Honour amongst Backward Camel-fucking Wastes of Semen

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/may/11/iraq.humanrights

This article raises a number of interesting questions, about Iraqi Shi'ite society, about women's rights in Arab countries, about cultural relativity and about how news becomes news.

But most of all, it raises an atavistic anger in me. It makes me want to tie Abdel-Qadir Ali's genitals to a truck and to floor the accelerator. It makes me want to use a barbed wire rope.

I suspect I'm not alone in this. If you believe in free love, if you believe in unconditional love of child, if you reject a parent's ownership of a child, even if you reject private justice, then there's no way you can feel that Abdel-Qadir is a sympathetic character. This is an act so self-evidently and disgustingly wrong that it's hard not to feel a violent revulsion for it.

Yet the Iraqi police felt he'd done the right thing and apparently congratulated him. His employers haven't fired him. There's no indication that he's done anything wrong.

To remind you, this is a man who choked, suffocated and stabbed his seventeen-year old daughter to death. Because she'd fallen in love - just fallen in love, she hadn't even become involved in a physical relationship - with a British soldier.

What kind of society accepts this? Sad to say, and without wanting to come over all Christopher Hitchens on you, it's an Islamic society.

I haven't read the Koran and am in no particular hurry to do so. I don't consider it particularly relevant what exactly it says about honour killings. What's relevant is that Abdel-Qadir Ali thinks it legitimises him murdering his daughter for having emotions he doesn't like.

Worse, he's proud.

'I have only two boys from now on. That girl was a mistake in my life. I know God is blessing me for what I did,' he said, his voice swelling with pride. 'My sons are by my side, and they were men enough to help me finish the life of someone who just brought shame to ours.'

I don't know about you, but I don't consider it to be a manly act to kill a defenceless woman because she embarassed you. I'd tend to consider that a sign that you have an emotional age of around six. And I tend to think that if your imaginary bearded figure in the sky approves of this, then it's probably a good job he doesn't exist.

Of course, it's unfair to blame Allah for this. Deities aren't real - you're welcome to disagree, but unless you produce proof of the existence of one or a rational reason to suppose that one exists, I'm just going to look at you pityingly just long enough to irritate you, then I'm going to ignore you - and they don't kill people. But they certainly provide an easy excuse for people to kill people.

And of course, it's not like Islam is supremely bad in this respect. Christianity has a significant amount of blood on its hands, Hindus have killed their fair share, Sikhs have killed significantly more than their fair share, the Shinto faith isn't exactly blameless (kamikazes etc.) and whilst neo-paganism hasn't killed many people, it is supremely retarded and the belief systems it thinks it is based upon didn't condemn brutal sprees of violence in any noticeable way.

Right, now I've established my credentials as an atheist dickhead and equal-opportunity hater, let's talk about the Islamic attitude to the rights of women.

Or rather, let's talk about the absence of such rights. Let's hear from Abdel-Qadir again:

'People from western countries might be shocked, but our girls are not like their daughters that can sleep with any man they want and sometimes even get pregnant without marrying. Our girls should respect their religion, their family and their bodies.'

Notice the pride in not being like the decadent west. I'm going to take a brief pause to take pride in my decadent morality, which rejects the idea of killing women because one can't cope with people who don't subject themselves entirely to one's will. You may want to do the same.

Now let's look at exactly what he says. "their religion", "their family" and "their bodies". Notice how Abdel-Qadir Ali is full of shit and incorrect pronoun use. He doesn't for a minute believe that a daughter of his has the right to do what she wishes with her body. If he did, he'd still have a daughter.

All this outrage may be cathartic, but sadly it doesn't accomplish much. The question is what can be done about it. And unfortunately, I suspect the answer is not much. We're talking about a deeply misogynistic society, perhaps only rivalled in the Horn of Africa. We're also talking about a fundamentally anti-western society. We can't tell them to stop being dicks on this, because being a dick on this is part of their culture and they aren't about to change because a group of people they don't like tell them to.

