Fanatics in all the wrong places

On 26 January, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) announced that it had received allegations from Israel that twelve of its employees were directly involved in Hamas’ attack on Israel last October. These employees, some of whom are alleged to have participated in massacres of Israelis, have now been sacked, are dead, or are under investigation by UNRWA. Israel has also accused 190 of the UNRWA’s Gaza employees of being operatives of Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

This is not the first time that the UNRWA, founded in 1949 to aid the 700,000 Palestinian refugees created by the first Arab-Israeli War, has been accused of lax hiring practices. Last November, one of the released Israeli hostages claimed he had been held in an attic by a UNRWA teacher.

Now, a slew of countries, including the UK and the US, have stopped their funding for the UNRWA. Combined, these countries contributed over 60 per cent of the UNRWA’s budget in 2022. Whether this is a fair response or not (after all, the UNRWA is now more than ever a lifeline for besieged Palestinians), the allegations are worrying. What hope can there be of a just and stable settlement to this interminable conflict if even the aid agencies of the UN are harbouring violent extremists?

Speaking of fanatics popping up in unwelcome places, Dr Wahid Shaida was suspended by NHS England last month for being the head of Hizb ut-Tahrir in the UK. Hizb ut-Tahrir was itself proscribed as a terrorist organisation shortly before Shaida’s suspension. But just why the head of a woman-hating, homophobic, Islamist outfit, who had openly celebrated the stabbing of Salman Rushdie and the 7 October Hamas attack on Israel, was allowed to practise medicine in the first place is puzzling. One ought not to persecute others for their private beliefs, however distasteful, but it strikes me that such bigotry and fanaticism might have an adverse effect on a doctor’s ability to treat his or her patients fairly – particularly the female, gay, and Jewish ones. In any case, with the proscription of Hizb ut-Tahrir, Shaida’s suspension is certainly justified; though he is still, for some reason, registered with the General Medical Council.  

And then there is Mike Johnson, Speaker of the US House of Representatives and second in line to the presidency since last October. Johnson seems to be an avowed Christian nationalist and his pre-Speaker career highlights include advocating for the criminalisation of gay sex and helping Donald Trump’s demented and spurious legal attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 US presidential election. Read about all this and more in a white paper released by the Congressional Freethought Caucus on 11 January.

It is a sad, sad irony that the very nation founded upon Enlightenment ideals by a group of secularists and freethinkers, including the two great Toms (Paine and Jefferson), is home to some of the world’s most backward and most powerful Christian fundamentalists.

Modi’s triumph and the decay of subcontinental secularism

Meanwhile, India’s great secularist tradition continues to decay under Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist rule. On 22 January, Modi officially opened a new temple to the Hindu god Ram in Ayodhya, proclaiming that ‘After years of struggle and countless sacrifices, Lord Ram has arrived [home]. I want to congratulate every citizen of the country on this historic occasion.’

With elections on the horizon, Modi’s fulfilment of a long-standing Hindu nationalist dream was obviously a vote-getting ploy. Little, of course, was made of the fact that the temple’s site was once home to a centuries-old mosque destroyed by a Hindu mob in 1992. The mob were convinced that the mosque had originally been erected by Muslim invaders over an earlier temple where Ram had been born. (Leave it to the religious to desecrate the sacred sites of their rivals.) Riots provoked by the destruction of the mosque killed thousands.

So: communal strife, destruction of ancient buildings, the death of thousands—and all thanks to religious fantasy. And now the vandalism and horror of 1992 are being erased because Narendra Modi wishes to stir up his supporters. In doing so, his assault on India’s rich secularist history reaches new heights. Here is the triumph of Modi.

And this prompts a further reflection: from Israel and Gaza to the US and India—not to mention the bloodstained steppes of Ukraine, where Orthodox-inspired and supported Russian troops are trying to destroy a young democracy—religion, in various forms, remains one of the world’s greatest threats to democratic and secular ideals, and to the ideals of peace and freedom. How far we secularists still have to go! And perhaps it really is not too much to say that ‘religion poisons everything.’

The Navajo Nation vs NASA

On 6 January, one of the great crises of our time arose. The White House hastily convoked a meeting, attended by officials from NASA and the Federal Aviation Administration among others, to meet the crisis head-on. For a commercial lunar mission, Peregrine Mission One, was due to launch in a couple of days—and its payload contained human remains which were to be buried on the Moon.

What, you might ask, was the problem with that? It has been done before, and the Moon is quite a beautiful final resting place. Many people, myself included, would feel honoured to be fired out into space to rest forever on the Earth’s closest fellow orb. Allow the Navajo Nation President Buu Nygren to explain:

‘The moon holds a sacred place in Navajo cosmology… The suggestion of transforming it into a resting place for human remains is deeply disturbing and unacceptable to our people and many other tribal nations.’

Yes, really! This is no different from Catholics or Muslims imposing their religious beliefs on others. The only surprising thing is that it was paid such heed. The only proper response to this sort of thing is: Who cares? Or, perhaps, Too bad!

Of course, the reason no such firmly secularist response was given in this case is because the Navajo are a minority and they have faced terrible oppression. Guilt-ridden liberals who would happily scoff at, say, Catholic calls to ban homosexuality, are unable to do the same when it comes to indigenous people staking their own arrogant claims to religious privilege. This is an act of unintentional bigotry. It suggests that indigenous people cannot be held to the same standards as others and that their superstitions, which they are clearly incapable of throwing off, must be indulged.

But as citizens of democratic nations, nobody has the right to make special claims for themselves based on religion, let alone impose their beliefs on others. That is the essence of secularism. It does not matter whether the demand for privilege comes from a powerful bishop or an oppressed minority.

