on the Americans' part (for instance turning tombs of historical figures into barracks and foosball rooms; or destroying the country's system of order all at once without planning out how to manage it) the insurgents seem to be more like a horde of barbarian locusts, sucking the country dry and contributing nothing. Killing, torturing, intimidating, maiming, and leaving nothing behind but scared children and hatred.

What, apart from their indestructable sense of spiritual superiority, do the Jihadists offer? All of them the products of failed cultures and economies, they can do nothing but destroy what others have built. Their only vision of the future is a fantasy with even less appeal than that of the communists of yesteryear; their only rallying cry that of the dying; their only path through their cult of death.

(via Pajamas Media)

Terror and Liberalism, Paul Berman

I've written this summary mainly for myself, but if it persuades you to read the book, then good.

Berman's thesis is that Islamism is the latest in a line of violent and totalitarian rejections of liberalism and should be seen and confronted in the same way as the extreme Left and Right were in the 20th Century. He rejects Tariq Ramadan's claim that Islam (and, by extension, Islamism) occupies a different "universe of reference", a different civilisation and culture, one that cannot be understood from a Western viewpoint. On the contrary, Berman shows how much even a fountainhead of Islamist ideology like Sayyid Qutb draws on Western ideas and categories and how the movement that he inspires conforms to type. He also looks at Western reactions to the totalitarian challenge, in the Thirties and since.

Berman starts with Camus's analysis of romanticism in The Rebel. Starting with de Sade, the radical impulse has tended towards the ultimate transgression or rebellion of death, either of others or of the self. What for de Sade and Baudelaire was a literary pose became for revolutionary groups an essential weapon: political assassination, the elimination of a figure of authority that would bring down the pillars of that authority. Precise targets became random ones, and, in the early years of the 20th Century, transformed into mass movements, which, to achieve their aims, sought mass death. This was one of the many elements that were shared by all these movements, whether of the Left or the Right. Mass death as a means to an end - the war to end all wars and to usher in the final state. The final doctrine, the final movement, the final state. Nihilism.

Berman's most enlightening chapters are the two that outline the ideas of Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian idealogue of the Muslim Brotherhood. Islam as totality - there is no God but Allah and all derives from that single source: nature, man and all that man creates. Authority, therefore, can come only from God. Because it meant "the abolition of man-made laws" and a structure built on the only true law, Islam is "a universal declaration of the freedom of man from servitude to other men and from servitude to their own desires".
The West, on the contrary, is characterised by schizofrenia, a fatal division introduced by Christianity in its first centuries: the division between Greek rationality and Judaic piety - between the secular and the spiritual - ulitmately realised in the separation of politics and religion as practiced in liberal societies today. This is anathema - the enemy without that has infected the societies of the Umma.

Like the radical movements of the 20th Century, Qutb sees Islam as threatened with annihilation from without (by crusading Christians and Zionists and their schizofrenic worldview) and threatened from within (by reformers such as Ataturk and all those who do not follow the word of God). The true Muslim must fight a defensive war (a jihad) against both enemies, a war that would be terrible and involve death in all the World, but the jihadis would prevail and the perfect society would be born of the victory.

Berman traces this message from Nasser's prison to Saudi Arabia and to Iran, from Afghanistan to Jersey City, from which the political exile, Sheikh Rahman, issued orders to kill tourists and Jews. The constraints that Qutb had applied to jihadis, such as avoiding the murder of women and children, were quickly forgotten, though the rest was not.