Perhaps we could have some impact in a stable Iraq, where armed militias propagating reactionary social norms didn't control the streets, but even then there wouldn't be much change. And plenty would still yearn for the old days. Hell, there's a substantial body of opinion that still yearns for outdated gender roles here in Britain. The only difference is that our Overton window isn't stuck in the seventh century. And besides, a stable Iraq is a pipe dream for at least a decade.

Some might ask if it is right to try to intervene. Aren't all cultures of equal worth? The answer is simple: no. If your culture oppresses the powerless, if it makes some people second-class citizens due to circumstances of their birth, then on that your culture is wrong. That's not to say we should all have the same monoculture, that's just to say that those who indulge in cultural relativism over these issues are moral cowards legitimising abhorrent behaviour. I'm sorry if you find this attitude dismissive, but that's because I'm sorry that you think such a principle shouldn't be dismissed out of hand. There is right and there is wrong and if you aren't prepared to argue for your definition of right and wrong, then you don't really believe in it. And if Abdel-Qadir is going to argue for his morality, we damn well have to argue for ours and against his.

To return to my previous question, what can we do? We can't eliminate gender-bias in thinking or any other kind of discrimination, but we have to marginalise it. I could live with a separation of church and state, as in Turkey and the USA, but that's not enough. A more progressive form of Islam is needed, one that accepts that the world has changed since Heraclius was the Roman Emperor and that the morality within the Koran is not absolute.

Unfortunately, what I'm essentially arguing for is Islamic Anglicanism, and Anglicanism is the ideal religion for an atheist, since it doesn't really matter what you believe. So I'm at something of an impasse. Progress has been made in some areas - the Hudood Ordinance is no more - but not enough. When a sign of advance is the Saudi government considering allowing women to drive, you know the situation is bad.

In the end, I just find myself throwing up my arms in the air and praying that I'm wrong and there is a god, or at least a devil, and that Abdel-Qadir Ali will face a wailing and a gnashing of teeth. There's no obvious solution to this that I know of, only a feeling that there ought to be vengeance for this.

Tibet, the Death of Ideology and the Spectre of Nationalism

The violence in Tibet and the neighbouring provinces appears to have largely come to a halt. Its repercussions are not likely to be great for the outside world. There will be scuffles over the Olympic torch as it makes its way around the world and a succession of political leaders will hint that they might avoid the opening ceremony, although most will later decide to turn up and those who do not will strenuously deny that it has anything to do with China's human rights record.

Meanwhile, dissidents are no doubt being rounded up and imprisoned, joining the untold thousands (the Home Office records over a million sentenced prisoners, but there are many more who've never seen a trial and never will.) Movement of reporters will continue to be restricted, news which reflects negatively on the government will be suppressed, reporters who cross the line will find themselves incarcerated and international companies will continue to show contempt for the concept of freedom of the press.

It's fair to say that the Chinese government is a shit-stain upon the metaphorical sheets of the world's pretence to give a damn about justice. It's not a very pleasant image, nor a particularly informative one, but one can only really be either disgusted by their policies or apolitical to the point of immorality.

In the past forty years China has transformed itself from a Communist dictatorship which had degenerated into insanity in the Cultural Revolution into an economic juggernaut. It's economy is still fragile and it faces new challenges to do with a rapidly urbanising society and the influx of new technology, but at heart it still remains as a state capitalist behemoth, a demonstration that Bukharinism ia no more morally laudable than Stalinism, merely more economically realistic. [Yes, I will accept that there's no clear ideological link between Deng Xiaoping and the Right Opposition, but there are similarities and I'd like to pretend my A-level in History was slightly useful. Indulge me.]

Divorced from any ideological connection and committed only to remaining in power, China has become a force in the Third World. Whereas Western nations have to at least pretend to feel guilty when they deal with appalling despots before continuing their deals and shutting down bribery investigations the Chinese simply don't give a fuck whether or not you chuck water over your political prisoners before you attach electrodes to their genitals. Their foreign policy is realist, in that if you're willing to pay they'd overlook you skull-fucking a baby to death.