The Navajo case is representative of a more general trend: the indulgence of indigenous superstition in the name of inclusivity. Other instances include the adoption of such superstitions in American museums and the credence given to ‘indigenous science’ or ‘indigenous ways of knowing’ even in such august journals as Science. In New Zealand, meanwhile, where the embrace of ‘indigenous ways of knowing’ (in this case, Māori ways of knowing) has gone the furthest, a Māori local district councillor defied the secularist mayor during a meeting and recited a prayer.

If Narendra Modi and Mike Johnson are examples of the religious right flaunting its power, are the claims of the Navajo and the Māori examples of the religious ‘woke’ left in action? At least, the ‘woke’ left tends to support these claims. As ever, the only solution is the secularist one of fairness: nobody, however powerful or oppressed, gets a special pass for their beliefs, nor do they have the right to impose those beliefs on others.

Muslims v Michaela

The legal case currently being pursued against Katharine Birbalsingh’s Michaela Community School by fundamentalist Muslims angry at the school’s restriction of Muslim prayer has stirred up something quite unusual, but also very heartening: an outpouring from across the political spectrum of sympathy for secularism. But, as Megan Manson of the National Secular Society notes, this sympathy is somewhat shallow, given its ignorance (or ignoring) of the UK’s deeply anti-secular education system – never mind its overtly religious political system. Still, who knows? Perhaps the intimidation meted out to Michaela by aggrieved fundamentalists and the wave of public sympathy for the school will inspire the country to finally cast off all the vestiges of theocracy.

Postscript: the Conservative MP Mike Freer has just announced that he will stand down at the next election. Why? He is scared of the Islamists who have been intimidating him for years. He is, in fact, lucky to be alive given that he was in the line of sight of the Islamist who murdered Sir David Amess in 2021. As Rakib Ehsan writes in The Telegraph, ‘Freer’s decision to walk away from British politics for fear of his personal safety is yet another example of the Islamist-inspired erosion of British parliamentary democracy.’

An irreligious king?

On a related note, talk of Prince William’s irreligiousness compared to his father and grandmother caused some speculation that he might cut ties with the Church of England upon becoming King. Alas, such rumours were quickly dispelled, but not before they provoked some amusing grumbling from Peter Hitchens in The Mail on Sunday.

Alongside some thin guff in place of any serious reasoning about the truth of Christianity (never Hitchens’ strong point, and something he usually and wisely avoids), there was one point with which I found myself agreeing: ‘If this stuff is not true, or is marginal, or if we do not really believe it, then there is no purpose in having a King, or a Prince of Wales. We might as well have a President in a nice suit.’ Indeed—and huzzah!

The resurrected exorcist

The Daily Star, citing ‘a recently unearthed interview with [an] obscure Spanish magazine’, says that the Pope’s former exorcist Gabriele Amorth (who left this vale of tears in 2016) believed that the Devil is responsible for political evil and corruption. Even Hitler and Stalin, according to Father Amorth, are to be explained by old Nick’s seductive whisperings. Spooky!

But come now. Aside from its obvious foolishness, this is an abdication of moral and intellectual responsibility. Never mind the hard and necessary work of bothering to explain the evil of a Hitler or a Stalin in rational terms, so that we might understand and stop such men from gaining power ever again. No, no: it was the Devil! Just pray and obey our ancient and constipated moral teachings and all manner of thing shall be well.

Remember: this was the Pope’s exorcist. So, quite apart from the fact that the Pope still believes in exorcism like some medieval peasant, until quite recently his exorcist was a plain idiot. But what do you expect from the Catholic Church? And millions, if not billions, take the Pope’s pronouncements very seriously. The human species is still, clearly, very immature.

Some more wisdom from Father Amorth:

‘I tell those who come to see me to first go to a doctor or a psychologist… Most of the time there is a physical or psychological basis for explaining their suffering… The psychiatrists send me the incurable cases. There is no rivalry. The psychiatrist determines if it is an illness, the exorcist if it is a curse.’

‘I work seven days a week, from morning until night, including Christmas Eve and Holy Week. Everyone is vulnerable. The Devil is very intelligent. He retains the intelligence of the angel that he was.

‘Suppose, for example, that someone you work with is envious of you and casts a spell on you. You would get sick. Ninety per cent of the cases that I deal with are precisely spells. The rest are due to membership in satanic sects or participation in séances or magic.

‘If you live in harmony with God, it is much more difficult for the devil to possess you.’

Well, there you go: harmonise your aura with the Lord above, then that rascal Lucifer won’t be able to get you, and there’ll be no evil in the world! Because, of course, no evil has ever been committed by godly men…

Enter Russell Crowe

Apparently, Father Amorth was the subject of a (highly dramatised) movie starring Russell Crowe last year. According to the summary on Wikipedia, ‘[Amorth] learns that a founder of the Spanish Inquisition, an exorcist, was possessed, which let him infiltrate the Church and do many evils. Amorth also finds the Church covered this up…’ This does not, so far as I know, represent anything done or claimed by the real Amorth, but it does chime with his comments given above—and what an easy escape for the Church! All its many crimes throughout history were just a satanic aberration. It was the Devil all along! Thank the Lord for that. Let us never trouble ourselves again about the Inquisition, or Galileo, or Giordano Bruno, or the Crusades, or child sex abuse, or…

So much for mea culpa, never mind mea maxima culpa, then.

