To the Tooting Station

Just say no

This should be a bloggers dream, but...no, Christ, I'm off to read this instead. Maybe tomorrow. Hmmm:

Almost every thoughtful, educated Muslim in this country has been exposed to - and to varying degrees influenced by - the Muslim Brotherhood, the 20th century's most influential political Islamic movement. The obvious historical analogy to Bright is those US cold war warriors in the 50s who smeared anyone who had ever read Marx.

Yep, it's that obvious? Well, obviously.

UPDATE: Paul Anderson's resistance:

Madeleine Bunting is an affront to all that I hold dear. She is part of a mainstream media assault on atheists and secularists that insults us insistently and leaves us no option but militant resistance.

They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented

What is it with the Guardian and democracy? First, there was Madeleine Bunting (yep, her again) in her attack on the ‘cheerleaders’ of the Iraqi war. Bunting’s case against the Iraqi war was based on the apparent impossibility of establishing democracy in a liberated Iraq – Iraq, it seemed, doesn’t (or at least didn’t) possess democratic foundations:

This callow arrogance about the political cultures of other countries, more than any other issue, prompted my opposition to both wars.

… Francis Fukuyama's new book admits the error of the assumption that "democracy was the default condition to which societies reverted once coercive regime change occurred".

Then we had Martin Jacques musing over the incompatibility of democracy with non-Western societies:

The idea that western-style democracy is universally applicable in the world today is mistaken: it is a product of a desire to impose our system on cultures which are quite different and which require an indigenous form of democratic process that will often be very protracted and certainly very distinct from our own.

Now Jacques’ at it again:

In short, globalisation has brought with it a new kind of western hubris - present in Europe in a relatively benign form, manifest in the US in the belligerent manner befitting a superpower: that western values and arrangements should be those of the world; that they are of universal application and merit. At the heart of globalisation is a new kind of intolerance in the west towards other cultures, traditions and values, less brutal than in the era of colonialism, but more comprehensive and totalitarian.

The idea that each culture is possessed of its own specific wisdom and characteristics, its own novelty and uniqueness, born of its own individual struggle over thousands of years to cope with nature and circumstance, has been drowned out by the hue and cry that the world is now one, that the western model - neoliberal markets, democracy and the rest - is the template for all.

In one sense democracy always has to be ‘imposed’, whether it be internally or externally. Democracy didn’t exist at the dawn of time, it had to be established. Yet its introduction has to take the form of an imposition - it’s simply impossible for democracy to conjure itself into being any other way. While the imposition may be popular – even, you could say, democratic – there must be a prior acceptance of democracy for it to democratically occur, which would, in turn, require a prior democratic imposition. You end up in some infinite regression to the first stage when democracy was imposed.

But why does Jacques refer to this as an ‘imposition’? If democracy always has to be created, was its creation in Europe and the US an imposition? Was it incompatible with the previously (un?)-democratic culture? Do we regard it as being imposed, or simply a reflection of these underlying cultures? When historians refer to the creation of democracy in the West, its development tends to be celebrated in slightly less pejorative, more progressive, terms. Couldn’t this progressive narrative be equally transferable to other nations, even cultures?

For Bunting and Jacques the problem is cultural incommensurability – democracy is an integral element of Western culture. The world is neatly divided up into camps each possessing differing cultures and, subsequently, differing political, economic, legal forms - the erstwhile Marxist Jacques has simply replaced the economy with culture as the determining substructure. Yet this categorisation isn’t the only one available - why specific national cultures? Why not a class-based analysis? Or maybe one that primarily deals with political affiliations irreducible to national culture? Or economic interests? Or even one of universal interests? These could, after all, be opposed to the determinant monoculture that Jacques seeks to theoretically impose. As Amartya Sen has reiterated:

In fact, of course, the people of the world can be classified according to many other partitions, each of which has some—often far-reaching—relevance in our lives: nationalities, locations, classes, occupations, social status, languages, politics, and many others. While religious categories have received much airing in recent years, they cannot be presumed to obliterate other distinctions, and even less can they be seen as the only relevant system of classifying people across the globe. In partitioning the population of the world into those belonging to "the Islamic world," "the Western world," "the Hindu world," "the Buddhist world," the divisive power of classificatory priority is implicitly used to place people firmly inside a unique set of rigid boxes. Other divisions (say, between the rich and the poor, between members of different classes and occupations, between people of different politics, between distinct nationalities and residential locations, between language groups, etc.) are all submerged by this allegedly primal way of seeing the differences between people.