He turns to us (we are interesting), to how we react to anti-liberal threats. And tells one of those stories that become a filter which you apply to the news and to the world from that moment onwards. The story of the French socialists of the 1930s. The French Socialists were a successful party in the France of the 30s, and their leader, Léon Blum, was Prime Minister 3 times. Faced with the rise of the Nazis, Blum called for re-militarisation and opposition to Hitler. But a large faction in his party were of a different view. Fearing another war (another verdun) above all things, they sought to rationalise the hatreds and hysteria of Nazi Germany. They tried and succeeding in seeing something in Nazi complaints, in Nazi conspiracy theories. And they turned on those within their own society who would fight back - they were the real enemies. The real dangers to peace were the warmongers, the arms manufacturers, the international financiers, some of whom were Jewish (as was Blum). Come the invasion, and the proposal of Marshall Petain to create a pro-Nazi government, the majority of the Socialists voted in favour. Some ended up in the Vichy regime, passed the anti-Jewish laws and sent the police to round up Jews so that they could be sent to the concentration camps.
Berman explains their evolution with reference to their irrational faith in the idea of a rational world. If people behave so irrationally, mustn't there be a rational explanation? As rational beings, are we not duty-bound to understand their irrationality before condemning them? Surely, there are powerful, explicable forces at work and if we understand those forces, then we can deal with them. He illustrates this with another admonitory tale. That of the reaction to the 2nd Intifada in 2002.

A wave of suicide bombings hits Israel. The Israelis react. Protests across the world. A mass anti-globalisation march in Washington raises the chant of "Martyrs, not murderers". At the annual Socialist Scholars Conference (at which Berman has spoken several times), an Egyptian speaker who defends a suicide bomber is applauded. A delegation of the International Parliament of Writers visits the Palestinian territories. Breyten Breytenbach claims the Jews see themselves as a Herrenvolk (ie Aparthied whites, a Nazi Master Race). According to Jose Saramago, the Israelis' hounding of Arafat in his Ramallah compound was "a crime comparable to Auschwitz". Berman quotes from Saramago's El Pais article which depicts Israel as a "blond" David firing missiles from helicopters at innocents and, concerning suicide bombers, concludes, "Israel still has a lot to learn if it is not capable of understanding the reasons that can bring a human being to turn himself into a bomb".

What is most interesting, however, is the reaction of the self-righteous after the Israelis have managed to suppress the suicide attacks. All the Palestinian achievements of the 90s have been destroyed - the economy, which had put forth buds, is virtually non-existant; poverty is now rife; hope of any sort of normal life completely illusory. But the suicide bombings have peaked and faded. Yet despite the real suffering that the Palestinians must now endure, world protests fade as well. As if we have returned to normality. The bombings had brought out the rationalisers among us; with the pause in the bombings came a silence from the rationalisers.

There is a lot more, but that is what I have kept with me from the book.

Choudhury back in it

Last January the 22nd when Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury's trial for sedition was postponed because no government witnesses turned up, things were starting to look better for him. In addition, under American pressure, the Bangladeshi Government had stated that two more scheduled appearances would go the same way and end the persecution of the journalist. The second was yesterday; it didn't go like that.

Instead, two government witnesses did show and the radical-affiliated judge signed an order forcing the trial to continue and accusing Choudhury of being a “threat to the security of Bangladesh.”

The international pressure continues.

Recently, resolutions condemning Choudhury’s persecution have been passed in the European and Australian Parliaments. A similar resolution in the US Congress recently passed the powerful House Committee on Foreign Affairs without opposition and with open support by the US State Department.

Bad and worse

Bernard Lewis, speaking to the staff of The Jerusalem Post, didn't go out of his way to cheer them up.

Instead of fighting the threat, he elaborated, Europeans had given up.

"Europeans are losing their own loyalties and their own self-confidence," he said. "They have no respect for their own culture." Europeans had "surrendered" on every issue with regard to Islam in a mood of "self-abasement," "political correctness" and "multi-culturalism," said Lewis, who was born in London to middle-class Jewish parents but has long lived in the United States.

He's not about to be moving home.

"The outlook for the Jewish communities of Europe is dim." Soon, he warned, the only pertinent question regarding Europe's future would be, "Will it be an Islamized Europe or Europeanized Islam?"

And can you blame him?

Attacks on Jews reached their highest level for more than two decades last year, an authoritative research report said Thursday.

There were nearly 600 anti-Semitic assaults, incidents of vandalism, cases of abuse and threats made against Jewish individuals and institutions, it found. The number of attacks was up by nearly a third on 2005.

Who is doing the attacking? Here eucumenism is flourishing.

White attackers were responsible for anti-Semitic incidents in fewer than half of those where the colour or racial background of the perpetrator was identified. More than a third, 37 per cent, of attackers whose background was known were Asian or Arab.

