Tensions

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If the inspiration for El-Hussein’s rampage is pretty plain, the broader consonances between his case and that of the French gunmen are more significant. While he was a young man, with no apparent history of Islamist activism (as opposed to the hardened jihadis who conducted the Paris attacks with military precision — he appears like them to have become radicalized in prison, and the wider social background is similar.

El-Hussein lived on a deprived estate in the north-west of the city, described by one anonymous resident as a place where “foreign-origin families have all been lumped together…by politicians” (The Guardian, February 16). His biography sounds like that of many dislocated migrant youths across Europe: failure to complete school, apparent activity with hash-dealing gangs, and prison sentences.

Tensions over immigration are running high in Denmark, and anti-Islamic sentiment along with it. The third largest parliamentary fraction belongs to the far-right People’s Party. With such tension, unsurprisingly, comes the attraction of radical Islam. At least 100 Danes have made their way to the Middle East to fight for Islamist insurgent groups, one of the highest per capita figures in Europe. Denmark is also, naturally, in the sights of Islamist militants for the publication of cartoons of Mohammed in the right-wing daily Jyllands Posten in 2006.

The rising tide of reaction against put-upon migrant communities, and the counter-reaction of disaffected youth, is one ingredient in the Islamist mix, of course. The more important one by far is the calamity wrought in the Middle East by US imperialism in the first instance. Groups such as al Qa’eda in the Arabian Peninsula (which had the allegiance of the Paris gunmen) and, more infamously in recent times, IS, have thrived in the chaos that followed first the Iraq war, then the west’s support of anti-Assad guerrillas (overwhelmingly Islamist) in Syria, the failure of the Libyan state after the overthrow of Gaddafi, and so on.

Unlike your run-of-the-mill radical imam in Paris, London, or Copenhagen, the likes of IS can “prove it all night”: they have the glamor of bloody intransigence and improbable military success about them. They have proven themselves able to exploit the nihilism that grows on the imperialist home front — with the financial aid, bizarrely, of imperialist allies in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia and Qatar, primarily.

The violent convulsions of declining American power, coupled with the global collapse of the Left after 1991, have produced a very modern form of ultra-reaction, which may not be able to defeat the marine corps in a straight fight, but can inspire atrocities in European capitals: IS even has a “social media strategy,” which is the envy of advertising agencies from New York to Berlin.

After the smoke cleared, the vulgar opportunists lined up to make political capital out of the attacks. For the People’s Party, naturally, the answer is a clampdown on “hate speech.” In this regard, however, the prize goes to Binyamin Netanyahu, who again seemed almost indecently keen to spin this into a reason for Jews to move to Israel. When it comes to brazen exploitation of anti-Semitic violence, you cannot beat an Israeli prime minister.

No doubt we will hear a further chorus from our own cops, Tories, and spooks demanding more powers, more clampdowns, and more impunity. As if somehow the House of Commons can pass a law that gives MI5 the power to read everyone’s mind at once. What else can prevent a recently radicalized and determined individual from springing an assault of this nature on a lightly guarded public location?

War is hell

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On the opposite end of the stupidity spectrum, we find the usual suspects. Thus, inevitably, we turn to the Socialist Workers Party, of whose coverage of the Charlie Hebdo massacre the best that can be said is that it stopped short of saying that the victims had it coming. For a moment, perusing the contents of the latest issue of Socialist Worker, I wondered if this time around they had decided that discretion was the better part of “anti-racist” valor, and simply decided not to mention it at all, instead stuffing the running order with plugs for the (wait for it) “really important” anti-racist demonstration on March 21. Diaries out, comrades!

Eventually, a careful search dredged up, firstly, one parenthetical reference in an article on the Chapel Hill shootings in North Carolina, where Craig Hicks — according to some media reports, apparently some kind of deranged Dawkinsite — has murdered several Muslims. The refusal to treat Hicks immediately as a terrorist proves the hypocrisy of the West. “If the killer had been Muslim and the victims white,” the logic goes, “it would have quickly been deemed a terrorist attack.” Of the Copenhagen shooting, it is noted that “one victim was killed outside a synagogue and another in a cultural center which was holding a ‘debate’ on Islam and free speech.” I quote this only to highlight the scare-quotes, and the coyness about El-Hussein’s anti-Semitic motives.

Socialist Worker’s ironically named “What we think” leader column looks initially more promising: “Politicians and the media want to use last week’s killings in Copenhagen to ramp up Islamophobia, extend repressive powers and justify imperialist war,” it begins. “We must not allow this.” Indeed, we must not!

Unfortunately, none of the rest of the article sees fit to mention the Copenhagen attacks. Instead, we get a Middle Eastern tour of bloody chaos, another reminder that imperialist war is bad, and… er… that’s it. Socialist Worker’s sum total contribution to our knowledge of this event is to point out that Western leaders are hypocrites and war is hell (February 17). In other news, the pope shits in the Vatican.

The blind spot is painfully obvious: having chased mindlessly after spontaneity for decades on end, the notion that the “spontaneous” reaction of sections of the oppressed to their deleterious condition could be profoundly reactionary causes a painful cognitive dissonance — the only way out is to try, in vain, to scream over everyone else, about how racism and war are bad things. To do otherwise would be to acknowledge that merely turning people out on enough anti-racist demonstrations in itself has no transformative effect on their consciousness.

None of this means that the sort of persistent ridicule leveled at religious believers by the likes of Charlie Hebdo is any more successful. Indeed, it plainly is not. The proof of this is not so much the bloody assault of the Kouachi brothers, but that the Front National is on the march while the French Left is more or less in disarray. Meanwhile, the condition of those in the banlieues is deteriorating.

When the Left is strong, people’s standard of life materially and culturally tends to improve: this or that attack from a boss or landlord is more likely to be repelled, leaving a more stable existence more amenable to political organization and consciousness. When we are weak, the opposite happens; and, as people fall off the lower rungs, they become atomized. The spiritual community of religion is thereby an attractive palliative: the “opium of the people.” In a very few cases, this process produces terrorist fanatics.

The right to mock religious practices is indispensable: it is, after all, the same right that we enjoy when we castigate a Netanyahu or David Cameron. On top of that, communists have a duty to combat irrationality, superstition, and mumbo-jumbo in all its forms. We cannot do so, obviously, if we shrink from criticizing a religious ideology at all in the name of anti-racism, as Socialist Worker does. We are also quite unlikely to be successful, however, if we lean too heavily on mockery.

Free speech has to be for something: for us, it is a weapon we employ, among other things, to turn the attention of the religious from the life eternal in Paradise to the transformation of life on earth. This task is most urgent in the case of the exploited and oppressed masses; the appeal of radical Islam is one aspect of this problem, but we could equally mention the multiplication of evangelical churches — some very dodgy operations indeed — among poor black communities in London. Neither patronizing such people with anti-racist platitudes nor lampooning them with cartoons is likely to be sufficient to break the power of the pastors and imams over them.