But why is there even the temptation to begin from the assumption of difference? Isn’t it at least equally plausible that humans have some interests that are irreducible to things like culture, economics, politics, territory, etc…? That some values are universal? If democracy is possible in South Korea and Iceland, why not in Iraq or North Korea?

When you begin to empirically test the theory, things start to get worse. For even on their own premise – that Western forms of government (not necessarily confined to democracy) are incompatible with non-Western cultures - wouldn’t you have to logically oppose any non-Western government with even minimal (and seemingly inexplicable) traces of Western influence? Why is it that only democracy is opposed? After all, the Ba’athist government of Iraq was a murderous blend of Nazism and Stalinism. On the basis of Bunting’s and Jacques’ argument, shouldn’t that have been opposed as a Western imposition and subsequently replaced with something more in tune with Iraqi culture?

And what happens when you run into people from non-Western cultures that – despite your careful analysis – want democracy and insist on universal rights? Once again, you could deploy an enormously condescending Marxist term – false consciousness. You could casually inform them how they’re betraying their undemocratic culture – and I’m sure most would welcome the insight. Or you might want to revert to an older notion of solidarity, siding with the victims of oppression, rather than its very perpetrators:

Thomas Mann used to say that Hitler didn’t land on German ground like a meteor, and so Germany, as a result, could never simply rid itself of Nazism. He added, however, that he too was Germany. Rather than trying to sweet-talk fanatics with dishonorable pieties about The Other and respecting The Other, it is incumbent upon us to affirm unceasing solidarity with all the Thomas Manns of the Muslim world.

Guardian columnist seeks enlightenment

‘I need some help’ – yep, for once she’s bang on. Madeleine’s been getting down with Muslim intellectuals: they’re getting edgy about the Enlightenment tradition being ‘used (implicitly or explicitly) against Islam’:

These Muslims then argue that the Enlightenment was a process of European definition in the face of the Ottoman Empire; it was shaped in opposition to Islam and hence has an inbuilt anti-Islamic bias.

It’s the classic Orientalist argument, so all well and good. But… Accusing the Enlightenment of being anti-Islamic is a bit like accusing a curmudgeonly misanthropist of having it in for blondes – it’s not the hair that’s the unique object of enmity. Similarly with the Enlightenment - when it was atheist, it was against religion per se: Islam wasn’t a unique target. In fact, the Enlightenment’s main target was European Christianity, clericalism, and monarchy – the arbitrary authority of theistic tradition and social conservatism in eighteenth-century Europe.

When the Enlightenment did address non-European cultures, it was far from disdainful, without falling into some proto-Buntingesque relativism. It accepted cultural and religious diversity, yet simultaneously held to a limited universalism. It could sometimes indulge religious thought, yet believed religion should be subjected to the appeal of reason. And it also sought to establish institutions and laws to guarantee freedom of religion, freedom of thought, the free flow of ideas, etc…. When Enlightenment thinkers analysed non-European societies, they refused to place cultures in a hierarchy of development, in some crude Hegelian-cum-Darwinian fashion. Far from being uniquely hostile to religion, the Enlightenment established conditions for private religiosity:

Usually deists rather than atheists, concerned with fostering tolerance rather than embracing any type of dogma, most philosophes considered religious faith nothing more than superstition, but they were content to leave matters of belief to the individual. Hardly any of them were concerned with abolishing religious forms of identification and most implicitly understood the difference between “religiosity” and “religion.”

Enlightenment thinkers wished to temper the power of religious institutions by privileging the secular state and, for this reason, traditionalists and dogmatic defenders of the faith – all faiths – have criticized them unmercifully ever since…. Such a stance involves recognizing faith as a private conviction…. For those committed to the Enlightenment legacy, indeed, religion turns into a problem only when it strays beyond the private sphere and identifies its concerns with those of the public weal. (Stephen Eric Bronner, Reclaiming the Enlightenment, 2004, pp.166-167)

But what the Enlightenment balked at was the idea that religion should ever intrude into the public sphere, that it should subsume government and law.