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Further reading:

The Israel-Palestine conflict

Bloodshed in Gaza: Islamists, leftist ideologues, and the prospects of a two-state solution, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

Religion and the Arab-Israeli conflict, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

Is the Israel-Palestine conflict fundamentally a nationalist, not a religious, war? by Ralph Leonard

Christian nationalism in the US

Reproductive freedom is religious freedom, by Andrew Seidel and Rachel Laser

Secular conservatives? If only… by Jacques Berlinerblau

Indian secularism and Hindu nationalism

Religion and the decline of freethought in South Asia, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

‘We need to move from identity politics to a politics of solidarity’ – interview with Pragna Patel

Campaign ‘to unite India and save its secular soul’, by Puja Bhattacharjee

British Islam, secularism, and free speech

Free speech in Britain: a losing battle? by Porcus Sapiens

Secularism and the struggle for free speech, by Stephen Evans

British Islam and the crisis of ‘wokeism’ in universities – interview with Steven Greer

Monarchy, religion, and republicanism

Bring on the British republic – Graham Smith’s ‘Abolish the Monarchy’, reviewed, by Daniel James Sharp

‘I do not think you are going to get a secular state without getting rid of the monarchy’ –interview with Graham Smith

The post Faith Watch, February 2024 appeared first on The Freethinker.

What role does religion play in the Israel-Palestine conflict? Two contrasting views have recently appeared in the pages of the Freethinker. Kunwar Khuldune Shahid argued that ‘[a]t the heart of the ongoing conflict…is the fact that different religious groups are claiming exclusive control over much of the same territory’. Meanwhile, the liberal imam Taj Hargey took the opposite view in an interview with Freethinker editor Emma Park: ‘[T]he root cause of this conflict is not between Islam and Judaism, between Muslims and Jews, but between Zionist colonial settlers and the legitimate Palestinian resistance. That is the fight.’

The land where so much blood is currently being needlessly spilled is the Holy Land, sacred to the faithful of all three major Abrahamic religions, who exalt it within their respective spiritual and theological practices and traditions. Moreover, religious fundamentalists on both sides—whether in the hard right Israeli government and the fanatical religious Zionist settler movement or the Islamist outfits of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ)—continually invoke their sacred texts to justify their exclusive rights to the Holy Land. There is also a great deal of sensitivity when it comes to the use of religious sites like the Temple Mount/al-Aqsa. Given all this, it would be naïve to disregard the important part religion plays in this conflict—and it is easy to see why, in the face of such zealotry, one might see it as nothing more than a religious dispute.

Fundamentally, however, the Israel-Palestine conflict is not a holy war. Its roots lie not in supposed ancient hatreds or Quranic enmities but in modern and secular conditions. In essence, I would argue that the conflict is not, as Shahid claims, about different religious groups fighting for exclusive control of the same territory. Rather, it is a quarrel between two nations of roughly equal size—one Hebrew-speaking and predominantly (though not exclusively) Jewish, and one Arabic-speaking and predominantly Muslim, but with a significant and influential Christian minority—over who should be the undisputed master of the whole land.

In the original 1964 charter of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), the words ‘Arab’, ‘Palestinian’, ‘homeland’ and ‘nationalism’ form a consistent motif. It does not refer much to religion, except in vague and ecumenical terms – in contrast, Hamas’ 1988 charter is replete with religious references. Moreover, in the 1970s and 1980s, the most prominent Palestinian nationalist outfit after Yasser Arafat’s Fatah was the ostensibly Marxist-Leninist (though ‘Stalinist’ would be a more apt description) Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). Founded by George Habash, who came from a Christian background, many of the PFLP’s members were very secular-minded; many were even avowed atheists. It is mostly forgotten now, but when Hamas first arose in the 1980s, they would frequently clash with PFLP members, who they condemned as ‘apostates’. At that time, Israel, playing at the old imperial game of divide and rule, also implicitly backed Hamas, seeing it as a conservative counterweight to secular Palestinian groups.

The goal of leftist Palestinian nationalism is one secular democratic socialist state. This has been criticised as a Trojan horse for Arab ethnonationalist domination, but even if this was true, it would be an ethnonational, not religious, domination. It was only in 2003, under Arafat’s autocratic rule, that the constitution of the Palestinian Authority was amended to proclaim that Islam was to be the sole official religion of Palestine and sharia was to be ‘a principal source of legislation’.

On the other side, the founders of the Zionist movement, from Moses Hess to Theodor Herzl to David Ben Gurion, were, likewise, extremely secular, even anti-religious. ‘We shall keep our priests within the confines of their temples’, Herzl wrote in his infamous cri de coeur, Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State) in 1896. Zionism originated in 19^th-century romantic nationalism. It understood the Jewish predicament in a very particular sense. Jews were a nation in the abnormal condition of being the ‘stranger par excellence’, as the Russian Zionist Leon Pinsker put it in 1882: ‘They home everywhere, but are nowhere at home … [T]hey are everywhere aliens … [and] everywhere endangered’. Therefore the answer to the so-called Jewish question was to create a Jewish national home that would morph into a Jewish state in what they saw as the organic homeland of the Jews: Eretz Israel/Palestine.

Whether it advocated for a Jewish nation-state or a Jewish socialist commonwealth, early Zionist thought made its claims not in the name of the Jewish faith, but of the Jewish people.

Zionists heartily invoked traditional Jewish mythology and the Hebrew language, but these were subordinated to their project of national renewal. Among the first and most ardent opponents of Zionism were religious Jews who railed against the Zionist prescription of a Jewish state as a blasphemy against the Torah; in their eyes, only the Messiah (who was, as yet, still tarrying) could establish a true Jewish state. As the Israeli philosopher Micah Goodman has put it, ‘[S]ome of the main Zionist thinkers saw Zionism as a Jewish revolt against Judaism.’