Since 1984, when the recording of anti-Semitic incidents by the trust began, white attackers have been in a minority only last year and in 2004.

It is Islamophobia we are supposed to be worried about, yet according to the police figures, a Jew is four times more likely to be attacked than a Muslim. Surprisingly, despite the fact that there is a lot of suspicion about towards Muslims, it rarely seems to spill over into violence. All the more surprising given that the provocation has not been lacking. Brendan O'Neill at Spiked Online.

Amongst the left and their allies in self-selected Muslim community groups, it’s widely claimed that Islamophobia is stalking the land. In fact, Islamophobia is a myth, an invention by groups keen to play the victim card against what they view as a seething white mob of Muslim-haters. For all the hysterical talk of ‘an orgy of Islamophobia’, acts of anti-Muslim hatred or violence remain remarkably low. One Muslim commentator says Muslims in Britain are ‘subject to attacks reminiscent of the gathering storm of anti-Semitism in the first decades of the last century. In truth, there are a tiny number of attacks on Muslims. At the end of last year, the Crown Prosecution Service revealed that in 2005-2006 – in the aftermath of the 7/7 bombings, when politicians, the police and others predicted there would be an anti-Muslim pogrom – there were only 43 cases of religiously aggravated crime, 18 of them against Muslims (or ‘perceived’ Muslims). This represented a decline from 23 anti-Muslim crimes in 2004-2005 (3). Kristallnacht it ain’t.

Fairness demands that I add that O'Neill then goes on to lambast the ‘anti-Islamist intelligentsia’ and their fears of civilisational takeover. He makes some good points; eg that the number of terrorist attacks has fallen in the last 30 years. However, terror was a broader church in those days. A more salient point:

the anti-Islamist intellectuals dodge the harder task of interrogating what it is about British and Western society that can make the backward and obscurantist ranting of Islamic sects seem like an attractive alternative for often well-brought-up and educated young Muslims.

Rather unconvincing, though, is this logic inherited from the appeasers of the 30s.

The one thing that seems to sustain their [terrorist] violence is the Islamo-obsessions of the political and cultural elites.

I don't think so.

Outreach

What is going on? Michael Gove, Conservative MP for Surrey Heath, writes in The Spectator in praise of Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, Christopher Hitchens, Nick Cohen and the Euston Manifesto for their

bravery in placing themselves outside literary London’s comfort zone by being brave enough to reject the moral relativism of so many on the left.

[See the post below]

He invokes the struggle of the Cold War and the ideological and intellectual fight undertaken to win it. Blair and Brown have called for efforts here by the side of military 'outreach', but I have yet to hear Bush speak of this or put some dosh down for its support. Arguably, it is more important than the use of force.

But victory in the Cold War depended not just on the voices of Western intellectuals, crucially it depended on Western governments giving support to those dissident voices which were struggling to be heard in the Eastern bloc. Where are the political leaders now who will defend liberal and progressive voices in the Islamic world in the way in which Reagan and Thatcher championed the Sharanskys and Sakharovs? The real heroes of the anti-Islamist intelligentsia are Arab thinkers like Shaker al-Nabulsi who are challenging totalitarianism within the Islamic world. If the West is really serious about winning hearts and minds in this generational struggle, then it needs to show its support for those who, in the least propitious circumstances, still have the bravery to cry freedom.

Icon of Hatred - The impact of al-Dura

I have posted many times on the case of Muhamed al-Dura and the France2 footage showing his death "at the hands of the Israeli army", of the impact of the footage, and the recent trials in France. (For a quick summary of the controversy surrounding the footage, go here).

Richard Landes of Second Draft, a site dedicated to the case, produced a film analysing the al-Dura footage, which, if you haven't seen it, should be watched first: The Birth of an Icon (.wmv 13.52). First, that is, before you watch this new film Icon of Hatred (.wmv 17.39). Both are available here. Icon of Hatred focusses on the effect of the al-Dura footage, the use it has been put to by Jihadists, Islamists, the Palestinians, and usual mouths of the Western Left. It's powerful and unremitting. (Perhaps the worst clips are those with children, their eyes alight at the prospect of martyrdom.)