Bunting describes a debate between Bronner – also author of an impassioned, if sometimes rather ranting, diatribe against the Iraqi War – and Jonathan Ree: Bronner sees the Enlightenment positioned

… at the heart of all democracy. It forms the basis of freedom and human rights, for example its views on torture. It argued that we temper our worst tendencies through reason. It was not against religion, but against fanaticism, and argued that religion should be kept in the private sphere…. He concluded by saying we need to pick up the Enlightenment legacy and adapt it.

Yet for Bunting this is all superfluous. Despite holding to some Enlightenment values – free flow of ideas, the appeal to evidence, some notion of what is a true argument, and, the courage to use her own (admittedly tenuous) understanding – she’d rather embrace the irrationality of Freud, Nietzsche and Foucault.

Then we come to this un-enlightened flourish:

… why do people think an understanding of rationality which is over 200 years old is useful now?

Oh, I don't know? Maybe because of all the above? Why does 200 years old become the arbitrary cut-off point? Of course, it doesn’t: if it did, why would Madeleine pay any attention to Islamic thought (1400 years old). Why would Freud (80 years old), Foucault (30 years old) and Nietzsche (120 years old) sneak in through the back door with their theories of irrationality? And why would people still persist in writing (and unfortunately reading) interminable nonsense, despite all the available evidence suggesting they should probably desist?

Shackles of irrationality

Madeleine Bunting draws attention to the apparent inadequacies of tolerance and ‘smug multiculturalism’ in today’s Guardian. There’s quite a lot to take exception to: the implication that ‘glorification-of-terrorism legislation’ is guaranteed to ‘provoke Muslim outrage’ (even from the vast majority of tolerant Muslims?); the assertion that Islam is the ‘object not just of military aggression but also of cultural aggression’; and the statement that Denmark and the Netherlands have ‘hatched a deep hostility to Islam’.

Yet while some of the words change, the argument is practically the same: any problem associated with Islam or Islamism is the fault of the non-Muslim world, whose inhabitants, it seems, are far more interested in ‘Celebrity Big Brother than its Muslim neighbours.’

This is the flipside of Gordon Brown's much lauded British tolerance: indifference. The vast majority in this country know little about Islam and care even less. They know few, if any, Muslims and see no reason to change that. How many Muslims could you count as friends?

…The potential for real dialogue, where there can be a mutual changing of minds rather than simply getting other people to agree with you, is small.

The problem is that the Muslim ‘politicised community [is] desperate to be heard’, yet we’re all too preoccupied mocking George Galloway’s feline impersonations to listen. The failure to listen has provoked the "cream of the Muslim educated elite” into threatening: "we will react without the shackles of rationality, regardless of the consequences".

Bunting suggests that multiculturalism may be a bad thing: that it tends towards insularity, religious navel-gazing, closed cultures, lack of dialogue, etc… Yet her substitute isn’t much of an alternative: rather than dialogue, individuals should actively engage in listening to a faith-inspired monologue. One problem might be with Bunting’s notions of truth and value – for her we all possess equally valid values (none of which are necessarily true, although Bunting tends to imply that non-Western values have a certain novel grandeur) determined by cultural and religious identity. In this world, there aren’t any values that are necessarily preferable – or values that necessarily must precede the proposed conversation. Yet, as Kwame Anthony Appiah has noted, this belief (or, dare I say it, value) inhibits conversation:

For if relativism about ethics and morality were true, then, at the end of many discussions, we each have to end up saying, “From where I stand, I am right. From where you stand, you are right.” And there would be nothing further to say. From our different perspectives, we would be living effectively in different worlds. And without a shared world, what is there to discuss? People often recommend relativism because they think it will lead to tolerance. But if we cannot learn from one another what it is right to think and feel and do, then conversation between us will be pointless. Relativism of that sort isn’t a way to encourage conversation; it’s just a reason to fall silent.

To begin dialogue there has to be some acceptance on both sides of common values: things like freedom of speech (at least to some extent), the rules of debate, humanity, and that each participant’s input is of equal worth. While Madeleine professes some enthusiasm for such dialogue, she fails to notice that this conversation could be rather limited. For she denigrates non-Muslims’ refusal to even discuss the ‘role of women’ – yet surely this value, the acceptance of the equal contribution of all to the proposed conversation is a precondition of the subsequent conversation. If there is no initial agreement on who may or may not speak, things could get rather quiet. And when you even provisionally suggest that half the human race may not necessarily play any part in this wonderful dialogue, you hardly appear to be aiming at conversation. When there’s no mutuality, the prospect of a ‘mutual changing of minds’ starts to recede.