Many Palestinians and Arabs find the notion of Jewish nationhood hard to swallow. To them, Judaism is just a religion; it does not denote a nation or a people. This position is also expressed in the PLO charter: ‘Judaism because it is a divine religion is not a nationality with independent existence. Furthermore the Jews are not one people with an independent personality…’ To acknowledge the secular fact of Jewish peoplehood and the depth of the historic and cultural attachment to Eretz Israel would be, to them, tantamount to legitimising Zionism, and, thus, the mass displacement and dispossession of the Palestinian Arabs in 1948 and onwards. The Israeli state’s own lack of clarity as to whether it sees Jewishness in either ethnic or religious terms exacerbates this confusion.

Zionism is not particularly unique in using religion as the external badge of nationhood. One can find a parallel (as Shahid astutely notes) in the Pakistani nationalist movement. Muhammad Ali Jinnah, its founding father, was firmly irreligious, and he argued that the Muslim population of South Asia was a particular nation that could not live as a minority under an India where the Hindu ‘nation’ was the majority. Therefore, Muslims required their own state.

Understanding the national foundation of the conflict means having a more nuanced understanding of the enmity towards Israel. Shahid claims that Islamic anti-Semitism is the ‘predominant motivation behind Muslim animosity towards Israel’. No doubt there is an element of truth to this. Religiously-motivated anti-Semitism has proliferated across many Muslim countries, as Hina Husain, for instance, has described in an article on her Pakistani upbringing. For jihadists like Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, opposition to Israel really is about ‘Muslim imperialism’, as Shahid puts it. They do not care about Palestinian nationhood; for them, Palestine is nothing more than a province in a lost empire that they wish to resurrect.

But it would be wrong to see all Arab opposition to Israel as a result of eternal anti-Semitism. The Palestinian Arab enmity towards Israel, in particular, is rooted in the concrete reality of what Zionism in practice has meant for them: the takeover of their land by newcomers, guarded by an external imperial power, to create a new political order that they would be excluded from, thus necessitating their extirpation. In other words, settler colonialism.

‘The fear of territorial displacement and dispossession was to be the chief motor of Arab antagonism to Zionism down to 1948 (& indeed after 1967 as well)’, observed the Israeli historian Benny Morris in his book Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-2001. This antagonism would have been present whatever the identity of their dispossessors—because it is a rational and materially-based antagonism, rather than a result of hideous prejudice. This is not to say that genuine prejudice has not emerged among Palestinian Arabs, just that not all of their opposition to Israel can be dismissed as such.

In this sense, Taj Hargey is right to make his parallel with settler colonialism. But this point, rather en vogue at the moment, needs more nuance. Zionism is a peculiar form of settler colonialism, because it was also a national movement of an immensely persecuted people, who were not regarded as ‘of’ European civilisation. The means of settler colonisation were used to attain the end of an independent ethnonationalist state, and the Palestinians paid the price for that.

It is also true that in recent decades, the conflict has acquired a more overtly religious character. On the one hand, we have seen the rise of religious Zionism, culminating in the ascension to power of the increasingly sectarian Benjamin Netanyahu, and, on the other, the ‘degeneration of Palestinian Arab nationalism into the theocratic and thanatocratic hell of Hamas and Islamic Jihad’ (as Christopher Hitchens put it in 2008). But even this does not negate the national basis of the conflict. It complements it. Nationalism, like religion, can be extremely irrational; it too can create ahistorical ‘sacred’ mythologies and inspire all sorts of horrors.

In essence, the Israel-Palestine question is partially an issue of settler colonialism and partially an unresolved national question. Religion is an exacerbating, toxifying factor. With the parties of God holding a veto—and exercising it liberally—over any peaceful settlement, religion has made the conflict even more intractable. One has to understand all of these dimensions as part of a whole to truly grasp the nature of the conflict.

It has become a truism to describe the Israel-Palestine conflict as ‘complex’, defying simplistic narratives. Certain things, though, such as the atrocities perpetrated by Hamas/PIJ commandos on 7 October, or the obscene bombardment Israel has inflicted on Gaza since that date, or the tyrannical Israeli occupation of the West Bank, are, however, very simple to understand and easy to take a clear position on. Still, this conflict demands a subtle yet principled approach that forthrightly opposes all racist chauvinism and religious demagoguery, whatever form it might take. Standing Together is a great civil society initiative within Israel, organised by Jews and Palestinian Arabs, seeking to promote Arab-Jewish solidarity and opposing both the occupation and extremism on all sides. This is a movement that any humanist could and should support.

Edward Said’s remark that the Palestinians are the ‘victims of the victims’ encapsulates much of the emotional intricacy underlying the conflict. In the 2015 novel The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen, which concerns itself with another protracted and deadly war, there is a passage that also sums up for me the tragedy of the Israel-Palestine conflict: ‘As Hegel said, tragedy was not the conflict between right and wrong but right and right, a dilemma none of us who wanted to participate in history could escape.’ The scars of the Israel-Palestine calamity are very deep. They will not be healed any time soon. But the fact remains: Jews and Arabs are tied to a common future in the Holy Land—a land which both belong to. The task of creating a common civic society, in which both can live as free people on a free land, may be arduous. But that does not make it any less necessary.

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The post Is the Israel-Palestine conflict fundamentally a nationalist, not a religious, war? appeared first on The Freethinker.

The blood-soaked holy land

The Israel-Palestine conflict today involves a tangled and tragic web of disputes, but it is ultimately rooted in competing religious ideologies. So long as fanatical Jews, Muslims, and Christians see Palestine as their personal holy land, it is hard to see how the conflict will ever be resolved.

In such a politically complex dispute, with so many historic grievances and so much suffering on both sides, it is hard to understand what is really happening on the ground, let alone get any sense of how the conflict could or should be ended. Some form of the old two-state solution, moribund as it seems now, is probably still the only viable path to peace. So long as bigotry and fanaticism reign on all sides, however, that outcome is unlikely to be realised.