To put it another way

Martin Amis in The Independent.

What is the most depressing thing about Britain you have observed since your return? And the best?

The most depressing thing was the sight of middle-class white demonstrators, last August, waddling around under placards saying, We Are All Hizbollah Now. Well, make the most of being Hizbollah while you can. As its leader, Hasan Nasrallah, famously advised the West: "We don't want anything from you. We just want to eliminate you."

Similarly, when I went on Question Time the other week, a woman in the audience, her voice quavering with self-righteousness, presented the following argument: since it was America that supported Osama bin Laden when he was fighting the Russians, the US armed forces, in response to September 11, "should be dropping bombs on themselves!" And the audience applauded. It is quite an achievement. People of liberal sympathies, stupefied by relativism, have become the apologists for a creedal wave that is racist, misogynist, homophobic, imperialist, and genocidal. To put it another way, they are up the arse of those that want them dead.

The best thing has been to find myself living in what, despite its faults (despite a million ills), is an extraordinarily successful multi-racial society. This is a beautiful idea, with a good chance of becoming a beautiful reality, too.

Plus, to add to your collection of funny headlines, this from the Washington Post:

Arab World Outraged Over Hangings in Iraq

(via Tim Blair)

Erwin Cotler on Shoaib Choudhury

Irwin Cotler, MP and ex-Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada, is a major human rights lawyer who has acted on behalf of Nelson Mandela, Andrei Sakharov, Natan Sharansky and Saad Edin Ibrahim. He is now representing, though I'm not sure in what capacity, Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury, whose trial starts next week.

Cotler has an article in the Jerusalem Post giving the background and detailing Choudhury's legal position. In most countries, there wouldn't even be a trial. Even at home, his one 'crime', attempting to travel to a country not recognised by Bangladesh, would normally have earned him an $8 fine. That wasn't good enough for the Islamists seeking complete power, and they are determined to convict him of treason and sedition despite the complete lack of what you or I would call evidence.

Cotler also lists the 12 ways in which Choudhury's rights have been violated.

a. the right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty;
b. the right not to be arbitrarily arrested and detained;
c. the right to be informed promptly and in detail of the nature of the charge, and the right to a prompt appearance before a judge to challenge the lawfulness of arrest and detention;
d. the prohibition against torture and the right to humane conditions during detention;
e. the right to protection against coercive interrogation;
f. the right of access to legal counsel;
g. the right to equal access to, and equality before, the courts;
h. the right to a fair hearing by a competent, independent and impartial tribunal established by law;
i. the right to freedom of religion and conscience;
j. the right to freedom of expression and freedom of the press;
k. the right to freedom of association and assembly; and
l. the right to freedom of movement, including the right to leave and re-enter the country.

The 64,000 dollar question

Shoaib Choudhury writes for The Jewish Week in New York.

According to latest estimates, there are at least 64,000 madrassas in Bangladesh, most of which are beyond any form of governmental control or supervision. Moderate Muslims note that the Taliban was born in similar madrassas in Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier Province and in Afghan refugee camps, where they promoted a new radical and extremely militant model for Islamic revolutions.

As he notes, often they are the only means of education for the poor. It would be interesting to know what skills the madrassas develop in their young charges, apart from more or less questionable interpretations of the Koran. This is an example of Saudi soft power, one we would do well to imitate and compete with. One of the things I have heard nothing about in the latest Washington strategy changes is the use of American soft power. In the long run, it is going to be more important than the use of the military. Is the White House developing a strategy to deal with the mindspace? That is, after all, the main battlefield in this Long War.

Shoaib Choudhury latest

Shoaib Choudhury's trial in Bangladesh starts on the 22nd of January. There's little hope of a fair trial and the two sentencing options are 30 years or death. But the campaign to save him is growing by the day.

Rep. Mark Kirk of Illinois and Rep. Nita Lowey of New York have introduced House Resolution 1080, calling on the Bangladeshi government to drop all charges against Choudhury, to cease the harassment campaign against him, and to bring his attackers to justice.

Campaigners are also calling for consumer pressure to be applied.