In addition to these notions, there’s also that of how belief is held, notions that inform the conversational preconditions – the above might be seen as non-negotiable (‘Toleration requires a concept of the intolerable’), yet:

… cosmopolitans believe in universal truth, too, though we are less certain that we have it all already. It is not scepticism about the very idea of truth that guides us; it is realism about how hard the truth is to find. One truth we hold to, however, is that every human being has obligations to every other. Everybody matters: that is our central idea. And it sharply limits the scope of our tolerance.

Rather than forcing others to be free of the ‘shackles of rationality’, it might be an idea to discard some of those more fashionable shackles of irrationality: those of a dubious relativism and fundamentalist version of faith.

Unfriendly fire

Hopes weren't exactly high, but it's not what you'd call hard-hitting stuff. From Bunting:

Palestinian suicide bombings in Israel, he insists, are a form of jihad. "The actor who commits this is a martyr because he gave his life for the noble cause of fighting oppression and defending his community," he says. "These operations are best seen as the weapon of the weak against the powerful. It is a kind of divine justice when the poor, who don't have weapons, are given a weapon which the fully equipped and armed-to-the-teeth powerful don't have - the powerful are not willing to give their lives for any cause."

He maintains that Palestinian suicide bombing is targeted at combatants (something his critics would strongly dispute). "Sometimes they kill a child or a woman. Provided they don't mean to, that's OK, but they shouldn't aim to kill them. In every war, mistakes are made and non-combatants get killed and usually military commanders come forward (as in the case of the US) and apologise - why can't they accept others do the same?"

But he draws a distinction between suicide bombing in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and its use in London or New York. "The difference is huge. What happens in Palestine is self-defence. But in 9/11 they were not fighting an invasion; they didn't just use their own bodies but those of all the others in the planes. These young men attacked non combatants - even other Muslims and Arabs - going about their daily lives. Because of this I have condemned what happened in London, Sharm El Sheikh [the Egyptian resort] and Madrid both in my personal capacity and as chair of the International Union of Muslim Scholars."

But surely not only his critics could strongly dispute this? You know, might it be the responsibility of a journalist, maybe even the specific journalist interviewing Qaradawi to dispute this? It's not as if Israeli civilians are 'sometimes' killed. Infact, analysis by Zeev Schiff of Haaretz, suggests totally the opposite:

Some 1,001 Israelis were killed by Palestinian attacks in the Second Intifada, most of them (more than 75%) civilians.

Is it really believable that this number of deaths are unintended? When a suicide bomber boards a crowded bus, enters a cafe or restaurant, with the specific goal of causing massive death, in what manner can these deaths ever be described as 'unintended', or simply a 'mistake'? Are these deaths, therefore, any different from those in London and Madrid actually condemned by Qaradawi?

Yet for Madeleine Bunting, someone uttering such palpable nonsense is seen as somehow displaying 'independence of mind'. If this is friendly fire...

Emotional unintelligence

She’s back! And she’s not happy about women going out to work. Not Western women of course, but women from developing countries:

Increasing numbers of women are taking up paid employment across the developing world and, at the same time, the migration from rural areas to cities is accelerating. The combination of these two is rupturing centuries-old traditions of child rearing and care - in particular, the habit of a mother keeping children with her while she worked in the fields….

Ahhh, the halcyon days of women rearing their children in fields, with no water, electricity, healthcare, eh? Why not return to feudalism and simply have done with all this modern capitalism nonsense?

Then this nugget:

The solution in the west is to outsource care - pay someone else to do it - and that is often provided by migrant female labour from the developing world. So the care gap of the west is resolved at the cost of exacerbating the care gap of the developing world.

So, if a woman earning a pittance decides to earn more by migrating to the West - sometimes sending the money back home to her family and increasing their standard of living - this is something to be derided.

Still, the argument isn’t totally unconvincing. I can see that some individuals - maybe society in general - may benefit from one woman in particular returning to the domestic hearth.

