Don’t pull your punches

These days people like to believe they’re speaking out courageously. They’re telling truths that others dare not tell, saying the unsayable and boldly articulating what no man has articulated before.

Anyway that’s what Bishop Tom Butler seemed to be trying to do on Today’s Thought for the Day. He had an anecdote for us about preventing extremism, which contained a knowing message, which I took to be:  All religions have nasty, violent and vengeful bits, and before true openness and interfaith understanding can be achieved these unpalatable passages need to be brought out into the open, and preferably rejected or at least adapted to fit civilised society. And Bob’s your uncle. Extremism tackled.

However, the anecdote he proceeded to deliver did not cite or specify the nasty, vengeful, racist bits in the Quran. You know, those parts which  inspire the particular ‘extremism’  that’s causing all the current difficulties.

No. Bishop Butler must have thought we weren’t ready to hear any of that; perhaps he wasn’t quite ready to say it.  Instead he used an analogy. Don’t bother to rack your brains any further, his tale concerned a Jewish rabbi.

  

At some interfaith gathering or other, the particular party game they were playing required all the multi-faith religious leaders to read out an uplifting verse from their own particular sacred scriptures.  But the rabbi was ill, so he had kindly sent his chosen verses (from psalm137) to be read out.

“You devastator! Happy shall they be who pay them back for what you have done to us. Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock” 

“There was a stunned silence. Later I met the rabbi and asked him why ever did you choose that lamentable psalm?” 

continued Bishop Butler, getting into his stride, and recounting the rabbi's reply as follows: 

“All our scriptures have difficult and even scandalous passages, and we won’t make real progress in interfaith relationships until we have the courage to discuss those with one another”

The Bishop followed this with what he undoubtedly intended as his TFTD message, although one might speculate that several unintended messages had already been delivered.

“As a Christian it made me think of the leader of the Jonestown community who, before they committed mass suicide, was fond of quoting to the Christian followers of his extremist sect the words from St. Luke’s gospel. “Whoever does not hate father and mother wife and children, brothers and sisters cannot be my disciple.”
It’s commonly said that people committing atrocities are not real members of the faith they’re dying for or killing for, but that’s certainly not their own understanding. They’re feeding on certain verses on their sacred scriptures or events in their faith history, which encourage them to act in extreme or even violent ways. Well the truth is that any world faith doesn’t have a single colour to its understanding of God and the world. It’s a spectrum of colours.”

Get it? Jews and Christians are potentially violent extremists too. We’ve all got an inner suicide bomber, and it’s still in there somewhere, just waiting to be ignited.

“That’s why it’s difficult to put our finger on real Christianity or real Islam or real Judy-ism, or even real Britishness”

It amuses me when people say ‘Judy-ism’. Punch and Judy are indeed a violent couple. Islam is Punchism, then. Islam is Mr. Punch to the Jews’ Judy. That’s the way to do it.

I see what Bishop Butler is doing here. He wants us to believe that Christians and Jews are inherently as hate-filled and vengeful as (so-called) Islamic State. There but for the grace of progress and civilisation, go we all.

But Bishop, Muslims are not the new Jews. Let’s call a spade a spade. No more moral equivalence. If you must besmirch Jews by bandying about colourful passages from the Hebrew Bible, or if you want to distance yourself from the bad bits in your own sacred verses by citing examples from extreme Christian sects, then go ahead. Be open, why don’t you. 

Most of all, if you want to be seen as a plain speaker don’t beat about the bush.  If you want to say that it’s high time Muslims brought their religion into the 21st century, just say so. 

Extreme confusion

Did you see Michael Gove on the Andy Marr show? Yes of course you did. Before he was wheeled in, Norman Tebbit and Helena Kennedy took a look at the papers. A  gentle disagreement over what is and isn’t acceptable with regard to Islam in the UK ensued.

Norman was looking frail beside the larger-than-life Baroness Kennedy, who managed to introduce the commonly held but false equivalence when defending Sharia law in the UK by citing ‘Jewish law’ and metaphorically squashing Mr. Tebbit’s protests by sheer force of her comparatively overbearing personality. 

Michael Gove was introduced with a promising fanfare - namely that he once authored a book warning the West about the threat of Islam.

“The forces of militant Islamism were determined to wage a war upon the West, which he described as The Conflict of our Times. He compared the Islamist threat with that posed by communism and that posed by the Nazis in the previous century. Strong Stuff.”

We were then entertained by the audio version of scary British Jihadi Abu Osama  speaking on BBC Radio 5 live.  To heighten the drama I transcribe it phonetically.

”Ah don’t want too coom buck too wha ah left behind there is nothing in Brit-tain s’ joost a pure evil if and when ah coom back too brit-tain it will be when the salaffa this islamic state coomes to conquer brit-tain und ah coom t’ raise the bluck flug of islam over Downing Street over bookinam palace over tower bridge and over bigben.”

Put that in your pipes you infidels. 

Oh, we thought to ourselves, in view of the fact that Islamism, Jihad, ISIS, Trojan Horses, Ramadan, Burka rights, Caliphates, Iraq, Syria and Islam-related affairs have dominated the news for the last goodness knows how long, at last we’re about to hear some hard-hitting words of wisdom from a strong voice, perchance a clamp-down on Islam-creep.

But no. That was too much to hope for. Michael Gove wears those specs hoping they make him look like a swot, but we all  realise that if he took them off he’d turn back into a little boy; but even with them on, he still looks like a naughty boy wearing man specs. Being in government has infantalised the lot of them. They’re afraid of rocking the horrible boat that they’ve created for us.

What we got was the usual contradictory waffle. We don’t want to stop people practicing their religion, he says. But when that religion is inimical to everything we hold dear yet stops short of violence, is that okay? asks Marr.  What about Sharia?  Are this-that-and-the-other illiberal cultural practices, which are part and parcel of conservative Islamic religiosity, acceptable? 

We need to draw a distinction between expression of deep religious faith, and extremism, says Gove, sagely. There’s  Islam and Islamism, a perversion of Islam!

Conservative religiosity will be tolerated as long as it stops short of extremism - direct advocacy or incitement to terrorism, perhaps. We all know that defining extremism with clarity eludes everyone under the sun. 

You say in your book that there’s a parallel between religiously conservative views and Jihadi views, prompts Marr. 

We draw that distinction. It’s perfectly acceptable for someone to hold deeply conservative views ..... but wrong for that individual to run a school, is the reply. 

What??  Oh, here we go. So ‘extremism’ doesn’t actually mean ‘extreme’. It means Jihadi? It means war-like? It means God knows what? 

Still confused dot com.