"And speaking of money, Bangladeshi factories continue to churn out endless dollars worth of clothing imported by U.S. stores: The Gap, Wal-mart, Nike. Let these retailers know that you have urgent concerns about their trading partner. The Bangladesh garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association is one of the most powerful organizations in that country, and controls millions of its jobs."

This article from Canada Free Press gives the background and latest news.

Armed information

I think there is little doubt that in the Muslim world, and to a great degree in the West, the image of the US is tarnished, to put it mildly. At best, it is seen as a heavy-handed keeper of the status quo; at worst, as an oppressive imperial power willing to kill on a 'vast' scale just to ensure oil supplies and a military presence in the region that holds those resources.

Many (me, included) have blamed the media and kept gimlet-eyes on it to bore through the facade of objectivity and to pick out and hold up the weavils that demonstrate the opposite. They are not difficult to find, especially with regard to Israel. But it's not enough.

Not enough, I mean, to explain the losses we have suffered in the information war. So often it has seemed that what has been gained with vast expenditures of energy, time, wealth and blood can be lost in an instant, in the time it takes for some nutter to press a button on his belt. So often it has seemed that every move we make, no matter how successful in terms of military or economic targets reached, is a mere blundering that destroys more than it protects.

One of the reasons for my enthusiasm for that post on Blackfive that I linked to yesterday was that no only does he explain why it seems that way, but he goes on to analyse what we can do about it. Today I clicked on some of the links he supplies, including the one that is the source for a lot of his ideas (among which, the word 'disaggregation').

It turns out that we have an Australian army captain called David Kilcullen to thank for these insights. And two experiences that got him thinking.

The first was a visit in 1993 to a museum dedicated to the defeat of a separatist Muslim insurgency movement called Darul Islam in the sixties. He wanted to understand how the Indonesian government achieved victory (in part, by doing what the coalition is not allowed to do in Iraq). But then, as he was writing, he witnessed the rise of Jemaah Islamiya in the same region as before as well as the success of the separatist Christian movement in East Timor. The Indonesians used the tactics that had brought them success in the first war, but to no avail. Why not? What was different? Kilcullen got to thinking.

I am not going to even try to cover all the ground he does. Just a couple of examples. He concluded, as many have in the last couple of years, that this is more an information war than a military one. He recalls listening to a bin Laden tape and his list of grievances against America: Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, global warming. Global warming? “I thought, Hang on! What kind of jihadist are you?” He gives several examples of where the point of an action (such as 9/11) is not just to kill, but more importantly send a message to the 'constituency' and to the enemy (us). For example,

As soon as the recent fighting in Lebanon between Hezbollah and Israeli troops ended, Hezbollah marked, with its party flags, houses that had been damaged. Kilcullen said, “That’s not a reconstruction operation—it’s an information operation. It’s influence. They’re going out there to send a couple of messages. To the Lebanese people they’re saying, ‘We’re going to take care of you.’ To all the aid agencies it’s like a dog pissing on trees: they’re saying, ‘We own this house—don’t you touch it.’ ” He went on, “When the aid agencies arrive a few days later, they have to negotiate with Hezbollah because there’s a Hezbollah flag on the house. Hezbollah says, ‘Yeah, you can sell a contract to us to fix up that house.’ It’s an information operation. They’re trying to generate influence.”

Another reason that this analysis strikes me as something more than wishful thinking is its hard-headedness. No sentimental delusions.

[W]inning hearts and minds is not a matter of making local people like you—as some American initiates to counterinsurgency whom I met in Iraq seemed to believe—but of getting them to accept that supporting your side is in their interest, which requires an element of coercion. Kilcullen met senior European officers with the NATO force in Afghanistan who seemed to be applying “a development model to counterinsurgency,” hoping that gratitude for good work would bring the Afghans over to their side. He told me, “In a counterinsurgency, the gratitude effect will last until the sun goes down and the insurgents show up and say, ‘You’re on our side, aren’t you? Otherwise, we’re going to kill you.’ If one side is willing to apply lethal force to bring the population to its side and the other side isn’t, ultimately you’re going to find yourself losing.” Kilcullen was describing a willingness to show local people that supporting the enemy risks harm and hardship.