A bit more Madeleine

Norm and Harry's Place have done the necessary work on Madeleine, but...

Following on from Norm's excerpt:

The irony of course is that when Muslims do speak with one voice - on British foreign policy - Goggins and his government colleagues refuse to listen.

To be fair - for once - to Madeleine, she does admit that 'the internecine factionalism of minority community politics is confusing.' But why is there this over-riding assumption that Muslim's can or do speak with one voice? Regarding 'British foreign policy' - thinly-veiled code for Afghanistan and Iraq, wilfully omitting Bosnia - when did this happen? Do we expect Christians, Jews, Hindus or Buddhists to speak with one voice when it comes to foreign policies? One the one hand US policy is condemned for being too Christian, yet the Church of England apologises (pdf) for the intervention. Why does Madeleine assume there is even the slightest possibility of those from one religion adopting exactly the same stance towards British policy? Isn't this logic a bit too similar to the Al-Qaeda definition of Muslims, where all of those who don't adopt the one view simply become apostates, not really true Muslims. Didn't even Marxist-Leninism - not exactly the most liberal of ideologies - eventually abandon this line of reasoning after condemning most of the working class as class-collaborators, deluded by their false-consciousness?

The thing is, you don't really have to look that hard to find some more ambiguous Muslim views on British foreign policy. How about the Muslim Iraqi exiles? What are their views on British foreign policy? How about the exiled Bosnian Muslims? What about the displaced Afghan Muslims that fled the Islamism of the Taliban, and who have returned in their millions since the US intervention. If you look further afield, say in Iraq, the picture becomes more unclear. The vast majority of the Iraqi electorate is Muslim, yet 8.5 million voted in January's elections. An independent poll conducted in February 2004 asked Iraqis whether the US-led invasion was right, somewhat right, etc... Over 55.2% stated the invasion was right or somewhat right.

Maybe it's really these Muslim voices - democratic, liberal and secular - that have been lost in Madeleine's rush to make headlines?

A turkey-shoot on rights

Today Madeleine offers us Turkey's accession to the European Union as an example of 'regime change, European style.'

For Madeleine, the parallels with the Iraq War are inescapable:

... the US launched its regime change in a Muslim country with shock and awe, an unprecedented onslaught of military power. The EU quietly initiates its regime change in the Muslim country next door with the shock of 80,000 pages of EU regulations on everything from the treatment of waste water to the protection of Kurdish minority rights. While one sends in the Humvees and helicopters, the other sends in an army of management consultants, human-rights lawyers and food-hygiene specialists.

So why is there a different approach? Is it really a difference between say, the EU and the US political mentality, one preferring peaceful negotiation while the latter, in a fit of righteous anger, relies on the first-resort of military force? Or could there, I don't know, be a difference in the regime undergoing the change? You know, things like this perhaps? While management consultants are intelligent people, I'm not sure if they've yet carved out a niche in Genocide Solutions.

These EU negotiators don't seem all that concerned with things like freedom of expression, human rights, sexual equality either. For Turkey to enter the EU it will simply 'have to jump through a number of hoops on issues such as corruption and sewerage....' But, as Madeleine does concede, even within Turkey, there may be problems: '...the prospective trial of the novelist Orhan Pamuk for his comments on the Armenian massacre indicate that some in Turkey are only to keen to torpedo the whole process.' Absolutely, I mean, why let insistence on things like free-speech and human rights get in the way of the grand political themes such as sewerage and corruption? Madeleine again:

If Europe was to turn truculent with Turkey, an extraordinary opportunity to strengthen human rights and ensure stable democracy would be lost.... exorcising the "clash of civilisations" ghost. If there was a secular, democratic, economically successful Muslim state it would kill off intense argument about the incompatibility of Islam with democracy or Islam with human rights and modernity.... Finally... it would strengthen the claim of Europe's 15 million-strong Muslim minority to a home in Europe. In sharp contrast to the US, Europe could shape a new, prosperous and peaceful accommodation between Islam and the secular west.

What would turning 'truculent' mean? Insisting that individuals have, you know, the basics of any democratic, modern secular state, things like human rights, perhaps? I mean, surely there's a bit more to it than sheer truculence? Perhaps it could be the Turkish state, not the novelist Orhan Pamuk, who's really torpedoing this process. Once again, Madeleine seems to side with the oppresser rather than the oppressed.

