27th December 2014

Tendring Topics…….on line

The Challenge of Islamic Extremism

            The problem of Islamic Extremism (Jihadism) is surely among the most serious facing what we think of as ‘civilisation’ today.  In this blog I have returned to the subject again and again and I can think of no easy – or even difficult – solutions to it.  I am sitting comfortably and securely at home in the safety of the UK.  Elsewhere in the world innocent men, women and little children are facing torture, slavery and death at the hands of jihadists.    A regular, and very articulate, reader of the blog has written to me over Christmas to tell me of his concerns and of a possible solution.

I see in your blog you include a comment about the dreadful killing in Pakistan. Almost as bad as the gunning down of children was the special treatment of incineration meted out to the head teacher and a class teacher who tried to protect the children. The gunmen arrived with a can of petrol for that specific purpose.  The next day the Nigerian Islamists (Boku Harran) took 100 people hostage - almost a whole village, but that didn't even make it to the headlines. The BBC calculated that over 5000 people were killed by Islamic extremists during the month of November alone, from 10 counties around the world - and that was before the Pakistan incident!

However, there seems to me to be a few issues to consider in formulating a response. The first is that both the Sydney incident and the Pakistan incident were a direct response to the action taken by those governments in seeking to crush these extremists.  That has been the pattern of so many of the atrocities- like the Spanish train bomb, the attacks on Kenya and the London Tube bombs.  There is also the very obvious threat of radicalisation within the Muslim community at home. This risk is massively increased by a foreign policy which could be seen as hostile to Islam. There may well be valid reasons for our involvement overseas and for forcefully opposing these people. Making the home nation safer (the Tony Blair argument) certainly isn't one of them.

‘Western’ governments have to recognise that jihadism is a world-wide movement, not a bit like Nazi Germany, which was the vision of a deranged man with power in his hands. The U.S. / Israeli policy of assassinating extremist leaders using Drones, just doesn't work.  Innocent people are killed, there are always other leaders to replace those killed, and illegal action of this kind in another country only perpetuates the cycle of grievance and retaliation.

I think maybe it is time to acknowledge - even if we totally disagree with it - that there is popular support in some parts of the world for an extreme Islamic nation with everything which goes with that - lack of human rights, complete rejection of Western views and democracy etc. I am thinking the thing which might eventually end the bloodshed would be the allocation of land and the establishment of Islamic Governments in prescribed areas where there is already a strong belief in that sort of regime. A peace settlement should be based on a few fundamental principles - non aggression into the "less Islamic zone", free movement of disaffected citizens out of the Islamic Zone and free movement of radical Islamists from other counties into the Zone.  Frankly the Pakistan / Afghanistan border area may as well be declared as such, because neither government  has control and the act of trying to control is a cause of endless attacks on Kabul and Islamabad. Perhaps the same should be true of Northern Nigeria where it seems to me the Government is very half hearted about dealing with the situation and has allowed that area to deteriorate economically and thereby fuelled antiwestern resentment. I suspect that a part of Somalia is the same.

It’s certainly an idea and, if jihadists were guided by reason and prepared to negotiate a peace settlement, it might work.  I don’t think they are. They are, I believe, convinced that they have been chosen by God to convert the whole world to their particularly noxious brand of Islam and to enslave and/or kill any who oppose them.  The idea that they could live at peace with people who don’t share that viewpoint would be anathema to them.  I do agree with my correspondent though, that violent attacks, air-strikes and drone assassinations only produce more enthusiastic recruits for the jihadist cause. You can’t destroy an idea, even a thoroughly bad one, by violence.

I believe that the only permanent answer to Islamic extremism must come from Muslims themselves.  I think that most Muslims instinctively prefer to live in a mainly Christian, multifaith or secular society rather than in a strictly Islamic one.  Why else did Muslim refugees from Kosovo seek refuge in western Europe rather than in Albania – the Muslim country ‘next door’?     Why do Muslim refugees seek to gain access to multifaith Australia rather than Muslim Indonesia?  When the former Archbishop of Canterbury suggested that some aspects of Sharia law might be introduced in the UK, he overlooked the fact that a considerable number of people who consider themselves to be devout Muslims had come to this country for no other reason than to escape the strictures of Sharia law.