Even if a compromise is reached, as Kunwar Khuldune Shahid argues in his essay on Hamas and Islamist-leftist extremism, ‘the solution is still set to be as arbitrarily imposed as the problem was.’ We hope to offer further reflections on the conflict from different perspectives in the coming weeks.

A heroine honoured

In other, somewhat brighter, news, the Iranian feminist Narges Mohammadi was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on 6 October. Unfortunately, Mohammadi is currently languishing in a Tehran prison for her anti-regime activism, particularly her opposition to the hijab. The Iranian mullahs are the paymasters of Hamas and are almost certainly responsible for the attack in Israel – which was, coincidentally, launched the day after the Nobel was announced. But Mohammadi represents something very troubling for the mullahs: the growth in Iran of a mass movement for secular democracy and equality between the sexes. Let us hope this movement succeeds sooner rather than later.

An Islamic party pooped

An application to form a Party of Islam in the UK was rejected by the Electoral Commission last month. The application, sent just days after Hamas’s attack on Israel, seems to have been put together rather shoddily. As EU Today reported:

‘In its official application, the Party of Islam states “We are a party who has been created to help all of the minority in the land of Great Britain have a voice.”

The Party of Islam has also stated its intention to “help all of the minority in the land of Great Britain have a voice,” further stating: “We will make sure that all problems which lingure (sic) in the great country of Great Britain is defeated.”’

Everyone should be free to set up political organisations of whatever stripe they want, of course, but one does wonder what exactly the Party of Islam would stand for.

Would a PoI prime minister disestablish the Church of England? Would there be a Mosque of England in its place? Would blasphemy laws be reenacted? What stance would the party take on, say, the Batley Grammar School teacher who is still in hiding after displaying an image of Muhammad in his classroom in 2021? What would their social policies look like?

Given that another, now defunct, Islamic political party wanted to bring back the death penalty for homosexuality, is it too far-fetched to wonder whether such parties are really just Islamist outfits exploiting the language of inclusivity to further their theocratic agenda? Surely not! But who knows? Perhaps, just in case, it is time for Britain to adopt something like the First Amendment and become a properly secular country…

Christians against…sponges?

On 4 November, Freethinker contributor and National Secular Society historian Bob Forder gave a lecture at Conway Hall entitled ‘Condoms, Sponges and Syringes: The 19th century pioneers of family planning’. Curiously for a lecture unrelated to abortion, it drew the ire of an evangelical ‘pro-life’ group, who turned up to protest, parading some gruesome images.

A strange turn of events, to be sure, but the anti-spongers are entitled to their freedom of speech, and they caused no serious disruption. As Bob Forder told The Freethinker, ‘there were no interruptions apart from some raucous hymn singing when they left.’

Yet another gay orgy scandal for the Catholic Church

Finally, it is always amusing to have new additions to the ancient canon of stories about debauched and perfidious priests. Grzegorz Kaszak’s resignation from his post as bishop of the diocese of Sosnowiec, Poland, was accepted by Pope Francis late in October. No reason was given for the good bishop’s resignation, but it is curious to note that, under his reign, Sosnowiec has seen more gay sex scandals than the sweetly innocent might expect from a diocese of the Roman Catholic Church.

In 2010, the acting rector of a Sosnowiec seminary got into a fight in a gay club. This August, one of Kaszak’s priests was arrested for trying to prevent paramedics from entering his apartment after a man, having overdosed on erectile dysfunction pills during a gay orgy, collapsed. The priest later said, ‘I perceive this as an obvious attack on the church, including the clergy and the faithful, in order to humiliate its position, tasks and mission.’ Well, of course!

Sexual scandal is hardly new for the Catholic Church. Gay orgy scandals, in particular, seem to be as popular among priests as poppers are at…well, gay orgies. Or take another example, just for fun. In 2017, Luigi Capozzi, private secretary to Cardinal Francesco Coccopalmerio, was arrested by the Vatican police for snorting cocaine during another such orgy in the cardinal’s apartment (the cardinal, it should be noted, was not present).

The church continues to claim divine authority to pronounce on morality and condemn gay people while running an organised system of child sexual abuse—another thing that would be funny if it were not true.

As for the hypocrisy of its priests, who uphold anti-gay doctrine while bedding half the men in their dioceses—well, let them have their fun. They could, after all, be doing much worse things—like preaching. Though if you need a supply of erectile dysfunction pills for your orgy, you probably have no future in the business.

Enjoy this article? Subscribe to our free fortnightly newsletter for the latest updates on free thought. Or make a donation to support our work into the future.

Further reading:

The Israel-Palestine conflict

Bloodshed in Gaza: Islamists, leftist ideologues, and the prospects of a two-state solution, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

Religion and the Arab-Israeli conflict, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

Islamist ideology and anti-Semitism

The radicalisation of young Muslims in the UK: an ongoing problem?, by Khadija Khan

Iranian resistance to theocracy

The ‘Women’s Revolution’: from two activists in Iran, by Rastine Mortad and Sadaf Sepiddasht

Batley Grammar School case

Blasphemy in the classroom, by Emma Park (New Humanist)

Free speech in Britain: a losing battle? – Freethinker

Abuse in the Catholic Church

The Pope’s Apology, by Ray Argyle

The post Faith Watch, November 2023 appeared first on The Freethinker.

In July, President Joe Biden is likely to visit Israel and Saudi Arabia, as the two countries draw closer towards formalising the ties that have previously remained unofficial. The normalisation process that began with the Abraham Accords in 2020, when UAE, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco recognised the state of Israel, will be extended, through Saudi, to the broader Sunni Muslim world. And Riyadh has been laying the groundwork to formalisation.

