k-punk

There are good reasons to suppose that the al-Ghuraaba march of a couple of weeks ago was infiltrated and indeed organised by MI5. (It was a conclusion Infinite Thought and I immediately leapt to the moment we saw the al-Ghuraaba banners, most of them neatly written in the same hand, all of them bearing screamingly provactive slogans apparently designed to correspond to Middle England’s worst nightmares.) But the political truth of this conspiracy speculation resides in the fact that, even if the march was not a government put-up, it might as well have been. Images of the march can hardly have impeded the smooth passage through parliament this week of the government’s bill outlawing the ‘glorification of Terrorism’. But there is a wider lesson to be drawn here: that it is in the interests of both the War on Terror and political Islam for it to be believed that we are in the midst of a global Jihad. The notion that the US and the UK governments are implacably opposed to political Islam in all its forms is an illusion. The Iraqi constitution is only one example of a series of accommodations that the Bush and Blair administrations have come to with political Islam.
Tariq Ali points out that the actual numbers involved in violent protests against the Danish cartoons was actually astonishingly small:
‘In reality, the number of original demonstrators was tiny: 300 in Pakistan, 400 in Indonesia, 200 in Tripoli, a few hundred in Britain (before Saturday’s bigger reconciliation march), and government-organised hoodlums in Damascus burning an embassy. Beirut was a bit larger. Why blow this up and pretend that the protests had entered the subsoil of spontaneous mass anger? They certainly haven’t anywhere in the Muslim world, though the European media has been busy fertilising the widespread ignorance that exists in this continent.’
As Ali goes on to argue, given the ferocious scale of the US-led attacks on Iraq and Afghanistan, the outrage was also curiously misplaced. But there is, in fact, a symmetry between the US racist attack on secular Iraq and the protests of Islamists and other Muslims which make no reference to racism at all. Thus, to understand the current situation in religious terms is not a ‘stage’ on the way to politicization; it is actively opposed to a political interpretation. It colludes with the view – happily accepted by Bush and Blair, both of whom condemned the publication of the cartoons – that offences against religion count far more than violent attacks upon people.
‘Did the Danish imam who travelled round the Muslim world pleading for this show the same anger at Danish troops being sent to Iraq? The occupation of Iraq has costs tens of thousands of Iraqi lives. Where is the response to that or the tortures in Abu Ghraib? Or the rapes of Iraqi women by occupying soldiers? Where is the response to the daily deaths of Palestinians? These are the issues that anger me. Last year Afghans protested after a US marine in Guantánamo had urinated on the Qur’an. It was a vile act and there was an official inquiry. The marine in question explained that he had been urinating on a prisoner and a few drops had fallen accidentally on the Qur’an – as if pissing on a prisoner (an old imperial habit) was somehow more acceptable.’