There's another aspect to the modernisation of Turkey that Madeleine doesn't mention: the role modern Turkey plays in the ideology of Islamofascism. For instance, in the first video following 9/11, Bin Laden said:

Our Islamic nation has been tasting the same for more [than] eighty years, of humiliation and disgrace, its sons killed and their blood spilled, its sanctities desecrated.

So what was it that happened over 80 years ago? Paul Berman states:

Bin Laden was speaking about the crimes of Kemal Ataturk - the plunge into secular modernity that culminated in 1924 in the abolition of the Caliphate. Bin Laden was speaking about the initial, devastating attack on the Islamic nation - the attack that signalled the beginnings of Islam's "extermination".... (Paul Berman, Terror and Liberalism, 2004, p.118)

If Turkey does accede to the EU and if, subsequently, this increases the scale of Islamist terrorism, it would be nice if Madeleine defended this modern, democratic secular state, rather then pen continued apologias for those extremists opposed to it's very existence.

Liberals in the gym

Quite like the new format Guardian, but Madeleine 'Mad' Bunting's at it again...

Yep, this week we have the new 'muscular liberals', a creation that, I guess, has replaced the position previously occupied by effete pinko liberals. Well these muscular liberals - think she may having a bit of a dig at Nick Cohen, although something of a straw-based, rather than muscle-based, version - apparently just relish the 'clash of civilizations'.

Bunting's argument lacks, among other things, a certain subtlety. Those muscular liberals, it would appear, believe all Muslims are enemies! Hmmm... well, no. I think what this new breed of muscular liberalism is arguing is that many of the values we frequently take for granted can be somewhat fragile. And by not defending these values, or offering a platform to those that seek to dismantle such liberal values, one may be suffering from either a large dose of bad faith, self-loathing, lack of historical knowledge, blind ignorance, etc... Or one may simply be jumping on the back of extreme Islamic views to further one's personal ideological preferences. Bunting, despite benefiting from a free press, if inadvertently providing an almost watertight case against one, breezily dismisses such liberal beliefs and practises as the 'checklist of universal Enlightenment values', as if these were simply wheeled out to impress your incredulous, yet amazed, friends.

Bunting asks:

The louder Tony Blair expounds "our values" and "our way of life", the more vacuous the phrases sound. How do British values look to an African?

Discounting the patriotic rhetoric referring to British values, what we're actually talking here are liberal values. I'd have thought that some Africans, if you did take the time and trouble to engage with them, would blissfully welcome some British values. Say if I was in Zimbabwe, or maybe Sudan, I think I'd be reasonably happy with an influx of some of these values in halting genocide. But for Bunting, this is all sheer vacuousness.

These muscular liberals, it turns out, aren't even that interested in that many Enlightenment values. They're suffering from 'political exhaustion' - an all-too contagious disease when reading Madeleine Bunting's column. For these liberals same-sex marriage and abortion become the defining issues.

... So an elite squabbles about Islam's take on gay rights and gender equality in a charade of moralistic grandstanding.

So, Ken Livingstone is applauded for seducing Yusuf al-Quaradawi - he, of course, has the political stature to overlook such things as gay-rights, abortion, etc.... Not that same-sex marriage, abortion and gender equality are necessarily trivial matters, but I'd have thought the dividing line may be a little more significant than just those issues. For instance, Nick Cohen commented that

Islam Online had him [al-Quaradawi] supporting wife beating and genital mutilation. Along with his unbending line on the homosexual question, the alleged progressive also said the penalty for grown-up Muslims who concluded there was no god was death and, inevitably, that no criticism could be made of bombers who murdered Israeli civilians.

These issues, unfortunately, seem a little trivial for Bunting to concern herself with. She seems quite happy ploughing her unique political furrow, accussing others of racism while simultaneously abandoning 'Arab liberals in a fruitless quest for the approval of their enemies on the religious right.'

(Update: Norm, Harry's Place and Guardian letters.)

Fear and self-loathing

Madeleine Bunting has a new piece in the Guardian. This is almost becoming obsessive, but try and bear with me...