In Turkey, despite its seven-decade old relations with Israel and recent collaborations, Recep Erdogan is still capable of using Islamist rhetoric to muster hyperbolic outrage. Saudi Arabia, however, is financially incentivising Turkey to keep this rhetoric in check. It is also offering financial support to the unflinchingly Judaeophobic Pakistan; this should extend the normalisation process from the Middle East to South Asia.

While financial and geopolitical gains were a critical factor in the 2020 Arab-Israeli normalisation, they had to be complemented by a religious rationale for the Accords – hence the nod to Abraham in their title. Saudi Arabia, for long the self-appointed leader of the Sunni half of the Arab world and custodian of Islamic sites, knows that it needs a religious narrative to sell to the Muslim world, since the latter has long been taught Jewish hatred through Islamic scriptures, which display every kind of Judaeophobia, from asking the believers ‘not to take Jews as friends’ to ordering their genocide.

Post-postcolonialism

Since World War II, three generations of global leftist intelligentsia have endowed the Arab-Israeli conflict with immutable postcolonial narratives. The Western powers, which were primarily responsible for enforcing the new world order and the injustices that came with it, created Israel as a haven for the Jews whom it had actively persecuted, or as a colonial base to continue subjugating the locals in the Middle East. At least, this is how, for the past seven decades, the ‘progressive’ argument has gone.

The idea that any land should be allocated to a religious community owing to the claims of its canonical scripture would be preposterous for anyone not believing in that scripture. However, this happened with the new state of Israel, in a part of the world which was surrounded by states ethnically cleansing the very religious community from which it was formed. The same Muslim-majority states actively persecuted other minorities using Islamic scriptures. In a world brimming with religious injustices, only one succeeded in capturing the attention of many of those on the progressive Left, who have then spent decades dismissing suggestions that religion has anything to do with it.

For proponents of this view, Israel is touted as an ‘artificial’, ‘imposed’ nation-state. Yet this is in a region where the very idea of a nation state has been artificially imposed, and where regional borders are delineated according to spheres of control exercised by competing powers. Neither Jordon, Lebanon, Syria or Iraq existed as unified states prior to the interference by the West, which had also seen the African continent sliced up like a cake. Similarly, the parallels between Pakistan and Israel are innumerable: the creation of Pakistan resulted in the largest mass migration in human history, leaving significantly more people displaced than were by the creation of Israel. The fabrication of borders to create these states is as much a consequence of Western colonialism as their Muslim-majority identity is a result of Islamic imperialism.

But just as postcolonial ideologues have artificially expunged religion out of any examination of the Middle East’s difficulties, their narrative has also sought to sanitise Islam and diminish its imperialistic tendencies. For instance, Edward Said, the prophet of Middle Eastern postcolonial studies, in his staunch defence of Islam, castigated Western media for depicting Islam negatively – at the same time as many Muslim-majority states were carrying out gory, antediluvian punishments, such as flogging for extramarital sex and stoning individuals to death for exercising freethought about Islam, in accordance with Islamic law (sharia). Said’s ‘Orientalism’ has evolved into today’s cultural-relativist ‘Islamophobia’ narrative, in which the unflinching protection of 1,400-year-old ideas, which themselves codify violence in large parts of the Muslim world, is deemed the hallmark of intellectual progressiveness.

That many on the progressive Left have chosen to view certain issues through the narrow, selectively opaque lens of postcolonialism seems to have blinded them to the fact that others can be passionately attached to the same cause, but as a result of a completely different set of ideas – ideas which also invoke an ideology that actively seeks the destruction of much of what the progressives otherwise stand for. This has created a bizarre and perilous pact between the Islamists and the Left, who together try to minimise Islam’s role in any conflict in the region, including for the maintenance of the Arab-Israeli conflict and for the refusal to create a Palestinian state.

Religious roots

In addition to Islam, it is important to stress how the two other Abrahamic religions have contributed to the conflict in the Middle East. Just as Islam, from its onset, has explicitly condemned Christian and Jews, and rejected the fundamental beliefs of its predecessors – for instance by calling Jesus a prophet and not the son of God – Christianity too was keen from an early stage to distance itself from its Judaic roots. 

Biblical Judeophobia, which holds the Jews responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus, oversaw the persecution and even pogroms of Jewish populations from western Europe to Russia. Pogroms were also carried out under the Ottoman Empire. There were cheerleaders aplenty in both Christian-majority and Muslim-majority countries when the Axis powers were preparing the grounds for the Holocaust. The latter was itself spearheaded by an ethno-supremacist Nazi ideology, the genocidal antisemitism of which was complemented by religionist Judaeophobia.

Yet Zionism, the movement for the creation of a Jewish homeland in the historic land of Israel which emerged amid the escalating Jewish persecution in the 19th century, has found many of its proponents aspiring to recreate ‘land of Canaan’ that would encompass the entire territory between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. The Biblical ‘Judea and Samaria’, today called the West Bank, was captured by Israeli forces after the 1967 war. The West Bank forms a large chunk of the Palestinian territory that was earmarked by the 1947 UN Partition Plan. Yet over the past 55 years, it has been inhabited by nearly half a million Jewish settlers, a vast majority of them Orthodox Jews looking to fulfil the canonical prophecies.

Jerusalem symbolises the common roots, and shared animosity, between the three Abrahamic religions and the expansionist empires that have conquered the city, from the Romans in the first century AD to the Arabs in seventh century. Each conqueror in turn aspired to assert its dominance atop the remnants of the vanquished religions. The Temple Mount is a symbol of intra-Abrahamic antagonism and the tangible religious root of the centuries-old conflict between them.

Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, built atop the Temple Mount, signifies the third holiest site in Islam. According to Islamic tradition, it was the first qibla (direction of prayer) sanctioned by Muhammad and the site of the fable that narrates his flight to Jannah (heaven). It is the Jewish occupation of this holy land that has outraged the vast majority of the Muslim world, and constitutes its main grievance against Israel – more so than Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory. The animosity for Jews in Islamic scriptures adds Judaeophobic fuel to the Islamist fire.

Islamic anti-Semitism

While Jewish and Christian progressives largely denounce their scriptures’ contribution to the conflict, Muslim progressives have historically toed the leftist position on Israel: even those otherwise critical of Islamist doctrines have actively disassociated Islamic anti-Semitism from the broader Muslim denunciation of the Jewish state. Many have argued that the anti-Jewish bigotry in Muslim-majority states, which sometimes spirals into conspiratorial hysteria, is in fact rooted in the creation of Israel. This is a convenient, or deliberate, rewriting of the Muslim world’s history. Horrific massacres of Jews were being carried out centuries before modern-day Israel was born – from Hebron, Safed, and Petah Tikva in modern day Israel-Palestine to Damascus, Algiers, and Basra.

As far back as 628 AD, the Battle of Khaybar saw the conquest of Muhammad’s army over Jewish tribes; according to Islamic tradition, this involved the massacre and expulsion of the Jews. The Qatar-produced Ramadan television series ‘Khaybar’ alluded to the battle using the popular Arabic chant ‘Khaybar Khaybar, ya yahud, Jaish Muhammad, sa yahud’ (Jews, remember Khaybar, the army of Muhammad is returning’). This chant is frequently heard in anti-Israeli rallies from the Middle East to Western Europe. There are many hadiths (sayings of Muhammad) that encourage killing of Jews. For instance, a quotation often cited by jihadists and radical Islamists asks Muslims to fight the Jews until the time when trees and stones tell the believers, ‘O Muslim! There’s a Jew behind me, so kill him.’ The charter of Hamas uses many verses from the Islamic scriptures to call for the extermination of Jews.

Over the past century, episodes of ethnic cleansing of Jews have been carried out across the Muslim world from the Middle East to South and East Asia. These have run in parallel with expressions of fear over Israel’s attempted elimination of Muslims in Palestine. The lack of a global Muslim push to establish a Palestinian state in West Bank and Gaza between 1948 and 1967, when the territories were under Jordanian and Egyptian occupation, also suggests that creation of another Arab-Muslim state was not as high a priority as elimination of the Jewish one.

At the end of the 1970s and in the wake of the Iranian Revolution, the siege of Mecca, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, a schism between Sunnis and Shias, led by Riyadh and Tehran respectively, exploded. A newfound oil hegemony became the economic basis for a proxy jihad between Saudi Arabia and Iran. This led to the radicalisation of Muslim movements from Palestine to Kashmir; even the formerly secular nationalist strains of the movements were purged in favour of a monolithic Islamist narrative. Meanwhile, as Saudi Arabia peddled violent anti-Semitism through mosques and school curricula, it was simultaneously Israel’s ally in the US alliance that pushed anti-Soviet jihad in the 1980s. Simultaneously, Iran, the hub of Shia proxy warfare, has actively allied itself with the Sunni jihadist Hamas to maintain its leverage in the Arab world. In turn, the jihadist takeover of the broader Muslim world in recent decades has meant that instead of rallying together over humanitarian grounds, even the officially secular Indonesia and Turkey have condemned Israel in an anti-Semitic way.

An Islamic rationale for Israel

New geopolitical realities, spearheaded by shared animosity for Iran, however, have pushed the Sunni Arab states, led by Saudi Arabia, into publicly befriending the Jewish state which they have long threatened with destruction. As a result, the radically Islamised curriculum in Saudi Arabia has been revised to remove anti-Semitic texts. The highest Saudi clerics, who long called for the ‘annihilation’ of Jews, dubbing them ‘descendants of apes and pigs’, have now been increasingly asking Muslims to exhibit kindness to Jews. From TV shows based on Islamic history, to deliberations in academic conferences, there has been a swift turnaround in the Arab narrative on Jews and Israel, eventually culminating in the 2020 agreements. And since the promises of Israel’s demolition were rooted in Islam, so is the rationale for this remarkable volte-face. 

In his 2020 visit to Auschwitz, Mohammed al-Issa, the head of the Muslim World League, passionately vowed ‘this must never happen again.’ He insisted that fighting hatred against Jews is a ‘religious obligation’, and maintained that the Muslim World League would keep challenging anti-Semitism till it ceased to exist. ‘Political outlooks change over time but our values, our morals should never change,’ al-Issa said. And yet that is precisely what has been happening, thanks in large part to religion.

Apologists of the anti-Semitism in Islamic scriptures have long sought to contextualise, or dismiss, explicit calls for Jewish blood in the canonical texts that Muslims around the world are taught. In its condemnation of January’s jihadist attack on a Texas synagogue, the Council of American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) rejected anti-Semitism. However, it will be unlikely to address its own Judaeophobia and support for antisemitic jihadists like Aafia Siddiqui, who inspired the attack. In the aftermath of jihadist anti-Semitic manoeuvres, Muslim groups like the CAIR point to Islamic passages that urge tolerance and brotherhood, all the while refusing to address the passages that explicitly urge violence.

For instance, Jews are among the Ahl-al-Kitaab(‘People of the Book’) that the Quran refers to 31 times. According to Islamic tradition and jurisprudence, the ‘People of the Book’ were entitled to religious recognition under Islamic sharia, through being given the inferior status of dhimmi (‘protected persons’), which required them to pay jizya (tax) in return for protection. Islamic sharia also allows Muslim men to marry Christian and Jewish women, although not the other way round.