There's an article from the New Yorker about Kilcullen and two pieces by the man himself: Twenty-Eight Articles - Fundamentals of Company-level Counterinsurgency (pdf) and Counterinsurgency Redux (pdf).

The State of the Jihad

Bill Roggio gives a quick guide to the state of play in the countries under Islamist attack. The maps are really useful.

Irwin Cotler for Shoaib Choudhury

Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury, the Bangladishi journalist on trial for sedition, treason, and blasphemy (=criticising Islamic radicalism, but not Christians and Jews) has added a major human rights lawyer to his defence team. Professor Irwin Cotler, who has acted on behalf of Nelson Mandela, Andrei Sakharov, Natan Sharansky and Saad Edin Ibrahim and is a member of the Canadian Parliament, has already identified 8 violations of Choudhury's rights under Bangladeshi law and says that the charges against him are "unfounded in fact and wrong in law".

I posted about this here and here.

Veiled threat

A translation from an article in Information, “the paper for left-wing Danish intellectuals”, with an interview with Chahdorrt Djavann, a woman of Turkish-Azerbaijani descent, since 1993 living in France. She is an anthropologist and also a newly-published novelist. The title of the novel speaks volumes: How Can One Be French?

The interview is entirely about the veil, which she was forced to wear between the ages of 13 and 23. She doesn't take a soft line.

[O]ne of the primary dogmas of Islamic Sharia Law is that the value of a woman is only half that of a man. A woman is forever a de facto minor, unable to control her own body, her life, or her future. And, in this context, the veil has an extremely important psycho-sexual and social meaning. In addition, we have followed a development from the 80s in which Islam has been affected by the ideologies and politics of Saudi Arabia and Iran who both finance the Islamist movements around the world — movements that gain more and more influence. So, the emblem for these movements and their political system, the “sharia state” is the woman’s veil. In the same way that the swastika was the symbol of the Nazis.

I don't really think the comparison to the swastika helps a lot except as an emotional marker of strength of feeling. However, I wouldn't dismiss the point she is making. The veil is a powerful symbol and the political controversy surrounding it pre-dates Jack Straw by many decades. It was Ataturk who banned it in civic spaces in Turkey and Morocco is moving towards the same stance. For Ataturk it was a symbol of cultural backwardness, but in the last couple of decades it has come to signify the sort of backwardness that some would like to welcome back to the futuer. As the Moroccan Minister for Education, Aboulkacem Samir, put it, "The hijab has become for women what the beard is for men, a political symbol". A symbol of militancy; a claim made on the social order as well as a signifier of identity and belonging.

It is interesting that the veil, and not the beard, draws all this ire and defensiveness. But the great dividing line, as much for militant Muslims as for Militant Westerners, is Woman. Minor or major? Dependent or independent? Brain or womb? And though to most of us, there's really no competition as to the type of woman we would like to be (with), in any long-term contest between the womb and the other parts of a woman, it is always going to be the womb that decides.

Only we can ...

The Australian Foreign Minister, Alexander Downer, at the dedication of Ohel Devorah (a new synagogue), in Melbourne on the 9th of November.

As a speaker, he's no Tony Blair, but what he says is worth listening to.

Sometimes they have to be defeated them in the battlefield. But in the end we, as what I might broadly describe as a Western society, can decide whether we will defeat these people or whether we won’t. We can make that decision...

Only we can allow them to make progress, gain ground by sending a message to them that we can be defeated by showing a lack of will, by showing a lack of determination.

He has a concrete example.

I find and I’ve been doing this today as we cast our votes in the United Nations against some of what I call the extreme Palestinian resolutions. I mention this today because at Melbourne airport I was signing off on how we would vote on a number of these resolutions that are coming up over the next couple days.

These resolutions are deeply anti-Israeli, deeply anti-Israeli, and big majorities always carry them. And we are always being told, the best thing for diplomacy is to: all right minister, you don’t like the resolution, but in the interests of diplomacy why don’t you abstain? And I say, let’s vote against it because it is wrong.

And the more we and other countries stand up to this sort of behaviour, the more we stand a chance of success… the more we try to appease, the more we will encourage. And it is enormously important to remember that.