 Islam doesn’t have an equivalent of the Pope or the Archbishop of Canterbury who can with authority, denounce this, that or the other practice as being contrary to the will of God.  Surely though there must be devout, respected and charismatic Muslim leaders who can publicly and convincingly declare that forced conversions, murder of non-believers, abduction and sale of young girls into sex slavery is not just un-Islamic  but is in blasphemous denial of the will of Allah, who is  compassionate, merciful and just. Those who carry out such practices can expect to answer for their actions in a higher than worldly court.   

            I eagerly await the emergence of such Muslim leaders.  Without them, I fear that the world will be condemned to an endless cycle of murder and vengeance.

A British Middle East Presence

            I didn’t think that I would ever agree with any pronouncement made by Nigel Farage, leader of Ukip.   However I do wholeheartedly agree with his opposition to the government’s massive reinforcement of the   forces already training Iraqi troops to fight the forces of Islamic State.  It’s ‘mission creep’ and it’s beginning to speed up.  How long will it be, I wonder, before one of those ‘training units’ is attacked by IS and compelled to defend itself – and we’ll be well on our way to involvement in ‘the third gulf war’?

            I don’t know what Mr Farage thinks of the government’s establishing a naval base in Bahrain but I think that, like the reinforcement of our ‘training mission’ in Iraq, it is expensive idiocy.  Britain, largely as a result of the present government’s and its New Labour predecessors’ activities, is regarded with deep suspicion throughout the Middle East – and with good reason.  Wherever we have interfered – in Iraq, in Libya and in Syria, we have managed to make a bad situation even worse.

            We no longer have an Empire.  We’re an average sized country on the western fringes of Europe.  The only way we can effectively make our voice heard on the global stage is as a leading and active member of a more-closely-knit European Union.  We no longer need a ‘presence’ east of Suez and we never have needed those  wildly expensive Trident submarines that have signally failed to deter a single one of the international acts of aggression that have occurred during the past half century.

            Now there’s a couple of ways in which George Osborne could reduce that deficit – without reducing the poor to starvation.

Making a bad situation worse

            There’s been plenty of bad news in the newspapers and on the tv and radio recently; atrocities committed by Islamic State, a terrible road accident in Glasgow, continuing Ebola epidemic in West Africa, thousands rendered jobless in Britain by the failure of a privately owned delivery service.  However there was one undoubted piece of good news on a BBC bulletin on Boxing Day.   An exchange of prisoners of war between the forces of the Kiev government in Ukraine and the forces of the pro-Russian rebels in the eastern provinces of that divided country.  As a former PoW myself I know how much that means to the individuals freed under the agreement and to their families.

                        It’s all part of an uneasy cease-fire brokered by the Russian Government some months ago.   It is a cease-fire peace initiative that ‘the west’ should be whole-heartedly supporting, urging both sides to be prepared to make concessions in the interests of a just and lasting peace.  Instead, we are offering unqualified support to the Kiev government and encouraging them to join NATO, which the Russians inevitably see as a hostile alliance with which they are increasingly surrounded.  Have we really forgotten, in the centenary year of the outbreak of World War I, that it was just such a system of alliances that led to the carnage of 1914/1918?

            The European Union’s latest initiative in the conflict is to inflict economic sanctions directly onto the inhabitants of the Crimea and Sebastapol.  Are they being punished for having wanted to be annexed by (they would say re-united with)   Russia?  Their position is not unlike that of the inhabitants of the Falkland Islands who wanted to remain British despite their geographical proximity to Argentina. Just as the UK has ensured that the will of the overwhelming majority of Falklanders has been fulfilled, so Russia has fulfilled the wishes of the overwhelming majority of Crimeans.  The only difference I can discern is that, unlike the British, the Russians achieved their objective without loss of blood.  The pro-Russian separatists are not like the zealots of the Islamic State.  They are prepared to negotiate.  We should encourage them, not make a bad situation worse.    

           Dear Blog readers.......

.I qu  ............I quite thought that the previous blog would be the last one for 2014, but here I am again.  I have had a wonderful Christmas break with my family and feel thoroughly refreshed. I have no idea when the next blog will appear but, in the meantime, I wish all blog readers (and all people of good will towards their fellow men, women and children, of whatever race, colour or creed) a very Happy New Year.  May 2015 be a year of peace and hope. 