Today, a blend of theological guarantees for the Ahl-al-Kitaab and emphasis on the holiness of Al-Aqsa Mosque are the basis of the Islamic rationale used to justify the Muslim world’s normalisation of relations with Israel. Many even quote parts of the Quran to argue that Islamic scriptures in fact affirm that the land of Israel belongs to the Jews. The ostensible Islamic justification for Israel has been pushed by Saudi Arabia as it draws closer to normalising relations with it. A Saudi-led Arab influence over Al-Aqsa would further bolster Islamic tourism – which has also been spearheaded by Riyadh, as it increasingly looks to find substitutes for its revenue from the oil that is eventually going to run out.

This Saudi push for reformist interpretations of Islam, in other words, is not an offshoot of collective Muslim reflection, but a powerplay designed to reinvent Islam as the geo-economic foundation of an Arab world that is still just as invested in maintaining its totalitarian hegemony over its peoples. The Muslim world’s monolithic attitudes towards Islam, and the geopolitical conflicts where Islam has been imposed, could have evolved organically through permitting freedom of conscience and religion once again, after their centuries of suppression. Instead, however, the new interpretations of Islam are being forged autocratically by leaders, and while maintaining inflexible restraints on free thought among the wider Muslim populations. 

Suppressing free thought

The suppression of critical thinking means that Muslims around the world would have to arbitrarily accept Israel through Islamic legitimisation, just as they were previously pushed to support the Israel’s genocidal destruction through a different interpretation of the same canonical texts. What this also means is that much needed interfaith coexistence, regional peace, and Muslim intellectual progress will continue to be held hostage by the interpretation of Islam that best suits the geopolitical ambitions of the Arab monarchs at any given point. That is why, regardless of how reformist an interpretation of Islam the Arab states might be upholding today, they will not accept any allowance for challenging Islam itself. For instance, while the Hindutva regime in India has been actively targeting Muslims, and while its military has occupied the Muslim-majority state of Jammu and Kashmir, the Arab countries only  criticised New Delhi over the perceived blasphemy by Nupur Sharma, the BJP spokesperson, against Muhammad, when she alluded to the marriage of Islam’s prophet to six-year-old Aisha as narrated in Islamic scriptures.

Whether in South Asia or the Middle East, regional stability and human progress have long been stymied by the interference of religion in policymaking. The millennia-old faultlines between Israel and Palestine, or their respective cultures, have long needed reconciliatory solutions that are based on pragmatism rather than religion. But the progressives who should be spearheading such movements have created an ideology that reflects the monolithism and dogmatism of organised religion.

Historically, the hard Left has cherished the Marxist aspiration of destroying Israel as a way of removing Western capitalism from the region. The ‘anti-capitalist’ movement calling for ‘illegitimate’ Israel’s eradication grew in parallel with Arab monarchies, whose own legitimacy was rooted in the historic triumph of their founders in tribal warfare, and whose fast-accumulating oil wealth gave them disproportionate influence on the global stage. After the dissolution of the USSR, the Left broadly acquiesced to a two-state solution, but its fixation with Israel, often in parallel to the abandonment of human rights abuses elsewhere such as Kurdistan, Balochistan, Nagorno-Karabakh, or Xinjiang, has persisted. While the Marxist-Leninist goal of eliminating of Israel during the Soviet era described the Jewish state itself as artificial and colonial, the heirs of those ideologies use the same labels for Israel, but have moved the focus of their campaign to the territories captured after 1967 depending on the audience.

The hard Left’s doublespeak in its position on Israel – shifting between condemning the occupied territories or the state itself as illegal – is similar to the way in which Israeli leaders and expansionist Zionists allude to the ‘state of Israel’, whose borders vary from the pre-1967 state to ‘between Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea’, depending on the setting of the discussion. Former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spent his entire political career fighting against the creation of a Palestinian state, before becoming the first leader of the Israeli right to concede the possibility of one in 2009, and then going on to spend the next decade or so in power persisting with his expansionist definition of Israel and rejecting any notion of a Palestinian state.

No one faction has a monopoly on duplicity: some Western media have suppressed free speech about Israel’s war crimes by depicting criticism of Israel as synonymous with anti-Semitism. Compare, for example, their contrasting coverage of Palestine and Ukraine.

Even so, my primary focus in this article has been on Islamists and Leftist opponents of Israel. This is not only because these two factions have bound Palestinians to their respective ideologies, all the while claiming to be their well-wishers, but also because criticism of Western media can be easily found in Western media itself, and denunciation of Israeli crimes in Israeli newspapers. In contrast, the Muslim Left has mirrored the Muslim Right by silencing any dissentient views on Israel, while globally, the ideological Left has suppressed divergent opinions, to the point of facilitating anti-Semitism within their own ranks.

Today, the prohibition on dissent among hardliners on the Left, and their enactment of their own blasphemy codes, can arguably be seen in the ‘woke’ cancel culture that religiously silences any challenge to the ideological status quo. Today, liberal women who express concern over hard-earned sex-based rights are being apostatised out of many progressive circles, and their refusal to conform to fast-evolving gender narratives is equated with bigotry against entire groups.

Unfortunately, this jettisoning of free speech, instead of allowing the open debate of ideas that are deemed ‘wrong’ or ‘offensive’ – the raison d’être of the right to free speech – has restricted their discussion. For the Palestinians, the historical silencing of viewpoints by their friends and foes alike has pushed the region today closer towards having a ‘solution’ arbitrarily imposed upon it. And it is the ‘progressive’ ideologues who have been willing to leave the Palestinians helpless in the face of autocratic religious leaders, and who have glorified the suffering of a minority as a way of legitimising their own puritanic views.

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