So yeah, I have to say that China's probably the nation to whose government I am most totally opposed. They're powerful, aggressively immoral and perhaps most worryingly, they appear to be relatively competent. North Korea, though run by a devastatingly unpleasant and bat-fuck insane clique, is at least run by a bat-fuck insane clique. It isn't comforting that they have nukes, but at least there's the chance that when they get drunk and try to use them they'll just immolate themselves rather than their neighbours. China, on the other hand, appears to work. It understands how the modern world works. It doesn't have to shut out companies like Yahoo! and Google. It just makes sure that they help the state security apparatus to suppress unpleasant and unChinese notions like democracy.

I hope I've managed to express how pleased I would be if the entire National Leadership of the PRC were consumed by Cthulhu. Now that that's out of the way, I'd like to discuss my concerns about the actions of the rioters in what Wikipedia is calling, in its wonderfully vague and weaselly manner, the 2008 Tibetan unrest.

It'd be nice if this was a simple black and white situation, with clearly defined good guys and bad guys. Then again, it'd be nice if I regularly updated this blog, or if it was regularly read by people who aren't my friends or family. None of these propositions are in the slightest bit feasible.

You see, I'm not squeamish about resistance movements or rebel groups. Driving out an occupying force, or even bringing it to the negotiating table, is not easy and it's never going to happen without blood being spilt. In fact, it generally takes a lot of blood and unfortunately as the quantity of blood rises, the likelihood that some of it belongs to individuals who are, for want of a better word, innocent rapidly approaches 100%. Unless one wishes to condemn absolutely every uprising ever, one has to be sanguine about the deaths of members of occupying forces or their collaborators.

It's not hard to view the PLA as a foreign occupying force. Chinese sovereignty over Tibetan areas was established by military force and it's a fair guess (although obviously an impossible proof) that most of the population in these areas do not wish to be part of the PRC.

My problem is that it's hard for me to see the rioters as a resistance movement per se. Violence broke out because of the dispersal of a peaceful protest by the police. But the ensuing chaos soon lost connection to that event. It degenerated into an orgy of looting. That wouldn't be a particular problem, except for the reasoning behind the violence - Tibetan-owned businesses were spared, whilst those owned by Han Chinese were ruthlessly looted, Han and Hui Chinese were brutally attacked and the rioting culminated in an attempt to burn down a mosque.

To put this in context, recent years have seen an influx of middle-class Han Chinese to the province and they know own numerous small businesses in the area. One can certainly understand the resentment of Tibetans in economically marginal positions, but it seems clear to me that this has to be seen as an outpouring of misdirected rage.

It's not an organised attack on an occupying force. It's not an attack on the entity that holds them in an economically marginal position - the Chinese economic system and the government that oversees them. It is, and I hope you will forgive me for the charged nature of the term I am about to use, but it seems to fit the circumstances particularly well, a pogrom.

In principle, I have no objection to the idea of an independent Tibetan state (although I don't expect one to appear within my lifetime.) But I do have an objection to a Tibetan state in which only ethnic Tibetans are considered to be full citizens. That kind of nationalism is something I'd hoped we had left behind in the twentieth century.

Particularly since this isn't one province of China. Tibetan autonomous administrative divisions cover most of the province of Qinghai as well as western Sichuan and northern Yunnan and Tibetan enclaves can be found in plenty of other provinces. If the Chinese Communist Party loses power, I will be dancing in the street along with everybody else, but I don't want to see a successor state that represents the values of the rioters in Lhasa and elsewhere.

A Tibetan resistance group with a commitment to ethnic and religious tolerance (and a rejection of the theocracy which the Dalai Lama somewhat sheepishly represents) is something I can get behind without any qualms. But a putative state that believes in Tibet for the Tibetans gives me the shivers. It's very nearly as bad an idea as the People's Republic of China, which believes in staying in power whatever happens.