  M

  

  

             

 

             

Week 20 2014

Tendring Topics…..on line

The Odessa Steps – déjà vue?

          One of the most striking sequences in The Battleship Potemkin, a very early classic silent film, is of the massacre of unarmed protesting civilians by the Tsar’s Cossacks on the Odessa Steps, a giant stairway providing the main access to the town of Odessa from the Black Sea.  The film tells the story of the mutiny and takeover of the Potemkin in 1905 by its crew, provoked by brutal treatment and maggoty rations.  At about the same time there was an attempted revolt against the Tsar in Moscow and elsewhere throughout Russia.  The revolt was put down with extreme brutality.

            The Potemkin with its mutinous crew put in at Odessa and the mutineers were supported by the town’s people.  The film, directed by Eisenstein, shows them gathering on the Odessa Steps  (elderly men and women, students, a mother with a baby in its pram) to welcome the mutineers,  and being massacred by Cossacks and other of the Tsar’s troops.   It is a very vivid and memorable sequence, subsequently much used for propaganda purposes.  I saw the film for the first time two or three years ago and it certainly impressed me.

            History records though that it didn’t actually happen – not like that anyway.  In Odessa there were demonstrations in support of the mutineers and of the revolt against the Tsar.  The Tsarist troops did respond and did quell the revolt with brutality – but there was no spectacular massacre on the Odessa Steps.

            Perhaps in time to come someone will make a film about another massacre that took place in Odessa a week or so ago.  Again there was a public protest – this time against the pro-western government in Kiev and in support of the pro-Russian rebels in Eastern Ukraine.  It seems though that there was also a rival demonstration by supporters of the Kiev government – described by their opponents as violent Fascists and Nazis.  Violent they certainly were.  They drove the pro-Russian demonstrators back to take refuge in the local trade union building, and then threw in petrol bombs setting the building on fire.  There were over 40 victims – either burnt alive by the fire, or dying when leaping from upper windows to escape the flames.

            Meanwhile the police watched – and did nothing.  Who knows?  Perhaps there were so many pro-Kiev demonstrators that there was nothing else they could do.

            A glance at a map of Ukraine will make clear the significance of the events in Odessa.   This Black Sea port is many miles south-west of ‘eastern Ukraine’ where many of the inhabitants are ethnic Russians and most of them favour closer ties with Russia rather than with the EU and NATO.   It is clear that in Odessa and, no doubt, in many parts of Western Ukraine there are a considerable number – though probably a minority – of residents who have a similar outlook.   I expect too that in Eastern Ukraine there is also a minority loyal to the Kiev government.  That being so, any system of Federal Autonomous regions would leave large numbers of people still feeling that they weren’t represented.

            I think that if Ukraine is to have anything like a lasting peace ‘the West’ and the Russians need to forget their ‘cold war’ enmity and co-operate instead of competing both economically and politically.  We all face a common enemy in militant extremist Islam.  The USA the UK and other NATO countries, the Russian Federation and China have all suffered from the acts of terrorism of the jihadists.  They need to pull together, with mainstream Muslims both east and west, to defeat them.   Squabbling over Ukraine is just a distraction from the real struggle (Tony Blair got it right for once!) that faces civilisation.  

            Russia and the EU should break down the trade barriers between them and give Ukraine equal access to each economic bloc.  Ukraine’s permanent neutrality should be guaranteed by both NATO and the Russian Federation.  The reduction in Ukrainian defence spending that could follow such an agreement, plus economic access to both the EU and Russia, would surely give a tremendous boost to the country’s economy and give it the possibility of achieving a living standard equal to, or higher than any in the world.  Both the EU and Russia would also benefit.  The only losers would be the armaments manufacturers who thrive on ‘wars and rumours of wars’!

I wish I thought that there was even the remotest chance of all that happening!

‘Bloodshed divides, prayer and forgiveness unite’

          Thus declared Russian Quakers after they had recently considered the situation in the Ukraine..  They called for restraint by all parties and abstention from violence in any form.  ‘We are for purely peaceful and non-violent activities in defence of their claims and protection of their rights by everyone, regardless of which group of the population they represent in Ukrainian society. .Peace cannot be enforced by military means and no circumstances can justify armed warfare.

