A very New Atheist event
The attack on Rushdie is a result of Muslim intolerance of blasphemy
“God does not exist – and I hate him.” So Peter Hitchens summarised New Atheism, the noughties rage against god that followed the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York.
I enjoy the phrase despite New Atheism being my route into politics as a teenager. As I’ve previously written, the influence remains with me, even though I don’t relish god’s absence as much as Peter’s brother Christopher did.
More people seem to be on my side than Christopher’s at this point. New Atheism is almost two decades of fruitless Middle Eastern wars behind us, and feels longer ago. But the stabbing of Salman Rushdie this week seems a very New Atheist event, being likely motivated by Muslim beliefs, however hedged the reports.
It is notable how little is made of the Muslim character of such attempted assassinations. When the British MP David Amess was killed by a Muslim last year, the man’s background attracted much less attention than that of the MP Jo Cox’s murderer, a white nationalist.
Given Cox was killed at the height of Brexit fervour, one could make too much of the differences in these cases. But it is still true that progressives are squeamish about criticising minorities, and conservatives don’t seem to have much appetite for it either, perhaps out of fears of being accused of racism.
This is bolstered by another factor which I think pertains to the attack on Rushdie. The writer has been on the run from would-be murderers for decades following the 1988 publication of The Satanic Verses, which many Muslims believe to be blasphemous.
The issue flares up from time to time, as when Iran put a bounty on Rushdie’s head or when Rushdie was offered a knighthood1. That interest is exceptional is illustrative of a broader truth: we seem to have become bored by Muslim violence. Recent attacks generate little excitement – the police kill the assailants, and we move on.
In a sense such behaviour is rational. Your odds of being caught up in a terrorist attack in the West are negligible, and it would be an overreaction for any individual to change their behaviour to reduce the risk.
Where it becomes irrational is if you have any interest in widening free expression rather than narrowing it. It is hackneyed to say so, but a violent attack on any writer for something they said reduces the scope of what people will say, as well as what we can read, listen to or watch.
Free speech advocates in Britain have lately focused on the trans debate, and especially instances of cretinous police turning up to ‘check the thinking’ of mean tweeters. Opposing such things is worthwhile, but being told off by a British copper is small beer when adherents to the world’s second-largest religion will try to kill you for criticising their supernatural beliefs.
And we kind of put up with it. I say that not as a criticism, because I’m not sure what else we can do at this point. We can insist on our right to say what we like, continue publishing and apply diplomatic pressure, but we can’t reduce the risk of an angry Muslim killing people to zero. The terrorists will keep coming.
What we can stop doing is accepting the sweet nothings of politicians where they condemn the attackers’ alleged cowardice2 and wish the surviving victims a swift recovery. Such comments invariably miss the point that there is a particular group assaulting our rights to express ourselves.
While there is much you could criticise the New Atheists for, at least they brought matters to a head. They expressed their belief in a right to blaspheme, which obliged others to say why such a right shouldn’t exist.
Rather than cowering before minority electorates, politicians should embrace their inner Richard Dawkins. Be strident.
Exposed dragon. The Guardian’s Owen Jones complains that the latest cover of the New European is “plainly gratuitously racist” for using a dragon to represent “China’s increased chokehold on Britain”, as the cover line runs.
First, a straightforward rebuttal: dragons are cool. If you are going to insult a country there are plenty of creatures to choose from: naked mole-rats, blobfish, scrotum frogs – yes I did just google a list of the world’s ugliest animals.
Second, Jones has posted this comment with the air of a man who has wandered into a bar with a head injury. The use of animals to symbolise countries in political cartoons is well established in Britain, and these days it is rarely intended as a comment on a racial group.
A little googling yielded a picture of a Chinese dragon yanking the tail of a British lion in none other than the Guardian. One can also find an image using an American eagle to mock the presumed toupe of former president Donald Trump, drawn by Bob Moran, formerly of the Telegraph. This is all fair game.
There is even evidence that the Chinese do the same thing. A viral image on Chinese social media from 2021 depicted the G7 at The Last Summer, with the American eagle as Jesus surrounded by his acolytes, including a Canadian beaver, a French cock and an Australian kangaroo.
Of course, it’s good to step outside the assumptions of whatever context you were brought up in. But it’s also unfair to analyse something as context-dependent as political cartooning without considering how words and symbols are understood.
In short: Jones is being ignorant.
Woke blob. The other day I heard a colleague complain that the term ‘woke’ was meaningless and that he objected to his mum using it to describe him. As with many such cases: pick one.
Insults rankle most when they are true or you at least fear them to be, and most people who work in the media or regularly read mainstream news will well know what ‘woke’ broadly means. Just ask yourself: is it woke to say that trans women are women?
I nonetheless enjoyed Jonn Elledge’s cheeky re-appropriation of ‘the blob’, a term that was popularised in the British context by former education secretary Michael Gove, and inevitably taken from the US.
“It’s a reference to a 1957 horror movie about an alien life form that absorbs everything it touches, growing as it does. This, it seems to me, is a far better description of the unstoppable yet oddly shapeless concept of ‘wokery’ than of anything the left have done recently.”
Semantic arguments are probably overused in British political discourse. I suspect one reason for this is the number of English and humanities grads floating around the system. A broader explanation is that people like to dominate one another, and when violence isn’t an option and your field is populated by smartypants, arguing over language is what you’re left with. (See also: academia, religion.)
Those disclaimers aside, Elledge is undoubtedly correct that the definition of ‘woke’ has expanded, comprising everything from awareness about racial injustice (its original meaning) to climate change. You can be lawyerly and note that even climate change has a racial slant (people in white countries are often less vulnerable to its effects), but clearly ‘woke’ has a broader meaning than it used to.
This isn’t unusual, especially in politics. The film from which the term ‘gaslighting’ derives involves deliberate psychological manipulation to convince somebody they are losing the plot. But I’ve heard it used to describe simple disagreements of interpretation, which is not merely part of politics but the whole point.
Given that definitions will inevitably shift, I think a term’s usefulness has to be defined by something more than how broad it is.
To go back to the other example, ‘gaslighting’ is an intriguing phenomenon with obvious applications to domestic abuse cases. It’s less clear that it happens much outside that. Many cases of alleged gaslighting could well be organisations lying to cover their arse, or people trying to rationalise that they are not bad people.
By contrast, increased focus on racial or other demographic injustices is clearly a feature of our politics. If anything it’s perplexing that progressives are so prickly about ‘wokery’ being so discussed – it’s an expansion of the concept of equality, which is arguably their most important value!
Hard day’s work. And one for the silly season to finish. James O’Brien of LBC fame reckons that his job is harder work than manual labour. This is to say he is sceptical that one could have enough energy to chat shit at a microphone for eight hours a day while occasionally fielding calls from people sufficiently bored that they phone into LBC.
It is easy to scoff, because the proposition is plainly stupid. But to be fair, there is some effort involved in keeping a chat show running for several hours. Like most office jobs it takes mental effort, and doing that for hours without breaks is draining.
I am nonetheless reminded of those in academia that moan about long hours, low pay, and job insecurity. The point is taken, but I take it rather less than I would from somebody who scrubs out bogs for a living.
Form obliges me to link you to this video of the Hitchens brothers discussing the controversy.
I tend to agree with Bill Maher that while terrorist attacks are deplorable, it takes guts to carry one out.