In the seven weeks since the London bombings, we can trace how fear is shaping our political culture - and distorting it. The danger is that the imperative to satisfy the emotional needs posed by fear and its close associate, anger, will end up crippling our capacity to respond effectively to the threat of Islamist terrorism.

The problem with this is that, for Madeleine Bunting, she doesn’t really seem to believe in such a threat. The very words, fear and anxiety, are deployed pejoratively - this is starting to become compulsive in her writing. Fear and anxiety suggests these are simply emotional or irrational responses, responses to a virtual, rather than an actual or potential threat.

For Bunting, the underlying global threat, in the sense of the existence of an extremist Islamofascist ideology, is rarely seen as significant. And politicians' attempts to deal with the potential threat simply aren't as complex as they should be:

The first is that politicians provide a narrative structure that can satisfy the "why" question: why us, why now and why here? That involves a clear plot and a plausible cast of goodies and baddies. The scale of the plot must be big enough to provide a large enough description of our fear, which usually means the threat is greatly inflated. And the goodies, of course, must win. The aim of the narrative is to offer emotional reassurance on several levels. It has to say it's understandable you're so afraid; we're on the side of good against evil; we will vanquish our enemies.

This is, at best, a caricature of the entire argument. I don’t think anyone would suggest it is a battle between absolute Good and absolute Evil. However, it could be seen as a battle for Good Things – liberalism, secularism, human rights, sexual equality, modernity – against, well, Evil Things – theocratic rule, sexual inequality, repressive government. And if you believe in these Good Things, is it merely emotionally re-assuring to believe these values will win out? Might it not be that you wish these values to win and that, through your very intervention in the debate, you’re making a case for these values and hoping to galvanise support for such values?

David Cameron’s speech on the threat of extreme Islamic movements is seen as part of this larger political movement, demonstrating how he has ‘mastered the new orthodoxy - the politics of fear’. Cameron’s argument was essentially a paraphrasing of Paul Berman’s Terror and Liberalism – placing Islamic extremism in the context of twentieth century extremist - fascist, communist and religious - movements. For Bunting though, providing this context is simply ‘rummaging for props in 20th-century history to find familiar analogies that can meet all of the above criteria. For a growing number in the Anglo-American political establishment, Nazism fits the bill best. Here was an epic struggle of Britain and Americaagainst an evil system in which we were victorious - our proudest hour and all that. So Cameron duly framed his understanding of Islamist terrorism within the context of Nazism. He mentioned two points they have in common: their use of violence and their hatred of cosmopolitan influences.’

Cameron is reproached for overlooking ‘how little relevance these mass political movements and their capture of the state have to Islamist terrorism - let alone the enormous exaggeration required to liken the threat of a few hundred potential terrorists in the UK with a sustained world war in which hundreds of thousands of Britons died fighting a hugely powerful, highly organised nation state.’ However, some extremist Islamism is consciously indebted to such movements. Others, while not direct ideological heirs, display characteristics, that for analytical and political purposes, can be seen to be analogous to twentieth century extremist movements. Are these analogies made simply as rhetorical tactic, as Bunting suggests, to ‘slur’ ones enemies? Or, in another reading, could they be relevant, in highlighting historical antecedents to today’s threats?

The ‘third impact of fear is that it, understandably, prompts a great desire for solidarity. There has been much talk of standing together and uniting around shared values.’ In a move from the ridiculous to the preposterous, Bunting dwells here on the apparently contradictory shared values of a nation: fair play versus binge drinking and sexual debauchery. But we can have some shared values without sharing everything. While I may share some values – say, liberalism, secularism, tolerance, universalism – with my neighbour, I wouldn’t see us as having contradictory values merely because he can be a little promiscuous and from time to time.

Islamist terrorism is vicious but it will not destroy our country - it can kill hundreds but it will not take over our government and impose sharia law. We need to be much calmer about the nature of the threat, and more sophisticated about the scale of risk.

It is unlikely it will destroy our country in the foreseeable future, but it may destroy other countries – Afghanistan and Algeria provide a warning on the potential scale of the threat. But it is a very real threat that wants to turn back the vast gains in global human rights made over the long twentieth century. Recognising the threat, showing solidarity with it's victims and retaining a committment to liberal values, may prove to be more helpful than hectoring those people, that through fear, anxiety, emotionalism or what-not, believe these values were, and remain, worth fighting for.