Note – Quakers have had a long and friendly relationship with Russia.  Two Tsars; Peter the Great in 1697 and Alexander I in 1817, joined Friends at Meeting for Worship when visiting England. Also in 1817 the Tsar invited English Quaker Daniel Wheeler to plan and supervise the drainage of the marshes and reclaim land near St Petersburg – a task that engaged him for thirty years!   A daughter-in-law of novelist Leo Tolstoy was a Quaker, and British and American Quakers were active in famine relief and other relief and rehabilitation work in Russia in the aftermath of World War I, the revolution and civil war.  In 1921 alone British and American Quakers fed some 212,000 people.  They remained a presence there throughout the 1920s.

The present Quaker presence is centred on Friends House Moscow.  Type Quakers in Russia or Friends House Moscow into Google, for a wealth of information on the subject.

Applause for David Cameron…….again!

            A fortnight ago I applauded David Cameron’s declaration that the UK is a Christian country and that we should be glad that of it.  This week I am again endorsing one of his public statements. No, I haven’t changed my political outlook. I don’t think I could ever vote for an election candidate from his party – unless, of course, it seemed to be the only way of preventing a U-kipper from topping the poll! There are though surely some topics on which all people of good will and compassion will agree and act.  David Cameron found one of them when he denounced, with real passion, the evil acts of the Boko Haram terrorist organisation in burning down a school in a remote part of Nigeria, abducting some 200 teenage girl pupils and threatening to sell them into slavery or forced marriage. Subsequently the same organisation has kidnapped more teenage girls and carried out more murderous terrorist acts in the same country.

            Mr Cameron was quite right too in pointing out that these were not isolated acts committed by a small group of terrorists in a remote part of Africa.  They are part of a loose movement of fanatics who practise a perversion of Islam that subjugates women, detests ‘western’ education especially for women and girls, and seeks to gain God’s approval by carrying out a hate-filled jihad of violence against everything that the rest of the world values.  They were responsible for ‘9/11’, for the tube bombings in London and for the many bomb outrages in Russia, including those before the winter Olympics in Volgograd (formerly Stalingrad).  I fear that they are to be found among those whom Britain and the USA have been supporting, trying to overthrow the Assad regime in Syria.

            The USA the UK, France and China have all volunteered to assist in securing the liberation of those kidnapped girls.  I am sorry that Russia is not among them.  They have had longer and more recent experience of dealing with jihadist terrorists and could probably have offered valuable help and advice.  It is also important that we should obtain the vocal and visible support of the great majority of Muslims.

            We have seen them take to the streets in protest when their Koran has been burnt or defiled, or their prophet insulted.  I’d like to see them do the same about the abduction, imprisonment and sale into slavery of those Nigerian teenagers.  They, the majority of peaceful Muslims who are happy to live in peace and friendship with those of other religious faiths, have the greatest reason for supporting the downfall of the extremists.  In the short term, acts like those of the Boko Hara and other Islamic terrorists, fan the flames of Islam-phobia.  ‘Phobia’, it should be remembered, means fear.  The acts of these terrorists give others cause to fear.

            Then again it is only the contents of the Holy Book of any religion that are sacred.  The book itself is the work of human hands.  If one copy of the book is burnt or defiled, a hundred other copies can be printed to replace it.  But each one of those abducted teenage girls is precious, a child of God, created by God in his own image, unique and irreplaceable.  To defile, misuse or deliberately injure any one of them is a most grievous sin.   To claim, as these extremists do, that they are doing so in obedience to God’s will is surely the ultimate blasphemy.  It is the sin against the Holy Spirit that Jesus of Nazareth, a prophet of Islam and much more than that to Christians, declared to be the one unforgivable sin.

            The deliberate harm of even one of God's children evokes more sorrow – and perhaps anger - in Heaven than the burning of a score of holy books.  I hope that the majority of peace-loving, tolerant Muslims will denounce with fervour these acts of terror and blasphemy by those who claim to share their faith, and will support efforts to end their activities.